But but, I was told there's a complete three dimensional engine underneath SimCity 4...
You can move the screen up, down, left and right, and you can zoom in and out, and you can rotate... in.. 90 degree blocks... just like you can in Isometric with 2D sprites and 1/4th the hardware requirements. Err...
Correction, we are addicted to oil until such point that is becomes uneconomical to do so. At which point, it would probably be natural gas for a few years until we realize we hadn't built enough refineries for that either. And the fission people will be saying, if you had only built any plants in the last 30 years... but noone will listen. The whole time, there will be thousands of other people pointing at all the resources buried in the ground and off the coasts, untouchable due to self-imposed regulations.
By then, I wouldn't be surprised if we switch back to coal, given the advances in plant designs over the last 30 years. That's a fuel that the eastern US has an overabundance of, yet is frowned upon by the environmentalist lobby because of the tendancy of existing plants to just vent the waste products into the atmosphere. Good thing the DoE is already working on it. It's amazing what the free markets can provide, when you let them work...
Last time I checked, Disney was not a governmental agency...
They are beholden to their stock holders and their only true purpose is to turn a profit. They weigh the costs of various business... their profit is a function of providing family friendly entertainment, and the distribution of this propaganda would anger a great majority of their consumers, directly leading to reduced profitability. So, they chose to pass on distributing the product.
Now, did they bury the product altogether, so that noone can see the movie? No, because it can still be seen, and obviously winning awards. Has anyone been killed to silence the criticism? No, everyone's still alive and chattering as far as I can see. Has anything been done in any fashion to edit the movie, anything beyond the normal criticism that exists around hollywood? Nope. So, that leads me to believe that no censorship has taken place. And the founding fathers agreed, because that is why corporations cannot be held to censorship laws, only the government.
Today it does... But think about when it first appeared... The.mod (.s3m,.xm, etc) format was a bridge between.mid and.wav formats... in MIDI, you have a pure music score, and you rely on the local hardware to decode the song and make it sound realistic. A Waveform is pure audio output, with no track structure to indicate which instrument is supposed to play when, it's just an amalgum of all the frequencies together. Back in 1987 only the Amiga had multivoice sound, and you didn't have all this fancy on-board sound banks. You were supposed to buy a dedicated card for MIDI, or external hardware. Later for IBM PCs, your joystick port was expected to serially connect to a MIDI device that could play the music... which is why it's also called a Roland MPU-401 port.
The Module format allows you to create a song in pseudo-sheet music form, while it also stores the audio samples for the tracks in the file itself... The song sounds just as good on an 8-bit audio card without a MIDI decoder, as it does on today's 32-bit cards with practically a symphony of samples in ROM. Yes, you were limited to music beats in 1/64th of a measure, and Yes, early.mod formats were 4 voices (now 64), but Modules still fill a niche.
Ah, information. We can see from this history that the SoundBlaster had their own form of synthesized music in 1989 (OPL2), and didn't support General MIDI until SoundBlaster 16 in 1992.
when you have a really cool joke all worked out, you go to type it into SlashDot, you hit submit, and realize you have a spelling error that completely breaks the joke. Happens to me all the time.
Excellent Timing to scare the masses...
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Oil futures prices are down 2.7% today. The rumor on the Drudge Report is that Iraq is already pumping oil above expected output...
Meanwhile, the USA is filling its strategic oil reserves to the highest levels ever. The thought is that with the proper reserves, they could soak any future terrorist attack that may cut off supply... recall that Bill Clinton tapped the oil reserves in 2000 for price control, a move widely seen as covering up effects of the dot-com recession that had begun earlier in the year. In 2000, it was noted that the reserves could support 100% production levels in the USA for two months, and that was at 571m barrels. Prices at the time were only about $26/barrel as shown on this graph.
Either that, or its because we're more open about the fact we're sifting.
It's the cold war all over again. We don't have to build the impenetrable system, we just have to make you think we can, so you waste a good chunck of your resources trying to deter us.
The EU can't afford to build the impenetrable unbiquitous network when they have so much health care to provide, retirements to fund, and socialism to spread. I predict that the US in the next few years will pull its troops out of europe completely... something that at first will be met with wild cheers from the EU, until they realize that they will now also have to spend more money to defend themselves. Hit them in the pocketbooks.
His point is not that it cannot be done, but that the "package" deal is currently how the product is being offered to the consumer.
I can go to the grocery store and buy an Orange, split it myself, visually inspect it and enjoy a tasty portion. Or, I can go to the canned food aisle, and buy a "remix" of individual slices repackaged (in a jar). To continue the analogy, what we really want is a salad bar, where there's a whole bucket of pre-separated orange slices, where the consumer can pick out the nasty bits and pay by the pound.
Back to music, we can look at services like iTunes that sell by the track that provide this individual product. Sure, it's not the major means of distributing (packaging) the product, but the concept is still new. Of course, the artist would like to think that their products are not interchangable (buy by the pound) and that some are worth more than others. Right now, pricing points are set by the record stores (something that gets them in trouble every few years), not necessarily generated by the consumer by pure demand.
I would also interject that there is a feedback loop of Artist joins label, label "acquires" radio time, radio creates demand, demand makes label money, label gives to artist. We need to change this paradigm and make the artist understand that there are alternative methods to create demand, and alternatives ways to get what's due to them. At the end of the day, it is up to the individual artist how they wish to present their material... they have the option to not use the union, I mean, RIAA.
Going back and overwriting the old entry is obviously a bad practice. For example:
For example, I generate a report at the beginning of the month: A $100 + B $200 + C -$100 = $200
The next month, we discover that product B didn't wasn't $200, it was actually $300. Whatever. The point is, that the total as of now is $300, except that I have all these old printouts up till today that say it was $200.
If I go back in my ledger and change "B" with no audit history, then what happens to all those hard copies that were distributed? I can now never go back and reproduce those documents for what the budget was on a given day. And that gives auditors the heebie jeebies.
And all those managers that made project decision.. what if they looked at the first budget and thought they wouldnt be able to fund a project. If the budget is changed with no history tracking, then someone could go back and say "why did you cancel the project when there was all this money available?". At the time, it didn't appear that way.
Now, we all understand that you have the "actual" cash, vs the "perceived" number with errors. However, let's say that I purchased "C" for $100, and I send them my check. The company cashes it, and at the end of the month realizes they overbilled me by $20. "C" only cost me $80, but money still changed hands and needs to be tracked. Sure, we know what the final cost was now, but for a period of time that $20 was inaccessable, and needs to be represented.
This was actually covered on Futurama season 2, The Lesser of Two Evils, when Bender runs into (techincally, runs over) his twin Flexo, a twin with a goatee... shortly thereafter, a priceless tiara goes missing, and Flexo is the suspect...
In the end, it turns out that the Evil Bender robot is Bender after all...
"`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe." -- Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
What the world is running out of is economical, pre-pressurized deposits that ooze oil just by digging a little below the surface. There will always be oil deposits, the question is at what cost.
But that's ok, we know we're not running out of oil anyways. And if we don't conserve any oil and don't make a single machine more efficient in the next 50 years, when we run out of the stuff in the ground, we can always just recycle ourselves some more.
True, the exact same chemical may not work in humans as it does in mice. However, the research helps define the processes that result in weight loss in mammals...
We can now analyze the "MouseShrinker" chemical and examine its structure, look at mouse cells and see how it binds to block nutrients, look at similar fat cells in humans, and extrapolate what the "HumanShrinker" chemical should be. It gives scientists something to go on, to investigate. If it doesn't pan out now, oh well, but it may point to the real discovery down the road.
What you really want is for minimum ecological impact is a "pumped storage" hydro plant. Build a man-made reservoir at the top of the hill, and a basin at the bottom of the hill. Fill the top reservoir with water. During the day, you let the water flow with gravity downhill through a set of turbines to generate electricity. At night, power the turbines to flow in reverse, and pump the water back up to the reservoir, basically "refuelling" itself.
But, you say, what's the sense in doing that? Conservation of energy says motors use more energy than they can generate in reverse, so aren't you wasting electricity just moving water about? You'll go out of business!
The key is not the volume of water, but WHEN you're generating. In deregulated energy markets like in most of the USA, there is also an ebb and flow to the price of electricity along the day... at night, when people are sleeping, there's too much online supply and not enough people using it, so the price drops... and during the day, when everyone is awake and watching TV and cooking and cleaning and working and computing, the demand for electricity is much higher, therefore the price of energy is higher.
So, generate electricity during the day and have people buy from you at higher rates, and run your pumps at night purchasing electricity from someone else for lower rates. Net, you're making money, keeping your average costs low. Not only that, you avoid erosion and killing fish like you do with conventional run-of-river dams. For an impressive beast of a plant, check out Bath County Station in Virginia.
"The problem will not be solved until Muslims give up their psychotic desire to control the bodies, property, and eventually souls of everyone else. Maybe if they all switched to Ahmadism, or Bahaism..."
I never played Nox, but back when I was in college, there was this game Die By The Sword.
The claim to fame was, it was a 1st-person "melee", where you used the keyboard to walk, but the way you moved your mouse caused the hero's sword to swing in odd maneuvers. Very dynamic poly models could capture any movement of the arms, and depending on swing speed, direction, and where you hit, that's how you did damage to the enemies.
Good analysis. My only caveat is that, in single-player, I thought this was one of the MOST linear games ever designed. The majority of the game was (1) you have a town/safe zone where you can sell things and recruit partners and (2) you have a linear stretch of terrain with one special fork into a closed dungeon. At the end of (2) you find a (1).
I can think of only one area where the progress loops back on itself, and that was "the giant stone gate is barricaded, you have to go through the icky spider dungeon to get to the other side, where you can clear the barricade" and use the city to sell items again. Nowhere is there a "you can take this path, or you can take that path" and have different outcomes.
Excellent graphics, but I'd put it more on par with a souped up Gauntlet than a real RPG.
IIIIII-mmanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable. Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy begger Who could think you under the table. David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel, And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist. Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day. Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram, And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
Slashdot Mirror
But but, I was told there's a complete three dimensional engine underneath SimCity 4...
You can move the screen up, down, left and right, and you can zoom in and out, and you can rotate... in.. 90 degree blocks... just like you can in Isometric with 2D sprites and 1/4th the hardware requirements. Err...
Correction, we are addicted to oil until such point that is becomes uneconomical to do so. At which point, it would probably be natural gas for a few years until we realize we hadn't built enough refineries for that either. And the fission people will be saying, if you had only built any plants in the last 30 years... but noone will listen. The whole time, there will be thousands of other people pointing at all the resources buried in the ground and off the coasts, untouchable due to self-imposed regulations.
By then, I wouldn't be surprised if we switch back to coal, given the advances in plant designs over the last 30 years. That's a fuel that the eastern US has an overabundance of, yet is frowned upon by the environmentalist lobby because of the tendancy of existing plants to just vent the waste products into the atmosphere. Good thing the DoE is already working on it. It's amazing what the free markets can provide, when you let them work...
Last time I checked, Disney was not a governmental agency...
They are beholden to their stock holders and their only true purpose is to turn a profit. They weigh the costs of various business... their profit is a function of providing family friendly entertainment, and the distribution of this propaganda would anger a great majority of their consumers, directly leading to reduced profitability. So, they chose to pass on distributing the product.
Now, did they bury the product altogether, so that noone can see the movie? No, because it can still be seen, and obviously winning awards. Has anyone been killed to silence the criticism? No, everyone's still alive and chattering as far as I can see. Has anything been done in any fashion to edit the movie, anything beyond the normal criticism that exists around hollywood? Nope. So, that leads me to believe that no censorship has taken place. And the founding fathers agreed, because that is why corporations cannot be held to censorship laws, only the government.
Today it does... But think about when it first appeared... The .mod (.s3m, .xm, etc) format was a bridge between .mid and .wav formats... in MIDI, you have a pure music score, and you rely on the local hardware to decode the song and make it sound realistic. A Waveform is pure audio output, with no track structure to indicate which instrument is supposed to play when, it's just an amalgum of all the frequencies together. Back in 1987 only the Amiga had multivoice sound, and you didn't have all this fancy on-board sound banks. You were supposed to buy a dedicated card for MIDI, or external hardware. Later for IBM PCs, your joystick port was expected to serially connect to a MIDI device that could play the music... which is why it's also called a Roland MPU-401 port.
.mod formats were 4 voices (now 64), but Modules still fill a niche.
The Module format allows you to create a song in pseudo-sheet music form, while it also stores the audio samples for the tracks in the file itself... The song sounds just as good on an 8-bit audio card without a MIDI decoder, as it does on today's 32-bit cards with practically a symphony of samples in ROM. Yes, you were limited to music beats in 1/64th of a measure, and Yes, early
Ah, information. We can see from this history that the SoundBlaster had their own form of synthesized music in 1989 (OPL2), and didn't support General MIDI until SoundBlaster 16 in 1992.
when you have a really cool joke all worked out, you go to type it into SlashDot, you hit submit, and realize you have a spelling error that completely breaks the joke. Happens to me all the time.
Oil futures prices are down 2.7% today. The rumor on the Drudge Report is that Iraq is already pumping oil above expected output...
Meanwhile, the USA is filling its strategic oil reserves to the highest levels ever. The thought is that with the proper reserves, they could soak any future terrorist attack that may cut off supply... recall that Bill Clinton tapped the oil reserves in 2000 for price control, a move widely seen as covering up effects of the dot-com recession that had begun earlier in the year. In 2000, it was noted that the reserves could support 100% production levels in the USA for two months, and that was at 571m barrels. Prices at the time were only about $26/barrel as shown on this graph.
Either that, or its because we're more open about the fact we're sifting.
It's the cold war all over again. We don't have to build the impenetrable system, we just have to make you think we can, so you waste a good chunck of your resources trying to deter us.
The EU can't afford to build the impenetrable unbiquitous network when they have so much health care to provide, retirements to fund, and socialism to spread. I predict that the US in the next few years will pull its troops out of europe completely... something that at first will be met with wild cheers from the EU, until they realize that they will now also have to spend more money to defend themselves. Hit them in the pocketbooks.
Oh yea, Fark had it yesterday...
"Man sells PowerBook on Ebay, gets fraudulent offer, sends scammer p-p-p-powerbook instead"
His point is not that it cannot be done, but that the "package" deal is currently how the product is being offered to the consumer.
I can go to the grocery store and buy an Orange, split it myself, visually inspect it and enjoy a tasty portion. Or, I can go to the canned food aisle, and buy a "remix" of individual slices repackaged (in a jar). To continue the analogy, what we really want is a salad bar, where there's a whole bucket of pre-separated orange slices, where the consumer can pick out the nasty bits and pay by the pound.
Back to music, we can look at services like iTunes that sell by the track that provide this individual product. Sure, it's not the major means of distributing (packaging) the product, but the concept is still new. Of course, the artist would like to think that their products are not interchangable (buy by the pound) and that some are worth more than others. Right now, pricing points are set by the record stores (something that gets them in trouble every few years), not necessarily generated by the consumer by pure demand.
I would also interject that there is a feedback loop of Artist joins label, label "acquires" radio time, radio creates demand, demand makes label money, label gives to artist. We need to change this paradigm and make the artist understand that there are alternative methods to create demand, and alternatives ways to get what's due to them. At the end of the day, it is up to the individual artist how they wish to present their material... they have the option to not use the union, I mean, RIAA.
Going back and overwriting the old entry is obviously a bad practice. For example:
For example, I generate a report at the beginning of the month: A $100 + B $200 + C -$100 = $200
The next month, we discover that product B didn't wasn't $200, it was actually $300. Whatever. The point is, that the total as of now is $300, except that I have all these old printouts up till today that say it was $200.
If I go back in my ledger and change "B" with no audit history, then what happens to all those hard copies that were distributed? I can now never go back and reproduce those documents for what the budget was on a given day. And that gives auditors the heebie jeebies.
And all those managers that made project decision.. what if they looked at the first budget and thought they wouldnt be able to fund a project. If the budget is changed with no history tracking, then someone could go back and say "why did you cancel the project when there was all this money available?". At the time, it didn't appear that way.
Now, we all understand that you have the "actual" cash, vs the "perceived" number with errors. However, let's say that I purchased "C" for $100, and I send them my check. The company cashes it, and at the end of the month realizes they overbilled me by $20. "C" only cost me $80, but money still changed hands and needs to be tracked. Sure, we know what the final cost was now, but for a period of time that $20 was inaccessable, and needs to be represented.
This was actually covered on Futurama season 2, The Lesser of Two Evils, when Bender runs into (techincally, runs over) his twin Flexo, a twin with a goatee... shortly thereafter, a priceless tiara goes missing, and Flexo is the suspect...
In the end, it turns out that the Evil Bender robot is Bender after all...
Yeah, at least give them some time to restock the pretzels...
I'm voting Republican, again.
As I've written before, I believe that half of congress needs to go. Where we differ is on which half.
"`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
-- Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
What the world is running out of is economical, pre-pressurized deposits that ooze oil just by digging a little below the surface. There will always be oil deposits, the question is at what cost.
But that's ok, we know we're not running out of oil anyways. And if we don't conserve any oil and don't make a single machine more efficient in the next 50 years, when we run out of the stuff in the ground, we can always just recycle ourselves some more.
True, the exact same chemical may not work in humans as it does in mice. However, the research helps define the processes that result in weight loss in mammals...
We can now analyze the "MouseShrinker" chemical and examine its structure, look at mouse cells and see how it binds to block nutrients, look at similar fat cells in humans, and extrapolate what the "HumanShrinker" chemical should be. It gives scientists something to go on, to investigate. If it doesn't pan out now, oh well, but it may point to the real discovery down the road.
What you really want is for minimum ecological impact is a "pumped storage" hydro plant. Build a man-made reservoir at the top of the hill, and a basin at the bottom of the hill. Fill the top reservoir with water. During the day, you let the water flow with gravity downhill through a set of turbines to generate electricity. At night, power the turbines to flow in reverse, and pump the water back up to the reservoir, basically "refuelling" itself.
But, you say, what's the sense in doing that? Conservation of energy says motors use more energy than they can generate in reverse, so aren't you wasting electricity just moving water about? You'll go out of business!
The key is not the volume of water, but WHEN you're generating. In deregulated energy markets like in most of the USA, there is also an ebb and flow to the price of electricity along the day... at night, when people are sleeping, there's too much online supply and not enough people using it, so the price drops... and during the day, when everyone is awake and watching TV and cooking and cleaning and working and computing, the demand for electricity is much higher, therefore the price of energy is higher.
So, generate electricity during the day and have people buy from you at higher rates, and run your pumps at night purchasing electricity from someone else for lower rates. Net, you're making money, keeping your average costs low. Not only that, you avoid erosion and killing fish like you do with conventional run-of-river dams. For an impressive beast of a plant, check out Bath County Station in Virginia.
"The problem will not be solved until Muslims give up their psychotic desire to control the bodies, property, and eventually souls of everyone else. Maybe if they all switched to Ahmadism, or Bahaism..."
Or maybe find employment at the R.I.A.A. ?
While playing with laser-tag (tm) equipment in college, we found that white wall paint does a very good job at reflecting infrared.
A study on infrared reflective materials: "... conventional white paint has a reflectance for the radiation from fire of 30% or less."
Decent study ideas, but is undersea exploration and nutrition studies really the function of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?
Perhaps the other branches of government, such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the National Oeanic and Atmospheric Administration should start X Prizes of their own?
So this is what happens when your art department is too lazy to come up with new sprites...
See, 4 seconds on google, and you would have found the answer. But you were too busy criticizing.
$237,967 annual salary in 2003, with $582,075 in cash allowances.
It's good to be the king.
I never played Nox, but back when I was in college, there was this game Die By The Sword.
The claim to fame was, it was a 1st-person "melee", where you used the keyboard to walk, but the way you moved your mouse caused the hero's sword to swing in odd maneuvers. Very dynamic poly models could capture any movement of the arms, and depending on swing speed, direction, and where you hit, that's how you did damage to the enemies.
Good analysis. My only caveat is that, in single-player, I thought this was one of the MOST linear games ever designed. The majority of the game was (1) you have a town/safe zone where you can sell things and recruit partners and (2) you have a linear stretch of terrain with one special fork into a closed dungeon. At the end of (2) you find a (1).
I can think of only one area where the progress loops back on itself, and that was "the giant stone gate is barricaded, you have to go through the icky spider dungeon to get to the other side, where you can clear the barricade" and use the city to sell items again. Nowhere is there a "you can take this path, or you can take that path" and have different outcomes.
Excellent graphics, but I'd put it more on par with a souped up Gauntlet than a real RPG.
IIIIII-mmanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy begger
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!