multi pointer is a huge first leap, and i think it will springboard us into something greater. but htere are some very profound changes in mpx alone. i think mpx will start to shift people into the idea of a distributed computing environment.
my own case was pretty simple. freshman year of college i built myself a video project. it was pretty damned bright, a not very efficient bulb but 600watts of non-efficiency still adds up to pretty bright. so i had a huge screen (aka, painted sheet). plus, i had two monitors. all of it rigged to one computer. so there'd be ten people in my basement, chilling out playing video games, watching tv / movies, listening to music, browsing the web or playing flash games sometimes all four at once. but rigging up the input for this was catastrophic. ZSNES or ePSXe had two usbplaystation adapters, and used those joysticks, the web browser got the keyboard and mouse, the movie & music had an ATI rf remote, and Dscaler ran the PS2 which had its own input. if anything needed adjusting (and something always did, the image quality was crap without extreme fine tuning and tweaking, the sound levels was always changing & needed mixing) i had to tell whomever was using the computer to pause for a second while I borrowed the mouse & keyboard. I had two logitech cordless sets, but of course they shared the same input "channel". there were some fd.o threads and X threads that were interesting on MPX, but i never seriously believed anything would ever happen. i had some loose code started to grab devices and try to construct virtual cursors, but it got put on back burner a couple years ago (and i never believed it would mature into an actual solution).
discovering mpx a couple weeks ago was one of the most life altering experiences i have ever had. knowing there's someone else out there with a similar conception of how this whole game is playing out, that is just refreshing. i really enjoyed your post, thank you. lordmyren
The new phillips 90nm lpc3180 has not only floating point, but vectorized floating point, and some of the lowest power consumption available. Mono runs great on it. That seems pretty standard to me. ARM really is the new first class citizen of the CPU world, long after x86 pushed everyone else out.
Intel really just pulled a Pentium IV with XScale. It was basically a StrongARM core jacked up in mhz. The new ones run like 700 mhz, but they're the same architecture as the 100 mhz StrongARM they ran a decade ago. Very poor integration, power consumption not that great, just not a good chip, except if you look at the mhz. Like you say, they kind of got their pants beat.
This is pretty weird news, pretty unexpected. Intel's been trying to make inroads on embedded for years, they know there's huge volume there. StrongARM and XScale were kind of their front line warriors in that battle. Presumably, they're going to be relying on convincing people to use low voltage Core's in the future. Continuing an ARM based line would only draw attention away from their amazing x86 market. It still seems flaky though, given that x86 hasnt been used as a SoC in a long time; 80186 or so. Cell phone with a north bridge, anyone?
On the other hand, while StrongARM was a reasonable contender in the ARM market, the initial XScale models provided virtually no real enhancement over StrongARM, and often increased power consumption in the process. This was a long time ago, but I remember some rather tempermental items on the Errata sheets. Intel simply wasnt cracking heads like the silicon giant it wanted to be. It just wasnt an impressive processor in any respect. Its probably three or four years old now, and Intel's decided the experiment has come time to wind down.
All this as newer faster better ARM cores keep showing up.
I really want to see what Intel's next move is. I am certain they're not going to drop the embedded sector, I know they realize how big it is, how massively its growing. What they're next heading is after this move, that should prove quite interesting.
Havent we abused the desktop metaphor long enough? I dont think anyone thinks of the computer as an actual desktop, and I'm highly suspect that making a computer closer resemble a desktop will not aid anyone.
You have some very good points. Much better than grandfathers blathering, thanks.
I'd just like to quietly point out that costs are often switching costs, not HBA. Even 10GigE is getting reasonable for the adapters, but the switching costs are still completely astronomical.
It will be very interesting to see what the future of interconnects & cache coherency holds. We're definately rapidly approaching a cusp of something new. AMD today announced they're making a new socket for external peripherials, a great little indicator. I personally think the days of concentional HBA's are rapidly coming to a close, thats the 5 year obsolescence Dillon was talking about. Its going to be a drastic change, not just newer better adapters, newer fabrics, as used to be the case. PCI-ASI (switching fabric built around pci-express, very damned cool) and HT are becoming internal and peripherial busses, becoming full fabrics.
Really, I'm just glad things are finally in motion again, and that multiple groups are trying multiple approaches to this huge problem. There's been a lot of stagnation, besides the slow crawl forwards. Cache coherency and interconnection are being completely rethought, from many different angles.
FYI, Dillon is the guy doing DragonFly BSD, which is working on getting high latency cache coherency working in the OS, across systems. He's a little biased towards the "network is the computer", but in the general case he's dead on. There are definately cases where every usec of latency is a usec of 8,000 computers not doing any work whatsover, in which case IB is probably your god. But for most people? I'd wager HT or PCIe based interconnects, already ubiquitous but not used for system interconnect, will probably take over first. Couple million PCIexpress chipsets shipped this year, how many IB chips? Its advancing whats already used.
I think you have no clue whom you were talking to.
Open Standard says nothing about price. IB HBA's might be cheap, but the switching fabric sure as fuck aint.
As for cache coherency, you were addressing the man trying to change the cache coherency game. Watch out, skinny.
Lastly, there are some proprietary gigabit technologies (non IP based) that, while not 2.7 usec, are very close. Numerous MPI implementations are written with these technologies, although many also require hardware.
I dont think anyone is writing off IB. Its just a long ways away before we see switches that cost less than very nice houses. You can usually buy a house and stuff it with a couple rooms of gigabit switches for cheaper.
Its great tech, just not anywhere near the realm of mortals.
All interesting behavior happens at the fringes of systems.
In this particular case, I believe the author is incorrectly connecting two different factors; 1. Giving the player consistent purpose 2. Deciding how or whether they move towards that purpose
Elder Scrolls has been a fine example, although a little short and unclear on criteria #1 (furthermore, earlier ES's lacked a a form of internal consistency such that the player could, in effect, get trapped outside of plot due to stupid bugs). The player truly is free to do just about anything, there is no real expected path for them to walk, thus no potential for loss of credibility. Credibility loss would consist of stepping outside game mechanics, aka bugs.
If anything, most games lack credibility because they try to prevent the player from doing imporbable things. The real credibility loss comes from having the characters trapped in such small snow globes, so to speak. The world is false & artificial. Half life 2 is a blast, but its still obviously false because its totally linear in nature.
Towards the end though, the author makes it clear. Really what he's talking about is Mage: The Ascension. Description/Aside: M:TA is a Pencil and paper RPG where you can bend reality to your will, although reality objects with increasing viciousness the the more flagrant your violation, often to painful ends. Basically you loose credibility with reality for ignoring it too often.
I fail to see how the credibility rating would apply to a game. Thats the thing, lucky or abberant behavior, un-credible actions do not carry real consequences with them in real life. Thats the definition of luck, of probability; its just one roll of the dice. Cold table effects be damned.
Personally, I think its game developers jobs to create environments where players can fool around on the fringe of possibility, to expand the horizon of possibility as far as possible. Only when our worlds are credible enough can we start going back and trying to limit the plots within our worlds to more credible boundaries.
The perfect story here is Halo, what it was planned as and what it became. The original goal was to allow you to wage an adhoc gureilla war against Covenant. But Bungie realized taht would mean building a complete world, a credible dynamic world. They chose what hte author chose; limit the world to build credibility. The ultimate goal though, the interesting goal, is the opposite: to build a credible world, and then help the player chisel a plot out of it.
This whole price thing is such a sham. I cant believe everyone is eating this at face value. This e3, far more than any others, has shown just how lovingly people dive into the hype. Yes, what nintendo is doing is exciting and cool, yes, hte initial Sony price is perposterous. But over the next five years, I truly believe the real innovation, the truly amazing, in greater part is going to be coming from the Sony side of the game.
Sure its going to cost $500 at launch. Thats a bargain! A elementary case of supply and demand; and guess what, there isnt going to be any supply, no matter what Sony charges. Ebay scalpers are gonna sell these things for $800, easy, unless the Yields fairy comes down and magically solves all sony's fab problems and lets sony start shipipng the stupid thing en-volume. The INQ is right, basically, this is a paper launch of limited production, and you really can get away with charging whatever you want on paper launch.
Once Sony figures out how to build the damned things, after a coule tens of thousands of very expensive units get shipped, prices will drop to a far more respectable level. And thats when we'll be able to actually find the things.
But again, the eternal sony question, will the left hand have any idea what the right is doing? Once they start selling for $500, they're going be lament to lower the price, even though right now its their honest and true #1 chief goal.
Sony's a tragic left hand / right hand company, everything is compromise & compromised. On that note, it will be exceedingly interesting to see the Linux open-development status at release; another PS2 failure, or a real attempt this time-- sony has never been known for being open.
What you're saying is whichever line has the highest voltage is the only one which is contributing power. What I dont get is how this would affect the neutral. Instead of flowing from phase0 its now flowing from phase120; but its still going to neutral... what kind of abrupt transient should I expect that would generate the noise, where would this transient come from?
Couldnt you get really smooth DC from three phase? Most applications could care less, but if you're trying to build an amplifier and rely on having a completely stable DC line, three phase would let you remove a lot of the caps. Your minimum voltage goes from 0% to something like 60% of Vmax.
that's damned brilliant. how come I never thought of something like this
I might actually build a half bridge DC-AC widget for my car to take advantage of this; I've got more space dedicated to wall warts than I do the computing gear its powering. USB2.0 hub... 1 cubic inch. Power supply for USB2.0 hub... 6 cubic inches.
as long as you get the harmonics right, you could probably build a nice PWM uC to do power modulation straight from a bridge, sans transformer. do it wrong and you'll be feeding your devices a most unusualy waveform, of course. I guess considering the price you can get transformers for, pretty silly idea I guess.
We need space manufacturing more than anything else, and my guess is that this wont entail people, it'll entail automated machines doing their shit.
Sending a box of crap into space isnt so hard. Add a person and suddenly there's all sorts of unnceessary crap you have to worry about; rad exposure, oxygen, waste management, living space and lets not forget loose heatshielding.
I'm all for people in space, but I really think it'd be more useful if we had a space infrastructure already set up. And I dont think people in space are required to build that infrastructure in the first place. Plus, we're on the cusp of doing some amazing things with aerospace propulsion. Sending people up now with thirty year old technology is rediculously costsly, it'd be far better invested in advancement not sending up high school science projects and lab technicians.
Yeah i just ran smack into the IE/no-dom jerk off yesterday. Fan fucking tastic.
No, I think there's real value to having your existing code to know what you did. Often beginning code is a process of doing things a bunch fo times till you find something that works. The truly dogged find something that works well. Especailly in the latter case, having the answer to old problem sets someplace on disk can be infinitely useful.
Then again, I often change languages. I just wrote my first non-trivial perl program in probably five years. Having reference material of my own creation is invaluable for reasons exactly like this. Even Oreilly's ____ in a Nutshell's usually got nothing on looking at some of my own old code.
Thesis: Directed games always loose. You either limit success to almost no one and piss everyone else off, or you make the goal infinitely achievable and everyone wins, making winning loose all sense of distinction. Why not just give everyone a gold metal, they tried really hard right?
Real victory is enguagement. Armored Core is a great example; the quintessential giant mech fighting game. I'd dub Gran Turismo the Armored Core of racing, except you'd have to throw in motorcycle, hovertanks and machine guns. As a mech builder, you have to work with design constraints to build a mech you can work with. F'n Buddha used to be the king of ariel missile batteries. Our lord ChronoXaos had a notorious plad anti-radar ducky mech. Mercutio rocked the could-barely-move turret/tank. Everyone could cook up their own style, their own play, or we could make new ones up on the fly. We spent days doing nothin but ariel sword fighting, or giving one guy a rifle and one guy a flame thrower. It was all about play.
If you're hoping the current genre rehash / sequel mega-series / coder-slave formula is going to produce any kind of dramatic industrial growth in the games market, you are sadly mistaken.
We've got one more next gen leap after the new consoles before "something has to change". Companies have two generations left to retread the same games with prettier graphics before the difference is impercievable, before they're forced to go back to gameplay to make something better.
Games are growing because they're taking over conventional media; adults come home and play Xbox360 now, not the kids. Instead of watching TV, instead of reading, instead of movies, instead of dicking off on the net, people come home and play PS2. Retreading the same constrained zero sum purpose-driven games is only going to last so long. Its formulaic, too formulaic. Games biggest challengers are movies and TV, and games win every time because they're interactive. But the current level of interactivity is extremely shallow. Even the mmogs are skin deep, WoW is treasure hunting + slaughterfest, with friends. If you forget for a moment its a mmog, it would otherwise be unimaginably repetitive. The winning games are ones like GTA, where you just run around and do shit for fun; they exemplify the deeper meaning of reality itself, the exestential "the purpose of life is but life only".
If games want to grow, they need to cover new territory. Reality hack games and alternative reality games are the future; they're the kind of infinite games that people play in real life. Games need to encourage play and experimentation, need to be interactive enough to get the player doing their own thing, not just playing to win. Cross Planetside with Second Life, throw in some safe non-combat zones and I think you might have a winner.
Our game worlds are too directed to "the game". Part of the real game, part of life, is finding your own play, making your own games up.
My `rents are paying like $14/mo to get a cable that gives them the OTA stations, their reception is so bad. It still looks like garbage and they still only get like 12 channels. Coastal maine tho, ymmv.
Honestly some of the postprocessing is so overboard I would take the no-resolution 15 year old TV we found in the trash (37 inch Zenith). It wasnt the sharpness, but some other filter made one of the sets look like the everything was coated in three layers of ceran wrap.
Lest anyone thing I'm some kind of pretentious better untouched purist junkie, many of the filters are really quite good. The guy who was doing customer reporting did some demo modes for some of the sets where the filtering was only on half the screen (same thing I do with ffdshow to tune)... some of the defaults were very nice. Just saying, it _is_ possible to do horrible horrible things to your video.
When I was running my DIY projector in the basement, for instance, I had to abuse the living #$@#$@# out of DScaler's filters to get a good video image, otherwise the darks would completely wash out. The screen was really low gain, so they'd just disappear without a very strong gamma. Custom levels mapping allowed me to inflate the darks heavily while still allowing me to make the higher end of the spectrum appear to have a versatile and pleasant dynamic range. Too often gamma just makes the upper spectrum look flat.
Many consumer sets are tuned to be strongly oversharpened. I was at circuit city and some guy was doing consumer research for whatever big company he worked for, asked me to compare some DLP and Plasma units. Since I was doing that for myself anyways, I was happy to oblidge in some discussion.
The JVC at first looked really eye catching and noticable from the rest, but staring at it for three minutes made me realize it was because they cranked the crap out of the sharpness filter. Everything looks sharp and bold for a couple minutes, very eye catching, but after three minutes it gets really exhausting and thoroughly artificial. I cant remember the other set that did this. Way too much post-processing, but it catches your eye.
I told the guy this, he says I was defiantely the first person to ever describe anything as "oversharp" to him. Suprising, considering how much filtering some of these units do.
I'd just built a projector out of a LCD monitor. It was rigged up out of lego's, cardboard boxes, duct tape and hot glue, in the nice dark basement. We had a seven foot tall screen of playstation 2 going and had been playing GTA3, GT3 and Armored Core all week.
My friend went out and bought a light gun thinking how awsome it would be. "Does not work with monitors, lcd's or projectors."
Slashdot Mirror
multi pointer is a huge first leap, and i think it will springboard us into something greater. but htere are some very profound changes in mpx alone. i think mpx will start to shift people into the idea of a distributed computing environment.
my own case was pretty simple. freshman year of college i built myself a video project. it was pretty damned bright, a not very efficient bulb but 600watts of non-efficiency still adds up to pretty bright. so i had a huge screen (aka, painted sheet). plus, i had two monitors. all of it rigged to one computer. so there'd be ten people in my basement, chilling out playing video games, watching tv / movies, listening to music, browsing the web or playing flash games sometimes all four at once. but rigging up the input for this was catastrophic. ZSNES or ePSXe had two usbplaystation adapters, and used those joysticks, the web browser got the keyboard and mouse, the movie & music had an ATI rf remote, and Dscaler ran the PS2 which had its own input. if anything needed adjusting (and something always did, the image quality was crap without extreme fine tuning and tweaking, the sound levels was always changing & needed mixing) i had to tell whomever was using the computer to pause for a second while I borrowed the mouse & keyboard. I had two logitech cordless sets, but of course they shared the same input "channel". there were some fd.o threads and X threads that were interesting on MPX, but i never seriously believed anything would ever happen. i had some loose code started to grab devices and try to construct virtual cursors, but it got put on back burner a couple years ago (and i never believed it would mature into an actual solution).
discovering mpx a couple weeks ago was one of the most life altering experiences i have ever had.
knowing there's someone else out there with a similar conception of how this whole game is playing out, that is just refreshing.
i really enjoyed your post, thank you.
lordmyren
world class amazing
sadly proprietary
fucknuts, could have been
a haiku,
-LM
bump.
I had a friend who played E&B and loved it. From a cursory, the game looked more "full" than Eve, although I never really saw much real gameplay.
The new phillips 90nm lpc3180 has not only floating point, but vectorized floating point, and some of the lowest power consumption available. Mono runs great on it. That seems pretty standard to me. ARM really is the new first class citizen of the CPU world, long after x86 pushed everyone else out.
Intel really just pulled a Pentium IV with XScale. It was basically a StrongARM core jacked up in mhz. The new ones run like 700 mhz, but they're the same architecture as the 100 mhz StrongARM they ran a decade ago. Very poor integration, power consumption not that great, just not a good chip, except if you look at the mhz. Like you say, they kind of got their pants beat.
This is pretty weird news, pretty unexpected. Intel's been trying to make inroads on embedded for years, they know there's huge volume there. StrongARM and XScale were kind of their front line warriors in that battle. Presumably, they're going to be relying on convincing people to use low voltage Core's in the future. Continuing an ARM based line would only draw attention away from their amazing x86 market. It still seems flaky though, given that x86 hasnt been used as a SoC in a long time; 80186 or so. Cell phone with a north bridge, anyone?
On the other hand, while StrongARM was a reasonable contender in the ARM market, the initial XScale models provided virtually no real enhancement over StrongARM, and often increased power consumption in the process. This was a long time ago, but I remember some rather tempermental items on the Errata sheets. Intel simply wasnt cracking heads like the silicon giant it wanted to be. It just wasnt an impressive processor in any respect. Its probably three or four years old now, and Intel's decided the experiment has come time to wind down.
All this as newer faster better ARM cores keep showing up.
I really want to see what Intel's next move is. I am certain they're not going to drop the embedded sector, I know they realize how big it is, how massively its growing. What they're next heading is after this move, that should prove quite interesting.
-LM
Lowfat is interesting, but the MPX it runs on is fucking godlike.
MPX should have an army of top teir coders supported by massive grants. It is the only innovative desktop project being coded right now.
Havent we abused the desktop metaphor long enough? I dont think anyone thinks of the computer as an actual desktop, and I'm highly suspect that making a computer closer resemble a desktop will not aid anyone.
Its time to start inventing new metaphors.
-LM
i believe parent was talking about 1024 cpus on a chip.
ps, using all 1024 threads was indeed hard.
You have some very good points. Much better than grandfathers blathering, thanks.
I'd just like to quietly point out that costs are often switching costs, not HBA. Even 10GigE is getting reasonable for the adapters, but the switching costs are still completely astronomical.
It will be very interesting to see what the future of interconnects & cache coherency holds. We're definately rapidly approaching a cusp of something new. AMD today announced they're making a new socket for external peripherials, a great little indicator. I personally think the days of concentional HBA's are rapidly coming to a close, thats the 5 year obsolescence Dillon was talking about. Its going to be a drastic change, not just newer better adapters, newer fabrics, as used to be the case. PCI-ASI (switching fabric built around pci-express, very damned cool) and HT are becoming internal and peripherial busses, becoming full fabrics.
Really, I'm just glad things are finally in motion again, and that multiple groups are trying multiple approaches to this huge problem. There's been a lot of stagnation, besides the slow crawl forwards. Cache coherency and interconnection are being completely rethought, from many different angles.
FYI, Dillon is the guy doing DragonFly BSD, which is working on getting high latency cache coherency working in the OS, across systems. He's a little biased towards the "network is the computer", but in the general case he's dead on. There are definately cases where every usec of latency is a usec of 8,000 computers not doing any work whatsover, in which case IB is probably your god. But for most people? I'd wager HT or PCIe based interconnects, already ubiquitous but not used for system interconnect, will probably take over first. Couple million PCIexpress chipsets shipped this year, how many IB chips? Its advancing whats already used.
Good post mate, cheers.
I think you have no clue whom you were talking to.
Open Standard says nothing about price.
IB HBA's might be cheap, but the switching fabric sure as fuck aint.
As for cache coherency, you were addressing the man trying to change the cache coherency game. Watch out, skinny.
Lastly, there are some proprietary gigabit technologies (non IP based) that, while not 2.7 usec, are very close. Numerous MPI implementations are written with these technologies, although many also require hardware.
I dont think anyone is writing off IB. Its just a long ways away before we see switches that cost less than very nice houses. You can usually buy a house and stuff it with a couple rooms of gigabit switches for cheaper.
Its great tech, just not anywhere near the realm of mortals.
Once upon a time there was a computer called Deep Blue....
Computers evolve scenarios far faster than humans ever could. We just havent bothered giving them enough imagination yet.
All interesting behavior happens at the fringes of systems.
In this particular case, I believe the author is incorrectly connecting two different factors;
1. Giving the player consistent purpose
2. Deciding how or whether they move towards that purpose
Elder Scrolls has been a fine example, although a little short and unclear on criteria #1 (furthermore, earlier ES's lacked a a form of internal consistency such that the player could, in effect, get trapped outside of plot due to stupid bugs). The player truly is free to do just about anything, there is no real expected path for them to walk, thus no potential for loss of credibility. Credibility loss would consist of stepping outside game mechanics, aka bugs.
If anything, most games lack credibility because they try to prevent the player from doing imporbable things. The real credibility loss comes from having the characters trapped in such small snow globes, so to speak. The world is false & artificial. Half life 2 is a blast, but its still obviously false because its totally linear in nature.
Towards the end though, the author makes it clear. Really what he's talking about is Mage: The Ascension.
Description/Aside: M:TA is a Pencil and paper RPG where you can bend reality to your will, although reality objects with increasing viciousness the the more flagrant your violation, often to painful ends. Basically you loose credibility with reality for ignoring it too often.
I fail to see how the credibility rating would apply to a game. Thats the thing, lucky or abberant behavior, un-credible actions do not carry real consequences with them in real life. Thats the definition of luck, of probability; its just one roll of the dice. Cold table effects be damned.
Personally, I think its game developers jobs to create environments where players can fool around on the fringe of possibility, to expand the horizon of possibility as far as possible. Only when our worlds are credible enough can we start going back and trying to limit the plots within our worlds to more credible boundaries.
The perfect story here is Halo, what it was planned as and what it became. The original goal was to allow you to wage an adhoc gureilla war against Covenant. But Bungie realized taht would mean building a complete world, a credible dynamic world. They chose what hte author chose; limit the world to build credibility. The ultimate goal though, the interesting goal, is the opposite: to build a credible world, and then help the player chisel a plot out of it.
myren
Clearly this is just further "christian science" meddling to try to get us to believe an individual is born at conception.
No matter how much of a mutant freak they really are.
Identify mutants. For your protection.
This whole price thing is such a sham. I cant believe everyone is eating this at face value. This e3, far more than any others, has shown just how lovingly people dive into the hype. Yes, what nintendo is doing is exciting and cool, yes, hte initial Sony price is perposterous. But over the next five years, I truly believe the real innovation, the truly amazing, in greater part is going to be coming from the Sony side of the game.
Sure its going to cost $500 at launch. Thats a bargain! A elementary case of supply and demand; and guess what, there isnt going to be any supply, no matter what Sony charges. Ebay scalpers are gonna sell these things for $800, easy, unless the Yields fairy comes down and magically solves all sony's fab problems and lets sony start shipipng the stupid thing en-volume. The INQ is right, basically, this is a paper launch of limited production, and you really can get away with charging whatever you want on paper launch.
Once Sony figures out how to build the damned things, after a coule tens of thousands of very expensive units get shipped, prices will drop to a far more respectable level. And thats when we'll be able to actually find the things.
But again, the eternal sony question, will the left hand have any idea what the right is doing? Once they start selling for $500, they're going be lament to lower the price, even though right now its their honest and true #1 chief goal.
Sony's a tragic left hand / right hand company, everything is compromise & compromised. On that note, it will be exceedingly interesting to see the Linux open-development status at release; another PS2 failure, or a real attempt this time-- sony has never been known for being open.
Myren
What you're saying is whichever line has the highest voltage is the only one which is contributing power. What I dont get is how this would affect the neutral. Instead of flowing from phase0 its now flowing from phase120; but its still going to neutral... what kind of abrupt transient should I expect that would generate the noise, where would this transient come from?
Couldnt you get really smooth DC from three phase? Most applications could care less, but if you're trying to build an amplifier and rely on having a completely stable DC line, three phase would let you remove a lot of the caps. Your minimum voltage goes from 0% to something like 60% of Vmax.
that's damned brilliant. how come I never thought of something like this
I might actually build a half bridge DC-AC widget for my car to take advantage of this; I've got more space dedicated to wall warts than I do the computing gear its powering. USB2.0 hub... 1 cubic inch. Power supply for USB2.0 hub... 6 cubic inches.
as long as you get the harmonics right, you could probably build a nice PWM uC to do power modulation straight from a bridge, sans transformer. do it wrong and you'll be feeding your devices a most unusualy waveform, of course. I guess considering the price you can get transformers for, pretty silly idea I guess.
How can a Directed game loose?
"he more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Attempt to impose order leads to a runaway situation away from the desired point of order.
Jerk. PS, you misspelled distinction.
We need space manufacturing more than anything else, and my guess is that this wont entail people, it'll entail automated machines doing their shit.
Sending a box of crap into space isnt so hard. Add a person and suddenly there's all sorts of unnceessary crap you have to worry about; rad exposure, oxygen, waste management, living space and lets not forget loose heatshielding.
I'm all for people in space, but I really think it'd be more useful if we had a space infrastructure already set up. And I dont think people in space are required to build that infrastructure in the first place. Plus, we're on the cusp of doing some amazing things with aerospace propulsion. Sending people up now with thirty year old technology is rediculously costsly, it'd be far better invested in advancement not sending up high school science projects and lab technicians.
Some day. That day is not today.
Yeah i just ran smack into the IE/no-dom jerk off yesterday. Fan fucking tastic.
No, I think there's real value to having your existing code to know what you did. Often beginning code is a process of doing things a bunch fo times till you find something that works. The truly dogged find something that works well. Especailly in the latter case, having the answer to old problem sets someplace on disk can be infinitely useful.
Then again, I often change languages. I just wrote my first non-trivial perl program in probably five years. Having reference material of my own creation is invaluable for reasons exactly like this. Even Oreilly's ____ in a Nutshell's usually got nothing on looking at some of my own old code.
Myren
Thesis: Directed games always loose. You either limit success to almost no one and piss everyone else off, or you make the goal infinitely achievable and everyone wins, making winning loose all sense of distinction. Why not just give everyone a gold metal, they tried really hard right?
Real victory is enguagement. Armored Core is a great example; the quintessential giant mech fighting game. I'd dub Gran Turismo the Armored Core of racing, except you'd have to throw in motorcycle, hovertanks and machine guns. As a mech builder, you have to work with design constraints to build a mech you can work with. F'n Buddha used to be the king of ariel missile batteries. Our lord ChronoXaos had a notorious plad anti-radar ducky mech. Mercutio rocked the could-barely-move turret/tank. Everyone could cook up their own style, their own play, or we could make new ones up on the fly. We spent days doing nothin but ariel sword fighting, or giving one guy a rifle and one guy a flame thrower. It was all about play.
If you're hoping the current genre rehash / sequel mega-series / coder-slave formula is going to produce any kind of dramatic industrial growth in the games market, you are sadly mistaken.
We've got one more next gen leap after the new consoles before "something has to change". Companies have two generations left to retread the same games with prettier graphics before the difference is impercievable, before they're forced to go back to gameplay to make something better.
Games are growing because they're taking over conventional media; adults come home and play Xbox360 now, not the kids. Instead of watching TV, instead of reading, instead of movies, instead of dicking off on the net, people come home and play PS2. Retreading the same constrained zero sum purpose-driven games is only going to last so long. Its formulaic, too formulaic. Games biggest challengers are movies and TV, and games win every time because they're interactive. But the current level of interactivity is extremely shallow. Even the mmogs are skin deep, WoW is treasure hunting + slaughterfest, with friends. If you forget for a moment its a mmog, it would otherwise be unimaginably repetitive. The winning games are ones like GTA, where you just run around and do shit for fun; they exemplify the deeper meaning of reality itself, the exestential "the purpose of life is but life only".
If games want to grow, they need to cover new territory. Reality hack games and alternative reality games are the future; they're the kind of infinite games that people play in real life. Games need to encourage play and experimentation, need to be interactive enough to get the player doing their own thing, not just playing to win. Cross Planetside with Second Life, throw in some safe non-combat zones and I think you might have a winner.
Our game worlds are too directed to "the game". Part of the real game, part of life, is finding your own play, making your own games up.
26 channels? What kind of OTA are you getting?
My `rents are paying like $14/mo to get a cable that gives them the OTA stations, their reception is so bad. It still looks like garbage and they still only get like 12 channels. Coastal maine tho, ymmv.
Honestly some of the postprocessing is so overboard I would take the no-resolution 15 year old TV we found in the trash (37 inch Zenith). It wasnt the sharpness, but some other filter made one of the sets look like the everything was coated in three layers of ceran wrap.
Lest anyone thing I'm some kind of pretentious better untouched purist junkie, many of the filters are really quite good. The guy who was doing customer reporting did some demo modes for some of the sets where the filtering was only on half the screen (same thing I do with ffdshow to tune)... some of the defaults were very nice. Just saying, it _is_ possible to do horrible horrible things to your video.
When I was running my DIY projector in the basement, for instance, I had to abuse the living #$@#$@# out of DScaler's filters to get a good video image, otherwise the darks would completely wash out. The screen was really low gain, so they'd just disappear without a very strong gamma. Custom levels mapping allowed me to inflate the darks heavily while still allowing me to make the higher end of the spectrum appear to have a versatile and pleasant dynamic range. Too often gamma just makes the upper spectrum look flat.
Many consumer sets are tuned to be strongly oversharpened. I was at circuit city and some guy was doing consumer research for whatever big company he worked for, asked me to compare some DLP and Plasma units. Since I was doing that for myself anyways, I was happy to oblidge in some discussion.
The JVC at first looked really eye catching and noticable from the rest, but staring at it for three minutes made me realize it was because they cranked the crap out of the sharpness filter. Everything looks sharp and bold for a couple minutes, very eye catching, but after three minutes it gets really exhausting and thoroughly artificial. I cant remember the other set that did this. Way too much post-processing, but it catches your eye.
I told the guy this, he says I was defiantely the first person to ever describe anything as "oversharp" to him. Suprising, considering how much filtering some of these units do.
I'd just built a projector out of a LCD monitor. It was rigged up out of lego's, cardboard boxes, duct tape and hot glue, in the nice dark basement. We had a seven foot tall screen of playstation 2 going and had been playing GTA3, GT3 and Armored Core all week.
My friend went out and bought a light gun thinking how awsome it would be. "Does not work with monitors, lcd's or projectors."
Of course, it was actually all three.