The reason Bill Watterson chose to never license his trademarks for anything besides his comics was to prevent the development of trashy stuff like this. It's sad that his trademark ownership is often ignored.
That's saying a lot considering not a single screenshot of Quake 4 has been released, the game is very early in development, only a tiny bit about the story is known, and it has yet to be shown publically at all except for a single piece of concept art and the bits of leaked artwork.
Doom III has had physics simulation for a very long time. A Gamespy interview from August 2002 states, "First, Tim showed the physics system by shooting some boxes off a shelf -- the boxes would react differently depending on where they were shot. Next, Tim shot the side of a lighting fixture, causing it to swing back and forth, and subsequently cast moving shadows on the zombie below." The 2002 E3 demo also showed ragdoll physics, as an enemy fell down the stairs you could see his limbs bending and moving realistically as they hit a siderail and then the steps.
The physics enhancements are in no way a response to the unveiling of Half-Life 2, which unlike Doom 3 does not use an in-house developed physics engine (Half-Life 2 and many other games use the Havok physics engine). They were in place and demonstrated to the public far before Half-Life 2 was ever shown.
Let me repeat: pulse jets are not pulse detonation jets. Unlike pulse detonation jets, pure pulse jet research efforts have been all but abandoned as they were concluded to be too inefficent and overall inferior to any other jet design.
Pulse jets are composed of a combustion section, a set of inlet shutters and an exhaust valve. Air enters the combustion chamber and the inlet shutters closes, forcing the combusting fuel-air mixture out through the exhaust valve, producing thrust. Pulse detonation jets have no such valves.
Are you actually trying to propose this as a new theory, or did you read it somewhere else and are pretending to have come up with it? I have never read a description of the "donuts on a rope" contrail without an accompanying description of pulse jets, and the connection is incredibly obvious.
Here's a specification comparison with an equivalently priced (both at $399) iPod... info from dapreview, an excellent respository of specs of hdd audio players which reported on the Karma aka "Pearl" months ago.
Karma Capacity: 20GB Weight: 5.5 ounces Formats: MP3 WMA OGG FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec making WAV not needed) Interfaces: USB 2 and Ethernet Battery Life: 15 hours Extras: Dynamic playlists, Dual RCA Line-Outs, 5 band equalizer LCD: 160x128 backlit
Seems like if you want purely a music player that is conveniently-sized, supports OGG and has 25% more capacity than the iPod for the same price, the Karma is the way to go. The iPod's perks are tempting though, if you want more than just a music player.
Well, WMA lossless is backwards compatible with standard WMA as far as playing in Windows Media Player goes, so maybe the Karma will be able to handle WMA lossless to make up for a lack of WAV support.
Snopes rocks. I was particularly impressed by the explanation of the "police radar causes missile to be launched at it" urban legend. Where I've seen mainstream media utterly fail at describing the details modern weaponry (vagueness, flat-out inaccuracies or both), snopes.com provided a refreshingly detailed explanation that I found no errors in. It's nice that the author chosen for it was very informed in the subject.
More details from Code One magainze
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 2, Informative
From the October 2003 issue of Code One magazine:
Avionics testing faces two major challenges: software stability and missile shots. "We are struggling with some stability problems," Tomeny says. "The problems are similar to a home computer freezing when a program is launched. The computer has to be restarted. When our software works, it works very well. When the software related to a particular system freezes, we have to deal with restarts for that system. We're getting the bugs out of the system so it starts correctly and works for the entire flight. These problems are encountered in every development program. We discover most of them in the lab and in the flying test bed. But other problems still crop up when we load software on the airplane. That, unfortunately, is the nature of software development."
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2003/art ic les/apr_03/fa22testing/index.html
Sounds urban-legend-ish to me. You're turning and burning, pulling on the stick with sweat pouring down your face as you try to line up that iron sight with the enemy aircraft's flightpath, while the other pilot does the same. Do you really think a guy signaling is going to stop you?
Re:Avionic stability?
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The F/A-22 does not need IFF with datalink and NCTR. Some USAF aircraft are not currently even equipped with IFF (the F-16 for example) and they have done quite well.
The APG-77 has a terrain following mode. And the widely spread weak emissions from it are much harder to detect than those from a conventional radar.
The Martin-Baker ACES II ejection seat can save a pilot's life from zero feet of altitude (that's why it's called a "zero-zero" ejection seat- effective down to zero altitude and zero speed)
Re:Why is this a big deal?
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 5, Informative
This isn't flight control software we're talking about. This is sensor fusion software. The flight control system is unaffected.
The sensor fusion software's task is to combine the data from all of the various sources (radar, RWR, multiple datalinks etc.) and redistribute it among the systems that could benefit from it. For example, a target detected by radar would show also up on the Horizontal Situational Display, and would also be re-transmitted via datalink to JSTARS and/or AWACS and any other datalink-capable aircraft. In addition, contact information can correlated for maximum accuracy. A target's radar emissions could be detected by the Radar Warning Receiver, and that information could then be used by the radar for Non Cooperative Target Recognition allowing the radar to display the type of target (though NCTR in the F/A-22 reportedly works differently from this). All of the numerous sensors on the F/A-22 have their resources and products pooled together, allowing for extremely effective target detection, tracking and ID. Sensor fusion is an incredible development in avionics and is one of the foundations of 5th generation fighter aircraft technology.
This has been going on for a while. The software which controls the digital flight control system is not affected. As mentioned, it only affects the sensor fusion software.
Just thought of this; maybe it's all for PR? A full "lab" of open source stuff would certainly lend credence to Microsoft's attacks on open source software, regardless of whether MS demonstrates any specific findings that come from their apparent research.
Surely Microsoft has already done extensive studies with Linux involving actual usage and deployment before? If not, this is long, long overdue.
I find it pretty unlikely though that this is the first time Microsoft has conducted a serious investigation into Linux's capabilities by actually using it. It's known at least that some people at Microsoft have used it significantly and reported on its performance; there were the leaked "Halloween" documents which gave glowing praise of Linux, and there was the report from Hotmail on migrating their servers from *BSD to Windows (after Hotmail was acquired by MS) in which the author detailed the flexibility offered by *BSD that also happens to exist in Linux.
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The reason Bill Watterson chose to never license his trademarks for anything besides his comics was to prevent the development of trashy stuff like this. It's sad that his trademark ownership is often ignored.
Soviet Russia, that is.
In Soviet Russian, exploit patches you!
"Hell, ProE on Mac OSX is better for both purposes than AutoCAD on windblows"
And CATIA and SolidWorks on Windows are way better than both.
GameSpy is good for its connections that provide exclusives, but the writing quality of its articles has always been poor.
That's saying a lot considering not a single screenshot of Quake 4 has been released, the game is very early in development, only a tiny bit about the story is known, and it has yet to be shown publically at all except for a single piece of concept art and the bits of leaked artwork.
Except Quake 4 is a continuation of Quake 2, not Quake 3.
Doom III has had physics simulation for a very long time. A Gamespy interview from August 2002 states, "First, Tim showed the physics system by shooting some boxes off a shelf -- the boxes would react differently depending on where they were shot. Next, Tim shot the side of a lighting fixture, causing it to swing back and forth, and subsequently cast moving shadows on the zombie below." The 2002 E3 demo also showed ragdoll physics, as an enemy fell down the stairs you could see his limbs bending and moving realistically as they hit a siderail and then the steps.
The physics enhancements are in no way a response to the unveiling of Half-Life 2, which unlike Doom 3 does not use an in-house developed physics engine (Half-Life 2 and many other games use the Havok physics engine). They were in place and demonstrated to the public far before Half-Life 2 was ever shown.
Let me repeat: pulse jets are not pulse detonation jets. Unlike pulse detonation jets, pure pulse jet research efforts have been all but abandoned as they were concluded to be too inefficent and overall inferior to any other jet design.
Pulse jets are composed of a combustion section, a set of inlet shutters and an exhaust valve. Air enters the combustion chamber and the inlet shutters closes, forcing the combusting fuel-air mixture out through the exhaust valve, producing thrust. Pulse detonation jets have no such valves.
Are you actually trying to propose this as a new theory, or did you read it somewhere else and are pretending to have come up with it? I have never read a description of the "donuts on a rope" contrail without an accompanying description of pulse jets, and the connection is incredibly obvious.
And why is this type of contrail "infamous"?
Is there an easy way to convert SVG graphics to XML?
I was thinking the same thing. Brings back memories...
Nevermind, the Karma supports FLAC. No reason to use WAV over FLAC when FLAC is lossless and typically results in compression factors of 1.5-3x.
Here's a specification comparison with an equivalently priced (both at $399) iPod... info from dapreview, an excellent respository of specs of hdd audio players which reported on the Karma aka "Pearl" months ago.
iPod
Capacity: 15GB
Weight: 5.6 ounces
Formats: MP3 AAC AIFF WAV
Interfaces: Firewire 400
Battery Life: "Over 8 hours"
Extras: Games, Contacts, Calendar, Alarm, Sleep Timer, Clock, "20 equalizer settings"
LCD: 160x128 backlit
Karma
Capacity: 20GB
Weight: 5.5 ounces
Formats: MP3 WMA OGG FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec making WAV not needed)
Interfaces: USB 2 and Ethernet
Battery Life: 15 hours
Extras: Dynamic playlists, Dual RCA Line-Outs, 5 band equalizer
LCD: 160x128 backlit
Seems like if you want purely a music player that is conveniently-sized, supports OGG and has 25% more capacity than the iPod for the same price, the Karma is the way to go. The iPod's perks are tempting though, if you want more than just a music player.
Well, WMA lossless is backwards compatible with standard WMA as far as playing in Windows Media Player goes, so maybe the Karma will be able to handle WMA lossless to make up for a lack of WAV support.
It's as big as a brick!
The problem with posts about Microsoft is that they're all assumption.
Snopes rocks. I was particularly impressed by the explanation of the "police radar causes missile to be launched at it" urban legend. Where I've seen mainstream media utterly fail at describing the details modern weaponry (vagueness, flat-out inaccuracies or both), snopes.com provided a refreshingly detailed explanation that I found no errors in. It's nice that the author chosen for it was very informed in the subject.
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2003/ar
Sounds urban-legend-ish to me. You're turning and burning, pulling on the stick with sweat pouring down your face as you try to line up that iron sight with the enemy aircraft's flightpath, while the other pilot does the same. Do you really think a guy signaling is going to stop you?
The F/A-22 does not need IFF with datalink and NCTR. Some USAF aircraft are not currently even equipped with IFF (the F-16 for example) and they have done quite well.
The APG-77 has a terrain following mode. And the widely spread weak emissions from it are much harder to detect than those from a conventional radar.
The Martin-Baker ACES II ejection seat can save a pilot's life from zero feet of altitude (that's why it's called a "zero-zero" ejection seat- effective down to zero altitude and zero speed)
This isn't flight control software we're talking about. This is sensor fusion software. The flight control system is unaffected.
The sensor fusion software's task is to combine the data from all of the various sources (radar, RWR, multiple datalinks etc.) and redistribute it among the systems that could benefit from it. For example, a target detected by radar would show also up on the Horizontal Situational Display, and would also be re-transmitted via datalink to JSTARS and/or AWACS and any other datalink-capable aircraft. In addition, contact information can correlated for maximum accuracy. A target's radar emissions could be detected by the Radar Warning Receiver, and that information could then be used by the radar for Non Cooperative Target Recognition allowing the radar to display the type of target (though NCTR in the F/A-22 reportedly works differently from this). All of the numerous sensors on the F/A-22 have their resources and products pooled together, allowing for extremely effective target detection, tracking and ID. Sensor fusion is an incredible development in avionics and is one of the foundations of 5th generation fighter aircraft technology.
This has been going on for a while. The software which controls the digital flight control system is not affected. As mentioned, it only affects the sensor fusion software.
Just thought of this; maybe it's all for PR? A full "lab" of open source stuff would certainly lend credence to Microsoft's attacks on open source software, regardless of whether MS demonstrates any specific findings that come from their apparent research.
Surely Microsoft has already done extensive studies with Linux involving actual usage and deployment before? If not, this is long, long overdue.
I find it pretty unlikely though that this is the first time Microsoft has conducted a serious investigation into Linux's capabilities by actually using it. It's known at least that some people at Microsoft have used it significantly and reported on its performance; there were the leaked "Halloween" documents which gave glowing praise of Linux, and there was the report from Hotmail on migrating their servers from *BSD to Windows (after Hotmail was acquired by MS) in which the author detailed the flexibility offered by *BSD that also happens to exist in Linux.