So, if you are one of the people who still has a glide card, but it was designed so that it couldn't do OpenGL becuase it used completely different technology, how useful would it be to you?
Normally I avoid Grammar Nazi posts on slash, but this is completely indecipherable. If you're setting up a hypothetical, use the subjunctive. If you're asserting that Glide-oriented cards don't support OpenGL, you're flat-out wrong; they have full OpenGL support. 3dfx also provided a stripped-down, "Quake only" driver that was significantly faster (as was Metabyte's WickedGL driver).
Interesting different example: the first two Delta Force games rendered with voxels, which meant they were software only (they managed to finangle some sort of minor hardware assist with the right accelerator, but only minor). I thought it added a lot to the game, but alas, with Land Warrior they switched to polygons to avoid, frankly, looking like garbage given the hardware support out there.
While utilizing the fan network and and fan ethusiasm, they have never taken advantage of fans to maintain momentum while they diddle-dally on a game.
While I agree with much of what you say, don't forget that Valve set a ship date for HL2, missed it dramatically, and then blamed the source code theft, even though that wasn't the problem. I understand how and why it happened, but they were hardly being level with us.
You're right, though: hype needs careful management. Daikatana would have been merely a mediocre game without "Suck it down!" Now it's one of the worst games of all time for many people.
I don't know the details of Voyager itself, but just keeping a program running does have some significant costs. Deep Space Network time isn't cheap; you have pure operating costs for that, paying engineers to run it (and the operations people are really *wonderful* on the whole, they do a lot of work, solve a lot of problems, and with very little fanfare), an appropriate fraction of upkeep/maintenance for it, etc. Then there's the grants for data analysis, keeping a few grad students fed while they work plus covering appropriate travel expenses, equipment, etc. And then all this is happening in a bureaucracy--add overhead. It adds up.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program. We're trying to refocus where we can, support the effort with good science, but the only way we're going to continue to expand our understanding of the space environment as a whole is if you--all of you--get on the phone and convince your congressfolk that pure research is worth funding through NASA. Otherwise things are going to come to a pretty serious halt and space scientists are going to start leaving the US.
This is measuring the "dark side of the Sun" (couldn't resist). So Sun's between us and Jupiter, photons go out from Sun, hit Jupiter, reflect, come back past Sun to Earth.
I don't see the fundamentally photon nature of the setup, except in the detector. By that logic, a grating+CCD spectrometer violates the duality principle. Was this published anywhere other than New Scientist?
(doesn't make it any less of a classic experiement, either. Classic experiments are elegant demonstrations of a particular principle and don't lose their value just because one can find some case where the principle is violated).
> It's funny how B5 fans sneer at Firefly, and > Firefly fans love to make fun of B5. Funny; I love both. Look forward to Serinity and was looking forward to TMoS. Maybe someday...
> 3B. You may permanently transfer ownership of the > Game and all parts thereof, and all of your rights > and obligations under the License Agreement
I don't have a copy of the EULA, not owning the game, but does "rights and obligations under the License Agreement" include the right to actually play the game on the servers? You'd think it would, but unless it's specified, I would guess that right is associated with the account, not the game-in-the-box. And presumably right of access to the servers is revokable by Blizzard at any time for any reason?
The SRB's were permitted to be built in sections because otherwise they would need to be shipped by sea, and that was counter to an open bidding process. The winning bid was from Morton-Thiokol, based in Utah (and thus landlocked), not California.
The O-ring failed because politicians pushed and pushed for a launch in conditions significantly worse than those known to cause substantial O-ring erosion.
I graduated with a BA in physics (note that often a BA looks better for grad school admissions than a BS, as it implies a broader background) and a BS in computer science. After three years of grunt programming in the business world, I went back to grad school and am two years into my PhD. My suggestions:
If you can find a lab job or similar (check into NIST, NRAO, etc.), it might help in a number of ways: real learning, some taste for research, look good on the resume. But it'll suck, hardcore, for paying off those debts.
Keep all your undergrad stuff around--notes, texts, etc. It'll come in handy for admissions, GRE cramming, and when you apply to MIT, they want a complete list of textbooks you used as an undergrad
Don't slack off now--your grades in your advanced courses will have a big effect on your admissions prospects. Get a paper published if you can.
Keep your hand in. Poke through OCW and study stuff you didn't cover well in undergrad. Learn IDL or Matlab if you haven't already (and can afford the licenses--in fact, look into a student license now).
Plan well in advance for the GRE--you'll need to be taking it nearly a year before sending in applications, so you have to register well in advance for the subject tests (the general's a lot easier to get into). Prepare hard for the subject test--I found this was a real learning process where I assimilated all my knowledge from four years of undergrad.
Take on learning opportunities in your job. Anything you can learn, any skill you can develop, is worth having. On my applications I underscored that I had three years of working in a company and dealing with clients, that I knew how to run a small project, that I understood concepts of deadlines and budgets, and that I could effectively communicate technical information to non-technical people. This sort of thing will differentiate you from the fresh out of college crowd.
Keep living like a student--cheap and focussed. It's easy to get distracted and spend all your time (except for work) and money on having fun. Moderate that urge.
> It's hard to get a bike going fast enough to do this.
No it isn't. It's basically the way to turn sharply at any sort of decent speed. Nor is it necessarily a gyroscopic effect. See Bicycling Street Smarts.
Nobody said the probe is actually crossing the termination shock. It's observing ENA's generated at the termination shock.
Uber-brief introduction to energetic neutral atoms: Ions (charged particles) are susceptible to magnetic and electric forces. As a result, they can be boosted to very high energies in certain situations, but also usually can't travel very far before being modified in some way by electromagnetic forces. If, however, an ion interacts with a neutral (charge exchange), it can "steal" one or more electrons from the neutral without substantially changing the energies of either, leaving a nonenergetic ion and an energetic neutral, which then leaves the vicinity as it is no longer subject to EM forces. We can observe these ENA's and infer properties of the acceleration region.
Why is it that when scientists talk about exploring the edges of the solar system, they insist in sending probes "out past Pluto"?
Your question has been answered by others here, but I should point out that this particular mission is exploring the edges of the Solar system from Earth orbit. Hardly out past Pluto:)
(article doesn't specifically say that, but implied from the budget, the program it's under, and the fact that it's observing ENA's...remote sensing using ENA's is one of the Cool Things right now).
(And since the lameness filter won't let me get away with the pithy, direct reply, I'll point out that the only possible answer for something that's already happened is "1." But if you want to engage in retroactive prediction, and are asking "what is the probability that, given the existence of an asteroid designated 2001 DA42 but otherwise unnamed, and a small campaign to find an appropriate rock to memorialize Douglas Adams, the two will be combined," I'd also say "pretty close to 1, given the societal impetus towards meaning." This wasn't some sort of random match-up. If you want to play games of "oh, but why did there even exist the designation 2001 DA42" we can start calculating the probability of him being named Douglas Adams, and dying in 2001, and the answer becomes "vanishingly small, but the question has no meaning.")
My then-girlfriend found African violets to be very very picky--she killed them about as fast as I could keep buying them (no jokes, please). They're kinda picky about just the right amount of water and fry easily in too much sunlight.
SRAM (Static) actually keeps it's state when you power it off
No. SRAM keeps its state as long as it's still powered. DRAM is in a state of continual decay, and must be refreshed on a regular basis.
Chain reaction made it *very* clear that the energy came from burning hydrogen--they demonstrate it with a match! Basically they built a perpetual motion machine--electrolyze the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burn the hydrogen (combining it with oxygen) to get water, lather rinse repeat.
Okay, what is with this usage of "anymore"? Until maybe two years ago I never encountered it without the negatory but now this sort of thing is all over ("more" of something one didn't do before...), as well as usage in the sense of "evermore" (always have, always will). Is this some sort of shift in common usage? A formerly awkward or unusual construction becoming accepted? Before I've encountered it mainly in grammar-mangling and ESL-heavy IRC--not that slash is a bastion of eloquent usage:)
No offense to the parent; according to define: your usage is correct (although implied unusual). Hope the etymology geeks come out to clear up my befuddlement....
Low pressure sodium, not helium (well, some people might have suggested helium, but this is the first I've heard of it). Y'know, those nasty orange lights. Incredibly efficient, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I avoid Grammar Nazi posts on slash, but this is completely indecipherable. If you're setting up a hypothetical, use the subjunctive. If you're asserting that Glide-oriented cards don't support OpenGL, you're flat-out wrong; they have full OpenGL support. 3dfx also provided a stripped-down, "Quake only" driver that was significantly faster (as was Metabyte's WickedGL driver).
Interesting different example: the first two Delta Force games rendered with voxels, which meant they were software only (they managed to finangle some sort of minor hardware assist with the right accelerator, but only minor). I thought it added a lot to the game, but alas, with Land Warrior they switched to polygons to avoid, frankly, looking like garbage given the hardware support out there.
(yes, yes, not directly for that purpose, but thought it was an important/relevant link)
Also less "alternative" uses, like troops calling home.
While I agree with much of what you say, don't forget that Valve set a ship date for HL2, missed it dramatically, and then blamed the source code theft, even though that wasn't the problem. I understand how and why it happened, but they were hardly being level with us.
You're right, though: hype needs careful management. Daikatana would have been merely a mediocre game without "Suck it down!" Now it's one of the worst games of all time for many people.
I don't know the details of Voyager itself, but just keeping a program running does have some significant costs. Deep Space Network time isn't cheap; you have pure operating costs for that, paying engineers to run it (and the operations people are really *wonderful* on the whole, they do a lot of work, solve a lot of problems, and with very little fanfare), an appropriate fraction of upkeep/maintenance for it, etc. Then there's the grants for data analysis, keeping a few grad students fed while they work plus covering appropriate travel expenses, equipment, etc. And then all this is happening in a bureaucracy--add overhead. It adds up.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program. We're trying to refocus where we can, support the effort with good science, but the only way we're going to continue to expand our understanding of the space environment as a whole is if you--all of you--get on the phone and convince your congressfolk that pure research is worth funding through NASA. Otherwise things are going to come to a pretty serious halt and space scientists are going to start leaving the US.
This is measuring the "dark side of the Sun" (couldn't resist). So Sun's between us and Jupiter, photons go out from Sun, hit Jupiter, reflect, come back past Sun to Earth.
Only works half the year, obviously.
I don't see the fundamentally photon nature of the setup, except in the detector. By that logic, a grating+CCD spectrometer violates the duality principle. Was this published anywhere other than New Scientist?
(doesn't make it any less of a classic experiement, either. Classic experiments are elegant demonstrations of a particular principle and don't lose their value just because one can find some case where the principle is violated).
> A toaster causes toast. You put in bread, press the lever, and you get toast, every time.
But where does the bread go?
> It's funny how B5 fans sneer at Firefly, and
> Firefly fans love to make fun of B5.
Funny; I love both. Look forward to Serinity and was looking forward to TMoS. Maybe someday...
> 3B. You may permanently transfer ownership of the
> Game and all parts thereof, and all of your rights
> and obligations under the License Agreement
I don't have a copy of the EULA, not owning the game, but does "rights and obligations under the License Agreement" include the right to actually play the game on the servers? You'd think it would, but unless it's specified, I would guess that right is associated with the account, not the game-in-the-box. And presumably right of access to the servers is revokable by Blizzard at any time for any reason?
Wine Is Not an Emulator.
The SRB's were permitted to be built in sections because otherwise they would need to be shipped by sea, and that was counter to an open bidding process. The winning bid was from Morton-Thiokol, based in Utah (and thus landlocked), not California.
The O-ring failed because politicians pushed and pushed for a launch in conditions significantly worse than those known to cause substantial O-ring erosion.
No it isn't. It's basically the way to turn sharply at any sort of decent speed. Nor is it necessarily a gyroscopic effect. See Bicycling Street Smarts.
Uber-brief introduction to energetic neutral atoms: Ions (charged particles) are susceptible to magnetic and electric forces. As a result, they can be boosted to very high energies in certain situations, but also usually can't travel very far before being modified in some way by electromagnetic forces. If, however, an ion interacts with a neutral (charge exchange), it can "steal" one or more electrons from the neutral without substantially changing the energies of either, leaving a nonenergetic ion and an energetic neutral, which then leaves the vicinity as it is no longer subject to EM forces. We can observe these ENA's and infer properties of the acceleration region.
Your question has been answered by others here, but I should point out that this particular mission is exploring the edges of the Solar system from Earth orbit. Hardly out past Pluto :)
(article doesn't specifically say that, but implied from the budget, the program it's under, and the fact that it's observing ENA's...remote sensing using ENA's is one of the Cool Things right now).
1
(And since the lameness filter won't let me get away with the pithy, direct reply, I'll point out that the only possible answer for something that's already happened is "1." But if you want to engage in retroactive prediction, and are asking "what is the probability that, given the existence of an asteroid designated 2001 DA42 but otherwise unnamed, and a small campaign to find an appropriate rock to memorialize Douglas Adams, the two will be combined," I'd also say "pretty close to 1, given the societal impetus towards meaning." This wasn't some sort of random match-up. If you want to play games of "oh, but why did there even exist the designation 2001 DA42" we can start calculating the probability of him being named Douglas Adams, and dying in 2001, and the answer becomes "vanishingly small, but the question has no meaning.")
My then-girlfriend found African violets to be very very picky--she killed them about as fast as I could keep buying them (no jokes, please). They're kinda picky about just the right amount of water and fry easily in too much sunlight.
SRAM (Static) actually keeps it's state when you power it off
No. SRAM keeps its state as long as it's still powered. DRAM is in a state of continual decay, and must be refreshed on a regular basis.
Chain reaction made it *very* clear that the energy came from burning hydrogen--they demonstrate it with a match! Basically they built a perpetual motion machine--electrolyze the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burn the hydrogen (combining it with oxygen) to get water, lather rinse repeat.
> it sounds to me like the way they've been running
> battle.net for years
Nah, they haven't sued anyone yet.
Okay, what is with this usage of "anymore"? Until maybe two years ago I never encountered it without the negatory but now this sort of thing is all over ("more" of something one didn't do before...), as well as usage in the sense of "evermore" (always have, always will). Is this some sort of shift in common usage? A formerly awkward or unusual construction becoming accepted? Before I've encountered it mainly in grammar-mangling and ESL-heavy IRC--not that slash is a bastion of eloquent usage :)
No offense to the parent; according to define: your usage is correct (although implied unusual). Hope the etymology geeks come out to clear up my befuddlement....
Preview? Missing end tag? A Jedi craves not these things!
Low pressure sodium, not helium (well, some people might have suggested helium, but this is the first I've heard of it). Y'know, those nasty orange lights. Incredibly efficient, too.
http://www.darksky.org/
> First they say that "radio waves find leaks".
Man, they got Gooch's Law wrong. That's supposed to be "RF gotta go somewhere."