It's probably good enough to do software development on. I can't see it being any slower, CPU-wise, than a Core II duo 5 year old MBP, never mind that it has 2 more cores. It seems like it could be a very good deal - hook up to an external monitor and BT keyboard/mouse and it should be a screamer. It's astonishing how good consumer-grade hardware is these days.
I don't think that those issues have eluded anyone. It's much simpler than that: nobody looked in that mess of code. A lot, and I mean, a lot of core gnu code is sorely due for an overhaul. Heck, I wish they rewrote a lot of it using modern C++ (perahps without iostreams, though). It'd become a much smaller, more manageable code base. Properly done C-to-C++ ports should shed at least 50% of the code outright, possibly much more.
There is no such thing as a reactionless drive. Without reaction you're not changing your trajectory. Like, um, duh. Sure, if you think it's efficient to convert energy into momentum and you've got oodles of energy, you can emit very energetic photons, but the mass is conserved: no matter what your energy source, you craft is losing exactly the same mass as the E/c^2 of the emitted photons. Even a car battery loses the E/c^2 of the energy you take out of it. It's just rather hard to measure:) Of course the photons you emit can carry lots of momentum, linearly proportional to their energy, and you lose the mass proportional to said momentum.
Launch three identical, reasonably sized chemically propulsed spacecrafts into 300km orbits in KSP. Launch them into orbital planes spaced 120 degrees apart. Your goal: dock all three together. Use mechjeb and dpai if you wish. It'll dispel any such myths in one evening.
That's precisely the mental model mistake that everyone makes. If all you've got is reaction mass and relatively low Isp thrusters, the requisite orbital momentum changes make any sort of extended maneouvering impossible. If your opponent is in an orbit perpendicular to yours, good luck. It'll be trivial for them to avoid you forever until you rotate your orbital plane. With chemical engines without on-orbit refueling, you can pull that trick off once or twice and that's it. And if you have multiple opponents and they happen to understand that they should have launched in multiple orbital planes, they'll be pretty much invulnerable to any sort of conventional (chemical) propulsion pursuit by a single craft.
Call me silly, but does Vimeo actually, you know, reliably work?. Every other time I get across a Vimeo link, there's something wrong either with the link itself, or the web player, etc. I don't know what Youtube does right that Vimeo doesn't, but for me, the bad UX just doesn't justify using Vimeo. And this has nothing to do with anything that Google has any influence over, BTW, I'm using neither Chrome nor Chromium, and I'm not following google search result links either.
They are - the updates, at least. The factory image is compressed and stored in a read-only partition. Deleting anything from it is equivalent to making your own "rom" (as that's what the system partition constitutes, in a large part).
Hangouts is a conferencing tool. It's most definitely not something that was designed for teens. It's a Google alternative to Skype. It's also not true that the crapware always runs. Sure, it's part of the factory image, but it never needs any additional space, and it's stored compressed on that image. Simply uninstall any updates to it and disable it. Done and gone.
You can disable pretty much all Google services and they won't occupy any RAM (System Memory) when you do so. I thought that was like Android 101. Just because those apps are stored on the Flash doesn't mean they have to be running. You also don't need to update them if you don't use them - go to Settings, Apps, go through all Google apps that you don't use and [Uninstall Updates] followed by [Disable] on each one of them. You need to disable automatic app updates as well, otherwise the apps will get updated and will occupy the Internal Memory (FLASH).
The thing is: Android makes crapware rather unintrusive, as far as I can tell. On said $100 tablet. If Windows crapware was so unintrusive, I doubt I'd care much about it. Yeah, I've got Nook, Google+, a couple others. Big deal. Those apps don't have to be updated, they can be disabled, and they won't consume any resources other than being present in the factory image that's on the device anyway.
I think that the requirement to ship recent Android versions was long time coming and is sorely needed. The other applications aren't that much of a drain, I don't think, other than taking up some of the "native" storage. Low end devices (say a $100 tablet) that often only have 1G of built-in storage will be thus strained more. Yet storage prices keep falling, so I don't see it as that much of a problem. Cost-wise, soldered-on flash is anyway cheaper than a microSD card that has to have extra packaging and a separate controller chip.
There isn't much fighting going on for no reason at all. Fights are usually over influence or resources. They'll be thus focused on a planet, a planetary system or some other resource - say an asteroid. Say there's a planet with resources you need. A defensive force can be assembled in orbit to make sure you're the only one who can mine it. Etc. It doesn't mean much that space is big - the battles won't be fought over the empty space, unless that empty space becomes a resource in itself. Say if there was some spacetime-bending stuff that needed vast "empty" space to operate.
Orbital mechanics are easy if the UI is built to let you deal with that fact. Given the popularity of KSP and its various add-ons, I'd say that everything depends on how you present stuff. Orbital mechanics are only unintuitive because we are surface dwellers and have no first-hand experience. Your job as a game designer is to provide a bridge between our everyday experience and the game mechanics.
I don't think it's a problem, just the physical reality. Vacuum laser-based warfare is short distance unless you've got a big ship that can support big mirrors. Duh.
With powerful lasers, the main problem in the atmosphere is most definitely not any "diffusion", but self focusing - a nonlinear optical effect. When you've got air, or really any sufficiently dense gas, even a desktop-size laser beam can exhibit self-focusing. If you're not trying to destroy things, it's actually a problem, since a self-focusing beam has this nagging tendency to destroy the optics places in its path:(
There's no point to artillery shells in space. The kinetic energy alone is all you need as it will dwarf the chemical energy you can pack within the projectile. What's the point of a kiloton of TNT when it can have a megaton of kinetic energy:)
The 10-20s warning you get doesn't depend on the presence of thrust, but on a radar echo. The ionized exhaust plume is, I'd think, a net radar absorber and actually hampers detection. Using radars for space combat threat detection requires big antennas if you wish to detect far-away threats.
A shock wave can form in a fluid medium of a very tenuous pressure. You have shock waves forming in the solar wind at the fringes of our Solar system for crying out loud, and that's vacuum that's much better than any we can make on Earth! You have spectacular shock waves forming in relativistic jets, and that stuff too is fancy looking but very good vacuum nevertheless.
They do - perhaps not in the way you'd tend to think - but man, they most certainly do. All of the laser energy for various laser fusion experiments is channeled through fiber optics and mirrors. You have either internal reflections in the fiber optics, or surface reflections on mirrors. And they route what, gigawatts these days? All going through multiple reflections.
Umm, just no. Remember that maneuverability implies a change in momentum. Good luck changing that orbital plane - you have to change the orbital momentum. For example, setting up an orbit perpendicular to the one you currently have requires you to shed all of your existing orbital momentum first.
While lasers don't self-focus in vacuum, in gases, though, laser beam self-focusing actually a problem! Yeah, when you have a beam of sufficient intensity in air, it'll self focus and stay that way until its intensity decays below the self-focusing threshold. Non-linear effects FTW:)
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It's probably good enough to do software development on. I can't see it being any slower, CPU-wise, than a Core II duo 5 year old MBP, never mind that it has 2 more cores. It seems like it could be a very good deal - hook up to an external monitor and BT keyboard/mouse and it should be a screamer. It's astonishing how good consumer-grade hardware is these days.
I don't think that those issues have eluded anyone. It's much simpler than that: nobody looked in that mess of code. A lot, and I mean, a lot of core gnu code is sorely due for an overhaul. Heck, I wish they rewrote a lot of it using modern C++ (perahps without iostreams, though). It'd become a much smaller, more manageable code base. Properly done C-to-C++ ports should shed at least 50% of the code outright, possibly much more.
There is no such thing as a reactionless drive. Without reaction you're not changing your trajectory. Like, um, duh. Sure, if you think it's efficient to convert energy into momentum and you've got oodles of energy, you can emit very energetic photons, but the mass is conserved: no matter what your energy source, you craft is losing exactly the same mass as the E/c^2 of the emitted photons. Even a car battery loses the E/c^2 of the energy you take out of it. It's just rather hard to measure :) Of course the photons you emit can carry lots of momentum, linearly proportional to their energy, and you lose the mass proportional to said momentum.
Launch three identical, reasonably sized chemically propulsed spacecrafts into 300km orbits in KSP. Launch them into orbital planes spaced 120 degrees apart. Your goal: dock all three together. Use mechjeb and dpai if you wish. It'll dispel any such myths in one evening.
That's precisely the mental model mistake that everyone makes. If all you've got is reaction mass and relatively low Isp thrusters, the requisite orbital momentum changes make any sort of extended maneouvering impossible. If your opponent is in an orbit perpendicular to yours, good luck. It'll be trivial for them to avoid you forever until you rotate your orbital plane. With chemical engines without on-orbit refueling, you can pull that trick off once or twice and that's it. And if you have multiple opponents and they happen to understand that they should have launched in multiple orbital planes, they'll be pretty much invulnerable to any sort of conventional (chemical) propulsion pursuit by a single craft.
Call me silly, but does Vimeo actually, you know, reliably work?. Every other time I get across a Vimeo link, there's something wrong either with the link itself, or the web player, etc. I don't know what Youtube does right that Vimeo doesn't, but for me, the bad UX just doesn't justify using Vimeo. And this has nothing to do with anything that Google has any influence over, BTW, I'm using neither Chrome nor Chromium, and I'm not following google search result links either.
They are - the updates, at least. The factory image is compressed and stored in a read-only partition. Deleting anything from it is equivalent to making your own "rom" (as that's what the system partition constitutes, in a large part).
Hangouts is a conferencing tool. It's most definitely not something that was designed for teens. It's a Google alternative to Skype. It's also not true that the crapware always runs. Sure, it's part of the factory image, but it never needs any additional space, and it's stored compressed on that image. Simply uninstall any updates to it and disable it. Done and gone.
You can disable pretty much all Google services and they won't occupy any RAM (System Memory) when you do so. I thought that was like Android 101. Just because those apps are stored on the Flash doesn't mean they have to be running. You also don't need to update them if you don't use them - go to Settings, Apps, go through all Google apps that you don't use and [Uninstall Updates] followed by [Disable] on each one of them. You need to disable automatic app updates as well, otherwise the apps will get updated and will occupy the Internal Memory (FLASH).
The thing is: Android makes crapware rather unintrusive, as far as I can tell. On said $100 tablet. If Windows crapware was so unintrusive, I doubt I'd care much about it. Yeah, I've got Nook, Google+, a couple others. Big deal. Those apps don't have to be updated, they can be disabled, and they won't consume any resources other than being present in the factory image that's on the device anyway.
I think that the requirement to ship recent Android versions was long time coming and is sorely needed. The other applications aren't that much of a drain, I don't think, other than taking up some of the "native" storage. Low end devices (say a $100 tablet) that often only have 1G of built-in storage will be thus strained more. Yet storage prices keep falling, so I don't see it as that much of a problem. Cost-wise, soldered-on flash is anyway cheaper than a microSD card that has to have extra packaging and a separate controller chip.
This is feeding the troll, but the bug's importance is overblown IMHO. It is exploitable on systems that are otherwise full of holes anyway.
Of course it's pretty much irrelevant. The bug doesn't matter in practice unless you're doing other, severely braindead things.
2,000 pages long
Maybe if you insist on reading it on a cellphone :/
There isn't much fighting going on for no reason at all. Fights are usually over influence or resources. They'll be thus focused on a planet, a planetary system or some other resource - say an asteroid. Say there's a planet with resources you need. A defensive force can be assembled in orbit to make sure you're the only one who can mine it. Etc. It doesn't mean much that space is big - the battles won't be fought over the empty space, unless that empty space becomes a resource in itself. Say if there was some spacetime-bending stuff that needed vast "empty" space to operate.
Orbital mechanics are easy if the UI is built to let you deal with that fact. Given the popularity of KSP and its various add-ons, I'd say that everything depends on how you present stuff. Orbital mechanics are only unintuitive because we are surface dwellers and have no first-hand experience. Your job as a game designer is to provide a bridge between our everyday experience and the game mechanics.
I don't think it's a problem, just the physical reality. Vacuum laser-based warfare is short distance unless you've got a big ship that can support big mirrors. Duh.
With powerful lasers, the main problem in the atmosphere is most definitely not any "diffusion", but self focusing - a nonlinear optical effect. When you've got air, or really any sufficiently dense gas, even a desktop-size laser beam can exhibit self-focusing. If you're not trying to destroy things, it's actually a problem, since a self-focusing beam has this nagging tendency to destroy the optics places in its path :(
There's no point to artillery shells in space. The kinetic energy alone is all you need as it will dwarf the chemical energy you can pack within the projectile. What's the point of a kiloton of TNT when it can have a megaton of kinetic energy :)
The 10-20s warning you get doesn't depend on the presence of thrust, but on a radar echo. The ionized exhaust plume is, I'd think, a net radar absorber and actually hampers detection. Using radars for space combat threat detection requires big antennas if you wish to detect far-away threats.
You can, because vacuum is not vacuum, at least not in any practical sense.
A shock wave can form in a fluid medium of a very tenuous pressure. You have shock waves forming in the solar wind at the fringes of our Solar system for crying out loud, and that's vacuum that's much better than any we can make on Earth! You have spectacular shock waves forming in relativistic jets, and that stuff too is fancy looking but very good vacuum nevertheless.
They do - perhaps not in the way you'd tend to think - but man, they most certainly do. All of the laser energy for various laser fusion experiments is channeled through fiber optics and mirrors. You have either internal reflections in the fiber optics, or surface reflections on mirrors. And they route what, gigawatts these days? All going through multiple reflections.
Umm, just no. Remember that maneuverability implies a change in momentum. Good luck changing that orbital plane - you have to change the orbital momentum. For example, setting up an orbit perpendicular to the one you currently have requires you to shed all of your existing orbital momentum first.
While lasers don't self-focus in vacuum, in gases, though, laser beam self-focusing actually a problem! Yeah, when you have a beam of sufficient intensity in air, it'll self focus and stay that way until its intensity decays below the self-focusing threshold. Non-linear effects FTW :)