So a hypothetical photorealistic painting of an item isn't any different than the (indistinguishable) photograph of that item, despite it having required far more technique, time, and intent? Is it any different than your memory of the original item? Intent matters in art as well.
Even better, let's take two blank white canvases, side by side. One is blank because the artist hasn't gotten around to painting it. The other is blank because its Kasimir Malevich's "White Square on White", on loan from MOMA. Which is better?
1: I'm not at all convinced that's a common belief these days, but yes, if you believe there's no such thing as free will, then the two are directly comparable.
2: If there is a God, and he gave us free will, he isn't culpable for our actions: the act of giving us free will made us responsible for our own actions. If you assume he maintained any right to overrule our actions if he sufficiently dislikes them, you actually don't believe in free will - you believe in determinism with the ability for God "not to care" about some things. As such, someone who truly believes in both God and free will can assign blame for the natural disaster to God (assuming that he presets non-thinking things) but not for the human disaster, assuming we have free will.
And I say again: the other viewpoints are bullshit. I don't really care about the views of people who don't believe in free will, because they believe I absolutely must be the way I am whether or not I want to be. As such, if they're right I'm obligated to bitch them out by determinism, and if they're wrong I'm obligated to bitch them out because they're wrong.
Well, speaking for the significant number of people who believe in some form of free will, either with a god in the picture or without one: your response is totally vapid Philosophy 101 bullshit. I'm not looking for a philosophical argument regarding free will; I'm pointing out that the cause does matter when considering the importance of an event.
I believe you're full of shit and looking for an argument. Now, argue my point on the merits of the point, not on free will, or fuck off and troll elsewhere.
It's a natural disaster. A large one, to be sure, but the Colombia volcano in 1985 killed around 25,000, Mont Pelee in 1902 killed 25,000, and let's not forget the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people. There's a qualitative difference between something that happened because Mother Nature got titchy, and something that humans planned and carried out.
Different. You can't compare them on the same scale.
The damage here is worse, sure, but in the end, this is the sort of thing that we had nothing to do with, something that (given current technology) we can do nothing to prevent, only to try to mitigate.
Was this *event* worse than 9/11? (That's a different question from asking if the damage was worse). Well, that's like asking if its worse when a landslide kills 25 hikers or when a crazy person kills 2 people at a gas station. The events have to be considered in different lights. You can't compare apples to oranges, Macs to PCs, WinME to FreeBSD... and you can't compare massive devastation from natural disasters to massive devastation from acts of terrorism.
All of this doesn't matter for a shared car service; cosmetic condition is (relatively) unimportant, so long as the car service is maintaining the car properly.
Dings are totally unimportant - scratches more so, since they do provide a vector for rust to attack the metal.
Well, starving the occupants of a vessel in order to force them off probably falls under the description 'piracy'. Or some other criminal description with a name neither one of us is familiar with.
Buying Soyuz from the Russians wouldn't really solve the problem, even assuming they would be willing to sell. For one thing, we'd have to redevelop the ability to manufacture all of the components, or else buy them from Russians sources, a proposal unlikely to do well politically. As to something - they are planning to scrap the Shuttle by 2010, and replace it with some new capsule design (called Constellation or the CEV) by 2008. Whether or not you believe these are proper goals, it's hard to argue they aren't trying to do something. We can't just dump Shuttle immediately; amongst other things, we've promised to finish ISS, which requires Shuttle to launch major components. But there are plans to replace it with a more reasonable vehicle. They are working on fixing the problem; but these aren't computers. NASA has very, very long lead times. It'll take 5 years, minimum, and probably closer to 10, before a new manned design is being flown (with people) regularly.
If you'd like to nitpick modules, the current ISS is:
Name (Built-Funded) Zarya (R-U) Unity (U-U) Zvezda (R-R) Z1 Truss (U-U) PMA1 (U-U) PMA2 (U-U) PMA3 (U-U) Destiny (U-U) Pirs (Russian Docking Compartment) (R-R) S0 Truss (U-U) (includes Mobile Transporter) S1 Truss (U-U) Canadarm2 (C-C) Mobile Base System (C-C) P1 Truss (U-U) P6 Truss (U-U) Quest (U-U) Node 1 (U-U)
My count gives me: 3 Russian-built, one of which was American funded, and 12 American built, all of which were American funded. And unlike the Euro-built Nodes, which are being built in exchange for NASA launching Columbus, FGB was bought by the Americans because the Russians couldn't.
By the way, Wikipedia isn't authoritative on this; I'd trust NASA's assembly drawings, which are publicly available at spaceflight.nasa.gov, quite a bit more.
Pirs is a docking module. The trusses, in addition to providing support structure, include photovoltaics to provide power and radiators to provide thermal control. Russian experience is certainly why they get away with relatively small amounts of contribution, but the truth is - they lied about what they could do, financially, and as a result have received significant loans and leeway. Between paying for Zarya and having to purchase a backup for Zvezda because the Russians couldn't/wouldn't, significant financial resources have been expended by the Americans to cover the Russians' asses.
Russia has the utilization rights to 100% of the Russian portion of the station, and no rights to the rest of the station (the NASA/NASDA/ESA/CSA section). Right now, that amounts to roughly zero, since there is zero experimental capability on the Russian side. Any resources they have are in exchange for the Russian crewmembers time.
I'm pretty correct on this; the funding is mainly American, and the distribution of resources reflects that. If and when Russia ever gets around to launching RRM and SPP, I'll be wrong, but it doesn't look like that's ever going to happen. Russia has as much up there are they're likely to ever have, while there's quite a bit of American, European, and Canadian segments still to be launched.
It isn't the American station; it is, however, a station funded mainly by the US.
No problem, so long as you understand that I neither said nor implied the US paid for the entirety, simply that we paid for the majority of the station as currently built, and will have paid for the large majority at core-complete. I already did it once tonight, might as well just repeat the post (which, for the record, got modded 0 Flamebait.)
We are funding, if not building, nearly all of the station, even the limited core-complete version that was the plan immediately prior to Columbia's loss. The new core-complete plan, as shown here , shows launch methods. Items funded by other countries:
JEM (Japanese Experiment Module, Japan funded) Columbus (European Research Module, EU funded) Zvezda (Service module, Russia funded) RRM (Russian Research Module, Russia funded if it ever launches)
This page has an accurate image showing who funded what; that exact image is hanging over the desk of one of the shuttle payload integration managers, last I knew - the guy responsible for making sure that once something is launched and attached to ISS, it works properly. Of course, looking at that image, SPP is unlikely to ever be built at this point due to lack of funding (according to the Russians), and RRM is unlikely as well (same reason), so shrink the Russian contribution considerably.
Russia funds/funded around 2 percent of ISS; the remainder comes from the US and other Western countries. Japan funds 13%. ESA funds roughly 9%. CSA funds another 2%. And guess who funds the rest? That's right. The US. Roughly 70-75%, depending on how you interpret the numbers, and what year it is.
Well, when I worked in ISS payload processing for a few months, I did learn a little bit about it: namely, that we put up the lion's share of the funding and that the Russians put up next to nothing. Also saw the second of the two graphics about 8 million times, considering my boss had it mounted to the door to our office space. Hard to forget something you see everytime you come in to work, go to the bathroom, go to lunch, etc.
(As to moderation, I don't let it bother me. I take more satisfaction in savagely bitchslapping people with the truth, than with recognition of said savage bitchslapping.)
If they did that, NASA would work out a way to adapt one of our unmanned launchers to supply the ISS; also, there are the NASDA HTV and ESA ATV programs which might be accelerable, as neither Japan nor the Europeans are likely to want to allow Russia to have ISS all to itself. Probably a huge expense, but nothing gets money out of Congress like "The Russkies are trying to screw us out of our space station!". That and the US would probably declare Russia in default on the loans we've given them over the past decade or so.
It is by no means a shame that there are probably treaties to stop it - do you really want to institutionalize space piracy?
You do realize that most of our space program is *great*, right? I mean, the unmanned portion does incredible science, at generally reasonable cost, with very high rates of success. Look at the Soviet Mars exploration program - their first 3 missions failed, the 4th was a 200,000 km flyby, and only 2 of their first 10 Mars missions achieved any measure of success.
It's just the manned portion of our program that's a little bit screwy, and honestly, we're not much worse at that than anyone else is, we just try to do things everyone else thinks are dumb for reasons having nothing to do with actual science utility, having more to do with the military (see: Space Shuttle program). If we'd stuck with capsules for reentry, we'd probably be quite a bit further than we are; the politics of manned space flight are what's been destroying NASA, not some mythical incompetence at running a space program. It's hard to do good work when middle management (Congress) keeps butting in and telling you to do something different, when the priorities you're being asked to achieve change constantly - any Slashdot software developer ought to have some experience with that.
a) Would let the Russians take the space station the US paid for? b) Would negotiate with the Russians for a resumption of normal relations? c) Would simply blow up the ISS to end the argument over who owns it? (Hey, it cost less than Iraq!) d) Would just blow up Moscow instead?
The Russians aren't dumb, and hijacking the ISS would be an act of war.
They are correct; we are funding, if not building, nearly all of the station, even the limited core-complete version that was the plan immediately prior to Columbia's loss. The new core-complete plan, as shown here, shows launch methods. Items funded by other countries:
JEM (Japanese Experiment Module, Japan funded) Columbus (European Research Module, EU funded) Zvezda (Service module, Russia funded) RRM (Russian Research Module, Russia funded if it ever launches)
This page has an accurate image showing who funded what. Of course, SPP is unlikely to ever be built at this point (according to the Russians), and RRM is unlikely as well, so shrink the Russian contribution considerably.
Russia funds/funded around 2 percent of ISS; the remainder comes from the US and other Western countries. And guess who funds the majority of that? That's right. The US.
A CCD can, in theory, operate to infinitely small gaps in time, limited only by the bandwidth of the readout circuitry. However, as your time of collection decreases, you run into signal-to-noise problems; you have a finite, unrelated to integration time, amount of readout noise as well as thermal noise which is proportional to integration time. Thus, while you lose thermal noise when you shorten your integration time, readout noise remains fixed, and thus occupies an increasingly large portion of the read out compared to the signal.
Basically, you can increase this method relatively infinitely at the cost of signal ratio; the less time you allot for collection, the lower the number of electrons collected, the dimmer the signal and the more interference you'll get from the inherent noise sources.
However, thinking about it, overlapping collection time shouldn't be an issue assuming that motion in frame during collection is minimal - as that motion increases, you'll start to see 'blur' in your detectors. If you think of each detector as capturing a 'smear' of position in time, it doesn't matter if their 'smears' overlap, so long as during each 'smear' the object remains essentially fixed in position with respect to the detector. That's a seat of the pants guess, though.
The optimal case would probably be collection time exactly equal to the frame length, but for best results with any scenario you're going to use the one thing any photographer can tell you will provide the best results - proper (i.e. VERY BRIGHT) lighting. If sufficient light is being scattered onto the sensors, even a short collection time will be enough to yield usable signal.
From what people who've seen the video are saying, they don't actually bother with alignment - they just accept the parallax shift that's going to happen with an array of non-colocated sensors.
Recording-wise, two thoughts here: for one, high speed cameras are usually used to capture very short events, so they may only need to store a tenth of a second or a half seconds worth of data. Given that that might only be a gig or two of data, you could quite easily back the CCDs with a RAM buffer capable of holding the entire shot sequence, and then slowly parcel it out to a slower hard drive.
Second, there's always RAID (whether actual RAID or just multi-drive arrangements isn't important).
All of the CCDs run at 30 FPS. So, yes, they can scale this almost endlessly (until the parallax variation from non-colocated image captures becomes extreme, basically, or until the trigger timing required becomes too hard to achieve and jitter begins to be large enough to significantly alter your frame timing/sequencing).
The trick is that A runs on 0.000, 1.000, 2.000, etc. while B runs on 0.001, 1.001, 2.001, etc., C is on 0.002, 1.002, 2.002, etc. (units are frames relative to a starting time), and then the frames are sequenced appropriately (ABCABCABC etc.). This gives a very high frame rate while using relatively low-cost sensors - effectively, they're exploiting parallelism as a way to increase the array's effective sampling rate.
Basically, if you have N sensors capable of sampling X times per second each, and are capable of accurately triggering each sensor to a high degree of time accuracy, your effective sampling rate can be NX. Neat trick.
Yep, DKC did it, as did (I believe) Super Mario Kart. Basically, any game that emulators used to have lots of trouble with, you can bet it might use a coprocessor of some variety, whether it be 3D (SuperFX) or even just something like sound, which was (I think) the issue with SMK.
Nope, CPU was in the main system. A few games (SNES, at least) had coprocessors inside of the cartridge; I recall Star Fox being one of them. There might have been coprocessored NES games, but I'm not certain.
All copper lines on a PCB are traces. This includes power and ground lines, excepting large areas of copper, which are usually called planes. Also, there are things called "ground shields", which are actually not connected to ground - they're electrically isolated continuous bits of copper used to provide electromagnetic shielding.
Anyway.
Traces are the copper lines on a PCB - buses are composed of multiple traces carrying a collection of related signals (for example, an address bus is N traces, each carrying one bit of the N bit address.)
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
So a hypothetical photorealistic painting of an item isn't any different than the (indistinguishable) photograph of that item, despite it having required far more technique, time, and intent? Is it any different than your memory of the original item? Intent matters in art as well.
Even better, let's take two blank white canvases, side by side. One is blank because the artist hasn't gotten around to painting it. The other is blank because its Kasimir Malevich's "White Square on White", on loan from MOMA. Which is better?
Intent MATTERS.
Intent matters in art, just like anywhere else.
1: I'm not at all convinced that's a common belief these days, but yes, if you believe there's no such thing as free will, then the two are directly comparable.
2: If there is a God, and he gave us free will, he isn't culpable for our actions: the act of giving us free will made us responsible for our own actions. If you assume he maintained any right to overrule our actions if he sufficiently dislikes them, you actually don't believe in free will - you believe in determinism with the ability for God "not to care" about some things. As such, someone who truly believes in both God and free will can assign blame for the natural disaster to God (assuming that he presets non-thinking things) but not for the human disaster, assuming we have free will.
And I say again: the other viewpoints are bullshit. I don't really care about the views of people who don't believe in free will, because they believe I absolutely must be the way I am whether or not I want to be. As such, if they're right I'm obligated to bitch them out by determinism, and if they're wrong I'm obligated to bitch them out because they're wrong.
Of course, they can't possibly be making huge amounts of private donations, can they?
We have no control over our government these days. If you haven't figured that out in the past 20 years, welcome to the next 200.
Well, speaking for the significant number of people who believe in some form of free will, either with a god in the picture or without one: your response is totally vapid Philosophy 101 bullshit. I'm not looking for a philosophical argument regarding free will; I'm pointing out that the cause does matter when considering the importance of an event.
I believe you're full of shit and looking for an argument. Now, argue my point on the merits of the point, not on free will, or fuck off and troll elsewhere.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
It's a natural disaster. A large one, to be sure, but the Colombia volcano in 1985 killed around 25,000, Mont Pelee in 1902 killed 25,000, and let's not forget the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people. There's a qualitative difference between something that happened because Mother Nature got titchy, and something that humans planned and carried out.
Different. You can't compare them on the same scale.
Humans caused 9/11.
The damage here is worse, sure, but in the end, this is the sort of thing that we had nothing to do with, something that (given current technology) we can do nothing to prevent, only to try to mitigate.
Was this *event* worse than 9/11? (That's a different question from asking if the damage was worse). Well, that's like asking if its worse when a landslide kills 25 hikers or when a crazy person kills 2 people at a gas station. The events have to be considered in different lights. You can't compare apples to oranges, Macs to PCs, WinME to FreeBSD... and you can't compare massive devastation from natural disasters to massive devastation from acts of terrorism.
All of this is true.
All of this doesn't matter for a shared car service; cosmetic condition is (relatively) unimportant, so long as the car service is maintaining the car properly.
Dings are totally unimportant - scratches more so, since they do provide a vector for rust to attack the metal.
Well, starving the occupants of a vessel in order to force them off probably falls under the description 'piracy'. Or some other criminal description with a name neither one of us is familiar with.
Buying Soyuz from the Russians wouldn't really solve the problem, even assuming they would be willing to sell. For one thing, we'd have to redevelop the ability to manufacture all of the components, or else buy them from Russians sources, a proposal unlikely to do well politically. As to something - they are planning to scrap the Shuttle by 2010, and replace it with some new capsule design (called Constellation or the CEV) by 2008. Whether or not you believe these are proper goals, it's hard to argue they aren't trying to do something. We can't just dump Shuttle immediately; amongst other things, we've promised to finish ISS, which requires Shuttle to launch major components. But there are plans to replace it with a more reasonable vehicle. They are working on fixing the problem; but these aren't computers. NASA has very, very long lead times. It'll take 5 years, minimum, and probably closer to 10, before a new manned design is being flown (with people) regularly.
If you'd like to nitpick modules, the current ISS is:
Name (Built-Funded)
Zarya (R-U)
Unity (U-U)
Zvezda (R-R)
Z1 Truss (U-U)
PMA1 (U-U)
PMA2 (U-U)
PMA3 (U-U)
Destiny (U-U)
Pirs (Russian Docking Compartment) (R-R)
S0 Truss (U-U) (includes Mobile Transporter)
S1 Truss (U-U)
Canadarm2 (C-C)
Mobile Base System (C-C)
P1 Truss (U-U)
P6 Truss (U-U)
Quest (U-U)
Node 1 (U-U)
My count gives me: 3 Russian-built, one of which was American funded, and 12 American built, all of which were American funded. And unlike the Euro-built Nodes, which are being built in exchange for NASA launching Columbus, FGB was bought by the Americans because the Russians couldn't.
By the way, Wikipedia isn't authoritative on this; I'd trust NASA's assembly drawings, which are publicly available at spaceflight.nasa.gov, quite a bit more.
Pirs is a docking module. The trusses, in addition to providing support structure, include photovoltaics to provide power and radiators to provide thermal control. Russian experience is certainly why they get away with relatively small amounts of contribution, but the truth is - they lied about what they could do, financially, and as a result have received significant loans and leeway. Between paying for Zarya and having to purchase a backup for Zvezda because the Russians couldn't/wouldn't, significant financial resources have been expended by the Americans to cover the Russians' asses.
Russia has the utilization rights to 100% of the Russian portion of the station, and no rights to the rest of the station (the NASA/NASDA/ESA/CSA section). Right now, that amounts to roughly zero, since there is zero experimental capability on the Russian side. Any resources they have are in exchange for the Russian crewmembers time.
I'm pretty correct on this; the funding is mainly American, and the distribution of resources reflects that. If and when Russia ever gets around to launching RRM and SPP, I'll be wrong, but it doesn't look like that's ever going to happen. Russia has as much up there are they're likely to ever have, while there's quite a bit of American, European, and Canadian segments still to be launched.
It isn't the American station; it is, however, a station funded mainly by the US.
No problem, so long as you understand that I neither said nor implied the US paid for the entirety, simply that we paid for the majority of the station as currently built, and will have paid for the large majority at core-complete. I already did it once tonight, might as well just repeat the post (which, for the record, got modded 0 Flamebait.)
We are funding, if not building, nearly all of the station, even the limited core-complete version that was the plan immediately prior to Columbia's loss. The new core-complete plan, as shown here , shows launch methods. Items funded by other countries:
JEM (Japanese Experiment Module, Japan funded)
Columbus (European Research Module, EU funded)
Zvezda (Service module, Russia funded)
RRM (Russian Research Module, Russia funded if it ever launches)
This page has an accurate image showing who funded what; that exact image is hanging over the desk of one of the shuttle payload integration managers, last I knew - the guy responsible for making sure that once something is launched and attached to ISS, it works properly. Of course, looking at that image, SPP is unlikely to ever be built at this point due to lack of funding (according to the Russians), and RRM is unlikely as well (same reason), so shrink the Russian contribution considerably.
Russia funds/funded around 2 percent of ISS; the remainder comes from the US and other Western countries. Japan funds 13%. ESA funds roughly 9%. CSA funds another 2%. And guess who funds the rest? That's right. The US. Roughly 70-75%, depending on how you interpret the numbers, and what year it is.
Well, when I worked in ISS payload processing for a few months, I did learn a little bit about it: namely, that we put up the lion's share of the funding and that the Russians put up next to nothing. Also saw the second of the two graphics about 8 million times, considering my boss had it mounted to the door to our office space. Hard to forget something you see everytime you come in to work, go to the bathroom, go to lunch, etc.
(As to moderation, I don't let it bother me. I take more satisfaction in savagely bitchslapping people with the truth, than with recognition of said savage bitchslapping.)
It's flamebait because I'm right, of course.
If they did that, NASA would work out a way to adapt one of our unmanned launchers to supply the ISS; also, there are the NASDA HTV and ESA ATV programs which might be accelerable, as neither Japan nor the Europeans are likely to want to allow Russia to have ISS all to itself. Probably a huge expense, but nothing gets money out of Congress like "The Russkies are trying to screw us out of our space station!". That and the US would probably declare Russia in default on the loans we've given them over the past decade or so.
It is by no means a shame that there are probably treaties to stop it - do you really want to institutionalize space piracy?
You do realize that most of our space program is *great*, right? I mean, the unmanned portion does incredible science, at generally reasonable cost, with very high rates of success. Look at the Soviet Mars exploration program - their first 3 missions failed, the 4th was a 200,000 km flyby, and only 2 of their first 10 Mars missions achieved any measure of success.
It's just the manned portion of our program that's a little bit screwy, and honestly, we're not much worse at that than anyone else is, we just try to do things everyone else thinks are dumb for reasons having nothing to do with actual science utility, having more to do with the military (see: Space Shuttle program). If we'd stuck with capsules for reentry, we'd probably be quite a bit further than we are; the politics of manned space flight are what's been destroying NASA, not some mythical incompetence at running a space program. It's hard to do good work when middle management (Congress) keeps butting in and telling you to do something different, when the priorities you're being asked to achieve change constantly - any Slashdot software developer ought to have some experience with that.
Why choose one, when for both you and me there's option:
e) All of the above!
Knowing Bush, do you think he:
a) Would let the Russians take the space station the US paid for?
b) Would negotiate with the Russians for a resumption of normal relations?
c) Would simply blow up the ISS to end the argument over who owns it? (Hey, it cost less than Iraq!)
d) Would just blow up Moscow instead?
The Russians aren't dumb, and hijacking the ISS would be an act of war.
They are correct; we are funding, if not building, nearly all of the station, even the limited core-complete version that was the plan immediately prior to Columbia's loss. The new core-complete plan, as shown here, shows launch methods. Items funded by other countries:
JEM (Japanese Experiment Module, Japan funded)
Columbus (European Research Module, EU funded)
Zvezda (Service module, Russia funded)
RRM (Russian Research Module, Russia funded if it ever launches)
This page has an accurate image showing who funded what. Of course, SPP is unlikely to ever be built at this point (according to the Russians), and RRM is unlikely as well, so shrink the Russian contribution considerably.
Russia funds/funded around 2 percent of ISS; the remainder comes from the US and other Western countries. And guess who funds the majority of that? That's right. The US.
A CCD can, in theory, operate to infinitely small gaps in time, limited only by the bandwidth of the readout circuitry. However, as your time of collection decreases, you run into signal-to-noise problems; you have a finite, unrelated to integration time, amount of readout noise as well as thermal noise which is proportional to integration time. Thus, while you lose thermal noise when you shorten your integration time, readout noise remains fixed, and thus occupies an increasingly large portion of the read out compared to the signal.
Basically, you can increase this method relatively infinitely at the cost of signal ratio; the less time you allot for collection, the lower the number of electrons collected, the dimmer the signal and the more interference you'll get from the inherent noise sources.
However, thinking about it, overlapping collection time shouldn't be an issue assuming that motion in frame during collection is minimal - as that motion increases, you'll start to see 'blur' in your detectors. If you think of each detector as capturing a 'smear' of position in time, it doesn't matter if their 'smears' overlap, so long as during each 'smear' the object remains essentially fixed in position with respect to the detector. That's a seat of the pants guess, though.
The optimal case would probably be collection time exactly equal to the frame length, but for best results with any scenario you're going to use the one thing any photographer can tell you will provide the best results - proper (i.e. VERY BRIGHT) lighting. If sufficient light is being scattered onto the sensors, even a short collection time will be enough to yield usable signal.
From what people who've seen the video are saying, they don't actually bother with alignment - they just accept the parallax shift that's going to happen with an array of non-colocated sensors.
Recording-wise, two thoughts here: for one, high speed cameras are usually used to capture very short events, so they may only need to store a tenth of a second or a half seconds worth of data. Given that that might only be a gig or two of data, you could quite easily back the CCDs with a RAM buffer capable of holding the entire shot sequence, and then slowly parcel it out to a slower hard drive.
Second, there's always RAID (whether actual RAID or just multi-drive arrangements isn't important).
All of the CCDs run at 30 FPS. So, yes, they can scale this almost endlessly (until the parallax variation from non-colocated image captures becomes extreme, basically, or until the trigger timing required becomes too hard to achieve and jitter begins to be large enough to significantly alter your frame timing/sequencing).
The trick is that A runs on 0.000, 1.000, 2.000, etc. while B runs on 0.001, 1.001, 2.001, etc., C is on 0.002, 1.002, 2.002, etc. (units are frames relative to a starting time), and then the frames are sequenced appropriately (ABCABCABC etc.). This gives a very high frame rate while using relatively low-cost sensors - effectively, they're exploiting parallelism as a way to increase the array's effective sampling rate.
Basically, if you have N sensors capable of sampling X times per second each, and are capable of accurately triggering each sensor to a high degree of time accuracy, your effective sampling rate can be NX. Neat trick.
Can Wayne Gretzky create a goalkeeper so good even Wayne Gretzky cannot score a goal on him?
Yah, the problem is that video games that cost $50 here cost £50 over there.
What, like this? Or maybe this?
Been out for a while now.
Yep, DKC did it, as did (I believe) Super Mario Kart. Basically, any game that emulators used to have lots of trouble with, you can bet it might use a coprocessor of some variety, whether it be 3D (SuperFX) or even just something like sound, which was (I think) the issue with SMK.
Nope, CPU was in the main system. A few games (SNES, at least) had coprocessors inside of the cartridge; I recall Star Fox being one of them. There might have been coprocessored NES games, but I'm not certain.
Technically:
All copper lines on a PCB are traces. This includes power and ground lines, excepting large areas of copper, which are usually called planes. Also, there are things called "ground shields", which are actually not connected to ground - they're electrically isolated continuous bits of copper used to provide electromagnetic shielding.
Anyway.
Traces are the copper lines on a PCB - buses are composed of multiple traces carrying a collection of related signals (for example, an address bus is N traces, each carrying one bit of the N bit address.)