Well, of course you're going to get smaller heat engines over time. You're ALSO going to get smaller and lighter gasoline engines over time. And in fact between the '70s and the '90s gasoline engines HAVE gotten smaller and lighter.
You're still not going to get rid of the need for a large and efficient radiator. For a given level of technology (similar materials, controllers, and so on) you're going to need a larger power plant to deliver the same amount of power. How much larger, I'm not going to speculate. Do I think it's going to be large enough a difference to count as a drawback? I don't know. I hope not. I'm not and I wasn't arguing against heat engines, quite the opposite. They are very efficient and versatile.
In the context of an engine that burns arbitrary biomass, mind you, you're likely to need to operate at a relatively low temperature, which implies a larger radiator to keep the cool side cool.
Where in that report is the comparison of the mass of the internal combustion engine and the stirling engine of the same power output?
The only comparison I can see implies that the Mod-II equipped Celebrity has a higher curb weight than the original vehicle. It also (as I noted, but you didn't quote) has a high efficiency.
Can you elaborate on whatever point you're making?
Heat engines can be quite efficient. The problem is the heat exchanger has to be pretty big, so they tend to have lower power density... that is, a heat engine (say, a stirling engine) will be larger and heavier than an internal combustion engine of the same output.
This would be easy to implement and some games show a similar behavior. Still this is not widespread because it just does not add to the gameplay.
I suppose it depends on how much realism you expect from a game. And how much realism the game otherwise provides.
When the characters are abstract specters and you're a yellow ball, you expect them to behave crazily. When they're high resolution avatars with simple AIs, it makes it harder to keep those suspenders of disbelief on when they act brain-damaged.
With all the advancements in Windows 7, especially the new taskbar, we can't help but think that users of the lower-tiered versions of the OS would feel even more left out if such new UI changes were excluded.
If it means the Ribbon gets left out, I'll go for Windows 7 Base Bones Budget version, thanks very much.
Followed by a rather embarrassing trip to the emergency room, I imagine.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of a different kind of lubricant. Or do people really use petroleum-based lubricants in a manner likely to make for embarrassing trips to the emergency room?
Consider that you "steer" planes with foot peddles. But watching that pilot drive down the freeway with his arms crossed would look ridiculous to the mass populous.
That's "populace". And the mass populace knows what a car looks like, which is why they don't work like aircraft.
So while I know that when I do a WHOIS lookup, it doesn't make cubes spin on my computer screen and then print the results in 72pt Comic Sans Wide Wingdings. Unless the industry starts doing a lot of close-ups, I'm okay with the big graphic font thing.
On the other hand, I don't recall EVER seeing a phonebook with 72 point Comic Sans on the page, so when the private eye pulls a page out of the bad guy's phone book you get a close-up of the bad guy's handwritten note next to the pawn shop. Why do they bother? Because they know people watching the movie know what a real phone book looks like. Well, more and more people know what a real computer looks like. So why do they still have the 72 point Comic Sans?
Well, you know, increasingly they don't. Even on the Enterprise, they show a bunch of dense text and occasional <H1>Big Titles</H1>... or even have Picard or Janeway reading something out loud from a PADD that's never shown to the screen. And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable cinematographic device that avoids having to deal with this annoying reality stuff without being boring.
Oh, and to get back to your FIRST point, they don't seem to complain about the Enterprise being steered by voice commands and the occasional swipe at a touch panel. And it's not boring either.
Besides, it was kind of cool to see them using an actual ssh exploit attack in the Matrix. And I don't recall anyone complaining that closeup was boring.
I can handle having to reacquire software every 3-4 years.
That's another difference, perhaps. It could well be that I get more software, or weirder software, than you, because after 2 years I could NOT find software for the Pocket PC to replace all of the programs I used on my Visor... and I suspect Apple will never allow me to get some of them for the iPhone without jailbreaking it. The iPhone isn't even on my *long* list just because it's not open-source friendly.
but really how is this any different than having to go through the same stuff every time you replace your PDA?
To begin with... for the price of a smartphone I can buy two PDAs.
But beyond that, my PDA is also a good deal less likely to get dropped or broken than my phone (this is just my experience here... I'm not likely to get an important "PDA call" when my hands are occupied, it's a device with a more leisurely lifestyle), and it's a simpler device and so it's got fewer innards to go wrong. And I've had good luck being able to buy used (even reconditioned or refurbished) old PDAs when mine breaks... reducing the likelihood that I'll have to upgrade to an incompatible model (and, perhaps, a sign that I'm not the only one who takes better care of PDAs than phones). My current PDA is a five year old Sony, on its second battery, and I've been through three phones since I got it. Right now, I don't see a PDA I like enough to replace it.
I have in the past had a Handspring Visor and an HP Jornada, and found that I couldn't "cut the cord" from my Visor and just depend on the Jornada... which is why I bought the Clie: it had most of the features I liked from the Jornada, and it was compatible with my "white album"... the software that was tethering me to the Visor.
I could probably switch now... the software available for the Pocket PC is no longer so limited... but it would still be a substantial extra cost. There's no way I'd have been happy to take that hit every time I replaced my phone.
This comes from highly intelligent people not having an outlet for their intelligence.
Say *what*?
You're insulting all the smart people who found an outlet for their intelligence, especially those of us with spotty academic records who somehow managed to avoid turning into criminal bullies. Maybe it's not "society's fault" after all?
I'm not even big on having a camera and mp3 player in my cellphone. Or running applications in it. My ideal cellphone would have a battery the size of a candy bar with a basic cellphone with maybe a 4 line B&W display, and a PAN link to my *separate* PDA. It would have 8 days hold time, and at least 8 hours talk time, and the battery would have a swing-out USB connector so I can use anything with a USB port to charge my spare battery.
That way all the important stuff (data and software) would be on my PDA, so I wouldn't need to "buy the white album again" if I replaced my cellphone. And I wouldn't worry about running my cellphone down playing Tetris.
Intel isn't trying to do ray tracing. Really, their point is to find a way to make GPUs unnecessary since it is a threat to the CPU market.
They can call it "ray tracing extensions" to the I7 or I8 CPU. It's not like the x86/x86_64 instruction sets are some kind of blushing virgin whose precious architectural purity would be violated by adding instructions like "RT_LOAD_MESH" and "RT_LOAD_SHADER"...
What bothers me is how nVidia is missing the boat.
At least the money spent on this toy wasn't spent on tightening their grip on the desktop or creating new barriers to entry for open source. Or shutting down internal competition like they did when they killed the high end Windows CE devices in favor of the ill-conceived "Tablet PC". Or buying up companies and crippling them by forcing them to toe the line, like they did with Hotmail.
All I demand of them is to either split the company up, or quit trying to turn everything they do into life support for the "Wintendo" business.
They're still taking the wrong approach to raytracing. If Philip Slusallek was able to get 30 FPS in a raytraced game in 2005, using a single Pentium 4 behind a raytracing accelerator that was roughly equivalent to a Rage Pro in terms of gates and clock speed, it seems silly to me to ignore the possibilities of adding an "RPU" to the mix instead of just adding more general purpose CPU power. Yes, I know that's Intel's thing, but even for Intel... a raytracing core would be a tiny speck in an I7.
As someone else noted, both pictures were raytraced.
To really show the difference between 2d and 3d water, you need to show the water interacting with a solid object close enough so that you can see that in one example the waves really go up and down and in another they're just a picture of waves on a mirror.
There's been a LOT of work making 2d water look dramatic, and I've seen people say they prefer 2d water in broad shots like this in other games (not even raytraced ones), but when you're in the game looking over the edge of a dock or looking at a nearby boat with the light behind you, it's pretty clear that spending more time on the physics of the water pays off.
Heck, even with 2d water, paying attention to the wave effects in shallow versus deep water pays off when you interact with it. And that's rarely done because it's not as dramatic.
SHAC members [...] threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes.
Christ, John Grubor did worse than that to me back when he was ranting his way through Usenet. It never even occurred to me to call in the cops. We're talking tens of thousands of hate messages. I should have demanded Google's servers instead of just asking them to turf the spam?
If the site doesn't log IP addresses, then it doesn't log IP addresses. A mirror of the site will *certainly* not have IP addresses on it even if the original server did... so this doesn't seem to have been taken to gather information, it was taken to punish them for not being able to provide the IP address of the poster. And the expectation that the IP address *would* be logged because there's an EU directive requiring it is disturbing.
If this was from Some Random University would you have made the article "University of XXXX plan to destroy music"? But because it's Microsoft, you have to lace the summary with "oh noes, it's terrible what Microsoft's doing"...
Sheesh. Not even Microsoft can be completely evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course you're going to get smaller heat engines over time. You're ALSO going to get smaller and lighter gasoline engines over time. And in fact between the '70s and the '90s gasoline engines HAVE gotten smaller and lighter.
You're still not going to get rid of the need for a large and efficient radiator. For a given level of technology (similar materials, controllers, and so on) you're going to need a larger power plant to deliver the same amount of power. How much larger, I'm not going to speculate. Do I think it's going to be large enough a difference to count as a drawback? I don't know. I hope not. I'm not and I wasn't arguing against heat engines, quite the opposite. They are very efficient and versatile.
In the context of an engine that burns arbitrary biomass, mind you, you're likely to need to operate at a relatively low temperature, which implies a larger radiator to keep the cool side cool.
Where in that report is the comparison of the mass of the internal combustion engine and the stirling engine of the same power output?
The only comparison I can see implies that the Mod-II equipped Celebrity has a higher curb weight than the original vehicle. It also (as I noted, but you didn't quote) has a high efficiency.
Can you elaborate on whatever point you're making?
It's almost certainly wildly inefficient.
Heat engines can be quite efficient. The problem is the heat exchanger has to be pretty big, so they tend to have lower power density... that is, a heat engine (say, a stirling engine) will be larger and heavier than an internal combustion engine of the same output.
This would be easy to implement and some games show a similar behavior. Still this is not widespread because it just does not add to the gameplay.
I suppose it depends on how much realism you expect from a game. And how much realism the game otherwise provides.
When the characters are abstract specters and you're a yellow ball, you expect them to behave crazily. When they're high resolution avatars with simple AIs, it makes it harder to keep those suspenders of disbelief on when they act brain-damaged.
Apple's hardware is not and has rarely ever been their strong point. It's something to put up with because OS X isn't available for the Thinkpad.
But it's a solvent, not a lubricant.
Well, you know what they say. If you're not part of the solution...
With all the advancements in Windows 7, especially the new taskbar, we can't help but think that users of the lower-tiered versions of the OS would feel even more left out if such new UI changes were excluded.
If it means the Ribbon gets left out, I'll go for Windows 7 Base Bones Budget version, thanks very much.
Steady on, you're not SUPPOSED to take LD50 of WD40 before posting to Slashdot.
Followed by a rather embarrassing trip to the emergency room, I imagine.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of a different kind of lubricant. Or do people really use petroleum-based lubricants in a manner likely to make for embarrassing trips to the emergency room?
Yeah, it's SO easy to confuse a water displacing lubricant with a hard drive. It happens to me all the time!
I hope you keep good backups.
It'll be so slick when the 4.0 TB WD40 comes out.
Consider that you "steer" planes with foot peddles. But watching that pilot drive down the freeway with his arms crossed would look ridiculous to the mass populous.
That's "populace". And the mass populace knows what a car looks like, which is why they don't work like aircraft.
So while I know that when I do a WHOIS lookup, it doesn't make cubes spin on my computer screen and then print the results in 72pt Comic Sans Wide Wingdings. Unless the industry starts doing a lot of close-ups, I'm okay with the big graphic font thing.
On the other hand, I don't recall EVER seeing a phonebook with 72 point Comic Sans on the page, so when the private eye pulls a page out of the bad guy's phone book you get a close-up of the bad guy's handwritten note next to the pawn shop. Why do they bother? Because they know people watching the movie know what a real phone book looks like. Well, more and more people know what a real computer looks like. So why do they still have the 72 point Comic Sans?
Well, you know, increasingly they don't. Even on the Enterprise, they show a bunch of dense text and occasional <H1>Big Titles</H1>... or even have Picard or Janeway reading something out loud from a PADD that's never shown to the screen. And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable cinematographic device that avoids having to deal with this annoying reality stuff without being boring.
Oh, and to get back to your FIRST point, they don't seem to complain about the Enterprise being steered by voice commands and the occasional swipe at a touch panel. And it's not boring either.
Besides, it was kind of cool to see them using an actual ssh exploit attack in the Matrix. And I don't recall anyone complaining that closeup was boring.
Men, women, children... up against the wall... of science!
I can handle having to reacquire software every 3-4 years.
That's another difference, perhaps. It could well be that I get more software, or weirder software, than you, because after 2 years I could NOT find software for the Pocket PC to replace all of the programs I used on my Visor... and I suspect Apple will never allow me to get some of them for the iPhone without jailbreaking it. The iPhone isn't even on my *long* list just because it's not open-source friendly.
but really how is this any different than having to go through the same stuff every time you replace your PDA?
To begin with... for the price of a smartphone I can buy two PDAs.
But beyond that, my PDA is also a good deal less likely to get dropped or broken than my phone (this is just my experience here... I'm not likely to get an important "PDA call" when my hands are occupied, it's a device with a more leisurely lifestyle), and it's a simpler device and so it's got fewer innards to go wrong. And I've had good luck being able to buy used (even reconditioned or refurbished) old PDAs when mine breaks... reducing the likelihood that I'll have to upgrade to an incompatible model (and, perhaps, a sign that I'm not the only one who takes better care of PDAs than phones). My current PDA is a five year old Sony, on its second battery, and I've been through three phones since I got it. Right now, I don't see a PDA I like enough to replace it.
I have in the past had a Handspring Visor and an HP Jornada, and found that I couldn't "cut the cord" from my Visor and just depend on the Jornada... which is why I bought the Clie: it had most of the features I liked from the Jornada, and it was compatible with my "white album" ... the software that was tethering me to the Visor.
I could probably switch now... the software available for the Pocket PC is no longer so limited... but it would still be a substantial extra cost. There's no way I'd have been happy to take that hit every time I replaced my phone.
This comes from highly intelligent people not having an outlet for their intelligence.
Say *what*?
You're insulting all the smart people who found an outlet for their intelligence, especially those of us with spotty academic records who somehow managed to avoid turning into criminal bullies. Maybe it's not "society's fault" after all?
I'm not even big on having a camera and mp3 player in my cellphone. Or running applications in it. My ideal cellphone would have a battery the size of a candy bar with a basic cellphone with maybe a 4 line B&W display, and a PAN link to my *separate* PDA. It would have 8 days hold time, and at least 8 hours talk time, and the battery would have a swing-out USB connector so I can use anything with a USB port to charge my spare battery.
That way all the important stuff (data and software) would be on my PDA, so I wouldn't need to "buy the white album again" if I replaced my cellphone. And I wouldn't worry about running my cellphone down playing Tetris.
Intel isn't trying to do ray tracing. Really, their point is to find a way to make GPUs unnecessary since it is a threat to the CPU market.
They can call it "ray tracing extensions" to the I7 or I8 CPU. It's not like the x86/x86_64 instruction sets are some kind of blushing virgin whose precious architectural purity would be violated by adding instructions like "RT_LOAD_MESH" and "RT_LOAD_SHADER"...
What bothers me is how nVidia is missing the boat.
Is it too much to ask that people look at the links?
Oh, right, this is slashdot. Even reading the fine article is gauche.
At least the money spent on this toy wasn't spent on tightening their grip on the desktop or creating new barriers to entry for open source. Or shutting down internal competition like they did when they killed the high end Windows CE devices in favor of the ill-conceived "Tablet PC". Or buying up companies and crippling them by forcing them to toe the line, like they did with Hotmail.
All I demand of them is to either split the company up, or quit trying to turn everything they do into life support for the "Wintendo" business.
They're still taking the wrong approach to raytracing. If Philip Slusallek was able to get 30 FPS in a raytraced game in 2005, using a single Pentium 4 behind a raytracing accelerator that was roughly equivalent to a Rage Pro in terms of gates and clock speed, it seems silly to me to ignore the possibilities of adding an "RPU" to the mix instead of just adding more general purpose CPU power. Yes, I know that's Intel's thing, but even for Intel... a raytracing core would be a tiny speck in an I7.
As someone else noted, both pictures were raytraced.
To really show the difference between 2d and 3d water, you need to show the water interacting with a solid object close enough so that you can see that in one example the waves really go up and down and in another they're just a picture of waves on a mirror.
There's been a LOT of work making 2d water look dramatic, and I've seen people say they prefer 2d water in broad shots like this in other games (not even raytraced ones), but when you're in the game looking over the edge of a dock or looking at a nearby boat with the light behind you, it's pretty clear that spending more time on the physics of the water pays off.
Heck, even with 2d water, paying attention to the wave effects in shallow versus deep water pays off when you interact with it. And that's rarely done because it's not as dramatic.
SHAC members [...] threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes.
Christ, John Grubor did worse than that to me back when he was ranting his way through Usenet. It never even occurred to me to call in the cops. We're talking tens of thousands of hate messages. I should have demanded Google's servers instead of just asking them to turf the spam?
If the site doesn't log IP addresses, then it doesn't log IP addresses. A mirror of the site will *certainly* not have IP addresses on it even if the original server did... so this doesn't seem to have been taken to gather information, it was taken to punish them for not being able to provide the IP address of the poster. And the expectation that the IP address *would* be logged because there's an EU directive requiring it is disturbing.
If this was from Some Random University would you have made the article "University of XXXX plan to destroy music"? But because it's Microsoft, you have to lace the summary with "oh noes, it's terrible what Microsoft's doing"...
Sheesh. Not even Microsoft can be completely evil.
Ha ha.
No, really, why are they even considering subsidizing video games at all?