Beer probably does not contain enough alcohol to count as a flammable liquid,
It definitely doesn't. Alcohol/water mixtures (the basis of every alcoholic beverage, with assorted other chemicals and flavorings) have to be something above 50% alcohol to be flammable. The term "proof" in this context comes from this, the proof was in whether it would burn, underproof (now under 100 proof in US terms) wouldn't, overproof would.
It's quite sobering to open a bottle of, say, Bacardi 151 (151 proof, about 75% ethanol) Rum and see the flame arrestor built into the bottle opening. Fortunately imbibing the contents takes care of that;-)
Remember, d = 1/2 a * t^2 (plus v * t given an initial nonzero v, plus whatever d you start with). However, you don't define "forward velocity" -- is that longitudinal velocity or the vector sum of long and lat velocity? The latter makes most sense, but then you have to specify the direction vector as well as the speed, and work backwards from that (sin and cos) to get the lat and long components of the forward velocity.
For a crude approximation just take the instantaneous LatG and LongG for your 'a' values, for a better approximation average the current and previous values. This ought to be "good enough" for reasonably low values of jolt (rate of change of acceleration).
You young pups. My dad had a slide rule, and my mother programmed with punch cards.
For that matter, so did I until I discovered the campus time sharing system (supposedly for grad students and faculty only) and hacked myself an account on it... Of course that spoiled me on the microcomputers then becoming available (Kim-I, Altair etc) because my personal computer (well, in a way) was a Burroughs B6700. (Hey, I had the Burroughs MCP equivalent of root, I owned it:-)
Just so this isn't totally off-topic, the 100-GB drives are a lifesaver. A few months ago I installed some systems that are running three (3) 75GB drives apiece just for data (video) storage. That's only about 15 hours of DV total. The limit now is tiny little 32-bit filesystems limiting you to 2GB (or 4GB) per file.
The question is can a fuel cell deliver enough energy for a flight long enough to be practical.
The answer is, "yes".
Fuel cells are very efficient at converting chemical to electrical energy -- the cells NASA has been using on manned spacecraft since the 1960s run at about 75% efficient -- compare that to the roughly 30% efficiency of a combustion engine. (Although for a proper comparison we'd also need to factor in the efficiency of the electric motor. At 85%-90% (numbers I've seen quoted) that gives a net chemical-to-mechanical efficency of about 64%-67%.)
As far as safety goes -- well, NASA has been running H2-O2 fuel cells on manned spacecraft since Gemini, and the only problem they've ever had with that system was due to a combination of spec changes and improper procedures causing an O2 tank to explode (Apollo XIII).
Re:From the pictures...
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
If you're talking about Starbucks, the coffee is over-roasted crap that tastes like it's been on the burner about an hour too long.
I suppose some folks think its cool or macho or 1337 to drink charcoal'n'water. I think they're idiots.
I'll agree on the rest of it, though. But there are plenty of places that meet those criteria that actually know how to make coffee.
does this mean that they can be wired back to back to create spray on transistors? Ultracheap custom chips
Spray on transistors are almost there. (The linked article mentions some spray on circuitry but the (fast) transistors are rubber-stamped, they're still working on spraying those). The folks described here are doing spray-on polymer transistors.
Hmm, couple the LEDs, the transistors and some good optical sensors and you can make yourself a cloak of invisibility...
Nice, but 132000 feet is only 25 miles, just half of what USAF awards astronaut wings for (50 miles, and some X-15 pilots earned them). Even less than half of the 100 km that the International Aeronautical Federation considers the edge of space.
Code phrases hidden (and sometimes, not so hidden) in public broadcasts have a long history. Recall BBC's nightly broadcasts during WW-II, which frequently concluded with a long list of apparently nonsense phrases. Most of them were, in fact, nonsense, but some were "trigger phrases" aimed at groups like the Resistance to coordinate actions. The nonsense phrases were thrown in so that the Germans couldn't do traffic analysis.
If the secret message is just "the target is X, the date is Y" where X and Y are a relatively small list of predefined targets and dates, you don't need a whole lot of code phrases -- or even signs, given a video tape (consider signals between catcher and pitcher in baseball, for example) -- to convey which X and Y you mean.
Farfetched? Not really. But even if it is, why take the slightest chance on spreading the enemy's message for him?
And to answer your questions: Do I send an encrypted letter? Do I send a human messenger by plane to carry the message? Do I phone them and use secret phrases with hidden meanings to convey the message to them? The answer is NO, not if you are being actively sought out and such communications might fall into the wrong hands, betray your location and/or not get delivered.
In the simulator, you don't have 10 different people in the traffic pattern, with a frazzled tower controller who gets confused every now and then.
Actually, you can, depending on the sim software and the setup. Years back there was simulator software (SubLogic's? I don't recall) that let you see the other aircraft in the pattern if you networked the machines, and there was also software called something like ATC (Air Traffic Control) Simulator, which also tied into the same net and showed the aircraft on a radar screen. Don't recall the details of how the communications worked.
And I can't imagine anyone playing air traffic controller for fun.
(Oh, and speaking of physics, I've yet to see a PC-based simulator that could model a spin. Although I haven't looked lately.)
The 1394 has been working - more or less - for quite a while, including backports to 2.2.x. The thing is, it is also a work-in-progress: developments in the 1394 subsystems (video/isochronos packets, storage systems, ip-over-1394, etc) can have subtle effects on what works with a given card and peripherals.
Personally I still tend to rely more on the patches directly from the 1394 project (linux1394 on SourceForge) still, although the Mandrake 8.0 1394 stuff worked for me out of the box (mostly, except for a patch to the video driver for an NTSC camcorder). Haven't tried 8.1 yet, nor the stock kernels.
But I'm wondering if this (well, the German version) is actually some digital signature that CD copiers and MS Windows is looking for and then disallowing playback (explainable as a Windows bug because it should just disallow copy).
Consider that Mac users can listen (and copy?) to them.
A couple of suggested experiments for anyone with one of the unlistenable German discs: plug earphones into the audio jack on the front of your CD-ROM drive -- can you hear anything that way? (That's a direct analog out from a D/A converter built into the drive, bypassing anything the OS does). How about playing/ripping it on Linux?
Enquiring minds want to know.
(Oh, BTW, I think it's Philips that owns the Compact Disc trademark, or Philips + Sony)
There have been calls to close National Airport since that iced-up 737 crashed into a bridge over the Potomac years ago, probably even before that. It's location is just awful for jet aircraft, which have to fly some pretty bizarre approaches and takeoffs. But it was just too damn convenient for congresscritters wanting to commute home to their constituents.
They really ought to close it permanently. It's an anachronism. Unfortunately now would be a psychologically bad time to do so.
Most linux distributions are downloadable. SuSE is the major exception that I know of
Correction, SuSE is also downloadable. Just not in convenient ISO form. The packages SuSE puts on its CDs/DVDs are all downloadable (except for any commercial stuff SuSE pays a royalty or license fee on).
(And actually, SuSE 7.1 for SPARC is freely downloadable as ISO images, they no longer ship that as a boxed set.)
Shakespeare really is a fairly simple programming language with built-in steganographic obfuscation. But it'd be a hoot to see MPAA try to come down on a Shakespeare version of DeCSS or Adobe try to complain about a Shakespearean e-book decryptor.
(And while the language looks at quick glance to be turing-complete it could do with some richer semantics -- floats, function calls, etc.)
Well no, this is Australia. It'd be PAL at 25 FPS.
(Not that I think it's anywhere near that, either. And since PAL has a slightly larger field the bitrate is the same as NTSC anyway, at least with DV.)
That's a nice toy -- and a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than the telerobot "Tycho" that some friends (Will Smith, Henry Vanderbilt) put together about a dozen years ago. (That was based on the "Clodbuster" R/C car, a Sony WatchCam, transmitter, etc.)
Teleoperating something on the Moon is going to have about a 3-second delay between the time you send the command and the time you see the result. Gets worse the further you go (at least 20 minutes for Mars, more depending on relative positions in the orbit.)
The Tycho machine (wish there was a web page for it, maybe I'll grab some stills from the video we made) incorporated the time-lag in software: control input went to the computer, three seconds later it sent the commands to the vehicle. We watched the video feedback live in the living room while the vehicle roamed around the parking lot. (Had remote pan/tilt on the camera and a digital voltmeter in the camera's view to give "telemetry" on the battery. It really needed an artifical horizon, otherwise the only clue that you were sideways on a hill (and about to roll) was that the trees were tilted...)
Even in real-time driving one of these things takes a bit of getting used to. (But it's fun!) With a three-second delay it takes a lot of getting used to...
It's nice to see students getting a chance to do this. If the effective government monopoly on space launch could be pried loose the price might come down to where more colleges could afford this (as it is their getting a "free" launch).
Oh, and re:
"And they were innovative - they discovered that the tape in a tape measure would flip into place on its own while in orbit. A more expensive antenna system would have depended on electronics to do the same thing."
This must be the Microsoft definition of "innovative" -- the steel tape measure technique for satellite antennas has been around since the 1960's.
For that matter, motorized antennas are pretty cheap (think automobile scrap), just ridiculously heavy for that application.
Why, oh, why must people propogate the myth that Java is slow?
First, I do a lot of coding in Java. Also in C and C++. Right tool for the job and all that.
But Java -- even compiled Java -- is slower than C/C++ code, it just tends to be more correct and less likely to fail in mysterious or security-threatening ways. There are reasons for this.
The startup time is one of the obvious "slow" areas of Java -- particularly so to folks just doing a quick "Hello World" to try the language out, rather than for apps that once running keep going for days or weeks at a time. This is because Java defers linking until run time -- and links every class separately. The equivalent in C++ would be for every class to be in its own.so library.
Contributing to relative run-time slowness is the fact that Java bounds-checks every array access and every memory reference (and may have more indirection on those references depending on the implementation). C/C++ doesn't. Now, a good C/C++ program should do a heck of a lot more such bounds checking than most programs do (we'd have a lot fewer buffer-overflow exploits), but there are cases -- such as in an array initialization loop -- where a C/C++ programmer can get away without checking every access because of the limits imposed by the loop code, whereas Java will bounds check regardless.
Note that one of the features of the gjc Java compiler is an option to omit a lot of this runtime checking. As this compiler matures (gets better optimization) I'd expect gjc compiled-to-native Java to be just as fast as C++ code.
Of course, considering the state of today's typical hardware (1.5 GHz CPU, 133 MHz memory, etc), even an interpreted Java program running on that will be faster than a compiled C++ program running on the hardware available at Java's introduction (1995-ish, 100 MHz CPU, 16 MHz memory). If C++ programs were fast enough on that hardware (some were, some weren't), then the equivalent program in Java on today's hardware will also be fast enough -- and likely more quickly developed and less prone to mysterious bugs.
The Cineon format sometimes used in digital film work (compositing, etc) uses 3 10-bit channels using a logarithmic scale. Depends what your ultimate display medium will be.
So it renders to a computer screen at 2.5 FPS. That's nice and all, but a long way from film-making.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000 (give or take depending on aspect ratio, etc). Now, even assuming we could gang up 16 or 25 or whatever of these nvidia boards, we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film. All the hardware shortcuts and special-purpose circuitry in the latest video card are useless when it comes to final render for film, because they're not built into the gadget (and there are several different sorts) that's actually bombarding the emulsion with photons. (Typically some sort of three-pass (R,G,B) laser scanner).
Yes, it'll make for wonderful computer games (if you like that sort of thing) and maybe even some interesting experiments in real-time porno animation, but it doesn't do much for the film industry, nor would it at 10 times the speed (24 FPS is typical movie framerate). It'd have to be about 250 times faster for full framerate, full resolution images. About 12 years at Moore's Law rates. (Althogh I suspect at that resolution the flaws in the rendering and physics would become very distracting.)
(Actually, it helps the film production process, where animators can preview their work that much quicker. Faster graphics is always good, just let's not get carried away with the hype.)
I run a server with three virtual domains, separate logs for each. The IP numbers are sequential, but I see 1092 hits (of the XXXXX variant) on one, 584 on the second and 579 on the third.
Whoops, make that 1094 on the first and 580 on the third -- got a couple more as I was entering this.
I've blown a whole motherboard - except the processor - from the modem line.
Mind, it was a lightning-induced surge on the phone line that did it -- blew out the modem card, the VGA card, and the motherboard itself, but the CPU, memory, and other cards were fine. (I transplanted them to a new mobo and have been fine for a year now). Electricity is wierd.
(It also blew out my caller ID box, a phone, and my garage door opener. None of those, however, were connected to the computer -- and my garage door opener wasn't connected to the phone line. Wierd.)
I've got to wonder, though, if a CG character will ever become so popular that it will end up in other CG movies completely unrelated to the first one it appeared in.
It's already happened, although not due to the popularity of the character as such.
Pixar did a short film about an old guy playing a chess match with himself ("Gerry's Game"? I don't remember the exact title) which was shown along with "A Bug's Life". They re-used that "actor" as the toy restoration artist in "Toy Story 2".
Building even digital models is not a cheap process, they reuse them where possible. (Pixar also used the ravine from "A Bug's Life", redressed somewhat, as part of the planet of Zurg's fortress for the Buzz Lightyear opening sequence for "Toy Story 2", and many of the background objects in "Toy Story" had been in earlier Pixar shorts -- the Luxo lamp, for an obvious example.)
Electrons slamming to a stop produce X-rays. The faster the electrons and the faster the stop, the higher energy the X-rays. Color monitors have a lot of lead in the glass (several pounds of it) to keep your skull from developing a nice monitor burn:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Beer probably does not contain enough alcohol to count as a flammable liquid,
;-)
It definitely doesn't. Alcohol/water mixtures (the basis of every alcoholic beverage, with assorted other chemicals and flavorings) have to be something above 50% alcohol to be flammable. The term "proof" in this context comes from this, the proof was in whether it would burn, underproof (now under 100 proof in US terms) wouldn't, overproof would.
It's quite sobering to open a bottle of, say, Bacardi 151 (151 proof, about 75% ethanol) Rum and see the flame arrestor built into the bottle opening. Fortunately imbibing the contents takes care of that
Remember, d = 1/2 a * t^2 (plus v * t given an initial nonzero v, plus whatever d you start with). However, you don't define "forward velocity" -- is that longitudinal velocity or the vector sum of long and lat velocity? The latter makes most sense, but then you have to specify the direction vector as well as the speed, and work backwards from that (sin and cos) to get the lat and long components of the forward velocity.
For a crude approximation just take the instantaneous LatG and LongG for your 'a' values, for a better approximation average the current and previous values. This ought to be "good enough" for reasonably low values of jolt (rate of change of acceleration).
You young pups. My dad had a slide rule, and my mother programmed with punch cards.
:-)
For that matter, so did I until I discovered the campus time sharing system (supposedly for grad students and faculty only) and hacked myself an account on it... Of course that spoiled me on the microcomputers then becoming available (Kim-I, Altair etc) because my personal computer (well, in a way) was a Burroughs B6700. (Hey, I had the Burroughs MCP equivalent of root, I owned it
Just so this isn't totally off-topic, the 100-GB drives are a lifesaver. A few months ago I installed some systems that are running three (3) 75GB drives apiece just for data (video) storage. That's only about 15 hours of DV total. The limit now is tiny little 32-bit filesystems limiting you to 2GB (or 4GB) per file.
The question is can a fuel cell deliver enough energy for a flight long enough to be practical.
The answer is, "yes".
Fuel cells are very efficient at converting chemical to electrical energy -- the cells NASA has been using on manned spacecraft since the 1960s run at about 75% efficient -- compare that to the roughly 30% efficiency of a combustion engine. (Although for a proper comparison we'd also need to factor in the efficiency of the electric motor. At 85%-90% (numbers I've seen quoted) that gives a net chemical-to-mechanical efficency of about 64%-67%.)
As far as safety goes -- well, NASA has been running H2-O2 fuel cells on manned spacecraft since Gemini, and the only problem they've ever had with that system was due to a combination of spec changes and improper procedures causing an O2 tank to explode (Apollo XIII).
If you're talking about Starbucks, the coffee is over-roasted crap that tastes like it's been on the burner about an hour too long.
I suppose some folks think its cool or macho or 1337 to drink charcoal'n'water. I think they're idiots.
I'll agree on the rest of it, though. But there are plenty of places that meet those criteria that actually know how to make coffee.
does this mean that they can be wired back to back to create spray on transistors? Ultracheap custom chips
Spray on transistors are almost there. (The linked article mentions some spray on circuitry but the (fast) transistors are rubber-stamped, they're still working on spraying those). The folks described here are doing spray-on polymer transistors.
Hmm, couple the LEDs, the transistors and some good optical sensors and you can make yourself a cloak of invisibility...
Nice, but 132000 feet is only 25 miles, just half of what USAF awards astronaut wings for (50 miles, and some X-15 pilots earned them). Even less than half of the 100 km that the International Aeronautical Federation considers the edge of space.
Still, it sounds like a fun ride!
Code phrases hidden (and sometimes, not so hidden) in public broadcasts have a long history. Recall BBC's nightly broadcasts during WW-II, which frequently concluded with a long list of apparently nonsense phrases. Most of them were, in fact, nonsense, but some were "trigger phrases" aimed at groups like the Resistance to coordinate actions. The nonsense phrases were thrown in so that the Germans couldn't do traffic analysis.
If the secret message is just "the target is X, the date is Y" where X and Y are a relatively small list of predefined targets and dates, you don't need a whole lot of code phrases -- or even signs, given a video tape (consider signals between catcher and pitcher in baseball, for example) -- to convey which X and Y you mean.
Farfetched? Not really. But even if it is, why take the slightest chance on spreading the enemy's message for him?
And to answer your questions: Do I send an encrypted letter? Do I send a human messenger by plane to carry the message? Do I phone them and use secret phrases with hidden meanings to convey the message to them? The answer is NO, not if you are being actively sought out and such communications might fall into the wrong hands, betray your location and/or not get delivered.
the most realistic flight model available
Ah, but will it let me do spins?
Plane-Maker (to make your own planes and helos if desired)
I want to model rocket planes like the EZ-Rocket! (Better yet, I want to fly the real thing!)
In the simulator, you don't have 10 different people in the traffic pattern, with a frazzled tower controller who gets confused every now and then.
Actually, you can, depending on the sim software and the setup. Years back there was simulator software (SubLogic's? I don't recall) that let you see the other aircraft in the pattern if you networked the machines, and there was also software called something like ATC (Air Traffic Control) Simulator, which also tied into the same net and showed the aircraft on a radar screen. Don't recall the details of how the communications worked.
And I can't imagine anyone playing air traffic controller for fun.
(Oh, and speaking of physics, I've yet to see a PC-based simulator that could model a spin. Although I haven't looked lately.)
The 1394 has been working - more or less - for quite a while, including backports to 2.2.x. The thing is, it is also a work-in-progress: developments in the 1394 subsystems (video/isochronos packets, storage systems, ip-over-1394, etc) can have subtle effects on what works with a given card and peripherals.
Personally I still tend to rely more on the patches directly from the 1394 project (linux1394 on SourceForge) still, although the Mandrake 8.0 1394 stuff worked for me out of the box (mostly, except for a patch to the video driver for an NTSC camcorder). Haven't tried 8.1 yet, nor the stock kernels.
But I'm wondering if this (well, the German version) is actually some digital signature that CD copiers and MS Windows is looking for and then disallowing playback (explainable as a Windows bug because it should just disallow copy).
Consider that Mac users can listen (and copy?) to them.
A couple of suggested experiments for anyone with one of the unlistenable German discs: plug earphones into the audio jack on the front of your CD-ROM drive -- can you hear anything that way? (That's a direct analog out from a D/A converter built into the drive, bypassing anything the OS does). How about playing/ripping it on Linux?
Enquiring minds want to know.
(Oh, BTW, I think it's Philips that owns the Compact Disc trademark, or Philips + Sony)
There have been calls to close National Airport since that iced-up 737 crashed into a bridge over the Potomac years ago, probably even before that. It's location is just awful for jet aircraft, which have to fly some pretty bizarre approaches and takeoffs. But it was just too damn convenient for congresscritters wanting to commute home to their constituents.
They really ought to close it permanently. It's an anachronism. Unfortunately now would be a psychologically bad time to do so.
Most linux distributions are downloadable. SuSE is the major exception that I know of
Correction, SuSE is also downloadable. Just not in convenient ISO form. The packages SuSE puts on its CDs/DVDs are all downloadable (except for any commercial stuff SuSE pays a royalty or license fee on).
(And actually, SuSE 7.1 for SPARC is freely downloadable as ISO images, they no longer ship that as a boxed set.)
My first thought too.
Shakespeare really is a fairly simple programming language with built-in steganographic obfuscation. But it'd be a hoot to see MPAA try to come down on a Shakespeare version of DeCSS or Adobe try to complain about a Shakespearean e-book decryptor.
(And while the language looks at quick glance to be turing-complete it could do with some richer semantics -- floats, function calls, etc.)
true NTSC @ 29.97 FPS ?
Well no, this is Australia. It'd be PAL at 25 FPS.
(Not that I think it's anywhere near that, either. And since PAL has a slightly larger field the bitrate is the same as NTSC anyway, at least with DV.)
That's a nice toy -- and a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than the telerobot "Tycho" that some friends (Will Smith, Henry Vanderbilt) put together about a dozen years ago. (That was based on the "Clodbuster" R/C car, a Sony WatchCam, transmitter, etc.)
Teleoperating something on the Moon is going to have about a 3-second delay between the time you send the command and the time you see the result. Gets worse the further you go (at least 20 minutes for Mars, more depending on relative positions in the orbit.)
The Tycho machine (wish there was a web page for it, maybe I'll grab some stills from the video we made) incorporated the time-lag in software: control input went to the computer, three seconds later it sent the commands to the vehicle. We watched the video feedback live in the living room while the vehicle roamed around the parking lot. (Had remote pan/tilt on the camera and a digital voltmeter in the camera's view to give "telemetry" on the battery. It really needed an artifical horizon, otherwise the only clue that you were sideways on a hill (and about to roll) was that the trees were tilted...)
Even in real-time driving one of these things takes a bit of getting used to. (But it's fun!) With a three-second delay it takes a lot of getting used to...
It's nice to see students getting a chance to do this. If the effective government monopoly on space launch could be pried loose the price might come down to where more colleges could afford this (as it is their getting a "free" launch).
Oh, and re:
"And they were innovative - they discovered that the tape in a tape measure would flip into place on its own while in orbit. A more expensive antenna system would have depended on electronics to do the same thing."
This must be the Microsoft definition of "innovative" -- the steel tape measure technique for satellite antennas has been around since the 1960's.
For that matter, motorized antennas are pretty cheap (think automobile scrap), just ridiculously heavy for that application.
Why, oh, why must people propogate the myth that Java is slow?
.so library.
First, I do a lot of coding in Java. Also in C and C++. Right tool for the job and all that.
But Java -- even compiled Java -- is slower than C/C++ code, it just tends to be more correct and less likely to fail in mysterious or security-threatening ways. There are reasons for this.
The startup time is one of the obvious "slow" areas of Java -- particularly so to folks just doing a quick "Hello World" to try the language out, rather than for apps that once running keep going for days or weeks at a time. This is because Java defers linking until run time -- and links every class separately. The equivalent in C++ would be for every class to be in its own
Contributing to relative run-time slowness is the fact that Java bounds-checks every array access and every memory reference (and may have more indirection on those references depending on the implementation). C/C++ doesn't. Now, a good C/C++ program should do a heck of a lot more such bounds checking than most programs do (we'd have a lot fewer buffer-overflow exploits), but there are cases -- such as in an array initialization loop -- where a C/C++ programmer can get away without checking every access because of the limits imposed by the loop code, whereas Java will bounds check regardless.
Note that one of the features of the gjc Java compiler is an option to omit a lot of this runtime checking. As this compiler matures (gets better optimization) I'd expect gjc compiled-to-native Java to be just as fast as C++ code.
Of course, considering the state of today's typical hardware (1.5 GHz CPU, 133 MHz memory, etc), even an interpreted Java program running on that will be faster than a compiled C++ program running on the hardware available at Java's introduction (1995-ish, 100 MHz CPU, 16 MHz memory). If C++ programs were fast enough on that hardware (some were, some weren't), then the equivalent program in Java on today's hardware will also be fast enough -- and likely more quickly developed and less prone to mysterious bugs.
Depends on the encoding scheme.
The Cineon format sometimes used in digital film work (compositing, etc) uses 3 10-bit channels using a logarithmic scale. Depends what your ultimate display medium will be.
So it renders to a computer screen at 2.5 FPS. That's nice and all, but a long way from film-making.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000 (give or take depending on aspect ratio, etc). Now, even assuming we could gang up 16 or 25 or whatever of these nvidia boards, we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film. All the hardware shortcuts and special-purpose circuitry in the latest video card are useless when it comes to final render for film, because they're not built into the gadget (and there are several different sorts) that's actually bombarding the emulsion with photons. (Typically some sort of three-pass (R,G,B) laser scanner).
Yes, it'll make for wonderful computer games (if you like that sort of thing) and maybe even some interesting experiments in real-time porno animation, but it doesn't do much for the film industry, nor would it at 10 times the speed (24 FPS is typical movie framerate). It'd have to be about 250 times faster for full framerate, full resolution images. About 12 years at Moore's Law rates. (Althogh I suspect at that resolution the flaws in the rendering and physics would become very distracting.)
(Actually, it helps the film production process, where animators can preview their work that much quicker. Faster graphics is always good, just let's not get carried away with the hype.)
I run a server with three virtual domains, separate logs for each. The IP numbers are sequential, but I see 1092 hits (of the XXXXX variant) on one, 584 on the second and 579 on the third.
Whoops, make that 1094 on the first and 580 on the third -- got a couple more as I was entering this.
I've blown a whole motherboard - except the processor - from the modem line.
Mind, it was a lightning-induced surge on the phone line that did it -- blew out the modem card, the VGA card, and the motherboard itself, but the CPU, memory, and other cards were fine. (I transplanted them to a new mobo and have been fine for a year now). Electricity is wierd.
(It also blew out my caller ID box, a phone, and my garage door opener. None of those, however, were connected to the computer -- and my garage door opener wasn't connected to the phone line. Wierd.)
I've got to wonder, though, if a CG character will ever become so popular that it will end up in other CG movies completely unrelated to the first one it appeared in.
It's already happened, although not due to the popularity of the character as such.
Pixar did a short film about an old guy playing a chess match with himself ("Gerry's Game"? I don't remember the exact title) which was shown along with "A Bug's Life". They re-used that "actor" as the toy restoration artist in "Toy Story 2".
Building even digital models is not a cheap process, they reuse them where possible. (Pixar also used the ravine from "A Bug's Life", redressed somewhat, as part of the planet of Zurg's fortress for the Buzz Lightyear opening sequence for "Toy Story 2", and many of the background objects in "Toy Story" had been in earlier Pixar shorts -- the Luxo lamp, for an obvious example.)
Electrons slamming to a stop produce X-rays. The faster the electrons and the faster the stop, the higher energy the X-rays. Color monitors have a lot of lead in the glass (several pounds of it) to keep your skull from developing a nice monitor burn :-)