Another reason for giving raw data to the mission's science team first is that they were part of the mission design and know how to calibrate and correct the measurements. Raw data seldom can be used "as is"; it must be filtered, corrected for a bunch of instrumental and spacecraft drifts, etc.
In mission-speak, the first thing to do is transform raw data (Level 1A) into corrected data (Level 1B), before it is ready to be processed and interpreted (Level 2 and above). Mission scientists don't want uninformed scientist to apply ad-hoc calibration and corrections to Level 1A data and publish results which contradicts theirs just because they applied the wrong transformation.
Evidently, the fusion is the real source of energy that the machines use. So what are humans doing in the power plant? Controlled fusion is a subtle and complex process, requiring constant monitoring and micromanaging. The human brain, on the other hand, is a superb parallel computer. Most likely, the machines are harnessing the spare brainpower of the human race as a colossal distributed processor for controlling the nuclear fusion reactions.
... And what if the computer on which the Matrix itself run was a vastly parallel biocomputer composed of billions of human brains? That would be an even better explanation IMHO.
Life in Canada is much like life in USA, except that revenues and costs are lower (except for gas, which means much more Honda Civic's than you'd expect).
And since USA is the most important customer in Canada's economy, whatever law is passed in the USA is habitually adopted (often in a weaker form though) later in Canada for compatibility's sake.
There are as much guns per capita as in USA but crime is lower because citizen are farther apart.
The other side of the medal for those alternatives are:
1. Tethers physics in orbit are incredibly complicated. The few experiments done in the past show that the tether's contorsions when deployed are unpredictable.
2. Canons and other railguns must either provide a ridiculously strong acceleration or be ridiculously long and tall (Storrs-Hall seems to envision a 100km-tall, 300km-long device).
3. Space elevators would require an incredible amount of incredibly strong material. Geosynchronous orbit is 36,000 km away. You have to build a cable, let's say, at least 10 m in diameter, and actually longer than 36,000 km (it must extant up to a counterweight so that its center of mass is in geosynchronous orbit). Yep, that's over 1 cubic kilometer of material, not even counting the counterweight.
There is also Tsiolkovsy's equatorial ring... build a ring around Earths's equator and somehow make it elastic, and make it turn really fast around the globe. Under centrifugal forces, it will expand... a few % or expansion is enough for it to reach low Earth orbit, and the quantity of material that could be lifted would be enormous. Caveats involves the Andes, among other things.
The moon has really been neglected in the past decades. I'm an engineer now, and like my fellow not-yet-30-years-old collegues, I wasn't even born the last time man has touched our natural satellite's ground. There is enormous potential for hi-tech research, science and even industrial exploitation on the moon, and it's not too far. The Earth-Moon system's Lagrange points have been largely unexploited also...
As for Mars, our (I speak as a human being) succes rate at going there isn't very good yet. Almost one spaceship out of two that tries to enter Mars orbit is lost. We need a "welcome" infrastructure: communication and meteo satellites around Mars so that the following probes (and crews!) can safely reach destination.
We also need something strong to cruise rapidly (I don't believe yet in 3-years-plus missions). Prometheus (nuclear propulsion) would facilitate the trip a lot...
First of all, I'm not an expert on this matter so I can't answer you definetely. Obviously there are many security holes in the game as demonstrated by the many aimbots available. PunkBuster is a technology enabling the detection of aimbot use, and the banning and kicking out of aimbot users, but does not prevent aimbot use per se. However in my knowledge there is no cheat allowing physics hacks (e.g. high jumping), so that the physics must be computed or checked server-side (?).
However, the rate at which this is done is certainly less than 125 times per second. Given a ballistic trajectory (e.g. a player during a jump), the trajectory could be checked by the server but the actual position occupied by the player along that trajectory is updated at the frame rate. At 125 FPS, given the standard height at which each player can jump in Quake, the player actually is able to be during one frame at the apogee of the trajectory, which is not the case at other framerates. Thus, certain items in certain maps for example are only reachable if your framerate is exactly 125 FPS.
Thus, the physics doesn't really change with the framerate. It's the way the "world" is sampled (trajectories, etc.) that is the problem here. And this is done client-side. You can decouple the two in single-player mode (i.e. position updated at 125 Hz, but screenshots generated at 50 Hz), but in multiplayer, by default, servers do not allow this.
Sorry I can't be more precise... Do a search for "Quake 3 trickjumping" to now more about this, since many "trickjumps" in Quake necessitate the 125 FPS framerate.
In all seriousness... In Quake 3, the physics model is tied to your framerate (i.e. a new snapshot of the "world" is computed at each frame). It is well known among avid quakers that the physics is different for different framerate, and that there is an optimum at 125 FPS. This has nothing to do with the visuals. You can go faster and jump higher when getting 125 FPS. In one-player mode, it is possible to separate world snapshots and visual frames, but not in multi-player mode. So most gamers will in some ways try to achieve above 125 FPS and then cap it (using the com_maxfps in-game variable) to 125 FPS. It is then important that the card do above 125 FPS in all maps, all occasions (moreover in heavy battles involving many models and thus many polygons).
I can't talk for other games, but since the Q3 engine is widely used, that may be the case for some of them too. That partly explains the "need" for high-FPS.
Humanity sure has done some progress in the twentieth century. However, "morphing into any shape" and "uploading ourselves to traverse the universe" in 100 years seems just a little to enthusiastic in my opinion.
Sure we have "the technology" to go to the Moon, and maybe Mars, right now. But we certainly don't have the will (read economic ressources and interest), and I'd be happily surprised if just a handful of people would reside permanently outside the earth's atmosphere in 100 years. Hey, nobody's got to the moon, which is at our door, since 30 years, and NASA is planning to close the ISS for long stretches of time.
It is much more likely that in 100 years, most of the world will be at home connected to the Net by VR -- and there play MMORPG games in which we have the ability to morph into almost any imaginable shape and becoming uploads traversing the universe...
[i]Ironically, a thoroughly rigorous and systematic ban on DoD use of FOSS could also affect a number of proprietary product that rely on FOSS products that permit incorporation of FOSS into their closed-source products. For example, Microsoft Office uses the FOSS zlib collection of data compression software, and thus could technically be banned as a product that incorporates FOSS software.[/i]
But before anything, the patents must be granted, which is the tricky part. The article mentions a similar tactic used in biotech (where two guys patented some kind of animal-human hybrids in order to either forbid anyone of doing so or force the USPO to re-evaluate its policies concerning biotech patents). The biotech patent was not granted -- which is fine for them since the goal was to see if the patent would be granted or not -- but for Lucky Green's tactic to work, the patent must be granted first, and if MSFT gets the patent first, it will fail.
PC "Consoles"?
on
UT2003 LiveCD
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What I find interesting is the possibility to offer games that come with their own OS. Instead of distributing a game which comes for Windows, Linux, or MacOS, why not put an optimized OS on the CD or DVD so that anyone can boot it and play the game. The game could fetch configs and saved games, if available, on a user-specified location on disk, or better, online. It would work much as a console; of course, having to boot on the CD is a drawback, but console users don't seem to mind.
Read the article. Private wants to use its own copyrighted material as a base.
[i]Private Media claims to own the largest library of adult-oriented content in the world, with global copyrights to the content.
"Along with Hollywood and the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright infringement inherent in the free peer-to-peer file swapping services," Prast said.[/i]
If you need to do numerical linear algebra (vectors and matrix), nothing beats Matlab. But as you said, Matlab costs a bunch of money. Maybe you'd be interested in Octave, an open-source, Matlab-like and mostly Matlab-compatible scripting language / interpreter.
Maybe you'd want listening to online mp3 broadcasts... Almost all online radio stations have forums to discuss what's on air and such; pick up a station you like and you'll see what's playing, and what other listeners like. I suggest:
DigitallyImported (probably the most popular; trance, hard trance, house) Massinova (eurodance / trance site in which users decide what will play next, with a moderation system for the tracks...) SomaFM (oops, killed by CARP -- had good Drum'n'Bass) Tag's Trance Trip (trance -- wait, off the air due to CARP) XTC Radio (trance and prog house) Philosomatika (goa and psytrance) Bassdrive (drum'n'bass) Xanu (Chillout and lounge)
Isn't this just a new take on the Podkletnov effect?
Excerpt of the article in the paper version of SciAm:
(...) Even if Chiao's contraption works, it wouldn't allow the generation of antigravity fields, as Russian materials scientist Eugene Podkletnov, then at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, controversially claimed to have observed in 1992. (...)
I regularly come across websites that performs a check before showing the content and sometimes prevents you from viewing it if you're not using MSIE. A year ago or so, that was the case with two financial institutions where my wife and I kept our money...
I don't know if Opera still has this feature but I remember that it was possible to make the Opera browser present itself as Netscape or MSIE; that was a nice feature, that I would like to see in Moz right now.
I don't think this is exactly what you're looking for, but if you really want to know more, the book we used in my first quantum physics course was Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei and Particles by R. Eisberg and R. Resnick, edited at Wiley. It assumes basic knowledge of classical physics and calculus, but it is otherwise addressed to undergrads. You would probably be interested only by the first few chapters. The introduction of Schrodinger's equation, even if a little convoluted when you know of other, more advanced but more direct approaches, is quite interesting and not too hard to follow.
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
So in other words, according to MSFT, the government should not create its own software and give it away to the public since it would be unfair competition?
Since Doom 3 will be released in 2003 (or so it seems), those 128 MB GeForce 4 will probably get you average performance (ok I know this is an exaggeration but you get the point). I for one paid only a few bucks for a GeForce 2 MX that renders UT, Quake, RTCW & Cie perfectly at a decent framerate for the moment, and upgrade only when the next generation games will be on the shelf.
If anyone is tempted to do something about the lack of equation editor, could I suggest some sort of compatibility with LaTeX syntax? That would be so great. Something like LyX' equation editor, where typing a circonflex accent ^ creates a superscript field, and typing an underscore _ creates a subscript field, typing \alpha gets you a lowercase alpha and \Alpha an uppercase alpha.Import/export would be great too, of course.
The last think I'd want when being frustrated would be the computer doing *anything* I didn't specifically ask it to do. Come on, say you're angry, swearing towards the screen and hitting your keyboard; what could the computer do to ease your frustration? Play soft music? Open a help window? Soothing messages? Saving and closing your work? No way, that would drive me mad.
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason for giving raw data to the mission's science team first is that they were part of the mission design and know how to calibrate and correct the measurements. Raw data seldom can be used "as is"; it must be filtered, corrected for a bunch of instrumental and spacecraft drifts, etc.
In mission-speak, the first thing to do is transform raw data (Level 1A) into corrected data (Level 1B), before it is ready to be processed and interpreted (Level 2 and above). Mission scientists don't want uninformed scientist to apply ad-hoc calibration and corrections to Level 1A data and publish results which contradicts theirs just because they applied the wrong transformation.
Life in Canada is much like life in USA, except that revenues and costs are lower (except for gas, which means much more Honda Civic's than you'd expect).
And since USA is the most important customer in Canada's economy, whatever law is passed in the USA is habitually adopted (often in a weaker form though) later in Canada for compatibility's sake.
There are as much guns per capita as in USA but crime is lower because citizen are farther apart.
Appealing isn'it?
The other side of the medal for those alternatives are:
1. Tethers physics in orbit are incredibly complicated. The few experiments done in the past show that the tether's contorsions when deployed are unpredictable.
2. Canons and other railguns must either provide a ridiculously strong acceleration or be ridiculously long and tall (Storrs-Hall seems to envision a 100km-tall, 300km-long device).
3. Space elevators would require an incredible amount of incredibly strong material. Geosynchronous orbit is 36,000 km away. You have to build a cable, let's say, at least 10 m in diameter, and actually longer than 36,000 km (it must extant up to a counterweight so that its center of mass is in geosynchronous orbit). Yep, that's over 1 cubic kilometer of material, not even counting the counterweight.
There is also Tsiolkovsy's equatorial ring... build a ring around Earths's equator and somehow make it elastic, and make it turn really fast around the globe. Under centrifugal forces, it will expand... a few % or expansion is enough for it to reach low Earth orbit, and the quantity of material that could be lifted would be enormous. Caveats involves the Andes, among other things.
The moon has really been neglected in the past decades. I'm an engineer now, and like my fellow not-yet-30-years-old collegues, I wasn't even born the last time man has touched our natural satellite's ground. There is enormous potential for hi-tech research, science and even industrial exploitation on the moon, and it's not too far. The Earth-Moon system's Lagrange points have been largely unexploited also...
As for Mars, our (I speak as a human being) succes rate at going there isn't very good yet. Almost one spaceship out of two that tries to enter Mars orbit is lost. We need a "welcome" infrastructure: communication and meteo satellites around Mars so that the following probes (and crews!) can safely reach destination.
We also need something strong to cruise rapidly (I don't believe yet in 3-years-plus missions). Prometheus (nuclear propulsion) would facilitate the trip a lot...
First of all, I'm not an expert on this matter so I can't answer you definetely. Obviously there are many security holes in the game as demonstrated by the many aimbots available. PunkBuster is a technology enabling the detection of aimbot use, and the banning and kicking out of aimbot users, but does not prevent aimbot use per se. However in my knowledge there is no cheat allowing physics hacks (e.g. high jumping), so that the physics must be computed or checked server-side (?).
However, the rate at which this is done is certainly less than 125 times per second. Given a ballistic trajectory (e.g. a player during a jump), the trajectory could be checked by the server but the actual position occupied by the player along that trajectory is updated at the frame rate. At 125 FPS, given the standard height at which each player can jump in Quake, the player actually is able to be during one frame at the apogee of the trajectory, which is not the case at other framerates. Thus, certain items in certain maps for example are only reachable if your framerate is exactly 125 FPS.
Thus, the physics doesn't really change with the framerate. It's the way the "world" is sampled (trajectories, etc.) that is the problem here. And this is done client-side. You can decouple the two in single-player mode (i.e. position updated at 125 Hz, but screenshots generated at 50 Hz), but in multiplayer, by default, servers do not allow this.
Sorry I can't be more precise... Do a search for "Quake 3 trickjumping" to now more about this, since many "trickjumps" in Quake necessitate the 125 FPS framerate.
In all seriousness... In Quake 3, the physics model is tied to your framerate (i.e. a new snapshot of the "world" is computed at each frame). It is well known among avid quakers that the physics is different for different framerate, and that there is an optimum at 125 FPS. This has nothing to do with the visuals. You can go faster and jump higher when getting 125 FPS. In one-player mode, it is possible to separate world snapshots and visual frames, but not in multi-player mode. So most gamers will in some ways try to achieve above 125 FPS and then cap it (using the com_maxfps in-game variable) to 125 FPS. It is then important that the card do above 125 FPS in all maps, all occasions (moreover in heavy battles involving many models and thus many polygons).
I can't talk for other games, but since the Q3 engine is widely used, that may be the case for some of them too. That partly explains the "need" for high-FPS.
Humanity sure has done some progress in the twentieth century. However, "morphing into any shape" and "uploading ourselves to traverse the universe" in 100 years seems just a little to enthusiastic in my opinion.
Sure we have "the technology" to go to the Moon, and maybe Mars, right now. But we certainly don't have the will (read economic ressources and interest), and I'd be happily surprised if just a handful of people would reside permanently outside the earth's atmosphere in 100 years. Hey, nobody's got to the moon, which is at our door, since 30 years, and NASA is planning to close the ISS for long stretches of time.
It is much more likely that in 100 years, most of the world will be at home connected to the Net by VR -- and there play MMORPG games in which we have the ability to morph into almost any imaginable shape and becoming uploads traversing the universe...
In page 22:
[i]Ironically, a thoroughly rigorous and systematic ban on DoD use of FOSS could also affect a number of proprietary product that rely on FOSS products that permit incorporation of FOSS into their closed-source products. For example, Microsoft Office uses the FOSS zlib collection of data compression software, and thus could technically be banned as a product that incorporates FOSS software.[/i]
when NASA did half its calculation in metric and the rest in SI
THAT would have turned out just fine...
But before anything, the patents must be granted, which is the tricky part. The article mentions a similar tactic used in biotech (where two guys patented some kind of animal-human hybrids in order to either forbid anyone of doing so or force the USPO to re-evaluate its policies concerning biotech patents). The biotech patent was not granted -- which is fine for them since the goal was to see if the patent would be granted or not -- but for Lucky Green's tactic to work, the patent must be granted first, and if MSFT gets the patent first, it will fail.
Nevertheless, Starcraft2.com is up.
What I find interesting is the possibility to offer games that come with their own OS. Instead of distributing a game which comes for Windows, Linux, or MacOS, why not put an optimized OS on the CD or DVD so that anyone can boot it and play the game. The game could fetch configs and saved games, if available, on a user-specified location on disk, or better, online. It would work much as a console; of course, having to boot on the CD is a drawback, but console users don't seem to mind.
Read the article. Private wants to use its own copyrighted material as a base.
[i]Private Media claims to own the largest library of adult-oriented content in the world, with global copyrights to the content.
"Along with Hollywood and the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright infringement inherent in the free peer-to-peer file swapping services," Prast said.[/i]
If you need to do numerical linear algebra (vectors and matrix), nothing beats Matlab. But as you said, Matlab costs a bunch of money. Maybe you'd be interested in Octave, an open-source, Matlab-like and mostly Matlab-compatible scripting language / interpreter.
Maybe you'd want listening to online mp3 broadcasts... Almost all online radio stations have forums to discuss what's on air and such; pick up a station you like and you'll see what's playing, and what other listeners like. I suggest:
DigitallyImported (probably the most popular; trance, hard trance, house)
Massinova (eurodance / trance site in which users decide what will play next, with a moderation system for the tracks...)
SomaFM (oops, killed by CARP -- had good Drum'n'Bass)
Tag's Trance Trip (trance -- wait, off the air due to CARP)
XTC Radio (trance and prog house)
Philosomatika (goa and psytrance)
Bassdrive (drum'n'bass)
Xanu (Chillout and lounge)
Excerpt of the article in the paper version of SciAm:
I regularly come across websites that performs a check before showing the content and sometimes prevents you from viewing it if you're not using MSIE. A year ago or so, that was the case with two financial institutions where my wife and I kept our money...
I don't know if Opera still has this feature but I remember that it was possible to make the Opera browser present itself as Netscape or MSIE; that was a nice feature, that I would like to see in Moz right now.
I don't think this is exactly what you're looking for, but if you really want to know more, the book we used in my first quantum physics course was Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei and Particles by R. Eisberg and R. Resnick, edited at Wiley. It assumes basic knowledge of classical physics and calculus, but it is otherwise addressed to undergrads. You would probably be interested only by the first few chapters. The introduction of Schrodinger's equation, even if a little convoluted when you know of other, more advanced but more direct approaches, is quite interesting and not too hard to follow.
If you don't believe me, try sending a CD's worth of data across your room at that speed.
Done. I broke the jewel case though.
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
So in other words, according to MSFT, the government should not create its own software and give it away to the public since it would be unfair competition?
Since Doom 3 will be released in 2003 (or so it seems), those 128 MB GeForce 4 will probably get you average performance (ok I know this is an exaggeration but you get the point). I for one paid only a few bucks for a GeForce 2 MX that renders UT, Quake, RTCW & Cie perfectly at a decent framerate for the moment, and upgrade only when the next generation games will be on the shelf.
30 years ago we were on the moon (and by we, I mean, a LEMful of astronauts). Now where are we?
If anyone is tempted to do something about the lack of equation editor, could I suggest some sort of compatibility with LaTeX syntax? That would be so great. Something like LyX' equation editor, where typing a circonflex accent ^ creates a superscript field, and typing an underscore _ creates a subscript field, typing \alpha gets you a lowercase alpha and \Alpha an uppercase alpha.Import/export would be great too, of course.
The last think I'd want when being frustrated would be the computer doing *anything* I didn't specifically ask it to do. Come on, say you're angry, swearing towards the screen and hitting your keyboard; what could the computer do to ease your frustration? Play soft music? Open a help window? Soothing messages? Saving and closing your work? No way, that would drive me mad.