A Zany-Brainy exclusive: Cause Kids learn best when they're having fun.
Pagans MC "Little Cooker" Organic Chemistry Kit (Ages 8 to 80)
Who needs a wimpy chemistry set when you can give your child a leg up on the competition with our super-fun crash-course in organic chemistry?
Your child will learn the Ephedrine reduction technique and the German technique to turn Pseudoephedrine into pure organic gold.
When the experiment is over, simply call the Pagans at 1-800-GOT-METH and we will safely "dispose" of the harmful end product and award your child cash prizes and a Pagan "Little Cooker" merit badge.
(Pseudoephedrine, rusty bathtub, and HAZMAT team not included.)
Remember the Big Book of British Smiles? Perhaps England might not be the best place to find acceptable source material for potential facial transplants.
Does England have the fashion sense to give me the face of Cage or Travolta?
Britain might have better quality control, but I suspect the most stylish faces will come from the Italian transplants.
That motion sensor at the door won't be going away anytime soon. Some time just before the announcement, the all the motion sensors were replaced with an infra-red laser bar coder/reader. Just happens to coincide with the Shacks upcoming "Feel the burn" spring campaign.
If you pick up an over-priced Tandy Infra-Scan, you will find a small barcode somewhere on your midsection. Some of you geeks will need to reach for the ceiling to stretch the fold where it may be hidden. Time to pick up some Old Navy tin foil cargos.
I was thinking more of one of those Russian dolls, with littler nested dolls inside.
I think we have virtual machines inside virtual machines.
The folding of the DNA selectively exposes sections of bytecodes that drive RNA transcription that feeds another virtual machine (the ribosome) that generates another set of bytecodes to build peptides.
The vertex shader 1024 instructions limit of the 9700 is mostly misreported.
The Geforce vertex shader is more powerful, supporting dynamic branching, but the 9700 can do a static branching per primitive with instruction lengths of 65,026. I'm sure such shaders will be equally unwieldy for gaming on both cards.
It seems some of the reviewers only looked only at what NVidia told them and what DX9 exposes and not what the 9700's actual silicon supports.
The reviewers barely understand the full capabilities of the 9700 months after its release. I'm sure the FX will provide similar surprises (good and bad) when they actually get their hands on one.
I'm a happy owner of a 9700 pro. I'm sure future buyers will be happy with the NV30.
Despite all the puffery of the PR, they only claim about 40% increase over the 9700. 46 measly frames in Doom III with all the goods!!! Neither of these cards will run the Doom demo well! Hardly worthy of the claim creating a "new era of cinematic graphics". ATI started the new era, and NVIDIA is now matching ATI's offering with a slight increase in performance. Good job to both camps. We will all enjoy the benefits.
Future NVIDIA purchasers will have ATI to thank for the NV30's clockspeed and required hoover for cooling. There is little doubt that if it were not for the 9700 NV30 would be delivered later or clocked lower. I think ATI really surprised NVIDIA. We shall see who has the next surprise.
I think the big lie is that cinematic effects only begin with their deeper 2.0+ shaders. If you look at the DX9 demos from ATI, you can see the stock 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders offer plenty of opportunity for cinematic effects.
The hoopla helps deflects attention away from NV30's lower bandwidth and poorer clockspeed-t/performace ratio compared to the 9700. I suspect the deeper shaders will not perform well for gaming and will only be used in near-real-time applications.
Both will be decent cards that adequately handle requirements (DX9) that may only start to matter for mainstream games by the time we're debating NV40 vs. R400.
I you try to track my time vehicle, I'm gonna throw 2 hams in the Mr. Fusion and reverse the DeLorean back to Sri Lanka. I'll kill Arthur C, Marconi, or anyone else who would track the time vehicle or potentially lead to the tracking of the time vehicle.
Things could get ugly real fast. I'm not above paradoxes and am willing to live in a universe without donuts. So don't' try and track the time vehicle.
I want a cart that will scan my coupons and shopping list beforehand, plan the shortest route to the goods I desire, and scan all of the products I place into it and show me the running total of my purchases.
My cart would communicate my total as I passed through an unmanned register. I bag myself, swipe my debit or credit card, and I'm out of there without getting stuck behind that chatty senior citizen.
Anything less will just be an advertising vehicle to increase store sales than provide better customer convenience.
I bet none of these super-special "Geforce FX" games uses anything more than DX9's stock 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders and will be equally "cinematic" on an R300.
Much of Lucas' dialog writing skillz come off like Mojo Jo Jo.
Luke, I, Darth Vader, am your father! And you shall obey my commands because I am the father (not the son). It is I who you will obey! Obeying my commands is what you will do as the son. I will give you commands, and you will obey them! Ha ha ha ha ha! I do this because I am bad, I am evil, I am the father. I am Darth Vader!
It seems that all the Hollywood movies I've seen recently are going for that washed-out, slate gray look of Saving Private Ryan. I'm thinking these cinematographers are now filming these things on budget camcorders in darkened theaters just to reproduce Spielberg's look.
Some are even resorting to adding a pixelized 'NB' or scary watermarks as a cheap play on audience emotions. Heck, some of these hacks are even adding audience reaction to the soundtracks or overlaying eerie back outlines of audience members on top of the primary action. I think we can blame Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo for this new trend in filmmaking.
If these Hollywood hacks can't come up with some new visual ideas, I'm staying away from news servers altogether.
What are the Thomas Edison pictures doing the in the background of a MAC museum? If Edison hadn't died in 1910, he would have finished that Copper list he was hacking for his boffo Amiga light-bulb demo. His corpse is Boing-Balling in his grave as we speak.
I was thinking more of the Seinfeld episode with the most excellent Philip Baker Hall as Library cop Lt. Bookman.
"BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. Y'know that little TOS, the one that says "No Uncapping"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about bandwidth? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without throughput, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a web browser, right now, in a branch at the local library and enduring slow downloads of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better throughput? Look. If you think this is about cybercrimes and missing bandwidth, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to surf the web without getting his mind warped with slowness! Or: maybe that turns you on, Seinfeld; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over."
Yeah, it was probably just like that episode. Except for the drawn weapons.
The 5th amendment's call for just compensation and due process when property is taken for public use seems to create thorny issues and legitimate questions in the cases of imminent domain, property seizure, and environmental regulation.
If you can point me to any passage in the constitution that gives the feds power to regulate what American citizens ingest, then maybe you can call us libertarians hypocrites on the drug thing.
We can disagree if the a law is good for the people, but we risk great peril when we ignore a system designed to limit power just because its more convenient to do an end-run around it to get what we want.
As much as my class-of-82 self might want to think it all started with hardcore punk, I think there are earlier examples when barriers of entry came crashing down and individual efforts were way ahead of what the mass merchants saw profit in pushing.
It's hardly the punk DIY, but rock-era accidents like Sun Studio, built on a business model of "We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime" opened the studio to artists that record companies would never touch. I'm sure, if we looked, we might find similar swing and jazz age examples of more direct connections between artists, production and audiences that were later defeated or managed by an all-controlling distribution system, much like today's TRL punk.
The Progress-based POS system we were developing indexed into a text file of error messages. We would often edit the file to spice up the error messages that filled our days with development horror. Occasionally our development databases got mistakenly deployed to customer sites.
I still remember the call from a curious CFO who called to inquire as to the reason behind the "**no ad_mstr record available you chowderhead!" messages he kept getting.
I was looking forward to Enterprise and its promise not to use a particle-of-the-week approach to wrapping up each episode. I'm afraid the temporal cold war sounds like another crutch for weak screen writers. Heck, even ESPN's Tuesday morning quarterback is left questioning the situation (find near the end of the article).
At the end of the cliffhanger, something goes horribly wrong and Archer and the agent from the future find themselves again in the San Francisco apartment, but 900 years later. All San Francisco lies in smoking ruins; something Archer did in the past has altered the time line, and that's the cliffhanger. But what TMQ noticed was that except for broken windows, Archer's apartment looked exactly the same in the 31st century as it had in the back-to-the-past scene in the 22nd century. Nothing in Archer's apartment had changed in 900 years.
You know your in trouble when the dumb Jocks are smart enough to figure out something is wrong here.
How good Adams' draft and how loyal will the filmmakers be to the spirit of the initial series?
Kirkpatrick's work on Chicken Run and James and the Giant Peach were smart and retained enough of the British Sensibility that Hitchhikers is going to need to play for me.
Despite all the arguments, I think the handoff of Kubrick's A.I. to Spielberg went surprisingly well. I actually have hope for this new project.
"One of the contributors described watching small plastic bags circulating in wind pockets, commenting that "sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I just can't take it"
Slashdot Mirror
A Zany-Brainy exclusive:
Cause Kids learn best when they're having fun.
Pagans MC "Little Cooker" Organic Chemistry Kit (Ages 8 to 80)
Who needs a wimpy chemistry set when you can give your child a leg up on the competition with our super-fun crash-course in organic chemistry?
Your child will learn the Ephedrine reduction technique and the German technique to turn Pseudoephedrine into pure organic gold.
When the experiment is over, simply call the Pagans at 1-800-GOT-METH and we will safely "dispose" of the harmful end product and award your child cash prizes and a Pagan "Little Cooker" merit badge.
(Pseudoephedrine, rusty bathtub, and HAZMAT team not included.)
I think I'll pass on the British face transplant.
Remember the Big Book of British Smiles? Perhaps England might not be the best place to find acceptable source material for potential facial transplants.
Does England have the fashion sense to give me the face of Cage or Travolta?
Britain might have better quality control, but I suspect the most stylish faces will come from the Italian transplants.
"It was the Best of times, It was the Blurst of times"
You stupid genetically altered monkey!
A 50,000 character particle system would run slower than Doom III!!!
This Massive stuff will be slow on the fastest next-generation movie theater accelerators even with tons of memory.
When the credits are rolling, the frame rates might be okay, but in the battle scene I bet they drop to around 24fps.
That motion sensor at the door won't be going away anytime soon. Some time just before the announcement, the all the motion sensors were replaced with an infra-red laser bar coder/reader. Just happens to coincide with the Shacks upcoming "Feel the burn" spring campaign.
If you pick up an over-priced Tandy Infra-Scan, you will find a small barcode somewhere on your midsection. Some of you geeks will need to reach for the ceiling to stretch the fold where it may be hidden. Time to pick up some Old Navy tin foil cargos.
Cool Analogy.
I was thinking more of one of those Russian dolls, with littler nested dolls inside.
I think we have virtual machines inside virtual machines.
The folding of the DNA selectively exposes sections of bytecodes that drive RNA transcription that feeds another virtual machine (the ribosome) that generates another set of bytecodes to build peptides.
Does god work for Transmeta?
It seems the GeforceFx previews made some mistakes when comparing the relative merits of the NV30 and 9700.
For a good read check out this comparison of the new chips. Even this gets a few things wrong
The vertex shader 1024 instructions limit of the 9700 is mostly misreported.
The Geforce vertex shader is more powerful, supporting dynamic branching, but the 9700 can do a static branching per primitive with instruction lengths of 65,026. I'm sure such shaders will be equally unwieldy for gaming on both cards.
It seems some of the reviewers only looked only at what NVidia told them and what DX9 exposes and not what the 9700's actual silicon supports.
The reviewers barely understand the full capabilities of the 9700 months after its release. I'm sure the FX will provide similar surprises (good and bad) when they actually get their hands on one.
I'm a happy owner of a 9700 pro. I'm sure future buyers will be happy with the NV30.
Despite all the puffery of the PR, they only claim about 40% increase over the 9700. 46 measly frames in Doom III with all the goods!!! Neither of these cards will run the Doom demo well! Hardly worthy of the claim creating a "new era of cinematic graphics". ATI started the new era, and NVIDIA is now matching ATI's offering with a slight increase in performance. Good job to both camps. We will all enjoy the benefits.
Future NVIDIA purchasers will have ATI to thank for the NV30's clockspeed and required hoover for cooling. There is little doubt that if it were not for the 9700 NV30 would be delivered later or clocked lower. I think ATI really surprised NVIDIA. We shall see who has the next surprise.
I think the big lie is that cinematic effects only begin with their deeper 2.0+ shaders. If you look at the DX9 demos from ATI, you can see the stock 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders offer plenty of opportunity for cinematic effects.
The hoopla helps deflects attention away from NV30's lower bandwidth and poorer clockspeed-t/performace ratio compared to the 9700. I suspect the deeper shaders will not perform well for gaming and will only be used in near-real-time applications.
Both will be decent cards that adequately handle requirements (DX9) that may only start to matter for mainstream games by the time we're debating NV40 vs. R400.
I you try to track my time vehicle, I'm gonna throw 2 hams in the Mr. Fusion and reverse the DeLorean back to Sri Lanka. I'll kill Arthur C, Marconi, or anyone else who would track the time vehicle or potentially lead to the tracking of the time vehicle.
Things could get ugly real fast. I'm not above paradoxes and am willing to live in a universe without donuts. So don't' try and track the time vehicle.
I want a cart that will scan my coupons and shopping list beforehand, plan the shortest route to the goods I desire, and scan all of the products I place into it and show me the running total of my purchases.
My cart would communicate my total as I passed through an unmanned register. I bag myself, swipe my debit or credit card, and I'm out of there without getting stuck behind that chatty senior citizen.
Anything less will just be an advertising vehicle to increase store sales than provide better customer convenience.
That's before overclocking.
"The computers, which will be built by 2004, will lack the consciousness, intellect and capacity for thought"
The only brain this computer may rival is that of a coma patient.
I bet none of these super-special "Geforce FX" games uses anything more than DX9's stock 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders and will be equally "cinematic" on an R300.
Damn, Nvidia, why couldn't you have this thing ready for fall?
I've been searching for years for a leaf blower that could run Doom III at acceptable frame rates.
Much of Lucas' dialog writing skillz come off like Mojo Jo Jo.
Luke, I, Darth Vader, am your father! And you shall obey my commands because I am the father (not the son). It is I who you will obey! Obeying my commands is what you will do as the son. I will give you commands, and you will obey them! Ha ha ha ha ha! I do this because I am bad, I am evil, I am the father. I am Darth Vader!
It seems that all the Hollywood movies I've seen recently are going for that washed-out, slate gray look of Saving Private Ryan. I'm thinking these cinematographers are now filming these things on budget camcorders in darkened theaters just to reproduce Spielberg's look.
Some are even resorting to adding a pixelized 'NB' or scary watermarks as a cheap play on audience emotions. Heck, some of these hacks are even adding audience reaction to the soundtracks or overlaying eerie back outlines of audience members on top of the primary action. I think we can blame Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo for this new trend in filmmaking.
If these Hollywood hacks can't come up with some new visual ideas, I'm staying away from news servers altogether.
What are the Thomas Edison pictures doing the in the background of a MAC museum? If Edison hadn't died in 1910, he would have finished that Copper list he was hacking for his boffo Amiga light-bulb demo. His corpse is Boing-Balling in his grave as we speak.
Library cop Lt. Bookman.
"BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. Y'know that little TOS,
the one that says "No Uncapping"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about bandwidth? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without throughput, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a web browser, right now, in a branch at the local library and enduring slow downloads of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better throughput? Look. If you think this is about cybercrimes and missing bandwidth, you'd better think again. This is about that
kid's right to surf the web without getting his mind warped with slowness! Or: maybe that turns you on, Seinfeld; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over."
Yeah, it was probably just like that episode. Except for the drawn weapons.
"Drug Laws Bad, Property Laws Good!..BZZZT"
The 5th amendment's call for just compensation and due process when property is taken for public use seems to create thorny issues and legitimate questions in the cases of imminent domain, property seizure, and environmental regulation.
If you can point me to any passage in the constitution that gives the feds power to regulate what American citizens ingest, then maybe you can call us libertarians hypocrites on the drug thing.
We can disagree if the a law is good for the people, but we risk great peril when we ignore a system designed to limit power just because its more convenient to do an end-run around it to get what we want.
...seems like some cold-car soviet idea of miniaturization in electronics
Appears to the feature all the precision and hand feel of drawing with a ballpark hotdog.
As much as my class-of-82 self might want to think it all started with hardcore punk, I think there are earlier examples when barriers of entry came crashing down and individual efforts were way ahead of what the mass merchants saw profit in pushing.
It's hardly the punk DIY, but rock-era accidents like Sun Studio, built on a business model of "We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime" opened the studio to artists that record companies would never touch. I'm sure, if we looked, we might find similar swing and jazz age examples of more direct connections between artists, production and audiences that were later defeated or managed by an all-controlling distribution system, much like today's TRL punk.
The Progress-based POS system we were developing indexed into a text file of error messages. We would often edit the file to spice up the error messages that filled our days with development horror. Occasionally our development databases got mistakenly deployed to customer sites.
I still remember the call from a curious CFO who called to inquire as to the reason behind the "**no ad_mstr record available you chowderhead!" messages he kept getting.
I was looking forward to Enterprise and its promise not to use a particle-of-the-week approach to wrapping up each episode. I'm afraid the temporal cold war sounds like another crutch for weak screen writers. Heck, even ESPN's Tuesday morning quarterback is left questioning the situation (find near the end of the article).
At the end of the cliffhanger, something goes horribly wrong and Archer and the agent from the future find themselves again in the San Francisco apartment, but 900 years later. All San Francisco lies in smoking ruins; something Archer did in the past has altered the time line, and that's the cliffhanger. But what TMQ noticed was that except for broken windows, Archer's apartment looked exactly the same in the 31st century as it had in the back-to-the-past scene in the 22nd century. Nothing in Archer's apartment had changed in 900 years.
You know your in trouble when the dumb Jocks are smart enough to figure out something is wrong here.
How good Adams' draft and how loyal will the filmmakers be to the spirit of the initial series?
Kirkpatrick's work on Chicken Run and James and the Giant Peach were smart and retained enough of the British Sensibility that Hitchhikers is going to need to play for me.
Despite all the arguments, I think the handoff of Kubrick's A.I. to Spielberg went surprisingly well. I actually have hope for this new project.
"One of the contributors described watching small plastic bags circulating in wind pockets, commenting that "sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I just can't take it"
Proving the physics crowd needs to get out to the movies more often.