I think the best analogy for this situation if we try to destroy Microsoft would be akin to the early electrical utility industry--every company had their own ideas on how to generate and distribute electricity, and each company will have its own idea on a wall socket. No thanks!
This is where Linux desperately needs to get all the major developers together and create a true unified standard for the entire OS from the OS kernel all the way up to the user interface. All that would do is save untold hours of costs from installation, configuration and maintainance of the entire OS.
I think fragmenting Windows is as good an idea as it's cracked up to be. (pun intended)
The reason is simple: it would result in IT management nightmare, especially when you have competing software installed throughout the company. Think carefully: while IBM does have a major Linux development program, I think they too would love to make sure there is as much unification of everything above the OS kernel level as possible to make installation, configuration, and maintainance of the Linux as easy as possible. This is why I think Red Hat Linux has become the de facto standard for Linux, since for IT support simplicity it would be best if the entire organization uses the same distribution of Linux.
Competition at the commodity level (e.g., oil, basic food products, etc.) is great, but when the product gets very complicated (e.g., a computer operating system), competition would be akin to the early electric industry--no thanks.
In Europe and Japan, the taxes on gasoline are so high that the average price of petrol (as gasoline is known in most of the world) is the equivalent of US$5-US$6 per US gallon.
At those prices, people will end up buying a lot smaller cars than currently; I'm not sure if Americans want to drive vehicles with the average size being that of the current Volkswagen Polo (what Europeans call the super mini class of vehicles).
One quick way to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is to rapidly develop clean-burning diesel engine technologies; with the EPA mandating low-sulfur diesel fuels very soon, diesel cars can have sophisticated fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control systems that are found on European market diesel cars, and this will allow diesel cars to even meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard for exhaust emissions. The nice thing about diesel technology today is that they now offer 30% or more better fuel efficiency with almost no loss in performance; the proof of this is the amazing Duramax engine found on the Chevrolet Silverado, which has more torque than the equivalent gasoline engine but has nearly 50% better fuel mileage!
Actually, now that the current consumer version of Windows (Windows XP) uses the Windows 2000 code base, I think Microsoft will now more emphasize running multiple applications at one time since in WinXP each app for the most part runs in its own memory space, just like Unix has been for all these years.
I still think WiFi networking should not be processed by the CPU because networking like that is a very CPU-intensive process, just like the example of DVD movie playback I mentioned earlier.
Hmmm... with all that signal processing oriented compute power on the graphics card, why not make that available to do the wifi demodulation or software radio in general?
One good reason: simplicity of computer architectural design. Putting the decoding process into the CPU keeps the hardware count down, for starters. That is the reason why on the x86 compatible side we've seen the addition of CPU registers oriented towards multimedia processing: Intel's MMX, SSE and SSE2 and AMD's 3DNow! and 3DNow! Professional.
In the case of decoding MPEG-2 video streams from a DVD movie disc, you can decode them in software pretty reasonably well, especially with today's 1,000 MHz and faster CPU's. However, that still means using a lot of CPU cycles doing it, and that means other programs may start to drag because the CPU isn't so available.
Due to the fairly computationally-intensive process involved in decoding MPEG-2 video, that's why there has always been interest in off-loading the decoding process somewhere else. That's why when DVD-ROM's first started showing up on PC's we saw separate decoding adapter cards from Creative and Sigma Designs so the decoding is completely done by these specialized cards. When CPU speeds got fast enough and Intel introduced the wider bandwidth AGP connector, ATI implemented HWMC and IDCT assistance for MPEG-2 decoding on the graphics card itself starting with the Rage 128 chipset, which off-loaded most of the MPEG-2 decoding process from the CPU; most other chipset manufacturers (S3, SiS and nVidia) soon had at least HWMC assistance. The success of ATI with this way of MPEG-2 decoding is the reason why the nVidia GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti series of chipsets now have multiple levels of hardware assistance for MPEG-2 decoding, not only for playing back DVD movies for also eventually for playing back 1080i 16:9 HDTV video.
I think many people seriously soured on softmodems because the earliest implementations of the concept (e.g., the US Robotics Winmodem) really sucked like a vacuum cleaner in terms of performance; this is because these early designs didn't take advantage of MMX, SSE, SSE2 and/or 3DNow! registers on modern CPU's.
Fortunately, the modern softmodem implementations from the likes of Lucent, PCTel and Conexent do use these CPU registers, so modem performance is pretty resonable. I've played with a US$15 PCI modem that uses the PCTel chipset and it ran just as well as my Zoom Telephonics 56Kx (Model 2949L) external modem.
The problem is that even if the software WiFi takes advantage of AMD's 3DNow! Professional or Intel's SSE2 multimedia extensions to speed up operation, the CPU cycle usage would be considerable, which may drag down the rest of the system. No thanks!
By the way, today's winmodems are way better than the original 3Com/US Robotics designs. I've played with a winmodem that uses the PCTel chipset and it does actually work quite well, thanks to the fact the PCTel chipset does use at least the MMX registers on newer CPU's to keep its performance reasonable.
Despite the speed of today's CPU's, having to use CPU cycles to do WiFi networking is not a great idea, especially when you also have to take into account for CPU cycles being used for everything else in the system.
I mean, consider the situation of playing DVD discs on a computer. Sure, you can do it completely in software if the CPU is fast enough, but the CPU cycles it requires to do this even on a very fast CPU can drag a system down pretty quickly. Now you know why ATI has Hardware Motion Compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) decoding assistance on their graphics chipsets starting with the Rage 128 series, and nVidia has pretty much done the same with the current GeForce4 MX/Ti chipset series.
I think Java can be extremely successful, but the problem is that Sun's development pace for Java has kind of rubbed Hewlett-Packard and IBM the wrong way at times.
What Java really needs is the backing of a company that has made Java do real useful applications and provides a very good Java Development Kit. That company is called IBM.
Why do you think IBM's Java tools are so well-liked in the developer community?
I just wish they'd shoot for something more original.
It'll be very interesting to see the reaction of the general audience to Lilo & Stitch (due in June) and Treasure Planet (due late this year). Both are definitely not in the early 1990's mold of Disney animated features.
Mind you, Nadia was in many ways a retelling of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, so there.
The problem with Nadia: Secret of Blue Water was while the early and late episodes were great, the middle episodes bored me to tears at times, and Nadia's attitude is nowhere like that of Kidagakash's, that's to be sure.
Actually, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is not as bad as some people think.
I think people are so engrained by the successful style of Disney animated features from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King that any deviation from that formula results in a lot of complaints about Disney not doing the right style of movie.
Given that I have the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set, I can say that the movie as escapist entertainment actually works quite well; after all, by definition this type of movie has to seen with some suspension of belief (which is true of most science fiction and fantasy stories).
There are two things I loved about the movie: 1) the breathtaking quality of animation (especially backgrounds), especially the wonderful digital-to-digital transfer on DVD; 2) the very effective use of sound effects throughout the movie (the opening sequence WILL damage your home theater setup of speakers and amps if you're not careful). Too bad Disney didn't submit this movie for Best Animated Feature Oscar, because I think the movie could have been nominated for Original Score, Sound and Sound Editing.
I think you might be correct if you're mentioning his earlier books, but his more recent books are better-rooted in decent scientific research.
I do know that Underworld, which will be published in the USA later this year, notes that there are many unusual structures found only a few hundred feet below the ocean level at many spots around the world.
Besides, consider this: back during the last Ice Age up to about 12,000 years ago, because of the massive advance of glaciers much of North America, Europe and Siberia was buried in those glaciers. This meant because so much water was locked up in ice, the sea level could be quite a bit lower than now--probably as much as 100 meters (328 feet). When you have 100 meters lower sea level a lot more lands near the equator will be exposed, to say the least. For one thing, that would turn the entire West Indies chain of islands from Cuba eastwards into one pretty big land mass, which could end up being a candidate for the location of the ancient Atlantis.
We do know that as the glaciers melted, lakes formed by ice dams broke and there was unprecedented land flooding; the emptying of the ancient Lake Bonneville in what is now Utah about 15,000 BC (which carved out the Snake River Canyon and much of the canyons of the Columbia River gorges) is a good example of this. Also, the rise of the Black Sea around 9,000 BC was probably caused by a combination of heavy water outflows from the north from melting glaciers and the breakthrough of water from the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosphorus Straits as the Mediterranean's sea level exceeded that of the natural dam in the Bosphorus holding the water back as the sea level rose from the melting of the glaciers.
In my personal opinion, the best Japanese anime series of 1996 (Shin Seiki Evangelion was shown from late 1995 to early 1996 in its first run in Japan) was not this series.
The last two episodes just confused the heck out of me, to say the least.
The best anime series for calendar year 1996 was Tenkuu no Escaflowne (known in the West as The Vision of Escaflowne), which had WAY better animation, superior storytelling and of course the excellent musical score by Yoko Kanno, a legend in Japan for her work on music for anime series.
Re:Titanium is very hard to work on
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 2
They had to switch over to a deionized, distilled water supply. As for the cadnium problem, it stemmed from the techs using cadnium-plated wrenches on bolts on Blackbird, and when they were heated, the boltheads fell off!
Now you know why titanium alloys are only used on very specialized applications in aerospace, primarily in high-temperature environments. If titanium was easier to work with today's commercial jetliners would sport quite a bit more titanium structural parts (because of its high strength per kilogram) instead of the heavy use of epoxy-resin and carbon-fiber composites seen on modern jet airliners such as the Airbus A320 Family of planes and the Boeing 777.
While Titanium is actually a very common element of the Earth's crust, working on titanium metal is major problem, to say the least.
This was what Lockheed discovered when they built what became the famous A-12/YF-12/SR-71A Blackbird using titanium structural parts. Cutting the metal was a major problem, you couldn't use tools with cadmium as part of the metal alloy to work on titanium, and manufacturing large quantities of quality titanium metal was very hard, too.
Even today, titanium alloys are still way too expensive to make compared to modern steel and aluminum alloys. That's why golf clubs with titanium alloy shafts cost over US$400 per club, and also the reason why for commercial airliners titanium alloys are used only in areas where high temperature resistance is needed (e.g., jet engine nacelles).
Besides, the rapid development of epoxy-resin and graphite composites in the last 30 years has reduced the need to use titanium alloys for lighter airplane structures, especially for private and commercial planes. Even though composites are a bit more expensive than stainless steel or aluminum alloys they're still way less expensive than titanium alloys.
I think people are woefully forgetting that movies like the original Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were in many ways akin the old movie serials, but instead of seeing only 12-15 minutes per week in the theater like it was back in the 1930's and 1940's, the whole story is presented in a single two-hour movie.
In short, it was Lucas' homage to these old serials, thrown in with influences from things like the Akira Kurosawa movie The Hidden Fortress.
I'm not sure if this is apocryphal or not, but didn't Lucas wanted to direct a new Flash Gordon movie originally?
If you have a system that uses at least the Intel 440BX chipset, you can run most current software pretty easily, even Windows XP Professional.
The big bottleneck nowadays is not the CPU, it's not enough memory and too-slow hard drives. Fortunately, memory prices for PC-100/133 DIMM's aren't really that bad, and most 440BX chipset motherboards with a BIOS upgrade will support modern 7200 RPM ATA-100 hard drive (they are backward-compatible with ATA-33).
I'll almost bet that once you get 256 MB of RAM and a 7200 RPM ATA-100 hard drive, your computer's performance could increase as much as 60%.
I'm running a Celeron A 466 MHz system using an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard, 256 MB of RAM, and a 10 GB ATA-66 hard drive; most everything I throw at it runs pretty reasonably quick.:-)
My guess is that with the new motherboard design for the PlayStation2, we may see a drop in price from US$299 to something more like US$229 initially and US$199 about a year from now. Sony is probably doing this because otherwise when the new 40 GB HD/broadband adapter becomes available it could cost a gamer over US$400 for the whole PlayStation 2 setup!
Of course, it didn't help that the MiG-29 is still in many ways tied to the old Russian style of air defense, namely heavy reliance on Ground-Controlled Intercepts (GCI).
I think the MiG-29 operated in a Western manner with the pilot more involved in the process of a shootdown would be a very potent fighter indeed. It will be VERY interesting to see what happens if India and Pakistan get into a shooting war and we get air-to-air combat with the Pakistani F-16's versus the Indian MiG-29's. I do know that during the 1960's Pakistani F-6's (Chinese-built MiG-19's) shot down a lot of Indian AF Mirage III's and MiG-21's because of the potent triple-cannon setup of the F-6.
Alas, the Russian system isn't exactly that great given the combat record of the MiG-29 so far. When has the MiG-29 shot down our current generation of fighters?
The big problem with LCD's is that they're optimized for one resolution, which is not a great idea IMHO. At least the newest LCD's don't have the motion blurring problem that made LCD's very unpleasant to use on multimedia applications.
This is the nice thing about CRT's--they look good over a wide range of resolutions. On my MAG DX1795 monitor at home, I run 1024x768 @ 75 Hz, though I can in a pinch run 1152x864 @ 70 Hz if I need to see larger images.
Today's really good 19" monitors from Sony, NEC, Idek Iilyama and Viewsonic can display all the way up to 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz very cleanly, though at 1600x1200 resolution objects on screen are displayed a bit too small for my taste.
This person's project is actually a very crude version of a special camera system used by many state transportation authorities to map freeways.
I believe that California's CalTrans has special movies that show the view out front on a freeway that has pictures taken every 50 feet or so. I remember seeing a news report on KCRA (Sacramento's main TV station) about these pretty amazing movies.
You obviously never driven the Acura RSX Type S. (smile) And it gets better with the RSX Type R with 230 bhp and lighter weight body that is due early in 2003. They're definitely not rice boy cars, that's to be sure.
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I think the best analogy for this situation if we try to destroy Microsoft would be akin to the early electrical utility industry--every company had their own ideas on how to generate and distribute electricity, and each company will have its own idea on a wall socket. No thanks!
This is where Linux desperately needs to get all the major developers together and create a true unified standard for the entire OS from the OS kernel all the way up to the user interface. All that would do is save untold hours of costs from installation, configuration and maintainance of the entire OS.
I think fragmenting Windows is as good an idea as it's cracked up to be. (pun intended)
The reason is simple: it would result in IT management nightmare, especially when you have competing software installed throughout the company. Think carefully: while IBM does have a major Linux development program, I think they too would love to make sure there is as much unification of everything above the OS kernel level as possible to make installation, configuration, and maintainance of the Linux as easy as possible. This is why I think Red Hat Linux has become the de facto standard for Linux, since for IT support simplicity it would be best if the entire organization uses the same distribution of Linux.
Competition at the commodity level (e.g., oil, basic food products, etc.) is great, but when the product gets very complicated (e.g., a computer operating system), competition would be akin to the early electric industry--no thanks.
In Europe and Japan, the taxes on gasoline are so high that the average price of petrol (as gasoline is known in most of the world) is the equivalent of US$5-US$6 per US gallon.
At those prices, people will end up buying a lot smaller cars than currently; I'm not sure if Americans want to drive vehicles with the average size being that of the current Volkswagen Polo (what Europeans call the super mini class of vehicles).
One quick way to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is to rapidly develop clean-burning diesel engine technologies; with the EPA mandating low-sulfur diesel fuels very soon, diesel cars can have sophisticated fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control systems that are found on European market diesel cars, and this will allow diesel cars to even meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard for exhaust emissions. The nice thing about diesel technology today is that they now offer 30% or more better fuel efficiency with almost no loss in performance; the proof of this is the amazing Duramax engine found on the Chevrolet Silverado, which has more torque than the equivalent gasoline engine but has nearly 50% better fuel mileage!
Actually, now that the current consumer version of Windows (Windows XP) uses the Windows 2000 code base, I think Microsoft will now more emphasize running multiple applications at one time since in WinXP each app for the most part runs in its own memory space, just like Unix has been for all these years.
I still think WiFi networking should not be processed by the CPU because networking like that is a very CPU-intensive process, just like the example of DVD movie playback I mentioned earlier.
Hmmm... with all that signal processing oriented compute power on the graphics card, why not make that available to do the wifi demodulation or software radio in general?
One good reason: simplicity of computer architectural design. Putting the decoding process into the CPU keeps the hardware count down, for starters. That is the reason why on the x86 compatible side we've seen the addition of CPU registers oriented towards multimedia processing: Intel's MMX, SSE and SSE2 and AMD's 3DNow! and 3DNow! Professional.
In the case of decoding MPEG-2 video streams from a DVD movie disc, you can decode them in software pretty reasonably well, especially with today's 1,000 MHz and faster CPU's. However, that still means using a lot of CPU cycles doing it, and that means other programs may start to drag because the CPU isn't so available.
Due to the fairly computationally-intensive process involved in decoding MPEG-2 video, that's why there has always been interest in off-loading the decoding process somewhere else. That's why when DVD-ROM's first started showing up on PC's we saw separate decoding adapter cards from Creative and Sigma Designs so the decoding is completely done by these specialized cards. When CPU speeds got fast enough and Intel introduced the wider bandwidth AGP connector, ATI implemented HWMC and IDCT assistance for MPEG-2 decoding on the graphics card itself starting with the Rage 128 chipset, which off-loaded most of the MPEG-2 decoding process from the CPU; most other chipset manufacturers (S3, SiS and nVidia) soon had at least HWMC assistance. The success of ATI with this way of MPEG-2 decoding is the reason why the nVidia GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti series of chipsets now have multiple levels of hardware assistance for MPEG-2 decoding, not only for playing back DVD movies for also eventually for playing back 1080i 16:9 HDTV video.
I think many people seriously soured on softmodems because the earliest implementations of the concept (e.g., the US Robotics Winmodem) really sucked like a vacuum cleaner in terms of performance; this is because these early designs didn't take advantage of MMX, SSE, SSE2 and/or 3DNow! registers on modern CPU's.
Fortunately, the modern softmodem implementations from the likes of Lucent, PCTel and Conexent do use these CPU registers, so modem performance is pretty resonable. I've played with a US$15 PCI modem that uses the PCTel chipset and it ran just as well as my Zoom Telephonics 56Kx (Model 2949L) external modem.
I still don't think it's a good idea.
The problem is that even if the software WiFi takes advantage of AMD's 3DNow! Professional or Intel's SSE2 multimedia extensions to speed up operation, the CPU cycle usage would be considerable, which may drag down the rest of the system. No thanks!
By the way, today's winmodems are way better than the original 3Com/US Robotics designs. I've played with a winmodem that uses the PCTel chipset and it does actually work quite well, thanks to the fact the PCTel chipset does use at least the MMX registers on newer CPU's to keep its performance reasonable.
I think it's a terrible idea!
Despite the speed of today's CPU's, having to use CPU cycles to do WiFi networking is not a great idea, especially when you also have to take into account for CPU cycles being used for everything else in the system.
I mean, consider the situation of playing DVD discs on a computer. Sure, you can do it completely in software if the CPU is fast enough, but the CPU cycles it requires to do this even on a very fast CPU can drag a system down pretty quickly. Now you know why ATI has Hardware Motion Compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) decoding assistance on their graphics chipsets starting with the Rage 128 series, and nVidia has pretty much done the same with the current GeForce4 MX/Ti chipset series.
I think Java can be extremely successful, but the problem is that Sun's development pace for Java has kind of rubbed Hewlett-Packard and IBM the wrong way at times.
What Java really needs is the backing of a company that has made Java do real useful applications and provides a very good Java Development Kit. That company is called IBM.
Why do you think IBM's Java tools are so well-liked in the developer community?
I just wish they'd shoot for something more original.
It'll be very interesting to see the reaction of the general audience to Lilo & Stitch (due in June) and Treasure Planet (due late this year). Both are definitely not in the early 1990's mold of Disney animated features.
Mind you, Nadia was in many ways a retelling of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, so there.
The problem with Nadia: Secret of Blue Water was while the early and late episodes were great, the middle episodes bored me to tears at times, and Nadia's attitude is nowhere like that of Kidagakash's, that's to be sure.
Actually, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is not as bad as some people think.
I think people are so engrained by the successful style of Disney animated features from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King that any deviation from that formula results in a lot of complaints about Disney not doing the right style of movie.
Given that I have the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set, I can say that the movie as escapist entertainment actually works quite well; after all, by definition this type of movie has to seen with some suspension of belief (which is true of most science fiction and fantasy stories).
There are two things I loved about the movie: 1) the breathtaking quality of animation (especially backgrounds), especially the wonderful digital-to-digital transfer on DVD; 2) the very effective use of sound effects throughout the movie (the opening sequence WILL damage your home theater setup of speakers and amps if you're not careful). Too bad Disney didn't submit this movie for Best Animated Feature Oscar, because I think the movie could have been nominated for Original Score, Sound and Sound Editing.
I think you might be correct if you're mentioning his earlier books, but his more recent books are better-rooted in decent scientific research.
I do know that Underworld, which will be published in the USA later this year, notes that there are many unusual structures found only a few hundred feet below the ocean level at many spots around the world.
Besides, consider this: back during the last Ice Age up to about 12,000 years ago, because of the massive advance of glaciers much of North America, Europe and Siberia was buried in those glaciers. This meant because so much water was locked up in ice, the sea level could be quite a bit lower than now--probably as much as 100 meters (328 feet). When you have 100 meters lower sea level a lot more lands near the equator will be exposed, to say the least. For one thing, that would turn the entire West Indies chain of islands from Cuba eastwards into one pretty big land mass, which could end up being a candidate for the location of the ancient Atlantis.
We do know that as the glaciers melted, lakes formed by ice dams broke and there was unprecedented land flooding; the emptying of the ancient Lake Bonneville in what is now Utah about 15,000 BC (which carved out the Snake River Canyon and much of the canyons of the Columbia River gorges) is a good example of this. Also, the rise of the Black Sea around 9,000 BC was probably caused by a combination of heavy water outflows from the north from melting glaciers and the breakthrough of water from the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosphorus Straits as the Mediterranean's sea level exceeded that of the natural dam in the Bosphorus holding the water back as the sea level rose from the melting of the glaciers.
In my personal opinion, the best Japanese anime series of 1996 (Shin Seiki Evangelion was shown from late 1995 to early 1996 in its first run in Japan) was not this series.
The last two episodes just confused the heck out of me, to say the least.
The best anime series for calendar year 1996 was Tenkuu no Escaflowne (known in the West as The Vision of Escaflowne), which had WAY better animation, superior storytelling and of course the excellent musical score by Yoko Kanno, a legend in Japan for her work on music for anime series.
They had to switch over to a deionized, distilled water supply. As for the cadnium problem, it stemmed from the techs using cadnium-plated wrenches on bolts on Blackbird, and when they were heated, the boltheads fell off!
Now you know why titanium alloys are only used on very specialized applications in aerospace, primarily in high-temperature environments. If titanium was easier to work with today's commercial jetliners would sport quite a bit more titanium structural parts (because of its high strength per kilogram) instead of the heavy use of epoxy-resin and carbon-fiber composites seen on modern jet airliners such as the Airbus A320 Family of planes and the Boeing 777.
While Titanium is actually a very common element of the Earth's crust, working on titanium metal is major problem, to say the least.
This was what Lockheed discovered when they built what became the famous A-12/YF-12/SR-71A Blackbird using titanium structural parts. Cutting the metal was a major problem, you couldn't use tools with cadmium as part of the metal alloy to work on titanium, and manufacturing large quantities of quality titanium metal was very hard, too.
Even today, titanium alloys are still way too expensive to make compared to modern steel and aluminum alloys. That's why golf clubs with titanium alloy shafts cost over US$400 per club, and also the reason why for commercial airliners titanium alloys are used only in areas where high temperature resistance is needed (e.g., jet engine nacelles).
Besides, the rapid development of epoxy-resin and graphite composites in the last 30 years has reduced the need to use titanium alloys for lighter airplane structures, especially for private and commercial planes. Even though composites are a bit more expensive than stainless steel or aluminum alloys they're still way less expensive than titanium alloys.
I think people are woefully forgetting that movies like the original Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were in many ways akin the old movie serials, but instead of seeing only 12-15 minutes per week in the theater like it was back in the 1930's and 1940's, the whole story is presented in a single two-hour movie.
In short, it was Lucas' homage to these old serials, thrown in with influences from things like the Akira Kurosawa movie The Hidden Fortress.
I'm not sure if this is apocryphal or not, but didn't Lucas wanted to direct a new Flash Gordon movie originally?
If you have a system that uses at least the Intel 440BX chipset, you can run most current software pretty easily, even Windows XP Professional.
:-)
The big bottleneck nowadays is not the CPU, it's not enough memory and too-slow hard drives. Fortunately, memory prices for PC-100/133 DIMM's aren't really that bad, and most 440BX chipset motherboards with a BIOS upgrade will support modern 7200 RPM ATA-100 hard drive (they are backward-compatible with ATA-33).
I'll almost bet that once you get 256 MB of RAM and a 7200 RPM ATA-100 hard drive, your computer's performance could increase as much as 60%.
I'm running a Celeron A 466 MHz system using an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard, 256 MB of RAM, and a 10 GB ATA-66 hard drive; most everything I throw at it runs pretty reasonably quick.
My guess is that with the new motherboard design for the PlayStation2, we may see a drop in price from US$299 to something more like US$229 initially and US$199 about a year from now. Sony is probably doing this because otherwise when the new 40 GB HD/broadband adapter becomes available it could cost a gamer over US$400 for the whole PlayStation 2 setup!
Of course, it didn't help that the MiG-29 is still in many ways tied to the old Russian style of air defense, namely heavy reliance on Ground-Controlled Intercepts (GCI).
I think the MiG-29 operated in a Western manner with the pilot more involved in the process of a shootdown would be a very potent fighter indeed. It will be VERY interesting to see what happens if India and Pakistan get into a shooting war and we get air-to-air combat with the Pakistani F-16's versus the Indian MiG-29's. I do know that during the 1960's Pakistani F-6's (Chinese-built MiG-19's) shot down a lot of Indian AF Mirage III's and MiG-21's because of the potent triple-cannon setup of the F-6.
Alas, the Russian system isn't exactly that great given the combat record of the MiG-29 so far. When has the MiG-29 shot down our current generation of fighters?
I'm using a MAG DX1795 at home right now. I want to get a good 19" CRT monitor from either Viewsonic, Sony or Samsung once I have the money. :-)
The big problem with LCD's is that they're optimized for one resolution, which is not a great idea IMHO. At least the newest LCD's don't have the motion blurring problem that made LCD's very unpleasant to use on multimedia applications.
This is the nice thing about CRT's--they look good over a wide range of resolutions. On my MAG DX1795 monitor at home, I run 1024x768 @ 75 Hz, though I can in a pinch run 1152x864 @ 70 Hz if I need to see larger images.
Today's really good 19" monitors from Sony, NEC, Idek Iilyama and Viewsonic can display all the way up to 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz very cleanly, though at 1600x1200 resolution objects on screen are displayed a bit too small for my taste.
This person's project is actually a very crude version of a special camera system used by many state transportation authorities to map freeways.
I believe that California's CalTrans has special movies that show the view out front on a freeway that has pictures taken every 50 feet or so. I remember seeing a news report on KCRA (Sacramento's main TV station) about these pretty amazing movies.
4 bangers just NEVER sound cool.
You obviously never driven the Acura RSX Type S. (smile) And it gets better with the RSX Type R with 230 bhp and lighter weight body that is due early in 2003. They're definitely not rice boy cars, that's to be sure.