If the episode of Connections 3 I just watched tonight is to be believed Fahrenheit developed his scale using a number of weird semi-arbitrary refrences that he actually stole from a lesser known scientist whose notes had burned up (allowing for Fahrenheit to steal the glory, such as it was).
The scale originally started with the freezing temperature of water beign 0 F and the top of scale being the temperature of a man's healthy armpit (no joke) or approximately 90 F. But there was a need to be cleanly divisible by 8 or some such other nonsense and he started fudgeing the scale with 32 F becoming freezing and 100 F being the healthy armpit. Of course his reading of 100 F was off and human body temp would later be established as 98.6 F.
The CG character was a knight composed of stained glass. I remember beign extremely impressed with this effect when I originally saw the film in theaters.
Can you think of anything appearing before 1988 which had actual computer animated humans in it?
Young Sherlock Holmes is generally credited as beign the first major motion picture to use CG for an animated character in a film. It also marked the first time CG had been used to represent something that was meant to be a real part of the movies world rather than a simulation or part of a computer (such as in Wrath of Khan or Tron). The movie came out in 1985.
LOTR:FOTR Sepcial Edition is to LOTR:FOTR Theatrical
as
The Abyss Special Edition is to The Abyss Theatrical
In other words, the entire feel of the film changes and the characters are much more enaging. The Special Edition puts back in all the character development and haunting sorrow missing from the Theatrical Edition. It also gives us much needed downtime between the action sequences and smooths out the pacing. The repair of the pacing issue (something that bothered me in the theater particularly since Jackson had proved he was a master of pacing with The Frighteners) also corrects the impression of too much land traveled in too short a time. The days, weeks, and months that pass between certain events are more readily apparent now.
That issue of the Onion is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my entire life. I remember when it first came out.
I mean yes, those guys have done a wonderful job of producing biting satire for years, but to tackle a subject that sensitive so soon after the event itself was something no one in their right minds would do. And yet The Onion managed to find small glimmers of dark dark humour in an otherwise depressing event while still paying great respect to those that lost their lives and not feeling like an attempt to wring attention out of a horrible event.
Using humour to pay respect to a tragedy like Sept 11th is an enormous challenge. The Onion made it looks easy.
Personally I think Vivendi-Universal/Sci-Fi Channel has sorely miscalculated the resolve of the highly technical and intelligent Farscape fanbase. Despite the explosion of tech industry careers at all levels and the susequent rise in demand for genre programming no one has really provided quality television for them. The watchable genre shows can be counted on one hand. Of them Farscape was the most consistently daring and well written, appealing to wide (by sci-fi standards) demographic. I don't think Vivendi and company realized exactly how attached this fairly ignored market segment felt to that show. The longer they hold out, the more foolish they look.
Actually my area has fiber all the way through the last mile. Butg it is just sitting there at the moment. Go figure.
In most areas you are correct, there are a lot of "last mile" problems in most areas. A lot of which is being caused by the insistence of the telcos of holding on to their aging copper telephony lines and refusal to make way for the next generation of connectivity.
Dean Kamen's super advanced robotic wheelchair is far more impressive (a lot of the technology behind the Segway comes from it). It is 4 wheel drive, can stand a person upright so that the wheelchair bound can look "norms" in the eyes, climbs stairs with ease, is faster than a Segway, and is as compact a normal non-folding wheelchair.
And he has been working on a true compact Stirling Engine using modern materials for quite some time. Supposedly is quite close to getting it working affordably. Such a device could do wonders for the energy problems of today (not to mention providing electric power even in the most remote areas).
This is also the guy that invented several key medical devices used in much of modern cardiovascular and vascular medicine. Things such as a blood pump that due to the design of the turbine blades within it does not damage blood cells as they pass through the device.
Dean is also the founder of the US FIRST program designed to get children of the US (and other countries) interested in science and invention at an early age. The US FIRST robotics competition has inspired some very interesting advances in robotics.
There are several big problems with the treatment of internet access in the modern world.
One issue is that telcos and cable companies imitating telcos are in control of the market. These companies take the physical asset cost saving approach of assuming certain peak loads and usage patterns per customer per hour of the day. The problem is that internet service is not a static one use service like the telephone was originally. As deliverables and uses change and grow, so do the bandwidth needs. This messes with those lovely assumptions about how much time and how much data each customer will expend while using their connection. In fact when people started using modems in large numbers the telcos started crying about how it was screwing up their careful usage calaculations because a modem user staid online for hours when the usage rates were calculated for the average 3 minute phone call. The internet is not a bloody phone system. Deal with it. There is a ton of dark fiber laying around out there that is not being used despite having already been paid for and having the hardware to connect it all. Give me the fiber link to my bloody house and light all the fiber out there before you start charging me more based on poor customer usage predictions.
Another issue is that american buisness has a horrible case of short sightedness (encouraged greatly by the reactionary and short sighted tendencies of the stock market). Bandwidth does not incur huge ongoing costs. Bandwidth incurs a huge initial cost (the laying of fiber/copper, routing hardware; etc) followed by rather reasonable maintenance costs (in most cases cheaper than regular telco lines). There are three ways to recoup your losses from the initial setup:
1) Charge a huge amount of money for use of the service because (in a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy arrangement) you have decided that not enough users will purchase the service.
2) Charge a very low amount of money for the service in the hopes that you will gain enough customers fast enough to reduce cost of operation per customer.
3) Charge a moderate amount of money to attempt to get as much back initially as possible while not alienating an overly large chunk of your customer base with prohibitive rates.
For a while now providers have been going with option number 3 (which makes the most sense) and charging about $50 a month for high speed access.
The recent moves towards usage caps is mostly in reaction to hemoraging money from failed or miscalculated ventures elsewhere and is an attempt to belatedly go back to option nubmer 1. Option number 1 being a huge reason why ISDN never really took off despite being around for a long time.
Now this trick (basically a big bait and switch) of hooking customers at a moderate pricing scheme and then swapping it out for an expensive one will work in the short term, but it is ultimately going to wind up less profitable than charging a lower amount for services and increasing your customer base by nearly 10 times. Right now the US is way behind other countries in terms of broadband deployment. And it is not so much because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because the costs are still outside the comfort levels for most consumers.
Leave broadband unlimited at $50 for decent (read higher than 512Kbps downstream/128Kbps upstream) connections and add lower cost plans at $12-$20 per month for low speed (below 512/128Kbps) and you will see a huge jump in subscribers that will also even out your bandwidth usage per customer (most people don't eat nearly as much bandwidth as gamers and the like do) and allow you to expand services.
The below is way oversimplified, but helps illustrate the point a little.
Current US households with broadband is estimated at ~15 million. 15 million households with broadband now at $50/month = $750 million.
Assuming you would keep those subscribers (with no usage caps) but offer the lower speed (again with no caps)at around $20 and you can add the remaining US households (85 million of them) for an addition $1.7 billion a month.
This brings the theoretical total to $2.45 billion per month or $29.4 billion per year.
Well (to me) it was one of the more memorable things that happened over the years at GenCon.
You guys and Raven software were the only two software companies in the state with a decent amount of recognition and it was cool to see a hometown company be lavished praise by the Origin crew that I respected a great deal.
It's always interesting to see who you will run into in teh/. forums.:)
Yeah I thought about that when I wrote it. They aren't perfect descriptors and make it sound a bit more harsh than it needs to, but not wholly inappropriate either.
The sarcasm/admonishment was more in the tone of the comment. The tone gave the last part the feeling of "Geez are you an idiot? Of course we know your company." But he really meant it in a joking manner.
Admonishing is to warn, caution, or correct. Generally used in describing someone sternly informing someone else of the proper way of doing something and the punishment/danger of doing it another way. In this case that would be Warren correcting the PKWare guy's assumption that no one knew of his company.
Sarcasm is the act of saying one thing, but meaning the opposite. Also frequently used with exaggeration to make it obvious that what is being said is not to be taken at face value. This appears mainly in the tone/inflection of what Warren said and not the words themselves.
The description may have been a bit strong, but I think it fairly accurately described the statement's tone (if not necessarily the specific language).
My apologies if you found it confusing.
Personally I was more annoyed that I missed a bunch of typographical errors in the post than I was about slightly incongruous language.
One of the coolest moments of the many GenCon Game Fair's that I attended in Miwaukee, WI was when a panel consisting of most of the premiere Origin producers including Richard Garriot and Warren Spector took a question from the crowd during the Q&A session and when the nervous speaker said, "Well I have a programming question...and...um.. well I'm from a little company in town...do you know PKWare?"
And all the members of the panel looked at one another and then started doing the Wayne's World bow and chanting, "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"
Then Warren (if I remember correctly) made a mildly sarcastic and admonishing comment towards the poor PKWare dude along the lines of, "Hey man you guys have saved us tons of money on media. We use Zip all the time. Of course we know your company." (games of the era were beginning to approach some 30 floppy discs compressed and CD-ROM had not yet become an affordable alternative)
It's nice when a little mostly unkown (at the time) company making software compression utilities gets recognition from a (at the time) powerhouse game development company like that.
Re:My take on the game after playing it recently:
on
Gaming Goodness
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1) Marines get a similar HUD bonus when they advance far enough to get motion tracking.
2) Rushing works when the Marine side is unprepared and disorganized in the opening moments. Aliens always try to rush with Skulks in the opening minutes and almost always are easily defeated so long as you don't have unskilled morons on the marine side.
3) Human Turrets are very hard to destory. But you are either playing an unpatched server or haven't read the docs if you think they are hard to disable. All you need to do is take out the Turret factory and all the turrets near-bye will cease to function.
4) Commander interface has a hotkeys to jump around the map more easily, the problem is that a lot of this is not obvious to newbie commanders. The biggest thing a commander needs is a headset. Communication between commander and troops is vital and with 10 marines yelling at you it is hard to type responses to all of them.
5) No this is not too powerful at all. It is very easy to take out a marine faster than the commander can select a new health pack and drop it and if the marine manages to last a long while the commander is occupied with that area and ignoring others which are then far more vulnerable.
6) Medics are not really necessary with the commander and the aliens already have the ability to cloak with an upgrade not to mention the skulk being able to climb walls and cielings to avoid detection. In the middle of a huge battle with turrets everyewhere I managed to sneak my Skulk all the way into the command area and attack and kill a commander and his command station.
7) There are several levels where flight is crucial and you can effect very very nasty surprises from the rafters of super tall rooms. One alien tactic is to evolve into a Lerk then fly 10 stories up to a vent then evolve into a Fade and bomb any humans that enter the room to death with acid rockets and the like.
Overall I have found that while there were some minor balance issues with game initially, with the server side patch NS is almost perfect and virtually all the "problems" people list stem from an inability to play the game properly. This is not a deathmatch game. This is not Team Fortress. There is a lot more strategy and tactical prowess need to play NS properly.
I remember when I first started messing around with Mosaic on the X-Terms at UW Milwaukee. When hypertext and imbedded images were still an astonishing thing.
And that one X-Term facing the back wall of the computer lab always had pr0n on its 21" display whether someone was using the terminal or not.
You are correct on the designation. I blame lack of sleep for my error.:)
The "poor dogfighter" comment comes mostly from the standpoint of it being a high speed/low maneuverability aircraft. This is not to say it couldn't be effective at close in air to air combat, just that it was not as capable as it should have been.
I would hate to have to clean the carrier deck after an SR-71 variant took off from it. The things leaked fuel all over the place till they hit supersonic and the tanks heat expanded closed.
The A-12 was actually the original designation for the CIA variant of the SR-71. The SR-71 is the Air Forces designation. There was never an armed variant to my knowledge.
The F-15 had several variants envisioned from the outset. Some were single seaters, some two. While its main focus was air superiority there was design intended to replace older air-to-ground systems like the A-10. Desert Storm would prove that the A-10's were still the best tank killers out there; but the F-15 was not nearly as deficient in this area as its detractors had suggested. The multi-role F-16 also turned in an impressive performance in AtG operations.
The F-4 (apparently a huge pain in the ass to do maintenance on according to an ex-Navy mechanic friend of mine) was never an awesome fighter plane (it was designed for stand off kills and had poor maneuverability when compared to Russian fighter planes of the time), but it did find its niche killing radar installations and engaging in ECM with the F-4E Wild Weasel variant.
The F-16 is indeed the other plane in our arsenal capable of pure vertical acceleration. One variant of the F-15 could actually out accelerate a Saturn V rocket up to about 60K feet.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but:
All the Klingon vessels in TOS were given to the Klingon's by the Romulans. The Klingon Battlecruiser was a Romulan design. Ships sold to the Klingon's did not have cloaks. Which is why you never see the bigger Battlecruisers cloaking in TOS. Originally only the Romulans could cloak. The Romulan "Bird of Prey" looks nothing like the Klingon Bird of Prey. I am not certain, but I believe that according to cannon the Klingon Bird of Prey was indeed designed by them and not the Romulans. (The ship was called a Bird of Prey in ST III because originally it was meant to be the new Romulan vessel and the Romulans were supposed to be the bad guys in the film which of course helps add confusion to the whole vessel origin situation)
The Romulan Warbird from TNG is actually supposed to be 2-3 times larger than the Galaxy class Enterprise, but the show never did a good job of defining the scale. All we could tell was the the Warbird's were somewhat bigger than the Enterprise.
http://www.rccaraction.com/rc/articles/need_speed. asp
From the above:
"Our sister publication, Radio Control Nitro, featured Steve Pond's 101mph HPI Super Nitro RS4 (see the March 2001 issue). Prior to that, Cliff Lett's 24-cell Associated L3O Insane Speed Run car was clocked at 94mph at the Dominguez Hills Bicycle Velodrome in California."
and
"...on January 13, 2001 to break Guinness's published record and post a speed more befitting of an official world record title. The result? Legendary RC racer and Team Associated chief designer Cliff Lett spooled up his Factory Team TC3 to over 95mph and touched 111mph with an RC10 L30!"
Actually in larger metropolitan areas Police helicopters are equipped with Steadicam style cameras and near military grade image recognition systems that once locked onto a vehicle will keep the camera tracked to it at all times. Older systems required manual reacquisition of the target after it passed under a bridge or similar obstruction, but many of the newest units are perfectly capable of doing this on their own. The D.C. area even has a U.K. like ground based video surveillance and tracking network.
What the military can provide is a larger number of high resolution imaging and tracking systems making it more likely that they will be in the right spot at the right time to be able to acquire the fleeing suspect's vehicle.
Still I would have expected it to be cheaper to borrow air units from Baltimore and other neighboring cities than to re-task surveillance aircraft from the military. The "sword vs scalpel" analogy is apt. The military is a very big stick and tends to be a bit cumbersome to communicate and interoperate with. Particularly when going through multiple levels of city, state, and national governing bodies.
But it is also likely that this is partly about the blame game. With military units involved the D.C. police department has some of the pressure and blame removed from its shoulders should this drag on too much longer. That is not to say that passing the buck is a primary goal of involving the military, but you can be certain that the benifit has been brought up by someone within the police department when they were discussing this idea.
A new spin off of the NHRA, NEDRA is the National Electric Drag Racing Association.
Nothing like an electric motorcycle hitting 152 mph in 9.4 seconds on the quarter mile.
Also amusing to see an old Mazda RX7 nearly stand pure vertical on its rear bumper on launch. They added wheelie bars to the car the next year.
Or perhaps you'd rather drive a nice 100 mile range electric sports car that can beat a Corvette off the line.
Electric vehicles are advancing rather impressively on the small scale with little or no R&D funding. Which makes the total lack of interest displayed by the major auto manufacturers all the more disheartening.
It happened last wednesday/thursday when/. posted the story regarding Stallman's FAQ about why Linux should be called GNU/Linux. There were so many posts occurring that/. went into overload mode and started only serving out static pages until the traffic died down./. has/.ed itself many times in its history. Though before the Stallman article it had been a while.
I have been interested in OS X since its release and what little time I have managed to spend using it makes me interested in obtaining a system running it. However the G3 Notebooks are pathetically slow and the G4 Titaniums, while looking gorgeous, are exceedingly expensive.
If there was something beyond the nice display and good OS to justify the price I might be swayed, but right now the cost to value ratio is way off when compared to what you get for similar money in an Athlon or Pentium notebook.
I want to use OS X, I just don't want to go in debt over the hardware.
No, the point is that Intel's showing off of an overclocked CPU that is just barely stable at approximately 4.7Ghz and the news media is reporting it as if this was going to be a readily available packaged processor rating within a short period of time.
In reality it is more like reporting that Kyle over at [H]ard|OCP managed to get a few samples of P4 CPU's to run at 4.68 Ghz for a few minutes without it crashing.
There is nothing evil about Intel overclocking their own hardware, but it is getting totally misrepresented as an actual new product. Which it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
If the episode of Connections 3 I just watched tonight is to be believed Fahrenheit developed his scale using a number of weird semi-arbitrary refrences that he actually stole from a lesser known scientist whose notes had burned up (allowing for Fahrenheit to steal the glory, such as it was).
/ 02 /05.html
The scale originally started with the freezing temperature of water beign 0 F and the top of scale being the temperature of a man's healthy armpit (no joke) or approximately 90 F. But there was a need to be cleanly divisible by 8 or some such other nonsense and he started fudgeing the scale with 32 F becoming freezing and 100 F being the healthy armpit. Of course his reading of 100 F was off and human body temp would later be established as 98.6 F.
http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/2001
I forgot to mention.
The CG character was a knight composed of stained glass. I remember beign extremely impressed with this effect when I originally saw the film in theaters.
Can you think of anything appearing before 1988 which had actual computer animated humans in it?
Young Sherlock Holmes is generally credited as beign the first major motion picture to use CG for an animated character in a film. It also marked the first time CG had been used to represent something that was meant to be a real part of the movies world rather than a simulation or part of a computer (such as in Wrath of Khan or Tron). The movie came out in 1985.
I agree.
LOTR:FOTR Sepcial Edition is to LOTR:FOTR Theatrical
as
The Abyss Special Edition is to The Abyss Theatrical
In other words, the entire feel of the film changes and the characters are much more enaging. The Special Edition puts back in all the character development and haunting sorrow missing from the Theatrical Edition. It also gives us much needed downtime between the action sequences and smooths out the pacing. The repair of the pacing issue (something that bothered me in the theater particularly since Jackson had proved he was a master of pacing with The Frighteners) also corrects the impression of too much land traveled in too short a time. The days, weeks, and months that pass between certain events are more readily apparent now.
That issue of the Onion is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my entire life. I remember when it first came out.
I mean yes, those guys have done a wonderful job of producing biting satire for years, but to tackle a subject that sensitive so soon after the event itself was something no one in their right minds would do. And yet The Onion managed to find small glimmers of dark dark humour in an otherwise depressing event while still paying great respect to those that lost their lives and not feeling like an attempt to wring attention out of a horrible event.
Using humour to pay respect to a tragedy like Sept 11th is an enormous challenge. The Onion made it looks easy.
I found this article in particular to be a perfect balance of the two: God Angrily Clarifies "Don't Kill" Rule.
Strange Horizons had a great write-up on the corporate shuffling that has killed Farscape.
Personally I think Vivendi-Universal/Sci-Fi Channel has sorely miscalculated the resolve of the highly technical and intelligent Farscape fanbase. Despite the explosion of tech industry careers at all levels and the susequent rise in demand for genre programming no one has really provided quality television for them. The watchable genre shows can be counted on one hand. Of them Farscape was the most consistently daring and well written, appealing to wide (by sci-fi standards) demographic. I don't think Vivendi and company realized exactly how attached this fairly ignored market segment felt to that show. The longer they hold out, the more foolish they look.
Actually my area has fiber all the way through the last mile. Butg it is just sitting there at the moment. Go figure.
In most areas you are correct, there are a lot of "last mile" problems in most areas. A lot of which is being caused by the insistence of the telcos of holding on to their aging copper telephony lines and refusal to make way for the next generation of connectivity.
IT is most likely the Stirling Engine that Kamen has been working on for a long while.
The cheap modern Stirling engine of Kamen's dreams would indeed be an incredible development is it ever comes to fruition.
Dean Kamen's super advanced robotic wheelchair is far more impressive (a lot of the technology behind the Segway comes from it). It is 4 wheel drive, can stand a person upright so that the wheelchair bound can look "norms" in the eyes, climbs stairs with ease, is faster than a Segway, and is as compact a normal non-folding wheelchair.
And he has been working on a true compact Stirling Engine using modern materials for quite some time. Supposedly is quite close to getting it working affordably. Such a device could do wonders for the energy problems of today (not to mention providing electric power even in the most remote areas).
This is also the guy that invented several key medical devices used in much of modern cardiovascular and vascular medicine. Things such as a blood pump that due to the design of the turbine blades within it does not damage blood cells as they pass through the device.
Dean is also the founder of the US FIRST program designed to get children of the US (and other countries) interested in science and invention at an early age. The US FIRST robotics competition has inspired some very interesting advances in robotics.
Whoa there a second.
There are several big problems with the treatment of internet access in the modern world.
One issue is that telcos and cable companies imitating telcos are in control of the market. These companies take the physical asset cost saving approach of assuming certain peak loads and usage patterns per customer per hour of the day. The problem is that internet service is not a static one use service like the telephone was originally. As deliverables and uses change and grow, so do the bandwidth needs. This messes with those lovely assumptions about how much time and how much data each customer will expend while using their connection. In fact when people started using modems in large numbers the telcos started crying about how it was screwing up their careful usage calaculations because a modem user staid online for hours when the usage rates were calculated for the average 3 minute phone call. The internet is not a bloody phone system. Deal with it. There is a ton of dark fiber laying around out there that is not being used despite having already been paid for and having the hardware to connect it all. Give me the fiber link to my bloody house and light all the fiber out there before you start charging me more based on poor customer usage predictions.
Another issue is that american buisness has a horrible case of short sightedness (encouraged greatly by the reactionary and short sighted tendencies of the stock market). Bandwidth does not incur huge ongoing costs. Bandwidth incurs a huge initial cost (the laying of fiber/copper, routing hardware; etc) followed by rather reasonable maintenance costs (in most cases cheaper than regular telco lines). There are three ways to recoup your losses from the initial setup:
1) Charge a huge amount of money for use of the service because (in a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy arrangement) you have decided that not enough users will purchase the service.
2) Charge a very low amount of money for the service in the hopes that you will gain enough customers fast enough to reduce cost of operation per customer.
3) Charge a moderate amount of money to attempt to get as much back initially as possible while not alienating an overly large chunk of your customer base with prohibitive rates.
For a while now providers have been going with option number 3 (which makes the most sense) and charging about $50 a month for high speed access.
The recent moves towards usage caps is mostly in reaction to hemoraging money from failed or miscalculated ventures elsewhere and is an attempt to belatedly go back to option nubmer 1. Option number 1 being a huge reason why ISDN never really took off despite being around for a long time.
Now this trick (basically a big bait and switch) of hooking customers at a moderate pricing scheme and then swapping it out for an expensive one will work in the short term, but it is ultimately going to wind up less profitable than charging a lower amount for services and increasing your customer base by nearly 10 times. Right now the US is way behind other countries in terms of broadband deployment. And it is not so much because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because the costs are still outside the comfort levels for most consumers.
Leave broadband unlimited at $50 for decent (read higher than 512Kbps downstream/128Kbps upstream) connections and add lower cost plans at $12-$20 per month for low speed (below 512/128Kbps) and you will see a huge jump in subscribers that will also even out your bandwidth usage per customer (most people don't eat nearly as much bandwidth as gamers and the like do) and allow you to expand services.
The below is way oversimplified, but helps illustrate the point a little.
Current US households with broadband is estimated at ~15 million. 15 million households with broadband now at $50/month = $750 million.
Assuming you would keep those subscribers (with no usage caps) but offer the lower speed (again with no caps)at around $20 and you can add the remaining US households (85 million of them) for an addition $1.7 billion a month.
This brings the theoretical total to $2.45 billion per month or $29.4 billion per year.
:)
/. forums. :)
Well (to me) it was one of the more memorable things that happened over the years at GenCon.
You guys and Raven software were the only two software companies in the state with a decent amount of recognition and it was cool to see a hometown company be lavished praise by the Origin crew that I respected a great deal.
It's always interesting to see who you will run into in teh
Yeah I thought about that when I wrote it. They aren't perfect descriptors and make it sound a bit more harsh than it needs to, but not wholly inappropriate either.
The sarcasm/admonishment was more in the tone of the comment. The tone gave the last part the feeling of "Geez are you an idiot? Of course we know your company." But he really meant it in a joking manner.
Admonishing is to warn, caution, or correct. Generally used in describing someone sternly informing someone else of the proper way of doing something and the punishment/danger of doing it another way. In this case that would be Warren correcting the PKWare guy's assumption that no one knew of his company.
Sarcasm is the act of saying one thing, but meaning the opposite. Also frequently used with exaggeration to make it obvious that what is being said is not to be taken at face value. This appears mainly in the tone/inflection of what Warren said and not the words themselves.
The description may have been a bit strong, but I think it fairly accurately described the statement's tone (if not necessarily the specific language).
My apologies if you found it confusing.
Personally I was more annoyed that I missed a bunch of typographical errors in the post than I was about slightly incongruous language.
One of the coolest moments of the many GenCon Game Fair's that I attended in Miwaukee, WI was when a panel consisting of most of the premiere Origin producers including Richard Garriot and Warren Spector took a question from the crowd during the Q&A session and when the nervous speaker said, "Well I have a programming question...and...um.. well I'm from a little company in town...do you know PKWare?"
And all the members of the panel looked at one another and then started doing the Wayne's World bow and chanting, "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"
Then Warren (if I remember correctly) made a mildly sarcastic and admonishing comment towards the poor PKWare dude along the lines of, "Hey man you guys have saved us tons of money on media. We use Zip all the time. Of course we know your company." (games of the era were beginning to approach some 30 floppy discs compressed and CD-ROM had not yet become an affordable alternative)
It's nice when a little mostly unkown (at the time) company making software compression utilities gets recognition from a (at the time) powerhouse game development company like that.
1) Marines get a similar HUD bonus when they advance far enough to get motion tracking.
2) Rushing works when the Marine side is unprepared and disorganized in the opening moments. Aliens always try to rush with Skulks in the opening minutes and almost always are easily defeated so long as you don't have unskilled morons on the marine side.
3) Human Turrets are very hard to destory. But you are either playing an unpatched server or haven't read the docs if you think they are hard to disable. All you need to do is take out the Turret factory and all the turrets near-bye will cease to function.
4) Commander interface has a hotkeys to jump around the map more easily, the problem is that a lot of this is not obvious to newbie commanders. The biggest thing a commander needs is a headset. Communication between commander and troops is vital and with 10 marines yelling at you it is hard to type responses to all of them.
5) No this is not too powerful at all. It is very easy to take out a marine faster than the commander can select a new health pack and drop it and if the marine manages to last a long while the commander is occupied with that area and ignoring others which are then far more vulnerable.
6) Medics are not really necessary with the commander and the aliens already have the ability to cloak with an upgrade not to mention the skulk being able to climb walls and cielings to avoid detection. In the middle of a huge battle with turrets everyewhere I managed to sneak my Skulk all the way into the command area and attack and kill a commander and his command station.
7) There are several levels where flight is crucial and you can effect very very nasty surprises from the rafters of super tall rooms. One alien tactic is to evolve into a Lerk then fly 10 stories up to a vent then evolve into a Fade and bomb any humans that enter the room to death with acid rockets and the like.
Overall I have found that while there were some minor balance issues with game initially, with the server side patch NS is almost perfect and virtually all the "problems" people list stem from an inability to play the game properly. This is not a deathmatch game. This is not Team Fortress. There is a lot more strategy and tactical prowess need to play NS properly.
Wasn't Netscape .9 still called Mosaic?
I remember when I first started messing around with Mosaic on the X-Terms at UW Milwaukee. When hypertext and imbedded images were still an astonishing thing.
And that one X-Term facing the back wall of the computer lab always had pr0n on its 21" display whether someone was using the terminal or not.
You are correct on the designation. I blame lack of sleep for my error. :)
The "poor dogfighter" comment comes mostly from the standpoint of it being a high speed/low maneuverability aircraft. This is not to say it couldn't be effective at close in air to air combat, just that it was not as capable as it should have been.
I would hate to have to clean the carrier deck after an SR-71 variant took off from it. The things leaked fuel all over the place till they hit supersonic and the tanks heat expanded closed.
The A-12 was actually the original designation for the CIA variant of the SR-71. The SR-71 is the Air Forces designation. There was never an armed variant to my knowledge.
Bizarrely enough there was a UAV built around an SR-71 engine and wing ( http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/annex/an11.htm ).
The F-15 had several variants envisioned from the outset. Some were single seaters, some two. While its main focus was air superiority there was design intended to replace older air-to-ground systems like the A-10. Desert Storm would prove that the A-10's were still the best tank killers out there; but the F-15 was not nearly as deficient in this area as its detractors had suggested. The multi-role F-16 also turned in an impressive performance in AtG operations.
The F-4 (apparently a huge pain in the ass to do maintenance on according to an ex-Navy mechanic friend of mine) was never an awesome fighter plane (it was designed for stand off kills and had poor maneuverability when compared to Russian fighter planes of the time), but it did find its niche killing radar installations and engaging in ECM with the F-4E Wild Weasel variant.
The F-16 is indeed the other plane in our arsenal capable of pure vertical acceleration. One variant of the F-15 could actually out accelerate a Saturn V rocket up to about 60K feet.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but:
All the Klingon vessels in TOS were given to the Klingon's by the Romulans. The Klingon Battlecruiser was a Romulan design. Ships sold to the Klingon's did not have cloaks. Which is why you never see the bigger Battlecruisers cloaking in TOS. Originally only the Romulans could cloak. The Romulan "Bird of Prey" looks nothing like the Klingon Bird of Prey. I am not certain, but I believe that according to cannon the Klingon Bird of Prey was indeed designed by them and not the Romulans. (The ship was called a Bird of Prey in ST III because originally it was meant to be the new Romulan vessel and the Romulans were supposed to be the bad guys in the film which of course helps add confusion to the whole vessel origin situation)
The Romulan Warbird from TNG is actually supposed to be 2-3 times larger than the Galaxy class Enterprise, but the show never did a good job of defining the scale. All we could tell was the the Warbird's were somewhat bigger than the Enterprise.
http://www.rccaraction.com/rc/articles/need_speed. asp
From the above:
"Our sister publication, Radio Control Nitro, featured Steve Pond's 101mph HPI Super Nitro RS4 (see the March 2001 issue). Prior to that, Cliff Lett's 24-cell Associated L3O Insane Speed Run car was clocked at 94mph at the Dominguez Hills Bicycle Velodrome in California."
and
"...on January 13, 2001 to break Guinness's published record and post a speed more befitting of an official world record title. The result? Legendary RC racer and Team Associated chief designer Cliff Lett spooled up his Factory Team TC3 to over 95mph and touched 111mph with an RC10 L30!"
Actually in larger metropolitan areas Police helicopters are equipped with Steadicam style cameras and near military grade image recognition systems that once locked onto a vehicle will keep the camera tracked to it at all times. Older systems required manual reacquisition of the target after it passed under a bridge or similar obstruction, but many of the newest units are perfectly capable of doing this on their own. The D.C. area even has a U.K. like ground based video surveillance and tracking network.
What the military can provide is a larger number of high resolution imaging and tracking systems making it more likely that they will be in the right spot at the right time to be able to acquire the fleeing suspect's vehicle.
Still I would have expected it to be cheaper to borrow air units from Baltimore and other neighboring cities than to re-task surveillance aircraft from the military. The "sword vs scalpel" analogy is apt. The military is a very big stick and tends to be a bit cumbersome to communicate and interoperate with. Particularly when going through multiple levels of city, state, and national governing bodies.
But it is also likely that this is partly about the blame game. With military units involved the D.C. police department has some of the pressure and blame removed from its shoulders should this drag on too much longer. That is not to say that passing the buck is a primary goal of involving the military, but you can be certain that the benifit has been brought up by someone within the police department when they were discussing this idea.
A new spin off of the NHRA, NEDRA is the National Electric Drag Racing Association.
Nothing like an electric motorcycle hitting 152 mph in 9.4 seconds on the quarter mile.
Also amusing to see an old Mazda RX7 nearly stand pure vertical on its rear bumper on launch. They added wheelie bars to the car the next year.
Or perhaps you'd rather drive a nice 100 mile range electric sports car that can beat a Corvette off the line.
Electric vehicles are advancing rather impressively on the small scale with little or no R&D funding. Which makes the total lack of interest displayed by the major auto manufacturers all the more disheartening.
It happened last wednesday/thursday when /. posted the story regarding Stallman's FAQ about why Linux should be called GNU/Linux. There were so many posts occurring that /. went into overload mode and started only serving out static pages until the traffic died down. /. has /.ed itself many times in its history. Though before the Stallman article it had been a while.
No hard numbers. That's "feels like" comment having used played aroudn with both a G3 iBook and a G4 iTanium.
"pathetic" is being more than a bit harsh, but it was certainly more sluggish than I am willing to accept, particularly given the cost.
I have been interested in OS X since its release and what little time I have managed to spend using it makes me interested in obtaining a system running it. However the G3 Notebooks are pathetically slow and the G4 Titaniums, while looking gorgeous, are exceedingly expensive.
If there was something beyond the nice display and good OS to justify the price I might be swayed, but right now the cost to value ratio is way off when compared to what you get for similar money in an Athlon or Pentium notebook.
I want to use OS X, I just don't want to go in debt over the hardware.
No, the point is that Intel's showing off of an overclocked CPU that is just barely stable at approximately 4.7Ghz and the news media is reporting it as if this was going to be a readily available packaged processor rating within a short period of time.
In reality it is more like reporting that Kyle over at [H]ard|OCP managed to get a few samples of P4 CPU's to run at 4.68 Ghz for a few minutes without it crashing.
There is nothing evil about Intel overclocking their own hardware, but it is getting totally misrepresented as an actual new product. Which it is not.