True, but some of us like complexity. I'm like the original poster, I get bored to death playing the "classic" arcade games. I have trouble understanding how anyone could be amused by them. I am a huge RPG fan, and I like games that create a virtual world that sucks me in. When I'm playing a good RPG I am my character. I live in that world. I care about what happens.
Perhaps that last part is the most important thing for me. When I play pacman I couldn't care less what happens to pacman. He's just a big yellow dot that eats little dots. Some people try to go for high scores, but that just doesn't interest me. It's a number that's all.
Now, I'm not trying to force anyone to share my viewpoint. If you like going for high scores then good for you. More power to you. I just want to make it clear that not everyone shares that opinion. Yeah, there are a lot of unoriginal games today, but if you think there was ever a time when that wasn't true then your memory is playing tricks on you. You've simply forgotten the clones an knock-offs because they're so...forgettable. There are original games being made, unfortunately most of them don't do so well. System Shock 2 was an incredible game, but hardly anyone bought it. You can find in in the bargain bin these days for like $15, and at that price you don't have any excuse not to get it. There's also Deus Ex, which I haven't played yet (I don't think it will even run on my computer:-( ), but I have heard some very good things about it. If you've got a good computer, check it out!
Re:Random ramblings-REALITY CHECK
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Selfish Society
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OK, this was obviously a troll, but I have nothing better to do so I'll bite.
While it is quite true that our society used to work fine without the aid of computers, it is impossible to claim that there is no benefit to be had from computers and technology. It's quite simply the difference between working and working better. This is what causes all technological revolutions, not just the advent of computer technology. There was a time when everyone lived in caves and hunted things with big clubs. Just ask OOG about it;-) . Anyway, when some of these cavemen discovered fire and tried to harness it, there were probably others who claimed that everything was just fine without it. From our perspective that position would seem absurd, but we have the benefit of hindsight. We know that fire was only the beginning and we can see what it led to.
Now, you can certainly claim that computers will never have the same kind of impact that fire had. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe they already have. Do you have any idea how much of our society has benefitted from computer technology? It's hard to think of anything which hasn't. Your grocery store can keep track of inventory better and handle customer transactions faster. Your car can run more efficiently. Your long distance phone calls are cheaper and clearer. Virtually anything in manufacturing can be made better and cheaper with the help of computer models. I'm listing more mundane things to try to show you how much influence computers have really had in everyday life, but there are other things which would have been outright impossible without computer technology. Think of the benefits to scientific research that have resulted from computers. The genetic research. Better weather prediction. Improved efficiency in agriculture. Not to mention advances in pure mathematics and other less concrete fields.
And let's not forget the Internet. I'm not one to claim that it has or will totally change society, but it is certainly an impressive force. We can now connect minds that are worlds apart. We can truly be connected with the rest of the world. Even here on/. we see a bunch of US citizens who are normally completely ignorant of the rest of the world (no offense to anyone, I'm a US citizen myself) arguing about certain laws passed in Australia and Britain. We also have an unprecedented level of freedom of speech, although there are certainly some forces at work trying to take that away. However, the benefits of true freedom of speech is not something to take for granted, as is being made all the more apparent.
My point is that computers are not in anyway limited to the desktops that we use to read/. and play Diablo. Those tasks may be seen as an utter waste, and maybe they are. However, there's something to be said for recreation. As society has progress people have been allowed increasingly larger amounts of time and more options for recreation. The use of computers for this purpose is just another example of how our lives are being improved.
While some certainly do think that computers are "cool" (and I'm one of them!), that is not the reason they have become so useful to society. If there was no benefit to be had from computer technology we would never have developed it to the point where people can talk about how "cool" it is in the first place. All our lives have been improved by computers, even you've never touched one (which is obviously not the case seeing how you were able to post a message to/.). You should be thankful for what you have. There are many poor nations out there that have missed out on the benefits of computers (and a lot of other things!). You should be thankful for all that you have, instead of whining about it.
Agh! Your sig is totally wrong! I'm sorry, I'm not normally one to bitch about such things, but I'm a huge Simpsons fan and the fact that you're going around with a messed up sig is a travesty!
Here is what it's supposed to be:
"We must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling towards freedom."
You see, the biggest part about this joke is the fact that he contradicts himself. First he says to go forward instead of backward, and then he says to go upward instead of forward. It's funny! The way you had it is just stupid. It almost makes sense. What's the point of making sense?
There's nothing stopping you from installing from tarballs in Debian, but why would you want to? With very few exceptions, Debian provides virtually every package you could ever want. You certainly don't have to use sendmail if you don't want to (in fact, I don't think it's even the default, although it's been a while since I last installed Debian). The incredible upgradability and dependency checking of.deb's also means that you'll never want to use anything else.
And about kernels: Debian provides both images and source on their servers. I never touch the images so I can't comment on them. They are generally pretty good about providing up-to-date source (of course, I'm using unstable), although naturally if you want to get the latest version right away you're better off downloading it from kernel.org. However, there's not much of a difference when you're talking about kernel sources. Even with the.deb's, the source isn't unpacked until you do it yourself, so the source package basically contains one file. The only real reason to go with the.deb is convenience.
Now, Debian does provide a great package (make-kpkg) that allows you to compile and install your kernel as a Debian package. You can use this regardless of where you got your source and I highly recommend you do. It streamlines the whole process of installing and maintaining your kernel.
While I loved Baldur's Gate, Torment was much better. It just doesn't seem fair to me that you're giving Bioware all the credit when they didn't make Torment. Sure, Torment was based on the same engine (although heavily modified), but that's it. Torment was a product of Interplay's own Black Isle Studios (makers of Fallout). Baldur's Gate was also published under the Black Isle Studios label, but it was made by Bioware while Torment was an internal Black Isle product. BTW, so is Icewind Dale (which just doesn't look as promising to me). Bioware made Baldur's Gate and then went on to make MDK2 (Yeah, that's right, it's not an RPG!), the engine of which is also being used for Neverwinter Nights, another Bioware product. Their next game out should be Baldur's Gate II, which will be released sometime this fall. Neverwinter Nights will be out sometime in 2001.
Please excuse me if I get a bit rantish, but I just don't get it. What is this article trying to show? Is a comprehensive security analysis? Nope. Is it a review? Nope. Is it anything?!
It looks to me like the author simply decided it was time to have Fun With Graphs(tm). All he did was look at the number of security fixes different distributions have. What does that prove? If a distribution has a gaping security hole in it and it was never fixed, it would end up looking better by the standards of this article. Nowhere is it taken into account what percentage of security holes were actually plugged with these fixes, how long the fixes took, or how serious the security problems are. Furthermore, if a certain distribution goes a long time before being replaced with the next version, then it's likely to have many more fixes. Does this mean it's insecure? Of course not! Why would it?
Which brings us to the issue of Debian and Slack. The author probably ignored them for the very reason I mentioned above, but that's silly. In my opinion these two distributions (especially Debian) are among the most secured Linux distros out there, in part because of their slow release cycles. If they don't try to instantly cram every new feature into the distro then they have more time to make sure that everything in there is working. It's outright foolish to completely ignore these distros in a security analysis, but then this article isn't much of an analysis anyway. Maybe it's for the better.
I've NEVER seen a US citizen (netizien or "real") who actually believed that the US was not the hub of the world.
Hey now! I'm a US citizen and I certainly don't think the US is "the hub of the world". Just because there are a lot of ignorant, arrogant fools in this damn country doesn't mean we all are!
This is freaky. I'm not normally one to jump on the anti-Signal11 bandwagon. In fact, I've rather enjoyed some of his posts. But it looks to me like you're really onto something here. This karma-whoring is getting out of hand. It's not surprising that somebody might sell a high-karma account, and the Enoch Root of today seems very different than the Enoch Root of old. However, if that is all there was to it there would be no reason to believe a Signal11 conspiracy.
What really drives your point home are the bios on the user pages you linked to. That's just too much to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm not ready to believe that Signal11 is forming a "Karma Mafia", but I think it's becoming pretty clear that he's abusing the system. As you will almost certainly be moderated down I'm posting this with my +1 Bonus in the hope that it will cause people to notice your post and read it in its entirety. Moderators should take note of this and it will hopefully be a factor in their future moderating decisions.
See Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology for an interesting take on how this might be constructed.
Ugh! Am I the only one who hated those books? They had to be some of the crappiest sci-fi stories I've ever read. Red Mars was OK, but after that...ugh!
If you want to read a good story about a space elevator, check out Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise. Quite a good read
Why not have the SETI client use some of the great FPU (Floating Point Unit) on the graphics processors of a Voodoo card?
I hate to break it to you, but most graphics cards do not have a "great FPU". In fact, many graphics cards don't have a FPU at all. You're graphics card handles rendering, which is an integer intensive process. Transformation and lighting (T&L) is a floating-point intensive process, but until very recently it was handled entirely by the main processor. Your voodoo certainly doesn't do it. There's also triangle setup, which is floating point and is usually handled by modern graphics cards, but it is secondary to rendering and I don't believe the triangle setup engines of most graphics cards are especially powerful.
Now, back to your original question. I still don't think it's possible. Yes, there are some graphics cards with powerful FPUs (like the GeForce), but they are extremely specialized pieces of hardware. They are designed to do one thing and one thing only. Even if it were possible to access the T&L engine of a GeForce directly it would require new drivers specifically designed for this purpose and writing those drivers would require intimate knowledge of how the hardware works. In other words, don't expect to see this happen unless Nvidia decides to release the complete, fully documented specs for their chip, and that's something which just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
There are Mac versions of some ATI products, although you naturally have to get a card specifically designed for Macs, you can't just plug your PC card into a Mac. The Dreamcast definately does not use an ATI card. Its graphics processor is based on Videologic's PowerVR technology. I really don't know about emdedded stuff.
As far as I know, NO manufacturer has gotten mutiple graphics chips to work under Windows 2000. The Voodoo 5 might work by now.
It's an AGP issue. The AGP bus is designed to support one and only one device. The Voodoo 5 gets around this by basically pretending to be a PCI card even though it's on the AGP bus. Unfortunately, this means that it can't take advantage of any of AGP's advanced features. Not that that's a big loss or anything. In case anyone out there still hasn't noticed, AGP is pure hype and really doesn't offer any measurable performance increase.
Anyway, the Rage Fury MAXX does things a bit differently. The way it's supposed to work is that one chip is recognized as an AGP device and the other is recognized as a PCI device. For whatever reason they're having a hell of a time getting this to work in Win2000. The bottom line is if you intend to use that OS, don't get a Rage Fury MAXX.
This is ridiculous. I don't know about you, but I was once a newbie myself. That's right, I wasn't born knowing UNIX! Oh my god!
Anyway, my point is that I didn't find it that hard! A cliff? No way. Sure, it was more complicated than windoze, but I relished in the power that complexity allowed me. If I didn't know something, I RTFM (and that is grammatically correct if one changes the tense of R, which just doesn't happen to change the first letter). Am I a "normal" user? Who knows! What's normal? I suppose I'm pretty far from normal in a lot of ways, but then who really is normal? Those who understand the benefits of a more complex system will also tend to have the abilities needed to tame such systems.
What about those who don't need or want complexity? Get a Mac! For crying out loud, why do some people feel the need to use UNIX for everything? Hell, maybe Caldera or somebody will one day publish a Linux distro that is so simple my dog could use it. Good for them. But you know what? I'm not going to use it.
You ever heard the saying, "The right tool for the right job"? Well, how about "The right operating system for the righ person"?
Anyway, I'm not sure what my original point was, but I'm pretty sure I've strayed pretty far from it.
Thank you! It's about time somebody cleared this up. Libertarians are not anarchists. They believe in a minimal government, not no government. I think that something like enforcing contracts is definately a useful role of the government.
Now, personally I'm not a libertarian. I'm a registered independent, largely because I try not to confine myself to any specific philosophy or dogma and I believe in always trying to determine what the right solution for the problem at hand is. Still, I find I agree with a lot of the libertarian philosophy and I scored about 90% on their "Are you a libertarian?" test thinging, not that it's a scientifically accurate test or anything. Anyway, I think I had a point at some time, but I forgot what it is.
Anyway, the question which started this thread really bugs me. First of all, I don't think there is a conflict between libertarian ideals and enforcing contracts, but that's besides the point. If the original poster does feel there is such a conflict, then why is he a libertarian? Why subscribe to a party philosohpy you don't agree with? 'Cause/. told you to?
This get's into why I'm not a libertarian, despite the fact that I agree with 90% of what they say. I don't like dogma, I don't like canned solutions. Why can't people just think for themselves instead of being confined to a few predetermined options? There is no one magic solution for anything, let alone complex world issues. Take some time to actually evaluate different possibilities instead of just saying, "I'm a libertarian and this conflicts with libertarian ideals so I don't like it"!
Anyway, that's enough incoherent ranting for one day.
Of course, the notion of never letting yourself be influenced by dogma is, in of itself, a dogma.
Actually, the Pentium 4 is a very drastic change from the P3. It has an entirely new core, with some interesting new ideas (trace cache, "double pumped" ALUs). However, whether or not it is any good remains to be seen. Your comment that it is just a marketing exercise may very well prove to be true anyway.
You see, the P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. Now that's a lot compared to most chips, meaning that it will take a huge penalty for a branch misprediction. What's the advantage of a 20 stage pipeline? Clockspeed. The P4 was designed first and foremost for clockspeed, because that's all the clueless average computer user looks at. There's a very good possibility that the P4 will perform worse at the same clockspeed than the P3, but it will reach some insane clockspeeds. This is especially true in floating-point operations. The P4 only has one FPU while even the P3 has two (the Athlon has three). That just doesn't cut the mustard these days.
Of course, intel is banking on SSE2 to make up for their pathetic FPU, but that has to be specifically supported in the application. Anything FPU intensive and without SSE2 support will perform much better on a P3 than a P4 of the same clockspeed. Of course, intel will base all their bencharks on the miniscule number of applications that will support SSE2 (and pressure third-party benchmark makers to include SSE2 support as well), so they'll have a bunch or pretty graphs showing that the P4 is super-duper fast.
You're whole argument is based on the simply untrue assumption that RAMBUS is ultimately a better solution than DDR. Well, I've got news for you: it ain't. The goal behind RAMBUS was to increase bandwidth and lower the pin count. They did both of these things, creating a 800 mhz memory module (actually 400 DDR) that uses a 16 bit bus. This delivers the same bandwidth as 200 mhz SDRAM would, since SDRAM uses a 64 bit bus. However, RAMBUS ran into a LOT of unexpected problems. Let's go over them all:
First of all, there's the whole latency issue. Basically, RAMBUS will always have higher latencies then SDRAM. This is a big part of the reason that RAMBUS can't seem to significantly outperform regular PC133 even though it should have 50% more bandwidth.
Then there's the memory limit issue. As one adds more and more RAMBUS memory, because of signalling issues (which I'll be the first to admit I don't completely understand) it becomes extremely difficult to keep it all working. The end result is that there is currently no way to have more than 512 megs of RAMBUS memory. This simply isn't enough for servers, and because of this even Intel, the big RAMBUS supporter, plans on using DDR memory for the server version of Willamette. It won't be long until 512 isn't enough for the desktop either. Do you really want to be stuck with this limit?
There's also the price issue. RAMBUS was supposed to be cheaper than SDRAM because it uses fewer pins, but things don't always work out the way they're supposed to. RAMBUS yeilds are horrible, and it is unlikely they will ever be as good as SDRAM yeilds. RAMBUS also requires a more expensive packaging and needs its own heatsink to deal with heat issues. The idea of ever putting RAMBUS in a laptop horrifies me. Also, because RAMBUS is yeilding so terribly 800 mhz modules are actually quite rare. Most RAMBUS being made is either 600 or 700 mhz, which compares quite pourly with PC133 considering that the 800 mhz modules can barely outperform it. There are also concerns that RAMBUS might not have much room to grow. Some video cards already use 200 mhz (non-DDR) SDRAM, and although these speeds are not mass-produced yet, the biggest limiting factor is motherboards which support it. SDRAM still has a lot of room to increase its frequency. RAMBUS doesn't.
Of course, during all this I was comparing RAMBUS to regular SDRAM, and RAMBUS doesn't compare very well at all. It wins a few points, but not many. Now, let's compare it to DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is estimated to cost about 3% more to manufacture than regular SDRAM. 3%! RAMBUS costs at least 4-5 times as much! Now, PC2100 (133 mhz DDR, they rate it by the bandwidth and not the frequency for marketing reasons. Probably because they don't want the average consumer to be choosing between PC266 and PC800 not realizing what it means.) will offer more bandwidth than RAMBUS, still have the lower latencies of SDRAM, cost significantly less, and not be limited to 512 megs. Do you really want RAMBUS to win?
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
OK, I agree with you on the first part. If RAMBUS didn't have intel's support it would have failed long ago. But where on earther did you come up with that second part?! AMD adopted RAMBUS? Since when? You can't buy a Athlon motherboard that supports RAMBUS if you wanted to! They don't exist. Sure, AMD licensed RAMBUS, but only as a "just in case" measure. If the industry moved towards RAMBUS they didn't want to be left out in the cold. But the industry hasn't, and it doesn't look like they're going to.
And now you're saying that AMD's next-generation CPU will be RAMBUS-only?! Huh? Where do you come up with this stuff? AMD has announced strong support of DDR SDRAM for their Mustang (the next version of the Athlon to be released late this year) and has absolutely no plans to have it support RAMBUS. They haven't announced anything as far as what memory the K8/Sledgehammer will use, but there is no reason to believe that it will be RAMBUS-only. Especially now that AMD has officially started supporting DDR SDRAM. How on earth did you get the idea that AMD was only going to support RAMBUS? Is this just FUD, or did you really believe it?
Actually I don't think anyone is expected to know every law, just the ones that are relevant to what you are doing. I think you will find that no one requires you to know patent laws unless you are intending to file a patent or infringe on one.
But that's just the whole problem, isn't it? How many people go out and say, "I feel like infringing on some patents today"? If you don't know every single law on the books, you can break laws without realizing it. The problems is there are 20 trillion different laws on the books and it is physically impossible to store than much information in a human brain, even if there were some way to plug that brain directly into a massive database containing all the laws. I believe the government uses some kind of optical storage technology to hold their laws because all the servers in the world combined could not possibly contain them all. There are too many laws. I know, let's make a law against that! It seems that the only thing the government knows how to do is make more and more laws regulating every single possible thing imaginable.
OK, I started out with a point but I kind of entered into rant mode there. Sorry.
I realize I don't use "proper" grammer, but the way I type makes more sense than "proper" grammer.
...considering how it was the fastest card on the market when it was released and is still a pretty damn good contendor. Unfortunately, when I tried out BeOS I found that I could only run in it grayscale mode! Forget about hardware acceleration.
Don't get me wrong. I think BeOS is certainly a good OS in many ways, but you can't claim with a straight face that it doesn't have compatability problems. There is a ton of hardware out there it won't work with at all and even more it has mediorce support for. I think it would be great if BeOS got better support, but it just isn't going to happen.
Just because Toshiba folded doesn't mean that everyone is going to. RAMBUS's claims of controlling DDR SDRAM are totally bogus. It is and always has been an open standard which many companies have invested a lot of money it. They are not going to just sit by and watch RAMBUS take it over for the sole purpose of destroying DDR SDRAM and forcing everyone to buy RAMBUS. This is definately going to be disputed by a lot of players in the memory market, and I think that any court would have to realize that RAMBUS doesn't have a case.
So why did Toshiba fold? If it had been Micron or somebody similar, I would have to say that things would be looking quite bad. But Toshiba has never been a big DDR-SDRAM supporter in the first place. It is possible that they cut some deal with RAMBUS because RAMBUS is desperately trying to establish some kind of justification for a future campaign against other memory makers. This could serve as a precedent, or at least some kind of evidence, for legal action. However, if that's all RAMBUS has to go on it's not going to be enough
I'm not saying that this is a good thing. Not by any means. However, I don't think RAMBUS will be able to stop DDR-SDRAM from becoming popular by doing this. At worst they might be able to delay it for a while and increase prices a bit. Considering how incredibly non-competitive RAMBUS is and how many memory manufacturers are simply sick of Intel and RAMBUS trying to force them to use what they consider to be a poor technology, I don't think anyone is going to give up on DDR-SDRAM anytime soon.
Yes!! FF3 sucked me in like no other game before and no other game since. It basically ruled my life from the time I got it until the time I finished it. I can remember playing it until my parents made me go to bed (hey, this was years ago!) and then getting up at 3:00 or 4:00 am to get in a few more hours before school. And whenever I wasn't playing it, I was talking about it, which kind of drove away my friends because they had no idea what I was talking about. I don't think most of the poor fools ever got to experience the greatness that is FF3.
But do you know what the most amazing thing about FF3 is? It still does it. Every once in a while I fire it up (Using a ROM and an emulator. Hey, I did buy the original game and I don't have my SNES anymore.) and even though the graphics are incredibly dated and I've played through it 17 million times already it still sucks me in. Maybe not quite as much as it did the first time through, but still more than most modern games.
The only games which can compare to FF3 are other Squaresoft games. Those guys are brilliant. FF7 was excellent, although still not as good as FF3 (which was actually called FF6 in Japan, in case anyone reading this is wondering why there is such a big gap there). FF8 was a bit of a disappointment. It was still a good game, although not as good as FF3 and FF7. The only other game that even comes close to FF3 (in my opinion) is Chrono Trigger. The only non-Squaresoft game that I really think is comparable to Squaresoft's best would be (again, in my opinion) Planescape: Torment, although it's a very different style game (much darker).
Oh, and about the music: You couldn't be more right. I happen to collect Final Fantasy music (actually it's a rather small collection right now but I am very interested in expanding it) and I have to say that FF3 has some of the best there is. FF7 and FF8 are also have some rather good moments (In fact I find myself humming Liberi Fatali [the music from FF8's opening, Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec...] to myself rather often), however FF3 has more variety and (in my opinion) consisten quality. Unfortunately, SNES synth is rather primitive sounding by today's standards and there was never a decent arranged version of FF3's music made. My current hope is Project Majestic Mix, an independent project by KFSS Studios to create arranged versions of the best music from the final fantasy series, and it is currently set to feature a great deal of FF3 music. This project is not affiliated with Squaresoft, however the guy running it obviously has the same passion for FF music of freaks like me, and some of the mp3 samples on their webpage look great. Check it out.
Anyway, as you can probably tell be now this post has little purpose besides me ranting about how much I love Squaresoft. So sue me. And yes, I realize I'm a dork. I just don't care.
It's quite simply really. BC3K was quite possibly the buggiest game ever created in the history of the universe. I am not exagerating, I'm serious. BC3K redefines bugginess. Everything that could go wrong did, and then some.
That's a long post, but I think I may be able to help;-)
In a nutshell, Cole's Notes edition, how does gravity work, according to science's current understanding?
That's an incredibly vague question. General Relativity describes gravity as being a property of the curvature of spacetime. Wherever there is a mass, it will "bend" spacetime around it and cause the effects of gravity. This interpretation works very well and is consistent with all experimental data, but it still leaves out some questions. What is spacetime? How does gravity bend it? And so on.
Quantum mechanics takes a different approach. It says that all the fundamental forces (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity) are caused by the exchange of particles, and this of course includes gravity. The strong nuclear force is caused by the exchange of gluons, the weak nuclear force is caused by the exchange of W+, W-, and Z bosons, the electromagnetic force is caused by the exchange of photons, and gravity is supposed to be caused by the exchange of gravitons. Notice I say "supposed", because there is currently no direct evidence whatsoever for the existence of the graviton. Just about every modern physicist believes it must exist simply because all the other forces are caused by the exchange of particles. If gravity somehow operated by a different method it would pretty much ruin any chance of coming up with a TOE
We are capable of creating and breaking nuclear bonds, both in (un)controlled fission and uncontrolled fusion. We're pretty capable of transmuting elements from one to another; U-238 into Am-241 for smoke detectors, etc., even if these transmuted elements are just by-products of other processes. Is it gravity or is it gluons that hold together the protons in a nucleus despite their repellant similar charges? (Especially fascinating in some isotopes of helium and lithium that lack neutrons.) Even if we don't know, we have some control over the makeup of an atom.
First of all, it is definately gluons, or rather the strong nuclear force which is caused by the exchange of gluons among so-called "colored" particles (That has nothing to do with what most people think of as "color". Don't worry about it for now.), which cause the nucleus of the atom to be held together. The effect of gravity is incredibly weak when compared to the electromagnetic force and it could not possibly hold a nucleus together. The electromagnetic force, on the other hand, is rather weak when compared to the strong nuclear force.
Anyway, that's besides the point. You're talking about our "control" over the fundamental forces. But what does it mean to "control" a force? You use nuclear fission as an example, but all we do there is take some radioactive material, stick it all together, and let nature run its course. Is that really "controlling" it? Can I say that I am "controlling" gravity when I ride a rollercoaster? Just something to think about...
I'm not sure what this means, either. Fission and fusion relate to changes to the makeup of the nucleus; the net number of protons in the nucleus will change the number of electrons required to achieve equilibrium and therefore will affect the chemical properties of the element. Is it possible that weak nuclear refers to chemical properties brought on by the number of electrons required for equilibrium and therefore determines which other elements will chemically react with this element? Or is weak nuclear referring to things like photon emissions as electrons drop shells?
First off, everything you talked about is dealing with the electromagnetic force. The weak nuclear force is a strange force. It's not really responsible for a "force" in the sense of what we normally think of as a force. What it is responsible for is various processes which occur in the nucleus of an atom. The classic example is beta decay. Before I begin I should note that I may have the neutron and the proton reversed, as I can never remember which is udd and which is uud. What happens in beta decay is that a down quark inside a neutron changes to a up quark, converting the neutron (which consists of an up quark and two down quarks, udd) into a proton (uud). In the process, an electron and an anti-electron neutrino are released. The weak force is what is responsible for this process. The quark actually changes by emitting a W- boson, which immediately decays into the electron and the anti-electron neutrino. This is not the only process which the weak nuclear force is responsible for, but it is the only one I can come up with off the top of my head.
The emissions of radiation I see as being caused by the stronger nuclear forces. As the nucleus gets larger (and gets seeded with neutrons in the right ratios), it becomes more unstable, more likely to break the ?gravity? or ?gluonic? bonds that attach the similarily-charged protons which indirectly control the chemical properties. Net effect: fission occurs, energy is released. Alpha particles are just positive helium ions, beta particles are just electrons (that get shot from the positive nucleus, go figure) and gamma rays are photons of energy released as an infinitesimally small quantity of matter in the nucleus is converted to energy. So, since nuclear radiation is occuring very much as a factor of the strong bonds that hold a nucleus together, is radiation really a part of the weaker nuclear bonds? I must be missing something; I fail to understand.
You're actually pretty close to the mark with the radiation thing. It so happens that as the nucleus of an atom becomes larger and larger the strong nuclear force has difficulty holding it together and the nucleus become unstable. I do not remember the exact reason why this is so, but I believe it has something to do with the short-range nature of the nuclear forces (unlike electromagnetism and gravity, which continue on theoretically forever growing closer and closer to zero as distance increases, the nuclear forces actually have a "range", which is why their effects are limited to the nucleus of an atom), however don't quote me on that. Alpha particles are basically just pieces of a nucleus that get spit out, they're not that interesting;-) . I talked about beta decay when I discussed the weak force. I should note something about Gamma particles however. Basically, what happens with a Gamma particle is that a neutron or a proton in the nucleus of an atom becomes "excited", similar to how electrons circling the nucleus become "excited" all the time. However, the neutron of the proton are controlled primarily by the strong nuclear force, which is a great deal stronger than the electromagnetic force, and so it takes significantly more energy to exicte them than it takes to excite an electron. Generally, the excitement of a neutron or a proton is caused by some other nuclear interaction (Alpha or Beta decay, being hit by a free neutron, colliding with another nucleus [fusion]) because that is the only way to get enough energy to excite a proton or neutron. When the proton or neutron returns to its previous "energy level" (we don't normally think of protons and neutrons as having energy levels, but really they do) it releases a photon, only this photon has far more energy than any photon released in normal chemical processes.
I really don't understand what you are asking in the last part of your paragraph there. Radiation can be caused by the strong nuclear or weak nuclear forces, as discussed above. It all depends on the type of radiation really.
Anyway, I'd love to continue this discussion with gravity (which I know is what you were asking about in the first place), but I've spent too much time talking already and I think my boss will be upset if I don't actually do some work today. Oh well, I hope I've cleared some things up.
Holy Shit! I've been using Go!Zilla for years and I had no idea this crap was on my computer! Of course I reinstall windoze fairly frequently, but I generally reinstall Go!Zilla as well, so that doesn't exactly help. Hell, it's a good program but it's not that good. There has got to be something illegal about this. How can slashdot not consider this a topic worth discussing?
Thank you for telling me about this. I can't believe it's been going on for this long...it rather disturbs me. At least on the plus side I run Linux most of the time and don't dial up that often in windoze. Still, the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is purge my computer.
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Perhaps that last part is the most important thing for me. When I play pacman I couldn't care less what happens to pacman. He's just a big yellow dot that eats little dots. Some people try to go for high scores, but that just doesn't interest me. It's a number that's all.
Now, I'm not trying to force anyone to share my viewpoint. If you like going for high scores then good for you. More power to you. I just want to make it clear that not everyone shares that opinion. Yeah, there are a lot of unoriginal games today, but if you think there was ever a time when that wasn't true then your memory is playing tricks on you. You've simply forgotten the clones an knock-offs because they're so...forgettable. There are original games being made, unfortunately most of them don't do so well. System Shock 2 was an incredible game, but hardly anyone bought it. You can find in in the bargain bin these days for like $15, and at that price you don't have any excuse not to get it. There's also Deus Ex, which I haven't played yet (I don't think it will even run on my computer :-( ), but I have heard some very good things about it. If you've got a good computer, check it out!
OK, this was obviously a troll, but I have nothing better to do so I'll bite.
;-) . Anyway, when some of these cavemen discovered fire and tried to harness it, there were probably others who claimed that everything was just fine without it. From our perspective that position would seem absurd, but we have the benefit of hindsight. We know that fire was only the beginning and we can see what it led to.
/. we see a bunch of US citizens who are normally completely ignorant of the rest of the world (no offense to anyone, I'm a US citizen myself) arguing about certain laws passed in Australia and Britain. We also have an unprecedented level of freedom of speech, although there are certainly some forces at work trying to take that away. However, the benefits of true freedom of speech is not something to take for granted, as is being made all the more apparent.
/. and play Diablo. Those tasks may be seen as an utter waste, and maybe they are. However, there's something to be said for recreation. As society has progress people have been allowed increasingly larger amounts of time and more options for recreation. The use of computers for this purpose is just another example of how our lives are being improved.
/.). You should be thankful for what you have. There are many poor nations out there that have missed out on the benefits of computers (and a lot of other things!). You should be thankful for all that you have, instead of whining about it.
While it is quite true that our society used to work fine without the aid of computers, it is impossible to claim that there is no benefit to be had from computers and technology. It's quite simply the difference between working and working better. This is what causes all technological revolutions, not just the advent of computer technology. There was a time when everyone lived in caves and hunted things with big clubs. Just ask OOG about it
Now, you can certainly claim that computers will never have the same kind of impact that fire had. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe they already have. Do you have any idea how much of our society has benefitted from computer technology? It's hard to think of anything which hasn't. Your grocery store can keep track of inventory better and handle customer transactions faster. Your car can run more efficiently. Your long distance phone calls are cheaper and clearer. Virtually anything in manufacturing can be made better and cheaper with the help of computer models. I'm listing more mundane things to try to show you how much influence computers have really had in everyday life, but there are other things which would have been outright impossible without computer technology. Think of the benefits to scientific research that have resulted from computers. The genetic research. Better weather prediction. Improved efficiency in agriculture. Not to mention advances in pure mathematics and other less concrete fields.
And let's not forget the Internet. I'm not one to claim that it has or will totally change society, but it is certainly an impressive force. We can now connect minds that are worlds apart. We can truly be connected with the rest of the world. Even here on
My point is that computers are not in anyway limited to the desktops that we use to read
While some certainly do think that computers are "cool" (and I'm one of them!), that is not the reason they have become so useful to society. If there was no benefit to be had from computer technology we would never have developed it to the point where people can talk about how "cool" it is in the first place. All our lives have been improved by computers, even you've never touched one (which is obviously not the case seeing how you were able to post a message to
Agh! Your sig is totally wrong! I'm sorry, I'm not normally one to bitch about such things, but I'm a huge Simpsons fan and the fact that you're going around with a messed up sig is a travesty!
Here is what it's supposed to be:
"We must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling towards freedom."
You see, the biggest part about this joke is the fact that he contradicts himself. First he says to go forward instead of backward, and then he says to go upward instead of forward. It's funny! The way you had it is just stupid. It almost makes sense. What's the point of making sense?
There's nothing stopping you from installing from tarballs in Debian, but why would you want to? With very few exceptions, Debian provides virtually every package you could ever want. You certainly don't have to use sendmail if you don't want to (in fact, I don't think it's even the default, although it's been a while since I last installed Debian). The incredible upgradability and dependency checking of .deb's also means that you'll never want to use anything else.
.deb's, the source isn't unpacked until you do it yourself, so the source package basically contains one file. The only real reason to go with the .deb is convenience.
And about kernels: Debian provides both images and source on their servers. I never touch the images so I can't comment on them. They are generally pretty good about providing up-to-date source (of course, I'm using unstable), although naturally if you want to get the latest version right away you're better off downloading it from kernel.org. However, there's not much of a difference when you're talking about kernel sources. Even with the
Now, Debian does provide a great package (make-kpkg) that allows you to compile and install your kernel as a Debian package. You can use this regardless of where you got your source and I highly recommend you do. It streamlines the whole process of installing and maintaining your kernel.
I forgive you for being confused, Siggy.
It looks to me like the author simply decided it was time to have Fun With Graphs(tm). All he did was look at the number of security fixes different distributions have. What does that prove? If a distribution has a gaping security hole in it and it was never fixed, it would end up looking better by the standards of this article. Nowhere is it taken into account what percentage of security holes were actually plugged with these fixes, how long the fixes took, or how serious the security problems are. Furthermore, if a certain distribution goes a long time before being replaced with the next version, then it's likely to have many more fixes. Does this mean it's insecure? Of course not! Why would it?
Which brings us to the issue of Debian and Slack. The author probably ignored them for the very reason I mentioned above, but that's silly. In my opinion these two distributions (especially Debian) are among the most secured Linux distros out there, in part because of their slow release cycles. If they don't try to instantly cram every new feature into the distro then they have more time to make sure that everything in there is working. It's outright foolish to completely ignore these distros in a security analysis, but then this article isn't much of an analysis anyway. Maybe it's for the better.
Hey now! I'm a US citizen and I certainly don't think the US is "the hub of the world". Just because there are a lot of ignorant, arrogant fools in this damn country doesn't mean we all are!
What really drives your point home are the bios on the user pages you linked to. That's just too much to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm not ready to believe that Signal11 is forming a "Karma Mafia", but I think it's becoming pretty clear that he's abusing the system. As you will almost certainly be moderated down I'm posting this with my +1 Bonus in the hope that it will cause people to notice your post and read it in its entirety. Moderators should take note of this and it will hopefully be a factor in their future moderating decisions.
Ugh! Am I the only one who hated those books? They had to be some of the crappiest sci-fi stories I've ever read. Red Mars was OK, but after that...ugh!
If you want to read a good story about a space elevator, check out Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise. Quite a good read
I hate to break it to you, but most graphics cards do not have a "great FPU". In fact, many graphics cards don't have a FPU at all. You're graphics card handles rendering, which is an integer intensive process. Transformation and lighting (T&L) is a floating-point intensive process, but until very recently it was handled entirely by the main processor. Your voodoo certainly doesn't do it. There's also triangle setup, which is floating point and is usually handled by modern graphics cards, but it is secondary to rendering and I don't believe the triangle setup engines of most graphics cards are especially powerful.
Now, back to your original question. I still don't think it's possible. Yes, there are some graphics cards with powerful FPUs (like the GeForce), but they are extremely specialized pieces of hardware. They are designed to do one thing and one thing only. Even if it were possible to access the T&L engine of a GeForce directly it would require new drivers specifically designed for this purpose and writing those drivers would require intimate knowledge of how the hardware works. In other words, don't expect to see this happen unless Nvidia decides to release the complete, fully documented specs for their chip, and that's something which just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
It's an AGP issue. The AGP bus is designed to support one and only one device. The Voodoo 5 gets around this by basically pretending to be a PCI card even though it's on the AGP bus. Unfortunately, this means that it can't take advantage of any of AGP's advanced features. Not that that's a big loss or anything. In case anyone out there still hasn't noticed, AGP is pure hype and really doesn't offer any measurable performance increase.
Anyway, the Rage Fury MAXX does things a bit differently. The way it's supposed to work is that one chip is recognized as an AGP device and the other is recognized as a PCI device. For whatever reason they're having a hell of a time getting this to work in Win2000. The bottom line is if you intend to use that OS, don't get a Rage Fury MAXX.
This is ridiculous. I don't know about you, but I was once a newbie myself. That's right, I wasn't born knowing UNIX! Oh my god!
Anyway, my point is that I didn't find it that hard! A cliff? No way. Sure, it was more complicated than windoze, but I relished in the power that complexity allowed me. If I didn't know something, I RTFM (and that is grammatically correct if one changes the tense of R, which just doesn't happen to change the first letter). Am I a "normal" user? Who knows! What's normal? I suppose I'm pretty far from normal in a lot of ways, but then who really is normal? Those who understand the benefits of a more complex system will also tend to have the abilities needed to tame such systems.
What about those who don't need or want complexity? Get a Mac! For crying out loud, why do some people feel the need to use UNIX for everything? Hell, maybe Caldera or somebody will one day publish a Linux distro that is so simple my dog could use it. Good for them. But you know what? I'm not going to use it.
You ever heard the saying, "The right tool for the right job"? Well, how about "The right operating system for the righ person"?
Anyway, I'm not sure what my original point was, but I'm pretty sure I've strayed pretty far from it.
Dude, that would make a great sig!
Thank you! It's about time somebody cleared this up. Libertarians are not anarchists. They believe in a minimal government, not no government. I think that something like enforcing contracts is definately a useful role of the government.
Now, personally I'm not a libertarian. I'm a registered independent, largely because I try not to confine myself to any specific philosophy or dogma and I believe in always trying to determine what the right solution for the problem at hand is. Still, I find I agree with a lot of the libertarian philosophy and I scored about 90% on their "Are you a libertarian?" test thinging, not that it's a scientifically accurate test or anything. Anyway, I think I had a point at some time, but I forgot what it is.
Anyway, the question which started this thread really bugs me. First of all, I don't think there is a conflict between libertarian ideals and enforcing contracts, but that's besides the point. If the original poster does feel there is such a conflict, then why is he a libertarian? Why subscribe to a party philosohpy you don't agree with? 'Cause /. told you to?
This get's into why I'm not a libertarian, despite the fact that I agree with 90% of what they say. I don't like dogma, I don't like canned solutions. Why can't people just think for themselves instead of being confined to a few predetermined options? There is no one magic solution for anything, let alone complex world issues. Take some time to actually evaluate different possibilities instead of just saying, "I'm a libertarian and this conflicts with libertarian ideals so I don't like it"!
Anyway, that's enough incoherent ranting for one day.
Of course, the notion of never letting yourself be influenced by dogma is, in of itself, a dogma.
Actually, the Pentium 4 is a very drastic change from the P3. It has an entirely new core, with some interesting new ideas (trace cache, "double pumped" ALUs). However, whether or not it is any good remains to be seen. Your comment that it is just a marketing exercise may very well prove to be true anyway.
You see, the P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. Now that's a lot compared to most chips, meaning that it will take a huge penalty for a branch misprediction. What's the advantage of a 20 stage pipeline? Clockspeed. The P4 was designed first and foremost for clockspeed, because that's all the clueless average computer user looks at. There's a very good possibility that the P4 will perform worse at the same clockspeed than the P3, but it will reach some insane clockspeeds. This is especially true in floating-point operations. The P4 only has one FPU while even the P3 has two (the Athlon has three). That just doesn't cut the mustard these days.
Of course, intel is banking on SSE2 to make up for their pathetic FPU, but that has to be specifically supported in the application. Anything FPU intensive and without SSE2 support will perform much better on a P3 than a P4 of the same clockspeed. Of course, intel will base all their bencharks on the miniscule number of applications that will support SSE2 (and pressure third-party benchmark makers to include SSE2 support as well), so they'll have a bunch or pretty graphs showing that the P4 is super-duper fast.
You're whole argument is based on the simply untrue assumption that RAMBUS is ultimately a better solution than DDR. Well, I've got news for you: it ain't. The goal behind RAMBUS was to increase bandwidth and lower the pin count. They did both of these things, creating a 800 mhz memory module (actually 400 DDR) that uses a 16 bit bus. This delivers the same bandwidth as 200 mhz SDRAM would, since SDRAM uses a 64 bit bus. However, RAMBUS ran into a LOT of unexpected problems. Let's go over them all:
First of all, there's the whole latency issue. Basically, RAMBUS will always have higher latencies then SDRAM. This is a big part of the reason that RAMBUS can't seem to significantly outperform regular PC133 even though it should have 50% more bandwidth.
Then there's the memory limit issue. As one adds more and more RAMBUS memory, because of signalling issues (which I'll be the first to admit I don't completely understand) it becomes extremely difficult to keep it all working. The end result is that there is currently no way to have more than 512 megs of RAMBUS memory. This simply isn't enough for servers, and because of this even Intel, the big RAMBUS supporter, plans on using DDR memory for the server version of Willamette. It won't be long until 512 isn't enough for the desktop either. Do you really want to be stuck with this limit?
There's also the price issue. RAMBUS was supposed to be cheaper than SDRAM because it uses fewer pins, but things don't always work out the way they're supposed to. RAMBUS yeilds are horrible, and it is unlikely they will ever be as good as SDRAM yeilds. RAMBUS also requires a more expensive packaging and needs its own heatsink to deal with heat issues. The idea of ever putting RAMBUS in a laptop horrifies me. Also, because RAMBUS is yeilding so terribly 800 mhz modules are actually quite rare. Most RAMBUS being made is either 600 or 700 mhz, which compares quite pourly with PC133 considering that the 800 mhz modules can barely outperform it. There are also concerns that RAMBUS might not have much room to grow. Some video cards already use 200 mhz (non-DDR) SDRAM, and although these speeds are not mass-produced yet, the biggest limiting factor is motherboards which support it. SDRAM still has a lot of room to increase its frequency. RAMBUS doesn't.
Of course, during all this I was comparing RAMBUS to regular SDRAM, and RAMBUS doesn't compare very well at all. It wins a few points, but not many. Now, let's compare it to DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is estimated to cost about 3% more to manufacture than regular SDRAM. 3%! RAMBUS costs at least 4-5 times as much! Now, PC2100 (133 mhz DDR, they rate it by the bandwidth and not the frequency for marketing reasons. Probably because they don't want the average consumer to be choosing between PC266 and PC800 not realizing what it means.) will offer more bandwidth than RAMBUS, still have the lower latencies of SDRAM, cost significantly less, and not be limited to 512 megs. Do you really want RAMBUS to win?
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
OK, I agree with you on the first part. If RAMBUS didn't have intel's support it would have failed long ago. But where on earther did you come up with that second part?! AMD adopted RAMBUS? Since when? You can't buy a Athlon motherboard that supports RAMBUS if you wanted to! They don't exist. Sure, AMD licensed RAMBUS, but only as a "just in case" measure. If the industry moved towards RAMBUS they didn't want to be left out in the cold. But the industry hasn't, and it doesn't look like they're going to.
And now you're saying that AMD's next-generation CPU will be RAMBUS-only?! Huh? Where do you come up with this stuff? AMD has announced strong support of DDR SDRAM for their Mustang (the next version of the Athlon to be released late this year) and has absolutely no plans to have it support RAMBUS. They haven't announced anything as far as what memory the K8/Sledgehammer will use, but there is no reason to believe that it will be RAMBUS-only. Especially now that AMD has officially started supporting DDR SDRAM. How on earth did you get the idea that AMD was only going to support RAMBUS? Is this just FUD, or did you really believe it?
Actually I don't think anyone is expected to know every law, just the ones that are relevant to what you are doing. I think you will find that no one requires you to know patent laws unless you are intending to file a patent or infringe on one.
But that's just the whole problem, isn't it? How many people go out and say, "I feel like infringing on some patents today"? If you don't know every single law on the books, you can break laws without realizing it. The problems is there are 20 trillion different laws on the books and it is physically impossible to store than much information in a human brain, even if there were some way to plug that brain directly into a massive database containing all the laws. I believe the government uses some kind of optical storage technology to hold their laws because all the servers in the world combined could not possibly contain them all. There are too many laws. I know, let's make a law against that! It seems that the only thing the government knows how to do is make more and more laws regulating every single possible thing imaginable.
OK, I started out with a point but I kind of entered into rant mode there. Sorry.
I realize I don't use "proper" grammer, but the way I type makes more sense than "proper" grammer.
...considering how it was the fastest card on the market when it was released and is still a pretty damn good contendor. Unfortunately, when I tried out BeOS I found that I could only run in it grayscale mode! Forget about hardware acceleration.
Don't get me wrong. I think BeOS is certainly a good OS in many ways, but you can't claim with a straight face that it doesn't have compatability problems. There is a ton of hardware out there it won't work with at all and even more it has mediorce support for. I think it would be great if BeOS got better support, but it just isn't going to happen.
...At least not quite yet.
Just because Toshiba folded doesn't mean that everyone is going to. RAMBUS's claims of controlling DDR SDRAM are totally bogus. It is and always has been an open standard which many companies have invested a lot of money it. They are not going to just sit by and watch RAMBUS take it over for the sole purpose of destroying DDR SDRAM and forcing everyone to buy RAMBUS. This is definately going to be disputed by a lot of players in the memory market, and I think that any court would have to realize that RAMBUS doesn't have a case.
So why did Toshiba fold? If it had been Micron or somebody similar, I would have to say that things would be looking quite bad. But Toshiba has never been a big DDR-SDRAM supporter in the first place. It is possible that they cut some deal with RAMBUS because RAMBUS is desperately trying to establish some kind of justification for a future campaign against other memory makers. This could serve as a precedent, or at least some kind of evidence, for legal action. However, if that's all RAMBUS has to go on it's not going to be enough
I'm not saying that this is a good thing. Not by any means. However, I don't think RAMBUS will be able to stop DDR-SDRAM from becoming popular by doing this. At worst they might be able to delay it for a while and increase prices a bit. Considering how incredibly non-competitive RAMBUS is and how many memory manufacturers are simply sick of Intel and RAMBUS trying to force them to use what they consider to be a poor technology, I don't think anyone is going to give up on DDR-SDRAM anytime soon.
Yes!! FF3 sucked me in like no other game before and no other game since. It basically ruled my life from the time I got it until the time I finished it. I can remember playing it until my parents made me go to bed (hey, this was years ago!) and then getting up at 3:00 or 4:00 am to get in a few more hours before school. And whenever I wasn't playing it, I was talking about it, which kind of drove away my friends because they had no idea what I was talking about. I don't think most of the poor fools ever got to experience the greatness that is FF3.
But do you know what the most amazing thing about FF3 is? It still does it. Every once in a while I fire it up (Using a ROM and an emulator. Hey, I did buy the original game and I don't have my SNES anymore.) and even though the graphics are incredibly dated and I've played through it 17 million times already it still sucks me in. Maybe not quite as much as it did the first time through, but still more than most modern games.
The only games which can compare to FF3 are other Squaresoft games. Those guys are brilliant. FF7 was excellent, although still not as good as FF3 (which was actually called FF6 in Japan, in case anyone reading this is wondering why there is such a big gap there). FF8 was a bit of a disappointment. It was still a good game, although not as good as FF3 and FF7. The only other game that even comes close to FF3 (in my opinion) is Chrono Trigger. The only non-Squaresoft game that I really think is comparable to Squaresoft's best would be (again, in my opinion) Planescape: Torment, although it's a very different style game (much darker).
Oh, and about the music: You couldn't be more right. I happen to collect Final Fantasy music (actually it's a rather small collection right now but I am very interested in expanding it) and I have to say that FF3 has some of the best there is. FF7 and FF8 are also have some rather good moments (In fact I find myself humming Liberi Fatali [the music from FF8's opening, Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec...] to myself rather often), however FF3 has more variety and (in my opinion) consisten quality. Unfortunately, SNES synth is rather primitive sounding by today's standards and there was never a decent arranged version of FF3's music made. My current hope is Project Majestic Mix, an independent project by KFSS Studios to create arranged versions of the best music from the final fantasy series, and it is currently set to feature a great deal of FF3 music. This project is not affiliated with Squaresoft, however the guy running it obviously has the same passion for FF music of freaks like me, and some of the mp3 samples on their webpage look great. Check it out.
Anyway, as you can probably tell be now this post has little purpose besides me ranting about how much I love Squaresoft. So sue me. And yes, I realize I'm a dork. I just don't care.
It's quite simply really. BC3K was quite possibly the buggiest game ever created in the history of the universe. I am not exagerating, I'm serious. BC3K redefines bugginess. Everything that could go wrong did, and then some.
That's a long post, but I think I may be able to help ;-)
In a nutshell, Cole's Notes edition, how does gravity work, according to science's current understanding?
That's an incredibly vague question. General Relativity describes gravity as being a property of the curvature of spacetime. Wherever there is a mass, it will "bend" spacetime around it and cause the effects of gravity. This interpretation works very well and is consistent with all experimental data, but it still leaves out some questions. What is spacetime? How does gravity bend it? And so on.
Quantum mechanics takes a different approach. It says that all the fundamental forces (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity) are caused by the exchange of particles, and this of course includes gravity. The strong nuclear force is caused by the exchange of gluons, the weak nuclear force is caused by the exchange of W+, W-, and Z bosons, the electromagnetic force is caused by the exchange of photons, and gravity is supposed to be caused by the exchange of gravitons. Notice I say "supposed", because there is currently no direct evidence whatsoever for the existence of the graviton. Just about every modern physicist believes it must exist simply because all the other forces are caused by the exchange of particles. If gravity somehow operated by a different method it would pretty much ruin any chance of coming up with a TOE
We are capable of creating and breaking nuclear bonds, both in (un)controlled fission and uncontrolled fusion. We're pretty capable of transmuting elements from one to another; U-238 into Am-241 for smoke detectors, etc., even if these transmuted elements are just by-products of other processes. Is it gravity or is it gluons that hold together the protons in a nucleus despite their repellant similar charges? (Especially fascinating in some isotopes of helium and lithium that lack neutrons.) Even if we don't know, we have some control over the makeup of an atom.
First of all, it is definately gluons, or rather the strong nuclear force which is caused by the exchange of gluons among so-called "colored" particles (That has nothing to do with what most people think of as "color". Don't worry about it for now.), which cause the nucleus of the atom to be held together. The effect of gravity is incredibly weak when compared to the electromagnetic force and it could not possibly hold a nucleus together. The electromagnetic force, on the other hand, is rather weak when compared to the strong nuclear force.
Anyway, that's besides the point. You're talking about our "control" over the fundamental forces. But what does it mean to "control" a force? You use nuclear fission as an example, but all we do there is take some radioactive material, stick it all together, and let nature run its course. Is that really "controlling" it? Can I say that I am "controlling" gravity when I ride a rollercoaster? Just something to think about...
I'm not sure what this means, either. Fission and fusion relate to changes to the makeup of the nucleus; the net number of protons in the nucleus will change the number of electrons required to achieve equilibrium and therefore will affect the chemical properties of the element. Is it possible that weak nuclear refers to chemical properties brought on by the number of electrons required for equilibrium and therefore determines which other elements will chemically react with this element? Or is weak nuclear referring to things like photon emissions as electrons drop shells?
First off, everything you talked about is dealing with the electromagnetic force. The weak nuclear force is a strange force. It's not really responsible for a "force" in the sense of what we normally think of as a force. What it is responsible for is various processes which occur in the nucleus of an atom. The classic example is beta decay. Before I begin I should note that I may have the neutron and the proton reversed, as I can never remember which is udd and which is uud. What happens in beta decay is that a down quark inside a neutron changes to a up quark, converting the neutron (which consists of an up quark and two down quarks, udd) into a proton (uud). In the process, an electron and an anti-electron neutrino are released. The weak force is what is responsible for this process. The quark actually changes by emitting a W- boson, which immediately decays into the electron and the anti-electron neutrino. This is not the only process which the weak nuclear force is responsible for, but it is the only one I can come up with off the top of my head.
The emissions of radiation I see as being caused by the stronger nuclear forces. As the nucleus gets larger (and gets seeded with neutrons in the right ratios), it becomes more unstable, more likely to break the ?gravity? or ?gluonic? bonds that attach the similarily-charged protons which indirectly control the chemical properties. Net effect: fission occurs, energy is released. Alpha particles are just positive helium ions, beta particles are just electrons (that get shot from the positive nucleus, go figure) and gamma rays are photons of energy released as an infinitesimally small quantity of matter in the nucleus is converted to energy. So, since nuclear radiation is occuring very much as a factor of the strong bonds that hold a nucleus together, is radiation really a part of the weaker nuclear bonds? I must be missing something; I fail to understand.
You're actually pretty close to the mark with the radiation thing. It so happens that as the nucleus of an atom becomes larger and larger the strong nuclear force has difficulty holding it together and the nucleus become unstable. I do not remember the exact reason why this is so, but I believe it has something to do with the short-range nature of the nuclear forces (unlike electromagnetism and gravity, which continue on theoretically forever growing closer and closer to zero as distance increases, the nuclear forces actually have a "range", which is why their effects are limited to the nucleus of an atom), however don't quote me on that. Alpha particles are basically just pieces of a nucleus that get spit out, they're not that interesting ;-) . I talked about beta decay when I discussed the weak force. I should note something about Gamma particles however. Basically, what happens with a Gamma particle is that a neutron or a proton in the nucleus of an atom becomes "excited", similar to how electrons circling the nucleus become "excited" all the time. However, the neutron of the proton are controlled primarily by the strong nuclear force, which is a great deal stronger than the electromagnetic force, and so it takes significantly more energy to exicte them than it takes to excite an electron. Generally, the excitement of a neutron or a proton is caused by some other nuclear interaction (Alpha or Beta decay, being hit by a free neutron, colliding with another nucleus [fusion]) because that is the only way to get enough energy to excite a proton or neutron. When the proton or neutron returns to its previous "energy level" (we don't normally think of protons and neutrons as having energy levels, but really they do) it releases a photon, only this photon has far more energy than any photon released in normal chemical processes.
I really don't understand what you are asking in the last part of your paragraph there. Radiation can be caused by the strong nuclear or weak nuclear forces, as discussed above. It all depends on the type of radiation really.
Anyway, I'd love to continue this discussion with gravity (which I know is what you were asking about in the first place), but I've spent too much time talking already and I think my boss will be upset if I don't actually do some work today. Oh well, I hope I've cleared some things up.
Holy Shit! I've been using Go!Zilla for years and I had no idea this crap was on my computer! Of course I reinstall windoze fairly frequently, but I generally reinstall Go!Zilla as well, so that doesn't exactly help. Hell, it's a good program but it's not that good. There has got to be something illegal about this. How can slashdot not consider this a topic worth discussing?
Thank you for telling me about this. I can't believe it's been going on for this long...it rather disturbs me. At least on the plus side I run Linux most of the time and don't dial up that often in windoze. Still, the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is purge my computer.
Why can't everything be open source?