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User: Laser_47

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  1. Redundancy, not priority on If This Had Been An Actual Emergency · · Score: 1

    When 9/11 happened the weaknesses that we saw on the net were web servers falling appart as everyone crammed a http request down CNN's throat. The only place that didn't get hammered was /. because it's used to the load.

    Wouldn't the govt. be better off creating a P2P wrapper protocol with a structure of nodes that help create redundant links for IM, whiteboard sharing, and VoIP?
    Send many packets to a single destination that have multiple, redudant routes so that reliability goes up. TCP/IP has some of this built in, but if a core router somewhere buckles under load RIP/BGP/IGRP takes some time to converge and sessions would get broken.

  2. Re:What could we do on Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth · · Score: 1

    Depends on how far away we notice it. Ideas have been pushing it off trajectory with either rockets (lotsa fuel needed) or exploding a nuclear device nearby pushing it off course. If it's on the far side of Jupiter when we do that, we only need to push it 0.0001 of a degree to alter it's course enough to miss us. If we don't notice until it's on the other side of the moon, we won't have time to get the paperwork together to launch a shuttle, let alone do something about it.

  3. Re:Tesla was a crackpot on Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth · · Score: 1

    his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks

    Energy out of thin air, like your AM radio?
    Death rays, like your microwave?

    Whatever.

  4. Re:Retinal damage on Laser HUD Projected on Retina · · Score: 1

    Photons from a laser have a small divergence as part of being coherent. That makes them dificult for the lens in your eye to focus it onto the back of your retna, and can concentrate more photons on a single area in your eye than desired. Even small power lasers, like a 1mW pointer, has that power concentrated in a single beam of light energy. If you took a 1W flashlight, and concentrated all the light that flys off in all directions in one concentrated direction, the result would be brighter than you think.

    The problem with something like this is that it's going to have some GUI interface that will draw consistant patterns in certain areas. Dialog boxes would always be centered in your view. Close the window "X" buttons would be in the upper left. There may be a box around everything showing you the visible drawing area. Those patterns may get burned onto your vision after log exposure to a system like this, like an old vga monitor that's been running a server for too long in a closet. I wouldn't want to see a "Press Contol-Alt-Delete to Logon" message every time I close my eyes!

  5. Old News on Laser HUD Projected on Retina · · Score: 1

    This has the same article in it posted in June.

  6. Not interested in redhat either on AOL Time Warner Files Anti-Trust Suit against MS · · Score: 1

    According to MSNBC AOL/TW wasn't interested in Redhat.

  7. Re:ReMooting points. on Measuring The Distance From Earth To Moon · · Score: 1

    There is no dark side of the moon. Matter of fact it's all dark! (thump-thump, thump-thump, thump...)

    Actually light does hit the far side of the moon, but we can't see it from the earth. The lockstep of the moon's rotation and it's orbit around earth means that one side always faces us, but when the moon is new (dark) the far side is lit up, we just can't see it from our vantage point.

  8. Flexability's the key on Making Strategy Games with...Strategy? · · Score: 1

    I've played several RTS games since the original Warcraft, and I've seen actual improvements to the genre, and a lot of hype also. The best games I've seen so far is Total Annihilation from Cavedog. The game is eons old in CPU time, and still has better playability than several others that are newer. Even after playing it for years, a master at the game learned something new about it just last week! A game that has such a broad range of characteristics has to have been well designed.

    Having different pieces that have different functions is the basis for tactics in RTS type games. Adding to the diversity helps a player decide a particular play style. In checkers, all the pieces are the same, and there's only a couple of types of moves. The strategy involved is "hope the other player screws up so I can force him into a bad position." Chess has the same playfield, but pieces that move in different ways, and this allows the player to rush, build defensivly, or some medium between the two. Having a large supply of units to pick from allows combinations of attacks, and makes the game more diverse.

    An infinite "technology tree" would be an additional way to diversify units. In Warcraft 2 the blacksmith shop let you upgrade your armor twice and your weapons twice. In big battles this was done by both sides in a matter of 10 minutes, and didn't really do anybody any good. If this was a curve of diminishing returns that never ended, a person could make a piece nasty in a particular characteristic. A doubling in price for an additional 10% increase in that charataristic would allow a player to custom taylor their pieces to their style of play. You could make tanks that are + 160% armor, but do you really want to pay $6,553,600 for that upgrade? Of course, I could negate it by making my tanks shoot + 160% for the same $6,553,600. Or a player could balance weapons, armor, unit speed, firing speed, sight distance, mining capacity, etc. Apply the same philosiphy to buildings - faster unit production, cheaper unit prodution, higher resource output, etc.

    Small details that I've seen in a couple of games that were neat, but didn't make the gameplay better were automatic map copy from the host if you didn't have it, saving the game to be resumed later, entering the game in the middle to watch, etc. This makes getting a game going at a LAN party smoother and more enjoyable...

  9. Re:Laser board as BIG-TV on LaserMAME: Playing Tempest In A Whole New Light · · Score: 1

    The projector won't have enought horizontal bandwidth. The laser projector works by moving a teeny-tiny mirror back and forth to move the laser around. To scan a simple NTSC requires a horizontal bandwidth of 15kHz. The momentum/inerta of a mirror is much more than that of an electon beam.

  10. Re:The OS in ROM on Other Uses For The Linux RAM Disk? · · Score: 1

    A flash ROM has a limited number of write-cycles before it begins to flip out. You obviously won't be able to use it for anything like swap or /tmp, but shouldn't even use it for medium-term things like email. Also, the initialization routine of several devices takes a piece of the boot time, so you might not notice a big boot increase, but maybe once the system is running, X should load faster.