but where do they get the ANTImatter? I mean, it's not as though it's just laying-around waiting to be scooped up.
Per the Next Gen Tech Manual, the antimatter is stored in large, magnetic bottle slush-tanks in the secondary hull. The Enterprise D is designed for refueling every 3 years. Some antimatter can be created out of stellar hydrogen with special equipment installed near the slush-tanks.
In the Star Trek universe, the Deflector Dish on the front of the ship projects force fields to sweep larger particles and objects away from the ship. (Think of it like a space-age cow-pusher.) The Bussard collectors then use their own fields to pull in the Stellar Hydrogen for fuel. On top of that, the Enterprise is actually traveling at a small fraction of c. The warp field magnifies the distance traveled by warping space. The end result is that particles colliding with the ship would hit with a force more in line with when the ship is under impulse power.
They're not following canon at all, they're re-booting the series.
Except that the official line is that they are NOT rebooting the series. Which is rather two-faced when you think about it. On one hand you're telling the fans that you're not rebooting the series (at a time when fans are probably most receptive to a reboot) then you go and reboot it anyway.
With PR management like that, is it any wonder that fans are upset?
The REAL trailer is coming out in another five days. (Per startrekmovie.com where you can watch the previous trailer in HD.) Perhaps it would have been better to wait before proclaiming it? Or at least give useful information on the release date of the footage?
The real news at the moment is that a photo of the new Enterprise was released yesterday. I was expecting changes, but this awkward kitbash makes me very unhappy.
The new bridge was also revealed about a month ago. Many refer to it as the "iBridge" because of its resemblance to Apple hardware. Personally, I'm mostly happy with the bridge design. It appears to be functional and otherwise looks nice.
I just wish they hadn't made a parody out of the old girl.:-(
"Let's make sure history never forgets the name, Enterprise." --Captain Picard (Yesterday's Enterprise)
2) Obama made a more sane VP selection. Frankly, there were far more negative things to say about Palin.
You mean the "One Man Gaffe Machine"? If McCain hadn't chosen Palin, Biden would have ended up just as much an albatross around Obama's neck as Palin was for McCain.
The good news is that he's guaranteed to be the next Dan Quayle, ensuring that we Americans will be well-entertained over the next Presidential term.;-)
Pricing: Sun Storage 7110: $10,995 for 2TB; Sun Storage 7210 starts at $34,995 for 11.5TB; Sun Storage 7410: Single node version starts at $57,490 for 12TB; cluster version (with two server nodes) starts at $89,490 for 12TB.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Unless I'm misunderstanding this hardware, the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication. In that way, the data is safe from failure in the same way that GoogleFS protects against individual machine failures. The only difference is that Google probably doesn't pay $11,000 for 2TB of storage.:-/
One of these days, I really will understand why Sun regularly shoots themselves in the foot. Until then, I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea. (i.e. I'd really love to see Sun bring Google-style reliability from unreliability to the market.)
The Wii's genius is that the "awesome" games don't fit the mold that other consoles have set. Games like Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, Excite Truck, Zack and Wiki, and Defend Your Castle may seem like budget or cash-in titles, but they truly are what makes the system awesome.
Just my 2 cents worth of advice. Take it for what it's worth.:-)
I think you're misreading a chart somewhere. Circuit City shares dropped to 11 cents this morning, and was halted almost immediately by the New York Stock exchange. If there's no trading going on, there's no way the value can fall below 11 cents.
Of course, 11 cents a share with trading halted is just another way of saying that the stock is worthless. It's not even worth the paper it's printed on.
So let me see if I can get this straight: You don't want to buy any games for your Wii because you don't play it. But you don't play your Wii because you refuse to buy any games for it?
Wing Commander, Duke Nukem I & II, BioForge, Command and Conquer, Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity, Secret of Monkey Island, System Shock, Sim City, The Incredible Machine, Where in the [World|Time|Space] is Carmen Sandiego?, California Raisins, Space Quest, Prince of Persia, King's Quest, Myst, Doom, X-Com, Under a Killing Moon
Just to name a few.:-P
I miss Gaming Goodness(TM) and all the pointy sticks that went with it. *sigh*
Wii Ware selection is still sparse and uncompelling
Are you serious?
- Defend Your Castle - Toki Tori - World of Goo - Mega Man 9 - Alien Crush Returns - Lost Winds - Bomberman Blast - Tetris Party - Art Style: Orbient - Dr. Mario RX - Star Soldier R - Strong Bad - Wild West Guns - Gyrostarr
While a few of the items do not appeal to me personally, I included them because they appeal to a majority of other gamers I've spoken with. However, the super-majority of the list are games I have downloaded and enjoyed. (WiiWare is going to send me to the poor house at this rate!:-P) The games I didn't like on that list are merely a difference in gaming preferences.
So there is certainly more than enough to choose from. If you can't find a bunch of great games on WiiWare, you either are too picky or have already played them all because you've got WAY too much time and money.;-)
Recent games aren't games so much as simulations. Simulations can be fun at times but they don't have the same game play value as a real game.
Bingo. Games used to be fun because of their interesting mechanics, not their realism. We used to have such wonderfully varied genres ranging from platformers, side-scrolling shooters, space combat, point and click adventures, "arcade" games (e.g. QBert/Donkey Kong/Galaga), action-puzzle games, shmups, etc. Once gaming went down a path of realism, the lines between games started to blur more and more. Some of the genres that were once popular got lost in the transition to greater realism. Pretty soon the only genres left were First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters/Platformers, and Racing.
Some of the newer games are trying to differentiate themselves with interesting mechanics (e.g. Using a cyber-arm to swing around, gymnastics, portals, vertical climbing and gravity effects), which does occasionally make the games more compelling. But at the end of the day a GAME does not need realism any more than Clue or Monopoly need the realism of a hexagonal wargame. It just needs to be fun. That's an aspect of video games that modern gaming is having to rediscover.
That's because you're taking technology for granted. If you weren't there, that technology couldn't be deployed to help people get their jobs done. Which means no servers, no desktops, no laptops, no networks, no printers, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero.
Now all you have to do is compute how much it would cost to get common tasks done. Take handouts for a meeting as an example. Right now I'm sure that the employees type up the documents then print a few copies off the printer. Since we're talking about modern wordpressor technology, it would take them 2-3 complete, hand-written (or perhaps typewriter typed) drafts to develop the same document. Then they'd need to run the final document through the copy machine for the number of copies they need.
How much would all that labor cost?
That document would then have to be backed up into filing cabinets. Take a rough estimate of the number of documents that go through your system. Work out a figure for how many documents would fit in your average filing cabinet. How much would those cabinets cost? How much would the extra floor space cost? How much would staff to manage the filed documents cost?
Now on to email. Remember inter-office memos? Back when entire mail departments were needed just to distribute memos between employees? Find out how many employees usually staffed these mail rooms. Add to this the cost of inboxes on desks, mail carrying equipment, space needed by the average mail room, and/or (if your company is really big) the infrastructure cost of pnuematic tubes.
Does anyone in your company do spreadsheets? Imagine if they had to do these sheets by hand, on paper. Figure out how many seconds it would take you to do a spreadsheet calculation by hand. (Perhaps with the assistance of a calculator.) Take that time and work out a cost per calculation based on some common salary. (e.g. $100k/yr) Now multiply it by a few hundred to account for the dozens of calculations in a spreadsheet that must be calculated and recalculated for each change to the document. That is the cost of a single spreadsheet.
Presentations... remember overhead projectors? What you want to do is compute the cost of overhead projectors, plus the cost to have a third-party like Kinkos print up a set of transparencies. Take the number of conference rooms, multiply by the cost of an overhead projector. Estimate the number of presentations per year and work out what it would cost to print, say, 50 transparencies per presentation. Multiply those figures and add to the previous overhead projector figures.
I haven't even gotten into subjects like billing, reporting, and other data processing. Feel free to work out the cost of mainframes or (even worse) a small army of accountants and typists.
If you're following along so far, you should already have a rather significant figure. One that should dwarf your IT budget. And you should also have a greater appreciation for why corporations of the 60's and 70's were so amazingly big.
[W]hat we've got to figure out is can we store the material properly? Can we make sure that they're secure? Can we deal with the expense? Because the problem is, is that a lot of our nuclear industry, it reinvents the wheel. Each nuclear power plant that is proposed has a new design, has--it, it has all kinds of changes, there are all sorts of cost overruns. So it has not been an effective option.
I'm hoping it's possible to swing his opinion toward strong support for nuclear energy. Because most of the issues he raises have already been solved, but are blocked by outdated and ineffective government regulation.
Barack is not so much against the idea as he is the implementation. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to realize that much of the implementation problems are caused by the regulations around nuclear power. Waste disposal in particular is problematic because the government requires waste disposal rather than reuse and reprocessing. (I'm not going to go into the full details of the issue, but let's just say that it was a pointless attempt to prevent terrorists from getting Nuclear bombs. More security theater.)
so you have a problem with the fighting forces of world war i and world war ii? where we gave 18 year olds guns and made them serve on the front lines of mayhem and death? i'm just saying, you'd better have a problem with the idea of a military draft, for the sake of intellectual honesty
Actually, I do have a problem with it. One of the key force multipliers that the brass has identified is that a voluntary fighting force is many times more effective than a drafted force. One of the key issues in WWI and WWII is that our men were dying without ever firing their weapon.
It's not that they never had an opportunity, but rather that they were not professional soldiers. Being pressed into service with the fairly limited weapons training of the time did not train them to respond on instinct. They thought too much before pulling the trigger, and it got a lot of good men killed.
However, the draft was a necessity for WWI & II. It wasn't until Vietnam that the true horrors of a draft became apparent. How many good men died in a war where we never lost a battle but lost the war? How many vets came back to be spat on, beat up, and otherwise disowned by the American people? How many vets lost limbs or were crippled only to come back and find hatred rather than care?
The draft is an evil thing. Sometimes a necessary evil, but evil none the less. I can only hope that the US will never have to issue a draft again.
...now we'll see if we can get him to change his policy on Nuclear Power (a necessity for cleaner power), pay more attention to what the AMA has to say on insurance, convince him not to raise taxes in the middle of an economic crisis*, and plead with him to leave Griffin as head of NASA and keep him properly funded. Anything I'm missing?
While I'm being a little bit snarky, I think it's great that Obama has this outlet to let our voices be heard. I look forward to seeing if he listens.:-)
* The $250,000 bit doesn't matter. What's more concerning is when Bush's existing tax breaks expire. When Hoover raised taxes in 1932, it caused a complete economic collapse of an already precarious situation.
Webkit is LGPL. As long as they have the engine separated into the same sort of controls they have today, it should meet the LGPL license just fine. Perhaps with a bit of wrapper code released as LGPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Per the Next Gen Tech Manual, the antimatter is stored in large, magnetic bottle slush-tanks in the secondary hull. The Enterprise D is designed for refueling every 3 years. Some antimatter can be created out of stellar hydrogen with special equipment installed near the slush-tanks.
In the Star Trek universe, the Deflector Dish on the front of the ship projects force fields to sweep larger particles and objects away from the ship. (Think of it like a space-age cow-pusher.) The Bussard collectors then use their own fields to pull in the Stellar Hydrogen for fuel. On top of that, the Enterprise is actually traveling at a small fraction of c. The warp field magnifies the distance traveled by warping space. The end result is that particles colliding with the ship would hit with a force more in line with when the ship is under impulse power.
Except that the official line is that they are NOT rebooting the series. Which is rather two-faced when you think about it. On one hand you're telling the fans that you're not rebooting the series (at a time when fans are probably most receptive to a reboot) then you go and reboot it anyway.
With PR management like that, is it any wonder that fans are upset?
The REAL trailer is coming out in another five days. (Per startrekmovie.com where you can watch the previous trailer in HD.) Perhaps it would have been better to wait before proclaiming it? Or at least give useful information on the release date of the footage?
The real news at the moment is that a photo of the new Enterprise was released yesterday. I was expecting changes, but this awkward kitbash makes me very unhappy.
The new bridge was also revealed about a month ago. Many refer to it as the "iBridge" because of its resemblance to Apple hardware. Personally, I'm mostly happy with the bridge design. It appears to be functional and otherwise looks nice.
I just wish they hadn't made a parody out of the old girl. :-(
Well... see... um... you do go by the name "Ghandi"... ?
Yeah, he already said that. Better answers include:
- Kids Electronics Lab
- Eyeclops Microscope
- Commodore 64
- Lego Mindstorms
Those are just a few toys that can be used educationally to learn about science, engineering, and math.
You mean the "One Man Gaffe Machine"? If McCain hadn't chosen Palin, Biden would have ended up just as much an albatross around Obama's neck as Palin was for McCain.
The good news is that he's guaranteed to be the next Dan Quayle, ensuring that we Americans will be well-entertained over the next Presidential term. ;-)
How does 2TB of Solid State Memory compare to 2TB (14 x 146GB) of spinning disks? Apples to oranges, my friend. Apples to oranges.
(FWIW, you need to spend about $71 grand (!) to get a mere 18GB of SSD. Almost like a cracker-jack prize or something. :-P)
Sure.
Heck, I'll even throw in the same vendor!
Even better. It will have had the same testing and engineering, PLUS a pre-existing history of operating in the marketplace.
I give you, the Sun Fire X4500 Server:
12TB (48x250GB) - $23,995.00
24TB (48 x 500GB) - $34,995.00
48TB (48 x 1TB) - $61,995.00
Let us compare with Sun's new line, shall we?
11.5 TB (46 x 250GB) - $34,995.00
22.5 TB (45 x 500GB) - $71,995.00
44.0 TB (44 x 1TB) - $117,995.00
So... twice the price for the same storage? To steal a line from a very famous "programmer":
Brillant
If you're driving 48 SATA drives on one bus, you're:
A) Not looking at the minimum 11.5TB layout
B) Not paying $35,000
C) Not a small-business customer
Which brings me back to: Sun is promising to target the small business and yet totally missed the mark. This is Enterprise hardware.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Unless I'm misunderstanding this hardware, the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication. In that way, the data is safe from failure in the same way that GoogleFS protects against individual machine failures. The only difference is that Google probably doesn't pay $11,000 for 2TB of storage. :-/
One of these days, I really will understand why Sun regularly shoots themselves in the foot. Until then, I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea. (i.e. I'd really love to see Sun bring Google-style reliability from unreliability to the market.)
BTW, here's the link to Sun's marketing on this:
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp
It's actually pretty cool tech. Sun could own the market if they just understood how the market views pricing and features.
The Wii's genius is that the "awesome" games don't fit the mold that other consoles have set. Games like Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, Excite Truck, Zack and Wiki, and Defend Your Castle may seem like budget or cash-in titles, but they truly are what makes the system awesome.
Just my 2 cents worth of advice. Take it for what it's worth. :-)
I think you're misreading a chart somewhere. Circuit City shares dropped to 11 cents this morning, and was halted almost immediately by the New York Stock exchange. If there's no trading going on, there's no way the value can fall below 11 cents.
Of course, 11 cents a share with trading halted is just another way of saying that the stock is worthless. It's not even worth the paper it's printed on.
Unconscionability
So let me see if I can get this straight: You don't want to buy any games for your Wii because you don't play it. But you don't play your Wii because you refuse to buy any games for it?
I think I see your problem.
Dragon? What Dragon?
Personally, I can't figure out why more games don't have killer ducks. Those mofos were the scariest fowl ever rendered on a low-res display!
Wing Commander, Duke Nukem I & II, BioForge, Command and Conquer, Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity, Secret of Monkey Island, System Shock, Sim City, The Incredible Machine, Where in the [World|Time|Space] is Carmen Sandiego?, California Raisins, Space Quest, Prince of Persia, King's Quest, Myst, Doom, X-Com, Under a Killing Moon
Just to name a few. :-P
I miss Gaming Goodness(TM) and all the pointy sticks that went with it. *sigh*
Are you serious?
- Defend Your Castle
- Toki Tori
- World of Goo
- Mega Man 9
- Alien Crush Returns
- Lost Winds
- Bomberman Blast
- Tetris Party
- Art Style: Orbient
- Dr. Mario RX
- Star Soldier R
- Strong Bad
- Wild West Guns
- Gyrostarr
While a few of the items do not appeal to me personally, I included them because they appeal to a majority of other gamers I've spoken with. However, the super-majority of the list are games I have downloaded and enjoyed. (WiiWare is going to send me to the poor house at this rate! :-P) The games I didn't like on that list are merely a difference in gaming preferences.
So there is certainly more than enough to choose from. If you can't find a bunch of great games on WiiWare, you either are too picky or have already played them all because you've got WAY too much time and money. ;-)
Bingo. Games used to be fun because of their interesting mechanics, not their realism. We used to have such wonderfully varied genres ranging from platformers, side-scrolling shooters, space combat, point and click adventures, "arcade" games (e.g. QBert/Donkey Kong/Galaga), action-puzzle games, shmups, etc. Once gaming went down a path of realism, the lines between games started to blur more and more. Some of the genres that were once popular got lost in the transition to greater realism. Pretty soon the only genres left were First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters/Platformers, and Racing.
Some of the newer games are trying to differentiate themselves with interesting mechanics (e.g. Using a cyber-arm to swing around, gymnastics, portals, vertical climbing and gravity effects), which does occasionally make the games more compelling. But at the end of the day a GAME does not need realism any more than Clue or Monopoly need the realism of a hexagonal wargame. It just needs to be fun. That's an aspect of video games that modern gaming is having to rediscover.
That's because you're taking technology for granted. If you weren't there, that technology couldn't be deployed to help people get their jobs done. Which means no servers, no desktops, no laptops, no networks, no printers, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero.
Now all you have to do is compute how much it would cost to get common tasks done. Take handouts for a meeting as an example. Right now I'm sure that the employees type up the documents then print a few copies off the printer. Since we're talking about modern wordpressor technology, it would take them 2-3 complete, hand-written (or perhaps typewriter typed) drafts to develop the same document. Then they'd need to run the final document through the copy machine for the number of copies they need.
How much would all that labor cost?
That document would then have to be backed up into filing cabinets. Take a rough estimate of the number of documents that go through your system. Work out a figure for how many documents would fit in your average filing cabinet. How much would those cabinets cost? How much would the extra floor space cost? How much would staff to manage the filed documents cost?
Now on to email. Remember inter-office memos? Back when entire mail departments were needed just to distribute memos between employees? Find out how many employees usually staffed these mail rooms. Add to this the cost of inboxes on desks, mail carrying equipment, space needed by the average mail room, and/or (if your company is really big) the infrastructure cost of pnuematic tubes.
Does anyone in your company do spreadsheets? Imagine if they had to do these sheets by hand, on paper. Figure out how many seconds it would take you to do a spreadsheet calculation by hand. (Perhaps with the assistance of a calculator.) Take that time and work out a cost per calculation based on some common salary. (e.g. $100k/yr) Now multiply it by a few hundred to account for the dozens of calculations in a spreadsheet that must be calculated and recalculated for each change to the document. That is the cost of a single spreadsheet.
Presentations... remember overhead projectors? What you want to do is compute the cost of overhead projectors, plus the cost to have a third-party like Kinkos print up a set of transparencies. Take the number of conference rooms, multiply by the cost of an overhead projector. Estimate the number of presentations per year and work out what it would cost to print, say, 50 transparencies per presentation. Multiply those figures and add to the previous overhead projector figures.
I haven't even gotten into subjects like billing, reporting, and other data processing. Feel free to work out the cost of mainframes or (even worse) a small army of accountants and typists.
If you're following along so far, you should already have a rather significant figure. One that should dwarf your IT budget. And you should also have a greater appreciation for why corporations of the 60's and 70's were so amazingly big.
Here's a link directly from the horse's mouth:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/05/barack-obama-on-nuclear-energy.html
I'm hoping it's possible to swing his opinion toward strong support for nuclear energy. Because most of the issues he raises have already been solved, but are blocked by outdated and ineffective government regulation.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/NuclearPower
Barack is not so much against the idea as he is the implementation. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to realize that much of the implementation problems are caused by the regulations around nuclear power. Waste disposal in particular is problematic because the government requires waste disposal rather than reuse and reprocessing. (I'm not going to go into the full details of the issue, but let's just say that it was a pointless attempt to prevent terrorists from getting Nuclear bombs. More security theater.)
Actually, I do have a problem with it. One of the key force multipliers that the brass has identified is that a voluntary fighting force is many times more effective than a drafted force. One of the key issues in WWI and WWII is that our men were dying without ever firing their weapon.
It's not that they never had an opportunity, but rather that they were not professional soldiers. Being pressed into service with the fairly limited weapons training of the time did not train them to respond on instinct. They thought too much before pulling the trigger, and it got a lot of good men killed.
However, the draft was a necessity for WWI & II. It wasn't until Vietnam that the true horrors of a draft became apparent. How many good men died in a war where we never lost a battle but lost the war? How many vets came back to be spat on, beat up, and otherwise disowned by the American people? How many vets lost limbs or were crippled only to come back and find hatred rather than care?
The draft is an evil thing. Sometimes a necessary evil, but evil none the less. I can only hope that the US will never have to issue a draft again.
...now we'll see if we can get him to change his policy on Nuclear Power (a necessity for cleaner power), pay more attention to what the AMA has to say on insurance, convince him not to raise taxes in the middle of an economic crisis*, and plead with him to leave Griffin as head of NASA and keep him properly funded. Anything I'm missing?
While I'm being a little bit snarky, I think it's great that Obama has this outlet to let our voices be heard. I look forward to seeing if he listens. :-)
* The $250,000 bit doesn't matter. What's more concerning is when Bush's existing tax breaks expire. When Hoover raised taxes in 1932, it caused a complete economic collapse of an already precarious situation.
Webkit is LGPL. As long as they have the engine separated into the same sort of controls they have today, it should meet the LGPL license just fine. Perhaps with a bit of wrapper code released as LGPL.