The problem was that Sega was selling them at a loss. While the console itself sold fairly well, the games for it sold too slowly for Sega to turn a profit on the Dreamcast (Sega hoped to make up for selling the console at a loss by getting royalties from the games, as well as selling developer licenses). The reason for games Dreamcast games not selling well enough: the Dreamcast came out at a time when many consumers were perfectly happy with their PS1 games (like you said), and lots more were still on the way.
Sega had something like a one year lead over Sony. Had they perhaps waited a few more months (meanwhile trying to get 3rd party developers to stop developing for the PS1 and start developing for the Dreamcast), they might still be a contender in the hardware wars. On the other hand, the release of the PS2 would've been that much closer, so the odds that many consumers would have just waited for the PS2 are greater.
And while the Dreamcast was easier to develop for, Sony had the advantage of coming off the success of the PS1, and all the mindshare and free press that came with that.
Dammit Sega, make another console and call it the Genesis 2 (Megadrive 2 for the European market)! And try to get some COMPETANT execs to market the damn thing! And don't drop the ball so quickly! I still have my Saturn, and bought games for it 'till the end, despite my friends telling me things like, "Dude, get a PlayStation so you can play Twisted Metal 67 and Crash Bandicoot 45!" Same with my Genesis (I never gave a shit about the SNES and "kiddie" games like Donky Kong Country, I wanted to play a good version of Jurassic Park, never mind the fact that I was obsessed with Sonic 1, 2, & 3 and games like Vectorman; the Genesis was the king of side-scrolling platform games), and I would've done the same with my Dreamcast had someone not stolen it. I'd do it again with yet another console if I had the chance. And this time, make a "real" Sonic The Hedgehog game for it!
However, a question: The high pressure area pushing the helicopter (or plane, or whatever) into the low pressure area above it is what keeps the aircraft in the air, yes? In that case, the high pressure area also pushing air downward is just a side effect, and doesn't directly affect the aircraft unless it is at a low altitude, right? In other words, the high pressure area forcing the aircraft upwards into the low pressure area is the desired effect, and the equal and opposite reaction of the high pressure air also going downwards is unused much of the time.
If that is the case, how am I wrong? Aren't we both arguing the same thing?
There are a lot of people (I am not one of them) who are convinced that the rotorblades on a helicopter work the same way as a household fan, or a ship's screw, which is incorrect; rotorblades are just wings that spin. I thought you were agreeing with them (read: you too thought that rotorblade = screw that's in the air), but now I see that you aren't. Sorry.
In fact, if the air pressure was close enough to the water pressure, you could go outside and swim around (until you got hypothermia from the extremely cold water, anyway).
I should point out that you'd still need an airlock to go outside the sub. However, because the air in your lungs has enough pressure to counteract the pressure of the water, and because the rest of your body has adjusted to it, you don't get crushed.
So at least Sphere (the movie, didn't read the book) got something right;)
Each of the rotorblades is a wing. It generates lift by creating a low-pressure area above itself, just like an airplane's wing. This lift is what enables the helicopter to fly.
While the air being forced downwards probably helps, that alone isn't what keeps the helicopter airborne.
Funny, I don't EVER remember hearing about Lewis & Clark trekking through the Northwest Passage when my class was learning about Lewis & Clark in school, because the Northwest Passage doesn't exist!
Lots of people died while trying to find it, though.
Here's the (abridged) story of Lewis & Clark:
After greatly expanding US territory via the Louisiana Purchase (the Louisiana Purchase covered a lot more land than what is now known as the state of Louisiana, FYI), in 1804 then-president Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark to explore the new territory.
Their expedition ended up taking just over 2 years and took them all the way to the Pacific coast.
However, the article does say: " 'The maiden voyage of Deep Flight Aviator in San Francisco Bay,' they said, 'ranks with the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk and Lewis and Clark's trek through the Northwest Passage.' "
The article is just quoting the guys who built the sub. It isn't the journalist who is incorrect, but rather the sub's designers, or so it would seem.
Let me explain: each rotorblade on a helocopter is a wing than spins. The lift generated by these rapidly spinning wings is what keeps the helicopter airborne. The side effect of this is that air gets forced downward, but this byproduct of the spinning rotorblades is unused.
I always thought that the bends occurred when ascending (coming back up to the surface), not descending (diving).
Being in a submersible that increased the air pressure to help ease the stress on the pressure hull therefore wouldn't cause a problem, so long as the air pressure was slowly brought back to 1 atmosphere on your way back up to the surface.
If memory serves, nearly all submersibles capable of deep submergence increase the air pressure at least a little to help counter the pressure of the water. In fact, if the air pressure was close enough to the water pressure, you could go outside and swim around (until you got hypothermia from the extremely cold water, anyway).
The only real problems with increasing the air pressure are oxygen concentration (as you increase the air pressure, you increase the amount of oxygen per cubic inch, thereby increasing the amount that you breathe in; too much oxygen will kill you) and making sure that the pressure is released slowly enough to prevent the bends (possibly resulting in the crew having to sit inside the sub after it has been brought back onboard while they wait for the pressure to drop to 1 atmosphere, depending on the sub's ascent rate).
IIRC, the bends only occur when you ascend too quickly (or the pressure in a pressurized sub drops too fast). The cure is to sit inside a pressure chamber, with the pressure racked up to equal what you would've felt at whatever depth you were at when you began your (too rapid) ascent, and then have the pressure slowly brought back to 1 atmosphere.
Face it, Roland Emerich was pulling insipid crap out of his ass (again). All his movies follow the same pattern: - Excellent first act, makes movie seem full of potential - Boring second act. Dumb melodrama. Lots of talking heads. We usually learn more about the bad guys than we could even want to know. - Lame and uninspired third act. Protagonists are down and out, but at the last minute they pull something together and kick the bad guys' ass.
Take, for example, ID4: - First act: aliens come and blow shit up - Second act: they're down in the Area 51 bunker for what seems like ages. Lots of "talking heads" scenes. - Third act: down and out, all seems lost. Suddenly, Jeff Goldblum has a "Eureka!" moment, and after some trite "Tell my children I love them!" self-sacrifice crap, the good guys win.
Stargate: - First act: the stargate is discovered. They go through it, and come across the natives. - Second act: Mr. Crying Game arrives, we get some uninspiring examples of how bad of a person he is. Then he kicks the heroes' asses. - Third act: down and out, all seems lost. Then, "unexpectedly", Guy From Supernova won't kill his friends, and Boys Who Rebelled Against The Establishment Because They Saw The True Path help our heroes save the day.
The Patriot: - First act: the colonists get sick of the Limeys and start some shit. While clearly outclassed and outmanned, there is still Hope. We see the Good Guys use their Good Guy Intuition to kick some British ass. - Second act: Colonel Bad Guy On Horseback gets permission to do whatever he wants. Cue melodrama about how much he's beating the Good Guys. In a particularly underwhelming scene, Good Guy From Down Under gets whacked by Colonel Bad Guy On Horseback. Mucho mas talking heads. - Third act: All seems lost. Both of That Braveheart Dude's sons are dead. The rebels are getting their asses handed to them. George Washington is going to be taking it up the poop chute Real Soon Now. "Unexpectedly" That Braveheart Dude comes up with a plan, and the colonists pull a Hail Mary tactic in the following battle. Cue trite "Dead Good Guy From Down Under told us some insipid 'insightful' crap in Act Two, so we're doing it by building a house" scene.
Yes, it's true that most movies follow a three act layout, but none are as formulaic as a Roland Emerich movie. None have as uninteresting of a second act or as uninspired of a third act as a Roland Emerich movie.
1)You'd still need to know about their CPU instruction set, as well as the architecture of the rest of the machine. The virtual machine that Java code runs upon has to translate the Java instructions into instructions for your CPU, which requires knowledge by the virtual machine writer of said CPU. 2)Yes, but we wouldn't even know their network protocols, i.e. our network couldn't interface with theirs 3)An invading military force that doesn't at least TRY to make sure their communications and computer systems are secure? 4)You can send then trojans all day long, it won't make a difference unless they actually run them on a live, production system. The only way to guarantee a virus would spread across their network would be to root one of their servers 5)I was making a joke. Of course there are still people around who know EBCDIC, all 5 of them;)
You can see evolution and natural selection happening right now. Don't believe me? Go to your local doctor's office.
Years ago, penicillin used to be able to kill just about everything that you could be infected with. However, mutant strains of common bacteria that were resistant to penicillin survived, while the strains that hadn't evolved to resist penicillin died off. There's natural selection in action for you. It's still happening: drug companies are developing new antibiotics every day to combat the mutant strains of bacteria and viruses that have become resistant to yesterday's antibiotics.
As for the evolution part: take some kind of bacteria that causes people to get sick. There are always going to be a few of each kind that mutate. That's all evolution really is, IIRC: mutation and heredity via DNA.
Some of the sun's radiation passes through a bacterium, and slightly alters its DNA. This bacterium then divides. Now, if the genetic mutation that the sun caused is beneficial, then natural selection means that it has a greater chance to survive than its non-mutated brethren. If the mutation is detrimental, then the new strain will soon die off.
Assuming that the aliens designed their computers the same way we do, there is still virtually no chance of a virus we made even running on their computers.
1)Completely different CPU instruction sets 2)They probably have some form of network security. 3)Even us stupid human sysops know that you don't just run any old program that you get off the network. You verify that the person who gave you the program is trustworthy, then you verify that the program itself doesn't do anything bad by running it on a standalone system. 4)The only way to get their computers to run our code would be to root their OS. 5)Of course, we wouldn't know anything about their OS. And since they're aliens, they probably use EBCDIC instead of ASCII;)
Well, few (actually, none that I know of) raster graphics formats contain data in the form: At X, Y, the pixel color should be RGB
Rather, it's just a long array of data, with a few bytes of header information before that (to specify things like X size, Y size, color depth, etc.).
Some formats, like TIFF, are more flexible than this, but all formats generally follow the same layout.
Compressed image formats aren't much different, except that there's some extra information in the header that specifies things like where each scanline starts, the amount of compression, etc.
No, they will use nuclear power to move the ship through space. Read the article.
Basically, you use the heat from a nuclear reaction to heat up some material, and then shoot the heated material out the back of the ship. Bang (no pun intended), you've got a nuclear rocket. It's more efficient than chemical rockets, and you don't have to carry as much of the ancillary stuff. I think that hydrogen would be a good source. Just inject it somewhere to be heated, and let the reactor do the rest.
Additionally, they could probably (and probably will) use the nuclear reactor to generate electricity.
The only real problems with using nuclear-powered rockets are the people who will inevitably, not understanding the details or why a nuclear rocket is necessary, proclaim "No! Nuclear anything is bad! We're hurint earth! Yes, I understand that the rocket will be far from earth, but still! It's the principle of it!" and try to kill the project. That and radiation shielding. While we've got enough technology to shield the reactor enough to bring the rad levels down to a safe level on things like submarines and aircraft carriers, we have yet to solve the problem of shielding the entire ship from things like cosmic radiation. The astronauts on the ISS experience higher radiation levels than do the crew of a nuclear submarine. Interplanetary space is boiling with radiation IIRC.
It might be that it's more of a pain to maintain a few static pages in a sea of dynamic scripts than to let Perl/PHP/ASP/JSP take care of everything.
The way I was describing, you _do_ let Perl/PHP/whatever take care of everything. It generates the static HTML pages for you. If you make an update, it generates them again, based on the new content.
In case I didn't make it clear, you yourself don't modify the static page once it's been generated. Rather, whenever you update your page, you do it via a Perl script the same as you would for a script that generates a new page for every view, but instead this one then updates the static page for you.
And this guy has said that the thing that killed his server was that he was using a Perl script to serve up the images. If he needed a dynamic image gallery, write a Perl script to generate a static HTML page. The page itself will be static, sparing the server, yet the content can be dynamic because whenever you upload a new image the Perl script can generate a new static HTML page containing the new pic.
What I usually do when I need to use CGI is instead of a Perl script that coughs up the dynamic content on every page view, I have a Perl script that creates a static HTML page from the dynamic content whenever new content is uploaded.
I get the best of both worlds: being able to update from anywhere, and since the page only has to be generated by the Perl script _once_ instead of _every page view_, the CPU overhead is minimal.
I mean, really, using _any_ language such as Perl, PHP, etc., to generate your content for every page view is kind of amateurish.
Yeah, I imagine using a Perl script to serve up your images isn't the most CPU-friendly way to do it.
Why not just have a Perl script that creates static HTML pages, and overwrites them with new ones when you post new images? I'm sure something like that could be cooked up in an afternoon.
You get the advantages of not having to mess with HTML every time you add a new picture (so you can upload the pictures from work *cough*, your grandma's house, or wherever), yet you also don't have the overhead of running Perl on every page view.
While the fact that it ran Linux is cool, I don't think that was the reason of it being posted on/.
Rather, I think it was a, "He made his own WHAT? Weather balloon? And it reached 80000 feet? How cool is _that_?"
Unfortunately, the Slashdot editor who posted the story decided to put the word "Linux" in the title, which means that all the morons on Slashdot will think that the sole reason it was posted was because of what operating system the thing ran.
Yeah, I've been wondering something for quite a while: since the GBA has a fairly beefy processor as far as handheld gaming goes, how long before developers start making games that use it to its full potential?
The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.
Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the GameBoy Advance is nowhere near based on the Super Nintendo.
SNES CPU: Motorola 65816 (16-bit) @ 2.58/3.58 megahertz GBA CPU: Arm 32-bit RISC @ 16mhz? w/embedded memory
SNES MEMORY: 128K RAM, 64K video RAM GBA MEMORY: 32K (embedded in CPU, however, it's RAM, not cache), 96K video RAM (also in CPU), 256K "WRAM" (outside of CPU)
SNES MAX. COLORS: 32768 (only 256 on-screen at once, though) GBA MAX. COLORS: 32768 (511 on-screen at once in character mode, 32768 at once in bitmap mode)
SNES RESOLUTION: 512x448 GBA RESOLUTION: 240x160
The GBA specs were taken from Nintendo's site, and the SNES specs were found via the magic of Google.
Although similar in some respects, the two are more different than they are the same. The GBA has the SNES beat hands down in terms of processing power. I don't know how many sprites the GBA can put on screen at once (or how big they can be), but it can display more colors at once than the SNES, and if it weren't for the small screen (and corresponding low resolution) and pitifully dark LCD I would say that the GBA had better graphics, too.
Well, according to posts on/. by the guys who made the thing, what they did was take the list of ingredients and run it through an online drink database. They then programmed the results into BarMonkey.
When/if they change the ingredients, the number of drinks that BarMonkey can make will increase or decrease, depending on the results obtained from inputting the new list of ingredients into the online database.
Slashdot Mirror
Actuall, I saw quite a few Dreamcast commercials.
The problem was that Sega was selling them at a loss. While the console itself sold fairly well, the games for it sold too slowly for Sega to turn a profit on the Dreamcast (Sega hoped to make up for selling the console at a loss by getting royalties from the games, as well as selling developer licenses). The reason for games Dreamcast games not selling well enough: the Dreamcast came out at a time when many consumers were perfectly happy with their PS1 games (like you said), and lots more were still on the way.
Sega had something like a one year lead over Sony. Had they perhaps waited a few more months (meanwhile trying to get 3rd party developers to stop developing for the PS1 and start developing for the Dreamcast), they might still be a contender in the hardware wars. On the other hand, the release of the PS2 would've been that much closer, so the odds that many consumers would have just waited for the PS2 are greater.
And while the Dreamcast was easier to develop for, Sony had the advantage of coming off the success of the PS1, and all the mindshare and free press that came with that.
Dammit Sega, make another console and call it the Genesis 2 (Megadrive 2 for the European market)! And try to get some COMPETANT execs to market the damn thing! And don't drop the ball so quickly! I still have my Saturn, and bought games for it 'till the end, despite my friends telling me things like, "Dude, get a PlayStation so you can play Twisted Metal 67 and Crash Bandicoot 45!" Same with my Genesis (I never gave a shit about the SNES and "kiddie" games like Donky Kong Country, I wanted to play a good version of Jurassic Park, never mind the fact that I was obsessed with Sonic 1, 2, & 3 and games like Vectorman; the Genesis was the king of side-scrolling platform games), and I would've done the same with my Dreamcast had someone not stolen it. I'd do it again with yet another console if I had the chance. And this time, make a "real" Sonic The Hedgehog game for it!
I stand corrected.
However, a question:
The high pressure area pushing the helicopter (or plane, or whatever) into the low pressure area above it is what keeps the aircraft in the air, yes? In that case, the high pressure area also pushing air downward is just a side effect, and doesn't directly affect the aircraft unless it is at a low altitude, right? In other words, the high pressure area forcing the aircraft upwards into the low pressure area is the desired effect, and the equal and opposite reaction of the high pressure air also going downwards is unused much of the time.
If that is the case, how am I wrong? Aren't we both arguing the same thing?
There are a lot of people (I am not one of them) who are convinced that the rotorblades on a helicopter work the same way as a household fan, or a ship's screw, which is incorrect; rotorblades are just wings that spin. I thought you were agreeing with them (read: you too thought that rotorblade = screw that's in the air), but now I see that you aren't. Sorry.
In fact, if the air pressure was close enough to the water pressure, you could go outside and swim around (until you got hypothermia from the extremely cold water, anyway).
;)
I should point out that you'd still need an airlock to go outside the sub. However, because the air in your lungs has enough pressure to counteract the pressure of the water, and because the rest of your body has adjusted to it, you don't get crushed.
So at least Sphere (the movie, didn't read the book) got something right
No no no.
Each of the rotorblades is a wing. It generates lift by creating a low-pressure area above itself, just like an airplane's wing. This lift is what enables the helicopter to fly.
While the air being forced downwards probably helps, that alone isn't what keeps the helicopter airborne.
Funny, I don't EVER remember hearing about Lewis & Clark trekking through the Northwest Passage when my class was learning about Lewis & Clark in school, because the Northwest Passage doesn't exist!
Lots of people died while trying to find it, though.
Here's the (abridged) story of Lewis & Clark:
After greatly expanding US territory via the Louisiana Purchase (the Louisiana Purchase covered a lot more land than what is now known as the state of Louisiana, FYI), in 1804 then-president Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark to explore the new territory.
Their expedition ended up taking just over 2 years and took them all the way to the Pacific coast.
However, the article does say:
" 'The maiden voyage of Deep Flight Aviator in San Francisco Bay,' they said, 'ranks with the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk and Lewis and Clark's trek through the Northwest Passage.' "
The article is just quoting the guys who built the sub. It isn't the journalist who is incorrect, but rather the sub's designers, or so it would seem.
Let me explain: each rotorblade on a helocopter is a wing than spins. The lift generated by these rapidly spinning wings is what keeps the helicopter airborne. The side effect of this is that air gets forced downward, but this byproduct of the spinning rotorblades is unused.
And does a helicopter also work by forcing air downwards?
Hint: no
I always thought that the bends occurred when ascending (coming back up to the surface), not descending (diving).
Being in a submersible that increased the air pressure to help ease the stress on the pressure hull therefore wouldn't cause a problem, so long as the air pressure was slowly brought back to 1 atmosphere on your way back up to the surface.
If memory serves, nearly all submersibles capable of deep submergence increase the air pressure at least a little to help counter the pressure of the water. In fact, if the air pressure was close enough to the water pressure, you could go outside and swim around (until you got hypothermia from the extremely cold water, anyway).
The only real problems with increasing the air pressure are oxygen concentration (as you increase the air pressure, you increase the amount of oxygen per cubic inch, thereby increasing the amount that you breathe in; too much oxygen will kill you) and making sure that the pressure is released slowly enough to prevent the bends (possibly resulting in the crew having to sit inside the sub after it has been brought back onboard while they wait for the pressure to drop to 1 atmosphere, depending on the sub's ascent rate).
IIRC, the bends only occur when you ascend too quickly (or the pressure in a pressurized sub drops too fast). The cure is to sit inside a pressure chamber, with the pressure racked up to equal what you would've felt at whatever depth you were at when you began your (too rapid) ascent, and then have the pressure slowly brought back to 1 atmosphere.
Face it, Roland Emerich was pulling insipid crap out of his ass (again). All his movies follow the same pattern:
- Excellent first act, makes movie seem full of potential
- Boring second act. Dumb melodrama. Lots of talking heads. We usually learn more about the bad guys than we could even want to know.
- Lame and uninspired third act. Protagonists are down and out, but at the last minute they pull something together and kick the bad guys' ass.
Take, for example, ID4:
- First act: aliens come and blow shit up
- Second act: they're down in the Area 51 bunker for what seems like ages. Lots of "talking heads" scenes.
- Third act: down and out, all seems lost. Suddenly, Jeff Goldblum has a "Eureka!" moment, and after some trite "Tell my children I love them!" self-sacrifice crap, the good guys win.
Stargate:
- First act: the stargate is discovered. They go through it, and come across the natives.
- Second act: Mr. Crying Game arrives, we get some uninspiring examples of how bad of a person he is. Then he kicks the heroes' asses.
- Third act: down and out, all seems lost. Then, "unexpectedly", Guy From Supernova won't kill his friends, and Boys Who Rebelled Against The Establishment Because They Saw The True Path help our heroes save the day.
The Patriot:
- First act: the colonists get sick of the Limeys and start some shit. While clearly outclassed and outmanned, there is still Hope. We see the Good Guys use their Good Guy Intuition to kick some British ass.
- Second act: Colonel Bad Guy On Horseback gets permission to do whatever he wants. Cue melodrama about how much he's beating the Good Guys. In a particularly underwhelming scene, Good Guy From Down Under gets whacked by Colonel Bad Guy On Horseback. Mucho mas talking heads.
- Third act: All seems lost. Both of That Braveheart Dude's sons are dead. The rebels are getting their asses handed to them. George Washington is going to be taking it up the poop chute Real Soon Now. "Unexpectedly" That Braveheart Dude comes up with a plan, and the colonists pull a Hail Mary tactic in the following battle. Cue trite "Dead Good Guy From Down Under told us some insipid 'insightful' crap in Act Two, so we're doing it by building a house" scene.
Yes, it's true that most movies follow a three act layout, but none are as formulaic as a Roland Emerich movie. None have as uninteresting of a second act or as uninspired of a third act as a Roland Emerich movie.
1)You'd still need to know about their CPU instruction set, as well as the architecture of the rest of the machine. The virtual machine that Java code runs upon has to translate the Java instructions into instructions for your CPU, which requires knowledge by the virtual machine writer of said CPU. ;)
2)Yes, but we wouldn't even know their network protocols, i.e. our network couldn't interface with theirs
3)An invading military force that doesn't at least TRY to make sure their communications and computer systems are secure?
4)You can send then trojans all day long, it won't make a difference unless they actually run them on a live, production system. The only way to guarantee a virus would spread across their network would be to root one of their servers
5)I was making a joke. Of course there are still people around who know EBCDIC, all 5 of them
You can see evolution and natural selection happening right now. Don't believe me? Go to your local doctor's office.
Years ago, penicillin used to be able to kill just about everything that you could be infected with. However, mutant strains of common bacteria that were resistant to penicillin survived, while the strains that hadn't evolved to resist penicillin died off. There's natural selection in action for you. It's still happening: drug companies are developing new antibiotics every day to combat the mutant strains of bacteria and viruses that have become resistant to yesterday's antibiotics.
As for the evolution part: take some kind of bacteria that causes people to get sick. There are always going to be a few of each kind that mutate. That's all evolution really is, IIRC: mutation and heredity via DNA.
Some of the sun's radiation passes through a bacterium, and slightly alters its DNA. This bacterium then divides. Now, if the genetic mutation that the sun caused is beneficial, then natural selection means that it has a greater chance to survive than its non-mutated brethren. If the mutation is detrimental, then the new strain will soon die off.
Assuming that the aliens designed their computers the same way we do, there is still virtually no chance of a virus we made even running on their computers.
;)
1)Completely different CPU instruction sets
2)They probably have some form of network security.
3)Even us stupid human sysops know that you don't just run any old program that you get off the network. You verify that the person who gave you the program is trustworthy, then you verify that the program itself doesn't do anything bad by running it on a standalone system.
4)The only way to get their computers to run our code would be to root their OS.
5)Of course, we wouldn't know anything about their OS. And since they're aliens, they probably use EBCDIC instead of ASCII
Well, few (actually, none that I know of) raster graphics formats contain data in the form:
At X, Y, the pixel color should be RGB
Rather, it's just a long array of data, with a few bytes of header information before that (to specify things like X size, Y size, color depth, etc.).
Some formats, like TIFF, are more flexible than this, but all formats generally follow the same layout.
Compressed image formats aren't much different, except that there's some extra information in the header that specifies things like where each scanline starts, the amount of compression, etc.
No, they will use nuclear power to move the ship through space. Read the article.
Basically, you use the heat from a nuclear reaction to heat up some material, and then shoot the heated material out the back of the ship. Bang (no pun intended), you've got a nuclear rocket. It's more efficient than chemical rockets, and you don't have to carry as much of the ancillary stuff. I think that hydrogen would be a good source. Just inject it somewhere to be heated, and let the reactor do the rest.
Additionally, they could probably (and probably will) use the nuclear reactor to generate electricity.
The only real problems with using nuclear-powered rockets are the people who will inevitably, not understanding the details or why a nuclear rocket is necessary, proclaim "No! Nuclear anything is bad! We're hurint earth! Yes, I understand that the rocket will be far from earth, but still! It's the principle of it!" and try to kill the project. That and radiation shielding. While we've got enough technology to shield the reactor enough to bring the rad levels down to a safe level on things like submarines and aircraft carriers, we have yet to solve the problem of shielding the entire ship from things like cosmic radiation. The astronauts on the ISS experience higher radiation levels than do the crew of a nuclear submarine. Interplanetary space is boiling with radiation IIRC.
There are still nearly 300 million taxpayers in the United States.
Even if the cost ballooned to 100 billion dollars, that comes out to $333.33 per taxpayer, spread out over 7 years, or $47.62 per taxpayer per year.
The last time I looked, home theater systems cost a lot more than $47.62. The good ones cost a lot more than $333.33 too.
Quit fishing for excuses.
I happen to live in Arizona for all 12 months of the year, thank you very much.
Yeah, it gets hot in the summer. Big deal, why the hell do you think just about every house has a pool?
It might be that it's more of a pain to maintain a few static pages in a sea of dynamic scripts than to let Perl/PHP/ASP/JSP take care of everything.
The way I was describing, you _do_ let Perl/PHP/whatever take care of everything. It generates the static HTML pages for you. If you make an update, it generates them again, based on the new content.
In case I didn't make it clear, you yourself don't modify the static page once it's been generated. Rather, whenever you update your page, you do it via a Perl script the same as you would for a script that generates a new page for every view, but instead this one then updates the static page for you.
And this guy has said that the thing that killed his server was that he was using a Perl script to serve up the images. If he needed a dynamic image gallery, write a Perl script to generate a static HTML page. The page itself will be static, sparing the server, yet the content can be dynamic because whenever you upload a new image the Perl script can generate a new static HTML page containing the new pic.
I run a woody on a P1/133/32Mb laptop at the moment...
No! Don't do that! Didn't you hear about the guy who was electrocuted/severely burned/whatever from sticking his woody into his laptop?
NEVER STICK YOUR WOODY IN YOUR LAPTOP!
What I usually do when I need to use CGI is instead of a Perl script that coughs up the dynamic content on every page view, I have a Perl script that creates a static HTML page from the dynamic content whenever new content is uploaded.
I get the best of both worlds: being able to update from anywhere, and since the page only has to be generated by the Perl script _once_ instead of _every page view_, the CPU overhead is minimal.
I mean, really, using _any_ language such as Perl, PHP, etc., to generate your content for every page view is kind of amateurish.
Yeah, I imagine using a Perl script to serve up your images isn't the most CPU-friendly way to do it.
Why not just have a Perl script that creates static HTML pages, and overwrites them with new ones when you post new images? I'm sure something like that could be cooked up in an afternoon.
You get the advantages of not having to mess with HTML every time you add a new picture (so you can upload the pictures from work *cough*, your grandma's house, or wherever), yet you also don't have the overhead of running Perl on every page view.
While the fact that it ran Linux is cool, I don't think that was the reason of it being posted on /.
Rather, I think it was a, "He made his own WHAT? Weather balloon? And it reached 80000 feet? How cool is _that_?"
Unfortunately, the Slashdot editor who posted the story decided to put the word "Linux" in the title, which means that all the morons on Slashdot will think that the sole reason it was posted was because of what operating system the thing ran.
Duh, a hot-o-graph is a measure of how attractive a woman is. Which is why it's so weird that those hotographs are of a Speak & Spell.
;)
First there were the damn furries, and now there's a Speak & Spell fetish
Yeah, I've been wondering something for quite a while: since the GBA has a fairly beefy processor as far as handheld gaming goes, how long before developers start making games that use it to its full potential?
The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.
Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the GameBoy Advance is nowhere near based on the Super Nintendo.
SNES CPU: Motorola 65816 (16-bit) @ 2.58/3.58 megahertz
GBA CPU: Arm 32-bit RISC @ 16mhz? w/embedded memory
SNES MEMORY: 128K RAM, 64K video RAM
GBA MEMORY: 32K (embedded in CPU, however, it's RAM, not cache), 96K video RAM (also in CPU), 256K "WRAM" (outside of CPU)
SNES CART SIZE: 2Mbit - 48Mbit (256Kbytes - 6Mbytes)
GBA CART SIZE: ??? - 256Mbit (32Mbytes)
SNES MAX. COLORS: 32768 (only 256 on-screen at once, though)
GBA MAX. COLORS: 32768 (511 on-screen at once in character mode, 32768 at once in bitmap mode)
SNES RESOLUTION: 512x448
GBA RESOLUTION: 240x160
The GBA specs were taken from Nintendo's site, and the SNES specs were found via the magic of Google.
Although similar in some respects, the two are more different than they are the same. The GBA has the SNES beat hands down in terms of processing power. I don't know how many sprites the GBA can put on screen at once (or how big they can be), but it can display more colors at once than the SNES, and if it weren't for the small screen (and corresponding low resolution) and pitifully dark LCD I would say that the GBA had better graphics, too.
Well, according to posts on /. by the guys who made the thing, what they did was take the list of ingredients and run it through an online drink database. They then programmed the results into BarMonkey.
When/if they change the ingredients, the number of drinks that BarMonkey can make will increase or decrease, depending on the results obtained from inputting the new list of ingredients into the online database.