They just have a North American cluster, but there are always people on from across both oceans. There are many very active european players (one from Romainia just aired Vendetta on a Romainian Tech TV show he works on).
But wait! You made a mistake: there never was a GeForce 1. It was the GeForce 256 (with both SDR and DDR versions). So the GeForce 4 is better than the GeForce 256...
Yeah, yeah, we know what you meant, but NO! I know two GeForce 256 owners that are confused by this. They're answer to this: "whatever, I'll just buy whatever you tell me to when Doom comes out".
Like you I bought the HSN special and I'm similarly hesitent to deviate from the Red Hat kernels. I went to this page and got the source RPM made by someone at Red Hat. Best of all, it doesn't try to patch your kernel source!
Four months ago, our company tried buying a copy of VMware with WinXP licenced to run in the VM. VMware said that they were working out a new license with Microsoft so they could sell XP and that we should call them back in a couple of months. Our purchasing guy has called them once a month since then and we still can't get it.
I agree with you that "just another FPS" doesn't really need to be prototyped. And I even agree with the original poster that prototyping is a Good Thing. My point was that it isn't always possible to prototype, expecially when everything is new. Just getting a game platform that can manage 500 players isn't trivial. Then add a (presumablly) 3D engine... and a rudimentary world... and some basic controls... you probably need some basic AI...
Once you've got enough of a prototype to get a feel for the game, you're quite far into it. And at that point it's not a "prototype", but a "beta".
Yes, sometimes you can prototype, but it's not asy easy as "woops, should've prototyped!"
I don't think this is necessarily true. I've played a few FPS "tests" where the only thing you can do is run around an empty level. Sometimes I've even had a gun so I can shoot walls. This isn't fun. It's interesting to see what the engine is like, but it doesn't give a feel for the game at all.
Cutting through the sensationalist crap, the article didn't really show that the 'posse' actually accomplished anything:
The FBI figured out the worm used IRC before assembling the posse.
A lone agent using normal sniffing techniques found the criminal.
The worms are still active.
While the posse was loking at Leaves, Code Red ran rampant through the Internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they did something. It's just that, according to the article, they look like idiots fiddling with a problem they didn't solve while another worm destroys the Internet.
Fibre Channel drives and SCSI drives cost the same. If they were to cost more they whould have never been accepted into the enterprise (you would see RAID boxes with SCSI inside and FC outside). What make FC more expensive are the switches and management. FC switches contain services such as name, time, and security servers are so complex that even though they've been on the market for about seven years, they still don't interoperate very well. Management costs include complex software and highly skilled administrators.
You are right about many of the benifits of FC, but speed isn't one of them. The maximum FC speed is currently 2Gb, while 320MB SCSI drives are available. The 640MB SCSI spec. has been finalized, but devices aren't available yet, and 4Gb FC (and 10Gb FC for the backbones) and 3Gb SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) will be available in 2004. That said, line speed doesn't matter all that much because the bandwidth bottlenexk is the head speed (the rate the data is read off the platter). FC and SCSI drives are often the same drive with a different PCB so they have the same head speed, which is currently 50-60MB/s.
I mentioned SAS before and I thought I'd point out that, like ATA, parallel SCSI is reaching the end of its life. SAS uses similar connectors and cables as SATA and even allows for SATA drives to be plugged into SAS JBODs & RAIDs. Although SAS will only be coming out at 3Gb in 2004, 6Gb SAS won't be far behind.
As far as your hacked together FC loop, all I have to say is ugh! You can buy T-cards (the industry name for the PCBs you made) that have bypass chips on them and using Cat 5 is just a bad idea. Not to mention your hack to save a few bucks on a GBIC. Ugh! Please don't trust any valuble data to your setup. Oh, and daisy-chaining more than a few hubs together will cause the same problems eithernet has: signal integrity degridation. You need a switch or other device to retime the signal or the device on the far end will have trouble getting bit sync.
Fibre Channel is for the entrprise. If you want something better than ATA for home / small office use, stick with SCSI. It's just as fast and less likely to cause headaches when you try to get creative when cabling it up.
I work with the drive manufactures in the Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI specification working groups and the drive connector (it's almost identical for both protocols) had to fit on a 2.5" disk. All drives are going to be 2.5", even in the enterprise. Many newer drive models have 2.5" platters inside already. The transition to 2.5" enclosures will be mostly cosmetic.
With that in mind, working on a new, smaller form-factor just makes sense.
You apparently didn't read the post you're replying to:
... All of this points to a general power system failure...
and
...because the vehicle should be able to continue flying as an unguided, aerodynamically stabilized vehicle if it is going fast enough, but right-off-the-pad, it could turn into a land shark.
They obviously know about where the center of gravity should be relative to the center of pressure, but how do you generate pressure when your rocket is just lifting off?
Just in case people don't know: Cathy isn't just a pretty face for the show she's the Executive Producer. I read this in the Star Tribune about Full Metal Challenge and thought it was enlightening. From the article:
"Full Metal Challenge," filmed in a converted power plant outside London this summer, is executive-produced by Cathy Rogers, who has produced and presented three seasons of "Junkyard Wars." She and Rollins co-host "Full Metal Challenge."
Without Soyuz craft the ISS can only be run at a maintenance level--i wonder how long before they'll be back in full operation, or if the Russians don't suspend their programs the way we do when we lose an orbiter b/c of an O-ring.
From the article:
"There are no plans as yet to postpone the [next] flight," Sergei Gorbunov, spokesman for Russia's top space authority Rosaviakosmos told Reuters.
This is the one major misconception that non-TiVo owners always make. The fact that TiVo records the shows digitally isn't what makes it great. It's the fact that you tell it "record new episodes of Junkyard Wars" or "record all episodes of Barney" and it does it.
My family hasn't watched live TV since we got the TiVo. I don't even know what channels some of my shows are on. I just pull up a list of the shows TiVo has recorded and watch what I want. We watch TV when WE want to. If I want to kill some time, I see what TiVo has for me. I can pick-and-choose between shows I like, not whatever happens to be on.
It's really a change in viewing habits that you don't appreciate it until you've tried it. I think the best marketing strategy TiVo could ever try would be to give out TiVos free for a month or two and see how many people buy it instead of giving it back.
P.S. TiVo doesn't skip commercials, that's ReplayTV.
While not a solution today, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) specification allows for adding Serial ATA devices to a SAS system. They both use the same physical layer, so support will only depend on whether companies support STP (Serial ATA Transport Protocol). Both the HBA and expander (a.k.a. switch) need to support STP for this to work.
I expect we'll see many companies offering scary things like enterprise-class RAID boxes with your option of SAS or SATA drives. As other posters have already observed, ATA isn't reliable enough for this kind of thing and the added maintenance doesn't offset the cost difference for your average RAID installment.
10Gb Eithernet is pushing the limits of hardware. Everyone working on this are only running the optical link at 10Gb, but then splitting the signal into 4 lanes (called XAUI) so the signal can be processed at sane speeds. Both the 10Gb Ethernet spec. and the 10Gb Fibre Channel spec. take this into account, so all the data is 128-bit alligned.
Companies won't have hardware in their labs until early next year, so don't expect that you will see and 10Gb NICs at Best Buy any time soon.
Using Cat5e for 1Gb was a big hack. Our hardware guys wince at the thought of such a crappy medium for high-speed applications. Once you start running longer than a couple of meters you really need to use optical. 10Gb will not run on copper.
Given an infinite amount of heat energy, sure. But if the probe's just "kinda warm", it will merely create a stable pocket of water around itself. The water will never get significantly above 32 degrees (F) ya know.
But gravity will pull the probe to the bottom of the pocket, continuing to melt the ice underneath it (while the water at the top of the pocket will refreeze). Assuming you can make a probe maintain >32 degrees long enough for it to reach the ocean, it should create a falling pocket of water through the ice.
Hey, how 'bout this: Leave a solar array on the surface, make the submersible part as small as possible (camera, heat elements, and spool of fine wire). Then you can power the heater electrically from a wire you unwind as your blazing hot ice-melter sinks.
Once the ice-melter gets down a ways (e.g. half a mile), I'd think that you'd have to worry about the ice above it freezing to the wire, thus preventing the ice-melter from burrowing any deeper.
Advertisement blocks can be replaced by advertising during a show.
This is illegal for children's shows. The problem is that kids can't tell what's advertising and what isn't. If Barney chugs a Bud Light, children assume that everyone drinks beer. They're too impresionable to understand that TV may not reflect reality. Children under 8 have a hard time seperating commercials from the program, and advertising in the program would only be worse. (Yes, a 6 year old may be able to identify the commercials, but they lack the reasoning skills to identify what the real goal of the commercials is).
I'm not quite sure what kind of bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc you're talking about, but It would seem to me that you wouldn't detect just two points as a result. If you view the Earth as a hollow sphere and try to imagine what would happen if there was a b/r/e/q/etc inside that sphere, what would the intersection of the shock wave from that event be? Assuming the event was off-center, it would first appear as a single point where the Earth's surface was closest to the event and would spread in a circle outwards, eventually meeting at the opposite side of the sphere (but so weak that it's effects would be lost in the noise). Now, if the shock wave didn't travel at the same rate in all directions, the "circle" expanding out from the initial point would not be round, but it would still be evident that it is radiating out from that point.
In addition, that would have to be a pretty scary-big bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc to cause detectable earthquakes thousands of miles apart. I'd think there would have to be other evidence of something that massive that would have caught somebody's attention back in 1993.
If you think about it, all earthquakes (with the possible exception of those in 1993) are caused by an inter-earth bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc (usually plates scraping against eachother), but they're only a few miles down, so thay don't really seem to be "inter-earth".
This finding won't be of much help against the larger doomsday asteroids (like the recently discovered 1950 DA)
Oink.NET and timothy obviously didn't read the article referenced by Slashdot yesterday (talking about 1950 DA). It explicitly states:
The good news is that the same effect might be harnessed someday to provide the gentlest of all methods of nudging this or any other asteroid aside if it does turn out to be on a collision course. Simply altering the surface albedo in places, for example by selectively dropping white chalk or black carbon powder to darken or lighten some regions, could be enough to do the trick. If so, it might be the first time in history that a whitewash was the real solution to a serious problem.
Maybe he's a busy guy, but I still think timothy should read the articles before he posts them (he posted both of these articles).
Slashdot Mirror
They just have a North American cluster, but there are always people on from across both oceans. There are many very active european players (one from Romainia just aired Vendetta on a Romainian Tech TV show he works on).
But wait! You made a mistake: there never was a GeForce 1. It was the GeForce 256 (with both SDR and DDR versions). So the GeForce 4 is better than the GeForce 256...
Yeah, yeah, we know what you meant, but NO! I know two GeForce 256 owners that are confused by this. They're answer to this: "whatever, I'll just buy whatever you tell me to when Doom comes out".
Like you I bought the HSN special and I'm similarly hesitent to deviate from the Red Hat kernels. I went to this page and got the source RPM made by someone at Red Hat. Best of all, it doesn't try to patch your kernel source!
Spreading the knowledge: Problems? e-mail me.
Four months ago, our company tried buying a copy of VMware with WinXP licenced to run in the VM. VMware said that they were working out a new license with Microsoft so they could sell XP and that we should call them back in a couple of months. Our purchasing guy has called them once a month since then and we still can't get it.
Now I know why it's taking so long...
I agree with you that "just another FPS" doesn't really need to be prototyped. And I even agree with the original poster that prototyping is a Good Thing. My point was that it isn't always possible to prototype, expecially when everything is new. Just getting a game platform that can manage 500 players isn't trivial. Then add a (presumablly) 3D engine... and a rudimentary world... and some basic controls... you probably need some basic AI... Once you've got enough of a prototype to get a feel for the game, you're quite far into it. And at that point it's not a "prototype", but a "beta". Yes, sometimes you can prototype, but it's not asy easy as "woops, should've prototyped!"
I don't think this is necessarily true. I've played a few FPS "tests" where the only thing you can do is run around an empty level. Sometimes I've even had a gun so I can shoot walls. This isn't fun. It's interesting to see what the engine is like, but it doesn't give a feel for the game at all.
The FBI figured out the worm used IRC before assembling the posse.
A lone agent using normal sniffing techniques found the criminal.
The worms are still active.
While the posse was loking at Leaves, Code Red ran rampant through the Internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they did something. It's just that, according to the article, they look like idiots fiddling with a problem they didn't solve while another worm destroys the Internet.
This needs some clarification:
Fibre Channel drives and SCSI drives cost the same. If they were to cost more they whould have never been accepted into the enterprise (you would see RAID boxes with SCSI inside and FC outside). What make FC more expensive are the switches and management. FC switches contain services such as name, time, and security servers are so complex that even though they've been on the market for about seven years, they still don't interoperate very well. Management costs include complex software and highly skilled administrators.
You are right about many of the benifits of FC, but speed isn't one of them. The maximum FC speed is currently 2Gb, while 320MB SCSI drives are available. The 640MB SCSI spec. has been finalized, but devices aren't available yet, and 4Gb FC (and 10Gb FC for the backbones) and 3Gb SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) will be available in 2004. That said, line speed doesn't matter all that much because the bandwidth bottlenexk is the head speed (the rate the data is read off the platter). FC and SCSI drives are often the same drive with a different PCB so they have the same head speed, which is currently 50-60MB/s.
I mentioned SAS before and I thought I'd point out that, like ATA, parallel SCSI is reaching the end of its life. SAS uses similar connectors and cables as SATA and even allows for SATA drives to be plugged into SAS JBODs & RAIDs. Although SAS will only be coming out at 3Gb in 2004, 6Gb SAS won't be far behind.
As far as your hacked together FC loop, all I have to say is ugh! You can buy T-cards (the industry name for the PCBs you made) that have bypass chips on them and using Cat 5 is just a bad idea. Not to mention your hack to save a few bucks on a GBIC. Ugh! Please don't trust any valuble data to your setup. Oh, and daisy-chaining more than a few hubs together will cause the same problems eithernet has: signal integrity degridation. You need a switch or other device to retime the signal or the device on the far end will have trouble getting bit sync.
Fibre Channel is for the entrprise. If you want something better than ATA for home / small office use, stick with SCSI. It's just as fast and less likely to cause headaches when you try to get creative when cabling it up.
I work with the drive manufactures in the Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI specification working groups and the drive connector (it's almost identical for both protocols) had to fit on a 2.5" disk. All drives are going to be 2.5", even in the enterprise. Many newer drive models have 2.5" platters inside already. The transition to 2.5" enclosures will be mostly cosmetic.
With that in mind, working on a new, smaller form-factor just makes sense.
Okay, okay. I should clarify: Yes, I knew what he was trying to say, but perhaps he should check his math...
Um, 54?
and
They obviously know about where the center of gravity should be relative to the center of pressure, but how do you generate pressure when your rocket is just lifting off?
From the article:
This is the one major misconception that non-TiVo owners always make. The fact that TiVo records the shows digitally isn't what makes it great. It's the fact that you tell it "record new episodes of Junkyard Wars" or "record all episodes of Barney" and it does it.
My family hasn't watched live TV since we got the TiVo. I don't even know what channels some of my shows are on. I just pull up a list of the shows TiVo has recorded and watch what I want. We watch TV when WE want to. If I want to kill some time, I see what TiVo has for me. I can pick-and-choose between shows I like, not whatever happens to be on.
It's really a change in viewing habits that you don't appreciate it until you've tried it. I think the best marketing strategy TiVo could ever try would be to give out TiVos free for a month or two and see how many people buy it instead of giving it back.
P.S. TiVo doesn't skip commercials, that's ReplayTV.
While not a solution today, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) specification allows for adding Serial ATA devices to a SAS system. They both use the same physical layer, so support will only depend on whether companies support STP (Serial ATA Transport Protocol). Both the HBA and expander (a.k.a. switch) need to support STP for this to work.
I expect we'll see many companies offering scary things like enterprise-class RAID boxes with your option of SAS or SATA drives. As other posters have already observed, ATA isn't reliable enough for this kind of thing and the added maintenance doesn't offset the cost difference for your average RAID installment.
Did any-one else notice - that kila_m seemed - to be trying to subliminally - sway the Slash-dot reader-ship - into picking one - format over another?
10Gb Eithernet is pushing the limits of hardware. Everyone working on this are only running the optical link at 10Gb, but then splitting the signal into 4 lanes (called XAUI) so the signal can be processed at sane speeds. Both the 10Gb Ethernet spec. and the 10Gb Fibre Channel spec. take this into account, so all the data is 128-bit alligned.
Companies won't have hardware in their labs until early next year, so don't expect that you will see and 10Gb NICs at Best Buy any time soon.
Using Cat5e for 1Gb was a big hack. Our hardware guys wince at the thought of such a crappy medium for high-speed applications. Once you start running longer than a couple of meters you really need to use optical. 10Gb will not run on copper.
It's Crais and Talyn. Go to www.scifi.com/farscape or www.farscape.com (I prefer SciFi's page).
But gravity will pull the probe to the bottom of the pocket, continuing to melt the ice underneath it (while the water at the top of the pocket will refreeze). Assuming you can make a probe maintain >32 degrees long enough for it to reach the ocean, it should create a falling pocket of water through the ice.
Once the ice-melter gets down a ways (e.g. half a mile), I'd think that you'd have to worry about the ice above it freezing to the wire, thus preventing the ice-melter from burrowing any deeper.
I'm not quite sure what kind of bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc you're talking about, but It would seem to me that you wouldn't detect just two points as a result. If you view the Earth as a hollow sphere and try to imagine what would happen if there was a b/r/e/q/etc inside that sphere, what would the intersection of the shock wave from that event be? Assuming the event was off-center, it would first appear as a single point where the Earth's surface was closest to the event and would spread in a circle outwards, eventually meeting at the opposite side of the sphere (but so weak that it's effects would be lost in the noise). Now, if the shock wave didn't travel at the same rate in all directions, the "circle" expanding out from the initial point would not be round, but it would still be evident that it is radiating out from that point.
In addition, that would have to be a pretty scary-big bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc to cause detectable earthquakes thousands of miles apart. I'd think there would have to be other evidence of something that massive that would have caught somebody's attention back in 1993.
If you think about it, all earthquakes (with the possible exception of those in 1993) are caused by an inter-earth bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc (usually plates scraping against eachother), but they're only a few miles down, so thay don't really seem to be "inter-earth".
When I saw the Slashdot artilce's title, I immediately thought of this one over at Absurd Notions.
I think it's a cool way to list links, and it works well for sorting web comics (based on how often they're updated).
Oink.NET and timothy obviously didn't read the article referenced by Slashdot yesterday (talking about 1950 DA). It explicitly states:
Maybe he's a busy guy, but I still think timothy should read the articles before he posts them (he posted both of these articles).