Basically a flamable propellant adds little or nothing to the damage to the target, but if the ammo store is hit, it adds quite a lot to the destruction of the ammo store.
Not to mention that it's less material to carry to the battlefield; logistically, electricity and air compressors are a lot easier to deliver to the battlefield than tons of gunpowder...
thy don't say how they ignite the time fuze and verify it's burning before a tubeload of rapidly decompressing
A friend of a friend that's in the know indicated to me that it's electronically timed... basically fuse on a chip. The chip goes up with the rocket and ignites so many milliseconds after launch or whatever...
it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...
Your post assumes quite a few things:
a. That bandwidth with a satellite is costly on a per-usage basis b. That a connection with a satellite can be multi-plexed c. That the cost of bandwidth and processing power on earth is comparable with the cost of a satellite
Merely launching a satellite costs from $10million to about $150million dollars, depending on the weight of the satellite and its orbit. That doesn't include the cost of all the equipment on the satellite, nor does it include the exhaustive testing required. If merely installing it costs more than $10million and once its up there, its up there for life, then you can afford a few extra million dollars to make sure it works right.
Each satellite needs a dedicated satellite dish; it has to be pointed at the satellite to work properly, and repointing it takes a non-trivial amount of time. As far as I know, the designs for solid-state direction antenna wouldn't apply to satellite's, due to the amount of gain required, and the precision of directionality required.
Once you've built the dish and the decoding equipment, the cost per byte to transmit is extremely low. However, amortized over the lifespan of the satellite, each and every image it takes has a fixed and surprisingly high cost to take; at that point, the cost to transmit it down, decode it, and process it is far less. There is no good economic reason not to get every single bit that goes through the satellite's imaging array. Especially if you can get it in a burst mode, which most imaging satellites are capable of.
Actually, there is in fact a way to be in a stable balance of inertial and gravitational forces by thrusting straight up; just hit one of the lagrange points with no relative velocity and you'll be in a stable location. Not necessarily orbiting anything (other than the sun of course), but still...
I'm on my second card, second operating system, and about 3rd or 4th install on that O/S (KnoppMyth)... all this because:
1. The drivers for Windows suck 2. The install for KnoppMyth truly sucks
And this isn't your typical "I'm a windows user and I can't do things without a wizard" rant.
It's more like this;
I have a device that will run my home theatre. Naturally it has no monitor, it doesn't need one. It only needs to be hooked up to the television.
Except any time I have to boot to text mode in KnoppMyth, or if I have to boot into admin mode. Because KnoppMyth isn't smart enough about tv-out to try to make a compatible signal during it's install.
Sure I had to hack Windows XP to get it to run properly in the same conditions; but because the installer goes for a least common denominater, I can do it all without lugging over a monitor.
Oh and for those thinking of trying to install a hauppauge in WinXP; good luck. Of the 4 people I personally know, all of whom know a thing or two about computers, who have attempted to do so, none have ever succeeded. I honestly have no clue how they passed their own internal QA, much less the Windows Hardware Quality Labs on this product.
OK... so... which of those three is the single most important feature of any display?
Heh caught me.
I prefer to think of resolution + color depth + refresh rate as a single parameter... because those three parameters determine the dot clock of your RAMDAC, and that is fundamentally how much information you can convey to your audience. But I couldn't think of a good word to summarize all three so I just listed them:D
Soon cellphone owners will be able to play games with realistic three-dimensional graphics rivaling those on PC's and game consoles.
Rivaling... as in an approximately equivalent feature set...
Disregarding antialiasing, polygon throughput rates, and the like... let's look at just the single most important feature in any display; resolution, color depth, and refresh rate
Game console: 640x480 (underscanned) 24-bit color with a 60 field per second refresh rate
PC: 800x600 (and up) 24-bit color with a 60Hz+ refresh rate
Cellphone: 256x256 12-bit color with a 15+ Hz refresh rate
I was pretty sure this was nothing new, although I'm sure a general case algorithm, let alone a fast and accurate general case would be novel. But I was writing polygon aggregation code for my undergraduate computer graphics subjects
MilkSpace 3D, the nearly free ($20) 3D modelling software geared towards mod developers has had mesh simplification built in for some time, and it is an accurate (though not necessarily fast) general case.
Offering free hosting for local artists. Kind of a community portfolio. Even better if you find someone with edgy or risque work.
Offering free hosting for local underground musicians. Include an "internet" radio station that broadcasts their content. Hell, even hook it up to the internet if you want. Most internet radio stations will let you setup playlists, so it doesn't have to be manned 24/7. I would even suggest putting the DJ "booth" live in one of the cafes for use by anyone walking by. Dyne:Bolic (www.dyne.org), a Mini ITX motherboard and case (mini-itx.org), and a CD drive is all you need...
Definitely get community games in there; they will drive your early adopters, who will in turn drive your widespread adoption.
Get a community sponsor to offer some monthly "door prizes"... a free coffee at the local coffee shop, family bowling, 50% off one title at the game store... for that matter, a local LAN gaming facility might be interested in co-sponsoring the whole thing in exchange for high visibility advertising in their target community...
almost sounds more frightening than the cloak, since there's no reason why the sensors would have to be placed outside.
Everyone is talking like he's got some brand new technology here or something.
It's just a camera and a video projector. With a cloak or wall made out of some highly reflective material. That's it. You have to setup the camera ahead of time, and setup the video projector ahead of time. You have to have power to run it all. You have to stand in exactly the right spot, and it only works as an invisibility cloak if the other guy is standing near line of sight with the projector. Which is itself obviously pretty visible.
Before this guy put all this stuff together, bosses were putting cameras in the workplace. This "innovation" (and believe me I use the term loosely) doesn't really add anything to that equation.
I used to try doing this kind of thing, back when I thought that MENSA was a good organization to try to belong to.
Looking at the practice test, I realize that I don't really like word puzzles. It's that last criss cross puzzle that got me. There's no general solution to word puzzles; you just arbitrarily try answers till you get it. And the final solution doesn't have any beauty.
Take the rotator puzzle. This is an interesting puzzle, and the algorithm to find the final solution may be very interesting indeed, even applicable in video processing and the like...
But don't include NP complete problems in your puzzle. I don't like them. The algorithm and method of solving isn't interesting or insightful, it's just boring and tedious.
That would still give you problems on different surfaces, which affect the degrees turned per unit time or whatever very substantially, due to slip between the wheel and the carpet. The only way of doing it properly, I think, is to install a compass or equivalent.
Or just design your code so that it doesn't depend on absolute positioning and pointing. None of my lego creations have ever been hung up with the idea that they have to be parallel to any wall. If they start edging too close to the wall, they just steer away from it a little...
But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other. A Chinese friend of mine, for instance, told me that she has a lot of trouble talking to her Chinese-speaking friends about computers, because she only knows the technical terms in English. And Chinese is her native language. I would guess that I know as many English words as she knows of English and Chinese put together. Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person
Actually, in this case, it may have more to do with the languages involved. Many oriental languages are very poorly suited to conveying precise or technical concepts, and in fact many languages haven't bothered to translate computer terms. For instance, the word computer is pronounced in Japanese as "kon-PUT-er" Likewise, many acronyms such as RAM or CPU are pronounced exactly as they are in English.
Unless you mean all armoured assault vehicles share targeting information and fire many small projectiles instead of one big one? Good grief, that would be deadly. Hope the army don't think of it.
I saw an article on US tech improvements; They're working on a bomb that when it explodes, deploys lots of little coptors, utilizing solid rocket fuel to spin. They seek out targets by their targetting criteria and then fire their charge (which can be a regular bullet, an explosive charge, whatever) straight down...
Supposedly with infrared sensors they can take out an entire platoon instantaneously...
The only way I've found to get a true color 3D image is to put both images side by side, then look at their center cross eyed. Is there a better way?
Well, most stereo display technologies seperate the image into left-eye and right-eye views. These displays use vertical lines for each view, so your y resolution is cut in half. Shutter Glasses use page flipping for each view, so your refresh rate is cut in half.
The z dimension is assembled by the brain itself, and doesn't have a resolution per se. My experience has been that a good anti-aliasing renderer can achieve an image that appears to be as deep as it is wide, with sub-pixel depth accuracy. (that is, if you assume that each pixel is a cube and not a square, a good renderer can position images with sub-pixel accuracy in the z dimension)
I have yet to see someone do good transparent wireframes; this is something I'd be interested in trying, however:)
The only way I've found to get a true color 3D image is to put both images side by side, then look at their center cross eyed. Is there a better way?
Yeah, get an nvidia graphics card and a $30 pair of LCD shutterglasses.
Format the image as a.jps and it'll show up. I have software to do the conversion, as well as repair slight imaging defects, if you want it. (James dot McCracken At Stratapult dot Com)
Oh, and pointing the lenses inward is called "toe-in" and is not suggested for good stereo imagery.
The best way to get good stereo imagery is to point both cameras dead forward and parallel. Seperate the lenses by 1/30th the distance to the nearest in-frame object.
Oh, and if you want to do it without two cameras, I bought a stainless steel drawer slide, drilled and tapped holes for tripod bolts (4-20 is the thread size), and mount my camera to that. Then I take a picture, slide the camera, take another picture. It's nice because it lets me be flexible; I'm publishing a book of 3D images that will include portraits, macro photography, and landscapes... a fixed mount just won't meet my needs...
Traditionally the 3D demo object of choice is a teapot.
I would like to submit that a teapot was a great choice for a render before the advent of texture mapping, when gourad shading was just coming into vogue, and the idea of properly shading a curved surface represented as a polygon was an idea lots of people were having a hard time connecting to.
Now that we have things like texture and bump mapping, maybe we can come up with a slightly more visually interesting demo object?
I've used displays similar to the one in this article; teapots are VERY uninteresting. Bumpmaps are VERY interesting.
I'm a programmer interested in 3D. I've been trying to get the time to build a 3D design program; basically, if you use Direct3D to do all your rednering (and you're a full screen app), then the nVidia drivers will do stereo for you; all you need is a $30 pair of shutterglasses (and an nVidia card, of course) and you're good to go...
The 3D display technology has no bearing on the battery life; basically the display technology is a special lens laid over the screen with software to format the image appropriately.
Basically, the theory (unproven) is that an NP complete problem can only be solved in polynomial time if an oracle function exists.
To say another way, an NP complete problem is one such that an algorithm cannot differentiate between useful and unuseful avenues of research without having a way to determine the result of the research being done; as far as we know, prognostication is the only way to do so.
All bets are off in the case of quantum computing, of course.
Ahhh that easier qualifier is in fact a better nitpick.
I would like to say that it is not the mass that lets one drop a letter, it is the weight. Were one in microgravity and one let go of a letter in the middle of the room, it would not be attracted to the floor. It is the weight, the force of gravity on the letter, that causes it to drop.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically a flamable propellant adds little or nothing to the damage to the target, but if the ammo store is hit, it adds quite a lot to the destruction of the ammo store.
Not to mention that it's less material to carry to the battlefield; logistically, electricity and air compressors are a lot easier to deliver to the battlefield than tons of gunpowder...
thy don't say how they ignite the time fuze and verify it's burning before a tubeload of rapidly decompressing
A friend of a friend that's in the know indicated to me that it's electronically timed... basically fuse on a chip. The chip goes up with the rocket and ignites so many milliseconds after launch or whatever...
OHMIGOD did peter actually break his years long silence?
I take it back; I didn't realize but there is one very important factor that makes saving bandwidth make sense;
A high end scientific satellite can collect approximately 10 times as much information, continuously, as its bandwidth.
it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...
Your post assumes quite a few things:
a. That bandwidth with a satellite is costly on a per-usage basis
b. That a connection with a satellite can be multi-plexed
c. That the cost of bandwidth and processing power on earth is comparable with the cost of a satellite
Merely launching a satellite costs from $10million to about $150million dollars, depending on the weight of the satellite and its orbit. That doesn't include the cost of all the equipment on the satellite, nor does it include the exhaustive testing required. If merely installing it costs more than $10million and once its up there, its up there for life, then you can afford a few extra million dollars to make sure it works right.
Each satellite needs a dedicated satellite dish; it has to be pointed at the satellite to work properly, and repointing it takes a non-trivial amount of time. As far as I know, the designs for solid-state direction antenna wouldn't apply to satellite's, due to the amount of gain required, and the precision of directionality required.
Once you've built the dish and the decoding equipment, the cost per byte to transmit is extremely low. However, amortized over the lifespan of the satellite, each and every image it takes has a fixed and surprisingly high cost to take; at that point, the cost to transmit it down, decode it, and process it is far less. There is no good economic reason not to get every single bit that goes through the satellite's imaging array. Especially if you can get it in a burst mode, which most imaging satellites are capable of.
May I take it from your address that you currently live in florida and that your birthday is 12/12/1974?
I used to live in florida and my birthday is 12/12/1977...
Actually, there is in fact a way to be in a stable balance of inertial and gravitational forces by thrusting straight up; just hit one of the lagrange points with no relative velocity and you'll be in a stable location. Not necessarily orbiting anything (other than the sun of course), but still...
I'm on my second card, second operating system, and about 3rd or 4th install on that O/S (KnoppMyth)... all this because:
1. The drivers for Windows suck
2. The install for KnoppMyth truly sucks
And this isn't your typical "I'm a windows user and I can't do things without a wizard" rant.
It's more like this;
I have a device that will run my home theatre. Naturally it has no monitor, it doesn't need one. It only needs to be hooked up to the television.
Except any time I have to boot to text mode in KnoppMyth, or if I have to boot into admin mode. Because KnoppMyth isn't smart enough about tv-out to try to make a compatible signal during it's install.
Sure I had to hack Windows XP to get it to run properly in the same conditions; but because the installer goes for a least common denominater, I can do it all without lugging over a monitor.
Oh and for those thinking of trying to install a hauppauge in WinXP; good luck. Of the 4 people I personally know, all of whom know a thing or two about computers, who have attempted to do so, none have ever succeeded. I honestly have no clue how they passed their own internal QA, much less the Windows Hardware Quality Labs on this product.
OK ... so ... which of those three is the single most important feature of any display?
:D
Heh caught me.
I prefer to think of resolution + color depth + refresh rate as a single parameter... because those three parameters determine the dot clock of your RAMDAC, and that is fundamentally how much information you can convey to your audience. But I couldn't think of a good word to summarize all three so I just listed them
Soon cellphone owners will be able to play games with realistic three-dimensional graphics rivaling those on PC's and game consoles.
Rivaling... as in an approximately equivalent feature set...
Disregarding antialiasing, polygon throughput rates, and the like... let's look at just the single most important feature in any display; resolution, color depth, and refresh rate
Game console: 640x480 (underscanned) 24-bit color with a 60 field per second refresh rate
PC: 800x600 (and up) 24-bit color with a 60Hz+ refresh rate
Cellphone: 256x256 12-bit color with a 15+ Hz refresh rate
Doesn't really seem to rival to me...
I was pretty sure this was nothing new, although I'm sure a general case algorithm, let alone a fast and accurate general case would be novel. But I was writing polygon aggregation code for my undergraduate computer graphics subjects
MilkSpace 3D, the nearly free ($20) 3D modelling software geared towards mod developers has had mesh simplification built in for some time, and it is an accurate (though not necessarily fast) general case.
will be your success or demise.
May I suggest:
Offering free hosting for local artists. Kind of a community portfolio. Even better if you find someone with edgy or risque work.
Offering free hosting for local underground musicians. Include an "internet" radio station that broadcasts their content. Hell, even hook it up to the internet if you want. Most internet radio stations will let you setup playlists, so it doesn't have to be manned 24/7. I would even suggest putting the DJ "booth" live in one of the cafes for use by anyone walking by. Dyne:Bolic (www.dyne.org), a Mini ITX motherboard and case (mini-itx.org), and a CD drive is all you need...
Definitely get community games in there; they will drive your early adopters, who will in turn drive your widespread adoption.
Get a community sponsor to offer some monthly "door prizes"... a free coffee at the local coffee shop, family bowling, 50% off one title at the game store... for that matter, a local LAN gaming facility might be interested in co-sponsoring the whole thing in exchange for high visibility advertising in their target community...
almost sounds more frightening than the cloak, since there's no reason why the sensors would have to be placed outside.
Everyone is talking like he's got some brand new technology here or something.
It's just a camera and a video projector. With a cloak or wall made out of some highly reflective material. That's it. You have to setup the camera ahead of time, and setup the video projector ahead of time. You have to have power to run it all. You have to stand in exactly the right spot, and it only works as an invisibility cloak if the other guy is standing near line of sight with the projector. Which is itself obviously pretty visible.
Before this guy put all this stuff together, bosses were putting cameras in the workplace. This "innovation" (and believe me I use the term loosely) doesn't really add anything to that equation.
I used to try doing this kind of thing, back when I thought that MENSA was a good organization to try to belong to.
Looking at the practice test, I realize that I don't really like word puzzles. It's that last criss cross puzzle that got me. There's no general solution to word puzzles; you just arbitrarily try answers till you get it. And the final solution doesn't have any beauty.
Take the rotator puzzle. This is an interesting puzzle, and the algorithm to find the final solution may be very interesting indeed, even applicable in video processing and the like...
But don't include NP complete problems in your puzzle. I don't like them. The algorithm and method of solving isn't interesting or insightful, it's just boring and tedious.
That would still give you problems on different surfaces, which affect the degrees turned per unit time or whatever very substantially, due to slip between the wheel and the carpet. The only way of doing it properly, I think, is to install a compass or equivalent.
Or just design your code so that it doesn't depend on absolute positioning and pointing. None of my lego creations have ever been hung up with the idea that they have to be parallel to any wall. If they start edging too close to the wall, they just steer away from it a little...
But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other. A Chinese friend of mine, for instance, told me that she has a lot of trouble talking to her Chinese-speaking friends about computers, because she only knows the technical terms in English. And Chinese is her native language. I would guess that I know as many English words as she knows of English and Chinese put together. Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person
Actually, in this case, it may have more to do with the languages involved. Many oriental languages are very poorly suited to conveying precise or technical concepts, and in fact many languages haven't bothered to translate computer terms. For instance, the word computer is pronounced in Japanese as "kon-PUT-er" Likewise, many acronyms such as RAM or CPU are pronounced exactly as they are in English.
Unless you mean all armoured assault vehicles share targeting information and fire many small projectiles instead of one big one?
Good grief, that would be deadly. Hope the army don't think of it.
I saw an article on US tech improvements; They're working on a bomb that when it explodes, deploys lots of little coptors, utilizing solid rocket fuel to spin. They seek out targets by their targetting criteria and then fire their charge (which can be a regular bullet, an explosive charge, whatever) straight down...
Supposedly with infrared sensors they can take out an entire platoon instantaneously...
The only way I've found to get a true color 3D image is to put both images side by side, then look at their center cross eyed. Is there a better way?
:)
Well, most stereo display technologies seperate the image into left-eye and right-eye views. These displays use vertical lines for each view, so your y resolution is cut in half. Shutter Glasses use page flipping for each view, so your refresh rate is cut in half.
The z dimension is assembled by the brain itself, and doesn't have a resolution per se. My experience has been that a good anti-aliasing renderer can achieve an image that appears to be as deep as it is wide, with sub-pixel depth accuracy. (that is, if you assume that each pixel is a cube and not a square, a good renderer can position images with sub-pixel accuracy in the z dimension)
I have yet to see someone do good transparent wireframes; this is something I'd be interested in trying, however
How much processing power is needed to create such a display, especially from a 3D model?
Well, nVidia has a plug in to their drivers allowing you to do stereo rendering in the card...
I use it with my shutter glasses all the time. Every 3D game is compatible. It's good stuff.
The only way I've found to get a true color 3D image is to put both images side by side, then look at their center cross eyed. Is there a better way?
.jps and it'll show up. I have software to do the conversion, as well as repair slight imaging defects, if you want it. (James dot McCracken At Stratapult dot Com)
Yeah, get an nvidia graphics card and a $30 pair of LCD shutterglasses.
Format the image as a
Oh, and pointing the lenses inward is called "toe-in" and is not suggested for good stereo imagery.
The best way to get good stereo imagery is to point both cameras dead forward and parallel. Seperate the lenses by 1/30th the distance to the nearest in-frame object.
Oh, and if you want to do it without two cameras, I bought a stainless steel drawer slide, drilled and tapped holes for tripod bolts (4-20 is the thread size), and mount my camera to that. Then I take a picture, slide the camera, take another picture. It's nice because it lets me be flexible; I'm publishing a book of 3D images that will include portraits, macro photography, and landscapes... a fixed mount just won't meet my needs...
Traditionally the 3D demo object of choice is a teapot.
I would like to submit that a teapot was a great choice for a render before the advent of texture mapping, when gourad shading was just coming into vogue, and the idea of properly shading a curved surface represented as a polygon was an idea lots of people were having a hard time connecting to.
Now that we have things like texture and bump mapping, maybe we can come up with a slightly more visually interesting demo object?
I've used displays similar to the one in this article; teapots are VERY uninteresting. Bumpmaps are VERY interesting.
I'm a programmer interested in 3D. I've been trying to get the time to build a 3D design program; basically, if you use Direct3D to do all your rednering (and you're a full screen app), then the nVidia drivers will do stereo for you; all you need is a $30 pair of shutterglasses (and an nVidia card, of course) and you're good to go...
The 3D display technology has no bearing on the battery life; basically the display technology is a special lens laid over the screen with software to format the image appropriately.
You are correct sir.
Basically, the theory (unproven) is that an NP complete problem can only be solved in polynomial time if an oracle function exists.
To say another way, an NP complete problem is one such that an algorithm cannot differentiate between useful and unuseful avenues of research without having a way to determine the result of the research being done; as far as we know, prognostication is the only way to do so.
All bets are off in the case of quantum computing, of course.
Ahhh that easier qualifier is in fact a better nitpick.
I would like to say that it is not the mass that lets one drop a letter, it is the weight. Were one in microgravity and one let go of a letter in the middle of the room, it would not be attracted to the floor. It is the weight, the force of gravity on the letter, that causes it to drop.