www.junkscience.com is funded prominently by the Cato Foundation, a Libertarian political organization with more Conservative than Liberal leanings.
While I agree with some of junkscience.com's scientific arguments (on the causes and significance of the Antarctic Ozone Hole, e.g.), they tend to be selective. They are in essence a propaganda arm for the Tobacco, Oil, and other Smokestack Industries, giving the imprimatur of scientific study to their side of every debate.
What they post may occasionally be right, but it's not to their credit, since they ignore other facts at their leisure.
It might also be interesting, while conducting a dig for slide rules, to conduct a dig for the first time the subject of the archaeology of slide rules came up on Usenet. Should be early '80s net.misc, or so. There could be a whole taxonomy of wistful ruminations on the slipstick. The Well, CompuServe, in fact any BBS whose archives survive in paleontological context...
groups.google.com would be kind of useless. dejanews was kind of useless, too. They don't go back far enough. I guess you'd have to start the "recorded history" of the net somewhere around 1990.
Okay. That link shows the Capresso machines. Wanting to know more, I found them at capresso.com.
What I don't get is why the C1000 is a dead ringer for the Krups Orchestro (with that form factor they've got to have the same guts), but costs a good $100 more.
Besides, if it doesn't have a genuflecting duck on it, it ain't really an espresso machine...
"The trick is to create a concrete mix that is less dense or lighter than water. Regular concrete is 140 pounds per cubic foot, but the students create concrete that is as light as 41 pounds per cubic foot. Water is 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, so the less dense concrete will float. However, students can create heavier canoes that will float, as long as the canoes displace their own weight (and the weight of the paddlers) in water."
The concrete doesn't ever need to be lighter than water. The boat plus passengers and gear needs to be lighter than water. Which means the maximum displacement of the boat (fully loaded volume including outside hull sectioned at a plane level with the waterline) needs to weigh less than the load plus the boat. The concrete itself can be far more dense than water.
Having concrete that is lighter than water means you can make a raft out of concrete. It means your boat won't sink if it floods. It also means your boat has less inertia.
It looks like a minor point, I know, but this is an engineering contest. It's all about minor points and the error bars on them. To put conflicting statements in the brochure is to sandbag the less-experienced contestants.
The real trick is that normal building concrete is much heavier than water (and somewhat absorbent, which reduces its effective displacement in contact with water). But this contest years ago ceased to be about floating a hunk of sidewalk.
The actual number that appears in the connection setup is something like 410 kbps. When I first got Ricochet, I could get occasional ftp xfers (under Windows) of over 320 kbps. Since then, they've obviously fiddled some configs (which fixed some disastrous problems, so I'm not complaining) that have brought the nominal top end down to 150k. There might be a few 250k+ seconds here and there, but I don't check it much anymore.
Someone almost certainly will be able to buy and bail this out. Those Rico & Chet commercials must've cost a bundle, but the Chapter can write that off. And there's still no viable competition for the market segment: 100kbps at 70mph.
Microsoft develops hardware as applications for its OS, so put the Xbox in the Apps baby-bill.
WinCE is OS, so it goes in OS bb copied three ways.
WinXP is an illegal collusion of OS and Internet services. Give it to the OS bb, but don't let them serve its must-connect-to-MSN communications. The three OS bb's will figure out how to get the network services from whichever fungible provider gives them the best deal. That probably won't be MSN for all three of them, if one can strike an exclusivity deal, which it will do, to screw the other two (ain't the free market grand?). The other two, of course, will own a full license to the interfaces and business models, so they can get J.Random.Com to put together the website.
Think about it. I'd jump on a chance to form-fit-and-function a parallel business providing the.NET services for XP users.
This is exactly the sort of reason you have to split the company up at least 5 ways.
Someone mentioned development tools. I see them as apps. The Apps bb will have three OS bb's to work with. Compatibility will suffer only insofar as each OS bb coordinates proprietary functionality with them. But guess what. That's innovation and competition. If they're really worried about compatibility becoming an issue, they can join a standards group and let the rest of us help define what we want them to do.
See? Isn't that world looking better than the monopolistic one we live in?
Here's the breakup plan I've proposed all along. You split the company into 3 segments:
Online-services arm (MSN).
Application software.
Operating System.
Then you split the Operating System segment into three segments, giving each a full copy of the current and past code bases. Each one starts out as a clone of the others.
From then on, the five companies act independently, with the usual rules on how they can interact when doing business with each other.
The OS companies will end up competing with each other for market share and for relationships with other companies and with the Microsoft App and Network companies.
The rules would have to include that the companies can't create secret interfaces in the software when codeveloping features. All APIs would be documented, and in such a way that the reader can understand what the system actually does.
If it's not about the War on Drugs, why write a lecture on the War on Drugs? You seem to have missed the keen aim of my point.
Let me put it this way:
The vast majority of sites online supporting hemp are sites (on up to large organizations like Mother Jones and High Times) that are also associated with outspoken support of marijuana.
Why does the head community spend so much energy on something that (you say) doesn't serve its primary interest one bit? (If the answer isn't associated with drugs, then the head community becomes less about heads and more about stubborn opposition to government).
If hemp is so valuable and so unlike marijuana, why isn't the mainstream also trying to right this bureaucratic, agricultural, textile, economic wrong and making it a slam-dunk? Why are only 10% of states in on taking a Q-T peek at it? The first one to legalize hemp is going to kick ass.
It's stronger than flax and jute (I have no data re: nylon), and softer than cotton.
Then the problem certainly isn't the War on Drugs. It's the Cotton Lobby. And whaddaya bet they have their fingers in the problem running all the way back? Form a Hemp Lobby, wink-wink-nudge-nudge the politicians into understanding they won't lose a nickel of their graft if they bail on Cotton, and Hemp will become the next Internet.
Okay, it seems like a no-brainer, so I looked it up, and there are 5 states (IL, KY, 3 unnamed others) legislating "research" status for industrial hemp.
On the other hand, there are a zillion "head" websites touting the stuff. The question is why? The answer must be that they think getting drugless hemp legalized will somehow get them better access to Thai Stick or something.
But it's clear the "reasearch" status is specifically designed to ensure that you can't mix weed in with IH at any level. I suspect that one of the goals will be to ensure that the smoke of one won't smell like the other.
Otherwise, it'd be a great substitute for the tobacco economy, many times over since it has way more uses than just stuffing your paraphernalia and lighting it.
So it's stronger than cotton. Is it stronger than flax or jute or nylon and as soft as cotton? Because maybe that's why it's not in demand as a fiber. As-scrungy alternatives may exist.
It's all based on waves (classical theory). And it seems to be a surface phenomenon only, and dependent only on the geometric surface description.
Real QED would include interactions of photons with the subatomic particles of the atoms within the body of the material.
Diffraction and thin-foil effects are too-simple examples, with classical analogues. Phase-conjugate mirrors or simulacral holograms; now there you have to have QED.
This isn't to take away from Stam's work. It's gorgeous. The idea of walking into a bar with a double-barrelled shotgun and blowing away the pseudo-retro Wurlitzer with the wave-rendered CDs rotating on top, wave-rendered shards of CD spinning through space...
The idea of finding a secret because of its slight change in lustre vs its surroundings when the overhead lights dim and an accent spotlight becomes dominant...
The idea of being able to tell painted plastic from painted metal and painted wood, or black dirt from gunpowder and incinerated-demon charcoal...
Most of this stuff can continue to use Newtonian optics. Even Bragg diffraction, now that I think about it. So you're right that degenerate modelling will do us for quite some time, and most of the canon.
But the first person who wants to model proper rainbows, sun-dogs, or coatings...
The really hard part about QED isn't the iterations. It's defining the integration regime in the first place. I haven't looked in a couple of years, but I bet even the best Feynman diagram tools still can't work without heuristic input.
--Blair
"Luxo, Jr. always wanted to grow up to be an electron microscope."
Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.
> Those who can, create. Those who can't become art critics.
The quote is "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." Since almost everyone who can do has learned from a teacher, how bad is that? And many of the best teachers are masters--those who can do, well, and convey the technique and sense to others.
The other quote is "A critic is just a failed artist."
What a canard. Criticism is itself an art. All artists are naturally critics (it's how they place themselves within their genre and justify their depressions and histrionics). All people are naturally critics, and almost all people are frustrated artists. That canard is generally blathered by hacks whose stuff just got panned, or by politically correct art-sycophants. In most cases, it's the critic who is right. For every Picasso, there are 16,000 dorks doing clowns on velvet and repeating to themselves "a critic is just a failed artist".
Michelangelo painted the fucking Vatican. Van Gogh's works' excess value comes chiefly from the agonized life he led while painting them, and the hype-multiplier effect on collectibles. Da Vinci was persecuted by religious fixers who knew his analyses were correct but sought to suppress them as dangerous to their political and financial positions. Mozart was the 18th centry equivalent of a rock star.
People trot out anecdotes about fringe analyses to justify demonizing all criticism in an attempt to deny the truth in negative comments on their own work. They make and promote a prejudicial determination not borne out by fact.
--Blair
"Those who can criticize, do; those who can't, pretend to artistry; those who criticize critics make their pretense public."
What, did all the clueful people die when Slashdot got sold?
> lead people to accept lower and lower quality in the name of convenience
At least you understand that such things exist, even if you don't understand that this is exactly how the economy works. Consumers say "I don't need an elegant instruction set/300 horsepower with burled maple panelling/foie gras. I want cheap access to basic functionality/basic transportation/salt and fat and protein." And buy Wintel/Ford/McDonald's.
> McNuggets may be fine for the kids occasionally, would you serve it at a board meeting?
Note I didn't mention any board members by name who work two jobs. Board members don't have to settle for Intel PCs or Ford Escorts. They're not the bulk of the economy. If we were all board members, this would be moot. But that ain't how it works. Understand that, and you'll either become a communist or you'll reject your theory and search for the reasons it does work even though it's not egalitarian. In a couple of decades, you might even get it.
It's nice to see someone with a clue in this thread.
My P.S. mentioned partial dimensionality, and the followups ignored it. The longer one simply misinterpreted most of what I said.
Doom wasn't the first 3D game. Quake certainly wasn't. Wolfenstein wasn't by a decade. The first 3D games were probably Battlezone and Red Baron. Red Baron especially, being a wireframe simulation of a biplane shooting down enemy planes. The enemy moved in three dimensions relative to you, and you had control in three (pitch, roll, and throttle) that gave you the same trajectorized-6-degree control that any airplane gives you (you can have any position and attitude in space, but it depends on your previous position and attitude).
Descent was different enough that it made me buy the $100 3D controller that it came with (the Logitech Cyberman II puck, which was perfect for that game, but integrated into very few others).
As for what Carmack says, that's just his view that having three coordinates for the map wasn't enough. I'd agree, but I'd never go so far as to say Doom wasn't 3D at all. When you turned, the environment moved in perspective.
Again, the first thing I said was that there are many kinds of 3D going on in a virtual reality. The environment (position/orientation/perspective), the objects (sprites vs. wireframed/wrapped-wireframed vs. solid), and the control (paddle, arrow-keys/ joysticks, pucks/joyballs). Carmack's world had 3 DOF, 3 visual dimensions, and 2+ map dimensions.
The most important point one should take from my posts (both of which someone was so kind as to mod down, proving that metamoderation is a boon to mankind), is that true 3D will arrive when we can view from all angles.
(Think about the chesslike game R2D2 and Chewbacca play on the Millennium Falcon. With movable-camera environments and multiplayer, we're close, but still not there; we need the real volumetric display. And there was that holographic gunslinger game from ca. 1980, but it had only the one visual sequence, repeated over and over again in the same place. I wouldn't be surprised if the arcade at Disneyland still has one of those in operation...)
The argument about the player always being (0,0,0) proving the simulation is less 3D-ish makes me think that people should learn their math in school and not from computer games.
Korg, 70,000 years ago, could have created the microprocessor. I mean, he had the atoms at his disposal. All he had to do was stack the boxes, get the bananas, and induct from there.
Slashdot Mirror
Reality check:
www.junkscience.com is funded prominently by the Cato Foundation, a Libertarian political organization with more Conservative than Liberal leanings.
While I agree with some of junkscience.com's scientific arguments (on the causes and significance of the Antarctic Ozone Hole, e.g.), they tend to be selective. They are in essence a propaganda arm for the Tobacco, Oil, and other Smokestack Industries, giving the imprimatur of scientific study to their side of every debate.
What they post may occasionally be right, but it's not to their credit, since they ignore other facts at their leisure.
--Blair
What do I owe Africa?
Really?
"Fruits of the 21st Century?"
How about if Africa gets itself out of the 6th century by producing something the world wants?
And this time, try not to make it slaves, terrorists, virus es, endangered species, or diamonds to raise money to hack people to death.
--Blair
"You are only as free, happy, smart, and rich as you think you are."
It might also be interesting, while conducting a dig for slide rules, to conduct a dig for the first time the subject of the archaeology of slide rules came up on Usenet. Should be early '80s net.misc, or so. There could be a whole taxonomy of wistful ruminations on the slipstick. The Well, CompuServe, in fact any BBS whose archives survive in paleontological context...
groups.google.com would be kind of useless. dejanews was kind of useless, too. They don't go back far enough. I guess you'd have to start the "recorded history" of the net somewhere around 1990.
--Blair
When reading this, remember that water is 1,000 kg/m^3 (1.000 for the Euros); a bit more if it's sea-water:
p df
http://www.silicafume.net/PDF/C4-20-NORDHORDLAND.
I think the pontoons are hollow.
--Blair
P.S. 1,615 m is almost exactly one mile and three Smoots, give or take an ear.
Okay. That link shows the Capresso machines. Wanting to know more, I found them at capresso.com.
What I don't get is why the C1000 is a dead ringer for the Krups Orchestro (with that form factor they've got to have the same guts), but costs a good $100 more.
Besides, if it doesn't have a genuflecting duck on it, it ain't really an espresso machine...
--Blair
The concrete doesn't ever need to be lighter than water. The boat plus passengers and gear needs to be lighter than water. Which means the maximum displacement of the boat (fully loaded volume including outside hull sectioned at a plane level with the waterline) needs to weigh less than the load plus the boat. The concrete itself can be far more dense than water.
Having concrete that is lighter than water means you can make a raft out of concrete. It means your boat won't sink if it floods. It also means your boat has less inertia.
It looks like a minor point, I know, but this is an engineering contest. It's all about minor points and the error bars on them. To put conflicting statements in the brochure is to sandbag the less-experienced contestants.
The real trick is that normal building concrete is much heavier than water (and somewhat absorbent, which reduces its effective displacement in contact with water). But this contest years ago ceased to be about floating a hunk of sidewalk.
--Blair
But hey, Death started it:
www.aidsquilt.org
--Blair
Uh-oh, pipe-size wars...
The actual number that appears in the connection setup is something like 410 kbps. When I first got Ricochet, I could get occasional ftp xfers (under Windows) of over 320 kbps. Since then, they've obviously fiddled some configs (which fixed some disastrous problems, so I'm not complaining) that have brought the nominal top end down to 150k. There might be a few 250k+ seconds here and there, but I don't check it much anymore.
Someone almost certainly will be able to buy and bail this out. Those Rico & Chet commercials must've cost a bundle, but the Chapter can write that off. And there's still no viable competition for the market segment: 100kbps at 70mph.
--Blair
Microsoft develops hardware as applications for its OS, so put the Xbox in the Apps baby-bill.
.NET services for XP users.
WinCE is OS, so it goes in OS bb copied three ways.
WinXP is an illegal collusion of OS and Internet services. Give it to the OS bb, but don't let them serve its must-connect-to-MSN communications. The three OS bb's will figure out how to get the network services from whichever fungible provider gives them the best deal. That probably won't be MSN for all three of them, if one can strike an exclusivity deal, which it will do, to screw the other two (ain't the free market grand?). The other two, of course, will own a full license to the interfaces and business models, so they can get J.Random.Com to put together the website.
Think about it. I'd jump on a chance to form-fit-and-function a parallel business providing the
This is exactly the sort of reason you have to split the company up at least 5 ways.
Someone mentioned development tools. I see them as apps. The Apps bb will have three OS bb's to work with. Compatibility will suffer only insofar as each OS bb coordinates proprietary functionality with them. But guess what. That's innovation and competition. If they're really worried about compatibility becoming an issue, they can join a standards group and let the rest of us help define what we want them to do.
See? Isn't that world looking better than the monopolistic one we live in?
--Blair
This quote is by Steve Ballmer, from the Washington Post op-ed piece:
"because Windows has real-time communications built into it"
I don't think he knows what "real" or "time" mean, and he especially doesn't know what "real-time" means.
--Blair
Here's the breakup plan I've proposed all along. You split the company into 3 segments:
Online-services arm (MSN).
Application software.
Operating System.
Then you split the Operating System segment into three segments, giving each a full copy of the current and past code bases. Each one starts out as a clone of the others.
From then on, the five companies act independently, with the usual rules on how they can interact when doing business with each other.
The OS companies will end up competing with each other for market share and for relationships with other companies and with the Microsoft App and Network companies.
The rules would have to include that the companies can't create secret interfaces in the software when codeveloping features. All APIs would be documented, and in such a way that the reader can understand what the system actually does.
If it's not about the War on Drugs, why write a lecture on the War on Drugs? You seem to have missed the keen aim of my point.
Let me put it this way:
The vast majority of sites online supporting hemp are sites (on up to large organizations like Mother Jones and High Times) that are also associated with outspoken support of marijuana.
Why does the head community spend so much energy on something that (you say) doesn't serve its primary interest one bit? (If the answer isn't associated with drugs, then the head community becomes less about heads and more about stubborn opposition to government).
If hemp is so valuable and so unlike marijuana, why isn't the mainstream also trying to right this bureaucratic, agricultural, textile, economic wrong and making it a slam-dunk? Why are only 10% of states in on taking a Q-T peek at it? The first one to legalize hemp is going to kick ass.
It's stronger than flax and jute (I have no data re: nylon), and softer than cotton.
Then the problem certainly isn't the War on Drugs. It's the Cotton Lobby. And whaddaya bet they have their fingers in the problem running all the way back? Form a Hemp Lobby, wink-wink-nudge-nudge the politicians into understanding they won't lose a nickel of their graft if they bail on Cotton, and Hemp will become the next Internet.
--Blair
Okay, it seems like a no-brainer, so I looked it up, and there are 5 states (IL, KY, 3 unnamed others) legislating "research" status for industrial hemp.
On the other hand, there are a zillion "head" websites touting the stuff. The question is why? The answer must be that they think getting drugless hemp legalized will somehow get them better access to Thai Stick or something.
But it's clear the "reasearch" status is specifically designed to ensure that you can't mix weed in with IH at any level. I suspect that one of the goals will be to ensure that the smoke of one won't smell like the other.
Otherwise, it'd be a great substitute for the tobacco economy, many times over since it has way more uses than just stuffing your paraphernalia and lighting it.
So it's stronger than cotton. Is it stronger than flax or jute or nylon and as soft as cotton? Because maybe that's why it's not in demand as a fiber. As-scrungy alternatives may exist.
--Blair
> why there's so much cash spent on bio-engineering new strains of plants when hemp is a perfectly good as-is solution!
Because genetically engineered, THC-free, high-yield, extra-strong hemp would kick its ass and be Pat. Pend. Archer Daniels Midland.
--Blair
With or without their "real UNIX"?
--Blair
Damn cool, but it's not QED yet.
It's all based on waves (classical theory). And it seems to be a surface phenomenon only, and dependent only on the geometric surface description.
Real QED would include interactions of photons with the subatomic particles of the atoms within the body of the material.
Diffraction and thin-foil effects are too-simple examples, with classical analogues. Phase-conjugate mirrors or simulacral holograms; now there you have to have QED.
This isn't to take away from Stam's work. It's gorgeous. The idea of walking into a bar with a double-barrelled shotgun and blowing away the pseudo-retro Wurlitzer with the wave-rendered CDs rotating on top, wave-rendered shards of CD spinning through space...
The idea of finding a secret because of its slight change in lustre vs its surroundings when the overhead lights dim and an accent spotlight becomes dominant...
The idea of being able to tell painted plastic from painted metal and painted wood, or black dirt from gunpowder and incinerated-demon charcoal...
Someone get nVidia on the horn.
--Blair
Most of this stuff can continue to use Newtonian optics. Even Bragg diffraction, now that I think about it. So you're right that degenerate modelling will do us for quite some time, and most of the canon.
But the first person who wants to model proper rainbows, sun-dogs, or coatings...
The really hard part about QED isn't the iterations. It's defining the integration regime in the first place. I haven't looked in a couple of years, but I bet even the best Feynman diagram tools still can't work without heuristic input.
--Blair
"Luxo, Jr. always wanted to grow up to be an electron microscope."
Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.
--Blair
Get 40 downloads for only a penny!
Napster is in with the record companies, and is now becoming a record company.
How long before it's a buck a rip, $16 for a full album?
--Blair
> Those who can, create. Those who can't become art critics.
The quote is "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." Since almost everyone who can do has learned from a teacher, how bad is that? And many of the best teachers are masters--those who can do, well, and convey the technique and sense to others.
The other quote is "A critic is just a failed artist."
What a canard. Criticism is itself an art. All artists are naturally critics (it's how they place themselves within their genre and justify their depressions and histrionics). All people are naturally critics, and almost all people are frustrated artists. That canard is generally blathered by hacks whose stuff just got panned, or by politically correct art-sycophants. In most cases, it's the critic who is right. For every Picasso, there are 16,000 dorks doing clowns on velvet and repeating to themselves "a critic is just a failed artist".
Michelangelo painted the fucking Vatican. Van Gogh's works' excess value comes chiefly from the agonized life he led while painting them, and the hype-multiplier effect on collectibles. Da Vinci was persecuted by religious fixers who knew his analyses were correct but sought to suppress them as dangerous to their political and financial positions. Mozart was the 18th centry equivalent of a rock star.
People trot out anecdotes about fringe analyses to justify demonizing all criticism in an attempt to deny the truth in negative comments on their own work. They make and promote a prejudicial determination not borne out by fact.
--Blair
"Those who can criticize, do; those who can't, pretend to artistry; those who criticize critics make their pretense public."
What, did all the clueful people die when Slashdot got sold?
> lead people to accept lower and lower quality in the name of convenience
At least you understand that such things exist, even if you don't understand that this is exactly how the economy works. Consumers say "I don't need an elegant instruction set/300 horsepower with burled maple panelling/foie gras. I want cheap access to basic functionality/basic transportation/salt and fat and protein." And buy Wintel/Ford/McDonald's.
> McNuggets may be fine for the kids occasionally, would you serve it at a board meeting?
Note I didn't mention any board members by name who work two jobs. Board members don't have to settle for Intel PCs or Ford Escorts. They're not the bulk of the economy. If we were all board members, this would be moot. But that ain't how it works. Understand that, and you'll either become a communist or you'll reject your theory and search for the reasons it does work even though it's not egalitarian. In a couple of decades, you might even get it.
--Blair
The moderators have been awfully anal the past couple of days.
--Blair
No, it wouldn't be sweet.
:-P
There would be 200 million horses in the U.S.
200 million extra mouths to feed.
200 million unrepentant street-crappers. All the pollution, 1/200th the power.
No ability to spread the population to the suburbs.
No interstate transport system.
But we'd still have television. That was invented buy a kid out plowing a field one day in the early '20s. Behind a mule.
--Blair
P.S. to the luddite who modded me down:
It's nice to see someone with a clue in this thread.
My P.S. mentioned partial dimensionality, and the followups ignored it. The longer one simply misinterpreted most of what I said.
Doom wasn't the first 3D game. Quake certainly wasn't. Wolfenstein wasn't by a decade. The first 3D games were probably Battlezone and Red Baron. Red Baron especially, being a wireframe simulation of a biplane shooting down enemy planes. The enemy moved in three dimensions relative to you, and you had control in three (pitch, roll, and throttle) that gave you the same trajectorized-6-degree control that any airplane gives you (you can have any position and attitude in space, but it depends on your previous position and attitude).
Descent was different enough that it made me buy the $100 3D controller that it came with (the Logitech Cyberman II puck, which was perfect for that game, but integrated into very few others).
As for what Carmack says, that's just his view that having three coordinates for the map wasn't enough. I'd agree, but I'd never go so far as to say Doom wasn't 3D at all. When you turned, the environment moved in perspective.
Again, the first thing I said was that there are many kinds of 3D going on in a virtual reality. The environment (position/orientation/perspective), the objects (sprites vs. wireframed/wrapped-wireframed vs. solid), and the control (paddle, arrow-keys/ joysticks, pucks/joyballs). Carmack's world had 3 DOF, 3 visual dimensions, and 2+ map dimensions.
The most important point one should take from my posts (both of which someone was so kind as to mod down, proving that metamoderation is a boon to mankind), is that true 3D will arrive when we can view from all angles.
(Think about the chesslike game R2D2 and Chewbacca play on the Millennium Falcon. With movable-camera environments and multiplayer, we're close, but still not there; we need the real volumetric display. And there was that holographic gunslinger game from ca. 1980, but it had only the one visual sequence, repeated over and over again in the same place. I wouldn't be surprised if the arcade at Disneyland still has one of those in operation...)
The argument about the player always being (0,0,0) proving the simulation is less 3D-ish makes me think that people should learn their math in school and not from computer games.
--Blair
"Let the Wookiee win."
Korg, 70,000 years ago, could have created the microprocessor. I mean, he had the atoms at his disposal. All he had to do was stack the boxes, get the bananas, and induct from there.
--Blair