I keep toying with the idea of a twin ammonia-calcium chloride adsorption A/C
Ammonia might not be a good idea for Joe Lugnut the backyard mechanic. One good whiff of ammonia can actually kill you. Granted, its properties are a dream for refrigeration cycles, but there's a reason why it isn't used in consumer products.
Theoretically, one could stick reverse Peltiers all over the catalytic converter too, and use the thermoelectric generated power to run the cooling Peltiers. It would be grossly inefficient and pretty damn expensive, but it would basically give you free cooling with no power loss, similar to your idea above. I suppose the cost could be brought down by using cheaper Seebeck junctions at a trade-off in output power.
A solar panel on the roof or rear deck could run this unit all day, keeping the temperature down inside your vehicle. You can probably get a pretty decent solar panel for the price of a replacement AC pump.
Consider the metal components and precision machining required for parts in a current automotive AC system versus a couple pelters, heatsinks, and possibly a small auxiliary electric fan. I think the component and machining cost savings would be substantial enough that AC could be equipped as standard equipment on all vehicles.
Alternators don't waste power needlessly, the load that they put on the engine depends on the amount of current that they are producing. So switching off the Peltier doesn't cost you anything. I know AC compressors have clutches too but I'm just pointing this out.
The moment something better and cheaper* appears we'll jump in with both feet.
There is no doubt about that. Noble goals of reducing emissions and all that are great, but the sad fact is that companies are basically controlled by very greedy individuals. If they can be convinced that the company can "break into a new market segment" and have "tremendous growth potential" then they will throw money at whatever it is without much hesitation.
Actually, the oil industry is writing its own epitaph by failing to keep prices down. At the current price levels, oil is only just slightly cheaper than some alternate fuels. I've heard an estimate that if gasoline were $4 per gallon then hydrogen becomes competitive. If oil prices go up much more then suddenly some other fuel will become more attractive and the fuel wars will begin in earnest.
The thing is, oil is a finite resource and its price can ultimately only increase. Alternative fuels are typically synthesized and their price will eventually drop as better technology improves their production process. Because the alternatives are created from raw materials which are essentially unlimited, their price is primarily dependant on the process used to synthesize them.
The question is: when will the two lines on the graph intersect. They are already drawing near enough that we are seeing things like biodiesel companies emerge. There will always be a niche market for fossil fuels, but decoupling cars and trucks from it would tremendously reduce consumption.
I had to implement it. My employer was providing CD-ROM's to sales agents under the agreement that the graphics and other material could not be distributed. My soluton was to use steganography to watermark a serial number onto every graphic so we could trace it back to the original cdrom. I know its not infallible and easily defeated, but sales agents are typically idiots and that was the best idea that I could come up with. It must have worked because I got fired pretty soon afterwards.
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
Thats a valid point of course. Unfortunately how many new games are produced with randomizers, map generators, persistent high score tables, concise goals to initiate a reset, or even consideration for a player's fun.
// firing up a honking big cigar
Doom3, with all of its wonderfull graphics, was scarey and spookey. Every time you turned around some stupid demon was gateing in behind you. I want sniper mode, not reflex whip around and shotgun the monster who just appeared out of nowhere behind me mode. I think the game scared me so bad that I have a psychological block against replaying it. Good game - YES! Replayable - NO!
HL2 is stupendous. Its great. Amazing graphics and near Doom3 quality stuff with a much more involved plot. But its a freaking depression trip. The world is already subjugated, the monsters are depressing, the City-17 guards are gas-mask wearing clowns, everything looks like ruined shit everywhere, and your only hope is to somehow defeat Mr. Personality and then what? Are you going to magically rebuild a shattered society where anybody which had any backbone was probably gassed years ago? The problem with HL2 was that things were screwed up so badly you had little hope of fixing things even if you did overthrow the regime. Total depression trip and it's just not fun.
Dammit! I want FUN games where I can ostensibly make a difference, not some angst ridden trip into the dark side!
Cherry pick bullshit. These new game companies have 1000x the resources that the old DOS developers did. The fact is that a corporation simply cannot produce anything that is "fun." It takes the work of one person leading the team to drive a game to excellence. Once you yoke game development to modern business theory you will never make a fun game again ever because making a game is like handcrafting a quality item and that is completely incompatible with modern business practices.
TW2002 was simply excellent. It was the pentultimate Trade Wars door ever created. I'm a licensed owner of TW2002 and OOII for what its worth, although I can't get my XBBS system to boot anymore because of Y2K issues. I had high hopes of running my old BBS as a telnet service on my Linux system in DOSBox or whatnot using telnet as a virtual modem but it isn't working and I fear I have lost my backups after so many years. I still have my OOII and TW2002 registration codes somewhere in my lockbox (I think).
OOII had so much creative genius involved it wasn't funny. Every monster, weapon, and item had a cool and unique name. Thats why it would be great to base a new game from Operation Overkill ][ is because the author "Dustin Nulf" invented a totally original scheme of weapons, monsters, and everything that was pretty much like nothing ever seen before or since. You'd have to play the game to understand the creative genius that went into it. It was amazingly fresh and sadly, it has become mostly forgotten.
DOSBox smokes in Linux too, in fact it probably works better under that environment than Windows since you can easily recompile it for yourself in Linux but you probably have to download a binary if you're a WinD0z3 d00d.
Once it's built it provides the virtual machine. Doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, you get a VGA card, Soundblaster, MIDI, virtual C: drive, EMS, XMS.
The coolest thing is the ability to toggle up and down with the cycles. As long as your machine is fast enough you usually adjust the cycles DOWN until the game runs at a playable speed. With my aging Athlon-XP 2400+ I can play most old DOS games with a couple exceptions: Privateer 2 doesn't run fast enough (I'm not surprised), and the Crusader games seem too sluggish or something. System Shock 1 runs on my system but its really laggy.
Once I get my Athlon-X2 for Christmas, all your DOSBos will belong to me!
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
There is a lot truth there, although the older games that I play now are like five-star "Top Dog" classic "Best Games of All Time" titles that I simply couldn't afford buying back when they were new even if I had heard of them which I hadn't. I run them in DOSBox, compile them in Linux, or whatever and then give them a whirl. Usually I am not disappointed.
I was just playing abandonware Master of Orion in Gentoo Linux DOSBox last weekend... my wife glanced over and said "Hrrmph, that looks cheesey..." (320x240 looks kind of grainy on a 20" monitor) but I was deep in thought moving my attack fleet into position. I mumbled "Yeah this is one of those old classic type games." The fact is that my brain was highly occupied calculating attack strategies and I was deep into the Zen of war gaming, I wasn't paying much if any attention to the graphics at that point.
I had never played X-COM until about a year ago, likewise with (Elite) Frontier First Encounters, and I only got Master of Orion working last week. I'm willing to accept old graphics if the game rocks, and some of them really do. DOSBox is your ticket to play some of the highest rated classic PC games ever created. I'd suggest checking them out.
My personal favorite BBS door game was Operation Overkill ][ which I ran on my BBS Tactical Operations XBBS. The goal of the game was to explore the wastelands fighting radioactive mutants, road warriors, Hydrites, and all manner of fearsome creatures. You could build bases out in the wastelands so that you didn't have to haul it back to the Main Complex every night and risk camping in the open where other players might kill you and steal your gear. Once you battled your way down to level four, invaded the Hydrite Prison, and got the keycards, if Overkill's spaceship landed you could storm it and try and kill him. When somebody killed Overkill the got onto the Hall of Fame and the game reset! Combat was done like this:
Hit "A"
...A...B...C...A...B...C...A(whap spacebar)
You hit the Hydrite with your Herculean!
The Hydrite is flurried by the infernal blast!
Man that game was fun. I contacted the author, one "Dustin Nulf" once and suggested that a Overkill themed Half-Life multiplayer mod would be really awesome. He wrote back and agreed but I gathered he was too busy with other things and he had put OOII behind him. Pity, it was really a nifty game. Once again, your imagination did most of the work.
Don't forget the Ur-Quan Masters which is a totally modern remake of Star Control 2 using the original source code. It runs on Windows, Linux, probably even BSD and OS/X.
Reminds me of Privateer 2 for the PC. It wonderfull little video cutscenes for almost everything that must have cost a small fortune to produce. Unfortunately once you lanched into space, combat was pretty lacking. And what made it worse was if you didn't dock within about 40 jumps, it crashed every single time. I've played it on four different types of PC's it always crashes. What a disappointment. I still play it occasionally but I get ticked when it locks up and makes me reboot and usually switch to something else. Maybe they should have just made a damn movie. Combat was nothing like Privateer 1 where you'd battle for an hour taking massive damage and could still usually limp your smoking wreck of a ship into port: in P2 you'd be doing fine and then BLAM! sheild failed hull breach imminent you're dead game over you suck.
There's no doubt that most of these new games lack the fun factor. I find myself consistently going back to some older classics. Here's my "most played" list.
Neverwinter Nights - I have a PW Server that I have been playing on for years now. Still a ton of fun. I play this several times a week usually.
Jagged Alliance 2 (and its mods) - Every couple months or so I get heavy into a game of this for a week or so. This game is brilliant! Been playing it regularly for years now.
DOSBox - While not a game per se, I use this to run X-COM, Master of Orion, Privateer, and Ultima Underworld. If you have DOSBox and a good PC then abandonware sites are like gold mines. I regularly rotate through the above games as the whim strikes me.
4X Games - These tend to have lots of replayability. Master of Orion (DOSBox), Space Empires IV, and Galactic Civilizations are some of my personal favorites.
Bioware and Black Isle games - Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout. These series are great to replay every so often. Fallout 1 is always cool to play through because its a quick game compared to the rest.
Shooters - I think the most fun ones are Quake, Quake2, Serious Sam, Fortress mods, and Duke Nukem 3D. Others are cool but I keep coming back to these for some mindless blasting. I gotta say I'm burned out on shooters right now though.
There's no doubt that the replayability of most new games has suffered. It seems like the old ones always had randomizers and scenario generators while new ones just trust that they will live on in multiplayer and user-made mods.
My hope for the future: Duke Nukem Forever, Jagged Alliance 3, Fallout 3, Quake IV, and Elite 4. They all come from a long lineage of "fun" games and hopefully they will uphold the tradition.
I was just trying to point out that there are lots of alternative methods to make ethanol, and they don't have to be all that energy intensive.
Typical industrial mindset is to make as much as possible as fast as you can and do it continuously. Thats where all the waste energy comes in. TFA even mentioned the energy required to make nitrogen fertilizer, but you can plant soybeans in fallow feilds and plow them under to enrich the soil too.
There are lots of innovative ways to reduce energy inputs but they usually involve trade-offs vs production issues which may not be compatible with modern business thinking.
So how do you keep a hydroelectric barrage from producing its typical output? Block the water flow and flood some more native lands?
Well, thats an entirely different situation obviously. In that case you can't cut back on the power output so you need to shunt it or do something otherwise useful with it.
Cracking water would be pretty neat considering you'd obviously have plenty of water nearby, but on such a massive scale it might be challenging to implement.
I always thought that electrolyzing molten salt down into sodium metal and chlorine gas would be a cool way to store energy. There's no question that reacting chlorine and sodium would be *vigorous* and highly exothermic. Storing the chlorine would be problematic; I think you can bubble it into water to make hydrochloric acid but it would be a pain.
Other ideas would be to run a huge air compressor and then produce liquid nitrogen and bottled oxygen. Whatever your power plant uses for fuel, unless its nuclear, it would probably burn a lot cleaner and hotter with pure oxygen. Excess liquid nitrogen could probably be put to good use if one was clever.
Generally though anytime you convert electicity to another form of energy you are going to have terrible inefficiency. It would be much better to have a good computer controlled power plant which closely produces only as much power as necessary to keep the grid up to nominal voltage levels.
Six times the energy input does not necessarily work out, especially if the input energy is low level process heat, sunlight, or other "cheap" sources of energy.
"Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy," he said. "We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient."
Consider the process of making ethanol from corn. You plant some field corn and let it grow. There is some energy involved here but mostly human labor and sunlight is involved. Once your corn is ready to harvest you probably want to use some kind of farm machine to harvest it up, ok some more energy here but probably not all that much. Maybe your farm machine could use ethanol for fuel.
For processing, since this corn is not for consumption I would imagine you could let it dry on the cobs, soak it down to sprout it, and then toss it into some kind of grinder to pulverise it into a very coarse mash. By sprouting it you allow the natural process to create mashing enzymes and sugar similar to barley malt. I can't imagine grinding up corncobs would require that much energy.
Then you heat up your mash to the conversion temperature of around 160F and convert all remaining starches to fermentable sugars. There's no point in straining the mixture really so once it cools down some you toss in a cake of distiller's yeast and let it ferment out.
Finally, you draw off your liquid which will contain some portion of ethanol. If you stored it until winter, you could use partial crystalization to refine your alcohol. No energy required here.
And the final distillation. Again, if you wait until the winter, you can utilize process heat from the distillation to heat your building. Some energy required here but you could probably use some of the ethanol you are producing to run your process and/or burn left over stalks, corncobs, and organic materials.
Really with some clever use of waste streams, the whole process could run with zero net outside energy input other than human labor and sunlight.
Overall the energy input probably does exceed the content of the finished product, but you are essentially concentrating your energy into a much more useful form (read: you can sell it for cash).
This is nothing new, all industry involves taking large amounts of relatively worthless raw materials and condensing them down into some form which is more useful and valuable.
A million joules of sunlight is essentially worthless, but a hundred thousand joules worth of ethanol is something you can sell!
Sure, its not as speedy as a C program, but its not designed to be. Ill take the developement cycle and portability ease in most situation that dont require absolute speed.
That's a pretty good summation of how I feel about it. I use Python if I really don't care about the execution speed and want the quickest development times. Java is a step up the rung and its much more suitable for use in business environments.
Python is great for a quick and dirty implementation, and C++ is good if you are making a commercial product, but if your app is going to be used by your average corporate shmuck for an in-house system then Java is a smart choice. Java based database frontends are easy to maintain, robust, and very professional looking, and this is where Java shines most brightly I think.
I don't know, I find myself almost drooling over the upcoming dual core X2 chips. I used to have a system with dual Pentium II 450's and it was pretty sweet, especially in Linux. The OS and system services can run on one of the cores, leaving you with essentially 100% cycles for your game on the second core. From my experience, the dual processor system was very consistently fast, it took a lot of effort to bog it down. You can do things in Linux like run a game on a second X-Server in a different VC and toggle back and forth to your desktop to read the strategy guide in your web browser with no performance hit.
Pure windows gamers would probably opt for the faster single-core, but I would think that anybody who was running Linux would really benefit from the dual cores. I know what I want for X-mas now this year:-)
Almost identical here. I get a login prompt in about 58s, first desktop in 1m7s, completely loaded up systray in 1m49s. Thats Win2k on an AthlonXP 2400+ with 1GB. My system is pretty lean and mean, but it still loads an antivirus, steam, and OpenOffice quicklauncher.
Yeah, my wife's computer is a PII 333 with something like 128Mb RAM, I compiled Gentoo with the full gnome-desktop package and OpenOffice and it runs pretty well (I compiled it using distcc and my fast machine doing the work). It's not overly speedy but its bearable.
She also has WinXP installed on it and thats what she normally uses. Its pretty sluggish from the times I have used it, but also bearable.
I do have to laugh at all the crap that is installed on most new PC windows systems. Fifteen "Click here to install the Doofus Network" etc. All these stubs which prompt you to purchase something. I usually delete all that crap when I set up a PC. Heaven forbid they just sell you a damn operating system. No, they have to load it up with more ads than the Sunday paper. Disgusting.
I have played NwN online quite a bit. Find yourself a nice persistent world server, make your ultimate barbarian, and have at it! The online experience is pretty cool.
I can say this I guess because among other things, I'm a DM on a popular NwN server! When the Town Crier starts shouting, you know the manure is gonna hit the bellows. Grab your trusty greataxe, check how many heal potions you have left, and follow the guy in front of you because he's probably heading right for the thick of it.
There's still a lot of fun to be had with this game and it runs great on Linux. It crashes constantly for me in Win2K but it runs pretty stable in Gentoo for some reason (go figure).
And no I'm not going to say what server I DM on, the last thing I need is a million/. n00bie lusers logging in and ruining the experience with all of your "All your castle are belong to me" and "In monster cave, monster kils YOU!" and "Imagine dual wielding these babies!" witticisms. All I can say is seek and ye shall find.
If Apple had done this about three years ago, I would have leaped onto their bandwagon eagerly.
The fact is though, Linux has come a long ways in the last few years. It runs great, looks good, has lots of nice software now, robust, free, etc. I'm pretty content to stick with it now.
I just can't see myself switching to OS/X anymore unless it became the new commercial PC gaming platform of choice. Otherwise its just a somewhat shined up version of the same thing that I'm already using: a unix-like operating system with a windowing system. Granted, Gnome isn't as pretty as Aqua, but its not too bad either. A little playing around and installing some fonts and themes and it looks pretty nice actually.
600 bones for a vid card that is going to showcase what reveloutionry/evolutionary new game?
Exactly. I'm pretty bored with all my FPS shooters. HL2 and Doom3 were both pretty cool and all, but I just don't find myself spending much time playing them. I think they added too much frustration and realism and forgot to make the games fun.
I spend way more time playing NwN online or running classic old DOS games like Master of Orion using DOSBox than playing these latest and greatest offerings.
The most recent FPS game I have played which was actually FUN was Serious Sam 1. That game is just a howl in multiplayer co-op mode with unlimited ammo turned on and serious difficulty level. I haven't even played that for a year at least.
I'd say that this is one of those times where hardware has shot past the software in capabilities. Kind of like running Quake2 on your Voodoo2 card. I should probably try FarCry one of these days but I just can't get enthused about another shooter right now.
My FX5900 is still doing a great job for me both in Windows and Linux. Considering that my most GPU intensive games are Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Neverwinter Nights, I see no reason to upgrade in the near future.
Maybe when Duke Nukem Forever is released I'll think about an upgrade. The 5900 was a pretty substantial leap from my previous 4MX and has held up pretty well in the year or so that I've been using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ammonia might not be a good idea for Joe Lugnut the backyard mechanic. One good whiff of ammonia can actually kill you. Granted, its properties are a dream for refrigeration cycles, but there's a reason why it isn't used in consumer products.
Theoretically, one could stick reverse Peltiers all over the catalytic converter too, and use the thermoelectric generated power to run the cooling Peltiers. It would be grossly inefficient and pretty damn expensive, but it would basically give you free cooling with no power loss, similar to your idea above. I suppose the cost could be brought down by using cheaper Seebeck junctions at a trade-off in output power.
A solar panel on the roof or rear deck could run this unit all day, keeping the temperature down inside your vehicle. You can probably get a pretty decent solar panel for the price of a replacement AC pump.
Consider the metal components and precision machining required for parts in a current automotive AC system versus a couple pelters, heatsinks, and possibly a small auxiliary electric fan. I think the component and machining cost savings would be substantial enough that AC could be equipped as standard equipment on all vehicles.
Alternators don't waste power needlessly, the load that they put on the engine depends on the amount of current that they are producing. So switching off the Peltier doesn't cost you anything. I know AC compressors have clutches too but I'm just pointing this out.
There is no doubt about that. Noble goals of reducing emissions and all that are great, but the sad fact is that companies are basically controlled by very greedy individuals. If they can be convinced that the company can "break into a new market segment" and have "tremendous growth potential" then they will throw money at whatever it is without much hesitation.
Actually, the oil industry is writing its own epitaph by failing to keep prices down. At the current price levels, oil is only just slightly cheaper than some alternate fuels. I've heard an estimate that if gasoline were $4 per gallon then hydrogen becomes competitive. If oil prices go up much more then suddenly some other fuel will become more attractive and the fuel wars will begin in earnest.
The thing is, oil is a finite resource and its price can ultimately only increase. Alternative fuels are typically synthesized and their price will eventually drop as better technology improves their production process. Because the alternatives are created from raw materials which are essentially unlimited, their price is primarily dependant on the process used to synthesize them.
The question is: when will the two lines on the graph intersect. They are already drawing near enough that we are seeing things like biodiesel companies emerge. There will always be a niche market for fossil fuels, but decoupling cars and trucks from it would tremendously reduce consumption.
I had to implement it. My employer was providing CD-ROM's to sales agents under the agreement that the graphics and other material could not be distributed. My soluton was to use steganography to watermark a serial number onto every graphic so we could trace it back to the original cdrom. I know its not infallible and easily defeated, but sales agents are typically idiots and that was the best idea that I could come up with. It must have worked because I got fired pretty soon afterwards.
Thats a valid point of course. Unfortunately how many new games are produced with randomizers, map generators, persistent high score tables, concise goals to initiate a reset, or even consideration for a player's fun.
// firing up a honking big cigar
Doom3, with all of its wonderfull graphics, was scarey and spookey. Every time you turned around some stupid demon was gateing in behind you. I want sniper mode, not reflex whip around and shotgun the monster who just appeared out of nowhere behind me mode. I think the game scared me so bad that I have a psychological block against replaying it. Good game - YES! Replayable - NO!
HL2 is stupendous. Its great. Amazing graphics and near Doom3 quality stuff with a much more involved plot. But its a freaking depression trip. The world is already subjugated, the monsters are depressing, the City-17 guards are gas-mask wearing clowns, everything looks like ruined shit everywhere, and your only hope is to somehow defeat Mr. Personality and then what? Are you going to magically rebuild a shattered society where anybody which had any backbone was probably gassed years ago? The problem with HL2 was that things were screwed up so badly you had little hope of fixing things even if you did overthrow the regime. Total depression trip and it's just not fun.
Dammit! I want FUN games where I can ostensibly make a difference, not some angst ridden trip into the dark side!
Cherry pick bullshit. These new game companies have 1000x the resources that the old DOS developers did. The fact is that a corporation simply cannot produce anything that is "fun." It takes the work of one person leading the team to drive a game to excellence. Once you yoke game development to modern business theory you will never make a fun game again ever because making a game is like handcrafting a quality item and that is completely incompatible with modern business practices.
OOII had so much creative genius involved it wasn't funny. Every monster, weapon, and item had a cool and unique name. Thats why it would be great to base a new game from Operation Overkill ][ is because the author "Dustin Nulf" invented a totally original scheme of weapons, monsters, and everything that was pretty much like nothing ever seen before or since. You'd have to play the game to understand the creative genius that went into it. It was amazingly fresh and sadly, it has become mostly forgotten.
Once it's built it provides the virtual machine. Doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, you get a VGA card, Soundblaster, MIDI, virtual C: drive, EMS, XMS.
The coolest thing is the ability to toggle up and down with the cycles. As long as your machine is fast enough you usually adjust the cycles DOWN until the game runs at a playable speed. With my aging Athlon-XP 2400+ I can play most old DOS games with a couple exceptions: Privateer 2 doesn't run fast enough (I'm not surprised), and the Crusader games seem too sluggish or something. System Shock 1 runs on my system but its really laggy.
Once I get my Athlon-X2 for Christmas, all your DOSBos will belong to me!
There is a lot truth there, although the older games that I play now are like five-star "Top Dog" classic "Best Games of All Time" titles that I simply couldn't afford buying back when they were new even if I had heard of them which I hadn't. I run them in DOSBox, compile them in Linux, or whatever and then give them a whirl. Usually I am not disappointed.
I was just playing abandonware Master of Orion in Gentoo Linux DOSBox last weekend... my wife glanced over and said "Hrrmph, that looks cheesey..." (320x240 looks kind of grainy on a 20" monitor) but I was deep in thought moving my attack fleet into position. I mumbled "Yeah this is one of those old classic type games." The fact is that my brain was highly occupied calculating attack strategies and I was deep into the Zen of war gaming, I wasn't paying much if any attention to the graphics at that point.
I had never played X-COM until about a year ago, likewise with (Elite) Frontier First Encounters, and I only got Master of Orion working last week. I'm willing to accept old graphics if the game rocks, and some of them really do. DOSBox is your ticket to play some of the highest rated classic PC games ever created. I'd suggest checking them out.
I'm going to get a PS3 just so I can run Linux on a Cell machine. If it plays games thats cool too.
Hit "A"
...A...B...C...A...B...C...A(whap spacebar)
You hit the Hydrite with your Herculean!
The Hydrite is flurried by the infernal blast!
Man that game was fun. I contacted the author, one "Dustin Nulf" once and suggested that a Overkill themed Half-Life multiplayer mod would be really awesome. He wrote back and agreed but I gathered he was too busy with other things and he had put OOII behind him. Pity, it was really a nifty game. Once again, your imagination did most of the work.
The Ur-Quan Masters
I've spent a lot of time with this one and I was just considering playing it again soon, actually.
Reminds me of Privateer 2 for the PC. It wonderfull little video cutscenes for almost everything that must have cost a small fortune to produce. Unfortunately once you lanched into space, combat was pretty lacking. And what made it worse was if you didn't dock within about 40 jumps, it crashed every single time. I've played it on four different types of PC's it always crashes. What a disappointment. I still play it occasionally but I get ticked when it locks up and makes me reboot and usually switch to something else. Maybe they should have just made a damn movie. Combat was nothing like Privateer 1 where you'd battle for an hour taking massive damage and could still usually limp your smoking wreck of a ship into port: in P2 you'd be doing fine and then BLAM! sheild failed hull breach imminent you're dead game over you suck.
- Neverwinter Nights - I have a PW Server that I have been playing on for years now. Still a ton of fun. I play this several times a week usually.
- Jagged Alliance 2 (and its mods) - Every couple months or so I get heavy into a game of this for a week or so. This game is brilliant! Been playing it regularly for years now.
- DOSBox - While not a game per se, I use this to run X-COM, Master of Orion, Privateer, and Ultima Underworld. If you have DOSBox and a good PC then abandonware sites are like gold mines. I regularly rotate through the above games as the whim strikes me.
- 4X Games - These tend to have lots of replayability. Master of Orion (DOSBox), Space Empires IV, and Galactic Civilizations are some of my personal favorites.
- Bioware and Black Isle games - Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout. These series are great to replay every so often. Fallout 1 is always cool to play through because its a quick game compared to the rest.
- Shooters - I think the most fun ones are Quake, Quake2, Serious Sam, Fortress mods, and Duke Nukem 3D. Others are cool but I keep coming back to these for some mindless blasting. I gotta say I'm burned out on shooters right now though.
There's no doubt that the replayability of most new games has suffered. It seems like the old ones always had randomizers and scenario generators while new ones just trust that they will live on in multiplayer and user-made mods.My hope for the future: Duke Nukem Forever, Jagged Alliance 3, Fallout 3, Quake IV, and Elite 4. They all come from a long lineage of "fun" games and hopefully they will uphold the tradition.
Typical industrial mindset is to make as much as possible as fast as you can and do it continuously. Thats where all the waste energy comes in. TFA even mentioned the energy required to make nitrogen fertilizer, but you can plant soybeans in fallow feilds and plow them under to enrich the soil too.
There are lots of innovative ways to reduce energy inputs but they usually involve trade-offs vs production issues which may not be compatible with modern business thinking.
Well, thats an entirely different situation obviously. In that case you can't cut back on the power output so you need to shunt it or do something otherwise useful with it.
Cracking water would be pretty neat considering you'd obviously have plenty of water nearby, but on such a massive scale it might be challenging to implement.
Other ideas would be to run a huge air compressor and then produce liquid nitrogen and bottled oxygen. Whatever your power plant uses for fuel, unless its nuclear, it would probably burn a lot cleaner and hotter with pure oxygen. Excess liquid nitrogen could probably be put to good use if one was clever.
Generally though anytime you convert electicity to another form of energy you are going to have terrible inefficiency. It would be much better to have a good computer controlled power plant which closely produces only as much power as necessary to keep the grid up to nominal voltage levels.
For processing, since this corn is not for consumption I would imagine you could let it dry on the cobs, soak it down to sprout it, and then toss it into some kind of grinder to pulverise it into a very coarse mash. By sprouting it you allow the natural process to create mashing enzymes and sugar similar to barley malt. I can't imagine grinding up corncobs would require that much energy.
Then you heat up your mash to the conversion temperature of around 160F and convert all remaining starches to fermentable sugars. There's no point in straining the mixture really so once it cools down some you toss in a cake of distiller's yeast and let it ferment out.
Finally, you draw off your liquid which will contain some portion of ethanol. If you stored it until winter, you could use partial crystalization to refine your alcohol. No energy required here.
And the final distillation. Again, if you wait until the winter, you can utilize process heat from the distillation to heat your building. Some energy required here but you could probably use some of the ethanol you are producing to run your process and/or burn left over stalks, corncobs, and organic materials.
Really with some clever use of waste streams, the whole process could run with zero net outside energy input other than human labor and sunlight.
Overall the energy input probably does exceed the content of the finished product, but you are essentially concentrating your energy into a much more useful form (read: you can sell it for cash).
This is nothing new, all industry involves taking large amounts of relatively worthless raw materials and condensing them down into some form which is more useful and valuable.
A million joules of sunlight is essentially worthless, but a hundred thousand joules worth of ethanol is something you can sell!
That's a pretty good summation of how I feel about it. I use Python if I really don't care about the execution speed and want the quickest development times. Java is a step up the rung and its much more suitable for use in business environments.
Python is great for a quick and dirty implementation, and C++ is good if you are making a commercial product, but if your app is going to be used by your average corporate shmuck for an in-house system then Java is a smart choice. Java based database frontends are easy to maintain, robust, and very professional looking, and this is where Java shines most brightly I think.
Pure windows gamers would probably opt for the faster single-core, but I would think that anybody who was running Linux would really benefit from the dual cores. I know what I want for X-mas now this year :-)
Almost identical here. I get a login prompt in about 58s, first desktop in 1m7s, completely loaded up systray in 1m49s. Thats Win2k on an AthlonXP 2400+ with 1GB. My system is pretty lean and mean, but it still loads an antivirus, steam, and OpenOffice quicklauncher.
She also has WinXP installed on it and thats what she normally uses. Its pretty sluggish from the times I have used it, but also bearable.
I do have to laugh at all the crap that is installed on most new PC windows systems. Fifteen "Click here to install the Doofus Network" etc. All these stubs which prompt you to purchase something. I usually delete all that crap when I set up a PC. Heaven forbid they just sell you a damn operating system. No, they have to load it up with more ads than the Sunday paper. Disgusting.
I can say this I guess because among other things, I'm a DM on a popular NwN server! When the Town Crier starts shouting, you know the manure is gonna hit the bellows. Grab your trusty greataxe, check how many heal potions you have left, and follow the guy in front of you because he's probably heading right for the thick of it.
There's still a lot of fun to be had with this game and it runs great on Linux. It crashes constantly for me in Win2K but it runs pretty stable in Gentoo for some reason (go figure).
And no I'm not going to say what server I DM on, the last thing I need is a million /. n00bie lusers logging in and ruining the experience with all of your "All your castle are belong to me" and "In monster cave, monster kils YOU!" and "Imagine dual wielding these babies!" witticisms. All I can say is seek and ye shall find.
The fact is though, Linux has come a long ways in the last few years. It runs great, looks good, has lots of nice software now, robust, free, etc. I'm pretty content to stick with it now.
I just can't see myself switching to OS/X anymore unless it became the new commercial PC gaming platform of choice. Otherwise its just a somewhat shined up version of the same thing that I'm already using: a unix-like operating system with a windowing system. Granted, Gnome isn't as pretty as Aqua, but its not too bad either. A little playing around and installing some fonts and themes and it looks pretty nice actually.
Exactly. I'm pretty bored with all my FPS shooters. HL2 and Doom3 were both pretty cool and all, but I just don't find myself spending much time playing them. I think they added too much frustration and realism and forgot to make the games fun.
I spend way more time playing NwN online or running classic old DOS games like Master of Orion using DOSBox than playing these latest and greatest offerings.
The most recent FPS game I have played which was actually FUN was Serious Sam 1. That game is just a howl in multiplayer co-op mode with unlimited ammo turned on and serious difficulty level. I haven't even played that for a year at least.
I'd say that this is one of those times where hardware has shot past the software in capabilities. Kind of like running Quake2 on your Voodoo2 card. I should probably try FarCry one of these days but I just can't get enthused about another shooter right now.
My FX5900 is still doing a great job for me both in Windows and Linux. Considering that my most GPU intensive games are Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Neverwinter Nights, I see no reason to upgrade in the near future.
Maybe when Duke Nukem Forever is released I'll think about an upgrade. The 5900 was a pretty substantial leap from my previous 4MX and has held up pretty well in the year or so that I've been using it.