I think you ought to have a map of the Internet on your wall. ThinkGeek used to sell one, but they don't seem to have it anymore, sadly.
However, if you have access to a reliable printing shop (and being a university department, you should) consider printing and/or re-rendering one of these visualizations for your wall.
As with most problems in orbital mechanics, the problem is not the distance, but the speed it is travelling to maintain its orbit. In order to crash into the sun, it needs to reduce its speed from a very high number that maintains its orbit, to a very low number that allows it to crash into the sun without gaining so much speed due to gravity that it simply ends up in a newer, more elliptical orbit.
I am certain that it doesn't have enough fuel onboard to change its speed by even a fraction of the required amount. Keep in mind that simply by merit of launching from Earth, it started off with a substantial amount of orbital velocity already (namely, Earth's). To slow it right down to near zero would take a mind-boggling amount of fuel...
Or they could just cut and take control of the data cables that carry the commands to the control surfaces and engines, rendering the cockpit mostly superfluous. By necessity those cables must at some point travel through the fuselage to the wings/tail.
Um, no, they're called "binary stars", which if you read the damn post is exactly what Rei is saying Pluto and Charon should be called: "binary (insert-appropriate-term-here)"
Rei even said it doesn't matter what you call them. Do you want to call them "binary planets"? Go ahead, from what Rei said in the post it's fine. All Rei said is that they should be prefixed "binary", just like stars are prefixed "binary". And I agree, they should be.
In name only. It's not even close to the same Asheron's Call you probably remember. Superficially it's similar enough, but there's nothing left of the game underneath.
Too bad, AC was the only MMORPG I ever really got into.
With nearly 10 million pounds of thrust, I imagine there are still significant blast pressures on that pad even when the shuttle is a kilometer or more above it. For comparison, the blast danger area for other aircraft behind a 747 at full takeoff thrust is more than half a kilometer. If you don't believe that, there's a Top Gear episode that amply demonstrates the fact.
I've got an Athlon 900 server that's been running for around 8 years at a constant CPU temperature of 90-95 Celsius at idle. Still trucking away just fine. They were amazingly hot chips, but they seem to handle it okay.
I can't speak about Hibernate specifically, but I can tell you what my first concern would be. Database frameworks usually tend to have trouble dealing with complex database designs, and if they can deal with them they are invariably much slower and less efficient than a SQL statement could be.
Some of these complexity and efficiency issues can be resolved by partial denormalization of the database design, but again, that introduces inefficiency.
Basically, the use of a high-level framework like that introduces significantly more difficulty into the already difficult problem of performance optimization. And for most people, performance is a more immediate and obvious problem that needs solving as opposed to security.
Another problem in my opinion is that there approximately a million and one different database abstraction layers like Hibernate out there. The lack of standardization makes it very difficult for any of them to gain any sort of critical mass of developers and documentation the way SQL has.
See, there's your problem. The magnetotail wasn't so big back then, because of the ozone hole and global warming and oprah winfrey. Also, gnomes did it.
Depends how twitchy the game is. For high-speed fast-kill games (the Quake family and CounterStrike for example) a mouse will utterly destroy a joystick every time. The joystick limits you to a certain "max turning speed" even when the joystick is slammed all the way to the stops. A mouse provides no such limitation, subject to the scan speed of the sensor which is not realistically a limitation.
The mouse also allows you to utilize a sort of "muscle memory", since a given position on the pad will always more-or-less correspond to a certain view direction in the game. So you can instantly turn to that direction without thinking about what direction you're currently facing, or whatever. It provides many levels of direct feedback, which is unconscious but there, and it's important for gaming, in my opinion.
For the record, no matter how much I try, I can't imagine ever coming close to how good I am on a mouse. Which is fine, if that's all the game allows. Goldeneye on N64 was tremendous fun, and everyone was on the same playing field controller-wise. But if you tried to use a gamepad while playing against someone using a mouse? I can't imagine it ever working. You'd get your ass handed to you, I think.
Having a good bit of experience with both, I'd say that the documentation and overall support structure for PG is about the same as MySQL these days.
The only caveat that typically hangs up new users (especially ones coming from a MySQL background) and is not particularly clearly documented is the default authentication mechanism.
By default (at least on many distributions), Postgres uses "ident" authentication, which means no password is required for database logins on a local socket. What *is* required, on the other hand, is that you must be logged in/running as the UNIX user of same name. Obviously this poses problems for webapps that want their own database user and is generally just very confusing for users who are used to the database having its own independent set of usernames and passwords (which Postgres still does, for remote connections... causing further confusion)
Of course, like any good database Postgres will be more than happy to handle its own user authentication entirely natively, you simply have to use md5 instead of ident in pg_hba.conf
You're right, the weight that cars have gained has not been because of the engines, but the other poster never said that it was. He said that engine sizes have increased, and he's right. The additional weight has resulted in a significant increase in the sizes of the engines to compensate for the added weight while maintaining or increasing performance. So yes, the increased fuel consumption is because of bigger engines. The bigger engines, in turn, are because of the increased weight.
So I wouldn't say his guess sucks. It sounds like it was right on, he just neglected to boil it down to the root cause. You're both right.
Just make sure to uninstall all the Vista crapware, as usual. Official drivers seem to be available for XP if you're feeling ambitious. Runs fine with Linux though.:)
Who honestly works in a properly designed work environment though? Everywhere I've ever worked has overhead fluorescents, no matter how many other creature comforts they offer. To avoid seeing a reflection of those overhead lights (usually in someone else's office/cube so removing the bulbs is not an option) in your glossy screen you need to tilt it to unusual and unpleasant angles, if you are even able to avoid seeing the reflections at all.
I think those are technically T61p's. I just got a fully-loaded T61p with the 15.4" 1920x1200 widescreen a week ago and it is wonderful. I'm loving it so far.
I suspect Russia, Pakistan, or China would be more than willing to supply them all the aircraft they might need. Or they could just build some more of their own planes.
Fuck that, you expect people to play FPS games on a console? RTS? Flight simulators? Create mods? Emphatically NO, my friend. No. PC gaming is far from dead, and for the time being that means Windows. I'd like to see it change to Linux, but it isn't there yet. I would not like to see it change to console, and it won't, not until consoles have changed into something that's closer to a PC anyway.
I think marketers are annoying because they tell me to buy things I don't want. It's not the buying that bothers me, because it never happens. It's the telling. Over, and over, and over, without providing me a way to say "NO!"
You said it perfectly right here: "marketers are merely helping you fulfill this need by pushing past other products' attempts to get you to purchase them."
This is the crux of the problem, because it belies a conceit that marketers have: that their product is a better choice than all competitors for their entire target group. This is unspeakably arrogant for starters, and unbelievably annoying when, naturally, every marketer believes this about their product, so you get 100 products all arrogantly claiming to be the right choice for me and in all likelihood drowning out the one choice that is in fact right for me, which in my case is almost never the one with the biggest pockets.
So, you're saying the gaming machine I bought in 2000 could run Vista? It was relatively top-of-the-line, though it was purchased on a student budget so it skimped in a few areas.
I know a few who do, yes. Obviously, most don't believe it can be a long term solution, but first we have to kill the beast before we figure out how we're going to collect the loot.
Yes, the Asus does. Sort of. It doesn't support all the features of EAX newer versions, because Creative has parts of them patented. Usually stupid parts that personally I don't care about.
Anyway, they're being sued over it at the moment, so we'll see how it turns out, but the sound card at least tells GAMES that it supports EAX 5. Even if it doesn't support every little nuance they might throw at it, it still supports the majority of the positional audio, that's good enough for me.
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I think you ought to have a map of the Internet on your wall. ThinkGeek used to sell one, but they don't seem to have it anymore, sadly.
However, if you have access to a reliable printing shop (and being a university department, you should) consider printing and/or re-rendering one of these visualizations for your wall.
Do you even know what ray-tracing is? I agree, this isn't in the same league as a Radeon 2400XT. In fact, it's not even playing the same sport.
As with most problems in orbital mechanics, the problem is not the distance, but the speed it is travelling to maintain its orbit. In order to crash into the sun, it needs to reduce its speed from a very high number that maintains its orbit, to a very low number that allows it to crash into the sun without gaining so much speed due to gravity that it simply ends up in a newer, more elliptical orbit.
I am certain that it doesn't have enough fuel onboard to change its speed by even a fraction of the required amount. Keep in mind that simply by merit of launching from Earth, it started off with a substantial amount of orbital velocity already (namely, Earth's). To slow it right down to near zero would take a mind-boggling amount of fuel...
Or they could just cut and take control of the data cables that carry the commands to the control surfaces and engines, rendering the cockpit mostly superfluous. By necessity those cables must at some point travel through the fuselage to the wings/tail.
Um, no, they're called "binary stars", which if you read the damn post is exactly what Rei is saying Pluto and Charon should be called: "binary (insert-appropriate-term-here)"
Rei even said it doesn't matter what you call them. Do you want to call them "binary planets"? Go ahead, from what Rei said in the post it's fine. All Rei said is that they should be prefixed "binary", just like stars are prefixed "binary". And I agree, they should be.
In name only. It's not even close to the same Asheron's Call you probably remember. Superficially it's similar enough, but there's nothing left of the game underneath.
Too bad, AC was the only MMORPG I ever really got into.
You know exactly what "PC only" in this context meant. So you're just being pedantic.
extremely high-end
You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
It depends on your definition of "nearby".
With nearly 10 million pounds of thrust, I imagine there are still significant blast pressures on that pad even when the shuttle is a kilometer or more above it. For comparison, the blast danger area for other aircraft behind a 747 at full takeoff thrust is more than half a kilometer. If you don't believe that, there's a Top Gear episode that amply demonstrates the fact.
I've got an Athlon 900 server that's been running for around 8 years at a constant CPU temperature of 90-95 Celsius at idle. Still trucking away just fine. They were amazingly hot chips, but they seem to handle it okay.
I can't speak about Hibernate specifically, but I can tell you what my first concern would be. Database frameworks usually tend to have trouble dealing with complex database designs, and if they can deal with them they are invariably much slower and less efficient than a SQL statement could be.
Some of these complexity and efficiency issues can be resolved by partial denormalization of the database design, but again, that introduces inefficiency.
Basically, the use of a high-level framework like that introduces significantly more difficulty into the already difficult problem of performance optimization. And for most people, performance is a more immediate and obvious problem that needs solving as opposed to security.
Another problem in my opinion is that there approximately a million and one different database abstraction layers like Hibernate out there. The lack of standardization makes it very difficult for any of them to gain any sort of critical mass of developers and documentation the way SQL has.
This was in the early 1970s.
See, there's your problem. The magnetotail wasn't so big back then, because of the ozone hole and global warming and oprah winfrey. Also, gnomes did it.
Depends how twitchy the game is. For high-speed fast-kill games (the Quake family and CounterStrike for example) a mouse will utterly destroy a joystick every time. The joystick limits you to a certain "max turning speed" even when the joystick is slammed all the way to the stops. A mouse provides no such limitation, subject to the scan speed of the sensor which is not realistically a limitation.
The mouse also allows you to utilize a sort of "muscle memory", since a given position on the pad will always more-or-less correspond to a certain view direction in the game. So you can instantly turn to that direction without thinking about what direction you're currently facing, or whatever. It provides many levels of direct feedback, which is unconscious but there, and it's important for gaming, in my opinion.
For the record, no matter how much I try, I can't imagine ever coming close to how good I am on a mouse. Which is fine, if that's all the game allows. Goldeneye on N64 was tremendous fun, and everyone was on the same playing field controller-wise. But if you tried to use a gamepad while playing against someone using a mouse? I can't imagine it ever working. You'd get your ass handed to you, I think.
Having a good bit of experience with both, I'd say that the documentation and overall support structure for PG is about the same as MySQL these days.
The only caveat that typically hangs up new users (especially ones coming from a MySQL background) and is not particularly clearly documented is the default authentication mechanism.
By default (at least on many distributions), Postgres uses "ident" authentication, which means no password is required for database logins on a local socket. What *is* required, on the other hand, is that you must be logged in/running as the UNIX user of same name. Obviously this poses problems for webapps that want their own database user and is generally just very confusing for users who are used to the database having its own independent set of usernames and passwords (which Postgres still does, for remote connections... causing further confusion)
Of course, like any good database Postgres will be more than happy to handle its own user authentication entirely natively, you simply have to use md5 instead of ident in pg_hba.conf
You're right, the weight that cars have gained has not been because of the engines, but the other poster never said that it was. He said that engine sizes have increased, and he's right. The additional weight has resulted in a significant increase in the sizes of the engines to compensate for the added weight while maintaining or increasing performance. So yes, the increased fuel consumption is because of bigger engines. The bigger engines, in turn, are because of the increased weight.
So I wouldn't say his guess sucks. It sounds like it was right on, he just neglected to boil it down to the root cause. You're both right.
Just make sure to uninstall all the Vista crapware, as usual. Official drivers seem to be available for XP if you're feeling ambitious. Runs fine with Linux though. :)
Who honestly works in a properly designed work environment though? Everywhere I've ever worked has overhead fluorescents, no matter how many other creature comforts they offer. To avoid seeing a reflection of those overhead lights (usually in someone else's office/cube so removing the bulbs is not an option) in your glossy screen you need to tilt it to unusual and unpleasant angles, if you are even able to avoid seeing the reflections at all.
I think those are technically T61p's. I just got a fully-loaded T61p with the 15.4" 1920x1200 widescreen a week ago and it is wonderful. I'm loving it so far.
So I third the T61 recommendation.
I suspect Russia, Pakistan, or China would be more than willing to supply them all the aircraft they might need. Or they could just build some more of their own planes.
Not that they're really in dire need of more. They're pretty well equipped as it is.
Fuck that, you expect people to play FPS games on a console? RTS? Flight simulators? Create mods? Emphatically NO, my friend. No. PC gaming is far from dead, and for the time being that means Windows. I'd like to see it change to Linux, but it isn't there yet. I would not like to see it change to console, and it won't, not until consoles have changed into something that's closer to a PC anyway.
I think marketers are annoying because they tell me to buy things I don't want. It's not the buying that bothers me, because it never happens. It's the telling. Over, and over, and over, without providing me a way to say "NO!"
You said it perfectly right here: "marketers are merely helping you fulfill this need by pushing past other products' attempts to get you to purchase them."
This is the crux of the problem, because it belies a conceit that marketers have: that their product is a better choice than all competitors for their entire target group. This is unspeakably arrogant for starters, and unbelievably annoying when, naturally, every marketer believes this about their product, so you get 100 products all arrogantly claiming to be the right choice for me and in all likelihood drowning out the one choice that is in fact right for me, which in my case is almost never the one with the biggest pockets.
So, you're saying the gaming machine I bought in 2000 could run Vista? It was relatively top-of-the-line, though it was purchased on a student budget so it skimped in a few areas.
Let's see. Athlon Slot-A 700MHz. Voodoo3 graphics. 64MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB). 17GB 5400rpm hard drive. 1.44 floppy! 24x CDROM reader. 250W Athlon-approved powersupply.
Minor upgrades my ass, you'd be replacing everything but the case.
I know a few who do, yes. Obviously, most don't believe it can be a long term solution, but first we have to kill the beast before we figure out how we're going to collect the loot.
Remove the "compile once" step then.
Interpreted languages FTW.
Yes, the Asus does. Sort of. It doesn't support all the features of EAX newer versions, because Creative has parts of them patented. Usually stupid parts that personally I don't care about.
Anyway, they're being sued over it at the moment, so we'll see how it turns out, but the sound card at least tells GAMES that it supports EAX 5. Even if it doesn't support every little nuance they might throw at it, it still supports the majority of the positional audio, that's good enough for me.