Wow, it uses Faraday's Principle of Induction to generate electricity? What a novel way of doing it!
Sorry, I couldn't help but make fun of you for stating it like it's something interesting or uncommon. Virtually ALL of the world's energy comes from changing kinetic energy into electricity using a dynamo or generator -- which use, you guessed it, Faraday's principle of induction. There are a few exceptions, such as photovoltaic cells and thermocouples, but those are absolutely marginal at best. Grid-scale solar power doesn't use photovoltaic cells, but typically heats water into steam to turn turbines. Thermocouples have never been widely deployed.
True, these reports are mostly considered unsubstantiated rumour, though. One notable hoax of this nature was an eBay seller who made up numerous stories in an attempt to FUD other sellers of 4GB microdrives. There was even a doctored picture of the innards of a MuVo with solder along the drive edge photoshopped in, in this mythical 'new version of the MuVo'.
s/iPod Mini/Creative Labs MuVo^2/g -- to get the correct version of the parent comment.
iPod Minis contain a different version of the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive. In the iPod Mini, the ability for the card to do CF+ has been disabled, it operates only in IDE mode -- making it useless for digital cameras and most other things one would want a Microdrive for. The MuVo has the standard consumer model of the Microdrive with working CF+ support. It has been tested to work properly in the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) among other cameras.
You can see whether a drive is from the MuVo or the iPod Mini because the iPod Mini version is barcoded and serial numbered on the label, while the MuVo version is just an empty white label.
I don't actually expect laser projection displays to go anywhere. The advantage of a laser for projection is its high brightness (intensity in a small area). That's great for vector display where you want to "draw" bright lines. When you use a scanning laser for a raster display you lose this advantage, though.
Funny, the same thing could be said of cathode ray tubes. You know, that technology that is only now starting to be supplanted by LCDs? CRTs were great for line-drawing applications like oscilloscopes.
There are also safety/legal issues with laser projection. Any laser bright enough for a large projection display is dangerous if it stops scanning.
I'm guessing you are implying by the 'stops scanning' bit that you are worried it will burn a hole in the wall or something. Do you really have any concept how powerful a laser it takes to even make something warm, much less be "dangerous" to anything other than your eyes? We're talking LASER DIODES here, not xenon/argon lasers.
Granted it may still be dangerous to the human eye, whether it's scanning or not, but so are laser pointers, and they're a bit easier to aim at someone's eyes.
The projectors of course have interlocks that shut off the laser if the raster scan jams or stops, but such a system could fail or be defeated by someone with malicious intent.
Yeah, because THAT's not an unbelievable, overly elaborate way of trying to be malicious. Are you a James Bond Supervillain or something?
I don't tolerate ignorance in language any more than I tolerate spyware on my computer. Neither are immediately damaging, but they're both somewhat distasteful. I don't think it makes me uptight, but you're welcome to your opinion.
Besides, I consider the demonstration of ignorance an open invitation to be educated. Whether they choose to listen or not is up to them.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Please don't use that term unless you actually honestly know what the hell you're doing. "Begging the question" has nothing to do with an actual question anyway. If your statement has a question mark in it you're almost certainly NOT begging the question.
Chalk me up under the "hate videogame real-life-ism" tally.
That comes with a major caveat though: I think strongly that games have to at least be realistic within their own universe. It's one thing for the heavily armed and armored, trained for fighting, shieldpack-wearing ogres in Unreal Tournament to be able to take a chaingun barrage in the chest. It's what the game is all about.
It is not, on the other hand, acceptable for a bored civilian in Deus Ex 2 to be able to withstand a point-blank pistol blast to the head without even getting angry at me. Nowhere in the game's story did it suggest that humans had evolved metal skulls, or that the anti-gun lobby had gotten all firearms replaced with bb-guns.
No. "It raises the question -- how much money would it take to bury Linux?" is the only correct way of writing it, even if you meant it in a rhetorical sense (as in, the implied answer is "No amount of money can bury Linux")
To "beg the question" means that you have made an error in reasoning. It has nothing to do with an actual question. It is a circular argument, where you try to prove a point by using that same point as fact. "Cars are bad for the environment because they cause serious environmental damage." -- to which someone might reply, "You are begging the question."
(Grammar nazis, please be gentle -- I may not have perfectly explained the term, but it's a far sight closer than using it as equivalent to "raises the question")
You misinterpreted 'the land of the free'. This is the new America, it's all about the freedom of corporations. They are free to abuse their employees however they see fit, you see, because it's a free market for employees, supply and demand and all that, and what better way to show off our perfect free market economy of capitalist goodness. Corporations are free from all sorts of things: free from moral and ethical constraints, free from copyright limitations; they're scrutiny-free, tax-free, responsibility-free, and striving to become competition-free.
As you can see, it's all about freedom. I for one welcome our newly incorporated overlords.
I can understand not including it, as it is closed source (although technically it is available on one UNIX platform...;), but it is by far the best mail client I've ever used.
Try Chromatron if you're interested in a hard game. The best part? When you get bored of trying to beat level 50 (or 39, for that matter), there are two sequels of (I'm told) even more sleeplessness-inducing, head-banging, "this is god damn impossible, there's no way..."-mumbling fun.
That game has stolen countless hours of my life away, and I refuse to move on to the sequels until I complete levels 39 and 50. So there.
The author of cpo is aiming very squarely (excuse the pun) at third place. Check out this post for more information. Given the undoubtedly tiny number of bytes, if he even gets a few votes I think he's almost guaranteed a third place finish.
Kind of an interesting approach at subverting the calculations for third place, but a bit against the spirit of things, so it won't get my vote.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment of upload speads being artificially and retardedly expensive, I do have to mention that the $200 "business" line gets you lots of fun added perks like the poor network admin's cellphone number.:D
3am: "Hi, this is (insert my incorporated-but-mostly-fake business name here). We've lost our Internet connection, what's going on?"... I would probably feel more sorry for him if I hadn't also been woken up at 3am. *sigh*
The Alberta SuperNet is connecting rural communities via fiber links. That's easy. Long-distance fiber is surprisingly cheap (in a relative sense) and easy to install, as is evidenced by the amount of long-distance dark fiber laying around. For fiber, the real cost is in the last mile (it's always in the last mile, but especially so for fiber) because of all the equipment needed to translate the modulated light into digital, and vice versa. Doing 900-odd fiber drops over long, mostly rural distances pales in comparison to doing 100,000 fiber drops in downtown Calgary.
That's the real reason that all that long-distance fiber is dark, by the way -- there's so much intercity bandwidth that there's no way to fill it, since they can't cost-effectively filter the bandwidth at the NOC down to the places where they need it. This leads to a lot of bullshit such as the situation I'm in:
ADSL line, downtown Calgary, connected directly into Telus' NOC. There is no shortage of bandwidth there, I know this for a fact -- that specific building is one of the primary hubs for Internet traffic in Western Canada. Now I am being pestered by my ISP about my 11GB upload limit. Why? Because Telus charges my ISP exorbitant rates to keep them in check, since Telus also provides ADSL. Why doesn't Telus allow capless ADSL then? I can only imagine it's so that you get equivalent service regardless of whether you're connected to a heavily-saturated CO in the suburbs with a T3, or connected directly to the NOC, since you're paying the same price.
What's amazing is that no other film has won 11 oscars ever.
Untrue. Both "Titanic" and "Ben-Hur" achieved this. Neither of them managed to win in all the categories they were nominated in, though. (Which actually suggests they may have been "better" since they were nominated in 12 or more categories)
I agree that it's dangerous. So is a compiler option that changes memory around beneath the programmer without making it 100% absolutely transparent. Neither is safe, and neither should be allowed in any company that favours quality over speed.
the idea being to ensure that the compiler is not doing something horrible like flipping the bytes around in memory when the char* is cast into an int*.
You were probably querying it hundreds of times per hour, because twice per hour is fine with slashdot.
Bullshit. Try it. Slashdot's ridiculous RSS restrictions are not only excessively draconian, but also buggy, frequently tagging non-offenders.
All this, for a small RSS file on a website that gets millions of hits to its graphical front page per day. What crack are they smoking?
Perhaps anyone wanting to automate the listing of slashdot stories should write a parser for the Slashdot frontpage instead, since clearly that is not subject to pointless draconian restrictions. Have it download images to/dev/null too, just for kicks.
Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Kart, Crystal Chronicles (all great party games), Metroid Prime, I Ninja, F-Zero, Wind Waker, Prince Of Persia, Splinter Cell, Ikaruga, Eternal Darkness, Sonic Heroes.
Oops, that was 12. My mistake. (Not even counting some of my personal favourites there, P.N. 03, Phantasy Star Online, and Animal Crossing)
How many of the above games are currently exclusive to gamecube? All except one as far as I know (I purposely tried to avoid all-platform titles for this list, though rest assured there are plenty of those too)
When you come up with the perfect voting system, please let us all know. We'd love to apply it to things like American Politics.
Until then, there's no such thing as a perfect polling mechanism. Any attempt to average the diverse views of a few hundred, hundred thousand, or hundred million people is NEVER going to be completely representative of how everyone truly feels, even if you have directly polled each and every one of them.
With all that said though, I do concede that "bracket" selection is quite possibly slightly more 'flawed' than some other approaches, like approval voting.
But GameFAQs has always done bracket voting, as quite frankly the intention is not to get the "one true answer" as much as it is to have a lot of fun in the voting process. And watching your favourite games traverse the ladder towards the top, voting for them each step of the way, that's a lot of fun compared to saying "I think this is the best game" and clicking "Submit" and waiting for the other results to tally.
If you consider the preview pictures for the Assault mode in the demo to be representative, then I'd be willing to go out on a limb here and say that yes, there will be assault mode maps with vehicles in them -- every single preview features vehicles.:P
Seriously though, I am hoping that they bring back some of my old favourites, which their marketing suggests they'll be doing. AS Frigate and AS Overlord were awesome, AS OceanFloor and AS Hispeed were also cool if you liked the harder-to-defend style.
And in a feeble attempt to make this less off-topic: Yeah, how about that Biogun... I hear it used some sort of lab-engineered 'Superflu' virus. Though it's not very useful against vehicles, I imagine!
My favourite text adventure was tabtne.vda and tabtxe.nda in Wing Commander: Privateer. They are, for the unenlightened, commonly referred to as advent.bat and adnext.bat.
Yes, the people at Origin included a pair of text adventures, written in DOS BATCH FILES, with their game. How cool (and masochistic) is that?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, it uses Faraday's Principle of Induction to generate electricity? What a novel way of doing it!
Sorry, I couldn't help but make fun of you for stating it like it's something interesting or uncommon. Virtually ALL of the world's energy comes from changing kinetic energy into electricity using a dynamo or generator -- which use, you guessed it, Faraday's principle of induction. There are a few exceptions, such as photovoltaic cells and thermocouples, but those are absolutely marginal at best. Grid-scale solar power doesn't use photovoltaic cells, but typically heats water into steam to turn turbines. Thermocouples have never been widely deployed.
True, these reports are mostly considered unsubstantiated rumour, though. One notable hoax of this nature was an eBay seller who made up numerous stories in an attempt to FUD other sellers of 4GB microdrives. There was even a doctored picture of the innards of a MuVo with solder along the drive edge photoshopped in, in this mythical 'new version of the MuVo'.
-1, Blatantly Incorrect
s/iPod Mini/Creative Labs MuVo^2/g -- to get the correct version of the parent comment.
iPod Minis contain a different version of the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive. In the iPod Mini, the ability for the card to do CF+ has been disabled, it operates only in IDE mode -- making it useless for digital cameras and most other things one would want a Microdrive for. The MuVo has the standard consumer model of the Microdrive with working CF+ support. It has been tested to work properly in the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) among other cameras.
You can see whether a drive is from the MuVo or the iPod Mini because the iPod Mini version is barcoded and serial numbered on the label, while the MuVo version is just an empty white label.
More info here.
I don't actually expect laser projection displays to go anywhere. The advantage of a laser for projection is its high brightness (intensity in a small area). That's great for vector display where you want to "draw" bright lines. When you use a scanning laser for a raster display you lose this advantage, though.
Funny, the same thing could be said of cathode ray tubes. You know, that technology that is only now starting to be supplanted by LCDs? CRTs were great for line-drawing applications like oscilloscopes.
There are also safety/legal issues with laser projection. Any laser bright enough for a large projection display is dangerous if it stops scanning.
I'm guessing you are implying by the 'stops scanning' bit that you are worried it will burn a hole in the wall or something. Do you really have any concept how powerful a laser it takes to even make something warm, much less be "dangerous" to anything other than your eyes? We're talking LASER DIODES here, not xenon/argon lasers.
Granted it may still be dangerous to the human eye, whether it's scanning or not, but so are laser pointers, and they're a bit easier to aim at someone's eyes.
The projectors of course have interlocks that shut off the laser if the raster scan jams or stops, but such a system could fail or be defeated by someone with malicious intent.
Yeah, because THAT's not an unbelievable, overly elaborate way of trying to be malicious. Are you a James Bond Supervillain or something?
I don't tolerate ignorance in language any more than I tolerate spyware on my computer. Neither are immediately damaging, but they're both somewhat distasteful. I don't think it makes me uptight, but you're welcome to your opinion.
Besides, I consider the demonstration of ignorance an open invitation to be educated. Whether they choose to listen or not is up to them.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Please don't use that term unless you actually honestly know what the hell you're doing. "Begging the question" has nothing to do with an actual question anyway. If your statement has a question mark in it you're almost certainly NOT begging the question.
Chalk me up under the "hate videogame real-life-ism" tally.
That comes with a major caveat though: I think strongly that games have to at least be realistic within their own universe. It's one thing for the heavily armed and armored, trained for fighting, shieldpack-wearing ogres in Unreal Tournament to be able to take a chaingun barrage in the chest. It's what the game is all about.
It is not, on the other hand, acceptable for a bored civilian in Deus Ex 2 to be able to withstand a point-blank pistol blast to the head without even getting angry at me. Nowhere in the game's story did it suggest that humans had evolved metal skulls, or that the anti-gun lobby had gotten all firearms replaced with bb-guns.
No. "It raises the question -- how much money would it take to bury Linux?" is the only correct way of writing it, even if you meant it in a rhetorical sense (as in, the implied answer is "No amount of money can bury Linux")
To "beg the question" means that you have made an error in reasoning. It has nothing to do with an actual question. It is a circular argument, where you try to prove a point by using that same point as fact. "Cars are bad for the environment because they cause serious environmental damage." -- to which someone might reply, "You are begging the question."
(Grammar nazis, please be gentle -- I may not have perfectly explained the term, but it's a far sight closer than using it as equivalent to "raises the question")
You misinterpreted 'the land of the free'. This is the new America, it's all about the freedom of corporations. They are free to abuse their employees however they see fit, you see, because it's a free market for employees, supply and demand and all that, and what better way to show off our perfect free market economy of capitalist goodness. Corporations are free from all sorts of things: free from moral and ethical constraints, free from copyright limitations; they're scrutiny-free, tax-free, responsibility-free, and striving to become competition-free.
As you can see, it's all about freedom. I for one welcome our newly incorporated overlords.
I can understand not including it, as it is closed source (although technically it is available on one UNIX platform... ;), but it is by far the best mail client I've ever used.
Its like they say "come here viewers come check out this great new series!" then they go "SUCKERS !! haha no show for you !!".
I'm pretty sure that's actually the thought process they go though. Good call.
In case you couldn't guess from the URL of my website -- I'm bitter too. Firefly rocks. Futurama rocks. Family guy rocks. Fox sucks.
Try Chromatron if you're interested in a hard game. The best part? When you get bored of trying to beat level 50 (or 39, for that matter), there are two sequels of (I'm told) even more sleeplessness-inducing, head-banging, "this is god damn impossible, there's no way..."-mumbling fun.
That game has stolen countless hours of my life away, and I refuse to move on to the sequels until I complete levels 39 and 50. So there.
The author of cpo is aiming very squarely (excuse the pun) at third place. Check out this post for more information. Given the undoubtedly tiny number of bytes, if he even gets a few votes I think he's almost guaranteed a third place finish.
Kind of an interesting approach at subverting the calculations for third place, but a bit against the spirit of things, so it won't get my vote.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment of upload speads being artificially and retardedly expensive, I do have to mention that the $200 "business" line gets you lots of fun added perks like the poor network admin's cellphone number. :D
... I would probably feel more sorry for him if I hadn't also been woken up at 3am. *sigh*
3am: "Hi, this is (insert my incorporated-but-mostly-fake business name here). We've lost our Internet connection, what's going on?"
The Alberta SuperNet is connecting rural communities via fiber links. That's easy. Long-distance fiber is surprisingly cheap (in a relative sense) and easy to install, as is evidenced by the amount of long-distance dark fiber laying around. For fiber, the real cost is in the last mile (it's always in the last mile, but especially so for fiber) because of all the equipment needed to translate the modulated light into digital, and vice versa. Doing 900-odd fiber drops over long, mostly rural distances pales in comparison to doing 100,000 fiber drops in downtown Calgary.
That's the real reason that all that long-distance fiber is dark, by the way -- there's so much intercity bandwidth that there's no way to fill it, since they can't cost-effectively filter the bandwidth at the NOC down to the places where they need it. This leads to a lot of bullshit such as the situation I'm in:
ADSL line, downtown Calgary, connected directly into Telus' NOC. There is no shortage of bandwidth there, I know this for a fact -- that specific building is one of the primary hubs for Internet traffic in Western Canada. Now I am being pestered by my ISP about my 11GB upload limit. Why? Because Telus charges my ISP exorbitant rates to keep them in check, since Telus also provides ADSL. Why doesn't Telus allow capless ADSL then? I can only imagine it's so that you get equivalent service regardless of whether you're connected to a heavily-saturated CO in the suburbs with a T3, or connected directly to the NOC, since you're paying the same price.
And so the great bandwidth game goes.
What's amazing is that no other film has won 11 oscars ever.
Untrue. Both "Titanic" and "Ben-Hur" achieved this. Neither of them managed to win in all the categories they were nominated in, though. (Which actually suggests they may have been "better" since they were nominated in 12 or more categories)
Anyway, nice try, but you lose.
... Aha, I see I typed them in the wrong order. :) YHW, IHL, HAND.
I agree that it's dangerous. So is a compiler option that changes memory around beneath the programmer without making it 100% absolutely transparent. Neither is safe, and neither should be allowed in any company that favours quality over speed.
you missed the line "pChars[0] = 1;"
the idea being to ensure that the compiler is not doing something horrible like flipping the bytes around in memory when the char* is cast into an int*.
You were probably querying it hundreds of times per hour, because twice per hour is fine with slashdot.
/dev/null too, just for kicks.
Bullshit. Try it. Slashdot's ridiculous RSS restrictions are not only excessively draconian, but also buggy, frequently tagging non-offenders.
All this, for a small RSS file on a website that gets millions of hits to its graphical front page per day. What crack are they smoking?
Perhaps anyone wanting to automate the listing of slashdot stories should write a parser for the Slashdot frontpage instead, since clearly that is not subject to pointless draconian restrictions. Have it download images to
Compiler option handles endianness? What magical compiler option would that be? Can you point it out to me?
And let's see how it handles this:
char* pChars = new char[8];
pChars[0] = 1;
memset(pChars, 0, 8);
int* pInts = (int*)pChars;
pInts[1] = 1;
if (pChars[0] != 1 || pChars[7] != 1)
printf("Oh no, the universe is broken!\n");
Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Kart, Crystal Chronicles (all great party games), Metroid Prime, I Ninja, F-Zero, Wind Waker, Prince Of Persia, Splinter Cell, Ikaruga, Eternal Darkness, Sonic Heroes.
Oops, that was 12. My mistake. (Not even counting some of my personal favourites there, P.N. 03, Phantasy Star Online, and Animal Crossing)
How many of the above games are currently exclusive to gamecube? All except one as far as I know (I purposely tried to avoid all-platform titles for this list, though rest assured there are plenty of those too)
When you come up with the perfect voting system, please let us all know. We'd love to apply it to things like American Politics.
Until then, there's no such thing as a perfect polling mechanism. Any attempt to average the diverse views of a few hundred, hundred thousand, or hundred million people is NEVER going to be completely representative of how everyone truly feels, even if you have directly polled each and every one of them.
With all that said though, I do concede that "bracket" selection is quite possibly slightly more 'flawed' than some other approaches, like approval voting.
But GameFAQs has always done bracket voting, as quite frankly the intention is not to get the "one true answer" as much as it is to have a lot of fun in the voting process. And watching your favourite games traverse the ladder towards the top, voting for them each step of the way, that's a lot of fun compared to saying "I think this is the best game" and clicking "Submit" and waiting for the other results to tally.
If you consider the preview pictures for the Assault mode in the demo to be representative, then I'd be willing to go out on a limb here and say that yes, there will be assault mode maps with vehicles in them -- every single preview features vehicles. :P
Seriously though, I am hoping that they bring back some of my old favourites, which their marketing suggests they'll be doing. AS Frigate and AS Overlord were awesome, AS OceanFloor and AS Hispeed were also cool if you liked the harder-to-defend style.
And in a feeble attempt to make this less off-topic: Yeah, how about that Biogun... I hear it used some sort of lab-engineered 'Superflu' virus. Though it's not very useful against vehicles, I imagine!
My favourite text adventure was tabtne.vda and tabtxe.nda in Wing Commander: Privateer. They are, for the unenlightened, commonly referred to as advent.bat and adnext.bat.
Yes, the people at Origin included a pair of text adventures, written in DOS BATCH FILES, with their game. How cool (and masochistic) is that?
They were actually pretty fun little games.