I see, so incredible ammounts of number-crunching power are going, not to research of anything important, but to making a large, 3D, screensaver
Hey dad, get off the internet you're getting grumpy again.
Come on, you have accidentally coined the meaning of Nerd. That's what everything most of us nerds think is cool.
And I you read a bit further down you would have read this statement too:
"A lot of people walking down that corridor already love computer engineering," she said. "We want to show them how they can apply those skills to fluid dynamics."
I mean, it's cool, it seems a blast to do, it will require some real understanding of fluid dynamics, and might even spark some interrest for other fields of use for computer science. All you have to do is to get over the fact that they are using a Microsoft grant to do it.
Something has to be done to give parents a fighting chance, however. Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
Well call me naive, or maybe European (which I am), but I'm still wondering what is so wrong with kids occasionaly seeing naked people. Really. Is there any proof that children that have seen sexual scens turn out to be dangerous criminals, perverts, or worse Polticians ?
In my contry we still have adult magazins right next to the "standard" magazins in shops. Children are exposed to these as well as on TV, even in the lamest Ad for shampoo you have naked women and such. And any kid that that is looking for some "exposure" only has to wait for some weekends late night (23h-1am) movies.
I'm still pretty sure that all the fuss about p0rn comes from the lack of knowledge of it. It's like most things in life. If it's forbiden then you will damn well try to get it. How hard is it for parents to simply explain to their kid what sex is, why their are porno magazins, and hence why their are porno Sites on the net.
I mean, my parents did it, and although they are in my mind Uber parents, I'm sure a lot of others have done it too.
Murphy(c) Oh and by the way I haven't turned out to be a child rapist or pervert.... yet.:)
Well if you are looking at a nice fanless solution for a fanless CPU cooling, you might want ot check out Zalman's solution. They have some pretty huge heatsinks that should cool any average cpu (under 1800) without any fan.
There is and excellent Wired article, that touches the subject. It gives you the idea of why they had to go with a "low profile" like Eldred and not some one like Michael Hartthe of the Gutenberg project.
In the verdict of June 20th, the judge has ordered to remove the hyperlinks and to keep them removed, in as far as these hyperlinks lead to the Radikal articles, either directly or indirectly and notwithstanding whether these hyperlinks were placed by visitors. If Indymedia NL does not comply with this order, a penal sum of 5,000 Euros per day can be imposed. The judge ordered that, like an Internet Service Provider but just as much like the editors of a newspaper, Indymedia NL is, in principle, responsible for the content that has been published with its help.(My emphasis)
First, that means that if/. was based in.NL, doing this would be illigeal.
Second, the judged rulled that as an ISP, Indymedia NL, is responsible for the content of their client.
I really hope that the Dutch constitution isn't to dependent on Jurisprudence, otherwise this rulling is definitely a Bad Thing(tm)
There is one totaly legit way of doing the same thing without having to use a NoCD patch.
Juste install Daemon-Tools. It's a wonderfull little program that lets you mount an ISO file as if it was a standard CDDrive. It's free (as in beer), tiny ( ~400Kb), and works like a charme on Win2k/98/XP. It can even emulate some form of copyprotection like Safedisc, SecureRom and LaserLock.
All you have to do to play your favorite game is create a RAW (1:1 image) copy of your original game CD, and then mount the image as a CD drive.
Well, in France most people use high speed train (TGV - 360kph, tested @ 515kph) rather than plane or conventional train...
Reasons:
It's cheaper than plane (and about the same price as conventional train) Trains (at last in France) are nearly always on time It's quite always faster to take TGV than a plane (at last in France where distances are not that big)
Well those are all good reasons, but you forget something very important in that picture. Strikes. Yes that's right, for those who might not know, France is actually the contry with the most labor strikes of all Europe. And to be practical "a la Française", they always manage to have Train, Airport, Air Controller, etc.. strikes right when the big summer vacations are.
A train system is only as good as the people working them.
Murphy(c) And yes, I live in a neighboring country that laught it's head of each time we see the country next door all paralysed by a couple of labor strikes.
Although your post strikes a lot of resemblance with a Troll, you do raise a good question.
Were the "enemies" portrayed as Germans ?
Before even playing the game, it is something that I wondered about. Back in the wolfenstein3D age, it wasn't much of a problem, but now, in our so politically correct times surely people would react to it.
And I think that greymatter/id did a great job at show that the bad guys were SS. All the bad guys wear the typical black uniform and the red armband with a swastika (albeit it's not really a swastika but a cleverly made logo that supposedly symbolizes nazi).
Also killing any civilians will abort your mission, and you will have to start the level again.
I think that this is largely for thermal control, and is nothing to do with ionizing radiation.
Well yes and no.
It's true that the current shuttle ISS spacesuits do not have any special radiation hardening, but that is mostly because at shuttle/ISS operating altitudes (~300Km) they are still protected by the earth's magnetic field.
Now on the moon it's not the same story. The suits they used were a lot more expensive, had the faceplates gold platted, etc...
On a side note, I also remember NASA finding out that tomato seeds resisted very well beeing exposed to space for a long time. Now, they are not saying that tomatos comes from mars, but it's a nice concept to throw around.
It is all crap. Not a single thing you said can be backed up by anything other than science FICTION. Prove me wrong
I'm betting 100$ that someone came up to Jules Verne, and said exactly the same thing.
Verne didn't invent the submarine, the corporation nor did he invent video-conferencing. It was just how he saw things, and well some (most) of it turned out to be true.
Murphy.
Maybe we have a little Jules in each of us...
I remember reading at the time that the general idea was to have as little radar cross-section as possible, very low noise, and almost now wake whatsoever.
The shape evidently took care of the low radar feed-back (as a matter of fact the whole squarish shape of all the 1st generation of stealth planes was due to the limitation of the radar echoing software simulation).
To reduce the overall noise they designed the ship to have the generators mounted above water, and only have electric engines in the submerged section.
And lastly the wake problem was well resolved by the catamaran like shape hull.
I haven't seen this pointed out up to now, but depending on the placement of this room, you might consider adding some exrta insulation, mostly to deal with noise.
Don't forget that a lot of PCs make a lote of noise, so depending on your sweethalf's state of mind, even the tiniest of noise can be a cause for headeaches. And boy, you DON'T want that to happen...
Also if it's feasable, an oustisde air-duct can be nice for the cooling in the mid seasons, when flowing hot air to the rest of the house gets unpractical, but it's still cooler outside.
What do you mean by "alternative fuel is the future", wasn't that what one presidential runner-up said back in october of last year, when asked about the underlaying power crisis ?
Oh, right, but then again you guys voted for the one saying "Heck no, we gotta'a plenty of Ol' black gold stuck in lotsa natural reserve, let's dig that up."
I work for a local computer shop, and although we are no Dell or Gateway, we've seen a lot of weird hardware stuff over the years.
And the fact of the matter is that AMD CPUs can really burn up just like in Tom's Video.
We've seen more than once, a customer coming back with what he said was a defective AMD CPU, and when we check the CPU, we could see the adhesive barcode that we put on the underside of each, partially burned out !
And don't get me started on the damn fragility of those AMD CPU, we've got dozens of them broken because some guy slipped when installing a fan on them.
Very true. But to a lesser extent, you can already have a somewhat similar effect by using Box running snort[snort.org], which is an excellent IDS, and a couple of third party tools that dynamically update an IPTable on the server. Effectivelly droping all traffic from a host that has been marked as 'hostile' by snort.
I honestly don't see the big difference from what McAfee is trying to do, that snort doesn't already do(as in monitor network traffic and raising warnings on suspect connections).
25 Years ago they actully managed to get through with this kind of missions. Nowadays they just plain fail
25 Years ago they still had popular support, the moon race had totally inflamed the public, the Big Bad Russian(tm) had been beaten to it, and now those sneaky Russian were at it again, this time for Mars.
That's why NASA had a budget of over 1Billion for the Viking lander.
...Time changes...
The Russians are now Firendly but Poor(c), most people remember the moon landing as something only their dad talks about. And people want results right here, right now, because for them NASA is just another TV show in their 400 channel choice.
That's why NASA made 130Million probes, and try to get as much science as they can out of them. Meaning that they'll use off the shelf equipment as much as they can, and try to cram every new technollogy into the smallest mission (the DS1 is an exellent example). They even (succesfully)landed a prob on the asteroid Eros, even though that prob had never been designed to get closer than a couple hundred kilometers to it.
From the article :
It is the product of about six months of work here by three research groups at the University of Southern California
And to think that Quake3 took about 18 month to make, and it didn't even get close to simulate...simulating emotions and the unexpected effects that panic, stress, anxiety and fear...
Another one, this one scares me a bit :
largely financed by the Army to promote collaboration among the military, Hollywood and computer researchers
I'm pretty sure some guys at the pentagone have seen one too many Michael Bay movies where every thing just goes "Boom" and the nice Americans wins in the end.
True.
But, it's already been done in water. I'll agree that they did it only with ammo Rounds (as in machingun Rounds), but it is feasable.
Quote from Scientific American :
In 1997 a research team at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport in Rhode Island demonstrated the fully submerged launch of a supercavitating projectile with a muzzle velocity of 1,549 meters per second, which exceeds the speed of sound in water.
There even is a cool picture of the actual firing.
I will agree with you that it only is a speculation, since no one (no even the Russians) really knows what happened. But is seems that you overlooked some of the articles passages.
Quote from the given link :
The tests of upgraded VA-111 ("Shkval") torpedo with a rocket propulsion are supposed to conduct on the submarine. It explains the presence onboard of two experts of "Dagdizel" military plant. The aforesaid modernization is supposed to be replacement of hard fuel on cheaper, but explosion-dangerous liquid one. The version is founded on the analysis of audio signals obtained USS MEMPHIS and the NORSAR Service.
Now, if you also read the Scientific American article you will have noticed that they also talk about the Russian build Supercavitation torpedo name "Shkval"
Quote from Scientific American Article:
In 1977, after more than a decade of research and development, the Soviet navy secretly introduced a rocket-powered torpedo called the Shkval (Squall) that can "fly" through water at 100 meters per second (about 230 miles per hour) or more inside a self-generated gas cavity.
Please refrain from yelling about any sensationalism, BEFOR fully reading both articles.
I had the sinking sensation that it's simply doing things the way old software renderers used to do it (especially the good old demos by Future Crew and friends).
I had the exact same feeling while reading through AnandTech's write-up.
And seeing such a huge performance difference between Q3 and Serious Sam, I wondered if it didn't come from the fact that Serious Sam's 3D engine "wasts" more bandwidth. Which would again explain the huge difference in the Fill Rate measured with Serious Sam.
While Quake3's engine would be more effective, sending less hidden polys to the card.
I remembered the days I fooled around making a couple of Q2 levels that, that a well designed level (mostly iD's) were very optimised in a bsp-tree kind of way (I sure hope what I'm saying makes any sens, because I'm really far from a 3D guru).
I for one would sure LOVE to here from John Carmack's point of view on such a technic, as he is probably the most thourough graphic card analyst I've ever read. And his points are from the other side of the fence, on the cosumer side.
I sure have no grip with VNC, but on Windows Boxes I would still recomend RemotelyAnywhere.
(I'm only talking of doing admin on WinBoxes here), it's IMHO faster and more versatile than VNC, and offers a HUGE amount of other features such as a SSH telnet server, remote file manipulation, process level info, performance graph, etc...
So okay it's not free (as in Beer) like VNC, but is an outstanding product, they have a trial version, give it a spin.
Let's not forget that befor the *official* "Falcon" nickname, test pilotes refered to it as "lawn-dart" (100% true).
Systems based on interia and gyroscopes have been in use on commercial aircraft from the very beginning.
True, yet their calibration must be done in an extremly precise way. Their has been numerous reports of inertial aviation computer going of course, just because some ground crew were refulling the plane when the system was calibrated. That is also why inertail navigation is constantly rechecked against onboard star mapers. My point beeing that, trying to calibrate such a thing on earth is already quite a problem, now just try and do the same on a planet we know very little about, a couple of million of miles away.
I'm really the first to say that we should put more funding into space exploration and Fundamental research. I'm sure, we can all imagine the 'commercial' spinoffs making an AI that can fly a chopper on some planet that's got a LAG of over an hour.
But I think that there is one thing that was not mentioned in the article, and that is the amount (or actually the lack) of data we have on Titan. Look at the huge amount of trial and error testing that had to be done to get to valid helicopter design here no earth, where we can measure almost every variable that compose the complex notion of flying a rotating wing design. Even the prototype helicopter from Carnegie Mellon, uses technology that has been designed from, and for earth specs. BTW if you want to check out Carnegie Mellon's helicopter project, here is a link
If you want to have a look at a complex AI piloting an acutal spaceship, you can go and checkout the DeepSpace 1 prob. Which among other things is a real test bed for a lot of NASA's technology.
Because back here in Switzerland and Germany as well it's been doing quite well.
Over here it's about the same price (or even less expensive) than traditional analogue lines. And a 100% clean, 64kb (or if you use both channels it can be 128kb), low latency line is pretty nice if you just don't want to go ahead to DSL.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey dad, get off the internet you're getting grumpy again.
Come on, you have accidentally coined the meaning of Nerd. That's what everything most of us nerds think is cool.
And I you read a bit further down you would have read this statement too
"A lot of people walking down that corridor already love computer engineering," she said. "We want to show them how they can apply those skills to fluid dynamics."
I mean, it's cool, it seems a blast to do, it will require some real understanding of fluid dynamics, and might even spark some interrest for other fields of use for computer science. All you have to do is to get over the fact that they are using a Microsoft grant to do it.
Murphy(c)
Something has to be done to give parents a fighting chance, however. Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
:)
Well call me naive, or maybe European (which I am), but I'm still wondering what is so wrong with kids occasionaly seeing naked people.
Really. Is there any proof that children that have seen sexual scens turn out to be dangerous criminals, perverts, or worse Polticians ?
In my contry we still have adult magazins right next to the "standard" magazins in shops. Children are exposed to these as well as on TV, even in the lamest Ad for shampoo you have naked women and such. And any kid that that is looking for some "exposure" only has to wait for some weekends late night (23h-1am) movies.
I'm still pretty sure that all the fuss about p0rn comes from the lack of knowledge of it. It's like most things in life. If it's forbiden then you will damn well try to get it. How hard is it for parents to simply explain to their kid what sex is, why their are porno magazins, and hence why their are porno Sites on the net.
I mean, my parents did it, and although they are in my mind Uber parents, I'm sure a lot of others have done it too.
Murphy(c)
Oh and by the way I haven't turned out to be a child rapist or pervert.... yet.
Well if you are looking at a nice fanless solution for a fanless CPU cooling, you might want ot check out Zalman's solution. They have some pretty huge heatsinks that should cool any average cpu (under 1800) without any fan.
Murphy(c)
There is and excellent Wired article, that touches the subject.
It gives you the idea of why they had to go with a "low profile" like Eldred and not some one like Michael Hartthe of the Gutenberg project.
Really an interresting read.
Murphy(c)
Any idea how much a M1A1 tank weighs? Neither do I, but I can guarentee you that you won't get more than 1 (if that) in a 747.
Well According to this Googlish page, a M1A1 wights about 68 tons.
So if we're just speaking in weight, it might be possible to transport 2 of them on a 747 (given enough space of course).
Murphy(c).
From the press release:
/. was based in .NL, doing this would be illigeal.
In the verdict of June 20th, the judge has ordered to remove the hyperlinks
and to keep them removed, in as far as these hyperlinks lead to the Radikal
articles, either directly or indirectly and notwithstanding whether these
hyperlinks were placed by visitors. If Indymedia NL does not comply with
this order, a penal sum of 5,000 Euros per day can be imposed. The judge
ordered that, like an Internet Service Provider but just as much like the
editors of a newspaper, Indymedia NL is, in principle, responsible for the
content that has been published with its help.(My emphasis)
First, that means that if
Second, the judged rulled that as an ISP, Indymedia NL, is responsible for the content of their client.
I really hope that the Dutch constitution isn't to dependent on Jurisprudence, otherwise this rulling is definitely a Bad Thing(tm)
Murphy(c).
There is one totaly legit way of doing the same thing without having to use a NoCD patch.
Juste install Daemon-Tools. It's a wonderfull little program that lets you mount an ISO file as if it was a standard CDDrive. It's free (as in beer), tiny ( ~400Kb), and works like a charme on Win2k/98/XP.
It can even emulate some form of copyprotection like Safedisc, SecureRom and LaserLock.
All you have to do to play your favorite game is create a RAW (1:1 image) copy of your original game CD, and then mount the image as a CD drive.
Really a brilliant little program.
Murphy
Well, in France most people use high speed train (TGV - 360kph, tested @ 515kph) rather than plane or conventional train...
:
Reasons
It's cheaper than plane (and about the same price as conventional train)
Trains (at last in France) are nearly always on time
It's quite always faster to take TGV than a plane (at last in France where distances are not that big)
Well those are all good reasons, but you forget something very important in that picture.
Strikes.
Yes that's right, for those who might not know, France is actually the contry with the most labor strikes of all Europe. And to be practical "a la Française", they always manage to have Train, Airport, Air Controller, etc.. strikes right when the big summer vacations are.
A train system is only as good as the people working them.
Murphy(c)
And yes, I live in a neighboring country that laught it's head of each time we see the country next door all paralysed by a couple of labor strikes.
Although your post strikes a lot of resemblance with a Troll, you do raise a good question.
Were the "enemies" portrayed as Germans ?
Before even playing the game, it is something that I wondered about. Back in the wolfenstein3D age, it wasn't much of a problem, but now, in our so politically correct times surely people would react to it.
And I think that greymatter/id did a great job at show that the bad guys were SS. All the bad guys wear the typical black uniform and the red armband with a swastika (albeit it's not really a swastika but a cleverly made logo that supposedly symbolizes nazi).
Also killing any civilians will abort your mission, and you will have to start the level again.
Murphy(c)
We should do this more often, and call it the "International Internet Is Fast Again Day".
Affectionatly known as IIIFAD.
Murphy(c)
I think that this is largely for thermal control, and is nothing to do with ionizing radiation.
Well yes and no.
It's true that the current shuttle ISS spacesuits do not have any special radiation hardening, but that is mostly because at shuttle/ISS operating altitudes (~300Km) they are still protected by the earth's magnetic field.
Now on the moon it's not the same story. The suits they used were a lot more expensive, had the faceplates gold platted, etc...
On a side note, I also remember NASA finding out that tomato seeds resisted very well beeing exposed to space for a long time. Now, they are not saying that tomatos comes from mars, but it's a nice concept to throw around.
Murphy(c)
It is all crap. Not a single thing you said can be backed up by anything other than science FICTION. Prove me wrong
I'm betting 100$ that someone came up to Jules Verne, and said exactly the same thing.
Verne didn't invent the submarine, the corporation nor did he invent video-conferencing. It was just how he saw things, and well some (most) of it turned out to be true.
Murphy.
Maybe we have a little Jules in each of us...
I rembered a Poupular mechanics/Science articles a couple of years back talking about this.
Here is some more info.
I remember reading at the time that the general idea was to have as little radar cross-section as possible, very low noise, and almost now wake whatsoever.
The shape evidently took care of the low radar feed-back (as a matter of fact the whole squarish shape of all the 1st generation of stealth planes was due to the limitation of the radar echoing software simulation).
To reduce the overall noise they designed the ship to have the generators mounted above water, and only have electric engines in the submerged section.
And lastly the wake problem was well resolved by the catamaran like shape hull.
Murphy(c)
I haven't seen this pointed out up to now, but depending on the placement of this room, you might consider adding some exrta insulation, mostly to deal with noise.
Don't forget that a lot of PCs make a lote of noise, so depending on your sweethalf's state of mind, even the tiniest of noise can be a cause for headeaches. And boy, you DON'T want that to happen...
Also if it's feasable, an oustisde air-duct can be nice for the cooling in the mid seasons, when flowing hot air to the rest of the house gets unpractical, but it's still cooler outside.
Murphy(c)
What do you mean by "alternative fuel is the future", wasn't that what one presidential runner-up said back in october of last year, when asked about the underlaying power crisis ?
Oh, right, but then again you guys voted for the one saying "Heck no, we gotta'a plenty of Ol' black gold stuck in lotsa natural reserve, let's dig that up."
Murphy(c).
I work for a local computer shop, and although we are no Dell or Gateway, we've seen a lot of weird hardware stuff over the years.
And the fact of the matter is that AMD CPUs can really burn up just like in Tom's Video.
We've seen more than once, a customer coming back with what he said was a defective AMD CPU, and when we check the CPU, we could see the adhesive barcode that we put on the underside of each, partially burned out !
And don't get me started on the damn fragility of those AMD CPU, we've got dozens of them broken because some guy slipped when installing a fan on them.
Murphy
Very true. But to a lesser extent, you can already have a somewhat similar effect by using Box running snort[snort.org], which is an excellent IDS, and a couple of third party tools that dynamically update an IPTable on the server. Effectivelly droping all traffic from a host that has been marked as 'hostile' by snort.
I honestly don't see the big difference from what McAfee is trying to do, that snort doesn't already do(as in monitor network traffic and raising warnings on suspect connections).
Murphy(c).
25 Years ago they actully managed to get through with this kind of missions. Nowadays they just plain fail
25 Years ago they still had popular support, the moon race had totally inflamed the public, the Big Bad Russian(tm) had been beaten to it, and now those sneaky Russian were at it again, this time for Mars.
That's why NASA had a budget of over 1Billion for the Viking lander.
...Time changes...
The Russians are now Firendly but Poor(c), most people remember the moon landing as something only their dad talks about. And people want results right here, right now, because for them NASA is just another TV show in their 400 channel choice.
That's why NASA made 130Million probes, and try to get as much science as they can out of them. Meaning that they'll use off the shelf equipment as much as they can, and try to cram every new technollogy into the smallest mission (the DS1 is an exellent example). They even (succesfully)landed a prob on the asteroid Eros, even though that prob had never been designed to get closer than a couple hundred kilometers to it.
Murphy(c).
Murphy.
From the article :
...simulating emotions and the unexpected effects that panic, stress, anxiety and fear...
It is the product of about six months of work here by three research groups at the University of Southern California
And to think that Quake3 took about 18 month to make, and it didn't even get close to simulate
Another one, this one scares me a bit :
largely financed by the Army to promote collaboration among the military, Hollywood and computer researchers
I'm pretty sure some guys at the pentagone have seen one too many Michael Bay movies where every thing just goes "Boom" and the nice Americans wins in the end.
Murphy.
True.
But, it's already been done in water. I'll agree that they did it only with ammo Rounds (as in machingun Rounds), but it is feasable.
Quote from Scientific American :
In 1997 a research team at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport in Rhode Island demonstrated the fully submerged launch of a supercavitating projectile with a muzzle velocity of 1,549 meters per second, which exceeds the speed of sound in water.
There even is a cool picture of the actual firing.
Murphy(c)
Not at all.
I will agree with you that it only is a speculation, since no one (no even the Russians) really knows what happened. But is seems that you overlooked some of the articles passages.
Quote from the given link :
The tests of upgraded VA-111 ("Shkval") torpedo with a rocket propulsion are supposed to conduct on the submarine. It explains the presence onboard of two experts of "Dagdizel" military plant. The aforesaid modernization is supposed to be replacement of hard fuel on cheaper, but explosion-dangerous liquid one. The version is founded on the analysis of audio signals obtained USS MEMPHIS and the NORSAR Service.
Now, if you also read the Scientific American article you will have noticed that they also talk about the Russian build Supercavitation torpedo name "Shkval"
Quote from Scientific American Article:
In 1977, after more than a decade of research and development, the Soviet navy secretly introduced a rocket-powered torpedo called the Shkval (Squall) that can "fly" through water at 100 meters per second (about 230 miles per hour) or more inside a self-generated gas cavity.
Please refrain from yelling about any sensationalism, BEFOR fully reading both articles.
Murphy(c)
I had the sinking sensation that it's simply doing things the way old software renderers used to do it (especially the good old demos by Future Crew and friends).
I had the exact same feeling while reading through AnandTech's write-up.
And seeing such a huge performance difference between Q3 and Serious Sam, I wondered if it didn't come from the fact that Serious Sam's 3D engine "wasts" more bandwidth. Which would again explain the huge difference in the Fill Rate measured with Serious Sam.
While Quake3's engine would be more effective, sending less hidden polys to the card.
I remembered the days I fooled around making a couple of Q2 levels that, that a well designed level (mostly iD's) were very optimised in a bsp-tree kind of way (I sure hope what I'm saying makes any sens, because I'm really far from a 3D guru).
I for one would sure LOVE to here from John Carmack's point of view on such a technic, as he is probably the most thourough graphic card analyst I've ever read. And his points are from the other side of the fence, on the cosumer side.
Murphy(c)
I sure have no grip with VNC, but on Windows Boxes I would still recomend RemotelyAnywhere.
(I'm only talking of doing admin on WinBoxes here), it's IMHO faster and more versatile than VNC, and offers a HUGE amount of other features such as a SSH telnet server, remote file manipulation, process level info, performance graph, etc...
So okay it's not free (as in Beer) like VNC, but is an outstanding product, they have a trial version, give it a spin.
Murphy(c)
Look at the F-16 and the fly-by-wire system...
Let's not forget that befor the *official* "Falcon" nickname, test pilotes refered to it as "lawn-dart" (100% true).
Systems based on interia and gyroscopes have been in use on commercial aircraft from the very beginning.
True, yet their calibration must be done in an extremly precise way. Their has been numerous reports of inertial aviation computer going of course, just because some ground crew were refulling the plane when the system was calibrated. That is also why inertail navigation is constantly rechecked against onboard star mapers.
My point beeing that, trying to calibrate such a thing on earth is already quite a problem, now just try and do the same on a planet we know very little about, a couple of million of miles away.
I'm really the first to say that we should put more funding into space exploration and Fundamental research. I'm sure, we can all imagine the 'commercial' spinoffs making an AI that can fly a chopper on some planet that's got a LAG of over an hour.
But I think that there is one thing that was not mentioned in the article, and that is the amount (or actually the lack) of data we have on Titan.
Look at the huge amount of trial and error testing that had to be done to get to valid helicopter design here no earth, where we can measure almost every variable that compose the complex notion of flying a rotating wing design. Even the prototype helicopter from Carnegie Mellon, uses technology that has been designed from, and for earth specs. BTW if you want to check out Carnegie Mellon's helicopter project, here is a link
If you want to have a look at a complex AI piloting an acutal spaceship, you can go and checkout the DeepSpace 1 prob. Which among other things is a real test bed for a lot of NASA's technology.
Murphy(c).
Do you guys have ISDN over in the US ?
Because back here in Switzerland and Germany as well it's been doing quite well.
Over here it's about the same price (or even less expensive) than traditional analogue lines. And a 100% clean, 64kb (or if you use both channels it can be 128kb), low latency line is pretty nice if you just don't want to go ahead to DSL.
Murphy(c)