A few years ago, I once worked for a company doing internal development of a VB/Access CRM and trouble ticket application. In its original incarnation, it was using Access 97, and supporting around 25-30 people using it. Amazingly enough, it worked, for the most part.
Of course, it did have problems with the database corrupting, on occasion, as using Access in a multi-user application is not something you should do. What can I say, I inherited a nightmare (by the time I left, we had migrated it to Access 2003, which behaved better, and I had also went a long way towards getting it communicating and working well with PostgreSQL). At any rate, under Access 97, one of the more heavily accessed tables would - every once in a while - get a corrupted row. This wasn't much of an issue, unless you tried to access such a row, say by doing a search or other table scan function. At that point, the application would crash. I added layers of error checking, which worked OK - at least the app wouldn't crash. Still, it annoyed the users, they would complain via an email to me, and I would have to go in, locate, and remove the offending row in Access.
After doing this a few times, I got tired of it, and realizing that I had a process which worked every time to correct the issue, I proceeded to come up with a solution to automate the task. What I did was create a simple bit of code which would perform the "correction", and randomly pick a user when the started the application to call the routine. When the routine ran, I would write to a config table that it was being performed, so that way other users wouldn't be running the same fix at the same time (to avoid any possible collision issue - though it probably wouldn't have mattered). The users wouldn't even know this was happenning, outside of their session running a little slower, as I did it in such a way (ie, calling DoEvents) so that they could continue using the application as normal.
So, one day after this was put into place, I come in to work and see an email (sent about an hour before I got in) "The database is corrupted again...", immediately followed by another email from the same user (about 5 minutes later - realize, I am still not at work) "Thank you! You fixed it! It is working great now!". The user had no clue that I was never even in the office (most likely, I was in the shower at home, or sleeping, or something). I had successfully automated myself!
I showed the emails to my supervisor, and explained what I had done - he was cool with it, liked that I had taken the initiative to put such a thing in place. We immediately began to think how to correct the issue for good, as well as how to educate the users that the system would automagically fix the problems in the meantime. This led to a redesign of the database communication layer (one of the big things was dropping as much use of VB/Access DB update commands, and using SQL heavily, while switching to Access 2003, both of which dovetailed neatly into using PostgreSQL, ultimately)...
The debate in the U.S. isn't even about fetal vs adult stem cells. It's about who pays for it. The U.S. government hasn't banned fetal stem cell research. It just won't pay for it.
I won't argue the point of fetal vs. adult stem cells - it seems to me, as a layman, that most of the stories and successful research has happenned around adult stem cells. Whether this is because they are more easily available or because fetal stem cell research has been effectively halted in the United States, I don't know. Likely, it is former, as well as there being issues using fetal stem cell lines of any type for treatments - after all, if they were viable in any shape, we should be hearing more from overseas research. So far, not much has been heard, at least to my limited knowledge.
What I will argue about is regarding the reasoning for banning funding to researchers. It is one thing if a researcher wants money for such research and is denied. It is another thing if they want to do the research, but aren't allowed because they (or their lab/research facilities) currently do government funded research in a completely unrelated (to stem cells) area. Since they take government funds in some manner, for some research, they have the choice of losing all government funding to all research, to research fetal stem cells, or to not research fetal stem cell lines at all and keep what funding they have.
So, if you are a university (where a lot of research occurs), you are (nearly by default) receiving some form of government funding. Ergo, you cannot do fetal stem cell research (outside of the contaminated lines which were grandfathered in), without losing your government funding for your robotics lab (along with a bunch of other areas). It is either be completely self or privately funded for all areas of research, and be able to research fetal stem cell lines - or keep your government funding for your other research, and forget any fetal stem cell research. Some choice. No wonder private funding isn't available - because once your institution tried to do it, you would also need funding for all of your other research activities, which isn't going to happen, of course.
I guess we should all hope and pray that fetal stem cell lines continue to be fruitless pursuits, and that somebody outside of America doesn't make that primary discovery that proves to make adult stem cell research obsolete or worthless. Somehow, I think we as country are going to eat our shorts on that one, all because of ignorant, petty and baseless religious objections.
Religion will be humanity's downfall, and the fundamentalists will be leading the charge...
Don't get me wrong - it isn't that I don't believe you, because I do - and it pisses me off!
I give you a book, and in return you give me, say, a radio - we have come to a deal to exchange two goods of equal value to each other, in effect "bartering" one item for the other, no money changing hands.
Now, you tell me that according to the government (depending on your government, of course), we each have to "pay taxes" on that transaction? What fuckin' rabbit hole did I fall down into, anyway?
I can sorta understand the reasoning behind all of this - after all, money is nothing more than tokens which represent value which are bartered for physical goods which have real value. Therefore, if there is sales tax on a good, that tax is then paid with money. In the barter, the tax is "included" in the value of the barter exchange - it is just up to each of us when we do this to "be honest" and report it to the IRS on our income taxes, right?
Bastards, the whole lot of 'em! The fuckin' machine can never be satisfied, even if feed our soul's into its gaping maw. Tell me again why we citizens continue to support this mess?
Yeah - I know about that project - I remember seeing a video demo of it with several cars in "train configuration" (where they were all following each other mere feet bumper-to-bumper at high speed), with the "drivers" (passengers? donors?) hanging their hands/arms out the window. I wasn't trying to suggest it as being a "new idea", I am more peeved that it is an old idea which should have been implemented by now.
I started this project (heh, have yet to finish it, but that is a whole 'nother story) to build an electric vehicle using bicycle parts, and decided to build the machine using a recumbent design. A couple of steel garage sale bikes, a bit of welding, and I had my frame. The seat was a fishing boat seat picked up from Walmart. Since I am planning on attaching an electric motor, there isn't any pedals or chain, but one could easily see how such a system could be attached in place of foot rest.
Do some googling on homemade recumbent bicycles - they are very easy to make, you don't even need to know how to weld or braze to put one together (one of the bents I saw out there was held together with bolts, screws and pipe clamps!). Go around on a bulk trash pickup day (if your city runs them) and you will find many, many bikes simply being thrown away. I used two bikes, a 26" (for the rear) 10 speed, and a 20" for the front fork assembly. Other tubing came from the same bikes as they were cut up. If you wanted a longer frame, steel electrical conduit could be substituted.
I have seen some weird homemade designs out there - including one made out of wood! I would imagine, if you had the skills, workspace, and a bit of money, you could design and build one using aluminum tubing and/or carbon fiber. You could probably JB-Weld and/or pop-rivet the thing together (provided you mixed the 2-part precisely to get the maximum strength bond).
So far, I have spent very little money on my project - I would wager you could build an equivalent steel framed bent (factoring in extra parts and such, not counting tool needs, of course) for under $200.00 (and that is probably too high an estimate). If you needed something lighter, it could be done, but it would take more scrounging and probably a trip to scrap metal yard to get some aluminum tubing cheap enough (unless you got lucky and someone was getting rid of an old aluminum mast antenna). Get the beater bikes and cut off/grind the bearings and such, attach them together using epoxy and kevlar string (think of "lashing an axe head" onto an handle, then liberally applying several coats of epoxy resin to the kevlar lashing).
Once again, do some googling on the subject - many people have successfully built homemade recumbent bicycles for very little or no money involved. You won't likely find a "how-to" guide, but you will find plenty of pictures, advice, and other documentation to get your ideas and creativity flowing toward building your own.
First, I didn't read the article, but from the summary I don't think they are talking about the "actor" per-se, but rather the "performance artist" who creates the movements for the CGI model - ie, the team and artists performing mo-cap.
In this sense, the mo-cap performance artist does a lot to help bring the character to life, because he or she must be very flexible and capable of acting (in motion and character) just like how the CGI would actually work (as near as can be determined - after all, it is fantasy in many cases) in "real life" if it actually existed.
For example, it is one thing to draw and model Garfield, it is another to imitate the moves of Garfield, as a human mo-cap artist (actually, I don't know if they used mo-cap for Garfield, I am just giving an example). You can't use a real cat, because the cat isn't going to really perform for you (for some things, a real cat might suffice, actually). But maybe you can get a human to mimic some properties of a cat, capture the motion, then morph (and/or modify/extract/re-combine data from) the mo-cap motion model to match the CGI model you are working with.
As you can see, it easily takes a whole team to create a CGI character - the modeler is only one part of the team. Sometimes, the modeler can even make convincing motion, without needing mo-cap. However, for some things (actually, quite a lot of things when it comes to movies, where an audience can easily pick out bad animation), real mo-cap with performance artists and data capture manipulation is necessary and needed.
As as another poster pointed out, lack of roadway sign and marking standards are a big issue. Fix that, and it would go a long way to fixing the issue in general.
However, we have all the technology to enable such a vehicle, especially if we limit it to highway travel (where conditions tend to be less variable than surface streets). One such improvement for guidance would be a combination of active and passive "dots" lining the lanes. The passive ones could be simple rare-earth magnets. The active ones would take a bit more work, but I can easily envision a small solar panel with an integrated RF/IR transponder - perhaps it could even communicate with other dots wirelessly to forward information toward on-coming traffic about road conditions and such. I am also thinking of a system like an ant-trail, where the communication could be forwarded by "hitchhiking" packets of information onto the car as it travels, and then it could deposit the info in a later dot (not sure if or how this would be useful, but it sounds like it could be in some manner).
Couple this with signage broadcasting data, cars with navigational aids (GPS and radar, mainly), standard vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocols (so cars could talk to each other to let each know intent and yielding) - I would be willing to bet that all of this is easily available, without needing special DGPS systems installed. Even without special "active dots", most of the system would be easy and cheap to develop.
The expensive and hard to develop part isn't the hardware - it's the software. This includes not just the software for the system and the cars, but the "software" (ie, business processes) needed for insurance and liability concerns for all parties involved.
I was wondering about this, too. With that many problems, I will be sure to steer clear of newer VW products, I think. My current daily driver is a 1994 Ford Ranger XLT 4-banger, with 150,000+ miles on it. I have yet to replace the MAF sensor or the O2 sensors (still pass with flying colors at inspection), and I certainly don't burn anywhere near as much oil. One of the other things I like about my lil' pickup is that the oil filter (Motorcraft F1-A) is the same filter as the one on my 1979 Bronco (which will NEVER be a daily driver, given the amount of gas the V8 in it uses!) - makes thinking about oil changes on both an easy issue.
I find this tag to be one of the more interesting "new" HTML tags. From what I understand, the Safari browser (OSX?) was the first to have it, then (IIRC) Opera, then finally the Firefox browser. IE6 doesn't support it, although people have been able to create some interesting workarounds using SVG.
I just like the possibilities this tag brings to browsers and web applications, as well as (simple) gaming. However, I haven't heard anything about it working (or not) in any of the IE7 betas that have been released yet...
Row 2 extends row 1? I think not (except maybe as a lab experiment proving it's possible).
I suppose it could depend on what you mean by "extend" in an object oriented manner. If you have a table in a database that has an ID key field, as well as a ParentID field for each row - then row 2 could be easily parented to row 1, thus in a manner "extending" row 1's set of data. Depending on how the table was set up, such a system can easily be made to work in an object oriented manner (though it isn't pretty, and SQL to access the data properly become tedious)...
You are probably right about your apartment building - basically, you have to factor in the height of the building plus the soil composition. Here in Phoenix metro area it seems like (almost) that they just lay out some boards and pour the concrete right on the ground. I know this isn't the case, but you would be amazed at some of the things contractors have done.
I am not an expert on pouring a foundation (so google up on it for real-world instructions), but I would imagine that for a house your foundation would be about a foot thick, total - probably a dug down 8 inches or so, four inches of gravel, then concrete with aggregate mix poured on top of this. Maybe with a reinforcing steel mesh (made from thick wire for a house, thin rebar for bigger or taller structures) embedded in the concrete.
I would expect this to be close to what would be needed for residential structures - but as I said before, I am not an expert on this (hell, I am not even an amateur - just basing this on what I have seen done)...
Yes, most transmission lines are higher than your average dump truck bed, though some of the longbed trailer dump rigs (you know, the kind with the rear dolly that stays in one place and the driver backs up the tractor to lift the 70+ foot long trailer) come close. Of course, the really tall OHT lines are mostly out of harm's way, which is why I threw in the crane reference.
In reality, though, dump trucks and cranes (among other things, like drilling rigs) can and have come in contact with high voltage lines - just do a google search on the issue, plenty of articles and papers on the issue (almost as bad as lockout/tagout references).
In the end, though, I was just trying to "make a joke" over a "non-joking" matter - it just seems like you hear on a fairly regular basis about some crane or dump truck operator getting tangled up in electrical lines, tearing them down or killing himself or worse...
I wonder why more people don't find this old technology fascinating, given the popularity of "steampunk" fiction amongst the Slashdotting class. They were building huge text-based addressable store-and-forward networks before the advent of the microprocessor - or even electronics - y'know...
Actually, it seems like there is a dearth of interest in anything historically related to computers prior to about 1990 by most people, even among self-described "computer geeks". I personally find the history of computing and information handling a very fascinating subject. Especially when it comes to the original experimentation of "fax machines" (information reproduction on paper or other medium over wires), or old-time stock-market/telegraph tickers running over morse-code lines. Then you have the various mechanical calculating machines, and electro-mechanical tabulators of Hollerith's design...
I have to say the most fascinating thing in computing history has to be the developments leading up to the insights of Turing of computers being symbol-processing machines. Prior to this development, the machines were looked upon as calculators, manipulators of numbers only. It took Turing to get us where we are now. In addition, there is the interesting thing that even though electricity and relays (of a sort, in the form of telegraph systems) were available to Babbage, and Babbage (being a renowned mathematician) knew of George Boole's logic system and boolean (base-2) math, that he still chose to continue with mechanical designs. Part of this had to do with manufacturing capability, but I will always wonder at this. Imagine if Hollerith (who successfully applied electro-mechanical systems to tabulation) had known more about Babbage and base-2 mathematics, or had been as "inspired" or such? Could we have had a relay-based computer in the 1890's?
Alas, it is just another example of things, ideas, and people being in the right place at the right time...
Last of all, 2x4s, nails and sheetrock. That's not really a complete picture of how modern building techniques work. There's a lot more cross bracing, insulation and heavy reinforcement involved.
I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe you might get "garbage truck repelling" construction on a new home that is custom designed and built, but I can guarantee that you won't get the same in your standard suburb tract-housing.
I can't speak for California construction, but I know that here in Phoenix, if you are lucky, you get an 8 inch thick pad with 2x4 construction on top (2x6 if you pay a lot more). That is, base plate, uprights on 18 inch centers with horizontal firewalls (they may tell you "cross bracing", but its not - its meant to contain a fire and preventing it from spreading to attic space), upper horizontals, then top plate. Inside is finished with drywall, some form of insulation in between (generally pink fiberglass blanket), and then tyvek wrapping, chicken wire, then stucco. Sometimes it seems the cheapest houses don't even have the tyvek wrapping. Also, in many of the newer tract housing sections in Arizona (especially Anthem), the pads are cracking due to the soil not being prepared properly, causing sinking and lifting during rains - eventually causing the house to crack in half if it isn't repaired (several people in Anthem, a "tract housing" suburb north of Phoenix which isn't exactly cheap to buy into, have been stuck with busted houses as of late).
Block construction for cheap tract housing stopped sometime in the 1980's - I currently live in a block house built by Continental Homes in 1973. When I was in the market for a house, I explicitly stated to my realtor what I wanted - the combination of my budget, want for concrete block construction, and no HOA meant that my choices were limited to roughly pre-1980's constructed houses. Everything else in my price range was el-cheapo construction otherwise (sure, it was "brand new", with gestapo HOA fees thrown in).
In the Phoenix market, it seems if you want anything beyond standard "stick frame" construction you need to either have it custom built (using block, or steel/alluminum framing, among other options), or spend more than $300,000.00...
If instead of the 100 billion+ dollars that has been spent on this "war on terror", if instead the money had been used to do something completely different, namely getting our country (and later, the world) off of dependence on oil from the Middle East, and ultimately, OPEC?
What would such a plan look like? Could it be done? Could it have been done (at least for the United States) for the amount of money already spent?
What if, after learning the pricetag for such a "war on terror" was going to be 100 billion+ dollars, the President had instead stated that instead of using the money in wasteful "blow up the desert" spending in the Middle East, we instead had a 10 year program (10 billion per year):
Dedicated 10 billion (1 billion per program year) for taxable deductions for citizens, to those who could prove they were saving energy in some manner
Dedicated another 10 billion (2 billion per program year) for a nationwide contest to any individual or company who could create a revolutionary alternative energy technology over the first 5 years of the program
Dedicated another 10 billion (2 billion per program year) for a subsidy program to help citizens of America switch to more fuel efficient vehicles (hybrids, electrics, biofuel, conversions, etc) over the first 5 years of the program
Dedicated another 10 billion (1 billion per program year) for a subsidy program for homeowners making their homes more energy efficient
Dedicated the remaining 60 billion (6 billion per program year) on a "Manhattan" style program to create and implement a sustainable alternative energy program for nationwide use
Ultimately, the goal would have been to educate America on being energy efficient and conserving energy, while at the same time providing for ways and incentives for the country to move in that direction. This would have to have included all manner of alternative energy - wind, solar, hydrogen, biofuels - and standard fossil fuels. Both in production and usage, as well as saving energy by being more efficient with processes and eliminating waste/errors in production and use (perhaps nationwide application of 6s methodologies). No one alternative energy system would work - but all of them together could possibly take a big chunk out the issue. We would have to have been smart (ie, quit subsidizing corn producers for ethanol production and use something better for it - like hemp or switchgrass or something - also, quit putting a tariff on sugar, etc).
In 10 years (5 of which have now passed), we should have been able to eliminate - if we worked hard at it, and had the 100 billion+ dollars that we have already wasted - the 20 percent or so dependence we have on Middle East oil. Ultimately, in the end, we would simply "pull out" once and for all - COMPLETELY - from the Middle East. Let them (all of them, including Israel) duke it out in whatever way they want. Yes, we would still be sending money to them via OPEC at first - but I bet we could whittle the amount we would need to send to OPEC for oil (because we would always need it, if only for chemical/plastics) to a small amount compared to today.
I know my ideas above are very simplistic, and leave out many things (like getting the big 3 to build energy efficient vehicles, among other things). I also don't think that (at least in the short term) such a plan could make our country completely energy independent (as I said before, we will always need oil in some part) - but I honestly think that if we had wanted to, we could have been five years into such a plan already, instead of having spent five years (and way more than 100 billion+ dollars) on a war that doesn't seem to have an end yet. Maybe such a plan could even had made us a manufacturing power again (of "green" industrial solutions, "green" energy systems, biofuels, etc).
I think about this - it saddens me that our "leaders" have chosen to ignore one of the biggest issues facing us today, and their war is doing nothing (it seems) to al
(Slashdotters with a mechanical bent really should look into the old electromechanical teleprinters. They're amazing machines; a real tribute to the ingenuity of their designers. Given a motor spinning at 3000 RPM, and no electronics, how would you convert a 5-bit code to printed text?)
Sounds interesting - given enough time, I could even probably come up with a solution (something involving solenoids, cams, clutches, and ratchets - among other things - would be needed). If you want to see something similar, look into old "reproducing" player pianos. Imagine how you would convert a 4-5 bit value into a volume level (ie, a hardware-based DAC - in the early 1900's). There was a writeup on this in an old 1976 issue of Byte Magazine - what really made this issue "fun" was that they described one hobbyist who interfaced his player piano to his 8-bit kit computer located in the basement (using a very primitive bit-banger serial interface to keep the wire count down - he also had to use twisted-pair wire, grounding one of the pair to improve signal shielding and prevent crosstalk over the length of wire).
This is easily possible, but I would suggest that anyone planning to try this to "do it right" and use proper parallel port interfacing techniques. The OP's suggestion has merit, but properly interfacing to the parallel port isn't simply a matter of hooking up some relays to the pins. Yes, it is possible to do this, it is also possible to "blow your port" (and if you are really unlucky, your entire "super i/o" chip). Interface it right (ie, using at minimum a switching NPN transistor with current limiting base resistor - better would be to precede this with a hex buffer chip) - most parallel ports can only source/sink about 100ma of current - a relay connected straight will probably blow the port, not to mention the kickback from the coil when you turn it off).
Also, note that if you are doing this as the OP suggests (cron job, etc), there is a *nix utility out there that can turn on/off individual parallel port pins - I don't have a link, but it is fairly easy to find (search under parallel port interfacing off of the ePanorama site). The only possible 'catch' to the app is that it needs to run as root, but I would imagine you would set up the cron job and such for this kind of monitoring that way anyhow...
Yeah, lead acid gel cells do this in UPSs - I recently found my "under the desk" UPS (some cheapo CyberPower unit) not working (as in, it wouldn't turn on at all, system completely down) - pulled it apart (figuring it needed a new battery, minimum) - the battery in it was swollen and CRACKED. A quick trip to Fry's and $20.00 later, my UPS (and system) was back up running nicely.
The kicker to all of this is the number of "dead" UPSs I have seen that people have thrown away, without simply trying to replace the battery. Usually, when I find them, I dig them out, replace the battery, and have a nice UPS for the cost of a battery or two - typically, the batteries cost no more than $10-20.00, depending on the size and such. Typical consumers, though, so I am not really surprised...
Amiga had 2 channels of stereo sound and 4 channels of mono sound. It did not have an FM sound chip (like the Atari ST, for example). The maximum hardware playback sampling rate was 22 KHz, 8-bit. More KHz could only be done by software, although Amiga did not need it because it had excellent sound filters and very low noise.
Thanks for the clarification here - I didn't mean to imply that there was an FM sound chip, which I know there wasn't - everything else you wrote is correct.
Wrong. It is the other way around: fast RAM was for the OS, slow RAM was for the OS and the custom chips. The reason it was called slow RAM it was because the bus was multiplexed for access by the custom chips, whereas fast RAM got accessed only by the main CPU.
Ah - thanks for this clarification - I simply knew that there were the two types of RAM, but I appologize for having my understanding backward...
Wrong. It was the copper chip that allowed two or more resolutions in the same screen. The copper chip was a very simple co-processor with 3 instructions that could alter the scanning frequency of the beam as well as the background color (hence the copper bar effects).
This is correct - my mistake.
You can not do texture mapping or polygon filling with the main CPU on a planar video ram...you can do fine 2D effects like parallax scrolling, but you can not do anything 3D.
Many, many graphics demos of the time (Cheese Cube was one of the earlier ones) proved this wrong. While I realize a demo does not make a 3D engine, it does show that "you can not do anything 3D" is false. Plus, there were several 3D filled-polygon games out there (no, not textured mapped and such, but they were 3D).
Oh, you are so wrong it is almost enjoyable!!! I have a 68030 board for my Amiga 500 as well as a PowerPC board for my Amiga 1200...I have seen boards with 68040 at 40 MHz.
Exactly! bingo! if Commodore had a 3d polygonizer custom chip along their blitter, there wouldn't be a need for upgrading. In fact, Commodore did have a chip like that which could do 1 million polygons (in 1990!) but it was scrapped as being 'unrealistic'.
Do you have any links or other information about this? I never heard anything back in the day about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist. Even so, Commodore didn't make their machines easily upgradable in the sense of cost - there were upgrades available both from them (though not many) and third parties, but they were anything but inexpensive. Furthermore, there were very few video upgrades available (all from third party), and none became the next "standard", unfortunately.
The problem with raycasting is that it requires a non-planar framebuffer. Do you know that the PC has a planar VGA mode? it's called mode X. You need a very fast CPU and VGA hardware to do raycasting on a planar video ram.
No. The sad fact is that Amiga could not do sprite scaling, rotation, raycasting etc. It could only shift 2D images very quickly. The pseudo-3d games that were made were very limited even compared to Wolfenstein 3D and came much later.
I forgot about "Mode X" - yes, that was a planar VGA mode, and I remember a few PC demos and games that took advantage of it, but not many. As far as needing a fast CPU and VGA hardware for raycasting, I guess it depends on what you mean by "raycasting" - simple raycasting just needs the ability to plot color via scaling using a form of the Bresenham algorithm. More complex forms scale strips from textures and sprites. I don't understand why you think sprite scaling and rotation couldn't be done on the Amiga - plenty of demos and games did both so many times over it became cliche.
I am not arguing that any of the raycasting games that came out for the Amiga (or any other platform) came out before Wolfenstein 3D - that is what made that PC title so shocking to the world (especially in game development). I am just arguing that the possibility existed all the time for
Unfortunately, the "ultimate FPS" has come and went, and if you didn't get a chance to experience it, I am sorry.
Dactyl Nightmare was the "pilot" game for most of the CS1000 virtual reality pods manufactured by W Industries (known later as Virtuality) back in late 1991. As this "in-game" image details (apparently they took this screenshot using an NTSC encoder on the pod's PAL output, thus gaining a black and white image - the original in-game view was in color), the game was a first-person "shooter" whereby you and three other people competed in an "arena" to shoot and "kill" (de-rez?) each other, all the while avoiding the pteradactyl which circled above you, and would grab you (unless you shot it first - tricky, but possible), lift you into the "sky" and drop you to your death on the arena floor below.
The pods were networked together, and ran on extremely customized Amiga 3000 platforms (using custom dual video boards to the Visette HMDs, and a custom 3D spatial position tracking system, IIRC, from Polhemus, to track the pistol-grip controller and head movements, as well as a custom CD-ROM drive system for the software and audio). Each HMD had a microphone, so players could talk with/to each other. The HMDs were large, but well balanced, though the system had lag that could be noticed if you moved your head too rapidly (although the HMD was so heavy that if you did that too much you might wrench your neck from the inertia).
The game was fairly simple in design and play, in a manner like "virtual paintball", where you ran around (by pointing your gun in one direction and pressing a trigger to move forward in that direction - a separate trigger fired your gun), and shot your "pellets" (which had a set velocity, and "gravity" pulled them in an arc in the arena, making for some interesting "shots") at each other as you ran up and down stairs through various levels of the arena, and also used "transporter pads" which were small areas you could step onto and they would transport you in an arc to other levels in the arena (but don't fall off! just like q-bert, you'll die).
What I liked most about the game, which isn't something you can do in a standard FPS (although maybe newer ones today allow for something like it), is that you could "back up" against one of the "pillars" in the game, and use it as "cover", and extend your arm and shoulder around the corner (thus exposing just your arm and a bit of your head, like IRL) to shoot at someone. You could easily crouch and fire, run and hide (strafing was not something you could do, though), duck and fire.
No, the graphics weren't hi-res, the speed wasn't fantastic, the game wasn't complex - but I have yet to play any game that was as engrossing and caused me to feel like I was "really there" - where I could look down and see my legs, look at my hand and see my gun - then run, duck, crouch, rise up and fire, blowing my opponent away, while I heard them in the headphones saying "what happened?" (unfortunately for most people they didn't have a clue as to how the whole thing worked - many "players" seemed to stand around looking, and not realizing that they were supposed to run around and shoot at things - this made for bad gameplay sometimes, it was always a much better experience playing with people who knew how to play).
You can't find these pods much anymore - there are a few on the fairground amusement rounds, that is about it. Others have moved on to the newer pods, which are still being made and sold by Arcadian Virtual Reality and their partners. Still, despite the real immersive interactivity these machines offer, there doesn't seem to be great interest, and to most they are still a "novelty"...
We probably won't ever see such a system in the home any time soon, mainly because of several reasons, which include liability concerns (from falling hazards to
In the double slit experiment, the light or particle source that is used is turned down so low that at any given time, there is no more than 1 particle going through the barrier.
Also, isn't it that the collapse of the wave function depends on what you put after the barrier?
That is, if you put a single particle detector at one of the slits (or a very sensitive screen), you will get "pings" that eventually "build up" to show the interference pattern fringing. However, if you put a particle detector in front of both slits, the "fringing" disappears - implying the wave function has collapsed and no interference pattern results (because the particle can only go through one of the slits at a time). If I understand it it correctly, this is the essence of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
There seem to be other interpretations of this phenomena as well. The Wikipedia article on the Double Slit Experiment goes into great detail, with a lot of links to bring you up to speed on this fascinating subject of QM...
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Of course, it did have problems with the database corrupting, on occasion, as using Access in a multi-user application is not something you should do. What can I say, I inherited a nightmare (by the time I left, we had migrated it to Access 2003, which behaved better, and I had also went a long way towards getting it communicating and working well with PostgreSQL). At any rate, under Access 97, one of the more heavily accessed tables would - every once in a while - get a corrupted row. This wasn't much of an issue, unless you tried to access such a row, say by doing a search or other table scan function. At that point, the application would crash. I added layers of error checking, which worked OK - at least the app wouldn't crash. Still, it annoyed the users, they would complain via an email to me, and I would have to go in, locate, and remove the offending row in Access.
After doing this a few times, I got tired of it, and realizing that I had a process which worked every time to correct the issue, I proceeded to come up with a solution to automate the task. What I did was create a simple bit of code which would perform the "correction", and randomly pick a user when the started the application to call the routine. When the routine ran, I would write to a config table that it was being performed, so that way other users wouldn't be running the same fix at the same time (to avoid any possible collision issue - though it probably wouldn't have mattered). The users wouldn't even know this was happenning, outside of their session running a little slower, as I did it in such a way (ie, calling DoEvents) so that they could continue using the application as normal.
So, one day after this was put into place, I come in to work and see an email (sent about an hour before I got in) "The database is corrupted again...", immediately followed by another email from the same user (about 5 minutes later - realize, I am still not at work) "Thank you! You fixed it! It is working great now!". The user had no clue that I was never even in the office (most likely, I was in the shower at home, or sleeping, or something). I had successfully automated myself!
I showed the emails to my supervisor, and explained what I had done - he was cool with it, liked that I had taken the initiative to put such a thing in place. We immediately began to think how to correct the issue for good, as well as how to educate the users that the system would automagically fix the problems in the meantime. This led to a redesign of the database communication layer (one of the big things was dropping as much use of VB/Access DB update commands, and using SQL heavily, while switching to Access 2003, both of which dovetailed neatly into using PostgreSQL, ultimately)...
I won't argue the point of fetal vs. adult stem cells - it seems to me, as a layman, that most of the stories and successful research has happenned around adult stem cells. Whether this is because they are more easily available or because fetal stem cell research has been effectively halted in the United States, I don't know. Likely, it is former, as well as there being issues using fetal stem cell lines of any type for treatments - after all, if they were viable in any shape, we should be hearing more from overseas research. So far, not much has been heard, at least to my limited knowledge.
What I will argue about is regarding the reasoning for banning funding to researchers. It is one thing if a researcher wants money for such research and is denied. It is another thing if they want to do the research, but aren't allowed because they (or their lab/research facilities) currently do government funded research in a completely unrelated (to stem cells) area. Since they take government funds in some manner, for some research, they have the choice of losing all government funding to all research, to research fetal stem cells, or to not research fetal stem cell lines at all and keep what funding they have.
So, if you are a university (where a lot of research occurs), you are (nearly by default) receiving some form of government funding. Ergo, you cannot do fetal stem cell research (outside of the contaminated lines which were grandfathered in), without losing your government funding for your robotics lab (along with a bunch of other areas). It is either be completely self or privately funded for all areas of research, and be able to research fetal stem cell lines - or keep your government funding for your other research, and forget any fetal stem cell research. Some choice. No wonder private funding isn't available - because once your institution tried to do it, you would also need funding for all of your other research activities, which isn't going to happen, of course.
I guess we should all hope and pray that fetal stem cell lines continue to be fruitless pursuits, and that somebody outside of America doesn't make that primary discovery that proves to make adult stem cell research obsolete or worthless. Somehow, I think we as country are going to eat our shorts on that one, all because of ignorant, petty and baseless religious objections.
Religion will be humanity's downfall, and the fundamentalists will be leading the charge...
I give you a book, and in return you give me, say, a radio - we have come to a deal to exchange two goods of equal value to each other, in effect "bartering" one item for the other, no money changing hands.
Now, you tell me that according to the government (depending on your government, of course), we each have to "pay taxes" on that transaction? What fuckin' rabbit hole did I fall down into, anyway?
I can sorta understand the reasoning behind all of this - after all, money is nothing more than tokens which represent value which are bartered for physical goods which have real value. Therefore, if there is sales tax on a good, that tax is then paid with money. In the barter, the tax is "included" in the value of the barter exchange - it is just up to each of us when we do this to "be honest" and report it to the IRS on our income taxes, right?
Bastards, the whole lot of 'em! The fuckin' machine can never be satisfied, even if feed our soul's into its gaping maw. Tell me again why we citizens continue to support this mess?
Thanks for the link, though...
I started this project (heh, have yet to finish it, but that is a whole 'nother story) to build an electric vehicle using bicycle parts, and decided to build the machine using a recumbent design. A couple of steel garage sale bikes, a bit of welding, and I had my frame. The seat was a fishing boat seat picked up from Walmart. Since I am planning on attaching an electric motor, there isn't any pedals or chain, but one could easily see how such a system could be attached in place of foot rest.
Do some googling on homemade recumbent bicycles - they are very easy to make, you don't even need to know how to weld or braze to put one together (one of the bents I saw out there was held together with bolts, screws and pipe clamps!). Go around on a bulk trash pickup day (if your city runs them) and you will find many, many bikes simply being thrown away. I used two bikes, a 26" (for the rear) 10 speed, and a 20" for the front fork assembly. Other tubing came from the same bikes as they were cut up. If you wanted a longer frame, steel electrical conduit could be substituted.
I have seen some weird homemade designs out there - including one made out of wood! I would imagine, if you had the skills, workspace, and a bit of money, you could design and build one using aluminum tubing and/or carbon fiber. You could probably JB-Weld and/or pop-rivet the thing together (provided you mixed the 2-part precisely to get the maximum strength bond).
So far, I have spent very little money on my project - I would wager you could build an equivalent steel framed bent (factoring in extra parts and such, not counting tool needs, of course) for under $200.00 (and that is probably too high an estimate). If you needed something lighter, it could be done, but it would take more scrounging and probably a trip to scrap metal yard to get some aluminum tubing cheap enough (unless you got lucky and someone was getting rid of an old aluminum mast antenna). Get the beater bikes and cut off/grind the bearings and such, attach them together using epoxy and kevlar string (think of "lashing an axe head" onto an handle, then liberally applying several coats of epoxy resin to the kevlar lashing).
Once again, do some googling on the subject - many people have successfully built homemade recumbent bicycles for very little or no money involved. You won't likely find a "how-to" guide, but you will find plenty of pictures, advice, and other documentation to get your ideas and creativity flowing toward building your own.
I hope you take this post to heart - good luck!
In this sense, the mo-cap performance artist does a lot to help bring the character to life, because he or she must be very flexible and capable of acting (in motion and character) just like how the CGI would actually work (as near as can be determined - after all, it is fantasy in many cases) in "real life" if it actually existed.
For example, it is one thing to draw and model Garfield, it is another to imitate the moves of Garfield, as a human mo-cap artist (actually, I don't know if they used mo-cap for Garfield, I am just giving an example). You can't use a real cat, because the cat isn't going to really perform for you (for some things, a real cat might suffice, actually). But maybe you can get a human to mimic some properties of a cat, capture the motion, then morph (and/or modify/extract/re-combine data from) the mo-cap motion model to match the CGI model you are working with.
As you can see, it easily takes a whole team to create a CGI character - the modeler is only one part of the team. Sometimes, the modeler can even make convincing motion, without needing mo-cap. However, for some things (actually, quite a lot of things when it comes to movies, where an audience can easily pick out bad animation), real mo-cap with performance artists and data capture manipulation is necessary and needed.
However, we have all the technology to enable such a vehicle, especially if we limit it to highway travel (where conditions tend to be less variable than surface streets). One such improvement for guidance would be a combination of active and passive "dots" lining the lanes. The passive ones could be simple rare-earth magnets. The active ones would take a bit more work, but I can easily envision a small solar panel with an integrated RF/IR transponder - perhaps it could even communicate with other dots wirelessly to forward information toward on-coming traffic about road conditions and such. I am also thinking of a system like an ant-trail, where the communication could be forwarded by "hitchhiking" packets of information onto the car as it travels, and then it could deposit the info in a later dot (not sure if or how this would be useful, but it sounds like it could be in some manner).
Couple this with signage broadcasting data, cars with navigational aids (GPS and radar, mainly), standard vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocols (so cars could talk to each other to let each know intent and yielding) - I would be willing to bet that all of this is easily available, without needing special DGPS systems installed. Even without special "active dots", most of the system would be easy and cheap to develop.
The expensive and hard to develop part isn't the hardware - it's the software. This includes not just the software for the system and the cars, but the "software" (ie, business processes) needed for insurance and liability concerns for all parties involved.
I was wondering about this, too. With that many problems, I will be sure to steer clear of newer VW products, I think. My current daily driver is a 1994 Ford Ranger XLT 4-banger, with 150,000+ miles on it. I have yet to replace the MAF sensor or the O2 sensors (still pass with flying colors at inspection), and I certainly don't burn anywhere near as much oil. One of the other things I like about my lil' pickup is that the oil filter (Motorcraft F1-A) is the same filter as the one on my 1979 Bronco (which will NEVER be a daily driver, given the amount of gas the V8 in it uses!) - makes thinking about oil changes on both an easy issue.
I just like the possibilities this tag brings to browsers and web applications, as well as (simple) gaming. However, I haven't heard anything about it working (or not) in any of the IE7 betas that have been released yet...
I suppose it could depend on what you mean by "extend" in an object oriented manner. If you have a table in a database that has an ID key field, as well as a ParentID field for each row - then row 2 could be easily parented to row 1, thus in a manner "extending" row 1's set of data. Depending on how the table was set up, such a system can easily be made to work in an object oriented manner (though it isn't pretty, and SQL to access the data properly become tedious)...
I am not an expert on pouring a foundation (so google up on it for real-world instructions), but I would imagine that for a house your foundation would be about a foot thick, total - probably a dug down 8 inches or so, four inches of gravel, then concrete with aggregate mix poured on top of this. Maybe with a reinforcing steel mesh (made from thick wire for a house, thin rebar for bigger or taller structures) embedded in the concrete.
I would expect this to be close to what would be needed for residential structures - but as I said before, I am not an expert on this (hell, I am not even an amateur - just basing this on what I have seen done)...
In reality, though, dump trucks and cranes (among other things, like drilling rigs) can and have come in contact with high voltage lines - just do a google search on the issue, plenty of articles and papers on the issue (almost as bad as lockout/tagout references).
In the end, though, I was just trying to "make a joke" over a "non-joking" matter - it just seems like you hear on a fairly regular basis about some crane or dump truck operator getting tangled up in electrical lines, tearing them down or killing himself or worse...
Actually, it seems like there is a dearth of interest in anything historically related to computers prior to about 1990 by most people, even among self-described "computer geeks". I personally find the history of computing and information handling a very fascinating subject. Especially when it comes to the original experimentation of "fax machines" (information reproduction on paper or other medium over wires), or old-time stock-market/telegraph tickers running over morse-code lines. Then you have the various mechanical calculating machines, and electro-mechanical tabulators of Hollerith's design...
I have to say the most fascinating thing in computing history has to be the developments leading up to the insights of Turing of computers being symbol-processing machines. Prior to this development, the machines were looked upon as calculators, manipulators of numbers only. It took Turing to get us where we are now. In addition, there is the interesting thing that even though electricity and relays (of a sort, in the form of telegraph systems) were available to Babbage, and Babbage (being a renowned mathematician) knew of George Boole's logic system and boolean (base-2) math, that he still chose to continue with mechanical designs. Part of this had to do with manufacturing capability, but I will always wonder at this. Imagine if Hollerith (who successfully applied electro-mechanical systems to tabulation) had known more about Babbage and base-2 mathematics, or had been as "inspired" or such? Could we have had a relay-based computer in the 1890's?
Alas, it is just another example of things, ideas, and people being in the right place at the right time...
Hmm - learned something new today - here I was (an American) thinking you simply misspelled "trickle"...
...yet you seem to be unable to create a working link...
But dump truck and crane operators always seem to find a way, it seems...
I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe you might get "garbage truck repelling" construction on a new home that is custom designed and built, but I can guarantee that you won't get the same in your standard suburb tract-housing.
I can't speak for California construction, but I know that here in Phoenix, if you are lucky, you get an 8 inch thick pad with 2x4 construction on top (2x6 if you pay a lot more). That is, base plate, uprights on 18 inch centers with horizontal firewalls (they may tell you "cross bracing", but its not - its meant to contain a fire and preventing it from spreading to attic space), upper horizontals, then top plate. Inside is finished with drywall, some form of insulation in between (generally pink fiberglass blanket), and then tyvek wrapping, chicken wire, then stucco. Sometimes it seems the cheapest houses don't even have the tyvek wrapping. Also, in many of the newer tract housing sections in Arizona (especially Anthem), the pads are cracking due to the soil not being prepared properly, causing sinking and lifting during rains - eventually causing the house to crack in half if it isn't repaired (several people in Anthem, a "tract housing" suburb north of Phoenix which isn't exactly cheap to buy into, have been stuck with busted houses as of late).
Block construction for cheap tract housing stopped sometime in the 1980's - I currently live in a block house built by Continental Homes in 1973. When I was in the market for a house, I explicitly stated to my realtor what I wanted - the combination of my budget, want for concrete block construction, and no HOA meant that my choices were limited to roughly pre-1980's constructed houses. Everything else in my price range was el-cheapo construction otherwise (sure, it was "brand new", with gestapo HOA fees thrown in).
In the Phoenix market, it seems if you want anything beyond standard "stick frame" construction you need to either have it custom built (using block, or steel/alluminum framing, among other options), or spend more than $300,000.00...
What would such a plan look like? Could it be done? Could it have been done (at least for the United States) for the amount of money already spent?
What if, after learning the pricetag for such a "war on terror" was going to be 100 billion+ dollars, the President had instead stated that instead of using the money in wasteful "blow up the desert" spending in the Middle East, we instead had a 10 year program (10 billion per year):
Ultimately, the goal would have been to educate America on being energy efficient and conserving energy, while at the same time providing for ways and incentives for the country to move in that direction. This would have to have included all manner of alternative energy - wind, solar, hydrogen, biofuels - and standard fossil fuels. Both in production and usage, as well as saving energy by being more efficient with processes and eliminating waste/errors in production and use (perhaps nationwide application of 6s methodologies). No one alternative energy system would work - but all of them together could possibly take a big chunk out the issue. We would have to have been smart (ie, quit subsidizing corn producers for ethanol production and use something better for it - like hemp or switchgrass or something - also, quit putting a tariff on sugar, etc).
In 10 years (5 of which have now passed), we should have been able to eliminate - if we worked hard at it, and had the 100 billion+ dollars that we have already wasted - the 20 percent or so dependence we have on Middle East oil. Ultimately, in the end, we would simply "pull out" once and for all - COMPLETELY - from the Middle East. Let them (all of them, including Israel) duke it out in whatever way they want. Yes, we would still be sending money to them via OPEC at first - but I bet we could whittle the amount we would need to send to OPEC for oil (because we would always need it, if only for chemical/plastics) to a small amount compared to today.
I know my ideas above are very simplistic, and leave out many things (like getting the big 3 to build energy efficient vehicles, among other things). I also don't think that (at least in the short term) such a plan could make our country completely energy independent (as I said before, we will always need oil in some part) - but I honestly think that if we had wanted to, we could have been five years into such a plan already, instead of having spent five years (and way more than 100 billion+ dollars) on a war that doesn't seem to have an end yet. Maybe such a plan could even had made us a manufacturing power again (of "green" industrial solutions, "green" energy systems, biofuels, etc).
I think about this - it saddens me that our "leaders" have chosen to ignore one of the biggest issues facing us today, and their war is doing nothing (it seems) to al
Sounds interesting - given enough time, I could even probably come up with a solution (something involving solenoids, cams, clutches, and ratchets - among other things - would be needed). If you want to see something similar, look into old "reproducing" player pianos. Imagine how you would convert a 4-5 bit value into a volume level (ie, a hardware-based DAC - in the early 1900's). There was a writeup on this in an old 1976 issue of Byte Magazine - what really made this issue "fun" was that they described one hobbyist who interfaced his player piano to his 8-bit kit computer located in the basement (using a very primitive bit-banger serial interface to keep the wire count down - he also had to use twisted-pair wire, grounding one of the pair to improve signal shielding and prevent crosstalk over the length of wire).
Also, note that if you are doing this as the OP suggests (cron job, etc), there is a *nix utility out there that can turn on/off individual parallel port pins - I don't have a link, but it is fairly easy to find (search under parallel port interfacing off of the ePanorama site). The only possible 'catch' to the app is that it needs to run as root, but I would imagine you would set up the cron job and such for this kind of monitoring that way anyhow...
Kinda like Burning Man, but without all the dust...
The kicker to all of this is the number of "dead" UPSs I have seen that people have thrown away, without simply trying to replace the battery. Usually, when I find them, I dig them out, replace the battery, and have a nice UPS for the cost of a battery or two - typically, the batteries cost no more than $10-20.00, depending on the size and such. Typical consumers, though, so I am not really surprised...
Thanks for the clarification here - I didn't mean to imply that there was an FM sound chip, which I know there wasn't - everything else you wrote is correct.
Wrong. It is the other way around: fast RAM was for the OS, slow RAM was for the OS and the custom chips. The reason it was called slow RAM it was because the bus was multiplexed for access by the custom chips, whereas fast RAM got accessed only by the main CPU.
Ah - thanks for this clarification - I simply knew that there were the two types of RAM, but I appologize for having my understanding backward...
Wrong. It was the copper chip that allowed two or more resolutions in the same screen. The copper chip was a very simple co-processor with 3 instructions that could alter the scanning frequency of the beam as well as the background color (hence the copper bar effects).
This is correct - my mistake.
You can not do texture mapping or polygon filling with the main CPU on a planar video ram...you can do fine 2D effects like parallax scrolling, but you can not do anything 3D.
Many, many graphics demos of the time (Cheese Cube was one of the earlier ones) proved this wrong. While I realize a demo does not make a 3D engine, it does show that "you can not do anything 3D" is false. Plus, there were several 3D filled-polygon games out there (no, not textured mapped and such, but they were 3D).
Oh, you are so wrong it is almost enjoyable!!! I have a 68030 board for my Amiga 500 as well as a PowerPC board for my Amiga 1200...I have seen boards with 68040 at 40 MHz.
Exactly! bingo! if Commodore had a 3d polygonizer custom chip along their blitter, there wouldn't be a need for upgrading. In fact, Commodore did have a chip like that which could do 1 million polygons (in 1990!) but it was scrapped as being 'unrealistic'.
Do you have any links or other information about this? I never heard anything back in the day about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist. Even so, Commodore didn't make their machines easily upgradable in the sense of cost - there were upgrades available both from them (though not many) and third parties, but they were anything but inexpensive. Furthermore, there were very few video upgrades available (all from third party), and none became the next "standard", unfortunately.
The problem with raycasting is that it requires a non-planar framebuffer. Do you know that the PC has a planar VGA mode? it's called mode X. You need a very fast CPU and VGA hardware to do raycasting on a planar video ram.
No. The sad fact is that Amiga could not do sprite scaling, rotation, raycasting etc. It could only shift 2D images very quickly. The pseudo-3d games that were made were very limited even compared to Wolfenstein 3D and came much later.
I forgot about "Mode X" - yes, that was a planar VGA mode, and I remember a few PC demos and games that took advantage of it, but not many. As far as needing a fast CPU and VGA hardware for raycasting, I guess it depends on what you mean by "raycasting" - simple raycasting just needs the ability to plot color via scaling using a form of the Bresenham algorithm. More complex forms scale strips from textures and sprites. I don't understand why you think sprite scaling and rotation couldn't be done on the Amiga - plenty of demos and games did both so many times over it became cliche.
I am not arguing that any of the raycasting games that came out for the Amiga (or any other platform) came out before Wolfenstein 3D - that is what made that PC title so shocking to the world (especially in game development). I am just arguing that the possibility existed all the time for
Dactyl Nightmare was the "pilot" game for most of the CS1000 virtual reality pods manufactured by W Industries (known later as Virtuality) back in late 1991. As this "in-game" image details (apparently they took this screenshot using an NTSC encoder on the pod's PAL output, thus gaining a black and white image - the original in-game view was in color), the game was a first-person "shooter" whereby you and three other people competed in an "arena" to shoot and "kill" (de-rez?) each other, all the while avoiding the pteradactyl which circled above you, and would grab you (unless you shot it first - tricky, but possible), lift you into the "sky" and drop you to your death on the arena floor below.
The pods were networked together, and ran on extremely customized Amiga 3000 platforms (using custom dual video boards to the Visette HMDs, and a custom 3D spatial position tracking system, IIRC, from Polhemus, to track the pistol-grip controller and head movements, as well as a custom CD-ROM drive system for the software and audio). Each HMD had a microphone, so players could talk with/to each other. The HMDs were large, but well balanced, though the system had lag that could be noticed if you moved your head too rapidly (although the HMD was so heavy that if you did that too much you might wrench your neck from the inertia).
The game was fairly simple in design and play, in a manner like "virtual paintball", where you ran around (by pointing your gun in one direction and pressing a trigger to move forward in that direction - a separate trigger fired your gun), and shot your "pellets" (which had a set velocity, and "gravity" pulled them in an arc in the arena, making for some interesting "shots") at each other as you ran up and down stairs through various levels of the arena, and also used "transporter pads" which were small areas you could step onto and they would transport you in an arc to other levels in the arena (but don't fall off! just like q-bert, you'll die).
What I liked most about the game, which isn't something you can do in a standard FPS (although maybe newer ones today allow for something like it), is that you could "back up" against one of the "pillars" in the game, and use it as "cover", and extend your arm and shoulder around the corner (thus exposing just your arm and a bit of your head, like IRL) to shoot at someone. You could easily crouch and fire, run and hide (strafing was not something you could do, though), duck and fire.
No, the graphics weren't hi-res, the speed wasn't fantastic, the game wasn't complex - but I have yet to play any game that was as engrossing and caused me to feel like I was "really there" - where I could look down and see my legs, look at my hand and see my gun - then run, duck, crouch, rise up and fire, blowing my opponent away, while I heard them in the headphones saying "what happened?" (unfortunately for most people they didn't have a clue as to how the whole thing worked - many "players" seemed to stand around looking, and not realizing that they were supposed to run around and shoot at things - this made for bad gameplay sometimes, it was always a much better experience playing with people who knew how to play).
You can't find these pods much anymore - there are a few on the fairground amusement rounds, that is about it. Others have moved on to the newer pods, which are still being made and sold by Arcadian Virtual Reality and their partners. Still, despite the real immersive interactivity these machines offer, there doesn't seem to be great interest, and to most they are still a "novelty"...
We probably won't ever see such a system in the home any time soon, mainly because of several reasons, which include liability concerns (from falling hazards to
Also, isn't it that the collapse of the wave function depends on what you put after the barrier?
That is, if you put a single particle detector at one of the slits (or a very sensitive screen), you will get "pings" that eventually "build up" to show the interference pattern fringing. However, if you put a particle detector in front of both slits, the "fringing" disappears - implying the wave function has collapsed and no interference pattern results (because the particle can only go through one of the slits at a time). If I understand it it correctly, this is the essence of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
There seem to be other interpretations of this phenomena as well. The Wikipedia article on the Double Slit Experiment goes into great detail, with a lot of links to bring you up to speed on this fascinating subject of QM...