Definitely fooled me. That's why I went out last *week* to buy a replacement for my newer Nvidia GForce 2 400 (or something) that was BSOD'ing my OS like crazy.
I've run into one teeny tiny bug in a game with my ATI Radeon 9000.
That's why I went and jumped companies thanks to NVidia's Detonator drivers that crapping my system out. The latest drivers were even worse than the ones that shipped with the two cards I was trying to use. My new ATI Radeon 9000 has been breezing along with almost no problems.
That was sarcasm, if you didn't catch it. McFarlene is a bit sue happy. Paladium had a fairly neat post-apocolyptic gothic horror world called "Nightspawn". Other than the fact that it had the name "Spawn" in it, it was totally different conceptually other than "horror".
But if you are tight for money, it doesn't pay to fight a legal battle. So now Nightspawn doesn't exit and it's been renamed to Nightbane.
The theory seems pretty good (by my layman's understanding, anyways.)
But it's like saying that you can only melt metals to make a ring near a volcano, because that's the way we figured out how to do it originally. Obviously, we don't have to, because we have things called forges!;P
Once they figure out how to fiddle with wormholes and know what they are trying to do (big, big if) they'll just change the wormhole parameters so that the other end appears where and whenever they want.
Bing, there's the time machine. It'll probably recquire a traveling(space)craft/machine to pass through the aperature.
So the obvious (well, to me) solution would be to make a rotating drum of CCDs. The timing would be tricky, you may have to reassemble you picture later, but it is technically doable.
An analog/digital convergance solution.
The neat thing about that, is when CCDs and transfer rates get faster, you can just up the speed of the drum, to get even faster picture rates.
With a possiblily of a triple booster with strap on solid rocket boosters. They don't list what that one can lift to GEO, but I would assume it is very heavy indeed.
They have little breakdown of the model number. Up to two Centaurs and five solid rocket boosters.
If I had to guess, I say that the triple booster, two centaur and five+ SRB configuration would probably boost about 17,000 lbs into GEO. And 90,000 (45 Tons!) to LEO.
Yeah, I think Lockheed/Martin can say this is the heaviest current ELV.
_19,114 Atlas 5 551 _28,950 Delta IV _39,600 Ariane V _45,320 Proton K _47,800 Titan IV _63,500 Space Shuttle 231,000 Energia SL17 236,000 Saturn V
Well, Enerigia doesn't exist anymore than Saturn. Although I do wonder how it can claim to be the heaviest EELV with the others higher on the list.
[smacks forehead] Atlas V ELV carries that much to Geostationary Orbit. Duh.
The Space Shuttle can't go to GEO. And Proton isn't a GTO either, IIRC. What could an Atlas V put to LEO? Probably siginificantly higher payload than the others.
Most of the advancements are in ease of building the rocket and manufacturing costs. IIRC, the Delta 4 and that Atlas 5 are both redesigns looking to simplify the building and assembling the rockets. There is a lot of added technology in smart sensors (for "health monitoring") and such. It's also supposed to be much, much simpler to assemble (and faster to assemble too.) There was an articel at http://www.space.com that talked about the advances in the new ELVs.
Um, and the South lost, remember? The North was all about the Union, the South was for States. The Civil War wasn't only about Slavery, but Nationalism and National Supremecy. Not that the states don't have *any* say. They have quite a bit.
but they're stupid. The only ones that I've seen that look vaguely usefull have been the ones from Gasaraki and elements of (yeah, I know) Bubblegum Crisis (original).
Pretty much what the US Army is aiming for with their exo-frame suits. Enhanced solidiers that can run faster and carry bigger weapons than the enemy.
I'll bet you that most tank commanders laugh their asses off about 45 foot targets with 400% more moving parts than a tank.
Too bad that computers are not just run by geeks but by the bottomline. I totally expect that AMD's implementation will be 1% to 5% slower with 64 bit apps. Unless they do some seriously cool opimization.
But your CFO is going to look at this box and ask what is it going to do. (It cost enough, he wants real answers.)
And your tech who bought Intel will say, it runs this one App in 64 bit mode that we really need to stay competitive.
Your tech who bought AMD will say, it runs this one App in 64 bit mode that we really need to stay competitive and all of our 'legacy' 32 bit apps that we run our business on.
Can someone explain what Carmack is talking about here? This has sparked some brain cell activity, but my inability to comprehend what he is talking about has left the brain stalled.
Carmack: There is something to be said for grappling with a challenge that only involves the forces of nature (ignoring, for the moment, the regulatory challenges), rather than consumer tastes.
The appalling inefficiency in the aerospace industry is also a bit of a driving factor. Due to an accident of history tying them to ICBMs, the evolution of space vehicles has wound up tending towards a local optimum that is in a completely different area than better global solutions, and it doesn't seem likely to break out of the current context. The aerospace industry needs a fresh reboot. There is an order of magnitude improvement available in low hanging fruit.
I have a reasonable time table going for all of our development work, and things are proceeding satisfactorily.
John Carmack owns/runs a company called www.armadilloaerospace.com that is developing rocket technologies and launchers with the intent of eventually getting someone into space.
There is a lot of condemnation against the current establishment (Boeing, Lockheed, NASA, etc.) as they are not seen as working towards Cheap Access To Space (CATS).
There is some truth to this, but the nature of rocket technology was pushed too far with simple technology instead of an incremental expansion of technology with better understanding.
Freedom Force is just itching to be modded. You can download their proffesional model/skin viewer, skin relatively easily and quite a few models have already been made.
It's only weeks old and has *hundreds* of skins, many made before it even came out.
The only thing that'll make it awesome is co-operative multiplayer.
...in attacking Afganstan *after* verifying facts well enough for 3/4's of the world, *after* demanding the surrender of the peoples that we felt were responsible. After all, we didn't just fly in there immediately and started killing *everyone*! Right?
The Taliban kept putting up rediculous road blocks while saying that the US would drown in our own blood.
The Taliban and its ilk are terrorists who would love to see the US and anyone who is like-minded to us brutally killed.
Did we have to attack Afganinstan to oust the Taliban and the Al Queda? Yup, because they were more than happy treat their own, deprived, *downtrodden* people as a shield in their war against the hated 'satan'.
But in a war like that, the US played the *moderate* card. We didn't aim at civilians if we could help it. We minimalized the deaths (and if you don't think we did, you haven't checked your WWII battles.)
The US, if it had wanted to, could have wholy depopulated the entire country. And we would have been rightly called barbarians for doing it that way.
Now the US and Great Britan are helping to rebuild that country as best we can under the constraints of international law.
It sucks to be the US. We're the bad guys even when we're doing the right thing. Just because we're on top.
I wonder if Intel is seeing what AMD saw over a year ago. Many people are looking at the latest greatest operating system and going... oh. That's nice. Does it run my old program? It doesn't? How do I get my Win98 back on there so it will?
Non-backwards compatibility was supposed to be a *benefit* for their new chip.
And now they're suddenly looking at backwards compatibility? Give it ten years *after* and they'll probably be able to *use* a non-backwards compatible chip.
Score one for AMD's clear thinking. No wonder they're breathing down Intel's neck.
You lose all levels and all characters are conformed to the baselines of the server you are logging in (XP, magic items and stats are configurable based on a progression level that the DM sets up.)
Then you are in luck, as NWN can be played as closely as you can get to Pen and Paper (PnP) as you can get currently from a computer game.
So get your group of friends together online, have one of them build a 'module' around a story and the player's character and let 'em Dungeon Master it. It'll only be as linear as you DM.
The true strength will be the toolset (unfortunately released only on Windows) and how easy it is to make loadable modules.
If I remember a quote by the programmer, he was aiming for something so easy that even his own grandmother could make a module.
And with the proliferation of people willing to make mods out there (skins, models, etc.) you've got a game that has some serious replay value.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely fooled me. That's why I went out last *week* to buy a replacement for my newer Nvidia GForce 2 400 (or something) that was BSOD'ing my OS like crazy.
I've run into one teeny tiny bug in a game with my ATI Radeon 9000.
That's it.
That's why I went and jumped companies thanks to NVidia's Detonator drivers that crapping my system out. The latest drivers were even worse than the ones that shipped with the two cards I was trying to use. My new ATI Radeon 9000 has been breezing along with almost no problems.
Crapper of a retirement package tho'. No refurbing that bad boy. :P
Arthur Hansen
Actually, I believe a recent stufy found the Sahara shrunk a little bit in the last five years or so.
That was sarcasm, if you didn't catch it. McFarlene is a bit sue happy. Paladium had a fairly neat post-apocolyptic gothic horror world called "Nightspawn". Other than the fact that it had the name "Spawn" in it, it was totally different conceptually other than "horror".
But if you are tight for money, it doesn't pay to fight a legal battle. So now Nightspawn doesn't exit and it's been renamed to Nightbane.
The theory seems pretty good (by my layman's understanding, anyways.)
;P
But it's like saying that you can only melt metals to make a ring near a volcano, because that's the way we figured out how to do it originally. Obviously, we don't have to, because we have things called forges!
Once they figure out how to fiddle with wormholes and know what they are trying to do (big, big if) they'll just change the wormhole parameters so that the other end appears where and whenever they want.
Bing, there's the time machine. It'll probably recquire a traveling(space)craft/machine to pass through the aperature.
Arthur Hansen
So the obvious (well, to me) solution would be to make a rotating drum of CCDs. The timing would be tricky, you may have to reassemble you picture later, but it is technically doable.
An analog/digital convergance solution.
The neat thing about that, is when CCDs and transfer rates get faster, you can just up the speed of the drum, to get even faster picture rates.
With a possiblily of a triple booster with strap on solid rocket boosters. They don't list what that one can lift to GEO, but I would assume it is very heavy indeed.
They have little breakdown of the model number. Up to two Centaurs and five solid rocket boosters.
If I had to guess, I say that the triple booster, two centaur and five+ SRB configuration would probably boost about 17,000 lbs into GEO. And 90,000 (45 Tons!) to LEO.
Yeah, I think Lockheed/Martin can say this is the heaviest current ELV.
http://www.ilslaunch.com/stories/AtlasVUpdates/
_19,114 Atlas 5 551
_28,950 Delta IV
_39,600 Ariane V
_45,320 Proton K
_47,800 Titan IV
_63,500 Space Shuttle
231,000 Energia SL17
236,000 Saturn V
Well, Enerigia doesn't exist anymore than Saturn. Although I do wonder how it can claim to be the heaviest EELV with the others higher on the list.
[smacks forehead] Atlas V ELV carries that much to Geostationary Orbit. Duh.
The Space Shuttle can't go to GEO. And Proton isn't a GTO either, IIRC. What could an Atlas V put to LEO? Probably siginificantly higher payload than the others.
Most of the advancements are in ease of building the rocket and manufacturing costs. IIRC, the Delta 4 and that Atlas 5 are both redesigns looking to simplify the building and assembling the rockets. There is a lot of added technology in smart sensors (for "health monitoring") and such. It's also supposed to be much, much simpler to assemble (and faster to assemble too.) There was an articel at http://www.space.com that talked about the advances in the new ELVs.
Um, and the South lost, remember? The North was all about the Union, the South was for States. The Civil War wasn't only about Slavery, but Nationalism and National Supremecy. Not that the states don't have *any* say. They have quite a bit.
But they can't over-ride the national government.
Gah. I'm at work, you dink. That sort of crap can get me canned! Do you know how hard it is to get a job these days?
Grrr.
Arthur Hansen
Actually, with the Moon's negligible atmosphere, all you need is energy and a mass driver.
It would be quite easy to use the Moon as a stepping stone to get more mass into Earth/Moon orbits.
The big stumbling blocks for this of course is that there is no market and we have no idea on how to mine in vacuum(sp?)
But the Moon is much easier to get off of in the long term, if you really think about it.
Cool, a Gundam reference. I love anime mecha...
but they're stupid. The only ones that I've seen that look vaguely usefull have been the ones from Gasaraki and elements of (yeah, I know) Bubblegum Crisis (original).
Pretty much what the US Army is aiming for with their exo-frame suits. Enhanced solidiers that can run faster and carry bigger weapons than the enemy.
I'll bet you that most tank commanders laugh their asses off about 45 foot targets with 400% more moving parts than a tank.
Too bad that computers are not just run by geeks but by the bottomline. I totally expect that AMD's implementation will be 1% to 5% slower with 64 bit apps. Unless they do some seriously cool opimization.
But your CFO is going to look at this box and ask what is it going to do. (It cost enough, he wants real answers.)
And your tech who bought Intel will say, it runs this one App in 64 bit mode that we really need to stay competitive.
Your tech who bought AMD will say, it runs this one App in 64 bit mode that we really need to stay competitive and all of our 'legacy' 32 bit apps that we run our business on.
Can you guess which CFO is going to be happier?
There is a lot of condemnation against the current establishment (Boeing, Lockheed, NASA, etc.) as they are not seen as working towards Cheap Access To Space (CATS).
There is some truth to this, but the nature of rocket technology was pushed too far with simple technology instead of an incremental expansion of technology with better understanding.
Arthur Hansen
Freedom Force is just itching to be modded. You can download their proffesional model/skin viewer, skin relatively easily and quite a few models have already been made.
It's only weeks old and has *hundreds* of skins, many made before it even came out.
The only thing that'll make it awesome is co-operative multiplayer.
And they are seriously talking about that too.
...in attacking Afganstan *after* verifying facts well enough for 3/4's of the world, *after* demanding the surrender of the peoples that we felt were responsible. After all, we didn't just fly in there immediately and started killing *everyone*! Right?
The Taliban kept putting up rediculous road blocks while saying that the US would drown in our own blood.
The Taliban and its ilk are terrorists who would love to see the US and anyone who is like-minded to us brutally killed.
Did we have to attack Afganinstan to oust the Taliban and the Al Queda? Yup, because they were more than happy treat their own, deprived, *downtrodden* people as a shield in their war against the hated 'satan'.
But in a war like that, the US played the *moderate* card. We didn't aim at civilians if we could help it. We minimalized the deaths (and if you don't think we did, you haven't checked your WWII battles.)
The US, if it had wanted to, could have wholy depopulated the entire country. And we would have been rightly called barbarians for doing it that way.
Now the US and Great Britan are helping to rebuild that country as best we can under the constraints of international law.
It sucks to be the US. We're the bad guys even when we're doing the right thing. Just because we're on top.
AMD's *fully* compatible? No.
But they were going to be a lot more compatible than Intel 64bit mainstream processor was *supposed* to be.
But Intel just changed their mind.
.
I wonder if Intel is seeing what AMD saw over a year ago. Many people are looking at the latest greatest operating system and going... oh. That's nice. Does it run my old program? It doesn't? How do I get my Win98 back on there so it will?
Non-backwards compatibility was supposed to be a *benefit* for their new chip.
And now they're suddenly looking at backwards compatibility? Give it ten years *after* and they'll probably be able to *use* a non-backwards compatible chip.
Score one for AMD's clear thinking. No wonder they're breathing down Intel's neck.
You lose all levels and all characters are conformed to the baselines of the server you are logging in (XP, magic items and stats are configurable based on a progression level that the DM sets up.)
That's pretty much it.
NWN is going to be limited to "around" 64 players for DSL/Cable Modem type connection.
Then you are in luck, as NWN can be played as closely as you can get to Pen and Paper (PnP) as you can get currently from a computer game.
So get your group of friends together online, have one of them build a 'module' around a story and the player's character and let 'em Dungeon Master it. It'll only be as linear as you DM.
The true strength will be the toolset (unfortunately released only on Windows) and how easy it is to make loadable modules.
If I remember a quote by the programmer, he was aiming for something so easy that even his own grandmother could make a module.
And with the proliferation of people willing to make mods out there (skins, models, etc.) you've got a game that has some serious replay value.
The thing that people are mising is that the technology is in its infant stage.
They even *expect* it to not work perfectly. If you are building something totally brand new, you should expect a few bumps along the road.
I guess only cynical naysayers think that enough money should be spent to do it right first, no matter what.
The funny thing is, they probably learned just as much from the misses as the hits.