" The Blended Wing is a cross between a traditional swept-wing design and the flying wing concept."
Don't forget that several companies were competing to make a plane that was basically one big wing. That was considered the 'holy grail' of aviation. I saw a couple of old old films of failed attempts at designs that looked a little like a boomerang.
The confusion of who invented what doesn't surprise me. I'm confused about it myself because of all the different models that were tried. Heh.
I withdraw my question. *hides* I'm so used to Yahoo not having pics. Heh.
Hmm.. I'm looking at the plane now. I see the design problem with adding windows. I was hoping I could offer a suggestion, but it is a huge challenge.
I bet what they do is make a 'lounge area' where people can get up and look out the window. I don't see right away how else they can, non-electronically, give people a view outside.
I'm reaaaaaaaally curious to see an artist's rendering (photo'd be better...) of this plane. Anybody know where I can find one?
Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
·
· Score: 2
"I think you and others don't understand OpenGL 2.0 like the person you replied to. OpenGL 2.0 makes almost everything programable meaninging that there are much closer to infinite possibilites of how the program can use OpenGL."
Interesting...
Question: How do they deal with all these possibilites? Do they compile a little dll with each game that gets called? *Confused*
Is there a layman's reference I can read about how OpenGL 2.0 works? I think you're right, I'm a little confused now.
I'm wondering if they drove around with a laptop and an 802.11 card and found him that way.
There's a hint of that in the original Slashdot posting. Unfortunately, the guy himself doesn't offer much in terms of details. If that's all they did, then I'm not sure I'm going to jump on the 'Cable is evil!!!' bandwagon right away. It's rude that he got that letter, but it seems like if he were to set up a basic encryption key (which is rather trivial) then they'd never have known about it.
Part of me wonders if there are two stories being balled up into one. I think MS's involvement in this is so that MSN can be used as an ISP. So they're trying to say 'cable companies are being bad!'. I don't want the cable companies behaving like that, but I'm leary of MS backing that. Heh.
"Microsoft is behind the fight for broadband freedom?"
My assumption is that they're fighting to make sure everybody and their mother runs MSN's net service. My gf's mother bought a computer with XP on it. I'm a little light on details, but the computer was trying to VPN to MSN via AT&T's cable modem. There were problems with that so they asked me to remove it, which I was happy to do.
I'm pretty sure the nature of MS's complaint is that they can't expand into cable as an ISP.
I'm just curious how they detected his wireless usage. It seems like he could install a router with NAT between the cable modem and the wireless node, then call up and say "problem solved."
Here's another question: Was he using encryption? If he's not, I can understand the company's point of view. (Note: I said understand, I didn't say I agree with it.) If he were to say 'its encrypted...', that should solve it.
Hmmm sounds like a call to pre-emptively sue the cable/dsl companies for express permission to use wireless. When I signed on with @Home (and then ATT Broadband), they were advertising how to use multiple computers on the same connection. I even found a howto on how to do it. Here's the address: http://www.computers4sure.com/linksys/store/att_wi reless.asp
Note: AT&T's site linked me to this. When you go to this site before going to AT&T's site, you see the AT&T logo on the screen. Strange, eh? hehe.
Re:And why would this be a good thing?
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
"Are you quoting yourself in your.sig?"
No, I was quoting NanoG.
If my karma points were lost due to any of my sigs, I'm reasonably certain that I wouldn't have blamed my having a GF for it.:D
Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"This won't force companies to write good OpenGL 2.0 drivers, it will only force them to write drivers that impement those functions that DOOM 3 uses, the other functions may not even be implemented properly or implemeted at all."
I think you're being a little cynical, though there is some truth to what you're saying. I've heard of drivers being tweaked especially for Quake 3. Pretty nasty, eh?
The good news, though, is that the 3D Rendering market uses gaming cards. This is a case where if the card doesn't perform, actual money can be lost, and I'm reasonably sure most card manufacturers would rather avoid those potential problems.
If that's not enough, Nvidia has a form of 'global driver' that works on any of their chipsets. I have a feeling this idea may catch on. I personally trust NVidia and keep an eye on what they're up to. I'm a little hesitant with other cards like Radeon.
I do have a piece of advice for new card shoppers though: Best Buy has a pretty good return policy. You get 30 days price match and satisfaction guaranteed. CompUSA, though, is 14 days and I think they charge a restocking fee for returns. If you go shopping for a card, look for stores that have a policy similar to Best Buy. The reason I mention BB in particular is that you can order from the web and return at the store.
It's not just games. Lightwave is cross platform (Mac -- PC, no Linux yet) and it relies HEAVILY on OpenGL. Nearly all 3D rendering progs use OpenGL for the interface.
Personally, I'm all for anything that gets OpenGL development pushed. The more supported extensions, the more feedback I get from LW w/o having to render.
That's a neat idea! I could go to Game Traders and get a SNES controller for pretty cheap. Before I do that, is anybody aware of a SNES - Paralell adapter?
"This is not funny. You (and those moderators) are just ignorant.
Actually the joke was about the ignorance that most people have about chinese keyboards. Very few non-asians have any idea what they're like. That's why my comment was funny. Chinese using 10,000 key keyboard isn't the joke, the joke is people not knowing any better.
The clue that I was being sarcastic was here: "the 10,000 button Chinese keyboard won't ship until next year.
It's kind of like in the South Park Movie when the Americans were laughing at the Canadians about saying 'aboot' instead of about. That scene really wasn't making fun of the Canadians, but the American's silly reaction to a different pronounciation of a word. It was rather amusing watching a Canadian friend of mine get all upset about it because he didn't pay attention to what was really happening. He thought South Park was anti-Canadian.
You kind of remind me of that guy. Pity, my sarcastic comment was expressing your view about people's ignorance of asian culture. I kinda thought you of all people would find it funny.
I know this doesn't directly answer your request, but have you considered using an emulator?
The bright side of using an emulator to play the 2600 games is you may find games you never knew existed!
I got into SNES emulating a couple of years ago, and I thought it was cool that I could play around with the Japanese versions of games. Very fascinating stuff. You may find something out about your Atari that you didn't know about.:)
"...This would be used in small, enclosed places where people are already expected to be quiet -- "
Yeah, you're right. I just had a vision like this:
First they start blocking it in theaters. People like it.
Then they do it in sections of a library. People like it.
Then suggestions like "Why not just use electronic cell phone jammers?" suddenly start getting serious support.
Then people find they cannot use their cell phones in a good chunk of a city.
Likely? Probably not. In the same vein, though, people don't like when the Gov't installs things like video cameras in public for fear of what might happen, rather than what is happening now. I kinda thought people'd understand my point of view. (agreeing is a different story)
Oh well.
I do appreciate your tactful response. Most of the people in this thread were directly attacking me.
"I may be quibbling now, but I dont' think Caller ID would be enough to let you identify urgent calls, which was why I assumed you'd want to anser every call. "
Good question. Here's what I do at a theater now: My cell phone is set to silent. When a movie has a boring part (every movie has a boring part) I sometimes take out my phone, turn it towards the movie screen (for light, I don't use the backlight), and look for a voicemail icon. Before I check the voice mail, I look at the caller ID. If it's from my dad, for example, then it's probably bad news because we chat once a week at a certain time on Sundays. (to my disgruntlement, usually during the Simpsons...)
If it's a number I don't know about, then I wait for the voice mail indicator to come on, then I hit 1 to check it. Let me be clear about something here: My phone's not making *any* sound, and I turned off the backlight. I normally sit in the back and this behaviour has never caused anybody to glance at me. If the voice mail is urgent, I step out of the theater and return the call. Let me be really clear, if I got so much as a glance about it, I'd just leave the phone off and be done about it. However, I'm 100% convinced that I'm not bothering anybody so I don't want to be punished because some other jackass isn't as considerate.
My phone does not ring very often. I think I get a call every couple of days at most. I guess I'm in the minority there. I go to a lot of movies, I've seen a couple of people do stupid stuff with cell phones, but I honestly cannot remember any cell phone related even that made me want to 'break somebodys nose'. (...as somebody threatened to do to me earlier in this thread.) Heck, I can't remember a single cell phone event in the last 5 movies I went to. My biggest complaint about movies, by far, is crying children/babies. Hopefully now you can understand why I don't think the right solution is to block the signals all together. I think it sets a bad precedant. And the people here have cornered me into making ridiculous extremes (that I'm embarrased about) in order to try to get them to see that this particular way of stopping this problem is over-reaching and unncecessary. Some of them think that violence is the answer. Go fig.
Heh there was a dork in my algebra class that spent waaaaaaaay too much time playing with his TI-85. He was actually popular for a day when he found a way to view porn on it. People actually started talking to him for about a week, but his lack of personality killed that phase. Heh.
Still, he did manage to drastically improve the popularity of those calcs.
"...but the expressions on people's faces at LAN parties will be OH so worth it."
I have a dual monitor setup at home, and I play Quake a lot with it, but I haven't been able to make much use of the second screen in that game. (I do like being able to see what time it is, though.. heh.)
Does anybody know of any 'dual-head' mods for either Quake or any other FPS game that uses the second screen for anything? I'd *LOVE* if the left screen was the front view and the right screen was the rear view!! Or maybe stats? I dunno...
Just curious if anybody using dual-head has done anything interesting with it in relation to lan-party style games.
"I love how people expand from "I won't enjoy it" to "no one will enjoy it"."
Yeah, that attitude is common. I think when some people comment, they automatically go into 'cynicism mode' and ask "why would I want this?" Then the append it with "I could do the same thing if I build this, pay for that, or learn to live without it." I think people have equated cynicism with getting modded up. Heh.
One thing to think about with gaming, though, is that the interface is every bit as important as the fun factor of the game. I love playing Donkey Kong Country, but playing it emulated presents a problem because I do not have a controller. One of these days I may break down and buy one, but that isn't high on my list at the moment.
I think Solitaire on the PocketPC is extremely addictive, but man it'd suck playing it on my cell phone, even with a rocker switch. My old cell phone lent itself pretty well to playing snake. I found that out when I got to a theater 20 minutes early, but didn't want to give up my good seat. (the movie was highly anticipated...) I never thought of my cell phone as a game machine before, but I did enjoy having something to do besides watch the slideshow trivia.:)
Unfortunately... the 10,000 button Chinese keyboard won't ship until next year. They're still developing a way to make a stylus on the molecular level.
"The difference is that Linux is open about their problems - and they make an effort to keep the public informed. If a critical problem is found, the code is changed (almost immediately). Microsoft hides their bugs. So for them to come out and announce bugs (and patches) before the bugs become newsworthy issues is a step in the right direction. "
I see the problem a little differently. A lot of the vulnerabilities that have been mentioned in Windows are really features that MS implemented that people have found a way to exploit. The Melissa virus comes to mind.
So what'll happen is MS will add new features, and then somebody'll find a way to be a nuisance with them. Unfortunately, what'll happen is that the resolution to the problem isn't so clear. "Do we take out the feature, or do we put a rule in it and wait for somebody to find a loophole?"
Anybody used Office XP? (heh yah right, sorry) One of my coworkers is using Outlook XP. One of his coworkers tried to send him an.EXE (no, not one of those web games, it was a test build of some code he was writing) but Outlook refused to admit that it had it. What happened was Outlook XP had disabled the ability to recieve.EXE files. I don't mind this by default, but there wasn't a menu option to re-enable it. Result? A Google search and a clumsy registry hack.
I can't help but think that MS just got tired of people being hit with it and just removed it all together.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing with you, just presenting another angle to the story. It's a big tangled mess. Windows has bugs, vulnerabilities, and features that can be used against you. I hope the Linux community is paying attention to this. I have a feeling they could develop a solution that allows the interesting features without allowing kiddie scripters to exploit them.
Slashdot Mirror
" The Blended Wing is a cross between a traditional swept-wing design and the flying wing concept."
Don't forget that several companies were competing to make a plane that was basically one big wing. That was considered the 'holy grail' of aviation. I saw a couple of old old films of failed attempts at designs that looked a little like a boomerang.
The confusion of who invented what doesn't surprise me. I'm confused about it myself because of all the different models that were tried. Heh.
"Teach this +2 poster his place, mod his two posts down to hell. "
Or, you could just realize that I made a simple mistake and continue on.
The reason I was asking was that I wanted to see if I could come up with an interesting solution to the windows problem.
As for +2 posting: At least I'm not hiding behind AC so I don't lose my karma. +2 is a default setting. I didn't change it.
Sorry, I didn't see the other two links.
I withdraw my question. *hides* I'm so used to Yahoo not having pics. Heh.
Hmm.. I'm looking at the plane now. I see the design problem with adding windows. I was hoping I could offer a suggestion, but it is a huge challenge.
I bet what they do is make a 'lounge area' where people can get up and look out the window. I don't see right away how else they can, non-electronically, give people a view outside.
I'm reaaaaaaaally curious to see an artist's rendering (photo'd be better...) of this plane. Anybody know where I can find one?
"I think you and others don't understand OpenGL 2.0 like the person you replied to. OpenGL 2.0 makes almost everything programable meaninging that there are much closer to infinite possibilites of how the program can use OpenGL."
Interesting...
Question: How do they deal with all these possibilites? Do they compile a little dll with each game that gets called? *Confused*
Is there a layman's reference I can read about how OpenGL 2.0 works? I think you're right, I'm a little confused now.
I'm wondering if they drove around with a laptop and an 802.11 card and found him that way.
There's a hint of that in the original Slashdot posting. Unfortunately, the guy himself doesn't offer much in terms of details. If that's all they did, then I'm not sure I'm going to jump on the 'Cable is evil!!!' bandwagon right away. It's rude that he got that letter, but it seems like if he were to set up a basic encryption key (which is rather trivial) then they'd never have known about it.
Part of me wonders if there are two stories being balled up into one. I think MS's involvement in this is so that MSN can be used as an ISP. So they're trying to say 'cable companies are being bad!'. I don't want the cable companies behaving like that, but I'm leary of MS backing that. Heh.
I dunno. What do you guys think?
"Microsoft is behind the fight for broadband freedom?"
My assumption is that they're fighting to make sure everybody and their mother runs MSN's net service. My gf's mother bought a computer with XP on it. I'm a little light on details, but the computer was trying to VPN to MSN via AT&T's cable modem. There were problems with that so they asked me to remove it, which I was happy to do.
I'm pretty sure the nature of MS's complaint is that they can't expand into cable as an ISP.
I'm just curious how they detected his wireless usage. It seems like he could install a router with NAT between the cable modem and the wireless node, then call up and say "problem solved."
i reless.asp
Here's another question: Was he using encryption? If he's not, I can understand the company's point of view. (Note: I said understand, I didn't say I agree with it.) If he were to say 'its encrypted...', that should solve it.
Hmmm sounds like a call to pre-emptively sue the cable/dsl companies for express permission to use wireless. When I signed on with @Home (and then ATT Broadband), they were advertising how to use multiple computers on the same connection. I even found a howto on how to do it. Here's the address: http://www.computers4sure.com/linksys/store/att_w
Note: AT&T's site linked me to this. When you go to this site before going to AT&T's site, you see the AT&T logo on the screen. Strange, eh? hehe.
"Are you quoting yourself in your .sig?"
:D
No, I was quoting NanoG.
If my karma points were lost due to any of my sigs, I'm reasonably certain that I wouldn't have blamed my having a GF for it.
"This won't force companies to write good OpenGL 2.0 drivers, it will only force them to write drivers that impement those functions that DOOM 3 uses, the other functions may not even be implemented properly or implemeted at all."
I think you're being a little cynical, though there is some truth to what you're saying. I've heard of drivers being tweaked especially for Quake 3. Pretty nasty, eh?
The good news, though, is that the 3D Rendering market uses gaming cards. This is a case where if the card doesn't perform, actual money can be lost, and I'm reasonably sure most card manufacturers would rather avoid those potential problems.
If that's not enough, Nvidia has a form of 'global driver' that works on any of their chipsets. I have a feeling this idea may catch on. I personally trust NVidia and keep an eye on what they're up to. I'm a little hesitant with other cards like Radeon.
I do have a piece of advice for new card shoppers though: Best Buy has a pretty good return policy. You get 30 days price match and satisfaction guaranteed. CompUSA, though, is 14 days and I think they charge a restocking fee for returns. If you go shopping for a card, look for stores that have a policy similar to Best Buy. The reason I mention BB in particular is that you can order from the web and return at the store.
Cheers.
It's not just games. Lightwave is cross platform (Mac -- PC, no Linux yet) and it relies HEAVILY on OpenGL. Nearly all 3D rendering progs use OpenGL for the interface.
Personally, I'm all for anything that gets OpenGL development pushed. The more supported extensions, the more feedback I get from LW w/o having to render.
I just wanted to thank everybody who posted. I got lotsa info to look through. It's appreciated! :)
That's a neat idea! I could go to Game Traders and get a SNES controller for pretty cheap. Before I do that, is anybody aware of a SNES - Paralell adapter?
Thanks for the sugg!
"This is not funny. You (and those moderators) are just ignorant.
Actually the joke was about the ignorance that most people have about chinese keyboards. Very few non-asians have any idea what they're like. That's why my comment was funny. Chinese using 10,000 key keyboard isn't the joke, the joke is people not knowing any better.
The clue that I was being sarcastic was here: "the 10,000 button Chinese keyboard won't ship until next year.
It's kind of like in the South Park Movie when the Americans were laughing at the Canadians about saying 'aboot' instead of about. That scene really wasn't making fun of the Canadians, but the American's silly reaction to a different pronounciation of a word. It was rather amusing watching a Canadian friend of mine get all upset about it because he didn't pay attention to what was really happening. He thought South Park was anti-Canadian.
You kind of remind me of that guy. Pity, my sarcastic comment was expressing your view about people's ignorance of asian culture. I kinda thought you of all people would find it funny.
"What part did they have in the production of the game? "
:D
They provided their logo!
I know this doesn't directly answer your request, but have you considered using an emulator?
:)
The bright side of using an emulator to play the 2600 games is you may find games you never knew existed!
I got into SNES emulating a couple of years ago, and I thought it was cool that I could play around with the Japanese versions of games. Very fascinating stuff. You may find something out about your Atari that you didn't know about.
"...This would be used in small, enclosed places where people are already expected to be quiet -- "
Yeah, you're right. I just had a vision like this:
First they start blocking it in theaters. People like it.
Then they do it in sections of a library. People like it.
Then suggestions like "Why not just use electronic cell phone jammers?" suddenly start getting serious support.
Then people find they cannot use their cell phones in a good chunk of a city.
Likely? Probably not. In the same vein, though, people don't like when the Gov't installs things like video cameras in public for fear of what might happen, rather than what is happening now. I kinda thought people'd understand my point of view. (agreeing is a different story)
Oh well.
I do appreciate your tactful response. Most of the people in this thread were directly attacking me.
"I may be quibbling now, but I dont' think Caller ID would be enough to let you identify urgent calls, which was why I assumed you'd want to anser every call. "
Good question. Here's what I do at a theater now: My cell phone is set to silent. When a movie has a boring part (every movie has a boring part) I sometimes take out my phone, turn it towards the movie screen (for light, I don't use the backlight), and look for a voicemail icon. Before I check the voice mail, I look at the caller ID. If it's from my dad, for example, then it's probably bad news because we chat once a week at a certain time on Sundays. (to my disgruntlement, usually during the Simpsons...)
If it's a number I don't know about, then I wait for the voice mail indicator to come on, then I hit 1 to check it. Let me be clear about something here: My phone's not making *any* sound, and I turned off the backlight. I normally sit in the back and this behaviour has never caused anybody to glance at me. If the voice mail is urgent, I step out of the theater and return the call. Let me be really clear, if I got so much as a glance about it, I'd just leave the phone off and be done about it. However, I'm 100% convinced that I'm not bothering anybody so I don't want to be punished because some other jackass isn't as considerate.
My phone does not ring very often. I think I get a call every couple of days at most. I guess I'm in the minority there. I go to a lot of movies, I've seen a couple of people do stupid stuff with cell phones, but I honestly cannot remember any cell phone related even that made me want to 'break somebodys nose'. (...as somebody threatened to do to me earlier in this thread.) Heck, I can't remember a single cell phone event in the last 5 movies I went to. My biggest complaint about movies, by far, is crying children/babies. Hopefully now you can understand why I don't think the right solution is to block the signals all together. I think it sets a bad precedant. And the people here have cornered me into making ridiculous extremes (that I'm embarrased about) in order to try to get them to see that this particular way of stopping this problem is over-reaching and unncecessary. Some of them think that violence is the answer. Go fig.
Heh there was a dork in my algebra class that spent waaaaaaaay too much time playing with his TI-85. He was actually popular for a day when he found a way to view porn on it. People actually started talking to him for about a week, but his lack of personality killed that phase. Heh.
Still, he did manage to drastically improve the popularity of those calcs.
"...but the expressions on people's faces at LAN parties will be OH so worth it."
I have a dual monitor setup at home, and I play Quake a lot with it, but I haven't been able to make much use of the second screen in that game. (I do like being able to see what time it is, though.. heh.)
Does anybody know of any 'dual-head' mods for either Quake or any other FPS game that uses the second screen for anything? I'd *LOVE* if the left screen was the front view and the right screen was the rear view!! Or maybe stats? I dunno...
Just curious if anybody using dual-head has done anything interesting with it in relation to lan-party style games.
"I love how people expand from "I won't enjoy it" to "no one will enjoy it"."
:)
Yeah, that attitude is common. I think when some people comment, they automatically go into 'cynicism mode' and ask "why would I want this?" Then the append it with "I could do the same thing if I build this, pay for that, or learn to live without it." I think people have equated cynicism with getting modded up. Heh.
One thing to think about with gaming, though, is that the interface is every bit as important as the fun factor of the game. I love playing Donkey Kong Country, but playing it emulated presents a problem because I do not have a controller. One of these days I may break down and buy one, but that isn't high on my list at the moment.
I think Solitaire on the PocketPC is extremely addictive, but man it'd suck playing it on my cell phone, even with a rocker switch. My old cell phone lent itself pretty well to playing snake. I found that out when I got to a theater 20 minutes early, but didn't want to give up my good seat. (the movie was highly anticipated...) I never thought of my cell phone as a game machine before, but I did enjoy having something to do besides watch the slideshow trivia.
Unfortunately... the 10,000 button Chinese keyboard won't ship until next year. They're still developing a way to make a stylus on the molecular level.
"The difference is that Linux is open about their problems - and they make an effort to keep the public informed. If a critical problem is found, the code is changed (almost immediately).
.EXE (no, not one of those web games, it was a test build of some code he was writing) but Outlook refused to admit that it had it. What happened was Outlook XP had disabled the ability to recieve .EXE files. I don't mind this by default, but there wasn't a menu option to re-enable it. Result? A Google search and a clumsy registry hack.
Microsoft hides their bugs. So for them to come out and announce bugs (and patches) before the bugs become newsworthy issues is a step in the right direction. "
I see the problem a little differently. A lot of the vulnerabilities that have been mentioned in Windows are really features that MS implemented that people have found a way to exploit. The Melissa virus comes to mind.
So what'll happen is MS will add new features, and then somebody'll find a way to be a nuisance with them. Unfortunately, what'll happen is that the resolution to the problem isn't so clear. "Do we take out the feature, or do we put a rule in it and wait for somebody to find a loophole?"
Anybody used Office XP? (heh yah right, sorry) One of my coworkers is using Outlook XP. One of his coworkers tried to send him an
I can't help but think that MS just got tired of people being hit with it and just removed it all together.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing with you, just presenting another angle to the story. It's a big tangled mess. Windows has bugs, vulnerabilities, and features that can be used against you. I hope the Linux community is paying attention to this. I have a feeling they could develop a solution that allows the interesting features without allowing kiddie scripters to exploit them.
"If a Linux computer falls in a valley, does Slashdot make a sound?"
:)
Heh.
Heh. Actually my thinking was that she could call for help after the rape. I'm not sure why people thought I meant she'd dial 911 during it. O_o