Some people are saying that games are meant to be unrealistic: jumping higher, unrealistic strength etc. This doesn't mean abandoning physics, it just means changing a few numbers. Lower the gravitational acceleration constant you're using and the player will jump higher while the jump will still look right. Most of the exagerations games use can be done in this way. One exception is being able to change direction while in mid air. In some games it works, in others it just looks really stupid.
There was a good article a while back in one of the mags (Scientific American?) i get about a team putting even more physics into games. If you shoot someone in the shoulder, they spin a bit etc. They were trying to make bullet hits look more real (as in reaction not gore). Anyone have a link?
Yeah, I have no idea what they were smoking when they thought that one up. On a real destop when you are finished with something you put it away. You don't drop it into the trash! This is one of their few really stupid UI decisions. Most of their other mistakes you could see where they were coming from, it just didn't work in reality. The trash thing seems inexplicable.
Oh well, at least they sort of fixed this in MacOSX. The trash icon turns into a giant eject symbol when you drag a disk. It's still really just covering up a mistake though. I prefer right click -> eject.
Holodecks are also supposed to use full motion, photo realistic holography. This sounds more like surround television. Impressive but not exactly Star Trek grade.
I think the main problem with this article is that the authors have forgotten what the desktop metaphor represents. It represents a desktop (surprise!). On a real desktop, if you run out of space you start filling stuff away into folders. You DON'T buy a second desk and constantly switch between them. You certainly don't end up with dozens of desks. I have over 150,000 files. How many desktops would I need?
Directories may not make sense to some. That's why Apple and others called them folders, as in a manila folder. You take a document off your desktop and file it away in a folder. Simple.
Remember, the original Macs used floppy disks. You frequently had more than one inserted. They looked the same on screen as they did on your other desktop. You put stuff you didn't want anymore in the trash can. Very simple for office workers to learn.
Getting back to the article, of course the desktop took up the whole screen. What do you want around it, the floor?! Walls?
How does one get rid of the disk icon? I have two main internal hard drives (20GB and 30GB). How else do I tell them apart? What if I insert a zip or a CD? How do I tell them apart? Or an external FireWire or USB drive? This doesn't sound very well thought out! You *could* integrate permanent drives into one structure using mount points but how is that easier for the new comer? "Oh your second disk is mounted so that it is part of your first disk". "What?"
Having said all this, I don't have a desktop. I use MacOSX. The only thing below the windows is a desktop picture. My hard drives are in the computer window. So, in a sense, Apple has partly phased out the desktop metaphor. It still has folders, but you can choose not to display a desktop. The new representation is a Computer with icons representing all your storage devices (similar to My Computer in Windows). This is closer to what the new, computer literate generation, mine, interprets it to be.
In short, we don't need a metaphor anymore. You only need a metaphor when explaining to new people. Using the office as an analogy made sense when computers were new. How is an office analogy going to help a young child learn about computers?
I'd like to see us go to a database-like idea with the ability to attach arbitrary attributes to files and replace folders with categories. A file could belong to more than one category. Related categories could have links between them. Instead of a tree you'd get more of a web. Don't know if it'd be any simpler though. For the time being the current idea works.
I'm curious what bad things you've heard. Out of the box almost everything is off: no webserver, no ftp, no ssh. Sure, it's only one click to turn these things on but isn't that better than RedHat's policy of almost everything on by default?
Out of the box, MacOSX isn't much easier to break into than MacOS9 (read: near impossible). Of course i'm not an 1337 hax0r but I'd say it's no less secure than most base linux installations and probably more secure.
And if you're someone who hates one-button mice, right click and select burn disc. Really, I'm so sick of people with no experience on MacOSX knocking it. Please if you don't know, don't post.
It's really good to see people thinking of new ways to boot a computer. I think the whole "Small bootloader in ROM finding and loading an OS from a hard drive" is getting a bit old. Personally, I'd like to see mobos with a decent size flash rom on them that you could put a full sized kernel + some more commonly used programs on. I'm talking about shells, server processes etc not the GIMP. You'd boot a fully running computer in seconds! After all, turning a laptop off when you're not using it is the best way to conserve battery life. A fast boot time makes this convenient.
I wonder if we'll even invent a RAM-like thing that doesn't loose it's state on power off. Sort of like magnetic core memory but at modern RAM speeds. Oh well, I can dream...
Compare that to the P-51 Mustang which went from the design boards to full production in 6 months time. Of course, the Mustang was obsolete in the USAF by the middle of the Korean War. Compare that to the F15 which first flew in 1970 and 30 years later remains a top line fighter.
This is very unfair to the good ol' Mustang. It was obsoleted after only a decade of service because that entire type of aircraft was obsoleted, not because of bad design. The P-51 was one of the last and best propeller powered fighters. They just couldn't compete with the new jets or be retrofitted with jets themselves. How many spitfires were still in service after the 40s? P-47s? Hurricanes?
In the time between when the F-15 was introduced and the present no fundamentally new aerospace technologies have been invented. If we find a form of propulsion that doesn't require burning jet fuel (electric?) and ends up having higher performance (more munitions) and costs less to run, how long do you think our current warplanes will last? I'd say about a decade, which is about how long the P-51 lasted after jets were introduced at the end of WWII. In fact, the P-51 was such a superb fighter in it's day that it out lasted most of the other prop fighters in service.
What about the ones small enough to be significantly deflected towards the magnet but just big enough not to be deflected all the way into the magnet+shield. For objects that size aren't you *attracting* them towards the station. If you were careful, and switched it off when you saw an object that size coming, it might work.
What kind of shell does this "console" for Darwin/BSD have? Does it come with bash? Does it come with many of the standard Unix tools like top, vi, etc... Does the directory structure look fairly close to Unix? Do the Mac user apps really go into/usr like we're used to?
The default shell is tcsh. It comes with zsh but it's not default. Bash is NOT installed but it can be downloaded easily or compiled from sources if you're paranoid.
top, vi etc are all there./usr/bin is where CLI programs go. MacOSX GUI programs go into/Applications. This is so that if you don't want to use a command line, you don't see any CLI apps (/usr is invisible to the GUI by default). A Terminal window sees all though.
There is no need for the quotes around "console". It is not some lame DOS ripoff that Apple put there for marketing purposes. Open a term window and you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from FreeBSD except for directories like/Applications being there.
And this toolkit on the extra CD... is that the Cocoa tools? Is it somewhat comparable to how Qt/GTK is worked with?
Yes it is the Dev tools (Cocoa, Carbon, C++ compilers, etc). Side note: When NeXT was selling this, the dev tools were several hundred dollars, $700 IIRC. Apple is GIVING them away. Of couse some here would ignore that and gripe that they're not open source *sigh*.
Is almost seems like OSX is "open" at the Darwin/BSD level, but the "closed/restricted" part is the GUI level above. You can work with the Cocoa tools to build apps, but unlike Qt/GTK, you can never have open access to much of what's going on in the UI layer. Does that seem about a fair description?
Sort of. The OS and unix CLI stuff is Darwin. It's open and can be downloaded separately for free for PPC and x86. It has no GUI but you can install XFree86 if you want. The rest of MacOSX is only for PPC and is a set of closed source libraries and applications.
Yes, you can't change the source. Apple is a NASDAQ company and must make money. They have to keep some things in-house. The Cocoa environment is EXTREMELY good though and by subclassing etc you can override a lot of defaults, not that it's usually necessary though. Apple did a good job the first time. If you want to see how some things are implemented, check out GNUStep, an open source implementation of Cocoa for Linux.
Good, object orientated frameworks mean that you don't have to see the source to have flexibility. Check out the Cocoa docs.
What's the point in dual booting NetBSD and MacOS on an iMac? Get MacOSX which has MacOS Classic, all that bsd stuff, x windows if you download it and a whole bunch of other stuff that isn't in the NetBSD+MacOS combo. Now, if it was a machine that didn't support MacOSX I'd understand.
That would make sense. One of the pictures in the article showing the greenhouse under the tower shows what looks like farm land.
Then again, it is an artist's impression and you know how accurate those are when a plan is still in its early stages.
This is a REALLY cool idea though. I hope we (I'm an Aussie) build it but we seem to have a nack for missing opportunities. Sad really.
Re:To celebrate the birthday of email:
on
Email Turns Thirty
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· Score: 1
I would have mentioned the ILOVEYOU and other macro viruses since, IIRC, Sircam and Nimda were their own SMTP clients (ie no Outlook). Also it's Admin backwards, or Nimda, not Nimbda.
The point they are trying to make is that having to see them first is a handicap. Modern air to air missiles (like the Aim-120 or the Aim-54) have huge ranges (> 100 nautical miles for the Aim-54). In the gulf war, because of American AWACS, a lot of Iraqi planes never saw what hit them, and that was before the AIM-120 entered service. It was all directed from afar. This beyond visual range fighting is why IFF (Identify Friend of Foe) was developed. Can these lasers travel 100 nautical miles through clouds? No, then they are essentially useless for air combat.
I like the idea of having more TLDs but they have to be specific..biz sucks because it is just a try-hard.com. No one is going to risk having only a.biz and not a.com so what's the point?
.museum OTOH is good, especially the index. These specific TLDs are a great way to keep out the rifraf, by that I mean porn sites etc. Someone was complaining that their favorite museum isn't included. I see this as a misuse of power. If it fits in the category of museum then it should be in there, even if it is under internet.museum or computers.museum (alternative.museum ?).
These specific TLDs are sort of like a web within a web. They should have a good index.tld to keep things consistent and they should use categories within them as well (science.museum) if useful. They are like an umbrella web site or like Google's directory.
I have no problems at all with them being CNAMEs to start off with but, as it becomes wider known, the old address should become the CNAME for a while then disappear. A site could belong to more than one specific TLD (one A and the rest CNAME) eg. smithsonian.museum and smithsonian.ref (reference).
A New Scientist article a while back talked about doing exactly that. They claimed that, very cheaply, someone could build lots of jammers using off the shelf components and a portable generator (car engine?). You basically pump a lot of energy into a homemade antenna and swap a huge range of frequencies. US anti-radiation missiles should be able to blow them up without too much difficulty but this could take a while. It would cost a lot to take out all of them, especially if you built hundreds.
The lack of GPS would severely hamper the US's ability to wage war. The US relies heavily on GPS guided tomahawk cruise missiles to take out air defenses as a first strike to clear the way for aircraft. Anti-radiation missiles are fired from F-16s etc so you'd have to send in planes with the high risk of loosing them to missiles and flak. I think the US would be able to do it but it'd be much harder than with GPS functioning. This is not even counting the difficulty in aircraft navigation without GPS.
First, why would we mine the moon when Near Earth Asteroids are cheaper to get to and have a much greater abundance of useful stuff (As opposed to rock)? Just one 2km iron asteroid is supposed to have more ore than we have ever mined in the history of civilization. Others are thought to be almost all ice (ice + electricity = rocket fuel).
Second, space mining isn't going to be able to compete with Earth-based mining for a long time. Guess what, it doesn't need to. We currently spend vast sums of money launching intrinsically cheap rocket fuel and metal into space when all we need is already up there. To get a gallon of gas soft-landed on the moon is costs ~$40,001, ~$1 for the gas and $40,000 to get it there. This is utterly ridiculous. If you could get that gallon (Ok, not gas but pretend it's liquid hydrogen) for $20,000 by asteroid mining, you are already way, way in the black.
All this Moon mining crap is just looking for an excuse to go back. I want to go back too, but this is just poor economics and makes space mining seem like a pipe dream when it's almost practical today.
While I agree that having entire windows transparent is pointless, translucency can have a use. In MacOSX, anything that is transient is slightly translucent: dragged icons, menus, sheets (dialog boxes attached to a window), etc.
Some other things that are otherwise featureless are translucent. This is for eye candy value. Example: the background of the dock is translucent. But for things that you have to be able to read or complex toolbars, translucency is a pain. It looks cool but is impossible to use unless the transparency is very, very low. Example: my terminal window is black and set at 90% opaque. Still readable.
Here is someone elses screenshot (sorry, I couldn't find a bigger one). Note that in the Terminal the translucency is done well. Only the background is translucent, the actual letters, scroll bars, title bar, etc are opaque.
Basically, I'm not impressed with this glass2k thing. It doesn't really compare to the fine grained control native to MacOSX.
Note: I'm not trying to be a Mac zealot, I use Windows too. But in this case I think the Mac does transparency better and uses it well to improve the interface.
Compared to the exceedingly thin but still significant outer atmosphere they're flying in (well, the lower one anyway)? These would not be strong lasers by any stretch of the word. Hell, sunlight would be pushing on them much harder.
I'd say undetectable. I could be wrong though. We seem to have a nack for measuring (or calculating) very small quantities. I'd like to hear an answer from someone who can work out a number though.
Common misconception. There isn't one velocity called orbital velocity that you have to reach to orbit. The velocity needed for a particular orbit is dependent on it's height: the lower you are the higher the speed. Also if the two satellites are traveling in opposite directions then it's more like 14km/s. The only time the relative velocity will be 0 is if they are both in exactly the same orbit.
31,000 km is not geo-stationary, 35,785 km is. I made the same mistake at first because they are so close. Also, it didn't say that the orbit was above the equator, which is crucial. You are still correct that the period would be very close to 24 hours as it is about the same size and velocity as a geo-stationary orbit.
So, yes i'm nit picking.
Now the question is: Why isn't it in Geo-stationary orbit? Am I missing something?
Such sick evilmen might attack commucinations satellites and bring down the whole internet in no time.
I know this is a joke but it raises a point made in a New Scientist article this year called "The Heavens At War" (Sorry, no link). You don't need much of a rocket to take down a satellite. All you need is the ability to deposit lots of hard objects in the satellites path. Ball bearings would do. The satellite flys into them with the combined speed of both (if they are going opposite directions). This puts puts the impact at about 14km/s. Ouch!
According to the article, dozens of countries are capable of firing this 21st century flak.
Yucatan not India
on
Mapping Gravity
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· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC the asteroid theory only gained popularity when they found that huge son of a bitch hole in the Yucatan peninsula and managed to date it to 65 million years ago, which matched the time of the Cretaceous extinctions.
It's huge. It's only hidden because it's under water. Check here for pictures of said hole in the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a good article a while back in one of the mags (Scientific American?) i get about a team putting even more physics into games. If you shoot someone in the shoulder, they spin a bit etc. They were trying to make bullet hits look more real (as in reaction not gore). Anyone have a link?
Oh well, at least they sort of fixed this in MacOSX. The trash icon turns into a giant eject symbol when you drag a disk. It's still really just covering up a mistake though. I prefer right click -> eject.
Holodecks are also supposed to use full motion, photo realistic holography. This sounds more like surround television. Impressive but not exactly Star Trek grade.
Directories may not make sense to some. That's why Apple and others called them folders, as in a manila folder. You take a document off your desktop and file it away in a folder. Simple.
Remember, the original Macs used floppy disks. You frequently had more than one inserted. They looked the same on screen as they did on your other desktop. You put stuff you didn't want anymore in the trash can. Very simple for office workers to learn.
Getting back to the article, of course the desktop took up the whole screen. What do you want around it, the floor?! Walls?
How does one get rid of the disk icon? I have two main internal hard drives (20GB and 30GB). How else do I tell them apart? What if I insert a zip or a CD? How do I tell them apart? Or an external FireWire or USB drive? This doesn't sound very well thought out! You *could* integrate permanent drives into one structure using mount points but how is that easier for the new comer? "Oh your second disk is mounted so that it is part of your first disk". "What?"
Having said all this, I don't have a desktop. I use MacOSX. The only thing below the windows is a desktop picture. My hard drives are in the computer window. So, in a sense, Apple has partly phased out the desktop metaphor. It still has folders, but you can choose not to display a desktop. The new representation is a Computer with icons representing all your storage devices (similar to My Computer in Windows). This is closer to what the new, computer literate generation, mine, interprets it to be.
In short, we don't need a metaphor anymore. You only need a metaphor when explaining to new people. Using the office as an analogy made sense when computers were new. How is an office analogy going to help a young child learn about computers?
I'd like to see us go to a database-like idea with the ability to attach arbitrary attributes to files and replace folders with categories. A file could belong to more than one category. Related categories could have links between them. Instead of a tree you'd get more of a web. Don't know if it'd be any simpler though. For the time being the current idea works.
Out of the box, MacOSX isn't much easier to break into than MacOS9 (read: near impossible). Of course i'm not an 1337 hax0r but I'd say it's no less secure than most base linux installations and probably more secure.
And if you're someone who hates one-button mice, right click and select burn disc. Really, I'm so sick of people with no experience on MacOSX knocking it. Please if you don't know, don't post.
I wonder if we'll even invent a RAM-like thing that doesn't loose it's state on power off. Sort of like magnetic core memory but at modern RAM speeds. Oh well, I can dream...
In the time between when the F-15 was introduced and the present no fundamentally new aerospace technologies have been invented. If we find a form of propulsion that doesn't require burning jet fuel (electric?) and ends up having higher performance (more munitions) and costs less to run, how long do you think our current warplanes will last? I'd say about a decade, which is about how long the P-51 lasted after jets were introduced at the end of WWII. In fact, the P-51 was such a superb fighter in it's day that it out lasted most of the other prop fighters in service.
What about the ones small enough to be significantly deflected towards the magnet but just big enough not to be deflected all the way into the magnet+shield. For objects that size aren't you *attracting* them towards the station. If you were careful, and switched it off when you saw an object that size coming, it might work.
I'd like to see someone try positioning their computers by uptime! "Noooo, don't plug the vacuum in there... ah crap."
top, vi etc are all there. /usr/bin is where CLI programs go. MacOSX GUI programs go into /Applications. This is so that if you don't want to use a command line, you don't see any CLI apps (/usr is invisible to the GUI by default). A Terminal window sees all though.
There is no need for the quotes around "console". It is not some lame DOS ripoff that Apple put there for marketing purposes. Open a term window and you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from FreeBSD except for directories like /Applications being there.
Yes it is the Dev tools (Cocoa, Carbon, C++ compilers, etc). Side note: When NeXT was selling this, the dev tools were several hundred dollars, $700 IIRC. Apple is GIVING them away. Of couse some here would ignore that and gripe that they're not open source *sigh*. Sort of. The OS and unix CLI stuff is Darwin. It's open and can be downloaded separately for free for PPC and x86. It has no GUI but you can install XFree86 if you want. The rest of MacOSX is only for PPC and is a set of closed source libraries and applications.Yes, you can't change the source. Apple is a NASDAQ company and must make money. They have to keep some things in-house. The Cocoa environment is EXTREMELY good though and by subclassing etc you can override a lot of defaults, not that it's usually necessary though. Apple did a good job the first time. If you want to see how some things are implemented, check out GNUStep, an open source implementation of Cocoa for Linux.
Good, object orientated frameworks mean that you don't have to see the source to have flexibility. Check out the Cocoa docs.
It IS cool that it's possible though.
Then again, it is an artist's impression and you know how accurate those are when a plan is still in its early stages.
This is a REALLY cool idea though. I hope we (I'm an Aussie) build it but we seem to have a nack for missing opportunities. Sad really.
Oh yeah, funny post though.
It's also has more than just a web interface. See the DICT RFC. There are clients available etc.
See:
AIM-54 Phoenix Missile
AIM-120 AMRAAM
.museum OTOH is good, especially the index. These specific TLDs are a great way to keep out the rifraf, by that I mean porn sites etc. Someone was complaining that their favorite museum isn't included. I see this as a misuse of power. If it fits in the category of museum then it should be in there, even if it is under internet.museum or computers.museum (alternative.museum ?).
These specific TLDs are sort of like a web within a web. They should have a good index.tld to keep things consistent and they should use categories within them as well (science.museum) if useful. They are like an umbrella web site or like Google's directory.
I have no problems at all with them being CNAMEs to start off with but, as it becomes wider known, the old address should become the CNAME for a while then disappear. A site could belong to more than one specific TLD (one A and the rest CNAME) eg. smithsonian.museum and smithsonian.ref (reference).
These could make the web much easier to traverse.
Summary: museum = good, biz = bad
The lack of GPS would severely hamper the US's ability to wage war. The US relies heavily on GPS guided tomahawk cruise missiles to take out air defenses as a first strike to clear the way for aircraft. Anti-radiation missiles are fired from F-16s etc so you'd have to send in planes with the high risk of loosing them to missiles and flak. I think the US would be able to do it but it'd be much harder than with GPS functioning. This is not even counting the difficulty in aircraft navigation without GPS.
First, why would we mine the moon when Near Earth Asteroids are cheaper to get to and have a much greater abundance of useful stuff (As opposed to rock)? Just one 2km iron asteroid is supposed to have more ore than we have ever mined in the history of civilization. Others are thought to be almost all ice (ice + electricity = rocket fuel).
Second, space mining isn't going to be able to compete with Earth-based mining for a long time. Guess what, it doesn't need to. We currently spend vast sums of money launching intrinsically cheap rocket fuel and metal into space when all we need is already up there. To get a gallon of gas soft-landed on the moon is costs ~$40,001, ~$1 for the gas and $40,000 to get it there. This is utterly ridiculous. If you could get that gallon (Ok, not gas but pretend it's liquid hydrogen) for $20,000 by asteroid mining, you are already way, way in the black.
All this Moon mining crap is just looking for an excuse to go back. I want to go back too, but this is just poor economics and makes space mining seem like a pipe dream when it's almost practical today.
See Making Money in Space or just Google it for more.
Some other things that are otherwise featureless are translucent. This is for eye candy value. Example: the background of the dock is translucent. But for things that you have to be able to read or complex toolbars, translucency is a pain. It looks cool but is impossible to use unless the transparency is very, very low. Example: my terminal window is black and set at 90% opaque. Still readable.
Here is someone elses screenshot (sorry, I couldn't find a bigger one). Note that in the Terminal the translucency is done well. Only the background is translucent, the actual letters, scroll bars, title bar, etc are opaque.
Basically, I'm not impressed with this glass2k thing. It doesn't really compare to the fine grained control native to MacOSX.
Note: I'm not trying to be a Mac zealot, I use Windows too. But in this case I think the Mac does transparency better and uses it well to improve the interface.
I'd say undetectable. I could be wrong though. We seem to have a nack for measuring (or calculating) very small quantities. I'd like to hear an answer from someone who can work out a number though.
Common misconception. There isn't one velocity called orbital velocity that you have to reach to orbit. The velocity needed for a particular orbit is dependent on it's height: the lower you are the higher the speed. Also if the two satellites are traveling in opposite directions then it's more like 14km/s. The only time the relative velocity will be 0 is if they are both in exactly the same orbit.
So, yes i'm nit picking.
Now the question is: Why isn't it in Geo-stationary orbit? Am I missing something?
According to the article, dozens of countries are capable of firing this 21st century flak.
More can be found at the authors site.
It's huge. It's only hidden because it's under water. Check here for pictures of said hole in the ground.