"Is 3DS MAX really more powerful than Google Sketch?" - We gave 10 randomly selected people half an hour to learn to use them, and then compared the results.
And, coming soon...
"Is DVCPRO HD actually better than VHS (after you resize it to 64x48 pixels)?"
"Is a dual-socket, quad-core workstation actually faster than a ZX Spectrum (when playing Space Invaders)?"
> Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W > of your power supplies in each system > is dissipated as heat.
A lot? Well, unless you count the noise and air movement (which are eventually also turned into heat, though not in the actual box), it's pretty much all of it, no? It's not like it's being stored in some sort of chemical compound or potential energy "reservoir".
You didn't exactly play "against" the AI, and it wasn't impressive in terms of decision-making, but the variety of actions coupled with clever "schedules", the huge dialog trees and the interconnected stories created a pretty good illusion of a living world, with believable characters. Considering this was the DOS era, when games came in floppies and CPU speed was measured in MHz, it was pretty impressive stuff.
And 15 years later we have Oblivion, where the "characters" move around aimlessly and all say exactly the same irrelevant lines. Something went terribly, terribly wrong along the way...
Remember Ultima 7? You started off as a hero, with several companions, and the game was about exploring the world and discovering the story by interacting with characters, not about "powering up". Sure, you could find better items (several of them unique, which is a lot more interesting than going from a "+5 sword" to a "+6 sword"), but most of the progress came from discovering new areas, talking to characters, carving your place in the game world (in other words, role-playing), etc., not "powering up".
It's been downhill ever since (ok, the Underworld games were also good, but less ambitious), and I feel kind of sad for people who think that games like Baldur's Gate, Oblivion or Diablo are good representatives of the RPG genre.
The problem with Baldur's Gate (and its descendants) is that it relies on simplified rules, designed for pen and paper RPGs. But pen and paper RPGs work due to the imagination of their players, and how they build a complex world around those simple rules. In a computer, it simply doesn't make sense. The games feel static (characters always standing in the same place, etc.), and the interface ends up getting in the way of the story (which is still a lot about "powering up"). The games have some good bits, and plenty of humour, but they just don't feel "alive", like Ultima 7 did).
Diablo I won't even comment on. It's a hack'n'slash game with power-ups. Calling that a RPG is like calling Space Invaders a "space simulator".
Oblivion held a lot of promise. Its authors specifically mentioned Ultima 7's "living word" atmosphere and promised "amazing AI". But in the end it feels deader than Morrowind (despite the great graphics and improved interface). The characters feel like automata, and the world is completely unrealistic. The "automatic level scaling" is an action game feature, completely out of place in an RPG. What sense does it make for the exact same dungeon to have different monsters based on your character's "level"? There should be easy areas (near cities and roads) and hard areas (wilderness, caves, etc.), and it should be up to the player to decide which areas he or she wants to explore. The result of Oblivion's "automatic level scaling" is that every fight feels the same. The enemies are always hard enough to take some of your time, but always easy enough to be beatable. And then there are the endless scripting and "world consistency" bugs, that just make the game feel fake. It's as if they spent 4 years developing the game engine and models, 6 months working on the story, and 2 hours testing it.
The result is basically Diablo in 3D with some poorly "tacked-on" story elements that really just get in the way of the (moderately fun) fighting.
A long time ago I read an interview with Gabe Newell (of Valve Software) where he said their first project (before Half-Life) had been an "open ended RPG, a sort of world simulator", but they realised the technology of the time didn't allow them to do what they wanted. I hope that now, with faster processors and the Source engine, they decide to revisit that idea (preferably with help from some members of the Ultima 7 team, and maybe Warren Spector). Valve is one of the few companies that understands the importance of playtesting a game from the start (that, more than anything, is the reason why Half-Life was so far above the competition).
With Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights, I've pretty much lost all faith in Bethesda and Bioware. They're decent games, but they're not real RPGs.
It doesn't seem to work in Opera 9.02, despite some people saying that it works on every browser. Either Google has changed something or the example code isn't working.
This just shows how the US military is completely detached from reality. For the amount of money they're pouring into this system (which will never work correctly; automated translators screw up even between languages as similar as Spanish and Italian, let alone English and Arabic - of which there are dozens of variants), they could train and hire hundreds of human interpreters, that could not only translate the words, but also understand and adapt information related to the culture, the person's state of mind, their body language, etc..
If I was a cynical person I'd say the real objectives of this are:
a) Detach the soldiers from the locals even more, so they feel like they're playing a computer game and don't have any second thoughts when they're told to kill a lot of innocent people.
b) Move a lot of money from the taxpayer's pockets into the pockets of the military contractors developing these systems.
The issue isn't the logic. The issue is the fact that CMOS and CCD chips have a limited dynamic range (as does film, as do our eyes, etc.).
In fact, even our eyes' instantaneous dynamic range is far more limited than some people believe. What happens is our brain builds an "HDR" mental picture from multiple "exposures".
Likewise, you can do multiple-shot exposure bracketing on a digital camera (using different shutter speeds), and then load those images into HDRShop (for example) and create an HDR file from them. Then you can adjust the exposure of that image in post (either selecting only part of the source range or compressing all of it into the available output range). Most digital SLRs will automatically do 3-shot exposure bracketing, but usually within a limited range (ex., +/- 3 EV).
Sure, cameras could do all the work internally (take multiple shots, then compile them into one HDR file), but that wouldn't really have any advantage over keeping multiple separate shots and letting your PC software combine them later. I don't want my camera wasting time and battery power with unnecessary processing.
And, of course, multiple-shot exposure bracketing doesn't work very well when the subject of the photo is moving (our brain "fakes" it reasonably well, but the brain can always tell the eyes to look at any specific element, if it needs more detail in that part of the "image" - a camera can't do that).
What I'd really like to see is monitors and graphics cards with floating-point image data, and exposure control. That way brighter monitors could show you a bigger range, instead of simply making the whole image brighter, etc.. But to work properly that would require pretty accurate self-calibration and a standrd way for the monitor and graphics card to communicate those parameters to each other. Can you see all GPU, OS and monitor manufacturers agreeing on a standard (not to mention including those features on most monitors)? I can't.
90% of monitors being sold these days are crappy 6-bit LCD panels and most people don't even seem to care (they're all too obsessed with ficticious reaction times), so clearly there's not much demand for good LDR displays, let alone HDR ones. Sigh...
> Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist [...]
Depends on what you mean by HDR.
For some people, HDR simply means "a very high dynamic range" (compared to competing products, or the "normal" standards). That's the case with these monitors.
For othr people, HDR means a dynamic range that is greater than your output medium. By definition, a "HDR" monitor can't comply with this definition, although a monitor can certainly be compatible with "HDR input", if both it and the graphics card support it.
And for other people HDR means virtually unconstrained, floating-point representation of light properties (including negative light, for example). Again, a monitor can't really represent this, but it can accept an input format that supports an approximation of this model. Think of it as "extreme self-calibration".
Most modern digital still cameras capture at least 20% more information than they store in JPEG format. In other words, their raw format is "HDR" (second definition above, not the third one) when compared to their JPEG output. When you load a raw file into an application, you'll typically have the option to respect the original exposure (and basically discard those extra 20%) or lower the exposure so that all the information is compressed into the "visible" range.
Photoshop's support for floating-point HDR is in its infancy (they don't even fully support LDR 16-bit images). If you want to play around with HDR, a better choice is Paul Debevec'sHDRShop. In fact, Paul's site has long been one of the most important resources for digital HDR development and research (and here I include the third definition above, which is what "HDR" normally means when applied to CGI).
Unfortunately "HDR" has become a marketing buzzword, which means that in most cases it's used incorrectly, simply to mean "higher precision" or "with light blooming effects"...
Tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get that we've...
Anyway, tonight on "It's the Mind" we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange...
The new Macs are basically PCs running OSX, right? So when Apple says the new Macs are twice as fast as the old Macs, what they are really saying is the old Macs ran at half the speed of a PC. While that fact isn't exactly "news" to anyone living outside the iMarketing reality distortion field, it is "news" that Apple is admitting it.
Or, considering Apple used to claim old Macs were twice as fast as Intel PCs, if the new (Intel-based) Macs are twice as fast as those, this means Intel CPUs are four times as fast as themselves.
When you consider that AMD CPUs are even faster than that, I'm pretty sure this is the end of the space-time continuum as we know it.
"People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events (the oil just spilled there, the safety fence broken just there), that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous."
Those 4.5% were right, though. The series (Firefly) is very good (a couple of episodes are bad, a couple are brilliant), but the movie was a piece of crap. It was as if they took one of the bad episodes (like "The message" or "Out of gas"), stretched out the plot holes, ridiculous plot devices (Mr. Universe? Puh-leeze!) and just plain stupid parts until it was the right length for a film, and didn't even bother to add more jokes or witty dialogue.
I have to wonder if James "plot hole" Cameron managed to infect the script, somehow. At least Cameron can direct action sequences (the space battles in Serenity are depressingly bad, and even the fight sequences only manage to be passable thanks to Summer Glau's natural ability - the direction, editing and coreography are very poor).
I suspect the people who gave Serenity a positive score were fans of the series, who were just glad to get a new "fix".
Serenity is not just bad because of what it is (and it is very bad - the fact that other recent sci-fi is terrible doesn't make it good), but also because of what it could have been, and because of all the bridges it burns (not just the characters, but the whole "universe"). Any fan of the series could have written a better plot for the film.
If I had seen Serenity before Firefly, I wouldn't have bothered to watch Firefly at all (and Firefly is probably my favourite sci-fi series of the last 15 years).
If Serenity was what Whedon had in mind for Firefly, I'm glad the series died there. Now excuse me while I watch "Our Mrs. Reynolds" for the 7th time.
Actually, it's a reference to the apple that Adam bit, that was supposed to give mankind the knowledge and power of a god. Hence the bite. The Newton played on the name "Apple", but it wouldn't make any sense for it to be bitten. And who would want to buy a poisonous computer? It's "the apple from the tree of knowledge".
In Europe in general, Sinclair computers (ZX-81, Spectrum, Spectrum +N, even the QL) were a lot more common than Commodore's. The original Spectrum, in particular, probably had more market share than all the competition put together.
I still have a couple of Spectrums (complete with those hideous MicroDrives that failed so much they ended up being slower than tapes).
And I have a memory expansion "brick" that pushed the ZX-81's RAM all the way to 16k. How often do people add 15x more RAM, these days?;-)
If someone sends you detailed instructions on how to bust a myth you confirmed, or on how to confirm a myth that you busted, will you do a new segment, correcting your previous verdict? Has this ever happened (I never saw it, but I missed a couple of shows)?
Also, have you ever reached a similar conclusion yourselves (i.e., after watching the show, thought "can't believe we overlooked X - our verdict was wrong")?
I have a feeling most people commenting on this particular "myth" didn't even watch the show.
For the record, they split a lot of arrows, just not perfectly down the middle of the shaft.
They also showed that, in flight, arrows "wobble" due to their own maleability (they bend when they're fired, and then oscillate in flight). This wobble makes it virtually impossible for an arrow head to travel in a straigth line.
Even when driving an arrow straight into another one (inside a narrow pipe, with no wobble), the split followed the wood grain, which is almost never perfectly straight
The myth was that Robin Hood was so good he could deliberately and consistently split arrows down the middle. Given the facts above that myth was busted.
If you use a different material, perfectly rigid arrows, etc., it's perfectly possible to split an arrow down the middle. But that's not the myth they were testing.
MythBusters does get a lot of things wrong, and often shows a complete lack of scientific understanding, but in this case they were quite thorough and quite precise.
I understand the arbitrary origin concept perfectly well
No, you don't. Or you wouldn't say this:
there was a period where everyone who was anyone was convinced that the sun revolved around the earth, which is simply not true by any stretch of the imagination.
It is true. You just have to take the Earth as your fixed point. The problem with the geocentric theory is not the motion of the Sun; it's the motion of all the other planets.
What you don't seem to understand is that both views are perfectly valid. You can pick any point in the universe and use it as your fixed referential. Using the Sun as the fixed point simply makes it a lot easier to deal with the orbits of other planets. And when you're dealing with a galaxy, you'll usually pick the centre of that galaxy as the fixed point, and so on.
The problem with the geocentric theory is not that the Sun goes around the Earth (that's a perfectly valid construct). The problem was that it said the other planets orbited the Earth.
No sane person describes the orbit of the Earth in relation to the actual "centre" of the universe (the centre of mass, or the geometric centre, or the point where the big bang is thought to have occurred, etc.).
The "historical" geocentric models had a lot of other problems (circular orbits, everything going directly around the Earth etc.), but there is absolutely no reason why you cannot use a geocentric referential (if you're a mathematical masochist). The other planets clearly don't orbit the Earth, but you can still describe their orbits around the Sun as a function of their position relative to the Earth.
So, the "fact" that the Earth is the centre of the universe is perfectly valid. The "fact" that Venus, Mars, etc., rotate around the Earth, following circular trajectories, is false, and would not have been confirmed by any obervations (in fact, Ptolemy realised this, even using his geocentric model). In other words, it wasn't so much a "fact" as an incorrect belief, based on uninformed hearsay, not on any real facts or observations.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is 3DS MAX really more powerful than Google Sketch?" - We gave 10 randomly selected people half an hour to learn to use them, and then compared the results.
And, coming soon...
"Is DVCPRO HD actually better than VHS (after you resize it to 64x48 pixels)?"
"Is a dual-socket, quad-core workstation actually faster than a ZX Spectrum (when playing Space Invaders)?"
> Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W
> of your power supplies in each system
> is dissipated as heat.
A lot? Well, unless you count the noise and air movement (which are eventually also turned into heat, though not in the actual box), it's pretty much all of it, no? It's not like it's being stored in some sort of chemical compound or potential energy "reservoir".
And they've started with an enhanced Pentium clone.
You didn't exactly play "against" the AI, and it wasn't impressive in terms of decision-making, but the variety of actions coupled with clever "schedules", the huge dialog trees and the interconnected stories created a pretty good illusion of a living world, with believable characters. Considering this was the DOS era, when games came in floppies and CPU speed was measured in MHz, it was pretty impressive stuff.
And 15 years later we have Oblivion, where the "characters" move around aimlessly and all say exactly the same irrelevant lines. Something went terribly, terribly wrong along the way...
Remember Ultima 7? You started off as a hero, with several companions, and the game was about exploring the world and discovering the story by interacting with characters, not about "powering up". Sure, you could find better items (several of them unique, which is a lot more interesting than going from a "+5 sword" to a "+6 sword"), but most of the progress came from discovering new areas, talking to characters, carving your place in the game world (in other words, role-playing), etc., not "powering up".
It's been downhill ever since (ok, the Underworld games were also good, but less ambitious), and I feel kind of sad for people who think that games like Baldur's Gate, Oblivion or Diablo are good representatives of the RPG genre.
The problem with Baldur's Gate (and its descendants) is that it relies on simplified rules, designed for pen and paper RPGs. But pen and paper RPGs work due to the imagination of their players, and how they build a complex world around those simple rules. In a computer, it simply doesn't make sense. The games feel static (characters always standing in the same place, etc.), and the interface ends up getting in the way of the story (which is still a lot about "powering up"). The games have some good bits, and plenty of humour, but they just don't feel "alive", like Ultima 7 did).
Diablo I won't even comment on. It's a hack'n'slash game with power-ups. Calling that a RPG is like calling Space Invaders a "space simulator".
Oblivion held a lot of promise. Its authors specifically mentioned Ultima 7's "living word" atmosphere and promised "amazing AI". But in the end it feels deader than Morrowind (despite the great graphics and improved interface). The characters feel like automata, and the world is completely unrealistic. The "automatic level scaling" is an action game feature, completely out of place in an RPG. What sense does it make for the exact same dungeon to have different monsters based on your character's "level"? There should be easy areas (near cities and roads) and hard areas (wilderness, caves, etc.), and it should be up to the player to decide which areas he or she wants to explore. The result of Oblivion's "automatic level scaling" is that every fight feels the same. The enemies are always hard enough to take some of your time, but always easy enough to be beatable. And then there are the endless scripting and "world consistency" bugs, that just make the game feel fake. It's as if they spent 4 years developing the game engine and models, 6 months working on the story, and 2 hours testing it.
The result is basically Diablo in 3D with some poorly "tacked-on" story elements that really just get in the way of the (moderately fun) fighting.
A long time ago I read an interview with Gabe Newell (of Valve Software) where he said their first project (before Half-Life) had been an "open ended RPG, a sort of world simulator", but they realised the technology of the time didn't allow them to do what they wanted. I hope that now, with faster processors and the Source engine, they decide to revisit that idea (preferably with help from some members of the Ultima 7 team, and maybe Warren Spector). Valve is one of the few companies that understands the importance of playtesting a game from the start (that, more than anything, is the reason why Half-Life was so far above the competition).
With Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights, I've pretty much lost all faith in Bethesda and Bioware. They're decent games, but they're not real RPGs.
It doesn't seem to work in Opera 9.02, despite some people saying that it works on every browser. Either Google has changed something or the example code isn't working.
Exactly. Any sane forum admin will block this immediately.
/. "article" is just advertising for yet another ad-supported site...
This
RMN
~~~
In English it's called a "CD player".
RMN
~~~
This just shows how the US military is completely detached from reality. For the amount of money they're pouring into this system (which will never work correctly; automated translators screw up even between languages as similar as Spanish and Italian, let alone English and Arabic - of which there are dozens of variants), they could train and hire hundreds of human interpreters, that could not only translate the words, but also understand and adapt information related to the culture, the person's state of mind, their body language, etc..
If I was a cynical person I'd say the real objectives of this are:
a) Detach the soldiers from the locals even more, so they feel like they're playing a computer game and don't have any second thoughts when they're told to kill a lot of innocent people.
b) Move a lot of money from the taxpayer's pockets into the pockets of the military contractors developing these systems.
RMN
~~~
The issue isn't the logic. The issue is the fact that CMOS and CCD chips have a limited dynamic range (as does film, as do our eyes, etc.).
In fact, even our eyes' instantaneous dynamic range is far more limited than some people believe. What happens is our brain builds an "HDR" mental picture from multiple "exposures".
Likewise, you can do multiple-shot exposure bracketing on a digital camera (using different shutter speeds), and then load those images into HDRShop (for example) and create an HDR file from them. Then you can adjust the exposure of that image in post (either selecting only part of the source range or compressing all of it into the available output range). Most digital SLRs will automatically do 3-shot exposure bracketing, but usually within a limited range (ex., +/- 3 EV).
Sure, cameras could do all the work internally (take multiple shots, then compile them into one HDR file), but that wouldn't really have any advantage over keeping multiple separate shots and letting your PC software combine them later. I don't want my camera wasting time and battery power with unnecessary processing.
And, of course, multiple-shot exposure bracketing doesn't work very well when the subject of the photo is moving (our brain "fakes" it reasonably well, but the brain can always tell the eyes to look at any specific element, if it needs more detail in that part of the "image" - a camera can't do that).
What I'd really like to see is monitors and graphics cards with floating-point image data, and exposure control. That way brighter monitors could show you a bigger range, instead of simply making the whole image brighter, etc.. But to work properly that would require pretty accurate self-calibration and a standrd way for the monitor and graphics card to communicate those parameters to each other. Can you see all GPU, OS and monitor manufacturers agreeing on a standard (not to mention including those features on most monitors)? I can't.
90% of monitors being sold these days are crappy 6-bit LCD panels and most people don't even seem to care (they're all too obsessed with ficticious reaction times), so clearly there's not much demand for good LDR displays, let alone HDR ones. Sigh...
RMN
~~~
> Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist [...]
Depends on what you mean by HDR.
For some people, HDR simply means "a very high dynamic range" (compared to competing products, or the "normal" standards). That's the case with these monitors.
For othr people, HDR means a dynamic range that is greater than your output medium. By definition, a "HDR" monitor can't comply with this definition, although a monitor can certainly be compatible with "HDR input", if both it and the graphics card support it.
And for other people HDR means virtually unconstrained, floating-point representation of light properties (including negative light, for example). Again, a monitor can't really represent this, but it can accept an input format that supports an approximation of this model. Think of it as "extreme self-calibration".
Most modern digital still cameras capture at least 20% more information than they store in JPEG format. In other words, their raw format is "HDR" (second definition above, not the third one) when compared to their JPEG output. When you load a raw file into an application, you'll typically have the option to respect the original exposure (and basically discard those extra 20%) or lower the exposure so that all the information is compressed into the "visible" range.
Photoshop's support for floating-point HDR is in its infancy (they don't even fully support LDR 16-bit images). If you want to play around with HDR, a better choice is Paul Debevec's HDRShop. In fact, Paul's site has long been one of the most important resources for digital HDR development and research (and here I include the third definition above, which is what "HDR" normally means when applied to CGI).
Unfortunately "HDR" has become a marketing buzzword, which means that in most cases it's used incorrectly, simply to mean "higher precision" or "with light blooming effects"...
RMN
~~~
Should we start replacing the "in Soviet Russia" jokes with "in Neocon America" ones?
And I have a strange feeling that I've written it before...
RMN
~~~
Good evening.
Tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get that we've...
Anyway, tonight on "It's the Mind" we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange...
http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/dejavu.htm
RMN
~~~
The new Macs are basically PCs running OSX, right? So when Apple says the new Macs are twice as fast as the old Macs, what they are really saying is the old Macs ran at half the speed of a PC. While that fact isn't exactly "news" to anyone living outside the iMarketing reality distortion field, it is "news" that Apple is admitting it.
Or, considering Apple used to claim old Macs were twice as fast as Intel PCs, if the new (Intel-based) Macs are twice as fast as those, this means Intel CPUs are four times as fast as themselves.
When you consider that AMD CPUs are even faster than that, I'm pretty sure this is the end of the space-time continuum as we know it.
The short answer is "no". The long answer is "nooooooo".
Am I the only one thinking of Lexx?
To quote Terry Pratchett:
"People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events (the oil just spilled there, the safety fence broken just there), that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous."
RMN
~~~
Those 4.5% were right, though. The series (Firefly) is very good (a couple of episodes are bad, a couple are brilliant), but the movie was a piece of crap. It was as if they took one of the bad episodes (like "The message" or "Out of gas"), stretched out the plot holes, ridiculous plot devices (Mr. Universe? Puh-leeze!) and just plain stupid parts until it was the right length for a film, and didn't even bother to add more jokes or witty dialogue.
I have to wonder if James "plot hole" Cameron managed to infect the script, somehow. At least Cameron can direct action sequences (the space battles in Serenity are depressingly bad, and even the fight sequences only manage to be passable thanks to Summer Glau's natural ability - the direction, editing and coreography are very poor).
I suspect the people who gave Serenity a positive score were fans of the series, who were just glad to get a new "fix".
Serenity is not just bad because of what it is (and it is very bad - the fact that other recent sci-fi is terrible doesn't make it good), but also because of what it could have been, and because of all the bridges it burns (not just the characters, but the whole "universe"). Any fan of the series could have written a better plot for the film.
If I had seen Serenity before Firefly, I wouldn't have bothered to watch Firefly at all (and Firefly is probably my favourite sci-fi series of the last 15 years).
If Serenity was what Whedon had in mind for Firefly, I'm glad the series died there. Now excuse me while I watch "Our Mrs. Reynolds" for the 7th time.
Actually, it's a reference to the apple that Adam bit, that was supposed to give mankind the knowledge and power of a god. Hence the bite. The Newton played on the name "Apple", but it wouldn't make any sense for it to be bitten. And who would want to buy a poisonous computer? It's "the apple from the tree of knowledge".
RMN
~~~
In Europe in general, Sinclair computers (ZX-81, Spectrum, Spectrum +N, even the QL) were a lot more common than Commodore's. The original Spectrum, in particular, probably had more market share than all the competition put together.
;-)
I still have a couple of Spectrums (complete with those hideous MicroDrives that failed so much they ended up being slower than tapes).
And I have a memory expansion "brick" that pushed the ZX-81's RAM all the way to 16k. How often do people add 15x more RAM, these days?
If someone sends you detailed instructions on how to bust a myth you confirmed, or on how to confirm a myth that you busted, will you do a new segment, correcting your previous verdict? Has this ever happened (I never saw it, but I missed a couple of shows)?
Also, have you ever reached a similar conclusion yourselves (i.e., after watching the show, thought "can't believe we overlooked X - our verdict was wrong")?
RMN
~~~
I have a feeling most people commenting on this particular "myth" didn't even watch the show.
For the record, they split a lot of arrows, just not perfectly down the middle of the shaft.
They also showed that, in flight, arrows "wobble" due to their own maleability (they bend when they're fired, and then oscillate in flight). This wobble makes it virtually impossible for an arrow head to travel in a straigth line.
Even when driving an arrow straight into another one (inside a narrow pipe, with no wobble), the split followed the wood grain, which is almost never perfectly straight
The myth was that Robin Hood was so good he could deliberately and consistently split arrows down the middle. Given the facts above that myth was busted.
If you use a different material, perfectly rigid arrows, etc., it's perfectly possible to split an arrow down the middle. But that's not the myth they were testing.
MythBusters does get a lot of things wrong, and often shows a complete lack of scientific understanding, but in this case they were quite thorough and quite precise.
RMN
~~~
I understand the arbitrary origin concept perfectly well
No, you don't. Or you wouldn't say this:
there was a period where everyone who was anyone was convinced that the sun revolved around the earth, which is simply not true by any stretch of the imagination.
It is true. You just have to take the Earth as your fixed point. The problem with the geocentric theory is not the motion of the Sun; it's the motion of all the other planets.
RMN
~~~
What you don't seem to understand is that both views are perfectly valid. You can pick any point in the universe and use it as your fixed referential. Using the Sun as the fixed point simply makes it a lot easier to deal with the orbits of other planets. And when you're dealing with a galaxy, you'll usually pick the centre of that galaxy as the fixed point, and so on.
The problem with the geocentric theory is not that the Sun goes around the Earth (that's a perfectly valid construct). The problem was that it said the other planets orbited the Earth.
No sane person describes the orbit of the Earth in relation to the actual "centre" of the universe (the centre of mass, or the geometric centre, or the point where the big bang is thought to have occurred, etc.).
The "historical" geocentric models had a lot of other problems (circular orbits, everything going directly around the Earth etc.), but there is absolutely no reason why you cannot use a geocentric referential (if you're a mathematical masochist). The other planets clearly don't orbit the Earth, but you can still describe their orbits around the Sun as a function of their position relative to the Earth.
So, the "fact" that the Earth is the centre of the universe is perfectly valid. The "fact" that Venus, Mars, etc., rotate around the Earth, following circular trajectories, is false, and would not have been confirmed by any obervations (in fact, Ptolemy realised this, even using his geocentric model). In other words, it wasn't so much a "fact" as an incorrect belief, based on uninformed hearsay, not on any real facts or observations.
RMN
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