Resurecting the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) might lead to reviewing its unsightly bastard brother Pluto (bottom of page), one of the most horrible weapons ever devised.
Pluto is a low altitude Mach 3 nuclear cruise missile. It's designed to hurt the enemy threefold
By the shear force of its Mach 3 sonic boom.
By the highly radioactive exhaust.
By the (many) fusion warheads it can launch.
After expending its warheads, the Pluto would cruise back and forth over enemy territory for weeks, spewing radioactivity all the while, until running out of fuel or being shot down.
Not the kind of weapon you would like to see in, well, any hands.
The opening lines of Fishspotting, the story of Gollum:
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big horse. Choose tables, chairs, fireplace and a fucking big larder...
Choose fishing, choose farming, choose good health, high cholesterol and six meals a day. Choose a starter home, choose your friends, choose leisure wear and the matching pipe, choose a three piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that park watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing fireworks, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life...
But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life, I chose something else and the reasons? There are no reasons, who needs reasons when you've got the One Ring of Power?
Nah, what they mean is that they catch all errors were one or two bits in one packet have been flipped. When three or more bits in a packet have been flipped, they can catch 99,998% of such errors.
Suppose one packet in 100 gets a bit mangled (high error rate for sake of demonstration). The probability of three or more bits being flipped in a packet is 1:1.000.000. And only 1:20.000 of those cases go undetected. The total probability of an error getting past the CRC and FUBARing your data is 1:20.000.000.000 transfered packets.
I checked out the 5k site. Most of the entries were Flash, not that impressive. But the 5k Wolfenstein (will only work in IE on Win, yadda yadda) game you mentioned... (h,j,k,n to move, space to shoot).
Yikes! It's a small fps entirely done in JavaScript(!), including multiple independantly moving foes, and the ability to shoot them. And in less than 5 kB! I spent an hour or so reverse-engineering the program.
As far as I can tell, it works by generating the (1 bitplane BW) graphics into an array p, then creating a JavaScript source code string that contains a definition of the image (im="... static char t_bits[]={(things based on p)}"), then inserting that back into the page with document.images[0].src="javascript:count;im;", where im is the name of the variable containg the above-mentioned string...
Do check out the source code! This is heavy!!
PS. I played it a little bit more. Oh no, the thing even has scoring, multiple levels with increasing numbers of foes... (/me looks suprisedly at his once rampant, now wilting ego.)
PPS. Oh, and Window Pong (keypad numlocked 8+2) was good for a laugh, and seems more compatible.
... continous and rapid advance of processing power is the one thing that's holding back affordable universal and pervasive computing in schools
Run that by me again? So, buy 1 million used C=64's. They can be had for as litle as $5 a piece. Oh, you want something faster and more capable? Good thing Moore's law didn't stop in the 80's then!
Things are better now because relatively useful computers can be had for very cheaply, compared to just a few years ago, but scrapping Moore's law altogether is even better.
Insightfulx2? Informative?
Small hint: The reasons that "useful computers can be had for very cheaply" is Moore's law!
Jesus on a pogo stick... Hint #2: No-one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to upgrade. You could continue with your old computers, and old programs indefinetely. What you are essentially saying is that "There are some really good new programs we want. Unfortunately they won't run on our '286 DOS machines."
"The injustice! The horror! If only all progress would have stopped for a couple of decades, then (...?)". I can't complete this sentence. Anyone?
Yo, Chemical! No-one else will probably see this, but: I got my DSL from BoStream (~HomeStream) in the lovely country of Sweden. They've upped their charges since then very considerably, the current prices are approx. like this:
0.5 MB xDSL: $30/month (no static IP)
2.5 MB xDSL: $50/month
8.0 MB xDSL: $70/month
Execept for the budget version (0,5), you will get a static IP! There's nothing in the contract that says you cannot run severs! I have my own domain, own mail, own web, own everyting! Yeah! Go BoStream!
I'm still bound by the old contract, until April... Even so, I will gladly pay $50 a month for my STATIC IP TRUE SERVER status
Of course I keep the humongous texture map in memory. The whole point of my program is to be able to see the entire globe, quickly zoom in on an area of interest, then quickly zoom out and move to another area of interest. Basically, I'm trying to reproduce the effect in MiB (although that movie had'nt been done yet when I started in 1996 (on a 128 MB SparcStation, with 8192x4096 textures)). To smoothly scan to any region of the Earth at great detail.
Regarding keeping the interesting parts of the map in memory, and swapping the others to disk... That's what virtual memory is supposed to do for you, yes? I do use mip-mapping, ie. having a hierarchy of textures, each with half the resolution of the last. When looking at the whole globe, you're just using the 1024x512 texture, but when you're fully zoomed in, you're using (a small subset of) the 40,000 x 20,000 map.
Basically, you are suggesting that I should use complex alogorithms to shift any un-needed data to disk (when normal paging will probably do the same task faster and simpler).
I should use a SCSI RAID (or perhaps fibre channel SAN?) to make globe-turning faster? Yes, it will be less than turgid, but it won't be smooth. Besides, I run this on a normal consumer computer, no RAID in sight... What you don't see here is that I, simply, for good reasons, wan't to keep it ALL in memory, allowing beautful, fast sweeps from any region on the Earth to any other. I DON'T want to swap to disk. Thankfully, I won't have to, in a year or so (due to current RAM increases), IFF Intel finally realizes that some programs do need more than 4 GB. AMD does. Guess which system I'll buy.
It is. That scene was shot on location at Arecibo, the worlds most gargantuan telescope of any kind. Impressive bit of equipment, innit? To bad it can't be pointed, being sunk into the mountain and all;-)
[unlikely]... One would think that the signal the aliens put out would have to be specifically targeted at earth itself in order for its frequency to stay constant...
BINGO!
A signal of this type would have to be directly targeted at the Earth by intelligent creatures. The alien scientist must have detected Earth's presence, and orbit (and perhaps they've picked up some "I Love Lucy" to prove we're intelligent... Erh...). They then sent a special, compensated transmission ment for us, and us only. And they must have been doing this for an extended amount of time.
Maybe such a signal might be just slightly interesting? Perhaps this is why SETI bumps any signal of this kind to the top?
That's why SETI call it a "Magic Signal". It's a clear attempt of a fellow civilization to contact us, specifically.
As others have pointed out, we could pick up something that existed a few score or a few hundred years ago, and that would certainly be interesting.
As others have pointed out......Without a shread of evidence. Terestrial radio/TV is designed to get from A to B on the planets surface, and not much further. Long range radio (shortwave) is even designed to bounce of the stratosphere to spread further.
Remember, signal strength falls as distance squared, and even a few light years is quite some distance. Still, radio telescopes are extremely sensitive. Maybe our radio/TV could be picked up at a distance of 10 light years... If there's no interference. Well, last time I looked, there was a rather large, bright and yellow source of interference right next to us.
And not one second to soon. See this machine (points to the floor and right)? It's got 2 GB of memory (2^63), and it's my friggin' home computer. The fact that Intel is not pushing for 64-bit desktops is very strange indeed, considering that the will be nessecary even for high-end consumers like myself within the year.
And don't give me that crap about 36 bit virtual adressing... The reason I use 2 GB in my machine is that I USE >1GB, in one process, and in a very random fashion (in fact, the hobby program I'm developing would really like ~7 GB of RAM (yes, just for this one process), but I can't afford that just yet).
For those who are wondering what kind of "hobby program" I'm writing that needs such a shit-load of memory: It's an application that displays the globe, using the Blue Marble world texture maps at 1x1 km resolution from NASA (40,000x20,000 pixels, night and day side). And sometime soon-ish they'll release 100m maps, and I will need 700 GB of ram, then 10m/70TB, 1m/7PB...
... The problem is the novels are so pervasive and anyone into "media" was probably into them at some time, unless they hate fantasy, in which case they would be biased against the Lord of the Rings movies.
That statement is probably very true, which makes it even more interesting that I did not see one review in Swedish media that did not begin with words to the effect of:
"I never in my life read Tolkien, but..."
"I hated Tolkiens books, but..."
"I regularly piss on Tolkiens grave, but..."
and (this guy must be a real fan-boy)
"I haven't read Tolkien in a great while, but...
After which follows a favourable through enthusiastic review.
Well, as I understand it the board really has four PCI slots and one AGP slot, but if you use the fourth PCI slot you kill the AGP slot. Don't ask me why.
Perhaps one of my favorite SF writers, Bruce Sterling, was closer than I thought...
In "Sacred Cow" he postulated that there was a slower, more insidious form of BSE which only affected humans after decades... Resulting in >80% death tolls in Britain, >60% in the rest of Europe. 50% in the US. 20% in Japan. A modern black plague.
The western world collapses, India, Japan and China rise to control the world.
How much cost in bandwidth, monetary, will that be again?
Oh... Well... (Scrambles to use calculator)... That would be about $0, since I pay a flat rate for my broadband and have plenty of free download bandwidth.
However, I guess you want a calculation based on bytes per month and dollars per month. Well, a non-compressed CD is about 10MB per minute. Lets say the song is about three minutes, 30MB.
I pay about $25 per month for my 2.5Mb=312.5kB ADSL. 3,125e5 bytes per second is 2.7e10 bytes per day, or about 8.1e11 bytes per month (811 GB per month). So that's a grand total of $25*3e7/8.1e11, or... 0.1 cent.
Oh, JESUS ON-A-POGO-STICK CHRIST!!! I never realized it was that much!!! </sarcasm> I do realize that my providers are overselling bandwidth by a large amount. Suppose the factor is 1000. Then my download actually cost 10 cents. Oh, JESUS FISTING MARY! 10 cents! The sky is falling!
Only after a port has used up all possible usefullness.
You know what, you're so right, and insightful!
When all the parallel printers and external modems are "recycled"(Sent to China) and no networking company uses the serial Console port on their products anymore.
Yes, exactly! It's not as if there was a way to hang an old parallell printer on some sort of network connected gadget to make it behave as a network printer! And, I mean, we all know it's impossible to connect a serial device to a USB chain. No-one has ever made a converter (damn shame).
THEN, you can get rid of those legacy ports. Think about the people trying to abolish floppy drives from computers... Is making a boot CD as easy as making a boot floppy? Are you going to use a 700 MB CD-R for a 40k document?
Indeed. For that 40kb startup I'm definitely going to use a 500kB 8 inch floppy. Better fit. Cost conscious. Legacy.
Unless I can get a pile of punch-cards or perhaps a team of men to flip dip-switches or reconnect wires to enter the data. Even better.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England!
(No longer to-the-word-)But I just want to sing:... And no singing!
Well, with 6 bits you can have the capital letters and some punctuation.
With 12 bits, you can have all the European alphabets, and Russian and (some) Japanese.
With 24 bits, you can have Unicode. (No, you can't have Unicode in 16 bits. It's grown to 21 bits already (allthough only 2^20 code positions are actually in the code).)
To conclude: 12 bits, 4096 characters, is a very good size for a rudimentary global character set. 24 bits lets you use all of Unicode (21 bits) and is a much better fit than 32 bits.
To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market [more]
I guess you are right, if you choose to completely ignore the millions of dollars that went into Amiga games. Thousands where made, some sold a million. In fact in the late 80's/early 90's the PC was the complete laughing stock of the gaming community (4096 color Amiga or 16 (fixed) color EGA PC?). It wasn't until Doom that people even started switching.
Slashdot Mirror
Resurecting the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) might lead to reviewing its unsightly bastard brother Pluto (bottom of page), one of the most horrible weapons ever devised.
Pluto is a low altitude Mach 3 nuclear cruise missile. It's designed to hurt the enemy threefold
- By the shear force of its Mach 3 sonic boom.
- By the highly radioactive exhaust.
- By the (many) fusion warheads it can launch.
After expending its warheads, the Pluto would cruise back and forth over enemy territory for weeks, spewing radioactivity all the while, until running out of fuel or being shot down.Not the kind of weapon you would like to see in, well, any hands.
The opening lines of Fishspotting, the story of Gollum:
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big horse. Choose tables, chairs, fireplace and a fucking big larder...
Choose fishing, choose farming, choose good health, high cholesterol and six meals a day. Choose a starter home, choose your friends, choose leisure wear and the matching pipe, choose a three piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that park watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing fireworks, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life...
But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life, I chose something else and the reasons? There are no reasons, who needs reasons when you've got the One Ring of Power?
Fox kills Futurama, breaking contract. CN gets a deal for showing re-runs. Am I supposed to be jubilant or what?
Nah, what they mean is that they catch all errors were one or two bits in one packet have been flipped. When three or more bits in a packet have been flipped, they can catch 99,998% of such errors.
Suppose one packet in 100 gets a bit mangled (high error rate for sake of demonstration). The probability of three or more bits being flipped in a packet is 1:1.000.000. And only 1:20.000 of those cases go undetected. The total probability of an error getting past the CRC and FUBARing your data is 1:20.000.000.000 transfered packets.
Heh... Which reminds me of The Best Terminator Quote ever:
I checked out the 5k site. Most of the entries were Flash, not that impressive. But the 5k Wolfenstein (will only work in IE on Win, yadda yadda) game you mentioned... (h,j,k,n to move, space to shoot).
Yikes! It's a small fps entirely done in JavaScript(!), including multiple independantly moving foes, and the ability to shoot them. And in less than 5 kB! I spent an hour or so reverse-engineering the program.
As far as I can tell, it works by generating the (1 bitplane BW) graphics into an array p, then creating a JavaScript source code string that contains a definition of the image (im="... static char t_bits[]={(things based on p)}"), then inserting that back into the page with document.images[0].src="javascript:count;im;", where im is the name of the variable containg the above-mentioned string...
Do check out the source code! This is heavy !!
PS. I played it a little bit more. Oh no, the thing even has scoring, multiple levels with increasing numbers of foes... (/me looks suprisedly at his once rampant, now wilting ego.)
PPS. Oh, and Window Pong (keypad numlocked 8+2) was good for a laugh, and seems more compatible.
Run that by me again? So, buy 1 million used C=64's. They can be had for as litle as $5 a piece. Oh, you want something faster and more capable? Good thing Moore's law didn't stop in the 80's then!
Insightfulx2? Informative?
Small hint: The reasons that "useful computers can be had for very cheaply" is Moore's law! Jesus on a pogo stick... Hint #2: No-one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to upgrade. You could continue with your old computers, and old programs indefinetely. What you are essentially saying is that "There are some really good new programs we want. Unfortunately they won't run on our '286 DOS machines."
"The injustice! The horror! If only all progress would have stopped for a couple of decades, then (...?)". I can't complete this sentence. Anyone?
"Postulate" I can agree to, but "axiom"? As in something obviously and nesessecarily true??
Myself, I would coin it "Moore's projection"
Yo, Chemical! No-one else will probably see this, but: I got my DSL from BoStream (~HomeStream) in the lovely country of Sweden. They've upped their charges since then very considerably, the current prices are approx. like this:
0.5 MB xDSL: $30/month (no static IP)
2.5 MB xDSL: $50/month
8.0 MB xDSL: $70/month
Execept for the budget version (0,5), you will get a static IP! There's nothing in the contract that says you cannot run severs! I have my own domain, own mail, own web, own everyting! Yeah! Go BoStream!
I'm still bound by the old contract, until April... Even so, I will gladly pay $50 a month for my STATIC IP TRUE SERVER status
Of course I keep the humongous texture map in memory. The whole point of my program is to be able to see the entire globe, quickly zoom in on an area of interest, then quickly zoom out and move to another area of interest. Basically, I'm trying to reproduce the effect in MiB (although that movie had'nt been done yet when I started in 1996 (on a 128 MB SparcStation, with 8192x4096 textures)). To smoothly scan to any region of the Earth at great detail.
Regarding keeping the interesting parts of the map in memory, and swapping the others to disk... That's what virtual memory is supposed to do for you, yes? I do use mip-mapping, ie. having a hierarchy of textures, each with half the resolution of the last. When looking at the whole globe, you're just using the 1024x512 texture, but when you're fully zoomed in, you're using (a small subset of) the 40,000 x 20,000 map.
Basically, you are suggesting that I should use complex alogorithms to shift any un-needed data to disk (when normal paging will probably do the same task faster and simpler).
I should use a SCSI RAID (or perhaps fibre channel SAN?) to make globe-turning faster? Yes, it will be less than turgid, but it won't be smooth. Besides, I run this on a normal consumer computer, no RAID in sight... What you don't see here is that I, simply, for good reasons, wan't to keep it ALL in memory, allowing beautful, fast sweeps from any region on the Earth to any other. I DON'T want to swap to disk. Thankfully, I won't have to, in a year or so (due to current RAM increases), IFF Intel finally realizes that some programs do need more than 4 GB. AMD does. Guess which system I'll buy.
It is. That scene was shot on location at Arecibo, the worlds most gargantuan telescope of any kind. Impressive bit of equipment, innit? To bad it can't be pointed, being sunk into the mountain and all ;-)
BINGO!
A signal of this type would have to be directly targeted at the Earth by intelligent creatures. The alien scientist must have detected Earth's presence, and orbit (and perhaps they've picked up some "I Love Lucy" to prove we're intelligent... Erh...). They then sent a special, compensated transmission ment for us, and us only. And they must have been doing this for an extended amount of time.
Maybe such a signal might be just slightly interesting? Perhaps this is why SETI bumps any signal of this kind to the top?
That's why SETI call it a "Magic Signal". It's a clear attempt of a fellow civilization to contact us, specifically.
As others have pointed out... ...Without a shread of evidence. Terestrial radio/TV is designed to get from A to B on the planets surface, and not much further. Long range radio (shortwave) is even designed to bounce of the stratosphere to spread further.
Remember, signal strength falls as distance squared, and even a few light years is quite some distance. Still, radio telescopes are extremely sensitive. Maybe our radio/TV could be picked up at a distance of 10 light years... If there's no interference. Well, last time I looked, there was a rather large, bright and yellow source of interference right next to us.
And not one second to soon. See this machine (points to the floor and right)? It's got 2 GB of memory (2^63), and it's my friggin' home computer. The fact that Intel is not pushing for 64-bit desktops is very strange indeed, considering that the will be nessecary even for high-end consumers like myself within the year.
And don't give me that crap about 36 bit virtual adressing... The reason I use 2 GB in my machine is that I USE >1GB, in one process, and in a very random fashion (in fact, the hobby program I'm developing would really like ~7 GB of RAM (yes, just for this one process), but I can't afford that just yet).
For those who are wondering what kind of "hobby program" I'm writing that needs such a shit-load of memory: It's an application that displays the globe, using the Blue Marble world texture maps at 1x1 km resolution from NASA (40,000x20,000 pixels, night and day side). And sometime soon-ish they'll release 100m maps, and I will need 700 GB of ram, then 10m/70TB, 1m/7PB...
That statement is probably very true, which makes it even more interesting that I did not see one review in Swedish media that did not begin with words to the effect of:
"I never in my life read Tolkien, but..."
"I hated Tolkiens books, but..."
"I regularly piss on Tolkiens grave, but..."
and (this guy must be a real fan-boy) "I haven't read Tolkien in a great while, but...
After which follows a favourable through enthusiastic review.
Well, as I understand it the board really has four PCI slots and one AGP slot, but if you use the fourth PCI slot you kill the AGP slot. Don't ask me why.
Doh! I changed Egan for Sterling in the text but not in the subject... Time for bed...
Perhaps one of my favorite SF writers, Bruce Sterling, was closer than I thought...
In "Sacred Cow" he postulated that there was a slower, more insidious form of BSE which only affected humans after decades... Resulting in >80% death tolls in Britain, >60% in the rest of Europe. 50% in the US. 20% in Japan. A modern black plague.
The western world collapses, India, Japan and China rise to control the world.
So we have a Space Robot.
But, can it push or at least shove. I know I would need that capability to protect me from the terrible secret of space
Oh... Well... (Scrambles to use calculator)... That would be about $0, since I pay a flat rate for my broadband and have plenty of free download bandwidth.
However, I guess you want a calculation based on bytes per month and dollars per month. Well, a non-compressed CD is about 10MB per minute. Lets say the song is about three minutes, 30MB.
I pay about $25 per month for my 2.5Mb=312.5kB ADSL. 3,125e5 bytes per second is 2.7e10 bytes per day, or about 8.1e11 bytes per month (811 GB per month). So that's a grand total of $25*3e7/8.1e11, or... 0.1 cent.
Oh, JESUS ON-A-POGO-STICK CHRIST!!! I never realized it was that much!!! </sarcasm> I do realize that my providers are overselling bandwidth by a large amount. Suppose the factor is 1000. Then my download actually cost 10 cents. Oh, JESUS FISTING MARY! 10 cents! The sky is falling!
PS. HIBT?
You know what, you're so right, and insightful!
Yes, exactly! It's not as if there was a way to hang an old parallell printer on some sort of network connected gadget to make it behave as a network printer! And, I mean, we all know it's impossible to connect a serial device to a USB chain. No-one has ever made a converter (damn shame).
Indeed. For that 40kb startup I'm definitely going to use a 500kB 8 inch floppy. Better fit. Cost conscious. Legacy.
Unless I can get a pile of punch-cards or perhaps a team of men to flip dip-switches or reconnect wires to enter the data. Even better.
PS. HIBT?
Less rough, though still offtopic quote:
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England!
(No longer to-the-word-)But I just want to sing: ... And no singing!
Well, with 6 bits you can have the capital letters and some punctuation.
With 12 bits, you can have all the European alphabets, and Russian and (some) Japanese.
With 24 bits, you can have Unicode. (No, you can't have Unicode in 16 bits. It's grown to 21 bits already (allthough only 2^20 code positions are actually in the code).)
To conclude: 12 bits, 4096 characters, is a very good size for a rudimentary global character set. 24 bits lets you use all of Unicode (21 bits) and is a much better fit than 32 bits.
I guess you are right, if you choose to completely ignore the millions of dollars that went into Amiga games. Thousands where made, some sold a million. In fact in the late 80's/early 90's the PC was the complete laughing stock of the gaming community (4096 color Amiga or 16 (fixed) color EGA PC?). It wasn't until Doom that people even started switching.
So, your children will bloat into 200 pound 15-year-olds on Wendy's and Burger King-fare, instead if McDonalds? Good for you! Solidarity, man!