I really don't think that microsoft would spend any time coming up with a snazzy longhorn bull logo when "longhorn" is only the code name. I mean, the leaked shots of Win95 didn't have the chicago skyline in the background, did they? For that reason I am guessing those pics are fake as well.
Hopefully they will learn their lesson this time and leave missiles on there for at least a while.
Back when the F-4 first came out in the sixties it didnt have a gun - they figured the newfangled missiles would take care of everything. Then the pilots actually flying the things in Nam came back screaming that they were getting into gun situations and all they had were these crappy sidewinders that would miss all the time. So they put a gun back on the F-4, but it took until the J version I believe.
I don't understand these people who think that the solution to all problems is just to get rid of regulation. This kind of thinking is fine for a situation like North America in 1750, where the population was tiny compared to the landmass, but it is just loony in a huge, modern society like the US.
For instance, there is the classic moral problem of the prisoner's dilemma, where all players converge to a mutually distructive outcome. The only solution to a PD problem is a common moral code or government regulation. We all know how easy it is to ensure everyone has a common moral code.
Apparently governmental regulation of health concerns infringes on liberty. Fine then, the Free Staters should be happy when their deregulated corporations think its great for the bottom line to dump toxic waste into the water supply. Or they decide to use their liberty to break strikes, etc., etc., etc.
What these people don't seem to get is that the increase of govermental regulation happened for a reason, and it was not because of some evil fat cats twiddling their mustaches in a back room. The possibility of a society such as they envision died with the industrial revolution, and its not ever coming back.
I am so sick and tired of this "back in the good ole' days [5 | 10 | 15 | 20] years ago we had real gameplay and we didn't need no stinkin' graphics" line. This is a simple case of nostalgia bred from remembering the greats and forgeting the crap. I guarantee 5 years from now we will be hearing the exact same line.
Does anyone who thinks this even PLAY the games that have come out in the past 5 years? In no particular order, I can think of Half-life, Counter-Strike, Starcraft, Baldurs Gate 2, No One Lives Forever, Soul Calibur, Age of Empires 2, The Sims (already mentioned), Black and White. Each one of those games brought gameplay in its respective genre to a new height, and it did it with great graphics in the bargain. There are always those games where gameplay is sacrificed to graphics, but those games are just another kind of crappy game. Crappy games are nothing new.
Each one of the independent claims in the RIM patent is very specific about the geometry of the keyboard. From the piture, the only one that the Turngsten W would come near is claim 23, which (among other things) claims
... the three sets of tilted keys are arranged into a QWERTY keyboard having at least three rows of keys, a top row, a middle row, and a bottom row, wherein the first set of keys is tilted at a first angle to a vertical reference and forms a top row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, the second set of keys is tilted to a second angle to the vertical reference and forms a middle row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, and the third set of keys is tilted to a third angle to the vertical reference and forms the bottom row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, wherein the first, second and third angles are equal;
Besides the fact that this could probably be shot down by prior art, all Palm would have to do (if they cared about being sued) would be to change the angle of the key rows a bit and they would be in the clear. Seems like a patent so specific as this one really shouldn't be a threat to innovation; all it really stops is exact BlackBerry clones.
But I agree with your first point, important moving parts on a thing that's supposed to ride in your pocket all day are a Bad Thing.
pixar uses the same hacks to generate their movies. Their renderman is a rasterizer, not a raytracer, just not a scanline rasterizer like hardware units. And they use shadow maps for their shadows, pretty much the same way that hardware does (they have deep shadow maps which arent supported in hardware yet, but the idea is basically the same).
As for the model complexity, high quality modeling is generally done using higher-order surfaces such as subdivision surfaces or NURBS. Something like renderman then subdivides these down into polygons at render time, which is basically the same capability that we are seeing in the next generation hardware. Not quite there yet, but its not a qualitative difference that you suggest.
All this is because doing things really right, with full raytracing and global illumination, is too expensive even for production off-line rendering.
So I suppose two wrongs make a right, then? They killed prisoners of war, which justifies us firebombing an entire city. Great logic, that.
Moreover, the Soviet offensive into Manchuria was the main reason for the end of Japanese resistance, according to Japanese records. The atom bombs contributed, but if wasting entire cities would have won the war, then Japan would have surrendered after Yokohama, Tokyo, etc. were razed.
The ends do not justify the means, eh? A nice cliche, but it rings hollow if you think about it for just a minute.
If you had the choice of defeating, say, Nazi Germany, but the price was that you had to kill innocent German civilians by firebombing them, would you do it? I'd like to hear you tell all the Jews in the extermination camps "sorry, the ends do not justify the means, tough shit for you."
Dude, 20,000 leagues under the sea means that Nemo and crew traveled 60,000 miles while submerged, not that they dived that far, however impressive that would be.
I'm going to guess that he got the money for the equipment off of a grant, and that those grant people wouldn't be too happy if he spent it taking private jets...
Not to mention that Steve Mann, of all people, would never spend extra money on a useless flight that he could spend on a new toy.
perhaps you are forgetting the (quite reasonable) possibility of finding life on mars.
The day we find extra-terrestrial life, whatever its form, is without question one of if not the most significant days in human history. That seems like reason enough to me.
I don't think this will actually be a problem, though I am not certain. But consider:
A physics friend tells me that the average velocity of a hydrogen molecule at STP is on the order of 1000 mph, or about 0.5 km/s. Assuming an oxygen molecule would have the same KE (since the temp is the same), the velocity of O2 would be around 0.12 km/s. Given that the escape velocity of Mars is 5 km/s, it should be able to hold an oxygen molecule easily.
Of course that's average, and the distribution may be totally whacked. But still there is more than an order of magnitude to work with there.
Re:so, you people want to build a gun eh?
on
Homemade Gauss Gun
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The armor piercing rounds of a standard American tank cannon (120mm Rheinmetall) have a muzzle velocity of around 1800m/s. The length of the barrel is around 3-4 m. So no, the payload would not shatter under the strain. And that's total bull about the air having the consistency of concrete. Like the previous poster said, we couldn't exactly expect missiles and rockets to fly at mach 4+ if they were slogging through concrete.
Oh yes and though the voltage inside your house may be 120v, the voltage in the lines outside is much, much higher. That's why they use AC, so they can transform it.
ebay doesn't sell EverQuest characters any more because Verant complained, but prior to that you could make some decent pocket money playing EQ. 1 plat in the game was worth about 1 US cent, IIRC. My roomate sold a character with a lot of good equipment for about $1000.
You can still sell items and game cash in several other games like Diablo 2 and Dark Age of Camelot. I guess the innovation in Entropy is that the monetary conversion is actually sponsored by the company, but practically this is nothing new.
A method to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves which comprises generating opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light.
Certainly not going to get shot down by prior art...
A good devil's advocate is has his facts straight and makes powerful arguments that make people think.
JonKatz has his facts confused and makes vapid arguments that make people flame.
Well, thanks for the response. That's a bit more helpful than the usual HASCS boilerplate.
I still feel that shoving all the undergraduates in a low bandwidth ghetto because of a few bad apples is unfair and rather obnoxious. I know of at least one faculty member who is a Morpheus user, who gets a free and clear connection from his office.
They need to come up with a viable long term solution, and the one they have now is not it. Regulating bandwidth by user seems to be the only fair system. Keep a running count of the amount of data going to and from a certain IP, and if it exceeds some set amount in a period of time, just cut off the connection. Yes this requires some new infrastructure, but it is a reasonable amount. Normal ISPs do this sort of metering all the time.
They instituted a packet shaping policy at my school (Harvard) last semester to kill file sharing apps. It apparently does a lot of packet dropping on ports above 1000. Unfortunately for me, it destroyed my beloved Counter-Strike (300+ pings, 30-40% packet loss etc), along with every single multiplayer game I have tried. Now no one can convince me that CS is a bandwidth hog - the netgraph shows an average usage of a little over 1kb/s. It was designed to be played over a 56k.
Problem is, no one at school wants to hear about the problem; they just accept the collateral damage.
Does anyone know why/if this must be the case? i don't really understand why the software (perhaps Packetshaper as mentioned above) ruins the ping times - shouldn't it just drop enough packets so a TCP connection stays at a slow transfer rate?
Also, shooters generally use UDP to send the state information. I imagine file transfer programs use TCP. Not knowing much about the software, would it be possible to shape TCP connections and not UDP? (this would require reading the header)
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Refering to the earlier windows longhorn post.
I really don't think that microsoft would spend any time coming up with a snazzy longhorn bull logo when "longhorn" is only the code name. I mean, the leaked shots of Win95 didn't have the chicago skyline in the background, did they? For that reason I am guessing those pics are fake as well.
Back when the F-4 first came out in the sixties it didnt have a gun - they figured the newfangled missiles would take care of everything. Then the pilots actually flying the things in Nam came back screaming that they were getting into gun situations and all they had were these crappy sidewinders that would miss all the time. So they put a gun back on the F-4, but it took until the J version I believe.
For instance, there is the classic moral problem of the prisoner's dilemma, where all players converge to a mutually distructive outcome. The only solution to a PD problem is a common moral code or government regulation. We all know how easy it is to ensure everyone has a common moral code.
Apparently governmental regulation of health concerns infringes on liberty. Fine then, the Free Staters should be happy when their deregulated corporations think its great for the bottom line to dump toxic waste into the water supply. Or they decide to use their liberty to break strikes, etc., etc., etc.
What these people don't seem to get is that the increase of govermental regulation happened for a reason, and it was not because of some evil fat cats twiddling their mustaches in a back room. The possibility of a society such as they envision died with the industrial revolution, and its not ever coming back.
Does anyone who thinks this even PLAY the games that have come out in the past 5 years? In no particular order, I can think of Half-life, Counter-Strike, Starcraft, Baldurs Gate 2, No One Lives Forever, Soul Calibur, Age of Empires 2, The Sims (already mentioned), Black and White. Each one of those games brought gameplay in its respective genre to a new height, and it did it with great graphics in the bargain. There are always those games where gameplay is sacrificed to graphics, but those games are just another kind of crappy game. Crappy games are nothing new.
As long as it is meant to blow things up it is perfectly legal, even if it does fry some eyeballs in the process.
Besides the fact that this could probably be shot down by prior art, all Palm would have to do (if they cared about being sued) would be to change the angle of the key rows a bit and they would be in the clear. Seems like a patent so specific as this one really shouldn't be a threat to innovation; all it really stops is exact BlackBerry clones.
But I agree with your first point, important moving parts on a thing that's supposed to ride in your pocket all day are a Bad Thing.
As for the model complexity, high quality modeling is generally done using higher-order surfaces such as subdivision surfaces or NURBS. Something like renderman then subdivides these down into polygons at render time, which is basically the same capability that we are seeing in the next generation hardware. Not quite there yet, but its not a qualitative difference that you suggest.
All this is because doing things really right, with full raytracing and global illumination, is too expensive even for production off-line rendering.
Moreover, the Soviet offensive into Manchuria was the main reason for the end of Japanese resistance, according to Japanese records. The atom bombs contributed, but if wasting entire cities would have won the war, then Japan would have surrendered after Yokohama, Tokyo, etc. were razed.
If you had the choice of defeating, say, Nazi Germany, but the price was that you had to kill innocent German civilians by firebombing them, would you do it? I'd like to hear you tell all the Jews in the extermination camps "sorry, the ends do not justify the means, tough shit for you."
Dude, 20,000 leagues under the sea means that Nemo and crew traveled 60,000 miles while submerged, not that they dived that far, however impressive that would be.
Not to mention that Steve Mann, of all people, would never spend extra money on a useless flight that he could spend on a new toy.
The day we find extra-terrestrial life, whatever its form, is without question one of if not the most significant days in human history. That seems like reason enough to me.
A physics friend tells me that the average velocity of a hydrogen molecule at STP is on the order of 1000 mph, or about 0.5 km/s. Assuming an oxygen molecule would have the same KE (since the temp is the same), the velocity of O2 would be around 0.12 km/s. Given that the escape velocity of Mars is 5 km/s, it should be able to hold an oxygen molecule easily.
Of course that's average, and the distribution may be totally whacked. But still there is more than an order of magnitude to work with there.
Oh yes and though the voltage inside your house may be 120v, the voltage in the lines outside is much, much higher. That's why they use AC, so they can transform it.
You can still sell items and game cash in several other games like Diablo 2 and Dark Age of Camelot. I guess the innovation in Entropy is that the monetary conversion is actually sponsored by the company, but practically this is nothing new.
US Patent 6025810:
A method to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves which comprises generating opposing magnetic fields having a plane of maximum force running perpendicular to a longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating a heat source along an axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the magnetic field; generating an accelerator parallel to and in close proximity to the heat source, thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light.
Certainly not going to get shot down by prior art...
A good devil's advocate is has his facts straight and makes powerful arguments that make people think. JonKatz has his facts confused and makes vapid arguments that make people flame.
Right. But that doesn't make for a ranting column.
I still feel that shoving all the undergraduates in a low bandwidth ghetto because of a few bad apples is unfair and rather obnoxious. I know of at least one faculty member who is a Morpheus user, who gets a free and clear connection from his office.
They need to come up with a viable long term solution, and the one they have now is not it. Regulating bandwidth by user seems to be the only fair system. Keep a running count of the amount of data going to and from a certain IP, and if it exceeds some set amount in a period of time, just cut off the connection. Yes this requires some new infrastructure, but it is a reasonable amount. Normal ISPs do this sort of metering all the time.
Problem is, no one at school wants to hear about the problem; they just accept the collateral damage.
Does anyone know why/if this must be the case? i don't really understand why the software (perhaps Packetshaper as mentioned above) ruins the ping times - shouldn't it just drop enough packets so a TCP connection stays at a slow transfer rate?
Also, shooters generally use UDP to send the state information. I imagine file transfer programs use TCP. Not knowing much about the software, would it be possible to shape TCP connections and not UDP? (this would require reading the header)