The V5 was overly power hungry (aka edselish ahead of it's time type stuff) requiring it's own PSU connection. This scared some people as did it's quad processors.
Unless you're a really hardcore 3dfx fanboy, you never had a Voodoo 5 with four processors. The Voodoo 4 4500 had one processor (I bought one just after 3dfx collapsed for damn cheap and put it in a K6/2 400 machine, did the job just fine. Hell, it did a half-decent job in my Athlon 2000, before I finally drank the nVidia kool-aid...). The Voodoo 5 5500 had two. The Voodoo 5 6500 had four, and didn't just need its own PSU connection, it needed its own PSU. They appear on eBay from time to time, having been passed around enthusiasts in the years since techs leaving 3dfx labs took the prototypes and demo units with them.
I gather those beasts get awesome FPS in glQuake;-)
... and yeah, it seemed terribly vague. I went through counting the number of ways it ignored basic physics: conservation of momentum, check. Principle of relativity, check. Simple high-school resolution of forces along different axes, check. Microwave photons moving at near lightspeed, check.
But what really got me fuming wasn't the author's total failure to notice that any of these were an issue - which I'll grant got me quite livid, being as bad as a football report from someone who doesn't know the offside rule. That it violates basic physics is bad, and should certainly have been seriously raised as an issue in the article, but if it works then that's just too bad for basic physics.
What upset me most of all was the lack of imagination. What if this thing works as advertised? Oh, then we can have planes that work a bit differently. Hovercars, perhaps. For the love of God, man, it's a reactionless drive! Strap a few to a nuclear reactor and go to Saturn and back in a week! A rocket that doesn't have to carry vast tanks of reaction mass around with it? The whole galaxy would open up!
I'll buy this week's New Scientist in the hope of some sort of grovelling apology for this appalling mess of an article. Or at least of a proper flaming of the editors in the letters pages. And then I think I'll see if I can't get a reliable supply of Scientific American - it's quite scarce in UK newsagents but always has some really solid science in it.
Ummm.. Nintendo is already churning out systems for a launch date AFTER the PS3's! Shouldn't they already have things "finalized", or is it just me?
The Wiimote is central to Nintendo's plans for the Wii. The PS3 controller, on the other hand... isn't so critical. Nintendo want the Wii to be to the Gamecube what the DS was to the GBA. Sony, OTOH, want the PS3 to be to the PS2 what the PS2 was to the PS1.
If Sony have to ship with standard-issue PS2 controllers, so be it; the motion sensor jobs will ship later, some people will buy them, and if they don't it won't matter too much because most games won't really use them. If Nintendo don't have the Wiimote ready, though, it's a show-stopper; from what I've seen, most Wii games are going wholeheartedly for the Wiimote. To play them with a Gamecube pad, while possible, would be to miss the point.
Somehow, through digital representations of Legos they captured the feeling of Star Wars.
Lego is the perfect medium for Star Wars.
Consider why it is we remember Star Wars so favourably. Star Wars gave us a universe painted in broad, bold strokes, but with vast expanses of the unknown. We follow an innocent farmboy into a galactic war, leaving his narrow horizons to change the world, learning to use the Force to reconstruct reality itself... The film shows us the outlines of a magnificent world, with endless possibility. So much detail, implying so much more than we ever saw, and a mysterious backstory we never got to hear the whole of and had to speculate and build it for ourselves. For the eight-year-olds we were, this all adds up to the greatest movie ever.
Now, what about Lego? Again, we were eight years old, and playing with this toy that comes with instructions for how to make this one plane or spaceship or whatever it might be... but has pictures of a few other things you might build with it instead. And of course you do. And in time it gets broken up and goes into the sack with the rest of the Lego and next thing you know it's something else entirely, something that's yours.
To my mind, rebuilding my Lego as I wanted it, into something based on the original design but definitely my own, is the same impulse as building my own backstory to Star Wars - of how Darth Vader hunted down the Jedi, how Yoda and Obi-Wan managed to hide themselves and the children, of General Kenobi and Bail Organa and the Clone Wars, of how Anakin fell, of the long and proud history of the clan so famous for their command of the Force that they gained the title of Skywalker. And of course it's the same impulse as picking up a stick and waving it around going 'whoom... whoooooooom.... whooom!' It's taking what you're given and expanding upon it, making it your own. It's creativity.
I might add that my own imagination of the untold stories of Star Wars did not involve midichlorians, or Gungans, or virgin births, or anyone going 'yippee' for any reason whatever. Which perhaps is why even Revenge of the Sith, which was actually pretty good, will never be as well loved. It was beautiful, sure, but it was like that one guy who glued his Lego together. There's just nothing there to have any fun with.
This software won't have a chance against SimCity until they implement some decent disasters (Tornado, Nuclear Meltdown, Godzilla) that the user can unleash upon the city while laughing.
Triggering disasters manually from the menu was a bit... cheap. My favourite approach was always zoning high-density commercial areas right by the end of the main runway at the airport.
Microsoft won't be applying the DRM... then end users will be. They're the ones who received the music, are bound by it's license, and acted in a way that violated the license.
Contributory infringement. Same way they got Napster.
Can you argue that Microsoft is providing a system *intended* to break a CC license?
Sure. Assuming we're discussing Zune's DRM'ing of anything shared wirelessly, the intention is, clearly, to prevent the free sharing and dissemination of media regardless of the creator's intentions, just as Napster's intention was, equally clearly, to enable the free sharing and dissemination of media regardless of the creator's intentions. If Napster was guilty of contributory infringement of the rights of creators who did not want their works freely distributed, then clearly Microsoft with Zune are guilty of contributory infringement of the rights of creators who do want their works so distributed.
Napster violated one licence (the You Can't Copy This At All Ever licence) and Microsoft are set to violate another (the Creative Commons licence). Either both licences are deserving of legal protection or neither are.
When I tried it from a motor glider in a fairly remote area (few cells, large areas) I got a snotty letter from Orange saying that roaming at 50kts between very non-adjacent cells made their network shit itself. I wish I'd kept the letter...
1) Get an untraceable PAYG mobile
2) Load it onto a remote-controlled plane
3) Fly it around over central London at lunchtime
4) ???
5) Try to explain to Hastur and Ligur exactly how this constitutes
6) Profit!
Yet again showing that those of us who care about this stuff are in an extreme minority. We delude ourselves every time we believe that our concerns are going to be taken up by the general populace. It makes me wonder. Will the Wii actually be successful, or is that just a small group of vocal fanboys? Will HP actually get anything other than a slap on the wrist? What about Net Neutrality? Oops.
Net crazes can be successful, though.
For instance, according to the 2001 UK census, there leading religions were:
1) Christianity
2) Islam
3) Hinduism
4) Buddhism
5) Jediism
6) Sikhism
Alas, the formal statistical analyses counted 'Jedi' as another variant of 'Other', but nonetheless the result was in many of the papers: an astonishing number of Britons follow the ways of the Force.
If you can get people to put a joke religion on a census form out of Star Wars fandom, contempt for religion in general or just a plain sense of fun, it seems quite possible that you could get people to vote for a joke party on the off-chance that they'd get unlimited free movies and music out of it.
So, according to SPEWS, we should switch ISPs. What SPEWS doesn't take into account is that large businesses can't just switch ISPs *like that*. Most of the time, you have a contract, and in our case, we have 4 more years of that contract.
You signed a five-year contract with a spam-friendly ISP whose abuse department you freely admit are idiotic, and you now express surprise that you're having problems with email delivery?
Next time around, when choosing an ISP, if reliable email is mission-critical make sure it's one that actually knows its arse from its elbow when it comes to mail admin work.
Here in Britain, Sony have already admitted they prefer selling to the rest of the world, and won't let us have any until after the Christmas sales rush, which has pissed off a LOT of gamers. The big question here is will Nintendo also treat us like second-class citizens and hand the British games market to MS on a plate by giving them a second uncontested Christmas?
My guess: not a chance. Everyone at Nintendo must have been jumping up and down in glee when Sony decided they'd have to miss Christmas. Sony wouldn't have done that unless their shortages and delays had absolutely forced them to do so. AFAIK Nintendo have no such problems.
Toy manufacturers don't miss Christmas lightly, after all.
It is a proven working tactic: unite the people against a common enemy (like Argentina against England over Falklands/Maldivas island) so there is a "us vs. them" feeling
As I read it, the Falklands invasion was a bit of a desperate move by Galtieri. As the ruler of a military dictatorship, his position depended upon the prestige of the army. He felt his control beginning to slip - people no longer respected the Argentine military as perhaps they once had. So: pick a fight with a major power, but one so far away it probably won't make too much of a fuss, over a symbolically important but otherwise bloody useless scrap of rock.
Unfortunately for him, Thatcher's prestige was also on the slip at the time, and probably the best thing any British prime minister can ever do for their popularity is win a war.
Now, note what became of Galtieri's regime after losing the war with the UK. If you're basing your regime on military prestige and jingoism, whatever the hell you do don't lose a war. Now, take a look at Iraq. And for that matter at Afghanistan in recent months.
Heh. My phones (I carry around two because I've never been bothered to transfer my old PAYG number to the contract service) have as their ringtones Raspberry Heaven from Azumanga Daioh and Tank from Cowboy Bebop.
Oh, and Soramimi Cake as the alarm.
For a while I had the battle theme from the Both Of You, Dance Like You Want To Win! episode of Evangelion on there, but it got boring fast. And back when my local geek circle was busy working through a dubious Taiwanese boxset of Dragonball Z that someone had bought in, I had We Gotta Pawaa and two other guys had We Were Angels and Cha La, Head Cha La going on.
So, yeah. Hooray for anime ringtones. Distinctive enough so you know it's definitely your phone. Sound perfectly ordinary to normal people. Signal your true nature to other otaku. Totally the way to go.
Violence in games is so pervasive that even seemingly non-violent games like Animal Crossing... include eliminates of warfare as their core gameplay.
Animal Crossing? Remind me where the violence is there? I got attacked by bees once, and I've been bitten by mosquitoes, but that's about it. Unless you're an animal rights obsessive for whom the fishing constitutes torture of an innocent creature...
Saddam was selling oil way to cheap, so we didn't like him.
You grossly oversimplify; actually, the situation was a lot more complex than that. Saddam was selling oil way too cheap, in euros, to the French. So we didn't like him.
Spinning Star? What range of rotation rates occurs in low-mass stars, How much pressure does it relieve at the core at a minimum? (Is there any real occurance of a low mass star with absolutely no rotation?)
The rotation of a star would presumably be a result of its original collapse. Conservation of angular momentum. Hence the really enormously fast rotation of extremely collapsed objects like pulsars.
A low-mass star, then, would probably spin relatively slowly. Less mass means less angular momentum. Since we're looking at protostars, they wouldn't have had time to exchange angular momentum with other systems, so I wouldn't expect to find any that weren't rotating at all either.
Umm... Read more fellow. They use Plutonium... Not something I would want in my basment
Hell, I would. RTGs are inefficient at generating electricity maybe, but I reckon they'd make a fine nuclear water heater. Free hot water, no more central heating bills.
I just wouldn't feel comfortable with you having it in your basement. Dirty bombs, as you say. Nasty.
The way I see it, the Solar System has 8 Major Planets (4 terrestrial, 4 gas giants), at least 50 Dwarf Planets (Pluto, Ceres, 2003 UB313, etc) that are round due to self-gravitation
If we're going to go down this road, I'd say the Solar System has 4 major planets (gas giants), 53 dwarf planets (Pluto, Ceres, Earth, Xena, Mercury, Quaoar etc)...
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're a really hardcore 3dfx fanboy, you never had a Voodoo 5 with four processors. The Voodoo 4 4500 had one processor (I bought one just after 3dfx collapsed for damn cheap and put it in a K6/2 400 machine, did the job just fine. Hell, it did a half-decent job in my Athlon 2000, before I finally drank the nVidia kool-aid...). The Voodoo 5 5500 had two. The Voodoo 5 6500 had four, and didn't just need its own PSU connection, it needed its own PSU. They appear on eBay from time to time, having been passed around enthusiasts in the years since techs leaving 3dfx labs took the prototypes and demo units with them.
I gather those beasts get awesome FPS in glQuake ;-)
But what really got me fuming wasn't the author's total failure to notice that any of these were an issue - which I'll grant got me quite livid, being as bad as a football report from someone who doesn't know the offside rule. That it violates basic physics is bad, and should certainly have been seriously raised as an issue in the article, but if it works then that's just too bad for basic physics.
What upset me most of all was the lack of imagination. What if this thing works as advertised? Oh, then we can have planes that work a bit differently. Hovercars, perhaps. For the love of God, man, it's a reactionless drive! Strap a few to a nuclear reactor and go to Saturn and back in a week! A rocket that doesn't have to carry vast tanks of reaction mass around with it? The whole galaxy would open up!
I'll buy this week's New Scientist in the hope of some sort of grovelling apology for this appalling mess of an article. Or at least of a proper flaming of the editors in the letters pages. And then I think I'll see if I can't get a reliable supply of Scientific American - it's quite scarce in UK newsagents but always has some really solid science in it.
The Wiimote is central to Nintendo's plans for the Wii. The PS3 controller, on the other hand... isn't so critical. Nintendo want the Wii to be to the Gamecube what the DS was to the GBA. Sony, OTOH, want the PS3 to be to the PS2 what the PS2 was to the PS1.
If Sony have to ship with standard-issue PS2 controllers, so be it; the motion sensor jobs will ship later, some people will buy them, and if they don't it won't matter too much because most games won't really use them. If Nintendo don't have the Wiimote ready, though, it's a show-stopper; from what I've seen, most Wii games are going wholeheartedly for the Wiimote. To play them with a Gamecube pad, while possible, would be to miss the point.
Lego is the perfect medium for Star Wars.
Consider why it is we remember Star Wars so favourably. Star Wars gave us a universe painted in broad, bold strokes, but with vast expanses of the unknown. We follow an innocent farmboy into a galactic war, leaving his narrow horizons to change the world, learning to use the Force to reconstruct reality itself... The film shows us the outlines of a magnificent world, with endless possibility. So much detail, implying so much more than we ever saw, and a mysterious backstory we never got to hear the whole of and had to speculate and build it for ourselves. For the eight-year-olds we were, this all adds up to the greatest movie ever.
Now, what about Lego? Again, we were eight years old, and playing with this toy that comes with instructions for how to make this one plane or spaceship or whatever it might be... but has pictures of a few other things you might build with it instead. And of course you do. And in time it gets broken up and goes into the sack with the rest of the Lego and next thing you know it's something else entirely, something that's yours.
To my mind, rebuilding my Lego as I wanted it, into something based on the original design but definitely my own, is the same impulse as building my own backstory to Star Wars - of how Darth Vader hunted down the Jedi, how Yoda and Obi-Wan managed to hide themselves and the children, of General Kenobi and Bail Organa and the Clone Wars, of how Anakin fell, of the long and proud history of the clan so famous for their command of the Force that they gained the title of Skywalker. And of course it's the same impulse as picking up a stick and waving it around going 'whoom... whoooooooom.... whooom!' It's taking what you're given and expanding upon it, making it your own. It's creativity.
I might add that my own imagination of the untold stories of Star Wars did not involve midichlorians, or Gungans, or virgin births, or anyone going 'yippee' for any reason whatever. Which perhaps is why even Revenge of the Sith, which was actually pretty good, will never be as well loved. It was beautiful, sure, but it was like that one guy who glued his Lego together. There's just nothing there to have any fun with.
You can get a Lego boxset of 'Jabba's Palace'.
Leia in the gold bikini: hot. Leia in the gold bikini in Lego: deeply disturbing.
Triggering disasters manually from the menu was a bit... cheap. My favourite approach was always zoning high-density commercial areas right by the end of the main runway at the airport.
Skyscraper goes up... plane goes up... CRAAASSSSHHHH!...
"No, I'm not going to rezone. Why do you ask?"
Skyscraper gets rebuilt... plane goes up... CRAAASSSSHHHH!....
That, or gratuitously shooting down the SimCopter.
Contributory infringement. Same way they got Napster.
Can you argue that Microsoft is providing a system *intended* to break a CC license?
Sure. Assuming we're discussing Zune's DRM'ing of anything shared wirelessly, the intention is, clearly, to prevent the free sharing and dissemination of media regardless of the creator's intentions, just as Napster's intention was, equally clearly, to enable the free sharing and dissemination of media regardless of the creator's intentions. If Napster was guilty of contributory infringement of the rights of creators who did not want their works freely distributed, then clearly Microsoft with Zune are guilty of contributory infringement of the rights of creators who do want their works so distributed.
Napster violated one licence (the You Can't Copy This At All Ever licence) and Microsoft are set to violate another (the Creative Commons licence). Either both licences are deserving of legal protection or neither are.
Forget Norway!
Kenyaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
1) Get an untraceable PAYG mobile
2) Load it onto a remote-controlled plane
3) Fly it around over central London at lunchtime
4) ???
5) Try to explain to Hastur and Ligur exactly how this constitutes
6) Profit!
Net crazes can be successful, though.
For instance, according to the 2001 UK census, there leading religions were:
1) Christianity
2) Islam
3) Hinduism
4) Buddhism
5) Jediism
6) Sikhism
Alas, the formal statistical analyses counted 'Jedi' as another variant of 'Other', but nonetheless the result was in many of the papers: an astonishing number of Britons follow the ways of the Force.
If you can get people to put a joke religion on a census form out of Star Wars fandom, contempt for religion in general or just a plain sense of fun, it seems quite possible that you could get people to vote for a joke party on the off-chance that they'd get unlimited free movies and music out of it.
You signed a five-year contract with a spam-friendly ISP whose abuse department you freely admit are idiotic, and you now express surprise that you're having problems with email delivery?
Next time around, when choosing an ISP, if reliable email is mission-critical make sure it's one that actually knows its arse from its elbow when it comes to mail admin work.
Yeah, right. I have one word to say to you on that subject: blue!
I said BLUE. What, you deaf or something? BLUE! BLUE! BLUUUUE!
My guess: not a chance. Everyone at Nintendo must have been jumping up and down in glee when Sony decided they'd have to miss Christmas. Sony wouldn't have done that unless their shortages and delays had absolutely forced them to do so. AFAIK Nintendo have no such problems.
Toy manufacturers don't miss Christmas lightly, after all.
As I read it, the Falklands invasion was a bit of a desperate move by Galtieri. As the ruler of a military dictatorship, his position depended upon the prestige of the army. He felt his control beginning to slip - people no longer respected the Argentine military as perhaps they once had. So: pick a fight with a major power, but one so far away it probably won't make too much of a fuss, over a symbolically important but otherwise bloody useless scrap of rock.
Unfortunately for him, Thatcher's prestige was also on the slip at the time, and probably the best thing any British prime minister can ever do for their popularity is win a war.
Now, note what became of Galtieri's regime after losing the war with the UK. If you're basing your regime on military prestige and jingoism, whatever the hell you do don't lose a war. Now, take a look at Iraq. And for that matter at Afghanistan in recent months.
Oops.
Oh, and Soramimi Cake as the alarm.
For a while I had the battle theme from the Both Of You, Dance Like You Want To Win! episode of Evangelion on there, but it got boring fast. And back when my local geek circle was busy working through a dubious Taiwanese boxset of Dragonball Z that someone had bought in, I had We Gotta Pawaa and two other guys had We Were Angels and Cha La, Head Cha La going on.
So, yeah. Hooray for anime ringtones. Distinctive enough so you know it's definitely your phone. Sound perfectly ordinary to normal people. Signal your true nature to other otaku. Totally the way to go.
Animal Crossing? Remind me where the violence is there? I got attacked by bees once, and I've been bitten by mosquitoes, but that's about it. Unless you're an animal rights obsessive for whom the fishing constitutes torture of an innocent creature...
You grossly oversimplify; actually, the situation was a lot more complex than that. Saddam was selling oil way too cheap, in euros, to the French. So we didn't like him.
I'd vote for that all right.
Hell, it could even be argued that the UK should have four. Well, three and six-thirtyseconds...
Or possibly they were aware that the British gutter press have some seriously heavyweight libel lawyers on their side.
Except for the Private Eye, of course, which can't ever get hold of a decent libel lawyer for love or money...
Ask anyone who's been sent to prison for growing and selling plants.
The rotation of a star would presumably be a result of its original collapse. Conservation of angular momentum. Hence the really enormously fast rotation of extremely collapsed objects like pulsars.
A low-mass star, then, would probably spin relatively slowly. Less mass means less angular momentum. Since we're looking at protostars, they wouldn't have had time to exchange angular momentum with other systems, so I wouldn't expect to find any that weren't rotating at all either.
Which is why the Americans keep giving the bastards money.
Hell, I would. RTGs are inefficient at generating electricity maybe, but I reckon they'd make a fine nuclear water heater. Free hot water, no more central heating bills.
I just wouldn't feel comfortable with you having it in your basement. Dirty bombs, as you say. Nasty.
The legal system in Florida has credibility?
If we're going to go down this road, I'd say the Solar System has 4 major planets (gas giants), 53 dwarf planets (Pluto, Ceres, Earth, Xena, Mercury, Quaoar etc)...