I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror. Even thinking about people being able to see me talking in a demur tone to a webcam just makes me shudder. Through the internet is nightmarish.
I think text blogs (not even pictures) are much better - it depends on your ability to describe things well, and it puts a comfortable anonymity for you *and* your reader. Who was it that said "After TV is in every american household, you will never see another president in a wheelchair"?
Granted, often a picture is worth a thousand words - but I don't think video blog is worth the bandwidth / storage area. Even pictures needs to be sorted out to the last 5% of the cream before they are put on magazines, etc - video is just nasty. Slide show, maybe - video, no. (Just how many people go back and watch, minute my minute, their old family videos? exactly)
And yes, I blog; pretty regularly too, so maybe I don't speak with authority, I have (some) experience in this
Let me ask you this: how many women (of childbearing age) do you know that have more than two children? How many women do you know that have less than two children? What is the average number of children per woman that you know? What if you limit it to women under 30 or 35?
come on, get real. Looking at people around you, which are all in a specific demographic group? Dont be silly. Besides, you can't use a few people you know to judge the outlook of a few billion people - people seem to underestimate the largeness of that number, for some reason...
I agree that in US, a lot of people that's been populating cities of late are empty nesters - which may account for your observations, but that doesn't mean jack on a global scale. China's population control is breaking down with social mobility; India is HAPPY to finally overtake china in the near future population wise; As you have recognized, some ethnic groups and people from some areas frequently have families the size of two digits.
If a family has 8 children (and you will see this a lot of places. A good example being Mexico), it takes FOUR families with zero children to make up for it. Moreover, even if people only have 2 children per family on average, the average lifespan is increasing now too, so you will still end up with more people. Of course, this is difficult to calculate where the equilibrium lies since we can't predict lifespan for people still alive - as it depends on medical advances in the future - though it is a little doubt that the lifespan will be increasing and not the reverse.
I find it highly unlikely that the world will ever see a decreasing population. There are exceptions - I think Japan has been fighting to keep the population delta positive; but apparently the only reason people will stop having children is when it is very expensive to do so, and that means raising the standard of living to a certain level. That will not be accomplished anytime in the forseeable future (this is all over the world, now), so don't count on it.
I remember reading in Asimov that robots can listen and understand speech, (not even going to go through the three rules, we are ever further from those) but was for a long while not fast enough to actually synthesize speech.
Only except that the exact opposite happened; On the old-end we got sound-blaster and the Dr. whoever that was able to talk back to you; on the weird-end the cookie monster (virus; erm, sort of) that will squeeze out "I wanna cookie" from your PC speaker, and on the new-and-fancy-end we got OS-X that will SING out your text a la church choir. (actually the OSX thing is really cool. give it a try sometimes)
But computers are not the nearest in understanding what we tell them. (or, they are not letting us know that they know, for the conspirists out there)
As for destroying ourselves, I dunno, maybe we havn't *got there* yet, supposedly, but how do you know that we are not terminally heading for that direction? And of course the pessimist can argue that we are all morally corrupt, etc. leaving that alone for now.
Funny, I remember reading in detail about Wing Commander (Close enough to F-117, I suppose), and they (Origin) were saying something to the extent of even on the hardest difficulty, the player's craft has buffed stats (on the order of 50%, was it? now remember the shields on Wing Commander *regenerates*). The reason was something like "You will never make it through otherwise, and yes you should trust us because we played this for too long." So, no, I wouldn't think that games are accurate, and I think there is a good reason for it - so that they are playable.
On the other hand, maybe MeckWarrior might be accurate, though. heh.
I have a 8100 and 512M; I disable paging altogether; It's just not worth it - I mean, HD access slow things down AND drains power. I see no reason why anything I do should not fit into the 512M space (I know there are people who needs more for other stuff - but come on it's a laptop). Anything that needs more would usually use its own page file anyway (UT2k3, photoshop, etc etc).
All rated at 1920x1200. Now, if you want cheap, Dell makes a FP2000 at 1600x1200 (20") that can usually be gotten for under 1000. Too bad they sell out faster than hot cakes.
so exactly how many people is this comment directed to? I mean, might we get as much as 1% of the readership checking out the graphs before certain unfortunate server suffers a horrible death / temporary trauma?
no kidding! I swear, kids are quick to adopt to everything. Maybe their brain is still empty so cramming stuff in is easy - or there is some osmosis going on that just sucks all the "how to use computer" knowledge right in with a swishing noise.
Heck, I swear if you taught a kid some assembly on an X86, and they found it remotely fun, they will be hacking out FFT algorithms under three monthes.
This afinity of kids with technology is amazing. It is a wonder why most of them don't apply it to piano lessons, though.
reminds me of a slashdot story a while back about a group of people that was able to get your data transfer by looking at your (external) modem's LED.
I mean, same thing except, well, faster...
The cool part, though, is that now the router's status LEDs are actually good for something. You can theoretically face two routers toward eachother and that's IT! done! until some idiot walks between them. ha!
but really though, The thing with radio we seem to not be able to do with light yet is frequency modulation. If we can do that, I think we can push some very serious bandwidth through this spectrum.
The data-hiding possibilities are immense. you can technically send humongous amouts of data through a TV set, even, if it was made of as many LEDs as there are pixels, and by varying the each LED just ever-so-slighly. You can be watching the TV for pictures, and your Aibo would be sitting beside you, downloading zillions of bytes of data, and gaining consciousness (sorry just watched the animatrix, heh).
So these are the people that also brought you Naked News and this?
The only logical combination would be remote-sex and telerobotic masturbation...
Actually, on the point of telerobotic-sex. How about telerobotic cooking? so maybe my mom can cook me an omlete that I can't get so often, since I live some 8000 miles away? Or have famous french chefs cook you some *real* french dinner? Or, heck, have the shit on Iron Chef telerobotically cooked in your local telerobotic restaurant / community food-center, so we can taste, and not just dool over, the fine ass dishes they make on the show? I'd pay some serious cash for the food network to be broadcasting such kinds of data. I wouldn't think it's difficult to record it and have the same meal prepared when you need that exotic whatever to save your life (say, when you get the munchies, or your pregnant wife gets the cravings, etc). Still have to buy the ingredients though...
Peace in Iraq has left 2 million civilians dead. Give war a chance.
Offtopic, but I have seen your sig quite a few times now, and I have a little karma saved up...
I am not sure if it escapes people's memory, but the US did give war a chance. Remember the war a little while back in Iraq? What did that leave us with? In fact, what did ANY WAR that US has fought since WWII leave us with?
So, that's not leaving a very good track record. Before anybody start spewing off stuff about Afganastan being a successful lil excursion, I'd like to remind everyone that a) the US trained the taliban - something people tend to forget conveniently for some reason, and b) Bush's energy certainly does not seem to be focused on Afgan restoration, or locating Bin Laden, who is still at large, after nearly a year and half being supposedly the most wanted man on the planet.
Even if we assumed that the US can get some kind of act together and indeed do things properly - overthrow Saddam, rebild Iraq, etc. It is also something to mention that muslim countries often were never accustomed to democracy and it isn't something that's wanted anyhow - there are examples of citizens voting themselves a new king, whose whole campain was "I will do away with this democracy shit if I get elected." That's not to mention US's nonchalance toward other non-democratic countries, a good example being, say, Kuwait.
Moreover, I am sure most people are familiar with the UN weapon's inspector's stance of "golly, nuclear weapons is not exactly an easy thing to hide, and we can't find any of them" right? Even US's "strong" allie, UK, admits that from the evidence available, it is quite impossible for Sadam to get anything near nukes for quite some time (several election terms, if you don't mind).
Now, back to the point - If US was able to do things properly, and for the right reasons, does the war has to start, NOW? When the stock market takes a plunge at every mention of war? when the economy is not seen as recovering? Spending a few hundred billion waging a war for no logical reasons is, frankly, beyond description.
The only real intention I can conclude about Bush is that he is either incredibly stupid and don't realize this, or he realizes this but don't care as long as there is good for himself and his few good friends. Enron execs gets off to a nice retirement with 200 millions but MCI / A.Anderson execs gets jail time? Bush simply does not come off as the most morally straight person, which, again, puts doubts into me that he is doing this for moral reasons.
So, yeah, I would give war a chance, if only this president has demonstrated either some capability of analysis, foreign policy, morality, etc. You know, presidential stuff. It's a shame that he runs head-first into this and seems so sure of himself that a large portion just goes with the flow and assumes that this is leadership, when it's in fact something awful and repugnent, be it stupidity or corruption.
They do not need to get scrubbed. If they are a critical care surgeon, by golly, they may have their end right in their den at their personal residence. Even if the surgeon was in a most unsanitary condition at the time of need, that would not be a factor.
for some odd reason this reminded me of a scene in Swordfish where a certain person had to do certain tasks in a most unfavorable (erm, favorable?) position.
medical profession do have it the best eh? being able to save somebody's life and be get some lovin' all at the same time - and get paid alot. For other professions it's just not logistically possible. Maybe except porn actors, but I'd hardly qualify that as "saving lives."
That SMART-1 is a solar-plasma-hall-effect propelled... thing? (I don't know what to call it. "technology demo" would be most fitting)
Anyway, with US short a shuttle, I'd think there should be more of europe stepping up to support the ISS; you know, the *international* space station? of which they are also a part of?
Granted, it'd be the day when you see muslim (like, say, from Saudi) or chinese (as in, from Beijing) flying to the ISS on a regular basis, so maybe it's not that international...
If anybody watched the movie about treasure of Caliostro; in the end, you can see the interpol (Internatioal Police, supposedly) cars, but they have "åY¼çZè¦åY" or somesuch written on the side - which is actually "Saitama Police" - Saitama being a Japanese prefecture north of Tokyo.
Now, this was supposedly in the small but influential *country* of Caliostro, which is supposedly in Europe or something, so I couldn't help but chuckle.
ahem, now a piece of *useful* information has been squeezed out of your brain, I feel a bit better.
okay, sorry to ruin all the fun here, but if they have chips *that* small that will serve pages, why not put one in one of those stomache-camera-pills, along with an RFID type low-power broadcaster, so you can webcam your interior?
sorry I find no other reason why you'd do this kind of things.
If it's all "nice touches," I think most 3D realms stuff was better - Shadow warrior had all the "confuscious says" thing when you find a secret area, and I need not to comment on Duck Nuke'm.
(True, they were after the original Doom, but while I commend id for their engines and fancy technology, I don't really think they made the best GAMES, when everything else is taken into consideration, even if you give them time to work out the game design aspect. Unreal / Half-life was a much better single player game than anything id has put out. But I don't dispute carmack's ability in pumping out engines.)
would have loved to, but in my dormitory (this was highschool) did not allow in room connections of anykind beside power-plugs (yup, no phone either).
so we had a lot of people willing to play but no way of connecting. In the end we rolled out some barrels of 50ft null-modem cables and pulled it across the hall every-which-way.
by the time Descent 3 was out I realized that i am so out of practice that I won't ever make it multiplayer. people were just getting too damn good with the mercury missiles and gauss cannons. Besides that I went through the whole three games using joystick, but that really doesn't cut it in the end, maybe.
Never got far with the space orb; too weak for the learning curve... sigh.
Ever wonder why the only two nations with massive stocks of ICBMs are the ones that had advanced space programs?
Building inter-continental missiles and shooting people into space go hand-in-hand. IIRC china wasn't so gun-ho until back in the first stages of Bush administration that he wanted to do a missile-shield thingy.
Going to the mood will certainly be a great part national pride, but don't underestimate the amount of scientific / engineering data china will get out of it for other purposes.
OTOH, some 60% of the US nuclear stockpile are in submarines. maybe that's why china has bought a few dozen russian supercavitation torpedos (skylrov or something)?
I think china is always on the watchout for the contingency of getting into a fight with US, especially with taiwan still kinda in limbo. Should play itself out in about half a century, methinks.
In 2000, Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1 million prize for proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Interestingly, disproof of the Riemann hypothesis (e.g., by using a computer to actually find a zero off the critical line), does not earn the $1 million award.
An example that operates on the exact opposite principle of awarding prizes is the recent battle between Kasprov and Deep Jr: He gets 500k regardless, and 300k extra if he wins, 200k extra if he loses, or 250k if draw (i think the last case took place).
Talk about being stingy! I'd think that disproving the Riemann Hypothesis would be equally interesting as proving it - There are soooo many theorms out there that basically begins with "We assume that the Riemann Hypothesis to be true, and so forth so forth."
Have anybody ever held a VHS tape and simply marvel at how much data it can (theoretically) hold? I mean, DVD is 4.7G (probably more) for a movie, compressed as much as 40:1. That means that each VHS tape can theoretically hold close to 1/5 of a TERABYTE. taking off for some redundency, let's say 10X, I should still get 15G out of a 2 dollar tape.
I remember there was people who made "VCR backup solutions," too. Anybody knows what happened to them?
before anybody gets too negative, remember I am talking 10X redundancy for 15G. Heck it's sure a lot cheaper than DVD-RW right now, so from price/GB point of view, I think it still kicks DVD's butt, even if higher redundancy was needed.
how about "we don't know yet but you bet something is gonna happen mighty fast after we get another space race."
Rumors has (have it? please correct my grammar) it that china wants to goto mars too - now, they are probably willing to send somebody over, bone-loss and radiation damage not-withstanding. US can't do the same; we will see some interesting stuff happen.
To be honest, I'd go even if it was just a one-way trip. I might get a darwin award, but you'd be damn sure that
1) I will populate BEFORE leaving, and
2) fame, baby, and not the 15-minute kind.
Never tried continuum; but anyhow. "better gameplay" is probably too subjective to be used, no? I liked descent's gameplay much more than Doom / Doom2 / Heretic / etc etc; I really thought that it became awfully boring after a while. Unreal was good, though, and Quake II okay. MDK was excellent if you want to count it in the FPS category.
Back then we used to multiplay over a null-modem cable. Warcraft 2 and Descent. I liked Descent more, personally. Being able to use the 3D effectively - hiding / flanking / dodging was a most challenging and exciting aspect that most FPS (even today, to be honest) don't offer.
as for the "why doom" question. I was actually thinking "because Quake (II) won't support so damn many monsters," after reading / thinking about it for a while.
I don't think Virtua Racing was texture mapped, more like colored polygons. Highly doubt that any game before that which I don't know about would be pumping out texture mapped 3D worlds, simply on a "limited processing power" perspective.
Anyway, I think Descent was innovative and notable because
1) you are not limited to 2D of movement / game space. Think of it as in FPS terms the added element of being able to snipe somebody from above. 3D is not worth anything without you being able to utilize the 3D, from a game perspective
2) The graphics were impressive, especially considering lack of hardware acceleration. Remember how awful QuakeII looked without hardware accel? I think for the amount of hardware they had to work with, it is impressive to say the least. If using texture is not new, it was impressive that they used texture of that size, or that many of it, animated sometimes; whatever.
3) game elements were 3D. You have any idea how long I waited for stuff (especially monsters) to be look-at-able from the sides without the stupid 8-directional sprite thing going?
4) FMV was niiice; maybe not as impressive as some of the later wing commander series (ha!), Descent 2 had some very beautifully rendered FMV. IIRC it took other games quite a few years before similar quality ones was around. Not really "new," but done extremely well.
Anyhoo. I don't think 3D gaming has improved that much fundamentally since Descent. I do believe that it was too advanced for its times; so many FPS kids can't handle the real 6-d (3 strafe + 3 rotation) controls and gave up. I mean, these days, the graphics got better, the level got more complex, and there are possibly more game-modes, but I can't imagine something that the original didn't *have* in some tremendous way. I am comparing with FPS, since there arn't exactly a category to fit the game into...
I am sorry but to me, really, Doom was just the "step up" from Wolfenstein, nothing revolutionary. Not ditching Carmack or nothing, but sprite graphics with horrible problem of perspective distortion (not as apparent in Doom, but in D2 and Heretic when you can look up) really doesn't cut it by that time.
Descent was Out just a little later, but was 100% 3D, in ways that not even today's 3D games may be necessarily be able to compare to (in the sense of complete freedom of direction and orientation). By that time, it took id soft quite sometime to come out with a reasonable replacement, Quake, and that's after Doom2 and heretic came out based on the original Doom engine.
Seriously though, I don't understand why people all don't get their facts straight when coming to 3D gaming. Descent, AFAIK, was the first *real* 3D game, and it ran on 486s with 8M of ram; afterwards, looking at anything based on the sprite graphics engine just makes you go "ack."
On the other hand, Quake, not to mention Quake 2 engines are all open-source now. Why is he sticking with DOOM, or all things?
Slashdot Mirror
I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror. Even thinking about people being able to see me talking in a demur tone to a webcam just makes me shudder. Through the internet is nightmarish.
I think text blogs (not even pictures) are much better - it depends on your ability to describe things well, and it puts a comfortable anonymity for you *and* your reader. Who was it that said "After TV is in every american household, you will never see another president in a wheelchair"?
Granted, often a picture is worth a thousand words - but I don't think video blog is worth the bandwidth / storage area. Even pictures needs to be sorted out to the last 5% of the cream before they are put on magazines, etc - video is just nasty. Slide show, maybe - video, no. (Just how many people go back and watch, minute my minute, their old family videos? exactly)
And yes, I blog; pretty regularly too, so maybe I don't speak with authority, I have (some) experience in this
Actually I typo'd my post, I really meant "I'd think there should be more *NEWS* of europe stepping up... ..."
Everybody seem to be pissed at me on this, but - what in the world would an international shuttle standard would have to do with it either way around?
come on, get real. Looking at people around you, which are all in a specific demographic group? Dont be silly. Besides, you can't use a few people you know to judge the outlook of a few billion people - people seem to underestimate the largeness of that number, for some reason...
I agree that in US, a lot of people that's been populating cities of late are empty nesters - which may account for your observations, but that doesn't mean jack on a global scale. China's population control is breaking down with social mobility; India is HAPPY to finally overtake china in the near future population wise; As you have recognized, some ethnic groups and people from some areas frequently have families the size of two digits.
If a family has 8 children (and you will see this a lot of places. A good example being Mexico), it takes FOUR families with zero children to make up for it. Moreover, even if people only have 2 children per family on average, the average lifespan is increasing now too, so you will still end up with more people. Of course, this is difficult to calculate where the equilibrium lies since we can't predict lifespan for people still alive - as it depends on medical advances in the future - though it is a little doubt that the lifespan will be increasing and not the reverse.
I find it highly unlikely that the world will ever see a decreasing population. There are exceptions - I think Japan has been fighting to keep the population delta positive; but apparently the only reason people will stop having children is when it is very expensive to do so, and that means raising the standard of living to a certain level. That will not be accomplished anytime in the forseeable future (this is all over the world, now), so don't count on it.
I remember reading in Asimov that robots can listen and understand speech, (not even going to go through the three rules, we are ever further from those) but was for a long while not fast enough to actually synthesize speech.
Only except that the exact opposite happened; On the old-end we got sound-blaster and the Dr. whoever that was able to talk back to you; on the weird-end the cookie monster (virus; erm, sort of) that will squeeze out "I wanna cookie" from your PC speaker, and on the new-and-fancy-end we got OS-X that will SING out your text a la church choir. (actually the OSX thing is really cool. give it a try sometimes)
But computers are not the nearest in understanding what we tell them. (or, they are not letting us know that they know, for the conspirists out there)
As for destroying ourselves, I dunno, maybe we havn't *got there* yet, supposedly, but how do you know that we are not terminally heading for that direction? And of course the pessimist can argue that we are all morally corrupt, etc. leaving that alone for now.
Funny, I remember reading in detail about Wing Commander (Close enough to F-117, I suppose), and they (Origin) were saying something to the extent of even on the hardest difficulty, the player's craft has buffed stats (on the order of 50%, was it? now remember the shields on Wing Commander *regenerates*). The reason was something like "You will never make it through otherwise, and yes you should trust us because we played this for too long." So, no, I wouldn't think that games are accurate, and I think there is a good reason for it - so that they are playable.
On the other hand, maybe MeckWarrior might be accurate, though. heh.
I have a 8100 and 512M; I disable paging altogether; It's just not worth it - I mean, HD access slow things down AND drains power. I see no reason why anything I do should not fit into the 512M space (I know there are people who needs more for other stuff - but come on it's a laptop). Anything that needs more would usually use its own page file anyway (UT2k3, photoshop, etc etc).
First, let's try a SONY 23"
Then, we have a Samsung 24"
Of course we can't forget the Apple 23"
All rated at 1920x1200. Now, if you want cheap, Dell makes a FP2000 at 1600x1200 (20") that can usually be gotten for under 1000. Too bad they sell out faster than hot cakes.
so exactly how many people is this comment directed to? I mean, might we get as much as 1% of the readership checking out the graphs before certain unfortunate server suffers a horrible death / temporary trauma?
Heck, I swear if you taught a kid some assembly on an X86, and they found it remotely fun, they will be hacking out FFT algorithms under three monthes.
This afinity of kids with technology is amazing. It is a wonder why most of them don't apply it to piano lessons, though.
reminds me of a slashdot story a while back about a group of people that was able to get your data transfer by looking at your (external) modem's LED.
I mean, same thing except, well, faster...
The cool part, though, is that now the router's status LEDs are actually good for something. You can theoretically face two routers toward eachother and that's IT! done! until some idiot walks between them. ha!
but really though, The thing with radio we seem to not be able to do with light yet is frequency modulation. If we can do that, I think we can push some very serious bandwidth through this spectrum.
The data-hiding possibilities are immense. you can technically send humongous amouts of data through a TV set, even, if it was made of as many LEDs as there are pixels, and by varying the each LED just ever-so-slighly. You can be watching the TV for pictures, and your Aibo would be sitting beside you, downloading zillions of bytes of data, and gaining consciousness (sorry just watched the animatrix, heh).
The only logical combination would be remote-sex and telerobotic masturbation...
Actually, on the point of telerobotic-sex. How about telerobotic cooking? so maybe my mom can cook me an omlete that I can't get so often, since I live some 8000 miles away? Or have famous french chefs cook you some *real* french dinner? Or, heck, have the shit on Iron Chef telerobotically cooked in your local telerobotic restaurant / community food-center, so we can taste, and not just dool over, the fine ass dishes they make on the show? I'd pay some serious cash for the food network to be broadcasting such kinds of data. I wouldn't think it's difficult to record it and have the same meal prepared when you need that exotic whatever to save your life (say, when you get the munchies, or your pregnant wife gets the cravings, etc). Still have to buy the ingredients though...
Offtopic, but I have seen your sig quite a few times now, and I have a little karma saved up...
I am not sure if it escapes people's memory, but the US did give war a chance. Remember the war a little while back in Iraq? What did that leave us with? In fact, what did ANY WAR that US has fought since WWII leave us with?
So, that's not leaving a very good track record. Before anybody start spewing off stuff about Afganastan being a successful lil excursion, I'd like to remind everyone that a) the US trained the taliban - something people tend to forget conveniently for some reason, and b) Bush's energy certainly does not seem to be focused on Afgan restoration, or locating Bin Laden, who is still at large, after nearly a year and half being supposedly the most wanted man on the planet.
Even if we assumed that the US can get some kind of act together and indeed do things properly - overthrow Saddam, rebild Iraq, etc. It is also something to mention that muslim countries often were never accustomed to democracy and it isn't something that's wanted anyhow - there are examples of citizens voting themselves a new king, whose whole campain was "I will do away with this democracy shit if I get elected." That's not to mention US's nonchalance toward other non-democratic countries, a good example being, say, Kuwait.
Moreover, I am sure most people are familiar with the UN weapon's inspector's stance of "golly, nuclear weapons is not exactly an easy thing to hide, and we can't find any of them" right? Even US's "strong" allie, UK, admits that from the evidence available, it is quite impossible for Sadam to get anything near nukes for quite some time (several election terms, if you don't mind).
Now, back to the point - If US was able to do things properly, and for the right reasons, does the war has to start, NOW? When the stock market takes a plunge at every mention of war? when the economy is not seen as recovering? Spending a few hundred billion waging a war for no logical reasons is, frankly, beyond description.
The only real intention I can conclude about Bush is that he is either incredibly stupid and don't realize this, or he realizes this but don't care as long as there is good for himself and his few good friends. Enron execs gets off to a nice retirement with 200 millions but MCI / A.Anderson execs gets jail time? Bush simply does not come off as the most morally straight person, which, again, puts doubts into me that he is doing this for moral reasons.
So, yeah, I would give war a chance, if only this president has demonstrated either some capability of analysis, foreign policy, morality, etc. You know, presidential stuff. It's a shame that he runs head-first into this and seems so sure of himself that a large portion just goes with the flow and assumes that this is leadership, when it's in fact something awful and repugnent, be it stupidity or corruption.
for some odd reason this reminded me of a scene in Swordfish where a certain person had to do certain tasks in a most unfavorable (erm, favorable?) position.
medical profession do have it the best eh? being able to save somebody's life and be get some lovin' all at the same time - and get paid alot. For other professions it's just not logistically possible. Maybe except porn actors, but I'd hardly qualify that as "saving lives."
That SMART-1 is a solar-plasma-hall-effect propelled... thing? (I don't know what to call it. "technology demo" would be most fitting)
Anyway, with US short a shuttle, I'd think there should be more of europe stepping up to support the ISS; you know, the *international* space station? of which they are also a part of?
Granted, it'd be the day when you see muslim (like, say, from Saudi) or chinese (as in, from Beijing) flying to the ISS on a regular basis, so maybe it's not that international...
posting late, but:
If anybody watched the movie about treasure of Caliostro; in the end, you can see the interpol (Internatioal Police, supposedly) cars, but they have "åY¼çZè¦åY" or somesuch written on the side - which is actually "Saitama Police" - Saitama being a Japanese prefecture north of Tokyo.
Now, this was supposedly in the small but influential *country* of Caliostro, which is supposedly in Europe or something, so I couldn't help but chuckle.
ahem, now a piece of *useful* information has been squeezed out of your brain, I feel a bit better.
okay, sorry to ruin all the fun here, but if they have chips *that* small that will serve pages, why not put one in one of those stomache-camera-pills, along with an RFID type low-power broadcaster, so you can webcam your interior?
sorry I find no other reason why you'd do this kind of things.
If it's all "nice touches," I think most 3D realms stuff was better - Shadow warrior had all the "confuscious says" thing when you find a secret area, and I need not to comment on Duck Nuke'm.
(True, they were after the original Doom, but while I commend id for their engines and fancy technology, I don't really think they made the best GAMES, when everything else is taken into consideration, even if you give them time to work out the game design aspect. Unreal / Half-life was a much better single player game than anything id has put out. But I don't dispute carmack's ability in pumping out engines.)
would have loved to, but in my dormitory (this was highschool) did not allow in room connections of anykind beside power-plugs (yup, no phone either).
so we had a lot of people willing to play but no way of connecting. In the end we rolled out some barrels of 50ft null-modem cables and pulled it across the hall every-which-way.
by the time Descent 3 was out I realized that i am so out of practice that I won't ever make it multiplayer. people were just getting too damn good with the mercury missiles and gauss cannons. Besides that I went through the whole three games using joystick, but that really doesn't cut it in the end, maybe.
Never got far with the space orb; too weak for the learning curve... sigh.
Ever wonder why the only two nations with massive stocks of ICBMs are the ones that had advanced space programs?
Building inter-continental missiles and shooting people into space go hand-in-hand. IIRC china wasn't so gun-ho until back in the first stages of Bush administration that he wanted to do a missile-shield thingy.
Going to the mood will certainly be a great part national pride, but don't underestimate the amount of scientific / engineering data china will get out of it for other purposes.
OTOH, some 60% of the US nuclear stockpile are in submarines. maybe that's why china has bought a few dozen russian supercavitation torpedos (skylrov or something)?
I think china is always on the watchout for the contingency of getting into a fight with US, especially with taiwan still kinda in limbo. Should play itself out in about half a century, methinks.
In 2000, Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1 million prize for proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Interestingly, disproof of the Riemann hypothesis (e.g., by using a computer to actually find a zero off the critical line), does not earn the $1 million award.
An example that operates on the exact opposite principle of awarding prizes is the recent battle between Kasprov and Deep Jr: He gets 500k regardless, and 300k extra if he wins, 200k extra if he loses, or 250k if draw (i think the last case took place).
Talk about being stingy! I'd think that disproving the Riemann Hypothesis would be equally interesting as proving it - There are soooo many theorms out there that basically begins with "We assume that the Riemann Hypothesis to be true, and so forth so forth."
Have anybody ever held a VHS tape and simply marvel at how much data it can (theoretically) hold? I mean, DVD is 4.7G (probably more) for a movie, compressed as much as 40:1. That means that each VHS tape can theoretically hold close to 1/5 of a TERABYTE. taking off for some redundency, let's say 10X, I should still get 15G out of a 2 dollar tape.
I remember there was people who made "VCR backup solutions," too. Anybody knows what happened to them?
before anybody gets too negative, remember I am talking 10X redundancy for 15G. Heck it's sure a lot cheaper than DVD-RW right now, so from price/GB point of view, I think it still kicks DVD's butt, even if higher redundancy was needed.
Rumors has (have it? please correct my grammar) it that china wants to goto mars too - now, they are probably willing to send somebody over, bone-loss and radiation damage not-withstanding. US can't do the same; we will see some interesting stuff happen.
To be honest, I'd go even if it was just a one-way trip. I might get a darwin award, but you'd be damn sure that
1) I will populate BEFORE leaving, and
2) fame, baby, and not the 15-minute kind.
Never tried continuum; but anyhow. "better gameplay" is probably too subjective to be used, no? I liked descent's gameplay much more than Doom / Doom2 / Heretic / etc etc; I really thought that it became awfully boring after a while. Unreal was good, though, and Quake II okay. MDK was excellent if you want to count it in the FPS category.
Back then we used to multiplay over a null-modem cable. Warcraft 2 and Descent. I liked Descent more, personally. Being able to use the 3D effectively - hiding / flanking / dodging was a most challenging and exciting aspect that most FPS (even today, to be honest) don't offer.
as for the "why doom" question. I was actually thinking "because Quake (II) won't support so damn many monsters," after reading / thinking about it for a while.
I don't think Virtua Racing was texture mapped, more like colored polygons. Highly doubt that any game before that which I don't know about would be pumping out texture mapped 3D worlds, simply on a "limited processing power" perspective.
Anyway, I think Descent was innovative and notable because
1) you are not limited to 2D of movement / game space. Think of it as in FPS terms the added element of being able to snipe somebody from above. 3D is not worth anything without you being able to utilize the 3D, from a game perspective
2) The graphics were impressive, especially considering lack of hardware acceleration. Remember how awful QuakeII looked without hardware accel? I think for the amount of hardware they had to work with, it is impressive to say the least. If using texture is not new, it was impressive that they used texture of that size, or that many of it, animated sometimes; whatever.
3) game elements were 3D. You have any idea how long I waited for stuff (especially monsters) to be look-at-able from the sides without the stupid 8-directional sprite thing going?
4) FMV was niiice; maybe not as impressive as some of the later wing commander series (ha!), Descent 2 had some very beautifully rendered FMV. IIRC it took other games quite a few years before similar quality ones was around. Not really "new," but done extremely well.
Anyhoo. I don't think 3D gaming has improved that much fundamentally since Descent. I do believe that it was too advanced for its times; so many FPS kids can't handle the real 6-d (3 strafe + 3 rotation) controls and gave up. I mean, these days, the graphics got better, the level got more complex, and there are possibly more game-modes, but I can't imagine something that the original didn't *have* in some tremendous way. I am comparing with FPS, since there arn't exactly a category to fit the game into...
I am sorry but to me, really, Doom was just the "step up" from Wolfenstein, nothing revolutionary. Not ditching Carmack or nothing, but sprite graphics with horrible problem of perspective distortion (not as apparent in Doom, but in D2 and Heretic when you can look up) really doesn't cut it by that time.
Descent was Out just a little later, but was 100% 3D, in ways that not even today's 3D games may be necessarily be able to compare to (in the sense of complete freedom of direction and orientation). By that time, it took id soft quite sometime to come out with a reasonable replacement, Quake, and that's after Doom2 and heretic came out based on the original Doom engine.
Seriously though, I don't understand why people all don't get their facts straight when coming to 3D gaming. Descent, AFAIK, was the first *real* 3D game, and it ran on 486s with 8M of ram; afterwards, looking at anything based on the sprite graphics engine just makes you go "ack."
On the other hand, Quake, not to mention Quake 2 engines are all open-source now. Why is he sticking with DOOM, or all things?