I wonder how have the experiences of programming things like the DOOM / QUAKE engine helped in this project? I mean, I am very sure that it is a great asset to be an all-around great programmer for the armadillo project, but I cannot relate how being able to squeeze frames and triangles out of a graphics card helps when dealing with rocket related... stuff; Maybe writing the physics engine and the collision detection code and being able to debug well helped? was there any direct relationships between the day job and the hobby? How did they help eachother?
I honestly cannot imagine what profound thing one have to say in a blog that full HTML style markups are necessary. After all, a blog is a primarily *verbal* medium of communication, and books have done perfectly well as plain text for thousands of years - Reading the ASCII version of shakespeare won't diminish any of his glory, but instead should amplify upon it as an example of mastery of the language and expression. And I can only imagine what did people do without HTML / XML to markup the bible / Koran / teachings of Budda.
If you want to get fancy, put in symbols that you absolutely need by using UTF-8 (sadly some blogs *ahem*slashdot*ahem* don't support this), and you should be alright until the end of time as far as backing up easily, editing easily, and near-universal portability.
the liquid you want is called Flourinert. It's ~500 dollars per gallon. If you know people in chip-manufacture industry, you might be able to sneak away with some used ones (capital equipment has their flourinert changed every few monthes, and the used up ones are pretty much the same as new ones anyway (or not different enough to make up a difference of 500 dollars).
viscosity of oil is pretty bad and flourinert is ok until about -40 degrees.
or you can, i don't know, buy liquid cooled system like ValuStar TZ that had liquid cooling for almost a year now? (Granted, maybe japan only)
So, can we say that MS copies off apple, but apple actually is copying off of NEC? kind of a hard fact to accept, but innovation would seem to be, erm, not so alive in the US these days...
so, your hypothetical 50GB storage PDA of the future (let's assume for a moment that PDA has a future, which I doubt) costs how much in the future? and how much now?
see you can't say "we will need it one day therefore we need it now." That's bullshit because the economics don't come out right. 2GB card costs a (hefty) premium today, and there are not so many conveniences that justifies this premium. After all, if the darn thing was free then we'll all stock up with hundreds! "What would I need this for" is actually a shortened question for "What would I need this for, at this price?"
I think for the price premium, I cannot find any good reason why I would spend so much money for it - SD / MMC card based cameras are mostly storing stuff in JPEG (every camera that assumes to be pro-oriented and stores raw has compact flash for storage, even SONY!), so for cameras it's moot. for PDAs, sure - but like I said, do you really need 2G of storage on the go for the price of another PDA or even a fully funcitonal music player that stores 10x as much?
i know you are kidding, but there are fuel free research. some almost exact replicas of Verne's canon. Of course, since you have to travel through dense atmosphere for a _long_time_, 7.9km/s is not nearly enough.
And the payload would go through something like 10,000G through the acceleration phase. I think they are suggesting that electronics can generally handle this, which is surprising to me.
AND the payload would burn through about five inches of ablative.
I think the current technical problem they are facing is to get the huge acceleration out of the canon - because chemical charges can not ever get you the muzzle velocity, probably ever. So now you are in the realm of railguns. don't expect to see payloads shot up this way for a few years. =)
but, like i said, there are ideas floating around about it.
Chinese can lauch multiple satellites too, you know. However, once a rocket bites the dust, several satellites go with it instead of one.
While indeed that no *small* chinese launchers can do this, there are really not such a big market for satellites small enough that several fit into a Vega.
Can't argue with the military aspects, though. I don't think EU trusts the US pushing military satelites into space either these days...
Last time I drove by some highschools, I located some pockets that could fit rhode island...
Probably off topic, but if you need a good camera, AND going to japan - it might be a wild thought and all, but maybe you should consider buying one in japan where most of the major camera manufactures are based...
(in case you actually do this: haggle the yodobashi-camera guys. more likely than not, they WILL negociate)
Funny that I am typing this in Moz right now, BUT:
using FireFox + ThunderBird may take longer to start total and take a bit more memory overhead, but when Moz browser dies, it always takes mail with it - and on more than one occasion it has taken some long mail I have composed, but not yet saved in drafts or sent, with it too.
That said, I like Moz browser's inline search functionality so I can't get used to firefox. And does anybody else notice that the context menu for tabs on the two apps are different? (one has close tab on top and the other on bottom) It's a pain when you reflexively click the wrong one.
I also don't like firefox's lack of Ctrl-Enter in new tab thing, as well as some auto-appending www /.com thing. (try typing slashdot.org into firefox and it will try to go to http://www.slashdot.org.com/.really is a more mature product.
Since I saw the announcement on TV last night, being in japan and all, i figure i can add some comments from the footage of the actual thing.
the 40" screen is damn thin. i mean, it must have been maybe 2cm. it was amazingly sexy in that regard.
however, upon closer inspection of the screen (the camera-crew took the pains to zoom in onto the screen), there are alignment issues between pixel blocks of the screen and there are dead pixels. What i am guessing is that to get the 40" they created blocks of pixels at a time, and at the edges there are visible chasms maybe 30% pixel width.
I am not sure about the dead pixel.
anyway it's impressive but the immaturity of the technology really shows.
Regardless of how much Ford (the original) made cheap cars, he knew that it would mean jack if his employee's can't afford them. He hence paid his employees very well.
There is no point for a company to be cutting costs if all it does is starve the consumers - it will create a vicious cycle whereby the more you cut costs, the smaller your market.
Granted, you are opening a new market in the countries where you now do most of your hiring - BUT then it's still a comparative small market because your prices are aimed at consumers with assumed income several times that people in whose countries the products are made.
Isn't this just another great example of the great human fault of discounting the future?
a gallon burned is a gallon burned, that i grant. however the emissions are not necessarily the same. mentally compare an old dodge truck that gets incomplete combustion and burns oil and gets 20mpg, versus a modern BMW with variable just-about-everything engine control that also gets 20mpg.
too many of you are confusing between environmentally harmful emissions (CO, NOx, HC chains) and CO2 emissions, indeed CO2 is considered a culprit for global warming, but you won't get rid of it for a few years yet until we all switch to hydrogen - but even then you are still shifting the CO2 emission points to the powerplants.
in any case, due to the highly regulated load of the hybrid gasoline engine, the operating parameters can be finely controlled so you achieve optimum combustion and therefore low emissions, while a directly gas-driven car must deal with different driving conditions, and the engine computer cannot always keep the emissions down.
so you might get the same milage, but no, your emissions are most definitely not going to be the same. i realize the money you spend on gas might be the same, but just because of that it does not translate to the same amount of harm to the environment.
It's better than GT because the controller is about the same size as the steering wheel on my car right?
but seriously though, GT was so good because it was so, real. even if you cut the graphics to half it's current quality, the controls, the way cars handle, once you do GT and touch any other racer, the way the cars move feel fake and alien - and that's what makes GT special.
Heck, compared to today's standards, GT(s) for the original PS had graphics that can be rivaled by a 4 year old and a box of crayons, but they were damn fun nontheless.
at the same time, i remember EA licensed porsche exclusively. how does MS get around this? by paying EA a lot of money? I'm curious.
hmm? vodafone V601SH is the precessor to V602SH and it has 640x480 (actually 480x640 technically), i'd be damn surprised if the new model doesn't sport the fanciness.
QVGA is the size of the video you can take with it, not the brilliantly beautiful screen's size.
however a few more years of minituarisation and we'll see cheap phones with good battery life and the regular PDA features such as calendar, internet access, decent addressbook, mp3 player, java VM, email client etc. in a form factor around that of today's regular phones.
you don't need to wait a few years. pretty much every thing you listed is in my old-ass docomo phone and it's older than sand. i don't think it's the waiting but rather, damn, why does cellphone technology suck so bad in the US (it's more like a complain / observation than a question - many explanations of said suckage has already been posted here)
vodafone had a TV-tuner phone for a while now. you might get around watching it in open space, but in buildings and trains it's _very_ flaky, and in subway you can forget about it altogether.
all the display usits i saw had such shitty reception that the a few clued shops (this even excludes the huge yodobashi-camera in shinjuku) connected the phone to in-house cable which is further connected to land cable or big antenna on top of building with a modified adaptor.
i wonder why it wasn't a popular sell =)
i mean, compared to bad-reception tv versus catching up on emailing your buddies / browsing the web (in full colour) on your cellphone, both available for ages, which would you choose?
The Sharp models have very nice displays that boast 640x480 resolution on a 3" screen. you have to realize that people use it for email / web browsing (well, maybe more mail than web for vodafone service) more than they use their phone for a phone, since calls are so expensive comparatively.
it also comes with 2mpix digital camera, which, coupled with the screen, is a very nice treat.
the phone isn't too expensive when you factor in the various contract-length discounts. It comes out to be less than 200USD for the top of line vodafone has to offer, and consider how much a slim 2mpix digicam alone would cost you, i don't think it's a terrible price.
comments on the article is that, though: isn't this kind of old news? vodafone TV has been around for like half a year now and the reception isn't terrific - especially, erm, on subways; the pet-emotion-translator has also been about 8 monthes or so if not longer. it's an add-on 32MB SD card software package, though, so didn't try it.
phones with digicams that comes with optical zoom was probably first seen on one of the earlier model panasonic FOMA phones (for NTT docomo) and that was like two years ago.
hmm, but maybe i'm just spoiled bathing in the abundant supply of unnecessary toys readily available in japan.
1) He was named "Paris Lane"? like some bastard cross between Paris Hilton and Lois Lane but about 10E8 less sexy?
2) This is low-incoming housing, right? where did he get money for a gun if the taxpayers are helping him pay rent?
3) does dead people have actual rights regarding privacy? I mean, pretty sure that there are laws against defiling a corpse, but suicide is considered felon in like 9 states anyway, and I am pretty sure felons get less rights than regular people... still beats getting your body dragged through the streets and buried at a crossroad w/ a stake through the heart, though (old english punishment for suicide)
4) erm... this appeared on a... pornography website?
I don't care if you mod me up or mod me down, somebody at least answer the questions
Just on the trademark thing, I think because of obvious reasons, the Mozilla icon in Japan is a fat "mo" in hiragana. I thought I'd point it out because it seems ironic that it's not Touhou (big japanese media company that distributes most of movies, good anime, and more importantly the Godzilla series) isn't doing the rademark legal actions...
(I mean, I am all for Moz, but the irony is unignorable)
Case in point #1: NEC (in japan) has a water cooled computer now on sale to the teeming millions. water runs over the CPU and goes into a radiator to the back of the case. the radiator sits just outside of the power supply fan, which turns at an incredibly low speed (kinda like the apple G5 fans). Damn quiet.
Case in point #2: Mitsubishi, after not building any planes since WWII (zero fighter was by them, after all), entered the business-jet arena. The first thing they did was to design a new shape of turbine intake blades using computer simulation that cuts something like 10dB off the engine noise compared to traditioal strait blade intakes.
So, instead of brute forcing one's way around the noise problem, there are more elegant ways!
What they mean is that current TCP protocol becomes a bottleneck at high bandwidth applications, so a new protocol is designed that would be efficient up to ~6000xDSL speed (just a pot-shot guess, up to 9Gb/S?). It has nothing to do with pushing data down the POTS line, just that if one day you had a fat pipe to your house, this new protocol would make use of it properly unlike today's TCP.
It's a stupid comparison, but I guess they expect people to not have an idea what 9Gb/S is...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how have the experiences of programming things like the DOOM / QUAKE engine helped in this project? I mean, I am very sure that it is a great asset to be an all-around great programmer for the armadillo project, but I cannot relate how being able to squeeze frames and triangles out of a graphics card helps when dealing with rocket related... stuff; Maybe writing the physics engine and the collision detection code and being able to debug well helped? was there any direct relationships between the day job and the hobby? How did they help eachother?
/. should do another interview with J.C...
dammit
I honestly cannot imagine what profound thing one have to say in a blog that full HTML style markups are necessary. After all, a blog is a primarily *verbal* medium of communication, and books have done perfectly well as plain text for thousands of years - Reading the ASCII version of shakespeare won't diminish any of his glory, but instead should amplify upon it as an example of mastery of the language and expression. And I can only imagine what did people do without HTML / XML to markup the bible / Koran / teachings of Budda.
If you want to get fancy, put in symbols that you absolutely need by using UTF-8 (sadly some blogs *ahem*slashdot*ahem* don't support this), and you should be alright until the end of time as far as backing up easily, editing easily, and near-universal portability.
viscosity of oil is pretty bad and flourinert is ok until about -40 degrees.
or you can, i don't know, buy liquid cooled system like ValuStar TZ that had liquid cooling for almost a year now? (Granted, maybe japan only)
So, can we say that MS copies off apple, but apple actually is copying off of NEC? kind of a hard fact to accept, but innovation would seem to be, erm, not so alive in the US these days...
so, your hypothetical 50GB storage PDA of the future (let's assume for a moment that PDA has a future, which I doubt) costs how much in the future? and how much now?
see you can't say "we will need it one day therefore we need it now." That's bullshit because the economics don't come out right. 2GB card costs a (hefty) premium today, and there are not so many conveniences that justifies this premium. After all, if the darn thing was free then we'll all stock up with hundreds! "What would I need this for" is actually a shortened question for "What would I need this for, at this price?"
I think for the price premium, I cannot find any good reason why I would spend so much money for it - SD / MMC card based cameras are mostly storing stuff in JPEG (every camera that assumes to be pro-oriented and stores raw has compact flash for storage, even SONY!), so for cameras it's moot. for PDAs, sure - but like I said, do you really need 2G of storage on the go for the price of another PDA or even a fully funcitonal music player that stores 10x as much?
i know you are kidding, but there are fuel free research. some almost exact replicas of Verne's canon. Of course, since you have to travel through dense atmosphere for a _long_time_, 7.9km/s is not nearly enough.
And the payload would go through something like 10,000G through the acceleration phase. I think they are suggesting that electronics can generally handle this, which is surprising to me.
AND the payload would burn through about five inches of ablative.
I think the current technical problem they are facing is to get the huge acceleration out of the canon - because chemical charges can not ever get you the muzzle velocity, probably ever. So now you are in the realm of railguns. don't expect to see payloads shot up this way for a few years. =)
but, like i said, there are ideas floating around about it.
Chinese can lauch multiple satellites too, you know. However, once a rocket bites the dust, several satellites go with it instead of one.
While indeed that no *small* chinese launchers can do this, there are really not such a big market for satellites small enough that several fit into a Vega.
Can't argue with the military aspects, though. I don't think EU trusts the US pushing military satelites into space either these days...
Now seems a good time to introduce flashblock. Very ironic, isn't it?
Last time I drove by some highschools, I located some pockets that could fit rhode island...
Probably off topic, but if you need a good camera, AND going to japan - it might be a wild thought and all, but maybe you should consider buying one in japan where most of the major camera manufactures are based...
(in case you actually do this: haggle the yodobashi-camera guys. more likely than not, they WILL negociate)
do a little dance while at it.
Funny that I am typing this in Moz right now, BUT:
.com thing. (try typing slashdot.org into firefox and it will try to go to http://www.slashdot.org.com/.really is a more mature product.
using FireFox + ThunderBird may take longer to start total and take a bit more memory overhead, but when Moz browser dies, it always takes mail with it - and on more than one occasion it has taken some long mail I have composed, but not yet saved in drafts or sent, with it too.
That said, I like Moz browser's inline search functionality so I can't get used to firefox. And does anybody else notice that the context menu for tabs on the two apps are different? (one has close tab on top and the other on bottom) It's a pain when you reflexively click the wrong one.
I also don't like firefox's lack of Ctrl-Enter in new tab thing, as well as some auto-appending www /
Since I saw the announcement on TV last night, being in japan and all, i figure i can add some comments from the footage of the actual thing.
the 40" screen is damn thin. i mean, it must have been maybe 2cm. it was amazingly sexy in that regard.
however, upon closer inspection of the screen (the camera-crew took the pains to zoom in onto the screen), there are alignment issues between pixel blocks of the screen and there are dead pixels. What i am guessing is that to get the 40" they created blocks of pixels at a time, and at the edges there are visible chasms maybe 30% pixel width.
I am not sure about the dead pixel.
anyway it's impressive but the immaturity of the technology really shows.
Regardless of how much Ford (the original) made cheap cars, he knew that it would mean jack if his employee's can't afford them. He hence paid his employees very well.
There is no point for a company to be cutting costs if all it does is starve the consumers - it will create a vicious cycle whereby the more you cut costs, the smaller your market.
Granted, you are opening a new market in the countries where you now do most of your hiring - BUT then it's still a comparative small market because your prices are aimed at consumers with assumed income several times that people in whose countries the products are made.
Isn't this just another great example of the great human fault of discounting the future?
a gallon burned is a gallon burned, that i grant. however the emissions are not necessarily the same. mentally compare an old dodge truck that gets incomplete combustion and burns oil and gets 20mpg, versus a modern BMW with variable just-about-everything engine control that also gets 20mpg.
too many of you are confusing between environmentally harmful emissions (CO, NOx, HC chains) and CO2 emissions, indeed CO2 is considered a culprit for global warming, but you won't get rid of it for a few years yet until we all switch to hydrogen - but even then you are still shifting the CO2 emission points to the powerplants.
in any case, due to the highly regulated load of the hybrid gasoline engine, the operating parameters can be finely controlled so you achieve optimum combustion and therefore low emissions, while a directly gas-driven car must deal with different driving conditions, and the engine computer cannot always keep the emissions down.
so you might get the same milage, but no, your emissions are most definitely not going to be the same. i realize the money you spend on gas might be the same, but just because of that it does not translate to the same amount of harm to the environment.
same problem with diesel, by the way.
It's better than GT because the controller is about the same size as the steering wheel on my car right?
but seriously though, GT was so good because it was so, real. even if you cut the graphics to half it's current quality, the controls, the way cars handle, once you do GT and touch any other racer, the way the cars move feel fake and alien - and that's what makes GT special.
Heck, compared to today's standards, GT(s) for the original PS had graphics that can be rivaled by a 4 year old and a box of crayons, but they were damn fun nontheless.
at the same time, i remember EA licensed porsche exclusively. how does MS get around this? by paying EA a lot of money? I'm curious.
hmm? vodafone V601SH is the precessor to V602SH and it has 640x480 (actually 480x640 technically), i'd be damn surprised if the new model doesn't sport the fanciness.
QVGA is the size of the video you can take with it, not the brilliantly beautiful screen's size.
you don't need to wait a few years. pretty much every thing you listed is in my old-ass docomo phone and it's older than sand. i don't think it's the waiting but rather, damn, why does cellphone technology suck so bad in the US (it's more like a complain / observation than a question - many explanations of said suckage has already been posted here)
vodafone had a TV-tuner phone for a while now. you might get around watching it in open space, but in buildings and trains it's _very_ flaky, and in subway you can forget about it altogether.
all the display usits i saw had such shitty reception that the a few clued shops (this even excludes the huge yodobashi-camera in shinjuku) connected the phone to in-house cable which is further connected to land cable or big antenna on top of building with a modified adaptor.
i wonder why it wasn't a popular sell =)
i mean, compared to bad-reception tv versus catching up on emailing your buddies / browsing the web (in full colour) on your cellphone, both available for ages, which would you choose?
The Sharp models have very nice displays that boast 640x480 resolution on a 3" screen. you have to realize that people use it for email / web browsing (well, maybe more mail than web for vodafone service) more than they use their phone for a phone, since calls are so expensive comparatively.
it also comes with 2mpix digital camera, which, coupled with the screen, is a very nice treat.
the phone isn't too expensive when you factor in the various contract-length discounts. It comes out to be less than 200USD for the top of line vodafone has to offer, and consider how much a slim 2mpix digicam alone would cost you, i don't think it's a terrible price.
comments on the article is that, though: isn't this kind of old news? vodafone TV has been around for like half a year now and the reception isn't terrific - especially, erm, on subways; the pet-emotion-translator has also been about 8 monthes or so if not longer. it's an add-on 32MB SD card software package, though, so didn't try it.
phones with digicams that comes with optical zoom was probably first seen on one of the earlier model panasonic FOMA phones (for NTT docomo) and that was like two years ago.
hmm, but maybe i'm just spoiled bathing in the abundant supply of unnecessary toys readily available in japan.
1) He was named "Paris Lane"? like some bastard cross between Paris Hilton and Lois Lane but about 10E8 less sexy?
2) This is low-incoming housing, right? where did he get money for a gun if the taxpayers are helping him pay rent?
3) does dead people have actual rights regarding privacy? I mean, pretty sure that there are laws against defiling a corpse, but suicide is considered felon in like 9 states anyway, and I am pretty sure felons get less rights than regular people... still beats getting your body dragged through the streets and buried at a crossroad w/ a stake through the heart, though (old english punishment for suicide)
4) erm... this appeared on a... pornography website?
I don't care if you mod me up or mod me down, somebody at least answer the questions
Just before the Nationalists fled mainland china to Taiwan, they pre-charged everyone something like 50-years worth of taxes.
Let's just say that for everybody that paid, it wasn't a very good investment.
(That said, it's not that people had a choice in the matter or anything)
I am holding out for the Phantom...
I just KNOW it will have Duke Nuk'em Forever bundled.
(it's a joke. laugh)
Just on the trademark thing, I think because of obvious reasons, the Mozilla icon in Japan is a fat "mo" in hiragana. I thought I'd point it out because it seems ironic that it's not Touhou (big japanese media company that distributes most of movies, good anime, and more importantly the Godzilla series) isn't doing the rademark legal actions...
(I mean, I am all for Moz, but the irony is unignorable)
Design quieter cooling technologies.
I mean it's not like it's not possible.
Case in point #1: NEC (in japan) has a water cooled computer now on sale to the teeming millions. water runs over the CPU and goes into a radiator to the back of the case. the radiator sits just outside of the power supply fan, which turns at an incredibly low speed (kinda like the apple G5 fans). Damn quiet.
Case in point #2: Mitsubishi, after not building any planes since WWII (zero fighter was by them, after all), entered the business-jet arena. The first thing they did was to design a new shape of turbine intake blades using computer simulation that cuts something like 10dB off the engine noise compared to traditioal strait blade intakes.
So, instead of brute forcing one's way around the noise problem, there are more elegant ways!
What they mean is that current TCP protocol becomes a bottleneck at high bandwidth applications, so a new protocol is designed that would be efficient up to ~6000xDSL speed (just a pot-shot guess, up to 9Gb/S?). It has nothing to do with pushing data down the POTS line, just that if one day you had a fat pipe to your house, this new protocol would make use of it properly unlike today's TCP.
It's a stupid comparison, but I guess they expect people to not have an idea what 9Gb/S is...
I thought that the news about this drive was that it's 7200rpm - the former "biggest" was maxtor at 5400rpm only. (IIRC)
(i say only, because I hope nobody is using those terrible 4200rpm bigfoot drives these days)