Um, no- X-Plane came out well before 1997. That was back in the days before 3D cards- at the time, it sold for $249, as as an engineering simulator for homebuilders, an IFR trainer and a VFR trainer all in one.
It's still all that and a bag of chips, but please don't get the impression that X-Plane comes from gamer land.
I just wanted to say for anyone who's not familiar with this sim that it is THE geek flight sim bar none. I've been running it on the Mac since it was $200, and it was worth it even at that price.
It's never perfectly debugged but it's also never stopped adding cool details, features and stuff. These get divided among flight model features and eye candy. In the former category, Austin (yes, this is all ONE GUY coding it) added support for gyrocopters. (It's _always_ had helicopter support, which is rare). In the latter category, he's been enhancing the clouds and scenery hugely- even 5.66 (not the new version) already has very impressive 3D clouds, which don't even eat the frame rate that much.
The true geek factor in X-Plane is not even flying the planes- it's designing them. Using all the tools like Part-Maker, Plane-Maker (and these need to be included, 'scuse me for stating the obvious) you can literally design just about anything, right down to designing your own _airfoils_, using various third-party stuff to determine lift/drag/moment of the foil at various angles of attack, and then entering that into Part-Maker to bring the airfoil into X-Plane for use. Plane-Maker is about placing wings and elements anywhere, NOT about punching in 'stall, top speed' etc values: the utterly amazingly geeky thing about this sim is that it builds the flight model from just analysis of the plane parts, ten times a second, relative to things like AoA and speed and propwash and ground effect. So when you put something together in Plane-Maker, and it doesn't exist in the real world, you're actually using X-Plane as an aeronautical design tool, and instead of working out on paper whether the CG is too far aft, you save the plane, fire up X-Plane, 'get in the drivers' seat' and take the bastard up and see if it kills you;)
That's about as cool as virtual reality gets, right there- and it's the heart of the geek appeal, to me: if you play with the sim this way you have to _be_ capable of interpreting behavior like a test pilot. The planes behave in amazingly unexpected ways. I've had a high-speed jet show a nasty tendency to pitch up sharply at a certain speed- puzzling until I realised that it was hitting Mach 1, and the shockwave was interacting with the wing geometry (!) Try _that_ in MSFS or Fly...
I've actually taken ideas from Slashdot into X-Plane: some time ago there was an article about Japanese ground-effect flying trains, so naturally what do I do? Go fire up Plane-Maker, and try to build a ground-effect vehicle that maintained a consistent ground height all by itself. Didn't quite succeed, but I did manage to make the most forgiving aircraft I've ever seen for zooming about really close to the ground... and now there's gyrocopter support, there's lighter-than-air support (and the Hindenburg), and the helos (and the SoloTrek- yes, the two-ducted-fan thing that you stand on), and whatever neat aero thing turns up next year on Slashdot, I am sure X-Plane will be able to handle modelling it. Hell, there's even an entirely fictional Japanese Anime Plane to play with. I flew it straight up into space and the stars came out, in a perfectly black sky, as I passed escape velocity. Now if we could model something _real_ that does that, we'd really have something...
Think of it as a commercial aviation design simulator for less than $50. There are in fact a _number_ of people using it to rough-draft real-world planes being built in real life... suffice to say, X-Plane getting a Linux port is _totally_ news for nerds, and if you're an aero nerd it is very much stuff that matters. It's probably the single coolest program I have, of any description. If you want a specifically opensource flight sim, Flight Gear has a lot going for it- but if your interest is strictly aviationgeek and not coder, X-Plane absolutely maims anything else out there, by a wide margin, even given that it's usually kinda quirky (5.66 was running nicely for me, though).
The only reason you'd want a spherical enclosure is because the _outside_ of a sphere produces the evenest response. Unfortunately the inside is the single worse shape for an enclosure you could have.
Plus, in general terms, wall rigidity is enormously important for a speaker enclosure. Now, there's two sides to this: on the one hand you want vibrations to be damped down effectively, and in this the inflatable might even wind up with some advantages. Unfortunately the other side is that walls are rigid for a reason.
You could do a dipole this way by using the inflatable for the back wave, but there's barely any difference between that and NO enclosure at all. These equate to just the driver sitting there. The worst aspect, bar none, is bass and dynamic impact. Treble, diffraction and cabinet coloration might be improved somewhat over cheap plywood- but at what cost?
Sorry- you've been spun. These aren't the speakers you've been looking for. Move along..
Well, it's not just trying to have persistent data: 20 billion planets is not fun! Games are _constrained_. Especially with a plot. Look at how constrained even some MMORGs are: it's 'camp out by monster X's spawn point' and all that.
Here's what I'd gotten to, in case it's useful in any way: I figured, the universe was divided neatly into 8 quadrants. Center of the universe is too hot with radiation to survive in, so you're going around the edges. Two corners are occupied by opposite races: one, a race of pacifist avian creatures, and two, a race of basically Daleks;) robot things that only want to take over everything else and exterminate everyone. That is an immediate overriding plotline: these bad guys, with a home turf, making attacks. You could also have certain resources only exist within the baddies' territory. It's all about forcing mechanisms- you don't give a player a choice. If you play chess it's not to perform interpretive dance with knight movements, it's to take pieces and win and beat the other player. In a vast universe game like we're talking about there has to be a vast universe-sized plot-line, and the most direct one is an attacker.
That said, look to Star Wars for an object lesson in the scale of conflict. In theory it's about the decline and return of the Jedi etc etc, but in practice, in the film, it's Luke in hand to hand combat with his father Darth Vader. In 'A New Hope', even the cinematography is more upfront and immediate- things are in your face, whizzing through the frame, it's not about pulling back and getting a broad view. (PM does that sometimes, and it sucks;) )
So, in making your massive universe, in what ways can it be made so that a player's IMMEDIATE location is compellingly interesting? Then there can be billions of such locations- but people will be interested in just the one they're in.
Yes, absolutely. In future years students will learn, "These are some of the historical ways a trust can gain and wield absolute control over their market. Believe it or not, at one time the venture capitalists of the era actually would consult directly with Microsoft before investing in companies in the same field, for fear of giving money to something that Microsoft had targetted! These abuses led, through slow, painful, and rabidly opposed progress, to a fuller understanding of how a healthy market operates, and what the requirements are for running a system that lives up to the promise of capitalism. Ironically, at the time Microsoft strongly felt they epitomized capitalism, though in retrospect the system they were aiming towards was more characteristic of classic Soviet Union communism, with themselves as the central authorities."
You better believe people will be studying what Microsoft does. People study crimes, or diseases, too! You mustn't assume people will be studying Microsoft to _emulate_ them: for one, you can't. There's only one Microsoft and no room for another. Once we've straightened that out it will only be in a context where nobody else has such an easy, unopposed path to that kind of economic authority.
Business students will be studying Microsoft as an example of an unsustainable local profit maximum, kind of like a pyramid scheme. If conditions are right you can ride such a situation to the very top- at which point, you're damaging capitalism so badly that you can't continue, and you can't expand any further, and the best possible outcome is decline and fall. Screw things up and you're looking at a crash, instead. That is of _great_ interest to business students, particularly ones that seek long rewarding careers in business.
I've done this too... difference is, when I realised it didn't really lead towards personal Cadillacs etc. rather than immediately decide to take the project proprietary, I just sort of drifted away towards other things... have always meant to return one day, and I will.
What you're seeing in the mpeg videos behind that link is flyover scenes that generate a terrain grid with dynamic level of detail concentrated near the camera, overlaid onto an entirely synthetic and repeatable world which is derived from multiple pointer math on a large (16M) data file. That means FAST- it was only implemented in REALbasic and still runs reasonably fast, and is a natural for C.
I also spent some time producing universe distributions- one stumbling block that I ran into that I hadn't got around to solving was what I was keeping world space in, as the universe is very big and at the same time the actual planets would go down to roughly 1/8" level of detail using some approaches for data synthesis. In particular, one of the techniques for positioning stuff would go down to 1/8" level of detail with four pointer-like operations using no kind of higher math. The difficulty is that you don't get a list of objects- instead if you wanted to synthesise, say, blades of grass, you'd go over a ten mile view by scanning across your view grid and every eighth of an inch, would do the fairly quick lookup of whether there was a blade of grass or some similar object on that eighth-inch spot. On the bright side, it would at least be repeatable, being entirely procedural.
The thing about these projects, and I can see that many people have done them, is that you can get grandiose about them but the bottom line is: this is not a game. This is not inherently fun, or interesting. One thing I'd thought of for _my_ approach is to apply some Warcraft-like game (scaled to MMORG, of course;) I think that's a rule for all people coding virtual worlds) and make use of the fact that you can have a world-sized area with (perpetual) resources laid out irregularly and down to an extraordinary level of detail. So you could be in a game, and have to dig for gold or iron or something, and go by people's reports of where that resource could be found- including "There's this planet out by Alpha Centauri that's loaded with it". I also had a procedural planet and location name generator that wasn't entirely horrible;)
Like I said- you get into this sort of thing and totally forget that it's NOT FUN for anybody else, unless there's a plot. I'd suggest that the author of this more recent work, if he seriously expects to earn money off it, should treat it very much like selling an art object: 'here's a viewer through which you can explore millions of worlds much like Bryce, only with less interaction', and not be too haughty about the price, either. This isn't a set of libs that will be useful for anyone creating a game, period. For one thing, you can get the same thing cheaper from elsewhere- it's NOT a unique idea.
Oh, but they won't (play nice). You are assuming that they, viewed as a 'corporate personality', are rational. They're not playing it like a court case, they're playing it like a crusade. What would you have said the odds were that they would fabricate evidence in court with so much at stake? And yet they did. Are you suggesting they will change?
What I'm wondering is: given that Microsoft will almost certainly do something just as outrageous in the new court, will this present a problem for the new judge? It's almost as if they are intentionally behaving so outrageously that no judge could fail to be deeply offended- and then expecting to use the offended judge as an argument for their innocence. Though that would be a rational ploy, just a very cynical one- and I think that Microsoft actually means well, but is completely insane and to THEM, faking video evidence (thank you, David Boies) is 'higher truth' because the real truth is whatever they want it to be.
Which means it's pointless to look for signs of cynicism from the Microsoft camp- indeed, they are doing all this 'in good faith'- and instead, the thing to do is keep an eye out for fits of insanity, and 'truths' that are wildly irrational and psychotic. And I think we'll be seeing more of those.
Hell, if _I_ was trying to defend them I'd cop an insanity plea at this point. *G* for me, not for them!;)
Absolutely. I can cite examples from my own field, audio.
The trouble with audio as a scientific field is that it's hugely driven by vendors: almost everything taken as gospel was being pushed by some vendor at some point or other. It's as bad as medicine- very tough to find anyone who isn't backing a commercial interest.
Ten years ago, we had a wave of vendor-backed authorities arguing desperately that direct-sampled 16/44 digital was audio perfection. Right now, it's widely accepted in serious pro audio circles that working with more resolution is better, and you'll _still_ hear echoes from the days where the gospel was, 'CD (just any CD no matter what you do) contains all sound anyone could ever hope to hear!'.
Currently, we have Sony trying to push SACD (aka DSD encoding), and on the one hand, trying to sell it as a multitracking/intermediate format (which is stupid, it's a final output format) and on the other, suggesting its recognizably lusher sound is due to high frequency extension- when in fact its performance at genuinely supersonic content is considerably distorted, and its real strong suit is in producing extraordinarily high resolution at LOW frequencies.
If all you had was kooks filling the air with misinformation and noise, it'd be difficult, but when the actual 'scientists' are putting spin on things for marketing reasons (easier to sell high frequency response than resolution space?), it is IMPOSSIBLE to have an open marketplace of ideas on libertarian principles.
Just taking my one example, Sony with its SACD, you would not believe some of the stuff I've heard about what Sony's doing. I'm given to understand they are tightly controlling what truth can get out there- for instance I've been told you can't get the recording equipment unless you legally agree not to test it, or put out noise-floor charts, that sort of thing- and the bleeding irony of this is that the format _is_ a great format. It's got striking characteristics that could be 'spun' as flaws, but really aren't. But seriously exploring the performance of this stuff in a scientific way is not an option with things controlled so tightly, and that's what happens when you have a totally uncontrolled 'marketplace of ideas'. It's not just the kooks who want to make things go a certain way. Again, my understanding is that Sony are doing the same thing, simply because they want to oversell SACD as a recording format, and because they don't trust that they'll be able to explain it to Joe Consumer as anything more sophisticated than 'more treble! Listen to the more treble!'. When in fact the real story is much more complicated and interesting than that- but requires pretty deep knowledge of the art to understand why it works as well as it does.
Truth is harder, and more expensive: sometimes when lies have more market value, truth isn't something you can even afford to get from the idea market. You're on your own when that happens.
Part of their beef is that they have no intention of having us teach their children. This isn't the major reason for our war here, or theirs, but it's a very bad idea to decide that we need to solve matters by brainwashing their children and re-educating them (words formerly used in the contexts of Imperial Japan and Imperial Russia).
They can teach their children what they damned well please as long as said children's ACTIONS don't step on our toes. Maybe if we were slower to jump on notions of 'oh, let's re-educate all those naughty Muslims to be good Americans!' their own educations would be less hate-filled.
This is put strongly, on purpose. Apologies if it seems harsh, or exaggerated.
I have never, EVER seen a Slashdot post that deserved a '5 Informative' rating more. *spontaneous applause* keep posting, Douglas! It is people like you and the time they spend who make Slashdot possibly the one most powerful resource on our current state of war. Your supplying of references is the final touch. THANK you!
No, that's not sufficient. People can come up with bravery even in the face of terror.
The only way this war will end is when the fundamentalists (Muslims/Christians/insert fanatic sect name here) don't feel they are being hunted down. Which is unlikely... but let's look at the current situation. I've all too often seen otherwise sensible people deciding that the thing to do is just invade the crap out of Afganistan- hell, how about all the Middle East? Hell, why not invade Canada as well, and Mexico? It'd be good for them. What the world obviously needs is an American Empire since they're obviously insane and incapable of governing themselves without staging attacks on innocent people... *etc, etc- and yes I see people genuinely believe this*
So step back and look at this from the outside like an intelligent person: presto! Looks kinda like an imperialist Western Capitalist fanatical movement that sees nothing at all amiss with taking over most of the world. Gee, how'd that happen? What if you're in the Middle East looking at this, how confident are you that the ones in power _don't_ represent these real live American people who happen to think USA should rule over anyone who looks naughty? If you have no armies what do you do to fire a shot across their bows, aware that this could make matters worse but desperate to not be just quietly over-run?
As Americans the best thing we can do right now is get global- the worst thing we can do is start acting all manifest destiny. We are so utterly in a position to play the Axis in the re-enactment of WWII: all we need is for Bush to vow that he will 'smash Afganistan by military action', perhaps throw in a few other countries, start implying that other governments nearby need to be peacefully occupied, and bam: we will BE the bad guys. We have legitimate boundaries that stop far short of 'the entire world'. Hell, our _culture_ of western capitalism has legitimate boundaries itself.
The world isn't a monoculture and can't be- so peace means finding ways to tolerate other stuff in the world that is poison to YOU, it's having boundaries and not lightly ignoring them. That doesn't just go for us- Bin Laden far exceeded any sane boundaries by attacking us. Let them blow up McDonaldses in Afganistan if there ever were any, let them attack military bases and/or Western Capitalism bases that are on THEIR TURF. Their attack on us was a signal that they feel the WORLD is their turf. NOT! But by the same token, our job is to smack that notion out of them without also behaving like the world is OUR turf.
The best possible outcome would be for Taliban, even Bin Laden maybe, to continue to exist but to stick the hell within their boundaries from now on. I for one would be very very very interested to know exactly what they figure intruded on their space so badly that they chose to go on the no-quarter assault. 'Fanaticism' isn't enough. I thought we ourselves armed them to drive the Russians out. Is it a matter of capitalism ascendant? If so they might notice that capitalism isn't as stable as the Chicago School guys think it is, and that they're reacting to the claims of other fanatics instead of trying to pay attention to what the reality is. As capitalism expands past _its_ legitimate boundaries, it begins to destroy itself with no help from terrorists, thank you- it's like the terrorists have been taking the grandiose claims of capitalist fanatics at face value, and that's stupid!
I don't know where all this is leading, but I do know this: not having all the answers is the _proper_ state to be in. Any situation we might find ourselves in where it all seems neatly worked out and solved, is doomed to fail, because the world doesn't reduce itself to such stable terms. By nature it's totally chaotic- a stable instability- and we have got to embrace that, and not try to push for 100% solved-and-fixed-up situations. I hope we can settle for 'a job half done' in this situation, because to fully satisfy ourselves is a setup for future problems. Ever heard of the Versailles Treaty at the end of WWI?
The current state of web advertising is comparable to TV advertisements that come out of the TV, walk over to you or follow you into the kitchen or bathroom and tug on your sleeve whining 'buy me!'.
That's bad advertising, plain and simple. It's been _proven_ through marketing research that if you get too annoying you unsell your product, most notably that's been proven through market research of particular sorts of TV advertising.
We're not talking about 'just let these poor people make money, will you?', we're talking about enabling them to hose themselves through severely stupid and bad advertising. The people using ad blockers are doing advertisers a FAVOR- that is valuable data, that information. They often accompany this with other valuable data- announcements that "if it was all quiet well-behaved banner ads that didn't blink or flash or move a lot, we wouldn't feel compelled to be doing this". That's valuable information. Since when is a random consumer's browsing history more valuable than an outright, impassioned statement of that consumer's preferences on how they want to be courted, advertising-wise?
Intrusive web advertising can be compared to billboards: the people attempting to use it can make a big fuss about how it's a moral imperative that they should be allowed to do this, but it's not only a lie, it's not even a healthy or useful thing to be doing. They are wrong in wishing to do it. If they are allowed to do it they will actually harm advertising in general- though this does create a window of opportunity for well-behaved advertisers, as well as substantially driving down the costs for well-behaved advertisers. Still... if you don't actively hate the entire field of advertising, it's hard to justify these abusive, useless practices, which harm advertising in general.
David Ogilvy considered advertising the art of 'speaking well about' things. Abusing people to the point that they are blindly, acutely hostile to anything resembling advertising makes it that much harder to do it properly and sensibly.
Just as restrictions are placed on the use of roadside billboards, I would like to see this abusive web advertising restricted by regulation and government oversight. It's plain that these people cannot and will not behave or police themselves.
Good god, no. The unsigned bands don't get anything. Farmclub has one of the nastiest, most evil artist contracts in the business for 'unsigned internet bands'. Far from expecting a piece of the pie, they are legally required to not _suggest_ that their being on Farmclub means Farmclub _endorses_ them in any way. Yes, there is (last I read it) specific language in the contract forbidding the bands from even boasting about having a page on Farmclub if that implies that Farmclub _endorses_ them in some way...
But if you really want to make your band's lawyer shit a brick, show them the 60 page contract you have to sign if you are asked to perform on the TV show they have. I know of at least one act who refused an appearance on the show after seeing the contract. Naturally, there were lots of people who'd sign anything to get on TV, to replace them...
If you're really a friend of your friends on Farmclub, either persuade them to get off it immediately and consult a lawyer about their position, or at least convince them to run the agreements by their lawyer- ESPECIALLY if they 'get' to be on the TV program, the bait for most of the acts on Farmclub. You could call that show the parade of the damned- a revue of artists and bands who are already so contractually fucked that they will never have a career in the music business, even before they've sold a record.
This does matter- because now, Microsoft will never reach any sort of settlement or back off the slightest amount. To them, now that XP has started to ship and sell, they will try to _expand_ their behavior, at the same time as the new judge is trying to get a handle on them and a sense of what they are.
This is a recipe for total hubris on Microsoft's part, and a nasty defeat for them. I suspect it's better that they don't compromise or parley, because they lie anyway so why should we want them to be striking bargains? Let them be slapped down in full hubris. They can't be cured or moderated or reasoned with. I'm sure this judge has seen completely recidivist cases before.
They don't WANT McDonalds. Hell, I'm American and I don't always want McDonalds either- certainly not as a replacement for the cultures of the world.
Give them food, clothing, shelter, and then give their countrymen in the USA _freedom_ and representation. If whole countries seek holy poverty rather than american 'affluenza' maybe we should be LISTENING rather than offering to change them until they are like us.
Apart from that, great idea. You're half right and half-pig-headed here... screw McDonalds and the generosity of offering to be the one in charge with the guns and employers. Give them some support with NO strings attached and let 'em grow to be like themselves even if that isn't like us.
You're talking empire building, quite literally. You're talking American Empire to control and run the world. That is exactly the damn problem! Slow down a bit and use that American generosity and basic naive decency to give these people some support WITHOUT boxing them into a corner. It wouldn't be THAT hard.
Demanding that they work in McDonaldses with their wives in blue jeans and Western cosmetics while US military jets fly overhead is no generosity at all.
Nope! There is further discovery scheduled. I'd love to see this detail worked in to the elaborate tapestry of control and dominance Microsoft's produced for judiciary perusal:)
Alright: so you cannot make a page which compares MSNBC reporting with, say, Reuters, and draws comment to MSNBC's version using the news headline component- and you cannot make a page with MSN Search annotated with some search terms and MS-biased results that wouldn't be found by normal search engines.
But this is a smokescreen because you're not lawyer enough to read what you've posted. The web components INCLUDE those wizzy features. They are not LIMITED to those things, they just include them. Anyone have a complete list of what constitutes a FrontPage web component? Like, say, an uploading tool, perchance? Is it even possible to make and upload a FrontPage page without using a 'FrontPage web component'?
You are waaaaay too naive for anything named 'CthulhuDragon';)
Wow... I like that image _so_ much. Call it counterinsurgency. Bomb Afghanistan with _relief_ supplies. Whatever the merits and faults of Western Capitalism, are the terrorists feeding and sheltering the populace of Afghanistan? No they are not.
People talk about 'assimilating hostile countries' and sometimes that sounds rather disturbing, but this is one context where it makes sense. We have billions dedicated to the cause of beating these terrorists. Let's use some of those billions to dump _lots_ of food and blankets and simple medical supplies, not on the terrorists but on the poor bastards who've been on ground zero for war after war. We _know_ Afghanistan is a wasteland, and we _know_ there are innocents there- and we can also be pretty damned certain that dropping food and blankets isn't going to help the terrorists- _they_ have food, you'd better believe it. They're arranging to get airliner pilot training while the people of Afghanistan starve and die- is it any wonder that there's nobody to boot Bin Laden out? The only ones with food and shelter _are_ the militants.
I hope someone does something with this idea, because it would be so easy, so easy to do.
There is a place for 3D on the desktop- use of the illusion of depth produced by overlapping windows, only more so. I wrote up an idea piece on that, linked above, a while ago.
Interestingly enough, MacOSX has every single bit of technical underpinning necessary to do this, in its Display PDF layer. The window-minimizing animation literally takes a full window and not only shrinks it but distorts it oddly. It would be nothing to scale windows under OSX. I'm not sure if it'd be just as easy to fade them toward a background haze color, but it's certainly eye-opening to consider. Basically, almost a year ago I was envisioning this way of using a third dimension on xterms alone, because those are already resizable in many term programs. I thought it would be impossibly tough to do that with full-on GUI apps, but OSX already does more than that- it just does not currently furnish any method for zooming specific windows forward or back in space.
Makes me wonder if it'll be possible to come up with 'hacks' on OSX's Finder and add this behavior...
I wish I could mod this up.:) all I can say is 'yeah!' despite it being a bit too personal. Not everything is about producing big powerful software projects to take over the world. The simple ability to see the code and learn from it and (typically) incorporate ideas from it into your own stuff, or adapt it to a specialized purpose, has huge value.
Our way of life is not office blocks. Our way of life is not towers, glass, steel, the power to control the life of the rest of the world. That's not the way we started out, that's not the only theme in our literature, that's not all there is.
I'm not singling you out, I'm reacting to MANY people I've seen who have just the same opinion- "make newer bigger towers because it symbolizes our way of life!". Maybe, in the context of the larger world, it symbolizes our way of death, and damn straight it symbolizes to most of the rest of the world, 'we can kick your ass, look how rich and powerful we are'. I'm not okay with perpetuating that, and so my notion of what should be done is to turn the site into a memorial park INSTEAD of more towers.
That would not be a rejection of our way of life- because the WTC did NOT really represent our way of life. It represented a particular tendency we as Americans have- and I think we need to consider exactly what that means rather than just charge even more determinedly along the path that has led us to this.
Maybe I am alone in this, but you know what I would like to see instead of rebuilding the towers even bigger and more dominant than ever?
A memorial park.
To hell with furthering the arrogance that was these people's excuse to attack us so brutally. To hell with 'bigger better faster more', to hell with 'we will make our new architectural penis even LONGER!'. To HELL with all of that, the posturing, the arrogance, the chest-thumping American machismo that got us in this position. It didn't come from nowhere.
Clear the rubble, bury the countless dead and plant something green- let's have a memorial park.
Slashdot Mirror
It's still all that and a bag of chips, but please don't get the impression that X-Plane comes from gamer land.
It's never perfectly debugged but it's also never stopped adding cool details, features and stuff. These get divided among flight model features and eye candy. In the former category, Austin (yes, this is all ONE GUY coding it) added support for gyrocopters. (It's _always_ had helicopter support, which is rare). In the latter category, he's been enhancing the clouds and scenery hugely- even 5.66 (not the new version) already has very impressive 3D clouds, which don't even eat the frame rate that much.
The true geek factor in X-Plane is not even flying the planes- it's designing them. Using all the tools like Part-Maker, Plane-Maker (and these need to be included, 'scuse me for stating the obvious) you can literally design just about anything, right down to designing your own _airfoils_, using various third-party stuff to determine lift/drag/moment of the foil at various angles of attack, and then entering that into Part-Maker to bring the airfoil into X-Plane for use. Plane-Maker is about placing wings and elements anywhere, NOT about punching in 'stall, top speed' etc values: the utterly amazingly geeky thing about this sim is that it builds the flight model from just analysis of the plane parts, ten times a second, relative to things like AoA and speed and propwash and ground effect. So when you put something together in Plane-Maker, and it doesn't exist in the real world, you're actually using X-Plane as an aeronautical design tool, and instead of working out on paper whether the CG is too far aft, you save the plane, fire up X-Plane, 'get in the drivers' seat' and take the bastard up and see if it kills you ;)
That's about as cool as virtual reality gets, right there- and it's the heart of the geek appeal, to me: if you play with the sim this way you have to _be_ capable of interpreting behavior like a test pilot. The planes behave in amazingly unexpected ways. I've had a high-speed jet show a nasty tendency to pitch up sharply at a certain speed- puzzling until I realised that it was hitting Mach 1, and the shockwave was interacting with the wing geometry (!) Try _that_ in MSFS or Fly...
I've actually taken ideas from Slashdot into X-Plane: some time ago there was an article about Japanese ground-effect flying trains, so naturally what do I do? Go fire up Plane-Maker, and try to build a ground-effect vehicle that maintained a consistent ground height all by itself. Didn't quite succeed, but I did manage to make the most forgiving aircraft I've ever seen for zooming about really close to the ground... and now there's gyrocopter support, there's lighter-than-air support (and the Hindenburg), and the helos (and the SoloTrek- yes, the two-ducted-fan thing that you stand on), and whatever neat aero thing turns up next year on Slashdot, I am sure X-Plane will be able to handle modelling it. Hell, there's even an entirely fictional Japanese Anime Plane to play with. I flew it straight up into space and the stars came out, in a perfectly black sky, as I passed escape velocity. Now if we could model something _real_ that does that, we'd really have something...
Think of it as a commercial aviation design simulator for less than $50. There are in fact a _number_ of people using it to rough-draft real-world planes being built in real life... suffice to say, X-Plane getting a Linux port is _totally_ news for nerds, and if you're an aero nerd it is very much stuff that matters. It's probably the single coolest program I have, of any description. If you want a specifically opensource flight sim, Flight Gear has a lot going for it- but if your interest is strictly aviationgeek and not coder, X-Plane absolutely maims anything else out there, by a wide margin, even given that it's usually kinda quirky (5.66 was running nicely for me, though).
The only reason you'd want a spherical enclosure is because the _outside_ of a sphere produces the evenest response. Unfortunately the inside is the single worse shape for an enclosure you could have.
Plus, in general terms, wall rigidity is enormously important for a speaker enclosure. Now, there's two sides to this: on the one hand you want vibrations to be damped down effectively, and in this the inflatable might even wind up with some advantages. Unfortunately the other side is that walls are rigid for a reason.
You could do a dipole this way by using the inflatable for the back wave, but there's barely any difference between that and NO enclosure at all. These equate to just the driver sitting there. The worst aspect, bar none, is bass and dynamic impact. Treble, diffraction and cabinet coloration might be improved somewhat over cheap plywood- but at what cost?
Sorry- you've been spun. These aren't the speakers you've been looking for. Move along..
Here's what I'd gotten to, in case it's useful in any way: I figured, the universe was divided neatly into 8 quadrants. Center of the universe is too hot with radiation to survive in, so you're going around the edges. Two corners are occupied by opposite races: one, a race of pacifist avian creatures, and two, a race of basically Daleks ;) robot things that only want to take over everything else and exterminate everyone. That is an immediate overriding plotline: these bad guys, with a home turf, making attacks. You could also have certain resources only exist within the baddies' territory. It's all about forcing mechanisms- you don't give a player a choice. If you play chess it's not to perform interpretive dance with knight movements, it's to take pieces and win and beat the other player. In a vast universe game like we're talking about there has to be a vast universe-sized plot-line, and the most direct one is an attacker.
That said, look to Star Wars for an object lesson in the scale of conflict. In theory it's about the decline and return of the Jedi etc etc, but in practice, in the film, it's Luke in hand to hand combat with his father Darth Vader. In 'A New Hope', even the cinematography is more upfront and immediate- things are in your face, whizzing through the frame, it's not about pulling back and getting a broad view. (PM does that sometimes, and it sucks ;) )
So, in making your massive universe, in what ways can it be made so that a player's IMMEDIATE location is compellingly interesting? Then there can be billions of such locations- but people will be interested in just the one they're in.
You better believe people will be studying what Microsoft does. People study crimes, or diseases, too! You mustn't assume people will be studying Microsoft to _emulate_ them: for one, you can't. There's only one Microsoft and no room for another. Once we've straightened that out it will only be in a context where nobody else has such an easy, unopposed path to that kind of economic authority.
Business students will be studying Microsoft as an example of an unsustainable local profit maximum, kind of like a pyramid scheme. If conditions are right you can ride such a situation to the very top- at which point, you're damaging capitalism so badly that you can't continue, and you can't expand any further, and the best possible outcome is decline and fall. Screw things up and you're looking at a crash, instead. That is of _great_ interest to business students, particularly ones that seek long rewarding careers in business.
What you're seeing in the mpeg videos behind that link is flyover scenes that generate a terrain grid with dynamic level of detail concentrated near the camera, overlaid onto an entirely synthetic and repeatable world which is derived from multiple pointer math on a large (16M) data file. That means FAST- it was only implemented in REALbasic and still runs reasonably fast, and is a natural for C.
I also spent some time producing universe distributions- one stumbling block that I ran into that I hadn't got around to solving was what I was keeping world space in, as the universe is very big and at the same time the actual planets would go down to roughly 1/8" level of detail using some approaches for data synthesis. In particular, one of the techniques for positioning stuff would go down to 1/8" level of detail with four pointer-like operations using no kind of higher math. The difficulty is that you don't get a list of objects- instead if you wanted to synthesise, say, blades of grass, you'd go over a ten mile view by scanning across your view grid and every eighth of an inch, would do the fairly quick lookup of whether there was a blade of grass or some similar object on that eighth-inch spot. On the bright side, it would at least be repeatable, being entirely procedural.
The thing about these projects, and I can see that many people have done them, is that you can get grandiose about them but the bottom line is: this is not a game. This is not inherently fun, or interesting. One thing I'd thought of for _my_ approach is to apply some Warcraft-like game (scaled to MMORG, of course ;) I think that's a rule for all people coding virtual worlds) and make use of the fact that you can have a world-sized area with (perpetual) resources laid out irregularly and down to an extraordinary level of detail. So you could be in a game, and have to dig for gold or iron or something, and go by people's reports of where that resource could be found- including "There's this planet out by Alpha Centauri that's loaded with it". I also had a procedural planet and location name generator that wasn't entirely horrible ;)
Like I said- you get into this sort of thing and totally forget that it's NOT FUN for anybody else, unless there's a plot. I'd suggest that the author of this more recent work, if he seriously expects to earn money off it, should treat it very much like selling an art object: 'here's a viewer through which you can explore millions of worlds much like Bryce, only with less interaction', and not be too haughty about the price, either. This isn't a set of libs that will be useful for anyone creating a game, period. For one thing, you can get the same thing cheaper from elsewhere- it's NOT a unique idea.
What I'm wondering is: given that Microsoft will almost certainly do something just as outrageous in the new court, will this present a problem for the new judge? It's almost as if they are intentionally behaving so outrageously that no judge could fail to be deeply offended- and then expecting to use the offended judge as an argument for their innocence. Though that would be a rational ploy, just a very cynical one- and I think that Microsoft actually means well, but is completely insane and to THEM, faking video evidence (thank you, David Boies) is 'higher truth' because the real truth is whatever they want it to be.
Which means it's pointless to look for signs of cynicism from the Microsoft camp- indeed, they are doing all this 'in good faith'- and instead, the thing to do is keep an eye out for fits of insanity, and 'truths' that are wildly irrational and psychotic. And I think we'll be seeing more of those.
Hell, if _I_ was trying to defend them I'd cop an insanity plea at this point. *G* for me, not for them! ;)
The trouble with audio as a scientific field is that it's hugely driven by vendors: almost everything taken as gospel was being pushed by some vendor at some point or other. It's as bad as medicine- very tough to find anyone who isn't backing a commercial interest.
Ten years ago, we had a wave of vendor-backed authorities arguing desperately that direct-sampled 16/44 digital was audio perfection. Right now, it's widely accepted in serious pro audio circles that working with more resolution is better, and you'll _still_ hear echoes from the days where the gospel was, 'CD (just any CD no matter what you do) contains all sound anyone could ever hope to hear!'.
Currently, we have Sony trying to push SACD (aka DSD encoding), and on the one hand, trying to sell it as a multitracking/intermediate format (which is stupid, it's a final output format) and on the other, suggesting its recognizably lusher sound is due to high frequency extension- when in fact its performance at genuinely supersonic content is considerably distorted, and its real strong suit is in producing extraordinarily high resolution at LOW frequencies.
If all you had was kooks filling the air with misinformation and noise, it'd be difficult, but when the actual 'scientists' are putting spin on things for marketing reasons (easier to sell high frequency response than resolution space?), it is IMPOSSIBLE to have an open marketplace of ideas on libertarian principles.
Just taking my one example, Sony with its SACD, you would not believe some of the stuff I've heard about what Sony's doing. I'm given to understand they are tightly controlling what truth can get out there- for instance I've been told you can't get the recording equipment unless you legally agree not to test it, or put out noise-floor charts, that sort of thing- and the bleeding irony of this is that the format _is_ a great format. It's got striking characteristics that could be 'spun' as flaws, but really aren't. But seriously exploring the performance of this stuff in a scientific way is not an option with things controlled so tightly, and that's what happens when you have a totally uncontrolled 'marketplace of ideas'. It's not just the kooks who want to make things go a certain way. Again, my understanding is that Sony are doing the same thing, simply because they want to oversell SACD as a recording format, and because they don't trust that they'll be able to explain it to Joe Consumer as anything more sophisticated than 'more treble! Listen to the more treble!'. When in fact the real story is much more complicated and interesting than that- but requires pretty deep knowledge of the art to understand why it works as well as it does.
Truth is harder, and more expensive: sometimes when lies have more market value, truth isn't something you can even afford to get from the idea market. You're on your own when that happens.
Part of their beef is that they have no intention of having us teach their children. This isn't the major reason for our war here, or theirs, but it's a very bad idea to decide that we need to solve matters by brainwashing their children and re-educating them (words formerly used in the contexts of Imperial Japan and Imperial Russia).
They can teach their children what they damned well please as long as said children's ACTIONS don't step on our toes. Maybe if we were slower to jump on notions of 'oh, let's re-educate all those naughty Muslims to be good Americans!' their own educations would be less hate-filled.
This is put strongly, on purpose. Apologies if it seems harsh, or exaggerated.
I have never, EVER seen a Slashdot post that deserved a '5 Informative' rating more. *spontaneous applause* keep posting, Douglas! It is people like you and the time they spend who make Slashdot possibly the one most powerful resource on our current state of war. Your supplying of references is the final touch. THANK you!
The only way this war will end is when the fundamentalists (Muslims/Christians/insert fanatic sect name here) don't feel they are being hunted down. Which is unlikely... but let's look at the current situation. I've all too often seen otherwise sensible people deciding that the thing to do is just invade the crap out of Afganistan- hell, how about all the Middle East? Hell, why not invade Canada as well, and Mexico? It'd be good for them. What the world obviously needs is an American Empire since they're obviously insane and incapable of governing themselves without staging attacks on innocent people... *etc, etc- and yes I see people genuinely believe this*
So step back and look at this from the outside like an intelligent person: presto! Looks kinda like an imperialist Western Capitalist fanatical movement that sees nothing at all amiss with taking over most of the world. Gee, how'd that happen? What if you're in the Middle East looking at this, how confident are you that the ones in power _don't_ represent these real live American people who happen to think USA should rule over anyone who looks naughty? If you have no armies what do you do to fire a shot across their bows, aware that this could make matters worse but desperate to not be just quietly over-run?
As Americans the best thing we can do right now is get global- the worst thing we can do is start acting all manifest destiny. We are so utterly in a position to play the Axis in the re-enactment of WWII: all we need is for Bush to vow that he will 'smash Afganistan by military action', perhaps throw in a few other countries, start implying that other governments nearby need to be peacefully occupied, and bam: we will BE the bad guys. We have legitimate boundaries that stop far short of 'the entire world'. Hell, our _culture_ of western capitalism has legitimate boundaries itself.
The world isn't a monoculture and can't be- so peace means finding ways to tolerate other stuff in the world that is poison to YOU, it's having boundaries and not lightly ignoring them. That doesn't just go for us- Bin Laden far exceeded any sane boundaries by attacking us. Let them blow up McDonaldses in Afganistan if there ever were any, let them attack military bases and/or Western Capitalism bases that are on THEIR TURF. Their attack on us was a signal that they feel the WORLD is their turf. NOT! But by the same token, our job is to smack that notion out of them without also behaving like the world is OUR turf.
The best possible outcome would be for Taliban, even Bin Laden maybe, to continue to exist but to stick the hell within their boundaries from now on. I for one would be very very very interested to know exactly what they figure intruded on their space so badly that they chose to go on the no-quarter assault. 'Fanaticism' isn't enough. I thought we ourselves armed them to drive the Russians out. Is it a matter of capitalism ascendant? If so they might notice that capitalism isn't as stable as the Chicago School guys think it is, and that they're reacting to the claims of other fanatics instead of trying to pay attention to what the reality is. As capitalism expands past _its_ legitimate boundaries, it begins to destroy itself with no help from terrorists, thank you- it's like the terrorists have been taking the grandiose claims of capitalist fanatics at face value, and that's stupid!
I don't know where all this is leading, but I do know this: not having all the answers is the _proper_ state to be in. Any situation we might find ourselves in where it all seems neatly worked out and solved, is doomed to fail, because the world doesn't reduce itself to such stable terms. By nature it's totally chaotic- a stable instability- and we have got to embrace that, and not try to push for 100% solved-and-fixed-up situations. I hope we can settle for 'a job half done' in this situation, because to fully satisfy ourselves is a setup for future problems. Ever heard of the Versailles Treaty at the end of WWI?
That's bad advertising, plain and simple. It's been _proven_ through marketing research that if you get too annoying you unsell your product, most notably that's been proven through market research of particular sorts of TV advertising.
We're not talking about 'just let these poor people make money, will you?', we're talking about enabling them to hose themselves through severely stupid and bad advertising. The people using ad blockers are doing advertisers a FAVOR- that is valuable data, that information. They often accompany this with other valuable data- announcements that "if it was all quiet well-behaved banner ads that didn't blink or flash or move a lot, we wouldn't feel compelled to be doing this". That's valuable information. Since when is a random consumer's browsing history more valuable than an outright, impassioned statement of that consumer's preferences on how they want to be courted, advertising-wise?
Intrusive web advertising can be compared to billboards: the people attempting to use it can make a big fuss about how it's a moral imperative that they should be allowed to do this, but it's not only a lie, it's not even a healthy or useful thing to be doing. They are wrong in wishing to do it. If they are allowed to do it they will actually harm advertising in general- though this does create a window of opportunity for well-behaved advertisers, as well as substantially driving down the costs for well-behaved advertisers. Still... if you don't actively hate the entire field of advertising, it's hard to justify these abusive, useless practices, which harm advertising in general.
David Ogilvy considered advertising the art of 'speaking well about' things. Abusing people to the point that they are blindly, acutely hostile to anything resembling advertising makes it that much harder to do it properly and sensibly.
Just as restrictions are placed on the use of roadside billboards, I would like to see this abusive web advertising restricted by regulation and government oversight. It's plain that these people cannot and will not behave or police themselves.
But if you really want to make your band's lawyer shit a brick, show them the 60 page contract you have to sign if you are asked to perform on the TV show they have. I know of at least one act who refused an appearance on the show after seeing the contract. Naturally, there were lots of people who'd sign anything to get on TV, to replace them...
If you're really a friend of your friends on Farmclub, either persuade them to get off it immediately and consult a lawyer about their position, or at least convince them to run the agreements by their lawyer- ESPECIALLY if they 'get' to be on the TV program, the bait for most of the acts on Farmclub. You could call that show the parade of the damned- a revue of artists and bands who are already so contractually fucked that they will never have a career in the music business, even before they've sold a record.
This is a recipe for total hubris on Microsoft's part, and a nasty defeat for them. I suspect it's better that they don't compromise or parley, because they lie anyway so why should we want them to be striking bargains? Let them be slapped down in full hubris. They can't be cured or moderated or reasoned with. I'm sure this judge has seen completely recidivist cases before.
Give them food, clothing, shelter, and then give their countrymen in the USA _freedom_ and representation. If whole countries seek holy poverty rather than american 'affluenza' maybe we should be LISTENING rather than offering to change them until they are like us.
Apart from that, great idea. You're half right and half-pig-headed here... screw McDonalds and the generosity of offering to be the one in charge with the guns and employers. Give them some support with NO strings attached and let 'em grow to be like themselves even if that isn't like us.
You're talking empire building, quite literally. You're talking American Empire to control and run the world. That is exactly the damn problem! Slow down a bit and use that American generosity and basic naive decency to give these people some support WITHOUT boxing them into a corner. It wouldn't be THAT hard.
Demanding that they work in McDonaldses with their wives in blue jeans and Western cosmetics while US military jets fly overhead is no generosity at all.
You will get rid of all limits on campaign financing (that will be EASY, believe me)...
And this is 'power to the people'. Uh... okay...
*backs away calmly, not making any sudden moves* ;)
Nope! There is further discovery scheduled. I'd love to see this detail worked in to the elaborate tapestry of control and dominance Microsoft's produced for judiciary perusal :)
But this is a smokescreen because you're not lawyer enough to read what you've posted. The web components INCLUDE those wizzy features. They are not LIMITED to those things, they just include them. Anyone have a complete list of what constitutes a FrontPage web component? Like, say, an uploading tool, perchance? Is it even possible to make and upload a FrontPage page without using a 'FrontPage web component'?
You are waaaaay too naive for anything named 'CthulhuDragon' ;)
People talk about 'assimilating hostile countries' and sometimes that sounds rather disturbing, but this is one context where it makes sense. We have billions dedicated to the cause of beating these terrorists. Let's use some of those billions to dump _lots_ of food and blankets and simple medical supplies, not on the terrorists but on the poor bastards who've been on ground zero for war after war. We _know_ Afghanistan is a wasteland, and we _know_ there are innocents there- and we can also be pretty damned certain that dropping food and blankets isn't going to help the terrorists- _they_ have food, you'd better believe it. They're arranging to get airliner pilot training while the people of Afghanistan starve and die- is it any wonder that there's nobody to boot Bin Laden out? The only ones with food and shelter _are_ the militants.
I hope someone does something with this idea, because it would be so easy, so easy to do.
There is a place for 3D on the desktop- use of the illusion of depth produced by overlapping windows, only more so. I wrote up an idea piece on that, linked above, a while ago.
Interestingly enough, MacOSX has every single bit of technical underpinning necessary to do this, in its Display PDF layer. The window-minimizing animation literally takes a full window and not only shrinks it but distorts it oddly. It would be nothing to scale windows under OSX. I'm not sure if it'd be just as easy to fade them toward a background haze color, but it's certainly eye-opening to consider. Basically, almost a year ago I was envisioning this way of using a third dimension on xterms alone, because those are already resizable in many term programs. I thought it would be impossibly tough to do that with full-on GUI apps, but OSX already does more than that- it just does not currently furnish any method for zooming specific windows forward or back in space.
Makes me wonder if it'll be possible to come up with 'hacks' on OSX's Finder and add this behavior...
I wish I could mod this up. :) all I can say is 'yeah!' despite it being a bit too personal. Not everything is about producing big powerful software projects to take over the world. The simple ability to see the code and learn from it and (typically) incorporate ideas from it into your own stuff, or adapt it to a specialized purpose, has huge value.
I'm not singling you out, I'm reacting to MANY people I've seen who have just the same opinion- "make newer bigger towers because it symbolizes our way of life!". Maybe, in the context of the larger world, it symbolizes our way of death, and damn straight it symbolizes to most of the rest of the world, 'we can kick your ass, look how rich and powerful we are'. I'm not okay with perpetuating that, and so my notion of what should be done is to turn the site into a memorial park INSTEAD of more towers.
That would not be a rejection of our way of life- because the WTC did NOT really represent our way of life. It represented a particular tendency we as Americans have- and I think we need to consider exactly what that means rather than just charge even more determinedly along the path that has led us to this.
No, I think symbolically the right thing to do would be to clear the rubble and build a memorial park.
I desperately hope that these events mean we grow up- we've GOT to be better citizens of the world.
A memorial park.
To hell with furthering the arrogance that was these people's excuse to attack us so brutally. To hell with 'bigger better faster more', to hell with 'we will make our new architectural penis even LONGER!'. To HELL with all of that, the posturing, the arrogance, the chest-thumping American machismo that got us in this position. It didn't come from nowhere.
Clear the rubble, bury the countless dead and plant something green- let's have a memorial park.