Gravitons are only theoretical. At this point it looks like they don't exist.
Actually, according to String Theory, they're very real.
ST's use of them is really interesting - there's always been kind of a mystery as to why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces. ST says that the strong/weak forces and electromagnetism have carrier particles whose strings are anchored to our brane in the bulk*. It goes on to say that gravitons' strings are free-floating, so they are not bound to our brane. This would mean that when a source of gravity was present, much of it was leaking out of our brane, leaving behind the relatively weak force we feel instead.
Apparently something that is being looked forward to with the Large Hadron Collider is that they might be able to see evidence of a graviton escaping from our brane.
* For those who aren't familiar with these concepts, ST includes the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe (3 spatial, plus time) is only one "slice" of an extradimensional body called "the bulk." The "slice" is referred to as a "brane." If String Theory is right, there are other branes millimetres away from us, but in a higher spatial dimension. The only theoretical way to communicate between them is with a graviton-generating device.
Incidentally, Alastair Reynolds makes use of this concept in his latest novel, Absolution Gap. There are some quotes from his books in my journal if anyone is interested.
A little OT, but what is wrong with Walmart? I haven't read any bad crap on them.
You are joking, right?
In case you aren't:
- Many Walmart stores lock their night employees in. As in, they can't get out until the morning, even if their shift ends in the middle of the night. There was a story in the NYTimes (only available paid now) about how people who were injured on the job during those shifts were told that if they went to the hospital, they'd be fired.
- Walmart managers tell new hires that if they unionize, they'll be fired.
- Walmart stores put small local retailers out of business, and replace the jobs they offered with minimum-wage positions.
There's more, but those are the main reasons I won't shop at them. If you are honestly looking for information, just do a google search on the first topic and it should hook you up with a plethora of sites.
I use both on a regular basis (and, in fact, my team supports about 12,000 2k workstations and 500 2k servers). XP is more stable, and has better support from non-enterprise software vendors. Combined with 2003 Server, there are also some cool policy things you can do that aren't possible in 2k.
The *only* serious bloat in XP that isn't also possible to turn on in 2k is really the themes, and you can disable that in less than five minutes.
That wasn't my point, though. My point is that it's your unwillingness to even work on a client's XP machine that doesn't make sense. That was just a sidebar to my comment about.NET anyway.
It's the.net runtime framework i'm in morbid fear of.
Why? Are you afraid of DirectX too?.NET is just an engine that allows new types of programs to run. Developing in.NET is faster and easier for a lot of applications. We use VB.NET and ASP.NET in my engineering department at work, and they're really handy. I also know some hardcore developers who like C# and managed C++.
I'm sure it's possible to write apps that do bad things using VS.NET, but you can make just as many with non-.NET technologies.
Maybe you are thinking of the original world-assimilating plan for.NET? HailStorm, and all of that? They're different things. MS is putting the.NET label on everything now.
if a biz client is running winXP, I refuse to work on it.
This is just silly. XP is the best desktop OS that MS has released to market. Turn off themes, turn off the new logon interface, and it's everything that 2k was but better.
That's not to say that it's the best OS on the planet, but it's certainly far superior to 2k, 9x, or NT4.
I've had a feeling that the true history of humankind, and most of the early biblical events, took place on Mars or another planet.
This is an idea I've heard before, but I can't see it making sense. There's evidence of life on earth (including our ancestors) for millions of years. The Bible was only written a few thousand ago. Do you think that our chimpanzee-esque forebearers preserved the history orally all of that time?
Back in the day, Telengard for the commodore did this too, except it made the levels very huge, and the same from game to game, so that the level was always the same for everyone, but it was never stored anywhere, it was only generated from the "seed", which never changed.
River Raid (the ancient console game) allegedly works this way too.
I think if there were female producers looking for jobs in Gaming they would be hired.
There already are women working in the gaming industry. The director of both Soul Reaver games and Defiance is a woman (Amy Hennig), and one of the three people taking over for her on the next game in the series is (Jen Fernandez), and one of the producers for all three (Rosaura Sandoval) is too.
I haven't been reading the credits for other games too much, but they can't be the only ones.
I here 60k and up is normal for a game producer
You are joking, right? Most game *programmers* make more than that.
How many of you assumed Samus was a man before you found out the truth? Why did you assume that?
I think that back in the days of the original Metroid, it was fair to assume that Samus was a man (if you hadn't finished the game) because the only other sci-fi bounty hunter who had mass popularity at the time was Boba Fett. Samus was clearly based at least in part on him, so why not take that to its logical conclusion?
...and * Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain * Cyber Empires * Dark Legions * Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem * Fantasy Empires * Fantasy Fest! * Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ED and MGS:tTS were just their biggest titles. They have also been working on the (rapidly approaching Duke Nuk'em Whenever status) Too Human.
Blood Omen is really the only other game that doesn't belong in a museum, though.
SK has been working on Too Human since before Blood Omen was finished (IE somewhere around 1996). I was hoping Nintendo was going to make it a launch title for their next system (and include the working Playstation, N64, and Gamecube versions as bonus material =P), but now I doubt it will ever be released.
I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like.
I think you are right.
I loved ED. About six months ago I saw a sealed copy of the Gamecube RE on eBay for $20, so I thought I'd take a chance. It's awful. The graphics are obviously excellent, but the controls are completely stupid (Capcom, you got it right with Devil May Cry. Why won't you make the RE team use a control system that makes sense for people who aren't tank drivers, or at least *give me the option* of using a normal control scheme? And don't even get me started on the stupidity of having a "run" button on a controller with analogue sticks), the save system is incredibly inconvenient, the pace of the game is too slow, and you don't have enough ammunition.
Also, I found out *after* playing the game for a few hours that all the zombies I'd "killed" were going to come back later as invincible super zombies because I hadn't found the items that would let me torch them once they were down.
Finally, Capcom really needs to start hiring some professional voice actors for their English dubs instead of paying the janitor and their best friends $5 to record dialogue. It's amazingly insulting to the US audience that they will spend tons of money on the game production and then stick people who are incompetent at acting in front of the microphone. That goes for everything of theirs I've ever played (with the possible exception of Steel Battalion), not just RE. Say what you like about ED, but at least SK sprung for quality voice actors like Michael Bell and Richard Doyle and it really improves the cinematic feel of the game.
its the LACK of hacking activities at companies like MS that started this problem
According to a friend who used to work there, MS has teams of people whose job is to take their custom-built equipment anywhere they want on site and see if they can hack into systems.
I'm not really sure what more they could be doing, other than allowing everybody to view their source code.
Well, I guess the person who modded you as flamebait has never experienced the click of death in an Iomega Zip drive or had the glorious responsibility of managing one of their flakey Win 2000 NAS products.
Or even the incredibly poor quality of one of their original Jaz drives.
I was suckered into buying one when I went to university. A year later I heard that KMFDM had lost an entire album's worth of music to a Jaz disk dying, but I figured it was just bad luck.
Then I lost the entire contents of one of my disks (and the disk itself) when the drive at my part time job ate it. Losing a $100 disk is bad, but it's even worse when you're a student on a budget.
That was the only time I've ever lost my temper and destroyed a piece of computer hardware. I did learn something funny, though, which is that if you throw a Jaz drive at a concrete floor, it will literally explode into various components instead of just breaking apart.
I also learned that it doesn't necessarily make a good impression on new employees when the sysadmin runs into the lobby, screams "you motherFUCKER!" and then breaks something loudly.
I think I gave my own drive away. I hope it didn't do anything bad to whoever ended up with it.
The RIAA takes some plastic that costs well under a buck, and sells it for over $15.00
This is an old, and poor argument. Do you think Adobe's markup on Photoshop is 50,000% or something equally ridiculous because they sell it for $500? Production costs are not limited to that of the physical media.
$3200. That's a fucking FORTUNE to most people, let alone guys that spend 18 hours a day in a van moving from gig to gig hoping that the manager of the club they're playing tonight doesn't fuck them out of their money so they can eat and gas up the van.
Mod parent up.
Most independent musicians I know are lucky to make about $100 playing a show. When a couple of them went on tour a few years ago, they actually *lost* money the whole time, because it was so expensive to tour up and down the west coast. This wasn't living the rockstar lifestyle, either. They were throwing down sleeping bags on the side of the road at night because motels would have been too expensive.
Like it or not, being a major label band has its benefits. You don't see Evanescence getting kicked offstage after four songs because the club's sound guy is an asshole, or having to threaten physical violence to get more than 50% of the payment for the show they were "guaranteed."
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 2, Insightful
$.50 a track
Don't you think that's more than a little unrealistic? Fifty cents a track means a total cost of less than six dollars for most albums. You can pay more than that for a six-pack of decent beer, and it certainly won't last as long as a good album.
I've never understood what people's problem is with paying $10-15 per CD. I have at least a hundred that I bought ten years ago that I still like. How many products in that price range deliver that kind of long-term value, besides film and music?
If I were a professional musician, and my alleged "fans" would only pay fifty cents for their favourite track, I would pack up and quit because it would be so insulting. You can't even buy a soda pop from a vending machine for that little anymore.
You know that a sabot is that little metal band that goes around a subcaibre bullet, right? Why would I rattle that?
A "sabot" is a shoe, which is why the bullets and other projectile weapons have them.
The sabot reference in the grandparent post is to "sabotage," where workers angry over automation replacing their jobs threw their wooden shoes into the machinery to destroy it.
a wav file that you can't hear but is supposed to make you go all funny.
If that 20hz sine wave really did anything odd, then there would be a huge problem in the dance and rap scenes because of the 808 kick drum and/or use of subharmonic synthesizers in clubs.
Good'ol human powered transportation never hurt any one..or has it?
Bikes hate me.
When I was in high school, I went bike riding with a friend. Due to some brake problems, a hill, and having to avoid a giant metal gate on the hill, mine managed to flip end over end like some sort of pedal-powered Evel Knivel stunt gone wrong, with me landing on my head and the bike on top of me.
Fortunately I was wearing a helmet, but it convinced me that anything with less than four wheels is something I should avoid.
Re:At the present rate
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Alcubierre's idea was that the ship doesn't move. Instead, it modifies the space around it much like an esclator.
I'm with you so far.
However, at this time, there was a problem with obtaining the required energy, which was quite alot [think total solar output of the sun in its current life, per second].
The main stumbling block to Alcubierre's drive is that it requires negative energy. My understanding is that the human race can't produce that right now, at least in appreciable quantities.
All of the FTL drive concepts that I've seen involve something currently unobtainable (or outright impossible) like this - infinitely long neutronium rods, creation of a pocket universe to put the ship in, etc.
In 1999, however, Thomas Valone spotted an answer. Zero Point Energy.
No. Pseudo-science can solve lots of problems theoretically, but it is not the answer to real-world problems.
I think the problem is the current focus on stunning graphics rather than fun gameplay.
I keep hearing people say this (and the ever-popular "gameplay was better in the 80s"), but when a game *does* come out that has a more basic arcade-style feel (like P.N.03 on the Gamecube) it does terribly. P.N.03 even has good graphics in addition to the old-school gameplay mechanics, and it still sold pretty poorly.
The future of the current gaming industry is online gaming and LAN parties.
I certainly hope not. I hate multiplayer games. The only one I ever had fun with was Starcraft, and I wouldn't have been into that either if the single-player campaign hadn't been as well done.
Slashdot Mirror
Gravitons are only theoretical. At this point it looks like they don't exist.
Actually, according to String Theory, they're very real.
ST's use of them is really interesting - there's always been kind of a mystery as to why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces. ST says that the strong/weak forces and electromagnetism have carrier particles whose strings are anchored to our brane in the bulk*. It goes on to say that gravitons' strings are free-floating, so they are not bound to our brane. This would mean that when a source of gravity was present, much of it was leaking out of our brane, leaving behind the relatively weak force we feel instead.
Apparently something that is being looked forward to with the Large Hadron Collider is that they might be able to see evidence of a graviton escaping from our brane.
* For those who aren't familiar with these concepts, ST includes the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe (3 spatial, plus time) is only one "slice" of an extradimensional body called "the bulk." The "slice" is referred to as a "brane." If String Theory is right, there are other branes millimetres away from us, but in a higher spatial dimension. The only theoretical way to communicate between them is with a graviton-generating device.
Incidentally, Alastair Reynolds makes use of this concept in his latest novel, Absolution Gap. There are some quotes from his books in my journal if anyone is interested.
A little OT, but what is wrong with Walmart? I haven't read any bad crap on them.
You are joking, right?
In case you aren't:
- Many Walmart stores lock their night employees in. As in, they can't get out until the morning, even if their shift ends in the middle of the night. There was a story in the NYTimes (only available paid now) about how people who were injured on the job during those shifts were told that if they went to the hospital, they'd be fired.
- Walmart managers tell new hires that if they unionize, they'll be fired.
- Walmart stores put small local retailers out of business, and replace the jobs they offered with minimum-wage positions.
There's more, but those are the main reasons I won't shop at them. If you are honestly looking for information, just do a google search on the first topic and it should hook you up with a plethora of sites.
Win2k. All the power, non of the crap.
.NET anyway.
I use both on a regular basis (and, in fact, my team supports about 12,000 2k workstations and 500 2k servers). XP is more stable, and has better support from non-enterprise software vendors. Combined with 2003 Server, there are also some cool policy things you can do that aren't possible in 2k.
The *only* serious bloat in XP that isn't also possible to turn on in 2k is really the themes, and you can disable that in less than five minutes.
That wasn't my point, though. My point is that it's your unwillingness to even work on a client's XP machine that doesn't make sense. That was just a sidebar to my comment about
It's the .net runtime framework i'm in morbid fear of.
.NET is just an engine that allows new types of programs to run. Developing in .NET is faster and easier for a lot of applications. We use VB.NET and ASP.NET in my engineering department at work, and they're really handy. I also know some hardcore developers who like C# and managed C++.
.NET? HailStorm, and all of that? They're different things. MS is putting the .NET label on everything now.
Why? Are you afraid of DirectX too?
I'm sure it's possible to write apps that do bad things using VS.NET, but you can make just as many with non-.NET technologies.
Maybe you are thinking of the original world-assimilating plan for
if a biz client is running winXP, I refuse to work on it.
This is just silly. XP is the best desktop OS that MS has released to market. Turn off themes, turn off the new logon interface, and it's everything that 2k was but better.
That's not to say that it's the best OS on the planet, but it's certainly far superior to 2k, 9x, or NT4.
I've had a feeling that the true history of humankind, and most of the early biblical events, took place on Mars or another planet.
This is an idea I've heard before, but I can't see it making sense. There's evidence of life on earth (including our ancestors) for millions of years. The Bible was only written a few thousand ago. Do you think that our chimpanzee-esque forebearers preserved the history orally all of that time?
Back in the day, Telengard for the commodore did this too, except it made the levels very huge, and the same from game to game, so that the level was always the same for everyone, but it was never stored anywhere, it was only generated from the "seed", which never changed.
River Raid (the ancient console game) allegedly works this way too.
And I can assure you, a GF4Ti does _not_ cut it unless you call 2-5fps acceptable. *sigh*
I think there is something else going on. I have a ti4600 and it plays fine (for a tech demo) - something like 20-30fps.
My processor is an Athlon XP 1700+, so it's not like I have some sort of speed demon machine either.
Young rady, in this house we obey the raws of thelmodynamics
Japanese people do not talk like this. There are no "L" sounds in the Japanese set of syllables. What is this, the 1940s?
Maybe to the company you worked for?
No. That episode convinced me that trusting any data to a Jaz drive was a bad idea, so I auctioned the rest of our disks on eBay.
I'm really not sure where mine ended up. Not many people I knew at the time had the SCSI adapter that would have been necessary to use it.
I think if there were female producers looking for jobs in Gaming they would be hired.
There already are women working in the gaming industry. The director of both Soul Reaver games and Defiance is a woman (Amy Hennig), and one of the three people taking over for her on the next game in the series is (Jen Fernandez), and one of the producers for all three (Rosaura Sandoval) is too.
I haven't been reading the credits for other games too much, but they can't be the only ones.
I here 60k and up is normal for a game producer
You are joking, right? Most game *programmers* make more than that.
How many of you assumed Samus was a man before you found out the truth? Why did you assume that?
I think that back in the days of the original Metroid, it was fair to assume that Samus was a man (if you hadn't finished the game) because the only other sci-fi bounty hunter who had mass popularity at the time was Boba Fett. Samus was clearly based at least in part on him, so why not take that to its logical conclusion?
...and * Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain * Cyber Empires * Dark Legions * Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem * Fantasy Empires * Fantasy Fest! * Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ED and MGS:tTS were just their biggest titles. They have also been working on the (rapidly approaching Duke Nuk'em Whenever status) Too Human.
Blood Omen is really the only other game that doesn't belong in a museum, though.
SK has been working on Too Human since before Blood Omen was finished (IE somewhere around 1996). I was hoping Nintendo was going to make it a launch title for their next system (and include the working Playstation, N64, and Gamecube versions as bonus material =P), but now I doubt it will ever be released.
I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like.
I think you are right.
I loved ED. About six months ago I saw a sealed copy of the Gamecube RE on eBay for $20, so I thought I'd take a chance. It's awful. The graphics are obviously excellent, but the controls are completely stupid (Capcom, you got it right with Devil May Cry. Why won't you make the RE team use a control system that makes sense for people who aren't tank drivers, or at least *give me the option* of using a normal control scheme? And don't even get me started on the stupidity of having a "run" button on a controller with analogue sticks), the save system is incredibly inconvenient, the pace of the game is too slow, and you don't have enough ammunition.
Also, I found out *after* playing the game for a few hours that all the zombies I'd "killed" were going to come back later as invincible super zombies because I hadn't found the items that would let me torch them once they were down.
Finally, Capcom really needs to start hiring some professional voice actors for their English dubs instead of paying the janitor and their best friends $5 to record dialogue. It's amazingly insulting to the US audience that they will spend tons of money on the game production and then stick people who are incompetent at acting in front of the microphone. That goes for everything of theirs I've ever played (with the possible exception of Steel Battalion), not just RE. Say what you like about ED, but at least SK sprung for quality voice actors like Michael Bell and Richard Doyle and it really improves the cinematic feel of the game.
its the LACK of hacking activities at companies like MS that started this problem
According to a friend who used to work there, MS has teams of people whose job is to take their custom-built equipment anywhere they want on site and see if they can hack into systems.
I'm not really sure what more they could be doing, other than allowing everybody to view their source code.
Well, I guess the person who modded you as flamebait has never experienced the click of death in an Iomega Zip drive or had the glorious responsibility of managing one of their flakey Win 2000 NAS products.
Or even the incredibly poor quality of one of their original Jaz drives.
I was suckered into buying one when I went to university. A year later I heard that KMFDM had lost an entire album's worth of music to a Jaz disk dying, but I figured it was just bad luck.
Then I lost the entire contents of one of my disks (and the disk itself) when the drive at my part time job ate it. Losing a $100 disk is bad, but it's even worse when you're a student on a budget.
That was the only time I've ever lost my temper and destroyed a piece of computer hardware. I did learn something funny, though, which is that if you throw a Jaz drive at a concrete floor, it will literally explode into various components instead of just breaking apart.
I also learned that it doesn't necessarily make a good impression on new employees when the sysadmin runs into the lobby, screams "you motherFUCKER!" and then breaks something loudly.
I think I gave my own drive away. I hope it didn't do anything bad to whoever ended up with it.
The RIAA takes some plastic that costs well under a buck, and sells it for over $15.00
This is an old, and poor argument. Do you think Adobe's markup on Photoshop is 50,000% or something equally ridiculous because they sell it for $500? Production costs are not limited to that of the physical media.
$3200. That's a fucking FORTUNE to most people, let alone guys that spend 18 hours a day in a van moving from gig to gig hoping that the manager of the club they're playing tonight doesn't fuck them out of their money so they can eat and gas up the van.
Mod parent up.
Most independent musicians I know are lucky to make about $100 playing a show. When a couple of them went on tour a few years ago, they actually *lost* money the whole time, because it was so expensive to tour up and down the west coast. This wasn't living the rockstar lifestyle, either. They were throwing down sleeping bags on the side of the road at night because motels would have been too expensive.
Like it or not, being a major label band has its benefits. You don't see Evanescence getting kicked offstage after four songs because the club's sound guy is an asshole, or having to threaten physical violence to get more than 50% of the payment for the show they were "guaranteed."
$.50 a track
Don't you think that's more than a little unrealistic? Fifty cents a track means a total cost of less than six dollars for most albums. You can pay more than that for a six-pack of decent beer, and it certainly won't last as long as a good album.
I've never understood what people's problem is with paying $10-15 per CD. I have at least a hundred that I bought ten years ago that I still like. How many products in that price range deliver that kind of long-term value, besides film and music?
If I were a professional musician, and my alleged "fans" would only pay fifty cents for their favourite track, I would pack up and quit because it would be so insulting. You can't even buy a soda pop from a vending machine for that little anymore.
someone want to explain how this isn't a tripod on wheels with a weight attached?
Wheels? Are you sure you're looking at the same website?
You know that a sabot is that little metal band that goes around a subcaibre bullet, right? Why would I rattle that?
A "sabot" is a shoe, which is why the bullets and other projectile weapons have them.
The sabot reference in the grandparent post is to "sabotage," where workers angry over automation replacing their jobs threw their wooden shoes into the machinery to destroy it.
a wav file that you can't hear but is supposed to make you go all funny.
If that 20hz sine wave really did anything odd, then there would be a huge problem in the dance and rap scenes because of the 808 kick drum and/or use of subharmonic synthesizers in clubs.
What is this 8 hour workday I keep hearing people talk about? - Salaried, exempt. :-(
Most of the people I know who are salaried (including myself) already make 3-5+ times what a Wal-Mart or other low-wage worker does anyway.
It seems to me that there's a bit of built-in compensation there for overtime.
Fortunately I also work for a company that's good about balancing out massive overtime for salaried workers with comp time.
Good'ol human powered transportation never hurt any one..or has it?
Bikes hate me.
When I was in high school, I went bike riding with a friend. Due to some brake problems, a hill, and having to avoid a giant metal gate on the hill, mine managed to flip end over end like some sort of pedal-powered Evel Knivel stunt gone wrong, with me landing on my head and the bike on top of me.
Fortunately I was wearing a helmet, but it convinced me that anything with less than four wheels is something I should avoid.
Alcubierre's idea was that the ship doesn't move. Instead, it modifies the space around it much like an esclator.
I'm with you so far.
However, at this time, there was a problem with obtaining the required energy, which was quite alot [think total solar output of the sun in its current life, per second].
The main stumbling block to Alcubierre's drive is that it requires negative energy. My understanding is that the human race can't produce that right now, at least in appreciable quantities.
All of the FTL drive concepts that I've seen involve something currently unobtainable (or outright impossible) like this - infinitely long neutronium rods, creation of a pocket universe to put the ship in, etc.
In 1999, however, Thomas Valone spotted an answer. Zero Point Energy.
No. Pseudo-science can solve lots of problems theoretically, but it is not the answer to real-world problems.
I think the problem is the current focus on stunning graphics rather than fun gameplay.
I keep hearing people say this (and the ever-popular "gameplay was better in the 80s"), but when a game *does* come out that has a more basic arcade-style feel (like P.N.03 on the Gamecube) it does terribly. P.N.03 even has good graphics in addition to the old-school gameplay mechanics, and it still sold pretty poorly.
The future of the current gaming industry is online gaming and LAN parties.
I certainly hope not. I hate multiplayer games. The only one I ever had fun with was Starcraft, and I wouldn't have been into that either if the single-player campaign hadn't been as well done.