You don't want to inhale DU dust, but that's mostly because it's poisonous like other heavy metals. It's not particularly radioactive, with a half-life on the order of the age of the planet. That's why it's called Depleted Uranium...:)
Factor 5's "Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader" uses the ARAM as a "swap file", paging code and data to and from main memory. We did something similar at Pandemic for "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", and it worked fairly well. That 16MB came in handy.:)
Battlestar Galactica isn't the only thing guilty of this--virtually every sci-fi series seems to put lights in space helmets. In these cases, showing the actor's face is more important than realism.
I realize replying to one's own message is somewhat gauche, but for those who can't be bothered to follow the link, here's another relevant excerpt that explains why the Southern states decided to bail:
A precursor for a War Between the States came in 1832, when South Carolina called a convention to nullify tariff acts of 1828 and 1832, referred to as the 'Tariffs of Abominations." A compromise lowering the tariff was reached, averting secession and possibly war. The North favored protective tariffs for their manufacturing industry. The South, which exported agricultural products to and imported manufactured goods from Europe, favored free trade and was hurt by the tariffs. Plus, a northern-dominated Congress enacted laws similar to Britain's Navigation Acts to protect northern shipping interests.
Shortly after Lincoln's election, Congress passed the highly protectionist Morrill tariffs. That's when the South seceded, setting up a new government. Their constitution was nearly identical to the U.S. Constitution except that it outlawed protectionist tariffs, business handouts and mandated a two-thirds majority vote for all spending measures.
Basically, it was a free-trade versus tariff thing.
As Williams states,
The only good coming from the War Between the States was the abolition of slavery. The great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of-the governed" was overturned by force of arms. By destroying the states' right to secession, Abraham Lincoln opened the door to the kind of unconstrained, despotic, arrogant government we have today, something the framers of the Constitution could not have possibly imagined.
Re:Frodo often seen as ``everyman''
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
History books have misled today's Americans to believe the war was fought to free slaves. Statements from the time suggest otherwise. In President Lincoln's first inaugural address, he said, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so." During the war, in an 1862 letter to the New York Daily Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln said, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery." A recent article by Baltimore's Loyola College Professor Thomas DiLorenzo titled "The Great Centralizer," in The Independent Review (Fall 1998) cites quotation after quotation of similar northern sentiment about slavery.
States were supposed to have the constitutional right to secede from the union, meant as a check against unlimited Federal power. The somewhat-misnamed Civil War put an end to that once and for all.
Re:How to up your frame rate on a console game
on
Doom 3 Alpha Leaked
·
· Score: 1
In the shell, I'm pretty sure it's T&L bound as there's not much overdraw going on, but lots of vertices. In the game, it's actually simulation bound, as PS2 memory doesn't like random access (which the physics and collision system do a lot). That's what happens when you start with a PC background and move to consoles...:)
I've heard about that half-frame trick before from several sources, and it's a big win if you can pull it off. Not only does it halve your fill-rate requirement, it halves the size of your back buffer, front buffer, and z buffer, so you have more space for textures. Unfortunately, it doesn't handle dropped frames very well.
30 -> 60, you will be hard pressed to notice the difference (but it IS possible)
I would disagree with this assertion, though it does depend on the application. With any sort of action game, the difference is very noticeable. You can get by with 30... until you see 60. I'm particularly aware of this because the PS2 game I'm working on tends to run at 30 fps in the game shell, but occasionally hits 60. There's such a profound qualitative change that we might have to clamp the rate at 30 to prevent the bursts of 60 from making 30 look bad.:)
I'd say 60 is the frame rate above which the changes become less obvious, but they're still perceptible as increasing smoothness. If you're talking motion-blurred images, it gets almost impossible to tell, but that doesn't really apply to games yet (you'd be better off hitting your monitor's maximum refresh rate before trying to go that route).
(Incidentally, I can tell the difference between a 60Hz refresh rate and a 70Hz refresh rate, though between a 70Hz refresh rate and an 80Hz refresh rate. 60Hz seems to flicker for me, especially in my peripheral vision.)
First, high frame rate improves the responsiveness of the controls. The loop from monitor to eye to brain to hand to mouse to input to simulation to rendering to monitor should be as short as possible. The image on the screen is always just a bit behind--it's just a matter of how much behind. For a fast action game, you want the response to be as close to instantaneous as possible.
Second, high frame rateproduces a realistic sense of motion. Even though the integration time of your retina isn't particularly fast, higher update rates give an more convincing illusion of continuous time. Movies and television can get away with 24 fps and 60 fps (fields) respectively because the images displayed have motion blur built into them. Games don't have that advantage, so they have to "fill in the gaps" with high frame rate.
(And yes, I work in the game industry so I know these things. At Activision, the difference between Battlezone running in software at 30 fps versus Battlezone running with hardware acceleration at 60+ fps was astonishing.)
I would think a DVD player is significantly cheaper and more family/kid friendly than a distributed computer connected to a television. Not everyone wants network cable running all over their house.:)
One of the images indicates that the 2980kg weight includes eight passengers. Assuming 80kg per passenger, that's 640kg right there, leaving 2340kg. Two and a half metric tons isn't so bad for an eight-passenger vehicle.
That's why you want to have plenty of milestones; if you start slipping on early ones, you still have time to correct understaffing and other problems. If you miss the later ones, then MMM definitely applies.
Quick mental exercise: what do you suppose would have happened if the United States just rolled over and let the Soviet Union do whatever it wanted? While we were feeding the masses, educating the world, and developing propulsion systems, the Soviets would have been taking over the world--they stated that was their goal. Eventually, the peaceful U.S. would have gotten rolled over.
One can argue that by spending all that money on weapons and military, we forced the Soviet Union to spend itself into oblivion. Until someone forever rids the world of tyrannical regimes and megalomaniacs, there will always be a need for big effing guns. It's a little thing called deterrence.
So, does this qualify as "Flame Bait" or "Troll"?:)
Not exactly; core wars was all about directly attacking the other program, not indirectly competing against it. In this contest, your program will be completely safe, even if your robot is not.:)
(I used to play core wars in college, though I was never much good at it, and I never got into the newer versions of the programming language.)
These extra values past the edge are generally called "sentinel elements", and this technique can greatly simplify and speed up algorithms when used properly.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't want to inhale DU dust, but that's mostly because it's poisonous like other heavy metals. It's not particularly radioactive, with a half-life on the order of the age of the planet. That's why it's called Depleted Uranium... :)
He said fusion, not fission. "No rads for you! Come back, one year!"
Factor 5's "Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader" uses the ARAM as a "swap file", paging code and data to and from main memory. We did something similar at Pandemic for "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", and it worked fairly well. That 16MB came in handy. :)
Battlestar Galactica isn't the only thing guilty of this--virtually every sci-fi series seems to put lights in space helmets. In these cases, showing the actor's face is more important than realism.
A relevant excerpt:
States were supposed to have the constitutional right to secede from the union, meant as a check against unlimited Federal power. The somewhat-misnamed Civil War put an end to that once and for all.I've heard about that half-frame trick before from several sources, and it's a big win if you can pull it off. Not only does it halve your fill-rate requirement, it halves the size of your back buffer, front buffer, and z buffer, so you have more space for textures. Unfortunately, it doesn't handle dropped frames very well.
I'd say 60 is the frame rate above which the changes become less obvious, but they're still perceptible as increasing smoothness. If you're talking motion-blurred images, it gets almost impossible to tell, but that doesn't really apply to games yet (you'd be better off hitting your monitor's maximum refresh rate before trying to go that route).
(Incidentally, I can tell the difference between a 60Hz refresh rate and a 70Hz refresh rate, though between a 70Hz refresh rate and an 80Hz refresh rate. 60Hz seems to flicker for me, especially in my peripheral vision.)
Second, high frame rateproduces a realistic sense of motion. Even though the integration time of your retina isn't particularly fast, higher update rates give an more convincing illusion of continuous time. Movies and television can get away with 24 fps and 60 fps (fields) respectively because the images displayed have motion blur built into them. Games don't have that advantage, so they have to "fill in the gaps" with high frame rate.
(And yes, I work in the game industry so I know these things. At Activision, the difference between Battlezone running in software at 30 fps versus Battlezone running with hardware acceleration at 60+ fps was astonishing.)
I would think a DVD player is significantly cheaper and more family/kid friendly than a distributed computer connected to a television. Not everyone wants network cable running all over their house. :)
I think you missed the point. He's making VCD disks so other people in his household don't tie up the computer watching videos.
I suppose they'd be like matter and antimatter--they'd mutally annihalate yielding a torrent of high-energy flames. :)
One of the images indicates that the 2980kg weight includes eight passengers. Assuming 80kg per passenger, that's 640kg right there, leaving 2340kg. Two and a half metric tons isn't so bad for an eight-passenger vehicle.
That's why you want to have plenty of milestones; if you start slipping on early ones, you still have time to correct understaffing and other problems. If you miss the later ones, then MMM definitely applies.
(I also worked on Battlezone 2 with Pandemic Studios, and now Star Wars: The Clone Wars for Gamecube)
Quick mental exercise: what do you suppose would have happened if the United States just rolled over and let the Soviet Union do whatever it wanted? While we were feeding the masses, educating the world, and developing propulsion systems, the Soviets would have been taking over the world--they stated that was their goal. Eventually, the peaceful U.S. would have gotten rolled over.
One can argue that by spending all that money on weapons and military, we forced the Soviet Union to spend itself into oblivion. Until someone forever rids the world of tyrannical regimes and megalomaniacs, there will always be a need for big effing guns. It's a little thing called deterrence.
So, does this qualify as "Flame Bait" or "Troll"? :)
(I used to play core wars in college, though I was never much good at it, and I never got into the newer versions of the programming language.)
These extra values past the edge are generally called "sentinel elements", and this technique can greatly simplify and speed up algorithms when used properly.
Actually, if you check the article carefully, the cost is the absolute value of your bid. So you pay for bidding negative numbers too.