The GP's reformatted paragraph didn't take into account the line indentation that the article showed. I think part of the trick for them is to make the "carriage return" shorter, making your eyes have to travel less distance to get to the next piece of the sentence. Note how, in the article, the lines that started indented were short, so that the distance from the end of them to the beginning of the next line, which was indented less, still wasn't much? This keeps the text from creeping across the page as it goes down.
Also, if you try to read something that is randomly broken along indeterminate points in a sentence, then it will be much harder to read than if it has
been dissected into parts that pay attention to the natural breaks in the language.
Civ IV has the same sort of thing (dunno about earlier versions), albeit with a fairly limited catalog of sounds. If you zoom in on a city, you get noises relative to the work being done there, but if you zoom in on the ocean, you get wave sounds. I like it. It adds dimensionality to the game that would otherwise be lacking.
I can't believe I've made it this far down the thread without someone imagining a Beowulf cluster of these things. Has that little gem of Slashdot culture gone so far out of style?
Ten years ago I was working with Compaq servers that had the capability to shut down power to a single slot. We (I was working at Intel at the time) were developing a dual-port NIC in partnership with them, and hot-swap PCI was the big new tech. Several times I got distracted and pulled cards without powering down the slot (which was done with a little push button on each slot). Pulling the cards was no problem, and so long as the power was off to the slot when you put the card in, you could power it up, reload the driver (NLM; I was testing Netware) and keep running. It was a nice setup.
Well, while the article seems to have a clue what they're talking about, you certainly don't. Intelligent design really is a bunch of lazy researchers...
Your argument a) misses the joke, and b) holds water less than the parent. Clues must be in short supply, as you indicated.
Sorry to have scuttled you there. If it helps, your link to the Wikepedia article on Diamond Age has encouraged me to read it. Snowcrash is one of my all time favorite novels, and, oddly enough, I've never read anything else by Stephenson.
Agreed. I think the USPTO should have a forum here on Slashdot to collect opinions on patents being applied for. Patent examiners should read the forum filtered at 4 to obviate all the goatse, GNAA and "frist psot" posts, focusing on things that have been modded up by at least two people (making a three-vote for the comment being noteworthy on some level). I realize that this would require some level of maturity and commitment to the process on the part of Slashdot users, something that may be unattainable, but it seems like it would be worth a shot. At the very least, they could "try" patents that have passed their otherwise rigorous patent examination process for a sanity check before they're released into the wild.
Would you suggest ending patents all together? The article doesn't have a lot of details about what patents are being violated, but, presuming that the patent is for clearly different technology (unlike "one click" or somesuch), the patent holder should have the right to protect that. OTOH, the patent should be for the method, not the idea to do it. Vonnage should be able to come up with a different method for achieving the same goal (like launching an application by clicking on an associated graphical representation; it's all in the registration of the "icon" with the OS and how the application gets instanciated, not that the user points the mouse at a picture).
They should be able to pull it out in court. Sounds like VG stock is a good buy right now.
I've got no mod points, so will post an agreement. If people are pissed about a PC vendor's advertising practices, then they should go after the PC vendor, not the OS vendor that "allowed them" to say something about their own product. This is a simple case of MS-haters wanting to find a way to stick it to the OS vendor anyway they can. Two things we need (among others) in this country are a) people who take responsibility for their own (purchasing) choices, and b) companies that back what they advertise. If Microsoft didn't send ad copy to [Dell, Gateway, Lenovo,...] and say, "If you don't run these ads, you can't buy our software," then I believe they are off the hook.
...cars today are significantly safer beasts then they were when the 65 MPH rule was put in place.
If you come down off your soapbox for a minute and take a breath, you might be able to use the time to consider that, while cars have gotten safer, drivers certainly haven't. It's more likely that, because cars have gotten safer and more comfortable to drive, drivers have become more complacent and less safe. Most of the yayhoos I see driving around here scare the crap out of me now, let alone if they were commonly allowed to exceed 100 mph.
An article over at macnn.com about how a Mac Mini outperformed an (old) XServe says that the Mini used.37 amps at its peak. Presuming that was measuring the 110 Volt side, that's just over 40 Watts running full steam. I'd call that fairly power efficient.
I'm not saying that Moller isn't something of a crackpot, and I suspect that he makes just enough progress to keep the investments rolling in without having to actually produce something viable on an automotive lot. However, he is making progress, and there may be a market for the vehicles if they work even half as well as he touts.
I think the important question is, "Given a (two stroke) gas engine and full (two gallon) fuel tank, what would the power of a fuel cell/electric motor system be for the same amount of runtime?" I think the answer is "Not much." Two stroke (noisy, stinky) gas engines are very good at converting fuel into mechanical power. You just pay for it in environmental damage, not only in noise and smell, but in toxicity.
I guess weight is the major obstacle at the moment.
It is. Current (pardon the pun) PEM fuel cell technology typically uses platinum, AFAIK. Stacks are heavy. The Ballard Mark 1030 provides about 78 Watts per liter of unit volume and 66 Watts per kilogram. The Ballard Mark 902, which is used in several fuel cell cars and buses, is much more powerful at 1133 Watts per liter of unit volume and 885 Watts per kilogram, but it's heavy (96 kilos, over 211 pounds). Note that neither of these devices weights include the power conditioning and management systems, fuel handling, etc. The entire integrated stack is much heavier when you're considering a "hydrogen in, electricity out" system. Furthermore, if you're not supplying fuel from a bottle of anhydrous hydrogen (a strange phrase if I've ever heard one), you've got a fuel reformer to take into account, which is one more package of weight and one more power draw on the system.
Having said all that, I think this is a great idea and hope it succeeds. From what I know (or think I know), so-called "ultracapacitors" are much lighter and more responsive than Lithium Ion batteries, and other slow-and-steady power generation systems, such as zinc-air batteries, might be able to back them up with better success.
How about "Children of Men" ? It's quirky and quite cerebral. I'm not sure how much it's grossed so far, but it seems to be getting good reviews. All sci-fi doesn't have to have spaceships and androids.
While I agree that there's a certain cross-section of the role-playing geek crowd that fits your description, a lot of people (myself included) are more interested in the pure creativity involved. Most in our group like oddball characters with strange aspects to them. We're all pretty much past the self-aggrandizement among friends phase that drove us to the ends you describe.
Pixels? Kids these days! In my day, we had lines. Lots of them. And every one of them were horizontal. We had to line them up on our tubes (yeah, tubes!) to make pictures out of them. By hand. We had these dials see, with strange labels like V-Hold and Horiz.
As soon as someone hacks it (this weekend maybe?) to do something it doesn't, there will be a flood of other hacks for it that make it do everything else you might want. Oh, except whatever lewd thing you're thinking right now.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, there's a system-wide switch for later versions of Windows (post W2k?) that enforces case sensitivity. Don't care, though; I use a Mac.
The GP's reformatted paragraph didn't take into account the line indentation that the article showed. I think part of the trick for them is to make the "carriage return" shorter, making your eyes have to travel less distance to get to the next piece of the sentence. Note how, in the article, the lines that started indented were short, so that the distance from the end of them to the beginning of the next line, which was indented less, still wasn't much? This keeps the text from creeping across the page as it goes down.
Also, if you try to read
something that
is randomly
broken
along indeterminate
points in a sentence,
then it will be
much harder to
read than if it has
been dissected into
parts that pay attention
to the natural
breaks in the language.
Civ IV has the same sort of thing (dunno about earlier versions), albeit with a fairly limited catalog of sounds. If you zoom in on a city, you get noises relative to the work being done there, but if you zoom in on the ocean, you get wave sounds. I like it. It adds dimensionality to the game that would otherwise be lacking.
I can't believe I've made it this far down the thread without someone imagining a Beowulf cluster of these things. Has that little gem of Slashdot culture gone so far out of style?
Ten years ago I was working with Compaq servers that had the capability to shut down power to a single slot. We (I was working at Intel at the time) were developing a dual-port NIC in partnership with them, and hot-swap PCI was the big new tech. Several times I got distracted and pulled cards without powering down the slot (which was done with a little push button on each slot). Pulling the cards was no problem, and so long as the power was off to the slot when you put the card in, you could power it up, reload the driver (NLM; I was testing Netware) and keep running. It was a nice setup.
Well, while the article seems to have a clue what they're talking about, you certainly don't. Intelligent design really is a bunch of lazy researchers...
Your argument a) misses the joke, and b) holds water less than the parent. Clues must be in short supply, as you indicated.
Anyone else read "full ack" as "f*ck all" ??
I doubt it.
Don't you mean "method for modifying the stable state of chemical compounds by rapid oxidization" ??
Sorry to have scuttled you there. If it helps, your link to the Wikepedia article on Diamond Age has encouraged me to read it. Snowcrash is one of my all time favorite novels, and, oddly enough, I've never read anything else by Stephenson.
We'll probably deploy them on Earth first. On the battlefield.
Particularly in ST:TNG where most problems were solved by reconfiguring the deflector array to emit some heretofore unmentioned particle or wave.
"Geordi! The shower in my quarters is broken, and I haven't bathed in days."
"No problem, sir. I'll just reconfigure the deflector array to emit B.O. antiprotons, negating the effects emmanating from your pits."
Karma whoring: http://www.nokiausa.com/N800/1,9008,,00.html
Agreed. I think the USPTO should have a forum here on Slashdot to collect opinions on patents being applied for. Patent examiners should read the forum filtered at 4 to obviate all the goatse, GNAA and "frist psot" posts, focusing on things that have been modded up by at least two people (making a three-vote for the comment being noteworthy on some level). I realize that this would require some level of maturity and commitment to the process on the part of Slashdot users, something that may be unattainable, but it seems like it would be worth a shot. At the very least, they could "try" patents that have passed their otherwise rigorous patent examination process for a sanity check before they're released into the wild.
Would you suggest ending patents all together? The article doesn't have a lot of details about what patents are being violated, but, presuming that the patent is for clearly different technology (unlike "one click" or somesuch), the patent holder should have the right to protect that. OTOH, the patent should be for the method, not the idea to do it. Vonnage should be able to come up with a different method for achieving the same goal (like launching an application by clicking on an associated graphical representation; it's all in the registration of the "icon" with the OS and how the application gets instanciated, not that the user points the mouse at a picture).
They should be able to pull it out in court. Sounds like VG stock is a good buy right now.
Mac or not, how many games make good use of parallel processing? I'm not trolling, I really don't know.
I've got no mod points, so will post an agreement. If people are pissed about a PC vendor's advertising practices, then they should go after the PC vendor, not the OS vendor that "allowed them" to say something about their own product. This is a simple case of MS-haters wanting to find a way to stick it to the OS vendor anyway they can. Two things we need (among others) in this country are a) people who take responsibility for their own (purchasing) choices, and b) companies that back what they advertise. If Microsoft didn't send ad copy to [Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, ...] and say, "If you don't run these ads, you can't buy our software," then I believe they are off the hook.
If you come down off your soapbox for a minute and take a breath, you might be able to use the time to consider that, while cars have gotten safer, drivers certainly haven't. It's more likely that, because cars have gotten safer and more comfortable to drive, drivers have become more complacent and less safe. Most of the yayhoos I see driving around here scare the crap out of me now, let alone if they were commonly allowed to exceed 100 mph.
An article over at macnn.com about how a Mac Mini outperformed an (old) XServe says that the Mini used .37 amps at its peak. Presuming that was measuring the 110 Volt side, that's just over 40 Watts running full steam. I'd call that fairly power efficient.
It's tethered, but... http://www.moller.com/medi.htm#
I'm not saying that Moller isn't something of a crackpot, and I suspect that he makes just enough progress to keep the investments rolling in without having to actually produce something viable on an automotive lot. However, he is making progress, and there may be a market for the vehicles if they work even half as well as he touts.
I think the important question is, "Given a (two stroke) gas engine and full (two gallon) fuel tank, what would the power of a fuel cell/electric motor system be for the same amount of runtime?" I think the answer is "Not much." Two stroke (noisy, stinky) gas engines are very good at converting fuel into mechanical power. You just pay for it in environmental damage, not only in noise and smell, but in toxicity.
I guess weight is the major obstacle at the moment.
It is. Current (pardon the pun) PEM fuel cell technology typically uses platinum, AFAIK. Stacks are heavy. The Ballard Mark 1030 provides about 78 Watts per liter of unit volume and 66 Watts per kilogram. The Ballard Mark 902, which is used in several fuel cell cars and buses, is much more powerful at 1133 Watts per liter of unit volume and 885 Watts per kilogram, but it's heavy (96 kilos, over 211 pounds). Note that neither of these devices weights include the power conditioning and management systems, fuel handling, etc. The entire integrated stack is much heavier when you're considering a "hydrogen in, electricity out" system. Furthermore, if you're not supplying fuel from a bottle of anhydrous hydrogen (a strange phrase if I've ever heard one), you've got a fuel reformer to take into account, which is one more package of weight and one more power draw on the system.
Having said all that, I think this is a great idea and hope it succeeds. From what I know (or think I know), so-called "ultracapacitors" are much lighter and more responsive than Lithium Ion batteries, and other slow-and-steady power generation systems, such as zinc-air batteries, might be able to back them up with better success.
How about "Children of Men" ? It's quirky and quite cerebral. I'm not sure how much it's grossed so far, but it seems to be getting good reviews. All sci-fi doesn't have to have spaceships and androids.
While I agree that there's a certain cross-section of the role-playing geek crowd that fits your description, a lot of people (myself included) are more interested in the pure creativity involved. Most in our group like oddball characters with strange aspects to them. We're all pretty much past the self-aggrandizement among friends phase that drove us to the ends you describe.
Pixels? Kids these days! In my day, we had lines. Lots of them. And every one of them were horizontal. We had to line them up on our tubes (yeah, tubes!) to make pictures out of them. By hand. We had these dials see, with strange labels like V-Hold and Horiz.
Pixels! We would have died to have pixels.
As soon as someone hacks it (this weekend maybe?) to do something it doesn't, there will be a flood of other hacks for it that make it do everything else you might want. Oh, except whatever lewd thing you're thinking right now.