Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.
You can play any of hundreds games, now. No purchase, no download, no install, no cracking, no registering, easier than torrents. You just start a game and play it. And if you don't like it, switch it off and play another, you lost maybe half a dollar trying it out, not fifty bucks at a store, not thirty bucks and three hours downloading and installing from Steam, not three hours downloading and installing from piratebay. You just have it as if it was already installed on your PC, all included in rental fee.
It's the same mindset that cancelled the program of school education aimed at reducing teen pregnancy ratio. After 8 months since the program started the rate of births by mothers below 18 didn't drop by any significant percent and so the program was cancelled.
You protest the parent post on basis that the ideas he criticizes are actually good. You are right the ideas are actually good. You are conveniently missing the detail how they usually are abused, twisted and fail to perform according to their spirit.
1. "Regulations" are the mechanism for a lobby group (often clueless or harmful to the society) to impose their will on the society. Laws are usually put under public scrutinity. Regulations are usually applied arbitrarily with no review process and without allowing them for discussion outside the small body that creates them.
2. If a group has no clue how to tackle a problem, they designate a smaller group with similarly no clue how to tackle the problem, but has to come up with a solution nevertheless. So the group eventually comes up with a solution of "let's do more of the same we were doing so far to prevent that", after a year of deliberation. Committees are notoriously inefficient. A case a single determined competent leader would solve in a week can be totally fucked up by a commitee over a period of a year. The idea was noble but the execution fails more often than not. Also, often the solution to a problem is obvious (and needs to be applied fast), but no, let's form a committee and discuss that, and the committee will come up with an answer: you should have used the known solution instead of forming the committee, now it's too late.
3. Some people are more senior, and have more authority; other people are less senior and have less authority. Some people have ultimate authority over a certain domain, their voice is final, and despite officially there existing due process to override it, there are always small technicalities that make this process not applicable, making any opposition futile. They know how to game the system to assure their domination and rule their domain with iron hand. The name "Czars" is to reflect the style of government by Russian Czars, where the Czar's word is an ultimate order, Czar answers to no one, any opposition or competition is squashed, any delegated power can be taken away just as easily as it was given, and nothing short of the Great Revolution is going to replace a Czar.
"Are you in favor of everyone having the same authority?" No, I'm in favor of nobody having ultimate authority, full responsibility and a chain of command where no node can be made irreplaceable.
4. The idea of an agency is reasonable. A small group that manages a large set of resources/assets and passes them between producers/providers and consumers/users. This is good when executed properly. The problem is it's extremely exploitable because it's easy to establish an arbitrary body anywhere on a flow of given resource, give it arbitrary power over that flow and call it "agency". It can act as a toll gate on the flow, providing no service only delaying transfer and collecting arbitrarily assigned fees. It can act as monopolizing filter, providing goods from chosen providers and cutting others out. It can be a barnacle with no function at all, feeding off federal fund and serving providing workplaces to relatives of people at power. While it can function as a safety valve on unstable free market, it can just as well be used as a destabilizing power. And quite often it is just incompetent and slow, freezing assets and making them go wasted while they are needed elsewhere but won't be dispatched simply because the agency takes its precious time to decide.
When you see government creating an agency and a committee to create regulations, you may be sure it will be a clusterfuck of failure and wastefulness. Not because the concepts are wrong, just because government about never gets them right.
you mean there are environmental variables that disable the application-writing wizards?
That and the help system was my worst grudge. The help contained -everything-. In alphabetical order. The same function as called from C++, from VB, from shell, from some API and so on, five articles on one entry, and you had to guess the language from the context (nope, this looks like VB syntax, I don't think it's the C++ page...). And the wizards... add a button. Get two screens of code scattered over 4 files added automatically. Remove the button. Start removing the two screens of code scattered over 4 files, by hand.
Oh, but DO push hardware limits. Just not in graphics.
We are still waiting for enemy AI to beat that of Alien Breed 3D 2 for Amiga. We want fully interactive environments. And by fully interactive I mean enough explosives should enable me to dig out of that tunnel to the surface without need to find exit. We still have no big games with realistic fluid dynamics. What about procedurally creating believable boundless/enormous world? The last mainstream experiment in that direction was Daggerfall! Bots that are comparable to players in skill, while not cheating? MMORPG that is actual Massive MORPG instead of Minimal, with a common massive in-game chatroom area/instance selector?
It may not be dead as an OS for phones. It is pretty much dead as a platform being developed for.
How many people develop for VxWorks?...and it is a very popular OS for cameras. It's just that it is loaded into the final product and stays there, unchanged, till the product reaches end of life. No apps added, no system modified, new upgrades come out with new hardware.
I'm not sure why going to the bank. With most banks in Europe you activate the new card by using it in an ATM or performing a purchase that requires PIN. The rule of thumb is to send in the PIN by a different means than the card, say, you get it at the bank while signing the papers, or you get it with your confirmation papers through registered letter. At worst it is mailed 1 week before the card. If the card is a continuation of expired one, PIN is never sent, it is transferred over from the old one. So, in order to use the card in fraudable 1% uses scenario you first have to use it in a secure 99% uses scenario to activate it. (you don't even have to withdraw any money from the ATM, checking account balance is sufficient to activate the card).
You must follow orders of the officer if special circumstances occur. Refusing to follow orders of the officer (in -any- circumstances) creates said special circumstances.
Catch 22 we can make up laws on the spot.
Note there is no restriction on requirement of the orders being physically possible, and the police is entitled to use force upon failure to perform to orders.
Catch 22 we can beat you if we like.
You are free to refuse identification unless you create reasonable suspicion. By the act of refusing identification you create reasonable suspicion. You lose most of your rights the moment you try to assert them in similar way.
Catch 22 we have a way around those pesky citizens rights.
The definition of police state is not when the police can do illegal things and get away with them. That is just plain anarchy, a broken system out of control.
The police state is when whatever the police does is legal, no matter what they do, and any action (or inaction) you take can be declared illegal (and punished accordingly), at will.
The article listed the questions the experiment was to answer and then concentrated on political, visual and show-business value of the experiment but it didn't answer the questions in the end.
If you place an insulator between the layers, then you've just invented a garden variety capacitor,
of molecular density.
Of course due to minimal distance breakdown voltage will be very low.
Graphite conducts electricity within the planes, is a reasonable insulator when you attempt to conduct electricity across the planes.
C = E0 Er A/d
Take a graphite monocrystal 1cm^2 wide, 1mm thick.
E0 = 8.854*10E12 F/m Er = ~10 - lowest grade of Graphite. d = 0.335 nm A = 1cm^2 * num of layers (1mm/0.335nm)
This results in roughly 80 farads. Not your garden variety capacitor. And no, it's not true that only the outer layers store the charge. A typical capacitor is multiple layers (often millions) sandwiched together, often as one long tape in a spiral roll, but sometimes as separate layers.
Of course making contacts for every other layer of graphite is pretty much outside the scope of current technology, and besides somewhat lower capacity with much higher breakdown voltage makes for a greater total charge stored. Still, the example stands - the molecular strength increases with stored charge (until breakdown voltage is reached).
As for the reinforced concrete, you missed the point: reinforcing it is not meant here as a method of storing energy to be used directly later. It is meant as a way of increasing the beam's energy capacity: more energy can be absorbed by the beam during normal usage (that is bending under load) than it would be able to store if it wasn't "pre-charged" by tension bars. We have strengthened the molecular bonds in concrete by compressing the beam - storing energy in it. And yes, we did it at cost of respective bonds in steel, but the point is steel has a plenty to spare in -that- direction, which isn't very useful, and the -usable- energy capacity has increased. Oh, and energy density can be measured in many metrics, J/kg, J/m^3, J/$ and all of them have their importance. As you say reinforced concrete's energy capacity is very low, allow me to disagree, it's J/$ is awesome.
In a summary, if an object can store two kinds of energy that cancel (partially) each other, it is able to store more of it than it could if it stored only one of them - that's a truism, but the important conclusion is if you are able to "freeze" certain amount of one of them in the object, you increase its capacity to contain the other one. Molecular strength of expanding material is the usual force we use for containing the energy, but it doesn't have to be - or we can turn its vector and store energy by compressing the atoms, and thus escape the trap of "falling apart/exploding" due to expansion.
You're neglecting the possibility for the material being its own container on molecular level.
Imagine a crystal of structure similar to graphite - layers of fairly dense material separated by wide distances. It is normally moderately brittle and low-energy. Now assume this crystal has no electric connection between the layers but the layers themselves are conductive. Apply altering charge to each of them. The thing becomes a capacitor with each layer pulled closer to the next. The bonds between layers get compressed, layers get closer. The layers themselves expand slightly plane-wise, but their internal strength is vastly higher than the inter-planar bond, they are at no risk of breaking. As result, the material becomes much more dense - harder, particles packed more tightly, less brittle. The energy is not stored in bonds stretched to their limits making the material weak and prone to tear/explode, but in compression of the bonds, making it very hard and dense, decompressing to normal volume upon discharge.
Of course rapid discharge would create vast amounts of heat that would make this thing explode. But that's true about mostly any high-energy material, turn its released energy against its own structural integrity and shit hits the fan. But as opposed to overcharging normal materials where the bonds will be getting weaker and eventually break up, this one would get harder and stronger with each bit of charge stored, and you can keep charging it until the distance between layers becomes a spark gap, never worrying about its tensile strength as it increases as you charge.
The real-life example is reinforced concrete. Normally, concrete is very durable against compression while vulnerable to bending/decompression. Quite opposite to steel bars. So strained steel is enclosed in concrete, and released it applies its own compressing tension to the concrete. Now a bending/straining such a concrete beam would first have to overcome the strain of the steel before it gets to stretch the concrete, energy got stored and locked in it, and despite it being brittle and vulnerable to decompression, you first have to provide energy equivalent to what was enclosed in it before you can act against its vulnerability. And since its compression strength is vast, the steel inside is safe against bending through compression. So - the composite material got a lot of (tensile) energy stored inside during production and it became vastly more durable than a mere compound sum of its components. It may store (withstand) less than energy difference between zero tension and maximally compressed raw concrete or zero tension and maximally strained steel, but its durability range between maximum compression and maximum strain beats both.
The government is paying welfare for local unemployed. Local employed and their employers are sucked dry to fund it. Meanwhile outsourced labor money are taxed to fund government activities in country where the outsourcing is performed.
I think the outsourced labor should be taxed as much as it costs the government not to have a local counterpart employed instead...
Mostly yes, but you are wrong here about Portal. Yes, they did foresee about everything you could do "out of the box" in the game, playtested every gimmick to death. Then they left them in, 100% untouched, and created the challenges that require you to find them yourself.
Yep, there's this pit which you can use to jump to the cube to press the button to lift the platform to access generator to pass the globe to power up the exit lift.
Or you can launch the portal next to the exit lift, propel yourself into the pit and reach the exit in 2 portals and 30 seconds. You just got silver medal. Want gold? Better learn bunny-hopping because then you'll reach the exit lift in 8 seconds without using portals at all..
No. I'm not the original poster in this thread. I just stated AC has nothing to do with diode bridge working or not. The same voltage drop occurs in AC. The voltage drop may be unacceptable in certain scenarios, desired in others. 0.2V is often negligible. If your circuit is voltage-regulated, the initial drop will occur anyway so you can integrate the bridge circuit just as well - and voltage regulation is very often necessary.
No, you try to be snarky but you prove you have no clue over and again.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.
You can play any of hundreds games, now. No purchase, no download, no install, no cracking, no registering, easier than torrents. You just start a game and play it. And if you don't like it, switch it off and play another, you lost maybe half a dollar trying it out, not fifty bucks at a store, not thirty bucks and three hours downloading and installing from Steam, not three hours downloading and installing from piratebay. You just have it as if it was already installed on your PC, all included in rental fee.
It's the same mindset that cancelled the program of school education aimed at reducing teen pregnancy ratio. After 8 months since the program started the rate of births by mothers below 18 didn't drop by any significant percent and so the program was cancelled.
You protest the parent post on basis that the ideas he criticizes are actually good. You are right the ideas are actually good. You are conveniently missing the detail how they usually are abused, twisted and fail to perform according to their spirit.
1. "Regulations" are the mechanism for a lobby group (often clueless or harmful to the society) to impose their will on the society. Laws are usually put under public scrutinity. Regulations are usually applied arbitrarily with no review process and without allowing them for discussion outside the small body that creates them.
2. If a group has no clue how to tackle a problem, they designate a smaller group with similarly no clue how to tackle the problem, but has to come up with a solution nevertheless. So the group eventually comes up with a solution of "let's do more of the same we were doing so far to prevent that", after a year of deliberation. Committees are notoriously inefficient. A case a single determined competent leader would solve in a week can be totally fucked up by a commitee over a period of a year. The idea was noble but the execution fails more often than not. Also, often the solution to a problem is obvious (and needs to be applied fast), but no, let's form a committee and discuss that, and the committee will come up with an answer: you should have used the known solution instead of forming the committee, now it's too late.
3. Some people are more senior, and have more authority; other people are less senior and have less authority. Some people have ultimate authority over a certain domain, their voice is final, and despite officially there existing due process to override it, there are always small technicalities that make this process not applicable, making any opposition futile. They know how to game the system to assure their domination and rule their domain with iron hand. The name "Czars" is to reflect the style of government by Russian Czars, where the Czar's word is an ultimate order, Czar answers to no one, any opposition or competition is squashed, any delegated power can be taken away just as easily as it was given, and nothing short of the Great Revolution is going to replace a Czar.
"Are you in favor of everyone having the same authority?" No, I'm in favor of nobody having ultimate authority, full responsibility and a chain of command where no node can be made irreplaceable.
4. The idea of an agency is reasonable. A small group that manages a large set of resources/assets and passes them between producers/providers and consumers/users. This is good when executed properly. The problem is it's extremely exploitable because it's easy to establish an arbitrary body anywhere on a flow of given resource, give it arbitrary power over that flow and call it "agency". It can act as a toll gate on the flow, providing no service only delaying transfer and collecting arbitrarily assigned fees. It can act as monopolizing filter, providing goods from chosen providers and cutting others out. It can be a barnacle with no function at all, feeding off federal fund and serving providing workplaces to relatives of people at power. While it can function as a safety valve on unstable free market, it can just as well be used as a destabilizing power. And quite often it is just incompetent and slow, freezing assets and making them go wasted while they are needed elsewhere but won't be dispatched simply because the agency takes its precious time to decide.
When you see government creating an agency and a committee to create regulations, you may be sure it will be a clusterfuck of failure and wastefulness. Not because the concepts are wrong, just because government about never gets them right.
you mean there are environmental variables that disable the application-writing wizards?
That and the help system was my worst grudge. The help contained -everything-. In alphabetical order. The same function as called from C++, from VB, from shell, from some API and so on, five articles on one entry, and you had to guess the language from the context (nope, this looks like VB syntax, I don't think it's the C++ page...). And the wizards... add a button. Get two screens of code scattered over 4 files added automatically. Remove the button. Start removing the two screens of code scattered over 4 files, by hand.
Oh, why would you think any part of the universe other than this unfashionable backwater planet has such an impractical invention as "a woman"?
Does that mean that if I machine-generate a song that is quite similar to an existing one, I can't be sued for copyright violation?
Oh, but DO push hardware limits. Just not in graphics.
We are still waiting for enemy AI to beat that of Alien Breed 3D 2 for Amiga.
We want fully interactive environments. And by fully interactive I mean enough explosives should enable me to dig out of that tunnel to the surface without need to find exit.
We still have no big games with realistic fluid dynamics.
What about procedurally creating believable boundless/enormous world? The last mainstream experiment in that direction was Daggerfall!
Bots that are comparable to players in skill, while not cheating?
MMORPG that is actual Massive MORPG instead of Minimal, with a common massive in-game chatroom area/instance selector?
It may not be dead as an OS for phones. It is pretty much dead as a platform being developed for.
How many people develop for VxWorks? ...and it is a very popular OS for cameras.
It's just that it is loaded into the final product and stays there, unchanged, till the product reaches end of life. No apps added, no system modified, new upgrades come out with new hardware.
I'm not sure why going to the bank. With most banks in Europe you activate the new card by using it in an ATM or performing a purchase that requires PIN. The rule of thumb is to send in the PIN by a different means than the card, say, you get it at the bank while signing the papers, or you get it with your confirmation papers through registered letter. At worst it is mailed 1 week before the card. If the card is a continuation of expired one, PIN is never sent, it is transferred over from the old one. So, in order to use the card in fraudable 1% uses scenario you first have to use it in a secure 99% uses scenario to activate it. (you don't even have to withdraw any money from the ATM, checking account balance is sufficient to activate the card).
so? The article didn't answer them, so I asked, got answers (thanks) and what's wrong about that?
Oh, not quite! This is perfectly legal!
You must follow orders of the officer if special circumstances occur.
Refusing to follow orders of the officer (in -any- circumstances) creates said special circumstances.
Catch 22 we can make up laws on the spot.
Note there is no restriction on requirement of the orders being physically possible, and the police is entitled to use force upon failure to perform to orders.
Catch 22 we can beat you if we like.
You are free to refuse identification unless you create reasonable suspicion. By the act of refusing identification you create reasonable suspicion. You lose most of your rights the moment you try to assert them in similar way.
Catch 22 we have a way around those pesky citizens rights.
The definition of police state is not when the police can do illegal things and get away with them. That is just plain anarchy, a broken system out of control.
The police state is when whatever the police does is legal, no matter what they do, and any action (or inaction) you take can be declared illegal (and punished accordingly), at will.
The article listed the questions the experiment was to answer and then concentrated on political, visual and show-business value of the experiment but it didn't answer the questions in the end.
Could someone...?
If you place an insulator between the layers, then you've just invented a garden variety capacitor,
of molecular density.
Of course due to minimal distance breakdown voltage will be very low.
Graphite conducts electricity within the planes, is a reasonable insulator when you attempt to conduct electricity across the planes.
C = E0 Er A/d
Take a graphite monocrystal 1cm^2 wide, 1mm thick.
E0 = 8.854*10E12 F/m
Er = ~10 - lowest grade of Graphite.
d = 0.335 nm
A = 1cm^2 * num of layers (1mm/0.335nm)
This results in roughly 80 farads. Not your garden variety capacitor. And no, it's not true that only the outer layers store the charge. A typical capacitor is multiple layers (often millions) sandwiched together, often as one long tape in a spiral roll, but sometimes as separate layers.
Of course making contacts for every other layer of graphite is pretty much outside the scope of current technology, and besides somewhat lower capacity with much higher breakdown voltage makes for a greater total charge stored. Still, the example stands - the molecular strength increases with stored charge (until breakdown voltage is reached).
As for the reinforced concrete, you missed the point: reinforcing it is not meant here as a method of storing energy to be used directly later. It is meant as a way of increasing the beam's energy capacity: more energy can be absorbed by the beam during normal usage (that is bending under load) than it would be able to store if it wasn't "pre-charged" by tension bars. We have strengthened the molecular bonds in concrete by compressing the beam - storing energy in it. And yes, we did it at cost of respective bonds in steel, but the point is steel has a plenty to spare in -that- direction, which isn't very useful, and the -usable- energy capacity has increased. Oh, and energy density can be measured in many metrics, J/kg, J/m^3, J/$ and all of them have their importance. As you say reinforced concrete's energy capacity is very low, allow me to disagree, it's J/$ is awesome.
In a summary, if an object can store two kinds of energy that cancel (partially) each other, it is able to store more of it than it could if it stored only one of them - that's a truism, but the important conclusion is if you are able to "freeze" certain amount of one of them in the object, you increase its capacity to contain the other one. Molecular strength of expanding material is the usual force we use for containing the energy, but it doesn't have to be - or we can turn its vector and store energy by compressing the atoms, and thus escape the trap of "falling apart/exploding" due to expansion.
You're neglecting the possibility for the material being its own container on molecular level.
Imagine a crystal of structure similar to graphite - layers of fairly dense material separated by wide distances. It is normally moderately brittle and low-energy. Now assume this crystal has no electric connection between the layers but the layers themselves are conductive. Apply altering charge to each of them. The thing becomes a capacitor with each layer pulled closer to the next. The bonds between layers get compressed, layers get closer. The layers themselves expand slightly plane-wise, but their internal strength is vastly higher than the inter-planar bond, they are at no risk of breaking. As result, the material becomes much more dense - harder, particles packed more tightly, less brittle. The energy is not stored in bonds stretched to their limits making the material weak and prone to tear/explode, but in compression of the bonds, making it very hard and dense, decompressing to normal volume upon discharge.
Of course rapid discharge would create vast amounts of heat that would make this thing explode. But that's true about mostly any high-energy material, turn its released energy against its own structural integrity and shit hits the fan. But as opposed to overcharging normal materials where the bonds will be getting weaker and eventually break up, this one would get harder and stronger with each bit of charge stored, and you can keep charging it until the distance between layers becomes a spark gap, never worrying about its tensile strength as it increases as you charge.
The real-life example is reinforced concrete. Normally, concrete is very durable against compression while vulnerable to bending/decompression. Quite opposite to steel bars. So strained steel is enclosed in concrete, and released it applies its own compressing tension to the concrete. Now a bending/straining such a concrete beam would first have to overcome the strain of the steel before it gets to stretch the concrete, energy got stored and locked in it, and despite it being brittle and vulnerable to decompression, you first have to provide energy equivalent to what was enclosed in it before you can act against its vulnerability. And since its compression strength is vast, the steel inside is safe against bending through compression. So - the composite material got a lot of (tensile) energy stored inside during production and it became vastly more durable than a mere compound sum of its components. It may store (withstand) less than energy difference between zero tension and maximally compressed raw concrete or zero tension and maximally strained steel, but its durability range between maximum compression and maximum strain beats both.
The government is paying welfare for local unemployed. Local employed and their employers are sucked dry to fund it. Meanwhile outsourced labor money are taxed to fund government activities in country where the outsourcing is performed.
I think the outsourced labor should be taxed as much as it costs the government not to have a local counterpart employed instead...
true... "I know that I know nothing" is a certain level of enlightenment...
"Oh well, just save it and come back later when I'm bored. If I come back later that is."
If you paid for the game, it has served its purpose already.
If you didn't... you horrible thief, how dare you steal the hard work?!
Mostly yes, but you are wrong here about Portal. Yes, they did foresee about everything you could do "out of the box" in the game, playtested every gimmick to death. Then they left them in, 100% untouched, and created the challenges that require you to find them yourself.
Yep, there's this pit which you can use to jump to the cube to press the button to lift the platform to access generator to pass the globe to power up the exit lift.
Or you can launch the portal next to the exit lift, propel yourself into the pit and reach the exit in 2 portals and 30 seconds. You just got silver medal. Want gold? Better learn bunny-hopping because then you'll reach the exit lift in 8 seconds without using portals at all..
just 2 times. One end for each battery can be a generic spring.
...instead of acknowledging he doesn't know what games are.
No. I'm not the original poster in this thread. I just stated AC has nothing to do with diode bridge working or not. The same voltage drop occurs in AC. The voltage drop may be unacceptable in certain scenarios, desired in others. 0.2V is often negligible. If your circuit is voltage-regulated, the initial drop will occur anyway so you can integrate the bridge circuit just as well - and voltage regulation is very often necessary.
No, you try to be snarky but you prove you have no clue over and again.
I think you should first analyze how the diode bridge works. FYI, it fixes polarity of DC input just fine.
Not exactly unknown invention...
http://www.instructables.com/id/Repair-a-Broken-Ethernet-Plug/
Repair a broken ethernet plug using a zip tie
Better "CPU" than "Hard disk" which is the recent de facto standard name for it.