Re:RTFM is the fix?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 2, Funny
An Alenia Spazio spokeswoman said that none of the company's officials were available to comment because of a company-wide summer vacation period.
As drew says, the fact that all the people at the company at fault were on vactation should not be construed as an attempt by them to duck the issue.
These Europeans all have completely non-intuitive amounts of vacation time which sometimes lead us NAers to believe we are getting screwed over in some subtle, uspecified way. I do a fair amount of work with some German companies and they are on vacation about half of the time.
On the plus side it means that another Northern European War is pretty much a logistical impossibility. Back before WWI all the brightest minds on both sides were put to work generating the astoundingly complicated railway schedules needed to minimize the time taken to mobilize the huge citizen armies. The logistical difficulties involved in coordinating the movements of multiple armies along the same railways so that each got to its designated start line at the right time pale in comparison to the utter impossibility of getting a couple of hundred thousand Frenchmen and Germans to not be taking vacation all at the same time.
I for one, see this as a positive development. Even if it does push all my timelines out about two weeks more than I'd like.
I'll admit right off the bat that I'm a hopeless GW fanboy so I have a biased opinion. I was very disappointed when I heard that this title was cancelled. From all the things I had seen online and at various Games Day presentations it had a ton of features unique in the fantasy MMORPG genre which would have given it good differentiation from the rest of the masses. On the other hand I wasn't too surprised at its demise either. The prospect of going toe to toe with both WoW and EQ2 at the same time must have been really frightening to the money-men.
If this rumour is true then there's a good chance that it's because of the success of Dawn of War. Even though Warhammer is a pretty main-stream geek activity there are still millions of hard-core gamers who have never even heard of the franchise. With the increased exposure of PC gamers to GW's IP generated by the success of DoW maybe Nottingham feels that there there will be enough brand recognition at launch to allow the game to compete against the other players in the marketplace.
They may also be hoping that by not having to compete directly with the Huge Two at launch they will be able to survive the inevitable shake-downs that occur after release. The flip side is that they will be launching against two established and less buggy competitors.
The point is probably moot though as this is likely just some crazy fanboy rumour with no real substance at all...it would be too good if it were true.
its called evolution and survival of the fittest. the only good reason to have a list like this is if these are pests messing with the economy. otherwise who cares?
True enough, I'm not one of those who thinks that the world needs to be locked in stasis. Nature evolves constantly and it's changing now in response to us. Sadly, many people seem to think that they somehow exist outside "nature" just because they can't see it out the window of their SUV. Does it really matter if it's one species of Lady-bug or another that's eating the aphids? Yes, if one of those species is too bad-ass to be kept down by the local ecosystem and takes off on some xenocidal bug rampage until there is nothing left but them and the plants which soon die out because there are no pollinators left.
Problem is that while we humies are great at adapting to new environments we are fookin' terrible at predicting complex systems. Who knows if the vine we introduce now won't end up somehow destroying the lumber industry 25 years hence. If we go too far on the path of not giving a rat's ass about the balance of the ecosystems we inhabit then we will end up having to manage and control them ourselves which will take a lot of effort and energy. It seems incredibly short sighted and foolish to take the position that something is OK just because it doesn't damage us in the immediate near-term.
As somebody who has personally watched stuff fall off of test tables as they rotate to vertical I can definitively say that that the sinking feeling in your stomache as the equipment slowly topples off the stand is exceeded only by the sinking feeling in your bowels when it shatters on the ground.
I can only imagine the multiplicative factor involved when it's a $240M satellite instead of a $20K prototype.
As for why they took a year to report out on the cause...the thing cost 240 million frickin' dollars! I'm sure the managers wanted more of an answer as to why it's in pieces on the ground than "Uh...we dropped it". Maybe they wanted to know "why it was dropped" and "how it was dropped" and "what is the likelyhood that a thing will be dropped again" and "where does that tech who dropped it live?"
Eve-Online is not US based...it's Icelandic. Iceland will not be a part on the US until after GWB wins the election.
From TFA I read: "Shanda enjoys the leading market position in both casual games and in massively multiplayer online role playing (MMORPG) games in terms of peak concurrent users.''
From this and other info I infer that BNB (whatever the hell that stands for) is not in fact an MMORPG of any sort so it might be more apt to compare the numbers with the number of people concurrently playing Counterstike on-line rather than Eve-Online (for concurrent players) or Everquest (for more total players).
...a Neil Stephenson book that ends unsatisfyingly?
After reading Cryptonomicon I thought that was the whole point of the man. To make cool works of fiction and then have them end in arbitrary and sucky ways. The ol' "Set-em up and fail to knock-em down" technique.
Why not try attracting mosquitos or something. I can't spend 5 minutes outside without 50 or so lunging for my sweet succulent veins. Just get the robot to be warmer than the environment and smell like a sweaty human. Only slightly less offensive than shit I admit but an improvement none-the-less.
What I don't get is why Lockheed's engineers all have still two boxes on their desks. Four years ago we were the same way with a SUN for CAD work and a PC for other applications but with PCs as powerful as they have become that ended three years ago. Everybody in my company who uses a CAD package that is supported on PC (eg Unigraphics) has only a PC workstation. And these guys aren't doing trivial things either. Maybe Lockheed is just so big that it's taken them a long time to get with the program and ditch all the expensive Sun systems for cheaper alternatives...or maybe as a government contractor they are rich enough that they don't need to worry about saving money.
If you read the article you will see that there is no claim on 99% efficiency of the LED. The claim is 99% efficiency on the reflector. No LED anywhere in the world comes even close to 220 lumens/watt. The best I've seen in the real world is about 80 lumens from the 3 watt Luxeon devices put out by Lumileds. These devices are very hot and need a lot of heat-sinking to avoid destroying themselves in any confined application. You have to remember that LEDs aren't magic. They are just full of inefficiencies and the back reflector issue is only one of them. I work with high intensity white LEDs every day and if you know of some that can give the output you talk about that don't need active cooling for God's sake tell me where I can buy them.
Projector bulb systems typically put out light in the order of 5000-8000 lumens (although cheap ones make do with less). Even high-wattage white LEDs put out nowhere near this amount of light and so you would need a bunch of them together to get the same bright image you are used to with your noisy gas discharge system. The innovation will not increase efficiencies enough in the near-term to change this.
You won't get rid of the noise either...since LEDs require a low junction temperature to operate efficiently and since the high-wattage LEDs generate quite a lot of heat (especially given that you will need to cram a good number into a small area) you will need some active cooling to kep them from cooking themselves. Nobody wants their movie or game getting progressively dimmer as time passes after all..
As the man says, a 99% reflector is not a 99% LED but this technology would certainly seem to be a useful advance.
Some current LEDs already use thin flim techniques and reflectors to collect the rear emitted light and throw it out the front but this is the first I have heard of combining the reflector with the wiring. This might also have the potential of moving heat out of the junction more efficiently would would be a real help in a lot of applications.
Still I'm curious about how much this will add to the cost of a white LED. There is no point making a bright LED if the total system cost is still ten to twenty times that of an incandescent source. I'm an illumination engineer in the automotive field and when we look at replacing a bulb with LEDs we have to add in not only the cost of the LEDs themselves but also the board, the heatsink, the drive module and associated cicuitry. So while it is true that more light and less heat would be better the real roadblock in my application is cost and we won't see the widespread replacement of filament sources with LEDs until that issue is resolved.
I am assuming you are referring to the recent impass between the EU and the US. The NA in NAFTA stands for North American. Last I checked neither Canada nor Mexico were members of the EU.
Or he could be reffering to the massive tarrifs the Bush administration has been levying on Canadian softwood lumber for the past couple of years.
...I did do two work terms with some in '97 and this scenario was old news/conventional wisdom even then.
What really gets me is the number of people who I would normally assume to be right-wing "I only care about me" types who brush global warming off as being none of their problem.
I personally kind of like pandas and parrots and cute little animals but even if I preferred my wildlife fried-up rather than free-roam I'd still care a great deal about global warming.
Environmentalists whine "We are ruining the environment with our nasty pollution" so the people who don't give a shit about the survival of some endangered marmot tend to ignore what that means to them. Well when it comes right down to it Mankind couldn't do longterm lasting damage to the "environment" if we tried. Even if we cried havok and let slip the nukes of war things would settle back down in a few million years and diversity would return as broad and beautiful as before. As we all know it's happened several times over the course of geologic history.
I'm much more concerned about People. We've come to depend rather heavily on the nicely moderate little climate we enjoy now. Back when the climate last changed dramatically we were still nomadic anyways so it was no biggie to pack up and move where the weather dictated. These days our options are more limited. Regardless of our culpability in the matter of global warming if our ocean circulation ticks over from one metastable state to another we'll all feel it. The article says that NA will get off relatively lightly due to our wealth but that doesn't mean there won't be massive disruptions. To suggest that we ignore the possibility of this happening just because we don't think it would be our fault is just plain foolish
I work in the Automotive sector and most of the sytems and procedures we use to judge and prioritize risk come directly or indirectly from NASA. It's wierd to think that the Agency which developed the DFMEA (Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis) is now getting slammed for having a poor safety culture.
Visibility-wise if you type "games workshop" into a search engine I bet it shows you the GW corperate site first on the list. In fact I just tested a number of different key-words and the Games Workshop site came up #1 for all of them except "GW" which gave me a page about Bush. So if you are looking for info on GW products the fact that they have cut out the internet resellers (who usually don't have much info other than price-lists anyways) will mean little.
I'm quite sure that they will have done some market research to find out if they will lose many sales by doing this. Think of it this way. People will no longer be able to buy at 30% off. Some of these people will stop playing the game (since it is addictive like nicotine this percentage will be low). GW will lose these sales from which they were getting about 55% of MSRP. Other people will just sigh and go to the GW online store. Now instead of getting 55% from these people GW will get 100% of the MSRP. This is equal to Profit as long as the about half the people who shopped only on-line don't quit buying. I find it unlikely that they will see abandonment of this magnitude.
People have been hating GW for a long time. I have been hating GW for a long time. The thing is...everybody still plays. People will continue to buy because GW models are good and the ruleset is (despite the many flaws) the best and most played one out there.
First off, when Slashdot links to Dakkadakka I see my worlds colliding...big time.
I don't see the problem with GW wanting to stop internet resellers from undercutting their retail operations. Slashdotters should be all for this since the people who are hurt most by this reselling are the small local games shops. I've never seen an unsuccessful GW retail store but I've seen a lot of struggling independants. Part of that is because GW is mean to small retailers but most of it is because you can buy all your figs for 30% less on the internet. As for the foolishness of cutting off sales over the internet...in case you were unaware, GW has a pretty high capacity mail-order section. It's not like anybody with access to the internet is suddenly going to lose the ability to buy GW models. The GW web-site is certainly as easy to find as the NewWave site or the Wandering Mage or any of the other discount sites.
A lot of people have this strange belief that GW is somehow evil. They aren't. They sell a superior product at a premium price and what the heck is wrong with that? I really don't see how this tactic hurts GW in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
An Alenia Spazio spokeswoman said that none of the company's officials were available to comment because of a company-wide summer vacation period.
As drew says, the fact that all the people at the company at fault were on vactation should not be construed as an attempt by them to duck the issue.
These Europeans all have completely non-intuitive amounts of vacation time which sometimes lead us NAers to believe we are getting screwed over in some subtle, uspecified way. I do a fair amount of work with some German companies and they are on vacation about half of the time.
On the plus side it means that another Northern European War is pretty much a logistical impossibility. Back before WWI all the brightest minds on both sides were put to work generating the astoundingly complicated railway schedules needed to minimize the time taken to mobilize the huge citizen armies. The logistical difficulties involved in coordinating the movements of multiple armies along the same railways so that each got to its designated start line at the right time pale in comparison to the utter impossibility of getting a couple of hundred thousand Frenchmen and Germans to not be taking vacation all at the same time.
I for one, see this as a positive development. Even if it does push all my timelines out about two weeks more than I'd like.
-Pinkoir
(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)
C'mon Neal...you should know slashdotters better than that. We don't hit the back button, we use mouse gestures.
-Pinkoir
I'll admit right off the bat that I'm a hopeless GW fanboy so I have a biased opinion. I was very disappointed when I heard that this title was cancelled. From all the things I had seen online and at various Games Day presentations it had a ton of features unique in the fantasy MMORPG genre which would have given it good differentiation from the rest of the masses. On the other hand I wasn't too surprised at its demise either. The prospect of going toe to toe with both WoW and EQ2 at the same time must have been really frightening to the money-men.
If this rumour is true then there's a good chance that it's because of the success of Dawn of War. Even though Warhammer is a pretty main-stream geek activity there are still millions of hard-core gamers who have never even heard of the franchise. With the increased exposure of PC gamers to GW's IP generated by the success of DoW maybe Nottingham feels that there there will be enough brand recognition at launch to allow the game to compete against the other players in the marketplace.
They may also be hoping that by not having to compete directly with the Huge Two at launch they will be able to survive the inevitable shake-downs that occur after release. The flip side is that they will be launching against two established and less buggy competitors.
The point is probably moot though as this is likely just some crazy fanboy rumour with no real substance at all...it would be too good if it were true.
-Pinkoir
its called evolution and survival of the fittest. the only good reason to have a list like this is if these are pests messing with the economy. otherwise who cares?
True enough, I'm not one of those who thinks that the world needs to be locked in stasis. Nature evolves constantly and it's changing now in response to us. Sadly, many people seem to think that they somehow exist outside "nature" just because they can't see it out the window of their SUV. Does it really matter if it's one species of Lady-bug or another that's eating the aphids? Yes, if one of those species is too bad-ass to be kept down by the local ecosystem and takes off on some xenocidal bug rampage until there is nothing left but them and the plants which soon die out because there are no pollinators left.
Problem is that while we humies are great at adapting to new environments we are fookin' terrible at predicting complex systems. Who knows if the vine we introduce now won't end up somehow destroying the lumber industry 25 years hence. If we go too far on the path of not giving a rat's ass about the balance of the ecosystems we inhabit then we will end up having to manage and control them ourselves which will take a lot of effort and energy. It seems incredibly short sighted and foolish to take the position that something is OK just because it doesn't damage us in the immediate near-term.
-Pinkoir
As somebody who has personally watched stuff fall off of test tables as they rotate to vertical I can definitively say that that the sinking feeling in your stomache as the equipment slowly topples off the stand is exceeded only by the sinking feeling in your bowels when it shatters on the ground.
I can only imagine the multiplicative factor involved when it's a $240M satellite instead of a $20K prototype.
As for why they took a year to report out on the cause...the thing cost 240 million frickin' dollars! I'm sure the managers wanted more of an answer as to why it's in pieces on the ground than "Uh...we dropped it". Maybe they wanted to know "why it was dropped" and "how it was dropped" and "what is the likelyhood that a thing will be dropped again" and "where does that tech who dropped it live?"
-Pinkoir
Umm....what kind of "patch" are you talking about given the context of this story?
-Pinkoir
Eve-Online is not US based...it's Icelandic. Iceland will not be a part on the US until after GWB wins the election.
From TFA I read: "Shanda enjoys the leading market position in both casual games and in massively multiplayer online role playing (MMORPG) games in terms of peak concurrent users.''
From this and other info I infer that BNB (whatever the hell that stands for) is not in fact an MMORPG of any sort so it might be more apt to compare the numbers with the number of people concurrently playing Counterstike on-line rather than Eve-Online (for concurrent players) or Everquest (for more total players).
-Pinkoir
...a Neil Stephenson book that ends unsatisfyingly?
After reading Cryptonomicon I thought that was the whole point of the man. To make cool works of fiction and then have them end in arbitrary and sucky ways. The ol' "Set-em up and fail to knock-em down" technique.
-Pinkoir
Why not try attracting mosquitos or something. I can't spend 5 minutes outside without 50 or so lunging for my sweet succulent veins. Just get the robot to be warmer than the environment and smell like a sweaty human. Only slightly less offensive than shit I admit but an improvement none-the-less.
-Pinkoir
...that the name of that journal is PNAS?
Come on...can't they think of a less juvenile and funny name for such an august publication?
Of course it is a story about monkeys so I guess the name is pretty relevent given their fixation on that part of the anatomy...
-Pinkoir
What I don't get is why Lockheed's engineers all have still two boxes on their desks. Four years ago we were the same way with a SUN for CAD work and a PC for other applications but with PCs as powerful as they have become that ended three years ago. Everybody in my company who uses a CAD package that is supported on PC (eg Unigraphics) has only a PC workstation. And these guys aren't doing trivial things either. Maybe Lockheed is just so big that it's taken them a long time to get with the program and ditch all the expensive Sun systems for cheaper alternatives...or maybe as a government contractor they are rich enough that they don't need to worry about saving money.
-Pinkoir
If you read the article you will see that there is no claim on 99% efficiency of the LED. The claim is 99% efficiency on the reflector. No LED anywhere in the world comes even close to 220 lumens/watt. The best I've seen in the real world is about 80 lumens from the 3 watt Luxeon devices put out by Lumileds. These devices are very hot and need a lot of heat-sinking to avoid destroying themselves in any confined application. You have to remember that LEDs aren't magic. They are just full of inefficiencies and the back reflector issue is only one of them. I work with high intensity white LEDs every day and if you know of some that can give the output you talk about that don't need active cooling for God's sake tell me where I can buy them.
-Pinkoir
Projector bulb systems typically put out light in the order of 5000-8000 lumens (although cheap ones make do with less). Even high-wattage white LEDs put out nowhere near this amount of light and so you would need a bunch of them together to get the same bright image you are used to with your noisy gas discharge system. The innovation will not increase efficiencies enough in the near-term to change this.
You won't get rid of the noise either...since LEDs require a low junction temperature to operate efficiently and since the high-wattage LEDs generate quite a lot of heat (especially given that you will need to cram a good number into a small area) you will need some active cooling to kep them from cooking themselves. Nobody wants their movie or game getting progressively dimmer as time passes after all..
-Pinkoir
Try shifting the letter "h" in "Sith" two characters to the left....
-Pinkoir
As the man says, a 99% reflector is not a 99% LED but this technology would certainly seem to be a useful advance.
Some current LEDs already use thin flim techniques and reflectors to collect the rear emitted light and throw it out the front but this is the first I have heard of combining the reflector with the wiring. This might also have the potential of moving heat out of the junction more efficiently would would be a real help in a lot of applications.
Still I'm curious about how much this will add to the cost of a white LED. There is no point making a bright LED if the total system cost is still ten to twenty times that of an incandescent source. I'm an illumination engineer in the automotive field and when we look at replacing a bulb with LEDs we have to add in not only the cost of the LEDs themselves but also the board, the heatsink, the drive module and associated cicuitry. So while it is true that more light and less heat would be better the real roadblock in my application is cost and we won't see the widespread replacement of filament sources with LEDs until that issue is resolved.
-Pinkoir
ROTS does indeed make a lot of sense but if you look closely at the title you will also find a clue as to the quality of the upcoming film...
"Revenge of the Sith"...
Try anagramming "Sith" and you will quickly see what we can look forward to.
-Pinkoir
Wierd...'cause the "digital agents" I've been dating for years never say anything at all...
-Pinkoir
I am assuming you are referring to the recent impass between the EU and the US. The NA in NAFTA stands for North American. Last I checked neither Canada nor Mexico were members of the EU.
Or he could be reffering to the massive tarrifs the Bush administration has been levying on Canadian softwood lumber for the past couple of years.
CBC Story
BC Government
Euros aren't the only ones who feel the sting of American protectionism
-Pinkoir
...I did do two work terms with some in '97 and this scenario was old news/conventional wisdom even then.
What really gets me is the number of people who I would normally assume to be right-wing "I only care about me" types who brush global warming off as being none of their problem.
I personally kind of like pandas and parrots and cute little animals but even if I preferred my wildlife fried-up rather than free-roam I'd still care a great deal about global warming.
Environmentalists whine "We are ruining the environment with our nasty pollution" so the people who don't give a shit about the survival of some endangered marmot tend to ignore what that means to them. Well when it comes right down to it Mankind couldn't do longterm lasting damage to the "environment" if we tried. Even if we cried havok and let slip the nukes of war things would settle back down in a few million years and diversity would return as broad and beautiful as before. As we all know it's happened several times over the course of geologic history. I'm much more concerned about People. We've come to depend rather heavily on the nicely moderate little climate we enjoy now. Back when the climate last changed dramatically we were still nomadic anyways so it was no biggie to pack up and move where the weather dictated. These days our options are more limited. Regardless of our culpability in the matter of global warming if our ocean circulation ticks over from one metastable state to another we'll all feel it. The article says that NA will get off relatively lightly due to our wealth but that doesn't mean there won't be massive disruptions. To suggest that we ignore the possibility of this happening just because we don't think it would be our fault is just plain foolish
-Pinkoir
Yikes...I read the title and thought that the US was helping Iranians launder money...that would represent quite the policy shift eh?
-Pinkoir
I work in the Automotive sector and most of the sytems and procedures we use to judge and prioritize risk come directly or indirectly from NASA. It's wierd to think that the Agency which developed the DFMEA (Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis) is now getting slammed for having a poor safety culture.
-Pinkoir
However, his 3D perception and face and object recognition was still severely impaired
Hmmmm.....maybe he has bad 3D perception because he only has one eye
Just a thought...
-Pinkoir
I just don't see how they are dumasses...
Visibility-wise if you type "games workshop" into a search engine I bet it shows you the GW corperate site first on the list. In fact I just tested a number of different key-words and the Games Workshop site came up #1 for all of them except "GW" which gave me a page about Bush. So if you are looking for info on GW products the fact that they have cut out the internet resellers (who usually don't have much info other than price-lists anyways) will mean little.
I'm quite sure that they will have done some market research to find out if they will lose many sales by doing this. Think of it this way. People will no longer be able to buy at 30% off. Some of these people will stop playing the game (since it is addictive like nicotine this percentage will be low). GW will lose these sales from which they were getting about 55% of MSRP. Other people will just sigh and go to the GW online store. Now instead of getting 55% from these people GW will get 100% of the MSRP. This is equal to Profit as long as the about half the people who shopped only on-line don't quit buying. I find it unlikely that they will see abandonment of this magnitude.
People have been hating GW for a long time. I have been hating GW for a long time. The thing is...everybody still plays. People will continue to buy because GW models are good and the ruleset is (despite the many flaws) the best and most played one out there.
-Pinkoir
Ever hear of "Fire Warrior"?
It's a FPS where you get to be a Tau Shas'la and shoot up those nasty marines and what-not...website is www.firewarrior.com
-Pinkoir
First off, when Slashdot links to Dakkadakka I see my worlds colliding...big time.
I don't see the problem with GW wanting to stop internet resellers from undercutting their retail operations. Slashdotters should be all for this since the people who are hurt most by this reselling are the small local games shops. I've never seen an unsuccessful GW retail store but I've seen a lot of struggling independants. Part of that is because GW is mean to small retailers but most of it is because you can buy all your figs for 30% less on the internet. As for the foolishness of cutting off sales over the internet...in case you were unaware, GW has a pretty high capacity mail-order section. It's not like anybody with access to the internet is suddenly going to lose the ability to buy GW models. The GW web-site is certainly as easy to find as the NewWave site or the Wandering Mage or any of the other discount sites.
A lot of people have this strange belief that GW is somehow evil. They aren't. They sell a superior product at a premium price and what the heck is wrong with that? I really don't see how this tactic hurts GW in the long term.
-Pinkoir