The same can't be said for PNGs without verifying each of them by hand. That's the fatal flaw to which I speak -- it's just too damned hard to use them for the types of images they're supposed to be used for.
The only thing I can think of is that the software you're using to save your PNG files must be horribly broken. It should be giving you the option to save the gamma value or not --- for what you want, you want not. The Gimp has a whole dialogue it pops up whenever you save a PNG file asking you what extra information you want to save; resolution, creation date, gamma, etc.
To remove the gamma chunk from someone else's files, try this:
and btw, i never knew gifs could support more than 256 colors.
It's a very neat trick. I remember marvelling at it the last time it came round.
It works because each frame in an animated GIF has its own palette --- but that palette doesn't have to match the palette in the other frames. So the first frame draws the first 256 colours, then the second frame draws the next, etc. The test image has been slowed down so you can see it load.
Of course, it's not actually useful --- the resulting image is far larger than, say, the PNG version --- but it's a clever hack anyway and I wish I'd thought of it...
Oop! I'm sorry, that was your credibility that just went down the drain. Here's a tip: if you want people to listen to what you have to say, don't insult your target audience.
It doesn't matter any more what points you're trying to make. You've just prejudiced your reader against you. This is great if you want an argument, but not so sensible if you actually want to get your point across...
Oh, gee, how terrible that people decide for themselves what stories they want to write and what stories they want to read.
It's a pity there isn't a -1, Missed The Point.
If people only read what they want to read, they'll never hear about anything that they don't want to read --- but should be reading. Let's say your country is having a war. It's going badly. Do people want to hear about yet another messy encounter where far too many people died on both sides with no actual result? Hell, no. They'd much rather read about heroic rescues of photogenic young soldiers, and then skip on to the sport pages. The result? They end up either not knowing about what's going on, or not caring, or both. It's good for people to have their world upset every so often, regardless of what they want.
Ever hear of freedom of the press?
Yes. It means that journalists are allowed to print anything that they think the audience should know about, which is totally different.
I thought the coke problem had been solved --- methanol fuel cells for small electronics are just beginning to go into production. How do these avoid it? Do they just assume that the lifetime of the fuel cell is going to be short enough that they don't need to worry about it?
And besides, there's other ways of using the stuff. Steam reformation will break methanol down producing hydrogen, which you can then feed into the fuel cell. If all else fails, just burn the ethanol in an IC engine.
And as for producing ethanol through fermentation --- that wasn't really what I meant. There are other ways of making it; I've heard that you can synthesise it directly by running a fuel cell in reverse, although embarassingly I can't find a reference. I was really thinking of using it as an energy storage medium, rather than as a primary source.
(Although organic production is good --- if you can get the efficiency up. If some budding genetic engineer can produce, say, sugar cane that produces ethanol directly, they'll make one hell of a lot of money...)
What is the current technology in storing hydrogen, anyway?
That's good. What I'm looking for now is a push-based P2P system; one which allows you to subscribe for content and will then automatically download new content as it's propagated through the network.
You want to do this in a decentralised manner? Tricky. You end up having to subscribe to a hub, so that when the hub gets notified of a change, it notifies you. In turn, the hub subscribes to another hub, etc, until you reach the original source of the file. Whenever the file changes, the notifications would trickle down from hub to hub until all subscribers were notified.
You know, that sounds very familiar --- yes, that's it! It's called DNS. A distributed database that's incredibly standard, incredibly reliable, and incredibly scalable.
The way you'd do this with DNS is as follows: the source of the file would publish a TXT entry with a special name. The TXT entry would describe the data. Subscribers would still have to poll this at intervals, but they'd be polling their local DNS server.
In effect, you're now using the network-of-hubs model, except you've managed to con your ISP into being your local hub. And your ISPs provider becomes the next level, etc. The source's DNS server would end up having to serve a tiny fraction of the number of requests that an RSS feed would need. And DNS is really good at that sort of thing.
DNS is fun. You can do all kinds of things with it --- remember that guy who'd managed to do live audio streaming? It's proven technology, and everybody already has it! Okay, you wouldn't want to distribute huge amounts of data with it, but this kind of change notification is what it was designed to do.
The thing I don't understand is why everyone's focusing on hydrogen as an energy transport medium. It's lousy. Sure, the energy-per-unit-mass is high, but to store it you have to use high-pressure containment vessels or cryogenics. Complex and expensive. Just pumping the stuff from one tank to another is problematic.
Why not use a fuel that's liquid at STP? Ethanol, say? The energy-per-unit-mass is lower, but it's so much denser you end up with a far higher energy-per-unit-volume. Storing and pumping liquids is a solved problem; you can use the existing infrastructure built by the petrochemical industry. Ethanol can be burnt and synthesised by fuel cells, too.
Wow! Information! Thanks for that, it was very helpful. Balanced and well-written, too.
Britain's in a rather interesting position. Geographically, we have strong ties to Europe. Culturally, we have strong ties to the US, being the major English-language cultural exporter. This means one foot's drifting left and the other's drifting right, which is leading to some... interesting... situations. (Ask someone about railway privatisation in the UK sometime. Go on, I dare you. You'll regret it.)
My personal opinion is that Britain is drifting rather further right than is strictly comfortable, and the US is a lot further over and accelerating; one problem with very right-wing societies is that power tends to end up concentrated on those with power, which leads to an unhealthy feedback situation. (The same goes for very left-wing societies, but for a different reason.) Traditionally, from what I can tell, the US counters this by having a very active judiciary. Currently, however, the judiciary doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the government, although there are signs that's beginning to change. I'd be happier if we had stronger ties with the EU in order to balance the growing influence of the US, but that's just me.
I'll be very interested to see the result of the election.
No what would be really elegant is if there was an NDIS interface written into the linux kernel so you could nativly load NDIS drivers in linux.
Um, that's what ndiswrapper is. It currently builds as a module for ease of development but it would be trivial to compile it in to the kernel binary itself. It looks in a special directory for files describing the NDIS drivers, and if it finds the hardware, loads them and binds them. The end result is you end up with a bunch of standard ethernet devices. No userspace tools required anywhere, except for setting up the special directory in the first place...
Yes, it really would be possible to have an option in your favourite distribution's installer saying 'Install network driver from floppy disk'.
When did Linux start allowing binary drivers that were not kernel specific?
I'm posting this using a desktop machine running Linux that's talking to a server running Linux via two wireless ethernet cards using Windows drivers.
Check out ndiswrapper. It's a surprisingly elegant system for letting you use WLAN drivers written to the NDIS standard (e.g., Windows network drivers) under Linux.
It's wonderful. It's simple and highly effective. It lets you use drivers written by people with access to actual technical documentation, it's small, it's adequately fast, it's easy to manage... it also lets me use my two network cards under Linux, which I can't do otherwise. (One's a RTL8180, which is unsupported under Linux, and the other's a ACX100, for which a driver does exist but which sucks.)
Didn't NDIS start out as a portable driver standard, anyway? Netware, OS/2 and Windows, wasn't it? What would be really elegant is to use some sort of code translation to allow the drivers to be used on non-ix86 machines...
Really? I just downloaded the wrapper, ran it through cat, and went to the url that was in the midst of the gibberish:)
Interesting; what I got was a 272-byte binary MOV file. I found the word 'farscape-peacekeeper_m480.mov' in it, so I tried that in the obvious place and it worked.
Maybe I just missed the human-readable version when groping through the HTML source trying to find where the movie actually was. Sigh. Damned movie plugins. I wish people would just supply real download links for those of us who are standards-advantaged...
Most of the people I know here in the UK use Yahoo. I don't like MSN's interface very much; far too much advertising and crap. Yahoo's is better. For preference, however, I use gaim (I have accounts with practically all the IM providers). Protocol-wise, Yahoo wins because it stores the contact list on the server so that if I change it, all my other machines pick it up automatically. Which is cool. I don't know if MSN does that as well.
Hmm, ICQ... I've just made sure that my ancient ICQ account still works (it does). I can't remember the last time someone sent me a message on it. I think it was spam.
Now, I didn't RTFA, but I really hope that they don't make it like MERP (the Rolemaster based pnp rpg), where any player can just be a high-elf, or a half-elf, or a wizard, or an ent, or something else that's supposed to be rare as diamonds. Its a stupid world where the rare peoples outnumber the normal, common humans. Same thing for magical artifacts - and notice that Gandalf primarily fights with a sword and staff, not "lightningbolt!" and "I'm gonna cast magic missile."
Tolkien wrote primarily about spiritual magic.
Gandalf was the master of fire. Partly, this manifested itself through his skill with fireworks and magical fire, but that wasn't the important bit. What Tolkien felt was far more important, and was stressed over and over again, was the fact the Gandalf could 'kindle the fire in men's souls'. Look at the way he can muster enthusiasm in practically everyone. The classic example is the way he brought Théoden back from the brink in _RotK_ (ignore the lousy movie effects --- this is one of the few bits that Peter Jackson got totally wrong). Even more impressive, to my mind --- he managed to talk Bilbo into going dragon-hunting in The Hobbit.
(Saruman's power was his will and his voice. He could talk practically anyone into doing anything. He had very little power of his own; once the Ents destroyed Isengard, he was shafted. Again, another bit the film got completely wrong was his fight with Gandalf. In the books, it's a battle of wills, and pre-Moria Gandalf is definitely Saruman's inferior.)
The rest of Tolkien's world is similar. The difference between Elves, Dwarves, Men and the other races? They're races, not species. Tolkien wasn't interested in their outward appearance, or whether they could interbreed, or the shape of their ears. The fundamental, crucial difference, intrinsic to Middle-Earth's entire philosophy, the thing that is hammered home over and over again, is the shape of their souls.
When Elves die, they're reincarnated. When Dwarves die --- actually, I forget. I believe they end up in some classical afterlife. When Men die, however, the souls leave the universe entirely. Nobody knows what happens to them. By Tolkien's view, Men are specially favoured. They get to move on to whatever Eru has planned for them next, and are unique in that aspect. All the other races are bound to Arda until the end of time.
(This is the reason why Arwen had to become human. She was a descendent of a Man-Elf cross. All such people had to choose between following the Elven path or the mortal path, because you have to pick what kind of soul you have. All the rest follows from there.)
(If you're interested in such things, read The Silmarillion. It's tough going, but rewarding.)
Tolkien just doesn't go in for material magic very much. He didn't find it interesting. While this makes his universe incredibly rich and rewarding to study, it doesn't really fit a modern game where the player wants to trigger some flashy effect and kill loads of orcs... I await the MMORPG with some trepidation.
I'm British. I simply can't tell the difference between Republican and Democrat. From my point of view they're both way out on the far right.
I have on occasion attempted to find out exactly what the difference is, and on all previous attempts have got precisely nowhere: all the various arguments I've found seem to be making artificial distinctions.
Can someone sum up the differences briefly for me, and any other geographically-advantaged readers?
...and it's brilliant. Really. The characters are excellent, the graphics are great, the voice acting is superb (although there's not much of it), it has an atmosphere you can cut with a knife, and the writing --- wow. If you've played it, you'll know what I mean when I say that Morte, Dak'kon and Annah's backstories all hit me at the same time, and I was glued to my monitor for several hours, ignoring the graphics, just reading the text as it scrolled past...
Alas, it's not perfect. The AI ain't great; Ignus, my physically weak but very powerful sorceror, has a tendency to wander up to some huge, horrible monster when I ask him to cast a long-range spell unless I keep an eye on him. (This tends to be terminal for him.) There are some scripting bugs; there's one minor subquest I can't complete. There are some more serious engine bugs, too. If I try and enter one room the game crashes on me, which is a pity because I need something that's in it. One whole section, the Godsman temple, is noticeably poorly written, at least compared to the rest of it.
The worst problem is that it's far too easy to get involved in the story and gallop through the main plot while avoiding the subplots. (I did this.) This means you end up at the endgame grossly underpowered. I'm now wandering around trying to level up so I stand a slight chance against the...
But the problems are minor. If you like RPGs, get it. It's not expensive these days, and you'll enjoy it. It's the classic RPG; if you think you know about the genre, it's required playing. It's the Hamlet of RPGs, and no, I don't think I'm overstating the case.
It's a damned shame it didn't sell better --- it was probably too intelligent.
If it had, perhaps we'd have more games that were that good.
I want to like Blender. I really do. Every so often I have another look, try and make it do what I want, and give up.
The user interface is fine, I can cope with that. The problem I have is it's so weird and inconsistent under the hood. Admittedly, most of these problems stem from using the scanline renderer; I haven't investigated Yafray.
For example:
I want to make a planet. Fine, I create a sphere for the planet and a omni light source for the sun. That works.
Now I want an atmosphere. I create another sphere, a bit bigger than the planet. Doesn't work. Do some investigation... Blender doesn't do volumetric effects. Damn.
I look into halos. Eventually I manage to get something in roughly the right place, although it looks crap. It's also being lit by the sun even when it's behind the planet.
After more investigation, eventually I find out that I have to turn on shadows on the planet and the atmosphere; and shadows only work if you're using spotlight lamps! This strikes me as incredibly broken.
So I switch to a spotlight lamp. Now most of the features of my planet are there, although it looks really awful. One of the problems is that the lamp is too close to the planet, so that the light isn't parallel. I move the lamp away... and everything goes black.
More investigation reveals that spotlight lamps seem to stop illuminating anything more than 40 units away. Just dead. At one stage I had half the planet illuminated and the other half in complete blackness.
It was at this point that I gave up. In Povray, however, I was happily rendering entire solar systems to scale, so that my planet was 12000 units in diameter, the sun was 150000000 units away, my camera was 0.002 units above the planetary surface, and it worked perfectly. Plus, I had a whole bunch of programmatic macros to map a latitude and longitude on my planet onto my universal coordinate space for any given date and time, which was cool.
Another thing I hate about Blender is its insistence on using meshes for everything. Meshes are grainy, eat memory, and look naff if you zoom in too far (like on my planet). Oh, it does have basic CSG support, but what happens if I create a complex model and then decide that I want to move one of my primitives a little to the left? I can't, that's what. Once you've applied the CSG operation that's it; if you want to change something, you have to start from scratch. Povray's script-based system means that you just change one coordinate and rerender.
There is stuff I like in Blender; the texture system is really nice, and I wish I could find a way of exporting a Blender texture and using it in Povray. Being able to just point at things instead of searching through your script is useful, and being able to position stuff visually rather than typing in coordinates is wonderful. The inverse kinematics would be cool, too, if I could ever make it work.
Plus, at my level of skill, Povray looks so much better than Blender. I never managed to make Blender's scanline renderer produce anything halfway decent. But Povray, with its mathematically perfect shapes, looks wonderful every time. I can focus on the scene content, and not have to keep adding hacks to improve the image quality.
Do you have a source for this. I find it extremely difficult to believe, given the height of clouds, compared to the height of wind turbines...
Yes, it sounds totally bogus to me, too. The amount of air that the turbines intersect will be completely insignificant compared to the total amount of air passing through the area. Plus, turbines don't manage to extract any great percentage of the energy out of the air.
Magnetic containment fusion isn't the only way of doing it. Electrostatic containment fusion works very nicely indeed, and you can build one in your garage quite easily (for given values of easily; a skilled TV repairman could do it). Alas, the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor can't really be scaled up and would appear to have theoretical problems that prevent it reaching break-even, but hot damn, you can fuse hydrogen on your kitchen table. Watch out for those neutrons.
More information, including plans, is available at Fusor.net.
When its all done I couln't belive it, I could never have done what he did. I wont sleep tonight thinking about poor HardHead. He lost his money but breaking his trust was the worst of all. Think about it, if Trazir gave him his money back, or gave him the full profits, Hardhead will still never be the same. Yes that irk was indeed cursed.
Yeah, I felt sorry for Hardhead. Defrauding Thoggins I could feel good about, but Hardhead seemed to be a nice guy.
But the one I really want to know about is Frosttt. Some newbie, flying around, and this guy hands him 300M isk --- what's he going to do with it? I'd love to see what happened to that money...
...but if you're going to post an advertisement, say it's an advertisement! Tio Holtzmann is a direct spokesman for VCF; submitting a story as if it was written by a third party is dishonest and makes the whole editorial process at Slashdot look shabby.
Well, shabbier.
At least the submitter is a real user with a history, and wasn't created as a marketing ploy; but would it have been so hard to stick 'Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers!' at the bottom?
And the previous page/next page links have mysteriously vanished, as have the META NEXT/PREV links that make Firefox's link toolbar work. This is making Slashdot significantly harder for me to read.
I've been giving serious thought as to writing a web page scraper for Slashdot so that you can browse it in a decent environment. The web front end is seriously beginning to suck.
Is there anywhere appropriate where I can send comments? There seems to be no webmaster link anywhere. The 'Bugs' link off on the left goes directly to the Slash bug submission page. Is this appropriate for discussing Slashdot itself?
I dont understand why solar-powered ion drives are not used on missions like this. Probes like the ESA SMART-1 has shown that such craft can be small & economical, and there is an abundance of solar power available for free.
I suspect that as far as Messenger is concerned, it doesn't use an ion drive simply because they weren't around when the project was started --- I can't find any information on when design started, but these missions routinely take well over a decade from when the paperwork starts to when pieces start getting put together.
Actually, for the inner solar system, you really want a light sail. No fuel! Plus, they're fast; the thrust is tiny, but it never stops... isn't there supposed to be a light sail test mission some time Real Soon Now?
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I can think of is that the software you're using to save your PNG files must be horribly broken. It should be giving you the option to save the gamma value or not --- for what you want, you want not. The Gimp has a whole dialogue it pops up whenever you save a PNG file asking you what extra information you want to save; resolution, creation date, gamma, etc.
To remove the gamma chunk from someone else's files, try this:
...although if you've been converting them to GIFs, you've probably been editing them.
It's a very neat trick. I remember marvelling at it the last time it came round.
It works because each frame in an animated GIF has its own palette --- but that palette doesn't have to match the palette in the other frames. So the first frame draws the first 256 colours, then the second frame draws the next, etc. The test image has been slowed down so you can see it load.
Of course, it's not actually useful --- the resulting image is far larger than, say, the PNG version --- but it's a clever hack anyway and I wish I'd thought of it...
Oop! I'm sorry, that was your credibility that just went down the drain. Here's a tip: if you want people to listen to what you have to say, don't insult your target audience.
It doesn't matter any more what points you're trying to make. You've just prejudiced your reader against you. This is great if you want an argument, but not so sensible if you actually want to get your point across...
It's a pity there isn't a -1, Missed The Point.
If people only read what they want to read, they'll never hear about anything that they don't want to read --- but should be reading. Let's say your country is having a war. It's going badly. Do people want to hear about yet another messy encounter where far too many people died on both sides with no actual result? Hell, no. They'd much rather read about heroic rescues of photogenic young soldiers, and then skip on to the sport pages. The result? They end up either not knowing about what's going on, or not caring, or both. It's good for people to have their world upset every so often, regardless of what they want.
Ever hear of freedom of the press?
Yes. It means that journalists are allowed to print anything that they think the audience should know about, which is totally different.
And besides, there's other ways of using the stuff. Steam reformation will break methanol down producing hydrogen, which you can then feed into the fuel cell. If all else fails, just burn the ethanol in an IC engine.
And as for producing ethanol through fermentation --- that wasn't really what I meant. There are other ways of making it; I've heard that you can synthesise it directly by running a fuel cell in reverse, although embarassingly I can't find a reference. I was really thinking of using it as an energy storage medium, rather than as a primary source.
(Although organic production is good --- if you can get the efficiency up. If some budding genetic engineer can produce, say, sugar cane that produces ethanol directly, they'll make one hell of a lot of money...)
What is the current technology in storing hydrogen, anyway?
You want to do this in a decentralised manner? Tricky. You end up having to subscribe to a hub, so that when the hub gets notified of a change, it notifies you. In turn, the hub subscribes to another hub, etc, until you reach the original source of the file. Whenever the file changes, the notifications would trickle down from hub to hub until all subscribers were notified.
You know, that sounds very familiar --- yes, that's it! It's called DNS. A distributed database that's incredibly standard, incredibly reliable, and incredibly scalable.
The way you'd do this with DNS is as follows: the source of the file would publish a TXT entry with a special name. The TXT entry would describe the data. Subscribers would still have to poll this at intervals, but they'd be polling their local DNS server.
In effect, you're now using the network-of-hubs model, except you've managed to con your ISP into being your local hub. And your ISPs provider becomes the next level, etc. The source's DNS server would end up having to serve a tiny fraction of the number of requests that an RSS feed would need. And DNS is really good at that sort of thing.
DNS is fun. You can do all kinds of things with it --- remember that guy who'd managed to do live audio streaming? It's proven technology, and everybody already has it! Okay, you wouldn't want to distribute huge amounts of data with it, but this kind of change notification is what it was designed to do.
Why not use a fuel that's liquid at STP? Ethanol, say? The energy-per-unit-mass is lower, but it's so much denser you end up with a far higher energy-per-unit-volume. Storing and pumping liquids is a solved problem; you can use the existing infrastructure built by the petrochemical industry. Ethanol can be burnt and synthesised by fuel cells, too.
So what's with the hydrogen obsession?
Britain's in a rather interesting position. Geographically, we have strong ties to Europe. Culturally, we have strong ties to the US, being the major English-language cultural exporter. This means one foot's drifting left and the other's drifting right, which is leading to some... interesting... situations. (Ask someone about railway privatisation in the UK sometime. Go on, I dare you. You'll regret it.)
My personal opinion is that Britain is drifting rather further right than is strictly comfortable, and the US is a lot further over and accelerating; one problem with very right-wing societies is that power tends to end up concentrated on those with power, which leads to an unhealthy feedback situation. (The same goes for very left-wing societies, but for a different reason.) Traditionally, from what I can tell, the US counters this by having a very active judiciary. Currently, however, the judiciary doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the government, although there are signs that's beginning to change. I'd be happier if we had stronger ties with the EU in order to balance the growing influence of the US, but that's just me.
I'll be very interested to see the result of the election.
Um, that's what ndiswrapper is. It currently builds as a module for ease of development but it would be trivial to compile it in to the kernel binary itself. It looks in a special directory for files describing the NDIS drivers, and if it finds the hardware, loads them and binds them. The end result is you end up with a bunch of standard ethernet devices. No userspace tools required anywhere, except for setting up the special directory in the first place...
Yes, it really would be possible to have an option in your favourite distribution's installer saying 'Install network driver from floppy disk'.
I'm posting this using a desktop machine running Linux that's talking to a server running Linux via two wireless ethernet cards using Windows drivers.
Check out ndiswrapper. It's a surprisingly elegant system for letting you use WLAN drivers written to the NDIS standard (e.g., Windows network drivers) under Linux.
It's wonderful. It's simple and highly effective. It lets you use drivers written by people with access to actual technical documentation, it's small, it's adequately fast, it's easy to manage... it also lets me use my two network cards under Linux, which I can't do otherwise. (One's a RTL8180, which is unsupported under Linux, and the other's a ACX100, for which a driver does exist but which sucks.)
Didn't NDIS start out as a portable driver standard, anyway? Netware, OS/2 and Windows, wasn't it? What would be really elegant is to use some sort of code translation to allow the drivers to be used on non-ix86 machines...
Interesting; what I got was a 272-byte binary MOV file. I found the word 'farscape-peacekeeper_m480.mov' in it, so I tried that in the obvious place and it worked.
Maybe I just missed the human-readable version when groping through the HTML source trying to find where the movie actually was. Sigh. Damned movie plugins. I wish people would just supply real download links for those of us who are standards-advantaged...
6 MB medium-resolution download
18 MB high-resolution download
Needed to poke around inside the original .mov with a hex editor to get them, too...
Most of the people I know here in the UK use Yahoo. I don't like MSN's interface very much; far too much advertising and crap. Yahoo's is better. For preference, however, I use gaim (I have accounts with practically all the IM providers). Protocol-wise, Yahoo wins because it stores the contact list on the server so that if I change it, all my other machines pick it up automatically. Which is cool. I don't know if MSN does that as well.
Hmm, ICQ... I've just made sure that my ancient ICQ account still works (it does). I can't remember the last time someone sent me a message on it. I think it was spam.
Tolkien wrote primarily about spiritual magic.
Gandalf was the master of fire. Partly, this manifested itself through his skill with fireworks and magical fire, but that wasn't the important bit. What Tolkien felt was far more important, and was stressed over and over again, was the fact the Gandalf could 'kindle the fire in men's souls'. Look at the way he can muster enthusiasm in practically everyone. The classic example is the way he brought Théoden back from the brink in _RotK_ (ignore the lousy movie effects --- this is one of the few bits that Peter Jackson got totally wrong). Even more impressive, to my mind --- he managed to talk Bilbo into going dragon-hunting in The Hobbit.
(Saruman's power was his will and his voice. He could talk practically anyone into doing anything. He had very little power of his own; once the Ents destroyed Isengard, he was shafted. Again, another bit the film got completely wrong was his fight with Gandalf. In the books, it's a battle of wills, and pre-Moria Gandalf is definitely Saruman's inferior.)
The rest of Tolkien's world is similar. The difference between Elves, Dwarves, Men and the other races? They're races, not species. Tolkien wasn't interested in their outward appearance, or whether they could interbreed, or the shape of their ears. The fundamental, crucial difference, intrinsic to Middle-Earth's entire philosophy, the thing that is hammered home over and over again, is the shape of their souls.
When Elves die, they're reincarnated. When Dwarves die --- actually, I forget. I believe they end up in some classical afterlife. When Men die, however, the souls leave the universe entirely. Nobody knows what happens to them. By Tolkien's view, Men are specially favoured. They get to move on to whatever Eru has planned for them next, and are unique in that aspect. All the other races are bound to Arda until the end of time.
(This is the reason why Arwen had to become human. She was a descendent of a Man-Elf cross. All such people had to choose between following the Elven path or the mortal path, because you have to pick what kind of soul you have. All the rest follows from there.)
(If you're interested in such things, read The Silmarillion. It's tough going, but rewarding.)
Tolkien just doesn't go in for material magic very much. He didn't find it interesting. While this makes his universe incredibly rich and rewarding to study, it doesn't really fit a modern game where the player wants to trigger some flashy effect and kill loads of orcs... I await the MMORPG with some trepidation.
I have on occasion attempted to find out exactly what the difference is, and on all previous attempts have got precisely nowhere: all the various arguments I've found seem to be making artificial distinctions.
Can someone sum up the differences briefly for me, and any other geographically-advantaged readers?
Alas, it's not perfect. The AI ain't great; Ignus, my physically weak but very powerful sorceror, has a tendency to wander up to some huge, horrible monster when I ask him to cast a long-range spell unless I keep an eye on him. (This tends to be terminal for him.) There are some scripting bugs; there's one minor subquest I can't complete. There are some more serious engine bugs, too. If I try and enter one room the game crashes on me, which is a pity because I need something that's in it. One whole section, the Godsman temple, is noticeably poorly written, at least compared to the rest of it.
The worst problem is that it's far too easy to get involved in the story and gallop through the main plot while avoiding the subplots. (I did this.) This means you end up at the endgame grossly underpowered. I'm now wandering around trying to level up so I stand a slight chance against the ...
But the problems are minor. If you like RPGs, get it. It's not expensive these days, and you'll enjoy it. It's the classic RPG; if you think you know about the genre, it's required playing. It's the Hamlet of RPGs, and no, I don't think I'm overstating the case.
It's a damned shame it didn't sell better --- it was probably too intelligent. If it had, perhaps we'd have more games that were that good.
I want to like Blender. I really do. Every so often I have another look, try and make it do what I want, and give up.
The user interface is fine, I can cope with that. The problem I have is it's so weird and inconsistent under the hood. Admittedly, most of these problems stem from using the scanline renderer; I haven't investigated Yafray.
For example:
I want to make a planet. Fine, I create a sphere for the planet and a omni light source for the sun. That works.
Now I want an atmosphere. I create another sphere, a bit bigger than the planet. Doesn't work. Do some investigation... Blender doesn't do volumetric effects. Damn.
I look into halos. Eventually I manage to get something in roughly the right place, although it looks crap. It's also being lit by the sun even when it's behind the planet.
After more investigation, eventually I find out that I have to turn on shadows on the planet and the atmosphere; and shadows only work if you're using spotlight lamps! This strikes me as incredibly broken.
So I switch to a spotlight lamp. Now most of the features of my planet are there, although it looks really awful. One of the problems is that the lamp is too close to the planet, so that the light isn't parallel. I move the lamp away... and everything goes black.
More investigation reveals that spotlight lamps seem to stop illuminating anything more than 40 units away. Just dead. At one stage I had half the planet illuminated and the other half in complete blackness.
It was at this point that I gave up. In Povray, however, I was happily rendering entire solar systems to scale, so that my planet was 12000 units in diameter, the sun was 150000000 units away, my camera was 0.002 units above the planetary surface, and it worked perfectly. Plus, I had a whole bunch of programmatic macros to map a latitude and longitude on my planet onto my universal coordinate space for any given date and time, which was cool.
Another thing I hate about Blender is its insistence on using meshes for everything. Meshes are grainy, eat memory, and look naff if you zoom in too far (like on my planet). Oh, it does have basic CSG support, but what happens if I create a complex model and then decide that I want to move one of my primitives a little to the left? I can't, that's what. Once you've applied the CSG operation that's it; if you want to change something, you have to start from scratch. Povray's script-based system means that you just change one coordinate and rerender.
There is stuff I like in Blender; the texture system is really nice, and I wish I could find a way of exporting a Blender texture and using it in Povray. Being able to just point at things instead of searching through your script is useful, and being able to position stuff visually rather than typing in coordinates is wonderful. The inverse kinematics would be cool, too, if I could ever make it work.
Plus, at my level of skill, Povray looks so much better than Blender. I never managed to make Blender's scanline renderer produce anything halfway decent. But Povray, with its mathematically perfect shapes, looks wonderful every time. I can focus on the scene content, and not have to keep adding hacks to improve the image quality.
Yes, it sounds totally bogus to me, too. The amount of air that the turbines intersect will be completely insignificant compared to the total amount of air passing through the area. Plus, turbines don't manage to extract any great percentage of the energy out of the air.
puqloDwI' ja'pu'vawq Dayep
pe'vIl chop Ho'Du'Daj; pe'vIl Suq pachDu'Daj
Ha'DIbaH puv juchyub yIyep
bInDepSuHach vaQeHmuS ghombe' DanIDjaj
'etlhDaj veSpatlh HujtaH ghopDaj--
jagh HoSlaw' law' veqlargh Hos puS! nIteb nej nI'
vaj Sor tamtam, ghaH retlhDaq Qam
nI'be' leSlI' ghah (Sor retlhDaq) 'ej ghaH QublI'
(Courtesy of Keith Lim...)
More information, including plans, is available at Fusor.net.
Yeah, I felt sorry for Hardhead. Defrauding Thoggins I could feel good about, but Hardhead seemed to be a nice guy.
But the one I really want to know about is Frosttt. Some newbie, flying around, and this guy hands him 300M isk --- what's he going to do with it? I'd love to see what happened to that money...
Well, shabbier.
At least the submitter is a real user with a history, and wasn't created as a marketing ploy; but would it have been so hard to stick 'Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers!' at the bottom?
See the irony in the post?
ACRONYM: A Contrived Reduction Of Nomenclature, Yielding Mnemonics.
I've been giving serious thought as to writing a web page scraper for Slashdot so that you can browse it in a decent environment. The web front end is seriously beginning to suck.
Is there anywhere appropriate where I can send comments? There seems to be no webmaster link anywhere. The 'Bugs' link off on the left goes directly to the Slash bug submission page. Is this appropriate for discussing Slashdot itself?
I suspect that as far as Messenger is concerned, it doesn't use an ion drive simply because they weren't around when the project was started --- I can't find any information on when design started, but these missions routinely take well over a decade from when the paperwork starts to when pieces start getting put together.
Actually, for the inner solar system, you really want a light sail. No fuel! Plus, they're fast; the thrust is tiny, but it never stops... isn't there supposed to be a light sail test mission some time Real Soon Now?