I've never understood why surgeons can't do the same with blood vessels - the patient is bleeding from a major artery, and it never occurs to them that the could slice the artery in half and connect the ends with surgical tubing?
I have heard stories of people who've survived a slice in a major artery (such as in the leg) because the artery had been completely severed. The muscular end had then contracted, reducing the flow rate considerably, where a simple tear would have been stretched open.
My uneducated, uninformed gut opinion is that it could well work. Possible problems I can think of is that arterial blood pressure is quite high (if my maths is right, I've just come up with 0.2 atmospheres), and you need to worry about connecting the severed ends once the immediate crisis is over.
But yeah, this ought to be a fairly simple engineering problem. There's nothing actually medically difficult here. Any actual doctors willing to comment?
The format of the data is also an issue. The DVDs would need to be formatted for packet writing...
Actually, it would probably be simpler to use a simple HD image burnt onto the disc. Packet writing's only worthwhile on modifiable discs. To create it, you'd need to create a vast disk image, chop it up, and burn it chunk onto a seperate DVD... exactly how you're going to do this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Also note that your example only produces 250 gigs of storage, so you need 200 drives for a terrabyte. That's 50 cheap PCs, or if your estimates are correct, $10,000 for a terrabyte.
Yeah, I misread the original post. The whole concept is futile.
I'll just have to bring on my next trick: using standard hard drives as cache for a massive array of RAID tape drives! By using multiple terabyte tape systems, you could quickly ramp up truly vast amounts of random-access storage that will be, well, horribly slow!
It would take 250 DVDs (all FULL!) to get you to that terabyte. But you want to put ten 250GB drives together... so you want 4 drives (for the space) and six drives for redundancy.
Hmm. A thought has occurred to me. Say that terabyte of data was *read only*, or at least only updated infrequently. What's the best way of storing it?
A DVD-R stores 5GB. (Roughly.) A cheapo DVD drive is, what, $20? This means you'll need 50 drives. A 50-way RAID enclosure is going to be pricy, but you can probably make do with a cluster of cheap PCs (if it works for Google...). Figure $100 per four drives, which means the cost per drive is now about $50.
The total price is now $2500. It'll be slow and bulky, but it'll work. The data's easily duplicated by copying the DVDs. You can update the data by burning a replacement set of discs --- clever management would mean that you should be able to replace disks piecemeal. You might even be able to veneer the array with a hard disk to store changes until it's worth recreating the disk set.
Is this thing actually going to be at all useful to anyone?
My uncle was the manager responsible for the group at Barclay's Bank that introduced the first ATMs into the UK. He used to tell stories about having to juggle all the various political camps involved.
One of them involved the two rival implementations, both with fairly large followings of engineers: there first one involved the card contained a unique ID that was keyed to a central database, requiring every ATM to be connected to the database in order to authorise connections. This is the one we use today.
The second one involved having all the necessary information, such as the account balance, stored directly on the card. This meant that an ATM could authorise a transaction instantly without needing to communicate with the base. This was popular because it was faster, cheaper, much simpler, and allowed all kinds of nice features like mobile ATMs.
Apparently there were quite a lot of engineers and other managers who didn't understand why having all this information on the card was a bad idea...
So, if you ever use an ATM in the UK, remember my Uncle Ron, who managed to persuade the people in charge that the more expensive, more complex system was in fact the right way to go!
Lets wait for something to happen three times before declaring it a part of our regular cultural fabric, eh?
Hey, kid, this is the Internet. Things move fast here. We don't have time to wait for it to happen three times! Hell, a lot of the time if you wait for it to happen twice, some newer, more aggressive e-tradition will get in before you and steal all your mindshare!
In fact, soon you won't even be able to wait for something to happen even once. You'll have to declare something to be a tradition before it's happened at all. You can already see this beginning to happen with urban legends...
Wow. That's one of the most evil, despicable, grotesque and just plain ugly abuses of the web I've ever seen. You are a sick and twisted person, and I duly honour you...
(Oh, yes, and I will forward it on to various friends of mine who are going to look at it and say ewww. Just try and stop me!)
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
PCWs are still hanging on, occasionally. Z80-based, usually 256 or 512kB of memory, 720kB floppies (3.5" for the recent models, 3" for the older ones). Suprisingly large monochrome screen; roughly 90x30 8x8 characters, IIRC. They worked because they were word processing appliances; take it out of the box, plug it in, and it Just Works. They came with Locoscript, a word processor that was its own operating system and came on a bootable floppy.
They also came with CP/M so that you could run other software and were pretty well respected as cheap CP/M machines. Locomotive Basic and Dr. Logo were supplied on the utilities disk. You could get all kinds of upgrades for them, including hard disks!
Pretty nice machines; didn't do much, but what they did they did reasonably well.
(I wrote a bunch of games and half a novel on one. Then I discovered that it's a really good idea to make sure that the right disk is in the drive when you reformat it... and at the same time I learned why it's important to make backups. Hmm. Excuse me, I must go and make a backup.)
How about when a game comes out that has a story where the character is gay, and the characters sexuality adds something to the storyline? I'm sure it won't end up being like that, some game developer will do it just to be 'edgy' and it probably will have no bearing on the game whatsoever.
You may be interested in Graham Nelson's interactive fiction game, Jigsaw (reckoned to be one of the best text adventures ever written).
There are two main characters, working against each other: White, you is the player character; and Black, the major NPC. Black is trying to change history, and you are trying to prevent it. Mostly.
One of the major plot elements is that you and Black fall in love. This makes things a little complicated, as you can imagine, and is extremely significant to the storyline.
However, the interesting thing is that Jigsaw never mentions what sex you and Black are. Clever wording means that the text never even uses pronouns to refer to the two of you. All you know is that you find Black highly attractive. This means that you're free to project any sex you like onto the two characters. Different players will have different mental images; some reviewers saw White and Black as both being male, more tended to see them as being a heterosexual couple, of various combinations. (If you're at all interested, I saw White as being female and Black as being male.) It's a remarkable piece of work.
(Must try replaying it... I never finished it the last time I tried; it is fiendishly hard.)
CDs aren't actually recorded like this. The recordings are fine - it's when they go in to get the whole song (and CD) mastered that this happens. Audio Engineers are under increasing pressure to make the CD "sound louder" by the PHBs.
One reason for this, IMO, is that people are listening to more and more music in cars. Cars suck for listening to music in: they're loud. Even a quite car has got a fairly high level of background noise. This means that you've only got a limited amount of range left to present the music in, which means that listening to high-dynamic-range music just doesn't work.
(Ever tried to listen to classical music in the car? Ever found yourself adjusting the volume to make the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter? You've just run out of range. Modern music is easier but it tends to have a much smaller range anyway, even without compression.)
Compressing the range makes the music much more accessible in cars (and other high-noise environments). Of course, this makes it suck when you're listening to it on real audio equipment. But since radio is a major market, and most radios these days are in cars, there's a major push towards compression.
(Incidentally, as anyone who actually knows anything about audio equipment will tell you --- unless you're in the habit of listening to music in your car with the engine off, spending serious money on a car audio system is just not worth it. That background noise will ruin everything, every time. Spend the money on a digital jukebox instead and leave the high-quality audio at home, where you can listen to it in the environment it deserves.)
I like the idea of this greylisting - it sounds perfect for my work BSD mail system.
Greylisting is so simple and so effective --- it amazes me that so few people have heard of it! I originally wrote mine because my feeble P166 server was spending >10 seconds processing each message with SpamAsassin. Now it can reject spam before it even arrives...
Incidentally, as it's hosted on SourceForge, the site should damn well be responding. It's all visible from here. If you still can't get there, I think there may be connectivity problems somewhere.
Basically the present thinking is based on attempting to filter spam out - I would argue that given the amount of variables involved, it it a method doomed to failure. Current methods also assume that the incoming mail is mostly valid, and are attempting to remove the undesirable parts - spam.
The problem with this approach is that you run the risk of throwing away ham. Because you're starting with mixed spam and ham, and you're picking out the ham, you don't know for sure that what's left is pure spam. Traditional approaches are safer, because the take mixed spam and ham and throw away only what is known to be spam. Therefore (unless the spam selection process is overeager) they won't throw away ham.
(I feel hungry now...)
I use a greylister. It's brilliant. It reduces the amount of spam I get from about 100 to 150 messages per day to about 5 --- and because it does this before the messages are transferred to my machine, I don't even get the overhead of running them through spamassassin or even my MTA.
Greylisting implements the old sender-pays spam filtering system by exploiting the SMTP system. It requires messages to be sent twice: the first time it's rejected with a try-again-later reply. This makes it the sender's responsibility to store the message and resend it --- this is the cost. As most spam engines aren't real SMTP servers, they usually don't bother to retry. Real messages, however, will arrive about half an hour late. (You then implement lots of optimisation so that you don't bother greylisting messages from known good senders, etc.)
Advantages? It's highly effective. It's completely standards-compliant. It's 100% safe; it won't lose ham unless an upstream mail server goes wrong. It can work before the message body is transmitted. It works against a lot of Outlook Express email viruses too. And, best of all, it's completely invisible to both sender and recipient: set it up, get it going, and it Just Works.
If you're interested, I strongly recommend the one wot I wrote<BLATANT ADVERTISING/>, because it's simple to set up and works on any MTA, but there are lots more around --- the earlier link is a major resource.
He's a computer programmer. Therefore, he's powered by caffeine. Without it he does not function.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that the mind acquires speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking is a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion...
Am I alone among Slashdotters in not being addicted to first person shooters? I'm not saying that this story is not a worthy one, or that everyone should be like me, or anything like that. I sincerely am curious if I represent a miniscule minority, or if anyone else here finds FPS games unappealing.
I like FPS games, but not multiplayer ones. The reason for this is that I play FPS games like puzzle games, moving slowly and carefully from one area to the next, working out the lowest-risk strategy for each creature. I suck at multiplayer games because humans play entirely differently from AIs; way faster, for one thing. In classic Quake, people move so quickly that I just can't keep up.
My favourite type of game are combination arcade/adventure games. N64 Zelda is a classic example of this. While it's not a FPS, it seamlessly combines reflex gaming with mental gaming. Now, if I could find a FPS that did this kind of thing, I'd be happy. (I hear good things about Marathon.)
Not to knock you off your "Christian mythology" highhorse but since the Tower of Babel story is in Genesis, it's from the Torah and technically rooted in "Jewish Mythology".
Well, yeah. Since Christianity is a offshoot of Judaism, that means that most (but not all) Jewish mythology is part of Christian mythology. The same applies to Muslim mythology; they're all based on the same fundamental root.
It's just that I'm most familiar with the Christian version, so that's the one I mentioned. The Wikipedia article has got lots more information on the Jewish version of the story. What's your point?
I realise this is almost certainly a troll, but hey, any excuse to add actual information to the discussion.
The Tower of Babel is a legend from Christian mythology. In the very early days of humanity, it goes, people only spoke one language. They decided to build a tower that stretched all the way to heaven. God thought this was presumptious, and prevented the construction of the tower by cursing the people so that they spoke different languages and could no longer understand each other.
Lots more information on the appropriate Wikipedia page. (Including a copy of the King James version of the legend, and information about the real tower.)
...by using a technology such as TenDRA: the plugins are distributed in a platform-neutral format, and then the final stage of compilation into fast, native machine code is done on installation. For the sandbox environment of a web browser, TenDRA's ability to define global interfaces would be a great help.
Has anyone actually done anything useful with TenDRA yet? It seems like such a great idea, and yet there's so little interest...
It might, but it won't help: I also need to say, I want this element to be the same height as the page minus the height of that element, and CSS doesn't let you do that kind of thing. And the container model is sufficiently broken, at least in IE, that that approach won't work either.
However, I have found the ex unit, which may let me use absolute sizes in a way that scales more nicely than pixels, so I'll play with that and see what happens. Sigh...
(I would post a link but (a) it doesn't work yet and (b) my server is a P166 on an ADSL link. Wheee!)
Even the Google Answers site linked to screws it up. Their horizontal ad bar at the top gets vertically truncated since they decided to allocate a fixed number of pixels to it. Other sites have borders around the article as a fixed length and so I get articles abruptly terminating and have to drag the mouse on the text to see what is below the end of the arbitrary bottom border.
The problem here is that CSS is, fundamentally, inadequate for specifying complex layouts. You get to specify dimensions in pixels, font-relative sizes (and it's not really very clear which font or size), and percentages of either the screen or the parent element depending on what web browser you're using.
It's just not possible to say, I want this element to be just big enough to contain its contents, but no bigger. This means that it's simply not possible to implement, say, a paned layout without using fixed sizes.
I know this because I've recently tried to implement one: a simple layout with a variable-sized center area and banners at the top and bottom. I tried. Trust me, I really tried. Eventually I had to specify that the top banner was 40px and the bottom 80px. It sucks but nothing else works.
(It also doesn't help that IE and Gecko, my two test renderers, implement the right: and bottom: properties differently. Gecko gets it right; I'm not quite sure what IE does, but it's not useful. IE also has a nasty tendency to treat percentage sizes as relative to the screen and not the parent element. Getting a style sheet to display more-or-less correctly on both browsers is an exercise in frustration.)
So, yeah, while it would be nice to have size-independent web pages, as soon as you try to implement any non-trivial layout, it's not nearly as easy as you think. My pages display reasonably well at a wide range of font sizes, and I'll have to make do with that.
POV-Ray's a bit different from usual 3D rendering and modelling software, in that a lot of the effort has gone into making a programming language which can then be used to generate objects. Typical renderers strive to render as many triangles as possible as quickly as possible, while POV-Ray gives you an entire programming environment. For instance, while a typical 3D modeller might laboriously hand-craft a tree out of triangles, shaders and alpha-blended foliage textures, a POV-Ray user would effectively write a program for generating trees.
This has some unexpected advantages: firstly, CSG trees are very efficient on space, so it's perfectly possible to create a single complex tree and then instantiate it a thousand times with different scaling factors, textures etc and the scene graph will still contain a single tree; and secondly, since POV primitives are mathematically perfect, the can be scaled arbitrarily and will remain mathematically perfect.
A while back I had a passion for rendering planets. To scale. I used a POV unit of 1.0 for a kilometre. So I made a sphere 12000 units in diameter, put a light source 150x10^6 units away, put a camera.002 units above the sphere's surface... and it all worked. Fast, too. You can't do that in Blender.
The only thing I couldn't work out was how to match light intensities to physical units, but I'm sure it's possible. Plus some of the textures seemed to go a little funny, probably due to rounding errors...
No, I hadn't... but it still doesn't help. The website won't let me pick a timezone, it wants me to pick a city --- and I don't know where the hell PST is!
I did make a wild stab and fed in Los Angeles, being the only west-coast city I know in the US, and it came out the same, so I am reassured.
Seriously, guys, if you're talking to a world audience it's so much more convenient if you use UTC. Everyone knows how to convert UTC to and from their local time; it's considerably harder to convert to and from some bizarre local time half way round the planet.
Look, guys, saying that it arrives at '1:56 PST' is bloody useless. Apart from the fact that Pacific Time is largely meaningless to most of the world, you don't even say whether that's morning or afternoon!
Having scoured the web sites --- it's actually quite hard to find the information --- the probe is doing the close flyby at 2056 UTC (i.e. about two and a half hours from now). Assuming I've got the daylight saving compensation right, of course...
Yes, I worked that out eventually; the title was mentioned in the article, but it wasn't clear that it was the name of the film, and not the game (who makes a film with a name as cheesy as The Chronicles of Riddick these days, anyway? Apart from George Lucas, that is).
...it says that this is based on a film --- what film? Looking at the article and a few related links doesn't show anything. I'm probably not looking in the right place, but I would have expected someone to at least mention the title. Somewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I've been reading Slashdot way too long.
(It's still a good article though. Worth rereading if you're at all interested in how ELF binaries work.)
I have heard stories of people who've survived a slice in a major artery (such as in the leg) because the artery had been completely severed. The muscular end had then contracted, reducing the flow rate considerably, where a simple tear would have been stretched open.
My uneducated, uninformed gut opinion is that it could well work. Possible problems I can think of is that arterial blood pressure is quite high (if my maths is right, I've just come up with 0.2 atmospheres), and you need to worry about connecting the severed ends once the immediate crisis is over.
But yeah, this ought to be a fairly simple engineering problem. There's nothing actually medically difficult here. Any actual doctors willing to comment?
Actually, it would probably be simpler to use a simple HD image burnt onto the disc. Packet writing's only worthwhile on modifiable discs. To create it, you'd need to create a vast disk image, chop it up, and burn it chunk onto a seperate DVD... exactly how you're going to do this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Also note that your example only produces 250 gigs of storage, so you need 200 drives for a terrabyte. That's 50 cheap PCs, or if your estimates are correct, $10,000 for a terrabyte.
Yeah, I misread the original post. The whole concept is futile.
I'll just have to bring on my next trick: using standard hard drives as cache for a massive array of RAID tape drives! By using multiple terabyte tape systems, you could quickly ramp up truly vast amounts of random-access storage that will be, well, horribly slow!
Excuse me. I need to switch to decaf.
Hmm. A thought has occurred to me. Say that terabyte of data was *read only*, or at least only updated infrequently. What's the best way of storing it?
A DVD-R stores 5GB. (Roughly.) A cheapo DVD drive is, what, $20? This means you'll need 50 drives. A 50-way RAID enclosure is going to be pricy, but you can probably make do with a cluster of cheap PCs (if it works for Google...). Figure $100 per four drives, which means the cost per drive is now about $50.
The total price is now $2500. It'll be slow and bulky, but it'll work. The data's easily duplicated by copying the DVDs. You can update the data by burning a replacement set of discs --- clever management would mean that you should be able to replace disks piecemeal. You might even be able to veneer the array with a hard disk to store changes until it's worth recreating the disk set.
Is this thing actually going to be at all useful to anyone?
One of them involved the two rival implementations, both with fairly large followings of engineers: there first one involved the card contained a unique ID that was keyed to a central database, requiring every ATM to be connected to the database in order to authorise connections. This is the one we use today.
The second one involved having all the necessary information, such as the account balance, stored directly on the card. This meant that an ATM could authorise a transaction instantly without needing to communicate with the base. This was popular because it was faster, cheaper, much simpler, and allowed all kinds of nice features like mobile ATMs.
Apparently there were quite a lot of engineers and other managers who didn't understand why having all this information on the card was a bad idea...
So, if you ever use an ATM in the UK, remember my Uncle Ron, who managed to persuade the people in charge that the more expensive, more complex system was in fact the right way to go!
Hey, kid, this is the Internet. Things move fast here. We don't have time to wait for it to happen three times! Hell, a lot of the time if you wait for it to happen twice, some newer, more aggressive e-tradition will get in before you and steal all your mindshare!
In fact, soon you won't even be able to wait for something to happen even once. You'll have to declare something to be a tradition before it's happened at all. You can already see this beginning to happen with urban legends...
(Oh, yes, and I will forward it on to various friends of mine who are going to look at it and say ewww. Just try and stop me!)
PCWs are still hanging on, occasionally. Z80-based, usually 256 or 512kB of memory, 720kB floppies (3.5" for the recent models, 3" for the older ones). Suprisingly large monochrome screen; roughly 90x30 8x8 characters, IIRC. They worked because they were word processing appliances; take it out of the box, plug it in, and it Just Works. They came with Locoscript, a word processor that was its own operating system and came on a bootable floppy.
They also came with CP/M so that you could run other software and were pretty well respected as cheap CP/M machines. Locomotive Basic and Dr. Logo were supplied on the utilities disk. You could get all kinds of upgrades for them, including hard disks!
Pretty nice machines; didn't do much, but what they did they did reasonably well.
(I wrote a bunch of games and half a novel on one. Then I discovered that it's a really good idea to make sure that the right disk is in the drive when you reformat it... and at the same time I learned why it's important to make backups. Hmm. Excuse me, I must go and make a backup.)
You may be interested in Graham Nelson's interactive fiction game, Jigsaw (reckoned to be one of the best text adventures ever written).
There are two main characters, working against each other: White, you is the player character; and Black, the major NPC. Black is trying to change history, and you are trying to prevent it. Mostly.
One of the major plot elements is that you and Black fall in love. This makes things a little complicated, as you can imagine, and is extremely significant to the storyline.
However, the interesting thing is that Jigsaw never mentions what sex you and Black are. Clever wording means that the text never even uses pronouns to refer to the two of you. All you know is that you find Black highly attractive. This means that you're free to project any sex you like onto the two characters. Different players will have different mental images; some reviewers saw White and Black as both being male, more tended to see them as being a heterosexual couple, of various combinations. (If you're at all interested, I saw White as being female and Black as being male.) It's a remarkable piece of work.
(Must try replaying it... I never finished it the last time I tried; it is fiendishly hard.)
One reason for this, IMO, is that people are listening to more and more music in cars. Cars suck for listening to music in: they're loud. Even a quite car has got a fairly high level of background noise. This means that you've only got a limited amount of range left to present the music in, which means that listening to high-dynamic-range music just doesn't work.
(Ever tried to listen to classical music in the car? Ever found yourself adjusting the volume to make the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter? You've just run out of range. Modern music is easier but it tends to have a much smaller range anyway, even without compression.)
Compressing the range makes the music much more accessible in cars (and other high-noise environments). Of course, this makes it suck when you're listening to it on real audio equipment. But since radio is a major market, and most radios these days are in cars, there's a major push towards compression.
(Incidentally, as anyone who actually knows anything about audio equipment will tell you --- unless you're in the habit of listening to music in your car with the engine off, spending serious money on a car audio system is just not worth it. That background noise will ruin everything, every time. Spend the money on a digital jukebox instead and leave the high-quality audio at home, where you can listen to it in the environment it deserves.)
Greylisting is so simple and so effective --- it amazes me that so few people have heard of it! I originally wrote mine because my feeble P166 server was spending >10 seconds processing each message with SpamAsassin. Now it can reject spam before it even arrives...
Incidentally, as it's hosted on SourceForge, the site should damn well be responding. It's all visible from here. If you still can't get there, I think there may be connectivity problems somewhere.
The problem with this approach is that you run the risk of throwing away ham. Because you're starting with mixed spam and ham, and you're picking out the ham, you don't know for sure that what's left is pure spam. Traditional approaches are safer, because the take mixed spam and ham and throw away only what is known to be spam. Therefore (unless the spam selection process is overeager) they won't throw away ham.
(I feel hungry now...)
I use a greylister. It's brilliant. It reduces the amount of spam I get from about 100 to 150 messages per day to about 5 --- and because it does this before the messages are transferred to my machine, I don't even get the overhead of running them through spamassassin or even my MTA.
Greylisting implements the old sender-pays spam filtering system by exploiting the SMTP system. It requires messages to be sent twice: the first time it's rejected with a try-again-later reply. This makes it the sender's responsibility to store the message and resend it --- this is the cost. As most spam engines aren't real SMTP servers, they usually don't bother to retry. Real messages, however, will arrive about half an hour late. (You then implement lots of optimisation so that you don't bother greylisting messages from known good senders, etc.)
Advantages? It's highly effective. It's completely standards-compliant. It's 100% safe; it won't lose ham unless an upstream mail server goes wrong. It can work before the message body is transmitted. It works against a lot of Outlook Express email viruses too. And, best of all, it's completely invisible to both sender and recipient: set it up, get it going, and it Just Works.
If you're interested, I strongly recommend the one wot I wrote<BLATANT ADVERTISING/>, because it's simple to set up and works on any MTA, but there are lots more around --- the earlier link is a major resource.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that the mind acquires speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking is a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion...
I like FPS games, but not multiplayer ones. The reason for this is that I play FPS games like puzzle games, moving slowly and carefully from one area to the next, working out the lowest-risk strategy for each creature. I suck at multiplayer games because humans play entirely differently from AIs; way faster, for one thing. In classic Quake, people move so quickly that I just can't keep up.
My favourite type of game are combination arcade/adventure games. N64 Zelda is a classic example of this. While it's not a FPS, it seamlessly combines reflex gaming with mental gaming. Now, if I could find a FPS that did this kind of thing, I'd be happy. (I hear good things about Marathon.)
Well, yeah. Since Christianity is a offshoot of Judaism, that means that most (but not all) Jewish mythology is part of Christian mythology. The same applies to Muslim mythology; they're all based on the same fundamental root.
It's just that I'm most familiar with the Christian version, so that's the one I mentioned. The Wikipedia article has got lots more information on the Jewish version of the story. What's your point?
I realise this is almost certainly a troll, but hey, any excuse to add actual information to the discussion.
The Tower of Babel is a legend from Christian mythology. In the very early days of humanity, it goes, people only spoke one language. They decided to build a tower that stretched all the way to heaven. God thought this was presumptious, and prevented the construction of the tower by cursing the people so that they spoke different languages and could no longer understand each other.
Lots more information on the appropriate Wikipedia page. (Including a copy of the King James version of the legend, and information about the real tower.)
No signs of intelligent life, then?
Has anyone actually done anything useful with TenDRA yet? It seems like such a great idea, and yet there's so little interest...
It might, but it won't help: I also need to say, I want this element to be the same height as the page minus the height of that element, and CSS doesn't let you do that kind of thing. And the container model is sufficiently broken, at least in IE, that that approach won't work either.
However, I have found the ex unit, which may let me use absolute sizes in a way that scales more nicely than pixels, so I'll play with that and see what happens. Sigh...
(I would post a link but (a) it doesn't work yet and (b) my server is a P166 on an ADSL link. Wheee!)
The problem here is that CSS is, fundamentally, inadequate for specifying complex layouts. You get to specify dimensions in pixels, font-relative sizes (and it's not really very clear which font or size), and percentages of either the screen or the parent element depending on what web browser you're using.
It's just not possible to say, I want this element to be just big enough to contain its contents, but no bigger. This means that it's simply not possible to implement, say, a paned layout without using fixed sizes.
I know this because I've recently tried to implement one: a simple layout with a variable-sized center area and banners at the top and bottom. I tried. Trust me, I really tried. Eventually I had to specify that the top banner was 40px and the bottom 80px. It sucks but nothing else works.
(It also doesn't help that IE and Gecko, my two test renderers, implement the right: and bottom: properties differently. Gecko gets it right; I'm not quite sure what IE does, but it's not useful. IE also has a nasty tendency to treat percentage sizes as relative to the screen and not the parent element. Getting a style sheet to display more-or-less correctly on both browsers is an exercise in frustration.)
So, yeah, while it would be nice to have size-independent web pages, as soon as you try to implement any non-trivial layout, it's not nearly as easy as you think. My pages display reasonably well at a wide range of font sizes, and I'll have to make do with that.
This has some unexpected advantages: firstly, CSG trees are very efficient on space, so it's perfectly possible to create a single complex tree and then instantiate it a thousand times with different scaling factors, textures etc and the scene graph will still contain a single tree; and secondly, since POV primitives are mathematically perfect, the can be scaled arbitrarily and will remain mathematically perfect.
A while back I had a passion for rendering planets. To scale. I used a POV unit of 1.0 for a kilometre. So I made a sphere 12000 units in diameter, put a light source 150x10^6 units away, put a camera .002 units above the sphere's surface... and it all worked. Fast, too. You can't do that in Blender.
The only thing I couldn't work out was how to match light intensities to physical units, but I'm sure it's possible. Plus some of the textures seemed to go a little funny, probably due to rounding errors...
No, I hadn't... but it still doesn't help. The website won't let me pick a timezone, it wants me to pick a city --- and I don't know where the hell PST is!
I did make a wild stab and fed in Los Angeles, being the only west-coast city I know in the US, and it came out the same, so I am reassured.
Seriously, guys, if you're talking to a world audience it's so much more convenient if you use UTC. Everyone knows how to convert UTC to and from their local time; it's considerably harder to convert to and from some bizarre local time half way round the planet.
Having scoured the web sites --- it's actually quite hard to find the information --- the probe is doing the close flyby at 2056 UTC (i.e. about two and a half hours from now). Assuming I've got the daylight saving compensation right, of course...
And Pitch Black was awesome.
...it says that this is based on a film --- what film? Looking at the article and a few related links doesn't show anything. I'm probably not looking in the right place, but I would have expected someone to at least mention the title. Somewhere...