I completely agree with your post. I suggest, however that you move from hate to a more enlightened perspective- why hate idiots when you can laugh at them from a distance??? Both are perfectly futile as objective outlooks, but the seconds leads to lower blood pressure and fewer strokes/heart attacks/psychotic episodes.
-----
IMUHO the truly funny thing about all of this is that anyone who understands classical science fiction understands that the relationship between Star Wars and SF is exactly the same as the relationship between N*sync and the thousands of excellent, non-manufactured musicians performing in bars and clubs across the world.
People who crave epic fantasy productions** (in the Campbellian sense****) have no modern epic fantasy productions to enjoy. Therefore they become excited by the most trite and pitiful semblance thereof, provided it is well advertised. I.E. Star Wars becomes the biggest smash hit in hollywood history, and people who should know better still worship it 23 years later. Mel Brooks understood it in 1987, yet the collective slashdot audience does not (even today, even with his help).
People who crave beautiful, passionate, exciting music** have no (readily apparent) beautiful modern music to enjoy. Therefore they become excited by the most trite and pitiful semblance thereof, provided it is well advertised. I.E. N*sync becomes becomes the biggest smash hit in music history, while Derek Dick, the greatest lyricist in the world, holds an estate sale to feed his wife and daughter. Weird Al understood it well before 1985, yet the vast majority of targets*^*^* do not (even today, even with his help).
It's hilarious.
-----
The original SW was vain, insipid, proselytizing, and fscking annoying- a symptom of a diseased culture- if for no other reason than that there is no better alternative. With all the incredible pieces of art which have been produced in that field, in the seminal literature which both defines and accompanies humanity as we progress towards our destiny, a story about a white trash farmer's son who blows up a space station is the best we can hope for??? At least the Good Guys(tm) win.
Star Wars was successful because 1) it was (fairly) well done (especially in comparison with other sf films of the time) 2) it was advertised like no other film in history and 3)Lucas understood enough about human nature to know what appealed to the people he was trying to sell to. EXACTLY the same reasons N*synch are successful. The reason you don't remember it is because your parents were the victims, not yourselves. Or, perhaps, because the advertising that was targetted at you was successful, while N*sync advertising is not successful b/c it is not targetted at you.
David Brin, back before the trolls drove him from slashdot, had an incredible post about this exact subject. Too bad I don't have time to try to find it...
6 prophecies:
[1] In 10 years, current N*sync fans will not be fans of (insert 2012 boy band name here). They will have children, and say that fans of (insert 2012 boy band name here) are vain, insipid, proselytizing, and fscking annoying. The reason they are fans of N*sync today is that the advertisements for N*sync(2002) are targetted towards them, while the advertisements for N*sync(2012) will be targetted at their children.
[2]You will pay to take your children to see Star wars Episode VII- and it will suck just as badly as I-VI. People who think Star Wars Episode I was awesome will agree that it sucks.
[3]Your children will love it. They will also have N*Sync(2012) posters above their beds.
[4]You won't understand your children's POV, and your children will think "parents just don't uderstand...".
[6]Rev. Neh Scudder will still think 1-5 are hilarious.
Rev. Neh
First Prophet
**all people, as in, symptomatic of human nature. Endemic. See any Joseph Campbell book for details.
****either Joseph or John:P
*^*^* {that select portion of western civilization which has sufficient disposable income to purchase large quantities of compact disks, i.e. 14 year old girls}
When I worked at AEDC I spent some time involved in NASA Lewis (now Glenn)'s numerical propulsion system simulation project. The idea of this project was to apply OO principles to turbine engine modeling.
Each component of a modern engine was viewed as an object (compressor, turbine, burner, etc). The solver could use helper aplications of any complexity to model components, then tie them together (very useful for integrating proprietary codes with a common architecture).
I could talk a lot more about it but it has been years and it would be better for you just to follow the link...
Or just compile the physics code as a fortran library and link it. You'll probably gain 25-50% in execution speed as well, since fortran is much better suited to numerical programming.
Nah, not traded, supplemented. So many projects use the aircraft that NASA was having to delay projects (such as the X-43 flight) to do proper periodic maintenance. The fact that the current NASA aircraft uses J-57-19 engines and every other B-52 in existence has moved to TF33-P-3/103's has made it interesting to support. With 2 B-52's, NASA can alleviate some of the scheduling problems.
In fact, Orbital Sciences originally planned to purchase a G or H model for use with their pegasus rockets because of this, but decided to buy an L-1011 instead because of support issues (i.e. only the USAF can fix B-52's).
The original NASA aircraft is the only B model still flying, fyi. The rest were AMARC'd (and cut in half to prove to Russian inspectors that they couldn't be used again, per treaty).
Anyway NASA will continue flying the original, and use the H when OC-ALC finishes demilitarizing it.
You can't get tossed in jail for it. You can get removed from the jury (in fact, the second best way* to get out of jury duty is to mention to the prosecutor that you are aware that jury nullification exists), but the prosecuting attorney can only remove a few people, and if all mention it then chances are someone who believes in jury nullification can and will slip through to prevent injustice from occurring. This is one of the main checks that the people have against the system.
Now, of course, since this is a check on the system the people who run the system (i.e. judges, prosecuting attorneys, etc) would rather you didn't know about it, and will do what they can to discourage it. But you cannot go to jail simply for saying someone is not guilty despite a preponderance of evidence, which is what jury nullification is. Contempt of court in another story, which is why it is best not to advertise loudly what you are doing and/or why.
Neh
*The first best is to tell the defense that his client is guilty... no matter what.
I guess i'd have to be more familiar with the WireGL and how it renders frames, but as long as most of the crunching is done on the video cards, I would think that you could do this with many fewer systems. Especially since you are only running at sub-1024x768 resolution per screen. How about 4 dual athlon PC's with 1 AGP and 4 PCI dual-head cards each? That would still give you the same number of pixels, at a significant savings in hardware cost.
Although you probably couldn't play quake on it, could you do most other things?
Heck, I'd pay $50 for an hour of quake on this. They could rent it out on nights and weekends and it would pay for itself in a month or two. Well, maybe a year or two. But it would still be a good investment...
Indeed. The really, really funny thing is that a lot of Windows users can't even use a very slightly modified Windows system.
For instance, I used a hex editor to change the word on my start menu from "Start" to something useful (i.e. the name of the computer, Astarte).
Every single person who sat down at it saked, "Where is your start button?" immediately. Even though it was in the exact same place. Nothing else changed except the word on it. I'm not talking about just my mom; I'm talking about engineer types, people who have used other operating systems (primarily SGI Irix) extensively.
If the people in this survey had clicked a nappy foot, or a K on the top of the screen, or even some "useful text string in the lower left hand corner" every day for 10 years, they would sit down at a MS windows box and say "Where are the programs at?" or, "'Start'? what a stupid name for a computer!"
It will halt proliferation because countries like North Korea will realize that having nuclear weapons does not give them any additional leverage. Nuclear weapon delivery systems cost a huge amount of money, and if they are not useful they won't be built.
I guess it won't do much to stop countries like India or Pakistan or Iraq, because those people would have their missiles pointed at places like israel, china, and each other. But it would keep them from pointing them at me, so I support the defense initiative.
I don't believe that terrorists hate the US because we have nuclear weapons, or because we are relatively free, or even because we don't sacrifice virgin goats to Allah. They hate us because we practice an interventionist foreign policy, which is another issue altogether (and not one I want to debate).
i agree that nuclear attack via greyhound bus would be much more practical- but such an attack requires a great deal more planning etc than simply pushing a button, and allows many opportunities to stop between conception and delivery. A missile is currently not stoppable by any means.
"What's a few hundred million lives? We have many more."
-mao, 1972, when told what a nuclear war with India would cost his country (the answer was 263 million peasants).
If you believe that the leaders of other countries necessarily think the same as you on anything, much less on the concept of human rights or the value of a human life (or a million, or hundred million) you are too naive to bother talking to. You're betting millions of other peoples lives on the fact that no one, anywhere, will be brave enough, stupid ehough, incompetent or insane enough to push a button... when you don't necessarily even know what their concepts of bravery, stupidity, competence or sanity entails.
And if you think that finding a single submarine in the middle of a big ocean is trivial, maybe you could join the navy and show them how- because i doubt that they think it is. Even if you find it, you will very likely not be able to track it without destroying it- and once you've done that, how the hell will you know whose it was? Every submarine the chinese or north koreans own was built in a russian shipyard.
No, the only way to stop a rogue missile is with an effective interceptor. The simple fact that we have the capability of stopping such an attack would probably do more to halt nuclear proliferation amongst rogue states than anything else ever has.
We'll be back in the 50s again waiting in fear for someone to finally push the button.
That's the whole point- to paraphrase a bad movie, I'm not afraid of the country with 10,000 nuclear warheads. I'm afraid of the country who has one, and decides to use it. And then we would watch it launch, sail across 15000 miles of ocean, utterly and completely helpless to stop it- and watch it explode over San Francisco or Seattle or Los Angeles. Sure, we could shoot back, and I'm sure we would; but that won't bring back the dead people. When an evil of that magnitude is so incredibly easy to prevent, not doing so would be evidence of absolute foolishness.
I think the trolls would do fine. However, the stupid jerks who call themselves trolls but are really just OTees, would probably fail most intelligence tests.
Genuine trolling takes quite a bit of intellectual effort. Posting goatse.cx links, first post comments, or Jon Katz stories does not.
The proper response to your examples is not to do anything. Let the scientific community respond for you. If university A produces fraudulent reports, smart guys from university B and C and D come forward and say "That's incorrect!".
University A will be discredited, lose research money from other sources, and probably fire the people who fudged the data.
This is the way it has always worked, and it has been incredibly effective; intellectual integrity is the only thing valued more than intellectance in the scientific community. If you are low on either one, you don't last long.
To attempt to control research by any other means, regardless of funding source, would be controlling research. Which inevitably leads to stifling research, which is a Bad Thing.
I'm working with a suite of ancient fortran codes right now (written between 66-78) and have seen some similar problems. For instance, I had an array construct in a common block which was dynamically resized in a subroutine; it went from dimension 199 to dimension 99. Just a typo on the part of some long-dead programmer, and apparently it compiled and ran fine on the Amdahl it was written for. However, surprise surprise, it does not on the Microsoft Fortran compiler which I am forced to use.
From the point of the redimensioning on, the next 100 or so memory locations were permanently assigned the value of the 100 lost array units. Even explicitly writing 'R=7.8d0 ' in the code would not change the value of R... it took me almost a week to find the problem, since the code was close to 50k lines long and the problem was in a common block which the step debugger skipped.
yech.
Anyway although Fortran can be frustrating, there is no way I would consider doing any kind of complex cfd in C. I've seen the source of a NASA code which is written in C- those guys must have spent every moment of every day cursing the idiot who told them "C is the future"... The code is (at least) twice as long as it needs to be, runs at least 50% slower than an equivelant code in Fortran, and is nowhere near as extensible as a code written in Fortran would be. As far as engineering programming goes, FORTRAN is really the best solution.
Even though the older quake games were much less dependant on pure aiming (lpb) skills, given 2 players in q1 with the same skills, the lpb would still win. I've met plenty of people that i spanked on lan's that I lost bigtime to in q1 and q2 because i was a hpw:)
Of course. The difference between Q1 and Q3 is that a good HPB (150-300) usually beat an average LPB (50-150) in Q1, whereas in Q3 fighting up just 50 ms is like having a lead weight tied to your railgun. Railing someone whose ping is 150 less than yours in Q3 is like trying to swat a flying mosquito with a broadsword.
Wasn't "improved networking code" one of the main selling points of Q3? I seem to remember Carmack saying that ping would matter less. I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.
In Q1 matador I found that 250 was pretty playable as long as the local lpb's didn't have quad lightning + res rune. I was consistently ranked in the top ten Q1 matador players at the CLQ, on a 56k; I didn't get much better when I moved to a cable modem, except that now people called me an LPB bot instead of just a bot. No one bothered to consider the idea that strategy might be more important than ping.
PL was the real killer; a 75 ping with a 15% pl was worse than a 250/0 pl. In Q1.
In Q3 I can't play with a ping over 90; i get hit with rockets and then hear them fire, or I'll get hit with a rail shot and then see the doors I was hiding behind open. Not to mention the fact that people with low pings move 50% faster and strafe (or jump) circles around 100 ping "hpb's" in Q3.
Sigh... I guess it doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, but I sure miss the old Q1 days.
Stacking units should make them harder to kill, as well... none of that "kill 15 units with three missile rovers" nonsense.
And I would like, for once, an a.i. program that doesn't do blatantly stupid things like build 75 bombers/cruise missile/planet busters and then not use them to attack me when we are at war (or declare war on me because I wouldn't give them the secret to some high-level weapons technology). AI programming in civ/civ2/smac is some of the worst of any game I've ever played.
You may be right- I looked in the Rage XL User's Guide, but I didn't read closely enough. They have the same users guide for about 16 video cards; I only looked at one, the Rage Fury Pro, which supports up to 2048x1536@32bpp (page 36). Looks like that is the only one that will do it though.
As an aside, what in the world do you use that resolution for? That has to be physically painful to look at. My eyes would be bleeding.
Following the original inquirer link, and drilling down a bit to an older article, it seems the on-board video will be ATI Rage XL. It's an ancient chipset, but it will do 2048x1536.
More importantly, it should do superwide 1600x1048 for my 1600sw... hehe.
It really depends on the size of the airplane. A tiny (~12 ft) plane like the X-43 will have very little inertial energy compared to the size of the wave drag force that it will see, meaning that it will have a massive deceleration. A manned plane would be more like 90-250 ft long, weighing upwards of 2 million pounds fully fueled. Inertia and drag would be much less disparate in that case.
A better way to think about the fuel is as a heat sink. It takes a lot of energy to go from 70K to 2900K, especially since there is a phase change involved. A manned plane would also probably have much more complex cooling system, and would probably be made of materials that could support hypersonic cooling. The X-43 is so tiny that there is little effective internal mass to use as a heat sink, so the engineers were forced to improvise. I do think their method is ingenious, as long as it works...
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with your post. I suggest, however that you move from hate to a more enlightened perspective- why hate idiots when you can laugh at them from a distance??? Both are perfectly futile as objective outlooks, but the seconds leads to lower blood pressure and fewer strokes/heart attacks/psychotic episodes.
:P
-----
IMUHO the truly funny thing about all of this is that anyone who understands classical science fiction understands that the relationship between Star Wars and SF is exactly the same as the relationship between N*sync and the thousands of excellent, non-manufactured musicians performing in bars and clubs across the world.
People who crave epic fantasy productions** (in the Campbellian sense****) have no modern epic fantasy productions to enjoy. Therefore they become excited by the most trite and pitiful semblance thereof, provided it is well advertised. I.E. Star Wars becomes the biggest smash hit in hollywood history, and people who should know better still worship it 23 years later. Mel Brooks understood it in 1987, yet the collective slashdot audience does not (even today, even with his help).
People who crave beautiful, passionate, exciting music** have no (readily apparent) beautiful modern music to enjoy. Therefore they become excited by the most trite and pitiful semblance thereof, provided it is well advertised. I.E. N*sync becomes becomes the biggest smash hit in music history, while Derek Dick, the greatest lyricist in the world, holds an estate sale to feed his wife and daughter. Weird Al understood it well before 1985, yet the vast majority of targets*^*^* do not (even today, even with his help).
It's hilarious.
-----
The original SW was vain, insipid, proselytizing, and fscking annoying- a symptom of a diseased culture- if for no other reason than that there is no better alternative. With all the incredible pieces of art which have been produced in that field, in the seminal literature which both defines and accompanies humanity as we progress towards our destiny, a story about a white trash farmer's son who blows up a space station is the best we can hope for??? At least the Good Guys(tm) win.
Star Wars was successful because 1) it was (fairly) well done (especially in comparison with other sf films of the time) 2) it was advertised like no other film in history and 3)Lucas understood enough about human nature to know what appealed to the people he was trying to sell to. EXACTLY the same reasons N*synch are successful. The reason you don't remember it is because your parents were the victims, not yourselves. Or, perhaps, because the advertising that was targetted at you was successful, while N*sync advertising is not successful b/c it is not targetted at you.
David Brin, back before the trolls drove him from slashdot, had an incredible post about this exact subject. Too bad I don't have time to try to find it...
6 prophecies:
[1] In 10 years, current N*sync fans will not be fans of (insert 2012 boy band name here). They will have children, and say that fans of (insert 2012 boy band name here) are vain, insipid, proselytizing, and fscking annoying. The reason they are fans of N*sync today is that the advertisements for N*sync(2002) are targetted towards them, while the advertisements for N*sync(2012) will be targetted at their children.
[2]You will pay to take your children to see Star wars Episode VII- and it will suck just as badly as I-VI. People who think Star Wars Episode I was awesome will agree that it sucks.
[3]Your children will love it. They will also have N*Sync(2012) posters above their beds.
[4]You won't understand your children's POV, and your children will think "parents just don't uderstand...".
[5]Lucasfilms/"Free Lance Entertainment" (lol) will laugh all the way to the bank
[6]Rev. Neh Scudder will still think 1-5 are hilarious.
Rev. Neh
First Prophet
**all people, as in, symptomatic of human nature. Endemic. See any Joseph Campbell book for details.
****either Joseph or John
*^*^* {that select portion of western civilization which has sufficient disposable income to purchase large quantities of compact disks, i.e. 14 year old girls}
When I worked at AEDC I spent some time involved in NASA Lewis (now Glenn)'s numerical propulsion system simulation project. The idea of this project was to apply OO principles to turbine engine modeling.
Each component of a modern engine was viewed as an object (compressor, turbine, burner, etc). The solver could use helper aplications of any complexity to model components, then tie them together (very useful for integrating proprietary codes with a common architecture).
I could talk a lot more about it but it has been years and it would be better for you just to follow the link...
neh
Or just compile the physics code as a fortran library and link it. You'll probably gain 25-50% in execution speed as well, since fortran is much better suited to numerical programming.
neh
Nah, not traded, supplemented. So many projects use the aircraft that NASA was having to delay projects (such as the X-43 flight) to do proper periodic maintenance. The fact that the current NASA aircraft uses J-57-19 engines and every other B-52 in existence has moved to TF33-P-3/103's has made it interesting to support. With 2 B-52's, NASA can alleviate some of the scheduling problems.
In fact, Orbital Sciences originally planned to purchase a G or H model for use with their pegasus rockets because of this, but decided to buy an L-1011 instead because of support issues (i.e. only the USAF can fix B-52's).
The original NASA aircraft is the only B model still flying, fyi. The rest were AMARC'd (and cut in half to prove to Russian inspectors that they couldn't be used again, per treaty).
Anyway NASA will continue flying the original, and use the H when OC-ALC finishes demilitarizing it.
Neh
The mig-25 was built to counter the XB-70 Valkyrie, not a "bomber version of the SR-71". FYI.
I would personally prefer a usb jack in the back of my head. Maybe behind my ear, or at the back of my neck. That would be a "real" PDA, imuho.
neh
I don't think you'd make Slashdot's front page by producing a 100mhz chip. Not this decade, at least...
neh
You can't get tossed in jail for it. You can get removed from the jury (in fact, the second best way* to get out of jury duty is to mention to the prosecutor that you are aware that jury nullification exists), but the prosecuting attorney can only remove a few people, and if all mention it then chances are someone who believes in jury nullification can and will slip through to prevent injustice from occurring. This is one of the main checks that the people have against the system.
Now, of course, since this is a check on the system the people who run the system (i.e. judges, prosecuting attorneys, etc) would rather you didn't know about it, and will do what they can to discourage it. But you cannot go to jail simply for saying someone is not guilty despite a preponderance of evidence, which is what jury nullification is. Contempt of court in another story, which is why it is best not to advertise loudly what you are doing and/or why.
Neh
*The first best is to tell the defense that his client is guilty... no matter what.
Yeah, I agree. I was hoping SMAC II would be next.
I guess i'd have to be more familiar with the WireGL and how it renders frames, but as long as most of the crunching is done on the video cards, I would think that you could do this with many fewer systems. Especially since you are only running at sub-1024x768 resolution per screen. How about 4 dual athlon PC's with 1 AGP and 4 PCI dual-head cards each? That would still give you the same number of pixels, at a significant savings in hardware cost.
Although you probably couldn't play quake on it, could you do most other things?
Neh
Heck, I'd pay $50 for an hour of quake on this. They could rent it out on nights and weekends and it would pay for itself in a month or two. Well, maybe a year or two. But it would still be a good investment...
Neh
Actually, it is Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile, or AMRAAM. You got the AIM-120 part right, though.
There have been tests using this as a ground to air missile, so it could possibly have been an AIM-120 he saw.
Neh
Indeed. The really, really funny thing is that a lot of Windows users can't even use a very slightly modified Windows system.
For instance, I used a hex editor to change the word on my start menu from "Start" to something useful (i.e. the name of the computer, Astarte).
Every single person who sat down at it saked, "Where is your start button?" immediately. Even though it was in the exact same place. Nothing else changed except the word on it. I'm not talking about just my mom; I'm talking about engineer types, people who have used other operating systems (primarily SGI Irix) extensively.
If the people in this survey had clicked a nappy foot, or a K on the top of the screen, or even some "useful text string in the lower left hand corner" every day for 10 years, they would sit down at a MS windows box and say "Where are the programs at?" or, "'Start'? what a stupid name for a computer!"
Neh
It will halt proliferation because countries like North Korea will realize that having nuclear weapons does not give them any additional leverage. Nuclear weapon delivery systems cost a huge amount of money, and if they are not useful they won't be built.
I guess it won't do much to stop countries like India or Pakistan or Iraq, because those people would have their missiles pointed at places like israel, china, and each other. But it would keep them from pointing them at me, so I support the defense initiative.
I don't believe that terrorists hate the US because we have nuclear weapons, or because we are relatively free, or even because we don't sacrifice virgin goats to Allah. They hate us because we practice an interventionist foreign policy, which is another issue altogether (and not one I want to debate).
i agree that nuclear attack via greyhound bus would be much more practical- but such an attack requires a great deal more planning etc than simply pushing a button, and allows many opportunities to stop between conception and delivery. A missile is currently not stoppable by any means.
-Neh
"What's a few hundred million lives? We have many more."
-mao, 1972, when told what a nuclear war with India would cost his country (the answer was 263 million peasants).
If you believe that the leaders of other countries necessarily think the same as you on anything, much less on the concept of human rights or the value of a human life (or a million, or hundred million) you are too naive to bother talking to. You're betting millions of other peoples lives on the fact that no one, anywhere, will be brave enough, stupid ehough, incompetent or insane enough to push a button... when you don't necessarily even know what their concepts of bravery, stupidity, competence or sanity entails.
And if you think that finding a single submarine in the middle of a big ocean is trivial, maybe you could join the navy and show them how- because i doubt that they think it is. Even if you find it, you will very likely not be able to track it without destroying it- and once you've done that, how the hell will you know whose it was? Every submarine the chinese or north koreans own was built in a russian shipyard.
No, the only way to stop a rogue missile is with an effective interceptor. The simple fact that we have the capability of stopping such an attack would probably do more to halt nuclear proliferation amongst rogue states than anything else ever has.
We'll be back in the 50s again waiting in fear for someone to finally push the button.
That's the whole point- to paraphrase a bad movie, I'm not afraid of the country with 10,000 nuclear warheads. I'm afraid of the country who has one, and decides to use it. And then we would watch it launch, sail across 15000 miles of ocean, utterly and completely helpless to stop it- and watch it explode over San Francisco or Seattle or Los Angeles. Sure, we could shoot back, and I'm sure we would; but that won't bring back the dead people. When an evil of that magnitude is so incredibly easy to prevent, not doing so would be evidence of absolute foolishness.
Neh
I think the trolls would do fine. However, the stupid jerks who call themselves trolls but are really just OTees, would probably fail most intelligence tests.
Genuine trolling takes quite a bit of intellectual effort. Posting goatse.cx links, first post comments, or Jon Katz stories does not.
The proper response to your examples is not to do anything. Let the scientific community respond for you. If university A produces fraudulent reports, smart guys from university B and C and D come forward and say "That's incorrect!".
University A will be discredited, lose research money from other sources, and probably fire the people who fudged the data.
This is the way it has always worked, and it has been incredibly effective; intellectual integrity is the only thing valued more than intellectance in the scientific community. If you are low on either one, you don't last long.
To attempt to control research by any other means, regardless of funding source, would be controlling research. Which inevitably leads to stifling research, which is a Bad Thing.
I'm working with a suite of ancient fortran codes right now (written between 66-78) and have seen some similar problems. For instance, I had an array construct in a common block which was dynamically resized in a subroutine; it went from dimension 199 to dimension 99. Just a typo on the part of some long-dead programmer, and apparently it compiled and ran fine on the Amdahl it was written for. However, surprise surprise, it does not on the Microsoft Fortran compiler which I am forced to use.
From the point of the redimensioning on, the next 100 or so memory locations were permanently assigned the value of the 100 lost array units. Even explicitly writing 'R=7.8d0 ' in the code would not change the value of R... it took me almost a week to find the problem, since the code was close to 50k lines long and the problem was in a common block which the step debugger skipped.
yech.
Anyway although Fortran can be frustrating, there is no way I would consider doing any kind of complex cfd in C. I've seen the source of a NASA code which is written in C- those guys must have spent every moment of every day cursing the idiot who told them "C is the future"... The code is (at least) twice as long as it needs to be, runs at least 50% slower than an equivelant code in Fortran, and is nowhere near as extensible as a code written in Fortran would be. As far as engineering programming goes, FORTRAN is really the best solution.
This is good news, since it implies that:
NASA PLANS ON RETURNING SAMPLES FROM MARS SOMETIME SOON
Of course, I'll believe it when I see it (we can't even seem to hit the planet now, much less hit it and come back)
Even though the older quake games were much less dependant on pure aiming (lpb) skills, given 2 players in q1 with the same skills, the lpb would still win. I've met plenty of people that i spanked on lan's that I lost bigtime to in q1 and q2 because i was a hpw :)
Of course. The difference between Q1 and Q3 is that a good HPB (150-300) usually beat an average LPB (50-150) in Q1, whereas in Q3 fighting up just 50 ms is like having a lead weight tied to your railgun. Railing someone whose ping is 150 less than yours in Q3 is like trying to swat a flying mosquito with a broadsword.
Wasn't "improved networking code" one of the main selling points of Q3? I seem to remember Carmack saying that ping would matter less. I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.
In Q1 matador I found that 250 was pretty playable as long as the local lpb's didn't have quad lightning + res rune. I was consistently ranked in the top ten Q1 matador players at the CLQ, on a 56k; I didn't get much better when I moved to a cable modem, except that now people called me an LPB bot instead of just a bot. No one bothered to consider the idea that strategy might be more important than ping.
PL was the real killer; a 75 ping with a 15% pl was worse than a 250/0 pl. In Q1.
In Q3 I can't play with a ping over 90; i get hit with rockets and then hear them fire, or I'll get hit with a rail shot and then see the doors I was hiding behind open. Not to mention the fact that people with low pings move 50% faster and strafe (or jump) circles around 100 ping "hpb's" in Q3.
Sigh... I guess it doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, but I sure miss the old Q1 days.
Stacking units should make them harder to kill, as well... none of that "kill 15 units with three missile rovers" nonsense.
And I would like, for once, an a.i. program that doesn't do blatantly stupid things like build 75 bombers/cruise missile/planet busters and then not use them to attack me when we are at war (or declare war on me because I wouldn't give them the secret to some high-level weapons technology). AI programming in civ/civ2/smac is some of the worst of any game I've ever played.
You may be right- I looked in the Rage XL User's Guide, but I didn't read closely enough. They have the same users guide for about 16 video cards; I only looked at one, the Rage Fury Pro, which supports up to 2048x1536@32bpp (page 36). Looks like that is the only one that will do it though.
As an aside, what in the world do you use that resolution for? That has to be physically painful to look at. My eyes would be bleeding.
Following the original inquirer link, and drilling down a bit to an older article, it seems the on-board video will be ATI Rage XL. It's an ancient chipset, but it will do 2048x1536.
More importantly, it should do superwide 1600x1048 for my 1600sw... hehe.
It really depends on the size of the airplane. A tiny (~12 ft) plane like the X-43 will have very little inertial energy compared to the size of the wave drag force that it will see, meaning that it will have a massive deceleration. A manned plane would be more like 90-250 ft long, weighing upwards of 2 million pounds fully fueled. Inertia and drag would be much less disparate in that case.
A better way to think about the fuel is as a heat sink. It takes a lot of energy to go from 70K to 2900K, especially since there is a phase change involved. A manned plane would also probably have much more complex cooling system, and would probably be made of materials that could support hypersonic cooling. The X-43 is so tiny that there is little effective internal mass to use as a heat sink, so the engineers were forced to improvise. I do think their method is ingenious, as long as it works...