Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
·
· Score: 2
And most importantly, it assumes that you have either speed or altitude to work with. If you're hovering thirty feet up and you suddently lose power, you're going splat.
Planes are a little better, because under normal conditions, you've always got some speed to work with (if you don't, the plane stalls.) Of course, the worst power-loss problems happen when you lose power on take off -- yes, you could land safely straight ahead, but people still try to make it back to the runway...
You won't find single A cells at the grocery store, but they're still used in battery packs like this -- for laptops, camcorders, R/C planes and cars, etc. You use them when AA is too small, and sub-C is too big.
why do you want insane resolution to have clearer, sharper images, when the most basic of optics isn't even being respected: FOCUS. when you are facing a column and the rest of the room is on the left and the right of the column, isn't the room supposed to be blurred?
Two reasons --
1) that's hard to do with current 3D hardware (though I seem to recall some recent cards doing blurring like that.)
2) I don't know about you, but my eyes can move around independant of my head, and can focus on whatever they see. Unless your game can determine where exactly your eyes are pointed and focus on just that part of the screen, this would not work.
3) It may be more realistic, but blurring doesn't add much to the gameplay of your average FPS, and may take away from it signifigantly.
Also, FPSs are not the only class of game out there. RTSs benefit from lots of pixels -- I remember playing Dune II at 320x200, and I don't miss that resolution at all. I'd much rather play Total Annihilation (which is still several years old) at 1024x768.
Even RPGs like Baldur's Gate greatly benefit from the additional resolution that a TV cannot deliver. Yes, I know there's a console port of it now. In the few minutes of playing with it at CompUSA, I found it very annoying and found myself longing for the PC version instead.
They only make igloos when they're travelling. They use them like we'd use tents.
If I recall correctly, most of the time they live in houses made of dirt and/or driftwood.
(To be fair, all the ekimos I've known lived in houses much like the house I lived in. But then again, I only lived in Anchorage and never really got to know anybody who was living way out in the styx.)
(ObPC: The Eskimos are only one of several types of natives living in Alaska, but they're the ones known for making igloos...)
The only way that PC games are going to truly die is if :
* The FPS and RTS genre's games are MUCH easier to play with mice. The dreamcast could accept a mouse -- can any others, and do the games work with it?
* 640x480 just isn't good enough anymore (and your TV set can't even do that well.) Consoles will have to be able to display to SVGA monitors just like the computers do. HDTV is another option, but how many people have HDTV now? Not very many.
* And last, but not least, you can't justify an Xbox to do your taxes. People are going to buy PCs for `productive' things, and when that's done, they'll want to play a game.
(Now, if a console can run Turbo Tax, that might be what's needed to drive the final nail into the PC game coffin. Of course, if that happens, then that console you're using... is basically just a PC!)
Like it or not, but certain genres of games are still dominated by PC games -- in particular, I'm thinking of FPS and RTS games. Maybe this will change in the future... we shall see.
NASA has lost more than seven astronauts. Seven died in Challenger, and I'm not aware of any others actually dying in a spacecraft in flight, but three died in Apollo 1, for example. And I suspect that more have died in plane crashes and the like while doing testing and such.
Electric R/C planes have been quite popular for several years now -- in fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all if people were drawing on the experience gained there to design/improve this plane.
They tend to suffer from the same problems, however -- low flight times. You can have an electric R/C plane that's extremely high performance and fly for 3 minutes (with Ni-cads), or a very very tame flying plane that flys for 30 minutes (using Li-ion cells.) With a glow or gas engine, you can have a very high performance plane that flies for 30 minutes -- or you can try and fly across the Atlantic in an 11 lb plane.
Electrics are quieter, cleaner (no oil sprayed everywhere) and easier to deal with, which are the main reasons for their popularity. You can fly them where gas/glow planes would not be allowed.
Still, a plane that carries a passenger (i.e. not a model) for only 100 miles per charge really isn't going to be that useful. They're going to need to be able to make the fuel cells work before this plane will be accepted as anymore more than a toy. Either that, or they're going to need to make a *massive* improvent in battery technology -- such as being able to hold 5x as much charge. It may happen eventually, but it's not likely to happen soon.
There is no reason to allow sites from outside your LAN to relay through your mail server based just on the From line or the MAIL FROM smtp command.
Incorrect. There is a reason -- convenience. It allows him to go anywhere and send mail without even changing his relay.
However, the reason to not do this is that it's insecure. A large percentage of the spam I receive claims to be from the domain that it's being sent to, so his system would happily relay it.
The second reason should trump the first reason, but obviously if you're a clue resistant lawyer with a chip on your shoulder, it doesn't.
For those who appreciate irony, consider this --
He's basically written this big diatribe, which to spammers says `hey! you can relay through my mail server!'... so a spammer finds it, and forges their spam to allow it to go through it, and uses it to spam the world. Then somebody gets flooded with these spams, and sues our friend Bret. They can even use his article as evidence that his mail server was open and he knew it, but that he refuses to secure it.
Re:Screen scraping cold war
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How long until web designers begin making small randomizations to their page layout to break any screen scrapers code?
This already happens.
Another thing that sites do is encode certain bits of text as images. Paypal, for example, does this. And they muck with the font to make it hard for OCR software to read it -- obviously they've had problems with people creating accounts programatically. (why people would, I don't know, but when there's money involved, people will certainly go to great lengths to break the system, and the system will have to go to great lengths to stop it -- or they'll lose money.)
It's nice that there's a book on this now... but people have been doing this for a long time. For as long as there has been information on web sites, people have been downloading them and parsing the good parts out.
The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam.
And he's correct. A few years ago, most spam filters did look for individual properties of spam.
BUT, now, the best spam filters out there already use statistical properties. Spamassassin does this, for example, and it works *extremely* well. Before I found Spamassassin, I had a huge procmial recipe that used it's scoring mechanism to do basically the same thing -- but of course spamassassin does it better, so I switched:)
That's not quite true yet, even in the R/C car world. NiMH are far more popular than they used to be, but they're hardly ruling the world quite yet.
NiMH offers higher capacity for a given size/weight. But the internal resistance is higher, and they will not tolerate the high discharge rates that NiCd's will. Here's a reference for you. Cars and planes have similar requirements, but planes are far more vulnerable to increased weight, so you'll find that high performance planes often only have enough capacity to fly for a few minutes -- they use the bare minimum capacity to keep weight down. And since they need to dump their charge in 3 minutes, they need NiCd's.
Matched packs have been around for a long time, and the procedures for making them have not changed since NiMH became popular. The idea is to have all your cells go dead at the same time -- otherwise 1) you've got extra, unused capacity at the end of your race, capacity that could have given you more speed and 2) if one cell goes dead first, the other reverse charge it, making it even weaker, and eventually ruining it.
In your case, if a good NiMH cell can do 30 amps, a good NiCd cell of the same size may be able to do 60 amps delivering the same voltage. It all depends on what you're looking for. If you want to dump all your power *very* quickly, you want NiCd. If you want to do it slower, NiMH may be what you want. And if you've got an hour to do it, Li-ion works well.
After all, there's a reason rechargable power tools and similar items usually use NiCd's -- the same sized battery can deliver more current at the same voltage.
Btw, the reason that NiMh batteries are taking over isn't just the higher capacity -- the main reason is that NiCd batteries are unfriendly to the environment, so they're being `phased' out.
I have planes that use NiCd cells, and planes that use NiMH cells. The NiCd planes are usually high performance, short flights, and the NiMH planes are usually lower performance but fly longer.
I've also got a few R/C cars, and so far, all my batteries for those are NiCd. NiCd's may give me a shorter run, but they also give me more power. It's all a tradeoff...
I just checked the link -- they only fly for 5 minutes. Definately, they *need* NiCd's to handle that much current draw.
If you were to use NiMH or Li-ion batteries, you'd need much larger ones -- they'd be so large that it couldn't fly with the additional weight.
On the bright side, these NiCd's can probably be charged in 15 minutes. So, if you have four or five battery packs and a good charger, you should be able to keep flying with only short stops to swap out batteries -- the other battery packs will either be cooling or charging (charging hot batteries = bad idea -- great way to ruin them.)
NiCd's tolerate high discharge rates better than NiMH batteries, and FAR better than Li-ion batteries. They can also be charged faster.
You can discharge a SCR NiCd battery in four minutes and not damage it. Do that to a NiMH battery, and it'll be too hot to touch, and will be damaged. Try to do that to a Li-ion battery, and you'll ruin it the very first time.
Also, the NiMH and Li-ion batteries have a higher internal resistance. Voltage drop == discharge rate * internal resistance, so as you draw more and more amps, you get fewer and fewer volts. Eventually, you get less total power from the NiMH and Li-ion batteries, even though they have higher capacities.
I doubt these things will fly for much longer than ten minutes (if even that.) You're discharging the batteries at a high rate, so you need batteries that can handle it. And those batteries are NiCd's.
Some park fliers can use Li-ion batteries, and they can stay up for 30-60 minutes at a time. But they fly very slowly and have very little power. Helicopters and other similar vehicles are not so efficient.
Even if X10 doesn't do it, there's lots of companies out there who will sell you model airplanes with small transmitting cameras. In fact, it's scary how many people are trying to fill this niche...
Especially since it's a simple matter of buying the plane yourself, building it yourself, and then buying and installing some sort of wireless camera yourself. No need to pay somebody else to do it -- this is hardly rocket science.
Ghostscript (gs) basically converts postscript to a bitmap, then uses whatever drivers it has to convert that to the needed format.
This works reasonably well for pictures and stuff, but for a plotter this would be iffy at best. When you actually printed it out, rather than drawing the lines as designed, the pen would trace a line across the page, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, etc. As needed, the pen would be raised and dropped, probably drawing lots of dots. Eventually, it would probably draw the picture ok, but it could take hours, and would wear out your plotter.
This all assumes that what I know about plotters hasn't become totally obsolete. When I worked with plotters like 15 years ago, that's how they worked. Maybe they're fancier now.
To put this in video game terms -- think a Vectrex vs an Atari 2600. The Vectrex draws lines, and they look perfect (in arcade terms, think the original Star Wars game, think Asteroids, Star Castles.) The 2600 drew bitmaps -- less precise, but more flexible (think the arcade Space Invaders.)
Here's some instructions for making a bootable Windows 98 cd. This doesn't boot you into DOS -- it boots you into Windows, with the GUI, registry, etc. all up and working. And it all works off the cd.
Haven't had a need to try it myself, but if you need it, you can find the instructions
here.
As far as bloatware goes, emacs is no longer even close to the top. Netscape, Mozilla, KDE, gnome, X itself, etc all have it beat in terms of memory consumption by a large margin.
Not like the old page that said `Linux only had 128 MB swap files' and FUD like that. This page actually lists things that Microsoft does better, in a mostly factual, hype-limited way. They're not trying to be really fair to Linux, but at least they don't pull things that don't matter out of their rear and say `see? we're better!'. The things they list are, at least for a large part of it, actually important, and things that Microsoft does do better.
As much as I love to bash Microsoft, they're finally doing this right. At least with this page, anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Planes are a little better, because under normal conditions, you've always got some speed to work with (if you don't, the plane stalls.) Of course, the worst power-loss problems happen when you lose power on take off -- yes, you could land safely straight ahead, but people still try to make it back to the runway ...
Here's a picture of a battery pack made up of A cells --
click here (from www.radicalrc.com)
You won't find single A cells at the grocery store, but they're still used in battery packs like this -- for laptops, camcorders, R/C planes and cars, etc. You use them when AA is too small, and sub-C is too big.
Diablo was fun. Problem is that my pointer finger didn't agree, and it still aches ...
1) that's hard to do with current 3D hardware (though I seem to recall some recent cards doing blurring like that.)
2) I don't know about you, but my eyes can move around independant of my head, and can focus on whatever they see. Unless your game can determine where exactly your eyes are pointed and focus on just that part of the screen, this would not work.
3) It may be more realistic, but blurring doesn't add much to the gameplay of your average FPS, and may take away from it signifigantly.
Also, FPSs are not the only class of game out there. RTSs benefit from lots of pixels -- I remember playing Dune II at 320x200, and I don't miss that resolution at all. I'd much rather play Total Annihilation (which is still several years old) at 1024x768.
Even RPGs like Baldur's Gate greatly benefit from the additional resolution that a TV cannot deliver. Yes, I know there's a console port of it now. In the few minutes of playing with it at CompUSA, I found it very annoying and found myself longing for the PC version instead.
If I recall correctly, most of the time they live in houses made of dirt and/or driftwood.
(To be fair, all the ekimos I've known lived in houses much like the house I lived in. But then again, I only lived in Anchorage and never really got to know anybody who was living way out in the styx.)
(ObPC: The Eskimos are only one of several types of natives living in Alaska, but they're the ones known for making igloos ...)
* The FPS and RTS genre's games are MUCH easier to play with mice. The dreamcast could accept a mouse -- can any others, and do the games work with it?
* 640x480 just isn't good enough anymore (and your TV set can't even do that well.) Consoles will have to be able to display to SVGA monitors just like the computers do. HDTV is another option, but how many people have HDTV now? Not very many.
* And last, but not least, you can't justify an Xbox to do your taxes. People are going to buy PCs for `productive' things, and when that's done, they'll want to play a game.
(Now, if a console can run Turbo Tax, that might be what's needed to drive the final nail into the PC game coffin. Of course, if that happens, then that console you're using ... is basically just a PC!)
Like it or not, but certain genres of games are still dominated by PC games -- in particular, I'm thinking of FPS and RTS games. Maybe this will change in the future ... we shall see.
Still, a remarkably good safety record.
They tend to suffer from the same problems, however -- low flight times. You can have an electric R/C plane that's extremely high performance and fly for 3 minutes (with Ni-cads), or a very very tame flying plane that flys for 30 minutes (using Li-ion cells.) With a glow or gas engine, you can have a very high performance plane that flies for 30 minutes -- or you can try and fly across the Atlantic in an 11 lb plane.
Electrics are quieter, cleaner (no oil sprayed everywhere) and easier to deal with, which are the main reasons for their popularity. You can fly them where gas/glow planes would not be allowed.
Still, a plane that carries a passenger (i.e. not a model) for only 100 miles per charge really isn't going to be that useful. They're going to need to be able to make the fuel cells work before this plane will be accepted as anymore more than a toy. Either that, or they're going to need to make a *massive* improvent in battery technology -- such as being able to hold 5x as much charge. It may happen eventually, but it's not likely to happen soon.
However, the reason to not do this is that it's insecure. A large percentage of the spam I receive claims to be from the domain that it's being sent to, so his system would happily relay it.
The second reason should trump the first reason, but obviously if you're a clue resistant lawyer with a chip on your shoulder, it doesn't.
For those who appreciate irony, consider this --
He's basically written this big diatribe, which to spammers says `hey! you can relay through my mail server!' ... so a spammer finds it, and forges their spam to allow it to go through it, and uses it to spam the world. Then somebody gets flooded with these spams, and sues our friend Bret. They can even use his article as evidence that his mail server was open and he knew it, but that he refuses to secure it.
Another thing that sites do is encode certain bits of text as images. Paypal, for example, does this. And they muck with the font to make it hard for OCR software to read it -- obviously they've had problems with people creating accounts programatically. (why people would, I don't know, but when there's money involved, people will certainly go to great lengths to break the system, and the system will have to go to great lengths to stop it -- or they'll lose money.)
It's nice that there's a book on this now ... but people have been doing this for a long time. For as long as there has been information on web sites, people have been downloading them and parsing the good parts out.
Hmmmm ...
BUT, now, the best spam filters out there already use statistical properties. Spamassassin does this, for example, and it works *extremely* well. Before I found Spamassassin, I had a huge procmial recipe that used it's scoring mechanism to do basically the same thing -- but of course spamassassin does it better, so I switched :)
A minor point, but important
NiMH offers higher capacity for a given size/weight. But the internal resistance is higher, and they will not tolerate the high discharge rates that NiCd's will. Here's a reference for you. Cars and planes have similar requirements, but planes are far more vulnerable to increased weight, so you'll find that high performance planes often only have enough capacity to fly for a few minutes -- they use the bare minimum capacity to keep weight down. And since they need to dump their charge in 3 minutes, they need NiCd's.
Matched packs have been around for a long time, and the procedures for making them have not changed since NiMH became popular. The idea is to have all your cells go dead at the same time -- otherwise 1) you've got extra, unused capacity at the end of your race, capacity that could have given you more speed and 2) if one cell goes dead first, the other reverse charge it, making it even weaker, and eventually ruining it.
In your case, if a good NiMH cell can do 30 amps, a good NiCd cell of the same size may be able to do 60 amps delivering the same voltage. It all depends on what you're looking for. If you want to dump all your power *very* quickly, you want NiCd. If you want to do it slower, NiMH may be what you want. And if you've got an hour to do it, Li-ion works well.
After all, there's a reason rechargable power tools and similar items usually use NiCd's -- the same sized battery can deliver more current at the same voltage.
Btw, the reason that NiMh batteries are taking over isn't just the higher capacity -- the main reason is that NiCd batteries are unfriendly to the environment, so they're being `phased' out.
I have planes that use NiCd cells, and planes that use NiMH cells. The NiCd planes are usually high performance, short flights, and the NiMH planes are usually lower performance but fly longer.
I've also got a few R/C cars, and so far, all my batteries for those are NiCd. NiCd's may give me a shorter run, but they also give me more power. It's all a tradeoff ...
Check out their Draganflyer X-Pro model.
Here's the google cache.
Only $4997! (no, I didn't miss a decimal point.)
If you were to use NiMH or Li-ion batteries, you'd need much larger ones -- they'd be so large that it couldn't fly with the additional weight.
On the bright side, these NiCd's can probably be charged in 15 minutes. So, if you have four or five battery packs and a good charger, you should be able to keep flying with only short stops to swap out batteries -- the other battery packs will either be cooling or charging (charging hot batteries = bad idea -- great way to ruin them.)
NiCd's tolerate high discharge rates better than NiMH batteries, and FAR better than Li-ion batteries. They can also be charged faster.
You can discharge a SCR NiCd battery in four minutes and not damage it. Do that to a NiMH battery, and it'll be too hot to touch, and will be damaged. Try to do that to a Li-ion battery, and you'll ruin it the very first time.
Also, the NiMH and Li-ion batteries have a higher internal resistance. Voltage drop == discharge rate * internal resistance, so as you draw more and more amps, you get fewer and fewer volts. Eventually, you get less total power from the NiMH and Li-ion batteries, even though they have higher capacities.
I doubt these things will fly for much longer than ten minutes (if even that.) You're discharging the batteries at a high rate, so you need batteries that can handle it. And those batteries are NiCd's.
Some park fliers can use Li-ion batteries, and they can stay up for 30-60 minutes at a time. But they fly very slowly and have very little power. Helicopters and other similar vehicles are not so efficient.
Their marketing people must be extremely happy!
Especially since it's a simple matter of buying the plane yourself, building it yourself, and then buying and installing some sort of wireless camera yourself. No need to pay somebody else to do it -- this is hardly rocket science.
Obviously you have no clue, `PhysicsGenius'. Actually get some experience with model airplanes, and come back later.
Ghostscript (gs) basically converts postscript to a bitmap, then uses whatever drivers it has to convert that to the needed format.
This works reasonably well for pictures and stuff, but for a plotter this would be iffy at best. When you actually printed it out, rather than drawing the lines as designed, the pen would trace a line across the page, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, etc. As needed, the pen would be raised and dropped, probably drawing lots of dots. Eventually, it would probably draw the picture ok, but it could take hours, and would wear out your plotter.
This all assumes that what I know about plotters hasn't become totally obsolete. When I worked with plotters like 15 years ago, that's how they worked. Maybe they're fancier now.
To put this in video game terms -- think a Vectrex vs an Atari 2600. The Vectrex draws lines, and they look perfect (in arcade terms, think the original Star Wars game, think Asteroids, Star Castles.) The 2600 drew bitmaps -- less precise, but more flexible (think the arcade Space Invaders.)
Haven't had a need to try it myself, but if you need it, you can find the instructions here.
As far as bloatware goes, emacs is no longer even close to the top. Netscape, Mozilla, KDE, gnome, X itself, etc all have it beat in terms of memory consumption by a large margin.
Not like the old page that said `Linux only had 128 MB swap files' and FUD like that. This page actually lists things that Microsoft does better, in a mostly factual, hype-limited way. They're not trying to be really fair to Linux, but at least they don't pull things that don't matter out of their rear and say `see? we're better!'. The things they list are, at least for a large part of it, actually important, and things that Microsoft does do better.
As much as I love to bash Microsoft, they're finally doing this right. At least with this page, anyways.