Well, if you're doing some game with more than one thing happening at a time, like most every one today, there are all sorts of things that need doing, and can be done independently. Ray-tracing and 3D graphics are about as parallelizable as they come, and AI for n entities can be split between n processors. Suppose that you've got 40 cores to go around. You can put 5 cores to work on AI, 20 on graphics, another 10 on physics, and have 5 left for sound, controls, and other things. Modern game design is based around doling out the resources as efficiently as possible. This makes it easier, we hope, and will allow for better games in the future.
You mean Einhundertdreiundzwanzig? Translated to English, it's one hundred three and twenty. So yes, someone does use that method, even if it is confusing as hell.
I think that the reason that he used such damn short commands was partly due to the original development system being connected to the teletype by a 110 baud modem. For reference purposes, that means printing an 80x25 character text block took three goddamn minutes! This meant that working with something as verbose as COBOL would be untenable. Thus, when they developed UNIX and C, they made everything as short and easy to type as possible.
If you really want to get a feel for what it was like, misconfigure that terminal you have lying around your house (don't be ashamed, we all do), use ed, and toss a case of trackfeed paper under your desk. Oh, and try to fit the OS into the L1 cache on your CPU.
Defensive weapons in nuclear war, however, seem to start giving politicians ideas that they can 'win' a nuclear exchange. Frankly, I'd prefer them shitting their pants every time Putin raises his voice.
Not that I'm an expert on this, but doesn't nonvisible light affect the retinas just as much as visible light, hence why you should never look into a laser, no matter how weak, even if you can't see anything? Even worse, since you can't see it, the pupils would stay dilated, allowing it to still stream in, and your natural defenses can't do a thing. Thus, you probably wouldn't want high output, if you're not into massive lawsuits.
They don't have anything in the way of console variation, so they can just make it rock solid on the one configuration that they do support. A huge percentage of bugs come from dealing with all sorts of hardware variants, but if there's only one controller that you'll accept, then there will be fewer bugs in the controller interface. If there's only one audio and video chip set supported, then hey, that makes your life easier, too. The extra time can be spent ironing out what bugs do appear, so console games are generally more stable.
God, I remember someone writing that you had to have premium handmade fiberoptic cable, and that spending a mere $80 bucks on it would destroy the sound quality, damn what those ignorant fools say about the signal being digital and having built in ECC. 99% of audiophile spending is on snake-oil, but for the love of Christ, they don't want to hear about double-blind tests, actual physics, or why you can use just about anything electrically conductive to send a digital signal.
Well, you could always go with distributed storage. Put a million servers out there on the Internet with huge RAID arrays. Copy important data to 100 different servers. If you had 2 TB of storage per server, then between the total number of servers, we'd expect about 20 PB of storage, with at least 100 drives having to go bad at once to destroy some piece of data. Of course, since this whole exercise is assuming about 8 million IDE drives, you could expect with a 500,000 hour MTBF that a drive would go farming about one every two minutes.
This'll work well for some massive government, which might want that much storage space, and would be willing to pay for upgrades every couple of years.
Regular people could consider more redundant ways of encoding things. One idea I had was using the weights of the verticies of a neural network to store information. See pp 306-307 of Self Organizing Maps by T. Kohonen for an implementation using transmission. This would have the advantage of gracefully degrading, if the type of storage failure is at a bitwise resolution. Caution: Because I thought of it doesn't mean that it will work, and probably indicates the converse. Standard Disclaimers apply. YMMV.
Actually, in the final implementation, I thought that he does that. It creates a few thousand files, each one containing n primes, and then it goes through each previous file up to the square root of the largest number in the current file, and then it quits and goes to the next file. If you want to duplicate this guy's efforts, I think that the biggest help for this would be a REALLY fast HD array and lots of RAM.
Here's a hint. If some guy named Rob Malda ever comes knocking on your door offering to sell you an HTML generator, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
It's engineering dick-waving and a common misconception. The idea is that you can get the design and refurbishment costs down below just rebuilding the item. This sounds like it's doable, but in reality it's really damn difficult. Just to keep weight down, you end up having to engineer stuff to the limits of its ability to work.
One example that most people would understand would be race cars. A normal car's engine revs up to something like 7-8000 rpm. An F1 race car can hit up to 15000 rpm, which works out to about four times the stress on the engine otherwise. They try to keep the engine as light as possible, so for something lighter than my car's engine that produces ten times the horsepower, they had to make a compromise somewhere. They run it for one race, and send it back to the factory for refurbishment.
The reason that they do things that way is simply because they need the performance, and making an engine that can handle those stresses for long periods of time is either impossible, or more expensive than the alternative. NASA can, or could before the cold war ended, spend all the money it needed coming up with the design it wanted. You don't want Commies in space, do you?
With all of that out of the way, this requirement was basically decided upon by someone who thought that this would be closer in concept to making a family sedan than to making a race car. Today's sedans are faster than yesteryear's race cars, so there is hope that building with the sedan model will eventually be able to be made more cheaply than the race car model, which is currently cheaper.
Steam engines aren't bad at all. They're harder to learn how to drive, but they aren't impossible. All you need once you have the train and the tracks is a source of clean water and a source of something that burns. Coal isn't all that you can run a steam engine on, and it'll always be cheaper than oil. In fact, the most powerful train engines have been steam. Only recently have the Diesel Electric engines really begun to out do the Big Boy.
Biplanes aren't all that weird. They allow for a much greater wing area without a large wingspan, and are common for cropdusters and the such, and WWI era rifles aren't that bad, if well maintained. And if you're off in some place that nobody's going to invade sometime soon, why give the soldiers top of the line equipment? That's the problem in Iraq. The reservists were equipped with the assumption that they wouldn't be used to fight a war somewhere else unless the regulars were completely wiped out or already committed somewhere else. With an army as big as China's, if you want any money left over for other things, like running a country, you're going to have to skimp in some way.
China isn't pre-WWII backward in most respects as you're implying. They have a finite amount of resources, and they try to allot them in the most efficient manner possible. Having a controlled economy means that someone up high will make many of these decisions. It's instructive in how they chose to allocate things, deciding that cell phones were more important than newer trains. This isn't to say that either system is superior, but it gives you insight into what the current rulers feel is important at the moment.
Well, if you make some reasonable assumptions, I'd say that "You can't scratch a turd" is a good corrolary to "You can't polish a turd". (But do note Stanley Kubrick's reply "You can, if you freeze it first")
This needs to be combined with better ragdoll physics, so when I'm playing Chaos Unreal Tournament Evolution, I can really whack people with the warhammer. There's nothing better than flying corpses.
Frankly, I don't think that most Americans even know who the French president is, much less hate him. If they do "hate" Chirac, it's because they've been told to, and view him as a "Cheese-eating surrender monkey" to quote the Simpsons. Otherwise, there's nothing that really motivates us to hate him. Some of the anti-war contingent may think that he's a bit too far to the right, but other than that, there isn't much about Chirac to raise the hackles of Americans.
Part of why gearheads are so disdainful of ricers is their complete lack of understanding of how cars work. Putting bigger wheels on a car requires some understanding of what you're doing, and if you don't then the car will end out worse than before.
For instance, larger wheels also have the effect of making the transmission taller. That means that the car is slower in acceleration and if the car is horsepower limited to a top speed, then it will actually go slower. To add insult to injury, the speedometer is now inaccurate, as is the odometer. This may not be much, but it's still screwing up your car.
Shorter springs without any other changes is a bad idea. Some people get it in their heads that they've got to have spring rates that make late 80's F1 racers look goddamn pedestrian. Put in racing seats, and you'll see why race car drivers get paid so much. It's like getting kicked in the ass repeatedly. Oh, and it makes handling worse.
If they understood that the super stiff shocks is because of the regulations that allowed unlimited ground effect, they'd understand that this was done in order to add a few more pounds of downforce in the corners, by keeping the car uniformly low. And as far as lowering your car to F1 levels, they keep the tracks pool-table smooth. You can't say that about the roads where I live.
Body modifications are done because they're needed, not because they're good looking. That means making bigger fenders for larger wheels, a front grille that allows more airflow to the radiator, or vents for cooling. Big engines are hot engines. Panels to make your car look lower are all show, no go.
Finally, getting power from the engine and then getting it to the road is very important, and a ricer wouldn't give a damn about that. Or they might just put in a new air filter. Exhaust pipe tips are the worst part, however. Larger diameter exhaust pipes reduce backpressure and allow more power to be used turning the wheels than pushing CO2 out the back. Tips do nothing, but make it look like you've actually done something.
This is irritating to those who actually like fast cars, since it makes people think that everyone with a fast car is all show, no go. Would you like to have an original Acura Integra type R, with papers, and nobody believes you? I have a friend whose dad drives a '94 SVT Cobra. I knew another kid at school who drives a V6 Mustang with Cobra badging, but only one exhaust pipe sticking out the back.
Ricers are Poseurs, first and foremost. They usually aren't newbies. Newbies may have some misconceptions and no idea how some concepts work, but are willing to learn. Poseurs act as if they're already experts, but refuse to learn. They honestly think that five degrees of toe on your suspension is the greatest thing since sliced bread (9 out of 10 tire manufacturers agree!), and think that you can modify the exhaust system on a 1.6 liter and have it be competitive against a friggin 8.3 V10.
The Cray XT3 has several 10 gig NICs, and enough RAM to soak up anything you want to send at it. You can't really have more than a quarter petabyte of data you need to send right now, do you? In big ass systems, the one constant you can always count on is communication to be the thing that slows it down.
The United Kingdom is generally recognized as a country, as is France. Sealand is some idiot in an offshore platform. It carries the exact same weight as me claiming to be God-emperor of Jupiter. The UK could make some claim to the artificial island as government property and evict him, but going through the trouble just to remove him seems like a waste of time.
The reason that Sealand 'outlaws' child pornography is that if you're already thumbing your nose at the local authorities, don't give them a really good reason for them to toss you into jail. "Fugitive Child Pornographer Brought to Justice" is not good press.
Sealand is simply a Libertarian fantasyland; people who wax eloquent about what this means for personal rights are denying the simple reality that this is someone who the government has decided isn't enough of a problem to deal with right now. Prince Roy's claims that the UK hasn't claimed sovereignty over Sealand and that the courts have backed him up hasn't been tested since the UK extended its territory out to 12 miles. If it happened today, I would be suprised if they didn't claim jurisdiction.
I think that such a device would be discontinued pretty soon after someone discovered that, hey, we have a digital audio stream coming into our PC! Let's redirect it to a compression utility and save it. You could expand your collection of MP3s drastically by ripping all the stuff that they're beaming at you, and there's nothing that the RIAA could do, since they wouldn't be able to find out.
StationRipper is a similar utility for Web Radio, but I've had to ramp back my usage since that sucker can fill a moderately sized hard drive in no time at all. I've left my computer and come back with over a gig of new music. You are limited to what the Web Radio stations are playing at the moment, but if you have some Techno obsession, you'll never be wanting for music.
People here seem to think that innovation is good for its own sake. It can be, but when dealing with a product, sometimes taking the original and tweaking it can provide a better gaming experience. Fred Brooks mentioned in The MMM that you should consider building one to throw away. Now, some companies, like Blizzard, can afford to toss something that doesn't work out perfectly, but now, we get it in an earlier game in some series.
Games evolve over time, and new features have to debut in some game or another. If I recall correctly, true locational sound debuted in Hexen. If we stopped development of artillery type games at Gorillas, then we would never have gotten Scorched Earth. It wasn't really innovative, but it was still fun as hell. Many concepts and genres began with some obscure game that few people played.
Sequels allow a company to take some system to its logical conclusions. San Andreas is the culmination of a line of evolution to make the ultimate thug game. You can see how interior areas became more important in each of the sequels, as the game tries to make more and more of a real city. The innovations come in small leaps, like food, exercise, motorcycles, and the ability to jump out of moving cars. That's where the innovation is, not making some whole new genre every three months.
Re:Just the name brings back memories
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Cray XT-3 Ships
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During times of no activity, they find something for it to do. Typically, if you've got a fast enough computer, there's people lining up just to get their hands on the thing for a few milliseconds. You use something like a workstation to talk to it, and it spends all of its time running FORTRAN or C.
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Well, if you're doing some game with more than one thing happening at a time, like most every one today, there are all sorts of things that need doing, and can be done independently. Ray-tracing and 3D graphics are about as parallelizable as they come, and AI for n entities can be split between n processors. Suppose that you've got 40 cores to go around. You can put 5 cores to work on AI, 20 on graphics, another 10 on physics, and have 5 left for sound, controls, and other things. Modern game design is based around doling out the resources as efficiently as possible. This makes it easier, we hope, and will allow for better games in the future.
You mean Einhundertdreiundzwanzig? Translated to English, it's one hundred three and twenty. So yes, someone does use that method, even if it is confusing as hell.
If you really want to get a feel for what it was like, misconfigure that terminal you have lying around your house (don't be ashamed, we all do), use ed, and toss a case of trackfeed paper under your desk. Oh, and try to fit the OS into the L1 cache on your CPU.
Rule #3 of Pivot Tables: There are n dimensions to a table.
Defensive weapons in nuclear war, however, seem to start giving politicians ideas that they can 'win' a nuclear exchange. Frankly, I'd prefer them shitting their pants every time Putin raises his voice.
Not that I'm an expert on this, but doesn't nonvisible light affect the retinas just as much as visible light, hence why you should never look into a laser, no matter how weak, even if you can't see anything? Even worse, since you can't see it, the pupils would stay dilated, allowing it to still stream in, and your natural defenses can't do a thing. Thus, you probably wouldn't want high output, if you're not into massive lawsuits.
They don't have anything in the way of console variation, so they can just make it rock solid on the one configuration that they do support. A huge percentage of bugs come from dealing with all sorts of hardware variants, but if there's only one controller that you'll accept, then there will be fewer bugs in the controller interface. If there's only one audio and video chip set supported, then hey, that makes your life easier, too. The extra time can be spent ironing out what bugs do appear, so console games are generally more stable.
God, I remember someone writing that you had to have premium handmade fiberoptic cable, and that spending a mere $80 bucks on it would destroy the sound quality, damn what those ignorant fools say about the signal being digital and having built in ECC. 99% of audiophile spending is on snake-oil, but for the love of Christ, they don't want to hear about double-blind tests, actual physics, or why you can use just about anything electrically conductive to send a digital signal.
This'll work well for some massive government, which might want that much storage space, and would be willing to pay for upgrades every couple of years.
Regular people could consider more redundant ways of encoding things. One idea I had was using the weights of the verticies of a neural network to store information. See pp 306-307 of Self Organizing Maps by T. Kohonen for an implementation using transmission. This would have the advantage of gracefully degrading, if the type of storage failure is at a bitwise resolution. Caution: Because I thought of it doesn't mean that it will work, and probably indicates the converse. Standard Disclaimers apply. YMMV.
Actually, in the final implementation, I thought that he does that. It creates a few thousand files, each one containing n primes, and then it goes through each previous file up to the square root of the largest number in the current file, and then it quits and goes to the next file. If you want to duplicate this guy's efforts, I think that the biggest help for this would be a REALLY fast HD array and lots of RAM.
Here's a hint. If some guy named Rob Malda ever comes knocking on your door offering to sell you an HTML generator, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
One example that most people would understand would be race cars. A normal car's engine revs up to something like 7-8000 rpm. An F1 race car can hit up to 15000 rpm, which works out to about four times the stress on the engine otherwise. They try to keep the engine as light as possible, so for something lighter than my car's engine that produces ten times the horsepower, they had to make a compromise somewhere. They run it for one race, and send it back to the factory for refurbishment.
The reason that they do things that way is simply because they need the performance, and making an engine that can handle those stresses for long periods of time is either impossible, or more expensive than the alternative. NASA can, or could before the cold war ended, spend all the money it needed coming up with the design it wanted. You don't want Commies in space, do you?
With all of that out of the way, this requirement was basically decided upon by someone who thought that this would be closer in concept to making a family sedan than to making a race car. Today's sedans are faster than yesteryear's race cars, so there is hope that building with the sedan model will eventually be able to be made more cheaply than the race car model, which is currently cheaper.
Biplanes aren't all that weird. They allow for a much greater wing area without a large wingspan, and are common for cropdusters and the such, and WWI era rifles aren't that bad, if well maintained. And if you're off in some place that nobody's going to invade sometime soon, why give the soldiers top of the line equipment? That's the problem in Iraq. The reservists were equipped with the assumption that they wouldn't be used to fight a war somewhere else unless the regulars were completely wiped out or already committed somewhere else. With an army as big as China's, if you want any money left over for other things, like running a country, you're going to have to skimp in some way.
China isn't pre-WWII backward in most respects as you're implying. They have a finite amount of resources, and they try to allot them in the most efficient manner possible. Having a controlled economy means that someone up high will make many of these decisions. It's instructive in how they chose to allocate things, deciding that cell phones were more important than newer trains. This isn't to say that either system is superior, but it gives you insight into what the current rulers feel is important at the moment.
It can't be Netcraft. They haven't predicted the death of the Internet due to this load.
Well, if you make some reasonable assumptions, I'd say that "You can't scratch a turd" is a good corrolary to "You can't polish a turd". (But do note Stanley Kubrick's reply "You can, if you freeze it first")
This needs to be combined with better ragdoll physics, so when I'm playing Chaos Unreal Tournament Evolution, I can really whack people with the warhammer. There's nothing better than flying corpses.
Frankly, I don't think that most Americans even know who the French president is, much less hate him. If they do "hate" Chirac, it's because they've been told to, and view him as a "Cheese-eating surrender monkey" to quote the Simpsons. Otherwise, there's nothing that really motivates us to hate him. Some of the anti-war contingent may think that he's a bit too far to the right, but other than that, there isn't much about Chirac to raise the hackles of Americans.
For instance, larger wheels also have the effect of making the transmission taller. That means that the car is slower in acceleration and if the car is horsepower limited to a top speed, then it will actually go slower. To add insult to injury, the speedometer is now inaccurate, as is the odometer. This may not be much, but it's still screwing up your car.
Shorter springs without any other changes is a bad idea. Some people get it in their heads that they've got to have spring rates that make late 80's F1 racers look goddamn pedestrian. Put in racing seats, and you'll see why race car drivers get paid so much. It's like getting kicked in the ass repeatedly. Oh, and it makes handling worse.
If they understood that the super stiff shocks is because of the regulations that allowed unlimited ground effect, they'd understand that this was done in order to add a few more pounds of downforce in the corners, by keeping the car uniformly low. And as far as lowering your car to F1 levels, they keep the tracks pool-table smooth. You can't say that about the roads where I live.
Body modifications are done because they're needed, not because they're good looking. That means making bigger fenders for larger wheels, a front grille that allows more airflow to the radiator, or vents for cooling. Big engines are hot engines. Panels to make your car look lower are all show, no go.
Finally, getting power from the engine and then getting it to the road is very important, and a ricer wouldn't give a damn about that. Or they might just put in a new air filter. Exhaust pipe tips are the worst part, however. Larger diameter exhaust pipes reduce backpressure and allow more power to be used turning the wheels than pushing CO2 out the back. Tips do nothing, but make it look like you've actually done something.
This is irritating to those who actually like fast cars, since it makes people think that everyone with a fast car is all show, no go. Would you like to have an original Acura Integra type R, with papers, and nobody believes you? I have a friend whose dad drives a '94 SVT Cobra. I knew another kid at school who drives a V6 Mustang with Cobra badging, but only one exhaust pipe sticking out the back.
Ricers are Poseurs, first and foremost. They usually aren't newbies. Newbies may have some misconceptions and no idea how some concepts work, but are willing to learn. Poseurs act as if they're already experts, but refuse to learn. They honestly think that five degrees of toe on your suspension is the greatest thing since sliced bread (9 out of 10 tire manufacturers agree!), and think that you can modify the exhaust system on a 1.6 liter and have it be competitive against a friggin 8.3 V10.
The Cray XT3 has several 10 gig NICs, and enough RAM to soak up anything you want to send at it. You can't really have more than a quarter petabyte of data you need to send right now, do you? In big ass systems, the one constant you can always count on is communication to be the thing that slows it down.
The reason that Sealand 'outlaws' child pornography is that if you're already thumbing your nose at the local authorities, don't give them a really good reason for them to toss you into jail. "Fugitive Child Pornographer Brought to Justice" is not good press.
Sealand is simply a Libertarian fantasyland; people who wax eloquent about what this means for personal rights are denying the simple reality that this is someone who the government has decided isn't enough of a problem to deal with right now. Prince Roy's claims that the UK hasn't claimed sovereignty over Sealand and that the courts have backed him up hasn't been tested since the UK extended its territory out to 12 miles. If it happened today, I would be suprised if they didn't claim jurisdiction.
StationRipper is a similar utility for Web Radio, but I've had to ramp back my usage since that sucker can fill a moderately sized hard drive in no time at all. I've left my computer and come back with over a gig of new music. You are limited to what the Web Radio stations are playing at the moment, but if you have some Techno obsession, you'll never be wanting for music.
Games evolve over time, and new features have to debut in some game or another. If I recall correctly, true locational sound debuted in Hexen. If we stopped development of artillery type games at Gorillas, then we would never have gotten Scorched Earth. It wasn't really innovative, but it was still fun as hell. Many concepts and genres began with some obscure game that few people played.
Sequels allow a company to take some system to its logical conclusions. San Andreas is the culmination of a line of evolution to make the ultimate thug game. You can see how interior areas became more important in each of the sequels, as the game tries to make more and more of a real city. The innovations come in small leaps, like food, exercise, motorcycles, and the ability to jump out of moving cars. That's where the innovation is, not making some whole new genre every three months.
During times of no activity, they find something for it to do. Typically, if you've got a fast enough computer, there's people lining up just to get their hands on the thing for a few milliseconds. You use something like a workstation to talk to it, and it spends all of its time running FORTRAN or C.
Finally, someone who actually does something to earn his handle.
Monomolecular and monofilament are different things. In fact, you can buy monofilament by the hundred yards at Wal-Mart. It's called fishing line.