Well, the first half of it had a certain OMG WE ALL GONNA DIE tone to it that I didn't expect from Nova. After that it all settled down and got to the "Yeah, background radiation will go slightly up, but hey, more auroras!" gist of it.
It might not have been the best way to explain it - it's actually moving at a different rate than your head, which causes eyestrain and headaches much like reading while driving. Color me crazy, though, because I know that back when I had a non-buffered portable CD player for my car, it'd skip like mad if I set it on the seat (on bad roads), but rarely skipped if I held on to it, and I wasn't even trying to stabilize it, I was just holding it up in the air.
Your big, clumsy, relatively massive forearms carry quite a chunk of inertia (compared to a, what, maybe 8 oz device) that damps down the sudden accelerations your body feels through the suspension. Your ass, spine, neck and head go up when you hit a bump, but your arms lag for a second. That should reduce the "instantaneous" G's that your drive has to cope with. As long as the passed acceleration is low enough that the mechanism can handle it, you won't get a skip.
Personally, playing a portable in a car is a great recipe for a migraine, though, so it's a moot point for me. If it doesn't skip while I'm shuffling from foot to foot while I'm out having a smoke, I'm good.
Yeah, I kind of expect the games will be similar in cost to current home console prices ($50) instead of the portable prices ($30). Am I bothered? Only if the games aren't worth it. But if I can get a home-console experience portably? I would pay up, sure.
Yeah, I suspect a lot of it will boil down to how large the cache is. If it is constantly streaming data off the drive, it might be a problem, sure. But if it has a 32meg cache, the only time that skipping might be apparent would be, say, during movies.
Additionally, physically speaking, the disc is only what, half the diameter of a CD? Less? That helps because any sort of shock doesn't get to be projected across a 5" disk, amplifying the original shock.
Something else that's being overlooked is that, at least as a gaming medium (not counting audio or "other" uses), it'll probably take a _lot_ less shock than a CD player is subjected to. If you're playing the game in a moving vehicle, you'll be unconsciously stabilizing the device already so your eyes don't have to track a moving picture. Walking has never given me much trouble with CD players, and I can't picture jogging and playing a game. I mean, unless if'n you want to get intimate with that tree, like.
Me, I'm looking forward to a portable that can break the 16M barrier. Yeah, companies can do a lot with the limited storage on a GBA, but suddenly having an optical drive means that a lot of doors are opened. Better soundtracks, more varied images, FMV to get plot across instead of talking sprite bubbles, etc. It'll sting the hardcore oldschoolers, sure, but I enjoy it. (Compare FFX's FMVs to extend the plot to FF6's Nintendoized sprite conversations. The FMV is worse _how_?)
Yeah, but anyone who has ever done any sort of support knows that generally speaking, the only people you hear from are people who are having a problem. The vast majority of people who don't have a problem and probably never will have a problem don't usually pop up to go "Hey, just to report, my PS2 is running fine 2 years later!" Saying "commonly defective" requires numbers from Sony.
Does it matter if the failure rate is only say 0.1% or lower? When you have a product that has sold tens of millions of units (exact numbers not at hand), yeah, you're still going to have a large number of people with bum-from-the-factory or mistreated hardware. As a percentage of units actually out there, though, it might not really be that much.
Or, more succinctly, the wing on the left would have a negative angle of attack and the blade on the right would have a positive angle of attack. That would be pretty close in concept to having your ailerons cranked over and starting a roll in a fixed wing plane. Now that I think about it, helis do this all the time whilst hovering - the AOA should be relatively neutral, rotor head speed and meteorologic conditions aside. When you want to climb you can add more head speed by gunning the throttle (bad!) or you can adjust the angle of attack on the blades (good!) And you still need to give it more juice because the blades are doing more work. (Or do I have causality reversed here? Pilots are welcome to chime in.) But at least you're not simply trying to alter the rotational momentum of a relatively massive chunk of kit. So all you need to do for this is have independant control over the AOA per rotorblade, and I _tend_ to think they already do in current helis.
I'm kinda coming around to being able to picture a wing chord that show no distinct preference for wind direction, though, which was my other mindbending "objection".
Yeah, but that's what, the next generation of consoles there? I haven't been keeping up in the rumormill specs, but I'd be shocked silly if Sony wasn't planning on including some form of large storage in the PS3, and MS taking it out of the Xbox2 would be truly unique. I'm not sure whether or not Nintendo is planning on putting a drive in their next gen hardware (codename: Snarf), but I'm not entirely sure they count.
So what's getting patched, though - XBL content, or single player gamecode? I could probably excuse XBL content, as patching to update network issues or work around discovered client/server problems, etc, doesn't bug me too much. I can understand it, anyway. But SP stuff darn well ought to be correct out the door, yeah. I'm not trying to be confrontational - I don't actually know.
You go knock yourself out in that massive 256K flash rom that's the biggest I think is available as a game save flash size. That's the same size as the WRAM (?) internal to the GBA that you can write to from your USB port with little fuss. Since the smallest games are 4MB, you're only 1/32nd of the way there!
(Seriously. Buy the F2A - $100 isn't too much to pay to spend the rest of the GBA's lifespan avoiding true stinkers, and the homebrew scene is really pretty good this time around.)
Yeah, around here it's not terribly uncommon to see a plow cruising down side streets merrily clearing them for the light traffic those roads see, and completely ignoring the still-covered arterials.
There's a lot to be said for dropping like a stone, y'know.
My guess is that the canard and horizontal stab provide sufficient lift at the mid-to-top end of the rotary-winged flight envelope that when the rotor is clutching down and converting to be fixed wing, you still fly, you just can't climb very well. At least I'd want it to work like that if I were to ever get into one.
What this world needs is a jet powered gyrocopter. Yeah!
Yep. Which is what a collective (? IANAHP) control does on a normal chopper. Basically, when the plane converts to fast forward flight, the rotors lock perpendicular to the body of the plane, and the right hand "wing" adjusts it's angle of attack to be a lifting surface. But this is normal for a helicopter as well - the whole idea is to make one side lift more than the other (independant blade control), the rotor cone angles in the appropriate direction, Newton takes over. The fly in the ointment is precession (?) and that.. I don't get. Something to do with the action needing to start 90 degrees before the intended direction. I mean, yeah, the rotor is a huge gyroscope, but it's hard to picture.
This is significantly more complicated that variable pitch blades in normal fixed wing craft. So much so that I'm tempted to buy an RC heli _just_ to poke at the swashplate assembly.
The part I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the idea that, in FFF, one of the blades is cutting through the air backwards. I mean, I can imagine mechanical linkages that would flip the leading edge around and all, but that seems kinda hackneyed. And in FFF, is the rotorwing a control surface or just a lifting surface? Ow, ow, brane hurty.
(OTOH, I also have a problem with aerobatic symmetrical wings. Does bernoulli's law go out the window there?)
Meh. In the end when you have 200 768k customers connected to any particular CO with a T3 uplink, does it really matter? DSL is not necessarily a guarantee for better available outbound bandwidth. Yeah, there's an argument to be made for improved latency for DSL over Cable, I guess, but it seems to have improved around here. I'll admit that I might be in the minority with TWC here, and it could all go to hell in the next year or two, but I live in a fairly built up neighborhood. I'd figure it's as saturated as it's going to get.
For the record, for the bandwidth DSW, I get 3mb all day every day.:)
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The most recent ones do both. You may need to buy an adaptor cable, but that's no big.
Well, the first half of it had a certain OMG WE ALL GONNA DIE tone to it that I didn't expect from Nova. After that it all settled down and got to the "Yeah, background radiation will go slightly up, but hey, more auroras!" gist of it.
It might not have been the best way to explain it - it's actually moving at a different rate than your head, which causes eyestrain and headaches much like reading while driving. Color me crazy, though, because I know that back when I had a non-buffered portable CD player for my car, it'd skip like mad if I set it on the seat (on bad roads), but rarely skipped if I held on to it, and I wasn't even trying to stabilize it, I was just holding it up in the air.
Your big, clumsy, relatively massive forearms carry quite a chunk of inertia (compared to a, what, maybe 8 oz device) that damps down the sudden accelerations your body feels through the suspension. Your ass, spine, neck and head go up when you hit a bump, but your arms lag for a second. That should reduce the "instantaneous" G's that your drive has to cope with. As long as the passed acceleration is low enough that the mechanism can handle it, you won't get a skip.
Personally, playing a portable in a car is a great recipe for a migraine, though, so it's a moot point for me. If it doesn't skip while I'm shuffling from foot to foot while I'm out having a smoke, I'm good.
Yeah, I kind of expect the games will be similar in cost to current home console prices ($50) instead of the portable prices ($30). Am I bothered? Only if the games aren't worth it. But if I can get a home-console experience portably? I would pay up, sure.
Yeah, I suspect a lot of it will boil down to how large the cache is. If it is constantly streaming data off the drive, it might be a problem, sure. But if it has a 32meg cache, the only time that skipping might be apparent would be, say, during movies.
Additionally, physically speaking, the disc is only what, half the diameter of a CD? Less? That helps because any sort of shock doesn't get to be projected across a 5" disk, amplifying the original shock.
Something else that's being overlooked is that, at least as a gaming medium (not counting audio or "other" uses), it'll probably take a _lot_ less shock than a CD player is subjected to. If you're playing the game in a moving vehicle, you'll be unconsciously stabilizing the device already so your eyes don't have to track a moving picture. Walking has never given me much trouble with CD players, and I can't picture jogging and playing a game. I mean, unless if'n you want to get intimate with that tree, like.
Me, I'm looking forward to a portable that can break the 16M barrier. Yeah, companies can do a lot with the limited storage on a GBA, but suddenly having an optical drive means that a lot of doors are opened. Better soundtracks, more varied images, FMV to get plot across instead of talking sprite bubbles, etc. It'll sting the hardcore oldschoolers, sure, but I enjoy it. (Compare FFX's FMVs to extend the plot to FF6's Nintendoized sprite conversations. The FMV is worse _how_?)
Yeah, but anyone who has ever done any sort of support knows that generally speaking, the only people you hear from are people who are having a problem. The vast majority of people who don't have a problem and probably never will have a problem don't usually pop up to go "Hey, just to report, my PS2 is running fine 2 years later!" Saying "commonly defective" requires numbers from Sony.
Does it matter if the failure rate is only say 0.1% or lower? When you have a product that has sold tens of millions of units (exact numbers not at hand), yeah, you're still going to have a large number of people with bum-from-the-factory or mistreated hardware. As a percentage of units actually out there, though, it might not really be that much.
Or, more succinctly, the wing on the left would have a negative angle of attack and the blade on the right would have a positive angle of attack. That would be pretty close in concept to having your ailerons cranked over and starting a roll in a fixed wing plane. Now that I think about it, helis do this all the time whilst hovering - the AOA should be relatively neutral, rotor head speed and meteorologic conditions aside. When you want to climb you can add more head speed by gunning the throttle (bad!) or you can adjust the angle of attack on the blades (good!) And you still need to give it more juice because the blades are doing more work. (Or do I have causality reversed here? Pilots are welcome to chime in.) But at least you're not simply trying to alter the rotational momentum of a relatively massive chunk of kit. So all you need to do for this is have independant control over the AOA per rotorblade, and I _tend_ to think they already do in current helis.
I'm kinda coming around to being able to picture a wing chord that show no distinct preference for wind direction, though, which was my other mindbending "objection".
Yeah, but that's what, the next generation of consoles there? I haven't been keeping up in the rumormill specs, but I'd be shocked silly if Sony wasn't planning on including some form of large storage in the PS3, and MS taking it out of the Xbox2 would be truly unique. I'm not sure whether or not Nintendo is planning on putting a drive in their next gen hardware (codename: Snarf), but I'm not entirely sure they count.
(Score: -1, Redundant)
So what's getting patched, though - XBL content, or single player gamecode? I could probably excuse XBL content, as patching to update network issues or work around discovered client/server problems, etc, doesn't bug me too much. I can understand it, anyway. But SP stuff darn well ought to be correct out the door, yeah. I'm not trying to be confrontational - I don't actually know.
You go knock yourself out in that massive 256K flash rom that's the biggest I think is available as a game save flash size. That's the same size as the WRAM (?) internal to the GBA that you can write to from your USB port with little fuss. Since the smallest games are 4MB, you're only 1/32nd of the way there!
(Seriously. Buy the F2A - $100 isn't too much to pay to spend the rest of the GBA's lifespan avoiding true stinkers, and the homebrew scene is really pretty good this time around.)
Yeah, around here it's not terribly uncommon to see a plow cruising down side streets merrily clearing them for the light traffic those roads see, and completely ignoring the still-covered arterials.
Oooh, ooh, I know this one! Sociology!
There's a lot to be said for dropping like a stone, y'know.
My guess is that the canard and horizontal stab provide sufficient lift at the mid-to-top end of the rotary-winged flight envelope that when the rotor is clutching down and converting to be fixed wing, you still fly, you just can't climb very well. At least I'd want it to work like that if I were to ever get into one.
What this world needs is a jet powered gyrocopter. Yeah!
Yep. Which is what a collective (? IANAHP) control does on a normal chopper. Basically, when the plane converts to fast forward flight, the rotors lock perpendicular to the body of the plane, and the right hand "wing" adjusts it's angle of attack to be a lifting surface. But this is normal for a helicopter as well - the whole idea is to make one side lift more than the other (independant blade control), the rotor cone angles in the appropriate direction, Newton takes over. The fly in the ointment is precession (?) and that.. I don't get. Something to do with the action needing to start 90 degrees before the intended direction. I mean, yeah, the rotor is a huge gyroscope, but it's hard to picture.
This is significantly more complicated that variable pitch blades in normal fixed wing craft. So much so that I'm tempted to buy an RC heli _just_ to poke at the swashplate assembly.
The part I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the idea that, in FFF, one of the blades is cutting through the air backwards. I mean, I can imagine mechanical linkages that would flip the leading edge around and all, but that seems kinda hackneyed. And in FFF, is the rotorwing a control surface or just a lifting surface? Ow, ow, brane hurty.
(OTOH, I also have a problem with aerobatic symmetrical wings. Does bernoulli's law go out the window there?)
Meh. In the end when you have 200 768k customers connected to any particular CO with a T3 uplink, does it really matter? DSL is not necessarily a guarantee for better available outbound bandwidth. Yeah, there's an argument to be made for improved latency for DSL over Cable, I guess, but it seems to have improved around here. I'll admit that I might be in the minority with TWC here, and it could all go to hell in the next year or two, but I live in a fairly built up neighborhood. I'd figure it's as saturated as it's going to get.
:)
For the record, for the bandwidth DSW, I get 3mb all day every day.