Once upon a time (3 years ago) a housemate gave me his ancient Palm when he moved out. It turns out that a device with reflective monochrome LCD the size of a deck of cards and hardware up and down buttons is a really, really convenient device for reading things. I used to grab Avantgo articles for news, too, and if I had figured it out, I probably would've dumped each day's RSS feeds on it. If you want to try out electronic books for a lark, they're a nearly-free starting point, and the combination of price and small size makes such a single-function device rather practical. When ebook readers can come down to the same sort of price and portability, then there will be much more interest in them.
From underground nuclear tests, the "melt cavity" created by vaporization of rock and the flow of liquefied rock is about 2000 cubic metres per kiloton, so the OP's estimate is about right, assuming one half of the energy is lost to the air by a surface explosion.
Actually a 75m section of a 2000m cylinder, from pi * r^2 * depth comes out at about 200 MILLION cubic metres. Multiply that by about two metric tonnes per cubic metre (sandstone) and you get four hundred million metric tonnes. I can't be bothered to account for the curvature of the crater, but I doubt it'll bring that down much under a hundred million tonnes. There's still the "vapourisation versus excavation" question, of course, I'm just pointing out that your estimate of mass is off by three orders of magnitude.
The average dump truck has a load capacity of about twenty five metric tonnes. If the craters you've seen could be filled in by one tipper truck, I humbly suggest that they were not created by high-yield nuclear weapons.
To be fair, the original press release also mangles observed and simulated results like crazy. They've definitely found the exoplanet and determined its orbit and mass. They've either confirmed or hypothesised from simulation that there are no volatile compounds on or around the planet, which they hypothesise is due to bake-out. They've hypothesised based on simulations that it is likely to have a rock-based atmosphere which, depending on composition, could be verified spectroscopically.
For those with short attention spans, the product is supposed to provide games by server-side rendering. The essential question is: on aggregate, is it cheaper for them to buy the game-rendering hardware and set up the network infrastructure and add their margin, than for the end user to simply go out and buy a games console outright? If 20% of their users want to play Crysis 2, and 80% want to play Peggle, the company needs to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for all of those people to play Crysis 2, and still offer the service at a price which will please people who want Peggle. I'm not sure that the maths will work.
Your memory's faulty. The Phantom was essentially Steam or Xbox 360's version of Live before the infrastructure existed to support such a thing. It was still supposed to be a client-side games console. Server-side rendering is a different animal. A ridiculous animal, mind you, but a different animal none the less.
Why not give it away? It's probably cheaper than the average cable TV box. Their real expenses are server-side, and need to be paid by gathering a large customer base. There's little to be gained by deterring potential customers by overcharging for a piece-of-crap streaming box.
My understanding is that there's no "algorithm", rather the GBC has preset palettes for recognised Gameboy games such as Metroid II and a single palette for the remainder. Could be wrong though, it's not like I have the most extensive retro collection to test it out with. At any rate, having the ROM dump should finally be able to set the matter to rest.
Exposing your own weak security is a mistake. Exposing someone else's is what gets hackles up. If Demon had accidentally emailed out BT's customer details you can bet there'd be hell to pay.
It's not just "haptic feedback" which befuddles touch keyboards. You also have the issue of keeping your hands oriented on the keyboard, which is difficult when you can't feel it. Then there's ergonomics. To operate a touch keypad, you hold your fingers off the keypad when you're not actively pressing the buttons. That's the reverse of a mechanical keypad, and it's going to be exhausting. These are fixable (Nokia's tactile screen concept for the former, the Blackberry click-screen idea for the latter) but aren't ready for market.
However this all assumes that keys are necessary for text entry. Why not use handwriting recognition instead?
Not really. Origami was basically a way of reviving Windows XP Tablet Edition in something resembling a Game Gear, where you have a two-hand grip and do most of your control through the thumbs. This seems to be more of a bespoke OS, in a proper tablet form factor.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 2, Funny
My combat algorithm was somewhat less refined than yours. I couldn't keep track of the enemy in flight, so I developed:
1) Lock autopilot onto enemy 2) a) If enemy is flying away, shoot at him. 2) b) If enemy is shooting at me, break lock and fly in another direction until he stops 2) c) If enemy launches missile, lock on autopilot, shoot, and hope missile bites it 3) If enemy is still alive, return to 1
As you can probably guess, about half of my encounters resulted in mutual destruction by collision.
Re:I learned about some history today.
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
"Hastily taken down"? It was up there for about seven years. It listed the Dolphin as a possible platform when it was first written up and the only change was swapping out "GameCube" then killing the platforms list completely. You can hardly accuse them of an elaborate campaign of deception.
Elite IV has a much better chance of being made than DNF ever did, because Frontier hasn't been working on it. That sounds stupid, but a developer that's shelved a project for ten years and works on other things isn't going to go bankrupt.
Seeding! The huge universe was generated, procedurally, from a one-byte-or-so seed. The procedure is deterministic so the universe always turns out the same provided the seed is the same, but it's essentially arbitrary.
Settlement's often the right choice in this scenario. Settle, and the matter is dropped (usually) without prejudice, giving you the chance to invalidate their case when you're better-prepared. Take it to court and you're facing off on their terms. They've got a specific case made up, you're the respondent who has to pull things together in a time limit. You may wind up with a precident-setting court decision against you, which leaves you worse off than when you started, and makes it easier for the winning plaintiff to prosecute new cases against others.
The best part is, it automatically selects for words which are invulnerable to OCR-based attacks. And if the user's presented with an illegible scanned CAPTCHA, they aren't penalised for getting it wrong.
There's no reason we can't do both. Supply of recyclable plastics is pretty tightly coupled to demand for plastics, but it'd be nice to have a use for the occasional inevitable excesses other than letting it pile up somewhere.
The libelor/slanderer is not bound by presumption of innocence, because he can't have you thrown in jail or extract money from you by force. The legal system can, however, throw you in jail or extract money from you by force. It should be bound by presumption of innocence.
I read "The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals" and "The Architecture of Molecules". Y'know, books on the subjects in which he is regarded as a genius. I can't say either really changed my opinions on naturopathy. Likewise reading "Six Easy Pieces" didn't change my opinions on Feynman's bongo playing.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time (3 years ago) a housemate gave me his ancient Palm when he moved out. It turns out that a device with reflective monochrome LCD the size of a deck of cards and hardware up and down buttons is a really, really convenient device for reading things. I used to grab Avantgo articles for news, too, and if I had figured it out, I probably would've dumped each day's RSS feeds on it. If you want to try out electronic books for a lark, they're a nearly-free starting point, and the combination of price and small size makes such a single-function device rather practical. When ebook readers can come down to the same sort of price and portability, then there will be much more interest in them.
The adjective is "to use one's name as a trademark", not "to trademark one's name".
There is rock on the ground, but not in the air.
Surely this new astronomical finding forces us to reassess that assumption? :p
From underground nuclear tests, the "melt cavity" created by vaporization of rock and the flow of liquefied rock is about 2000 cubic metres per kiloton, so the OP's estimate is about right, assuming one half of the energy is lost to the air by a surface explosion.
Actually a 75m section of a 2000m cylinder, from pi * r^2 * depth comes out at about 200 MILLION cubic metres. Multiply that by about two metric tonnes per cubic metre (sandstone) and you get four hundred million metric tonnes. I can't be bothered to account for the curvature of the crater, but I doubt it'll bring that down much under a hundred million tonnes. There's still the "vapourisation versus excavation" question, of course, I'm just pointing out that your estimate of mass is off by three orders of magnitude.
The average dump truck has a load capacity of about twenty five metric tonnes. If the craters you've seen could be filled in by one tipper truck, I humbly suggest that they were not created by high-yield nuclear weapons.
To be fair, the original press release also mangles observed and simulated results like crazy. They've definitely found the exoplanet and determined its orbit and mass. They've either confirmed or hypothesised from simulation that there are no volatile compounds on or around the planet, which they hypothesise is due to bake-out. They've hypothesised based on simulations that it is likely to have a rock-based atmosphere which, depending on composition, could be verified spectroscopically.
For those with short attention spans, the product is supposed to provide games by server-side rendering. The essential question is: on aggregate, is it cheaper for them to buy the game-rendering hardware and set up the network infrastructure and add their margin, than for the end user to simply go out and buy a games console outright? If 20% of their users want to play Crysis 2, and 80% want to play Peggle, the company needs to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for all of those people to play Crysis 2, and still offer the service at a price which will please people who want Peggle. I'm not sure that the maths will work.
Your memory's faulty. The Phantom was essentially Steam or Xbox 360's version of Live before the infrastructure existed to support such a thing. It was still supposed to be a client-side games console. Server-side rendering is a different animal. A ridiculous animal, mind you, but a different animal none the less.
Why not give it away? It's probably cheaper than the average cable TV box. Their real expenses are server-side, and need to be paid by gathering a large customer base. There's little to be gained by deterring potential customers by overcharging for a piece-of-crap streaming box.
Sure, but it defaults to a colour scheme which seems game-dependent.
My understanding is that there's no "algorithm", rather the GBC has preset palettes for recognised Gameboy games such as Metroid II and a single palette for the remainder. Could be wrong though, it's not like I have the most extensive retro collection to test it out with. At any rate, having the ROM dump should finally be able to set the matter to rest.
Exposing your own weak security is a mistake. Exposing someone else's is what gets hackles up. If Demon had accidentally emailed out BT's customer details you can bet there'd be hell to pay.
It's not just "haptic feedback" which befuddles touch keyboards. You also have the issue of keeping your hands oriented on the keyboard, which is difficult when you can't feel it. Then there's ergonomics. To operate a touch keypad, you hold your fingers off the keypad when you're not actively pressing the buttons. That's the reverse of a mechanical keypad, and it's going to be exhausting. These are fixable (Nokia's tactile screen concept for the former, the Blackberry click-screen idea for the latter) but aren't ready for market.
However this all assumes that keys are necessary for text entry. Why not use handwriting recognition instead?
Not really. Origami was basically a way of reviving Windows XP Tablet Edition in something resembling a Game Gear, where you have a two-hand grip and do most of your control through the thumbs. This seems to be more of a bespoke OS, in a proper tablet form factor.
My combat algorithm was somewhat less refined than yours. I couldn't keep track of the enemy in flight, so I developed:
1) Lock autopilot onto enemy
2) a) If enemy is flying away, shoot at him.
2) b) If enemy is shooting at me, break lock and fly in another direction until he stops
2) c) If enemy launches missile, lock on autopilot, shoot, and hope missile bites it
3) If enemy is still alive, return to 1
As you can probably guess, about half of my encounters resulted in mutual destruction by collision.
"Hastily taken down"? It was up there for about seven years. It listed the Dolphin as a possible platform when it was first written up and the only change was swapping out "GameCube" then killing the platforms list completely. You can hardly accuse them of an elaborate campaign of deception.
Elite IV has a much better chance of being made than DNF ever did, because Frontier hasn't been working on it. That sounds stupid, but a developer that's shelved a project for ten years and works on other things isn't going to go bankrupt.
Seeding! The huge universe was generated, procedurally, from a one-byte-or-so seed. The procedure is deterministic so the universe always turns out the same provided the seed is the same, but it's essentially arbitrary.
Settlement's often the right choice in this scenario. Settle, and the matter is dropped (usually) without prejudice, giving you the chance to invalidate their case when you're better-prepared. Take it to court and you're facing off on their terms. They've got a specific case made up, you're the respondent who has to pull things together in a time limit. You may wind up with a precident-setting court decision against you, which leaves you worse off than when you started, and makes it easier for the winning plaintiff to prosecute new cases against others.
I've already posted so I can't mod you up, but that might be the greatest analogy I've ever heard. I'm already thinking up applications for it.
That'd involve designing a pattern-recognition system which can reliably decide which of two OCR words is less readable, mind you.
The best part is, it automatically selects for words which are invulnerable to OCR-based attacks. And if the user's presented with an illegible scanned CAPTCHA, they aren't penalised for getting it wrong.
There's no reason we can't do both. Supply of recyclable plastics is pretty tightly coupled to demand for plastics, but it'd be nice to have a use for the occasional inevitable excesses other than letting it pile up somewhere.
The libelor/slanderer is not bound by presumption of innocence, because he can't have you thrown in jail or extract money from you by force. The legal system can, however, throw you in jail or extract money from you by force. It should be bound by presumption of innocence.
read a book or two by Linus Pauling
I read "The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals" and "The Architecture of Molecules". Y'know, books on the subjects in which he is regarded as a genius. I can't say either really changed my opinions on naturopathy. Likewise reading "Six Easy Pieces" didn't change my opinions on Feynman's bongo playing.