CG actors and actresses don't come close to the realism, emotion, or raporte that real ones do. I personally doubt (and kind of hope they don't, because it would be somewhat creepy) they never actually will. CG is a great medium for getting creating fantasy (like with Toy Story or Shrek) or for unique special effects (like the Matrix or Fight Club...but not Star Wars. ILM owned CG in the original trilogy, in my opinion).
Where you are right is that real actors aren't really worth $20 million or whatever a film. I'll bet there's thousands of aspiring actors out there with just as much talent and even as much good looks as the celebrities who roll in the dough from major productions. The reason they do get the money though is marketing. It's a familiar face and a person who's given the audience a positive experience before. How many people go watch a Tom Cruise movie just because it's Tom Cruise (although I no longer understand the appeal behind that one)? How many CG films still pay out big bucks to get major names doing the voice acting?
I'm not saying that a movie can't succeed without big name actors, but it's almost like an insurance policy. The major studios can basically rely on a certain amount of income based entirely off of who's name is with the movie.
"Nut" was my add on. I'm a fan of Captain Renault, too, but I don't list it on my resume.
I read his articles in some depth and they seemed to convey a really strong anti-space, and particularly anti-NASA/anti-Griffin vibe. Perhaps I misinterpreted them, but as I said, they weren't particularly coherent (he writes like my dad). The impression I got is that he was arguing that Griffin is trying to kill everything else so he can turn CEV into elaborate super-machine. I agree that the CEV should be kept simple, but flexible. If that is Bell's contention, as well, then he piles on the rhetoric far too thick to communicate the point effectively.
His dimishing private space industry enthusiasm which you mention is probably in better measure than his criticism of the shuttle (which I believe was the wrong direction to go, but far from a hopeless mistake). I expect little more from the space tourism business than a few joy rides and a lot of bankruptcy filings once the novelty wears off. The private industry's real potential lies in the less flashy companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace, who are trying to improve the accessibility and living conditions of space. It's not something that's going to happen overnight, or even upon the completion of a "spaceport" or two.
"Jeffrey F. Bell is a former space scientist and recovering pro-space activist. Capitane Renault in Casablanca is his favorite movie character."
The author you linked to is a self-described anti-space nut. Convincing everyone that the CEV is hopeless is apparently his crusade. His arguments are incohesive, largely incoherent, and sometimes flat-out incorrect (for example, his claims that only the space shuttle can boost the ISS's orbit and that NASA has done nothing about the foam...flat out wrong on both counts). As far as I can tell, he's claiming that Griffin himself is trying to (1) use the shuttle to kill aeronautics and science programs, (2) use the CEV to kill the shuttle, and (3) simply abandon the ISS, either to fall into the ocean or be given free of charge entirely to the Russians.
This guy is a troll. The only logical thing I can figure out about him is he must in some way be related to Art Bell.
3.) Add another surcharge for "local maintenance and upgrades" (somehow that isn't figured into the $35/month they charge for 256k DSL???)
4.) more profit!!!
After I signed up for DSL and phone last summer and my $39.95 monthly bill totaled up at $63/month and their billing system was so screwed up I had to pay for a month of service after I disconnected and then get re-imbursed, I swore Qwest was the epitomy of evil and I would never do business with them again. Then it turns out that the company that charges only $18/mo for 768k DSL is freely giving their call logs to the NSA.
Maybe what the world needs is for Qwest, Comcast, Microsoft, Walmart, the RIAA, and any other "evil" companies to get together and form a country so we'll finally have someone to use all those nuclear weapons on and not feel bad about it at the day's end.
Pretty darn resistant to lightning, actually. A lot of designing goes into making sure that critical systems remain functional and that nothing carries an excessive current in the event of a lightning strike, which happens a lot more frequently than most passengers probably realize. During the 80's NASA did a very extensive investigation into the effects of lightning on airplanes. Some of the test pilots involved had their planes hit hundreds of times while deliberately flying through the most active parts of the storms. A source I just googled up says the average passenger plane gets hit once a year. According to another source the last commercial airline accident attributed to lightning was in 1967, which was due to a fuel tank explosion, not a control outage.
Old style plane controls were based on either cables (not suitable for larger aircraft) run from the pilot's controls (yoke, pedals, throttle) to the control surface or else on hydraulics. In the latter, there are hydraulic valves actuated by the pilot, and the pressure is transferred via hose from the pump to the valves to hydraulic cylinders or motors that move the control surfaces. Anyone who is familiar with hydraulics knows how heavy those components are. Fly-by-wire eliminates the direct link, allowing much shorter hydraulic routing, replacing hoses with pumps at the point of use, or even replacing hydraulics with electrical actuators. All the components are surge protected and wiring is typically triple redundant.
I believe there are three dangers presented to airplanes by lightning: interference, stray currents, and energy dissipation. Interference can be dealt with by minimizing the opportunity to pick up signals (the 777 for example uses fiber optics instead of wires) and signal processing. Stray currents, which can damage componenets, are handled by isolating the electrical systems from the structure and using surge protectors. By energy dissipation I mean resistive heating of the airframe. This normally isn't a problem with aluminum airframes/skins, because the bolt passes straight through the plane with little trouble. With composite fuselages like on the A380, there is typically a safe path designed into the system for the same purpose. Otherwise a bolt might find a relatively small current path and overwhelm it, heating it so fast it could actually vaporize violently (a somewhat more technical way of saying it explodes).
This sounds purely academic at this point. Control information really has to be as resistant to interference as possible. In fact, I don't even think drive by wire systems have been approved for braking or steering in cars yet. They all have to have a direct link in case the power assist features fail.
They are right about adding flexibility, but safety is going to trump that one pretty hard every time.
Dude, people didn't even listen when the blaster worm came out with its bug that would give a 60 second warning before shutting down the computer. We tried to explain to them what was going on, why they needed an AV suite, why they needed to run Windows Update, and why they shouldn't click on popups and stuff, and they ignored it. I was still removing blaster occasionally from people's computers 2 years after Microsoft released the patch. There were people who would ask what all the fuss was about, to whom I would explain, including about how the virus made your computer shut down for no reason, and a week later they would call me up asking if I could figure out why their computer shut down at 2 PM every day. My words went in one ear and out the other. There were people who's systems I reformatted to get rid of blaster, set Windows update to automatic, and installed AVG. Sure enough, give 'em just two or three weeks and they either downloaded an infected file or opened up an unprotected network share (something else I told them not to do).
A message saying "You been haxored, grow a brain" would just get a "Whatever, my computer still works moron" response (or better yet, "but the Norton scan came up clean..."). If shutting down while a student was typing a paper due the next day (and hadn't saved yet) didn't inspire a little bit of sensibility, I seriously doubt deleting a few music files will. Especially since most users definitely seem to be shifting away from P2P in favor of legal music sources, and probably wouldn't have much targeted by this trojan.
Crusading against pornography and file-sharing seems far more likely.
The comment is funny, but if I were going to guess on who wrote this virus and why, that would be my guess. Well, not Pat Robertson, but some other person who disagrees morally with pornography and illegal music sharing.
Regardless of their intent or your own positions on porn and music sharing (I personally dislike porn and conditionally dislike music sharing), I think we can pretty safely agree this isn't the way to go about your crusade.
Still it sounds much less unpleasant than dealing with the RIAA.
Agreed to a point. This seems pretty harmless. It's a little more personal than baby photos and home videos since it's constant, but probably no more exciting to anyone. It doesn't sound like there is any intent to keep recording data beyond the age of 2 or 3 anyways.
This is going to yield a huge dataset! I imagine a couple CS majors could make a good senior project out of writing the sorting algorithms. I'd be kind of interesting to see a follow-up on how they're going to go about that. The kind of data analysis I typically do, even when I'm looking at a few hundred megs of data, I can typically sort down to peak or rate values very quickly with simple software. Even high energy physics research that can generate terrabytes of data per experiment I suspect can be broken down the same way with a decent amount of raw processing power. This research, however, will be sifting through a huge set of similar data and looking for subtle effects.
The overall experiment reminds me much more of The Final Cut than The Truman Show like others have suggested. Obviously that movie was far more personal in its intrusion, but it was basically about privacy versus (somewhat public) memory. The writers obviously recognized the scale of the data generated, too. They introduced a special computer called a Guillotine that seperated a persons life into clips by category.
I get 2nd and 3rd mixed up. 3rd doesn't seem quite right. It suggests an unrelated character, but the player is still supposed to assume the position of the character. Since first person is "I", second person is "you" (the person I'm looking at), and third person is he/she (someone not immediately part of the discussion), second person seems a more natural term to apply in my mind. Maybe I can keep them straight just by remembering it's opposite the way I'd expect.
My personal experience has been that I start to have noteworthy trouble tracking with my crosshairs once the framerate falls below that off TV (24 Hz). Above that I consider it playable, although perhaps people whose eyes are more attuned to games are more sensitive. I don't notice any improvement in the fluidity of movement above 60 Hz, and I'm extremely skeptical of any North American gamer who claims otherwise. Any improvement above ~40 Hz appears very marginal to my eyes, so I go ahead and keep the settings turned up if I can manage, but I still have a blast playing Day of Defeat even though heavy smoke can momentarily drop my framerate down below 10 fps on my ancient GeForce 2.
Hearing him talk about this, I immediately think about the level in Half Life where you're walking along the cliff with all the ladders and that stinkin' helicopter popping out to shoot at you. Just the same red rock repeating every couple of feet. Really, there were two other things that made it feel fake though. The first was the simple geometry of the cliff face. The second was the fact that it relied on the skybox to draw the bottom of bottom of the canyon. Too much discontinuity. Having an open floor like that is pretty uncommon, though. The Quake screenshots in the article didn't jump out at me for their mega textures. They caught my eye mostly because of the detail of the models and the map (the lighting helped too).
More directly to your comment, though, I think it's more a matter of the first person perspective fits the shooter genre best rather than a fetish with gunplay. First person on a 1024x768 screen tends to result in tunnel vision but its very precise and personal. The 2nd person, like in Grand Theft Auto, gives more situational awareness, but at the cost of precision (crosshair movement is somewhat awkward, it's harder to tell exactly where your next step will land, and the camera is often interfered with by objects immediately behind the character).
Games like Myst go a long ways with graphics but ditch the shooter story in favor of puzzles. I think Myst has a first person mode, too (I've never played it, but one of my friends was big into it). It looks like a pretty engaging game that could definitely benefit artistically from this mega texturing.
Please someone tell me I did not just see a diss against Spaceballs on Slashdot. What's next, people ranting about how the killer rabbit scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was corny? Writing off Douglas Adams as a hopeless Steve Jobs fanboy just because Marvin happened to look a little bit like a Macintosh in the movie? Or maybe even a relativistic analysis of Star Wars based on camera angles proving once and for all that Han and Greedo shot at the same time but Han's blast arrived sooner from the viewer's point of view and later from Greedo's?
You guys need to grow up and face the facts:
1.) The killer rabbit had audiences around the world gripping their seats in shock, weeping bitterly as Arthur's men were slaughtered, then cheering ecstatically as the Holy Hand Grenage of Antioch brought its blessing down upon those brave men.
2.) Marvin had a brain that was practically the size of a planet and he was gloomy. Obviously he was not a Macintosh because Macs are little and happy (eep!)
3.) Han shot first. Actually rumor is this was Harrison Ford misreading a cue and George Lucas didn't notice it until editing after filming was done. It kept him up at nights until the miracle of digital enhancement allowed him to ruin ^H^H^H^H fix the movie.
4.) Spaceballs is hilarious. It's a fact of nature like F=ma and slashdotter's always being the first one out in dodgeball. Come on people! Pizza-the-Hut! You just don't get stuff like that from unfunny movies.
I've wasted enough of my time here. There's some people over on Digg who need to have the differences between the MCP from Tron and that Colonel Sanders looking guy from the Matrix explained to them, again!
The article isn't about audio players. It's about personal computers, which are a far larger market. In one corner are the IBM-compatibles (is that term still used?) with their huge choice of compatible components and software allowing a purchaser to pick everything from front-side bus speed to what kind of case lights to use. In the other corner is Macintosh, based on purpose-built systems running Mac software. The entire discussion in the article surrounds the choice of personal computers, but the contentions are based on the success of the iPod. Mac is on a solid upswing, but they are still a tiny fraction of the overall computer market. Random crap like the fact that Microsoft is developing a media player means basically nothing in relation to the PC market.
If the author truly wanted to sound insightful, he would have talked about how the evolution of computers in our daily life is tending towards specific-purpose devices like media players, PDA's, game consoles, etc, as the first poster in the discussion noted with his electric motor analogy. I don't totally agree with that either, but it's a heck of a lot better argument saying that Mac has beat Microsoft by offering fewer choices.
There seems to be a huge amount of misunderstanding about the law regarding the use of SSN's. It is a violation of federal law to require a person to submit their SSN for anything other than certain finance related purposes (actually that's a pretty big and unfortunately hazy list, but one that is far smaller than businesses respect). I think it is legal for anyone to request it, but probably 90% of the time they have no basis for requiring it.
The measure would award four prizes of up to $1 million every other year for technological advances in hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization. One prize of up to $4 million would be awarded every second year for the creation of a working hydrogen vehicle prototype.
I wouldn't go calling this H-prize the answer before you even know what the criteria actually are. "Technological advances" is not a criteria. "Working prototype" is almost a criteria, except that much has been done before. What defines a working protoptype? This article is a little sparse on useful details.
Comments like "until we re-invent the automobile" make it sound like these politicians are expecting the hover cars from the Jetson's to come out of this, yet quite a bit more money has already been invested in hydrogen research, with no yield so far to the consumer. Plus $10 million is really small fry compared to the true value of the personal transportation market. That is the true economic carrot you mention and it hasn't inspired anybody with resources yet. I seriously doubt we'll see anything either revolutionary (like a high efficiency production process) or groundbreaking (like Scaled Composites winning the X-prize) come out of this.
Most importantly, this still does not address the issue of energy production. Between burning gas in a small inefficient engine or burning fossil fuels in a large efficient turbine, transmitting electricity, lysing water, then converting it back to electricity in a small, moderately efficient fuel cell, there might be a small net savings in energy, but ultimately, little changes except I suppose coal prices are a little more stable than oil since we produce most of that domestically.
Ok, so if I pay the mean amount of taxes for an American, that's $0.04 that probably won't accomplish anything.
Previous discussion of broadband over powerlines that I've read discussed it as an alternative to wireless or wiring your home...really small networks that then plug into a traditional connection. I'm curious how you would handle multiple users on one line. You're not just running half a dozen or so connections into a hub and multiplexing the signals. The power grid is huge! Along those lines, what about capacitance and interference? Wouldn't those kill the range?
Actually, perhaps someone should post it on Digg...assuming it hasn't already happened. Then everyone on Digg can complain about how lousy Digg is because this article was on Slashdot yesterday.
Expect the New Horizons mission to Pluto to disappoint you then. It will take pictures and spectrometry/radar readings for a few brief hours as it flies by, transmit it all to earth, then go to sleep again as it continues into the Kuiper belt to rendezvous with a couple objects out there. To be fair, they will be by far the most revealing pictures of Pluto ever and answer a ton of questions about the planet, but I don't expect them to be any more impressive to the untrained eye than the comet closeups from Deep Impact and Stardust, which are cool, but not quite as fascinating nor as dynamic as Hguyens was. The same for the Messenger mission to Mercury. It will no doubt tell us a lot about Mercury and solar system's formation, but be incredibly boring visually.
MRO will be cool. I am really hoping NASA releases all the imagery as it becomes available, so Google can add it to that fun Mars version of their maps that they recently released. It's absolutely fascinating to me to click and drag my way around a planet's surface, be it earth, the moon, or Mars. It would also be fun to be able to see landing sites (or craters as the case may be) of probes in decent detail. Currently, images from Mars Global Surveyer show a dark pixel for each of the rovers, a dark pixel for their landers, and a string of slightly hazy pixels representing their tracks. MRO should enable the rovers to actually be distinguished from the surrounding terrain and give observers the ability to discern some of the larger features they've examined.
I agree it was really cool how the Hguyens team stitched together all that data into a meaningful presentation portraying what was going on. The amount of pictures they could return though, was limited by the amount of data they could transmit to Cassini during that three hours.
I wonder if there are any major piece of agricultural equipment that can be set up to "run from the grid" in a sense. Like big batteries on tractors that recharge every day?
I grew up on a farm and I currently work with forklifts (both ICE and electric), so I have some relevant experience to offer a comparison. A tractor runs at a high load consistently for very long times, usually a significant distance from the shop, almost always outside. Tractors on a major farm typically have engine displacements over 6 liters, which is a decent sized engine. The big Deere articulated tractors run up to 16 liter engines, and dwarf semi-trucks. During the peak of the season, they may operate for over 12 hours a day (even longer in areas where dew isn't a problem), and due to limitations on harvesting due the weather, down time is pretty much unacceptable. Refueling typically must be conducted in the field.
In comparison, a forklift alternates high and low throttle as it shifts between lifting, shuttling, and waiting for loads. They may operated only an hour or two per day or as much as 24 hours per day, generally not moving very far from their fuel supply. Forklifts below 5 ton capacity may be electric or ICE (internal combustion), but above 5 ton they are almost exclusively combustion, with ~4 liter engines (compare to the tractors with 6 L). Operators that use electric lifts and must operate for more than 8 hours in a day make the investment in additional batteries so they can swap them out as fast as they become discharged.
The primary reason for using batteries on forklifts is not efficiency, but reduced emmissions, which is important when working indoors, especially for industries that require cleanliness like food services. Despite recent advances in motor and battery technology, their performance still falls well short of ICE lift trucks. Comparing their typical usage on forklifts to what would be demanded on agricultural tractors, I think I can competently say it would not be feasible to utilize electric tractors on the farm.
Of course, I should mention, you probably shouldn't be running your tractors and other equipment that you use to harvest the corn or other agricultural product with oil or ethanol. That doesn't work. It only works if you have a mostly electrical system.
Unless it turns out to be a viable way to use your waste material. Sell the waste to a local processing plant and buy back fuel for cheaper than at the pump. Some farms are already doing this with biodiesel. Of course, the financial savings might not be as great as for the ordinary consumer, since fuel for agricultural purposes is not taxed.
Actually, it surprised me, too. I believe the major inefficiency comes from the battery. The number I gave was rounded off from the wikipedia entry (I hate turning to an unaccredited site everytime I need an answer, but it's soooo easy). I will assume the efficiency values you referred don't account for the CVT, which also run 80-90% efficient (compared to 90-95% for geared transmissions). So on these assumptions:
Where battery total is the total efficiency of the battery-related processes. 0.3 / 0.553 = 0.54. So the overall battery charge*store*discharge efficiency would be on the order of 54%. I don't know if that's reasonable or not, but I suspect there's somebody around here who can enlighten us.
I share your doubts, but must point out that current hybrid cars already use regenerativebraking. The efficiency is only something like 30% (losses to transmit through the CVT, generate, store, spin the motor again), but it's still a little bit of return. Since the motor is already designed to act as a generator, it should be little extra investment to program the transmission to load the motor before mechanically engaging the brakes.
My values were based on a value of energy in a megaton of 4 gigajoules (if I remember right) and a really loose number tossed out in Lost Moon that a Saturn V produced enough energy to lift everyone in the US 1 foot off the ground (in the 60's). I made some assumptions about the number of people and their weights in the 60's and compared that to a 100 megaton bomb, although I think the largest every detonated was actually 50 megatons.
Let's try looking at it from your method. A Saturn V weighed about 3 kilotons. If 2.5 kilotons are fuel, then 100,000 kt over 2.5 = 40000 times...hmm. Something's wrong somewhere. Oh well...the point still stands. This is a big freaking place.
Slashdot Mirror
CG actors and actresses don't come close to the realism, emotion, or raporte that real ones do. I personally doubt (and kind of hope they don't, because it would be somewhat creepy) they never actually will. CG is a great medium for getting creating fantasy (like with Toy Story or Shrek) or for unique special effects (like the Matrix or Fight Club...but not Star Wars. ILM owned CG in the original trilogy, in my opinion).
Where you are right is that real actors aren't really worth $20 million or whatever a film. I'll bet there's thousands of aspiring actors out there with just as much talent and even as much good looks as the celebrities who roll in the dough from major productions. The reason they do get the money though is marketing. It's a familiar face and a person who's given the audience a positive experience before. How many people go watch a Tom Cruise movie just because it's Tom Cruise (although I no longer understand the appeal behind that one)? How many CG films still pay out big bucks to get major names doing the voice acting?
I'm not saying that a movie can't succeed without big name actors, but it's almost like an insurance policy. The major studios can basically rely on a certain amount of income based entirely off of who's name is with the movie.
"Nut" was my add on. I'm a fan of Captain Renault, too, but I don't list it on my resume.
I read his articles in some depth and they seemed to convey a really strong anti-space, and particularly anti-NASA/anti-Griffin vibe. Perhaps I misinterpreted them, but as I said, they weren't particularly coherent (he writes like my dad). The impression I got is that he was arguing that Griffin is trying to kill everything else so he can turn CEV into elaborate super-machine. I agree that the CEV should be kept simple, but flexible. If that is Bell's contention, as well, then he piles on the rhetoric far too thick to communicate the point effectively.
His dimishing private space industry enthusiasm which you mention is probably in better measure than his criticism of the shuttle (which I believe was the wrong direction to go, but far from a hopeless mistake). I expect little more from the space tourism business than a few joy rides and a lot of bankruptcy filings once the novelty wears off. The private industry's real potential lies in the less flashy companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace, who are trying to improve the accessibility and living conditions of space. It's not something that's going to happen overnight, or even upon the completion of a "spaceport" or two.
The author you linked to is a self-described anti-space nut. Convincing everyone that the CEV is hopeless is apparently his crusade. His arguments are incohesive, largely incoherent, and sometimes flat-out incorrect (for example, his claims that only the space shuttle can boost the ISS's orbit and that NASA has done nothing about the foam...flat out wrong on both counts). As far as I can tell, he's claiming that Griffin himself is trying to (1) use the shuttle to kill aeronautics and science programs, (2) use the CEV to kill the shuttle, and (3) simply abandon the ISS, either to fall into the ocean or be given free of charge entirely to the Russians.
This guy is a troll. The only logical thing I can figure out about him is he must in some way be related to Art Bell.
You forgot the last two parts...
3.) Add another surcharge for "local maintenance and upgrades" (somehow that isn't figured into the $35/month they charge for 256k DSL???) 4.) more profit!!!
After I signed up for DSL and phone last summer and my $39.95 monthly bill totaled up at $63/month and their billing system was so screwed up I had to pay for a month of service after I disconnected and then get re-imbursed, I swore Qwest was the epitomy of evil and I would never do business with them again. Then it turns out that the company that charges only $18/mo for 768k DSL is freely giving their call logs to the NSA.
Maybe what the world needs is for Qwest, Comcast, Microsoft, Walmart, the RIAA, and any other "evil" companies to get together and form a country so we'll finally have someone to use all those nuclear weapons on and not feel bad about it at the day's end.
Pretty darn resistant to lightning, actually. A lot of designing goes into making sure that critical systems remain functional and that nothing carries an excessive current in the event of a lightning strike, which happens a lot more frequently than most passengers probably realize. During the 80's NASA did a very extensive investigation into the effects of lightning on airplanes. Some of the test pilots involved had their planes hit hundreds of times while deliberately flying through the most active parts of the storms. A source I just googled up says the average passenger plane gets hit once a year. According to another source the last commercial airline accident attributed to lightning was in 1967, which was due to a fuel tank explosion, not a control outage.
Old style plane controls were based on either cables (not suitable for larger aircraft) run from the pilot's controls (yoke, pedals, throttle) to the control surface or else on hydraulics. In the latter, there are hydraulic valves actuated by the pilot, and the pressure is transferred via hose from the pump to the valves to hydraulic cylinders or motors that move the control surfaces. Anyone who is familiar with hydraulics knows how heavy those components are. Fly-by-wire eliminates the direct link, allowing much shorter hydraulic routing, replacing hoses with pumps at the point of use, or even replacing hydraulics with electrical actuators. All the components are surge protected and wiring is typically triple redundant.
I believe there are three dangers presented to airplanes by lightning: interference, stray currents, and energy dissipation. Interference can be dealt with by minimizing the opportunity to pick up signals (the 777 for example uses fiber optics instead of wires) and signal processing. Stray currents, which can damage componenets, are handled by isolating the electrical systems from the structure and using surge protectors. By energy dissipation I mean resistive heating of the airframe. This normally isn't a problem with aluminum airframes/skins, because the bolt passes straight through the plane with little trouble. With composite fuselages like on the A380, there is typically a safe path designed into the system for the same purpose. Otherwise a bolt might find a relatively small current path and overwhelm it, heating it so fast it could actually vaporize violently (a somewhat more technical way of saying it explodes).
This sounds purely academic at this point. Control information really has to be as resistant to interference as possible. In fact, I don't even think drive by wire systems have been approved for braking or steering in cars yet. They all have to have a direct link in case the power assist features fail.
They are right about adding flexibility, but safety is going to trump that one pretty hard every time.
Dude, people didn't even listen when the blaster worm came out with its bug that would give a 60 second warning before shutting down the computer. We tried to explain to them what was going on, why they needed an AV suite, why they needed to run Windows Update, and why they shouldn't click on popups and stuff, and they ignored it. I was still removing blaster occasionally from people's computers 2 years after Microsoft released the patch. There were people who would ask what all the fuss was about, to whom I would explain, including about how the virus made your computer shut down for no reason, and a week later they would call me up asking if I could figure out why their computer shut down at 2 PM every day. My words went in one ear and out the other. There were people who's systems I reformatted to get rid of blaster, set Windows update to automatic, and installed AVG. Sure enough, give 'em just two or three weeks and they either downloaded an infected file or opened up an unprotected network share (something else I told them not to do).
A message saying "You been haxored, grow a brain" would just get a "Whatever, my computer still works moron" response (or better yet, "but the Norton scan came up clean..."). If shutting down while a student was typing a paper due the next day (and hadn't saved yet) didn't inspire a little bit of sensibility, I seriously doubt deleting a few music files will. Especially since most users definitely seem to be shifting away from P2P in favor of legal music sources, and probably wouldn't have much targeted by this trojan.
Crusading against pornography and file-sharing seems far more likely.
The comment is funny, but if I were going to guess on who wrote this virus and why, that would be my guess. Well, not Pat Robertson, but some other person who disagrees morally with pornography and illegal music sharing.
Regardless of their intent or your own positions on porn and music sharing (I personally dislike porn and conditionally dislike music sharing), I think we can pretty safely agree this isn't the way to go about your crusade.
Still it sounds much less unpleasant than dealing with the RIAA.
Agreed to a point. This seems pretty harmless. It's a little more personal than baby photos and home videos since it's constant, but probably no more exciting to anyone. It doesn't sound like there is any intent to keep recording data beyond the age of 2 or 3 anyways.
This is going to yield a huge dataset! I imagine a couple CS majors could make a good senior project out of writing the sorting algorithms. I'd be kind of interesting to see a follow-up on how they're going to go about that. The kind of data analysis I typically do, even when I'm looking at a few hundred megs of data, I can typically sort down to peak or rate values very quickly with simple software. Even high energy physics research that can generate terrabytes of data per experiment I suspect can be broken down the same way with a decent amount of raw processing power. This research, however, will be sifting through a huge set of similar data and looking for subtle effects.
The overall experiment reminds me much more of The Final Cut than The Truman Show like others have suggested. Obviously that movie was far more personal in its intrusion, but it was basically about privacy versus (somewhat public) memory. The writers obviously recognized the scale of the data generated, too. They introduced a special computer called a Guillotine that seperated a persons life into clips by category.
I get 2nd and 3rd mixed up. 3rd doesn't seem quite right. It suggests an unrelated character, but the player is still supposed to assume the position of the character. Since first person is "I", second person is "you" (the person I'm looking at), and third person is he/she (someone not immediately part of the discussion), second person seems a more natural term to apply in my mind. Maybe I can keep them straight just by remembering it's opposite the way I'd expect.
My personal experience has been that I start to have noteworthy trouble tracking with my crosshairs once the framerate falls below that off TV (24 Hz). Above that I consider it playable, although perhaps people whose eyes are more attuned to games are more sensitive. I don't notice any improvement in the fluidity of movement above 60 Hz, and I'm extremely skeptical of any North American gamer who claims otherwise. Any improvement above ~40 Hz appears very marginal to my eyes, so I go ahead and keep the settings turned up if I can manage, but I still have a blast playing Day of Defeat even though heavy smoke can momentarily drop my framerate down below 10 fps on my ancient GeForce 2.
Hearing him talk about this, I immediately think about the level in Half Life where you're walking along the cliff with all the ladders and that stinkin' helicopter popping out to shoot at you. Just the same red rock repeating every couple of feet. Really, there were two other things that made it feel fake though. The first was the simple geometry of the cliff face. The second was the fact that it relied on the skybox to draw the bottom of bottom of the canyon. Too much discontinuity. Having an open floor like that is pretty uncommon, though. The Quake screenshots in the article didn't jump out at me for their mega textures. They caught my eye mostly because of the detail of the models and the map (the lighting helped too).
More directly to your comment, though, I think it's more a matter of the first person perspective fits the shooter genre best rather than a fetish with gunplay. First person on a 1024x768 screen tends to result in tunnel vision but its very precise and personal. The 2nd person, like in Grand Theft Auto, gives more situational awareness, but at the cost of precision (crosshair movement is somewhat awkward, it's harder to tell exactly where your next step will land, and the camera is often interfered with by objects immediately behind the character).
Games like Myst go a long ways with graphics but ditch the shooter story in favor of puzzles. I think Myst has a first person mode, too (I've never played it, but one of my friends was big into it). It looks like a pretty engaging game that could definitely benefit artistically from this mega texturing.
Please someone tell me I did not just see a diss against Spaceballs on Slashdot. What's next, people ranting about how the killer rabbit scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was corny? Writing off Douglas Adams as a hopeless Steve Jobs fanboy just because Marvin happened to look a little bit like a Macintosh in the movie? Or maybe even a relativistic analysis of Star Wars based on camera angles proving once and for all that Han and Greedo shot at the same time but Han's blast arrived sooner from the viewer's point of view and later from Greedo's?
You guys need to grow up and face the facts:
1.) The killer rabbit had audiences around the world gripping their seats in shock, weeping bitterly as Arthur's men were slaughtered, then cheering ecstatically as the Holy Hand Grenage of Antioch brought its blessing down upon those brave men.
2.) Marvin had a brain that was practically the size of a planet and he was gloomy. Obviously he was not a Macintosh because Macs are little and happy (eep!)
3.) Han shot first. Actually rumor is this was Harrison Ford misreading a cue and George Lucas didn't notice it until editing after filming was done. It kept him up at nights until the miracle of digital enhancement allowed him to ruin ^H^H^H^H fix the movie.
4.) Spaceballs is hilarious. It's a fact of nature like F=ma and slashdotter's always being the first one out in dodgeball. Come on people! Pizza-the-Hut! You just don't get stuff like that from unfunny movies.
I've wasted enough of my time here. There's some people over on Digg who need to have the differences between the MCP from Tron and that Colonel Sanders looking guy from the Matrix explained to them, again!
The article isn't about audio players. It's about personal computers, which are a far larger market. In one corner are the IBM-compatibles (is that term still used?) with their huge choice of compatible components and software allowing a purchaser to pick everything from front-side bus speed to what kind of case lights to use. In the other corner is Macintosh, based on purpose-built systems running Mac software. The entire discussion in the article surrounds the choice of personal computers, but the contentions are based on the success of the iPod. Mac is on a solid upswing, but they are still a tiny fraction of the overall computer market. Random crap like the fact that Microsoft is developing a media player means basically nothing in relation to the PC market.
If the author truly wanted to sound insightful, he would have talked about how the evolution of computers in our daily life is tending towards specific-purpose devices like media players, PDA's, game consoles, etc, as the first poster in the discussion noted with his electric motor analogy. I don't totally agree with that either, but it's a heck of a lot better argument saying that Mac has beat Microsoft by offering fewer choices.
Which is why Apple is dominating the PC market share...oh wait.
There seems to be a huge amount of misunderstanding about the law regarding the use of SSN's. It is a violation of federal law to require a person to submit their SSN for anything other than certain finance related purposes (actually that's a pretty big and unfortunately hazy list, but one that is far smaller than businesses respect). I think it is legal for anyone to request it, but probably 90% of the time they have no basis for requiring it.
I wouldn't go calling this H-prize the answer before you even know what the criteria actually are. "Technological advances" is not a criteria. "Working prototype" is almost a criteria, except that much has been done before. What defines a working protoptype? This article is a little sparse on useful details.
Comments like "until we re-invent the automobile" make it sound like these politicians are expecting the hover cars from the Jetson's to come out of this, yet quite a bit more money has already been invested in hydrogen research, with no yield so far to the consumer. Plus $10 million is really small fry compared to the true value of the personal transportation market. That is the true economic carrot you mention and it hasn't inspired anybody with resources yet. I seriously doubt we'll see anything either revolutionary (like a high efficiency production process) or groundbreaking (like Scaled Composites winning the X-prize) come out of this.
Most importantly, this still does not address the issue of energy production. Between burning gas in a small inefficient engine or burning fossil fuels in a large efficient turbine, transmitting electricity, lysing water, then converting it back to electricity in a small, moderately efficient fuel cell, there might be a small net savings in energy, but ultimately, little changes except I suppose coal prices are a little more stable than oil since we produce most of that domestically.
Ok, so if I pay the mean amount of taxes for an American, that's $0.04 that probably won't accomplish anything.
Previous discussion of broadband over powerlines that I've read discussed it as an alternative to wireless or wiring your home...really small networks that then plug into a traditional connection. I'm curious how you would handle multiple users on one line. You're not just running half a dozen or so connections into a hub and multiplexing the signals. The power grid is huge! Along those lines, what about capacitance and interference? Wouldn't those kill the range?
Actually, perhaps someone should post it on Digg...assuming it hasn't already happened. Then everyone on Digg can complain about how lousy Digg is because this article was on Slashdot yesterday.
Expect the New Horizons mission to Pluto to disappoint you then. It will take pictures and spectrometry/radar readings for a few brief hours as it flies by, transmit it all to earth, then go to sleep again as it continues into the Kuiper belt to rendezvous with a couple objects out there. To be fair, they will be by far the most revealing pictures of Pluto ever and answer a ton of questions about the planet, but I don't expect them to be any more impressive to the untrained eye than the comet closeups from Deep Impact and Stardust, which are cool, but not quite as fascinating nor as dynamic as Hguyens was. The same for the Messenger mission to Mercury. It will no doubt tell us a lot about Mercury and solar system's formation, but be incredibly boring visually.
MRO will be cool. I am really hoping NASA releases all the imagery as it becomes available, so Google can add it to that fun Mars version of their maps that they recently released. It's absolutely fascinating to me to click and drag my way around a planet's surface, be it earth, the moon, or Mars. It would also be fun to be able to see landing sites (or craters as the case may be) of probes in decent detail. Currently, images from Mars Global Surveyer show a dark pixel for each of the rovers, a dark pixel for their landers, and a string of slightly hazy pixels representing their tracks. MRO should enable the rovers to actually be distinguished from the surrounding terrain and give observers the ability to discern some of the larger features they've examined.
I agree it was really cool how the Hguyens team stitched together all that data into a meaningful presentation portraying what was going on. The amount of pictures they could return though, was limited by the amount of data they could transmit to Cassini during that three hours.
I grew up on a farm and I currently work with forklifts (both ICE and electric), so I have some relevant experience to offer a comparison. A tractor runs at a high load consistently for very long times, usually a significant distance from the shop, almost always outside. Tractors on a major farm typically have engine displacements over 6 liters, which is a decent sized engine. The big Deere articulated tractors run up to 16 liter engines, and dwarf semi-trucks. During the peak of the season, they may operate for over 12 hours a day (even longer in areas where dew isn't a problem), and due to limitations on harvesting due the weather, down time is pretty much unacceptable. Refueling typically must be conducted in the field.
In comparison, a forklift alternates high and low throttle as it shifts between lifting, shuttling, and waiting for loads. They may operated only an hour or two per day or as much as 24 hours per day, generally not moving very far from their fuel supply. Forklifts below 5 ton capacity may be electric or ICE (internal combustion), but above 5 ton they are almost exclusively combustion, with ~4 liter engines (compare to the tractors with 6 L). Operators that use electric lifts and must operate for more than 8 hours in a day make the investment in additional batteries so they can swap them out as fast as they become discharged.
The primary reason for using batteries on forklifts is not efficiency, but reduced emmissions, which is important when working indoors, especially for industries that require cleanliness like food services. Despite recent advances in motor and battery technology, their performance still falls well short of ICE lift trucks. Comparing their typical usage on forklifts to what would be demanded on agricultural tractors, I think I can competently say it would not be feasible to utilize electric tractors on the farm.
Unless it turns out to be a viable way to use your waste material. Sell the waste to a local processing plant and buy back fuel for cheaper than at the pump. Some farms are already doing this with biodiesel. Of course, the financial savings might not be as great as for the ordinary consumer, since fuel for agricultural purposes is not taxed.Actually, it surprised me, too. I believe the major inefficiency comes from the battery. The number I gave was rounded off from the wikipedia entry (I hate turning to an unaccredited site everytime I need an answer, but it's soooo easy). I will assume the efficiency values you referred don't account for the CVT, which also run 80-90% efficient (compared to 90-95% for geared transmissions). So on these assumptions:
eta(trans) * eta(gen) * eta(charge) * eta(discharge) * eta(motor) * eta(trans) =
0.85 * 0.85 * eta(battery total) * 0.9 * 0.85 = 0.553 * eta (sigma battery)
Where battery total is the total efficiency of the battery-related processes. 0.3 / 0.553 = 0.54. So the overall battery charge*store*discharge efficiency would be on the order of 54%. I don't know if that's reasonable or not, but I suspect there's somebody around here who can enlighten us.
I share your doubts, but must point out that current hybrid cars already use regenerative braking. The efficiency is only something like 30% (losses to transmit through the CVT, generate, store, spin the motor again), but it's still a little bit of return. Since the motor is already designed to act as a generator, it should be little extra investment to program the transmission to load the motor before mechanically engaging the brakes.
My values were based on a value of energy in a megaton of 4 gigajoules (if I remember right) and a really loose number tossed out in Lost Moon that a Saturn V produced enough energy to lift everyone in the US 1 foot off the ground (in the 60's). I made some assumptions about the number of people and their weights in the 60's and compared that to a 100 megaton bomb, although I think the largest every detonated was actually 50 megatons.
Let's try looking at it from your method. A Saturn V weighed about 3 kilotons. If 2.5 kilotons are fuel, then 100,000 kt over 2.5 = 40000 times...hmm. Something's wrong somewhere. Oh well...the point still stands. This is a big freaking place.