I don't know how you got a +5 insightful for that. I agree that the best candidates were weeded out (and never even came close to having a chance), but I notice you didn't say who you voted for in the primaries. You also failed to mention the fact that some puppets would be far worse than others. As similar as some like to claim they have gotten, the two parties are still far from the same, so the choice is far from moot.
I agree with some of your post, but don't feel it's entirely correct. The cobra moving from side to side gets depth cues from parallax. With normal shutter glasses moving your head has no effect, which breaks the realism and messes up your depth perception. I think everyone would agree that a solution with head-tracking would be far superior to a solution without (whether using a monitor or a VR headset).
The glasses do suck, but it's not because stereoscopic cues aren't important. When I've played 3D games that work well with shutter glasses, it has been awesome. But the glasses are too expensive and problematic, you need a special monitor, there's ghosting, you get double-vision on your cross-hairs if they're way up front and you're aiming at something far away, and so on. To be honest, some cheap cardboard red-blue glasses would work 10 times better than any shutter glasses I've seen. IMO, if you're not going all the way with a VR headset, you may as well stick to the cheap red-blue glasses.
The effect on some 3D games was incredible, but the shutter glasses were a pain to deal with, there were ghosting issues, and even at 120Hz, it wasn't comfortable to use them for long. I actually would have preferred the red-blue glasses you used to get at the movie theaters (which would only need special drivers, not special hardware). I'd rather have the colors be a little off than have my frame rate cut in half.
Even if GPU's go away, there's no indication that libraries like OpenGL will go away. As a 3D graphics programmer who uses OpenGL and shaders, I know that no one will want to reinvent the wheel and rewrite all that low-level rasterizing, perspective correct texture mapping, and TnL code. Even when using shaders for as much as possible, you don't have to do all that by hand.
1) The force powers in the "Jedi Knight" games gave them an edge over many other FPS's, especially in multi-player. Being able to force-choke an opponent, lift him in the air, and drop him off a ledge while he struggles has to be my all-time favorite way to kill someone in an FPS. 2) While it may not be true to the story, it looks awesome (not the Star Destroyer part, but the force powers in general). I'd love to be able to pick up a Tie Fighter with the force and smash it into an opponent. 3) They did say they wanted to go "over the top" with the force powers, thus the "Unleashed" name. 4) "Size matters not."
Having said all that, poor game-play would be truly disappointing. The story is worth something, but the feel of the game-play is extremely important.
My original post was a joke, although someone else beat it hands down with "maybe Anonymous Coward IS a lawyer". Of course you shouldn't be able to get in trouble for giving casual advice of a legal nature, but I've heard of too many ludicrous lawsuits being initiated. In one case, a church member was suing his pastor for giving his advice that ended up hurting him financially. Even if it's obvious the law suit is going to fail, you still have to spend time and money to fight it. And every now and then, probably when someone can't afford anything but a crappy lawyer, the ludicrous law suit wins.
Of course, if someone did try to sue you for giving casual legal advice, I doubt IANAL would change anything one way or another. But then again, IANAL.;-)
I was joking. But in answer to your question, you don't have to be a baker to bake bread. You don't have to be a taxi driver to know the local area (or tell someone about it). You do have to be a lawyer to practice law. Even then, a lot of lawyers may not be much good, and a lot of legal verbiage is designed to trip up lawyers who aren't paying close enough attention. So you can't really trust any legal advice you get from/. (and you can barely trust it from your lawyer).
But what if it changes global weather patterns in a nasty way? It would be better if we could fix the temperatures without affecting global cloud cover. In theory it could make the Sahara green again while turning the US into another Sahara.
IMO, the only valid claim made by global warming skeptics is that we really don't know for certain what will happen globally when something forces a significant change in our atmosphere, the ocean, etc. From what I've read, our weather modeling programs are maintained mostly by "reaction". The scientists can't experiment globally with controls and variables to make sure their equations are perfect, so they have to guess based on past data. When the data doesn't match the model, they try to fudge it by tweaking the equations and "magic constants" they've come up with, which would mostly be meaningless if conditions in the atmosphere changed.
Apparently you missed the "45 MPH", which is faster than an average speedboat can go. I'll bet someone could water-ski behind this thing. Most electric scooters max out around 25-35MPH, and something like this would require even more power.
I personally know a few who did, and had to explain to them why they were idiots (in a diplomatic way). Unfortunately, aiming for the lowest common denominator works extremely well. And in this case, the lowest common denominator will continue to drag us down to their level by setting "the standard". I'm certain that MS is no more ashamed of this than P.T. Barnum was. They will laugh all the way to the bank, and then find more ways to tighten the screws to force the developers to make sure their products support their latest OS, and to make sure people buy it. It's a vicious cycle that MS will do everything in its power to make sure no one can break, and thinking about it from a business perspective, you can't really blame them for it.
IMO, the best way to send Microsoft a message that they're going in the wrong direction is to switch to smaller low-power devices like the Asus EEE, or for gaming the nVidia Tegra devices (when they become available). MS knows Vista is too bloated to run on those, and they will be forced to back-pedal if sales for their flagship OS drop off significantly. Personally, I'd love to have a Tegra mini-laptop running BSD without X-Windows. (I'd much rather have full-screen OpenGL with a windowing toolkit built on top of it, and an exclusive full-screen mode for games.)
But doesn't hot air generally rise? And isn't the air that comes out an exhaust pipe generally hot? Even if not, wouldn't a mild wind make this fairly ineffective? Maybe everyone could bend their tailpipes to aim the exhaust downward, although I imagine that would mean people sitting in traffic would end up breathing a higher concentration of CO.
A long stick? For an asteroid more than 1km in diameter? That's a pretty long stick to try to send into space. The bag would be unthinkable. Even if you could manage to send a bag that big up there, if the asteroid is spinning the bag would get ripped to shreds and anything tethered to a rope would be flung off into space (the mass of the asteroid would be enormous compared to anything we can send up there). It would be better to try a "grappling gun" approach, but even that would have problems with a spinning asteroid.
So far the only ideas I've heard that make sense to me are the tractor method they described or the "land an engine on it" method I described. Their idea is easier to implement without problems (i.e. it doesn't require landing on uncertain surfaces), but it may not provide enough of a push. I could be way off, but I imagine the pull of gravity between bodies that small (and at that distance) is significantly less than the thrust of one ion engine, and my idea would use several (which would help if a percentage of the engines had problems landing/firing).
Ok, the only known ways to accelerate in space are: 1) To eject matter from the object in the opposite direction (preferably at very high speed). 2) To get a push (or pull) from other matter.
To keep the tractor at the right distance from the asteroid (i.e. to keep it pulling), it would have to keep accelerating away from the asteroid. The matter ejected from the tractor would hit the asteroid, pushing it back on course and negating the pull of the tractor. I suppose you could eject the matter in a spray all around so it passes around the asteroid, but that would waste fuel and would mean keeping the craft at a pretty good distance from the asteroid, and the force of gravity decreases by distance squared (that's probably why the craft looks the way it does in the article, a dumbbell shape with much of the weight at one and and thrusters at the other). It's still not very elegant, and it's very expensive to send heavy craft into deep space to rendezvous with an asteroid.
It seems like it would be better to land a small light craft (or a number of them) with an ion engine on the asteroid's surface. Simply land, point the solar panels and ion engine straight up (or at an angle if necessary), and let it fire. Landing may be difficult if the asteroid is spinning too quickly, but scientists have used craft designed to crash land before. It should work as long as they can land and manage to hang on, even if the ion engines have to be fired intermittently to keep thrusting in the right direction. It should be cheaper than trying to send a big heavy lump of a ship to catch an asteroid, and it should provide a much better thrust-to-weight ratio.
Yeah, MS has definitely been bribing/wooing nVidia heavily. For the first time ever with the GeForce 8800, nVidia did NOT lead with OpenGL demos and documentation (even though it meant most of their customers had to wait an extra year until Vista shipped to play with the card's new features). I'll bet MS bribed them heavily for that. Of course, when DX10 was left out of XP, it didn't make sense to use anything but OpenGL (assuming ATI will fix their broken OpenGL drivers, which they won't).
I don't think x86 compatibility is a very useful feature for hand-held devices, or even for mini-laptops. Windows is fine on my desktop. I don't want it hogging the resources on my hand-held. When it comes to BSD/Linux, it's easy to recompile apps for a different platform. It's less easy to customize the apps for the smaller screens and lack of input devices, but it's not like that would be any easier for a Windows app.
Ultra low power combined with powerful graphics, on the other hand, is so much more useful. I may be a bit biased because I'm a 3D graphics/game developer, but great games and audio/video playback are incredibly desirable features on devices like this. And it's not like it won't be able to run a web browser, mail client, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
When the Tegra comes out, this news will be more relevant.
Damn. I was hoping that year of playing Carmageddon would pay off.
"Screw you guys, I'm going home."
I don't know how you got a +5 insightful for that. I agree that the best candidates were weeded out (and never even came close to having a chance), but I notice you didn't say who you voted for in the primaries. You also failed to mention the fact that some puppets would be far worse than others. As similar as some like to claim they have gotten, the two parties are still far from the same, so the choice is far from moot.
When can I apply to fly the new Veritech fighter?
I agree with some of your post, but don't feel it's entirely correct. The cobra moving from side to side gets depth cues from parallax. With normal shutter glasses moving your head has no effect, which breaks the realism and messes up your depth perception. I think everyone would agree that a solution with head-tracking would be far superior to a solution without (whether using a monitor or a VR headset).
The glasses do suck, but it's not because stereoscopic cues aren't important. When I've played 3D games that work well with shutter glasses, it has been awesome. But the glasses are too expensive and problematic, you need a special monitor, there's ghosting, you get double-vision on your cross-hairs if they're way up front and you're aiming at something far away, and so on. To be honest, some cheap cardboard red-blue glasses would work 10 times better than any shutter glasses I've seen. IMO, if you're not going all the way with a VR headset, you may as well stick to the cheap red-blue glasses.
The effect on some 3D games was incredible, but the shutter glasses were a pain to deal with, there were ghosting issues, and even at 120Hz, it wasn't comfortable to use them for long. I actually would have preferred the red-blue glasses you used to get at the movie theaters (which would only need special drivers, not special hardware). I'd rather have the colors be a little off than have my frame rate cut in half.
Even if GPU's go away, there's no indication that libraries like OpenGL will go away. As a 3D graphics programmer who uses OpenGL and shaders, I know that no one will want to reinvent the wheel and rewrite all that low-level rasterizing, perspective correct texture mapping, and TnL code. Even when using shaders for as much as possible, you don't have to do all that by hand.
You're right, and it's a shame. I would buy a PC version in a heart-beat, but there's no way I'll buy a console system just for one game.
1) The force powers in the "Jedi Knight" games gave them an edge over many other FPS's, especially in multi-player. Being able to force-choke an opponent, lift him in the air, and drop him off a ledge while he struggles has to be my all-time favorite way to kill someone in an FPS.
2) While it may not be true to the story, it looks awesome (not the Star Destroyer part, but the force powers in general). I'd love to be able to pick up a Tie Fighter with the force and smash it into an opponent.
3) They did say they wanted to go "over the top" with the force powers, thus the "Unleashed" name.
4) "Size matters not."
Having said all that, poor game-play would be truly disappointing. The story is worth something, but the feel of the game-play is extremely important.
My original post was a joke, although someone else beat it hands down with "maybe Anonymous Coward IS a lawyer". Of course you shouldn't be able to get in trouble for giving casual advice of a legal nature, but I've heard of too many ludicrous lawsuits being initiated. In one case, a church member was suing his pastor for giving his advice that ended up hurting him financially. Even if it's obvious the law suit is going to fail, you still have to spend time and money to fight it. And every now and then, probably when someone can't afford anything but a crappy lawyer, the ludicrous law suit wins.
Of course, if someone did try to sue you for giving casual legal advice, I doubt IANAL would change anything one way or another. But then again, IANAL. ;-)
I was joking. But in answer to your question, you don't have to be a baker to bake bread. You don't have to be a taxi driver to know the local area (or tell someone about it). You do have to be a lawyer to practice law. Even then, a lot of lawyers may not be much good, and a lot of legal verbiage is designed to trip up lawyers who aren't paying close enough attention. So you can't really trust any legal advice you get from /. (and you can barely trust it from your lawyer).
Yeah, you might as well ban legal discussions on /. if you do that.
You forgot to start your post with IANAL. ;-)
But what if it changes global weather patterns in a nasty way? It would be better if we could fix the temperatures without affecting global cloud cover. In theory it could make the Sahara green again while turning the US into another Sahara.
IMO, the only valid claim made by global warming skeptics is that we really don't know for certain what will happen globally when something forces a significant change in our atmosphere, the ocean, etc. From what I've read, our weather modeling programs are maintained mostly by "reaction". The scientists can't experiment globally with controls and variables to make sure their equations are perfect, so they have to guess based on past data. When the data doesn't match the model, they try to fudge it by tweaking the equations and "magic constants" they've come up with, which would mostly be meaningless if conditions in the atmosphere changed.
Apparently you missed the "45 MPH", which is faster than an average speedboat can go. I'll bet someone could water-ski behind this thing. Most electric scooters max out around 25-35MPH, and something like this would require even more power.
Damn, you beat me too it. I'm surprised you got modded funny. It's probably true to some extent.
Let's make some horror video games where the people in it are creepy enough to really freak people out.
I personally know a few who did, and had to explain to them why they were idiots (in a diplomatic way). Unfortunately, aiming for the lowest common denominator works extremely well. And in this case, the lowest common denominator will continue to drag us down to their level by setting "the standard". I'm certain that MS is no more ashamed of this than P.T. Barnum was. They will laugh all the way to the bank, and then find more ways to tighten the screws to force the developers to make sure their products support their latest OS, and to make sure people buy it. It's a vicious cycle that MS will do everything in its power to make sure no one can break, and thinking about it from a business perspective, you can't really blame them for it.
IMO, the best way to send Microsoft a message that they're going in the wrong direction is to switch to smaller low-power devices like the Asus EEE, or for gaming the nVidia Tegra devices (when they become available). MS knows Vista is too bloated to run on those, and they will be forced to back-pedal if sales for their flagship OS drop off significantly. Personally, I'd love to have a Tegra mini-laptop running BSD without X-Windows. (I'd much rather have full-screen OpenGL with a windowing toolkit built on top of it, and an exclusive full-screen mode for games.)
But doesn't hot air generally rise? And isn't the air that comes out an exhaust pipe generally hot? Even if not, wouldn't a mild wind make this fairly ineffective? Maybe everyone could bend their tailpipes to aim the exhaust downward, although I imagine that would mean people sitting in traffic would end up breathing a higher concentration of CO.
A long stick? For an asteroid more than 1km in diameter? That's a pretty long stick to try to send into space. The bag would be unthinkable. Even if you could manage to send a bag that big up there, if the asteroid is spinning the bag would get ripped to shreds and anything tethered to a rope would be flung off into space (the mass of the asteroid would be enormous compared to anything we can send up there). It would be better to try a "grappling gun" approach, but even that would have problems with a spinning asteroid.
So far the only ideas I've heard that make sense to me are the tractor method they described or the "land an engine on it" method I described. Their idea is easier to implement without problems (i.e. it doesn't require landing on uncertain surfaces), but it may not provide enough of a push. I could be way off, but I imagine the pull of gravity between bodies that small (and at that distance) is significantly less than the thrust of one ion engine, and my idea would use several (which would help if a percentage of the engines had problems landing/firing).
Ok, the only known ways to accelerate in space are:
1) To eject matter from the object in the opposite direction (preferably at very high speed).
2) To get a push (or pull) from other matter.
To keep the tractor at the right distance from the asteroid (i.e. to keep it pulling), it would have to keep accelerating away from the asteroid. The matter ejected from the tractor would hit the asteroid, pushing it back on course and negating the pull of the tractor. I suppose you could eject the matter in a spray all around so it passes around the asteroid, but that would waste fuel and would mean keeping the craft at a pretty good distance from the asteroid, and the force of gravity decreases by distance squared (that's probably why the craft looks the way it does in the article, a dumbbell shape with much of the weight at one and and thrusters at the other). It's still not very elegant, and it's very expensive to send heavy craft into deep space to rendezvous with an asteroid.
It seems like it would be better to land a small light craft (or a number of them) with an ion engine on the asteroid's surface. Simply land, point the solar panels and ion engine straight up (or at an angle if necessary), and let it fire. Landing may be difficult if the asteroid is spinning too quickly, but scientists have used craft designed to crash land before. It should work as long as they can land and manage to hang on, even if the ion engines have to be fired intermittently to keep thrusting in the right direction. It should be cheaper than trying to send a big heavy lump of a ship to catch an asteroid, and it should provide a much better thrust-to-weight ratio.
Maybe that library was on double-secret probation.
Yeah, MS has definitely been bribing/wooing nVidia heavily. For the first time ever with the GeForce 8800, nVidia did NOT lead with OpenGL demos and documentation (even though it meant most of their customers had to wait an extra year until Vista shipped to play with the card's new features). I'll bet MS bribed them heavily for that. Of course, when DX10 was left out of XP, it didn't make sense to use anything but OpenGL (assuming ATI will fix their broken OpenGL drivers, which they won't).
I don't think x86 compatibility is a very useful feature for hand-held devices, or even for mini-laptops. Windows is fine on my desktop. I don't want it hogging the resources on my hand-held. When it comes to BSD/Linux, it's easy to recompile apps for a different platform. It's less easy to customize the apps for the smaller screens and lack of input devices, but it's not like that would be any easier for a Windows app.
Ultra low power combined with powerful graphics, on the other hand, is so much more useful. I may be a bit biased because I'm a 3D graphics/game developer, but great games and audio/video playback are incredibly desirable features on devices like this. And it's not like it won't be able to run a web browser, mail client, etc.