Yeah, gametab misses some, on a quick scroll of the list there's no Iridion 1 or Snood. I also spotted a game that isn't out yet in English (AFAIK) - Fire Emblem 2. But, assuming those two effects cancel out then we're still taking 400-650 games (I wouldn't be surprised if it was at the lower end of that scale since of the ~2000 released I'd expect Japan to get a larger share than the other territories).
Anyway, that's a lot of games, in the same league as the Xbox though not as many as the PS2...
The GBA and GBA SP take the same cartridges, and are the exact same hardware in different packages. The launch of the SP did not make an original GBA out of date, they play the same games. They are still releasing new GBA games even though the DS is out. The GBA has an absolutely huge game library, there are nearly 2000 games for it (I base this on the ROM numbering system used by warez groups, this counts each localised version seperately so you should really divide by 3), you can't complain that it hasn't been developed for. Finally, all these handhelds are backwards compatible - the DS plays GBA games and the GBA plays gameboy games.
But, astronomers use "Solar Masses", not "Sun Masses". Basically, the problem here is that English is pointlessly crufty. I can't imagine how much thought must be wasted producing "correct" English.
In zero gravity conditions, you measure the mass of* something by attaching it to a spring and measuring the frequency of oscillation. This measures mass directly, not weight. You can obviously do it under gravity as well (watch fat people bungee...), it's just less convenient than using scales.
*ironically, given the discussion, I wrote "weigh" here when I first wrote this...
But it's not actually the first episode, since there was a miniseries before... it starts with a "previously, on Battlestar Galactica", which is a bit annoying... still, it's free.
There are others. I should also point out that allowing levelling up in a beat-em-up is a bad idea, their gameplay mechanics are intended to be balanced and the winner is the skilled (sometimes lucky) player.
Yeah, tried the link, it's fine. generic-man, I'm not too sure about the controls on a pocket PC... most of the ones I've seen look a bit crap for gaming, more designed for using a stylus. Can you strafe easily, for instance? If I really wanted a good mobile game of Doom, I'd probably get a GP32. Or a laptop with a mouse so I could play zdoom, and play 4 player multiplayer (which the GP32 might do, I don't know), use bots etc. Maybe if we wait a year or two Doom will get ported to PSP with its neat wireless multiplayer.
Of course, the major bonus of a pocket PC is that if you're lucky, you can get your employer to buy you one, and you can take it to meetings:)
The GBA has a 240x160 screen, and Doom was designed for 320x240, preferably 640x480. The GBA version also isn't all that smooth, presumably the CPU (~16 Mhz Arm7 I think)isn't quite as powerful as Doom would like. This device has slightly more reasonable specs, i.e. a 320x240 screen and a 400 Mhz Xscale, and also a hard drive so you can add extra maps or use mods (I love that Doom railgun!). Still, that said, I'm not going to rush out and buy one to replace my GBA...
where radius is the radius you build the sphere at. number_of_stars is something like 10^11
Galaxy dyson sphere: 1*2*pi*8_kiloparsecs^2
16 kiloparsecs is given as the approximation of the galaxy in question's diameter. I'm using 2*pi*radius^2 since you can build a flattened spheroid... spiral galaxies are pretty flat.
n.b. 1 parsec = 3.1x10^16 m 1 earth-sun distance (astronomical unit) = 1.50x10^11 m
so surface area of case 1 over case 2 is
radius^2*7.3x10^-8
where radius is in astronomical units. So, if you take a pretty conservative case and build your sphere at the same distance the Earth is at, then you have to use about 10^7 times more material to build a galaxy sphere. (I'm sure with most stars you could build it a lot closer, and live on the outside)
Still, interesting idea, and I agree totally that it would be prettier. It might have a problem with stars hitting it though...
Anyway, to get a little more on-topic, it's impossible in this case since astronomers detected hydrogen in the galaxy, they just haven't observed any stars. So the stars could be covered, the whole galaxy couldn't be.
/. main page, near the bottom, there's a link saying "yesterday's news". If I miss my daily dose, I click on that and read what's there. Granted, the discussion has died down somewhat, but you can always find someone to talk to about any issue on the net...
Do U.S. companies not do this? Have £50 or so in small notes and change locked in a drawer somewhere, you swap the receipt for your doodad with money from the petty cash box. Maybe you sign a paper ledger and someone types that in whenever they're sorting the accounts out. Seems like a better system than letting people potentially mess your whole company's payroll up by accident. In fact, I'd much rather keep vital stuff like accounts on a computer not connected to the network at all, not having a route to the internet is a great defence against viruses or crackers. I suppose the feasability of this depends on if your organisation uses electronic timesheets or not.
It's pretty cool. I downloaded all five CDs of Solaris 10 x86 in under ten minutes. And running a 32-player Unreal Tournament server needs at least a 10 Mbps connection, preferably several times more if you're using custom maps (as players will download the maps off you). It's also nice to have the slow part of smaller downloads being you typing in where you want the file saved, rather than the actual downloading. I can't wait for legal film downloads. That said, if you're just using the net rather than serving stuff, a couple of megabits and a little patience works just as well.
"I also remember Micro Machines being somewhat familiar in the term 'Rubber Band'. When one player had fallen behind the lead players, play would stop and the lagging player would be dropped just behind the pack."
Yes, but that was how the point system worked, at least in the versions I've played. Drop outside the camera's view (which followed the lead player), and you lost a point, whilst the leader gained one. They took a rubber-band mechanism and made it into an AFAIK unique gameplay.
Anyway, this whole discussion is pretty moot. Unless this game gets released for the Cube I'm not likely to play it so I can't exactly comment.
Google for light year, astronomical unit, divide the two and multiply by 10. You get 632396.7165
1: is pretty good. Wrong in the last place.
2: is wrong, and probably sarcasm
3: is a factor of 10 out, plus some change
4: is actually the closest, but gives the answer to 7 places when it's wrong in the fourth. So, it's more wrong than 1: i.e. it claims an accuracy of + or - 0.05, and is out by 32, that's a factor of 640. 1: (presumably, though it's not actually using standard form) claims + or - 500 and is 1396.7 out - a mere factor of 2.8
Therefore, after some consideration (and in the anticipation of controversy), the drxray prize for accuracy in pointless calculation goes to Mr Anonymous Coward!*
*unless someone's found a Mersenne Prime recently:)
When you're flying a plane, stuff is pretty far away. I don't think your eyes actually get any parallax on the ground when it's a kilometre away, so both projectors end up displaying the same thing.
A back of the envelope calculation gives 0.004 degrees difference in angle between your two lines of sight at 1 km, or 16 arcseconds. Your eye's resolution (they are pretty much diffraction-limited, AFAIK) is something like twice that, so you'd only get any kind of 3d effect on stuff within ~500metres - probably less. (This is assuming your projectors aren't the limiting factor in resolution.) So, it would be helpful for landing, but pretty useless mid-flight. On the other hand, it would be a brilliant setup for fragging!
Except, I think web designers forget that us mere mortals have just the one screen. Many sites look terrible if you're reading them in a fairly small window, because you're e.g. using an instant messenger or watching a video at the same time. A good web designer will check a site works in 640x480, a great one will check 1150x250. And no sound! Can't you tell I'm listening to an MP3 here?
Did they try using a landline for the same length of time? Or some other kind of communication with similar characteristics to a mobile (i.e. crappy, unreliable signal, pathetic microphone and speaker, background noise, poor volume so you have to half-shout all the time). These seem like the major problems with mobile phones to me. Just holding something up to your head for 4 hours a day probably isn't very good for your wrist or your face... Maybe it is the RF, but there are a lot of potential factors there, not only physical, but the mental stress of being in constant contact can't be good for you either.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the Outer Space Treaty says no governments own space.
Yeah, gametab misses some, on a quick scroll of the list there's no Iridion 1 or Snood. I also spotted a game that isn't out yet in English (AFAIK) - Fire Emblem 2. But, assuming those two effects cancel out then we're still taking 400-650 games (I wouldn't be surprised if it was at the lower end of that scale since of the ~2000 released I'd expect Japan to get a larger share than the other territories). Anyway, that's a lot of games, in the same league as the Xbox though not as many as the PS2...
The GBA and GBA SP take the same cartridges, and are the exact same hardware in different packages. The launch of the SP did not make an original GBA out of date, they play the same games.
They are still releasing new GBA games even though the DS is out. The GBA has an absolutely huge game library, there are nearly 2000 games for it (I base this on the ROM numbering system used by warez groups, this counts each localised version seperately so you should really divide by 3), you can't complain that it hasn't been developed for.
Finally, all these handhelds are backwards compatible - the DS plays GBA games and the GBA plays gameboy games.
Well, what do you expect if you insist on overclocking your organs...
But, astronomers use "Solar Masses", not "Sun Masses". Basically, the problem here is that English is pointlessly crufty. I can't imagine how much thought must be wasted producing "correct" English.
In zero gravity conditions, you measure the mass of* something by attaching it to a spring and measuring the frequency of oscillation. This measures mass directly, not weight. You can obviously do it under gravity as well (watch fat people bungee...), it's just less convenient than using scales.
*ironically, given the discussion, I wrote "weigh" here when I first wrote this...
If this was a MIDI file, why distribute by MP3? The same music at 10 times the file size...
But it's not actually the first episode, since there was a miniseries before... it starts with a "previously, on Battlestar Galactica", which is a bit annoying... still, it's free.
"we can't play Street Fighter 2 or Tekken online because the latency is too much"
I refer you to
Dead or Alive Ultimate, playable over Xbox Live.
Street Fighter 2 for Matching Service. This used modems dialled into Capcom servers.
There are others. I should also point out that allowing levelling up in a beat-em-up is a bad idea, their gameplay mechanics are intended to be balanced and the winner is the skilled (sometimes lucky) player.
Yeah, tried the link, it's fine. generic-man, I'm not too sure about the controls on a pocket PC... most of the ones I've seen look a bit crap for gaming, more designed for using a stylus. Can you strafe easily, for instance?
:)
If I really wanted a good mobile game of Doom, I'd probably get a GP32. Or a laptop with a mouse so I could play zdoom, and play 4 player multiplayer (which the GP32 might do, I don't know), use bots etc. Maybe if we wait a year or two Doom will get ported to PSP with its neat wireless multiplayer.
Of course, the major bonus of a pocket PC is that if you're lucky, you can get your employer to buy you one, and you can take it to meetings
The GBA has a 240x160 screen, and Doom was designed for 320x240, preferably 640x480. The GBA version also isn't all that smooth, presumably the CPU (~16 Mhz Arm7 I think)isn't quite as powerful as Doom would like. This device has slightly more reasonable specs, i.e. a 320x240 screen and a 400 Mhz Xscale, and also a hard drive so you can add extra maps or use mods (I love that Doom railgun!).
Still, that said, I'm not going to rush out and buy one to replace my GBA...
Excellent point. But, maybe the aliens are converting the energy to matter, to build more dyson spheres.
(no, I don't believe that either)
OK, I'll do it.
Single-star dyson spheres: number_of_stars*4*pi*radius^2
where radius is the radius you build the sphere at. number_of_stars is something like 10^11
Galaxy dyson sphere: 1*2*pi*8_kiloparsecs^2
16 kiloparsecs is given as the approximation of the galaxy in question's diameter. I'm using 2*pi*radius^2 since you can build a flattened spheroid... spiral galaxies are pretty flat.
n.b. 1 parsec = 3.1x10^16 m
1 earth-sun distance (astronomical unit) = 1.50x10^11 m
so surface area of case 1 over case 2 is
radius^2*7.3x10^-8
where radius is in astronomical units. So, if you take a pretty conservative case and build your sphere at the same distance the Earth is at, then you have to use about 10^7 times more material to build a galaxy sphere. (I'm sure with most stars you could build it a lot closer, and live on the outside)
Still, interesting idea, and I agree totally that it would be prettier. It might have a problem with stars hitting it though...
Anyway, to get a little more on-topic, it's impossible in this case since astronomers detected hydrogen in the galaxy, they just haven't observed any stars. So the stars could be covered, the whole galaxy couldn't be.
/. main page, near the bottom, there's a link saying "yesterday's news". If I miss my daily dose, I click on that and read what's there. Granted, the discussion has died down somewhat, but you can always find someone to talk to about any issue on the net...
Pretty damn hard, apparently. You spelt it wrong twice in one sentence.
Bah-boom CHHH!
Petty Cash.
Do U.S. companies not do this? Have £50 or so in small notes and change locked in a drawer somewhere, you swap the receipt for your doodad with money from the petty cash box. Maybe you sign a paper ledger and someone types that in whenever they're sorting the accounts out. Seems like a better system than letting people potentially mess your whole company's payroll up by accident. In fact, I'd much rather keep vital stuff like accounts on a computer not connected to the network at all, not having a route to the internet is a great defence against viruses or crackers. I suppose the feasability of this depends on if your organisation uses electronic timesheets or not.
It's pretty cool. I downloaded all five CDs of Solaris 10 x86 in under ten minutes. And running a 32-player Unreal Tournament server needs at least a 10 Mbps connection, preferably several times more if you're using custom maps (as players will download the maps off you). It's also nice to have the slow part of smaller downloads being you typing in where you want the file saved, rather than the actual downloading.
I can't wait for legal film downloads.
That said, if you're just using the net rather than serving stuff, a couple of megabits and a little patience works just as well.
What he said. TimeSplitters 2 > TS1 > Goldeneye 64 > not worth it*.
Mind you, unreal champsionship 2 and TS 3 are both out soon.
*haven't played halo 2. Maybe it got better.
I'm still waiting till we have a black Queen of England :)
Yes, but that was how the point system worked, at least in the versions I've played. Drop outside the camera's view (which followed the lead player), and you lost a point, whilst the leader gained one. They took a rubber-band mechanism and made it into an AFAIK unique gameplay.
Anyway, this whole discussion is pretty moot. Unless this game gets released for the Cube I'm not likely to play it so I can't exactly comment.
Google for light year, astronomical unit, divide the two and multiply by 10. You get 632396.7165
:)
1: is pretty good. Wrong in the last place.
2: is wrong, and probably sarcasm
3: is a factor of 10 out, plus some change
4: is actually the closest, but gives the answer to 7 places when it's wrong in the fourth. So, it's more wrong than 1: i.e. it claims an accuracy of + or - 0.05, and is out by 32, that's a factor of 640. 1: (presumably, though it's not actually using standard form) claims + or - 500 and is 1396.7 out - a mere factor of 2.8
Therefore, after some consideration (and in the anticipation of controversy), the drxray prize for accuracy in pointless calculation goes to Mr Anonymous Coward!*
*unless someone's found a Mersenne Prime recently
When you're flying a plane, stuff is pretty far away. I don't think your eyes actually get any parallax on the ground when it's a kilometre away, so both projectors end up displaying the same thing.
A back of the envelope calculation gives 0.004 degrees difference in angle between your two lines of sight at 1 km, or 16 arcseconds. Your eye's resolution (they are pretty much diffraction-limited, AFAIK) is something like twice that, so you'd only get any kind of 3d effect on stuff within ~500metres - probably less. (This is assuming your projectors aren't the limiting factor in resolution.) So, it would be helpful for landing, but pretty useless mid-flight. On the other hand, it would be a brilliant setup for fragging!
l37z 5u3 th3|\/| u|\|d3r t3h D.|\/|.(.4.!
Except, I think web designers forget that us mere mortals have just the one screen. Many sites look terrible if you're reading them in a fairly small window, because you're e.g. using an instant messenger or watching a video at the same time. A good web designer will check a site works in 640x480, a great one will check 1150x250.
And no sound! Can't you tell I'm listening to an MP3 here?
Did they try using a landline for the same length of time? Or some other kind of communication with similar characteristics to a mobile (i.e. crappy, unreliable signal, pathetic microphone and speaker, background noise, poor volume so you have to half-shout all the time).
These seem like the major problems with mobile phones to me. Just holding something up to your head for 4 hours a day probably isn't very good for your wrist or your face...
Maybe it is the RF, but there are a lot of potential factors there, not only physical, but the mental stress of being in constant contact can't be good for you either.