The imaging system used is a monochromatic camera, because they are simpler to operate and calibrate. The science teams aren't particularly interested in colour photography, the filters are there to narrow down the response range of the detector to provide some useful information on the surface properties of the things they image, as different minerals reflect/absorb/scatter light differently. By using filters of known transmission characteristics you can infer things about the soil and rocks around you. A colour CCD like you have in your average digital camera wouldn't be able to do this. As a side-effect you can colorise and recombine the images to approximate a colour picture as you might see if you were stood there yourself. Some NASA PR guys stitch these together while the science team go to work on the black and white stuff.
Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data...
Is that from all instruments or just a subset? If all that's pretty impressive.
the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.
So what do your postgrads pretend to do now to cover up the fact that they're playing quake all day?;)
I can see the benefit of an SMS telling you the event has occurred so you can get to a workstation and look at the raw data yourself. But surely sending the actual data to your phone is a little over the top?
It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?
True. Halley's Comet is ideal for this kind of observation because it has one of the most accurately known orbits of all comets of this kind of orbital period. But you shouldn't see this as just a comet finding exercise (though it does prove the capabilities of the VLT rather well). By analysing the image further it will be possible to determine whether there is any activity at this distance, or a residual dust cloud. Depending on what filters they used for the observation, they might be able to compare the "colour" of the nucleus with that observed by the spacecraft back in 1986 and look for changes. This might indicate a change in surface conditions at large distances form the sun.
According to this page only 3 of 26 missions to Venus have been total failures. When you consider that Venus is a much more hostile environment than Mars then you have to conclude that either Mars is just plain unlucky or mission planners are getting something wrong.
I would assume this is not the case. This means that this event only happens when the Earth and Mercury are approximately at the point of intersection of the two orbital planes at the correct time.
Correct. Mercury's orbit is inclined at 7 degrees to that of the earth. This makes the chances that mercury will cross the solar disk (roughly half a degree apparent diameter) at the exact moment rrequired for a transit pretty slim...
This has very little significance. a) It is not possible for 5 planets to transit the Sun, since only two planets are closer to the sun than Earth. b) It has never happened before. (see a) c) Alignments of several planets in a row do happen, if very rarely. The combined gravitational effect of the planets is still tiny when compared to that of the Sun which makes up the VAST majority of the mass of the solar system.
I think you've missed something The tiny screen is just for controlling the DVD playback while he sends the full movie picture to a projector for full massive movie viewing.
The only benchmarks available are for V5 5500 (both PCI and AGP) products. I've never seen one where the 5500 beats a GeForce2 Ultra and I've never seen one where it beat a GeForce2 GTS either, although the gap was smaller at higher resolutions (ie fill rate limited). There are no benchmarks available for the V5 6000 as yet.
One other thing that complicates matters is the FSAA issue which on V5 boards is done in hardware and on GF2 is software. I couldn't quote fps figures as they all suffer a performance hit, but I do know that almost every review I've read says that the V5 AA looks better.
The main reason I'll probably buy one is because it has the four VSA-100 units. In a fill rate limited situation that is going to make a whole load of difference. I've seen benchmarks of the V5 5500 compared to a Geforce2GTS on a number of the usual sites and while the GeForce is faster, as the resolution increases the gap narrows.
I don't expect the 6000 to be faster than a GTS Ultra at 640x480 say but at 1024x768 and above I wouldn't be surprised if it gave it a run for it's money.
I've still got a voodoo2 setup. Two of them SLI'd up. My framerate is essentially resolution independent from what I've determined so having 4-way SLI sounds good to me.
Not sure about the external power supply, it does sound dodgy in cases of kicking it out etc. but on the other hand my 235W power supply could do with some help so why not? Some sort of catch or clip perhaps to stop it getting accidentally removed?
A relevant write up which everyone may have seen already can be found in John Carmack's.plan file. Which is one of the better summaries I've seen of the current situation with graphics cards for gamers.
Just how is this story different from this one, posted over the weekend?
Wake up guys...
Re:I Can Identify John Katz's Posts By The Title
on
The New Mediascape
·
· Score: 1
> Is mediascape even a real word?
Unlikely, but it is better than "recognizance" which I saw in a Katz headline the other day. Or did someone repeal the word "recognition"? Guess I must have missed that post.
Coupla things really. First I'm pretty sure FPS wasn't the last genre of game to be invented, but maybe I'm a bit hazy on dates. I'd have thought Dune 2 invented RTS, but was that before or after Wolfenstein?
And what about the soldier sim? Games like Delta Force 2, Rainbow Spear, Shadow Company and top of my chart, Hidden and Dangerous, don't count as FPS in my book as they're all about squad tactics and using team members with different strengths and weaknesses. Game slike that have only recently started to appear.
Games like Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu are also hard to place in the FPS band. They're stealth'em ups
If you think there is a decline in genres (something I'm not so sure of) then it's probably down to growth in consoles. Consoles are less flexible in their control methods so it's not possible to do a flight sim with 90 odd controls.
Another problem with the flight sim is that the emphasis is on realism and, in the end, except for the hardcore aviator no one can be arsed to learn how to fly that precisely. Especially when they also have to manage the campaign, set all the way points, load the ordnance and direct 4 wingmen to their targets at the same time.
From what I remember about the maximum resolution of Hubble, it would be capable of resolving features around 20m across on the Moon's surface. But they can't point it at the Moon because the amount of light would overload the more sensitive electronics on board.
And what would be the point, when 90%+ of the surface of the Moon has been imaged at superior resolution by lunar orbiting satellites already?
I'm going to ignore the whole veggie rant thing and just talk about the way games are classified in the UK. At the moment games are not subject to any mandatory classification, but will have a tiny little mark on the back describing the recommended age group. In my experience very few people take any notice. However it is fairly common for games to be submitted by the publishers for classification by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), the body who rate movies and videos before release. This is because the legal boundaries between videos/films and games are somewhat blurred since everyone started using decent graphics so publishers play it safe and submit their games. Being fairly cynical I'd also say that they submit their games for classification in the hope that a certificate will be refused, which is effectively a ban on the distribution of the game. When this happens they can make a huge fuss and get loads of free publicity and when released the game sells like something that sells REALLY fast (I haven't had any coffee yet this morning so the similes are lacking somewhat). Two notable cases of this are Carmageddon (1 and 2) and Grand Theft Auto. Both of which made it onto TV news - advertising you just can't buy.
For the record Soldier of Fortune was given an 18 rating - the highest, with no fuss. I bought it and was suitably impressed with the realism of the game engine in how it deals with shots and blows to different parts of the body and the motion capture etc, and pretty unimpressed with the extremely linear level design and bollocks plot.
Slashdot Mirror
The imaging system used is a monochromatic camera, because they are simpler to operate and calibrate. The science teams aren't particularly interested in colour photography, the filters are there to narrow down the response range of the detector to provide some useful information on the surface properties of the things they image, as different minerals reflect/absorb/scatter light differently. By using filters of known transmission characteristics you can infer things about the soil and rocks around you. A colour CCD like you have in your average digital camera wouldn't be able to do this.
As a side-effect you can colorise and recombine the images to approximate a colour picture as you might see if you were stood there yourself. Some NASA PR guys stitch these together while the science team go to work on the black and white stuff.
Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data ...
;)
Is that from all instruments or just a subset? If all that's pretty impressive.
the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.
So what do your postgrads pretend to do now to cover up the fact that they're playing quake all day?
I can see the benefit of an SMS telling you the event has occurred so you can get to a workstation and look at the raw data yourself. But surely sending the actual data to your phone is a little over the top?
It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?
True. Halley's Comet is ideal for this kind of observation because it has one of the most accurately known orbits of all comets of this kind of orbital period.
But you shouldn't see this as just a comet finding exercise (though it does prove the capabilities of the VLT rather well).
By analysing the image further it will be possible to determine whether there is any activity at this distance, or a residual dust cloud. Depending on what filters they used for the observation, they might be able to compare the "colour" of the nucleus with that observed by the spacecraft back in 1986 and look for changes. This might indicate a change in surface conditions at large distances form the sun.
That should be European Southern Observatory (www.eso.org).
According to this page only 3 of 26 missions to Venus have been total failures. When you consider that Venus is a much more hostile environment than Mars then you have to conclude that either Mars is just plain unlucky or mission planners are getting something wrong.
1. Do you know how to drive an aircraft carrier? I don't think it has merely a gas/brake/steering wheel.
;)
Absolutely not. It was built in England so has a clutch pedal too.
I would assume this is not the case. This means that this event only happens when the Earth and Mercury are approximately at the point of intersection of the two orbital planes at the correct time.
Correct. Mercury's orbit is inclined at 7 degrees to that of the earth. This makes the chances that mercury will cross the solar disk (roughly half a degree apparent diameter) at the exact moment rrequired for a transit pretty slim...
This has very little significance.
a) It is not possible for 5 planets to transit the Sun, since only two planets are closer to the sun than Earth.
b) It has never happened before. (see a)
c) Alignments of several planets in a row do happen, if very rarely. The combined gravitational effect of the planets is still tiny when compared to that of the Sun which makes up the VAST majority of the mass of the solar system.
The PC version is due on May 13th in the US and May 16th in UK (and europe?). This is according to a Gamesdomain news story I saw yetserday.
As Kang once said... "Your superior intellect is no match for our primitive weapons."
I think you've missed something The tiny screen is just for controlling the DVD playback while he sends the full movie picture to a projector for full massive movie viewing.
well I dunno what the symbol is (kinda hard to tell) but from the mobo specs on the Lex page it has to be an S-VHS TV-out.
I've used Matrox cads before and while I can't fault the 2D image quality, i've had trouble with drivers especially OpenGL ones.
IIRC one film that is unavailable, and likely to stay that way. Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. There's a couple of others but I can't remember them...
Let me get this straight, you're complaining that you have the best browser available? I don't understand...
The only benchmarks available are for V5 5500 (both PCI and AGP) products. I've never seen one where the 5500 beats a GeForce2 Ultra and I've never seen one where it beat a GeForce2 GTS either, although the gap was smaller at higher resolutions (ie fill rate limited). There are no benchmarks available for the V5 6000 as yet.
One other thing that complicates matters is the FSAA issue which on V5 boards is done in hardware and on GF2 is software. I couldn't quote fps figures as they all suffer a performance hit, but I do know that almost every review I've read says that the V5 AA looks better.
I don't expect the 6000 to be faster than a GTS Ultra at 640x480 say but at 1024x768 and above I wouldn't be surprised if it gave it a run for it's money.
I've still got a voodoo2 setup. Two of them SLI'd up. My framerate is essentially resolution independent from what I've determined so having 4-way SLI sounds good to me.
Not sure about the external power supply, it does sound dodgy in cases of kicking it out etc. but on the other hand my 235W power supply could do with some help so why not? Some sort of catch or clip perhaps to stop it getting accidentally removed?
A relevant write up which everyone may have seen already can be found in John Carmack's
Wake up guys...
Unlikely, but it is better than "recognizance" which I saw in a Katz headline the other day. Or did someone repeal the word "recognition"? Guess I must have missed that post.
And what about the soldier sim? Games like Delta Force 2, Rainbow Spear, Shadow Company and top of my chart, Hidden and Dangerous, don't count as FPS in my book as they're all about squad tactics and using team members with different strengths and weaknesses. Game slike that have only recently started to appear.
Games like Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu are also hard to place in the FPS band. They're stealth'em ups
If you think there is a decline in genres (something I'm not so sure of) then it's probably down to growth in consoles. Consoles are less flexible in their control methods so it's not possible to do a flight sim with 90 odd controls.
Another problem with the flight sim is that the emphasis is on realism and, in the end, except for the hardcore aviator no one can be arsed to learn how to fly that precisely. Especially when they also have to manage the campaign, set all the way points, load the ordnance and direct 4 wingmen to their targets at the same time.
That'll do me for now...
From what I remember about the maximum resolution of Hubble, it would be capable of resolving features around 20m across on the Moon's surface. But they can't point it at the Moon because the amount of light would overload the more sensitive electronics on board.
And what would be the point, when 90%+ of the surface of the Moon has been imaged at superior resolution by lunar orbiting satellites already?
I'm going to ignore the whole veggie rant thing and just talk about the way games are classified in the UK.
At the moment games are not subject to any mandatory classification, but will have a tiny little mark on the back describing the recommended age group. In my experience very few people take any notice.
However it is fairly common for games to be submitted by the publishers for classification by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), the body who rate movies and videos before release. This is because the legal boundaries between videos/films and games are somewhat blurred since everyone started using decent graphics so publishers play it safe and submit their games.
Being fairly cynical I'd also say that they submit their games for classification in the hope that a certificate will be refused, which is effectively a ban on the distribution of the game. When this happens they can make a huge fuss and get loads of free publicity and when released the game sells like something that sells REALLY fast (I haven't had any coffee yet this morning so the similes are lacking somewhat). Two notable cases of this are Carmageddon (1 and 2) and Grand Theft Auto. Both of which made it onto TV news - advertising you just can't buy.
For the record Soldier of Fortune was given an 18 rating - the highest, with no fuss. I bought it and was suitably impressed with the realism of the game engine in how it deals with shots and blows to different parts of the body and the motion capture etc, and pretty unimpressed with the extremely linear level design and bollocks plot.
I'd be much more interested in the "Unarmed Nuclear Warfare HOWTO"...
But the Write once disk they talk about is only 30mm across. So it's 5 times smaller but with similar capacity... Ideal for notebooks.