I'm an Mechanical/Aerospace engineer and I find legos pretty restrictive in the ways they can be pieced together. But that's just me... don't get me wrong, I loved them when I was a kid, and my son in a few years will have a slew of them, but as a platform for development they are just too 1-dimensional. They stack up, in order to connect left-right you have to stack up or use pins and brackets, etc. Other development systems like Fischertechnik or VEX even are a lot more similar to real-world engineering techniques. But again, I'm an engineer.
The thing that killed me about the NXT though is the lack of IO. My brother has one, I taught him the fundamentals to get him up-and-running last time I was home, but the number of IO/motor ports are so restrictive. 4 inputs, 3 outputs. You need 2 motors for a simple differential drive, and one motor is pretty pointless except for the most trivial grabber or (if you were doing a car-type base instead of differential drive) steering mechanism.
From the Article: Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that "Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264" -- protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.
In other words they are drawing conclusions from two missing entries that may turn out to be typos or may be missing for a reason other than compatibility. Just another FUD-laden EFF article.
Some may argue it's limited in scale. But find me another set where you have 3 motor servos, an ultrasound sensor, light sensor, touch sensor, microphone, speaker, lcd display, flash storage for programs, easy to use software, usb connection, guaranteed compatibility between sensors and the system, about 500-600 pieces, and a huge support base in case you need help. Lego has that all hands down.
Fischertechnik. It is double the price but worth it. Many colleges use it in their robotics curriculum. The parts are able to connect in three dimensions, they aren't "bricks" but have slots on all sides and connector pins so any 2 blocks can mate in any orientation. The controller has more IO ports, the ability to natively program in "real" programming languages verses a GUI (granted with the NXT you can program in NQC [C], BASIC, and.NET if you can get the non-supported additional software working).
For example: Industrial robotic systems using Fischertechnik. They show some very large-scale assembly line robotics processes. Some very cool stuff. Click on the "Computing Kits" link for kit information. There are a few different kits with motors, pneumatics, etc.
Lego's are fine - my 12 year old brother makes robots using the NXT kit - but if you are in the slashdot age and are serious about this, Fischertechnik might be the way to go.
Paper does not ensure that the counters will count accurately. Paper does not ensure that the counters are not subject to a poltical bias or bribes. Only a well-defined process with proper auditing, traceability, etc. regardless of the actual method used to poll the constituents, is the method that will be accurate.
fta: Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said.
Yeah, but the PhysX card is doing something different, and handling it differently... believe me... otherwise we'd be seeing a lawsuit:) This card is not handling full body physics rather AI, which are real easy to describe in very few terms, versus a full suite of physics which yes, takes a lot of data.
Just cause two cards push data across a bus doesn't mean they will have the same faults. That's like comparing your sound card to your NIC. They do two differnt things, consume two different levels of bandwidth, etc.
occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side)
It is not abnormal to present both english and metric units in a presentation such as this when you have a diverse audience (the source was the BBC, although it appears the article submitter did his own math to get the side length). 110-108.83 = 1.17 meters, which is 1.06% off. Which is more than acceptable when talking to the "common man"... now when ordering the carpenting, on the other hand...
For example in Everquest (sorry, not all that familiar with World of Warcraft) there was Kerafyrm, the great crystalline dragon otherwise known as "the sleeper" because he was in an eternal slumber due to the workings of other dragons, but I'll leave you to research that story on your own. Anyways he was buff - so buff no guild could ever hope to defeat him. Well, five or so years into the game several guilds (on a PVP server no less - and everquest PVP is multi factioned, not horde VS alliance, these multiple factions worked together) took down the sleeper. It took several hours and he is no more on that server.
Another instance is the city of Firiona Vie. Normally a gooodie city in evil territory it was sieged and taken over by Lanys. World event happened, players were encouraged to participate, and the zone map changed as a consequence.
Another instance is the godamn froglok race (I hate frogloks). When they came into being they kicked the trolls out of Grobb. Another big deal was made out of this, zone map changes, etc.
Everquest, at least, is a living MMO. The storyline evolves. Things die off. Other things come to life. And in the case of Everquest, the game **will** end - we know that, EQ2 is set in the future and based on the storyline there we know just about what is going to happen.
If there was an actual plotline (in terms of exposition, hook, rising action, climax,falling action, and resolution) then one would be able to "Beat Wow"
You are confusing one player's story with the story of the world as a whole.
The world has one story. I have my own. That's another interesting thing about EQ - from time to time players get commemorated for their actions and receive a title. Generally for completing an event run by a GM in game. In addition by being part of a guild or at least a group of friends, you create your own stories. And roleplaying your characters - at least in EQ you were given a huge bank of lore, I'm assuming for WoW it's the same - you could be who you wanted to be, the typical human male or a rebel Iksar. And with factions as diverse as they were you could screw your city and decide to take up residence somewhere else. Hard work, but possible. Its your story.
(Hope I don't come off as an EQ shill, just spent the better part of 4 years of my life there... and although my wife plays WoW I don't... )
They want to completely ruin game performance by killing the PCI bus bandwidth
Positional updates to a character in the game are very low bandwidth - I mean, MMO's do this all the time and don't saturate network connections, much less a PCI buss. The calculations are heavy but the input and end result are just a few numbers, plus a terrain map you would load once and forget until you zone, at which time a little latency is happening anyways.
causing the GPU to stall waiting on the position/orientation and generated geometry that it will have to render?
Read carefully. It isn't generating terrain, just sending around updates. Diffs between 2 meshes don't have to be big. The mesh will probably stay the same, just relocate. Send an array of updated points with the corresponding indices. It isn't hard to imagine that a dedicated processor could do these things significantly faster than a processor that is already breaking its behind doing thousands of matrix transformations, player calculations, sound and graphics effects, etc.
Instead of going to a movie once a month, play a MMO. Or, instead of going out to eat once or twice, play a MMO. A music CD will cost you about the same...
$15 doesn't buy much nowadays in the entertainment world, a whole months worth of entertainment for $15 is a deal! (And if you play Everquest 1 year is $100! Less than $10 a month.)
If you want to do cross platform computers do OpenGL/(some windowing toolkit)... but you will still have inconsistencies between each platform. Unfortunately.
... which can be broken down into oxygen and carbon monoxide. Oxygen is breathable. Now, lunar regolith does have oxygen but from what I'm told the process on Mars isn't that hard to extract oxygen. And Zubrin proposes a process to make fuel from the CO (only done on labscale to date, take with a grain of salt for real-world work...)
What used to be a time filled with heroes that inspired a generation of space travellers
1. Remember, we had to beat those Russians. It wasn't just walking on the moon that inspired, it was the American spirit, the fact that we (finally) won. The russians beat us in every other space milestone, until we walked on the moon. Nowadays we don't have an enemy in space to beat - so there is no reason to derive a sense of national pride or heroism from space travel. They are just scientists and engineers, just like any other scientists and engineer working in a lab or research facility. They just get a cool ride once in awhile. has now become a time where going to a space station is a big deal
2. Back in the Apollo days it was "space exploration" and human life was considered expendable. Now that we aren't facing the Russians we are more careful. Its like how people get all up-in-arms over human testing of drugs. We don't think the research is worth losing 7 human lives every now and then. That is why going to Space Station is always made out to be "such a big deal."
3. If you want to have it back to the "good old days" then NASA needs more money. Orion is being built for less than the Saturn V, and is expected to do a far more aggressive mission.
OK, if you buy into Zubrin's method of generating fuel (Which again, as another poster has mentioned, has only been done on a lab scale test and never in the field, much less sent on a probe to Mars) you still have a deficit of 200T for the remaining supplies to support your crew. If you read the Case for Mars, you know he advocates mission stays on the order of years, and that is a lot of supplies...
I like Zubrin's writings - I own all of his books - but he is a freaking optomist, not to mention he makes a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions. You know what they say about assumptions....
IF you are interested in never going farther in robotics the Lego system is darn nice and easier to deal with, but if you want to program your Bot in C or C++ (or even ruby) under a real time OS you have to do some really ugly hacks.
Mindstorms has a C compiler, a RTOS, and even a.NET port. Not all that hard to work with, either (I know... my little brother has one, and I've assisted in the FIRST robotics competitions) I'm not saying they don't have limitations - I prefer a MC68HC11 board myself - but prettymuch every dig you have about the Mindstorms kit is patently false.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the fact that the very artic ice that is used to pull measurements from samples frozen thousands of years ago is melting away as we speak.
...
Can't have an ice ages unless it gets warm in between
You are just as likely to get oral cancer, especially lip cancer.
thats why we do an envirrrronmental impact analysis.
I'm an Mechanical/Aerospace engineer and I find legos pretty restrictive in the ways they can be pieced together. But that's just me... don't get me wrong, I loved them when I was a kid, and my son in a few years will have a slew of them, but as a platform for development they are just too 1-dimensional. They stack up, in order to connect left-right you have to stack up or use pins and brackets, etc. Other development systems like Fischertechnik or VEX even are a lot more similar to real-world engineering techniques. But again, I'm an engineer.
The thing that killed me about the NXT though is the lack of IO. My brother has one, I taught him the fundamentals to get him up-and-running last time I was home, but the number of IO/motor ports are so restrictive. 4 inputs, 3 outputs. You need 2 motors for a simple differential drive, and one motor is pretty pointless except for the most trivial grabber or (if you were doing a car-type base instead of differential drive) steering mechanism.
(let the flame war ensue)
thar ninjas, they be conspirin to bury the pirate party in ol' Davy's lockaaar.
From the Article: Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that "Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264" -- protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.
In other words they are drawing conclusions from two missing entries that may turn out to be typos or may be missing for a reason other than compatibility. Just another FUD-laden EFF article.
Some may argue it's limited in scale. But find me another set where you have 3 motor servos, an ultrasound sensor, light sensor, touch sensor, microphone, speaker, lcd display, flash storage for programs, easy to use software, usb connection, guaranteed compatibility between sensors and the system, about 500-600 pieces, and a huge support base in case you need help. Lego has that all hands down.
.NET if you can get the non-supported additional software working).
Fischertechnik. It is double the price but worth it. Many colleges use it in their robotics curriculum. The parts are able to connect in three dimensions, they aren't "bricks" but have slots on all sides and connector pins so any 2 blocks can mate in any orientation. The controller has more IO ports, the ability to natively program in "real" programming languages verses a GUI (granted with the NXT you can program in NQC [C], BASIC, and
For example: Industrial robotic systems using Fischertechnik. They show some very large-scale assembly line robotics processes. Some very cool stuff. Click on the "Computing Kits" link for kit information. There are a few different kits with motors, pneumatics, etc.
Lego's are fine - my 12 year old brother makes robots using the NXT kit - but if you are in the slashdot age and are serious about this, Fischertechnik might be the way to go.
I musn't run away...I musn't run away...
I musn't run away...I musn't run away!!!
*sigh* shinji is such a little b*tch.
can't forget the Noid!
and a bigger screen... and you won't look like 90% of the yuppies out there.
counted and counted correctly
Paper does not ensure that the counters will count accurately. Paper does not ensure that the counters are not subject to a poltical bias or bribes. Only a well-defined process with proper auditing, traceability, etc. regardless of the actual method used to poll the constituents, is the method that will be accurate.
It was a ID10T error .... they forgot the cards.
fta: Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said.
Yeah, but the PhysX card is doing something different, and handling it differently ... believe me ... otherwise we'd be seeing a lawsuit :) This card is not handling full body physics rather AI, which are real easy to describe in very few terms, versus a full suite of physics which yes, takes a lot of data.
Just cause two cards push data across a bus doesn't mean they will have the same faults. That's like comparing your sound card to your NIC. They do two differnt things, consume two different levels of bandwidth, etc.
occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side) It is not abnormal to present both english and metric units in a presentation such as this when you have a diverse audience (the source was the BBC, although it appears the article submitter did his own math to get the side length). 110-108.83 = 1.17 meters, which is 1.06% off. Which is more than acceptable when talking to the "common man" ... now when ordering the carpenting, on the other hand ...
For example in Everquest (sorry, not all that familiar with World of Warcraft) there was Kerafyrm, the great crystalline dragon otherwise known as "the sleeper" because he was in an eternal slumber due to the workings of other dragons, but I'll leave you to research that story on your own. Anyways he was buff - so buff no guild could ever hope to defeat him. Well, five or so years into the game several guilds (on a PVP server no less - and everquest PVP is multi factioned, not horde VS alliance, these multiple factions worked together) took down the sleeper. It took several hours and he is no more on that server.
Another instance is the city of Firiona Vie. Normally a gooodie city in evil territory it was sieged and taken over by Lanys. World event happened, players were encouraged to participate, and the zone map changed as a consequence.
Another instance is the godamn froglok race (I hate frogloks). When they came into being they kicked the trolls out of Grobb. Another big deal was made out of this, zone map changes, etc.
Everquest, at least, is a living MMO. The storyline evolves. Things die off. Other things come to life. And in the case of Everquest, the game **will** end - we know that, EQ2 is set in the future and based on the storyline there we know just about what is going to happen.
If there was an actual plotline (in terms of exposition, hook, rising action, climax,falling action, and resolution) then one would be able to "Beat Wow"
You are confusing one player's story with the story of the world as a whole.
The world has one story. I have my own. That's another interesting thing about EQ - from time to time players get commemorated for their actions and receive a title. Generally for completing an event run by a GM in game. In addition by being part of a guild or at least a group of friends, you create your own stories. And roleplaying your characters - at least in EQ you were given a huge bank of lore, I'm assuming for WoW it's the same - you could be who you wanted to be, the typical human male or a rebel Iksar. And with factions as diverse as they were you could screw your city and decide to take up residence somewhere else. Hard work, but possible. Its your story.
(Hope I don't come off as an EQ shill, just spent the better part of 4 years of my life there... and although my wife plays WoW I don't... )
They want to completely ruin game performance by killing the PCI bus bandwidth
Positional updates to a character in the game are very low bandwidth - I mean, MMO's do this all the time and don't saturate network connections, much less a PCI buss. The calculations are heavy but the input and end result are just a few numbers, plus a terrain map you would load once and forget until you zone, at which time a little latency is happening anyways.
causing the GPU to stall waiting on the position/orientation and generated geometry that it will have to render?
Read carefully. It isn't generating terrain, just sending around updates. Diffs between 2 meshes don't have to be big. The mesh will probably stay the same, just relocate. Send an array of updated points with the corresponding indices. It isn't hard to imagine that a dedicated processor could do these things significantly faster than a processor that is already breaking its behind doing thousands of matrix transformations, player calculations, sound and graphics effects, etc.
damn leafers.
Both Curt Schilling and R. A. Salvatore are former/current/long-time Everquest players. I'm very excited to see what they come up with.
Instead of going to a movie once a month, play a MMO. Or, instead of going out to eat once or twice, play a MMO. A music CD will cost you about the same...
$15 doesn't buy much nowadays in the entertainment world, a whole months worth of entertainment for $15 is a deal! (And if you play Everquest 1 year is $100! Less than $10 a month.)
PC/XBox360. But still, that's a big thing.
... but you will still have inconsistencies between each platform. Unfortunately.
If you want to do cross platform computers do OpenGL/(some windowing toolkit)
... which can be broken down into oxygen and carbon monoxide. Oxygen is breathable. Now, lunar regolith does have oxygen but from what I'm told the process on Mars isn't that hard to extract oxygen. And Zubrin proposes a process to make fuel from the CO (only done on labscale to date, take with a grain of salt for real-world work...)
What used to be a time filled with heroes that inspired a generation of space travellers
1. Remember, we had to beat those Russians. It wasn't just walking on the moon that inspired, it was the American spirit, the fact that we (finally) won. The russians beat us in every other space milestone, until we walked on the moon. Nowadays we don't have an enemy in space to beat - so there is no reason to derive a sense of national pride or heroism from space travel. They are just scientists and engineers, just like any other scientists and engineer working in a lab or research facility. They just get a cool ride once in awhile.
has now become a time where going to a space station is a big deal
2. Back in the Apollo days it was "space exploration" and human life was considered expendable. Now that we aren't facing the Russians we are more careful. Its like how people get all up-in-arms over human testing of drugs. We don't think the research is worth losing 7 human lives every now and then. That is why going to Space Station is always made out to be "such a big deal."
3. If you want to have it back to the "good old days" then NASA needs more money. Orion is being built for less than the Saturn V, and is expected to do a far more aggressive mission.
OK, if you buy into Zubrin's method of generating fuel (Which again, as another poster has mentioned, has only been done on a lab scale test and never in the field, much less sent on a probe to Mars) you still have a deficit of 200T for the remaining supplies to support your crew. If you read the Case for Mars, you know he advocates mission stays on the order of years, and that is a lot of supplies...
I like Zubrin's writings - I own all of his books - but he is a freaking optomist, not to mention he makes a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions. You know what they say about assumptions....
IF you are interested in never going farther in robotics the Lego system is darn nice and easier to deal with, but if you want to program your Bot in C or C++ (or even ruby) under a real time OS you have to do some really ugly hacks.
.NET port. Not all that hard to work with, either (I know ... my little brother has one, and I've assisted in the FIRST robotics competitions) I'm not saying they don't have limitations - I prefer a MC68HC11 board myself - but prettymuch every dig you have about the Mindstorms kit is patently false.
Mindstorms has a C compiler, a RTOS, and even a