Since friction gets converted to heat and given the temperatures that 10k and 15k drives like to operate at without adequate cooling, frankly I think there is a whole freaking lot of drag. You're equating smoothness as seen by the naked eye to atomic-level smoothness, which is just rubbish.
Btw, Physics 101 called and they are interested in your no-friction disk platters for their student's lab experiements.
The spinning foil platter problem... that's (fairly) trivial mechanical engineering. I'll trust the folks he's working with who have real credentials than some AC on./, thanks.
You assume the air between platters is stationary. I assert you're wrong on your initial assumption. Air between platters should tend to rotate with the platters. Similar to making a hollow, capped tube out of the cyl's and spinning it. The air inside isn't going stay motionless, it will speed up and eventually reach a steady state with the rotation.
The read/write heads will disrupt that air flow, but I did note I was assuming they were out of the way.
The platters have (per platter) a much smaller edge, so they're going to get less friction from the air. Less friction means less heat AND less power required to keep the disk spinning at the same velocity. The area isn't that big compared to the surface of the disk, but I'd guess (assuming the heads were at the outer tracks of the disk) that the air near the spindle spins with the disks and probably causes very little if any friction, so the majority source of air friction is going to be the edge (where it moves air around the "interesting" interior shape of the enclosure).
In his talk I referenced above, he specifically stated that they were using smaller/lower power motors because they didn't need as much power as a conventional disk. Also remember that conventional disk motors may have to be "overspecced" to be able to spin the disks up to speed in a reasonable amount of time, and that may make them less efficient when they're just trying to maintain speed rather than spin up. You'd have to ask an EE on that one though, 'cuz I'm not. Just another stab that occurs to me for why it may cost a lot less power.
He also referenced making higher-RPM drives than current methods. I want to say 30k sticks in my head, but I'm not sure on that you'd have to watch the talk to verify my tylenol cold muddled memory.
At the UIUC Reflections|Projects ACM conference. It was actually a fairly interesting talk (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2006/webcast.p hp) about the same topic, maybe a little more in-depth than the article. At least more pretty pictures than the article.
This is confusing. You claim that stopping nukes (or similar) has to be part of the solution. Then you claim that no single country can accurately monitor the activities of the others. How do you then propose to insure that everyone is following the guidelines and that there isn't a rogue state who is hiding their nukes and going to use one(/them) anyway?
I suppose you remove the ability to kill everyone and bring it back to "just kill some." But given that "some" could be a fairly large number, like a major metro area, I'm not sure I could call it that much better of a solution. Just a different, and also bad, solution.
A valid point, but consider the machine that BeOS was built (mainly) on: dual PPC 603@66Mhz with no L2 cache. (I believe the memory controller supported either 2 processors or 1 proc + L2 cache. The BeBox had 2 procs, thus no L2 cache.) The last thing for performance you want to do is waste the precious little L1 cache you have by having both processors have an (almost) mirror cache copy because they're trading threads off left and right.
Judging by how well most applications worked, (and certainly how well the system worked overall considering the low-end CPUs and no L2 cache), I'd say it is safe to say that programmers generally did things the right way and your worries are overblown.
With the heavily threaded nature of BeOS, even demanding apps would really fly on the quad+ core cpus that are preparing to take over the world.
Not that you couldn't do threading right in Windows, OS X, or Linux. But BeOS made it practically mandatory: each window was a new thread, as well as an application-level thread. Plus any others you wanted to create. So to make a crappy application that locks up when it is trying to do something (like update the state of 500+ nodes in a list; ARD3 I'm looking at you) actually took skill and dedication. The default state tended to be applications that wouldn't lockup while they worked, which is really nice.
Your starting assumptions are off-base. An internal combustion engine and associated stuff (battery, gas, gearing, all that good stuff) are HEAVY. Electric motors are "heavy", sure, but nothing like a petrol-product engine. All it would take is for their capacitor to be small and/or low-density and your 50 MPG assumption may be looking a wee bit low.
Look at any of the world's super-fast railways: France's TGV, or Japan's Bullet Train. They are both electric trains, powered by overhead lines. No heavy batteries, gas, or any of that. Now how heavy the claimed device is we don't know. If it is lightweight however, you can see where your math would be way off.
The original game (ep 1-3) is AWESOME for the lightsaber chopping action. "Why look it is Jar-Jar!" *chwooom* "yeoww!" *chwoom* "Yeahhoooww!" *schwoom* "Yeagh" *pops into jar-jar bits*
wget and less (or more likely, links or links2) will let you read the instructions and are standardly installed in even the most basic stage 1 install you do... or you can read the copy included on the install cd (copy to disk if you like, or remount the cd after reboot to the real OS). You'd need GPM, but that is a heck of a lot less than a working X setup (even excluding gnome).
I do have to admit I'm the type gentoo is targetted at. I built my first linux (m68k) from a "stage 1" root tarball and source.tar.gz by hand back around, umm must have been the '94-'95 school year. Source code and compiler errors don't scare me, they just annoy me.:-P
I was actually going to comment that the author is in fact just an idiot. That could be the same thing as "can't follow directions" for the purposes of installing a distro. For example:
The live CD didn't like the video card in my machine. I noticed as I booted that the text began about three-quarters of the way across the screen, then wrapped around to continue on the left side. When the GUI display appeared, it was similarly offset. Using the monitor's auto-image adjust feature, I was able to set the display properly.
This isn't a live CD problem. This says the resolution/h and v-freq the live CD happened to pick to drive your card at was not the same as what you had been running, and your monitor's adjustments for the old timings were off. The fact you talk about auto-image adjust fixing it tells me that the image that was being output was just fine, but the user observing it is not "just fine."
His ending comment about "a good programmer" is funny considering he tried to build his system like a bad programmer programs. He tried to compile everything as one blob and then is distressed one package broke (in programming: write whole app, test later). Duh. You install the least you have to (ssh, kernel, screen, grub, and associated libraries) then reboot under the real OS not under the live cd. Then ssh in, start a screen, and emerge what you want to have. You can monitor it remotely and kick it if needed.
Particularly handy if you find during the compiles that your hardware is slightly flakey and will bomb out a compile ever so often, but that when you restart it, it compiles fine.
Just require more great people to initiate. I think it is 3 for the second, 4 four the third, and so on. Not that I ever use great people for that, but I hear you could.
Actually I'm pretty sure my 2-3 year old PC would run Civ4 just fine, but I'll admit my machines are probably well above the "average" PC, especially in the memory and graphics memory. Heck, I can run Civ4 on my 3 year old laptop -- now I'll admit the terrain doesn't render on screen ("show tile production", units, and cities show up fine, which is most of what you need anyway) but c'mon. It is a ultra-portable laptop. The fact I got half a game played in on it while on the road (just after Civ4 came out) says that you're making a mountain out of a molehill. And that they didn't need to hog all that memory for graphics either, but that's another debate.
I think that global thermonuclear war is really a much more likely option than being wiped out my a miniature black hole. Or polluting the planet to such a state it is unable to sustain modern technological life.
Until MMOs die out (not looking likely) and voice chat takes the place of MMO text chat (yes just what I want to hear the oriental gold farmer spam-yelling "GOLD LOVEBUY SIXTY FOR ONE THOUSAND" in a bad accent), you can bet that PC gaming isn't going anywhere. Or until consoles get keyboards, I suppose, but those aren't usually standard equipment even if they are available.
Blizzard is claiming 7 mil subscribers right now. They're paying them $15 a month, which is about 3-4 games a year. Plus the expansion (when it comes out) and the initial game cost. So that's 21 to 28 million "copies" sold in what, two-ish years? Those numbers approach the "sales" numbers of some of the console world's bundled video games.
Since the Mhz jumps of the past seem to be by and large behind us these days, but we're looking at more and more cores, isn't it time that games become multithreaded and offload that nasty pathing work to a second core? Sure you could buy stupid shiny cards for the game physics and AI and network (some sort of network booster that avoids the OS's TCP stack -- posted a while back I believe), or alternatly just make use of the extra hardware that/will/ be in the box anyway.
Now, the decent AI toolkit that folks can license might be worth it anyway, when they figure out they should just run it on the CPU instead of their custom CPU-like-thing.
A day late but hey: You mean Asheron's Call II, the second big-name MMO to have closed its doors? (right behind Earth and Beyond Online)
They were a base-classes with specializations type hybrid between the pure class and pure skill systems. It didn't really work out so well for them.
World of Warcraft has done it to a lesser extent with the talent trees within each class -- particularly the hybrids (Paladin, Shaman, Druid) who can spec to heal/nuke/melee (to a greater or lesser degree in each). Problem is that only one spec in each is really that viable in the end-game raiding because Blizzard didn't do a good job designing the talent trees. They've fixed that somewhat for the druids and have pretty much wholly failed to fix it for the Paladin and Shamans.
Of course, with those two classes side-specific (until the expansion) that's not too much of a "gee ya think" as it could be -- fix one and watch the other side complain to no end. So as soon as they botched fixing the Paladin, they couldn't fix the Shaman (despite the Paladin being desired in the end-game raids, and Shaman... not so much really).
A lot of us like our skill-based MMO (and RPG)s thanks much. Really the aren't that much harder to balance -- you just need to balance the attacking skills that do damage versus each other (and versus cost) and you're 90% of the way there.
Asheron's Call, for all the flaws it may have did a fairly nice job of this WITHIN SETS. By that I mean, the melee skills: dagger, staff, spear, unarmed, mace, axe, sword were fairly balanced. The more you paid (low to high cost in that list) the more damage you did. But the more you paid, the less other skills you could get. Dagger cost 4 to spec, sword cost 16. On the other hand with those 12 free points, the dagger user could pick up life magic to heal and protect himself (and allies). Or they could pick up specced healing skill and pretty much NEVER FAIL a healing-kit application (cheap and plentiful, unlike in practically every other game in existance).
Now balance between sets, don't get me started. 28 points for war magic and it does less damage than a 16 point sword swinger? Something went horribly wrong. Add life magic in to the picture, the mage is up to 48 points spent and is doing on-par-ish damage with the sword swinger who's spent 36 points. Plus the sword swinger has a shield and is MUCH more survivable. Still, that's not an insurmountable problem.
Skill-based also tends to help soloists out -- becuase you can get all the relevant skills you need to really excell in one character. Also, you don't have to roll up 5 billion characters if you can do respecs -- start a sword user. Decide you hate it? Swap over to dagger. Don't like that? Try an archer. Now, sometimes the big 3 conversion (mage vs archer vs melee) is a problem because of other stats (attributes, equipment) but you CAN do it if you put your mind to it. That's cool.
Classes? Attack of the clones. Bleh. Everyone is the same FOTM build. Yes, you can do that in a skill system too. But frankly in my experience, less people do.
Yes. Work like you don't have to own a frikkin mouse.
The old civ 1 used the keyboard much better than most of the recent civs. Heck, you could play the whole game using only the keyboard, and I usually did. (it was faster than the mouse) Civs 3 and 4 have been particularly bad about not accepting movement chains -- say you're moving a tank with movement 3 along roads (so move cost = 1/3rd). 9 keypresses will use up your movement. In civ 1, if you knew where you wanted to go you could key in those keypresses as fast as you can type. The game would remember them and catch up later. In recent versions (3 and 4) if you press a key too soon, the game just eats the keypress. Yes yes, "go to" is the solution in that example, but given the spazz-outs that "go to" can produce on railroads in the older civs, I don't tend to trust it. (I've been learning to trust it again in 4)
This might be a UI decision to make it harder for idiots to screw up by spamming keys, but frankly it sucks. I also have that problem with the wait-at-end-of-turn (which I prefer, but I hate it missing my first "enter" because it is busy animating a unit). Sure, I could turn animations off, but in general that didn't seem to solve my problem. Decide I'm done with my only unit (early-game problem), hit space and enter rapidly and it misses it.
Also, the new build UI sucks in 4. For one thing, why in god's green earth are the reccomendations not marked when you zoom in to the city level? This has been obviously missing since the beginning and should be there by now. And why are there 3+ lines of things to build (units, city improvments, wonders) and only 2 lines visible at once?
Growing legs is inefficient for a fish. If you go back to a time where terrestrial animals didn't exist, growing legs was a major advantage. Just look at all that (food, space) waiting to be (eaten, sat in)! Contrast vs now: that terrestrial space is already used by reptiles, mammels, birds, and so on.
From 4 amps max on an Xserve G5 now to 8 amps max on the new Xserve Xeons? Ouch. Remember seeing pictures of some of the mac supercomputers that have machines spaced out only on even numbered slots, with odd slots being blankers? Now imagine that with half those machines gone, in order not to overload their power or cooling.
If this is "better performance/watt" from Intel I'd hate to see what "worse performance/watt" was. I'm honestly not sure what you'd have to do to cool a 42U rack full of these new machines. The racks I work with that are full of the Xserve G5s already have an 18" raised floor for under floor cooling plus above-rack Liebert XDV units for additional top-of-the-rack cooling. I'm not sure where (or how) you'd shove more cold air at the rack without just stuffing a big old cooling coil in the front rack door itself.
I picked up the 2300DL two years ago at Sam's Club and it has been really nice. We've had some trouble printing photos (claims to be laser photo paper, but it is still not fusing the toner to the paper right and it comes off the paper on some roller and goes on another later sheet of paper), but for non-photo and non-cardstock it works great.
Erm, yeah.. If global warming were the only conceivable doomsdayscenario..
Nuclear weaponry isn't quite enhancing my life, nor are worldwide influenza pandemics, direct meteor hits, global overexposure to radiation as a result of a freakishly excessive sunspot or near-by exploding supernova, or even, in fact, global alien invasion bent on genocide.
Know anyone who has benefitted from radiation cancer treatment? Or do you like the power that comes out of your wall socket (varies % nuke generated by location)? Claiming that nukes are good for nothing but destruction is shortsighted at best. There's a whole host of related technologies that are very beneficial that came hand in hand with them.
Not to mention the only possible way you could deal with an asteriod right now would be lobbing nukes at it and who knows if that'd even work. You certainly aren't going to deflect it with conventional chemical explosives.
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Since friction gets converted to heat and given the temperatures that 10k and 15k drives like to operate at without adequate cooling, frankly I think there is a whole freaking lot of drag. You're equating smoothness as seen by the naked eye to atomic-level smoothness, which is just rubbish.
./, thanks.
Btw, Physics 101 called and they are interested in your no-friction disk platters for their student's lab experiements.
The spinning foil platter problem... that's (fairly) trivial mechanical engineering. I'll trust the folks he's working with who have real credentials than some AC on
You assume the air between platters is stationary. I assert you're wrong on your initial assumption. Air between platters should tend to rotate with the platters. Similar to making a hollow, capped tube out of the cyl's and spinning it. The air inside isn't going stay motionless, it will speed up and eventually reach a steady state with the rotation.
The read/write heads will disrupt that air flow, but I did note I was assuming they were out of the way.
The platters have (per platter) a much smaller edge, so they're going to get less friction from the air. Less friction means less heat AND less power required to keep the disk spinning at the same velocity. The area isn't that big compared to the surface of the disk, but I'd guess (assuming the heads were at the outer tracks of the disk) that the air near the spindle spins with the disks and probably causes very little if any friction, so the majority source of air friction is going to be the edge (where it moves air around the "interesting" interior shape of the enclosure).
In his talk I referenced above, he specifically stated that they were using smaller/lower power motors because they didn't need as much power as a conventional disk. Also remember that conventional disk motors may have to be "overspecced" to be able to spin the disks up to speed in a reasonable amount of time, and that may make them less efficient when they're just trying to maintain speed rather than spin up. You'd have to ask an EE on that one though, 'cuz I'm not. Just another stab that occurs to me for why it may cost a lot less power.
He also referenced making higher-RPM drives than current methods. I want to say 30k sticks in my head, but I'm not sure on that you'd have to watch the talk to verify my tylenol cold muddled memory.
At the UIUC Reflections|Projects ACM conference. It was actually a fairly interesting talk (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2006/webcast.p hp) about the same topic, maybe a little more in-depth than the article. At least more pretty pictures than the article.
Your job sucks if you work 8 hours a day every day of the week. Yeesh!
The feeling that you've eaten this beef before.
This is confusing. You claim that stopping nukes (or similar) has to be part of the solution. Then you claim that no single country can accurately monitor the activities of the others. How do you then propose to insure that everyone is following the guidelines and that there isn't a rogue state who is hiding their nukes and going to use one(/them) anyway?
I suppose you remove the ability to kill everyone and bring it back to "just kill some." But given that "some" could be a fairly large number, like a major metro area, I'm not sure I could call it that much better of a solution. Just a different, and also bad, solution.
A valid point, but consider the machine that BeOS was built (mainly) on: dual PPC 603@66Mhz with no L2 cache. (I believe the memory controller supported either 2 processors or 1 proc + L2 cache. The BeBox had 2 procs, thus no L2 cache.) The last thing for performance you want to do is waste the precious little L1 cache you have by having both processors have an (almost) mirror cache copy because they're trading threads off left and right.
Judging by how well most applications worked, (and certainly how well the system worked overall considering the low-end CPUs and no L2 cache), I'd say it is safe to say that programmers generally did things the right way and your worries are overblown.
With the heavily threaded nature of BeOS, even demanding apps would really fly on the quad+ core cpus that are preparing to take over the world.
Not that you couldn't do threading right in Windows, OS X, or Linux. But BeOS made it practically mandatory: each window was a new thread, as well as an application-level thread. Plus any others you wanted to create. So to make a crappy application that locks up when it is trying to do something (like update the state of 500+ nodes in a list; ARD3 I'm looking at you) actually took skill and dedication. The default state tended to be applications that wouldn't lockup while they worked, which is really nice.
Your starting assumptions are off-base. An internal combustion engine and associated stuff (battery, gas, gearing, all that good stuff) are HEAVY. Electric motors are "heavy", sure, but nothing like a petrol-product engine. All it would take is for their capacitor to be small and/or low-density and your 50 MPG assumption may be looking a wee bit low.
Look at any of the world's super-fast railways: France's TGV, or Japan's Bullet Train. They are both electric trains, powered by overhead lines. No heavy batteries, gas, or any of that. Now how heavy the claimed device is we don't know. If it is lightweight however, you can see where your math would be way off.
The original game (ep 1-3) is AWESOME for the lightsaber chopping action. "Why look it is Jar-Jar!" *chwooom* "yeoww!" *chwoom* "Yeahhoooww!" *schwoom* "Yeagh" *pops into jar-jar bits*
wget and less (or more likely, links or links2) will let you read the instructions and are standardly installed in even the most basic stage 1 install you do... or you can read the copy included on the install cd (copy to disk if you like, or remount the cd after reboot to the real OS). You'd need GPM, but that is a heck of a lot less than a working X setup (even excluding gnome).
:-P
I do have to admit I'm the type gentoo is targetted at. I built my first linux (m68k) from a "stage 1" root tarball and source.tar.gz by hand back around, umm must have been the '94-'95 school year. Source code and compiler errors don't scare me, they just annoy me.
This isn't a live CD problem. This says the resolution/h and v-freq the live CD happened to pick to drive your card at was not the same as what you had been running, and your monitor's adjustments for the old timings were off. The fact you talk about auto-image adjust fixing it tells me that the image that was being output was just fine, but the user observing it is not "just fine."
His ending comment about "a good programmer" is funny considering he tried to build his system like a bad programmer programs. He tried to compile everything as one blob and then is distressed one package broke (in programming: write whole app, test later). Duh. You install the least you have to (ssh, kernel, screen, grub, and associated libraries) then reboot under the real OS not under the live cd. Then ssh in, start a screen, and emerge what you want to have. You can monitor it remotely and kick it if needed.
Particularly handy if you find during the compiles that your hardware is slightly flakey and will bomb out a compile ever so often, but that when you restart it, it compiles fine.
Just require more great people to initiate. I think it is 3 for the second, 4 four the third, and so on. Not that I ever use great people for that, but I hear you could.
(Oblig Civ4 ref.)
Actually I'm pretty sure my 2-3 year old PC would run Civ4 just fine, but I'll admit my machines are probably well above the "average" PC, especially in the memory and graphics memory. Heck, I can run Civ4 on my 3 year old laptop -- now I'll admit the terrain doesn't render on screen ("show tile production", units, and cities show up fine, which is most of what you need anyway) but c'mon. It is a ultra-portable laptop. The fact I got half a game played in on it while on the road (just after Civ4 came out) says that you're making a mountain out of a molehill. And that they didn't need to hog all that memory for graphics either, but that's another debate.
I think that global thermonuclear war is really a much more likely option than being wiped out my a miniature black hole. Or polluting the planet to such a state it is unable to sustain modern technological life.
Until MMOs die out (not looking likely) and voice chat takes the place of MMO text chat (yes just what I want to hear the oriental gold farmer spam-yelling "GOLD LOVEBUY SIXTY FOR ONE THOUSAND" in a bad accent), you can bet that PC gaming isn't going anywhere. Or until consoles get keyboards, I suppose, but those aren't usually standard equipment even if they are available.
Blizzard is claiming 7 mil subscribers right now. They're paying them $15 a month, which is about 3-4 games a year. Plus the expansion (when it comes out) and the initial game cost. So that's 21 to 28 million "copies" sold in what, two-ish years? Those numbers approach the "sales" numbers of some of the console world's bundled video games.
Since the Mhz jumps of the past seem to be by and large behind us these days, but we're looking at more and more cores, isn't it time that games become multithreaded and offload that nasty pathing work to a second core? Sure you could buy stupid shiny cards for the game physics and AI and network (some sort of network booster that avoids the OS's TCP stack -- posted a while back I believe), or alternatly just make use of the extra hardware that /will/ be in the box anyway.
Now, the decent AI toolkit that folks can license might be worth it anyway, when they figure out they should just run it on the CPU instead of their custom CPU-like-thing.
A day late but hey: You mean Asheron's Call II, the second big-name MMO to have closed its doors? (right behind Earth and Beyond Online)
They were a base-classes with specializations type hybrid between the pure class and pure skill systems. It didn't really work out so well for them.
World of Warcraft has done it to a lesser extent with the talent trees within each class -- particularly the hybrids (Paladin, Shaman, Druid) who can spec to heal/nuke/melee (to a greater or lesser degree in each). Problem is that only one spec in each is really that viable in the end-game raiding because Blizzard didn't do a good job designing the talent trees. They've fixed that somewhat for the druids and have pretty much wholly failed to fix it for the Paladin and Shamans.
Of course, with those two classes side-specific (until the expansion) that's not too much of a "gee ya think" as it could be -- fix one and watch the other side complain to no end. So as soon as they botched fixing the Paladin, they couldn't fix the Shaman (despite the Paladin being desired in the end-game raids, and Shaman... not so much really).
A lot of us like our skill-based MMO (and RPG)s thanks much. Really the aren't that much harder to balance -- you just need to balance the attacking skills that do damage versus each other (and versus cost) and you're 90% of the way there.
Asheron's Call, for all the flaws it may have did a fairly nice job of this WITHIN SETS. By that I mean, the melee skills: dagger, staff, spear, unarmed, mace, axe, sword were fairly balanced. The more you paid (low to high cost in that list) the more damage you did. But the more you paid, the less other skills you could get. Dagger cost 4 to spec, sword cost 16. On the other hand with those 12 free points, the dagger user could pick up life magic to heal and protect himself (and allies). Or they could pick up specced healing skill and pretty much NEVER FAIL a healing-kit application (cheap and plentiful, unlike in practically every other game in existance).
Now balance between sets, don't get me started. 28 points for war magic and it does less damage than a 16 point sword swinger? Something went horribly wrong. Add life magic in to the picture, the mage is up to 48 points spent and is doing on-par-ish damage with the sword swinger who's spent 36 points. Plus the sword swinger has a shield and is MUCH more survivable. Still, that's not an insurmountable problem.
Skill-based also tends to help soloists out -- becuase you can get all the relevant skills you need to really excell in one character. Also, you don't have to roll up 5 billion characters if you can do respecs -- start a sword user. Decide you hate it? Swap over to dagger. Don't like that? Try an archer. Now, sometimes the big 3 conversion (mage vs archer vs melee) is a problem because of other stats (attributes, equipment) but you CAN do it if you put your mind to it. That's cool.
Classes? Attack of the clones. Bleh. Everyone is the same FOTM build. Yes, you can do that in a skill system too. But frankly in my experience, less people do.
Yes. Work like you don't have to own a frikkin mouse.
The old civ 1 used the keyboard much better than most of the recent civs. Heck, you could play the whole game using only the keyboard, and I usually did. (it was faster than the mouse) Civs 3 and 4 have been particularly bad about not accepting movement chains -- say you're moving a tank with movement 3 along roads (so move cost = 1/3rd). 9 keypresses will use up your movement. In civ 1, if you knew where you wanted to go you could key in those keypresses as fast as you can type. The game would remember them and catch up later. In recent versions (3 and 4) if you press a key too soon, the game just eats the keypress. Yes yes, "go to" is the solution in that example, but given the spazz-outs that "go to" can produce on railroads in the older civs, I don't tend to trust it. (I've been learning to trust it again in 4)
This might be a UI decision to make it harder for idiots to screw up by spamming keys, but frankly it sucks. I also have that problem with the wait-at-end-of-turn (which I prefer, but I hate it missing my first "enter" because it is busy animating a unit). Sure, I could turn animations off, but in general that didn't seem to solve my problem. Decide I'm done with my only unit (early-game problem), hit space and enter rapidly and it misses it.
Also, the new build UI sucks in 4. For one thing, why in god's green earth are the reccomendations not marked when you zoom in to the city level? This has been obviously missing since the beginning and should be there by now. And why are there 3+ lines of things to build (units, city improvments, wonders) and only 2 lines visible at once?
Growing legs is inefficient for a fish. If you go back to a time where terrestrial animals didn't exist, growing legs was a major advantage. Just look at all that (food, space) waiting to be (eaten, sat in)! Contrast vs now: that terrestrial space is already used by reptiles, mammels, birds, and so on.
From 4 amps max on an Xserve G5 now to 8 amps max on the new Xserve Xeons? Ouch. Remember seeing pictures of some of the mac supercomputers that have machines spaced out only on even numbered slots, with odd slots being blankers? Now imagine that with half those machines gone, in order not to overload their power or cooling.
If this is "better performance/watt" from Intel I'd hate to see what "worse performance/watt" was. I'm honestly not sure what you'd have to do to cool a 42U rack full of these new machines. The racks I work with that are full of the Xserve G5s already have an 18" raised floor for under floor cooling plus above-rack Liebert XDV units for additional top-of-the-rack cooling. I'm not sure where (or how) you'd shove more cold air at the rack without just stuffing a big old cooling coil in the front rack door itself.
I picked up the 2300DL two years ago at Sam's Club and it has been really nice. We've had some trouble printing photos (claims to be laser photo paper, but it is still not fusing the toner to the paper right and it comes off the paper on some roller and goes on another later sheet of paper), but for non-photo and non-cardstock it works great.
Know anyone who has benefitted from radiation cancer treatment? Or do you like the power that comes out of your wall socket (varies % nuke generated by location)? Claiming that nukes are good for nothing but destruction is shortsighted at best. There's a whole host of related technologies that are very beneficial that came hand in hand with them.
Not to mention the only possible way you could deal with an asteriod right now would be lobbing nukes at it and who knows if that'd even work. You certainly aren't going to deflect it with conventional chemical explosives.