The maximun launch weight on pure ski-jump systems are much much lower than catapult launches. The old British carriers for example were stuck launching Sea Harriers which had a max take off weight of 12000kg. The F-18 (the original one... they've all been replaced by heavier planes) had an EMPTY weight just 1000kg less than that. It's max take off weight from a US Carrier was almost over twice that of the Sea Harrier.
The new British carriers (suppose to launch Eurofighter variant) will also have a catapult.
The catapult is another point of failure. That's one reason there's 4 on a ship. And that's reason why US had an advantage. They had an unbroken string of experience designing, building, and maintaining catapult systems since the end of WW2.
No, you stop this bullshit. It's pretty clear that they're talking about graphics capabilities here. The word innovative doesn't even appear anywhere in the summary or articles. Every fucking time we talk about games or movies, its the same shit. "Omg, it's shiny it sucks". Shiny and "creative" and "fun" and "innovative" are all largely orthogonal to each other. Their only real conflict is the budget. And this is goddamn Crysis. It's a game which is meant to be a tech demo. Like UT. Of fucking course their making it shiny.
And you know what? Crysis was shiny as fuck when it came out. It was slightly innovative within the FPS field (the multi power suit thing). And it was FUN. Maybe you didn't like it because you were clouded by your "only play games that can run on old hardware" snobbery, but I got to run around blowing shit up and throw chickens at people. And I look forward to doing it again. In New York.
Seriously I'm tired of this shit. It's not like these new shiny games are a torture to play or anything. You just refuse to enjoy them. Did you insist on Half Life being playable on 10 year old hardware when it came out too? Doom?
Many municipalities run special garden composting services. You rake/pick up your garden waste/trimmings/whatever, put it in this giant paper bag, and they come by every few weeks and pick it up and turn it to compost. Which you can then buy back. And before you go yelling about them taking your stuff and selling it back to you, you -could- just compost it yourself. But you won't cause it's more work than you would like and smells bad. Which is precisely why they have to charge you for it.
Joking aside, tell him about Joseph Kittenger and Felix Baumgartner. Kittenger was the pilot/sky diver involved in Project Excelsior. The highest/longest sky dive in history. 15 minutes of free fall. Felix Baumgartner is a dare-devil currently trying to break that record. He's being sponsered/supported by Red Bull (come on, thats instant cool), and Kittenger is consulting on the whole thing. If all goes to plan Baumgartner will break the sound barrier. With his body.
If he wants famous aircraft designers, two giants that come to mind are Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson, both of Lockheed Skunkworks fame. Unfortunately, they're both gone from this world... the days of airplanes being a single person's brain child is quickly faming (if not gone). If you wants some famous pilots, probably the single most important pilot would be John Boyd. One of the best fighter pilots ever, he also went ahead and pushed an entire generation of air force fighters into service, developed an entire engineering metric on comparing the performance of fighters, and then went ahead and revolutionized the way we fight wars (look up Maneuver warfare... all of the official doctrines of the armed services are based on his ideas).
Cut lengths just like CGI is a tool. You can use it to achieve great things, or to shoot a pile of crying babies over and over again.
Requiem for a Dream - largely considered a great or at least interesting movie - has music video amounts of cuts. Wikipedia says it has 2000 cuts during its run time.
Long cuts done properly are great. Done wrong, its like sitting through one of those boring presentations where the presenter stands around figitting around for 5 seconds every 30 seconds while trying to remember his points.
Just because fast cuts are overused today, does not mean they don't have their place. Just like CGI.
It's an mSATA. The entire point of these drives is that you don't need to take up a full harddrive slot to use them. If you want a SSD in your current laptop, you can buy one that comes in a 2.5" enclosure (the internals of those are the same as these). Where these shine is future laptops, where hopefully manufacturers will leave space for the extra SSD or something, as well as full out desktops.
Let's repeat. These are functionally identical to a 2.5" SSD. If you rip a 2.5" SSD apart, you'll find what is basically one of these 'new' SSDs. It's just a different form factor, meant for different circumstances.
They didn't try very hard to make these SSDs smaller. This is actually what a bare SSD looks like inside the 2.5" or 3.5" case that you usually buy right now. Most of the space is filler/kinda wasted for the sake of easier adoption (a good decision). These cards are basically what you get when you rip one of those apart and will attach right to a m-SATA (yeah, it's a real standard) interface, instead of going all the way around pretending to be a HD.
There have been cases where people badly in need of a liver transplant due to failure have been put on artificial livers that took enough load off the livers/bought the patient enough time that their livers regenerated themselves completely. No need for transplant!
The failure rate is much much better now. No one will deny there were problems on release and for some time afterwords.
The HD format thing kind of sucks. But you know what? If you want to game, the 360 is great. In fact, I would say that it's fantastic. If you enjoy the game selection, then you'll enjoy a 360. Cause it works. It's a goddamn console. It plays games before anything else.
The mass of practice questions with solutions and answers which are usually (as much as we bitch, the error rate can't be much higher than ~2%) is plenty of value. That's pretty much it.
I rather my professors and TAs not spend their timing creating 100 practice problems a week.
How could this possibly be modded interesting? Do you really wish to flog yourself to death? You know all those reasons why you couldn't just stop buying chinese goods for the last 5 years? Well, every single one of them still applies. The damage you would wreck upon yourself, especially in the short term would be orders of magnitudes greater than the damage caused by a rare earth metal shortage.
Perhaps if you suggested a more limited or symbolic ban/tariff then it may work.
But seriously, everyone knows by now that China and American are stuck. Breaking out of the current relationship would fuck both of you up. And China has way more slack than the US does to fuck around and be an abusive boyfriend. And everyone saw that coming to.
Article (and doctor) says that it's powered by a plug that inserts behind his left ear. Does that mean he has a power cable running from his head to his chest? How did they implant that? I somehow doubt they made an incision the whole length. Did they run it along a blood vessel? They also said the implant itself fits into the left ventricle. So is the pump basically just powering half of heart, and relying on residual pressure to work the other half? If he's suffering from muscular degeneration, does having an external source moving what's left of the muscles result in any complications? The graphic (and explanation) seems to indicate that the implant is just pump that forces blood through an inoperative heart. Presumably that's enough enough to work the heart valves.
PM is defacto head of state. Queen is actual head of state, but since our Queen prefers to live in her palaces in one of the other countries she lords over, we get her governor-general to sign everything for her.
GG and Queen is largely ceremonial, though they actually do have some actual power. Recently, our PM asked the GG to prorogue (end) parliament early. It would have been within her (our previous GG was female) to say no (and a lot of wished she did). Turns out Harper had a devious plan of bugging the Queen to overrule her GG if she actually did say no. That would have been something remarkable to see. Probably the most the Queen has used her power in any official capacity in a long time.
And we don't need a monarch to come up with "pointless bullshit". Your army actually spends money making sure their unit crests are heraldry correct according to rules made up by bunch of old Europeans back before guns ever did anything useful. Think about that.
This is nothing like the gamma knife, aside from that it uses radiation. They're using an MRI to guide a physical probe through the brain to the tumor where the probe then does a thermal discharge. So instead of shooting intersecting deathrays (very cool stuff by the way), they're sending a guided killbot that gets right up close.
You are aware that Android also "kinda" has a licensing fee? The Google app stack (including the Marketplace) is only accessible if you pay Google and extend a branch for them as they keep fall- wait, what?
The source tapes were from Australia. The highest quality video from the moon landing were in Australia. Since they decided to land on the moon early, the US was under the horizon, so they transmitted to Australia instead.
Dude. They're still pumping out Bold and Curve revisions that are nothing but spec bumps + the trackpad. All this other crap? It's on the side.
I know a looot of people who work at RIM. They all know that they have to keep the enterprise market locked down. But that's mostly to do with the BES. Hardware wise, they've already long surpassed what "enterprise" needs. To keep growing, they NEED to grab some part of the consumer market. All that RIM growth the last couple years? That's just been them leveraging the hell out of BBM and selling them to college students. That's not going to last at this rate if their hardware doesn't keep up.
And Iridium is still working. After the original company went bankrupt, all the assets got scooped up for 25 million (a bargain!) and now the company is happily making money. They're even planning on the next set of sats to replace the current generation as they start to age/fail. There is still a market for these devices, though most of the time its people/groups renting out units for a month or two instead of continuous subscription. Though I'm sure there are some mining/gas exploration companies and the like who have a bunch of these.
You're seeing a moving halo effect. Most tone-mapping processes have trouble with dark on light transitions. Basically, in an attempt to 'smooth' out the transition between lightening/darkening, you get the lightening effect bleeding from the dark regions to the lighter regions creating a halo. If you watch the starting sequence with the buildings, if you look at the right side with one building in the foreground, and the dark side of another building in the background, you can once again see the halo effect. Just go google around HDR images, and you'll see it everywhere. It's very hard to get rid of, and simply put, if you run any tone-mapping process on default, you'll end up with them.
It's basically the result of the software not being able to tell with confidence where the boundaries between higher/lower exposure is, so instead it assigns an approximate that "plays it safe" in one direction, and then smears out the boundary. Basically photoshop's magic selection wand + feathering.
You can get HDR to look 'fine' or whatever adjective you want to use. It's just hard. The tone-mapping software/settings that many people use will just go and create doll skin and haloes everywhere. But if you do everything well (hard work!) you can get some really cool looking stuff. For example...
Somewhat like many other art techniques, when best used, you barely notice it at all. And that is the most important thing to remember. HDR + tone mapping isn't just a technology, it is an art. Being able to capture video in 3 different stops at once is great, but it'll still look like crap unless you treat it with respect and give it the effort and time needed.
Remember, HDR + tone mapping is just trying to create a low dynamic range image on a low dynamic range display that LOOKS something like what your mind perceives in a high dynamic range environment. Obviously, that's kinda hard, especially since the human eye can change its sensitivity as it focuses on different parts of a scene in real life, but not really when looking at a computer screen or print.
They already have a weapon similar to this. It's called a HARM (High Speed Anti Radiation Missile). They were developed/used to take out radar sites. Similarly, they can be used to take out radar jammers (at least theoretically, I don't know if they ever have) since they operate on the same frequencies. So if you could tune the antenna/software to the right frequencies, then you can now go after communications jammers (and assuming some sort of IFF).
I don't see the connection, nor the worry. Nike+ biggest boon for an athlete is that it made tracking your own performance even easier. You now have an automatic record of how fast/long/hard each run was. You can get on the run (ha!) updates to your progress (it'll read you how far you've run so far), which is always useful. It's my understanding that humans typically enjoy forming 'personal' relationships with 'their' gadgets. Your iPhone is the same as any iPhone, and even if you loaded the exact same data on each one, one is still 'youres' and the other is someone else's (at least initially).
Besides, Nike+ is an add-on to Nike Shoes. You have to buy the pedometer separately, and it slips in like an insole. If look around for 3rd party solutions, you can use Nike+ in whatever shoe you want. Hell, you could tape it to the top of your foot and run bare feet if you wanted to.
Finally, many of the things that the article claims Nike+ enabled people to do are things that people naturally do anyways. "Users can also upload their information online, discuss achievements with other users, and challenge them to distance or speed competitions", which sounds to me like any group of athletic friends. Just bigger. You know, the whole point of the internet. So you can now interact with people far away.
Why do you think that? I'm curious. Why not Mars orbit? It's not like the belt is actually that dense. I mean, you could blindly aim a spaceship through the belt, and as long as it can take collisions with pebble size objects, it'll almost certainly make it through unscathed. Most of its mass lies in few bodies. Putting a settlement on/around one of those would be just like putting one on any non-earth moon.
My thinking is that the best place to set up self sufficient colonies independent of Earth is to start in a location where they can be dependent on Earth. Bootstrapping and all. Once you build an self sufficient earth orbit, or lunar settlement, then you can get the hell out of there and do whatever, as long as your power and transport can scale.
Slashdot Mirror
The maximun launch weight on pure ski-jump systems are much much lower than catapult launches. The old British carriers for example were stuck launching Sea Harriers which had a max take off weight of 12000kg. The F-18 (the original one... they've all been replaced by heavier planes) had an EMPTY weight just 1000kg less than that. It's max take off weight from a US Carrier was almost over twice that of the Sea Harrier.
The new British carriers (suppose to launch Eurofighter variant) will also have a catapult.
The catapult is another point of failure. That's one reason there's 4 on a ship. And that's reason why US had an advantage. They had an unbroken string of experience designing, building, and maintaining catapult systems since the end of WW2.
No, you stop this bullshit. It's pretty clear that they're talking about graphics capabilities here. The word innovative doesn't even appear anywhere in the summary or articles. Every fucking time we talk about games or movies, its the same shit. "Omg, it's shiny it sucks". Shiny and "creative" and "fun" and "innovative" are all largely orthogonal to each other. Their only real conflict is the budget. And this is goddamn Crysis. It's a game which is meant to be a tech demo. Like UT. Of fucking course their making it shiny.
And you know what? Crysis was shiny as fuck when it came out. It was slightly innovative within the FPS field (the multi power suit thing). And it was FUN. Maybe you didn't like it because you were clouded by your "only play games that can run on old hardware" snobbery, but I got to run around blowing shit up and throw chickens at people. And I look forward to doing it again. In New York.
Seriously I'm tired of this shit. It's not like these new shiny games are a torture to play or anything. You just refuse to enjoy them. Did you insist on Half Life being playable on 10 year old hardware when it came out too? Doom?
Many municipalities run special garden composting services. You rake/pick up your garden waste/trimmings/whatever, put it in this giant paper bag, and they come by every few weeks and pick it up and turn it to compost. Which you can then buy back. And before you go yelling about them taking your stuff and selling it back to you, you -could- just compost it yourself. But you won't cause it's more work than you would like and smells bad. Which is precisely why they have to charge you for it.
Is this list for him, or is really for you? =P
Joking aside, tell him about Joseph Kittenger and Felix Baumgartner. Kittenger was the pilot/sky diver involved in Project Excelsior. The highest/longest sky dive in history. 15 minutes of free fall. Felix Baumgartner is a dare-devil currently trying to break that record. He's being sponsered/supported by Red Bull (come on, thats instant cool), and Kittenger is consulting on the whole thing. If all goes to plan Baumgartner will break the sound barrier. With his body.
If he wants famous aircraft designers, two giants that come to mind are Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson, both of Lockheed Skunkworks fame. Unfortunately, they're both gone from this world... the days of airplanes being a single person's brain child is quickly faming (if not gone). If you wants some famous pilots, probably the single most important pilot would be John Boyd. One of the best fighter pilots ever, he also went ahead and pushed an entire generation of air force fighters into service, developed an entire engineering metric on comparing the performance of fighters, and then went ahead and revolutionized the way we fight wars (look up Maneuver warfare... all of the official doctrines of the armed services are based on his ideas).
Cut lengths just like CGI is a tool. You can use it to achieve great things, or to shoot a pile of crying babies over and over again.
Requiem for a Dream - largely considered a great or at least interesting movie - has music video amounts of cuts. Wikipedia says it has 2000 cuts during its run time.
Long cuts done properly are great. Done wrong, its like sitting through one of those boring presentations where the presenter stands around figitting around for 5 seconds every 30 seconds while trying to remember his points.
Just because fast cuts are overused today, does not mean they don't have their place. Just like CGI.
It's an mSATA. The entire point of these drives is that you don't need to take up a full harddrive slot to use them. If you want a SSD in your current laptop, you can buy one that comes in a 2.5" enclosure (the internals of those are the same as these). Where these shine is future laptops, where hopefully manufacturers will leave space for the extra SSD or something, as well as full out desktops.
Let's repeat. These are functionally identical to a 2.5" SSD. If you rip a 2.5" SSD apart, you'll find what is basically one of these 'new' SSDs. It's just a different form factor, meant for different circumstances.
They didn't try very hard to make these SSDs smaller. This is actually what a bare SSD looks like inside the 2.5" or 3.5" case that you usually buy right now. Most of the space is filler/kinda wasted for the sake of easier adoption (a good decision). These cards are basically what you get when you rip one of those apart and will attach right to a m-SATA (yeah, it's a real standard) interface, instead of going all the way around pretending to be a HD.
There have been cases where people badly in need of a liver transplant due to failure have been put on artificial livers that took enough load off the livers/bought the patient enough time that their livers regenerated themselves completely. No need for transplant!
The original Starcraft didn't have any hotkey mapping at all.
The failure rate is much much better now. No one will deny there were problems on release and for some time afterwords.
The HD format thing kind of sucks. But you know what? If you want to game, the 360 is great. In fact, I would say that it's fantastic. If you enjoy the game selection, then you'll enjoy a 360. Cause it works. It's a goddamn console. It plays games before anything else.
The mass of practice questions with solutions and answers which are usually (as much as we bitch, the error rate can't be much higher than ~2%) is plenty of value. That's pretty much it.
I rather my professors and TAs not spend their timing creating 100 practice problems a week.
Though granted, its totally overpriced.
It's vaguely like Windows 7 with a side bar instead at the bottom. And kind of a start button.
There's some screens below.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/10/ars-reviews-ubuntu-1010-wip.ars/7
How could this possibly be modded interesting? Do you really wish to flog yourself to death? You know all those reasons why you couldn't just stop buying chinese goods for the last 5 years? Well, every single one of them still applies. The damage you would wreck upon yourself, especially in the short term would be orders of magnitudes greater than the damage caused by a rare earth metal shortage.
Perhaps if you suggested a more limited or symbolic ban/tariff then it may work.
But seriously, everyone knows by now that China and American are stuck. Breaking out of the current relationship would fuck both of you up. And China has way more slack than the US does to fuck around and be an abusive boyfriend. And everyone saw that coming to.
Article (and doctor) says that it's powered by a plug that inserts behind his left ear. Does that mean he has a power cable running from his head to his chest? How did they implant that? I somehow doubt they made an incision the whole length. Did they run it along a blood vessel? They also said the implant itself fits into the left ventricle. So is the pump basically just powering half of heart, and relying on residual pressure to work the other half? If he's suffering from muscular degeneration, does having an external source moving what's left of the muscles result in any complications? The graphic (and explanation) seems to indicate that the implant is just pump that forces blood through an inoperative heart. Presumably that's enough enough to work the heart valves.
So many questions!
PM is defacto head of state. Queen is actual head of state, but since our Queen prefers to live in her palaces in one of the other countries she lords over, we get her governor-general to sign everything for her.
GG and Queen is largely ceremonial, though they actually do have some actual power. Recently, our PM asked the GG to prorogue (end) parliament early. It would have been within her (our previous GG was female) to say no (and a lot of wished she did). Turns out Harper had a devious plan of bugging the Queen to overrule her GG if she actually did say no. That would have been something remarkable to see. Probably the most the Queen has used her power in any official capacity in a long time.
And we don't need a monarch to come up with "pointless bullshit". Your army actually spends money making sure their unit crests are heraldry correct according to rules made up by bunch of old Europeans back before guns ever did anything useful. Think about that.
This is nothing like the gamma knife, aside from that it uses radiation. They're using an MRI to guide a physical probe through the brain to the tumor where the probe then does a thermal discharge. So instead of shooting intersecting deathrays (very cool stuff by the way), they're sending a guided killbot that gets right up close.
You are aware that Android also "kinda" has a licensing fee? The Google app stack (including the Marketplace) is only accessible if you pay Google and extend a branch for them as they keep fall- wait, what?
The source tapes were from Australia. The highest quality video from the moon landing were in Australia. Since they decided to land on the moon early, the US was under the horizon, so they transmitted to Australia instead.
Dude. They're still pumping out Bold and Curve revisions that are nothing but spec bumps + the trackpad. All this other crap? It's on the side.
I know a looot of people who work at RIM. They all know that they have to keep the enterprise market locked down. But that's mostly to do with the BES. Hardware wise, they've already long surpassed what "enterprise" needs. To keep growing, they NEED to grab some part of the consumer market. All that RIM growth the last couple years? That's just been them leveraging the hell out of BBM and selling them to college students. That's not going to last at this rate if their hardware doesn't keep up.
And Iridium is still working. After the original company went bankrupt, all the assets got scooped up for 25 million (a bargain!) and now the company is happily making money. They're even planning on the next set of sats to replace the current generation as they start to age/fail. There is still a market for these devices, though most of the time its people/groups renting out units for a month or two instead of continuous subscription. Though I'm sure there are some mining/gas exploration companies and the like who have a bunch of these.
You're seeing a moving halo effect. Most tone-mapping processes have trouble with dark on light transitions. Basically, in an attempt to 'smooth' out the transition between lightening/darkening, you get the lightening effect bleeding from the dark regions to the lighter regions creating a halo. If you watch the starting sequence with the buildings, if you look at the right side with one building in the foreground, and the dark side of another building in the background, you can once again see the halo effect. Just go google around HDR images, and you'll see it everywhere. It's very hard to get rid of, and simply put, if you run any tone-mapping process on default, you'll end up with them.
It's basically the result of the software not being able to tell with confidence where the boundaries between higher/lower exposure is, so instead it assigns an approximate that "plays it safe" in one direction, and then smears out the boundary. Basically photoshop's magic selection wand + feathering.
You can get HDR to look 'fine' or whatever adjective you want to use. It's just hard. The tone-mapping software/settings that many people use will just go and create doll skin and haloes everywhere. But if you do everything well (hard work!) you can get some really cool looking stuff. For example...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322363690/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/swakt1/2322366898/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ten851/4972637653/in/pool-hdr
Somewhat like many other art techniques, when best used, you barely notice it at all. And that is the most important thing to remember. HDR + tone mapping isn't just a technology, it is an art. Being able to capture video in 3 different stops at once is great, but it'll still look like crap unless you treat it with respect and give it the effort and time needed.
Remember, HDR + tone mapping is just trying to create a low dynamic range image on a low dynamic range display that LOOKS something like what your mind perceives in a high dynamic range environment. Obviously, that's kinda hard, especially since the human eye can change its sensitivity as it focuses on different parts of a scene in real life, but not really when looking at a computer screen or print.
They already have a weapon similar to this. It's called a HARM (High Speed Anti Radiation Missile). They were developed/used to take out radar sites. Similarly, they can be used to take out radar jammers (at least theoretically, I don't know if they ever have) since they operate on the same frequencies. So if you could tune the antenna/software to the right frequencies, then you can now go after communications jammers (and assuming some sort of IFF).
I don't see the connection, nor the worry. Nike+ biggest boon for an athlete is that it made tracking your own performance even easier. You now have an automatic record of how fast/long/hard each run was. You can get on the run (ha!) updates to your progress (it'll read you how far you've run so far), which is always useful. It's my understanding that humans typically enjoy forming 'personal' relationships with 'their' gadgets. Your iPhone is the same as any iPhone, and even if you loaded the exact same data on each one, one is still 'youres' and the other is someone else's (at least initially).
Besides, Nike+ is an add-on to Nike Shoes. You have to buy the pedometer separately, and it slips in like an insole. If look around for 3rd party solutions, you can use Nike+ in whatever shoe you want. Hell, you could tape it to the top of your foot and run bare feet if you wanted to.
Finally, many of the things that the article claims Nike+ enabled people to do are things that people naturally do anyways. "Users can also upload their information online, discuss achievements with other users, and challenge them to distance or speed competitions", which sounds to me like any group of athletic friends. Just bigger. You know, the whole point of the internet. So you can now interact with people far away.
Why do you think that? I'm curious. Why not Mars orbit? It's not like the belt is actually that dense. I mean, you could blindly aim a spaceship through the belt, and as long as it can take collisions with pebble size objects, it'll almost certainly make it through unscathed. Most of its mass lies in few bodies. Putting a settlement on/around one of those would be just like putting one on any non-earth moon.
My thinking is that the best place to set up self sufficient colonies independent of Earth is to start in a location where they can be dependent on Earth. Bootstrapping and all. Once you build an self sufficient earth orbit, or lunar settlement, then you can get the hell out of there and do whatever, as long as your power and transport can scale.