Passwords can be changed, and can be changed quickly. If you discover a password has been compromised, locking down the system is a password change away.
If you want to be really secure, change your password daily. Or hourly. Or after each transaction.
But once your obfuscated URL is discovered - and discovering it is trivial - then the secret is out, and what little protection it did provide is lost until you can change the obfuscation.
For the best example, see the CSS system used on DVD players. That security system hinged on keeping something secret. Once it was discovered, there was no way to put the cat back in the bag without changing the key on everything that needed to be able to read DVDs - and obviously, the MPAA couldn't do that without rendering all the DVD players out there nonfunctional.
Secrets, as part of a security system, are BAD. They only become acceptable when they can be quickly changed once compromised. If they cannot be changed quickly, they render you more vulnerable than if they were out in the open to begin with.
One of the advantages of the F1 guys going crazy is that their stuff trickles down to us little guys.
Shaker rig time is now cheap enough that even small teams like mine (hey Malda! Wanna sponsor a race car?) can afford it, once and a while.
http://www.morissdampers.com offers 4 and 7 post shaker stuff.
The only reason I haven't used it is that I don't (yet!) have the data to drive the rig. It wants 4 suspension position sensors and 4 wheel accelerometers as a minimum.
But even then, there's still stuff to be learned from even simple stuff like frequency sweeps. The NASCAR guys recently discovered the Ohlins rig in North Carolina, and it's been booked solid for a year now.
Not only can the engine management engineer retune the engine on the fly during a race, most of the teams go even further.
Every team has what is called a "7-post shaker rig". This is an electro-hydro-mechanical device that places a hydraulic ram under each tire, plus 3 more attached to the aero centre for feeding in aero loads. By playing back the loads recorded by the car during operation by the position sensors, load cells, strain gauges, and accelerometers though these rams, the engineers can watch the car operate under real racing conditions in the lab.
Well, the bigger teams transmit the telemetry coming off the car during the race back to the shop in England, where the shaker righ data is played back on a duplicate car on the shaker rig in near real-time, so that they can keep an eye open for problems.
F1 has more money and technical ability than can be imagined.
F1 gearboxes have been fully automatic for most teams for a couple of seasons now. They retain the ability to do manual gearchanges if the driver wants to, but that almost never happens.
They are not torque-converter slushboxes like passenger cars. These are sequential-gearchange boxes like motorcycles, with hydraulic-actuated, computer-controlled shift mechanisms. There are zero drivetrain losses compared to a full-manual version, and they outperform a driver shifting in every respect.
Sorry Hoss, but you're not even close on this one.
The amount of _torque_ an engine puts out is (to grossly simplify) a function of its displacement.
The amount of _power_ produced is torque over time, so it is a function of displacement times engine RPM.
At no time does cylinder count enter into this. Two given engines, one a V12 and the other an I4, of the same displacement and turning the same RPM should, all else being equal, produce equal power levels.
Where the real world starts intruding is when you start increasing displacement. Ignoring forced induction for a second, you increase displacement by adding bore diameter, stroke length, or additional cylinders.
As you increase bore diameter and/or stroke length, you tend to increase the inertial loads on the con rods, and these loads increase as a function of a power of engine RPM. Given that there is a fixed strength amount for reasonable materials used in non-racing engines, increasing displacement by going to a bigger bore or a longer stroke means reducing maximum RPM potential.
For a big diesel where redline is often less than 3000 RPM, this isn't an issue, so you take advantage of the natural balance of the I6 and make the bores and strokes as big as you like.
But on passenger car engines, and especially in racing engines, adding displacment while retaining RPM capacity means adding cylinders.
Once you start doing that, the primary constraint becomes packaging - all else being equal, a 4 litre I8 will be twice as long as a 2 litre I4, but a 4 litre V8 is only slightly longer (but wider) than a 2 litre I4.
The Faramir scenes rubbed me the wrong way at first too, but upon further reflection I've come to realize that they make for a better movie.
The problem here, from a filmmaker's perspective, is twofold:
Firstly, the entire second half of TTT is Frodo, Sam, and Gollum struggling to get to Mordor without being discovered, and their observations about the journey, what it means to them, and the ever-increasing sense of gloom and despair that envelops them the closer they get to Mordor.
You can have that in a book, because the dialogue and scene setting keeps the story moving. It's a slow part of the book, but it's a slow part of the _journey_ too, so that's appropriate. The slow gloominess puts the reader into a gloomy mood as well as they empathise with the characters.
In the book, the encounter with Faramir is a ray of sunshine and hope in the middle of all the gloom and despair. It serves as a bit of an emotional relief, and provides contrast to how bad things are elsewhere. Faramir and Ithlien are there to say "hey, everything doesn't suck; there is still good in the world, even on the borders of Mordor, and not all Men are yet lost and without hope" It's a chance to catch our breath before we plunge back into the gloom and despair stuff.
But film is a visual medium, and unlike a book, is limited in time. Jackson cannot afford to spend the same proporation of time to having Frodo and Sam climbing over rocks and mucking through swamps, and ducking under bushes every time they hear a noise. It may work in a book, but in a film, once you've seen one hobbit scrabbling over a rock, you've seen them all.
So that means that Jackson doesn't get to establish all the gloom and despair that Tolkien did. Jackson is too busy intercutting all the action for us to ever get emotionally bogged down in the travails of the ringbearer.
In that light then, the as-written Ithlien scene, with an as-written nice-guy Faramir, breaks the tone. Not only do we not need Faramir to provide an emotional "up", we don't have the time to spare on any "ups" - all the scenes with Frodo in them need to be predominantly "down", more so than the book, because we don't spend as much time with him.
Secondly, we're not given all the backstory about how dangerous the Ring really is. In the book, by the time Frodo is on the borders of Mordor, we _know_ how dangerous the Ring is. It doesn't need underscoring. But in the movie, the Ring cannot just be a harmless MacGuffin; it's danger must be underscored at every opportunity to provide the emotional tension needed whenever the Ring is near to being discovered or taken.
So then, we get the movie Faramir: a man who provides a threat to Frodo and friends, rather than succor (but one that at least overcomes his temptation in the end, showing a glimpse of the book Faramir)
It's a major deviation from the book, yes, but it makes for a better movie.
BTW, it's good to see that after the movies are completed, that the giant flaming eyeball who played Sauron will be able to find employment as a lighthouse.... WTF was up with THAT?
Are you implying that the aluminum your hammer was made of exists because of divine intervention?
As far as your archer fish is concerned, there are evolutionary process analogues to turning, milling, drilling and so on. Some of those processes can be demonstrated in the lab, much the same way that you demonstrated "machining" on scrap metal that was "not your hammer" but was sufficiantly "like your hammer" to demonstrate the validity of the process as applied to "hammers"
So while nobody is going to start with some sort of proto-archerfish and "evolve" it into a bona fide archerfish in front of you, they can demonstrate the mechanisms by which proto-archerfish could develop into bona fide archerfish, and this should be sufficiant to prove the point.
You could call that "faith" if you really wanted to, but to do so is to miss the point.
Incidently, people _have_ "developed" atoms before. You can make helium out of hydrogen given enough energy.... it's been done.:)
You're using an abnormally rigourous definition of "faith" here.
The toast you had for breakfast started out life as a series of wheat plants growing on a farm somewhere. It was then subjected to a variety of processes that ultimately ended up in the toast on your plate.
I can describe these processes in the general, but would find it very difficult to reconstruct those processes in reverse, finally ending up on the plot of land where the wheat once grew that constituted your breakfast.
Instead, it is far easier to generalize somewhat, describing the processes in the chain from wheat to toast in a less specific manner - and you must take it "on faith" that these general processes map to your specific piece of toast.
That inability to provide specific evidence with regards to your breakfast does not mean that the generalization of how toast is made is de facto invalid.
So with regard to your angler fish, the underlying mechanisms and processes - natural selection, random and inheritable mutation, and so on and so forth - can suffice to show how the species _could_ have evolved, without needing to present you with the preserved corpses (and all their contained genetic information) of each successive generation of "angler fish" back to some earlier ancestor.
If you want to see examples of the mechanisms of evolution at work, where you _can_ track change through successive generations, you have to work forward - and there's lots and lots of examples done with fruit flies (whose gestation period is sufficiently short to permit experimentation) and realize - call it an act of "faith" if you must - that the same mechanisms apply to all known DNA-based organisms.
Thanks to Loki (RIP) I've had a chance to do both on my Linux box:
Quake Quake2 Soldier of Fortune Quake 3 Descent 3
And to be honest, I found the "Quake-alikes" to be a lot more fun; a lot more immersive, than Descent.
I've run for my life from a Shambler, gotten totally creeped out when I found a lab full of my fellow space marines begging for death, and laid patiently behind cover while scouting an area with the scope on my sniper rifle - great fun, all. I could suspend disbelief enough to make me care about what was going on in the game.
Descent... left me cold. Robots drifting around endless corridors? Why? Where's the motivation?
Story can really change a FPS into something much more than "run amok shooting baddies" - Bungie's Marathon is a prime example. Done well, it can really hold your imagination. And isn't that what fun is all about? Not every game needs an original play mechanism, if the story is gripping enough.
That's why Q3 didn't do much for me either - pretty engine, awesome control, gameplay that left me flat after a little while (no story) But hey, lots of other people love the game, so I don't have any problem with it. To each his own.
Man, you can tell at a glance who read the article and who didn't.
I'm going to simplify a great deal here to try and boil this down to the essence. John Carmack please feel free to correct any mistakes I make.
Up to this point, the imagery coming out of the gaming graphics cards has been limited by the hardware design of the cards. The feature set implemented by the cards limits how complicated you can get with the details in the final image.
Note that we're not just talking about simple things like pure polygon counts. Film Industry CGI isn't of higher quality just because they throw more polygons at the problem; they have all kinds of highly complex shaders that can generate special textures without changing the number of polygons in the model - if you saw the "special features" on the Shrek DVD, you can see this at work with Donkey's fur.
Rendering all these extra shaders is CPU expensive, which is why the big animation houses have big render farms.
But two things have happened that stand to change that.
The first (and the most ingenious) is that it has been discovered that you can compile any shader into a series of OpenGL language commands. The tradeoff is the number of passes through the pipeline that implementing a given shader may require may well be a large number - but even so, any shader currently in use by a Hollywood Mouse House can, in theory, be compiled into OpenGL and executed on any OpenGL card.
And here's the really cool part - rendering in OpenGL is many times faster than doing it in software on a general-purpose CPU. Many, many times faster.
Secondly, the biggest problem with trying to crank Shrek through your GF2MX400 (assuming you've compiled all the shaders into OpenGL) is that each shader may require 200 passes, but the data structures inside the card lack precision - either not enough bits as a float, or perhaps not even floats at all, but integers.
That means the data is being savaged by rounding errors and lack of precision during each render pass. It's like photocopying photocopies.
BUT, the latest generation of graphics chips have the necessary precision to do 200-pass rendering without falling victim to rounding errors.
Combine these two things together, and you can quite literally take a frame from Shrek, with all the crazy shaders, compile it to OpenGL, and render the frame on your GF6-whatever **faster than the native render platform**
A very good deal faster than the native render platform.
Is this "Shrek in real-time"? No, not by a long shot. But it may well be "Pixar's renderfarm in a box".
Now, as Bruce pointed out, having Pixar's renderfarm in a box doesn't make you Pixar. There is still a requirement for artistic talent. But all that cheap extra horsepower may well mean that the quality of CGI is going to explode for those talented enough to make use of it.
How will this affect games? It makes a bunch of shader techniques that were previously availible only to the movie industry possible within the framework of a game. And it divorces, somewhat, the game visuals from the card's hardware because these shaders are executed as general-purpose OpenGL instructions, not as dedicated hardware on the card. If you, as a game designer, can write a "fur shader" that runs in few enough passes to meet real-time output timings, then you get fur on your model, even if the card doesn't have a built-in "fur shader" or "fur engine".
THIS is why this is all such a big deal. The amount of quality per mSec of render time is about to explode.
Keep in mind that I'm a retired tank troop commander, so I sorta know what I'm talking about.
1) Modern armour can stop APFSDS rounds
Under the right circumstances, yes, but consider what the "right circumstances" are.
Firstly, any data from the Gulf war vs American tanks is data that describes second or third line equipment vs state of the art equipment. In case you didn't know, the digits in the designation of Soviet-era equipment represent the year it was first identified by NATO - so a T55 was first encountered in *1955* and a T-72 in *1972*
Related to this is that the Soviets never sold their top-line equipment to client states. They kept the good stuff for themselves, and sold derated stuff to customers.
Secondly, the price of all that armour protection is a great deal of mass. While the exact composition of the M1's armour is still top secret, it is known to have at least one layer of depleted uranium in it (the same stuff used in the penetrator) It also has a bunch of ceramics to defend against HEAT warheads, and an anti-spall layer to help the crew.
On a legged vehicle, you have to not only move this mass forward, you have to LIFT it too.
On a tracked vehicle, the tank rolls over its tracks much like a train. There is suprisingly little friction there - ask anyone who ever made the mistake of trying to change both tracks at once, and had the tank roll away from them.
The idea of 65 tons JUMPING straight up in the air is just ludicrous. Work out how much energy that would take! And then work out the ground pressure when it lands, and figure out how far it'll be driven into the soil.
2) Tanks are very much more manouverable than you seem to realize. They can spin in place at very high speeds, and then squirt out in unexpected directions. The first time you actually see a tank in motion, it'll scare the crap out of you. These are not giant lumbering monsters, they are 65 ton sportscars.
3) Even if you somehow manage to find a power source that could drive a legged vehicle, even if you can solve the ground pressure problem, you still have to deal with the fact that you're still completely dependant on crew reaction time to recognise you're being shot at, assess the incoming tradjectory, and then make an appropriate evasive action. The incoming round is supersonic, so no help there. Radar and other active sensors give away your position, so that's no good. You're down to the Mark I eyeball picking up the muzzle blast... and at an average of 1 second from firing to impact, you'd have a better chance at dodging a bullet.
There's two more disadvantages to consider - gun platform stability, and ground pressure.
A legged vehicle is probably pretty stable while stationary, but what happens if you fire a 125mm main gun while walking, with legs up in the air?
The other consideration is ground pressure. Tanks weigh between 40 and 70 tons. They spread all that weight over the large surface area of the tracks, and get the ground pressure down to a more reasonable level. What happens if you move from the high-surface-area tracks to 6 low-surface-area legs, especially in muddy or soft terrain?
Kinda embarrassing to get your AT-AT stuck in the mud....
Modern tank main guns, when used in the anti-armour role, don't use an explosive projectile. Instead, they fire a dart of dense metal (like tungsten or depleted uranium) at very high velocities. The pure kinetic energy drives the penetrator through the armour, and the sudden pressure rise within the fighting compartment superheats the air inside, killing the crew and (usually) cooking off any ammo inside the turret in a secondary explosion.
The muzzle velocity of these projectiles ranges from 1400 m/s to 1800 m/s.
Typical engagement ranges in open country extend from 5000m at the very outside, down to about 1000m Ranges in close country are correspondingly closer.
That means in the best possible case (a 5000m engagement in open country) you will have roughly 3 seconds to realize you have been fired upon, attempt evasive action, and get the vehicle clear of the space that will be occupied by the penetrator.
At more typical ranges, you have 1 second to accomplish same.
One of these things - especially if the display is really bright - would be great for the race car.
DG
Windows and the Hidden CLI
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think the biggest failing behind Windows (and by implication the Mac that it so blatently stole from) was that it hid the Command Line Interface (or shell if you prefer)
GUIs are well-suited for simple tasks, and are good for the important-task-infrequently-used items, but for items of moderate complexity, nothing beats dropping into a shell.
But by hiding the shell (and making it clunky, as per Windows and DOS) or by removing it entirely (Mac) there is now a huge class of computer users who expect *everything* on the computer to be availible via GUI widgets. The concept of communicating with the computer via a type of language is completely and utterly foreign to them, and is viewed with fear and distrust.
But to ignore the shell is to ignore the greater part of the power of the machine!
It's like all the books in the world were suddenly converted into comic books, and all literature was abandoned. Not that there's anything wrong with a comic book, but they don't deal well with Shakespere or Gibbon.
The fact that Perl has a multitude of different syntaxes and structures available to do the same job - that hack on hack stuff you disparage - is a feature. It's one of the language's strongest suits. And it closely approximates a typical spoken language, like English.
Where you see piled-on hacks, I see evolution at work. Perl is richly expressive, and allows you to code in whatever style works best for the task at hand, rather than trying to force the solution-space of the problem into the modeling-space of the language.
That's why Java and other B&D languages suck so badly - they trade flexability for orthadoxy.
But spoken languages have proven to be stubbornly resistant to the imposition of bondage and discipline in the name of "simplicity", and attempts at creating new, simpler spoken languages from scratch - like Esperanto - have failed miserably. The parallel with programming language should hold true as well. What is a programming language but a way of communicating with your computer, your users, and other programmers?
It should be at least as expressive as your spoken tongue, not less.
"A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds" and nothing illustrates that point better than a discussion of Perl by those who don't actually use it.
DG
Render Engine is nice, but modelers?
on
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Is there, anywhere, an open-source modeler that is as easy to use as Lightwave?
Don't say "Blender" - that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.
"That's right! The prize is cash! And none of that flaccid, green, American funny-money, either. Instead, it's this season's rapidly escalating, crisp, brand-new, supranational, global-standard currency:
EUROS!
Yes indeed! No fewer than 150 Euros, a staggering one hundred and fifty of 'em! And that's not all!
Because if Microsoft (like so many other large American companies) turns out to have some major accounting skeletons in its closet, the value of these Euros could skyrocket overnight."
It's that last sentence that grabbed my attention. Ye Gods, can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft's UberFortune turns out to be ficticious?
My job - before I retired - in the Canadian Army was armoured recce. We were the guys who went out in advance of the main troop body, looking for the bad guys so that the good guys with big guns could come kill them.
One of our other jobs was to survey routes and determine their suitability for passing military traffic. We would prepare "route reports" that would indicate widths, overhead clearences, the strength of the road surface (tanks chew up roads pretty quickly) and how much weight bridges could carry (we were taught techniques for inspecting bridges and making guesses as to how much weight they would hold.)
Certain types of "resources" would be noted on the reports, but they tended to be things like "gravel pit here" (for repairing roads torn up by tanks) or "harbour site here" (a good place to park vehicles off the route)
If anybody were to know about "secret peacekeeper sign codes" it would be us - and I can state categorically that there is no such thing.
There ARE some military signs around, but in North America they are temporary, not permenent. If you see a sign with a card suit on it, and an arrow (or sometimes a unit patch) that is a convoy route mark sign. It helps keep the poor non-recce types from getting lost while moving from one place to another, and they are removed once the convoy is complete.
In Europe, you'll see a lot of "bridge classification" signs that will have a tank, and a number, and possibly a truck, and a number. The number is the number of tons the bridge will support, the tank represents "tracked vehicles" and the truck represents "wheeled vehicles"
As you can probably tell, I am an athiest. I was raised Roman Catholic (and so got the full religious education) and I came to atheism once I was on my own and free to think for myself. I have a lot of sympathy for the religious, in that I understand full well how difficult it is to let go of stuff that was taught to you as (heh) gospel truth for most of your whole life.
The earth could have litterally have been built in 6 days. There is no way to prove or disprove this. Or, the context in which the word "Day" is described does not mean a literal 24 hour day.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
As it sits right now, the word ancient Greek word that has been translated as "day", meaning "a 24 hour period". Certainly that is the interpretation that is commonly accepted.
If "day" does NOT mean "a 24 hour period", but rather "some period of time very much longer than 24 hours" then the common use of the word "day" in Genesis is an ERROR - a faithfully reproduced, painstakingly copied ERROR.
It is, of course, possible that God snapped His fingers, and the Earth came together complete with a fossil record and the evidence of very long term geological processes. As such, it is impossible to disprove, in a scientific way, that the Earth was not created in 6 days.
At some point you have to make a decision: given the massive amounts of evidence that show that the Earth was created millions of years ago and then slowly acquired life through natural processes, does that not make more sense than an Earth created in a mystical fashion in an unnaturally quick timeframe, complete with falsified evidence of a natural creation and the slow development of life?
If you are of the camp that believes that God triggered the Big Bang and then sat back and watched His divine plan unfold, fine. That is a much more reasonable Creation story, as it allows all the scientific evidence we have to date to remain True. But if you *are* of ths camp, then Genesis is in error, and at least one portion of the Bible is FALSE.
I wonder why the Gospels are picked on so much.
Mostly because - unlike the Old Testement - the Gospels provide four independant accounts of the same events. There is no "Book of Moses according to Levi", "Book of Moses according to Samuel" etc so it is harder to show that given Old Testament passages refer to the same event (if indeed they actually do)
But the Gospels refer to the life and actions of the same guy, who incidently is supposed to be the Son of God (and so what he says and does is core to Christianity)
If the Gospels contradict themselves on so much as one fact - say the date of the birth of Jesus - then at least one of them is False on that fact. If there is one Falsehood, there may be more, and you have no way of determining which passage is False or not.
Which is another way of stating that there is no way to tell is a given Biblical passage is actually True.
I'm not the first person to ever state this. Many, many learned scholars throughout the history of Christianity have struggled with this concept, and great and amazing feats of logical gymnastics have taken place in order to rationallize these logical problems away. But notwithstanding great efforts at rationalization, the core problem remains: how do you trust a book that contains known false statements, given that there is no way to independantly test any of these statements outside of the context of the book?
It is very, very good that you are seeking the Truth, but Truth is a very slippery fish indeed. It is one of the core tenets of science that determining Truth is very difficult, that you have to be prepared to provide excellent evidence of given would-be Truth, and you have to be ready to accept that today's Truth may well be disproven tomorrow. The "Truth" of science is a fuzzy, nebulous concept that you at best glimpse out of the corner of your eye from time to time. But it also maps very well into the real world.
Ask yourself this: "Why do I insist on the existence of God and the Truth of the Bible?" What purpose does it serve? Seriously. Think about this. Meditate on it. And see if you can answer yourself truthfully. I'd be interested in what you discover.
(We seem to be in agreement on the issue of the danger of fanatics - of any stripe - so I promise not to beat you up too badly:)
But the issue of Biblical "truth" is an interesting one, because so many people's concepts of what "Biblical truth" actually *means* are so different and so contradictory - often self-contraditictory.
If I understand your position correctly (and I agree that text is not a perfect communications medium), you believe:
1) Everything in the Bible is True
2) Mistakes may be made in translation, such that a False version of what was once a True statement may appear in later versions.
3) Even given a perfect translation, people may (intentionally or accidently) misconstrue what a passage actually means, and so the version of the passage as it exists in their heads may become False.
I agree wholeheartedly with statements 2 and 3 from the above summary.
Now let me make the following observations
1) There are some parts of the Bible that are very obviously False - the Earth was not built 6 days, for example. The four Gospels (which all discuss the same events) often contradict each other on dates, places, and sequences of events.
So there are passages to one can point to and state "this is False" and other passages one can point to and state "up to three of these may be False, but we don't know which"
2) Given the lack of access to early copies (which may not necessarily track the original texts themselves) and the lack of ability of most Christians to read the ancient languages (usually Greek) in which they were written, most people must thus read the Bible in the translation to their native language, and thus get the full force of any translation and copy errors.
This in turn means that in their copy of the Bible, there exist passages which are not the same as the "True" Bible, and so are False.
3) For a given person, there is some level of probability that they will misconstrue a given passage at any given time, and so their "internal model" of the passage becomes False.
When you tie this all together, this means that:
1) for a given passage, there is some probability that the passage is False
2) You have no way of determining what that probability is
This means that _every single passage in the Bible is suspect_!
How can one choose to base a life, make decisions, or answer questions, based on the contents of the Bible, if there is no way to know if the answer is True or not?
Slashdot Mirror
Passwords can be changed, and can be changed quickly. If you discover a password has been compromised, locking down the system is a password change away.
If you want to be really secure, change your password daily. Or hourly. Or after each transaction.
But once your obfuscated URL is discovered - and discovering it is trivial - then the secret is out, and what little protection it did provide is lost until you can change the obfuscation.
For the best example, see the CSS system used on DVD players. That security system hinged on keeping something secret. Once it was discovered, there was no way to put the cat back in the bag without changing the key on everything that needed to be able to read DVDs - and obviously, the MPAA couldn't do that without rendering all the DVD players out there nonfunctional.
Secrets, as part of a security system, are BAD. They only become acceptable when they can be quickly changed once compromised. If they cannot be changed quickly, they render you more vulnerable than if they were out in the open to begin with.
DG
One of the advantages of the F1 guys going crazy is that their stuff trickles down to us little guys.
Shaker rig time is now cheap enough that even small teams like mine (hey Malda! Wanna sponsor a race car?) can afford it, once and a while.
http://www.morissdampers.com offers 4 and 7 post shaker stuff.
The only reason I haven't used it is that I don't (yet!) have the data to drive the rig. It wants 4 suspension position sensors and 4 wheel accelerometers as a minimum.
But even then, there's still stuff to be learned from even simple stuff like frequency sweeps. The NASCAR guys recently discovered the Ohlins rig in North Carolina, and it's been booked solid for a year now.
DG
Not only can the engine management engineer retune the engine on the fly during a race, most of the teams go even further.
Every team has what is called a "7-post shaker rig". This is an electro-hydro-mechanical device that places a hydraulic ram under each tire, plus 3 more attached to the aero centre for feeding in aero loads. By playing back the loads recorded by the car during operation by the position sensors, load cells, strain gauges, and accelerometers though these rams, the engineers can watch the car operate under real racing conditions in the lab.
Well, the bigger teams transmit the telemetry coming off the car during the race back to the shop in England, where the shaker righ data is played back on a duplicate car on the shaker rig in near real-time, so that they can keep an eye open for problems.
F1 has more money and technical ability than can be imagined.
DG
F1 gearboxes have been fully automatic for most teams for a couple of seasons now. They retain the ability to do manual gearchanges if the driver wants to, but that almost never happens.
They are not torque-converter slushboxes like passenger cars. These are sequential-gearchange boxes like motorcycles, with hydraulic-actuated, computer-controlled shift mechanisms. There are zero drivetrain losses compared to a full-manual version, and they outperform a driver shifting in every respect.
DG
Mind you, it's far more effective to use an aftermarket ECU.
Check out http://farnorthracing.com to see the team website, and http://www.gems.co.uk to download the software I use.
DG
Sorry Hoss, but you're not even close on this one.
The amount of _torque_ an engine puts out is (to grossly simplify) a function of its displacement.
The amount of _power_ produced is torque over time, so it is a function of displacement times engine RPM.
At no time does cylinder count enter into this. Two given engines, one a V12 and the other an I4, of the same displacement and turning the same RPM should, all else being equal, produce equal power levels.
Where the real world starts intruding is when you start increasing displacement. Ignoring forced induction for a second, you increase displacement by adding bore diameter, stroke length, or additional cylinders.
As you increase bore diameter and/or stroke length, you tend to increase the inertial loads on the con rods, and these loads increase as a function of a power of engine RPM. Given that there is a fixed strength amount for reasonable materials used in non-racing engines, increasing displacement by going to a bigger bore or a longer stroke means reducing maximum RPM potential.
For a big diesel where redline is often less than 3000 RPM, this isn't an issue, so you take advantage of the natural balance of the I6 and make the bores and strokes as big as you like.
But on passenger car engines, and especially in racing engines, adding displacment while retaining RPM capacity means adding cylinders.
Once you start doing that, the primary constraint becomes packaging - all else being equal, a 4 litre I8 will be twice as long as a 2 litre I4, but a 4 litre V8 is only slightly longer (but wider) than a 2 litre I4.
DG
The Faramir scenes rubbed me the wrong way at first too, but upon further reflection I've come to realize that they make for a better movie.
The problem here, from a filmmaker's perspective, is twofold:
Firstly, the entire second half of TTT is Frodo, Sam, and Gollum struggling to get to Mordor without being discovered, and their observations about the journey, what it means to them, and the ever-increasing sense of gloom and despair that envelops them the closer they get to Mordor.
You can have that in a book, because the dialogue and scene setting keeps the story moving. It's a slow part of the book, but it's a slow part of the _journey_ too, so that's appropriate. The slow gloominess puts the reader into a gloomy mood as well as they empathise with the characters.
In the book, the encounter with Faramir is a ray of sunshine and hope in the middle of all the gloom and despair. It serves as a bit of an emotional relief, and provides contrast to how bad things are elsewhere. Faramir and Ithlien are there to say "hey, everything doesn't suck; there is still good in the world, even on the borders of Mordor, and not all Men are yet lost and without hope" It's a chance to catch our breath before we plunge back into the gloom and despair stuff.
But film is a visual medium, and unlike a book, is limited in time. Jackson cannot afford to spend the same proporation of time to having Frodo and Sam climbing over rocks and mucking through swamps, and ducking under bushes every time they hear a noise. It may work in a book, but in a film, once you've seen one hobbit scrabbling over a rock, you've seen them all.
So that means that Jackson doesn't get to establish all the gloom and despair that Tolkien did. Jackson is too busy intercutting all the action for us to ever get emotionally bogged down in the travails of the ringbearer.
In that light then, the as-written Ithlien scene, with an as-written nice-guy Faramir, breaks the tone. Not only do we not need Faramir to provide an emotional "up", we don't have the time to spare on any "ups" - all the scenes with Frodo in them need to be predominantly "down", more so than the book, because we don't spend as much time with him.
Secondly, we're not given all the backstory about how dangerous the Ring really is. In the book, by the time Frodo is on the borders of Mordor, we _know_ how dangerous the Ring is. It doesn't need underscoring. But in the movie, the Ring cannot just be a harmless MacGuffin; it's danger must be underscored at every opportunity to provide the emotional tension needed whenever the Ring is near to being discovered or taken.
So then, we get the movie Faramir: a man who provides a threat to Frodo and friends, rather than succor (but one that at least overcomes his temptation in the end, showing a glimpse of the book Faramir)
It's a major deviation from the book, yes, but it makes for a better movie.
BTW, it's good to see that after the movies are completed, that the giant flaming eyeball who played Sauron will be able to find employment as a lighthouse.... WTF was up with THAT?
DG
Oh, come on.
c qu isition/76.html
If you're going to add a tach, don't go with one of those puny little Sun tachs. Use one of these bad boys:
http://www.autometer.com/hp/2001_catalog/data_a
It'll be about as much use on a computer as it is on the typical riced-up Civic....
DG
I'm not sure where' you're going with that reply.
:)
Are you implying that the aluminum your hammer was made of exists because of divine intervention?
As far as your archer fish is concerned, there are evolutionary process analogues to turning, milling, drilling and so on. Some of those processes can be demonstrated in the lab, much the same way that you demonstrated "machining" on scrap metal that was "not your hammer" but was sufficiantly "like your hammer" to demonstrate the validity of the process as applied to "hammers"
So while nobody is going to start with some sort of proto-archerfish and "evolve" it into a bona fide archerfish in front of you, they can demonstrate the mechanisms by which proto-archerfish could develop into bona fide archerfish, and this should be sufficiant to prove the point.
You could call that "faith" if you really wanted to, but to do so is to miss the point.
Incidently, people _have_ "developed" atoms before. You can make helium out of hydrogen given enough energy.... it's been done.
DG
You're using an abnormally rigourous definition of "faith" here.
The toast you had for breakfast started out life as a series of wheat plants growing on a farm somewhere. It was then subjected to a variety of processes that ultimately ended up in the toast on your plate.
I can describe these processes in the general, but would find it very difficult to reconstruct those processes in reverse, finally ending up on the plot of land where the wheat once grew that constituted your breakfast.
Instead, it is far easier to generalize somewhat, describing the processes in the chain from wheat to toast in a less specific manner - and you must take it "on faith" that these general processes map to your specific piece of toast.
That inability to provide specific evidence with regards to your breakfast does not mean that the generalization of how toast is made is de facto invalid.
So with regard to your angler fish, the underlying mechanisms and processes - natural selection, random and inheritable mutation, and so on and so forth - can suffice to show how the species _could_ have evolved, without needing to present you with the preserved corpses (and all their contained genetic information) of each successive generation of "angler fish" back to some earlier ancestor.
If you want to see examples of the mechanisms of evolution at work, where you _can_ track change through successive generations, you have to work forward - and there's lots and lots of examples done with fruit flies (whose gestation period is sufficiently short to permit experimentation) and realize - call it an act of "faith" if you must - that the same mechanisms apply to all known DNA-based organisms.
DG
Using ice as radiation shielding might be a good idea on long-range manned exploration missions, despite the weight/volume issues.
It might be useful to bring along 264000 US gallons of water.
DG
Thanks to Loki (RIP) I've had a chance to do both on my Linux box:
Quake
Quake2
Soldier of Fortune
Quake 3
Descent 3
And to be honest, I found the "Quake-alikes" to be a lot more fun; a lot more immersive, than Descent.
I've run for my life from a Shambler, gotten totally creeped out when I found a lab full of my fellow space marines begging for death, and laid patiently behind cover while scouting an area with the scope on my sniper rifle - great fun, all. I could suspend disbelief enough to make me care about what was going on in the game.
Descent... left me cold. Robots drifting around endless corridors? Why? Where's the motivation?
Story can really change a FPS into something much more than "run amok shooting baddies" - Bungie's Marathon is a prime example. Done well, it can really hold your imagination. And isn't that what fun is all about? Not every game needs an original play mechanism, if the story is gripping enough.
That's why Q3 didn't do much for me either - pretty engine, awesome control, gameplay that left me flat after a little while (no story) But hey, lots of other people love the game, so I don't have any problem with it. To each his own.
DG
Man, you can tell at a glance who read the article and who didn't.
I'm going to simplify a great deal here to try and boil this down to the essence. John Carmack please feel free to correct any mistakes I make.
Up to this point, the imagery coming out of the gaming graphics cards has been limited by the hardware design of the cards. The feature set implemented by the cards limits how complicated you can get with the details in the final image.
Note that we're not just talking about simple things like pure polygon counts. Film Industry CGI isn't of higher quality just because they throw more polygons at the problem; they have all kinds of highly complex shaders that can generate special textures without changing the number of polygons in the model - if you saw the "special features" on the Shrek DVD, you can see this at work with Donkey's fur.
Rendering all these extra shaders is CPU expensive, which is why the big animation houses have big render farms.
But two things have happened that stand to change that.
The first (and the most ingenious) is that it has been discovered that you can compile any shader into a series of OpenGL language commands. The tradeoff is the number of passes through the pipeline that implementing a given shader may require may well be a large number - but even so, any shader currently in use by a Hollywood Mouse House can, in theory, be compiled into OpenGL and executed on any OpenGL card.
And here's the really cool part - rendering in OpenGL is many times faster than doing it in software on a general-purpose CPU. Many, many times faster.
Secondly, the biggest problem with trying to crank Shrek through your GF2MX400 (assuming you've compiled all the shaders into OpenGL) is that each shader may require 200 passes, but the data structures inside the card lack precision - either not enough bits as a float, or perhaps not even floats at all, but integers.
That means the data is being savaged by rounding errors and lack of precision during each render pass. It's like photocopying photocopies.
BUT, the latest generation of graphics chips have the necessary precision to do 200-pass rendering without falling victim to rounding errors.
Combine these two things together, and you can quite literally take a frame from Shrek, with all the crazy shaders, compile it to OpenGL, and render the frame on your GF6-whatever **faster than the native render platform**
A very good deal faster than the native render platform.
Is this "Shrek in real-time"? No, not by a long shot. But it may well be "Pixar's renderfarm in a box".
Now, as Bruce pointed out, having Pixar's renderfarm in a box doesn't make you Pixar. There is still a requirement for artistic talent. But all that cheap extra horsepower may well mean that the quality of CGI is going to explode for those talented enough to make use of it.
How will this affect games? It makes a bunch of shader techniques that were previously availible only to the movie industry possible within the framework of a game. And it divorces, somewhat, the game visuals from the card's hardware because these shaders are executed as general-purpose OpenGL instructions, not as dedicated hardware on the card. If you, as a game designer, can write a "fur shader" that runs in few enough passes to meet real-time output timings, then you get fur on your model, even if the card doesn't have a built-in "fur shader" or "fur engine".
THIS is why this is all such a big deal. The amount of quality per mSec of render time is about to explode.
Cool stuff!
DG
Keep in mind that I'm a retired tank troop commander, so I sorta know what I'm talking about.
1) Modern armour can stop APFSDS rounds
Under the right circumstances, yes, but consider what the "right circumstances" are.
Firstly, any data from the Gulf war vs American tanks is data that describes second or third line equipment vs state of the art equipment. In case you didn't know, the digits in the designation of Soviet-era equipment represent the year it was first identified by NATO - so a T55 was first encountered in *1955* and a T-72 in *1972*
Related to this is that the Soviets never sold their top-line equipment to client states. They kept the good stuff for themselves, and sold derated stuff to customers.
Secondly, the price of all that armour protection is a great deal of mass. While the exact composition of the M1's armour is still top secret, it is known to have at least one layer of depleted uranium in it (the same stuff used in the penetrator) It also has a bunch of ceramics to defend against HEAT warheads, and an anti-spall layer to help the crew.
On a legged vehicle, you have to not only move this mass forward, you have to LIFT it too.
On a tracked vehicle, the tank rolls over its tracks much like a train. There is suprisingly little friction there - ask anyone who ever made the mistake of trying to change both tracks at once, and had the tank roll away from them.
The idea of 65 tons JUMPING straight up in the air is just ludicrous. Work out how much energy that would take! And then work out the ground pressure when it lands, and figure out how far it'll be driven into the soil.
2) Tanks are very much more manouverable than you seem to realize. They can spin in place at very high speeds, and then squirt out in unexpected directions. The first time you actually see a tank in motion, it'll scare the crap out of you. These are not giant lumbering monsters, they are 65 ton sportscars.
3) Even if you somehow manage to find a power source that could drive a legged vehicle, even if you can solve the ground pressure problem, you still have to deal with the fact that you're still completely dependant on crew reaction time to recognise you're being shot at, assess the incoming tradjectory, and then make an appropriate evasive action. The incoming round is supersonic, so no help there. Radar and other active sensors give away your position, so that's no good. You're down to the Mark I eyeball picking up the muzzle blast... and at an average of 1 second from firing to impact, you'd have a better chance at dodging a bullet.
Not gonna happen.
DG
There's two more disadvantages to consider - gun platform stability, and ground pressure.
A legged vehicle is probably pretty stable while stationary, but what happens if you fire a 125mm main gun while walking, with legs up in the air?
The other consideration is ground pressure. Tanks weigh between 40 and 70 tons. They spread all that weight over the large surface area of the tracks, and get the ground pressure down to a more reasonable level. What happens if you move from the high-surface-area tracks to 6 low-surface-area legs, especially in muddy or soft terrain?
Kinda embarrassing to get your AT-AT stuck in the mud....
DG
Modern tank main guns, when used in the anti-armour role, don't use an explosive projectile. Instead, they fire a dart of dense metal (like tungsten or depleted uranium) at very high velocities. The pure kinetic energy drives the penetrator through the armour, and the sudden pressure rise within the fighting compartment superheats the air inside, killing the crew and (usually) cooking off any ammo inside the turret in a secondary explosion.
The muzzle velocity of these projectiles ranges from 1400 m/s to 1800 m/s.
Typical engagement ranges in open country extend from 5000m at the very outside, down to about 1000m Ranges in close country are correspondingly closer.
That means in the best possible case (a 5000m engagement in open country) you will have roughly 3 seconds to realize you have been fired upon, attempt evasive action, and get the vehicle clear of the space that will be occupied by the penetrator.
At more typical ranges, you have 1 second to accomplish same.
Not going to happen. Sorry.
DG
You have any idea of what pricing is like?
One of these things - especially if the display is really bright - would be great for the race car.
DG
I think the biggest failing behind Windows (and by implication the Mac that it so blatently stole from) was that it hid the Command Line Interface (or shell if you prefer)
GUIs are well-suited for simple tasks, and are good for the important-task-infrequently-used items, but for items of moderate complexity, nothing beats dropping into a shell.
But by hiding the shell (and making it clunky, as per Windows and DOS) or by removing it entirely (Mac) there is now a huge class of computer users who expect *everything* on the computer to be availible via GUI widgets. The concept of communicating with the computer via a type of language is completely and utterly foreign to them, and is viewed with fear and distrust.
But to ignore the shell is to ignore the greater part of the power of the machine!
It's like all the books in the world were suddenly converted into comic books, and all literature was abandoned. Not that there's anything wrong with a comic book, but they don't deal well with Shakespere or Gibbon.
Celebrate the shell! Bring back the CLI!
DG
The fact that Perl has a multitude of different syntaxes and structures available to do the same job - that hack on hack stuff you disparage - is a feature. It's one of the language's strongest suits. And it closely approximates a typical spoken language, like English.
Where you see piled-on hacks, I see evolution at work. Perl is richly expressive, and allows you to code in whatever style works best for the task at hand, rather than trying to force the solution-space of the problem into the modeling-space of the language.
That's why Java and other B&D languages suck so badly - they trade flexability for orthadoxy.
But spoken languages have proven to be stubbornly resistant to the imposition of bondage and discipline in the name of "simplicity", and attempts at creating new, simpler spoken languages from scratch - like Esperanto - have failed miserably. The parallel with programming language should hold true as well. What is a programming language but a way of communicating with your computer, your users, and other programmers?
It should be at least as expressive as your spoken tongue, not less.
"A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds" and nothing illustrates that point better than a discussion of Perl by those who don't actually use it.
DG
Is there, anywhere, an open-source modeler that is as easy to use as Lightwave?
Don't say "Blender" - that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.
*sigh* I miss LW.
DG
Part of the prize announcement:
"That's right! The prize is cash! And none of that flaccid, green, American funny-money, either. Instead, it's this season's rapidly escalating, crisp, brand-new, supranational, global-standard currency:
EUROS!
Yes indeed! No fewer than 150 Euros, a staggering one hundred and fifty of 'em! And that's not all!
Because if Microsoft (like so many other large American companies) turns out to have some major accounting skeletons in its closet, the value of these Euros could skyrocket overnight."
It's that last sentence that grabbed my attention. Ye Gods, can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft's UberFortune turns out to be ficticious?
Ooooooooh.....
DG
I seem to recall a similar piece entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Regan"
It seems that this joke dates at least back to the 1980's
Prior art?
DG
My job - before I retired - in the Canadian Army was armoured recce. We were the guys who went out in advance of the main troop body, looking for the bad guys so that the good guys with big guns could come kill them.
One of our other jobs was to survey routes and determine their suitability for passing military traffic. We would prepare "route reports" that would indicate widths, overhead clearences, the strength of the road surface (tanks chew up roads pretty quickly) and how much weight bridges could carry (we were taught techniques for inspecting bridges and making guesses as to how much weight they would hold.)
Certain types of "resources" would be noted on the reports, but they tended to be things like "gravel pit here" (for repairing roads torn up by tanks) or "harbour site here" (a good place to park vehicles off the route)
If anybody were to know about "secret peacekeeper sign codes" it would be us - and I can state categorically that there is no such thing.
There ARE some military signs around, but in North America they are temporary, not permenent. If you see a sign with a card suit on it, and an arrow (or sometimes a unit patch) that is a convoy route mark sign. It helps keep the poor non-recce types from getting lost while moving from one place to another, and they are removed once the convoy is complete.
In Europe, you'll see a lot of "bridge classification" signs that will have a tank, and a number, and possibly a truck, and a number. The number is the number of tons the bridge will support, the tank represents "tracked vehicles" and the truck represents "wheeled vehicles"
But these guys are absolute loons.
Feel free to laugh.
DG
Thanks for the well thought reply.
No problem.
As you can probably tell, I am an athiest. I was raised Roman Catholic (and so got the full religious education) and I came to atheism once I was on my own and free to think for myself. I have a lot of sympathy for the religious, in that I understand full well how difficult it is to let go of stuff that was taught to you as (heh) gospel truth for most of your whole life.
The earth could have litterally have been built in 6 days. There is no way to prove or disprove this. Or, the context in which the word "Day" is described does not mean a literal 24 hour day.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
As it sits right now, the word ancient Greek word that has been translated as "day", meaning "a 24 hour period". Certainly that is the interpretation that is commonly accepted.
If "day" does NOT mean "a 24 hour period", but rather "some period of time very much longer than 24 hours" then the common use of the word "day" in Genesis is an ERROR - a faithfully reproduced, painstakingly copied ERROR.
It is, of course, possible that God snapped His fingers, and the Earth came together complete with a fossil record and the evidence of very long term geological processes. As such, it is impossible to disprove, in a scientific way, that the Earth was not created in 6 days.
At some point you have to make a decision: given the massive amounts of evidence that show that the Earth was created millions of years ago and then slowly acquired life through natural processes, does that not make more sense than an Earth created in a mystical fashion in an unnaturally quick timeframe, complete with falsified evidence of a natural creation and the slow development of life?
If you are of the camp that believes that God triggered the Big Bang and then sat back and watched His divine plan unfold, fine. That is a much more reasonable Creation story, as it allows all the scientific evidence we have to date to remain True. But if you *are* of ths camp, then Genesis is in error, and at least one portion of the Bible is FALSE.
I wonder why the Gospels are picked on so much.
Mostly because - unlike the Old Testement - the Gospels provide four independant accounts of the same events. There is no "Book of Moses according to Levi", "Book of Moses according to Samuel" etc so it is harder to show that given Old Testament passages refer to the same event (if indeed they actually do)
But the Gospels refer to the life and actions of the same guy, who incidently is supposed to be the Son of God (and so what he says and does is core to Christianity)
If the Gospels contradict themselves on so much as one fact - say the date of the birth of Jesus - then at least one of them is False on that fact. If there is one Falsehood, there may be more, and you have no way of determining which passage is False or not.
Which is another way of stating that there is no way to tell is a given Biblical passage is actually True.
I'm not the first person to ever state this. Many, many learned scholars throughout the history of Christianity have struggled with this concept, and great and amazing feats of logical gymnastics have taken place in order to rationallize these logical problems away. But notwithstanding great efforts at rationalization, the core problem remains: how do you trust a book that contains known false statements, given that there is no way to independantly test any of these statements outside of the context of the book?
It is very, very good that you are seeking the Truth, but Truth is a very slippery fish indeed. It is one of the core tenets of science that determining Truth is very difficult, that you have to be prepared to provide excellent evidence of given would-be Truth, and you have to be ready to accept that today's Truth may well be disproven tomorrow. The "Truth" of science is a fuzzy, nebulous concept that you at best glimpse out of the corner of your eye from time to time. But it also maps very well into the real world.
Ask yourself this: "Why do I insist on the existence of God and the Truth of the Bible?" What purpose does it serve? Seriously. Think about this. Meditate on it. And see if you can answer yourself truthfully. I'd be interested in what you discover.
DG
(We seem to be in agreement on the issue of the danger of fanatics - of any stripe - so I promise not to beat you up too badly :)
But the issue of Biblical "truth" is an interesting one, because so many people's concepts of what "Biblical truth" actually *means* are so different and so contradictory - often self-contraditictory.
If I understand your position correctly (and I agree that text is not a perfect communications medium), you believe:
1) Everything in the Bible is True
2) Mistakes may be made in translation, such that a False version of what was once a True statement may appear in later versions.
3) Even given a perfect translation, people may (intentionally or accidently) misconstrue what a passage actually means, and so the version of the passage as it exists in their heads may become False.
I agree wholeheartedly with statements 2 and 3 from the above summary.
Now let me make the following observations
1) There are some parts of the Bible that are very obviously False - the Earth was not built 6 days, for example. The four Gospels (which all discuss the same events) often contradict each other on dates, places, and sequences of events.
So there are passages to one can point to and state "this is False" and other passages one can point to and state "up to three of these may be False, but we don't know which"
2) Given the lack of access to early copies (which may not necessarily track the original texts themselves) and the lack of ability of most Christians to read the ancient languages (usually Greek) in which they were written, most people must thus read the Bible in the translation to their native language, and thus get the full force of any translation and copy errors.
This in turn means that in their copy of the Bible, there exist passages which are not the same as the "True" Bible, and so are False.
3) For a given person, there is some level of probability that they will misconstrue a given passage at any given time, and so their "internal model" of the passage becomes False.
When you tie this all together, this means that:
1) for a given passage, there is some probability that the passage is False
2) You have no way of determining what that probability is
This means that _every single passage in the Bible is suspect_!
How can one choose to base a life, make decisions, or answer questions, based on the contents of the Bible, if there is no way to know if the answer is True or not?
DG