- On-board, almost every other connector and whoosit you could want in a PC? Check.
Oh my God, they've invented the Amiga!
:)
The Army Groks Simulation
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P2P Goes To War
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.
When you train live, in the real world, there's really no good way to tell who killed who. I've seen exercises with millions of dollars of equipment and dozens of highly trained, professional soldiers degenerate into a game of "I shot you first!"
In the simulators, you get to actually employ the weapons against targets, and work with the results. Make a mistake, and you get killed. Get killed a few times, and you start learning.
And besides, it's a kick-ass game.:) Beats Q3 down cold.
Even as rough and clunky as the system was around the edges, it was still the best training I ever had. My biggest regret was that we didn't have one at the home unit - if we did, I'd've had the boys spend hours in it every day, practicing, and getting better and better at the job.
Simulation is the next big military advantage, and the Army has really grabbed ahold of the idea. Watch for some cool stuff to come out of this space.
Now that sub-$1k computers are running in the GHz range, it seems that all the computational tasks on a common desktop system are not processor-bound.
3D, rendered-on-the-fly games get well over 30 frames per second at insanely high resolutions and levels of detail. The most bloated and poorly-written office software scrolls though huge documents and recalculates massive spreadsheets in a snap. Compiling the Linux kernel can be done in less than 5 minutes. And so on.
It seems that the limiting speed of modern computers is off the processor, in IO.
What then, do you forsee coming down the pike that requires more processor power than we have today? What's the underlying goal you intend to solve with your work?
Hey, don't dis Earnheart
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
OK, so maybe some people are treating Dale like he's in line for sainthood, which is a little much, but he's not just "a hick with a fast car", any more than Babe Ruth was "a fat guy with a stick" or John Carmack is a "pasty guy that types on a keyboard"
Show some respect, OK?
It's about the *gameplay*, stupid
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 2
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but what has always impressed me most about the N64 Zeldas (my entry point into the Zelda story) has been the wonderfully balanced gameplay and control.
They've always managed to strike a perfect balance between challenge/difficulty, and achievability. Puzzles are tough, but not obscure. Beating bosses are a challenge, but don't take nanosecond twitch responses to pull off. There's no "find the magic pixel" or "die a thousand deaths".
Future game developers would do well to study the N64 Zeldas. They're as close to perfect as any game I've ever played.
It is quite possible to have state-sponsored medical research without having to have state ownership of the drug companies.
One way to do it is similar to the military procurement process - put it up for competitive bid.
The state puts aside funds for a certain purpose - say a cure for AIDS. Some of those funds are front-loaded to drug companies seeking the contract. The rest is used for milestone bonuses, and a REALLY big bonus at the end for the first company to find the cure. Once the cure is found, release the formula to the world as public domain.
As long as the money is good, there's no reason why you won't see drug companies signing up - especially as R&D usually has spinoffs.
The world doesn't need to be pure capitalist or pure communist. A decent mix of the best of both gets a lot more done.
I assume if you're going to start throwing around the word "coward" then you must have walked the talk yourself, done time in military service, and earned the right to say that.
So where did you serve?
It's real easy to advocate military solutions when it's not YOUR ass on the line.
There are a couple of very key differences in this situation:
1) The ABM treaty is an agreement between STATES, and thus, an implied agreement between the people in those states (the state speaking for the people) A corporation does not speak with the voice of a people; it is an artificial entity to enable individuals to make money.
States are responsible to the people they represent. Corporations are responsible to no-one.
Unilaterally breaking a treaty is to thus break with a people - and is a far more serious kettle of fish.
States appropriate private property (for the good of the state) all the time. Usually, it's compensated for, but not always.
2) As a practical matter, a drug company has little it can do in form of retaliation. A state, however (especially a nuclear state) is not so limited. There may be serious repecussions to breaking the ABM treaty.
In many cases, unilateral treaty-breaking can be seen as an act of war. In the best of cases, it's not very damned polite.
Breaking this _particular_ treaty also has strategic implications. If one believes that an effective missile shield can be erected, then one who has missiles, but no shield, had best strike BEFORE the shield is in place.
Thankfully, the current Russian government seems to have more sense than that. I'm not sure that is univerally applicable to all nuclear powers.
By continuing on its current course of action, the current administration is walking a very thin line. It's not at all a simple case of "erect shield, protect Americans". It's more like "attempt to erect shield, piss off all other nuclear powers, invite first strike, further reputation as a treaty-breaking country not to be trusted" A military success perhaps, but a diplomatic disaster.
It would be far, FAR better to negotiate a new ABM treaty that allowed the new system (having one's cake and eating it too) than to just go ahead and build it anyway.
I'd point out that the last major Western power to ignore the terms of major military treaties and do what they wanted was Nazi Germany, but then I'd wind up invoking Godwin's Law.;)
OK, so the subject line is a little inflammitory, and thus, by actually stating an opinion, I too am moderator-bait. We share that much at least.;)
But as for your opinion itself... can you actually be serious?
You've got a country full of dying people. There's a drug available that can save a goodly number of them. It's expensive, and you're poor. You have the ability to reverse-engineer the drug (or just steal the formula outright, whatever) and produce it yourself for minimal cost.
Would you, as the leader of this country, REALLY allow people to DIE a slow, lingering, and very painful death just because a piece of paper says you have too?
I'm sorry, not me. As a hypothetical Brazillian leader, my duty is to serve the people of my country, not some foreign drug company. If they won't play ball on price, then we do what we gotta do to save them.
The point on education is a salient one, but this is not a zero-sum game - producing the drug does not mean a reduction in education, nor does increasing education do a dammned thing for those already infected.
This case is one of the best examples for the "IP is bogus, information wants to be free" position that I've seen. We're not talking about music files or games here, this is information that will actually SAVE REAL HUMAN LIVES, that a corporation wants hidden and protected SO IT CAN MAKE MONEY.
If that doesn't make you sick to your stomach, I don't know what will.
This is my real issue with the Libertarians of the world. There is no place in their world-view for the public project, done for the benefit of mankind. Everything must have a profit motive, and protecting profits has priority over all else.
Just like Marxist-Leninism goes too far, by wanting _everything_ state-owned and state-run, Libertarian goes too far by giving all control to the private sector. Either extreme is insane. The Real World requires compromise, and I for one am glad to see Brazil stick up for REAL freedom, and do what is right.
I just had a quick price look, and a G450 Dual Head is only $100 in most places.
Dual head would be nice....
What's the 3D performance on this card like? Got any benchmarks? Is Quake3 playable, in a decent resolution with all the goodies turned on? (I don't need bazillions of fps, 30 is good enough for me)
Thanks for the tip,
So, what's a good Linux 3D card then?
on
ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 2
I'm finally going to upgrade my trusty old P233MMX w/Matrox Mill II to something a little more modern - hell, I got a good 5 years out of this system, running Linux.
Current plans are for an Athlon 1.2 GHz (266)
So what's a good 3D card to go with this system, given that it is exclusively for Linux?
Back in the Dark Ages of corporate acceptance of Free Software (circa '97 or so) a common pointy-haired manager complaint was "Who do we sue?"
IE, if the software contained some fatal flaw that resulted in Actual Money being lost, the corporation could go after a commercial software house in the courts in an attempt to recover costs.
Free Software, being provided as a community service with no sue-able corporation behind it, lacked this perceived accountability.
Well, here we have a gold-plated example of a fatal flaw in a piece of commercial software, coupled to a lax attitude towards fixing it, that has without question resulted in the loss of Actual Money by a great deal of people. One would think then, that IS Managers across the world would be queuing up to sue Microsoft and recover their costs.
Having a fair amount of hands-on experience with military hardware, I think you're greatly underestimating how good these systems really are.
We're long past the days of where an infrared seeker was a "hot blob" device. Modern seekers have high enough resolution to act as HDTV cameras. The NODLR camera on my LAV-RECCE was sensitive enough to tell the temperature difference in clothing worn next-to-skin and over clothing - meaning that you could "see" right through someone's clothing to tell who was wearing boxers or briefs - at several hundred meters.
Missle seekers have been good enough to pick up heat from atmospheric friction on subsonic aircraft for at least 15 years, and the more modern varients on the AIM-9 Sidewinder can distinguish between an aircraft and a flare with no trouble at all.
Your "pre-chilled" scenario is totally bogus. Air friction at launch would defeat it in seconds.
Defeating countermeasures is a sticky problem to be sure, but it is entirely solvable, as the past 50 or so years of homing torpedoes and anti-air missles shows. And the stakes are VERY high. These are NBC weapons you're shooting at, not piddly little high explosives. If one of these things gets through, there is real and serious pain to be had.
Their effectiveness against the "mass launch" Soviet-style attack scenario may be dubious (so instead of 5 warheads per city, you get 1. Oh well.) but against less affluent states who don't have those kinds of stockpiles, it's entirely reasonable to expect to neutralize the attack. That adds a powerful deterrent factor - I've got 5 warheads. If I mount them on my Long March and fire them at the US, none of them may get though, and then I've kicked the hornet's nest for nothing.
The nice thing, technically, from a missle defense system is that it gives you and added response to an agressor. If every ABM gets through and delivers a payload, then your only real response is retaliation in kind - hello MAD! If the bad guys nuke LA... well, if they nuke LA they might get applause... if they nuke Daytona Beach, then you're pretty well forced to nuke a city back, and if the nuke-er has sufficiant capacity, you start escalating. With a defense system, you can absorb the attack without harm, and possibly use a less destructive form of retaliation.
Ever notice that Superman never carried a gun?
Politically, there are other issues that go along with developing and deploying a missle defense system that make it a less attractive option. i find it odd that the current administration is pushing so hard for it - better, I think, to develop the technology quietly. But that's a discussion for another day.
To call it "snake oil" though, as if it couldn't possibly work, is to reveal a great deal of ignorence.
1) A radar system detects the launch
2) The radar tracks the target to determine trajectory
3) The tracking signal is fed to the interceptor missle
4) The interceptor is launched along the track of the incoming warhead
5) When the interceptor is close enough, it switches to it's own seeker systems and homes in on the warhead
The problem is that the radar portion isn't done yet - but they wanted to test the final-interecept stage (which is the hard part anyway)
So they configured a GPS system to transmit the _same information that the radar would have provided_ using the same formats and same systems. the interecptor got no information that the radar would not have provided - so the test is perfectly valid.
At least, as long as one assumes that the radar will work as designed.
The intereceptor did NOT "home in on the beacon" as some people would have you believe. Everything here was completely above board.
They learned their lesson back in the Sgt York days. Faking Isn't Worth It.
The spokesperson at the initial "success" press conference was very open and forthcoming about the GPS beacon placed on the target vehicle. They didn't try and hide it at all - in fact, its existence was part of the presentation.
The test was of the final-stage-to-intercept section, which includes a decoy-detection function.
However, this part of the system needs an initial lanch vector from a launch-detect radar system. the radar picks up the launch, feeds the missle trajectory into the intercept stage, and then the interceptor carries out the actual intercept.
The launch-detect radar portion of the system is not yet finished, so the GPS beacon was placed on the target to supply the missing information that the intercept stage requires.
Note, however, that the data from the beacon was presented in the same manner as it would have existed if it came from the radar system. It supplied no additional information. If one assumes that the radar works as designed, then the test is perfectly valid.
The military learned a lot about faking demos from the Sheridan "tank" and the Sgt York gun air defense system. They don't do that any more. It hurts too much when they get caught.
What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it. Dammed if you do, dammned if you don't.
No matter what one may think about Bush's politics, the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Ladies and Gentleman of the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate,
I cannot find words that describe my relief upon discovering that you are seeking public comment on the issues of Intellectual Property and Copyright in the digital age before going forth and making a law similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as it exists in the United States. This means there is still time to affect the law-making process, to prevent such a travesty of justice being imposed upon the Canadian citizenry.
It is far, far better to prevent a bad law from coming into existence than to have it struck down after the fact.
The issue here is that undoubtedly the majority of opinion that has been reaching your forum has been sponsored by the people with the most to lose, those being the movers and shakers in the music and entertainment industries - and perhaps more to the point, the people involved with the distribution and sale of pre-packaged entertainment media. These "middlemen" have made their fortunes profiting off an artificial limitation in the way that content is distributed from artist to audience (please note that I did not say "consumer"!) and now that technology has arrived that threatens their business model, they are pulling out all the stops seeking legislative protection for their cash cow,
Ladies and Gentlemen, the automobile has been invented, and the representatives of the buggy-whip industry are before you seeking legislation to have the "horseless carriage" banned, lest the country (which we all know rests on the pillars of the horse-drawn carriage industry) collapse all around us. No doubt the people profiting from the sale of so-called "Intellectual Property" are describing the threat digital media poses to them in all manner of apocalyptic language.
Allow me then, please, to raise a voice in defense of the "consumer".
We have reached a new height in the course of human civilization, in that the duplication and dissemination of information and knowledge has never been easier or cheaper. Consider the Middle Ages, before the development of the printing press, where every book extant had to be laboriously copied out by hand. The vast majority of humanity was illiterate and uneducated, not because people were stupider, but because the rate of production of literary material was so slow that demand far outstripped supply.
Furthermore, because the number of books was so small, it was entirely possible that the knowledge contained within them could be lost if all existing copies were destroyed - either by misadventure, or by purposeful suppression by those who disliked the views expressed in them.
As time went on, and as the printing press, moveable type, and industrial paper production were developed, this became less and less true. Costs came down, availability came up, and books (and eventually audio recordings, and then video recordings) became more and more widespread. Along with this came a better informed, more educated public.
We are now at the point where perfect copies of information - be they the written word, music, movies, or even computer software - can be made at zero cost, and the cost of distribution is near-zero as well. Any piece of human knowledge can be duplicated and published to any other human on the planet nearly instantly and with NO COST.
It's worth taking a look at that statement "no cost", as I'm sure that those profiting off the current laws will take objection to it. When one has a digital copy of a work, it exists only as a number. There is no physical media associated with it - the supply of numbers is infinite. Thus, producing a copy consumes no resources (aside from the trivial amount of electric power needed to keep the computer operating) More importantly, the act of producing the copy does not degrade or reduce the original in any manner whatsoever, and the copy, being perfect, can also be used to produce other perfect copies. Note that at no time does the act of producing and publishing a copy deny the work to anybody - so nobody is "hurt" in the process. When I choose to provide a copy to someone else, my personal copy is unaffected. This, coupled with the ease of producing the copy, produces a strong motivation to share with others.
One might argue that the middleman who sold the original work is being "hurt", by being denied sales of the information being duplicated. But nowhere in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, nor in the Constitution of Canada, is it written anywhere that people - or corporations - have the fundamental right to make money. If I buy a watermelon at the supermarket, it is mine to do with as I wish. If I choose to extract the seeds and grow them (thus denying a watermelon farmer and a grocery store the sales my future watermelon needs would produce) nothing wrong or illegal has taken place. Furthermore, if I decide to give away (or even sell!) my surplus watermelons, raised from those initial seeds (thus compounding the loss of watermelon sales) this is regarded as an act of altruism on my part, not an act of theft against the watermelon farmer. Why should digital data be any different than watermelons?
Ladies and gentleman, it is not the place of the Government of Canada to enforce business models, especially BROKEN business models. If people have decided to sell a product that is easily duplicated and given away for free, that is their problem, not the Government's. A high-profile attempt at selling pet food over the Internet failed recently - should Pets.com have sought legislation requiring that the sales of pet food at the local depanneur be halted, in order that they be able to make money? Should the automobile have been banned to support the buggy-whip industry?
But most importantly, there is a very real and dangerous cost that accompanies the attempt to enforce copyright law as it now stands in a digital world, a cost that our neighbors to the south are just now discovering - they having made the law before working out the repercussions. This is the REAL danger a law like the DMCA entails. Not that the entertainment industry might loose money, but that the fundamental rights and freedoms of the public are invaded and raped in order to satisfy the desires of corporations. Real people, in real prisons, for the heinous crime of providing duplicates of information to their friends!
If a law like the DCMA is passed in Canada, then the simple act of copying a file and providing that copy to someone else becomes a crime. In order to enforce the law, it will require a level of monitoring of ordinary citizens that put George Owell's most paranoid works beyond the pale. Any company will be able to make a claim that their copyrights are being infringed, and the police will swoop in, confiscate computers, and send people to jail.
If that sounds like the melodramatic claims of a Chicken Little, consider that it has already happened in the US
Adobe Software (of California) produces a product called an "e-book" This is exactly what it sounds like, an electronic representation of a book. In order to help alley the fears of the publishing houses, Adobe's product encrypts the data in such a way as to (notionally) prevent copies from being made, and in fact, attempts to tie the data to a specific computer.
In Russia, there exists a law that states that people are entitled to make copies of computer software and data for their own use - I believe this is to allow archiving and backup of one's computer programs. Adobe's e-book software violated this law, so an enterprising Russian computer firm reverse-engineered the encryption format on the e-books, and wrote a program that converted an e-book to a more standard, copyable format, so that Russian citizens might have access to their legal copies. The program in question was sold to Russians, and under Russian law, was totally legal and legitimate.
Adobe was not particularly happy about this development. So when the principle programmer for this product arrived in the US for a conference (in which he made a presentation describing how the decryption of an e-book may be accomplished) Adobe had him arrested under the terms of the DCMA preventing "circumvention of a digital copy protection scheme" He was taken directly to jail, where he is being held on felony charges _without bail_. He is still there, awaiting trial.
Imagine if the Soviet Union (back when the Soviet Union still existed) had made playing hockey illegal. Imagine Wayne Gretsky visiting the USSR to give a presentation on how to play hockey, and being arrested and thrown in jail, held without bail until his trial. This situation is exactly parallel to what has happened in the "Home of the Free" down south - and the irony of the person being detained by the oppressive state being a citizen of the former "Evil Empire" I trust is not lost on you.
I'm certain that we'll be seeing more examples of this Orwellian behavior in the future. The Americans have passed a law that places corporate interests over the liberties and freedoms of the people, and in order to enforce that law, liberties and freedoms must be trampled.
I would strongly dispute any claims made by the "IP Industries" that they are in any danger - in fact, there was strong evidence that increased exposure to new music via Napster was resulting in _increased_ music sales, not decreased sales, despite what the RIAA has claimed. But even if Napster et al was the kiss of death for the music industry, even if it resulted in the total collapse of that entire segment of the economy (the ultimate Chicken Little Scenario) is preventing that worth the cost to liberty and freedom? Do we want to create a police state in order that Sony Music may make money? Is the bottom line of Paramount Pictures so important, that we would send people they dislike to jail?
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not exaggerating the scope of this decision. It is within your power to either support the greatest blossoming of education and literacy in human history, or to start the descent of Canada into a police state. That is what is at stake here. I served my country for one third of my life in order to protect it (as we thought at the time) from threats from a police state. Please do not undo my sacrifice by handing the country to those who would see progress and freedom stifled for their own purposes and profit.
Thank you for this opportunity to present my view. Rest assured that I am not the only one with this opinion, and that I hope others choose to speak up an express it.
Yours,
[signed]
I'm with you on the "sky is falling" stuff
on
Zeitgeist
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· Score: 2
I'm totally with you on the "sky is falling" environmental stuff - I think there's still a lot of work to do before any rash claims can be made, and I've seen a couple of studies that suggest that global warming and increased CO2 (man-made or not) might be a GOOD thing (plants grow better, evidence of increased crop yields, feed more people with less area - that sort of thing)
So go back to his speech, and cross out all the environmental Chicken-Littleism. Read what's left.
See what I mean? Not _exactly_ the point that I was making (or fumbling towards making) but there's a lot of crossover there.
Incidently, I'm firmly in the "IP is dead" camp. Yes, it causes problems for artists. (I can sympathise with musicians et al, but I have no pity for the Big Industries they are part of)
The introduction of the automobile caused grave discomfort for the riding tack and horse-drawn-carriage industries, but laws were NOT passed to try and force people to, say, buy a saddle every time they boght a car. The widespread copying of digital data is a fact of life, hurts nothing more than a business model, and can only be stopped by gross trampling-upon of the rights of the common people - the remedy is far worse than the symptoms. The current IP laws MUST be struck down, and soon, before things get any worse.
The summary of the "Slashdot Attitude" you posted is non-representative.
I suppose you're probably just trolling... but on the off chance that you're not, that you're actually looking for serious discussion and debate:
Summary of the Slashdot Attitude:
Money Isn't Everything.
Some things are more important than money, and placing them subordinate to corporate profits is evil and wrong.
The DCMA is Evil, not because it interferes with my free music, movies, or whatever, but because it makes it a crime, punishable by inprisonment, to "open the hood" on a piece of data. I bought that CD, or that DVD, or that e-book; it's mine. If I choose to de-encrypt it so I can use it a manner that I choose, that's my business. If someone chooses to tell me how to circumvent that encryption, that's "freedom of speech", and not something that should be made illegal because some corporations feel it has the potential to cut into their profits.
Free Software is Good, not because I get shit for free, but because it's all about people pooling their resources, of their own free will, to build something for the communal good - and protected in such a way that nobody can ever remove the ability of the community to continue working on it and sharing the wealth. Oh, and it's higher quality too.
A strong economy is important, but not so important that all other factors become its slaves. Communal good is more important than corporate profits - THAT is the "Slashdot Attitude"
Or at least my part of it.
Huh, funny how the world works.
on
Zeitgeist
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· Score: 3
Just last night, I finished re-reading The Difference Engine, that Sterling co-wrote with Bill Gibson.
Earlier yesterday, I had a minor social-political epiphany, which manifested itself as a (horribly spelled) slashdot post
And now, I find this speech by M. Stirling which ties the two together.
Here's one of the hard, harsh facts of life - politics and philosophy rarely outlive the people who subscribe to it.
Here's another: the dominant philosophy of a given group of people tends to be that of the people leading the group - and these leaders are in their 50s and 60s.
These people were typically born in the post WWII boom. They had their childhood in the 50s, their teen years in the 60s, their adult-but-politically-powerless years in the 70s and 80s. They took over the reins of political power from the generation that _fought_ in WWII, who's primary political concerns were the issues fought over in that war.
That generation was educated in WWII, and when they took political power, they were consumed with idealogical issues (communism, fascism, and capitalism) Their children were educated in economic prosparity (with little focus on pure politics) and now that they have political power, they are primarily concerned with economic issues.
Compare JFK (a politically motivated leader from the WWII generation) to Bill Gates (an economically motivated leader from the post-WWII generation)
But _our_ generation seems more and more interested in something else entirely. It's hard to describe or pigeonhole. We're not slaves to a political agenda like our grandparents. We're not (usually) slaves to our greed like our parents.
We believe in free access to information. We believe that the economic interests of corporations are subordinate to the social needs of individuals. We're better connected to each other than at any other time in human history, and that tends to make us more tolerent of each other.
The same way our parents (who have power now) can't imagine going on the Communist-witchunts of the 50s, we can't imagine (once we take over power) of passing laws like the DCMA.
The established order may not like that very much - but who cares? In 10, 20 years, they'll be dying off and irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that we don't fight and resist certain things now (the jailing of Dimitry is outrageous!) but even if we suffer local setbacks for the time being, we'll still win in the end.
Just like our children will eventually triumph over whatever idiocies we put in place when we take power.
All the Challenge numbers are the product of two primes, so there's only 2 factors. If we had a list of al the primes of length n, where n is the length of the longest Challenge number, this would be trivial. But since we don't...
Just doodling on the back of a napkin, trying to figure out the best way to tackle this one.
The obvious way is pure Brute Force: Iterate between 2 and n, where n is the number. If the current iteration i divides into n, j times (with no remainder), remember the factors i and j, and then recursively repeat with i and j as values for n.
Continue until all values of n are non-divisible (prime)
When you want to see human/machine interfaces designed for real-world high-stress environments, you go look at the military - the contols on fighter aircraft and tanks.
A frag hurts a lot more in real life.
What you'll find is that any control that has a combat function - things like vehicle manoevering, weapons selection, and triggers - are one-button-per-function, tactile-feedback items. Controls for communications and information systems tend to be placed on multi-use displays with changing menus - sometimes iconic, but mostly text.
This little gadget sounds like the latter, not the former. Good for keys and functions not heavily used, but not suitable for rapid action games like Quake and friends.
While I can't help but snicker at all the "one more swing of the cat" anti-franchise posts (preach on, brothers!) I can't help but note that the design of the Movie Enterprise (ST1-ST6) is one of the most beautiful, graceful, and just plain _right_ examples of industrial design I have ever seen.
That's what I wish real spaceships looked like.
Reliant was pretty good, borrowing heavily from the Enterprise design, and the FASA Starship Combat pen-and-paper game had an endless array of variations on the theme, most of which worked as well.
Excelcior wasn't bad, but lacked the grace of the Enterprise design.
But once they got back on the samll screen, the design went into the toilet. Enterprise-D was lopsided, unbalanced, and *ugly* "First Contact" Enterprise looked like something a Goth would design, and Voyager was putrid too. Swinging nacelles? Mein gott!
The alien races fared no better. Klingons and Romulans in the OS looked bad-ass and _alien_. In the NG and later, they just looked... hokey.
Starship design peaked in the OS movies. I hope whoever penned the design for the movie Enterprise won an award for it; he was the high water mark.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to get drawn into a huge Amiga-zelotry argument over a joke, but the Amiga was screamingly fast _for its time_.
Remember that we're talking about a computer who's first iteration was 1985, its second 1990, and its third 1992.
Given that the 486 et al were a generation (hardware wise) later on, it's not at all suprising that it was superceded.
DG
Something about this motherboard seems strangely familliar.....
- On-board, highly-advanced graphics processor? Check.
- On-board, highly-advanced sound processor? Check.
- On-board, almost every other connector and whoosit you could want in a PC? Check.
Oh my God, they've invented the Amiga!
:)
I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.
:) Beats Q3 down cold.
When you train live, in the real world, there's really no good way to tell who killed who. I've seen exercises with millions of dollars of equipment and dozens of highly trained, professional soldiers degenerate into a game of "I shot you first!"
In the simulators, you get to actually employ the weapons against targets, and work with the results. Make a mistake, and you get killed. Get killed a few times, and you start learning.
And besides, it's a kick-ass game.
Even as rough and clunky as the system was around the edges, it was still the best training I ever had. My biggest regret was that we didn't have one at the home unit - if we did, I'd've had the boys spend hours in it every day, practicing, and getting better and better at the job.
Simulation is the next big military advantage, and the Army has really grabbed ahold of the idea. Watch for some cool stuff to come out of this space.
Now that sub-$1k computers are running in the GHz range, it seems that all the computational tasks on a common desktop system are not processor-bound.
3D, rendered-on-the-fly games get well over 30 frames per second at insanely high resolutions and levels of detail. The most bloated and poorly-written office software scrolls though huge documents and recalculates massive spreadsheets in a snap. Compiling the Linux kernel can be done in less than 5 minutes. And so on.
It seems that the limiting speed of modern computers is off the processor, in IO.
What then, do you forsee coming down the pike that requires more processor power than we have today? What's the underlying goal you intend to solve with your work?
OK, so maybe some people are treating Dale like he's in line for sainthood, which is a little much, but he's not just "a hick with a fast car", any more than Babe Ruth was "a fat guy with a stick" or John Carmack is a "pasty guy that types on a keyboard"
Show some respect, OK?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but what has always impressed me most about the N64 Zeldas (my entry point into the Zelda story) has been the wonderfully balanced gameplay and control.
They've always managed to strike a perfect balance between challenge/difficulty, and achievability. Puzzles are tough, but not obscure. Beating bosses are a challenge, but don't take nanosecond twitch responses to pull off. There's no "find the magic pixel" or "die a thousand deaths".
Future game developers would do well to study the N64 Zeldas. They're as close to perfect as any game I've ever played.
It is quite possible to have state-sponsored medical research without having to have state ownership of the drug companies.
One way to do it is similar to the military procurement process - put it up for competitive bid.
The state puts aside funds for a certain purpose - say a cure for AIDS. Some of those funds are front-loaded to drug companies seeking the contract. The rest is used for milestone bonuses, and a REALLY big bonus at the end for the first company to find the cure. Once the cure is found, release the formula to the world as public domain.
As long as the money is good, there's no reason why you won't see drug companies signing up - especially as R&D usually has spinoffs.
The world doesn't need to be pure capitalist or pure communist. A decent mix of the best of both gets a lot more done.
I assume if you're going to start throwing around the word "coward" then you must have walked the talk yourself, done time in military service, and earned the right to say that.
So where did you serve?
It's real easy to advocate military solutions when it's not YOUR ass on the line.
DG
There are a couple of very key differences in this situation:
;)
1) The ABM treaty is an agreement between STATES, and thus, an implied agreement between the people in those states (the state speaking for the people) A corporation does not speak with the voice of a people; it is an artificial entity to enable individuals to make money.
States are responsible to the people they represent. Corporations are responsible to no-one.
Unilaterally breaking a treaty is to thus break with a people - and is a far more serious kettle of fish.
States appropriate private property (for the good of the state) all the time. Usually, it's compensated for, but not always.
2) As a practical matter, a drug company has little it can do in form of retaliation. A state, however (especially a nuclear state) is not so limited. There may be serious repecussions to breaking the ABM treaty.
In many cases, unilateral treaty-breaking can be seen as an act of war. In the best of cases, it's not very damned polite.
Breaking this _particular_ treaty also has strategic implications. If one believes that an effective missile shield can be erected, then one who has missiles, but no shield, had best strike BEFORE the shield is in place.
Thankfully, the current Russian government seems to have more sense than that. I'm not sure that is univerally applicable to all nuclear powers.
By continuing on its current course of action, the current administration is walking a very thin line. It's not at all a simple case of "erect shield, protect Americans". It's more like "attempt to erect shield, piss off all other nuclear powers, invite first strike, further reputation as a treaty-breaking country not to be trusted" A military success perhaps, but a diplomatic disaster.
It would be far, FAR better to negotiate a new ABM treaty that allowed the new system (having one's cake and eating it too) than to just go ahead and build it anyway.
I'd point out that the last major Western power to ignore the terms of major military treaties and do what they wanted was Nazi Germany, but then I'd wind up invoking Godwin's Law.
OK, so the subject line is a little inflammitory, and thus, by actually stating an opinion, I too am moderator-bait. We share that much at least. ;)
But as for your opinion itself... can you actually be serious?
You've got a country full of dying people. There's a drug available that can save a goodly number of them. It's expensive, and you're poor. You have the ability to reverse-engineer the drug (or just steal the formula outright, whatever) and produce it yourself for minimal cost.
Would you, as the leader of this country, REALLY allow people to DIE a slow, lingering, and very painful death just because a piece of paper says you have too?
I'm sorry, not me. As a hypothetical Brazillian leader, my duty is to serve the people of my country, not some foreign drug company. If they won't play ball on price, then we do what we gotta do to save them.
The point on education is a salient one, but this is not a zero-sum game - producing the drug does not mean a reduction in education, nor does increasing education do a dammned thing for those already infected.
This case is one of the best examples for the "IP is bogus, information wants to be free" position that I've seen. We're not talking about music files or games here, this is information that will actually SAVE REAL HUMAN LIVES, that a corporation wants hidden and protected SO IT CAN MAKE MONEY.
If that doesn't make you sick to your stomach, I don't know what will.
This is my real issue with the Libertarians of the world. There is no place in their world-view for the public project, done for the benefit of mankind. Everything must have a profit motive, and protecting profits has priority over all else.
Just like Marxist-Leninism goes too far, by wanting _everything_ state-owned and state-run, Libertarian goes too far by giving all control to the private sector. Either extreme is insane. The Real World requires compromise, and I for one am glad to see Brazil stick up for REAL freedom, and do what is right.
I just had a quick price look, and a G450 Dual Head is only $100 in most places.
Dual head would be nice....
What's the 3D performance on this card like? Got any benchmarks? Is Quake3 playable, in a decent resolution with all the goodies turned on? (I don't need bazillions of fps, 30 is good enough for me)
Thanks for the tip,
I'm finally going to upgrade my trusty old P233MMX w/Matrox Mill II to something a little more modern - hell, I got a good 5 years out of this system, running Linux.
Current plans are for an Athlon 1.2 GHz (266)
So what's a good 3D card to go with this system, given that it is exclusively for Linux?
Back in the Dark Ages of corporate acceptance of Free Software (circa '97 or so) a common pointy-haired manager complaint was "Who do we sue?"
IE, if the software contained some fatal flaw that resulted in Actual Money being lost, the corporation could go after a commercial software house in the courts in an attempt to recover costs.
Free Software, being provided as a community service with no sue-able corporation behind it, lacked this perceived accountability.
Well, here we have a gold-plated example of a fatal flaw in a piece of commercial software, coupled to a lax attitude towards fixing it, that has without question resulted in the loss of Actual Money by a great deal of people. One would think then, that IS Managers across the world would be queuing up to sue Microsoft and recover their costs.
Anybody seeing any evidence of this happening?
Having a fair amount of hands-on experience with military hardware, I think you're greatly underestimating how good these systems really are.
We're long past the days of where an infrared seeker was a "hot blob" device. Modern seekers have high enough resolution to act as HDTV cameras. The NODLR camera on my LAV-RECCE was sensitive enough to tell the temperature difference in clothing worn next-to-skin and over clothing - meaning that you could "see" right through someone's clothing to tell who was wearing boxers or briefs - at several hundred meters.
Missle seekers have been good enough to pick up heat from atmospheric friction on subsonic aircraft for at least 15 years, and the more modern varients on the AIM-9 Sidewinder can distinguish between an aircraft and a flare with no trouble at all.
Your "pre-chilled" scenario is totally bogus. Air friction at launch would defeat it in seconds.
Defeating countermeasures is a sticky problem to be sure, but it is entirely solvable, as the past 50 or so years of homing torpedoes and anti-air missles shows. And the stakes are VERY high. These are NBC weapons you're shooting at, not piddly little high explosives. If one of these things gets through, there is real and serious pain to be had.
Their effectiveness against the "mass launch" Soviet-style attack scenario may be dubious (so instead of 5 warheads per city, you get 1. Oh well.) but against less affluent states who don't have those kinds of stockpiles, it's entirely reasonable to expect to neutralize the attack. That adds a powerful deterrent factor - I've got 5 warheads. If I mount them on my Long March and fire them at the US, none of them may get though, and then I've kicked the hornet's nest for nothing.
The nice thing, technically, from a missle defense system is that it gives you and added response to an agressor. If every ABM gets through and delivers a payload, then your only real response is retaliation in kind - hello MAD! If the bad guys nuke LA... well, if they nuke LA they might get applause... if they nuke Daytona Beach, then you're pretty well forced to nuke a city back, and if the nuke-er has sufficiant capacity, you start escalating. With a defense system, you can absorb the attack without harm, and possibly use a less destructive form of retaliation.
Ever notice that Superman never carried a gun?
Politically, there are other issues that go along with developing and deploying a missle defense system that make it a less attractive option. i find it odd that the current administration is pushing so hard for it - better, I think, to develop the technology quietly. But that's a discussion for another day.
To call it "snake oil" though, as if it couldn't possibly work, is to reveal a great deal of ignorence.
That's the way the system is designed to work:
1) A radar system detects the launch
2) The radar tracks the target to determine trajectory
3) The tracking signal is fed to the interceptor missle
4) The interceptor is launched along the track of the incoming warhead
5) When the interceptor is close enough, it switches to it's own seeker systems and homes in on the warhead
The problem is that the radar portion isn't done yet - but they wanted to test the final-interecept stage (which is the hard part anyway)
So they configured a GPS system to transmit the _same information that the radar would have provided_ using the same formats and same systems. the interecptor got no information that the radar would not have provided - so the test is perfectly valid.
At least, as long as one assumes that the radar will work as designed.
The intereceptor did NOT "home in on the beacon" as some people would have you believe. Everything here was completely above board.
They learned their lesson back in the Sgt York days. Faking Isn't Worth It.
The spokesperson at the initial "success" press conference was very open and forthcoming about the GPS beacon placed on the target vehicle. They didn't try and hide it at all - in fact, its existence was part of the presentation. The test was of the final-stage-to-intercept section, which includes a decoy-detection function. However, this part of the system needs an initial lanch vector from a launch-detect radar system. the radar picks up the launch, feeds the missle trajectory into the intercept stage, and then the interceptor carries out the actual intercept. The launch-detect radar portion of the system is not yet finished, so the GPS beacon was placed on the target to supply the missing information that the intercept stage requires. Note, however, that the data from the beacon was presented in the same manner as it would have existed if it came from the radar system. It supplied no additional information. If one assumes that the radar works as designed, then the test is perfectly valid. The military learned a lot about faking demos from the Sheridan "tank" and the Sgt York gun air defense system. They don't do that any more. It hurts too much when they get caught. What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it. Dammed if you do, dammned if you don't. No matter what one may think about Bush's politics, the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Ladies and Gentleman of the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate,
I cannot find words that describe my relief upon discovering that you are seeking public comment on the issues of Intellectual Property and Copyright in the digital age before going forth and making a law similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as it exists in the United States. This means there is still time to affect the law-making process, to prevent such a travesty of justice being imposed upon the Canadian citizenry.
It is far, far better to prevent a bad law from coming into existence than to have it struck down after the fact.
The issue here is that undoubtedly the majority of opinion that has been reaching your forum has been sponsored by the people with the most to lose, those being the movers and shakers in the music and entertainment industries - and perhaps more to the point, the people involved with the distribution and sale of pre-packaged entertainment media. These "middlemen" have made their fortunes profiting off an artificial limitation in the way that content is distributed from artist to audience (please note that I did not say "consumer"!) and now that technology has arrived that threatens their business model, they are pulling out all the stops seeking legislative protection for their cash cow,
Ladies and Gentlemen, the automobile has been invented, and the representatives of the buggy-whip industry are before you seeking legislation to have the "horseless carriage" banned, lest the country (which we all know rests on the pillars of the horse-drawn carriage industry) collapse all around us. No doubt the people profiting from the sale of so-called "Intellectual Property" are describing the threat digital media poses to them in all manner of apocalyptic language.
Allow me then, please, to raise a voice in defense of the "consumer".
We have reached a new height in the course of human civilization, in that the duplication and dissemination of information and knowledge has never been easier or cheaper. Consider the Middle Ages, before the development of the printing press, where every book extant had to be laboriously copied out by hand. The vast majority of humanity was illiterate and uneducated, not because people were stupider, but because the rate of production of literary material was so slow that demand far outstripped supply.
Furthermore, because the number of books was so small, it was entirely possible that the knowledge contained within them could be lost if all existing copies were destroyed - either by misadventure, or by purposeful suppression by those who disliked the views expressed in them.
As time went on, and as the printing press, moveable type, and industrial paper production were developed, this became less and less true. Costs came down, availability came up, and books (and eventually audio recordings, and then video recordings) became more and more widespread. Along with this came a better informed, more educated public.
We are now at the point where perfect copies of information - be they the written word, music, movies, or even computer software - can be made at zero cost, and the cost of distribution is near-zero as well. Any piece of human knowledge can be duplicated and published to any other human on the planet nearly instantly and with NO COST.
It's worth taking a look at that statement "no cost", as I'm sure that those profiting off the current laws will take objection to it. When one has a digital copy of a work, it exists only as a number. There is no physical media associated with it - the supply of numbers is infinite. Thus, producing a copy consumes no resources (aside from the trivial amount of electric power needed to keep the computer operating) More importantly, the act of producing the copy does not degrade or reduce the original in any manner whatsoever, and the copy, being perfect, can also be used to produce other perfect copies. Note that at no time does the act of producing and publishing a copy deny the work to anybody - so nobody is "hurt" in the process. When I choose to provide a copy to someone else, my personal copy is unaffected. This, coupled with the ease of producing the copy, produces a strong motivation to share with others.
One might argue that the middleman who sold the original work is being "hurt", by being denied sales of the information being duplicated. But nowhere in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, nor in the Constitution of Canada, is it written anywhere that people - or corporations - have the fundamental right to make money. If I buy a watermelon at the supermarket, it is mine to do with as I wish. If I choose to extract the seeds and grow them (thus denying a watermelon farmer and a grocery store the sales my future watermelon needs would produce) nothing wrong or illegal has taken place. Furthermore, if I decide to give away (or even sell!) my surplus watermelons, raised from those initial seeds (thus compounding the loss of watermelon sales) this is regarded as an act of altruism on my part, not an act of theft against the watermelon farmer. Why should digital data be any different than watermelons?
Ladies and gentleman, it is not the place of the Government of Canada to enforce business models, especially BROKEN business models. If people have decided to sell a product that is easily duplicated and given away for free, that is their problem, not the Government's. A high-profile attempt at selling pet food over the Internet failed recently - should Pets.com have sought legislation requiring that the sales of pet food at the local depanneur be halted, in order that they be able to make money? Should the automobile have been banned to support the buggy-whip industry?
But most importantly, there is a very real and dangerous cost that accompanies the attempt to enforce copyright law as it now stands in a digital world, a cost that our neighbors to the south are just now discovering - they having made the law before working out the repercussions. This is the REAL danger a law like the DMCA entails. Not that the entertainment industry might loose money, but that the fundamental rights and freedoms of the public are invaded and raped in order to satisfy the desires of corporations. Real people, in real prisons, for the heinous crime of providing duplicates of information to their friends!
If a law like the DCMA is passed in Canada, then the simple act of copying a file and providing that copy to someone else becomes a crime. In order to enforce the law, it will require a level of monitoring of ordinary citizens that put George Owell's most paranoid works beyond the pale. Any company will be able to make a claim that their copyrights are being infringed, and the police will swoop in, confiscate computers, and send people to jail.
If that sounds like the melodramatic claims of a Chicken Little, consider that it has already happened in the US
Adobe Software (of California) produces a product called an "e-book" This is exactly what it sounds like, an electronic representation of a book. In order to help alley the fears of the publishing houses, Adobe's product encrypts the data in such a way as to (notionally) prevent copies from being made, and in fact, attempts to tie the data to a specific computer.
In Russia, there exists a law that states that people are entitled to make copies of computer software and data for their own use - I believe this is to allow archiving and backup of one's computer programs. Adobe's e-book software violated this law, so an enterprising Russian computer firm reverse-engineered the encryption format on the e-books, and wrote a program that converted an e-book to a more standard, copyable format, so that Russian citizens might have access to their legal copies. The program in question was sold to Russians, and under Russian law, was totally legal and legitimate.
Adobe was not particularly happy about this development. So when the principle programmer for this product arrived in the US for a conference (in which he made a presentation describing how the decryption of an e-book may be accomplished) Adobe had him arrested under the terms of the DCMA preventing "circumvention of a digital copy protection scheme" He was taken directly to jail, where he is being held on felony charges _without bail_. He is still there, awaiting trial.
Imagine if the Soviet Union (back when the Soviet Union still existed) had made playing hockey illegal. Imagine Wayne Gretsky visiting the USSR to give a presentation on how to play hockey, and being arrested and thrown in jail, held without bail until his trial. This situation is exactly parallel to what has happened in the "Home of the Free" down south - and the irony of the person being detained by the oppressive state being a citizen of the former "Evil Empire" I trust is not lost on you.
I'm certain that we'll be seeing more examples of this Orwellian behavior in the future. The Americans have passed a law that places corporate interests over the liberties and freedoms of the people, and in order to enforce that law, liberties and freedoms must be trampled.
I would strongly dispute any claims made by the "IP Industries" that they are in any danger - in fact, there was strong evidence that increased exposure to new music via Napster was resulting in _increased_ music sales, not decreased sales, despite what the RIAA has claimed. But even if Napster et al was the kiss of death for the music industry, even if it resulted in the total collapse of that entire segment of the economy (the ultimate Chicken Little Scenario) is preventing that worth the cost to liberty and freedom? Do we want to create a police state in order that Sony Music may make money? Is the bottom line of Paramount Pictures so important, that we would send people they dislike to jail?
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not exaggerating the scope of this decision. It is within your power to either support the greatest blossoming of education and literacy in human history, or to start the descent of Canada into a police state. That is what is at stake here. I served my country for one third of my life in order to protect it (as we thought at the time) from threats from a police state. Please do not undo my sacrifice by handing the country to those who would see progress and freedom stifled for their own purposes and profit.
Thank you for this opportunity to present my view. Rest assured that I am not the only one with this opinion, and that I hope others choose to speak up an express it.
Yours,
[signed]
I'm totally with you on the "sky is falling" environmental stuff - I think there's still a lot of work to do before any rash claims can be made, and I've seen a couple of studies that suggest that global warming and increased CO2 (man-made or not) might be a GOOD thing (plants grow better, evidence of increased crop yields, feed more people with less area - that sort of thing)
So go back to his speech, and cross out all the environmental Chicken-Littleism. Read what's left.
See what I mean? Not _exactly_ the point that I was making (or fumbling towards making) but there's a lot of crossover there.
Incidently, I'm firmly in the "IP is dead" camp. Yes, it causes problems for artists. (I can sympathise with musicians et al, but I have no pity for the Big Industries they are part of)
The introduction of the automobile caused grave discomfort for the riding tack and horse-drawn-carriage industries, but laws were NOT passed to try and force people to, say, buy a saddle every time they boght a car. The widespread copying of digital data is a fact of life, hurts nothing more than a business model, and can only be stopped by gross trampling-upon of the rights of the common people - the remedy is far worse than the symptoms. The current IP laws MUST be struck down, and soon, before things get any worse.
DG
The summary of the "Slashdot Attitude" you posted is non-representative.
I suppose you're probably just trolling... but on the off chance that you're not, that you're actually looking for serious discussion and debate:
Summary of the Slashdot Attitude:
Money Isn't Everything.
Some things are more important than money, and placing them subordinate to corporate profits is evil and wrong.
The DCMA is Evil, not because it interferes with my free music, movies, or whatever, but because it makes it a crime, punishable by inprisonment, to "open the hood" on a piece of data. I bought that CD, or that DVD, or that e-book; it's mine. If I choose to de-encrypt it so I can use it a manner that I choose, that's my business. If someone chooses to tell me how to circumvent that encryption, that's "freedom of speech", and not something that should be made illegal because some corporations feel it has the potential to cut into their profits.
Free Software is Good, not because I get shit for free, but because it's all about people pooling their resources, of their own free will, to build something for the communal good - and protected in such a way that nobody can ever remove the ability of the community to continue working on it and sharing the wealth. Oh, and it's higher quality too.
A strong economy is important, but not so important that all other factors become its slaves. Communal good is more important than corporate profits - THAT is the "Slashdot Attitude"
Or at least my part of it.
Just last night, I finished re-reading The Difference Engine, that Sterling co-wrote with Bill Gibson.
Earlier yesterday, I had a minor social-political epiphany, which manifested itself as a (horribly spelled) slashdot post
And now, I find this speech by M. Stirling which ties the two together.
Mostly.
Innit funny how the world works?
Here's one of the hard, harsh facts of life - politics and philosophy rarely outlive the people who subscribe to it.
Here's another: the dominant philosophy of a given group of people tends to be that of the people leading the group - and these leaders are in their 50s and 60s.
These people were typically born in the post WWII boom. They had their childhood in the 50s, their teen years in the 60s, their adult-but-politically-powerless years in the 70s and 80s. They took over the reins of political power from the generation that _fought_ in WWII, who's primary political concerns were the issues fought over in that war.
That generation was educated in WWII, and when they took political power, they were consumed with idealogical issues (communism, fascism, and capitalism) Their children were educated in economic prosparity (with little focus on pure politics) and now that they have political power, they are primarily concerned with economic issues.
Compare JFK (a politically motivated leader from the WWII generation) to Bill Gates (an economically motivated leader from the post-WWII generation)
But _our_ generation seems more and more interested in something else entirely. It's hard to describe or pigeonhole. We're not slaves to a political agenda like our grandparents. We're not (usually) slaves to our greed like our parents.
We believe in free access to information. We believe that the economic interests of corporations are subordinate to the social needs of individuals. We're better connected to each other than at any other time in human history, and that tends to make us more tolerent of each other.
The same way our parents (who have power now) can't imagine going on the Communist-witchunts of the 50s, we can't imagine (once we take over power) of passing laws like the DCMA.
The established order may not like that very much - but who cares? In 10, 20 years, they'll be dying off and irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that we don't fight and resist certain things now (the jailing of Dimitry is outrageous!) but even if we suffer local setbacks for the time being, we'll still win in the end.
Just like our children will eventually triumph over whatever idiocies we put in place when we take power.
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/2-3-4.html
:)
Hmm...
All the Challenge numbers are the product of two primes, so there's only 2 factors. If we had a list of al the primes of length n, where n is the length of the longest Challenge number, this would be trivial. But since we don't...
Well, read the FAQ for yourseves.
Just doodling on the back of a napkin, trying to figure out the best way to tackle this one.
The obvious way is pure Brute Force: Iterate between 2 and n, where n is the number. If the current iteration i divides into n, j times (with no remainder), remember the factors i and j, and then recursively repeat with i and j as values for n.
Continue until all values of n are non-divisible (prime)
Anybody have a better algorithm?
When you want to see human/machine interfaces designed for real-world high-stress environments, you go look at the military - the contols on fighter aircraft and tanks.
A frag hurts a lot more in real life.
What you'll find is that any control that has a combat function - things like vehicle manoevering, weapons selection, and triggers - are one-button-per-function, tactile-feedback items. Controls for communications and information systems tend to be placed on multi-use displays with changing menus - sometimes iconic, but mostly text.
This little gadget sounds like the latter, not the former. Good for keys and functions not heavily used, but not suitable for rapid action games like Quake and friends.
While I can't help but snicker at all the "one more swing of the cat" anti-franchise posts (preach on, brothers!) I can't help but note that the design of the Movie Enterprise (ST1-ST6) is one of the most beautiful, graceful, and just plain _right_ examples of industrial design I have ever seen.
That's what I wish real spaceships looked like.
Reliant was pretty good, borrowing heavily from the Enterprise design, and the FASA Starship Combat pen-and-paper game had an endless array of variations on the theme, most of which worked as well.
Excelcior wasn't bad, but lacked the grace of the Enterprise design.
But once they got back on the samll screen, the design went into the toilet. Enterprise-D was lopsided, unbalanced, and *ugly* "First Contact" Enterprise looked like something a Goth would design, and Voyager was putrid too. Swinging nacelles? Mein gott!
The alien races fared no better. Klingons and Romulans in the OS looked bad-ass and _alien_. In the NG and later, they just looked... hokey.
Starship design peaked in the OS movies. I hope whoever penned the design for the movie Enterprise won an award for it; he was the high water mark.