If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you’re missing a LOT.
Get. Firefox. NOW!
Full disclosure: Mozilla pays me nothing for pushing their browser. I LIKE it. It works.
This article (free registration required) I received from the Washington Post’s Tech News E-Mail took me back:
Downloaded and Ready to Rock
iPod Nights Turn Amateurs Into Digital DJs at D.C. Club
By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page A01
I’m not even going to excerpt it; you get the idea from the title. I’ve been navel gazing on our new toys, our iPods, as I play more with iTunes and my ability to make playlists. The simple ability to sit down at you computer and drag and drop playlists is both very cool and very sad at the same time.
Remember when you were young and single and had a LOT of free time on your hands? Yeah, me neither, but I somehow managed to spend a ridiculous amount of time making mix tapes. I still have some around the house in boxes and old AAFES bags. Every stereo in the dorm had not only a turntable but two cassette player/recorders. Mine had “fast dubbing” so I could record tape to tape twice as fast. There was the geek with the reel to reel but he listened to wayyy too much classical. And of course, the obligatory idiot who had to put Bose 901s into a 8’x8′ dorm room. He may not have been in your dorm…but you could hear him. The Base Commander could usually hear him, and you can be sure the Wing Commander knew the young idjit’s name because he somehow managed to crank out “Welcome to the Jungle” five minutes before the “no-notice” recall was supposed to start.
It used to be you borrowed a friend’s album…you cleaned it, because no one and I do mean no one took better care of other people’s albums than you did. You needed music, you had minimal cash, you needed your reputation. You made sure your needle was clean. Maybe blast the turntable area with a bit of canned air. You got your Memorex or your TDK out of the shrink wrap. You tried to remember the last time you cleaned the heads of your cassette recorder and you gave up and cleaned them again too. All that before you cued up the tape past the leader hitting play/record/pause…holding your finger on pause as you oh so lightly let the needle land into the intro groove just as you released the pause button. Minimal sizzle…no pop…a clean recording…in real time so you had to listen to what you were doing. And that was just for one master album.
Mix tapes were best done on Saturdays…maybe get started a little before noon. You’ve had breakfast at the chow hall. There’s still adequate beer left in your lil ‘fridge from last night. Time to get to work. You’re mixing. You don’t know what yet but there’s been a playlist forming in your head for about a week or so now. This nagging chord that fades into a riff that you just know will be sweet if you can put it together. Crack a beer…check your notes…you think you’ve got the first side done but what to go out with? Wait…damn…you’re 15 seconds over on side one.
You get the idea.
And as much as it gives me the tinglies to simply be able to drag and drop my playlists, juggling orders with the ease of cut and paste, deciding on the two second pause between tracks with the click of the mouse, I kind of miss all the work. I know…it’s happened. I’ve grown a bit nostalgic for the way things used to be. I know it’s better to spend 10 minutes doing what it used to take all afternoon to do…musically anyway…but I kind of miss the feeling of there being a craft to it. It’s all cerebral now. It’s easier to make the mix, but I miss the old tools.
Guess that makes me old huh?
Yesterday’s successful missile intercept is making the headlines today. But deeper investigation reveals that this is really no big deal.
The Aegis SMD system is basically just a ship-borne version of the well-developed Patriot PAC-3 system, and has been effective is about a half-dozen tests before this one. It’s nice to know that our fleet defense capabilities will soon be ratcheted-up a notch. But the success of the Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI), the system which will defend the homeland, has been hit-or-miss (pun most certainly intended). Much of the technology is the same between SMD, PAC-3 and GBI. But the GBI program appears to me to have some engineering management issues.
Our old CRT Monitor was on its last bit of flicker. The colors were dying. The brightness was set at nuthin’ because if you went higher it simply washed all out, and the contrast was cranked all the way up and still…you couldn’t see much.
So I went to the store and bought this. I’ll be checking it out on a couple of my favorite games and then I’m sure that Beautiful Wife and Boyo will dive into Morrowwind with it.
I know it shouldn’t make that much difference but 20″ vs 19″ is a lot of ocular real estate. Plus, I didn’t realize just how bad the old monitor sucked until this one came on. Yes…I’m trying digital mode for the first time. It seems to like digital mode just fine.
All you geeks out there, please leave comments about the pros and cons of digital vs analog display properties.
And no…I didn’t pay that price for it…I paid less…AND got a $100.00 rebate. I’m not unhappy.
Yes…that does just about wipe out the tax return for this year. Thank you Uncle Sugar for hanging onto my money for me. If it wasn’t for my IRS Savings Account, I don’t think we’d ever buy anything new.
UPDATE: The feline roommates are quite upset with me, especially Miko…who jumped up to get her butt all nice and toasty and managed to stay balanced on the 1 inch width of the new flatscreen for a full 2 seconds before having to jump off. I applauded as she did her “I meant to do that.” cleaning of her face. She’s having none of it.
Sander Sassen writes in Hardware Analysis about something I’ve suspected for a long time:
There’s a reason for opting for an Intel chipset, and that’s the simple fact that it is a rare occurrence to see issues with Intel processors on Intel chipset motherboards. Basically you plug it all in, install the operating system and Intel drivers and it is up and running. With chipsets manufactured by these 3rd part chipset manufacturers it is often relying on drivers written by an overworked, underpaid, Taiwanese software engineer that have not undergone stringent quality testing whatsoever. Obviously this is a scenario that often leads to issues with 3rd part chipsets and that’s what we all want to prevent right? Classic example is VIA, which used to offer drivers for their chipsets that broke more features than they fixed. Fortunately they cleaned up their act over the past few years, but you get what I’m hinting at, although VIA was a particularly bad example.
With AMD it is another story, as of late they’ve basically only manufactured processors and left it up to 3rd party chipsets manufacturers to come up with a chipset to run it on. NVIDIA is a prime example of how a company can go from good to bad overnight. Their Nforce family of chipsets can best be described as a mixed bag, there’s excellent chipsets, such as the Nforce3-250, but also particularly bad ones such as the first Nforce2. And now that PCIe is here, and all chipset manufacturers launched their chipsets supporting it, we see the same problems all over again. For example; Nforce 4 looks good on paper, the NVIDIA reference motherboard works like a charm, but all Nforce 4 SLI motherboards currently out have issues.
So am I a nitpicking Intel fanboy that bares a grudge towards AMD? No, I don’t have a preference per se, and we obviously get as many AMD processors and motherboards in the lab as we get Intel’s. The problem is that with new chipset releases such as with PCIe Intel is always spot on, no issues, it just runs out of the box. Whereas with AMD there’s always issues plaguing these new chipsets which make the system unstable, cause for features to not work and a plethora of other problems, NVIDIA’s Nforce 4 SLI chipset being a prime example. These issues take many months and multiple BIOS/drivers revisions to get fixed, after which the next chipset is usually around the corner, so the whole thing starts over again.
That was the question just put to the analyists at Forbes on Fox. And the opinion was split. But they were all wrong. Both of these industries are going to feel the pinch on providing “pipelines” into America’s homes, as more and more municipalities offer free city wide wi-fi service.
Of course, I’d like to have access to a service like this myself. The $50 a month I pay to Earthlink, a large portion of which they pay to Verizon, is money I’d rather spend elsewhere. But the libertarian side of me is rather agast.
PMBR technology promises to do for nuclear power what the Model T did for automobiles. And the Chinese are taking the lead:
The difference between incumbent nuke designs and PBMR is like night and day. Western reactors reflect the “bigger is better” mentality that prevailed when plants were first built. Industry mismanagement in the 1970’s and 1980’s added layers of safety systems to already complex designs. U.S. nuclear plants are run much better today than a decade ago, but next generation designs still feature tons of safety-oriented concrete and mazes of redundant valves, controls, and piping. PBMRs, by contrast, epitomize Internet Age principles of miniaturization and modularity. Each PBMR is about one-fifth the size of a conventional reactor. They are designed without many backup cooling systems in existing plants, relying instead on a reactor core that theoretically cools itself if nuclear fuel gets too hot. PBMR’s smaller footprint and simplified design, it’s hoped, will allow multiple reactors to be built on one site faster and cheaper.
But the challenge to incumbent nuclear companies does not end there. Most of today’s nuclear industry profits come from making and replacing fuel in operating plants not building new ones. Western companies have a large stake in preserving how nuclear fuel is now made, a tightly controlled system run by quasi-government entities and nuclear service companies. The status quo works for everyone, consumers included, so long as existing reactor designs are the only viable options. PBMR commercialization would upset this arrangement. PBMR uses a totally different fuel design to current reactors. PBMRs should refuel while running whereas Western designs require refueling shutdowns every two years. So PBMRs do not need either Western-style fuel or Western companies’ refueling services. Faced with this challenge, nuclear vendors — with future plant sales and lucrative fuel and services businesses at stake — have attacked PBMR as an idea whose time will never come.
Until recently, the incumbents were winning. Then China, facing a monumental power shortage, put its top scientific brains to work to commercialize PBMRs. China needs electricity, a lot of it and fast. Coal and oil-fired power plants can meet some of this gap but the only long-term option that can provide China with the amount of power it needs at stable costs and without worsening air pollution is nuclear. China will buy some Western-style nuclear plants but it will not go “all-Western” for important strategic and practical reasons.
Conventional back fusion surgery is involved, expensive, has a long recovery time, and isn’t sure-fire. This new technique appears to be a massive leap ahead:
Dr. Charles Rosen believes there’s a better way. For the last two years, Rosen and about 2,000 other spine surgeons around the country have been using a genetically engineered human protein to encourage the spine to grow its own bone – and leave the poor hip out of it.
In a four-hour surgery, surgeons place bone morphogenic protein, or BMP, in a titanium cage between the vertebrae that need to be fused. BMP acts as a kind of bat signal, calling stemcellsto swarm the site and grow new bone. The body contains its own morphogenic protein in small amounts, but not nearly enough to grow bone at the rate required for surgery, Rosen said.
“It’s the exact protein that the human body produces when it needs to have bone formed,” Rosen said. “It’s synthetic, but it’s exact.”
Since BMP received FDA approval in 2002, 100,000 surgeries have been performed in the United States. That’s a small percentage of the 115,000 spinal-fusion surgeries performed each year, and Medicare doesn’t cover the procedure. But Blue Cross of California and other insurers are recognizing the benefit of the surgery and are starting to pick up the tab, and Rosen expects BMP to become the industry standard.
“We’re getting close to 100 percent fusion success rates, which is unheard of. From my standpoint, it’s incredible,” Rosen said.
The U2 Special Edition for myself and the 20 gig 4th Generation iPod for Beautiful Wife. I have no idea if I’ll ever get around to buying the U2 Collection to make the additional cost make sense, but I do like the color…red, black and chrome. Has an oriental feel to it. Once Beautiful Wife finds out she can decorate hers with different colored stickers or sleeves…hers won’t stay the same color for more than a week anyways. Besides…since she’s got the cassette player in the minivan, she now has the better option for tunes because I bought her the adapter. Once I’m done, the van will be able to cruise with her entire library at our fingertips. That’s just cool.
Next project…get rid of all WMA files and Real Audio Files on my computer and convert re-download everything that’s not to a high quality MP3 Format that will work on all my toys. I was very ignorant of all this when I started putting music on my computer. I just sort of let Real Audio take care of this task and Windows Media take care of another and none of them ever got it all together. Since I can’t go back to work until next week at the very earliest, may as well finally get all my media files into one coherent library. That will be a first.
Oh…how do they sound? Better than I thought they would. They’re digital and clean sounding but there’s a richness…a depth to the sound that I simply wasn’t expecting.
One complaint. With the cost of these suckers they could at least print out the coherent owner’s manual for you. It comes on disk.
Carrying cases? Went with the nylon Case Logics vs the leather Belkins. I’ve never wore out a Case Logic product and I’ve had some of their stuff for over 10 years. They just keep going. Get ’em dirty? Throw ’em in the wash. Perhaps not as chique as some cases, but that’s okay, I’m not out to impress anyone but my ears.
Must go rip more music and load the hungry little rascals now. 20 gigs is a LOT of music and I know I won’t get them all filled up anytime soon but I do want my basics on there. And then Beautiful Wife will sit down and load hers up which will be different since she’s got some similar tastes, but not all.
Update: Get a carrying case of some sort ‘cuz damn…they scratch wayyyyyyyyy too easy. Doesn’t show so much on the white but on the black? It leaps right out at you. Just an aesthetic thing but…I’m nothing if not thorough.
This from AZoM.com:
Austin, Texas-based Nano-Proprietary, Inc., through its subsidiary, Applied Nanotech, Inc. (ANI), today announced that it has entered into a research and development agreement with Shimane Institute for Industrial Technology (SIIT) to develop a new aluminum alloy using carbon nanotubes that has thermal conductivity 4-5 times greater than aluminum metal. SIIT is a technology organization fully supported by the government of Shimane Prefecture, Japan.
This agreement is a result of international cooperation between Shimane Prefecture and the State of Texas. This relationship was initiated in January 2004 by the Governor of Texas, Mr. Rick Perry, and the Governor of Shimane Prefecture, Mr. Nobuyoshi Sumita, with the goal of enhancing the cooperation in nanotechnology between Shimane and Texas companies for economic development and job creation in both regions.
Under the terms of the agreement, SIIT will pay ANI $30,000 over a period of 6 months to develop and engineer a process to manufacture thin foils of aluminum alloys having superior thermo-conductivity. Applications include any microelectronic device that generates heat, including circuit boards for computers and high powered radar. These alloys can also improve the strength of the aluminum without adding weight.
Of course, any tech-geek knows, better cooling equals faster computers. I’m wondering when we will see this technology in, say, pistons of Formula One cars.
I’m making a rare post seeking suggestions for software. I’m starting up a site for utilitarian purposes (ie, not a blog) that’s meant to be a centralized repository of useful information. What I need is:
1. Some sort of content delivery system that looks professional (or can be made to look professional)
2. Is easy to update, maintain and design
3. Is not some blog/hybrid kluge but was purpose built for the task
4. Is easy for a user to navigate between sections and categories and perhaps submit information of their own
5. Preferably open source, but not really required.
I can do the thing in Flash and make it do what I want to do, but I need something non-Flash based to serve people who want something traditional.
about corrective surgery is that as the incisions heal you realize that the pain you started with is gone and as the pain from the wounds fade, your legs are better than before the surgery. But now I’ve got 8 days of itchy staples to deal with and if I don’t go mad, I don’t know why.
Okay, all you gizmo freaks. I’ve got a very very nice tax return coming this year…so much for tax breaks just for the rich…and I’m thinking of upgrading my MP3 players. I use both hard drive and flash. I’m thinking of going all IPod.
What say you all?
Maybe it’s just me. Could it be that I attract these problems? Read on:
I remember the story of the old farmer who lived hereabouts, whose young wife was expecting her firstborn, sometime around 1880. The women from farms all around gathered as labor set in, and found outside tasks for the nervous farmer, to keep him busy. “Boil some water,” said one matronly woman, handing him an iron pot and directing him to the huge fireplace where a roaring fire kept the room just above freezing. He complied, taking the pot back into the room where women seemed to be directing an assault on Hill 180. “Go get more firewood,” another woman directed, as she moved the lantern where it would do her more good. He did, as the squalls of one baby lit up the room.
The husband leapt for joy, but the women told him to get busy with the firewood, shoving him out the door. As the poor farmer stumbled back into the room, laden with firewood, dumping it by the fireplace, another set of squeals and cries joined with the first in a newborn duet. “Get out, go bring some blankets,” said another large, motherly neighbor, as she lit another lantern and placed it strategically. Somewhat dumbfounded, somewhat elated, and yet pensive, the man went to the attic and retrieved a couple of thick blankets, pushing his way back into the birthing room. As he lay the blankets down, he was startled by yet a third cry joining his two newborn daughters. Eyes like saucers, mouth agape, he looked around the cluttered room, past the women, past the lump of his wife under covers on the bed, and his gaze stopped on the lanterns casting shadows into the corners, lighting the scene.
“That’s it!” the man exclaimed, “Now I see what’s the problem! The light’s a-drawin’ ’em! Get rid of those lanterns, quick, before a-nuther one gets here!” The solution: “The light’s a-drawin’ ’em!”
So, my own problem, weird as it was, had a strange solution. A few weeks ago, we noticed the desktop going bonkers. It was loading web pages as fast as it could, all by itself. I couldn’t get it to stop, it was faster than I was. When I finally got things under control, I had a ton of pages to delete, and was wondering what kind of gremlin could cause this kind of trouble. When I started the machine back up, it seemed to work OK, so I sat there watching. Nothing. I opened one of my word processor programs, typed a paragraph or two, everything normal. We went to bed, and a few minutes later while watching TV, I saw reflections from the computer room, a spare room across the hall from our bedroom, jumping across the wall, different colors, varied patterns of reflected light, so I jumped (slowly, remember the BP) out of the bed and ran in there. The computer was loading web pages at warp speed!
Got control again, shut it down, and waited until morning to tackle it again, thinking it may be an overheat problem. I was really puzzled by this behavior as I turned on the system again the next morning. A few minutes went by, and the thing went nuts again. Not a heat problem for sure!
To cut to the chase, I tried a word processor again and this time, I sat there and watched in amazement as the computer started putting !!!’s, 1111’s, and all sorts of letters and punctuation marks, line by line. This time I thought to try something else. I unplugged the keyboard and connected a spare one I had in a closet. Worked perfectly. Cranked up the DSL, everything OK. I let it sit there, all normal. That night, Nurse Jenny got on the internet as she does every night, no problems. The next morning, I re-connected the original keyboard, and in a few minutes, it went nuts again.
So that was it: a keyboard that had a mind of its own. I have never seen a keyboard do such things, but a new keyboard took care of the problem. Disassembly and cleaning of the old keyboard did not reveal any obvious problem, so the malfunction was simply not visible to the eye. Pretty new keyboard with lots of functions is still in place, and the offender is up in the closet.
Next problem: Some of you may remember that I have griped lately about writing posts or comments only to have them disappear into thin air upon attempting to post. I was using an 802.11B wireless connection, and began to be curious as to whether that may be the problem. Last week I picked up an 802.11G wireless card for the laptop, and shazzam, no more dropped comments or posts! I just needed the faster speed of the “G” module, and all now seems to be well.
As I think back to the time when I first started playing with electronics, in my teens, some 48 years or so ago, when I got interested in amateur radio, there have always been strange and thorny problems. And they’re there, no matter what the branch of electronics. I’ve got more than 25 years in avionics, many years part-time in such things as TV repair (UGH!!), two-way radio service, computers, and other branches best forgotten . In each and every one of these fields, there have always been weird and sometimes very surprising problems. Some of them were even humorous, and a few downright outlandish!
So, I tip my hat to those just embarking on a career in electronics: may your weird problems be few and funny! And may you always FIND the problem!
In recent years, consumer computer products have adopted the ATX (or micro-ATX) format as an almost universal format. But control of heat and noise in an ATX box, with current high-performance CPU/GPUs has been a real problem. And a big ol’ full or mid-tower, which will accommodate an “extreme cooling” solution, presents a “workspace packaging” problem for many users. Here, Hardware Analysis tests a high-performance desktop in Intel’s micro-BTX configuration. They like it – to a limit:
There are a few drawbacks about this approach as well, components will be cooled with airflow coming from the processor heatsink, thus the temperature will always be several degrees higher due to the heat dissipated by the processor. But there’s more; due to the small size of the micro-BTX case the power supply and harddisk are tucked away in a corner with very little or, in case of the harddisk, no airflow over them at all. This means that under heavy loads the power supply fan will need to spin up to a high rpm to provide adequate airflow to keep it cool. The harddisk will not receive any cooling, but for natural convection, which, with today’s 200GB and larger harddisks, is not recommended, temperatures will rise quickly and cut into the MTBF of the harddisk. In terms of noise production, which is highly subjective, the micro-BTX case fared well. It isn’t exactly whisper quiet, but with the notion that there’s a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor running inside that small case it bests any other small case we’ve seen thus far. Due to the fiery Prescott core it is hard to properly cool these processors in a small case and keep quiet about it, this micro-BTX case with ducted fan heatsink certainly is up to the task.
Nanotechnology is on the verge of changing the face of warfare:
Carpenter says the U.S. military has developed “cave-buster” bombs using nanoaluminum, and it is also working on missiles and torpedoes that move so quickly that they strike their targets before evasive actions can be taken.
“Nanoaluminum provides ultra high burn rates for propellants that are ten times higher than existing propellants,” says Carpenter.
The military is also trying to make sure that its bullets kill quickly.
The U.S. Army Environmental Center began a program in 1997 to develop alternatives to the toxic lead that is used in the hundreds of millions of rounds that are annually fired during conflicts and at its training ranges. Carpenter says that although bullets using nanoaluminum are ready to be field tested, the government has been slow implement the technology.
[…]
Nanotechnology “could completely change the face of weaponry,” according to Andy Oppenheimer, a weapons expert with analyst firm and publisher Jane’s Information Group. Oppenheimer says nations including the United States, Germany, and Russia are developing “mini-nuke” devices that use nanotechnology to create much smaller nuclear detonators.
Oppenheimer says the devices could fit inside a briefcase and would be powerful enough to destroy a building. Although the devices require nuclear materials, because of their small size “they blur the line with conventional weapons,” Oppenheimer says.
It would seem this same technology could be used to create synthetic superfuels for civilian transportation and other energy uses.
Hat Tip: Instapundit
Update: There seems seems to be some confusion about what I meant by “this same technology.” What I was talking about was plasma vapor phase reactions, which seems to be the basis for all contemporary nanochemistry. I only have a cursory practical knowledge of this, from working on chrome deposition chambers back in the late ’70s – early ’80s. But I understand the potential.
Take a .30 Rem, put a .270 slug on it, and you’ve got the 6.8×43 Remington SPC. My info tells me this cartridge has tested VERY favorably, and will be the choice, over the old 5.56 NATO standard, on the new H&K XM8. It seems the M16 has gotten a very bad rap in Iraq. It’s too big for house-to-house fighting, and too weak for the open desert. Hell, this is the same thing my range instructor told us back in 1975.
Anyone with newer information, please comment.
I wonder how all this will play in Russia, where their AN-94 Abakan, hailed by many as “the wolrd’s most advanced” assult rifle, fires an even smaller, weaker shell then the 5.56 NATO?
Exertional Compartment Syndrome is what I’ve got. Been thinking about it and decided that if I’m going to do the First Sergeant thing, I should be running with my folks and not wimpin’ out on the sidelines doing the bike. Yes the bike is harder than it was…but no, I still don’t feel like it’s a real test.
So…sometime in the next month or two I’ll have my lower legs cut open from the knee to the ankle, but not very deep, just skin, fat, and then the facia slit on the tibialis anterior muscle of both legs and then the legs will be closed up again. I’ll be home the same day. Takes anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks before I can start really working them again…I’ll be able to walk the same day although not far.
I’m very happy my Doctor did what he did. He made me run on a treadmill until my legs hurt like hell and then sat me down and felt up and down the shin and around and said…”Nah, don’t have to stick a needle in that…it’s pretty obvious that thing’s gonna blow at any minute.” Funny guy.
Let me preface by saying this is the game I’ve been waiting for. Doom 3 was fun, but I was still waiting for this one.
I got The Collector’s Edition with Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life 2. It loaded just fine once I realized this version came on a DVD vs a CD ROM. Loading was easy and quick…until it came time for the decrypting. Yes friends, we’ve gotten that far. Not only does the game have to load, but it has to talk to it’s home server and then has to decrypt. If you don’t have an internet connection or you don’t let their server talk to your computer, you ain’t playin’. Sorry. Thanks for buying the game anyway. And the decrypting takes forever…go make yourself a bowl of Easy Mac, let it cool, eat it slowly, you have time. I’m sorry, but in the year 2004 anything that takes longer than 10 minutes is just too freaking long.
I’m running a P4/1.8Gig, 512Meg on the board and 256Meg on the VideoCard. When the game first loads it gives you a bit of a start…the screen is all blurry…but down in the lower right-hand corner…perfectly sharp and legible is a little oval with the word loading in it. And the picture sharpens…and sharpens…and then sharpens even more. Oh….my….God.
Remember how startled you were the first time you saw “Myst” back in the mid-90s? It’s that big of a leap.
For me the game runs smoothly in the default settings that the game chose for my computer, except for immediately after the next section loads…then it’s a bit choppy and you may want to do a circle or two and jump up and down a time or two to get the stickiness out before going further. As you progress, watch out for baddies at your points of entry.
And who are the baddies? Besides our old friends the crabheads and their flying asshole symbiants, we have a new group of humanoids to fight…The Combine. Deciding when to fight them and when not to fight them is up to you. Sometimes it’s better to duck and run…but you need to figure that out yourself. And ALL of the baddies are smarter than they ought to be. The AI on this game is almost too good. I’m playing in Easy mode the first time and they’re still displaying too much cooperation and too much evasive capability. I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to crank it up a notch.
Some of our favorite Non-Player-Characters are back…my favorite being Barney. Although this time he’s not quite so inept and seems to have beefed up a bit.
There’s more than just a new set of office spaces to work our way through…this is an environment. We’re in their world: Outside, inside, day, night, city, beach, country.
One word of advice that won’t ruin the story…stay with your vehicle for as long as you possibly can. There’s usually a way to do that if you look hard enough.
Which brings me to the puzzles. As with all games of this genre, the key is to look around. Get all the angles. You’ve got a zoom feature…use it…the answer may not be right HERE it may be over THERE. Oh…and brush up on your Newtonian Physics…particularly the first three laws of motion. You may have to run…you may have to crouch…you may have to jump. If you find yourself saying, “You’ve GOT to be shi—kidding me.” you’ve probably figured it out. The folks who put this together have nothing if not a twisted sense of humor. The puzzles aren’t so hard as to completely discourage, but you ARE going to have to think.
This isn’t Doom. They’re not out to startle us at every turn. It’s more…disturbing than startling or horrifying. You may have to acknowledge your inner-psycho if you’re going to survive because sometimes the only answer is for you to get just as twisted as the folks who put this together. But being a horror film fan won’t hurt you either…there are some nods to some classics buried in here and when you catch them you can’t help but grin.
So far I’m having a blast. Beautiful Wife looked at one scene and said…”Oh wow that’s really pretty…hey, I bet if you put that thing there it would make that thing fall and you could get over there.” Of course she was right…and yes…I love it when she looks over my shoulder when I’m doing crosswords…why do you ask?
Worth the money? Yes. Worth waiting an extra year for? Well, yeah, but the shock of how good it looks would have been even greater before Doom 3 came out. Lucky for them the folks at ID like playing Doom in the dark.
Users of Symbian-based smart phones should avoid the MetalGear game:
The malware, MetalGear.a, which masquerades as a Symbian version of the Metal Gear Solid game, disables antivirus programs and also installs a version of the Cabir worm identified earlier this year, according to SimWorks International, which issued an alert on Tuesday.
The Cabir worm, in turn, attempts to spread a second Trojan program, called SEXXXY, to nearby phones through the Bluetooth short-range wireless protocol.
“This is a new strand of smart phone malware because it actually consists of three pieces: two Trojans and a worm,” said Aaron Davidson, chief executive officer of SimWorks, in a telephone interview Thursday from the company’s headquarters in Auckland. “It also shows how viruses writers are getting more sophisticated.”
In a related story, it seems of of the few bright spots in the IT job market is for cybersecurity professionals:
I just saw Phil Donohue on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. And admittedly, I didn’t hear much over the sound of my crunchy Cheetos. But, shortly before I heard this idiot singing the praises of Al Franken, I heard him tell Bill, “there’s no such thing as a precision bomb.”
Well, let’s see here: historians widely agree, the age of “precision” manufacturing, the harbinger of the Industrial Age, dawned in the mid-eighteenth century. But they had no conception of things like micro-tolerance lapping, EDM, and laser interferomitry, which we routinely employ today.
Admittedly, the “precision” of our munitions in ODS was far less than the military/administration spinmeisters had lead us to believe. But t was far better than the “drop on faith” Norden bomb sight protocol of WWII through Vietnam. Today, we can (not with 100% repeatability, but pretty good) not only reliably drop a munitions on a particular building, but a particular floor on that building, AND select the precise load, so that we drop that building, and not the one adjacent.
So, tell me, Phil, what exactly is your definition of “precision”: when we can fly a cruise missile up Zarqawi’s ass, and have it enter so smoothly that he doesn’t even realize it until it detonates? Well, just give the folks at Textron another ten years.
After successful tests aboard the USS Kearsarge, the MV-22 Osprey will finally be going operational at MCAS New River, NC. The folks in Amarillo, TX are looking forward to good economic times.
You simply must see Honda’s latest improvements in it’s ASIMO robot. As it even has the capability to intelligently avoid obstructions, it occurs to me that, if it has the range, it would be a good candidate for DARPA’s Grand Challenge.
Any of yous guys ever had something called, “Exercise Induced Compressed Compartment Syndrome?” I’m looking for folks who have had it and had the surgery to correct it. I’m going to have to make a decision next month on whether or not to let the Air Force cut my leg open. The other option is a semi-permanent waiver from running, which, with my knees, sounds very attractive. I save a surgery and my knees.
To the makers of those wonderful gel paks that you put in the freezer and then put on painful spots on your body…you have my undying gratitude.
Sander Sassen reports in Hardware Analysis on Digital Rights Management at its worst:
That agreement, amongst other things, stated that I could only play back the content for a period of five days, on the computer I installed the InterActual Player application onto, after which I had to re-acquire a license. To be honest that really pissed me off, I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I’m only being given a temporary license, where’s my rights as a consumer? If this is how future DRM protected content will be distributed I have strong objections to the use of DRM, as this is a prime example of how to quickly alienate any prospective consumers. If a license is given and the content decrypted isn’t it clear that I’m the rightful owner? Can’t I decide for myself when and where I want to play this content back on? Obviously Artisan Home Entertainment Inc. has other ideas about that, ideas they should clearly communicate on the dvd cover, instead of simply omitting them to prevent people not buying this two-disk dvd set. Shame on you Artisan Home Entertainment Inc. and may this serve as a prime example of DRM at its worst.
I wonder if Artisan would be fortcoming with a refund?
So I’m watching Monster Garage tonight, which was pretty tame in and of itself; they put a shortened ’64 Continental body on a NASCAR chassis.
But the cool part was when one of the build crew broke a tooth with a grinder. They had a dentist and his assistant wheel a workstation into the garage. He then took a couple of digital photos of the guy’s mouth, which the computer made into a 3-D model. He then rendered a crown on the image, And this little machine milled a new permanent crown from a billet of (I would assume) ceramic material, while the dentist was grinding down the guy’s old tooth. Absolutely amazing.
I’ve just printed out Bell-Boeing’s 26 page PDF information sheet on the V-22 Osprey – some light bedtime reading. A quick scan indicates there’s little here I don’t already know. But I’m pretty sure at least a few of my readers are a lot smarter on this subject than I am.
As I’m sure most of you know, the Osprey is one of the most ill-fated and politically beleaguered and punted-around projects in military procurement history. And I also know why it’s survived (besides the fact that it represents a lot of employment in a lot of key congressional districts).The Osprey, or a system like it, is an absolutely key component in the “faster and leaner” military of the future. Could you imagine how history might be different if we would of had fully functional Ospreys for Operation Eagle Claw? Jimmy Carter might have won a second term (so, ok – it’s a mixed blessing. 🙂 ).
So, anyway, we have had operational tilt-rotor craft in service since the late 1950s. It seems to me that the technical difficulty with the V-22 centers around the military’s insistence that the craft be capable of running on a single engine, and the enabling interconnect hardware. This stands to reason. Transferring all that torque from one wingtip to the other through such articulations, coupled with the aerodynamic, static, and momental loads, and resultant flexure – what a fucking blivet.
Then it occurs to me: If you are going to couple the engines together anyway, why put them out at the wingtips? Why not mount them in the fuselage? Or more likely, the center portion of the pivoting wing structure?
I have some more ideas, if anyone cares to enter into a private brainstorming session.