shinRaiden

It's a very interesting piece. Of course the tech demo he built was intended to be as abstract as possible, so a lot of materials were not "life-like" in construction. That's not to say that they can't be, it's just that he chose not to so as not to confuse his message. The key point is rather than manually creating static data, it's dynamically generated in run time, and it's relational. So you're not just looking at smaller file sizes, you're actually getting a lot more flexibility in usability. One example would be to split your textures into base's and effects - ie camo patterns and seams etc. The seams would be static and mainly alpha, but the camo could be dynamic and use the exact same function used in the cloth design generators. Same with vehicles. You could then just create the overlay, then define the permitted variations. Traditionally static resources have been load-balanced via some form of prebuilt LOD system. Too often the result is a set of distinct models in a single 'package' that have no relation to each other - OFP and (Z)oldner. With proceedural code, you could have one model, and that might not be a model in the classic sense either. Designing such components visually would only be to arrange the reference points, mapping, and bounds. The primary point of his lecture was to discuss and explore the concept of an entirely different approach to system design. Combined with a suitable mass/physics system, there's effectively no limit to the simulated capabilities you can support. -edit- Links : Pics Notes by Don Hopkins Gamespy review, pretty good actually Comments included say that he has been working with the micro-demo community, although it's not clear whether that was for code compactness or for the proceedural constructs.

Davis-Monthan is indeed the boneyard. They say they're just parking stuff out there, but they mothball them when they park them. After a few years, the seals shrivel and crack, and the oil and lube gums up. Cables and controls soon follow. Even if they were massively overhauled back to flight-worthy status, there's no weaps there.

Almost enough to make me get a PS2... Any chance of a PC version... ever? It lists a track in Tsukuba. It's not actually a track in RL, it's the Japan National Auto-safety research center. Nice big dented oval, drag lane, plus cross-overs iirc. Never get in a car wreck anywhere near Tsukuba, even just a fender-bender bump. They'll do a full accident investigation, because they can and they're close, and it's 'research'. Now the streets of tsukuba though... it's probably the only place in Japan with big wide, and straight arterials that go on for quite a number of km. I'm sure they have camera's at every intersection as a result, plus it is a college town after all. North side of town is Bloodbrother's custom lowriders, probably one of the biggest collections of the finest custom cadillacs in greater Tokyo, if not all of Japan. There was probably at least two dozen in there at any given time, plus the 'black dragon'... What they're sadly missing is the tambo's of Hokuriku... [natsukashii] One fine christmas day I hopped in a car to go christmas caroling to some friends in outskirts of Komatsu in Ishikawa-ken. We went all over the place and ended up out at one guy's house about an hour out of town, probably about 15min from where the Yankee's Hideki Matsui was born and raised incidently. Anyway, when we were done with our song and dance, we were in a panic as we realized we biffed our schedule and needed to be back in town in 30 minutes, a normal drive of about 60 minutes. We'd been riding around with one guy in his little putt-putt car, but it was clear we'd 'need' to switch cars and hitch a ride back to town with trusty fukuoka-san and his pimped Imprezza WRX. So we packed all five of us in, myself the nerd, the chubby kid from LA, the hermit, the crazy hawaiian, and of course fukuoka driving. We warmed up the tires peeling out of the subdivision and towards the main highway leading back to town from the high mountains. It was now a little past 9pm and quite dark out, little light other than the sparse street lamps. We took some shortcuts on the levee roads across the rice paddies (about the width of the WRX, no shoulder, 1~2m drops on either side) at a good highway rate of speed. Finding the main highway, we drifted across a number of empty lanes and floored it heading for town. Somewhere above 120kmph I noticed that the ride was much smoother, and the 'feel' of the road augmented by the g's on the corner was becoming quite fun, even though my 188cm frame was wedged in the back right corner of the car. Insultingly, a stoplight switched to red. We pulled up along side the only other car out that night, a blacked out RX-7 FDCS with all the bells and whistles, except for the one that goes 'wooo'... vooom-vum-vum-vum-v000mmmm.... He'd also heavily tinted his windows, as you couldn't tell where windows stoped and body started. Fukuoka, being a quiet-unassuming shy guy, just tapped his pedals, with one eye on his tach and one eye on the light. Blink-Blink-GREEN-BWAH-AH-AH-*get me out of the trunk!?! Of course with the weight there was no way we could match him, even with all the hawaiian's vocal afterburner trailing on behind. We left the main road soon there after to take another shortcut across more unlit narrow levee roads, and cross some rickety old farm bridges as well, making it back with 30 seconds to spare for our appointment. [/natsukashii] But it's not always all about the car, skillz pwn too. One day heading up to a contract at evil Mr. Bill's, I was at a light next to some guy who just went and bought himself a brandnew Nissan turbo 350z. He was sitting there sipping his cup of four-bucks paying no attention to my grubby self in an unwashed Mazda 626 four-banger clunker with lots of dings and scratches. So I decided to school him. By the time that he looked up and noticed the light had changed, I was already nosing across the other side of the intersection. He saw, as well as I, that his lane was closed justed whine of a n00b that doesn't know how to work a clutch, let alone g ahead. I heard the sad sound of the high-pitchet it out of first as I slipped past him and through the construction zone, never breaking the posted 10-under-the-speedlimit. That's driving life in Seattle for you, it's mortal combat. Ph34r my 1986 12-passenger Ford van of doom, it leaves mossy and oily goobers all over everything. That and my brother put the steering wheel back on twisted about 5~10 deg off center.

@chops : Mmm... ekiben's, natsukashii... @denoir : nice contrast with the HSX.

1 ) this system is not at all realisticly portable, it consists of up to 6 60deg angle projector screens plus effects and other equipment. not something you just slap together and run with. 2 ) this was featured on an MSNBC spot last Thanksgiving at ITTSEC. A typical mission (breaching/clearing) is measured in seconds, not minutes. 3 ) There's quite a bit of infrastructure, so setup and maintanence per session could take a while. 4 ) The imported video restricts flexibility and expansion, limiting to effectively a jumbo version of "House of the Dead", "Time Crisis", or "Area 51" type repetitious arcades. "Hmm, a box... pop-up man behind box, repeat..." 5 ) The other drawback is that each module or resource has to be videotaped and digitized, you can't just swap weapons back and forth between people, since they're video - not models.

*cough*dupe1, dupe2*cough*

Various tributes Mormons Southern Baptists Closing

The Pope of Popes

The Blessed Sounds of Silence

The links to his bio and history have been posted previously, if you do not care to check prior posts then it's pointless to repost them. Specifically, I would like to hear more about his earlier ministry, before he was made Cardinal. Any refs?

I was referring to the position of the Catholic church, which universally condemns all euthanasia, any abortions, population management, birth control, war, or other such involuntary termination or abrogation of the mortal existance of the human soul. While I personally may differ on minor technical points of doctrine, I do agree with the premise that life is not to be determined by any measure of so-called mortal "quality-of-life". For example, the Jewish population in germany created an uncomfortable emotional and psychological pressure on some german peoples, as well as allegations of tainting the gene-pool via intermarriage, as there are some hereditary genetic tendancies found in some parts of the Jewish population. Obviously to protect the quality of life for the particular german populations this imminent threat needed to be immediately eradicated, right? Judge Blackmun in Roe v. Wade (a case argued under false pretenses and suborned witnesses btw) commented that as 'scholars, academics, philosephers of religion, and doctors of medicine have not been able to come to any consensus of what life is, it most certainly is not the place of the (US Supreme) Court to decide that.' (paraphased.) The net effect was to say that as the courts were incapable of determining the existance or relevance of a 'soul', they are solely bound to adjudicate re matters of tangible observation. Thus, if people like Terri Schiavo are more of a fiscal liability to an aggrieved party than is quantifiablely remuneratable, then the clear result must be to pull the plug. This goes further though into the ramifications of the nihilistic doctines held by some that as humans are physically capable and mentally competent to interfere in the evolutionally process, that that ability to interfere presents itself as the greatest "imminent danger/WMD" the world has ever seen, and immediate action must be taken to stop the potential abuse. So strictly speaking from a humanist perspective, if it requires more juice to keep Terri Schiavo or the Pope alive than they can ever hope to replace back into the 'natural' environment, it's better to hasten turning them into fertilizer. Notice though that there is zero consideration whatsoever here of the strongly held beliefs of many that the human essence or 'soul' is uniquely distinct from the phyiscal body. Of course that is not quantifiable presently by sceptical science. But you've got two choices, either eradicate all the 'obviously' mentally deficient 'believers in silly notions' because of their genetic defiencies or danger of indoctrination - which incidently would likely have a significant impact on global warming due to the massive decomposition - or remain in the uncomfortable postion of continued 'living' (er, for you 'dwelling' or 'residing') next door to 'crazed' Bible, Koran, Torah, or even Rig Veda thumpers, who have *shock* opinions that differ from yours. I'm sure I could make as many reasons for the institutionalization of liberals as you could for the incarceration of conservatives. Moot point. The embryo issue comes down to two camps, either there is a soul - automaticly granting legal status, or if no soul just play darts with a calendar to determine when the lump of tissue is no longer exclusively the property of the mother and becomes an independently recognized legal entity. Vegetables are generally tasty. Jeffrey Dahmer had opinions about other dinner choices. But you don't see somebody sitting in Old Sparky for eating a tofuburger on rye. Afaik nobody seriously argues that a head of iceberg lettuce has anymore inside its head than tasty leaves. As for the iraqis, some are glad for regime change, some are not. Gee, what a coincidence, division there too, I thought it only existed in the US. How dare they have opinions, the little ingrates... What about the ground-level protests and envoy to Jordan 'recalled for consultations' regarding percived under-the-table Jordaninan support for some Sunni-affiliate suicide bombers? Capital punishment is obviously a whole 'nother 900lb gorilla, but that's no problem for the courts since they've ruled that they'll just pass down what ever feels good atm, or pass the buck to someone else to avoid the prickly difficulties of principles which might inadvertently reflect something so atrocious as *shock* moral values. -- back on topic re the Pope specifically -- I had a friend who passed away in a similar medical situation several years ago. She seemed perfectly healthy going in for major back surgery, developed an infection in postop (due to non-disclosure that she had a repressed immune system due to the flu or something at the time), which rapidly flared overnight into septic shock and kidney shutdown. Unfortunately, at that point things quickly become medically messy, and there's not a lot of options available. She passed away within about 48 hours of the flareup, but was peacefully unconcious throughout it all. Regardless of your faith or denomination, I think all people can look up the example and mission he served, as well as the principles he advocated and lived - even if you disagree with the doctrine - as beneficial to the world and worthy of emulation. Along those lines, a nun at a holy site in Israel I visited once commented that although the authenticity of the site's location was uncertain, the fact still remained that the purpose of the memorial was to remind people of the event and purpose remembered at that location, and to help fortify and direct people. So it is with Karol Wojtyla. Whether you accept him as your pope, or just some old geezer that's on TV a lot, he has had a remarkable influence for good, and more importantly for inspiring other people to do likewise. For his good works and fervent faith I as a non-catholic non-protestant Christian say thank you, God-speed, and God Bless Karol Wojtyla.

Dan Brown's got an axe to grind and pockets to line. Put it on the shelf. Don't have cable here, so I'm stuck with just the online wire services, since none wants to give freewebcast's even with ad's. Nobody except idiots mourned the passing of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc. The pope is certainly no tyrant, and he as an individual, priest, and pontiff has done a great deal of good will for the entire world, as well as inspiring others to do likewise. If you have credible and reputable evidence that he is actually an evil agent of darkness, and that that information has immediate relevance atm, post it in full. Otherwise stop knocking the guy because of what a prior pontiff or insubordinate priest may have done. He's suffered enough already, no need to be kicked and insulted as he passes. The premise of the pontificate is the belief that they continue the ecclesiastical mission of St. Peter, who was according to interpretation to stand as a foundation rock and hold the spiritual keys to the church. John Paul II imho has done an excellent job of striving to fill that role and mantle, despite the turmoil of world events that occured during the term of his mortal ministry. Perhaps the greatest criticisms have come from people impatient for secular responses to what the catholic church, and many other denominations for that matter, believe to be spiritual concerns. The real test of his legacy of course will be to see what direction is taken by the Cardinals and the next Pontiff. John Paul II has been such a commanding presence for the past several decades that he will leave very large shoes to fill for the next pontiff. Technically slippers re the vestments, but I digress. Re the living will. The position is that none has the right or place to deprive a living being of basic medical or life-sustaining support. Also there is nothing wrong with unplugging a dead person. Notice the distinction, so long has he lives, he has requested that every effort be made to sustain his life. But when he passes, he will be gone so it's okay to unplug the body that remains. Terri Schiavo was not dead, that's where the outrage was. Relating to this though is the aspect of finality. By electing to remain in his apartments rather than be transported to the hospital, he's showing that he understands his time is drawing to a close, but it's still only God's place to decide when to take him home.

For duel-booting, put windows on first, then linux. That way linux's mre capable boot loader can switch between the windows loader and the linux one. Regardless of which distro you go with, unless someone is handing you a preinstalled sanitized box, you're going to need to have a pretty good idea of the specs and layout and balancing of your system. Knoppix livecd's let you get away from some of that temporarily, but hey, even in windows setting one big massive glut partition is bad karma. Gentoo does offer imho the most efficent and controlable tweaking interfacing, but you realisticly need at least a 2nd pc to double-check the docs and package db if you're doing offline work. Secondly, its normal method of downloading and compiling the source code can be a significant impact on low-bandwidth/processing machines, like my poor little Athlon 900. Mandrake's been the easiest imo to install, RedHat/PinkTie/Fedora/IcantMakeUpMyMindWhichHatImGoingToWearToday is kinda clunky. Haven't tried SUSE, I'm very curious to play with it some time due to the Novell enterprise connectivity. As mentioned previous, ATI's really slacked off in rolling out decent drivers for Linux. That said, I doubt it's going to have much effect either way for a 9000 IGP. I swear the idiot who came up with memory-sharing IGP stupidity would have us all back at 40x25 ASCII consoles if he had his way. One little niggly worth mentioning here. Aside from Mandrake, most distro's do not have NTFS support turned on out of the box. If you're duel-booting, you'll definately want to enable that so you can at least read files off your Windows drives into Linux. Iirc, it's still officially read-only to avoid any risk of writing garbley-gook to the file ACL's, but if you use standard home-user level lack of file security you might be okay for limited file writes. Otherwise you'd have to burn files to CD or copy back and forth via USB stick or something.

http://reuters.myway.com/article....DC.html http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L01208036.htm

As someone who is in my christian denomination about as doctrinally opposite the pope as you can get, I still say that I believe God raised up Karol Wojtyla and inspired him to do a great work among all nations. Has there been difficulties during the time that he's led the Roman Catholic church? Of course, but he has also been at the forefront of ecclesiastically denouncing and correcting those issues. Not since the early days of the church has any pope afaik done so much to reach out to, and assist the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem communities, while striving to bring peace to even the atheist nations of communism. He has been blessed with remarkable fortitude and endurance, and has symbolically and doctrinally stood firm against apathy, ambiguity, and antagonism. His defiance of the communist regimes gave later leaders the ammo to stand against the Evil Empire. He has also been unafraid to voice his convictions, and disapproval of the ambiguious era one commentator referred to as "Slouching towards Gomorrah". In discussing the assasination attempt of a couple decades ago (where he previously recieved last rites) he commented that he felt that he was divinely rescued to fulfill his as-yet incomplete mission. His efforts in fighting the increasing liberalizing of the church are having a profound effect in ministries of many denominations throughout the world. While media attention is drawn to cases of polarizing incidents, what they have not adequately covered is the vast underlying attitude changes with a renewed return to religious fundamentalism in all denominations in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It's through the inspired efforts of people like the Pope that this great reawakening is spreading. Although I believe he is misguided on many minor points of doctrine, I still believe that he truely has magnified the mission God gave him, is living a magnicent live worthy of emulation in terms of spiritual dedication and integrity, and will be richly rewarded in Heaven for his personal sacrifices here. But, he's not dead yet, according to the wire. Supposedly he's just having trouble getting food down following the previous throat surgery. That was due to breathing difficulties. Not sure if that is due to the Parkinson's disease or not. My grandpa (the glowing nuke guy, just turned 91) also has Parkinson's, but was able to pretty much arrest it due to early detection and treatment. Plus he's never been shot and has the opportunity to hike mountains everyday. So maybe it's the Parkinson's progression, maybe it's the crud, or maybe he's just getting old. Regardless what the reason, the pope continues to be a living being, and when God's done with him here, God will take him home.

First announced 12 posts above, and about 20 days ago. There's two parts to the system, the physics SDK, and the hardware accelerator chip. You can get a good portion of the functionality in the software, the chip provides scalability and performance. AFAIK, OFP already uses some licensed phyiscs libs in the Immersion Foundation Classes. Ageia's Novodex SDK likely offers much of the same functionality, but also has the hooks to offload the processing to the PPU if present. The flip side to this is that the systems are not exactly interchangable, for programming and licensing reasons. You can't just pull out one linked DLL and drop in a different one without all sorts of complications. The plus side though is that the SDK does not require the hardware, so that gives some flexibility there.

More news info on the misfire:

Real simple, I was in the area a couple days after. Here's what happened: They have had a ton of snow this year and as a result burned through their supply of ammo. They got a new stock recently. When they get the shipment from the Army, each round comes with 7 charges. The canyon that they work in only needs 5 charges to hit the avalanche zones. 7 puts it over the ridge. When they got the new ammo, whoever was in charge forgot that they had to trim the loads. They had a storm over the end of the week, and loaded up some rounds to blast some snow. Rounds went up and over the ridge, which is actually some fairly substantial mountains too. Iirc, it was a standard towed 105mm howitzer commonly loaned from the army for avalanche control.

the catagory you found it under, "tie-ups", is either a list of indy films and misc video games where TM gear was used, or it's a list of various products with overly complicated cross-brand promotional campaigns. The specific movie looks to be a low-budget direct-to-video/DVD movie called "Covert Mission", published by Art Port. I haven't found any info yet on Art Port's site, TM announced a video rental release date of April 28 and sales on the 29th of April this year. Web translators don't work unless you know exactly how to preload them, and if you do then you can already read enough to do a translation or analysis like this one.

And it's the same as the demo island and rather similar to the ...

The OICW features two distinct weapons systems in the single package, with a variable optics and controls system. That's a number of suggestions right there. The XM8 project is a modular system like a fully railed M4. Modular weapons has also been suggested as well. Modular systems, multiple combined weapons, flexible optics and controls, these are generic engine suggestions, of which the XM8 and OICW are only two minor examples.

Some musings on this in light of evolutions since the initial announcement of OFP2 some time ago... I think the time if and when dual-processors make it to the consumer desktop in even negligible quantities are still some ways off. However, the likely market penetration of dual-core chips is much more imminently relevant. In either case, you have to significantly restructure the code to be much more multi-threading designed and optimized. I think in the process that better code design in that model could create better stream paths for closer to real-time priority for function components, regardless of the number of cores or processors it's executed on. This also adds to the MP scalability capability, by extending server processing capability to stupid amounts of CPU and memory. Me personally, I want clustering support with dynamic cross-over, but I also want streamed 1m res terrain dynamically generated from GIS data too. On the other hand, reworking the code for better multithreading would also be a great time and opportunity structure that code so as to do as concurrant as possible simultanious builds for WindowsMP and LinuxMP. Anyway, on to Linux issues. There are several issues involved, and not just video API's. OFP uses DX API's for Video, Audio, Input, and Networking, plus voice-chat. The net-code sucks, no need to refresh that and the voice-chat complaints. That's why we have sockets. I'd rather see a VoIP frontend, but what really needs to happen is for the gameDev industry to make a XML VoIP schema so that the games can remote-control an external VoIP chat app, and let an external provider handle that. SDL libs would help with the Audio and abstracted input methods somewhat. Creative is rather aggressive with their EAX pushiness, and unfortunately that saddles you with a noticable CPU hit and nasty IP messes. Dolby has their own share of IP issues historically, but at least you can off-load the CPU work to a standardized performance system. Your input methods are pretty simple cross-platform, however joysticks can get complicated where you have specialty wrapper drivers that custom config the joystick controls. These often involve fake-keyboard cheats and such, and often are exclusively for Windows. The big item of course is the graphics system being done currently in DirectX. This isn't an HL2 vs Doom3 or ATI vs Nvidia issue like AA/AS double depth or cG programming or some other little obscure detail like that, it's the simple fact that Microsoft has every reason to not port DirectX to Linux, and the Linux community has every obligation to not accept the kludgey insecure DirectX layered hooks into Linux. OpenGL is stable, reliable, and documented on both platforms, DirectX is not. That's the basis of the arguement. Does M$ hold you hand and make simpler support and make D3D more dev-friendly? Yes, but at a price. On top of this though is the cold hard reality of market demographics. Is Joe Walmart going to have even a dual-core machine in the next five years? Is he even going to care or notice? Bob Bestbuy doesn't even change the passwords on his brand-name PC, let alone know what Linux is. What's the honest potential market, and ROI for shipping to the Linux market, other than tweakers, hackers, and crazy server admins? The biggest positive thing that could come from this though is that the code could be cleaned up enough in the process to make it really begin to sing and dance, regardless of whether it ever actually made it to Linux. Like my previous rants about what I believe to be the realistic potential of OFP:Xbox, I do think though that the exercise/effort is valuable in fixing up the PC version. There's one other item I neglected to mention. There are two additional licensed libraries, the Intel JPEG library and the Immersion Foundation Classes (IFC). I'm not positive atm whether the IFC libs are physics or DirectInput or both, but it's still a significant component that would need to be compensated for. This brings up one other item that is admittedly a tweaker component for the near future, but may have significant future growth potential, the dedicated physics processor card. One solution was recently announced by Ageia at the recent Game Developer's Conference with announced support by Ubisoft and the next Unreal platform. Initial solutions are targeted for Christmas 2005. It's going to take some time before a product of this kind gains wide market penetration, but it still has a lot of potential.

Comments from 2005-03-07 Report from 2005-03-13 For colloquial, wakaran might get picked up, but not likely. You're not going to get imaichi or typos to resolve in babelfish, and certainly not gure-nedo rancha to return either.

I would post the comments I made on another board relating to the quality and capability of online translators, but that would be violating all sorts of content rules of these boards. You're not helping yourself or anyone else running it through Babelfish, you have to pretty much already be operational in the language in order to properly preprocess data for the online translators. They can't do anything about colloquial euphimisms or misspellings, of which there is precedent in SCARS postings. I'll post a logical and accurate translation as soon as I get a chance to work it over.

I sold BIS-ChibiChari, but BIS-ChubbyChari's always ready for a good scrap.