Comment Re:Blood pressure issues? (Score -1) 465
It's hard for *you* to complain.
Comment Kudos to the programmers... (Score -1) 154
...for doing it with a single code!
Comment LOL (Score -1) 678
So if she gave permission to sex being splashed in her face you'd be OK with it?
Comment Where's raytracing at now? (Score -1) 82
I don't keep up much on the advancement of video cards and graphics processing but I recall several months ago (perhaps almost a year?) that raytracing was trying to get traction again as a viable rendering technology for computer games. And now lately I've also been hearing a lot of about how fast graphics cards have become and how many cores they have.
With all this in mind, how close are we to having games being rendered via raytracing? Is it still not possible even with all the hardware available now?
Comment Re:Actually they are right (Score -1) 412
Call me crazy but I don't think "one or two times" gives much weight to a statement like "Paypal ALWAYS ruled against me".
Submission + - New Nuclear Powered Spaceship Design Revealed (tfot.info)
Iddo Genuth writes: "A U.S. based company introduced an
innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months) and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling. The system, which may dramatically affect interplanetary space travel is called the Miniature Magnetic Orion (Mini-Mag Orion for short), and is an optimization of the 1958 Orion interplanetary propulsion concept."
Submission + - Hollywood Seeks to Change "G.I. Joe" (blogspot.com)
Advocate123 writes: Clearly, Hollywood has forgotten the, "Real American Hero." G.I. Joe originally symbolized the American WWII soldier and our greatest generation. Now Hollywood celebrities are going to turn him into a politically correct Feminazi. Isn't anything sacred to these people?
Submission + - Wal-Mart ditches DRM, keeps censorship (arstechnica.com) 1
Smiley Face writes: Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with today's announcement that it will be participating in Universal's DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain's continued censorship. 'It's a bit hard to believe that all the customers who shop at the world's largest retailer want censored versions of music, though, but that's what they get. Only edited versions of albums with parental advisories are available, just as they are in Wal-Mart's offline stores. This isn't a new policy; Wal-Mart's online music store has carried only edited versions for years, but it's worth pointing out to potential new users tempted by the lower prices and lack of DRM.'
Submission + - MIT startup unveils new 64-core CPU (arstechnica.com)
single-threaded writes: Tilera, a startup out of MIT, has announced that it is shipping a 64-core CPU. Called the TILE64, the CPU is fabbed on a 90nm process and is clocked at anywhere from 600MHz to 900MHz. From Ars' coverage: 'what will make or break Tilera is not how many peak theoretical operations per second it's capable of (Tilera claims 192 billion 32-bit ops/sec), nor how energy-efficient its mesh network is, but how easy it is for programmers to extract performance from the device. That's the critical piece of TILE64's launch story that's missing right now, and it's what I'll keep an eye out for as I watch this product make its way in the market. Though there are any number of questions about this product that remain to be answered, one thing is for certain: TILE64 has indeed brought us into the era of 64 general-purpose, mesh-networked processor cores on a single chip, and that's a major milestone. '
Submission + - Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary (space.com)
Raver32 writes: "NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are celebrating three decades of flight as they careen toward interstellar space billions of miles from the solar system's edge.
Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Both spacecraft continue to return information from distances more than three times farther away than Pluto, where the sun's outer heliosphere meets the boundary of interstellar space.
"The Voyager mission is a legend in the annals of space exploration. It opened our eyes to the scientific richness of the outer solar system, and it has pioneered the deepest exploration of the sun's domain ever conducted," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. "It's a testament to Voyager's designers, builders and operators that both spacecraft continue to deliver important findings more than 25 years after their primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn concluded."
Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers)."
Submission + - Linux Foundation launches kernel dev roadmap
kwabbles writes: The Linux Weather Forecast was launched today, along with "current conditions" for kernel development, a "short-term forecast" and a "long-term forecast". Now developers and organizations that want to see when certain implementations/fixes are planned can look at this informative and handy site.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_F orecast
Submission + - Bad Movie Physics Hurt Scientific Understanding (physorg.com)
eldavojohn writes: "A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. From the article, "Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years "All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it." I commented on the physics of the most recent Die Hard having problems detracting from my enjoyment of the movie but is it really the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students?"
Submission + - New technology has dramatic chip-cooling potential
BillOfThePecosKind writes: "Researchers have demonstrated a new technology using tiny "ionic wind engines" that might dramatically improve computer chip cooling, possibly addressing a looming threat to future advances in computers and electronics."
Some researchers funded by Intel over at Purdue have improved the "heat-transfer coefficient" by some 250%. I never liked water cooled systems, and this sounds promising. However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces, probably not much.
Submission + - Woz Details His Plans for Energy-Efficient House (ecnmag.com)
An anonymous reader writes: ECN magazine posted a long interview with the Woz. "Apple Inc. co-founder and legendary hacker Steve Wozniak recently found a new passion in energy-efficienct housing. Last month he told PC World magazine, 'I have a long dream to build my own house in a very energy-efficient approach,' and here at ECN we thought you'd like to know more. So we interviewed Woz by email. Here is a transcript of our questions and his answers." Good insight into the mind of a living genius!
Submission + - Olympic Committee chooses XP over Vista (pclaunches.com)
Vinit writes: "The popularity of Windows XP is still making things difficult for Vista. Now Vista has again suffered a major setback, with Lenovo (Olympic 2008' official sponsor) installing XP on it's machines to run the Olympic Games' vital PC-related tasks. Vista will only be used in internet lounges set up for athletes to use during the games.
http://www.pclaunches.com/software/olympic_committ ee_chooses_xp_over_vista.php"
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I consider a new device or technology to have been culturally accepted when it has been used to commit a murder. -- M. Gallaher
