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scrapilot

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Everything posted by scrapilot

  1. I am rather confused about drilling being the answer. Drilling will add a few percent to the supply, which will take years to take effect. Why not do something that will make a difference in the present? How about taking oil off of the commodities exchange, which makes oil go up and down based on psychology, which is like what happens in the stock market. Then oil will be based on supply and demand, which some say would bring oil down to $80-$100 per barrel.
  2. Cool to have a good old school shooter with 360 degree movement made again. I remember the old top down shooters like Ikari Warriors and Mercs. None of them had enough of a somewhat believable realism aspect in the semi realistic game. Always was wanting a modern one with updated graphics that would finally give us a better 360 degree shooter.
  3. I'm not sure why space sims in general are given an unfair review by reviewers and gamers, while fighter jet sims are taken more seriously. It's not just UC that's has its idea that is shot down before they even play it. Starshatter is an excellent space sim with a Falcon 4.0 like campaign that is also a must for a space sim collection to alternate with UC in a gamer's library. Gamespot won't even review the new Universal Combat games or the new version of Starshatter. UC and Starshatter give a scientific simulation of space combat. Not sure why more flightsim players or reviewers don't give space combat simulations a chance.
  4. When playing a campaign in any game, you need to creme the enemy from the start to win. In BCM, you need to get to Supreme Commander as quickly as possible. If you don't succeed in your first missions perfectly and actually go beyond the objectives, it will be impossible to win no matter how well you do in subsequent missions. Just because you run out of tasks doesn't mean you've done well in a campaign. Often it is quite the contrary. It can mean that the central command planners have run out opportunities or missions to assign you. More missions should be thought of as more opportunities for victory, not that things are going badly. If you get a high rank too late, you will be too late to have much tasks left, which very well could mean you have lost. Probably the best thing to do is start over from scratch in such a situation.
  5. I downloaded the OFP demo from gamespot.com and it looks like a remarkable game. The terrain is curvy and densly populated with trees and buildings. The graphics only lack the extreme shading color of today. Best of all is it runs fast. The best feature about the game is the squad members communicate in a very detailed fashion.
  6. Windows Vista is a slow and impractical operating system at the present time. It is also very incompatible with Windows XP games. If Microsoft wants to sell very many copies to people who sometimes play games, they should have included Windows XP with it. It will be the stickypoint that will keep a sizable number of people from getting new computers. Many will wish they would have bought full version copies of Windows XP so they could have both Windows XP and Windows Vista on their machine. I think incompatibility will be less tolerated now than it would have been in the late 90s or in 2001 when Windows XP came out. Yet Vista is a version of Windows that is more backwards incompatible than ever. One of the strengths of Vista, however, is that its design in terms of security, has been largely overhauled. Many of the flaws that made Linux a superior security design over Windows are gone in Windows Vista. Common sense security changes are made to the operating system core to fix these flaws. Files unrelated to a running program can not be accessed by it that are irrevelant to the execution of that program. No Windows settings can be changed by an internet use attack without explicit user consent. If Windows does gets confused by where a program came from that does try to change system settings, it will attempt to catch any suspicious changes made by it. Also, programs do not run in administrative mode by default to prevent them from gaining control of the operating system. It also checks for suspicious elevation of privalege activity by a program. However, the Windows kernel can still be used as a vector for malware to attack the system, but atleast it is monitored on every level. Maybe their operating system monitoring technology is better than Linux due to the fact that they need it more than they do. The monitoring system might use artificial intelligence since Windows Vista has been in many more years of development than the earlier versions of Windows. I would be disappointed if it was too unintelligent to be characterized that way. Hopefully attempts for Linux and Windows interoperability will close paths of attacks by compartmentalizing programs or doing whatever else Linux does to block paths of attacks. There will be little to monitor in an operating system that actually blocks paths of attacks rather than just attempts to control them. Some Web content providers may insist on the lowering of security barriers to provide more poweful content in the future. So the dynamic security of Windows Vista monitoring would be best for that situation. Fortunately, the dynamic security will never have to be used, because ActiveX is dying and will die soon. I hope the legacy of ActiveX goes away soon and that websites quit sneaking in ActiveX that Explorer can't detect without Norton Firewall, when all that's on the webpage is simply text. It is about time the industry is forcing powerful web content to be produced in a way that compartmentalizes it in the web browser. DirectX10 is a good graphics language that is better than the competition. Swiftshaders will definately not replace it because they are software shaders. While it is great that it massively increases software shading performance for those that want it, it is still only as fast as a low end Direct3D card. Eventually, the Swiftshader's ability to convert hardware calls to software rendering will make hardware accelleration obsolete, once processor speed multiplies. For the present, however, its competitor, OpenGL which Linux uses, can not list what a graphic card can not do and pass that information to a program. This shortcoming of OpenGL can create speed stability problems, especially when graphic cards will vary widely in features again. Also unlike before, DirectX can now break down a graphic card driver into both user mode and kernel mode components so it will be just as fast. Microsoft is also setting strict standardization guidelines for DirectX10 cards, which should help make the new DirectX10 graphics cards technology good. But DirectX10 games like Crysis sound like they can be plenty good using DirectX9 cards. So DirectX10 is not quite the leap frog improvement in shading detail and performance that the hype would suggest. Given the poor speed, and incompatibility, there is no way Windows Vista is worth getting just for the security and DirectX10. You can always surf the web using Linux and then play games using Windows XP. One nice feature is it indexes files so they can be searched faster. Dramatically faster file searches in the file browser is worth buying for $10 maybe. A backwards incompatible operating system must have something that is better than the original, but wow I can't believe how minor the improvements are besides security. The operating system is laughably bad if it doesn't include Windows XP. Microsoft seems to forget that they are creating a product that must actually be used, not just a technology showpiece.
  7. Windows Vista is probably here to stay. It doesn't have to be efficient compared to the competition, or efficiently programmed. Web browsing is going to need to use features that create security problems to create more powerful features web content providers will want in the future. This means they will need browser control and control over some features of your computer. Websites are expected to do a lot more in the future, the microsoft website seems to predict. This means sites will need cookies and ActiveX whether you want it or not. The way it will have to be made secure is not through content provider restrictions but through rules. Rules mean artificial intelligence analaysis of usage of insecure features. Windows Vista sounds like it is ahead in making web browsing secure in a way that does not restrict what content providers can do. I think they call this dynamic security. Windows also seems to be ahead in driver technology. Manufactures can more easily make graphic cards for Windows than any other operating system. It is amazing that Windows can still work with graphic cards many years old and also work with dozens of new graphic cards without a game maker changing their code. A big technology Windows has that no one else can match is DirectX 10. Its Geometry shaders can create extremely fast, photographic shading without game makers having to revert to pixel shading. DirectX 10 might also be useful for 3d modeling for business use such as Computer Aided Design, and recreating or modelling an event or physical process for science. I think Microsoft knows that Windows Vista is too slow for today's machines. Its unnecessary features will become not much of a slow down on tomorrow's faster computers, just like what happened with Windows XP. It is a shame that they don't let you turn off features anymore, like in Windows 2000 Professional. Microsoft doesn't care if they don't sell very many copies of Windows Vista right now. They are betting it will sell well in the future. Windows Vista is probably only slower not because it is inferior, but because it won't let you turn off features. The memory allocation technology may be better as said in a previous post. Better memory allocation technology will make all the difference on future computers.
  8. Maybe the problem is that they focus on features rather than operating system technology. The Windows Vista information in the link says nothing about memory allocation technology improvements, scalability, or task allocater improvements. What are they selling here? Are they selling a new operating system or a bunch of add ons to the old operating system? The problem with Windows is they don't believe in embedded operating systems. They should have redesigns from the ground up to some extent for the consumer operating system and the network operating system for business. I have a feeling that security is only achieved through addons rather than redesigns. Security is only achieved at the expense of speed. Security features are probably just addons that work to contradict the windows features that create security problems. I think the solution to security problems is probably just to shut off scripts or program controls period. Maybe I am ignorant, but no data should ever be executed-period. I don't like browser scripts. I always say no to ActiveX requests unless the webpage won't run without them. I don't know how unwanted programs get installed but I believe it is probably because of scripts, which would make their origin very uncomplicated. However, I am not sure Windows XP is slower in every way than Windows 2000. Games may be faster on Windows XP. A forum said Falcon 4.0 runs fastest on Windows XP. I think the biggest culprit for speed is not memory allocation or task allocation slowness, but incessant disk activity caused by unneeded Windows processes. I wonder if limiting virtual memory would get the hard disk drive to stop running. [ 03-27-2007, 10:55 PM: Message edited by: rapilot ]
  9. Very nice space background and long range laser graphics. Can't wait to see a ton of long range lasers going off from capital ships and space stations. The battles should be spectacular.
  10. The math sounds impressive. I wonder how many computers had to run at once to solve the problem. The fact that they knew exactly what combinations to try to solve the matrix is impressive. I think it shows we have the mathematical know how to solve many problems in chemistry and physics provided computers become cheap enough to solve hundreds or thousands of math problems like this. Maybe if computers could be powerful enough to cheaply solve hundreds of matrixes like this on a regular basis, we could test theories to fill in the gaps for promising chemicals at the DNA level to make new medicines or novel fuels.
  11. I always thought Windows had built in hackability, but I did not know it was this bad. I think a reason why Data Execution Prevention had to be invented is because programs have to be run in Power User or Full Administrative mode as said in the previous post. What is the reason for allowing one program to mess with code in another program. I noticed from my firewall that cookies are running when I have no Internet browser running. Come on, what is the reason for that? Windows will probably call its built in hackability a connectivity feature. I have a feeling that most so called security flaws are really connectivity features. I am sure most consumers don't want super easy to use connectivity across the internet. A connectivity allowance slider in Windows would be nice.
  12. I don't see how opened source stuff could be better. So many more man hours of engineering time is available in propriety stuff like Windows. If security is an issue, why not just get software to surf invisibility which fools the internet that you are not anonymous. With all the innovative security software out there, someone has got to have patched the lack of security rules in Windows.
  13. Game reviewers need to base their reviews on many categories and subcategories. However, they should be our guide to tell us not only what is fun but what is the best. They should be more harshly critical than the audience so we don't waste our time with games that our merely fun, but are not the best of its type.
  14. I think the main reason game reviews are flawed is because gameplay is only one of several factors in the overall rating. They should instead make the rating all about gameplay. We should be rating the game and not the programming achievement of the product. It is no longer the early days of the video game industry. Back then it would make sense to give huge points for a game that makes achievements in graphics. Now, it is the gameplay that sets one game apart from another.
  15. I think the reason video game reviews suck is that they review the technical achievement of the game rather than how good it is. They are afraid of criticizing technical achievements in graphics. Movie reviewers don't care about special effects achievements and neither should video game reviewers. A game like a movie must not only be fun but be special to be good. Games are not good just because they are fun. They must be special, different, and interesting to be good. The games with super good graphics and nothing else that is special should get a rating of 70% for average at best.
  16. Read the tutorial and do some real fun stuff rather than just fly around. You get more done that way. To control where you land on a planet, click on a planet and then click observe. Zoom somewhere to your location of choice and place waypoint one there. You will planetfall there. CC(comand craft) will be on the planetary map showing your starting location. For combat missions in future, note the location of the Orbital defense missile battery in space tacops mode. Don't planetfall below that unless you want missiles falling on you from orbit.
  17. Console and popular shooter games get old real fast, except Battlefield 2. Popular shooters are linear and all the same. They are trail and errish and only mildly fun compared to simulations. In other words, skills learned in these games are part specific with no feeling that perfected tactics will get you through disimilar levels. Battlefield 2 has no levels which is why I like it. Simulations are the only games that make you feel you have experienced something lasting as opposed to feeling you have just passed time. This is because simulations are interesting and not just fun. You also play a fluid battle as opposed to just levels. You lose simulations because of dificient tactics, not because you don't know the game. Indy developers bring lasting excitement because they bring imagination that is believable and scientific. Mainstream games are worth a gloss over at most.
  18. Soldiers take an oath to follow the president, but the president needs to not take advantage of that too much. He needs to explain his strategy better so the troops and the public believe that they are fighting for something important. He made some good strategic changes but they seem a bit too late. If we are going to lose, then admit it and get the best deal you can. On the other hand, if the new strategy can achieve victory, we should give it a chance. I think that the new strategy of spreading the troops out into districts so they can stop violence as it is happening rather than respond afterwards might work. The timing of the leave should be based on the prospects for victory. If there is no hope for victory, then we should not delay the departure just to postpone the embarassement. Politics needs to be taken out of the timing on the leave. In every other activity in life, if you know you are going to lose, then you normally just stop doing it. War should not be an area that is any different.
  19. I forgot to mention that our building materials technology is also deficient. The materials we use or too depletable. Trees may be the most plentiful building material there is. You can get the most volume of building materials from trees, I hypothesize, than from any other plant. Not only is overpopulation a problem, but there will be more consumers of good sized houses. Genetic engineering is the solution here too. We need really good miracle grow to make the trees on tree farms grow as fast as possible. If we don't, the demand for wood will outstrip supply. If we take deforestation into account also, the situation we will face if we don't make our building materials technology better will be serious.
  20. I just don't understand the view that technologic advancement is a bad thing. I also don't buy the argument that says technological advancement is going to allow us to do and control everything because knowledge grows every year. Our astonishment of how we have made much larger than expected advances in computers has made us blind to the lack of technological advancement in other things. Also fear of technology further contributes to the assumption that technological advancement will be infinite and fast. We cannot stop technological advancement, the argument says. Technology is usually bad because it is applied before it is very good. Genetic modification of food is a good example. I don't think, however, that genetic engineering is a science that is bad for mankind. Biological science is probably the most important area we can advance in to achieve our ultimate goal of being able to control everything. We can make enormous advances in medicine with bioscience in making nutriceuticals and gene therapy products. The biggest advancement we could make is to understand how every species of life works at the component level. Plants are able to fight off many different diseases. Studying their mechanism of how they do this would give us major insight into making new drugs. Their chemicals can in rare instances even be used as drugs without much modification. To do this we need a species study program like the Apollo space program. The returns are too uncertain and far into the future for private industry to ever undertake such a task. If we don't recognize limits of progress in things such as drugs, then we won't reorganize our society to advance as far as we could. The more limits we can find like these the more corrections we will make so that technological advancement can be maximized. I like the idea of nuclear power due to its abundance of fuel. It means we will basically never run out of fuel. Technology to reduce the harmfulness of nuclear waste to a fraction of its original levels should make getting rid of the waste possible. However, nuclear waste is only part of the problem with nuclear power. There are too many cases of nuclear power plant leaks into groundwater and farmland. Unless we have the strictest of environmental standards like in France, nuclear power seems like a bad idea. Instead, we should be using genetic engineering to improve biofuels like ethanol as Brazil did. I think we could do this in less time than it would take to design and build good nuclear power plants, because nuclear power has to be expanded many times to provide power to all of the country. However, we must take carbon dioxide emissions into account, which biofuels will not solve because they are still used for thermal energy. Thermal energy no matter what fuel it uses emits carbon dioxide. In the near future, the majority of energy consumption will be from new energy users, which means we need new energy technology. To think we can solve our energy problems by just picking the best technology is arrogant and naive. Nuclear power may be our best option because it has negligible air emissions, and is compact and portable. Wind is nice in theory but adaquate wind to generate enough power is only available in a few areas of the country. We cannot have too much power generated in just one location because we can not transmit it far enough to reach all users. So energy transmission technology needs to improve. Solar technology has potential but its feasibility is unproven. Fuel cells would be the ultimate answer but they would take 50 years to invent to be good enough for mass energy production. But if carbon sequestration is feasible than biofueled power generation would be the answer. We are in the biotechnology age now. So we should apply this next generation technology to every place possible including power generation. We need studies before we decide on an energy technology. Therefore, if we leave knowledge accumulation for energy technology on its current path, our energy problems will not get solved. So technologic advancement is not being maximized in energy production either. The most important thing we need to do to improve things is to do away with any arrogance we have about how great our technological ability is. We can not advance by simply restricting how technology is used. We need to make all new technologies high quality technologies so none of them harm us. If we can direct our awe away from our technologies and to how complex plant and animal life is, our drug industry would stop making crummy drugs where they are embarassed to list their side effects. The same is true with energy technology. We need technology to advance just as much as we need to restrict how it is used, because we can never assume a technology will advance infinitely. Technology will not advance to its maximum unless we find our limits. We need to stop believing our technology will ever have the ability to play god, whether for good or for evil. Knowledge accumulation needs to be allocated with maximum efficiency to get the maximum beneficial result. Every other resource is like that and so is knowledge. Unlimited time and manpower won't cover the shortfall because neither is unlimited.
  21. The toy misquito helicopter made me realize how deficient the United States is in military helicopter technology. Why isn't the United States making a coaxial military helicopter like the Russians are. Our country needs the best helicopters too, not just the best jets. The problem with not having helicopters in close air support situations is that the timing is off in calls for close air support. You need fire support from aircraft faster than a jet can provide. A helicopter can fill that need. Soldiers in Afghanistan said they really provided good air support even though they got hit alot. A coaxial helicopter can take hits much better than one with a tail rotor. Coaxial helicopters seem to be the way to go. The mosquito helicopter looked much more stabile than micro helicopters that used a tail rotor.
  22. I believe we do have limits on progress, no matter whether the limits are on humans or any other intelligent alien life on another planet. We really need to reverse engineer the universe to even have a fraction of the knowledge God has. If we could somehow recreate the big bang and have it create both matter and life, that would be an accomplishment of God-like proportions. Life is the most difficult thing to reverse engineer. I think it would take dozens of thousands of years to create a big bang that could create life. You miss most of the essence of the knowledge of something, however, when you reverse engineer something as opposed to invent it. If we invented the computer and then placed it in some country or time period that did not have the scientific knowledge to create one yet, that would be a good test. They might be able to reverse engineer it and create their own computers. They also might be able to make refinements to it and make it better. However, you would not say they are as scientifically advanced as we are. It took alot of science to come up with the idea and invent it. They were also many intermediate inventions along the way to create the full featured computer. If we take this comparison to the universe, we would have to say the universe is a much more complicated invention by leaps and bounds. We can tinker with it and make parts of the universe better- and thus invent all kinds of sophisticated things. But to say our knowledge of it is or will ever become God-like is a bit antiscience. To say that our knowledge is God-like will make us stop looking into our limits of our knowledge. The more limits we can find, the more technogically advanced we will become. The greatest advancement in our knowledge often comes from knowing what we do not know. It would be especially bad for a fleet commander with a large group of warships to think their civilization is God-like. If they wander too far into uncharted territory that is 1000s of years more advanced than we are without thinking to launch a probe first, they could get all of galatic command killed. The last thing galatic command needs is people who think like the borg and try to assimilate the whole galaxy all at once.
  23. I find it interesting that the discussion has mostly just questioned our ability to become morally like God but has not questioned our ability to become God technically that much. I don't even buy that we even have a long way to go. As far as I am concerned, we are not even on the path to get there. The trend in the present day is that the more we advanced technologically, the stupider the average individual person becomes. Collective progress is progressing. But generation Y is a joke. They spend huge amounts of time learning the computer, but fall very short in core subjects like writing analytical papers, and reading comprehension. In other words, they spend so much time mesmorized in front of the computer, they don't work very hard on real school subjects. I have seen examples of book store workers not knowing alphabetical order when you ask for help finding a book. We are spending so much time learning computers rather than real subjects, that we have come to see them as the only thing we need to know. We think that since we must know how to operate complicated computers in our weapons and at work, that we must be smarter to operate in this society. Not the case. Computer skills are just a primitive trial and error skill that anyone can acquire if they use them enough. If you ask me, the computers that we worship so much are not even very advanced. We still use silicon chips rather than crystals. Computer speed is pegged at 3.6 Gigahertz because we won't switch to a better circuit board material. All we can do is stack them for speed. We are so primitive that we can't even build a computer fast enough to calculate a cure, providing we even know what calculations to do. Once computers are fast enough, we can only begin to do real drugs. The drugs we are making today are junk. Pharmaceutical companies put profit before passion. How else would you explain the mass marketing for new drugs that doctors say are not much better than the old drugs. We don't even spend the money on new antiobiotics because they are not as profitable as junk drugs. You hear on the news that a snake venom is a better cure than drugs developed by our vast pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry has a lot to learn about biology, yet they don't even bother to learn it much. And don't even get me started on our primitive energy technology. We are still using fossil fuels, a depletable energy resource humans did not create. What a joke. Can we say we know everything so we can call ourselves God. Not even close. Alteast not hear on Earth. Maybe some other planet is better technologically than Earth. This is why we need space travel. Make those warp engines. Bring us to 3000ad. Let us make trade relationships with other planets, build alliances and expand our fleet.
  24. I'm a Falcon 4.0 player but came to also like the Battlecruiser series. I'm a missile person and am one of the few in Hyperlobby that like to dogfight with missiles rather than guns. I think I also have a good shot with guns, but the fighters in Battlecruiser are even harder to hit with guns than in Falcon 4.0. The pilot AI is amazing and they jump all over the place, move in a circle around the screen when you get close, everything you can think of to make a gunshot next to impossible. Also fighters in space always turn at the max turnrate because they don't have to be at corner velocity speed to turn fast. Manuevering thrusters turn them instead of lift from wind. Atleast the turnrate is reasonable in the Battlecruiser series at one rotation every 12 seconds rather than one rotation every six seconds in arcade space combat sims like Freespace 2. Also unlike the arcade like space sims, the enemy AI fighters keep their distance. The AI manuever so wildly that the Target Lead Indicator doesn't change from a square to a dotted square until I'm closer than 1 kilometer, which indicates the TLD will score a hit if I can get my nose on it. That's a big if. I use autopilot to try to keep me on the enemy but it always backs off the distance to 3 kilometers. Can't the autopilot give me a little assistance, just a little? I wonder if I can get the target on my lift line whether the autopilot can pull just the right amount of G's to put me on the TLD and also keep me within 1 kilometer so the computed TLD will hit the target. I can get close to a hit but not quite exact enough. I wonder if there is an auto pilot option that just tries to get to the TLD quickly. The AI pilots are so good and tricky, I really need it.
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