Not that rockets generally "go good" - but here's a great bit of Japanese news featuring a rocket launcher against bullet proof glass.
Thanks MAKE.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
When Rockets Go Bad
Shop Like It's 1999
Snopes is being geektastic this week. Here's a clip of how 1967 thought shopping in 1999 would be, and it's actually not far off:
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
The Paradroid That Never Was
One of those classics of gaming that could really be interesting to remake.
TV Watch: Heroes Season Two "Year End" Finale
In what is the industry favorite euphemism for "we wanted to cheap out on Internet royalties so our writers stopped writing and he only had half a season so the story just ends here", Heroes had the "Year End" finale last night. It's a little hard to tell with a show like Heroes just what that actually means since the plot generally goes from one cliffhanger to another anyway.
The second season of Heroes feels very much like a sequel to the first. Some of the good elements remain while several hoops are being jumped to maintain focus on characters who only peripherally really deal with the plot anymore. Nikki's entire storyline feels grafted onto the show largely as an excuse to keep her in the show and while Super Cousin might have some potential, major stumbles like the iPod Of The Future kinda makes it a groaner. The whole revelation that an injection of Claire's blood apparently makes one Wolverine also adds a slew of needless complications. Why can't anyone's powers be transferred this way? Claire has what ... mutant red and white blood cells?
At least the core story clicks pretty well. The conflict between Nate and Peter, Hiro and Adam, and ... oh, somewhere that cop guy keeps showing up too. Least he isn't moaning on about his wife. Heroes still delivers some slick looking scenes and pretty decent action numbers, not to mention being one of the better looking shows on right now. The main plot not only hangs together - but maintains a level of intrigue even if it too feels a little rehashed from last year as well (time travel to foresee a terrible event, Peter being the catalyst between good and evil, etc.)
So while we end on a high note, with the virus plot being well flushed out - now we're stuck with Sylar again. Still unclear as to why the Company left him in a shack in a Mexican outland with basically one person and an unlocked door to guard him ... Sylar is quite possibly the most lethal living being on the planet and The Company guarded him with all the care of a pet hamster. So, gee, surprise, he's back.
Which, while I'm liking the show more than I did early in the season, I'm rather dreading its return.
1956 5 MB External Hard Drive
The 350 Disk Storage Unit consisted of the magnetic disk memory unit with its access mechanism, the electronic and pneumatic controls for the access mechanism, and a small air compressor. Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep. It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters, for a capacity of 5 million characters.
Disks rotated at 1,200 rpm, tracks (20 to the inch) were recorded at up to 100 bits per inch, and typical head-to-disk spacing was 800 microinches. The execution of a "seek" instruction positioned a read-write head to the track that contained the desired sector and selected the sector for a later read or write operation. Seek time averaged about 600 milliseconds.
With storage capacities of 5 million and 10 million digits, and the capability to be installed either singly or in pairs, the 350 provided the 305 system with storage capacities of 5, 10, 15 or 20 million characters.
An IBM RAMAC 305 with a 350 disk storage unit leased for about $3,200 per month back in 1957. Over a thousand of the 305 systems (one of IBM's last vacuum tube units) were manufactured before production ended in 1961, and the 305 was withdrawn in 1969.
Weighed over a ton. Maybe I'll stop cursing at my Lenovo Thinkpad now.
(nah, I'll keep cursing at it)
Sunday, December 02, 2007
DVD Watch: Futurama: Bender's Big Score
A friend from work loaned this to us since Netflix has it on "very long wait". Honestly there's not much to say about it other than it is good - I mean really, really good. A solid treat for Futurama fans everywhere.
Brilliant Maytag Support
The Girl wants to move one of our adjustable shelves. She's already drawn some blood in the process, so I decided to read the f'n manual. Problem is, Maytag doesn't seem to think it has one.
If you go to their site to download a manual, it will ask you for your model number. There's no alternative to browse models or anything, just the number. I tried ours - no results. I tried three other models I found online with adjustable shelves .... also no results. Did someone forget to maybe actually upload the stupid manuals?
I then tried the FAQ to find that the "next" arrow for moving pages just reloads the current page. Brilliant.
Stainboy #1
Did you know there was cartoon by Tim Burton with music by Elfman? I didn't - but there it is, from Atom films.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Team Fortress Notes: Bad Strategy #232 - Look At Me At C!
If you don't play TF2, turn back now, this rant won't really make any sense.
Hey, if you're on GravelPit and you're team has NOT taken both the A and B points, you know what would be a brilliant idea? Go be a sneaky bastard and stand on C while the rest of your team fights it out.
OK, granted sometimes that actually works. But usually it is one lone spy who can just hang back and hopefully his team already has the momentum. But for the two times tonight that three people three - generally one engineer, one spy and either a soldier/demo thought that holding C while the other two-thirds of the team actually played the game for you was a good idea - go play lawn darts and leave me the hell alone. You're idiots, you're point whores and glory hounds and the reason why most pick-up online teams fail.
Violent Game Study By The Numbers
On Sense:
This is absurd:
"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one
other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger
than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking
on lung ...
Read Full Article, Violent video games worse than smoking?!?"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one
other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger
than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking
on lung ...
Long time Cathode buddy Sterno points out that comparing violent media to smoking, alcohol and other health factors doesn't make any numerical sense. It's true, the age of modern computing and hence living room game systems has, if anything, brought less violent crime - not more.
To me, this is the biggest point with the scaremongering. It's hard to believe in an epidemic that doesn't exist. If violent television made kids violent criminals, my brother and I would have been knocking over bank and jumping rivers in his Volvo shortly after Dukes of Hazzard aired. Don't get me started on The Incredible Hulk.
With all the PlayStation 2's in the world today, we'd be seeing some kind of mass apocalypse if they were causing violent crimes.
And it's what really gets me about politicians complaining about the Wii and the wiimote as being "more violent". You don't get to extend your argument without first proving your argument. You can't say the wiimote will cause even more violence when you can't prove games cause any violence to begin with.
Study links violent media to aggression and crime
On Gamespot Recent Updates [News]:
University of Michigan professor ties violent media to aggressive behavior,
says they go together like smoking and lung cancer.
Read Full Article, Study: Violent games 'public health threat'says they go together like smoking and lung cancer.
It's really the second part that is a bit unsettling, linking media to criminal actions. The reason you should put that in highlight mode is that it is the stick certain politicians like to use to make censorship a "public safety" issue and not an "ethics" issue.
The old psych major in me, though, would argue with the methodology in the second part, though. It's an interview process, not a controlled experiment. It was a fifteen year follow-up and doesn't state a) whether these kids were watching more violent media to begin with (and if so, why) and b) what other factors might lead to the criminal behavior.
The whole "kids who watch 300 or Gladiator before playing football are more aggressive" argument feels flawed to me as well. Floor hockey is an aggressive sport. Football is an aggressive sport. Getting people pumped up before an aggressive sport is probably going to lead to more aggression in the aggressive sport. Did this guy not study basic biology? It's called adrenaline and if their dads stood yelling at them before sending them into the game - I'd bet they'd be more aggressive as well.
So maybe we should just ban that, too.
Rein On the Open Modding For UT3
On Joystiq:
Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, First Person Shooters,
Online
The always talkative Epic Games VP Mark Rein is exuberant about the open
system for downloading *Unreal Tournament 3* mods for the PlayStation 3.
"It's fantastic! I ...
Saying "open modding" is generally redundant except that in this case - nobody has really tried it for consoles before. Epic taking the high road and letting users be users, letting modders be modders, is about the only way to keep "modding" in any semblence of its original form. Otherwise its just cheap outsourcing.
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