Cpt. Obvious

This! I approve of this!

And yet he regularly manages to outmaneuver the Blackadder's most cunning plans, which is impressive as he's supposed to be on the same side... I blame the turnips.

Am I the only one that's looked at all these comments and still can't see what would be so bad about Cat Girl-ageddon? Let me rephrase that... I still can't see what might be wrong with an awesome Cat Girl-ageddon! Cat Girl-ageddon would be so awesome it negates any negative feelings. Awesome Cat Girl-ageddon would be AWESOME! Cat Girl-ageddon is best -ageddon! Cat Girl-ageddon... Mmmm

Getting scratched behind the ear, under the cheek, belly rubs, sleeping thirteen hours or more a day and no one says anything about it... The list goes on... Oh, and no one "owns" a cat, they own you. Claiming anything else is delusional.

All through this discussion there's been a lot of talk about what abilities Dex gained from the mark and how he was able to summon both the fire guys and the dragon... thing... Has there been any thought given to the fire shield he had? While the fire dudes weren't really burning, and it's been said that the dragon breath might have been similar to the fire dudes and perform more like a punch than a fire ball, the shield did actually radiate enough heat that Greg wasn't able to touch him. So if Dex mark was strictly a "Summon Fairy" or even a "Summon Whatever" spell then where did that shield come from? And I just thought of something that might disprove the dragon breath not burning theory. At the end the dragon was recalled to the dojo and sent it's breath in through the hole in the ceiling. According to what we heard Dex talking about how that would kill everyone inside, including him. Doesn't sound like a simple punch. It's still very possible that this was another lie told by the lying lier that lies...

But a train doesn't have to have to run on rails... Some of them doesn't even need roads. Though the really large ones does...

Yes, current generations there are quite big differences between the gaming cards, workstations cards, and computation cards. But a few years back that wasn't always the case. In fact there were some generations where the gaming and workstation cards were more or less identical, and by changing a single resistor you could promote the gaming card to accept both bios and drivers used for the workstation model. Oh and then there were the price premium of two to four times the price for the workstation card... AMD (ATI) and Nvidia also differ a bit in just what they add to the workstation series, but I'm not up to date on the details for current generations. Differences between workstation cards and computation cards are mainly that the later has no, or extremely gimped support for a monitor, the amount of memory and ECC support for the computation card, and as you wrote the number of GPU's on board. There is also quite strict guide lines for the cooling of these, and the one thing not found in these is a upper limit for sound... Pushing that much air though a chassis isn't something I think can be done quietly. I remember one computer manufacturer who marketed a quiet workstation with incredible specifications. I got hold of one of those and loaded it up with my usual stress test cocktail and stood back as the machine apparently was revving up for takeoff. At full tilt it could compete with some of the nosiest 19" rack servers I've built. Turns out there's not an easy way to quietly cool a computer that pulls more than a KW at the wall, but I pity the users who bought into the "Quiet" hype. Yes it was quiet, if you didn't push it. Load it down with some well optimized software that can max out the CPU's and GPU's concurrently and you will want to invest in earplugs.

Ahh... The NexGen 586! That was one oddball CPU, they tried a very unique design that initially didn't work out as well as they hoped for. Basically the CPU core had more in common with RISC designs rather than the CISC design of every other x86 compatible processor. It couldn't even run x86 code natively, but had a chunk of chisel dedicated to translating it to something the core could digest. Add that this was, if not the first then at least one of the first x86 compatibles that wasn't a drop in replacement for an existing intel processor. and the choice of motherboard became severely limited. But though initial performance hadn't been what man had hoped for they were onto something. Eventually AMD bought them and used some of the IP from NexGen when designing the K6 which was a very successful product.

Sounds like he could be a distant ancestor of Kornada...

Ohh... Graph in the Box, Magic Edition... (Original article)

Nope, I monitored their performance logs and those cards were actually doing a lot of the work. I've been trying to think of things that might explain the excessive demands. Things I can think of is that they were probably applying effects to simulate how the printing of the graphics on the material affected colors, and how the surface texture scattered the light and other such things. But still the combined CPU and GPU loads seems excessive for such a simple task. Those Tesla cards were quite expensive, and yet, it's my experience, they were way more prone to die on you than the high end gaming cards that used the same GPU core generation. And the price difference was drastic. A high end gaming card would cost about $700 to $800, a high end workstation card about $4000 to $5000, and a high end GPU processing card in the range of $5000 to $7000. I just had a look at the latest and greatest, and the current top of the line appears to be the Tesla P100, and the price for them ranges from $5900 for the 12GB version to $9400 for the 16GB SXM2 version. At those prices I sure hope those are reliable...

Hmm... Yes, I should have caught that myself. But what we can take away from this is that a top of the line PC CPU today is way faster than a one off speed monster back in the early eighties. Sometimes I see things that makes me wonder just what people are doing wrong when they work with 3D. I built a computer for a customer a few years back. It had dual Xeon processors, the fastest available at the time, and eight (8!) Tesla cards, again the fastest available, might have been K80 or M60. This was used to provide real time rendering of 3D models for the products that they sold. Their customers would log in on a website and use a web app that allowed them to slap graphics on the products and see what they would look like, supposedly in real time. I got to see the web app working and I was not impressed by the performance, and most importantly I can't see how what they were doing could require the immense amount of computational power that they had in that machine. But they wanted eight Tessla cards so they got eight Tessla cards. At full load that machine could draw almost 3KW of power... I did some burn in at full tilt and boy was it loud and hot.

I'd like to nominate Lavender! She's close enough to Edward that having her intervene would have him take notice, and being uryuom she shouldn't see any problem with Tedd switching gender now and then. But most importantly I'd like to see her get some kind of closure, and if helping to solve the issues that prevent Edward and Tedd from understanding each other is a part of the path to that then so much the better. She's been left hanging for too long by now. This got me wondering, as the uryuom isn't able to use human or immortal magic does that mean that Pandora has a harder time trying to predict how they are going to act? If her "powers of precognition" is at least partly dependent on magic then having a few uryuom around might make for a welcome distraction.

Things has sure changed a lot since the days of Tron. Back then the idea of real time rendering was a pipe dream. A single frame could take 20 minutes or so, and a 30 second clip would in theory take ten days to render. In practice there were few if any runs that were able to complete on time as the software tended to crash now and then... Even today most CGI scenes will not be rendered in real time, and the "rendering" referred to when talking about video editing is simply the rendering of things like special effects (scene transitions, text overlays, blur, sharpening and other things like that) and things such as color correction, frame rate conversion, resolution change and aspect ratio correction. Things like the computer generated content in Avatar is still not rendered in real time on a single machine. I guess the graphics for Tron would be possible to real time render today though, but those scenes were already dumbed down to suit the hardware available at the time. The computer used for Tron, the one and only Super Foonly F-1, had a total of 2 MB RAM and 330 MB of storage. It used a PDP-10 processor cranked to cycle at 90ns which resulted in a staggering 4.5 MIPS! Compare that to whatever device you are reading this on and you're likely to have more computational power available just to browse the web... And if you want to compare it to something a little more powerful then how about an Intel Core i7-6700 that cranks out about 270,000 MIPS. It's about 65 times as fast as the Foonly F-1, and still it doesn't have a chance to render something like the scenes in Avatar or The Hobbit in real time. But GPU rendering, some are likely to say, surely that changes things. And yes it does, but still it's not enough once you crank the resolution to something that will work in the cinema. Tron was rendered at 6000 pixels horizontally, so it used a higher resolution than most CGI used today when 4K is considered fine for the latest blockbuster movies. Yes, this is certainly one reason that most people think the on-board analogue output is good enough. And if you think it sounds good then it is good enough. The bad news is that once your expectations no longer is matched by the cheap and cheerful audio solutions you risk falling into the audiophile swamp, and then you're never to be satisfied with any audio system for long. I know that all MP3 files that use somewhat reasonable bit rates are full of artifacts, and I've had it demonstrated again and again to the degree that there is no way I can try to argue with that. And yet I have no problem listening to even quite bad MP3 encodes without breaking out in hives. The on boards audio solutions is another thing though. Even relatively expensive motherboards tend to have a problem with hiss and whistling sounds on the analogue ports. And portables are usually very bad at this. Another problem is that when using a analogue microphone with the on board sound solution every computer I've tested has had a problem with the on board audio solution picking up noise from the power plane. A high end audio card or a cheap USB audio card will usually do a much better job of filtering out that noise.

Scratch her behind the ear! What? Oh... Not attracting notice, right... Sorry but I still call for some scratching behind the ear and under her chin. A purring Catalina trumps just about everything right now...

I don't think there were many DGPS capable receivers back then that were portable. I think it was back in 98 that the US army was able to replace their old 35 pound GPS receivers with a new portable one weighing in at about 4 pounds. This was the result of a huge investment in research into developing a miniaturized receiver. And I'm pretty sure these didn't have DGPS capability, and they probably were very expensive. Having said that I can't help wondering about the history of geocaching.

The accuracy possible increases with the number of satellites used. When the GPS system was new the high accuracy was considered a problem as it could be used by a foreign military. To prevent this a pseudo random time modifier was used by the satellites. This degraded signal was believed to allow for an accuracy of about 100 yards which was thought to be good enough for civilian uses. The US military GPS receivers were able to use the same pseudo random algorithm to calculate the original time and thus were able to achieve the full accuracy that the system is capable of. While an accuracy of 100 meters might have been fine for some civilian use it wouldn't be good enough for something like a GPS navigator for a car. But through some software trickery GPS manufacturers were able to increase the accuracy to about 25 yards. This was much better but not enough for really demanding applications, and that's when someone dreamed up Differential GPS. By having a stationary GPS receiver transmit the satellite data to a computer they could calculate how large the time error was. That data was then sent as a radio signal that DGPS capable receivers would use to correct their received satellite signals. In favorable situations it was possible to get an accuracy of about 4 inches this way. Around 2000 it was determined that as DGPS had made it possible to achieve greater accuracy than what the military grade GPS receivers was capable of there was no reason to keep degrading the service for civilian use and the feature was turned off. Even so DGPS is still used for demanding applications today as it can correct some errors introduced by the atmosphere. Modern GPS receivers can track a large number of satellites simultaneously. While in theory it should be possible to triangulate your position using 3 satellites 4 is actually considered the minimum that's usable and 6 is adequate for most purposes. But modern GPS receivers can track many more than that. Tests show that there are significant improvements even going from 13 to 15 tracked satellites, it can improve the accuracy from about 2 yards to about one. Note that you may get excellent accuracy with only four satellites if the reception is good, but using more satellites improves the reliability. And why on earth did I feel compelled to write this? I really don't remember, but perhaps it was to remind people just how amazingly complex the GPS system is, and yet we take it for granted today as almost all new mobiles and pads has GPS capability.

Well we can't have that. Here you go!

Nope, they are all buckets of popcorn. I'm not about to leave any evidence...

Wow. That will require several buckets of popcorn. And here I was thinking that I could just as well crawl into bed as there was nothing interesting on TV. Thanks for saving my Friday night.

I'm wondering if not most of the rest of the country considers Moperville something of a hoax. After all most anything in the media about that town is obviously made up, and it's been that way for as long as theres been newspapers. It probably started as a joke that became perpetuated as more and more papers used stories from Moperville as light entertainment whenever they were a bit short on real news. After all most every news story about that town is about some weird giant animal, flying critters the size of a camper, burning people fighting in the streets and flying cheerleaders. There's no way that place actually exists, and if it does then they are probably playing along just for the fun and to sell Moperville Mad Monster merchandise. A bit like how you can buy Blinky merchandise in any town called Springfield...

She is also wearing a bulky sweater and her reaction in the second panel could have just made them more noticeable. If you look back a few pages, they're more noticeable in panel 1 than they are in panel 3. That actually seem like EXACTLY same difference. Ok, it's the bulky sweater ... It looks like having Rhoda cuddling up to her made Catalina straighten up. Actually it looks like most all of her went a bit stiff there in panel two. The tail kind of suggests that. That could account for the way her bust seems a bit more prominent in panel two, and that pose in panel three, with her arm up high should also help lifting her bust slightly. So bulky sweater and cute girlfriend brushing up against her is all that's needed for this illusion.

How about Math v.s Greg cosplaying as Chun-Li? I want to see Math's expression those first few seconds when his brain is trying to make sense of what he is seeing...

No, it's like "humans are great apes" Whales and dolphins are both cetacea. The smallest of them is the Maui dolphin which usually is about a meter in length and weigh about 50 kg, and the largest are the blue whales which can be almost 30 meters long and weigh nearly 200,000 kg. Wikipedia article here.

It would have made the total dragon population four and like Dan said, why on Earth would you summon four dragons when you could have five?