Strange cloud formation over Moscow
Have a look at this. This phenomena happened Wednesday October 7th over Moscow.
I don’t know what it is, but it sure looks very strange. Not that much info out on it yet. However the scientists are blaming cold and warm fronts meeting, and the sun shining from a certain direction. It doesn’t seem that likely to me but then again I’m no meterologist.
It’s an interesting phenomena whatever caused it. The odds of nature forming something that precise in such a chaotic system as cloud formation seems a bit far fetched to me.
What do you guys think?
It does seem a lot like it has something to do with cloud seeding or a similar activity or effect, see more here
Also have a look at the fallstreak hole cloud
And why not the scientific possibilities of cloaking devices while you’re at it 
Need for Speed Shift ATI performance issues explained – sort of
I looked forward to playing the new installment of the Need For Speed series – The new game Shift looked like a fun cross-breed between sim and arcade.
However, Shift is performing very poorly on most ATI cards, while it is flying fine on nVidia boards.
After looking into the issue, I found the following statement from ATI, regarding Shift, in a hardcop review of a new 5000-series ATI card:
“In another TWIMTBP* title, we submitted a list of issues that we discovered during the games’ development. These issues include inefficiencies in how the game engine worked with our hardware in addition to real bugs, etc.. We have sent this list to the developer for review.
Unfortunately you will be unable to get a fair assessment of our hardware’s performance on this software until the developer releases a patch to address and fix our reported issues.”
So, apparently it’s a problem with the game engine, and the developers need to address this, no driver updates from ATI can really help the situation.
We’ll just have to wait I guess… And play GRID instead, at least Codemasters seem to know what they are doing. Sloppy work from Slightly Mad Studios to release the game with this issue, I mean they must have tested the game on ATI cards during the development process…
*
“The Way It’s Meant To Be Played (TWIMTBP) is a program that helps game developers to optimize and incorporate exclusive features in their games and applications exclusively for NVIDIA’s video cards. The deal also adds a splash screen to “the way it’s meant to be played” games as well as branding within the game; this is widely considered as a promotion campaign for NVIDIA. This program was launched 2003 by NVIDIA, a video card producer. The program aims at providing the best experience possible for users of NVIDIA GeForce video cards, and more particularly provides extensive guidelines on game performance optimizations for the GeForce video cards.” Wiki quote’
However, this whole thing is just rediculous, as a prefessional game-house like EA you cannot release beta software that hasn’t been tested and optimized to work okay on the types of hardware you include in your requirements list. At this time the requierement should read. “BETA SOFTWARE: Nvidia graphics card needed. Not compatible with ATI-cards.”
This is just completely unacceptable behaviour towards the customer. I’ve seen alpha buids that have been more polished and optimized than this!
Now let the science commence.
I realized that my GPU usage was tied directly to my fps. And the GPU usage went down when I had other cars visible on screen. Why?
The CPU usage stayed the same regardless of this trend and it stays around 60-70%. The following graphs clearly show the link between GPU usage (TOP) and FPS (Middle):
Is this right? I mean shouldn’t the GPU constantly be working, especially with more cars on the track? Is it waiting for data from the CPU? If so why do i have a 30% Idle Process on the CPU in that case? Shouldn’t it be working it’s butt off to feed the GPU?
System: Core2 duo E2160@ stock - ATI 3 850HD 720/1000 MHz - 2Gig DDR2 – XP Professional Catalyst 9.9
Check out the ATI forums http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=118976&enterthread=y
Allegedly we have a commment from Ian Bell, Game deveveloper of NFS:Shift
“We’ve worked hard to add additional optimisations for ATI cards with success. This will be coming in a future patch.” -I have no vaildated source for this
and here is an audio interview with Electronic Arts Europe VP Patrick Soderlund that discusses some of these issues.
Pentagon 9/11 attack flight path discrepancies
Air Powered car developed. MDI Enterprises
I hadn’t heard about this before. The project was started by mechanical engineer Guy Negre who used to be in Formula One.
The concept is a car that uses compressed air as a fuel source. This is just a heads up, and I have to read more about it, but apparently Tata the big Indian car company will be building these zero emission cars. These types of cars is intended to be driven in overpopulated and particularly polluted cities. An american model will be available in 2010 made by zeroemission cars.
It features:
- Two minutes refill
- Mono-energy compressed-air in city, dual-energy on road
- Zero Pollution with mono-energy, 30g of CO2 with dual-energy
- 900Km road range with dual-energy, 100Km with mono-energy
- Car body monoblock made in fiberglass and external chassis for safety
Apparently this has been in the making for quite some time, here are some milestones:
1996 Compressed Air engines (1st generation).
1998 First cars (Green Taxi)
1999 “MDIs Industrial concept”
2000 Move to CARROS
2001 Dual-energy technology – “stop and go” piston
2002 Presentation of the MiniCATs at the‘Mondial de l’auto’
2003 New thermodynamic cycle (active chamber)
2005 Creation of the “cold combustion” cycle.
2006 Move to the model plant in CARROS
2007 Signature of the TATA Motors agreement – Development of the OneCATS
2008 Development of the OneCATS and preparation of the Model factory
2009 Launching of the OneCAT
It’s cool, I want one!
Read more here http://www.mdi.lu/english/
T-shirt design, Illustrator and Cafepress Spreadshirt Zazzle and the likes
I always liked designing things, and i need to get better at Illustrator. A great practice for me is to design stuff and put on t-shirts. I just wanted to tell my readers about this and let them know. Since designing a T-shirt is a process, I decided to blog about some of my designs. I think it makes them more valuable for the wearer. To know what I was thinking and a bit how i did the design. You can check out my designs in my t-shirt design blog spreadmaster.wordpress.com, or you can go directly to www.zazzle.com/spreadmaster and visit my shop. I decided to use Zazzle because, well, there is not really any reasons that’s just how it turned out.
I hope you like my designs, and I’d really appreciate if you took the time to rate some of them! (And who knows maybe even buy one and make me money for a coffee 
Here are a couple of my designs:
If you like these you might like the rest of my designs too. If you need logos or other designed elements for t-shirts, business, the web or anything else, feel free to contact my graphics repartment (that means me) at: info(AT)spreadmaster.tk.
Carry on!
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