Submitted by taoyue on Thu, 06/15/2006 - 16:00
[...]
Microsoft Flight Simulator virtually buckles you in the pilot seat
without having to shell out $100 an hour to rent a Cessna. Orbiter has
taken the trail blazed by the long-since discontinued Microsoft Space
Simulator (1994), and paved it into a multi-lane expressway. With
Orbiter and its add-ons, you can (virtually) strap yourself into the
astronaut's couch for $20 million less than it costs to fly along on a
Soyuz mission to the International Space Station. In some ways, it's
better. You can get a flying license and actually control a plane, but
even the billionaire space tourists are mostly just sightseeing. This is
truly a geeky thrill that will not be available for decades to come.
[...]
Such is the power of Moore's Law. In Apollo 13, Tom Hanks
proudly describes a computer that fits in a single room and has a
megabyte of memory. Film critic Roger Ebert remarked that he was typing
his review on a more powerful computer than the one that guided a
spacecraft to the moon. Well, now, we have so much computer power that
we can calculate trajectories, render realistic 1280x1024 images of the
spacecraft at over 25 fps, and emulate every hardware function
of the Apollo Guidance Computer, fast enough for the original software to
run in real time. That's progress.
[...]
