Astrophysics people have definitions of different black hole classes, judged by their mass. There is a range of masses that have no superlative attached, micro black holes (which I think are only theoretical at this point), massive and super massive. I'm not sure what the ranges of each class are (wikipedia will help you there, no doubt), and there may be more classed than the four I've just listed, but to someone who knows a little more astrophysics than I the word "massive" tells them that this object is bigger than a certain mass but not massive enough to be in the "super massive" class. IIRC the massive and super massive types are usually found in the centre of galaxies.
It is rare these classes start from the point of having no CPU and RAM modules or anything, which is where this project started.
For instance in my first year of CS out electronics module involved putting together an 8-bit machine, but we were given RAM and EEPROM chips plus a CPU (something Z80 based). The bit that wasn't just putting the data bus together was the actual programming of the CPU (that was done from scratch in assembler, and the result dumped onto the EEPROM) and the I/O sub-system (we created a vector based display using an oscilloscope, and used a simple keypad for user input). The most impressive demo at the end of term was one fella had a Cobra Mk III on screen rotating and moving in 3D, other demos included simple pong implementations. The extension project next term was to create a simple positioning system, which picked up signals output from a beacon in the room calculated their absolute position within the building.
My point is that this lad has done all that (he has a raster based graphics output, but I assume the challenge was similar to our vector based one) *and* put together his own CPU and RAM rather than using pre-made TTL chips (though he used gate chips rather than making his own individual gates, that is quite different from using a pre-made RAM module and a world apart from the pre-made CPU we used). The whole machine, from scratch. And to top it off he is a little younger than a first year undergrad. So I think you are definitely underestimating his level of personal achievement here, and that he deserves that feeling of achievement. I just hope he has a couple of good friends to have a pizza and/or a beer or few with to celebrate his current 15 minutes of techie fame!
FYI when I picked my Uni (some years ago now) I deliberately went for one whose CS course included a bit of this as well as the abstract math, programming and such. I'm of the opinion that a little dicking around with TTL chips is a useful part of a well rounded understanding of the industry.
So they flood the market with apps in an attempt to be the one that gets bought. When there's 20 choices and you published 19 of them, it sounds like a good bet. (In reality, I avoided it because it looked scammy.)
Definitely avoid them, and not just because you might be giving money to a copier rather than the content/app creator (as you are more likely to be doing by buying the original). There are many apps out there laden with malware, and your scummy app copying personage may well have put something like that in there while they were making their name change. Or on a less serious level: they could have just taken a completely free (and Free) open source app and added there own adverts to it. Either way, you get something you didn't want that may net them a couple of $s.
That is something on my list of things to investigate, once I've kicked git around a little more and feel confident I'm understanding the semantics of all its basics.
SVN is still widely considered one of the best at what it does, so if it works for your current requirements there is probably no need to switch. A lot of companies using it will remain there because they have no particular reason to move (i.e. the shortcomings that can be resolved with something else like git don't affect them in a way they are aware of) and it is integrated into their key processes like build and test.
Companies moving from something else (something proprietary and/or order than subversion) or starting from scratch are more likely to go for git though, which I think is where most of its current momentum comes from.
The interface(s) to git are a major factor that will keep some companies away for some time. While we experienced unix-a-like people are perfectly fine with it and other with a decent brain between there ears will pick it up quick enough too, there are a lot of people out there who won't cope with it as-is so many companies will keep back until there is a nice well-rounded stable official GUI (preferably that integrates well with VS in the Windows world). And it isn't just junior/bad developers to worry about - in a small company the PHB will expect to be able to look at what you are working on so will want access (in a larger company there are several levels of shielding between the PHBs and the source repositories, but not in smaller ones) and I don't know about you but I don't fancy being the one who has to try explain git to my line-manager's boss...
FYI: I'm starting to use git for my own stuff, but I'll not be recommending it for here just yet.
and Oracle is just making an obvious business decision
But (assuming HP are correct about the contract terms) that decision is in breach of what they have originally agreed.
If HP aren't blowing hot air, then it will cost Oracle. Though they may have planned for this eventuality and calculated that "sum(max(amount_could_sue-for+legal_expenses)) from clients where contract_says_architecture_will_be_supported_longer=1 and likely_to_sue=1" is smaller than the cost of continue support.
I don't tend to object to extra cat calls. Some people get quite passionate about "demogification" so I might be asking to be modded to oblivion here, but I often find an extra cat improves the flow of a command when read. "cat something | someprogram --option=value" makes more natural sense to someone who natively reads left-to-right than "someprogram --option=value someprogram" or "someprogram --option=value
Some of my scripts may need to be read by others, now or in the future, with less command line experience and less ability to think so this could make a beneficial difference. The issue of instantiating an extra process is usually not a big deal (it is hardly an expensive operation on Linux/BSD/similar), nor is that extra process reading and writing the content with no other action (disk/network IO being the main bottleneck usually). Also when at the command-line directly you can replace cat with pv (or similar) without rearranging anything else and get a useful progress bar if the operation is going to take a long time to complete, though that wouldn't work in this example.
Also, useful variable names are your friend.
Now there I am definitely with you. I remember the joy of up-to-40-character variable names in BBC BASIC when just about every other 8-bit would only look at the first two. Limited RAM meant you often had to reduce the names later if a project grew large enough, had tight loops to worry about (but if you had loops so speed critical that the speed of the interpreter was an issue, you probably needed to switch to assembler anyway), or you were competing for some "one liner" challenge, but I always went for meaningful first and search+replace to shorten as needed later (which it usually wasn't).
Really is it that hard to build some basic security into one's site? I mean like storing the passwords as hash, instead of plaintext?
No, but while it isn't hard it is still easier not to bother in many cases. And unless you are sufficiently cynical you'll be surprised how many people out there are running a site, or programming for one, without the faintest idea about potential security issues and how to address them.
What is the purpose of the threat to tell peoples families about the porn they look at?
The intention may be to embarrass people into taking proper security precautions like keeping different passwords for different accounts (I even keep different usernames for some things, using a catchall sub-domain for sites that insist my email address should be my username (also useful for screening spam, when a site is hacked or sells on their address list)). Or to embarras the sites into operating in a secure manner (not saving passwords unhashed/unsalted and so forth).
In either case I doubt it will work. Users affected will just complain about the hackers or stay silent and hope nobody they know notices that their name is on the list, and sites affected will make some token effort to clear up this one hole but leave many more in place (and probably not stop storing passwords plain).
Of course, as the group name suggests, they may have just done it (and suggested others do more) because they can rather than because they want to encourage better security awareness in sites and their users, or because of any other lofty ideals.
This is looking like a blackmail mechanism.
Though they themselves are not blackmailing the users in that way (but legally they could be help a party to any such action someone else takes as they have publicly encouraged it), so extorting anything other than awareness from people can't be their aim. Unless they are using the usernames+passwords themselves and using the public announcement to encourage others to arrange an amount of cover fire to disguise their action amongst the resulting smoke, of course...
Much as I like the idea of a Faraday cage around cinemas and other such establishments, there is an important problem with it in that it would affect the emergency services should they ever be called in.
The proxy for calls to emergency services and comms between people providing those services would not hold water as it becomes a new point of failure - if a fire takes out the power, the proxy no longer works and the fire service can no longer communicate with any of their team they put inside the building.
Go to a screening where the rules are off. My local cinema holds at least a couple of these per week, mainly to allow parents with kids and no reliable babysitter to catch a film in the theatre but I believe the "no phones" rule is relaxed as well.
Sorry to be a prick (actually, I take that back, I'm not sorry at all), but your job is not anyone else's problem. I'm sure you are paid well enough for the inconvenience of being on call 24/7, and if you aren't then you are being seriously diddled by your employer and you need to be talking to them instead of moaning to slashdot.
If she has texted in every other theatre in the area (though I call bull on that too) then this just means the other theatres don't enforce their own policies. I don't know of any theatre that doesn't simply state quite clearly in signage with simple language (and pictograms for those who haven't mastered reading in the local language) "don't use your phone" and/or "turn your phone OFF" (not "to silent mode", "OFF").
If I were a local competing theatre I might be tempted to put out a statement that "err, no she hasn't or she'd have been turfed out of here too" (though that might be considered drawing attention to a competitor's campaign so none may do that even if they felt like doing so at first thought).
and there is NO way this woman could have been ignorant of the policy.
I think you misunderstand the level of ignorance found in the general population...
Particularly the level of intentional ignorance for people who seem to think they or their circumstance is special enough that the rules don't apply to them on this occasion (the circumstance usually boiling down to nothing more than "the rule is inconvenient to me on this occasion").
What is it with this modern fad of having to join some exclusive, pay-for, preorder list for something that you have NO idea what it will play like, before you get to see (for example) a bloody demo!
This, and the comments from people who have played the demo thus far, makes my decision final. Rather than saving 20% by pre-ordering via Steam's offer, I'm going to wait it out and see what happens when the real reviews come in. Then, only if it doesn't turn out to be awful, I'll wait six months and buy it for 50% or less of the release day price. Heck, HMV had DeadSapce 2 for PC at a little less than half price no more than three months after release.
Also regarding pre-order offers (and DLC, another often irritating facet of modern games), this is relevant: the sad state of modern gaming.
I certainly wouldn't hold Sony to a promise that was extorted from them.
Personally I can't say I'd have any expectation of them keeping promises that they make without extortion or other threats. But I'm a cynic like that (about most commercial entities but some, including Sony, in particular).
I'll take that without a large pinch of salt when other manufacturers chime in with similar stats on returns that they think are due to this issue.
Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power.
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola. I might have to check what my phone is doing, I'm in a part of the world where cellular data access is neither free nor unlimited (unless you are on an expensive contract, which I am not).
It would actually be interesting to see this information myself. I've just had a mooch around my phone and the "portal" available when connected to a PC and can't see any interface to show such data.
I wonder how much CPU time and battery power the included apps that I can't seem to uninstall and which keep restarting themselves after a while when I kill them with a task manager. I can tell you that the battery life on this Motorola phone has been laughable (quite frankly I consider the battery life specs on the sales information for this phone to be simply fraudulent) since I got it, before any extra apps were added by myself, and adding apps doesn't seem to have made it significantly worse (aside from the wireless tethering tool, but as that keeps the wifi and 3G radios at full tilt when in use I expect that to drain battery power far quicker than normal).
It may be worth you trying Opera if you haven't already. I've not used it for a while myself so things may have changed, but it certainly used to be the nippiest browsing experience by a significant margin on older CPUs and limited RAM.
Chrome would be faster than Firefox generally, though I'll not go as far as recommending you try (though it'd not do any harm to install and remove if it runs like a three legged asthmatic & arthritic dog) it as I'm not sure how well it will cope with limited memory and a CPU from quite that far back.
Nothing specifically. I think they are going for "the current stable release" and "the previous major stable release", and are considering 3.6 to be a major release. Presumably they are doing the same with the other browsers (it seems to be the case with IE for instance).
This could cause a problem in corporate environments where it takes an age to move from one browser to another (hence so many sites still running IE6 and some (like our banking clients) only just moving from that to IE8), so hopefully for their sake (and Google's) Google are using a more refined metric than just "two major versions and nothing else" - perhaps they'll take the %age of people accessing their apps with each browser into account.
It makes sense to limit what you support from a testing PoV. Testing in FF3.0 and 3.5 (and any point releases likely to have issues different from the latest point release for each version) would obviously increase the testing resource required, and that extra resource might not be worth spending if it only helps a few hundred users. This metric would mean IE8 support will likely last longer than after the release of IE10, due to the number of corporate environments actively using IE8.
Even counting "full HD" resolution (~8Mbyte per 32bit frame-buffer), the background actually being a couple of times larger than a full screen, and multiple levels of buffering for the active display, the game itself isn't going to need a lot of RAM by modern standards, though you are right in that most of that minimum spec RAM-wise is Windows' footprint.
The cartoony images should compress well though, especially at larger sizes, so they shouldn't take a massive amount of disk space each. And the audio was CD quality in the original not for the sake of the quality but to save CPU resources and install space. Compression techniques as good as MP3 and the like were not around, and even if they were the original game ran nicely on (for instance) my old 386SX where the extra effort of decoding decent quality audio could have made a difference. Full CD quality sound was actually much easier (just play it direct off the CD to the sound card and the CPU need not be bothered by the process at all) and saved install adding even the compressed audio to the install-set. A modern game will have the audio in MP3 format or similar so unless there is a god few hours of it the total won't come to the amount of data in the uncompressed audio tracks on the original Worms CD.
Maybe I'm just being old and moaning about lazy youngsters for the sake of it. In my day we had to rearrange large chunks of code to save a few bytes here or there, or we'd run out of the 20K of heap available after the screen memory and everything else had taken their cut...
I was thinking more along the lines of using her biological make-up as a reference to help extract the Doctor's influence on the Flesh from the remnants left behind by the humans. Of course if they (whoever "they" are) know of her and have her alive, she would make a more logical vessel than Amy if the baby is in fact entirely or part gallifreyan.
Slashdot Mirror
Astrophysics people have definitions of different black hole classes, judged by their mass. There is a range of masses that have no superlative attached, micro black holes (which I think are only theoretical at this point), massive and super massive. I'm not sure what the ranges of each class are (wikipedia will help you there, no doubt), and there may be more classed than the four I've just listed, but to someone who knows a little more astrophysics than I the word "massive" tells them that this object is bigger than a certain mass but not massive enough to be in the "super massive" class. IIRC the massive and super massive types are usually found in the centre of galaxies.
It is rare these classes start from the point of having no CPU and RAM modules or anything, which is where this project started.
For instance in my first year of CS out electronics module involved putting together an 8-bit machine, but we were given RAM and EEPROM chips plus a CPU (something Z80 based). The bit that wasn't just putting the data bus together was the actual programming of the CPU (that was done from scratch in assembler, and the result dumped onto the EEPROM) and the I/O sub-system (we created a vector based display using an oscilloscope, and used a simple keypad for user input). The most impressive demo at the end of term was one fella had a Cobra Mk III on screen rotating and moving in 3D, other demos included simple pong implementations. The extension project next term was to create a simple positioning system, which picked up signals output from a beacon in the room calculated their absolute position within the building.
My point is that this lad has done all that (he has a raster based graphics output, but I assume the challenge was similar to our vector based one) *and* put together his own CPU and RAM rather than using pre-made TTL chips (though he used gate chips rather than making his own individual gates, that is quite different from using a pre-made RAM module and a world apart from the pre-made CPU we used). The whole machine, from scratch. And to top it off he is a little younger than a first year undergrad. So I think you are definitely underestimating his level of personal achievement here, and that he deserves that feeling of achievement. I just hope he has a couple of good friends to have a pizza and/or a beer or few with to celebrate his current 15 minutes of techie fame!
FYI when I picked my Uni (some years ago now) I deliberately went for one whose CS course included a bit of this as well as the abstract math, programming and such. I'm of the opinion that a little dicking around with TTL chips is a useful part of a well rounded understanding of the industry.
So they flood the market with apps in an attempt to be the one that gets bought. When there's 20 choices and you published 19 of them, it sounds like a good bet. (In reality, I avoided it because it looked scammy.)
Definitely avoid them, and not just because you might be giving money to a copier rather than the content/app creator (as you are more likely to be doing by buying the original). There are many apps out there laden with malware, and your scummy app copying personage may well have put something like that in there while they were making their name change. Or on a less serious level: they could have just taken a completely free (and Free) open source app and added there own adverts to it. Either way, you get something you didn't want that may net them a couple of $s.
That is something on my list of things to investigate, once I've kicked git around a little more and feel confident I'm understanding the semantics of all its basics.
SVN is still widely considered one of the best at what it does, so if it works for your current requirements there is probably no need to switch. A lot of companies using it will remain there because they have no particular reason to move (i.e. the shortcomings that can be resolved with something else like git don't affect them in a way they are aware of) and it is integrated into their key processes like build and test.
Companies moving from something else (something proprietary and/or order than subversion) or starting from scratch are more likely to go for git though, which I think is where most of its current momentum comes from.
The interface(s) to git are a major factor that will keep some companies away for some time. While we experienced unix-a-like people are perfectly fine with it and other with a decent brain between there ears will pick it up quick enough too, there are a lot of people out there who won't cope with it as-is so many companies will keep back until there is a nice well-rounded stable official GUI (preferably that integrates well with VS in the Windows world). And it isn't just junior/bad developers to worry about - in a small company the PHB will expect to be able to look at what you are working on so will want access (in a larger company there are several levels of shielding between the PHBs and the source repositories, but not in smaller ones) and I don't know about you but I don't fancy being the one who has to try explain git to my line-manager's boss...
FYI: I'm starting to use git for my own stuff, but I'll not be recommending it for here just yet.
and Oracle is just making an obvious business decision
But (assuming HP are correct about the contract terms) that decision is in breach of what they have originally agreed.
If HP aren't blowing hot air, then it will cost Oracle. Though they may have planned for this eventuality and calculated that "sum(max(amount_could_sue-for+legal_expenses)) from clients where contract_says_architecture_will_be_supported_longer=1 and likely_to_sue=1" is smaller than the cost of continue support.
I think remember there being 3rd party add-ons for it at least as far back as the mid 90s. I'm not sure about further back than that.
Gratuitous use of `cat'
I don't tend to object to extra cat calls. Some people get quite passionate about "demogification" so I might be asking to be modded to oblivion here, but I often find an extra cat improves the flow of a command when read. "cat something | someprogram --option=value" makes more natural sense to someone who natively reads left-to-right than "someprogram --option=value someprogram" or "someprogram --option=value
Some of my scripts may need to be read by others, now or in the future, with less command line experience and less ability to think so this could make a beneficial difference. The issue of instantiating an extra process is usually not a big deal (it is hardly an expensive operation on Linux/BSD/similar), nor is that extra process reading and writing the content with no other action (disk/network IO being the main bottleneck usually). Also when at the command-line directly you can replace cat with pv (or similar) without rearranging anything else and get a useful progress bar if the operation is going to take a long time to complete, though that wouldn't work in this example.
Also, useful variable names are your friend.
Now there I am definitely with you. I remember the joy of up-to-40-character variable names in BBC BASIC when just about every other 8-bit would only look at the first two. Limited RAM meant you often had to reduce the names later if a project grew large enough, had tight loops to worry about (but if you had loops so speed critical that the speed of the interpreter was an issue, you probably needed to switch to assembler anyway), or you were competing for some "one liner" challenge, but I always went for meaningful first and search+replace to shorten as needed later (which it usually wasn't).
Really is it that hard to build some basic security into one's site? I mean like storing the passwords as hash, instead of plaintext?
No, but while it isn't hard it is still easier not to bother in many cases. And unless you are sufficiently cynical you'll be surprised how many people out there are running a site, or programming for one, without the faintest idea about potential security issues and how to address them.
How many signups were done by someone else "ordering a pizza" for a little revenge.
It that how you are explaining your address being on the list!
I jest, of course...
What is the purpose of the threat to tell peoples families about the porn they look at?
The intention may be to embarrass people into taking proper security precautions like keeping different passwords for different accounts (I even keep different usernames for some things, using a catchall sub-domain for sites that insist my email address should be my username (also useful for screening spam, when a site is hacked or sells on their address list)). Or to embarras the sites into operating in a secure manner (not saving passwords unhashed/unsalted and so forth).
In either case I doubt it will work. Users affected will just complain about the hackers or stay silent and hope nobody they know notices that their name is on the list, and sites affected will make some token effort to clear up this one hole but leave many more in place (and probably not stop storing passwords plain).
Of course, as the group name suggests, they may have just done it (and suggested others do more) because they can rather than because they want to encourage better security awareness in sites and their users, or because of any other lofty ideals.
This is looking like a blackmail mechanism.
Though they themselves are not blackmailing the users in that way (but legally they could be help a party to any such action someone else takes as they have publicly encouraged it), so extorting anything other than awareness from people can't be their aim. Unless they are using the usernames+passwords themselves and using the public announcement to encourage others to arrange an amount of cover fire to disguise their action amongst the resulting smoke, of course...
Much as I like the idea of a Faraday cage around cinemas and other such establishments, there is an important problem with it in that it would affect the emergency services should they ever be called in.
The proxy for calls to emergency services and comms between people providing those services would not hold water as it becomes a new point of failure - if a fire takes out the power, the proxy no longer works and the fire service can no longer communicate with any of their team they put inside the building.
Go to a screening where the rules are off. My local cinema holds at least a couple of these per week, mainly to allow parents with kids and no reliable babysitter to catch a film in the theatre but I believe the "no phones" rule is relaxed as well.
Sorry to be a prick (actually, I take that back, I'm not sorry at all), but your job is not anyone else's problem. I'm sure you are paid well enough for the inconvenience of being on call 24/7, and if you aren't then you are being seriously diddled by your employer and you need to be talking to them instead of moaning to slashdot.
If she has texted in every other theatre in the area (though I call bull on that too) then this just means the other theatres don't enforce their own policies. I don't know of any theatre that doesn't simply state quite clearly in signage with simple language (and pictograms for those who haven't mastered reading in the local language) "don't use your phone" and/or "turn your phone OFF" (not "to silent mode", "OFF").
If I were a local competing theatre I might be tempted to put out a statement that "err, no she hasn't or she'd have been turfed out of here too" (though that might be considered drawing attention to a competitor's campaign so none may do that even if they felt like doing so at first thought).
and there is NO way this woman could have been ignorant of the policy.
I think you misunderstand the level of ignorance found in the general population...
Particularly the level of intentional ignorance for people who seem to think they or their circumstance is special enough that the rules don't apply to them on this occasion (the circumstance usually boiling down to nothing more than "the rule is inconvenient to me on this occasion").
What is it with this modern fad of having to join some exclusive, pay-for, preorder list for something that you have NO idea what it will play like, before you get to see (for example) a bloody demo!
This, and the comments from people who have played the demo thus far, makes my decision final. Rather than saving 20% by pre-ordering via Steam's offer, I'm going to wait it out and see what happens when the real reviews come in. Then, only if it doesn't turn out to be awful, I'll wait six months and buy it for 50% or less of the release day price. Heck, HMV had DeadSapce 2 for PC at a little less than half price no more than three months after release.
Also regarding pre-order offers (and DLC, another often irritating facet of modern games), this is relevant: the sad state of modern gaming.
I certainly wouldn't hold Sony to a promise that was extorted from them.
Personally I can't say I'd have any expectation of them keeping promises that they make without extortion or other threats. But I'm a cynic like that (about most commercial entities but some, including Sony, in particular).
Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power.
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola. I might have to check what my phone is doing, I'm in a part of the world where cellular data access is neither free nor unlimited (unless you are on an expensive contract, which I am not).
It would actually be interesting to see this information myself. I've just had a mooch around my phone and the "portal" available when connected to a PC and can't see any interface to show such data.
I wonder how much CPU time and battery power the included apps that I can't seem to uninstall and which keep restarting themselves after a while when I kill them with a task manager. I can tell you that the battery life on this Motorola phone has been laughable (quite frankly I consider the battery life specs on the sales information for this phone to be simply fraudulent) since I got it, before any extra apps were added by myself, and adding apps doesn't seem to have made it significantly worse (aside from the wireless tethering tool, but as that keeps the wifi and 3G radios at full tilt when in use I expect that to drain battery power far quicker than normal).
Technology saves the day again!
Though really people, if you know you are going to hate something how about just not watching it and finding something else to do with the time?
It may be worth you trying Opera if you haven't already. I've not used it for a while myself so things may have changed, but it certainly used to be the nippiest browsing experience by a significant margin on older CPUs and limited RAM.
Chrome would be faster than Firefox generally, though I'll not go as far as recommending you try (though it'd not do any harm to install and remove if it runs like a three legged asthmatic & arthritic dog) it as I'm not sure how well it will cope with limited memory and a CPU from quite that far back.
What's wrong with firefox 3.5?
Nothing specifically. I think they are going for "the current stable release" and "the previous major stable release", and are considering 3.6 to be a major release. Presumably they are doing the same with the other browsers (it seems to be the case with IE for instance).
This could cause a problem in corporate environments where it takes an age to move from one browser to another (hence so many sites still running IE6 and some (like our banking clients) only just moving from that to IE8), so hopefully for their sake (and Google's) Google are using a more refined metric than just "two major versions and nothing else" - perhaps they'll take the %age of people accessing their apps with each browser into account.
It makes sense to limit what you support from a testing PoV. Testing in FF3.0 and 3.5 (and any point releases likely to have issues different from the latest point release for each version) would obviously increase the testing resource required, and that extra resource might not be worth spending if it only helps a few hundred users. This metric would mean IE8 support will likely last longer than after the release of IE10, due to the number of corporate environments actively using IE8.
That is exactly what I mean.
I'd somehow managed to be blind to its existence. Not ready for production use yet it would seem, but something I'll certainly be keeping my eye on.
Again?!
Even counting "full HD" resolution (~8Mbyte per 32bit frame-buffer), the background actually being a couple of times larger than a full screen, and multiple levels of buffering for the active display, the game itself isn't going to need a lot of RAM by modern standards, though you are right in that most of that minimum spec RAM-wise is Windows' footprint.
The cartoony images should compress well though, especially at larger sizes, so they shouldn't take a massive amount of disk space each. And the audio was CD quality in the original not for the sake of the quality but to save CPU resources and install space. Compression techniques as good as MP3 and the like were not around, and even if they were the original game ran nicely on (for instance) my old 386SX where the extra effort of decoding decent quality audio could have made a difference. Full CD quality sound was actually much easier (just play it direct off the CD to the sound card and the CPU need not be bothered by the process at all) and saved install adding even the compressed audio to the install-set. A modern game will have the audio in MP3 format or similar so unless there is a god few hours of it the total won't come to the amount of data in the uncompressed audio tracks on the original Worms CD.
Maybe I'm just being old and moaning about lazy youngsters for the sake of it. In my day we had to rearrange large chunks of code to save a few bytes here or there, or we'd run out of the 20K of heap available after the screen memory and everything else had taken their cut...
I was thinking more along the lines of using her biological make-up as a reference to help extract the Doctor's influence on the Flesh from the remnants left behind by the humans. Of course if they (whoever "they" are) know of her and have her alive, she would make a more logical vessel than Amy if the baby is in fact entirely or part gallifreyan.