depends what else it's doing at that instant, I guess. But the idea of a hardware emulator I'm guessing here, is that it resembles a freshly powered up doing-absolutely-nothing-else-but-waiting-for-input target system as closely as technically possible - to the point where the *software* doesn't know the difference.
Canaries were there to indicate carbon monoxide and methane, not carbon dioxide. An indicator for the presence of carbon dioxide underground would be a bed of limestone submerged in sulfidic water which would also corrode flesh to the bone on contact. A potential indicator would be the presence of gypsum, which would also necessitate the use of a positive pressure airflow system throughout the mine complex - or an opencast pit. A more dramatic indicator of CO2 presence underground would be fire.
Carbon dioxide is a NORMAL COMPONENT GAS IN BLOOD. If it were so toxic it would not be present. Period. According to the HSE the lethal dosage level of CO2 is not settled science for the simple reason that it entirely depends on the concentration of CO2, the concentration relative to the concentration of oxygen and other gases, and the duration of exposure. Yes, 15% would be lethal in fairly short order if it displaced oxygen to reach those levels, if it displaced nitrogen you can go up to 50% before it becomes an immediate issue. The HSE's Toxic Load Assessment for CO2 has it that statistically you're 50% likely to die within one minute of exposure to 15% air concentration of CO2 with a proportionate oxygen displacement, as a result of a single incident of exposure. That is not due to CO2 toxicity, that's due to cerebral hypoxia coupled with general asphyxia. FYI, asphyxia is the decrease in oxyhaemoglobin due to environmental imbalance and the associated increase in carboxyhaemoglobin (which is the stable binding of haemoglobin and carbon monoxide to form an inert compound). You're not suffocating because of the CO2, you're suffocating because your blood is unable to diffuse out CO2 and replace it with O2, so instead it pops 2CO2H and ends with 2CH+O2. You get a little oxygen but that pair of haemoglobin molecules is now useless. Carbon dioxide isn't killing you, carbon monoxide and your own body is.
we had slugs the size of haddock last year, I was throwing them into the incinerator and having to stand back when they popped. Fucking things destroyed most of my garden.
they're putting cherry picked data of twelve sample points from the last thirty eight years and completely ignoring what they call "anomalies" - ie, the entire metrological record from the beginning of recorded history - into models designed to produce desired results.
Yes, we've all heard this silly and pointless argument a million times and it usually ends in the same, and rather ignorant conclusion (or should I say assumption) that just because the Xbox is PC similar, it's hardware should be relatively easy to emulate. That's a very wrong frame of mind. How hard can it be? Very. Xbox's hardware is very complex and still poorly documented to this day. This requires some explanation.
1. Is a PC easy to emulate? Well, I wouldn't say so myself. Take a look at the source code from bochs. A lot of source code/work isn't it? The 486 emulator for the Archimedes RISC architecture was a: limited in scope and b: REQUIRED an Archimedes 3000 or faster, RISC OS 3.x AND an internal hard drive.
2. Emulating an x86 CPU is a lot harder than it sounds. I don't know where this mindless assumption comes from. Yes, there's loads of documentation on how the x86 processor *works*, but that doesn't exactly make it easy. First of all, the x86 instruction set is M-A-S-S-I-V-E! There can be at least 20 different versions of one instruction (i.e. There are many different versions of the MOV instruction, as well as INC, DEC, ADD, SUB, SHR, SHL, AND, OR, XOR etc.) and it takes time to implement them all. Of course, that's not exactly difficult. The real problem is that any modern x86 processor including the entire Pentium line from III/Coppermine onward can execute multiple instructions at once. So it's not like emulating a Z80 doing one instruction at a time. The actual algorithm and how x86 does this is undocumented and still unknown. In short, the Xbox's CPU can be emulated, but not accurately and not in real time - which is the whole point of a useful emulation.
3. Emulating any hardware by NVIDIA is not a walk in the park! The Xbox's GPU, the NV2A is often assumed just a GeForce 3. It's not! It's similar but not identical. It has some GeForce 4 capabilities too, so it's more of a cross between an NV20 and NV25. This is by no means easy to emulate either. NVIDIA's GPUs have very large register sets and afaik not even half of them have been discovered, and a large portion of known registers have unknown purposes. There is little to no documentation on how NVIDIA GPUs work. The best thing to do is to look at similar GPUs such as RIVA, TNT, and older GeForce cards. Some registers are similar, but not identical. The best place to look for information is in open source drivers available on the net. Adding to the dificulty is that no one has ever discovered how pixel shaders work on NV2x cards, vertex shaders yes though. The Xbox GPU also has exclusive registers that are not found in other GeForce cards. Information on the NV2A's GPU registers were just hitting hacker boards three years ago. And yet, there's still a long way to go. The GeForce 3 series is the most mysterious of all NVIDIA GPUs (G7x and G8x aside) and the NV2A is alot worse. "But can't you just directly execute the NV2A instructions on another NVIDIA card?". No, it is impossible. Its MMIO addresses are different and the exclusive registers must be emulated. Plus, in windows, we don't have ring 0 access anyway, so you all can scratch that idea now. Then comes the NForce 2 chipset. This is where it get easier. The NVIDIA MCPX is the control centre for things such as audio, USB for input, Network adapters, PCI, AGP, etc. These things are not really that difficult to emulate IMO except for the audio.
4. The Audio system is rather complex. Xbox's audio consists of at least 4 DSPs, an audio codec (AC '97) and an NVIDIA SoundStorm APU. The DSPs shouldn't be a problem (just figuring out what they all are is) nor should the AC '97 but the NVIDIA SoundStorm APU is the really difficult part. Information is scarce to nonexistent.
5. The Xbox BIOS isn't fully understood. The basic execution process of the BIOS is understood, but details on the process are at a loss. What we do know gives us hints, but before the BIOS can be emulated, w
the software to which you refer has been modified to run on a platform that is pretty universally loathed. I have a fairly comparable collection of software that runs "native" (as in completely unmodified with the exception of later DOS titles that require access to CDROM images - platform hacking takes care of that at the host level) on a virtual machine using original Microsoft MSDOS.SYS and the other gubbins that make up MS-DOS 6.22 installed on a sandbox from original installation media (3 floppies for the win). If you want an authentic snapshot of what life was like before semi-opaque windows and banners that took up a quarter of the screen, at least do it properly.
climate change is happening, I won't dispute that, what I will dispute is the claim that human activity is to "blame". Solar and volcanic activity had more influence than we ever could short a few thousand nuclear groundbursts. Proof: the permafrost record.
Plants require carbon dioxide to grow. Humans are 18% carbon by mass. Glucose (the simplest sugar, and the basic chemical potential compound for all life on Earth) is 40% carbon by mass. Carbon dioxide is about the furthest thing from toxic it is possible to get: in fact, I've just proven that as a building block it is ESSENTIAL for the continued survival of life on this planet that this compound is allowed to persist - ideally in larger amounts. Ever wonder why nursery gardeners burn wood in sealed greenhouses? It's to increase the amount of CO2 and encourage plant growth - not to heat the place. Plants are as sensitive to temperature change as we are.
Citation: BBC naturalist and climatologist of 38 years, David Bellamy OBE.
ok... that's just insane. When did a long-established behaviour of physically plugging in a jack breaking the ground connection to a pair of internal speakers suddenly become inconvenient to the point where the switching was taken and placed in the software realm??
the official line maintains that the Salomon Brothers building fell at 4.58pm when in fact it was still standing behind a BBC reporter for an entire 23 minutes after that while she was on the air delivering a live report from the scene.
I do not believe the official reports when they blatantly lie like that. I want to see the EVIDENCE.
we have a general election coming in May. What's the betting I can get an audience in the Commons chamber before it breaks for the campaign if I write a cheque for say, seven digits as a direct contribution to a campaign fund?
As a counter-wager, what's the betting I won't get anything more than a boilerplate refusal if I simply ask my MP (Lillian Greenwood, Lab. Nottingham South) to get me that same audience out of her sense of duty to her public function?
the two bombs weren't dropped to maximise radiation effects, they were dropped for maximal burst effects (and maximum casualties) based on the drop accuracy (off by 500 feet in any direction, meaning for optimal blast effect they had to be detonated 2-3 times the height of the offset - which is the default for any nuclear weapon not built for EMP yield). Little Boy detonated at less than 500m (~1800 feet) for maximal blast radius (3 miles, everything in the Mach cloud area below zero point out to a radius of 1400 yards was incinerated in the initial blast). The same effect would have been seen on a drop over a German city which was the endgame for deployment: they would have seen a lot more Dresdens if they'd carried on. Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion. If it were, Ukraine would have been a nation of burned, blind and dying people. It simply isn't. Because the fissile material which leaked was ejected by steam pressure not a nuclear detonation. Those living within the initial contamination area were either directly exposed to the core (as workers) or were exposed to excreta from those workers (ie their families) after the fact, or caught a face full of radioactive steam. Which would kind of hurt. The resultant cloud made its way round Europe slightly raising background radiation levels for a few years, and now why don't we hear anything about Chernobyl on the news? Because the city has been sealed, the reactor bed is now in a concrete coffin and the remnants of the radiation victims are all but dead and certainly in no condition to breed. If that much radioactive material (it's a nuclear power plant with several tens of kilograms of fissile material in the reserve, not a warhead with a 10kg ball wrapped in C4) had actually detonated, Ukraine would be a deep hole and there would have been no survivors.
Citations: Hachiya & Ors.: Hiroshima, UNICEF & IAEA: Chernobyl, Manhattan Project (Oppenheimer, Tuck, Fuchs, Penney among others): Blast and other effects of nuclear weapons
LG and Samsung do it. Samsung have been caught fairly recently, who knows how long they've been doing it for, but LG did it with a sweeping change to their ToS last June. Basically it was a clickthrough agreement (illegal in the UK) that locked ALL your non-broadcast services until you agreed to it. So no iPlayer, no games, no VoD, no CatchupTV, NO TIVO!(!). The Office of Fair Trading here went ape fucking shit at LG and pretty much said to them "We're going to fine you by the DAY until you sort this shit out". They're still sweeping up the pieces...
my Netgear allows me to reserve a specific IP for a specific device by hostname and/or by MAC address.
(I did it earlier on to lock in a machine for my lad so he can run a game server).
Following that, it also allows me to control - from the router - precisely which ports the device is allowed to use, or which ones it is not allowed to use, which ports to forward...
Slashdot Mirror
most of them are probably more concerned with making it to the toilet in time to not piss themselves than scoring some trim.
my vote: hemp paper or vellum, and lampblack ink.
It worked for the Chinese.
I can see it now:
"Vangelis has dentist today. NLF."
"3 Spartans like this".
I just coffee'd my keyboard, you git!
depends what else it's doing at that instant, I guess. But the idea of a hardware emulator I'm guessing here, is that it resembles a freshly powered up doing-absolutely-nothing-else-but-waiting-for-input target system as closely as technically possible - to the point where the *software* doesn't know the difference.
Canaries were there to indicate carbon monoxide and methane, not carbon dioxide. An indicator for the presence of carbon dioxide underground would be a bed of limestone submerged in sulfidic water which would also corrode flesh to the bone on contact. A potential indicator would be the presence of gypsum, which would also necessitate the use of a positive pressure airflow system throughout the mine complex - or an opencast pit. A more dramatic indicator of CO2 presence underground would be fire.
Carbon dioxide is a NORMAL COMPONENT GAS IN BLOOD. If it were so toxic it would not be present. Period. According to the HSE the lethal dosage level of CO2 is not settled science for the simple reason that it entirely depends on the concentration of CO2, the concentration relative to the concentration of oxygen and other gases, and the duration of exposure. Yes, 15% would be lethal in fairly short order if it displaced oxygen to reach those levels, if it displaced nitrogen you can go up to 50% before it becomes an immediate issue. The HSE's Toxic Load Assessment for CO2 has it that statistically you're 50% likely to die within one minute of exposure to 15% air concentration of CO2 with a proportionate oxygen displacement, as a result of a single incident of exposure. That is not due to CO2 toxicity, that's due to cerebral hypoxia coupled with general asphyxia. FYI, asphyxia is the decrease in oxyhaemoglobin due to environmental imbalance and the associated increase in carboxyhaemoglobin (which is the stable binding of haemoglobin and carbon monoxide to form an inert compound). You're not suffocating because of the CO2, you're suffocating because your blood is unable to diffuse out CO2 and replace it with O2, so instead it pops 2CO2H and ends with 2CH+O2. You get a little oxygen but that pair of haemoglobin molecules is now useless. Carbon dioxide isn't killing you, carbon monoxide and your own body is.
we had slugs the size of haddock last year, I was throwing them into the incinerator and having to stand back when they popped. Fucking things destroyed most of my garden.
More people died of hypothermia in the UK in the last twelve months than died of heat exhaustion.
Pissed in your cornflakes, didn't it?
they're putting cherry picked data of twelve sample points from the last thirty eight years and completely ignoring what they call "anomalies" - ie, the entire metrological record from the beginning of recorded history - into models designed to produce desired results.
Nope, I don't trust the findings a bit.
XBOX Classic. ...
"Xbox is just like a PC, it's easy to emulate!"
Yes, we've all heard this silly and pointless argument a million times and it usually ends in the same, and rather ignorant conclusion (or should I say assumption) that just because the Xbox is PC similar, it's hardware should be relatively easy to emulate. That's a very wrong frame of mind. How hard can it be? Very. Xbox's hardware is very complex and still poorly documented to this day. This requires some explanation.
1. Is a PC easy to emulate? Well, I wouldn't say so myself. Take a look at the source code from bochs. A lot of source code/work isn't it? The 486 emulator for the Archimedes RISC architecture was a: limited in scope and b: REQUIRED an Archimedes 3000 or faster, RISC OS 3.x AND an internal hard drive.
2. Emulating an x86 CPU is a lot harder than it sounds. I don't know where this mindless assumption comes from. Yes, there's loads of documentation on how the x86 processor *works*, but that doesn't exactly make it easy. First of all, the x86 instruction set is M-A-S-S-I-V-E! There can be at least 20 different versions of one instruction (i.e. There are many different versions of the MOV instruction, as well as INC, DEC, ADD, SUB, SHR, SHL, AND, OR, XOR etc.) and it takes time to implement them all. Of course, that's not exactly difficult. The real problem is that any modern x86 processor including the entire Pentium line from III/Coppermine onward can execute multiple instructions at once. So it's not like emulating a Z80 doing one instruction at a time. The actual algorithm and how x86 does this is undocumented and still unknown. In short, the Xbox's CPU can be emulated, but not accurately and not in real time - which is the whole point of a useful emulation.
3. Emulating any hardware by NVIDIA is not a walk in the park! The Xbox's GPU, the NV2A is often assumed just a GeForce 3. It's not! It's similar but not identical. It has some GeForce 4 capabilities too, so it's more of a cross between an NV20 and NV25. This is by no means easy to emulate either. NVIDIA's GPUs have very large register sets and afaik not even half of them have been discovered, and a large portion of known registers have unknown purposes. There is little to no documentation on how NVIDIA GPUs work. The best thing to do is to look at similar GPUs such as RIVA, TNT, and older GeForce cards. Some registers are similar, but not identical. The best place to look for information is in open source drivers available on the net. Adding to the dificulty is that no one has ever discovered how pixel shaders work on NV2x cards, vertex shaders yes though. The Xbox GPU also has exclusive registers that are not found in other GeForce cards. Information on the NV2A's GPU registers were just hitting hacker boards three years ago. And yet, there's still a long way to go. The GeForce 3 series is the most mysterious of all NVIDIA GPUs (G7x and G8x aside) and the NV2A is alot worse. "But can't you just directly execute the NV2A instructions on another NVIDIA card?". No, it is impossible. Its MMIO addresses are different and the exclusive registers must be emulated. Plus, in windows, we don't have ring 0 access anyway, so you all can scratch that idea now. Then comes the NForce 2 chipset. This is where it get easier. The NVIDIA MCPX is the control centre for things such as audio, USB for input, Network adapters, PCI, AGP, etc. These things are not really that difficult to emulate IMO except for the audio.
4. The Audio system is rather complex. Xbox's audio consists of at least 4 DSPs, an audio codec (AC '97) and an NVIDIA SoundStorm APU. The DSPs shouldn't be a problem (just figuring out what they all are is) nor should the AC '97 but the NVIDIA SoundStorm APU is the really difficult part. Information is scarce to nonexistent.
5. The Xbox BIOS isn't fully understood. The basic execution process of the BIOS is understood, but details on the process are at a loss. What we do know gives us hints, but before the BIOS can be emulated, w
the software to which you refer has been modified to run on a platform that is pretty universally loathed. I have a fairly comparable collection of software that runs "native" (as in completely unmodified with the exception of later DOS titles that require access to CDROM images - platform hacking takes care of that at the host level) on a virtual machine using original Microsoft MSDOS.SYS and the other gubbins that make up MS-DOS 6.22 installed on a sandbox from original installation media (3 floppies for the win). If you want an authentic snapshot of what life was like before semi-opaque windows and banners that took up a quarter of the screen, at least do it properly.
climate change is happening, I won't dispute that, what I will dispute is the claim that human activity is to "blame". Solar and volcanic activity had more influence than we ever could short a few thousand nuclear groundbursts. Proof: the permafrost record.
Plants require carbon dioxide to grow.
Humans are 18% carbon by mass.
Glucose (the simplest sugar, and the basic chemical potential compound for all life on Earth) is 40% carbon by mass.
Carbon dioxide is about the furthest thing from toxic it is possible to get: in fact, I've just proven that as a building block it is ESSENTIAL for the continued survival of life on this planet that this compound is allowed to persist - ideally in larger amounts. Ever wonder why nursery gardeners burn wood in sealed greenhouses? It's to increase the amount of CO2 and encourage plant growth - not to heat the place. Plants are as sensitive to temperature change as we are.
Citation: BBC naturalist and climatologist of 38 years, David Bellamy OBE.
ok... that's just insane. When did a long-established behaviour of physically plugging in a jack breaking the ground connection to a pair of internal speakers suddenly become inconvenient to the point where the switching was taken and placed in the software realm??
Inquiring minds really, really *need* to know.
the official line maintains that the Salomon Brothers building fell at 4.58pm when in fact it was still standing behind a BBC reporter for an entire 23 minutes after that while she was on the air delivering a live report from the scene.
I do not believe the official reports when they blatantly lie like that. I want to see the EVIDENCE.
you're repeating. I'll give you three more, DIFFERENT ones:
Columbia
Cuba
Argentina.
Not enough? Here's THREE MORE:
South Korea
Vietnam
Panama.
Well, shit. This'll keep you occupied in typing out those same three former Soviet states over the weekend: Three more:
Grenada
Lebanon
Dominican Republic.
You are beginning to look fucking stupid now.
yes, and there are two million people living in the city of Hiroshima TODAY. What the fuck is your TL;DR point??
we have a general election coming in May. What's the betting I can get an audience in the Commons chamber before it breaks for the campaign if I write a cheque for say, seven digits as a direct contribution to a campaign fund?
As a counter-wager, what's the betting I won't get anything more than a boilerplate refusal if I simply ask my MP (Lillian Greenwood, Lab. Nottingham South) to get me that same audience out of her sense of duty to her public function?
the two bombs weren't dropped to maximise radiation effects, they were dropped for maximal burst effects (and maximum casualties) based on the drop accuracy (off by 500 feet in any direction, meaning for optimal blast effect they had to be detonated 2-3 times the height of the offset - which is the default for any nuclear weapon not built for EMP yield). Little Boy detonated at less than 500m (~1800 feet) for maximal blast radius (3 miles, everything in the Mach cloud area below zero point out to a radius of 1400 yards was incinerated in the initial blast). The same effect would have been seen on a drop over a German city which was the endgame for deployment: they would have seen a lot more Dresdens if they'd carried on. Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion. If it were, Ukraine would have been a nation of burned, blind and dying people. It simply isn't. Because the fissile material which leaked was ejected by steam pressure not a nuclear detonation. Those living within the initial contamination area were either directly exposed to the core (as workers) or were exposed to excreta from those workers (ie their families) after the fact, or caught a face full of radioactive steam. Which would kind of hurt. The resultant cloud made its way round Europe slightly raising background radiation levels for a few years, and now why don't we hear anything about Chernobyl on the news? Because the city has been sealed, the reactor bed is now in a concrete coffin and the remnants of the radiation victims are all but dead and certainly in no condition to breed. If that much radioactive material (it's a nuclear power plant with several tens of kilograms of fissile material in the reserve, not a warhead with a 10kg ball wrapped in C4) had actually detonated, Ukraine would be a deep hole and there would have been no survivors.
Citations: Hachiya & Ors.: Hiroshima, UNICEF & IAEA: Chernobyl, Manhattan Project (Oppenheimer, Tuck, Fuchs, Penney among others): Blast and other effects of nuclear weapons
say that when your battery dies. :)
2709 Sagan.
don't they come with headphone sockets anymore? Just plug in a dummy load and be done.
LG and Samsung do it. Samsung have been caught fairly recently, who knows how long they've been doing it for, but LG did it with a sweeping change to their ToS last June. Basically it was a clickthrough agreement (illegal in the UK) that locked ALL your non-broadcast services until you agreed to it. So no iPlayer, no games, no VoD, no CatchupTV, NO TIVO!(!). The Office of Fair Trading here went ape fucking shit at LG and pretty much said to them "We're going to fine you by the DAY until you sort this shit out". They're still sweeping up the pieces...
my Netgear allows me to reserve a specific IP for a specific device by hostname and/or by MAC address.
(I did it earlier on to lock in a machine for my lad so he can run a game server).
Following that, it also allows me to control - from the router - precisely which ports the device is allowed to use, or which ones it is not allowed to use, which ports to forward...
grey, not white. If you're using white you're doing it wrong.