The storage capacity of the brain is a slibbery thing, first off, no one fully understands exactly how it wokrs, but it at least seems that the state of the neurons as well as the state of connections between them is related to this. Second, the estimate goes up as our notions of what big storage is. I don't think any seriousperson would acribe any sort of byte value. But if you think about it, we don't have that much capacity in our minds, our data storage is extremely lossy and we have very good minds that involve deriving a likely past state based on very few details.
Actually this is still security through obscurity. It doesn't have to be source code obscurity for this to be true. The misconception presented here is that you should never do security by obscurity, and that is not true, the caution is that the approach should never be the *only* protection used.
I am not that familiar with Thor, but I'll give a go at some of these questions.
As far as throwing the hammer and catching it to propel himself, it seems possible. Simple experiment, when bowling, throw the ball forward but don't let go, the moemntum you impart to the ball is sufficient to pull you forward. The question then becomes why do this, as it would be less efficient than jumping or if his legs aren't that strong, jumping with his hands? My guess is that his strength in throwing the hammer is provided by some patented technique that Thor had to license from the inventor, and a term of the license was that he couldn't use this strength to jump (presumably the license to do that would be more expensive), so he cheats the system by using a legal application (throwing the hammer) to accomplish the desired effect without technically violating his license. A clearly awesome hack that allows him to get the most of his money, to be sure. I am certain that since Thor's fragrant misuse of the "throwing" license, the inventor has since revised future license agreement to prevent its misuse.
As far as his helmet falling off, he just needs to keep his feed pointed roughly in the direction of motion, no biggie.
As to lightning flashes, I lack sufficient knowledge to make any thoroughly accurate claim, but my guess would be that before he goes to use this power he rubs his feet on some carpet a *lot* before heading out, thereby giving himself a lot of static electricity. Who knows, in his abode he may have a super secret material that is so electropostivie (or negative) it makes him able to build up an abnormally large charge, or maybe it is just your run of the mill rabbit fur. This possible material would very likely be purchased from the same guy who holds the super-strength patent.
As far as this whole relative-mass thing depedning on worthiness, lighten up, it's just a comic:)
My physics teacher loved discussing physics in comics and movies. Why is that superman looks just as strained stopping a comet from hitting the earth as he looks stopping a bus on the stree? Why do cars going over cliffs seem to inexplicably jump up before falling (i.e. Thelma & Louise) even when no ramp seems to exist before the jump?
On my 1.0RC1 all that happens is that the menu gets stuck in the open condition stealing focus until you initiate a drag of another object in the ui, guess it is time to upddate to rc2.
What the hell do they mean by RF lighting? That makes no sense where RF tech comes into lighting, sounds like spittng out light at 2.4GHz which would be useless... Could someone point out a plausible explanation or is this just a hoax?
ogle/xtheater/pythontheater offer more consistant dialogs. At least xine's gui is better than mplayers, mplayer doesn't even support drag and drop, while xine does. Too many of these media programs insist that they have to have a new and unique interface, which is total stupidity..
mplayer and xine work ok. My favorite is ogle, as it is the most complete dvd support you will find. vlc (video lan client) I have heard also works well. non-ogle players typically take a long time to wade through css encryption when present, and has better sdupport for dvd menus (dvdnav works mostly, but still has a few issues compared to ogle.
I've been jumping from one sinking ship to another the last couple of years. I've managed to spend less than 2 weeks total unemployed between jobs, but the pay has been unsatisfactory and I'm constantly aware of the fact wherever I am is not a very solid position. I finally found a pretty solid company, but I got in under a situation which will be resolved in a few months and therefore my services are no longer required, so I've started circulating my resume again... If what they said is true, maybe I'll have an easier time of it. Of course, we keep hearing this again and again, but maybe for once they will be right. I have noticed an increase in open positions and a couple of companies lifting hiring freezes.
I want to know more about how this works. Is this like prodding the rat to do something, or essentially killing off the rat and replacing it with a remote control? I guess if they are saying this could be done to humans, something along the lines of the latter is possilb,e which kinda disturbs me. Well, Star Trek predicted this sort of thing...remember the episode when Spock's brain was stolen?
Rolling your own box is great for a small network or a special system. All my home machines are self-rolled, it's worth the savings. However in a large, corporate environment, it ceases to be practical. Presumably, if resources are strained, you probably have better things to do then sitting down and killing tons of time diagnosing occasional hardware issues. It may even make you look less competent (what, he is still fixing that box? Dell would have fixed it by now). An OEM always has spare systems to swap out on a moments notice, and can do the swap and worry about more thorough diagnostics later, while you can not.
For college students at least, they start at $1249. Building an equivalent Powermac system is about 1480 dollars (adding monitor to education "entry" model powermac.) These things would be tempting if I had the money to cough up for it. In a few weeks I'll have the cash, but won't be a college student anymore. The Macs are nice, but not worth that amount of cash to home users. The price/benefit ratio for home users is killed by Windows PCs. For professional graphics work, though, they are great workstations...
If they are really that advanced, they have no MS in their society, and therefore can no longer fathom the thought of "viruses". Or, it could be like Independence Day, where the alien society obviously never had script kiddies so our 1337 virus technology will screw them over and allow a few F18s to blow the hell out of them...
Of course, you can only have one interface connected at a time, BBA or Modem.... No HD needed for a NAT box (you would shoot the low power req right there). Get a cheap cable/dsl "router". This interface may even take up the BBA slot, so no network with this. To make Dreamcast a Good NAT box, you would need an adapter with two Ethernet ports and a bit of nvram (if you want to have any sort of persistant, yet flexible rules..)
It has beend done, here is a url: http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/dreamcast/ You can even get an ISO for the modified RedHat/eCos there. It supports the video card (unaccelrated framebuffer, maybe improved by now), and the BBA (if you are lucky enough to have one). You *could* make it into a web server through nfs, or static on CD, but see no good reason. Doesn't support the sound though. Personally, If I had a BBA and linux supported the sound, it could make a convenient MP3 jukebox with neato visualizations, or even an MPG player. You can get software to play MPG and MP# from CD already, but over NFS would be so much more convenient... Home theater applications, that could be useful, since it's form factor is so nice. Linux on the XBox would be a truly great Home Theater thing (hard drive and ethernet built in). Hell, any general purpose OS on the XBox would make the box more attractive, the games sure as hell don't excite me.
Yeah, SUVs sure are safe... Makes perfect since. Just a note to any idiots out there who think so, nothing could be further from the truth. A damn SUV ran a red light in front of me going at a pretty normal speed, hit a car, the car was fine, but the damn SUV flipped over, and the passenger fell head first into the asphalt (they had the sunroof open and he was wearing no seatbelt, guess he felt the SUV was safe). He was as good as dead from then, and technically died in the ambulance. He was 18 years old too... I never want to see antyhing like that again, and at that moment was sure I definitely would never get a SUV. Of course, then again he probably could have walked away from the accident had he only worn his seatbelt, the driver for example walked away... A damn shame, but when a vehicle can flip as easily as a SUV, all bets are off with regards to safety.
You know, I'm kinda in the opposite position. I've kinda been pigeonholed into sysadmin positions, because my first convenient job was a SunOS sysadmin, Thanks to that little chunk of experience, when I interviewed for two departments of a company, a software development and the sysadmins, both said they would hire me, but the sysadmin's were more enthusiastic so the software department yielded. So I've been stuck in the same type of sysadmin position for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I love being a sysadmin. On the plus side, when the economy went to the gutter, I picked up a job as a sysadmin for a manufacturing company, but the developers didn't have anywhere to go. Now I'm back to a software company, and am trying to prove myself as a devleoper. Why? Because I see the same pattern, I arrive when things are a mess, help plan out a configuration that is more reliable, then after some hard work implementing it, it works pretty smoothly until hardware fails. In the manufacturing job it was particularly boring, as they didn't need a very dynamic enivornment. In a software company, they regularly need crazy things done to testing and development platforms to emulate customer enviornments. But still, my perceived value in the company goes down because I'm only useful when things break, and it would be cheaper just to call in contractors those times than to keep me around. And as software advances, administration gets to be an easier job. My method of dodging the bullet this time is to get into the programming assingments and do more and more devleopment. That way they have a developer who can get things working if something goes bad. They aren't paying me to sit and wait for something to happen. It seems sad, but it seems like aa lot of companies are finding administrators constantly on the payroll to be excessive and unnecessary, opting to call a support company when they need it..
Does XFree86 provide alternate color spaces as overlays? I have never tried, but I know sun hardware will allow an 8bpp program to run in a 32 bpp screen depth as an overlay. This would make things much easier than switching on the fly. I think overlays are better than changing screen depths ont he fly. There was a time when changing color depths would have been more important, for example my Voodoo3 needs to be in 16bpp mode for games, and 32bpp is nice for non-games. Also, people wanting to have really large screens most of the time, but added color depth at a smaller resolution is not so much an issue with cards with massively large amounts of memory, that can operate in massive color depths at any resolution. I would say that a couple of years ago it would have been worth solving the problem, but now I say crank it all the way up and don't worry about it. I can certainly see the problem, old applications would never understand being told their colorspace has changed, though I would think you could slip something into the X libraries that could make it work for new and dynanicly links apps, but I'm far from an expert.
Well, maintaining protocol compatibility would be nothing to brag about, every X implementation ever made should do that. But there is a binary compatibility involved. There is more than simply the X-Server talking to the applications, the mechanisms provided to the applications for commuincating with the server are provided through *libraries* (libX11.so, for example). If they are claiming binary compatibility, that means an app compiled with their very first version of the libraries should be able to painlessly run in an enviornment today with current libraries. Of course, the huge overhauls and impressive work is mostly done on the X server itself, so the libraries can be mostly left alone. I would think this claims is hard to prove, since 10 years ago most every library but XFree86 has changed dramatically, but I guess someone might have compiled really old versions of XFree86 on modern distros and checked, but I seriously wonder if they have *really* checked to see if this is true.
YEs, that is the design focus, but they have a gui if you pass special options at configure and runtime. I like GUI mode becuase I frequently am viewing many music videos, and it is much easier to use drag and drop to chose what I want to see next than it is to either type the line every time or to plan ahead of time which order I want to see them in and make a playlist, or to have a program randomly pick for me, I don't want to plan, but I still want control. That all said they are very talented developers, just not good at GUI design.
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The storage capacity of the brain is a slibbery thing, first off, no one fully understands exactly how it wokrs, but it at least seems that the state of the neurons as well as the state of connections between them is related to this.
Second, the estimate goes up as our notions of what big storage is. I don't think any seriousperson would acribe any sort of byte value. But if you think about it, we don't have that much capacity in our minds, our data storage is extremely lossy and we have very good minds that involve deriving a likely past state based on very few details.
Actually this is still security through obscurity. It doesn't have to be source code obscurity for this to be true. The misconception presented here is that you should never do security by obscurity, and that is not true, the caution is that the approach should never be the *only* protection used.
I am not that familiar with Thor, but I'll give a go at some of these questions.
:)
As far as throwing the hammer and catching it to propel himself, it seems possible. Simple experiment, when bowling, throw the ball forward but don't let go, the moemntum you impart to the ball is sufficient to pull you forward. The question then becomes why do this, as it would be less efficient than jumping or if his legs aren't that strong, jumping with his hands? My guess is that his strength in throwing the hammer is provided by some patented technique that Thor had to license from the inventor, and a term of the license was that he couldn't use this strength to jump (presumably the license to do that would be more expensive), so he cheats the system by using a legal application (throwing the hammer) to accomplish the desired effect without technically violating his license. A clearly awesome hack that allows him to get the most of his money, to be sure. I am certain that since Thor's fragrant misuse of the "throwing" license, the inventor has since revised future license agreement to prevent its misuse.
As far as his helmet falling off, he just needs to keep his feed pointed roughly in the direction of motion, no biggie.
As to lightning flashes, I lack sufficient knowledge to make any thoroughly accurate claim, but my guess would be that before he goes to use this power he rubs his feet on some carpet a *lot* before heading out, thereby giving himself a lot of static electricity. Who knows, in his abode he may have a super secret material that is so electropostivie (or negative) it makes him able to build up an abnormally large charge, or maybe it is just your run of the mill rabbit fur. This possible material would very likely be purchased from the same guy who holds the super-strength patent.
As far as this whole relative-mass thing depedning on worthiness, lighten up, it's just a comic
My physics teacher loved discussing physics in comics and movies. Why is that superman looks just as strained stopping a comet from hitting the earth as he looks stopping a bus on the stree? Why do cars going over cliffs seem to inexplicably jump up before falling (i.e. Thelma & Louise) even when no ramp seems to exist before the jump?
On my 1.0RC1 all that happens is that the menu gets stuck in the open condition stealing focus until you initiate a drag of another object in the ui, guess it is time to upddate to rc2.
What the hell do they mean by RF lighting? That makes no sense where RF tech comes into lighting, sounds like spittng out light at 2.4GHz which would be useless... Could someone point out a plausible explanation or is this just a hoax?
ogle/xtheater/pythontheater offer more consistant dialogs. At least xine's gui is better than mplayers, mplayer doesn't even support drag and drop, while xine does. Too many of these media programs insist that they have to have a new and unique interface, which is total stupidity..
mplayer and xine work ok. My favorite is ogle, as it is the most complete dvd support you will find. vlc (video lan client) I have heard also works well. non-ogle players typically take a long time to wade through css encryption when present, and has better sdupport for dvd menus (dvdnav works mostly, but still has a few issues compared to ogle.
More along the lines of I'll give you, personally, 25 thousand bucks in exchange for 95 million dollars of tax payer money..
I've been jumping from one sinking ship to another the last couple of years. I've managed to spend less than 2 weeks total unemployed between jobs, but the pay has been unsatisfactory and I'm constantly aware of the fact wherever I am is not a very solid position. I finally found a pretty solid company, but I got in under a situation which will be resolved in a few months and therefore my services are no longer required, so I've started circulating my resume again... If what they said is true, maybe I'll have an easier time of it. Of course, we keep hearing this again and again, but maybe for once they will be right. I have noticed an increase in open positions and a couple of companies lifting hiring freezes.
http://legacy.newdoom.com/ is more interesting to me, it runs under linux.
I want to know more about how this works. Is this like prodding the rat to do something, or essentially killing off the rat and replacing it with a remote control? I guess if they are saying this could be done to humans, something along the lines of the latter is possilb,e which kinda disturbs me. .remember the episode when Spock's brain was stolen?
Well, Star Trek predicted this sort of thing..
Rolling your own box is great for a small network or a special system. All my home machines are self-rolled, it's worth the savings. However in a large, corporate environment, it ceases to be practical. Presumably, if resources are strained, you probably have better things to do then sitting down and killing tons of time diagnosing occasional hardware issues. It may even make you look less competent (what, he is still fixing that box? Dell would have fixed it by now). An OEM always has spare systems to swap out on a moments notice, and can do the swap and worry about more thorough diagnostics later, while you can not.
Wusses, all you need for web development is vi.
For college students at least, they start at $1249.
Building an equivalent Powermac system is about 1480 dollars (adding monitor to education "entry" model powermac.) These things would be tempting if I had the money to cough up for it. In a few weeks I'll have the cash, but won't be a college student anymore. The Macs are nice, but not worth that amount of cash to home users. The price/benefit ratio for home users is killed by Windows PCs. For professional graphics work, though, they are great workstations...
but if you thought those MVP/VIC/etc... cards were bad about providing tacking info, this is a nightmare
If they are really that advanced, they have no MS in their society, and therefore can no longer fathom the thought of "viruses".
Or, it could be like Independence Day, where the alien society obviously never had script kiddies so our 1337 virus technology will screw them over and allow a few F18s to blow the hell out of them...
Of course, you can only have one interface connected at a time, BBA or Modem.... No HD needed for a NAT box (you would shoot the low power req right there). Get a cheap cable/dsl "router". This interface may even take up the BBA slot, so no network with this. To make Dreamcast a Good NAT box, you would need an adapter with two Ethernet ports and a bit of nvram (if you want to have any sort of persistant, yet flexible rules..)
Hell, it's a lot more than 640k, and you'd never need more than that...
But seriously, I have a P60 w/ 16 megs of ram running Linux. swaps like hell but it works..
It has beend done, here is a url:u can even get an ISO for the modified RedHat/eCos there.
http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/dreamcast/
Yo
It supports the video card (unaccelrated framebuffer, maybe improved by now), and the BBA (if you are lucky enough to have one). You *could* make it into a web server through nfs, or static on CD, but see no good reason. Doesn't support the sound though.
Personally, If I had a BBA and linux supported the sound, it could make a convenient MP3 jukebox with neato visualizations, or even an MPG player. You can get software to play MPG and MP# from CD already, but over NFS would be so much more convenient... Home theater applications, that could be useful, since it's form factor is so nice. Linux on the XBox would be a truly great Home Theater thing (hard drive and ethernet built in). Hell, any general purpose OS on the XBox would make the box more attractive, the games sure as hell don't excite me.
Yeah, SUVs sure are safe... Makes perfect since. Just a note to any idiots out there who think so, nothing could be further from the truth. A damn SUV ran a red light in front of me going at a pretty normal speed, hit a car, the car was fine, but the damn SUV flipped over, and the passenger fell head first into the asphalt (they had the sunroof open and he was wearing no seatbelt, guess he felt the SUV was safe). He was as good as dead from then, and technically died in the ambulance. He was 18 years old too... I never want to see antyhing like that again, and at that moment was sure I definitely would never get a SUV. Of course, then again he probably could have walked away from the accident had he only worn his seatbelt, the driver for example walked away... A damn shame, but when a vehicle can flip as easily as a SUV, all bets are off with regards to safety.
You know, I'm kinda in the opposite position. I've kinda been pigeonholed into sysadmin positions, because my first convenient job was a SunOS sysadmin, Thanks to that little chunk of experience, when I interviewed for two departments of a company, a software development and the sysadmins, both said they would hire me, but the sysadmin's were more enthusiastic so the software department yielded. So I've been stuck in the same type of sysadmin position for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I love being a sysadmin. On the plus side, when the economy went to the gutter, I picked up a job as a sysadmin for a manufacturing company, but the developers didn't have anywhere to go. Now I'm back to a software company, and am trying to prove myself as a devleoper. Why? Because I see the same pattern, I arrive when things are a mess, help plan out a configuration that is more reliable, then after some hard work implementing it, it works pretty smoothly until hardware fails. In the manufacturing job it was particularly boring, as they didn't need a very dynamic enivornment. In a software company, they regularly need crazy things done to testing and development platforms to emulate customer enviornments. But still, my perceived value in the company goes down because I'm only useful when things break, and it would be cheaper just to call in contractors those times than to keep me around. And as software advances, administration gets to be an easier job. My method of dodging the bullet this time is to get into the programming assingments and do more and more devleopment. That way they have a developer who can get things working if something goes bad. They aren't paying me to sit and wait for something to happen.
It seems sad, but it seems like aa lot of companies are finding administrators constantly on the payroll to be excessive and unnecessary, opting to call a support company when they need it..
Ogle does menus, awesome program. The only one I've ever seen that bothered with them,
check it out: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/
Does XFree86 provide alternate color spaces as overlays? I have never tried, but I know sun hardware will allow an 8bpp program to run in a 32 bpp screen depth as an overlay. This would make things much easier than switching on the fly. I think overlays are better than changing screen depths ont he fly. There was a time when changing color depths would have been more important, for example my Voodoo3 needs to be in 16bpp mode for games, and 32bpp is nice for non-games. Also, people wanting to have really large screens most of the time, but added color depth at a smaller resolution is not so much an issue with cards with massively large amounts of memory, that can operate in massive color depths at any resolution.
I would say that a couple of years ago it would have been worth solving the problem, but now I say crank it all the way up and don't worry about it. I can certainly see the problem, old applications would never understand being told their colorspace has changed, though I would think you could slip something into the X libraries that could make it work for new and dynanicly links apps, but I'm far from an expert.
Well, maintaining protocol compatibility would be nothing to brag about, every X implementation ever made should do that. But there is a binary compatibility involved. There is more than simply the X-Server talking to the applications, the mechanisms provided to the applications for commuincating with the server are provided through *libraries* (libX11.so, for example). If they are claiming binary compatibility, that means an app compiled with their very first version of the libraries should be able to painlessly run in an enviornment today with current libraries. Of course, the huge overhauls and impressive work is mostly done on the X server itself, so the libraries can be mostly left alone. I would think this claims is hard to prove, since 10 years ago most every library but XFree86 has changed dramatically, but I guess someone might have compiled really old versions of XFree86 on modern distros and checked, but I seriously wonder if they have *really* checked to see if this is true.
YEs, that is the design focus, but they have a gui if you pass special options at configure and runtime. I like GUI mode becuase I frequently am viewing many music videos, and it is much easier to use drag and drop to chose what I want to see next than it is to either type the line every time or to plan ahead of time which order I want to see them in and make a playlist, or to have a program randomly pick for me, I don't want to plan, but I still want control. That all said they are very talented developers, just not good at GUI design.