Personally, I can't wait for crap-eating bacteria that live in your underwear. That'd save me the hassle of getting up in the middle of a coding session to relieve myself. Unfortunately, since THAT will never happen (and if it does, it'll never hit the market), I'm thinking sweat-eating bacteria could be applied to a more practical use: mouse gloves. I have sweaty palms, so during a late-night gaming session, I usually find myself wiping my right hand on whatever dry object I can find (don't ask) every five seconds so my grip on my mouse doesn't falter.
...imagine if 5% of all Americans all played the same online game, for instance.
I think we already have an idea as to how bad that gets. Just look at CounterStrike. I don't think you have to imagine how ridiculous that gets. Instead of players accusing eachother of stealing items, players accuse eachother of cheating!
Re:Voy at least needs a "wrap up" episode.
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
1. The Maquis were "forgiven" by the Federation around the time that the Cardassians allied themselves with the Dominion and officially became the enemy once more. I don't think there are any more Maquis in the Alpha Quadrant because most of them would've jumped at the chance to serve in a Federation that understands their ideals.
2. I couldn't possibly answer that question.
3. Although it would be easy to say that the Doctor's "married life" in the alternate reality where it took Voyager some 22 years to get home, adds the possibility that things will be different, I think holograms, once proven sentient (like the Doctor), have the same rights as any other Federation citizen. Otherwise, upon the Doctor's return to the Federation in Message in a Bottle, what would've stopped the Federation from simply replacing his program with an upgraded version and sending him back?
4. I couldn't possibly answer that question, though I assume if Chakotay and Seven don't push their relationship to the extremes, Janeway and Chakotay would probably hit it off.
5. Because, unlike most other science fiction series, the assimilation/destruction of Earth isn't a primary objective for the Borg. I think the Borg Queen already stated in the final episode that she was pretty much "leaving Voyager alone" because they, and the rest of the Federation, didn't have a high priority on the assimilation list.
6. Yes. Temporal mechanics. The only way the Borg could've survived this one is if the Queen wasn't such a freaking idiot and sent orders to that last sphere to go back in time, relay the information to the Queen at that time, and make sure the Queen of that time destroys Voyager before any of what we know now happened in the first place. But nooo, she had to set her sights on the present-day Janeway... yes, the Queen dies twice, though I don't think she'll be around for a third strike.
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Yes. Voyager was apparently the first Intrepid-class starship to have a newer generation of warp core installed, one that required the nacelles to arc upwards during warp travel (unlike the newer starships that use this warp drive, the Intrepids had to be refitted, instead of being designed around the new engine). I suppose the easiest way to explain why the Prometheus, Defiant, or Sovereign classes of ships didn't require folding nacelles was because they had been designed around the newer warp drive.
One of the things you didn't factor into the time was the random events that would take a few years off their journey home. The transwarp coil stolen from the Borg, Kes' "gift", the slingshot, et cetera. I'm guessing about 20-30% of the total length of the trip was taken care of by those incidents, at the most.
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
It was Warp 6.
Re:Warp drive silliness : somebody skipped math 10
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Though we may have different ideas on how it works, I'm quite certain it is exponential.
Until you hit warp 9.
Then I believe it's a quadratic curve to infinity, where, as you said, it takes infinite energy to go at infinite speed and occupy every point in the universe simultaneously.
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I have that one. It also illustrated the differences between the TOS Warp scale and the revised TNG warp scale.
Then again, I have about four or five tech manuals, plus a load more of other stuff strung out around my room. It helps when writing Star Trek fanfics.:)
1. The Dominion didn't need DS9 other than as a base, like the Federation did, to guard the wormhole. Don't forget that DS9/Terok Nor (original Cardassian name) was pretty much the only stationary object between anything and the wormhole. The Dominion needed to hold DS9 as a base of operations to ensure that their reinforcements from the Gamma Quadrant got through without interference.
2. Q introduced the Federation to the Borg as a "wakeup call" to the Federation, and Picard in particular.
Re:The day I realized Trek sucked
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
That's because they DROPPED the shields of the ship that Scotty was on.
Re:Warp drive silliness : somebody skipped math 10
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
One thing you have yet to realize is that the Warp Speed measurements are exponential. Warp 2 is ten times, not two times, the speed of Warp 1. As Warp 1 == the speed of light, Warp 9 != 9x the speed of light.
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
That, also, would be completely incorrect. I'm probably wrong on this note, but 70,000 light years being equivalent to a 75 year travel time would only be correct if the starship was limited to Warp One. As it's exponential (like the Richter Scale, Warp 2 is 10x as fast as Warp 1, while Warp 3 is 100x as fast as Warp 1, et cetera), the time it would take Voyager to travel home at cruising speed of Warp 6 would be much much MUCH less than 70 years (though I'm not sure what it would be).
Re:I'm ashamed to admit it
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 3
You're thinking of the "slingshot around the sun" effect warp has on the spacetime continuum, not the Warp Six limitation the Federation imposed on all space travel within the Federation's territories.
The Warp Six limitation that the author mentions was the result of a TNG episode that demonstrated that old school warp drives and their warp fields slowly damaged subspace at speeds greater than Warp Six. The "folding" nacelles on Voyager were the result of the development of a new design of warp core, the M-ARA/II, which became standard on all Federation starships. In order to get the correct warp field for an Intrepid-class starship, its warp nacelles had to be modified to "fold" upwards during warp travel, to alter the geometry of the warp field. Ships later designed around the M-ARA/II warp drive, like the Prometheus, Defiant, and Sovereign, don't have this requirement as they already have a newer design of warp nacelle to control it automatically.
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
That's where he's got it totally wrong. The introduction of the "warp speed limit" was introduced shortly after a certain TNG episode where the Enterprise helped come to the realization that old-school warp drives were slowly damaging subspace. The variable pitch warp nacelles, like the "folding" ones used on Voyager, were designed to negate the warp speed limit by negating all damage that warp drives do to subspace.
Realize a couple of things, twoflower, before you respond to this:
1. When I said 16k, 16k = 16k/second, not 16kbps. 16k/sec = 128kbps.
2. The 2-3 miles of the distribution node thing still applies. You proved that when you specified that you lived in a *city*. That implies an urban area, not a suburban or rural area, like most of America, ironically.
3. Of course I'm generalizing. If I was to go into specifics on everything, my post would've been ten pages long at 1600x1200 resolution. As I don't have the time to do something that indepth that would've been pointless.
The server threads already know everything there is to know about players' movement and aiming. Tracking keystrokes, however, can't be done without moving keyboard parsing into the server thread, which consequentially means completely destroying Valve's net code and re-writing a lot of the engine.
Valve's netcode is already destroyed, according to a lot of people.
This can't be determined from key patterns, since it's entirely pre-entered configuration data, so to do this from the server would mean creating a challenge/response for the key/aliases table (which is easily faked). Doing this from the client inside the engine would require an ugly hack which would be worked around almost immediately; and since games can't be updated too frequently, that's as good as not working at all. Doing it from any sort of TSR outside the game's thread would require cross-program memory reading, which is disgusting hackish and non-portable at best.
Well you can't really blame a guy for trying.
But, it doesn't let server admins know who's cheating. Any cheat which can be detected by the server is a cheat that doesn't work properly; there's absolutely nothing which can prevent clients from spoofing responses.
So clients can spoof responses. So what? Isn't the server supposed to parse responses such that if a spoofed response is off, the server drops the connection with something like "user sent bogus command". I've had that happen to me on quite a few occasions.
Still, you can't blame a guy for trying. It's wishful thinking, I know, but simply because fusion power is currently impossible for us to develop doesn't mean we shouldn't look down that road.
As I stated before, it's the switch command necessary for the OpenGL wallhack that's freely available.
You download the hacked OpenGL32.dll, put it in your HL directory, and run HL. It has an OpenGL32.ini file that controls it all.
All the wallhack does is control whether textures are rendered with transparency enabled or disabled. When you enable the wallhack, the textures are still rendered, but the RGB information is decoded as all alpha channels. You still see the textures, though they look more like glass walls than solid walls. You still get walls and floors, they're just almost totally transparent. It doesn't actually change the mipmapping mode, it just acts as a switch for whether or not you want RGB texture info converted to alpha texture info.
Furthermore, the thing I'm talking about would be almost completely clientside. You install the program, and download the profile. If you don't have a net connection where you currently are, it can still work for you as long as you have the program installed, it just wouldn't have the option to upload anything. It would still understand how you use the keyboard and work the way it's supposed to.
And if it's really necessary for you to have that profile, you can just save the thing to a floppy disk, bring it to a computer that has a net connection, and upload it.
Of course, something like this isn't all that feasable in the first place, but it still sounds cool even if a little bit unrealistic.
And since you have to log in to a remote machine to use this service, you're doing the hard work for them--they already know that user XYZ is sitting down at 111.222.222.111. No company in the world would pass up the opportunity to sell this info once they realized, "Hey, we have a userbase, and we know which IPs they're using 75% of the time." And what happens if you're in the back of the beyond, far from even a 14.4 dialup? "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." No thanks!
In the case of being in the back of the beyond, far from a 14.4 dialup, would it be safe to assume that the computer you're using is one that you are used to using? I mean, if you're far from a possible net connection, as in, way out in the middle of nowhere, chances are you're stuck on a laptop where your cellphone service doesn't reach.
It wouldn't be "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." It would be "Sorry, I need to access the net, otherwise I'm going to make huge amounts of spelling errors up the arse because I've gotten so used to having my hand held that I've gotten lazy at learning how to type."
I admit, it wouldn't be useful for the majority of us, but the comparison as well as the usefulness of it being used for the majority of the AOL lemmings out there would make some big money.
Yes, it has, but not in the method I have proposed.
All it does is use a static specification of "common errors" such that if you perform one, it corrects it on the fly. I'm talking about an online profiling system that corrects, on the fly, spelling errors dependent on the type of keyboard you use. If you use a different brand-name of keyboard, you're undoubtedly going to experience certain nuances with that keyboard that you aren't used to, and thus, you're going to start collecting spelling errors. The program would log those errors, as well as offer fixes, and in time, it will get used to you making those kinds of errors such that when you do make those errors, it automatically fixes them and sends a profile update back to the site (with your consent, of course).
Or if they really want to get crafty, they can use spyware systems that have worked in the past such as Comet Cursor. Package something "cool" but totally useless, everyone thinks it's neat and installs it, and the next thing you know, WHAM, they've got you logged no matter where you go.
Seriously. This thought just entered my head, and it will undoubtedly be stolen by some entrepreneur looking to make a few bucks, but oh well.
Couldn't they modify this technology such that, not to invade upon your privacy or anything, but to understand the way you use your keyboard and mouse to be an automatic spelling checker?
Seriously, it could correct spelling and grammar mistakes you make on the fly without you having to hit the backspace key simply by understanding how you use your keyboard. They could also have a completely voluntary profiling system on a website that would allow you do use "personal profiles" on different systems, so all you have to do is download a program, log in online, and you have an automatic spelling and grammar checker at your fingertips that logs what sort of keyboard you use and how well you use it. Sit in front of a keyboard that's the same model as the one at your house, and never have to worry about making a spelling error, even if you type differently on an ergonomic keyboard as opposed to a standard keyboard.
In my personal opinion, this would be ultra-helpful, as I type about 150 WPM on ergonomic keyboards yet only about 40 WPM on standard keyboards.
Next thing ya know, someone will develop a program for CounterStrike servers that can track players' movement, aiming, and keystrokes, that can tell the server admins if they're using binds to things like:
"gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR;bind r gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST;"
In case you're curious, that's the switch command necessary for the OpenGL wallhack that's freely available.
On the bright side, though, that would be rather neat. The server admins would once and for all know who was and who wasn't cheating on their servers, though I figure all the privacy advocates would go apeshit over it.
As for this technology, however, it's not like this is anything new. Didn't DoubleClick.net have something like this going that would track what sorts of banners you would click on as well as what sites you visit such that they can tailor their ads to your preferences to attempt to get you to click on them?
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I can't wait for crap-eating bacteria that live in your underwear. That'd save me the hassle of getting up in the middle of a coding session to relieve myself. Unfortunately, since THAT will never happen (and if it does, it'll never hit the market), I'm thinking sweat-eating bacteria could be applied to a more practical use: mouse gloves. I have sweaty palms, so during a late-night gaming session, I usually find myself wiping my right hand on whatever dry object I can find (don't ask) every five seconds so my grip on my mouse doesn't falter.
Now it's Napster's fault that this company puts out music that puts people to sleep.
...imagine if 5% of all Americans all played the same online game, for instance.
I think we already have an idea as to how bad that gets. Just look at CounterStrike. I don't think you have to imagine how ridiculous that gets. Instead of players accusing eachother of stealing items, players accuse eachother of cheating!
1. The Maquis were "forgiven" by the Federation around the time that the Cardassians allied themselves with the Dominion and officially became the enemy once more. I don't think there are any more Maquis in the Alpha Quadrant because most of them would've jumped at the chance to serve in a Federation that understands their ideals.
2. I couldn't possibly answer that question.
3. Although it would be easy to say that the Doctor's "married life" in the alternate reality where it took Voyager some 22 years to get home, adds the possibility that things will be different, I think holograms, once proven sentient (like the Doctor), have the same rights as any other Federation citizen. Otherwise, upon the Doctor's return to the Federation in Message in a Bottle, what would've stopped the Federation from simply replacing his program with an upgraded version and sending him back?
4. I couldn't possibly answer that question, though I assume if Chakotay and Seven don't push their relationship to the extremes, Janeway and Chakotay would probably hit it off.
5. Because, unlike most other science fiction series, the assimilation/destruction of Earth isn't a primary objective for the Borg. I think the Borg Queen already stated in the final episode that she was pretty much "leaving Voyager alone" because they, and the rest of the Federation, didn't have a high priority on the assimilation list.
6. Yes. Temporal mechanics. The only way the Borg could've survived this one is if the Queen wasn't such a freaking idiot and sent orders to that last sphere to go back in time, relay the information to the Queen at that time, and make sure the Queen of that time destroys Voyager before any of what we know now happened in the first place. But nooo, she had to set her sights on the present-day Janeway... yes, the Queen dies twice, though I don't think she'll be around for a third strike.
Yes. Voyager was apparently the first Intrepid-class starship to have a newer generation of warp core installed, one that required the nacelles to arc upwards during warp travel (unlike the newer starships that use this warp drive, the Intrepids had to be refitted, instead of being designed around the new engine). I suppose the easiest way to explain why the Prometheus, Defiant, or Sovereign classes of ships didn't require folding nacelles was because they had been designed around the newer warp drive.
One of the things you didn't factor into the time was the random events that would take a few years off their journey home. The transwarp coil stolen from the Borg, Kes' "gift", the slingshot, et cetera. I'm guessing about 20-30% of the total length of the trip was taken care of by those incidents, at the most.
It was Warp 6.
Though we may have different ideas on how it works, I'm quite certain it is exponential.
Until you hit warp 9.
Then I believe it's a quadratic curve to infinity, where, as you said, it takes infinite energy to go at infinite speed and occupy every point in the universe simultaneously.
Yes, I have that one. It also illustrated the differences between the TOS Warp scale and the revised TNG warp scale.
:)
Then again, I have about four or five tech manuals, plus a load more of other stuff strung out around my room. It helps when writing Star Trek fanfics.
1. The Dominion didn't need DS9 other than as a base, like the Federation did, to guard the wormhole. Don't forget that DS9/Terok Nor (original Cardassian name) was pretty much the only stationary object between anything and the wormhole. The Dominion needed to hold DS9 as a base of operations to ensure that their reinforcements from the Gamma Quadrant got through without interference.
2. Q introduced the Federation to the Borg as a "wakeup call" to the Federation, and Picard in particular.
That's because they DROPPED the shields of the ship that Scotty was on.
One thing you have yet to realize is that the Warp Speed measurements are exponential. Warp 2 is ten times, not two times, the speed of Warp 1. As Warp 1 == the speed of light, Warp 9 != 9x the speed of light.
That, also, would be completely incorrect. I'm probably wrong on this note, but 70,000 light years being equivalent to a 75 year travel time would only be correct if the starship was limited to Warp One. As it's exponential (like the Richter Scale, Warp 2 is 10x as fast as Warp 1, while Warp 3 is 100x as fast as Warp 1, et cetera), the time it would take Voyager to travel home at cruising speed of Warp 6 would be much much MUCH less than 70 years (though I'm not sure what it would be).
You're thinking of the "slingshot around the sun" effect warp has on the spacetime continuum, not the Warp Six limitation the Federation imposed on all space travel within the Federation's territories.
The Warp Six limitation that the author mentions was the result of a TNG episode that demonstrated that old school warp drives and their warp fields slowly damaged subspace at speeds greater than Warp Six. The "folding" nacelles on Voyager were the result of the development of a new design of warp core, the M-ARA/II, which became standard on all Federation starships. In order to get the correct warp field for an Intrepid-class starship, its warp nacelles had to be modified to "fold" upwards during warp travel, to alter the geometry of the warp field. Ships later designed around the M-ARA/II warp drive, like the Prometheus, Defiant, and Sovereign, don't have this requirement as they already have a newer design of warp nacelle to control it automatically.
That's where he's got it totally wrong. The introduction of the "warp speed limit" was introduced shortly after a certain TNG episode where the Enterprise helped come to the realization that old-school warp drives were slowly damaging subspace. The variable pitch warp nacelles, like the "folding" ones used on Voyager, were designed to negate the warp speed limit by negating all damage that warp drives do to subspace.
Here's a fixed link for those that haven't yet figured out where the page is:
The page in question.
Realize a couple of things, twoflower, before you respond to this:
1. When I said 16k, 16k = 16k/second, not 16kbps. 16k/sec = 128kbps.
2. The 2-3 miles of the distribution node thing still applies. You proved that when you specified that you lived in a *city*. That implies an urban area, not a suburban or rural area, like most of America, ironically.
3. Of course I'm generalizing. If I was to go into specifics on everything, my post would've been ten pages long at 1600x1200 resolution. As I don't have the time to do something that indepth that would've been pointless.
The server threads already know everything there is to know about players' movement and aiming. Tracking keystrokes, however, can't be done without moving keyboard parsing into the server thread, which consequentially means completely destroying Valve's net code and re-writing a lot of the engine.
Valve's netcode is already destroyed, according to a lot of people.
This can't be determined from key patterns, since it's entirely pre-entered configuration data, so to do this from the server would mean creating a challenge/response for the key/aliases table (which is easily faked). Doing this from the client inside the engine would require an ugly hack which would be worked around almost immediately; and since games can't be updated too frequently, that's as good as not working at all. Doing it from any sort of TSR outside the game's thread would require cross-program memory reading, which is disgusting hackish and non-portable at best.
Well you can't really blame a guy for trying.
But, it doesn't let server admins know who's cheating. Any cheat which can be detected by the server is a cheat that doesn't work properly; there's absolutely nothing which can prevent clients from spoofing responses.
So clients can spoof responses. So what? Isn't the server supposed to parse responses such that if a spoofed response is off, the server drops the connection with something like "user sent bogus command". I've had that happen to me on quite a few occasions.
Still, you can't blame a guy for trying. It's wishful thinking, I know, but simply because fusion power is currently impossible for us to develop doesn't mean we shouldn't look down that road.
As I stated before, it's the switch command necessary for the OpenGL wallhack that's freely available.
You download the hacked OpenGL32.dll, put it in your HL directory, and run HL. It has an OpenGL32.ini file that controls it all.
All the wallhack does is control whether textures are rendered with transparency enabled or disabled. When you enable the wallhack, the textures are still rendered, but the RGB information is decoded as all alpha channels. You still see the textures, though they look more like glass walls than solid walls. You still get walls and floors, they're just almost totally transparent. It doesn't actually change the mipmapping mode, it just acts as a switch for whether or not you want RGB texture info converted to alpha texture info.
Furthermore, the thing I'm talking about would be almost completely clientside. You install the program, and download the profile. If you don't have a net connection where you currently are, it can still work for you as long as you have the program installed, it just wouldn't have the option to upload anything. It would still understand how you use the keyboard and work the way it's supposed to.
And if it's really necessary for you to have that profile, you can just save the thing to a floppy disk, bring it to a computer that has a net connection, and upload it.
Of course, something like this isn't all that feasable in the first place, but it still sounds cool even if a little bit unrealistic.
And since you have to log in to a remote machine to use this service, you're doing the hard work for them--they already know that user XYZ is sitting down at 111.222.222.111. No company in the world would pass up the opportunity to sell this info once they realized, "Hey, we have a userbase, and we know which IPs they're using 75% of the time." And what happens if you're in the back of the beyond, far from even a 14.4 dialup? "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." No thanks!
In the case of being in the back of the beyond, far from a 14.4 dialup, would it be safe to assume that the computer you're using is one that you are used to using? I mean, if you're far from a possible net connection, as in, way out in the middle of nowhere, chances are you're stuck on a laptop where your cellphone service doesn't reach.
It wouldn't be "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." It would be "Sorry, I need to access the net, otherwise I'm going to make huge amounts of spelling errors up the arse because I've gotten so used to having my hand held that I've gotten lazy at learning how to type."
I admit, it wouldn't be useful for the majority of us, but the comparison as well as the usefulness of it being used for the majority of the AOL lemmings out there would make some big money.
Yes, it has, but not in the method I have proposed.
All it does is use a static specification of "common errors" such that if you perform one, it corrects it on the fly. I'm talking about an online profiling system that corrects, on the fly, spelling errors dependent on the type of keyboard you use. If you use a different brand-name of keyboard, you're undoubtedly going to experience certain nuances with that keyboard that you aren't used to, and thus, you're going to start collecting spelling errors. The program would log those errors, as well as offer fixes, and in time, it will get used to you making those kinds of errors such that when you do make those errors, it automatically fixes them and sends a profile update back to the site (with your consent, of course).
Or if they really want to get crafty, they can use spyware systems that have worked in the past such as Comet Cursor. Package something "cool" but totally useless, everyone thinks it's neat and installs it, and the next thing you know, WHAM, they've got you logged no matter where you go.
Seriously. This thought just entered my head, and it will undoubtedly be stolen by some entrepreneur looking to make a few bucks, but oh well.
Couldn't they modify this technology such that, not to invade upon your privacy or anything, but to understand the way you use your keyboard and mouse to be an automatic spelling checker?
Seriously, it could correct spelling and grammar mistakes you make on the fly without you having to hit the backspace key simply by understanding how you use your keyboard. They could also have a completely voluntary profiling system on a website that would allow you do use "personal profiles" on different systems, so all you have to do is download a program, log in online, and you have an automatic spelling and grammar checker at your fingertips that logs what sort of keyboard you use and how well you use it. Sit in front of a keyboard that's the same model as the one at your house, and never have to worry about making a spelling error, even if you type differently on an ergonomic keyboard as opposed to a standard keyboard.
In my personal opinion, this would be ultra-helpful, as I type about 150 WPM on ergonomic keyboards yet only about 40 WPM on standard keyboards.
Next thing ya know, someone will develop a program for CounterStrike servers that can track players' movement, aiming, and keystrokes, that can tell the server admins if they're using binds to things like:
"gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR;bind r gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST;"
In case you're curious, that's the switch command necessary for the OpenGL wallhack that's freely available.
On the bright side, though, that would be rather neat. The server admins would once and for all know who was and who wasn't cheating on their servers, though I figure all the privacy advocates would go apeshit over it.
As for this technology, however, it's not like this is anything new. Didn't DoubleClick.net have something like this going that would track what sorts of banners you would click on as well as what sites you visit such that they can tailor their ads to your preferences to attempt to get you to click on them?
No, no, no.
The reason we've decided that going to the moon isn't worth the time and effort anymore is rather simple.
We found out it wasn't made of cheese.
:)