You could also arguably equate the Valar and the Maiar to the norse Vanir and Aesir. OK, so they're not quite the same but there are some similarities
...but which way around? In Norse mythology, the Vanir are identified with the elves, a broad category that covers all kinds of spirits, including dwarves ('swarthy elves'), valkyries, disir, trolls, etc. as well as Frey, Freyja, Njord, Nerthus... the boundary between 'god' and 'spirit' simply wasn't very pronounced, just as it isn't in Japanese Shinto. Indeed, the Eddas sometimes use 'Aesir and Vanir' and sometimes 'Aesir and elves' to mean all the gods. Tolkein's elves, by contrast, correspond to the narrower category 'light elves'. But the Vanir are I think older than the Aesir, at least for the Norse. My own theory is that in mythology generally the more overtly 'powerful' beings are usually historically younger. So first we have the 'spirits of wood and water', the elves, the Vanir, and then come the Aesir, and then with the conversion to Christianity, the One God.
A good source is Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson.
By the way, did you know Gandalf is a dwarf? Check out "The Catalogue of Dwarves" in the Voluspa, in the Poetic Edda. Apparently his name means "magical elf"... there's also dwarves that are the four cardinal directions, the waxing and waning moon, and a number of names you might recognise as dwarves from LOTR...
...well, not actually distributions of course, since they wouldn't include the OS itself. But imagine a single 'upgrade pack' marketed as "everything Microsoft left out of Windows XP" that contained a large number of free (as in beer) and cheaply-licensed packages such as Sun's Java VM, Netscape, QuickTime, ShockWave player, etc., etc. all under a single 'no-brainer' installer.
Maybe it would cost around $20-$30, or maybe it would be a free download/$10 CD. Anyway, you get the idea.
The patent has some interesting background as well as, of course, full technical descriptions of the various claimed methods. Click on "images" for a scan of the patent, it includes some interesting (if very grainy) pictures of a blade and the famous "damask" texture of the metal.
Something that would be very useful for me: a proper language for specifying schemes for recurring appointments and the like.
Some concepts I'd like to be able to express (not necessarily example strings):
the third Sunday of every month
every Saturday in every July
4pm every Wednesday, except Nov 29th, 2000
three hours starting from sunset every weekday
from 11pm to sunrise
the first weekday on or after April 15th
from two days before to one day after the last Sunday in May
the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox
the second full moon of the month
I've done a little bit of work in this direction (data model, not parser), in both Java and Haskell. Java is probably more useful, or easier to convert to C++ if necessary, but this sort of thing is really made for a functional language like ML or Haskell.
While on the subject of time, how about being able to correctly handle all time-zones and "daylight saving" schemes, know the difference between UTC, UT1 and TAI, correctly account for all past leap-seconds and make reasonable guesses as to future ones?
I need a file system that knows what type a file is. In case you hadn't noticed, it's not in general possible to calculate the type of a file just by looking at its name, 'permission' flags and contents.
Magic numbers? So what's the magic number for a plain text file in UTF-8 as opposed to ISO 8859-1?
My ideal file system would
store a MIME 'content-type' for each file (as BeFS),
allow file-names with up to at least 255 of any Unicode UCS2 codepoints, and
have polyhierarchic directory structures (i.e. enforce acyclicity but not require trees -- as if you could hard-link to non-ancestor directories, giving directories multiple parents)
Trouble is, this sort of thing is rather outside what the average GNU/Linux program expects from a file-system...
A bit pedantic, this, but attack graphs are not always trees. Starting with a 'consequence graph', pick a node as the goal and follow edges in the 'caused by' direction, ignoring edges that take you back to nodes you've already reached: what you end up with will always be acyclic, but not always a tree (which never 'share substructure').
An obvious example comes from 2-out-of-3 secret sharing:
obtain secret: do one of
obtain shadows 1 & 2: do all of
obtain shadow 1
obtain shadow 2
obtain shadows 2 & 3: do all of
obtain shadow 2
obtain shadow 3
obtain shadows 1 & 3: do all of
obtain shadow 1
obtain shadow 3
Directed acyclic graphs are usually known acronymically as 'DAGs'. Structures with this form are sometimes known as 'polyhierarchies'.
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A good source is Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson.
By the way, did you know Gandalf is a dwarf? Check out "The Catalogue of Dwarves" in the Voluspa, in the Poetic Edda. Apparently his name means "magical elf"... there's also dwarves that are the four cardinal directions, the waxing and waning moon, and a number of names you might recognise as dwarves from LOTR...
Maybe it would cost around $20-$30, or maybe it would be a free download/$10 CD. Anyway, you get the idea.
The patent has some interesting background as well as, of course, full technical descriptions of the various claimed methods. Click on "images" for a scan of the patent, it includes some interesting (if very grainy) pictures of a blade and the famous "damask" texture of the metal.
Some concepts I'd like to be able to express (not necessarily example strings):
- the third Sunday of every month
- every Saturday in every July
- 4pm every Wednesday, except Nov 29th, 2000
- three hours starting from sunset every weekday
- from 11pm to sunrise
- the first weekday on or after April 15th
- from two days before to one day after the last Sunday in May
- the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox
- the second full moon of the month
I've done a little bit of work in this direction (data model, not parser), in both Java and Haskell. Java is probably more useful, or easier to convert to C++ if necessary, but this sort of thing is really made for a functional language like ML or Haskell.While on the subject of time, how about being able to correctly handle all time-zones and "daylight saving" schemes, know the difference between UTC, UT1 and TAI, correctly account for all past leap-seconds and make reasonable guesses as to future ones?
Get the state to legalise marijuana. And watch them young folk come pouring in.
Magic numbers? So what's the magic number for a plain text file in UTF-8 as opposed to ISO 8859-1?
My ideal file system would
- store a MIME 'content-type' for each file (as BeFS),
- allow file-names with up to at least 255 of any Unicode UCS2 codepoints, and
- have polyhierarchic directory structures (i.e. enforce acyclicity but not require trees -- as if you could hard-link to non-ancestor directories, giving directories multiple parents)
Trouble is, this sort of thing is rather outside what the average GNU/Linux program expects from a file-system...New OS, anyone?
An obvious example comes from 2-out-of-3 secret sharing:
Directed acyclic graphs are usually known acronymically as 'DAGs'. Structures with this form are sometimes known as 'polyhierarchies'.
Of course the Barbie PC does not have slots. Instead, the place where the slots would be is covered by unremovable panties.