The trouble is, once you trick C into overflowing into the black buffer, how do you inconspicuously ensure that the data that goes into it still "looks" black?
I was able to successfully keep the color data by converting each RGB triplet to 16 bits of color, then distributing them across the image in the bottom two bits of each pixel. It's pretty much impossible to tell visually that there's any extra pixel data stored in the redacted image, and the restored image looks almost identical to the original.
When it comes to figuring out how to hide the rogue code that does the information hiding, however, I am at a loss.
I played through XII once and gave it away. I played straight through and didn't do too many sidequests other than some hunts, which was a welcome alternative to grinding. I did max out everyone's lame-ass "license board" and buy decent spells and abilities... *when* I could find them. When I beat the final boss (in whom I had zero emotional investment), I watched through an HOUR of cinematic crap expecting there to be more game before I realized with dismay that the letters on the screen spelled "THE END".
Aside from all my characters fighting for me the entire damn time (which, since I'm a programmer, I'll admit I found kind of cool), I had a few real other beefs with the battle system. Summoning absolutely BLEW in XII. First you had to GET the summon, then you had to get one of your characters all the way over the license board to activate it, one person and one person only could choose to summon it, and it basically hung around being useless until you gave it something to do. Limit breaks sucked too. The amount of damage you deal is directly proportional to how fast you can identify a button and push it.
And what's up with making moogles and chocobos all grimy and animal-like? Sure it fits in with the backdrop of the universe, but dammit, these creatures are supposed to be cute and cuddly regardless of the setting. Part of their appeal is that they are intentionally out of place. Give me a teddy bear that deals 9999 HP of damage to Kefka for crying out loud.
I really admired the game from a technical standpoint, but as a main-series Final Fantasy title, it ranks a solid... 12. Bring me back ATB battles and engaging storylines and give me a freaking Final Fantasy game.
Actually, at the end of X-2 a guy named "Shinra" is talking about discovering vast amounts of energy that could be harnessed for electrical power emanating from the "Farplane", the place where dead things go in that universe.
In FFVII, "Shinra" is a former munitions manufacturing corporation that controls the world through the sale of Mako, electrical energy drawn from the "Lifestream", the "place" where dead things go in that universe.
Square-Enix has said that this is intentional.
I choose to believe that a game that's entirely sidequest-based and where character development is synonymous with dress-up is not Final Fantasy canon. Didn't stop me from finishing it though.
Yeah... In my frantic attempt to cobble together an accurate list of US Final Fantasy releases, a couple slipped by my otherwise ironclad recall abaility.
FFI came out for the NES in 1990. I loved it so much I had to beg my parents to buy me a SNES for FFII/IV. Then FFVII came out for the Playstation. Fortunately, it did so well that they ported it to the PC. Then FFVIII tanked on the PC and FFIX released only on the playstation, so I went out and bought one, allowing me to scoop up Anthology, Chronicles, and Origins in the crossfire.
Then FFX came out for the PS2. I loved FFVII and FFIX so much I had to buy myself a PS2 to play FFX.
Then the original FFII and FFIII came out on the WonderSwan Color. In Japan only.
Then the original FFIII came out for the Nintendo DS. Guess who went out and bought one.
Unfortunately for Square-Enix, I did not love FFXII so much that I will be buying a PS3 to play FFXIII. The spell is finally broken. Or I'm getting older.
I figure once we are unable to keep pace with pathogenic mutations in our antibiotic research, it will force an evolutionary arms race between humans and bacteria where the more disease-resistant population survives and becomes the forbears of future humanity. Then, assuming a total collapse of civilization, those with the ingenuity to figure out how to harness dormant technologies will gain significant advantages over the rest of the population, and thereby dominate. The nerds win!!!
I wonder if maybe there's a second universe containing all that missing antimatter; that universe's big bang could be our big crunch and vice versa. Then time would essentially be one big circle. Of course I have no sound justification to back that up, last time I studied physics was 2003... it's just interesting to take what I think I understand about theoretical physics and extrapolate...
The speed of any inertial frame of reference can be seen as a rotation in spacetime. As such, there always exists a frame of reference that can observe any particle traveling a speed of light, e.g. the frame of reference of a photon. To that end, any object can always be said to be going the speed of light in four dimensions; one's apparent speed to an observer, then, is a measure of the relative angle between the observer's and the traveler's arrows of travel in four dimensions.
The point of gp is that when you apply maxwell's equations in four dimensions, an antiproton is indistinguishable from a proton moving backwards in time.
If we maintain that causality only travels in the forward direction (not an unreasonable assumption to make), then you could actually solve this problem by saying the antiproton was, from its own frame of reference, annihilated, at the same time that it was created from your frame of reference, and vice versa.
Even more interestingly, when you consider that we travel through spacetime at the speed of light, you can think of the creation of a PP- pair as an antiproton "bouncing in time" off a burst of energy, one that is exactly equal in magnitude to the energy required to reverse the direction of a proton traveling at the speed of light.
Then, when you consider a recently-generated PP- pair that re-self-annihilates, releasing their combined energy, you can think of the same "bounce" in reverse, at which point, you have a single proton bouncing around in a game of nanoscopic temporal ping-pong!
There's usually one weekend in May where the grocery store strawberries in some US regions are decent. If you're lucky you'll catch a radio ad about "strawberries being in season".
Any other time of the year and they're usually mostly green to white to off-white pink, unpleasantly tart (even bitter) and distinctly non-juicy. I grew up helping my grandma harvest strawberries from her garden so I'm admittedly a touch spoiled.
In my first out-of-college job, I was getting frustrated at the code-compile-wait cycle, so I investigated. I noticed glaring inefficiencies in the makefile for the agency's main project so I (unprompted) tightened it up reducing the build time from 30 minutes to under 1 minute. I then (also unprompted) enabled line-debugging, on-the-fly recompilation and hot deployment. Our department's productivity shot through the roof.
My boss got employee of the year. I got a $2/hr raise and a free trip to JavaOne... a year later.
I used my boss's glowing recommendation to get a better paying job. I left with my boss's blessing.
Apparently this was the wrong thread to discuss Linux and CPU heat on notebooks. I rarely get such fiercely negative moddage. Yikes.
It appears to run cool no matter what I do in Windows. I can get it under 40C by letting it idle in Linux, but if I run glxgears for 60 seconds it'll ramp up to 60C and start setting off all kinds of alarms and warning messages.
I'm considering hotwiring the fan so I can control it with the COM bus, because none of the kernel modules are touching it right now.
I do have cpufreq working on my machine which I believe achieves the same goal. It runs relatively cool (and slow -- ~800MHz) when I'm not doing much but when I kickstart the CPU with say glxgears the CPU temp jumps back up again.
I still can't get my core CPU temperature below 55 degrees Celsius while doing anything useful on my Inspiron 1501, regardless of the Linux distribution, even with it propped up on stilts and pointing an AC fan on high at the rear. None of the available CPU fan control software packages work with my hardware, not ACPI, not i8k, not speedfan.
Running Vista, it rarely creeps above 38 degrees Celsius, even though I could be running SETI@Home while simultaneously watching a DVD and playing WoW. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
Or slightly chilled if it's white.
The trouble is, once you trick C into overflowing into the black buffer, how do you inconspicuously ensure that the data that goes into it still "looks" black?
I was able to successfully keep the color data by converting each RGB triplet to 16 bits of color, then distributing them across the image in the bottom two bits of each pixel. It's pretty much impossible to tell visually that there's any extra pixel data stored in the redacted image, and the restored image looks almost identical to the original.
When it comes to figuring out how to hide the rogue code that does the information hiding, however, I am at a loss.
I hope a bunch of people go to prison for this. Karma's a bitch, RIAAssholes.
I played through XII once and gave it away. I played straight through and didn't do too many sidequests other than some hunts, which was a welcome alternative to grinding. I did max out everyone's lame-ass "license board" and buy decent spells and abilities... *when* I could find them. When I beat the final boss (in whom I had zero emotional investment), I watched through an HOUR of cinematic crap expecting there to be more game before I realized with dismay that the letters on the screen spelled "THE END".
Aside from all my characters fighting for me the entire damn time (which, since I'm a programmer, I'll admit I found kind of cool), I had a few real other beefs with the battle system. Summoning absolutely BLEW in XII. First you had to GET the summon, then you had to get one of your characters all the way over the license board to activate it, one person and one person only could choose to summon it, and it basically hung around being useless until you gave it something to do. Limit breaks sucked too. The amount of damage you deal is directly proportional to how fast you can identify a button and push it.
And what's up with making moogles and chocobos all grimy and animal-like? Sure it fits in with the backdrop of the universe, but dammit, these creatures are supposed to be cute and cuddly regardless of the setting. Part of their appeal is that they are intentionally out of place. Give me a teddy bear that deals 9999 HP of damage to Kefka for crying out loud.
I really admired the game from a technical standpoint, but as a main-series Final Fantasy title, it ranks a solid... 12. Bring me back ATB battles and engaging storylines and give me a freaking Final Fantasy game.
Actually, at the end of X-2 a guy named "Shinra" is talking about discovering vast amounts of energy that could be harnessed for electrical power emanating from the "Farplane", the place where dead things go in that universe.
In FFVII, "Shinra" is a former munitions manufacturing corporation that controls the world through the sale of Mako, electrical energy drawn from the "Lifestream", the "place" where dead things go in that universe.
Square-Enix has said that this is intentional.
I choose to believe that a game that's entirely sidequest-based and where character development is synonymous with dress-up is not Final Fantasy canon. Didn't stop me from finishing it though.
Yeah... In my frantic attempt to cobble together an accurate list of US Final Fantasy releases, a couple slipped by my otherwise ironclad recall abaility.
The Final Fantasy series is a console mover.
FFI came out for the NES in 1990. I loved it so much I had to beg my parents to buy me a SNES for FFII/IV.
Then FFVII came out for the Playstation. Fortunately, it did so well that they ported it to the PC. Then FFVIII tanked on the PC and FFIX released only on the playstation, so I went out and bought one, allowing me to scoop up Anthology, Chronicles, and Origins in the crossfire.
Then FFX came out for the PS2. I loved FFVII and FFIX so much I had to buy myself a PS2 to play FFX.
Then the original FFII and FFIII came out on the WonderSwan Color. In Japan only.
Then the original FFIII came out for the Nintendo DS. Guess who went out and bought one.
Unfortunately for Square-Enix, I did not love FFXII so much that I will be buying a PS3 to play FFXIII. The spell is finally broken. Or I'm getting older.
I believe you meant "EVILutionists". ;)
I figure once we are unable to keep pace with pathogenic mutations in our antibiotic research, it will force an evolutionary arms race between humans and bacteria where the more disease-resistant population survives and becomes the forbears of future humanity. Then, assuming a total collapse of civilization, those with the ingenuity to figure out how to harness dormant technologies will gain significant advantages over the rest of the population, and thereby dominate. The nerds win!!!
Marty! You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally!!
I wonder if maybe there's a second universe containing all that missing antimatter; that universe's big bang could be our big crunch and vice versa. Then time would essentially be one big circle. Of course I have no sound justification to back that up, last time I studied physics was 2003... it's just interesting to take what I think I understand about theoretical physics and extrapolate...
The speed of any inertial frame of reference can be seen as a rotation in spacetime. As such, there always exists a frame of reference that can observe any particle traveling a speed of light, e.g. the frame of reference of a photon. To that end, any object can always be said to be going the speed of light in four dimensions; one's apparent speed to an observer, then, is a measure of the relative angle between the observer's and the traveler's arrows of travel in four dimensions.
The point of gp is that when you apply maxwell's equations in four dimensions, an antiproton is indistinguishable from a proton moving backwards in time.
If we maintain that causality only travels in the forward direction (not an unreasonable assumption to make), then you could actually solve this problem by saying the antiproton was, from its own frame of reference, annihilated, at the same time that it was created from your frame of reference, and vice versa.
Even more interestingly, when you consider that we travel through spacetime at the speed of light, you can think of the creation of a PP- pair as an antiproton "bouncing in time" off a burst of energy, one that is exactly equal in magnitude to the energy required to reverse the direction of a proton traveling at the speed of light.
Then, when you consider a recently-generated PP- pair that re-self-annihilates, releasing their combined energy, you can think of the same "bounce" in reverse, at which point, you have a single proton bouncing around in a game of nanoscopic temporal ping-pong!
There's usually one weekend in May where the grocery store strawberries in some US regions are decent. If you're lucky you'll catch a radio ad about "strawberries being in season".
Any other time of the year and they're usually mostly green to white to off-white pink, unpleasantly tart (even bitter) and distinctly non-juicy. I grew up helping my grandma harvest strawberries from her garden so I'm admittedly a touch spoiled.
Mojito sauce? As in mint, lime, rum and club soda in a highball over ice?
Cigars have nicotine, not alcohol.
Now, if they could pull THAT off with gene splicing...
In my first out-of-college job, I was getting frustrated at the code-compile-wait cycle, so I investigated. I noticed glaring inefficiencies in the makefile for the agency's main project so I (unprompted) tightened it up reducing the build time from 30 minutes to under 1 minute. I then (also unprompted) enabled line-debugging, on-the-fly recompilation and hot deployment. Our department's productivity shot through the roof.
My boss got employee of the year. I got a $2/hr raise and a free trip to JavaOne... a year later.
I used my boss's glowing recommendation to get a better paying job. I left with my boss's blessing.
Oh wait. Yes. Yes it is, actually. Never mind.
Apparently this was the wrong thread to discuss Linux and CPU heat on notebooks. I rarely get such fiercely negative moddage. Yikes.
It appears to run cool no matter what I do in Windows. I can get it under 40C by letting it idle in Linux, but if I run glxgears for 60 seconds it'll ramp up to 60C and start setting off all kinds of alarms and warning messages.
I'm considering hotwiring the fan so I can control it with the COM bus, because none of the kernel modules are touching it right now.
I do have cpufreq working on my machine which I believe achieves the same goal. It runs relatively cool (and slow -- ~800MHz) when I'm not doing much but when I kickstart the CPU with say glxgears the CPU temp jumps back up again.
Also, to whoever modded me offtopic: booooo....
I still can't get my core CPU temperature below 55 degrees Celsius while doing anything useful on my Inspiron 1501, regardless of the Linux distribution, even with it propped up on stilts and pointing an AC fan on high at the rear. None of the available CPU fan control software packages work with my hardware, not ACPI, not i8k, not speedfan.
Running Vista, it rarely creeps above 38 degrees Celsius, even though I could be running SETI@Home while simultaneously watching a DVD and playing WoW. Go figure.
In unrelated news, it is now a felony not to run Windows on your machine, and Linus Torvalds has gone into hiding.
As long as there are people who are looking for a challenge and want to write code for the fun of it, there will always be open source software.