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Comment Re:Cool. (Score 1) 169

> Almost every native culture on Earth has legends about a "golden age" when a more advanced civilization existed, which then disappeared during a subsequent "dark age".

This idea appeared and appears every time after the war, specially in conquests with the resulting establishment of an oppressive regime. With time, it becomes part of the "legendary history" and conforms the roots of many independence movements and nationalisms.

Comment Re:To bring the book industry into the 21st centur (Score 1) 223

Yeah, if you want to see how that thing could actually work, look at the Tempts Fate segment of the Goblins comic (currently on hiatus).

Here's how it goes: At the beginning of the month, the author posts an initial setting comic; at the bottom of the comic are several obstacles that Tempts Fate (the main character) will have to pass. Each obstacle is associated with a donation goal.

When the date of the obstacle rolls around, Tempts Fate will only defeat the obstacle if the goal has been met. How easily Tempts Fate defeats the obstacle depends on how much money over the goal the author has received.

If the donation goal hasn't been met, Tempts Fate will die.

The author initially started this several years ago, probably expecting that Tempts Fate would die in a couple of issues. Right now it's paused because the author has other stuff going on, but so far Tempts Fate has been no less than a little Goblin ninja; the donation goals are almost always exceeded, and sometimes by quite a lot.

Comment Re:Cool. (Score 1) 169

he disagreed with most of Hancock's assertions, that some of them deserved much closer consideration. And it's not only academic politics that have shaped our "consensus" regarding those civilizations. Religious and political forces have played an even greater role in making sure that the accepted history supports certain orthodoxies.

Do you have any that you can share? Any specifics?

I would like to know more than just what "lies my teacher told me" kind of books show. History is important, and unfortunately are rewriting to suit the winners, usually with political/religion goals. I didn't think discovery was that harsh, although suspected it played a roll.

So please impart with us more than a simple "the truth is out there" . . .

Comment Re:Careful What You Laugh At (Score 1) 511

You cannot add information once it's been thrown away, you can only simulate it. IF the camera had a yellow channel and the video signal actually carried the yellow channel, it MIGHT be useful for the TV to display it, but that's not what's happening.

I say might, because other than a very few tetrachromates out there we probably cannot actually perceive the extra color space anyway. The ideal color reproduction would require a trichromate camera (we're good there) where the three colors are exactly those of the cones in the eye (could use some work there) and exactly the same frequency response as the cones (also could use some work).

It MIGHT help a little bit with dynamic range, but it would be well into the diminishing returns part of the curve. more exact tuning of the existing 3 colors would probably have more effect but might be techincally more difficult or expensive.

Presumably the viewscreens in the Star Trek universe use many many colors rather than color blending for image reproduction since no species seems to find them horribly inaccurate (or at least none have commented on it).

Comment Re:RGB, not YUV? (Score 1) 511

After rummaging though some documentation, I found that the HDTV format named "REC 709" specifies colors in YUV. The conversion algorithm from YUV to RGB contains three clip instructions, which means that information is lost in the conversion. In other words, there are colors in the YUV gamut that fall outside of RGB. Am I wrong?

Comment Re:How is it slow? (Score 1) 99

Well, one issue is boot payload is getting bigger and bigger. One distro has about 20MB of download that would be tftped in the default case. Windows uses tftp for a *lot* more.

This is nonsense. Nobody in their right mind loads up the boot image in the first stage. The first stage is to download syslinux/grub/etc via TFTP. From there, you have all the features included in the boot loader of your choice, and can ignore PXE limitations. Want support for HTTPS? Good idea! Go include it in your boot loader.

The only reason PXE may need to be updated is because of IPv6 addressing.

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