GeekForce

In the continuing vain of stupid superhero mash-ups…

I know you’ve all been wondering about such match up, and have spent plenty of time thinking about all the possible outcomes.

In order to begin to understand this matchup, we need to ask our first, and most critical question:
1. What model Terminator are we talking about?

T-100 (I think that’s the model of terminator from the first movie - correct me if I’m wrong)
* Metal endoskeleton, covered with flesh material
* It wont take much to uncover the skeleton. Once the skeleton is exposed, a head shot will effectively disable the T-100.

T-1000 Liquid metal
* Liquid metal self-organizing Nanotechnology. Even a small amount of the material if separated, can compose itself into a weapon.
* Much more difficult to disable. Explosive weapons are shown to be of little use against this foe.
* More intelligent - more processors working in concert with each other make for a faster, more adaptive system.
* Prone to weakness when temperature changes dramatically.

What would happen if it was dropped it into a trash compactor, like the one in Star Wars?

T-x Hardened endoskeletal chassis covered with the liquid metal from the T-1000
* This thing can change out its weapon on a whim. But the moving parts are vulnerable, because they are somewhat delicate.
* The liquid metal exterior gives it the ability to pose as anyone, while still maintaining the strength from the endskeleton.

2. Is Terminator’s mission to kill Batman?

If so, I think that Batman is dead. I dont think that Batman has the weapons to counter the futuristic systems that the Terminator has. Plus the Terminator is faster than the Batman.

If the Terminator’s mission is some other target, there’s the chance that the Terminator would ignore the Batman as being inconsequential, and just continue to complete it’s mission. That would be its downfall. Batman could bring more techniques to bear, since he has access to a blistering R&D department at Wayne Enterprises, they could probably find a Phased Plsma Rifle in the 40MW range for him.

This got us thinking about Terminator vs. Predator…

Ummm…
Has anyone seen this?
Would Batman win against Aliens?
I keep on saying that the premise of the film is kind of bogus. Predator’s want to take a trophy home. When they have any alien in their sights, would they take the head shot? I dont think so!

Why didn’t Batman die when the Alien’s head exploded all over him? Wouldn’t he get molecular acid all over himself?

I guess it comes down to this question too: Once the Predator spots Batman, and sees him going up against the alien, do they want the alien? or do they change their goal, and go after Batman?

Questions… questions…

My problem is that with all the Windows stuff I’ve been doing lately, my Mac skills are getting rusty.
You may already know that I’ve got a pretty complex setup here at Dave’s House. I have the media server in the basement. It’s an Intel dual core processor, it has a Hauppauge PVR 350 TV Tuner card, and two 200GB disks.
It runs Mythtv, and netatalk, as well as the wonderful mt-daapd by Ron Pedde.
Here’s the way things are set up:

I advertise the netatalk AFP shares via my ldap server, which gets advertised by — OOPS! — my dhcp configuration. You can set that up by openning Directory Access, and highlight LDAPv3, and click Configure. At the top of the property page, there is a checkbox labelled Use DHCP supplied LDAP… check that checkbox. I know, I know what you’re thinking… Dave’s just asking for his laptop to get hacked.

Anyway, this setup works REALLY well. I tunes thinks its library is at media:music which it is, and that works. What’s realyl great is that when I rip a CD, it automatically goes to the basement, so all my music centralized, and none of it ever hits the laptop, keeping that disk free for 10,000 more photos.

Cut to the chase here: lately, when I import a CD, the process can take an hour, or more! I’ve been struggling to figure this out. And this weekend, what with the dreary weather, is the weekend to get this problem solved. I have to say that I did not take an engineers approach, or a scientists for that matter.

I played with it last night, and did some testing. I was unable to get high speed transfers to work well. At least writing files over the network is very slow. Reading is just fine. So I can play the music in my library. but I cant import new music - not without intolerable delays, and possible timeouts on the client - which cause other problems.

So, I uninstalled netatalk, and deleted the /etc/atalk directory. Then re-installed, and started with a default config. I got what I was looking for. So now i can copy 5MB in about 3 minutes. Actually pretty crappy, but better than before.

So, I’ve made only minimal configuration changes to get my media AFP share working again, and did some more testing. So far so good. No drop in performance, so about 5MB in 3min.

Like I said, babysteps here. I’m waiting for the 2.0.3 of netatalk for fedora core 4 x86_64. This is still in testing… I’m still confused about why the performance is so spotty. It looks as though the bigger the file, the proportionally crappy the performance is.