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Futuristic A New Life

Somebody save me from these first year students and their bullcrap D: Got hired by a college to assist students with their projects and stuff (Yay extra moneys) but I swear to god some of these students are so terrible and not improving that I want to give them a box of Lego and see if they can manage that. But now it is weekend and I can just relax and get back on track with the RP.
 
back from the woods! Also, to kill something is to rob it of life. A life killer is redundant, as there is nothing that you can kill that isn't alive. A killing-killer, basically. Perhaps you meant, hunter killer? Also, question. Is it possible to just throw up a memory buffer for that mass of white noise you just threw down the com lines and DD 'zero' to the buffer, producing a empty file? like, replace all the values with zero and then let it write nothing to empty memory?
 
"Life killer" is a tongue-in-cheek name :P They may be the most effective tool against characters at the moment, but DI doesn't take the threat very seriously.


Zeroing the data isn't gonna help you in any way; alloc->free->alloc->free thrashes your memory, memory-allocation layer, and your cache like mad. The problem is that the flow of data is so large, that the OS is forced to switch tasks to handling that data, pulling cycle time from you. Not only that, but since the task requires so much memory, its data is swapped into physical memory every single time the OS switches to it. This clobbers your data, meaning that your data must be flushed to disk. Sadly, disk is already SUPER BUSY trying to handle the excess data, so an already super-slow operation (reading/writing to disk) becomes excruciatingly slow.


Basically, if your computing power were a highway, Operator is taking you out by flooding your highway with traffic on the highway, and traffic coming onto the highway. And traffic going off. TRAFFIC EVERYWHERE.


@Gladius @Mitchs98 Punks, you're slowing us down!
 
FancyKiddo said:
"Life killer" is a tongue-in-cheek name :P They may be the most effective tool against characters at the moment, but DI doesn't take the threat very seriously.
Zeroing the data isn't gonna help you in any way; alloc->free->alloc->free thrashes your memory, memory-allocation layer, and your cache like mad. The problem is that the flow of data is so large, that the OS is forced to switch tasks to handling that data, pulling cycle time from you. Not only that, but since the task requires so much memory, its data is swapped into physical memory every single time the OS switches to it. This clobbers your data, meaning that your data must be flushed to disk. Sadly, disk is already SUPER BUSY trying to handle the excess data, so an already super-slow operation (reading/writing to disk) becomes excruciatingly slow.


Basically, if your computing power were a highway, Operator is taking you out by flooding your highway with traffic on the highway, and traffic coming onto the highway. And traffic going off. TRAFFIC EVERYWHERE.


@Gladius @Mitchs98 Punks, you're slowing us down!
Uhhh..idk what 2 post
 
Well your best friend in the whole wide world (that's Dhampir, just fyi) is getting attacked by an evil, gun-powered robot dog!
 
what about bandwith-my comms system can't write that fast. It's a radio signal, not exactly HD wi-fi. There's also the issue of "system time". Because of his passive interface power, Warlock thinks in processor cycles, much much faster than a normal nervous system. As a result, he and any other data-submerged entity would experience an altered sense of time inside of a computer. Each of them would make a few actions per cycle, (assumably future processors are well beyond multithreading)....which would ultimately result in them making thousands if not millions of exchanges per actual second. Presumably computers at this time are at least optical, and thus faster than radio waves. Warlock would have to be wired to keep up with standard computers, and would likely be at least near optical. This means he would react faster than radio signals, (light is faster than radio) and allow him to close the port before it crashes him completely. Basically, inside a computer, things run really really fast. How would this be handled in RP?
 
FancyKiddo said:
Well your best friend in the whole wide world (that's Dhampir, just fyi) is getting attacked by an evil, gun-powered robot dog!
Oh. Whale..I didn't read that post >_>
 
I'm totes fine with you closing the port before you crash. The intent is not to make you crash, but to force you to pull out of Operator's systems in order to take care of your own. It's a friendly reminder from Operator/Dhampir that you may be fast and good at what you do, but you still have a weak point (your physical body).
 
and the system time issue? If I fight operator, it may only take seconds if we fight at several million cycles per second. Should I mark my posts to indicate real time/system time divergance?
 
Assume that Operator puts up enough of a fight that it takes a reasonable amount of time in realtime. I don't expect you to detail the days of intellectual fighting that the two of you do :P
 
true....but it IS allowable to perform dozens of strikes in a second, with respect to the fact that several hours of digital effort just went by. Yes?
 
To understand the level of security we're talking about here, consider this calculation of the energy requirements to crack just a 256-bit AES key:


Time and energy required to brute-force a AES-256 encryption key. • /r/theydidthemath


Then realize that I used a salted 512-bit AES key for Dhampir's authorization to mark you as hostile.


Now, yes, you're probably not trying to brute-force an AES key up there. That would be real dumb. But, that is the level of security that you're up against. The system is designed smart, and you're actively fighting against an AI that has access to a lot more processing power than you do. So, you're going to have to try A LOT of different techniques, and you'll process A LOT of data and A LOT of commands.


More importantly, you're in space. Which may sound like a good thing; "Hey, it's really cold in space, so I shouldn't have to worry about cooling!" Except, no, a vacuum is literally the hardest place to cool off. A vacuum is an amazing insulator (that's why thermoses work), and so, on top of your own processing power (which, following Moore's law, would be pretty crazy however far in the future we are now), you have to take into account not only your energy, but also the dissipation of your heat.


In other words, your character's theoretical maximum computation speed is not your limiting factor here. Because you'd need to be submerged in liquid nitrogen to deal with all that heat. No, you'll be running at extremely-underclocked rates because otherwise you'll melt yourself, and that's not what anyone is going for here.


Yes, your character is smart. Yes, you have an upper hand because a backdoor has been left open for you. After all, you are intended to get into the system eventually. But, it is far from the fast, trivial job that you are making it sound like :P
 
actually, that is why I am asking you this, to calibrate. I do not know how fast it would be. While you are correct about space, I DO have a massive metal object to pour heat into, as the whole metal outer hull could be used as a radiator/heat sink. Or I could tie into the gun's thermal distributors, as such a device would need it's own heat sinks. Wouldn't be liquid nitro, but it would be better than nothing. Thank you for the references, I shall research and post when I have completed calibration. Your technical knowledge is most helpful....and here I thought you were a graphics guy, not a security techie.
 
Haha I am a graphics guy... just have fun with the theoretical side of the security stuff. I was working on a data storage system for a hospital at one point...


As for using the ship itself as a heat sink, that would only work well for a heat-based character who can literally pump heat from one place to another. Your character's surface area into the ship is very small, and beyond that, has lots of indirection between those parts that create the heat and the "heat sink," including a layer of paint! (Would still be useful to some extent, not gonna deny that.)


The ship itself avoids this whole problem by internally recapturing the heat from processing and using it to drive turbines! The more you knooooooow.


And yeah, don't worry about apologizing about this sort of thing. I am pedantic myself, and have been kicked out of RPs for asking too many gosh darn questions that the GM just didn't want to think about. I'd never do that to someone else!
 
Nicely met, I can follow that. Logical. Also, it will be really funny if warlock ever has to soaked in engine super-coolant to run at maximum processing power. Also....wouldn't more efficient conductors reduce heat-waste? less energy lost per impulse.


also, if it soaks all heat from processors and sends it to the turbines, the guns would have a connection to that. which I could likely tie into. ah well, semantics. Anyway, you helped make civ 6, hmm? You know what, I'll see your video game and raise you one novel. Because I have had it with badly written media and have put my keyboard where my mouth was.


Because book.
 
Oh nice, you're published! That's sweet ^.^ You gonna turn that into a series, or...?


As for efficiency of conductors, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Are we talking about heat sinks? Are we talking about computer chips (which are semi conductors, tyvm)? If we're talking heat sinks, more-efficient conductors do very little for you in this situation, as what they are efficient at is taking in and letting go of heat. When there's somewhere for the heat to go, that's wonderful. When there's nowhere for the heat to go, that just means that they arrive at the heat of the processor faster. This does mean that the processor is cooler early when it's just starting up, but beyond that means zilch for you. You'll still be limited by how hot you can go before things start just not working.


As for efficiency of semiconductors in your chips themselves, there is a bit to be said about that, but really only a bit. At the moment, we are apparently using about 5 times the theoretical minimum current required to actually change silicone from conductive to non-conductive, so there are energy savings possible there. But only at a magnitude of 5 times.


The efficiency fight here has been at two levels: manufacturing size, and component packing. But both actually are limited by the same thing: how small we can make our little information superhighways, and how high we can increase the speed limit, until information start literally hopping between wires. It's a thing! At some point, you get small enough that you introduce error that can't be removed algorithmicly, and that's as far as you can go. We're pretty darn close to that right now, though technology has always had a way of hopping over the hurdles placed in front of it. Technically, quantum machines should be able to avoid this problem because the distance that the data must travel has no relation to the speed of the transfer. I know little about quantum machines, though.


But, for component packing, we do have some ways to go on that front. For instance, take a look at the difference between DDR4 and HBM. By stacking memory in 3D rather than going with an old-fashion 2D design, AMD was able to place the memory closer to the computational cores AND increase the bandwidth, all while also reducing the clock speed (which results in power savings, woo!). There's room for this design philosophy to take over more of the market, but AFAIK the benefits of it are not the sort that are going to make as large a difference as we're looking for.


What you're suggesting sounds suspiciously like a water-cooling system, which really is what's going on. Sadly, you really can't "tap into" a water cooling system, once again because of surface area. And, just because you have access to some wiring for the gun through a hatch doesn't mean that you have access to all of the internals of it.
 

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