Jitu's Blog

Speed of bullet is something like 20-30 miles/hr, surprised? read on

Scene 1

Tonight we were having discussion (read fight) on Clark Kent abilities in my room. Anand pointed out “Can you guess the speed with which Clark can run?” and then we said may be something near supersonic. He said in his typical style "I can show you in one of the episode of Smallville he tells his friend (asks me his name and yeah I knew that) Pete that he can run with 20-30 miles/hour". We said that he is wrong because Smallville people can not make that mistake. Then he said "No I am damn sure that he did say that and its true". I said "abe tumhare dimag pe pala pad gaya hai" (out of your mind). He got angry and said "Come on I will show you?" and usual added "kuch pata nahi hota hai aur bake ja rahe ho"(speaking without knowledge).

Scene 2

We went into Anand room and after few misses we got the right episode (its 203). In a scene at the end of the episode, after Pete finds out that his friend Clark is from some other planet and he can run fast, both are playing basket ball. Pete says to Clark " How fast can you run? 20-30 miles/hour". Clark trying to be modest replies "something like that". We tried to explain avs that Clark is simply being modest. It something like getting batch-max and when someone asks telling him that about the average. He being an A-botian was not ready to accept. Then he said "OK, it is for sure that Clark can not dodge a speeding bullet". Bunty quickly gave one instant (episode 202-Heat) where Clark melts the bullet(shot by his father on Lex) with heat rays from his eyes. Anand explained that "We are able to see things moving much faster but can we move that fast?". Quite a convincing one (thats why I included this and if person who does not knows about this man must atleast know that he is very intelligent, logical and also remembers everythings, even the things taught in lecture on someday of semester while he was sleeping in class).

Bunty then again told another instant when Clark Kent saves Lana Lang from a cop (episode 120-obscura) by putting his hand in path of bullet and diverting it. (In this episode  of Lana gets strange visions and a cop kidnaps Chloe in order to get credit by saving her). Nandu explained "See that in this he is adjacent to cop when he shot. It is very difficult to move your body then your hands at that speed and it is possible that he can move his hand but moving full body would not be possible for Clark". Then one more incident came to our mind where Clark come to know that next target of the killer (actually he was freak killer) is Lex, he runs to save him at his corporate house in Metropolis. There killer takes headshot of Lex. Clark grabs the bullet and crouches Lex. But here also Anand said "He is not present in the scene, we will have to look at distance he had to run after the gun was shot". I said "Bolne se pehale soch to lo". But eventually he didnot accept it heartedly.

Moral of the story: "Speed of bullet is something like 20-30 miles/hr".

Today I went to the .net show site to see what all stuff has come in new episodes. (Previously Aayush used to download all the episode and shared them to me.) On very first page I got to know that the latest episode is about XP Media Center Edition. I wanted to know about what this MCE is all about? Can it be installed on my PC? so I tried to download it but somehow the validation failed and repeated try did not help. So I clicked on "play" button and watched one and a half streaming video meant for 300K connection (having largest size 175MB approx.) without any delays. Can you believe that here at IITK? The only regret is that I used up 175MB quota without having videos to share with my friends.

Now about the episode. As usual .net news update was not of my interest but l did not miss it :). Then two people from Microsoft who worked on MCE talked about it and demonstrated it. After that another person talked about how the application that can be developed for MCE using the SDKs. In last then 10 min some other guy from Microsoft who worked on MSN Media talked to beautiful lady.

What I could get from the video is something like this. MCE is for people like my friends who now ever days just searches for video stuff on net, download it and like to watch them preferably on somewhat big screen (>21 inch monitor) and like to control all from comfort of sofa using a remote. And also more importantly would like to share that stuff with others. In simple words I would say MCE is Windows XP coupled with enhanced Windows Media Player which can be controlled by a remote control, multimedia stuff can be shared, download, makes no difference between stuff broadcast, on internet or on your hard disk and most importantly developer can use SDKs to build applications that can be integrate with this Media Player. In other words we can say that as MS Office is for professionals same is MCE for people who are fond of videos and music. Only difference being that former does not come bundled with any version. (i.e. you have to buy it separately).

So if we try to estimate number of "potential buyers" of MCE here in IIT, it would outweigh the other OSs by 70 to 80%. I am not exaggerating. In fact people all over the world would like to have power of computers in their TV sets. And people who work on computers do use it for watching movies, videos and listening to music. So why would they not switch over to MCE? A single hurdle (that too minor one) is extra hardware (remote + receiver) needed to take real advantage.

Second thing, application development for MCE. Microsoft provides SDKs that can be downloaded freely from their site. A demo application shown in videos was a RSS feed viewer. Idea is that suppose you are watching a channel and a person writes a blog to which you have subscribed. You get a notification (as we get for Outlook), and decide to view it. You can view that blog as slide show on one part of the screen together with watching the channel. How favorable is it? I don't know. But you can surely built other application that can really be valuable.

So thats it.