The Greek goddess of revenge, or retribution. She was daughter of Nyx. In addition to being a personification of the desire for revenge, Nemesis had a sense of equilibrium - she acted to make sure that undeserved evil was punished, as well as undeserved good. Her name means, "She who metes out."

She also acted as assistant to Zeus, in his role as God of Law and Order.

She was also mother of Helene of Troy, by Zeus.

Nemesis is the "righteous indignation" evoked by a lack of aidos in another person. The Trojans--and especially Hector, the hero of aidos--feel nemesis toward Paris when he hangs back from fighting in the war he is chiefly responsible for starting.

Nemesis is the feeling of righteous indignation aroused especially by the sight of the wicked in undeserved prosperity

A personified emotion from Greek mythology.

One of the lesser-known books by Isaac Asimov. It was published in 1989, only 3 years before his death. It is not part of Foundation, Robot or Empire -trilogy (which are really just one damn big series), but an independent and parallel story, although he hinted at foreword that he might integrate it one day.

Story of Nemesis starts at 23rd century. Earth has populated our solar system with space colonies to fight the increasing problems with overpopulation. These colonies are more or less independent and disdain the chaotic planet earth, which in turn shuns the snobby colonies. One of the colonies, Rotor, is led by particularly competent and visionary governor Janus Pitt. When Rotor accidentally discovers the secret of hyperdrive, Pitt decides to leave the squabbling mankind and go away to build better world.

In more local storyline is told the story of Marlene Fisher, teenage girl who isn't exactly best equipped in body department, but possesses such skill in reading body language that it's close to telepathy. Her skills come in handy with the newly colonized planet that eerily reminds me of Alpha Centauri.

So much for story, of which I told too much already; what did I think of it? Well, it was refreshing in a way. Although there supposedly grand events determining the fate of mankind going on, the storytelling was strangely soothing and peaceful. Events happened due their course, and there was not a single scene that could be thought 'action'. It wasn't a boring book, however, the story was actually quite fascinating. I don't know how old idea Planetmind is but chronlogically thinking, I'd say that creators of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri certainly read this book.

0/10 rating: 8

Nemesis is the nickname of a theorhetical and highly controversial companion star to our Sun. It is thought to be a small, dim dwarf, orbiting the Sun in an elliptical orbit, with a period of 25 - 30 million years.

The theory behind this star is the apparent extinction of large amounts of animal species, which seem to happen every 26 million years, according to David Raup and John Sepkoski at the University of Chicago. The most recent of these eradications took place 11.3 million years ago. Michael Rampino, using a different analysis, found this period to be 30 million years.

The basic idea behind the theory is that Nemesis, in it's passing, disturbs the Oort Cloud surrounding our solar system, and as a result, thousands, perhaps millions of comets will be sent out of their orbit, tumbling towards the Sun.

There is much controversy surrounding the alleged extinction theories, and very few researchers take them seriously. The main argument against it is that this star and our Sun would interact so weakly that other stars around us would jerk it out of its orbit. Also, numerous searches for large nearby objects have been conducted, and the largest detected so far has only 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Background


Nemesis is (also) an experimental operating system, built from the ground up to support Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in multimedia applications. Originally developed at the Computer Lab at Cambridge University, with later contributions from University of Glasgow (Scotland), University of Twente (Netherlands) and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

Goals for the Operating System include not only providing the necessary support for real-time and multimedia applications, but also the provision of a stable and flexible (and largely Open Source) platform for practical research in multimedia and QoS, particularly Network QoS (largely ATM based) and Disk QoS projects at Cambridge.
 
 

What is QoS?


Quality of Service, as a general concept in computing, is more or less what you'd expect from the name. A Quality of Service guarantee states that resources necessary to complete or maintain a process are guaranteed to be available within a specified timescale, and can be applied to almost any resource available in a computer system:

For example, to play a RealVideo movie might require 56kbps of network bandwidth, some buffering in physical memory, and a small amount of CPU time for each frame. If one of these isn't available at the correct time, frames will be dropped and the movie will lose quality.

In a traditional operating system, scheduling of resource allocation to a process is based on a simple prioritized time-sharing system, typically with the CPU scheduling demand-driving other resource allocation (such as physical memory). The availability of resources to a program therefore depends on the activity of other programs on the system. In the above example, where the movie needs 56kbps of network bandwidth, the movie's playback would be affected by some other application (e.g.. NewsUpd) requiring network bandwidth, particularly if the connection was via a 56kbps.

This unintentional interaction between different applications clamoring for resources is known as crosstalk.

You're probably already familiar with these effects if you've ever tried to use your computer while watching a DVD or burning a CDR. The cross-talk across your CPU usage or disk access will adversely affect the behaviour of the DVD player or CD burner. In the former the result is annoying; in the latter, you get coasters.

Nemesis schedules resources (primarily CPU time) by allocating a guaranteed portion of a resource to a process, and ensuring that it's always available.  The DVD player application above would be allocated it's required CPU time, and regardless of the activities of other CPU-intensive applications, the required CPU would always be available to the DVD player, allowing continuous glitch-free operation. If the operating system had already committed too much CPU time and couldn't allocate the necessary time to play the DVD properly, it would warn about this, rather than making a half-assed job of it and at the same time disrupt the operation of other processes.

It seems obvious, doesn't it?
 
 

Technical Details


Fundamentally, Nemesis is a microkernel operating system, consisting of a small supervisor mode executable (the NTSC, or the Nemesis Trusted Supervisor Code) managing direct access to hardware and driving processor scheduling etc. Since there's a fairly small amount of architecture specific code, ports exist for i386 PC hardware, Alpha platforms and various ARM platforms including RiscPC and Sidewinder.

All other functionality is provided by various layers of code libraries. Process model, file systems, network protocols etc. are implemented by libraries. Even applications are fundamentally libraries.

This greatly helps in accounting for CPU usage by an application. under UNIX and X-Windows, a video player process uses some CPU time to decode it's data, but also requires some CPU time in the X server process to render that data to the framebuffer. The necessary CPU time to play the video can't be accounted for simply as the CPU time used by the video player process: it also includes the time used by the X server on behalf of the video player. This is difficult to extract from the time used by the X server since it will also include time used on behalf of other applications. Nemesis' library based approach allows the entire activity to be carried out (excluding window control functions which are still handled by a single server application...) by the process itself. The precise amount of CPU time needed can be calculated and guaranteed to that process.

Nemesis is also a Single Address Space operating system. An object in memory will live at the same address visible to every application. This reduces context switching overhead by cutting down on the memory mapping required to move from one process to another, and on systems (such as ARM systems) which have virtually mapped caches, it eliminates the need to flush the caches on each context switch, allowing higher resolution scheduling in small chunks of time. This isn't to say that memory protection is absent; applications are protected from each other, but only the protection permissions are changed on a context switch. Other applications' data is still mapped into memory, but inaccessible unless explicitly shared.

This single address space raises all sorts of problems: A library may be used by more than one program at the same time. Data local to that library cannot be stored at a fixed address since multiple instances of the data must be kept. All libraries must know to keep their data at an address specific to the calling application. Global state in Nemesis is truly global. Since application programs are also libraries (and can be invoked as multiple processes), most C programs which rely on global state will not run without modification.

This has been the primary barrier to Nemesis' development as a useful platform, but has been overcome with the use of such tools as pre-processors which move 'static' state to structs referenced by a local pointer.

Libraries in Nemesis export their interfaces as a closure, in the CLU sense of the word: an interface encapsulating some state and functions (much like a class in C++, but without all the messy vtables). These interfaces are defined and compiled to C from an abstract Ada-like language, much like Mach's interfaces.

Nemesis has a CLU-like scripting language, known as Clanger, which allows libraries to be scripted, and the global namespace manipulated. More importantly, however, it allows Nemesis types to say "Yes, I do speak Clanger..." :-)
 

Far more information than you could ever possibly want to know is available from the Nemesis homepage at the Computer Lab:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/old-projects/nemesis/

The Nemesis expansion set for Magic: The Gathering was released on February 14, 2000. It was a smaller expansion set, with a total of 143 cards, and was considered part of the Mercadian Masques block. There were four preconstructed decks available for this set, and they combined cards from both Nemesis and Mercadian Masques.

Nemesis introduced a new rule into the game - Fading. Cards fading also have a number after their ability, which would read like "Fading 5". When played, a number of counters equal to the fading number is placed on the card. During a player's upkeep, every card with fading will have one of the counters removed. If there are no counters left, the card is sacrificed. Some of the cards with fading have activation costs that use the counters, shortening the lifetime of the card for using it's ability.

All of the new abilities introduced in Mercadian Masques are also continued in this set.

Artifacts

Black

Blue

Green

Red

White

Land

LaPorte Nemesis Lacrosse is a team built on, and building, tradition. This high school varsity lacrosse team was finally founded in 2003 after numerous years of struggle and failure. Based in LaPorte, Indiana, The Nemesis was aptly named due to the resistance to its creation. In the summer of 2001, Ryan Humphrey and alumni captains Adam Christ and Mike Gonzales attempted to form the team under the flag of LaPorte High School. The Athletic Director refused the creation of the team time and time again and thus the team seemed doom. However, the IHSLA (Indiana High School Lacrosse Association) bylaws permit teams to enter the league independently, without the consent and support of their high school, and in the fall of 2003, the LaPorte Nemesis was voted into the IHSLA at the State coaches’ meeting in Kokomo, Indiana. The tradition was just beginning.

In the fall of 2003, The Nemesis acquired permission from the LaPorte Parks and Recreation Department to use a field at Kesling Park, a large, green park near a local middle school. The field proved to be smaller than required but the team began conditioning and learning the fundamentals anyway. Twenty one players came out to the original fall practices (Tuesdays and Thursdays), many would leave and many would join in their stead. As winter hit, the team had no indoor facility and remained dormant, aside from a parent meeting, most of the winter.

As spring practices rolled around the team had a few irons in the fire. Early March, the team had scheduled to play in a two-day “Icebreaker” event in Louisville, Kentucky. This would cover Saturday and Sunday pitting the team in four games, most of their “skill level”. The players had one week of outdoor practices, on a non-lined field, before this opening weekend. During that week the team roster went from sixteen to nineteen with the additions of football player and defenseman Ben Rogowski, hard-nosed attacker Alex Rook, and skilled midfielder Brian Crum. The team attempted to learn a few plays but really mastered one: Stampede. This simple play would prove quite valuable as the team began a car caravan for Kentucky that Saturday morning.

Kentucky proved to be another tradition setting weekend for the team. Few parents were in tow but the Fara Family as well as goalie Eric Quadlin’s parents were strong supporters on an otherwise barren sideline. The team opened on Saturday, quite nervous and wet, to a quick loss. Much was learned and proved however when the team came back game two to a tie. They learned the hard way there is no overtime at the Louisville event. Saturday night, exhausted, the team crashed at their hotel. They had no clue what the next day had in store.

Day two, Sunday, was poised to be historic. The Nemesis took the field to another early tie, and, frustrated, found their schedule had them facing Ballard for their final game. Ballard, a high school known in Kentucky, acquired the title of State Runners-Up the previous year. Ballard was going to put up a fight. Ballard had no idea what was coming.

The game took an early physical turn. Ballard had a player ejected, penalties were piling up on both sides, and LaPorte had a lead off of a couple fast goals. The game came close but LaPorte took their first victory home from that game and the energy was unparalleled. The Thrill of Victory was theirs to embrace.

With a great weekend under their belts, LaPorte was ready for regular season games. With only a few home games on their schedule, the team was ready to hit the road and did so against Snider for their season opener, losing 4-1. Unfortunately, the varsity losses kept piling up. While being able to claim they went undefeated against junior varsity teams, their varsity record ended up 1-13, with a win against first year program Bloomington.

LaPorte Nemesis tradition has quickly grown. In the second year, they added a middle school team feeding from the two LaPorte middle schools. In year two they fielded a 24 man varsity team and 14 man (13 men and 1 girl) middle school team. The commitment level and dedication this team shows is simply amazing and the tradition will continue to grow from that one, first, hard year.


Season One

Opponent and Score (us-them)
Snider 1-8
Concord 7-14
Bloomington 9-4
West Lafayette 5-13
Park Tudor 4-11
Culver Military Academy 1-9
Brebeuf Jesuit 0-18
West Lafayette 9-10
Culver Military Academy 1-11
Bishop Chatard 1-11
North Central 0-23
St. Joseph 1-14
Pike 3-7

Team MVP Jesse Kousen
Attacker MVP Adam Christ
Midfield MVP Brian Crum
Defensive MVP Mike Thielen

Head Coach Ryan Humphrey
Assistant Coach Tim Gropp

Nem"e*sis (?), n. [L., fr. gr. , orig., distribution, fr. to distribute. See Nomad.] Class. Myth.

The goddess of retribution or vengeance; hence, retributive justice personified; divine vengeance.

This is that ancient doctrine of nemesis who keeps watch in the universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. Emerson.

 

© Webster 1913.

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