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I evangelised to my co-workers and managers at Maxis about how I thought Loki would be the ideal company to port The Sims to Linux. Since there really isn't much demand for a Linux port, I proposed doing a Mac port in a way that would facilitate them both. Before The Sims was ever released, I wrote and sent a proposal around Maxis, outlining how to port The Sims to the Mac and Linux, using SDL and Open GL.

I met Scott Draeker at the Game Developers conference on March 7 2000, about a month after The Sims shipped on Feb 4. I suggested that Loki port The Sims to Linux, because I was optimistic that it was going to be a popular game. He didn't seem to think so, and brushed me off, with a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.

But I gave Scott Draeker the benefit of the doubt, that he was just tired after a long day in the trade show booth, and not really as curt and indifferent to the idea as he seemed.

Once The Sims shipped, I left my full time job at Maxis to work on some of my own projects, but I kept working on The Sims for Maxis as a contractor. I worked on content creation tools, developed Transmogrifier and other stuff. I still have legitimate access to The Sims source code, and I keep Will Wright up to date on what I'm doing.

As a proof of concept, I started porting The Sims to Linux on my own time. I hoped to overcome the skepticism of some people at Maxis, as well as Scott Draeker at Loki, by demonstrating that it was indeed possible, and experimenting to find the best approach empirically.

My goal was to find the best approach to getting The Sims to run on Linux. Not just to use one particular technology or another. The end result is what matters most, not the way it's implemented.

Thanks to the encouragement of John Gilmore, I certainly did consider using Wine, but at the time it was nowhere near sufficient. (But since then, Transgaming has made astounding progress with Wine, and it's now obviously quite sufficient, to my delight.)

So I used SDL to do a native port of The Sims to Linux, and got most of the game running quite well, except for drawing the people and roofs (which would require hacking a system memory back end to Mesa), and sound (which would require using OpenAL, with which I hoped Loki would have been able to help me).

I was actually quite surprised at how quickly I was able to get a native port of The Sims running on Linux. My previous experience porting SimCity to Unix took a lot more time. But the tools are much better and computers are way faster now. And of course I was more familiar with the code base.

I offered the results of my work to Loki on reasonable terms. They didn't seem interested. I talked to some people at Maxis about it, and they said that Loki had been discussing it with Maxis, but they hadn't heard back from them in a long time.

I finally got some brusque uninformative email from Scott Draeker, and we talked briefly on the phone, but he said that he was really busy, he had a lot of paperwork in progress that had to be finish, and he'd get back to me some time. So I stopped working on the port, and waited to hear back from him...

I considered approaching other Linux game companies about porting The Sims to Linux, but decided to wait, because I still believed Loki was the best company to do it, and I did not want to undercut their ongoing negotiations with Maxis. Just the opposite -- I encouraged Maxis to quickly reach a fair deal with Loki, because I believed we could work together to get it to market fast. But Maxis wasn't the only company dragging their feet.

Months later, I finally read on the net that Loki had decided not to port The Sims to Linux, because "Maxis wanted too much money". By that time, The Sims had been topping the charts for months, so of course Maxis was asking a lot for it.

What I didn't know at the time, was that Loki was soon to declare Chapter 11. So it was actually a combination of Maxis wanting a lot for it, and Loki not having any money. But of course Draeker didn't mention that fact at the time.

But fortunately, my time and effort porting The Sims to Linux was not wasted, because Maxis needed The Sims to run on Linux, as the multi-player game server for The Sims Online.

So I used the original port at a guide, and more cleanly ported and optimized the newer Sims Online code to Linux again, making a headless build without all the graphics (removing SDL and DirectX). But the Linux build of the code is for Maxis's internal use on their servers, not as a commercial product for Linux.

I made the same code base compile on both Windows and Linux, and both with or without graphic. The SDL graphics code still works on Linux, but it's only used for diagnostic and debugging purposes, and not for production.

It's nice to run the graphical build of the Linux server in order to see what the server's doing during development. But the production server can't require a connection to an X server, and doesn't read in any graphics, because many must run on the same machine in parallel.

Even though Loki blew their chance to port The Sims to Linux, I still wanted to see it happen anyway. But because so much time had passed since the release of The Sims, I would rather put my efforts into finishing porting The Sims Online client to Linux, and work with some other company than Loki.

But I discussed it with Will Wright, and he explained to me in his reasonable, thoughtful, well considered manner: a native port of The Sims Online client to Linux would not be practical as a commercial product, because of its nature as a dynamically updated online game.

The way The Sims Online and many other online games work, is that the server and the clients all run the same deterministic simulation in lock step, funneling any user requested changes through a central "headless" server, so the actions can be scheduled to happen at the same time in all parallel universes.

So the server simulation and protocol must be *EXACTLY* the same as the clients, or all hell will break loose. Any online game, no matter what the architecture, requires that the client and the servers be in sync. That's not so hard if the game is trivial like Othello or Quake, but The Sims network protocol is much more complex and quite sensitive to incompatibilities.

So there is absolutely no way to support any more than one client executable, because the clients and servers must be updated together in real time by downloading patches, just like Ultima Online and other games.

In order for there to be a Linux port (or a Mac port), it would necessarily have to be done in-house at Maxis, built off of the same code tree, developed in parallel.

It is simply not possible for a third party developer like Loki to stay in sync with the ongoing development at Maxis of The Sims Online. That would require enormous overhead and resources on the part of Maxis, all for an extremely negative return on investment: it would extremely complicate and slow down the development process, require extra programmers, quality assurance people with Linux skills, etc.

Cross platform development requires a LOT of overhead -- please believe me if you haven't tried it. The gross income from selling Linux clients would be infintesimal, and would never outweigh the enormous cost of development. There is absolutely no way EA would ever allow Maxis to flush their stock holders' money down the toilet like that.

That is the harsh, real, undenyable reason that Wine is the most practical and economical way to run games on Linux.

I am quite pleased that Transgaming has developed Wine so far that it can now actually run The Sims! What's wrong with one Linux company coming up with a free and practical implementation of a great idea, that puts another Linux company out of business? Think of it as evolution in action, to quote somebody whose name doesn't deserve mentioning.

The way Transgaming has improved Wine is so generally beneficial, that running The Sims Online on Linux the very day it's release on Windows, is now practically in the bag! With Loki's pace and approach, there was never any hope of that.

The thing that matters most is the fact that a game DOES run on Linux, not HOW it's implemented. Real People in the Real World don't care about religious issues like if it's running under Wine or if it's a native port. It takes over the whole screen anyway, so what does it matter? The end experience is the same.

Thanks to the generality of Wine, now there exists a whole spectrum of solutions, from binary emulation, to recompilation, all the way to native porting. Wine could be an extremely useful tool in the process of doing a fully native port.

Those irrational people who reject Wine for purely political reasons, are doing much more damage to Linux than Wine will ever do. They're trying to argue that trivial invisible implementation details matter so much to users, that they would reject Linux if their favorite games weren't native ports, even if they ran under Wine. That's totally ridiculous.

The fact that a game runs on Linux at all, is MUCH more important than whether or not it's a native port.

Another advantage to Transgaming's Wine approach, is that all the existing free external tools like Transmogrifier, SimShow, Facelift, Art Studio, Home Crafer, Menu Edit, File Cop, and the many third party tools, will all probably run under Wine. And if they don't, Transgaming considers it a bug in Wine, and wants to fix it. Most of those tools will never be ported native to Linux, so the only way to use them is though Wine.

I just can't believe that people would attack Transgaming for all that they've done and given back to the community. The alternative is for Linux to simply hold its breath and go without most games.

The consequences of that alternative are dreadful, and much more harmful to Linux than the imaginary consequences of Wine. Now that Wine has been improved enough to run games like The Sims, it has so many other wonderful uses as well. Why would you ever consider sacrificing all that?

It's not worth attacking Wine out of political correctness, in order to wait around forever for native ports that will never happen. Please don't cut off your nose to spite your face.

-Don

I did this better in webcollage years ago. But of course I didn't call myself an Artist Collective, and I didn't put out a press release, so no article in the Times for me, darn. I guess that's why webcollage is a ``hack'' rather than an ``art project.''

I swear, one of these days I'm gonna apply for a federal grant to hack on xscreensaver . I've seen people get money for worse things . All you have to do is swallow your sanity and gag up an artist statement of some kind, and the literati will take you seriously: if you cloak it in pretentiousness, the most trivial piece of eye candy can become a Serious Work, full of Insight And Meaning!

The problem with art is artists. My goal has long been to eliminate the artist from the creative process.

To quote Don Hopkins (Unix haters): Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

Broadway was trying to solve an extremely complex non-problem for which it was never intended, that doesn't do anyone any good.

The only people who need Broadway are the people desparately promoting trash like X11 and Motif and CDE, who were put out of business by the web, Linux, Gnome, KDE, TCL/Tk, Python, and other useful technology.

What I said about the ICCCM would certainly apply to Broadway, had it ever gotten off the ground:

"In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor."

And of course JWZ's comment still applies:

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." - Jamie Zawinski

For more thoughts on the subject: The X-Windows Disaster.

And here are some notes on why X11 window management has gone so horribly wrong, which helps to explain why Broadway is necessarily such a horrible failure.

Window Manager Flames: Why the ICCCM Sucks.

-Don

Broadway was trying to solve an extremely complex non-problem for which it was never intended, that doesn't do anyone any good.

The only people who need Broadway are the people desparately promoting trash like X11 and Motif and CDE, who were put out of business by the web, Linux, Gnome, KDE, TCL/Tk, Python, and other useful technology.

What I said about the ICCCM would certainly apply to Broadway, had it ever gotten off the ground:

"In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor."

And of course JWZ's comment still applies:

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." - Jamie Zawinski

For more thoughts on the subject: The X-Windows Disaster.

And here are some notes on why X11 window management has gone so horribly wrong, which helps to explain why Broadway is necessarily such a horrible failure.

Window Manager Flames: Why the ICCCM Sucks.

-Don

You DO realize Mac OS X uses Mach as its kernel, not the BSD kernel, don't you? Thus, it gets its stability from something completely unrelated to UNIX. The only thing Mac OS X gains from having UNIX underneath is a bunch of old 1970s-era command line tools.

Bearing that in mind, would you mind explaining what you think is so "powerful" about a bunch of stupid tools like sed, awk, grep, and vi?

Here is some recommended reading to help you get rid of that "UNIX IS GOOD" brainwashing you're obviously suffering from.

KMP also wrote an animal guessing game that would get upset and warn you not to use naughty words. If you didn't relent and kept on cussing, it would get angry at you, and send some email to you and KMP, telling on you and demanding an apology. So you couldn't play the game again until you emailed an apology to his program.

It's great to know KMP is still teaching lisp.

But I've always wondered: who was the bright-12-old (who's now about 28) who benefited from recycling Jerry Pournelle's account?

====

From http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/pourne-smut.html:

Date: Fri, 31 May 85 09:39 EDT
From: Kent M Pitman <KMP at SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>
To: CStacy at MIT-MC.ARPA
cc: Klotz at MIT-MC.ARPA, KMP at SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA, Gumby at MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Pourne

Date: Fri, 31 May 85 01:11:16 EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA>
To: KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA

I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone.

Personally, I'd just turn off his account. It's not like it's the first time, and he not only flaunts his use of our machines but stabs us in the back with grumblings about why he doesn't like this or that program of ours when he gets a chance. (Am thinking particularly of an article he wrote which condemned Lisp for reasons amounting to little more than his ignorance, but which cited Teach-Lisp in a not-friendly light... The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)

====

-Don

X-Windows: ...A mistake carried out to perfection. X-Windows: ...Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X-Windows: ...Don't get frustrated without it. X-Windows: ...Even your dog won't like it. X-Windows: ...Flaky and built to stay that way. X-Windows: ...Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. X-Windows: ...Flawed beyond belief. X-Windows: ...Form follows malfunction. X-Windows: ...Garbage at your fingertips. X-Windows: ...Ignorance is our most important resource. X-Windows: ...It could be worse, but it'll take time. X-Windows: ...It could happen to you. X-Windows: ...Japan's secret weapon. X-Windows: ...Let it get in *your* way. X-Windows: ...Live the nightmare. X-Windows: ...More than enough rope. X-Windows: ...Never had it, never will. X-Windows: ...No hardware is safe. X-Windows: ...Power tools for power fools. X-Windows: ...Putting new limits on productivity. X-Windows: ...Simplicity made complex. X-Windows: ...The cutting edge of obsolescence. X-Windows: ...The art of incompetence. X-Windows: ...The defacto substandard. X-Windows: ...The first fully modular software disaster. X-Windows: ...The joke that kills. X-Windows: ...The problem for your problem. X-Windows: ...There's got to be a better way. X-Windows: ...Warn your friends about it. X-Windows: ...You'd better sit down. X-Windows: ...You'll envy the dead.

X has its flaws (see Chapter 7 of the Unix Hater's Handbook), but it was extremely important for the evolution of UNIX. Now, it's time for the next step.

X has its flaws (see Chapter 7 of the Unix Hater's Handbook), but it was extremely important for the evolution of UNIX. Now, it's time for the next step.

1. It's - what ever Anti-YaST-FUD(TM) may say - very well organized. Even if you havn't got a DVD drive you won't get a stiff arm from changing CDs for a normal install. If you do have a DVD, you can use that all-on-one disk. (iirc that was SuSEs idea)

2. It's transparent! Again, that Anti-SuSE talk is nothing but FUD. They come great lengths to tell people what they do and change and why - much unlike lots of other people who tend to spread their apps across tons of directories and seem to have no sense for tidyness. The X-Window desaster has a nice remark on this somewhere in the middle. (Allthough it's not quite up to date :-) )

3. It has top-of-the-pops documentation. Half of my Linux-specific bookshelf are made up of those books that come with that heavy box. And they are the ones I go for the most, because they offer answers fast!

4. Since 7.2 you can update with a couple of mouseclicks. YOU (YaST Online Update) implements that buisnessmodel that Mickeysoft thries to achieve with XP, to the full extent. And for once, it makes sense to do a speedy update of of an app or system component inbetween. Even third partys are starting to make dowloads YOU compliant (nVidia for an instance).

5. Even though it IS transparent and easy to modify for expierienced users, it's extremly easy to handle for anybody who is used to a GUI based OS. I consider SuSE the most likely candidate to get Windozers to see the advantage fo using a modern and professional OS. (After all, they, along with E and Loki :-), got me to ditch Mickeysoft for good)

Just my observations, but I think they make some points. If you're considering to purchase a distro or have a friend who is, get SuSE, you'll like it.

yeah.. looks like it is the same guy... interesting..

http://catalog.com/hopkins/arpanet/index-large.htm l

This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986.

-Don

www.catalog.com/hopkins/text/pourne-smut.html

-Don

Maybe the best way to think about his articles is to cheer for the opposite of what he's saying.

Much of the time a magazine big enough to have several columnists cover an issue will let one or two say bad things about a major advertiser's products as long as there are sycophants on staff who can be counted on to "balance" that bad press.

There are also apparently professional interviewees who give whatever comments are required to fit the slant of a particular story. Eventually you notice these guys cropping up more and more as word gets around that they can be counted on to deliver.

There was also the more benign case of Jerry Pournelle, who never called a tech support line that didn't like him when he wrote for BYTE. Everybody knew who he was so they treated him like a demigod, and it skewed his view of customer service in the industry.

Fun net.lore: How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPAnet

I must admit that I've never actually used NeWS myself, but when I glaced at the UNIX Hater's Handbook, the chapter complaining about X Window talked about NeWS.

Here's a snippet:

Sounds like science fiction? An extensible window server was precisely the strategy taken by the NeWS (Network extensible Window System) window system written by James Gosling at Sun. With such an extensible system, the user interfae toolkit becomes an extensible server library of classes that clients download directly into the server (the approach taken by Sun's TNT Toolkit). Toolkit objects in different applications share common objects in the server, saving both time and memory, and reating a look-and-feel that is both consistent aross applications and customizable. With NeWS, the window manager itself was implemented inside the server, eliminating network overhead for window manipulation operations -- and along with it the race conditions, context switching overhead, and interaction problems that plague X toolkits and window manager.

I disagreed with a good amount of things I read in that text though, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Interesting, anyway, though.


--harlan

Due to growing up in a tiny-tiny town with no money to upgrade the typewriters in the high school, I learned on a manual. The first typewriter I owned was, in fact, a manual (Smith-Corona Classic Twelve). As a consequence, I haven't had even the smallest difficulty with repetitive motion injuries, despite having recently typed a 154,000 word novel. My hands do cramp up while using the tiny keyboards on Compaq machines. This was solved by using the ErgoForce keyboard by KeyTronic; it has an added advantage of being very cheap. One problem to be noted: because of my initial training with manual typewriters, I go through keyboards with alarming regularity. The ErgoForce keyboard has lasted about a year. I figure it'll last about another six months before I pound it to pieces. For those not fortunate enough to have trained on a manual, there are exercises you can perform regularly (about every hour or so while typing) that will enable you to fend off CTS. Google came up with a few things. Here are illustrations of the exercises. There's a nice article about it here. There is even a hand-fitness guru out there, Greg Irwin, with advice and stuff to sell at www.handhealth.com.

Netscape 4 made the menu context change the top item, so if you tried to do the above over an image (even an invisible one, like one colored like the background) or frames, it wouldn't work--hence it was no longer gestural. (Which sucked. I downloaded the original mozilla source just to fix that for myself.)

It's possible to do more gestures using menus like this (so that it's not really separate gesture code), but gesturing a particular distance is harder than a particular direction.

Pie menus to the rescue! Pie menus open up around the cursor arranged in a circle. By making sure the directions to particular items are always fixed, it can be made gestural. (Not too different from Ken Perlin's alternate PDA input language, actually.)

Pie menus have been around for over ten years. There's pie menu widgets for windows and X, and even a piewm.

Two come to mind:

1. Catalog.com - Their Linux servers have really jumped in price, but they are running a special on slightly beefed up Raq3's (extra RAM). I don't have any personal experience with them, but I have heard decent reports from abroad and was highly considering them when I was looking for a dedicated server. I read on their forums before that a couple customers ded's got hacked, but they seem to take a pro-active approach to helping to secure servers.

2. CIHost.com - I am currently hosting a shared (virtual) account there and have been for about 6 months. I have had no major problems thus far (granted, it's not a dedicated server), but what issues I have had (questions, setting up databases, etc) have been handled promptly. As well, I just noticed that even though I used their online Credit Card processing page to pay for my last month, the charge never appeared on my CC and my account hasn't reflected the payment. Yet, my page is still functional and there has been no break in service. :)
As well, they are running a special on Dedicated Servers. Lease one, get one free :) That's a pretty cool deal if you ask me. They have an into ded. server (special doesn't apply to this package) that goes for 99 bucks a month. For hosting one domain, that is fairly adaquate if you ask me.

There are plenty of others out there, but these are the two I was really looking at when I was in the market for a ded. Still don't have one, figured a new car should come first =)

Good luck in getting everything resolved!

Years ago I got a call from some sad minion at SGI whose job it was to track down all the web sites publishing the famous 1993 "Software Usability II" memo, and whine at them to remove it. He said I should remove it from my web site, because it was an internal memo that wasn't officially released. I explained to him that it had "already seen fairly broad network distribution", having been widely published on risks-digest, and forwarded all around the internet because it was so hillariously entertaining. Why it's even assigned reading in university operating systems courses! It's a great thing that computer science students should be required to read this "wonderful record of what goes wrong with large software projects".

-Don

Years ago I got a call from some sad minion at SGI whose job it was to track down all the web sites publishing the famous 1993 "Software Usability II" memo, and whine at them to remove it. He said I should remove it from my web site, because it was an internal memo that wasn't officially released. I explained to him that it had "already seen fairly broad network distribution", having been widely published on risks-digest, and forwarded all around the internet because it was so hillariously entertaining. Why it's even assigned reading in university operating systems courses! It's a great thing that computer science students should be required to read this "wonderful record of what goes wrong with large software projects".

-Don

Antiorp has developed a vast suite of real time video processing plug-ins called "NATO" for the visual programming language "Max" which runs on the PowerPC Macintosh. She's implemented her own Quicktime streaming RTP video broadcaster (in spite of the fact that Apple's own Quicktime documentation says that the api is undocumented and that Sorenson Video Broadcaster is the "only game in town").

An artist/programmer can use the Max visual programming language and NATO plug-in modules to create extremely dynamic interactive audio/video art pieces, with all kinds of real time audio and image processing effects in response to programmed simulations, midi, network, video and other input devices. It enables sending and receiving real time quicktime streams, integrating and sharing live local and globally produced content, and jamming together with other artists over the net.

Unfortunately NATO is just as expensive as Max itself (about $1000 a pop), and it also requires a Mac with lots of horsepower, so it's out of the range of most starving multimedia artists. However, her product support is astounding -- she often replies to questions about NATO within minutes, and writes code and custom modules and posts new plug-ins and patches within days. But sometimes it's hard to discern the raving ascii graphics from the product support (Max patches written out as inscrutable text, and metaphorical anti-corporate diatribes embeded with oblique references to surrealistically named functions and variables).

She is extremly verbose and hard to understand, and you have to wade through a lot of impenetrable multilingual diatribes and ascii graphics to discern what she's saying. It's like she puts out a force field of noisy bullshit to drive away the weak of heart, who don't deserve to understand what she's about.

Here are a couple of her strangely named sites / interactive art pieces -- but first: please fasten your seatbelt and put your tray table into its upright and locked position:

http://www.eusocial.com/nato.0+55+3d
(My favorite part is the Amazonian "just 1 klik" order system you have to go through to buy her products.)

http://www.0100101110101101.org

http://www.m9ndfukc.com

http://www.www.god-emil.dk

(Be warned: These sites will probably crash your browser if you're foolish and self-flagellating enough to use a lame version of Netscape. But I suppose that's just another aspect of the performance art. If you feel put off, left out and persecuted, then that's how it was meant to be.)

-Don

Years ago I implemented the rule described in the book, and a cell editor that I used to make a few circuits. Here's a circuit for a 2-d cellular automata rule that supports passing signals along wires and performing logical operations, with cross over, fan out, conjunction and negation -- all you need! Theoretically you could program anything -- but timing is everything.

http://catalog.com/hopkins/art/circuit.gif

The top left is an "or" gate, with a couple of looped inputs that endlessly repeat the same values, and a graphical "ground" that the output flows out of (not connected to anything). To its right is an xor gate, and after that are a couple loops and delay lines. Below those is a half adder, and a criss-crossing fan out that duplicates the pair of signals a couple of times. Below that are a couple of half adders composed together to make an adder with carry. Next to last is a part of a circuit that I can't remember what it does, and under that is a pulse widener, that duplicates a signal, delays it, and ors it back into itself to make it into a longer train of bits.

It was really fun making these, since the simulator and the graphics editor were running at the same time, so it was like soldering live logic, with signals flowing through it in real time!

I've lost track of the original Forth source code for the rule, which is based on a Margolis neighborhood using a lookup table, but it's described in the book.

More stuff on cellular automata:

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/art/cell.html

Of course the granddaddy of cellular automata is John von Neumann himself, who designed a complex self reproducing cellular automata "universal constructor" on graph paper before it was ever practical to simulate them. It's reproduced in some historical ACM monographs on computer science.

Here's an actual implementation of John von Neumann's universal constructor, which is absolutely amazing to watch going about its business of reproducing itself:

http://alife.santafe.edu/alife/software/jvn.html

The paper computers would be great for implementing cellular automata, that you could draw on with a pencil while they ran in ferrociously real time!

-Don

Years ago I implemented the rule described in the book, and a cell editor that I used to make a few circuits. Here's a circuit for a 2-d cellular automata rule that supports passing signals along wires and performing logical operations, with cross over, fan out, conjunction and negation -- all you need! Theoretically you could program anything -- but timing is everything.

http://catalog.com/hopkins/art/circuit.gif

The top left is an "or" gate, with a couple of looped inputs that endlessly repeat the same values, and a graphical "ground" that the output flows out of (not connected to anything). To its right is an xor gate, and after that are a couple loops and delay lines. Below those is a half adder, and a criss-crossing fan out that duplicates the pair of signals a couple of times. Below that are a couple of half adders composed together to make an adder with carry. Next to last is a part of a circuit that I can't remember what it does, and under that is a pulse widener, that duplicates a signal, delays it, and ors it back into itself to make it into a longer train of bits.

It was really fun making these, since the simulator and the graphics editor were running at the same time, so it was like soldering live logic, with signals flowing through it in real time!

I've lost track of the original Forth source code for the rule, which is based on a Margolis neighborhood using a lookup table, but it's described in the book.

More stuff on cellular automata:

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/art/cell.html

Of course the granddaddy of cellular automata is John von Neumann himself, who designed a complex self reproducing cellular automata "universal constructor" on graph paper before it was ever practical to simulate them. It's reproduced in some historical ACM monographs on computer science.

Here's an actual implementation of John von Neumann's universal constructor, which is absolutely amazing to watch going about its business of reproducing itself:

http://alife.santafe.edu/alife/software/jvn.html

The paper computers would be great for implementing cellular automata, that you could draw on with a pencil while they ran in ferrociously real time!

-Don

"Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder."

-Quoted from Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games. A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins, at http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright. html

In the context of that essay about SimCity:

The anatomy of a simulation game:

There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user's model.

In order for a game to be realizable, all of those different parts must be tractable. There are games that might have a great user interface, be fun to play, easy to understand, but involve processes that are currently impossible to simulate on a computer. There are also games that are possible to simulate, fun to play, easy to understand, but that don't afford a useable interface: Will has designed a great game called "Sim Thunder Storm", but he hasn't been able to think of a user interface that would make any sense.

On the user model:

The digital models running on a computer are only compilers for the mental models users construct in their heads. The actual end product of SimCity is not the shallow model of the city running in the computer. More importantly, it's the deeper model of the real world, and the intuitive understanding of complex dynamic systems, that people learn from playing it, in the context of everything else about a city that they already know. In that sense, SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt are quite educational, since they implant useful models in their users minds.

On the simulation model:

Many geeks have spent their time trying to reverse engineer the simulator by performing experiments to determine how it works, just for fun. This would be a great exercise for a programming class. When I first started playing SimCity, I constructed elaborate fantasies about how it was implemented, which turned out to be quite inaccurate. But the exercise of coming up with elaborate fantasies about how to simulate a city was very educational, because it's a hard problem!

The actual simulation is much less idealisticly general purpose that I would have thought, epitomizing the Nike "just do it" slogan. In SimCity classic, the representation of the city is low level and distilled down compactly enough that a small home computer can push it around. The city is represented by tiles, indexed by numbers that are literally scattered throughout the code, which is hardly general purpose or modular, but runs fast. It sacrifices expandability and modularity for speed and size, just the right trade-off for the wonderful game that it is.

Some educators have asked Maxis to make SimCity expose more about the actual simulation itself, instead of hiding its inner workings from the user. They want to see how it works and what it depends on, so it is less of a game, and more educational. But what's really going on inside is not as realistic as they would want to believe: because of its nature as a game, and the constraint that it must run on low end home computers, it tries to fool people into thinking it's doing more than it really is, by taking advantage of the knowledge and expectations people already have about how a city is supposed to work. Implication is more efficient than simulation.

People naturally attribute cause and effect relationships to events in SimCity that Will as the programmer knows are not actually related. Perhaps it is more educational for SimCity players to integrate what they already know to fill in the gaps, than letting them in on the secret of how simple and discrete it really is. As an educational game, SimCity stimulates students to learn more about the real world, without revealing the internals of its artificial simulation. The implementation details of SimCity are quite interesting for a programmer or game designer to study, but not your average high school social studies class.

Educators who want to expose the internals of SimCity to students may not realize how brittle and shallow it really is. I don't mean that as criticism of Will, SimCity, or the educators who are seeking open, realistic, general purpose simulators for use in teaching. SimCity does what it was designed to and much more, but it's not that. Their goals are noble, but the software's not there yet. Once kids master SimCity, they could learn Logo, or some high level visual programming language like KidSim, and write their own simulations and games!

Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think.

Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like "which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?" He replied, "I just kind of optimized for game play."

Then there was the oil company who wanted "Sim Refinery", so you could use it to lay out oil tanker ports and petrolium storage and piping systems, because they thought that it would give their employees useful experience in toxic waste disaster management, in the same way SimCity gives kids useful experience in being the mayor of a city. They didn't realize that the real lessons of SimCity are much more subtle than teaching people how to be good mayors. But the oil company hoped they could use it to teach any other lessons on their agenda just by plugging in a new set of graphics, a few rules, and a bunch of disasters.

And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for free to Managers of Information Systems, whose job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have fun playing this game in which they could build networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers (instead of roads with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings), that had disasters like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's, and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows on every PC, and business charts that would graphically highlight the high maintanence cost of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use a fun game to subtly influence people into buying their product, by making them lose if they didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly realized the potential to exploit the indirect ways in which a game like SimCity can influence the user's mind, but they had no grip on the concept of subtlety or game design.

Continued in context at:
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright. html]

If you're really so autointoxicated that you'd consider buying Sun equipment, it would be much more cost effective in the long run to get a PinkBoard instead.

"You will be surprised at what comes out of you."

-Don

A CADR Lisp Machine spews its guts, on the 9th floor MIT AI Lab at Tech Square.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/cadr.jpg

JSol, RMS, the gerbil, Liz, and MG, at Kabuki in Cambridge. The expression on Richard's face is saying, "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?"
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/jsol-rms-ger bil-liz-mg.jpg

-Don

A CADR Lisp Machine spews its guts, on the 9th floor MIT AI Lab at Tech Square.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/cadr.jpg

JSol, RMS, the gerbil, Liz, and MG, at Kabuki in Cambridge. The expression on Richard's face is saying, "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?"
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/jsol-rms-ger bil-liz-mg.jpg

-Don

A CADR Lisp Machine spews its guts, on the 9th floor MIT AI Lab at Tech Square.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/cadr.jpg

JSol, RMS, the gerbil, Liz, and MG, at Kabuki in Cambridge. The expression on Richard's face is saying, "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?"
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/images/jsol-rms-ger bil-liz-mg.jpg

-Don

• The Unix-Haters largely come out of the community of users of Lisp machines, with a few "X haters" that preferred NeXTstep and NeWS;
• You probably don't work with mainframe folk; they are pretty desparaging of Unix-like stuff as being "toyish;"
• VMS users are a similarly proud (albeit seemingly fading) group that generally aren't big fans of Linux
• Then there's Multics ...
• Fewer people remember GECOS, Stratus, and such...
• PDP-10's ran such notable OSes as TOPS-10, ITS, all vastly not Unix.

GCC came about later as a means to compile Emacs (once it was rewritten in C instead of Teco). CGG wasn't intended to become so popular, or even to be used by human beings -- it just kind of got out of control.

If you don't believe me, here's what Stallard Richman himself has to say:

Why you should not use Unix

-Don

No-one thinks only Microsoft lackeys hate Unix, except for inexperienced newbie B1FF3R5 who've never used anything but Linux, so they don't have anything to compare it with.

You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/handboo k.html

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/etc/magoo.h tml

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/whinux/your -time.html

-Don

No-one thinks only Microsoft lackeys hate Unix, except for inexperienced newbie B1FF3R5 who've never used anything but Linux, so they don't have anything to compare it with.

You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/handboo k.html

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/etc/magoo.h tml

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/whinux/your -time.html

-Don

No-one thinks only Microsoft lackeys hate Unix, except for inexperienced newbie B1FF3R5 who've never used anything but Linux, so they don't have anything to compare it with.

You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/handboo k.html

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/etc/magoo.h tml

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/whinux/your -time.html

-Don

-Don

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

Farmer, 1993: Farmer, F. R. (1993). Habitat Citizenry. In Loeffler, C. E., (ed.), Virtual Reality: A Survey of Technology and Culture. Van Nostrand Rheingold.

Farmer et al., 1994 Farmer, F. R., Morningstar, C., et Crockford, D. (1994). From Habitat to Global Cyberspace. In Proceedings from CompCon '94. IEEE Computer Society.
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications/ papers/habitat/hab2cybr.txt

Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes. By Howard Rheingold.

Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud. MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.

The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.

Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!

Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!

-Don

Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud. MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.

The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.

Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!

Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!

-Don

Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud. MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.

The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.

Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!

Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!

-Don

Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud. MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.

The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.

Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!

Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!

-Don

Zork was directly responsible for getting me interested in using the arpanet, around 1980 or so. On MIT-DM, the DEC-10 running a strange version of ITS where Zork was developed, only two people were allowed to play Zork at once. So all the other people would hang around watching them for clues (using a program called :OS that let you spy on the output of somebody else's login session), chit-chatting by sending messages and email, and fooling around with emacs at 300 baud. MIT-DM was basically the first chat server / online game lobby / waiting room for a bunch of kids across the country awaiting their turn to play Zork.

The exciting adventure you had to get through in order to play Zork was dialing up an arpanet tip (which didn't have passwords yet), typing "@L 70" to connect to MIT-DM (which was #70 of the vast 256 possible addresses), deciding on a unique user name (since RMS was disabled -- err, differently challenged), applying for a tourist account, and making up a hokey reason why the MIT AI Lab should let you use their computer for free during off hours, other than simply "playing Zork". I think the phrase I used was "Programming MDL for algebraic and calculus applications." (I didn't know what it meant at the time, but somebody told me that would work, and it did!) Don't tell anyone on USER-ACCOUNTS that I lied, but at least I wasn't abusive.

Nowdays when everybody's wearing java nipple rings with more computing power than went into launching Skylab, the idea of MIT giving away free accounts for kids to play Zork doesn't seem like a big thing, but it sure meant a lot back then. Thanks!

Did they ever fix the "give axe to troll" bug in the Infocom version? He ate anything you have him, without checking if he was holding it himself. So he'd gobble down his own axe he was wielding at you, then cower whimpering in the corner waiting for you to kill him. Worse yet, you could say "give troll to troll" and he'd eat himself, and disappear in a puff of logic, without clearing the room's troll flag. So if you try to leave the room through the exit he was once blocking, he would appearantly suddenly reappear to block your way, then disappear again, so you couldn't ever kill him!

-Don

Here we have illustrated a key issue not often understood about schools: schools do not exist for the students. Simple enough? Schools, which are there - in theory - solely because of the students, are not for the students. When you understand why schools as they are today exist, then it all makes perfect sense.

This Sheldon Richman article, ``Horrors! Maybe the Schools are Working Just Fine'' explains it well, as does John Taylor Gatto, whom he references. Schools as we see them today were not designed for the good of students, they were designed for the good of the state, and in particular, to mass-produce good little unquestioning soldiers after Prussia's embarrassing defeat at the hands of the amateur Napoleon, which was a PR disaster for mercenary-powered Prussia near as big as Microsoft's recent demonstration of system security (-: BTW, has anyone found w2ksrc.zip 420763k on a warez site yet? ;-). Prussia, to survive as it was, thought it had to thoroughly subvert the needs of the individual to the needs of the State, and did. Schools (the regimentation, the systems of grading and competition, age segregation, large classes etc ad mauseum) were a big part of this, and we've inherited them.

That's why school seems insane if viewed as a haven for the principle of learning: they're not, it's a proletariat-worker factory which would be deserting its founding principles should it (God forbid) become a Realschulen and start actually fostering any bona fide learning.

I also commend to you Karl Bunday's site for many different reasons that school is bad for students, and you in particular.

So how about a chapter on this topic, Jon? I won't even ask for credit! <g,d,r>

Hey, you forgot to include the obligatory link to The X-Windows Disaster. :-)

You could, at least in theory, port a different set of those utilities for the Linux kernel- say the set provided with the BSDs- and get a GNU-free version of Linux.

This neglects the fact that all the free BSDs I know of use the GNU C compiler. To remove all parts of the GNU OS from GNU/Linux would require rewriting pretty much everything except the kernel.

Of course the FSF also neglects to mention that there's also a hell of a lot that's neither GNU nor Linux included in most distributions. XFree86, for instance, is completely separate but is included in just about every distro.

And you don't seem to understand that these are not part of the OS. An X Windowing System is including in most distributions of the GNU OS (including both those running the Linux and in the future those running the Hurd kernels), but it is certainly not part of it.

X11 is a protocol

Why, yes. X11 is a protocol. So is Windows' SMB protocol.

Being a protocol doesn't mean that it isn't inherently flawed. X11 and SMB are very much alike in the fact that they are a series of hacks, forced inconsistencies, and special cases for backwards compatibility. They are both dangerous to run in kernel mode because there is no clean way to implement a broken standard. You may eventually reach stability, but there will still be occasional "gotchas," and your code will never be clean and well designed.

If you don't believe me, try actually reading some of the ICCCM standard sometime.

Try reading some of the sections of the Unix-Hater's handbook dedicated to X, like this one.

If you honestly think that just because X11 is a protocol that it's not inherently flawed, then you obviously have never tried to implement someone else's protcol before. There is a major difference between implementing something clean and simple and something that is a complex mass of special cases. Yes, you still want X for a Mac, just the same as you want SAMBA for Unix boxes, but don't go thinking it's not a flawed system. X is an albatross hanging about the neck of the Unix world. It's a great example of how superior products can be crushed by flawed but free alternatives.

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/x-windows/d isaster.html

And he's not kidding. It really was the predecessor to the X Windows System. At least X wasn't named "W++". "W" was originally a black and white 1-bit display, although color was added later. Looks like the Yopy has color. There's also the Vinyl Window System, but it's not available for the Yopy.

---- ----

I totally forgot about NeWS until this article brought it up... This was wonderful!! A lot like NEXTSTEP's display system. Completely device independant PostScript. Since Sun is moving away from CDE in favor of GNOME, why not move away from the bloated hack that is X at the same time! Throw in some X11 compatibility libraries and open-source it and the world would be a better place.

Who was it that had a shit eating fetish. It was some big rock star...

One was Frank Zappa, though he denies it.