Slashdot Mirror
Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?
Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"
My boss has definitely been influenced by the world of literature. Most of the things he promises people are straight from science fiction although the schedules are more of a pure fantasy.
Hush.... I am currently working on a big project called... The METAVERSE.
I make decisions every day based upon what I read on Slashdot!
I know one guy who claimed he was trying to decipher a morris code message from the HDD activity light but claimed it only worked if you used nasty font contrasts and coded in perl or something... We suspected drugs, but you would never see this kind of behavior in fiction. (grin)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
cat /dev/urandom | /usr/games/morse > /dev/hda
Try it, it really works. You must be root of course.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Did you just call my comment stupid!?
As the greatgrandparent of this post mentioned, many of us are better at expressing emotion and nuance through the written word than through facial expressions.
The lack of emotion involved keeps people from taking offense, and IMHO leads to less confusion. Flamewars aren't really arguments, but rather jokes.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
try {
if (kirk.shirtState() == Shirts.RIPPED_OPEN) {
FemaleAlien zand = new FemaleAlien(Boobs.BIG,Motives.TRECHERY);
FemaleAlien.initialMating(kirk);
}
else {
enterprise.selfDestruct(60000);
}
}
catch (CleverPlotPoint cpp) {
Script.out.println(cpp.plotLine());
}
Geeks comunicate better through striaght forward written words. If we had social skills we wouldn't be geeks.
How many robotics engineers haven't been influenced by Azimov?
I highly doubt that very many roboticists have heard of this Azimov guy. I certainly haven't, and I read *tons* of scifi. There was a guy with a similar name, though - Asimov - who was very, very influential in the field of robotics.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Yeah. That whole "moving around" thing with your "body" is stupid.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
not informative!
/.ers would understand it, but no.
/me thanks goodness that bsdgames isn't installed in Mandrake by default.
This writes morse code out in ascii text directly onto the primary ide hard disk. I figured
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's also very good at removing nuances in speech or facial expressions that prevent listeners from taking offense, or not understanding the joke. It may leave thought, but it may not be the thought you thought you left.
:)
Well, thats what emoticons are for
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... Bach's polyphonic works for inspiration when I design programs.
My colleagues are horrified. Have you ever tried to change a couple of notes in a Bach fugue, and preserve the integrity of the whole work?
Oh, I've worked in labs where people smoked pot in the fume hoods. But I like the sage idea. Yerba buena, I think that's another name for it.
My boss is so superstitious that he made us throw out a whole set of pipettors because this one guy he really didn't like had used them. He insisted that they were bad luck.