According to this page, the VIC-20 started at $299 and in stages cut the price to $99 in a vicious price war with the TI-99/4A, which eventually saw TI selling for less than manufacturing cost.
IIRC, there really were experiments with chips whose instruction set was a simplified Forth. This would have been 15+ years ago, so I guess we can conclude they didn't work out so well.
I was looking more for "I want to take a big whack to my power in return for a higher score at the end of the game", which is orthogonal to your suggestion.
Without [corruption/unhappiness]... only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium.
This is my biggest problem with the 4X game genre - there is a point where you know you are doing well enough that you are going to win, but this point is often well under half of the way through the game (in real world time.)
I'd like to see an option where you can give up most of your empire to a new computer player (call it a civil war or something) and get a big bonus on your score for doing so. That way you can spend the whole game struggling against superior foes, which is when it is interesting, racking up a huge score if you can split your empire multiple times and still come back.
Another thing I'd like to see is variable techs - in this game, artilliary isn't so useful, so you'll need to adjust your tactics to account for it. In the next game, tunnelling is so effective you get the option for a normally unavailable tech, "underground cities". Etc. The closer you get to aquiring a tech, the more information you get on how effective it will be.
How long do you really think it takes for your scientists to figure out "porn" once you have photography?
This reminds me of a friend's comments on the original Civilization computer game:
"It's just taken my scientists 200 years to figure out the secret of 'horseback riding'. What were they doing in that time? 'Hm, we're researching "horseback riding". Lets spend a few years trying to ride the tails of sheep - maybe that is it.'"
Seriously. The group I work in has a Beowulf cluster. The scheduling is, IMAO, rather a mess. Although there are queues for (e.g.) jobs that use 16 nodes simultaniously, I doubt anything on such a queue would ever get run, because there are never 16 free nodes simultaniously. Short jobs can wait for ages for a node while long jobs run.
All this is hard to avoid with the current architecture. If it were possible to suspend a process, dump it to disk, and later restart on a different node, the scheduling could be much more rational:
* Clear 16 nodes to start a multi-processor job. Put the suspended jobs back in the queue for the next free processors. * Suspend long-running jobs to give potentially quick jobs waiting on the queue a chance to run.
(Disclaimer: I'm just a user on our Beowulf cluster - I'm not too familiar with the current capabilities. Perhaps they are more advanced than I think.)
Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.
1) The dinosaurs dominated the large animal niches for far longer than mammals have. It is a few hundred million years too early to start gloating.
2) The dinosaurs did survive - I can see their ancestors swimming around in the duckpond outside my window.
Speak for yourself. Summer has pretty much decided to give New Zealand a miss this year. IIRC, December narrowly avoided being the coldest on record.
But February is coming up. The weather's always warm in February, isn't it? Hm, what happened last February? - I remember! We had a 100 year flood in the city I live in!
(On the other hand, Monday 24th is a regional holiday, and I'll be with my nieces, so it promises to be pretty good.)
I have a DSLR (Nikon D70.) This is (1) insufficiently precise (won't detect subtle lack of focus) and (2) requires far too much fiddling with controls to do routinely.
that I or somebody might add if the cameras were reprogramable:
A preview mode to show sharpness of image across the picture.
After downloading from the camera, I often find a picture is slightly out of focus or focused on the wrong point - but this is very hard to see on the minute screen on the camera.
If I could (on the camera) see the image passed through an edge detector, or colour-coded for highest spatial frequency, I could know my mistake at the time, and take another shot.
I was thinking about a slightly different safety issue - we have a smallish object (speaker) intended to be held close to the skull. It is in clothing intended for use at high speed on an unstable platform in the presence of hard objects (rocks, trees.)
I don't know enough about snowboarding gear or this product to say whether it is an extra hazard. (Do snowboarders wear helmets? Is the speaker a small, hard object ready to be imbedded in the skull, or a wide rigid object that adds helmet-like protection?)
As always, Hewlett Packard got there first and better. (Yes, HP was once a great company, before the current management took over.) The very first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP35 in 1972, calculated exp(ln(2.02))=2. reference.
Thanks. My non-lawyery interpretation of that is that if I find it, I get to keep it until they sue me to get it back. In that case, I might not get to keep it, but there is enough doubt that I can't be done for theft, and hopefully won't have to pay their legal fees.
String theory is a 'theory' in the non-scientific sense. The other two, like evolution, are scientific fact - they are so well proved, that advances will be elaborations on them, not overthrowing. (As general relativity is an elaboration of classical Newtonian gravity - classical gravitation theory is only wrong in extreme cases of relativistic velocities or very large gravitational fields.)
You have no conception of how much modern technology relies on quantum mechanics.
Here's an analogy: In the USA, government may not (it is unconstitutional to) decide they don't like Voodoo, and therefore ban animal sacrifice. They may (and do) ban certain practices on the grounds of hygene and animal cruelty. These bans may prevent Voodoo animal sacrifice, but they are constitutional, because they were enacted for a secular purpose. (As I recall, there has been a court case over exactly this issue.)*
Evolution is similar: it is a scientific theory, developed in isolation from religious beliefs - it neither seeks to advance nor refute any religion. The fact that it incidentally conflicts with the religious beliefs of some people (as did the animal slaughter laws) is not relevant to the constitutionality of mandating its teaching.
In contrast, the stickers are entirely driven by religion. The 'open mindedness' argument fails because other scientific theories given the same treatment. Where is the warning that electrons and gravity are 'only theories'?
* I think there is a legal middle ground, where the law stands but a religious exception must be granted. I'm not familiar with the details.
Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. I am an athiest and an evolutionary biomathematician.
The Spirit of the GPL is to provide software that people can modify and use however they want, without letting others take the software and make it proprietary. But by making it impossible to run custom software on the target hardware, the use of Open Source becomes a marketing ploy and essentially a leeching strategy for development.
I disagree. E.g. Acme produces a neat digital camera which runs imbedded Linux. There is no easy way to update this software.
I run a company, Nadir Products, and I want to get into the digital camera market. I slap together some off-the-shelf hardware, buy an Acme camera and demand the source code, modify it to run on my hardware, and sell the resulting camera.
This is the spirit (and letter) of the GPL - the fact I can't reprogram my Acme camera is irrelevant.
Ouch! What ever happened to balanced reporting? That story is awash with editorializing.
I happen to generally agree with the editorializing in this case, but it severely erodes my trust in the paper's ethics.
Oh, wait, it is USA Today - the newspaper for those who lack the time for the greater in-depth news coverage of television. I guess I don't have any trust left to erode.
However besides that the only component that must completely be kept clear of any sawdust is your hard drive. Any sort of foreign molecule will cause it to screw up, so when buying a hard drive make sure its fully encased and not one of those drives which has its bottom open with the circuit board showing.
The sensitive bits of the drive (magnetic media, heads) are hermetically sealed, even when the PCB is exposed. Why should the PCB of a hard drive be more dust-sensitive than any other PCB in your system?
This is on top of many more inaccuracies/misconceptions pointed out in another reply.
I suspect IBM would rather spend the money than let this thing be resurectable - so they wouldn't take a settlement that didn't include something like dismisal with prejudice, or SCO's Unix rights transfered to IBM, or at minimum a cast-iron agreement from SCO that nothing IBM is doing is infringing any of SCOs IP.
I fought this argument on Usenet way back in (pauses to search Usenet archives...) 1992.
On one side were those who felt that artificial muscles could make mecha more viable than tanks, on the other side were those who pointed out that if the muscles were so great, you could just use them to power a tank instead of a walking coffin (to use your terminology.)
Characters in filename names are a rare commodity, to be used wisely.
In a previous job, I was (among other things) maintaining a tool for installing updates to a big vertical-market ap. We got a bug report that it was throwing errors over some file. On investigation, we found a java file with a file name over 100 bytes long, which was more than 'tar' could handle.
We could have done some workaround on 'tar', but instead we bounced it back to the developers and told them to fix their *#$*%&#^ file name. Descriptive file names can go too far.
Alias: "Let's play a game - can you guess what this means?"
Product: Eudora mail reader, Atria/Rational/IBM ClearCase revision control system.
Bug: Eudora: The 'check mail' icon has a picture of an envelope and a "check" mark. ClearCase: The 'check in' icon has a picture of a document, an arrow (in a direction arbitrarily ordained to be 'in') and a "check" mark. Notice the use of the "check" mark to imply the English word "check". Not only is this going to be completely opaque to every non-English speaker, it is very murky to about half of the world's English speaking population also. "Check" is the American name for this mark, in British (and Australian, New Zealand...) English it is a "tick" mark. It took me two years before I realized why it was on Eudora's "check mail" button.
Discussion: Icons are supposed to transcend language barriers - not to limit themselves to one dialect. A related bug are the highly stylized icons found on Swedish home appliances: circles, crosses, dotted arcs etc. These are quite incomprehensible without a manual, which likely has been lost. If they just wrote Swedish words, at least I can find a Swedish/English dictionary in my local library. Bug first observed: c1987, "Eudora" mail reader, c2000, Rational (now IBM) ClearCase.
Bug reported to supplier: Reported to Rational c2000. They told me where I could find the bitmap file for the icon so I could edit it myself.
---------------------
As an aside: I expect this one has long since been fixed. Macintosh, c1990, in a shared computer room environment: You'd start using a computer, and at some point the computer would demand that you insert some floppy disk. Said disk belonged to the previous user of the computer, who has left. The computer would refuse to do anything at all until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I knew of to this was a reboot.
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According to this page, the VIC-20 started at $299 and in stages cut the price to $99 in a vicious price war with the TI-99/4A, which eventually saw TI selling for less than manufacturing cost.
But they could still trademark "Intel 64" and "Intel Inside 64", so what would be the point of the silly pseudo-Roman numerals?
I think they could also trademark a sufficiently unusual style of writing "64".
IIRC, there really were experiments with chips whose instruction set was a simplified Forth. This would have been 15+ years ago, so I guess we can conclude they didn't work out so well.
I was looking more for "I want to take a big whack to my power in return for a higher score at the end of the game", which is orthogonal to your suggestion.
Without [corruption/unhappiness]... only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium.
This is my biggest problem with the 4X game genre - there is a point where you know you are doing well enough that you are going to win, but this point is often well under half of the way through the game (in real world time.)
I'd like to see an option where you can give up most of your empire to a new computer player (call it a civil war or something) and get a big bonus on your score for doing so. That way you can spend the whole game struggling against superior foes, which is when it is interesting, racking up a huge score if you can split your empire multiple times and still come back.
Another thing I'd like to see is variable techs - in this game, artilliary isn't so useful, so you'll need to adjust your tactics to account for it. In the next game, tunnelling is so effective you get the option for a normally unavailable tech, "underground cities". Etc. The closer you get to aquiring a tech, the more information you get on how effective it will be.
How long do you really think it takes for your scientists to figure out "porn" once you have photography?
This reminds me of a friend's comments on the original Civilization computer game:
"It's just taken my scientists 200 years to figure out the secret of 'horseback riding'. What were they doing in that time? 'Hm, we're researching "horseback riding". Lets spend a few years trying to ride the tails of sheep - maybe that is it.'"
Seriously. The group I work in has a Beowulf cluster. The scheduling is, IMAO, rather a mess. Although there are queues for (e.g.) jobs that use 16 nodes simultaniously, I doubt anything on such a queue would ever get run, because there are never 16 free nodes simultaniously. Short jobs can wait for ages for a node while long jobs run.
All this is hard to avoid with the current architecture. If it were possible to suspend a process, dump it to disk, and later restart on a different node, the scheduling could be much more rational:
* Clear 16 nodes to start a multi-processor job. Put the suspended jobs back in the queue for the next free processors.
* Suspend long-running jobs to give potentially quick jobs waiting on the queue a chance to run.
(Disclaimer: I'm just a user on our Beowulf cluster - I'm not too familiar with the current capabilities. Perhaps they are more advanced than I think.)
Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.
1) The dinosaurs dominated the large animal niches for far longer than mammals have. It is a few hundred million years too early to start gloating.
2) The dinosaurs did survive - I can see their ancestors swimming around in the duckpond outside my window.
Speak for yourself. Summer has pretty much decided to give New Zealand a miss this year. IIRC, December narrowly avoided being the coldest on record.
But February is coming up. The weather's always warm in February, isn't it? Hm, what happened last February? - I remember! We had a 100 year flood in the city I live in!
(On the other hand, Monday 24th is a regional holiday, and I'll be with my nieces, so it promises to be pretty good.)
I have a DSLR (Nikon D70.) This is (1) insufficiently precise (won't detect subtle lack of focus) and (2) requires far too much fiddling with controls to do routinely.
that I or somebody might add if the cameras were reprogramable:
A preview mode to show sharpness of image across the picture.
After downloading from the camera, I often find a picture is slightly out of focus or focused on the wrong point - but this is very hard to see on the minute screen on the camera.
If I could (on the camera) see the image passed through an edge detector, or colour-coded for highest spatial frequency, I could know my mistake at the time, and take another shot.
I was thinking about a slightly different safety issue - we have a smallish object (speaker) intended to be held close to the skull. It is in clothing intended for use at high speed on an unstable platform in the presence of hard objects (rocks, trees.)
I don't know enough about snowboarding gear or this product to say whether it is an extra hazard. (Do snowboarders wear helmets? Is the speaker a small, hard object ready to be imbedded in the skull, or a wide rigid object that adds helmet-like protection?)
As always, Hewlett Packard got there first and better. (Yes, HP was once a great company, before the current management took over.) The very first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP35 in 1972, calculated exp(ln(2.02))=2. reference.
Thanks. My non-lawyery interpretation of that is that if I find it, I get to keep it until they sue me to get it back. In that case, I might not get to keep it, but there is enough doubt that I can't be done for theft, and hopefully won't have to pay their legal fees.
"There is no god but Truth, and Science is its prophet."
(Quote is original to me. I used to wear a badge saying this.)
Or, later translated into mangled Latin:
Non est Deus nisi Veritas, et sapientia vates eius.
String theory is a 'theory' in the non-scientific sense. The other two, like evolution, are scientific fact - they are so well proved, that advances will be elaborations on them, not overthrowing. (As general relativity is an elaboration of classical Newtonian gravity - classical gravitation theory is only wrong in extreme cases of relativistic velocities or very large gravitational fields.)
You have no conception of how much modern technology relies on quantum mechanics.
Here's an analogy: In the USA, government may not (it is unconstitutional to) decide they don't like Voodoo, and therefore ban animal sacrifice. They may (and do) ban certain practices on the grounds of hygene and animal cruelty. These bans may prevent Voodoo animal sacrifice, but they are constitutional, because they were enacted for a secular purpose. (As I recall, there has been a court case over exactly this issue.)*
Evolution is similar: it is a scientific theory, developed in isolation from religious beliefs - it neither seeks to advance nor refute any religion. The fact that it incidentally conflicts with the religious beliefs of some people (as did the animal slaughter laws) is not relevant to the constitutionality of mandating its teaching.
In contrast, the stickers are entirely driven by religion. The 'open mindedness' argument fails because other scientific theories given the same treatment. Where is the warning that electrons and gravity are 'only theories'?
* I think there is a legal middle ground, where the law stands but a religious exception must be granted. I'm not familiar with the details.
Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. I am an athiest and an evolutionary biomathematician.
This was my thought. If you find such a GPS bug, is it yours by virtue of having been abandoned on your property?
The Spirit of the GPL is to provide software that people can modify and use however they want, without letting others take the software and make it proprietary. But by making it impossible to run custom software on the target hardware, the use of Open Source becomes a marketing ploy and essentially a leeching strategy for development.
I disagree. E.g. Acme produces a neat digital camera which runs imbedded Linux. There is no easy way to update this software.
I run a company, Nadir Products, and I want to get into the digital camera market. I slap together some off-the-shelf hardware, buy an Acme camera and demand the source code, modify it to run on my hardware, and sell the resulting camera.
This is the spirit (and letter) of the GPL - the fact I can't reprogram my Acme camera is irrelevant.
Ouch! What ever happened to balanced reporting? That story is awash with editorializing.
I happen to generally agree with the editorializing in this case, but it severely erodes my trust in the paper's ethics.
Oh, wait, it is USA Today - the newspaper for those who lack the time for the greater in-depth news coverage of television. I guess I don't have any trust left to erode.
However besides that the only component that must completely be kept clear of any sawdust is your hard drive. Any sort of foreign molecule will cause it to screw up, so when buying a hard drive make sure its fully encased and not one of those drives which has its bottom open with the circuit board showing.
The sensitive bits of the drive (magnetic media, heads) are hermetically sealed, even when the PCB is exposed. Why should the PCB of a hard drive be more dust-sensitive than any other PCB in your system?
This is on top of many more inaccuracies/misconceptions pointed out in another reply.
I suspect IBM would rather spend the money than let this thing be resurectable - so they wouldn't take a settlement that didn't include something like dismisal with prejudice, or SCO's Unix rights transfered to IBM, or at minimum a cast-iron agreement from SCO that nothing IBM is doing is infringing any of SCOs IP.
I fought this argument on Usenet way back in (pauses to search Usenet archives...) 1992.
On one side were those who felt that artificial muscles could make mecha more viable than tanks, on the other side were those who pointed out that if the muscles were so great, you could just use them to power a tank instead of a walking coffin (to use your terminology.)
Eventually I came up with a compromise position: Put the mechs on bicycles.
Characters in filename names are a rare commodity, to be used wisely.
In a previous job, I was (among other things) maintaining a tool for installing updates to a big vertical-market ap. We got a bug report that it was throwing errors over some file. On investigation, we found a java file with a file name over 100 bytes long, which was more than 'tar' could handle.
We could have done some workaround on 'tar', but instead we bounced it back to the developers and told them to fix their *#$*%&#^ file name. Descriptive file names can go too far.
Bug Name: Rebus icons
Duration: 15+ years
Supplier: Eudora, Rational (now part of IBM)
Alias: "Let's play a game - can you guess what this means?"
Product: Eudora mail reader, Atria/Rational/IBM ClearCase revision
control system.
Bug: Eudora: The 'check mail' icon has a picture of an envelope and a
"check" mark. ClearCase: The 'check in' icon has a picture of a
document, an arrow (in a direction arbitrarily ordained to be 'in') and
a "check" mark.
Notice the use of the "check" mark to imply the English word "check".
Not only is this going to be completely opaque to every non-English
speaker, it is very murky to about half of the world's English speaking
population also. "Check" is the American name for this mark, in British
(and Australian, New Zealand...) English it is a "tick" mark. It took me
two years before I realized why it was on Eudora's "check mail" button.
Discussion:
Icons are supposed to transcend language barriers - not to limit
themselves to one dialect. A related bug are the highly stylized icons
found on Swedish home appliances: circles, crosses, dotted arcs etc.
These are quite incomprehensible without a manual, which likely has been
lost. If they just wrote Swedish words, at least I can find a
Swedish/English dictionary in my local library.
Bug first observed: c1987, "Eudora" mail reader, c2000, Rational (now
IBM) ClearCase.
Bug reported to supplier: Reported to Rational c2000. They told me where
I could find the bitmap file for the icon so I could edit it myself.
---------------------
As an aside: I expect this one has long since been fixed. Macintosh,
c1990, in a shared computer room environment: You'd start using a
computer, and at some point the computer would demand that you insert
some floppy disk. Said disk belonged to the previous user of the
computer, who has left. The computer would refuse to do anything at all
until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I
knew of to this was a reboot.