I don't notice anything particularly bad about the color scheme. OTOH, I've changed my prefs to "Light" and "No Icons", so everything looks the same on Netscape and AvantGo.
Don't confuse the trailer with my speculation. The plot points that I noted were specific to "A Bug's Life", not "Seven Samurai" (unless Kurosawa's epic had eight-foot tall insectoid villians that I somehow missed).
I just finished watching the trailer, and I couldn't help thinking that the plot seemed just a bit familar. Let's see, likable humanoid characters living in a dark three-dimensional community, terrorized by large insectoid villians who want free (as in beer) food. Finally, one character leaves home to search for a way to overthrow the thugs.
So what happens next? Does the girl meet up with an bunch of itenerant "circus bugs"? Do they build a giant mechanical bird to try to frighten the villians away? Inquiring minds want to know!
But the ASP never copies the program to your computer's memory. The program sits on the server, does its thing, and the output is the only thing that gets transfered across the 'net.
In the late 1970's, I got a mainframe FORTRAN version, loaded it up on the IBM 370 at work, and played it over a 300 baud dial-up line every night for several weeks. Early on, my girl friend was looking over my shoulder as I tried to get past the snake. After several failed attempts, she said, "You know, some types of _____ kill snakes." It worked, and we got married soon thereafter.
The first time that I (unexpectedly) entered the " twisty little maze with passages all alike", it was like getting sucker punched. I had to get up and walk around to collect my thoughts before continuing. Fortunately, moving the opposite direction let me get back out before I had a chance to get lost.
I also still remember the first time I found the volcano view. It was visually (and yes, I know it's a TEXT adventure!) stunning, more so than anything I've seen in the years since. Years before Infocom, it proved that your imagination is better than any graphics hardware.
And yes, like so many others have posted, I did have dreams about the game.
Episode Title: 'Bounty' Episode Number: 225 Airdate: May 14, 2003 Synopsis: "A Tellarite bounty hunter captures Archer intending to turn him over to the Klingons for a substantial reward. Meanwhile, T'Pol is infected with an alien pathogen that unleashes her primal Vulcan urges."
You said it yourself: "Neither programmers nor system administrators like diversity in the underlying environment: it makes debugging much more difficult." So, the solution isn't to switch en masse to Java or Perl; the solution is to make it harder to write insecure code in gcc. No one should be using sprintf anymore, so why doesn't its use triggers a warning of some sort? For instance, have libc only export "unsafe_sprintf", and have stdio.h #define sprintf to that *and* emit a #pragma warning each time it's used.
I took a break from the obsessive viewing of cable news networks (yeah, BBC!) to look at this. The first few pages loaded OK, then at precisely 5am CST it went to hell, apparently slashdotted. A few things that I noted...
neowin's web interface sucks!
There are 18 pages in the article, but there's no "Next" or "Prevous" links. Instead, you have to pick out the next page from a list in the lower left corner of the page. Over in the lower right, there's what's apparently supposed to be a better navigation tool, but it seemed to be stuck on "1 2 3... >>", where the "..." wasn't a link. The digits took you to the appropriate pages, the ">>" seems to be to take you to the last page, but instead takes you to page 10.
Also, clicking on any of the images brought it up in a new window, overlaying the original, so I couldn't navigate back except by closing the window. That really sucked, and discouraged me from investigating many of the images. (Of course, if you're anticipating being slashdotted, maybe you don't want people trying to load many of the images!)
Overall, I'd submit this article for inclusion in the hall of shame, except that http://www.iarchitect.com/ doesn't seem to have survived the dot-bomb crash.
Tritium isn't plutonium. It decays relatively quickly. Waiting eight half-lives eliminates over 99.5% of any radioactive material; for tritium that translates into less than a century.
Projecting my digital photos using a video projector gives them a vividness unlike anything I've ever seen in a hard copy. There's an "inner glow" to a projected image that paper just can't match.;-)
That brings up a good point. Maybe somebody should rename "Mailer Daemon" to "Email Robot". There are probably people who think that somebody named Mailer (mom was a Normal Mailer fan) Daemon (probably some "furiner") runs the ISP email system.
You apparently didn't follow the link. The link didn't lead to the story, it pointed to a discussion of the story's release under the Creative Commons license. Cory Doctorow didn't just write a story about a principle, he applied that principle to the publication of the story. He hoped to increase sales by getting "word of mouth" publicity via the simultaneous release of an electronic version of the story. Cory Doctorow not only professes disagreement with the original post's premise, he demonstrates that the premise is faulty.
Why is it that the ring was forgotten by all, but everyone who turns up in the book knows about it? Eh?
The ring is similar to the Holy Grail in the Arthurian legends, in that everyone knows what it is, but no body knows where it is. Bilbo found the ring in "The Hobbit" and kept it for several decades before Gandolf got off his butt and figured out what it was. Even then, if Frodo were to walk into the Prancing Pony and say, "Look here, I've got the One Ring!", everyone would shrug their shoulders and go back to drinking. The only characters who take an interest in the ring are those who trust either Gandalf's or Sauron's opinion of its identity.
Thus the black riders were told by Sauron to go to the Shire and try to sniff it out; once they arrived at the Prancing Pony they got busy asking about the ring and if anything unusual had occured recently (like people turning invisible).
Here's an idea that uses existing SMTP to accomplish much of what's been suggested, while avoiding certain drawbacks.
Someone's server connects to yours and sends the MAIL TO and RCPT FROM commands. Your server checks this info, along with the originating IP address), against a list of pre-authenticated sites (your employer, your family, etc) to decide if it will accept the DATA command. If so, you get the mail; otherwise the connection is severed. The sender should then start retrying deliveries intermittently over the next few days.
Meanwhile, you get a message from your server telling you that mail is available from so-and-so addressed to such-and-such. You use a canned reply: DENY, to keep rejecting the mail until the server gives us, ACCEPT ONCE, to accept the next message with that description, or ACCEPT FOREVER, to add the description to your permanent acceptance list.
Note that "important" stuff gets fully delivered immediately, so you can check your email offline later, while potential spam is held at the sender's expense, not yours.
Also note a simple variation on this idea: your SMTP sever could decide to accept the DATA commnand, but then read the mail headers, evaluate them, and then decide whether to break the connection prior to accepting the body of the message. This would give you enough data to perform stochastic filtering on the message. (I've seen reports that indicate that the headers are the most useful data when applying spam filters.)
My tag analogy makes lots of sense. I don't know which country my stuffed animal is from, because I can't read the label. I can, however, tell that the label isn't from any country using the Latin character set. Likewise, we can't tell what star created the dust particles, but we can tell that it isn't from around here.
The only planet in our solar system that could be the source of either particles or radiation such as you describe would be Pluto. We've sent robots to all of the others without seeing anything such as you describe. When you can provide a mechanism that explains how a cold object that's closer in size to an asteroid than a planet could do this, people will listen. Also, those robots have also mapped the solar systems magnetic fields, so the idea that magnetic fields somehow redirect point-source radiation to appear to come from all directions equally doesn't hold water, either. As for non-magnetic fields, gravity fields large enough to do the job would have other visible side-effects on planetary orbits, while quantum fields don't have the range.
It takes the Sun a lot of effort to produce heat. Effort means work, which has a precise formula for its calculation. Or don't you think that those descriptions of "the equivalent of X million atomic bombs going off every second" denote anything?
If a narrow-band radiation-emitting "fog" were part of empty space, we would see evidence in several ways. Depending on the scale, stars or galaxies would appear different to us according to their distance. If local phenomena cleared away the fog close to us (in an astronomical sense), the fog would appear to be more shell-like and we would observe shell-like effects, unless we are at the exact center of the shell. That seems unlikely, since we aren't anywhere near the center of the solar system, our arm of the galaxy, or the local cluster of galaxies.
Soviet scientists observed the same radiation as Western scientists using instruments built with very different technologies. The only thing that they have in common are Maxwell's equations, which seem to work well enough for designing your TV set and the ICs in your computer. If you can provide equations that work exactly like Maxwell's except for predicting the spurious reception of frequencies identical to the cosmic black-body radiation, people will listen.
A lot of science works like counting cards in blackjack. For instance, once all the face cards have been dealt, you don't have to physically examine the deck to know that you won't bust on a twelve. Likewise, science sees certain phenomena and reaches certain conclusions about the nature of the universe, without having to travel beyond our solar system. The same conclusions that led to the development of your freezer or cellphone also led to certain deductions about the nature of the universe. Now, I'll admit the possibility that the game is rigged. Maybe electricity is a fraud to steal my money. Maybe gnomes stuff ice in the walls of my freezer when I'm not looking. Maybe when I talk on my cell phone, I really talking to a very tiny parrot (cared for nightly by those same gnomes) who uses telepathy to communicate with other parrots in other cell phones.
The other trick was to fopen(3) a new file, do a large fseek(3) and fclose(3) the filehandle. Then simply read the file to get the data that had been written on the disk blocks previously.
Actually, that would create a sparse file which ls(1) would report as having a size of "large" bytes, but du(1) would report as occuping zero blocks.
OK, I know its a troll, but I've been sucked in anyway. Let me try to answer two of your points.
They don't. They don't have any way of knowing it's from another solar system, since they have never been in another solar system.
I've never been to a different continent. I have a stuffed goldfish that's from a different continent. I can tell by reading its tag. Yes, really. It could have been made here, but that would mean that it was sold with a fake tag, which is very unlikely given the effort required to produce one, and without a legitimate tag, because someone would have had to remove the original, which is unlikely because I see no evidence of that. Likewise, the dust particles have tags (oxygen isotope ratios). To have a very different ratio would require a great deal of effort, along the lines of a naturally occuring gaseous diffusion isotope seperator, plus any deposits of oxygen atoms at the original ratio would have to be removed, which would also leave evidence.
We have no way of knowing whether the [background microwave] radiation is just inherent to our solar system, galaxy, or even planet. In fact, it is most likely that the instruments themselves are the problem.
Let's first assume that the radiation comes from a spherical shell that surrounds us. If the shell enclosed just our planet, we would see minor changes in intensity at different altitudes. If it enclosed just our solar system, we would see minor changes in intensity as we orbited the sun. If it enclosed just our galaxy, we would see minor directional changes in intensity as look in different directions (since we aren't at the galatic center). Now let's assume that the radiation comes from a fog that we're embedded within. In this case, we would see the radiation even when looking at something that would block it (the moon, distant galaxies, etc), but we don't. Finally, if the instruments are the problem, we would see differences as we used different instruments.
You obviously don't understand the time value of money. From a pure dollars-and-cents perspective, if the inflation-adjusted annual profit from treatment is less than roughly 5% of the profit of the cure, then it's more profitable to treat, otherwise it's more profitable to cure.
An example: I used to have chronic athete's foot, and I got by just fine with the over-the-counter treatments. Then I got a nail fungus infection, that I also lived with for a few years. I got eventually got tired of the appearance of the toenail and got a prescription for some pill to cure it, which also knocked out the athlete's foot. The pills for the cure cost several hundred dollars, whereas foot-powder cost very little, so the cure was much more profitable.
The turing test measures the performance of something not it's competence. [...] Imaginge a person in a paralyzed state, they have the competance but lack the ability to performance.
I'm not sure what you mean. The two sentences that I quoted seem to indicate that Christopher Reeves couldn't participate in a Turing Test. Turing's insight was that performance is the only measure that we have of intellegence. His paper actually included several hypothetical ways by which performance isn't the only measure. For example, parapsychological effects: you look at a Rhine Card and ask the testee what you're looking at. If humans consistently guess better (or worse!) than computers, then the Turing Test is invalid (and a whole new field of scientific study has opened up).
On the other hand, you could ask Chris Reeve (or a computer) to play chess with you. Either could say, "Sorry, I don't have a board handy, how about tic-tac-toe?"
As you read this, are you evaluating my competance or my performance? How do you know that I'm not really a bot from Cycorp?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't notice anything particularly bad about the color scheme. OTOH, I've changed my prefs to "Light" and "No Icons", so everything looks the same on Netscape and AvantGo.
Don't confuse the trailer with my speculation. The plot points that I noted were specific to "A Bug's Life", not "Seven Samurai" (unless Kurosawa's epic had eight-foot tall insectoid villians that I somehow missed).
So what happens next? Does the girl meet up with an bunch of itenerant "circus bugs"? Do they build a giant mechanical bird to try to frighten the villians away? Inquiring minds want to know!
But the ASP never copies the program to your computer's memory. The program sits on the server, does its thing, and the output is the only thing that gets transfered across the 'net.
The first time that I (unexpectedly) entered the " twisty little maze with passages all alike", it was like getting sucker punched. I had to get up and walk around to collect my thoughts before continuing. Fortunately, moving the opposite direction let me get back out before I had a chance to get lost.
I also still remember the first time I found the volcano view. It was visually (and yes, I know it's a TEXT adventure!) stunning, more so than anything I've seen in the years since. Years before Infocom, it proved that your imagination is better than any graphics hardware.
And yes, like so many others have posted, I did have dreams about the game.
Just wait a couple of weeks.
How about this:
Episode Title: 'Bounty'
Episode Number: 225
Airdate: May 14, 2003
Synopsis: "A Tellarite bounty hunter captures Archer intending to turn him over to the Klingons for a substantial reward. Meanwhile, T'Pol is infected with an alien pathogen that unleashes her primal Vulcan urges."
So obviously, we should write everything in Z-code, which runs on possibly the most portable virtual machine ever created.
You said it yourself: "Neither programmers nor system administrators like diversity in the underlying environment: it makes debugging much more difficult." So, the solution isn't to switch en masse to Java or Perl; the solution is to make it harder to write insecure code in gcc. No one should be using sprintf anymore, so why doesn't its use triggers a warning of some sort? For instance, have libc only export "unsafe_sprintf", and have stdio.h #define sprintf to that *and* emit a #pragma warning each time it's used.
neowin's web interface sucks!
There are 18 pages in the article, but there's no "Next" or "Prevous" links. Instead, you have to pick out the next page from a list in the lower left corner of the page. Over in the lower right, there's what's apparently supposed to be a better navigation tool, but it seemed to be stuck on "1 2 3 ... >>", where the "..." wasn't a link. The digits took you to the appropriate pages, the ">>" seems to be to take you to the last page, but instead takes you to page 10.
Also, clicking on any of the images brought it up in a new window, overlaying the original, so I couldn't navigate back except by closing the window. That really sucked, and discouraged me from investigating many of the images. (Of course, if you're anticipating being slashdotted, maybe you don't want people trying to load many of the images!)
Overall, I'd submit this article for inclusion in the hall of shame, except that http://www.iarchitect.com/ doesn't seem to have survived the dot-bomb crash.
Tritium isn't plutonium. It decays relatively quickly. Waiting eight half-lives eliminates over 99.5% of any radioactive material; for tritium that translates into less than a century.
Projecting my digital photos using a video projector gives them a vividness unlike anything I've ever seen in a hard copy. There's an "inner glow" to a projected image that paper just can't match. ;-)
That brings up a good point. Maybe somebody should rename "Mailer Daemon" to "Email Robot". There are probably people who think that somebody named Mailer (mom was a Normal Mailer fan) Daemon (probably some "furiner") runs the ISP email system.
You apparently didn't follow the link. The link didn't lead to the story, it pointed to a discussion of the story's release under the Creative Commons license. Cory Doctorow didn't just write a story about a principle, he applied that principle to the publication of the story. He hoped to increase sales by getting "word of mouth" publicity via the simultaneous release of an electronic version of the story. Cory Doctorow not only professes disagreement with the original post's premise, he demonstrates that the premise is faulty.
Janis Ian's experiences
Advice for the aspiring musician
Baen Free Library
Why is it that the ring was forgotten by all, but everyone who turns up in the book knows about it? Eh?
The ring is similar to the Holy Grail in the Arthurian legends, in that everyone knows what it is, but no body knows where it is. Bilbo found the ring in "The Hobbit" and kept it for several decades before Gandolf got off his butt and figured out what it was. Even then, if Frodo were to walk into the Prancing Pony and say, "Look here, I've got the One Ring!", everyone would shrug their shoulders and go back to drinking. The only characters who take an interest in the ring are those who trust either Gandalf's or Sauron's opinion of its identity.
Thus the black riders were told by Sauron to go to the Shire and try to sniff it out; once they arrived at the Prancing Pony they got busy asking about the ring and if anything unusual had occured recently (like people turning invisible).
Someone's server connects to yours and sends the MAIL TO and RCPT FROM commands. Your server checks this info, along with the originating IP address), against a list of pre-authenticated sites (your employer, your family, etc) to decide if it will accept the DATA command. If so, you get the mail; otherwise the connection is severed. The sender should then start retrying deliveries intermittently over the next few days.
Meanwhile, you get a message from your server telling you that mail is available from so-and-so addressed to such-and-such. You use a canned reply: DENY, to keep rejecting the mail until the server gives us, ACCEPT ONCE, to accept the next message with that description, or ACCEPT FOREVER, to add the description to your permanent acceptance list.
Note that "important" stuff gets fully delivered immediately, so you can check your email offline later, while potential spam is held at the sender's expense, not yours.
Also note a simple variation on this idea: your SMTP sever could decide to accept the DATA commnand, but then read the mail headers, evaluate them, and then decide whether to break the connection prior to accepting the body of the message. This would give you enough data to perform stochastic filtering on the message. (I've seen reports that indicate that the headers are the most useful data when applying spam filters.)
My tag analogy makes lots of sense. I don't know which country my stuffed animal is from, because I can't read the label. I can, however, tell that the label isn't from any country using the Latin character set. Likewise, we can't tell what star created the dust particles, but we can tell that it isn't from around here.
The only planet in our solar system that could be the source of either particles or radiation such as you describe would be Pluto. We've sent robots to all of the others without seeing anything such as you describe. When you can provide a mechanism that explains how a cold object that's closer in size to an asteroid than a planet could do this, people will listen. Also, those robots have also mapped the solar systems magnetic fields, so the idea that magnetic fields somehow redirect point-source radiation to appear to come from all directions equally doesn't hold water, either. As for non-magnetic fields, gravity fields large enough to do the job would have other visible side-effects on planetary orbits, while quantum fields don't have the range.
It takes the Sun a lot of effort to produce heat. Effort means work, which has a precise formula for its calculation. Or don't you think that those descriptions of "the equivalent of X million atomic bombs going off every second" denote anything?
If a narrow-band radiation-emitting "fog" were part of empty space, we would see evidence in several ways. Depending on the scale, stars or galaxies would appear different to us according to their distance. If local phenomena cleared away the fog close to us (in an astronomical sense), the fog would appear to be more shell-like and we would observe shell-like effects, unless we are at the exact center of the shell. That seems unlikely, since we aren't anywhere near the center of the solar system, our arm of the galaxy, or the local cluster of galaxies.
Soviet scientists observed the same radiation as Western scientists using instruments built with very different technologies. The only thing that they have in common are Maxwell's equations, which seem to work well enough for designing your TV set and the ICs in your computer. If you can provide equations that work exactly like Maxwell's except for predicting the spurious reception of frequencies identical to the cosmic black-body radiation, people will listen.
A lot of science works like counting cards in blackjack. For instance, once all the face cards have been dealt, you don't have to physically examine the deck to know that you won't bust on a twelve. Likewise, science sees certain phenomena and reaches certain conclusions about the nature of the universe, without having to travel beyond our solar system. The same conclusions that led to the development of your freezer or cellphone also led to certain deductions about the nature of the universe. Now, I'll admit the possibility that the game is rigged. Maybe electricity is a fraud to steal my money. Maybe gnomes stuff ice in the walls of my freezer when I'm not looking. Maybe when I talk on my cell phone, I really talking to a very tiny parrot (cared for nightly by those same gnomes) who uses telepathy to communicate with other parrots in other cell phones.
Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Actually, that would create a sparse file which ls(1) would report as having a size of "large" bytes, but du(1) would report as occuping zero blocks.
Which would you rather have, $7,300 right now or a dollar a day for the rest of your life?
They don't. They don't have any way of knowing it's from another solar system, since they have never been in another solar system.
I've never been to a different continent. I have a stuffed goldfish that's from a different continent. I can tell by reading its tag. Yes, really. It could have been made here, but that would mean that it was sold with a fake tag, which is very unlikely given the effort required to produce one, and without a legitimate tag, because someone would have had to remove the original, which is unlikely because I see no evidence of that. Likewise, the dust particles have tags (oxygen isotope ratios). To have a very different ratio would require a great deal of effort, along the lines of a naturally occuring gaseous diffusion isotope seperator, plus any deposits of oxygen atoms at the original ratio would have to be removed, which would also leave evidence.
We have no way of knowing whether the [background microwave] radiation is just inherent to our solar system, galaxy, or even planet. In fact, it is most likely that the instruments themselves are the problem.
Let's first assume that the radiation comes from a spherical shell that surrounds us. If the shell enclosed just our planet, we would see minor changes in intensity at different altitudes. If it enclosed just our solar system, we would see minor changes in intensity as we orbited the sun. If it enclosed just our galaxy, we would see minor directional changes in intensity as look in different directions (since we aren't at the galatic center). Now let's assume that the radiation comes from a fog that we're embedded within. In this case, we would see the radiation even when looking at something that would block it (the moon, distant galaxies, etc), but we don't. Finally, if the instruments are the problem, we would see differences as we used different instruments.
An example: I used to have chronic athete's foot, and I got by just fine with the over-the-counter treatments. Then I got a nail fungus infection, that I also lived with for a few years. I got eventually got tired of the appearance of the toenail and got a prescription for some pill to cure it, which also knocked out the athlete's foot. The pills for the cure cost several hundred dollars, whereas foot-powder cost very little, so the cure was much more profitable.
You mean like this?
I'm not sure what you mean. The two sentences that I quoted seem to indicate that Christopher Reeves couldn't participate in a Turing Test. Turing's insight was that performance is the only measure that we have of intellegence. His paper actually included several hypothetical ways by which performance isn't the only measure. For example, parapsychological effects: you look at a Rhine Card and ask the testee what you're looking at. If humans consistently guess better (or worse!) than computers, then the Turing Test is invalid (and a whole new field of scientific study has opened up).
On the other hand, you could ask Chris Reeve (or a computer) to play chess with you. Either could say, "Sorry, I don't have a board handy, how about tic-tac-toe?"
As you read this, are you evaluating my competance or my performance? How do you know that I'm not really a bot from Cycorp?
EB620 Classic RC-Timer 12 - 15VDC supply, 240V/10A R79.80