Thanks! As for my typos...Argh! Laird and visitg. (Yep, I found another typo in my post.) Gah. Well, at least at this rate I should be getting an offer to be a Slashdot editor.:)
paided? Well, that's a new one to me. Must see if anyone notices in a game of Boggle. $2,500 for a machine and you want it to run for 15 years? I built embedded kiosks for the US Coast Guard for a fraction of that that not only had to last 10-15 years but do so under rough seas and/or under fire. I've built embedded systems for chemstry departments that had to work more-or-less indefinitely in an atmosphere rich in nitric acid fumes. (Metal literally corroded in front of you.) No, what could I, a mere programmer, not some tally room typist, know about extreme conditions?
If you were the least bit serious and genuinely wanted a ruggedized voting system that could last 10-15 years on a continuous run without maintenance, I could build vastly superior machines to the ones you get for $1,500 initially, perhaps half that if you ordered in bulk. If you wanted printers that could never jam, that would be harder but I don't regard it as even in the realms of difficult. I see no reason why I couldn't design and build you a jamless printer with equal warranty if that is what you really wanted. My guess is that a fair-sized fraction of Slashdot - probably 2,000 of the 100,000 readers to visitg regularly - could do at least one or both of these tasks.
It is also interesting that independent observers and those to voted in the last few elections complained of machines overheating far more than they complained of paper jams (where paper was supplied). Are you saying that all these people lied and you are the sole bearer of truth? You may well be telling the truth about the machines you monitored, but how dare you insinuate that all those other folks were out-and-out liard, unless you have definite proof they were?
Above all, how dare you tell the technical community that we're mere "slashdot readers" when most of us can build vastly superior machines, maintain machines to a higher standard, or even just know how to keep a bunch of rollers clean? Unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, and run the comparison, don't tell us what we can and cannot do.
Fahrenheit was developed by adding contaminants to water and marking the new freezing and boiling points, if I remember that science class corrctly, making 0F the lowest temperature you can get salt water (saturated? I forget) before it will freeze regardless. It's useful as a domestic range largely because the fixed points were based on extreme but realistic domestic cases. Since computers are not domestic items, I do not see the value in using fahrenheit.
A server that could be used in North Dakota! (Seriously, that place is lethally hot in the summer and lethally cold the rest of the year. Rumour has it that the Indian burial mounds there were built by aliens, as the Indians didn't want to stay there long enough.)
An extreme end server that is ruggedized against severe temperatures has potential value in a number of areas. First, it certainly meets the thermal requirements for military-grade systems, so I would expect to see this getting some interested looks from that direction. Severe temperatures have killed voting machines, so that's another place that might be very interested in this server. Commodity e-voting with far more reliable hardware will sound a LOT more atractive to many States. The range isn't extreme enough to support some of the really harsh environments out there, but it would be good enough to get a tracked vehicle with a hose attachment into places too hot and too dangerous for human firefighters who wouldn't be able to stay that close to a fire.
I love this sort of stuff. A long time ago, I considered getting involved in writing adventures, after two friends founded a small company for selling adventures for the Archimedes. Ley Hey Software, I think it was. They'd built a game generator derived in concept from one from a computer magazine for the BBC. I wrote a short game on their generator, which was fun, but the logic I was wanting to use really pushed the software. You can only do so much with a binary flag-based system when you want to allow any of a finite subset of possible paths through a specific multi-component puzzle, where only some paths are reversible and only under certain conditions. You end up using a lot of flags or a lot of records to represent cases.
It doesn't help that GCC 4.2.x is getting a bad rap for potentially optimizing out some bounds-checking. A third option would be to require three rings, rather than two, and have the third ring perform potentially hazardous (to the OS) operations. This would require much faster context switching and better communications. Or maybe not. If you have a 4 core CPU and dedicate 1 core to the kernel, 1 core to hazardous operations, and leave the other 2 open to the user, you have no context switches, you only have message passing between cores.
In England, the use of UV ink is popular as an addition for security marking. The theory is that a visible tag can be removed, but an invisible tag is tougher as thieves won't know it's there. The police are supposed to check items they believe are stolen for such tags, so that property can be returned to the lawful owner.
Although in total vioation of any nation's law, it seems to me a screecher should help. This is a simple one-shot transmitter that blasts a signal for as long as the power lasts at a clearly illegal frequency. The idea is to make the theft impossible to ignore and easy to trace, but have the offending signal impossible to pin on you.
Also legally dubious, booby-trap the laptop and require something only you know or have to disable it. The booby-trap would need to be non-destructive to the computer, but could include an embedded pepper spray, mace, or something equally nasty. To avoid the law getting upset, again it must be impossible to pin on you, so would need the used cylinder or cartridge to be ejected after use.
Remarkably, it might be far more legal to steal DNA samples of the marcupial tiger and get it cloned in south korea. This stops thieves from breaking in, but given their ferocious jaws, also stops them lodging a formal complaint.
Strictly speaking no facts were presented. The questions do not state that anything is happening or true now, nor do they imply that if the suggested precursors and conditions are met that the event will happen. "Could" is a marvellous question if you plan on FUD, because almost anything COULD happen and cause-and-effect is left for the reader to infer. If I eat a cheezeburger, a meteorite COULD land on top of me, but unless McDonalds have gravitic weaponry installed, there would be no relationship between the two. Now, if I were to post about cheezeburgers on a lolcat site, maybe.
This exemplies to me why critical thinking, high-level language skills and logic should be core subjects in any education system. If people learned to be less passive in their reading and comprehension, they should be less subject to brain DoS attacks, otherwise known as FUD.
KGI was a damn good system - somewhat overshaddowed by GGI and other similar efforts, though, as the argument of the time was that the kernel shouldn't do what userspace can do. KGI might have stood a better chance if development had been faster, or some significant card could not be made to work correctly in userspace, or there was a demonstrable vulnerability implied.
As I recall, there was also the arument that grahics in the kernel risked instability that would impact the system and be hard to trace. I can sympathize with this argument a bit more, but in the end it is true of all hardware drivers - hence the efforts of microkernel and exokernel developers to move such stuff into isolatable containers. It's a good idea, not terribly efficient because of all the message passing, but I can understand the reasoning.
Hugo hasn't been touched in a couple of years. There are 2 independent TADS implementations on Freshmeat in addition to the original. Inform looks good, but the natives are restless on Slashdot over whether to use Inform 6 or 7. I'll probably take a look at some tomorrow, but suggestions/advice is never amis.
That one bugged me. Particularly the ants problem. Most of the problems were logical, but that one seemed more like a Laural and Hardy sketch. The more parts I solved, the less logical it became. Secret Agent was better - the puzzles made sense - but it was too simple.
Of all the comercial programs I've written, there are two that I would have no problem with being examined or run. One is 10 years old, the other is getting on for 20. My O- and A-Level projects, written much earlier, would also be on that list. My O-Level project was actually used by the school district as an example of how to write good software. More recent analysis, design and specification notes would also be fine, but I wouldn't call the code that came from them my best work.
Actually, that would appear to be an apt way to describe them. The article talks about there being a crater next to The Heart Of Gold and how the information concerning it (it involves sperm whales so isn't suitable for a family website) was visible in the code but was not reachable within the game. There was also a whole lot of planned material that got scripted out (again, discussed in the article) that never got coded at all but could more-or-less be dropped into place as-is. If the source was available and if the parties concerned agreed to play nicely and allow a community effort to finish the game, I think the master vision could be done.
There was a graphics mode in Beyond Zork where you could see the map displayed as a vector diagram on the top right of the screen. It caused the colours to break, though, so you ended up with a white background and black text.
They botched up on the database, letting themselves be bought out was suicidal, and the "graphics" on Beyond Zork constituted intellectual genocide, but the quality of their imagination was staggeringly good. The descriptions bested anything Level 9 could do and the puzzles were supremely elegant. Scott Adams' adventures - the third major series of the time - paled into insignificance. And if Infocom was the Manchester United of computer games at the time, competitors like Acorn and Melbourne House were the Subbutio.
With this discovery and restoration of such ancient treasures, it would be nice to think that the interest would spur some sort of reunion and one last game "for memory's sake". Actually, although I rank them second, I'd love to see that with Level 9 as well. It won't happen, although I guess Infocom fans ("Infocommies" according to the New Zork Times) could have a crack at writing an Infocom-like game for their interpreter.
The article and the slashdot story seem to say the same thing - the numbers produced are just numbers out of a hat. They don't represent anything meaningful and indeed can't because the participants are self-selecting and therefore not a random sample of the population. This is obvious and always has been. The popularity of a site (or a TV show or anything else) cannot be measured by any simple means, if it can be measured at all.
Ah, well if you shift the problem from whether it's even technically possible to whether it's remotely probable, then that's a different matter. Trusted third parties are arguably reasonable enough, but very large scale, economically viable trusted third parties are, whilst technically within the realms of possibility, not the least bit likely.
That's why a lot of "purist" sci-fi fans prefer to use the more generic label of SF, as that includes "Science Fantasy", which most of the shows you mentioned could reasonably be listed as, and "Speculative Fiction".
Science Fiction is usually reserved for programs or stories that are "close to" the known laws (but can violate one or two for dramatic purposes). Star Wars' "force" could be considered a single violation, their hyperspace the second, so that's still within what could be classically called Science Fiction. The third category, Speculative Fiction, is reserved specifically for programs that do not violate any known law and could plausibly occur if the context and situation described arose in practice. Given the limits of knowledge at the time the original book of "Contact" was written, this could be considered Speculative Fiction. It pushed the limits a bit, but was arguably within the bounds of what was known at that precise time.
Other "SF" categories probably exist, but those are the Big Three. By using SF rather than Sci-Fi, you avoid the problem of misrepresenting either a story or a category. Most people use Sci-Fi as the generic label anyway - Worldcon does, for example - so most people understand it as the generic form rather than the specific form, but the confusion that can cause is avoidable.
Or a sailor, or a bunch of turtles. Commercials and infomercials disguised as regular TV programs are old-hat, but not necessarily on the scale being talked about, and certainly not by the IT industry. However, I guess it was inevitable. With the exception of publicly-funded TV stations, funding - and therefore control - has been from advertising. Costs are going up but the time available for regular adverts is constrained by the need for regular programming. The obvious solution is to make adverts that are regular programs, thereby getting both more time and more control than would otherwise be available (as far as the advertisers are concerned) and more income (as far as the TV station is concerned).
Freedom to do this is fair enough. I've no problems with the concept. What I have problems with is the fact that there are no significant alternatives in the US. PBS is massively underfunded and relies so much on commercial sponsorship that it cannot be considered an alternative. It also doesn't produce much in the way of range in programming. As far as I know, there are no other non-corporate, non-profit TV stations of any significance. Oh, there are some small operations that do local stuff, but you can't seriously expect those to produce anything to rival the BBC's 90's production of "Pride and Prejudice" or Paramount's "Deep Space Nine". I seriously doubt any independent non-profit operator would even have the budget for something on the scale of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "Space: 1999".
Why is it important that it be non-profit? A commercial operator could do any of the above. Yes, they could, but if it is more profitable to produce commercials in the form of programs than to produce dramas in the form of programs, you can't expect businessmen to put art before money. Art is expensive and risky. Commercials are paid for by someone else and the income is guaranteed because it's paid for by the person doing the advertising. In addition to high expenses just for operating, many have shareholders to placate. Shareholders might enjoy relaxing, watching a good TV show, but they are going to enjoy watching their stocks go up in value even more.
You didn't hear? The show is centered around a group of humans on Earth in the 23rd century who discover an alien technology so advanced that it can even run the next service pack reliably. Their purpose is to save their civilization from the two groups of deep space colonists who are returning to Earth by means of vessels running alternative operating systems. The group will be run by a Captain Jack lookalike as it has become increasingly important to be beyond the Government.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! As for my typos...Argh! Laird and visitg. (Yep, I found another typo in my post.) Gah. Well, at least at this rate I should be getting an offer to be a Slashdot editor. :)
If you were the least bit serious and genuinely wanted a ruggedized voting system that could last 10-15 years on a continuous run without maintenance, I could build vastly superior machines to the ones you get for $1,500 initially, perhaps half that if you ordered in bulk. If you wanted printers that could never jam, that would be harder but I don't regard it as even in the realms of difficult. I see no reason why I couldn't design and build you a jamless printer with equal warranty if that is what you really wanted. My guess is that a fair-sized fraction of Slashdot - probably 2,000 of the 100,000 readers to visitg regularly - could do at least one or both of these tasks.
It is also interesting that independent observers and those to voted in the last few elections complained of machines overheating far more than they complained of paper jams (where paper was supplied). Are you saying that all these people lied and you are the sole bearer of truth? You may well be telling the truth about the machines you monitored, but how dare you insinuate that all those other folks were out-and-out liard, unless you have definite proof they were?
Above all, how dare you tell the technical community that we're mere "slashdot readers" when most of us can build vastly superior machines, maintain machines to a higher standard, or even just know how to keep a bunch of rollers clean? Unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, and run the comparison, don't tell us what we can and cannot do.
Depends. Are they planning on posting to Usenet?
Fahrenheit was developed by adding contaminants to water and marking the new freezing and boiling points, if I remember that science class corrctly, making 0F the lowest temperature you can get salt water (saturated? I forget) before it will freeze regardless. It's useful as a domestic range largely because the fixed points were based on extreme but realistic domestic cases. Since computers are not domestic items, I do not see the value in using fahrenheit.
An extreme end server that is ruggedized against severe temperatures has potential value in a number of areas. First, it certainly meets the thermal requirements for military-grade systems, so I would expect to see this getting some interested looks from that direction. Severe temperatures have killed voting machines, so that's another place that might be very interested in this server. Commodity e-voting with far more reliable hardware will sound a LOT more atractive to many States. The range isn't extreme enough to support some of the really harsh environments out there, but it would be good enough to get a tracked vehicle with a hose attachment into places too hot and too dangerous for human firefighters who wouldn't be able to stay that close to a fire.
You'd get sued by the laywers for infringing on their trademark or business patent or something.
I love this sort of stuff. A long time ago, I considered getting involved in writing adventures, after two friends founded a small company for selling adventures for the Archimedes. Ley Hey Software, I think it was. They'd built a game generator derived in concept from one from a computer magazine for the BBC. I wrote a short game on their generator, which was fun, but the logic I was wanting to use really pushed the software. You can only do so much with a binary flag-based system when you want to allow any of a finite subset of possible paths through a specific multi-component puzzle, where only some paths are reversible and only under certain conditions. You end up using a lot of flags or a lot of records to represent cases.
It doesn't help that GCC 4.2.x is getting a bad rap for potentially optimizing out some bounds-checking. A third option would be to require three rings, rather than two, and have the third ring perform potentially hazardous (to the OS) operations. This would require much faster context switching and better communications. Or maybe not. If you have a 4 core CPU and dedicate 1 core to the kernel, 1 core to hazardous operations, and leave the other 2 open to the user, you have no context switches, you only have message passing between cores.
Although in total vioation of any nation's law, it seems to me a screecher should help. This is a simple one-shot transmitter that blasts a signal for as long as the power lasts at a clearly illegal frequency. The idea is to make the theft impossible to ignore and easy to trace, but have the offending signal impossible to pin on you.
Also legally dubious, booby-trap the laptop and require something only you know or have to disable it. The booby-trap would need to be non-destructive to the computer, but could include an embedded pepper spray, mace, or something equally nasty. To avoid the law getting upset, again it must be impossible to pin on you, so would need the used cylinder or cartridge to be ejected after use.
Remarkably, it might be far more legal to steal DNA samples of the marcupial tiger and get it cloned in south korea. This stops thieves from breaking in, but given their ferocious jaws, also stops them lodging a formal complaint.
Strictly speaking no facts were presented. The questions do not state that anything is happening or true now, nor do they imply that if the suggested precursors and conditions are met that the event will happen. "Could" is a marvellous question if you plan on FUD, because almost anything COULD happen and cause-and-effect is left for the reader to infer. If I eat a cheezeburger, a meteorite COULD land on top of me, but unless McDonalds have gravitic weaponry installed, there would be no relationship between the two. Now, if I were to post about cheezeburgers on a lolcat site, maybe.
This exemplies to me why critical thinking, high-level language skills and logic should be core subjects in any education system. If people learned to be less passive in their reading and comprehension, they should be less subject to brain DoS attacks, otherwise known as FUD.
As I recall, there was also the arument that grahics in the kernel risked instability that would impact the system and be hard to trace. I can sympathize with this argument a bit more, but in the end it is true of all hardware drivers - hence the efforts of microkernel and exokernel developers to move such stuff into isolatable containers. It's a good idea, not terribly efficient because of all the message passing, but I can understand the reasoning.
Hugo hasn't been touched in a couple of years. There are 2 independent TADS implementations on Freshmeat in addition to the original. Inform looks good, but the natives are restless on Slashdot over whether to use Inform 6 or 7. I'll probably take a look at some tomorrow, but suggestions/advice is never amis.
That one bugged me. Particularly the ants problem. Most of the problems were logical, but that one seemed more like a Laural and Hardy sketch. The more parts I solved, the less logical it became. Secret Agent was better - the puzzles made sense - but it was too simple.
Of all the comercial programs I've written, there are two that I would have no problem with being examined or run. One is 10 years old, the other is getting on for 20. My O- and A-Level projects, written much earlier, would also be on that list. My O-Level project was actually used by the school district as an example of how to write good software. More recent analysis, design and specification notes would also be fine, but I wouldn't call the code that came from them my best work.
Actually, that would appear to be an apt way to describe them. The article talks about there being a crater next to The Heart Of Gold and how the information concerning it (it involves sperm whales so isn't suitable for a family website) was visible in the code but was not reachable within the game. There was also a whole lot of planned material that got scripted out (again, discussed in the article) that never got coded at all but could more-or-less be dropped into place as-is. If the source was available and if the parties concerned agreed to play nicely and allow a community effort to finish the game, I think the master vision could be done.
He cloned himself in a tragic accident involving an improbability generator, an elastic band and a Rezrov scroll.
No, they have the can of grue repellent from the lake in Sorcerer.
There was a graphics mode in Beyond Zork where you could see the map displayed as a vector diagram on the top right of the screen. It caused the colours to break, though, so you ended up with a white background and black text.
With this discovery and restoration of such ancient treasures, it would be nice to think that the interest would spur some sort of reunion and one last game "for memory's sake". Actually, although I rank them second, I'd love to see that with Level 9 as well. It won't happen, although I guess Infocom fans ("Infocommies" according to the New Zork Times) could have a crack at writing an Infocom-like game for their interpreter.
The article and the slashdot story seem to say the same thing - the numbers produced are just numbers out of a hat. They don't represent anything meaningful and indeed can't because the participants are self-selecting and therefore not a random sample of the population. This is obvious and always has been. The popularity of a site (or a TV show or anything else) cannot be measured by any simple means, if it can be measured at all.
Ah, well if you shift the problem from whether it's even technically possible to whether it's remotely probable, then that's a different matter. Trusted third parties are arguably reasonable enough, but very large scale, economically viable trusted third parties are, whilst technically within the realms of possibility, not the least bit likely.
Science Fiction is usually reserved for programs or stories that are "close to" the known laws (but can violate one or two for dramatic purposes). Star Wars' "force" could be considered a single violation, their hyperspace the second, so that's still within what could be classically called Science Fiction. The third category, Speculative Fiction, is reserved specifically for programs that do not violate any known law and could plausibly occur if the context and situation described arose in practice. Given the limits of knowledge at the time the original book of "Contact" was written, this could be considered Speculative Fiction. It pushed the limits a bit, but was arguably within the bounds of what was known at that precise time.
Other "SF" categories probably exist, but those are the Big Three. By using SF rather than Sci-Fi, you avoid the problem of misrepresenting either a story or a category. Most people use Sci-Fi as the generic label anyway - Worldcon does, for example - so most people understand it as the generic form rather than the specific form, but the confusion that can cause is avoidable.
Freedom to do this is fair enough. I've no problems with the concept. What I have problems with is the fact that there are no significant alternatives in the US. PBS is massively underfunded and relies so much on commercial sponsorship that it cannot be considered an alternative. It also doesn't produce much in the way of range in programming. As far as I know, there are no other non-corporate, non-profit TV stations of any significance. Oh, there are some small operations that do local stuff, but you can't seriously expect those to produce anything to rival the BBC's 90's production of "Pride and Prejudice" or Paramount's "Deep Space Nine". I seriously doubt any independent non-profit operator would even have the budget for something on the scale of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "Space: 1999".
Why is it important that it be non-profit? A commercial operator could do any of the above. Yes, they could, but if it is more profitable to produce commercials in the form of programs than to produce dramas in the form of programs, you can't expect businessmen to put art before money. Art is expensive and risky. Commercials are paid for by someone else and the income is guaranteed because it's paid for by the person doing the advertising. In addition to high expenses just for operating, many have shareholders to placate. Shareholders might enjoy relaxing, watching a good TV show, but they are going to enjoy watching their stocks go up in value even more.
You didn't hear? The show is centered around a group of humans on Earth in the 23rd century who discover an alien technology so advanced that it can even run the next service pack reliably. Their purpose is to save their civilization from the two groups of deep space colonists who are returning to Earth by means of vessels running alternative operating systems. The group will be run by a Captain Jack lookalike as it has become increasingly important to be beyond the Government.