FOREVER WAR vs. STARSHIP TROOPERS
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The Forever War first appeared as a series of short stories and novellas in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact magazine. When the first story, "Hero," was published in 1972, critics complained it was a rip-off of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers with sex (and slightly fancier powered armor).
The difference? Heinlein was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who contracted tuberculosis and was forced out of the service with a medical discarge; I believe he was never given the chance to see combat. Haldeman was a Vietnam draftee. (His online biography says, "Purple Heart and other standard medals.") They had very different views of war. Haldeman's was new and unusual for the SF community.
Microsoft's newest version of Windows, billed as the most secure ever, contains several serious flaws that allow hackers to steal or destroy a victim's data files across the Internet or implant rogue computer software.
I wonder what their least secure version allows?-)
I couldn't find the earliest J. Michael Straczynski postings about Babylon 5. I see some articles from 1992, but they sound as if he's been there for quite some time already.
I am really glad to see these (in particular, and many others in general) available again!
(P.S.: I always tried to live by a policy of being the most reasonable person in any discussion, especially online. Thank goodness; I don't appear to have any past sins to worry about from this newly available archive.)
What is your take on the proposed settlements in the antitrust and civil Microsoft cases? To most Slashdotters, the former seems like a slap on the wrist, the latter like a a punishment turned into a reward (increasing dominance of the U.S. education market). Is there something we're missing?
Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Tom Burt said the software giant could help more schools under the proposed settlement, distributing more software at a lower cost than if the same schools went out and bought programs on the open market.
Save us from such "help"!
Notice he said the "open" market, and not the "Open Source" (or Free) market.-)
(Though Microsoft genuinely thinks the world would be a better place if more people used their software -- blame it on confidence, blame it on ego, blame it on a reality distortion field, I don't know -- so they really think kids would be "helped" more if they were exposed to "good" Microsoft software rather than "bad" Mac/GNU/BSD software.)
Note that Microsoft controls the prices of software on the open market (pretty closely), on the educational market, and under the terms of this plan. Whether Mr. Burt's statement is true or false is pretty much completely under Microsoft's control.
"If in the solution there are structural biases, however good the intention, then that's something that's got to be of concern," Motz said.... In later remarks, Motz expressed some sympathy for Microsoft's explanation, saying that the potential harm to competition had to be weighed against the settlement providing "more bang for the buck" than just handing out cash.
Motz is going to need the wisdom of Solomon to split this baby!
That's how my friends refer to their 16-year-old's favorite game. He once told them he had to stay on line for 24 hours to camp in front of an abandoned house.
On the other hand, the EQ account is in Dad's name and Dad's credit card. The ultimate disciplinary threat is, "No EverCrack for a month!"
Most games have some sort of "payoff" device that is implicit when you play it. When you get that payoff, whether it is the final goal or some sort of intermediary plateau, you take a breather and appreciate your accomplishment. If a game defers that payoff and continues to promise it, it will become more and more of a time-sink. This fairly much appeals to the natural structure of human motivation - it's *designed* to generate obsessive behavior.
Oh, for moderator points; this is so on the money.
Behaviorism is a sinkhole of controversy (at best), but some of the results tell us a lot about (animal and human) learning: Anything that's rewarded immediately and regularly is reinforced quickly but can fade quickly. Anything that's rewarded infrequently and unreliably is reinforced slowly but is hard to "unlearn".
There seems to be a family of disorders here. Single player game addiction -- I remember a SimCity session where I stayed up too late to go to bed:-| -- is one thing. Anything involving other people in real time, whether it's MMORPGs, chat rooms, or even online card games, is probably even worse.
I don't understand what is going on at all. What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own? Did they do business with AT&T, or with consumers directly? What is AT&T@Home? And AT&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?
Foo@Home (for any Foo) was the combination of Foo, the cable company, making sure your cable to the Foo office can be used for IP (and that you got billed for it), and Excite@Home, making sure there was IP connectivity from Foo to the Internet. (I don't know where the line of demarcation is between the two organizations.)
AT&T already has an organization that provides IP connectivity to the Internet for home customers: AT&T WorldNet Services.
The trick is getting the AT&T (formerly TCI) cable offices connected to AT&T's existing IP infrastructure.
AT&T (and Cox) had been working on this for a while, knowing a crisis was coming to a head.
AT&T was going to pay $305M for the 75% of Excite@Home they didn't already own.
Comcast and Cox paid $320M for the honor of the lights turned out more or less gracefully.
Sounds good... except Excite@Home (or the companies it owned money to) probably could have gotten up to $400M from AT&T. These are the same folks who thought Excite@Home was worth $1B, and who thought their fair cut of our $40/month payments was about $50/month. (They're getting about $95/month for the "three months, you're out" plan.)
You know why its not really going anywhere? Because there isn't that much innovation anymore.
There's a lot of reasons for that, but Mr. Sterling named one:
The big time in modern outlaw geekdom is definitely Microsoft. The Justice Department can round up all the Al Qaeda guys they can wiretap, but when they went to round up Redmond, they went home limping and sobbing, and without a job. That is a geek fait accompli, it's a true geek lock-in. In 2001, Microsoft has got its semi-legal code in every box that matters....
So: we don't have any crypto anarchy in computers in 2001. What we have is a feudal empire. Innovation is not bursting out of pirate utopias run by the mentally liberated. No, innovation has slowed to a crawl; no, it's actually crawling in full reverse. You can buy a top-end Wintel machine now: say [sic.] 512 meg of ram, 400 megaherz == with every rational expectation that machine will last you ten solid years. Maybe longer. Good luck finding any broadband for it, but as far as the machine itself goes, it'll sit on a shelf like a lump of putty, running Windows. Moore's Law, to hell with that. There's nothing new and fancy for a bigger chip to run. Nobody's thought that up. It's even worse than Detroit before the Japanese. It's all chrome tail-fins and creeping featuritis: it's unsafe at any speed.
(Except he describes Lawrence Lessig as "an American Justice Department lawyer who had his head handed to him in court by Microsoft," which is pretty confused on a few levels.)
How does Bruce distinguish this from a lynch mob or posse of surveillance?
The KKK wore hoods.
If they wore T-shirts with their driver's license numbers writ large and visible from all angles, they wouldn't have formed lynch mobs.
Read the text Mr. Sterling wrote between the last two sentences you quoted:
I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting secure, accountable devices with digital signatures built in. They're cryptographically time-stamped, their voice signals and photographs are cryptographically overwritten, proving their source. They are tamperproofed, and very sternly verifiable, and usable as proven evidence in courts of law. They're not civilian toys, they are genuine weapons of information warfare, in much the same way that an unarmed Predator surveillance aircraft is a weapon. They are people's media weapons. Their proper use requires some training and discretion; it's like a citizen's audiovisual arrest.
Why was it not possible/desirable to license Python under one of the existing Free Software licenses, and instead necessary to come up with another one?
Because the Python source code was, at various times, "owned" (copyright was in the name of) Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, BeOpen, Digital Creations, and the Python Software Foundation.
Guido couldn't release it under the GPL, because it wasn't entirely "his" software to license.
On the x86 side of things, we found that much of the inexpensive x86 hardware is targetted towards the home market and, accordingly, was not really suitable to the task at hand. Intel-based servers offered by OEMs did not offer much of a price break over our SPARC options, if any at all. As for the DIY market, there was a premium associated with the more high-end motherboards and other components we desired. Commodity hardware prices aside, a platform change would incur its own costs in the form of investments in software that would have to be replaced.
I think the software development costs (they'd already done a lot of work for a platform they knew, apparently with some specific third party tools not available for Solaris/x86) were their biggest consideration. (They also mention "sparse hardware support" for Solaris/x86.)
Oddly, their OS choices for x86 seemed to be Windows 9x and Solaris; no mention of NT/2000/XP, let alone Linux or *BSD.
Ousterhout says threads are bad for apparent concurrency but good for taking advantage of multiple processors, and for building scalable servers.
In other words, with the right hardware architecture, threads could be very useful for sites such as Ace's Hardware (though they happened to go with a uniprocessor) and Slashdot.
Java threads are also easier to program than C and C++ threads, though not easy. (Manual memory management is hard; thread programming is hard; manual memory management in a threaded program is very hard. I'm not speaking hypothetically on the last point; I've really envied Java programmers the last few weeks.)-:
Consider a user with a typical analog modem that has an average maximum downstream throughput of, say, 5 KB/s. If this user is trying to download the general message board index page, about 200 KB in size (rather small by today's standards), it will require a solid 40 seconds to complete this single download.... To maximize the efficiency of the network itself, we can compress the output stream and thus, compress the site. HTML is often very repetitive, so it's not impossible to reach a very high compression ratio. The 200 KB request mentioned above required 40 seconds of sustained transfer on a 5 KB/s link. If that 200 KB request can be compressed to 15 KB, it will require only 3 seconds of transfer time.
Except that 56 Kbps modems get 5 KBps thoughput by compressing the data! If the client and server compress, the modems won't be able to; the net effect is lots of extra work on the server side, and probably no increased throughput for the modem user.
The server might or might not see a decrease in latency, and in the number of sockets needed simultaneously; it depends on how much it can "stuff" the intermediate "pipes". The server will see an overall decrease in bandwidth needed to serve all the pages.
Ironically, broadband customers (who presumably don't have any compression between their clients and Internet servers) will see pages load faster. (And the poor cable modem providers from the previous story will be happy.)
I think his [Stallman's] goal is (and I think this because my recollection is that he's told me, not because of some analysis I've done) to make the world work for him personally in the way he wants.
You mean like this?
The following was part of SNL's "Weekend Update" on December 8, 1979:
Al Franken: Well, the "me" decade is almost over, and good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. The 70's were simply 10 years of people thinking of nothing but themselves. No wonder we were unable to get together and solve any of the many serious problems facing our nation. Oh sure, some people did do some positive things in the 70's - like jogging - but always for the wrong reasons, for their own selfish, personal benefit. Well, I believe the 80's are gonna have to be different. I think that people are going to stop thinking about themselves, and start thinking about me, Al Franken. That's right. I believe we're entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the 80's will be pretty much the same as the 70's. I'll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you'll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you'll be thinking, "I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?", "I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?" And you women will be thinking, "What can I wear that will please Al Franken?", or "What can I
not wear?" You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, "Why Al Franken?" Well, because I thought of it, and I'm on TV, so I've already gotten the jump on you. So, I say let's leave behind the fragmented, selfish 70's, and go into the 80's with a unity and purpose. That's what I think. I'm Al Franken.
If you've got a system that's half C++, half (for example) Perl, you might consider either extending Perl to support your C++ code, or embedding Perl (interpreter and your code) in your C++ code. For Perl, it's documented in chapter 21 of the Blue Camel (3rd edition). I assume the same tricks can be applied to PHP. C++ and Java can play well together with native methods, I believe.
I'll point out the downside: This still requires your successor(s) to know both languages, plus the "glue" between them.
(Forget about being hit by a bus; you may want to move on inside your current organization. The harder it is for your successor(s) to support this system, the more likely it'll be a boat anchor around your ankles, when it comes to job mobility.)
I work on a medium-sized (~50-100K LOC) cross platform commercial application.
The original developer (1.0 was Windows-only) wanted to use SourceSafe; it's a Windows-based source control system, but he'd heard there was also Unix support. I'd tried to use it on my previous project; true for small values of "support".
We use CVS, checking out onto Windows or onto Unix, hosted on Unix. It just plain works.
FYI, we could not find any way to check out one copy of the source on one platform and build on the other. Visual C++:-( was very unhappy about Unix-like end-of-line sequences. We check out on each platform, and keep them in sync more or less "by hand" (carrying files or patches from one to the other).
P.S.: I have no personal experience with ACE but have also heard good things about it. Commercial support is available from Riverace, if that's an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
The Forever War first appeared as a series of short stories and novellas in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact magazine. When the first story, "Hero," was published in 1972, critics complained it was a rip-off of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers with sex (and slightly fancier powered armor).
The difference? Heinlein was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who contracted tuberculosis and was forced out of the service with a medical discarge; I believe he was never given the chance to see combat. Haldeman was a Vietnam draftee. (His online biography says, "Purple Heart and other standard medals.") They had very different views of war. Haldeman's was new and unusual for the SF community.
Both are very good stories by very good writers.
What are the biggest loopholes in the proposed settlement, in your opinion? How would you address them?
I couldn't find the earliest J. Michael Straczynski postings about Babylon 5. I see some articles from 1992, but they sound as if he's been there for quite some time already.
I am really glad to see these (in particular, and many others in general) available again!
(P.S.: I always tried to live by a policy of being the most reasonable person in any discussion, especially online. Thank goodness; I don't appear to have any past sins to worry about from this newly available archive.)
What is your take on the proposed settlements in the antitrust and civil Microsoft cases? To most Slashdotters, the former seems like a slap on the wrist, the latter like a a punishment turned into a reward (increasing dominance of the U.S. education market). Is there something we're missing?
Notice he said the "open" market, and not the "Open Source" (or Free) market.-)
(Though Microsoft genuinely thinks the world would be a better place if more people used their software -- blame it on confidence, blame it on ego, blame it on a reality distortion field, I don't know -- so they really think kids would be "helped" more if they were exposed to "good" Microsoft software rather than "bad" Mac/GNU/BSD software.)
Note that Microsoft controls the prices of software on the open market (pretty closely), on the educational market, and under the terms of this plan. Whether Mr. Burt's statement is true or false is pretty much completely under Microsoft's control.
Motz is going to need the wisdom of Solomon to split this baby!
On the other hand, the EQ account is in Dad's name and Dad's credit card. The ultimate disciplinary threat is, "No EverCrack for a month!"
Behaviorism is a sinkhole of controversy (at best), but some of the results tell us a lot about (animal and human) learning: Anything that's rewarded immediately and regularly is reinforced quickly but can fade quickly. Anything that's rewarded infrequently and unreliably is reinforced slowly but is hard to "unlearn".
There seems to be a family of disorders here. Single player game addiction -- I remember a SimCity session where I stayed up too late to go to bed
God help us all when Star Wars Galaxies comes out!
Nicely plagiarized from here.
Compare and contrast: "The U.S. government should hold off regulating high-speed Internet services to accelerate their deployment, an independent panel of experts said in a report that could bolster telephone giants' lobbying for relief from having to share network parts with rivals."
AT&T already has an organization that provides IP connectivity to the Internet for home customers: AT&T WorldNet Services.
The trick is getting the AT&T (formerly TCI) cable offices connected to AT&T's existing IP infrastructure.
AT&T (and Cox) had been working on this for a while, knowing a crisis was coming to a head.
AT&T was going to pay $305M for the 75% of Excite@Home they didn't already own.
... except Excite@Home (or the companies it owned money to) probably could have gotten up to $400M from AT&T. These are the same folks who thought Excite@Home was worth $1B, and who thought their fair cut of our $40/month payments was about $50/month. (They're getting about $95/month for the "three months, you're out" plan.)
Comcast and Cox paid $320M for the honor of the lights turned out more or less gracefully.
Sounds good
... because they wanted to control it all, including everything on the Olympics.com Web site.
http://www.forbes.com/2000/08/23/feat.html
(Except he describes Lawrence Lessig as "an American Justice Department lawyer who had his head handed to him in court by Microsoft," which is pretty confused on a few levels.)
If they wore T-shirts with their driver's license numbers writ large and visible from all angles, they wouldn't have formed lynch mobs.
Read the text Mr. Sterling wrote between the last two sentences you quoted:
... watch video clips while riding your Segway scooter?-)
Why was it not possible/desirable to license Python under one of the existing Free Software licenses, and instead necessary to come up with another one?
Because the Python source code was, at various times, "owned" (copyright was in the name of) Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, BeOpen, Digital Creations, and the Python Software Foundation.
Guido couldn't release it under the GPL, because it wasn't entirely "his" software to license.
(Google cache of the license)
I think the software development costs (they'd already done a lot of work for a platform they knew, apparently with some specific third party tools not available for Solaris/x86) were their biggest consideration. (They also mention "sparse hardware support" for Solaris/x86.)
Oddly, their OS choices for x86 seemed to be Windows 9x and Solaris; no mention of NT/2000/XP, let alone Linux or *BSD.
Ousterhout says threads are bad for apparent concurrency but good for taking advantage of multiple processors, and for building scalable servers.
In other words, with the right hardware architecture, threads could be very useful for sites such as Ace's Hardware (though they happened to go with a uniprocessor) and Slashdot.
Java threads are also easier to program than C and C++ threads, though not easy. (Manual memory management is hard; thread programming is hard; manual memory management in a threaded program is very hard. I'm not speaking hypothetically on the last point; I've really envied Java programmers the last few weeks.)-:
Consider a user with a typical analog modem that has an average maximum downstream throughput of, say, 5 KB/s. If this user is trying to download the general message board index page, about 200 KB in size (rather small by today's standards), it will require a solid 40 seconds to complete this single download.... To maximize the efficiency of the network itself, we can compress the output stream and thus, compress the site. HTML is often very repetitive, so it's not impossible to reach a very high compression ratio. The 200 KB request mentioned above required 40 seconds of sustained transfer on a 5 KB/s link. If that 200 KB request can be compressed to 15 KB, it will require only 3 seconds of transfer time.
Except that 56 Kbps modems get 5 KBps thoughput by compressing the data! If the client and server compress, the modems won't be able to; the net effect is lots of extra work on the server side, and probably no increased throughput for the modem user.
The server might or might not see a decrease in latency, and in the number of sockets needed simultaneously; it depends on how much it can "stuff" the intermediate "pipes". The server will see an overall decrease in bandwidth needed to serve all the pages.
Ironically, broadband customers (who presumably don't have any compression between their clients and Internet servers) will see pages load faster. (And the poor cable modem providers from the previous story will be happy.)
You mean like this?
The following was part of SNL's "Weekend Update" on December 8, 1979:
You may already be doing this ...
If you've got a system that's half C++, half (for example) Perl, you might consider either extending Perl to support your C++ code, or embedding Perl (interpreter and your code) in your C++ code. For Perl, it's documented in chapter 21 of the Blue Camel (3rd edition). I assume the same tricks can be applied to PHP. C++ and Java can play well together with native methods, I believe.
I'll point out the downside: This still requires your successor(s) to know both languages, plus the "glue" between them.
(Forget about being hit by a bus; you may want to move on inside your current organization. The harder it is for your successor(s) to support this system, the more likely it'll be a boat anchor around your ankles, when it comes to job mobility.)
I tend to use C++ as my controlling program, and then execute Perl, PHP, or Java ...
... unusual. You're using C++ as your "glue" language, and a higher level language for the code where your inner loop resides?
That's very
I work on a medium-sized (~50-100K LOC) cross platform commercial application.
:-( was very unhappy about Unix-like end-of-line sequences. We check out on each platform, and keep them in sync more or less "by hand" (carrying files or patches from one to the other).
The original developer (1.0 was Windows-only) wanted to use SourceSafe; it's a Windows-based source control system, but he'd heard there was also Unix support. I'd tried to use it on my previous project; true for small values of "support".
We use CVS, checking out onto Windows or onto Unix, hosted on Unix. It just plain works.
FYI, we could not find any way to check out one copy of the source on one platform and build on the other. Visual C++
P.S.: I have no personal experience with ACE but have also heard good things about it. Commercial support is available from Riverace, if that's an issue.