Well, I said I wanted an account on DM to learn MDL, but I actually only wanted to play Zork. I tried to find the source code at the time, to help me solve the harder puzzles, but not until years later did I stumble across it thanks to google. Finding the source code was a grand adventure in itself!
MDL is basically just a fancy dialect of Lisp, with data types and angled brackets.
Now days, the best way to learn MDL is to read the Zork source code!
Where did you find the MDL binary on Twenex.org? I wonder if the binary version of MDL you found would run under the KLH10 PDP-10 emulator, like the one you can telnet to at its.svensson.org. Probably not, since ITS is a lot different than Twenex. Maybe Devon could pull it off of an old DM dump tape! Good luck with your open source MDL interpreter!
You might try asking Gerald J Sussman, Hal Abelson, Stu W. Galley or Steve Meretzky. I wonder who owns the copyright, and if they'd be willing to make it GPL and put the original Zork source code up on Google Code for people to read and search and learn from? The version I found is the latest greatest PDP-10 ITS version, just before Infocom took it and ported it to microcomputers.
The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.
-Don
<DEFINE TROLL ("AUX" (HERE,HERE) (T <SFIND-OBJ "TROLL">) (A <SFIND-OBJ "AXE">))
#DECL ((WIN) ADV (HERE) ROOM (T A) OBJECT)
<COND (<VERB? "FGHT?">
<COND (<==? <OCAN.A>.T> <>)
(<AND <MEMQ.A <ROBJS,HERE>> <PROB 75 90>>
<SNARF-OBJECT.T.A>
<AND <==?.HERE <OROOM.T>>
<TELL
"The troll, now worried about this encounter, recovers his bloody
axe.">>
T)
(<==?.HERE <OROOM.T>>
<TELL
"The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in
the guttural tongue of the trolls.">
T)>)
(<VERB? "DEAD!"> <SETG TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG T>)
(<VERB? "OUT!">
<TRZ.A,OVISON>
<ODESC1.T,TROLLOUT>
<SETG TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG T>)
(<VERB? "IN!">
<TRO.A,OVISON>
<COND (<==? <OROOM.T>.HERE>
<TELL
"The troll stirs, quickly resuming a fighting stance.">)>
<ODESC1.T,TROLLDESC>
<SETG TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG <>>)
(<VERB? "1ST?"> <PROB 33 66>)
(<OR <AND <VERB? "THROW" "GIVE"> <NOT <EMPTY? <PRSO>>>>
<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE" "MUNG">>
<COND (<L? <OSTRENGTH.T> 0>
<OSTRENGTH.T <- <OSTRENGTH.T>>>
<PERFORM TROLL <FIND-VERB "IN!">>)>
<COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE">
<COND (<VERB? "THROW">
<TELL
"The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>)
(<TELL
"The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)>
<COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">>
<TELL
"and being for the moment sated, throws it back. Fortunately, the
troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor. He does
not look pleased.",LONG-TELL1>
<TRO.T,FIGHTBIT>)
(<TELL
"and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.">
<REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>)
(<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE">
<TELL
"The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">)
(<VERB? "MUNG">
<TELL
"The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>)
(<AND,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG
<VERB? "HELLO">>
<TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>>
(Sorry about the indentation! It looks nicer in the original source. Slashdot filter fodder: bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla...)
Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used:CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.
Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/
The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play.
I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll bit that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll bit!
<OBJECT ["TROLL"]
["NASTY"]
"troll"
<+,OVISON,VICBIT,VILLAIN>
TROLL
(<GET-OBJ "AXE">)
(ODESC1
"A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages
out of the room."
OSTRENGTH 2
OFMSGS,TROLL-MELEE)>
<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">
<ROOM "MTROL"
"This is a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
<EXIT "WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST"
"NORTH"
"SOUTH"
(<GET-OBJ "TROLL">)>
I'm sure your cell phone service provider would be thrilled for you to upload uncompressed videos over their slow expensive internet connection, because Steve Jobs decided they only programming language you have access to is JavaScript.
How far will Apple fan-boys go to justify Apple's horrible designs and stupid decisions? Will you pay $500 for the airtime it takes to upload an uncompressed movie, while your phone line is tied up for three days sending data? You'd better get two iPhones if you want to receive any calls.
Spore is for real, not vaporware, but it has to go through a lot of tuning before it's really fun and balanced, just like all of Will Wright's other games. It's a process called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion", and it takes a long time, but it's worth the wait.
The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
Here are some questions and answers from the interview with The Sims designer Chris Trottier:
Reports that Electronic Arts' highly anticipated Spore has been further delayed are "misinformation," the publisher told Next-Gen today.
ImageIt's one of the most anticipated games of today, and any word of further delay for Will Wright's Spore is sure to make headlines.
But reports making rounds today are basically old news being made into "new" news, EA said.
"There seems to be some misinformation flying around," explained a rep in a phone interview. "Nothing's changed since our call on May 8, where [CEO] John Riccitello specifically said that we were moving Spore from fiscal '08 to early fiscal '09."
EA's fiscal 2009 runs from April 2008 through March 2009.
During that May earnings call, Riccitello stated, "...Spore is a title we have enormous confidence in. I've had the chance to review the title three times in the my short return to EA and it looks fantastic. I will also tell you that it's right up [to] the bubble in Q4 [of fiscal '08], if not sometime in early fiscal '09, so we don't feel comfortable in forecasting it."
There has yet to be a firm announced released date for Spore. An "early fiscal '09" release means that the game could theoretically launch in spring 2008.
The rep said that the rumor of the additional delay was exacerbated by a quote making the rounds in the games press lifted from the latest issue of Game Informer which says that the game is "delayed indefinitely." Apparently, the information from the conference call was misconstrued, the rep determined.
"It's the same information we said in May. Spore's progressing and it looks great," she added.
Speaking of resizing windows easily thanks to applying Fitts' Law, here's an even earlier demo of a pie menu window manager for X10 (the predecessor to X11) based on "uwm", scripted in Forth, which lets you resize and manipulate windows with a flick of the mouse:
X10 Pie Menu Window Manager Demo. I recorded this some time around 1987 or so.
I'm really disappointed in the Mac window manager and desktop user interface, which is still much too hard to use, after all these years. Steve Jobs fired all Apple's good user interface designers years ago. Pardon the tired cliches, but Apple is totally stuck in a rut, and they've been resting on their laurels and stewing in their own juices for far too long.
Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights
("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated
March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At
this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no
representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these
IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working
Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at
W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the
disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.
Any questions regarding this communication should be directed to:
Director of Patents
Apple Computer, Inc.
1 Infinite Loop, MS 3-PAT
Cupertino, CA 95014-2084
Voice: (408) 974-9453
Fax: (408) 974-5436
E-mail: iplaw at apple.com
Sincerely,
Helene Plotka Workman
Senior Patent Counsel, Apple Computer, Inc.
Here is a QuickTime movie of
Tabbed Pie Menu Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0.
I recorded that in 1992 or so, running on a Sun workstation running OpenWindows 3.0. It was all written in object oriented PostScript. We even wrote an X11 window manager in NeWS that put those tabbed pie menu window frames around unsuspecting X-Windows!
And how many extra mouse clicks does it to resize a window whose lower right hand corner is off the edge of the screen?
If you can resize any corner or edge, you still always know which corner to go to resize the window. In fact you don't even have to remember, or tell your left from your right. You just resize the corner that you want to move.
Apple made a stupid mistake in 1984, and just like George W Bush, they're too proud and arrogant to admit it was a mistake, which is the first thing they need to do before addressing the problem.
It's stupid for Bush to act that way, and it's stupid for Apple to act that way.
Real programmers know how to use the APIs to notify their applications efficiently when a file changes, and know other ways for multiple instances of an application to communicate. Something that simple should not cause a real programmer headaches.
How far will Apple fan-boys go to defend Apple's bad designs and shoddy implementations?
If you think Apple can do no wrong (lest their programmers get headaches), then why are Mac windows only resizeable from the lower right corner? Do you have some twisted excuse why that's a better design than how Windows lets you resize a window from any corner or edge? Surely it's worth giving one of Apple's programmers a temporary headache for a few minutes, to solve a problem that's been plaguing Mac users for 23 years since 1984?
I'm talking about the QuickTime SDK, not the QuickTime player.
The API that Adobe Premier has to use to create QuickTime movies, for example.
It took Apple several years to come out with a QuickTime SDK on Windows that supported creating movies, after the SDK on the Mac did. The same thing for supporting streaming QuickTime video. The same thing about supporting capturing the closed captioning text stream from video capture devices (i.e. TV tuner cards, which are all required to support closed captioning by law).
Apple has a long history of going out of their way to break crap they port to Windows, like QuickTime, just to piss off Windows developers and users in a futile attempt to badger them into using Macs instead.
QuickTime has historically been crippled on Windows. Apple originally left out all the movie creation functionality because they only wanted people to create QuickTime movies on Macs, and only play them on PCs, and they wanted to discourage developers from creating applications that edited video on Windows.
Later releases of QuickTime left out important features like streaming video and many other things. The QuickTime SDK was ridiculously paultry and stripped down, did not include any documentation, examples, or anything that would clue developers into the the fact that many parts of it were simply missing. You had to discover that by trying to use the undefined functions, and discover they were missing the hard way.
It's just Apple's way of saying "fuck you" to Windows and Linux developers. They have always done that, and they always will.
Why would theology and science have to occupy totally different parts of many peoples lives, if they weren't mutually incompatible? Why put a firewall between two belief systems? Because you can't reconcile them! When you apply the scientific method to religious doctrine, the doctrine falls apart and looks ridiculous. So Cafeteria Christians argue that it's better to separate your beliefs instead of integrate them. That is the definition of TABOO. They might as well take it to the next step, and get a lobotomy that cuts their brain cut in half, so one half can believe in science, and the other can believe in religion.
Cafeteria Christianity
is a pejorative term, used in general to describe individual Christians or Christian churches who selectively follow or believe in the doctrines of their religion, particularly what the Bible states as being the word or will of God. The use of the term suggests that the believers being so described are not as legitimate as other Christians. As cafeteria style means to pick-and-choose, as in choosing what food to purchase from a cafeteria line, the implication of the term "Cafeteria Christianity" is that the individual's professed religious belief is actually a proxy for their personal opinions rather than a genuine interpretation of or spiritual relationship with Christian doctrine or the teachings of Jesus. The selectivity implied may relate to the acceptance of Christian doctrines (such as creationism and the virgin birth of Jesus) or Biblical morality and ethical prohibitions (e.g. a rejection of homosexual acts and dietary laws) and is often associated with discussions concerning the applicability of Old Testament laws to Christians and the Sermon on the Mount.
The label "Cafeteria Christianity" has been used both to encourage more conformity with Biblical teachings and to advocate for less. When used by Conservative Christians, it is often an expression of a preference for a more literal and uniform approach to the Bible, rather than the carefree do-what-you-want theology preferred (as some see it) by Liberal Christians. The term in this sense thus expresses contempt for those viewed as lax in their Christianity.
It is also used by some Christians and skeptics to undermine the advocacy of particular Christian precepts by pointing out the supposed inconsistency of the advocate's position. The logic of such a usage is that someone who has rejected one supposed command of God has little room to argue that another such command should be followed. Thus these individuals observe that some Christians are more than willing to condemn certain behavior on Biblical grounds and yet do not themselves adhere to the Bible in its totality, i.e. a charge of hypocrisy. For an example, see An Atheist argument on Cafeteria Christianity. The counter argument is usually that, according to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (as well as some Paul's letters), Gentile Christians are not obliged to keep the entire Old Testament Law.
The term Cafeteria Catholic (also à la carte Catholic or CINO = "Catholic In Name Only") is a pejorative or an insulting characterization and is used to describe people who dissent from certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining an identity as Catholics. These people are said to view the Church much like a "cafeteria", where one picks and chooses only those items that appeal to them. The term is typically applied to those who blatently dissent from selected Catholic moral teaching on issues such as abortion, contraception, premarital sex, and homosexuality. The term is less frequently applied to those who dissent from other Catholic moral teaching on issues such as social justice, capital punishment, or just war. Groups labeled as such include Call to Action, FutureChurch, DignityUSA, and Catholics for a Free Choice. Some of those who employ the term in their vocabulary accuse those who view the term pejoratively of believing dissent from the constant teaching of the Church to be a form of devoutness.
It should be noted that the this epithet is not created, used, or endorsed by official church teaching. However, the practice of selective adherence to the magisterium of the church has been repeatedly condemned through the teaching of the Popes:
* In a homily delivered on April 18, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI clarified the relation of dissent to faith:
"Being an adult means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the
I'm working with EA and the OLPC project, to make the original version of SimCity Classic open source.
It's currently going through EA's QA process right now, and the legal department is working on their end of the deal.
This sort of stuff always takes a long time to complete, but Will Wright wants it to happen, so I'm optimistic it will.
Once all the QA and legal stuff is done, we're going to release an updated version for the OLPC of the original X11/TCL/Tk version I developed for Unix about 15 years ago, which supports cooperative multi player mode (voting, chat, shared whiteboard, etc), and I've heavily optimized it so it runs really fast. After it's released, then we're going to adapt it to the OLPC's "Sugar" user interface, which is based on GTK and Cairo. SimCity will be scriptable in Python, of course! We'll rewrite the multi player mode on top of Sugar's standard networking libraries, instead of directly opening multiple X11 connections, as it currently does.
>> I'm a relatively new "convert" (from XML Schema) to RELAX NG. I understand that there is no standard way to associate a RELAX NG schema with a document. I'm just wondering if there is any plan to make this possible.
> Not really. The theory is that you might want to validate a document against different schemas for different purposes, and no one schema is really preferred.
James Clark weighs in with his usual clarity:
>> In simpler words, the people who designed the
technology don't see a consistent way to formally express an
association that already exists, or didn't implement it yet.
> It's part of the general problem of specifying appropriate XML processing; an RNG-specific solution is neither particularly general nor, IMHO, particularly useful.
I would divide the problem of specifying appropriate XML processing for
a document into:
(a) how to specify the process to be performed
(b) how to locate the appropriate processing specification
I see (b) as a special case of the problem of how to specify rules that,
given an XML document, find a related resource. This is problem that
the XML vocabulary that I've designed for nXML mode is intended to
solve. It's not specific to RELAX NG or for that matter to schemas.
You could use the same vocabulary to describe how to find the XSLT
stylesheet to use to display an XML document.
[...]
Although it's important to be able to individually specify the schema to
use for a particular document, it's also convenient to be able to
specify rules that apply to classes of document. For example, on my
system I have a rule that says when the namespace URI of the document
element is http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0, then the schema is/home/jjc/schema/relaxng.rnc.
James
> Hum, that's a place where I would expect the XML Catalogs to take a role in abstracting the file paths.
I think that's an independent issue. If you are in an environment that
has a policy of using XML catalogs for URI remapping in XML-related
contexts, then it would make sense to use them for remapping both URIs
occuring in include/externalRef in schemas and URIs occurring in
locating files. However I don't see any need to explicitly couple
locating files to catalogs. My personal opinion is that, although XML
catalogs are an appropriate solution to the problem of publicId-to-URI
mapping, using XML catalogs to perform URI-to-URI mapping is an
XML-specific solution to a non-XML-specific problem.
James
> Thus, for me the only reasonable choice is still to use the DOCTYPE declaration for all associations
If you want to use DOCTYPEs, the nXML method can accomodate you (by
doctypePublicId rules). However, I find the problems of using DOCTYPEs
worse by far than the problem of associations disappearing on a rename.
And even with DOCTYPEs, you can still get problem of the association
changing; you still have to associate your DOCTYPEs with schemas. If
you force me to put something in the instance, I would much prefer a
processing instruction.
There's no single right way to do the association. Different users will
legitimately prefer different approaches. A solution needs to be
flexible enough to accomodate them.
James
> My opinion is that this association should be obligatory once present and could not be overriden.
It's a basic tenet of RELAX NG that the schema is not inherent in the
document and that validation is a process that has two
independently-specifiable inputs. Section 8 of the spec says: "A
conforming RELAX NG validator must be a
Bungie wins big in this fight, because they're lucky for Miyamoto to even acknowledge their existence.
In the same way, The World's Greatest Creationist Scientists win big whenever a real respected scientist agrees to debate them, not because the Creationists can possibly win the debate, but because they score points and gain undeserved legitimacy by having a real scientist take them seriously enough to waste the time debating with them.
It's as unfair a fight as Richard Dawkins debating A. E. Wilder-Smith, where the creationists totally lose the argument, but score propaganda points by being taken much more seriously than they deserve.
Yes, that was the problem with PalmOS: It reeked of having been designed by ex-80s-Apple people, all the way to the core.
Their actual tools for developing Palm software on Windows (like the resource compiler) were built on top of an awful Mac file system / resource manager emulation library that was proprietary, which belonged to some other company who went out of business a long time ago, so they could not make all of their software development tools open source. They just couldn't get away from the curse of horrible Mac resource files, requiring them to be emulated on Windows, and actually using them on the Palm itself.
The other blatent symptom that the Palm operating system was designed by ex-80s-Apple people is that they have been promising to make a new operating system for many years, and keep making false starts and never following through with it. It took Apple so many years of false starts and broken promises until they finally moved over to OS/X, and it is talking Palm just as long.
I have done a lot of Palm programming, and I don't ever want to do any more. I've totally given up on those knuckleheads.
Slashdot Mirror
A: AT&T.
Well, I said I wanted an account on DM to learn MDL, but I actually only wanted to play Zork. I tried to find the source code at the time, to help me solve the harder puzzles, but not until years later did I stumble across it thanks to google. Finding the source code was a grand adventure in itself!
MDL is basically just a fancy dialect of Lisp, with data types and angled brackets. Now days, the best way to learn MDL is to read the Zork source code!
Where did you find the MDL binary on Twenex.org? I wonder if the binary version of MDL you found would run under the KLH10 PDP-10 emulator, like the one you can telnet to at its.svensson.org. Probably not, since ITS is a lot different than Twenex. Maybe Devon could pull it off of an old DM dump tape! Good luck with your open source MDL interpreter!
I've had a hard time finding the tech reports about MDL online. Here is a thread about locating those and other MIT LCS Tech Reports. It mentions this place to find TR's. That links to this catalog, which lists several MDL publications. Those listings say you can purchase them from MIT Document Services.
MIT-LCS-TR-292: The MDL Programmig Language Primer, by M. Dornbrook, M. Blank.
MIT-LCS-TR-293: The MDL Programming Language, by S. W. Galley, G Pfister.
MIT-LCS-TR-294: The MDL Programming Environment, bu P. D. Lebling.
You might try asking Gerald J Sussman, Hal Abelson, Stu W. Galley or Steve Meretzky. I wonder who owns the copyright, and if they'd be willing to make it GPL and put the original Zork source code up on Google Code for people to read and search and learn from? The version I found is the latest greatest PDP-10 ITS version, just before Infocom took it and ported it to microcomputers.
-Don
>Give Zonk to troll
The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.
-Don
(Sorry about the indentation! It looks nicer in the original source. Slashdot filter fodder: bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla...)
Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used :CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.
Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/
The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play. I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll bit that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll bit!
From http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/dung.mud:
,OVISON ,VICBIT ,VILLAIN> ,TROLL-MELEE)>
<OBJECT ["TROLL"]
["NASTY"]
"troll"
<+
TROLL
(<GET-OBJ "AXE">)
(ODESC1
"A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages
out of the room."
OSTRENGTH 2
OFMSGS
<PSETG FLAG-NAMES
<UVECTOR TROLL-FLAG
LOW-TIDE
DOME-FLAG
GLACIER-FLAG
ECHO-FLAG
RIDDLE-FLAG
LLD-FLAG
CYCLOPS-FLAG
MAGIC-FLAG
RAINBOW
GNOME-DOOR
CAROUSEL-FLIP
CAGE-SOLVE
BANK-SOLVE
EGG-SOLVE
SING-SONG
CPSOLVE
PALAN-SOLVE
SLIDE-SOLVE>>
<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">
<ROOM "MTROL"
"This is a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
<EXIT "WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST" "NORTH" "SOUTH" (<GET-OBJ "TROLL">)>
-Don
A small screen doesn't make bad videos look good. It makes all videos look bad. You can't get something for nothing.
-Don
I'm sure your cell phone service provider would be thrilled for you to upload uncompressed videos over their slow expensive internet connection, because Steve Jobs decided they only programming language you have access to is JavaScript.
How far will Apple fan-boys go to justify Apple's horrible designs and stupid decisions? Will you pay $500 for the airtime it takes to upload an uncompressed movie, while your phone line is tied up for three days sending data? You'd better get two iPhones if you want to receive any calls.
-Don
Spore is for real, not vaporware, but it has to go through a lot of tuning before it's really fun and balanced, just like all of Will Wright's other games. It's a process called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion", and it takes a long time, but it's worth the wait.
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion . (Chris also worked on Spore!)
-Don
Apparently the article is just a bunch of "user generated procedural content", i.e. bullshit. c(-;
-Don
EA: Spore Delay "Misinformation"
Reports that Electronic Arts' highly anticipated Spore has been further delayed are "misinformation," the publisher told Next-Gen today. ImageIt's one of the most anticipated games of today, and any word of further delay for Will Wright's Spore is sure to make headlines.
But reports making rounds today are basically old news being made into "new" news, EA said.
"There seems to be some misinformation flying around," explained a rep in a phone interview. "Nothing's changed since our call on May 8, where [CEO] John Riccitello specifically said that we were moving Spore from fiscal '08 to early fiscal '09."
EA's fiscal 2009 runs from April 2008 through March 2009.
During that May earnings call, Riccitello stated, "...Spore is a title we have enormous confidence in. I've had the chance to review the title three times in the my short return to EA and it looks fantastic. I will also tell you that it's right up [to] the bubble in Q4 [of fiscal '08], if not sometime in early fiscal '09, so we don't feel comfortable in forecasting it."
There has yet to be a firm announced released date for Spore. An "early fiscal '09" release means that the game could theoretically launch in spring 2008.
The rep said that the rumor of the additional delay was exacerbated by a quote making the rounds in the games press lifted from the latest issue of Game Informer which says that the game is "delayed indefinitely." Apparently, the information from the conference call was misconstrued, the rep determined.
"It's the same information we said in May. Spore's progressing and it looks great," she added.
Speaking of resizing windows easily thanks to applying Fitts' Law, here's an even earlier demo of a pie menu window manager for X10 (the predecessor to X11) based on "uwm", scripted in Forth, which lets you resize and manipulate windows with a flick of the mouse: X10 Pie Menu Window Manager Demo. I recorded this some time around 1987 or so.
I'm really disappointed in the Mac window manager and desktop user interface, which is still much too hard to use, after all these years. Steve Jobs fired all Apple's good user interface designers years ago. Pardon the tired cliches, but Apple is totally stuck in a rut, and they've been resting on their laurels and stewing in their own juices for far too long.
-Don
Email from Apple Senior Patent Counsel to WHATWG group:
Dear WHATWG and Mr. Hickson,
Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights ("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.
Any questions regarding this communication should be directed to:
Director of Patents
Apple Computer, Inc.
1 Infinite Loop, MS 3-PAT
Cupertino, CA 95014-2084
Voice: (408) 974-9453
Fax: (408) 974-5436
E-mail: iplaw at apple.com
Sincerely,
Helene Plotka Workman
Senior Patent Counsel, Apple Computer, Inc.
Yay Fitts' Law!
Here is a QuickTime movie of Tabbed Pie Menu Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0. I recorded that in 1992 or so, running on a Sun workstation running OpenWindows 3.0. It was all written in object oriented PostScript. We even wrote an X11 window manager in NeWS that put those tabbed pie menu window frames around unsuspecting X-Windows!
-Don
And how many extra mouse clicks does it to resize a window whose lower right hand corner is off the edge of the screen?
If you can resize any corner or edge, you still always know which corner to go to resize the window. In fact you don't even have to remember, or tell your left from your right. You just resize the corner that you want to move.
Apple made a stupid mistake in 1984, and just like George W Bush, they're too proud and arrogant to admit it was a mistake, which is the first thing they need to do before addressing the problem.
It's stupid for Bush to act that way, and it's stupid for Apple to act that way.
-Don
Real programmers know how to use the APIs to notify their applications efficiently when a file changes, and know other ways for multiple instances of an application to communicate. Something that simple should not cause a real programmer headaches.
How far will Apple fan-boys go to defend Apple's bad designs and shoddy implementations?
If you think Apple can do no wrong (lest their programmers get headaches), then why are Mac windows only resizeable from the lower right corner? Do you have some twisted excuse why that's a better design than how Windows lets you resize a window from any corner or edge? Surely it's worth giving one of Apple's programmers a temporary headache for a few minutes, to solve a problem that's been plaguing Mac users for 23 years since 1984?
-Don
I'm talking about the QuickTime SDK, not the QuickTime player. The API that Adobe Premier has to use to create QuickTime movies, for example.
It took Apple several years to come out with a QuickTime SDK on Windows that supported creating movies, after the SDK on the Mac did. The same thing for supporting streaming QuickTime video. The same thing about supporting capturing the closed captioning text stream from video capture devices (i.e. TV tuner cards, which are all required to support closed captioning by law).
-Don
Are you like one of those imitation programmers who can't figure out how to get two programs to share the same music library?
-Don
Apple has a long history of going out of their way to break crap they port to Windows, like QuickTime, just to piss off Windows developers and users in a futile attempt to badger them into using Macs instead.
QuickTime has historically been crippled on Windows. Apple originally left out all the movie creation functionality because they only wanted people to create QuickTime movies on Macs, and only play them on PCs, and they wanted to discourage developers from creating applications that edited video on Windows.
Later releases of QuickTime left out important features like streaming video and many other things. The QuickTime SDK was ridiculously paultry and stripped down, did not include any documentation, examples, or anything that would clue developers into the the fact that many parts of it were simply missing. You had to discover that by trying to use the undefined functions, and discover they were missing the hard way.
It's just Apple's way of saying "fuck you" to Windows and Linux developers. They have always done that, and they always will.
-Don
They don't call them SHARED LIBRARIES for nothing.
-Don
Why would theology and science have to occupy totally different parts of many peoples lives, if they weren't mutually incompatible? Why put a firewall between two belief systems? Because you can't reconcile them! When you apply the scientific method to religious doctrine, the doctrine falls apart and looks ridiculous. So Cafeteria Christians argue that it's better to separate your beliefs instead of integrate them. That is the definition of TABOO. They might as well take it to the next step, and get a lobotomy that cuts their brain cut in half, so one half can believe in science, and the other can believe in religion.
-Don
Cafeteria Christianity is a pejorative term, used in general to describe individual Christians or Christian churches who selectively follow or believe in the doctrines of their religion, particularly what the Bible states as being the word or will of God. The use of the term suggests that the believers being so described are not as legitimate as other Christians. As cafeteria style means to pick-and-choose, as in choosing what food to purchase from a cafeteria line, the implication of the term "Cafeteria Christianity" is that the individual's professed religious belief is actually a proxy for their personal opinions rather than a genuine interpretation of or spiritual relationship with Christian doctrine or the teachings of Jesus. The selectivity implied may relate to the acceptance of Christian doctrines (such as creationism and the virgin birth of Jesus) or Biblical morality and ethical prohibitions (e.g. a rejection of homosexual acts and dietary laws) and is often associated with discussions concerning the applicability of Old Testament laws to Christians and the Sermon on the Mount.
The label "Cafeteria Christianity" has been used both to encourage more conformity with Biblical teachings and to advocate for less. When used by Conservative Christians, it is often an expression of a preference for a more literal and uniform approach to the Bible, rather than the carefree do-what-you-want theology preferred (as some see it) by Liberal Christians. The term in this sense thus expresses contempt for those viewed as lax in their Christianity.
It is also used by some Christians and skeptics to undermine the advocacy of particular Christian precepts by pointing out the supposed inconsistency of the advocate's position. The logic of such a usage is that someone who has rejected one supposed command of God has little room to argue that another such command should be followed. Thus these individuals observe that some Christians are more than willing to condemn certain behavior on Biblical grounds and yet do not themselves adhere to the Bible in its totality, i.e. a charge of hypocrisy. For an example, see An Atheist argument on Cafeteria Christianity. The counter argument is usually that, according to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (as well as some Paul's letters), Gentile Christians are not obliged to keep the entire Old Testament Law.
The term Cafeteria Catholic (also à la carte Catholic or CINO = "Catholic In Name Only") is a pejorative or an insulting characterization and is used to describe people who dissent from certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining an identity as Catholics. These people are said to view the Church much like a "cafeteria", where one picks and chooses only those items that appeal to them. The term is typically applied to those who blatently dissent from selected Catholic moral teaching on issues such as abortion, contraception, premarital sex, and homosexuality. The term is less frequently applied to those who dissent from other Catholic moral teaching on issues such as social justice, capital punishment, or just war. Groups labeled as such include Call to Action, FutureChurch, DignityUSA, and Catholics for a Free Choice. Some of those who employ the term in their vocabulary accuse those who view the term pejoratively of believing dissent from the constant teaching of the Church to be a form of devoutness.
It should be noted that the this epithet is not created, used, or endorsed by official church teaching. However, the practice of selective adherence to the magisterium of the church has been repeatedly condemned through the teaching of the Popes:
* In a homily delivered on April 18, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI clarified the relation of dissent to faith:
I'm working with EA and the OLPC project, to make the original version of SimCity Classic open source. It's currently going through EA's QA process right now, and the legal department is working on their end of the deal. This sort of stuff always takes a long time to complete, but Will Wright wants it to happen, so I'm optimistic it will.
Once all the QA and legal stuff is done, we're going to release an updated version for the OLPC of the original X11/TCL/Tk version I developed for Unix about 15 years ago, which supports cooperative multi player mode (voting, chat, shared whiteboard, etc), and I've heavily optimized it so it runs really fast. After it's released, then we're going to adapt it to the OLPC's "Sugar" user interface, which is based on GTK and Cairo. SimCity will be scriptable in Python, of course! We'll rewrite the multi player mode on top of Sugar's standard networking libraries, instead of directly opening multiple X11 connections, as it currently does.
Some ideas about SimCity on the OLPC:
SimCity for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child): Applying Papert's Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program.
I'm already developing some of the software components required to port SimCity to the OLPC, including pie menus and a tile engine:
Pie Menus for OLPC Sugar User Interface, in Python with GTK, Cairo and Pango modules.
[OLPC-Games] Efficient general purpose tile engine, and a cellular automata machine.
-Don
RMS -vs- Doctor, on the evils of Natalism
Mike Gallaher (UniPress Emacs Hacker Boss, aka "Evil Software Hoarder") and I were walking around a science fiction convention, and we ran into RMS.
Mike said "Richard, I heard a rumor that your house burnt down..."
RMS immediately replied: "Where you work, I thought you would have heard about it in advance!"
-Don
There's a reason for that!
Here's a discussion about it on the Relaxng-user mailing list:
http://relaxng.org/pipermail/relaxng-user/2003-Oct ober/thread.html
>> I'm a relatively new "convert" (from XML Schema) to RELAX NG. I understand that there is no standard way to associate a RELAX NG schema with a document. I'm just wondering if there is any plan to make this possible.
> Not really. The theory is that you might want to validate a document against different schemas for different purposes, and no one schema is really preferred.
James Clark weighs in with his usual clarity:
I would divide the problem of specifying appropriate XML processing for a document into:
(a) how to specify the process to be performed
(b) how to locate the appropriate processing specification
I see (b) as a special case of the problem of how to specify rules that, given an XML document, find a related resource. This is problem that the XML vocabulary that I've designed for nXML mode is intended to solve. It's not specific to RELAX NG or for that matter to schemas. You could use the same vocabulary to describe how to find the XSLT stylesheet to use to display an XML document.
[...]
Although it's important to be able to individually specify the schema to use for a particular document, it's also convenient to be able to specify rules that apply to classes of document. For example, on my system I have a rule that says when the namespace URI of the document element is http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0, then the schema is /home/jjc/schema/relaxng.rnc.
James
> Hum, that's a place where I would expect the XML Catalogs to take a role in abstracting the file paths.
I think that's an independent issue. If you are in an environment that has a policy of using XML catalogs for URI remapping in XML-related contexts, then it would make sense to use them for remapping both URIs occuring in include/externalRef in schemas and URIs occurring in locating files. However I don't see any need to explicitly couple locating files to catalogs. My personal opinion is that, although XML catalogs are an appropriate solution to the problem of publicId-to-URI mapping, using XML catalogs to perform URI-to-URI mapping is an XML-specific solution to a non-XML-specific problem.
James
> Thus, for me the only reasonable choice is still to use the DOCTYPE declaration for all associations
If you want to use DOCTYPEs, the nXML method can accomodate you (by doctypePublicId rules). However, I find the problems of using DOCTYPEs worse by far than the problem of associations disappearing on a rename. And even with DOCTYPEs, you can still get problem of the association changing; you still have to associate your DOCTYPEs with schemas. If you force me to put something in the instance, I would much prefer a processing instruction.
There's no single right way to do the association. Different users will legitimately prefer different approaches. A solution needs to be flexible enough to accomodate them.
James
> My opinion is that this association should be obligatory once present and could not be overriden.
It's a basic tenet of RELAX NG that the schema is not inherent in the document and that validation is a process that has two independently-specifiable inputs. Section 8 of the spec says: "A conforming RELAX NG validator must be a
Bungie wins big in this fight, because they're lucky for Miyamoto to even acknowledge their existence.
In the same way, The World's Greatest Creationist Scientists win big whenever a real respected scientist agrees to debate them, not because the Creationists can possibly win the debate, but because they score points and gain undeserved legitimacy by having a real scientist take them seriously enough to waste the time debating with them.
It's as unfair a fight as Richard Dawkins debating A. E. Wilder-Smith, where the creationists totally lose the argument, but score propaganda points by being taken much more seriously than they deserve.
-Don
Yes, that was the problem with PalmOS: It reeked of having been designed by ex-80s-Apple people, all the way to the core.
Their actual tools for developing Palm software on Windows (like the resource compiler) were built on top of an awful Mac file system / resource manager emulation library that was proprietary, which belonged to some other company who went out of business a long time ago, so they could not make all of their software development tools open source. They just couldn't get away from the curse of horrible Mac resource files, requiring them to be emulated on Windows, and actually using them on the Palm itself.
The other blatent symptom that the Palm operating system was designed by ex-80s-Apple people is that they have been promising to make a new operating system for many years, and keep making false starts and never following through with it. It took Apple so many years of false starts and broken promises until they finally moved over to OS/X, and it is talking Palm just as long.
I have done a lot of Palm programming, and I don't ever want to do any more. I've totally given up on those knuckleheads.
-Don