I think this is more likely so that stupid people don't get email from "hotmail_support@hotmail.com" saying "Please send us your password, we need to fix our database," rather than from any motive of squashing your right to say that they suck.
Anyone who doesn't think things haven't changed lately should ask someone born in the 1940's to a) see their teeth and b) ask what going to the dentist was like as a kid. Fluoride and air-powered drills are two of the things I'm thankful for.
My father told horror stories of the foot-pedal powered drill his dentist used. And he had horrible, horrible teeth, all of his molars were either filled or capped, and he was religious about brushing. My mother's not much better. I've had one cavity in my life, and I have friends who have had none.
Sounds like it might have been a courtroom stenographer's style keyboard, which uses phonetic input. Software on the back end sorts it back into English. I've been led to believe this is what is used for closed-captioning, also.
Personally, I use a Kinesis when I'm on my desktop, and it was *incredibly* helpful when my wrists were at their worst. Now I'm out of grad school, I'm not typing enough to really make a difference, I think. Some might complain that $250 is a lot for a keyboard, but how much is it worth to not hurt all the time, and to not ruin your career by not being able to type, and wind up flipping burgers for $5 rather than whatever you might make on computers?
I find it interesting that there's no Macintoshes or Suns in the test, although there are at least one Alpha and two RS/6000s. How can they claim to be a useful benchmark by concentrating mostly on Intel hardware, and only running three HTTP servers? I'd think that the differences between different servers running on the same hardware could be just as much as between different hardware configurations; hell, even poorly configured vs. properly configured systems would be a huge difference...
Then (presumably) the same person or persons gained access to our boot file and added the following line of text: (the boot file tells the server which domains it is hosting or reporting DNS for)
primary nike.com nike.com.dns
So, doesn't this sound to you like the guy is admitting that he was the one who hacked Nike? "Err, yeah, evil hackers broke into my system and modified my boot file! That's the ticket!" Maybe he should be a little less transparent in his attempts. (First, "amazon.gr," now this.)
The article really says that the Dragonslayer Project is a *design project* for undergraduates, with teams of freshmen (apparently) working on the marketing plan while teams of upperclassmen do the detailed design (finite element analysis, for one) that their knowledge allows.
There is no statement that this is actually going to get produced. There's nothing to prevent it from happening, but this was a design class project, not an actual funded program to create a sword.
As someone who specialized in design education in grad school, however, it sounds like the class itself is at the forefront of current (design class) practice. By using teams at different ability levels, the 'junior' teams get a great learning benefit. Also, the first-year students get a taste for using a design process and get a good idea of their entire curriculum right at the start of their program, which helps them put most of their other classes in perspective and (educators hope) improves learning by tying it all together and helps the students decide very early if they're in a field they feel they belong.
On an unrelated note, Spaf (Dr. Spafford to you, buddy) also runs the usually-funny Yucks mailing list. This list has long seemed among the cream of the crop of net-humor to me.
I never thought I'd see an article saying "back in the day" about the early days of Wired, talking about how noone new about the internet. When Time-Warner knows enough about the internet to start a magazine about it, and for everyone to almost universally judge it as "not quite getting it," I think that counts as people knowing about the internet. Makes me long for the days when September sucked due to all the new freshmen coming online at once, until they caught on in late October and got a clue.
let's kill all the managers. It seems to me like we can track 99% of the crap out there in the computer world nowadays to managers saying "Wouldn't it be neat if, in addition to everything users wanted, we could get the software to do (x) for the guys in (department) too?"
Day of the Tentacle had all of the original Maniac Mansion embedded in it... the Tentacle had, in its room, an old IBM PC, which, if you booted it up, would run the original Maniac Mansion, to which Day of the Tentacle was a sequel.
Some musings on the death of Pinball in the 90s
on
Is Pinball Dying?
·
· Score: 2
I see a few major reasons for the so-called recent death of pinball. Back when I stopped playing around 1994 due to RSI in my wrists (a combination of typing and pinball messed up my ulnar nerve pretty fierce), the 'art' of pinball was actually at its highest. Funhouse (1989?), The Adaams Family (1992?) and The Twilight Zone (1993) are arguably the best pinball games ever. Deep rulesets that were well balanced and allowed both novices a fun game, while experts had a variety of goals; a sense of humor; and well-laid out shots.
However, all through the 1990's Data East pinball (who became Sega and are now Stern) continued to pump out mediocre games using licensed themes. Simpsons, Jurassic Park, Tales from the Crypt... even up to South Park recently. (I haven't played any of the new Stern games) The game would suck in the average arcade goer who wanted to play a game tied to the latest hip cultural trend. They'd find a game with flippers that were hard to control (compare an early-90's Data East to a Bally or Midway of the same era for "flipper feel"), and had boring gameplay. Thus, the person attracted to pinball for perhaps the first time, would find that it just wasn't that much fun.
Top that with the need of operators to actually *maintain* the games (hahah!) -- something as simple as a slightly weak flipper could ruin a game with the advent of ramps on the playfield, I belive in Black Knight from 1981 or 1982. The longer gameplay combined with the ability of an expert to get a replay and continue playing for free, and operators simply were not making much money in the same amount of time as with the (then) hit chop-socky games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II -- both of which almost guaranteed a new quarter being pumped in every 90 seconds or so, especially during two-player games. When I was good I could easily play for ten or fifteen minutes for fifty cents on Addams Family, after only about one school term's worth of daily practice.
I think the final nail in the coffin was Bally/Midway/Williams's attempt to update the pinball game by bringing in a video monitor for their Pinball 2000 line of two games - Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode One. Unfortunately neither of these games were real barn-burners in the fun department and the setup to reflect the monitor obscured shots and made play difficult. They bet the farm on this idea, and it failed.
Fortunately, pinballs still live on. Stern (who made games back in the 70's, and I'm sure earlier, I'm just too lasy to hit the pinball database) purchased Sega's pinball division, and that's it for currently manufactured games. Let's hope they don't continue the Data East - Sega tradition. Some people are starting to make their own personalized games. And eBay has a nice category of pinball stuff, which, as all things eBay, can be both a ripoff or a treasure.
And, finally I have to mention the simulations. I forget the company, but one group put out "Timeshock" and "The Web" (and, I'm sure, more since then) for both Windows and Mac which struck me as very nice and realistic feeling new-style games with dot-matrix display and all. Another company put out a number of originals ("Loony Labyrinth," "Crystal Caliburn," and recently "Angel Egg") that are pretty good, and two reproductions, ("Royal Flush" and "Eight Ball Deluxe"), all for the PC and Mac. I own 8-Ball Deluxe and found it very fun and pretty good physics, and much as I remembered the original. They had also programmed most of "Funhouse," which many were drooling over, but it was never released. The company apparently split into a Japanese group which is still producting games and the American group doing the reproductions which has been dead for five or six years. Anything with Sierra's name and "3-D" on it is probably a waste, it only looks like pinball but sure doesn't play like it. And, surprisingly, the Game Boy game Pokemon Pinball is an excellent little simulation for the $25 it cost and has given me more pleasure than any Game Boy game I own.
Want to see a fun exercise? Use Finder or Win Explorer. Go into a directory, and erase everything over a certain size, with the string 'llama' somewhere in the title, that is more than three days old.
This is easier than you think. CMD-F to open Sherlock, which, although technically not the finder, is close enough for our purposes as it's part of MacOS. Click "more choices" twice. Select: Find items in the finder selection whose name contains llama; size is greater than 128k; date created is before 7 Jun 2000. Select-all on the results window and trash it.
Rudy Rucker comes to my mind, he's a mathematician prof. at San Jose State University. He wrote (among others) the cyberpunk classic Software, one of the short-lived steampunk genre, The Hollow Earth, cellular automata SF The Hacker and the Ants, and a couple of popular mathematics books The Fourth Dimension and Mindtools. He's also written a number of cellular automata programs (which is his area of expertise) and his webpage indicates he teaches two programming classes.
His books have some neat ideas but his characters all seem to devolve into the same loser / burnout type. According to his biography he's working on an historical novel about Peter Bruegel which I look forward to as an interesting change. The fourth *ware book, Realware just came out.
1) a good looking women Unix systems administrator 2) the server room is hot, really hot, she has to take her shirt off just to work on the cluster 3) see kills the evil bad guys (ie: suits) with heavy machine guns and high explosives 4) To relax at the end of the day she has multi good looking women freinds join her naked in the hot tub.
Well, it sounds like you've got some of the basic ideas of the Sandra Bullock film The Net, which, if you haven't seen yet, you should... consider yourself lucky. The worst movie I saw that year, tied with Species. But it does have the basic idea of a good looking sysadmin and bad guys with guns.
"Of course," he replied. "Fahrenheit 451. I remember because Jon Bon Jovi wrote a song about that." "You mean, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?"
Or, worse, nowadays... "You mean, Paul McCartney was in a band?"
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is more likely so that stupid people don't get email from "hotmail_support@hotmail.com" saying "Please send us your password, we need to fix our database," rather than from any motive of squashing your right to say that they suck.
My father told horror stories of the foot-pedal powered drill his dentist used. And he had horrible, horrible teeth, all of his molars were either filled or capped, and he was religious about brushing. My mother's not much better. I've had one cavity in my life, and I have friends who have had none.
Personally, I use a Kinesis when I'm on my desktop, and it was *incredibly* helpful when my wrists were at their worst. Now I'm out of grad school, I'm not typing enough to really make a difference, I think. Some might complain that $250 is a lot for a keyboard, but how much is it worth to not hurt all the time, and to not ruin your career by not being able to type, and wind up flipping burgers for $5 rather than whatever you might make on computers?
I find it interesting that there's no Macintoshes or Suns in the test, although there are at least one Alpha and two RS/6000s. How can they claim to be a useful benchmark by concentrating mostly on Intel hardware, and only running three HTTP servers? I'd think that the differences between different servers running on the same hardware could be just as much as between different hardware configurations; hell, even poorly configured vs. properly configured systems would be a huge difference...
I hear they don't call it a Quarter Pounder in France. I hear they call it a "Royale with Cheese."
primary nike.com nike.com.dns
So, doesn't this sound to you like the guy is admitting that he was the one who hacked Nike? "Err, yeah, evil hackers broke into my system and modified my boot file! That's the ticket!" Maybe he should be a little less transparent in his attempts. (First, "amazon.gr," now this.)
The article really says that the Dragonslayer Project is a *design project* for undergraduates, with teams of freshmen (apparently) working on the marketing plan while teams of upperclassmen do the detailed design (finite element analysis, for one) that their knowledge allows.
There is no statement that this is actually going to get produced. There's nothing to prevent it from happening, but this was a design class project, not an actual funded program to create a sword.
As someone who specialized in design education in grad school, however, it sounds like the class itself is at the forefront of current (design class) practice. By using teams at different ability levels, the 'junior' teams get a great learning benefit. Also, the first-year students get a taste for using a design process and get a good idea of their entire curriculum right at the start of their program, which helps them put most of their other classes in perspective and (educators hope) improves learning by tying it all together and helps the students decide very early if they're in a field they feel they belong.
On an unrelated note, Spaf (Dr. Spafford to you, buddy) also runs the usually-funny Yucks mailing list. This list has long seemed among the cream of the crop of net-humor to me.
I never thought I'd see an article saying "back in the day" about the early days of Wired, talking about how noone new about the internet. When Time-Warner knows enough about the internet to start a magazine about it, and for everyone to almost universally judge it as "not quite getting it," I think that counts as people knowing about the internet. Makes me long for the days when September sucked due to all the new freshmen coming online at once, until they caught on in late October and got a clue.
let's kill all the managers. It seems to me like we can track 99% of the crap out there in the computer world nowadays to managers saying "Wouldn't it be neat if, in addition to everything users wanted, we could get the software to do (x) for the guys in (department) too?"
Day of the Tentacle had all of the original Maniac Mansion embedded in it... the Tentacle had, in its room, an old IBM PC, which, if you booted it up, would run the original Maniac Mansion, to which Day of the Tentacle was a sequel.
I see a few major reasons for the so-called recent death of pinball. Back when I stopped playing around 1994 due to RSI in my wrists (a combination of typing and pinball messed up my ulnar nerve pretty fierce), the 'art' of pinball was actually at its highest. Funhouse (1989?), The Adaams Family (1992?) and The Twilight Zone (1993) are arguably the best pinball games ever. Deep rulesets that were well balanced and allowed both novices a fun game, while experts had a variety of goals; a sense of humor; and well-laid out shots.
However, all through the 1990's Data East pinball (who became Sega and are now Stern) continued to pump out mediocre games using licensed themes. Simpsons, Jurassic Park, Tales from the Crypt... even up to South Park recently. (I haven't played any of the new Stern games) The game would suck in the average arcade goer who wanted to play a game tied to the latest hip cultural trend. They'd find a game with flippers that were hard to control (compare an early-90's Data East to a Bally or Midway of the same era for "flipper feel"), and had boring gameplay. Thus, the person attracted to pinball for perhaps the first time, would find that it just wasn't that much fun.
Top that with the need of operators to actually *maintain* the games (hahah!) -- something as simple as a slightly weak flipper could ruin a game with the advent of ramps on the playfield, I belive in Black Knight from 1981 or 1982. The longer gameplay combined with the ability of an expert to get a replay and continue playing for free, and operators simply were not making much money in the same amount of time as with the (then) hit chop-socky games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II -- both of which almost guaranteed a new quarter being pumped in every 90 seconds or so, especially during two-player games. When I was good I could easily play for ten or fifteen minutes for fifty cents on Addams Family, after only about one school term's worth of daily practice.
I think the final nail in the coffin was Bally/Midway/Williams's attempt to update the pinball game by bringing in a video monitor for their Pinball 2000 line of two games - Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode One. Unfortunately neither of these games were real barn-burners in the fun department and the setup to reflect the monitor obscured shots and made play difficult. They bet the farm on this idea, and it failed.
Fortunately, pinballs still live on. Stern (who made games back in the 70's, and I'm sure earlier, I'm just too lasy to hit the pinball database) purchased Sega's pinball division, and that's it for currently manufactured games. Let's hope they don't continue the Data East - Sega tradition. Some people are starting to make their own personalized games. And eBay has a nice category of pinball stuff, which, as all things eBay, can be both a ripoff or a treasure.
And, finally I have to mention the simulations. I forget the company, but one group put out "Timeshock" and "The Web" (and, I'm sure, more since then) for both Windows and Mac which struck me as very nice and realistic feeling new-style games with dot-matrix display and all. Another company put out a number of originals ("Loony Labyrinth," "Crystal Caliburn," and recently "Angel Egg") that are pretty good, and two reproductions, ("Royal Flush" and "Eight Ball Deluxe"), all for the PC and Mac. I own 8-Ball Deluxe and found it very fun and pretty good physics, and much as I remembered the original. They had also programmed most of "Funhouse," which many were drooling over, but it was never released. The company apparently split into a Japanese group which is still producting games and the American group doing the reproductions which has been dead for five or six years. Anything with Sierra's name and "3-D" on it is probably a waste, it only looks like pinball but sure doesn't play like it. And, surprisingly, the Game Boy game Pokemon Pinball is an excellent little simulation for the $25 it cost and has given me more pleasure than any Game Boy game I own.
Want to see a fun exercise? Use Finder or Win Explorer. Go into a directory, and erase everything over a certain size, with the string 'llama' somewhere in the title, that is more than three days old.
This is easier than you think. CMD-F to open Sherlock, which, although technically not the finder, is close enough for our purposes as it's part of MacOS. Click "more choices" twice. Select: Find items in the finder selection whose name contains llama; size is greater than 128k; date created is before 7 Jun 2000. Select-all on the results window and trash it.
Rudy Rucker comes to my mind, he's a mathematician prof. at San Jose State University. He wrote (among others) the cyberpunk classic Software, one of the short-lived steampunk genre, The Hollow Earth, cellular automata SF The Hacker and the Ants, and a couple of popular mathematics books The Fourth Dimension and Mindtools. He's also written a number of cellular automata programs (which is his area of expertise) and his webpage indicates he teaches two programming classes.
His books have some neat ideas but his characters all seem to devolve into the same loser / burnout type. According to his biography he's working on an historical novel about Peter Bruegel which I look forward to as an interesting change. The fourth *ware book, Realware just came out.
1) a good looking women Unix systems administrator
2) the server room is hot, really hot, she has to take her shirt off just to work on the cluster
3) see kills the evil bad guys (ie: suits) with heavy machine guns and high explosives
4) To relax at the end of the day she has multi good looking women freinds join her naked in the hot tub.
Well, it sounds like you've got some of the basic ideas of the Sandra Bullock film The Net, which, if you haven't seen yet, you should... consider yourself lucky. The worst movie I saw that year, tied with Species. But it does have the basic idea of a good looking sysadmin and bad guys with guns.
"Of course," he replied. "Fahrenheit 451. I remember because Jon Bon Jovi wrote a song about that."
"You mean, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?"
Or, worse, nowadays... "You mean, Paul McCartney was in a band?"