You'd have to have the build system recognize the save file. The problem is that the Z-Machine only saves a file to a (particular) arbitrary format.
The thing that makes me doubt the possibility of an inform port is the theorem-prover that you'd need. I don't recall that being part of the standard library, despite its obvious usefulness for making puzzles...
Infocom compiled all of their games to a virtual machine to make porting easier. Clearly, if this is going to be a proper text adventure, it should be available for that VM. That way, if you want to configure your kernel on, say, your pilot or your VIC-20, it would be no problem.
They were planning to replace the BSD boxes with Windows ones, but they decided to wait unril they had to reboot them, and then they completely forgot about them because they're used to rebooting machines every week.
They would replace them now, but... uh... they got lost during some recent renovations...
Reference vs. actual board?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
It's hard to tell exactly what the chipset can do, as opposed to what the reference board does. I would assume that, if this chipset can't handle a better GPU, they'll make one before long that can. Likewise, most of the obvious problems are probably a result of them doing the motherboard when they normally do chipsets.
If they've improved memory bandwidth enough that the GPU and CPU can both use the same memory without getting too slow, that would probably be a big advantage-- you could dynamically allocate memory size and memory bandwidth, so that you only give the graphic system a huge amount of memory when it wants it, and you can use the memory for programs when you're not doing that much graphics.
Suppose someone actually set up a scheme where you pay 25 cents/month to see a site, free the first few times so you can decide whether it interests you, and paying by the month rather than by the page.
In order for this to work, it would have to be voluntary: someone *could* just keep pretending they were new, there on the free trial, or they could share passwords or send the comics to their friends, or whatever.
On the other hand, 25 cents isn't a lot of money. If it were convenient, people wouldn't avoid it, assuming they actually liked what they were getting. The time it takes to read a comic strip each day for a month is probably worth more than 25 cents to the viewer. The right interface would probably just be a thing that popped up if you hadn't paid for a month and you'd read more than a couple strips; you click the thing and don't think about it again for another month.
The main issue I see is that micropayments only make sense if you're making a bunch of them. Getting money into the system only works on a larger scale (~20$); similarly, getting money out of the system requires a large number of payments.
If you're going to pay $20/month to the sites you pay, and all of them will accept payments from the same account, it's feasible with credit cards or checks to the micropayment bank. But if there are only a few sites, it's going to be hard to find sites you'd be willing to spend enough on each month to justify getting the account.
Today's students will probably do thir best work in a language similar to Java, but with better support for the things that Java is bad at. This language does not yet exist at all.
It will use many of the same language features that languages that currently exist have, though, and this is what it is worth learning. Of course, its features which are currently available are available in different languages, so it's important to learn multiple languages.
For OOP, I think that Java is a good tool. Possibly Scheme would be better if you wanted to present the full range of possibilities, since there are theoretically significant features that Java lacks (e.g., singleton instances). Of course, in order to be particularly good programmers, people need to know more than just OO concepts, and that means they'll need to learn a language that's good for teaching those concepts.
In practice, currently I would suggest C for actual programming, including OOP, unless you need platform-independence or you need libraries that exist only in another language. But I wouldn't want to try *teaching* OOP with C; you really want to have a language where the OO syntax is obvious and explicit.
I've never met anyone who had RSI of any sort who wasn't under a whole lot of stress. I suspect that people who type a lot are more likely to manifest their stress as CTS than people who don't do much with their hands. Media exposure probably also increases the chance, as the article suggests.
Whether the physical damage is real or not is questionable. Stress could either be manifested as pain or as susceptability to damage, and it could vary among people.
All in all, I think RSI is better for you than heart disease or chronic fatigue or whatever people will get when they stop getting RSI.
The distinguishing feature of wearables is that you can use them without taking them out of whatever you carry them in. Palms are designed to be always with you, but not always usable; you can't see where you're going and they take both hands.
The location of the machine doesn't really matter; what you're actually wearing is the I/O devices, so that you can use them without looking down or occupying your hands all of the time.
The pictures are of the "demo" clothes, which have all the hardware on the outside. There are other versions which actually cover all of the hardware for protection and so that you don't look like a Radio Shack fell on you. Coffee shouldn't be a problem, although a rain storm or a water balloon might be.
UTF-8 encodes 7-bit ASCII characters as themselves and all of the rest of UCS-4 (the unicode extension to 32-bits) as sequences of non-ascii characters. This means that apps which can't handle anything but ascii can simply ignore non-ascii and get all of the ascii characters (and, with minimal work, report the correct number of unknown characters).
The only issue is that there's not a good way to set a mask for the characters such that 0-127 (which take up a single byte) are the common characters for the language, and so on, so English is more compact than other languages, even languages which don't require more characters.
I can just imagine it: you get three quarters of the way through the book, having no clue what's really going on but expecting it to all make sense in the end...
...and then the rest of the book is blank, except for an editor's note at the end, explaining that the author died partway though.
People would argue for years over how he intended to finish it.
MIT has been using various UNIX flavors for ages. There are some departments which use MS software, but by and large the impression is that the lack of office applications is not a problem is that other people are discouraged from using office applications. People don't send you Word documents and such because they can't write them, so you don't need to read them.
The only issue I see is that Google can modify your posts, which most free sites do anyway (adding advertizing blurbs, etc).
If Google wasn't allowed to publish (etc) your posts, they couldn't propagate your posts. In fact, Google does most of those things to posts made through other news servers, too, since they reformat them in HTML and serve them to Google users.
Non-executable stacks can still be exploited, but the exploits that are easy to write and work on most machine won't work. While it does give you a false sense of security, it means that someone searching for a machine to exploit will probably move on. Of course, if everyone used it, attackers would get around it, but it's helpful for now.
Service Packs, I believe, contain fixes for a ton of different programs and such. Since this is exclusively the kernel that is getting updated, it's not really a "pack".
The point about not changing things that work is still valid, although in this case, it's only changing a single thing; it won't make all of your software behave differently.
It strikes me that the reason MS has been coming down so hard on the GPL could be to get managers at MS Research to keep people from doing this.
It seems to me that they could be worried that carelessness or malice at MS Research could put them in a situation of having GPLed code they own but whose licensing they can't withdraw infect their main products.
When reading patents, you have to read the actual claims, not just the headings of the claims. The headings of the claims are necessarily obvious ideas; if it can be described in a line or two, it's probably obvious. What is important is the described process (in this sort of patent), not the result. For example:
1. A method for getting to my friend's house:
Go down this street, turn left, cut through the park, staying on the path because people walk their dogs in the park, go down the dead-end street, slip though the hole in the fence, and turn right.
Such a patent would only apply to the method, which is somewhat clever, and not to either the steps involved (which come be used by other people) or the end result (which could be done in other ways). As far as I can tell, TiVo's patent doesn't even apply to their direct competitor's product (I believe ReplayTV uses a different storage format), let alone prohibit the creation of devices that differ in other ways. Basically, you just can't build an exact clone of TiVo.
There are things that users want to do and ways they want their programs to behave. By and large, users want their programs to behave in ways that are similar to what they have, in the past, learned. There is no reason that the way they want their programs to behave would be good for accomplishing their tasks, compared to an alternative which they are not yet accustomed to.
If their goals are to create and read documents, they would be better served by emacs and LaTeX, which are less work than Word if you ever modify the middle of a document (in my experience). What business users want, however, is to generate and read Word files, which is difficult both for programmers and for users.
The basic task (creating documents) is easy to accomplish. The particular requirements that users have (creating Word documents, doing WYSIWYG) is very difficult. This is why Word is harder to use and more error-prone than, for example, WordPerfect 5.0; emacs does not have a particular edge over WP50 but has not gone down the unusability paths that Word has.
MS makes so much money, in part, because they define, through their business relationships, how people have to accomplish the tasks they're trying to do. Users have to know how to use Office because it's in their job requirements and because that's the only way they can read the documents they have to read. To a certain extent, also, MS implements the software that people think will help them get their work done. There are a lot of features which are, at a first glance, attractive but which hide a lack of more effective functionality or get in the way most of the time.
MS's success is in getting their formats adopted, not in technical merit.
Software better than Office is essentially trivial: emacs has always been better than Office for actually getting things done. The interface is more straightforward, and it's easier to see what you're doing. If you use LaTeX, you don't need fix your document formatting every time you change anything. Office has enough fundamental design flaws that, on technical merit (including usability) it's not hard to compete.
What Linux lacks is a program that is exactly like Office; this is the niche that StarOffice and such are trying to fill. Since business users want have generally gone through hell to learn how to deal with Office, they want to use this skill instead of learning even an easier and more efficient system. Crippled by trying to have the same functionality and file formats as Office, it's not surprising that Linux fails to have an acceptable program; Microsoft doesn't really have an acceptable version, and they control the standard.
Sell something other than what you GPL
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
What I see as the appropriate major role of companies in open source development is in the development of products the company wants to use but is not interested in selling.
For instance, a company that wants to have backups could sensibly contribute to a GPLed backup program, not pay for it, and improve it to handle their needs. They pay the community in improvements instead of paying a commercial company in money, thus causing increased value in a public space instead of in another private company.
Of course, Microsoft is a very large private company based on having people pay them for products instead of contributing time or money to the creation of products which would then be freely available.
Distributions make sense when there are tons of people who are going approximately the same thing you are. If a distribution is not really doing much with sparcs, it's not going to be particularly helpful.
On the other hand, most programs build with tar/configure/make install these days, so, once you have a shell, a method for fetching tarballs over the network, and a set of tools, you can get the rest easily; it should take a couple of days, assuming the tools and libraries you start with aren't too far behind. It took me about a week (admittedly on x86), including migrating from libc5 (which I had working already) to libc6 (which I wanted to have on the new machine).
In 3 years, Linux and the various free projects will supposedly be ready to replace all of MS's software. So you can tell the salesperson, "Three years is fine; I'm planning to switch to Linux then anyway."
Nothing like a normal database, but...
on
SQL Over FreeNet
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· Score: 2
Even if it's not persistent and stable like a traditional database, there's likely to be some good use for it; after all, traditional file systems are persistent and stable, and FreeNet by itself implements a filesystem of a different sort.
Considering how loudly people seem to speak when trying to be hear over a small phone, I think it's not really a good idea. Ideally, of course, it would have a little mic that you'd pull out to your mouth when you want to use it.
A chording keyboard is a great idea, and will let you type things in addition to dialup phone numbers, but you're not going to get the functionality without at least the 12 buttons, because people tend to remember how to dial numbers using the standard grid. You could have 4 buttons on it, and make people dial in binary, but nobody would use it.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to have the build system recognize the save file. The problem is that the Z-Machine only saves a file to a (particular) arbitrary format.
The thing that makes me doubt the possibility of an inform port is the theorem-prover that you'd need. I don't recall that being part of the standard library, despite its obvious usefulness for making puzzles...
Infocom compiled all of their games to a virtual machine to make porting easier. Clearly, if this is going to be a proper text adventure, it should be available for that VM. That way, if you want to configure your kernel on, say, your pilot or your VIC-20, it would be no problem.
Steve Ballmer created the fungus that eats Windows licenses, but nobody's looked for their Windows license since it was released...
They were planning to replace the BSD boxes with Windows ones, but they decided to wait unril they had to reboot them, and then they completely forgot about them because they're used to rebooting machines every week.
They would replace them now, but... uh... they got lost during some recent renovations...
It's hard to tell exactly what the chipset can do, as opposed to what the reference board does. I would assume that, if this chipset can't handle a better GPU, they'll make one before long that can. Likewise, most of the obvious problems are probably a result of them doing the motherboard when they normally do chipsets.
If they've improved memory bandwidth enough that the GPU and CPU can both use the same memory without getting too slow, that would probably be a big advantage-- you could dynamically allocate memory size and memory bandwidth, so that you only give the graphic system a huge amount of memory when it wants it, and you can use the memory for programs when you're not doing that much graphics.
Suppose someone actually set up a scheme where you pay 25 cents/month to see a site, free the first few times so you can decide whether it interests you, and paying by the month rather than by the page.
In order for this to work, it would have to be voluntary: someone *could* just keep pretending they were new, there on the free trial, or they could share passwords or send the comics to their friends, or whatever.
On the other hand, 25 cents isn't a lot of money. If it were convenient, people wouldn't avoid it, assuming they actually liked what they were getting. The time it takes to read a comic strip each day for a month is probably worth more than 25 cents to the viewer. The right interface would probably just be a thing that popped up if you hadn't paid for a month and you'd read more than a couple strips; you click the thing and don't think about it again for another month.
The main issue I see is that micropayments only make sense if you're making a bunch of them. Getting money into the system only works on a larger scale (~20$); similarly, getting money out of the system requires a large number of payments.
If you're going to pay $20/month to the sites you pay, and all of them will accept payments from the same account, it's feasible with credit cards or checks to the micropayment bank. But if there are only a few sites, it's going to be hard to find sites you'd be willing to spend enough on each month to justify getting the account.
Today's students will probably do thir best work in a language similar to Java, but with better support for the things that Java is bad at. This language does not yet exist at all.
It will use many of the same language features that languages that currently exist have, though, and this is what it is worth learning. Of course, its features which are currently available are available in different languages, so it's important to learn multiple languages.
For OOP, I think that Java is a good tool. Possibly Scheme would be better if you wanted to present the full range of possibilities, since there are theoretically significant features that Java lacks (e.g., singleton instances). Of course, in order to be particularly good programmers, people need to know more than just OO concepts, and that means they'll need to learn a language that's good for teaching those concepts.
In practice, currently I would suggest C for actual programming, including OOP, unless you need platform-independence or you need libraries that exist only in another language. But I wouldn't want to try *teaching* OOP with C; you really want to have a language where the OO syntax is obvious and explicit.
I've never met anyone who had RSI of any sort who wasn't under a whole lot of stress. I suspect that people who type a lot are more likely to manifest their stress as CTS than people who don't do much with their hands. Media exposure probably also increases the chance, as the article suggests.
Whether the physical damage is real or not is questionable. Stress could either be manifested as pain or as susceptability to damage, and it could vary among people.
All in all, I think RSI is better for you than heart disease or chronic fatigue or whatever people will get when they stop getting RSI.
The distinguishing feature of wearables is that you can use them without taking them out of whatever you carry them in. Palms are designed to be always with you, but not always usable; you can't see where you're going and they take both hands.
The location of the machine doesn't really matter; what you're actually wearing is the I/O devices, so that you can use them without looking down or occupying your hands all of the time.
The pictures are of the "demo" clothes, which have all the hardware on the outside. There are other versions which actually cover all of the hardware for protection and so that you don't look like a Radio Shack fell on you. Coffee shouldn't be a problem, although a rain storm or a water balloon might be.
UTF-8 encodes 7-bit ASCII characters as themselves and all of the rest of UCS-4 (the unicode extension to 32-bits) as sequences of non-ascii characters. This means that apps which can't handle anything but ascii can simply ignore non-ascii and get all of the ascii characters (and, with minimal work, report the correct number of unknown characters).
The only issue is that there's not a good way to set a mask for the characters such that 0-127 (which take up a single byte) are the common characters for the language, and so on, so English is more compact than other languages, even languages which don't require more characters.
I can just imagine it: you get three quarters of the way through the book, having no clue what's really going on but expecting it to all make sense in the end...
...and then the rest of the book is blank, except for an editor's note at the end, explaining that the author died partway though.
People would argue for years over how he intended to finish it.
MIT has been using various UNIX flavors for ages. There are some departments which use MS software, but by and large the impression is that the lack of office applications is not a problem is that other people are discouraged from using office applications. People don't send you Word documents and such because they can't write them, so you don't need to read them.
The only issue I see is that Google can modify your posts, which most free sites do anyway (adding advertizing blurbs, etc).
If Google wasn't allowed to publish (etc) your posts, they couldn't propagate your posts. In fact, Google does most of those things to posts made through other news servers, too, since they reformat them in HTML and serve them to Google users.
Non-executable stacks can still be exploited, but the exploits that are easy to write and work on most machine won't work. While it does give you a false sense of security, it means that someone searching for a machine to exploit will probably move on. Of course, if everyone used it, attackers would get around it, but it's helpful for now.
Service Packs, I believe, contain fixes for a ton of different programs and such. Since this is exclusively the kernel that is getting updated, it's not really a "pack".
The point about not changing things that work is still valid, although in this case, it's only changing a single thing; it won't make all of your software behave differently.
It strikes me that the reason MS has been coming down so hard on the GPL could be to get managers at MS Research to keep people from doing this.
It seems to me that they could be worried that carelessness or malice at MS Research could put them in a situation of having GPLed code they own but whose licensing they can't withdraw infect their main products.
When reading patents, you have to read the actual claims, not just the headings of the claims. The headings of the claims are necessarily obvious ideas; if it can be described in a line or two, it's probably obvious. What is important is the described process (in this sort of patent), not the result. For example:
1. A method for getting to my friend's house:
Go down this street, turn left, cut through the park, staying on the path because people walk their dogs in the park, go down the dead-end street, slip though the hole in the fence, and turn right.
Such a patent would only apply to the method, which is somewhat clever, and not to either the steps involved (which come be used by other people) or the end result (which could be done in other ways). As far as I can tell, TiVo's patent doesn't even apply to their direct competitor's product (I believe ReplayTV uses a different storage format), let alone prohibit the creation of devices that differ in other ways. Basically, you just can't build an exact clone of TiVo.
There are things that users want to do and ways they want their programs to behave. By and large, users want their programs to behave in ways that are similar to what they have, in the past, learned. There is no reason that the way they want their programs to behave would be good for accomplishing their tasks, compared to an alternative which they are not yet accustomed to.
If their goals are to create and read documents, they would be better served by emacs and LaTeX, which are less work than Word if you ever modify the middle of a document (in my experience). What business users want, however, is to generate and read Word files, which is difficult both for programmers and for users.
The basic task (creating documents) is easy to accomplish. The particular requirements that users have (creating Word documents, doing WYSIWYG) is very difficult. This is why Word is harder to use and more error-prone than, for example, WordPerfect 5.0; emacs does not have a particular edge over WP50 but has not gone down the unusability paths that Word has.
MS makes so much money, in part, because they define, through their business relationships, how people have to accomplish the tasks they're trying to do. Users have to know how to use Office because it's in their job requirements and because that's the only way they can read the documents they have to read. To a certain extent, also, MS implements the software that people think will help them get their work done. There are a lot of features which are, at a first glance, attractive but which hide a lack of more effective functionality or get in the way most of the time.
MS's success is in getting their formats adopted, not in technical merit.
Software better than Office is essentially trivial: emacs has always been better than Office for actually getting things done. The interface is more straightforward, and it's easier to see what you're doing. If you use LaTeX, you don't need fix your document formatting every time you change anything. Office has enough fundamental design flaws that, on technical merit (including usability) it's not hard to compete.
What Linux lacks is a program that is exactly like Office; this is the niche that StarOffice and such are trying to fill. Since business users want have generally gone through hell to learn how to deal with Office, they want to use this skill instead of learning even an easier and more efficient system. Crippled by trying to have the same functionality and file formats as Office, it's not surprising that Linux fails to have an acceptable program; Microsoft doesn't really have an acceptable version, and they control the standard.
What I see as the appropriate major role of companies in open source development is in the development of products the company wants to use but is not interested in selling.
For instance, a company that wants to have backups could sensibly contribute to a GPLed backup program, not pay for it, and improve it to handle their needs. They pay the community in improvements instead of paying a commercial company in money, thus causing increased value in a public space instead of in another private company.
Of course, Microsoft is a very large private company based on having people pay them for products instead of contributing time or money to the creation of products which would then be freely available.
Distributions make sense when there are tons of people who are going approximately the same thing you are. If a distribution is not really doing much with sparcs, it's not going to be particularly helpful.
On the other hand, most programs build with tar/configure/make install these days, so, once you have a shell, a method for fetching tarballs over the network, and a set of tools, you can get the rest easily; it should take a couple of days, assuming the tools and libraries you start with aren't too far behind. It took me about a week (admittedly on x86), including migrating from libc5 (which I had working already) to libc6 (which I wanted to have on the new machine).
In 3 years, Linux and the various free projects will supposedly be ready to replace all of MS's software. So you can tell the salesperson, "Three years is fine; I'm planning to switch to Linux then anyway."
Even if it's not persistent and stable like a traditional database, there's likely to be some good use for it; after all, traditional file systems are persistent and stable, and FreeNet by itself implements a filesystem of a different sort.
Considering how loudly people seem to speak when trying to be hear over a small phone, I think it's not really a good idea. Ideally, of course, it would have a little mic that you'd pull out to your mouth when you want to use it.
A chording keyboard is a great idea, and will let you type things in addition to dialup phone numbers, but you're not going to get the functionality without at least the 12 buttons, because people tend to remember how to dial numbers using the standard grid. You could have 4 buttons on it, and make people dial in binary, but nobody would use it.