One, to give some cred or at least fun to the minions who toil long and hard to create the thing (most people have no idea who coded MS Excel).
Two, to encourage white hat, old-skool hacking (playing around with things to see what you can find/do)
Open Source easter eggs really aren't, after all, you can read the code and figure out how to get the machine to display a picture of the development team, or whatever. And since Open Source developers are credited well, why hide "identifier" easter eggs?
I think there's part of all developers that want to give "props" (what a neat term) to things they enjoy. Witness the "turnip" discussion between guards in Myth II that's cribbed from Black Adder II.
What happened to the content that was in the two sites?
As someone interested in Linux development, let me just make this quick note: sites that are w4y kewl r4d h4x0r pages that are just links can die a horrible ignoble death as far as I'm concerned, but when a site goes down with original content, no matter if there were only two original articles there or whatever, that's a loss.
Maybe that insightful look into how ELF binaries are loaded or whatever will be lost.
Can I ask in future if a site's going to be pulled, to let us know in ADVANCE, so that we can copy the relevant (non-copyrighted) info?
Who's now got their content, that's what I want to know.
Maybe having one central repository'd be a better idea. A sort of LSDN.
Games like Quake, et. al. work cause the monitor is like a kind of window into a world you look into - and you get immersed.
This isn't just sour grapes cause I have almost no stereopsis, but it would seem to me that this technology is good at making solitary 3D objects look like they're IN FRONT OF the monitor.
Wouldn't that destroy the illusion they're going for?
Instead of you suspending your disbelief that you're walking through a corridor, etc. you're looking at this 3 inch tall elf hovering above your keyboard. Not quite the effect I think people want.
For stereomicroscopy, yes. A game of chess, so you can see all the pieces from any angle, yes. For archiving and the like, definitely. Even, my friends, for salespeople, the idea of bringing it along as a low-cost alternative to lugging around a 14 ton worm gear (you can browse the 1/12 scale model virtually!) to conventions, etc. yes.
Problem is, people really like to see sky. You could have a multi-tiered living environment: ground zero would cost $1000/mo for a 2 bedroom floor 679 would cost $300,000,000/mo for a 2 bedroom.
It seems to me that there's always ONE yahoo who seems to think that whatever legal, social, logistical, or other restrictions exist, they exist for absolutely everybody but them.
Let's see - everyone else with more than 11 items is in the NON express checkout. But me, being all-important, will use said checkout with my 19 items and try to pay by cheque even though it is cash only. And I'll complain and have the little peon who works there fired if he complains.
Ever wonder why traffic is always stopped when there's ONE LANE closed? Cause there are those who think that just letting the traffic carry on through is too slow for their too-important selves, so they ying down the free lane right up to the big red arrow sign, and cut in to whoever is hapless enough to be there at the time. If it's Boston, then they'll have the audacity to point and swerve in without stopping or swerving. And someone in a Suzuki Samurai or SUV will see this, decide that's a great idea, and try and cut across three lanes of stopped traffic to do the same.
Sir, you can't smoke on the airplane. Fine, I'll go into the bathroom and destroy the smoke alarm. What if we need it later? Ah, who cares. It won't be this flight, but a later one!
All the technology in the world won't change the fact that we're becoming a race of utter bastards with no respect for anyone or anything.
I think common decency should be taught, and enforced.
And we should lose the respect for those who take these little "short-cuts". Americans tend to respect those who live outside the rules without regard for the fact that anarchy makes noone truly free (cause you're too busy looking over your own shoulder! In a car, every intersection is a potential hazard! In the street, every person is a potential attacker!)
If there's only a handful of companies, big companies, who handle the backbone of Internet traffic, isn't there this as a potential scenario?
Problem: Some people are being critical of the government.
Potential solutions:
1) Go after every single ISP and track every offending file (Not workable - there are too many) 2) Go after every user who traffics in such information (Not workable - there are too many) 3) Install a "Net nanny" type software on the backbones (targeting four, maybe five backbone providers) to filter out/squash said information.
Apart from FreeBSD/Linux/Slashdotters figuring out how to wire up small dishes to the side of their boxen and aiming them at a community sponsored bunch of satellites to handle transmission of said data, there appears to be no way to thwart said scenario...
I remember the days of WWIVnet - where people actually uploaded and downloaded packages of posts and mail from BBS to BBS via modem. Try filtering that one.
The last century is actually an anomaly - I don't remember any other point in human history where people expected to trade intellectual property for durable goods with the possible exception of religion.
The purpose of economics is to figure out how to take infinite need and map it to finite resources. Given that intellectual property isn't a finite resource (I produce DOS, and I can give it away an infinite number of times and still have it to give away!) mapping the barter of an infinite resource to a finite resource is ludicrous.
Software should be about the SERVICE it provides, not a commodity in itself, which is why the open-source model is so revolutionary in terms of putting the money where the actual finite quantity exists (implementor time).
As for art, it used to be that artists were subsidised by wealthy patrons for prestige. The idea of selling art in its own right was unheard of until recently.
Somebody recently pointed out that music used to be paying someone for their time in playing a show, not for a copy of that person's "image".
The real goal of the next coming period in our history will be to figure out how to properly reward people who produce IP without either getting into the commodification of things like knowledge (Einstein patenting relativity and charging a licence fee for E=MC2?) or the wholescale ripping off of artists who work hard doing what they do.
Hopefully nanotech will make all of this moot; by churning out everything anyone would ever want, we'd no longer be worried about anything but our own intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Ah, but then space would become a commodity. Damn.
Some of these are legitimate, but I couldn't help tossing a few sarcastic ones in as well.
1) The costumes: I mean, this gives geeks more options when dressing up at the next con than Klingon, expendable crew member from Star Trek, expendable crew member from Star Trek, The Next Generation, expendable crew member from Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, expendable crew member from Star Trek, Voyager, Mr. Spock, or Doctor Who.
2) The costumes, part II: older Unix geeks who have eyebrows the same bushiness and length as those of the Psychlos could take inspiration from this and comb them behind their ears to hang down their shoulders rather than brandishing them at other people like antennae on a hostile roach.
3) We haven't had a "USA saves the world from alien invaders, preferably against some American patriotic backdrop like Independance Day, the Declaration of Independance, some government building of great importance, etc" in a long time. American jingoism is so badly represented in one dimensional action sci-fi flicks that it's good to see this inequality addressed.
4) We finally get to see the literary works of L.Ron Hubbard, a well recognised master of English literature up there with Shakespeare, Poe, and the like, given proper cinematic treatment.
5) This is one of the few movies that dates can agree on. She'll like the buff cavemen and the great costumes and clothes, he'll like the fact that things explode and they talk in grunts most of the time.
6) If a caveman can learn to fly a Harrier jump jet in less than a week, so can you. Be all that you can be, and don't let lack of innate intelligence, formal education or opposable thumbs stop you from a great career with the military. (Opposable) thumbs-up from the Armed Forces for presenting militaria in such a hip light.
7) The learning machine didn't ask Goodboy where he wanted to go today. Microsoft doesn't end up conquering all the known universe. Just Earth. (Hooray!)
8) Goodboy is actually seen teaching science to cavemen, and this is supposed to be cool. In Real Life people who try this (YOU try teaching geometry to the football team) get wedgied and tossed into dumpsters. Wow, science, learning and education is given a thumbs up in a major Hollywood movie, whoda thunk it.
9) This is the LAST we'll see of Travolta for a VERY LONG TIME.
10) This should be an inspiration to many FPS game writers! You too can take a hodgepodge of every hack idea that's come out in the last twenty years, wrap it in a bit of eye candy, weave a plot into it so thin it'd tear if you breathed on it, and turn it into a major religion. Ditto that for operating systems monopolies (bada boom ching)
11) People can point to Terl and say "This is how to get ahead in the business world, son." Retitle his every word "Software Monopoly for Dummies" and watch a new crop of billionaires come out of the Puget Sound region of Washington State.
Slashdot Mirror
RE: No known material could withstand these temperatures.
So those "plasma globes" in Radio Shack really aren't?
And this particular plasma, wouldn't it melt the craft producing it?
...have a multiplicity of purposes.
One, to give some cred or at least fun to the minions who toil long and hard to create the thing (most people have no idea who coded MS Excel).
Two, to encourage white hat, old-skool hacking (playing around with things to see what you can find/do)
Open Source easter eggs really aren't, after all, you can read the code and figure out how to get the machine to display a picture of the development team, or whatever. And since Open Source developers are credited well, why hide "identifier" easter eggs?
I think there's part of all developers that want to give "props" (what a neat term) to things they enjoy. Witness the "turnip" discussion between guards in Myth II that's cribbed from Black Adder II.
What happened to the content that was in the two sites?
As someone interested in Linux development, let me just make this quick note: sites that are w4y kewl r4d h4x0r pages that are just links can die a horrible ignoble death as far as I'm concerned, but when a site goes down with original content, no matter if there were only two original articles there or whatever, that's a loss.
Maybe that insightful look into how ELF binaries are loaded or whatever will be lost.
Can I ask in future if a site's going to be pulled, to let us know in ADVANCE, so that we can copy the relevant (non-copyrighted) info?
Who's now got their content, that's what I want to know.
Maybe having one central repository'd be a better idea. A sort of LSDN.
Games like Quake, et. al. work cause the monitor is like a kind of window into a world you look into - and you get immersed.
This isn't just sour grapes cause I have almost no stereopsis, but it would seem to me that this technology is good at making solitary 3D objects look like they're IN FRONT OF the monitor.
Wouldn't that destroy the illusion they're going for?
Instead of you suspending your disbelief that you're walking through a corridor, etc. you're looking at this 3 inch tall elf hovering above your keyboard. Not quite the effect I think people want.
For stereomicroscopy, yes. A game of chess, so you can see all the pieces from any angle, yes. For archiving and the like, definitely. Even, my friends, for salespeople, the idea of bringing it along as a low-cost alternative to lugging around a 14 ton worm gear (you can browse the 1/12 scale model virtually!) to conventions, etc. yes.
But gaming?
Somehow I don't see Quake working this way.
Problem is, people really like to see sky. You could have a multi-tiered living environment: ground zero would cost $1000/mo for a 2 bedroom floor 679 would cost $300,000,000/mo for a 2 bedroom.
It seems to me that there's always ONE yahoo who seems to think that whatever legal, social, logistical, or other restrictions exist, they exist for absolutely everybody but them.
Let's see - everyone else with more than 11 items is in the NON express checkout. But me, being all-important, will use said checkout with my 19 items and try to pay by cheque even though it is cash only. And I'll complain and have the little peon who works there fired if he complains.
Ever wonder why traffic is always stopped when there's ONE LANE closed? Cause there are those who think that just letting the traffic carry on through is too slow for their too-important selves, so they ying down the free lane right up to the big red arrow sign, and cut in to whoever is hapless enough to be there at the time. If it's Boston, then they'll have the audacity to point and swerve in without stopping or swerving. And someone in a Suzuki Samurai or SUV will see this, decide that's a great idea, and try and cut across three lanes of stopped traffic to do the same.
Sir, you can't smoke on the airplane. Fine, I'll go into the bathroom and destroy the smoke alarm. What if we need it later? Ah, who cares. It won't be this flight, but a later one!
All the technology in the world won't change the fact that we're becoming a race of utter bastards with no respect for anyone or anything.
I think common decency should be taught, and enforced.
And we should lose the respect for those who take these little "short-cuts". Americans tend to respect those who live outside the rules without regard for the fact that anarchy makes noone truly free (cause you're too busy looking over your own shoulder! In a car, every intersection is a potential hazard! In the street, every person is a potential attacker!)
Can you imagine what this would do to cooking?
1) Open microwave door.
2) Eat hot dog.
2) Two minutes later, stick raw hot dog into microwave.
I wonder what would happen if I didn't like the hot dog after I'd eaten it, and not bothered to put it in?
If there's only a handful of companies, big companies, who handle the backbone of Internet traffic, isn't there this as a potential scenario?
Problem: Some people are being critical of the government.
Potential solutions:
1) Go after every single ISP and track every offending file (Not workable - there are too many)
2) Go after every user who traffics in such information (Not workable - there are too many)
3) Install a "Net nanny" type software on the backbones (targeting four, maybe five backbone providers) to filter out/squash said information.
Apart from FreeBSD/Linux/Slashdotters figuring out how to wire up small dishes to the side of their boxen and aiming them at a community sponsored bunch of satellites to handle transmission of said data, there appears to be no way to thwart said scenario...
I remember the days of WWIVnet - where people actually uploaded and downloaded packages of posts and mail from BBS to BBS via modem. Try filtering that one.
The last century is actually an anomaly - I don't remember any other point in human history where people expected to trade intellectual property for durable goods with the possible exception of religion.
The purpose of economics is to figure out how to take infinite need and map it to finite resources. Given that intellectual property isn't a finite resource (I produce DOS, and I can give it away an infinite number of times and still have it to give away!) mapping the barter of an infinite resource to a finite resource is ludicrous.
Software should be about the SERVICE it provides, not a commodity in itself, which is why the open-source model is so revolutionary in terms of putting the money where the actual finite quantity exists (implementor time).
As for art, it used to be that artists were subsidised by wealthy patrons for prestige. The idea of selling art in its own right was unheard of until recently.
Somebody recently pointed out that music used to be paying someone for their time in playing a show, not for a copy of that person's "image".
The real goal of the next coming period in our history will be to figure out how to properly reward people who produce IP without either getting into the commodification of things like knowledge (Einstein patenting relativity and charging a licence fee for E=MC2?) or the wholescale ripping off of artists who work hard doing what they do.
Hopefully nanotech will make all of this moot; by churning out everything anyone would ever want, we'd no longer be worried about anything but our own intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Ah, but then space would become a commodity. Damn.
And how exactly are you going to give the book to someone who we don't even know who it was?
A.C. could very well have been me...
But I agree with you, this has to be the best reason ever.
Some of these are legitimate, but I couldn't help tossing a few sarcastic ones in as well.
1) The costumes: I mean, this gives geeks more options when dressing up at the next con than Klingon, expendable crew member from Star Trek, expendable crew member from Star Trek, The Next Generation, expendable crew member from Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, expendable crew member from Star Trek, Voyager, Mr. Spock, or Doctor Who.
2) The costumes, part II: older Unix geeks who have eyebrows the same bushiness and length as those of the Psychlos could take inspiration from this and comb them behind their ears to hang down their shoulders rather than brandishing them at other people like antennae on a hostile roach.
3) We haven't had a "USA saves the world from alien invaders, preferably against some American patriotic backdrop like Independance Day, the Declaration of Independance, some government building of great importance, etc" in a long time. American jingoism is so badly represented in one dimensional action sci-fi flicks that it's good to see this inequality addressed.
4) We finally get to see the literary works of L.Ron Hubbard, a well recognised master of English literature up there with Shakespeare, Poe, and the like, given proper cinematic treatment.
5) This is one of the few movies that dates can agree on. She'll like the buff cavemen and the great costumes and clothes, he'll like the fact that things explode and they talk in grunts most of the time.
6) If a caveman can learn to fly a Harrier jump jet in less than a week, so can you. Be all that you can be, and don't let lack of innate intelligence, formal education or opposable thumbs stop you from a great career with the military. (Opposable) thumbs-up from the Armed Forces for presenting militaria in such a hip light.
7) The learning machine didn't ask Goodboy where he wanted to go today. Microsoft doesn't end up conquering all the known universe. Just Earth. (Hooray!)
8) Goodboy is actually seen teaching science to cavemen, and this is supposed to be cool. In Real Life people who try this (YOU try teaching geometry to the football team) get wedgied and tossed into dumpsters. Wow, science, learning and education is given a thumbs up in a major Hollywood movie, whoda thunk it.
9) This is the LAST we'll see of Travolta for a VERY LONG TIME.
10) This should be an inspiration to many FPS game writers! You too can take a hodgepodge of every hack idea that's come out in the last twenty years, wrap it in a bit of eye candy, weave a plot into it so thin it'd tear if you breathed on it, and turn it into a major religion. Ditto that for operating systems monopolies (bada boom ching)
11) People can point to Terl and say "This is how to get ahead in the business world, son." Retitle his every word "Software Monopoly for Dummies" and watch a new crop of billionaires come out of the Puget Sound region of Washington State.