Re:The Forbin Project
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
It's only overriding goal, presumably because it had been started with it in mind, was maintining the peace.
Actually, it seemed to be more interested in staying "alive" and in keeping the communication with Guardian (the Soviet computer) happening than in anything else. After all, it and Guardian each nuked a city to make their points. It was interested in peace mainly because that was the best way (from its point of view) to maintain the status quo.
Intersting point about its not wanting to be human. I imagine it considered humans to be inferior. Although it was kind of curious about the weird human needs of Dr. Forbin.
I don't think any device could start without the 'addition' of energy. Gravity is a type of energy. Isn't magnetism a form either? I'm not totally sure on that one, but I'd think it would be.
Well, according to the site, there are basically 2 classes of PM machine. One produces more energy than it consumes, the other will go forever. It seems to be acceptable to give either type a push to get it started. (This seems to be more in reply to gilesjuk than to you, I suppose)
All of a sudden I can't post replies in Opera 7.03... anyone have any ideas why? I had to go into IE (ick!) to post this!
If you mean you aren't logged in when when you're in the Science section, I have the same problem in Opera 6. It appears to be a problem with the login cookie not getting passed to any of the Slashdot subdomains. I hear you re IE and ick. (Hint: Don't try going back to the previous page in IE to look at context while composing your post. Opera caches partially filled out forms. IE -- Does Not.) I was sorta hoping this might be fixed in 7.0 - I guess not.
Of course, you could be having some other problem altogether, in which case I apologize for being full of shit. It wouldn't be the first time...
If you like bisexual/lesbian vampire movies (and who doesn't?), check this one out. Ancient fabulous babe vampire in the modern world, working as a hired killer. When she's not doing that or having sex, she hangs out at goth clubs where her friends are really impressed by her teeth.
Swordfighting, sex, asskicking, sex, and menstruation was never so sexy! Plus a nice surprise ending.
Fantastic movie, but it creeped me out to the point where I couldn't sleep. That never happens. Think about it - what would fuck your life up worse than not being able to remember anything past 10 minutes ago?
I never did figure out what the deal was with Teddy - was he what he said he was or not? I guess I'll never know, since I don't think I can watch it again.
Yeah, this was Seagal's last good movie. My favorites of his are Above The Law and Out For Justice (wasn't that the one where he beats the living shit out of everyone in the bar, using a pool cue and the cue ball?) No Sleep Till Brooklyn!
Oh yeah - directed by Francis Coppola, too, with a small part for Harrison Ford (his first role after American Graffiti). The first 10 minutes is worth the price of the rental. Riveting movie, full of paranoia, but a very unsettling ending that almost makes me not want to watch it again. Almost.
...two of their titles have been referenced by bands (They Might be Giants is, of course, a band; The Hot Rock is the title of my favorite Sleater-Kinney album).
I believe TBMG took their name from this movie. Excellent flick, by the way. George C. Scott as a retired judge who's convinced he's Sherlock Holmes, his brother wants him committed (so he can take his money) and brings in a female psychiatrist named - you guessed it - Watson. Scott convinces her to follow him around New York City with a group of very eccentric people, loking for Dr. Moriarty. Very cool. Scott is one of my all-time favorite actors.
By the way, I submitted this story last night. Today I go to the video store, come back, and it's here with 400+ comments. Wow.
First of all, the main character seemed to be a whiny little girl for far too long, and seemed fairly well-adapted to being enslaved as a bath wench. The main goal she had was to free her parents, but she doesn't actually embark on doing so until at least 2/3 of the way through the film.
Well, if you're going to criticize it based on logic and plot holes, you're going to miss the entire point. In that case, let's talk about gun battles on the outside hull of a spacehip with projectile weapons in Cowboy Bebop, kids going off their bikes at 100KPH while wearing T-shirts and getting up without even a scratch in Akira, and a million others.
It's an animated fantasy, already. You can't apply real-world standards of logic to it and still have anything enjoyable. Once you accept that you're at the bathhouse of the gods and your parents have been turned into pigs, everything else just flows from there. Enjoy it for the beautiful animation, dreamy pacing, and classic story, even if the cultural differences are going to be baffling.
The only people I know that really enjoyed Spirited Away were either the die-hard anime fans that/.ers are warned about, or those that only ever enjoy the really esoteric and sort of isolationist-intellectual-film-nut anime.
I fall into none of those categories. I just love movies, and if the acting, writing, story and/or direction are good enough, I can ignore a lot of imperfections. I'm sorry you didn't appreciate it. I know it's not an actioner, but try watching it again just to enjoy the story. You might feel differently about it this time.
What a great idea! Especially since the live action "Rocky and Bullwinkle" made so much money, not to mention the live action "Scooby-Doo" and "Flintstones".
Of course, "The Flintstones" had a sequel, so what do I know? What's left of my childhood to rape?
While it tickles me pink that this wonderful movie is getting another big-screen release, I doubt it will do any better this time than it did last time.
Spirited Away is just too Japanese/Asian for middle-Americans to get.
Oh, I hope not. I'd really like to think that The Rest Of Us could appreciate it. True, it's full of Japanese cultural references, but the story is still the classic kid-and-friends-on-a-quest-to-get-home story. Think of it as a Japanese "Wizard of Oz".
There's always hope. After all, no one expected "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" to do anything, and it stuck around the theaters for a year or so. Then again, my rational self doubts it. I'm afraid you're right.
Aw man, I first typed "1982" as "1992", caught it and thought "Oh that was dumb. Let's not make *that* mistake." Sigh. Why do I bother to preview again?
Actually, Compaq did it first, in 1982, but kept it to themselves. Phoenix did their own in 1994 that they licensed to the world. So yeah, you're right, it was actually Phoenix who really started the true compatibles off.
BTW, this and lots of other good info about the history of the PC, Bill Gates and Microsoft comes from "Gates", by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews. Very interesting book, great, evenhanded job of describing it all. The pictures are especially interesting - Bill Gates doing deals with IBM and Radio Shack, looking about 16; Steve Ballmer in a plaid jacket in 1987, pointing his finger at the audience like a carney barker ("Do anything to get the business, get the business, get the business!"). Some things never change.
The other piece of the puzzle was Compaq's ability to reverse engineer the BIOS. I've never understood why that held up from a legal standpoint, but it enabled Compaq to commence its Attack of the IBM Clones.
Because they did a cleanroom implementation. That way, if IBM complained, Compaq could show them the code and say "Nope, it's totally different." This was reason the clones happened, because Compaq licensed their BIOS out.
And thanks for shooting down the "Gary went flying" canard. I going to say it if you hadn't. I'm really tired of hearing that one.
Of course you can. It's called an opportunity. For instance, I work at a place that wasnt' ISO country code compliant. We fixed our databases so that we can later open ourselves to use other ISO country code compliant software. Nothing was particularly broken.
Well, to *be* nitpicky, you didn't redesign because you weren't standards compliant, you redesigned to allow for future functionality. Changing a bunch of things just to be able to say "we're compliant with FOO.197" is harder to justify, unless you can do more business or save money by being FOO compliant. Which seems to have been ESPN's motive.
...I'll install Opera when it does something extra that is worth learning a whole new program for...
Honestly, what's to learn? Click on a link to open it, Alt-left/right arrow (or just Z/X) to go back/forward, Ctrl-T to add a bookmark, Ctrl-space for the home page, Esc to stop loading a page. There. Now you know how to use Opera.
Oh, and F12 for the cool menu that lets you turn off popups/Javascript/cookies/GIF animation/etc. Trust me, it's worth trying Opera just for that.
And by the way, I've found Opera to be quite fast. Just keep an eye out for the memory leak!
I think the memory leaks that Opera used to have in the 4.x - 5.x days are gone. You do have to be careful if you use the "Enable automatic RAM cache" option, though. My Opera (on W2k) is using 398,168k with that setting. Then again, I have 27 pages open and a 512 meg machine, so I'm cool with that. (Would you like to know my views on tabbed browsing?)
Back to the topic: I agree completely. If you want to see modern web pages, you need a modern browser. If you're happy with a 1996 web, more power to you, but you really can't complain.
In a word... no. The study only looked at developers who had already moved at least partway to linux. You are justified in drawing absolutely NO conclusions about how soon other developers may start making the same move! To do so is mere sensationalistic handwaving.
But that's the whole point of statistics, to look at past trends and attempt to predict the future based on them. If, for instance, the data show that over the last 4 years, Linux development has gone up 15% every year, then you are somewhat justified in predicting, all other things being equal, that Linux development next year will increase about the same amount.
That said, it's ridiculous to suggest that Linux will overtake Windows any time soon, especially based on this thin set of data. A better survey would be of 1000 server-side developers, asking "What platforms do you develop for now?", "What platforms did you develop for last year?" and "What platforms will you be developing for in the next 3 years?"
>On an abandoned oil platform in the North Sea, a community of libertarian cypher-punks establish the world's first free data haven:
Great. Shalkespeare redone in leetspeek as a William Gibson clone. I think I can safely skip this one. "Cypher-punk" is just soo 1994 Wired anyway, isn't it?
For a more accessible reworking of Macbeth, the other night I watched Scotland, PA, set in a hamburger restaurant in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970's. James LeGros as Macbeth, Christopher Walken in goofy mode as McDuff, the homicide detective. Lots of great Bad Company music and, for some reason, everybody drives an ~1970 Camaro. Funny (Duncan meets a most unfortunate end), and, as near as I can tell, holds very close to the original story.
Mainly, you need to conform to the current set of Microsoft standards for things like install/uninstall, navigation, standard locations, accessibility and such, as well as buying into the latest technologies they're pushing (sound, networked gaming, registry vs. INI files, yada yada). You submit your app and supporting documentation to the compatibility testing labs, which may or may not be still run by Microsoft, which thrash them out and award the logo.
There are different criteria for games than for multimedia or for office-type apps (Office integration and VBA scripting used to be on that list). I have to say, a lot of the rules are pretty good ones. Don't make the user reboot, follow keyboard guidelines and respect standard install locations, don't overwrite system files, and, in general, do what the user expects (assuming the user expectations of Windows XP). I wish more apps for other platforms would take some of these ideas to heart.
I think it's interesting that the ideas behind the logo are at least somewhat intended to do just what Apple's guidelines do, only Microsoft feels the need to enforce them on everyone. I suppose that has a lot to do with a) the fact that the rules are also designed to make all their technologies ubiquitous and b) Microsoft's basic philosophy versus Apple's.
This may be an initial glimpse at how Microsoft could introduce Digital Restrictions Management by ensuring all retail hardware and software products are approved by Redmond.
This is just silly and paranoid. The whole "Designed for Windows XX" logo thing has been pretty much a non-issue for consumers since Windows 95. At this point, it's pretty much another bullet point on the features list. As the article and others here point out, this is an Office Depot decision, part of their "fanatical customer service". There may have been some armtwisting from Microsoft behind the scenes, but Microsoft do love that logo program. So unless DRM is a requirement for the XP logo, this entire statement is unwarranted.
As for the idea that this means the end of all Mac and Linux software at Office Depot, I think we can take the quoted letter as meaning "All Windows software must be certified, all hardware must be certified". If the exact words are ambiguous, well, how many pronouncements from management have you seen that weren't poorly thought out and ambiguous?
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It's only overriding goal, presumably because it had been started with it in mind, was maintining the peace.
Actually, it seemed to be more interested in staying "alive" and in keeping the communication with Guardian (the Soviet computer) happening than in anything else. After all, it and Guardian each nuked a city to make their points. It was interested in peace mainly because that was the best way (from its point of view) to maintain the status quo.
Intersting point about its not wanting to be human. I imagine it considered humans to be inferior. Although it was kind of curious about the weird human needs of Dr. Forbin.
I don't think any device could start without the 'addition' of energy. Gravity is a type of energy. Isn't magnetism a form either? I'm not totally sure on that one, but I'd think it would be.
Well, according to the site, there are basically 2 classes of PM machine. One produces more energy than it consumes, the other will go forever. It seems to be acceptable to give either type a push to get it started. (This seems to be more in reply to gilesjuk than to you, I suppose)
All of a sudden I can't post replies in Opera 7.03... anyone have any ideas why? I had to go into IE (ick!) to post this!
If you mean you aren't logged in when when you're in the Science section, I have the same problem in Opera 6. It appears to be a problem with the login cookie not getting passed to any of the Slashdot subdomains. I hear you re IE and ick. (Hint: Don't try going back to the previous page in IE to look at context while composing your post. Opera caches partially filled out forms. IE -- Does Not.) I was sorta hoping this might be fixed in 7.0 - I guess not.
Of course, you could be having some other problem altogether, in which case I apologize for being full of shit. It wouldn't be the first time...
If you like bisexual/lesbian vampire movies (and who doesn't?), check this one out. Ancient fabulous babe vampire in the modern world, working as a hired killer. When she's not doing that or having sex, she hangs out at goth clubs where her friends are really impressed by her teeth.
Swordfighting, sex, asskicking, sex, and menstruation was never so sexy! Plus a nice surprise ending.
Yes, but it didn't have the charm and poignancy of the original. Sequels never do...
Fantastic movie, but it creeped me out to the point where I couldn't sleep. That never happens. Think about it - what would fuck your life up worse than not being able to remember anything past 10 minutes ago?
I never did figure out what the deal was with Teddy - was he what he said he was or not? I guess I'll never know, since I don't think I can watch it again.
Yeah, this was Seagal's last good movie. My favorites of his are Above The Law and Out For Justice (wasn't that the one where he beats the living shit out of everyone in the bar, using a pool cue and the cue ball?) No Sleep Till Brooklyn!
Oh yeah, guilty pleasures.
Oh yeah - directed by Francis Coppola, too, with a small part for Harrison Ford (his first role after American Graffiti). The first 10 minutes is worth the price of the rental. Riveting movie, full of paranoia, but a very unsettling ending that almost makes me not want to watch it again. Almost.
I believe TBMG took their name from this movie. Excellent flick, by the way. George C. Scott as a retired judge who's convinced he's Sherlock Holmes, his brother wants him committed (so he can take his money) and brings in a female psychiatrist named - you guessed it - Watson. Scott convinces her to follow him around New York City with a group of very eccentric people, loking for Dr. Moriarty. Very cool. Scott is one of my all-time favorite actors.
By the way, I submitted this story last night. Today I go to the video store, come back, and it's here with 400+ comments. Wow.
Or until someone figures out that pesky uber haxor command
C:\>net use x: \\yourcomputername\c$
And they guess your password.
Even if not, how is streaming any different in practical effect than just putting a read-only (no copy/move/etc) copy on the music on ppl's HD.
Think about what you just said. How do you propose to give people read permissions to a file and keep them from copying it?
Yeah, that's what makes streaming different.
The company wouldn't be breaking the law. Their actions fall under fair use.
Interesting legal reasoning you have there. Be sure to let me know when you get hauled into court. I definitely want to watch this.
First of all, the main character seemed to be a whiny little girl for far too long, and seemed fairly well-adapted to being enslaved as a bath wench. The main goal she had was to free her parents, but she doesn't actually embark on doing so until at least 2/3 of the way through the film.
Well, if you're going to criticize it based on logic and plot holes, you're going to miss the entire point. In that case, let's talk about gun battles on the outside hull of a spacehip with projectile weapons in Cowboy Bebop, kids going off their bikes at 100KPH while wearing T-shirts and getting up without even a scratch in Akira, and a million others.
It's an animated fantasy, already. You can't apply real-world standards of logic to it and still have anything enjoyable. Once you accept that you're at the bathhouse of the gods and your parents have been turned into pigs, everything else just flows from there. Enjoy it for the beautiful animation, dreamy pacing, and classic story, even if the cultural differences are going to be baffling.
The only people I know that really enjoyed Spirited Away were either the die-hard anime fans that
I fall into none of those categories. I just love movies, and if the acting, writing, story and/or direction are good enough, I can ignore a lot of imperfections. I'm sorry you didn't appreciate it. I know it's not an actioner, but try watching it again just to enjoy the story. You might feel differently about it this time.
What a great idea! Especially since the live action "Rocky and Bullwinkle" made so much money, not to mention the live action "Scooby-Doo" and "Flintstones".
Of course, "The Flintstones" had a sequel, so what do I know? What's left of my childhood to rape?
While it tickles me pink that this wonderful movie is getting another big-screen release, I doubt it will do any better this time than it did last time.
Spirited Away is just too Japanese/Asian for middle-Americans to get.
Oh, I hope not. I'd really like to think that The Rest Of Us could appreciate it. True, it's full of Japanese cultural references, but the story is still the classic kid-and-friends-on-a-quest-to-get-home story. Think of it as a Japanese "Wizard of Oz".
There's always hope. After all, no one expected "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" to do anything, and it stuck around the theaters for a year or so. Then again, my rational self doubts it. I'm afraid you're right.
Aw man, I first typed "1982" as "1992", caught it and thought "Oh that was dumb. Let's not make *that* mistake." Sigh. Why do I bother to preview again?
Actually, Compaq did it first, in 1982, but kept it to themselves. Phoenix did their own in 1994 that they licensed to the world. So yeah, you're right, it was actually Phoenix who really started the true compatibles off.
BTW, this and lots of other good info about the history of the PC, Bill Gates and Microsoft comes from "Gates", by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews. Very interesting book, great, evenhanded job of describing it all. The pictures are especially interesting - Bill Gates doing deals with IBM and Radio Shack, looking about 16; Steve Ballmer in a plaid jacket in 1987, pointing his finger at the audience like a carney barker ("Do anything to get the business, get the business, get the business!"). Some things never change.
The other piece of the puzzle was Compaq's ability to reverse engineer the BIOS. I've never understood why that held up from a legal standpoint, but it enabled Compaq to commence its Attack of the IBM Clones.
Because they did a cleanroom implementation. That way, if IBM complained, Compaq could show them the code and say "Nope, it's totally different." This was reason the clones happened, because Compaq licensed their BIOS out.
And thanks for shooting down the "Gary went flying" canard. I going to say it if you hadn't. I'm really tired of hearing that one.
Of course you can. It's called an opportunity. For instance, I work at a place that wasnt' ISO country code compliant. We fixed our databases so that we can later open ourselves to use other ISO country code compliant software. Nothing was particularly broken.
Well, to *be* nitpicky, you didn't redesign because you weren't standards compliant, you redesigned to allow for future functionality. Changing a bunch of things just to be able to say "we're compliant with FOO.197" is harder to justify, unless you can do more business or save money by being FOO compliant. Which seems to have been ESPN's motive.
Honestly, what's to learn? Click on a link to open it, Alt-left/right arrow (or just Z/X) to go back/forward, Ctrl-T to add a bookmark, Ctrl-space for the home page, Esc to stop loading a page. There. Now you know how to use Opera.
Oh, and F12 for the cool menu that lets you turn off popups/Javascript/cookies/GIF animation/etc. Trust me, it's worth trying Opera just for that.
And by the way, I've found Opera to be quite fast. Just keep an eye out for the memory leak!
I think the memory leaks that Opera used to have in the 4.x - 5.x days are gone. You do have to be careful if you use the "Enable automatic RAM cache" option, though. My Opera (on W2k) is using 398,168k with that setting. Then again, I have 27 pages open and a 512 meg machine, so I'm cool with that. (Would you like to know my views on tabbed browsing?)
Back to the topic: I agree completely. If you want to see modern web pages, you need a modern browser. If you're happy with a 1996 web, more power to you, but you really can't complain.
So, you're saying that his lifespan was a 6-bit quantity, and he died when it overflowed. Appropriate.
In a word... no. The study only looked at developers who had already moved at least partway to linux. You are justified in drawing absolutely NO conclusions about how soon other developers may start making the same move! To do so is mere sensationalistic handwaving.
But that's the whole point of statistics, to look at past trends and attempt to predict the future based on them. If, for instance, the data show that over the last 4 years, Linux development has gone up 15% every year, then you are somewhat justified in predicting, all other things being equal, that Linux development next year will increase about the same amount.
That said, it's ridiculous to suggest that Linux will overtake Windows any time soon, especially based on this thin set of data. A better survey would be of 1000 server-side developers, asking "What platforms do you develop for now?", "What platforms did you develop for last year?" and "What platforms will you be developing for in the next 3 years?"
From the project site:
>On an abandoned oil platform in the North Sea, a community of libertarian cypher-punks establish the world's first free data haven:
Great. Shalkespeare redone in leetspeek as a William Gibson clone. I think I can safely skip this one. "Cypher-punk" is just soo 1994 Wired anyway, isn't it?
For a more accessible reworking of Macbeth, the other night I watched Scotland, PA, set in a hamburger restaurant in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970's. James LeGros as Macbeth, Christopher Walken in goofy mode as McDuff, the homicide detective. Lots of great Bad Company music and, for some reason, everybody drives an ~1970 Camaro. Funny (Duncan meets a most unfortunate end), and, as near as I can tell, holds very close to the original story.
Sirname - you know, "Sir Richard", "Sir Arthur", "Sir Myron".
Mainly, you need to conform to the current set of Microsoft standards for things like install/uninstall, navigation, standard locations, accessibility and such, as well as buying into the latest technologies they're pushing (sound, networked gaming, registry vs. INI files, yada yada). You submit your app and supporting documentation to the compatibility testing labs, which may or may not be still run by Microsoft, which thrash them out and award the logo.
There are different criteria for games than for multimedia or for office-type apps (Office integration and VBA scripting used to be on that list). I have to say, a lot of the rules are pretty good ones. Don't make the user reboot, follow keyboard guidelines and respect standard install locations, don't overwrite system files, and, in general, do what the user expects (assuming the user expectations of Windows XP). I wish more apps for other platforms would take some of these ideas to heart.
I think it's interesting that the ideas behind the logo are at least somewhat intended to do just what Apple's guidelines do, only Microsoft feels the need to enforce them on everyone. I suppose that has a lot to do with a) the fact that the rules are also designed to make all their technologies ubiquitous and b) Microsoft's basic philosophy versus Apple's.
This may be an initial glimpse at how Microsoft could introduce Digital Restrictions Management by ensuring all retail hardware and software products are approved by Redmond.
This is just silly and paranoid. The whole "Designed for Windows XX" logo thing has been pretty much a non-issue for consumers since Windows 95. At this point, it's pretty much another bullet point on the features list. As the article and others here point out, this is an Office Depot decision, part of their "fanatical customer service". There may have been some armtwisting from Microsoft behind the scenes, but Microsoft do love that logo program. So unless DRM is a requirement for the XP logo, this entire statement is unwarranted.
As for the idea that this means the end of all Mac and Linux software at Office Depot, I think we can take the quoted letter as meaning "All Windows software must be certified, all hardware must be certified". If the exact words are ambiguous, well, how many pronouncements from management have you seen that weren't poorly thought out and ambiguous?