I'm sure some readers are sure that Paul Allen is just out to rape the SF world. Here's a true story that I hope will cast this project in a positive light.
There already is a Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It was started several years ago, sponsored by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (KaCSFFS) and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Financial backing was primarily provided by KaCSFFS, with the bulk of the money raised in a benefit auction each Memorial Day weekend at ConQuesT. KU has never really embraced the SFHoF, declining to even provide a place to hang the plaque listing all the inductees.
Along comes Paul Allen and his project. Now, they could have very easily said "screw you, we'll do our own Hall of Fame!" But they didn't. Instead, they are taking over the Hall of Fame, with full acknowledgement of the history of the existing hall and inductees. After the 2004 induction ceremony, held at the Campbell Conference, responsibility for the Hall will be transferred.
Is this some huge financial windfall for KaCSFFS? No, we aren't getting a penny out of the deal. What we are getting is the acknowledgement of our past efforts, and the comfort of knowing that future inductions are going to be done by a group with the money and PR presence necessary to do it right.
Do you know who has been inducted in the past? Probably not. Our efforts have mostly fallen on deaf ears in the media. But I suspect that when the 2005 inductees are announced, you'll see the story on Slashdot!
I doubt that very much made it to Seattle. 4SJ didn't sell off "some", he was forced to sell off damn near everything. He was left with a small collection of items of special value to himself.
There are people, like Paul Allen, who were in a position to buy the whole collection. None of them did a thing.
This section of the code wasn't put in with the intent of stopping jigsaw puzzle makers, that's just an additional implication. The intent was to address people cutting the corners off $20s, gluing them onto $1s, and attempting to pass them as a $20.
Some of the early vending machine bill readers only did pattern recognition on the corners of the bill. These same readers could only accept a $1 or $5. There were numerous reports of readers accepting a corner covered $1 as a $5.
With over 600 comments posted before I ever saw this story, I doubt that anybody will ever read my comments, but I'll post them anyway. I am currently doing Neurofeedback (and curious what they charge where the original poster lives, as I don't consider the treatments especially expensive).
After just *THREE* treatments, I saw a definite improvement in anger management. My concentration and organization skills are improved. Maybe it is just new-millenium snake-oil, but it is snake-oil that works!
We originally tried it for my teenager daughters explosive temperment. Things are not "all perfect" now, but compared to what we had before she started, I'll take it. There were times when her anger was so out-of-control that my wife and I feared for our safety. Not anymore.
My predecessor only knew how to program in RPG. When they needed to develop a PC based application for the field, she bought the S/36 emulators. I would have never done so. As it happens, I've got somewhere between six and ten dongles sitting on the shelf. In the meantime, replacing those apps in on my "one of these days" list.
"Having a turbo switch on your computer is kind of like saying 'I have this really cool ferrari that when I press a button it turns into a pinto'".
I'm guessing you never ran a program that was dependent on the processor clock speed to operate properly?
Back in the day, there were plenty of programs out there that had been written so they worked just fine on the current generation of computers. But then, when the next generation came out, they were way too fast.
In the early days of PCs, a popular practical joke program claimed to find water in your A: drive. You would sneak this into their autoexec.bat, and at boot up it would report this, spin the drive, and the speaker would make a noise that sounded somewhat similar to water going down a drain.
Before too long, the machines were fast enough that the drain noise sounded like little bells ringing for a few seconds.
A friend gave me a program that emulated the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. A circle would open on the screen, and then it would spell out "That's All Folks", all while playing the Looney Tunes closing theme. I tried to use it on a borrowed computer at the end of a training program. It went "boop boop beep beep boop" and was done in about two seconds.
Turbo switches had their place. If you keep insulting those of us that used them, we'll beat you with our canes.
I use DOSemu to run Dongleware: a System/36 emulator. That's right, I'm emulating DOS under Linux so I can run software that emulates a S/36 under DOS.
We have a couple of legacy apps from our S/36 that work just fine. When we were ready to get rid of the S/36, I ported them over to the emulation product. We then installed the emulation product on a Linux box that blazes along on a 486DX-50. We plugged the dongle into the parallel port, and away we went.
There are three people that need to use the machine. As I was showing it to one of them, he entered the menu choice for a report he runs once a month. When the program finished less than a minute later, he informed me that it didn't work. I told him to go check the printer. That 486DX-50 runs our S/36 programs a couple orders of magnitude faster than the old 5360 with a B processer ever did.
A co-worker found a console telnet program that we use under Win9x, and we were able to get the odd key mappings the S/36 emulation expected. Under WinXP that program doesn't work right, and there are a couple places where we have to cancel a program because the graceful exit option doesn't work. But until I find a program that does what we need better than our old S/36 program, I see no need to migrate.
But space is not empty. As a spaceship goes faster and faster, it encounters the stray deep space molecule more and more frequently. As you approach the speed of light, your impact rate approaches atmospheric density.
As I recall, Marshall Savage did a decent job on the physics of this issue in "The Millenial Project"
They were obviously placed by a time-traveler from the future, stuck here in 2003. In order to return to the future he needs a just a few parts, or the plans for a simple time-transport device. Wait a second, I've got his e-mail address here somewhere...
Won't do our original correspondent much good, but in some parts of the KC area we have a service called "Everest Connections" that I've had good luck with. Everest pulls a double strand of coax to the house, and I tell SBC and Time-Warner to get stuffed.
With number portability I moved my two phone lines over to Everest; I signed up for a cable TV package with all the same channels that I ever watch; and while I didn't have RoadRunner, I now have Everest TrailBlazer. And I'm spending less than I did for SBC and T-W.
I've had no complaints with the service, it's always at least as good as whatever I got from SBC and T-W.
Alas, their parent company is struggling financially, and they've suspended any additional service rollouts. When the economy gets stronger, they hope to return to their go-go-go installation.
Everest did get some bad press for hitting gas lines laying cable. The real problem there was the gas company in that area didn't know where their own lines were located. They lost the plans in one of several corporate sales and acquisitions, so they just made their best guess and crossed their fingers -- but decided not to spend the money to have a repair crew standing by in case they were wrong. So Everest runs the cable where the gas company says it is safe, hits the cable, and the press blames Everest.
Back in 1983, maybe 1984, I read about a Star Wars based game that used galvanic response. You put your hand on the game pad, and then tried to raise Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter out of the Dagobah swamp.
I'm not sure that there was anything to the game beyond that -- I don't know of anybody who actually had the game. Truth be known, it may have never made it to market (imagine that!).
In the Western World, actually, NO, being found "not guilty" does NOT mean "innocent". "Not guilty" means the state failed to show guilt. The law places the burden of proof on the prosecution; the defendent does not need to show innocence, only that the state cannot prove guilt.
This is why the OJ criminal trial result shows that the system does work. The prosecution failed to convince the jury, and the jury found OJ not guilty. We can debate all week why they were not convinced (well, YOU can, I won't participate), but they were not. The jury DID NOT found OJ innocent.
In his novel "After The Festival" (originally serialized in Analog as "Dying of the Light"), George R.R. Martin describes a society that believes a thing is the sum of its names. If there is no name for something, then that thing does not really exist.
(Yeah, GRRM has earned GoH as TorCon, the guy has only been writing excellent stuff for 30 years!)
"Counterprogramming" is a term that has been used in the TV industry for years. It refers to running programs that will appeal to a demographic not interested in the dominant programming already offered. Examples include showing chick-flicks opposite the Super Bowl, or kiddie-cartoons opposite news programs.
In other words, not only is it not a new term, it is not really even a new use for an old term. It is barely stretching the existing meaning.
I think I may have first encountered it watching the Mary Tyler Moore show. Lou Grant is promoted to station manager, and immediately begins juggling the schedule. When asked why he has Chuckles to Clown (is the right name?) in the news time slot, his answer is "Counterprogramming!". Alas, he rocks the boat too much, and find himself demoted back to executive producer of the news before the half-hour is over.
No Wired...It isn't Nitrozak
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 1
Wired got it wrong though! It isn't NitrozaK. It's Nitrozac. With a "C"!
Think about it...to many people AOL IS the internet. How many of those people would by an AOL PC? Give them a machine that runs AOL, a basic word processor and spreadsheet, and what more do they need? To the great unwashed masses, it would be the ultimate information appliance.
Remember the days when people didn't want "PC Compatible", they wanted "Lotus 1-2-3 Compatible" and "Microsoft Flight Simulator Compatible". The problem with the various attempts at internet appliances has been that the target audience knows what they want, and what they want is AOL.
What's limited? It is a 4-SPATIAL-dimension maze. Perhaps not a very good one, but 4D none the less.
Games Magazine printed a similar 4D maze back when dirt was young and Apple ]['s ruled the earth. Sometime between '79 and '82 I would say, probably closer to the early end of that time frame. In theirs, every square was colored, and you could jump to a same color square in an adjacent 2D slice. As I recall it was only 3x3x3x3, but it was certainly much more difficult than this one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure some readers are sure that Paul Allen is just out to rape the SF world. Here's a true story that I hope will cast this project in a positive light.
There already is a Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It was started several years ago, sponsored by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (KaCSFFS) and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Financial backing was primarily provided by KaCSFFS, with the bulk of the money raised in a benefit auction each Memorial Day weekend at ConQuesT. KU has never really embraced the SFHoF, declining to even provide a place to hang the plaque listing all the inductees.
Along comes Paul Allen and his project. Now, they could have very easily said "screw you, we'll do our own Hall of Fame!" But they didn't. Instead, they are taking over the Hall of Fame, with full acknowledgement of the history of the existing hall and inductees. After the 2004 induction ceremony, held at the Campbell Conference, responsibility for the Hall will be transferred.
Is this some huge financial windfall for KaCSFFS? No, we aren't getting a penny out of the deal. What we are getting is the acknowledgement of our past efforts, and the comfort of knowing that future inductions are going to be done by a group with the money and PR presence necessary to do it right.
Do you know who has been inducted in the past? Probably not. Our efforts have mostly fallen on deaf ears in the media. But I suspect that when the 2005 inductees are announced, you'll see the story on Slashdot!
I doubt that very much made it to Seattle. 4SJ didn't sell off "some", he was forced to sell off damn near everything. He was left with a small collection of items of special value to himself.
There are people, like Paul Allen, who were in a position to buy the whole collection. None of them did a thing.
This section of the code wasn't put in with the intent of stopping jigsaw puzzle makers, that's just an additional implication. The intent was to address people cutting the corners off $20s, gluing them onto $1s, and attempting to pass them as a $20.
Some of the early vending machine bill readers only did pattern recognition on the corners of the bill. These same readers could only accept a $1 or $5. There were numerous reports of readers accepting a corner covered $1 as a $5.
With over 600 comments posted before I ever saw this story, I doubt that anybody will ever read my comments, but I'll post them anyway. I am currently doing Neurofeedback (and curious what they charge where the original poster lives, as I don't consider the treatments especially expensive).
After just *THREE* treatments, I saw a definite improvement in anger management. My concentration and organization skills are improved. Maybe it is just new-millenium snake-oil, but it is snake-oil that works!
We originally tried it for my teenager daughters explosive temperment. Things are not "all perfect" now, but compared to what we had before she started, I'll take it. There were times when her anger was so out-of-control that my wife and I feared for our safety. Not anymore.
My predecessor only knew how to program in RPG. When they needed to develop a PC based application for the field, she bought the S/36 emulators. I would have never done so. As it happens, I've got somewhere between six and ten dongles sitting on the shelf. In the meantime, replacing those apps in on my "one of these days" list.
I'm guessing you never ran a program that was dependent on the processor clock speed to operate properly?
Back in the day, there were plenty of programs out there that had been written so they worked just fine on the current generation of computers. But then, when the next generation came out, they were way too fast.
In the early days of PCs, a popular practical joke program claimed to find water in your A: drive. You would sneak this into their autoexec.bat, and at boot up it would report this, spin the drive, and the speaker would make a noise that sounded somewhat similar to water going down a drain.
Before too long, the machines were fast enough that the drain noise sounded like little bells ringing for a few seconds.
A friend gave me a program that emulated the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. A circle would open on the screen, and then it would spell out "That's All Folks", all while playing the Looney Tunes closing theme. I tried to use it on a borrowed computer at the end of a training program. It went "boop boop beep beep boop" and was done in about two seconds.
Turbo switches had their place. If you keep insulting those of us that used them, we'll beat you with our canes.
I use DOSemu to run Dongleware: a System/36 emulator. That's right, I'm emulating DOS under Linux so I can run software that emulates a S/36 under DOS.
We have a couple of legacy apps from our S/36 that work just fine. When we were ready to get rid of the S/36, I ported them over to the emulation product. We then installed the emulation product on a Linux box that blazes along on a 486DX-50. We plugged the dongle into the parallel port, and away we went.
There are three people that need to use the machine. As I was showing it to one of them, he entered the menu choice for a report he runs once a month. When the program finished less than a minute later, he informed me that it didn't work. I told him to go check the printer. That 486DX-50 runs our S/36 programs a couple orders of magnitude faster than the old 5360 with a B processer ever did.
A co-worker found a console telnet program that we use under Win9x, and we were able to get the odd key mappings the S/36 emulation expected. Under WinXP that program doesn't work right, and there are a couple places where we have to cancel a program because the graceful exit option doesn't work. But until I find a program that does what we need better than our old S/36 program, I see no need to migrate.
But space is not empty. As a spaceship goes faster and faster, it encounters the stray deep space molecule more and more frequently. As you approach the speed of light, your impact rate approaches atmospheric density.
As I recall, Marshall Savage did a decent job on the physics of this issue in "The Millenial Project"
Trust me...I live in Kansas City, and during the summer around here it is not too difficult to make an impression into asphalt.
They were obviously placed by a time-traveler from the future, stuck here in 2003. In order to return to the future he needs a just a few parts, or the plans for a simple time-transport device. Wait a second, I've got his e-mail address here somewhere...
Won't do our original correspondent much good, but in some parts of the KC area we have a service called "Everest Connections" that I've had good luck with. Everest pulls a double strand of coax to the house, and I tell SBC and Time-Warner to get stuffed.
With number portability I moved my two phone lines over to Everest; I signed up for a cable TV package with all the same channels that I ever watch; and while I didn't have RoadRunner, I now have Everest TrailBlazer. And I'm spending less than I did for SBC and T-W.
I've had no complaints with the service, it's always at least as good as whatever I got from SBC and T-W.
Alas, their parent company is struggling financially, and they've suspended any additional service rollouts. When the economy gets stronger, they hope to return to their go-go-go installation.
Everest did get some bad press for hitting gas lines laying cable. The real problem there was the gas company in that area didn't know where their own lines were located. They lost the plans in one of several corporate sales and acquisitions, so they just made their best guess and crossed their fingers -- but decided not to spend the money to have a repair crew standing by in case they were wrong. So Everest runs the cable where the gas company says it is safe, hits the cable, and the press blames Everest.
Everything old is new again.
Back in 1983, maybe 1984, I read about a Star Wars based game that used galvanic response. You put your hand on the game pad, and then tried to raise Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter out of the Dagobah swamp.
I'm not sure that there was anything to the game beyond that -- I don't know of anybody who actually had the game. Truth be known, it may have never made it to market (imagine that!).
In the Western World, actually, NO, being found "not guilty" does NOT mean "innocent". "Not guilty" means the state failed to show guilt. The law places the burden of proof on the prosecution; the defendent does not need to show innocence, only that the state cannot prove guilt.
This is why the OJ criminal trial result shows that the system does work. The prosecution failed to convince the jury, and the jury found OJ not guilty. We can debate all week why they were not convinced (well, YOU can, I won't participate), but they were not. The jury DID NOT found OJ innocent.
MALARKY! The point is that a hacker may be fooled into trying UNIX/Linux exploits instead of MS-IIS exploits.
Security through obscurity? Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as protection through misdirection.
In his novel "After The Festival" (originally serialized in Analog as "Dying of the Light"), George R.R. Martin describes a society that believes a thing is the sum of its names. If there is no name for something, then that thing does not really exist.
(Yeah, GRRM has earned GoH as TorCon, the guy has only been writing excellent stuff for 30 years!)
It's a reference to an old Tom Lehrer bit:
For instance, I went to school with a fellow who was such an individualist that he spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y. The "3", you see, was silent.
No, when you try to get somebody out of a cult, that's "Deprogramming", not counterprogramming.
"Counterprogramming" is a term that has been used in the TV industry for years. It refers to running programs that will appeal to a demographic not interested in the dominant programming already offered. Examples include showing chick-flicks opposite the Super Bowl, or kiddie-cartoons opposite news programs.
In other words, not only is it not a new term, it is not really even a new use for an old term. It is barely stretching the existing meaning.
I think I may have first encountered it watching the Mary Tyler Moore show. Lou Grant is promoted to station manager, and immediately begins juggling the schedule. When asked why he has Chuckles to Clown (is the right name?) in the news time slot, his answer is "Counterprogramming!". Alas, he rocks the boat too much, and find himself demoted back to executive producer of the news before the half-hour is over.
Wired got it wrong though!
It isn't NitrozaK.
It's Nitrozac. With a "C"!
Think about it...to many people AOL IS the internet. How many of those people would by an AOL PC? Give them a machine that runs AOL, a basic word processor and spreadsheet, and what more do they need? To the great unwashed masses, it would be the ultimate information appliance.
Remember the days when people didn't want "PC Compatible", they wanted "Lotus 1-2-3 Compatible" and "Microsoft Flight Simulator Compatible". The problem with the various attempts at internet appliances has been that the target audience knows what they want, and what they want is AOL.
With all those July searches for Chandra Levy, don't you think SOMEBODY would have found her?
Reminds me of Flesh Gordon, the X-rated spoof (would it get worse than an R today?), when Dr. Flexi Jerkoff steps out of the rocket:
Good! There's oxygen on this planet.
What's limited? It is a 4-SPATIAL-dimension maze. Perhaps not a very good one, but 4D none the less. Games Magazine printed a similar 4D maze back when dirt was young and Apple ]['s ruled the earth. Sometime between '79 and '82 I would say, probably closer to the early end of that time frame. In theirs, every square was colored, and you could jump to a same color square in an adjacent 2D slice. As I recall it was only 3x3x3x3, but it was certainly much more difficult than this one.