I never considered that the doc would fit into 256 bytes. I did, however, wonder how he would write enough code to read the external data source, somehow display the result, handle I/O for editing of the doc...and still fit into those 256 bytes. It would still be a hell of a trick.
And, hey look! Turns out that he had upgraded the machine to 48K. So I guess he couldn't do it in 256bytes after all. Who's the fucking moron now, you fucking moron?
How do you think he proved it? I want to believe the guy, but I can't figure out how you make a machine with 256bytes of memory churns out wills and other documents.
old 486/33 with40meg drive, no CD. I think it's got an original VGA (640x480x16) card in it.
Dell P166. This was my main machine from like Feb 1995 to last month, and I was quite pleased to run Redhat on it. 128Meg RAM, but no hard drives or video because I did a brain transplant into...
AMD K6-2/350 just bought last month. 128Meg (newly bought, since the Dell stuff didn't come over). Brain transplant of something like 12Gig of drivespace from Dell. Also using 3dfx Voodoo2 (12Meg) and old AWE32 Soundblaster transplanted from said Dell box. Planning to install RH6 shortly.
Countless cables, adapters, genderbenders and mice.
Anybody had the unfortunate luck to use one of these keyboards, with the spacebar half the normal size, and an extra *backspace* taking up the remainder of the space? I didn't even know these things existeuntiIstartewritinlikthis.
Sitting at a Happy Hacking keyboard right now. Interesting that capslock is gone, but if you use the extra function key they gave me, prtscr/sysreq, scrlk and pause/break are all still there!
I have the same number of options, they're just on a smaller number of keys:)!
The other day one of the network admins (novell guy, not a unix guy) came by to do something to my machine (gotta love remote admin!). Took one look at my keyboard and said "What the hell is that?" I offered to stay and type for him, he said no. I came back 10 minutes later and he was saying "I don't know how to do control alt delete!":) (Del on this keyboard is "fn+'".
Months ago, while waiting for Civ:CTP to hit the shelves, I bought Q1+Q2 with all the mission packs (having never played through the mission packs). Just last night I finished Q1's missions, and installed Q2 this morning. After I finish those, I'll have Civ:CTP to tackle. Then, MythII. Then, Neverwinter Nights. Then, something else.
I don't know why people are saying there are no games, I'm having a blast.
What witch, though? Is the whole idea supposed to be that the crazy hermit in the house, and the witch are two entirely unrelated myths that just happen to both be true and take place in the same location? I wasn't the only person to walk out of there saying "Ok, so, where was the witch?"
(Remember the good ol' USENET days when you could stick a ^L in your spoiler posts?)
Now, I've got some questions about the ending that perhaps people can help me with. I just saw it like two nights ago, and haven't had a chance to discuss it with anyone, so I want to understand these bits better:
What was tied up in the bundle of sticks? A piece of Josh? Could we tell what bit? If it was a piece of Josh, did she tell Mike? I didn't think she did. If she did, why would they still be hoping to find him in the house?
That was Mike standing in the corner? How did he get there so fast? And why was he just standing there? I didn't understand that bit about the legend. If somebody tells me to stand in a corner while he kills my friend, I would think I'd be trying to get away? Maybe it was Josh standing there (if it wasn't a piece of him that she found). But then where did Mike go? She was right behind him coming down the steps.
What were all the stick figures in the trees? Did they have any connection to anything else we saw in the movie? I would gather that the piles of stones represented the dead -- 7 original disappeared, 7 piles. 3 of them, 3 piles. But all the stick figures were never really explained.
I liked the style, the acting, etc... and thought it was worth my money to support such creative, independent filmmaking.
As for the plot itself, though..umm....I think I was hoping for some more resolution on a few things. I mean, when something's mentioned at the beginning of the movie, you at least hope that it'll somehow tie up toward the end. And more stuff was left hanging, then resolved. Sure, the argument can be made that it wasn't intended to be plot-based, it was intended to be more real life documentary...but it was fiction, after all, and the filmmakers are supposed to at least attempt to make me want to go see it, or tell my friends about it.
Did everybody see the special on cable awhile back when they got some sort of award? They even brought Graham's ashes out with them on stage (and of course, knocked them over and had to vacuum him up).
I think it was Terry Jones who had this quote: "We were going for something that would be completely indescribable. Given that 'python-esque' is now in the OED, I think we pretty much failed miserably."
According to Michael Palin, John Cleese got up at Graham Chapman's funeral and said, "Graham Chapman, writer of the parrot sketch, is no more. He has ceased to be. He has gone to meet his maker..."
(1984-1987, during which time we moved from Apples and TRS-80s to a Novell network of PCs. But no internet or unix in sight)
...the kids who would write out text letters into pascal files, then tell each other their passwords so that they could pass notes. Hey, we didn't have an email system yet. Being system administrator, I would go in and correct their spelling.
...my friend who wrote a parser in TurboPascal to count the words in Green Eggs and Ham, because he'd heard that there were exactly 50. He ran it, there were 52, he was depressed and left. I looked at his code, found a bug, reran it - sure enough, 50. I never told him.:) (Numbers from memory! Don't anybody flame me and tell me they're wrong!)
...same kid who wrote a D&D character generator (didn't we all?) Of course, his worked by generating random numbers, and then applying a huge bunch of If statements to make sure that the abilities matched the class you wanted, and if they didn't, it would start over. So if you asked for a Monk you had to wait 10 minutes to get a good roll.
...our "friend" who wrote an accounting package in GW-Basic, then sold it for a few thousand...several times. I remember, even then, thinking "But you already wrote it, how come you're selling it to the next guy for the same price as the first guy?" That was about 16 years ago..last I heard from that guy he was trying to break a cocaine habit:). So the evidence is there: write commercial code --> get addicted to cocaine.:)
..the discovery of our first networked game, Snipes (Novell). Ah, the joy of seeing that familiar looking little beastie appear on screen. "The hell?!" you yell, as you hear "What's that?" from the other side of the room, and it dawns on you what multiplayer is all about. Your little guy is on his screen, his little guy is on your screen. Snipes becomes an instant classic and has to be removed from the network. Toward the end of the school year the teachers ask me to reinstall it because they have nothing for their kids to do.
..the test where the teacher said just to write any sort procedure. A friend wrote "random sort", which would grab two numbers and exchange them (without comparison) and then check to see if everything was in order. I wrote recursort, a recursive version of bubblesort. It got marked wrong, because the teacher couldn't find the failthrough/terminating condition. I said "Duh, when they're sorted, it falls through." He said "Oh."
Freshman year of college, I got a job working at my local SoftwareETC (lured in by the "loan out software" policy). I ended up buying a copy of TurboProlog. A year or so later in Human-Computer Interaction class, when we were given an assignment to write a shell, and told it didn't matter what language, I wrote it in Prolog. I got a 98. The instructor had taken 2 points off because in my finite state diagram I had used rectangles instead of circles. I'm convinced that he just didn't know the language, and was looking for something to take points off on.:)
I remember trying to teach fellow students how to work with TurboPascal vs DOS, and having to make statements such as "The menu in pascal knows what you want to do after the first letter you push, so you don't have to hit Enter. But with DOS, it doesn't know when you're done, so you have to hit Enter to tell it."
Isn't this the Asimov paradox? I always thought he was the first to say (or at least be credited with), "Time travel can't exist, because what happens if I go back and time and kill my own grandfather? Therefore I couldn't have been born, therefore I could not have gone back in time..."
I always liked Heinlein's approach: there are no paradoxes. Because these things were invented means, by their very existence, that you didn't kill the inventor.
I always like to wonder about the flip side, which is "What will happen if time travel ever is invented? How come no one has shown up claiming to be from the future?"
Re:Notice the investors...
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 2
Notice the investors...
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 2
One of the investors is Martin Hellman, famed in song, story and Diffie/Hellman algorithms. "Best known as co-inventor of public key cryptography", as they put it on the website. So, concerns about security should be addressed at least somewhat by his presence. d
And let the kids buy cigarettes, too! And porno mags, and alcohol! Hey, why should the storeowners try to restrict the kids, isn't that the parents job? Bring your kid up right and he won't want cigarettes, right?
My team is looking for senior full timers, and can't find any. One of the issues with looking at the "older" folks is that by the time you hit 35, you're likely to have had a fair amount of management experience. The team I'm on is run by a couple of 30yr olds (old in their own right!). There is sometimes an illusion that a 35yr old with 7 years of management experience will only want the job if he can run the place -- that he will have trouble taking direction from a young'un. Maybe that's not true, but it's a tough risk. We hired a consultant who had about 20 years industry experience, and although in the interview he said "I'll do whatever you need me to do", a few months in he basically demonstrated that he thought we were ridiculous, didn't listen to what we asked of him, and went off and did his own thing.
We're in a tough market right now. 80% of the resumes we get are for contract work. Of those, more than half are outrageously overpriced and underexperienced -- "I've got 2 years out of school! I read a book on servlets once! Pay me $120/hr!" When we find a fulltimer who doesn't look like he'll make a powerplay to take over the team, we usually jump all over that opportunity.
Somebody please give me just one reason why my pilot needs color? Just one? I'll always remember the person who said to me "I don't want a pilot until it has 8Meg of memory. I don't know why I want it, I just do." Sounds like color is the same sort of reasoning. Saying you need a color pilot is like saying you're incapable of drawing a diagram on the back of a napkin unless you have one of those goofy fat pens that writes in 4 different colors.
Games? Isn't this the crowd that would hail Space Invaders and Pacman, two games that can be played in monochrome, as two of the best games ever written?
Aren't there enough Lynx users in this audience to understand that it's the *information*, not the *presentation* that is important? Maybe, maybe there's an argument that color can be used to get more information onto a screen (such as showing a red number instead of a number in parentheses to signify a negative on a spreadsheet). But do I really want to deal with higher price and lower battery life to get that?
Things I'd rather see in the next pilot:
Sound recording/playback. Voice reco.
More natural handwriting reco.
More resolution.
Built in wireless connectivity.
JavaVM in ROM (yes, I know it's coming:))
Not changing the form factor of the device every other generation. (I have a PalmPro, PIIIx and a PalmV and all use different cradles.)
I like my Pilot. I don't want color. I won't upgrade in order to get color. I think, with Jeff Hawkins gone, that the whole Palm division of 3Com has been floundering for a vision. The PalmIV, "Razor", was shelved (is this new color one the second coming? I didn't read the article). We all hated that they came out with the IIIx and the V simultaneously. Nobody things the VII is a good idea (too expensive). The IIIe is a stupid way to make more money. So does anybody really think that, just by saying "color", 3Com suddenly has a long term plan in place that will benefit the consumer? Or will they simply scrap that idea 6 months from now and decide that wireless is the way to go, and make a new wireless model based on one of the old monochrome pilots?
I've watched amazon go downhill (in the "increasing chaos" sense) for a long time. It wasn't the videos or music that did it for me, it was the auctions. I primarily go to amazon to read the reader reviews of books, and the "You might also like books by..." section. Well, one day I hit a page and discovered that I now had to scroll to get to those, because there was a big old honkin' section of stuff for auction that I might be interested in. Excuse me? What kind of engine decided that, since I was looking at Dan Simmons' Hyperion, that I might also be interested in some Power Rangers childrens pajamas? It got all the worse when he assimilated pharmacy.com, so now I can only wonder what sort of book I have to search for in order to get it to recommend some Viagra.
There are more bookstore choices now, absolutely. But I'm still using Amazon for a couple of key reasons:
The recommendation engine, as I said. It doesn't always nail it. I don't go to the personal recommendations (because between buying gifts, sci-fi novels and books for work, it never knows what I want), but the "Readers who liked X also bought Y..." section is useful to me.
Gifts. I have some long distance friends that I send books to. Amazon is great in this respect, because not only will it giftwrap, it actually remembers the addresses of my friends so I can just click.
Amazon has succeeded, for me, in becoming the book version of IMDB. If I need to know something about a book, my fingers just know how to get me there. If they're not really doing anything wrong, why leave?
I don't like that he's branching all over the place, especially when it makes it harder for me to get the information I want. But the fact is, I still can get the information I want. Until he changes that, I'm not likely to switch providers.
Hey, I agree completely that those are all valid issues. In school I majored in computer science and "society-technology studies", which is basically a glorified way of saying "studying the place where people and machines meet." And I got to read plenty of Frankenstein and Vonnegut (Player Piano, hello?). I'll happily debate the issues you mention. But I see it as a facet to my overall education, not the goal. I put a spin on a practical degree, and now I work in the industry. I focus on educational issues, evangelizing Linux and open source, that sort of thing. What's somebody with a scifi degree going to do, exactly? Edit a scifi zine?
Duane
P.S. - Who the heck said (in another post) that Asimov's robots influenced technology? Most of the robot stories I read these days go out of their way to talk about how *ridiculous* the three laws are. They're a nice literary device, absolutely, but they have nothing to do with real tech.
Hmmmm...first a CS degree strictly in video games, now a literature degree strictly in science fiction. Note to self : Throw resumes from UK colleges in trash.
Microsoft hasn't settled yet because they walked into the trial thinking that they were better and more powerful than the government. Remember the exchange in which Jackson ordered them to remove IE from Windows, so they proceeded to produce a crippled version of Windows? Jackson said "Are you standing here telling me that you assumed I was ordering you to produce a product that doesn't work?" and the MS guy said "Yes."
That original agreement, what was it 94 or something, demonstrated that MS completely screwed the Feds and the customers and produced a "settlement" that continued to give MS exactly what it wanted. They likely started this trial assuming they'd get to do the same thing -- there were talks of early settlements. Sounds like the government has done much, much better this time around.
(It also helps that MS shot itself in the foot numerous times, and that Boies has done a great job destroying every witness MS has presented.)
Slashdot Mirror
I never considered that the doc would fit into 256 bytes. I did, however, wonder how he would write enough code to read the external data source, somehow display the result, handle I/O for editing of the doc...and still fit into those 256 bytes. It would still be a hell of a trick.
And, hey look! Turns out that he had upgraded the machine to 48K. So I guess he couldn't do it in 256bytes after all. Who's the fucking moron now, you fucking moron?
How do you think he proved it? I want to believe the guy, but I can't figure out how you make a machine with 256bytes of memory churns out wills and other documents.
d
d
I have the same number of options, they're just on a smaller number of keys :)!
The other day one of the network admins (novell guy, not a unix guy) came by to do something to my machine (gotta love remote admin!). Took one look at my keyboard and said "What the hell is that?" I offered to stay and type for him, he said no. I came back 10 minutes later and he was saying "I don't know how to do control alt delete!" :) (Del on this keyboard is "fn+'".
Duane
I don't know why people are saying there are no games, I'm having a blast.
What witch, though? Is the whole idea supposed to be that the crazy hermit in the house, and the witch are two entirely unrelated myths that just happen to both be true and take place in the same location? I wasn't the only person to walk out of there saying "Ok, so, where was the witch?"
(Remember the good ol' USENET days when you could stick a ^L in your spoiler posts?)
Now, I've got some questions about the ending that perhaps people can help me with. I just saw it like two nights ago, and haven't had a chance to discuss it with anyone, so I want to understand these bits better:
As for the plot itself, though..umm....I think I was hoping for some more resolution on a few things. I mean, when something's mentioned at the beginning of the movie, you at least hope that it'll somehow tie up toward the end. And more stuff was left hanging, then resolved. Sure, the argument can be made that it wasn't intended to be plot-based, it was intended to be more real life documentary...but it was fiction, after all, and the filmmakers are supposed to at least attempt to make me want to go see it, or tell my friends about it.
I think it was Terry Jones who had this quote: "We were going for something that would be completely indescribable. Given that 'python-esque' is now in the OED, I think we pretty much failed miserably."
According to Michael Palin, John Cleese got up at Graham Chapman's funeral and said, "Graham Chapman, writer of the parrot sketch, is no more. He has ceased to be. He has gone to meet his maker..."
(Joke! :))
Not yet, but maybe you can add it for him :).
...the kids who would write out text letters into pascal files, then tell each other their passwords so that they could pass notes. Hey, we didn't have an email system yet. Being system administrator, I would go in and correct their spelling.
...my friend who wrote a parser in TurboPascal to count the words in Green Eggs and Ham, because he'd heard that there were exactly 50. He ran it, there were 52, he was depressed and left. I looked at his code, found a bug, reran it - sure enough, 50. I never told him. :) (Numbers from memory! Don't anybody flame me and tell me they're wrong!)
...same kid who wrote a D&D character generator (didn't we all?) Of course, his worked by generating random numbers, and then applying a huge bunch of If statements to make sure that the abilities matched the class you wanted, and if they didn't, it would start over. So if you asked for a Monk you had to wait 10 minutes to get a good roll.
...our "friend" who wrote an accounting package in GW-Basic, then sold it for a few thousand...several times. I remember, even then, thinking "But you already wrote it, how come you're selling it to the next guy for the same price as the first guy?" That was about 16 years ago..last I heard from that guy he was trying to break a cocaine habit :). So the evidence is there: write commercial code --> get addicted to cocaine. :)
..the discovery of our first networked game, Snipes (Novell). Ah, the joy of seeing that familiar looking little beastie appear on screen. "The hell?!" you yell, as you hear "What's that?" from the other side of the room, and it dawns on you what multiplayer is all about. Your little guy is on his screen, his little guy is on your screen. Snipes becomes an instant classic and has to be removed from the network. Toward the end of the school year the teachers ask me to reinstall it because they have nothing for their kids to do.
..the test where the teacher said just to write any sort procedure. A friend wrote "random sort", which would grab two numbers and exchange them (without comparison) and then check to see if everything was in order. I wrote recursort, a recursive version of bubblesort. It got marked wrong, because the teacher couldn't find the failthrough/terminating condition. I said "Duh, when they're sorted, it falls through." He said "Oh."
Ah, memories.
I remember trying to teach fellow students how to work with TurboPascal vs DOS, and having to make statements such as "The menu in pascal knows what you want to do after the first letter you push, so you don't have to hit Enter. But with DOS, it doesn't know when you're done, so you have to hit Enter to tell it."
Ahhh, memories.
I always liked Heinlein's approach: there are no paradoxes. Because these things were invented means, by their very existence, that you didn't kill the inventor.
I always like to wonder about the flip side, which is "What will happen if time travel ever is invented? How come no one has shown up claiming to be from the future?"
URL: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/ pageview?cmd=investors
One of the investors is Martin Hellman, famed in song, story and Diffie/Hellman algorithms. "Best known as co-inventor of public key cryptography", as they put it on the website. So, concerns about security should be addressed at least somewhat by his presence. d
And let the kids buy cigarettes, too! And porno mags, and alcohol! Hey, why should the storeowners try to restrict the kids, isn't that the parents job? Bring your kid up right and he won't want cigarettes, right?
We're in a tough market right now. 80% of the resumes we get are for contract work. Of those, more than half are outrageously overpriced and underexperienced -- "I've got 2 years out of school! I read a book on servlets once! Pay me $120/hr!" When we find a fulltimer who doesn't look like he'll make a powerplay to take over the team, we usually jump all over that opportunity.
Including by yourself and your "can't let it rest" series on the subject.
d
Games? Isn't this the crowd that would hail Space Invaders and Pacman, two games that can be played in monochrome, as two of the best games ever written?
Aren't there enough Lynx users in this audience to understand that it's the *information*, not the *presentation* that is important? Maybe, maybe there's an argument that color can be used to get more information onto a screen (such as showing a red number instead of a number in parentheses to signify a negative on a spreadsheet). But do I really want to deal with higher price and lower battery life to get that?
Things I'd rather see in the next pilot:
- Sound recording/playback. Voice reco.
- More natural handwriting reco.
- More resolution.
- Built in wireless connectivity.
- JavaVM in ROM (yes, I know it's coming
:)) - Not changing the form factor of the device every other generation. (I have a PalmPro, PIIIx and a PalmV and all use different cradles.)
I like my Pilot. I don't want color. I won't upgrade in order to get color. I think, with Jeff Hawkins gone, that the whole Palm division of 3Com has been floundering for a vision. The PalmIV, "Razor", was shelved (is this new color one the second coming? I didn't read the article). We all hated that they came out with the IIIx and the V simultaneously. Nobody things the VII is a good idea (too expensive). The IIIe is a stupid way to make more money. So does anybody really think that, just by saying "color", 3Com suddenly has a long term plan in place that will benefit the consumer? Or will they simply scrap that idea 6 months from now and decide that wireless is the way to go, and make a new wireless model based on one of the old monochrome pilots?d
There are more bookstore choices now, absolutely. But I'm still using Amazon for a couple of key reasons:
I don't like that he's branching all over the place, especially when it makes it harder for me to get the information I want. But the fact is, I still can get the information I want. Until he changes that, I'm not likely to switch providers.
Duane
P.S. - Who the heck said (in another post) that Asimov's robots influenced technology? Most of the robot stories I read these days go out of their way to talk about how *ridiculous* the three laws are. They're a nice literary device, absolutely, but they have nothing to do with real tech.
Hmmmm...first a CS degree strictly in video games, now a literature degree strictly in science fiction. Note to self : Throw resumes from UK colleges in trash.
Ideas for new UK degrees:
That original agreement, what was it 94 or something, demonstrated that MS completely screwed the Feds and the customers and produced a "settlement" that continued to give MS exactly what it wanted. They likely started this trial assuming they'd get to do the same thing -- there were talks of early settlements. Sounds like the government has done much, much better this time around.
(It also helps that MS shot itself in the foot numerous times, and that Boies has done a great job destroying every witness MS has presented.)