Is there a web-interface for MOOs/MUDs that still allows user-programmed experiences? I'd love to see this available on the same wide-open terms as (eg) pbWiki, so that any old web community could use it as a chatspace...
Bill Budge's poetry in named variables
on
Is Programming Art?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bill Budge is not a well-remembered name, because his heyday was the Apple ][ era, and his masterwork was Pinball Construction Set (8-bit object oriented GUI).
But he did a couple of 6502 tutorials in an Apple magazine just before it went bankrupt (Softalk?), and the way he defined variables struck me as exactly like poetry-- he seemed to have meditated on the deep meaning long enough that he knew how to create exactly the right variables, and name them the right names.
How come I can't find any reference on the Web to this supposedly extinct species? Could it be that the discoverers wanted to make a plain old ordinary 2000yo date-pit sound more glamorous?
This makes no sense to me-- if it's frozen then it's solid, but a volcano has to be liquid. If I imagine a slushy liquid welling up and bursting thru a solid crust, is it convection due to density differences? And what's the heat source underground? Radioactivity? Tides???
"According to Phillip Laplante, associate professor of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley, the answer as to why spam is omnipresent is two-fold: it's easy to create and distribute, and it's economically advantageous for those who send it."
Hardest problem not yet addressed
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You can't expect any system to discover the deep structure of the human psyche on its own-- we humans bear the full responsibility of discovering it. But once we have a finite structure that can handle the most important aspects of human behavior, everything else should fall into place.
My suggestion is that we need to explore all the possible permutations of persons, places, and things, as they're reflected in the full range of literature, and classify these permutations to discover the underlying patterns.
He's way wrong about Google's history: "Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads."
AltaVista didn't suck, it had the largest index, and it had a clean interface. And a forgotten site called RankDex used links to ranks results. And supposedly the compromise of adding ads came much later.
Google added a more sophisticated ranking algorithm, was really all.
Start with Philip Greenspun's online book on database-backed website design. Read the hilarious Book behind the Book essay on why computer books are so bloated, but buy the dead-trees version anyway.
Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.
I think a videogame for thinking like a terrorist is almost a contradiction in terms, but a videogame like SimCity for anticipating problems like those in the occupation of Iraq could be a real winner-- but it should be designed by the people who are in charge of finding solutions.
The main goal would be winning the Iraqis' trust, so one of the most important rules would be that accidentally killing a bystander would drain local trust levels. Meanwhile you'd have to inventory and prioritize the gaps in the infrastructure, and then deploy improvements while guarding materials from theft.
Establishing a local police force would be another major headache-- somehow you have to quickly decide who's trustworthy.
I've been wondering why the first order of business for Garner/Bremmer wasn't to issue new id-cards to every Iraqi while building a database of past histories and who-recommends-whom. Libertarians might scream but it's hard to see any alternative...?
Similarly, including the Christian FPS 'Catechumen" on the politics and social page is pretty lame-- there's an infinite number of shallow Christian conversions that will flood that page and should be kept separate.
Social-and-political should be limited to sims like "Balance of Power" or the old Central-American-dictator game "Hidden Agenda".
I've managed to load another half-dozen pages, so here's more suggestions:
1. The top navigation-bar is the main point of interest, but it's not self-explanatory, and it's too wide, so break it up into several lines and spell out everything instead of abbreviating (COTS and Adv are way too cryptic). Also the colorscheme for this bar is near unreadable. Also, arrange the categories in order of popularity, most to least popular.
2. The front page should explain these categories for new visitors. Featuring the newest links on the front page only makes sense if most visitors visit frequently, which probably isn't true here. Have a separate new-links page for frequent visitors.
3. You've got a mild case of Harry-Knowles disease, making everything big and bold. Your lists are presumably going to get very long, so individual entries need to be as simple and lightweight as possible. (Even one layer of TABLEs will slow down page rendering a lot.)
4. Arranging entries by date-posted is totally meaningless to most visitors. I also strongly recommend AGAINST alphabetical order-- track down publication dates and arrange them from oldest to newest, or else from most important to least important.
5. The categories as they stand are not well differentiated. COTS is a catchall, and Edu is another catchall. I'd suggest you re-sort the whole list-so-far by asking "What games are most similar?" for each entry, and let the clustering emerge from the bottom up.
I didn't see "Balance of Power" on the politics page, so I imagine "Balance of the Planet" is missing too-- there probably ought to be a 'Science' page.
Popular Electronics, but I saw a smaller ad in Science Newsletter (renamed Science News).
Were these babies the ken of hobbyists who didn't have access to Mainframe or Minicomputers?
They were educational, not practical, of course.
I'd already explored the Heathkit busybox kit
with transistors, etc, where you connected wires using springs (stretch spring, insert bare end of
wire, release spring). The Minivac used the
same idea of an instruction book with lots of
different wiring-configurations, but the wires
had actual solid/male ends that fit into female
sockets in the breadboard.
I wonder what the likes of the TRMC thought of these?
I don't believe there's a 'remove subpage posts from x section' choice in preferences, yet.
Another way to help me skip boring posts would
be to describe more carefully who the target
audience is, and/or why they might or might not
be interested. Mostly what interests me is theory
about game design and insights about the gaming
biz-- I could care less about nostalgia or
rumors of upcoming sequels. (I do like screenshots
when they advance the state of the art, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
The lyrics there are helpful because the accent is hard to understand.
Is there a web-interface for MOOs/MUDs that still allows user-programmed experiences? I'd love to see this available on the same wide-open terms as (eg) pbWiki, so that any old web community could use it as a chatspace...
Bill Budge is not a well-remembered name, because his heyday was the Apple ][ era, and his masterwork was Pinball Construction Set (8-bit object oriented GUI).
But he did a couple of 6502 tutorials in an Apple magazine just before it went bankrupt (Softalk?), and the way he defined variables struck me as exactly like poetry-- he seemed to have meditated on the deep meaning long enough that he knew how to create exactly the right variables, and name them the right names.
Just because no one else has, yet: inept animated gif
How come I can't find any reference on the Web to this supposedly extinct species? Could it be that the discoverers wanted to make a plain old ordinary 2000yo date-pit sound more glamorous?
How could tides possibly heat the core more than the crust?
Nope, if pressure caused heat, you could do perpetual motion. A molecule gains KE as it falls towards another mass, but that just dissipates.
This makes no sense to me-- if it's frozen then it's solid, but a volcano has to be liquid. If I imagine a slushy liquid welling up and bursting thru a solid crust, is it convection due to density differences? And what's the heat source underground? Radioactivity? Tides???
"According to Phillip Laplante, associate professor of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley, the answer as to why spam is omnipresent is two-fold: it's easy to create and distribute, and it's economically advantageous for those who send it."
My suggestion is that we need to explore all the possible permutations of persons, places, and things, as they're reflected in the full range of literature, and classify these permutations to discover the underlying patterns.
(I've tried to make a start with my AntiMath and fractal-thicket indexing.)
It looks like the AV redesign was late 1999: http://www.robotwisdom.com/sites/altavista.html
Google had been doing 0.5M searches a day, they hit 100M by Feb 2001: http://www.robotwisdom.com/sites/google.html
And yes, everybody who'd been using AV defected to Google when the redesign was posted.
He's way wrong about Google's history: "Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads."
AltaVista didn't suck, it had the largest index, and it had a clean interface. And a forgotten site called RankDex used links to ranks results. And supposedly the compromise of adding ads came much later.
Google added a more sophisticated ranking algorithm, was really all.
Didn't Yahoo used to sell email addresses to spammers?
That's my main reason for avoiding Yahoo, but it's been so long my memory is vague.
That rant is here, linked (along with a few supporting points-of-view) from his Wikipedia bio.
Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.
The main goal would be winning the Iraqis' trust, so one of the most important rules would be that accidentally killing a bystander would drain local trust levels. Meanwhile you'd have to inventory and prioritize the gaps in the infrastructure, and then deploy improvements while guarding materials from theft.
Establishing a local police force would be another major headache-- somehow you have to quickly decide who's trustworthy.
I've been wondering why the first order of business for Garner/Bremmer wasn't to issue new id-cards to every Iraqi while building a database of past histories and who-recommends-whom. Libertarians might scream but it's hard to see any alternative...?
Social-and-political should be limited to sims like "Balance of Power" or the old Central-American-dictator game "Hidden Agenda".
1. The top navigation-bar is the main point of interest, but it's not self-explanatory, and it's too wide, so break it up into several lines and spell out everything instead of abbreviating (COTS and Adv are way too cryptic). Also the colorscheme for this bar is near unreadable. Also, arrange the categories in order of popularity, most to least popular.
2. The front page should explain these categories for new visitors. Featuring the newest links on the front page only makes sense if most visitors visit frequently, which probably isn't true here. Have a separate new-links page for frequent visitors.
3. You've got a mild case of Harry-Knowles disease, making everything big and bold. Your lists are presumably going to get very long, so individual entries need to be as simple and lightweight as possible. (Even one layer of TABLEs will slow down page rendering a lot.)
4. Arranging entries by date-posted is totally meaningless to most visitors. I also strongly recommend AGAINST alphabetical order-- track down publication dates and arrange them from oldest to newest, or else from most important to least important.
5. The categories as they stand are not well differentiated. COTS is a catchall, and Edu is another catchall. I'd suggest you re-sort the whole list-so-far by asking "What games are most similar?" for each entry, and let the clustering emerge from the bottom up.
I didn't see "Balance of Power" on the politics page, so I imagine "Balance of the Planet" is missing too-- there probably ought to be a 'Science' page.
Popular Electronics, but I saw a smaller ad in Science Newsletter (renamed Science News).
Were these babies the ken of hobbyists who didn't have access to Mainframe or Minicomputers?
They were educational, not practical, of course. I'd already explored the Heathkit busybox kit with transistors, etc, where you connected wires using springs (stretch spring, insert bare end of wire, release spring). The Minivac used the same idea of an instruction book with lots of different wiring-configurations, but the wires had actual solid/male ends that fit into female sockets in the breadboard.
I wonder what the likes of the TRMC thought of these?
TRMC?
My Minivac 601 could play tictactoe using its six relays. Fortysecond anniversary approaching...
So, are you a true moron, or just a lying creep?
Your link leads me to a site with extra-wide pages in extra-tiny type, and extra-opaque linktext so I didn't know what to try and read.
XML is a horrible data storage format
In general, yes. But for small shared databases it's pretty harmless, I imagine...?
(PS-- did any of the followups in this topic give real examples of nifty working XML apps?)
No, really, it's just, uh... resting.
Listing a series of dates does nothing a simple perl script can extract.
I can't imagine why you'd say this. If I'm interested in WW2 I ought to be able to specify a date-range 1939-1945 in my searches.
(Warning to innocent bystanders-- Isofarro is more-a-less a stalker of mine who generates lame counterarguments for the sake of arguing.)
Another way to help me skip boring posts would be to describe more carefully who the target audience is, and/or why they might or might not be interested. Mostly what interests me is theory about game design and insights about the gaming biz-- I could care less about nostalgia or rumors of upcoming sequels. (I do like screenshots when they advance the state of the art, too.)