What about power steering in my car? When I hit a bump or a rut in the road, the steering wheel shakes. Now, I really don't know a whole lot about how things in my car work (odd for a geek, no?), but isn't the whole mechanisim motor-driven? If so, shouldn't that be considered 'force-feedback', especially at this most basic level (being in a REAL car, that is?) Seriously, how long has power steering been around? 20 years? 30 years? I know I've put out a lot of rhetorical questions, but isn't this the same idea?
Here's what part of the page I could get before Geoshitties killed it...
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I enjoy playing with "what-ifs" and that sort of thing. I've written a few fanfics for Star Trek and Babylon 5, and I've got my own grand scifi plan perking through my head (though it won't see the light of day for a long time to come). I've created a couple of languages a la Tolkien and I've run a few role-playing game campaigns. The idea of creating a culture from scratch is utterly fascinating to me, and that is where Var'aq came from.
This page is sort of a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like. The language itself is named var'aq, which happens to be meaningless in standard Klingon but sounds like it might be named after some famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician. It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).
This page is a bit more than that, though. In it I try to imagine what Klingon hacker culture is like based on what's known about Klingon culture in general. For example, it's a man's world on Qo'noS, Chancellor Azetbur's history-making tenure notwithstanding. Most men are warriors at heart, seemingly taking little heed of home life or those things that do not contribute to honor (why do you think Klingon sex is so rough? Klingon women get so little...). One assumes a rough-and-ready, make-do attitude that assumes that bigger-better-faster is at best a waste of time. A Klingon warrior might love to play Quake once in a while (but wouldn't admit it due to a lack of real blood), but would most likely see the 1GHz Athlon in the box being devoted to realtime, near-photorealistic slamming of texture-mapped polygons to be a dishonorable waste of computer resources. Far better, when you need power, to string a bunch of processors together Beowulf-style, yes?
Var'aq and its accompanying information aren't quite here yet, but until they are you're welcome to send whatever you think might be of interest to this page.
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There is a Google cache here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:62oDEag2flo C: www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/+&hl=en
This page is sort of a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like. The language itself is named var'aq, which happens to be meaningless in standard Klingon but sounds like it might be named after some famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician.
How the hell does this guy know that there isn't a famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician? I'd like to see some credentials here, buddy!
"Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a programmer!"
Suffice to say, this guy is a bigger geek than I could ever hope to be.
You know, in those women's underwear catalogs that just happen to arrive at my door, there is a company or a brand called exactly 'MicroSoft', which has something to do with smaller fibers making the famric softer... or something. I only look at the pictures anyway.
Actually, it's a way of saying that I've spent tons of money upgrading my G3/350 (New hard drive, new video card, 512 MB of RAM), and there is no reason to warrant buying a new machine right now, except to run OSX. Yes, Apple's hardware is very expensive, but not only do I like my Mac better, but if I wanted to upgrade a Windows box to the point where it had what the Mac came with standard, I'd be spending ALMOST as much money. Make that money difference the cost of running a (by my opinion) superior OS, and it's the same amount of money. Except for OSX, my 3-year old machine isn't old enough to warrant buying a new machine. I can run Photoshop REALLY well, I can play Quake at 50 FPS, and I can even run Final Cut at an acceptable level.
The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.
While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.
I don't see how this is such a big deal... I mean, we already have this kind of stuff on the internet, and it's not very good. (streaming on-demand audio and video) Why not just get a DVD? It'll probably look better, (has anybody seen how BAD digital cable is? It's like a poorly-compressed MPEG) and you can play it whenever you want... this is just a new way for them to implement Pay Per View and charge you whenever you watch a show or a movie. Not to mention, as it's digital, they can keep you from physically recording it to media to watch it on whatever tou want.
With all the terrabytes a day coming into the Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org), plus the tons and tons of stuff they have from ancient times (as far back as 1996!) it would be awsome of it was searchable. Even some kind of mundane type of search. Sure, Google's index is great, but this blows Google way out of the water. I've found sites in there I made in middle school and never wanted to see again, but data is data.
Oh the searing pain! I think I actually saw this-- without the silhouettes and witty humor of Tom Servo, Crow, and Mike on late-night TV when I'd drank a few too many frappuccinos and couldn't nod off. I had no idea there was an MST3K version... (what kind of geek am I to have not seen every episode?...I have friends who have).
There are plenty of great (or should I say... well... not-great) movies that MST3K never got to before it's final run. True shame.
Spammers really go to all ends to get you to open their email. I got an email the other day that said, in all caps, "BIN LADEN HAS BEEN CAPTURED", and it came from a coherent-looking MSN email address. Realizing that I didn't know anybody lame enough to send me anything in all caps, I opened it anyway. Well, to no surprise, it was porn, in HTML format, with some 300k of blinky, flashy, seizure-inducing images.
If it's one thing I don't understand about spam (and this coming from the fact that my mother is in the advertising/graphic design business and I help them with tech support issues, I know how the corporate marketing machines work) is that you want to target a key demographic who is going to be interested in your product (in this case porn), you want to send it to the people who will be most likely to give you their money. Marketers spend millions of dollars on demographic databases to make sure that they aren't wasting money marketing to people who aren't interested. Now imagine how much it costs them to send 300k of images to the email boxes of, I'll be conservative here, a million email addresses. Imagine how much it costs when said email bounces. Witnessing the slashdot effect (especially right now, I haven't even been able to resolve the domain of the site linked above), I can't even imagine what must be going through spammers minds when they send an email with "BIN LADEN CAPTURED!" as the subject. After reading that subject, I imagine that most people would open the email, download all that porn, cost the spammers money, and then not even be interested as they weren't looking for porn to begin with. Same thing with them registering domain names... if you are looking for information on the White House (IE: whitehouse.com) and you come across porn, how interested are you going to be?
The other thing that surprises me: if it wasn't successful, they wouldn't bother.
About two years ago, I became really interested in urban exploration (exploring storm drain tunnels, etc). While I never actually went down in a drain (maybe some day), I remember going to city hall and spending some 5 bucks for gigantic plotted maps of the city storm drain and sewer system. The guy behind the counter in the engineering department gave me a few weird looks as to why I would need these maps and information, but legally he had to do so for various reasons, one of them being that I'm paying for these systems to be maintained with my tax dollars, I have a right to know about them. I think some of the more libral libraries might still give out this information, I have a hard time believing any library taking the US gov't seriously about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Macs tomorrow online.
Dell: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Dells in 6 months, plus shipping time, by phone.
What about power steering in my car? When I hit a bump or a rut in the road, the steering wheel shakes. Now, I really don't know a whole lot about how things in my car work (odd for a geek, no?), but isn't the whole mechanisim motor-driven? If so, shouldn't that be considered 'force-feedback', especially at this most basic level (being in a REAL car, that is?) Seriously, how long has power steering been around? 20 years? 30 years? I know I've put out a lot of rhetorical questions, but isn't this the same idea?
Here's what part of the page I could get before Geoshitties killed it...
o C: www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/+&hl=en
-------
I enjoy playing with "what-ifs" and that sort of thing. I've written a few fanfics for Star Trek and Babylon 5, and I've got my own grand scifi plan perking through my head (though it won't see the light of day for a long time to come). I've created a couple of languages a la Tolkien and I've run a few role-playing game campaigns. The idea of creating a culture from scratch is utterly fascinating to me, and that is where Var'aq came from.
This page is sort of a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like. The language itself is named var'aq, which happens to be meaningless in standard Klingon but sounds like it might be named after some famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician. It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).
This page is a bit more than that, though. In it I try to imagine what Klingon hacker culture is like based on what's known about Klingon culture in general. For example, it's a man's world on Qo'noS, Chancellor Azetbur's history-making tenure notwithstanding. Most men are warriors at heart, seemingly taking little heed of home life or those things that do not contribute to honor (why do you think Klingon sex is so rough? Klingon women get so little...). One assumes a rough-and-ready, make-do attitude that assumes that bigger-better-faster is at best a waste of time. A Klingon warrior might love to play Quake once in a while (but wouldn't admit it due to a lack of real blood), but would most likely see the 1GHz Athlon in the box being devoted to realtime, near-photorealistic slamming of texture-mapped polygons to be a dishonorable waste of computer resources. Far better, when you need power, to string a bunch of processors together Beowulf-style, yes?
Var'aq and its accompanying information aren't quite here yet, but until they are you're welcome to send whatever you think might be of interest to this page.
-------
There is a Google cache here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:62oDEag2fl
This page is sort of a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like. The language itself is named var'aq, which happens to be meaningless in standard Klingon but sounds like it might be named after some famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician. How the hell does this guy know that there isn't a famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician? I'd like to see some credentials here, buddy! "Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a programmer!" Suffice to say, this guy is a bigger geek than I could ever hope to be.
You know, in those women's underwear catalogs that just happen to arrive at my door, there is a company or a brand called exactly 'MicroSoft', which has something to do with smaller fibers making the famric softer... or something. I only look at the pictures anyway.
Actually, it's a way of saying that I've spent tons of money upgrading my G3/350 (New hard drive, new video card, 512 MB of RAM), and there is no reason to warrant buying a new machine right now, except to run OSX. Yes, Apple's hardware is very expensive, but not only do I like my Mac better, but if I wanted to upgrade a Windows box to the point where it had what the Mac came with standard, I'd be spending ALMOST as much money. Make that money difference the cost of running a (by my opinion) superior OS, and it's the same amount of money. Except for OSX, my 3-year old machine isn't old enough to warrant buying a new machine. I can run Photoshop REALLY well, I can play Quake at 50 FPS, and I can even run Final Cut at an acceptable level.
The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.
While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.
I don't see how this is such a big deal... I mean, we already have this kind of stuff on the internet, and it's not very good. (streaming on-demand audio and video) Why not just get a DVD? It'll probably look better, (has anybody seen how BAD digital cable is? It's like a poorly-compressed MPEG) and you can play it whenever you want... this is just a new way for them to implement Pay Per View and charge you whenever you watch a show or a movie. Not to mention, as it's digital, they can keep you from physically recording it to media to watch it on whatever tou want.
With all the terrabytes a day coming into the Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org), plus the tons and tons of stuff they have from ancient times (as far back as 1996!) it would be awsome of it was searchable. Even some kind of mundane type of search. Sure, Google's index is great, but this blows Google way out of the water. I've found sites in there I made in middle school and never wanted to see again, but data is data.
Oh the searing pain! I think I actually saw this-- without the silhouettes and witty humor of Tom Servo, Crow, and Mike on late-night TV when I'd drank a few too many frappuccinos and couldn't nod off. I had no idea there was an MST3K version... (what kind of geek am I to have not seen every episode? ...I have friends who have).
There are plenty of great (or should I say... well... not-great) movies that MST3K never got to before it's final run. True shame.
Spammers really go to all ends to get you to open their email. I got an email the other day that said, in all caps, "BIN LADEN HAS BEEN CAPTURED", and it came from a coherent-looking MSN email address. Realizing that I didn't know anybody lame enough to send me anything in all caps, I opened it anyway. Well, to no surprise, it was porn, in HTML format, with some 300k of blinky, flashy, seizure-inducing images.
If it's one thing I don't understand about spam (and this coming from the fact that my mother is in the advertising/graphic design business and I help them with tech support issues, I know how the corporate marketing machines work) is that you want to target a key demographic who is going to be interested in your product (in this case porn), you want to send it to the people who will be most likely to give you their money. Marketers spend millions of dollars on demographic databases to make sure that they aren't wasting money marketing to people who aren't interested. Now imagine how much it costs them to send 300k of images to the email boxes of, I'll be conservative here, a million email addresses. Imagine how much it costs when said email bounces. Witnessing the slashdot effect (especially right now, I haven't even been able to resolve the domain of the site linked above), I can't even imagine what must be going through spammers minds when they send an email with "BIN LADEN CAPTURED!" as the subject. After reading that subject, I imagine that most people would open the email, download all that porn, cost the spammers money, and then not even be interested as they weren't looking for porn to begin with. Same thing with them registering domain names... if you are looking for information on the White House (IE: whitehouse.com) and you come across porn, how interested are you going to be?
The other thing that surprises me: if it wasn't successful, they wouldn't bother.
About two years ago, I became really interested in urban exploration (exploring storm drain tunnels, etc). While I never actually went down in a drain (maybe some day), I remember going to city hall and spending some 5 bucks for gigantic plotted maps of the city storm drain and sewer system. The guy behind the counter in the engineering department gave me a few weird looks as to why I would need these maps and information, but legally he had to do so for various reasons, one of them being that I'm paying for these systems to be maintained with my tax dollars, I have a right to know about them. I think some of the more libral libraries might still give out this information, I have a hard time believing any library taking the US gov't seriously about this.
Remember kids, fiber keeps you regular!
Wouldn't it be possible to gat fiber (or some low-end form of it, it's just a school) for under $80k?
Well, there's always MyHomework for existing schools...