I still remember back when BBS's were the thing and DOOM had just come out. My friend Karl who was working doing some really high-power computer stuff (i think he was working on something for 3d studio) that required him to have a 486dx-50, 40 meg of ram, and a 21 inch monitor. He used to have these parties called "geekfests" where all the local BBS geeks would get to gether and hang out. In any case, the one where i first experienced DOOM in it's fullness was there, in a darkened room, with the 21" in front of me, and his sound card hooked up to the stereo. That feeling of your heart racing as you creep down a darkened passageway and have one of those ugly pink buggers with the lumpy heads come loking up on you is just unbeatable. Only a couple games ever gave me that feeling. It would be the following: Alien Breed (on the Amiga. Basicly a gauntlet knock off, but with Alien dudes, and _awesome_ sound), DOOM, and Alone In The Dark, which i wish somebody would remake for modern 3D technology. AITD was basicly like that old nintendo game "shadowgate" but realtime 3rd person 3d. Cool =:-)
I started ata bout 8 years old. My grandfather gave us his old Franklin Ace 1000 he was retiring in favor of a brand-new spiffy (*gasp* IBM XT). I used the machine for some games and stuff, and i wanted to make a couple games of my own, but didn't know how. Luckily both my mother and my 3rd grade teacher knew BASIC and they both taught me what they knew. This was enough that i could make a text adventure (more like a choose your own adventure story) where the program would output some stuff, and then prompt the user to choose among a few options of what they wanted to do next. THen i made it a little more complicated by using the random number generator to make some of the decisions, and then i went a little further by doing some calculations (as in i'd ask the user how much fuel they wanted to buy, and kept track of the usage...) I think that starting people in a text environment is good, because it provides a liniar, Input->Proccessing->Output flow model which will help them later in life (i run into a lot of programmers who started with threaded GUI environments who can't make or read a flowchart to save their lives, and who can't debug a simple state machine). These more threaded/event driven models are best learned once one has a good handle on logic and program flow. Also the text adventure format is nice because it is rather timeless. I still fire up and play some of the old text adventures i've played since elementary school (i'm 21 years old now, and working full time as a programmer) but all those years don't take away from the appeal of a good text adventure. After i had that down, i did most of my other learning (except for a pascal class in middle school) on my own. I took apart existing code (something that was possible then, and now due to open source, is possible again). I read books at the library. I talked with others with an interrest in programming. If anybody had told me it would be a marketable skill, i'd have laughed at them, but it has provided me with steady and decent employment for the last several years, so go figure. Now i think that starting them in BASIC may be a good idea still, but i would go for a console based BASIC rather than a GUI based setup. I also think that moving to C or C++ should happen before GUI stuff is added. But most of all, don't rush them, give them the seeds, and they will pick their own direction, etc...
I think you're right it is a good interview. I think he brushed off the last question because he had answered it at length before. I think that the non-degrading digital copy is the issue. I have to say that i'm glad to see that Metallica has though about and researched this, and I'm also glad that it is not the record company pushing this. The thing i think he says that is the most insightful is that the biggest SNAFU is the fact that the record companies didn't embrace the idea of electronic distribution, rather than damning it and ignoring it.
Some day i want to write either or both: An all encompasing adventure game, a simple modular OS designed to make programmers' lives easier by being free of all evil legacy features...
Now i must get back to work wrting dull business software so i can pay the rent =:-(
Are you ever tempted to swipe some of that computer time for say raytracing (povray clusters well, since tasks can be divided by line or frame, and the input is fairly granular...) or any other sort of task.
Secondly, what kind of cooling do you use to keep all those CPU's happy?
In the US constitution there is a specific clause that allows the government to hire pravateers (read Pirates) in times of war to sabotage, steal from, harrass, etc... the enemy...
When i was in high school, my father gave me a can of spam one time as a joke (he knows i don't particularly care for spam), and it sat around for years just accumulating dust, until i brought it to school one day, where my friend Seth payed my friend Matt to eat a bite (which he did). This left us with a dilemma which we were not otherwise prepared for... An open can of this inedible substance... After a short amout of consideration, we gathered as many geeks and punks as we could, cut the last couple classes and hopped on the bus to downtown. We then climbed the many stairs to the top of this parking garage that has bridge segment that goes over one of the main streets of town. On the side of that street was parked a neon green brand new shiny obnoxious SUV. Needless to say, we shook the spam out of it's can and let it drop. After a good solid 40-50ft drop, it.... landed unharmed on the hood of the vehicle. We ran down to take a closer look, and it was completely intact (minus the bite matt took out of it), down to the outline of that little ridge where the can is joined... How'z about that.. and people eat the stuff...
Anybody remember "A Rockstar Ate My Hampster"? Some of these ideas remind me of that. Also i thing there is an enebriation level in "Redneck Rampage", where the more you drink the less coherent the contol response is, and the less accurate your aim is (so you have to switch to the smooth bore scattergun to actually hit anything...) =:-)
My friend Lahclan wanted to make a game where you were a bird flying around a city, and you would get points for shitting on as many targets (people's heads, windshields, etc...) as possible withing your timelimit...
It's the anscestor to these, they are a little klunky, run on large japanese motorcycle engines, and are available as plans (evidentally it costs about $8000 plus engine to get all the machining done for the rotors and the strange bearings that control blade pitch...)
One of these days when i have both money and garage space at once...
Can anybody provide a link to an intermediate level description of what exactly a quantum computer does? I'm unclear about how they use this mysterious tube of liquid, and large magnets to perform the three basic steps of computing (input, proccessing, output). I'm interrested in how they feed information into the system, how they perform operations (either simple [i would say atomic, but that has a double meaning] operations like addition, division, etc..., or whatever the fundimental operations that they _can_ perform are...), and how they read/verify the results.
Talk of the nation is a good show. I like both flavors (science friday, and the normal one). For those of you in strange places, you can go the the WRVO web site (http://www.wrvo.org) and you can listen to it in Real Audio. It's on at 2:00 PM today (friday).
The trick here is that the company is probably selling this hardware at a stiff loss, and they figure that since it is proprietary and (they thought) it would only work with their service, they would make it up on the service. If a bunch of geeks go and buy them to make spiffy, cheap, X terminals out of them, they lose a lot of money. It's like if the game console manufacturers were suddenly undercut by some large unlicenced game producer that didn't pay them any royalties. On the other hand, i'd pay a little more for a version of this just to use as an actual X terminal. It still looks very cool =:-)
I think he does have a point that there is something to what he is saying, and that we do have to proceed with caution. I also think that The Matrix is an example (although that whole electrical power issue was stupid if taken literaly) of a public airing of this fear, and in a reasonable sense. I think that more stuff like that to raise the pubic consiousness is needed, to break laymen in softly and allow them to digest this slowly rather than have shock-fear reacitons that lead to ridiculous decisions.
Didn't SCO come out of Xenix? I think after they migrated from 80286 protected mode to 80386 page mode, it just got renamed... I'm not sure on this, but i seem to remember something about that...
Stool Consistancy Database and Draconian Copyright
on
Geographic Screening
·
· Score: 2
Hehehehhe. Yeah, i can write an open source prune juice tracking database system =:-)
Seriously though, i do feel strongly about the issue of overly strong protections for corporate owned copyrights, trademarks, and patents. I think that after a limited amout of time everything should be in the public domain. I don't think it's right for the disney company to have a multi-billion dollar monopoly based mainly on characters created by one guy (long dead) many years ago. I also think that fair use is worth protecting (imagine going to the library and having to put money on your little card for the amout of time you spend browsing through books from the shelf... When i was a kid my family had no money (for a while we were on food stamps), but i learned computer programming on an old Franklin Ace 1000 my grandfather retired from his business, and i did this by sitting in the library for hours every day reading over every programming book i could get my hands on (even forth for christs sake)). My point is that if giving the chance, big corporations will make us pay to breathe, walk, talk, and think. Anything that it's possibly to meter and measure, they will. If we want to keep thoughs free, we have to resist. Now my example of shooting cops is extreme, but not far-fetched at the rate things are changing. In a world where staying competitive and connected requires constant access to information, that's the most important freedom to protect. My previous post was more a vent of frustration, thus the "rant" tags. I think it is important that we realize that if there is no consumer support for squeezing more money out of the same copyrights (failure of divex, failure of online pay as you play encyclopedias, etc...), the next step will be to go around the consumer directly to the legislature (neatly stepping around the principles of capilism we all fought so hard to preserve during that stupid cold war). We will be forced by law to bend over and take it, unless we refuse. That refusal may eventually come to force. I know that if it comes down to it, i am prepared to kill (and possibly die) for my freedom.
funny again...
Actually, my father's second wife was a nutritionist that worked in various rest homes and a looney bin. In any case, one of the things she had to deal with (and i'm not making this up) was a database of stool properties (amount, consistancy, etc...) which was corrilated to what the patients were fed and stuff like that to try to tune the diets of pateints to what they digested best.
For those of you who missed it, the NY Times Magazine on Sunday (march 12th 2000), had an article very critical of the handling of software patents. It talked about how the process was designed for a much slower, less litigous, and more tangeble technological world, and how the inspecters are not allowed to consult anthing other than the patent database when looking for prior art. Worth the read, if anybody has a URL to the online version, please do post it.
Somehow a company that produces a product, then designs a certification exam for it, charges for both the product and the exam, and then tells everybody in the market that the only qualified people will have to get that exam, making it the defacto standard, sounds an aweful lot like collecting protection money. It sounds like a scam. I also think that microsoft is not being very smart by alienating so many of their trained techs. I think that people are going to take a once-bitten/twice shy sort of approach on this one. Everybody that MS screws over is going to be less likely to give it another toss. Also, younger geeks are certainly not going to want to pay a lot of money to get screwed by MS. I think that it is irresponsible to push software like that for marketing reasons, and it is even more irresponsible to try to use people and throw them away like that. I know this adds one more item to my list of reasons to distrust MS (and most other large companies...)
<rant> Even if the internet gets split into itty bitty pieces, people will construct little islands of restricted access servers linked by scattered VPN's and piracy will go on, just like it did back in the days of BBS's. I remember the board i used to run with my friend EK got fairly well connected. There were actually hierarchical distribution chairs for warez and porn, feedback and request networks, and the whole system was self-healing. Also there was a fairly quick response system if one board got busted, the others would take their areas offline, etc... In any case, the first time the gestapo comes knocking on my door for DeCSS, game cracks, etc... I'll come out shooting. How many pigs are gonna wanna die for some rich bastard's copyright? I figure they'll prolly shoot me down, but if i've gotta go, i'd rather go like that than shit myself to death at 85 in a goddamn resthome </rant>
I like this sort of thing, because a lot of people involved in the more "sexy" parts of development (videogames, GUI's, Compilers...) get heared from a lot. It's nice to hear from somebody who is in the trenches working on the mundane but absolutely invaluable day to day tools that we all use. One of my russian friends when talking about the programmers that write all the little bits of useful code translated (akwardly) a proverb that i cannot remember. It said basically that there is just as much dignity in being a farmer as [some high profile occupation] because without them we would all starve. If anybody knows the correct wording and or translation for this...
Yeah, he seems to really have his shit together. Sounds like the right way to approach the problem, for the right reasons. It also sounds like his expectations are about dead on too...
Slashdot Mirror
I still remember back when BBS's were the thing and DOOM had just come out. My friend Karl who was working doing some really high-power computer stuff (i think he was working on something for 3d studio) that required him to have a 486dx-50, 40 meg of ram, and a 21 inch monitor. He used to have these parties called "geekfests" where all the local BBS geeks would get to gether and hang out.
In any case, the one where i first experienced DOOM in it's fullness was there, in a darkened room, with the 21" in front of me, and his sound card hooked up to the stereo. That feeling of your heart racing as you creep down a darkened passageway and have one of those ugly pink buggers with the lumpy heads come loking up on you is just unbeatable. Only a couple games ever gave me that feeling. It would be the following: Alien Breed (on the Amiga. Basicly a gauntlet knock off, but with Alien dudes, and _awesome_ sound), DOOM, and Alone In The Dark, which i wish somebody would remake for modern 3D technology. AITD was basicly like that old nintendo game "shadowgate" but realtime 3rd person 3d. Cool =:-)
Hehehehhe =:-) Kick ass. I think you'd need to make your hostname FUCKUP at that point...
I started ata bout 8 years old. My grandfather gave us his old Franklin Ace 1000 he was retiring in favor of a brand-new spiffy (*gasp* IBM XT). I used the machine for some games and stuff, and i wanted to make a couple games of my own, but didn't know how. Luckily both my mother and my 3rd grade teacher knew BASIC and they both taught me what they knew. This was enough that i could make a text adventure (more like a choose your own adventure story) where the program would output some stuff, and then prompt the user to choose among a few options of what they wanted to do next. THen i made it a little more complicated by using the random number generator to make some of the decisions, and then i went a little further by doing some calculations (as in i'd ask the user how much fuel they wanted to buy, and kept track of the usage...)
I think that starting people in a text environment is good, because it provides a liniar, Input->Proccessing->Output flow model which will help them later in life (i run into a lot of programmers who started with threaded GUI environments who can't make or read a flowchart to save their lives, and who can't debug a simple state machine). These more threaded/event driven models are best learned once one has a good handle on logic and program flow.
Also the text adventure format is nice because it is rather timeless. I still fire up and play some of the old text adventures i've played since elementary school (i'm 21 years old now, and working full time as a programmer) but all those years don't take away from the appeal of a good text adventure.
After i had that down, i did most of my other learning (except for a pascal class in middle school) on my own. I took apart existing code (something that was possible then, and now due to open source, is possible again). I read books at the library. I talked with others with an interrest in programming. If anybody had told me it would be a marketable skill, i'd have laughed at them, but it has provided me with steady and decent employment for the last several years, so go figure.
Now i think that starting them in BASIC may be a good idea still, but i would go for a console based BASIC rather than a GUI based setup. I also think that moving to C or C++ should happen before GUI stuff is added. But most of all, don't rush them, give them the seeds, and they will pick their own direction, etc...
=:-) -lars
I think you're right it is a good interview. I think he brushed off the last question because he had answered it at length before. I think that the non-degrading digital copy is the issue.
I have to say that i'm glad to see that Metallica has though about and researched this, and I'm also glad that it is not the record company pushing this. The thing i think he says that is the most insightful is that the biggest SNAFU is the fact that the record companies didn't embrace the idea of electronic distribution, rather than damning it and ignoring it.
I have both the UF books, and they are nice. It's like a time warp reading through them, and also funny.
Some day i want to write either or both: An all encompasing adventure game, a simple modular OS designed to make programmers' lives easier by being free of all evil legacy features...
Now i must get back to work wrting dull business software so i can pay the rent =:-(
Are you ever tempted to swipe some of that computer time for say raytracing (povray clusters well, since tasks can be divided by line or frame, and the input is fairly granular...) or any other sort of task.
Secondly, what kind of cooling do you use to keep all those CPU's happy?
In the US constitution there is a specific clause that allows the government to hire pravateers (read Pirates) in times of war to sabotage, steal from, harrass, etc... the enemy...
Boy, his analysis of the GNU philosophy is dripping with venom, but the man _does_ have a point.
When i was in high school, my father gave me a can of spam one time as a joke (he knows i don't particularly care for spam), and it sat around for years just accumulating dust, until i brought it to school one day, where my friend Seth payed my friend Matt to eat a bite (which he did). This left us with a dilemma which we were not otherwise prepared for... An open can of this inedible substance... .... landed unharmed on the hood of the vehicle. We ran down to take a closer look, and it was completely intact (minus the bite matt took out of it), down to the outline of that little ridge where the can is joined... How'z about that.. and people eat the stuff...
After a short amout of consideration, we gathered as many geeks and punks as we could, cut the last couple classes and hopped on the bus to downtown. We then climbed the many stairs to the top of this parking garage that has bridge segment that goes over one of the main streets of town. On the side of that street was parked a neon green brand new shiny obnoxious SUV. Needless to say, we shook the spam out of it's can and let it drop. After a good solid 40-50ft drop, it
Anybody remember "A Rockstar Ate My Hampster"? Some of these ideas remind me of that. Also i thing there is an enebriation level in "Redneck Rampage", where the more you drink the less coherent the contol response is, and the less accurate your aim is (so you have to switch to the smooth bore scattergun to actually hit anything...) =:-)
My friend Lahclan wanted to make a game where you were a bird flying around a city, and you would get points for shitting on as many targets (people's heads, windshields, etc...) as possible withing your timelimit...
http://www.prismz.com/g1/index.html
It's the anscestor to these, they are a little klunky, run on large japanese motorcycle engines, and are available as plans (evidentally it costs about $8000 plus engine to get all the machining done for the rotors and the strange bearings that control blade pitch...)
One of these days when i have both money and garage space at once...
Can anybody provide a link to an intermediate level description of what exactly a quantum computer does? I'm unclear about how they use this mysterious tube of liquid, and large magnets to perform the three basic steps of computing (input, proccessing, output). I'm interrested in how they feed information into the system, how they perform operations (either simple [i would say atomic, but that has a double meaning] operations like addition, division, etc..., or whatever the fundimental operations that they _can_ perform are...), and how they read/verify the results.
Talk of the nation is a good show. I like both flavors (science friday, and the normal one). For those of you in strange places, you can go the the WRVO web site (http://www.wrvo.org) and you can listen to it in Real Audio. It's on at 2:00 PM today (friday).
The trick here is that the company is probably selling this hardware at a stiff loss, and they figure that since it is proprietary and (they thought) it would only work with their service, they would make it up on the service. If a bunch of geeks go and buy them to make spiffy, cheap, X terminals out of them, they lose a lot of money.
It's like if the game console manufacturers were suddenly undercut by some large unlicenced game producer that didn't pay them any royalties.
On the other hand, i'd pay a little more for a version of this just to use as an actual X terminal. It still looks very cool =:-)
I think he does have a point that there is something to what he is saying, and that we do have to proceed with caution. I also think that The Matrix is an example (although that whole electrical power issue was stupid if taken literaly) of a public airing of this fear, and in a reasonable sense. I think that more stuff like that to raise the pubic consiousness is needed, to break laymen in softly and allow them to digest this slowly rather than have shock-fear reacitons that lead to ridiculous decisions.
Yeah, now let's just all hope that apple doesn't sue them for infringing on the "sledgehammer" metaphore. Hehehhehehehe =:-)
Didn't SCO come out of Xenix? I think after they migrated from 80286 protected mode to 80386 page mode, it just got renamed... I'm not sure on this, but i seem to remember something about that...
Hehehehhe. Yeah, i can write an open source prune juice tracking database system =:-)
Seriously though, i do feel strongly about the issue of overly strong protections for corporate owned copyrights, trademarks, and patents. I think that after a limited amout of time everything should be in the public domain. I don't think it's right for the disney company to have a multi-billion dollar monopoly based mainly on characters created by one guy (long dead) many years ago.
I also think that fair use is worth protecting (imagine going to the library and having to put money on your little card for the amout of time you spend browsing through books from the shelf... When i was a kid my family had no money (for a while we were on food stamps), but i learned computer programming on an old Franklin Ace 1000 my grandfather retired from his business, and i did this by sitting in the library for hours every day reading over every programming book i could get my hands on (even forth for christs sake)). My point is that if giving the chance, big corporations will make us pay to breathe, walk, talk, and think. Anything that it's possibly to meter and measure, they will. If we want to keep thoughs free, we have to resist. Now my example of shooting cops is extreme, but not far-fetched at the rate things are changing. In a world where staying competitive and connected requires constant access to information, that's the most important freedom to protect. My previous post was more a vent of frustration, thus the "rant" tags.
I think it is important that we realize that if there is no consumer support for squeezing more money out of the same copyrights (failure of divex, failure of online pay as you play encyclopedias, etc...), the next step will be to go around the consumer directly to the legislature (neatly stepping around the principles of capilism we all fought so hard to preserve during that stupid cold war). We will be forced by law to bend over and take it, unless we refuse. That refusal may eventually come to force. I know that if it comes down to it, i am prepared to kill (and possibly die) for my freedom.
funny again...
Actually, my father's second wife was a nutritionist that worked in various rest homes and a looney bin. In any case, one of the things she had to deal with (and i'm not making this up) was a database of stool properties (amount, consistancy, etc...) which was corrilated to what the patients were fed and stuff like that to try to tune the diets of pateints to what they digested best.
For those of you who missed it, the NY Times Magazine on Sunday (march 12th 2000), had an article very critical of the handling of software patents. It talked about how the process was designed for a much slower, less litigous, and more tangeble technological world, and how the inspecters are not allowed to consult anthing other than the patent database when looking for prior art. Worth the read, if anybody has a URL to the online version, please do post it.
Somehow a company that produces a product, then designs a certification exam for it, charges for both the product and the exam, and then tells everybody in the market that the only qualified people will have to get that exam, making it the defacto standard, sounds an aweful lot like collecting protection money. It sounds like a scam.
I also think that microsoft is not being very smart by alienating so many of their trained techs. I think that people are going to take a once-bitten/twice shy sort of approach on this one. Everybody that MS screws over is going to be less likely to give it another toss. Also, younger geeks are certainly not going to want to pay a lot of money to get screwed by MS. I think that it is irresponsible to push software like that for marketing reasons, and it is even more irresponsible to try to use people and throw them away like that. I know this adds one more item to my list of reasons to distrust MS (and most other large companies...)
<rant>
Even if the internet gets split into itty bitty pieces, people will construct little islands of restricted access servers linked by scattered VPN's and piracy will go on, just like it did back in the days of BBS's. I remember the board i used to run with my friend EK got fairly well connected. There were actually hierarchical distribution chairs for warez and porn, feedback and request networks, and the whole system was self-healing. Also there was a fairly quick response system if one board got busted, the others would take their areas offline, etc...
In any case, the first time the gestapo comes knocking on my door for DeCSS, game cracks, etc... I'll come out shooting. How many pigs are gonna wanna die for some rich bastard's copyright?
I figure they'll prolly shoot me down, but if i've gotta go, i'd rather go like that than shit myself to death at 85 in a goddamn resthome
</rant>
I like this sort of thing, because a lot of people involved in the more "sexy" parts of development (videogames, GUI's, Compilers...) get heared from a lot. It's nice to hear from somebody who is in the trenches working on the mundane but absolutely invaluable day to day tools that we all use.
One of my russian friends when talking about the programmers that write all the little bits of useful code translated (akwardly) a proverb that i cannot remember. It said basically that there is just as much dignity in being a farmer as [some high profile occupation] because without them we would all starve.
If anybody knows the correct wording and or translation for this...
Yeah, he seems to really have his shit together. Sounds like the right way to approach the problem, for the right reasons. It also sounds like his expectations are about dead on too...