I think that you've already taken the biggest step: Acknowledging that open source developers are making useful and valuable contributions. For the most part, open source developers (or at least all the ones i know) are always happy to work/play (often it's the same) in an environment of good will and openness. I think that is the most important thing. For instance, if a hardware company doesn't produce a linux driver for their XYZ widget, it would be nice if they made hardware specs and possibly the code for their windows driver available so that people could work with it, and soon enough the XYZ widget would be supported under linux and BeOS and probably some other OSs nobody's ever even heard of...
It seems to me that the people pushing for this sort of system not only don't understand the technology, the also seem not to understand how people function. Firstly, this is like telling everybody who subscribes to a newspaper (including libraries...) that they have to pay extra if they tell a friend to go look at an article on page 5. It's neither enforcable, or logical. Everybody who is talking about how new technologies allow pay-as-you-go metered access to everything are failing to realize that older technologies allowed that too, but nobody bought them, so they faded away. People will pay for entertainment, but not for information. Businesses will pay for the minimum set of things they have to, but if given a less expensive option, they will take it.
I'm not so sure how i feel about motion blur in videogames... I could just get a crappy monitor for that... I mean, it is a neat visual effect, and i think it's pretty crazy that they can do that in hardware now, but if i remember correctly, that same technology could be giving us depth of field or soft shadows...
How do other people feel about motion blur? I guess it is sort of handy from a gaming point of view because it helps you at a glance estimate the heading and velosity of an object so you can lead it with the gun or avoid it with the car or whatever...
I piss of all my co-workers by doing it, but i do all my editing in joe or jed set to wordstar mode. When i was a kid i had a Franklin Ace 1000, and the word processor i had for that emulated wordstar in one particular mode. Then when i learned C, Borland Turbo C 2.0 had wordstar commands, and now i'm still using them. So fast, so nonsense free.
I would say lack of binaries is not a problem, except for the fact that i can't even remember how many times i've gotten frustrated when i tried to run configure and it died requiring the development version of some or another widget set one minor release ahead of the one i have, and i go and get that and it requires headers from openGL even though it does _nothing_ 3d, etc... and by the time i've downloaded all 50 development library sets i find out that now i can't build my own projects because i've broken some system header somewhere.
Now that being said, most things compile fine right-out-of-the-tarball. Things that use grapics (opengl, x, widget sets) or sound, as well as things that use somebody's wacky portability layer or whatever tend to be _really_ touchy, and the documentation on what's required to build them is iffy at best.
That being said, there are some things i wold have expected to be a royal pain that aren't, like MAME, i build that from tarballs with no problems. On the other hand i tried to build a copy of gtk+ and it was like pulling teeth.
It's not unusual for them to change language.... Back when i took it, it was in PASCAL and they were threatening to change over to C++. THe concepts are really the same at the basic datastructures and algorythms level. A quicksort is a quicksort no matter what language it's written in.
My one concern is the whole pointer thing... I think it's bad to teach on a language with garbage collection, because if kids don't learn to manage their heap early on, they will get into trouble later... Allocating memory is sort of like drinking beer =:-)
The reason people mind having pop ups and other interactive stuff happen while they are browsing and interrupt their activities, but don't bat an eye when it happens on the radio or television is because a radio or television is not capable of doing anything but blindly pouring forth some streamed content from elsewhere. On the other hand, a computer is an active piece of hardware. It is in essence running a program that is basicly hostile to the individual user, even if for economic reasons it's necesary. Even users who don't understand at the technology level seem to have an instinctive grasp of the idea that the advertisement is _taking control away_ from the user, very much against the whole philosophy of the personal computer movement. Some program, set up by some nameless entity at the other end of a communication line, with some obvious ulterior motive is taking control of the user's own PC, which they payed damn good money for so they would have control of their own machine. How does that sit with the individual?
I think that the way to handle this is just the way it's handled in print... Have you ever picked up a copy of the New York Times Magazine, the glossy insert they have on sundays, right? Okay, if you go look for the cover story which is usually about 10-12 pages long... Instead of being in one 12 page block, it's spread out in 1 or two page blocks, interspersed with the high-paying glossy two-page-spread ads for cars and expensive designer clothes, etc... If you want to follow the cover story from page to page, you have to thumb through multiple pages of ads, and to keep you from seeking to the correct page, the pages with ads are not numbered...
Some sites already do this, they will have an article split up into several pages of html with larger than banner ads in between sections of text, and it works fine. It's just like reading a magazine. Anything more intrusive or active than what's done in print will perminantly scare off users.
I think that running around shoving your favorite language down people's throats is a waste of time. But on a more subtle level, shoving it down your own throat can be a waste of time as well. I like C, it's a language that i get along well with, but there are times when it would be a pain to use C, so i will use something else that fits the problem better, like C++ (which is not half bad if you don't try and use a braindead class library... ). Some things may be better in Java, or even sometimes FORTH... Who knows, it depends entirely on the problem!
People who are strong supporters one any one language are like carpenters who really like crowbars, so much so that they try to use them as hammers, saws, rulers, etc... and spend a very long time fighting with the wrong tool for the job. Needless to say, a carpenter that behaves like that is not a very efficient one, and not one you'd want to hire if you with to have your house completed in finite time.
When the internet worm struck (which was luckily not my problem 'cause i didn't have internet access other than e-mail routed through an ugly waffle gateway from a local bbs, and my usage basicly consisted of using some ftpmail gateway to get at the programming part of the simtel archive...) it took down a whole host of servers, and flooded a lot of pipes. There were a lot of places that could no longer communicate with eachoter. That is part of the reason everybody set up and is maintaining security lists. E-mail is good because if you send a message to all 10,000 people who are signed on to your security list, even if a lot of the net is down, anywhere that is still up will get them, and will be able to fix the problem. Now if you have all the guts of your message on a web server somewhere, you are stuck if that server is down. What this trend represents is taking a FUNCTIONAL ROBUST SYSTEM and replacing it with a system based on a SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE that is PROVEN TO BE WEAK. The slashdot effect takes servers out of commission for hours at a time, imagine a large network security crisis like the internet worm... People are for political or economic reasons undermining all sense of practicality. L0pht because they want you to read their disclamer so they don't get their asses sued, and microsoft because they want to have ultimate control of everything, even if it really screws over the end-user.
I think that you are right about the design issue. When we are taught computer science, that is stressed very heavily, and you spend most of your time designing software, and working out logic, flow of information, data structures, etc...
But that is not how the software that _people use_ is built. Many companies have discovered that by having a flashy new feature or a higher version number out on the market _faster_ they will attract users like flies to sh*t. The problem is that designing software takes time, and users are antsy and want it now, so they put up with shoddy software (and even hardware) just so they can get the latest feature. I tend to prefer designed programs that i don't have to upgrade every 5 minutes, but then as a programmer i have a skewed view. If i were a normal consumer sort of person, i'd be going ape about the fact that i'm still running a browser that's a version old, and i'm still using a UNIX variant that's built on "30 year old technology". UNIX was designed, people sat down and thought it out before writing it, and that is the only reason it's held up so well; It still solves the problems it was designed to solve. Most people who are constantly cusring UNIX are just not aware that they are asking it to solve problems that would be better solved by some other OS that fits their needs.
That being said, software will get better when the average user demands it. The computing community already knows how to make software that works reliably, stays useful, consistant, and solves the problems it was designed to solve. The problem is that users keep buying software that doesn't work. This may be because they don't know or can't express what problems they really want the computer to solve. The author even states that a lot of his frustration with UNIX (as a good example piece of software) comes from trying to implement VR under UNIX. The trick is that the operating system under a VR rig needs to solve a very different set of problems than the operaying system used for a time-share application server. VR wants realtime, prioritized execution, lots of small asynchronous tasks, wheras UNIX solves the problems it was designed to solve (sharing resources fairly among users, networking, and being a portable base upon which to write software for computational taks). This may be a communication issue between users and developers, or it could be an artifact of agressive marketing and the need to keep users running the upgrade tredmill to keep the bottom line up. In either case, i think that the main problem with software is a human communication issue, from what i've observed.
I'm curious if you have any plans to include some set of virtual hardware that will be controlled with drivers running on the guest operating system, but will wrap APIs under the host operating system.
A good example of this is provided by UAE (the Ultimate Amiga Emulator) which has "hardware" build in that translates graphics access to a flexible frame buffer device based on the characteristics of your display window. The neat thing about that is that it works completely universally because there is a driver running under the emulator for this piece of "hardware", so all existing applications can take advantage of this more powerful graphics subsystem that didn't really ever exist on the amiga. It's very neat to have a 1280x1024 amiga desktop. (Before people flame me, there were lots of cool high-end video cards for the amiga, but i couldn't afford them)
So to make a short story long =:-), do you intend to do similar things in the future, so i could install the "plex86_fakecard OpenGL driver" for windows/qnx/whatever and run say 3D Studio and have that pass the 3D work to whatever native 3d hardware happened to be in my host system?
I'm glad that there are still geeks out there that aren't ashamed to admit to enjoying steriotypical geek food like Pizza and Beer. I remember years and years ago I was reading some book on learning UNIX (I can't for the life of me remember what. This was a long time ago...) but it suggested that if a user got stuck with a particularly tough problem, and they'd tried all the obvious approaches, they could probably convince their local UNIX guru to give it a shot in exchange for pizza and beer.
In any case, lately I've noticed that a lot computer geeks have been trying very hard to shake that reputation, image, and social stigma. The modern "tech boom" has created this new social respect for people who used to be misunderstood, and so many of these people (luckily not including me) have been trying very hard to shake those easily caricatured "typical geek behaviors" while they have their time in the sun.
I'm glad to see traditional geeks, down to caustic remarks about other people's coding (who else but a geek could that get worked up about it that it's a personal matter!). I'm glad, it makes me smile, 'cause that is the sort of person who made life interresting for me as a young geek, and hell, i hope they are around for ever...
I've played this blacknova traders, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up not having a chance to get on for a week due to hectic stuff and i got blown up =:-) Shit happens, it is fun, so give it a shot...
I don't know of anything national curerntly. As for sattelite, it certainly has to be a fixed base... They are coming out soon with sattelite based internet access (bidirectional), but the packet latency is something like 500ms so you don't wanna ssh, telnet, play quake, or any other real-time activity...
As for the wearable, it's a 486sx class machine, 66mhz. I'm currently using an M1 display from www.tekgear.ca I intend to use a new CPU core (similar, but lower power and with pcmcia support) at some time (when i can afford it mainly), and eventually use a different display solution. I want to move to a head mounted camera and a video overlay character generator going to something like the sony glasstron if i can manage it. I'm also playing with the idea of using a dallas semiconductor TINI board for something, idunno what though...
I don't like ads. I am actually considering buying a copy of opera, because it's so fast and slim compared to netscape 4.7 which i run now. I also like the fact that it formats cleanly too.
Does anybody know if the ads mean that it needs to be able to "phone home" to run? I would like to be able to use the browser on machines that are connected only to my inside lan and have no outside connectivity... I think writing software that phones home should be punishable by death...
I've been shopping around for a wireless solution for my wearable. Right now, my local ISP is putting in an 802.11 network that is starting to cover all of my town (Ithaca, NY). This is a good option, and about my only option.
Most of these services only cover places that are very densely populated, but ignore the fact that those places are very radio-wave unfriendly, with lots of gorunded steel structures everywhere.
Also a lot of them try to force you into a proprietary browser/client/driver/etc... I think if people can't use _all_ of their normal software they won't do it. Another thing is that the bandwidth charges are astronomical. Sometimes up to $1/meg for some of the services, or they will charge you cellphone rates per minute "connected" even when you are on a digital section of network...
I'm looking forward to the 802.11 from my local ISP because the bandwidth charges are going to be the same as for wired connections, and he has hired a bunch of progammers to write drivers for windows, linux, etc... for a tunneled secure protocol to keep sniffers off. It ought to be cool =:-)
I wonder what the CIR actually is though. I assume that they don't have enough peering to make sure people actually get that much bandwidth while talking to a bunch of distant machines. WOuld be nice to sign up at two different locations within their network and make a VPN though, because i bet they _are_ that fast to themselves...
I'm not sure if i saw the same video as everybody else, but a while ago when i was looking form information on this cool motorcycle (honda X-WING) that is not available outside of japan, i stumbled across a robot video while plowing through the japanese site. In any case, the cool thing i saw was this guy walking up to the robot, putting his hand on it's forhead and pushing it backwards, and it walked backwards to keep it's balance, and then when he stopped pushing it and it swayed, braced itself, and rearanged iself for better balance. It really moved LIKE A PERSON! It was so cool...
I've noticed that i can get a lot of those weird netscape plugins for IRIX on an old SGI O2 machine that i've been using as an X terminal/browser at work lately. I've got acrobat reader, shockwave, flash, and a few others. No quicktime though, but i hate quicktime anyhow. That whole phantom menace thing PISSED ME OFF! They basicly paid off (in hosting services, but that means $$$) lucasfilms to only release the phantom menace trailers in quicktime, and in the LATEST version which was an 11 meg download. THen you install it, and it's EVIL NAGWARE and on some systems wiht less common video cards, it then proceeds to eat your video drivers. Fucking nazis, i'll kick the stupid bastards in the brains if i ever get the chance. WHew... morning rant...
Hey, you have to start somewhere. Is it a reality to expect a hole slew of 8 year old kids to want to start programming when Hello World is 5 pages of code full of magic numbers and linked against 3 or 4 different libraries? Kids will outgrow BASIC all by themselves. They will feel cramped by the lack of solid data structure support. They will yearn for the greener fields of malloc() and free(). They will want their code to run faster, and they will _want_ to link to those libraries to get at their functionality. These things will happen on their own. I say make the beginning environment as unintimidating as possible, turn off this snobbery and remember that _everybody_ has to start at the beginning. Raise no barriers to who may enter, and let those with the curiosity and drive to learn more do so at their own pace, driven by their own curiosity. Those are the people who will become good programmers, because they are looking for better solutions, and are not satisfied with what they have if they know there is something cooler out there.
There is no need to jumpstart people and drop them hungry, cold, wet and naked into the world of modern programming, i think it's healthy if they get there themselves, at their own pace, starting from their own comfortable beginning. A little preachy, but i think it matters. I tried a lot of langages out before i settled on C and C++ as my two languages of choice. If i'm working with a sane and well written class library, i'm happy. On the way though i tried out BASIC, Pascal, Assembly language (for 3 different processors), Object Oriented Pascal, Forth, and even Perl.
not much of an article, but REALLY COOL IDEA!
on
Playstation 2 Basic?
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I miss when old computers/consoles/whatever like the old TRaSh 80 COCO II computers had a BASIC you could play with if you wanted to =:-) It was fun, and it was also what got me to learn to program in the first place. I was a kid, with a computer that would boot into basic, and i wanted to make a text adventure. It was fun. I hope this does the same for some kid out there. I wish they had it in the US.
I wonder if it'll be somethink like DarkBasic (which is a program designed to create a simple environment like all those old rom basic environments but allow the user to create 3d stuff and make simple games. Very cool idea, i find it a little limiting *understatement* coming from C, but for a beginner (read kid who wants to make a video game and learn something at once), it is a great system...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you've already taken the biggest step: Acknowledging that open source developers are making useful and valuable contributions. For the most part, open source developers (or at least all the ones i know) are always happy to work/play (often it's the same) in an environment of good will and openness. I think that is the most important thing. For instance, if a hardware company doesn't produce a linux driver for their XYZ widget, it would be nice if they made hardware specs and possibly the code for their windows driver available so that people could work with it, and soon enough the XYZ widget would be supported under linux and BeOS and probably some other OSs nobody's ever even heard of...
It seems to me that the people pushing for this sort of system not only don't understand the technology, the also seem not to understand how people function. Firstly, this is like telling everybody who subscribes to a newspaper (including libraries...) that they have to pay extra if they tell a friend to go look at an article on page 5. It's neither enforcable, or logical. Everybody who is talking about how new technologies allow pay-as-you-go metered access to everything are failing to realize that older technologies allowed that too, but nobody bought them, so they faded away. People will pay for entertainment, but not for information. Businesses will pay for the minimum set of things they have to, but if given a less expensive option, they will take it.
Thanks, i feel more enlightened =:-)
Happy [late] solstice and any other assorted holidays =:-)
I'm not so sure how i feel about motion blur in videogames... I could just get a crappy monitor for that... I mean, it is a neat visual effect, and i think it's pretty crazy that they can do that in hardware now, but if i remember correctly, that same technology could be giving us depth of field or soft shadows...
How do other people feel about motion blur? I guess it is sort of handy from a gaming point of view because it helps you at a glance estimate the heading and velosity of an object so you can lead it with the gun or avoid it with the car or whatever...
I piss of all my co-workers by doing it, but i do all my editing in joe or jed set to wordstar mode. When i was a kid i had a Franklin Ace 1000, and the word processor i had for that emulated wordstar in one particular mode. Then when i learned C, Borland Turbo C 2.0 had wordstar commands, and now i'm still using them. So fast, so nonsense free.
I would say lack of binaries is not a problem, except for the fact that i can't even remember how many times i've gotten frustrated when i tried to run configure and it died requiring the development version of some or another widget set one minor release ahead of the one i have, and i go and get that and it requires headers from openGL even though it does _nothing_ 3d, etc... and by the time i've downloaded all 50 development library sets i find out that now i can't build my own projects because i've broken some system header somewhere.
Now that being said, most things compile fine right-out-of-the-tarball. Things that use grapics (opengl, x, widget sets) or sound, as well as things that use somebody's wacky portability layer or whatever tend to be _really_ touchy, and the documentation on what's required to build them is iffy at best.
That being said, there are some things i wold have expected to be a royal pain that aren't, like MAME, i build that from tarballs with no problems. On the other hand i tried to build a copy of gtk+ and it was like pulling teeth.
It's not unusual for them to change language.... Back when i took it, it was in PASCAL and they were threatening to change over to C++. THe concepts are really the same at the basic datastructures and algorythms level. A quicksort is a quicksort no matter what language it's written in.
My one concern is the whole pointer thing... I think it's bad to teach on a language with garbage collection, because if kids don't learn to manage their heap early on, they will get into trouble later... Allocating memory is sort of like drinking beer =:-)
We need somebody to implement the street thing from snow crash on this baby, to hell with cancer, i want VR!
The reason people mind having pop ups and other interactive stuff happen while they are browsing and interrupt their activities, but don't bat an eye when it happens on the radio or television is because a radio or television is not capable of doing anything but blindly pouring forth some streamed content from elsewhere. On the other hand, a computer is an active piece of hardware. It is in essence running a program that is basicly hostile to the individual user, even if for economic reasons it's necesary. Even users who don't understand at the technology level seem to have an instinctive grasp of the idea that the advertisement is _taking control away_ from the user, very much against the whole philosophy of the personal computer movement. Some program, set up by some nameless entity at the other end of a communication line, with some obvious ulterior motive is taking control of the user's own PC, which they payed damn good money for so they would have control of their own machine. How does that sit with the individual?
I think that the way to handle this is just the way it's handled in print... Have you ever picked up a copy of the New York Times Magazine, the glossy insert they have on sundays, right? Okay, if you go look for the cover story which is usually about 10-12 pages long... Instead of being in one 12 page block, it's spread out in 1 or two page blocks, interspersed with the high-paying glossy two-page-spread ads for cars and expensive designer clothes, etc... If you want to follow the cover story from page to page, you have to thumb through multiple pages of ads, and to keep you from seeking to the correct page, the pages with ads are not numbered...
Some sites already do this, they will have an article split up into several pages of html with larger than banner ads in between sections of text, and it works fine. It's just like reading a magazine. Anything more intrusive or active than what's done in print will perminantly scare off users.
I think that running around shoving your favorite language down people's throats is a waste of time. But on a more subtle level, shoving it down your own throat can be a waste of time as well. I like C, it's a language that i get along well with, but there are times when it would be a pain to use C, so i will use something else that fits the problem better, like C++ (which is not half bad if you don't try and use a braindead class library... ). Some things may be better in Java, or even sometimes FORTH... Who knows, it depends entirely on the problem!
People who are strong supporters one any one language are like carpenters who really like crowbars, so much so that they try to use them as hammers, saws, rulers, etc... and spend a very long time fighting with the wrong tool for the job. Needless to say, a carpenter that behaves like that is not a very efficient one, and not one you'd want to hire if you with to have your house completed in finite time.
When the internet worm struck (which was luckily not my problem 'cause i didn't have internet access other than e-mail routed through an ugly waffle gateway from a local bbs, and my usage basicly consisted of using some ftpmail gateway to get at the programming part of the simtel archive...) it took down a whole host of servers, and flooded a lot of pipes. There were a lot of places that could no longer communicate with eachoter. That is part of the reason everybody set up and is maintaining security lists. E-mail is good because if you send a message to all 10,000 people who are signed on to your security list, even if a lot of the net is down, anywhere that is still up will get them, and will be able to fix the problem. Now if you have all the guts of your message on a web server somewhere, you are stuck if that server is down. What this trend represents is taking a FUNCTIONAL ROBUST SYSTEM and replacing it with a system based on a SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE that is PROVEN TO BE WEAK. The slashdot effect takes servers out of commission for hours at a time, imagine a large network security crisis like the internet worm... People are for political or economic reasons undermining all sense of practicality. L0pht because they want you to read their disclamer so they don't get their asses sued, and microsoft because they want to have ultimate control of everything, even if it really screws over the end-user.
I think that you are right about the design issue. When we are taught computer science, that is stressed very heavily, and you spend most of your time designing software, and working out logic, flow of information, data structures, etc...
But that is not how the software that _people use_ is built. Many companies have discovered that by having a flashy new feature or a higher version number out on the market _faster_ they will attract users like flies to sh*t. The problem is that designing software takes time, and users are antsy and want it now, so they put up with shoddy software (and even hardware) just so they can get the latest feature. I tend to prefer designed programs that i don't have to upgrade every 5 minutes, but then as a programmer i have a skewed view. If i were a normal consumer sort of person, i'd be going ape about the fact that i'm still running a browser that's a version old, and i'm still using a UNIX variant that's built on "30 year old technology". UNIX was designed, people sat down and thought it out before writing it, and that is the only reason it's held up so well; It still solves the problems it was designed to solve. Most people who are constantly cusring UNIX are just not aware that they are asking it to solve problems that would be better solved by some other OS that fits their needs.
That being said, software will get better when the average user demands it. The computing community already knows how to make software that works reliably, stays useful, consistant, and solves the problems it was designed to solve. The problem is that users keep buying software that doesn't work. This may be because they don't know or can't express what problems they really want the computer to solve. The author even states that a lot of his frustration with UNIX (as a good example piece of software) comes from trying to implement VR under UNIX. The trick is that the operating system under a VR rig needs to solve a very different set of problems than the operaying system used for a time-share application server. VR wants realtime, prioritized execution, lots of small asynchronous tasks, wheras UNIX solves the problems it was designed to solve (sharing resources fairly among users, networking, and being a portable base upon which to write software for computational taks). This may be a communication issue between users and developers, or it could be an artifact of agressive marketing and the need to keep users running the upgrade tredmill to keep the bottom line up. In either case, i think that the main problem with software is a human communication issue, from what i've observed.
I'm curious if you have any plans to include some set of virtual hardware that will be controlled with drivers running on the guest operating system, but will wrap APIs under the host operating system.
A good example of this is provided by UAE (the Ultimate Amiga Emulator) which has "hardware" build in that translates graphics access to a flexible frame buffer device based on the characteristics of your display window. The neat thing about that is that it works completely universally because there is a driver running under the emulator for this piece of "hardware", so all existing applications can take advantage of this more powerful graphics subsystem that didn't really ever exist on the amiga. It's very neat to have a 1280x1024 amiga desktop. (Before people flame me, there were lots of cool high-end video cards for the amiga, but i couldn't afford them)
So to make a short story long =:-), do you intend to do similar things in the future, so i could install the "plex86_fakecard OpenGL driver" for windows/qnx/whatever and run say 3D Studio and have that pass the 3D work to whatever native 3d hardware happened to be in my host system?
I'm glad that there are still geeks out there that aren't ashamed to admit to enjoying steriotypical geek food like Pizza and Beer. I remember years and years ago I was reading some book on learning UNIX (I can't for the life of me remember what. This was a long time ago...) but it suggested that if a user got stuck with a particularly tough problem, and they'd tried all the obvious approaches, they could probably convince their local UNIX guru to give it a shot in exchange for pizza and beer.
In any case, lately I've noticed that a lot computer geeks have been trying very hard to shake that reputation, image, and social stigma. The modern "tech boom" has created this new social respect for people who used to be misunderstood, and so many of these people (luckily not including me) have been trying very hard to shake those easily caricatured "typical geek behaviors" while they have their time in the sun.
I'm glad to see traditional geeks, down to caustic remarks about other people's coding (who else but a geek could that get worked up about it that it's a personal matter!). I'm glad, it makes me smile, 'cause that is the sort of person who made life interresting for me as a young geek, and hell, i hope they are around for ever...
I've played this blacknova traders, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up not having a chance to get on for a week due to hectic stuff and i got blown up =:-) Shit happens, it is fun, so give it a shot...
I don't know of anything national curerntly. As for sattelite, it certainly has to be a fixed base... They are coming out soon with sattelite based internet access (bidirectional), but the packet latency is something like 500ms so you don't wanna ssh, telnet, play quake, or any other real-time activity...
As for the wearable, it's a 486sx class machine, 66mhz. I'm currently using an M1 display from www.tekgear.ca I intend to use a new CPU core (similar, but lower power and with pcmcia support) at some time (when i can afford it mainly), and eventually use a different display solution. I want to move to a head mounted camera and a video overlay character generator going to something like the sony glasstron if i can manage it. I'm also playing with the idea of using a dallas semiconductor TINI board for something, idunno what though...
I don't like ads. I am actually considering buying a copy of opera, because it's so fast and slim compared to netscape 4.7 which i run now. I also like the fact that it formats cleanly too.
Does anybody know if the ads mean that it needs to be able to "phone home" to run? I would like to be able to use the browser on machines that are connected only to my inside lan and have no outside connectivity... I think writing software that phones home should be punishable by death...
I've been shopping around for a wireless solution for my wearable. Right now, my local ISP is putting in an 802.11 network that is starting to cover all of my town (Ithaca, NY). This is a good option, and about my only option.
Most of these services only cover places that are very densely populated, but ignore the fact that those places are very radio-wave unfriendly, with lots of gorunded steel structures everywhere.
Also a lot of them try to force you into a proprietary browser/client/driver/etc... I think if people can't use _all_ of their normal software they won't do it. Another thing is that the bandwidth charges are astronomical. Sometimes up to $1/meg for some of the services, or they will charge you cellphone rates per minute "connected" even when you are on a digital section of network...
I'm looking forward to the 802.11 from my local ISP because the bandwidth charges are going to be the same as for wired connections, and he has hired a bunch of progammers to write drivers for windows, linux, etc... for a tunneled secure protocol to keep sniffers off. It ought to be cool =:-)
I wonder what the CIR actually is though. I assume that they don't have enough peering to make sure people actually get that much bandwidth while talking to a bunch of distant machines. WOuld be nice to sign up at two different locations within their network and make a VPN though, because i bet they _are_ that fast to themselves...
Piss off, it's early in the morning, and you knew what I meant. Stupid nitpickers.
Sorry, i couldn't resist...
I'm not sure if i saw the same video as everybody else, but a while ago when i was looking form information on this cool motorcycle (honda X-WING) that is not available outside of japan, i stumbled across a robot video while plowing through the japanese site. In any case, the cool thing i saw was this guy walking up to the robot, putting his hand on it's forhead and pushing it backwards, and it walked backwards to keep it's balance, and then when he stopped pushing it and it swayed, braced itself, and rearanged iself for better balance. It really moved LIKE A PERSON! It was so cool...
I've noticed that i can get a lot of those weird netscape plugins for IRIX on an old SGI O2 machine that i've been using as an X terminal/browser at work lately. I've got acrobat reader, shockwave, flash, and a few others. No quicktime though, but i hate quicktime anyhow. That whole phantom menace thing PISSED ME OFF! They basicly paid off (in hosting services, but that means $$$) lucasfilms to only release the phantom menace trailers in quicktime, and in the LATEST version which was an 11 meg download. THen you install it, and it's EVIL NAGWARE and on some systems wiht less common video cards, it then proceeds to eat your video drivers. Fucking nazis, i'll kick the stupid bastards in the brains if i ever get the chance. WHew... morning rant...
Hey, you have to start somewhere. Is it a reality to expect a hole slew of 8 year old kids to want to start programming when Hello World is 5 pages of code full of magic numbers and linked against 3 or 4 different libraries? Kids will outgrow BASIC all by themselves. They will feel cramped by the lack of solid data structure support. They will yearn for the greener fields of malloc() and free(). They will want their code to run faster, and they will _want_ to link to those libraries to get at their functionality. These things will happen on their own. I say make the beginning environment as unintimidating as possible, turn off this snobbery and remember that _everybody_ has to start at the beginning. Raise no barriers to who may enter, and let those with the curiosity and drive to learn more do so at their own pace, driven by their own curiosity. Those are the people who will become good programmers, because they are looking for better solutions, and are not satisfied with what they have if they know there is something cooler out there.
There is no need to jumpstart people and drop them hungry, cold, wet and naked into the world of modern programming, i think it's healthy if they get there themselves, at their own pace, starting from their own comfortable beginning. A little preachy, but i think it matters. I tried a lot of langages out before i settled on C and C++ as my two languages of choice. If i'm working with a sane and well written class library, i'm happy. On the way though i tried out BASIC, Pascal, Assembly language (for 3 different processors), Object Oriented Pascal, Forth, and even Perl.
I miss when old computers/consoles/whatever like the old TRaSh 80 COCO II computers had a BASIC you could play with if you wanted to =:-) It was fun, and it was also what got me to learn to program in the first place. I was a kid, with a computer that would boot into basic, and i wanted to make a text adventure. It was fun. I hope this does the same for some kid out there. I wish they had it in the US.
I wonder if it'll be somethink like DarkBasic (which is a program designed to create a simple environment like all those old rom basic environments but allow the user to create 3d stuff and make simple games. Very cool idea, i find it a little limiting *understatement* coming from C, but for a beginner (read kid who wants to make a video game and learn something at once), it is a great system...