As a programmer and a 3D game lover, I can never get enough horsepower either at work or at home.
Intel long ago recognized the uselessness of more power after a certain point, and started building things like 3D right into their chip. MMX, MMX2, Internet services, whatever. Keep heaving it into there to give marginal speed increases to stay a reason for the mass market (not me) to keep buying.
The last upgrade I *had* to do was to get rid of my creeking and wheezing Mac IIci with 40MHz 68040 Radius Rocket accelerator card about five years ago. The old girl couldn't keep up with the newest Netscape release (3.0, 2.11, whatever) that was clearly heavily script-based, because you would type in a URL and characters would come up 1 letter per second. (Maybe they just search the entire history list each letter, that could have been it.)
Anyway, my choice was a PII 266, not another Mac, because both could surf, both could run Office suite, and the PC had a hundred to one game ratio.
> While being totally crappy to it's core, it
> offered significant productivity increases
> (meaning, companies could fire a bunch of
> secretaries and force middle managers to type
> their own memos),
Yes, firing a secretary from a manager and his group of engineers made great economic sense, as people earning a lot more than the secretary now type their own stuff.
Let's have the engineers sweep their own cubes while we're at it, so we can save money by firing the cleaning lady.
Does everyone forget the phone companies want to have their cake and eat it too?
A couple of years ago, at the same time, they were whining to the government that they should be able to charge extra money for long-hour local calls (ISP calls) because it was tying up too much of their system. Meanwhile, on the radio, they were advertising free installation of a second phone line for your computer modem!
Ehh, I remember in the early 90's where it was reasonable to consider buying a Sparc and a bunch of modems and setting up your own ISP. A few years later, that wasn't feasible as "giant" ISP's were able to undercut costs.
These "giant" ISP's were far smaller than a corporation with 4300 employees! Now *that* is the tiny corporation being swallowed!
All industries go through this. A hundred years ago, there were as many car companies as there were cities with a population over 10,000.
Consolidation, with the accompanying layoffs, reduces costs overall for the consumer because, heck, there go 2000 paychecks a month that were unneeded. Rough for those cut (sort of, it is the computer industry after all) but costs are lowered.
...or what if your country didn't happen to have several million tankers full of oil under it?
What's that old saying? Democracy is the worst government out there, except for every other government?
That's technically incorrect. A government based on freedom is the best government out there. Democracy is just small checkpoint politicians blow by that merely adds a small requiremtent to get the permission of the people before removing their own freedoms. History shows this is trivially easy, as political arguments that would be laughed at in any journal that even remotely knew what critical thinking was are heaved at yokels who embrace them.
Even allowing for ships that take millenia to reach other stars the universe should have long since been colonized.
Either we're the only one, or there is some other physical reality much better that is typically discovered at a technology level within the next thousand years or so of Earth's level. (Assumption: within the next 1000 years, humans will be able to freeze humans/grow them via machinery, and send such on relatively fast [few hundred years] ships to the nearby stars. This is no stretch of the imagination.)
So we may conclude:
1. We are the first (someone has to be)
2. "shortly" we will discover, say, a way to create other universes and teleport there such that we each have our own planet.
"Destroying all life on our planet" is not viable since there must be plenty of one-continent worlds where a world government formed, thus ruling out any world-wide war catastrophe.
Other technological catastrophes are also things that at least some other worlds must have survived self-reproducing nanobots consuming the world; crazy environmental terrorist releasing fast-spreading death virus; accidental unknown property of physics such that physicists create a black hole/strange low-energy matter that converts anything it touches/accidental mini-big bang/whatever
One other nasty possibility:
3. Some kind of powerful being or small group of beings that just blow away nascent galactic civilizations any time they see them.
My bet:
4. It's all out there, they don't use EMF to communicate because there's much better stuff, still undiscovered to us, and they don't go on planets because their long-lived bodies and minds exist in outer space; "living on a planet" is nothing more than an extremely ancient "quaint" way to live.
Why go down on a planet if you don't have to? (No Tom Arnold/Roseanne Barr jokes, please.)
A geek bites the head off a chicken. A freak was a medical oddity, like Siamese twins, pinheads, double-jointed people, the bearded lady, people without arms, legs, or pelvises, and so on.
A freak might do double-duty as a geek, of course.
And the geek was part of the sideshow, along with the freaks, the strongman, the psychic, the snake charmer, and others.
1. A hacker who hacks into computer systems on his own initiative (let's call this a Level 2 cracker.)
2. A script kiddie using tools others built but has no innate ability to hack into a system (thus they are not a hacker.) (Let's call this a Level 1 cracker.)
The initial cracking methods are developed by hackers hacking at a system.
A level 2 cracker is a hacker, but a level 1 cracker is not.
...you're better off buying a good second monitor and boxing and shipping it days ahead to your friend's house.
You can eat up a lot of shipments of a brighter, clearer picture for the price of one $2800 flatscreen.
As long as the lan parties aren't last-minute, you have plenty of lead time. You don't even have to unpack the monitor at home. Just call for an evening pickup and do ground, 2nd day, or overnight as the case is required.
> For the most part, it's actually just another
> reason to trot out the latest mind-boggling
> developments in special effects.
No argument there.
> Half the movie consists of Reeves asking
> Fishburne straight questions, only to have
> Fishburne respond as cryptically as possible,
> like the know-it-all blind guy in "Kung-Fu."
Still accurately described...
The only thing he left out was the silliness of the main principle of the movie -- the use of humans as batteries. Actually, he touched on it, but by that point in the movie, he "didn't care."
Actually, watching people pour over manuals for hours, and searching the web for information for hours, and writing code for days, is pretty boring stuff. Why would they want to show that?
They showed Neo's hacker-factory in his apartment, and his long hours. That's enough for me.
A nerd is actually what is referred to as a geek around here.
A geek was a weirdo who bit the heads off chickens in a circus routine. In Revenge of the Nerds, Booger was the closest to being a geek.
All the technologically advanced dorks were nerds, not geeks. A better term for the movie might have been "Revenge of the Dorks", consisting of geeks (Booger), nerds (the boys), foreigners (Asians) and Lamar. "Dork" is a synonym for shlong, though, and thus would not make an acceptable movie title.
Modern etymology has, apparently, swapped the meanings of nerd and geek for some reason. Perhaps "nerd" was so hateful growing up to teenagers in the 80's that they preferred the more respectable "geek"?
> Actually, the tech in 1984 was behind that of the real 1984.
Well, the human-subjugation and maniuplation techniques are well beyond even today's wildest dreams of the Democrats. Look at the crappy job Hillary did attempting to stir up popular rage against doctors, drug companies, insurance companies, and the like. She was using old racial (black) and religious (Jewish) hatred techniques scrubbed clean and applied to generic businessmen.
That's because the book came after the movie. First came the short story with the general concept of an ancient artifact. Then came Kubrik to Clarke, and they made the movie story together. Then Clarke wrote the book.
> Marvin Minsky says that HAL stands for
> Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
Minsky's a dope, then (actually, he kind of is.)
Heuristically-programmed algorithmic computer makes no sense.
Heuristic-Algorithm computer makes a lot more sense.
HAL seems much more like a machine with heuristic algorithms driving his mind than an algorithmic computer where the algorithms (whatever they are) are programmed using heuristic programming techniques (whatever those are, as opposed to object-oriented techniques, for example.)
Ellie from Contact: "Which is more likely? That the universe is only 6000 years old, and that some trickster God created it to look like it was billions of years old. OR.
"OR that the Bible is a bunch of made up crap! Palmer, dammit! I can't believe you voted for Drumlin! Those aliens will have super-advanced technology, probably be able to read every atom in my, I mean, his brain, and they'll see we sent a power-hungry, lying, political weasle as our representative?"
Curious, isn't it? Jake Busey may have actually done this planet a gigantic favor...
Scientist: Well, the universe is going to Big Crunch on itself in a few hundred quadrillion years!
Commoner: No! What can we do about it? This is scary! We had better start thinking of something!
Scientist: Hmmmm, let me check. (looks thru telescope.) Wait!
Commoner: What?!
Scientist: Oh. The universe won't Big Crunch. In fact, the universe will expand forever, and will run out of energy in a hundred duodecillion duodecillion duodecillion years.
Commoner: No! What can we do about it? This is scary! We had better start thinking of something!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given what he was up against, how was he supposed to know that Morpheus & Co. were demigods who could jump in and out of reality?
When you first see him, you see news stories about Morpheus scrolling by on his computer screen under some kind of automated web search he is running.
As a programmer and a 3D game lover, I can never get enough horsepower either at work or at home.
Intel long ago recognized the uselessness of more power after a certain point, and started building things like 3D right into their chip. MMX, MMX2, Internet services, whatever. Keep heaving it into there to give marginal speed increases to stay a reason for the mass market (not me) to keep buying.
The last upgrade I *had* to do was to get rid of my creeking and wheezing Mac IIci with 40MHz 68040 Radius Rocket accelerator card about five years ago. The old girl couldn't keep up with the newest Netscape release (3.0, 2.11, whatever) that was clearly heavily script-based, because you would type in a URL and characters would come up 1 letter per second. (Maybe they just search the entire history list each letter, that could have been it.)
Anyway, my choice was a PII 266, not another Mac, because both could surf, both could run Office suite, and the PC had a hundred to one game ratio.
> While being totally crappy to it's core, it
> offered significant productivity increases
> (meaning, companies could fire a bunch of
> secretaries and force middle managers to type
> their own memos),
Yes, firing a secretary from a manager and his group of engineers made great economic sense, as people earning a lot more than the secretary now type their own stuff.
Let's have the engineers sweep their own cubes while we're at it, so we can save money by firing the cleaning lady.
Does everyone forget the phone companies want to have their cake and eat it too?
A couple of years ago, at the same time, they were whining to the government that they should be able to charge extra money for long-hour local calls (ISP calls) because it was tying up too much of their system. Meanwhile, on the radio, they were advertising free installation of a second phone line for your computer modem!
Clueless is as clueless does.
Ehh, I remember in the early 90's where it was reasonable to consider buying a Sparc and a bunch of modems and setting up your own ISP. A few years later, that wasn't feasible as "giant" ISP's were able to undercut costs.
These "giant" ISP's were far smaller than a corporation with 4300 employees! Now *that* is the tiny corporation being swallowed!
All industries go through this. A hundred years ago, there were as many car companies as there were cities with a population over 10,000.
Consolidation, with the accompanying layoffs, reduces costs overall for the consumer because, heck, there go 2000 paychecks a month that were unneeded. Rough for those cut (sort of, it is the computer industry after all) but costs are lowered.
...or what if your country didn't happen to have several million tankers full of oil under it?
What's that old saying? Democracy is the worst government out there, except for every other government?
That's technically incorrect. A government based on freedom is the best government out there. Democracy is just small checkpoint politicians blow by that merely adds a small requiremtent to get the permission of the people before removing their own freedoms. History shows this is trivially easy, as political arguments that would be laughed at in any journal that even remotely knew what critical thinking was are heaved at yokels who embrace them.
Even allowing for ships that take millenia to reach other stars the universe should have long since been colonized.
Either we're the only one, or there is some other physical reality much better that is typically discovered at a technology level within the next thousand years or so of Earth's level. (Assumption: within the next 1000 years, humans will be able to freeze humans/grow them via machinery, and send such on relatively fast [few hundred years] ships to the nearby stars. This is no stretch of the imagination.)
So we may conclude:
1. We are the first (someone has to be)
2. "shortly" we will discover, say, a way to create other universes and teleport there such that we each have our own planet.
"Destroying all life on our planet" is not viable since there must be plenty of one-continent worlds where a world government formed, thus ruling out any world-wide war catastrophe.
Other technological catastrophes are also things that at least some other worlds must have survived self-reproducing nanobots consuming the world; crazy environmental terrorist releasing fast-spreading death virus; accidental unknown property of physics such that physicists create a black hole/strange low-energy matter that converts anything it touches/accidental mini-big bang/whatever
One other nasty possibility:
3. Some kind of powerful being or small group of beings that just blow away nascent galactic civilizations any time they see them.
My bet:
4. It's all out there, they don't use EMF to communicate because there's much better stuff, still undiscovered to us, and they don't go on planets because their long-lived bodies and minds exist in outer space; "living on a planet" is nothing more than an extremely ancient "quaint" way to live.
Why go down on a planet if you don't have to? (No Tom Arnold/Roseanne Barr jokes, please.)
A geek bites the head off a chicken. A freak was a medical oddity, like Siamese twins, pinheads, double-jointed people, the bearded lady, people without arms, legs, or pelvises, and so on.
A freak might do double-duty as a geek, of course.
And the geek was part of the sideshow, along with the freaks, the strongman, the psychic, the snake charmer, and others.
So let me see if I've got this now.
A cracker is either:
1. A hacker who hacks into computer systems on his own initiative (let's call this a Level 2 cracker.)
2. A script kiddie using tools others built but has no innate ability to hack into a system (thus they are not a hacker.) (Let's call this a Level 1 cracker.)
The initial cracking methods are developed by hackers hacking at a system.
A level 2 cracker is a hacker, but a level 1 cracker is not.
There, now everybody can go home happy.
...you're better off buying a good second monitor and boxing and shipping it days ahead to your friend's house.
You can eat up a lot of shipments of a brighter, clearer picture for the price of one $2800 flatscreen.
As long as the lan parties aren't last-minute, you have plenty of lead time. You don't even have to unpack the monitor at home. Just call for an evening pickup and do ground, 2nd day, or overnight as the case is required.
Not necessarily.
With a high-speed wireless link to the Internet, he live-cam's his video back to his server, and anyone who attacks him can be sent to jail leisurely.
I thought Robert Young was most famous for starring as Marcus Welby, MD.
> "Keanu Reeves stinks."
Well, the reviewer starts off right!
> For the most part, it's actually just another
> reason to trot out the latest mind-boggling
> developments in special effects.
No argument there.
> Half the movie consists of Reeves asking
> Fishburne straight questions, only to have
> Fishburne respond as cryptically as possible,
> like the know-it-all blind guy in "Kung-Fu."
Still accurately described...
The only thing he left out was the silliness of the main principle of the movie -- the use of humans as batteries. Actually, he touched on it, but by that point in the movie, he "didn't care."
Actually, watching people pour over manuals for hours, and searching the web for information for hours, and writing code for days, is pretty boring stuff. Why would they want to show that?
They showed Neo's hacker-factory in his apartment, and his long hours. That's enough for me.
I'm sorry, that's not correct.
A nerd is actually what is referred to as a geek around here.
A geek was a weirdo who bit the heads off chickens in a circus routine. In Revenge of the Nerds, Booger was the closest to being a geek.
All the technologically advanced dorks were nerds, not geeks. A better term for the movie might have been "Revenge of the Dorks", consisting of geeks (Booger), nerds (the boys), foreigners (Asians) and Lamar. "Dork" is a synonym for shlong, though, and thus would not make an acceptable movie title.
Modern etymology has, apparently, swapped the meanings of nerd and geek for some reason. Perhaps "nerd" was so hateful growing up to teenagers in the 80's that they preferred the more respectable "geek"?
> Actually, the tech in 1984 was behind that of the real 1984.
Well, the human-subjugation and maniuplation techniques are well beyond even today's wildest dreams of the Democrats. Look at the crappy job Hillary did attempting to stir up popular rage against doctors, drug companies, insurance companies, and the like. She was using old racial (black) and religious (Jewish) hatred techniques scrubbed clean and applied to generic businessmen.
That's VERY old social manipulation "technology."
> Eyes Wide Shut was a horrible movie.
Eh, the first few strawberry blonde minutes were intensely fascinating, and well worth the whole picture. Too bad we won't see a director's cut.
> I saw the original 2001...in 1968 and 1969. Yes, it was a favorite of...techies.
"Wow! Those computers don't even need punch cards!"
"Wow! I'll bet that thing has like, a hundred thousand bits of main memory!"
> but the movie is damn close to the book,
That's because the book came after the movie. First came the short story with the general concept of an ancient artifact. Then came Kubrik to Clarke, and they made the movie story together. Then Clarke wrote the book.
Patton
As opposed to lower forms of artificial life, like the piss-poor monsters in EverQuest
> Marvin Minsky says that HAL stands for
> Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
Minsky's a dope, then (actually, he kind of is.)
Heuristically-programmed algorithmic computer makes no sense.
Heuristic-Algorithm computer makes a lot more sense.
HAL seems much more like a machine with heuristic algorithms driving his mind than an algorithmic computer where the algorithms (whatever they are) are programmed using heuristic programming techniques (whatever those are, as opposed to object-oriented techniques, for example.)
> Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's gold is to gold.
Hmmm, seems to me plenty of people are stealing the fool's gold of Britney's latest song.
Sorry, pal. Theft of valuable stuff is theft.
Ellie from Contact: "Which is more likely? That the universe is only 6000 years old, and that some trickster God created it to look like it was billions of years old. OR.
"OR that the Bible is a bunch of made up crap! Palmer, dammit! I can't believe you voted for Drumlin! Those aliens will have super-advanced technology, probably be able to read every atom in my, I mean, his brain, and they'll see we sent a power-hungry, lying, political weasle as our representative?"
Curious, isn't it? Jake Busey may have actually done this planet a gigantic favor...
Scientist: Well, the universe is going to Big Crunch on itself in a few hundred quadrillion years!
Commoner: No! What can we do about it? This is scary! We had better start thinking of something!
Scientist: Hmmmm, let me check. (looks thru telescope.) Wait!
Commoner: What?!
Scientist: Oh. The universe won't Big Crunch. In fact, the universe will expand forever, and will run out of energy in a hundred duodecillion duodecillion duodecillion years.
Commoner: No! What can we do about it? This is scary! We had better start thinking of something!