What does that leave? Producing. You give the cash and some ideas, let others do the work.
Actually, you've missed what he's really good at and what the article hints at - editing the film into something that is very watchable.
Lucas has an amazing ability as a visual and audible story teller. He has the ability to place the viewer in the middle of the scene and make them feel as if they are a part of it. It is important to note that he worries about the sound just as much as the picture and they do merge seamlessly together.
He's the anti-Kevin Smith. Lucas has saddled himself with a story that everybody knows how it is going to play itself out, but he has managed to create some visually entertaining pieces of film along the way. Smith is the opposite, when he's at the top of his game you don't know what to expect at the end, but you know you'll be entertained by the dialog and bored by static cameras four to six feet from the talent.
The idea of Lucas being the anti-Kevin Smith got me to wondering what you would get if they were to collaborate. Smith would provide the story, dialog and characters while Lucas would make the movie visually and aurally interesting.
Hmmm... Kevin, if you're reading this, have your people talk to my people and we'll talk.
Thanx - it's an area I've always been interested in and I've been lucky enough to be involved with a small piece of it and some of the people that make it happen.
My experience with space rated equipment isn't all that extensive or current (I was involved in failure analysis of an AP-101 memory card that had an intermittent failure from the STS-2 and had some interactions with the engineers at IBM's old FSD division, which designed the AP-101s and wrote the flight software) but the article misses one very big point that is the really fascinating aspect (to me) of spacecraft computing hardware and I would have to challenge a number of facts in it.
1. The shuttle launch algorithms and orbital maintenance procedures are a lot more complex than the article makes them out to be. There are several hundred parameters that are continually checked, recorded and processed from tens to hundreds of times per second to make sure the flight path is correct and all systems are operating correctly. Along with monitoring the flight path, the computers were/are largely responsible for the data displayed on the astronaut/pilot's CRT displays in the cockpit.
2. It is my understanding, that in the early shuttle missions at least, there were multiple code loads during flight. The original AP-101s had a maximum of 256K words of 32 bit memory, which was enough for a separate launch, orbit and landing image, each which had to be loaded into the AP-101s before the next phase of flight. There have been issues with loading software or receiving and loading new software from the ground.
3. The original AP-101s were designed for the F-15 and could be considered "state of the art" for the early 1970s in terms of processing power and memory size. They are capable of about five MIPs and had a full megabyte of battery backed memory. They were chosen because they had been qualified for the high G-Loads and temperature extremes of the fighters. While the systems used on the shuttle were of the same design as used on the F-15 (and later the B-1B), they were inspected to much higher standards and all failures had to be resolved down to the point of having a test in place to prevent the failure from escaping the manufacturing/test processes as well root cause action plans at the component supplier.
The memory card failure that I was involved with was caused by a solder ball inside a metal RAM chip package. During the shuttle's ascent, vibration caused the solder ball to break free and intermittently touch the surface of the chip inside the package. The problem was extremely difficult to reproduce and was found by placing a microphone on the chip package and tapping the chip with the eraser end of a pencil. Chips with this solder ball defect "rang" differently than ones without this problem. After the ball was discovered and proven (by cutting open the chip package), every chip used in a shuttle AP-101 was tap tested by IBM to ensure no other solder balls were hidden inside the packages.
4. I don't know where that picture of the "Part of the AP-101S" came from as there is no way that is flight qualified hardware for an F-15, let alone a shuttle orbiter. Wire reworks are simply not allowed in high-G, high vibration environments and it looks like the surface mount components are hand soldered into place. I think this is prototype hardware that somebody pawned off on the author.
5. I don't understand where the idea that space systems having to be low power came from. The AP-101s were real power hogs (all their logic is bipolar) and were in fact glycol cooled. A significant fraction of the orbiter power generation is devoted to the compter systems (as well as the spacecraft cooling capabilies).
What is always interesting is looking at how the software for manned spacecraft is developed. A big joke is the Mars Observer and the mix up between English and Metric units, but think about how often you've heard about a software failure on board the shuttle - or any manned spacecraft for that matter. In Apollo, there were none and the software for the CM and LM computers was wire wrapped on a bed of nails instead of being burned into
This was written a few years ago and in it, Nimoy acknowledges the opportunities the role of Spock has given him. Nimoy ends up concluding that Spock is part of him and is responsible for a large fraction of his later success.
myke
I always end up behind that guy...
on
Inside the PSP
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, it always happens when I'm returning something like an extra cable that it turned out I did't need, still in the packaging and with the receipt in hand.
As part of the experience, I bet he will claim that his two year old got a hold of it for just a few seconds and managed to disassemble it and he not only wants to return the PSP but complain to Sony and tell them they should have designed the unit to be more robust. This will take an hour ending with a manager will show the "Void if Removed" sticker has been broken but they'll give him a break "this time".
I usually spend this time thinking pleasant thoughts like how they would have dealt with his kind in the dark ages.
I've gone around this block a few times and I have a few comments that you might find useful.
First off, you didn't say what is your market space. Are you shooting for home, office, workstation or server? I think you'll probably find it easiest to be compatible in the office desktop or server spaces where the configurations are quite generic and not apt to be modified by the end user. Secondly, you didn't say what you did. Are you a full system designer, motherboard designer or configurator? Are you looking to design components that are *nix compatible or are you looking to put together off the shelf components into a system that is *nix compatible? How you answer these questions will affect how you approach the problem.
If I were in your position, I would suggest that you look at the "PC/99" Specification put out by Microsoft/Intel and see what you can do to be compatible with this specification instead of the more Windows (and DRM) specific later specifications and try to get/design hardware that meets this specification; it should be very *nix compatible although it will not encompass the latest audio and video specifications (which is why I suggested office desktop and (preferably 1U) server products.
The problem with this approach will be specifying chipsets that can handle the latest processors and memory. You should be able to mix and match to end up with a motherboard that will run the latest processors with the most appropriate memory and access EIDE and SCSI storage and should be very *nix friendly.
How's that? So it's actually better to manually malloc and free memory than to let a GC take care of it? Surely you're just jesting!
It's funny that you would bring out this example - it is probably the one that I personally would consider to be the most concrete example of the superiority of low(er) level coding. Over the past few years, I've gotten quite a bit of experience debugging memory leaks and found that there probably isn't a Windows or Linux garbage collection implementation that is fool proof (partially because, as the saying goes, fools are so ingenious).
I just started listing some of the problems I've worked through in the past two years and looking at them, I can see the problems come down to the programmer
a) assuming they know how big the data is and defining arrays based on this assumption,
b) not checking their code to ensure that accesses stay within array/variable boundaries
c) "finding" a clever way of accessing data that saves a few lines of code.
With any of these problems, data critical to the application or the OS gets overwritten leading to problems somewhere down the road, but not at the point where the overwriting takes place.
What I find that I am always telling programmers is:
1. When declaring an array in an application, ALWAYS use the "sizeof" operator as the basis to ensure that the element size is properly included and then add 1 for a terminating null character.
2. When allocating memory for file data, make sure an LSEEK is done first to understand the size of memory - and check the result before allocating the memory. Again, add 1 for a terminating null character.
3. After writing the code for allocating memory, note it in the make file/allocate-free function source file and make sure everything that is allocated is freed.
This rigor has seemingly eliminated the incidence of memory leaks AND other application instabilities which we used to suffer from and is the point that the parent is making. "Good" code is a result of good design practices and thinking through how it will execute; when software development is properly implemented, the actual task of coding is quite small so the delta time and effort improvement of using a high level language isn't as significant and its "inefficiencies" (execution time, size and required resources) relative to low level coding become relatively larger.
I can see this turning into a holy war as to how to code applications is better and I want to state that I believe that both high and low level coding have their place but only after the design of the application has been thought through.
My year and a half old Kyocera 7135 has a built in MP3 player just like the Ericsson with a Palm Pilot built in to boot. It's a great feature for a phone and I was always surprised no other phones were offering it.
Good point - when I first looked at the Example Apps, I didn't see a lot that caught my eye (Tic/Tac/Toe on your TV?) and it turned me off. But maybe somebody will come up with a real killer app and not only will this keep TiVo in the Black but also create something special and unique.
Thanx for the reply, I didn't think of using the memory stick.
Just doing a quick search, the UMD Drive is 1.8 GB and Sony has announced a 2.0 GB memory stick became be available late last year. Right now, it looks like the 1.0 GB and 2.0 GB memory sticks are around $350 and $700 each, respectively.
I think this means there is still a market for a UMD disk burner.
I'm wondering how much the UMD disc movies will cost.
I'm expecting that within a week, somebody will have a process that will Rip the contents of a DVD, convert the content into a (MPeg4?) format that is appropriate for UMD and provide a process for burning a UMD compatible optical disk.
The question is, will it be Sony? If Sony really wanted to knock MS and Nintendo out of the building, they would provide the ability to Rip a Sony/Columbia DVD into a UMD disk without an additional licensing cost.
Unfortunately, we all live in the real world where Sony will see the UMD drive as an opportunity to charge a customer two licensing fees for the same bit of content. Sigh.
Your description of the purpose of Fortran doesn't really match anything I have seen before regarding it. My understanding is that Fortran was the first "high level" programming language and was designed to be used by everyone not just poorly trained egineers and scientists.
Being "first" had some advantages (namely long life) but many disadvantages as different programming styles and methodologies had not yet been invented, discussed or evaluated. As far as I can tell later versions of Fortran (ie IV, V, and 90 although not ANSI) were attempts to "modernize" the language and provide it with structured language extensions, etc.
In coming of age in the late '70s, early '80s, I generally saw people who were not formally trained in programming gravitating to "APL" which was a truly bizarre language/operating environment. For certain types of applications (primarily matrix operations), such as multiplying two matrices together in one line of code, it was fantastic. Unfortunately, the operator set used with APL uses non-standard (ie non-ASCII) characters which made the code impossible to follow unless you had a reference in front of you (or were very, very experienced in developing APL code). One of my first jobs was maintaining APL based applications that interfaced with system resources through the use of APIs. I would have preferred the "line noise" of Perl over what this looked like.
More recently, "Labview" seems to have taken over as the medium of choice for these applications. While it is outstanding as an application tool for developing fast instrumentation interconnect logic, traditional programming structures (like a "while loop") come out more like a page of Pentium IV schematics.
I think that you've gone too far in stating that Fortran was designed for just engineers and scientists, especially when compared to langauages/operating environmnets designed specifically for engineers and scientists. Fortran was simply the first product of an immature science.
The question I have is, are these addins restricted to just the Sims universe or can they access hardware/files on the PC?
The two methods I would expect to be able to do this are:
1. Direct file/hardware manipulation. I would presume that the features are organized like DLLs, so placing code to execute a from within the addin should be possible. 2. Sub files that can be placed in specific locations (ie execute when the PC boots). If there is no access to the file system, what about the PC's registry? Commands to access specific files should be placeable on boot up from the registry.
I would expect that an addin written for Windows would upchuck in a Linux/OSX environment, but would this crash the game/system?
I can see trading in diamonds made from famous people. How much do you think a diamond made from Einstein, Gallileo, Shakespeare, Da Vinci would go for? It could be interesting to have a diamond made from Cy Young put on the trophy that bears his name.
Of course there could be a certain amount of abuse - like Ted Williams' kid paying to keep his head frozen by selling off parts of his body as diamonds.
I know if I get turned into a diamond, I'll be treated like a ring on "The Lucy Show", you know get flushed down a sink, pass through a dog, get baked into a meatloaf.
Let's see, he could be shanghaid by a rogue pirate who teaches him the trade while telling each night, "Have a good sleep, for more likely than not I'll kill you in the morning" and then retires, leaving Wesley the ship and crew.
Wesley could then return to Starfleet headquarters, looking for his true love (an upperclassmen he met during his brief time at the acadamy) only to discover that she has become betrothed to an evil planetary governor who, unbeknownst to her, has ambitions to take over neighboring star systems and start interstellar war.
After being left for dead after being tortured using an octopus like extra-terrestrial creature that attaches its tentacles to major nerve bundles by the governor's minions. The purpose of the torture was to gain the vital "warp energy" that Wesley has learned to harness so the governor's assassins, can more through space like ghosts. Wesley rebuilds his strength and storms the governor's stronghold only to find out that the governor is his long believed dead father.
In the climactic battle, Wesley defeats, but does not kill his father. Wesley's true love does kill Wesley's father in a pique at being used to draw Wesley in. In his dying breath, Wesley's father renounces his evil and Wesley gives him the full starfleet funeral that he deserves.
Wesley realizes that he has evolved beyond common man and despite his feelings for the girl resumes his wandering of the universe, looking for wrongs to right and balances to be restored.
Hey, it's better than anything Rick Berman has produced in the last 10 years.
If they're not going to fix it, I'd like to understand why they must crash it down into the ocean? If they're going to send a propulsion module up there, why don't they move the Hubble to a Lagrange point between the Earth and moon?
I realize that it will probably take years to get there but I've seen a few proposals for future space stations being placed at the Lagrange points - wouldn't it be nice if they had a high-quality (maybe not as good as when launched) set of optics waiting to be used in a station observatory? I realize that there is a (very) good chance of this never happening, but it seems a damn sight better than crashing Hubble into the Pacific.
Actually, I'm serious; beer is a manufactured product but it requires a biological process to make it. How will the fabricator handle this case?
Personally, I'm still waiting for a "replicator" - as in "Computer, Alexander Keith's IPA at 2 degrees Centigrade". None of that synthehol crap for me.
I would think the *AA lobby would appreciate this - they are no longer the bad guys for suing grandparents because of what gets put on their machines during weekend visits and they have someone to complain about when U2's new album shows up as MP3s before the master is cut.
myke
With proper organizing, he could make the World a
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
better place.
I'm thinking that after Doug has completed is collection that he place "artists" such as Culture Club, Milli Vanilli and Barry Manilow on "protective" or "sacrificial" drives that are placed around the other drives. This way, when rampaging hordes, nuclear missiles or RIAA lawyers come in, they will have something to destroy, leaving the bulk of the music for prosperity.
In each of these three cases, the attackers will feel like they were successful, with humanity being the ultimate winners.
Slashdot Mirror
What does that leave? Producing. You give the cash and some ideas, let others do the work.
Actually, you've missed what he's really good at and what the article hints at - editing the film into something that is very watchable.
Lucas has an amazing ability as a visual and audible story teller. He has the ability to place the viewer in the middle of the scene and make them feel as if they are a part of it. It is important to note that he worries about the sound just as much as the picture and they do merge seamlessly together.
He's the anti-Kevin Smith. Lucas has saddled himself with a story that everybody knows how it is going to play itself out, but he has managed to create some visually entertaining pieces of film along the way. Smith is the opposite, when he's at the top of his game you don't know what to expect at the end, but you know you'll be entertained by the dialog and bored by static cameras four to six feet from the talent.
The idea of Lucas being the anti-Kevin Smith got me to wondering what you would get if they were to collaborate. Smith would provide the story, dialog and characters while Lucas would make the movie visually and aurally interesting.
Hmmm... Kevin, if you're reading this, have your people talk to my people and we'll talk.
myke
Thanx - it's an area I've always been interested in and I've been lucky enough to be involved with a small piece of it and some of the people that make it happen.
myke
My experience with space rated equipment isn't all that extensive or current (I was involved in failure analysis of an AP-101 memory card that had an intermittent failure from the STS-2 and had some interactions with the engineers at IBM's old FSD division, which designed the AP-101s and wrote the flight software) but the article misses one very big point that is the really fascinating aspect (to me) of spacecraft computing hardware and I would have to challenge a number of facts in it.
1. The shuttle launch algorithms and orbital maintenance procedures are a lot more complex than the article makes them out to be. There are several hundred parameters that are continually checked, recorded and processed from tens to hundreds of times per second to make sure the flight path is correct and all systems are operating correctly. Along with monitoring the flight path, the computers were/are largely responsible for the data displayed on the astronaut/pilot's CRT displays in the cockpit.
2. It is my understanding, that in the early shuttle missions at least, there were multiple code loads during flight. The original AP-101s had a maximum of 256K words of 32 bit memory, which was enough for a separate launch, orbit and landing image, each which had to be loaded into the AP-101s before the next phase of flight. There have been issues with loading software or receiving and loading new software from the ground.
3. The original AP-101s were designed for the F-15 and could be considered "state of the art" for the early 1970s in terms of processing power and memory size. They are capable of about five MIPs and had a full megabyte of battery backed memory. They were chosen because they had been qualified for the high G-Loads and temperature extremes of the fighters. While the systems used on the shuttle were of the same design as used on the F-15 (and later the B-1B), they were inspected to much higher standards and all failures had to be resolved down to the point of having a test in place to prevent the failure from escaping the manufacturing/test processes as well root cause action plans at the component supplier.
The memory card failure that I was involved with was caused by a solder ball inside a metal RAM chip package. During the shuttle's ascent, vibration caused the solder ball to break free and intermittently touch the surface of the chip inside the package. The problem was extremely difficult to reproduce and was found by placing a microphone on the chip package and tapping the chip with the eraser end of a pencil. Chips with this solder ball defect "rang" differently than ones without this problem. After the ball was discovered and proven (by cutting open the chip package), every chip used in a shuttle AP-101 was tap tested by IBM to ensure no other solder balls were hidden inside the packages.
4. I don't know where that picture of the "Part of the AP-101S" came from as there is no way that is flight qualified hardware for an F-15, let alone a shuttle orbiter. Wire reworks are simply not allowed in high-G, high vibration environments and it looks like the surface mount components are hand soldered into place. I think this is prototype hardware that somebody pawned off on the author.
5. I don't understand where the idea that space systems having to be low power came from. The AP-101s were real power hogs (all their logic is bipolar) and were in fact glycol cooled. A significant fraction of the orbiter power generation is devoted to the compter systems (as well as the spacecraft cooling capabilies).
What is always interesting is looking at how the software for manned spacecraft is developed. A big joke is the Mars Observer and the mix up between English and Metric units, but think about how often you've heard about a software failure on board the shuttle - or any manned spacecraft for that matter. In Apollo, there were none and the software for the CM and LM computers was wire wrapped on a bed of nails instead of being burned into
This was written a few years ago and in it, Nimoy acknowledges the opportunities the role of Spock has given him. Nimoy ends up concluding that Spock is part of him and is responsible for a large fraction of his later success.
myke
Seriously, it always happens when I'm returning something like an extra cable that it turned out I did't need, still in the packaging and with the receipt in hand.
As part of the experience, I bet he will claim that his two year old got a hold of it for just a few seconds and managed to disassemble it and he not only wants to return the PSP but complain to Sony and tell them they should have designed the unit to be more robust. This will take an hour ending with a manager will show the "Void if Removed" sticker has been broken but they'll give him a break "this time".
I usually spend this time thinking pleasant thoughts like how they would have dealt with his kind in the dark ages.
myke
Hey Bender,
I've gone around this block a few times and I have a few comments that you might find useful.
First off, you didn't say what is your market space. Are you shooting for home, office, workstation or server? I think you'll probably find it easiest to be compatible in the office desktop or server spaces where the configurations are quite generic and not apt to be modified by the end user. Secondly, you didn't say what you did. Are you a full system designer, motherboard designer or configurator? Are you looking to design components that are *nix compatible or are you looking to put together off the shelf components into a system that is *nix compatible? How you answer these questions will affect how you approach the problem.
If I were in your position, I would suggest that you look at the "PC/99" Specification put out by Microsoft/Intel and see what you can do to be compatible with this specification instead of the more Windows (and DRM) specific later specifications and try to get/design hardware that meets this specification; it should be very *nix compatible although it will not encompass the latest audio and video specifications (which is why I suggested office desktop and (preferably 1U) server products.
The problem with this approach will be specifying chipsets that can handle the latest processors and memory. You should be able to mix and match to end up with a motherboard that will run the latest processors with the most appropriate memory and access EIDE and SCSI storage and should be very *nix friendly.
Good luck and let us know how you make out,
myke
Hey Folks,
We've got to be more careful - he's starting to ask questions. It's pretty important that he doesn't find out what else we've been keeping from him.
myke
How's that? So it's actually better to manually malloc and free memory than to let a GC take care of it? Surely you're just jesting!
It's funny that you would bring out this example - it is probably the one that I personally would consider to be the most concrete example of the superiority of low(er) level coding. Over the past few years, I've gotten quite a bit of experience debugging memory leaks and found that there probably isn't a Windows or Linux garbage collection implementation that is fool proof (partially because, as the saying goes, fools are so ingenious).
I just started listing some of the problems I've worked through in the past two years and looking at them, I can see the problems come down to the programmer
a) assuming they know how big the data is and defining arrays based on this assumption,
b) not checking their code to ensure that accesses stay within array/variable boundaries
c) "finding" a clever way of accessing data that saves a few lines of code.
With any of these problems, data critical to the application or the OS gets overwritten leading to problems somewhere down the road, but not at the point where the overwriting takes place.
What I find that I am always telling programmers is:
1. When declaring an array in an application, ALWAYS use the "sizeof" operator as the basis to ensure that the element size is properly included and then add 1 for a terminating null character.
2. When allocating memory for file data, make sure an LSEEK is done first to understand the size of memory - and check the result before allocating the memory. Again, add 1 for a terminating null character.
3. After writing the code for allocating memory, note it in the make file/allocate-free function source file and make sure everything that is allocated is freed.
This rigor has seemingly eliminated the incidence of memory leaks AND other application instabilities which we used to suffer from and is the point that the parent is making. "Good" code is a result of good design practices and thinking through how it will execute; when software development is properly implemented, the actual task of coding is quite small so the delta time and effort improvement of using a high level language isn't as significant and its "inefficiencies" (execution time, size and required resources) relative to low level coding become relatively larger.
I can see this turning into a holy war as to how to code applications is better and I want to state that I believe that both high and low level coding have their place but only after the design of the application has been thought through.
myke
My year and a half old Kyocera 7135 has a built in MP3 player just like the Ericsson with a Palm Pilot built in to boot. It's a great feature for a phone and I was always surprised no other phones were offering it.
myke
Good point - when I first looked at the Example Apps, I didn't see a lot that caught my eye (Tic/Tac/Toe on your TV?) and it turned me off. But maybe somebody will come up with a real killer app and not only will this keep TiVo in the Black but also create something special and unique.
myke
When he goes into the arena for training by the babe in the silver jumpsuit...er...thong...er...alien Thrall training uniform.
myke
Thanx for the reply, I didn't think of using the memory stick.
Just doing a quick search, the UMD Drive is 1.8 GB and Sony has announced a 2.0 GB memory stick became be available late last year. Right now, it looks like the 1.0 GB and 2.0 GB memory sticks are around $350 and $700 each, respectively.
I think this means there is still a market for a UMD disk burner.
myke
I'm wondering how much the UMD disc movies will cost.
I'm expecting that within a week, somebody will have a process that will Rip the contents of a DVD, convert the content into a (MPeg4?) format that is appropriate for UMD and provide a process for burning a UMD compatible optical disk.
The question is, will it be Sony? If Sony really wanted to knock MS and Nintendo out of the building, they would provide the ability to Rip a Sony/Columbia DVD into a UMD disk without an additional licensing cost.
Unfortunately, we all live in the real world where Sony will see the UMD drive as an opportunity to charge a customer two licensing fees for the same bit of content. Sigh.
myke
Your description of the purpose of Fortran doesn't really match anything I have seen before regarding it. My understanding is that Fortran was the first "high level" programming language and was designed to be used by everyone not just poorly trained egineers and scientists.
Being "first" had some advantages (namely long life) but many disadvantages as different programming styles and methodologies had not yet been invented, discussed or evaluated. As far as I can tell later versions of Fortran (ie IV, V, and 90 although not ANSI) were attempts to "modernize" the language and provide it with structured language extensions, etc.
In coming of age in the late '70s, early '80s, I generally saw people who were not formally trained in programming gravitating to "APL" which was a truly bizarre language/operating environment. For certain types of applications (primarily matrix operations), such as multiplying two matrices together in one line of code, it was fantastic. Unfortunately, the operator set used with APL uses non-standard (ie non-ASCII) characters which made the code impossible to follow unless you had a reference in front of you (or were very, very experienced in developing APL code). One of my first jobs was maintaining APL based applications that interfaced with system resources through the use of APIs. I would have preferred the "line noise" of Perl over what this looked like.
More recently, "Labview" seems to have taken over as the medium of choice for these applications. While it is outstanding as an application tool for developing fast instrumentation interconnect logic, traditional programming structures (like a "while loop") come out more like a page of Pentium IV schematics.
I think that you've gone too far in stating that Fortran was designed for just engineers and scientists, especially when compared to langauages/operating environmnets designed specifically for engineers and scientists. Fortran was simply the first product of an immature science.
myke
Major Payne!
myke
The question I have is, are these addins restricted to just the Sims universe or can they access hardware/files on the PC?
The two methods I would expect to be able to do this are:
1. Direct file/hardware manipulation. I would presume that the features are organized like DLLs, so placing code to execute a from within the addin should be possible.
2. Sub files that can be placed in specific locations (ie execute when the PC boots). If there is no access to the file system, what about the PC's registry? Commands to access specific files should be placeable on boot up from the registry.
I would expect that an addin written for Windows would upchuck in a Linux/OSX environment, but would this crash the game/system?
myke
I'd be happy to design a circuit that will store an unlimited both ones and zeros in 19 sq nanometers for free.
If you want to read them back, well that's gonna cost you.
myke
Actually, that was an idea I had a few years ago when there were more "Dummies" titles than books sold in an given year.
I was convinced that "Writing 'Dummies' books for Dummies" would be a killer.
myke
Actually, it's funnier if you use his full name:
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry
myke
I can see trading in diamonds made from famous people. How much do you think a diamond made from Einstein, Gallileo, Shakespeare, Da Vinci would go for? It could be interesting to have a diamond made from Cy Young put on the trophy that bears his name.
Of course there could be a certain amount of abuse - like Ted Williams' kid paying to keep his head frozen by selling off parts of his body as diamonds.
I know if I get turned into a diamond, I'll be treated like a ring on "The Lucy Show", you know get flushed down a sink, pass through a dog, get baked into a meatloaf.
myke
Let's see, he could be shanghaid by a rogue pirate who teaches him the trade while telling each night, "Have a good sleep, for more likely than not I'll kill you in the morning" and then retires, leaving Wesley the ship and crew.
Wesley could then return to Starfleet headquarters, looking for his true love (an upperclassmen he met during his brief time at the acadamy) only to discover that she has become betrothed to an evil planetary governor who, unbeknownst to her, has ambitions to take over neighboring star systems and start interstellar war.
After being left for dead after being tortured using an octopus like extra-terrestrial creature that attaches its tentacles to major nerve bundles by the governor's minions. The purpose of the torture was to gain the vital "warp energy" that Wesley has learned to harness so the governor's assassins, can more through space like ghosts. Wesley rebuilds his strength and storms the governor's stronghold only to find out that the governor is his long believed dead father.
In the climactic battle, Wesley defeats, but does not kill his father. Wesley's true love does kill Wesley's father in a pique at being used to draw Wesley in. In his dying breath, Wesley's father renounces his evil and Wesley gives him the full starfleet funeral that he deserves.
Wesley realizes that he has evolved beyond common man and despite his feelings for the girl resumes his wandering of the universe, looking for wrongs to right and balances to be restored.
Hey, it's better than anything Rick Berman has produced in the last 10 years.
myke
If they're not going to fix it, I'd like to understand why they must crash it down into the ocean? If they're going to send a propulsion module up there, why don't they move the Hubble to a Lagrange point between the Earth and moon?
I realize that it will probably take years to get there but I've seen a few proposals for future space stations being placed at the Lagrange points - wouldn't it be nice if they had a high-quality (maybe not as good as when launched) set of optics waiting to be used in a station observatory? I realize that there is a (very) good chance of this never happening, but it seems a damn sight better than crashing Hubble into the Pacific.
myke
Actually, I'm serious; beer is a manufactured product but it requires a biological process to make it. How will the fabricator handle this case?
Personally, I'm still waiting for a "replicator" - as in "Computer, Alexander Keith's IPA at 2 degrees Centigrade". None of that synthehol crap for me.
myke ("mmmm Beer") predko
I would think the *AA lobby would appreciate this - they are no longer the bad guys for suing grandparents because of what gets put on their machines during weekend visits and they have someone to complain about when U2's new album shows up as MP3s before the master is cut.
myke
better place.
I'm thinking that after Doug has completed is collection that he place "artists" such as Culture Club, Milli Vanilli and Barry Manilow on "protective" or "sacrificial" drives that are placed around the other drives. This way, when rampaging hordes, nuclear missiles or RIAA lawyers come in, they will have something to destroy, leaving the bulk of the music for prosperity.
In each of these three cases, the attackers will feel like they were successful, with humanity being the ultimate winners.
myke