20 years - will it be 20 more?
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20 Years of NES
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· Score: 1
Doesn't seem like it has been that long, but I guess it has. Now, there are some who are eagerly awaiting Nintendo's next-gen console, the Revolution. All that has been seen so far is the controller.
The controller is innovative, but I wonder if it will really be the "revolution" promised? Will players like having the complex system this controller offers? I don't know. Furthermore, what will the actual system look like? We will have to wait and see, but it is likely to play, yet again, on a normal and boring (although HD) television set.
You know what would have been a true "Revolution"?
A little while back a homemade CGI animation "advertisement" video floated around, purporting to show the Nintendo "RevolutiON". It turned out to be nothing more than a very well made fan video (very well made) - but the gaming system it showed, if it could be built (or something similar to it) - would have been nothing short of revolutionary.
First person immersive large FOV HMD
Hand and head tracking system
Wireless control
In short, a home VR gaming rig, unlike anything the the home market has seen, this side of the (never made it to market) Sega VR system or (the flop) Nintendo Virtual Boy.
Unfortunately, due to the failure of the Virtual Boy, we will likely never see a system like this appear, at least from Nintendo (and maybe from nobody). Due to so many issues (simulator sickness/liability and affordable tracking systems being the main two reasons), such a system would be difficult for any company to bring out, but Nintendo has the Virtual Boy as an "albatross" to boot, keeping it from releasing such a "console".
We will likely never see a controller/HMD combo pack from a 3rd party, either - this was tried in the mid to late 1990's, and fell flat on its face (the technology wasn't there for a price that people were willing to pay, and the systems then in existence weren't ready for that level, either). I find it curiously odd, though - we have so many great first-person shooters and other first-person games, but taking them to the level of full-blown immersion doesn't seem to be something that gamers want. I tend to wonder why this is - the ability to "be in the game" - fooling your visual and auditory senses to the point where it feels like you are there - I would think that any gamer of today would be striving to have this, whether by commercial or homebrew means. But such a course doesn't even appear to be something gamers are thinking about...
Let's not forget the fact of arcades - I spent way too many quarters there as a youth. While arcades have never really died (although there for a while it seemed that arcades had nothing but fighting games), the NES was the first system to really bring "arcade level" gaming to the consumer home market (although, one could argue the Vectrex did that, too). So, in the time between the fall of the Atari console and the rise of the NES, we had regular arcades, and home computers for everything else.
AH! That is the company I am thinking about when I posted this response - you actually have one of these! Cool! I have always wanted to know more about this device (one of the cool pieces of VR tech I will never likely aquire), how well it worked and such - your post has been interesting in this regard. Email me, I would be interested in hearing more about it...
For all you aspiring wire heads out there, be careful. What this guy says is mostly truth - it can and possibly will work, but realize that you are applying electrical stimulation to a portion of your nervous system. If done incorrectly, you too can become another Darwin Award winner. Be safe, and realize what you are doing.
With that said, there was a company in the mid to late 1990's which tried to build a development market with a beta-test vestibular stimulator device, meant to be used with a VR HMD system, in order to help avoid or minimize simulator sickness by using such a system to simulate movement. IIRC, the device was a head mounted system that fit over your head, and had electrodes behind the ears (like the parent describes) and ones on your forehead (can't remember if it was one or two - placed in the center or to the sides just inside of the temples, respectively). They had beta-test units, and for something like $300.00 you could order a unit, plus an API for Windows (DirectX) that allowed you to control the device to simulate motion. It was said to work very well, but they became a casualty of the.COM bubble (and the VR hype bubble, too).
Also know that these such vestibular stimulators have been used by the medical profession to treat and study such things as vertigo and such. These medical devices are probably similar in scope to the crude (though likely working!) device described by the parent. They are said to cause nausea, diziness, a sense of motion, etc - a very interesting thing to think about.
Bandwidth - I would be very interested to hear more from you and your experiments...
It's the lifestyle or physiolgical conditions that lead to high cholesterol cause the problem.
You are correct with this statement, but the problem goes deeper than that. There are commercial, psychological, and sociological issues which cause high cholesterol, and ultimately CVD as well.
Commercial: It is easier, cheaper, and more profitable for companies to create and sell food containing refined sugars and trans-fats than to use regular sugars and non-trans-fats.
Psychological: We like the flavor and convenience of this manufactured food. We would probably like it if it were available in another form, but it would cost more, and we have psychologically adapted to "cheaper-is-better" while at the same time (cognitive dissonance?) knowing it isn't.
Sociological: Many of us are forced by society to lead go-go-go lives, hardly ever having the time to make a real meal, if we can even afford the raw ingredients. Many times, the best we can ever do is just to make a "meal" with less processed, but still "convenience" foods. These foods may or may not be any better for you than fast-food.
Ultimately, it is the complex interaction of all three of these concepts (along with the concepts you brought up) which lead to CVD and other problems (cancer, diebetes, high blood pressure, etc). We are a society that has limited time during our waking hours to do things. After work, after school, after cleaning house, after doing bills, after taking care of the kids and their homework (if you have any). What is left is some time to eat. Maybe there is time to cook? Maybe there is time to shop? Can we afford the lean meat or salmon steaks (have we gotten a raise lately)? Do we even have time to hit the farmer's market before we get home to get fresh vegetables, and even if we do, do we have the time or knowledge to prepare them? If we are lucky we have just enough time, after all of that, to maybe a bit of recreation or time to ourselves before we plop into bed. Some of us choose to use that time doing more work, in the form of exercize. Some of us use it for projects. Most of us use it to veg out in front of the TV, the opiate to get our minds off the fact that we are on a treadmill that will start up again fresh when we wake up in the morning.
We cut corners where we can, and our health concerns is the first to go. That is unfortunate. I truely hope for the day where I can go down to the store or fast-food place and get healthy, enjoyable food - food as enjoyable in taste, texture, and smell as the crap they are already feeding us, for the same price as I am paying now, and is as easy to purchase or prepare. Right now, no store satisfies all of those requirements in one package. The best you can do is cut back on the meat, bulk up on the fresh vegetables, lower the bread intake, and hope you have time to prepare it all. That, or eat a salad "dry" (that is, without any of the condiments or toppings) from Wendy's or McD's.
The rest of our day is mostly bland, boring, and difficult (from a psychological perspective, if not a physical one). We compensate by eating (a psychological problem for certain). We can either eat something bad, but tastes good, and get a small portion of "happiness", however bad it is for us - during our mediocre day-to-day lives - or we can use that same time and eat bland, boring tasting, but healthy food - provided we can find the time and money to buy and prepare it. Unfortunately, most people choose the former rather than the latter most of the time. Until our commercial industries, personal psychological makeup, and sociological pressures changes, we will likely never see widespread healthy lifestyle living.
Sometimes I wonder if automobile usage is actually a minor part of the problem...
Think about how we (speaking of mainly America here, but could apply anywhere) use energy in total, and the amount of waste of that energy. Look at any city at night - notice something? No matter what time it is, there is always light everywhere. Now, I am not suggesting we shut off all lights in a city, they do have a purpose, after all. But I think we could be more efficient in our use of lighting. For instance, why do so many places leave lights on inside the buildings when nobody is there? I have seen lights left on inside quik-lube shops in the middle of the night. What about store signs: why leave them on if you can't shop at them at night? What is the point? Do you really gain that much in advertisement? Also, why is so much light being wasted lighting up the night sky? That is wasted energy. In many of these cases, simple lights for security, maybe with some on motion sensors (which use electricity also - but nowhere near as much as a light left on) - would be sufficient.
How about how we build and use our buildings? Why is it that we are stuck with stick-frame construction when there are so many other and better methods to construct houses? Why do we stick with square-frame houses which take more energy to heat and cool (because of surface area among other reasons) than using dome structures (monolithic dome structures are cheaper to build, take less energy to heat and cool, and have lower maintenance issues)? What about using rammed earth? What about adobe (ever visit a pueblo in the middle of summer - cool living via thermal mass)? There are tons of other options, yet we continue to stick with cheap stick-frame houses, built on-site one 2x4 at a time (yeah - I know the answer here, too: they are cheap to erect for the builder which translates into big profit $$$$ - to hell with the buyer and the environment).
Why is solar water heating not standard on most homes? Why aren't homes built and oriented to take advantage of the sun? Just about anywhere in North America can use some form of solar heating. Even a simple passive "greenhouse" attached to the house properly can warm a home if built right. Set up properly, polystyrene beads can be blown in at night between double layer glass to insulate the house at night (preventing night-sky radiation - which, by the way, can be used for cooling and making ice), then vacuumed out in the day to continue heating. Solar heating can be used in a myriad of places where we currently use natural gas or electricity. You can even cook with solar heat (I built a solar oven out of trash that I have cooked rice and cornbread in) - people have built ovens with circulating fluid setups so that the fluid is run to a panel, and circulates around the indoor oven "box" to heat it up - so you can cook with solar while staying cool inside. Solar heating panels are cheap and easy to build, taking little more than some glass, 2x4's, plywood, black paint, caulking, and copper tubing to assemble.
There are tons of ways we could be doing things better, using energy wiser, using the energy from the sun - all of these little methods and changes (among many, many more which I haven't mentioned), if they were implemented and used by society - they would all go a long way to lessening our dependence on oil as a fuel source, while being cheaper in so many ways in the long run. I bet that if we were to all do these things, we would see a drastic reduction in our fuel needs, possibly more so than the equivalent reduction we would see from better/different automobiles. Performed in concert with automobile changes, the difference we would see would likely be enormous...
Yeah, that whole acronym thing threw me, too - even the link didn't clear it up until I really started reading it carefully. Your suggestion is spot on.
Regarding your "speaker pop" problem, I did some some checking and thinking. Googling "audigy speaker pop" led to some interesting links - yours is not the only system. This kind of thing is actually a common issue in the audiophile community, you might do some checking there - all kinds of solutions have been created. You might find such a solution at a place like MCM Electronics or such.
One of the links I found had a comment suggesting isolating the PC power supply from the speaker power supply by plugging them into separate surge protectors. I would even suggest separate electrical circuits if that is possible (likely isn't - but your situation and home layout may be different). Another comment suggesting putting in-line with the Audigy signal outputs capacitors to filter out the pop. I believe a similar system is used in car audio to filter out spark-plug noise issues, as well as in preventing "thump" from speakers when the car audio system is first turned on (only a real problem in high-power systems where the "thump" can ruin a set of expensive subs or something).
I hope you find this information useful, and good luck with your problem!
How is this software doing this? I mean, by reading about this I am imagining some form of stateful packet inspection. Wouldn't such inspection compromise the speed of the whole network? I remember such ideas being bandied about a long time ago for "detecting" pirated software transfers and such, but I also remember the argument being that it couldn't be done without compromising the speed of the entire network. Does it work like QOS routers, but in software? I am just curious how they are doing this without making life hell for everyone else on the network (because they have to inspect *every* packet)...?
Yes, I would say this is true in many cases. The psychological reasoning behind it is fascinating, though it makes for a twisted form of reasoning.
Basically, the rationale is that an individual, or a group of like minded individuals, have an attraction to something which has been deemed by the rest of society as being "wrong". To counter this attraction, these individuals seek to eliminate, in totality, that which they are attracted to. In certain cases, where the elimination of the object of attraction is not possible, they seek to make that attraction and/or the slightest expression of that attraction illegal, in the hopes that if this is so, they themselves will no longer be attracted to it, and the burden will be lifted.
Sounds fine and rational on the surface, doesn't it? Therein lies the problem, which these individuals never dare to face: the attraction lies entirely within the realms of their own psychological makeup. Removal of the external representation ultimately does nothing to quell the attraction which lies within their minds and thoughts. If they truely thought that it would work, rather than eliminate the external sources, they would just remove themselves from societal forces entirely, either via suicide (in the extreme case), or through self-imposed isolation or exile (moderately extreme, but likely the classic method for dealing with the pains of society by individuals throughout history - is it any wonder why such practice tends to be part and parcel of most major religions?). In the case of the latter solution (because, after all, sucessful suicide would be a working solution), these individuals would quickly realize that the issues and troubles they (and others) face is within them, and can only be rectified through self-realization and self-actualization...
Is it any wonder that this sounds like the beginning of so many religions?
Anybody with half a rational brain can deduce this. Unfortunately, for many, they have to take the difficult route and either screw up the rest of society which has figured this out already via crazy changes to the law, or return from the wilderness after an extended stay to reveal their "revelation" to the masses (many of whom then agree and seek to follow, giving money and property at every turn) - only after they realize that it is all in their heads, and not much short of changing their worldview will change that.
The thing is, if they would just stop what they were doing, and love themselves for who they are, both physically and mentally, rather than continuing with their self-flaggellation at every turn, the world would likely be a better place overall...
Unless your local Salvation Army sells stuff 3x-6x more than a garage sale
Haven't been thrift shopping lately, have you? In my locale (Phoenix, Arizona), if you go around and compare prices of equivalent items at a garage sale vs. Salvation Army vs. Goodwill, you will quickly find that on many items, the Salvation Army is ripping people off, and are making a hefty profit on "junk". Not that they don't have a right to make as much as they can for their "charity", but their margins tend to be way outside the norm of comparable items from other sources.
As noted, though, this may be indicative only of the Phoenix, Arizona market, and may not reflect on other markets elsewhere...
How can geeks be so smart and know nothing about tax law?
Yes, the idiocy of thinking that when someone else makes a donation in your name that you get the tax break is amazing, especially for a supposed geek (of course, lately it seems that more non-geeks are showing up on/. than ever before). However, to assume that geeks should know tax law to any large extent is ludicrous at best.
Take a look at law sometime from the perspective of a software developer. What you will see will make your hair stand on end. To use an unfair and cliche'ed portrayal, "I have seen better code written by a VB programmer".
To put it simply, all of law is the greatest mess of spaghetti code the world will ever know. It is time for a major refactor, if not for a complete redesign. I would not be surprised if you looked through any current State's (that is, any country or independent State) corpus of law and found "orphaned" laws - similar to how you can find code within any large software project that is never executed due to having had all calls/branches to it removed, either through design or oversight.
With law "structured" in such a manner, the phrase and meaning of the words "ignorance of the law is not a defense" becomes itself meaningless. The reasoning behind that statement is the fact that we have lawyers and judges the world over who themselves are ignorant of the laws which they swear to uphold. How can laws be upheld, if you are ignorant of them and know not whether they are just? Furthermore, there is the fact of "specialization" in law. This, in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are speaking of say, "copyright and trademark law" vs. "criminal justice law" or similar. However, here in the United States, at least (though I doubt it is a situation specific to our country), one would expect that all lawyers and judges should know and understand precisely what is contained within what is supposed to be the "supreme law of the land", our own Constitution. However, the fact that there is a branch of knowledge called "Constitutional Law", and that there are judges and lawyers who don't understand this document and how it may apply to cases of which they are party to, brings into question the entire system as it currently stands:
How can "ignorance of the law" not be a valid defense, when lawyers and judges are ignorant themselves? How can they dare hold a citizen to a higher standard than that which they hold themselves?
I doubt we will ever get an answer to this issue, however, because it is a question which exposes the system of law as it currently stands and upon which society is based, for the house of cards it is.
Finally, I must say your observation regarding charity vs. garage sales is spot on. This is something my wife and I learned a long time ago, soon after buying our house. The hassle and effort to go through a garage sale just isn't worth it in the end, and the deduction at the end of the year at tax-time is well worth donating the stuff to charity...
My suggestion: They should go back to these bosses, explain that their work up to this point has gone far above and beyond their actual job duties, and that if the bosses expect that work to continue then the coders should be rewarded above and beyond their actual paychecks. It's up to them whether they want this compensation in the form of money, a transfer to full time development work, prestige, scooby snacks, or glib promises that the bosses don't intend to keep.
What they should do is take the compensation in the form of the code produced - that is, the rights to own the code. If they do this, they could be getting paid their current wage to produce code which they could then conceivably use to start their own company. That code could bring them way more monetary compensation over time than a simple wage increase would in the same period (of course, doing this is more risky, and the software needs to be well written, documented, and marketed properly - plus it needs to have a market to succeed, etc)...
I hate to break it to ya, but nobody in Iraq did anything to us before we invaded. This undeclared war we are in was sold to the American public via a myriad of lies and deceit, for who knows exactly what purpose (maybe to make Cheney's buddies at Haliburton richer?). At worst, the only thing Iraq was guilty of was not abiding by the provisions set up after the first Gulf War. One could say that by doing so, a declaration of war wasn't necessary - but all that is just interpretation/mangling of the powers of war the Constitution grants Congress (I am not even sure the first Gulf War was officially declared or not). The truth is clear: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and Iraq had no WMDs (and I am not saying Saddam was a good guy, either - but if you are going to rain down bombs on another nation, at least have the balls to be honest about your reasons).
Unless you'd LIKE to be beheaded for what theses crazies call Islam.
I am not so much scared of the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East as I am of the growing Christian Fundamentalist movement right here in the United States. Oh, when will this madness end?
Ben Franklin disovered electricity, but did not invent it.
Your points stand, but I wanted to clear up a misconception: Franklin neither discovered nor invented electricity.
What he did do, though, was undertake an experiment to prove (indirectly) that lightning was the same as what was being called "electricity" at that time (actually, "static" electricity).
For thousands of years prior, people did know about electricity, in the form of static electricity. Various means to generate static electricity were well known prior to Franklin, and a means was also invented to store the charge created (via the Leyden Jar, essentially a primitive non-polarized capacitor). Scientists and others prior to Franklin had speculated on the nature of lightning, since it seemed to act similar to (though at a much larger scale) as the jump of spark from a Leyden Jar. What they weren't able to come up with was a means to verify this hunch.
Franklin came up with a (very dangerous - do not attempt this at home) method: fly a kite up into/near the clouds on a rainy (though not thundering and lightning, contrary to what you learned in school) day. Attached to the kite's string (which got wet due to the rain) was a key (or a light chain or wire - I am not sure if the key is a part of the legend or a fact). Also attached to the key, which Franklin held onto presumably under an umbrella to keep it dry, was a length of silk - probably a tie, cravat, or hankerchief as was customary then (this was to insulate Franklin from the charge being collected). The key was brought near and touching the electrode of a Leyden jar. Franklin correctly surmised that if a charge was collected in the Jar (and could be drawn off later via other ordinary means), that would prove the electrical nature of lighting. Miraculously, he wasn't killed in this attempt, and the experiment proved successful, chalking up one more point for the man. This happenned in the 1750's.
One thing Franklin isn't so well known for: He was one of the first (maybe the first?) inventors of an electric rotary motor which ran on static electricity. Yes, it is possible - more a lab curiosity than anything else, but possible and interesting...
Franklin's electrical experiments helped to spur on and open up electrical experimentation throughout the world - it wouldn't be until almost 50 years later (in 1800) when Alessandra Volta would invent the Volta Pile battery, changing the world and it's perceptions of electricity once again...
But you only need to produce it once for each end-user, and it would probably replace hundreds of paper (20 pages of newspaper a day, it adds up quick). So the cost would've even out over the long run, plus it makes the environmentalists happy (less tree cut).
I can see where companies like Georgia-Pacific might have an issue with this line of reasoning...
If our government/corporations (after all, aren't they one and the same today?) really wanted to the public to have more durable paper, save trees, and appease the environmentalists, they could do so easily with little more than the stroke of a pen.
It is a simple plant, the number of products of which it can produce, from durable paper, durable rope, durable and soft fabric, oil, fuel, and food, to name but a sample, are nearly as vast as those made of the lowly peanut or soybean. It even acts as a natural fertilizing system, because it fixes nitrogen into the soil, and it also has natural pest-resistant properties. It is a plant that grows everywhere, because, literally, it is a weed.
This plant's name is hemp, and I doubt you will ever see it produced legally here in the United States in your lifetime, due to all the forces (from the misguided people, governments, and corporations) working against it, unfortunately...
Seriously, though - I wonder if this stuff, if made right (perhaps combined with other substances - isn't there a polymer which shrinks in response to electrical stimulus?), could create an advanced artificial "muscle"? Could such a device be more useful (perhaps more efficient) in robotic and other mechanical applications where currently hydraulic, pneumatic, or electro-mechanical systems are used?
The thing that people need to realize is that companies work like cogs in machine. They do their job very well and with great efficiency, but they do it mindlessly.
Corporations are not mindless entities. What they are, though, is amoral and sociopathic. This has been explored in interesting and disturbing detail in the documentary film, The Corporation. This in and of itself may not necessarily be a bad thing - the real question is, "Are these sociopathic entities rational or irrational?". When you think about corporate entity "mindset" in this fashion, you rapidly come to the conclusion that the answer to that question is the latter, rather than the former. Here is where the problem lies: If a corporation is behaving in not just an amoral and sociopathic fashion, but irrationally as well, what chance do you or anybody else have at predicting how a corporation (as an entity) will react to stimuli? For a given a set of inputs to a corporation, what are the resultant outputs, or reaction, by that entity?
For many (most?) corporations, being amoral, sociopathic, and irrational, you can't predict that with any certainty. You may notice larger trends, but that is a weak indicator for future reactions. Having such a corporation be at least rational in its reactions would go a long way toward instilling a sense of knowledge of how a corporation will react given a set of inputs. This won't quell the amoral, sociopathic tendancies, but it may allow better guidance of these vehicles of commerce by their public and private interests, which can only help. So, how do you at least instill within a corporation, which is both amoral and sociopathic, a sense of rationality?
Corporations are, at their heart, a set of interlinking processes which perform one purpose: taking a set of inputs (as raw materials, labor, and information) and producing output (as product, information, and money). One of the very first steps is to be able to identify and map each of those individual processes of the entire company, down to the finest degree. The majority of processes in most companies have grown haphazardly, with no thinking in the design, measurements of performance, input structure, output structure, or how the process affects other processes within the company. It is this lack of knowledge and structure that is likely the cause of the irrationality of the corporate reactions. If these processes can be mapped out, debugged, and refactored - then followed without short-circuiting the processes by the employees performing them, the result should be a more rational (though still amoral and sociopathic, mind you) corporate entity. A single organization alone, though, cannot reap the ultimate benefits of this until more organizations do the same. Some gains can be expected (mostly monetary gains - since performing the above methods/steps will realize a cost savings as waste in processes is discovered, curtailed, or eliminated), but the ultimate gain of a more rational outcome on a societal level cannot be realized until more organizations are brought to the same level.
In other words, it helps not the rational entity to be the only rational entity in a sea of irrationality. However, as more rationality is injected into the system, the irrational behavior of the rest of the system becomes more apparent. It can be identified and helped, or barring that, eliminated as being a threat to the community of rational systems at large. Convincing other organizations to be rational is a difficult task, but one that must be done, and is being done - simply because ultimately it makes more money for the organization as a whole (by eliminating waste and error at all levels). The tide is slowly changing...
Are you the author of the COSA methodology/design? I had quick look-through of the site, about COSA, what it means, etc. I am definitely going to study this as time allows. From the little I have read, I find it insightful and highly interesting, not to mention very stimulating from a software development perspective. Wow!
Why do so many slashdotters claim that writing bug free software is impossible?
Something you (and so many others) are assumming here is that all code is written by humans. This isn't always the case.
Take, for instance, the credit industry (and a host of others) which utilize neural net software. Depending on the software, and the company that developed it, a neural net might be evolved using genetic algorithms to determine, based on a set of inputs, whether a person is a high or low credit risk, or whether fraud is occurring, or a host of other applications.
What happens if a decision that NN reaches happens to be the wrong decision - who do you blame/sue/fire/imprison?
The individual(s) who coded (or built, if made of hardware) the neural net engine? The individual(s) who coded the genetic algorithm? The genetic algorithm which evolved the neural net? The neural net itself?
Who would sign off (as in "this has no faults") on this kind of an application?
Many people, from highly educated programmers to computer scientists - have looked "under the hood" of trained neural nets (trained via a variety of methods, from simple back-propagation to genetic evolution systems), and in many cases, they are "aghast" at what they see: structures and "code" which seems to defy logic. When encoded via hardware, sometimes things get even stranger: with enough evolution and such, the "best" version begins to rely on issues of the parts themselves, such that the evolution took in favor tolerances and spacing of certain parts in certain manners to acheive the desired result. Furthermore, we are talking very simple NN systems here - should the complexity go up several magnitudes, "looking under the hood" would be so close to impossible (akin to trying to map and understand the neural net which makes up a single individual's brain) as to actually be impossible, practically speaking.
No engineer would, and no engineer could - sign off on such software.
This thinking doesn't just apply to neural nets - it applies to all complex systems. In many ways, a lot of software, and the interactions that software has within a single machine and with other software elsewhere (via a network) - form a complex system. These complex systems of "simple" parts have been known (it is like a natural law, actually) to exhibit behaviors outside the norm which aren't cause by flaws in the software, but by the way things are interacting. Anyone who has studied complexity and network theory at even a base level should understand this, that sometimes problems can arise from nowhere due to unexpected and possibly unexplainable (and maybe not even repeatable!) interaction of complex (and in some case, not complex at all - that is, complexity arising from the interaction of simplistic rules - see Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science") systems.
Can you imagine being a lead developer and being fired, sued, or imprisoned simply because your system was a part of an unpredictable (by ANY method) complex interaction between the systems it ran on and the other software it interacted with? Now, I am not saying that all software and systems are this complex, but we are talking about interaction here, which has nothing (and everything!) to do with underlying complexity...
Erm, that's entirely accurate. Lots of people call anything of the sort spyware, even if all it does is display ads. That's linguistic shift for you.
A linguistic shift it may be, and probably not intentional at all, but rather the results of ignorance. That is not to say that linguistic shift is a good thing, however. In many cases, such shifts can be detrimental to downright nasty.
One of recent note that has been railed upon endlessly here and elsewhere has been the shift/mixing of the terms "cracker" versus "hacker". Now, mind you, the term "hacker" has almost always had a slight "edge" to it, which made it a natural to hang it onto the idea of "shifty dude who knows computers at wizard level". Some people (myself included), hated the negative undertones, and preferred the original idea and meaning of the term, in which a hacker was just someone who was very, very good at a particular "thing", typically meaning working/programming with computers. It was seen as a badge of honor. Social forces among hackers brought the term "cracker" to bear upon those who used their hacking skills for bad. Other social forces, likely stronger, though, rendered the terms "hacker" and "cracker" meaningless, and mixed them both, and since "hacker" was the older of the two and already, in the general mainstream, had negative undertones, the term "hacker" has come to mean "criminal who works with computers" - but it still has the "romantic" undertones (similar to the word "pirate" - I mean, pirates were - and still are - bad people. Pirate groups were/are akin to today's street gangs, just on the sea. But there is still a "romantic" level of the word on which people associate feelings of freedom and adventure). There is also the view among some people (hackers themselves, mainly), who view the shift as a "conspiracy" to make the idea of "great computer knowledge" something which should be feared and possibly illegal. Whether this is true or not is besides the point (I doubt it is true, at least on a grand scale), the fact is that people are uneasy, somewhat scared, of what really goes on "inside the box", and people who are able to manipulate it adroitly are viewed with caution (similar in some respects to the alchemists of old). Funny it is to us who really understand the machines, and realize they are really nothing more than a fancy, souped-up form of player-piano. I wonder if people are or were afraid of how player-pianos worked?
Thus, you can see how linguistic shifts, whether due to societal pressures, or done purposefully via someone or group with an agenda to push, can help perpetuate and in some cases cause shifts in perception and thinking. After all, language plays a great part as something with which we work in our minds to symbolically connect thoughts and ideas, and ultimately think with. Shift the language, and you shift the thoughts, and ultimately the actions. If you can understand this, and furthermore if you can understand NLP (neural-linguistic programming - essentially a method of understanding how thoughts, vocal language, and body language interact to influence your own and other's thoughts, feelings, and actions) - you can, in essence, hack your own mind and the minds of others! This isn't a new thing - it is a natural thing for most humans (autistics and Asperger's aside), but most do it unconsciously. If you understand how it really works, and are completely aware of it at all time, you can use this to your advantage.
Other such linguistic shifts, over time, can mask negative aspects of situations and ideas. This form of linguistic shift even has a name - "politically correct" - which is, in and of itself, a self-referential linguistic shifting and mixing of several terms. In essence, it means a softening of language so as not to offend another's sensibility. Unfortunately, it also has the side effect of shifting the ideas to which the terms are connected in such a manner as to make those ideas soften, or seem "better", than they really are. George Carlin has a great bit on all
Just to stay on topic, I think the version of OS-9 used in CD-i machines was the 68000 release, and not the 8-bit Level-2 for the 6809. I am not sure if RTSI still sells the 68000 version - I know they discontinued the 8-bit releases a long time ago...
As far as whether there was anything else interesting you could do with OS-9, the answer is "yes" - if you had an assembler, a C compiler or BASIC-09, plus Multi-Vue (windowing). I mean, look at (just a few) of the CoCo 3 games that were made for OS-9: Koronis Rift, Sub Battle (IIRC), King's Quest III - unfortunately, only the really "hardcore" users of the CoCo ever went there...
I don't think it had so much to do with the complexity of OS-9 vs DECB, but rather the expense. Back in the day, to have a reasonable OS-9 system on the CoCo 3 required at minimum 512K and two floppy drives - an easy outlay of well over $500.00, and that is just for hardware. The license costs for OS-9, Multi-Vue, and BASIC-09 could easily bring that total to over $1000.00. If you wanted to get the best value of OS-9, you wanted to either upgrade RAM to 1 or 2 MB with third-party boards (Tandy only officially supported 512K), and add a hard drive (which back then, a 10-20 MB drive was insanely priced). Just too much money for what was, really, a hobby system.
Today, it has gotten much cheaper, but unfortunately there isn't any demand - the CoCo 3 has long been discontinued, and nobody has made a replacement (not that one is really needed). Nostalgic owners of the CoCo, people who want to play the old games, and those who have just a basic few needs for a computer - can emulate the CoCo 2 and 3 almost perfectly via a variety of emulators, most notable of which is the MESS system (put MESS and MAME on a fairly recent PC with TV-Out, and enough ROM images, and you can the dream system of yesteryear). OS-9 has been "replicated" via NitrOS9 (and even made better in some respects), though there isn't a replacement (AFAIK) for Multi-Vue. It will even run on original hardware (if you have it or can find it). Also, for more goodness, recent hardware and peripherals continue to be made - see the Cloud-9 site. I have also heard "rumblings" that a USB interface is in the works as well. Lastly, for other goodness, there is Sockmaster's site (he is the CoCo 3 graphics wizard) and the CoCo3.com site.
Is the CoCo dead? Yes and no. I would say it "languishes" along much like the C=64, Apple IIe, Amiga and a ton of other "old" machines. It will probably have a following for a long while. I intend to keep mine running and I play with it now and again. I have already set up an emulation box and have transferred all (well, a vast majority - some were unreadable) of my old floppies to CD. I was also instrumental in helping to get Diecom's "Gates of Delerium" (a clone of Ultima) restored and running under emulation (I was like one of seeming three people who owned it, and my copy was degrading), as well as helping to get Dave Dies to formally release the old software of Diecom to public domain (score another point for abandonware rescue!). Unfortunately, no one has yet put the ZIP file of GofD up - I have tried to get Curtis Boyle to do it, sent it to him with documentation from Dave Dies about the release - but he hasn't put it up yet (though he has a great repository of old CoCo software)...
Maybe you *should* pull that CoCo down from the attic, if you still have it. Dust it off (clean it good inside and out before powering it up if it has been sitting long - be careful with the keyboard ribbon cable connection, though, as you take the case apart), do some searching on the internet (there are a lot of CoCo and CoCo emulation sites), then if you are interested, let me know and I will point you to the CoCo mailing list (unless you find it yourself - I think you can get to it from the CoCo3.com site). It is a fun list, with a great
They used to be called "Pitsco-Lego-Dacta", but apparently (recently?) they spun off their Lego Educational stuff into a separate site and store (Pitsco sells a lot of science educational stuff, not just Lego) - and finally, you can buy the blue tanks (for the pneumatics)!!!
Then I'd get act all holier than though and spout out bullshit about how it "makes ZERO sense" to go to a garage and pay $19-$39 when you can do it at home for $10 a pop. And how your all suckers for wasting your money. Yawn.
People are suckers for wasting their money getting their oil changed. Changing your own oil is cheap, very cheap - and doesn't take long to do. The oil and filter is only going to cost about $20.00 for the amount needed in most cars, and it only takes about a half-hour to change. Unless you are making more than $40.00/hr (most people don't make that much), it is a better deal than having someone else do it (and still taking a half-hour to perform). Plus, you *know* what went into the car, and that other crap hasn't been messed with (this happens at some shops - things get "tweaked" so they break down the road, and you have to come back).
Some have mentioned it...latency...
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I want to ask it myself again - the problem with any audio system that utilizes streaming or another method over a network is room syncronization. In fact, I am not even sure it is possible at all. Basically, when you have a whole-house audio system, you might want to have certain rooms playing the exact same audio, while other get separate audio feeds. Typically, the rooms involved are adjacent to one another (or may be the entire house plus the outside) - so as you move from room to room, you have a continuous audio experience.
With a network and streaming, though, keeping the speakers in sync with one another is difficult, if not impossible. You end up with "effects" of delays - which make every room sound like an echo chamber (as you hear the delay in other rooms vs the zone/room you are in). With a standard audio solution, this isn't typically an issue. Yes, you have to pump more power through the wires to make up for the attenuation of the signal (or have remote amplifiers at the speakers) - but you won't have the effects of latency.
A TCP/IP streaming solution may work fine if everyone is listening to completely different audio in different rooms with their doors shut, but a whole house system listening to the same source in different rooms is going to cause issues, unless they have somehow improved the technology to eliminate the latency/delay issues...
As others have noted, this is an impossible task, simply because the technology isn't there yet (if we had something like e-ink "paper" coupled with a touch-sensitive layer to simulate paper with electronic notation - a tablet like this that was very inexpensive - heck, still probably wouldn't be good enough), plus dealing with all the incoming paper will be impossible.
At the last company I worked for, I was the lead developer of an in-house developed CRM and problem tracking system. Most people loved the system - it was fast, it was convenient, it handled certain billing aspects, had reporting on critical information, the problem tracking software was fairly nice (we had several clients ask if we were selling it - we weren't). Even so, people couldn't let go of the paper on the problem tracking system. A job would come in, it would be entered, and then printed out, then "passed around".
This wasn't necessary, though - the job could be "transferred" (with email notification to both parties and the client) between parties working on it, all time would be entered on the job, with a full history of who did what when. We allowed for "annotations" to the job, you could add "attachments" to the job (basically any file you had on your personal workstation or on the network) - which would "follow" the job around. Even so, people insisted on putting notes on the paper - and invariably, this would cause problems...
Every day, you would get an email or hear someone say "Has anyone seen job #xyz? I gave it to Bob yesterday, but he doesn't have it, he can't find it", etc. I used to wonder to myself "Duh, if you had left it completely electronic, this wouldn't be an issue" - I even on a number of occasions asked people why they did this - managers, programmers, others who worked with the job - to see if I could come up with an electronic solution...
Annotations were one thing, which got added in short order - basically as an attachment that could be "quick entered" - click the "Add Note" button, and a text editor would be openned which when the "save" button was clicked, would tack on the note as an attachment. This got used quite a bit, but things were still being passed around. A bit of discussion revealed that what they really were having problems with were screen prints faxed or emailed after the job was created. These were printed out, and stapled or clipped to the paper job as it was passed around. Sometimes, this stuff got unclipped, lost, thrown away - it was a nightmare to track. So we tried to come up with a solution. We created "scanning stations".
These were two machines (in a trial run) set up with cheapo Visioneer scanners (actually, they were pretty nice scanners), with a very simple desktop - the user would log-in with the scanning station login/password, the desktop had a single icon, which read "scan attachment". Clicking on this icon the user would launch a simple application which allowed them to log into the job tracking system (so it knew who scanned the attachment), select the job number to attach the scan to, then put the page on the scanner and click "scan" - once the scan was complete, the image would be attached to the job as an attachment, and they could log out, or scan another document.
We had plans and ideas of moving the "scanning" to the client end - so that they could log into our website, enter the job number, upload the image, and have it "auto-attach" to the job. We had ideas of using a fax server to automate the attachment of fax scans to the jobs (using OCR for Forms to detect a "written in" job number on the fax cover sheet or something). We even had an idea of hooking the phone system up so that a client could call in a problem, enter the job number in (or create a new job), speak the problem into the phone, capture the WAV file, create an MP3, and attach that to the job (voice clip attachment).
Even so - even if we had implemented all of that (I don't know of a solution that even does any of that last part - maybe Peoplesoft or something) - I still think people would have passed around paper...
Slashdot Mirror
The controller is innovative, but I wonder if it will really be the "revolution" promised? Will players like having the complex system this controller offers? I don't know. Furthermore, what will the actual system look like? We will have to wait and see, but it is likely to play, yet again, on a normal and boring (although HD) television set.
You know what would have been a true "Revolution"?
A little while back a homemade CGI animation "advertisement" video floated around, purporting to show the Nintendo "RevolutiON". It turned out to be nothing more than a very well made fan video (very well made) - but the gaming system it showed, if it could be built (or something similar to it) - would have been nothing short of revolutionary.
In short, a home VR gaming rig, unlike anything the the home market has seen, this side of the (never made it to market) Sega VR system or (the flop) Nintendo Virtual Boy.
Unfortunately, due to the failure of the Virtual Boy, we will likely never see a system like this appear, at least from Nintendo (and maybe from nobody). Due to so many issues (simulator sickness/liability and affordable tracking systems being the main two reasons), such a system would be difficult for any company to bring out, but Nintendo has the Virtual Boy as an "albatross" to boot, keeping it from releasing such a "console".
We will likely never see a controller/HMD combo pack from a 3rd party, either - this was tried in the mid to late 1990's, and fell flat on its face (the technology wasn't there for a price that people were willing to pay, and the systems then in existence weren't ready for that level, either). I find it curiously odd, though - we have so many great first-person shooters and other first-person games, but taking them to the level of full-blown immersion doesn't seem to be something that gamers want. I tend to wonder why this is - the ability to "be in the game" - fooling your visual and auditory senses to the point where it feels like you are there - I would think that any gamer of today would be striving to have this, whether by commercial or homebrew means. But such a course doesn't even appear to be something gamers are thinking about...
Let's not forget the fact of arcades - I spent way too many quarters there as a youth. While arcades have never really died (although there for a while it seemed that arcades had nothing but fighting games), the NES was the first system to really bring "arcade level" gaming to the consumer home market (although, one could argue the Vectrex did that, too). So, in the time between the fall of the Atari console and the rise of the NES, we had regular arcades, and home computers for everything else.
AH! That is the company I am thinking about when I posted this response - you actually have one of these! Cool! I have always wanted to know more about this device (one of the cool pieces of VR tech I will never likely aquire), how well it worked and such - your post has been interesting in this regard. Email me, I would be interested in hearing more about it...
With that said, there was a company in the mid to late 1990's which tried to build a development market with a beta-test vestibular stimulator device, meant to be used with a VR HMD system, in order to help avoid or minimize simulator sickness by using such a system to simulate movement. IIRC, the device was a head mounted system that fit over your head, and had electrodes behind the ears (like the parent describes) and ones on your forehead (can't remember if it was one or two - placed in the center or to the sides just inside of the temples, respectively). They had beta-test units, and for something like $300.00 you could order a unit, plus an API for Windows (DirectX) that allowed you to control the device to simulate motion. It was said to work very well, but they became a casualty of the .COM bubble (and the VR hype bubble, too).
Also know that these such vestibular stimulators have been used by the medical profession to treat and study such things as vertigo and such. These medical devices are probably similar in scope to the crude (though likely working!) device described by the parent. They are said to cause nausea, diziness, a sense of motion, etc - a very interesting thing to think about.
Bandwidth - I would be very interested to hear more from you and your experiments...
You are correct with this statement, but the problem goes deeper than that. There are commercial, psychological, and sociological issues which cause high cholesterol, and ultimately CVD as well.
Ultimately, it is the complex interaction of all three of these concepts (along with the concepts you brought up) which lead to CVD and other problems (cancer, diebetes, high blood pressure, etc). We are a society that has limited time during our waking hours to do things. After work, after school, after cleaning house, after doing bills, after taking care of the kids and their homework (if you have any). What is left is some time to eat. Maybe there is time to cook? Maybe there is time to shop? Can we afford the lean meat or salmon steaks (have we gotten a raise lately)? Do we even have time to hit the farmer's market before we get home to get fresh vegetables, and even if we do, do we have the time or knowledge to prepare them? If we are lucky we have just enough time, after all of that, to maybe a bit of recreation or time to ourselves before we plop into bed. Some of us choose to use that time doing more work, in the form of exercize. Some of us use it for projects. Most of us use it to veg out in front of the TV, the opiate to get our minds off the fact that we are on a treadmill that will start up again fresh when we wake up in the morning.
We cut corners where we can, and our health concerns is the first to go. That is unfortunate. I truely hope for the day where I can go down to the store or fast-food place and get healthy, enjoyable food - food as enjoyable in taste, texture, and smell as the crap they are already feeding us, for the same price as I am paying now, and is as easy to purchase or prepare. Right now, no store satisfies all of those requirements in one package. The best you can do is cut back on the meat, bulk up on the fresh vegetables, lower the bread intake, and hope you have time to prepare it all. That, or eat a salad "dry" (that is, without any of the condiments or toppings) from Wendy's or McD's.
The rest of our day is mostly bland, boring, and difficult (from a psychological perspective, if not a physical one). We compensate by eating (a psychological problem for certain). We can either eat something bad, but tastes good, and get a small portion of "happiness", however bad it is for us - during our mediocre day-to-day lives - or we can use that same time and eat bland, boring tasting, but healthy food - provided we can find the time and money to buy and prepare it. Unfortunately, most people choose the former rather than the latter most of the time. Until our commercial industries, personal psychological makeup, and sociological pressures changes, we will likely never see widespread healthy lifestyle living.
It is bad for profit, don't you know...?
Think about how we (speaking of mainly America here, but could apply anywhere) use energy in total, and the amount of waste of that energy. Look at any city at night - notice something? No matter what time it is, there is always light everywhere. Now, I am not suggesting we shut off all lights in a city, they do have a purpose, after all. But I think we could be more efficient in our use of lighting. For instance, why do so many places leave lights on inside the buildings when nobody is there? I have seen lights left on inside quik-lube shops in the middle of the night. What about store signs: why leave them on if you can't shop at them at night? What is the point? Do you really gain that much in advertisement? Also, why is so much light being wasted lighting up the night sky? That is wasted energy. In many of these cases, simple lights for security, maybe with some on motion sensors (which use electricity also - but nowhere near as much as a light left on) - would be sufficient.
How about how we build and use our buildings? Why is it that we are stuck with stick-frame construction when there are so many other and better methods to construct houses? Why do we stick with square-frame houses which take more energy to heat and cool (because of surface area among other reasons) than using dome structures (monolithic dome structures are cheaper to build, take less energy to heat and cool, and have lower maintenance issues)? What about using rammed earth? What about adobe (ever visit a pueblo in the middle of summer - cool living via thermal mass)? There are tons of other options, yet we continue to stick with cheap stick-frame houses, built on-site one 2x4 at a time (yeah - I know the answer here, too: they are cheap to erect for the builder which translates into big profit $$$$ - to hell with the buyer and the environment).
Why is solar water heating not standard on most homes? Why aren't homes built and oriented to take advantage of the sun? Just about anywhere in North America can use some form of solar heating. Even a simple passive "greenhouse" attached to the house properly can warm a home if built right. Set up properly, polystyrene beads can be blown in at night between double layer glass to insulate the house at night (preventing night-sky radiation - which, by the way, can be used for cooling and making ice), then vacuumed out in the day to continue heating. Solar heating can be used in a myriad of places where we currently use natural gas or electricity. You can even cook with solar heat (I built a solar oven out of trash that I have cooked rice and cornbread in) - people have built ovens with circulating fluid setups so that the fluid is run to a panel, and circulates around the indoor oven "box" to heat it up - so you can cook with solar while staying cool inside. Solar heating panels are cheap and easy to build, taking little more than some glass, 2x4's, plywood, black paint, caulking, and copper tubing to assemble.
There are tons of ways we could be doing things better, using energy wiser, using the energy from the sun - all of these little methods and changes (among many, many more which I haven't mentioned), if they were implemented and used by society - they would all go a long way to lessening our dependence on oil as a fuel source, while being cheaper in so many ways in the long run. I bet that if we were to all do these things, we would see a drastic reduction in our fuel needs, possibly more so than the equivalent reduction we would see from better/different automobiles. Performed in concert with automobile changes, the difference we would see would likely be enormous...
Regarding your "speaker pop" problem, I did some some checking and thinking. Googling "audigy speaker pop" led to some interesting links - yours is not the only system. This kind of thing is actually a common issue in the audiophile community, you might do some checking there - all kinds of solutions have been created. You might find such a solution at a place like MCM Electronics or such.
One of the links I found had a comment suggesting isolating the PC power supply from the speaker power supply by plugging them into separate surge protectors. I would even suggest separate electrical circuits if that is possible (likely isn't - but your situation and home layout may be different). Another comment suggesting putting in-line with the Audigy signal outputs capacitors to filter out the pop. I believe a similar system is used in car audio to filter out spark-plug noise issues, as well as in preventing "thump" from speakers when the car audio system is first turned on (only a real problem in high-power systems where the "thump" can ruin a set of expensive subs or something).
I hope you find this information useful, and good luck with your problem!
How is this software doing this? I mean, by reading about this I am imagining some form of stateful packet inspection. Wouldn't such inspection compromise the speed of the whole network? I remember such ideas being bandied about a long time ago for "detecting" pirated software transfers and such, but I also remember the argument being that it couldn't be done without compromising the speed of the entire network. Does it work like QOS routers, but in software? I am just curious how they are doing this without making life hell for everyone else on the network (because they have to inspect *every* packet)...?
Basically, the rationale is that an individual, or a group of like minded individuals, have an attraction to something which has been deemed by the rest of society as being "wrong". To counter this attraction, these individuals seek to eliminate, in totality, that which they are attracted to. In certain cases, where the elimination of the object of attraction is not possible, they seek to make that attraction and/or the slightest expression of that attraction illegal, in the hopes that if this is so, they themselves will no longer be attracted to it, and the burden will be lifted.
Sounds fine and rational on the surface, doesn't it? Therein lies the problem, which these individuals never dare to face: the attraction lies entirely within the realms of their own psychological makeup. Removal of the external representation ultimately does nothing to quell the attraction which lies within their minds and thoughts. If they truely thought that it would work, rather than eliminate the external sources, they would just remove themselves from societal forces entirely, either via suicide (in the extreme case), or through self-imposed isolation or exile (moderately extreme, but likely the classic method for dealing with the pains of society by individuals throughout history - is it any wonder why such practice tends to be part and parcel of most major religions?). In the case of the latter solution (because, after all, sucessful suicide would be a working solution), these individuals would quickly realize that the issues and troubles they (and others) face is within them, and can only be rectified through self-realization and self-actualization...
Is it any wonder that this sounds like the beginning of so many religions?
Anybody with half a rational brain can deduce this. Unfortunately, for many, they have to take the difficult route and either screw up the rest of society which has figured this out already via crazy changes to the law, or return from the wilderness after an extended stay to reveal their "revelation" to the masses (many of whom then agree and seek to follow, giving money and property at every turn) - only after they realize that it is all in their heads, and not much short of changing their worldview will change that.
The thing is, if they would just stop what they were doing, and love themselves for who they are, both physically and mentally, rather than continuing with their self-flaggellation at every turn, the world would likely be a better place overall...
Haven't been thrift shopping lately, have you? In my locale (Phoenix, Arizona), if you go around and compare prices of equivalent items at a garage sale vs. Salvation Army vs. Goodwill, you will quickly find that on many items, the Salvation Army is ripping people off, and are making a hefty profit on "junk". Not that they don't have a right to make as much as they can for their "charity", but their margins tend to be way outside the norm of comparable items from other sources.
As noted, though, this may be indicative only of the Phoenix, Arizona market, and may not reflect on other markets elsewhere...
Yes, the idiocy of thinking that when someone else makes a donation in your name that you get the tax break is amazing, especially for a supposed geek (of course, lately it seems that more non-geeks are showing up on /. than ever before). However, to assume that geeks should know tax law to any large extent is ludicrous at best.
Take a look at law sometime from the perspective of a software developer. What you will see will make your hair stand on end. To use an unfair and cliche'ed portrayal, "I have seen better code written by a VB programmer".
To put it simply, all of law is the greatest mess of spaghetti code the world will ever know. It is time for a major refactor, if not for a complete redesign. I would not be surprised if you looked through any current State's (that is, any country or independent State) corpus of law and found "orphaned" laws - similar to how you can find code within any large software project that is never executed due to having had all calls/branches to it removed, either through design or oversight.
With law "structured" in such a manner, the phrase and meaning of the words "ignorance of the law is not a defense" becomes itself meaningless. The reasoning behind that statement is the fact that we have lawyers and judges the world over who themselves are ignorant of the laws which they swear to uphold. How can laws be upheld, if you are ignorant of them and know not whether they are just? Furthermore, there is the fact of "specialization" in law. This, in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are speaking of say, "copyright and trademark law" vs. "criminal justice law" or similar. However, here in the United States, at least (though I doubt it is a situation specific to our country), one would expect that all lawyers and judges should know and understand precisely what is contained within what is supposed to be the "supreme law of the land", our own Constitution. However, the fact that there is a branch of knowledge called "Constitutional Law", and that there are judges and lawyers who don't understand this document and how it may apply to cases of which they are party to, brings into question the entire system as it currently stands:
How can "ignorance of the law" not be a valid defense, when lawyers and judges are ignorant themselves? How can they dare hold a citizen to a higher standard than that which they hold themselves?
I doubt we will ever get an answer to this issue, however, because it is a question which exposes the system of law as it currently stands and upon which society is based, for the house of cards it is.
Finally, I must say your observation regarding charity vs. garage sales is spot on. This is something my wife and I learned a long time ago, soon after buying our house. The hassle and effort to go through a garage sale just isn't worth it in the end, and the deduction at the end of the year at tax-time is well worth donating the stuff to charity...
What they should do is take the compensation in the form of the code produced - that is, the rights to own the code. If they do this, they could be getting paid their current wage to produce code which they could then conceivably use to start their own company. That code could bring them way more monetary compensation over time than a simple wage increase would in the same period (of course, doing this is more risky, and the software needs to be well written, documented, and marketed properly - plus it needs to have a market to succeed, etc)...
Unless you'd LIKE to be beheaded for what theses crazies call Islam.
I am not so much scared of the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East as I am of the growing Christian Fundamentalist movement right here in the United States. Oh, when will this madness end?
Your points stand, but I wanted to clear up a misconception: Franklin neither discovered nor invented electricity.
What he did do, though, was undertake an experiment to prove (indirectly) that lightning was the same as what was being called "electricity" at that time (actually, "static" electricity).
For thousands of years prior, people did know about electricity, in the form of static electricity. Various means to generate static electricity were well known prior to Franklin, and a means was also invented to store the charge created (via the Leyden Jar, essentially a primitive non-polarized capacitor). Scientists and others prior to Franklin had speculated on the nature of lightning, since it seemed to act similar to (though at a much larger scale) as the jump of spark from a Leyden Jar. What they weren't able to come up with was a means to verify this hunch.
Franklin came up with a (very dangerous - do not attempt this at home) method: fly a kite up into/near the clouds on a rainy (though not thundering and lightning, contrary to what you learned in school) day. Attached to the kite's string (which got wet due to the rain) was a key (or a light chain or wire - I am not sure if the key is a part of the legend or a fact). Also attached to the key, which Franklin held onto presumably under an umbrella to keep it dry, was a length of silk - probably a tie, cravat, or hankerchief as was customary then (this was to insulate Franklin from the charge being collected). The key was brought near and touching the electrode of a Leyden jar. Franklin correctly surmised that if a charge was collected in the Jar (and could be drawn off later via other ordinary means), that would prove the electrical nature of lighting. Miraculously, he wasn't killed in this attempt, and the experiment proved successful, chalking up one more point for the man. This happenned in the 1750's.
One thing Franklin isn't so well known for: He was one of the first (maybe the first?) inventors of an electric rotary motor which ran on static electricity. Yes, it is possible - more a lab curiosity than anything else, but possible and interesting...
Franklin's electrical experiments helped to spur on and open up electrical experimentation throughout the world - it wouldn't be until almost 50 years later (in 1800) when Alessandra Volta would invent the Volta Pile battery, changing the world and it's perceptions of electricity once again...
I can see where companies like Georgia-Pacific might have an issue with this line of reasoning...
If our government/corporations (after all, aren't they one and the same today?) really wanted to the public to have more durable paper, save trees, and appease the environmentalists, they could do so easily with little more than the stroke of a pen.
It is a simple plant, the number of products of which it can produce, from durable paper, durable rope, durable and soft fabric, oil, fuel, and food, to name but a sample, are nearly as vast as those made of the lowly peanut or soybean. It even acts as a natural fertilizing system, because it fixes nitrogen into the soil, and it also has natural pest-resistant properties. It is a plant that grows everywhere, because, literally, it is a weed.
This plant's name is hemp, and I doubt you will ever see it produced legally here in the United States in your lifetime, due to all the forces (from the misguided people, governments, and corporations) working against it, unfortunately...
Second, a resilin high-bounce ball...
Seriously, though - I wonder if this stuff, if made right (perhaps combined with other substances - isn't there a polymer which shrinks in response to electrical stimulus?), could create an advanced artificial "muscle"? Could such a device be more useful (perhaps more efficient) in robotic and other mechanical applications where currently hydraulic, pneumatic, or electro-mechanical systems are used?
Corporations are not mindless entities. What they are, though, is amoral and sociopathic. This has been explored in interesting and disturbing detail in the documentary film, The Corporation. This in and of itself may not necessarily be a bad thing - the real question is, "Are these sociopathic entities rational or irrational?". When you think about corporate entity "mindset" in this fashion, you rapidly come to the conclusion that the answer to that question is the latter, rather than the former. Here is where the problem lies: If a corporation is behaving in not just an amoral and sociopathic fashion, but irrationally as well, what chance do you or anybody else have at predicting how a corporation (as an entity) will react to stimuli? For a given a set of inputs to a corporation, what are the resultant outputs, or reaction, by that entity?
For many (most?) corporations, being amoral, sociopathic, and irrational, you can't predict that with any certainty. You may notice larger trends, but that is a weak indicator for future reactions. Having such a corporation be at least rational in its reactions would go a long way toward instilling a sense of knowledge of how a corporation will react given a set of inputs. This won't quell the amoral, sociopathic tendancies, but it may allow better guidance of these vehicles of commerce by their public and private interests, which can only help. So, how do you at least instill within a corporation, which is both amoral and sociopathic, a sense of rationality?
Corporations are, at their heart, a set of interlinking processes which perform one purpose: taking a set of inputs (as raw materials, labor, and information) and producing output (as product, information, and money). One of the very first steps is to be able to identify and map each of those individual processes of the entire company, down to the finest degree. The majority of processes in most companies have grown haphazardly, with no thinking in the design, measurements of performance, input structure, output structure, or how the process affects other processes within the company. It is this lack of knowledge and structure that is likely the cause of the irrationality of the corporate reactions. If these processes can be mapped out, debugged, and refactored - then followed without short-circuiting the processes by the employees performing them, the result should be a more rational (though still amoral and sociopathic, mind you) corporate entity. A single organization alone, though, cannot reap the ultimate benefits of this until more organizations do the same. Some gains can be expected (mostly monetary gains - since performing the above methods/steps will realize a cost savings as waste in processes is discovered, curtailed, or eliminated), but the ultimate gain of a more rational outcome on a societal level cannot be realized until more organizations are brought to the same level.
In other words, it helps not the rational entity to be the only rational entity in a sea of irrationality. However, as more rationality is injected into the system, the irrational behavior of the rest of the system becomes more apparent. It can be identified and helped, or barring that, eliminated as being a threat to the community of rational systems at large. Convincing other organizations to be rational is a difficult task, but one that must be done, and is being done - simply because ultimately it makes more money for the organization as a whole (by eliminating waste and error at all levels). The tide is slowly changing...
Are you the author of the COSA methodology/design? I had quick look-through of the site, about COSA, what it means, etc. I am definitely going to study this as time allows. From the little I have read, I find it insightful and highly interesting, not to mention very stimulating from a software development perspective. Wow!
Something you (and so many others) are assumming here is that all code is written by humans. This isn't always the case.
Take, for instance, the credit industry (and a host of others) which utilize neural net software. Depending on the software, and the company that developed it, a neural net might be evolved using genetic algorithms to determine, based on a set of inputs, whether a person is a high or low credit risk, or whether fraud is occurring, or a host of other applications.
What happens if a decision that NN reaches happens to be the wrong decision - who do you blame/sue/fire/imprison?
The individual(s) who coded (or built, if made of hardware) the neural net engine? The individual(s) who coded the genetic algorithm? The genetic algorithm which evolved the neural net? The neural net itself?
Who would sign off (as in "this has no faults") on this kind of an application?
Many people, from highly educated programmers to computer scientists - have looked "under the hood" of trained neural nets (trained via a variety of methods, from simple back-propagation to genetic evolution systems), and in many cases, they are "aghast" at what they see: structures and "code" which seems to defy logic. When encoded via hardware, sometimes things get even stranger: with enough evolution and such, the "best" version begins to rely on issues of the parts themselves, such that the evolution took in favor tolerances and spacing of certain parts in certain manners to acheive the desired result. Furthermore, we are talking very simple NN systems here - should the complexity go up several magnitudes, "looking under the hood" would be so close to impossible (akin to trying to map and understand the neural net which makes up a single individual's brain) as to actually be impossible, practically speaking.
No engineer would, and no engineer could - sign off on such software.
This thinking doesn't just apply to neural nets - it applies to all complex systems. In many ways, a lot of software, and the interactions that software has within a single machine and with other software elsewhere (via a network) - form a complex system. These complex systems of "simple" parts have been known (it is like a natural law, actually) to exhibit behaviors outside the norm which aren't cause by flaws in the software, but by the way things are interacting. Anyone who has studied complexity and network theory at even a base level should understand this, that sometimes problems can arise from nowhere due to unexpected and possibly unexplainable (and maybe not even repeatable!) interaction of complex (and in some case, not complex at all - that is, complexity arising from the interaction of simplistic rules - see Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science") systems.
Can you imagine being a lead developer and being fired, sued, or imprisoned simply because your system was a part of an unpredictable (by ANY method) complex interaction between the systems it ran on and the other software it interacted with? Now, I am not saying that all software and systems are this complex, but we are talking about interaction here, which has nothing (and everything!) to do with underlying complexity...
A linguistic shift it may be, and probably not intentional at all, but rather the results of ignorance. That is not to say that linguistic shift is a good thing, however. In many cases, such shifts can be detrimental to downright nasty.
One of recent note that has been railed upon endlessly here and elsewhere has been the shift/mixing of the terms "cracker" versus "hacker". Now, mind you, the term "hacker" has almost always had a slight "edge" to it, which made it a natural to hang it onto the idea of "shifty dude who knows computers at wizard level". Some people (myself included), hated the negative undertones, and preferred the original idea and meaning of the term, in which a hacker was just someone who was very, very good at a particular "thing", typically meaning working/programming with computers. It was seen as a badge of honor. Social forces among hackers brought the term "cracker" to bear upon those who used their hacking skills for bad. Other social forces, likely stronger, though, rendered the terms "hacker" and "cracker" meaningless, and mixed them both, and since "hacker" was the older of the two and already, in the general mainstream, had negative undertones, the term "hacker" has come to mean "criminal who works with computers" - but it still has the "romantic" undertones (similar to the word "pirate" - I mean, pirates were - and still are - bad people. Pirate groups were/are akin to today's street gangs, just on the sea. But there is still a "romantic" level of the word on which people associate feelings of freedom and adventure). There is also the view among some people (hackers themselves, mainly), who view the shift as a "conspiracy" to make the idea of "great computer knowledge" something which should be feared and possibly illegal. Whether this is true or not is besides the point (I doubt it is true, at least on a grand scale), the fact is that people are uneasy, somewhat scared, of what really goes on "inside the box", and people who are able to manipulate it adroitly are viewed with caution (similar in some respects to the alchemists of old). Funny it is to us who really understand the machines, and realize they are really nothing more than a fancy, souped-up form of player-piano. I wonder if people are or were afraid of how player-pianos worked?
Thus, you can see how linguistic shifts, whether due to societal pressures, or done purposefully via someone or group with an agenda to push, can help perpetuate and in some cases cause shifts in perception and thinking. After all, language plays a great part as something with which we work in our minds to symbolically connect thoughts and ideas, and ultimately think with. Shift the language, and you shift the thoughts, and ultimately the actions. If you can understand this, and furthermore if you can understand NLP (neural-linguistic programming - essentially a method of understanding how thoughts, vocal language, and body language interact to influence your own and other's thoughts, feelings, and actions) - you can, in essence, hack your own mind and the minds of others! This isn't a new thing - it is a natural thing for most humans (autistics and Asperger's aside), but most do it unconsciously. If you understand how it really works, and are completely aware of it at all time, you can use this to your advantage.
Other such linguistic shifts, over time, can mask negative aspects of situations and ideas. This form of linguistic shift even has a name - "politically correct" - which is, in and of itself, a self-referential linguistic shifting and mixing of several terms. In essence, it means a softening of language so as not to offend another's sensibility. Unfortunately, it also has the side effect of shifting the ideas to which the terms are connected in such a manner as to make those ideas soften, or seem "better", than they really are. George Carlin has a great bit on all
As far as whether there was anything else interesting you could do with OS-9, the answer is "yes" - if you had an assembler, a C compiler or BASIC-09, plus Multi-Vue (windowing). I mean, look at (just a few) of the CoCo 3 games that were made for OS-9: Koronis Rift, Sub Battle (IIRC), King's Quest III - unfortunately, only the really "hardcore" users of the CoCo ever went there...
I don't think it had so much to do with the complexity of OS-9 vs DECB, but rather the expense. Back in the day, to have a reasonable OS-9 system on the CoCo 3 required at minimum 512K and two floppy drives - an easy outlay of well over $500.00, and that is just for hardware. The license costs for OS-9, Multi-Vue, and BASIC-09 could easily bring that total to over $1000.00. If you wanted to get the best value of OS-9, you wanted to either upgrade RAM to 1 or 2 MB with third-party boards (Tandy only officially supported 512K), and add a hard drive (which back then, a 10-20 MB drive was insanely priced). Just too much money for what was, really, a hobby system.
Today, it has gotten much cheaper, but unfortunately there isn't any demand - the CoCo 3 has long been discontinued, and nobody has made a replacement (not that one is really needed). Nostalgic owners of the CoCo, people who want to play the old games, and those who have just a basic few needs for a computer - can emulate the CoCo 2 and 3 almost perfectly via a variety of emulators, most notable of which is the MESS system (put MESS and MAME on a fairly recent PC with TV-Out, and enough ROM images, and you can the dream system of yesteryear). OS-9 has been "replicated" via NitrOS9 (and even made better in some respects), though there isn't a replacement (AFAIK) for Multi-Vue. It will even run on original hardware (if you have it or can find it). Also, for more goodness, recent hardware and peripherals continue to be made - see the Cloud-9 site. I have also heard "rumblings" that a USB interface is in the works as well. Lastly, for other goodness, there is Sockmaster's site (he is the CoCo 3 graphics wizard) and the CoCo3.com site.
Is the CoCo dead? Yes and no. I would say it "languishes" along much like the C=64, Apple IIe, Amiga and a ton of other "old" machines. It will probably have a following for a long while. I intend to keep mine running and I play with it now and again. I have already set up an emulation box and have transferred all (well, a vast majority - some were unreadable) of my old floppies to CD. I was also instrumental in helping to get Diecom's "Gates of Delerium" (a clone of Ultima) restored and running under emulation (I was like one of seeming three people who owned it, and my copy was degrading), as well as helping to get Dave Dies to formally release the old software of Diecom to public domain (score another point for abandonware rescue!). Unfortunately, no one has yet put the ZIP file of GofD up - I have tried to get Curtis Boyle to do it, sent it to him with documentation from Dave Dies about the release - but he hasn't put it up yet (though he has a great repository of old CoCo software)...
Maybe you *should* pull that CoCo down from the attic, if you still have it. Dust it off (clean it good inside and out before powering it up if it has been sitting long - be careful with the keyboard ribbon cable connection, though, as you take the case apart), do some searching on the internet (there are a lot of CoCo and CoCo emulation sites), then if you are interested, let me know and I will point you to the CoCo mailing list (unless you find it yourself - I think you can get to it from the CoCo3.com site). It is a fun list, with a great
Of course you can...
They used to be called "Pitsco-Lego-Dacta", but apparently (recently?) they spun off their Lego Educational stuff into a separate site and store (Pitsco sells a lot of science educational stuff, not just Lego) - and finally, you can buy the blue tanks (for the pneumatics)!!!
People are suckers for wasting their money getting their oil changed. Changing your own oil is cheap, very cheap - and doesn't take long to do. The oil and filter is only going to cost about $20.00 for the amount needed in most cars, and it only takes about a half-hour to change. Unless you are making more than $40.00/hr (most people don't make that much), it is a better deal than having someone else do it (and still taking a half-hour to perform). Plus, you *know* what went into the car, and that other crap hasn't been messed with (this happens at some shops - things get "tweaked" so they break down the road, and you have to come back).
With a network and streaming, though, keeping the speakers in sync with one another is difficult, if not impossible. You end up with "effects" of delays - which make every room sound like an echo chamber (as you hear the delay in other rooms vs the zone/room you are in). With a standard audio solution, this isn't typically an issue. Yes, you have to pump more power through the wires to make up for the attenuation of the signal (or have remote amplifiers at the speakers) - but you won't have the effects of latency.
A TCP/IP streaming solution may work fine if everyone is listening to completely different audio in different rooms with their doors shut, but a whole house system listening to the same source in different rooms is going to cause issues, unless they have somehow improved the technology to eliminate the latency/delay issues...
At the last company I worked for, I was the lead developer of an in-house developed CRM and problem tracking system. Most people loved the system - it was fast, it was convenient, it handled certain billing aspects, had reporting on critical information, the problem tracking software was fairly nice (we had several clients ask if we were selling it - we weren't). Even so, people couldn't let go of the paper on the problem tracking system. A job would come in, it would be entered, and then printed out, then "passed around".
This wasn't necessary, though - the job could be "transferred" (with email notification to both parties and the client) between parties working on it, all time would be entered on the job, with a full history of who did what when. We allowed for "annotations" to the job, you could add "attachments" to the job (basically any file you had on your personal workstation or on the network) - which would "follow" the job around. Even so, people insisted on putting notes on the paper - and invariably, this would cause problems...
Every day, you would get an email or hear someone say "Has anyone seen job #xyz? I gave it to Bob yesterday, but he doesn't have it, he can't find it", etc. I used to wonder to myself "Duh, if you had left it completely electronic, this wouldn't be an issue" - I even on a number of occasions asked people why they did this - managers, programmers, others who worked with the job - to see if I could come up with an electronic solution...
Annotations were one thing, which got added in short order - basically as an attachment that could be "quick entered" - click the "Add Note" button, and a text editor would be openned which when the "save" button was clicked, would tack on the note as an attachment. This got used quite a bit, but things were still being passed around. A bit of discussion revealed that what they really were having problems with were screen prints faxed or emailed after the job was created. These were printed out, and stapled or clipped to the paper job as it was passed around. Sometimes, this stuff got unclipped, lost, thrown away - it was a nightmare to track. So we tried to come up with a solution. We created "scanning stations".
These were two machines (in a trial run) set up with cheapo Visioneer scanners (actually, they were pretty nice scanners), with a very simple desktop - the user would log-in with the scanning station login/password, the desktop had a single icon, which read "scan attachment". Clicking on this icon the user would launch a simple application which allowed them to log into the job tracking system (so it knew who scanned the attachment), select the job number to attach the scan to, then put the page on the scanner and click "scan" - once the scan was complete, the image would be attached to the job as an attachment, and they could log out, or scan another document.
We had plans and ideas of moving the "scanning" to the client end - so that they could log into our website, enter the job number, upload the image, and have it "auto-attach" to the job. We had ideas of using a fax server to automate the attachment of fax scans to the jobs (using OCR for Forms to detect a "written in" job number on the fax cover sheet or something). We even had an idea of hooking the phone system up so that a client could call in a problem, enter the job number in (or create a new job), speak the problem into the phone, capture the WAV file, create an MP3, and attach that to the job (voice clip attachment).
Even so - even if we had implemented all of that (I don't know of a solution that even does any of that last part - maybe Peoplesoft or something) - I still think people would have passed around paper...