Turing wasn't Church's student for the very good and simple reason that
Church was in Princeton in the USA
Turing was in Cambridge, England.
They both came up with separate, original proofs that the entscheidungsproblem was not soluable at pretty much the same time; neither was aware of the other's work. Nor did they meet until after both papers had been published.
Obviously the two proofs were logically equivalent but they could not have been more different and it was Turing, not Church who produced the blueprint for the first computer: the universal machine which can compute everything which can be computed. Even today we say of processors and languages that they either are or are not 'Turing equivalent' meaning that they either are or are not equivalent to the machine 'U'.
Furthermore, Turing did not show that you could run the Lambda Calculus on U (although it was implicit, because U could run anything which could be computed, and Lambda Calculus can be computed, therefore U could run Lambda Calculus). It was John McCarthy who did that.
My real question to Brits here is: How well is this burden accepted by the British people? Are the BBC TV and radio stations in the UK really non-commercial? I know the US government gives money to PBS and NPR but I don't know how it compares (especially per capita) to what the British government must spend on the BBC.
The BBC is funded by a license fee which all owners of television receivers are obliged to pay whether they actually receive BBC broadcasts or not. Although the government collects this money and pays it to the BBC it's not really a goverment subsidy as it is a hypothecated tax - one of very few in the UK. So essentially we the public pay for the BBC.
And although there's a little bit of grumbling I think on the whole we're very proud of it. I think we're very proud of the way it's prepared to stand up to the government, to oppose the government when it thinks the government is wrong. I think on the whole we're very proud of its committment to unbiased news reporting and high quality journalism. I think that if the government ever tried to control the BBC, or to cut off its funding, they'd face very serious public opposition.
How are they going to convince set-top manufacturers to support their codec or conglomerates to broadcast it? It's already been proven a hundred times over the superior and/or open rarely win out to their more profitable brethren. All the article states is there's a 'hint of a chance' of it being adopted by big media...
This is one of the world's biggest broadcasters we're talking about. They are big media, on a global scale. Whatever channel you watch, wherever in the world you watch it, chances are you're seeing some of Auntie Beeb's content. So if no-one else adopts it, there's still a big motivation for the set-top makers to incorporate it. After all, it isn't going to cost them.
It would be nice if IBM wasn't quite so quiet about all of this. I mean, I wouldn't mind seeing a little bluster from them, what they're thinking.
The thing is when people are playing this kind of corporate mind games, what they say doesn't tell you what they're thinking. It tells you what they want the other party to think they're thinking, and that's not the same thing at all. Or else it's a diversionary move, or a double bluff, or a smoke screen, or...
White men may speak with forked tongues, but the tongues of corporate lawyers are n-ary for large values of N.
...says the (presumebly) Windows user - running a multitasking operating system, with a GUI, using a mouse, with (most likely) audio and 3D graphics hardware, and connected to the internet;)
I was running a multitasking operating system, with a GUI, using a mouse, with audio hardware, and connected to the internet, in 1985. The name on the box was Xerox. There is no essential feature of the software environment of a modern Windows box that wasn't present on my Dandelion then. However, the Dandelion had lots of cool software features that your Windows box could not even begin to emulate.
IBM was evil back in the day but they were cool evil dammit. They made great techonological breakthroughs, won some Nobel prizes and helped bring a lot of cool things into existance (like hard drives).
Revolutionary technical change destabilises monopolies. It is, after all, what brought IBM down in the end. All monopolies seek to stifle and hold back technical development - IBM did so in the 1970's in just the same way Microsoft does now. They were not 'cool evil', they were just another greedy parasite, but, unlike Microsoft, a fearsomely efficient greedy parasite. IBM as a monopolist was far more damaging to our industry than Microsoft is now. You don't want them, or anyone else, back in that position. Seriously.
This is not an attack on IBM as presently constituted. Today they are pretty good citizens, as corporations go. But power corrupts, and monopoly power corrupts absolutely.
I too have been playing this game long enough to remember when IBM were the big monopolist. At present, IBM are being reasonably good corporate citizens, but it has to be said that unless and until we get open commodity data formats for the overwhelming majority of interchanged data (and, to be fair, we are on the way there) the software industry is dynamically unstable and will tend to produce monopolies. I don't trust any large commercial software business to have the public interest at heart in the long term. This is not an attack on IBM in particular. As others have pointed out on this thread, modern corporate governance is inherently amoral, and IBM is not immune to that.
So no, you don't want IBM - or anyone else - taking over from Microsoft as the world's dominant software vendor. We'd all be much better off with half a dozen competing software vendors, who were somehow compelled to use only open data formats. Somehow, I don't think modern capitalism is going to deliver that.
OK, OK, I know that some of the board members of this company are people we most of us respect. And judging by what Bruce Perens, at least, has contributed to this discussion it seems they really believe in the idea.
But it smells of snake oil.
One cannot, in general, prove a negative. I've no doubt this company has diligently gone through every line of the kernel and reviewed it. But they have not, because they cannot have, diligently gone through every line of pre-existing proprietary computer code on the planet. The majority of computer programs are never released in source form, and it is not normally possible to reconstruct the original source by reverse engineering a stripped binary. So for the vast majority of legally copyright software out there, they did not have the source and could not compare Linux against it.
But that, actually, is beside the point.
By reading diligently through the code the company may potentially put something back into Linux; they may notice and report back to the relevent authors blunders, inelegancies and bugs.
They may.
But apart from that, they make no contribution back to the community. They are, in effect, another bunch of freeloading parasites on the community - the moral equivalent of head lice. They cannot have done what they say they've done, because it is a logical and practical impossibility. But they will profit - probably substantially - on the fears of ill-informed or risk averse corporate managements, and that profit is at least to some extent at the community's expense, because it siphons off money that those corporations were at least in principle prepared to spend on Linux.
Textual description, unlike textual input, is not something I consider optional in a genuine IF game (despite what I wrote in the Montfort review about how we shouldn't be so quick to leave games like Deus Ex or Half-Life out of the IF canon.) When I walk into the room and see your box for the first time, a true IF engine should do more than just tell me about the presence of the box. It should show me what I've found, in a way that graphics alone can't (easily) accomplish:
On the table rests a small wooden box, carved of oak and stained with red wine or something darker. Fine scratches in the veneer lend the box a patina of antiquity, and a closer look reveals a spidery line of symbols carved into its lid.
"The runes of Woznir," muses Anrael. "I've seen their power before, under very unhappy circumstances. If you intend to open that foul repository, I'll wait for you in the next room... or perhaps the next life."
Again, I think you're raising objections without really thinking. Certainly there's no point (in Neverwinter) in writng that the box is on the table, because the user can see it's on the table. But you can, of course, add a rich textual description of the box which the player will see if they inspect the box. Sure, they right click and choose an eye simbol from the radial menu instead of typing inspect box, but that's purely a difference in user interface style.
And there's no difficulty at all in Neverwinter in assigning NPCs speach acts triggered by (very) specific events. You could either surround the table with a trigger zone which causes Anrael to make that speach when he first enters the zone (or every time he enters the zone, or only if the box is shut, or...) or else you could override the OnOpen behaviour of the box to cause Anrael (if present) to make the speach.
I'm not aware of anything you can do in any text-based interactive fiction engine that you can't do modulo user interface differences with Neverwinter. Nor, really, is there very much you can do with Neverwinter which you can't do (modulo user interface differences) with the best of the text-based interactive fiction toolkits. Neverwinter, despite its rather pedantic D&D roots, is an interactive fiction toolkit - but with (generally good quality) graphics.
Do you have any links to IF projects created with Aurora? I don't see how you can use that engine to carry on significant text-based interaction with the player. I'd be very interested in being proven wrong.
You're missing the point. All projects created with Aurora are interacive fiction by definition. There's no significant difference between
There is a box here.
> open the box
You don't have a key.
and just clicking on a box in Neverwinter. No, generally, user type-in is not a mode of interation the Aurora toolkit supports, but that isn't necessary for interactive fiction.
Of couse this does limit interaction with NPCs to choices from menus of predetermined speaches, and personally I find that a little limiting and disappointing. But that isn't the point. A game created with Aurora is just as much Interactive Fiction (and, at least potentiall, just as rich and deep interactive fiction) as games created with the classic text adventture toolkits.
Good interactive fiction doesn't need (and doesn't have) graphics for the same reason that pictures don't make a good book any better.
While I agree that interactive fiction doesn't need graphics, there's plenty of interactive fiction which does have graphics and which, in my opinion, greatly benefits from having graphics.
For example, Neverwinter Nights and its Aurora toolkit provide excellent tools for creating interactive fiction with the ability to do all the sorts of things you can do in a text-based IF environment. But it renders these fictions in an attractive real time near 3D environment. The game engine does have some flaws - in my opinion it is based too ridigly on Dungeons and Dragons, and some aspects of gameplay are a bit mechanistic in consequence - but it is a worthy successor of such game engines as the Infocom ones.
It would be possible to argue that Neverwinter is to Infocom as film is to printed books, but I think this would be a mistake. It is no harder or more complex to create IF in Neverwinter than in Infocom (indeed, I personally find it easier). It seems to me that Neverwinter and Infocom (and my own LISP based text game engines of twenty years ago) fall into the same category: frameworks for the creation of interactive fiction.
As an aside, does anyone know of other modern interactive fiction toolkits which compare to Neverwinter Aurora? Much as I like it, I'd like to try anything else that's good and around.
The reviewer's memory of (Monty) Python's a little weak. It's John Cleese who rants about the dead parrot. Unless, of course, this is a rhetorical flourish, since Chapman's no longer with us (to say the least).
All together now:
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'!
Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
It's damned difficult to be happy without prosperity. Indeed, the latter is pretty much a pre-condition for the former.
Actually, you're factually wrong there. In fact, the revese is more nearly true.
It's damned difficult to be happy without stability. If you don't know whether you'll have a job or a house or a meal tomorrow, or next week, or next year, it's hard to be happy. But if you are confident that things will stay the same or get a little better over time, and you have enough food and shelter and are not afraid of getting killed, it's much easier to be happy, no matter how little you have in money or material posessions. Generally rural people in 'less developed' societies - provided they have security of food and shelter, and are not in a war zone - are measurably happier than most people in the West.
Our urbanised, monetarised lives are extremely high stress, and most of us these days don't have basic security - we don't know we're going to have a job next week, we don't know whether we'll be able to pay the bills.
Whining that IE 5.0 doesn't fully support CSS is just braindead. It's an old browser. MS has been working on compliance and updating their browsers. If you insist on using a broken version when fixed versions are available, that's your issue. Not Microsoft's.
Where can you get these 'compliant' versions of IE? I can remember seeing an IE 6 beta about two years ago which rendered my home page correctly, but the version of IE (6.0.2800 - on XP Professional) which came on the new laptop I bought a fortnight ago still can't. So - brand new Windows machines shipping this month still have broken browsers. Where are the fixed ones?
It allows us to realize how fortunate it is that our engineers rejected the open-pile design which caused Chernobyl to be so dangerous. It also makes me thankful that, due to the skillful design, the TMI incident is a disaster only in the terms of public-relations among those who don't understand, or want to understand the science.
I don't think that anyone who isn't rabidly anti-nuclear power would consider these to events to be anywhere near equivalent.
I don't think anyone who isn't charmingly niaive would consider these events to be so very different. Ultimately it's all engineering failure, whether it's failure of a procedure or failure of a valve.
Very high concentrations of energy - any kind of energy - are extremely dangerous. The larger they are, the more dangerous. Nuclear power stations are very large concentrations of highly concentrated energy. Unless engineering is 100% perfect, sooner or later they'll blow, one way or another. Engineering is never 100% perfect.
Of course, this doesn't only apply to nuclear power stations. But the consequences of nuclear power station failure are more severe than any other category of civilian accident.
Subject says it all, really. She would make a great subject for a short documentary movie, taking a ride through the dead zone and talking about it. I would pay to watch it. I might even invest in it. It wouldn't cost very much to make.
I believe you mean "motorcycle riding photo-snapping Russian babe through nuclear wasteland";)
Don't you know any geography? Can't you even read? She isn't Russian. She's Ukrainian. There's no worse insult you can make to a Ukrainian than to call them Russian.
Yes, it's funny that it was a Windows firewall that was attacked. Yes, it's especially funny that it was an expensive Windows firewall that was attacked. Laugh.
But also think.
This could just as easily have been us. From my root logs I patched my servers for the OpenSSL vulnerability on Sunday 21st, which was four days after it had been announced. If the Witty worm had attacked OpenSSL, it would have got me. I suspect it would get most of us.
Linux (or BSD, or whatever) is not immune to this sort of attack. On the contrary, we're just as vulnerable as anyone else. Those of us who administer public-facing servers have got to learn to be still more cautious, and still more proactive about fixing holes as they are announced.
Re:Neither right nor wrong: just necessary
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The complete ecological system is so fragile and many parameters (asteroids, energy output of the sun) are out of human control...
very true, very true...
...that it would be negligent not to secure the prolonged human existence by going into space.
...is the wrong answer.
The environment is very fragile, and we're busily destroying it. Burning huge volumes of fossil fuel to hurl things into space hastens it's destruction - not very much in the general scheme of things, but it surely doesn't help. But what's worse is distracting a generation of scientists, engineers and decision makers from the very real crisis we've got to deal with, which is reversing the serious damage we've already done to the planet and patching up our life-support systems so that they can continue to support us in the future.
No rock hurtling through space poses such a serious or certain danger to the human race than our current out-of-control capitalist economy.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
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A mature settlement on the Moon would have a self-sustaining population of 5 billion, not 5 thousand.
Please can I not have any of what you're smoking?
It may have escaped your attention, but we can't sustain a population of five billion on Earth. We are running through non-renewables at a rate we can't sustain, detroying our best agricultural land, and poisoning our seas. Whether we have a population crash in the future is not a question - the only question is how soon it will come and how bad it will be.
Your glorious techno-future is not going to happen. All of our great grandchildren will go hungry; the only question is which of them will starve.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
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The Wrong Stuff
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One of the things which drives peoples' passion for manned spaceflight is that for many atheists it takes the same place that religion does for others - providing a reference point for the future. Many space enthusiasts believe passionately in "man's destiny in the stars" as a thing inherently good in and of itself, the kind of principle without dependence upon rationality that forms the basis of religious belief.
This is just plain common or garden lunacy, mainly influenced by reading too much cod scifi. Manned inter-system travel is just never going to happen. The human body was not designed to survive many years in low gravity. The complexity of keeping the crew alive and viable for the distance is just too high, and the benefits just too low. There are not a hoard of habitable planets out there waiting for us to just move in - or, to be precise, given the size of the Universe, there probably are, but they are unlikely to be discovered in finite time.
The only argument that manned spaceflight must be undertaken is that the Sun will eventually go nova and destroy the Earth; consequently, we had better think of a way off. Since we don't anticipate this happening within the next hundred years, however, and we do anticipate the continued advance of technology, why not ignore the question for a few hundred years and then start investigating manned spaceflight (at much less effort required)?
The Sun going nova is pretty much an irrelevence. Whatever happens, whether we remain on Earth or all migrate through a freak wormhole to the greater horseshoe nebula, the species homo sapiens will not last ten million years. The average lifespan of a species is much less than that, and human beings are far more destructive of the environment they depend on for survival than the average species.
What is more to the point is the rate at which we are destroying this planet, the rate at which we are poisoning the air we breathe, the land we farm, and the sea we fish. So long as we continue fantasise about some mythical escape route, whether it's the 0930 shuttle to Alpha Centauri Beta or the idea that Jesus is going to call us to an unpolluted heaven where we'll play happy harps among the skipping fluffy clouds for the rest of eternity - so long as we fantasise, we will treat the Earth as expendible.
Folks, it's not.
This is the liferaft. When we've used it up, there won't be another.
It's hard not to be reminded of the civilisation of the Easter Islanders, who cut down their last trees to raise bigger and bigger statues of themselves, and then more or less died out in the ecological catastrophe they'd created.
We're doing the same, just on a bigger scale. Are we really going to use the last barrel of fossil fuel to send a man to Mars? Is that going to stop the Atlantic Conveyor from failing? Is it going to be any comfort when our economy has collapsed, our climate has crashed, and our ability to produce food has been drastically reduced, to be able to say 'hey, but we put a man on Mars'?
My generation - people in their forties now - are not only materially the richest generation that have ever lived. We're also very probably the richest generation that will ever live. We've hoovered up the worlds wealth at a rate that can't be sustained, and dumped our toxic wastes without thought. This isn't something that may bite us in the far distant future; it's something that's beginning to bite now and which will bite harder with every generation that passes.
So if you really believe that the solution is to create an escape pod and drift peacefully away to some happy-clappy planet in the stars, you don't have'a few hundred years' to wait for better tech to be developed. You'd
What amazes me is how cynical people here are. Project Gutenberg owes everything to Michael Hart, and so you think that admirers of the original would be supportive of the new venture.
You're missing the point. Michael Hart's work on Project Gutenberg is indeed admirable and to be commended. But this new venture is bad for all the reasons that Project Gutenberg is good.
Project Gutenberg is about opening the information commons, making knowledge freely available in an accessible form to everyone. That is the core of what it is about.
This new venture is a land grab on parts of the information commons; it's about making knowledge available in proprietary formats to people who pay for it. There's nothing in principle wrong with doing that, it's what commercial publishers do all the time, and if it had been called 'Michael Hart and Associates' I don't think anyone would object to it. But it's objectives are the complete opposite of Project Gutenberg's
And therein lies the rub. There is no doubt that this venture can, will and must tarnish the reputation of the original project, because it carries the implication that the original project is somehow replaced or superceded by this tawdry little company. It will make peopel who previously trusted the Project Gutenberg name wary of it. It will make volunteers wary of contributing to the project, for fear that their work will be privatised by PG2. Mr Hart may own the name, but this use of it is nevertheless deceitful and dishonest, and very damaging, certainly to Project Gutenberg and probably to the new company.
One or other of them is going to have to change its name, and there is going to be a very nasty taste left in everyone's mouth.
I'm dealing with more vision problems right now, but I've found that viewing a monitor is MUCH more comfortable if you change the colors of your main tools to use black backgrounds with light text, usually green or yellow.
Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.
All good text editors and IDE's let you change the background/text colors.
They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.
My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.
I think you're very wrong. I think there's a huge amount of footage they shot which isn't in the released films. For example, they shot a whole lot of a story line in which Arwen had a much more prominent role, and then decided not to use it. Whether you could fuse all this extra material into a coherent story is another matter, but I'm quite confident that there will be a 'single movie' cut, probably twelve or so hours long, which will contain material we haven't yet seen.
And I have to say I think it will be worth it. I will certainly buy the 'extended edition' cut this autumn; I've already got the extended edition cuts of the first two movies, and both were well worth the money. I will almost certainly buy the 'single movie' cut when it comes out, unless there really isn't any significant new material.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, this is wrong in so many ways.
Turing wasn't Church's student for the very good and simple reason that
They both came up with separate, original proofs that the entscheidungsproblem was not soluable at pretty much the same time; neither was aware of the other's work. Nor did they meet until after both papers had been published.
Obviously the two proofs were logically equivalent but they could not have been more different and it was Turing, not Church who produced the blueprint for the first computer: the universal machine which can compute everything which can be computed. Even today we say of processors and languages that they either are or are not 'Turing equivalent' meaning that they either are or are not equivalent to the machine 'U'.
Furthermore, Turing did not show that you could run the Lambda Calculus on U (although it was implicit, because U could run anything which could be computed, and Lambda Calculus can be computed, therefore U could run Lambda Calculus). It was John McCarthy who did that.
The BBC is funded by a license fee which all owners of television receivers are obliged to pay whether they actually receive BBC broadcasts or not. Although the government collects this money and pays it to the BBC it's not really a goverment subsidy as it is a hypothecated tax - one of very few in the UK. So essentially we the public pay for the BBC.
And although there's a little bit of grumbling I think on the whole we're very proud of it. I think we're very proud of the way it's prepared to stand up to the government, to oppose the government when it thinks the government is wrong. I think on the whole we're very proud of its committment to unbiased news reporting and high quality journalism. I think that if the government ever tried to control the BBC, or to cut off its funding, they'd face very serious public opposition.
This is one of the world's biggest broadcasters we're talking about. They are big media, on a global scale. Whatever channel you watch, wherever in the world you watch it, chances are you're seeing some of Auntie Beeb's content. So if no-one else adopts it, there's still a big motivation for the set-top makers to incorporate it. After all, it isn't going to cost them.
The thing is when people are playing this kind of corporate mind games, what they say doesn't tell you what they're thinking. It tells you what they want the other party to think they're thinking, and that's not the same thing at all. Or else it's a diversionary move, or a double bluff, or a smoke screen, or...
White men may speak with forked tongues, but the tongues of corporate lawyers are n-ary for large values of N.
(apropos innovation)
I was running a multitasking operating system, with a GUI, using a mouse, with audio hardware, and connected to the internet, in 1985. The name on the box was Xerox. There is no essential feature of the software environment of a modern Windows box that wasn't present on my Dandelion then. However, the Dandelion had lots of cool software features that your Windows box could not even begin to emulate.
Next?
Revolutionary technical change destabilises monopolies. It is, after all, what brought IBM down in the end. All monopolies seek to stifle and hold back technical development - IBM did so in the 1970's in just the same way Microsoft does now. They were not 'cool evil', they were just another greedy parasite, but, unlike Microsoft, a fearsomely efficient greedy parasite. IBM as a monopolist was far more damaging to our industry than Microsoft is now. You don't want them, or anyone else, back in that position. Seriously.
This is not an attack on IBM as presently constituted. Today they are pretty good citizens, as corporations go. But power corrupts, and monopoly power corrupts absolutely.
I too have been playing this game long enough to remember when IBM were the big monopolist. At present, IBM are being reasonably good corporate citizens, but it has to be said that unless and until we get open commodity data formats for the overwhelming majority of interchanged data (and, to be fair, we are on the way there) the software industry is dynamically unstable and will tend to produce monopolies. I don't trust any large commercial software business to have the public interest at heart in the long term. This is not an attack on IBM in particular. As others have pointed out on this thread, modern corporate governance is inherently amoral, and IBM is not immune to that.
So no, you don't want IBM - or anyone else - taking over from Microsoft as the world's dominant software vendor. We'd all be much better off with half a dozen competing software vendors, who were somehow compelled to use only open data formats. Somehow, I don't think modern capitalism is going to deliver that.
OK, OK, I know that some of the board members of this company are people we most of us respect. And judging by what Bruce Perens, at least, has contributed to this discussion it seems they really believe in the idea.
But it smells of snake oil.
One cannot, in general, prove a negative. I've no doubt this company has diligently gone through every line of the kernel and reviewed it. But they have not, because they cannot have, diligently gone through every line of pre-existing proprietary computer code on the planet. The majority of computer programs are never released in source form, and it is not normally possible to reconstruct the original source by reverse engineering a stripped binary. So for the vast majority of legally copyright software out there, they did not have the source and could not compare Linux against it.
But that, actually, is beside the point.
By reading diligently through the code the company may potentially put something back into Linux; they may notice and report back to the relevent authors blunders, inelegancies and bugs.
They may.
But apart from that, they make no contribution back to the community. They are, in effect, another bunch of freeloading parasites on the community - the moral equivalent of head lice. They cannot have done what they say they've done, because it is a logical and practical impossibility. But they will profit - probably substantially - on the fears of ill-informed or risk averse corporate managements, and that profit is at least to some extent at the community's expense, because it siphons off money that those corporations were at least in principle prepared to spend on Linux.
Again, I think you're raising objections without really thinking. Certainly there's no point (in Neverwinter) in writng that the box is on the table, because the user can see it's on the table. But you can, of course, add a rich textual description of the box which the player will see if they inspect the box. Sure, they right click and choose an eye simbol from the radial menu instead of typing inspect box , but that's purely a difference in user interface style.
And there's no difficulty at all in Neverwinter in assigning NPCs speach acts triggered by (very) specific events. You could either surround the table with a trigger zone which causes Anrael to make that speach when he first enters the zone (or every time he enters the zone, or only if the box is shut, or...) or else you could override the OnOpen behaviour of the box to cause Anrael (if present) to make the speach.
I'm not aware of anything you can do in any text-based interactive fiction engine that you can't do modulo user interface differences with Neverwinter. Nor, really, is there very much you can do with Neverwinter which you can't do (modulo user interface differences) with the best of the text-based interactive fiction toolkits. Neverwinter, despite its rather pedantic D&D roots, is an interactive fiction toolkit - but with (generally good quality) graphics.
And that is the money.
You're missing the point. All projects created with Aurora are interacive fiction by definition. There's no significant difference between
There is a box here.
> open the box
You don't have a key.
and just clicking on a box in Neverwinter. No, generally, user type-in is not a mode of interation the Aurora toolkit supports, but that isn't necessary for interactive fiction.
Of couse this does limit interaction with NPCs to choices from menus of predetermined speaches, and personally I find that a little limiting and disappointing. But that isn't the point. A game created with Aurora is just as much Interactive Fiction (and, at least potentiall, just as rich and deep interactive fiction) as games created with the classic text adventture toolkits.
While I agree that interactive fiction doesn't need graphics, there's plenty of interactive fiction which does have graphics and which, in my opinion, greatly benefits from having graphics.
For example, Neverwinter Nights and its Aurora toolkit provide excellent tools for creating interactive fiction with the ability to do all the sorts of things you can do in a text-based IF environment. But it renders these fictions in an attractive real time near 3D environment. The game engine does have some flaws - in my opinion it is based too ridigly on Dungeons and Dragons, and some aspects of gameplay are a bit mechanistic in consequence - but it is a worthy successor of such game engines as the Infocom ones.
It would be possible to argue that Neverwinter is to Infocom as film is to printed books, but I think this would be a mistake. It is no harder or more complex to create IF in Neverwinter than in Infocom (indeed, I personally find it easier). It seems to me that Neverwinter and Infocom (and my own LISP based text game engines of twenty years ago) fall into the same category: frameworks for the creation of interactive fiction.
As an aside, does anyone know of other modern interactive fiction toolkits which compare to Neverwinter Aurora? Much as I like it, I'd like to try anything else that's good and around.
All together now:
Actually, you're factually wrong there. In fact, the revese is more nearly true.
It's damned difficult to be happy without stability. If you don't know whether you'll have a job or a house or a meal tomorrow, or next week, or next year, it's hard to be happy. But if you are confident that things will stay the same or get a little better over time, and you have enough food and shelter and are not afraid of getting killed, it's much easier to be happy, no matter how little you have in money or material posessions. Generally rural people in 'less developed' societies - provided they have security of food and shelter, and are not in a war zone - are measurably happier than most people in the West.
Our urbanised, monetarised lives are extremely high stress, and most of us these days don't have basic security - we don't know we're going to have a job next week, we don't know whether we'll be able to pay the bills.
Where can you get these 'compliant' versions of IE? I can remember seeing an IE 6 beta about two years ago which rendered my home page correctly, but the version of IE (6.0.2800 - on XP Professional) which came on the new laptop I bought a fortnight ago still can't. So - brand new Windows machines shipping this month still have broken browsers. Where are the fixed ones?
I don't think anyone who isn't charmingly niaive would consider these events to be so very different. Ultimately it's all engineering failure, whether it's failure of a procedure or failure of a valve.
Very high concentrations of energy - any kind of energy - are extremely dangerous. The larger they are, the more dangerous. Nuclear power stations are very large concentrations of highly concentrated energy. Unless engineering is 100% perfect, sooner or later they'll blow, one way or another. Engineering is never 100% perfect.
Of course, this doesn't only apply to nuclear power stations. But the consequences of nuclear power station failure are more severe than any other category of civilian accident.
Subject says it all, really. She would make a great subject for a short documentary movie, taking a ride through the dead zone and talking about it. I would pay to watch it. I might even invest in it. It wouldn't cost very much to make.
Don't you know any geography? Can't you even read? She isn't Russian. She's Ukrainian. There's no worse insult you can make to a Ukrainian than to call them Russian.
About a week ago, we had a vulnerability announced in OpenSSL. I imagine most of us patched pretty quickly. But the Witty worm appeared within twenty-four hours of the announcement of the vulnerability it attacked, and it infected 95% of vulnerable machines within 45 minutes.
Yes, it's funny that it was a Windows firewall that was attacked. Yes, it's especially funny that it was an expensive Windows firewall that was attacked. Laugh.
But also think.
This could just as easily have been us. From my root logs I patched my servers for the OpenSSL vulnerability on Sunday 21st, which was four days after it had been announced. If the Witty worm had attacked OpenSSL, it would have got me. I suspect it would get most of us.
Linux (or BSD, or whatever) is not immune to this sort of attack. On the contrary, we're just as vulnerable as anyone else. Those of us who administer public-facing servers have got to learn to be still more cautious, and still more proactive about fixing holes as they are announced.
very true, very true...
...is the wrong answer.
The environment is very fragile, and we're busily destroying it. Burning huge volumes of fossil fuel to hurl things into space hastens it's destruction - not very much in the general scheme of things, but it surely doesn't help. But what's worse is distracting a generation of scientists, engineers and decision makers from the very real crisis we've got to deal with, which is reversing the serious damage we've already done to the planet and patching up our life-support systems so that they can continue to support us in the future.
No rock hurtling through space poses such a serious or certain danger to the human race than our current out-of-control capitalist economy.
Please can I not have any of what you're smoking?
It may have escaped your attention, but we can't sustain a population of five billion on Earth. We are running through non-renewables at a rate we can't sustain, detroying our best agricultural land, and poisoning our seas. Whether we have a population crash in the future is not a question - the only question is how soon it will come and how bad it will be.
Your glorious techno-future is not going to happen. All of our great grandchildren will go hungry; the only question is which of them will starve.
This is just plain common or garden lunacy, mainly influenced by reading too much cod scifi. Manned inter-system travel is just never going to happen. The human body was not designed to survive many years in low gravity. The complexity of keeping the crew alive and viable for the distance is just too high, and the benefits just too low. There are not a hoard of habitable planets out there waiting for us to just move in - or, to be precise, given the size of the Universe, there probably are, but they are unlikely to be discovered in finite time.
The Sun going nova is pretty much an irrelevence. Whatever happens, whether we remain on Earth or all migrate through a freak wormhole to the greater horseshoe nebula, the species homo sapiens will not last ten million years. The average lifespan of a species is much less than that, and human beings are far more destructive of the environment they depend on for survival than the average species.
What is more to the point is the rate at which we are destroying this planet, the rate at which we are poisoning the air we breathe, the land we farm, and the sea we fish. So long as we continue fantasise about some mythical escape route, whether it's the 0930 shuttle to Alpha Centauri Beta or the idea that Jesus is going to call us to an unpolluted heaven where we'll play happy harps among the skipping fluffy clouds for the rest of eternity - so long as we fantasise, we will treat the Earth as expendible.
Folks, it's not.
This is the liferaft. When we've used it up, there won't be another.
It's hard not to be reminded of the civilisation of the Easter Islanders, who cut down their last trees to raise bigger and bigger statues of themselves, and then more or less died out in the ecological catastrophe they'd created.
We're doing the same, just on a bigger scale. Are we really going to use the last barrel of fossil fuel to send a man to Mars? Is that going to stop the Atlantic Conveyor from failing? Is it going to be any comfort when our economy has collapsed, our climate has crashed, and our ability to produce food has been drastically reduced, to be able to say 'hey, but we put a man on Mars'?
My generation - people in their forties now - are not only materially the richest generation that have ever lived. We're also very probably the richest generation that will ever live. We've hoovered up the worlds wealth at a rate that can't be sustained, and dumped our toxic wastes without thought. This isn't something that may bite us in the far distant future; it's something that's beginning to bite now and which will bite harder with every generation that passes.
So if you really believe that the solution is to create an escape pod and drift peacefully away to some happy-clappy planet in the stars, you don't have 'a few hundred years' to wait for better tech to be developed. You'd
Fwee Wodewick!
You're missing the point. Michael Hart's work on Project Gutenberg is indeed admirable and to be commended. But this new venture is bad for all the reasons that Project Gutenberg is good.
Project Gutenberg is about opening the information commons, making knowledge freely available in an accessible form to everyone. That is the core of what it is about.
This new venture is a land grab on parts of the information commons; it's about making knowledge available in proprietary formats to people who pay for it. There's nothing in principle wrong with doing that, it's what commercial publishers do all the time, and if it had been called 'Michael Hart and Associates' I don't think anyone would object to it. But it's objectives are the complete opposite of Project Gutenberg's
And therein lies the rub. There is no doubt that this venture can, will and must tarnish the reputation of the original project, because it carries the implication that the original project is somehow replaced or superceded by this tawdry little company. It will make peopel who previously trusted the Project Gutenberg name wary of it. It will make volunteers wary of contributing to the project, for fear that their work will be privatised by PG2. Mr Hart may own the name, but this use of it is nevertheless deceitful and dishonest, and very damaging, certainly to Project Gutenberg and probably to the new company.
One or other of them is going to have to change its name, and there is going to be a very nasty taste left in everyone's mouth.
Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.
They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.
My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.
And I have to say I think it will be worth it. I will certainly buy the 'extended edition' cut this autumn; I've already got the extended edition cuts of the first two movies, and both were well worth the money. I will almost certainly buy the 'single movie' cut when it comes out, unless there really isn't any significant new material.