A species goes extinct, whether it's as a result of our encroaching on nature, or simply natural selection, what is to say that it wasn't meant to happen?
Nothing whatsoever is "meant to happen", at least from a scientific perspective. Natural selection, like gravity, describes what happens not what ought to happen. If people decide that saving species X from extinction is worth it to them, then that's just fine.
Yes, yes, I think most people understand that Ig Nobel awards are awarded to both pseudoscience and amusing examples of real science. The problem is that combining the two ideas in one award is probably not a good idea, because people may mistake an example of one for another. Even if the researchers themselves have a sense of humor it doesn't mean that the politicians who hold the purse strings do.
Hey! My cat likes to walk across my keyboard, so it isn't as a absurd a occurance as it may seem. Of course my cat also likes to look at my screen, apparently unaware that she is blocking my view...
I think Bruce Sterling put it best: "Forrest Gump is like Stalinist propaganda: it suggests that the ideal citizen should be obedient and stupid". I want characters that question society, not just drift through it aimlessly.
Well, there are people moving in the other direction too. I'm an American working as a postdoc at the University of Waterloo, and the CS department here has a large percentage of Americans at the faculty level.
True, but really, at least the people who are talking about ADVENT have at least the basic idea of what interactive fiction is. I get the feeling that at least half of the Slashdot audience has no idea what interactive fiction is, because they weren't using computers in the '80s. I wonder if it is possible to interest people in modern text adventures if they've never played Zork?
Well, most MUDs are incredibly primitive in comparsion to an Infocom (or Inform) game, which this contest is about. I've never seen a MUD with a decent parser or plot. Essentially, MUDs are interactive Scott Adams' adventures rather than interactive Infocom adventures. If your only idea of a text adventures is from MUDs and the primitive adventures on floppy disk-less early 80s micros, you are really missing out on a lot.
What people have to realize about historical events is that they are only meaningful if they influence later events. While Canadians and Americans of Scandinavian descent like to bring up Leif Erikson as the first European to discover the New World, the simple fact is that his discovery (if indeed it occured) was meaningless because it did not lead to anything. Columbus' discovery lead of course to European colonization and therefore it was significant.
Similarly, Colossus did not lead to the evolution of today's computers, as it was classified in the early days of computing Even the ABC is only significant because it may have influenced the design of the ENIAC, which was the ancestor of every computer now in use.
But user interface stuff is exactly the problem. Yes, you *can* write a win32 app with Visual C++ without using the MFC, but it is akin to writing an X program with raw Xlib calls. And as regard to portability, I doubt most companies give a damn -- that's why there are companies like Loki which buy the rights to do the Linux ports -- the original companies aren't interested.
I've seen this error before. A professor that I know took a picture of a sign that was in front of a hotel in Germany: "We provide excellent hospitality for our pretentious guests"
The whole idea here is that breaking up MS is a bad idea because it would drive the price of MS products up, causing fewer, people to buy them, hurting the tech market by alienating customers. Now, before you say, "Huh uh! They'll just use Linux!" remember Grandma May and Steve The Jock whos idea of bleeding edge technology is AOL on their iMac.
And that iMac will run just fine without Windows -- so what exactly is your point? Grandmas and Jocks will be just fine.
So what if we do things to ourselves that make us cease to be human? That would only be a bad thing if "human" were the best we could be. I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.
Exactly. It is a really irritating cliche in science fiction that whenever a character becomes "more than human" (whatever that means), that character only gets to enjoy the benefits of that state for a brief while before descending into madness and death. There never is a rational justification for this; it is just the standard "don't mess with forces beyond your ken" nonsense. The fact is technology doesn't stand still -- and I, for one, intend to keep pace with it.
The difference is that postmodern thought just doesn't see itself as entertainment like the other arts (although reading Bruno LaTour fumble every scientific idea he mentions is rather unintentionally amusing), rather it sees itself as way of explaining the world itself, and ever since Copernicus, it has been obvious that science is the only way of explaining the world that actually works.
Well, Apple once claimed that all GUIs were direct rip-offs of the Macintosh interface, but they weren't too sucessful with that... How is this different?
They say in the article it is comparable to DSL and cable, so I'd go with 128 kilobytes/sec (My ASDL line is 128 kilobytes/sec on the downloading side) 128 kilobits/sec would only be comparable to modems and ISDN.
A game is new if it it is new to a platform you use, just like a book is new if it is new to a language you can read. For example, Umberto Eco's novels are available in their original Italian nearly a year before English translations are available. But that is only relevant if you can read Italian. I don't read Italian, nor do I play games on DOS or Windows. So when Loki ports a DOS/Windows game to Linux or William Weaver "ports" an Italian novel to English, they are new to me.
Personally, I would consider this lag to be an advantage -- when the game comes out, it has already been reviewed in the original version many times, so you can see if the gamed is at all worthwhile, plus the lag means that there is a greater chance that you own a machine capable of running a game that often required a cutting edge machine when it originally came out.
No, I simply happen to know a lot about the subject being both a molecular evolutionist and programmer, and can recognize hype from genuine scientific advancement. Yes, given a measure of fitness, and a method of generating variation, you will see hill climbing (evolution) if you supply selective pressure. This has been known since te days of the "New Synthesis" in the 1930's. The problem is that any mathematical representation of fitness, variation, and selection can only be a small subset of what really can occur.
Bringing us back to the robots, consider -- can his robots develop wings and fly? No? Why -- because flying robots are impossible? No -- because the programmer didn't allow the possibility in the program. Do you see the problem?
Like all such simulations of evolution, the program can't really create something novel that the programmer hadn't already thought of -- just combinations of preprogrammed parts. What makes biological evolution interesting and powerful is that new parts arise without a pre-conceived design.
But this is only because English is the language the United States, which the most powerful nation on Earth at the moment, and not because of any mystic superiority of the language. But as you Brits should know, it is easy to go from the master of the world to obscurity in an amazingly short amount of time. If the United States becomes obscure, well, there will be no reason to stick with English.
Well, the example of BASIC perhaps isn't quite in support of your idea, because there were quite a few differences between different implementations, if you remember. A random BBC Basic program would not work on GWBASIC, or on the Speccy, or on an Apple ][, or on a C64, etc.
Even Pascal had quite a few differences between implementations. We are quite lucky that C and C++ are so standardized.
Is that the movies listed aren't just obscure movies, they are movies that had reasonably large budgets and which were well hyped in advertisements when they came out, but flopped horribly. People really expected "Heartbeeps" to do well when it came out in 1981. But it not only flopped, it practically deleted itself from the collective subconscious. Sure some low-budget grade Z movies are more obscure, but they had no chance of not being obscure.
Well, Pinker doesn't believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it isn't really a hypothesis that can be refuted scientifically because nobody can really know how other people think. At most one can say that there is no support to the assumption that they think differently.
Well, have you tried any of Loki's strategy games? HOMM III and Railroad Tycoon are really good IMHO, and Alpha Centauri is likely to be equally as good.
Slashdot Mirror
A species goes extinct, whether it's as a result of our encroaching on nature, or simply natural selection, what is to say that it wasn't meant to happen?
Nothing whatsoever is "meant to happen", at least from a scientific perspective. Natural selection, like gravity, describes what happens not what ought to happen. If people decide that saving species X from extinction is worth it to them, then that's just fine.
Yes, yes, I think most people understand that Ig Nobel awards are awarded to both pseudoscience and amusing examples of real science. The problem is that combining the two ideas in one award is probably not a good idea, because people may mistake an example of one for another. Even if the researchers themselves have a sense of humor it doesn't mean that the politicians who hold the purse strings do.
Hey! My cat likes to walk across my keyboard, so it isn't as a absurd a occurance as it may seem. Of course my cat also likes to look at my screen, apparently unaware that she is blocking my view...
I think Bruce Sterling put it best: "Forrest Gump is like Stalinist propaganda: it suggests that the ideal citizen should be obedient and stupid". I want characters that question society, not just drift through it aimlessly.
Yeah, and I've always found OSs to lack plot and character development, so hopefully MacOS X will improve on this.
Well, there are people moving in the other direction too. I'm an American working as a postdoc at the University of Waterloo, and the CS department here has a large percentage of Americans at the faculty level.
True, but really, at least the people who are talking about ADVENT have at least the basic idea of what interactive fiction is. I get the feeling that at least half of the Slashdot audience has no idea what interactive fiction is, because they weren't using computers in the '80s. I wonder if it is possible to interest people in modern text adventures if they've never played Zork?
Well, most MUDs are incredibly primitive in comparsion to an Infocom (or Inform) game, which this contest is about. I've never seen a MUD with a decent parser or plot. Essentially, MUDs are interactive Scott Adams' adventures rather than interactive Infocom adventures. If your only idea of a text adventures is from MUDs and the primitive adventures on floppy disk-less early 80s micros, you are really missing out on a lot.
What people have to realize about historical events is that they are only meaningful if they influence later events. While Canadians and Americans of Scandinavian descent like to bring up Leif Erikson as the first European to discover the New World, the simple fact is that his discovery (if indeed it occured) was meaningless because it did not lead to anything. Columbus' discovery lead of course to European colonization and therefore it was significant.
Similarly, Colossus did not lead to the evolution of today's computers, as it was classified in the early days of computing Even the ABC is only significant because it may have influenced the design of the ENIAC, which was the ancestor of every computer now in use.
But user interface stuff is exactly the problem. Yes, you *can* write a win32 app with Visual C++ without using the MFC, but it is akin to writing an X program with raw Xlib calls. And as regard to portability, I doubt most companies give a damn -- that's why there are companies like Loki which buy the rights to do the Linux ports -- the original companies aren't interested.
I've seen this error before. A professor that I know took a picture of a sign that was in front of a hotel in Germany: "We provide excellent hospitality for our pretentious guests"
The whole idea here is that breaking up MS is a bad idea because it would drive the price of MS products up, causing fewer, people to buy them, hurting the tech market by alienating customers. Now, before you say, "Huh uh! They'll just use Linux!" remember Grandma May and Steve The Jock whos idea of bleeding edge technology is AOL on their iMac.
And that iMac will run just fine without Windows -- so what exactly is your point? Grandmas and Jocks will be just fine.
So what if we do things to ourselves that make us cease to be human? That would only be a bad thing if "human" were the best we could be. I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.
Exactly. It is a really irritating cliche in science fiction that whenever a character becomes "more than human" (whatever that means), that character only gets to enjoy the benefits of that state for a brief while before descending into madness and death. There never is a rational justification for this; it is just the standard "don't mess with forces beyond your ken" nonsense. The fact is technology doesn't stand still -- and I, for one, intend to keep pace with it.
The difference is that postmodern thought just doesn't see itself as entertainment like the other arts (although reading Bruno LaTour fumble every scientific idea he mentions is rather unintentionally amusing), rather it sees itself as way of explaining the world itself, and ever since Copernicus, it has been obvious that science is the only way of explaining the world that actually works.
Well, Apple once claimed that all GUIs were direct rip-offs of the Macintosh interface, but they weren't too sucessful with that... How is this different?
They say in the article it is comparable to DSL and cable, so I'd go with 128 kilobytes/sec (My ASDL line is 128 kilobytes/sec on the downloading side) 128 kilobits/sec would only be comparable to modems and ISDN.
A game is new if it it is new to a platform you use, just like a book is new if it is new to a language you can read. For example, Umberto Eco's novels are available in their original Italian nearly a year before English translations are available. But that is only relevant if you can read Italian. I don't read Italian, nor do I play games on DOS or Windows. So when Loki ports a DOS/Windows game to Linux or William Weaver "ports" an Italian novel to English, they are new to me.
Personally, I would consider this lag to be an advantage -- when the game comes out, it has already been reviewed in the original version many times, so you can see if the gamed is at all worthwhile, plus the lag means that there is a greater chance that you own a machine capable of running a game that often required a cutting edge machine when it originally came out.
Sorry. No. You're wrong. Troll?
No, I simply happen to know a lot about the subject being both a molecular evolutionist and programmer, and can recognize hype from genuine scientific advancement. Yes, given a measure of fitness, and a method of generating variation, you will see hill climbing (evolution) if you supply selective pressure. This has been known since te days of the "New Synthesis" in the 1930's. The problem is that any mathematical representation of fitness, variation, and selection can only be a small subset of what really can occur.
Bringing us back to the robots, consider -- can his robots develop wings and fly? No? Why -- because flying robots are impossible? No -- because the programmer didn't allow the possibility in the program. Do you see the problem?
Like all such simulations of evolution, the program can't really create something novel that the programmer hadn't already thought of -- just combinations of preprogrammed parts. What makes biological evolution interesting and powerful is that new parts arise without a pre-conceived design.
But this is only because English is the language the United States, which the most powerful nation on Earth at the moment, and not because of any mystic superiority of the language. But as you Brits should know, it is easy to go from the master of the world to obscurity in an amazingly short amount of time. If the United States becomes obscure, well, there will be no reason to stick with English.
Well, the example of BASIC perhaps isn't quite in support of your idea, because there were quite a few differences between different implementations, if you remember. A random BBC Basic program would not work on GWBASIC, or on the Speccy, or on an Apple ][, or on a C64, etc. Even Pascal had quite a few differences between implementations. We are quite lucky that C and C++ are so standardized.
Is that the movies listed aren't just obscure movies, they are movies that had reasonably large budgets and which were well hyped in advertisements when they came out, but flopped horribly. People really expected "Heartbeeps" to do well when it came out in 1981. But it not only flopped, it practically deleted itself from the collective subconscious. Sure some low-budget grade Z movies are more obscure, but they had no chance of not being obscure.
Well, Pinker doesn't believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it isn't really a hypothesis that can be refuted scientifically because nobody can really know how other people think. At most one can say that there is no support to the assumption that they think differently.
Well, have you tried any of Loki's strategy games? HOMM III and Railroad Tycoon are really good IMHO, and Alpha Centauri is likely to be equally as good.