IIRC, Zephram Cochrane was not black... I seem to remember him showing up in the original show with that sparky light entity on some planet. I don't remember that guy being black.
Daystrom of the "Daystrom Institute" was black though. Maybe you're confusing them?
Enterprise is often good trek, more often than Voyager. It is rarely as good as TNG and almost never as good as DS9. It is better sci fi than TOS, and they try a lot harder than TOS.
Take any one of the Andorian episodes. Or the last several of this season in the Expanse. And a smattering of other episodes from first and second season.
You are wrong that they disregard canon. No trek since TNG has disregarded canon, I challenge you to show deviations that cannot be explained away by effects of intervention from the future. And I think it is still trek (you will notice though that Star Trek does NOT appear in the title credits) since by and large I believe things will line up. You can think of the goal of the show to introduce things that could REALLY screw up the timeline, but the challenge is to get the broad strokes of history right. That are basically fighting to keep the timeline we know and love.
If you really want to like trek I recommend that you take a fresh look at the series from this point of view. The main problem I have with Enterprise is unrelated to these kinds of non-problems. It is more that lack of complex interpersonal and interspecies relationships that made DS9 and TNG great shows. I think Enterprise can get there though (and sometimes they get there), so I keep watching.
Some things will necessarily happen a bit earlier or in slightly different ways. With time travel that is to be expected.
As to whether I've gasped for breath at any great insights in Trek... not really, not ever. It isn't that level of entertainment for me. Most of the real "morality play" type stuff is pretty transparent to me.
That said, I hear lots of cool ideas, and echoes of my own thoughts and things I've read elsewhere, and occasionally a writer is clever enough to keep me on the edge of my seat, or at least can outthink me for a few minutes here and there. That is all I ask from trek. And it rarely disappoints (the steaming piece of crap that was Voyager, ah... I would be happy if that had never happened to the timeline...)
The key to happiness in life is adjusting your expectations to match reality.
Agree 100% on the Andorians and other species... it's been fun seeing the initial meetings. I was a little worried about "The Expanse" story arc since it would take them away from those types of things, but it turned out the andorians followed them in...
It's cool that we get to see more of them than we have in any other Trek, outside of the books (the new DS9 series has brought in some Andorian characters).
Hey, I'm a real fan, you sir, are an idiot. Unlike you I have seen every episode, read many of the books, Love Star Trek, so that makes me a real fan by any definition.
I like Enterprise. Not my favorite. I like it. DS9 is the best. But Enterprise is making a solid effort. It is not producing internal consistency beyond what one would expect when time travel is a central component of the series.
The early meeting with Klingons is totally in line with the temporal cold war.
It wouldn't have happened unless there were time travellers intervening. Period.
That makes it completely "canonical," at least insofar as time travel often has consequences in trek that change the past (and sometimes the affect future in significant ways).
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
Anyway, if you think that the current producers don't make a concerted effort to get internal consistency, leagues beyond what had ever been attempted before in a sci-fi tv series, you are simply misinformed.
Enterprise is progressing towards the birth of the Federation.
We're getting to see first meetings... tellarians, andorians, klingons, romulans (though not shown). That is exactly what I expected from the series, and it's been a lot of fun seeing that aspect of it. The whole "expanse" arc I wasn't hot on to begin with since it really diverged from that, but they worked it out if you watched last season.
I don't know why you think they shouldn't have phasers.
As far as distances between things in Enterprise vs. TOS: ST:TOS made very little effort to get distances and facts for that matter correct. That really only started to happen with TNG... Sternbach, Okuda... I think we have to give them some leeway there. It's a hard problem dealing with less than "careful" certainly not hard sci fi and keeping it convincing to a more aware audience than was expected with TOS.
Read through the Encyclopedia, you'll see even the experts can't resolve huge inconsistencies even within TOS itself.
When did time travel become the basis of the series? The first episode, Broken Bow, had Klang being chased by Suliban, under the influence of some unnamed individual from the future who had given the Suliban technology for genetic enhancements.
This is part of the temporal (time travel) cold war. The incident with Klang was not supposed to happen yet, so the show begins with a deviation from the timeline.
Therefore all following events should be expected to diverge somewhat from the cannon.
There is a simple word for it: adaptation. Tailoring maybe.
There are hard ways and less hard ways to do that.
Natural selection would be the hard way, and I doubt we could be adapted in that way in any reasonable amount of time.
Genetic engineering would be another way
A third way might be some sort of symbiotic relationship with another biological life form or articificial organism that could metabolize CO2 at a sufficiently fast rate. You still have to deal with climate and weather issues I suppose.
Enterprise is by no means perfect and I won't try to defend it in general. I'd say I enjoy it more than Voyager but less than TOS, TNG, and DS9. But I have to say the end of this last season did get a lot more interesting. And there have been plenty of episodes that I really liked.
I wouldn't say it lacks imagination. In any event, whether Enterprise does or does not lack imagination or whether I am willing to defend it doesn't have much impact on whether the cretin I was accusing of no imagination has any.
The point still stands. How many workers have been living in Saudi Arabia? How many have been abducted and killed by terrorists?
There's no false dichotomy in my argument. My point is that ANYWHERE YOU GO YOU CAN DIE. A lot of people don't like to deal with that fact.
There are plenty of criminals out there that will kill you without a second thought. There are plenty of situations you can get it in which there is no malicious agent but in which you can still die.
I'm just trying to inject a little clear thinking into the discussion here. Your "Go someplace where lots of people who don't like you want to kill you and can recognize you easily..." hmm... other than the "lots of people" I think any major city could satisfy that description. I'm sure there are plenty of major cities (New York, LA, etc.) where I could go and I could be easily recognized as a Mark and could be robbed and killed.
So then you have to quantify "lots of people." Can you? What's the ratio of the population of Saudi Arabian inhabitants that are murderous thugs out to kill Americans vs. those that are either indifferent or friendly or just don't like killing folks?
Only on/. would unintersting rehash of other drivel like yours be modded insightful.
TNG was great. It concentrated mostly on ethics and morality stuff.
DS9 was much more interesting to me. Because they stay in place, there is a chance for political tensions to develop. Makes things a lot more interesting being able to fully explore relationships between ST cultures. In many ways it was the best trek for my tastes.
Voyager sucked. Cheese factor over the top even for trek.
Enterprise: let me explain this to you since you seem to find it so hard to understand: with time travel involved which is THE BASIS OF THE SERIES, you can't really have a fucked up timeline. There will be changes to it, but in the end I'm sure the timeline will be pretty much as we'd expect at the end of the show. Some things may happen earlier/later, but in general it will all work out. You and the other 5 guys that spout this on Slashdot every day are simply wrong.
I'm tired of you folks saying they should pack it in. You're wrong, there are plenty of us that still enjoy trek. If you can find any way to produce sci fi that doesn't cost money and require marketing, lay it out there for us. With your limited imagination though, I doubt you could come up with much.
You can die anywhere you are at any time for any number of reasons. Like that Northen Exposure episode where the satellite falls on the guy... What's your likelihood of being abducted by terrorists in Saudi Arabia? Not very high. Even if you are there. Certainly not relative to any other of a number of ways you could die.
You can lock yourself up in your house if you want to. It just depends on how you want to live.
If you are really concerned about your life being out of control and in the hands of terrorists, just get fitted with one of those poison teeth. Then at least you can save yourself from suffering while you die.
Want to run Windows 95 applications? Run them under Windows 95 in QEMU, or VmWare, or maybe VirtualPC.
Given the project's momentum, within 1 year QEMU will be as good as VmWare in OS compatibility. It will be Free in all possible ways.
Crossover Office version of WINE works very well. With the abandonment of Win32 the API will be anything but a moving target.
I'm just saying that you can have as much backward compatibility as you like pretty much for free. Just quarantine those old apps off into their little sandbox subsystem.
What you don't want to do is keep growing the old API till its horrifyingly crufty and creaking under its own weight as Win32 is.
Interested in helping me patent this new-fangled technology I'm working on? I call it an "emulator." It lets you "emulate" your old operating systems with their APIs and dependent applications on new operating systems with different APIs.
I think it's really going to take off.
That solution will nail all of these problems. For those folks that want to run a bit faster there's another idea of mine called the "Compatibility Subsystem."
Yes, but... No one would write anything for an 8-bit machine that took 20 minutes to compile. Even with clunky floppies as mass storage I can't remember anything that took more than a minute or two if that.
And how much time do you get if you actually use it? Who cares how long it will sleep...
Until battery life is over 10 hours I am sticking with my 8-bit laptops... which get on the order of 20 hours of normal use (months of sleep if you care about that)
Model 100/102, Cambridge Z88, Amstrad NC100/200, NEC 8500/Starlet...
Hopefully this new technology will enable portable PCs with no hard drive... that will revolutionize our expectations for portable computers in battery life, ruggedness, "instant on", etc.
It brings about the possibility that modern laptops might finally be able to become truly portable and therefore compete with the 8-bit laptops (model 100/102/200, z88, amstrad nc100/200, NEC 8500, Starlet, etc.) from a couple decades ago... instant on, 20 hours battery life, run on alkalines, more rugged, etc.
How do you figure that a dynamic translator like QEMU is bounded to 1/3 the speed of the host processor? If you are dynamically translating code, you could theoretically get 100% efficiency after the initial translation hit. And if you load pre-translated code you can close the gap by a lot. Few people would count load time anyway.
The only place there is a ceiling is on the guest OS dynamically generating code, in which case you have to emulate. But I imagine there are few places in most OS's of note that do dynamic code generation and those could be detected and handled as special cases and you wouldn't have to invalidate the cache.
Imagine the best dynamic translator in the world is an assembly language programmer. I take a disassembly in from CPU1 and port that assembly code to CPU2. Is my final program on CPU2 bounded to 1/3 the efficiency of the program on
CPU1?
That first line was a little over the top, but I was emulating the Ferengi, and they are nothing if not over the top when it comes to profit.
There is a kernel of truth though... you have to admit that there are plenty of beancounters stupid enough to think that they can magically switch without a *long* transition period (years) when moving to an outsourced engineering model when your business culture is an on-staff engineering team.
It happens over and over. When people say "I kind of feel bad charging so much money for such simple work after they laid me off" or "why should I help them, they're jerks, they laid me off" I say, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're getting paid for doing work you would have been doing anyway just for a lot less money if you hadn't been laid off. They made the bad decision. You make the profit.
That should be a rule of acquisition. Being laid off is often an opportunity to make contractor $$$'s.
Just remember... it's always about money. No job lasts forever. No one owes you a job. Don't take it personally.
The only thing one can take heart in is that the best of us will always be in demand. (corollary to that is the best of us constantly update their skills)
Actually looked around and there was also model 102, and the WP2/ WP3 that had similar ability to run off AA batteries, long battery life and low weight.
Looks like you can buy refurbed WP2 or 3... seems like a good way to go. Those companies you listed are charging *way* too much for what today is an appropriate application for a microcontroller and a few cheap ICs.
I have seen some writers who like using the model 100/200 TRS-80. They are antiques (and unfortunately for the buyer, somewhat collectible), but they have really good battery life and an extraordinary keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, Zephram Cochrane was not black... I seem to remember him showing up in the original show with that sparky light entity on some planet. I don't remember that guy being black.
Daystrom of the "Daystrom Institute" was black though. Maybe you're confusing them?
Enterprise is often good trek, more often than Voyager. It is rarely as good as TNG and almost never as good as DS9. It is better sci fi than TOS, and they try a lot harder than TOS.
Take any one of the Andorian episodes. Or the last several of this season in the Expanse. And a smattering of other episodes from first and second season.
You are wrong that they disregard canon. No trek since TNG has disregarded canon, I challenge you to show deviations that cannot be explained away by effects of intervention from the future. And I think it is still trek (you will notice though that Star Trek does NOT appear in the title credits) since by and large I believe things will line up. You can think of the goal of the show to introduce things that could REALLY screw up the timeline, but the challenge is to get the broad strokes of history right. That are basically fighting to keep the timeline we know and love.
If you really want to like trek I recommend that you take a fresh look at the series from this point of view. The main problem I have with Enterprise is unrelated to these kinds of non-problems. It is more that lack of complex interpersonal and interspecies relationships that made DS9 and TNG great shows. I think Enterprise can get there though (and sometimes they get there), so I keep watching.
Some things will necessarily happen a bit earlier or in slightly different ways. With time travel that is to be expected.
As to whether I've gasped for breath at any great insights in Trek... not really, not ever. It isn't that level of entertainment for me. Most of the real "morality play" type stuff is pretty transparent to me.
That said, I hear lots of cool ideas, and echoes of my own thoughts and things I've read elsewhere, and occasionally a writer is clever enough to keep me on the edge of my seat, or at least can outthink me for a few minutes here and there. That is all I ask from trek. And it rarely disappoints (the steaming piece of crap that was Voyager, ah... I would be happy if that had never happened to the timeline...)
The key to happiness in life is adjusting your expectations to match reality.
Agree 100% on the Andorians and other species... it's been fun seeing the initial meetings. I was a little worried about "The Expanse" story arc since it would take them away from those types of things, but it turned out the andorians followed them in...
It's cool that we get to see more of them than we have in any other Trek, outside of the books (the new DS9 series has brought in some Andorian characters).
Hey, I'm a real fan, you sir, are an idiot. Unlike you I have seen every episode, read many of the books, Love Star Trek, so that makes me a real fan by any definition.
I like Enterprise. Not my favorite. I like it. DS9 is the best. But Enterprise is making a solid effort. It is not producing internal consistency beyond what one would expect when time travel is a central component of the series.
The early meeting with Klingons is totally in line with the temporal cold war.
It wouldn't have happened unless there were time travellers intervening. Period.
That makes it completely "canonical," at least insofar as time travel often has consequences in trek that change the past (and sometimes the affect future in significant ways).
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
Anyway, if you think that the current producers don't make a concerted effort to get internal consistency, leagues beyond what had ever been attempted before in a sci-fi tv series, you are simply misinformed.
There was no bait and switch.
Enterprise is progressing towards the birth of the Federation.
We're getting to see first meetings... tellarians, andorians, klingons, romulans (though not shown). That is exactly what I expected from the series, and it's been a lot of fun seeing that aspect of it. The whole "expanse" arc I wasn't hot on to begin with since it really diverged from that, but they worked it out if you watched last season.
I don't know why you think they shouldn't have phasers.
As far as distances between things in Enterprise vs. TOS: ST:TOS made very little effort to get distances and facts for that matter correct. That really only started to happen with TNG... Sternbach, Okuda... I think we have to give them some leeway there. It's a hard problem dealing with less than "careful" certainly not hard sci fi and keeping it convincing to a more aware audience than was expected with TOS.
Read through the Encyclopedia, you'll see even the experts can't resolve huge inconsistencies even within TOS itself.
When did time travel become the basis of the series? The first episode, Broken Bow, had Klang being chased by Suliban, under the influence of some unnamed individual from the future who had given the Suliban technology for genetic enhancements.
This is part of the temporal (time travel) cold war. The incident with Klang was not supposed to happen yet, so the show begins with a deviation from the timeline.
Therefore all following events should be expected to diverge somewhat from the cannon.
There is a simple word for it: adaptation. Tailoring maybe.
There are hard ways and less hard ways to do that.
Natural selection would be the hard way, and I doubt we could be adapted in that way in any reasonable amount of time.
Genetic engineering would be another way
A third way might be some sort of symbiotic relationship with another biological life form or articificial organism that could metabolize CO2 at a sufficiently fast rate. You still have to deal with climate and weather issues I suppose.
Enterprise is by no means perfect and I won't try to defend it in general. I'd say I enjoy it more than Voyager but less than TOS, TNG, and DS9. But I have to say the end of this last season did get a lot more interesting. And there have been plenty of episodes that I really liked.
I wouldn't say it lacks imagination. In any event, whether Enterprise does or does not lack imagination or whether I am willing to defend it doesn't have much impact on whether the cretin I was accusing of no imagination has any.
So I accuse YOU of faulty logic...
The point still stands. How many workers have been living in Saudi Arabia? How many have been abducted and killed by terrorists?
/. would unintersting rehash of other drivel like yours be modded insightful.
There's no false dichotomy in my argument. My point is that ANYWHERE YOU GO YOU CAN DIE. A lot of people don't like to deal with that fact.
There are plenty of criminals out there that will kill you without a second thought. There are plenty of situations you can get it in which there is no malicious agent but in which you can still die.
I'm just trying to inject a little clear thinking into the discussion here. Your "Go someplace where lots of people who don't like you want to kill you and can recognize you easily..." hmm... other than the "lots of people" I think any major city could satisfy that description. I'm sure there are plenty of major cities (New York, LA, etc.) where I could go and I could be easily recognized as a Mark and could be robbed and killed.
So then you have to quantify "lots of people." Can you? What's the ratio of the population of Saudi Arabian inhabitants that are murderous thugs out to kill Americans vs. those that are either indifferent or friendly or just don't like killing folks?
Only on
TNG was great. It concentrated mostly on ethics and morality stuff.
DS9 was much more interesting to me. Because they stay in place, there is a chance for political tensions to develop. Makes things a lot more interesting being able to fully explore relationships between ST cultures. In many ways it was the best trek for my tastes.
Voyager sucked. Cheese factor over the top even for trek.
Enterprise: let me explain this to you since you seem to find it so hard to understand: with time travel involved which is THE BASIS OF THE SERIES, you can't really have a fucked up timeline. There will be changes to it, but in the end I'm sure the timeline will be pretty much as we'd expect at the end of the show. Some things may happen earlier/later, but in general it will all work out. You and the other 5 guys that spout this on Slashdot every day are simply wrong.
I'm tired of you folks saying they should pack it in. You're wrong, there are plenty of us that still enjoy trek. If you can find any way to produce sci fi that doesn't cost money and require marketing, lay it out there for us. With your limited imagination though, I doubt you could come up with much.
You can die anywhere you are at any time for any number of reasons. Like that Northen Exposure episode where the satellite falls on the guy... What's your likelihood of being abducted by terrorists in Saudi Arabia? Not very high. Even if you are there. Certainly not relative to any other of a number of ways you could die.
You can lock yourself up in your house if you want to. It just depends on how you want to live.
If you are really concerned about your life being out of control and in the hands of terrorists, just get fitted with one of those poison teeth. Then at least you can save yourself from suffering while you die.
Myself, I don't spend any time worrying about it.
Hrm...
QEMU is more what I mean by emulator.
Want to run Windows 95 applications? Run them under Windows 95 in QEMU, or VmWare, or maybe VirtualPC.
Given the project's momentum, within 1 year QEMU will be as good as VmWare in OS compatibility. It will be Free in all possible ways.
Crossover Office version of WINE works very well. With the abandonment of Win32 the API will be anything but a moving target.
I'm just saying that you can have as much backward compatibility as you like pretty much for free. Just quarantine those old apps off into their little sandbox subsystem.
What you don't want to do is keep growing the old API till its horrifyingly crufty and creaking under its own weight as Win32 is.
Interested in helping me patent this new-fangled technology I'm working on? I call it an "emulator." It lets you "emulate" your old operating systems with their APIs and dependent applications on new operating systems with different APIs.
I think it's really going to take off.
That solution will nail all of these problems. For those folks that want to run a bit faster there's another idea of mine called the "Compatibility Subsystem."
Yes, but... No one would write anything for an 8-bit machine that took 20 minutes to compile. Even with clunky floppies as mass storage I can't remember anything that took more than a minute or two if that.
And how much time do you get if you actually use it? Who cares how long it will sleep...
Until battery life is over 10 hours I am sticking with my 8-bit laptops... which get on the order of 20 hours of normal use (months of sleep if you care about that)
Model 100/102, Cambridge Z88, Amstrad NC100/200, NEC 8500/Starlet...
Hopefully this new technology will enable portable PCs with no hard drive... that will revolutionize our expectations for portable computers in battery life, ruggedness, "instant on", etc.
Yeah.
It brings about the possibility that modern laptops might finally be able to become truly portable and therefore compete with the 8-bit laptops (model 100/102/200, z88, amstrad nc100/200, NEC 8500, Starlet, etc.) from a couple decades ago... instant on, 20 hours battery life, run on alkalines, more rugged, etc.
You didn't say why you are recording onto CD...
Why not just buy extra flash cards, enough so that you don't fill them up completely between cafes.
Then use a wireless PDA with flash reader to upload in the cafe, but if you're lucky the will already have a flash reader.
-- John.
Ok, I'll bite...
How do you figure that a dynamic translator like QEMU is bounded to 1/3 the speed of the host processor? If you are dynamically translating code, you could theoretically get 100% efficiency after the initial translation hit. And if you load pre-translated code you can close the gap by a lot. Few people would count load time anyway.
The only place there is a ceiling is on the guest OS dynamically generating code, in which case you have to emulate. But I imagine there are few places in most OS's of note that do dynamic code generation and those could be detected and handled as special cases and you wouldn't have to invalidate the cache.
Imagine the best dynamic translator in the world is an assembly language programmer. I take a disassembly in from CPU1 and port that assembly code to CPU2. Is my final program on CPU2 bounded to 1/3 the efficiency of the program on
CPU1?
#1 reason RPN is good: no one asks to borrow your calculator.
That first line was a little over the top, but I was emulating the Ferengi, and they are nothing if not over the top when it comes to profit.
There is a kernel of truth though... you have to admit that there are plenty of beancounters stupid enough to think that they can magically switch without a *long* transition period (years) when moving to an outsourced engineering model when your business culture is an on-staff engineering team.
It happens over and over. When people say "I kind of feel bad charging so much money for such simple work after they laid me off" or "why should I help them, they're jerks, they laid me off" I say, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're getting paid for doing work you would have been doing anyway just for a lot less money if you hadn't been laid off. They made the bad decision. You make the profit.
Most people are stupid. Exploit them.
That should be a rule of acquisition. Being laid off is often an opportunity to make contractor $$$'s.
Just remember... it's always about money. No job lasts forever. No one owes you a job. Don't take it personally.
The only thing one can take heart in is that the best of us will always be in demand. (corollary to that is the best of us constantly update their skills)
I read the license the same way: you must release the code if you distribute binaries. Just like the GPL...
Actually looked around and there was also model 102, and the WP2/ WP3 that had similar ability to run off AA batteries, long battery life and low weight.
Looks like you can buy refurbed WP2 or 3... seems like a good way to go. Those companies you listed are charging *way* too much for what today is an appropriate application for a microcontroller and a few cheap ICs.
http://www.8bit-micro.com/wp2wp3.htm
I have seen some writers who like using the model 100/200 TRS-80. They are antiques (and unfortunately for the buyer, somewhat collectible), but they have really good battery life and an extraordinary keyboard.
You can find some on Ebay.
If you have 'enough capital' you can just double down on your losses... you'll always come out ahead... eventually. You don't even need even odds.
;-)
Gets expensive kinda fast though