When Starlog gets their index page set up, I'll be able to look for that issue -- maybe it was May of '77 -- that had Star Wars as its cover feature -- it's the one with the X-Wing being strafed and the logo in purple. I bought that at a supermarket way back when I was fifteen, just a couple of weeks before the movie came out.
In it, Lucas describes his long-simmering idea for an action story that drew inspiration from the Saturday morning serials (science fiction and Western genres both) of his own youth. I didn't read about this mythology masturbation until a whole lot later -- well after the trilogy was finished, IIRC, and after Joseph Campbell became a household name thanks to the Bill Moyers interviews on PBS.
Eye movement too, or just head movement?
on
When Looks Can Kill
·
· Score: 2
Somebody commented to me that there was a system in development that would actually read the movement of the pilot's eyeballs to determine more precisely where he was looking -- anybody know anything about this?
...from a few years ago represented themselves as trying to develop this technology, although the article seemed to imply that the real purpose of the enterprise was to skin the investors. I presume this wasn't Whereify, because this sounds reassuringly on the up-and-up. Anybody remember that article?
One criticism I have of the trackballs I've used over the years is this: I'd really like a LARGE ball to use for more precise movement. It would have to be fairly lightweight, though. A bowling-ball-sized sphere is what I'd like, but certainly not one weighing several kilos.
A trackball that large would probably necessitate a pretty robust wrist/upper arm rest, too. It's hard to imagine some ergonomic hand-only platform like a Logitech combined with a really big sphere.
Accomodating troops' nutritional needs and providing a semblance of gastronomic comfort has been a problem even further back than the C rations in Vietnam. For example, here is a site describing the K rations used in the field.
For what it's worth, some Army cooks were able to work wonders with not much more than this kind of stuff. Dad, an Ordnance Corps guy, one day came across an infantry outfit in a not-all-that-rear area that was getting fed from a field kitchen that definitely had its act together -- Dad was awed that the cooks had even made soup and baked some fresh bread. It had to have been the first real meal these dogfaces had eaten since they'd gone into the line in France.
...even though the article didn't, it's worth noting that most of the code in existence today is COBOL, and legacy COBOL code is, as far as I know, always driven by JCL, the Original Script Language From Heck.
Having had to document JCL standards at two customer sites, I learned to feel sorry for the programmers. Both COBOL and JCL have formatting and syntax rules that are based on the usage of these 80-column cards, and heaven help you if you put in an extra space where the JCL interpreter wasn't expecting one; you'll be tearing your hair out figuring out what went wrong with an otherwise perfectly valid JCL expression. Rotsa ruck, buddy.
Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) and the animated character Jar Jar Binks are both members of the Senate, representing their respective planets, while... [emphasis mine]
I thought Jar Jar was fine for comic relief, but I can't buy him as an Imperial Senator. But then, I've found Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to be a succession of entertaining US Presidents, so anything's possible.
The first thing we technical writers learn in our profession is Consider Your Audience.
Imagine the reaction of the admin assistant in HR who sees the boilerplate message RMS advocates. Your average office drone doesn't know or care about the file formats or the merits of open software; s/he wants to get work done, period. If I were a Windows-accustomed office user and I saw that kind of diatribe in an email, my eyes would cross as my finger caressed the Del key. Others' admonitions about writing a short-to-the-point message (with instructions) about.RTF suffice, so I won't elaborate here.
However, for creating and sending, I'd add: If the formatting is kept sufficiently simple, StarOffice works just fine for creating.DOC files, thankyouverymuch. If your resume looks funny in Word format, most of the time it's because you tried to get a little too creative with the formatting.
Yeah, a lunar strike would be a fantastic show, but if we're talking a terrestrial one, how about the South Pole? Wouldn't the polar location mean a little bit less fallout than in a more temperate zone? And wouldn't all that ice act to some degree as a thermal sink to buffer some of the liberated kinetic energy from the strike? (Which, I'm sure, means that ocean levels might rise six inches for a year or so)
Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!
That beak doesn't have to open all that far if it can pull its prey apart first. ISTR reading some reference to a "sea monster" that was likely an Architeuthis dux trying to tear a rudder off a World War I troopship.
Possibly because it's true. I'm not trying to sound snarky here; I'm just pointing out that most companies that create and sell software are seeking a profit -- at the end of the day, they want to have some money left over after payroll and other overhead.
...as if companies are complete [sic] independent of people, a force all unto themselves.
With large companies, the ones that have multiple owners through publically traded stock, that's especially noticeable. Smaller companies might be a single person or a small group of people, but large companies -- big enough to have a board of directors and all that -- have responsibilities divided finely enough that they can seem literally and figuratively inhuman and amoral. A corporation's officers have one overarching responsibility -- a Prime Directive, if you will -- which is to maximize the stockholders' (owners') return on the money they've invested through their purchases of stock.
Just because the group of people is acting as a "company" does not resolve them of moral and ethical responsibilities.
True, but as we've seen with the company in question and many others besides, there's a huge gulf between what is legal vs. what's "moral and ethical" and that gulf is subjective.
I'm thinking of giving myself the gift of Harpoon 97 online for Xmas.
Harpoon is a series of naval-warfare simulation "games." I wasn't Navy, but ever since I read Tom Clancy's novel The Hunt for Red October, which the original Harpoon wargame was used to help develop, I've been fascinated at the idea of simulating a modern naval battle via software -- not just the surface-warfare element, but the air, submarine, and amphibious ones too.
My fondest dream is that either a bunch of people develop a GNU version, or that the code someday winds up placed in the public domain and naval-warfare-enthusiast geeks seize upon it, port it to the *x platforms, and extend it further. I fancy a small group naval-warfare geeks gaming over the 'net with this to win the Battle of Midway for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Lists like these lack the benefit of hindsight
on
Inventions of 2001
·
· Score: 2
...well, make that sufficient hindsight. Who knew what a big deal the stirrup and the interrupted-screw breech were going to be in military technology? More to the point, when Linus did his thing with a roll-yer-own Unix clone kernel ten years ago, how many people knew what a big deal it was going to be?
The great thing about the advent of the Web is it's going to more easily (I hope) let us track these kinds of lists for reference later, when the historians research the history of technology. But for now, it's hard to look at recent developments and say which ones are going to stick around, and which of those are going to be really influential, this close in time to their inception. Only sufficient passage of time will reveal which ones were (are) important.
Worse, from an ethical point of view, than being "evil," they're amoral. Their business decisions arise from the unified goal of maximizing their return on their stockholders' investment. Period. I argue that this motivation, especially in the context of responsibility distributed and diluted over such a large organization as Microsoft, tends to blind the company to the moral and ethical contexts of the issues at hand.
Their software looks and works actually pretty good, except for their obvious brain damage in security.
I think shortcomings in software are inevitable and forgivable, but it's their response (or sometimes the lack of it) that's often the problem. Coming from the tech-writing side of things, I'd say the infamous "Master Document" feature in Word is the most glaring example I can think of -- it's existed since Word 6 and has yet to be fixed satisfactorily. It's treacherous: When it works, it's wonderful to have a "master" document act as a container for constituent documents. But occasionally, inexplicably, unpredictably, unrecoverably and unforgiveably, a master document corrupts itself and all the documents contained within it, rendering a writer's work useless. Savvy technical writers know this "feature" and avoid it, but every once in a while an unwarned (I hate to say "ignorant") writer innocently loses an entire manual to this dragon.
Maybe this is unhealthy nostalgia on my part, but remember the Freedows operating system? Apart from at least one personality involved, it sounded like an interesting idea. I wonder if it's still percolating in somebody's basement or if it'll ever get dusted off and looked at afresh. The Alliance OS project was going to use the same cache-kernel technology, but it apparently hasn't budged either.
I'm enthused to see that this has a tablet form factor -- I'd rather tuck something under my arm or slip it into my shoulder pad if it means a screen big enough to comfortably read (and if not yet, eventually write on).
Not too long ago, a fellow Trekker and I discussed the prospect of a series based 150 years BTOS (before The Original Series), and we we both dicouraged when we saw our first view of the NX-01 -- clearly much more advanced-looking than even the post-refit NCC-1701 of Star Trek -- The Motion Picture.
I vaguely recall seeing now and again in a series espisode or movie some passing references to earlier, pre-Constitution-class Enterprises, all the way back to the USN aircraft carrier and beyond. Some of those designs, while not terribly inspiring visually, still conveyed a sense of foraying into the unfamiliar.
Coming from an earlier, less technologically sophisticated era, the ship should have looked less rather than more streamlined and fluid, even a bit clunky, conveying visually the idea of less advanced starship design in the earlier era. The production-design people have gotten this basic concept completely backwards. To make an analogy in terms of US naval warships, it's as if somebody wanted to make a movie about the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, but lacking any pre-World-War-II battleships because they'd all been sunk at Pearl Harbor or scrapped at the end of the war, the movie's producers used an ultramodern Aegis guided-missile cruiser as a stand-in and hoped nobody would notice or care.
By violating the canon, the series' producers have made a conscious fundamental goof with the biggest visual element of the series, presumably just to have some cooler eye candy. Maybe they'll suck in a younger generation of viewers this way, but to my mind, they've forgotten to "dance with them that brung'em," as we used to put it in Texas. And that kind of egregiously flawed decision making on such a basic, early choice gives me little reason to expect the other aspects of the series to be any better than a rehash of other Star Trekism.
...the US military has been characterized by one quality. They are almost completely unpredictable.
But don't just take a US history teacher's word for it. Here's more expert opinion:
"The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis." -- from a postwar debriefing of a German general
"One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine... -- From a Soviet junior lieutenant's notebook
Finally, a personal note: My late father earned a commendation from his artillery battery commander after responding to a shortage of howitzer firing pins (the replacement firing pins had been sent to the bottom by a U-boat). Having worked as a civilian tool-and-die maker manufacturing howitzers at Picatinny Arsenal prior to being conscripted in '43, Dad simply and expediently went to the nearest intact machine shop he could find, broke in, found the right kind of stock, and was busily turning out firing pins on a machine lathe when the gendarmes arrested him -- and a few hours later, the battery commander sent MPs to recover him.
Slashdot Mirror
When Starlog gets their index page set up, I'll be able to look for that issue -- maybe it was May of '77 -- that had Star Wars as its cover feature -- it's the one with the X-Wing being strafed and the logo in purple. I bought that at a supermarket way back when I was fifteen, just a couple of weeks before the movie came out.
In it, Lucas describes his long-simmering idea for an action story that drew inspiration from the Saturday morning serials (science fiction and Western genres both) of his own youth. I didn't read about this mythology masturbation until a whole lot later -- well after the trilogy was finished, IIRC, and after Joseph Campbell became a household name thanks to the Bill Moyers interviews on PBS.
Somebody commented to me that there was a system in development that would actually read the movement of the pilot's eyeballs to determine more precisely where he was looking -- anybody know anything about this?
...from a few years ago represented themselves as trying to develop this technology, although the article seemed to imply that the real purpose of the enterprise was to skin the investors. I presume this wasn't Whereify, because this sounds reassuringly on the up-and-up. Anybody remember that article?
One criticism I have of the trackballs I've used over the years is this: I'd really like a LARGE ball to use for more precise movement. It would have to be fairly lightweight, though. A bowling-ball-sized sphere is what I'd like, but certainly not one weighing several kilos.
A trackball that large would probably necessitate a pretty robust wrist/upper arm rest, too. It's hard to imagine some ergonomic hand-only platform like a Logitech combined with a really big sphere.
Naaaah. She's hip to "Deutschland."
Accomodating troops' nutritional needs and providing a semblance of gastronomic comfort has been a problem even further back than the C rations in Vietnam. For example, here is a site describing the K rations used in the field.
For what it's worth, some Army cooks were able to work wonders with not much more than this kind of stuff. Dad, an Ordnance Corps guy, one day came across an infantry outfit in a not-all-that-rear area that was getting fed from a field kitchen that definitely had its act together -- Dad was awed that the cooks had even made soup and baked some fresh bread. It had to have been the first real meal these dogfaces had eaten since they'd gone into the line in France.
if somebody knows about domain-name origins: Why is South Africa .za? My wife asked last nite.
...even though the article didn't, it's worth noting that most of the code in existence today is COBOL, and legacy COBOL code is, as far as I know, always driven by JCL, the Original Script Language From Heck.
Having had to document JCL standards at two customer sites, I learned to feel sorry for the programmers. Both COBOL and JCL have formatting and syntax rules that are based on the usage of these 80-column cards, and heaven help you if you put in an extra space where the JCL interpreter wasn't expecting one; you'll be tearing your hair out figuring out what went wrong with an otherwise perfectly valid JCL expression. Rotsa ruck, buddy.
Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) and the animated character Jar Jar Binks are both members of the Senate, representing their respective planets, while... [emphasis mine]
I thought Jar Jar was fine for comic relief, but I can't buy him as an Imperial Senator. But then, I've found Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to be a succession of entertaining US Presidents, so anything's possible.
...will you get a break on an AOL subscription?
The first thing we technical writers learn in our profession is Consider Your Audience.
.RTF suffice, so I won't elaborate here.
.DOC files, thankyouverymuch. If your resume looks funny in Word format, most of the time it's because you tried to get a little too creative with the formatting.
Imagine the reaction of the admin assistant in HR who sees the boilerplate message RMS advocates. Your average office drone doesn't know or care about the file formats or the merits of open software; s/he wants to get work done, period. If I were a Windows-accustomed office user and I saw that kind of diatribe in an email, my eyes would cross as my finger caressed the Del key. Others' admonitions about writing a short-to-the-point message (with instructions) about
However, for creating and sending, I'd add: If the formatting is kept sufficiently simple, StarOffice works just fine for creating
Yeah, a lunar strike would be a fantastic show, but if we're talking a terrestrial one, how about the South Pole? Wouldn't the polar location mean a little bit less fallout than in a more temperate zone? And wouldn't all that ice act to some degree as a thermal sink to buffer some of the liberated kinetic energy from the strike? (Which, I'm sure, means that ocean levels might rise six inches for a year or so)
Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!
That beak doesn't have to open all that far if it can pull its prey apart first. ISTR reading some reference to a "sea monster" that was likely an Architeuthis dux trying to tear a rudder off a World War I troopship.
Why is it that so many people believe...
...as if companies are complete [sic] independent of people, a force all unto themselves.
Possibly because it's true. I'm not trying to sound snarky here; I'm just pointing out that most companies that create and sell software are seeking a profit -- at the end of the day, they want to have some money left over after payroll and other overhead.
With large companies, the ones that have multiple owners through publically traded stock, that's especially noticeable. Smaller companies might be a single person or a small group of people, but large companies -- big enough to have a board of directors and all that -- have responsibilities divided finely enough that they can seem literally and figuratively inhuman and amoral. A corporation's officers have one overarching responsibility -- a Prime Directive, if you will -- which is to maximize the stockholders' (owners') return on the money they've invested through their purchases of stock.
Just because the group of people is acting as a "company" does not resolve them of moral and ethical responsibilities.
True, but as we've seen with the company in question and many others besides, there's a huge gulf between what is legal vs. what's "moral and ethical" and that gulf is subjective.
I'm thinking of giving myself the gift of Harpoon 97 online for Xmas.
Harpoon is a series of naval-warfare simulation "games." I wasn't Navy, but ever since I read Tom Clancy's novel The Hunt for Red October, which the original Harpoon wargame was used to help develop, I've been fascinated at the idea of simulating a modern naval battle via software -- not just the surface-warfare element, but the air, submarine, and amphibious ones too.
My fondest dream is that either a bunch of people develop a GNU version, or that the code someday winds up placed in the public domain and naval-warfare-enthusiast geeks seize upon it, port it to the *x platforms, and extend it further. I fancy a small group naval-warfare geeks gaming over the 'net with this to win the Battle of Midway for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
...well, make that sufficient hindsight. Who knew what a big deal the stirrup and the interrupted-screw breech were going to be in military technology? More to the point, when Linus did his thing with a roll-yer-own Unix clone kernel ten years ago, how many people knew what a big deal it was going to be?
The great thing about the advent of the Web is it's going to more easily (I hope) let us track these kinds of lists for reference later, when the historians research the history of technology. But for now, it's hard to look at recent developments and say which ones are going to stick around, and which of those are going to be really influential, this close in time to their inception. Only sufficient passage of time will reveal which ones were (are) important.
.inc, .llc, .ltd, .gmbh (if they allow more than three bytes), .sa, and so on?
.npo for non-profit organizations.
And maybe
...sniff...sob...
The Modern Language Association (MLA) announces its new desktop operating system...
Hmmmm....to some people, the whole Ayn Rand thing practically is a religion, so I guess that would make her works "religious texts" of a sort.
Any road, it's a rather apt quote.
Microsoft is of course not evil itself.
Worse, from an ethical point of view, than being "evil," they're amoral. Their business decisions arise from the unified goal of maximizing their return on their stockholders' investment. Period. I argue that this motivation, especially in the context of responsibility distributed and diluted over such a large organization as Microsoft, tends to blind the company to the moral and ethical contexts of the issues at hand.
Their software looks and works actually pretty good, except for their obvious brain damage in security.
I think shortcomings in software are inevitable and forgivable, but it's their response (or sometimes the lack of it) that's often the problem. Coming from the tech-writing side of things, I'd say the infamous "Master Document" feature in Word is the most glaring example I can think of -- it's existed since Word 6 and has yet to be fixed satisfactorily. It's treacherous: When it works, it's wonderful to have a "master" document act as a container for constituent documents. But occasionally, inexplicably, unpredictably, unrecoverably and unforgiveably, a master document corrupts itself and all the documents contained within it, rendering a writer's work useless. Savvy technical writers know this "feature" and avoid it, but every once in a while an unwarned (I hate to say "ignorant") writer innocently loses an entire manual to this dragon.
Surely Microsoft could do better.
Maybe this is unhealthy nostalgia on my part, but remember the Freedows operating system? Apart from at least one personality involved, it sounded like an interesting idea. I wonder if it's still percolating in somebody's basement or if it'll ever get dusted off and looked at afresh. The Alliance OS project was going to use the same cache-kernel technology, but it apparently hasn't budged either.
...How about a LaunchPad?
Or maybe a LilyPad?
I'm enthused to see that this has a tablet form factor -- I'd rather tuck something under my arm or slip it into my shoulder pad if it means a screen big enough to comfortably read (and if not yet, eventually write on).
Not too long ago, a fellow Trekker and I discussed the prospect of a series based 150 years BTOS (before The Original Series), and we we both dicouraged when we saw our first view of the NX-01 -- clearly much more advanced-looking than even the post-refit NCC-1701 of Star Trek -- The Motion Picture.
I vaguely recall seeing now and again in a series espisode or movie some passing references to earlier, pre-Constitution-class Enterprises, all the way back to the USN aircraft carrier and beyond. Some of those designs, while not terribly inspiring visually, still conveyed a sense of foraying into the unfamiliar.
Coming from an earlier, less technologically sophisticated era, the ship should have looked less rather than more streamlined and fluid, even a bit clunky, conveying visually the idea of less advanced starship design in the earlier era. The production-design people have gotten this basic concept completely backwards. To make an analogy in terms of US naval warships, it's as if somebody wanted to make a movie about the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, but lacking any pre-World-War-II battleships because they'd all been sunk at Pearl Harbor or scrapped at the end of the war, the movie's producers used an ultramodern Aegis guided-missile cruiser as a stand-in and hoped nobody would notice or care.
By violating the canon, the series' producers have made a conscious fundamental goof with the biggest visual element of the series, presumably just to have some cooler eye candy. Maybe they'll suck in a younger generation of viewers this way, but to my mind, they've forgotten to "dance with them that brung'em," as we used to put it in Texas. And that kind of egregiously flawed decision making on such a basic, early choice gives me little reason to expect the other aspects of the series to be any better than a rehash of other Star Trekism.
...the US military has been characterized by one quality. They are almost completely unpredictable.
But don't just take a US history teacher's word for it. Here's more expert opinion:
"The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis." -- from a postwar debriefing of a German general
"One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine... -- From a Soviet junior lieutenant's notebook
Finally, a personal note: My late father earned a commendation from his artillery battery commander after responding to a shortage of howitzer firing pins (the replacement firing pins had been sent to the bottom by a U-boat). Having worked as a civilian tool-and-die maker manufacturing howitzers at Picatinny Arsenal prior to being conscripted in '43, Dad simply and expediently went to the nearest intact machine shop he could find, broke in, found the right kind of stock, and was busily turning out firing pins on a machine lathe when the gendarmes arrested him -- and a few hours later, the battery commander sent MPs to recover him.