I just hope the Archos legal dept. isn't friends with the people over at Blizzard, or they might just pull out that DMCA whore and trick it out. I smell another bnetd.
I'm not much for Final Fantasy storylines, sometimes, but if you want to see INCREDIBLE CG, that movie is a prime example. First time I saw it, I was actually able to suspend belief for short periods of time, and imagine that the characters were actual, human, actors. (Except when they started talking - they still need to get lip synching right.)
But the creators of FF:Spirits mentioned that they used airbrushing to add wrinkles and other aging features to their characters (to add realism to them). If you haven't seen it, you should check it out.
If you fool around with the DVD Edition of Made (by Jon Favreau of Swingers fame), you'll see an example of in-DVD editing.
You're allowed to 'edit' a few scenes. The tone and feel of one scene in particular, the 'pottery painting' scene, can be completely changed by your editing. Basically, the DVD splices the scene up into three or four shots, and gives you three or four options for each of these shots. These shots include the one used in the movie and some that were left on the cutting room floor. Once you've finished selecting your shots, the DVD shows you your completed splice. Granted, the splice is a little rough on the edges, but, man, what a cool-ass feature.
The editing feature not only gives you an insight into what an editor's job is like (having such control over the tone of a scene is really amazing), its just a fun toy. It also neatly showcases the incredible power of DVD.
If you haven't rented it, the DVD is worth a rent - packed full of special features, and just a good movie to boot. Highly recommended.
I wasn't clear. The reason I think it is bad for HK to set a precendent by making these restrictions is that they completely remove the human interaction.
All that would be necessary is to overwrite the SmartCard with alternate biometric data. For example, I want to get into HK, but for various reasons, I cannot. (IE, I'm a known international terrorist or something.) I go to an offshore SmartCard "reprogramming service" which falsifies the SmartCard of an existing HKer by overprinting their biometric data with my own.
I then use this falsified smart card at the kiosk and zoom on through, as though I were a HK citizen.
That is why I'm afraid of this precedent. Because these cards are, by their very nature, insecure. Human/human interaction is still more secure.
From the CNN article: If the card is stolen, officials say the data on the chip can't be easily retrieved. This is probably not true. Check out:
Tamperproofing of Chip Card(s) - abstract: There are two ways of attacking smartcards - destructive reverse engineering of the silicon circuit (including the contents of ROM), and discovering the memory contents by other means; a well equipped laboratory can do both. Persistent amateurs have often managed the latter, and may shortly be able to do the former as well.
Tamper Resistance - a Cautionary Note - abstract: An increasing number of systems, from pay-TV to electronic purses, rely on the tamper resistance of smartcards and other security processors. We describe a number of attacks on such systems - some old, some new and some that are simply little known outside the chip testing community. We conclude that trusting tamper resistance is problematic; smartcards are broken routinely, and even a device that was described by a government signals agency as `the most secure processor generally available' turns out to be vulnerable. Designers of secure systems should consider the consequences with care.
With any cryptographic system, it all comes down to one concept: time. With enough time and resources, these cards CAN be broken, overwritten, you name it. We have seen ubiquitous evidence that even the strongest cryptography can be broken in time. HK is planning on using these SmartCards as digital passports. "Smart card holders will speed through Hong Kong immigration, using self-service kiosks that match digital biometric data on the card against the cardholder's fingerprint image read by a scanner."
The scariest part, for me, is that HK is setting a precedent. And it won't take long for other countries to jump on the bandwagon.
I worked for a famous defense contractor located in Fort Worth, TX. My department was responsible for writing requirements for software that was installed on fighter aircraft.
When using a requirements-based system (where you write requirements for software and then the software is written from the requirements), there are multiple checkpoints. First, the requirements document for the software must meet or pass certain criteria. Second, the software must meet or pass the criteria put forth by the requirements document. Third, the software is rigorously tested.
Now, in fighter planes, the software must be incredibly robust - you don't want planes falling out of the sky - and in defense projects, bureaucracy tends to inflate the whole process.
That being said, requirements are an excellent way to control the quality of software, or an installed computer system.
And this is important! We all remember the movie Hackers, in which the Davinci virus was going to cause a bunch of oil tankers to tip over into the ocean. And we all know how closely that movie parallels reality.
Just for fun... C is a hoax?
on
C
·
· Score: 5, Funny
An old april-fools joke, this snippet will give you a good chuckle at the expense of C:
"We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
In case you don't know what they're talking about
on
C
·
· Score: 1
When people talk about "K&R" as a book, they're referring specifically to "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (amazon), which is, without a doubt, the best reference available for C, and well worth the $40 its gonna cost ya.
Mind you, its probably not the best book to learn C, but once you have the basics, this book will become your bible. I keep a softbound copy at home, and a nice hardback version I found at a used bookstore at work. Absolutely indispensible.
Mm, there are benefits to broadband other than those you list (and beyond fast speed, as other commenters have noted).
When you talk about "always-on access," you may be forgetting that it works both ways. With a broadband connection, DNS, and dirt-cheap domain name registration, any somewhat-geek can install Apache and serve homepages right from their home computer. I'm certainly doing it.
I've taken this a step further. I have a P200 "used to be mom's computer" running console debian, apache, samba, and IP-MASQ. Samba allows me to mount up the 4 other computers in my house (most of which are Windoze). Using a domain name, I can quickly and easily get access to all the files on all the computers on my network. No muss, no fuss, no IPs to remember. Talk about convenience!
You simply couldn't utilize a dial-up connection for these purposes. For me, broadband is quickly dissolving the lines between my computer and anyone else's. I pull up a browser, hook into my VNC, and I'm working off of my own computer. Or, I download files and use local apps while I'm at school, then shoot it back up to my computers at home when I'm done.
Not to mention all the crazy crap that my roommate downloads every day through Morpheus.
For all the things I'm now using Broadband for, could I go back to Dial-up? I'd rather take a sharp stick in the eye than go back to carting floppies around. But don't tell my cable
company I'm violating pretty much every
rule they have in their little TOS.
Reading this article (and others), I find that M$'s repeated and only justification of their business practices is that changing them now would "undermine its Windows operating system" (from the article).
In other words, to circumvent fairness laws, produce a product that becomes widely distributed. Hopefully, make it so that businesses depend on your product to do their daily work. But make your product somewhat broken. Not broken enough to be unused, just broken enough to be a nuisance. Offer no free support or upgrades. (Call your product Windows.)
Now that you have people using your buggy crap, release an "update" of said software (all the while charging people for this update), and do something illegal with the software. For the sake of argument, lets say you do something ridiculous like integrate your web browser in an attempt to crush the competition's web browsers. (Because your browser never could compete on a level playing field.)
Then, when people try to raise a stink, defiantly state "what are you going to do? Kill Windows? You can't do that! People need Windows!"
February 28, 2002
A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . ..
By JOHN MARKOFF
STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.
There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends.
To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.
Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.
Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. "It set off a chain of events that created companies and led to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be," he said.
It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.
But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.
Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original computer hackers.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970's," said one of the game's creators, Alan Kotok. "I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle."
Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and one joined the secretive National Security Agency.
Their early creation is now a museum piece -- literally -- reflecting the software principles and programming culture of its era.
Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode- ray display screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a small group of software designers.
Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after working hours.
Spacewar was the original "twitch" game, requiring lightning reflexes. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen. Before long a "hyperspace" option was added so that a player could make his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding certain death.
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. "They were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world," he recalled. "Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me."
In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why better science fiction movies weren't being made.
Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called "expensive planetarium," an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed the night sky over Cambridge.
Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr. Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.
Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a battle between two spaceships.
Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.
"One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was engaging," said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.
After agreeing to be the project's lead programmer, Mr. Russell said he procrastinated until Mr. Kotok drove to Digital Equipment and returned with a paper tape containing necessary math subroutines. Mr. Russell set to work by entering code on a Flexowriter, a typewriter device that translated commands into holes punched in paper tape.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was that Spacewar worked at all. The processor for the PDP-1 minicomputer ran at about 100,000 instructions per second, snail-like in comparison with the speed of today's fastest microprocessors, which exceed two billion instructions per second.
Moreover, the computer, which was built from discrete transistors, had to make the most of about nine kilobytes of random access memory, unfathomably little compared with the RAM of today's desktop machines, which can boast as much as one gigabyte -- a million kilobytes.
"Each new game tends to push the state of the art," said Richard F. Rashid, who heads research at Microsoft. "They stretch the machine as far as you can stretch it."
Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version on another system without looking at the source code," Mr. Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to found the Atari Corporation. He was first seized by the idea of commercializing video game technology when he came across a version of Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space, which was a commercial flop. Mr. Bushnell kept at it, though, and soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate who with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck, installed Galaxy Game, a coin- operated version of Spacewar, in Stanford's student union several months before Mr. Bushnell introduced Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years, allowing Mr. Pitts to pay back the $60,000 he had invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, Calif.
For his part, Mr. Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
--
NOTE: This article remains the property of the New York Times. I'm posting it here because forcing people to do a free-register to read your content is asinine.
Story on CNN, link to informative site + movie
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 1
CNN is running pretty much the same story. One of the nice things? "Designers hope that the experience will cost about as much as an ordinary bus journey, or even less if passengers are prepared to share their pods."
I sure wouldn't mind cheap, available transportation. And if they're letting disabled people and bikes on board (according to the story, they are), they probably won't mind my rollerblades too much.
Rollerblades/Bike + Affordable, convenient Public Transportation = many people won't need cars. The only real problem with the system is the need to put in rails.
This website has details of the track, and a video of the car running on the track. The one really good picture on the site has a guy's fingertip in it.:P Still worth a look.
I think that's a sound theory, the only problem is that, if you look at the number of posts which are never accepted (how many times have you tried?), it would be a true art-form to properly/.-snipe. (That is, create a good enough story to garner/. attention.)
So, it is an interesting idea, but in reality, it would be too time-intensive to tailor a story in the hopes that it will be/.-posted, just to earn a couple of ad bucks.
Then again, some people will stop at nothing to make a friggin buck.
I was fascinated by this article, as I like to hear anyone's opinion and gather further fodder in my ongoing anti-M$ (et al.) quest.
But when article writers repeatedly use loaded words like "totalitarianism," which we as savvy minds comprehend to be the same as "virtual monopoly by way of market cornering," they are limiting their column to a small demographic (the savvy people listed above). It is equivalent to writing in some form of geek-code that only other geeks understand.
Basically, you limit the scope of your audience by your use of vocabulary. (IE, you will only reach other geeks by speaking in lingo.)
I'm just wondering who benefits from an article of this type - the nerds all know it, the non-nerds won't even understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just hope the Archos legal dept. isn't friends with the people over at Blizzard, or they might just pull out that DMCA whore and trick it out. I smell another bnetd.
Um, hello? Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?
I'm not much for Final Fantasy storylines, sometimes, but if you want to see INCREDIBLE CG, that movie is a prime example. First time I saw it, I was actually able to suspend belief for short periods of time, and imagine that the characters were actual, human, actors. (Except when they started talking - they still need to get lip synching right.)
But the creators of FF:Spirits mentioned that they used airbrushing to add wrinkles and other aging features to their characters (to add realism to them). If you haven't seen it, you should check it out.
If you fool around with the DVD Edition of Made (by Jon Favreau of Swingers fame), you'll see an example of in-DVD editing.
You're allowed to 'edit' a few scenes. The tone and feel of one scene in particular, the 'pottery painting' scene, can be completely changed by your editing. Basically, the DVD splices the scene up into three or four shots, and gives you three or four options for each of these shots. These shots include the one used in the movie and some that were left on the cutting room floor. Once you've finished selecting your shots, the DVD shows you your completed splice. Granted, the splice is a little rough on the edges, but, man, what a cool-ass feature.
The editing feature not only gives you an insight into what an editor's job is like (having such control over the tone of a scene is really amazing), its just a fun toy. It also neatly showcases the incredible power of DVD.
If you haven't rented it, the DVD is worth a rent - packed full of special features, and just a good movie to boot. Highly recommended.
I wasn't clear. The reason I think it is bad for HK to set a precendent by making these restrictions is that they completely remove the human interaction.
All that would be necessary is to overwrite the SmartCard with alternate biometric data. For example, I want to get into HK, but for various reasons, I cannot. (IE, I'm a known international terrorist or something.) I go to an offshore SmartCard "reprogramming service" which falsifies the SmartCard of an existing HKer by overprinting their biometric data with my own.
I then use this falsified smart card at the kiosk and zoom on through, as though I were a HK citizen.
That is why I'm afraid of this precedent. Because these cards are, by their very nature, insecure. Human/human interaction is still more secure.
From the CNN article: If the card is stolen, officials say the data on the chip can't be easily retrieved. This is probably not true. Check out:
Tamperproofing of Chip Card(s) - abstract: There are two ways of attacking smartcards - destructive reverse engineering of the silicon circuit (including the contents of ROM), and discovering the memory contents by other means; a well equipped laboratory can do both. Persistent amateurs have often managed the latter, and may shortly be able to do the former as well.
Tamper Resistance - a Cautionary Note - abstract: An increasing number of systems, from pay-TV to electronic purses, rely on the tamper resistance of smartcards and other security processors. We describe a number of attacks on such systems - some old, some new and some that are simply little known outside the chip testing community. We conclude that trusting tamper resistance is problematic; smartcards are broken routinely, and even a device that was described by a government signals agency as `the most secure processor generally available' turns out to be vulnerable. Designers of secure systems should consider the consequences with care.
With any cryptographic system, it all comes down to one concept: time. With enough time and resources, these cards CAN be broken, overwritten, you name it. We have seen ubiquitous evidence that even the strongest cryptography can be broken in time. HK is planning on using these SmartCards as digital passports. "Smart card holders will speed through Hong Kong immigration, using self-service kiosks that match digital biometric data on the card against the cardholder's fingerprint image read by a scanner."
The scariest part, for me, is that HK is setting a precedent. And it won't take long for other countries to jump on the bandwagon.
I worked for a famous defense contractor located in Fort Worth, TX. My department was responsible for writing requirements for software that was installed on fighter aircraft.
When using a requirements-based system (where you write requirements for software and then the software is written from the requirements), there are multiple checkpoints. First, the requirements document for the software must meet or pass certain criteria. Second, the software must meet or pass the criteria put forth by the requirements document. Third, the software is rigorously tested.
Now, in fighter planes, the software must be incredibly robust - you don't want planes falling out of the sky - and in defense projects, bureaucracy tends to inflate the whole process.
That being said, requirements are an excellent way to control the quality of software, or an installed computer system.
And this is important! We all remember the movie Hackers, in which the Davinci virus was going to cause a bunch of oil tankers to tip over into the ocean. And we all know how closely that movie parallels reality.
An old april-fools joke, this snippet will give you a good chuckle at the expense of C:
% 2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
"We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+*u++/8)
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension!"
Also check out shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages.
When people talk about "K&R" as a book, they're referring specifically to "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (amazon), which is, without a doubt, the best reference available for C, and well worth the $40 its gonna cost ya.
Mind you, its probably not the best book to learn C, but once you have the basics, this book will become your bible. I keep a softbound copy at home, and a nice hardback version I found at a used bookstore at work. Absolutely indispensible.
Mm, there are benefits to broadband other than those you list (and beyond fast speed, as other commenters have noted).
When you talk about "always-on access," you may be forgetting that it works both ways. With a broadband connection, DNS, and dirt-cheap domain name registration, any somewhat-geek can install Apache and serve homepages right from their home computer. I'm certainly doing it.
I've taken this a step further. I have a P200 "used to be mom's computer" running console debian, apache, samba, and IP-MASQ. Samba allows me to mount up the 4 other computers in my house (most of which are Windoze). Using a domain name, I can quickly and easily get access to all the files on all the computers on my network. No muss, no fuss, no IPs to remember. Talk about convenience!
You simply couldn't utilize a dial-up connection for these purposes. For me, broadband is quickly dissolving the lines between my computer and anyone else's. I pull up a browser, hook into my VNC, and I'm working off of my own computer. Or, I download files and use local apps while I'm at school, then shoot it back up to my computers at home when I'm done.
Not to mention all the crazy crap that my roommate downloads every day through Morpheus.
For all the things I'm now using Broadband for, could I go back to Dial-up? I'd rather take a sharp stick in the eye than go back to carting floppies around. But don't tell my cable company I'm violating pretty much every rule they have in their little TOS.
Curse you! Don't give M$ any ideas!
Hrm, not like anyone working for Microsoft reads Slashdot, if they did, they probably wouldn't work there for long...
"What are you going to do? Kill Windows?"
Reading this article (and others), I find that M$'s repeated and only justification of their business practices is that changing them now would "undermine its Windows operating system" (from the article).
In other words, to circumvent fairness laws, produce a product that becomes widely distributed. Hopefully, make it so that businesses depend on your product to do their daily work. But make your product somewhat broken. Not broken enough to be unused, just broken enough to be a nuisance. Offer no free support or upgrades. (Call your product Windows.)
Now that you have people using your buggy crap, release an "update" of said software (all the while charging people for this update), and do something illegal with the software. For the sake of argument, lets say you do something ridiculous like integrate your web browser in an attempt to crush the competition's web browsers. (Because your browser never could compete on a level playing field.)
Then, when people try to raise a stink, defiantly state "what are you going to do? Kill Windows? You can't do that! People need Windows!"
Microsoft is not seeking to justify anything.
February 28, 2002 .
A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . .
By JOHN MARKOFF
STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.
There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends.
To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.
Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.
Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. "It set off a chain of events that created companies and led to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be," he said.
It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.
But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.
Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original computer hackers.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970's," said one of the game's creators, Alan Kotok. "I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle."
Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and one joined the secretive National Security Agency.
Their early creation is now a museum piece -- literally -- reflecting the software principles and programming culture of its era.
Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode- ray display screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a small group of software designers.
Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after working hours.
Spacewar was the original "twitch" game, requiring lightning reflexes. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen. Before long a "hyperspace" option was added so that a player could make his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding certain death.
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. "They were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world," he recalled. "Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me."
In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why better science fiction movies weren't being made.
Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called "expensive planetarium," an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed the night sky over Cambridge.
Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr. Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.
Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a battle between two spaceships.
Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.
"One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was engaging," said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.
After agreeing to be the project's lead programmer, Mr. Russell said he procrastinated until Mr. Kotok drove to Digital Equipment and returned with a paper tape containing necessary math subroutines. Mr. Russell set to work by entering code on a Flexowriter, a typewriter device that translated commands into holes punched in paper tape.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was that Spacewar worked at all. The processor for the PDP-1 minicomputer ran at about 100,000 instructions per second, snail-like in comparison with the speed of today's fastest microprocessors, which exceed two billion instructions per second.
Moreover, the computer, which was built from discrete transistors, had to make the most of about nine kilobytes of random access memory, unfathomably little compared with the RAM of today's desktop machines, which can boast as much as one gigabyte -- a million kilobytes.
"Each new game tends to push the state of the art," said Richard F. Rashid, who heads research at Microsoft. "They stretch the machine as far as you can stretch it."
Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version on another system without looking at the source code," Mr. Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to found the Atari Corporation. He was first seized by the idea of commercializing video game technology when he came across a version of Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space, which was a commercial flop. Mr. Bushnell kept at it, though, and soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate who with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck, installed Galaxy Game, a coin- operated version of Spacewar, in Stanford's student union several months before Mr. Bushnell introduced Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years, allowing Mr. Pitts to pay back the $60,000 he had invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, Calif.
For his part, Mr. Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
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NOTE: This article remains the property of the New York Times. I'm posting it here because forcing people to do a free-register to read your content is asinine.
CNN is running pretty much the same story. One of the nice things? "Designers hope that the experience will cost about as much as an ordinary bus journey, or even less if passengers are prepared to share their pods."
:P Still worth a look.
I sure wouldn't mind cheap, available transportation. And if they're letting disabled people and bikes on board (according to the story, they are), they probably won't mind my rollerblades too much.
Rollerblades/Bike + Affordable, convenient Public Transportation = many people won't need cars. The only real problem with the system is the need to put in rails.
This website has details of the track, and a video of the car running on the track. The one really good picture on the site has a guy's fingertip in it.
I think that's a sound theory, the only problem is that, if you look at the number of posts which are never accepted (how many times have you tried?), it would be a true art-form to properly /.-snipe. (That is, create a good enough story to garner /. attention.)
/.-posted, just to earn a couple of ad bucks.
So, it is an interesting idea, but in reality, it would be too time-intensive to tailor a story in the hopes that it will be
Then again, some people will stop at nothing to make a friggin buck.
I was fascinated by this article, as I like to hear anyone's opinion and gather further fodder in my ongoing anti-M$ (et al.) quest.
But when article writers repeatedly use loaded words like "totalitarianism," which we as savvy minds comprehend to be the same as "virtual monopoly by way of market cornering," they are limiting their column to a small demographic (the savvy people listed above). It is equivalent to writing in some form of geek-code that only other geeks understand.
Basically, you limit the scope of your audience by your use of vocabulary. (IE, you will only reach other geeks by speaking in lingo.)
I'm just wondering who benefits from an article of this type - the nerds all know it, the non-nerds won't even understand it.