The article really just talked about how wargaming is changing due to the virtual technolog. Ender's game didn't really use simulations (other than the psy-game) and instead relied on physical formations and drilling - so its really not the model that the article talks about.
There is one thing that our soldiers could be learning from Enders Game though: make sure that your enemy cannot hurt you again.
In each circumstance that "tested" him, he made the decision to completely obliterate the enemy. To make sure that the enemy could not hurt him again. Whether it was a bully in school, or the "simulations" that they used against him (and frankly, I think at that point he was trying to eliminate the "simulations" and the people that were making him perform more than the actors in the "simulation".
Analogies to today? Al Queda attacked the US. Make sure they they are not capable of doing that again. I suppose Iraq is an extension of that (although I don't quite see how) But now that we've started, we need to make sure that the current Iraqi government will no never again have the power to hurt us. While I don't think we should have started this war, we're committed now and must complete the action; destroy the enemy and their capacity to make war completely.
I just hope we can draw a line between where this conflict stops and the next begins...
I once worked with a guy that worked for Atari; the army commissioned a custom version of BattleZone for their tank trainers. I've been trying to find a better link, but for now, this site discussing battlezone:
dadgum.com:
What's the story behind the U.S. Army version of "Battlezone"?
There was a group of consultants for the Army--a bunch of retired generals and such--that approached Atari with the idea that the technology for "Battlezone" could be used to make a training simulator for the then new Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea was that such a simulator could be made into a game that would encourage the soldiers to use it. They would learn not only the basic operation of the IFV technology, but would also learn to distinguish between the friendly and enemy vehicle silhouettes.
They approached us with this in December of 1980 and found a champion in the company in Rick Moncrief. They wanted a prototype to be finished in time for a worldwide TRADOC conference, being held via satellite, in March 1981. and more...visit the site
There are many legends about Seymour Cray. John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.
Well, he founded the company, so I guess he's entitled to be peculiar.
Erm...nothing about USB is "trival." It might seem that way if you've never been down-and-dirty with the firmware.
True, I've not had to write USB firmware; the chips I was referring to in the parent provide basically parallel port functionality in a single chip and a handful of discretes.
Most people (like me!) won't have the time or technical skills to try and customize the firmware. What I liked about the delcom chips was that all I only needed a host platform compiler for my favorite language and I was able to get my IO hacks working. Its in the sweet spot, IMHO, for a hobbiest.
I've been using the delcom usb chipset (http://www.delcom-eng.com/) on Mac OS X and Windows for doing various IO control things. Their eval board is very cheap and does the (trivial) amount of work to wire the pre-programmed USB chip to the usb cable, with some breadboard space to boot.
The engineering staff has been good to work with as well.
Also, they seem to sell a product almost exactly like what you describe, with bright LEDs in a diffraction grating, based on the same chipset. I don't know if it has quite the diffiusion you're looking for. (But it does have a buzzer!)
Otherwise, my advice would be to use the parallel port (very easy to program, unless you're a mac user and you don't have one;-) and don't use relays. In order to drive a relay, you'll need a transistor to switch the coils, and if you've already got the transistor, well, you can see where thats going!
You are of course, all correct (for the several respondents that corrected me.) Ths base license is for a single CPU. But you do have to admit that $199 for 5 machines vs. $129 for a single machine is still fairly liberal.
Of course, you had have purchased 100% Mac hardware previously, so perhaps its less of a big deal than I thought.
One thing I never see tossed around, when discussing just how pitiful Apple's processor speeds are, is that the license for OSX allows for up to *5* machines.
This means that a small office, currently running OS 9, can upgrade *1* machine for $1000 to a new G4 running OS X, and the rest (well, 5) of the machines in the office (assuming they're G3s with sufficient memory, or some old G4) are free to join in.
This means your hardware investment of 3 years is still valuable. I don't think (but please correct me if I'm wrong) that Microsoft offers the same kind of licensing terms for Windows XP. One copy per CPU, and legal threats if you violate the license agreement.
Apple's liberal licensing terms allow for a certain amount of guerrilla installs, which can only increase their mind share, if not their actual measured market share.
I'm a keyboard snob. One learned to touch type on an Apple IIe, and then I discovered Emacs on a Sun 3/60; that keyboard was *awesome* and felt like a nice pair of gloves. The thing both those keyboards had in common was the control key just to the left of the home row.
I was taught by peers to ignore "fancy" keyboard features, since their positions might change depending on what terminals we were using (and the motly assortment of terminals available in school meant random chance every time I sat down.) Hence, ^H for backspace/rubout and ^[ for esc. (One of them, I think an IBM, had a setting that WHACKed a solenoid against the terminal casing. As if the key followthrough weren't enough on that monster.)
Then a stupid thing happened: companies started putting the control key in completely the wrong place. I was working at Sun when they introduced the Type 4 keyboard and we had a bloody fit. CAPS LOCK in place of CONTROL? Give me a break. Only one person I knew used it, and they were missing an arm. To turn on caps lock, you should have to crawl under the desk and turn two key locks while getting a retina scan. And a colon scan. Friggin caps lock. Anyway, Sun heard the noise and came out with a "localized" unix variant keyboard - control key in the right place.
When I started working on Mac OS X, I couldn't stand the cheesy, mushy keyboards that they were shipping with (net weight must have been like 8 ozs) so I acquired a NeXT Cube and did all my work telneted into the Mac box. The NeXT keyboards were *really nice*. Great feel and of course, the control key is in the right place. (As an aside, since Apple does ship localized keyboards for, geesh, spain of all places, they should follow sun's lead in shipping a "unix" localized keyboard. Naah, the mushyness would still suck.)
I'm currently using a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite II (USB) on my macs. The keys are mostly in the right places, there's no caps lock (at least, it can be disabled with a DIP and would otherwise require chording several other keys to enable it) but it just doesn't have the full impact tactile feedback of those older keyboards.
Any time someone wanted to write an SBUS driver. Which admittedly, isn't too frequent anymore.
Still, a working knowledge of forth can make certain maintenance operations (booting a different kernel, examining the device tree) a whole lot easier when you're having boot problems.
Mac's have been OpenFirmware based since 1994 or so (first PCI PowerMacs).
Ham Radio has something called APRS: Automatic Position Reporting System.
This works by sending short bursts of location information over the radio at pre-defined frequencies, including your callsign. These are broadcast and picked up by repeater stations (and anyone can be a repeater.) Eventually, they're picked up and stuck in a database.
You can then query this database to find out where you are - or where your friends are.
I met Woz at the Computer History Museum last month, and brought along a copy of my 1977 Byte in which he describes the architecture of the upcoming Apple II.
He signed it, no fuss, and I shook his hand. He's just a hell-of-nice guy.
Another fellow brought his Disk ][ and had it signed.
Still, I don't think either of will be attempting to sell these off anytime soon.
BTW: an issue 1 of Macworld is currently going for about $40 on eBay.
When I worked at a small, 50 person, mostly mac software development company, we had 1 IT person who spent most of his time downloading porn over our shared 14kbps modem.
When we started bringing in windows boxes, the IT staff grew to 4 people to support them. The company was still under 75 people. The IT staff started wanting to put more and more windows boxes on peoples desks. They didn't want to support the Mac.
Why? Was it harder? No. By supporting windows, they could ask for (and receive) more resources for their group. More money, more headcount, more toys.
and are fortunate to have found the functional equivalent of a lactating tit in your employer
No, I'm in a similar situation as the above and have only had positive experiences with employers and my lack of formal education. Good companies will quickly look beyond the formal education to what an employee can actually deliver and has delivered in the past. The only company that took a risk was the first one; and there, I was hired in part because the manager that I was to work for also was degreeless.
Actually, for my last two jobs, I went to the people I wanted to work for, told them to hire me and why, and they had no problem.
Degrees can certainly help separate the chaff, but the lack of a degree does not have to be a limiting factor in advancement.
Somehow, I wound up with a free trial subscription to "Nature", which recently contained a salient abstract: Nature 419, 896 (2002); doi:10.1038/419896a
Brain development: Memory enhancement in early childhood
CONORLISTON AND JEROMEKAGAN
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
e-mail: cliston _GUESS_ post.harvard.edu
Regions of the brain's frontal lobe that are associated with memory retention and retrieval begin to mature during the last quarter of the first year in humans. This implies that infants younger than 8 or 9 months should have difficulty in registering an experience and retrieving it after a long delay. Here we show that 13-month-old children are unable to recall a sequence of actions performed in front of them when they were 9 months old, whereas 21- and 28-month-olds are able to retrieve representations of the same acts when these were witnessed at 17 and 24 months. Our findings indicate that long-term retention increases during the second year and support the idea that maturation of the frontal lobe at the end of the first year contributes to memory enhancement during this period.
I think a lot of the people that got laid off from failed.com failed to understand the risk they were taking by going with a pre-ipo company. Just as Ma and Pa shouldn't have invested their life savings in the stock market 3 years before retirement. The risk of failure was always there.
As an aside, my wife bought a Dogloo from pets.com during a free shipping promotion. It cost them more to ship it than we paid for the stpid thing. They deserve to have gone out, and their employees deserve to have lost their jobs for that farce.
Before someone tries to patent it...
Match people up based on what their tivo's knows you like. I mean, the average nerd and nerdess watches a lot of tivo'd tv, so the tivo already knows who's compatible...
This is good news for Linux. My experience with IS/IT professionals is that they will gravitate to a more expensive to adminster system since that increases their own departments budgets and makes them more important to the organization. Every company I worked at that had Macs and PCs saw the Macs phased out only because the IS/IT department didn't need to help manage them. If Linux costs more to admister than Windows, then long term, IS/IT people will gravitate towards deploying them.
Is the pieces they use to build it. Its extruded aluminum channels from www.xbeams.com. They go together with plastic connectors. Think big erector set. Also along those lines is www.8020.net, which I think is probably the original source of the xbeams product. They're tailored more for the industrial construction set, with a CAD program that translates designs into orders for the extrusions. Of course, it only runs on Windows... Cool stuff, though.
When I 'lost' my last phone I switched toa kyocera 6035 with built in palm. I doubt they're making them anymore because they're large and heavy (bugger than either a palm or phone.) But they did an admiral job briding the two, so I can tell who's calling and look up numbers quickly. Really, the only reason I like it is because I can play rogue...
However, I haven't seen anyone mention the iPod. I think the potential here is: its really hard to write notes and stuff on a tiny little pda screen, and hooking up a keyboard is usually more time consuming than just jotting down notes on paper. The iPod just doesn't even give you the opportunity - it just says "here's your data. Sync from your desktop. DOn't even think about maniupulating the data, you don't have time. You're busy!"
The only problem with that model is that I now have to carry a phone and the iPod with the data.
It'd be nice if someone would come out with a phone with a 20gig hard disk and the same attitude. Pop it in its (firewire) cradle to charge, sync with the address book and music library, and move on.
Once, we were all excited because the network was the computer and we could access our home direectory from any desktop. I predict in a few years we'll just have our home directories in our pockets.
When I was about 14, my parents moved to Jacksonville, FL. I came home from boarding school (ahem, military school) to visit there. We drove down to the cape and did the normal touristy tours of the facilities. They spent a bit of time talking about lightening detectors. Then they announced that there would be a launch today! Gosh was I excited!
But you know what? My iron bitch mother decided that we had best drive back home *now* before the launch because she didn't want to get caught in traffic. Much whining and pouting later found me crying in the back of the station wagon as we drove away without seeing the launch. (No, I didn't do very well at military school.)
But you know what? That launch vehicle was hit by lightning and exploded shortly after takeoff.
This joke was (originally?) selected by the british as "The funniest joke ever" (http://www.fictionfunhouse.com/wayiam/onfunny.htm ) using sherlock holmes and watson.
And I've just proved that I have no sense of humor.
I saw one as well, about 10 years ago. I was working in Berkeley, CA at the time and had just left work around 5pm to get some coffee. (I was still sober;-) and it was still daylight.)
Looking up from Shattuck towards the berkely hills, an orangish fireball, about the size of a dime held at arms length, with a tail that stretched about 8 inches behind (using the dime size perspective.) It was hard to tell just how far away it was. It was travelling almost horizontal, a bit of a downward angle and after about 10 seconds from when I first saw it, it disappeared behind the hills.
I was a bit freaked out, since it looked like it must have been a truly local event. I found an astrophysicist (You can't swing a dead hippie in berkeley without hitting one, you know) who confirmed that it was probably a small meteor glancing off the atmosphere. They happen rarely enough that they don't frequently get cought on film, and are not likely to ever make it to earth, instead skipping back into space.
b dup dup mul or
Also note that The Steve & Co have announced that they want to move away from MacWorld based announcements, for the very reason that sales always dramatically slow right before the events.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one thing that our soldiers could be learning from Enders Game though: make sure that your enemy cannot hurt you again.
In each circumstance that "tested" him, he made the decision to completely obliterate the enemy. To make sure that the enemy could not hurt him again. Whether it was a bully in school, or the "simulations" that they used against him (and frankly, I think at that point he was trying to eliminate the "simulations" and the people that were making him perform more than the actors in the "simulation".
Analogies to today? Al Queda attacked the US. Make sure they they are not capable of doing that again. I suppose Iraq is an extension of that (although I don't quite see how) But now that we've started, we need to make sure that the current Iraqi government will no never again have the power to hurt us. While I don't think we should have started this war, we're committed now and must complete the action; destroy the enemy and their capacity to make war completely.
I just hope we can draw a line between where this conflict stops and the next begins...
Well, he founded the company, so I guess he's entitled to be peculiar.
True, I've not had to write USB firmware; the chips I was referring to in the parent provide basically parallel port functionality in a single chip and a handful of discretes.
Most people (like me!) won't have the time or technical skills to try and customize the firmware. What I liked about the delcom chips was that all I only needed a host platform compiler for my favorite language and I was able to get my IO hacks working. Its in the sweet spot, IMHO, for a hobbiest.
The engineering staff has been good to work with as well.
Also, they seem to sell a product almost exactly like what you describe, with bright LEDs in a diffraction grating, based on the same chipset. I don't know if it has quite the diffiusion you're looking for. (But it does have a buzzer!)
Otherwise, my advice would be to use the parallel port (very easy to program, unless you're a mac user and you don't have one ;-) and don't use relays. In order to drive a relay, you'll need a transistor to switch the coils, and if you've already got the transistor, well, you can see where thats going!
Of course, you had have purchased 100% Mac hardware previously, so perhaps its less of a big deal than I thought.
Thanks for the corrections.
One thing I never see tossed around, when discussing just how pitiful Apple's processor speeds are, is that the license for OSX allows for up to *5* machines. This means that a small office, currently running OS 9, can upgrade *1* machine for $1000 to a new G4 running OS X, and the rest (well, 5) of the machines in the office (assuming they're G3s with sufficient memory, or some old G4) are free to join in. This means your hardware investment of 3 years is still valuable. I don't think (but please correct me if I'm wrong) that Microsoft offers the same kind of licensing terms for Windows XP. One copy per CPU, and legal threats if you violate the license agreement. Apple's liberal licensing terms allow for a certain amount of guerrilla installs, which can only increase their mind share, if not their actual measured market share.
"Hi, I'm Gary Gygax, and I'm".... rolls die ... "Pleased to meet you!"
I was taught by peers to ignore "fancy" keyboard features, since their positions might change depending on what terminals we were using (and the motly assortment of terminals available in school meant random chance every time I sat down.) Hence, ^H for backspace/rubout and ^[ for esc. (One of them, I think an IBM, had a setting that WHACKed a solenoid against the terminal casing. As if the key followthrough weren't enough on that monster.)
Then a stupid thing happened: companies started putting the control key in completely the wrong place. I was working at Sun when they introduced the Type 4 keyboard and we had a bloody fit. CAPS LOCK in place of CONTROL? Give me a break. Only one person I knew used it, and they were missing an arm. To turn on caps lock, you should have to crawl under the desk and turn two key locks while getting a retina scan. And a colon scan. Friggin caps lock. Anyway, Sun heard the noise and came out with a "localized" unix variant keyboard - control key in the right place.
When I started working on Mac OS X, I couldn't stand the cheesy, mushy keyboards that they were shipping with (net weight must have been like 8 ozs) so I acquired a NeXT Cube and did all my work telneted into the Mac box. The NeXT keyboards were *really nice*. Great feel and of course, the control key is in the right place. (As an aside, since Apple does ship localized keyboards for, geesh, spain of all places, they should follow sun's lead in shipping a "unix" localized keyboard. Naah, the mushyness would still suck.)
I'm currently using a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite II (USB) on my macs. The keys are mostly in the right places, there's no caps lock (at least, it can be disabled with a DIP and would otherwise require chording several other keys to enable it) but it just doesn't have the full impact tactile feedback of those older keyboards.
Still, a working knowledge of forth can make certain maintenance operations (booting a different kernel, examining the device tree) a whole lot easier when you're having boot problems.
Mac's have been OpenFirmware based since 1994 or so (first PCI PowerMacs).
Oh, and there's an OpenFirmware song, too: sung by Mitch Bradley
This works by sending short bursts of location information over the radio at pre-defined frequencies, including your callsign. These are broadcast and picked up by repeater stations (and anyone can be a repeater.) Eventually, they're picked up and stuck in a database.
You can then query this database to find out where you are - or where your friends are.
It don't get geekier.
He signed it, no fuss, and I shook his hand. He's just a hell-of-nice guy.
Another fellow brought his Disk ][ and had it signed.
Still, I don't think either of will be attempting to sell these off anytime soon.
BTW: an issue 1 of Macworld is currently going for about $40 on eBay.
When we started bringing in windows boxes, the IT staff grew to 4 people to support them. The company was still under 75 people. The IT staff started wanting to put more and more windows boxes on peoples desks. They didn't want to support the Mac.
Why? Was it harder? No. By supporting windows, they could ask for (and receive) more resources for their group. More money, more headcount, more toys.
No, I'm in a similar situation as the above and have only had positive experiences with employers and my lack of formal education. Good companies will quickly look beyond the formal education to what an employee can actually deliver and has delivered in the past. The only company that took a risk was the first one; and there, I was hired in part because the manager that I was to work for also was degreeless.
Actually, for my last two jobs, I went to the people I wanted to work for, told them to hire me and why, and they had no problem.
Degrees can certainly help separate the chaff, but the lack of a degree does not have to be a limiting factor in advancement.
Somehow, I wound up with a free trial subscription to "Nature", which recently contained a salient abstract:
Nature 419, 896 (2002); doi:10.1038/419896a
Brain development: Memory enhancement in early childhood
CONORLISTON AND JEROMEKAGAN
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
e-mail: cliston _GUESS_ post.harvard.edu
Regions of the brain's frontal lobe that are associated with memory retention and retrieval begin to mature during the last quarter of the first year in humans. This implies that infants younger than 8 or 9 months should have difficulty in registering an experience and retrieving it after a long delay. Here we show that 13-month-old children are unable to recall a sequence of actions performed in front of them when they were 9 months old, whereas 21- and 28-month-olds are able to retrieve representations of the same acts when these were witnessed at 17 and 24 months. Our findings indicate that long-term retention increases during the second year and support the idea that maturation of the frontal lobe at the end of the first year contributes to memory enhancement during this period.
I think a lot of the people that got laid off from failed .com failed to understand the risk they were taking by going with a pre-ipo company. Just as Ma and Pa shouldn't have invested their life savings in the stock market 3 years before retirement. The risk of failure was always there.
As an aside, my wife bought a Dogloo from pets.com during a free shipping promotion. It cost them more to ship it than we paid for the stpid thing. They deserve to have gone out, and their employees deserve to have lost their jobs for that farce.
The iPod is ARM based. (Actually has several ARMs in it..)
Before someone tries to patent it...
Match people up based on what their tivo's knows you like. I mean, the average nerd and nerdess watches a lot of tivo'd tv, so the tivo already knows who's compatible...
This is good news for Linux.
My experience with IS/IT professionals is that they will gravitate to a more expensive to adminster system since that increases their own departments budgets and makes them more important to the organization. Every company I worked at that had Macs and PCs saw the Macs phased out only because the IS/IT department didn't need to help manage them.
If Linux costs more to admister than Windows, then long term, IS/IT people will gravitate towards deploying them.
Is the pieces they use to build it. Its extruded aluminum channels from www.xbeams.com. They go together with plastic connectors. Think big erector set.
Also along those lines is www.8020.net, which I think is probably the original source of the xbeams product. They're tailored more for the industrial construction set, with a CAD program that translates designs into orders for the extrusions. Of course, it only runs on Windows... Cool stuff, though.
When I 'lost' my last phone I switched toa kyocera 6035 with built in palm. I doubt they're making them anymore because they're large and heavy (bugger than either a palm or phone.) But they did an admiral job briding the two, so I can tell who's calling and look up numbers quickly. Really, the only reason I like it is because I can play rogue... However, I haven't seen anyone mention the iPod. I think the potential here is: its really hard to write notes and stuff on a tiny little pda screen, and hooking up a keyboard is usually more time consuming than just jotting down notes on paper. The iPod just doesn't even give you the opportunity - it just says "here's your data. Sync from your desktop. DOn't even think about maniupulating the data, you don't have time. You're busy!" The only problem with that model is that I now have to carry a phone and the iPod with the data. It'd be nice if someone would come out with a phone with a 20gig hard disk and the same attitude. Pop it in its (firewire) cradle to charge, sync with the address book and music library, and move on. Once, we were all excited because the network was the computer and we could access our home direectory from any desktop. I predict in a few years we'll just have our home directories in our pockets.
When I was about 14, my parents moved to Jacksonville, FL. I came home from boarding school (ahem, military school) to visit there. We drove down to the cape and did the normal touristy tours of the facilities. They spent a bit of time talking about lightening detectors. Then they announced that there would be a launch today! Gosh was I excited!
But you know what? My iron bitch mother decided that we had best drive back home *now* before the launch because she didn't want to get caught in traffic. Much whining and pouting later found me crying in the back of the station wagon as we drove away without seeing the launch. (No, I didn't do very well at military school.)
But you know what? That launch vehicle was hit by lightning and exploded shortly after takeoff.
And I missed that too. Fuck you, mom.
This joke was (originally?) selected by the british as "The funniest joke ever" (http://www.fictionfunhouse.com/wayiam/onfunny.htm ) using sherlock holmes and watson.
And I've just proved that I have no sense of humor.
I saw one as well, about 10 years ago. I was working in Berkeley, CA at the time and had just left work around 5pm to get some coffee. (I was still sober ;-) and it was still daylight.)
Looking up from Shattuck towards the berkely hills, an orangish fireball, about the size of a dime held at arms length, with a tail that stretched about 8 inches behind (using the dime size perspective.) It was hard to tell just how far away it was. It was travelling almost horizontal, a bit of a downward angle and after about 10 seconds from when I first saw it, it disappeared behind the hills.
I was a bit freaked out, since it looked like it must have been a truly local event. I found an astrophysicist (You can't swing a dead hippie in berkeley without hitting one, you know) who confirmed that it was probably a small meteor glancing off the atmosphere. They happen rarely enough that they don't frequently get cought on film, and are not likely to ever make it to earth, instead skipping back into space.
b dup dup mul or
Also note that The Steve & Co have announced that they want to move away from MacWorld based announcements, for the very reason that sales always dramatically slow right before the events.