Delicate electronics aboard satellites would obviously not fare too well with such high acceleration
How delicate - are we talking about vacuum tubes, with their little feathery grids and filaments? I think the term "delicate" doesn't really apply to electronics any more, or rather doesn't have to. You couldn't use modular circuit boards, of course - you'd snap the connectors off. Or any sort of what we'd consider normal PC electronics, such as pluggable cables or rotating components such as disks or fans. They're built to be easy to build, and to modify.
But custom electronics, single-board stuff and SSD's, that can be made pretty robust. I'd think you could build them for 3-digit accelerations.
It's called "The Big Lie". Repeat something often enough, and eventually it becomes the truth. For example, we've been told repeatedly for almost forty years how we put men on the Moon,...
Troll? Dat be insightful+witty, mon. And interestingly sarcastic. Someone needs to be whacked upside their subtle bone.
So... get some secret hand signals together and talk to your wife with them...
Actually, I did that once. My wife and I play in the SCA and for a few years we sat as landed Baron and Baroness. We'd hold courts and pass out recognitions and honours and looked quite poncy with our robes and our little silver hats. It was fun.
But it also involved speaking in public as a team, often to reasonably large audiences (sometimes several hundred or so). My wife and I sat next to each other on thrones and we always held hands (awwww!). It wasn't just affection, though. We used a series of pre-agreed secret hand signals -- tap on the hand with a finger meant "Shush for a sec, let me get this point made." Two squeezes meant "I'm floundering here - could you please interrupt?". Three squeezes meant "if we don't wrap this up soon my bladder will explode" and four squeezes meant "you are so sleeping in the garage tonight for that". There were a few others, but you get the picture.
There were a number of other signals that were for our Baronial Guard - if I made the hand gesture that looked like Kirk flipping his communicator aboard, it was "beam me up Scotty" - i.e. somebody please intercept this time-waster for me. I also had pre-arranged and rehearsed with my Captain of the Guard (a particularly well-armed and mean looking dude) that I would pass my goblet up and behind me without a thought or a glance, and he'd refill it for me - and it all looked very authentic and automatic, because the signals were worked out beforehand. It made good theatre.
So there's more to communications than packets and wifi signal strength. If you get it right, it can look like ESP.
A long time ago map makers used to intentionally introduce errors so they could catch people just duplicating their maps rather than going out and measuring things for themselves and publishing the results.
I believe this was common practice for dictionary publishers, too. They'd introduce a word they made up themselves into the book as a signature of sorts. People who copied their dictionary copied the deliberate error as well, which was evidence they could take to court.
The fundamental design flaw they all have is that servers represent space in the game, it's a flawed assumption about the best model to use.
I'll bite, what's the best model to use?
Whether it was meant that way or not, that's a good point; I would wonder if it wasn't servers that represented space in the game (in terms of your computational point of view) but rather database connections - because when you think about it, you're really just moving data structures around during game play.
All the clever graphics runs in the memory of the gamers' PCs; details about in-game items and their status (i.e. item stats, equipped, in the backpack, where in the backpack, their state of repair etc.) just live in little pages that move up and down the link between gamer and "gamespace".
True, there's a lot of item contention involved (who killed what mob, rolling on loot etc.) but I wonder if the true question of managing parallel game spaces and making them work isn't embedded in the replication of tables from one database instance to another. This is well established technique for most databases. That could imply the need for very fast interprocessor communications, presumably because warlocks consume rowlocks.
The most complex software I've been into deeply enough to notice was VMS, some years ago - and that appeared to be a case where clever data structures did nearly all the work (that and REI of course;) and good data structures meant a lot less algorithm. It's an approach. To recap, I think it's easier to think of "game space" as a database issue, rather than a processor one. Your Beowulf cluster of hot grits just provides CPU cycles, really, and that's not quite as difficult to share.
Yes! Although the citation is sadly, not complete - there was a point where they shook hands and disappeared (presumably to the accompaniment of four quanta of extremely hard radiation).
Iran has crude oil. What they *don't* have is gasoline...
Expect an upsurge in homebrew Stirling or steam engines. They'll probably be ugly but workable. They only need something that will ignite.
What they don't have is gasoline infrastructure of the scale to do the job justice. But gasoline refineries are really only plumbing, taken on the large scale. The Iranians have shown themselves to be innovative, at least in places - they're making their own U235 centrifuges, aren't they? They should be able to come up with small-scale, distributed refining infrastructure if they keep the educational mill turning. Even if you truck the crude around rather than pipeline it, they could be rolling at home before their industrial bootstrapping job is complete.
Anyway, I'd expect semi-crude (i.e. low value, low yield refined crude) oil burners to appear on the scene in Iran first. Ideology may get in the way a bit, but brains seem to be resident in all sorts of people. It's a mistake to underestimate anybody.
If you name it Hyperdrive now, what will you name a FTL drive? Full-speed Hyperdrive? Hi-Speed?
Uberdrive FTL FTW!
Although I'd quite happily settle for a Ferrari 450.
On the gripping hand, we might want to outsource this FTL drive naming business to the auto manufacturers. They have people working on this sort of thing full time.
One definition that might fit your context a little better is "A big fast machine that runs absolutely every back-end banking transaction in your world." This ain't your average LAMP stack making your world a little better, this is a machine that owns the market for commercial transactions.
Today's mainframe isn't much different from your average tightly coupled HPC cluster, architecturally it's very similar to blades coupled with Infiniband connections.
I can't see your point of view, to be honest. There's the separation by instruction sets at the hardware level, which means incompatibility at the software end. Binaries ain't binaries at that point. Since the CICS etc. software runs only on those instruction sets, you've effectively a barrier that means all high end OLTP running on established business software (stupendous amounts of legacy code) can only run on the mainframe. It's not technology so much as tradition, but try getting an alternative (such as the Sun CICS emulator) past Aunt Cora for the big end of town. Not happening.
The more relevant history is that the government tried to tame IBM for a decade and failed.
And, strange as it seems, IBM's legal team at the time greatly outnumbered the number of lawyers the government had available to prosecute the anti-trust claim.
And it was all over a device channel, and the introduction of microcode on the humble 7" floppy disk, microcode they would not share.
...and IBM is back to the same stuff they tried against DEC and others.
Oh yes - dear gods, not again!
I remember IBM vs. the BUNCH, their predatory anticompetitive (brilliant, but deranged) buy-up of critical parts needed by DASD competitor Memorex (forced them into Chapter 11) with a long list of acts of um, anomalous civility that made Microsoft look saintly and the SCO/Linux litigation a traffic ticket in comparison.
Which strikes me as being all rather odd, given that this is not an era where popular opinion is encouraging toward corporate excess.
Perhaps they were talking about "a football" field, where "a football" is a set that incorporates all possible football field sizes and types in the set {a football}, including the empty set, as a sum (not a product, as the empty set would be a football field of effectively zero length, which product would be, however, adequately descriptive of the combined IQ's of those responsible for the production values of That Fine Article).
Phe, Phi, Pho, Phum, I smell an article pulled out of his bum.
There are astronomy clubs all over the world. Google offers a good list of them.
And please note, you'll likely be in very good scientific company - rather a lot of highly significant astronomical discoveries were made by amateurs, just people with their interest perked, ordinary people who persisted in their interest.
After a while, the truly enthusiastic may cross the bridge between amateur and expert. It happens sometimes, don't be afraid.
You may not like "money" (however you define it) as a way of allocating resources, but it's the only one we have right now
All tangential discussions of the value of money aside, I believe the studies will point out two things:
(1) That it's quite possible to get a grant to play computer games (disclosure: level 80 characters here, plural, think it's a good idea;P);
(2) People may become aware that money exists primarily as numbers registered in one of a number of accounting systems, and nowhere else. If you think about it, most MMORPG's have a hierarchical system of banks and a means for transferring numbers (call it "gold pieces" or "plat" or "lindens", it's still decimal currency) from one account to another.
(3) Most game EULA's specifically forbid trading in-game items for real-world (!) valuta, presumably to make it more attractive and to keep the tax people away;
Slashdot Mirror
"This cake was made with rotten eggs!"
"I think you need to take another bite."
A wonderous invention that somehow didn't make it from the Golden Age of SF to the far distant future of 2009.
And I've nearly got this perpetual motion thing worked out...
It had to be said.
What? Sorry, paradigm slam.
There are no games for non-gamers. You game, or you game not. There is no "non".
Delicate electronics aboard satellites would obviously not fare too well with such high acceleration
How delicate - are we talking about vacuum tubes, with their little feathery grids and filaments? I think the term "delicate" doesn't really apply to electronics any more, or rather doesn't have to. You couldn't use modular circuit boards, of course - you'd snap the connectors off. Or any sort of what we'd consider normal PC electronics, such as pluggable cables or rotating components such as disks or fans. They're built to be easy to build, and to modify.
But custom electronics, single-board stuff and SSD's, that can be made pretty robust. I'd think you could build them for 3-digit accelerations.
It's called "The Big Lie". Repeat something often enough, and eventually it becomes the truth. For example, we've been told repeatedly for almost forty years how we put men on the Moon, ...
Troll? Dat be insightful+witty, mon. And interestingly sarcastic. Someone needs to be whacked upside their subtle bone.
So ... get some secret hand signals together and talk to your wife with them...
Actually, I did that once. My wife and I play in the SCA and for a few years we sat as landed Baron and Baroness. We'd hold courts and pass out recognitions and honours and looked quite poncy with our robes and our little silver hats. It was fun.
But it also involved speaking in public as a team, often to reasonably large audiences (sometimes several hundred or so). My wife and I sat next to each other on thrones and we always held hands (awwww!). It wasn't just affection, though. We used a series of pre-agreed secret hand signals -- tap on the hand with a finger meant "Shush for a sec, let me get this point made." Two squeezes meant "I'm floundering here - could you please interrupt?". Three squeezes meant "if we don't wrap this up soon my bladder will explode" and four squeezes meant "you are so sleeping in the garage tonight for that". There were a few others, but you get the picture.
There were a number of other signals that were for our Baronial Guard - if I made the hand gesture that looked like Kirk flipping his communicator aboard, it was "beam me up Scotty" - i.e. somebody please intercept this time-waster for me. I also had pre-arranged and rehearsed with my Captain of the Guard (a particularly well-armed and mean looking dude) that I would pass my goblet up and behind me without a thought or a glance, and he'd refill it for me - and it all looked very authentic and automatic, because the signals were worked out beforehand. It made good theatre.
So there's more to communications than packets and wifi signal strength. If you get it right, it can look like ESP.
Obligatory XKCD.
A long time ago map makers used to intentionally introduce errors so they could catch people just duplicating their maps rather than going out and measuring things for themselves and publishing the results.
I believe this was common practice for dictionary publishers, too. They'd introduce a word they made up themselves into the book as a signature of sorts. People who copied their dictionary copied the deliberate error as well, which was evidence they could take to court.
Whether it was meant that way or not, that's a good point; I would wonder if it wasn't servers that represented space in the game (in terms of your computational point of view) but rather database connections - because when you think about it, you're really just moving data structures around during game play.
All the clever graphics runs in the memory of the gamers' PCs; details about in-game items and their status (i.e. item stats, equipped, in the backpack, where in the backpack, their state of repair etc.) just live in little pages that move up and down the link between gamer and "gamespace".
True, there's a lot of item contention involved (who killed what mob, rolling on loot etc.) but I wonder if the true question of managing parallel game spaces and making them work isn't embedded in the replication of tables from one database instance to another. This is well established technique for most databases. That could imply the need for very fast interprocessor communications, presumably because warlocks consume rowlocks.
The most complex software I've been into deeply enough to notice was VMS, some years ago - and that appeared to be a case where clever data structures did nearly all the work (that and REI of course ;) and good data structures meant a lot less algorithm. It's an approach. To recap, I think it's easier to think of "game space" as a database issue, rather than a processor one. Your Beowulf cluster of hot grits just provides CPU cycles, really, and that's not quite as difficult to share.
Yes! Although the citation is sadly, not complete - there was a point where they shook hands and disappeared (presumably to the accompaniment of four quanta of extremely hard radiation).
Iran has crude oil. What they *don't* have is gasoline...
Expect an upsurge in homebrew Stirling or steam engines. They'll probably be ugly but workable. They only need something that will ignite.
What they don't have is gasoline infrastructure of the scale to do the job justice. But gasoline refineries are really only plumbing, taken on the large scale. The Iranians have shown themselves to be innovative, at least in places - they're making their own U235 centrifuges, aren't they? They should be able to come up with small-scale, distributed refining infrastructure if they keep the educational mill turning. Even if you truck the crude around rather than pipeline it, they could be rolling at home before their industrial bootstrapping job is complete.
Anyway, I'd expect semi-crude (i.e. low value, low yield refined crude) oil burners to appear on the scene in Iran first. Ideology may get in the way a bit, but brains seem to be resident in all sorts of people. It's a mistake to underestimate anybody.
If you name it Hyperdrive now, what will you name a FTL drive? Full-speed Hyperdrive? Hi-Speed?
Uberdrive FTL FTW!
Although I'd quite happily settle for a Ferrari 450.
On the gripping hand, we might want to outsource this FTL drive naming business to the auto manufacturers. They have people working on this sort of thing full time.
What is the definition of a Mainframe?
One definition that might fit your context a little better is "A big fast machine that runs absolutely every back-end banking transaction in your world." This ain't your average LAMP stack making your world a little better, this is a machine that owns the market for commercial transactions.
Every. Fucking. Bank. Transaction.
Doesn't that deserve a bit of scrutiny?
Today's mainframe isn't much different from your average tightly coupled HPC cluster, architecturally it's very similar to blades coupled with Infiniband connections.
I can't see your point of view, to be honest. There's the separation by instruction sets at the hardware level, which means incompatibility at the software end. Binaries ain't binaries at that point. Since the CICS etc. software runs only on those instruction sets, you've effectively a barrier that means all high end OLTP running on established business software (stupendous amounts of legacy code) can only run on the mainframe. It's not technology so much as tradition, but try getting an alternative (such as the Sun CICS emulator) past Aunt Cora for the big end of town. Not happening.
The more relevant history is that the government tried to tame IBM for a decade and failed.
And, strange as it seems, IBM's legal team at the time greatly outnumbered the number of lawyers the government had available to prosecute the anti-trust claim.
And it was all over a device channel, and the introduction of microcode on the humble 7" floppy disk, microcode they would not share.
Sound familiar? Hey, it worked once...
...and IBM is back to the same stuff they tried against DEC and others.
Oh yes - dear gods, not again!
I remember IBM vs. the BUNCH, their predatory anticompetitive (brilliant, but deranged) buy-up of critical parts needed by DASD competitor Memorex (forced them into Chapter 11) with a long list of acts of um, anomalous civility that made Microsoft look saintly and the SCO/Linux litigation a traffic ticket in comparison.
Which strikes me as being all rather odd, given that this is not an era where popular opinion is encouraging toward corporate excess.
and opposite spin...
For sure! I mean, like they're not really annihilating each other, it's just a game they play. It's for the best anyway.
Anybody remember that poem about when Dr.Edward Teller met Dr.Edward Anti-Teller?
Phe, Phi, Pho, Phum, I smell an article pulled out of his bum.
Yes, but four-in-a-million is only five syllables, and thus much more useful.
Four in a million
NASA says we might survive
with hyperbole
There are astronomy clubs all over the world. Google offers a good list of them.
And please note, you'll likely be in very good scientific company - rather a lot of highly significant astronomical discoveries were made by amateurs, just people with their interest perked, ordinary people who persisted in their interest.
After a while, the truly enthusiastic may cross the bridge between amateur and expert. It happens sometimes, don't be afraid.
These were not the droids I was looking for.
I guess with any laptop USB is the preferred way to have hardware access and that seems to work well. Serial ports are pretty rare these days.
Please forgive my pedantry, but "USB" stands for exactly...what?
You may not like "money" (however you define it) as a way of allocating resources, but it's the only one we have right now
All tangential discussions of the value of money aside, I believe the studies will point out two things:
(1) That it's quite possible to get a grant to play computer games (disclosure: level 80 characters here, plural, think it's a good idea ;P);
(2) People may become aware that money exists primarily as numbers registered in one of a number of accounting systems, and nowhere else. If you think about it, most MMORPG's have a hierarchical system of banks and a means for transferring numbers (call it "gold pieces" or "plat" or "lindens", it's still decimal currency) from one account to another.
(3) Most game EULA's specifically forbid trading in-game items for real-world (!) valuta, presumably to make it more attractive and to keep the tax people away;
(4) ...???
My mother met Rod Serling at a writer's conference (she wrote Disney comic books and a few of the old Crusader Rabbit scripts. Fast company!)
She said Serling was very short and extremely charismatic.
Come to think of it, my little sister is a bit under-height for our family...