The figure I gave came from a replica of a ship from that era, this one to be precise. It could be that it was only valid for ships in this class, i.e. trading vessels sailing between the Netherlands and Indonesia. While that was a well-known route, it was extremely long and included some significant hazards.
If you are in the neighbourhood, visiting is highly recommended, BTW...
Sorry, but you have to realize that this is what the Netherlands really looks like. Well, not of all of it - we also have green fluffy bits, but since the country is so incredibly flat there are not too many high enough places to put your camera to make a picture like this, so that limited their options.
Having said that, I don't know why they didn't take their contraption to the Euromast where they could at least have taken a half-way decent picture of the Rotterdam harbor area...
Better analogy: How would people react in the middle ages if 1 ocean exploration mission out of 100 sank?
They'd be devastated. Despite the conditions at the time, the ships were generally quite safe, with only one or two out of a thousand actually sinking.
The same was not, of course, true for the crew. Generally speaking such ships set out with two complete crews and were lucky to come back with one. This happened in part because many would die along the way, but also because many sailors made just a single trip, choosing to live out their lives where the ship landed.
In case you are wondering why there are still so many shipwrecks - that's because those ships were mass-produced at the time, almost assembly-line style. Ship production was a significant cause of deforestation in Europe at one time...
No, this is all part of the original PowerPC plan: to make a new standard CPU for PC's that would replace the x86 architecture. Microsoft is finally throwing its muscle behind making this dream a reality. The new console will also come with the OS originally intended for that platform, which is of course... OS/2.
If you think about it, most procedures and working guidelines in development (of software, planes, whatever) seem to be designed to eliminate the human aspect of design - which is, "you need excellent designers to make an excellent product". Instead most procedures seem to focus on writing everything down in the vague hope of being able to reproduce earlier work, even though that work may have been of questionable quality. Kelly Johnsons rules, by comparison, attempt to limit the paperwork and instead focus on having excellent people do the work. And guess what: he was succesful that way. Unfortunately this way of working scares the shit out of incompetent managers, who try to stop this by forcing as much paperwork on the design team as possible (probably with the ultimate goal of producing only paper, and no product whatsoever. NASA has apparently gone a long way down this road).
But NASA also suffers very badly from rule #10, which is that they do not have a clear, fixed goal (and associated clear, fixed funding). What engineers need, more than anything, is a clear goal and an environment in which it can be achieved without interruptions. The american government has provided neither, changing budgets and goals on a yearly basis. As such the current state of affairs is at least as much their fault as it is NASA's. The practice of discarding engineers as soon as projects end is also a factor - it may save money in the short run, but ultimately a lot of knowledge and experience is lost this way.
Finally, while I admire Burt Rutan as much as everyone else here, the vehicle he has built is a long way away from being a true spacecraft (it is more like a redesign of the X15 plane). It cannot be turned into an orbital vehicle for just a few million more, as some seem to believe. Doing that would require a much stronger engine (to get up to speed) and matching amount of fuel, some way to get rid of that speed upon reentry (like a heatshield), and probably a much longer lasting life support capability. And if you really want to dock at the ISS you would need docking equipment too. It is still a major achievement, but ultimately it is just a repeat of a NASA program from the sixties.
Sorry, but this is now a minor threat compared to the possibility of a single person re-programming all machines for a desirable outcome. Buying off millions of voters would cost an absolute fortune, while buying off that lone programmer would be cheap and simple.
I'd like to point out one factor that gets snowed under in this discussion: paper trails not only allow recounts, they also provide confidence that your vote is recorded as you specified.
Given the enormous stakes, I am not happy about the fact that the actual recording of votes is an invisible process controlled by nameless employees of a company that has a known political bias. A machine without paper verification could easily give every tenth vote to another candidate than specified with noone the wiser. The paper trail would allow me to verify that my vote was recorded correctly. Manual recounts of randomly selected machines (say, 1% of all machines, selected after the elections of course) would give me the confidence the machines themselves are working properly.
This would allow you to do 99% of the counting automatically, yet still have confidence that the results were not tampered with.
My Sony MSX2+ (also in working order, of course) beats your 8250:-p
Anyway, you cannot expect people to get an MSX machine these days just to get an idea of what the system was like. For many people they will be near-impossible to find anyway. If people can get enjoyment out of emulators they should by all means do so.
Besides, I spent about six years of my life writing fMSX Amiga (which is an MSX emulator for the Amiga, but you probably guessed that already). I'm entitled to opinions about MSX emulation;-)
*Lots* of companies made MSX machines, as witnessed by the imposing list here.
Also, it is generally thought that MSX was the brainchild of Kay Nishi, a japanese businessman sometimes called "the Japanese Bill Gates". The only influence Microsoft had on the machines were that they created some of the built-in software, such as the BIOS, BASIC, and DOS (called, appropriately, "MSX-DOS"). The rest - the hardware, the compatibility concept, etc. - was in no way their idea.
The MSX standard specifies what an MSX machine is in terms of minimal requirements, and adding extra features was considered appropriate at the time (indeed, it was one of the charms of the system). And while there were some compatibility issues with software (mostly related to different memory layouts - MSX used bank switching extensively, and RAM could not be relied on to be in a specific bank), mostly all MSX software did indeed run on all MSX machines. Instead, the reason for their eventual disappearance is related to MSX being underpowered compared to newer machines that appeared in that era (MSX2 appeared in 1985, same as the Amiga. The Amiga absolutely blew it away in terms of performance and capabilities).
At the time, everyone I knew (and every book I bought) told me that MSX stood for "MicroSoft eXtended". Only recently did I hear about the Sony-Matsushita-X story, while attending a talk by Kay Nishi, whose word obviously carries a lot of weight in this matter.
Finally, MSX was a fun system that had some great software. If you have the chance, there are lots of great games available for emulation.
People are talking about Mozilla/Firefox as a platform, but I don't entirely understand what to expect from it. Does it give me the ability to have processing in a webpage on the desktop? The ability to open windows with controls that look like "normal" (read: non-HTML) Windows-windows? The ability to create my own controls and use those on any desktop?
- A "downloads" section that contains a demo of the game, as well as any patches that have since been released. I'm fine with bittorrent if you want to preserve bandwidth, but do not make me wait for hours at fileplanet or some subscription based site just to get a demo or some patches.
- LARGE screenshots (clickable from thumbnails of course). My screen is 1280*960. Screenshots that are smaller than, say, 128*128 are just too small to be of any use to me.
- Descriptive text that explains what the game is about, rendered using a font and colors I can actually read.
- No "entry tunnel" that takes three times longer to load than it takes me to click past it. That is soooo last century.
- A menu system that actually lets me navigate the site in comfort. I was thinking hyperlinks (with text and everything) instead of buttons that float all over the place.
- I agree about the mute button, but want to add that I usually play MP3's in the background so I do not want to turn off all sound.
Basically I want to find out about the game (or movie), and many of these websites seem to spend a lot of effort to make this hard on me. But hey, if they do not want my money...
Why, oh why must movie and game websites always be un-navigable flash monsters with bad soundtracks that loop every 8 seconds, stuff jumping all over the screen, stamp-sized images, and hard to read text? Is this some sort of conspiracy? Who makes these sites?
You are not the first smart ass to demonstrate your incredible intellectual superiority by pointing out this simple solution. So let us have a small thought experiment here.
Imagine this: you are working at Lockheed Martin, and you are the Chief Sensor Installer for this spacecraft. You have received a sensor that must be installed, and it has a convenient arrow on it. You are about to install the sensor. Should you:
[ ] Install the sensor with the arrow pointing up towards the heat shield?
[ ] Install the sensor with the arrow pointing down towards the ground?
Frankly, neither direction is obviously the right way to me.
The strength of ARexx (the Amiga version of Rexx) was NOT that it was a good language; it was that it allowed you to script any set of applications together into one seamless mega-application. That's like the UNIX-philosophy of having one tool do one thing, and string them together to do real work, expanded into the GUI arena.
On the Amiga, applications support Rexx in two ways: they can be commanded using Rexx, and upon certain events they can be made to launch specific Rexx scripts. Rexx commands applications in a markedly different way from the normal UNIX way of working: it assumes the application is already running, and sends commands to make it do different things. If I had a mailer, a Rexx-script for it could look somewhat like this (I forgot the syntax, bear with me...)
ADDRESS KMAIL.0
# now commands are going to the first instance of kmail that is running. Now we'll create a mail. Rexx has highly convenient associative variables for this.
mail.address = "johannesg@slashdot.org"
mail.subject = "Rexx is bloody useful"
mail.body = "at least, if all applications support it"
SEND mail
# Now we will store that mail in our mysql database:
ADDRESS MYSQL.0
SQL INSERT INTO sentmail VALUES mail
COMMIT
And done! We have linked together two already-running applications, to make a new, unique solution.
Similarly, my mailer _should_ just run a Rexx script when mail is received. The script should decide what to do with the mail, which could be classifying it, testing it for spam, forwarding it to another account, or for all I care making an immediate hardcopy and faxing it to my holiday address. None of those functions should be built into the mailer; instead, the user can configure the scripts precisely for his own needs.
This has some major benefits:
- Tools can remain lean, concentrating on core functionality. As long as the Rexx-interface is powerful enough, and the right triggers are provided, any user functionality you can imagine can be added by interfacing other applications to it.
- Complex tools for a specific purpose can be cobbled together by throwing a few existing applications together with some scripting glue.
- The GUI becomes as easy to script as the shell is today.
Of course I am not saying Rexx is the only way to do this, and indeed the KDE people are already moving in this direction with DCOP (I think). However, I believe noone in the Linux world has yet realized how amazingly powerful and useful this concept is.
So in the end, this isn't about Rexx at all - it is about how incredibly useful the concept of scripting together sets of applications is. The language really doesn't matter, since the Rexx interface works on the level of exchanging strings between the script and the addressed application (i.e. it might as well be Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or...). Rexx is only special because it did this so incredibly well on the Amiga that I still miss it on a weekly basis.
Well, I don't know. Let's look at the introduction shall we?
"The system runs, and programs come and pass, leaving data that becomes files. Files are deleted, and even the inodes are long forgotten when the program that gave it birth comes again. In one program, called the Compiler by some, a program yet to come, a program long past, an error rose in mountains_of_mist.c. The error was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the running of the system. But it was a beginning."
Slashdot Mirror
If you are in the neighbourhood, visiting is highly recommended, BTW...
Having said that, I don't know why they didn't take their contraption to the Euromast where they could at least have taken a half-way decent picture of the Rotterdam harbor area...
Can you maybe provide some pointers on where we could aquire our own female artists?
They'd be devastated. Despite the conditions at the time, the ships were generally quite safe, with only one or two out of a thousand actually sinking.
The same was not, of course, true for the crew. Generally speaking such ships set out with two complete crews and were lucky to come back with one. This happened in part because many would die along the way, but also because many sailors made just a single trip, choosing to live out their lives where the ship landed.
In case you are wondering why there are still so many shipwrecks - that's because those ships were mass-produced at the time, almost assembly-line style. Ship production was a significant cause of deforestation in Europe at one time...
No, this is all part of the original PowerPC plan: to make a new standard CPU for PC's that would replace the x86 architecture. Microsoft is finally throwing its muscle behind making this dream a reality. The new console will also come with the OS originally intended for that platform, which is of course... OS/2.
I loved that game back on the Amiga. Any word on how this new version compares?
I mean, the main use for Bluetooth is 'toothing. Personally I would consider seven million people somewhat above the enjoyable limit... ;-)
But NASA also suffers very badly from rule #10, which is that they do not have a clear, fixed goal (and associated clear, fixed funding). What engineers need, more than anything, is a clear goal and an environment in which it can be achieved without interruptions. The american government has provided neither, changing budgets and goals on a yearly basis. As such the current state of affairs is at least as much their fault as it is NASA's. The practice of discarding engineers as soon as projects end is also a factor - it may save money in the short run, but ultimately a lot of knowledge and experience is lost this way.
Finally, while I admire Burt Rutan as much as everyone else here, the vehicle he has built is a long way away from being a true spacecraft (it is more like a redesign of the X15 plane). It cannot be turned into an orbital vehicle for just a few million more, as some seem to believe. Doing that would require a much stronger engine (to get up to speed) and matching amount of fuel, some way to get rid of that speed upon reentry (like a heatshield), and probably a much longer lasting life support capability. And if you really want to dock at the ISS you would need docking equipment too. It is still a major achievement, but ultimately it is just a repeat of a NASA program from the sixties.
Given the enormous stakes, I am not happy about the fact that the actual recording of votes is an invisible process controlled by nameless employees of a company that has a known political bias. A machine without paper verification could easily give every tenth vote to another candidate than specified with noone the wiser. The paper trail would allow me to verify that my vote was recorded correctly. Manual recounts of randomly selected machines (say, 1% of all machines, selected after the elections of course) would give me the confidence the machines themselves are working properly.
This would allow you to do 99% of the counting automatically, yet still have confidence that the results were not tampered with.
Anyway, you cannot expect people to get an MSX machine these days just to get an idea of what the system was like. For many people they will be near-impossible to find anyway. If people can get enjoyment out of emulators they should by all means do so.
Besides, I spent about six years of my life writing fMSX Amiga (which is an MSX emulator for the Amiga, but you probably guessed that already). I'm entitled to opinions about MSX emulation ;-)
Also, it is generally thought that MSX was the brainchild of Kay Nishi, a japanese businessman sometimes called "the Japanese Bill Gates". The only influence Microsoft had on the machines were that they created some of the built-in software, such as the BIOS, BASIC, and DOS (called, appropriately, "MSX-DOS"). The rest - the hardware, the compatibility concept, etc. - was in no way their idea.
The MSX standard specifies what an MSX machine is in terms of minimal requirements, and adding extra features was considered appropriate at the time (indeed, it was one of the charms of the system). And while there were some compatibility issues with software (mostly related to different memory layouts - MSX used bank switching extensively, and RAM could not be relied on to be in a specific bank), mostly all MSX software did indeed run on all MSX machines. Instead, the reason for their eventual disappearance is related to MSX being underpowered compared to newer machines that appeared in that era (MSX2 appeared in 1985, same as the Amiga. The Amiga absolutely blew it away in terms of performance and capabilities).
At the time, everyone I knew (and every book I bought) told me that MSX stood for "MicroSoft eXtended". Only recently did I hear about the Sony-Matsushita-X story, while attending a talk by Kay Nishi, whose word obviously carries a lot of weight in this matter.
Finally, MSX was a fun system that had some great software. If you have the chance, there are lots of great games available for emulation.
Are such bags also impermeable to X-ray? If so, these things will go down really well with airport security...
...easy, really ;-)
Yeah, like there are none already...
That would be here.
Seriously, it could be a girly-man. I've seen guys with similar haircuts and those eyebrow shadows are scary.
An apt post, for a man whose name means "TheVirgin" in Dutch...
- A "downloads" section that contains a demo of the game, as well as any patches that have since been released. I'm fine with bittorrent if you want to preserve bandwidth, but do not make me wait for hours at fileplanet or some subscription based site just to get a demo or some patches.
- LARGE screenshots (clickable from thumbnails of course). My screen is 1280*960. Screenshots that are smaller than, say, 128*128 are just too small to be of any use to me.
- Descriptive text that explains what the game is about, rendered using a font and colors I can actually read.
- No "entry tunnel" that takes three times longer to load than it takes me to click past it. That is soooo last century.
- A menu system that actually lets me navigate the site in comfort. I was thinking hyperlinks (with text and everything) instead of buttons that float all over the place.
- I agree about the mute button, but want to add that I usually play MP3's in the background so I do not want to turn off all sound.
Basically I want to find out about the game (or movie), and many of these websites seem to spend a lot of effort to make this hard on me. But hey, if they do not want my money...
Why, oh why must movie and game websites always be un-navigable flash monsters with bad soundtracks that loop every 8 seconds, stuff jumping all over the screen, stamp-sized images, and hard to read text? Is this some sort of conspiracy? Who makes these sites?
Imagine this: you are working at Lockheed Martin, and you are the Chief Sensor Installer for this spacecraft. You have received a sensor that must be installed, and it has a convenient arrow on it. You are about to install the sensor. Should you:
[ ] Install the sensor with the arrow pointing up towards the heat shield?
[ ] Install the sensor with the arrow pointing down towards the ground?
Frankly, neither direction is obviously the right way to me.
On the Amiga, applications support Rexx in two ways: they can be commanded using Rexx, and upon certain events they can be made to launch specific Rexx scripts. Rexx commands applications in a markedly different way from the normal UNIX way of working: it assumes the application is already running, and sends commands to make it do different things. If I had a mailer, a Rexx-script for it could look somewhat like this (I forgot the syntax, bear with me...)
ADDRESS KMAIL.0
# now commands are going to the first instance of kmail that is running. Now we'll create a mail. Rexx has highly convenient associative variables for this.
mail.address = "johannesg@slashdot.org"
mail.subject = "Rexx is bloody useful"
mail.body = "at least, if all applications support it"
SEND mail
# Now we will store that mail in our mysql database:
ADDRESS MYSQL.0
SQL INSERT INTO sentmail VALUES mail
COMMIT
And done! We have linked together two already-running applications, to make a new, unique solution.
Similarly, my mailer _should_ just run a Rexx script when mail is received. The script should decide what to do with the mail, which could be classifying it, testing it for spam, forwarding it to another account, or for all I care making an immediate hardcopy and faxing it to my holiday address. None of those functions should be built into the mailer; instead, the user can configure the scripts precisely for his own needs.
This has some major benefits:
- Tools can remain lean, concentrating on core functionality. As long as the Rexx-interface is powerful enough, and the right triggers are provided, any user functionality you can imagine can be added by interfacing other applications to it.
- Complex tools for a specific purpose can be cobbled together by throwing a few existing applications together with some scripting glue.
- The GUI becomes as easy to script as the shell is today.
Of course I am not saying Rexx is the only way to do this, and indeed the KDE people are already moving in this direction with DCOP (I think). However, I believe noone in the Linux world has yet realized how amazingly powerful and useful this concept is.
So in the end, this isn't about Rexx at all - it is about how incredibly useful the concept of scripting together sets of applications is. The language really doesn't matter, since the Rexx interface works on the level of exchanging strings between the script and the addressed application (i.e. it might as well be Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or ...). Rexx is only special because it did this so incredibly well on the Amiga that I still miss it on a weekly basis.
Aren't they just being good citizens by offering up their patches for inclusion? You know, like that GPL thing says they should?
"The system runs, and programs come and pass, leaving data that becomes files. Files are deleted, and even the inodes are long forgotten when the program that gave it birth comes again. In one program, called the Compiler by some, a program yet to come, a program long past, an error rose in mountains_of_mist.c. The error was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the running of the system. But it was a beginning."
Yep. Jordan alright.