The game dates from far back in the mists of time; it was originally adapted from a CYOA published in a magazine in 1977. It's a suprising amount of fun for something so small.
I use this to test new compilers and the such; it's a much more interesting variant on 'Hello, world!' (and not a lot more complicated).
File header follows:
/* This is a solo paranoia game taken from the Jan/Feb issue (No 77) of
* "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer" magazine.
*
* Article by Sam Shirley.
* Implemented in C on Vax 11/780 under UNIX by Tim Lister
*
* This is a public domain adventure and may not be sold for profit
*
* $Source:/mit/softbone/source/src/paranoia/RCS/paranoia.c,v $
* $Author: tjcoppet $
*
*/
Re:Book spoiler
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In the old days, when I was young system admin, it was called "Monkey Testing".
This is moderated as funny... but it's true. You can even get software to automate the process. It just sends random keypresses and mouseclicks to the application under test, very very fast. You leave it running overnight. If you're application is still stable the next day, it passed.
It's scary how many bugs a simple test like this can throw up...
Geoworks was a very populare product with a problem. The market had already gone to Windows. While it made no sense at the time Microsoft had already gainned market domination.
Actually, Geoworks competed head-to-head with Microsoft for a time. Geos came out at about the same time as Windows 2, and beat the hell out of it: it was so much better it wasn't funny. Unfortunately, Geoworks had marketing people so bad that even Acorn didn't want 'em...
Geoworks also made the intresting choice of liccensing the MOTIF GUI. I always wondered if the infamous MOTIF API was found in Geoworks.. The problems you faced with it suggest the answer is yes.
No, it was quite different. You built your user interface by using special GOC constructs to declare objects in your application file. The GEOS linker would then create those objects when the application was loaded. You very rarely had to actually create things on-the-fly. The Motif-ness was strictly limited to the look and feel of the system, and had nothing to do with the internal implementation. Check out my source code; it's, uh, horrific.
New Deal Office had a different UI module: Screenshots here. Windows lookalike, of course.
It had it's own OO system that didn't match any programming language out there, so it had its own called GOC. This was implemented as a nasty preprocessor that spat out C, which you compiled with Borland C++ and linked using Geoworks' own buggy linker.
While the pure C API was pretty nice, in order to actually do anything you needed to use GOC objects, and the syntax was bizarre. I won't go into any details here, but all my old source code is available off the 'net.
Once you got past the weirdness, it was amazingly rich, however. Object oriented, fully multithreaded and preempted, bitmap and vector graphics including scaled, rotatable vector fonts, virtual memory (yes, even on the 8086!) But it was just too much effort to do.
My GEOS swan song was a Unix emulation system. It allowed you to use Minix-style split I/D executables in a Unix syscall interface environment inside a virtual terminal. It was amazingly powerful, worked well, and would have allowed you to actually develop for GEOS inside GEOS, once I'd actually finished it.
What I don't understand is why the ISS wasn't built next to Mir.
Okay, Mir was, towards the end, practically falling apart. But... it worked. It had guidance systems, attitude control, life support, power systems, everything you need for a long-term space vehicle. It also had mould, dents, leaks and a shredded solar panel, but we're not that bothered about that.
Start building the ISS as a set of add-on modules to Mir. Take advantage of Mir's facilities until you get the chance to replace them: run off the existing power bus until you get the replacement solar panels sent up (or, preferably, some RTGs). Use Mir's life support until the air recycler is installed. etc.
Eventually the new modules will be supplying all the functionality and the old parts of Mir will be unused. At which stage, you can either use them as living space, or depressurise them and mothball them. Maybe one day you can recycle the raw materials; even as scrap, Mir was ludicrously valuable.
But no, Mir went down in flames and the ISS went down in budget. All for annoying political reasons. IMO it's highly unlikely that the ISS will ever do anything useful. By the time it gets large enough, the commercial stations will be eclipsing it.
Actually, they're only known as the French Press in America --- the rest of the world knows 'em as cafetieres.
My parents used to have a twin-bulb glass syphoning percolator. It ran off a little alcohol burner. It was a lovely thing; there was a jug on the bottom, and a big bulb on the top. You filled the jug with water, put your coffee grounds on the top, and set the whole thing heating.
When the water was hot enough, it would automatically syphon up into the top bulb, steep, and drip down into the jug. The whole thing was totally automatic --- but was completely stupid. The heart of it was a really nicely designed syphon. It was great for dinner parties; it would get put in the middle of the table and bubble away while we ate nuts and talked.
Then they dropped it.
They now have a cafetiere. It's much less fun, but is far faster and produces better coffee. They're unbelievably simple to use. Pour in boiling water, put in grounds, let stand for a few minutes, push plunger, pour. You can even get mugs with built-in plungers, so you can make one cup of good coffee at a time.
Oh, yeah, and what the previous poster said: ground coffee has a limited shelf life. It's best kept in the freezer if you want to make it last.
They've got the skills, they've got cheap consumer hardware, they've got bugger all infrastructure. Like a lot of developing countries, if you want decent wide-area networking it could well be easier to skip the copper stage completely and move on to radio.
(consume.net, if you don't know, is a project to create ad-hoc WANs using 802.11 hardware on cheap PCs. Each node acts as a router for all the other nodes; packets get passed from one node to the next, with automatic route discovery and all that. It's very cool.)
What's more, given the state of their government and regulatory authorities, it'd probably be quite easy to grandfather in some nice high signal strength limits. At the moment, noone cares how strong your transmitter is. But it'll be regulated eventually, and once there's a decent amount of infrastructure running at 5W a node, it'll be politically infeasible to order it all to be torn down.
Acorn's Risc OS (a very early and startlingly good OS for the first ever ARM-based microcomputer) took things one step further: an application was a directory. The files in the directory defined the application, so the application could store whatever it liked in there.
Some of the files had special names. !Boot and !Run, for example; !Boot was executed when the application was first seen by the filer (and did things like load the application's icon, register file types, etc) and !Run was executed when the application was double-clicked on.
Unfortunately, Acorn weren't thinking about security when they designed this. (Hey, state of the art in those days was MS-DOS 3 and System 6.) !Boot in particular was a virus-writer's heaven. Stick your floppy disc in the drive, bring up a browser window and your virus automagically loads...
Incidentally, you can still buy Risc OS if you have an Acorn micro or a clone thereof. At one stage someone had even done a port to the Psion Netbook, but that seems to have evaporated. In terms of usability, it still knocks the Windows and MacOS desktops into a cocked hat --- despite being designed about two decades ago. If you want something more modern, and free, the ROX Desktop incorporates a lot of Risc OS' design elements into a desktop system that runs on Linux and X. Damn well, too.
I have an ancient Apricot Herculaes/MDA monitor. It's great. 80x25, two shades of green, or 720x348 pixels of monochrome. It's got long-latency phosphor which gives absolutely no flicker; it's by far the most rock solid display I've ever seen. The monitor itself is physically pretty small and makes a great thing to stash away in a corner of my desktop for monitoring things.
The only problem is that the monitor needs a special adaptor card that's ISA only. My IS department is having trouble finding me a new computer with an ISA slot... eventually I'm going to have to give it up, and I shall be extremely sad.
What about the Orcs? Nobody ever backs the Orcs. They get dissed in more games than anyone. How many other enemies explode on eye contact?
You need to read Mary Gentle's Grunts. Imagine Lord of the Rings written from an orc's point of view... by someone with a mind so twisted you could use them as a corkscrew.
My favourite Cheapass game is, in fact, the free one that comes on their catalogue: Fight the Power.
It's terribly, terribly simple. Each player controls a faction of elves working at the north pole. The aim of the game is to either grow your faction to eight elves (at which point you are now strong enough to overthrow Santa) or to reduce your faction to zero elves (at which point you are now safe enough to rat out the other factions to Santa). Both are win conditions.
Your elves are represented by six-sided dice. You start with four elves. The numbers shown on the dice are important, and persist from turn to turn; they only change when explicitely described below.
Play goes round the table. Each turn you may either fight or recruit.
To recruit, you steal an elf showing a given number from another player. You may only do this if you have more elves with the same number than the other player does.
To fight, you roll zero or more of your elves. The player you're attacking rolls all of their elves. Highest numbers shown wins. The winner must take an elf from the loser.
The reason why this game is so good is because whenever you gain an advantage, another player may be disadvantaged or advantages. If you, with four elves, attack a player with two elves, and you win the battle, your victim is now closer to winning the whole game (because zero is a win condition).
Every move you make affects the entire game state in non-obvious ways. Frequently I've seen someone attack another player just to force the other player to reroll their elves, because the numbers they had were too good. Attacking with an intent to lose is very common.
Total equipment needed: 4D6 per person. Games are short, the gameplay is addictive and surprisingly subtle. You'll play half a dozen games very quickly and then suddenly slow down as you start getting the hang of how it all works and start planning ahead.
Genetic engineering allows introduction into a species of genes that express proteins (and other molecules) not available within the host species' existing gene pool.
And guess what --- this happens all the time.
Ignoring simple mutation, which can add new encodings to a species' gene pool that weren't there before, there's a well-established and uncontroversial mechanism that allows gene sequences to be passed from one species to another, entirely different species.
It works like this: viruses reproduce by injecting their genetic material into a host cell. The new material hijacks the host cell, which starts producing more viruses.
Sometimes this doesn't work properly, and you end up with fragmented viral genetic material in the host cell, which doesn't work. What does the host do? What it always did, largely. Except that when it reproduces, it will now reproduce the viral genetic material as well. (If the viral genetic material isn't completely disabled, this can cause really odd effects, like cancer.)
What happens if the host cell happens to be a sex cell, like in the testes? Well, the sperm produced will contain the viral genetic material, as well, which will get reproduced into every cell in the offspring, etc. So you've now transferred viral genetic material into the gene pool.
It works the other way, too --- the host cell can start producing viruses containing fragments of host genetic material. So if one of these contaminated viruses infects a sex cell in another species of creature, you've now transferred genetic material from one species to another completely different species.
Does this sound far fetched? Yes, it is. But it happens. There are sections of human DNA that have been positively identified as coming from viruses, and there are sections that show clear signs as having come from other species --- although it's a bit hard to tell.
(Embarassingly, I can't remember the technical name for this process.)
It gets even more complicated with plants, because plants don't have the single-cell-zygote bottleneck between generations. It's entirely possible for several pollen cells to fertilise a plant, and the resulting offspring will be a chimera. (This happens surprisingly frequently with humans, too.) There are also some specialised processes for incorporating foreign genetic material that I don't really understand or remember enough of to describe.
Other examples where obscurity is the ONLY security:
1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits.
So change the code. Stop using hard limits, which is a stupid idea anyway, and start using score-based heuristics. The weightings aren't part of the code-base anyway, so analysis of the code won't give you much. Apply a random factor so the edges are fuzzy. People are going to try and find loopholes in the code and avoid audits anyway --- let 'em. If your code is good, the only way they can avoid audits is by not doing anything that requires auditing. Which is the whole point.
2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc.
3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches.
Exactly the same things apply here. Hiding the problems doesn't prevent the problems. All it will do is prevent you from knowing the problems exist. Make the algorithms public and you can see the problems --- yes, they can be exploited, but they can also be fixed far more quickly, and improving the algorithms is the correct solution.
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. The spammers are evolving to take advantage of Google. Google is evolving to defend itself from them. Open-sourcing Google would speed up the process, that's all; which means we'd end up with a better search engine more quickly.
...is this: that when we view a website (or TV programme, etc), we owe something to the website, which we are morally obliged to repay by looking at their advertisements.
Put that simply, it's true. But it's missing one huge, vast, crucial point: the advertisements are only valuable because of the visitors.
Why does Slashdot advertise? To pay the bills. Why do the advertisers give Slashdot money? Because Slashdot is valuable. Why is it valuable? Because people read it.
It's us, the readers, the give a website (or TV programme, etc) value. Never forget that. We don't need the advertisers. The advertisers need us. We are in control. We could kill Slashdot in a week, if we wanted to, merely by not visiting any more.
I don't see adverts any more. I have tinyproxy well trained to block them practically everywhere. You would not believe how much calmer and less stressful the web is now. I don't feel guilty about it --- I'm still visiting the websites, I'm still giving them value. I'm still posting comments like this, which people will read and comment on and in turn, give the website more value. Why should I be forced to have something flickering in the corner of my eye all the time, metaphorically screaming LOOK AT ME! READ ME! BE DISTRACTED! LOSE YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT! To me, adverts reduce the value of a website --- before I had tinyproxy, there were sites I just couldn't use any more. Too hard to find the content.
Yes, a website needs to earn its living, but for gods' sake, there are better ways of doing it than to deface the website beyond the bounds of usability. Look at Google --- advertising that's unobtrusive, tasteful, and actually works. There are other forms of revenue. There's sponsorship, which is not the same as advertising.
Yes, I'm one of those people who records commercial TV on videotape and fast forwards through the commercials. When I get a PVR, I'm going to make damn sure it has a skip-30 button...
Of course people are going to use technology to collect data about other people. Why? Because it's profitable. The more you know about someone --- even in the abstract --- the more chance you have of making money out of them. It's always been like this.
And it's easy. This is the kind of thing that computers are really good at; collecting vast quantities of mindless data and doing statistical analyses. Someone notices that a peak in rush-hour train times correlates with a peak slightly later in McDonald's sales near stations --- hey, there's an opportunity there! Open fast-food franchises in the stations and make a mint.
And, of course, with enough information you can identify individuals. You don't care who they are --- all you care about is what they're likely to spend money on. A surveillance system notices that customer #282712 is passing your restaurant --- your database notices that it's near suppertime, he eats out frequently and he's particularly fond of spaghetti bolognase. Quick! Change that sign --- yes, that one there, in his line of sight --- there's a special on!
But here's the kicker: this is unavoidable. It's unavoidable because it's profitable, and in a capitalist society, profit is king. Database aggregation and automated identification systems gives you targeted advertising like never before, and unlike most advertising, it's something the customers actually want, because you're advertising something they're interested in. It's the holy grail of marketing. You can legislate against this sort of thing if you like, but advertisers have big money, and money makes the laws.
But let's say by some miracle you do manage to pass a law prohibiting, say, automated face recognition. Do you really this is going to make a difference? If my local takeaway can buy a system that sits on the counter and reliably recognises customers, so that they knew what I was likely to want whenever I walked in, don't you think they'd be tempted? It gives me better service, which makes me more likely to spend money there. Or a night club; put the camera somewhere near the entrance so it alerts the bouncers whenever known troublemakers come near. How do you know they're troublemakers? All the nightclubs in the district pass round lists. Illegally, of course, but they'll do it.
All this is inevitable. We are all going to be watched; information is going to be collected about is; that information is going to be aggregated. The only question is, when, and who gets access first. Legislate against it and you're just going to drive it underground. When you can build mechanical flies that can send HDTV images back to a base station, they're going to be used, legally or otherwise. They'll be used from everything from watching football matches, to getting a bank's safe combination, to busting organised crime rings, to spying on your local politician to see what deals he's making, to watching the girl next door showering, to checking up on your husband, to child-minding...
Privacy is dying. It's not dead yet, but it's dying. Currently we can expect to be watched whenever we go out in public. Within ten to twenty years, I expect most people in cities will assume that they can be watched at any time. This is going to change things.
For better or for worse, I don't know. On the plus side, there's accountability. If the police are watched, all the time, then they'll be forced to be honest. On the minus side, there are no secrets. Let's say you start going out with someone the same sex you are, but don't want your family to know --- well, they will know. If they look.
This side of things has been better explored by people other than myself. Try David Brin's The Transparent Society, or Arthur C Clarke's The Light of Other Days. I don't know whether I'd like to live there; for someone who grew up in normal Western society, I think it would
I have been using Gandi for several years and been very happy with their service.
<AOL>Me too.</AOL>
The only slight quibble I've had is that their web site is a bit susceptible to weird cookie madness, which means that after moving house I've been unable to update my records; but that's happened with other e-commerce sites, so I don't think it's a specific problem with GANDI.
Other than that they've been easy to use, efficient, very low maintenance, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
I'm dubious --- the guy seems to fit several of the classic nutter profiles --- but it would be very cool if he was right (pun not intended). To his credit, he does say that he doesn't know why it works, and he's willing for other people to arrange to test it.
Of course, it probably still wouldn't be suitable as a reentry heat-shield material without further development --- it may be able to cope with the heat, but is it mechanically tough enough to cope with mach 25 winds? You don't want to get half-way through reentry and discover your heat shield blowing off in the breeze.
Even though a penny an email sounds innocuous, this just won't fly. For one thing, the infrastructure you'd need to track the financial side of things would probably prevent the figure from being that low. Plus there's the whole loss-of-anonymity that goes along with paying for email rights. The biggest problem is that while this service might appeal to those on the receiving end of email, I can't see a wide market wanting to sign up as senders...
Agree.
My pet idea is that the general principle is sound --- i.e., introduce some obligatory cost when sending email --- but it shouldn't be monetary. Instead, just introduce a, say, ten second delay every time the SMTP server accepts email.
This delay is short enough that most people won't notice it, particularly if their mail software has an outgoing queue. But it means you can only send about 8500 messages a day through the SMTP server. If you also introduced widespread blocking of port 25 by ISPs, it means that the only way to send email is via the delayed SMTP server --- which means the network can't be used to send spam.
(Before anyone asks, yes, this would affect mailing lists. But mailing lists are special, and any self-respecting ISP could easily set up a properly authenticating mailing list server that's not subject to the delay.)
Of course, this will never be adopted --- because it prevents an ISPs own customers from sending spam, rather than preventing the customers from being spammed from another ISP, there's no incentive. But it's cheap and easy to implement, involves no cultural or technological changes, no nasty financial penalties, and would probably actually work...
At last! Banknotes you don't have to read to work out the denomination of!
I'm British. I'm used to European money, which is all different colours and different sizes, and in a lot of cases is made out of plastic. You probably don't realise just how weird American money looks to us; it's all the same size, it's all the same colour --- even the material feels odd; thin and papery and not very robust. (Rag paper, isn't it?)
When I last visited the US, dealing with American money was a continual surprise. Normally when I visit another country it doesn't take long before I can recognise notes by colour and size, which makes it much easier to handle. With American money, I kept having to peer at it to work out what it was I was about to hand over. I got the impression that they were designed by someone who knew about ergonomics, but wanted no truck with the idea.
Of course, this is mostly just a matter of being used to a different system (I expect that with some practice you get used to looking at the picture rather than the overall design), but I do wonder how blind and partially sighted people manage.
While this isn't a complete solution, at least the high-denomination notes will look different from the low-denomination notes, which will make it much less easy to, e.g., tip someone a hundred dollars instead of one. (Although whether this is considered a benefit depends which side of the transaction you're standing.)
The argument is constantly made, "What about 'power users' and people who really do need extra functionality?". Fine, OK: put that stuff "under the hood" and document its location and functionality. But don't put in a user config dialog with 27 tab groups, 40 options per tab, with an 'Advanced' button on each one.
Way back in days of yore, when Microsoft was still working out how to do overlapping windows, there was a company called Geoworks that produced a really nice office suite for the PC.
I won't go into details about it, but one of the really cool features was that each application had a tunable user interface. For example, you could set the word processor to user level #1 (novice) and it would turn into Windows Write: most of the controls went away, and you ended up with toolbar buttons for italic, bold, underline, etc, plus justification options; you got simple menus that let you pick things like the font and size directly; you got really, really basic page layout features --- I think it let you pick your paper size, and that was it.
OTOH, turn it up to level #4 (expert) and it turned into Word. There were controls everywhere. Hierarchical editable character and paragraph styles, embedded fields, hyperlinks, a full vector drawing package including rotatable text (also with hierarchical editable styles), a full bitmap drawing package, up to four seperate customisable toolbars, ruler and frame based layout, etc, etc.
And they used the same files.
So it was perfectly possible for Precocious Teenager to log in in expert mode, put together some pretty templates, and then Grandma could log in in novice mode and type text into them with simple formatting. Mum and Dad could use levels #2 or #3, which gave you more features without the overwhelming complexity that level #4 gave you.
It was such a startlingly good idea that I am not at all surprised no-one appears to have done anything similar.
(Hmm. You might still be able to download an evaluation copy here, but I suspect it's a pig to run on a NT-based Windows. Worth a look, though, if you want to be amazed at what it's possible to do on a 2MB real-mode DOS machine.)
If average power is less, velocity increases at a slower rate. Therefore, the probe will take longer to get to a specific destination than a conventional rocket. MUCH longer.
You forgot about time. Your chemical engine accelerates your spacecraft at 10 m/s^2 for ten minutes, and then runs out of fuel and has to coast the rest of the way. Total delta-V: 6 km/s. Your ion drive accelerates at 0.1 m/s^2 for a year. Total delta-V: 50 km/s. At the end of the year, the ion drive vehicle is going a hell of a lot faster.
And in case you think that a year of continuous thrust is infeasible, Deep Space I's ion drive ran (on and off) for about 600 days.
Excellent observation from you, this is a new cutting edge propulsion technique, I have been studying this for the last year, I ran across this site which hosts amateur experiments in this phenomena, the made a crude working anti-gravity device, so far there is no solid physical explanation to why it flies, some have theorized that it is ion wind, I was surprised that NASA patented this propulsion technique, I'm too lazy to dig up the link now.
There's a perfectly solid explanation --- it is electric wind. You can hold your hand underneath one (assuming you're willing to risk being electrocuted by the insane voltages these things run off) and feel it. Space ion drives work just the same way, only they're much more energetic.
They're a neat trick, though. Alas, the largest one I've seen reports of --- the Maximus II --- weighs 190g, can carry a payload of 60g, and needs a power supply that can deliver 300W to make it work. If I've done my sums right, that means that an average 1.5V AA cell could probably run one for about thirty seconds --- provided you could find a cell that would deliver the necessary current. And you'd have to fit all the cell plus the HT converter within that 60 grammes.
Be a neat trick if you could make it work, though.
The other problem is that they tend to accumulate charge. They work by positively ionising the air at the top, attracting it towards the negative electrode at the bottom, and then stripping off the charge as the air goes past the electrode. But you're not going to strip off all the charge, which means that your lifter is going to lose positive electrical charge (because charge is conserved). In other words, it'll become negatively charged... which means it's going to have a tougher job accelerating the air and staying aloft. In the lab this isn't a problem because they're connected to a grounded power supply with a wire, which keeps the amount of charge constant. A free-flying one is going to have problems, though.
But if you could solve that, then some fun things are possible. Theoretically, of course, sunlight provides about one kilowatt per square metre. Modern solar cells are about 20% efficient. So your one square metre of solar cells will provide your 200W of energy... get your cells light enough, and you could build a lifter that would fly indefinitely in sunlight!
Slashdot Mirror
The game dates from far back in the mists of time; it was originally adapted from a CYOA published in a magazine in 1977. It's a suprising amount of fun for something so small.
I use this to test new compilers and the such; it's a much more interesting variant on 'Hello, world!' (and not a lot more complicated).
File header follows:
* "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer" magazine.
*
* Article by Sam Shirley.
* Implemented in C on Vax 11/780 under UNIX by Tim Lister
*
* This is a public domain adventure and may not be sold for profit
*
* $Source:
* $Author: tjcoppet $
*
*/
No, no, this is C++, remember? It ends with };.
This is moderated as funny... but it's true. You can even get software to automate the process. It just sends random keypresses and mouseclicks to the application under test, very very fast. You leave it running overnight. If you're application is still stable the next day, it passed.
It's scary how many bugs a simple test like this can throw up...
Actually, Geoworks competed head-to-head with Microsoft for a time. Geos came out at about the same time as Windows 2, and beat the hell out of it: it was so much better it wasn't funny. Unfortunately, Geoworks had marketing people so bad that even Acorn didn't want 'em...
Geoworks also made the intresting choice of liccensing the MOTIF GUI. I always wondered if the infamous MOTIF API was found in Geoworks.. The problems you faced with it suggest the answer is yes.
No, it was quite different. You built your user interface by using special GOC constructs to declare objects in your application file. The GEOS linker would then create those objects when the application was loaded. You very rarely had to actually create things on-the-fly. The Motif-ness was strictly limited to the look and feel of the system, and had nothing to do with the internal implementation. Check out my source code; it's, uh, horrific.
New Deal Office had a different UI module: Screenshots here. Windows lookalike, of course.
It had it's own OO system that didn't match any programming language out there, so it had its own called GOC. This was implemented as a nasty preprocessor that spat out C, which you compiled with Borland C++ and linked using Geoworks' own buggy linker.
While the pure C API was pretty nice, in order to actually do anything you needed to use GOC objects, and the syntax was bizarre. I won't go into any details here, but all my old source code is available off the 'net.
Once you got past the weirdness, it was amazingly rich, however. Object oriented, fully multithreaded and preempted, bitmap and vector graphics including scaled, rotatable vector fonts, virtual memory (yes, even on the 8086!) But it was just too much effort to do.
My GEOS swan song was a Unix emulation system. It allowed you to use Minix-style split I/D executables in a Unix syscall interface environment inside a virtual terminal. It was amazingly powerful, worked well, and would have allowed you to actually develop for GEOS inside GEOS, once I'd actually finished it.
No-one was interested.
Okay, Mir was, towards the end, practically falling apart. But... it worked. It had guidance systems, attitude control, life support, power systems, everything you need for a long-term space vehicle. It also had mould, dents, leaks and a shredded solar panel, but we're not that bothered about that.
Start building the ISS as a set of add-on modules to Mir. Take advantage of Mir's facilities until you get the chance to replace them: run off the existing power bus until you get the replacement solar panels sent up (or, preferably, some RTGs). Use Mir's life support until the air recycler is installed. etc.
Eventually the new modules will be supplying all the functionality and the old parts of Mir will be unused. At which stage, you can either use them as living space, or depressurise them and mothball them. Maybe one day you can recycle the raw materials; even as scrap, Mir was ludicrously valuable.
But no, Mir went down in flames and the ISS went down in budget. All for annoying political reasons. IMO it's highly unlikely that the ISS will ever do anything useful. By the time it gets large enough, the commercial stations will be eclipsing it.
Actually, they're only known as the French Press in America --- the rest of the world knows 'em as cafetieres.
My parents used to have a twin-bulb glass syphoning percolator. It ran off a little alcohol burner. It was a lovely thing; there was a jug on the bottom, and a big bulb on the top. You filled the jug with water, put your coffee grounds on the top, and set the whole thing heating.
When the water was hot enough, it would automatically syphon up into the top bulb, steep, and drip down into the jug. The whole thing was totally automatic --- but was completely stupid. The heart of it was a really nicely designed syphon. It was great for dinner parties; it would get put in the middle of the table and bubble away while we ate nuts and talked.
Then they dropped it.
They now have a cafetiere. It's much less fun, but is far faster and produces better coffee. They're unbelievably simple to use. Pour in boiling water, put in grounds, let stand for a few minutes, push plunger, pour. You can even get mugs with built-in plungers, so you can make one cup of good coffee at a time.
Oh, yeah, and what the previous poster said: ground coffee has a limited shelf life. It's best kept in the freezer if you want to make it last.
They've got the skills, they've got cheap consumer hardware, they've got bugger all infrastructure. Like a lot of developing countries, if you want decent wide-area networking it could well be easier to skip the copper stage completely and move on to radio.
(consume.net, if you don't know, is a project to create ad-hoc WANs using 802.11 hardware on cheap PCs. Each node acts as a router for all the other nodes; packets get passed from one node to the next, with automatic route discovery and all that. It's very cool.)
What's more, given the state of their government and regulatory authorities, it'd probably be quite easy to grandfather in some nice high signal strength limits. At the moment, noone cares how strong your transmitter is. But it'll be regulated eventually, and once there's a decent amount of infrastructure running at 5W a node, it'll be politically infeasible to order it all to be torn down.
Some of the files had special names. !Boot and !Run, for example; !Boot was executed when the application was first seen by the filer (and did things like load the application's icon, register file types, etc) and !Run was executed when the application was double-clicked on.
Unfortunately, Acorn weren't thinking about security when they designed this. (Hey, state of the art in those days was MS-DOS 3 and System 6.) !Boot in particular was a virus-writer's heaven. Stick your floppy disc in the drive, bring up a browser window and your virus automagically loads...
Incidentally, you can still buy Risc OS if you have an Acorn micro or a clone thereof. At one stage someone had even done a port to the Psion Netbook, but that seems to have evaporated. In terms of usability, it still knocks the Windows and MacOS desktops into a cocked hat --- despite being designed about two decades ago. If you want something more modern, and free, the ROX Desktop incorporates a lot of Risc OS' design elements into a desktop system that runs on Linux and X. Damn well, too.
The only problem is that the monitor needs a special adaptor card that's ISA only. My IS department is having trouble finding me a new computer with an ISA slot... eventually I'm going to have to give it up, and I shall be extremely sad.
You need to read Mary Gentle's Grunts . Imagine Lord of the Rings written from an orc's point of view... by someone with a mind so twisted you could use them as a corkscrew.
It's terribly, terribly simple. Each player controls a faction of elves working at the north pole. The aim of the game is to either grow your faction to eight elves (at which point you are now strong enough to overthrow Santa) or to reduce your faction to zero elves (at which point you are now safe enough to rat out the other factions to Santa). Both are win conditions.
Your elves are represented by six-sided dice. You start with four elves. The numbers shown on the dice are important, and persist from turn to turn; they only change when explicitely described below.
Play goes round the table. Each turn you may either fight or recruit.
To recruit, you steal an elf showing a given number from another player. You may only do this if you have more elves with the same number than the other player does.
To fight, you roll zero or more of your elves. The player you're attacking rolls all of their elves. Highest numbers shown wins. The winner must take an elf from the loser.
The reason why this game is so good is because whenever you gain an advantage, another player may be disadvantaged or advantages. If you, with four elves, attack a player with two elves, and you win the battle, your victim is now closer to winning the whole game (because zero is a win condition).
Every move you make affects the entire game state in non-obvious ways. Frequently I've seen someone attack another player just to force the other player to reroll their elves, because the numbers they had were too good. Attacking with an intent to lose is very common.
Total equipment needed: 4D6 per person. Games are short, the gameplay is addictive and surprisingly subtle. You'll play half a dozen games very quickly and then suddenly slow down as you start getting the hang of how it all works and start planning ahead.
Fun.
And guess what --- this happens all the time.
Ignoring simple mutation, which can add new encodings to a species' gene pool that weren't there before, there's a well-established and uncontroversial mechanism that allows gene sequences to be passed from one species to another, entirely different species.
It works like this: viruses reproduce by injecting their genetic material into a host cell. The new material hijacks the host cell, which starts producing more viruses.
Sometimes this doesn't work properly, and you end up with fragmented viral genetic material in the host cell, which doesn't work. What does the host do? What it always did, largely. Except that when it reproduces, it will now reproduce the viral genetic material as well. (If the viral genetic material isn't completely disabled, this can cause really odd effects, like cancer.)
What happens if the host cell happens to be a sex cell, like in the testes? Well, the sperm produced will contain the viral genetic material, as well, which will get reproduced into every cell in the offspring, etc. So you've now transferred viral genetic material into the gene pool.
It works the other way, too --- the host cell can start producing viruses containing fragments of host genetic material. So if one of these contaminated viruses infects a sex cell in another species of creature, you've now transferred genetic material from one species to another completely different species.
Does this sound far fetched? Yes, it is. But it happens. There are sections of human DNA that have been positively identified as coming from viruses, and there are sections that show clear signs as having come from other species --- although it's a bit hard to tell.
(Embarassingly, I can't remember the technical name for this process.)
It gets even more complicated with plants, because plants don't have the single-cell-zygote bottleneck between generations. It's entirely possible for several pollen cells to fertilise a plant, and the resulting offspring will be a chimera. (This happens surprisingly frequently with humans, too.) There are also some specialised processes for incorporating foreign genetic material that I don't really understand or remember enough of to describe.
DNA's not as sacred as you think it is.
1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits.
So change the code. Stop using hard limits, which is a stupid idea anyway, and start using score-based heuristics. The weightings aren't part of the code-base anyway, so analysis of the code won't give you much. Apply a random factor so the edges are fuzzy. People are going to try and find loopholes in the code and avoid audits anyway --- let 'em. If your code is good, the only way they can avoid audits is by not doing anything that requires auditing. Which is the whole point.
2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc.
3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches.
Exactly the same things apply here. Hiding the problems doesn't prevent the problems. All it will do is prevent you from knowing the problems exist. Make the algorithms public and you can see the problems --- yes, they can be exploited, but they can also be fixed far more quickly, and improving the algorithms is the correct solution.
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. The spammers are evolving to take advantage of Google. Google is evolving to defend itself from them. Open-sourcing Google would speed up the process, that's all; which means we'd end up with a better search engine more quickly.
Put that simply, it's true. But it's missing one huge, vast, crucial point: the advertisements are only valuable because of the visitors.
Why does Slashdot advertise? To pay the bills. Why do the advertisers give Slashdot money? Because Slashdot is valuable. Why is it valuable? Because people read it.
It's us, the readers, the give a website (or TV programme, etc) value. Never forget that. We don't need the advertisers. The advertisers need us. We are in control. We could kill Slashdot in a week, if we wanted to, merely by not visiting any more.
I don't see adverts any more. I have tinyproxy well trained to block them practically everywhere. You would not believe how much calmer and less stressful the web is now. I don't feel guilty about it --- I'm still visiting the websites, I'm still giving them value. I'm still posting comments like this, which people will read and comment on and in turn, give the website more value. Why should I be forced to have something flickering in the corner of my eye all the time, metaphorically screaming LOOK AT ME! READ ME! BE DISTRACTED! LOSE YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT! To me, adverts reduce the value of a website --- before I had tinyproxy, there were sites I just couldn't use any more. Too hard to find the content.
Yes, a website needs to earn its living, but for gods' sake, there are better ways of doing it than to deface the website beyond the bounds of usability. Look at Google --- advertising that's unobtrusive, tasteful, and actually works. There are other forms of revenue. There's sponsorship, which is not the same as advertising.
Yes, I'm one of those people who records commercial TV on videotape and fast forwards through the commercials. When I get a PVR, I'm going to make damn sure it has a skip-30 button...
And it's easy. This is the kind of thing that computers are really good at; collecting vast quantities of mindless data and doing statistical analyses. Someone notices that a peak in rush-hour train times correlates with a peak slightly later in McDonald's sales near stations --- hey, there's an opportunity there! Open fast-food franchises in the stations and make a mint.
And, of course, with enough information you can identify individuals. You don't care who they are --- all you care about is what they're likely to spend money on. A surveillance system notices that customer #282712 is passing your restaurant --- your database notices that it's near suppertime, he eats out frequently and he's particularly fond of spaghetti bolognase. Quick! Change that sign --- yes, that one there, in his line of sight --- there's a special on!
But here's the kicker: this is unavoidable. It's unavoidable because it's profitable, and in a capitalist society, profit is king. Database aggregation and automated identification systems gives you targeted advertising like never before, and unlike most advertising, it's something the customers actually want, because you're advertising something they're interested in. It's the holy grail of marketing. You can legislate against this sort of thing if you like, but advertisers have big money, and money makes the laws.
But let's say by some miracle you do manage to pass a law prohibiting, say, automated face recognition. Do you really this is going to make a difference? If my local takeaway can buy a system that sits on the counter and reliably recognises customers, so that they knew what I was likely to want whenever I walked in, don't you think they'd be tempted? It gives me better service, which makes me more likely to spend money there. Or a night club; put the camera somewhere near the entrance so it alerts the bouncers whenever known troublemakers come near. How do you know they're troublemakers? All the nightclubs in the district pass round lists. Illegally, of course, but they'll do it.
All this is inevitable. We are all going to be watched; information is going to be collected about is; that information is going to be aggregated. The only question is, when, and who gets access first. Legislate against it and you're just going to drive it underground. When you can build mechanical flies that can send HDTV images back to a base station, they're going to be used, legally or otherwise. They'll be used from everything from watching football matches, to getting a bank's safe combination, to busting organised crime rings, to spying on your local politician to see what deals he's making, to watching the girl next door showering, to checking up on your husband, to child-minding...
Privacy is dying. It's not dead yet, but it's dying. Currently we can expect to be watched whenever we go out in public. Within ten to twenty years, I expect most people in cities will assume that they can be watched at any time. This is going to change things.
For better or for worse, I don't know. On the plus side, there's accountability. If the police are watched, all the time, then they'll be forced to be honest. On the minus side, there are no secrets. Let's say you start going out with someone the same sex you are, but don't want your family to know --- well, they will know. If they look.
This side of things has been better explored by people other than myself. Try David Brin's The Transparent Society, or Arthur C Clarke's The Light of Other Days. I don't know whether I'd like to live there; for someone who grew up in normal Western society, I think it would
<AOL>Me too.</AOL>
The only slight quibble I've had is that their web site is a bit susceptible to weird cookie madness, which means that after moving house I've been unable to update my records; but that's happened with other e-commerce sites, so I don't think it's a specific problem with GANDI.
Other than that they've been easy to use, efficient, very low maintenance, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
They also speak English, BTW.
Of course, it probably still wouldn't be suitable as a reentry heat-shield material without further development --- it may be able to cope with the heat, but is it mechanically tough enough to cope with mach 25 winds? You don't want to get half-way through reentry and discover your heat shield blowing off in the breeze.
If only. If only...
Agree.
My pet idea is that the general principle is sound --- i.e., introduce some obligatory cost when sending email --- but it shouldn't be monetary. Instead, just introduce a, say, ten second delay every time the SMTP server accepts email.
This delay is short enough that most people won't notice it, particularly if their mail software has an outgoing queue. But it means you can only send about 8500 messages a day through the SMTP server. If you also introduced widespread blocking of port 25 by ISPs, it means that the only way to send email is via the delayed SMTP server --- which means the network can't be used to send spam.
(Before anyone asks, yes, this would affect mailing lists. But mailing lists are special, and any self-respecting ISP could easily set up a properly authenticating mailing list server that's not subject to the delay.)
Of course, this will never be adopted --- because it prevents an ISPs own customers from sending spam, rather than preventing the customers from being spammed from another ISP, there's no incentive. But it's cheap and easy to implement, involves no cultural or technological changes, no nasty financial penalties, and would probably actually work...
Unfortunately, I don't know if it's true; snopes doesn't have anything. Can anyone shed any light?
I'm British. I'm used to European money, which is all different colours and different sizes, and in a lot of cases is made out of plastic. You probably don't realise just how weird American money looks to us; it's all the same size, it's all the same colour --- even the material feels odd; thin and papery and not very robust. (Rag paper, isn't it?)
When I last visited the US, dealing with American money was a continual surprise. Normally when I visit another country it doesn't take long before I can recognise notes by colour and size, which makes it much easier to handle. With American money, I kept having to peer at it to work out what it was I was about to hand over. I got the impression that they were designed by someone who knew about ergonomics, but wanted no truck with the idea.
Of course, this is mostly just a matter of being used to a different system (I expect that with some practice you get used to looking at the picture rather than the overall design), but I do wonder how blind and partially sighted people manage.
While this isn't a complete solution, at least the high-denomination notes will look different from the low-denomination notes, which will make it much less easy to, e.g., tip someone a hundred dollars instead of one. (Although whether this is considered a benefit depends which side of the transaction you're standing.)
Way back in days of yore, when Microsoft was still working out how to do overlapping windows, there was a company called Geoworks that produced a really nice office suite for the PC.
I won't go into details about it, but one of the really cool features was that each application had a tunable user interface. For example, you could set the word processor to user level #1 (novice) and it would turn into Windows Write: most of the controls went away, and you ended up with toolbar buttons for italic, bold, underline, etc, plus justification options; you got simple menus that let you pick things like the font and size directly; you got really, really basic page layout features --- I think it let you pick your paper size, and that was it.
OTOH, turn it up to level #4 (expert) and it turned into Word. There were controls everywhere. Hierarchical editable character and paragraph styles, embedded fields, hyperlinks, a full vector drawing package including rotatable text (also with hierarchical editable styles), a full bitmap drawing package, up to four seperate customisable toolbars, ruler and frame based layout, etc, etc.
And they used the same files.
So it was perfectly possible for Precocious Teenager to log in in expert mode, put together some pretty templates, and then Grandma could log in in novice mode and type text into them with simple formatting. Mum and Dad could use levels #2 or #3, which gave you more features without the overwhelming complexity that level #4 gave you.
It was such a startlingly good idea that I am not at all surprised no-one appears to have done anything similar.
(Hmm. You might still be able to download an evaluation copy here, but I suspect it's a pig to run on a NT-based Windows. Worth a look, though, if you want to be amazed at what it's possible to do on a 2MB real-mode DOS machine.)
If average power is less, velocity increases at a slower rate. Therefore, the probe will take longer to get to a specific destination than a conventional rocket. MUCH longer.
You forgot about time. Your chemical engine accelerates your spacecraft at 10 m/s^2 for ten minutes, and then runs out of fuel and has to coast the rest of the way. Total delta-V: 6 km/s. Your ion drive accelerates at 0.1 m/s^2 for a year. Total delta-V: 50 km/s. At the end of the year, the ion drive vehicle is going a hell of a lot faster.
And in case you think that a year of continuous thrust is infeasible, Deep Space I's ion drive ran (on and off) for about 600 days.
There's a perfectly solid explanation --- it is electric wind. You can hold your hand underneath one (assuming you're willing to risk being electrocuted by the insane voltages these things run off) and feel it. Space ion drives work just the same way, only they're much more energetic.
They're a neat trick, though. Alas, the largest one I've seen reports of --- the Maximus II --- weighs 190g, can carry a payload of 60g, and needs a power supply that can deliver 300W to make it work. If I've done my sums right, that means that an average 1.5V AA cell could probably run one for about thirty seconds --- provided you could find a cell that would deliver the necessary current. And you'd have to fit all the cell plus the HT converter within that 60 grammes.
Be a neat trick if you could make it work, though.
The other problem is that they tend to accumulate charge. They work by positively ionising the air at the top, attracting it towards the negative electrode at the bottom, and then stripping off the charge as the air goes past the electrode. But you're not going to strip off all the charge, which means that your lifter is going to lose positive electrical charge (because charge is conserved). In other words, it'll become negatively charged... which means it's going to have a tougher job accelerating the air and staying aloft. In the lab this isn't a problem because they're connected to a grounded power supply with a wire, which keeps the amount of charge constant. A free-flying one is going to have problems, though.
But if you could solve that, then some fun things are possible. Theoretically, of course, sunlight provides about one kilowatt per square metre. Modern solar cells are about 20% efficient. So your one square metre of solar cells will provide your 200W of energy... get your cells light enough, and you could build a lifter that would fly indefinitely in sunlight!