The approximate understanding that a no-math simplified presentation of science gives can actually impede further learning. It gives an easy answer and takes away the challange. If you encourage children to settle for approximate truths, you teach then that the real proof doesn't matter very much. And that's a dangerous thing, the province of religion, not science.
Okay, so we've established that Lucas has 'raised the bar' and made it much, much, more expensive for someone with a great dramatic idea to get his/her vision onto the screen and before the public. Kinda the equivalent of what's happened in popular music, where you've gotta make a twelve million dollar 'video' before your music can become a hit.
Nevermind the fact that the whole Star Wars universe makes more sense when the updated (Director's Cut, if you will) scenes are added to the films.
You see, there's the problem. Great stories, and good movies, don't have to 'make sense' in that way. There's a trick in drama called the 'aesthetic distance' where the audience is supposed to 'buy into' the fact that the performance is an approximation, and expand the spectacle themselves, internally in their own mind.
Loose ends, paradoxes, etc. are supposed to be overwhelmed and become irrelevant because the dramatic effect smooths it all over.
Instead, in Lucas, and in filmmakers like him (sadly a dominant force these days in filmmaking) everything has to be 'real' or as 'real-seeming' as can be made possible.
It's like the difference between a fabulous Doctor Who episode, with cheese props but a wonderfully crafted story and brilliant acting, and the massively engineered psuedo-reality of the modern flicks. One works well within limits and succeeds in going beyond said limits. The other is just 'as good as it could be in the era it was produced' and people ten years later will obsess over the then-obsolete rough edges.
For a technician like Lucas, the second production makes him a ton of money. It also sells a lot more home theatre hardware and drives a need to continually upgrade the playback hardware in the theatres. I guess that stuff is important to some people.
One of the most ingenious tricks the right-wing has pulled on the American public is convincing them that every position on an issue is equally valid (ala evolution vs. creation).
Actually, no. That is the story presented by the 'everything is relative, there is no good or evil' left-end of the cultural spectrum. Moral relativism, and all that croft.
What the creationist nuts push is that evolution is just plain wrong. But creationism isn't 'right-wing.' It's just nuts.
The concepts can only be parodied in a 45 minute program. Without the theoretical background, based in Math, the science is only an approximation.
Keeping science in the public's mind is NOT a matter of presenting the public with a priesthood to lecture them. That's the whole 'Mass in latin' thing, and was debunked centuries ago.
I remember running up to five separate instances of Doom simultaneously in X Window frames on a Linux X desktop. This on a 486 box with 16 megs of RAM. Five different XDoom sessions, all running the 'demo mode' recording at full speed.
With Slackware and the 1.2 kernel. In 1995.
This was in the era when a lot of people struggled to get ONE instance of Doom to run on a DOS box...
IE4 isn't available as a PPC binary. The only web browser at all that I could get running is the stock IE 2.0 that always comes installed on NT4.
My experiment with NT/PPC was to see how much I could 'get around' on the web with an NT/PPC box. Almost nowhere, actually. IE 2 is basically plain Mosaic with a few enhancements.
Notably, you can no longer connect to http://www.microsoft.com with IE 2.0. If you have an old NT4 box that doesn't have any IE 'upgrade' on it, try it sometime for amusement purposes.
Now I'm pissed, because I had a StarMax awhile back and never tried installing NT on it. It was a pretty cool machine, PS/2 mouse and Serial Port, plus ADB, and VGA. All the usual PREP parts. I never suspected it would run NT (not that I would have run NT on it for very long).
My IBM PPC box wouldn't boot from the CD. The bootloader on the Microsoft CD is Intel (but I was using a Compaq OEM NT4 CD so it's even amazing it included the full compliment of platforms in the first place.)
There's a boot diskette that IBM provides. I downloaded it about a year ago. People should grab their copy of the image, as it's the kind of thing that won't be available forever.
You're probably right. The box that I fooled with was one that I got in an auction for ~$20 so I have no idea what it's original cost was. It had the feel, at the auction, of being a 'test bed' machine. I.e. it was the only PPC box in an auction of a bunch of Intel stuff. I suspect it was never a production machine.
The installation media is any old Microsoft NT4 CDrom. And a boot floppy whose image you can download from IBM. It's nothing special, and it's a half hour reinstall.
If we're going to be haughty about 'historical preservation' you should already know the above and have the media on hand and archived. I do, and I don't even have a PPC Thinkpad.
For people who want to run NT/PPC (just becuz), the model of RS/6000 I was using was an RS/6000 7248 box (I think that's the model number). They pop up on eBay all the time and you should be able to find one for under $50.
You just need an NT4 CD from Microsoft, and the special boot diskette, an image of which is available from an IBM site.
The RS/6000 box that I ran NT4 on wasn't a $5K box. Well, maybe it was because of low volume.
It was a regular desktop box, with on-board S3 Trio graphics, ISA slots, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, etc. It was comprable to the x86 boxes of the time that IBM was selling for OS/2 desktops.
And actually, it was a box I got at auction for like $15 or so.
Speaking of SCO, I latched onto an old Altos 8086 box that runs System 3 era Xenix (pre-SCO). Microsoft Xenix, mind you. I haven't received the box yet, but am looking forward to it.
I don't think it'll run Windows. Probably a curses port exists for 'graphical' stuff on dumb terminals.
IBM almost went with the 68000 for the 'IBM PC' project. My understanding is that a big reason why they didn't was that the old Dip package 68000 part was a monster to handle in product (huge huge physical package). The 8088 and 8xxx series Intel chips were a slam dunk for low cost, so they got designed in.
Not going to work. Products like VMware and VirtualPC do not emulate a CPU, they only provide timeslices of (or some other technique of sharing) the real, underlying CPU.
Wrong. In several ways.
There was a good emulation layer for NT/Alpha that DEC came out with. It made NT/Alpha run all the Win32 x86 apps pretty good. It's a matter of emulating the x86 instructions within a full Windows OS, not supporting a whole OS on an 'emulated machine' as VMWare and VirtualPC do.
There have been periods of time in which there has been excess foundry capacity. And there are smaller outfits like Dallas Semiconductor who are 'fabless' vendors, they contract out their designs.
They are a reduced-capacity market, though. I bet they fit a HELL of a lot of those bitty Dallas chips on each wafer.
I mean, those that use PPC (mostly Mac and PPC Linux users) use it becasue they don't want to use Windows.
We're talking like grownups here, i.e. a PPC chip built into some sort of system and a Windows port to run on it. Not platforms jocks flaming each other on *.advocacy newsgroups.
And I suspect a lot of Apple PPC users (and admins of RS/6000 boxes) would be mighty offended at the notion that their choice was essentially an anti-Windows one.
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The approximate understanding that a no-math simplified presentation of science gives can actually impede further learning. It gives an easy answer and takes away the challange. If you encourage children to settle for approximate truths, you teach then that the real proof doesn't matter very much. And that's a dangerous thing, the province of religion, not science.
I'll confess that none of my artwork creations have made it onto a Burger King soda cup.
Okay, so we've established that Lucas has 'raised the bar' and made it much, much, more expensive for someone with a great dramatic idea to get his/her vision onto the screen and before the public. Kinda the equivalent of what's happened in popular music, where you've gotta make a twelve million dollar 'video' before your music can become a hit.
How is that a good thing, again?
Nevermind the fact that the whole Star Wars universe makes more sense when the updated (Director's Cut, if you will) scenes are added to the films.
You see, there's the problem. Great stories, and good movies, don't have to 'make sense' in that way. There's a trick in drama called the 'aesthetic distance' where the audience is supposed to 'buy into' the fact that the performance is an approximation, and expand the spectacle themselves, internally in their own mind.
Loose ends, paradoxes, etc. are supposed to be overwhelmed and become irrelevant because the dramatic effect smooths it all over.
Instead, in Lucas, and in filmmakers like him (sadly a dominant force these days in filmmaking) everything has to be 'real' or as 'real-seeming' as can be made possible.
It's like the difference between a fabulous Doctor Who episode, with cheese props but a wonderfully crafted story and brilliant acting, and the massively engineered psuedo-reality of the modern flicks. One works well within limits and succeeds in going beyond said limits. The other is just 'as good as it could be in the era it was produced' and people ten years later will obsess over the then-obsolete rough edges.
For a technician like Lucas, the second production makes him a ton of money. It also sells a lot more home theatre hardware and drives a need to continually upgrade the playback hardware in the theatres. I guess that stuff is important to some people.
One of the most ingenious tricks the right-wing has pulled on the American public is convincing them that every position on an issue is equally valid (ala evolution vs. creation).
Actually, no. That is the story presented by the 'everything is relative, there is no good or evil' left-end of the cultural spectrum. Moral relativism, and all that croft.
What the creationist nuts push is that evolution is just plain wrong. But creationism isn't 'right-wing.' It's just nuts.
Jesus Flucking Cripes!
The concepts can only be parodied in a 45 minute program. Without the theoretical background, based in Math, the science is only an approximation.
Keeping science in the public's mind is NOT a matter of presenting the public with a priesthood to lecture them. That's the whole 'Mass in latin' thing, and was debunked centuries ago.
I remember running up to five separate instances of Doom simultaneously in X Window frames on a Linux X desktop. This on a 486 box with 16 megs of RAM. Five different XDoom sessions, all running the 'demo mode' recording at full speed.
With Slackware and the 1.2 kernel. In 1995.
This was in the era when a lot of people struggled to get ONE instance of Doom to run on a DOS box...
I thought it was pretty cool at the time.
IE4 isn't available as a PPC binary. The only web browser at all that I could get running is the stock IE 2.0 that always comes installed on NT4.
My experiment with NT/PPC was to see how much I could 'get around' on the web with an NT/PPC box. Almost nowhere, actually. IE 2 is basically plain Mosaic with a few enhancements.
Notably, you can no longer connect to http://www.microsoft.com with IE 2.0. If you have an old NT4 box that doesn't have any IE 'upgrade' on it, try it sometime for amusement purposes.
Now I'm pissed, because I had a StarMax awhile back and never tried installing NT on it. It was a pretty cool machine, PS/2 mouse and Serial Port, plus ADB, and VGA. All the usual PREP parts. I never suspected it would run NT (not that I would have run NT on it for very long).
The NT 4.0 and later kernel has UI stuff embedded in it.
NT 3.51 and earlier did not.
My IBM PPC box wouldn't boot from the CD. The bootloader on the Microsoft CD is Intel (but I was using a Compaq OEM NT4 CD so it's even amazing it included the full compliment of platforms in the first place.)
There's a boot diskette that IBM provides. I downloaded it about a year ago. People should grab their copy of the image, as it's the kind of thing that won't be available forever.
You're probably right. The box that I fooled with was one that I got in an auction for ~$20 so I have no idea what it's original cost was. It had the feel, at the auction, of being a 'test bed' machine. I.e. it was the only PPC box in an auction of a bunch of Intel stuff. I suspect it was never a production machine.
The installation media is any old Microsoft NT4 CDrom. And a boot floppy whose image you can download from IBM. It's nothing special, and it's a half hour reinstall.
If we're going to be haughty about 'historical preservation' you should already know the above and have the media on hand and archived. I do, and I don't even have a PPC Thinkpad.
For people who want to run NT/PPC (just becuz), the model of RS/6000 I was using was an RS/6000 7248 box (I think that's the model number). They pop up on eBay all the time and you should be able to find one for under $50.
You just need an NT4 CD from Microsoft, and the special boot diskette, an image of which is available from an IBM site.
The RS/6000 box that I ran NT4 on wasn't a $5K box. Well, maybe it was because of low volume.
It was a regular desktop box, with on-board S3 Trio graphics, ISA slots, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, etc. It was comprable to the x86 boxes of the time that IBM was selling for OS/2 desktops.
And actually, it was a box I got at auction for like $15 or so.
Speaking of SCO, I latched onto an old Altos 8086 box that runs System 3 era Xenix (pre-SCO). Microsoft Xenix, mind you. I haven't received the box yet, but am looking forward to it.
I don't think it'll run Windows. Probably a curses port exists for 'graphical' stuff on dumb terminals.
IBM almost went with the 68000 for the 'IBM PC' project. My understanding is that a big reason why they didn't was that the old Dip package 68000 part was a monster to handle in product (huge huge physical package). The 8088 and 8xxx series Intel chips were a slam dunk for low cost, so they got designed in.
Not going to work. Products like VMware and VirtualPC do not emulate a CPU, they only provide timeslices of (or some other technique of sharing) the real, underlying CPU.
Wrong. In several ways.
There was a good emulation layer for NT/Alpha that DEC came out with. It made NT/Alpha run all the Win32 x86 apps pretty good. It's a matter of emulating the x86 instructions within a full Windows OS, not supporting a whole OS on an 'emulated machine' as VMWare and VirtualPC do.
Also, forget tons and tons of good software that I've already purchased and am making good use of.
And plead on Usenet newsgroups and listservers for driver support for your new add-on thingie.
But anyways...
There have been periods of time in which there has been excess foundry capacity. And there are smaller outfits like Dallas Semiconductor who are 'fabless' vendors, they contract out their designs.
They are a reduced-capacity market, though. I bet they fit a HELL of a lot of those bitty Dallas chips on each wafer.
That laptop WANTS to run NetBSD. Do it a favor and put NetBSD on it. Then it can run Mozilla and all the cool new stuff.
Since you really can't run the current Mac Os X on that G3 (it hurts! oooh! it hurts!) what are you running? Debian? Mandrake?
I'm running NetBSD on my SE/30 and just got a real '040 chip for my LC to run NetBSD on it as well (color screen! higher than 348x240 resolution!)
(I like MacOS 9 for some things)
I'm still waiting for CP/M on Z-80 to have full efficiency.
I mean, those that use PPC (mostly Mac and PPC Linux users) use it becasue they don't want to use Windows.
We're talking like grownups here, i.e. a PPC chip built into some sort of system and a Windows port to run on it. Not platforms jocks flaming each other on *.advocacy newsgroups.
And I suspect a lot of Apple PPC users (and admins of RS/6000 boxes) would be mighty offended at the notion that their choice was essentially an anti-Windows one.
The processor architecture is of zero concern, except maybe as it pertains to battery life and heat.
Does this really mean the chorus of 'RISC is better' ignorance from Macheads is over??
Come on, let's have a RISC vs. CISC fight for good old times.
I'll champion the Microchip PIC processor (RISC).
You champion the Motorola 68HC11 processor (CISC).