When Richard first mooted his ideas (widely reported at the time by Byte) we all nodded and said "yes, this is how it ought to be" and stood by and ignored him. Don't *ever* dis that guy. He's got more balls than 100 of us together in the same room.
If he didn't exist we'd have to invent him. The bad guys *have* to have demons to fear too don't you think?
Personally, I hope and pray that someone sends RMS, ESR Guido and a few others on a world tour around universities so they can really kick ass... It would beat hearing Deep Purple from Lykavitos any day...
Don't do this! O3 isn't just nasty. It'll chew anything chewable on the mobo and the cable insulation. Not to mention what it'll do to the oil lube in the fan bearings etc. etc.
Easier to just dump it down with the rats in the server room and ask for a new box isn't it?
Wow. That's a bad one. I know a lot more about how to dispose of pig end product aka shit though (curses my father's obsession with gardening...). But, how about supercrit CO2? (love to see any pictures if you manage to fascinate a postgrad at your local university sufficiently - hey picture of the computer dude, not inflagrante delicto stuff )
Hey, they need it. I don't think anyone except Burt Rutan's outfit have a snowballs chance in hell.
But,it isn't about *winning* this prize. Even Burt doesn't really care about that. If in the 70 or so years you get on this planet you get to fulfil your dream (and create many others in younger minds) then consider yourself a worthy citizen (of the world)
Losing isn't fun, but unless you try you'll never win.
(Had to post this as an antidote to all the crass stupidity that claims to be typical/. fare)
No. Despite the post this is completely awry, screwed, and misleading (or worse). PlanetLab is NOT an Intel (sic) endeavour. It's an independent attempt to come up with a non disruptive way of using the Internet to explore otherwise disruptive technologies in a scientific manner. In other words, you want to copy the smart ideas (like p2p , worm and virus like replication etc.) that have fascinated (and repelled) researchers but want to do it in a way that allows for better metaphors than the current "chuck a packet out the door and pray" approach...
Intel is merely either a sponsor or a participant. Don't try to join. Individuals can't only organisations and currently that's around 1000.
I do wish people would *research* before posting here...
What really baffles me is how a company with such deep pockets and offices for it's programmers can still only strive to produce products that are well to put it politely mediocre in comparison to small outfits. Do they do this deliberately? Is it a corporate policy?
I think we should be told.
Aggrajag - keep the DIMM. If it passes MemTest and is really duff then file it away somewhere as a "stress test for memory test programs".
I was looking for a dead DIMM, and Zeus (guess where I live) gave me one. We had a huge blackout (two really) just prior to the Olympics and a spike went through my colleague's machine and hosed a DIMM.
Just one bit. Beautiful. I wanted a diagnostic but you never know if they are reliable. I wanted a dead DIMM but how the heck do you frie a single bit in one chip? Sending it out on a NASA probe isn't an option...
I love it when the Olympian gods are in a good mood.
I let my naive young greek (hey: I'm posting from greece ) colleague experiment with his home machine.
OK, it worked for him, but the bottom line was "my machine runs a bit slower now".
Sigh. Doesn't fix anything anyone with half a brain who is NATed and appropriately Gene Hackman wouldn't be able to fix, and you run even slower.
I'll stick with what I have now. What bothers me is that those "Merchants of Darkness" at Microsoft will use future service packs as a slippery slimy slope for delivering "Longhorn"....
At the end of the day *their* products will work. But all of ours will be waving their legs in the air as if they'd just received a burst of pyrethroids...
Good question (the parent), but it's a little like trying to capture the essence of that "one" moment which is pure magic. No scientific study can do that and in Psych terms anecdotal evidence is notoriously unreliable. Hence the studies using brain scans (which doesn't necessarily prove as much as naive wetware folks think) are still interesting.
Still - my gut instinct tells me that "altered state" or "zone" as a previous poster put it is pretty much the *same* thing as the feeling of anyone who solves "why that friggin M$ box won't install that bleep driver".
It's called the hunting instinct.
Those of us who have been afflicted with that "disease" called science are even worse victims...
Elmer, pass the shotgun...
I've never been aware of "how" I solved X problem. It just *felt* right. When it feels that way you couldn't explain *how* you solved it, but you *knew* way ahead of time which direction to go.
Hmm. Odd for someone who likes the universe to feel coherent.
If you look deep you can see why this is inspiring the US military to "play" (hey it's a lot less money than most defence projects) with 3D gaming engines.
For you the current poster - No, you don't have to have a finished game. It's not like you write things the way JC had to back in the early 90's is it? Chances are that you already have most of the core components (but someone had a crisis in the arts division...) so it's more about play balance than the idea. and $$$ - lots of them. I can close my eyes and remember when the games developers of the moment were 14 year old kids (allegedly).
if you're afflicted with the NIH disease then I feel sad for you. Perhaps prototyping with someone else's engine is feasible? (proof of concept, storyboarding etc.etc.). If your idea is worth stealing then at least 100 other people have already done something similar (there are a heck a lot of similarly equipped monkeys on this world you know )
I don't write games for a living, but then again oftentimes today I don't write programmes (!!) either.
You are living in a fantasy world a la Erewhon or Baron Munchhausen if you think that there can ever be such a thing as a design document for a game.
Fluidity is the rule.
Hey, neat. Let's all ask terry gilliam to make an Open source Munchhausen game....
spits venom jealously. I had to key in all (let me see 96 steps?) out of 100 possible on my first programmable (a TI SR56) (c.a. 1976) Oh and of course it forgot everything when you switched it off.
Sigh. Nothing can really capture the reality. Once when I was much much younger a friend gave me some "Boy's Own Papers" c.a. 1912. I still lust after some of the gadgets in the adverts. Whoa. Seriously interesting stuff.
If you want to see geek heaven go look through the adverts...
I keep going to look in the hope that someone will put Olaf Stapleton or EE "Doc" Smith up but alas rights are a real bitch...
(1950's SciAm are pretty cool too - stuff about electroluminescence and (cough) computers).
Once upon a time, I was a young(er) programmer who saw the creations coming out of Wirth's group at ETH. My friend and colleague (Mr. P.C) (yes really, but I won't name him) ported their Modula-2 compiler and a strange entity called "Andra" which was a document processor to that wondrous new home computer beast the Atari-ST. Nobody at the UK company (who older folks may recognize) understood Andra. I sure didn't.
Sigh. I didn't understand what it was then. Words were things that you processed with meaningful commands like/bold/unbold/deeplymeaningfulbutconfusing something.. in the text...
no WYSIWYG. What you saw was what you deserved. (There is a good reason why Don Knuth is a hero amongst most of us. Playing with fonts and stuff appeals to our taste for the bizarre...)
Now, Andra was really a distant ancestor of AmiPro (remember that?) and Wurd. But, all these years later I want to know precisely what is so difficult about making something with at least few enough bugs that the bug log doesn't implode and create a local black hole...
I'd like a black hole. It would be useful. I'd really like a "word processor". Until we actually get one I'll stick with VI (Elvis or VIM) for programs and Emacs for pure text.
Boo. My own primitive attempts at writing shrink wrap apps blow away the crud coming out of the N.W U.S. (or else someone explain why one man's feeble attempt at a windoze app scores 100% in terms of a language he doesn't understand too well despite living in said country almost 20 years...)
Oh come on guys! You still listen to this bozo? Almost every scenario he's painted sounds like a bad script for new star trek episodes. An improvement perhaps?
But seriously, MS's apps folks seem quaintly unaware of anything smacking of 20th century engineering, and I'm pretty certain that is the butt of many a joke amidst the systems/OS community in their cult...
Wait a minute, I made an out by one joke there somewhere...
..is that we'd just appreciate the good engineering done by others and build on it rather than prattle on like little old ladies. Maybe I'll die of old age before this happens but I have dreams...
Yes, Java (the idea) was wondrous. But not new. The UCSD p-system is the root of most of these ideas. Sigh. C# is prettier (and I ought to contribute to mono (I feel guilty)). Don't we all. I have to eat, my brethren and so do you. The catch is that we don't want to sell our souls in a faustian bargain. I just looked at the previous sentence and realized I was threatening to be a cannibal (ouch).
oh well. Maybe I have the appropriate skills in dyslexia to become a U.S. president...
Excuse me. I thought we were supposed to be engineers. Cool. What kind of lame excuse is that? We pick up the hot horse pucky and run with it... Right?
Sigh. Yet again. I won't read all of the postings but I'll guess that "it's slow.. It's constraining like a chastity belt" come up. Well. Dumb. I ported the UCSD p-system to loads of machines in my dark distant past and yes it was slow. That wasn't the issue then. Hmm. Seems to me that many of the younger folks out there haven't considered the benefits of executing on an imaginary processor.
1. You have control (yes: you can play nazi today!). In parallel (maybe co-operatively? Hey I like that paradox) 2. Script kiddies jump off the local landmark (example the clifton suspension bridge in Bristol UK) just because they can't get the immediate gratification they figured that they would get from watching that anime cartoon...). 3. We have horrendously kewl CPU's doing squawt most of the time. I don't care if my machine discovers E.T. (who wants to meet E.T?). I want to have a meaningful discussion with the Admiral from Romulus or Mr. Spock.
Sorry. I watched all of this the first time out. I guess I haven't matured at all...
Even if you replicate their structure (which oftentimes is a structured storage) you have no guarantees about anything. So, it't probably uncool to clone their braindead 1993 logic...
XML isn't so unkind. Think that way and gradually (or slowly slowly in the local metaphor here in Greece) you'll bite back...
Enjoy. At least you don't live next door to Hanford...
What else would convince you. This is a strange company which has a mix of the proper ethos (an office) and the wrong one (the OS).
I can't feel sorry that the open source world can do an end run around them. They deserve it. I shudder at the idea of working for a "Reverend Jim" organization. If I wanted to smell the smell of bitter almonds I'll go crush some laurel leaves...
(Ironic Huh. I'm here in the med....).
Anyway, I was about 7 years ahead of those virgins in terms of localization on my own baby so yah boo sucks!
Sorry. But the worst irony of mutleysoft is they *DON"T LISTEN TO THEIR OWN TECHNICAL FOLKS*.
I don't know why everyone wants to slag off a language which was designed to be a minimalist approach to getting software portably on set top boxen...
Yes, I prefer C# (aesthetically) , assembler (for control), C (for a reasonable trade off), Wirth languages (for attempts to make braindead cattle capable of programming), (write the rest, because I don't have enough space in the margin...).
Why the need to make this an interminably boring and dull debate? Next you'll post that CowboyNeal needs a spell checker or Michael has the repeats repeats repeats or that puke yellow isn't your favo(u)rite colo(u)r on slashdot...
Oh. Sorry. It's August isn't it. We have to watch the olympics (R)
Sigh. Being the oldster I am I thought the nonsense of mine is bigger than yours had died down.
This is the followup to a piece of hero worship (very much in the spirit of U.S centric culture) of the "Great Hacker". Oh where is this mythical beast? I see him not, yet I have longed to meet this wise and omnipotent entity.
Foo. Here in Europe we don't believe in such junk. I've met some fine artisans, and some really unpleasantly egotistical f**ks as well. Sometimes they seem to be one and the same entity. But like male cats you can't exist in the same arena without risking some nasty matter anti-matter collision...
Twenty plus years of avoiding cobol (deliberate lower case) and other crocks and I'm still reminded of that line in Blade Runner:
"I want more life f**ker"
Here in Greece, you could end up homeless for two years or worse just *trying* to be a hacker. Believe me. I've spent more time feeding the doves and educating the locals here in athens about dove culture than programming...
Slashdot Mirror
When Richard first mooted his ideas (widely reported at the time by Byte) we all nodded and said "yes, this is how it ought to be" and stood by and ignored him. Don't *ever* dis that guy. He's got more balls than 100 of us together in the same room.
If he didn't exist we'd have to invent him. The bad guys *have* to have demons to fear too don't you think?
Personally, I hope and pray that someone sends RMS, ESR Guido and a few others on a world tour
around universities so they can really kick ass...
It would beat hearing Deep Purple from Lykavitos
any day...
Just my 0.02 euro...
(Hey Paul, fund them please (quick Allen joke)).
Hmm. An on topic post at last (grins).
Dark matter in filaments implies gravitional lensing
Any news on that?
Hmm. Who do you think will be the next governor of
*Washington* state
Don't do this!
O3 isn't just nasty. It'll chew anything chewable on
the mobo and the cable insulation. Not to mention what it'll do to the oil lube in the fan bearings etc. etc.
Easier to just dump it down with the rats in the server room and ask for a new box isn't it?
Wow. That's a bad one. I know a lot more about how
to dispose of pig end product aka shit though (curses
my father's obsession with gardening...). But, how about supercrit CO2? (love to see any pictures if you
manage to fascinate a postgrad at your local university sufficiently - hey picture of the computer dude, not inflagrante delicto stuff )
You're an optimist are you?
I hate optimists.
Hey, they need it. I don't think anyone except Burt Rutan's outfit have a snowballs chance in hell.
/. fare)
But,it isn't about *winning* this prize. Even Burt doesn't really care about that. If in the 70 or so years you get on this planet you get to fulfil your dream (and create many others in younger minds) then
consider yourself a worthy citizen (of the world)
Losing isn't fun, but unless you try you'll never win.
(Had to post this as an antidote to all the crass
stupidity that claims to be typical
So mod me down ok?
Might I timidly suggest Dr. Jerry Pournelle? .
I doubt that you'd last one shake of a lamb's tail
if you suggested *he* was left wing
Who cares anyway. Diversity is healthy.
No. Despite the post this is completely awry, screwed, and misleading (or worse). PlanetLab is NOT an Intel (sic) endeavour. It's an independent attempt
to come up with a non disruptive way of using the Internet to explore otherwise disruptive technologies
in a scientific manner. In other words, you want to copy the smart ideas (like p2p , worm and virus like replication etc.) that have fascinated (and repelled)
researchers but want to do it in a way that allows
for better metaphors than the current "chuck a packet
out the door and pray" approach...
Intel is merely either a sponsor or a participant.
Don't try to join. Individuals can't only organisations and currently that's around 1000.
I do wish people would *research* before posting here...
lhc at home is not for processing the data output, but helping them to position the magnets as they
*build* the LHC.
What really baffles me is how a company with such
deep pockets and offices for it's programmers can still only strive to produce products that are well to put it politely mediocre in comparison to small outfits. Do they do this deliberately? Is it a corporate policy?
I think we should be told.
Aggrajag - keep the DIMM. If it passes MemTest and is
really duff then file it away somewhere as a "stress test for memory test programs".
I was looking for a dead DIMM, and Zeus (guess where I live) gave me one. We had a huge blackout
(two really) just prior to the Olympics and a spike went through my colleague's machine and hosed a DIMM.
Just one bit. Beautiful. I wanted a diagnostic but
you never know if they are reliable. I wanted a dead DIMM but how the heck do you frie a single bit in one chip? Sending it out on a NASA probe
isn't an option...
I love it when the Olympian gods are in a good mood.
I let my naive young greek (hey: I'm posting from greece ) colleague experiment with his home machine.
OK, it worked for him, but the bottom line was "my machine runs a bit slower now".
Sigh. Doesn't fix anything anyone with half a brain who is NATed and appropriately Gene Hackman wouldn't be able to fix, and you run even slower.
I'll stick with what I have now. What bothers me is that those "Merchants of Darkness" at Microsoft
will use future service packs as a slippery slimy slope for delivering "Longhorn"....
At the end of the day *their* products will work. But all of ours will be waving their legs in the air as if they'd just received a burst of pyrethroids...
Good question (the parent), but it's a little like trying to capture the essence of that "one" moment
....
which is pure magic. No scientific study can do that and in Psych terms anecdotal evidence is notoriously unreliable. Hence the studies using
brain scans (which doesn't necessarily prove as
much as naive wetware folks think) are still
interesting.
Still - my gut instinct tells me that "altered state" or "zone" as a previous poster put it
is pretty much the *same* thing as the feeling of anyone who solves "why that friggin M$ box won't install that bleep driver".
It's called the hunting instinct.
Those of us who have been afflicted with that "disease" called science are even worse victims...
Elmer, pass the shotgun...
I've never been aware of "how" I solved X problem.
It just *felt* right. When it feels that way you
couldn't explain *how* you solved it, but you
*knew* way ahead of time which direction to go.
Hmm. Odd for someone who likes the universe to feel coherent.
If you look deep you can see why this is inspiring
the US military to "play" (hey it's a lot less money than most defence projects) with 3D gaming
engines.
For you the current poster - No, you don't have to have a finished game. It's not like you write things the way JC had to back in the early 90's is it? Chances are that you already have most of the
core components (but someone had a crisis in the arts division...) so it's more about play balance than the idea. and $$$ - lots of them. I can close
my eyes and remember when the games developers of
the moment were 14 year old kids (allegedly).
if you're afflicted with the NIH disease then I
feel sad for you. Perhaps prototyping with someone
else's engine is feasible? (proof of concept, storyboarding etc.etc.). If your idea is worth
stealing then at least 100 other people have already done something similar (there are a heck a lot of similarly equipped monkeys on this world you know )
I don't write games for a living, but then again oftentimes today I don't write programmes (!!) either.
You are living in a fantasy world a la Erewhon or
Baron Munchhausen if you think that there can ever
be such a thing as a design document for a game.
Fluidity is the rule.
Hey, neat. Let's all ask terry gilliam to make an
Open source Munchhausen game
(stranger things have happened)
Perhaps after a quick glass of perspective and soda they had the nasty thought that their raw data might be uh more contaminated than they supposed?
Big panic. It gets worse if all of those Teraflops have been crunching bad data. Way uncool.
spits venom jealously. I had to key in all (let me see 96 steps?) out of 100 possible on my first programmable (a TI SR56) (c.a. 1976)
Oh and of course it forgot everything when you switched it off.
Sigh. Nothing can really capture the reality. Once when I was much much younger a friend gave me some "Boy's Own Papers" c.a. 1912. I still lust after some of the gadgets in the adverts. Whoa. Seriously interesting stuff.
If you want to see geek heaven go look through the adverts...
I keep going to look in the hope that someone will put Olaf Stapleton or EE "Doc" Smith up but alas rights are a real bitch...
(1950's SciAm are pretty cool too - stuff about electroluminescence and (cough) computers).
Once upon a time, I was a young(er) programmer who saw the creations coming out of Wirth's group at ETH.
/bold /unbold /deeplymeaningfulbutconfusing something .. in the text...
My friend and colleague (Mr. P.C) (yes really, but I won't name him) ported their Modula-2 compiler and a strange entity called "Andra" which was a document processor to that wondrous new home computer beast the Atari-ST. Nobody at the UK
company (who older folks may recognize) understood
Andra. I sure didn't.
Sigh. I didn't understand what it was then. Words were things that you processed with meaningful commands like
no WYSIWYG. What you saw was what you deserved.
(There is a good reason why Don Knuth is a hero
amongst most of us. Playing with fonts and stuff
appeals to our taste for the bizarre...)
Now, Andra was really a distant ancestor of AmiPro (remember that?) and Wurd. But, all these years later I want to know precisely what is so difficult about making something with at least few
enough bugs that the bug log doesn't implode and create a local black hole...
I'd like a black hole. It would be useful. I'd really like a "word processor". Until we actually
get one I'll stick with VI (Elvis or VIM) for programs and Emacs for pure text.
Boo. My own primitive attempts at writing shrink wrap apps blow away the crud coming out of the N.W
U.S. (or else someone explain why one man's feeble
attempt at a windoze app scores 100% in terms of
a language he doesn't understand too well despite
living in said country almost 20 years...)
Keen eyed watchers know which country I'm in...
Oh come on guys! You still listen to this bozo?
Almost every scenario he's painted sounds like a bad script for new star trek episodes. An improvement perhaps?
But seriously, MS's apps folks seem quaintly unaware of anything smacking of 20th century engineering, and
I'm pretty certain that is the butt of many a joke amidst the systems/OS community in their cult...
Wait a minute, I made an out by one joke there somewhere...
..is that we'd just appreciate the good engineering done by others and build on it rather than prattle on like little old ladies. Maybe I'll die of old age before this happens but I have dreams...
Yes, Java (the idea) was wondrous. But not new. The UCSD p-system is the root of most of these ideas. Sigh. C# is prettier (and I ought to contribute to mono (I feel guilty)). Don't we all. I have to eat, my brethren and so do you. The catch is that we don't want to sell our souls in a faustian bargain. I just looked at the previous sentence and realized I was threatening to be a cannibal (ouch).
oh well. Maybe I have the appropriate skills in dyslexia to become a U.S. president...
Excuse me. I thought we were supposed to be
engineers. Cool. What kind of lame excuse is
that? We pick up the hot horse pucky and run with
it... Right?
Sigh. Yet again. I won't read all of the postings but I'll guess that "it's slow.. It's constraining like a
chastity belt" come up. Well. Dumb. I ported the UCSD p-system to loads of machines in my dark distant past and yes it was slow. That wasn't the issue then. Hmm.
Seems to me that many of the younger folks out there haven't considered the benefits of executing on an imaginary processor.
1. You have control (yes: you can play nazi today!). In parallel (maybe co-operatively? Hey I like that paradox)
2. Script kiddies jump off the local landmark (example the clifton suspension bridge in Bristol UK) just because they can't get the immediate gratification they figured that they would get from watching that anime cartoon...).
3. We have horrendously kewl CPU's doing squawt most of the time. I don't care if my machine discovers E.T. (who wants to meet E.T?). I want to have a meaningful discussion with the Admiral from
Romulus or Mr. Spock.
Sorry. I watched all of this the first time out. I guess I haven't matured at all...
(hick. Another glass of metaxa methinks...)
Even if you replicate their structure (which oftentimes is a structured storage) you have no guarantees about anything. So, it't probably uncool to clone their braindead 1993 logic...
XML isn't so unkind. Think that way and gradually (or slowly slowly in the local metaphor here in Greece) you'll bite back...
Enjoy. At least you don't live next door to Hanford...
What else would convince you. This is a strange company which has a mix of the proper ethos (an office) and the wrong one (the OS).
I can't feel sorry that the open source world can do an end run around them. They deserve it. I shudder at the idea of working for a "Reverend Jim" organization. If I wanted to smell the smell of bitter almonds I'll go crush some laurel leaves...
(Ironic Huh. I'm here in the med....).
Anyway, I was about 7 years ahead of those virgins
in terms of localization on my own baby so yah boo
sucks!
Sorry. But the worst irony of mutleysoft is they
*DON"T LISTEN TO THEIR OWN TECHNICAL FOLKS*.
Big secret that...
I don't know why everyone wants to slag off a language which was designed to be a minimalist approach to getting software portably on set top boxen...
Yes, I prefer C# (aesthetically) , assembler (for control), C (for a reasonable trade off), Wirth languages (for attempts to make braindead cattle capable of programming), (write the rest, because I don't have enough space in the margin...).
Why the need to make this an interminably boring and dull debate? Next you'll post that CowboyNeal needs a spell checker or Michael has the repeats repeats repeats or that puke yellow isn't your favo(u)rite colo(u)r on slashdot...
Oh. Sorry. It's August isn't it. We have to watch the olympics (R)
(worth the mod down?)
Stop eatin the beans mike?
Sigh. Being the oldster I am I thought the nonsense of mine is bigger than yours had died down.
This is the followup to a piece of hero worship (very much in the spirit of U.S centric culture) of the "Great Hacker". Oh where is this mythical beast? I see him not, yet I have longed to meet this wise and omnipotent entity.
Foo. Here in Europe we don't believe in such junk.
I've met some fine artisans, and some really unpleasantly egotistical f**ks as well. Sometimes they seem to be one and the same entity. But like
male cats you can't exist in the same arena without risking some nasty matter anti-matter collision...
Twenty plus years of avoiding cobol (deliberate lower case) and other crocks and I'm still reminded of that line in Blade Runner:
"I want more life f**ker"
Here in Greece, you could end up homeless for two years or worse just *trying* to be a hacker. Believe me. I've spent more time feeding the doves and educating the locals here in athens about dove culture than programming...
Hope nobody remembers this post...