When I was a kid, three friends and I decided to build a "fort" in the lush forest-y area just over my back fence. We spent a good majority of the summer building it and, as one of the kids had a passing familiarity with how houses are framed, this "fort" was quite sturdy. It had framed walls covered in sheet plastic (we didn't have enough wood to properly close them off), a solid, planked, level floor with a removeable panel revealing a storage area beneath the floor, where we kept alcohol we stole from our parents shot by shot over many weeks, solid, wood bunk beds, a proper doorway (no door) and a nice wood table for setting things on.
The finished fort was about nine feet tall and about ten feet square.
We had many memorable parties in that fort until our last party in the fall. On that day, it seems enough of the leaves had fallen from the trees to provide a clear view of our fort from the vantage point of the local Canadian customs station located not 150 feet away. It seems we had built our fort on their land.
So, here we are sitting around in the fort, drinking vodka and orange juice from a large glass juice bottle, when three customs officers wander into the trees and into our fort. There they stood inside the doorway. We were dumbstruck. So, what did they do?
They didn't say anything at first; they just stood there looking around the room at our fort for a minute or two. Then one of them said with a slightly incredulous tone, "*What* is going on here?" We replied that we were just playing in our fort. They asked if our large juice bottle had any alcohol in it and we said it was just orange juice. They never took it from us and never bothered tasting it. Then another officer said, "Do you realize what you have here? This is classified as a *permenant* structure and you've build it on land you most certainly do *not* own. You're going to have to tear this thing down."
They made us tear it down. And then... that was it. End of story. No beatings, no arrests. They seemed more amazed and amused by the whole thing. We were, after all, just kids doing kid things, albeit with perhaps slightly above-average carpentry skills. How could we possibly be criminals? I mean, what rational-thinking group of people could possibly think it was a good idea to build their own party palace on Customs' land, less than a stone's throw from many officers?
Not long after that, my younger brother started going over to the customs station on a regular basis in the late evenings to play cribbage with one of the officers.
That was one of those golden summers. Probably around 1982, if I recall correctly. They never found our secret stash under the floor, by the way.:)
"Who in thier right mind would preorder something that hasn't even been properly demonstrated."
Nobody in their right mind would order one, at least to actually use the thing. Like Jamie said on Mythbusters when they tried to build one (ok, their device used props, but still), there's no failsafe on them; if they fail whilst in flight, you die. This is probably why we're not all flying around in helicopters.
Now, the reason he's taking preorders makes more sense:
1. Take preorders
2. Use preorder money to manufacture orders. More preorders means parts orders in bulk quantities, which means less cost to manufacture.
They could do what I did: buy a second hard drive, make it the master and the old drive a slave, install the legal copy of windows on it. Now all their old files are on the second slave drive and they have a fresh install of windows on a clean hard drive.
A slight added expense but hard drives are pretty cheap these days.
Bone microphone technology has been around for quite some time in the two-way radio communications biz, and it's much more discreet.
Bone microphones are sometimes used in the movie industry to communicate with actors/stunt people while on camera, when the person is too far away to reliably hear direction (if the person is dangling from a construction crane, for example).
The reason DVD imagery tends to look awful on widescreen TVs in shops is typically because they have the same signal running to multiple TVs, at least some of which are 4:3. For some odd reason, they tend to configure this shared display for the lowest-common (or perhaps better selling) denominator.
The fact that each TV is showing an image that has been been split multiple times also tends to result in image quality quite inferior to what the TV is capable of producing with a single connection.
This is why I don't judge a TV based on whatever it's displaying in a shop. I use the internet to find in-depth reviews carried out under more controlled conditions. I mean, if it's on the internet, it must be reliable, right?:)
I'm not sure if I would agree with his explanation of cell phones and why they can't be used to enter/exit the Matrix:
"The software that simulates the cell phones is running inside the Nebuchadnezzar's computer, not the Matrix's computer, so the rebels must find a land line--which are somewhat scarce in an era when everyone has a cell phone."
Didn't Neo steal some guy's cell phone while trying to escape the Matrix, yet was able to use it to communicate with the Nebuchadnezzar? Didn't Cypher use his cell phone to dial a traceable number within the Matrix to tip off the Agents to their location?
I think a better explanation would be that cell phones can't be used because they are portable. Therefore, they cannot be "attached" to a specific volume of space. Moving al the information for an avatar from one network node to another as they move from room to room would be ridculously prohibitive, so the node that stores the information for a specific volume of space would not necessarily include portable objects like cell phones, or avatars.
Instead, the node containing the volume would contain references or identifiers to the objects within that space.
Therefore, cell phones cannot be used reliably to associate the node containing the volume with the node containing the avatar, since the cell phone itself may be on a third node all by itself. A hard line, however, would be a permanent fixture (or semi-permanent if the machines practice refactoring), so the node containing the volume of space would be gauranteed to be be the one that references the avatar.
The cell phone would not directly reference the avatar because it is not a volume of space (it would be like trying to find out what hotel you're staying in by asking, say, one of your shoelaces).
While I'm sure that explanation has its own set of holes, it makes more sense (to me, at least) than the one in the essay.
The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920's will ever go out of copyright.
Now, eventually, there will no longer be any copyrightable works produced in the U.S. Works are rarely original; they are almost always derived from existing works. So much for innovation and competition.
Sad day for the U.S. While I'm glad I don't live there, I'm sure it will inevitably affect me, anyway.
Pop-ups, ads, and flash are not much of a problem for me, since I use filtering software to block it (PopUpCop).
What really drives me permanently away are sites that refuse to function unless cookies are enabled. This really burns my ass.
If I don't have an account on the offending site, what the hell is so hard about generating a temporary session ID, and tracking my position on their site using their own friggin' database? The fact that they don't do so leads me to believe that the site designers are either very stupid, or they're tracking more than just my position on their site.
If a site refuses to function, complaining that I don't have cookies enabled, I leave that site and never come back. There's no excuse for it.
With the advent of more memory and storage, it has become less necessary to code for optimization and efficiency (with regards to occupied space). With today's systems, the focus is (and should be) on readbility and maintainability. Making sure that a program is readable and maintainable is typically more important than ensuring that it fits in a restricted space.
While I'm sure the programmers of yesteryear wrote very efficient code, it is less likely that all of their coworkers could easily follow each others' code.
Bloatware is an unfortunate outcome of this turn of events, but bloatware is a subset of the whole.
Lets see even the best programmers used to point and drool GUI interfaces and hand holding wizards try and do that in 2K now using little more than paper tape! The people who designed, built and programmed these machines REALLY knew what they were doing
I'm pretty sure they would not have snubbed their nose at the idea of being given a machine that had a GUI interface and piles of RAM and storage. Oh, to be able to focus on the problem at hand and not have to be distracted by the limitations of a 64 byte stack!
To belittle the programmers of today because they have not suffered the restrictions of yesteryear is a bit silly. Even today, there are embedded systems programmers who still deal with such restrictions. Do we elevate them to deity status? No, we just sit back and wait for Carmack to speak.
It is a form of art that allows creations rivalling the beauty of Michelangelos "David" (Maxwells equations etc.) but the constraints are so much stricter than those of marble.
Kind of like trying to make ASCII art that is also functioning BF code... or vice versa...
When I get a hankerin' for some of that "back in the day" goodness, I find a handheld game, like Yahtzee or Battleship, for example (they help provide instant ideas and present a palatable project duration), and then sit down at my Atari 130XE and create my own version over a weekend, sometimes in a single sitting.
In an ancient world devoid of the need for multi-threading, exception handling, and lengthy design documentation, it's amazing how fast the assembly language flows from your fingertips.
It's quite a refreshing diversion, and allows me to recapture those carefree days.
I still have boxes of Compute!, Analog, Antic and Softside magazines. I learned tons of things from all of them, but had the most fun with Softside - a magazine with enormous type-in BASIC programs that were full-blown games. My mother's favourite game on our Atari 800 was the "Master's Golf" game I typed in from a Softside magazine.
I wish I still had the April Fools issue of Creative Computing. That whole issue was simply brilliant.
Now I want to set up my Atari 130XE again, or maybe play "Castles of Dr. Creep" on my C64... *sigh*...
I wonder if I can "Profit as an ET3 Licensee" by spell-checking their fucking website. I mean, hell, I'm otherwise sold on the presentation alone. Especially the sickly green colours.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid, three friends and I decided to build a "fort" in the lush forest-y area just over my back fence. We spent a good majority of the summer building it and, as one of the kids had a passing familiarity with how houses are framed, this "fort" was quite sturdy. It had framed walls covered in sheet plastic (we didn't have enough wood to properly close them off), a solid, planked, level floor with a removeable panel revealing a storage area beneath the floor, where we kept alcohol we stole from our parents shot by shot over many weeks, solid, wood bunk beds, a proper doorway (no door) and a nice wood table for setting things on.
:)
The finished fort was about nine feet tall and about ten feet square.
We had many memorable parties in that fort until our last party in the fall. On that day, it seems enough of the leaves had fallen from the trees to provide a clear view of our fort from the vantage point of the local Canadian customs station located not 150 feet away. It seems we had built our fort on their land.
So, here we are sitting around in the fort, drinking vodka and orange juice from a large glass juice bottle, when three customs officers wander into the trees and into our fort. There they stood inside the doorway. We were dumbstruck. So, what did they do?
They didn't say anything at first; they just stood there looking around the room at our fort for a minute or two. Then one of them said with a slightly incredulous tone, "*What* is going on here?" We replied that we were just playing in our fort. They asked if our large juice bottle had any alcohol in it and we said it was just orange juice. They never took it from us and never bothered tasting it. Then another officer said, "Do you realize what you have here? This is classified as a *permenant* structure and you've build it on land you most certainly do *not* own. You're going to have to tear this thing down."
They made us tear it down. And then... that was it. End of story. No beatings, no arrests. They seemed more amazed and amused by the whole thing. We were, after all, just kids doing kid things, albeit with perhaps slightly above-average carpentry skills. How could we possibly be criminals? I mean, what rational-thinking group of people could possibly think it was a good idea to build their own party palace on Customs' land, less than a stone's throw from many officers?
Not long after that, my younger brother started going over to the customs station on a regular basis in the late evenings to play cribbage with one of the officers.
That was one of those golden summers. Probably around 1982, if I recall correctly. They never found our secret stash under the floor, by the way.
"Who in thier right mind would preorder something that hasn't even been properly demonstrated."
Nobody in their right mind would order one, at least to actually use the thing. Like Jamie said on Mythbusters when they tried to build one (ok, their device used props, but still), there's no failsafe on them; if they fail whilst in flight, you die. This is probably why we're not all flying around in helicopters.
Now, the reason he's taking preorders makes more sense:
1. Take preorders
2. Use preorder money to manufacture orders. More preorders means parts orders in bulk quantities, which means less cost to manufacture.
3. There is no step 3.
4. Profit!
They could do what I did: buy a second hard drive, make it the master and the old drive a slave, install the legal copy of windows on it. Now all their old files are on the second slave drive and they have a fresh install of windows on a clean hard drive.
A slight added expense but hard drives are pretty cheap these days.
Bone microphone technology has been around for quite some time in the two-way radio communications biz, and it's much more discreet.
Bone microphones are sometimes used in the movie industry to communicate with actors/stunt people while on camera, when the person is too far away to reliably hear direction (if the person is dangling from a construction crane, for example).
One day, this convenient little word will get the promotion from 'jargon' to the big time. You just wait!
By George, I think I hit the nail on the head! :)
The reason DVD imagery tends to look awful on widescreen TVs in shops is typically because they have the same signal running to multiple TVs, at least some of which are 4:3. For some odd reason, they tend to configure this shared display for the lowest-common (or perhaps better selling) denominator.
The fact that each TV is showing an image that has been been split multiple times also tends to result in image quality quite inferior to what the TV is capable of producing with a single connection.
This is why I don't judge a TV based on whatever it's displaying in a shop. I use the internet to find in-depth reviews carried out under more controlled conditions. I mean, if it's on the internet, it must be reliable, right? :)
Maybe they could set up a wireless access point while they're at it. You know, for future warchalkernauts.
Didn't Neo steal some guy's cell phone while trying to escape the Matrix, yet was able to use it to communicate with the Nebuchadnezzar? Didn't Cypher use his cell phone to dial a traceable number within the Matrix to tip off the Agents to their location?
I think a better explanation would be that cell phones can't be used because they are portable. Therefore, they cannot be "attached" to a specific volume of space. Moving al the information for an avatar from one network node to another as they move from room to room would be ridculously prohibitive, so the node that stores the information for a specific volume of space would not necessarily include portable objects like cell phones, or avatars.
Instead, the node containing the volume would contain references or identifiers to the objects within that space.
Therefore, cell phones cannot be used reliably to associate the node containing the volume with the node containing the avatar, since the cell phone itself may be on a third node all by itself. A hard line, however, would be a permanent fixture (or semi-permanent if the machines practice refactoring), so the node containing the volume of space would be gauranteed to be be the one that references the avatar.
The cell phone would not directly reference the avatar because it is not a volume of space (it would be like trying to find out what hotel you're staying in by asking, say, one of your shoelaces).
While I'm sure that explanation has its own set of holes, it makes more sense (to me, at least) than the one in the essay.
If they inspected the code and found bugs, I have two questions:
1) Have these bugs been fixed now?
2) Why didn't they do this years ago?
Ugh! My bones feel weak and brittle. I don't understand. I'm drinking plenty of... Malk?
The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920's will ever go out of copyright.
Now, eventually, there will no longer be any copyrightable works produced in the U.S. Works are rarely original; they are almost always derived from existing works. So much for innovation and competition.
Sad day for the U.S. While I'm glad I don't live there, I'm sure it will inevitably affect me, anyway.
And not in a good way.
Pop-ups, ads, and flash are not much of a problem for me, since I use filtering software to block it (PopUpCop).
What really drives me permanently away are sites that refuse to function unless cookies are enabled. This really burns my ass.
If I don't have an account on the offending site, what the hell is so hard about generating a temporary session ID, and tracking my position on their site using their own friggin' database? The fact that they don't do so leads me to believe that the site designers are either very stupid, or they're tracking more than just my position on their site.
If a site refuses to function, complaining that I don't have cookies enabled, I leave that site and never come back. There's no excuse for it.
If she doesn't have a web presence, then the date's off. She obviously has no geeky attributes and is perhaps even computer illiterate.
:)
I could just ask her about computers, but doing so would defy my own geeky introversion and shyness.
With the advent of more memory and storage, it has become less necessary to code for optimization and efficiency (with regards to occupied space). With today's systems, the focus is (and should be) on readbility and maintainability. Making sure that a program is readable and maintainable is typically more important than ensuring that it fits in a restricted space.
While I'm sure the programmers of yesteryear wrote very efficient code, it is less likely that all of their coworkers could easily follow each others' code.
Bloatware is an unfortunate outcome of this turn of events, but bloatware is a subset of the whole.
I'm pretty sure they would not have snubbed their nose at the idea of being given a machine that had a GUI interface and piles of RAM and storage. Oh, to be able to focus on the problem at hand and not have to be distracted by the limitations of a 64 byte stack!
To belittle the programmers of today because they have not suffered the restrictions of yesteryear is a bit silly. Even today, there are embedded systems programmers who still deal with such restrictions. Do we elevate them to deity status? No, we just sit back and wait for Carmack to speak.
It is a form of art that allows creations rivalling the beauty of Michelangelos "David" (Maxwells equations etc.) but the constraints are so much stricter than those of marble.
Kind of like trying to make ASCII art that is also functioning BF code... or vice versa...
...can /. add a mod category called, say, "Greek", or perhaps "Clicks and pops"?
When I get a hankerin' for some of that "back in the day" goodness, I find a handheld game, like Yahtzee or Battleship, for example (they help provide instant ideas and present a palatable project duration), and then sit down at my Atari 130XE and create my own version over a weekend, sometimes in a single sitting.
In an ancient world devoid of the need for multi-threading, exception handling, and lengthy design documentation, it's amazing how fast the assembly language flows from your fingertips.
It's quite a refreshing diversion, and allows me to recapture those carefree days.
I still have boxes of Compute!, Analog, Antic and Softside magazines. I learned tons of things from all of them, but had the most fun with Softside - a magazine with enormous type-in BASIC programs that were full-blown games. My mother's favourite game on our Atari 800 was the "Master's Golf" game I typed in from a Softside magazine.
I wish I still had the April Fools issue of Creative Computing. That whole issue was simply brilliant.
Now I want to set up my Atari 130XE again, or maybe play "Castles of Dr. Creep" on my C64... *sigh*...
I know that when Microsoft gives something away for free, it means they're up to something.
I thought AOL was just preying upon the non-internet-literate, but I now see that AOL falls into the same category of evilness as Microsoft.
That makes sense, as I believe the ABIO is the much cheaper Taiwanese AIBO knock-off.
That would be the "Segwaybo", I presume.
I wonder if I can "Profit as an ET3 Licensee" by spell-checking their fucking website. I mean, hell, I'm otherwise sold on the presentation alone. Especially the sickly green colours.
Doesn't Microsoft consider its users members of an enemy force? Oh, hey, and the RIAA... and the MPAA, too...