Hardwired is as good as anything any of the other big name cyberpunk authors did. Then there's his comedy series....
Ignoring the idiot trolls, most of the other authors I've seen mentioned had a *lot* of awards, and are quite well known and appreciated. Well, Doc Smith - go read Skylark of Space, and remember a) he started writing it, with the help of a female friend, b) it was first published in 1928, and only slightly revised in the late fifties. Science, adventures, and not a screaming heroine in sight... AND it was the first startship out of the solar system.
My kids dragged me to that piece of crap. I managed to get out to the parking lot, afterwards, before I began a screaming rant about how many things were wrong with that movie. Perhaps it would have been much, much, much shorter, shorter than this post, to say what was right about it.. *
And that was having missed the assertion that it was the size of Texas.
Now, having lived in Texas, I can tell you that if you drive east on I-10, as you're leaving, the sign reads mile 899. That makes it not much less than the diameter of the Moon. You *think* astronomers, amateur or professional, might have noticed something that big careening through the solar system. The biggest asteroids are about 1/3 that size.
If an asteroid the size of Texas was headed earthward, there's a fine old set of instructions from the Cold War as to what to do: go away from all windows, then bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.
mark
* Fun anecdote, which I got from my late ex, who was an engineer there: when they were filming the scenes at KSC (that's Cape Canaveral to the ignorant), one of the idiot starts climbed up on the Crawler treads, WHILE IT WAS MOVING. A tech yelled at him to get off. He replied, "do you know who I am?" The tech responded no, and if he didn't get off and slipped, they'd need DNA analysis to figure out who he was.
I just finished re(re-re-...) reading Gibson's Neuromancer, but I can also think of William's Hardwired, or Sterling's stuff, and there aren't a lot of "happy endings". Of course, the OP asked about "scifi adventures", as though they were all adventure movies....
The really, really unpleasant part is how close we are to Gibson's world of Neuromancer....
200k lines is big, but not impossible. The real problem is what some subject matter expert coded 12 years ago, who left 8 years ago, and no one's looked at since, because everyone's scared of it.
What a lot of folks in the comments I've skimmed utterly ignore is that this is a "complex chemical processing plant". If slashdotters code crashes, oh, well, they get yelled at, and it gets fixed.
With a chemical plant, not quite the same. Think of the disaster in Bhopal, India , or the last major oil refinery fire.
The way I'd deal with it is this:
0) Identify one, or preferably more than one, subject matter expert in each area of the plant
covered by the software.
1) it's 10-20 yr old *spaghetti* code. Document it. ->Do flowcharts-. (And if you kids look down
on them, that's because you don't understand a toolbox larger than 1 hammer and 1 screwdriver,
and if I were hiring you, you'd be as junior as it gets). *THEN* you have some idea of what's
happening, in what order.
2) Bring in the subject matter experts for a working meeting, with very high level diagrams, and let
them figure out what section of the code, and process, they know about.
3) Set up meetings with individual subgroups, and get lower level flows - the code should relate to
the process in the plant, which presumably starts at one end, and various things come out
at various points
4) Identify where stuff jumps the line, and whether it actually does that, or whether that's a major
problem.
5) And pick a common language that's stable, going to still be common in 20 years, has a *lot* of
folks making a living in it now... and one that's close enough to G2 that the people you have
to work with, who'll probably be there long after you're gone, will be able to transistion to
easily, without a lot of resistance. Since you're saying Pascal w/ graphics, I'd suggest an
older language - C, or C++ - I promise you'll have a lot of problems with Java, and as for
current fad languages.... I do think you'll really, really want a *compiled* language, for
something like this, not a scripting language.
6) Now you're down to normal architecting: : des
1. No, that's C'thulhu 2. You just think that because of the rays from the Devos beneath the earth's crust and oceans. (Points if you recognize what that's from). 3. The Christians have been waiting for their God's Second Coming for 2000 years. Our Goddess has come twice tonight, already.
I mean, you, as a major corporatation, don't want to deal with *artists* or *authors*, who are notoriously difficult to handle, and have their own opinions[1], and want a real share of the profits[2], you want "content creators", who produce work for pay, and can be easily replaced, like any packages boy band, girl band, or whatever.....
mark
1. For example, as a corporation, you might have deals with airlines.... 2.
Because he can't figure out, since he doesn't know or want to know algebra, if two packages of meat (pkg x & pkg x+.25_ and a box of Brand A cereal is more than than a larger package of meat (pkg 2x) and a box of brand B cereal.
And there's a pro-home schooling op-ed in the WSJ.
Is there an attack on public education? Nahhhh.... and if you aren't currently online, and can study that way, then you and your kids don't deserve an education.
"The option of mandating time off"? Bullshit. Anybody here ever got that? If management says *anything*, it's "we don't have a comp time policy, that's up to your manager". They, of course, being given stupidly insane deadlines, will never have a chance to let you take anything.
Oh, but we're all "professionals" and "in management" (never mind the only thing 90%+ of us ever manage are computers), so we can't join a union, and have collective bargaining (oh, right, you have leverage with your employer..."), and *some* kind of legally-limited work week, like our parents and grandparents fought for for decades through unions, so they didn't have to work 12 and 16 hour days, six days a week. But we're SO much better....
"Enlightened self-interest", my ass. There are two kinds of Republicans/libertarians/tea partiers: millionaires, and suckers.
Second, it was rammed through by the telecoms, who wanted out from under the controls that the 1984 breakup of Mother Bell kept them under. Yes, I know what I'm talking about: 1995-1997, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells now swallowed by SWBell (which then swallowed AT&T, and tail wagged dog). That was explicitly one branch of the business plan - I was in a "startup" division that would be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. I, personally, along with every other employee in "management", and probably union members, too, got a personal email demanding that I write my Congresscritter and Senators to ask them to pass it... AND the president of our division wanted copies of those letters, and managers leaned on those of us who balked. So, yes, "rammed through" is the correct phrase. And it's got us *so* much more... right. Just remember, I know as an insider that they do have large, well-staffed divisions of bright people who spend 40, 50, 60, and sometimes 70 hour weeks doing nothing but coming up with plans that sound good to you, but will actually cost you more.
a) None of you are poor, or between jobs, right?[1] b) Even with the first two years of a Dem-controlled Congress, the Republicans have filibustered, or threatened to filibuster,
many proposals (let's not forget the near-default that *created* the "fiscal cliff") c) You don't know what's in the health care law. Try browsing ,
then come back. I expect to see you trying to spin things like the small business help, or the insurance for those who
can't afford insurance.
mark
1. Of course, when you were "between positions", you took unemployment. Just like your idol, Ron Paul, takes money from
Medicaide and Medicare, while ranting against them, and let his staffer *die* who didn't have insurance.
Given how many cops, who are *required* to have a certain number of hours regularly of training miss and hit other things, and studies after WWII showed that only 10% (or was it 20%) of combat troops, in firefights with real, approved, uniformed enemies shot *at* them, rather than around to try to chase them off, what are the chances that if people had pulled out guns and started shooting, they'd even *aim* at the shooter, or hit what they were aiming at?
Yeah, the phrase "station wagon" gave the car dealers and PR flacks cooties. The *original* SUVs, AFAIK, where built on truck frames, as were minivans.
Then they moved them to car frames. They're mostly crap. One of my daughters has an Outback, which looks like a cute little station wagon... and gets slightly better milage than a 1972 Maverick. We have a VW Jetta, which gets around 30mph.
I still miss my dearly departed beloved '86 Toyota Tercel wagon, carburated, which got 36 mph after I tuned it up, and was still doing that when it died in 2000 or 2001. And passed emission tests, IIRC. But computerized engines are *so* much cooler....
I do have a friend with a Suburban. They *need* it. They tow a trailer with a literal ton of stuff, and they go where the nearest *road* (not paved road, but road) is many miles away (they're geologists). The rest of the idiots driving SUVs... there's a quote from an unnamed Ford exec, years ago, that the only time 90% of these people drive offroad is when they miss their driveway at 3 am, drunk.
Well, gee, this is the same Republican Party of Texas who, at least through 2004, had on their official website, as part of the official party platform, that they wanted to change the Constitution and officially make the US a "Christian nation" (as opposed to the opinion of the Founding Fathers and the first Congress - see "Treaty of Tripoli", article 11).
Google's search, over the last few years, has gotten less and less helpful, as advertising became more and more big business. Try to find someone who's last name is hyphenated, or a product model with a hyphen in it. Or something with punctuation in what you're looking for, such as a period. There have also been plenty of searches that include, in the visible paragraph, exactly what I told it I did *not* want to see.
Google as an extension of our minds? Pardon me, but maybe some other search engine will not be coming down with ADHD.
Will it offer a high-power computing option, to enhance the picture, allowing you to see what's computed to be under her clothes? Or is the X-ray specs from the back of decades of comics still out of reach?
I beg your pardon, but that's bs by someone who wasn't there.
There was *zero* discussion of SQL in the late seventies into the mid-eighties, when I was studying. Everyone used heirarchcial databases. Not a college, not a nation board, not a Fortune 500 company, used SQL. The first time I ever *heard* or worked with SQL was '91.
But then, there are such fads in comp sci, and the latestgreatestnewestcoolest tool is the Answer To Life, the Universe, etc. Why, I remember the Jan '94 IEEE Spectrum, that *literally* presented OO as The Silver Bullet to the software backlog....
mark "has hammer, and screwdrivers with flat, Phillips, torx, etc heads...."
Slashdot Mirror
Oh? What city?
mark, Chicago, late nineties
Hardwired is as good as anything any of the other big name cyberpunk authors did. Then there's his comedy series....
Ignoring the idiot trolls, most of the other authors I've seen mentioned had a *lot* of awards, and are quite well known and appreciated. Well, Doc Smith - go read Skylark of Space, and remember a) he started writing it, with the help of a female friend, b) it was first published in 1928, and only slightly revised in the late fifties. Science, adventures, and not a screaming heroine in sight... AND it was the first startship out of the solar system.
mark
My kids dragged me to that piece of crap. I managed to get out to the parking lot, afterwards, before I began a screaming rant about how many things were wrong with that movie. Perhaps it would have been much, much, much shorter, shorter than this post, to say what was right about it.. *
And that was having missed the assertion that it was the size of Texas.
Now, having lived in Texas, I can tell you that if you drive east on I-10, as you're leaving, the sign reads mile 899. That makes it not much less than the diameter of the Moon. You *think* astronomers, amateur or professional, might have noticed something that big careening through the solar system. The biggest asteroids are about 1/3 that size.
If an asteroid the size of Texas was headed earthward, there's a fine old set of instructions from the Cold War as to what to do: go away from all windows, then bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.
mark
* Fun anecdote, which I got from my late ex, who was an engineer there: when they were filming the scenes at KSC (that's Cape Canaveral to the ignorant), one of the idiot starts climbed up on the Crawler treads, WHILE IT WAS MOVING. A tech yelled at him to get off. He replied, "do you know who I am?"
The tech responded no, and if he didn't get off and slipped, they'd need DNA analysis to figure out who he was.
I just finished re(re-re-...) reading Gibson's Neuromancer, but I can also think of William's Hardwired, or Sterling's stuff, and there aren't a lot of "happy endings". Of course, the OP asked about "scifi adventures", as though they were all adventure movies....
The really, really unpleasant part is how close we are to Gibson's world of Neuromancer....
mark
...but the first products won't be water, they'll be "energy drinks"....
mark "Ocean Bull has a real kick!"
200k lines is big, but not impossible. The real problem is what some subject matter expert coded 12 years ago, who left 8 years ago, and no one's looked at since, because everyone's scared of it.
What a lot of folks in the comments I've skimmed utterly ignore is that this is a "complex chemical processing plant". If slashdotters code crashes, oh, well, they get yelled at, and it gets fixed.
With a chemical plant, not quite the same. Think of the disaster in Bhopal, India , or the last major oil refinery fire.
The way I'd deal with it is this:
0) Identify one, or preferably more than one, subject matter expert in each area of the plant
covered by the software.
1) it's 10-20 yr old *spaghetti* code. Document it. ->Do flowcharts-. (And if you kids look down
on them, that's because you don't understand a toolbox larger than 1 hammer and 1 screwdriver,
and if I were hiring you, you'd be as junior as it gets). *THEN* you have some idea of what's
happening, in what order.
2) Bring in the subject matter experts for a working meeting, with very high level diagrams, and let
them figure out what section of the code, and process, they know about.
3) Set up meetings with individual subgroups, and get lower level flows - the code should relate to
the process in the plant, which presumably starts at one end, and various things come out
at various points
4) Identify where stuff jumps the line, and whether it actually does that, or whether that's a major
problem.
5) And pick a common language that's stable, going to still be common in 20 years, has a *lot* of
folks making a living in it now... and one that's close enough to G2 that the people you have
to work with, who'll probably be there long after you're gone, will be able to transistion to
easily, without a lot of resistance. Since you're saying Pascal w/ graphics, I'd suggest an
older language - C, or C++ - I promise you'll have a lot of problems with Java, and as for
current fad languages.... I do think you'll really, really want a *compiled* language, for
something like this, not a scripting language.
6) Now you're down to normal architecting: : des
Thoth is coming?
1. No, that's C'thulhu
2. You just think that because of the rays from the Devos beneath the earth's crust and oceans. (Points if you recognize what that's from).
3. The Christians have been waiting for their God's Second Coming for 2000 years. Our Goddess has come twice tonight, already.
mark
Let's try this again: footnote 2: http ://www.janisian.com/reading/internet.php
mark "gotta be some way to add a link"
I mean, you, as a major corporatation, don't want to deal with *artists* or *authors*, who are notoriously difficult to handle, and have their own opinions[1], and want a real share of the profits[2], you want "content creators", who produce work for pay, and can be easily replaced, like any packages boy band, girl band, or whatever.....
mark
1. For example, as a corporation, you might have deals with airlines....
2.
Because he can't figure out, since he doesn't know or want to know algebra, if two packages of meat (pkg x & pkg x+.25_ and a box of Brand A cereal is more than than a larger package of meat (pkg 2x) and a box of brand B cereal.
And there's a pro-home schooling op-ed in the WSJ.
Is there an attack on public education? Nahhhh.... and if you aren't currently online, and can study that way, then you and your kids don't deserve an education.
mark
And since you ask, feel like helping me rack nine 2U servers in a room with a temp of 63, and the wind from the vents at about 15 knots?
mark "then there are the sleds from the rackmount UPSes, at about 40-45 lbs apiece"
--
1.8x10^12: not just a good idea, it's the law
Yup, it's a windows operating system, masquerading as a text editor. Wonder why they never just rebranded it HURD...?
mark
"The option of mandating time off"? Bullshit. Anybody here ever got that? If management says *anything*, it's "we don't have a comp time policy, that's up to your manager". They, of course, being given stupidly insane deadlines, will never have a chance to let you take anything.
Oh, but we're all "professionals" and "in management" (never mind the only thing 90%+ of us ever manage are computers), so we can't join a union, and have collective bargaining (oh, right, you have leverage with your employer..."), and *some* kind of legally-limited work week, like our parents and grandparents fought for for decades through unions, so they didn't have to work 12 and 16 hour days, six days a week. But we're SO much better....
"Enlightened self-interest", my ass. There are two kinds of Republicans/libertarians/tea partiers: millionaires, and suckers.
mark
First, slashdot, that's 1996, not 1966.
Second, it was rammed through by the telecoms, who wanted out from under the controls that the 1984 breakup of Mother Bell kept them under. Yes, I know what I'm talking about: 1995-1997, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells now swallowed by SWBell (which then swallowed AT&T, and tail wagged dog). That was explicitly one branch of the business plan - I was in a "startup" division that would be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. I, personally, along with every other employee in "management", and probably union members, too, got a personal email demanding that I write my Congresscritter and Senators to ask them to pass it... AND the president of our division wanted copies of those letters, and managers leaned on those of us who balked. So, yes, "rammed through" is the correct phrase.
And it's got us *so* much more... right. Just remember, I know as an insider that they do have large, well-staffed divisions of bright people who spend 40, 50, 60, and sometimes 70 hour weeks doing nothing but coming up with plans that sound good to you, but will actually cost you more.
mark
a) None of you are poor, or between jobs, right?[1]
b) Even with the first two years of a Dem-controlled Congress, the Republicans have filibustered, or threatened to filibuster,
many proposals (let's not forget the near-default that *created* the "fiscal cliff")
c) You don't know what's in the health care law. Try browsing ,
then come back. I expect to see you trying to spin things like the small business help, or the insurance for those who
can't afford insurance.
mark
1. Of course, when you were "between positions", you took unemployment. Just like your idol, Ron Paul, takes money from
Medicaide and Medicare, while ranting against them, and let his staffer *die* who didn't have insurance.
Given how many cops, who are *required* to have a certain number of hours regularly of training miss and hit other things, and studies after WWII showed that only 10% (or was it 20%) of combat troops, in firefights with real, approved, uniformed enemies shot *at* them, rather than around to try to chase them off, what are the chances that if people had pulled out guns and started shooting, they'd even *aim* at the shooter, or hit what they were aiming at?
mark "and then there's the ease of buying guns"
The abstract says *nothing* about the results, which is what I'd be interested in knowing.
mark
No Spandex (tm) suit, no dyed hair, not even a getaway plan.
And isn't Colorado one of the states you can concealed carry? Where was the gunfight at the Dark Knight corral?
mark "guns make us *so* much safer"
Yeah, the phrase "station wagon" gave the car dealers and PR flacks cooties. The *original* SUVs, AFAIK, where built on truck frames, as were minivans.
Then they moved them to car frames. They're mostly crap. One of my daughters has an Outback, which looks like a cute little station wagon... and gets slightly better milage than a 1972 Maverick. We have a VW Jetta, which gets around 30mph.
I still miss my dearly departed beloved '86 Toyota Tercel wagon, carburated, which got 36 mph after I tuned it up, and was still doing that when it died in 2000 or 2001. And passed emission tests, IIRC. But computerized engines are *so* much cooler....
I do have a friend with a Suburban. They *need* it. They tow a trailer with a literal ton of stuff, and they go where the nearest *road* (not paved road, but road) is many miles away (they're geologists). The rest of the idiots driving SUVs... there's a quote from an unnamed Ford exec, years ago, that the only time 90% of these people drive offroad is when they miss their driveway at 3 am, drunk.
mark
Well, gee, this is the same Republican Party of Texas who, at least through 2004, had on their official website, as part of the official party platform, that they wanted to change the Constitution and officially make the US a "Christian nation" (as opposed to the opinion of the Founding Fathers and the first Congress - see "Treaty of Tripoli", article 11).
mark
A friend's project, with pics.
mark
Google's search, over the last few years, has gotten less and less helpful, as advertising became more and more big business. Try to find someone who's last name is hyphenated, or a product model with a hyphen in it. Or something with punctuation in what you're looking for, such as a period. There have also been plenty of searches that include, in the visible paragraph, exactly what I told it I did *not* want to see.
Google as an extension of our minds? Pardon me, but maybe some other search engine will not be coming down with ADHD.
mark
Will it offer a high-power computing option, to enhance the picture, allowing you to see what's computed to be under her clothes? Or is the X-ray specs from the back of decades of comics still out of reach?
mark
Dorks who think they're the same.
mark, who was on usenet in 1991, and has friends who were on it, and had email, 10 years earlier
I beg your pardon, but that's bs by someone who wasn't there.
There was *zero* discussion of SQL in the late seventies into the mid-eighties, when I was studying. Everyone used heirarchcial databases. Not a college, not a nation board, not a Fortune 500 company, used SQL. The first time I ever *heard* or worked with SQL was '91.
But then, there are such fads in comp sci, and the latestgreatestnewestcoolest tool is the Answer To Life, the Universe, etc. Why, I remember the Jan '94 IEEE Spectrum, that *literally* presented OO as The Silver Bullet to the software backlog....
mark "has hammer, and screwdrivers with flat, Phillips, torx, etc heads...."