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Admin
Oh course. I started just as cards were transitioned out, so I didn't have to use them for long. And it was a long time before I understood what the I in MUSIC (McGill University System for Interactive Computing) meant. Lab privileges were revoked for 24hrs if they caught you compiling. It did mean that I proof-read my code a lot better then... (Now, it's "I know there's an error - just let the compiler find it")
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Community college (College of DuPage) back in 1981-83. Then I went to Southern Illinois Univ and discovered the joys of compiling NOW! (Still using MUSIC)
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It doesn't matter, because any scientific law that makes the existence of Godzilla impossible is obviously flawed.
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They were still doing that when I was at school. The really impressive bit was getting the printout back the next day. As a vacation job while at school, I worked for a company that had its punch operation in Tooley Street (Thames docklands) and its computer in Smithfield. For several weeks I was being paid to take taxis between the sites twice a day to transfer tape one way and data for input the other. It never occurred to anyone to save money by using the bus, because this was computers.
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I only used punch cards in community college. (By the time I got to uni, we had hard-copy terminals connected to the multi-user computer at 300b/s or something like that. Some of the labs still had card punches, but I never saw anybody using them.) The card punches were in the data center, so you just put a rubber band around your card deck and put them in the box for the operator to run. Depending on how busy they were, you might get your cards back, along with the printout the next day, or in 5 minutes.
The operator would run a black marker down the cards when he put them in the reader. You got up to 5 tries to get your program to work. Already have 5 stripes down your card deck? The operator wouldn't run them again without special permission from your instructor (or repunching your program onto a fresh bunch of cards). I think I had to do this once for an extra-credit project in my assembly language class — the instructor permission, that is, not the cheat by repunching.
This was also the environment in which I learned to hate COBOL. In the FORTRAN class, we wrote hello world the first night of class. It took the COBOL class half the semester to write their first program, and students were crying because they had hundreds of compiler errors. When I saw that, I decided on the spot that I never wanted to touch COBOL. (Needless to say, I have never regretted that decision.)
And you — or at least we — wrote the entire program by hand on special coding forms that matched the card format — one character per column, each line representing one card — and carefully proof-read that before you went near a card punch.Admin
It's no secret in the run-up to the year 2000 that some people were paid a helluva lot of money to fix all that old code. After all, when that code runs the world economy, you don't care how much it costs; the cost is nothing compared to how much you'd lose if you didn't fix it.
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Ok, maybe there was a brief twinge of financial regret that I couldn't get paid that much for fixing old stuff, but generally, the farther I am from COBOL, the happier I am.
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Me too, but at the time I couldn't help noticing - because the crisis arose because there was no disaster recovery plan and no succession planning for legacy code which took into account the timescales involved. Unfortunately C++ turned out not to be a panacaea, attempts to invent reliable and secure languages like ADA were flawed in execution, and so when it was clear that a large excremento-turbo interaction was scheduled for not long enough in the future, the only answer was to fix the legacy stuff. And the industry has been like this before and since - 10 dioptre shortsightedness by managements. When Rolls-Royce develops a new ship or aircraft engine they expect to be able to support it for more than 50, sometimes 70 years. And the failure of a design of engine is not that catastrophic. But when it came to the world economy (as @RaceProUK observes) the only plan was "throw money at a crisis if it happens." This is basically the plan invented to deal with global warming, so I'm glad I won't be around in 50 years time to see how that is working out.
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I actually have one as well, though it's sitting out in the shop and not getting too much use (Having sat at a TOP screen kinda... burned it)....
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We can build software like engineers build physical objects. We don't because we have better ways. There is a relevant koan on this matter.
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could... not... resist... [image]
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In my field of engineering, we follow a middle — or more accurately, perhaps, hybrid — path. During development, we work more like software engineers (although Agile really isn't a thing, but incomplete and ambiguous specs certainly are), because at that point the project really is a software project, a simulation of what the hardware will eventually do.
However, once it is released to manufacturing, it becomes physical objects that cannot then be modified. Even fixing a bug in future production is a very expensive thing (perhaps as much as a million dollars just for the manufacturing equipment updates, not counting the engineering time to implement and test the changes), and often not done if it can be satisfactorily worked around in software.
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http://store.steampowered.com/app/367450/
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I actually like those sort of "games", but sometimes I question the physics and "reasonability" of them. i.e you can get to a point where there is no solution because it is impossible with the "resources" provided. Quite often, you cannot skip a "level"
The choice of a "bridge" for the image was pure serendipity. Or, the first that I thought best illustrated the quote.
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I think you are not responding to my point. This is not about different kinds of engineering; this is about long term planning. [edit - tl;dr deleted]
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[pendantry] It is a fable, not a koan. [/pendantry]
[cannotresist] Hitler liked designing bridges. [/cannotresist]
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i really need to finish @godwin/@hitler/@hilter
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I remember taking issue in the mid-90s with a Doctor Who spinoff book where the villains of the week had a computer virus that could kill people by making their computers' monitors explode. The author read the USENET thread in question and asked me why that broke my suspension of disbelief when a police box that travelled in time and space didn't. My answer: The TARDIS is alien and part of the premise of the show. The monitors would have been built by humans and been engineered with safety in mind.
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While you're at it, build @goebbels too, named after the snout of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
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Motto:
"Same bridge builder game you've seen a hundred times, slightly different art style!"
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The Tardis appears to have been built by an extremely advanced alien civilisation that was pretty crap at product design. It is quite funny how 20th century science fiction has aged really badly because its writers imagined all the wrong things in the future. Perhaps sticking to fantasy (and now steampunk) is just a lot safer.
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Think of it like this: cyberpunk is going to be just as ersatz-retrocool as steampunk currently is.
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See post above yours. My view is that it is not only a story not a koan, it is not a very good one. You would not want to cross a bridge constructed by those monks. Bridges are built out of the most readily available suitable construction materials. If gravity suddenly changed, we would have bigger problems than bridges. And so on.
Near my house is a stream that runs down to a river. It passes under several small stone bridges which have to take traffic much heavier than was in use when they were built. The channel under each one has simply been lined with a reinforced concrete pipe and backfilled with concrete. Structural engineers are a little bit more clever than this simplistic story seems to suggest.
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I don't read posts longer than 2 or 3 lines very thoroughly, sometimes. So I missed it.
You're right that this story is not a thought-out story (like many of that site).
Computation power is too readily available for software to be well-designed for some decades.
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But keep a few things in mind:
Tardises (?) are actually trained living beings, and not as much machines. They're like Moya in Farscape, but without a Pilot to translate.
The only one we see in the series is busted as shit and nothing in it works well (unless the plot requires it to).
The bigger problem in Doctor Who are the two opponents, Cybermen and Daleks, who both have SEVERE issues. The primary one seems to be that they all carry ranged weapons BUT NEVER ACTUALLY USE THEM!
The Cybermen walk up to a guy screaming DELETE!!! at the top of their lungs and physically place a hand on their shoulder and electrocutes them. Not exactly the Green Berets...
The Daleks seem to be vaguely aware that they carry ranged weapons, but at the same time almost never actually use them. In the movies starring Grand Moff Who, they shot fart-gas which had a range of maybe 4' and made Ian mildly annoyed for a few hours. The symptoms of being shot by that "lethal" weapon were actually more mild than the symptoms of eating 3 bowls of Texas chili. WHAT A GREAT WEAPON GUYS!
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In TOS they used them a lot more.
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And plenty in the newer series too; however, their accuracy is akin to your average Stormtrooper :rolleyes:
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Ah, so anyone other than your average Stark Trek red-shirt is going to be absolutely fine?
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The Doctor got hit once, but it only took out one of his hearts; other than that, the hero characters never get hit. Which is kinda understandable with the Daleks, as their laser rifles are (normally) insta-kill.
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Instantaneous lethal weapons are a very bad plot device for exactly this reason. Larry Niven's Puppeteers, who work through subtlety and guile to take over everything, with a convincing backstory of their extreme caution and unwillingness to expose themselves to risk, make much better cosmic-scale bad guys.
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True, but then the Daleks were created to make 8yo kids hide behind the sofa, and insta-kill lasers (used to) work pretty well for that purpose
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problem is, every time I have seen a darlek use it's weapon (Request to Forum Systems: Deploy :giggity: countermeasures, issued), regardless of the accuracy or lethality of the payload, it's weapon is pointing up in the air (Ok, recall :giggity: countermeasures, they are going to be outclassed)
or limply down at the ground (incoming :giggity:, we are screwed... ...dammit! Man down, friendly fire....)
oh fuc....................... :boom:
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I thought it was because the BBC special effects budget was $5.95.
At least until the films when they could afford that great "Edsel UFO" effect.
You can also see the fart-gas weapon the Daleks have in the trailer. And that the Daleks are easily defeated by that most deadly of all human weapons, a beat-up bread van.
Also I can't hear that "there's no good! the bombs are no good!" line without mentally adding the RiffTrax follow-up, "they're the robo-men of bombs!"
But the Edsel UFO is the best.
EDIT: related
[image]Admin
That too
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That was in old dollars, when they were $2.80 to the £. So it's even worse than you thought.
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Ah, the good old days when the mass media was just supposed to produce neurotic children, not paranoid adults.
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I… what?
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What do you think happened to the neurotic children?
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You are probably not old enough. What "enhanced" the view from behind the sofa was poor quality, almost washed out 405 line video.
My understanding of what goes a long way towards creating fear, is the inability to see / hear what is happening. Also, it just occurs to me - and this is probably worth a topic on it's own. Much of the old TV was poor quality acting, sets and props etc that were not considered to be an issue because much of the detail was lost in transmission (did you see what I done there). I wonder if the 405 to 625 upgrade had the same resistance (from the actors / presenters etc) as the the upgrade to HD had / has today I.e. being able to see every nostril hair, wrinkle and zit. I was not old enough at the time to take notice.
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found myself watching an episode with them in. I pissed myself laughing. Things are supposed to be not behind you when you turn to look (well there are still behind you except now they are in front of you when you turn back), not statues that have "moved" closer.
Some times I think these sort of scare tactics are counter productive. What fun is there in scaring you victim to death, if they drop dead of a heart attack because of the surprise?
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Which episode did you see? 'Blink' did it pretty well I think; subsequent appearances have dulled their effect somewhat.
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They were, until they because cartoon ridiculousness.
"If they touch you you go back in time! And they can move super fast! And now if you see a reflection of one in a TV it ends up in your brain and can control you and they have 537864327846234326161 other new superpowers we pull out of our asses every time lalalalala!"
They were scary for like one episode. Then lame.
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I have absolutely no idea, all I really recall is that a crypt was involved, and the Doctor "won" and the frequent employment a sonic screwdriver was significant in the winning
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If I had to guess, that was a Matt Smith double episode with the Byzantine and about 486392169048590725843782901534857684025784327084578394 Angels... yet they still escaped.
*googles*
Ah, it was the Byzantium, and the episodes were The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone.
And to be fair, this is almost every episode. Since the revival, anyway.Admin
Yes, the new show is, unfortunately, about 95% fanservice. I do think it's improved a bit since Davies left.
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I also find it odd that the sonic screwdriver works on everything except wood; it just seems way too arbitrary
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I told ya: fanservice. In the new show it's a crutch; in the old one it was mainly used for things like unlocking doors. In particular it wasn't a magic universal sensor. Although I always assumed the "everything except wood" meant, roughly "everything electronic", and then "except wood" flows naturally from that.
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I guess, but the way it's described in the show hints it'd be useful on Tupperware, which is about as electronic as a rock