So today I discovered that I needed a Java runtime.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never liked Java*, so I've always left it to scuttle around in the subbasement, doing useful stuff without ever being seen or heard. But like laundry service, 'once gone, soon missed', and today I needed it for the xTIMEcomposer IDE. XMOS was kind enough to send me one of their new Startkits, and its time to start using it.
First, I went to the Sun website and downloaded a .rpm.
While I could unpack it, I'm too naive to get it properly installed, or at least, when the installation failed, I don't know enough to figure out why. Hitting the forums gave me a pile of dead links -- has anyone considered that the Internet might be more useful if it had some sort of ROM like nature? --. and when I found a .pet file, FireFox decided it had no idea what to do.
Which was a blatant lie: the .pet autoinstall on download was the only thing that impressed me to date on this machine.**
Found the symlink, repaired the association. Java installed with a snap, and now the IDE comes up.
...annndddd the IDE unavoidable web login won't login. I've probably forgotten my password.
But seriously, XMOS. I understand the cross-platform choice of Java***, but the login is very close to a deal breaker. I know the concept of 'not being connected to the web' feels like a discussion about buggy whips. I know we are supposed to be cloud/stream/wireless/whatever 24/7/365. I'm not. My machines are connected some of the time, the connections are not always good, and I am not alone in this.
What percentage of people are not well-connected?
Its high.
This quote from John Carmack talking about Quakeworld vs the original Quake engine during Internet play is from the Bronze Age (1990s), but its always stuck in my head as a good admission of a programmers bias:
" While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game. My original design was targeted at 200ms connection latencies. People that have a digital connection to the internet through a good provider get a pretty good game experience. Unfortunately, 99% of the world gets on with a slip or ppp connection over a modem, often through a crappy overcrowded ISP. This gives 300+ ms latencies, minimum. Client. User's modem. ISP's modem. Server. ISP's modem. User's modem. Client. God, that sucks.
Ok, I made a bad call. I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn't familliar with PPP life. I'm adressing it now."
Talking about PPP may seem funny now, the problem is still real. For instance, I can't get broadband at my home. And fiber is just a pipe dream, unless I move two measly km.
So I connect via satellite, which I am quite happy with, except the unavoidable lag as the radio signal travels ~24,000 km to geosynchronous orbit(80 ms), gets buffered and then retransmitted to earth(at least another 80ms), gets processed at the uplink/downlink station, and routed onto the Internet. Physics demands her toll of 160ms, and in practise I get a lag greater then 280ms when the overheads are rolled in.
So as you can guess, FPS games are out for me, and the tens of thousands of other satellite modem users. And this isn't going to change for me. Until the phone company decides that running voice-over-copper is a waste of time, and rolls out fiber everywhere. Maybe sometime in the next 20 years, unless a new mitochondrial-telepathy communications system gets rolled out: its always so hard to predict new tech, beyond the fact that it'll usually waste more of our time in new and interesting ways.
*Do I actually like anything beyond home-made ice cream and Frankenstein movies?
**The whole SFS thing might be cool too, if it didn't remind me so much of a VCD.
*** Although I would have picked Python instead.
Showing posts with label Quake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quake. Show all posts
Gender Bender InterChangers
I cracked open a box of Old Computer Stuff, taped up and put away back in 2002.
It contained a 1 GB SCSI drive, a EGA video card, and my old computer converter kit, assembled over a decade, used with hatred & swearing, and thankfully forgotten.
DB-9, DB-25, mac to VGA, VGA to mac, Serial to PS/2, PS/2 to USB...the cursed phrases I used to mutter in my nightmarish sleep.
Notice the two hand-made adapters? One was hacked together to get a HUGE and AWKWARD scanner running...I don't remember its brand name, but it was the size of a dumpster, could scan at approximately
angstrom resolution, and would take an aeon to transfer that scan over a parallel port, even at 112,200 bps.
Anyone remember 112,200? I do, the way an aged war veteran remembers the trenches.
The other one was a male/male null modem built for the singular purpose of playing Quake at a laughably termed 'LAN Party' where almost no one had Ethernet adapters.
If we'd been a smart and as clever as we all thought we were at the time, then we'd have called it the 'unLAN Party' and actually managed to have a good time: the only highlight I remember of that evening was listening to DJ Shadow for the first time.
And the point of this masturbatory nostalgia is that I am really really glad the USB has conquered the world, and if they would just hurry up and ditch all connector styles but one, my happiness would be complete.
My nagging suspicion is that a new connector will become fad in time, probably some sort of barrel jack to transfer DC (Probably something irritatingly non-integer like 3.3V), and with a single fiber optic down the center to allow terabyte connection to a freaking mouse.
Because I also found a box of of Wang Diskettes (5 1/4",double sided, double density), which bear scribbled labels suggesting the RenegadeMime used them to archive a disassembler, I'll let An Wang have the last word: "Markets change, tastes change, so the companies and the individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change."
It contained a 1 GB SCSI drive, a EGA video card, and my old computer converter kit, assembled over a decade, used with hatred & swearing, and thankfully forgotten.
DB-9, DB-25, mac to VGA, VGA to mac, Serial to PS/2, PS/2 to USB...the cursed phrases I used to mutter in my nightmarish sleep.
Notice the two hand-made adapters? One was hacked together to get a HUGE and AWKWARD scanner running...I don't remember its brand name, but it was the size of a dumpster, could scan at approximately
angstrom resolution, and would take an aeon to transfer that scan over a parallel port, even at 112,200 bps.
Anyone remember 112,200? I do, the way an aged war veteran remembers the trenches.
The other one was a male/male null modem built for the singular purpose of playing Quake at a laughably termed 'LAN Party' where almost no one had Ethernet adapters.
If we'd been a smart and as clever as we all thought we were at the time, then we'd have called it the 'unLAN Party' and actually managed to have a good time: the only highlight I remember of that evening was listening to DJ Shadow for the first time.
And the point of this masturbatory nostalgia is that I am really really glad the USB has conquered the world, and if they would just hurry up and ditch all connector styles but one, my happiness would be complete.
My nagging suspicion is that a new connector will become fad in time, probably some sort of barrel jack to transfer DC (Probably something irritatingly non-integer like 3.3V), and with a single fiber optic down the center to allow terabyte connection to a freaking mouse.
Because I also found a box of of Wang Diskettes (5 1/4",double sided, double density), which bear scribbled labels suggesting the RenegadeMime used them to archive a disassembler, I'll let An Wang have the last word: "Markets change, tastes change, so the companies and the individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change."
the Internet seems to run on the 4 C's:
Code, Chatter, Carnality and Consumption.
Whats the actual information depth? Seems quite shallow at times, especially after you get out of the potholes of Academia and wander through the puddles of Forum Drivel (spelt Dribble, I suspect)
While the Singularity enthusiasts pursue their dream in tones that veer wildly between religious fervor (the Coming , man! Everything is gone to change!) and eroticism (the Cumming, man! Everything is gonna change!) I still find in very hard to determine exactly how this is going to come about.
Yes, CPU speeds continue to increase. Doesn't make my word processor any smarter.
Data storage continues to get cheaper. Files continue to proliferate. Data - as opposed to information - continues to pile up at a breathtaking rate.
But somehow, my computer isn't any smarter then it was. Quake 4 is glossier then Quake 1, but the experience hasn't changed. Google searches better than, say Webcrawler used to, but I still can't find info any better.
the Singularity is supposed to happen when we can't figure out how to find information, let alone aggregate it?
Search engines demonstrate RenegadeMime's First Problem of Intelligence: It ain't what info you can access, its what you can ignore. And without an ability to ignore, the Singularity is going to be about 40 % pornography, 20 % spam and 20 % academia.
Now picture an academic with a serious perverse bent and an obsessive-compulsion about the Nigerian $10-million dollar bank account. And then give it some fR** V1agra.
Lets take a subsection of the Net: the Mastercard validation and accounts network.
The network contains in excess of 360 terabytes of storage . Thats about the total information capacity of about 36 human brains.
The network can process over forty thousand transactions a second. It has a robust firewall and immune system. Its subsystems are watched by hundreds of clever humans, and thousands of lines of clever code. Do they detect the flickers of consciousness? The first dim rumbling dreams of awareness?
No ones seriously argues that that network is going to Singularity.
Why not?
Because is banal, and the Singularity is a romantic dream. Its much more romantic to argue Google becomes sentient - after all, its so smart, isn't it? It can answer our questions so swiftly!
Like with the eponymous BASIC program:
10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT "HELLO"A$
we are tricked by our willingness to ask stupid questions.
After a decade of the World Wide Web are we any smarter? Educated? Aware?
Not very.
And I will be the first to admit that sitting here adding this drivel to the storm of babble isn't making me any smarter either.
Code, Chatter, Carnality and Consumption.
Whats the actual information depth? Seems quite shallow at times, especially after you get out of the potholes of Academia and wander through the puddles of Forum Drivel (spelt Dribble, I suspect)
While the Singularity enthusiasts pursue their dream in tones that veer wildly between religious fervor (the Coming , man! Everything is gone to change!) and eroticism (the Cumming, man! Everything is gonna change!) I still find in very hard to determine exactly how this is going to come about.
Yes, CPU speeds continue to increase. Doesn't make my word processor any smarter.
Data storage continues to get cheaper. Files continue to proliferate. Data - as opposed to information - continues to pile up at a breathtaking rate.
But somehow, my computer isn't any smarter then it was. Quake 4 is glossier then Quake 1, but the experience hasn't changed. Google searches better than, say Webcrawler used to, but I still can't find info any better.
the Singularity is supposed to happen when we can't figure out how to find information, let alone aggregate it?
Search engines demonstrate RenegadeMime's First Problem of Intelligence: It ain't what info you can access, its what you can ignore. And without an ability to ignore, the Singularity is going to be about 40 % pornography, 20 % spam and 20 % academia.
Now picture an academic with a serious perverse bent and an obsessive-compulsion about the Nigerian $10-million dollar bank account. And then give it some fR** V1agra.
Lets take a subsection of the Net: the Mastercard validation and accounts network.
The network contains in excess of 360 terabytes of storage . Thats about the total information capacity of about 36 human brains.
The network can process over forty thousand transactions a second. It has a robust firewall and immune system. Its subsystems are watched by hundreds of clever humans, and thousands of lines of clever code. Do they detect the flickers of consciousness? The first dim rumbling dreams of awareness?
No ones seriously argues that that network is going to Singularity.
Why not?
Because is banal, and the Singularity is a romantic dream. Its much more romantic to argue Google becomes sentient - after all, its so smart, isn't it? It can answer our questions so swiftly!
Like with the eponymous BASIC program:
10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT "HELLO"A$
we are tricked by our willingness to ask stupid questions.
After a decade of the World Wide Web are we any smarter? Educated? Aware?
Not very.
And I will be the first to admit that sitting here adding this drivel to the storm of babble isn't making me any smarter either.
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