Terrarium

General Information 1 Response »
Apr 052004

I’m a programmer by day. It’s what I do. And I love doing it. I’ve had a computer and been programming since I was a young kid (my first computer was an Aquarius!). Anyway, my career path has taken me down the Java road. I know all about it; inside and out. But there’s another side to the world. And lately I’ve been toying with the idea of checking out .NET.

But I don’t want to just go buy some lame book and learn .NET from a few code examples … And there are other factors involved. I am about to start in on an AI project at work that needs to exhibit “emergent behavior”. So wouldn’t it be nice if my .NET learning experience also had some AI… And who wants to write a boring business app to learn something? Gaming is much more fun.

Thus, my great surprise and excitement ;7) when I stumbled across the following sample application built by Microsoft:

Terrarium, a sample application built by Microsoft

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Posted by shawker at 9:58 am Tagged with: ,

Viewing Anti-Trust Law as a Digital Design

General Information Comments Off
Apr 022004

Here is an interesting article that discusses the various Microsoft lawsuits and introduces a unique perspective of breaking the problem down into a computer problem.

Business itself is just a big computer program with the computer being our economy or maybe our entire culture. There are inputs, outputs, variables, coefficients, values, and constraints. Most of these are analog, but if we forget for a moment the business of business and think only of the business of law, suddenly the design becomes all-digital. That’s simply because laws are made up of yes’s and no’s which are effectively zeroes and ones — a binary system. Even the fuzzy logic of legal opinions can be reduced to digital values since someone inevitably wins while someone else loses, no matter how many words are involved in explaining the outcome.

In anti-trust law the actors are individuals, companies, and regulators. The clock rate of the overall system was defined no later than the 1930s when the most recent anti-trust laws were passed. The primary data bus is provided by the U.S. Mail. And here’s the most important part of all: coefficients were set too long ago to be effective in the case of [super large corporations]. Finally, there is almost no way to optimize the system, which is filled with extraneous wait states and timing loops that slow it to a crawl because lawyers are paid by the hour. Justice may be blind, but she is also slow.

Full article…

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Posted by shawker at 12:23 pm Tagged with:

Virtual PC

Technology Comments Off
Mar 272004

Every now and then a really awesome software product comes out.  This one is known as Virtual PC. 
It’s a Microsoft product that does full hardware emulation.  What
does this mean?  It means that you can run a “virtual operating
system” within it and the virtual os won’t even know it’s not running
on real hardware.  At first I must admit I was a bit
dubious.  But what could it hurt?  After all, my company had
bought some licenses for it, so I figured I’d give it a short.

Here’s the list of operating systems that I’ve successfully installed and run using virtual pc:

  • Windows XP
  • Windows 2000
  • Windows 98
  • DOS 6.22
  • RedHat Linux 9
  • SuSE Linux 9 (live eval)
  • SUN Solaris 8
  • SCO UnixWare 7
  • BeOS
  • Knoppix (linux)
  • (1 or two others that I can’t even remember!)

Quite a list huh?  And it’s so brainless to use; just run it, and
slip in the CD (or ISO image) and install the OS.  If something
goes wrong – no worrries – just delete the “virtual hard drive” file
and start again.  You don’t have to dedicate a machine to it, and
there are no risks.  It’s amazing.

So what do I use it for personally?  Well, at work it’s nice to
have several different environments to test with without having to have
several different machines (or at least several different hard drives
that I have to swap). 

Also, if there’s a piece of software that I want to try out but i’m not
really sure about, I’ll install it on a virtual OS first and see if I
like it.  If not, oh well – I don’t have to worry about it
cluttering my “real” system. 

Another is a virtual pc for my kids use; i’ve installed all their games
on it, and they just have an icon on my desktop that they click. 
And I don’t have to worry about them messing up any settings. 
It’s wonderful! :)  

Another is that there’s some software that’s only available on certain
OS’s but I want to run it.  No problem.  Just start up the
virtual os and use it.

I highly recommend that anyone reading this go and at least give it a try; go kick the tires and see what you think.  It’s well worth the investment.

And just so you don’t waste your time – no, you can’t install a virtual OS inside of another virtual OS. :)

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Posted by shawker at 12:08 pm Tagged with: ,

Gates gets knighted

General Information Comments Off
Jan 262004

When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke. But aparently it’s for real. Bill Gates has finally managed to find a way to get everyone to call him “sir” :)

Sir Bill

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Posted by shawker at 6:53 pm Tagged with:
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