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| 5/18 |
| 2008/3/31-4/6 [Recreation/Activities] UID:49625 Activity:kinda low |
3/31 From slashdot: "Neal Stephenson, author of greats like Snow Crash and
Cryptonomicon..." So, I hated Cryptonomicon. I thought it was boring
and generally kinda stupid. I only read it all the way through because
I got it as a gift. The same guy who gave me Cryptonomicon also
highly recommends Snow Crash. Is Snow Crash also crap? Everything
people say is 'cool' about it sounds like it was made up by a 9th
grader. 'Hiro Protagonist', 'Guy who rides a motorcycle with a nuke'
Sounds like crap.
\_ Stephenson used to be juvenile and boring, now he's just boring.
-- ilyas
\_ When I was 18 it was awesome. I bet it isn't so awesome anymore.
It does, however, have a pretty amusing opening chapter.
\_ I bought snowcrash again last week with the intent of reading
it as cheap geek pr0n on the plane but ended up reading
"Light" by M. John Harrison instead.
-sky
\_ Is it any good?
\- like much Science Fiction, Snow Crash is more of an
"ideas" book than a prose book ... not that it is Plato
or anything. I thought Cryptonomicon was ok ... what are
you comparing it to. With lightweight stuff I think the
question is more "was it amusing" [which might be more a
statement about you than the book], as opposed to "is it
good/deep/profound/a classic" [which is a statement
about the object, not subject].
\_ Yeah, and the ideas didn't age very well. I'm not sure if
that is because I got older and realized how trite they were
or if it just because they were ideas that got dated quickly.
I suspect it is a bit of both.
\_ I actually think it is because Snow Crash so influenced
what people thought was possible with technology, that
many of his ideas became realized. So now it seems obvious.
But in truth, it was seminal.
\_ What? If anything age has made it look laughably bad.
What ideas are realized?
\_ MMORPGs along with Half Life are both pretty much
entirely based riff on his idea of what cyberspace
entirely based on his idea of what cyberspace
would look like.
\_ No. No they aren't. Not to mention that
avatars existed long before Snow Crash.
\_ Where, other than in Hindu mythology?
\_ Video games, in the 70's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_%28video_game%29
Even pac-man is basically an avatar.
\_ Or, say, faces.
\_ Not even close to what was envisioned
in Snow Crash and then realized finally
in Half Life. Have you even used Half
Life?
\_ Uh, do you mean Second Life? Half-Life
is a first person shooter. Anyway,
you asked about avatars, I answered.
That habitat game has some aspects of
Second Life also. The tech was too
primitive to have 3D first person back
then, but MazeWar sort of had it.
Second Life may be based on Snow
Crash but the basic idea is still
just controlling a character in a
virtual world, which has been around
for a long time in video games. Maybe
the virtual economy idea was new, I
have no idea, but it's a basic
extension of a multiplayer RPG
system. Remember, TRON was developed
in 1982.
\_ Did anyone make it through the Baroque Cycle? I keep
trying to finish Quicksilver every year or so.
-sky
\_ I read the entire thing and loved it, but I happen to
enjoy his gonzo journalism style of economic/science
historical fiction. Quicksilver is hard to get through
unless the history of 17th century mercantile banks
turns you on. Yes, I'm weird, I get it. --erikred
\_ Snow Crash seems to have entered the cultural landscape enough
that I felt obligated to read it. I haven't gotten any must-read
vibes about any of his other stuff. Overall I did enjoy Snow
Crash but I was younger. It's a great book for a young male.
I didn't think it was the best sci-fi ever. But honestly there
just aren't many great books of that particular genre. It's
a tough audience and at this point the whole hacker culture
thing is kind of ruined by the Matrix etc. At least SC did not
take itself seriously.
\_ I have been told that Snow Crash is great by people who loved
Cryptonomicon. I did not particularly like Cryptonomicon and
could not finish it b/c I found it dry, boring and poorly
edited. I have tried to read Snow Crash more than once, and
I have never been able to finish it b/c I found it boring and
poorly edited as well. Note: By poor editing, I mean that no
one seems to have told the author to streamline the narrative
and exclude unnecessary exposition. Or if the author was told,
he wasn't smart enough to follow the editor's advice.
\- i think NS became a better writer between SC and C ... SC
kind of unreaveled in terms of technical execution,and while
i wouldnt say C was "polished", i think you could tell
NS had learned to managed a large book better.
\_ According to coworkers of mine who knew him, the original
C ran to 1600 pages... and that's when his editor told him
to stop and publish. Those of you who didn't like C might
instead enjoy The Big U or Zodiac, his much, much earlier
works. |
| 5/18 |
|
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War search Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars, Mazewar, or simply Maze) was a historically significant computer game. Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of games to follow. intellectual property disputes involving these features. Players wander around a maze, being capable of moving backward or forwards, and turning right or left, and peeking through doorways. Players gain points for shooting other players, and lose them for being shot. While some earlier games represented players as spacecraft or as dots, this was probably the first computer game to represent players as organic beings. Representation of a player's position on a playing field map. Unlike the playing field of a side-view or second-person perspective, this is only used for position reference as opposed to being the primary depiction of play. The combination of a first-person view and a top-down, second-person view has been used in many games since. In the 1977 version, a graphics terminal could be used by observers to watch the game in progress without participating. Yet another port was probably the first network-aware game which could be played across the modern Internet, in 1986. While probably not the first game to feature this, it certainly was a very early example. He had written a program for portraying and navigating mazes from a 3D isomorphic first-person perspective. The maze was depicted in memory with a 16 by 16 bit array. Colley writes: Maze was popular at first but quickly became boring. Then someone (Howard or Greg) had the idea to put people in the maze. To do this would take more than one Imlac, which at that time were not networked together. So we connected two Imlacs using the serial ports to transmit locations back and forth. This worked great, and soon the idea for shooting each other came along, and the first person shooter was born. MIT The original Imlac networked version was limited to two players, with the Imlacs directly cabled to each other. At MIT, the game was expanded to a client-server system. This was natural, since the Imlacs also used vector displays. This version introduced a full third dimension, by having a four-level maze with players able to climb up and down between levels. The game was so popular that even though it had been built as a class project it was kept assembled and operational for over a year. Data General servers used on the network were capable of gatewaying games to remote office locations, allowing people at several Xerox sites to play against each other, making Mazewar capable of being played in four different configurations: peer to peer with two Imlacs, client-server with Imlacs and a PDP-10, in pure hardware, and over ethernet and PUP. Several programmers at PARC cheated by modifying the code so that they could see the positions of other players on the playfield map. X Window System had been newly released as a result of collaborative efforts between DEC and MIT Kent wrote a networked version of Mazewar which he released in December of 1986. edit 1992, Oracle SQL*Net Using Kent's code, Oracle created a version of Maze running over Oracle SQL*Net over TCP/IP, Novell SPX/IPX, DECnet, and Banyan Vines at Fall Interop 92 on a number of workstations, including Unix machines from Sun, IBM, and SGI, as well as DEC VMS workstations and MS-Windows. |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_%28video_game%29 avatars, meaning that individual users had a third-person perspective of themselves, thus making the environment rather videogame-like in nature. The players in the same region (denoted by all objects and elements shown on a particular screen) could see, speak (through onscreen text output from the users), and interact with one another. barter for resources within the Habitat, and could even be robbed or "killed" by other avatars. Initially, this led to chaos within the Habitat, which led to rules and regulations (and authority avatars) to maintain order. Morningstar, C and F R Farmer (1990) "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", The First International Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, TX, USA * Robinett, W (1994). "Interactivity and Individual Viewpoint in Shard Virtual Worlds: The Big Screen vs. |