Especially interesting since it is technically the "intro" or "B plot." (Most of the series is a mini-version of The Right Stuff.) But the first third of the series is an oddball fusion of an office sitcom with a "dirty jobs" style documentary. (That is, JANITORS IN SPAAAAAAACE!)
The sender was not the person being punk'd; it was the recipient. The person who would have seen that confirmation dialog would have been in on the joke...
I remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer/footy games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.
Actually, the fact that young Spock was an outcast was already established by the early '70's thanks to the animated series’ episode “Yesteryear”, written by D. C. Fontana. For the most part, this was only episode of that series that was considered canon until ST: Enterprise incorporated more of that series into official lore.
It was actually established in 1967 in "Journey to Babel", when his mother said "When you were five years old and came home stiff-lipped, anguished, because the other boys tormented you saying that you weren't really Vulcan. I watched you, knowing that inside that the human part of you was crying and I cried, too."
It’s one thing to edit Wikipedia; it’s another thing altogether to make that edit stick. Now that Will Wright has been cited in an article published by a third party, an editor has already started the process of changing it via the article’s talk page. Creatives have had a very big problem self-correcting the site, since the official editors have a distrust of uncited sources.
Is there a startup opportunity in providing a way for creatives to quickly create a cite of themselves or otherwise fix this problem? After all, if you are the actual authority on the release date, some journalist getting it wrong in an article shouldn't trump what you say.
I think this would be a good example of something that a team of smart devs could whip up in a short period of time.
As well written as this article is, I do have a problem with its tone. The writer seems willing ignorant of why the Internet “sucks” for gaming; it was not designed for real time small packet transmission. Most of TCP’s design, in particular, was intended to facilitate the transmission of comparatively sizable files over FTP, NNTP, and SMTP. Even stuff like IRC was designed not to be so concerned about timeliness that the chatlog on each end would match up exactly.
The internet wasn't designed for high-latency, high-compression modem sessions. TCP works just fine over a 56 kbps leased line. It's terrifying on a 56k home modem, despite similar "bandwidth."
The leased line has 50 ms of very predictable latency and 56 kbps of very predictable throughput. The 56k PPP session has an unpredictable 300-500 ms of latency and a constantly varying capacity of 2.4 to 56 kbps thanks to high noise and ugly compression schemes.
Lots of things that worked perfectly well on the relatively crude internet of the 1980s were real pains in the ass on "high-tech" modems in the 1990s.
--
edit: a specific example would be X11. An emacs X11 session was totally usable on a leased line or ISDN, despite the low bandwidth, because they delivered low latency and packet loss. It was hellish on any kind of a home dial-up.
During the late '90's, I was a sysadmin for a fairly major computer science department. One of my periodic tasks, and my test of Internet health, was to download and build gcc. When I started, getting gcc took a while. By 1999 and later, when the Internet had been discovered, downloading gcc took several hours and frequently several retries.
> If the music tugged at all the right heartstrings, but you knew it wasn't made by a human, could you feel that depth of connection?
I do think this is a false dichotomy of sorts. (Right turn of phrase?) The music may have been made by a machine, but humans made the machine. What ultimately is the difference between music “made” by a violin being directly played, verses a synthesizer reconstructing songs based on what a programmer did beforehand? It’s just a matter of degree. It might be more productive in discussions to look at the “artist” verses “committee” angle instead.
Telltale Games has been carrying the torch for these kinds of games for the last decade. Beside resurrecting old LucasArt staples like Monkey Island and Sam & Max, they’ve launched other franchises to the format: Bone, Homestar Runner, and The Walking Dead come to mind. They also occasionally score a big license, like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park.
