Testing Chat Episode VI: Return of the Chat

[evilsoup]

what's the best way to do Xena's warrior cry?
'aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!' or maybe describe how it makes the Hound shit himself?

[adr]

i just heard that they are thinking of making a battlestar galactica movie with glen larson

seems a bit silly to remake a show that was so recently remade, but that's hollywood for you. regardless, i'll prolly watch that (on the dvd or tv of course) if it comes to pass. i liked the old show and the new show well enough, and i wanna see what larson has in store

i'm hoping it is MORMON STUFF

[Stofsk]

I watched the first episode of the original series and holy shit was it terrible

And I like all kinds of bad scifi

[adr]

I haven't actually watched it for years.... but IIRC it doesn't really get much different so if you don't like the first episode you'd prolly dislike the whole series.

[evilsoup]

I liked the episode of Galactica 1980 I saw
a bunch of kids from the fleet went down onto Earth and posed as boy scouts and they had superpowers because of the lower gravity? Or something. It was pretty funny.
(also I saw one where Starbuck -- who's a man in this version wtf -- was trapped on a planet with a cylon. And I think he had a baby with the cylon? Or something like that, and then that child turns out to be space jesus. I liked it at the time (I was like thirteen?), but I don't know if it would stand up if I watched it again)

[adr]

so I hate ruby on rails

"rails believes that restraints belong in the model, not the database"

THEN RAILS IS WRONG

it is like going back to MySQL 4 and its idiotic myisam tables, postgres is so much better than this why can't I just use it :-( :-( :-(

anger

[adr]

.... I was just wondering why a condition wasn't working
look what I wrote

Code: Select all

        if s.todo_id = params[:id]

unbelievable. that would be a compile time error in D btw

ruby is an awful language

[Darksi4190]

Snow on the ground on April 15th.



Fuck you mother nature.

[adr]

Yeah, I put on the shorts and everything for a short bike ride on Monday. Today, it feels like December, 18 degrees with a bit of snow.


But it is the pretty kind, not deep enough to cover the grass so there's a nice mix of green and white out there.

that reminds me I haven't made my wurm/angel deck yet

[Civil War Man]

Snow on the ground on April 15th.



Fuck you mother nature.

There was one time several years ago where I was at a reenactment. There was a freak snow squall that dumped about 3 inches on the ground. That day I bought a camp stool to add to my pack because the only other options were to either stand for the entire weekend or get your ass soaked by sitting in the snow in wool pants. The organizers ended up cancelling a bunch of the events that weekend, and several of us left early because we were all wet, cold, and miserable. Sure, the actual soldiers put up with much worse, but we are not the actual soldiers, and reenacting is not our job.

This reenactment was in May, for the record.

One-up achieved.

[adr]

blargh the new job has something that annoys me: daily meetings where i'm reminded to not waste time doing easy stuff myself

you wanna know what's a waste of time? these meetings, and looking up these libs.

yesterday for example there was a 30 minute meeting about what file attachment software to use. here's the solution to doing that yourself btw:

Code: Select all

<form method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data" target="lol"><input type="file" name="file" /><input type="submit" /></form><iframe name="lol" id="lol" /></form>

there, that's all that's needed, I even did the "AJAX" solution!

the server-side code is similarly trivial

why do we have to use a third party "gem" for this at all??!?!? and why do the options even need to be discussed? let's just ship it yo!

ruby on rails?

more like shluby on fails

[Stofsk]

Welcome to corporate life I guess

[adr]

The messed up thing is this isn't even really a corporate setup... it is a non-profit spinoff of another non-profit and still very early in that stage. It is more akin to a startup than a corp. But it isn't like the other startups i've worked with, i think it is mostly cuz their CTO perhaps worked a corp job.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Well it's open to bring that stuff up in a meeting if you haven't already.

[Darksi4190]

Can someone tell me why people keep paying chuck to review anime he has no knowledge of or interest in? Is one of you guys trolling him to make him watch stuff he'll think is "weird" or something?

[Gands]

People want to hear him talk about things they like, and hopefully validate their opinions by adding his authority.

Fucked if I know why.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Kannazuki no Miko lol

I watched his reviews of Gundam 0080 just out of sheer novelty

[adr]

Fucked if I know why.

can't you see that chuck is sweet

oh let me love him so

[Gands]

Chuck used to be interesting. But as time went on, it became clear that he was running out of interesting analyses and was just churning out product as people started paying.

He charges what, $50 a video? So for two to three hours work that's not bad.

[RogueIce]

Hey, if it pays the rent I can't fault him. It's a shame on the "sell out" aspect* I suppose, but if you gotta pay the bills then screw your artistic integrity.

*I'd define the sell out as "doing something you wouldn't normally do" which in this case, while he'd doubtless do review videos in general, if they're of series or genres he has zero interest in and never would have done were it not for the donation aspect, then yeah I'd have to say he's sold out to his fan base.

For the record I don't care if he made money off the videos or accepted donations or whatever otherwise, as long as he was still making the videos he wanted to make, rather than what somebody who paid him $50 or so wants him to do because...reasons?

Also I saw a thread on Spacebattles where they were organizing donations so they could get him to review various series. Not sure if that'll turn out well or not. Guess we'll see.

[adr]

i've never requested anything but i do honestly enjoy his videos (at least the ones on shows i actually know like star trek)

they are a nice 10 minutes of well prolly just trek nostalgia more than anything else but there are times when he says something totally cool and i love those and like the rest of the "filler episodes" if you will anyway

[Veef]

it just seems like a waste of time for a well read person to review "that show about lesbians fluting and also robots"

which was almost completely forgotten once people got tired of fluting jokes

[adr]

so i've played this game called "league of legends" and the first several times i played it i loathed it, it was like warcraft 3, a game i didn't like at all.


but i just played again on the new work laptop (yeah "work") with a keyboard and mouse plugged into it on a nice big desk... and it played SO much nicer than on the slower computer or on the laptop's built in keyboard and touchpad

with the separate mouse i could get my fingers on the hotkeys and scroll pretty fluently and it really improved my game

instead of going like 0/20, i just went 12/3

it is amazing how much less i hate a game after i win a round

[adr]

you guys ever stop to think about interstellar communications infrastructure in sci fi with jump points?

ok consider the following: travel between stars means going to a jump point and waving a magic wand. When you do, you arrive on the other side but since the speed of the two stars is so different you won't stay in the jump point for long; you're kinda thrown out of it

but if there's two magic wands sitting there they can twiddle bits in each other without actually jumping


so for communication you have two options: jump a ship/drone over and drop off the message or twiddle bits on the thingies

sending a ship specifically for a message would be a big hassle, if you immediately jumped back it would be a strain on the magic wand and you'd have to release a tape, and if you don't immediately jump back, you're stuck on the other side for a while

so it is possible, has enormous bandwidth (you could drop off as many hard drives as you want), but can't be done on a whim



another option is to send your message to a ship that is passing through anyway, and ask them to relay it. this would be the most efficient for bulk transfers - they are already going and storing a message isn't that much harder. it would need to use encryption for privacy since the courier could just read the message if not and they aren't necessarily trusted; they might keep a copy and give it to spies to decrypt anyway. you would also want to send it on multiple ships if you can just in case the message gets lost on one

and, of course, if you are in a light traffic area, the next ship passing through might be a long ways from now


so again we have high bandwidth, fairly low cost (the process would prolly be automatable on any ship's radio), but potentially low privacy and high latency


(don't forget too that you'd have to get the message to a ship, i imagine there'd be communications relays sent about so you send the message to one of them and they store and forward when a ship passes through. could still take a long time in lag tho)



then the final option is to twiddle the bits. this is obviously specific to my magic wand assumptions. but the way this works is you send a message to the relay at the jump point with regular radio or whatever.

this magic wand needs to be pretty large to prevent cross-talk across the bits and all it can sense is high or low rattling in a region... and the thing physically rattles a bit and that's what you detect so like you want some kind of damper and sensor and time delay to get a clear signal

so we have this large facility with like 10000 cubic meters devoted to receiving a single bit of information over several milliseconds repeated over and over again

bandwidth so far is like 50 BITS per second

so you build as many bit stations as you can fit without interfering with other traffic, space is big so you can do quite a bit so you get a lattice of like 1600 of these.... OMG A 56K MODEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

or on more remote regions you might only have like 8 bits



the jump points connect in a node map. so to get a message from middle of nowhere outpost 135 to starbase 12 you follow something like this. let's say we're sending a tweet

1) send message to local relay (1 second lag)
2) local relay sends over the jump point (4 second transmission lag)
3) other side forwards via radio to next jump point (3 second light speed lag)
4) jump point forwards the hub at starbase 26 (7 second transmission lag - you have to wait for other traffic to complete)
5) starbase 26 adds your message to the transmission queue and forwards when a slot is available (120 second wait)
6) message is routed through starbase 15 (8 second light speed lag, 60 second queue wait, 10 second transmission lag)
7) message added to existing ship traffic since it is not high enough priority to justify the use of real-time bandwidth who forward it through starbase 4 (5 minute wait)
starbase 4 sends to starbase 12 via ship relay (15 minute wait)


so a multistep process based on availability and stuff with about 4 minutes of wait through the "real time" system and 20 minutes of wait through the non-priority central hub ship forwarding


and remember: the message was just 160 characters. tho since much the time was high-bandwidth ship transfers you prolly could have like 10x'd the message and still took about the same time

but the bottleneck will quickly become the 50 bytes / second subspace transmitter at your outpost

* * *

what i find interesting about this is the routing and transmission control protocols needed to regulate traffic on these low speed links as well as the capabilities for compression and storing offered by the modern computers running the drivers

no seriously that's what i find most interesting about it


but in second place would be the way people would talk on this. it'd be like sending telegrams. no real-time video chats with starfleet command, more like "P1: 4 BOP S 12. RI." omg 4 birds of prey in sector 12, what do we do?!?!?

then after the exciting battle the message from starfleet command finally arrives

gee i think i've seen that on television somewhere

which means it has to be cool

[Oxymoron]

I had thought about this kind of things, yes. Though I usually assume better bandwidth for real-time communication nodes.

Also, depending on the setting's rules, there isn't much stopping these drone courier ships to just circle through the jump points at very regular intervals, or even have a number of them in the more frequented nodes to reduce lag.