I did mention AOL, as part of the "Eternal September" of Usenet (so tangentially, but still acknowledging it was there) but yeah, I did skip over some of the others. CompuSERVE was something I thought was really cool at the time, but there was no way my parents would pay those hourly charges for me...
I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the results at all.
One of my friends sold ten (!!) novels in the 1990s to a small publisher, but they sold in low volume and never earned out their advance. When her publisher dropped her, she wanted to republish them herself. The cost to buy back the rights exceeded all the money she had ever earned from the publisher for the entire series.
I guess what I'm saying is this: anecdotes are not data. Some will find success with the big publishers; many will not. Some will find success self-publishing; many will not. And some will find success with small publishers, but again... this is rare.
Success in writing is just really really hard. No matter what route you choose, luck will play a significant factor. The quality of your writing will also play a big role. Writing really well, exceptionally well, is probably the hardest thing of all.
The confusion and disconnect comes from the fact that the Metaverse, by definition, cannot ever exist. Zuckerberg is chasing a fantasy.
I wrote in more detail about it here [1], but the basic gist is:
1. A real "Metaverse" that isn't just another video game would require every tech company to agree on a single standard for a MMO world, and
2. There are zero financial reasons why any other company would agree to a) wait for a standard to be agreed upon and b) cede the majority of their profits to the owner of this singular Metaverse.
Therefore, a real Metaverse can never happen. Which makes it even sillier that Mark Zuckerberg continues to go all-in on this vision.
Doesn't that same logic apply to the web and html? Are you saying that an open standard like the web couldn't arise in the current political/economic climate?
I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of the space race in the late 1960s and early 70s. For a time, all the major tech companies were trying to build their own walled garden alternatives to the Internet (Microsoft with MSN, Apple with eWorld, AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) and they only failed because the Internet grew faster than any one of them could.
I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist.
But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional.
A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.
The Laserwriter was one of the first accessible laser printers. And also the first with Postscript. It was super expensive (easily more than the Macintosh needed to print to it) but it was revolutionary.
The only other common option was the early HP laser printers, but no Postscript.
You've got it right. I was going to label the inputs in the transistors in the second animation, but it made the diagram rather crowded, so I left it out.
The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like connections to ground, attached resistors that mitigate the total current, etc. But I wanted to convey, as simply as possible, how transistors worked and how gates could be made very simply out of a small number of transistors.
The actual CMOS chips in use by ARM (and still in use today) complicate things more, because you have different types of silicon (NMOS and PMOS) on the same substrate, so the transistors work slightly differently and you can simplify making things like NAND gates, which themselves can be combined to make all other types of gates. For this article, I didn't want to get that deep into the woods, though. :)
Hi, thanks for the article, I'm looking forward to the next installment! I hope you post it here when it comes out.
I actually appreciated the simplicity of the diagrams and I think most literature follows this where terminals(I think that's the correct term) are marked source, gate and drain and then the circuits are denoted input, output, voltage/vss. I've never seen it stated bluntly that "gates mean this in this context and we refer to as an input in the circuit context." Maybe it's just considered too obvious but it's always made me question my own understanding. Thanks for the confirmation.
I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open.
I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
Haha wouldn't put it beyond them to get to that level of detail.
The minute details don't bother me much, just that they're focused on so many of these (at times ridiculous) details, yet in my case and others, the elevator doesn't even appear.
At the least they should focus on making a playable/accessible game, then drill down
This is fake right? You enter a minigame to move your digital index finger around on the keypad sim and punch in the right opening code for the class of ship you're on and its commanding officer? And people paid 500 million bucks for this?
EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though.
I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").
There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
Just tap F, instead of holding it. Holding it brings up the equivalent of a context menu, like right clicking in a 2D application. Some items have more than one action, rather than make you open up a dialog to pick from a list of actions, they tried to simplify it into the context menu. For what it's worth, the actual design goal is that most things are in-world buttons or screens, and that the context menu is less necessary.
In a similar vein, I watched My Thai Bride on a recommendation from a friend, and it also stuck in my head for a long time. It's about an older British man who flies to Thailand in search of a wife, but it handles the entire situation with honesty and sensitivity. It sounds weird, but I learned a lot about geopolitical forces from this film.
