How Elon Musk and DOGE did it (and are still doing it)

The past three weeks in American life have been extraordinary, to put it mildly.  There hasn't been this much history made in my lifetime since the collapse of communism.  In some ways there are parallels between the two.  The Soviet Union fell because of Gorbachev's reforms in the face of that country's unsustainable bureaucracy.  And what some are calling American Revolution 2.0 is now transpiring as a consequence of even worse bureaucracy in the United States at last being made accountable to its people.

What President Donald Trump and his administration, and especially Elon Musk and his crack team of boffins at DOGE, are accomplishing just might be the second most dramatic "kicking over the tables at the temple" ever recorded.  There will be volumes written in years and decades to come about the winter of 2025 and the shaking up of the American government that has transpired in less than a month.  It's been a beautiful thing to behold... and I am of the mind that it's going to get even better.

A writer calling himself Eko over on Substack has published an intense account of what transpired in the wee hours of the Trump years just less than 21 days ago.  "Override" reads like a William Gibson cyberpunk novel as envisioned by Ron Paul.  Eko's write-up begins thusly:

The clock struck 2 AM on Jan 21, 2025.  

In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."

Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades. 

 

This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.

It's a helluva read, well worth recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in information technology or constitutional government. 

Read More

Last batch of AI-generated pictures that I'm posting

Here's that previous collection of artificial intelligence-created images that I prodded a computer to produce.

 

But it's time to move on.  ChatGPT has its fun uses but it's a tool, not a toy.

I would be lying if I said that I haven't had fun though.

So, here is the final bunch of artificial intelligence generated "art" that I'm putting on this blog.  Be sure to click the pics to enlarge them...

 

The Joker with a "Hello Kitty" bomb:

 

Eowyn, from The Lord of the Rings (I especially like the horse detail on her outfit):

 

Santa Claus with a flamethrower:

 

"The Horror of Taxation":

Young Al Capone:

 

Jesus confronting a Dalek (this was made for a friend who teaches Sunday school and I think he was going to use it for that):

 

The Hamburglar and his attorney (I tried to make this be Perry Mason but the AI refused to cooperate that well):

I told ChatGPT a few details about "wholesomely beautiful woman" and this is what it produced.  I like this picture a lot... except the eyes are so lopsided!

Second version of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, fighting zombies:

 

I told the AI to generate "Indolence" and this is the result:

A Big Daddy from the BioShock video game series (very nearly identical to the actual in-game model):

 

Lyndon Baines Johnson as a Cenobite from the Hellraiser movies (decide for yourself if there's some commentary in this):

 

A Space Marine of the Ultramarines chapter (from Warhammer 40,000) battling a xenomorph (from the Alien film franchise):

 

 

 

 John Fitzgerald Kennedy had he lived to be 75:

 

And finally there is this interesting piece.  I instructed ChatGPT to "generate an image of a brown gorilla throwing barrels at a plumber with a mustache".  That's all I prompted.  This was the result:

At least, I intend for this to be all of the AI art that I am going to present on this blog.  I'm learning a lot from it though.  How to be an "AI whisperer" as one friend puts it.  You have to possess a bit of a creative mind to defeat the "guardrails" of the system.  I was completely shocked by the Donkey Kong image, and friends have created even more impressive pictures.

Anyhoo, hope you enjoyed these :-)

Edit: I was able to generate something that's a real grand finale...

Batman clashing with a Predator:

Read More

First images I'm generating with ChatGPT

Still playing around with AI, for the first real time ever.  Consider it research.  I'm getting professionally involved with an endeavor that is heavy on artificial intelligence so I'm having to see what the thing is capable of doing, exactly.

(I'm adamantly sticking to my policy of NO writing blog posts with AI.  If you see something written here and it's not otherwise stated, you can be assured that it is absolutely entirely written by me with my own gray matter.)

Yesterday I experimented with having ChatGPT compose a poem about the Orks from Warhammer 40,000 (the faction that I play whenever I do a game of 40K).  You can, errr... enjoy the results here.  Tonight I went further, so after upgrading to the subscription I started playing around with image generation.

The results are, ummmm... interesting.

Here's the one I'm most proud of: a dachshund sitting atop a Harley-Davidson motorcycle...

 

But here's the first one that I did off the top of my head: Ronald McDonald running from zombies...

Then there's this: a Dalek from Doctor Who holding a can of beer...

 

And finally we have what I tried to make it be the Joker fighting a xenomorph from the Alien movies, but it came out looking more like they're dancing...

Looks so easy but trust me, this is much harder than it seems.  I tried to generate a picture of Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies shooting at a giant deranged bunny rabbit.  That had some wildly off results.  I then asked ChatGPT to "Generate an image of a hillbilly" and it refused to do so, saying that it would violate its policies.  How does...?!?

No.  Nevermind.  I'm sure it's some ridiculous reason for that.

Don't know if I'll do more of these but at least now you have this peek into the disturbed mind that is Robert Christopher Knight's :-D

Edit 05/22/2024 1:30 PM EST: had some downtime today and I'm feeling extra creative so here are some more.

Bruce Campbell fighting off badgers with a chainsaw...

Two dachshunds in the style of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...

General Robert E. Lee fighting a xenomorph (for some reason ChatGPT does a super good job rendering the monsters from the Alien movies)...

And finally (for now) here is Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, fighting zombies.  This sure ain't the Boer Wars!

Read More

My first foray into using an AI chatbot

No, I am still not going to "write" a blog post using artificial intelligence.  I'm sitting in front of a keyboard composing these words.  If you ever do see a product of AI being displayed, it's going to state as much.  Which is what I'm doing now.  What you are about to read is definitely the product of artificial intelligence.  It also represents the first time that I've used a "chatbot" to generate text.  Up until now I've avoided such things.  But as I'm currently involved in a project necessitating some familiarity with AI, there was little choice but to see what it is that I'm getting into.

A friend encouraged me to try ChatGPT.  I've been playing around with it since last night, firing hard at its walls.  And I have to say, I am intrigued.  One of the things I asked it to do was to describe the impact that the television series The Dukes of Hazzard had on high school football.  ChatGPT returned a thorough response in less than seven seconds.

This morning I tried something else: making the AI be "creative".  And now is where things start getting spooky.  The idea of a poem about the Orks from Warhammer 40,000 came to mind.  So I asked ChatGPT to compose some poetry featuring those wacky greenskins.

Here's what it came up with in the space of less than five seconds...

(I know I said previously that I wouldn't "copy and paste" an AI generated product, that I would only post screenshots.  I tried to make a screenshot with this but it was too big to fit onto one screen.  Sincerest apologies for that.)

------------------------------------------

 

"An Ode To WAAAGH!" 

by ChatGPT
05/19/2024 10:15 am EST

In the grim dark of the far future’s expanse,

Where hope is a shadow and death is a dance,

There roams a green tide with a hunger for war,

The Orks of the cosmos, in battles they soar.

 

With tusks sharp as daggers and muscles like steel,

They bellow and brawl with a fiery zeal.

Their laughter is thunder, their fury a storm,

In chaos and mayhem, their spirits transform.

 

Through rusted machines that clatter and grind,

They fashion their weapons, a savage design.

With choppa and slugga, they charge into fight,

Under skies burning red with the blood of the night.

 

WAAAGH! is their battle cry, echoing wide,

A call to destruction, no foe left to hide.

They’re born from the spores of a war-torn land,

To crush and to conquer with a brutish hand.

 

Gork and Mork, their gods of might,

Guide them through darkness, through endless night.

One brutal, one cunning, both deities grand,

In their name, the Orks spread terror unplanned.

 

Yet, in their chaos, there’s a unity fierce,

A bond of the battle, a truth they pierce.

For in every clash, in every raid,

An Ork’s heart is joyous, in war it’s laid.

 

So, heed the green tide, the Orks in their thrall,

For when they come knocking, it’s the end of it all.

In the far future’s expanse, where the strong will prevail,

The Orks march to WAAAGH!, their endless tale.

 

 ------------------------------------------

 

I have to admit, I am deeply impressed.  It's going to be very difficult to detect the use of AI already.  How convincing will it be even just a year from now?  What is going to happen to things like not only writing term papers and college theses, but also things like legal and business documents?  Would a minister delivering a sermon be found out if he had "cheated" with an AI chatbot?

AI can be a tool like anything else.  It can also be a crutch keeping us from discovering our fullest potential.  And in nefarious hands it can - and will - become a weapon.

As Yoda put it, "a dark place" this is taking us to.

Read More

DOOM is thirty years old today!

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release.

It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game - the shareware version - to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be players crashed the school's system as everyone and their brother (and a few sisters) tried to get Doom.  Hours later and campuses around the world were banning the game's network play capability, it was such a resource hog.

By the end of that first day it was very obviously clear: the world was Doomed.  It wasn't long afterward that the id Software staff started getting sales of the full game to the tune of a hundred THOUSAND dollars a day.

And it wasn't just the high school and college crowd that was playing Doom: it was people from all walks of life.  Young and old.  Students and professionals.  Especially when it came to the game's revolutionary multiplayer component.  Doom was the great leveler after death itself.  In a perfect world there would be no wars: only games of Doom to prove one's skill.

My first exposure to Doom came a few months later, when a friend brought over a box containing the shareware version that he had found at K-Mart for like a dollar.  This was still a time when most homes in America didn't have Internet and consequently no FTP access, so id also distributed the shareware edition in boxes for the cost of packaging.  Johnny's own computer was having problems running it, but maybe mine would.  We were sharing rides to the community college for a history class on Tuesday nights.  After I returned home that evening I installed Doom on the 486-SX system that I had gotten for Christmas.

Doom was a little overwhelming at first.  Also plenty violent.  I didn't honestly know what to make of it when I initially cranked it up, and there was school work and my job at the nearby seafood restaurant for most of the weekend.  But on Sunday afternoon I gave Doom another shot.  It sucked me in hard and refused to let go.  I was firing at anything and everything that moved.  By the time I found the chainsaw I was grinning like a maniac.  Dad walked past my door and looked in to see what I was doing.  He saw me blasting those Imps away with the shotgun and just sort-of shook his head in disbelief.  Later on he watched me sawing into the demons and I like to think he found it pretty amusing.  Just as I was finding that killing off hordes of the undead was a GREAT stress reliever after all.

It wasn't long after that when I sent a check off to Texas.  A week or so later the full version of Doom - containing version 1.666 - arrived at my door.  By that time I had conquered "Knee Deep In The Dead" many times on the various difficulties.  Now it was time at last to wade upon "The Shores Of Hell" on my way to "Inferno".

And then came the discovery that id Software had made the game almost completely customizable!  People had figured out how to create their own levels, edit and add-in new graphics, change up the sounds and music... pretty much anything pertaining to the game's environment.  That first night I tried an add-on, when I UNZIP-ped a WAD (acronym for "Where's All the Data?") file and changed the Baron of Hell into Barney the Dinosaur... that just lit a fire under me to find and collect EVERY add-on file that I could locate.  I think my favorite custom level was "Deimos Subway": a very well-designed board imitating a train station along with a catchy tune for background music.  There was the WAD that added sounds from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  And there is also no forgetting the various WADs that added classical MIDI music to the game.  All very clever (and often very funny) stuff.  Although I kind of harbor doubts that many people these days would be comfortable with loading the COSBY.WAD before starting the game...

Wow.  Thirty years.  So much has happened both in personal time and across the realm of video/computer gaming.  But even today, that first one-third of Doom is with us as much as ever.  Ports of the game have been made for everything from calculators to refrigerator doors to home pregnancy tests to John Deere tractors.  It's become an unofficial mantra of the coding sector: "It's not a computer if it doesn't run Doom."

And I would be remiss if I did not admit that every so often I find myself playing original Doom again.  There's just something about this game that charms the player and leaves an indelible mark on one's cerebral pleasure center.  I've played a lot of so-called "Doom-clones", but it's the original game which the game-oriented part of my personal entertainment proclivity owes its allegiance to.

Time has proven that it is true: "Doom will never die.  Only its players will."

So Happy Thirtieth Birthday to Doom!  May we be playing it for another thirty!

Read More

Artificial intelligence has original singers performing "Weird Al" Yankovic's parodies... and it's pretty horrifying

This is already the scariest thing I've seen all month... and it's only October 2nd.  A terrible, terrible line has been crossed.  Advanced technology really is taking us to places that, not to put too fine a point on it, are unnatural to the extreme.

Andy Baio at Waxy.org has applied artificial intelligence to a lot of songs - which are mostly parodies of other artists - by "Weird Al" Yankovic.  Baio's intent with this dubious exercise is to see what would happen if the original artists performed Al's parodies themselves.

In other words, Baio has Michael Jackson's voice singing Yankovic's "Eat It".  Among others.

Let Mr. Baio indict himse... I mean, explain himself:

In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”

Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”

This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.

This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.

This is a horrific milestone in digital manipulation.  There is no going back now.  Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight "You've changed things, forever."

Mash down here to read more about this experiment in abominable intelligence.  God have mercy on us all.

 

EDIT 10/08/2023 2:44 AM: Feel led to say something here.  All of this "the horror! the horror!" was done purely tongue in cheek.  I actually think is pretty cool.  Excellent work Mr. Baio :-)

Read More

My solemn word that anything you see posted here is genuine

You might have noticed a slight addition to this blog.  It's on the header, toward the right of the screen.  There now appears the following label:

 

 

I have heard all kinds of insane stories about people using ChatGPT and other "artificial intelligences" as something more than a curiosity.  Students have begun having AI write papers for classes.  Some ministers have admitted that they have used ChatGPT to compose sermons for Sunday morning.  In at least one situation a lawyer had AI create his legal paperwork for a court case: the judge was not impressed.

To be truthful, I'm not impressed by any so-called "artificial intelligence" thus far.  Their enthusiasts are claiming that AI is now able to pass the Turing Test (in which a living person can or cannot differentiate verbal responses from a human being or a computer).  It's not something I'm particularly jazzed about, not yet anyway.

But the horse is out of the barn.  And AI is going to start being used for a lot of things from here on out: some with benefit in mind, some not.

I just felt led to let the readers of this blog know, that I am absolutely committed to producing content that comes from my own mind, or from the rare occasion when The Knight Shift has welcomed a guest writer.  It is my vow to you, that there will be no posts or articles that you see here which will have been generated by a machine.  From the very start I've wanted this blog to be my own little online presence.  It's been that for nearly twenty years now.  I won't "take the easy way" and farm out the writing to a computer, no matter how stylish it is at the moment.

That doesn't mean that I may not experiment with AI some and report about what transpires.  Several weeks ago a good friend caused ChatGPT to lock up and get stuck after he convinced the AI that he too was an artificial intelligence.  It was like something you'd see on any number of episodes of the classic Star Trek.  My friend proved how ill-prepared AI currently is to handle complex concepts. I've an idea for my own experiment that I may carry out soon.  If so, I'll be posting screenshots of the AI's responses, rather than copy and paste it into the article.

Okay, well, there you go.  The Knight Shift will completely be a product of my own mind and heart and soul.  I promise.

Read More

Retro-Internet on an iPad Pro

For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the "classic" Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro...

Turns out: quite a bit!

Here's what I came up with after reaching back into the inner fog of time immemorial, or at least those strange days of college. Trying to find analogies on the App Store of everything that most of us had as Internet utilities on our PCs or, if you were fairly wealthy, laptops. Don't even think that we had smartphones in those days. "Internet" and "phone" usually meant waiting until your roomie was finished talking to his girlfriend before you could fire up the 14.4 baud modem (sorry about that guys).

The resulting group of apps, which with usual creative flair I dubbed "Old School Internet":

 

I still hate that %#$@ Gopher icon, looking at me, grinning, mocking...

That's pretty much what most people had on their Windows and Mac machines, absent having an account on a UNIX server (which students at most colleges and universities were given access to so even if you didn't have your own PC then, you still had quite a bit of Internet power to do uhhh... "work" with).

Aesthetically the most glaring omission from this group is Apple's Quicktime Player, which was the precursor of the H.264 video standard now so ubiquitous on most devices. Quicktime became the most commonly used - and most trusted in terms of security - video format on the 'net in a fairly short amount of time, supplanting RealMedia and some other competitors. But since the descendants of Quicktime are built into every browser (and Apple-built product) nowadays anyway, a dedicated Quicktime app would be worse than redundant.

For the web brower app, instead of using Safari as comes with the iPad Pro, I opted to include Firefox. Why? Because Firefox is the successor of Netscape Navigator, which was derived directly from Mosaic: the first "killer app" in Internet history. Mosaic was the first browser to incorporate the ability of using graphics and also gave greater control over fonts and text sizes. So let's pretend that this is Netscape Navigator, or even Mosaic:

 

The last website that Kip Chalmers ever saw...

That's the "official" website of Wyatt Oil. If you get the reference without Google-ing it, go buy yourself a candy bar and pretend you bought it from me. I'm not going to give you the candy bar because if you know the reference you already realize that giving it would be a violation of moral code.

If we seriously wanted antiquated Internet by any means, we would have to get e-mail through a UNIX system and using the Pine program. We used Pine with our accounts on the server at Elon (my own account name was was knigr5c0) but I don't have a UNIX server handy at the moment. So instead let's find an app that approximates the kind of program most of us used with commercial Internet providers. For a long time I used Eudora, made by Qualcomm. But there is no Eudora on the App Store and I didn't want to use the E-Mail app that comes with iOS devices, so I used the Google Mail app instead:

Just imagine it without the Nigerian scammers...

And now we're getting into the good stuff! I'd venture to say that the vast majority of Internet users have either never heard of Usenet or it's a vague notion playing on the edge of memory. But once upon a time Usenet was how a LOT of productivity - more or less - happened on the Internet. I know of at least two major websites, still going strong today, that spawned from their founders being active on newsgroups.

Okay so what's a "newsgroup"? Basically a big trove of publicly posted e-mails on just about every subject imaginable and some that Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't hallucinate matter how much acid he'd drop. I'm still trying to figure out what alt.muppets.bork.bork.bork was supposed to be about. Anyway, if you were a Star Wars geek, rec.arts.starwars was the big central place to pow-wow at. There was a hierarchy (more or less) and to be an "official" newsgroup it had to be voted on by Usenet, errr... users. Otherwise they were an "alt"-something. And of course this being the Internet even then one had to take anything you'd find on Usenet with a massive cow lick of salt.

I sincerely thought that Usenet wouldn't be around anymore, and I can't even remember the last time I went to a newsgroup. But there are a few Usenet servers still around. Most of them are with ISPs and are included with monthly subscription, but some out there are free... IF you can connect to them. No luck on that. Still, having a Usenet reader on my iPad is pretty neat:

 

Before Facebook and the Russian hackers THIS is how we got our fake news...

Telnet is a utility that is still often used in academia and other purposes. Not so much today by most private users but once upon a time this was one of the best arrows in your quiver. Telnet is remotely logging in to another computer, and usually a very BIG computer, and using it on your own desktop. It's how most of us checked the e-mail on our student accounts when we lived off campus. It's also how you could play MUDs (Multi-Level Dungeons) and join in the community on ISCA BBS. Operated by Iowa Student Computing Alumni, ISCA BBS was the "hang out place" for all the cool kids... even if we only had plain ASCII text on a screen.

So I found a Telnet client on the App Store and out of pure muscle memory typed the address, expecting it to not be there at all...

... but it WAS!

"I'm BAAAA-AAAACK!!"

Holy crap!! ISCA is still running!! Wish I could remember the name of the account I last used on there. My first screenname was "The Man Eating Cow" and over the next couple of years I was "Jedi Master Yoda" and "Let My People Go" and a few others (why so many names? There was a girl at Elon who was stalking me. Long story...). I joined this time as "TheKnightShift" and was welcomed by pretty much the same screens that came up every time I ever logged in before.

And then there were MUDs.  Something I never got into but they were popular enough that you knew what they were.  The MUDs were essentially an MMO like World of Warcraft, except all-text.  If you ever heard of a waaaaay old game called Zork well, a MUD was pretty much Zork with a few hundred people running around inside of it.  And some of them are still online!  If you want to telnet into one of the more famous ones from the ancient times and give it a try here's the official website for ShadowMUD.

FTP means "File Transfer Protocol" and is one of those things that is now running under the hood even if you don't know (or care) that it's there.  Still, it gets a fair bit of usage, particularly when bulk uploading or downloading material.  Here is one FTP utility I found in the App Store:

 

Meh...

I could never make sense out Gopher.  It was a search engine thingy that let you look for material on Gopher servers, usually at universities and major libraries.  If it was out in "Gopherspace" you could easily find it.  IF it was in Gopherspace that is.  But it must still be used and appreciated because there is at least one Gopher client for iOS devices and I'm assuming for Android also:

 

"Gophers, ya great git! Not golfers! The little brown furry rodents!"

I figured that a text-based browser like Lynx wouldn't be on the App Store.  If it is, it's so obscure that it didn't show up in a search.  And some might wonder about the point if a web browser that shows only text.  But there is quite a good rationale for it.  Lynx and other text-only browsers can tie in to software that converts the words into audible speech.  Hence, even thoughs with little or no eyesight at all can "surf the web".  Pretty neat aye?  There are some textual web browsers for the iPad Pro and other mobile devices. However none of them make it plain "Amish-style text".  All they do is strip out the graphics and other bells and whistles and generate text with the formatting, fonts etc. intact:

 

The Knight Shift: Apocalypse Mode
Because the wasteland cares not for your bandwidth...

And that's pretty much how it was two decades or so ago.  We were the pioneers.  The ones who had to dial in through a landline and hope that there weren't so many connections that we couldn't log in.  Who could only share photos with other users (like that girl who sounded so cute) by giving them our snail-mail address and wait a week for a Kodak print to arrive.  Who had to trust that the character waving at us inside a MUD really did have a sword equipped before we stormed the castle.  Who had to uudecode that file from a newsgroup, having good faith that it really was a pic of a computer-animated dewback from A New Hope: Special Edition and not something obscene.

That's how we had our Internet.  And we LIKED it!

"Now get off my lawn!"

Read More

GOG.com has released X-WING and TIE FIGHTER!

Today shall be a day long remembered...

Courtesy of the amazing folks at GOG.com (the GOG stands for Good Old Games), what are by far two of the greatest computer/video games ever wrought by mortal hands have gone on sale today, ready to be enjoyed by a new generation or by those who have longed to reminisce about those heady days of the early Nineties.

Stick it to the Empire in
X-Wing...

And I would be saying that even if they weren't Star Wars titles!

X-Wing was an astounding and revolutionary game in its own right and when it came out early in 1993 it took the industry by storm.  With a brilliant combination of 3D graphics, rich user interface, an immersive storyline and balanced yet incredibly challenging gameplay, X-Wing was the Star Wars experience that everyone wanted but few thought we would ever get.  This was the combat simulator of its time and even by today's standards it holds up incredibly well.  At last, players could join the ranks of the Rebel Alliance in the fight against tyranny, with a variety of fighters: the X-wing, Y-wing, the ever-slippery A-wing and the powerhouse B-wing.

...or blow Rebels to smithereens in
TIE Fighter!

But not to rest on its laurels, the following year LucasArts released TIE Fighter: still considered by some to be THE best computer game of all time.  TIE Fighter turned the tables and let gamers take to the skies against the scum and outlaws that the Rebels really are (the intro sequence alone are enough to make one giddy about blowing Rebel fighters out of the stars).  TIE Fighter improved on everything that made X-Wing work, and then some.  An even more interactive story/campaign and array of craft (including the TIE  Defender and my personal favorite the TIE Bomber) gave you all the tools you'd ever need to show them pesky Rebels what's what.

And as of today GOG has made X-Wing and TIE Fighter available and 100% compatible with modern systems!  If you're still playing these classics with old CD-ROMs (or even the original floppies), you'll never again have to juggle disks.  For $9.99 each you can download a DRM-free single-file installer and set up either game (or both) on any moderately-equipped system from Windows XP on up.

Incidentally, for the ten bucks you're actually getting two flavors of each game: the original DOS version and the "Collector's Edition" that ran on Windows and required a joystick (the DOS games could be played with a mouse).  The Windows-based Collector's versions have prettier graphics.  But the DOS ones have the iMuse MIDI score that changes dynamically as events in the game are triggered (i.e. the Imperial theme starting up as a Star Destroyer suddenly arrives on the scene).  The Windows editions have Redbook WAV audio instead (meaning it doesn't change per combat conditions).  Personally, I'm going with the DOS versions at least at first.  Having an iMuse score with the game itself more than justifies the price tag.

So what are we waiting for?  Mash down here for X-Wing and aim here for TIE Fighter!

These two games have been the most hotly-demanded on any modern game-delivery platform and now after years of yearning GOG has given both Star Wars fans and general gamers alike what they've wanted more than most.  And along with these two GOG is as of today also offering other classic games from the LucasArts vault: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (which some will argue is really the greatest PC game ever and not without reason), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Secret of Monkey Island, and the very twisted Sam & Max Hit the Road.  More LucasArts games are promised for the near future (maybe I'll finally get to play Full Throttle...)

So there it is: X-Wing and TIE Fighter for modern computers at long last.  Go get one.  Or the other.  Or get both.  Now.  You know you wanna.

(I'm holding off until after I finish writing my book.  Getting to play X-Wing again is going to be a present to myself :-)

Read More

Goodbye NAND flash? Startup's new storage holds insanely high promise

Imagine a few years from now having a smartphone or an iPad equipped with extremely nonvolatile memory, retaining information for decades, is ultra-fast, can be made cheap with already-existing manufacturing technology, and holding a terabyte of data.

Your reaction is probably gonna be the same as mine: "Shut up and take my money!!"

A Crossbar RRAM chip sitting atop a CMOS

A little company called Crossbar came out roaring yesterday with its announcement about developing what it's calling resistive RAM (RRAM).  And as The Register is reporting, this could be the "flash killer" that makes NAND memory - which is fast approaching the upper limit for feasibility - obsolete.

From the article:

"With our working Crossbar array, we have achieved all the major technical milestones that prove our RRAM technology is easy to manufacture and ready for commercialization," said Crossbar CEO George Minassian when announcing his company's new NAND flash competitor. "It's a watershed moment for the non-volatile memory industry."

Whether Minassian's exuberance is justified remains to be seen, but Crossbar RRAM tech certainly looks good on paper. The company claims that due to the tech's "simple" three-layer structure, it can be stacked in multiple layers resulting in multiple terabytes of storage space in a single chip "the size of a postage stamp."

Performance claims are also worth a gander. Compared with top-notch NAND flash memory, Crossbar claims that its tech will provide 20x faster writes at 20x lower power and with "10x the endurance," all in a die size that's half that of comparable NAND.

Lots of technical specs at the link above, comparing Crossbar's RRAM with standard NAND.  I haven't read the whitepaper about it yet but if somewhere in there it indicates that RRAM also has NAND's problem with cell degradation licked, this is looking to be the hot next big thing in computer technology.

That, and it would be nice to carry an entire Blu-ray collection around on my iPad :-)

Read More

Hackers use wi-fi laptop to control EVERYTHING on a modern car

Remember that stunt Jeff Gordon pulled on an unsuspecting car salesman a few months ago?  The one where Gordon was disguised as any off-the-street Joe Shmoe and took a car for a test drive and terrified the crap out of that poor guy?

This is scarier...


Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek - two top-rate hackers out of Indiana -went into the guts of a Toyota Prius, jimmied-around with thirty-something on-board computer units and were able to take charge of dang nearly every function of the car.  Using a wireless laptop they can steer, put on the brakes, honk the horn, fake the speedometer reading, switch on the headlights and even tighten and loosen the seatbelts.

My dad has long proclaimed that "Cars only need gas, air and electricity to work: they don't need a computer!"  After watching this video, it's hard to argue with that.

Crash here to read more about this amazing hack, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (the kind folks who brought us the Internet).

Read More

Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has passed away

Unless you're reading this on a mobile device (and even that owes a lot to him) you're enjoying this blog and practically everything else on the Internet because of this man: Douglas Engelbart.

While working at SRI in the 1960s, Engelbart was struck with the idea of humans interacting with computers by manipulating on the screen with an intuitive interface.  He called his invention the "x-y position indicator".  The first model was carved from a block of wood with wheels, a push-button and a connecting cord.

Douglas Engelbart had created the mouse.  And he didn't stop there.  By the time he left SRI in 1977, he had helped develop such now-common technologies as "display editing, online processing, linking and in-file object addressing, use of multiple windows, hypermedia, and context-sensitive help".

The sad word is coming out of Atherton, California tonight that Douglas Engelbart - pioneering engineer and visionary whose invention let the rest of us discover the power of computers - has passed away at the age of 88.

In his memory, here is the now-legendary "Mother of All Demos", which Engelbart presented on December 9th, 1968.  So much of what we use today, which Engelbart was showing us almost five full decades ago...

Read More

STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC comes to the iPad!

When I first heard about it this morning, it was only from a report and there had been no announced availability but my first reaction was already "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!"

Guess who just spent ten bucks on the App Store?

BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, deemed by many to be the greatest Star Wars video/computer game ever and one of THE best games of all time period, has been ported to the iPad and is on sale now!  Ten years after it was first released, Aspyr Media has taken this much-beloved classic and put the whole experience in the palm of your hands, to enjoy wherever you happen to be.  It requires at least an iPad 2 to run and it needs iOS 6.  As well as some hefty space for the install (1.9 gigs free but I'm hearing at least 2.5 is recommended).

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is available for $9.99 on the Apple App Store.  Go download it now, meatbags!

Read More

Xbox done

Here's the Xbox One...

There is no backward compatibility: you can't play anything from your already-existing library of Xbox 360 games on it.  You can't play your original Xbox games on it either.  Ditto for any games from Xbox Live Arcade.  It has no power button (it stays on all the time) and it needs an Internet connection to really function optimally.  It has a hard drive, but it's non-removable.  To play your games you must install from the disc.  If there is no more room on the hard drive you'll have to wipe some games off (then re-install if you want to play them again later on).  It won't work at all without the Kinect sensor (something which unless you have ample enough space, could be a problem).  Once you play a new game it's tied into that Xbox One unit and you can't easily take it anywhere else or let a friend borrow it or be allowed to sell it... okay well you can but the next player using it will have to pay a fee to Microsoft.

But at least it will tie all your incoming cable TV, satellite TV, Internet, Blu-ray and whatever else into it so that you only need one remote control.  I guess that's something worth five hundred bucks, huh?

The big "reveal" yesterday spent way more time raving about the Xbox One's television and home entertainment capabilities than it did about actual video gaming.  Seems to kinda defeat the point of pouring the entire budget of a typical developing country into the design of something for... you know... playing video games.

The lack of backward compatibility alone turns me off completely from wanting an Xbox One.  But then Microsoft had to add insult to injury more ways than I care to count...

I'm gonna be way, way content with my Xbox 360 for a long time to come.  Based on commentary I've seen since yesterday's reveal, I won't be the only one apparently.  Heck, lots of people and private businesses are still using Windows XP nearly twelve years after it was released.  I'm expecting the Xbox 360 to enjoy similar longevity.  Along with anticipating Microsoft's entry into the next-gen console wars to slip to a hard second after the PlayStation 4, and perhaps even lagging significantly behind the Wii U.

And one last thing about the Xbox One: it's ugly too.  It's like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey as envisioned by George Orwell: a big black solid slab of freedom is slavery.

Read More

Department of Defense has 3D printed gun yanked... but I got it anyway (and so can you!)

The Liberator: Coming soon to
a desktop near you!

Defense Distributed has made a lot of headlines lately about the Liberator: a firearm which is completely fabricated by "3D printing", apart from the firing pin.  I think the success of this gun already is that it's got politicians like Charles Schumer and Steve Israel all steamed-up about it.  Schumer wants 3D printed guns to be outlawed completely.

The thing is, politicos like Schumer can't figure out how to pull that off.  3D printing will soon be a household implement and if it can be drawn up on a computer, anyone will be able to produce a fully-functioning model right on their desktop.  The computer doesn't care if it's a replacement part for a kitchen appliance or an action figure or a real working handgun.  The barn door has been thrown wide open and there's no getting that horse back inside.

Never let something like common sense stop the government from trying.  Earlier today the Department of Defense requested that Defense Distributed remove all its 3D weapons-related files from its website.   Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson is laying the blame on the doorstep of Secretary of State John Kerry.

As of this writing, Defense Distributed's site has "gone dark".

But less than five minutes after reading about the government having the Liberator pulled from the web, I had downloaded the gun.  And not once, but twice.

Here's how I did it, and how anybody else can as well:

Download µTorrent if you don't have it already (it's a free download) and run the install.  Any other torrent client should work too.  I found the Liberator files on The Pirate Bay.  There are two torrents for it so far: here's #1 and here's #2.  If either of those can't be found just do a search for "liberator" and "gun": I got those two results at once.  The file size is 2.02 megabytes (such a tiny thing for something so much fuss about).

And then... just download your Liberator files!  If you possess a 3D printer you can start making your Liberator pistol immediately.

I downloaded the file from each of those two torrents.  It is on my hard drive.  It is also on at least two USB drives that I've copied it too.  I can e-mail the file to anyone, anywhere in the world.  I could even set up a torrent on my own and allow people to download it from me directly.

In fact, it is happening right now.  Not by me, but by other people.  Lots and lots of other people.

Shutting down the Defense Distributed website was just about the worst thing that the United States federal government could have done, if it didn't want the Liberator to get into the wild.  By trying to outlaw it, the feds have made it so that practically everyone can want it.  Defense Distributed could not have asked for better publicity for and dissemination of its product!

Anyhoo... "Annie get your gun!" :-)

Read More