Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Dan wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.
I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!

A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.
Nah.

When i was in the service, we had all the original series on 16 mm
color film, but the idiot station manager refused to put them on the
schedule. So, we would run them after midnight, after the transmitters
were shut down and watch it in the control room. The down side was it
was a B&W only station.
You didn't use the film chain to convert them to video tape? In the
1960s we had 1" and 2" video tape, I'm sure it would be no problem to
find a player now


There was no video tape equipment at the base. It was a small
research center. Our color conversion package and video tape equipment
was diverted to Greenland when it was 'Discovered' in a warehouse. It
came out of our budget, and some ass in the supply line stole it.

I never did get used to watching recent releases in 16 mm. Sometimes
they'd make the small site rounds before the full size films made base
theaters in Europe.

The poor Turk draftees who had never seen an R rated movie were in
shock when the saw what we had in Eskishihir.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Dan wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Dan wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.
I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!

A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.
Nah.

When i was in the service, we had all the original series on 16 mm
color film, but the idiot station manager refused to put them on the
schedule. So, we would run them after midnight, after the transmitters
were shut down and watch it in the control room. The down side was it
was a B&W only station.
You didn't use the film chain to convert them to video tape? In the
1960s we had 1" and 2" video tape, I'm sure it would be no problem to
find a player now


There was no video tape equipment at the base. It was a small
research center. Our color conversion package and video tape equipment
was diverted to Greenland when it was 'Discovered' in a warehouse. It
came out of our budget, and some ass in the supply line stole it.

I never did get used to watching recent releases in 16 mm. Sometimes
they'd make the small site rounds before the full size films made base
theaters in Europe.


The base theater had a pair of 35mm projectors, but with the hours I
worked I only saw a couple movies the whole time I was in Alaska. I had
to laugh at the projectionist, and his bragging that he was the only one
on base with a license to run the projector. I smiled and told him that
it didn't wouldn't let him touch the film or projectors at the TV
station. Then I rubbed it in, by telling him I also repaired the RCA
TP66 projectors. All he was allowed to do was change the bulbs in his.



The poor Turk draftees who had never seen an R rated movie were in
shock when the saw what we had in Eskishihir.


I can imagine. Talk about culture shock.


Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

flipper wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:13:03 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:50:41 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.

Hear attachment.

Thanks.

I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.

But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.

Yeah, like Norman and his android pals. Although, there's an obvious
up side to being 'enslaved' by the Alice series, or the Annabelle
series, or the Trudy series, or build one to taste.

Got to admit, Star Trek had the hottest babes on TV.

Too bad Dr. Forbin didn't have Kirk and company around to help him
drive Colossus crazy.


Or nymnuts.

Well, we only want to drive the computer crazy; not everyone on the
planet.


Then toss him into the room with the computer, and seal the door
forever.

This is beginning to sound more the devil collecting the computer's
soul and that's what hell is.


For dimbulb it would just be one more computer he didn't understand,
though.

flipper wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:16:34 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.

I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!


A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...

TNG was 'politically correct' from the get go and nothing highlighted
it more than Pickard's one chance to destroy the 'crystalline entity'
and all he wants is to 'talk' to the damn thing.


PC and SF just don't go together.


TOS handled the juxtaposition between 'fight' and 'negotiate' with
much more range, nuance, and balance.


Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

Pickard was the worst ship's captain of anything I've ever seen or
read in Science Fiction in the last 50 years.

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 01:18:39 -0500, "Tim Williams"
wrote:

"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message
m...
The protected model was there since the 286. There's no excuse for not
implementing it properly. Even though the OS didn't cause the crashes
it should have prevented them.

I can just imagine it...

C:\WINDOWSwin
DOS4/GW Protected Mode Executable
Starting Windows...

'Course, they took advantage of protected mode just fine, how else to get
those precious extended memories and 32 bit applications (once win32 came
out). But to this day, programs run in flat memory spaces with very
little protection between areas (let alone "segments", a concept long
since forgotten after the 8086, of course they call them "selectors" now,
but still).

Tim

C compilers and linkers promiscously mix code, stacks, and data. Which
is why we have buffer overflow exploits. The technical term for this
is "criminal stupidity."

John

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".

The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".

--
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zero, and remove the last word.

Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?


The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they had
no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or some
other lame story line.

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the
series would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer
section' could separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they
weren't prepared for their missions, and devised a way to run and
hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the
blueprints published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and
the rest was "secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Expensive special effect. It was probably just in the back of Gene's mind
at the time. And the model they had built probably wasn't separable.


The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room"
in the animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they
had no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or
some other lame story line.

No idea for a science fiction plot at any rate.


--

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zero, and remove the last word.

John Larkin wrote:

C compilers and linkers promiscously mix code, stacks, and data. Which
is why we have buffer overflow exploits. The technical term for this
is "criminal stupidity."

And NOT checking the boundaries of buffers when data is poured into them is
part of the C standard. C zealots are so proud that their language is
standardized they'd never consider changing this.


--

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zero, and remove the last word.

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:02:32 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


John Larkin wrote:

C compilers and linkers promiscously mix code, stacks, and data. Which
is why we have buffer overflow exploits. The technical term for this
is "criminal stupidity."

And NOT checking the boundaries of buffers when data is poured into them is
part of the C standard. C zealots are so proud that their language is
standardized they'd never consider changing this.

C was invented by geniuses so that geniuses could write tight, fast
code quickly. In the hands of mortals, it's dangerous.

We just shipped the first article of a board that has 13 ARM
processors. We used the Code Red development suite. Of course it's
written in C so is full of bugs. They say stuff like "you're runing
12.3.3? That won't work with that JTAG pod. Try 12.3.1." So we are
debugging 13 processors, talking to each other, all real-time as heck,
trying to figure out what the compiler and debugger are up to. It only
runs realtime at compiler optimization level 3, but you can only debug
the code at level 0.

If you play with the clock/pll setup, and program things wrong, and
save that to flash, the CPU is dead. The fix is to desolder it and put
in a new CPU. Production is going to replace three of them Monday
morning.

I seriously could have done it in 68K assembly in a fourth of the
time, with no bugs, no drama.

John

flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:22:00 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:16:34 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.

I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!


A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...

TNG was 'politically correct' from the get go and nothing highlighted
it more than Pickard's one chance to destroy the 'crystalline entity'
and all he wants is to 'talk' to the damn thing.


PC and SF just don't go together.

Well, PC doesn't go with reality either.

TOS handled the juxtaposition between 'fight' and 'negotiate' with
much more range, nuance, and balance.


Which would be what would happen in real life.

Precisely. That's what makes for good sci-fi, or anything else for
that matter.


I wrote a Sci-Fi trilogy about 25 years ago. When the main
characters offer help to a planet who's sun is about to go nova won't
stop bickering long enough to listen, they tell them they are leaving
them to their own fate. Suddenly they started to listen.


One of the more amusing ones is Errand of Mercy where Kirk starts off
to 'warn' the Organians of impending Klingon occupation, finds himself
compelled to take 'guerilla action' but gets incensed when the
Organians 'interfere' and is eventually humiliated during his
'defense' of 'the right' to make war and kill millions (which isn't
what he 'meant' but was the 'effect' of it).

I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

Eh, you're being too harsh and making unwarranted assumptions.
Separable sections is simply prudent.


Not the way they implemented it. It would have made more sense to
leave the civilians behind, or do missions with pairs of ships.


The original E could separate too but there was never any indication
it could 're-mate' back up again. Makes sense that the engine nacelles
could be jetsoned too if things went catastrophically wrong.

As for TNG, I can remember two times they separated 'in action' but in
neither case did they 'run'.


I watched very little of TNG. It made me ill to watch the pathetic
plot lines.


However, the re-mating capability which, of necessity, would
compromise integrity always seemed to me a bit of a contrivance for a
questionable strategy in the rarest of circumstances.


It was an excuse to carry non essential humans, as part of the lame
PC concept. IE: They are in no real danger, because they can leave any
time.


Only the 'battle' section has warp capability so the saucer would,
Borg battle notwithstanding, only be able to, as Scotty lamented,
wallow like a garbage scow against a warp driven star ship and sending
the weaker off to 'safety', as Crusher did, puts one dangerously close
to the situation Commodore Decker found himself in with his crew
beamed down to the third planet. I.E. Under most circumstances one
would imagine the weaker section could be easily picked off.


Yes. Any enemy could tell it was an under powered piece of junk, and
destroy it right away.


Pickard was the worst ship's captain of anything I've ever seen or
read in Science Fiction in the last 50 years.

Hehe. Well, it's obvious I'm no Pickard fan but methinks you're a bit
tough on him.


I call them like I see them.

Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the
series would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer
section' could separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they
weren't prepared for their missions, and devised a way to run and
hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the
blueprints published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and
the rest was "secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Expensive special effect. It was probably just in the back of Gene's mind
at the time. And the model they had built probably wasn't separable.


Even when it would have been useful. Like when fighting the so
called doomsday machine. They could have separated the saucer section
and left the rest behind to destroy it.


The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room"
in the animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they
had no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or
some other lame story line.

No idea for a science fiction plot at any rate.


Not what I consider Sci-Fi, anyway. I grew up reading Heinlein,
Asimov, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, and dozens of other early authors.

flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:00:24 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the
series would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer
section' could separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they
weren't prepared for their missions, and devised a way to run and
hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the
blueprints published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and
the rest was "secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Expensive special effect. It was probably just in the back of Gene's mind
at the time. And the model they had built probably wasn't separable.


The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room"
in the animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they
had no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or
some other lame story line.

No idea for a science fiction plot at any rate.

Oh, I dunno. I think there were a few, like in Voyager the photon
aliens mistaking holodeck characters for 'real' and the humans as
'fakes'.


I didn't get to see much of Voyager.

flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:32:49 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Well, my interpretation always was the capability was reserved for
only the direst and catastrophic circumstances where the 'saucer'
becomes, essentially, a (damn big) 'life boat' and not, as TNG made
it, a re-mateable section used for 'combat strategies'.

The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they had
no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or some
other lame story line.

I enjoyed the holodeck episodes but considered it extravagant, adding
to the 'Love Boat' cruise ship image.


And the original series was described as 'Wagon train to the stars'.

"flipper" wrote in message
...
Yeah. In the Borg battle they had the cube remain conveniently
stationary while they danced around it.

Well, cubes were never shown to be particularly maneuverable. They are
rather large. As recently as First Contact, they showed a bigass cube not
doing much, while a bunch of cute little starships swarmed around it.
Besides, they were set up as plodding automatons. It's how the drones
acted, and it's how the cube acted.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:12:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:32:49 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Well, my interpretation always was the capability was reserved for
only the direst and catastrophic circumstances where the 'saucer'
becomes, essentially, a (damn big) 'life boat' and not, as TNG made
it, a re-mateable section used for 'combat strategies'.

The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they had
no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or some
other lame story line.

I enjoyed the holodeck episodes but considered it extravagant, adding
to the 'Love Boat' cruise ship image.


And the original series was described as 'Wagon train to the stars'.

Well, any analogy can be distorted out of context (as can mine).

Roddenberry wasn't suggesting the show was a 'sci-fi western'. He was
referring to the virtually limitless plot opportunities because, for
whatever thing you wish to deal with, the wagon train can 'just
happen' to pass/stop by the watering hole, fort, Indian encampment,
town, or where ever that's the situation. Need an out of control town
sheriff to make a point about law and order? Look out, there's one
just around the bend.


That's very convenient in any work of fiction.


Same with Star Trek. Want to make a statement about the irrationality
of race bigotry? What luck, two alien nut cases, Lokai and
Commissioner Beale, show up to illustrate the point. And, if you like,
everything can be 'the other guys failing', since we're past that sort
of thing, which sort of makes it Aesop's Wagon Train to the Stars.


'Wagon Train to the Stars' was how it was pitched to Desilu Studios,
the studio that produced the show. Westerns were still popular, and
Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) OKed the pilot and then the first season's
production.


That, btw, becomes a problem if you're always in 'familiar' territory,
like TNG seemed to favor, or if you keep incorporating them into the
trek 'universe' because you're either stuck trying to find a 'crazy'
one of the familiar or creating a myriad of details for whole
civilizations. It's easier if you can deal with the one issue,
creating 'whatever' from whole cloth, and then never see them again
which, of course, is just the ticket for a ship 'way out there' on a
mission to seek out new life and new civilizations where "no man has
gone before." Next week's writer needn't worry much about last week's
episode because we aren't necessarily planning to be back there any
time soon.


It's difficult to do a continuing story line. Especially when
different authors write the scripts. Shows like 'The Twilight Zone' did
well with them, but each show was self contained. It was hard enough to
write a trilogy with the same characters. It started with a mission to
Mars, the ended up 200 years later, with 90% of the story line and the
main characters. The developed a lot of new technology, beat the bad
guys, then started exploring our galaxy.

flipper wrote:
Oh, I dunno. I think there were a few, like in Voyager the photon
aliens mistaking holodeck characters for 'real' and the humans as
'fakes'.

Yes, there were exceptions. They didn't involve Barkley.


IMO TNG, special effects notwithstanding, was nowhere near the quality
of TOS but there was an occasional stroke of brilliance, like
"Darmok."

As for fx, TNG never had a single shot of a shuttle entering or leaving the
bay. There was only one ep where they showed the view from inside the
shuttle when it lifted off, but it was a 2 second shot. Generally I think
TOS fx look more like the real thing in space.


For all the complaints I still enjoyed the sibling series (DS9 the
best) and was fond of saying that even the worst of Star Trek is
better than anything else. But then came 2009.

David Twohy (Waterworld, Pitch Black, Riddick) does better SF than that.


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Michael A. Terrell wrote:
I didn't get to see much of Voyager.

Set your DVR for it. It's on the Spike channel from 2 to 3 am ET (but often
starts 10 min late for some reason).


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flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:09:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses.

I'm not sure what their 'logic' was but if the mission were to destroy
'Star Trek' one would be hard pressed to do a better job of it. They
completely mangled the characters and Star Fleet must be run by idiots
to put a snot nosed academy flunky jerk in a captainship *regardless*
of what the hell he's done. Reinstate or an 'honorary graduation',
maybe, but captain of the flagship? Give me a break.

Nitpick: It wasn't the flagship. The Constitution was. It was a
Constitution Class Ship. Her number was NCC-1700.


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flipper wrote:
On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:17:23 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the
series would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer
section' could separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they
weren't prepared for their missions, and devised a way to run and
hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the
blueprints published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and
the rest was "secondary hull".

Not the engine nacelles and connecting pylons.

Right. The cigar was the secondary hull. The nacelles weren't habitable,
except for a catwalk that required engine shutdown for access.


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Tom Del Rosso wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:09:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses.

I'm not sure what their 'logic' was but if the mission were to destroy
'Star Trek' one would be hard pressed to do a better job of it. They
completely mangled the characters and Star Fleet must be run by idiots
to put a snot nosed academy flunky jerk in a captainship *regardless*
of what the hell he's done. Reinstate or an 'honorary graduation',
maybe, but captain of the flagship? Give me a break.

Nitpick: It wasn't the flagship. The Constitution was. It was a
Constitution Class Ship. Her number was NCC-1700.


And 1701 was a hard drive failure. ;-)

Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
I didn't get to see much of Voyager.

Set your DVR for it. It's on the Spike channel from 2 to 3 am ET (but often
starts 10 min late for some reason).


No DVR or Spike Channel. I only get the sub basic package of
channels you get with broadband internet. I had a choice of more
channels, or internet access.

flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:43:04 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:12:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:32:49 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Well, my interpretation always was the capability was reserved for
only the direst and catastrophic circumstances where the 'saucer'
becomes, essentially, a (damn big) 'life boat' and not, as TNG made
it, a re-mateable section used for 'combat strategies'.

The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they had
no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or some
other lame story line.

I enjoyed the holodeck episodes but considered it extravagant, adding
to the 'Love Boat' cruise ship image.


And the original series was described as 'Wagon train to the stars'.

Well, any analogy can be distorted out of context (as can mine).

Roddenberry wasn't suggesting the show was a 'sci-fi western'. He was
referring to the virtually limitless plot opportunities because, for
whatever thing you wish to deal with, the wagon train can 'just
happen' to pass/stop by the watering hole, fort, Indian encampment,
town, or where ever that's the situation. Need an out of control town
sheriff to make a point about law and order? Look out, there's one
just around the bend.


That's very convenient in any work of fiction.

True but "Green Acres" is set at "Green Acres" and Dr. Kildare doesn't
even make house calls (nice irony here as William Shatner won the
leading role and then declined).

Same with Star Trek. Want to make a statement about the irrationality
of race bigotry? What luck, two alien nut cases, Lokai and
Commissioner Beale, show up to illustrate the point. And, if you like,
everything can be 'the other guys failing', since we're past that sort
of thing, which sort of makes it Aesop's Wagon Train to the Stars.


'Wagon Train to the Stars' was how it was pitched to Desilu Studios,
the studio that produced the show.

Yes, that's what we're talking about.

Westerns were still popular,

Which is why there was a show called "Wagon Train" with which to make
the analogy. Calling it "Mr Ed to the stars" just wouldn't have
worked.


If Mr Ed had been a ddonkey, and they started with TNG, it would have
been approproiate.


If he had been making it a mercenary starship he might have pitched it
as "Have Gun Will Travel to the stars."


It was pitched as exploration, like the early settlers in the Western
Territories. You had to be armed for defense. Vietnam was in the news
daily, and no studio would have bought that concept.


Really, now, what do you think his pitch meant? That there'd be horses
pulling the Enterprise from planet to planet?


Why would it have to be horses? Wagons were pulled by other animals,
as well..


A good pitch puts things in terms the audience can understand and
"wagon train to the stars" does that.


The 'pitch' was to Desi and Lucy, a singer and a comedieane


and
Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) OKed the pilot and then the first season's
production.

Smart lady.

That, btw, becomes a problem if you're always in 'familiar' territory,
like TNG seemed to favor, or if you keep incorporating them into the
trek 'universe' because you're either stuck trying to find a 'crazy'
one of the familiar or creating a myriad of details for whole
civilizations. It's easier if you can deal with the one issue,
creating 'whatever' from whole cloth, and then never see them again
which, of course, is just the ticket for a ship 'way out there' on a
mission to seek out new life and new civilizations where "no man has
gone before." Next week's writer needn't worry much about last week's
episode because we aren't necessarily planning to be back there any
time soon.


It's difficult to do a continuing story line. Especially when
different authors write the scripts.

Well, Battlestar Galactica tried and Babylon 5 is a stunning
achievement of a continuing story line. It's even better the second
time around because then you know what all that mysterious, seeming,
babble is about.


I only saw a few episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica, wich was
the third or fourth series. It was the same three, aired about four
times at odd hours by a local station. I never saw enough Babylon 5 to
figure out what the hell was going on.


Of course, sci-fi has a unique problem in that the 'universe' must be
created whereas most shows, either contemporary or past time frame,
need little more than keeping the characters consistent.


That's both good and bad. You create your own story universe, but
some people may not grasp yoour concepts. Like some people around here
with Ohm's law. ;-)


Shows like 'The Twilight Zone' did
well with them, but each show was self contained.


It was hard enough to
write a trilogy with the same characters. It started with a mission to
Mars, the ended up 200 years later, with 90% of the story line and the
main characters. The developed a lot of new technology, beat the bad
guys, then started exploring our galaxy.

You lost me.

That was supposed to be two paragraphs. I dropped a large monitor
the other day, and it hit my legs. I'm in more pain than usual from the
missing skin, and didn't proofread it.

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:52:14 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:05:06 -0500, "Tim Williams"
wrote:

"flipper" wrote in message
. ..
Well, as it turned out, the 'store' code with that relative addressing
mode was '0' and if the offset was '0' and you had '0' in the register
then it stored 0 in the next location and then executed that 0, which
did the same thing, storing another 0 in the next location, which it
then executed, which....

It simply zipped as fast as it could go perpetually writing zeroes
through all of memory over and over till you hit HALT. Mystery solved.

Yuck. It's pretty common to set 00000000b as NOP.

Well, I didn't design the thing

Although, now that you mention it, that makes me wonder if 0 as NOP
might be a 'solid state' era thing where one imagines memory powers up
0, but core memory has no such predilection.

I say "imagine" because another company I worked for got bit by
assuming that, as well as what turned out to be poor programming. They
slapped a 'code' to set end of buffer or something, I forget what, and
figured alternating ones and zeroes was reasonable.

They were using CMOS static RAMs and the dern machine went nuts when a
certain manufacturer's SRAMs were installed.

I swear it's true, the stuff powered up with the same alternating ones
and zeroes pattern in every memory location.

Other manufacturer's same part number might power up with top 4 bits
zero and bottom 4 bits 1s while others had a different pattern but
there always was one and it turned out that the manufacturing process
(layout) determined which would be 1s and 0s.

Then there was the time memory write/read diagnostics passed with no
RAM installed. LOL

In fact, I took
advantage of this the first time I ever got out a Z80-CPU to play with: I
wired it as an extremely inefficient 16-bit counter. Control lines pulled
up, D0-D7 = 00h, address lines open, LED on A15 to indicate operation.

Incidentially, I did a lot of playing with that thing without the luxury
of an oscilloscope or logic analyzer (being in my dorm room at the time).
That might be troublesome, but I just hooked a wire from breadboard to my
audio mixer and listened.

Clever idea.

Making computers play tunes by hooking up a speaker to an assigned
register bit has been done at least since the middle 1960s. I think
the technique dates back to the earliest computers (at least if the
documents are to be trusted). Certainly putting one or more bits into
a DAC and then amplified for a speaker or headphone dates back that
far.

Loops buzz or whine. Multilevel loops buzz and click. Data processing
has a variety of multimode sounds, resembling FM synth with squarewaves
depending on what's being done. I wrote a 32 bit LFSR, which is indeed a
very effective source of white noise. I also wrote a tone generator,
which made something more harmonious than bus noises.

Speaking of which, I took the same tone generator code, ported it to the
AVR, and loaded the same data file:
http://myweb.msoe.edu/williamstm/Solfeg_Fast.mp3
Oops...... Z80 ran at 4MHz, AVR at 8 ;-)

Tim

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:49:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:27:03 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:39:48 -0500, Dan wrote:

flipper wrote:
snip

I really liked the PDP-11 and have one of the 'micro' versions.

John



I really liked the HP 2114A. The teletype I could do without now, but
I was used to it from timeshare days. The system we used had a tower
with a desk on the left for the TTY. The tower included and optical tape
reader, optical card reader which used cards one marked with a pencil,
the 2114A and a storage drawer with a hand held rewinder for longer
tapes. I can find pictures of the 2114A, but not the entire system.

I took a tour of Digital's Maynard facility and was impressed with
the PDP-12. Having used the PDP-8S, where the S stood for SLOW,

LOL. Yes, it's 1 bit serial ALU was deadly slow but it was also a lot
cheaper at $10k vs $25k for the 'fast' fellah.

In one of my EE courses we designed some interfaces for the PDP-8,
which was very simple to do so we spend most of the time playing
spacewar on it. hehe

That's the way to play a 'computer game', boy. Down in the bowels of a
computer lab with scopes, racks, and hardware scattered about so it
looks like you're doing something 'technical'.

the
PDP-12 with a CRT seemed wonderful.

A bit quirky, though. I'll take a PDP-11 any day.


Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

I typed my MIT Bachelor's Thesis onto paper tape, using the
flexowriter input to a PDP-8. I think I still have the paper tape
around here somewhere... 48 years later ;-)

(Fellow classmate and PDP-8 hacker Alan Kotok (later a significant
digital architect at DEC, deceased May 26, 2006) and I were good
buddies and members of the model railroad club :-)

...Jim Thompson

Bawg, a real Friden Flex? I met them in very early 1970s.

This a routine made to insure
that fault in the flex will not occur
....

I am still looking for the the original text.

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:12:26 -0500, Dan wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:53:42 -0500, Dan wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:27:03 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:39:48 -0500, Dan wrote:

flipper wrote:
snip
I really liked the PDP-11 and have one of the 'micro' versions.

John


I really liked the HP 2114A. The teletype I could do without now, but
I was used to it from timeshare days. The system we used had a tower
with a desk on the left for the TTY. The tower included and optical tape
reader, optical card reader which used cards one marked with a pencil,
the 2114A and a storage drawer with a hand held rewinder for longer
tapes. I can find pictures of the 2114A, but not the entire system.

I took a tour of Digital's Maynard facility and was impressed with
the PDP-12. Having used the PDP-8S, where the S stood for SLOW,
LOL. Yes, it's 1 bit serial ALU was deadly slow but it was also a lot
cheaper at $10k vs $25k for the 'fast' fellah.

In one of my EE courses we designed some interfaces for the PDP-8,
which was very simple to do so we spend most of the time playing
spacewar on it. hehe

That's the way to play a 'computer game', boy. Down in the bowels of a
computer lab with scopes, racks, and hardware scattered about so it
looks like you're doing something 'technical'.

the
PDP-12 with a CRT seemed wonderful.
A bit quirky, though. I'll take a PDP-11 any day.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
I typed my MIT Bachelor's Thesis onto paper tape, using the
flexowriter input to a PDP-8. I think I still have the paper tape
around here somewhere... 48 years later ;-)

(Fellow classmate and PDP-8 hacker Alan Kotok (later a significant
digital architect at DEC, deceased May 26, 2006) and I were good
buddies and members of the model railroad club :-)

...Jim Thompson
Computers and model trains? Egad, not live steam, I hope.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Electric, HO and (IIRC) TT gauge. Occupied two rooms in MIT's
infamous (but now replaced) all-WWII-wood-construction Building 20.

However, here in AZ, we have a reduced-scale live-steam train at
McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, Scottsdale.

...Jim Thompson

I'm in the process of building a live steam Pennsylvania switcher in
3/4" scale, 3.5 gauge track.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Yowzer! Go man go. Send photos.

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:29:46 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:28:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:13:09 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:07:20 -0500, Dan wrote:

flipper wrote:
snip

I imagine IBM didn't think that kind of mythology fit the 'IBM
culture'. Plus, their 'not computer savvy' customers probably didn't
want 'crazy computer brains' taking over their companies, or the whole
country. And don't tell me it can't happen because I saw Colossus: The
Forbin Project (1970) and one of those damn things drive Wally Cox
crazy in a Twilight Zone episode (From Agnes - with Love [1964])

I liked "Colossus, The Forbin Project" when it came out.

Yeah, me too. Although, I knew it "was over" about 5 minutes into the
thing when they caved to the first challenge.

Then I
started analyzing it and figured out numerous was to sabotage the
system. The funny thing is at that time neither computer would have
operated very long without repair.

Well, we could propose a number of theories to get around that but
trying to get movies or TV 'scientifically accurate' is worse than
pushing a wet noodle uphill. That just isn't 'the direction' they're
interested in going.

Of course, the biggest flaw in most of them is no one in their right
mind would make a computer/robot with NO freaking OFF switch.

They at least got that part sort of right with Star Trek's M5. There
was *supposed* to be an 'off switch' but the loony computer 'protected
itself'. An obvious design flaw

Kind of fun watching Kirk out psych it, though.

I did greatly enjoy the series' multiple forays into 'logic' but if
*I* were Nomad Kirk would have lost the debate.

One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

I prefer the voice of HAL.

Oh, yes. I loved HAL.

"Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly
think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think
things over."

At least he didn't have the chugga-chugga
sounds every time he had to process something.

Hehe. Yeah, well, it was 1967. The 'computer' needed to sound like a
'machine', or so they thought. That's still the era where you know
you're getting 'timely news' because they have TTYs going clackety
clackety in the background.

Star Trek is certainly dated but I remember thinking, at the time,
that the beeps and blips the control buttons, communicator, etc, made
was a stroke of genius, while my parents thought it was down right
silly.

Of course, just about everything 'beeps' these days.

The Colossus voice was
downright creepy.

I don't really remember it.


Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Playing on local talk radio right now:

Talk radio? Interesting place to put it.


We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and
incapable of error... error... error... error... error... error...
error... error...

The HAL 9000 series were not known for an abundance of modesty

There's a really good Isaac Asimov 'robot' short story, Little Lost
Robot, that kicks off with a similar problem: a 1'st law 'modified'
robot that's arrogant as hell. And after royally ****ing off an
engineer that's had a bad day the engineer tells him to get lost,
which the robot does (2'nd law).

The rest of the story is trying to find the (not entirely stable)
'lost' robot and ends with a 'logic' contest between Susan Calvin,
robo-psychologist, and the robot.

Wait a minute, wasn't it Blake and partner that did the
troubleshooting?
Part of the original collection of shorts in the book "I, Robot".

Actually, they're all good and Isaac Asimov's robot series is my all
time favorite science fiction.

I can see your point, even (especially) when he crossed it with his
foundation series. Which is of the same stature.

JosephKK wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:12:26 -0500, Dan wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:53:42 -0500, Dan wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:27:03 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:39:48 -0500, Dan wrote:

flipper wrote:
snip
I really liked the PDP-11 and have one of the 'micro' versions.

John


I really liked the HP 2114A. The teletype I could do without now, but
I was used to it from timeshare days. The system we used had a tower
with a desk on the left for the TTY. The tower included and optical tape
reader, optical card reader which used cards one marked with a pencil,
the 2114A and a storage drawer with a hand held rewinder for longer
tapes. I can find pictures of the 2114A, but not the entire system.

I took a tour of Digital's Maynard facility and was impressed with
the PDP-12. Having used the PDP-8S, where the S stood for SLOW,
LOL. Yes, it's 1 bit serial ALU was deadly slow but it was also a lot
cheaper at $10k vs $25k for the 'fast' fellah.

In one of my EE courses we designed some interfaces for the PDP-8,
which was very simple to do so we spend most of the time playing
spacewar on it. hehe

That's the way to play a 'computer game', boy. Down in the bowels of a
computer lab with scopes, racks, and hardware scattered about so it
looks like you're doing something 'technical'.

the
PDP-12 with a CRT seemed wonderful.
A bit quirky, though. I'll take a PDP-11 any day.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
I typed my MIT Bachelor's Thesis onto paper tape, using the
flexowriter input to a PDP-8. I think I still have the paper tape
around here somewhere... 48 years later ;-)

(Fellow classmate and PDP-8 hacker Alan Kotok (later a significant
digital architect at DEC, deceased May 26, 2006) and I were good
buddies and members of the model railroad club :-)

...Jim Thompson
Computers and model trains? Egad, not live steam, I hope.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
Electric, HO and (IIRC) TT gauge. Occupied two rooms in MIT's
infamous (but now replaced) all-WWII-wood-construction Building 20.

However, here in AZ, we have a reduced-scale live-steam train at
McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, Scottsdale.

...Jim Thompson
I'm in the process of building a live steam Pennsylvania switcher in
3/4" scale, 3.5 gauge track.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Yowzer! Go man go. Send photos.

At the rate I'm going it will be another 2 years.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

flipper wrote:
On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:08:54 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:

As for fx, TNG never had a single shot of a shuttle entering or
leaving the bay. There was only one ep where they showed the view
from inside the shuttle when it lifted off, but it was a 2 second
shot. Generally I think TOS fx look more like the real thing in
space.

Even to the Constellation shaking like a toy model on a stick as it
entered the planet killer and the poster view screens on the wall that
seem to be a slide projector when actually used?

I mean the basic and ever-present effect of lighting on surfaces. TNG looks
like CGI even when it isn't.

The Constellation's jerky motion was deliberate, so it was questionable
judgement about how it should look and not technique.

Some effects, like the control panel of the
M5/Atavachron/GarySeven'sComputer were very well-made props with built-in
effects.

The panel of "lights" in engineering that were made by sliding a mask behind
the panel (probably not detectable on an old TV) were good enough if you're
a few feet away.

The monitors on top of conference tables and such were well done even in The
Cage and Where No Man....

The ship and the starbase in Trouble with Tribbles was obviously a
small-scale model.

In TNG's "Where Silence Has Lease" the alien looks like Conan O'Brian's
face-on-the-monitor gimmick, where only the lips move.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Silence_Has_Lease

That was a pathetic fx job. So was the makeup in "Tapestry" where the
Nausicans wear Halloween masks that let you see their eyes in the recessed
holes.


I'm a die hard TOS fan but there's no doubt it could be improved.

My favorite trivia question used to be, "In what episode did the USS
Enterprise orbit a planet east to west?"

It WAS Shore Leave. (And no, it wasn't a reverse image.)

Now that they "improved" the effects, the "error" has been "fixed".

Somebody pointed out in another group that artificial satellites would
usually go in the same direction as a planet's rotation, so it would make
sense for a "standard orbit" to go the same way whether satellites are
present or not.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

flipper wrote:
We can quibble about personal preferences all day long but the fact of
the matter is if you did a split screen of the two one looks decidedly
'more modern' than the other.

Of course it does, but not better. And even if it did look better the
original should be left alone. It's like colorizing Casablanca.


Sincerely sorry, but it is a reverse image. You can't tell for sure on
the first shots but one later shows the nacelle's NCC-1701 'mirror
reverse'. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb but is decipherable
upon inspection.

Damn. But it still should be left alone. If it's that hard to spot then
its historic value is worth more than any harm it does.


There is another where she goes 'the other way' and that's Mirror,
Mirror where they show the alternate reality by the ship flash
flipping directions, ending in the 'other universe' reverse.

Nope. That's the ISS Enterprise. I said USS Enterprise.



Yes, well, don't worry too much about it because they routinely
orbited against the planet's rotation with The Naked Time and Man Trap
being two examples. The E is going in the time honored left to right
direction but the planet is rotating against her orbit.

Good visual memory.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:52:50 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:43:04 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:12:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:32:49 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Which would be what would happen in real life. I knew the series
would be crap when they announced that the 'saucer section' could
separate from the rest of the ship. IOW, they weren't prepared for
their missions, and devised a way to run and hide.

The original ship had the same capability, as noted in the blueprints
published in 1973. The saucer was "primary hull" and the rest was
"secondary hull".


Yet it was never used?

Well, my interpretation always was the capability was reserved for
only the direst and catastrophic circumstances where the 'saucer'
becomes, essentially, a (damn big) 'life boat' and not, as TNG made
it, a re-mateable section used for 'combat strategies'.

The holodeck wasn't an original idea either. It was the "rec room" in the
animated series episode "Practical Joker".


I hated the episodes on the holodeck. It usually meant that they had
no idea for a real plot so Captain Spittard played detective, or some
other lame story line.

I enjoyed the holodeck episodes but considered it extravagant, adding
to the 'Love Boat' cruise ship image.


And the original series was described as 'Wagon train to the stars'.

Well, any analogy can be distorted out of context (as can mine).

Roddenberry wasn't suggesting the show was a 'sci-fi western'. He was
referring to the virtually limitless plot opportunities because, for
whatever thing you wish to deal with, the wagon train can 'just
happen' to pass/stop by the watering hole, fort, Indian encampment,
town, or where ever that's the situation. Need an out of control town
sheriff to make a point about law and order? Look out, there's one
just around the bend.


That's very convenient in any work of fiction.

True but "Green Acres" is set at "Green Acres" and Dr. Kildare doesn't
even make house calls (nice irony here as William Shatner won the
leading role and then declined).

Same with Star Trek. Want to make a statement about the irrationality
of race bigotry? What luck, two alien nut cases, Lokai and
Commissioner Beale, show up to illustrate the point. And, if you like,
everything can be 'the other guys failing', since we're past that sort
of thing, which sort of makes it Aesop's Wagon Train to the Stars.


'Wagon Train to the Stars' was how it was pitched to Desilu Studios,
the studio that produced the show.

Yes, that's what we're talking about.

Westerns were still popular,

Which is why there was a show called "Wagon Train" with which to make
the analogy. Calling it "Mr Ed to the stars" just wouldn't have
worked.


If Mr Ed had been a ddonkey, and they started with TNG, it would have
been approproiate.

Well, Francis the talking mule came before Mr Ed.

If he had been making it a mercenary starship he might have pitched it
as "Have Gun Will Travel to the stars."


It was pitched as exploration, like the early settlers in the Western
Territories. You had to be armed for defense.

Yep. There are a lot of 'similarities', which made it a fairly good
pitch analogy.

Vietnam was in the news
daily, and no studio would have bought that concept.

Moot since it wasn't a mercenary concept anyway nor was that
Roddenberry's vision of the future.

Really, now, what do you think his pitch meant? That there'd be horses
pulling the Enterprise from planet to planet?


Why would it have to be horses? Wagons were pulled by other animals,
as well..

I think the question applies regardless of the animal pulling
Enterprise

A good pitch puts things in terms the audience can understand and
"wagon train to the stars" does that.


The 'pitch' was to Desi and Lucy, a singer and a comedieane

Are you trying to suggest they were incapable of understanding the
show Wagon Train?


No. They were busy with their shows, and running the studios. they
didn't have a lot of spare time to pour through scripts and spend days
or weeks discussing a project. In any case, it worked well for them.


When trying to explain a 'concept' it's not a bad idea to analogize to
something the listener is familiar with.

and
Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) OKed the pilot and then the first season's
production.

Smart lady.

That, btw, becomes a problem if you're always in 'familiar' territory,
like TNG seemed to favor, or if you keep incorporating them into the
trek 'universe' because you're either stuck trying to find a 'crazy'
one of the familiar or creating a myriad of details for whole
civilizations. It's easier if you can deal with the one issue,
creating 'whatever' from whole cloth, and then never see them again
which, of course, is just the ticket for a ship 'way out there' on a
mission to seek out new life and new civilizations where "no man has
gone before." Next week's writer needn't worry much about last week's
episode because we aren't necessarily planning to be back there any
time soon.


It's difficult to do a continuing story line. Especially when
different authors write the scripts.

Well, Battlestar Galactica tried and Babylon 5 is a stunning
achievement of a continuing story line. It's even better the second
time around because then you know what all that mysterious, seeming,
babble is about.


I only saw a few episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica, wich was
the third or fourth series. It was the same three, aired about four
times at odd hours by a local station.

I meant the original 1978 series but I watched the 'new' one too.

I always said the original had a great idea ('bad guys' are robots so
who can complain about shooting up toasters?) but they blew it as no
one wants to identify with perpetually on the run losers. And then
they made it infinitely worse by coming to Earth where they're, by
comparison, 'supermen' both technologically and physically. Oh thanks
a lot. Not only are they 'losers' but we're worse and they brought the
Cylons to our doorstep to boot. What the bloody hell were the writers
thinking?

I could have saved it, though. Short version is they run across a
surviving top secret, which is why no one (including the Cylons) knew
about it, Colonial military (manufacturing) colony with some number of
battlestars in various stages of operation/construction so they can
begin constituting an effective, but still outnumbered, fighting
force. Your cross season two part cliff hanger is then their version
of the Battle of Midway where, end of season, you set up the desperate
plan to engage with your outnumbered fleet and then, next season
opener, you do some serious Cylon ass kicking. The special effects
guys could go out of their mind with ecstasy and I guarantee the
viewing audience would be standing in their seats cheering.

From there you have an almost infinite supply of ready made 'War in
the Pacific' (oh what the hell, throw in the Nazis too) scripts to
transform into space as you 'planet hop' back to the homeland.

Frankly, when I saw their 'Pearl Harbor' opening I *thought* that's
what they had in mind all along. Talk about being disappointed.

I never saw enough Babylon 5 to
figure out what the hell was going on.

LOL. I know exactly what you mean.

I didn't watch but a few episodes the first time around myself but got
'stuck' watching a rerun because a good friend of mine insisted on it.

All that mystical mumbo jumbo comes to pass, is fully explained by the
time you get to the 'end' and even 'makes sense', which is what I
meant about it being even better the second time around.

I became a fan but the point here is it's a stunning achievement in
continuity and overall consistency over a long 5 year run. You're left
with the impression that every jot over the 5 years was done
specifically to get where you end up but it wasn't actually that way
(despite an over arching concept). For example, Straczynski defined
every characters in the series with a "trap door" in their background
so that, in the event of an actor's unexpected departure from the
series, the character could be written out with minimal impact on the
storyline.

Of course, sci-fi has a unique problem in that the 'universe' must be
created whereas most shows, either contemporary or past time frame,
need little more than keeping the characters consistent.


That's both good and bad. You create your own story universe, but
some people may not grasp yoour concepts. Like some people around here
with Ohm's law. ;-)

Hehe. Yes. An even bigger problem is it's simply difficult to be 'god'


One of the amazing things about Star Trek is how much work fans put
into arguing about how things 'really work'.

Shows like 'The Twilight Zone' did
well with them, but each show was self contained.


It was hard enough to
write a trilogy with the same characters. It started with a mission to
Mars, the ended up 200 years later, with 90% of the story line and the
main characters. The developed a lot of new technology, beat the bad
guys, then started exploring our galaxy.

You lost me.

That was supposed to be two paragraphs. I dropped a large monitor
the other day, and it hit my legs. I'm in more pain than usual from the
missing skin, and didn't proofread it.

Ouch.
You have my sympathies. Which won't help one bit but it's all I can
do.


Skin missing on both lower legs, but no blood yet. Diabetes and
circulation problems make it a slow and painful process to heal. I have
plasma running down one leg, and pus down the other. if I wasn't in so
much pain, it would be a good day to do some grocery shopping, just to
see the horrified looks on people's faces. ;-)

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:41:18 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.

Hear attachment.

Thanks.


I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.

But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.

Yeah, like Norman and his android pals. Although, there's an obvious
up side to being 'enslaved' by the Alice series, or the Annabelle
series, or the Trudy series, or build one to taste.

But there was only one Helen O'loy.

Got to admit, Star Trek had the hottest babes on TV.

Too bad Dr. Forbin didn't have Kirk and company around to help him
drive Colossus crazy.

Like some people.

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:11:21 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Dan wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:14:33 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible

A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.
Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.

I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.
Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..

Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)
Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin

Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned these
days?
Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"

Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.

It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.
LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.

Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of human
intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.

Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.
THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !


They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses. People who have no clue
what Science Fiction is, or was.

I learned about science friction in physics, does that count? At
least my lab reports were works of friction.


I learned to love books by reading Science Fiction as a child. My
bosses were always upset that my reports weren't fiction.

OTOH, some of the biggest fiction I've ever read were test
procedures, and how ISO-9001 'works'.

Crick. One more person rat noticed.

JosephKK wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

I learned to love books by reading Science Fiction as a child. My
bosses were always upset that my reports weren't fiction.

OTOH, some of the biggest fiction I've ever read were test
procedures, and how ISO-9001 'works'.

Crick. One more person rat noticed.


????????????????????????????????????????

flipper wrote:

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:14:53 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:52:50 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:43:04 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:12:30 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:32:49 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


snip

And the original series was described as 'Wagon train to the stars'.

Well, any analogy can be distorted out of context (as can mine).

Roddenberry wasn't suggesting the show was a 'sci-fi western'. He was
referring to the virtually limitless plot opportunities because, for
whatever thing you wish to deal with, the wagon train can 'just
happen' to pass/stop by the watering hole, fort, Indian encampment,
town, or where ever that's the situation. Need an out of control town
sheriff to make a point about law and order? Look out, there's one
just around the bend.


That's very convenient in any work of fiction.

True but "Green Acres" is set at "Green Acres" and Dr. Kildare doesn't
even make house calls (nice irony here as William Shatner won the
leading role and then declined).

Same with Star Trek. Want to make a statement about the irrationality
of race bigotry? What luck, two alien nut cases, Lokai and
Commissioner Beale, show up to illustrate the point. And, if you like,
everything can be 'the other guys failing', since we're past that sort
of thing, which sort of makes it Aesop's Wagon Train to the Stars.


'Wagon Train to the Stars' was how it was pitched to Desilu Studios,
the studio that produced the show.

Yes, that's what we're talking about.

Westerns were still popular,

Which is why there was a show called "Wagon Train" with which to make
the analogy. Calling it "Mr Ed to the stars" just wouldn't have
worked.


If Mr Ed had been a ddonkey, and they started with TNG, it would have
been approproiate.

Well, Francis the talking mule came before Mr Ed.

If he had been making it a mercenary starship he might have pitched it
as "Have Gun Will Travel to the stars."


It was pitched as exploration, like the early settlers in the Western
Territories. You had to be armed for defense.

Yep. There are a lot of 'similarities', which made it a fairly good
pitch analogy.

Vietnam was in the news
daily, and no studio would have bought that concept.

Moot since it wasn't a mercenary concept anyway nor was that
Roddenberry's vision of the future.

Really, now, what do you think his pitch meant? That there'd be horses
pulling the Enterprise from planet to planet?


Why would it have to be horses? Wagons were pulled by other animals,
as well..

I think the question applies regardless of the animal pulling
Enterprise

A good pitch puts things in terms the audience can understand and
"wagon train to the stars" does that.


The 'pitch' was to Desi and Lucy, a singer and a comedieane

Are you trying to suggest they were incapable of understanding the
show Wagon Train?


No. They were busy with their shows, and running the studios. they
didn't have a lot of spare time to pour through scripts and spend days
or weeks discussing a project.

I think that applies to any studio, plus likely being accosted by
scores of folks trying to pitch their own 'great idea' for a new TV
show.

Well, I don't mean they're all run by actors, I mean they're busy.

In any case, it worked well for them.

My take is it was not only serendipitous that Wagon Train existed, and
popular, but pretty darn good thinking on Gene's part to use it.


Roddenberry had already written scripts for other series, when he
pitched Star Trek. That was likely the biggest thing he had going for
him.

flipper wrote:
On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:58:00 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
We can quibble about personal preferences all day long but the
fact of the matter is if you did a split screen of the two one
looks decidedly 'more modern' than the other.

Of course it does, but not better.

We're talking about a portrayal of the 'future'. Yes, more 'modern'
effects are 'better' for that purpose.

Newer methods don't necessarily look more real.

The TNG ships have a cartoonish quality I can't explain. The fx are
inferior to the fx in movies of the 80's and 90's, and inferior to DS9 and
Voyager even when they were produced at the same time. Maybe TNG got better
in the later years and I'm thinking of how the earlier years looked, but TOS
definitely looked better to me than early TNG.


And even if it did look better the
original should be left alone.

It would appear you have a hidden agenda clouding your judgment.

It's not a cloud - it's a separate issue. You could make fx in lots of
classic movies look more real, but shouldn't.


It's like colorizing Casablanca.

I understand how you could make the analogy but it doesn't hold for a
number of reason with not the least being 'colorizing', quite frankly,
stinks. There is also a 'creative' argument that the film maker
intentionally used lighting and other means to create mood and effect
particular to the medium.

Go ahead and clean up noise, and even clean up the rectangular glow of the
photomask around shuttlecraft, but let the engines sparkle the same way they
always did. Also let the planets look featureless and cloudy. It's not
unreal that way, and certainly doesn't look "bad".


It is rather silly to argue, though, that Gene Roddenberry preferred
'outdated/primitive' special effects, or that he was trying to
'creatively' convey anything other than 'realism', and would chose
them over the newer, and especially so since he was involved in not
only the, for the period, 'modernized' TOS movies but was in control
of the creation and first season of TNG you are arguing is 'not
better'.

I don't think he would have exercised that kind of control over how fx was
done. I'm sure he paid more attention to scripts, and they stank in the
first season.


I think Gene would be tickled to death with the 'remaster' and,
besides, no one is talking about wiping the originals from history.
But, should any one try, fear not as I have a DVD set with which we
can foil their nefarious plot.

Recordings are nice, but broadcast is always the main medium of a TV show.
I have all kinds of recordings but I hate to think that any of them is never
going to be broadcast again. There's a sense of community when you watch
something and others are watching it too.


There is another where she goes 'the other way' and that's Mirror,
Mirror where they show the alternate reality by the ship flash
flipping directions, ending in the 'other universe' reverse.

Nope. That's the ISS Enterprise. I said USS Enterprise.


Yes, I know. Same producer, same special effects crew, same model. A
rose by any other name...

The "model" and the "ship" are not the same concept.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:34:32 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:02:32 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


John Larkin wrote:

C compilers and linkers promiscously mix code, stacks, and data. Which
is why we have buffer overflow exploits. The technical term for this
is "criminal stupidity."

And NOT checking the boundaries of buffers when data is poured into them is
part of the C standard. C zealots are so proud that their language is
standardized they'd never consider changing this.

C was invented by geniuses so that geniuses could write tight, fast
code quickly. In the hands of mortals, it's dangerous.

As much as i like "C" and like its expressive power, your just above
description is rather truer than i like.

We just shipped the first article of a board that has 13 ARM
processors. We used the Code Red development suite. Of course it's
written in C so is full of bugs. They say stuff like "you're runing
12.3.3? That won't work with that JTAG pod. Try 12.3.1." So we are
debugging 13 processors, talking to each other, all real-time as heck,
trying to figure out what the compiler and debugger are up to. It only
runs realtime at compiler optimization level 3, but you can only debug
the code at level 0.

If you play with the clock/pll setup, and program things wrong, and
save that to flash, the CPU is dead. The fix is to desolder it and put
in a new CPU. Production is going to replace three of them Monday
morning.

I seriously could have done it in 68K assembly in a fourth of the
time, with no bugs, no drama.

How hard is it to translate 68K code to arm code?

John

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Roddenberry had already written scripts for other series, when he
pitched Star Trek. That was likely the biggest thing he had going for
him.

Apparently he didn't write for Wagon Train but he did for Have Gun....

Wow. That was him saying "Real turkeys!"

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734472/

Charlie X (1966) TV episode (voice) (uncredited) .... Enterprise Chef


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:31:34 -0400 "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote in Message id:
:


JosephKK wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

I learned to love books by reading Science Fiction as a child. My
bosses were always upset that my reports weren't fiction.

OTOH, some of the biggest fiction I've ever read were test
procedures, and how ISO-9001 'works'.

Crick. One more person rat noticed.


????????????????????????????????????????

That?

flipper wrote:

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:25:47 -0700,
wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:41:18 -0500, flipper wrote:

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.

Hear attachment.

Thanks.


I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.

But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.

Yeah, like Norman and his android pals. Although, there's an obvious
up side to being 'enslaved' by the Alice series, or the Annabelle
series, or the Trudy series, or build one to taste.

But there was only one Helen O'loy.

Which is why Dave could love her and Spock hated Alice 210.

SPOCK: I love you. However, I hate you.
ALICE 210: But I'm identical in every way with Alice Twenty Seven.
SPOCK: Yes, of course. That is exactly why I hate you. Because you are
identical.

Another good episode although, these days, I'm sure the courts would
consider leaving Harry with 500 android copies of his incessantly
nagging wife Stella cruel and unusual punishment.


That would depend on how many of the judge's relatives had been
conned by Harry.


KIRK: Oh, there's one more thing, Harry. We've programmed a special
android attendant to take care of your every need. She'll help you
find an incentive to work with the androids and not exploit them.

MUDD: I call that unexpectedly civil of you, Captain.

KIRK: Yes.

STELLA 1: Harcourt! Harcourt Fenton Mudd, what have you been up to?
Have you been drinking again? You answer me!

MUDD: Shut up!

STELLA: You miserable, conniving toad!

MUDD: I order you. Shut up, Stella!

STELLA 1: Staying out all night then giving me some silly story.
STELLA 2: Harcourt! Harcourt Fenton Mudd, you've been overeating again
and drinking.

MUDD: Kirk, you can't do this.

STELLA 2: You need constant supervision.

MUDD: It's inhuman.

STELLA 2: I can see I've got my work cut out for me.
STELLA 500: Harcourt.

MUDD: No. Number five hundred? No, no, no.

STELLA 500: What have you been up to?

MUDD: (barely heard over the cacophony) Kirk. It's inhuman. Mercy.

KIRK: Goodbye, Harry. Have fun.

Got to admit, Star Trek had the hottest babes on TV.

Too bad Dr. Forbin didn't have Kirk and company around to help him
drive Colossus crazy.

Like some people.