From: shaun@octel.com (Ein keine nichtmusik)
Subject: Re: TECH GAP
Organization: Octel Communications Inc., Milpitas Ca.
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 18:28:09 GMT

In article <16n5q0INNkrd@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> tripstr@cats.ucsc.edu (Christopher Todd Courtois) writes:
>	I'm not sure what the point of my ranting is, other than I wish
>	more people would stop believing that they *can't* understand
>	technology, and "just do it".  So, if you're a person who is
>	interested in cyberpunk, virtual reality, or nanotech, don't
>	just read about this stuff: try to make it happen!  

>	Food for thought....

Indeed.  It's kind of sad how little actual hacking most people who identify
with cp do, considering how easy a lot of it is.  Making lights blink is a 
really neat way to get started, because it's cheap, easy, and gives immediate
visual results.  You can make a 4-bit LED up/down counter with one chip and
a few miscellaneous spare parts.  If you're lucky enough to live in an
area where there's a place like Surplus Stuff or the Weird Stuff Warehouse
where you can get scrap tech by the pound, you can do some pretty neat stuff
practically for free.

On the software side, there's still lots of space to make new discoveries,
fancy artwork, etc.  I just got a neat shareware program called Vivid yesterday
that takes an ASCII input file and produces a 24 bit ray traced image as output.
It runs under dos, registration is $30 ($50 for a 386 version) and renders in 
30 min to several days, depending on machine speed and image complexity.  

Snow Crash contains a line something like, "It used to be possible for a 
single hacker to write a complete program."  Those days may be vanishing, but
it's still possible for a single person to make some pretty exciting 
discoveries on his/her own, or in small informal groups, especially in fields
like cellular automata, image recognition, software architecture, etc.  You
don't need lots of fancy math or training to develop new stuff, just a good
imagination and a project to solve.  (That's the important thing -- having a
project.  Projects are made of up problems, and solving problems yields 
interesting solutions.)  As an example, I came across an article in the C
Users Journal recently detailing a technique for finding edges in an image.  
The technique was very, very simple -- take a pixel and it's eight neighbors.
Multiply that pixel and its neighbors by the values in the array

-1 -1 -1 
-1  8 -1
-1 -1 -1

add the results, and that's the new pixel.  Repeat for all pixels.  Pixels 
with a positive value are white.  Pixels with a 0 or negative value are black. 
What's the technique called?  "Image Convolution."  Yow.  This is really the
kind of stuff I prefer to a bazillion articles on object oriented programming
or writing device drivers.  Remember when computer magazines had "tips and
tricks" columns?  That's what I really miss.  The flow of information, as
Christopher notes, is one way, and it all seems to have become marketing info.
Bleah!  Byte used to have CODE in it.  I even have some issues that have
hardware schematics!  Man, if you've developed some twiddly little thing like
the Image Convolution idea, it's your hackerish duty to share the info and
send it into a magazine.  It's really easy:  

1)  Buy a few magazines that look like they might accept your material.
2)  Pick the likeliest looking one.  Phone them, and ask for their "author's
    guidelines."  Get the author's guidelines for all the other ones too.
3)  Write an article.  Make it perfect.  Stick to the guidelines like glue.
    Mail it in.
4)  Start work on the next brilliant idea you had.
5)  If you're rejected, rewrite the article for the next most likely magazine.
    Send it in.
6)  When it's accepted, collect your coupla hundred dollars, and blow it on 
    Pepsi and Crunch Tators.

(Remember, the whole world doesn't exist on Usenet.  Yet.)

You really can't imagine how fun and easy the graphical stuff like artificial
life and 3D rendering is until you try it. It's a bigger money maker than
cracking wares or writing viruses, that's fer sher. 

@Man

-- 
shaun@octel.com  ||  They lie, lie, lie and over simplify, I can't stannum; 
                 ||  They give me the fear.
@Man:  Hey...  You look like a floating disembodied head!
Beej:  Don't we all?
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk