NationStates Jolt Archive

I might be a nerd, but I often wondered what the people in NS use to program in, as operating system, as computer architecture, as method of internet access, as character set, as file format for images, for formatted text, for sound files? Preferably tell how the standards work and list those, which are freely usable ICly.


I pondered that Unicode might not suffice for the languages of NS and thus had an idea for something called MIKRE (from English 'migrate'). MIKRE is more like formatted text in so far as it consists of several segments of text which use their own representational engines and transliteration tables into the adequate default representational engine. So for example if you get a text in seleken but you do not have adequate seleken fonts, you can see the text in for example latin or rejistani characters. Only if this fails, for example because the DRE is using an ideographic alphabet without adequate means of MIKREization, a box-character is displayed.

MIKRE was invented by the Juniversiti Tani KaMaRi Kali (National University of KaMaRi City), later became a standard according to the Lasane jasika ve estandatije rejistaniha (Rejistani Board of Trade and Standardization). The current revision of this standard is 1.41421.


So tell me more about the acronym soup, your nations use!

OOC: You are so ridiculously over my head right now lol. I don't even know if this belongs here, General, on the moon, etc. o.O

I am refering to roleplay related things, so it does not belong into General. :)

To outline my intention with an example: Sometimes, I want a character to go online and look something up. Instead of writing something like: "Syku impatiently waits for her computer to start its graphical user interface, established a connection to the internet and started a browser" I want to be able to write something more detailed for example: "Syku impatiently waits for her somwhat SIstem to start TAREN 3.1415. The sound of the generic Hajis-compatible modem connecting to the lowcost provider of her lest distrust sounded, as if they had to agree on a lower bandwidth than normal. Syku sounded as if having Tourette's while starting Lynx." IE: when writing about nerdy things, I want to be able to add a few details without always having to explain everything.

It's really an interesting question because of the massive numbers of oceans, unfriendly nations, technologically backwards and unfriendly nations, authoritarian or censorship-heavy nations (we're talking worse than the Great Firewall of China here), vanishing nations (this happens ALL THE TIME) and so forth. All of which pose obstacles to laying down backbones, standard protocols, and generally everything that makes for a stable, unified global network.

I'd imagine that a lot of NS traffic gets routed through satellites, because they aren't vulnerable to a lot of the things that landlines on NS Earth would be - for example, what if your fiber backbone runs though a nation that suddenly ceases to exist?

As for protocols, I think we can assume that the vast majority of NS nations (let's say 80%):

A. are predominately human or humanoid
B. have their own national language

That makes for 60,000 different national languages. Assuming that 15% of those are ideographical languages with an average of 1000 characters, and the rest are phonetic with an average of 30 characters:

9000 ideographic languages * 1000 characters + 51,000 phonetic languages * 30 characters = 10,530,000 characters. Unicode can theoretically support about one million different characters. Even assuming that 50% of these characters are shared between at least two languages, you'll still need to use a 5-byte system to address the extra characters. (Which would make "NS-Unicode" files up to 25% more huuuuueg.)

There's also the problem of choosing a standard that EVERYBODY will agree to.

More realistically, there's probably some small subset of languages that large portions of NS Earth can read and write (such as American English or Japanese), and which the majority of international Internet communication takes place in.

At which point the problem becomes getting everyone to agree on a network protocol standard. NS Earth's internet is probably broken into a large number of smaller networks, each running their own protocols. Some networks are interconnected by "smart boxes" which understand multiple protocols and can translate back and forth, but on the whole you're probably going to end up staying inside your local network, whether it's the massive, high-tech Yut systems or a few shacks in bumfuck nowhere talking via packet radio.

The mark of a really good NS hacker would be the ability to understand and patch into other networks' protocols. No small feat! Not everyone uses TCP/IP, not everyone uses HTTP... even web page formats aren't reliably standardized - so you can't rely on HTML (or any other method of encoding data) to be readable to everyone.

In other news, I need to STOP USING WORDS. D:

Remember, the Internet was created by the US Military to provide a communications system that would survive a nuclear war. The land lines work because of the decentralized nature of the network. It is simply brilliant, and brilliantly simple.

Regarding web protocol; HTTP is but a subset of XML. XML is inherently decipherable; the structure is encoded within the datastream. Maybe not perfect, but a good place to start.

As for a global language, there's only ever been one, Esperanto!

- Higgins of Higgdom

Things like OSes, browsers are probably not necesarry to be fully explained a simple something like...


Roger pressed the button that turned on his computer, The screen flashed with the Microcosm Scenic start up screen. Soon it was showing a number of images with usernames underneath, Roger clicked his and entered his password. The screen changed to show his desktop almost a hundred icons spread across his desktop, he would need to clean it up some day, but he had something to do, something very Important.

Finally the network icon told him that he had access to the internet, he was glad for his broadband connection it made things so much easier and cheaper than dialing up.


I think we don't really need "universal" protocols, that's why we have IRL Gateways, we just need to have a limited set of standards so that devices can accomodate most approrpriate ones.

I think we don't really need "universal" protocols, that's why we have IRL Gateways, we just need to have a limited set of standards so that devices can accomodate most approrpriate ones.

I however want something, most of the people, I RP with agrees on :)