Even better (as far as "FPS experience" goes) was Photon in a genuine "Photon Center". They had darkly lit arena areas with lots of walls and halls and ramps to an upstairs area. The equipment was also heavy. The battery pack weighed ten pounds alone! I remember that I learned I could warm up by jogging in place while holding a pair of 2.5 gallon water jugs, just before leaving to go there.
It even had n00b fragging (a term which wouldn't be invented for at least another ten years), which I think was a main reason they died off. When people would form competition teams, instead of doing the intelligent thing and playing against each other for practice, most of the teams would play on one side and just frag noobs all evening, which doesn't do much to improve your skill, nor to encourage said noobs to come back the next week.
And FWIW, in Photon (at least in the original arena version), the guns were the receivers, and everything else was a transmitter. The player suits and the assorted targets had IR LEDs which would constantly flash a code. When you pulled the trigger, your equipment would look to see if it saw a code, and if so, it would send a radio message to the control computer, which would count the score and disable the target (also via radio).
So, Apple looks at this up-and-coming networking protocol that will be supported by Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS. It sees the advantages it will give to users if implemented correctly. Apple realizes it will be shut out of these networks for years using its current hardware. Apple collectively freaks.
Except for one thing. The question of Macs (and other non-PC devices with Ethernet ports) on the network with 802.1x type stuff is implemented has been an issue in the company where I work, which wants to implement this in the next year or so. There won't be a Mac supplicant for this in the near term. It looks like the general plan will be to identify Macs via their Ethernet MAC addresess. This should work fine except for those using PCMCIA wireless cards (there is a reason for the use of non-Apple PCMCIA wireless cards in Powerbooks at this time which I will not go into).
Re:The Book of Apple, Chapter 8...
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In that case, Microsoft will need to buy either Sun or SGI (or maybe even SCO?), and have the alpha geeks at that company take major positions in Microsoft, then rewrite their OS with a Unix base.
Because, after all, Apple was only saved when NeXT bought them for negative 400 million dollars.
It would have been a flop because it would have taken too long to get to market, and it would have been too expensive, just like the Lisa.
Not that they didn't use any good practices. Inside Macintosh shows the level of spec writing they went though. Sure, there were some ad-hoc parts, but mostly it was designed, rather than thrown together.
If you think that's expensive, how about the costs of Macs later than that? I have a Mac Week from September '91 with a list of prices for the new lineup of Macs. And you wouldn't even be able to buy the 400M HD models for another three or four months.
Unfortunately, MS Basic did some "naughty" things with low-memory globals, and at some point (probably 7.0) it stopped working properly. I tried it under Classic a few months ago and while it would start up, it would crash when you actually tried to use it. They came out with QuickBasic after that, but I never "acquired" a copy of it.
I wrote a Basic compiler using MS Basic back in summer '85. The linker took half an hour to link before I got it working, then the compiler took half an hour to compile before I got that working. And I still had to use a real ugly hack program I wrote called "SwapFork", which read the disk directory, found the file in question, then swapped its data and resource fork pointers, because this was before the Phone Book Inside Macintosh, and I didn't have a lot of info on how the A-traps worked, especially the paramblock ones.
I got my first mac in 1985, 128K+external floppy. I later got a Levco MonsterMac upgrade installed. Two frickin' megabytes. For over a year I would boot from a floppy that set up a 1.5M ramdisk. That thing was FAST (relatively) running off a ramdisk. I had to give that up with System 7, because it was no longer possible to system-switch to another disk.
Damn, I finally got to look at the "exceptions" list. I already have Big Nose Freaks Out, Toxic Crusaders, Tiny Toon Adventures, Moon Ranger, and Mario Bros., so I could have been only FIVE games away from a complete collection! (I have the box to Trolls On Treasure Island, but not the game)
Then again, I'd still be missing Bubble Bath Babes, Hot Slots, and Peek-a-Boo Poker. Oh well.
And the collection did have a Power Glove, after all.
I don't think "moralgorithm" is cromulent enough. Until I read the article, I thought it was about "moral" issues, not "morale" issues. Like how nice a team will play, or whether it will try to get away with fouls that the refs miss, or if they will just go for the hardest fouls they can.
I've already just about reached the 50% level, so no way am I paying that much to get half those titles all over again. One copy of the world's worst version of Xenophobe is enough for me.
As someone in TFA said, no power glove? But "It's so bad!"
Nice to look at, painful to use, impossible to keep working. In had much of what we have come to expect from modern controllers (except the D-pad): lots of buttons and an analog stick, with start/select/pause buttons on the controller itself.
While the fire buttons on the side were somewhat less painful than those of the Colecovision (at least they didn't need two pounds of force from your thumb), and favored either hand (the same two buttons were duplicated on both sides), Atari's bleeding-edge use of flex circuits was their main downfall.
In addition to the circuits being fragile (if you didn't know how to open the controller properly, you would ruin it), oxidation of the tin contacts made the buttons unreliable within a year, even if you didn't use them. One of the later versions had graphite coating on the contacts which made the buttons reliable, but Atari didn't realize this and settled on a final revision with uncoated contacts. They probably knew that gold plating would fix them but were too cheap by then to use gold.
And if the buttons didn't fail, one of the fifteen wires in the 6mm thick cable would break and make your control useless anyhow. Or one of the (non-socketed) CMOS input buffer chips on the motherboard would blow out.
It sucked for gamers, but was great for Atari. That thing had over a dozen patents associated with it. Too bad none of them related to ergonomics.
I actually made an adapter which connected one side of the fire button to a big piece of foil, then I would wrap another around my toe and clip it to the other side of the fire button. My "Foot Control[tm]" kicked total ass.
The correct solution here is to have the system create a random key upon startup and create a fresh filesystem where the logs will be stored. If the system is seized and powered off for cold anaylsis then the key will be lost. Not even the system admins would know it - and if they don't know it they can't be held liable for it even if the UK does consider it a crime to withhold decryption keys.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just put the logs on a RAM file system? Even then you might have to worry about what kind of stuff gets written into swap space, but it's sure a lot simpler than an encrypted file system with an immediately lost key.
The highest rez is (AFAIK) from aerial photography, and can be up to five years old in places. Austin's pics are a couple of years old, as you can tell by looking at the NW 183 construction near 620.
I'm disappointed that New Braunfels is still between high-rez areas, because I can't see Schlitterbahn.
Anyhow, enter "Smithville, TX" and switch to satellite view. I wonder if the letters were still in progress at the time the picture was taken.
Look closer. One AGP, two PCI, and a small connector that is probably PCI Express.
Still, I'm glad to see that it uses a coin battery. I'm tired of those damn 3.6V lithiums that love to die after only a year, even if you leave the computer on 24/7.
1) it's still going to use X-windows, not Quartz/Aqua
2) did you read the article yesterday about Codeweavers support? Apparently the Wine codebase works great under Linux, but BSD support is regularly broken.
But just how "normal"? Sure, it's enough to get NTLDR going, but can you install DOS on it? I didn't think that the NT/2K/XP boot process used too much of BIOS functionality. I'm pretty sure that once the kernel is loaded, most or all of BIOS is ignored.
They fixed it on the maps, but if you look at Elmendorf AFB just to the north of Anchorage, the satellite projection is still messed up. The most amusing part is the fighter planes on the tarmac. The ones pointing northward are fat, and the ones pointing eastward are thin.
I find the Mario and Zelda themes to be much catchier. Maybe it's because I never seriously played the NES Tetris at the time. Instead, I mostly played a ripoff for the Mac that had no sound whatsoever.
What's really interesting about the Zelda theme is that it was a last-minute thing. They were going to use Bolero, but found out that it was still under copyright. And who can forget Captain Lou Albano singing "Do The Mario"?
Nope, not for me, and been touch-typing since high school. Learned it the right way, too, back when it was still mostly for girls to become secretaries and typing pool droids.
If I have a problem with anything, it's that scrolly wheel on mice. It's less than comfortable to use that thing with my index finger. Sometimes I stand the mouse on its left side and use my thumb if I'm going to be doing nothing but scrolling for a minute or two. It would be great if it were under my thumb to begin with, but then maybe that might cause problems with just gripping the mouse. So it goes.
Their choices are probably going to be buy a new TV or switch to satellite or cable and continue to use their old TV.
Or to get a converter box. I've been watching digital TV for well over a year now using a tuner box. There's some talk about subsidized converter boxes, but right now one can set you back $200-$400. And it's not always easy to find one, because the big box electronics stores would rather sell you a subscription to satellite TV.
Wow, talk about a step backwards. Isn't openfirmware the reason powerbooks sleep and come out of standby immediately (unlike my windows laptops... all of them take approx 5-15 seconds to wake up)
No. They used to take that long to wake up in the OS 9 days, apparently mostly because of Open Transport (the networking stack).
The reason they wake up immediately under OS X is because The Steve complained about it. He made an argument that if you multiply all those 5-15 seconds by the number of times it gets done, it adds up to hundreds of years. So by waking up faster, "dozens of lifetimes" are saved.
The reason Windows laptops take so long to wake up (assume you're not just suspending to disk) is simply because nobody cared to fix it.
The vendors have said that autostereo LCDs are on the way in 12 to 18 months, but what can I do in the meantime?
Stock up on CRTs at closeout prices?
The main problem I have with CRTs is getting them to die so I can replace them with an LCD. By the time they die, maybe OLED will be out. I'd love to have an OLED laptop display that doesn't wash out in even indirect sunlight.
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It even had n00b fragging (a term which wouldn't be invented for at least another ten years), which I think was a main reason they died off. When people would form competition teams, instead of doing the intelligent thing and playing against each other for practice, most of the teams would play on one side and just frag noobs all evening, which doesn't do much to improve your skill, nor to encourage said noobs to come back the next week.
And FWIW, in Photon (at least in the original arena version), the guns were the receivers, and everything else was a transmitter. The player suits and the assorted targets had IR LEDs which would constantly flash a code. When you pulled the trigger, your equipment would look to see if it saw a code, and if so, it would send a radio message to the control computer, which would count the score and disable the target (also via radio).
And for the truly hardcore, you can put ice in the tank along with the water.
Except for one thing. The question of Macs (and other non-PC devices with Ethernet ports) on the network with 802.1x type stuff is implemented has been an issue in the company where I work, which wants to implement this in the next year or so. There won't be a Mac supplicant for this in the near term. It looks like the general plan will be to identify Macs via their Ethernet MAC addresess. This should work fine except for those using PCMCIA wireless cards (there is a reason for the use of non-Apple PCMCIA wireless cards in Powerbooks at this time which I will not go into).
Where can I buy "Teh Snappy Inside" stickers?
Because, after all, Apple was only saved when NeXT bought them for negative 400 million dollars.
Not that they didn't use any good practices. Inside Macintosh shows the level of spec writing they went though. Sure, there were some ad-hoc parts, but mostly it was designed, rather than thrown together.
PB 100 2/20 no floppy. . . $2299
PB 100 2/20 ext floppy . . $2499
PB 140 2/40. . . . . . . . $3199
PB 140 4/40. . . . . . . . $3499
PB 170 4/40 2400 fax modem $4599
ClasII 2/40. . . . . . . . $1899
ClasII 4/80. . . . . . . . $2399
Qdr700 4/floppy. . . . . . $5699 (with no HD!)
Qdr700 4/80. . . . . . . . $6399
Qdr700 4/160 . . . . . . . $6999
Qdr700 4/400 . . . . . . . $7699 (these were the days of $1000+ HDs)
Qdr900 4/floppy. . . . . . $7199 (with no HD!)
Qdr900 4/160 . . . . . . . $8499
Qdr900 4/400 . . . . . . . $9199
I wrote a Basic compiler using MS Basic back in summer '85. The linker took half an hour to link before I got it working, then the compiler took half an hour to compile before I got that working. And I still had to use a real ugly hack program I wrote called "SwapFork", which read the disk directory, found the file in question, then swapped its data and resource fork pointers, because this was before the Phone Book Inside Macintosh, and I didn't have a lot of info on how the A-traps worked, especially the paramblock ones.
I got my first mac in 1985, 128K+external floppy. I later got a Levco MonsterMac upgrade installed. Two frickin' megabytes. For over a year I would boot from a floppy that set up a 1.5M ramdisk. That thing was FAST (relatively) running off a ramdisk. I had to give that up with System 7, because it was no longer possible to system-switch to another disk.
Then again, I'd still be missing Bubble Bath Babes, Hot Slots, and Peek-a-Boo Poker. Oh well.
And the collection did have a Power Glove, after all.
I don't think "moralgorithm" is cromulent enough. Until I read the article, I thought it was about "moral" issues, not "morale" issues. Like how nice a team will play, or whether it will try to get away with fouls that the refs miss, or if they will just go for the hardest fouls they can.
As someone in TFA said, no power glove? But "It's so bad!"
Meanwhile, PA is TU.
While the fire buttons on the side were somewhat less painful than those of the Colecovision (at least they didn't need two pounds of force from your thumb), and favored either hand (the same two buttons were duplicated on both sides), Atari's bleeding-edge use of flex circuits was their main downfall.
In addition to the circuits being fragile (if you didn't know how to open the controller properly, you would ruin it), oxidation of the tin contacts made the buttons unreliable within a year, even if you didn't use them. One of the later versions had graphite coating on the contacts which made the buttons reliable, but Atari didn't realize this and settled on a final revision with uncoated contacts. They probably knew that gold plating would fix them but were too cheap by then to use gold.
And if the buttons didn't fail, one of the fifteen wires in the 6mm thick cable would break and make your control useless anyhow. Or one of the (non-socketed) CMOS input buffer chips on the motherboard would blow out.
It sucked for gamers, but was great for Atari. That thing had over a dozen patents associated with it. Too bad none of them related to ergonomics.
I actually made an adapter which connected one side of the fire button to a big piece of foil, then I would wrap another around my toe and clip it to the other side of the fire button. My "Foot Control[tm]" kicked total ass.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just put the logs on a RAM file system? Even then you might have to worry about what kind of stuff gets written into swap space, but it's sure a lot simpler than an encrypted file system with an immediately lost key.
I'm disappointed that New Braunfels is still between high-rez areas, because I can't see Schlitterbahn.
Anyhow, enter "Smithville, TX" and switch to satellite view. I wonder if the letters were still in progress at the time the picture was taken.
Still, I'm glad to see that it uses a coin battery. I'm tired of those damn 3.6V lithiums that love to die after only a year, even if you leave the computer on 24/7.
1) it's still going to use X-windows, not Quartz/Aqua
2) did you read the article yesterday about Codeweavers support? Apparently the Wine codebase works great under Linux, but BSD support is regularly broken.
But just how "normal"? Sure, it's enough to get NTLDR going, but can you install DOS on it? I didn't think that the NT/2K/XP boot process used too much of BIOS functionality. I'm pretty sure that once the kernel is loaded, most or all of BIOS is ignored.
I had to paws after that one. Fur sure.
They fixed it on the maps, but if you look at Elmendorf AFB just to the north of Anchorage, the satellite projection is still messed up. The most amusing part is the fighter planes on the tarmac. The ones pointing northward are fat, and the ones pointing eastward are thin.
What's really interesting about the Zelda theme is that it was a last-minute thing. They were going to use Bolero, but found out that it was still under copyright. And who can forget Captain Lou Albano singing "Do The Mario"?
If I have a problem with anything, it's that scrolly wheel on mice. It's less than comfortable to use that thing with my index finger. Sometimes I stand the mouse on its left side and use my thumb if I'm going to be doing nothing but scrolling for a minute or two. It would be great if it were under my thumb to begin with, but then maybe that might cause problems with just gripping the mouse. So it goes.
Or to get a converter box. I've been watching digital TV for well over a year now using a tuner box. There's some talk about subsidized converter boxes, but right now one can set you back $200-$400. And it's not always easy to find one, because the big box electronics stores would rather sell you a subscription to satellite TV.
No. They used to take that long to wake up in the OS 9 days, apparently mostly because of Open Transport (the networking stack).
The reason they wake up immediately under OS X is because The Steve complained about it. He made an argument that if you multiply all those 5-15 seconds by the number of times it gets done, it adds up to hundreds of years. So by waking up faster, "dozens of lifetimes" are saved.
The reason Windows laptops take so long to wake up (assume you're not just suspending to disk) is simply because nobody cared to fix it.
Stock up on CRTs at closeout prices?
The main problem I have with CRTs is getting them to die so I can replace them with an LCD. By the time they die, maybe OLED will be out. I'd love to have an OLED laptop display that doesn't wash out in even indirect sunlight.