IMO, a large part of the problem is how closely the network code has to be coupled with the rest of the game. All game state data has to be transmitted, as well as the position, orientation, velocity, etc. Add in scripted events, and there's no simple general purpose solution to reusing the network logic.
Also, the internet is so unpredictable and varying in capabilities it is really hard to tune for bandwidth, loss, and latency. I know a lot of Descent 3 players were telling the game they had T1 speeds when they really were on dialup. That caused lots of dropped packets, terrible bouts of delayed packets (which looks like horrible lag), etc. All because they tried to send too many packets in too short of a time, thinking "faster is better" would give them a better experience.
As one of the Kahn developers (another one of them is sitting in the office next to mine), and one of the programmers of Descent 3 I have to respond.
First off, the Kahn/Kali days were loads of fun, playing Descent 1 over the internet back in 1996 is a great memory I still have.
IMO, the problems with D3 was that we never got the scale right for flying. D1/D2 had a feeling of speed because the tunnels were smaller and simpler. In D3 the designers tried to achieve a sense of massive complexes, which meant larger rooms and tunnels plus outdoor terrain. The problem there was the sense of flying fast was lost. I think this is the thing that disappointed most Descent fans. But I don't think that is what kept it from being a commercial success. I think the problem there was 1) feature creep made the development of D3 cost too much, 2) As you mentioned, the game was released in an era that had loads of hardware video card driver issues, which lead to tons of returns, and IMO the biggest issue: 3) Descent fatigue (lots of people bought D1/D2 because it was a unique idea, but by D3 they had already been there and done that).
Contrary to what you say though, D3 wasn't primarily developed for Glide. It was originally developed for Glide, but that's because at the time development started that was the only real option. A lot of effort was put into OpenGL, but there were constant driver issues causing us grief.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about complaining about the use of TCP/IP for the online game play. I wrote the network layer for D3 (the same layer is used for other games including Freespace II if I remember correctly), and it used only UDP/IP for in game play. I think a lot of the complaints about laggy play were unfair given the networks people were playing over (no fast action game works well when pings get to 700ms or more).
I'd love to be involved with Descent again, but I really doubt it will happen.
BTW, my son was born right after D3 was released, and he really likes to play it now, which is pretty cool.
I've personally worked closely with Sid on a case several years back where I was a technical consultant for the company I worked for on an IP case. Sid totally changed my opinion of lawyers for the better, and I seriously considered going to law school after my experience working with him. He's a super nice guy, and extremely smart.
We would meet late in the evening the night before a court appearance, and the next morning he would have a amazingly well written brief he stayed up all night writing based on the meeting the night before. If I ever need an IP attorney I would hire him in a second (If I could afford him). It's great to see him doing such important work.
I think you are confusing a theory and a hypothesis (or a hypothetical theory). A theory isn't really proven by experiments, but a hypothesis is. A theory changes as evidence changes.
What's not realistic? They have another $250k challenge to see who can extract the most oxygen from the regolith in 8 hours. If you wanted to establish a base, you need something to bring all that regolith to get oxygen from.
Me too: Aug 12 03:02:30 : Failed password for illegal user test from 217.160.240.131 port 33627 ssh2 Aug 12 03:02:33 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 217.160.240.131 port 33696 ssh2 Aug 12 03:02:41 : Failed password for illegal user user from 217.160.240.131 port 33938 ssh2 Aug 12 03:02:52 : Failed password for illegal user test from 217.160.240.131 port 34270 ssh2 Aug 12 08:15:50 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 3383 ssh2 Aug 12 08:15:51 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 3403 ssh2 Aug 12 08:15:54 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 211.238.160.28 port 3491 ssh2 Aug 12 08:15:55 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 211.238.160.28 port 3507 ssh2 Aug 12 08:16:07 : Failed password for illegal user user from 211.238.160.28 port 3786 ssh2 Aug 12 08:16:08 : Failed password for illegal user user from 211.238.160.28 port 3813 ssh2 Aug 12 08:16:23 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 4219 ssh2 Aug 12 08:16:25 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 4250 ssh2 Aug 12 10:17:16 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 1761 ssh2 Aug 12 10:17:20 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 194.78.243.110 port 1866 ssh2 Aug 12 10:17:30 : Failed password for illegal user user from 194.78.243.110 port 2168 ssh2 Aug 12 10:17:44 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 2570 ssh2 Aug 12 10:29:58 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 2402 ssh2 Aug 12 10:30:02 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 194.78.243.110 port 2510 ssh2 Aug 12 10:30:12 : Failed password for illegal user user from 194.78.243.110 port 2818 ssh2 Aug 12 10:30:26 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 3235 ssh2
I've been using valueweb for only a few weeks, but I've been very happy so far.
dedicated server with:
60GB disk space
1000 GB transfer (!!)
1.3 duron
512 MB RAM
1 IP
Whatever aps you want
$59 a month with a $99 setup. Check it out...
And no, I have nothing to do with them other than being a happy customer so far...
What does this have to do with patents? I don't think patents were involved here at all. X10 was a customer of the company who sued them.
From what I've read in other articles about this suit, they were sued because they refused to pay the commission for all those pop-under ads. Imagine if you started a company and designed a banner ad for a company. Your contract said you get a certain amount for each time it is used. Then after the company owes you half a million dollars, they decide not to pay. That is what this is about, not patents.
Read here for more information
*sigh*... Typical...
Re: ... amazing and IMPORTANT (!?!?!)
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
That is taken out of context...I said "To hard-core gamers, these games were amazing, and important".
What is important to me as a person, or important to a specific group of people need not be important in the grand scheme of things.
What I am going to eat for dinner tonight is important to me, but does that mean it has to compete with cancer research for it to be important?
Ouch. I just wrote what I thought of the book in a way I thought would help people decide if they wanted to read it or not. It actually takes guts to submit something like this to/., knowing how many people will be more than willing to criticize you.
Now, if you will kindly provide your true identity, I'd be glad to refund your full purchase price you paid for this review.
If you have any constructive criticism however, I'd love to hear it.
Woohoo! I was one of the developers of Descent3, and I am the person who facilitated the release of the source code for D1 and D2. More importantly, I've been a Descent fan since way back in the day when I played over IHHD and then later, Kali.
Now my 4 year old and I play descent about every day...he loves it!
One thing I didn't complain about in the review was how Descent was portrayed very briefly as a knock off of DOOM.:(
I thought the book was excellent. Since I wrote the review, I figured it would be obvious that all that means is I thought the book was excellent. Did I think the writing was perfect? No. Did I think the book was overall very interesting and entertaining? Yes. I wrote this review specifically for slashdot because I thought a lot of people here would have similar interests as I did. I didn't write a literary critique of the book, I just wrote what amounts to a summary of what I thought of the book. Hey, it's not like I was being paid to write this or anything.
Last fall I had my credit card number lifted from a small website I ordered some electronic parts from. They maxed out the card very fast, and many of the charges turned out to be for places selling penis enlargment products, and things of that sort. As it turned out, these items were shipped to other victims of credit card fraud as I found out when some packages arrived for me. I tracked the source down and found that they had used a different stolen credit card to ship items to me. I'm guessing this was a sort of calling card left by the morons^H^H^H^H^H^H thiefs who stole my card.
Of course there is value in asking the second question. If Americans had asked that question and decided to the Manhattan Project, then hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians would have lived. They did not proceed with the program without asking that question, because they are not stupid.
Maybe my analogy could use some adjustments. Of course when it's time to throw the switch and do something, that is the correct time to ask questions. But when you are still not even sure what the nature of an atom is, to think you must stop and ponder all the possible outcomes of what that knowledge will be, is in my opinion a waste of time.
Here we don't even know how to make anything remotely intelligent, and people want to worry about what rights AI beings might have, or whether it is moral to create them. My point is first get the knowledge, see what we can and can't do, and then have the discussion over what is the right thing to do.
Asimov's quote assumes a binary choice: ignorance or self destruction
Not at all. His point was that if people think that we shouldn't gain knowledge or pursue technology because it might somehow hurt or destroy us, they are commiting us to a life in which we will never be able to understand the world around us. Not that pursuit of knowledge will lead to destruction (I believe Asimov was an optimist), but that even if it does lead to destruction, it would be worth it to have the knowledge
It isn't a straw man at all. It is just saying that fear of bad consequences are no reason to not pursue knowledge, because knowledge is more important.
The quote does not imply we shouldn't be mindful of bad consequences, it just says that bad consequences are no reason to avoid knowledge. A straw man argument would be that we have to ignore the consequences if we are to pursue knowledge, and I don't think he was saying that at all.
That's just a bunch of mental masturbation that people who cannot handle science or reason use to keep people who can from making progress in this world.
Why don't you prove to me that you aren't just a thinking machine, a result of your biology and learned experiences. You can't? That is because all life is just a sophisticated machine, some capable of cognition higher than others.
Oh, and this is not flamebait. It might offend some people who want to believe, but it isn't flamebait!
It drives me crazy that people are so concerned about possible technologies, that they want to "slow down and think about the consequences of xxx".
This is really just unfounded fear. While we still don't know if something is possible, is not the time to worry about what problems we can concieve that it will bring. Knowledge is more important than worrying about some issues that may or may not arise if we are able to do something. It is good to ask "If we cause this atom to split, will it kill us?", but I do not think there is any value in saying "Maybe we shouldn't find out what happens if we split this atom, because if it causes an explosion, someone might use that knowledge to build a bomb..."
One of my favorite quotes is from Isaac Asimov:
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knoweldge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too. -- Isaac Asimov
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but to me, knowledge is most important.
Not always true. I worked for a company where we were sued for back overtime. When it went to court, we lost because we hadn't been tracking the persons time (no time card). This was a branch manager position, and the company's standpoint was that the manager worked 40 hours a week. But we didn't have proof that they didn't work more than that, so when they came up with a list of dates/times where they worked, we had to either prove they didn't work then, or pay. In this case, the state dept. of labor actually represented the employee in court.
If you buy an extra LED flashlight and some ultra-violet LEDs on ebay, you can make a nice *very* bright portable blacklight cheap. Great for rockhounding in the desert, finding bark scorpions (they glow), etc...Just don't shine it in your eyes...
I got an A in Calc 1, and I've got a 94% halfway through Calc 2 right now, and I'd have to agree with you. I might add though, that even more important than plowing is to DO ALL THE HOMEWORK. There is a direct coorelation between the amount of homework/sample problems people do and how well they understand math. There is a good coorelation between understanding math and the grade you get.
There have been several topics I was confused about, but I plowed through, then did 50 sample problems (over 20+ hours) and found aftrwards that now I understood it, and it was actually easy. It's like a sport, you have to practice!
Re:Stay away from this site
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Aww, come on. He didn't intend for the mailing list to be postable from anyone except for himself, and he shutdown the list pretty quickly. Yeah, I got a bunch of messages too, but it wasn't spam, it was people asking questions about how to do stuff, etc.
Then after less than one day he shut down the list and setup forums. Give him a break.
That might sound like a great idea in theory. The problem is that you cannot separate politics from a project that would be this big and involve this much money. The more nations that get involved, the slower and less effective it would become. All you have to do is look at the ISS, which is a mini version of what you suggest.
I disagree....for around $150 you can easily have all the hardware and software you need to experiment with (very powerful) FPGAs. That's cheaper than a lot of hobbies!
I hate to respond to such an obvious troll....but...
A project like this is very valuable. For one thing, it makes a great hobby. How much time does the average moron spend watching NFL? Take that time over a year and you can create some pretty cool (and valuable in many ways) technology. Even if nobody other than yourself ever uses it, it has value.
What is the value? Although you claim that employers don't care, it is projects like this that have made my career. I'm currently employed, making a decent living as an engineer, even though I have no degree (working on it still at age 29.95). I got a job offer from one of those top 100 employers who was looking for an engineer with a masters degree because they were so impressed with my portfolio of hardware/software projects I had 'hacked' together on my own. I actually didn't take the job because I was interested in pursuing a different job offer I got because of some software I had written and published online as a hobby. It got me attention, and the offers literally came pouring in.
If you are unemployed, by all means spend most of your time looking for a job....but there is a lot of value in showing that you are smart enough and motivated enough (even more rare) to complete a project like this on your own.
So you can go back to watching NFL while the rest of us do something useful.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, a large part of the problem is how closely the network code has to be coupled with the rest of the game. All game state data has to be transmitted, as well as the position, orientation, velocity, etc. Add in scripted events, and there's no simple general purpose solution to reusing the network logic.
Also, the internet is so unpredictable and varying in capabilities it is really hard to tune for bandwidth, loss, and latency. I know a lot of Descent 3 players were telling the game they had T1 speeds when they really were on dialup. That caused lots of dropped packets, terrible bouts of delayed packets (which looks like horrible lag), etc. All because they tried to send too many packets in too short of a time, thinking "faster is better" would give them a better experience.
As one of the Kahn developers (another one of them is sitting in the office next to mine), and one of the programmers of Descent 3 I have to respond.
First off, the Kahn/Kali days were loads of fun, playing Descent 1 over the internet back in 1996 is a great memory I still have.
IMO, the problems with D3 was that we never got the scale right for flying. D1/D2 had a feeling of speed because the tunnels were smaller and simpler. In D3 the designers tried to achieve a sense of massive complexes, which meant larger rooms and tunnels plus outdoor terrain. The problem there was the sense of flying fast was lost. I think this is the thing that disappointed most Descent fans. But I don't think that is what kept it from being a commercial success. I think the problem there was 1) feature creep made the development of D3 cost too much, 2) As you mentioned, the game was released in an era that had loads of hardware video card driver issues, which lead to tons of returns, and IMO the biggest issue: 3) Descent fatigue (lots of people bought D1/D2 because it was a unique idea, but by D3 they had already been there and done that).
Contrary to what you say though, D3 wasn't primarily developed for Glide. It was originally developed for Glide, but that's because at the time development started that was the only real option. A lot of effort was put into OpenGL, but there were constant driver issues causing us grief.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about complaining about the use of TCP/IP for the online game play. I wrote the network layer for D3 (the same layer is used for other games including Freespace II if I remember correctly), and it used only UDP/IP for in game play. I think a lot of the complaints about laggy play were unfair given the networks people were playing over (no fast action game works well when pings get to 700ms or more).
I'd love to be involved with Descent again, but I really doubt it will happen.
BTW, my son was born right after D3 was released, and he really likes to play it now, which is pretty cool.
Re: Sid Leach, the attorney who filed the motion:
I've personally worked closely with Sid on a case several years back where I was a technical consultant for the company I worked for on an IP case. Sid totally changed my opinion of lawyers for the better, and I seriously considered going to law school after my experience working with him. He's a super nice guy, and extremely smart.
We would meet late in the evening the night before a court appearance, and the next morning he would have a amazingly well written brief he stayed up all night writing based on the meeting the night before. If I ever need an IP attorney I would hire him in a second (If I could afford him). It's great to see him doing such important work.
I think you are confusing a theory and a hypothesis (or a hypothetical theory). A theory isn't really proven by experiments, but a hypothesis is. A theory changes as evidence changes.
What's not realistic? They have another $250k challenge to see who can extract the most oxygen from the regolith in 8 hours. If you wanted to establish a base, you need something to bring all that regolith to get oxygen from.
Me too:
Aug 12 03:02:30 : Failed password for illegal user test from 217.160.240.131 port 33627 ssh2
Aug 12 03:02:33 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 217.160.240.131 port 33696 ssh2
Aug 12 03:02:41 : Failed password for illegal user user from 217.160.240.131 port 33938 ssh2
Aug 12 03:02:52 : Failed password for illegal user test from 217.160.240.131 port 34270 ssh2
Aug 12 08:15:50 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 3383 ssh2
Aug 12 08:15:51 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 3403 ssh2
Aug 12 08:15:54 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 211.238.160.28 port 3491 ssh2
Aug 12 08:15:55 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 211.238.160.28 port 3507 ssh2
Aug 12 08:16:07 : Failed password for illegal user user from 211.238.160.28 port 3786 ssh2
Aug 12 08:16:08 : Failed password for illegal user user from 211.238.160.28 port 3813 ssh2
Aug 12 08:16:23 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 4219 ssh2
Aug 12 08:16:25 : Failed password for illegal user test from 211.238.160.28 port 4250 ssh2
Aug 12 10:17:16 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 1761 ssh2
Aug 12 10:17:20 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 194.78.243.110 port 1866 ssh2
Aug 12 10:17:30 : Failed password for illegal user user from 194.78.243.110 port 2168 ssh2
Aug 12 10:17:44 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 2570 ssh2
Aug 12 10:29:58 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 2402 ssh2
Aug 12 10:30:02 : Failed password for illegal user guest from 194.78.243.110 port 2510 ssh2
Aug 12 10:30:12 : Failed password for illegal user user from 194.78.243.110 port 2818 ssh2
Aug 12 10:30:26 : Failed password for illegal user test from 194.78.243.110 port 3235 ssh2
dedicated server with:
60GB disk space
1000 GB transfer (!!)
1.3 duron
512 MB RAM
1 IP
Whatever aps you want
$59 a month with a $99 setup.
Check it out...
And no, I have nothing to do with them other than being a happy customer so far...
From what I've read in other articles about this suit, they were sued because they refused to pay the commission for all those pop-under ads. Imagine if you started a company and designed a banner ad for a company. Your contract said you get a certain amount for each time it is used. Then after the company owes you half a million dollars, they decide not to pay. That is what this is about, not patents. Read here for more information
*sigh* ... Typical...
That is taken out of context...I said "To hard-core gamers, these games were amazing, and important".
What is important to me as a person, or important to a specific group of people need not be important in the grand scheme of things.
What I am going to eat for dinner tonight is important to me, but does that mean it has to compete with cancer research for it to be important?
Ouch. I just wrote what I thought of the book in a way I thought would help people decide if they wanted to read it or not. It actually takes guts to submit something like this to /., knowing how many people will be more than willing to criticize you.
Now, if you will kindly provide your true identity, I'd be glad to refund your full purchase price you paid for this review.
If you have any constructive criticism however, I'd love to hear it.
Woohoo! I was one of the developers of Descent3, and I am the person who facilitated the release of the source code for D1 and D2. More importantly, I've been a Descent fan since way back in the day when I played over IHHD and then later, Kali.
:(
Now my 4 year old and I play descent about every day...he loves it!
One thing I didn't complain about in the review was how Descent was portrayed very briefly as a knock off of DOOM.
I thought the book was excellent. Since I wrote the review, I figured it would be obvious that all that means is I thought the book was excellent. Did I think the writing was perfect? No. Did I think the book was overall very interesting and entertaining? Yes. I wrote this review specifically for slashdot because I thought a lot of people here would have similar interests as I did. I didn't write a literary critique of the book, I just wrote what amounts to a summary of what I thought of the book. Hey, it's not like I was being paid to write this or anything.
Last fall I had my credit card number lifted from a small website I ordered some electronic parts from. They maxed out the card very fast, and many of the charges turned out to be for places selling penis enlargment products, and things of that sort. As it turned out, these items were shipped to other victims of credit card fraud as I found out when some packages arrived for me. I tracked the source down and found that they had used a different stolen credit card to ship items to me. I'm guessing this was a sort of calling card left by the morons^H^H^H^H^H^H thiefs who stole my card.
Maybe my analogy could use some adjustments. Of course when it's time to throw the switch and do something, that is the correct time to ask questions. But when you are still not even sure what the nature of an atom is, to think you must stop and ponder all the possible outcomes of what that knowledge will be, is in my opinion a waste of time.
Here we don't even know how to make anything remotely intelligent, and people want to worry about what rights AI beings might have, or whether it is moral to create them. My point is first get the knowledge, see what we can and can't do, and then have the discussion over what is the right thing to do.
Not at all. His point was that if people think that we shouldn't gain knowledge or pursue technology because it might somehow hurt or destroy us, they are commiting us to a life in which we will never be able to understand the world around us. Not that pursuit of knowledge will lead to destruction (I believe Asimov was an optimist), but that even if it does lead to destruction, it would be worth it to have the knowledge
It isn't a straw man at all. It is just saying that fear of bad consequences are no reason to not pursue knowledge, because knowledge is more important.
The quote does not imply we shouldn't be mindful of bad consequences, it just says that bad consequences are no reason to avoid knowledge. A straw man argument would be that we have to ignore the consequences if we are to pursue knowledge, and I don't think he was saying that at all.
That's just a bunch of mental masturbation that people who cannot handle science or reason use to keep people who can from making progress in this world.
Why don't you prove to me that you aren't just a thinking machine, a result of your biology and learned experiences. You can't? That is because all life is just a sophisticated machine, some capable of cognition higher than others.
Oh, and this is not flamebait. It might offend some people who want to believe, but it isn't flamebait!
It drives me crazy that people are so concerned about possible technologies, that they want to "slow down and think about the consequences of xxx".
This is really just unfounded fear. While we still don't know if something is possible, is not the time to worry about what problems we can concieve that it will bring. Knowledge is more important than worrying about some issues that may or may not arise if we are able to do something. It is good to ask "If we cause this atom to split, will it kill us?", but I do not think there is any value in saying "Maybe we shouldn't find out what happens if we split this atom, because if it causes an explosion, someone might use that knowledge to build a bomb..."
One of my favorite quotes is from Isaac Asimov:
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but to me, knowledge is most important.
Not always true. I worked for a company where we were sued for back overtime. When it went to court, we lost because we hadn't been tracking the persons time (no time card). This was a branch manager position, and the company's standpoint was that the manager worked 40 hours a week. But we didn't have proof that they didn't work more than that, so when they came up with a list of dates/times where they worked, we had to either prove they didn't work then, or pay. In this case, the state dept. of labor actually represented the employee in court.
If you buy an extra LED flashlight and some ultra-violet LEDs on ebay, you can make a nice *very* bright portable blacklight cheap. Great for rockhounding in the desert, finding bark scorpions (they glow), etc...Just don't shine it in your eyes...
I got an A in Calc 1, and I've got a 94% halfway through Calc 2 right now, and I'd have to agree with you. I might add though, that even more important than plowing is to DO ALL THE HOMEWORK. There is a direct coorelation between the amount of homework/sample problems people do and how well they understand math. There is a good coorelation between understanding math and the grade you get.
There have been several topics I was confused about, but I plowed through, then did 50 sample problems (over 20+ hours) and found aftrwards that now I understood it, and it was actually easy. It's like a sport, you have to practice!
Aww, come on. He didn't intend for the mailing list to be postable from anyone except for himself, and he shutdown the list pretty quickly. Yeah, I got a bunch of messages too, but it wasn't spam, it was people asking questions about how to do stuff, etc.
Then after less than one day he shut down the list and setup forums. Give him a break.
That might sound like a great idea in theory. The problem is that you cannot separate politics from a project that would be this big and involve this much money. The more nations that get involved, the slower and less effective it would become. All you have to do is look at the ISS, which is a mini version of what you suggest.
I disagree....for around $150 you can easily have all the hardware and software you need to experiment with (very powerful) FPGAs. That's cheaper than a lot of hobbies!
Only if you buy the wrong ones....
A nice list of FPGA dev boards and their prices
A nice cheap (and well loaded) dev board ($149)
I've got one of these, they are real nice for $99
These guys have lots of good stuff too. Inexpensive, and nice. I own a bunch of stuff I bought from them.
I hate to respond to such an obvious troll....but...
A project like this is very valuable. For one thing, it makes a great hobby. How much time does the average moron spend watching NFL? Take that time over a year and you can create some pretty cool (and valuable in many ways) technology. Even if nobody other than yourself ever uses it, it has value.
What is the value? Although you claim that employers don't care, it is projects like this that have made my career. I'm currently employed, making a decent living as an engineer, even though I have no degree (working on it still at age 29.95). I got a job offer from one of those top 100 employers who was looking for an engineer with a masters degree because they were so impressed with my portfolio of hardware/software projects I had 'hacked' together on my own. I actually didn't take the job because I was interested in pursuing a different job offer I got because of some software I had written and published online as a hobby. It got me attention, and the offers literally came pouring in.
If you are unemployed, by all means spend most of your time looking for a job....but there is a lot of value in showing that you are smart enough and motivated enough (even more rare) to complete a project like this on your own.
So you can go back to watching NFL while the rest of us do something useful.