Using the criteria specified by Mannila & de Raadt [1], the answer is: NO! As far as I can tell, Fortran is just as bad as C by their criteria.
[1] L. Mannila & M. de Raadt: An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming, Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea conference on Computing education research: Koli Calling 2006
When they can not find the @ key, they usually give up.
How do you type an email address in Iceland?
By pressing AltGr-Q to get an @ symbol, at least on XP. European keyboards often move characters that are seldom used (in whatever country the layout corresponds to) around to strange places to make room for extra alphabetic characters and dead keys with accents that can be combined with letter keys to produce accented characters. To compensate, the AltGr key (which replaces Right Alt) is added as an extra shift key. Apple keyboard layouts are, naturally, completely different, so one of the quickest ways to reduce a Finnish hacker to tears is to make him code on a Mac; for example, braces are hidden behind Alt-Shift-8 and Alt-Shift-9 (instead of the normal AltGr-7 and AltGr-0) and more often than not are not shown on the key tops!
Part of the problem is programmers who don't care about international use (often Americans) and start using symbols that are easy for them to type but uncommon in other countries. That said, lots of European layouts feature gratuitous layout changes; for example, the German keyboard swaps Y and Z for no apparent reason.
In conclusion, I'd say using an unusual keyboard layout is more likely to drive the technically-minded bonkers than the artistic. Unless it's Dvorak.
Re:About WOW and a game like rogue
on
A History of Rogue
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Simple games can be the best games... I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight
Come on, who really has a Klingon-supporting font installed and set in the web browser
Surprisingly many: X.org and XFree86 seem to include a font called "MUTT ClearlyU PUA" that includes the Klingon alphabet and numerals according to the ConScript Unicode Registry encoding for Klingon.
Try this Klingon Unicode test page. Despite many browsers (e.g. Firefox) substituting glyphs from whatever font happens to support a character, if necessary, you may have to specify the exact font name to avoid getting the proper Klingon overridden by another font that uses the same code points for other things (for example, GhostScript adds "Standard Symbols L" that, annoyingly, overrides some of the Klingon characters), since the Unicode Consortium declined to standardise Klingon.
Is there anything in the linked article that says that WINE with DX10 support will convert DX10 calls to DX9 or OpenGL? If so, I missed it. I'd guess that in order to use DX10 in WINE you'll need a DX10 card.
Graphics cards don't implement APIs, software does (although the graphics card's feature set does affect strongly how much work the main CPU has to do). Wine implements the DirectX API using OpenGL, so the features supported by your OpenGL implementation are going to be the limiting factor.
For good performance, though, you will need a card that supports the features added in DX10, but as OpenGL extensions. In practice, this means that you need a "DX10 card" to get all features running well, but some may work well on cards that do not support all DirectX 10 features.
First off, the game is being capped at 60Hz, but that says nothing about the minimum. The developers will still have to anticipate the game running on a system that cannot support 60Hz (at least some of the time), so regardless they'll have to support "variable" time steps.
Not at all. In many cases, the game logic uses negligible processing time compared to the graphics. This allows the game itself to run at a fixed speed (which is great for simplicity and consistency) and skip drawing frames to catch up.
but requiring me to go get a third party application purely to keep my monitor from being forced to 60hz every damn time I boot up the game pisses me off.
There are two possible reasons for this:
The application explicitly requests a 60 Hz refresh rate; for many applications it makes sense to match the refresh rate to the frame rate, which may be fixed either to have a consistent frame rate over all systems (and 60 Hz is more or less universal for PCs) or because you have content with a specific frame rate (e.g. 60 fields/s M ("NTSC") video).
The operating system or video driver defaults to 60 Hz or overrides the selected value.
OpenGL does not even support switching screen modes and often relies on OS-specific mechanisms. DirectX often suffers in my experience (and based on some web searches, in many others') from similar problems and the most common X11 implementations provide screen mode switching mechanisms that are clearly independent of OpenGL and easily (in the "just write lots of numbers into a text file" sense) configured for specific monitor timings.
In conclusion, I can probably make some of the resident Linux zealots happy by saying your problems are probably with Windows, not OpenGL.
With Wine under the LGPL (making much of CrossOver LGPL) and CodeWeavers supporting Wine development, this will probably result in standard Wine also supporting DirectX 10 soon. I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP. Both of these would be nice.
This sort of discussion is meaningless without a decent definition of "influential". I suggest "introduced central ideas to gaming that are well known", which can then be quantified based on e.g. number of players. Games that introduce important ideas can be said to create their own genres.
So, for example, taking modern genres to start off with, for the real-time strategy genre, the most influential game could be Dune II, from which the Command & Conquer, WarCraft and StarCraft series derive. For first-person shooters, most of the ideas were introduced in either Wolfenstein 3D (basic FPS concept) or Doom (up/down movement, many interactions with the environment such as triggering doors and lifts). The platform game gets much of its ideas from Space Panic (platforms) and Donkey Kong (jumping).
Standard disclaimer: legalese may not be 100% accurate. I am not a lawyer.
Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi) is shocked by today's decision by the Helsinki Administrative Court. The court downplayed the problems of e-voting and declined to annul the result of the election. Thus, the elections will not be repeated unless the Supreme Administrative Court overturns the decision. After last year's municipal elections, it was found that 232 voters' votes were lost.
Effi assisted in 16 complaints regarding e-voting in the three municipalities in which it was trialled. Based on the witness and expert statements gathered by Effi, the problems were due, amongst other things, to machines freezing at the moment of voting, inadequate testing, user interface design issues, not fixing detected problems and incorrect instructions. In some trial municipalities, even one vote could have changed the members of the council that was elected.
A central basis for the decision was that "A failure rate of slightly more than 2% can not, as such, be considered to show erroneous activity on the behalf of the election authority... The threshold for repeating an election must also be high even with respect to realising basic state rights."
Lawyer Mikko Välimäki, the complainants' advocate, comments: "The decision does not seem to be well founded. The problems are undeniable, and the election result was incorrect. The Administrative Court's line chips away at the trust in Finnish democracy. What happened to the basic rights of the "slightly more than 2%"?"
The vice chair of Effi, Ville Oksanen, wonders: "I understand that we agree that the election trials had serious problems. Now, however, the Administrative Court has accepted a situation in which it is clear that the result of the election did not correspond to the will of the voters. The last candidates to pass are within the margin of error of the system." Oksanen continues: "Not even the municipalities have denied the existence of problems in the judicial process or the possible effect of the missing votes on the results of the election. Going by the Administrative Court's logic, we could give up recounting votes, because the results don't change by more than a few votes anyway. The constitution guarantees everyone an equal right to vote. It doesn't say anything about 98%!"
Jari Arkko, who complained about the elections in Kauniainen, intends to appeal the decision: "We will study the court's decision in the next few days, but we have previously considered the matter to be so important in principle that we have reason enough to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court." In Vihti, complainant Tero Miettinen agrees: "A badly implemented system should not decide who is elected to the council of my home town. The margin of error in the electronic voting was many times that of the traditional election system. It is hard to understand why the Administrative Court does not consider this an indication that the system has failed."
Finnish municipal elections are always by the D'Hondt method, so the result can be strongly affected by a few additional votes. In fact, if the missing votes were all for one candidate, that candidate would have received the most votes.
Can't remember the exact name (Pac-3D or Pac-World or Pac-Maze, something like that), but there was a pseudo-3D version of Pac-Man where you could jump over the ghosts and some of the walls of the maze.
Pac-Mania? Isometric projection was big back then, and a reasonable way to do 3D quickly and easily with sprite-based graphics; perhaps it's due for a come-back?
To all those patting themselves on their back, giving each other high-fives that their closed source NVidia Linux drivers work for them *today*, fine, enjoy. Don't come crying to us tomorrow when NVidia has decided to abandon them, and only support newer hardware, and newer kernels. If the source was available, drivers never need become abandonware, your 'older' cards would still be supported, and people would start, maybe just start, to really see the freedom that people like Stallman talk about.
Personally, I'd rather see fully functional drivers for current hardware than for horribly obsolete stuff; unlike e.g. the X.org radeonhd drivers, NVIDIA delivers this. I have yet to see complete and free graphics drivers being released for any major chipset as quickly as closed ones.
Also, NVIDIA still provides legacy drivers all the way back to the Riva TNT (from 1998!) with full OpenGL and XVideo acceleration. I have an old Pentium III with a TNT2 running the latest openSUSE release on which I often use 3D and video, both of which are perfectly stable. Even if NVIDIA does drop support for older hardware, the setup I have will not stop working (although switching to a newer kernel could be problematic; support is already slowing down and getting unofficial). Seeing as running a current distro on 9-year old hardware is a pain anyway, there is little reason to upgrade. The primary reason I keep this machine around is for 90s retrogaming, the Linux installation is mostly there because it's possible, so it's really at the far end of reasonable to expect it to work, and I doubt many people would bother.
Finally, the free software community is not a magic bullet. Just because the source and specs are out there, there's no guarantee that anyone will maintain the driver. I've had several experiences with open drivers (even in the main kernel tree) with known bugs that never get fixed. Doing the job yourself or hiring someone to do it is probably going to be more expensive than simply replacing the hardware.
In conclusion, if NVIDIA does do something really stupid, we have someone to go cry to who is getting paid to care: NVIDIA. They mess up, we take our business elsewhere. In the meantime, I, for one, am happy (from the pragmatic point of view) with their approach.
AC power is almost universally a sine wave (or close) with a frequency of 50 or 60 Hz (i.e. cycles per second). Each cycle contains two peaks, one negative and one positive. As a light bulb works equally well irrespective of the direction of current, you get a 100 or 120 Hz cycle in the power output.
To my knowledge, two companies have expressed an interest in creating a sequel to Star Control II - The Ur-Quan Masters: Toys for Bob (the creators of Star Control and Star Control II; warning: site is entirely Flash) and Stardock (better known for strategy games like Galactic Civilizations).
Toys for Bob holds the copyright to Star Control II and its characters, which allowed them to open source the game (or, to be exact, a crude attempt to get the enhanced 3DO CD version to run on Windows, which has since been cleaned up and gained additional features such as network play) as The Ur-Quan Masters a few years ago (code under GPL 2 or later, content under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5).
The reason for dropping the name "Star Control" and using the subtitle is simple: the Star Control trademark is owned by Atari (a.k.a. Infogrames, who bought Star Control's publisher Accolade).
In other words, TFB has all the rights to make a sequel except the name (in fact, with the open sourcing, anyone could create a sequel, albeit non-commercially). However, since TFB is owned by Activision, they can't work on whatever they like (without being fired). TFB have stated on their news page that they need help convincing Activision to finance a sequel to Star Control II; they have the will, the skill and the rights to do so (albeit not the name, but that's secondary).
Why is it reasonable for Steam to run at startup by default?
I don't think that it is reasonable by the way. It is pure laziness on the part of software developers.
Would you care to justify that opinion? I find it hard to see why it's such a big problem.
No matter how you slice it, running at startup by default with an easy option to turn it off is much better than e.g. RealPlayer v10's infernal pop-ups all over the place (just making it stop popping stuff up is a pain, never mind removing the automatic startup "feature"). This is enough in my view to move this aspect of Steam from "serious pain" to "mildly annoying". It's reasonable because it's easily detected and corrected. Also, letting Steam do its thing at system boot has some benefits (such as logging in to Steam and getting updates before you decide to play). Valve made the choice that is more convenient for the common user (or at least the heavily Steam-using user), at the expense of using a little CPU time and memory. In any case, I just toggled the check box when I saw it and got what I wanted with practically no effort, so I'm happy.
Now, having to log in to a network service just to play a single-player game, that's the real problem; the off-line mode in Steam is a bit on the tricky side to get running (you easily end up with games that don't start). It's still less annoying than trying to find the DVD and inserting that, but I'd be happier if I could just run the game directly with a single double-click on a desktop icon (I'd also be a lot happier if I had a nice and stable Linux-native version, but that would really be an unreasonable demand).
Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not.
Figuring out what the first video game or first computer game is quickly becomes a matter of definitions. If you allow games that could be played without a computer, e.g. Noughts and Crosses, OXO on the EDSAC in 1952 appears to be the first computer game. U.S. patent #2455992 from 1947 describes an early electronic game (arguably a precursor to Missile Command) implemented using technology similar to Tennis for Two.
Slashdot Mirror
Using the criteria specified by Mannila & de Raadt [1], the answer is: NO! As far as I can tell, Fortran is just as bad as C by their criteria.
[1] L. Mannila & M. de Raadt: An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming, Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea conference on Computing education research: Koli Calling 2006
When they can not find the @ key, they usually give up.
How do you type an email address in Iceland?
By pressing AltGr-Q to get an @ symbol, at least on XP. European keyboards often move characters that are seldom used (in whatever country the layout corresponds to) around to strange places to make room for extra alphabetic characters and dead keys with accents that can be combined with letter keys to produce accented characters. To compensate, the AltGr key (which replaces Right Alt) is added as an extra shift key. Apple keyboard layouts are, naturally, completely different, so one of the quickest ways to reduce a Finnish hacker to tears is to make him code on a Mac; for example, braces are hidden behind Alt-Shift-8 and Alt-Shift-9 (instead of the normal AltGr-7 and AltGr-0) and more often than not are not shown on the key tops!
Part of the problem is programmers who don't care about international use (often Americans) and start using symbols that are easy for them to type but uncommon in other countries. That said, lots of European layouts feature gratuitous layout changes; for example, the German keyboard swaps Y and Z for no apparent reason.
In conclusion, I'd say using an unusual keyboard layout is more likely to drive the technically-minded bonkers than the artistic. Unless it's Dvorak.
Simple games can be the best games... I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight
Have you tried The Ur-Quan Masters?
However, I'd hesitate to call Starflight or Rogue "simple". Many of these games have quite a lot of depth compared to the FPS of the week.
Come on, who really has a Klingon-supporting font installed and set in the web browser
Surprisingly many: X.org and XFree86 seem to include a font called "MUTT ClearlyU PUA" that includes the Klingon alphabet and numerals according to the ConScript Unicode Registry encoding for Klingon.
Try this Klingon Unicode test page. Despite many browsers (e.g. Firefox) substituting glyphs from whatever font happens to support a character, if necessary, you may have to specify the exact font name to avoid getting the proper Klingon overridden by another font that uses the same code points for other things (for example, GhostScript adds "Standard Symbols L" that, annoyingly, overrides some of the Klingon characters), since the Unicode Consortium declined to standardise Klingon.
Qapla'!
Is there anything in the linked article that says that WINE with DX10 support will convert DX10 calls to DX9 or OpenGL? If so, I missed it. I'd guess that in order to use DX10 in WINE you'll need a DX10 card.
Graphics cards don't implement APIs, software does (although the graphics card's feature set does affect strongly how much work the main CPU has to do). Wine implements the DirectX API using OpenGL, so the features supported by your OpenGL implementation are going to be the limiting factor.
For good performance, though, you will need a card that supports the features added in DX10, but as OpenGL extensions. In practice, this means that you need a "DX10 card" to get all features running well, but some may work well on cards that do not support all DirectX 10 features.
First off, the game is being capped at 60Hz, but that says nothing about the minimum. The developers will still have to anticipate the game running on a system that cannot support 60Hz (at least some of the time), so regardless they'll have to support "variable" time steps.
Not at all. In many cases, the game logic uses negligible processing time compared to the graphics. This allows the game itself to run at a fixed speed (which is great for simplicity and consistency) and skip drawing frames to catch up.
If you don't recognize it, remove it. That's one threat vector on your system.
I agree. Users removing system components at random will almost certainly cause denial of service, so they're certainly a threat vector.
but requiring me to go get a third party application purely to keep my monitor from being forced to 60hz every damn time I boot up the game pisses me off.
There are two possible reasons for this:
OpenGL does not even support switching screen modes and often relies on OS-specific mechanisms. DirectX often suffers in my experience (and based on some web searches, in many others') from similar problems and the most common X11 implementations provide screen mode switching mechanisms that are clearly independent of OpenGL and easily (in the "just write lots of numbers into a text file" sense) configured for specific monitor timings.
In conclusion, I can probably make some of the resident Linux zealots happy by saying your problems are probably with Windows, not OpenGL.
With Wine under the LGPL (making much of CrossOver LGPL) and CodeWeavers supporting Wine development, this will probably result in standard Wine also supporting DirectX 10 soon. I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP. Both of these would be nice.
This sort of discussion is meaningless without a decent definition of "influential". I suggest "introduced central ideas to gaming that are well known", which can then be quantified based on e.g. number of players. Games that introduce important ideas can be said to create their own genres.
So, for example, taking modern genres to start off with, for the real-time strategy genre, the most influential game could be Dune II, from which the Command & Conquer, WarCraft and StarCraft series derive. For first-person shooters, most of the ideas were introduced in either Wolfenstein 3D (basic FPS concept) or Doom (up/down movement, many interactions with the environment such as triggering doors and lifts). The platform game gets much of its ideas from Space Panic (platforms) and Donkey Kong (jumping).
Can't you download Firefox on another machine first and transfer it by removable media?
You expect a person getting their first computer to know how to do this?
I expect them to have some friend, relative, colleague or similar who knows. Everyone I know does. B-)
Don't ISPs distribute installation discs any more? Can't you download Firefox on another machine first and transfer it by removable media?
With just a little planning ahead, you don't need a browser to get a browser.
Standard disclaimer: legalese may not be 100% accurate. I am not a lawyer.
Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi) is shocked by today's decision by the Helsinki Administrative Court. The court downplayed the problems of e-voting and declined to annul the result of the election. Thus, the elections will not be repeated unless the Supreme Administrative Court overturns the decision. After last year's municipal elections, it was found that 232 voters' votes were lost.
Effi assisted in 16 complaints regarding e-voting in the three municipalities in which it was trialled. Based on the witness and expert statements gathered by Effi, the problems were due, amongst other things, to machines freezing at the moment of voting, inadequate testing, user interface design issues, not fixing detected problems and incorrect instructions. In some trial municipalities, even one vote could have changed the members of the council that was elected.
A central basis for the decision was that "A failure rate of slightly more than 2% can not, as such, be considered to show erroneous activity on the behalf of the election authority... The threshold for repeating an election must also be high even with respect to realising basic state rights."
Lawyer Mikko Välimäki, the complainants' advocate, comments: "The decision does not seem to be well founded. The problems are undeniable, and the election result was incorrect. The Administrative Court's line chips away at the trust in Finnish democracy. What happened to the basic rights of the "slightly more than 2%"?"
The vice chair of Effi, Ville Oksanen, wonders: "I understand that we agree that the election trials had serious problems. Now, however, the Administrative Court has accepted a situation in which it is clear that the result of the election did not correspond to the will of the voters. The last candidates to pass are within the margin of error of the system." Oksanen continues: "Not even the municipalities have denied the existence of problems in the judicial process or the possible effect of the missing votes on the results of the election. Going by the Administrative Court's logic, we could give up recounting votes, because the results don't change by more than a few votes anyway. The constitution guarantees everyone an equal right to vote. It doesn't say anything about 98%!"
Jari Arkko, who complained about the elections in Kauniainen, intends to appeal the decision: "We will study the court's decision in the next few days, but we have previously considered the matter to be so important in principle that we have reason enough to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court." In Vihti, complainant Tero Miettinen agrees: "A badly implemented system should not decide who is elected to the council of my home town. The margin of error in the electronic voting was many times that of the traditional election system. It is hard to understand why the Administrative Court does not consider this an indication that the system has failed."
Finnish municipal elections are always by the D'Hondt method, so the result can be strongly affected by a few additional votes. In fact, if the missing votes were all for one candidate, that candidate would have received the most votes.
Can't remember the exact name (Pac-3D or Pac-World or Pac-Maze, something like that), but there was a pseudo-3D version of Pac-Man where you could jump over the ghosts and some of the walls of the maze.
Pac-Mania? Isometric projection was big back then, and a reasonable way to do 3D quickly and easily with sprite-based graphics; perhaps it's due for a come-back?
Personally, I'd rather see fully functional drivers for current hardware than for horribly obsolete stuff; unlike e.g. the X.org radeonhd drivers, NVIDIA delivers this. I have yet to see complete and free graphics drivers being released for any major chipset as quickly as closed ones.
Also, NVIDIA still provides legacy drivers all the way back to the Riva TNT (from 1998!) with full OpenGL and XVideo acceleration. I have an old Pentium III with a TNT2 running the latest openSUSE release on which I often use 3D and video, both of which are perfectly stable. Even if NVIDIA does drop support for older hardware, the setup I have will not stop working (although switching to a newer kernel could be problematic; support is already slowing down and getting unofficial). Seeing as running a current distro on 9-year old hardware is a pain anyway, there is little reason to upgrade. The primary reason I keep this machine around is for 90s retrogaming, the Linux installation is mostly there because it's possible, so it's really at the far end of reasonable to expect it to work, and I doubt many people would bother.
Finally, the free software community is not a magic bullet. Just because the source and specs are out there, there's no guarantee that anyone will maintain the driver. I've had several experiences with open drivers (even in the main kernel tree) with known bugs that never get fixed. Doing the job yourself or hiring someone to do it is probably going to be more expensive than simply replacing the hardware.
In conclusion, if NVIDIA does do something really stupid, we have someone to go cry to who is getting paid to care: NVIDIA. They mess up, we take our business elsewhere. In the meantime, I, for one, am happy (from the pragmatic point of view) with their approach.
AC power is almost universally a sine wave (or close) with a frequency of 50 or 60 Hz (i.e. cycles per second). Each cycle contains two peaks, one negative and one positive. As a light bulb works equally well irrespective of the direction of current, you get a 100 or 120 Hz cycle in the power output.
To my knowledge, two companies have expressed an interest in creating a sequel to Star Control II - The Ur-Quan Masters: Toys for Bob (the creators of Star Control and Star Control II; warning: site is entirely Flash) and Stardock (better known for strategy games like Galactic Civilizations).
Toys for Bob holds the copyright to Star Control II and its characters, which allowed them to open source the game (or, to be exact, a crude attempt to get the enhanced 3DO CD version to run on Windows, which has since been cleaned up and gained additional features such as network play) as The Ur-Quan Masters a few years ago (code under GPL 2 or later, content under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5).
The reason for dropping the name "Star Control" and using the subtitle is simple: the Star Control trademark is owned by Atari (a.k.a. Infogrames, who bought Star Control's publisher Accolade).
In other words, TFB has all the rights to make a sequel except the name (in fact, with the open sourcing, anyone could create a sequel, albeit non-commercially). However, since TFB is owned by Activision, they can't work on whatever they like (without being fired). TFB have stated on their news page that they need help convincing Activision to finance a sequel to Star Control II; they have the will, the skill and the rights to do so (albeit not the name, but that's secondary).
Even Microsoft Windows predates GEOS (not to mention the Apple Macintosh or, even more albeit less famously, the Xerox Alto).
Would you care to justify that opinion? I find it hard to see why it's such a big problem.
No matter how you slice it, running at startup by default with an easy option to turn it off is much better than e.g. RealPlayer v10's infernal pop-ups all over the place (just making it stop popping stuff up is a pain, never mind removing the automatic startup "feature"). This is enough in my view to move this aspect of Steam from "serious pain" to "mildly annoying". It's reasonable because it's easily detected and corrected. Also, letting Steam do its thing at system boot has some benefits (such as logging in to Steam and getting updates before you decide to play). Valve made the choice that is more convenient for the common user (or at least the heavily Steam-using user), at the expense of using a little CPU time and memory. In any case, I just toggled the check box when I saw it and got what I wanted with practically no effort, so I'm happy.
Now, having to log in to a network service just to play a single-player game, that's the real problem; the off-line mode in Steam is a bit on the tricky side to get running (you easily end up with games that don't start). It's still less annoying than trying to find the DVD and inserting that, but I'd be happier if I could just run the game directly with a single double-click on a desktop icon (I'd also be a lot happier if I had a nice and stable Linux-native version, but that would really be an unreasonable demand).
I wouldn't say they 'force' you, considering how easy it is to disable Steam from running at startup.
It's a Latin term from the English translations of Freud's work.
Figuring out what the first video game or first computer game is quickly becomes a matter of definitions. If you allow games that could be played without a computer, e.g. Noughts and Crosses, OXO on the EDSAC in 1952 appears to be the first computer game. U.S. patent #2455992 from 1947 describes an early electronic game (arguably a precursor to Missile Command) implemented using technology similar to Tennis for Two.
I assume you mean the currency sign. Slashdot seems to happily delete it from posts (as is usual for most stuff not in US ASCII).
I think you mean ALTER , which is capable of driving INTERCAL programmers (more) insane.