I've been a huge fan of their games since Ultima Underworld (a first person RPG only loosely tied to the rest of the Ultima series). They are, as far as I'm concerned, the most innovative and consistently excellent developer around. Every game they've done has brought something new to gaming. Three games on the Dark Engine later, there's still nothing else out there with a sound system to match, and even Half-Life could learn a few things about integrating story into gameplay from Thief (1&2) and SS2.
The way the gaming industry works, I'm sure if these guys want to stick together, they will be able to get a deal somewhere under a different name. But it's still incredibly sad to see LG close down. If not for them being in Boston (I like California too much), I would have tried to get a job there long ago.
Bye, LG. Don't let idiots get hold of those licenses (Thief and SS) if you can help it.
Twiki had the most important job on that whole show: carrying Dr. Theopolis around! Dr. Theopolis always knew how to save the (planet|ship|galaxy), but without Twiki to carry him around he would have been stuck in the closet unable to tell anyone. Sheesh! More useful than Twiki indeed. Think before you post these things!
You are right of course that there are an infinite number of really useful things computers can do to solve scientific, engineering, and mathematical problems. Those would also be good goals. My response was directed more towards someone who seemed to be looking to learn computers for computers' sake and not much more. That's fun for a while, but ultimately not very fulfilling for many people. If the person asking had an interest in some specific field that needed computing resources, he probably wouldn't have been asking.
I probably should have phrased it a little differently to avoid being called an idiot. But thanks for reminding me why I don't post to/. very often.
I used to say computers were only good for one thing: Games. In recent years they've also become an excellent communication tool (email, IM, browsers, in about that order of importance). Everything else is just boring. If it weren't for games and various means of talking to your fellow man, they would be worthless lumps of silicon.
So, broadening the communication aspect a bit, if you don't want to work on games, work on networking. But if you really want to do "Stuff that matters," work on networked games.
While I think the idea of a bootable CD-ROM with its own OS (be it windows, Linux, QNX, whatever) is great, it doesn't appear to be practical right now. I've installed Linux many times over the years, with several distributions, and haven't yet had one where I didn't have to tweak something by hand to make it work. Windows isn't any better. There are just too many pieces of oddball hardware out there to make it practical.
"But," you say, "You could probably make a CD that worked on 90% of the systems out there!" I'd say 90% is optimistic, but even if you could do that, that's 10 out of every 100 people that won't be able to run your game. When someone can't run the game, what do they do? Call tech support - though you might find this a little absurd, the cost of providing tech support for a game actually wipes out all the profit they made selling the game in the first place. 10% of your profits gone right here. Even aside from that, no developer wants to get a reputation for selling buggy games, and a bootable CD that doesn't work would certainly fit that description in the average person's mind. ("It's Linux that's not working, not our game!" just wouldn't fly in this situation.)
I think someday it might work out. Things are getting easier. The last couple of times I've installed Linux it has gone almost without a hitch. If anyone really wants to see this happen, I suggest you start working on a bootable Linux (FreeBSD, BeOS, whatever) distribution, with the goal of demonstrating it on a huge variety of hardware. That means every major 3D chipset, every sound card, dozens of USB devices, gameport devices, ethernet cards, modems, etc. If you could do that, you might be able to then drum up some interest. Without that, no game developer is going to be willing to risk committing to such a system, nor to putting the effort into into creating their own.
Joe
P.S. I am a gamer, and a developer, and I do have a Windows machine that's esentially only for games.
Maybe Midway picked up the rights to these at some point, but Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, "Defender II" (which was actually called Stargate in the arcade, but changed later), Sinistar, Bubbles, and Satan's Hollow are all Williams games. Out of the games listed, only Spy Hunter, Rampage, and Tapper are Midway games.
Note that Williams still exists. They haven't made video arcade games for a while, but they started as a pinball machine maker, and are still producing new pinball machines. Their web page is here
I sent email postcards (including pictures drawn on the Palm) last time I went on vacation. A record of them can be found at http://rumsey.org/trips.html. They were done using nothing but a Palm running MultiMail, with a Palm modem, connected through a shell account using SLiRP.
Greg Bear's Eon featured a very large hollowed out asteroid. He used one of the largest known asteroids, I'm sorry I don't remember the name. Wasn't Kleopatra, but it was even bigger. It's a great book, my favorite work by Bear.
And as one person already pointed out, Ender's Game had a hollowed out asteroid, but it didn't go into nearly so much detail.
Interestingly, Both books were published in 1985.
Anyone know of more giant hollow asteroid stories?
Not sure about lake sizes, but Hoover isn't even the largest dam in the US, much less the world, any more. Largest in US is the Grand Coulee on the Columbia river, and the largest in the world is the Aswan dam in Egypt, but will soon be the Three Gorges dam in China. (I didn't go look these up, I might be wrong, except about Three Gorges, it'll be far and away the largest when it's done.) Damn it's hard not typing damn instead of dam!
I'm not disagreeing that Electrification belongs at #1, it does, but I'd say that the Automobile (#2), the Airplane (#3), Water Supply and Distribution (#4), Agricultural Mechanization (#7), and Highways (#11) could have been accomplished without Electrification. Steam locomotives did not even require electricity, much less electrification, and could certainly have provided the technology for several of the things I just listed. I'm taking electrification to mean practical widespread distribution of electricity, not just electricity itself. Electricity as a discovery (and some inventions using it) predates the 20th century by quite a bit, and as a discovery is also not an "engineering achievement."
Refrigeration even seems to not require electricity, much less electrification. You could build a steam powered system of pumps (for the freon) and fans to circulate air over the freon pipes. It certainly wouldn't be as practical as using electricity (generating that much heat for the steam makes it tricky to then cool something else, but if you're clever you could do it)
You could make a case that Telephone (#9) doesn't require electrification, though the telephone does itself distribute small amounts of electricty over long distances. Also worth noting, however, is that Telephone does not belong on a list of 20th century achievements at all, as it was invented in 1876! The same could be said for the automobile, but I suppose they meant to imply widespread availability of these inventions, not the invention itself.
The "any drive" thing was actually the outer manifestation of one of the cooler things on the Amiga. A "volume" didn't have to be a physical disk at all; You could assign the volume label to any directory, anywhere. So when you took your floppy based copy of Deluxe Paint and copied it to a directory on your hard drive, and then it asked for "Volume DPaint: in any drive", all you had to do was assign DPaint: to dh0:DPaint instead.
Later versions of the OS even introduced virtual volumes that included multiple directories. Like, something looks for a file in "C:" (the equivalent of/bin) and you have C: spanning dh0:c, dh1:c, and ram:c, it'll look in all those places.
It isn't a Unix style unified file system, but it worked really well. It solved one of the problems both Windows and Unix have, making it easy to arrange your drives any way you want, and rearrange at will without breaking everything. If anyone's still worrying about paradigms for devices and file systems in 2000, they'd do well to examine the Amiga's solution.
I also saw an Amiga running a local access advertising channel, years and years ago. I wouldn't have ever known it, but one day it was sitting there with a full screen CLI (nothing interesting in it though, drat.)
I think that in the not so distant future, good computer translation from and to any language will make the language you happen to speak largely irrelevant. Not next year, likely not this decade, but still soon, you will be able to look at anything on the net and not know what language it was origrinally written in unless you click on view->untranslated.
The same will happen for spoken lanuage. An actual computerized babelfish you buy from a vending machine and drop in your ear is something I expect to see in my lifetime.
The idea that dinosaurs were warm blooded has been around for many years (I remember a book about it being on my dad's bookshelf in the 70's). It's widely (but not universally) thought to be correct by now. Finding something of the structure of one dinosaur's heart is just one more bit of evidence supporting the theory.
You're right, my fault. Is there another goofy sounding legal term for protecting against trademark infringement and/or dilution? That's what I was thinking of, and it's something that people often think applies to patent law as well, but doesn't.
One thing I've learned from all the patent stories on slashdot is that due diligence doesn't matter for patents. You are free to selectively enforce any patent as you see fit without losing the right to make any future claims.
Are the owners of a flea market (an open market where anyone can show up and set up a table to sell whatever they want for a small fee, or even for free) responsible for making sure all items being sold are legal? Anyone know? An online auction should logically be governed by the same set of laws. Whether it is or not probably has yet to be determined.
That is funny, as that's the only search I tried too. Looking for the Matrix is my standard test for this sort of thing. (Note to MPAA: I own a legal DVD copy, put that lawyer back in his cage)
Didn't work at all, not just that it didn't find any, but the thing appears to be broken.
Except that there are a few large banner ad companies (like doubleclick.net) and the banner ads you see all come from doubleclick's server, NOT the site you're viewing. So doubleclick can and does track your movement around the web, for every site that uses them.
Looks very nice. But they also look like a corporation. Yet they have no discernible source of revenue. Free service, no ads, no customer database to sell, no technology to license (they got their techonology from google). What's the catch here? Maybe get everyone hooked then start charging to use the site? I'm stumped.
Just to a pick a nit, Yahoo just picks up stories straight from The Associated Press. Blame AP/Ted Brides (the author) for the slanted journalism. You'll find the exact same story on any number of sites that carry the AP wire.
PalmOS has had a TCP/IP Stack since 2.0. And even the oldest models (1000 and 5000) can be upgraded to that version of the OS. None of the builtin apps as of 3.0 actually support networking, but adding programs that do is trivial. You can even get a POP/SMTP client that interfaces with the builtin email app, though there are much better email apps out there. Multimail is quite nice, supports plugins for viewing many kinds of attachments and generally does all the things you'd need from a mail program. There are also web browsers, telnet and ssh clients, etc. Even an IRC client.
As for development environments, Metrowerks makes CodeWarrior for Mac and Windows, and there is a port of GCC available for any platform that can run GCC. Quite a few projects use GCC. You don't get the nice UI layout tools (though that may have changed since the last time I checked) but there really isn't anything you can't do with it that you can with the Metrowerks package.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a huge fan of their games since Ultima Underworld (a first person RPG only loosely tied to the rest of the Ultima series). They are, as far as I'm concerned, the most innovative and consistently excellent developer around. Every game they've done has brought something new to gaming. Three games on the Dark Engine later, there's still nothing else out there with a sound system to match, and even Half-Life could learn a few things about integrating story into gameplay from Thief (1&2) and SS2.
The way the gaming industry works, I'm sure if these guys want to stick together, they will be able to get a deal somewhere under a different name. But it's still incredibly sad to see LG close down. If not for them being in Boston (I like California too much), I would have tried to get a job there long ago.
Bye, LG. Don't let idiots get hold of those licenses (Thief and SS) if you can help it.
ABC has video from the site.
Twiki had the most important job on that whole show: carrying Dr. Theopolis around! Dr. Theopolis always knew how to save the (planet|ship|galaxy), but without Twiki to carry him around he would have been stuck in the closet unable to tell anyone. Sheesh! More useful than Twiki indeed. Think before you post these things!
Biddy biddy biddy... BUCK!
You are right of course that there are an infinite number of really useful things computers can do to solve scientific, engineering, and mathematical problems. Those would also be good goals. My response was directed more towards someone who seemed to be looking to learn computers for computers' sake and not much more. That's fun for a while, but ultimately not very fulfilling for many people. If the person asking had an interest in some specific field that needed computing resources, he probably wouldn't have been asking.
/. very often.
I probably should have phrased it a little differently to avoid being called an idiot. But thanks for reminding me why I don't post to
I used to say computers were only good for one thing: Games. In recent years they've also become an excellent communication tool (email, IM, browsers, in about that order of importance). Everything else is just boring. If it weren't for games and various means of talking to your fellow man, they would be worthless lumps of silicon.
So, broadening the communication aspect a bit, if you don't want to work on games, work on networking. But if you really want to do "Stuff that matters," work on networked games.
While I think the idea of a bootable CD-ROM with its own OS (be it windows, Linux, QNX, whatever) is great, it doesn't appear to be practical right now. I've installed Linux many times over the years, with several distributions, and haven't yet had one where I didn't have to tweak something by hand to make it work. Windows isn't any better. There are just too many pieces of oddball hardware out there to make it practical.
"But," you say, "You could probably make a CD that worked on 90% of the systems out there!" I'd say 90% is optimistic, but even if you could do that, that's 10 out of every 100 people that won't be able to run your game. When someone can't run the game, what do they do? Call tech support - though you might find this a little absurd, the cost of providing tech support for a game actually wipes out all the profit they made selling the game in the first place. 10% of your profits gone right here. Even aside from that, no developer wants to get a reputation for selling buggy games, and a bootable CD that doesn't work would certainly fit that description in the average person's mind. ("It's Linux that's not working, not our game!" just wouldn't fly in this situation.)
I think someday it might work out. Things are getting easier. The last couple of times I've installed Linux it has gone almost without a hitch. If anyone really wants to see this happen, I suggest you start working on a bootable Linux (FreeBSD, BeOS, whatever) distribution, with the goal of demonstrating it on a huge variety of hardware. That means every major 3D chipset, every sound card, dozens of USB devices, gameport devices, ethernet cards, modems, etc. If you could do that, you might be able to then drum up some interest. Without that, no game developer is going to be willing to risk committing to such a system, nor to putting the effort into into creating their own.
Joe
P.S. I am a gamer, and a developer, and I do have a Windows machine that's esentially only for games.
Peter Molyneux is no longer at Bullfrog. B&W is being developed by his new company, Lionhead.
Maybe Midway picked up the rights to these at some point, but Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, "Defender II" (which was actually called Stargate in the arcade, but changed later), Sinistar, Bubbles, and Satan's Hollow are all Williams games. Out of the games listed, only Spy Hunter, Rampage, and Tapper are Midway games.
Note that Williams still exists. They haven't made video arcade games for a while, but they started as a pinball machine maker, and are still producing new pinball machines. Their web page is here
D'oh. http://rumsey.dhs.org/trips.html
I sent email postcards (including pictures drawn on the Palm) last time I went on vacation. A record of them can be found at http://rumsey.org/trips.html. They were done using nothing but a Palm running MultiMail, with a Palm modem, connected through a shell account using SLiRP.
Greg Bear's Eon featured a very large hollowed out asteroid. He used one of the largest known asteroids, I'm sorry I don't remember the name. Wasn't Kleopatra, but it was even bigger. It's a great book, my favorite work by Bear.
And as one person already pointed out, Ender's Game had a hollowed out asteroid, but it didn't go into nearly so much detail.
Interestingly, Both books were published in 1985.
Anyone know of more giant hollow asteroid stories?
Not sure about lake sizes, but Hoover isn't even the largest dam in the US, much less the world, any more. Largest in US is the Grand Coulee on the Columbia river, and the largest in the world is the Aswan dam in Egypt, but will soon be the Three Gorges dam in China. (I didn't go look these up, I might be wrong, except about Three Gorges, it'll be far and away the largest when it's done.) Damn it's hard not typing damn instead of dam!
I'm not disagreeing that Electrification belongs at #1, it does, but I'd say that the Automobile (#2), the Airplane (#3), Water Supply and Distribution (#4), Agricultural Mechanization (#7), and Highways (#11) could have been accomplished without Electrification. Steam locomotives did not even require electricity, much less electrification, and could certainly have provided the technology for several of the things I just listed. I'm taking electrification to mean practical widespread distribution of electricity, not just electricity itself. Electricity as a discovery (and some inventions using it) predates the 20th century by quite a bit, and as a discovery is also not an "engineering achievement."
Refrigeration even seems to not require electricity, much less electrification. You could build a steam powered system of pumps (for the freon) and fans to circulate air over the freon pipes. It certainly wouldn't be as practical as using electricity (generating that much heat for the steam makes it tricky to then cool something else, but if you're clever you could do it)
You could make a case that Telephone (#9) doesn't require electrification, though the telephone does itself distribute small amounts of electricty over long distances. Also worth noting, however, is that Telephone does not belong on a list of 20th century achievements at all, as it was invented in 1876! The same could be said for the automobile, but I suppose they meant to imply widespread availability of these inventions, not the invention itself.
The "any drive" thing was actually the outer manifestation of one of the cooler things on the Amiga. A "volume" didn't have to be a physical disk at all; You could assign the volume label to any directory, anywhere. So when you took your floppy based copy of Deluxe Paint and copied it to a directory on your hard drive, and then it asked for "Volume DPaint: in any drive", all you had to do was assign DPaint: to dh0:DPaint instead.
/bin) and you have C: spanning dh0:c, dh1:c, and ram:c, it'll look in all those places.
Later versions of the OS even introduced virtual volumes that included multiple directories. Like, something looks for a file in "C:" (the equivalent of
It isn't a Unix style unified file system, but it worked really well. It solved one of the problems both Windows and Unix have, making it easy to arrange your drives any way you want, and rearrange at will without breaking everything. If anyone's still worrying about paradigms for devices and file systems in 2000, they'd do well to examine the Amiga's solution.
I also saw an Amiga running a local access advertising channel, years and years ago. I wouldn't have ever known it, but one day it was sitting there with a full screen CLI (nothing interesting in it though, drat.)
I think that in the not so distant future, good computer translation from and to any language will make the language you happen to speak largely irrelevant. Not next year, likely not this decade, but still soon, you will be able to look at anything on the net and not know what language it was origrinally written in unless you click on view->untranslated.
The same will happen for spoken lanuage. An actual computerized babelfish you buy from a vending machine and drop in your ear is something I expect to see in my lifetime.
The idea that dinosaurs were warm blooded has been around for many years (I remember a book about it being on my dad's bookshelf in the 70's). It's widely (but not universally) thought to be correct by now. Finding something of the structure of one dinosaur's heart is just one more bit of evidence supporting the theory.
You're right, my fault. Is there another goofy sounding legal term for protecting against trademark infringement and/or dilution? That's what I was thinking of, and it's something that people often think applies to patent law as well, but doesn't.
One thing I've learned from all the patent stories on slashdot is that due diligence doesn't matter for patents. You are free to selectively enforce any patent as you see fit without losing the right to make any future claims.
Are the owners of a flea market (an open market where anyone can show up and set up a table to sell whatever they want for a small fee, or even for free) responsible for making sure all items being sold are legal? Anyone know? An online auction should logically be governed by the same set of laws. Whether it is or not probably has yet to be determined.
That is funny, as that's the only search I tried too. Looking for the Matrix is my standard test for this sort of thing. (Note to MPAA: I own a legal DVD copy, put that lawyer back in his cage)
Didn't work at all, not just that it didn't find any, but the thing appears to be broken.
Except that there are a few large banner ad companies (like doubleclick.net) and the banner ads you see all come from doubleclick's server, NOT the site you're viewing. So doubleclick can and does track your movement around the web, for every site that uses them.
Looks very nice. But they also look like a corporation. Yet they have no discernible source of revenue. Free service, no ads, no customer database to sell, no technology to license (they got their techonology from google). What's the catch here? Maybe get everyone hooked then start charging to use the site? I'm stumped.
Just to pick my own nit, the author's name is Ted Bridis, not Brides. D'oh.
Just to a pick a nit, Yahoo just picks up stories straight from The Associated Press. Blame AP/Ted Brides (the author) for the slanted journalism. You'll find the exact same story on any number of sites that carry the AP wire.
As for development environments, Metrowerks makes CodeWarrior for Mac and Windows, and there is a port of GCC available for any platform that can run GCC. Quite a few projects use GCC. You don't get the nice UI layout tools (though that may have changed since the last time I checked) but there really isn't anything you can't do with it that you can with the Metrowerks package.