the first system shock is heads and shoulders above the second, esp. with the voice logs (excellent voice acting). I've tried system shock 2 a few times but every single time I gave up bored a few levels in, nowhere near as immersive (or creepy) as the first.
Total Annihilation is another game that aged really well, I'd like to try SMAC but nobody seems to sell the Linux version anymore and the win32 one seems out of print as well:(
given this (and the fact that creative drivers suck) I think my next rig (for the first time since my first ever PC way back when, who had an (original) sb card, don't even want to think how much I paid for it) will NOT have an SB sound card inside.
My requirements are simple
1- must not be a CPU hog in games (aka, must have hw mixing acceleration and DirectAudio hw support) 2- don't care about positional audio at all 3- and here's the kicker: must have some sort of easily available midi in-out connection
1 and 2 should not be too hard to find (most onboard audio have it I think), but 3 has been stumping me for a while (for example the m-audio 2496 has midi in/out but according to posts I've read is kind of a CPU hog for games). Maybe I should just use the onboard audio of whatever new mobo I get and buy a midi card?
I've been waiting to upgrade for ages (still have a dual p3-450), I've pretty much decided on the NVIDIA 6800 GT Ultra (or whatever the top of the line 6800 is named), but I'm really not sure about if I should go AMD or Intel:
- p4 3.4C + asus p4c-800 deluxe
- athlon64 3200 754 pin + asus k8v deluxe
- athlon64 3500 939 pin + asus a8v deluxe
what do people here think would be the best route? For the first time in a LONG time I'm leaning towards AMD more than Intel, but who knows... how well are the athlon64s supported in Linux btw?
Also I know that PCI Express is coming out, but I'm not interested in waiting another 6 months and then having early-adopter pains.
'if you give yourself an extra 50% more time, the project will consume those 50 and still have crunch time'
this is bs, of COURSE if your staff is already burned out from the previous crunch time, for the first half of the schedule they'll 'recuperate' and not be very productive, which means that by the end they'll likely be a bit behind. Also a good project has a very 'tight' schedule (not tight = no time, tight = many meaningful milestones, possibly on a weekly basis)
If your work force is not exhausted, on the other hand, you'll see that if you do your scheduling well (adding buffers and so on) more often than not you'll be bang on or even early. In video games development you'll always likely be bang on because there are always a lot of 'nice to have' features you can work on if you're early.
The problem is how to go from an exhausted work force to a happy work force: you do this by having everybody basically take a month off after your last insane crunch spell and making it clear that from now on they will NOT BE ALLOWED to work more than 9 hours a day, and that if the deadline is not hit at the end they will NOT GET their bonus (which should be made a significant % of compensation).
All of this will definitely encourage people not to kill themselves, to have a life, and to be happy productive coders for many years to come. In the end it would also save the companies money, because they wouldn't have the staff turnover problems (with retraining costs etc.) they have now and so on and on.
Odds of this happening? pretty close to nil, also because there is some perverse 'you're not a tough guy coder unless you can go 48 hours on mt dew' psychology at work here as well...
people will always want something 'tangible' for their $$$, something to put in their DVD tower, to lend to friends, to resell if they want to, and to watch whenever and wherever. Given DRM and everything I really doubt video on demand will eclipse DVDs any time soon.
- private offices for everybody, with a window hopefully overlooking something green (it'd be also nice to have plants in the offices if at all possible)
- air conditioning individually adjustable in every office
- good soundproofing between offices so that it's possible to play music (at moderate levels) without disturbing others. Extra soundproofing can be made available off the worker's 'workspace budget' if needed
- individual customizations for workers' PCs, some people can't work (pain free) without specific keyboards, or prefer specific mice, whatever: a $50 investment for years of productivity is worth it (again, from the 'workspace budget')
- individual customizations for workers' offices, people come in different heights, shapes and sizes and while chair A might be perfect for a worker, it might be a torture device for others. Aeron for everybody is a waste, plenty of cheaper chairs that work just as well. Same goes for desks, some people like them tall, some people short: ergonomics is the name of the game. (again, from the 'workspace budget')
- high quality heavy window shades/drapes/... nothing worse than trying to code with massive sun glare on your monitor.
- incandescent lighting in all offices, makes the environment so much nicer to be in than fluorescent.
- 'common' room(s) with 3-4 workstations for when people prefer to hash things collaboratively (vnc or something similar to be used to access each worker's individual PC)
- at least 1 small meeting room (small = 4 seats) for every 8 workers, at least 1 medium (8-12 seats) for every 16 workers or so, and at least 1 large (fits everybody), if you don't plan to have many 'all hands' meetings just make it off the cafeteria/common area as not to waste space
- completely enclosed and secured network room ('room within the room') there should be no need for anybody to go in there besides your IT staff, but it's nice to have it in a semi-visible place (with transparent windows) as people like to see shiny blinky lights
- a sizeable cafeteria/common area with some couches, a TV, a foosball or pool table, a kitchen, fridges, microwaves etc. a TV sometimes is free teambuilding (esp. nowadays with the Euro soccer cup going on)
- a good admin/facilities person who is on the ball and keeps supplies coming in on time and things running smoothly in general.
these are just off the top of my head: it's amazing that so many bosses don't realize just how much more productive and efficient their workers could be if they just were put in the 'right' surroundings... hats of to MS in this case for their 'one worker - one office' policy (as far as I know).
at least IMHO, minimalistic, no menu bar, nice 3d scrollbar on the left, shift+pgup/down scrolling, what more do you need? I wish the article wasn't slashdotted so I could figure out if the reviewer agrees with me or not;)
BTW, I'm talking about 'standalone' terminals, I spend 90% of my time within emacs and its eterm works nearly as well as rxvt (a bit slower and sometimes screws up when you have long lines in your history and you want to edit them, but still good enough IMHO).
you mustn't have been online very long... I personally get
- about 20 megs a week on my old iname.com email address (been using it since the early 90s, had a domain registered with it, was on my homepage etc. etc. so it's in probably every spammer's list). A significant percentage of them are in some weird encoding/non-US charsets, I really can't use it for anything anymore due to the huge amounts of spam, the fact that iname.com doesn't filter it and that they don't give anymore free forwarding.
- even with provider-side filtering enabled probably a few hundred spams a week on my [dictionary word]@[provider name] address: without provider-side filtering I was getting about a few hundred A DAY
- 20-30 spams/week on my various yahoo.com/hotmail.com addresses (most of them correctly tagged as junk/bulk)
just with these I could probably account for a couple of gigs of spam per year. Now, to that you could probably add the many megs of portscanning traffic I've been getting (still spam, although not email), lately I've been seeing A LOT of hosts scanning me on 63000-63008, I wonder what that is (usually get hit 2-3 times/sec all the time)
the graphic in the article makes the phone spell out the word 'FUN', my money is on people using this a lot for messages that start out with the same two letters but end up differently, especially in traffic: I mean, come on, even if you scream at somebody who cut you off they won't hear you, now you'll be able to wave the phone at them and let them know how you REALLY feel (I wonder if this comes with a preference to spell things backwards so they'll appear straight up in rearview mirrors).
It's also definitely quite a possibility that somebody will stand up in the dark movie theatre and wave this thing around to tell nice things to all the folks sitting behind... not to mention the applications in school during tests and so on.
Jaded? cynical? maybe, but really, come on, this seems really like one of those products where the distruptive uses far outweigh the benefits it can afford...
As for the parallel port, there aren't many devices being sold today that use them
well, sorry but I'd like to keep using my PRINTER when I next upgrade my computer: heck, my old laserjet 4L is still alive and kicking after 10 years of valuable service.
Even high end Laserjets (say, LJ4300) still come with parallel ports only (if you don't want to spring for the network enabled models).
don't forget Grand Theft Auto 3, despite the '3' in its name I think it was one of the most innovative games in recent history (Vice City was derivative instead, and San Andreas will probably be as well).
while people will really like these if they do only the 'safety' tasks (illuminated, warnings for fog, standing water,...), there's no way they wouldn't be vandalized instantly if they were used for speed limit enforcement.
given that monkeys have basically four hands I think they'd be more suited for emacs (alt-meta-control-super-hyper-shift-q) than vi;-)
I have been using emacs for nearly 10 years now and I swear sometimes I have been seriously considering adding a foot pedal or 2 to my setup (besides control, shift and meta I also routinely use Super and Hyper, xmodmap is great!)
I don't mean to rip on ATI, believe me, but if I'm going to spend $ on a card it has to run whatever games I like (and not vice-versa), and if the ATI people don't think enough about GPLegends to implement the needed workarounds in their drivers they're not going to get my business. The day that NVIDIA cards won't work with GPL and ATI cards do I'll buy ATI:)
I know about the two previous AMD chipsets, the only problem was that the 760 was available only in dual configurations (I didn't want a dual at the time), and when the 750 came out I hadn't heard much about it. The main problem is what you yourself have talked about, AMD doesn't have the resources to be a chipset maker and they can't afford to alienate their partners (VIA etc.) so they can't really do much about this.
And to the people modding my other post as troll, please, get a life: just because I'm not on the 'AMD is the greatest' bandwagon it doesn't mean that I am out trolling. I have said it before and I'll say it again, if chipsets for the AMD cpus were as good as the CPUs themselves I'd STRONGLY consider getting one myself (heck, money doesn't grow on trees), but at this point in time I want something that 'just works' and never needs to be tweaked, or drivers downloaded for it every week etc. etc.
This is the same reason why I tend to buy NVidia vs ATI (ok, now the ATI people will mod me as troll) because in my experience NVidia drivers seem to play better with older games (I still enjoy very much Grand Prix Legends for example, which I hear has issues on ATI hardware) and with Linux in general.
I am not naive, I know that Intel chipsets have bugs and NVidia drivers have issues: but fact is that most software makers test their stuff with that combination in mind and implement workarounds to make them work.
I've always bought intel, not because of the CPUs (I think AMD makes really nice hardware) but because of the chipsets.
I've heard way too many horror stories (incompatibilities galore and other bogus things) from friends and acquaintances fighting to get things stable: personally I've always bought and recommended the best asus boards I knew about (P2B, CUSL2-C, P4T, P4C800-E) and never ever had a problem.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel because, after all, a few hundred extra $$$ are worth my peace of mind many times over (I tend to keep my computers for a long time and I'm past the age where fiddling to get things working is interesting).
why can't they just (at least as an option) load a save-game file from the original game and figure that out automatically? I'm sure most people buying KOTOR2 will have finished KOTOR anyways (and kept the just-before-the-end saves around)
thanks for the reply, I am in Canada so it's unlikely they'd have recording studios here: the Canadian association for the blind does have studios but only in Eastern Canada it seems...
I've been toying with the idea of doing some audiobook reading: for the people in here that do it for a living (for example) or that know somebody who does: how did you start? how does it work?
I have also been thinking about doing it for free (after all, I'm sure there must be charities somewhere that need books/magazines/newspapers readers for people that can't read for a reason or another) but google was not very helpful, does anybody have any ideas about where to look?
if you wanted to spend --all-- the computing power currently available
note: he meant that if you could put every single clock cycle into audio of a current high-end CPU (no game, no graphics, just audio) you could 'solve' most things. While there is really no limit to how much computing power you can sink in fluid dynamics I have the feeling that creating approximate sounds dynamically would not be as computationally expensive. Games nowadays probably put only 1% or so of the CPU's computing power into audio I believe...
John also says talks about give it a couple more turns of processor --generations--, this doesn't mean the 100MHz stepping changes that Intel/AMD are doing, this would mean the same difference in computing power between a p4 3.2GHz and a pentium 1 133MHz (3 generations roughly), I think it's fair to assume that if you had a p7 CPU clocked at 60GHz you could afford to devote enough computing power to sounds to be able to create fairly realistic synthesized sound effects for pretty much everything, not to mention fairly believable voices while having still tons of horsepower left for game logic, graphics and AI.
in Canada I'd be all ears... I've read enough stories of people with Karmas that had their HD fail in 3-4 months that I really would want to buy it locally or at least from a Canadian retailer (I wish amazon.ca started stocking electronics!)
Or would it cryptographically check with a central office
you just have to do two things:
#1 you check the digital signature of the actual data payload on the passport (which probably contains other things besides the iris scan, things like your name, address, blah blah blah)
#2 you do status checking on the certificate that was used to sign said data (just in case it was compromised, hey, it could happen).
#1 will already give you a pretty high level of confidence that things haven't been mucked around with (no way you'd be able to forge a digital signature, and one assumes that the certs used for this signing will be well guarded), #2 can be done in a variety of different ways (retrieving CRLs from the CA at specified time intervals all the way to realtime status checking via OCSP) depending on your level of paranoia.
Slashdot Mirror
the first system shock is heads and shoulders above the second, esp. with the voice logs (excellent voice acting). I've tried system shock 2 a few times but every single time I gave up bored a few levels in, nowhere near as immersive (or creepy) as the first.
:(
Total Annihilation is another game that aged really well, I'd like to try SMAC but nobody seems to sell the Linux version anymore and the win32 one seems out of print as well
given this (and the fact that creative drivers suck) I think my next rig (for the first time since my first ever PC way back when, who had an (original) sb card, don't even want to think how much I paid for it) will NOT have an SB sound card inside.
My requirements are simple
1- must not be a CPU hog in games (aka, must have hw mixing acceleration and DirectAudio hw support)
2- don't care about positional audio at all
3- and here's the kicker: must have some sort of easily available midi in-out connection
1 and 2 should not be too hard to find (most onboard audio have it I think), but 3 has been stumping me for a while (for example the m-audio 2496 has midi in/out but according to posts I've read is kind of a CPU hog for games). Maybe I should just use the onboard audio of whatever new mobo I get and buy a midi card?
I've been waiting to upgrade for ages (still have a dual p3-450), I've pretty much decided on the NVIDIA 6800 GT Ultra (or whatever the top of the line 6800 is named), but I'm really not sure about if I should go AMD or Intel:
- p4 3.4C + asus p4c-800 deluxe
- athlon64 3200 754 pin + asus k8v deluxe
- athlon64 3500 939 pin + asus a8v deluxe
what do people here think would be the best route? For the first time in a LONG time I'm leaning towards AMD more than Intel, but who knows... how well are the athlon64s supported in Linux btw?
Also I know that PCI Express is coming out, but I'm not interested in waiting another 6 months and then having early-adopter pains.
'if you give yourself an extra 50% more time, the project will consume those 50 and still have crunch time'
this is bs, of COURSE if your staff is already burned out from the previous crunch time, for the first half of the schedule they'll 'recuperate' and not be very productive, which means that by the end they'll likely be a bit behind. Also a good project has a very 'tight' schedule (not tight = no time, tight = many meaningful milestones, possibly on a weekly basis)
If your work force is not exhausted, on the other hand, you'll see that if you do your scheduling well (adding buffers and so on) more often than not you'll be bang on or even early. In video games development you'll always likely be bang on because there are always a lot of 'nice to have' features you can work on if you're early.
The problem is how to go from an exhausted work force to a happy work force: you do this by having everybody basically take a month off after your last insane crunch spell and making it clear that from now on they will NOT BE ALLOWED to work more than 9 hours a day, and that if the deadline is not hit at the end they will NOT GET their bonus (which should be made a significant % of compensation).
All of this will definitely encourage people not to kill themselves, to have a life, and to be happy productive coders for many years to come. In the end it would also save the companies money, because they wouldn't have the staff turnover problems (with retraining costs etc.) they have now and so on and on.
Odds of this happening? pretty close to nil, also because there is some perverse 'you're not a tough guy coder unless you can go 48 hours on mt dew' psychology at work here as well...
people will always want something 'tangible' for their $$$, something to put in their DVD tower, to lend to friends, to resell if they want to, and to watch whenever and wherever. Given DRM and everything I really doubt video on demand will eclipse DVDs any time soon.
- private offices for everybody, with a window hopefully overlooking something green (it'd be also nice to have plants in the offices if at all possible)
- air conditioning individually adjustable in every office
- good soundproofing between offices so that it's possible to play music (at moderate levels) without disturbing others. Extra soundproofing can be made available off the worker's 'workspace budget' if needed
- individual customizations for workers' PCs, some people can't work (pain free) without specific keyboards, or prefer specific mice, whatever: a $50 investment for years of productivity is worth it (again, from the 'workspace budget')
- individual customizations for workers' offices, people come in different heights, shapes and sizes and while chair A might be perfect for a worker, it might be a torture device for others. Aeron for everybody is a waste, plenty of cheaper chairs that work just as well. Same goes for desks, some people like them tall, some people short: ergonomics is the name of the game. (again, from the 'workspace budget')
- high quality heavy window shades/drapes/... nothing worse than trying to code with massive sun glare on your monitor.
- incandescent lighting in all offices, makes the environment so much nicer to be in than fluorescent.
- 'common' room(s) with 3-4 workstations for when people prefer to hash things collaboratively (vnc or something similar to be used to access each worker's individual PC)
- at least 1 small meeting room (small = 4 seats) for every 8 workers, at least 1 medium (8-12 seats) for every 16 workers or so, and at least 1 large (fits everybody), if you don't plan to have many 'all hands' meetings just make it off the cafeteria/common area as not to waste space
- completely enclosed and secured network room ('room within the room') there should be no need for anybody to go in there besides your IT staff, but it's nice to have it in a semi-visible place (with transparent windows) as people like to see shiny blinky lights
- a sizeable cafeteria/common area with some couches, a TV, a foosball or pool table, a kitchen, fridges, microwaves etc. a TV sometimes is free teambuilding (esp. nowadays with the Euro soccer cup going on)
- a good admin/facilities person who is on the ball and keeps supplies coming in on time and things running smoothly in general.
these are just off the top of my head: it's amazing that so many bosses don't realize just how much more productive and efficient their workers could be if they just were put in the 'right' surroundings... hats of to MS in this case for their 'one worker - one office' policy (as far as I know).
at least IMHO, minimalistic, no menu bar, nice 3d scrollbar on the left, shift+pgup/down scrolling, what more do you need? I wish the article wasn't slashdotted so I could figure out if the reviewer agrees with me or not ;)
BTW, I'm talking about 'standalone' terminals, I spend 90% of my time within emacs and its eterm works nearly as well as rxvt (a bit slower and sometimes screws up when you have long lines in your history and you want to edit them, but still good enough IMHO).
you mustn't have been online very long... I personally get
- about 20 megs a week on my old iname.com email address (been using it since the early 90s, had a domain registered with it, was on my homepage etc. etc. so it's in probably every spammer's list). A significant percentage of them are in some weird encoding/non-US charsets, I really can't use it for anything anymore due to the huge amounts of spam, the fact that iname.com doesn't filter it and that they don't give anymore free forwarding.
- even with provider-side filtering enabled probably a few hundred spams a week on my [dictionary word]@[provider name] address: without provider-side filtering I was getting about a few hundred A DAY
- 20-30 spams/week on my various yahoo.com/hotmail.com addresses (most of them correctly tagged as junk/bulk)
just with these I could probably account for a couple of gigs of spam per year. Now, to that you could probably add the many megs of portscanning traffic I've been getting (still spam, although not email), lately I've been seeing A LOT of hosts scanning me on 63000-63008, I wonder what that is (usually get hit 2-3 times/sec all the time)
the graphic in the article makes the phone spell out the word 'FUN', my money is on people using this a lot for messages that start out with the same two letters but end up differently, especially in traffic: I mean, come on, even if you scream at somebody who cut you off they won't hear you, now you'll be able to wave the phone at them and let them know how you REALLY feel (I wonder if this comes with a preference to spell things backwards so they'll appear straight up in rearview mirrors).
It's also definitely quite a possibility that somebody will stand up in the dark movie theatre and wave this thing around to tell nice things to all the folks sitting behind... not to mention the applications in school during tests and so on.
Jaded? cynical? maybe, but really, come on, this seems really like one of those products where the distruptive uses far outweigh the benefits it can afford...
As for the parallel port, there aren't many devices being sold today that use them
well, sorry but I'd like to keep using my PRINTER when I next upgrade my computer: heck, my old laserjet 4L is still alive and kicking after 10 years of valuable service.
Even high end Laserjets (say, LJ4300) still come with parallel ports only (if you don't want to spring for the network enabled models).
don't forget Grand Theft Auto 3, despite the '3' in its name I think it was one of the most innovative games in recent history (Vice City was derivative instead, and San Andreas will probably be as well).
while people will really like these if they do only the 'safety' tasks (illuminated, warnings for fog, standing water, ...), there's no way they wouldn't be vandalized instantly if they were used for speed limit enforcement.
given that monkeys have basically four hands I think they'd be more suited for emacs (alt-meta-control-super-hyper-shift-q) than vi ;-)
I have been using emacs for nearly 10 years now and I swear sometimes I have been seriously considering adding a foot pedal or 2 to my setup (besides control, shift and meta I also routinely use Super and Hyper, xmodmap is great!)
I don't mean to rip on ATI, believe me, but if I'm going to spend $ on a card it has to run whatever games I like (and not vice-versa), and if the ATI people don't think enough about GPLegends to implement the needed workarounds in their drivers they're not going to get my business. The day that NVIDIA cards won't work with GPL and ATI cards do I'll buy ATI :)
I know about the two previous AMD chipsets, the only problem was that the 760 was available only in dual configurations (I didn't want a dual at the time), and when the 750 came out I hadn't heard much about it. The main problem is what you yourself have talked about, AMD doesn't have the resources to be a chipset maker and they can't afford to alienate their partners (VIA etc.) so they can't really do much about this.
And to the people modding my other post as troll, please, get a life: just because I'm not on the 'AMD is the greatest' bandwagon it doesn't mean that I am out trolling. I have said it before and I'll say it again, if chipsets for the AMD cpus were as good as the CPUs themselves I'd STRONGLY consider getting one myself (heck, money doesn't grow on trees), but at this point in time I want something that 'just works' and never needs to be tweaked, or drivers downloaded for it every week etc. etc.
This is the same reason why I tend to buy NVidia vs ATI (ok, now the ATI people will mod me as troll) because in my experience NVidia drivers seem to play better with older games (I still enjoy very much Grand Prix Legends for example, which I hear has issues on ATI hardware) and with Linux in general.
I am not naive, I know that Intel chipsets have bugs and NVidia drivers have issues: but fact is that most software makers test their stuff with that combination in mind and implement workarounds to make them work.
I've always bought intel, not because of the CPUs (I think AMD makes really nice hardware) but because of the chipsets.
I've heard way too many horror stories (incompatibilities galore and other bogus things) from friends and acquaintances fighting to get things stable: personally I've always bought and recommended the best asus boards I knew about (P2B, CUSL2-C, P4T, P4C800-E) and never ever had a problem.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel because, after all, a few hundred extra $$$ are worth my peace of mind many times over (I tend to keep my computers for a long time and I'm past the age where fiddling to get things working is interesting).
this is why you get your tricked out domain name that forwards things to gmail if you're so inclined...
why can't they just (at least as an option) load a save-game file from the original game and figure that out automatically? I'm sure most people buying KOTOR2 will have finished KOTOR anyways (and kept the just-before-the-end saves around)
thanks for the reply, I am in Canada so it's unlikely they'd have recording studios here: the Canadian association for the blind does have studios but only in Eastern Canada it seems...
I've been toying with the idea of doing some audiobook reading: for the people in here that do it for a living (for example) or that know somebody who does: how did you start? how does it work?
I have also been thinking about doing it for free (after all, I'm sure there must be charities somewhere that need books/magazines/newspapers readers for people that can't read for a reason or another) but google was not very helpful, does anybody have any ideas about where to look?
if you wanted to spend --all-- the computing power currently available
note: he meant that if you could put every single clock cycle into audio of a current high-end CPU (no game, no graphics, just audio) you could 'solve' most things. While there is really no limit to how much computing power you can sink in fluid dynamics I have the feeling that creating approximate sounds dynamically would not be as computationally expensive. Games nowadays probably put only 1% or so of the CPU's computing power into audio I believe...
John also says talks about give it a couple more turns of processor --generations-- , this doesn't mean the 100MHz stepping changes that Intel/AMD are doing, this would mean the same difference in computing power between a p4 3.2GHz and a pentium 1 133MHz (3 generations roughly), I think it's fair to assume that if you had a p7 CPU clocked at 60GHz you could afford to devote enough computing power to sounds to be able to create fairly realistic synthesized sound effects for pretty much everything, not to mention fairly believable voices while having still tons of horsepower left for game logic, graphics and AI.
in Canada I'd be all ears... I've read enough stories of people with Karmas that had their HD fail in 3-4 months that I really would want to buy it locally or at least from a Canadian retailer (I wish amazon.ca started stocking electronics!)
Or would it cryptographically check with a central office
you just have to do two things:
#1 you check the digital signature of the actual data payload on the passport (which probably contains other things besides the iris scan, things like your name, address, blah blah blah)
#2 you do status checking on the certificate that was used to sign said data (just in case it was compromised, hey, it could happen).
#1 will already give you a pretty high level of confidence that things haven't been mucked around with (no way you'd be able to forge a digital signature, and one assumes that the certs used for this signing will be well guarded), #2 can be done in a variety of different ways (retrieving CRLs from the CA at specified time intervals all the way to realtime status checking via OCSP) depending on your level of paranoia.
move your mouse on different parts of the characters and you'll hear some really funny lines, heh, also the poster in the background is pretty cool
http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/poster.html
major props to the designer and the voice actors!
my fave is the guy that's supposed to give you the wallpaper, leave the pointer there for a while, his lines are hilarious.
great, great site!