Just wait, the next rash of games on PSN and they will start requiring a Plus membership in order to play online. Sony arbitrarily yanked OtherOS, I don't put a whole lot of stock in their assurances that they would never, ever, pinky-swear-we-wouldn't, require a plus membership for playing online.
For some reason I get the feeling this is going to crop up around the time I go to buy the next Gran Turismo (though I'm really not all that interested in playing it multiplayer anyway, so whatever).
That kind of environment doesn't pay for itself. If you don't like it, the PC market is still alive.
Well, sort of. Except that the same companies that are forcing us to go through centralized admin/anti-cheat servers (and according to you pay for the service) are doing the same in the PC space, minus having to pay for it (so far). Every PC gamer I know was quite content with self-governed, privately-hosted servers where the publisher incurs zero cost for hosting games, but for some reason we are being forced to only play on centralized servers in the newer games.
I'm sure very soon will be asked to pay for this "service" (that no one asked for) because the poor poor publishers will be whining about how having to host games is bleeding them dry.
So yes, the PC market is still alive, but every day it seems to be moving closer to being indistinguishable from the console market.
Of course, Windows95 managed to get it wrong by labeling it "start," leading to maximum user-astonishment when people wanted to shutdown or reboot, but I assume that was just a joke. The idea behind it, wasn't.
I never understood people's confusion about the whole Start->shutdown thing. I don't see how anyone could have been confused by it - the first time you use the Start menu to do anything, you see "Shutdown" down at the bottom, so you know it is there. Plus, system shutdown is a process, so you are essentially saying "start the shutdown process". Easy to find, makes sense, I think this was really a non-issue that was just good fodder for jokes, but really could only have been a problem for the brain-dead.
Reminds me of the subwoofer at my parents house. It will occasionally intercept radio communications (only time I've noticed is on brush pickup days, when the main truck and loader gizmo truck are running around outside their house yakking on the radio). Very weird, not sure if it is actually the sub, the cable, or perhaps even the receiver. It is very strange to suddenly hear a voice coming from the sub (as I recall it happens even when the sub is turned off, but it may just be in standby).
Everything else works fine, so I never bothered to look into it for them.
I recently put together a system with a 64 GB SSD system drive (~$150) and a 1.5 TB data drive (~$80).
So far it has worked pretty well. In general applications don't really use all that much space, so the small drive isn't an issue. I've got most of my normal applications installed (still a pretty new system, I tend to install apps as I need them), using about 30 gigs right now (including ~15 for Windows 7). The only problem so far is that some applications default to storing data in the User folder on the system drive, even after you change the Windows settings to use a different location for documents/etc (shouldn't be a problem at all if you are avoiding Windows). Not a problem now, but as time goes on this could result in more and more space being used on the system drive (which ideally should be pretty static in terms of volume usage, only changing when I add or remove applications).
Of course, part of the reason for the success of this system so far is that I made the decision to treat all games as second-class citizens, so they all go on the data drive, otherwise I'd be out of space real quick (I think the big ones right now are Mass Effect, which someone gave me a year or so ago and I'm finally getting around to playing - about 10 gigs; and Oblivion, which I've gone back to after a couple years, about 7 or 8 gigs with mods). From the benchmarks I've seen going with an SSD doesn't really help a whole lot with games anyway, so no big loss.
Not sure what you are doing that you need hundred-plus of gigs of apps, but so far I'm quite content with this system. The SSD does make an enormous difference in everyday usability. If you're waiting for prices to drop or capacity to increase significantly before trying them out I'd say don't bother; even if all you can fit on the SSD is your OS and one or two most-used apps you're going to appreciate the difference instantly.
I hate run-flat tires. Expensive, poor ride quality, and only really protect you from minor punctures. Give me a spare any day (though of course you probably can't fit a 17" spare in a mini).
It is a good idea to take a look at your city/region's franchise agreement. I just took a look at mine and was happy to discover that it quite clearly states that the Comcast franchise (currently only cable co. in the city) is non-exclusive; any other operator may build-out and operate a system in the city, under a separate franchise agreement, as long as the terms of the two franchise agreements are materially the same.
I guess I can't blame the City for lack of choices in TV service.
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
XKCD is fun, though I disagree with his points in that particular comic, especially the alt text. 60 fps looks fake because it is unnaturally smooth in pans.
Seriously, try this at home (or in the office) - sit in your chair and slowly rotate (pan) - what does it look like? Does the world go by nice and smoothly? Assuming you are actually focusing on anything, no, it does not - your eyes jump from one point to another in anything but a smooth fashion (yes, I realize you can avoid this by purposely focusing on nothing). The traditional 24 fps of films helps to recreate this semi-jerky motion in pans, which absolutely makes them feel more realistic. Other than pans higher frame rates are generally better, but it is that lack of jerky motion in panning that makes high-framerate material look "fake" to most people.
Not surprising to me. I grew up watching a B/W TV and the picture quality was definitely lower. Today, I am still happy to watch those old episodes in B/W. Its definitely about content. The thought that putting a movie in HD or 3D improves the storyline or the acting amuses me.
I generally agree, although I do enjoy the higher quality of HD programming (of course I dropped HD service a couple years ago because at the time it was costing too much, and haven't seen about adding it back) - I do think it makes sense to produce new shows in HD, just like at one point it made sense to move from B&W to color even though it didn't necessarily make a show any better and B&W is perfectly watchable.
The thing that bothers me isn't so much HD vs. SD (haven't been exposed to 3D TV yet, not really interested in it), it is picture quality. I don't mind a good-quality standard-def show, but the trouble is it has become nearly impossible to get a good-quality SD (or HD for that matter) picture. Every service I've seen hugely over-compresses the stream, so there are constant compression artifacts. This has been true on Comcast digital cable (analog looked much better before they cut it off), DISH, and DirecTV. There really doesn't seem to be a way to get good-quality TV service in the U.S. anymore. I particularly noticed this recently watching Top Gear. I've been watching it for a few years on BBC America, but they never play any of the older episodes. I was curious about them, so found a site where they are all available and downloaded the first season, which I stream from my PC to the PS3 for playback. Now these were scraped from various European broadcasts, so the resolution is somewhat higher than what you get on NTSC broadcasts, but it really isn't the difference in resolution that is noticeable. No motion artifacts, no blockiness, no getting distracted from the content by obvious and persistent compression artifacts - it is far superior to the crappy signal from the satellite/cable feed I'm used to.
So no, HD versus SD doesn't make better shows (though given the choice of HD or SD for a show I would choose HD), just as having more networks doesn't mean there are more good shows. Personally, I think about 50% of the channels need to be dropped and the bitrates pumped up on the others. Sadly this will never happen, as all of the providers sell themselves based on the number of channels they offer (easy to count and understand) instead of bitrate available for each channel (information that they don't provide anywhere, and which is more difficult to understand anyway).
AT&T U-verse recently became available in my area, which seems promising based on the technology, but reviews I've read don't seem to support that. If you aren't familiar, U-Verse is basically fiber-to-the-node, then runs over regular twisted pair to your house. Instead of trying to fit all of the channel streams into your relatively limited connection all of the time, it only sends you the channel (actually up to 4 channels at a time) that you want. It seems like this should offer plenty capacity for HD content (I seem to recall something like up to 18mbps downstream for internet plus 7-9 mbps for TV plus ~1 mbps for voice, though I think maybe the TV and voice actually subtract from the internet max). Sounds promising, but like I said, reviews I've seen don't sound like it actually works out to much (if any) improvement PQ-wise. I may have to look into Hulu/etc., to see if they offer better picture quality streamed to my TV (I'd say the only problem with this is live sports, but honestly I don't watch that much, and when I do - like the World Cup - the picture is so god-awful over DISH SD that I do my best to watch anywhere but at home.)
This isn't exactly a new idea. Even I had a similar idea that I realized years ago.
Back when I was at MIT, we had utility vehicles on campus and several keypadded gates. The men in trucks drove up to the gates and entered codes. Since I didn't want to build any hardware, I colored the keypad over with a permanent marker in similar color to the keys. I counted the audible beeps emitted by the controller. After a day or so, I went up and saw that only three keys had been depressed for the five beeps. After four tries, I had the code and could pointlessly open the gate for no reason at all at will!
I took some flying lessons in college at the local airport. The flying club was located in a hangar on the tarmac, so if you didn't have codes for the gates you had to walk a ways to get there (not a real big airport, though they did have scheduled passenger service). I noticed that most of the other people actually parked inside the gate next to the hangars, so I finally asked my instructor what the gate code was so I could save the few minute walk (and avoid the small, crowded parking lot). "I don't know, I just hit '9-1-1' and it opens" was the reply. Turns out this works at lots of other places, too. The gates are often just intended to keep the general public out, not really as a true security measure, and they will have an obvious code like that so emergency services can get in no problem (don't have to worry about every fire crew, ambulance crew, and police officer having an access card, or making sure they have the correct access code - only problem is that some places, I've heard, actually hook up the gates to an alarm system and entering 9-1-1 will set off the alarm in addition to opening the gate, but I've never run into that).
I'm not sure why that's posted on a spoof site, in my experience it's quite fucking true! BMWs seem pretty common and run of the mill in the UK now and I don't really encounter many that are driven badly above the norm for most cars, One series seem common as muck and I even saw one with one of those learner signs on the top of it the other day which made me chuckle.
It hasn't gotten to this point yet in the U.S. (as far as I've seen). BMWs are certainly more common than Audis, but in general it is still the BMW drivers that are self-important assholes. Audis aren't popular enough yet for them to be seen as the same kind of asshole-symbol, and certainly haven't replaced BMWs in this regard.
It is very sad, really. By all accounts BMWs are wonderful to drive, but you can't buy one because everyone will think you're an asshole. It's like having an Oakland Raiders sticker on your car, only it's the whole car. So it still seems to be BMWs that the yobs (I think that was the term I recall from Top Gear when they discussed this subject... yes, everything we Americans know about the British comes from either Monty Python or Top Gear) prefer in this country, they haven't made the switch to Audis (yet).
Sorry to any Raiders fans out there, but the "Raiders sticker = asshole" rule has thus far failed me only once, and I see a quite a few of them around where I live.
I would just set the controls to whatever FPS style you like. The original controls for Doom and Quake were horrible.
What do you mean, they worked great. Right hand on the arrow keys, left hand on ctrl (for blowing shit up), shift (for running), z and x for strafing. Of course for Wolfenstein 3D you couldn't use z and x to strafe, you had to hold alt and then left/right arrows. The controls worked great for the game, it was designed around them and trying to throw in a mouse would have just screwed it up.
The only problem was that some keyboards couldn't handle very many simultaneous button presses; I remember at least one keyboard I had where if I was turning, running, shooting, and strafing (so... 5 button presses) the controls would get stuck and it would beep at me. Not usually a problem in the single player, but it could be a problem when playing w/ a friend over the modem (or coax network, though I think that wasn't until Doom 2).
Ships aren't cheap, and marine environments are rather hostile (salt, water), and data centers can already be reasonably mobile by putting it in a shipping container and moving that shipping container somewhere... so what need is this filling?
At a guess, I'd say taxes. Any extra expense from going through the pain of putting a data center on a ship would likely be offset (and more than offset) by the tax results. In most places, property taxes can be very significant. If you are putting up a datacenter in a building on land, every dollar you spend (aside from servers) is going to cost you in the long run because you are increasing the taxable value. Datacenters have very extensive and expensive power and cooling infrastructure, and all of that expense contributes directly to the value (and therefore cost through property taxes) of the facility. Put all that expense into a vehicle, and not only do you not have to pay property tax on it, but you probably also get to write off more of your investment in depreciation (not sure about that).
Between the tax savings and potential cooling savings it might actually make sense to do this, though there are numerous other issues to overcome (berthing space is pretty limited most places and can be expensive, and getting power and data to/from the ship may be slightly trickier than for a land-based system, particularly if you want to to offer redundant connections).
It also allows the flexibility to chase cheap power/data; if they aren't getting good deals in the SF Bay, they could probably move it up the coast to Portland or Seattle.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait, the next rash of games on PSN and they will start requiring a Plus membership in order to play online. Sony arbitrarily yanked OtherOS, I don't put a whole lot of stock in their assurances that they would never, ever, pinky-swear-we-wouldn't, require a plus membership for playing online.
For some reason I get the feeling this is going to crop up around the time I go to buy the next Gran Turismo (though I'm really not all that interested in playing it multiplayer anyway, so whatever).
That kind of environment doesn't pay for itself. If you don't like it, the PC market is still alive.
Well, sort of. Except that the same companies that are forcing us to go through centralized admin/anti-cheat servers (and according to you pay for the service) are doing the same in the PC space, minus having to pay for it (so far). Every PC gamer I know was quite content with self-governed, privately-hosted servers where the publisher incurs zero cost for hosting games, but for some reason we are being forced to only play on centralized servers in the newer games.
I'm sure very soon will be asked to pay for this "service" (that no one asked for) because the poor poor publishers will be whining about how having to host games is bleeding them dry.
So yes, the PC market is still alive, but every day it seems to be moving closer to being indistinguishable from the console market.
Of course, Windows95 managed to get it wrong by labeling it "start," leading to maximum user-astonishment when people wanted to shutdown or reboot, but I assume that was just a joke. The idea behind it, wasn't.
I never understood people's confusion about the whole Start->shutdown thing. I don't see how anyone could have been confused by it - the first time you use the Start menu to do anything, you see "Shutdown" down at the bottom, so you know it is there. Plus, system shutdown is a process, so you are essentially saying "start the shutdown process". Easy to find, makes sense, I think this was really a non-issue that was just good fodder for jokes, but really could only have been a problem for the brain-dead.
Yes, and it's up there with groping crops for biofuel.
To be fair, it was an exceptionally well-formed ear of corn.
Reminds me of the subwoofer at my parents house. It will occasionally intercept radio communications (only time I've noticed is on brush pickup days, when the main truck and loader gizmo truck are running around outside their house yakking on the radio). Very weird, not sure if it is actually the sub, the cable, or perhaps even the receiver. It is very strange to suddenly hear a voice coming from the sub (as I recall it happens even when the sub is turned off, but it may just be in standby).
Everything else works fine, so I never bothered to look into it for them.
Just diversifying their portfolio or are there other objectives at work?
They're gonna add even more bloat, sucking more CPU cycles, forcing people to upgrade, and therefore buy more Intel CPUs.
The processor is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding processor.
How long will it take until the Sun enters the "quiet period" again? How "loud" will it be until then?
My sources indicate it may, in fact, go to 11.
'... may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun.
So why did the "hot soup of charged particles called plasma" change in the way that they circulated?
Because God made it so.
What, did you sleep through your creationism classes in high school or something?
I recently put together a system with a 64 GB SSD system drive (~$150) and a 1.5 TB data drive (~$80).
So far it has worked pretty well. In general applications don't really use all that much space, so the small drive isn't an issue. I've got most of my normal applications installed (still a pretty new system, I tend to install apps as I need them), using about 30 gigs right now (including ~15 for Windows 7). The only problem so far is that some applications default to storing data in the User folder on the system drive, even after you change the Windows settings to use a different location for documents/etc (shouldn't be a problem at all if you are avoiding Windows). Not a problem now, but as time goes on this could result in more and more space being used on the system drive (which ideally should be pretty static in terms of volume usage, only changing when I add or remove applications).
Of course, part of the reason for the success of this system so far is that I made the decision to treat all games as second-class citizens, so they all go on the data drive, otherwise I'd be out of space real quick (I think the big ones right now are Mass Effect, which someone gave me a year or so ago and I'm finally getting around to playing - about 10 gigs; and Oblivion, which I've gone back to after a couple years, about 7 or 8 gigs with mods). From the benchmarks I've seen going with an SSD doesn't really help a whole lot with games anyway, so no big loss.
Not sure what you are doing that you need hundred-plus of gigs of apps, but so far I'm quite content with this system. The SSD does make an enormous difference in everyday usability. If you're waiting for prices to drop or capacity to increase significantly before trying them out I'd say don't bother; even if all you can fit on the SSD is your OS and one or two most-used apps you're going to appreciate the difference instantly.
Whoa - hold on there cowboy. That's only if you're uploading heavy bits.
Yeah, if you're on ethernet you need to lean the computer the other way 'cause the etherbits are lighter than air.
I hate run-flat tires. Expensive, poor ride quality, and only really protect you from minor punctures. Give me a spare any day (though of course you probably can't fit a 17" spare in a mini).
It is a good idea to take a look at your city/region's franchise agreement. I just took a look at mine and was happy to discover that it quite clearly states that the Comcast franchise (currently only cable co. in the city) is non-exclusive; any other operator may build-out and operate a system in the city, under a separate franchise agreement, as long as the terms of the two franchise agreements are materially the same.
I guess I can't blame the City for lack of choices in TV service.
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
XKCD is fun, though I disagree with his points in that particular comic, especially the alt text. 60 fps looks fake because it is unnaturally smooth in pans.
Seriously, try this at home (or in the office) - sit in your chair and slowly rotate (pan) - what does it look like? Does the world go by nice and smoothly? Assuming you are actually focusing on anything, no, it does not - your eyes jump from one point to another in anything but a smooth fashion (yes, I realize you can avoid this by purposely focusing on nothing). The traditional 24 fps of films helps to recreate this semi-jerky motion in pans, which absolutely makes them feel more realistic. Other than pans higher frame rates are generally better, but it is that lack of jerky motion in panning that makes high-framerate material look "fake" to most people.
Not surprising to me. I grew up watching a B/W TV and the picture quality was definitely lower. Today, I am still happy to watch those old episodes in B/W. Its definitely about content. The thought that putting a movie in HD or 3D improves the storyline or the acting amuses me.
I generally agree, although I do enjoy the higher quality of HD programming (of course I dropped HD service a couple years ago because at the time it was costing too much, and haven't seen about adding it back) - I do think it makes sense to produce new shows in HD, just like at one point it made sense to move from B&W to color even though it didn't necessarily make a show any better and B&W is perfectly watchable.
The thing that bothers me isn't so much HD vs. SD (haven't been exposed to 3D TV yet, not really interested in it), it is picture quality. I don't mind a good-quality standard-def show, but the trouble is it has become nearly impossible to get a good-quality SD (or HD for that matter) picture. Every service I've seen hugely over-compresses the stream, so there are constant compression artifacts. This has been true on Comcast digital cable (analog looked much better before they cut it off), DISH, and DirecTV. There really doesn't seem to be a way to get good-quality TV service in the U.S. anymore. I particularly noticed this recently watching Top Gear. I've been watching it for a few years on BBC America, but they never play any of the older episodes. I was curious about them, so found a site where they are all available and downloaded the first season, which I stream from my PC to the PS3 for playback. Now these were scraped from various European broadcasts, so the resolution is somewhat higher than what you get on NTSC broadcasts, but it really isn't the difference in resolution that is noticeable. No motion artifacts, no blockiness, no getting distracted from the content by obvious and persistent compression artifacts - it is far superior to the crappy signal from the satellite/cable feed I'm used to.
So no, HD versus SD doesn't make better shows (though given the choice of HD or SD for a show I would choose HD), just as having more networks doesn't mean there are more good shows. Personally, I think about 50% of the channels need to be dropped and the bitrates pumped up on the others. Sadly this will never happen, as all of the providers sell themselves based on the number of channels they offer (easy to count and understand) instead of bitrate available for each channel (information that they don't provide anywhere, and which is more difficult to understand anyway).
AT&T U-verse recently became available in my area, which seems promising based on the technology, but reviews I've read don't seem to support that. If you aren't familiar, U-Verse is basically fiber-to-the-node, then runs over regular twisted pair to your house. Instead of trying to fit all of the channel streams into your relatively limited connection all of the time, it only sends you the channel (actually up to 4 channels at a time) that you want. It seems like this should offer plenty capacity for HD content (I seem to recall something like up to 18mbps downstream for internet plus 7-9 mbps for TV plus ~1 mbps for voice, though I think maybe the TV and voice actually subtract from the internet max). Sounds promising, but like I said, reviews I've seen don't sound like it actually works out to much (if any) improvement PQ-wise. I may have to look into Hulu/etc., to see if they offer better picture quality streamed to my TV (I'd say the only problem with this is live sports, but honestly I don't watch that much, and when I do - like the World Cup - the picture is so god-awful over DISH SD that I do my best to watch anywhere but at home.)
No, the solution to this problem is obvious...invent bigger sharks, and mount a whole battery of frikkin' lasers on their heads. Simple, really.
Just don't cross the beams!
I hope it isn't on wheels...
We need mirrored datacenters, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. That way we've always got one that isn't in summer.
-or-
My data center is on the equator, you insensitive clod!
I knew Zorro was still alive!
This isn't exactly a new idea. Even I had a similar idea that I realized years ago.
Back when I was at MIT, we had utility vehicles on campus and several keypadded gates. The men in trucks drove up to the gates and entered codes. Since I didn't want to build any hardware, I colored the keypad over with a permanent marker in similar color to the keys. I counted the audible beeps emitted by the controller. After a day or so, I went up and saw that only three keys had been depressed for the five beeps. After four tries, I had the code and could pointlessly open the gate for no reason at all at will!
I took some flying lessons in college at the local airport. The flying club was located in a hangar on the tarmac, so if you didn't have codes for the gates you had to walk a ways to get there (not a real big airport, though they did have scheduled passenger service). I noticed that most of the other people actually parked inside the gate next to the hangars, so I finally asked my instructor what the gate code was so I could save the few minute walk (and avoid the small, crowded parking lot). "I don't know, I just hit '9-1-1' and it opens" was the reply. Turns out this works at lots of other places, too. The gates are often just intended to keep the general public out, not really as a true security measure, and they will have an obvious code like that so emergency services can get in no problem (don't have to worry about every fire crew, ambulance crew, and police officer having an access card, or making sure they have the correct access code - only problem is that some places, I've heard, actually hook up the gates to an alarm system and entering 9-1-1 will set off the alarm in addition to opening the gate, but I've never run into that).
I'm not sure why that's posted on a spoof site, in my experience it's quite fucking true! BMWs seem pretty common and run of the mill in the UK now and I don't really encounter many that are driven badly above the norm for most cars, One series seem common as muck and I even saw one with one of those learner signs on the top of it the other day which made me chuckle.
It hasn't gotten to this point yet in the U.S. (as far as I've seen). BMWs are certainly more common than Audis, but in general it is still the BMW drivers that are self-important assholes. Audis aren't popular enough yet for them to be seen as the same kind of asshole-symbol, and certainly haven't replaced BMWs in this regard.
It is very sad, really. By all accounts BMWs are wonderful to drive, but you can't buy one because everyone will think you're an asshole. It's like having an Oakland Raiders sticker on your car, only it's the whole car. So it still seems to be BMWs that the yobs (I think that was the term I recall from Top Gear when they discussed this subject... yes, everything we Americans know about the British comes from either Monty Python or Top Gear) prefer in this country, they haven't made the switch to Audis (yet).
Sorry to any Raiders fans out there, but the "Raiders sticker = asshole" rule has thus far failed me only once, and I see a quite a few of them around where I live.
Wasn't IDKFA Doom 2? I seem to remember it was a different (longer) code in the original... maybe it was just different in the shareware demo version.
I would just set the controls to whatever FPS style you like. The original controls for Doom and Quake were horrible.
What do you mean, they worked great. Right hand on the arrow keys, left hand on ctrl (for blowing shit up), shift (for running), z and x for strafing. Of course for Wolfenstein 3D you couldn't use z and x to strafe, you had to hold alt and then left/right arrows. The controls worked great for the game, it was designed around them and trying to throw in a mouse would have just screwed it up.
The only problem was that some keyboards couldn't handle very many simultaneous button presses; I remember at least one keyboard I had where if I was turning, running, shooting, and strafing (so... 5 button presses) the controls would get stuck and it would beep at me. Not usually a problem in the single player, but it could be a problem when playing w/ a friend over the modem (or coax network, though I think that wasn't until Doom 2).
Or go the dedicated ray-tracer route.
Ships aren't cheap, and marine environments are rather hostile (salt, water), and data centers can already be reasonably mobile by putting it in a shipping container and moving that shipping container somewhere... so what need is this filling?
At a guess, I'd say taxes. Any extra expense from going through the pain of putting a data center on a ship would likely be offset (and more than offset) by the tax results. In most places, property taxes can be very significant. If you are putting up a datacenter in a building on land, every dollar you spend (aside from servers) is going to cost you in the long run because you are increasing the taxable value. Datacenters have very extensive and expensive power and cooling infrastructure, and all of that expense contributes directly to the value (and therefore cost through property taxes) of the facility. Put all that expense into a vehicle, and not only do you not have to pay property tax on it, but you probably also get to write off more of your investment in depreciation (not sure about that).
Between the tax savings and potential cooling savings it might actually make sense to do this, though there are numerous other issues to overcome (berthing space is pretty limited most places and can be expensive, and getting power and data to/from the ship may be slightly trickier than for a land-based system, particularly if you want to to offer redundant connections).
It also allows the flexibility to chase cheap power/data; if they aren't getting good deals in the SF Bay, they could probably move it up the coast to Portland or Seattle.