My Anecdote
on
High Score
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In 1979, I was a CS student at Utah State University. On of my friends was a grad student in EE. He had access to the "EE grad student's locker room", which was mostly used by the department for storing crap they hadn't quite decided to throw away. Among said crap was an old Hewlett-Packard mainframe, gathering dust in a corner. There was a reel of tape mounted on its drive.
One night, just screwing around, we tried to fire up the HP. Lo and behold, it worked. We read out the tape, and I recognized it as octal code for the DEC GT-40, an arcane vector graphics box the CS department had (I was taking a graphics class at the time, and we had to code for the rotten thing).
Very very late the next Saturday night, we stole the GT-40, put it on a cart, and wheeled it across the parking lot to the engineering building under cover of darkness. Plugged it into the HP's RS-232 port, and downloaded the tape.
Nolan Bushnell's original Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, from when he was a student there.
Some fun. I should have kept that tape, but oh, well.
An upside-down image reflected in a spherical black mirror does not constitute a "hologram", despite what the marketing department would have you believe.
That's if we want to get into orbit personally. A few ccs of gas is another matter entirely.
Not so. Most of the rocket is used just to get itself into orbit; the payload is fairly insignificant compared to the mass of the engines and propellant. Whatever it is, you still have to get it through the atmosphere and up to escape velocity, and it isn't going to be moving any faster than the rocket's final stage. While there is a difference between heavy- and light-lift boosters, they're both still great big, massive, things.
And it isn't just a "few ccs of gas" - it's a metal container of some kind to put them in, probably with telemetry, radios, computers, etc.; i.e. a payload, which would out-mass the gaseous contents by many orders of magnitude.
That's one big reason why a hyperspace plane is so very difficult to build - unlike a staged rocket, it doesn't shed mass on the way up.
Apple did their level best to discourage game development on the Mac, early on. They were worried about it being perceived as a game machine (as the IIc was) rather than a serious business computer (like IBM's entry offering). To that end, they managed development on the platform much like Sony and other console developers do today; access to technical documentation, development systems, and serious tools (C compilers, assemblers, etc.) was tightly controlled. You had to submit a project proposal and have it approved, and proposals for games were decidedly not welcome.
Not surprisingly, it worked.
Tech docs weren't available for the Mac until several years later, when the PC game market was already well established. The Mac was also somewhat hampered by the closed architecture and need for approval from Apple before marketing hardware - you couldn't just develop a zany 3D-accelerator video card because you wanted to - until the PC had practically conquered the market.
Of course, almost none of these reasons apply today - you can easily get the latest GeForce for your Mac - but there is a great deal of inertia in the industry, and the smaller userbase doesn't help. There is also a viscious circle at work here: because of the lack of games, Mac owners didn't buy their systems to play games, and aren't perceived as game buyers.
You are correct. There is no absolute metric; all velocities are relative to a frame of reference. It follows that time is also relative, and depends on your frame of reference. That is what Einstein showed.
It would have been unlikely, even when he was still being held and the furor was at its height, to meet a "man on the street" who knew who Kevin Mitnick was. On the other hand, during Prohibition it would have been hard to find someone who *didn't* know about Al Capone.
It may just be possible that more total words were written about Mitnick; if so, it's only because there are more words written about absolutely everything, these days, and that's a lousy way to compare the two. If you look at the proportional amount of coverage each was given in the contemporary media, Capone wins by a landslide.
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In 1979, I was a CS student at Utah State University. On of my friends was a grad student in EE. He had access to the "EE grad student's locker room", which was mostly used by the department for storing crap they hadn't quite decided to throw away. Among said crap was an old Hewlett-Packard mainframe, gathering dust in a corner. There was a reel of tape mounted on its drive.
One night, just screwing around, we tried to fire up the HP. Lo and behold, it worked. We read out the tape, and I recognized it as octal code for the DEC GT-40, an arcane vector graphics box the CS department had (I was taking a graphics class at the time, and we had to code for the rotten thing).
Very very late the next Saturday night, we stole the GT-40, put it on a cart, and wheeled it across the parking lot to the engineering building under cover of darkness. Plugged it into the HP's RS-232 port, and downloaded the tape.
Nolan Bushnell's original Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, from when he was a student there.
Some fun. I should have kept that tape, but oh, well.
An upside-down image reflected in a spherical black mirror does not constitute a "hologram", despite what the marketing department would have you believe.
That's if we want to get into orbit personally. A few ccs of gas is another matter entirely.
Not so. Most of the rocket is used just to get itself into orbit; the payload is fairly insignificant compared to the mass of the engines and propellant. Whatever it is, you still have to get it through the atmosphere and up to escape velocity, and it isn't going to be moving any faster than the rocket's final stage. While there is a difference between heavy- and light-lift boosters, they're both still great big, massive, things.
And it isn't just a "few ccs of gas" - it's a metal container of some kind to put them in, probably with telemetry, radios, computers, etc.; i.e. a payload, which would out-mass the gaseous contents by many orders of magnitude.
That's one big reason why a hyperspace plane is so very difficult to build - unlike a staged rocket, it doesn't shed mass on the way up.
Well, that works for half the equation. Maybe Owen is a droid too.
Apple did their level best to discourage game development on the Mac, early on. They were worried about it being perceived as a game machine (as the IIc was) rather than a serious business computer (like IBM's entry offering). To that end, they managed development on the platform much like Sony and other console developers do today; access to technical documentation, development systems, and serious tools (C compilers, assemblers, etc.) was tightly controlled. You had to submit a project proposal and have it approved, and proposals for games were decidedly not welcome.
Not surprisingly, it worked.
Tech docs weren't available for the Mac until several years later, when the PC game market was already well established. The Mac was also somewhat hampered by the closed architecture and need for approval from Apple before marketing hardware - you couldn't just develop a zany 3D-accelerator video card because you wanted to - until the PC had practically conquered the market.
Of course, almost none of these reasons apply today - you can easily get the latest GeForce for your Mac - but there is a great deal of inertia in the industry, and the smaller userbase doesn't help. There is also a viscious circle at work here: because of the lack of games, Mac owners didn't buy their systems to play games, and aren't perceived as game buyers.
You are correct. There is no absolute metric; all velocities are relative to a frame of reference. It follows that time is also relative, and depends on your frame of reference. That is what Einstein showed.
. . . stable enough to run Neverwinter?
Ahh, well then.
Big Hint - two letters: XP.
You're Welcome.
Yeah, what he said.
It would have been unlikely, even when he was still being held and the furor was at its height, to meet a "man on the street" who knew who Kevin Mitnick was. On the other hand, during Prohibition it would have been hard to find someone who *didn't* know about Al Capone.
It may just be possible that more total words were written about Mitnick; if so, it's only because there are more words written about absolutely everything, these days, and that's a lousy way to compare the two. If you look at the proportional amount of coverage each was given in the contemporary media, Capone wins by a landslide.