Obviously, people should fine-tune their resume to the job they are applying for, but I've often had "shotgun" resumes floating around that essentially list my strengths. Is it possible that the 45+ year old in question might not have thought they had a realistic shot at a position, so used a shotgun resume in the hopes that one of their strengths might actually be something you had a need for?
I decided I could safely retire early right after the residue of the dot-.bomb finished hitting the ground, but one of the reasons for that was the changing face of the industry; in 1997 I could walk into a interview with a glowing recommendation and obvious skills in the general area of what the business was doing, and get the job; and I was only a little older than you; by 2002, the 2nd rush of generally-bright-but-not-techies-and-just-after-the-money hit with the economic downturn in full force, and usually one moment after they saw my age I was out the door.
What bothers me is the older people who can't get any job; they're not shooting for a salary that would match their skills and experience, but want anything at all. I've got friends who are genuine rockstar programmers who can't get a job *anywhere*, because of their age.
I'm only 49, and I'm still freaked out by what people allow to happen. I remember watergate; I remember Iran-Contra. it seems to me that we hit the toppling point about 1995 or so?
The Best of both worlds. You don't get a big performance loss, it's rock stead, and it recognizes some pretty damn obscure hardware. Adding apps is a breeze, and it makes recovery operations on win32 machines damned easy. The only problem I have with Knoppix is that they really reduced the apps that come on the CD version after v6 or so... I run into quite a few systems that won't boot from DVD, and a few that won't do a thumbdrive boot, so I usually end up using a v5 era Knoppix CD.
Its hands down more useful as a general tool than any other distro.
Not quite right. Dave came up with the fantasy aspect, some of the basics of the magic system, and about half the overall idea; Gary came up with the combat, concept of mapping, and about 40% of the original idea. after the pamphlets, he just wasn't involved that much. Gary never denied he came up with half of the original idea. He did get a little disgruntled when people discounted the fact that he took it from a garage business to a multimillion dollar empire essentially by himself.
But AD&D and everything after about '76, he simply wasn't involved.
Since Gary's death a number of former TSR employee's and Gary's family have been organizing GaryCon in his honor. As word spreads each year, the attendance keeps growing. While it will likely never match GenCon, there is now a reason for old school gaming geeks to visit Lake Geneva.
That is pretty cool.
Plus, all the cons & stuff leaving the Lake Geneva area, and Hasbro making money was done *after* Gary was forced out; not his fault.
there were a lot of dead ends, paths that were not pursued. I would be pretty surprised, for instance, if anyone has figured out a emulator for the sound blaster AWE cards full range of functionality.
Not necessarily. 100 machines isn't really that many, and there might not be a whole lot of complexity involved... I could see a company deciding to just have someone put on a 2nd hat. My General Advice: 1st heavily define the current network, find everything, map it to death. 2nd set up a test network to play and practice on. 3rd make your purchases based on what your network needs, not what would be perfect. 4th re-purposing works. someday, somebody who knows what they are doing will look at what you did (possibly you).
Ditto. They showed 3 possible connections for my house, Charter, Verizon & Beasley Wireless, a little local WISP that I tried to get to work for over 2 years, until I got tired of only having internet between 11pm and 4am. and charter doesn't come within 2 miles of my place.
If nothing else, this article led me to the Wikipedia page that provided the information that Alone in the Dark was remade in 2008, and that Atari is suing pretty much everyone that has anything to do with it.
It was REALLY exciting, until I realized that no North American courts are involved... A sane decision concerning copyright infringement by a U.S. Court would be really fantastic.
Do you hear the word "Snide" a lot, out of curiosity?
What is the purpose of Windows? to manage hardware resources, and provide common services for the efficient execution of applications.
If a User only used a word processor, then the ultimate OS for that person would be an OS that booted the system directly into that application. But we don't have a lot of people with just one application; I've got about 100 +/-, so i want my OS to:
A) not get in the way of running my applications, making it easy to locate the program and then initiate it. With just a few applications, one obvious way to do this would be to have icons on the screen corresponding to the applications (or even better, programmable keys on a keyboard). With more than a few you really can't do that, so you bring up the problem of locating the applications. The Traditional ways: 1) memorize the file names, then type them in the "RUN" bar/box/whatever. Works great, and has for decades, but there is no framework to help you remember, and you have to have a working memory. of course, operating systems have always included some method to search for the stuff on the system, but, once again, you have to have SOME memory for this to work. 2) have a menu that lists the applications, perhaps grouping them by type of application; this has been established as the most useful method by long practice, and is The Industry Standard.
B) Use a minimum of system resources, and pass along as many of those resources as possible to the direct control of the applications. This would mean that anything done to beautify the operating system is counterproductive, and that is really the whole point; if the OS wastes a clock cycle or a byte of resources on ANYTHING besides running the applications that the user wants to run, it is not efficient.
OK, back to the real world. we like hi res backgrounds, and fading transparent resource screens. The companies that make operating systems have their own agenda, so they build in backdoors, DRM schemes, and planned obsolescence.
Also, all users are different. one user wants an icon on his desktop for each application, and if there isn't enough space, they increase the res and use smaller icons. another wants to type in the name of the apps and launch them that way, and may never look at a menu. Another might have Voice Command integration, and go through the hassle of training her computer to recognize her voice so that she can literally ask for the application that she wants.
The majority of users are going to want what they have always had, which is a Start menu, with icons representing applications, usually organized into categories by type. the girl with voice command will find this boring, the guy who wants to type in applications will find this old fashioned, and the guy working on the direct neural interface will find all this hopelessly obsolescent.
I would be running Windows 2000 if there were drivers to support my motherboard available, because it uses the least system resources. Since thee are no drivers, I use XP, because it uses less resources than other available Windows operating systems, and provides a simple interface to launch my applications, meeting the criteria for being the Most Efficient Operating System for my purposes.
If someone wants to run another Operating System, fine. But singing the praises of DRM, or justifying resource bloat, or bragging about the way your desktop transitions between screens, or criticizing people for using a menu system, etc, is just...annoying? yeah, I think that is the best word.
a lot of the weirder compounds do require a little bit of help, but I wouldn't qualify them as "High Explosives". for instance, some of the stuff you can eventually make if you have urine, a car battery, and some simple equipment works a lot better with a electric trigger.
The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.
I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.
But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.
Just for a moment, lets postulate that time travel is possible. The people who keep a eye on such things, to prevent discovery before it's time, notice that someone has posted on the internet that they have discovered an anachronism.
Thinking quickly, the agency in question pops back to circa 1926, and creates a hearing aid that makes the best possible use of 1926 technology, and packages it in an appropriate casing. it costs the equivalent of 6 new cars, and is so fragile that the thought of it functioning for more than a few hours is ridiculous, but it's possible. they contact a hearing aid manufacturer, get them to use the device in a couple of advertisements, and Voila! temporal anachronism explained away.
But it leaves one question; someone had to have been instructed to dig through the brittle yellowing remains of 1920's advertisements to locate this "reasonable explanation"; is that someone actually in the agencies employ, or did they just receive a anonymous tip?
I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked. 1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing. She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...
Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.
Their denial is sort of humorous.
Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.
I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked. 1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing. She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...
Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.
Their denial is sort of humorous.
Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.
The only problem I had with the Wii netflix was that, about 1/2 the time, my connection just goes flaky as hell, and the buffering system is simply stupid. I'm not sure what you are saying, but I think the problem here is their attempting to make everything workable by the most idiotic customers; we need advanced setting for those of us with non-standard and/or non-functioning connections.
You really did write up exactly what I was thinking but was too lazy to go into detail about.
one thing: while you are almost certainly right that the GPU manufacturers would make a new standard every year, even if consumers did not upgrade them, the Video Cards would still retain their ability to act as video cards for standard PC based games, and would add power to applications able to make use of GPU's for processing; people are going to be able to continue to use last years Gaming GPU for PC stuff.
I could see Nvidia essentially continuing the way they currently are, but they could add to the various cards as they come out "compliant with integrated console platform 2012A" with the economy cards only being compliant with "ICP 2011", for instance.
I think it would be an extremely elegant solution; I hate DRM, but as long as they keep to a hardware based DRM inside the thing (and unable to be modified by software), game developers could enjoy the same level of copy protection they currently get on consoles.
Manufacturing costs would be considerably lower, obviously, since you don't have to worry about storage interface, controller ports, power, networking, etc.
Sounds to me that they would do better by talking to video card manufactures; if everything was based on a video card, it wouldn't really matter what sort of PC you had; add TV out hardware (if you can find a video card without the hardware already there) and use the GPU for the games.
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Obviously, people should fine-tune their resume to the job they are applying for, but I've often had "shotgun" resumes floating around that essentially list my strengths. Is it possible that the 45+ year old in question might not have thought they had a realistic shot at a position, so used a shotgun resume in the hopes that one of their strengths might actually be something you had a need for?
I decided I could safely retire early right after the residue of the dot-.bomb finished hitting the ground, but one of the reasons for that was the changing face of the industry; in 1997 I could walk into a interview with a glowing recommendation and obvious skills in the general area of what the business was doing, and get the job; and I was only a little older than you; by 2002, the 2nd rush of generally-bright-but-not-techies-and-just-after-the-money hit with the economic downturn in full force, and usually one moment after they saw my age I was out the door.
What bothers me is the older people who can't get any job; they're not shooting for a salary that would match their skills and experience, but want anything at all. I've got friends who are genuine rockstar programmers who can't get a job *anywhere*, because of their age.
I'm only 49, and I'm still freaked out by what people allow to happen. I remember watergate; I remember Iran-Contra. it seems to me that we hit the toppling point about 1995 or so?
The Best of both worlds.
You don't get a big performance loss, it's rock stead, and it recognizes some pretty damn obscure hardware. Adding apps is a breeze, and it makes recovery operations on win32 machines damned easy.
The only problem I have with Knoppix is that they really reduced the apps that come on the CD version after v6 or so... I run into quite a few systems that won't boot from DVD, and a few that won't do a thumbdrive boot, so I usually end up using a v5 era Knoppix CD.
Its hands down more useful as a general tool than any other distro.
Not quite right.
Dave came up with the fantasy aspect, some of the basics of the magic system, and about half the overall idea; Gary came up with the combat, concept of mapping, and about 40% of the original idea. after the pamphlets, he just wasn't involved that much. Gary never denied he came up with half of the original idea. He did get a little disgruntled when people discounted the fact that he took it from a garage business to a multimillion dollar empire essentially by himself.
But AD&D and everything after about '76, he simply wasn't involved.
Since Gary's death a number of former TSR employee's and Gary's family have been organizing GaryCon in his honor. As word spreads each year, the attendance keeps growing. While it will likely never match GenCon, there is now a reason for old school gaming geeks to visit Lake Geneva.
That is pretty cool.
Plus, all the cons & stuff leaving the Lake Geneva area, and Hasbro making money was done *after* Gary was forced out; not his fault.
Excellent idea. It really should have a dungeon, but I would settle for a library with a big section on games theory.
there were a lot of dead ends, paths that were not pursued.
I would be pretty surprised, for instance, if anyone has figured out a emulator for the sound blaster AWE cards full range of functionality.
sounds like there is an existing network, it is possible that there might not be any big expenditures needed.
Not necessarily. 100 machines isn't really that many, and there might not be a whole lot of complexity involved... I could see a company deciding to just have someone put on a 2nd hat.
My General Advice: 1st heavily define the current network, find everything, map it to death. 2nd set up a test network to play and practice on. 3rd make your purchases based on what your network needs, not what would be perfect. 4th re-purposing works.
someday, somebody who knows what they are doing will look at what you did (possibly you).
But vmware CAN run inside of Virtual PC.
Ditto. They showed 3 possible connections for my house, Charter, Verizon & Beasley Wireless, a little local WISP that I tried to get to work for over 2 years, until I got tired of only having internet between 11pm and 4am. and charter doesn't come within 2 miles of my place.
If nothing else, this article led me to the Wikipedia page that provided the information that Alone in the Dark was remade in 2008, and that Atari is suing pretty much everyone that has anything to do with it.
It was REALLY exciting, until I realized that no North American courts are involved... A sane decision concerning copyright infringement by a U.S. Court would be really fantastic.
Do you hear the word "Snide" a lot, out of curiosity?
What is the purpose of Windows? to manage hardware resources, and provide common services for the efficient execution of applications.
If a User only used a word processor, then the ultimate OS for that person would be an OS that booted the system directly into that application. But we don't have a lot of people with just one application; I've got about 100 +/-, so i want my OS to:
A) not get in the way of running my applications, making it easy to locate the program and then initiate it. With just a few applications, one obvious way to do this would be to have icons on the screen corresponding to the applications (or even better, programmable keys on a keyboard). With more than a few you really can't do that, so you bring up the problem of locating the applications. The Traditional ways: 1) memorize the file names, then type them in the "RUN" bar/box/whatever. Works great, and has for decades, but there is no framework to help you remember, and you have to have a working memory. of course, operating systems have always included some method to search for the stuff on the system, but, once again, you have to have SOME memory for this to work. 2) have a menu that lists the applications, perhaps grouping them by type of application; this has been established as the most useful method by long practice, and is The Industry Standard.
B) Use a minimum of system resources, and pass along as many of those resources as possible to the direct control of the applications. This would mean that anything done to beautify the operating system is counterproductive, and that is really the whole point; if the OS wastes a clock cycle or a byte of resources on ANYTHING besides running the applications that the user wants to run, it is not efficient.
OK, back to the real world. we like hi res backgrounds, and fading transparent resource screens. The companies that make operating systems have their own agenda, so they build in backdoors, DRM schemes, and planned obsolescence.
Also, all users are different. one user wants an icon on his desktop for each application, and if there isn't enough space, they increase the res and use smaller icons. another wants to type in the name of the apps and launch them that way, and may never look at a menu. Another might have Voice Command integration, and go through the hassle of training her computer to recognize her voice so that she can literally ask for the application that she wants.
The majority of users are going to want what they have always had, which is a Start menu, with icons representing applications, usually organized into categories by type. the girl with voice command will find this boring, the guy who wants to type in applications will find this old fashioned, and the guy working on the direct neural interface will find all this hopelessly obsolescent.
I would be running Windows 2000 if there were drivers to support my motherboard available, because it uses the least system resources. Since thee are no drivers, I use XP, because it uses less resources than other available Windows operating systems, and provides a simple interface to launch my applications, meeting the criteria for being the Most Efficient Operating System for my purposes.
If someone wants to run another Operating System, fine. But singing the praises of DRM, or justifying resource bloat, or bragging about the way your desktop transitions between screens, or criticizing people for using a menu system, etc, is just...annoying? yeah, I think that is the best word.
a lot of the weirder compounds do require a little bit of help, but I wouldn't qualify them as "High Explosives".
for instance, some of the stuff you can eventually make if you have urine, a car battery, and some simple equipment works a lot better with a electric trigger.
as for Duty Free.... Huh. Compression?
Darn good thing I don't fly.
The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.
I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.
But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.
Damn. /. gave me no indication that the post had been accepted; i refreshed the thread, it wasn't there. i waited a couple of minutes, still not there.
Sorry.
Just for a moment, lets postulate that time travel is possible.
The people who keep a eye on such things, to prevent discovery before it's time, notice that someone has posted on the internet that they have discovered an anachronism.
Thinking quickly, the agency in question pops back to circa 1926, and creates a hearing aid that makes the best possible use of 1926 technology, and packages it in an appropriate casing. it costs the equivalent of 6 new cars, and is so fragile that the thought of it functioning for more than a few hours is ridiculous, but it's possible. they contact a hearing aid manufacturer, get them to use the device in a couple of advertisements, and Voila! temporal anachronism explained away.
But it leaves one question; someone had to have been instructed to dig through the brittle yellowing remains of 1920's advertisements to locate this "reasonable explanation"; is that someone actually in the agencies employ, or did they just receive a anonymous tip?
I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...
Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.
Their denial is sort of humorous.
Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.
my apologies if this is a dupe.
I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...
Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.
Their denial is sort of humorous.
Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.
I'm pretty sure Virtual PC supplies Voodoo support.
The only problem I had with the Wii netflix was that, about 1/2 the time, my connection just goes flaky as hell, and the buffering system is simply stupid.
I'm not sure what you are saying, but I think the problem here is their attempting to make everything workable by the most idiotic customers; we need advanced setting for those of us with non-standard and/or non-functioning connections.
...Which is why Sim City, Civilization, X-COM, Master of Magic, Mass effect, and nearly any RPG have been such total flops.
I've been Computer Gaming since the 80's. The only games I've ever played multi-player are MOO2, Age of Empires, Earth and Beyond and Empire Earth.
As TFA points out, the problem is that very few studios are making adequate effort to make quality single player games these days.
You really did write up exactly what I was thinking but was too lazy to go into detail about.
one thing: while you are almost certainly right that the GPU manufacturers would make a new standard every year, even if consumers did not upgrade them, the Video Cards would still retain their ability to act as video cards for standard PC based games, and would add power to applications able to make use of GPU's for processing; people are going to be able to continue to use last years Gaming GPU for PC stuff.
I could see Nvidia essentially continuing the way they currently are, but they could add to the various cards as they come out "compliant with integrated console platform 2012A" with the economy cards only being compliant with "ICP 2011", for instance.
I think it would be an extremely elegant solution; I hate DRM, but as long as they keep to a hardware based DRM inside the thing (and unable to be modified by software), game developers could enjoy the same level of copy protection they currently get on consoles.
Manufacturing costs would be considerably lower, obviously, since you don't have to worry about storage interface, controller ports, power, networking, etc.
Something tells me I should have patented this.
You wrote that up MUCH better than I did.
Sounds to me that they would do better by talking to video card manufactures; if everything was based on a video card, it wouldn't really matter what sort of PC you had; add TV out hardware (if you can find a video card without the hardware already there) and use the GPU for the games.