Black Mesa is not an 'open source' remake. Its a total conversion mod
But that just underscores the team's inability to reconstruct the game's assets.
Art design, level design, character design, scripting (events and dialog,) animation, sets, props, visual effects, sound effects, vocal performance, music, and so on.
...it's that your valuable information should be transcribed onto a special medallion, which is then quartered with each quarter piece buried in a deadly dungeon in a far flung corner of the land.
Because electronic media is more sensitive to heat and humidity than paper, media safes are constructed differently and insulated more heavily than those designed to protect paper.
Media safes are rated using the same hourly classes as those designed for paper except they are tested to maintain a temperature of 125 degrees F or less compared to a fire resistant safe which is tested to maintain a temperature of 350 degrees F or less.
There is a lot to be said for doing what people expect: keeping paper copies of your essential records in a safety deposit box which your next of kin can access without a hassle.
You digital records should quite safe in their Mormon vault in Utah and the limestone cavern in the Appalachians.
That doesn't mean you family will remember how to link to them --- or even be able to link to them --- when they are most needed.
I seem to remember a win95 radio card that slid into an AT slot back in the mid or late 90s...
WinRadio is still very much alive.
WinRadio builds SDR sets for marine, advanced hobbyist, and professional applications. Expect to pay $900-$1000 at entry level.
The WiNRADiO WR-G39DDCi 'EXCELSIOR' is a high-performance HF/VHF/UHF/SHF software-defined receiver with a frequency range from 9 kHz to 3500 MHz, with two independent channels of 4 MHz wide instantaneous bandwidth available for recording and further digital processing, plus a 16 MHz wide real-time spectrum analyzer.
Senators were openly bought by large corporations./quote
The Senators were often the robber barons themselves or only a bare step or two down from the top.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents will start making references to it.
Gene Roddenberry famously pitched Star Trek as "Wagon Train In Space."
Flying under the radar often gives the artist the freedom to do and say whatever he pleases.
The Phantom Blot (1939) is the most chillingly pathological of all Disney villains:
a killer who can't stand the sight of blood ---
and so expends his energy in crafting peculiarly sadistic and morbidly amusing Rube Goldberg death traps for his victims, each slightly and deliberately flawed.
If he is not there when the trap is sprung, he cannot be held responsible.
But the Blot makes his only appearance in the "funny animal" serial adventures of the Mickey Mouse comic strip, a kid's comic strip, at least at first glance, and a genre the critics and censors and Disney himself still generally ignored,
------
The novelist doesn't have to grapple with the problems of theatrical production, film or video.
The producer has to decide whether a project is technically feasible and whether the audience is there to make is profitable.
That tends to come closer to the end of the cycle then its beginning.
Ok - so one series of books in such a setting by one author - I can accept. A whole fracking genre?
Sreampunk tech is fun to draw and fun to animate, with a lot of personality --- but little that is magical or over-powering.
You can see how the machine works.
Things tend to move within a late Victorian and Edwardian world. That has always been an extraordinarily rich lode to mine for the writer of pulp fiction, the weird tale, and the classic adventure story.
The fantasy RPG looks back to the myths and legends of an distant and comforting agrarian past. You'll find damn little of that in Lovecraft or Doyle. You cannot move back, you can only move forward.
"Do not raise up what you cannot put down."
The spectral Hound of the Baskervilles is a theatrical illusion.
What is real and terrifying is to see the face of a later-day killer exposed in the centuries old portrait galleries of the Baskerville clan and to know that this has happened again and again.
Commercial repackaging and distribution of back list titles through outlets like Gog makes a great deal of sense for the publisher --- and the player,
The open source remake is very difficult to pull off.
Due to its long development time Black Mesa has recently become notable for its delays, and dwindling updates on the status of its completion. The delays led to Wired Magazine awarding Black Mesa high spots on their Vaporware Of The Year list in 2009, and again in 2010.
On June 10, 2012 the Black Mesa development team announced that new "media" would be released once their Facebook page reached 20,000 likes. This goal was reached on June 11, 2012 when 8 new screenshots were released.
Its a good thing the Military has been using this technology since the 70's
The patent is for the implementation not the idea.
It looks to me like they stole technology from the F35 helmet system.
The F35 helmet (1) is not yet combat ready and (2) is not mass market consumer tech.
The problems with the current Vision Systems International helmet-mounted display led Lockheed Martin to issue a draft specification for proposals for an alternative on 1 March 2011. The alternative system will be based on Anvis-9 night vision goggles.It will be supplied by BAE systems. The BAE system does not yet include all the features of the VSI helmet and if successful will have the remaining features incorporated. Use of the BAE system would also require a cockpit redesign.
In 2011, Lockheed granted VSI a contract to fix the vibration, jitter, night-vision and sensor display problems in their helmet-mounted display. The improved displays are expected to be delivered in third quarter of 2013.
The smallpox vaccine, the rabies vaccine and the poliomyelitis vaccine were all developed by small teams
Smallpox:
Edward Jenner. 1796.
Now tell me how you build a large medical research team under eighteenth century conditions and no clearly defined germ theory of disease.
Leslie Collier developed a freeze-drying method to produce a more heat stable smallpox vaccine in the late 1940s. Collier added a key component, peptone, a soluble protein, to the process. This protected the virus, enabling the production of a heat-stable vaccine in powdered form. Previously, smallpox vaccines would become ineffective after 1---2 days at ambient temperature.
The development of his vaccine production method played a large role in enabling the World Health Organization to initiate its global smallpox eradication campaign in 1967.
150 years of work before the vaccine exists in a form that will make possible the global eradication of the disease.
Rabies:
Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux. 1885.
But that is again only the beginning of the story.
The human diploid cell rabies vaccine (H.D.C.V.) was started in 1967. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines are made using the attenuated Pitman-Moore L503 strain of the virus. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines have been given to more than 1.5 million people as of 2006.
Aside from vaccinating humans, another approach was also developed by vaccinating dogs to prevent the spread of the virus. In 1979 the Van Houweling Research Laboratory of the Silliman University Medical Center in the Philippines developed and produced a dog vaccine that gave a three-year immunity from rabies.
In 1984 researchers at the Wistar Institute developed a recombinant vaccine called V-RG by inserting the glycoprotein gene from rabies into a vaccinia virus. The V-RG vaccine has since been commercialised by Merial under the trademark Raboral. It is harmless to humans and has been shown to be safe for various species of animals that might accidentally encounter it in the wild, including birds (gulls, hawks, and owls).
V-RG has been successfully used in the field in Belgium, France, Germany and the United States to prevent outbreaks of rabies in wildlife. The vaccine is stable under relatively high temperatures and can be delivered orally, making mass vaccination of wildlife possible by putting it in baits.
In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 a year. Amid this U.S. polio epidemic, millions of dollars were invested in finding and marketing a polio vaccine by commercial interests
There were many, many, teams working on Polio on separate tracks, with clinical trials and production on an unprecedented scale. 1.8 million kids drawn into the trials of the Salk vaccine alone. Polio vaccine
Neat graphics usually means heavy system requirements.
A lot of people may be fine with a game that isn't as beautiful, but can be run smoothly on their systems.
I am not sure I agree.
Think of the Flash based game Mechanarium.
The hardware requirements were trivial --- the art design and execution extraordinary:
It won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 12th Annual Independent Games Festivaland the Best Soundtrack award from PC Gamer in 2009. It was nominated for an Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and a Milthon award in the 'Best Indie Game' category at the Paris Game Festival.
The US is like the modern day Roman Empire. Eventually, the rest of the world will get tired of being bullied by the US and stand up.
The Western Empire had a 500 year run.
The Eastern Empire survived and prospered for the better part of 1,000 years after that.
Iceland has a population of 320,000. The Iceland parliament 63 members. That implies that each member of parliament represents about 5,000 people --- about the size of an upstate suburban township in New York.
There is no guarantee that the European Union will survive the year in its present form.
Every offensive move (aggressive pricing of Office to outcompete WordPerfect; developing a web browser to kill off Netscape; hostile take-over of other competing companies) have always been to defend the status quo which includes Windows on the desktop.
Netscape was the status quo.
WordPerfect was the status quo.
The character based word processor ported to every operating system known to man.
Each with their own fiefdom within the company and not a one willing to give ground as their platform declined.
WordPerfect was a fish out of water in a GUI world. It took another near-fatal blow in the transition from the stand-alone word processor to the integrated office suite.
Everyone wants part of the action of devices locked to a captive audience. Metro, Markets... no thanks. I'll retain control of my own devices.
The value of your device is in the software it can run, the resources it can access, and how easily that software can be discovered, installed and maintained.
The media app, for example can provide freeplay, rental and subscription services.
Instant access to a catalog of perhaps 10 million audio recordings and 30 to 60 thousand videos. Formatted for mobile play or as a "high-definition" feed to your home theater system.
Assuming RF meter reading. The meter reader would note no reading and then look at their property; which you have vandalized.
Then there is the small matter of theft of services;
the lack of a credible explanation for why you blocked a reading when the tech who comes out to check the meter can hear your central A/C running full throttle.
For desktop Linux, why couldn't you put together a machine from your own hardware instead of relying on an OEM? [T]here will always be the potential for businesses to spring up as well if the demand is there.
Mass market tech designed for the Windows eco-system is what made the home-brewed desktop or custom build simple and affordable, whatever the OS you chose to run.
The trend in desktops is towards smaller and lighter units --- not so tightly compressed as a laptop, to be sure, but not so inviting a DIY project as they once were.
I'm a linux fan, and I build a LOT of custom systems for people (and sell them for a living).
So pissing me off costs a manufacturer a few hundred sales a year. SO lets multiply that by a few thousand "linux fans" who are also responsible for corporate purchases, hardware sales at local shops, etc. It adds up.
Let's have a look at the numbers:
In terms of annual sales figures, ASUS emerged as the highest grossing motherboard vendor with 21.6 million units sales in calendar year 2010, followed by Gigabyte with 18 million units.
And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.
The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:
Slashdot Mirror
Black Mesa is not an 'open source' remake. Its a total conversion mod
But that just underscores the team's inability to reconstruct the game's assets.
Art design, level design, character design, scripting (events and dialog,) animation, sets, props, visual effects, sound effects, vocal performance, music, and so on.
(This is a variation on the old displaced strand of hair trick.)
Why I am I reminded of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon?
The hair trick works because the strand is damn near invisible.
The envelope you describe screams "Secrets In Here!" so loud that it can be heard from six blocks away.
...it's that your valuable information should be transcribed onto a special medallion, which is then quartered with each quarter piece buried in a deadly dungeon in a far flung corner of the land.
That didn't work out so well for Tom Riddle.
Because electronic media is more sensitive to heat and humidity than paper, media safes are constructed differently and insulated more heavily than those designed to protect paper.
Media safes are rated using the same hourly classes as those designed for paper except they are tested to maintain a temperature of 125 degrees F or less compared to a fire resistant safe which is tested to maintain a temperature of 350 degrees F or less.
There is a lot to be said for doing what people expect: keeping paper copies of your essential records in a safety deposit box which your next of kin can access without a hassle.
You digital records should quite safe in their Mormon vault in Utah and the limestone cavern in the Appalachians.
That doesn't mean you family will remember how to link to them --- or even be able to link to them --- when they are most needed.
I seem to remember a win95 radio card that slid into an AT slot back in the mid or late 90s...
WinRadio is still very much alive.
WinRadio builds SDR sets for marine, advanced hobbyist, and professional applications. Expect to pay $900-$1000 at entry level.
The WiNRADiO WR-G39DDCi 'EXCELSIOR' is a high-performance HF/VHF/UHF/SHF software-defined receiver with a frequency range from 9 kHz to 3500 MHz, with two independent channels of 4 MHz wide instantaneous bandwidth available for recording and further digital processing, plus a 16 MHz wide real-time spectrum analyzer.
WinRadio
Senators were openly bought by large corporations./quote The Senators were often the robber barons themselves or only a bare step or two down from the top.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents will start making references to it.
Gene Roddenberry famously pitched Star Trek as "Wagon Train In Space."
Flying under the radar often gives the artist the freedom to do and say whatever he pleases.
The Phantom Blot (1939) is the most chillingly pathological of all Disney villains:
a killer who can't stand the sight of blood ---
and so expends his energy in crafting peculiarly sadistic and morbidly amusing Rube Goldberg death traps for his victims, each slightly and deliberately flawed.
If he is not there when the trap is sprung, he cannot be held responsible.
But the Blot makes his only appearance in the "funny animal" serial adventures of the Mickey Mouse comic strip, a kid's comic strip, at least at first glance, and a genre the critics and censors and Disney himself still generally ignored,
------
The novelist doesn't have to grapple with the problems of theatrical production, film or video.
The producer has to decide whether a project is technically feasible and whether the audience is there to make is profitable.
That tends to come closer to the end of the cycle then its beginning.
Ok - so one series of books in such a setting by one author - I can accept. A whole fracking genre?
Sreampunk tech is fun to draw and fun to animate, with a lot of personality --- but little that is magical or over-powering.
You can see how the machine works.
Things tend to move within a late Victorian and Edwardian world. That has always been an extraordinarily rich lode to mine for the writer of pulp fiction, the weird tale, and the classic adventure story.
The fantasy RPG looks back to the myths and legends of an distant and comforting agrarian past. You'll find damn little of that in Lovecraft or Doyle. You cannot move back, you can only move forward.
"Do not raise up what you cannot put down."
The spectral Hound of the Baskervilles is a theatrical illusion.
What is real and terrifying is to see the face of a later-day killer exposed in the centuries old portrait galleries of the Baskerville clan and to know that this has happened again and again.
I'd really like to play Redneck Rampage
Redneck Rampage Collection is $6 at Gog.com, with soundtracks and extras. Carmageddon Max Pack coming soon.
You have to be realistic.
Commercial repackaging and distribution of back list titles through outlets like Gog makes a great deal of sense for the publisher --- and the player,
The open source remake is very difficult to pull off.
Due to its long development time Black Mesa has recently become notable for its delays, and dwindling updates on the status of its completion. The delays led to Wired Magazine awarding Black Mesa high spots on their Vaporware Of The Year list in 2009, and again in 2010.
On June 10, 2012 the Black Mesa development team announced that new "media" would be released once their Facebook page reached 20,000 likes. This goal was reached on June 11, 2012 when 8 new screenshots were released.
Black Mesa
Pathetic.
Its a good thing the Military has been using this technology since the 70's
The patent is for the implementation not the idea.
It looks to me like they stole technology from the F35 helmet system.
The F35 helmet (1) is not yet combat ready and (2) is not mass market consumer tech.
The problems with the current Vision Systems International helmet-mounted display led Lockheed Martin to issue a draft specification for proposals for an alternative on 1 March 2011. The alternative system will be based on Anvis-9 night vision goggles.It will be supplied by BAE systems. The BAE system does not yet include all the features of the VSI helmet and if successful will have the remaining features incorporated. Use of the BAE system would also require a cockpit redesign.
In 2011, Lockheed granted VSI a contract to fix the vibration, jitter, night-vision and sensor display problems in their helmet-mounted display. The improved displays are expected to be delivered in third quarter of 2013.
F-35 Helmet-mounted display system
(just pull in cold water from under the boat)
How cold is the water?
The smallpox vaccine, the rabies vaccine and the poliomyelitis vaccine were all developed by small teams
Smallpox:
Edward Jenner. 1796.
Now tell me how you build a large medical research team under eighteenth century conditions and no clearly defined germ theory of disease.
Leslie Collier developed a freeze-drying method to produce a more heat stable smallpox vaccine in the late 1940s. Collier added a key component, peptone, a soluble protein, to the process. This protected the virus, enabling the production of a heat-stable vaccine in powdered form. Previously, smallpox vaccines would become ineffective after 1---2 days at ambient temperature.
The development of his vaccine production method played a large role in enabling the World Health Organization to initiate its global smallpox eradication campaign in 1967.
Smallpox vaccine
150 years of work before the vaccine exists in a form that will make possible the global eradication of the disease.
Rabies:
Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux. 1885.
But that is again only the beginning of the story.
The human diploid cell rabies vaccine (H.D.C.V.) was started in 1967. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines are made using the attenuated Pitman-Moore L503 strain of the virus. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines have been given to more than 1.5 million people as of 2006.
Aside from vaccinating humans, another approach was also developed by vaccinating dogs to prevent the spread of the virus. In 1979 the Van Houweling Research Laboratory of the Silliman University Medical Center in the Philippines developed and produced a dog vaccine that gave a three-year immunity from rabies.
In 1984 researchers at the Wistar Institute developed a recombinant vaccine called V-RG by inserting the glycoprotein gene from rabies into a vaccinia virus. The V-RG vaccine has since been commercialised by Merial under the trademark Raboral. It is harmless to humans and has been shown to be safe for various species of animals that might accidentally encounter it in the wild, including birds (gulls, hawks, and owls).
V-RG has been successfully used in the field in Belgium, France, Germany and the United States to prevent outbreaks of rabies in wildlife. The vaccine is stable under relatively high temperatures and can be delivered orally, making mass vaccination of wildlife possible by putting it in baits.
Rabies vaccine
Polio vaccine
Jonas Salk. 1952.
In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 a year. Amid this U.S. polio epidemic, millions of dollars were invested in finding and marketing a polio vaccine by commercial interests
There were many, many, teams working on Polio on separate tracks, with clinical trials and production on an unprecedented scale. 1.8 million kids drawn into the trials of the Salk vaccine alone. Polio vaccine
Neat graphics usually means heavy system requirements.
A lot of people may be fine with a game that isn't as beautiful, but can be run smoothly on their systems.
I am not sure I agree.
Think of the Flash based game Mechanarium.
The hardware requirements were trivial --- the art design and execution extraordinary:
It won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 12th Annual Independent Games Festivaland the Best Soundtrack award from PC Gamer in 2009. It was nominated for an Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and a Milthon award in the 'Best Indie Game' category at the Paris Game Festival.
[wikipedia]
The US is like the modern day Roman Empire. Eventually, the rest of the world will get tired of being bullied by the US and stand up.
The Western Empire had a 500 year run.
The Eastern Empire survived and prospered for the better part of 1,000 years after that.
Iceland has a population of 320,000. The Iceland parliament 63 members. That implies that each member of parliament represents about 5,000 people --- about the size of an upstate suburban township in New York.
There is no guarantee that the European Union will survive the year in its present form.
Every offensive move (aggressive pricing of Office to outcompete WordPerfect; developing a web browser to kill off Netscape; hostile take-over of other competing companies) have always been to defend the status quo which includes Windows on the desktop.
Netscape was the status quo.
WordPerfect was the status quo.
The character based word processor ported to every operating system known to man.
Each with their own fiefdom within the company and not a one willing to give ground as their platform declined.
WordPerfect was a fish out of water in a GUI world. It took another near-fatal blow in the transition from the stand-alone word processor to the integrated office suite.
Everyone wants part of the action of devices locked to a captive audience. Metro, Markets... no thanks. I'll retain control of my own devices.
The value of your device is in the software it can run, the resources it can access, and how easily that software can be discovered, installed and maintained.
The media app, for example can provide freeplay, rental and subscription services.
Instant access to a catalog of perhaps 10 million audio recordings and 30 to 60 thousand videos. Formatted for mobile play or as a "high-definition" feed to your home theater system.
Assuming RF meter reading. The meter reader would note no reading and then look at their property; which you have vandalized.
Then there is the small matter of theft of services;
the lack of a credible explanation for why you blocked a reading when the tech who comes out to check the meter can hear your central A/C running full throttle.
For desktop Linux, why couldn't you put together a machine from your own hardware instead of relying on an OEM? [T]here will always be the potential for businesses to spring up as well if the demand is there.
Mass market tech designed for the Windows eco-system is what made the home-brewed desktop or custom build simple and affordable, whatever the OS you chose to run.
The trend in desktops is towards smaller and lighter units --- not so tightly compressed as a laptop, to be sure, but not so inviting a DIY project as they once were.
Wrong. Fedora has an ever bigger share.
and has made an even bigger commitment to support Secure Boot.
'nuff said.
If Canonical doesn't care about users, why is Ubuntu is the only Linux distribution to win a measurable share of the mass-market desktop?
I'm a linux fan, and I build a LOT of custom systems for people (and sell them for a living).
So pissing me off costs a manufacturer a few hundred sales a year.
SO lets multiply that by a few thousand "linux fans" who are also responsible for corporate purchases, hardware sales at local shops, etc.
It adds up.
Let's have a look at the numbers:
In terms of annual sales figures, ASUS emerged as the highest grossing motherboard vendor with 21.6 million units sales in calendar year 2010, followed by Gigabyte with 18 million units.
ASRock Third Largest Motherboard Vendor
ASRock sold eight million motherboards in 2011, compared with ECS and MSI who sold seven million apiece.
ASRock
It is a good bet, I think, that corporate buyers will be looking for a board that does support Secure Boot.
What is the product and who does it target?
Even in the Linux universe not everyone confident working with source.
The "donation" that delivers the goods in the only form a user can comfortably deal with is more properly called a "sale."
So you're too cheap to give some money to the person who's offering to do all that work for you?
He is saying he doesn't have the time or the money to do this on spec.
Free upgrade to Ubuntu from any version of windows.
No free Linux upgrade or port for every significant software package that runs under Windows.
While damn near everything client-side in FOSS is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
The parent post gets a predictable mod-up here.
But the truth of the thing is that only 1% of desktop users have seen any added value in Linux. I do not expect that to change,
And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.
The short answer is in the stats:
Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide
Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan
Mobile vs Desktop --- China
Mobile vs. Desktop --- India
The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:
Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide