The XBox can not do HD reliably enough though. 720p is the best you'll do (although you can squeeze a bit of 1080i out of it). And x264 performance isn't great (you'll get a lot of dropped frames, if it works), so you'll be stuck with xvid. But it is quite nice for the price.
Now how about releasing the source (and assets!) from their very first game, Black Crypt? That was one of my favorite Amiga games, and I'd love to monkey around with its guts.
Heres my CompUSA story. A few years back I bought my sister a cd burner from CompUSA. I managed to talk her through installing it, although it took a while. When she finally got it up an running, she said "Sweet, you put a burned copy of 'MS Office' in it for me!"
Uh, actually no I hadn't. It was a normal (or so I thought) shrink-wrapped box when I bought it. Amazing. I cant imagine that it was a returned burner (the burned copy of Office worked fine) although anything's possible. My hunch is that some employees used it to burn some software quick, re-shrink wrapped it, and put it back on the shelves - forgetting to take the last burned copy out.
The poppers (at least the type I have, a Poppery II) don't have a thermocouple, just an unadjustable bimetallic strip. The cheap mod some people use is to short out the thermostat, because they tend to open before the popper gets hot enough. Mine doesnt get hot enough, I've had beans not hit first crack after 20-30 minutes. After that, you can manually adjust the temp using a switch on the heating element while watching a meat thermometer. All thats missing from that is a way to wire the meat thermometer to a computer - and maybe an adjustable bimetallic strip so you dont burn down your house when your PC crashes.
I had the same idea, but I couldnt find any thermistors or other temperature sensing bits that were rated for high enough temperatures (at least 500F) without being crazy expensive.
I was excited to see this article to see what they used, but of course they dont mention what specific temperature sensor they're using. Initial Googling for "thermocouple" brought up a couple solutions that cost more than a whole automatic coffee roaster.
But I dont know a lot about electronics anyways, so I'm probably better off.
What is new in that trailer? Seems like the same one that was floating around before, but I'm too lazy to look up the old one.
And as far as the shape of the Heart of Gold, blame it on a glitch in the Infinite Improbability Drive. That always works.
I've had ideas for things to do with dead hardware, but I dont have enough of it layin around. Where do you guys go to find good stuff when you have a project in mind? Right now I'm think I need some dead hard drives, which I could probably find if I jumped into a computer shop's dumpster. But it'd be nice to get my hands on something larger than a 3.5".
Hopefully in the future we will see some real and high quality computer versions of Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates and all the other great board games most people have never heard of.
Theres a decent set of board games on BrettspielWelt, except its primarily a German site. They have Peurto Rico, Settlers, Carcassonne, and a mess of others. It could use a lot more players though...
I've got one of the motherboards with the infamous bad capacitors. The ones that were based on a stolen faulty formula. Basically they die too fast. But it works great!
Heres some pics that were taken over a year ago...
Pic 1Pic 2
That might not sound *that* abusive. But consider this - those pictures are hosted on the pictured computer, and I just posted links to them on Slashdot!
No videos of it landing? Oh dear, they mustve crashed it!
Wait, no videos of it crashing? Even worse! Oh dear, they mustve crashed it into the cameraman!
Hopefully next time they'll have 2 cameramen.
This has been the norm for at least a decade, probably more. Maybe this is the first time someone did a survey, but I've heard the horror stories for years.
The trouble is, programming games is "cool" and "fun". People dream about playing and writing games all day, and getting paid for it. So, the development companies have a huge pool of people they can recruit from. If you dont like your working conditions, they'll just hire someone else who will put up with it longer. Thats also why they can pay less on average for young programmers, they have plenty to choose from.
Perhaps the prize money and CPU time might be better spent searching for a cure for cancer? I know there's a distributed computing project out there that does just that (no link right now, I'm lazy), and this *is* a case where the computers are just as good at calculating numbers for cracking encryption as calculating numbers for saving lives.
Thaat would be www.grid.org. You can download it from this page. It does several projects, including the cancer one. For me, it seems to switch between smallpox and cancer research mostly.
Its scope is pretty limited, but JParanoia works pretty well for Paranoia games. You could probably shoehorn other games into it, but that might be ugly.
And if youre lucky, you might even get to beta test some new Paranoia XP rules.
I'd bet he found all those places in his web logs. If they look at your website, you served them something, and theyre your client! Some of my clients include the Austrailian Department of Defense, US Treasury, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micron, UPS, and Bank of America!:)
I'm worried about what would happen if they somehow got convinced to start development again. The suits already cancelled it once, they wont be very likely to budget much more money for it. It will be rushed out the door.
So then we'd get a terrible, buggy release. The game wont sell, and the suits will say "We told you so". That would be the end of adventure games. The current situtation is just a bit of a speedbump.
I realize that he popularized (and invented?) the music rythym genre, but somehow the award doesnt seem to fit.
I mean, last year the award went to the original founders of Activision. They were the first 3rd-party developer, and revolutionized the entire industry. Could you imagine if every game was programmed either by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft? Blech.
This year, the award is going to "Kick, punch, it's all in the mind!".
It's just a whole different level of "revolutionary" I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
The XBox can not do HD reliably enough though. 720p is the best you'll do (although you can squeeze a bit of 1080i out of it). And x264 performance isn't great (you'll get a lot of dropped frames, if it works), so you'll be stuck with xvid. But it is quite nice for the price.
Now how about releasing the source (and assets!) from their very first game, Black Crypt? That was one of my favorite Amiga games, and I'd love to monkey around with its guts.
Heres my CompUSA story. A few years back I bought my sister a cd burner from CompUSA. I managed to talk her through installing it, although it took a while. When she finally got it up an running, she said "Sweet, you put a burned copy of 'MS Office' in it for me!"
Uh, actually no I hadn't. It was a normal (or so I thought) shrink-wrapped box when I bought it. Amazing. I cant imagine that it was a returned burner (the burned copy of Office worked fine) although anything's possible. My hunch is that some employees used it to burn some software quick, re-shrink wrapped it, and put it back on the shelves - forgetting to take the last burned copy out.
I wish that games had to actually be released to be eligible. Last years winner "Aquaria" STILL hasn't been released.
35 years? And I thought *I* wrote bad SQL... Check your query plan for table scans!
Plus, no memory leak bug or reimplemented widget controls (I have an operating system that provides those natively, thanks).
I cant tell: Windows (memory leak bugs) or Mac (widgets)?
Yeah, like I'm going to tell people that I have NADD.
The poppers (at least the type I have, a Poppery II) don't have a thermocouple, just an unadjustable bimetallic strip. The cheap mod some people use is to short out the thermostat, because they tend to open before the popper gets hot enough. Mine doesnt get hot enough, I've had beans not hit first crack after 20-30 minutes. After that, you can manually adjust the temp using a switch on the heating element while watching a meat thermometer. All thats missing from that is a way to wire the meat thermometer to a computer - and maybe an adjustable bimetallic strip so you dont burn down your house when your PC crashes.
I had the same idea, but I couldnt find any thermistors or other temperature sensing bits that were rated for high enough temperatures (at least 500F) without being crazy expensive.
I was excited to see this article to see what they used, but of course they dont mention what specific temperature sensor they're using. Initial Googling for "thermocouple" brought up a couple solutions that cost more than a whole automatic coffee roaster.
But I dont know a lot about electronics anyways, so I'm probably better off.
// HH HH AAAA CCCC KK KK
// HH HH AA AA CC KK KK
// HHHHHH AAAAaAAA CC KKKKK
// HH HH AA AA CC KK KK
// HH HH AA AA CCCC KK KK
(Filter fooling)
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
What is new in that trailer? Seems like the same one that was floating around before, but I'm too lazy to look up the old one. And as far as the shape of the Heart of Gold, blame it on a glitch in the Infinite Improbability Drive. That always works.
I've had ideas for things to do with dead hardware, but I dont have enough of it layin around. Where do you guys go to find good stuff when you have a project in mind? Right now I'm think I need some dead hard drives, which I could probably find if I jumped into a computer shop's dumpster. But it'd be nice to get my hands on something larger than a 3.5".
Hopefully in the future we will see some real and high quality computer versions of Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates and all the other great board games most people have never heard of.
Theres a decent set of board games on BrettspielWelt, except its primarily a German site. They have Peurto Rico, Settlers, Carcassonne, and a mess of others. It could use a lot more players though...
I'm a dummy and put the same link twice. Pic 2
I've got one of the motherboards with the infamous bad capacitors. The ones that were based on a stolen faulty formula. Basically they die too fast. But it works great! Heres some pics that were taken over a year ago... Pic 1 Pic 2 That might not sound *that* abusive. But consider this - those pictures are hosted on the pictured computer, and I just posted links to them on Slashdot!
No videos of it landing? Oh dear, they mustve crashed it! Wait, no videos of it crashing? Even worse! Oh dear, they mustve crashed it into the cameraman! Hopefully next time they'll have 2 cameramen.
This has been the norm for at least a decade, probably more. Maybe this is the first time someone did a survey, but I've heard the horror stories for years.
The trouble is, programming games is "cool" and "fun". People dream about playing and writing games all day, and getting paid for it. So, the development companies have a huge pool of people they can recruit from. If you dont like your working conditions, they'll just hire someone else who will put up with it longer. Thats also why they can pay less on average for young programmers, they have plenty to choose from.
Perhaps the prize money and CPU time might be better spent searching for a cure for cancer? I know there's a distributed computing project out there that does just that (no link right now, I'm lazy), and this *is* a case where the computers are just as good at calculating numbers for cracking encryption as calculating numbers for saving lives.
Thaat would be www.grid.org. You can download it from this page. It does several projects, including the cancer one. For me, it seems to switch between smallpox and cancer research mostly.
With this technology, it certainly should be harder to stumble on pictures of the goatse guy or tubgirl.
Although, I suppose that depends on how good of an artist you are, especially if you need pictures of caves or waterfalls.
Sounds like somebody has a case of the mondays!
Its scope is pretty limited, but JParanoia works pretty well for Paranoia games. You could probably shoehorn other games into it, but that might be ugly. And if youre lucky, you might even get to beta test some new Paranoia XP rules.
I'd bet he found all those places in his web logs. If they look at your website, you served them something, and theyre your client! Some of my clients include the Austrailian Department of Defense, US Treasury, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micron, UPS, and Bank of America! :)
I'm worried about what would happen if they somehow got convinced to start development again. The suits already cancelled it once, they wont be very likely to budget much more money for it. It will be rushed out the door.
:)
So then we'd get a terrible, buggy release. The game wont sell, and the suits will say "We told you so". That would be the end of adventure games. The current situtation is just a bit of a speedbump.
Or am I just too pessimistic?
I realize that he popularized (and invented?) the music rythym genre, but somehow the award doesnt seem to fit. I mean, last year the award went to the original founders of Activision. They were the first 3rd-party developer, and revolutionized the entire industry. Could you imagine if every game was programmed either by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft? Blech.
This year, the award is going to "Kick, punch, it's all in the mind!".
It's just a whole different level of "revolutionary" I guess.
I have a buddy named Andy! He's too stupid to program anything, let alone a virus. But it's a good excuse to punch him for everyone.