years ago there was this device by DigiScent called iSmell that could connect to your computer. By combining a mixture of base scents from a palette, the device could synthesize a number of different scents that would be aerated out. The human olfactory system can recognize far more distinct smells than what iSmell could mix, but DigiScent promised thousands of possible scent combinations.
The product became vaporware sure, but such a technology could increase sensory immersion in video games. It would be fun if different scents could be aerated to match game settings like the smell of a jungle in Splinter Cell. Surely someone at DigiScent imagined synthesizing the smell of gunpowder.
How about games that require players to use different scents during gameplay. For example, in Nintendo's Harvest Moon gamers can buy flowers for some of the game's female characters. One of the games puzzles could be to pick flowers based on scents that would be most pleasing to the recipient. Maybe in a murder mystery game, a player could sniff the scent of perfume and deduct that Ms. Peacock killed Mr. Body in the obvervatory with the new Nintendo controller.
I have a 56K dial-up that I keep online almost 24 hours a day. I get transfer rates of 5.3~5.8 KB/sec consistently, which is enough for me to load about 5 websites simultaneously while chatting on AIM and transferring from Usenet.
As a dedicated dial-up user I have had to learn many tricks in order to manage my bandwidth. I block most web advertising. I use wget to handle web downloads, allowing me to pause and reschedule downloads at a later time via bash script. I use a newsreader that supports partial downloads. It's become a game of economics unto itself. Do I continue downloading that cool new anime bootleg that's got just days left on Usenet or do I pause it and download the 200MB it's going to take to upgrade Mac OS X, QuickTime, and iTunes?
I do get frustrated at having to miss out on online gaming and internet radio. and I do enjoy download multimedia content, but in general I am happy. Plus I hate the companies providing broadband in my area.
It sounds like you asking more about how best to organize your code for future use than how to store it physically (as in backups).
Comment your code extensively using quality remarks explaining how your code works and why you are doing the things that you are.
Keep a design document for your programs. This is a bit different from leaving code comments. It's more of a journal that you can rely on to get a contextual understanding of your code. I've relied on design documents to help me reevaluate assumptions I've made in my programs.
As others have said already, make your code as modular as possible. This doesn't mean you need to write object-oriented code or switch to an object-oriented language by design.
If you've got a lot of code that you frequently use, often at the same time, consider combining them into a single useful library. There's nothing to say that a programming library must contain functions that perform related tasks.
As for physical storage for your code, get it off your computer.
Having myself started as an ambitious self-taught novice, I have a collected a large amount of code covering multiple languages and platforms; and including completed programs, unfinished projects, homework, experimental code fragments, code written for dead systems, and third-party source that I found inspirational. Ergo, I have a beastly collection that doesn't mesh well with source control software. Still, something like SVN or CVS will help you further down the road as your software projects become larger and more complex.
Until then, I recommend maintaining paper copies for your most valuable code in addition to storing your source on dependable, portable, and ubiquitous backup media like CD-ROM in ISO-9660 format, uncompressed if possible, otherwise using a common compression format like GZIP. Sounds a bit anal maybe, but there's always one computer I need to use that chokes while trying to read my DVDRs, and over the years I've stored my code in cool compression formats like ARJ, ZOO, and StuffitX.;-)
I was wondering how much more taxing the games are on hardware than when running natively on a Win based machine. Also does Cedega have requirements itself?
Cedega is still basically WINE with maybe some optimizations for gaming, right? If so, games shouldn't be anymore taxing on Linux than on Windows since you're working with a translation layer to the Windows API rather than an emulation of Windows on Linux. In theory though, performance could take a hit if compromises were made in order to get DirectX 9 games working.
Disclaimer: I stopped trying to use WINE and Cedega years ago, so I'm admittedly ignorant of recent changes.
Thanks for the suggestion. I prefer the DAC-100 over any consumer grade capture box though... but my point was that the market for laptop-based video editing is pretty small. There's just a limited number of items from a limited number of companies, and each product really lacks one or two things that video editors regard as necessary. The PCI market faires much better, so it would be nice to use a device like the original article mention in conjunction with a PCI-based tuner... more options at an insane price.
What I enjoyed most of all (and I have posted about that on Slashdot before) was thumbing through the old-school Computer Shopper looking to build my dream machine and making sure I priced it the best I could.
Now that magazine was old school. I remember when each edition weighed more than a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. I still can't get over the thought of a new generation of techies not knowing about the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola is. *tears*
I agree, but I could certainly use a device like the one he's hoping for. I do a lot of video processing from a laptop. The video capture components market is pretty small to begin with, and the video capture market for laptops is a niche within a niche. It would be nice to be able to throw in the latest greatest PCI tuner card into a box the size of a typical external IDE case, then use it with my laptop.
Did anybody like me actually edit any maps? The map editing made doom editing feel like playing with playdough.
I never realized you could make your own maps! I was busy been making custom WADs for Doom at the time. I had a hard believing that Descent would actually run on my modest 486. Maybe in retrospect this doesn't mean much, but back then I thought it said a lot about the company.
Yeah, the Pacific theater was definitely ours. Russia did play an interesting hand though. A day after Japan failed to surrender following our bombing of Hiroshima, the USSR declared war and invaded occupied Manchuria. By some accounts, the Japanese decided to surrender after that event.
Following that theory, the Japanese basically either admitted they could not fight a two-front war against two **extremely** pissed-off adversaries, or the Japanese thought it would be better to surrender to Capitalist Americans than Communist Soviets. After all, we saw what the Russians did to Berlin.
Interesting point, and waaayy off-topic:)
Operations-wise, I believe we lost more battles in our shorter period of involvement than the others, so I disregard any claim that we went in and kicked ass and were the major cause for European liberation. But certainly, we added that extra layer of tension on Germany's supply chain and operations, which caused the Reich to buckle. We probably did buy Russia some time, but I'm not sure. Russian conscription really slowed Germany's advance.
I like your last statement. I've wondered this myself. Western Russia was pretty anti-semetic despite the number of Jews fighting in the Army, so Russians wouldn't have minded some of the Nazis' policies. Western Russians are actually several groups used to Russification by Muscovy, so picking up German probably wouldn't have been a tough decision. Germany had previously been the leader in social reform, so if Germany retook that position Belarussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and others might have welcomed Germany over Stalin's Russia.
Napoleon did bring about a period of relative peace in Europe during his reign, aside of course for his own antics, because Austria and the Catholic Church didn't wield quite as much power as they did before.
Everything I know about history I learned from Europa Universalis!
The French did not revolt against their monarchy because the crown aided American independence. Frenchmen like the Marquis de la Fayette and Alexis de Tocqueville were instrumental in shaping modern America.
By the way, the US Army is based on the French military model, not the English. So there's at least two positive things about America that the French are responsible for.
A new FreeSpace would have been great. Funny thing, after not even giving the game a thought for a couple of years, I pulled out my Freespace 2 discs and installed the game a couple of nights ago. FreeSpace 2 is every bit as engaging today as it was when I bought the game on release day.
I even googled up some now defunct FreeSpace fansites hoping to play online for the first time. I guess that hope is dashed. Is it just me or are space sims not based on Star Wars out of style now?
No monitoring whatsoever is appropriate.
More than that, it's the only American thing to do. Every week I run out of ways to differentiate the US from any other country in the world.
But how would one encrypt traffic practically anyway?
Sure, I can digitally sign and encrypt my email while alienating myself from everyone who doesn't take this measure, but I'm left wide open on the Web and Usenet. As you said, the authorities can always draw some conclusions based on where your packets come from or go to; so the answer there is to just break off all communications with people in "non-friendly" countries.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I've been under the belief that dial up users have more immediately anonomity than broadband users because we (I'm one too) don't have permanent IP addresses and aren't usually running servers long enough to gain attention in the public eye.
But that being said, wiretapping is already possible on traditional POTS, so nothing new here for us.
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously!
years ago there was this device by DigiScent called iSmell that could connect to your computer. By combining a mixture of base scents from a palette, the device could synthesize a number of different scents that would be aerated out. The human olfactory system can recognize far more distinct smells than what iSmell could mix, but DigiScent promised thousands of possible scent combinations.
The product became vaporware sure, but such a technology could increase sensory immersion in video games. It would be fun if different scents could be aerated to match game settings like the smell of a jungle in Splinter Cell. Surely someone at DigiScent imagined synthesizing the smell of gunpowder.
How about games that require players to use different scents during gameplay. For example, in Nintendo's Harvest Moon gamers can buy flowers for some of the game's female characters. One of the games puzzles could be to pick flowers based on scents that would be most pleasing to the recipient. Maybe in a murder mystery game, a player could sniff the scent of perfume and deduct that Ms. Peacock killed Mr. Body in the obvervatory with the new Nintendo controller.
iSmell was discussed at Wired.com too.
I have a 56K dial-up that I keep online almost 24 hours a day. I get transfer rates of 5.3~5.8 KB/sec consistently, which is enough for me to load about 5 websites simultaneously while chatting on AIM and transferring from Usenet. As a dedicated dial-up user I have had to learn many tricks in order to manage my bandwidth. I block most web advertising. I use wget to handle web downloads, allowing me to pause and reschedule downloads at a later time via bash script. I use a newsreader that supports partial downloads. It's become a game of economics unto itself. Do I continue downloading that cool new anime bootleg that's got just days left on Usenet or do I pause it and download the 200MB it's going to take to upgrade Mac OS X, QuickTime, and iTunes? I do get frustrated at having to miss out on online gaming and internet radio. and I do enjoy download multimedia content, but in general I am happy. Plus I hate the companies providing broadband in my area.
It sounds like you asking more about how best to organize your code for future use than how to store it physically (as in backups).
;-)
Comment your code extensively using quality remarks explaining how your code works and why you are doing the things that you are.
Keep a design document for your programs. This is a bit different from leaving code comments. It's more of a journal that you can rely on to get a contextual understanding of your code. I've relied on design documents to help me reevaluate assumptions I've made in my programs.
As others have said already, make your code as modular as possible. This doesn't mean you need to write object-oriented code or switch to an object-oriented language by design.
If you've got a lot of code that you frequently use, often at the same time, consider combining them into a single useful library. There's nothing to say that a programming library must contain functions that perform related tasks.
As for physical storage for your code, get it off your computer.
Having myself started as an ambitious self-taught novice, I have a collected a large amount of code covering multiple languages and platforms; and including completed programs, unfinished projects, homework, experimental code fragments, code written for dead systems, and third-party source that I found inspirational. Ergo, I have a beastly collection that doesn't mesh well with source control software. Still, something like SVN or CVS will help you further down the road as your software projects become larger and more complex.
Until then, I recommend maintaining paper copies for your most valuable code in addition to storing your source on dependable, portable, and ubiquitous backup media like CD-ROM in ISO-9660 format, uncompressed if possible, otherwise using a common compression format like GZIP. Sounds a bit anal maybe, but there's always one computer I need to use that chokes while trying to read my DVDRs, and over the years I've stored my code in cool compression formats like ARJ, ZOO, and StuffitX.
Cedega is still basically WINE with maybe some optimizations for gaming, right? If so, games shouldn't be anymore taxing on Linux than on Windows since you're working with a translation layer to the Windows API rather than an emulation of Windows on Linux. In theory though, performance could take a hit if compromises were made in order to get DirectX 9 games working.
Disclaimer: I stopped trying to use WINE and Cedega years ago, so I'm admittedly ignorant of recent changes.
Thanks for the suggestion. I prefer the DAC-100 over any consumer grade capture box though... but my point was that the market for laptop-based video editing is pretty small. There's just a limited number of items from a limited number of companies, and each product really lacks one or two things that video editors regard as necessary. The PCI market faires much better, so it would be nice to use a device like the original article mention in conjunction with a PCI-based tuner... more options at an insane price.
What I enjoyed most of all (and I have posted about that on Slashdot before) was thumbing through the old-school Computer Shopper looking to build my dream machine and making sure I priced it the best I could.
Now that magazine was old school. I remember when each edition weighed more than a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. I still can't get over the thought of a new generation of techies not knowing about the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola is. *tears*
Interplay is dead. Long live Interplay!
I agree, but I could certainly use a device like the one he's hoping for. I do a lot of video processing from a laptop. The video capture components market is pretty small to begin with, and the video capture market for laptops is a niche within a niche. It would be nice to be able to throw in the latest greatest PCI tuner card into a box the size of a typical external IDE case, then use it with my laptop.
Did anybody like me actually edit any maps? The map editing made doom editing feel like playing with playdough.
I never realized you could make your own maps! I was busy been making custom WADs for Doom at the time. I had a hard believing that Descent would actually run on my modest 486. Maybe in retrospect this doesn't mean much, but back then I thought it said a lot about the company.
Yeah, the Pacific theater was definitely ours. Russia did play an interesting hand though. A day after Japan failed to surrender following our bombing of Hiroshima, the USSR declared war and invaded occupied Manchuria. By some accounts, the Japanese decided to surrender after that event.
Following that theory, the Japanese basically either admitted they could not fight a two-front war against two **extremely** pissed-off adversaries, or the Japanese thought it would be better to surrender to Capitalist Americans than Communist Soviets. After all, we saw what the Russians did to Berlin.
Interesting point, and waaayy off-topic :)
Operations-wise, I believe we lost more battles in our shorter period of involvement than the others, so I disregard any claim that we went in and kicked ass and were the major cause for European liberation. But certainly, we added that extra layer of tension on Germany's supply chain and operations, which caused the Reich to buckle. We probably did buy Russia some time, but I'm not sure. Russian conscription really slowed Germany's advance.
I like your last statement. I've wondered this myself. Western Russia was pretty anti-semetic despite the number of Jews fighting in the Army, so Russians wouldn't have minded some of the Nazis' policies. Western Russians are actually several groups used to Russification by Muscovy, so picking up German probably wouldn't have been a tough decision. Germany had previously been the leader in social reform, so if Germany retook that position Belarussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and others might have welcomed Germany over Stalin's Russia.
Napoleon did bring about a period of relative peace in Europe during his reign, aside of course for his own antics, because Austria and the Catholic Church didn't wield quite as much power as they did before. Everything I know about history I learned from Europa Universalis!
The French did not revolt against their monarchy because the crown aided American independence. Frenchmen like the Marquis de la Fayette and Alexis de Tocqueville were instrumental in shaping modern America. By the way, the US Army is based on the French military model, not the English. So there's at least two positive things about America that the French are responsible for.
A new FreeSpace would have been great. Funny thing, after not even giving the game a thought for a couple of years, I pulled out my Freespace 2 discs and installed the game a couple of nights ago. FreeSpace 2 is every bit as engaging today as it was when I bought the game on release day. I even googled up some now defunct FreeSpace fansites hoping to play online for the first time. I guess that hope is dashed. Is it just me or are space sims not based on Star Wars out of style now?
No monitoring whatsoever is appropriate. More than that, it's the only American thing to do. Every week I run out of ways to differentiate the US from any other country in the world.
But how would one encrypt traffic practically anyway?
Sure, I can digitally sign and encrypt my email while alienating myself from everyone who doesn't take this measure, but I'm left wide open on the Web and Usenet. As you said, the authorities can always draw some conclusions based on where your packets come from or go to; so the answer there is to just break off all communications with people in "non-friendly" countries.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I've been under the belief that dial up users have more immediately anonomity than broadband users because we (I'm one too) don't have permanent IP addresses and aren't usually running servers long enough to gain attention in the public eye. But that being said, wiretapping is already possible on traditional POTS, so nothing new here for us.