I just checked e-bay and HP 48gx calculators are selling for $200 to $400! I love mine. At 13 years old, it's still the absolute best tool for so many jobs. They'll have to pry "Hewey" from my cold dead hands...:-)
Ok, shoot me an e-mail. My address is on the main page, towards the bottom. There is not a licence, but right now the game is closed source, freeware. I need to investigate a licence.
Development is all in.NET DirectX 9.0c.
The plan is to get it done. =) I'd love to port it to SDL/OpenGL/Linux eventually, but only after it's done.
Linux, BSD, Solaris and Windows rule the ISP server market. I've never touched an OSX box that did anything really important. Most don't take it seriously, and Apple has not built many 1u rack mounts, but I guess they have a new product now? I just checked..
Judging by the amount of stuff making the rounds on eBay and at my local thrift shop, I'd say that the average family PC is far more likely to escape the dumpster then say, some off-lease desktop from giant company X.
People see value in their old PC's and are far more likely to give them to friends, sell them on eBay or donate hardware to good will, especailly when they paid $1100 just 5 years ago. In a strange way, that old hardware often ends up in the hands of techie people who do care, and will either refurbish it, or dispose of it correctly.
But gazillions of corporate IBM desktops from cubicle land ---straight to----> dumpster.
Cable companies subsides are a fairly new thing, and far fewer than phone company subsidies. Most Cable Companies worked pretty hard to build their own plant, and indead own their infrastructure. The government had more prerogative to ensure the development phone and power companies, not MTV and HBO companies. Perhaps you are thinking of Verizon, MCI and Bell South.
And remember, it's now the Cable Companies that compete with the phone companies as their networks and products begin to overlap.
We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?
Have you not been paying attention?
What do you want to know about the Universe or the Planets? Ask a question and I bet NASA the ESA or the Russian Space Agency has answered it, or attempted to. NASA has filled more books with knowledge and science for those universities you wish to fund then any other one agency or government organization. Really.
Everything that we know about the outer solar system, which is a library full, is almost entirely thanks to Voyager 1 & 2. A great number of the things that we know about deep space and how stars are born is thanks to Hubble. What we know about the Ozone Layer, Global Warming, CFC's (Russian Venus Probes, planet side observations and later science funded by NASA) Van Allen Radiation (Explorer Probe) Solar Flairs (The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and the composition of our own planets atmosphere is thanks to the planetary science that NASA has funded or championed. I'd say that our knowledge of the planet Mars and it's unique dynamics has shed a lot of light on our own atmosphere thanks to, NASA. There are volumes of information on the geology and composition of Mars now. Thanks Mars Rovers. How was the moon born? Well, Apollo and the open disclosure of Moon rocks to scientists around the world has likely given us the correct answer. Thanks again. Just read the press releases at NASA.
Your tax dollars, friend, learn us some fantastic, inspirational things. Sure it could be better. But I feel good making the investment to what might be an imperfect organization, because I can see the value and learn something new whenever I try.
I find that rather comforting. I trust MS more then I trust ohh.. I don't know Belkin or D-Link. In practice, I have never seen a device driver exploit for Windows. I've seen plenty of buggy third party device drivers, which this idea you mention should curb or eliminate. This article is an example of an exploit on , you guessed it, a 3rd party device driver.
Hackers will continue to exploit the easiest Windows targets, unpatched machines, and the occasional zero day exploit in Explorer, Outlook.. what have you.
Windows certified drivers have never been an easy or high percentage target, nor are they ever likely to be. Now hack drivers from Anantech/Belkin/Radio-Shak... that could be another story.
That's kinda why I think the entire organization of NASA should be replaced with something else.
Who is going to replace NASA? They are the best at what they do. You need to divest the organization from the burracracy. They have decades of experience. We should replace (about 1/2 of) our lawyer congressmen with scientists.
You are happy with one successful mission a decade that spends tons of money doing it! So your suggesting cheaper-faster-more? That does notwork. At least in the long run; in the economical sense.
Overall I think you get the wrong impression from my post. I am gratefull for the things NASA has accomplished
despite small budgets and the erroneous initiatives of our political leaders. I am optimistic that in a few decades the agency will once again be great. I, like yourself, want a human
future in space. But that's eaiser said than done my friend.
P.S. did you know that Voyager 1 & 2 have to adjust their telemetry to account for the engagement of the tiny magnetic
tape head that records the data. That's right, every time that tape flinched, they had to stabilize the craft, otherwise,
it would have produced blurry, unusable pictures of Saturn. One of a thousand examples of precise engineering that takes decades to get right.
I've not yet deiced if Michel Griffin is doing a better job, or if I just paid less attention when Sean O'Keefe, the previous administrator fought such battles.
I think Michael Griffin is doing a better job. Focus on the missions, and the supplementary benefits will follow. NASA did not need to buy computers for students, build planetariums or make a special website so that I could learn about the Voyager missions. Instead, they supremely engineered those things, and the science that they returned (and are still returning) inspired and taught the world.
People tend to underestimate the impact of one successful mission. Voyager, Hubble, Apollo and The Mars Rovers have done more for science and education around the world than any congressman.
A.) The obscure Unix configuration file babble fish. B.) The auto-sensing left mouse button disabler, with shocker. C.) The magic lost e-mail retrieval robot, for when "it's not spam" D.) The magic inbox attitude adjuster, for "can you stop these from comming to my..." E.) An undo menu item for my xterm window.
We are pretty certain it has liquid lakes, but it may have caves as well.
We know so little about our solar system.
Re:Doom III Engine Doom II the Game
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
The actual games they produce are usually not very good as games
I'd never heard this until Doom 3, which is a very good game, just a slight disappointment. I remember reading the PCG review, and most others, they pretty much raved about it. Then Half Life 2 became the darling of the media. Half Life 2 is undeniably a great game, but saying that ID does not produce quality games is wholly inaccurate.
Quake, Quake II, Quake III (which is a masterpiece of simple, chaotic gameplay) were all critically acclaimed, smash hits. Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the Q3 engine version, to say nothing of the original) was quite good. As were Doom (obviously) and most every other game they produced. Even Hexen II was good. It seems gamers have a short memory and are quite subseptable to that heard mentality. Perhaps Doom 3 was a disappointment because people's expectations were sky high.
Now Quake 4 is mostly rubbish. It's OK, but not really good. But Quake 4 was developed with the Doom 3 engine by Raven Software.
Yea, don't blame NASA. Don't blame the engineers who work there. Don't blame Michael Griffin even. Blame the non-scientific, short sighted American people and their elected officials for not giving a damn. NASA's budget is a fraction of what it was during the agencies glory days.
Blame congress for freaking out after the ISS went 5 billion over budget. You see most of NASA's budget is "discretionary" meaning, it can be cut and funded at the discretion of politicians who think space geeks are not important.
Last year, Congress approved Bush's proposed 16 billion for NASA. They also approved about 500 billion for Iraq. 16 billion on the human future in space. 16 billion does not build to many aircraft carriers, or Saturn V's.
I work as a systems admin, and program games for fun. I say fun, but in reality it's not much fun anymore. The reality of it is, that the project I'm currently working on is so large, and so much work has been poured into it, that I can't foresee giving it up, so I continue to plod along. With that being said, I can relate to your circumstance. It's hard to get motivated at home. Here are some things I find helpfull.
1.) Keep a bug / todo / wishful feature list with EVERYTHING you can think of on it. If you run into programmers block, visit that. Try to work on small things, with big returns. Features that provide quick reward. That gets me into the swing of things.
2.) Determine you most productive hours and environment. Get into a routine around it. Develop a ritual and stick to it. Even if it's take a shower, make a cup of tea and eat an orange. That's mine and it's what I always do. My body and mind seem to know when it's time to focus because I have a pattern. Don't let anyone bug you. (Wife, BF, Cats, Mom - let them know when it's time to stop bugging you)
3.) Music and fresh air really help. As does good lighting.
4.) Listen to classical music. Really, it's provocative and relaxing at the same time and kind of encourages a mind grind.
5.) Work with pencil and paper for a while on a nice big notebook. I do this often, when I need to design.
6.) If you have a laptop and your really stuck, or have personal issues that are dragging you down, go to your local library and pick a cubicle. The library is where I do my best work because there are no distractions, clean air, good lighting, and it's a library, what else are you going to do?
The whole concept of procedural creation in games has not been fleshed out as I would have hoped. Procedural methods can do much more then make great FPS graphics fit on 800K.
Way back in 1986, I played a game called Starflight. Starflight used fractal algorithms to create a pretty
diverse universe with about 200 star systems and 800 planets. You could land on and explore each planet.
Close up. Let me say that again, you could land on each planet, collect it's life, find unique artifacts and rove your little tank around for hours. All of this fit onto two low density 5 1/4" floppies. Now, the CGA graphics and restrictive CPU power did no favors. Things got pretty repetitive, but the enormity of the game went unmatched for about 12 years.
In reflection, and now that I better understand it's design, it seems to me to be a microcosm of the real universe. You have a set of rules and a set of elements and by happenstance, (not by human hands in 3ds max) worlds are born.
For a long time, we've been stuck with with character models, human built maps, plot-lines on rails and worlds confined to the imagination of the story line department. Procedural graphics and world creation could make the universe out of a few megabytes.
There are a few games here and there that use this idea.
Here is a game in development using procedural graphics and fractal planet creation:
Infinity
I swear people here whine so much about NASA it's unbelievable.
I'm convinced that the mind boggling variety of publicly available NASA footage, pictures and video will never be enough for some. You can watch live NASA tv in Realplayer, Quicktime, Windows Media, or Browse to Yahoo and watch it with their flash player.
As the geek I am, NASA is one of the few govermental agencies that I cherrish. If I want to know something about some planet, any planet, it's probabbly thanks to the work that NASA has done.
There are a few almost viable solid state solutions right now.
If your requirements are modest, maybe you want a quiet game machine, or you could run a postfix spam filter, the
i-Ram is a neat solution.
I used to have a similar set up. 364 disk scsi array rsynced over an OC/3 to an offsite 3TB RAID 5 Array in Pasakastan. Then the GF complained that the lights dimmed every time I loaded a new playlist. So I bought a pleather 300 cd-flip-file at Kmart.
That sounds like a larger version of what happened about a mile from my house in 1959, the Knox Mine Disaster Basically coal miners dug to close to the bottom of the Susquehanna river (ignoring engineering recommendations) and a hole punched through flooding miles of underground mines. The tried all kinds of things to plug it and even contracted a company to build a massive concrete slab, that did not work. What did work eventually was several large rail road box cars. To this day, we have mine subsidences where large Victorian houses, schools etc.. in Scranton sink into mine shafts.
Re:Sun - Corporate mismanagement at its finest
on
Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs
·
· Score: 1
What, and make money selling it? Since when is jumping on the Linux bandwagon the magic money making, company saving pill?
If your point was that Sun could have been a cultural champion of a Linux revolution, then perhaps.
I'm stunned at the hate. Relax. I'm pretty leftist and do not advocate war. NASA did not invade Iraq.
Who exactally do you think the astronomers and engineers at NASA are? Warmongers? Think Carl Sagan. He did a lot of work for and with NASA. Every read any of his books?
That's all I'm saying.
Name me another large agency in the US goverment that has fewer alterior motives.
Sure the military has incentive to contract certain NASA projects. That's no secret.
I'd rather have Lockeed Marting building moon landers than building bombs. NASA doesn't make bombs.
And about public disclosure of all their technology. I'd bet that Iran, N. Korea etc.. might like
to know how to deliver a small payload on a rocket with a sub-orbital tragectory.
Slashdot Mirror
I need a break from this place.
It's like a when your Commodore 64 locked up, and it keept making that same horrible floppy drive noise over and over and over again..
I just checked e-bay and HP 48gx calculators are selling for $200 to $400! :-)
I love mine. At 13 years old, it's still the absolute best tool for so many jobs.
They'll have to pry "Hewey" from my cold dead hands...
Ok, shoot me an e-mail. My address is on the main page, towards the bottom.
.NET DirectX 9.0c.
There is not a licence, but right now the game is closed source, freeware.
I need to investigate a licence.
Development is all in
The plan is to get it done. =)
I'd love to port it to SDL/OpenGL/Linux eventually, but only after it's done.
Ahh.. glad to see someone mention Starflight.
I liked it so much I'm recreating it.
Props for Autoduel, Bard's Tale, Wing Commander and SimCity also.
Where has all that boyhood wonder gone?
Linux, BSD, Solaris and Windows rule the ISP server market.
I've never touched an OSX box that did anything really important.
Most don't take it seriously, and Apple has not built many 1u rack mounts, but I guess they have a new product now? I just checked..
Judging by the amount of stuff making the rounds on eBay and at my local thrift shop, I'd say that the average family PC is far more likely to escape the dumpster then say, some off-lease desktop from giant company X.
People see value in their old PC's and are far more likely to give them to friends, sell them on eBay or donate hardware to good will, especailly when they paid $1100 just 5 years ago. In a strange way, that old hardware often ends up in the hands of techie people who do care, and will either refurbish it, or dispose of it correctly.
But gazillions of corporate IBM desktops from cubicle land ---straight to----> dumpster.
Cable companies subsides are a fairly new thing, and far fewer than phone company subsidies. Most Cable Companies worked pretty hard to build their own plant, and indead own their infrastructure. The government had more prerogative to ensure the development phone and power companies, not MTV and HBO companies.
Perhaps you are thinking of Verizon, MCI and Bell South.
And remember, it's now the Cable Companies that compete with the phone companies as their networks and products begin to overlap.
We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?
Have you not been paying attention?
What do you want to know about the Universe or the Planets? Ask a question and I bet NASA the ESA or the Russian Space Agency has answered it, or attempted to. NASA has filled more books with knowledge and science for those universities you wish to fund then any other one agency or government organization. Really.
Everything that we know about the outer solar system, which is a library full, is almost entirely thanks to Voyager 1 & 2. A great number of the things that we know about deep space and how stars are born is thanks to Hubble. What we know about the Ozone Layer, Global Warming, CFC's (Russian Venus Probes, planet side observations and later science funded by NASA) Van Allen Radiation (Explorer Probe) Solar Flairs (The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and the composition
of our own planets atmosphere is thanks to the planetary science that NASA has funded or championed. I'd say that our knowledge of the planet Mars and it's unique dynamics has shed a lot of light on our own atmosphere thanks to, NASA. There are volumes of information on the geology and composition of Mars now. Thanks Mars Rovers. How was the moon born? Well, Apollo and the open disclosure of Moon rocks to scientists around the world has likely given us the correct answer. Thanks again. Just read the press releases at NASA.
Here is an interesting thing we learned yesterday.
Your tax dollars, friend, learn us some fantastic, inspirational things. Sure it could be better. But I feel good making the investment to what might be an imperfect organization, because I can see the value and learn something new whenever I try.
I find that rather comforting. I trust MS more then I trust ohh.. I don't know Belkin or D-Link. In practice, I have never seen a device driver exploit for Windows. I've seen plenty of buggy third party device drivers, which this idea you mention should curb or eliminate. This article is an example of an exploit on , you guessed it, a 3rd party device driver.
Hackers will continue to exploit the easiest Windows targets, unpatched machines, and the occasional zero day exploit in Explorer, Outlook.. what have you.
Windows certified drivers have never been an easy or high percentage target, nor are they ever likely to be.
Now hack drivers from Anantech/Belkin/Radio-Shak... that could be another story.
That's kinda why I think the entire organization of NASA should be replaced with something else.
Who is going to replace NASA? They are the best at what they do. You need to divest the organization from the burracracy. They have decades of experience. We should replace (about 1/2 of) our lawyer congressmen with scientists.
You are happy with one successful mission a decade that spends tons of money doing it!
So your suggesting cheaper-faster-more? That does not work. At least in the long run; in the economical sense.
Overall I think you get the wrong impression from my post. I am gratefull for the things NASA has accomplished despite small budgets and the erroneous initiatives of our political leaders. I am optimistic that in a few decades the agency will once again be great. I, like yourself, want a human future in space. But that's eaiser said than done my friend.
P.S. did you know that Voyager 1 & 2 have to adjust their telemetry to account for the engagement of the tiny magnetic tape head that records the data. That's right, every time that tape flinched, they had to stabilize the craft, otherwise, it would have produced blurry, unusable pictures of Saturn. One of a thousand examples of precise engineering that takes decades to get right.
I've not yet deiced if Michel Griffin is doing a better job, or if I just paid less attention when Sean O'Keefe, the previous administrator fought such battles.
I think Michael Griffin is doing a better job.
Focus on the missions, and the supplementary benefits will follow. NASA did not need to buy computers for students, build planetariums or make a special website so that I could learn about the Voyager missions. Instead, they supremely engineered those things, and the science that they returned (and are still returning) inspired and taught the world.
People tend to underestimate the impact of one successful mission. Voyager, Hubble, Apollo and The Mars Rovers have done more for
science and education around the world than any congressman.
I'd like:
A.) The obscure Unix configuration file babble fish.
B.) The auto-sensing left mouse button disabler, with shocker.
C.) The magic lost e-mail retrieval robot, for when "it's not spam"
D.) The magic inbox attitude adjuster, for "can you stop these from comming to my..."
E.) An undo menu item for my xterm window.
We are pretty certain it has liquid lakes, but it may
have caves as well.
We know so little about our solar system.
The actual games they produce are usually not very good as games
I'd never heard this until Doom 3, which is a very good game, just a slight disappointment. I remember reading the PCG review, and most others, they pretty much raved about it. Then Half Life 2 became the darling of the media. Half Life 2 is undeniably a great game, but saying that ID does not produce quality games is wholly inaccurate.
Quake, Quake II, Quake III (which is a masterpiece of simple, chaotic gameplay) were all critically acclaimed, smash hits. Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the Q3 engine version, to say nothing of the original) was quite good. As were Doom (obviously) and most every other game they produced. Even Hexen II was good. It seems gamers have a short memory and are quite subseptable to that heard mentality. Perhaps Doom 3 was a disappointment because people's expectations were sky high.
Now Quake 4 is mostly rubbish. It's OK, but not really good. But Quake 4 was developed with the Doom 3 engine by Raven Software.
Yea, don't blame NASA. Don't blame the engineers who work there. Don't blame Michael Griffin even. Blame the non-scientific, short sighted American people and their elected officials for not giving a damn. NASA's budget is a fraction of what it was during the agencies glory days.
Blame congress for freaking out after the ISS went 5 billion over budget. You see most of NASA's budget is "discretionary" meaning, it can be cut and funded at the discretion of politicians who think space geeks are not important.
Last year, Congress approved Bush's proposed 16 billion for NASA.
They also approved about 500 billion for Iraq. 16 billion on the human future in space. 16 billion does not build to many aircraft carriers, or Saturn V's.
Great news for those mission critical D-Link routers!
I work as a systems admin, and program games for fun. I say fun, but in reality it's not much fun anymore. The reality of it is, that the project I'm currently working on is so large, and so much work has been poured into it, that I can't foresee giving it up, so I continue to plod along. With that being said, I can relate to your circumstance. It's hard to get motivated at home. Here are some things I find helpfull.
1.) Keep a bug / todo / wishful feature list with EVERYTHING you can think of on it. If you run into programmers block, visit that. Try to work on small things, with big returns. Features that provide quick reward. That gets me into the swing of things.
2.) Determine you most productive hours and environment. Get into a routine around it. Develop a ritual and stick to it. Even if it's take a shower, make a cup of tea and eat an orange. That's mine and it's what I always do. My body and mind seem to know when it's time to focus because I have a pattern. Don't let anyone bug you. (Wife, BF, Cats, Mom - let them know when it's time to stop bugging you)
3.) Music and fresh air really help. As does good lighting.
4.) Listen to classical music. Really, it's provocative and relaxing at the same time and kind of encourages a mind grind.
5.) Work with pencil and paper for a while on a nice big notebook. I do this often, when I need to design.
6.) If you have a laptop and your really stuck, or have personal issues that are dragging you down, go to your local library and pick a cubicle. The library is where I do my best work because there are no distractions, clean air, good lighting, and it's a library, what else are you going to do?
The whole concept of procedural creation in games has not been fleshed out as I would have hoped. Procedural methods can do much more then make great FPS graphics fit on 800K. Way back in 1986, I played a game called Starflight. Starflight used fractal algorithms to create a pretty diverse universe with about 200 star systems and 800 planets. You could land on and explore each planet. Close up. Let me say that again, you could land on each planet, collect it's life, find unique artifacts and rove your little tank around for hours. All of this fit onto two low density 5 1/4" floppies. Now, the CGA graphics and restrictive CPU power did no favors. Things got pretty repetitive, but the enormity of the game went unmatched for about 12 years.
In reflection, and now that I better understand it's design, it seems to me to be a microcosm of the real universe. You have a set of rules and a set of elements and by happenstance, (not by human hands in 3ds max) worlds are born.
For a long time, we've been stuck with with character models, human built maps, plot-lines on rails and worlds confined to the imagination of the story line department. Procedural graphics and world creation could make the universe out of a few megabytes.
There are a few games here and there that use this idea. Here is a game in development using procedural graphics and fractal planet creation: Infinity
I swear people here whine so much about NASA it's unbelievable.
I'm convinced that the mind boggling variety of publicly available NASA footage, pictures and video will never be enough for some. You can watch live NASA tv in Realplayer, Quicktime, Windows Media, or Browse to Yahoo and watch it with their flash player.
As the geek I am, NASA is one of the few govermental agencies that I cherrish. If I want to know something about some planet, any planet, it's probabbly thanks to the work that NASA has done.
There are a few almost viable solid state solutions right now. If your requirements are modest, maybe you want a quiet game machine, or you could run a postfix spam filter, the i-Ram is a neat solution.
I used to have a similar set up. 364 disk scsi array rsynced over an OC/3 to an offsite 3TB RAID 5 Array in Pasakastan.
Then the GF complained that the lights dimmed every time I loaded a new playlist. So I bought a pleather 300 cd-flip-file at Kmart.
That sounds like a larger version of what happened about a mile from my house in 1959, the Knox Mine Disaster
Basically coal miners dug to close to the bottom of the Susquehanna river (ignoring engineering recommendations) and a hole punched through flooding miles of underground mines. The tried all kinds of things to plug it and even contracted a company to build a massive concrete slab, that did not work. What did work eventually was several large rail road box cars. To this day, we have mine subsidences where large Victorian houses, schools etc.. in Scranton sink into mine shafts.
What, and make money selling it?
Since when is jumping on the Linux bandwagon the magic money making, company saving pill?
If your point was that Sun could have been a cultural champion of a Linux revolution, then perhaps.
I'm stunned at the hate. Relax. I'm pretty leftist and do not advocate war. NASA did not invade Iraq. Who exactally do you think the astronomers and engineers at NASA are? Warmongers? Think Carl Sagan. He did a lot of work for and with NASA. Every read any of his books? That's all I'm saying.
Name me another large agency in the US goverment that has fewer alterior motives. Sure the military has incentive to contract certain NASA projects. That's no secret. I'd rather have Lockeed Marting building moon landers than building bombs. NASA doesn't make bombs. And about public disclosure of all their technology. I'd bet that Iran, N. Korea etc.. might like to know how to deliver a small payload on a rocket with a sub-orbital tragectory.