Wasn't the point of the FPS games generally loads of bad guys, multi-player and a sense of claustrophobia?
The "sense of claustrophobia" came from the limitations of most FPS engines at the time, which resulted in room-and-hallway level design to limited how much detail and how many NPCs got drawn on the screen. The Serious Sam engine was different as it featured wide open spaces and an endless supply of NPCs.
Plus being dark meant you imagined rather than saw generally rather full graphics?
Depending on the FPS engine, colored lighting requires time to calculate bounces and drop offs from each source. Some levels are dark because of the storyline, other levels are dark to compile faster. Serious Sam went with full brightness.
I never gotten into Serious Sam back in the day. Probably because of the endless hoard of enemies that keep on coming and coming and coming. A guy needs to rest between repeated comings, especially as he gets older.
But several decades of home values steadily ratcheting up, and house prices become so expensive that only super-rich and banks can own them.
Inflation didn't become an issue until after President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1972. My parents bought a house in Silicon Valley in the early 1960's for $32K. If they haven't sold the house in the late 1970's for a $25K profit, and kept it until they retired in the 1990's, they would have made a $900K profit. My father swore that renting a house would never cost more than $400 per month after selling the house. Besides getting married, this was one of the biggest mistakes my parents ever made.
Nope. I'm always surprised by how little university graduates know about hardware. I've been told on Slashdot that a computer scientist doesn't even need to know how to turn on a computer since the course material is theological knowledge and not applicable knowledge. A fine distinction that works well with mathematics but not with computers.
I was somewhat alarmed by this young candidate, because he emerged from a prominent 4-year institution with a CS degree, yet knew nothing useful about vim or *nix.
When I worked at the Google help desk in 2008, I had to walk a newly hired university graduate the process of turning on his own computer — "Please press the power button. If the computer doesn't explode, you may login into Windows." — since the university computer labs always had someone standing around to turn on the computers. It was a hard lesson for him to learn on his first day of the job.
Its controversial that a landlord can decide to stop renting when the rental agreement is complete and decide to live in their own property?
I very much doubt that the landlords are using the law to reclaim property to live in. More likely that they're using the law to charge higher rents or sell the building.
He had no idea how to do a simple replace in vim or even how to save a file.
Did he know how to Google? I know a lot of stuff in general but I don't always know the particular details. I'm often assigned unsolvable problems at work because I can almost always find a solution through a web search. Or, if I didn't find a solution, no one else would either.
Some places, like mine, actually REQUIRE you to know *nix and know it beyond installing Ubuntu.
As an engineer once told me on my internship in 1997: "Installing Linux is not the same as knowing Linux." Back then nothing worked out of the box. Compiling the kernel and device drivers was a necessary evil. Something most kids don't even know how to do.
They gladly do it, because it's a small price to pay for the money they'll make, especially in a market as overheated as San Francisco.
Developers may love it, but homeowner associations hate it. Some HOA's don't want those people moving into their neighborhood, causing problems and lowering house values.
Homeowners will not be happy, because they've lost money in the deal.
That's always a problem in California. An elderly neighbor brawled me out for having dead petunias in the front yard, causing the value of her house to drop by $25,000 in a rising market. Never mind that she wasn't selling the house, where the realized value may differ significantly from the perceived value.
Seems like too many young people don't respect their elders. When I was kid in the 1970's, I had to be silent in the presence of my grandparents who expected children to be seen but not heard. Since my current job involves working with ex-military people, respect is expected all around. Never know when retired brass might be in the office.
You are forced to live in a cheap, rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco!
I live in San Jose and the city restricts rent increases to 8% per year for apartment complexes. If you want stable housing with predictable rents, you want to live in an apartment.
What a horrible injustice is being done to you by giving you something at below market rate!
The only reason my rent is below market rate was because rents weren't increase for several years after the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and one-third of the apartments were vacant. Paying several hundred dollars less than market rate is not the same as paying $500 per month for low income housing.
How can you possibly cope?
I could pay market rate for a different apartment in Silicon Valley or rent a three-bedroom house in Sacramento. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
At some point, there will be no more rich people who want to live in San Francisco, and developers will start to concentrate on moderately priced housing.
It's not San Francisco. It's a nationwide problem as developers are focused almost exclusively on luxury housing.
And then the not-so-wealthy will move into their old apartments, and then the less-wealthy-than-that into theirs, and so on.
This would be true in an ideal market where the population is relatively stable. San Francisco has too many people who want to move into town. The landlord of the old apartment will slap on a coat of paint, install new carpets and granite countertops, and jack up the rent so much that only an outsider can afford to pay.
I think it would be fairly interesting to see what happens as nearly all food and cleaning and basic services workers get largely priced out of working in the city.
That's a common misperception. I make $50,000 per year, put 20% away in savings, rent a studio apartment in Silicon Valley, and most people consider me "poor" because I live a modest lifestyle. Meanwhile, I'm rubbing shoulders with the minimum-wage people on the Express Bus to clean up the same toilets I'm using at work. They may have three or four people under one roof to pay rent and utilities.
[...] these techies could easily afford a house in SV closer to work, but they choose a multi-hour commute so they can live in a hipster loft.
The hipsters I know at work in Palo Alto are always whining whenever their commute is longer than 30 minutes. Some recruiters and hiring managers are offering 40% more in pay rate to get some of these hipsters to commute to southern Silicon Valley (i.e., San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale), which is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
When they learn I'm an old school mainframe programmer, their eyes glass over.
When I was a lead video game tester, I shocked the new testers out of high school by informing them that I played video games in the early 1980's (most are surprised to learn that video games existed before the Sony PlayStation), introduced them to a tester who assembled arcade machines for Atari and Midway in the 1980's, and to another tester who tested pen-and-paper games in the 1970's. It's always important to instruct youngster to respect their elders.
Slashdot Mirror
You've only been laid by your hands.
Being celibate has its own rewards.
That isn't what I was talking about.
Be polite to others by keeping your personal problems to yourself. ;)
You know you're getting popular on Slashdot is when the ACs start trolling you on a regular basis.
Maybe someone can replace every cool enemy with something mundane and fuck up the controls.
WE DON'T NEED A REMAKE OF DAIKATANA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
Want a job in the gaming industry? Make a mod or make improvements to an open source game engine and instantly impress at the job interview.
I doubt that will work in Las Vegas. Their gaming industry is a little bit different.
Serious Sam Was a parody game of a Genre that took itself much to seriously.
The only game I can think of from that era would be Duke Nukem. Or was it Shadow Warrior?
Minute Man spotted.
My attention span these days are 15 minutes or less. My days of playing video games for hours at a time are long gone.
Wasn't the point of the FPS games generally loads of bad guys, multi-player and a sense of claustrophobia?
The "sense of claustrophobia" came from the limitations of most FPS engines at the time, which resulted in room-and-hallway level design to limited how much detail and how many NPCs got drawn on the screen. The Serious Sam engine was different as it featured wide open spaces and an endless supply of NPCs.
Plus being dark meant you imagined rather than saw generally rather full graphics?
Depending on the FPS engine, colored lighting requires time to calculate bounces and drop offs from each source. Some levels are dark because of the storyline, other levels are dark to compile faster. Serious Sam went with full brightness.
This is awful; was it ever impressive?
It was back in the day.
I never gotten into Serious Sam back in the day. Probably because of the endless hoard of enemies that keep on coming and coming and coming. A guy needs to rest between repeated comings, especially as he gets older.
But several decades of home values steadily ratcheting up, and house prices become so expensive that only super-rich and banks can own them.
Inflation didn't become an issue until after President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1972. My parents bought a house in Silicon Valley in the early 1960's for $32K. If they haven't sold the house in the late 1970's for a $25K profit, and kept it until they retired in the 1990's, they would have made a $900K profit. My father swore that renting a house would never cost more than $400 per month after selling the house. Besides getting married, this was one of the biggest mistakes my parents ever made.
Please tell me you're joking... :(
Nope. I'm always surprised by how little university graduates know about hardware. I've been told on Slashdot that a computer scientist doesn't even need to know how to turn on a computer since the course material is theological knowledge and not applicable knowledge. A fine distinction that works well with mathematics but not with computers.
How large is your family? How many dependents are you able to support?
Just me and a school of tropical fishes.
I was somewhat alarmed by this young candidate, because he emerged from a prominent 4-year institution with a CS degree, yet knew nothing useful about vim or *nix.
When I worked at the Google help desk in 2008, I had to walk a newly hired university graduate the process of turning on his own computer — "Please press the power button. If the computer doesn't explode, you may login into Windows." — since the university computer labs always had someone standing around to turn on the computers. It was a hard lesson for him to learn on his first day of the job.
Its controversial that a landlord can decide to stop renting when the rental agreement is complete and decide to live in their own property?
I very much doubt that the landlords are using the law to reclaim property to live in. More likely that they're using the law to charge higher rents or sell the building.
He had no idea how to do a simple replace in vim or even how to save a file.
Did he know how to Google? I know a lot of stuff in general but I don't always know the particular details. I'm often assigned unsolvable problems at work because I can almost always find a solution through a web search. Or, if I didn't find a solution, no one else would either.
Some places, like mine, actually REQUIRE you to know *nix and know it beyond installing Ubuntu.
As an engineer once told me on my internship in 1997: "Installing Linux is not the same as knowing Linux." Back then nothing worked out of the box. Compiling the kernel and device drivers was a necessary evil. Something most kids don't even know how to do.
They gladly do it, because it's a small price to pay for the money they'll make, especially in a market as overheated as San Francisco.
Developers may love it, but homeowner associations hate it. Some HOA's don't want those people moving into their neighborhood, causing problems and lowering house values.
Homeowners will not be happy, because they've lost money in the deal.
That's always a problem in California. An elderly neighbor brawled me out for having dead petunias in the front yard, causing the value of her house to drop by $25,000 in a rising market. Never mind that she wasn't selling the house, where the realized value may differ significantly from the perceived value.
Seems like too many young people don't respect their elders. When I was kid in the 1970's, I had to be silent in the presence of my grandparents who expected children to be seen but not heard. Since my current job involves working with ex-military people, respect is expected all around. Never know when retired brass might be in the office.
Think about moving to someplace you can afford? Virginia, Iowa, etc.?
If I ever move out of state, it would be Las Vegas.
You are forced to live in a cheap, rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco!
I live in San Jose and the city restricts rent increases to 8% per year for apartment complexes. If you want stable housing with predictable rents, you want to live in an apartment.
What a horrible injustice is being done to you by giving you something at below market rate!
The only reason my rent is below market rate was because rents weren't increase for several years after the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and one-third of the apartments were vacant. Paying several hundred dollars less than market rate is not the same as paying $500 per month for low income housing.
How can you possibly cope?
I could pay market rate for a different apartment in Silicon Valley or rent a three-bedroom house in Sacramento. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
At some point, there will be no more rich people who want to live in San Francisco, and developers will start to concentrate on moderately priced housing.
It's not San Francisco. It's a nationwide problem as developers are focused almost exclusively on luxury housing.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/22/3662239/luxury-housing-80-percent-developers/
And then the not-so-wealthy will move into their old apartments, and then the less-wealthy-than-that into theirs, and so on.
This would be true in an ideal market where the population is relatively stable. San Francisco has too many people who want to move into town. The landlord of the old apartment will slap on a coat of paint, install new carpets and granite countertops, and jack up the rent so much that only an outsider can afford to pay.
I think it would be fairly interesting to see what happens as nearly all food and cleaning and basic services workers get largely priced out of working in the city.
That's a common misperception. I make $50,000 per year, put 20% away in savings, rent a studio apartment in Silicon Valley, and most people consider me "poor" because I live a modest lifestyle. Meanwhile, I'm rubbing shoulders with the minimum-wage people on the Express Bus to clean up the same toilets I'm using at work. They may have three or four people under one roof to pay rent and utilities.
[...] these techies could easily afford a house in SV closer to work, but they choose a multi-hour commute so they can live in a hipster loft.
The hipsters I know at work in Palo Alto are always whining whenever their commute is longer than 30 minutes. Some recruiters and hiring managers are offering 40% more in pay rate to get some of these hipsters to commute to southern Silicon Valley (i.e., San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale), which is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
When they learn I'm an old school mainframe programmer, their eyes glass over.
When I was a lead video game tester, I shocked the new testers out of high school by informing them that I played video games in the early 1980's (most are surprised to learn that video games existed before the Sony PlayStation), introduced them to a tester who assembled arcade machines for Atari and Midway in the 1980's, and to another tester who tested pen-and-paper games in the 1970's. It's always important to instruct youngster to respect their elders.