How true. So alike yet the complete opposite of each other. Myspace is the direct inversion of Slashdot. (Reminds me of the JLA and the Crime Syndicate of America.)
I absolutely agree. If MS never managed to convince IBM to license their OS back in 1981, today's PC world would probably more resemble the fragmented mobile phone industry. Oh yes, there will be 3-4 major players (OS/2, Windows, some form of n*x, and a fourth upstart OS that doesn't exist in our timeline), but no single dominant OS... yet.
FOSS would rise to power much earlier. The PC boom wouldn't have been stunted, as suggested by the CNET article. On the contrary, it would have grown by leaps and bounds, with fierce competition and everyone jockeying for position to be the #1 platform. Borland would probably be at the forefront of development tools, creating cross-platform tools and frameworks.
Its just a thought though. Fun to imagine at times.
(This whole thing reminds me of the Age of Apocalypse timeline.)
This is a nice article that explores how the PC industry might have turned out if Microsoft never came to power as we know it in this world.
For alt-history buffs: "Now, here's an interesting question that looks back 25 years: What if IBM demands an exclusive license to that operating system? One of two things happens: Microsoft and IBM don't get a deal done, or Microsoft caves. Let's follow both scenarios as far as they can go:"
True. Some things are absolute, some relative. The Canadian guy you replied to said you could live on $900/mo in Canada but your quality of life would suck. With $900/month in Manila, I could retire by age 45 or sooner.
An iPod, or a decent MOBO, or even a mid-range graphics card would cost me half a month's wages, on that $450/mo figure. Yes, I've had to save up for those. I've also had to save up just to tour next-door countries. I personally know a lot of people from North America, Japan, Singapore, etc, who've come over here to retire. Of course, my 'wants' are somewhat different from a 1st world person's, but that's another story. Anyway, if one has (relatively) simple wants and needs, a 3rd world person having an outsourced 1st world job can live pretty well.
In other third world countries where these tech jobs are being outsourced to, $USD400-$600/month is very high. I live in Manila, and the minimum wage is roughly less than $USD 6.00 daily. Those who work in outsourced tech-support call centers make $300 monthly and they're very happy about it. I had a short web-design stint making about $450 monthly and I was really really happy about it, to say the least. Single people here could live like kings on that.
Another way to become invisible. 1. Build a Starport. 2. Build a connecting Control Tower. 3. Upgrade, add cloaking field for your wraiths. (Bonus: To stay invisible longer, build an Apollo reactor, gives you +50 energy.)
Yes, in Might and Magic I, your party had to be all-female if you wanted to survive, make it to the end. Without giving too much away, there's an important town there that drains your hitpoints per step for male characters. Not a few of my friends had to revamp their line-ups midway in the game. I started a bit later than them, so my party of six were all females right from the start.
In that game, its not just an advantage to be female. Its essential.
I had my first IBM-PC compatible back in 1986 so I am by no means an authority on what the really first PC games were. The first games that I saw were basically ports of existing classics. (They were mainstream at the time and weren't really 'classics' in that sense yet.) I played Dig-dug, Digger, Bluebush Chess, Q-bert, Pac-man, Tapper, Archon, Zork, Ancient Art of War, Bard's Tale, etc. Except for the last three I mentioned, many of them could fit on a double-sided 360Kb (Wow!) diskette. Since they were ports from Apple, Atari, C64, Vic-20, Amiga, etc, I sort of felt the IBM PC versions were poor copies. With 4 CGA colors, and just a squeaky speaker, it couldn't match up to the advanced sound and graphics capabilities of the other machines I mentioned. People developed mainly for the other platforms first before rewriting them for the PC. I had somewhat an inferiority complex to my friends who owned those machines. (Things changed in the early 90s with the advent of VGA, sound cards, etc, but that's another story.)
Off-hand, I'm hoping things work out the same way for Linux, (no not saying Linux games are inferior) that when it eventually reaches critical mass, people will develop games for Linux too no longer as an afterthought. (So I wouldn't keep resorting to WINE, trial and error, etc.)
Yes, and not much use to people like me who live outside the US for that matter. For now, the best legal thing that I have that doesn't have DRM, has a relatively wide selection, and has tracks that can be bought internationally, is Emusic.com.
The really, really bad players are either total n00bs, or really don't have an interest in that particular game, in which case, there's no point in going on. In the case of the former, where players are total n00bs, most modern games like Civ IV (or even Chess) have startup tips, which can be turned off.
I personally have no interest in racing games, sports games, and I'll be totally inept at playing them. No amount of coaching from the AI (or real people) will make me any better, or for that matter, even appreciate the help.
Very true. Not too long ago, a friend of mine wanted to try out Linux on his ancient, Cyrix 586 with 16MB, which had Win95. Even an old distro like Redhat 5.1 took hours to install, a trimmed-down StarOffice felt like Office 2003 on a Pentium 2. He ended up reinstalling Win95 and Office 97.
The old P-266MMX my Win98 was originally on has long since died and I've transferred the OS to a PC I got recently. (Which came with no OS.) No plans of moving up to XP. My machine dual boots to Ubuntu 6.06 and I do most of my stuff there. I keep W98 around for my old games, DOS apps, and for nostalgia. I can't justify the expense of getting XP (or Vista in the future) and meanwhile, Wine runs most of the few XP-only programs I have.
I'll keep my Win98 around till newer hardware can no longer run it. (No more driver support, etc.)
I miss Compute! Magazine from the 80s. Aside from the nice reviews, previews, I got a big kick out of the ads. They also listed source code for simple games (in BASIC) you could type in, and this is what actually got me started in coding.
Fast forward 10-15 years...
Up until recently, before getting broadband, the only reason I still bought game mags was for the demo disks. Mags these days just don't have the allure of the good old days.
Your nine other friends don't actually have to own a copy. This can be done to an extent the way StarCraft does it. Your copy can 'spawn' up to nine other games, then get together in a network. You can get together to play against other teams in a sports version of Battle.net. It can be done.
They left out
on
Five That Fell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Infocom. The flag-bearer of text-adventure gaming. Brought us dozens of hits like the Zork trilogy, Enchanter trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, etc. You didn't need the latest and the greatest GPU to play those games. There are still indie text-adventures but the genre practically died with the company. Oh I just miss those days. Reading "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" sent more chills up my spine than seeing the most grotesque creature from (insert latest FPS using latest cutting edge 3D engine here) at maximum settings.
A little off-topic but related... despite the open-source, superior quality ogg-vorbis format, mp3 remains the top format of choice for compressed audio. As much as I'm a fan of ODF, I'd have to agree it will take a while for it to dethrone DOC. I've sent out ODF files only to get 'Please resend in DOC' replies.
Re:You have to empathise with game designers
on
Gamer's Kryptonite
·
· Score: 1
He's effectively invincible but he needs to stop the bank robbers/terrorists/etc. in a minimum amount of time, with no human collateral damage and a minimum of property damage. The longer he dallies or the more of Metropolis he tears up while saving the world, the lower his publicity rating becomes. This will require strategic thinking and searching for non-obvious solutions (perhaps with the aid of X-ray vision).
I played that sort of game around 20 years ago on my Atari. http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?Softwar eID=1380
You started off as Clark Kent, changed into Superman and tried to capture all the crooks in Metropolis while trying to avoid Lex Luthor carrying Kryptonite. It was like a 2-D King's Quest with lots of screens, which you eventually memorized. The crooks were randomly scattered, and you had a time limit.
The graphics were low-res but I had lots of fun. I'm surprised nobody has remade this game. Or at least I haven't seen one of this sort.
I use my old projects as benchmarks. If say an old function/project had a difficulty rating of x, and it took me n days to finish it, and the new function/project needed was twice as hard, I'd quote 2n days. (Plus an additional 100% for padding.) I have found Steve McConnell's books to be helpful, like this one Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art http://www.edv-buchversand.de/mspress/product.asp? cnt=product&id=mp-0535
That's an oversimplification, since there are many factors, but it works. There's really no cut and dried way of estimating, but you can come close.
Slashdot Mirror
How true. So alike yet the complete opposite of each other. Myspace is the direct inversion of Slashdot. (Reminds me of the JLA and the Crime Syndicate of America.)
2.4 is old but by no means 'dated'. 2.4 is significantly leaner than 2.6, runs on old hardware and has a lot of backports from 2.6 http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ChangeLog- 2.4.33
Even DSL uses 2.4. I still use 2.4 on my old PIIs and newer hardware myself.
Slack aims to run on as many types of hardware as possible. Besides, you can always compile your own 2.6 kernel into your slack system.
I absolutely agree. If MS never managed to convince IBM to license their OS back in 1981, today's PC world would probably more resemble the fragmented mobile phone industry. Oh yes, there will be 3-4 major players (OS/2, Windows, some form of n*x, and a fourth upstart OS that doesn't exist in our timeline), but no single dominant OS... yet.
FOSS would rise to power much earlier. The PC boom wouldn't have been stunted, as suggested by the CNET article. On the contrary, it would have grown by leaps and bounds, with fierce competition and everyone jockeying for position to be the #1 platform. Borland would probably be at the forefront of development tools, creating cross-platform tools and frameworks.
Its just a thought though. Fun to imagine at times.
(This whole thing reminds me of the Age of Apocalypse timeline.)
This is a nice article that explores how the PC industry might have turned out if Microsoft never came to power as we know it in this world.
2 _3-6102503.html?tag=fd_carsl
For alt-history buffs: "Now, here's an interesting question that looks back 25 years: What if IBM demands an exclusive license to that operating system? One of two things happens: Microsoft and IBM don't get a deal done, or Microsoft caves. Let's follow both scenarios as far as they can go:"
http://news.com.com/The+great+PC+what-if/2010-104
Will running ad-aware, spybot totally hose the system?
True. Some things are absolute, some relative. The Canadian guy you replied to said you could live on $900/mo in Canada but your quality of life would suck. With $900/month in Manila, I could retire by age 45 or sooner.
An iPod, or a decent MOBO, or even a mid-range graphics card would cost me half a month's wages, on that $450/mo figure. Yes, I've had to save up for those. I've also had to save up just to tour next-door countries. I personally know a lot of people from North America, Japan, Singapore, etc, who've come over here to retire. Of course, my 'wants' are somewhat different from a 1st world person's, but that's another story. Anyway, if one has (relatively) simple wants and needs, a 3rd world person having an outsourced 1st world job can live pretty well.
In other third world countries where these tech jobs are being outsourced to, $USD400-$600/month is very high. I live in Manila, and the minimum wage is roughly less than $USD 6.00 daily. Those who work in outsourced tech-support call centers make $300 monthly and they're very happy about it. I had a short web-design stint making about $450 monthly and I was really really happy about it, to say the least. Single people here could live like kings on that.
Another way to become invisible.
1. Build a Starport.
2. Build a connecting Control Tower.
3. Upgrade, add cloaking field for your wraiths.
(Bonus: To stay invisible longer, build an Apollo reactor, gives you +50 energy.)
Hasta la vista, Microsoft.
Yes, in Might and Magic I, your party had to be all-female if you wanted to survive, make it to the end. Without giving too much away, there's an important town there that drains your hitpoints per step for male characters. Not a few of my friends had to revamp their line-ups midway in the game. I started a bit later than them, so my party of six were all females right from the start.
In that game, its not just an advantage to be female. Its essential.
Yup, I somehow have this feeling this story will be posted again.
I had my first IBM-PC compatible back in 1986 so I am by no means an authority on what the really first PC games were. The first games that I saw were basically ports of existing classics. (They were mainstream at the time and weren't really 'classics' in that sense yet.) I played Dig-dug, Digger, Bluebush Chess, Q-bert, Pac-man, Tapper, Archon, Zork, Ancient Art of War, Bard's Tale, etc. Except for the last three I mentioned, many of them could fit on a double-sided 360Kb (Wow!) diskette. Since they were ports from Apple, Atari, C64, Vic-20, Amiga, etc, I sort of felt the IBM PC versions were poor copies. With 4 CGA colors, and just a squeaky speaker, it couldn't match up to the advanced sound and graphics capabilities of the other machines I mentioned. People developed mainly for the other platforms first before rewriting them for the PC. I had somewhat an inferiority complex to my friends who owned those machines. (Things changed in the early 90s with the advent of VGA, sound cards, etc, but that's another story.)
Off-hand, I'm hoping things work out the same way for Linux, (no not saying Linux games are inferior) that when it eventually reaches critical mass, people will develop games for Linux too no longer as an afterthought. (So I wouldn't keep resorting to WINE, trial and error, etc.)
Yes, and not much use to people like me who live outside the US for that matter. For now, the best legal thing that I have that doesn't have DRM, has a relatively wide selection, and has tracks that can be bought internationally, is Emusic.com.
The really, really bad players are either total n00bs, or really don't have an interest in that particular game, in which case, there's no point in going on. In the case of the former, where players are total n00bs, most modern games like Civ IV (or even Chess) have startup tips, which can be turned off.
I personally have no interest in racing games, sports games, and I'll be totally inept at playing them. No amount of coaching from the AI (or real people) will make me any better, or for that matter, even appreciate the help.
If ReactOS were only a little more stable, all these people http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/11/ 0218250 could easily make the switch almost painlessly. Compared to Linux its almost a drop-in replacement for 98.
Very true. Not too long ago, a friend of mine wanted to try out Linux on his ancient, Cyrix 586 with 16MB, which had Win95. Even an old distro like Redhat 5.1 took hours to install, a trimmed-down StarOffice felt like Office 2003 on a Pentium 2. He ended up reinstalling Win95 and Office 97.
The old P-266MMX my Win98 was originally on has long since died and I've transferred the OS to a PC I got recently. (Which came with no OS.) No plans of moving up to XP. My machine dual boots to Ubuntu 6.06 and I do most of my stuff there. I keep W98 around for my old games, DOS apps, and for nostalgia. I can't justify the expense of getting XP (or Vista in the future) and meanwhile, Wine runs most of the few XP-only programs I have.
I'll keep my Win98 around till newer hardware can no longer run it. (No more driver support, etc.)
Is it just me or is Myspace really, strangely, the complete inversion of Slashdot? (Profiles, topics, content, etc.)
I miss Compute! Magazine from the 80s. Aside from the nice reviews, previews, I got a big kick out of the ads. They also listed source code for simple games (in BASIC) you could type in, and this is what actually got me started in coding.
Fast forward 10-15 years...
Up until recently, before getting broadband, the only reason I still bought game mags was for the demo disks. Mags these days just don't have the allure of the good old days.
Your nine other friends don't actually have to own a copy. This can be done to an extent the way StarCraft does it. Your copy can 'spawn' up to nine other games, then get together in a network. You can get together to play against other teams in a sports version of Battle.net. It can be done.
Infocom. The flag-bearer of text-adventure gaming. Brought us dozens of hits like the Zork trilogy, Enchanter trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, etc. You didn't need the latest and the greatest GPU to play those games. There are still indie text-adventures but the genre practically died with the company. Oh I just miss those days. Reading "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" sent more chills up my spine than seeing the most grotesque creature from (insert latest FPS using latest cutting edge 3D engine here) at maximum settings.
A little off-topic but related... despite the open-source, superior quality ogg-vorbis format, mp3 remains the top format of choice for compressed audio. As much as I'm a fan of ODF, I'd have to agree it will take a while for it to dethrone DOC. I've sent out ODF files only to get 'Please resend in DOC' replies.
he has the girl (but not the marriage) Actually, Superman is married to Lois Lane. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Lane
He's effectively invincible but he needs to stop the bank robbers/terrorists/etc. in a minimum amount of time, with no human collateral damage and a minimum of property damage. The longer he dallies or the more of Metropolis he tears up while saving the world, the lower his publicity rating becomes. This will require strategic thinking and searching for non-obvious solutions (perhaps with the aid of X-ray vision). I played that sort of game around 20 years ago on my Atari. http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?Softwar eID=1380
You started off as Clark Kent, changed into Superman and tried to capture all the crooks in Metropolis while trying to avoid Lex Luthor carrying Kryptonite. It was like a 2-D King's Quest with lots of screens, which you eventually memorized. The crooks were randomly scattered, and you had a time limit.
The graphics were low-res but I had lots of fun. I'm surprised nobody has remade this game. Or at least I haven't seen one of this sort.
I use my old projects as benchmarks. If say an old function/project had a difficulty rating of x, and it took me n days to finish it, and the new function/project needed was twice as hard, I'd quote 2n days. (Plus an additional 100% for padding.) I have found Steve McConnell's books to be helpful, like this one Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art http://www.edv-buchversand.de/mspress/product.asp? cnt=product&id=mp-0535
That's an oversimplification, since there are many factors, but it works. There's really no cut and dried way of estimating, but you can come close.