I'd guess the game industry in general is something like 70% developers without degrees, which is pretty close to the percentages for game programmers I know (75%). One guy I know who currently works for a value software game house was even a high school drop out. CSCI has some benefits, though, as I've found most non-educated programmers have terrible structure and design which often comes at a price. Up until recently, though, there weren't degrees that focused on the skills that game programmers needed - most programmer training in schools was for business and database related fields. Since business programming and graphics programming are radically different, it is really no surprise to me that most game programmers have no degree.
There still are a number of things that are way out in the future for graphics processors, especially polygon based - for instance, ray tracing has the ability to reflect off multiple surfaces (you could create a house of mirrors, for instance, with true curvature reflections), while polygon models have just started to make decent reflections on a single flat(ish) surface. Radiosity and similar effects are usually mapped beforehand because they are so processor intensive to calculate in real time, but could be used to cast "foggy" shadows and create other creepy effects. Another possibility is to offload the entire graphics model to hardware and do everything (e.g. frustum polygon culling and quadtree/oct-tree culling) inside the hardware instead of in software.
It seems to me graphics hardware has a long ways to go still. There are also probably newer, more photorealistic models that have appeared since I studied computer graphics, as well. Virtual reality in a sense depends on audio and AI in a true form, but a virtual visual (and perhaps audio) reality is probably on the horizon. AI is probably 15-20 years down the line (at least for something that stands a chance at passing a Turing test, IMO).
It's interesting to me, if not just to look at how engines I've had a hand in (mostly bug fixes and porting) are faring. I also like to know how they stack up to the competition, feature-wise (in most cases mediocre, but I won't get into that:)
This is probably more interesting to up-and-coming dev houses rather than big money houses. For that matter, you can have the best engine in the world and you won't get in the front door of EA if you're not already known as an AAA engine maker - you'll have to cut your teeth on a smaller market first. Also, some very good engines come with little or no cost if the game isn't in sales production, which is nice for new developers and indie houses that don't have the money to spend up front, so they can develop the game and later get the commercial contract when they get their publishing deal.
Cliffhanger was interesting - I learned later that it actually was a Japanese anime film called Lupin (one of several films, I seem to remember... it was so long ago) that got converted into a game. I remember seeing the film at an (anime) party in the early 90s.
I liked Space Ace better than Dragon's Lair myself (c'mon - the infanto ray that turns people into helpless babies - classic). Did some googling, and here's more info on Cliff Hanger (oh yeah, it was 2 words:)
well, if you're going with Linksys, you may have to use 3rd party firmware to boost the signals (info on third party firmware for Linksys info here). The very common WRT-54G wireless router runs at 19mw and at that power, barely penetrates a hollow 2 foot wooden wall with no insulation (and drops the signal periodically), at least from my personal experience.
Installing Sveasoft, OpenWRT, or WiFi box firmware allows you to boost the signal to 84mw. I've read to avoid the full 84mw, as it can damage hardware in extended use, but I've also read that this is still in the legal range for the device... even wireless A indoor/outdoor is 250mW. (and I think g is up to 4W).
actually, I'd think any reasonable distribution of the force would do - if it isn't breaking the shooter's wrist in the "equal and opposite reaction," it can probably be absorbed. The problem with Kevlar and ribs breaking is that it is placed against the chest and due to that proximity, the chest still takes quite a bit of the impact. By moving the armor out a bit like in the 2010, the impact is absorbed more by armor than chest.
Netscape is still released freely while Star Office is released as commercial software. The only reason Star Office is commercial, though, is because there was a demand for both additional fonts (which are licensed at cost) and support. The only reason Netscape is free is because MS forced them to give up their shareware model by bundling a 'free' browser with Windows. Microsoft soaked the cost by creating a non-free upgrade to Windows 98 (98SE) and hiking the price by $20.
All of this basically falls into value added software. It's not unlike RedHat or any other commercial Linux vendor. This model is starting to appear in other areas like games, too - there are a few Open Source 3D engines on sourceforge that allow for commercial development, often without releasing the source code (many are non-GPL).
It's not PC, but I had this picture of an outsourced Indian tech support guy being told he had to talk and act like he was sitting at Sony corporate headquarters (when I worked tech support for Bell Atlantic we were basically told to do that, which is where the germ of this one came from).
So in a sing-song English, No! You do wrong thing! Go back, try again. You understand Enrish? Try 'gain. NO! yooo... un... er.. stand... Eng-rish?
One of the reasons 2D games have accurate collision detection is that most of 'em make a two color bitmap (booleans, sometimes called black and white where white is a hit and black is not) of collision-able areas called a mask and does a simple bitwise AND check if the attack contacts the mask. If programmed right, this is actually faster and more accurate than bounding cubes (because the exact shape is taken into account), but takes up more memory by a factor of 1/depth (1/8 for 8 bit color, for instance).
Driving games can, for the most part, do something similar by just using the outline of the car (as long as you don't have tunnels directly overhead or underneath, but checking the Z (or Y if that is your up-down axis) can determine that if a bounding box isn't good enough.
People, OTOH, have many moving parts and their relative shape will change so you can't just project their outline to determine collision. Early FPS's used bounding spheres or boxes. To handle target locations, bounding boxes (or less often, spheres) were placed in several areas around a target. Per pixel hit locations are either refinements of this, or can be very quickly determined by using the depth buffer to do it for you. The problem with using the depth buffer, especially in multiplayer, is you need to implicitly trust the clients since that view volume and depth buffer is dependent on the client's view. This may be why you see collision detection differences in Tony Hawk - the single player game checks the Z buffer, the multiplayer probably uses bounding cubes to prevent cheating or inconsistencies between clients (due to mathamatical rounding errors, not all views are the same).
I don't think it's entirely out of line to expect DVD to be obsolete in 10 years - at least in its current form. There are two issues - #1) the studios are afraid of piracy, especially with some of the very high speed networking that is just around the corner, and #2) the media is becoming far more compact both in data storage technology and in compression technology.
From Bill's point of view, I think he sees the studio's desire for Digital Rights Management as a way to plan the death of the DVD as it now is (which has a form of DRM, but it's been cracked). I also have a feeling that he sees high speed downloads and/or wireless as an alternate distribution means, but again, only with built-in DRM. This would probably be desirable, as if the DRM was cracked, some new form could be used on newer media. Some people will never give up on physical media, though, so there probably will be a "new DVD" format, maybe with a writable area that can manage rights management (probably tied to hardware like DIVX [Digital Video Express, not the codec] was, with some way to view like video stores do, and also probably the thing I dread most).
Awareness is only half the battle. Familiarity and comfort is the other half - I tried to get my wife to use Open Office, MySQL and Linux for her (mini) web based business and she hated them and made me fork out $400 for Windows XP Home and Office 2003 Professional (OEM with some new hardware) because that's what she knows from her day job.
At least I have the knowhow to keep her machine relatively spyware/malware/virus free. Much better than many of the people who beg me for help in fixing their PCs (and I usually cave with suitable bribes;)
Sorry I was confusing there, I actually attached this to the wrong parent and didn't catch it until after submitting.
Still, graphics drivers would make a difference, since they are written as an interface between the OS and the hardware and therefore you can see differences between them depending on optimizations to that interface. ATI is notorious for releasing functional but non-optimized drivers and updating them for speed later, although I think they've been working on their image as of late:)
The article says they're trying to eliminate all GPL'd utilities from SFU including gcc, obviously so they don't have to release the source code. I wonder what SCO will demand for royalties that come out of the end-user pockets...
I really don't understand how this is all that big of news, though, aside from the fact that you won't have to download it separately - you can get it today from the MS web site. The only news is that it will be bundled with the OS without source code. I hope there's a way not to install it, though, as I'd prefer Cygwin.
As far as the GPL goes, it seems to me MS has a problem with this clause:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
I recall MS having a problem with the wording - it can be interpreted as you can't distribute the proprietary code and the GPL code together without following the GPL license (e.g. you must distribute them as separate works). I don't believe that was the intent, but MS doesn't like the ambiguous wording and so separates the pieces.
I'm not sure if it would be a good comparison or not - the gcc compiler for OS X still isn't as optimized as much as it is for Intel based OSes (probably by Tiger release it will be pretty close), so I suspect that there will still be a bit of a performance hit from the compiler. OTOH, the 64 bit architectures are fairly new for Intel and AMD and haven't been optimized much in compiler, either. Come to think of it, Apple may have an advantage with compiled 64 bit PPC instructions using gcc because of 64 bit work for AIX (not that I find gcc compiled binaries on AIX particularly fast). I have no idea whether Intel is submitting code to the gcc compiler nowadays (since they're supporting Linux, it wouldn't surprise me if they were, but my compiler lore is about a year stale), but that may offset their side - traditionally, Intel's supplied its own compiler that is quite a bit faster than gcc.
In other words, it's really a crap-shoot that depends heavily on hardware optimizations and drivers. It wouldn't surprise me if the Apple video drivers are inferior to the Intel drivers, as well, so game performance is probably worse on a mac. Probably depends on how much work is done in software or in hardware, though.
VNC isn't a terribly efficient way to do remote connections between Windows boxes - MS's stuff is faster (Terminal Services or whatever it's called now) because it can cheat on what it sends by sending window definitions rather than a bitmap or jpeg of the window frame and letting the client render those pieces (for example). If you're like me and go between a Linux box or mac box and a Windows PC, though, VNC is about the only option.
I sometimes do some coding on my home machines from work (usually mac or linux open source) over lunch, so I ssh tunnel a VNC session into my work box and just deal with any lagginess (which, incidentally, is more from the overtaxed T1 at work than my 1500/768 DSL home connection). Most of the other times I spend reading/. - like today:)
I can relate, but I knew better than to put all the posts in - I just didn't know they all didn't match up to a hole and put two too many in. Thankfully, it didn't damage the board, it just didn't work until I took the extraneous posts out.
Later, on a different board, I had a clip stand (or whatever those things are called - the alternate for posts - because the mobo maker didn't use the standard ATX post holes) that came loose and bent, hitting a far-too-close solder connection and blowing the board. I now use electrical tape to tape those things down whenever I have to use them as well as insulate the connection.
The other problem I've had is a fairly early revision of a board that defaulted to CAS 2.5 when using dual-channel memory, and I only had cheap memory handy (I got some Kingston Value Select DDR for $65 for a Gig from a friend who works as a wholesaler). I first tried the 100MHz bus without luck, then as a last resort, I tried a stick of PC2100 I had handy, and it booted. I then made all the changes necessary in BIOS, shut down, inserted the gig of CAS 3 memory, and reboot (which worked). Too bad I couldn't find CAS 2.5 or CAS 2 memory for less than $130 when I was looking - I needed the extra dough to put into my graphics card (which is much more important than RAM latencies in a gaming PC, at least usually).
The reason for air burst fusion bombs is specifically to reduce structural damage and increase casualties. In some ways, they are better - they clean out the city of life and do minimal structural damage, so you just wait a few months for residual radiation (from the Fission portion of the bomb that triggers the Fusion reaction) to go down, and move in. No messy virus that you may or may not be immune to that you need to worry about.
People born before 1970 were vaccinated for smallpox, people born after 1970 weren't (give or take a few months). The scar is really a circular area where a multi-headed needle was repeatedly pressed.
The smallpox virus in the soviet warheads probably is a refined and strengthened strain and compounded with reduced immunity, could affect immunized people (probably not as deadly, though).
And yeah, I remember the MAD days - nuclear bomb drills at schools where you duck and cover under a desk for the blast and then head to the nearest fallout shelter. I think the duck and cover part was just to save space in the fallout shelter for adults:) In any case, I probably had more confidence then that both sides would back off from certain death than I do now (e.g. if the same thing were happening today).
Wow - you didn't know that before hand? I suppose having had two salaried parents made me more aware of it earlier in life.
The whole idea of salaried workers is to avoid unplanned budgeting expenses and so overtime is built into the base pay. Unfortunately, it leads to far too much abuse, especially in the tech industry. Far too many of us are _expected_ to work more than 40 hours a week, which is just wrong unless they tell you in advance (e.g. you'll get $80k, but you'll work 50+ hour days every week).
I remember getting a mod of Castle Wolfenstein called Castle Smurfenstein, complete with audio encoded smurf song and a bloodcurdling scream.
Not too long later I got the mod to dino eggs called Dino Smurfs. Oddly enough, I'd purchased both games retail (a rarity back then).
Interesting... I googled on it and find out today the series came out in reverse order, or at least was meant to come out in a different order - look here for Dead Smurf Software info. Apparently Tom Hall of Id thought it was the first mod too (actually the first total conversion). It seems an appropriate next step to some of the stuff that was happening at the time (I had friends that created a popular Ultima editor, and we were huge WizEdit fans [and later the better Wizardry Scenario Editor] for Wizardry).
This is called the Equal Tempered scale. Others exist, such as several variants on the pythogorean scale and the Bohlen-Pierce 13 tone scale. Most western instruments are tuned to the equal tempered scale, but some, like bagpipes, aren't.
I used to know a lot more about this, but it's faded with time:)
As far as atonal music, I had a class that briefly covered it, and it did seem very alien, even more so than music with non-traditional tunings. The worst example, was a piece that was written mathematically using certain rules - something like all 12 notes need to be played before any are repeated, and then another 12 notes before another repeat of any note, ad-nauseum. It also had a tri-tone separator between the 12 notes passages, I think specifically to grate at western ears. This was the worst thing I've ever heard, closely followed by a Sun-Ra free jazz piece (some of the Sun-Ra Arkestra stuff wasn't bad... lots of it was, and a few pieces just plain terrible).
I could play a single note at a pitch that almost feels like a "why?" or other simple phrase. In which case it's a single note and it feels like it has meaning; fade and attack taking the place of changed pitch.
As for #1, that's much easier to picture - heck, I had a bass teacher years ago that was a master of it. He could play an entire song just bouncing between rhythm and attack on a single note.
The problem was, most stores wouldn't devote shelf space to mac because it only had 30% of the market and then 20% and then 10%... Some, like CompUSA, picked up the slack and sold quite a few games, probably because of the limited mac market elsewhere. Others, like Best Buy, got rid of their mac shelf space almost entirely before abandoning the platform. Many mac game distributors moved to shareware.
Marathon is in no way related to Halo Probably not true - the Halo logo has a small Marathon logo in it and there have been several parallels found in the storylines. It is suspected that the stories may collide in a future game.
Apple ][ may have been a gaming powerhouse compared to Mac, but Mac has been around a heck of a lot longer. The relative catalogs of games are probably pretty close now. The entire catalog is probably what the XBOX gets in a year, though;)
Not to say the mac market for games was great - it certainly was limited. Probably the worst part for a long time was limited input device choices - ever try a flight sim with a mouse and keyboard? Ewww. Thankfully, that was fixed by adopting USB. Quickly adopting AGP later probably helped, as well.
Entirely drag and drop inventory system and visible character statuses on character icon, and pixel-by-pixel character movement in icon combat area (as opposed to block movement like Ultima). Monster combat was done in a different window than the dungeon view (which was like Wizardry) and had a targeting circle around your character to show range.
Drag 'n Drop inventory is everywhere in RPGs nowadays, but back then, everything was keyboard still (click T to trade and 5 for character 5 sort of thing).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess the game industry in general is something like 70% developers without degrees, which is pretty close to the percentages for game programmers I know (75%). One guy I know who currently works for a value software game house was even a high school drop out. CSCI has some benefits, though, as I've found most non-educated programmers have terrible structure and design which often comes at a price. Up until recently, though, there weren't degrees that focused on the skills that game programmers needed - most programmer training in schools was for business and database related fields. Since business programming and graphics programming are radically different, it is really no surprise to me that most game programmers have no degree.
There still are a number of things that are way out in the future for graphics processors, especially polygon based - for instance, ray tracing has the ability to reflect off multiple surfaces (you could create a house of mirrors, for instance, with true curvature reflections), while polygon models have just started to make decent reflections on a single flat(ish) surface. Radiosity and similar effects are usually mapped beforehand because they are so processor intensive to calculate in real time, but could be used to cast "foggy" shadows and create other creepy effects. Another possibility is to offload the entire graphics model to hardware and do everything (e.g. frustum polygon culling and quadtree/oct-tree culling) inside the hardware instead of in software.
It seems to me graphics hardware has a long ways to go still. There are also probably newer, more photorealistic models that have appeared since I studied computer graphics, as well. Virtual reality in a sense depends on audio and AI in a true form, but a virtual visual (and perhaps audio) reality is probably on the horizon. AI is probably 15-20 years down the line (at least for something that stands a chance at passing a Turing test, IMO).
It's interesting to me, if not just to look at how engines I've had a hand in (mostly bug fixes and porting) are faring. I also like to know how they stack up to the competition, feature-wise (in most cases mediocre, but I won't get into that :)
This is probably more interesting to up-and-coming dev houses rather than big money houses. For that matter, you can have the best engine in the world and you won't get in the front door of EA if you're not already known as an AAA engine maker - you'll have to cut your teeth on a smaller market first. Also, some very good engines come with little or no cost if the game isn't in sales production, which is nice for new developers and indie houses that don't have the money to spend up front, so they can develop the game and later get the commercial contract when they get their publishing deal.
Cliffhanger was interesting - I learned later that it actually was a Japanese anime film called Lupin (one of several films, I seem to remember... it was so long ago) that got converted into a game. I remember seeing the film at an (anime) party in the early 90s.
:)
I liked Space Ace better than Dragon's Lair myself (c'mon - the infanto ray that turns people into helpless babies - classic). Did some googling, and here's more info on Cliff Hanger (oh yeah, it was 2 words
well, if you're going with Linksys, you may have to use 3rd party firmware to boost the signals (info on third party firmware for Linksys info here). The very common WRT-54G wireless router runs at 19mw and at that power, barely penetrates a hollow 2 foot wooden wall with no insulation (and drops the signal periodically), at least from my personal experience.
Installing Sveasoft, OpenWRT, or WiFi box firmware allows you to boost the signal to 84mw. I've read to avoid the full 84mw, as it can damage hardware in extended use, but I've also read that this is still in the legal range for the device... even wireless A indoor/outdoor is 250mW. (and I think g is up to 4W).
actually, I'd think any reasonable distribution of the force would do - if it isn't breaking the shooter's wrist in the "equal and opposite reaction," it can probably be absorbed. The problem with Kevlar and ribs breaking is that it is placed against the chest and due to that proximity, the chest still takes quite a bit of the impact. By moving the armor out a bit like in the 2010, the impact is absorbed more by armor than chest.
Not really the same -
Netscape is still released freely while Star Office is released as commercial software. The only reason Star Office is commercial, though, is because there was a demand for both additional fonts (which are licensed at cost) and support. The only reason Netscape is free is because MS forced them to give up their shareware model by bundling a 'free' browser with Windows. Microsoft soaked the cost by creating a non-free upgrade to Windows 98 (98SE) and hiking the price by $20.
All of this basically falls into value added software. It's not unlike RedHat or any other commercial Linux vendor. This model is starting to appear in other areas like games, too - there are a few Open Source 3D engines on sourceforge that allow for commercial development, often without releasing the source code (many are non-GPL).
It's not PC, but I had this picture of an outsourced Indian tech support guy being told he had to talk and act like he was sitting at Sony corporate headquarters (when I worked tech support for Bell Atlantic we were basically told to do that, which is where the germ of this one came from).
So in a sing-song English, No! You do wrong thing! Go back, try again. You understand Enrish? Try 'gain. NO! yooo... un... er.. stand... Eng-rish?
One of the reasons 2D games have accurate collision detection is that most of 'em make a two color bitmap (booleans, sometimes called black and white where white is a hit and black is not) of collision-able areas called a mask and does a simple bitwise AND check if the attack contacts the mask. If programmed right, this is actually faster and more accurate than bounding cubes (because the exact shape is taken into account), but takes up more memory by a factor of 1/depth (1/8 for 8 bit color, for instance).
Driving games can, for the most part, do something similar by just using the outline of the car (as long as you don't have tunnels directly overhead or underneath, but checking the Z (or Y if that is your up-down axis) can determine that if a bounding box isn't good enough.
People, OTOH, have many moving parts and their relative shape will change so you can't just project their outline to determine collision. Early FPS's used bounding spheres or boxes. To handle target locations, bounding boxes (or less often, spheres) were placed in several areas around a target. Per pixel hit locations are either refinements of this, or can be very quickly determined by using the depth buffer to do it for you. The problem with using the depth buffer, especially in multiplayer, is you need to implicitly trust the clients since that view volume and depth buffer is dependent on the client's view. This may be why you see collision detection differences in Tony Hawk - the single player game checks the Z buffer, the multiplayer probably uses bounding cubes to prevent cheating or inconsistencies between clients (due to mathamatical rounding errors, not all views are the same).
I don't think it's entirely out of line to expect DVD to be obsolete in 10 years - at least in its current form. There are two issues - #1) the studios are afraid of piracy, especially with some of the very high speed networking that is just around the corner, and #2) the media is becoming far more compact both in data storage technology and in compression technology.
From Bill's point of view, I think he sees the studio's desire for Digital Rights Management as a way to plan the death of the DVD as it now is (which has a form of DRM, but it's been cracked). I also have a feeling that he sees high speed downloads and/or wireless as an alternate distribution means, but again, only with built-in DRM. This would probably be desirable, as if the DRM was cracked, some new form could be used on newer media. Some people will never give up on physical media, though, so there probably will be a "new DVD" format, maybe with a writable area that can manage rights management (probably tied to hardware like DIVX [Digital Video Express, not the codec] was, with some way to view like video stores do, and also probably the thing I dread most).
Awareness is only half the battle. Familiarity and comfort is the other half - I tried to get my wife to use Open Office, MySQL and Linux for her (mini) web based business and she hated them and made me fork out $400 for Windows XP Home and Office 2003 Professional (OEM with some new hardware) because that's what she knows from her day job.
;)
At least I have the knowhow to keep her machine relatively spyware/malware/virus free. Much better than many of the people who beg me for help in fixing their PCs (and I usually cave with suitable bribes
Sorry I was confusing there, I actually attached this to the wrong parent and didn't catch it until after submitting.
:)
Still, graphics drivers would make a difference, since they are written as an interface between the OS and the hardware and therefore you can see differences between them depending on optimizations to that interface. ATI is notorious for releasing functional but non-optimized drivers and updating them for speed later, although I think they've been working on their image as of late
The article says they're trying to eliminate all GPL'd utilities from SFU including gcc, obviously so they don't have to release the source code. I wonder what SCO will demand for royalties that come out of the end-user pockets...
I really don't understand how this is all that big of news, though, aside from the fact that you won't have to download it separately - you can get it today from the MS web site. The only news is that it will be bundled with the OS without source code. I hope there's a way not to install it, though, as I'd prefer Cygwin.
As far as the GPL goes, it seems to me MS has a problem with this clause:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
I recall MS having a problem with the wording - it can be interpreted as you can't distribute the proprietary code and the GPL code together without following the GPL license (e.g. you must distribute them as separate works). I don't believe that was the intent, but MS doesn't like the ambiguous wording and so separates the pieces.
I'm not sure if it would be a good comparison or not - the gcc compiler for OS X still isn't as optimized as much as it is for Intel based OSes (probably by Tiger release it will be pretty close), so I suspect that there will still be a bit of a performance hit from the compiler. OTOH, the 64 bit architectures are fairly new for Intel and AMD and haven't been optimized much in compiler, either. Come to think of it, Apple may have an advantage with compiled 64 bit PPC instructions using gcc because of 64 bit work for AIX (not that I find gcc compiled binaries on AIX particularly fast). I have no idea whether Intel is submitting code to the gcc compiler nowadays (since they're supporting Linux, it wouldn't surprise me if they were, but my compiler lore is about a year stale), but that may offset their side - traditionally, Intel's supplied its own compiler that is quite a bit faster than gcc.
In other words, it's really a crap-shoot that depends heavily on hardware optimizations and drivers. It wouldn't surprise me if the Apple video drivers are inferior to the Intel drivers, as well, so game performance is probably worse on a mac. Probably depends on how much work is done in software or in hardware, though.
VNC isn't a terribly efficient way to do remote connections between Windows boxes - MS's stuff is faster (Terminal Services or whatever it's called now) because it can cheat on what it sends by sending window definitions rather than a bitmap or jpeg of the window frame and letting the client render those pieces (for example). If you're like me and go between a Linux box or mac box and a Windows PC, though, VNC is about the only option.
/. - like today :)
I sometimes do some coding on my home machines from work (usually mac or linux open source) over lunch, so I ssh tunnel a VNC session into my work box and just deal with any lagginess (which, incidentally, is more from the overtaxed T1 at work than my 1500/768 DSL home connection). Most of the other times I spend reading
I can relate, but I knew better than to put all the posts in - I just didn't know they all didn't match up to a hole and put two too many in. Thankfully, it didn't damage the board, it just didn't work until I took the extraneous posts out.
Later, on a different board, I had a clip stand (or whatever those things are called - the alternate for posts - because the mobo maker didn't use the standard ATX post holes) that came loose and bent, hitting a far-too-close solder connection and blowing the board. I now use electrical tape to tape those things down whenever I have to use them as well as insulate the connection.
The other problem I've had is a fairly early revision of a board that defaulted to CAS 2.5 when using dual-channel memory, and I only had cheap memory handy (I got some Kingston Value Select DDR for $65 for a Gig from a friend who works as a wholesaler). I first tried the 100MHz bus without luck, then as a last resort, I tried a stick of PC2100 I had handy, and it booted. I then made all the changes necessary in BIOS, shut down, inserted the gig of CAS 3 memory, and reboot (which worked). Too bad I couldn't find CAS 2.5 or CAS 2 memory for less than $130 when I was looking - I needed the extra dough to put into my graphics card (which is much more important than RAM latencies in a gaming PC, at least usually).
anyone besides me searching through the sigs to see if some guy named LinusTorvalds answered this post with a serious reply... and modded -1 Troll?
:)
anyhow, I suspect it was God on the 42nd day, but after a week or so he'd gotten too lazy to update his blog... we are made in his image, right
The reason for air burst fusion bombs is specifically to reduce structural damage and increase casualties. In some ways, they are better - they clean out the city of life and do minimal structural damage, so you just wait a few months for residual radiation (from the Fission portion of the bomb that triggers the Fusion reaction) to go down, and move in. No messy virus that you may or may not be immune to that you need to worry about.
People born before 1970 were vaccinated for smallpox, people born after 1970 weren't (give or take a few months). The scar is really a circular area where a multi-headed needle was repeatedly pressed.
:) In any case, I probably had more confidence then that both sides would back off from certain death than I do now (e.g. if the same thing were happening today).
The smallpox virus in the soviet warheads probably is a refined and strengthened strain and compounded with reduced immunity, could affect immunized people (probably not as deadly, though).
And yeah, I remember the MAD days - nuclear bomb drills at schools where you duck and cover under a desk for the blast and then head to the nearest fallout shelter. I think the duck and cover part was just to save space in the fallout shelter for adults
Wow - you didn't know that before hand? I suppose having had two salaried parents made me more aware of it earlier in life.
The whole idea of salaried workers is to avoid unplanned budgeting expenses and so overtime is built into the base pay. Unfortunately, it leads to far too much abuse, especially in the tech industry. Far too many of us are _expected_ to work more than 40 hours a week, which is just wrong unless they tell you in advance (e.g. you'll get $80k, but you'll work 50+ hour days every week).
I remember getting a mod of Castle Wolfenstein called Castle Smurfenstein, complete with audio encoded smurf song and a bloodcurdling scream.
Not too long later I got the mod to dino eggs called Dino Smurfs. Oddly enough, I'd purchased both games retail (a rarity back then).
Interesting... I googled on it and find out today the series came out in reverse order, or at least was meant to come out in a different order - look here for Dead Smurf Software info. Apparently Tom Hall of Id thought it was the first mod too (actually the first total conversion). It seems an appropriate next step to some of the stuff that was happening at the time (I had friends that created a popular Ultima editor, and we were huge WizEdit fans [and later the better Wizardry Scenario Editor] for Wizardry).
This is called the Equal Tempered scale. Others exist, such as several variants on the pythogorean scale and the Bohlen-Pierce 13 tone scale. Most western instruments are tuned to the equal tempered scale, but some, like bagpipes, aren't.
:)
I used to know a lot more about this, but it's faded with time
As far as atonal music, I had a class that briefly covered it, and it did seem very alien, even more so than music with non-traditional tunings. The worst example, was a piece that was written mathematically using certain rules - something like all 12 notes need to be played before any are repeated, and then another 12 notes before another repeat of any note, ad-nauseum. It also had a tri-tone separator between the 12 notes passages, I think specifically to grate at western ears. This was the worst thing I've ever heard, closely followed by a Sun-Ra free jazz piece (some of the Sun-Ra Arkestra stuff wasn't bad... lots of it was, and a few pieces just plain terrible).
You could even argue that.
I could play a single note at a pitch that almost feels like a "why?" or other simple phrase. In which case it's a single note and it feels like it has meaning; fade and attack taking the place of changed pitch.
As for #1, that's much easier to picture - heck, I had a bass teacher years ago that was a master of it. He could play an entire song just bouncing between rhythm and attack on a single note.
The problem was, most stores wouldn't devote shelf space to mac because it only had 30% of the market and then 20% and then 10%... Some, like CompUSA, picked up the slack and sold quite a few games, probably because of the limited mac market elsewhere. Others, like Best Buy, got rid of their mac shelf space almost entirely before abandoning the platform. Many mac game distributors moved to shareware.
;)
Marathon is in no way related to Halo
Probably not true - the Halo logo has a small Marathon logo in it and there have been several parallels found in the storylines. It is suspected that the stories may collide in a future game.
Apple ][ may have been a gaming powerhouse compared to Mac, but Mac has been around a heck of a lot longer. The relative catalogs of games are probably pretty close now. The entire catalog is probably what the XBOX gets in a year, though
Not to say the mac market for games was great - it certainly was limited. Probably the worst part for a long time was limited input device choices - ever try a flight sim with a mouse and keyboard? Ewww. Thankfully, that was fixed by adopting USB. Quickly adopting AGP later probably helped, as well.
Then there's the nearly completely forgotten Citadel: Adventures in the Crystal Keep
Entirely drag and drop inventory system and visible character statuses on character icon, and pixel-by-pixel character movement in icon combat area (as opposed to block movement like Ultima). Monster combat was done in a different window than the dungeon view (which was like Wizardry) and had a targeting circle around your character to show range.
Drag 'n Drop inventory is everywhere in RPGs nowadays, but back then, everything was keyboard still (click T to trade and 5 for character 5 sort of thing).