Pearl Harbor was orchestrated carefully. The US knew they were coming, had their maps, broke their codes, yet did nothing... ok, not really nothing - mysteriously, no aircraft carriers were in the harbor that day and only heavily armored battleships were in harbor. I think secret US planners were expecting radar to detect the planes and have 8 fully armed and ready battleships and some of the 80+ other ships ready and retaliate the attack, but a radar operator error failed to notify the troops of the attack, and thus the tragedy that befell them. There is plenty of other evidence to support this, but the fact that we had broken the blue and purple codes (diplomatic and naval, declassified in the early 1980s) is the most damning - we knew where their ships were and knew they planned to attack. FDR did plenty of other things to pull the wool over the eyes of the people (firing an admiral who said Pearl Harbor was too exposed, losing documents, etc).
The US was unofficially involved in WWII essentially from the mid-1940s, if not before. The administration knew without a doubt that Japan intended to attack the United States months before it happened, but FDR played the public.
FDR in 1940 said we would not go to war unless we were attacked.
The US at the time was the main oil exporter to Japan (supplying something like 80%) and embargoed oil and other fuel exports for them seizing Indochina (mid-1941). Incidentally, the embargo didn't apply to Germany, and the US oil companies continued to sell to both sides (also pointing to this being intentionally to get into the war). Germany captured several oil fields fairly early in the war (Romania, Turkey, Russia, etc) but Japan didn't really have an alternative.
(former President) Herbert Hoover's words on the oil embargo in 1941: "The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war..."
The US is also known to have fired first in the Pacific front. In the Atlantic front Germany fired first with subs damaging the USS Kearney and sinking the USS Reuben James (and lots of freighters).
Funny that you mention it - I actually don't mind condoms as much as my wife does - in fact, I generally perform much better with them due to the reduced sensitivity and initial lubrication (which can be bad, say, after a long hot bath). My wife, on the other hand, HATES them with a passion and would prefer abstinence to sex with a condom.
Not exactly, or at least it's not proven, but US companies did sell chemicals that could be used to create various poison gases, and it is also believed that the Carlyle military profiteering company (run by then Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci with George H.W. Bush on the board) did sell VX nerve agent to Iraq, but that has not been proven.
The US and Iran were at odds after the Islamic revolution and Saddam took power in Iraq and went to war with historical enemy Iran (partially because of fears that the Shia majority may attempt a similar uprising in Iraq). Since Iran was the enemy of the US, Iraq was viewed as an ally. Both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons during the war, but Iraq was the only one to use them genocidally on its own people (Kurds were believed by Saddam to be helping Iran). After the war was ended in 1988, Iraq was broke and couldn't get financial help, so it started accusing Kuwait of stealing its oil, leading to the eventual invasion of Kuwait. That led to a standoff with the US after the US retook Kuwait and led to the eventual US invasion of Iraq. Basically, US meddling came back and bit them on the butt again, just like with Afghanistan.
Go back and look at renaissance art, then. Heck, go back to Greek and Roman art. There are boobs and penises everywhere. Paintings of nudes. Sculptures of nudes. Paintings of orgies. Drawings of orgies. Sex and nudity is everywhere - the censorship of nudity is mostly a modern thing.
And what, exactly, is wrong with nudity? We're born naked, after all, and we're stuck in the skin we're given, no matter how much we cover up. No, I don't think we should all run around naked - nobody wants to see CowboyNeal nude, but why make a fuss about it?
In 50 years Halle Berry will be old or dead and the technology forgotten, so who knows? Maybe people will look passed the inanity of Swordfish and see it in a more artistic light (yeah, even I doubt that, I'm just sayin'). Even Halle might look back and say damn, I looked good!
That may depend - some games may be art, others not. I suspect as the medium develops, some will truly be considered art, and some may be already. The tale told by Doom the video game may be trivially simplistic and all about blowing things up, but was the tale told by Doom the movie any better? Why should Doom the movie be considered art and not Doom the game?
Some people consider literature art, others not. Is Alice in Wonderland the book art? How about the pictures in the book in the book or on the cover (most versions are illustrated)? Is a trashy romance novel art? How about the cover? How about the D&D manual? It certainly isn't literature, but it contains art.
You will always have the argument of it being interactive vs passive, so the story changes depending on the viewer, but theater is considered art, and improv theater is interactive, so it is possible.
Also if art is something you have to have some emotional attachment to, I'd say at least some video games are art - who doesn't have at least some emotional reaction to Dogmeat (Fallout), Gwen (Guild Wars), April (The Longest Journey), or even Samus (Metroid, though more so in later games)? I'd even go back to 1984 with the mostly forgotten Below the Root as any of the three protagonists (and how many other action games [it is essentially a platformer] become unwinnable if you kill ANYONE?).
LEDs won't hurt you - I think you're talking about these - sorta like LED projectors, but with frickin laser beams. No idea if they can be mounted on sharks.
They also are oiled in front of properties to control dust (often something like Dustlock [soybean oil soapstock], since crude oil spraying is banned in many states). From what I remember this is done a couple of times a year (I lived on a gravel road from age 6 to 7, and then they paved it), but sometimes they will do an extra coat if extra traffic is expected (say, a county fair) or if some sort of festival uses the roads (e.g. something like Woodstock).
Alternatives blacktop requires yearly maintenance like seal-coating and has a lifespan of only about 25-30 years and concrete is expensive (especially in northern climates where it is prone to cracking and can deteriorate due to salt exposure.
My laptop has it, but my desktop (with a newer, more powerful CPU) doesn't. Both AMD and Intel base it on marketing numbers and what the CPU is targeted for, but yes, in general AMD supports it on more platforms than Intel. I'm personally using Sun's VirtualBox at home on my desktop machine because it supports software virtualization.
I can vouch for darkness at sea - while places like Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin give a good view, the best view of the stars I've ever seen is definitely Aruba when the island lost power (crystal clear skies and only a slight wash of light from Venezuela 17 miles away). Then again, no northern lights in Aruba, so each has its pluses.
Well you're getting your wish in one respect - MMORPG first person shooter Huxley just went into public beta. Most isometric and sprite based games these days are asian browser based games.
There's also a MMORPG third person shooter coming called Global Agenda but I don't know much more about it other than the video on the site. I saw some E3 footage of that one, otherwise I'd have never heard of it.
At E3 they announced Starcraft 2 is expected to be released by the end of 2009 and will go into beta this summer. Of course, as previously announced, the game was split into three and will be released as a trilogy, so if you want your Zerg or Protoss stories, you'll have to wait.
Better to be released when its ready than to get a game either riddled with bugs or completely unfun. A perfect example is Lionheart a game that was rushed into publication without really finishing the last half. I worked on a game with a similar story - forced into publication before it could be finished (in fact, the publisher stopped funding the [indie] studio I worked for and gave the game to an in-house studio that basically strapped on an installer). The best MMORPG example I can think of is D&D Online, the buggiest online game I've ever played (though admittedly, not long, and only for a trial subscription period).
Not to mention computer engineers are a subset of electrical engineers (and yes, I was a computer engineering major for a while before changing majors - it was basically EE with focus on chip design and nearly all coding is microcode). He probably meant software engineers, who usually get the ribbing in this area, in which case I say he should go shove a rose bush up his ass (or wait, yeah, mod flamebait).
speaking of Vomit Comet, it has that name for a reason - and I imagine they may want to restrain from "you may now kiss the bride" until they hit gravity again.
Couple marries in zero g, then both die choking on vomit. We don't know who's vomit it was, you can't exactly dust for vomit (with thanks to Spinal Tap for that one).
Re:Some (probably all) genres need more history.
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Vintage Games
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· Score: 1
On a side note, Akalabeth was not officially published until 1980, though you could buy it in baggie form in 1979. I believe it was actually published slightly after another game with a similar view called Odyssey: The Complete Apventure (but that didn't have a dungeon view).
It wouldn't surprise me if Wizardry was developed concurrently with Ultima, but it was derivative of the dungeon view in Akalabeth (which was also used in Ultima). The first three Ultimas also used the same basic game engine (at least map format, dialog, etc. were essentially the same - I had a friend who wrote a scenario editor compatible with the first 3 scenarios).
Akalabeth was also written in BASIC (Applesoft, which was written by Microsoft). Odyssey: the Compleat Apventure Integer BASIC. Wizardry in Pascal. Most of the latter ones were probably mostly machine language, but I've always been amazed by the choice of language in those early games.
Not necessarily - you could define an object using some form of CSG and have the tessellation tool create the actual geometry (which is pretty much what CAD software does today). It won't be as simple as the grandparent suggests, though - it will require some sort of primitive input unless it is designed to work with some sort of Level of Detail scheme (an area I do know Microsoft has patents in)
A very simple instance of CSG is a sphere, which can be defined with a point and a radius. You could then do something like a mathematical subtract of, say, a cube to make a cube shaped hole in the sphere - that contains a mathematically polygonal structure, a curved surface, and could be entirely tessellated in hardware. I can do that today in DX10 hardware using the geometry shader, but the geometry shader tends to tessellate slowly and has limited a limited number of vertices it can emit (an nVidia 8800GTX can emit 1024, for instance - I haven't tried emitting on my ATI hardware because ATI has so far refused to enable it via extension in OpenGL, even though geometry shaders are supported in DirectX on the same hardware). I wonder if that's what they mean by "tessellation capable hardware" - yes it can be done, but without DX11 hardware it can't be done well. Incidentally, nVidia is supposed to display some DX11 hardware in June sometime, as well (but personally I won't care unless they release equivalent OpenGL extensions).
As for LoD schemes, currently one that is used in shaders takes a polygon and a texture of height and normal maps and basically does something similar to extrusion (but only on a visual level). Dynamic tessellation could actually extrude the texture detail as you get closer, which also makes soft shadows much easier to calculate than with pseudo-raytracing techniques (raytracing in general has a hard time with soft shadows due to typical use of point light sources, but hard shadows are easy).
Re:Some (probably all) genres need more history.
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Vintage Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic derived from Akalabeth's dungeons (Akalabeth was the prequel to Ultima and released in 1979). Questron and Phantasie mostly derived from Ultima, though yes, that was the first I remember mini-games in.
A couple of influential games I think are missing are Choplifter and Pitfall! Both were influential in gameplay and Choplifter was the first game to start as a computer game and become a video game (albeit rewritten and MUCH harder) and influenced some other games like Rescue Raiders and Armor Alley. Pitfall! was the first popular character based side scrolling game I remember, though some similar games came out the same year (Aztek comes to mind)
I always thought Super Mario Brothers was fairly derivative - basically it pulled a Blizzard, refining gameplay from many other games, including their own (like Space Panic, Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and others). I personally think Lode Runner was at least as influential, albeit also as derivative (it also was ported to arcade).
Utopia could be considered both the first god game and sim game and is missing.
And how about Bosconian? Yes, the mostly forgotten game gave us... the continue timer. Sorry - probably not really worth a mention other than I loved that game;)
I also wonder if Cinematronics Rip Off (Star Thief was the mac version, and it had other names for other clones) pre-dates Defender or not. Both were 1980 and had a main goal of protecting rather than destroying. It also introduced 2 player co-op mode according to wiki's Tim Skelly page and was the first game with flocking. Skelly also wrote Starhawk, the first game I remember seeing in (pseudo) 3d (released in 1977). Yes, those are all video games (first) rather than computer games, but so was Tetris.
Not sure about Europe, but the US specifically banned light bulbs that generate between 310-2600 lumens (roughly 40-150 Watt bulbs) and are not 25% more energy efficient by 2014 (so by energy use, not type). The same law requires bulbs to be 70% more efficient by 2020, so basically, this could extend the usage of ordinary bulbs by about 8 years past the 2012 phase out start date since it is only 40% more efficient. I believe the only bulbs that are 70% or more efficient compared to incandescent and typically run in that lumen range are gas discharge (fluorescent, sodium, sulfur, neon, etc) and LED/OLED, though light emitting plastics may also be a possibility.
There are monitors that accept HDMI - they are often built and sold as tuner-less televisions, not (computer) monitors, but some are sold as both. Samsung (in particular) includes VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs on many of their smaller monitors that can be used for TV or computer monitors (the T2#0HD line, where # is 2,4,6 and corresponds to 22", 24", and 26" - there may be more in that line, but I'm looking for a 24-26" computer monitor ATM, and that was one option)
My latest graphics card only has DVI connectors, but it has a digital audio connector and with a converter can send HDMI video and sound. There are also standalone boxes that convert DVI + Audio to HDMI (most I've seen take coaxial audio, which I assume means an analog signal).
I remember an nVidia SLI configuration that required something like 1350 watts, as well (I believe OC'd 8800 GTX's a couple of years ago). The 260GTX I have requires 500W, so I can only assume this will need 900-1000W at bare minimum (it has more stuff, but 500W includes other components, so its not a doubling from a single GPU to a double).
The real scary thing is a 1480Watt draw on my wall would nearly blow a fuse by itself (120V*15A=1800Watts), God forbid adding a laser printer like I have on that wall (it's an older color model which draws about 400 Watts when printing), the two server machines, or the TV (and yes, I blow fuses sometimes already).
I've worked with one of the key developers of Code::Blocks, but never actually used the IDE he develops, but everything I've seen him write was very well polished. I agree with you on IDEs - every one I've ever worked with has odd quirks.
Visual Studio is a decent IDE for Windows, but has Microsoft quirks like libraries that need a.lib and a.dll, the property manager that has odd usability issues that never get fixed like having to click on a line to see a... to add paths (unintuitive), and its oddities like insisting the C library is deprecated and you should use *_s functions (Microsoft's secure replacement for standard C functions).
Bloodshed's DevC++ worked well for me for a while, but I found binaries compiled with it were slower than Visual Studio's (due to using the gcc compiler rather than the Microsoft or Intel compiler). I haven't used DevC++ in about 2 years, so I'm not sure where it's at today.
I have used XCode extensively and agree with you on bloated - between X.2 and X.4 (I skipped X.3) it tripled its memory footprint on one of my projects (and God forbid I start the debugger). I also hate how XCode prefers System paths over local files (violating the C spec, and making it near impossible to override broken functions). Every 6 months or so the.Spotlight-V100 file gets corrupted and needs to be deleted, as well (XCode ties into Spotlight and some headers become unreadable - this problem has existed since X.0). The one feature I love is being able to see which files are not included in a project, which helps when I need to manually update the project, though I'd love this to be automatic or have a batch add capability.
Eclipse I can't say I like much - it is extensible, yes, but any IDE that requires a tutorial to get started with is more work than it's worth, IMO. I did get past understanding Perspectives and loading and compiling a project with it, but I personally found it a lot like my experience with Blender - when you know something else (and I know a lot of pro-CAD packages), everything with it seems backwards.
I've tried Anjuta and KDE Studio on Linux, but I wasn't fond of either one, though I can't remember why (that is more like 3 years ago). I admit, I have a tendency to just use vim for coding most of the time on Linux and debug with Insight (a gdb front end).
Also a long time ago I worked with Borland, CodeWarrior, and a few other IDEs, but most of those are dead now.
I think for most couples sex definitely drops off after marriage or shortly after and usually gets worse when you have kids and a tight schedule.
I won't even get into sex drive after/during cancer, tumor removal, or other diseases, and yes I am familiar with it because my wife had part of her cervix removed (tumors) and her mom died of pancreatic cancer (and her stepdad remarried a month after her death, so the loyalty wasn't really there at the end).
I thought about mentioning Fringe or Heroes, but to me they aren't really true science fiction - the former is more of a paranormal drama (like The X Files) and the latter is superhero. I generally see science fiction as set in at least the future, though you have exceptions like steampunk, which is essentially science fiction and that's set in the past and Stargate, which is based in the present or near-future. Still, Fringe's alternate realities vs, say Stargate's aren't too far different (but Stargate throws in a lot more traditional science fiction elements).
But it IS exactly like that - the basic plot has not changed, ever - always exactly one "good guy" and one "bad guy" sent back in time and they duke it out for survival of humanity. As a very short synopsis, the main plot has not changed.
Personally, I watched the first 6 episodes or so of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and completely lost interest - I didn't find the writing all that inspired or inspiring. Even the first episode was derivative - it was T3 all over, except set in a school not a veterinarian clinic. Or was it T2 all over when good Terminator saves John Connor from the bad Terminator at his house?
I was much more disappointed with the cancellation of Life On Mars - I was actually starting to enjoy the US version (I still liked the UK version better, but the US version had merits). I can't think of a sci-fi show on TV right now that I really care about - most are uninspired or derivative (Caprica? Stargate Universe? Come on SyFy - come up with something interesting besides rehashed series and monster movies/shows [which is everything else - Sanctuary, Primeval, etc]).
Some movies that are CGI heavy are well liked. I can't say I always like them, but here are some examples.
I have friends that think Independence Day was a fantastic movie and saw it many, many times. I personally hated it - bad plot, terrible science, mostly wooden acting, and totally implausible. Still, it won a Special Effects academy award and won a whole slew of other awards like the Saturn award for best sci-fi. If Will Smith hadn't been in that movie I'd have been bored to tears.
Then there was that godawful tornado chasing movie Twister. A friend of mine went to see it 9 fricking times because the special effects were "out of this world." I was in a graphics study course at the time and was underwhelmed - and barely made it through a single screening. I did not find it thrilling, I found it about as exciting as watching stupid people do stupid things (it's fun for about 20 minutes).
There are good sci-fi movies that make good use of special effects - I liked first Terminator, for instance. Terminator 2 from an action flick standpoint was good, as well, but the liquid metal terminator was a complete special effects gimmick - I was doing those same special effects in my graphics class a year before the movie was released (ooh, morphing...). T3 was just terrible.
The Lord of the Rings series made heavy use of CGI, as well, and TRotK won 11 Oscars including Best Visual Effects.
Yeah, that was probably due to how they taught people, more specifically untrained home users about PCs in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the drive "remembered" your data, people probably more strongly associated that with the word memory than RAM or ROM. When a program was loaded from disk it was also called "loaded in memory," so the terminology was used interchangeably. My mom and even I mostly used the term memory to talk about disk storage in the 1980s, but I eventually separated the terminology and my mom did not.
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Pearl Harbor was orchestrated carefully. The US knew they were coming, had their maps, broke their codes, yet did nothing... ok, not really nothing - mysteriously, no aircraft carriers were in the harbor that day and only heavily armored battleships were in harbor. I think secret US planners were expecting radar to detect the planes and have 8 fully armed and ready battleships and some of the 80+ other ships ready and retaliate the attack, but a radar operator error failed to notify the troops of the attack, and thus the tragedy that befell them. There is plenty of other evidence to support this, but the fact that we had broken the blue and purple codes (diplomatic and naval, declassified in the early 1980s) is the most damning - we knew where their ships were and knew they planned to attack. FDR did plenty of other things to pull the wool over the eyes of the people (firing an admiral who said Pearl Harbor was too exposed, losing documents, etc).
The US was unofficially involved in WWII essentially from the mid-1940s, if not before. The administration knew without a doubt that Japan intended to attack the United States months before it happened, but FDR played the public.
FDR in 1940 said we would not go to war unless we were attacked.
The US at the time was the main oil exporter to Japan (supplying something like 80%) and embargoed oil and other fuel exports for them seizing Indochina (mid-1941). Incidentally, the embargo didn't apply to Germany, and the US oil companies continued to sell to both sides (also pointing to this being intentionally to get into the war). Germany captured several oil fields fairly early in the war (Romania, Turkey, Russia, etc) but Japan didn't really have an alternative.
(former President) Herbert Hoover's words on the oil embargo in 1941:
"The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war..."
The US is also known to have fired first in the Pacific front. In the Atlantic front Germany fired first with subs damaging the USS Kearney and sinking the USS Reuben James (and lots of freighters).
Funny that you mention it - I actually don't mind condoms as much as my wife does - in fact, I generally perform much better with them due to the reduced sensitivity and initial lubrication (which can be bad, say, after a long hot bath). My wife, on the other hand, HATES them with a passion and would prefer abstinence to sex with a condom.
Not exactly, or at least it's not proven, but US companies did sell chemicals that could be used to create various poison gases, and it is also believed that the Carlyle military profiteering company (run by then Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci with George H.W. Bush on the board) did sell VX nerve agent to Iraq, but that has not been proven.
The US and Iran were at odds after the Islamic revolution and Saddam took power in Iraq and went to war with historical enemy Iran (partially because of fears that the Shia majority may attempt a similar uprising in Iraq). Since Iran was the enemy of the US, Iraq was viewed as an ally. Both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons during the war, but Iraq was the only one to use them genocidally on its own people (Kurds were believed by Saddam to be helping Iran). After the war was ended in 1988, Iraq was broke and couldn't get financial help, so it started accusing Kuwait of stealing its oil, leading to the eventual invasion of Kuwait. That led to a standoff with the US after the US retook Kuwait and led to the eventual US invasion of Iraq. Basically, US meddling came back and bit them on the butt again, just like with Afghanistan.
Go back and look at renaissance art, then. Heck, go back to Greek and Roman art. There are boobs and penises everywhere. Paintings of nudes. Sculptures of nudes. Paintings of orgies. Drawings of orgies. Sex and nudity is everywhere - the censorship of nudity is mostly a modern thing.
And what, exactly, is wrong with nudity? We're born naked, after all, and we're stuck in the skin we're given, no matter how much we cover up. No, I don't think we should all run around naked - nobody wants to see CowboyNeal nude, but why make a fuss about it?
In 50 years Halle Berry will be old or dead and the technology forgotten, so who knows? Maybe people will look passed the inanity of Swordfish and see it in a more artistic light (yeah, even I doubt that, I'm just sayin'). Even Halle might look back and say damn, I looked good!
That may depend - some games may be art, others not. I suspect as the medium develops, some will truly be considered art, and some may be already. The tale told by Doom the video game may be trivially simplistic and all about blowing things up, but was the tale told by Doom the movie any better? Why should Doom the movie be considered art and not Doom the game?
Some people consider literature art, others not. Is Alice in Wonderland the book art? How about the pictures in the book in the book or on the cover (most versions are illustrated)? Is a trashy romance novel art? How about the cover? How about the D&D manual? It certainly isn't literature, but it contains art.
You will always have the argument of it being interactive vs passive, so the story changes depending on the viewer, but theater is considered art, and improv theater is interactive, so it is possible.
Also if art is something you have to have some emotional attachment to, I'd say at least some video games are art - who doesn't have at least some emotional reaction to Dogmeat (Fallout), Gwen (Guild Wars), April (The Longest Journey), or even Samus (Metroid, though more so in later games)? I'd even go back to 1984 with the mostly forgotten Below the Root as any of the three protagonists (and how many other action games [it is essentially a platformer] become unwinnable if you kill ANYONE?).
LEDs won't hurt you - I think you're talking about these - sorta like LED projectors, but with frickin laser beams. No idea if they can be mounted on sharks.
They also are oiled in front of properties to control dust (often something like Dustlock [soybean oil soapstock], since crude oil spraying is banned in many states). From what I remember this is done a couple of times a year (I lived on a gravel road from age 6 to 7, and then they paved it), but sometimes they will do an extra coat if extra traffic is expected (say, a county fair) or if some sort of festival uses the roads (e.g. something like Woodstock).
Alternatives blacktop requires yearly maintenance like seal-coating and has a lifespan of only about 25-30 years and concrete is expensive (especially in northern climates where it is prone to cracking and can deteriorate due to salt exposure.
Hardware Virtualization for both AMD and Intel is hit and miss in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
My laptop has it, but my desktop (with a newer, more powerful CPU) doesn't. Both AMD and Intel base it on marketing numbers and what the CPU is targeted for, but yes, in general AMD supports it on more platforms than Intel. I'm personally using Sun's VirtualBox at home on my desktop machine because it supports software virtualization.
I can vouch for darkness at sea - while places like Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin give a good view, the best view of the stars I've ever seen is definitely Aruba when the island lost power (crystal clear skies and only a slight wash of light from Venezuela 17 miles away). Then again, no northern lights in Aruba, so each has its pluses.
Well you're getting your wish in one respect - MMORPG first person shooter Huxley just went into public beta. Most isometric and sprite based games these days are asian browser based games.
There's also a MMORPG third person shooter coming called Global Agenda but I don't know much more about it other than the video on the site. I saw some E3 footage of that one, otherwise I'd have never heard of it.
At E3 they announced Starcraft 2 is expected to be released by the end of 2009 and will go into beta this summer. Of course, as previously announced, the game was split into three and will be released as a trilogy, so if you want your Zerg or Protoss stories, you'll have to wait.
Better to be released when its ready than to get a game either riddled with bugs or completely unfun. A perfect example is Lionheart a game that was rushed into publication without really finishing the last half. I worked on a game with a similar story - forced into publication before it could be finished (in fact, the publisher stopped funding the [indie] studio I worked for and gave the game to an in-house studio that basically strapped on an installer). The best MMORPG example I can think of is D&D Online, the buggiest online game I've ever played (though admittedly, not long, and only for a trial subscription period).
Not to mention computer engineers are a subset of electrical engineers (and yes, I was a computer engineering major for a while before changing majors - it was basically EE with focus on chip design and nearly all coding is microcode). He probably meant software engineers, who usually get the ribbing in this area, in which case I say he should go shove a rose bush up his ass (or wait, yeah, mod flamebait).
speaking of Vomit Comet, it has that name for a reason - and I imagine they may want to restrain from "you may now kiss the bride" until they hit gravity again.
Couple marries in zero g, then both die choking on vomit. We don't know who's vomit it was, you can't exactly dust for vomit (with thanks to Spinal Tap for that one).
On a side note, Akalabeth was not officially published until 1980, though you could buy it in baggie form in 1979. I believe it was actually published slightly after another game with a similar view called Odyssey: The Complete Apventure (but that didn't have a dungeon view).
It wouldn't surprise me if Wizardry was developed concurrently with Ultima, but it was derivative of the dungeon view in Akalabeth (which was also used in Ultima). The first three Ultimas also used the same basic game engine (at least map format, dialog, etc. were essentially the same - I had a friend who wrote a scenario editor compatible with the first 3 scenarios).
Akalabeth was also written in BASIC (Applesoft, which was written by Microsoft). Odyssey: the Compleat Apventure Integer BASIC. Wizardry in Pascal. Most of the latter ones were probably mostly machine language, but I've always been amazed by the choice of language in those early games.
Not necessarily - you could define an object using some form of CSG and have the tessellation tool create the actual geometry (which is pretty much what CAD software does today). It won't be as simple as the grandparent suggests, though - it will require some sort of primitive input unless it is designed to work with some sort of Level of Detail scheme (an area I do know Microsoft has patents in)
A very simple instance of CSG is a sphere, which can be defined with a point and a radius. You could then do something like a mathematical subtract of, say, a cube to make a cube shaped hole in the sphere - that contains a mathematically polygonal structure, a curved surface, and could be entirely tessellated in hardware. I can do that today in DX10 hardware using the geometry shader, but the geometry shader tends to tessellate slowly and has limited a limited number of vertices it can emit (an nVidia 8800GTX can emit 1024, for instance - I haven't tried emitting on my ATI hardware because ATI has so far refused to enable it via extension in OpenGL, even though geometry shaders are supported in DirectX on the same hardware). I wonder if that's what they mean by "tessellation capable hardware" - yes it can be done, but without DX11 hardware it can't be done well. Incidentally, nVidia is supposed to display some DX11 hardware in June sometime, as well (but personally I won't care unless they release equivalent OpenGL extensions).
As for LoD schemes, currently one that is used in shaders takes a polygon and a texture of height and normal maps and basically does something similar to extrusion (but only on a visual level). Dynamic tessellation could actually extrude the texture detail as you get closer, which also makes soft shadows much easier to calculate than with pseudo-raytracing techniques (raytracing in general has a hard time with soft shadows due to typical use of point light sources, but hard shadows are easy).
Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic derived from Akalabeth's dungeons (Akalabeth was the prequel to Ultima and released in 1979). Questron and Phantasie mostly derived from Ultima, though yes, that was the first I remember mini-games in.
A couple of influential games I think are missing are Choplifter and Pitfall! Both were influential in gameplay and Choplifter was the first game to start as a computer game and become a video game (albeit rewritten and MUCH harder) and influenced some other games like Rescue Raiders and Armor Alley. Pitfall! was the first popular character based side scrolling game I remember, though some similar games came out the same year (Aztek comes to mind)
I always thought Super Mario Brothers was fairly derivative - basically it pulled a Blizzard, refining gameplay from many other games, including their own (like Space Panic, Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and others). I personally think Lode Runner was at least as influential, albeit also as derivative (it also was ported to arcade).
Utopia could be considered both the first god game and sim game and is missing.
And how about Bosconian? Yes, the mostly forgotten game gave us... the continue timer. Sorry - probably not really worth a mention other than I loved that game ;)
I also wonder if Cinematronics Rip Off (Star Thief was the mac version, and it had other names for other clones) pre-dates Defender or not. Both were 1980 and had a main goal of protecting rather than destroying. It also introduced 2 player co-op mode according to wiki's Tim Skelly page and was the first game with flocking. Skelly also wrote Starhawk, the first game I remember seeing in (pseudo) 3d (released in 1977). Yes, those are all video games (first) rather than computer games, but so was Tetris.
Not sure about Europe, but the US specifically banned light bulbs that generate between 310-2600 lumens (roughly 40-150 Watt bulbs) and are not 25% more energy efficient by 2014 (so by energy use, not type). The same law requires bulbs to be 70% more efficient by 2020, so basically, this could extend the usage of ordinary bulbs by about 8 years past the 2012 phase out start date since it is only 40% more efficient. I believe the only bulbs that are 70% or more efficient compared to incandescent and typically run in that lumen range are gas discharge (fluorescent, sodium, sulfur, neon, etc) and LED/OLED, though light emitting plastics may also be a possibility.
There are monitors that accept HDMI - they are often built and sold as tuner-less televisions, not (computer) monitors, but some are sold as both. Samsung (in particular) includes VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs on many of their smaller monitors that can be used for TV or computer monitors (the T2#0HD line, where # is 2,4,6 and corresponds to 22", 24", and 26" - there may be more in that line, but I'm looking for a 24-26" computer monitor ATM, and that was one option)
My latest graphics card only has DVI connectors, but it has a digital audio connector and with a converter can send HDMI video and sound. There are also standalone boxes that convert DVI + Audio to HDMI (most I've seen take coaxial audio, which I assume means an analog signal).
I remember an nVidia SLI configuration that required something like 1350 watts, as well (I believe OC'd 8800 GTX's a couple of years ago). The 260GTX I have requires 500W, so I can only assume this will need 900-1000W at bare minimum (it has more stuff, but 500W includes other components, so its not a doubling from a single GPU to a double).
The real scary thing is a 1480Watt draw on my wall would nearly blow a fuse by itself (120V*15A=1800Watts), God forbid adding a laser printer like I have on that wall (it's an older color model which draws about 400 Watts when printing), the two server machines, or the TV (and yes, I blow fuses sometimes already).
I've worked with one of the key developers of Code::Blocks, but never actually used the IDE he develops, but everything I've seen him write was very well polished. I agree with you on IDEs - every one I've ever worked with has odd quirks.
Visual Studio is a decent IDE for Windows, but has Microsoft quirks like libraries that need a .lib and a .dll, the property manager that has odd usability issues that never get fixed like having to click on a line to see a ... to add paths (unintuitive), and its oddities like insisting the C library is deprecated and you should use *_s functions (Microsoft's secure replacement for standard C functions).
Bloodshed's DevC++ worked well for me for a while, but I found binaries compiled with it were slower than Visual Studio's (due to using the gcc compiler rather than the Microsoft or Intel compiler). I haven't used DevC++ in about 2 years, so I'm not sure where it's at today.
I have used XCode extensively and agree with you on bloated - between X.2 and X.4 (I skipped X.3) it tripled its memory footprint on one of my projects (and God forbid I start the debugger). I also hate how XCode prefers System paths over local files (violating the C spec, and making it near impossible to override broken functions). Every 6 months or so the .Spotlight-V100 file gets corrupted and needs to be deleted, as well (XCode ties into Spotlight and some headers become unreadable - this problem has existed since X.0). The one feature I love is being able to see which files are not included in a project, which helps when I need to manually update the project, though I'd love this to be automatic or have a batch add capability.
Eclipse I can't say I like much - it is extensible, yes, but any IDE that requires a tutorial to get started with is more work than it's worth, IMO. I did get past understanding Perspectives and loading and compiling a project with it, but I personally found it a lot like my experience with Blender - when you know something else (and I know a lot of pro-CAD packages), everything with it seems backwards.
I've tried Anjuta and KDE Studio on Linux, but I wasn't fond of either one, though I can't remember why (that is more like 3 years ago). I admit, I have a tendency to just use vim for coding most of the time on Linux and debug with Insight (a gdb front end).
Also a long time ago I worked with Borland, CodeWarrior, and a few other IDEs, but most of those are dead now.
Never had a date or been married, have you?
I think for most couples sex definitely drops off after marriage or shortly after and usually gets worse when you have kids and a tight schedule.
I won't even get into sex drive after/during cancer, tumor removal, or other diseases, and yes I am familiar with it because my wife had part of her cervix removed (tumors) and her mom died of pancreatic cancer (and her stepdad remarried a month after her death, so the loyalty wasn't really there at the end).
I thought about mentioning Fringe or Heroes, but to me they aren't really true science fiction - the former is more of a paranormal drama (like The X Files) and the latter is superhero. I generally see science fiction as set in at least the future, though you have exceptions like steampunk, which is essentially science fiction and that's set in the past and Stargate, which is based in the present or near-future. Still, Fringe's alternate realities vs, say Stargate's aren't too far different (but Stargate throws in a lot more traditional science fiction elements).
But it IS exactly like that - the basic plot has not changed, ever - always exactly one "good guy" and one "bad guy" sent back in time and they duke it out for survival of humanity. As a very short synopsis, the main plot has not changed.
Personally, I watched the first 6 episodes or so of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and completely lost interest - I didn't find the writing all that inspired or inspiring. Even the first episode was derivative - it was T3 all over, except set in a school not a veterinarian clinic. Or was it T2 all over when good Terminator saves John Connor from the bad Terminator at his house?
I was much more disappointed with the cancellation of Life On Mars - I was actually starting to enjoy the US version (I still liked the UK version better, but the US version had merits). I can't think of a sci-fi show on TV right now that I really care about - most are uninspired or derivative (Caprica? Stargate Universe? Come on SyFy - come up with something interesting besides rehashed series and monster movies/shows [which is everything else - Sanctuary, Primeval, etc]).
Some movies that are CGI heavy are well liked. I can't say I always like them, but here are some examples.
I have friends that think Independence Day was a fantastic movie and saw it many, many times. I personally hated it - bad plot, terrible science, mostly wooden acting, and totally implausible. Still, it won a Special Effects academy award and won a whole slew of other awards like the Saturn award for best sci-fi. If Will Smith hadn't been in that movie I'd have been bored to tears.
Then there was that godawful tornado chasing movie Twister. A friend of mine went to see it 9 fricking times because the special effects were "out of this world." I was in a graphics study course at the time and was underwhelmed - and barely made it through a single screening. I did not find it thrilling, I found it about as exciting as watching stupid people do stupid things (it's fun for about 20 minutes).
There are good sci-fi movies that make good use of special effects - I liked first Terminator, for instance. Terminator 2 from an action flick standpoint was good, as well, but the liquid metal terminator was a complete special effects gimmick - I was doing those same special effects in my graphics class a year before the movie was released (ooh, morphing...). T3 was just terrible.
The Lord of the Rings series made heavy use of CGI, as well, and TRotK won 11 Oscars including Best Visual Effects.
Yeah, that was probably due to how they taught people, more specifically untrained home users about PCs in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the drive "remembered" your data, people probably more strongly associated that with the word memory than RAM or ROM. When a program was loaded from disk it was also called "loaded in memory," so the terminology was used interchangeably. My mom and even I mostly used the term memory to talk about disk storage in the 1980s, but I eventually separated the terminology and my mom did not.