What ever level you stopped at get the text from the next level onward. Abstract Algebra is an obvious choice. Or some other area which may interest you. Geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, is always fun. A few thousand sheets of paper, some bound notebooks, lots of pencils, some erasers, and a pencil sharpener would help too. Depending on where you are at a few boxes of candles might be handy.

A chess board and a book on famous chess games might be fun. Get a description of the games of 'Deep Blue' and see if you can reverse engineer the alylgorithm.

Basically any of that will help you stay sharp, focus, and develop analytical skills.

My guess it was an "affluent suburb or city magnet school" thing. Meaning the sort of school a stereotypical slashdotter might have attended, which is why quite a few have said they had access to it.

They're probably kind of guys who's father had a tech job who got them an account on their workplace's unix box, who got a Vic20, a C64 the next year and a PC clone the year after.

They got PLATO, but god forbid you live in a small town or rural area without a university to put PLATO in the local school.

As an example certain famous geeks had privileged/early access to technology:

Gates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Stallman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Robert Morris: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Reading this book will give you more details on RTM's tech privileged childhood: http://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUN...

It's easier to become a "worm-making unix-genius" when you have your own unix account when you're in junior high, given to you by your father who worked for Bell Labs.

Indeed!

A few years back, I was implementing Leslie's Bakery Algorithm. (Which, to be sure, you should look up his original paper, not the bastardizations you sometimes find in textbooks. That paper and more are available here.)

In my implementation, I wanted to SIMD-ize one of the steps to make it more efficient. I thought the transformation was valid, but wasn't certain, so I emailed Dr. Lamport. I was pleasantly surprised when Leslie actually replied to my email.

And yes, the transformation was valid. *whew* Our multiprocessor DSP software got a little faster that day.

Anyway, there's some fascinating stuff on his page full of papers. The link again: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

Not everyone has gone cell phone only, one can record calls on POTS phones quite easily.

They weren't bluffing and it's not actually laughable nonsense. Many cable companies supply cable modems that ARE wi-fi routers as well as being a cable modem. The local cable company supplies them by default now. They probably assumed you had that kind of equipment and didn't have a note in your file stating you supplied your own equipment.

They probably thought they WERE giving it to him since many cable modems these days also serve as wi-fi routers. The local cable company installs a wi-fi capable router by default with new installs these days, and they charge for that feature. Don't want it? They give you a standard non-gateway cable modem, and don't charge the fee.

On Eurogamer? You can't trust those "Euro-gamers" they tend to be PC Master Race guys, especially if all they got is a beta, or test release. They also don't tend to update their old information properly if they made mistake or a patch fixes an issue.

Destiny targets 30fps because it's cross-platform with the previous generation. And some people prefer more resolution to frame rate. I personally can tolerate 30fps, that was the SDTV frame rate after all. Anything above that is gravy.

I've seen a few such things, but mostly about early releases/preliminary code on the Xbox One. But...it doesn't matter if the game renders at 720p....if the game is fun. many PC Gamers focus too much on the technology and the specs, and not on the GAMES. If it's about the games, and the game is fun everything else doesn't matter.

Yep, that's what it looked like to me too.

Yes, that's always been the case, but the problem is cost/benefit ratio. There is a point of diminshing returns, and most people have a finite "tech toy" budget. One can spend $1500 on just a gaming rig, or $400 on a console AND $1000 on games.

That i7 itself costs $299. The two 670's are what...$260 each? That's over $800 right there. 980's are $560...each, sometimes more.

I'm not having to run my games at 720p or lower like many console games just to hit the target of 30FPS.

How is it a restriction? You're guaranteed that any game with the name of $console on the label works on your machine for the next 5 - 13 years with no further hardware purchases. Do you know when the last PSone game was released in the US? 2005. The last PS2 game was released in September...of last year. That would be like releasing a game that runs on a PII 300 last year.

For some PS3 games that's the case, but not for the current consoles.

In the old days of the NES, SNES, even the PSone, that may have been the came but it isn't now. Now games tend to be cross-platform, so 5 or more years later, they're still playing the same games everyone else is. They released Destiny on the PS3/360 as well as the PS4/Xbox One for goodness sake. So keeping the same hardware for 5 years isn't a limit, it saves you money for games. Games designed for the hardware you have, not the hardware you don't have like the original Crysis was for the PC.

I didn't know that. What about Android?

That would be enough for me.

Good question! I would consider your example to be "fair", since it's basically acting as a Demo. As long as one was straightforward/honest on the free version being a "Mako Reactor to Midgar exit Demo"

/me is not a bro.

Might want to check out the steam hardware survey on the "rigs" that are actually used.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

Sure maybe a few enthusiasts have a high end rig, but the faceless LoL/TF2 playing masses are running on things that are lightweight compared to a PS4.

They do? Thanks for the correction.

We "FreeBSD cough*PS4" owners get cookies? No one told me. And while my PS4 may not have SystemD, my Fedora 20 box does....I don't mind it.

The Linux version is out? Excellent. I play on the PS4, but I, for one, welcome our new Linux using War Thunder overlords.

(As an aside, I run Fedora 20 on my PC, and my first introduction to Linux was via the PS2 Linux kit.)

Don't we call those consoles?

Hasn't BSD already got there, since the PS3's "CellOS" is based on BSD (but doesn't use a BSD kernel), and the PS4 uses full fledged fork of FreeBSD 9