Wait, what? How many geeks have been harped on to get out, go to parties and see real people? Now the truth -- seeing other people is anti-social!

Guess it's back to playing violent video games with a million other people, the last vestige of polite society.

To once and for all prove that Twinkies are immortal.

I was a pioneer/advocate/addict of multimonitor gaming. To the point where back in the day when I got a deal on 22" Nokia high-res CRTs I bought three. I had my second on the desk and was going back for the third when I looked back and realized my desk was buckling under the weight of just two! After reinforcing the desk, XP era, it became obvious that multimonitor gaming was broken, because the resolution wasn't there to support it. What's the point of running 3 monitors if it's not 3 TIMES your normal res, which at 1920x1200, took quite a while to arrive. So I shelved it for a while.

Eventually, tech caught up and it struck me about 6 months back that I had the parts lying around to 5760x1200 the 24's and call it good. So I bought the adapter for #3, hooked it all up and prepared to rejoice. And there wasn't much rejoicing. Games just don't work.

What triple screen gaming even means is up for debate, but fundamentally, I think we all expect the extra screens to be more views on reality. More FOV, more of what we really see from our eyes in real life - wrap around video. Well, except it's NOT just FOV. Games need to be designed for it, and they're not.

I spent days running EVERY title I could. Widescreengaming.net is a huge help for this. But in the end, the views in everything from Quake to Rage are unbearably broken. The best results by far were from Dungeons & Dragons Online, which looked almost good enough to keep, but Unreal Engine titles, ID engine titles, everything else - nothing worked without horrible distortion. At last I fired up Civ IV, thinking isometric viewing at least would work; not a chance, instead of seeing the world (wrapped!) in glorious high-res, I got a screen where the men in cities 75% were as tall as the screen, and a small fraction of the world was displayed!

DDO actually was pretty hot, but frankly the only truly multimonitor title may be Flight Simulator. And that's almost cheating - they just have more than one screen to display. But Eyefinity et al is DOA if there aren't titles that support it. Otherwise it's about as effective as piling all your speakers on top of each other and playing Master & Commander in 5.1. Enjoy the mud.

This is the perfect excuse to read up, get your fix, then hop into D&D Online and get some tabletop action come to life. The client and a decent amount of content is free, and the DM voiceovers rock.

NOTE: This is Dungeons & Dragons Online, not WoW. There be TRAPS in dem dar dungeons, and they can and will kill you very dead!

As this post is old, this is probably too late, but the first languages to learn are other programming languages. Then I'd suggest French.

Having been around the block enough times to leave a trench, at one point I tried to count the programming languages I've learned. It was well past 30, then. This may devolve into a discussion of what constitutes language, but at one point we were told, specifically, that Data General CLI was NOT a programming language, which my friends and I immediately proved wrong. (Who says you can't waste an entire file to hold a variable?)

I have learned endless variants of BASIC, awesome but specific stuff like Action!, Algol, Fortran, Lisp, Forth, Prolog, too many assemblys, binary for a couple of CPUs, the older Unix 'scripting' and preprocessor languages, Perl, PHP, Java, Javascript, dozens of others and a couple I developed myself. We'll just skip the meta-languages like jQuery & m4. My gawd, at one point I could even write complex sendmail.cf configurations that worked!

What you really learn from other programming languages is different ideas, and the sad truth of it is basically every idea can be implemented in every other language. Languages are the flavor of the day. The 'one tool I would take to a desert island.' Some make it easier to do one thing or another, but in the end they all boil down to machine code. And it's all basically the same machine. 8 bits, 64 bits. SSDD. One's just more convenient. Languages lean different ways, and generally they all have at least one good idea or two. (Well, except for APL. ) But just learn everything. Eventually you get used to it, you take the ideas across languages and in your head it becomes The Language(tm). I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...

So what spoken language to learn? By all means, French.

Why? Well, French is unique in world languages in that the French are really, REALLY motivated to not let the language change. French is a pastime to the French like having lots of cars, guns and pounds is to Americans. As such, there's actually L'Académie française - an almost governmental organization to protect the language from language drift, with members appointed for life like the Supreme Court. They can all but outlaw words that aren't French, and as such, French is often the language of international law, because the meanings of words don't drift.

Think about that, programmer boy. Language without drift, only logical extension! That's like learning a C++ where your code works 3 revs to the compiler later. OMGWTFBBQ!

As has also been noted, French is awesome for ze sexy talkz. As we're discussing programmers here, get while the getting is good.

The really sad thing for us geezers is that we remember John's early posts on this whole 'virus' thing, back in the BBS days, when it was just him and no one knew what he was talking about at first. It would be difficult to overestimate how much good he has done the world.

It's not theirs to take. It's an American product, and yeah, some of us worked on it 25 years before they noticed it was important. What next, UN control of movies, rock 'n roll and blue jeans? Don't think so.

Intel is pretty corporate, and that's like a crime here on /. But for anyone old enough to remember or fool enough to listen, when it's all said and done this guy's track record has been damn close to paved in gold.

No, I don't mean Intel's track record with the Peruvian Jackalope, Global Coating or whatever axe you have to grind. I mean his job of being part of, contributing to and guiding a very large and important ship. Much of it before the average /.r could read.

Having been Z80 guy, a 6502 guy and a 68k guy, and also a guy writing endless apps in the Intel space and building endless machines, when it's all said and done, if your last words are anything other than "thank you", you're a punk.

Safe travels Paul.

You clearly have spent a lot of time on this. Could you repeat the text many times in almost the same way?

You're used to the "wicked speeds" and are looking for coverage compared to South Korea? Try some perspective first. Detroit has parking lots bigger than South Korea, and my personal backyard network would probably qualify as a MAN.

Kidding, mostly. But before you cop an attitude about dropped calls and poor reception, you might consider that you're using your experience in a nation the size of one of our urban areas and then asking for that in North America.

For the sarcasm impaired, here's a graphic. And yes, it probably could be argued that Detroit IS a parking lot the size of South Korea. Just with no DMZ. (Well, or all DMZ. Depends on how you want to call it.) http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/KR

Most people do. The Apple II didn't even have production tooling for the case until December 1977/early 78. Some early units were kits that were assembled and hand-sanded. Meanwhile the TRS-80 sold 10,000 units in the first month and a half.

Don't get me wrong, the Apple rocked. But it wasn't really a production machine like the TRS-80 was. If you're going to call Apple the first consumer PC, then it's not. If you want to include Apple's kit days, then include all the kits like the Apple I (go Woz!) and the Ohio Scientific Challenger, the Exidy and of course the legendary Altair, which might truly be first.

Got that straight. The TRS-80 Model I was for sale in stores in August of '77 [I was when it arrived], available as a retail purchase when Apples were just kits.

Thanks for correcting this .. propganda. Radio Shack released the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, the PC-1, in early 1980 several years before Psion went into hardware. It was manufactured by Sharp, had this funky black-on-amber LCD display and was followed on by a much more capable PC-2.

No wiki this time, I was there the day it was released, in the store that got the first unit. It's hard to imagine the impact this thing had at the time. A couple weeks before it arrived the Radio Shack staff showed me the newspaper ad for it and I actually thought it was a gag paper they had printed up! When it actually arrived it was like some bit of Star Trek had come to life.

I was just seriously shopping to dump Comcast for forgetting who their paying customer is with their sleeping-with-the-RIAA crap. This will buy them one month.

This is hardly shocking. This is the same NBC that 'proved' GM pickups would catch on fire with a side impact by rigging the gas tank with incendiary devices for the 'test.'

[See General Motors v. NBC section for an overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dateline_NBC ]