It was '98 and being on good terms with the Computer Science Department in general, and being a Senior, I was able to get the job of helping to install and later administrate their new Graphics Lab. Twenty plus Gateway 2000 desktops, Pentium II (i think) processors clocking around 400 MHz, I can't remember exactly how much RAM they had but it was a lot for the day, with 3dfx Voodoo II video cards, and 17" Trinitron flat-screen CRTs running 1024 x 768 @ 60 Hz.
After installing their rendering software, which I can't recall the name of right now, I then got permission to install some graphics testing programs to validate that everything was working.

My tool of choice was Quake II. We enabled the OpenGL that the cards supported. It was glorious.

Friday nights until I graduated, I hosted "Hardware Testing Sessions" after hours (6pm-9pm) with usually over a dozen people playing Q2 Deathmatch on what was pretty much the top of the line hardware at that time. It was CRAZY FUN. No food allowed, but plenty of non-alcoholic drinks with lids. We eventually started attracting more people, even girls, to the testing sessions. After we closed the lab, most of us migrated back to an off-campus, but near-by, apartment for the after party. Also CRAZY FUN.

Many years have passed since then. I have been a part of many an online gaming experience with just about anything you can imagine. Voice comms teamwork, 100+ players per match, MMOs, FPS, MOBA, whatever. None of them, not one, came close to how fun it was to all be in the same room with your friends playing games and then going to the after party. It was a higher level of fun that kids these days don't even know is possible. They only get a small taste of it if they happen to take turns playing console games. I did that when I was young with 8-bit Nintendo. The LAN Party was far superior.

1) When you start a new project, Create a rough draft document right up front for each document/procedure needed. This should just be section titles for various tasks the document is meant to cover. A skeleton that you will flesh-out later. Make a ticket to complete it, if you use tickets, and pick a completion date. Also, spell out who the target audience is for the document and write to the least experienced at that level. Do not assume only experts will read your document, most likely it will be novices or people entirely new to this system/product.

2) As you work, fill in the details for each section. When you have a finished working system or subsystem, fill in the details on how to start/stop/use/check/debug/validate. If you have a Test team, this is a good point to bring them in and they can use these details to write their test plans. It does not need to be well written and formmated at first, the polish can come later. Focus on getting the commands and menu choice path in the right areas.

3) When you change something in the code/system, immediately update the affected document(s). Also, let the Test team know it was changed so they can update their test plans.

4) Test your documents by trying to follow it word for word and make changes to make the instructions be very precise. This is where you put the polish on the document. Optimally, another person on your team should try to use it who is overly familiar with the system. The less assumptions and "routine obliviousness" (you do something so often that you are unaware that you do it) the better. If they have ANY questions on how to do something, then the document needs updating with those steps. Add in the formatting and flow. Repeat this step until no further changes are needed.

Overall, documentation is part culture and part personal choice. You need the culture to encourage it and then you need people that choose to do it. All the culture in the world won't change the mind of someone that does not want to do it.

I for one, am very hopeful for these types of ventures to succeed and space tourism really takes off. If it does, then eventually...
- one of them will do orbital flights
- then one of them will have a space-station Hotel & Casino
- then one of the hotels will offer a Moon orbit trip
- then one will land you on the moon, let you walk around for a bit, and then take you back.
- then one will have a Hotel/Casino on the Moon.
- then we will start colonizing the Moon.

After that, Humans will be all over the Solar-system and the True Space Age will have begun.

Anyone with kids that watch TV could make an argument that Advertising does work. Or kids that watch streamers and then beg you to get the game that streamer was playing.

On a deeper psychological level, just seeing the add for a brief moment is enough for our brain to recognize it and remember it. Familiarity can really influence decisions when all else is equal.

Movie Theaters need to offer something special to the masses. A big screen and big sound used to be enough. However, technology has caught up with them with large screen TVs, 4K HDR picture, and DOLBY ATMOS sound.

Theaters need to stay a step or two ahead of what is commercially available to the masses. 3D is an advantage, but not a popular one. I doubt that is enough. If it became popular, it would become affordable to the masses in short order. The tech is available already.

I'm not advocating shock chairs like they tried in the 1950s, but they need to think of something. Maybe a crazy high resolution (16K?) or even more colors (Ultra Dynamic Range??) or 3D surround sound with speakers above and below.... who knows? They need to innovate and push the technology to survive.

Reusing an existing rank structure where it is easy to map the jobs from one to the other will make things easier to integrate into the rest of the Armed Forces. So, the question then becomes: What do the spacecraft look like?

If the spacecraft look like the Space Shuttle, where the crew is essentially all in the cockpit and there is no engine room, then copying the Air Force ranks makes more sense.

If the spacecraft looks more like a submarine, where the crew can be all over the ship and there is an engine room and such, then copying the Navy ranks makes more sense.

As for the "foot soldiers", I could understand if they stuck with Army ranks since part of what they do is like the Airborne. However, I believe they would more closely resemble Marines as their VBSS training would be somewhat similar to tactics that a boarding party using a breaching pod or craft.

Over time, I'm positive that the Space Force will have to modify its rank structure in some way no matter which branch it uses as a model. However, that should not stop them from initially using the one that makes the most sense from a functionality perspective.

For some crazy reason, which I believe was all my friends stepping backwards when they asked volunteers to step forwards, I ended up running a small-medium sized gaming community for several years. Website, Wiki, BBS, Teamspeak, Calendars, Events, etc. So I have a good deal of experience in this matter.

The vast majority of communications that take place, in my observations, are:
1) text messages - just people text messaging in a channel that may or may not be about a specific topic.
2) Memes & Videos - posting links that turn into pictures you can see right in that channel and links that turn into embedded video so you can watch it there.
3) Voice Chat - multiple voice chat channels where we can control the voice quality.

Using a BBS or contributing to a Wiki were done but in such small amounts that it was negligible. Nobody wants to dive through a hierarchy on a BBS to post in the correct place anymore. We had them and it was barely used. Our users just dumped stuff that could have went there into the text chat area of whatever voice chat tool we used. They didn't care to expand the knowledge of all the other users, they just wanted to send it to a close friend or two they happen to be talking to at the time.

Above all, I'd say around 95% of the users will NEVER pay for anything. Donate to keep the Teamspeak servers online? Nope. They have money for a gaming rig PC and monthly subscriptions to a MMORPG, but 1$ per month to keep the lights on? "Sorry, can't this month." When the last of the 5% that is willing to pay leave, it all comes crashing down and the lights are all turned off. Deleted.

That brings me to Discord. Say what you will, but it accomplishes all the requirements. Texting, Memes, Videos, Voice, & it's FREE. Bonus: Game Streaming to your buddies, & Bots to do things like Application Forms or to Play music in the Voice Chat. And there's a phone app, if that is your fancy. I know some that used the phone app for Voice Chat by using their cellular data so they could focus their slow PC connection all on the game.

Is Discord the perfect communications app? No. But is it good enough? Yes. And that is mostly due to it being FREE.

I migrated that community that used to pay some hosting company about $120 per month over to Discord when all the Whales (the 5% that paid for things) left. Long before that, I was reducing plans & cutting unused Teamspeak capacity. Had it down to less than $20 per month. But it was just one guy that was paying for it. Eventually they stopped. I was able to build out what we need in Discord in about 2 hours of work. Honestly, Discord was the only real option. Me and two others did research. The other options just did not check all the boxes for us. YMMV.

Personally, I hate the way text and voice channels are displayed on a server's side bar in Discord. Very confusing at first because only difference between them is a small icon to the left. But past that, the text channels are very SMS like and it feels like you are just in a group chat on your phone. Probably why the young users like it....and if they use the phone app then it is merely just another chat app they have used. IMHO, the "targeting" Discord did at young users was simply making it look & feel like a phone app.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are more important things to remember today.

This. ^

Just judging by the frames per second mentioned (topping out at 60) it is likely not as good as Optifine which has numerous configuration options that allow you to get the best performance with your system.

Optifine (https://optifine.net/home) with a shader and texture pack can already make the game look amazing. However, it takes time, effort, and money to do it for each version. Presently, I believe they are working it for 1.15.2 java edition. So, they are usually a version or two behind the latest release.

2008 Crash was about over-leveraging fraudulent assets.

The best explanation I heard about it was something like this: A crooked drug dealer sells bags of oregano as pot. He took something that had no real value and passed it off as something that did have real value. Applying the example to 2008, the crooked drug dealer were the Banks, the oregano was the high-risk Sub-Prime Mortgages (You could get a large home loan with no income and no job), and the pot was Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and CDOs which were sold to Pension Funds, and Hedge Funds, and the like as valuable and safe AAA rated investment bonds. The large problem was that the Banks over-levered themselves with these Bonds and CDOs and when the Housing Market cooled and the variable rates kicked-in the defaults skyrocketed and those losses more than gobbled up the profits from the non-defaults and the Bonds became worthless and the Banks were stuck with them, along with the Funds they were selling them to.

Had the Banks not over-levered themselves with the Housing Bonds, the Crash would have only been a bad week. But, they would have made a LOT less money. So they continued to spray-paint dog turds with Krylon and sell them as gold ingots until they couldn't sell anymore and then discovered their store was full of dog shit they could not trick anyone into buying. (it took a while to acquire the turds, paint them, and let the paint dry so they had lots on hand at any given time) So instead of going bankrupt, they turned to the Fed and sold the turds to them in the form of a bail-out, and the Fed paid for it by just printing more money. (Quantitative Easing: a doubble-wammy to the taxpayer in the form of wasted money that year because they bought the turds and inflation every year afterwords because they printed the extra money)

I'd like to argue that movie studios SHOULD reboot movies like PLAN 9. Well, maybe not the bottom of the barrel... but non-remembered movies.

The movie that I think exemplifies this crazy theory of mine is Ocean's 11.

The original from 1960 was kind of a mess. Started out almost incoherently and then just muddles along not seeming to be able to decide if it was a musical or not. RT has it at 52% likely propped up by fans of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.. The remake is a good film. RT has it at 82%. They dumped the musical scenes and re-worked the plot. Add in a great script and A-list cast and they had a hit on their hands.

The take-away here is: It is a small risk vs. big reward for the studios if they choose to remake lesser-known, mediocre movies. They already have the skeleton of a concept and story from the original forgotten film. All they need to do is replace what didn't work and polish things up. Like rebuilding a car from the junkyard. As long as they don't go overboard on spending there is a good shot that it can make a profit. Conversely, the reason a lot of re-makes of popular movies flop is because they were tinkering with things that were already working and there is just too great a risk that they will ruin it through casting mis-matches or other changes.

I thought there were some reasons to modify the exhaust. Like more Horse Power. I could have sworn I read something about how muffling impedes exhaust flow which then requires more power from the engine to push the exhaust out instead of being used to move the bike forward. Possibly better fuel mileage too.

Gary Larson named it. That part of the Stegosaurus did not have a name until the cartoon. Paleontologists like it and started using it and it stuck. Read more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I still have not found an acceptable alternative to Firefox that can use the script blocking and ad blocking plug-ins effectively. I tried a few of the common alternative browsers, and they were clunky or not fully functional with all the protection I want.

Like the earlier comment "web browsers = bloat" and another comment below "websites = complex applications" I have just come to accept that people need a decent system to run a web browser. If Firefox wants to run 8 threads and use 4 GB of RAM, then so be it. I am never going to buy any computer that has less than 4 cores and 32 GB of RAM anymore so it won't be a problem for me. I just changed my perception that web browsing is not a lightweight task like word processing and e-mail. "Oh, grandma wants to surf the web... then she needs a low-end gaming rig or things will be painfully slow."