I'm am one of the original programmers from Ensemble Studios.

I've heard of the game being used for something like a few times over the years.

If I recall correctly, back in the day (around 1999-2002) we received a few requests for a customized version of Age of Kings to support whatever it was they were doing - be it adding extra data output (like a log file detailing every combat step), fixing the random number seeds so slightly different scenario could have the exact same random number sequence used or some additional feature to the scenario editor.

I think (and again my memory is hazy on this so I could be wrong) we actually did produce one, and maybe a second, custom build of the game for use in an academic / research setting.

The description sounded a lot like it was after there was an embryo. How about the ones that DO have an embryo, I assume nothing else is done with that?

Or, maybe I'm very confused.

Anybody want to buy an old SGI workstation? No, seriously, there's on in my basement...

It is a shame there's no incentive for code dumps with at least zero liability and there's no mechanism for using things abandoned by the copyright holder and, more generally, that our copyright is so onerously long that the prior point matters. But... I'm not at all sure old workstations are in my top 10 important cases of software where that matters.

I still lament the outliner called "More" from around 1991 MacOS that I have still never found the equal of.

One of those comments I hope is a troll... because that this is earnest would be pretty depressing.

You seem to be missing the general concept that the amount of anything matters. How about I give you a penny and you give me $10,000? Sound good?

Yes, you cannot create and drive around an electric car with inherently zero CO2 emissions. I have no idea how you jump over the idea that the gas car might have many, many, many MORE emissions.

There are several reasons electric and hybrid are inherently more efficient.

Maybe there is somewhere with horrendously managed coal power and extremely well managed ICE, but that seems unlikely.

This sounds great.

I'm kindof uncomfortable calling this mineralisation because this is a mineralisation-DEmineralisation technique. It dilutes the definition of mineralisation as an alternative way to store carbon with probably greater resiliency to leaks.

It's akin to equating e.g. nuclear power to hydrogen -- one is an originating source of energy for humanity that can't store it and the other is a way of storing energy that doesn't not source it. Maybe using hydrogen as a mechanism to store and distribute nuclear power makes sense, but any comparison between them doesn't.

(Hydrogen fusion would be, but everybody calls that "fusion" and not "hydrogen"

On the one hand, I don't think that's a very good definition of trolling. On the other hand that might be the best definition you could hope to plausibly classify things as in a regular research study, so maybe that's why they chose it. (Although of course even in general, "no reason" almost never exists; it's a question of who is doing the discerning, how far they can see, and how remote it is to whatever topic is at hand)

I'd describe classic trolling as something like: communication whose primary intent is covertly eliciting an asymmetric negative emotional situation for others with disregard for the personal authenticity of the communication. Most commonly this is also an asymmetric investment (a large response compared to the trolling) saying things the troll doesn't even particularly believe, and the negative emotional situation is frustration and exasperation that can sometimes border on anger, usually community-viewable. I don't think it requires true intent so I would also include "for no reason" -- any communication consistent with that intent unless it shows clear evidence of alternative rationales.

There are several things it's not, at least to me:

2) conventional bullying and/or personal attacks. This is almost by definition overt rather than covert. [Often it seems it does have a reason too, but that's murkier.
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3) Any means to a discernible end. e.g. Trying to draw out someone's authentic responses to primarily show the community truth about them -- perhaps to publicly uncover lies or inconsistencies or unpopular positions to lower the social status of that person. I think it has to be about generating their emotional reaction for its own sake. Provoking a bully to show they are a bully is, instead, a means to an actual end.

4) It's common to have SIWOTIS (Someone Is Wrong On The Internet Syndrome) where you have a strong tendency (perhaps some compulsion) to try to correct people who are egregiously wrong about something and you perceive have some hope that you can convince them to come around to the "correct" position. This makes a lot of sense if this correction is "please don't drink gasoline" but isn't limited to that. This is the easiest way to become a troll VICTIM because it's the easiest thing to exploit: Just strongly assert something concrete that's very wrong.

5) There are a lot of versions of attempting to have topical discourse that can start to look a lot like it, but I would disqualify anything that is using earnestly held beliefs.

5a) Discussing random topics on the internet that perhaps have no practical value and seem like a waste of time... describes a lot of the Internet. They're not calling that trolling, but for context I'd argue the "no reason" part would still apply here.

5b) Doing the above, it's relatively easy to end up in an argument with a stranger on the internet, even quite accidentally, because you're saying things in front of many strangers without a lot of historical context about who each other are or a lot of present context about what's going on right now. I would not consider this trolling, just a common red herring.

5c) And of course even you didn't do it explicitly it's certainly even easier to end up in an escalating argument if you have unmanaged anger issues or are a bully etc. That's being an assh*le, but I would not consider it trolling.

thank you

Way down in the tangents, but I'm pretty confused by the basic concept of NFC having computing power.

Can you catch me up?

Living in the Seattle area, and having met and hung out with some former Boeing Engineers, they all have pretty much echoed your statements.

They're supposed to take their time and milk that sweet, sweet cost-plus contract for a decade...

The largest part of GPU driver installs over the years has been bug fixes and/or improvements for specific games.

I can speak of a specific example of a GPU driver bug-fix, because I am the coder responsible for such a bug in Microsoft's Age of Empires (1997)

During the game's development in 1996 and 1997, we did not yet have 3D cards with 2D functionality (the stand alone Voodoo 1 card existed). Instead we were using 2D cards with 512K to 2MB of VRAM, capable of generating frame buffers up to 1280x1024 with 8-bit indexed color. These were VESA era cards, many of which used bank switching of 64K windows into the onboard VRAM.

Microsoft's DirectDraw API did for Windows 95 what UniVBE basically did for DOS games of the era - presented VRAM as a linear frame buffer that worked on (most) all video cards, and did any bank-switching needed behind the scenes by trapping the CPU fault when you wrote to a VRAM address that wasn't currently mapped to the card, and switching the address remapping and GPU VRAM bank transparently before resuming your code.

Using the DirectDraw API you had to issue a Lock() command to get access to the VRAM, and then Unlock() it when you were done copying pixels to it, so that it could do things like present the current frame, or next frame if you were double buffering, or execute a blit, which may or may not involve support hardware on the video card. The Unlock command would invalidate the mapped memory region to the GPU.

In one spot in the code of Age of Empires, I forgot to call Unlock(). On all the 2D cards in 1997.. it didn't matter. You could still write to the video card buffer and it was ok. Once we started getting GPUs with 3D and more VRAM like the nVidia GeForce 256 and ATI Radeon 9600, which also meant newer version of Direct3D (DriectX), etc, the code in Age of Empires would crash the game.

Both nVidia and ATI put code in their drivers to specifically detect that that game, and fix the problem so that the game ran, despite being a "bad citizen" and not calling Unlock(). This was keyed, at least in part, off the .exe filename. If you renamed empires.exe to expires1.exe (or anything else), the game would crash as soon as you attempted to start a game.

I think you meant JavaSCRIPT....

I asked some long time Microsoft employees about what happened to the quality of their documentation, and what I was told is that there was a distinct documentation group and the number of technical writers used to be significant, and you had people making the documentation that actually SWEs and/or had some knowledge and understanding of what they were writing about, and they would make sure sections were complete, and items cross referenced, etc.

But they were seen by executives as a big expense that could be eliminated, and most of them were let go/eliminated to save money and the bright idea was that going forward documentation could be a combination of written by the programmers making Windows or the compilers and documentation automatically generated by source scanning tools.

And that's how we've gotten to the state where let's say you might look for documentation on an enum used in a new API call because they can't decide if UWP is the future of Windows or the past, and the only documentation in existence you can find is an auto generated page that indicates the enum exists with no further information.

It's a quote from the source... BUT it's egregiously distorted.

The next sentence is "However, some people believe nuclear power is both ecologically and morally sound "

The journalist wrote that... followed immediately by ""However, some people believe nuclear power is both ecologically and morally sound ""

Submitter cropped it.