Happy 20th Birthday, Quake - <AUTHOR> http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake <comment><USER2> My family played way, way too much Quake. One son played it thru entirely with 1 health, using only a laptop with scratchpad (no mouse) just to prove it could be done. Had to cheat - but only because there were some health packs in doorways that couldn't be avoided, so he went thru, then cheated to set his health back to 1.

<comment><USER3> Awesome story. I hope he played it on the hardest difficulty too :P Er.. but you do mean using a touchpad right? Unless a scartchpad is something different?

<comment><USER2> Of course! Most games must be played on hardest difficulty. In fact when very young (6-8) the boys liked to play only in God Mode - the young are very conservative. I challenged them: win level 1 of Descent I at Insane level, and I would buy Descent II. Got a call at work 2 days later! And they never resorted to God Mode again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I bought Doom before I owned a PC. I bought the game, and sat it on my bedside while I saved up the money to buy a PC to play the game. I would go to the retail stores and install Doom on the demo PCs there just so I could play it.

Finally I had enough money for a PC to play Doom, my brother and I played Doom for a couple of years on our home lan. I played dialup doom with friends. I played Doom with the mouse and keyboard because it was the only easy way to strafe kill someone "easily". and then Quake came out.... I went to a friends place and they were playing DM. I hadn't even heard of Quake. I was like "What is this game" "Oh its Quake, by those guys who made Doom". I had to get it. I had a 486. Wasn't ever going to fly. It ran like shit. You couldn't run out and buy a AMD cpu to play it on either because of the FPU. You had to have an Intel. So I bought a second hand Pentium 60, and off I went! I still remember the day I got the Pentium 60 and 8mb of ram and now I could also run Windows 95 too.

Quake was a genre changing game, probably one of the most influential games ever. id loved to make modifiable games, and Doom had quite a solid mod community, but Quake was really the Internet's child. The Quake servers that came online initially were dark foreboding places for anyone not on a fixed line connection. You'd be dead before you knew what happened, so then Carmack created QuakeWorld, with the predictive movement, and suddenly online gaming FPS on a modem was a whole new experience.

So many game sites spawned from the advent of Quake that are still around today. Entire media companies popped up around it.

People have mentioned in other threads why didn't more people use SVGA mode. The answer is because no computer could run it at an acceptable speed. What came of that? GLQuake. Then people were buying shitty (not at the time!) Voodoo 3dfx cards to play GLQuake, with the broken GL implementation Glide, and thus the video card arms race was born.

I got my first real job because of my affiliations with the Quake community. My first true love (who I met through Quake), "Internet friends" that I made playing QuakeWorld that I am still friends with today.

I don't believe any other game has had anywhere near as much influence on my life, or gaming in general.

<comment><USER5> I was fortunate and privileged enough to have a father who very much liked computers and made sure we always had them, even though he's never been all that savvy. So while I never had difficulty in procuring either the hardware or the software, I do very much recognize pretty much all the rest of your writing – down to the first real job and everything. I'm still very much friends with my old clan members today. Feeling very nostalgic right about now!

I remember as well when QW came out and my friends would refuse to play it, considering it cheating. So they only ever played LANs, or university connections – since some were studying at the time – which were usually super fast. (At the time, if nothing else.)

So many great memories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.

<comment><USER7> That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday:

[https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is- ruining...](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining- video-games/)

Probably to coincide with the anniversary.

<comment><USER9> It was/is being discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The obligatory mention: If you haven't yet, go ahead and read _Masters of Doom_. It's the story of id Software, really well written and worth your time.

<comment><USER11> Seconding this. _Master of Doom_ was one of the reads that inspired me to be interested in startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everything from Wolf3d to Quake3 has a special place in our household's hearts. My dad brought the original iD games to mine and my sister's attention when we were still kids. The first time we played co-op Doom as a family on LAN is one of those memories that's been seared onto my brain - taking down a Cyberdemon together was too much fun!

Quake had a similar impact because that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around - given it was truly 3D and all. But I have to say that the Cyberdemon > Shambler, despite how cuddly the Shambler looked.

Happy Birthday Quake!

<comment><USER9> _> that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around_

I did one year earlier in Descent ;-)

<comment><USER13> Descent and Descent II is why I owned a flightstick.

Ahh, multiplayer was so much fun.

<comment><USER14> Descent is why I broke a flightstick hat switch. Customer service knew what was up as soon as I described the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember when QTest hit the internet, it was beta of sorts to help test network play (and the whole engine, I guess). Even though it was only 3 levels, I was blown away by the lighting of the players weapon when you rotated, the SVGA modes...

Did they release screenshots in 320x200 because that was the lowest common denominator resolution? Windows 95 was out at the time so I know people would have been able to view 640x480x256 screenshots.

<comment><USER16> Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option.

The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486.

In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU.

I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.

<comment><USER17> > Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

Wasn't it Mode X, i.e. 320x240?

<comment><USER15>
        vid_describemodes

        Lists all available video modes, built-in and VESA.

        vid_mode #

        Switches the video mode to mode #.  Quake has 11 built-in modes:

        0:  320x200
        1:  320x200
        2:  360x200
        3:  320x240
        4:  360x240
        5:  320x350
        6:  360x350
        7:  320x400
        8:  360x400
        9:  320x480
        10: 360x480

        0 is the default mode.  Modes above 10 are not built in, but are VESA
        modes which may be supported by Quake and your hardware.  Use
        vid_describemodes to see the available VESA modes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This and Unreal were the last great software rendered 3d game engines before GPUs became mainstream.

EDIT: I should have mentioned the BUILD engine too, written single-handedly by one developer for Duke Nukem 3D.

<comment><USER15> >> written single handled you one developer for duke nukem 3D

Ken Silverman was a prodigy of sorts. I always wondered what he would have done if he had ended up staying in the industry.

[http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm](http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm)

<comment><USER18> He's building stuff at Voxiebox now: [http://www.voxiebox.com/team/](http://www.voxiebox.com/team/)

<comment><USER19> He looks so young. Please don't let me fund out he built Build while I was ogling the stripper sprites in Duke Nukem and barely managing my CGSE maths homework...

<comment><USER20> From [1]:

> 08/24/1993: Ken signs employment agreement with Apogee Software Productions. > A special provision on the contract says that Apogee cannot interfere with > Ken's education.

Inferring from the first entry in the timeline, he must have been 17 or 18 then.

[1] [http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm](http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still remember playing multiplayer deathmatch (more than 1v1) over modem, with ~200 ping, and still feeling how crazy responsive it was. That was as transformative of an experience much like seeing SuperMario 64 for the first time.

Quake multiplayer was where I had to abandoned playing "closed style" on a keyboard and instead adopt the WASD mouse and Keyboard style.

Also remember when GameSpy was QSpy, and PlanetQuake was just a fan site?

And the fun of playing Threewave CTF with the grappling hook.

<comment><USER4> I reckon you're talking about QuakeWorld. Because Quake on a 200+ ping was ice-skate-mode.

<comment><USER21> I can't recall exactly when I made the switch to Quakeworld, but I'm pretty sure when I first fired up Quake1 over modem, it was still quite responsive even with the original netcode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Compared to everyone else here, my impression of quake back in the day was quite different. Back then I honestly couldn't appreciate the added 3D, but I found the art direction beyond boring, especially compared to the vibrant, changing and funny environments in Duke Nukem 3D. I found quake incredibly uninspiring and stuck with Duke for a long time.

Today I can appreciate how much more advanced quake is.

Does anybody know why it was called quake instead of doom 3?

<comment><USER23> The earliest concepts for the game were quite different than Doom. You were supposed to be playing a Thor-like character named Quake, who wielded a giant hammer.

<comment><USER24> Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?

<comment><USER25> The name Quake came from Carmack's D&D character, who was an inspiration for the original game design

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there a modern engine with hi-res support capable of running Q1 and Q2 WADs?

<comment><USER8> For Quake 1 its Darkplaces[1] or Quakespasm[2] (the former emphasizes more features, but has been dead for some years, the later is meant to be a more honest upgrade).

There are HD texture packs like Quake HD[3] and Epsilon[4] on moddb that work with either. All HD modpacks for both games are just like any mappack.

For Quake 2 I use Yamagi[5], but there is also KMQuake2[6] which is like Darkplaces from Quake 1. For HRT packs the only one I know of / have used is Berserker[7].

I think all those moddb packages are prebundled with Windows executables. You can just take the data directories and use them with your engine of choice.

[1][https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/](https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/)

[2][http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/](http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/)

[3][http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack- guide](http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide)

[4][http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon- build](http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build)

[5][http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/](http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/)

[6][http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/](http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/)

[7][http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2](http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2)

<comment><USER26> Oh, thank you! I'll try them all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > "I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur"

Didn't Joost have a Quake site? I feel like he did.

Time to reminisce: Ran my own Quake levels site back in the day. Meccaworld.com/quake with a lot of the files hosted at quakemecca.simplenet.com because simplenet offered "unlimited" bandwidth. ([http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld....](http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.com/quake/) )

If you're looking for some quality Single and Multiplayer Quake levels, most of the links work still (thanks to the magical way way back machine).

edit: to answer my question, yes - [http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/](http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/)

<comment><USER28> Yep, Joost ("rhymes with toast") Shuur started Aftershock, the first major Quake news site, during the pre-release days. Other sites like Blue's, Redwood's and sCaryname's took over after the game was actually released.

Sometime after that, Joost, ran a directory (remember those?) of Quake-related sites called Slipgate Central for a while.

Here's an old interview with him at the time:

[https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gam...](https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/spq2/quake1/int_joos.htm)

(Man, sure brings back a lot of memories, and not just of Quake; the 'net sure was a different place back then...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Was really expecting a longer post. Still pretty interesting though.

PS Really happy Romero set his URL like that.

</comment><comment><USER30> 1996 was definitely a landmark year for 3D gaming.

[http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years- old/](http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Dopefish lives....

</comment><comment><USER32> Wasn't a big player 20 years ago though many colleagues and employees were -- many occasions finding the "LAN guys" holed-up in the darkened data center at Prodigy frag-festing. Been playing OpenArena for the past several months. It's a lot of fun, and there are a lot of available mods. [http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment><comment><USER33> I remember being on the main irc channel when both qtest and the quake 1 official shareware was released.

It was absolute insanity and great fun.

Such an exciting time.

<comment><USER34> Yup. I believe it was EFNET #doom and I remember the release was delayed at least a few hours while they were uploading it to their server. I think I stayed up just long enough to start the download which probably took all night on my 56k modem.

Also, I recall the main news site covering it had a brick background but cannot remember the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Quake multiplayer was a really big thing!

I remember playing it on some 486 PCs, now unimaginable, but then it was really great!

There was even a ~700KB (!) version, stripped down to the most necesary: TCP/IP multiplayer with only 1 level, but man, you could bring it to the classroom on a 1,44MB floppy!

</comment><comment><USER36> Why are the screens so incredibly dark? Was the real game like this? I honestly can't remember.

<comment><USER37> The game was dark. These (doom, quake) were 256-color games which needed to burn substantial portions of the available palette just to facilitate shading and shadows atop colored textures. The dreary look of the game is somewhat forced by the limitations of VGA.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's true. Doom also used 256 colors with the same technique for shading and was much more colorful and brighter.

In some ways Quake started the "real is brown" trend.

That's not to say its visual design isn't really good, though!

<comment><USER37> No, really, as these games progressed from the simpler wolf3d-style rendering where there was no attempt to shade things, which allowed a much more diverse set of colors, their colors became progressively less diverse.

Just look at the Quake palette: [https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette](https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette)

Note how much of it is wasted on gradients, this is to get the more realistic 3d shading out of relatively few colors. Of course they made some choices in designing Quake to better position itself for a successful result working within these limitations, but it's the limitations forcing their hand.

<comment><USER9> The Doom palette looks very similar though: [http://zdoom.org/wiki/palette](http://zdoom.org/wiki/palette) So I don't think Quake's style was necessitated by technology.

<comment><USER37> They're not that similar in terms of how much space is spent on dark shades. In the doom palette the gradients don't go down to full blackness, and there's a technical reason for that; it's inappropriate for doom's engine.

The engines are very different in this regard, doom had no lighting. In quake you had lighting, and potential for dark shadows. The lighted colors needed to have range to blackness throughout, since they may occur in textures which get cast into full shadow. By limiting the full intensity of the colors chosen, smaller steps are achieved from black to full intensity across the 16 slots each color gradient was given. Those smaller steps improve the rendering quality, but the lower peak intensities contribute to the generally muted color-space of the game.

Doom and Quake do not use the same techniques as you mentioned above, that's incorrect. Quake was a major improvement over doom, doom more closely resembles the faux-3d "raycasting" of wolf3d. Quake is more like a traditional texture-mapped 3d engine, hence its 3dfx-accelerated readiness.

In the past I experimented with RGB direct-color modes in Mode-X (320x240x256) using a 332 format, to have the full color cube available and not have to preselect a fixed palette. This allowed a diverse color-space in a real-time 3d simulation, but the quality of the output was terrible due to the very few shades given to each color from full darkness to full brightness. This is why a game like Quake which would obviously benefit from a direct-color mode still ends up opting for a palette of dramatically constrained colors; it's just to improve the quality of the output.

In the world of 256 colors, the more advanced the 3d engines became the worse the colors got.

The very thing that made Quake so impressive at the time was the 3d with lighting and shadows on our 256-color displays. Nobody was doing that, probably because everyone assumed direct-color was a requirement, and with the VGA the only direct-color you could do was 8-bit "332". So while everyone was waiting for PC graphics hardware to mature a bit, id came along and gave a us a game full of browns, greens, and grays, and we loved it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Before I purchased the box / CD I was given a copy of the demo by a friend. He zipped it across 8 floppy disks and it took 2 painful attempts to get the zipping process to work without corruption. Those were the days!

</comment><comment><USER39> I was pretty young to play the original Quake but when I got around to play with it and DOom 95 (in the mid 2000s ), I realized what a amazing game it was and was hooked

</comment><comment><USER40> So weird seeing these screenshots again. I remember seeing these 20 years ago when they were first released.

</comment><comment><USER41> LAN parties!</comment>


The PDP-7 Where Unix Began - <AUTHOR> https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-pdp-7-where-unix-began.html <comment><USER2> > By porting Unix to the PDP-11 in 1970, the group ensured Unix would live on > into the future.

I have a question about that. Why would they do this?

What was so valuable in these few lines of (mostly proprietary) code, that you would make the effort to port instead of just writing from scratch on the new machine?

If you take a look at what came later, a lot of much more substantial software packages were made by a single bedroom coder in his spare time.

Why port? It couldn't be to save effort? (At least the conceptual level of things would remain the same if you start from scratch.)

<comment><USER3> About 1970 the first minicomputers were being applied to operations, administration and maintenance functions in the Bell System. The PDP-7 was too expensive and the PDP-8 was too limited to compete favorably with others. The PDP-11 was applied widely and if the Unix OS was to be used by the development groups instead of the DEC operating systems, it had to be ported.

<comment><USER4> The port wasn't motivated by the development groups. It was sold to management as a word processing / typesetting system.

I vividly remember my first encounter with Unix, in an ACM journal archive at the local university library as a teenager in the late '70s, utterly astonished to find _lower-case_ computer commands and prompts.

<comment><USER3> True, the development groups weren't too keen on Unix. They wanted to choose the minicomputer and operating system from those commercially available and get on with developing applications without the risks and effort of using an unproven operating system. But Research always wanted to demonstrate that they were contributing to the company, so eventually Unix had to be adopted.

Use by development groups for Western Electric products was different from the in-house Unix systems run by the Bell Labs data center that were used as time shared systems for email, general computing, and document production using nroff and memo macros. Moving away from all upper case made line printers less efficient, but about that time laser phototypesetting became available.

<comment><USER4> The main thing at the time was that mixed-case Teletypes were becoming common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note CRTs where a luxury item in the early 1970s. A 5x7x64 character generator requires 2240 bits uncompressed. Perhaps get closer to 1K if you had some run length compression. In my 1975 MIT digital lab the 1K memory chips where kept locked up because they were the most expensive chips at that time. By 1977 a lab I worked in bought a CRT terminal for each student because character ROMs had dropped in price.

<comment><USER6> The characters are not actually stored as rasters though. There are up,down,left,right,intensify and end signals that control the beam and the logic and no more than 30 pulses per character. In fact, I took photos of the "ROM" earlier this year: [https://imgur.com/a/QnFFkg6](https://imgur.com/a/QnFFkg6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of- first-p...](https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/10/video-footage-of-first- pdp-7-to-run-unix.html) has some further speculation... Footage of the PDP-7 that ken would later use to create Unix.

</comment><comment><USER8> > V0 Unix could run on only one of the PDP-7s.

Wow, I wonder how the history of UNIX would have panned out if that machine hadn't happened to land at Bell Labs.

<comment><USER9> I can't really speculate on that, but I can say the PDP series is a dream to program. The instruction set is simple and orthogonal, and you can hold an accurate model of the whole machine in your head that tells you exactly, step by step, what will happen when your program is executed. I don't know if any other contemporary machines also had these properties, but I do think it makes it an ideal research machine for creating a new programming environment (and that's really what UNIX was initially). That makes me think it was very likely either the PDP or a similar machine would end up at Bell Labs for people to develop on.

<comment><USER10> I think I learned -7 or -8 assembly in my comp org class. It had about 8 instructions and you had to make your own division instruction, and I think multiplication.

Then we moved onto a bit of 680x0. Yeah, that was different.

A simulator for it was pretty easy to write, switches and all.

<comment><USER9> I learned on a PDP-11, but we had 8's available, too. They felt very similar. I think the 11 had maybe 15-ish instructions?

Edit: just checked, and the 11 has about 70 instructions. I think MACRO-11 might abstract over many of them, making it look like it has fewer instructions. The instructions group nicely into a few families, which makes things really easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazing that the Unix of that day ran on an 8KB (not MB, not GB), 8KB machine with just 1MB (not GB, not TB), much-slower than today's SSD's, disk.

Compare that to Linux, its most popular descendant Unix of today...

Today's Linux requires a tad more memory and disk than that... just a _tad_... <g>

<comment><USER4> Note that wasn't the Unix we think of when we talk about Unix. It was written in assembly code. C didn't properly exist yet.</comment></comment>


Observational Signatures of Self-Destructive Civilisations - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.08530 <comment><USER3> This was not obvious to me from the title, but what they're talking about is ways that with tomorrow's telescopes, we could infer via observation how a technological civilization had destroyed itself, and therefore that an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization had been on that planet.

They seem to say that given Fermi's paradox and the possibility that _most_ civilizations self-annihilate, this is actually a good way to do SETI. Makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER4> >> As a star's gravitational well will likely be the deepest in the system, it is also energetically efficient to launch material on a stellar intercept trajectory.

Quite the opposite, that's one of the most delta-v expensive trajectories to embark upon. In fact from earth it's about twice as expensive as leaving the solar system.

<comment><USER5> Really? Why? Isn't the sun moving along some path in the milky way and can't we use that to accelerate the launch of a spacecraft? It looks like Voyager 2 used the effect, at least according to this image:

[http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/voy_traj.jpg](http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/voy_traj.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Orbits are not intuitive. To head "downwards", you have to slow down your orbital velocity, which reduces the radius of the orbit. In other words you have to decelerate. When you do the maths, you actually have to decelerate more from Earth orbit to get to the sun than you do to accelerate up to solar escape velocity.

<comment><USER7> Right, so an orbit implies an amount of kinetic energy which you need to lose to lower your orbit; and losing kinetic energy in a frictionless environment requires some kind of propulsion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe it was Vernor Vinge who made the comment that perhaps unexplained gamma ray burst were the last gasp of a planet or star that had been obliterated in anger by an adversary.

That said, if, for example, humans kill themselves off with a climate change it would have very little external signature.

<comment><USER9> Vernor Vinge also made the observation, that if most civilizations undergo an exponential increase in technological and societal progress, they're likely to disappear within a dozen generations after inventing radio. I'm not so sure we can reasonably imagine the signature of a civilization "subliming" to put it in Iain M. Bank's "Culture" terms.

So if the likeliest outcomes of industrial civilization are environmental self-destruct, self immolation in war, or "subliming" to something we can't imagine, then this would handily explain the Fermi paradox.

<comment><USER10> we know that we can't "see" most of the Universe - the dark matter/energy. That pretty much can happen to be the real Universe, and we're just living in the part set aside for the non-intelligent species. It is like being an ant on Earth - there is a planetary tech civilization being developed while you have no idea what is going around. The only interaction you my have with the civilization - if you're lucky, and you are some kind of special ants, then your colony may get moved before dam valley to be flooded, otherwise - <USER2> even that...

<comment><USER11> Given that A: dark matter has to have been around since the beginning to solve the problems it is meant to solve and B: must not interact strongly with anything, including itself, to solve the problems it is meant to solve, it seems unlikely that it can be supporting any structures whatsoever, let alone usefully living or computing ones.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's quite right. I think that it can't interact with anything electromagnetically, and it can't strongly interact with even itself _at larger distances_. But it could support something similar to the strong force with itself, and could therefore have structure at smaller scales ("smaller" means perhaps even at the scale of a planet).

Or have I missed something?

<comment><USER13> Dark matter is believed to be very weakly self interacting. If it had any type of self interaction it is assumed that it would aggregate into large structures (like stars) because it would lose momentum due to collisions or "drag" interacting with other dark matter. We would expect to observe structures like dark matter stars/galaxies/planets, but no such structures are observed. Even if those large structures did not interact electromagnetically, the gravitational effects of those objects would be felt on "ordinary matter" like stars and galaxies that we could observe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think these can differentiate between Self-Destruction and Murder by other parties?

<comment><USER11> Under their assumptions, murder doesn't come up very often, because civizilations rarely-to-never cross paths in the first place.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How old do you feel? - <AUTHOR> Not how old you are, how old do you feel? Example : 10 years older or 5 years younger or something like that... Why do you feel this way? Do you often hear 'He doesn't look his age.' <comment><USER2> I felt like I gained 25 years when I got a knee injury. Now my knee clicks and hurts, preventing the activity that had kept me thin.

</comment><comment><USER3> \- probably 30 years older than the average HNer (62yo)

\- Because I saw a post today where one person told about their old parents who where in their forties and just use their computers for email and videos.

Why do you ask this question? Do you want to know what are the temporal reference points of HNers, or what cultural reference they use for ageing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering about the process of ageing.</comment></comment>


PC obsolescence is obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/134760-pc-obsolescence-is-obsolete <comment><USER2> I think this pretty well reflects Microsoft's long-term consumer risk, too.

More than half of MSFT's revenue ([http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money- updated-20...](http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money- updated-2012/)) comes from Windows and Office (and over half the profit, Windows [http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-defer-revenue-windows- upgrad...](http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-defer-revenue-windows-upgrade- offer-140940839--finance.html)).

Back in the 90s and early 00s, the rate of change in the PC market was amazing. The hardware you could buy in 1998 basically didn't exist in 1996, so there always was something new and exciting to spur new hardware sales.

New hardware sales represent the bulk of Microsoft's Windows licensing (the so-called "Microsoft Tax") revenue and so a large part of MSFT's profits. All MS had to do was be the default OS and their profit would grow without lifting a finger (obviously that's greatly simplified, MS had to do a lot of things).

Now that this hardware revolution is no longer taking place, MS' Windows licensing rev (and thus the huge profits) are threatened. Competition in the PC market have driven hardware profits to zero. MS and their clone makers have painted themselves into a corner.

Contrast this with Apple's strategy - produce desirable hardware that people buy for non-technical reasons (design, fashion, software, etc.) instead of raw figures (CPU, Memory, etc.). Folks will upgrade because they _want_ to, not because they _need_ to. That's a lot harder to pull off, but Apple seems to be doing a great job of it.

Ultimately, I think Apple's strategy is going to make a lot more sense in the long run. Drive the cost of the operating system upgrades to zero (I'd be shocked if the next OSX upgrade costs anything; I was quite surprised that Mountain Lion was {edit: _not_ } a fee upgrade), limit the age of device that can run it, and create products that people want.

<comment><USER3> "I was quite surprised that Mountain Lion was a fee upgrade"

My knowledge of American anti-competition laws is lacking, but I remember back when they were able to release iOS-upgrades for the iPhone, but not the iPod Touch for free. At the time, there was supposedly something on the legal side of things which they were afraid to run afoul with by releasing free iPod Touch updates.

I suppose, if they were to release new versions of OS X for free, they may risk being sued for trying to push competitors out of the market by giving away a product that others are trying to sell.

No, it doesn't seem right to me, but sometimes laws are outdated or simply abused.

<comment><USER4> It was due to the way Apple had been accounting for OS upgrades, not due to competitive/monopoly concerns.

<comment><USER5> Specifically it's because Apple likes to take the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit for operating system development. The R&E credit requires that you work on a new product and not on simple refinement of an existing product and its features. There are a lot of subjective factors involved in qualifying and Apple felt more secure by requiring some money to upgrade. The big advantage was not the income but the big fat check from the federal government at the end of the year.

The R&E credit is a pork barrel scam for big companies with clever accounting departments, of course. But if it's there, why not take it?

<comment><USER2> According to this article, [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples- tax-strate...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy- aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?pagewanted=all) :

"In 1996, 1999 and 2000, for instance, the California Legislature increased the state's research and development tax credit, permitting hundreds of companies, including Apple, to avoid billions in state taxes, according to legislative analysts. Apple has reported tax savings of $412 million from research and development credits of all sorts since 1996."

$412M on the hundreds of billions Apple has earned since 1996 are pennies. That doesn't seem that much... Are there more?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Now, compare an early Core i7 system (Nehalem) against what's shipping today > (Ivy Bridge). Clock speeds are up a bit, and there are cheaper/lower-end > options available, but the Core i7-920 that launched at 2.67GHz with four > cores and eight threads is still absolutely capable of powering the latest > games and applications.

A big, big factor in the slowdown of obsolecense is that the current generation of consoles has stretched out far longer than is normal. Because the consoles have fairly PC-esque capabilities (arguably more parity than there has ever been before), many games released today are released on consoles and PC, often on a single code-base, at the very least on a single asset base.

Once the next generation of consoles is out, we will see games taking advantage of that extra power, and in turn PC requirements for new games will start to climb again.

<comment><USER7> This can't be emphasized enough- the _only_ reason nothing has moved forward is because gaming hasn't paved the way. Most major hardware advancements on the desktop we've had have been a result of devices added for higher requirements in games. And right now, with the death of the B-tier game studio, there's no one pushing PC-only experiences that really has a reason to ignore the consoles. That's it.

Now, whether the next console tier will actually allow that or not? I don't know. Investors seem to be catching wind to just how low-margin the games business is, and as a result seem to think social gaming is the way to go(if Zynga's large and horrible decline hasn't convinced you that they are wrong yet, give it time. It will.)- which means less marketing dollars justifying that new console, and thusly, less reason to push the desktop.

But we haven't stopped because there's no more need. Just, the market is in a bit of a wonky place right now. Console manufacturers would love to have a new one to sell, but developers are pushing back because to actually develop at the kind of fidelity required to go past where we are now, your _average_ game's budget will quickly double or more, with few returns in terms of profits- those margins just keep getting thinner.

<comment><USER8> You're putting the cart before the horse. The reason that performance has not improved in the desktop _and_ gaming are due to hitting fundamental limitations in the design of hardware.

<comment><USER9> The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of RAM, not exactly on par with a current PC gaming system, which can easily have 16 GB.

I would argue that the rising production costs to produce games that actually make use of ultra-advanced hardware are more to blame for the slowing of the graphics race.

You can always do things faster by doing things in parallel. It just gets much harder to program them.

<comment><USER8> Gaming PCs also have a general purpose OS on them. It's not an apples-to- apples comparison. One is a general purpose computer, the other is a device designed for a single purpose.

But that's beside the point: the games industry drives the graphics card business, but that is only a one part of the consumer computer business. General purpose processors are a larger part, and processor performance improvement is not the exponential curve it was a decade ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No doubt it has been replaced by _device_ obsolescence, where the screen, camera, wireless radio, etc. are bundled together and improvements in any one component compels the purchase of a whole new unit.

<comment><USER11> Sad, but true. Faced with the reality that well-designed, flexible, modular systems have simply become too good, manufacturers are now effectively building in forced obsolescence, either tying components together (the Apple way) or arbitrarily declaring that only certain combinations are permitted (which also works with consumables, like the way my HP colour printer refused to print a black and white document the other day until I replaced an empty colour toner cartridge).

Software seems to be going the same way. SaaS is a fairly transparent rip-off in many cases. Certain big-ticket professional software vendors restrict sales to a network of resellers they can control, who dutifully pull last year's version as soon as this year's is available, so if you want to buy an extra copy to go with the 10 you already have, you can't (unless you upgrade your entire organisation to maintain compatibility).

Bridging the gap nicely are drivers. Here we see a range of dubious techniques. One popular one seems to be releasing equipment with drivers for certian specific operating systems that are available at the time, but then conveniently not releasing any drivers to support new operating systems released within what would otherwise be the normal lifetime of the device, thus artificially shortening its life often by many years. Another good trick (I'm looking at you nVidia) is to take essentially the same hardware, but sell one version with nerfed drivers and another premium (sorry, "workstation") version with "certified" drivers that actually use the hardware to its full capabilities.

I'm a little surprised that we haven't yet seen more people pushing back against these obviously customer-hostile trends, because a lot of people are spending a lot more money and suffering a lot more hassle than they should have to. Certainly some rip-off merchants do come unstuck; I've heard about what would have been extremely lucrative sales of very expensive specialist equipment that got flushed when the prospective customer discovered some form of artificial nerfing in software and took their cash to someone else who didn't do that. But it seems that everyday hardware and software are in one big race to the bottom.

Even premium products, like those high-end graphics cards and professional software installations with their multi-thousand price tags per unit, seem to be tolerated because _almost everyone_ is doing it now. Perhaps this is partly because the more honest competition mostly comes from smaller organisations in the hardware field or in software's case via independent software houses and open source communities, and these kinds of suppliers are (rightly or wrongly, probably a bit of both) regarded as not being up to the job of supplying Serious Business Customers(TM).

What I haven't yet figured out is why this is still happening. Do you know anyone who, in either a personal or a professional capacity, actually thinks any of this stuff is done to help them, or that spending money on these things is a good deal? In a logical market, we would expect competition to spring up and exploit that vulnerability, promoting brands based on honest dealings and good quality, almost certainly charging a higher price for it, but with a greater perceived value that justifies that price. And yet, this doesn't seem to be happening, which suggests that many of the markets in technology industries are not effectively competitive, or some of the big name players are in practice dominant or outright monopolies even if they're not formally recognised as such.

<comment><USER12> The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers. And absent a conspiracy, there's no profit in that. Actually, I'd argue that the computer world has been increasingly tending toward openness, not away from it; but consumer devices are special a use case where almost all of computer-buying humanity simply doesn't care about the things you care about.

Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.

<comment> wes-exp "The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers."

I agree, but for the record, there have been a variety of customer-screwing conspiracies within the computer market. If memory serves correctly, price- fixing arrangements have occurred in at least RAM and LCDs. Not to mention various anti-trust issues.

<comment><USER13> If my memory serves there has been quite a few of them over the last couple of decades, people just tend to forget them over time.

Plus a few lawsuits were avoided or defeated because of the generosity of the US federal government making laws that makes it more difficult to be a consumer; the DMCA comes to mind. Laws pushed by the very companies that are not in a conspiracy but willing to work together for their own benefit when needed. You want a third-party ink cartridge? Screw you because the law says you can't and it's even illegal for you to try.

Nope, nothing to see here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Core i7? PC Hardware hit a usability plateau with the Core 2 Duo. For modest tasks, my 4.5 year old thinkpad and home desktop are both Core 2 Duo and perform most tasks fabulously. I do look forward to an upgrade but I have thought the same thing that this article states - that PCs are lasting much much longer than they used to.

What is more interesting is smaller hardware. Mini-ITX systems, The RaspberryPi, and ATMEL/Arduino systems. Writing C code for a 16k ATMEL is a great way to appreciate the hardware in an 'older' PC.

<comment><USER15> It is funny that hardware has taken a turn towards slower/lower-end. Appliance computing, I guess. There was a mad dash to make everything as fast as possible, then when it was faster than really required, attention shifted to making computers that are specifically designed for various tasks. Why have one computer that's not really good at anything (but does it fast enough to not care) when you can have a half dozen tiny and power-efficient computers that are great at their job (so good that you don't notice how slow they really are)?

<comment><USER16> Maybe I live in a different universe, but I feel like computers are so slow these days. How is everyone claiming that are sufficiently fast?

Starting up Outlook takes 10 full seconds (just the splash screen consumes half of that time). When I open up a web browser or click a link in an email, it takes about 5 seconds to fully load. Even distilling a file to pdf or loading Facebook takes almost 5 seconds.

I don't think it's an issue of my computer being particularly slow. Everyone at work with their quad core processors and 6gb of ram seem to just sit and wait without noticing. Have you ever been in someone's office while they search for an email? It takes minutes! And don't even try doing any work while Adobe is trying to update or the Antivirus scanner is running...

I spend so much time _waiting_ for a computer. Waiting for IDEs to redraw, waiting for my computer to let me disconnect my usb drive, waiting for splash screens. What is going on?

<comment><USER17> Do you have an SSD?

<comment><USER16> I do on one computer, and it does make things noticeably faster, but still feels slow compared to how people are describing their computers. I am constantly waiting a couple seconds in between actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Software and games have traditionally driven obsolescence. Now that software is shifting toward efficiency, remote processing, and web based interfaces, we don't need the power as much anymore.

It was easy to double the processing requirements of software when we were at a low exponent of moore's law, but now that is looked at as poor development. We're able to do more with less code.

Also, since facebook and other web services have diluted the demographic with people who mostly browse the web, the demand for power has waned.

However, I am annoyed with all the posts asserting that desktops are dead. This is far from true. Gamers will not give up their desktops. For power uses, a laptop just won't support 4 1080p monitors. I personally prefer having a desktop so I don't have to mess with docking/plugging in my laptop to a ton of cables when the desktop does a better job anyway. The desktop as serves as my media consumption station and is connected to the TV.

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to do a lot of server work. Mostly virtualization in a lab environment. We created an elaborate test rig which literally the more computers you threw at the problem the faster you could iterate. About 4 years ago I left, but looked back at hardware a few weeks ago. It blew my mind how things have doubled since then.

I think servers for real work are still important, and they're not done at getting better faster.

<comment><USER4> The server market is almost as stagnant though. Multicore CPUs are important because of server virtualization, and it's always nice to be able to put 1/4TB of memory into a system, but there's a dearth of reasons to upgrade short of EOL or support being discontinued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It really depends on what you do with your computer. I had a Core 2 Quad system that was perfectly fine for me in 2008, but as I dabble further in HD video editing, I dropped money on a new system a month or two ago. Now I can preview effects in real-time, and the rendering time is so much faster. Likewise, working with photos from my Canon T2i. The ability to chuck 24gb of memory in the system doesn't hurt either, and SSDs? I actually put my 4-year old computer on Craigslist for free because it seemed pretty useless to me after upgrading to this new system.

I'm looking forward to what kind of technology will be available in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am absolutely amazed, that picture at the beginning of the article seems to have taken on a life of it's own.

More on topic, quick PC obsolescence was always something of a myth. Parts were only really obsolete if you absolutely had to run the latest shooter at the absolute highest settings known to man. So it wasn't that it was obsolete, it was that the user needed to justify their desire to buy the latest for bragging rights.

<comment><USER22> Less on topic, but more on the picture: I was wondering about that image. Something struck me as off. And then I realized that the computer had a steering wheel. So for those interested, yes, it _is_ odd for a computer to have a steering wheel that large.

<http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp>

<comment><USER23> "Many a prognosticator who has tried to envision the future has been tripped up by a failure to correctly anticipate the direction of technological change."

I straight away thought of Kubrik's 2001. The complete failure to imagine _mobile_ phones. Floyd uses a fixed _video phone_ to phone home from the space ship. Personal mobile technology is the thing.

Back nearer the topic: When I can hook my phone up to a monitor and keyboard I'm done.

<http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android>

<comment><USER24> If you remember "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1960s) set around the year 2000, one of the characters, a reporter I believe, had a mobile phone that was the size of a briefcase. Another character marveled that he must be rather well off because mobile phones were so expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would say you're right for most cases. But not for gamers or "power users":

* Game developers constantly up the ante. Try playing Battlefield 3 at 2560x1440 on Ultra on your 2008 PC and see how you go, if it even starts at all.

* Virtualisation has resulted in consolidation (for me at least). Whereas I might have had to keep around a Windows box to do testing, now I just fire up a VM on my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER26> The relentless evolution of the PC was driven largely by PC gaming. In the 90's and early 2000's you could rely on the fact that a PC bought one year would struggle with games made the following year and be incapable of playing at least some games made 2-3 years later. As such, gamers eagerly adopted new hardware, overclocked, overspent by factors of 2 or 3 in the vain hope that it would buy them a few extra months (when in fact it was more sensible to buy a cheaper PC and upgrade more often).

Then a funny thing happened. The video game market outgrew the movie market. It started making financial sense to invest tens of millions in the development of a single game. The cost of the content (i.e. character designs, level designs, script, voice acting, motion capture, etc.) far outstripped the cost of coding the engine. It became a complete no-brainer to port games to as many platforms as possible to maximize your audience. The corollary to this is that it became necessary to _design_ games such that it was possible to port them to as many platforms as possible. That meant that most developers stopped exclusively developing for one platform and instead started designing for them all. While you can always tack on some superficial eye-candy on when the hardware supports it, games could not be designed to have basic gameplay requiring more resources than the slowest platform was capable of. Thus, consoles became an anchor that brought the relentless march of PC game requirements to a screeching halt.

The Xbox360 and PS3, not to mention the Wii, are handily out-performed by today's desktops by a large degree. Mobile phones are poised to pass them within a couple of years! However, the games you can play on a PC are largely identical to the console versions. Sure, there are some improved graphics, additional content, etc., but these differences are superficial. In fact, if your hardware isn't the latest and greatest, most games can simply scale back the eye-candy to maintain performance. Even PC-only developers, such as Blizzard, have recognized that they must build games with conservative minimum requirements in today's market.

The end result is that PC gamers can run new games with only superficial inferiority to what the latest generation of desktop hardware is capable of. They no longer _need_ to upgrade their desktops. At least, they won't until the next generation of consoles arrive. When that happens there will be many new games designed with greatly increased resources in mind and a big wave of desktop upgrades will ensue.

In the end, PC obsolescence isn't really dead. It's just quantized differently.

</comment><comment><USER27> _CPU_ obsolescence

OTOH everything else has been playing catch up. Disk, Network, Bus etc... Sure my CPU has hit the ceiling, but it spends 95% of its time idle anyway. Broadband five years ago was probably a 3-5Mbps link, and storage was a 7200rpm platter. Now broadband is 20mbps and storage is an SSD.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd say that this is even more valid for home servers. Of the 7 spare boxes I have, five are 5+ years old while two are 2 year old shit home laptops (Inspiron yay!).

These were all under $50 a piece when you factor in that 3 were free. All of these guys sit on ubuntu server or archlinux and never have problems. Hell, you can go buy surplus/ old 620's from corporate shops for < $100 and build yourself a full Beowulf cluster for under $500.

<comment><USER29> What's the power usage of old PCs like that? I've been using a sheeva plug as my server at home because it only uses something like 5 watts.

It seems like ARM servers are the best choice for home servers. They have adequate processing power and are cheap.

<comment><USER30> I also have a sheeva plug as my server, but if i did it over I would choose to grab an mac mini. My big jump to the sheeva was the power usage, but then I found out the mini only uses 12W! Along with the 12W you get a x86, with hd, cd drive, wifi, etc on a box that I can easily load linux (upgrading the sheeva's kernel isn't the easiest...) and in a few years when done with it I can easily sell the mini unlike the sheeva.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> According to cpubenchmark.net the Nehalem Core i7-920 in (from November 2008) mentioned in the article has about half the performance of the Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K released in April. In 2004 the best we had was Pentium 4's which were around 8x slower than the i7-920 that came 4 years later.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is quite true.

My parents are still using a desktop system from 2002 for all their stuff, and it still working quite well.

This is the problem most OEMs are facing nowadays, as there this no need to upgrade every few years like it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER33> You also have to factor in that life expectancy of these machines. Usually processors last about 5 years and by the time that happens you're probably going to want to get the latest which will most likely be a different socket and require a new motherboard.

Furthermore, PC enthusiasts and gamers will never be satisfied. These folk live for the next hardware releases to get even the tiniest gain on their overclocks or go from 2x AA to 4x AA. The PC enthusiast community is a force to be reckoned with. Don't believe me? Just check out the plethora of forums out there and see how active they are. I don't see that going away anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER34> For those who don't game or edit videos, this has been true for about 8 years. I retired my 2004 1GB RAM Dell desktop in 2012 and still keep it as a backup. The ever increasing speed of browsers and the shift of my work from the desktop to the cloud kept my system operating at the same speed it did 8 years ago - not blazing fast, but good enough.

I expect my Sandy Bridge replacement system to go another 7-10 years before I replace it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yep, seems pretty accurate to me.

In fact, my home system is pretty much identical to their hypothetical 2008 i7-920 system.

I have made a couple of upgrades over the years (Replaced the original Radeon 4870x2 with a GeForce 560 about 9 months ago when the ATI card died, recently upgraded from the original 6GB of RAM to 24GB.

Looking at what's other there now there's nothing that makes sense to upgrade to.

<comment><USER36> Raytraced games probably come closest to what would cause people to upgrade. But even Intel seems to be backing away from raytraced games off late.

<comment><USER37> Intel backed off because its futuristic hardware platform was too futuristic to make a good GPU. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm not sure I agree with this fully. There are compromises made in software as a result of lacking resources, with these resources now available some of these compromises can be avoided. For example, lets keep more resources in memory at all times, lets use more resource hungry algorithms that just was not feasible before, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's turn this thread on its head

Does anyone think a desktop PC with a 20 year life is possible now? What kind of design?

<comment><USER39> If nothing else, I think power consumption is a dealbreaker for a 20-year desktop PC. In (say) five years, there will be an iPhone with the same specs, and then you'll be running a desktop PC for 15 years at 100 times the power consumption for no reason. A good analogy is the way otherwise perfectly-good CRTs disappeared so quickly in favor of relatively expensive and low-contrast flat-panels. I'm using extreme numbers, but at that timescale even small efficiency increases will make it worth upgrading, and efficiency increases are a huge focus right now.

The place to look for a 20-year computer is probably the same place they are now -- embedded systems with minimal power consumption and ample specs for the limited job they're designed for. E.g., cars.

<comment><USER23> Interesting view which I had not thought of previously in quite that way.

Devil's advocate: My old workstation has a 440w power supply but uses much less than that most of the time. A small percentage of the total electrical power that my house uses. What pressure is there to switch the workstation for a more efficient PC?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Two (well, three) things have helped me extend the effective life of a few machines for self and family. 1. (Particularly for laptops,) Purchase top-end discreet graphics processing.); 2. Max out the RAM before it becomes terribly expensive (as its form factor is passed by); 3. When storage space becomes constrained, throw a new hard drive in there.

Particularly the graphics processing on laptops. Inevitably, this ends up making the difference between a machine becoming "a little slow" versus it becoming "unusable", for general, day-to-day use.

In the next ten years, who knows? But I'm betting that going with the best graphics processing available (again, particularly in laptops, where this is often un-upgradable) is going to be a good investment in terms of extending a unit's effective lifespan.

</comment><comment><USER41> When I first read this, I thought this said "PG obsolescence is obsolete"

</comment><comment><USER42> Dennard scaling: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Dennard>

It's about the shrinking of MOSFETS that happened over the 35 years since he wrote about it. My electronics textbooks mentioned the scaling, but did not make this named attribution (perhaps just a bibliographic reference).</comment>


Comparing al Qaeda and the IRA - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/07/comparing_al_qa.html

<comment><USER2> Not sure why this links to schneier. The actual article is here: <http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-was-wrong/></comment>


Pimcore a php cms and framework - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codesupport.info/category/cms/pimcore/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious about your experience using Pimcore.</comment>