Alaska has had to deal with an extreme version of this issue for a long time. One mitigation that the state has come up with is to offer competitively priced student loans to Alaska residents who are bound for colleges across the US. The interest rate on the loans is further lowered if you live in Alaska after graduation, incentivizing educated Alaskans to come back. Those students are also likely to have maintained their Alaska residency to qualify for the Permanent Fund Dividend (an annual payment that comes from rolling returns on the state’s sovereign wealth fund).
Kali! I haven’t heard that name in a long time. I used it to play many hours of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer with friends - what a great enabling technology for its day.
I played so much Descent on the Kali ladder, and a buddy and I would play 1v1 Descent 2 basically every day after school. The mind games around camera dropping were such a cool mechanic.
It's a shame there's apparently no appetite for that sort of 6DOF game anymore. While the quality increase in graphics, etc, is dumbfounding I also feel games have silo into just a few formats/genres. In particular anything that strays out side of the WSAD paradigm seems doomed to be ignored.
Back when I was playing Descent one of the big tips was to set up key bindings that'd let you strafe in 3 dimensions at once. So instead of WSAD, I'd have Left/Right on Q/A, Forward/Back on W/S, Up/Down on E/D and Roll on R/F. This was a big advantage over the default layout, but was probably too weird for people to try and get used to.
Yeah a flight joystick with a HAT control for sliding/strafing and throttle lever actually worked well in my experience. I'm sure keyboard and mouse would ultimately be faster, but it was fun feeling like you were a fighter pilot with lasers.
I used a joystick as well. The big advantage is I could control all 6DOF simultaneously without moving my fingers. Players who couldn't do that were definitely at a disadvantage when things got really chaotic as the automatic roll feature didn't work particularly well. You could do a 6D circle strafe vs them and tuck into a blind spot where they couldn't get back on aim to you without adjusting roll with a little pause/hitch in their movement.
I used the hat to switch weapons and such.
My friend used roughly the same idea with a trackball, which was probably even better.
Yeah there was something special there that I haven't seen happen in games ever since then. The full 6 degrees of freedom was disorienting at first but extremely fun once you got the hang of it.
descent multiplayer was so good. I loved seeing ships chasing and shooting at each other all over the map. I don't think any other game quite captures that level of mayhem.
The levels were just wild too. Huge open areas that trick you into thinking you know how they work, and then oops you forgot what's above and below you as people swoop down and blast you mercilessly.
I knocked up a more or less working FreeCell solitaire in Excel one bored afternoon, so Blackjack should certainly be possible in plain old Excel VBA.
Most impressive Excel things I've seen by other people: a Game of Life (I'm guessing not SeanDav's, but who knows!), a Dijkstra's algorithm demo which let you resize cells and recalculated the shortest distance between two cells, and this rather impressive Enigma cipher encoder/decoder:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755656
Essentially, excel is a functional language, without the ability for recursion. If there were a built in array datatype, that'd be possible. There's a few papers floating around explaining an integration between Haskell and excel, described in some places as hsExcel, but I haven't seen a working copy.
The comments here about przemoc's choice in browser are surprisingly critical and vitriolic. S/he claims to be purposely keeping that version, and so presumably has some good reason - specific plugins, specific version testing for an internal web application, etc. Even if przemoc didn't have what you would consider a good reason, it should be his or her choice to keep that browser version and the onus is on us as web developers to encourage him (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating the reasons for upgrading, etc.
Believe me when I say that I understand the frustrations that come from having to support outdated browsers - I used to develop a web application for the financial industry, where as of a year or two ago a significant portion of traffic still came from IE6-locked machines in large financial institutions - but browser choice is not the issue here.
The issue as I see it is that the software that przemoc was running did not behave as he or she wanted and expected it to behave. That means that the software had a design problem (poor or misleading auto-update setting design), a communication problem (didn't inform him or maybe mislead him about the default update behavior) or a bug (updated despite a setting telling it not to).
There isn't enough information in the original post to determine if the last one (auto-update occurring despite being turned off) is what happened here - I'd like to learn more. It would be worrying (and I'd argue an insecure design) if the software were even capable of self-updating with that setting turned off.
> [...] the onus is on us as web developers to encourage [him/her] (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating the reasons for upgrading, etc.
I disagree. The onus is on those peddling the product (i.e. marketers) to sell its worth to users.
> Believe me when I say that I understand the frustrations that come from having to support outdated browsers
I read about “frustration” when referring to older browsers a lot. That has led me to question just how much people learn about supporting those browsers. Shouldn't supporting browser X become trivial once a certain amount of experience is accrued? Or do we just hunt and peck until a page ostensibly works?
> There isn't enough information in the original post to determine if the last one (auto-update occurring despite being turned off) is what happened here - I'd like to learn more. It would be worrying (and I'd argue an insecure design) if the software were even capable of self-updating with that setting turned off.
As someone who tests every whole number version of Firefox (1-14), I have experience with the force-fed updates. Imagine my frustration when viewing the version information (via Help > About) led to the browser paving over my existing installation. I really don't want to have to tinker with the settings for fourteen separate programs.
Conversely, Opera 8+ will ask before updating. Though this happens every time I open the program, I can easily decline and continue with my business. This is how to respect users.
Chrome is far worse, as it forbids the existence of an older build, even after the newer build is uninstalled.
