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Comment: Re:Braben and Bell (Score 1) 283

by Roger W Moore (#47409681) Attached to: The World's Best Living Programmers

8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation.

Except that at the time almost nobody was doing this and they actually used the built in BBC Micro random number generator which is why it took so long to get the game ported to other platforms!

What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds...

...and bugs! I'll agree that it was as ambitious as Elite but it was full of often serious bugs where Elite was not. In addition to that there were some serious design issues such as your relative speed indicator switching to the planet you were trying to land on when you were far too close to the planet to be able to slow down. This resulted in having to approach at a snail's pace to ensure that you did not just add a crater to the existing surface features!

Comment: Braben and Bell (Score 1) 283

by Roger W Moore (#47408143) Attached to: The World's Best Living Programmers

Who's the best game programmer?

Easy: Braben and Bell who wrote 'Elite'. This game was so far ahead of its time it was simply unbelievable. It was one of (if not the) first true 3D game and contained 8 galaxies of 255 stars on a machine with 32kB of memory. It also introduced true "sandbox" gameplay. It might not stand up to today's standards and the sequels, while great games, were nowhere near as revolutionary, although it remains to be seen how Elite: Dangerous turns out - I have my fingers crossed!

So, no matter how you spin it, there is no way that you can deny that they were true Elite programmers! ;-)

Comment: Einstein NOT a School dropout (Score 1) 283

by Roger W Moore (#47408039) Attached to: The World's Best Living Programmers

Einstein and Edison were school dropouts.

I have no clue which alternate reality you have come from but in this one Einstein was most definitely NOT a school dropout, for details see Wikipedia. The worst that can be said about his education is that he initially failed to meet the required standard in the general entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic (although he excelled in the physics and maths portion) and had to go to a secondary school elsewhere for a few years before being admitted (at the age of 17) to the Polytechnic where he graduated with a maths and physics teaching diploma.

Comment: Speed of Evolution (Score 1) 553

And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us.

Not unless something radical happens with evolution. It would be more like a viking, anglo-saxon or celt from the year 1028 hanging around us. They may have different standards of acceptable behaviour but they would likely quickly learn how to fit into modern society because they are no less intelligent than we are. In fact they might quite possibly more intelligent on average given that they had no safety labels or health and safety inspectors to reduce attrition at the bottom end of the spectrum.

Comment: Re:Email Insecure (Score 1) 346

by Roger W Moore (#47384989) Attached to: Goldman Sachs Demands Google Unsend One of Its E-mails

You are wrong. email can be any level of security you want.

Only if you control the entire network and all the servers used. This is not really practical in 99.9% of the use cases of email since it means you need to form a separate email network, isolated from the outside world to prevent any forwarding over insecure networks or to insecure servers.

Comment: Re:Different from other revolution celebrations (Score 4, Informative) 340

by Roger W Moore (#47379759) Attached to: On 4th of July:
Given the significant French involvement it was hardly a civil war but rather a rebellion aided by a foreign power which, being successful, gets called a revolution. In fact the French accumulated such a large debt helping you that it is considered as a cause of the French Revolution (another successful rebellion) so it might be considered polite to remember that they were at least there. After all if it weren't for their help, instead of "freedom fries" you'd probably be eating chips.

Comment: Email Insecure (Score 5, Insightful) 346

by Roger W Moore (#47378789) Attached to: Goldman Sachs Demands Google Unsend One of Its E-mails

Through a combination of carelessness and cluelessness, this employee managed to put hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of customer funds at risk.

Sending information like this via email is where the mistake happened, not mistyping the address. Email is not secure even if it is sent to the right address you have no control over how it gets there and it could be easily intercepted and read enroute. Their reputation loss has already occurred by admitting that they use email for highly sensitive information like this.

Comment: Re:Relativistic Mass is fundamentally wrong (Score 1) 347

by Roger W Moore (#47357189) Attached to: Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light

Even professors that don't like using that concept warn their grad students about it because it comes up in papers still

Not in particle physics - I've never seen that notation used: 'm' always means the invariant mass. Perhaps if you go back to the 1950's but then you are really using textbooks and not papers and again they use invariant mass. If you write momentum as 'mv' I bet you would not find a single physicist in any reputable particle physics group that would think you meant it as a relativistic expression.

Other text books ranging from Coh-Tannoudjio to multiple modern physics and university level intro physics textbooks still stick with the relativistic mass system when glossing over stuff.

Rubbish. The intro texts typically introduce relativistic mass and then describe it as an incorrect and flawed concept (often citing Einstein) and then never, or rarely, mention it again. Senior undergrad particle texts never even mention the concept nor do the grad level texts or modern papers.

And the Lagrangian for that is Lorentz invariant, but that doesn't mean energy is invariant under Lorentz transformations...

Correct but a particle's mass comes from the energy it has in its rest frame which IS an invariant quantity and which is determined by the Higgs coupling for fundamental particles.
