Carr also made Pirate Battles and Treasure Island, at least one of which I remembered from my childhood, whereas I've never played Capture the Flag.
The sprites used in the shareware game I played remained etched in my memory, along with the red and blue colors for the teams, the top-down view with vibrant colors, the Windows 95 GUI, and keywords like "trapper" and "scout" (the other game apparently had "digger") but I had forgotten the name over the years and took me a lot of searching to find it again.
There are some communities like Reddit's tipofmyjoystick that are geared towards locating games by description, and the process inspired me to contribute to curation/catalog sites for games.
Abandonware sites fulfill much of that latter niche now, but these are not abandonware!
After I found the game's name, I found that there were very few Google search results for "shareware pirate battles carrsoft" or "shareware treasure island carrsoft". There's room for more shareware catalogs and searchable, browseable thematic directories.
He still sells a bundle of his games at carrsoft.com and I bought them recently. Highly recommend!
Perhaps it's a terminology issue. No one in the visible map frames of the Charlotte links would consider themselves to live in a 'rural' area. Sure, their neighborhood might be pleasant and quiet, and there's abundant tree cover, but the mapped path is alongside houses the entire time. The linear density is high. In a rural area, there exist lots with generous road frontage that interrupt the linear sea of homes.
Yes, there is certainly terminology ambiguity on what "suburb" is.
To me the huge lots, big setbacks of houses away from street and major forest cover, isn't a suburb. The new link you posted seem more like farmland, not rural housing.
To me a suburb is where houses or townhouses (but no highrises) are packed next to each other in small lots.
But yes, it would be useful to have more specific definitions of housing densities instead of dumping everything that's not farmland or Manhattan into "suburb".
There are several digital encoding schemes that add enhancement layers on top of an older, established base layer. It's a key concept of backwards compatibility. Not including cases where additional channels or domains of information are added (e.g. surround sound, 3D video), and only looking at cases where the perceptual quality of the existing channels or domains is improved (e.g. HDR, resolution), here are some examples:
* Progressive JPEG (1992)
* Spectral Band Replication (2001) in aacPlus -> HE-AACv1 (2003), mp3PRO (2001), WMA 10 Pro (2006)
* JPEG XT (2015) - enhancements on top of 1992 JPEG.
* Scalable Video Coding (2004? 2007?) (search for "SVC Annex G")
(Keep in mind that software patents aren't about ideas, but specific techniques being used together to achieve an effect, so this isn't intended to be a list of prior art, but rather a list of the same concept being used elsewhere.)
Fijivillage.com reports: "All websites and apps hosted in Fiji with the dotcom.fj suffix are currently down and this has also affected Vodafone’s M-PAiSA services.
This is due to an outage in the University of the South Pacific hosted dotcom.fj domain." [1][2]
I use 24 hours on anything I'm not planning on making changes to. High TTL is a better experience for customers because they'll probably have it in local-ish caches even if there is internet routing disruption.
And 10 mins on anything I'm about to make changes to. That means if I accidentally make the wrong change, the 'blast radius' is minimized.
Obviously, when changing 24h down to 10 mins, keep a close eye on DNS server load, packet loss on links close to it, etc. If in doubt, raise and lower ttl's slowly.
I would recommend an hour for almost everything except where very fast updates is expected, in which case 5m is my lowest number (I work at a registrar).
There are rumors of DNS resolvers deciding that some TTLs are “too low” to be valid, and applying their own default TTL value instead, thereby negating any benefit a low TTL would have had.
If the DNS server is out for more than 1 minute you'll get an outage. You also increase latency by preventing anybody from caching the response for more than 1 minute.
The tech is neat but the reasons this isn't already in use has to do a lot more with railroading company culture (operational familiarity, risk of losing business to a competitor) than with any particular shortcomings of the technology.
Right now, no one has to chaperone individual railcars (or bogies!), because trains of many railcars travel as a unit. This also makes track control / impact avoidance easier, regardless of the level of train control deployed on the track.
This may see more use in the EU, where EU-wide regulations are mandating all member states to separate ownership of their rail network from ownership of rail operators. Then, an adventurous operator may decide to trial this technology. But nonetheless, this is fairly unlikely, as rail slots are essentially priced by time occupied for the block, so it makes more sense to pack a train's worth of cargo into the reservation you paid for.
Even in the EU, you will want an engine in front and you'll want the train to be coulpled together. For one, the engine is the place where the train understands the gazillion signaling systems in the EU, and it's where the overhead power is converted to on train power. Both items cost like millions, it's not something you want to distribute.
perhaps automatic couplers and a power pack on each truck (bogie) will allow automatic shunting, which is the newtec gimmick that can make freight trains competitive again.
BNSF Railway has a major classification yard in Galesburg. Just like other railroads, they use their Chicago yard for intermodal traffic (loading containers from the trains onto trucks and vice versa), and use a nearby yard outside of Chicago to manage general traffic.
According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College, Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government, and the prison.
It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the standard rural fare, and a college also.
Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's conclusions.
I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not.
This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go.
One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line.
What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.
> so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
Lots of people in the US fly distances in the 300-800km range cited in the article. So equating long-distance and flight doesn't seem right. Trains are no less flexible than flights (or busses) over any distance (obviously they can be slower); they only lose flexibility when compared with cars.
> One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too.
The article's author says more or less precisely the same thing as you've said here. In addition, the flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus. Yes, bus services can range from inter-city routes moving at 80mph to local ones servicing small villages. But these are never the same busses.
In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.
As for buses, the article's author diminishes the significance of intercity buses in Europe by making it sound like private intra-national intercity bus service isn't competitive with HSR on travel time, as if HSR were widespread. HSR is only present along a dozen or so corridors in Europe, and while within France such premium bus services are a relatively new phenomenon, that isn't true elsewhere on the continent; so across the whole of Europe intercity buses are both much more common than he initially suggests, and much more competitive vs. rail than he suggests. After this, he does say buses thrive in the gaps between the train network, complement it, and have historically been important for international travel because of rail fare structures, and on those points I agree.
My wording of 'buses are flexible' does refer to the ease of introducing new routes (i.e. not having to build lots of rail), as a sibling comment correctly identified.
>In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.
For personal travel, I think I'd generally agree. However, lots of US business travellers (pre-COVID anyway) would fly distances of 100,200,300 miles (the shuttles from Phila to NYC were almost always full, and that's just 90 miles!). These journeys have the no-car-last-mile problem, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the wide use of flight for those journeys.
Granted, post-COVID, it's no longer clear how many of these short-haul journeys business travellers will be making in the next 2-10 years.
Business travelers take taxis from their arrival airport to their destination and then get reimbursed by their company later.
They are among the least price-sensitive travelers and are the ones least inconvenienced by the last-mile problem, so their decision-making differs from those traveling for other reasons. (On average, they are less constrained by price and switching of modes, but are more constrained by idiosyncratic company procedures around travel.)
>they only lose flexibility when compared with cars
Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
>flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus
Again, he means the flexibility of adding new routes, not having the bus pick you up at your hotel.
> Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
One of the justifications for California HSR was that existing airport slots are almost saturated. Studies showed that airport expansion was going to cost at least as much as HSR. Runway and terminal expansions actually do cost billions of dollars.
And while HSR costs have ballooned, so too would airport expansion costs. Perhaps even more so because much of the HSR cost increases are related to intransigent farm owners in rural areas, whereas the majority of airport capacity expansion work (at least on a cost basis) involves much more developed areas, where NIMBYs tend to be at least as ornery.
The studies also projected greater cost burdens with highway expansion alternatives. Nobody disputes that building additional lanes on I-5 in the Central Valley is cheaper than building HSR in those areas. But that's beside the point because the dilemma isn't about increasing throughway capacity in the Central Valley, but expanding capacity into and outof the SF and LA metro regions, where highway expansions are insanely expensive. Trains (and planes) let you offload people at various points within the metro region, so there's less of a highway bottleneck[2].
Maybe those studies were biased. Certainly many critics believed so. But the relative costs are much closer than people tend to believe.
>In March 2018, the Authority revised its estimate to $77.3 billion and up to $98.1 billion, pushing initial service to 2029 and services from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 2033
The cost of Ca HSR has gone up to $98 billion. There is no way building even 6 airports could possibly cost that much, and you can build the airports when you need the capacity one at a time and airports support travel to anywhere in the world, not just the handful of other cities in California the rails connect to.
So California could build 5 huge earthquake proof airports in the middle of the ocean including sea wall and bridge for the cost of HSR. It just makes no sense. I'm not opposed to rail or high-speed rail. But the places where better public transportation are needed are mostly in the US North East where density is much higher. Existing rail infrastructure is crumbling in the North East while California asks for Federal money for white elephant boondoggles like Ca HRS. It's infuriating.
Much of the cost increases you see in figures like those quoted for CAHSR are related to timelines.
First, projected infrastructure project costs in the United States are usually quoted (by agencies) in year of expenditure dollars, which means projected expenditures for each particular year are literally inflated. If you push a project back 15 years, you can easily see double-digit percentage increases in quoted total expenditures. I don't know the exact figure but AFAIU this is very much the case with CAHSR--a large fraction, and perhaps even a majority, of nominal cost increases is related to inflation adjustments as the timeline keeps getting pushed back and stretched. (Of course, that still leaves a large component that isn't.)
Secondly, pushing back timelines incurs all sorts of additional real costs. For example, you have to extend supply and labor contracts, which often means you end up getting less for your money because more people and equipment will end up sitting around idle for longer. You can also incur greater financing costs.
Also, I don't think any of the figures in that therichest.com link are inflation adjusted. AFAICT, they seem to just be tallying the year-of-expenditure or perhaps year-of-completion costs. This difference compounds inflation discrepancies even more. (There are other problems w/ those comparisons, too, such as that most of those airports were built far away from developed areas, but it's not worth going down that rabbit hole.)
Time is the themostcritical component in all large construction projects, public or private. Time is money isn't just a catchphrase. If there are any hand-wavy, magical solutions to the cost problem that can be easily applied, one of the simplest and most obvious is to finish projects as quickly as possible. Don't let them linger and get stretched out.
Unfortunately, there are often political and regulatory pressures that push things in the wrong direction. If political blowback causes timelines to be stretched out, directly or indirectly, cost increases become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After learning about the accounting methods for how projected costs are quoted, and in particular digging into CAHSR costs, I vowed as a voting citizen to never oppose a project once it got off the ground, even if I initially opposed it.
I think given the variation in costs for HSR worldwide, we need to consider the first point of discussion for CA (or US) HSR to be "why are the costs so much higher here?"
It's true that the costs are crazy high, but that's not true worldwide. That means that objections to CA/US HSR are initially (at least) really objections to the ridiculous costs, not the actual idea itself.
> Adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
Adding a new route, sure. Adding a new destination, not so much. Are airports cheaper than train stations? I don't know.
> infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US
Is 4 to 7 times higher than anywhere else in the world. We need to bring it down to reasonable levels.
>commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented
HSR isn't for commuting. It is for trips longer than a normal commute. The US is car-oriented - but I disagree with the word "too". HSR won't do as well (at least for the first dozen years) as other countries, but there are a lot of places where it should do well enough if we ever build it for a reasonable cost.
HSR is for commuting in additional to longer travel. I say this as someone that uses the HS1 line in the UK to commute to London at 140mph.
The key is the commute is under an hour, one stop, and it’s into London which a massive source of jobs in South east England.
I agree with your comment that HSR doesn’t do well for a decade. My train runs on the Eurostar line. That took a decade to draw people from planes. And the domestic train that I catch is now standing room only into London.
I like rail service and wish we had better. But right now there’s this political albatross in the US that rail is a slow, inefficient, money pit. That argument has some weight when you look at those super long distance lines. But when you exclude them and focus on the northeast corridor where Amtrak has good quality of service, the argument falls apart.
To me, the long game for the US to have better rail service means focusing on delivering excellent service quality in the places where they can to get some wins. Then expand service as they can while maintaining quality.
Sprinkling “a little rail” broadly across the country costs a lot more money and delivers far lower quality service. We only do it because of the need to get the senators from rural states to support our federal rail program.
I'm actually surprised that those long distance ridership numbers are as high as they are relative to something like the Northeast Corridor. I assume that must include some moderately popular but much shorter segments.
People who think the US needs high-quality commuter rail much more so than fast long-distance rail have the right idea.
Long-distance intercity rail is for the incidental traveler who travels occasionally, and this traveler has many competing choices for their journey.
Meanwhile, the typical commuter rail passenger will ride day after day, both ways, and often their only alternative is an arduous commute in a car -- or moving closer to their job, where their cost of housing would be higher.
Most commuter rail systems in the US suffer from the lack of agency-owned dedicated passenger tracks, and from poor integration into the metropolitan area's cohesive transportation fabric (of which both personal cars and downtown public transit are an inseparable part).
Much success could be achieved by (1) increasing the average speed of commuter transit, (2) investing in reliability, predictability, and frequency of service, (3) investing in Park-and-Ride hubs near certain stations, (4) looking for synergy with freeways and exits, (5) promoting transit-oriented development by both developer incentives and by land purchase and direct investment. The resulting changes would create a culture of transit use for commuting, which will go on to enable the eventual connection of the rail transit networks of neighboring city-pairs.
As for California, an Altamont Pass segment to their High Speed Rail project ought to have been one of first things built. A faster 'Altamont Corridor Express' would have created a ~1-hour link between Stockton and the Bay, integrating the corridor's economy further beyond its current role as an overlong exurban commute. It would've also provided for an alternate rail routing between Sacramento and the Bay that'd be competitive with the Capitol Corridor.
After the initial push towards a 'Super ACE', Altamont lost in the planning to Pacheco Pass; this increased linearity and reduced distance in the SF-SJ-Fresno axis, but in my opinion it was the wrong move. Fresno's accession to the economic continuum of the Bay is far less likely than that of Stockton or Modesto, and the increased linearity doesn't confer a meaningful benefit. Travelers are far more likely to travel between SJ and SF than between SJ and Fresno (or any point further south), so there's little operational benefit to having both SJ and Fresno accessible from San Francisco with no transfers from the same Fresno-bound train. The choice of the Pacheco Pass route is one of the several facepalm-worthy decisions made by CAHSR or by others early on in the process, like an extremely sweeping curve on a long, expensive viaduct just outside of Fresno station [1], or the barely-realistic journey times written into legislation that drive up cost.
you’re basically just wanting to solve the suburban/exurban commute problem, but that only exacerbates sprawl. that saps away resources and spreads it much thinner than creating denser, mixed-use neighborhoods in urban cores and developing inter-city high-speed rail for commerce.
LA to SF is one of the most travelled corridors in the country and rail can legitimately compete with air here. the decision to put it through the central valley was politically motivated rather than utilitarian. the coastal route up through san jose and silicon valley would have been more utilitarian (which is not to say that serving the central valley is unworthy, just less utilitarian).
I see why you'd say that, but the difference between (a) commuter rail lines between the urban core and every suburban edge city [1] vs. (b) high-speed intercity rail between high-population city-pairs ~300 miles apart [2] is one of scale.
The commuter rail operates on the scale of the primary city's own metropolitan area, encouraging activity nodes around those stations that are better placed than others. The idealized role of commuter rail is to provide reliability, predictability, and throughput, so that travelers want to concentrate their trips to the same transportation modes and nodes.
Meanwhile, intercity rail must balance its need to compete with air travel [3] with its desire to serve larger towns along the line. If it opts to serve fewer intermediate stops, it can deliver a better value proposition for long-distance city-to-city travelers, assuming there's transit or car rental options on the other end, like airports have today.
But if it opts to serve more stops along the route, those towns may turn into far-flung exurbs themselves, since they offer quick access to much larger job market. If that happens, you will get sprawl anyway [4]-- the spread of low-rise development on greenfield land as a "cheaper now, don't think about later" response to increased housing demand -- but you'll get the kind of sprawl that's typical of a bedroom community, instead of the kind typical of a mixed-used edge city. This is because the rail will out-range the reach of personal cars from the commuting zone, so the economic integration of the town into the adjacent metropolitan area will be be partial and asymmetric.
In California, the decision to route the SF-LA high speed rail through the Central Valley was a sensible one, because the terrain in the Central Valley is more conducive to high speed rail than up the coast through Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, and the Valley has significantly larger metropolitan areas than the locales along the coast. Both options require multiple challenging mountain range crossings. It's the SF-LA link itself that's tenuous to justify, because there's perfectly fine airports available today to anyone who wants to hop between the two.
[2] The approximate distance of Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-St Louis, Chicago-Cincinnati.
[3] Air travel is the most direct competitor of intercity rail, because both will discharge you at your destination with no car, and compared to a commuter scenario, the intended destinations of passengers will vary greatly within the broader geographical area.
[4] Sprawl spreads because cheap greenfield land exists at the momentary edge of all but the most geographically-constrained areas, many developers prefer these these cheap-to-build sites, and many people do prefer low-rise single-family homes with yards. Sprawl will always spread if housing demand outpaces supply unless you forbid it by law or ordinance, because new construction on greenfield land confers tangible benefits to those who can afford it.
sure, the difference is one of scale, but it's also one of purpose. the purpose of commuter rail is to be a spoke in a hub and spoke model. the purpose of intercity rail is to connect the hubs themselves. these superficially similar modes of transportation really shouldn't be contraposed, but if they were as in your argument, we should pick intercity rail over commuter rail because it tends to support density and walkability over sprawl (with all the environmental, health, and quality of life benefits that entails).
availability of land is a lesser factor for sprawl compared to reach. practically no one lives in suburban lands (like intraurban mountainscapes) unserviced by roads. sprawl is directly correlated to where we put roads, and less so to where there is open land. further, roads (and other infrastructure) are heavily subsidized, both directly and due to uninternalized externalities.
internalize all those externalities and we'd have much less debate on this topic. folks could simply choose what they prefer relative to actual costs.
> Long-distance intercity rail is for the incidental traveller who travels occasionally
US domestic air travel is growing at 5% a year, compound that over a decade or two and it's hardly "incidental" travellers anymore, it's everyone flying whenever they can. It is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions and is not easily replaced.
