Rift

Rift is a top-down shooter with a time-stopping twist. It was written in XNA by three Drexel students in three days:

• Brandon Bloom - Lead Programmer
• Lee Baker - Programmer and Sound
• Charbel El-Beyrouty - Artist

Watch the video:

(low quality, no sound, obvious recording artifacts -- I might have to buy Fraps)

 

Or download the game (with source):

http://brandonbloom.name/rift.zip

 

Hope you enjoy it!

A googol at Google

Ok, well maybe not quite a Googol (1x10E^100), but certainly 2^63-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807). This quote was taken from a talk by Steve Yegge:

We overflowed a long at Google once. Nobody thought that was possible, but it actually happened.

Working at Google has irreversibly damaged my ability to reason about numbers. One moment you are talking about petabytes of data and the next moment you are talking about nanoseconds. It is truly mind numbing, but it has become hard not to laugh when someone talks about a huuuuge dataset of a few gigabytes or a fast process at a few seconds.

It is easier to pirate Windows than to install it legally

My desktop machine is totally hosed. I don't know why or what is wrong, but it is really bad. So I want to re-install Vista, but I can't find the DVD or product key.

I currently own several Windows Vista licenses:

• Gift for being a Vista beta tester
• Drexel CS Department
• From interning at Microsoft for a combined 9 months (and full-time this July)
  
• Microsoft Dreamspark
• Probably more

I expected to use my beta tester Ultimate license via logging into connect.microsoft.com, downloading the DVD, and getting the product key from Connect as well. Unfortunately, I can't find the product key or download anywhere on the new Connect. Additionally, I'm blocked from all MSDN subscriber downloads because, well, I'm not a subscriber. Strangely enough, I vividly remember being able to download Vista from MSDN at one point...

I'm looking high and low for a spot to download Windows Vista legally. It is laughably easy to download it illegally, and the download speed will be better than Microsoft's servers anyway.

The next version of Windows should be freely available for download and the installer should ask for my Windows Live ID, not some cryptic 5x5 product key.