Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle' 232
trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'"
Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.
Re:Facebook is written in php (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, FB has a lot of technological excellence... it isn't seen:
1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.
2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.
3: They are excellent at geolocation.
4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy" where the fault tolerance is in the top of the stack, as opposed to the hardware like the IBM mainframes. This allows for the absolute cheapest machines possible, and if they die, things continue on. Even entire data centers can drop off the face of the earth.
5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.
6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.
7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.
8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.
9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
10: FB is platform agnostic.
So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.
Re: Legendary... (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a good book. I remember getting it at Barnes and Noble back in 1996. Back then AP computer science was taught in Pascal. But his book was in C so I couldn't use any of the code samples. But it was pretty easy to convert to Pascal. Made a rudimentary asteroids game in 320x240 VGA (with page flipping! Although I felt his way of loading VGA latches and then writing was too complicated so I just drew to a memory buffer and copied to alternating video pages with vsync) with prerendered graphics. It was absolutely awesome. And then I accidentally deleted my hard driveâ¦
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Interesting)