The Old New Thing

January 18, 2006 - The Old New Thing

From Doom to Gloom: The story of a video game

January 18, 2006 Jan 18, 2006 01/18/06
Raymond Chen
NPR's Morning Edition developed a series on the subject of flops, and one of their segments was devoted to the rise and fall of John Romero. You can read more about the phenomenon known as Daikatana in a huge series on Gamespot. Set aside at least an hour if you choose to read it. You can also read the Dallas Observer story that opened ...

The cost of trying too hard: Splay trees

January 18, 2006 Jan 18, 2006 01/18/06
Raymond Chen
Often, it doesn't pay off to be too clever. Back in the 1980's, I'm told the file system group was working out what in-memory data structures to use to represent the contents of a directory so that looking up a file by name was fast. One of the experiments they tried was the splay tree. Splay trees were developed in 1985 by Sleator and Tarjan ...