Doom

Download or read book Doom written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

Download or read book Masters of Doom written by David Kushner and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

Download or read book The Legal Code of Ælfred the Great written by Great Britain and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Game Engine Black Book: DOOM written by Fabien Sanglard and published by Software Wizards. This book was released on with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was early 1993 and id Software was at the top of the PC gaming industry. Wolfenstein 3D had established the First Person Shooter genre and sales of its sequel Spear of Destiny were skyrocketing. The technology and tools id had taken years to develop were no match for their many competitors. It would have been easy for id to coast on their success, but instead they made the audacious decision to throw away everything they had built and start from scratch. Game Engine Black Book: Doom is the story of how they did it. This is a book about history and engineering. Don’t expect much prose (the author’s English has improved since the first book but is still broken). Instead you will find inside extensive descriptions and drawings to better understand all the challenges id Software had to overcome. From the hardware -- the Intel 486 CPU, the Motorola 68040 CPU, and the NeXT workstations -- to the game engine’s revolutionary design, open up to learn how DOOM changed the gaming industry and became a legend among video games.

Download or read book Knee-Deep in the Dead written by Dafydd ab Hugh and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gates were there on Phobos when mankind first arrived. Inert, unyielding, impossibly alien constructs, for twenty years they sat lifeless, mute testaments to their long-vanished creators, their secrets hidden. Then one day, they sprang to life... Meet Corporal Flynn Taggart, United States Marine Corps; serial number 888-23-9912. He's the best warrior the twenty-first century has to offer, which is a damn good thing. Because Flynn Taggart is all that's standing between the hell that just dropped in on Mars and an unsuspectingg planet Earth...

Download or read book Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus written by Steve Benner and published by Sams. This book was released on 1995 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This all-inclusive source for creating WAD, PWAD, and other files for use with DOOM covers the most popular utilities available. It also serves as a tutorial for creating a new world to play in DOOM. The CD contains all the utilities and programs necessary to customize and create new worlds for DOOM.

Download or read book Shadows of Doom written by Ed Greenwood and published by Wizards of the Coast. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the gods are stripped of their powers, Elminster must carry the weight of Mystra’s magic upon his mortal shoulders It was the eve of the Time of Troubles. The chaos of spilled blood, lawless strife, monsters unleashed, and avatars roaming Faerûn was still to come. Unbeknownst to mortals, the gods had been summoned together—and among them was Mystra, grown proud and willful in the passing eons. With the others, she was about to be stripped of her godhood. The secret of her power gave her an idea. She made certain preparations, looking always for one who would be her successor . . . But until that person's ascension, her power must be preserved. A lone mortal must carry the greater share of her divine energy until the power could be reclaimed, and it was the fate of this mortal to risk being destroyed or driven wild, involuntarily and without warning. This was the occasion of Elminster's Doom.