from John Carmack's "finger" file

John M. Klassa (klassa@aur.alcatel.com)
Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:22:47 -0500


The folks at "id" (the Doom/Quake people) generally keep the public
informed by keeping fairly current .plan and .project files, which you
can get via "finger" (i.e. "finger johnc@idsoftware.com"). I saw this
and had to take pause... $20k -- a drop in the bucket for this guy. :-)

[ Figured the NEXTSTEP tie-in with this crowd wouldn't hurt either... :-) ]

2/8/98
------
Just got back from the Q2 wrap party in vegas that Activision threw for us.

Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief
in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me
is blackjack.

Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a
small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the
hard part is making yourself consistantly behave like a robot, rather than
succumbing to your "gut instincts".

I play a basic high/low count, but I scale my bets widely -- up to 20 to 1
in some cases. Its not like I'm trying to make a living at it, so the
chance of getting kicked out doesn't bother me too much.

I won $20,000 at the tables, which I am donating to the Free Software
Foundation. I have been meaning to do something for the FSF for a long
time. Quake was deployed on a dos port of FSF software, and both DOOM and
Quake were developed on NEXTSTEP, which uses many FSF based tools. I
don't subscribe to all the FSF dogma, but I have clearly benefited from
their efforts.

-- 
John Klassa / Alcatel Telecom / Raleigh, NC, USA <><