Originally Posted by
waterrockets
Yep.
My freaking radio power problem has now turned into a me writing a small game physics engine. It's been a while, but is fun.
Sometimes work is play. And then people pay you $'s just to have fun. Cool, isn't it.
Back in the early-to-mid-1990's I coded up a server-side application that would test the response time between computers on the Internet via a "ping" response time and based on that it would make decisions on which version of a web page to serve. It worked like this: on an HTML request for a page to the server it would first "ping" the asking party and then wait for the response time. For "slow" responses it would serve up the less image intensive version of the page, but for fast responses it would get the "full monty". Back in the day of 56K modem (or 28.8) versus T-1 this was a big issue. I'll tell you how "back in the day" this was: My 286/Windows 3.1 computer on my desktop was the only HTML server in my department and it was serving out the department's webpages. (Windows 3.1 knew NOTHING about TCP/IP and network sockets, so this was a bit of a trick.) With most folks using dial-up back then WWW meant World Wide Wait and we didn't want those folks to get irritated with us because of incredibly slow load times, but at the same time we didn't want those with fast connections to think that we were passe.
Seeing that I was a State of Florida employee at the time and that all intellectual property rights were vested in them, I didn't think for one second of trying to "cash in" on an idea that at the time was worthwhile, but would shortly become meaningless. I let it slide.
However I did think about quitting my job at UF and going to NYC to do web "stuff" at that time. There was ungodly sums of money available to anyone that knew anything back then.