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the tendency for open source game developers to spend massive amounts of time simply copying something we already have disappoints me

The tendency for other people to do things in their spare time to entertain themselves and others like them but not you is truly a great human failing- If only someone would write an epic novel to memorialize this for future generations: I've tried posting on slashdot but I'm yet to convince any accomplished writers to write stuff to my specification for free...

In my experience, inventing your own gameplay mechanics is far easier and more fun than implementing them.

Presumably why there's no code to download from your game site, right?

Why re-make Zelda when you could be creating something completely original?... I would be far more interested if someone had created an entirely original gameplay engine and an entirely original game

If you only care about certain aspects of game creation, you're not going to waste a lot of time being original in every other department you don't care about. The fact is, there's plenty of people making their own contributions to experimental gaming if you go look for them (Kenta Cho comes to mind in the graphics departmnet). But moost of those projects aren't worth a slashdot article, and very few have the nostalgia factor of 8-bit Legend of Zelda.

Not trolling, but (with one obvious exception - Virgin Galactic) when has Branson innovated?
Heh. Pam-Am Airlines (a huge airline at one time, now long since bankrupt) gave away "free moon flight" tickets years ago. They wanted (and believed) they would be the first airline to offer flights into space.

Here's a pic of one of the goodies that came in their space packet:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ym9n-em/about/card.htm l

I agree with you that sequels can be innovative - your example of Mario 64 is a good one. Still, Mario 64 had many qualities that made it a Mario game. It still had goombas that you could kill by stomping on their heads. It still had platforming sequences, underwater areas, Bowser... to me, it was Mario translated into 3D. In the same way, Metroid Prime feld just like Metroid translated into 3D. The problem that I have with this is that I was playing Mario and Metroid when I was 7 years old. There can be original concepts in established series, but for the most part series advancement is evolutionary rather than revolutionary (like Mario Sunshine compared to Mario 64, or Wind Waker compared to Ocarina of Time). With the similarities between what's been shown on the DS hardware and N64 games, I honestly don't expect to see that much innovation in established series, as most of them have already made the jump from 2D to 3D. Do you really think that people would buy a 3D Mario game if it played nothing like Mario 64? A franchise allows very little freedom for innovation. I would like to see games that take advantage of the DS hardware to deliver something that gamers have never really seen. The surgery game is a good example of this. While there have been surgery games in the past, this is not simply a rehash of those games. What about a game like Noize2 (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/java/noiz2_e .html) in which the point of the stylus is the player's ship?

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so I'll throw it out there -- PARSEC47 is proof that talented individuals need not be specialists. Tumiki fighters and parsec have been featured on slashdot not too long ago, with source code and windows binaries. I'm pleased to mention that an acquaintance has started up a sourceforge project to port Cho's games to Linux.

PARSEC is attributed to a single person, Kenta Cho. To sum the game is difficult, but I shall try. It's a stereotypical top down shooter with incredible amounts of ammo coming your way. Part of what distinguishes itself from the crowd is its particular aesthetic. The majority of the visuals are abstract GL_LINES, visually reminiscent of Tempest, and the music is trance/techno. It doesn't pay attention to plot, pacing or any other modern trappings of a "game" but is still very enjoyable. It has no plot, much like tetris has no ending, other than failure. It is a genre distilled and its waiting for you.

There are still plenty of people making awesome, simple games that you can sit down at for 20 min and just have fun. Check out this guy's stuff, you'll never think of 2-D shooters the same way again.

I really like the trend in indie gaming twoards non-photorealism. These games are supposed to look GOOD, but not REAL. This allows developers to focus more on gameplay. The retro kick makes it even cooler.

Two freeware examples of surrealist games (which are a hell of a lot of fun) that come instantly to mind are :
Noiz2sa (OS X Port)
RRootage (OS X Port)

I really like the trend in indie gaming twoards non-photorealism. These games are supposed to look GOOD, but not REAL. This allows developers to focus more on gameplay. The retro kick makes it even cooler.

Two freeware examples of surrealist games (which are a hell of a lot of fun) that come instantly to mind are :
Noiz2sa (OS X Port)
RRootage (OS X Port)

If you enjoyed Every Extend, you might also enjoy Kenta Cho's Tumiki Fighters, A7Xpg, or my personal favorite, Parsec 47. Tumiki Fighters is a stylish shooter, where pieces of your battered enemies glom onto your ship; eventually, you become a behemoth that can't help but stumble into incoming fire. I love Parsec 47, because it brings me back to arcades during the early '80s. MAME does this in a nostalgic manner, but Parsec does a great job of overwhelming the player with bright, flashy, fun graphics. It's what I remember arcade games to be.

Cho's games are why I'll contend that smaller developers can still wow audiences with style -- Parsec's not art-centric-beautiful, the way Doom III is; it's just damned pretty.

If you enjoyed Every Extend, you might also enjoy Kenta Cho's Tumiki Fighters, A7Xpg, or my personal favorite, Parsec 47. Tumiki Fighters is a stylish shooter, where pieces of your battered enemies glom onto your ship; eventually, you become a behemoth that can't help but stumble into incoming fire. I love Parsec 47, because it brings me back to arcades during the early '80s. MAME does this in a nostalgic manner, but Parsec does a great job of overwhelming the player with bright, flashy, fun graphics. It's what I remember arcade games to be.

Cho's games are why I'll contend that smaller developers can still wow audiences with style -- Parsec's not art-centric-beautiful, the way Doom III is; it's just damned pretty.

If you enjoyed Every Extend, you might also enjoy Kenta Cho's Tumiki Fighters, A7Xpg, or my personal favorite, Parsec 47. Tumiki Fighters is a stylish shooter, where pieces of your battered enemies glom onto your ship; eventually, you become a behemoth that can't help but stumble into incoming fire. I love Parsec 47, because it brings me back to arcades during the early '80s. MAME does this in a nostalgic manner, but Parsec does a great job of overwhelming the player with bright, flashy, fun graphics. It's what I remember arcade games to be.

Cho's games are why I'll contend that smaller developers can still wow audiences with style -- Parsec's not art-centric-beautiful, the way Doom III is; it's just damned pretty.

Jeeze, what planet (or university) are you from? Someplace where Google or Copernic is outlawed?

(Even coordinating a "joint annoucement" among an international group of top academicians, and their respective corporations and universities, typically takes -- trust me -- the patience of Job;-)

And what are you demanding, anyway: a detailed explanation of how Franke et al tweaked their algorithm for lattice sieving? A report on their new implementation of the block Lanczos algorithm for sparse matrices over F2? You say you want an estimate of how your individual efforts might be compared to (sic) their's? Pleeeeeeese!

(You are also wrong to declare that the "last stage" -- the post-processing the siever output -- hasn't been implemented in a distributed fashion. Frankel and friends wrote parallel implementations for both the filtering and the Lanczos step, and they had them running them on a LINUX cluster at IAM in Bonn a couple of years ago.)

This is not really a hardware game yet. The difference between my LAN and the 100 workstations they used to crack RSA174 is neither the number nor speed of the CPUs they used -- rather, it's the touch of obsessive genius involved in constantly refining their algorithms, and adapting them to more distributed computing efforts. There's a reason that all these record-breaking factoring efforts involve the same dozen or so famous gentlemen!! Not even the NSA bothers to compete with them in basic research on factoring!

For a little perspective, visit NSFnet to study up on their G(S)NFS implementation, which was built, at least in part, around the effort to factor this RSA Challenge number.

There still isn't any efficient G(S)NSF implementation that an individual can use on his own computers to factor numbers over 100 digits.

Below 100 digits, however, there is Satoshi Tomabechi's PPSIQS.

See also Chris Monico's GGNFS, which has reportedly been used to successfully factor numbers up to 50 digits or so.

Please put a leash on your hubris. Demanding that genius be translated into vernacular (and quickly!) is unreasonable, as well as futile.

Good god, people, the creator of the language deserves better than a score of 1---especially when he's counter-attacking a piece of FUD that got way over-modded.

Further discussion on memory management as it relates to D can be found here.

A slick, responsive 3D fighter game written in D (and somehow unencumbered by the burden placed on it by the garbage collector) can be found here. Source included, so you can see how slick it is on the inside.

And Walter: Thank you. I've spent a lot of time reading and interpreting the ISO C++ standard, and it usually leaves my brain feeling itchy, flaky, and swollen. With that in mind, I'd just like to say that, after reading all the specs I could find, D (so far) seems to me like the Gold Bond Medicated Powder of programming languages. :-)

noiz2sa - SDL
Aleph One - SDL/OpenGL
BZ Flag - OpenGL
Egoboo - SDL/OpenGL
PoopemUp - SDL/OpenGL
Neverwinter Nights - SDL/OpenGL
Not to mention all the Loki titles that used SDL (heck, didn't they develop it in the first place?): Myth, Rune, Civ3,Sim City 3000, Tribes 2, Alpha Centauri, and so on
Don't forget the billion or so Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein 3D ports/spinoffs.

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

C'mon, people. Let's show Kenta Cho some well-deserved love.

If you like shmups(vertical scrolling shoot'em ups with millions of bullets on the screen) you should check out:

ABA games

The graphics are abstract, but the gameplay is pure shmup. You can download the sourcecode and also modify the bullet patterns which he defines using an XML-like markup language called, bulletML.

Wow, that sounds pretty cool.

rRootage is another random game, though limited: a "boss only" space shooter, where big enemy motherships get created for your blasting pleasure.

Other similar ideas are a few games that generate games based on music...there was that one (unreleased in the USA?) for PSX, MOnster Rancher, a few others based on MP3...

Are we still waiting for FPS to "randomize" your opponents, mixing 'em the visual appearance enough so every game doesn't feel like a battle against the clone armies of Star Wars?

Noiz2SA

Admittedly its developed for Windows, but it uses SDL, and with just a bit of tweaking I had it compiled and running just fine on Linux. (You'll need to hunt down and compile the bulletML library as well as edit the provided Makefile to link against the appropriate lib*.so instead of the .dll's. It also doesn't "install", it expects to be run from the root of the directory created when you extract everything)

The music and the action in this game rocks. The artwork is way abstract, which makes it cool to look at. In my opinion the only thing that this game lacks is weapon upgrades.

Sorry, no.

You can find a copy of the treaty here.
If you read it, it says (paraphrasing here) "both parties will endeavour to settle any international disputes peacefully" but gives both parties "the right to defend Japan". In other words, there's no requirement that *only* Japan maintain a peaceful stance, and certainly nothing that says Japan's not allowed to use its armaments to defend itself.
On top of that, towards the end you'll see a section on concluding the treaty, which reads "after ten years from the signing of this treaty, either party may declare it void, with this taking effect one year thereafter". Since it was signed in 1960, there's no legal reason why Japan couldn't say that they're quitting the treaty.

What your army officer was probably talking about is the clause in the constitution - some legal scholars believe that it forbids Japan from owning any armaments, not just offensive armaments.

There are already some emacs mp3 players.

Get Amped is built using a custom Java libraries(Keel, similar to the situation with Eclipse and SWT). It comes with an embedded JRE though.

For "cool game-like" applets, you can try BulletML's demo applet, as well as the related BulletMorph applet(genetic evolving of 2D shooter bullets). Kenta also has a Java applet version of Noiz2 available as well.

Get Amped is built using a custom Java libraries(Keel, similar to the situation with Eclipse and SWT). It comes with an embedded JRE though.

For "cool game-like" applets, you can try BulletML's demo applet, as well as the related BulletMorph applet(genetic evolving of 2D shooter bullets). Kenta also has a Java applet version of Noiz2 available as well.

Get Amped is built using a custom Java libraries(Keel, similar to the situation with Eclipse and SWT). It comes with an embedded JRE though.

For "cool game-like" applets, you can try BulletML's demo applet, as well as the related BulletMorph applet(genetic evolving of 2D shooter bullets). Kenta also has a Java applet version of Noiz2 available as well.

Broadband via cable TV is available, but cable modems are a fairly new thing over there and many apartments don't have the cable lines anyway. (Take a look at any apartment building in Japan and you'll see dozens of those mini satellite dishes perched on the balconies.) However, if you want cable TV and broadband Internet, you can get a pretty good deal by combining the two -- about 80 USD/month. You might need a local friend to help you, though, because most cable providers don't have English-speaking customer service.

If you just want the Internet access, a better option is ADSL, which has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. Before ordering, you first need to decide whether you want land-line (as opposed to cellular) phone service. If you want a land line, get ADSL Type I, which includes phone service and Internet access. If you plan to get a cell phone in Japan, choose ADSL Type II, which provides Internet access only, but for a lower price.

The cheapest ADSL service is probably Yahoo! Japan BB, but they don't provide any English support, not even for sales. You're better off going with a company that has a dedicated English-speaking support line such as Global OnLine or eAccess. Unfortunately, these providers usually serve only the larger metropolitan areas, so if you're in a suburb or a smaller town, your only choice might be good old NTT. All you have to do is call the English-speaking sales line for NTT (the number depends on whether you live in the east or in the west) and tell them you want ADSL Type II. They'll be happy to hook you up for about 25 USD/month, and you can rent an ADSL modem from them for another 5 USD/month. Important tip: NTT will send you a CD-ROM containing PPPoE drivers that only work with the Japanese version of Windows, so you should download the freeware program RASPPPOE before you go and bring it along with you. It's compatible with NTT's ADSL modems.

There's another catch: Because NTT only provides the physical ADSL connection, you'll need to find an ISP that supports ADSL. I got mine through OCN for about 20 USD/month. They offer sales and support in English.

The Macintosh has about the same percentage of market share in Japan as in the U.S. (in other words, not much), so you can expect the same level of support and availability over there that you'll find here. I expect it's entirely possible to hook up your Mac to a Japanese ADSL modem, but don't expect much technical support if things go wrong. (I had no trouble connecting through my Linux laptop once I got the Roaring Penguin configuration set up right.) As for 802.11b, coverage is almost non-existent, although just about everyone over there does email wirelessly through their cell phone. Text messaging and services like DoCoMo are far more popular than the Internet in Japan, at least for now.

You should visit the ISP Japan FAQ for more details. You might also want to check out my Japan page for tips on living and working in Japan.

I highly recommend mi for anyone who's looking for a text editor for coding purposes. It's got customizable syntax coloring, FTP (better than BBE's), integration with shell scripts, and all kinds of goodies. And it's free (as in beer).

Yea right.If this is aesthetically pleasing, then see the Solar Sail, that one I could actually think of planting in my garden.

Well?

I live in Tokyo, and I have to say these things scare me...OK, one guy points out that if its cold, the heated seat can be nice. But, in our office men's room, people leave the heat on full blast all the time, and its somehow very sickening to sit on a hot toilet seat when you gotta take care of business...

The other thing is how sanitary is some little plastic water gun squirting high pressure water point blank at your arse?!

Lastly, sometimes these things get outta hand, and you don't know which button is used to flush. (Especially if you don't know too much Japanese!) I was in a hotel once, and the toilet seat itself didn't have any buttons; there was a HUGE (7x5")IR Remote velcroed to the wall with a sheet of instructions on using all the different functions. Honestly, you had to flush the toilet with a remote that had maybe 15-20 buttons on it...

I guess its better than the traditional Japanese toilet...

See Budapest by Blimp.

check out Huge Kite Museum for sample of size that can be built from low tech material.

also see Chronological Table of Kite History- time wise it works

So all is possible...

My person favorite: Pharaoh's Pump Foundation -- the pyramids are gaint water pumps!!

Given the deep differences between America and some countries that have successfully implemented gun control, I doubt that strict gun control would help much with the American's horrid record of violent crime. Gun control in the USA would likely reduce sucides and accidental death's, but I doubt it would reduce violent crime much. Still, gun control would save many lives.

As quoted in the next section, the main problem with guns is that they make it much too easy to kill. It lets one excalate violence much faster than other weapons - often causing uncessessary death. A rational person does not arm themself with lethal weapons for everyday life. A drunk armed with a knife isn't likely to kill a friend in a drunken rage, while this happens all to often when the drunk has a gun. I have never heard of anyone knifing a son or daughter to death by accident, but guns bought for 'home defense' kill more family and friends than intruders.

A Lucid Gun control Sight and Some quotes from it: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~zj5j-gttl/guns.htm

The problem with guns

The problem with guns is fairly straightforward: they make it easy to kill or injure a person. In Jeffrey A. Roth's Firearms and Violence (NIJ Research in Brief, February 1994, found at http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/guns/gun.viol), he points out the obvious dangers:

Approximately 60 percent of all murder victims in the United States in 1989 (about 12,000 people) were killed with firearms. According to estimates, firearm attacks injured another 70,000 victims, some of whom were left permanently disabled. In 1985 (the latest year for which data are available), the cost of shootings--either by others, through self-inflicted wounds, or in accidents--was estimated to be more than $14 billion nationwide for medical care, long-term disability, and premature death. (Editor's note: the number of gun victims has increased since 1989 to 15,456 gun homicides in 1994. Source: FBI UCR report.) In robberies and assaults, victims are far more likely to die when the perpetrator is armed with a gun than when he or she has another weapon or is unarmed.

Suicides

Residents of homes where a gun is present are 5 times more likely to experience a suicide than residents of homes without guns

Self-defense

But research has shown that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder.

Research by Dr. Arthur Kellerman has shown that keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one.

Other weapons

"People kill with knifes, too. Do you want to ban knifes?" From Dr. Roth's study: The overall fatality rate in gun robberies is an estimated 4 per 1,000--about 3 times the rate for knife robberies, 10 times the rate for robberies with other weapons, and 20 times the rate for robberies by unarmed offenders.

Gun Control, a History of Candian Gun control http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/Canadian_Gun_Control .htm

All generalizations are false.

This "Linux on iPAQ" sounds great to me, but I should point out that the name "PocketLinux" has already been used for more than a year by an OSS project porting Linux to some PDA from NEC.

Check out http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~bg3k- ysd/pocketlinux/.

As both project involves in same area, they'd better consider resolving this name crash...

Tudor Parfitt researched an African tribe called the Lemba, who claimed to be of Jewish decent. As well as the anthropological evidence, DNA was used to link the Lemba with Jews, specifically the Cohen modal haplotype. (Cohanim being the Jewish priests.)

So I'm thinking DNA could also tell us who Kennewick Man is, and trace the history of American indians. Where in Asia did they come from? Were there any migrations from Europe? And are they related to the Ainu?

While the "GeekGadgets" version is older than this, I think, version 20 has been ported. Go to http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xv9k -oki/en/Emacs.html.