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The question raised is whether you can add restricions so that each user can read/write files as their user on the server, not as www, or root, or whoever is running httpd.

You're mixing authentication (identity) with authorization (privilege). Read up on Apache::Authen vs Apache::Authz . You can intercede arbitrary access control modules (via the C or Perl APIs), before any content handling module (incl. DAV).

Brown has documented an elaborate system.

In my neck of the woods (New England), the Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is well worth a visit. They have a bunch of unique MS collections ("manuscript," not "Microsoft"), including an unrivalled selection of H. P. Lovecraft. They also have a huge collection of comic books donated by a professor from my alma mater.

In Worcester, Massachusetts is the The Higgins Armory Museum, which features the collection of arms and armor accumulated by John Woodman Higgins. It is, as the curators will happily tell you, the only museum in the Western Hemisphere dedicated to arms and armor.

Also, probably not worth a visit, but interesting to note if you happen to be passing by, the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts was made by evacuating and flooding four towns. If you hear anyone talking about the Lost Towns, that's what they mean. Always creeps me out to drive past it.

-Carolyn

In my neck of the woods (New England), the Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is well worth a visit. They have a bunch of unique MS collections ("manuscript," not "Microsoft"), including an unrivalled selection of H. P. Lovecraft. They also have a huge collection of comic books donated by a professor from my alma mater.

In Worcester, Massachusetts is the The Higgins Armory Museum, which features the collection of arms and armor accumulated by John Woodman Higgins. It is, as the curators will happily tell you, the only museum in the Western Hemisphere dedicated to arms and armor.

Also, probably not worth a visit, but interesting to note if you happen to be passing by, the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts was made by evacuating and flooding four towns. If you hear anyone talking about the Lost Towns, that's what they mean. Always creeps me out to drive past it.

-Carolyn

This has nothing to do with Photon's momentums or other such high physics and is a simple phenomena.

You are right when you describe the operation of the usual low cost Crooke's Radiometer. With these, the gas flow effects dominate.

However, if you get one with a really good vacuum you will see the blades spin the opposite way, that is to say the white side is pushed harder than the black. The reason is that the light reflects from the white side, doubling the momentum from photons that strike that side, while the black side absorbs the photons, delivering only the momentum with no multiplier. This is what would happen in space, which is a very good vacuum.

Gold's article says that Crookes' radiometer has invariably rotated in the opposite sense to the expected one. The black side of the paddles invariably recedes from the light, and many explanations have been offered, but not including that which would seem the most obvious: the absence of radiation pressure on the bright side.

This is either incredibly naive or incredibly disingenuous. Crooke's radiometer is well-understood: air heated by the black side of the paddles expands and pushes the paddles away from it. Operate the radiometer in a vacuum, and it doesn't move---proving only that dim light bouncing off tiny paddles cannot overcome significant friction. Reduce the friction, and the radiometer works just as expected (see the link).

The thing about unrefereed, unedited pubs is that these days it is not that hard to get anything even slightly clueful published in either a refereed conference or journal or a reasonably-edited popular publication: there are lots of venues. So when an extraordinary claim shows up on arxiv, you should probably figure it's nonsense unless experts tell you otherwise.

The article refutes the idea of solar sails designed to use momentum from photons to move a sail through space. The article seems to confuse thermodynamics and mechanics, ignoring the conservation of momentum to make its point. The article makes points out the fact that a perfect reflector would not drop the photons temperature, so it cannot be used as an engine (no temperature drop in a Carnot cycle).

Since a photon's 'temperature' is proportional to its frequency, I guess this is true. If there is no frequency change when the photon is reflected back in the opposite direction from a perfect reflector there is no 'temperature' change. But the direction of the photon is changed by reflection, and momentum must be conserved. an imperfect reflector would probably result in some 'temperature' change. How you could use this in a Carnot cycle I don't know.

The article quotes a Steven Soter: "Steven Soter, an astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, is open to Gold's idea. He says applying conservation of momentum to photons could be a mistake. 'Light is very different from matter, and one may wonder if the momentum rules are also different.'" Soter works at Hayden planetarium and was a collaborator with the late Carl Sagan. I don't know his background or credentials.

His statement shows a lack of understanding. The momentum of the photons should be p=hf/c. Where p is momentum, h is planck's constant, f is frequency, and c is the speed of light. If the photon is reflected perfectly the sail must pick up twice the original momentum in order to balance out. Momentum has both direction and magnitude. If you start out with one photon moving away fron the sun (call it one unit of momentum) and a stationary sail. After reflection you have one photon moving torwards the sun. The reflected photon has the same magnitude, but opposite direction, or -1 unit of momentum.

But conservation of momentum means that the total system should be the same before as after or one unit (positive direction) total. So to get a total of one positive unit the sail must have two positive units of momentum.

before collision the photon has one positive unit, and the stationary sail has zero units for a total of one positive unit. After collision the photon has one negative unit, the sail has two positive units for a total of one positive units. I think that the conservation of momentum has been tested for photons.

The article also states that the first flight of a solar sail will take place this fall, but the Russians have already launched.

The article also incorrectly explains why most crooke's radiometers move in the direction of the white side, and are propelled by the black side, here is a good link that explains why.

Whew! Both Steven Soter and Thomas Gold seem to have good reputations. I think Gold's arguments about a sail not being a carnot engine are accurate, and are being applied out of context. It does not matter if a solar sail is not a good Carnot engine, any more than it matters if a wind sail on a ship is a good Carnot engine. It does matter that a steamship have a good Carnot engine.

Mr. Soter's quote is disturbingly inaccurate.

Seems like a black body surface treatment would be better.

Now that I think about it I remember those little evacuated glass bulbs with the a small turnstile with small paddles - one paddle is black and the other is white. When placed in the sun they turn. That should be enough to prove the concept.

Now, I wouldn't advocate taking up ballroom simply because there tends to be a shortage of men, but I will mention that I got to know my fiancée by being on the team with her.

I keep meaning to look into how difficult it would be to write a tool that could take a list of packages and an apt repository to mirror and create from it a mirror containing just the named packages and their dependencies. Even better would be if it could do it with symlinks to a full repository so that a full repository and a subset can exist side-by-side without wasting disk.

It's certainly possible to produce special-purpose distributions from other distributions, but only Debian lends itself to this sort of manipulation and centralization.

Picture here.

By the way, this was a final project for cs32, the sophemore level software engineering class at Brown University.

Why not?

There are people that like to learn languages to speak and express themselves in those languages with people from other places. That is the people that will learn portuguese, japanese, swedish or other languages with a few million speakers.

But then, there is also another bunch of people that just likes languages. I.e., knowing how they work, why they work like that ... and of course, creating new languages. That's what Tolkien did, that's what Marc Okrand did (he's the creator of Klingon), and that's what many people is doing. It has even a name, and it's conlanging (from CONstructed LANGuages). A wonderful introductory piece is at Boheme Magazine.

The official meeting place for conlangers is CONLANG, a mailing-list that has been going strong since 1991. And for links, you have conlanglinks, with many resources to know more about conlanging or about languages in general. The audience of CONLANG is very diverse, but I'd dare to say that most of them are either programmers or language-related people (teachers, linguists, etc.)

Conlanging is fun. Really :-) I'm no linguist, but conlanging is something very creative, and for me it's quite like a programming problem: you have some rules (that you create), and have to use them to express all the things that a language can express. And from the time that you express something in your own created tongue, you're hooked %-)

Anyway, I can understand that I'm quite weird and that many people consider this a loss of time. But hey, even Eric Raymond likes it. Basically, if you like RP games and science-fiction and have somewhat of a creative streak, you very well could like conlanging.

My own conlang is named Unahoban, and a quite incomplete and sometimes incoherent grammar is here.

The two main standards currently under development are OpenGL ES by the Khronos group and the JSR-184 headed by Nokia. If you read through the list of participating companies, you'll notice a good bit of overlap; we can expect the two APIs to play quite nicely together.

Mobile 3D hardware will also be coming probably sooner than what most people think. Some Ericsson researchers will be giving a SIGGRAPH talk on the subject ("Graphics for the Masses: A Hardware Rasterization Architecture for Mobile Phones") even if nothing more than the title is known at this time.

While all mobile devices will have to make their own compromises on functionality, battery life, weight and cost, almost all of them are capable of running 3D graphics when the software is carefully constructed. Many modern software rendering techniques are based on dynamically generated/compiled code, and the processes are very similar to what happens inside 3D hardware. As these libraries will also be fairly small, they will not add cost or weight to the devices themselves. 3D chips will be reserved to those more keen on playing games on the road.

The technology is definitely coming, now all we need to do is invent the killer application. Ideas anyone?

Jouni

The Nabataeans did a good job at this.

As it turned out, the real problem was not teaching OOP to the students. OOP is easier to explain to new programmers than structured programming (people use real-world objects all the time - not so much real-world procedures). Half-way through the first semester, the students could implement Tetris.

The real problem was retraining the faculty. Even though they knew OOP was a good thing, it took them a while before they had internalized OOP enough to present, e.g., algorithms and data structures in an object-oriented style. No one believed that you could teach inheritance and polymorphism before you taught loops, conditionals, and arithmetic.

Faculty teaching the intro courses may be in touch with industry and research. That's not enough. The faculty need to rethink an entire course to present the right academic material in a modern, industry-relevant way. If the faculty can do that (and, make no mistake, it isn't easy), they you'll get a course the students love, that will get them a job, and that will prepare them for a strong academic program as well.

For the truly curious, the textbook for that course is actually still in print, even though it depended on Borland Pascal, which is long-since defunct.

As it turned out, the real problem was not teaching OOP to the students. OOP is easier to explain to new programmers than structured programming (people use real-world objects all the time - not so much real-world procedures). Half-way through the first semester, the students could implement Tetris.

The real problem was retraining the faculty. Even though they knew OOP was a good thing, it took them a while before they had internalized OOP enough to present, e.g., algorithms and data structures in an object-oriented style. No one believed that you could teach inheritance and polymorphism before you taught loops, conditionals, and arithmetic.

Faculty teaching the intro courses may be in touch with industry and research. That's not enough. The faculty need to rethink an entire course to present the right academic material in a modern, industry-relevant way. If the faculty can do that (and, make no mistake, it isn't easy), they you'll get a course the students love, that will get them a job, and that will prepare them for a strong academic program as well.

For the truly curious, the textbook for that course is actually still in print, even though it depended on Borland Pascal, which is long-since defunct.

More information from here, in an article from an Anime mailing list, in reference to bootlegged DVDs:


Further to my last e-mail. I went to a lecture at the Leeds East Asian Research Society tonight. It was by a police officer from the Met. in London talking about Chinese triads. He said that one of the big money spinners for mainland triads was - yep! you guessed it! - bootlegging DVD's. Actually it was a bit gruesome - perhaps more to your taste as a former forensic scientist then to a sensitive, squeamish soul like myself! To titillate his student audience he brought in full colour photo's of what these guys do to folk with whom they have some difference of opinion. It seems they like to slice them up with meat cleavers. The Chinese gangs are apparently quite artistic about it - they prefer not to kill their victims, just to slice chunks off them to leave them permanently scarred and disfigured as living warnings to anyone else who might be tempted to go their own way. The Vietnamese gangs are, it seems, less cultured in their use of ironmongery and merely stab their victims with often fatal consequences. Perhaps this is because of the mainland triads other big money spinner - people smuggling. (Do you remember all those poor kids who died in a container lorry in Dover a while back?) Apparently this is such a big thing the gangs give their customers professional training appropriate to their destination. For the UK this is a 2 week course in stir fry cookery! (Apparently they say this is all that's required as the Brits only eat half a dozen Chinese dishes!)

I thought I'd send you this because it reinforces the points you made. People who buy bootleg goods don't want their money to go to the people who created the goods they so desire but would rather it go into the coffers of murderers like these. I don't suppose people who buy bootleg DVD's think that they are supporting the sort of organisation that condemned all those young people to such an appalling death sealed in the container in Dover - but then they probably don't think all that much at all. Perhaps that's unfair. Maybe it's a problem for this generation that in a world dominated by consumer power people are going to be more aware of where their hard earned cash actually ends up.


Still I find the link to terrorism a bit of a stretch.

This will most likely lead open source software such as atc finally getting the recognition it deserves.

Imagine: the buggy (and needless to say proprietary) flight control software is installed. Two months later, grounded flights are at an all time high. The FAA is in an uproar, the media is clamoring for a solution, America is in turmoil.

*ring ring*

What's that? It's the phone. Who is it? Someone named Linux Torvalds...says he has a solution to our problems.

Bing bang bong boing boom, Linux is running the major world airports. Due to the superior stability and dependibility of Open Source Software, Linux is now the poster boy for good production values. The few hundred lives lost in the meantime will be well worth the benefit to software that is Free as in Speech.

Perhaps some of these bsdgames (especially atc) will be incorporated into some Linux distributions. After all, that is the beauty of open source. These features might be what gives Linux that "edge" over Windows that we have all been waiting for.

jonathan lebed

anyone remember this kid?

read the new york times magazine article i linked to if you aren't familiar with his story. it absolutely floored me. great story.

15 years old, made at least $250,000 in six months

the amazing thing about this kid is he settled with the SEC... they BACKED OFF prosecuting him because at the time, shortly before the stock bubble burst a few years ago, his lawyer was ready to make an issue of the illegality of what he was doing... inflating stock prices through hype.

the problem? think about it: what was going on at the time via PROFESSIONAL stock info outlets?

same damn thing

makes you think, doesn't it?

made the SEC think at least, they backed off, so the kid actually cleared some profit (a small percentage of whatever he actually made... no one knows for sure, but not bad for a 15 year old)

amazing!

jonathan lebed: if you're at some university today, lurking on slashdot, my hats off to you for staring down the whole damn SEC ;-P

Yes, his name was Jonathan Lebed. See this article here He was never convicted, but did reach an agreement with the SEC and was fined about $285 K. The article states that his total profit from his dealings were over $800 K, so he did get to keep a huge chunk of his profits. Nice work if you can get it.

Try this link, I just skimmed the article, but it seems to have the answer to your question:

www.brown.edu/Students/Catalyst/pre2001/archive/sp ring98/articles/bomb.html

Yesterday news also hit of bioethicist Dan Brock advocating mandatory abortion for disabled people such as blind and mentally ill.

This is not a new concept, but is one that is growing in feasability and global support.

What does this have to do with cloning and stem cell research? Well they all have the same amoral drive: creating a "better" human race through science without any moral guidelines. As we see on this board, many people ridicule those of us with moral presuppositions as "non-scientific", "ignorant", etc. Above, though, we see an extreme example of this.

Fast-forward now 10 or 20 years. Science has guaranteed a "perfect" child to anybody who can afford one. A minority of rich people get smarter, stronger, better-looking, and richer, in contrast to those who still suffer with gross things like blindness and the worst- mental inferiority. It wasn't enough to genetically engineer perfect children. The question now is "Why hold on to that last moral presupposition that we shouldn't kill scientifically inferior people?" You may think me an extremist, but it's happened before.

That is the question that should be answered today. If you truely believe in removing morals from science, be logically consistent with it: advocate a super-human race and the death of all inferior people. If you believe in moral presuppositions, though, realize what unchecked research in cloning, embryionic stem cells, and science in general will lead to. Either way, the question is: what criteria do you use to value human life? You may have about a year to decide.

There are alternatives, such as adult stem cells, which have potential as well and sidestep ethical concerns.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/lectures/13l inux.pdf
pages 7-20

...about 90% of the population considering themselves to be above average? All I could find was this.

Anyway, the point is that the worse you are at something, the more inflated your opinion of your abilities tends to be (I call this "first belt syndrome"...anyone who has studied a martial art will understand the reference), especially if your ego is tied up in doing well at that thing. It's times like these that force many of us to stop using the fun-house mirrors and start figuring out what we really are good at.

And if you still really think you're top notch but not getting the interviews, it's probably your resume and cover letter. Have someone who writes for a living (and does it well) help you get them into shape.

The coolest gestrual system I've ever seen is the gestural 3D Drawing program Sketch at Brown University. You can build pretty detailed 3D scenes with constraints and all quickly.

Actually it wasn't MIT but Brown University. The did it on the side of the library building, by putting chrismas light behinf the windows. It was put by these guys, Techhouse Here is the official site.

Back when it was running I was a URI student, so I lived in the neigborhood. They were very nice guys and even let me play for a little while.

The prize this year is $1000 and a trip to the conference

Actually, if I recall, they will only provide transportation and registration for the conference to students, not professionals. So if a professional won the second place prize at $250, it wouldn't really be in their best intrest to claim it since it would require a plane ticket to the conference (~$200), hotel for two nights $119*2=$238, and conference registration $350 (non-member price), which comes to a grand total of $838, so even if they won the $1000, they would only come out ahead by $162 which wouldn't be worth the vacation days necessary to take the trip anyways.

(Note: The prices for the conference registration and hotel rooms were taken from the conference website)

it's funny you should mention about diamonds, I was reading slasdhot when I saw a comment with this link: Glass with Attitude, an interesting article about the truth with them, something I never realized before. Interesting read..

I agree with most of your points: there's a lot of life left in the model making business. Sometimes models make more sense than 3d work, and since we don't have three dimensional screens, design reference models will be around for quite a while. Oh, and hell no theater won't replaced by CG (holograms?), no matter how good it becomes.

However, due to recent research papers, I do think that 3d-generated actors will be a reality, and without the need for references. There has been a lot of animation research into taking captured actions and changing them to fit the physical characteristics of generated models based on physics. As an example, I motion capture the skinny kid serving coffee on the set throwing a punch, and the motion is mapped to a 3d-generated (and non-aging) Ah-nold, with specialized algorithms adapting the motion to his bodytype, speed, size, etc. Its possible that eventually there will be whole libraries of motions that can be used with any 3d-generated 'actor' with the help of adaption alogorithms like these. For more information, you can check out the recent SIGGRAPH stuff, or perhaps look at this guy's work.

Speaking of cloth, yes there is also a lot more work to do here. Animating cloth by hand is a pain. Simulating cloth graphically is not hard, and can look quite good--until it collides with something. Fast cloth-on-cloth collision testing is still a ways away, but in a few years, I think animators will be able to specify the parameters of a model's clothes (for example) and then let the algorithms do the rest. For a good look at recent work in cloth simulation, check out this guy's work.

As long as the computing price/performance ratio keeps improving, the accessibility of computer-generated effects will continue to grow. And with computer graphics being such a hot research topic, both visual and procedural improvements will be coming fast and thick.

-s

...and everyone also knows that women were hired (and sometimes still are I think) to go out into public places and smoke cigarettes, offering cigarettes and a light to men.

What some might not know is that DeBeers paid actresses to wear diamond jewelry during the 1930s, and allowed them to keep the jewels, as diamonds were not as desirable then as they are now. (Similarly, DeBeers' marketroids also crafted the association between diamonds and engagement, forever changing the ritual of courtship in the U.S.)

What? Networked CAVE Quake isn't legal???

There's always XMX - An X Protocol Multiplexor, but I couldn't get it to work when I tried it (though I didn't waste too much time). The only "fault" is that you must run your primary session through it if you want to later have windown appear on many desktops. Dunno about its overhead. I just use x0rfbserver when I'm in a bind.

It is great to see open source software such as atc finally getting the recognition it deserves. Perhaps some of these bsdgames (especially atc) can be incorporated into some Linux distributions. After all, that is the beauty of open source. These features might be what gives Linux that "edge" over Windows that we have all been waiting for.

Do people know that there are two words, "then", and "than"? (See WineX headline for this common mistake.) Have people heard the expression "i before e, except after c"? Certainly our programmers of tomorrow don't know it.

It's just embarassing that so many people even make it out of high school with abysmal written communication skills.

# rant +

Rebecca and Rachel's Super Dooper Robot Trooper. A "retractable utensil" that they call "Super Trooper"?? How... Freudian... I got yer retractable artistic utensil right here, ladies...

you know what the great part about that comment is? If it goes down, it will be me at the CIT (Center for Information Services) at Brown tomorrow morning muttering, "goddamnit..." (I am one of the current SPOC's for the CS department at Brown =)

Anyhow, I don't think you guys are capable of it ;-)

I had to access a TN3270 server a while back. Luckily there is a great freeware client for the Mac.

Someone else mentioned the clients on Tucows. I checked each of them, and they are all shareware. They might be willing to allow a site licence if you drew a nice check, but it sounds like a free client would be better.

I could not dig up a freeware client for Windows that will run across the board (3.x up to XP and ME). In fact, I had trouble digging up a free client at all.

About the only thing I found was on a search of SourceForge. Freehost3270 is apparently in alpha testing right now, but it is probably worth a look. You might even be able to help out. It also has the benifit of being on the server side and not the client side.

You get more spam from hotmail than you do from your school address? I'm guessing Cornell, Brown as backup.

And install it in Hawaii. Those Somoans even eat that sh*t at nice restaurants!

Yuck

Eww

QUICHE!?

Cookbook!?

I'm suprised that nearly nobody has carried the story of the brown reaserchers who put a microchip into a monkey's brain which allowed them to control a computer mouse by thinking

They first played a game with a joystick, then played the same game controlling it with their mind, and they got about the same score both ways

Very interesting story.....has anybody seen anything on this? It's on brown's website at http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/20 01-02/01-098.html

All I can say is, check again. Diatomic oxygen (02 - a standard oxygen molecule) absorbs UV, but only up to 240nm wavelength. When it does this, it breaks down into free oxygen atoms, and frequently re-combines with another oxygen molecule to form ozone (O3).

Ozone absorbs UV radiation between 240 and 320 nm. Without the ozone in the upper atmosphere, this UV radiation would make it through to the surface of the earth.

For details on the chemistry of ozone, check here. More information can be found here, here, here, and many other places on the web.

Please, before popping off on a scientific issue, check the facts and not the politics.

Not only in the US--they control the distribution world-wide, including in Japan. That was what they really wanted when they went after the Ghibli library a few years back--the lucrative Japanese market. America was just an afterthought, and we can see the results of that now.

That was why the Mononoke DVD almost didn't have Japanese audio--Buena Vista Japan objected, fearing that the Japanese would import the DVD back into Japan, and DVD pirates would make cheap knockoffs, and it would hurt their bottom line.

The thought over on the Miyazaki Mailing List is, in part, that Spirited Away might just be Miyazaki's second chance in the USA. If it turns out to be a big hit, then that might kick Disney into gear cranking out the DVDs, if they can put "From the director of Spirited Away" on the cover in big letters. See this message from Marc Hairston for the reasoning.

SOFA (Students On Financial Aid)
VENOM (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem)
GROSS (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS)

Countdown to Snow Crash!

Right now this is Just Another Geeky Toy, but it doesn't seem like it's that far of a leap from the numerous PDAs that people love to carry around.

Personally, I'm waiting for x-ray goggles! ;-)

-- D

English is arguably the world's best language: It has shamelessly borrowed from other languages as needed (or perhaps just wanted) and as a result it allows for an expressiveness and granularity of meaning simply not possible in other languages. English is enormously complex, but that complexity allows unmatched specificity in distinguishing shades of meaning, an attribute that turns out to be tremendously valuable in the real world.

English is a lot like Unix/Linux in this respect - Thomas Scoville wrote an excellent paper a few years ago on the subject of why a love of English is almost a prerequisite for mastering Unix: Elements of Unix Style. A love of English is perhaps one of the best predictors for aptitude in Unix-land. Those that can't (or don't) write well will never really develop fluency and the ablity to effortlessly "think in Unix" that marks the true masters.

On the other hand, the same things that give English its strength have produced inconsistencies that vex, flummox, and perplex non-English speakers, especially in the realm of pronunciation. Try this one out - I'd bet most US college students can't get through it without being tripped up at least once or twice (actually, given the general illiteracy of the college grads I've talked with lately, I'm certain of it): English is tough stuff. Perhaps I should make reading this part of my interview process. At least it would filter out those that think technical skills are the only thing required for success, and the others that fail to recognize that it's far easier to take a good communicator and teach them technical skills than the other way around...

300 words for snow? Yup, if you are from the north
Its an urban myth that eskimoes have 100+ words for Snow and the color white.

This article also states that the SEC wanted it all. Lebed said not without a fight. SEC turned around and said .. ok give us some of it and keep the rest.

In 1968 Douglas C. Engelbart in this demo showed all the things we take for granted now every time we sit down at a computer, use a mobile phone or PDA - hyperlinks are not even half of it.

There is much more about Doug online here and a whole lot more on -

Enough said I think.

On a semi-related note... I wonder if anyone has tried to use a gestural interface with this task in mind. I heard of an interesting project at Brown called Sketch, but haven't seen anything go mainstream. Anyone know?

(a marketing rep lent Techhouse at Brown University an XBox so I got a chance on the system)

Halo is basically a pc game on a console, but the controls were quite good, despite it being a FPS.

The 1 player mode was short. I am not sure how many hours it took, but it was easily completed in a day.

Multiplay is cool. Its kinda fun to jump into a jeep and roll over your opponent, or even better, hitting his jeep just before he manages to get in, making his jeep roll him over (which counts as a suicide).

Anyhow, the graphics were damned nice - which is a good sign for microsoft - that a first gen game looked so good. Maybe most impressive is how smooth the game ran with so many explotions, and moving characfters, and such. Of course, our 65" HDTV helped the experience a bit.

I really wish I could get some nice pc net action on the game, though. I suppose the xbox wouldn't sell if halo came out for the pc. Oh well.