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all you have to remember is what changed, no different than differencing disks in the virtualization world.

Take a look at this, a 'text mode' version of elite.

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net...

Elite was of course a procedural universe on a 6502 back in the early 1980s.

And if you want to be 1990's wowed, check out Frontier Elite II...

http://www.frontierastro.co.uk...

This time Elite grew up to include multiple planets, star, even asteroids... It's amazing! and ran on a 68000 or 80286 without a maths coprocessor. David Braben is the go to guy when it comes to procedural universes!

The strained relations between Braben and Bell seem to be connected with some things Braben did on F:FE, after which Bell made some uncomplimentary comments in this interview, after which Braben sued Bell for libel. The original issue does seem to be in part some kind of glory-claiming, but I neither know nor care who's in the right... who knows, perhaps they've kissed and made up by now.

That must be Randomius Factoria.

One of the authors of the original Elite (on the BBC Micro) released the source years ago. Sadly, it's pretty much incomprehensible. I used to program on that platform, but endless pages of uncommented assembly language with multiple instructions per line are actually harder to read than a well formatted disassembly.

Oolite is the 21st century's free elite, it has many expansion packs and an active community.

Ubuntu users: do not install Oolite from Synaptic/Software Center - that's an old version. Download the tar archive.

One of the authors of the original Elite (on the BBC Micro) released the source years ago. Sadly, it's pretty much incomprehensible. I used to program on that platform, but endless pages of uncommented assembly language with multiple instructions per line are actually harder to read than a well formatted disassembly.

Take a look at Geomerics. Most of the visual quality that raytracing is supposed to provide is really better handled by radiosity, and Geomerics real-time radiosity and dynamic lighting is the best I have seen. It is being used in the new version of EVE Online and Battlefield 3. CUDA acceleration was just released for the SDK, which should bring radiosity lighting calculations down to less than 3ms/frame.

  It is based on "geometric algebra" (GA,real-valued Clifford algebra) which without any exaggeration is the most general and elegant form of math that can be used to describe physics and geometry. It works in any dimension of any signature, (5D "conformal" with two null-square dimensions being common for graphics) and allows operations and primitives which aren't effectively possible in conventional computer geometry. About half the top people in the GA field founded Geomerics.

One of the rare experts in GA in the UK who didn't join Geomerics is Ian G.C. Bell who co-wrote Elite, the seminal 3-D and space trading game from which Eve is descended. Ian has a free book, "Maths for (Games) Programmers" online, but the encoding of the HTML math requires using something like Netscape 4.79.

A far more usable introduction is Leo Dorst's free, small GA Viewer program and its associated pdf tutorials, which include the conformal model. This allows playing with the math visually (and it is fun), while also having rigorous but comprehensible instruction.

Of course it doesn't stay in those wells, that's how it was found in the other well too. And it's surely in other wells even further away, just at lower concentrations.

That's why they're looking for the source of the leak by drilling more wells. Once they find the leak they can fix it.

Some say they should shut down the plant while they find the leak. Which is an interesting concept. Do you know how they find leaks in underground pipes? They put in radioactive tracers and then detect for it.

http://www.darvill.clara.net/nucrad/uses.htm

So, as long as the levels of radiation at wells outside the plant are low enough it's safe to keep running the plant while the leak is found.

Also, radiation doesn't build up in your body. There is a model for body damage from radiation that counts cumulative exposure over a long period. But that isn't because the radiation stays in your body the whole time, it's because the damage from the radiation takes a long time to repair so it's useful mathematically to sum it up over time.

Either way, the radiation levels have not increased 37x. The danger has not increased 37x. There's not even information (at this time) that the leak has grown at all, they're just measuring at a new spot. This would be like jumping in a pool at the shallow end and saying it's 3 feet deep, then walking to the deep end and saying the pool got deeper. It was 6 feet deep at that end before, you just didn't measure it in that spot before.

I hope they get this problem fixed soon.

"Or maybe I'm just showing my age by knowing exactly what he was talking about"

You're showing your age, because virtually no one under 30 (born 1980, making them 4 when the game came out) would have any idea what he's talking about. There was a NES version for kids of the 80s but it wasn't released in the US.

"rebrand themselves Whore Media"

http://home.clara.net/lesmcdm/images/virgin.jpg

The Elite manual describes it thus:

Increase forward velocity to maximum. At this point you can take full advantage of the space-skip facility (J). Inter- space jumping does not function (because of interference patterns) if there is another ship, a planet or a sun in the immediate vicinity.

how did they do that ? ( It always bugged me)

As time progresses between vsyncs, the CRT electron beam scans left-to-right, then moves down a line, then left-to-right, until it hits the bottom-right - then it starts again at the next vsync. You set the video controller registers to mode A before the first line hits the CRT. A bit later, but before it reaches the bottom of the screen, you push new values into the video controller registers changing it to mode B; all the remaining lines are sent to the CRT in the new mode. You just have to make sure that the video controller register values get changed at the right point during each frame, and make sure that the mapped video memory contains data in the right format either side of the mode 'boundary' (although no boundary really exists). You can change mode more than once per frame if you want.

You could always read the Elite source code to see how Bell+Braben did it.

...then watch the musical!

No, really, go and look --- it was written by Aiden Bell (Ian Bell's brother) and Brian Phillips. Okay, you are going to have to stage it yourself, but the full book's there.

There's lots of other good stuff on Ian Bell's Elite website, including versions for most microcomputers, actual source code for the original BBC Micro version (which is damn scary, by the way), concept art, lots of reviews and interviews, a version of the trading engine written in C that's compatible with the original, unreleased versions (Game Boy Elite!), the novella The Dark Wheel that came with the game... and, sadly, lots of info about the ongoing feud between Bell and Braben after they fell out.

...then watch the musical!

No, really, go and look --- it was written by Aiden Bell (Ian Bell's brother) and Brian Phillips. Okay, you are going to have to stage it yourself, but the full book's there.

There's lots of other good stuff on Ian Bell's Elite website, including versions for most microcomputers, actual source code for the original BBC Micro version (which is damn scary, by the way), concept art, lots of reviews and interviews, a version of the trading engine written in C that's compatible with the original, unreleased versions (Game Boy Elite!), the novella The Dark Wheel that came with the game... and, sadly, lots of info about the ongoing feud between Bell and Braben after they fell out.

If there is one thing I miss about my old C64, it's Elite. I lost many, many hours on that game. How they built such a large universe on such a small platform I'll never figure out.

It was all produced from a random number generator. Ian Bell has released C source code that's equivalent to the original 6502 assembly version, if you really want to know.

Children are impressionable. They are (usually) unable to weigh the pros and cons of arguments and instead defer to authority figures. There are some theories which are not legitimately challenged in today's scientific world.

Should we teach alternative theories to the reason why things fall down? (Intelligent falling perhaps) After all, the Theory of Gravity is only a theory, not a fact.
Or perhaps that "the weight of a body on the surface of a heavenly body is the reaction force caused by the acceleration of the surface of the heavenly body away from its centre."
http://www.copples.clara.net/gravity.htm

This is an alternative theory of Gravity. It may even be true, however, no one seems to be trying to teach kids the controversy... because there isn't one. The science taught in high schools is well supported and, as mentioned above, not challenged by academia in any real way.

We have an obligation to our children to shield them from ideas which masquerade as science because they lack the skills needed for proper scientific inquiry. I can go to an average high school class and, assuming they don't have any smart asses, teach them about the horrible problems associated with dihydrogen monoxide. Chances are I can convince every one of them to firmly assert that they would be willing to ban water.

http://www.snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp
86% of freshman supported a ban on water,
12% were undecided
2% correctly identified it as water.

It's not that difficult to dupe the public as a whole, let alone children in an authoritative setting. You teach the best science available and continue to teach it until a better theory presents itself. It may take years for this "better theory" to get from not accepted to partially accepted to almost universally accepted, however, IMHO we shouldn't be teaching it until it gains the support of the majority of the scientific community.

Leave the debate on alternative theories of gravity to the Ph.D's who (probably) know what they are talking about. Teach it in the schools when you've convinced a gross majority of them. Convincing a gross majority of the general public does not make it a scientific theory.

David Braben tried to trick Ian Bell out of his Elite-related royalties.

Ain't life ironic?

See text elite:

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/text/index.htm

which abstracts the generation part of elite to a sort of text adventure, comes with source code!

http://home.clara.net/lesmcdm/images/desktop.png

I still am. ;)

My local pharmacy POS still uses DOS on 486 machines.

http://home.clara.net/lesmcdm/images/virgin.jpg

While I don't doubt the idea has been around long before, this reminds me of the "autoremotes" from the Elite novella "The Dark Wheel";

"Blinking through its solitary monitor, it hovered over his face like a squat, legless dachsund hound and pumped adrenalin, oxygen and glucose into his bloodstream. Alex opened his eyes and panicked slightly. The autoremote calmed him down with a quick pumpsurge of tetval.

The robot's voice whispered in his ears, 'Brandy? Scotch? Vodka? I am equipped with a full range of miniature stimulants to make the waiting easier.'

'What . . . happened . . . ship? . . . Avalonia . . .' he gasped through the tight face mask.

The autoremote blinked at him sympathetically, 'Brandy, then,' and hit Alex with two shots of Qutirian SynCognac."

There's nothing in particular wrong with the concept, but I can't help thinking a cheery voice would be the last thing I'd want if I had various limbs crushed under several tonnes of rubble.

Since we're going off topic anyway, I'll mention that the NES port of Elite is recommended by the authors as the best Elite experience.

Since we're going off topic anyway, I'll mention that the NES port of Elite is recommended by the authors as the best Elite experience.

Elite was first on the Acorn BBC Micro, not the Apple (though some of the code was developed on the earlier Acorn Atom). You can download many Elite ports from the website of Ian Bell, one of the two authors: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/. The Archimedes port was clearly the best, of course :)

http://home.clara.net/lesmcdm/images/squid.png

Elite never made it to the Atari 8bit which still annoys people today. It may be that by the time they started porting Elite (it sold BBCs initially so didn't get ported for some time) that the Atari 8bit market in Europe was too small to bother. There rumours of initial development work but nothing has ever turned up. You can get all versions of Elite from Ian Bell's site:
http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/

On the Spectrum thread does anyone one remember the Lenslok security system? I remember it from trying to play Elite at my friends house on his Speccy.

I almost dropped to the floor when I saw this announcement. Imagine my disappointment when I realised that this was not a new port of my favourite game from the 80's to the home console market.

Does this mean that the name "Elite" can be used to market games again, not sure Mr Braben would agree...

• http://www.frontier.co.uk/games/elite/index.html
• http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/faq.htm#A3

Perhaps finally all legal differences could be settled and the best space trading game could be in everyones home again :-)

Jez

Wven with the current USD-Sterling exchange rate.

Wait... did you mean that it "weighs" 39.2857 cloves?

Seriously; can we please try to use metric consistently, as NASA are finally doing themselves.

The Grand Marquis is a bad example because it's basically a 50s design with a solid rear axle and a non-split driveshaft, so the whole driveshaft has to move up and down with the axle. By contrast, my Volvo 240 which has a split driveshaft has a hump that's pretty small - maybe 5 or 6" tall in back. In front I guess you still get the transmission case between the driver and passenger, but that's not larger than a center console in any other car. You can make the hump even smaller, BTW, if you have an independent rear suspension so the driveshaft doesn't need room to move at all and most of the moving-up-and-down parts are behind the rear seat.

Maybe you ought to just get yourself a Toyota MR2 or something and be happy, even if it's not a sedan.

Personally, I'd prefer a Tatraplan. Or even a VW Squareback with a modern (Subaru) boxer motor.

-b.

The culture of the elite naturally incorporates the belief that a man can better himself,

Your father reckoned you have it in you to become one of the Elite. That's good enough for me.

1984. Elite came out, and my summer holidays disappeared. At one point I went downstairs to get food and realized I had cross-hair sights burned into my retinas; I could see them when I looked at the plain white of the refrigerator.

> But best was docking at the space stations (best while listening to the Blue Danube!)

Not on the BBC version there wasn't!

Oh, and here - on a terrible web page - is the source code to the BBC micro version:

http://home.clara.net/iancgbell/elite/bbc/index.ht m#src

Yes, the original Elite rocked, although the post Ian-Bell sequels were disappointing (interestingly enough for the exact same reason Quake wasn't as much fun as Doom II. The later game had prettier graphics, but failed to deliver the bursts of frenetic action that could be found in the orginal. Finishing up a massive dogfight in Elite, with no missiles, no shields, no energy bomb left, and a hull a budgie's fart away from failure, while you crusie through the debris field of your last opponent, rotating smoothly to capture his cargo pod full of alien goods in one motion--that was something. Ian Bell has a great page about the original Elite BTW, including source code.) But only a year of game play? :)My best friend and I clocked up about two and a half years on his C64: he'd man the joystick (a Boss 2-axis microswitch stick, tweaked for maximum sensitivity. The best thing about it was that the handle rotated, so for rear or side laser action, he'd rotate the base appropriately.) I manned the keyboard: missiles, speed, navigation. Lot of fun. The hidden stuff was fun, especially the 'trumbles', but the game was still excellent without it: a little secret stuff goes a long way. Today, I won't even look at a Gran Turismo game, because I have better things to do than spend about as much time getting a particular fake license as it would take to get a real one. Even stuff like Halo 2 can be a pain, because I don't have hours to find and practice all the superjumps, or learn to crouch jump on a particular pixel-wide ledge to get out of the geometry.

Cloaking Device Plans

KFG

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

The idea of this is pretty old. There are actually pumped storage reservoirs in production that will pump water up a hill during non-peak hours, and generated electricity during peak hours by letting the water flow back down.

Here's an example:

http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/pumped.htm

This article is just talking about making that kind of technology accessible on a smaller scale. I'm skeptical of being able to do this at good enough efficiency for small-scale use. If it does, though, that would be fantastic!

Power plants can't generally speed up or slow down production quickly enough to handle electrical use variations. Thus, plants burn more energy than they need to, to account for the maximum possible demand. If this kind of research can make this technology more accessible, that we can get more energy-efficient electricity.

[Y]ou could use a slide rule[.]

[Y]ou could use a slide rule[.]

Is the space simulator Elite? Screenshot. If so, hand in your geek card now for not knowing the name. ;)

Is the space simulator Elite? Screenshot. If so, hand in your geek card now for not knowing the name. ;)

I'd buy it.

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this wri

Why aren't there more games like Syberia, Myst, The 7th Guest?

There are. Looked at store shelves lately? Everyone and their dog is making adventures like that. Sure, many aren't very good but that happens with all games.

Why not, for example, a space exploration game -- concentrating on the science, economics, and logistics involved, instead of the usual shoot-the-evil-green-aliens theme?

One of the so-called 4X games (Elite and its ilk, these days X3 is popular)? You can do anything you want in those and if you don't want to fight you won't have to (except maybe to fend off the occassional pirate).

Biological processes often have temperature quotients (called Q10) that are near or greater than 2.0 (that is the reaction rate roughly doubles with every 10K or 10 oC [sorry for lack of degrees symbol] change in temperature; one example reference: http://www.rod.beavon.clara.net/Q10.htm ) Pure physical or chemical processes are usually closer to one, sometimes 1.5 or around there. From this you can see that there is a disconnect between the rates of processes when you cool down an organism. Diffusion may slow down by one rate, whereas enzyme function may slow down by another rate. Cooler temperatures could even reverse some reactions while merely slowing the majority. This can lead to a variety of effects and it depends on the tissue, etc., so it is pretty complex to model or explain. This may suggest that cooling is a better treatment option for some pathologies than others (maybe bleeding vs. stoke, but I'm just guessing). As for your example about calcium, ion channels that allow calcium to enter the cell may open significantly less well (i'm suggesting open probabiltiy, but it could simply be the result of lower conductances) at cooler temperatures. Neuronal apoptosis is usually dependent on NMDA-type glutamate receptors, and given the significant alterations in membrane fluidity with temperature, the signaling through these receptors may be reduced to subthreshold levels for excitotoxicity at cooler temperatures. Regardless of the exact mechanisms, this is an interesting approach to treating pathologies and could be significantly improved in the future.

Secondly, some signaling events have critical temperatures. For instance, protein vesicle transport out of the Golgi (Golgi export) is blocked at 20 oC. Synaptic vesicle release has another temperature (though I'm not sure what it is). I'm sure there are numerous other critical temperatures above 10 oC. Perhaps in the case of poisoning, one may want to cool the patient, while administering an antidote to increase the liklihood an antidote could reach the target before the poison, if the poison relies preferentially on biological processes to work and the antidote relies more heavily on physical processes-just an imaginary example, but it could be functionally equivilent to going back in time and pretreating with an antidote. Obviously, this can't go on indefinately, but cooling can slow down or even stop some critical processes that can give doctors more time to treat the patient. I imagine the 10% risk is better than 90-95% (perhaps) for patients who are not cooled.

It's rewarding to compare Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complexto the only other great science fiction show on TV right now, the new Battlestar Galatica, as both have the same overriding theme: What does it mean to be human, and where is the line between man and machine?.

Braben prefers to keep monetizing works like Elite. I'm more of an Ian Bell fan, if only because he has the balls to make the original Elite free.

Braben prefers to keep monetizing works like Elite. I'm more of an Ian Bell fan, if only because he has the balls to make the original Elite free.

Elite?

No kidding.. just take a look at some examples. No celebrity marketing there.

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/ [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/ [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php [clara.ne