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accelerated 3d

I do 3d development under Linux using OpenSceneGraph. I can personally attest to the fact that 3d acceleration works under Linux. framebuffer

Why the hell you want to use framebuffer with a spiffed up card is beyond me but yes, nVidia has a framebuffer driver, and here's a walkthruough: here

2d & video out

Haven't used it personally but I have friends who do. Again, same driver code is shared between Windows and Linux.

Also of interest:

NVIDIA also provides an open source OpenGL and XFree86 3.3.5 driver implementation on their website. The implementation supports the NV1, RIVA 128, RIVA 128ZX, RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2, and GeForce 256 chipsets. This driver has lower performance than NVIDIA's proprietary driver but it does include source code.

Yes, I fed a troll, but only so that he might not mislead others. May god have mercy on my soul.

There is a VNC like that. Get ultra-vnc along with the rc4 plugin. Generate your very own secure key and away you go.

This article was on CNN last night as well, under the headline "Viruses catch up to the Mac."

Uh, yeah. Sure. Two guys get hit by something, the articles are not even clear about exactly what, and it's, "Oh noes! The sky is falling!"

Yeah, viruses are really catching up to the Mac. One down (maybe), a few tens of thousands more to go to catch up to the quantity available for Windows. Look at all the crap you need to do properly secure an XP box. Even if this alleged Mac virus is the real thing, you can stay safe simply by not going to dodgy sites, and thinking for a moment about why that thing you downloaded from said dodgy site is asking for your admin password.

The antivirus vendors must have realized that we just laugh at their press releases touting the dire threats to the Mac, so now they're funneling their fearmongering drivel through the Associated Press in a laughable attempt to turn it into Real News. Nice try, guys.

~Philly

I've been using Opera for a long while but lately I've given Firefox a try... It's nice and all, but Opera has some neat details that Firefox lacks. A very simple and frivolous example: I can move my tabs from the top to any other the side! Yeah! Oh, Firefox has an extension for it? Is it the one that breaks with every new Firefox version? You get my drift...

Anyways, I see less and less advantages in Firefox when compared to Opera. So Firefox is opensource... well, I couldn't care less. It's the same if someone said "hey, don't drink Coke, drink Shomke, because we know the recipy and we can all change it!". I don't give a flying rat's ass about code and source code, I, as a end user, just want things to work a certain way. And Opera does work that way, and does let me change things around out of the box. In Firefox, we need a stupid "extensions" just to clip a toenail in the interface.

"Firefox can't do this" "Hey, here's an extension" "Firefox can't do that" "Here's another extension". Prety quickly you will have a handfull of extensions, that might or might not break with the next Firefox version...

Heck, I'll give you another example! There is an extension to (gasp!) minimize Firefox to the system tray, right next to the clock. In one of the last Firefox updates, that extension stoped working at my computer at work. Yes, FF is updated to the latest version and so is that extension, but everytime I use both together, FF just displays a big, empty window, with *nothing* to click or any menus. And guess what! At my home computer, I have the *same* version of both and it runs fine! And don't go blaming it on Windows, because I'm using the same Windows XP in both computers. Oh and in Opera, the hotkey for that specific funtion is Ctrl-H. No extensions, no breakups...

So, about this whole "holy-war" agains IE... I'm just sitting and watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when this will blow on the face of the zealots... remember folks, FUD works both ways, and if you spread FUD to suport your product of choice, sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.

And heres a little site for you to read: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html#Security

With all this large scale promoting of Firefox, some how people seem to forgot the facts and just start lying to make their points.

Firefox is not lighter or faster than IE. This is a confusion created by the fact that is it is lighter than the Mozilla suite.

Firefox still has security issues, the firefox people seem to be pretty good at patching rather quickly, but I still won't say that Firefox is 'safe'.

The advertising of a 'pop-up blocker' is bizaar, it's not a feature, it's the removal of a feature.

check it out: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html

Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still the best of the meger crap that is the web browser market, but that's no reason to lie to people.

- Jesse McNelis

Fur is high maintenance. It gets all over, has to be brushed a lot, harbors parasites, and makes it hard to keep cool.

My dog has a brutal time in summer:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/kira_grinnin g_lo.JPG

Some dog owners just give their pups a full body trim in late spring.

I used to work for Bell Atlantic.net, the pre-cursor to Verizon Online. We used to get comments all the time from disenchanted users who would point out to us that we advertised unlimited usage. We then had to explain that it was actually unlimited access, e.g., meaning you could access any time of the day, 24 x 7. Bear in mind, when broadband first started, many ISPs limited your access time to a set number of hours, usually 150, which worked out to an average of 5 hours per day. So the "unlimited" applied to your online time being unmetered. The Terms of Service for just about any ISP, which most users don't read any more than they read the EULAs for software installs, clearly give most of the rights to the ISP.

Unlimited never meant you could use your access account for anything you wanted.

Comcast's Terms of Use are available here: http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp. Section vii: restrict, inhibit, or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to use or enjoy the Service, including, without limitation, posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a worm, virus, or other harmful feature, or generating levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information; and Section xxii: interfere with computer networking or telecommunications service to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, denial of service attacks, flooding of a network, overloading a service, improper seizing and abuse of operator privileges and attempts to "crash" a host;

I could see where, if Comcast wanted to, they could legitimately cut your service off using either of these clauses by claiming your use of a torrent program interfered with other users on their system.

As always, YMMV

Comcast's usenet cap is 2GB per month per email address.

Good catch. I always thought that the Golem XIV story was the sort of story that the Slashdot audience should appreciate (and more so than the usual lame crap that people here worship, like Ender's Game). But it is probably above the heads of most readers, it is one of his most abstract works, probably surpassed in sheer abstraction only by "His Master's Voice."

Go read Golem XIV. Read it NOW.

Anyway, that is what was so great about Lem, his best works were philosophical essays only wrapped in the superficial trappings of science fiction because those were the topics of the modern age. Lem even gave up SF writing because he refused to be associated with such rubbish as was being published lately. When Lem was active, up until the early 1980s, SF was still subversive and was the literary genre of ideas. But then it turned into Space Opera rubbish at the hands of morons like George Lucas who popularized it and turned it into mass-media pablum. There was no more room for thinkers like Lem, so he gave up on the genre entirely. And the world was a poorer place for it. Shame on everyone for buying tickets to Star Wars and not buying more Lem books.

Thanks for the replies, but I have a specific, technical question that can only be answered by another user of the SA3250HD STB. I'm well aware that most Motorola STB's will turn analog TV signals into MPEG-2 Transport Streams over 1394, but I'm not sure what the SA3250HD does.

The relevant links for legaleze of HDTV requirements related to 1394 can be found here:

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/12feb20041 500/edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2004/octqtr/pdf/47c fr76.640.pdf

The relevant text only mentions that high-def set-top boxes must include a "functional" 1394 interface, but not whether non-digital channels must also be accessible via that interface.

Other links indicate that the SA3250HD does not convert analog channels to MPEG2-TS for firewire:

http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/firewire/readme .htm

So, the parent poster, who claims to use (or have used) MythTV via 1394 on a SA3250HD STB, would be in the best position to answer my question. Speculation will not help me further.

Something like these, maybe?
http://exent.com/Customers_and_Partners/customers_ partners.asp
http://www.atariondemand.com/
http://gamesoduser.comcast.net/gamesondemand/
http://gamezone.telenet.be/

Try the Standardization project at this URL. It makes the XDA II and related phones perform much better. If it only had vga resolution, I'd be very happy with it.

http://home.comcast.net/~sx66-blueangel/

You are reading Slashdot on a free day pass. Thanks for the support.

Ask Slashdot: What Corporate Email Limits Do You Have?
Posted by

Cliff

in The Mysterious Future!

from the drives-that-are-bursting-at-the-seams dept.

roundisfunny wonders: "We currently do not have any mailbox restrictions for our Exchange users - which has led us to have a 420 GB mail store for 320 users. Our largest mailbox has over 13 GB in it. One of the main concerns for us is the time it takes for a restore. We have encouraged archiving, but now have 250 GB of .pst files. What sort of limitations does your company have on mailbox size, amount of time you can keep mail, and archives? Please mention your email platform, type of business, and number of users."

IT: Harvard Offers Sneak Peek Into Their Network

Posted by

ScuttleMonkey

in The Mysterious Future!

from the what-makes-you-tick dept.

Bob Brown writes "Harvard University doesn't usually talk much about its internal network, but here, the guy overseeing it opens up about the homegrown and commercial tools used to manage the massive system." From the article: "Harvard, as of late, has been exhibiting another telco trait - considering the network as part of the university's critical infrastructure. As such, its construction is considered during the initial planning phases of building renovation, new construction and campus expansion projects. The data networks that are being built today, at Harvard and similar institutions, are being built to host a variety of IP-based traffic. Most every physical-plant control device, whether it be security cameras, chilled water-valve actuators or parking garage card readers, are being designed to work with the IP network"

This story is currently under construction.

Games: Come the Revolution

Posted by

Zonk

in The Mysterious Future!

from the up-against-the-wall dept.

GamesIndustry.biz has a piece looking at what game developers think will be req

I don't like the Firefox community either; I think they give their browser too much credit. But this "article" is just a waste of time.

See this page for a more thorough list of inaccuracies that are continually perpetuated by the Firefox community.

Comcast probably did this blocking to sell their own service.

They could justify the block with this part of their TOS.
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp

"You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network. In addition, you shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, disrupt, degrade, or impede Comcast's ability to deliver and provide the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services."

I have worked for ISP's where if someone is using to much bandwith we cut their connection. Most of the times ISP's oversell their network and hope that people dont use it up.

But i belive in this case this was just a shot to sell their own service, the main question is since its their network are they really ALLOWED to do this?

Reading this is making me nostalgic for LISP machines and interpreter environments that let programmers really play with the machine instead of abstracting it away. What I'd really like to see is someone who takes all the potential for reconfiguration and parallelism and doesn't hide it away but makes it available.

cost: It depends strongly on quality of finish materials: stone floors and counters or linoleum and formica? I built 4000 sq.ft, including an indoor swimming pool, passive solar heated for around $30/sq.ft. circa 1981. Its all red oak frame, with arched kneebraces. The land and the taxes in my particular town are outrageously expensive but sticks and bricks cost the same whereever you put them together...if you do the putting.

The frame technique is modified barn frame. Horizontally in the middle of this picture you see a beam that has tracklighting somehow sprouting downward from it. To the right is one of the joints. The modificatin is to use steel tubing welded up into an X anchored to the top of the posts and beams laminated of 2x10+2x6+2x10 producing a channel in the beam that fits over the projecting metal of the X's. Goes together like tinkertoys rather than traditional "bents"...you build it up one floor at a time more like steel skyscraper construction. We liked the tracklighting in our old place and made provision for it in a plank-on-joist floor sytem [no drop ceiling to hide the wires!] so the ability to do additional wiring is really more of a fortunate accident than the plan I would like to claim. Only real wood peg construction is where the knee braces are tennoned into the posts and the cathedral roof structure.

I have had occasion to move a few walls. Thats the real beauty of the frame: just take a sledge hammer and erase the wall. There are no bearing walls.

A very short classic sci fi story that tells us where we're heading! http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html

"Yes I would say life from that period would be different to a degree. It seems like there was simple life forms than boom a bunch of different ones."

Which were, at least compared to modern life, still pretty simple, and still obviously quite related to each other. And keep in mind that the "boom" took place spread out over the course of 30 million years: pretty fast in terms of evolutionary pace, but no small potatoes either.

"There's going to be change over time but such a radical event seems like it would either seriously change evolutionary theory or dump it for a new one."

Evolution did change to some extent: things like the Cambrian Explosion did away with a view which was known as phyletic gradualism, which was the idea that the amount of morphological change in all living things was constant. In contrast to that, most biolgoists today think that changes are more stuttery: populations remain fairly stable for longer periods of time after they reach equilibrium, and then burst out and change a lot faster when the environment changes and they have to adapt.

Genetics also seems to confirm this, in that most of the genetic code is unexpressed: mutational change to it don't actually affect anything, so bigger changes tend to come in clumps rather than at a steady rate. Likewise, studies in populations today show that creatures are actually capable of changing many many many time FASTER than what we see in the fossil record: faster even, in fact, than anything seen in the Cambrian explosion. That means that a lot of what natural selection does is not speeding up change, but rather slowing it down.

"What source are you using that humans came from eukaryotes and opisthokonts?"

Well, all of our cells are eukaryotic. And our reproductive cells are always obvious opisthokonts, as opposed to using cillia or some other means of propulsion found elsewhere in life. As for how we know that we are descended from...

"I'm finding lots of for and against on this subject. I guess I'm looking for the smoking gun, which isn't going to happen."

Well that link I posted before is a good start(the main page is just the start of things: the real meat is in the taxonomic class-by-class discussion of our ancestry:
http://home.comcast.net/~aronra/Clades.htm#An%20or ganism%20is%20any%20organic%20(Carbon-based)%20RNA /DNA%20protien%20which%20replicates%20&%20reproduc es.

The talk.origins common descent FAQ is also a really great start:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Here's a little demo by Tim Etler that shows how the Revolution controller would work with a FPS.

You might also take a look at this video.

Think of it more like an analog joystick than a mouse, where it'll turn as you point toward the edges. Probably with faster rotations the closer you're pointing to the edge and an area toward the middle of the screen where you have a bit of wiggle room for adjusting your aim without looking all over the place.

"I haven't heard about Behe, I'll have to read up on how he refutes the fossil evidence."

He doesn't really, because he by and large accepts macroevolution.

"Like I said to the last guy it can't be gradual because of the Cambrian Explosion, which turns the Darwin's tree of life upside-down."

No, it doesn't. Two things are significant about the Cambrian Explosion: lots of diversity emerged faster than it normally does, and hard parts, which fossilize better, emerged en masse for the first time. But nothing about it suggests that none of these forms had precursors.

"So if you use microevolution and fossil records you don't get macroevolution. It just doesn't add up. With the current data micro and macro evolution don't link together."

Read this:
http://home.comcast.net/~aronra/Taxonomy.html

You're not even close to correct on this one. The controversy about Gould and punc Eek has been GROSSLY mispresented.

or drinking them?

For me, the Atari 2600 version of asteroids never seems to get old. Even as laughably primitive as it is, I still fire up the emulator and blast rocks for an hour or two every now and again.

More recent (but still a decade old) is the Turbographix-16 game Military Madness (aka Nectaris). For some reason I keep coming back to this turn-based, hex-based strategy game -- I can't quite put a finger on why, but in my opinion it's even more addictive than Starcraft and all the other real-time strategy titles.

here's a nice one.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html

There is a Buy Danish blog with a list of products.

There is a Buy Danish blog with a list of products.

There is a list here

http://buydanish.home.comcast.net/products.htm

Time to strike back in a peaceful way by helping Denmark out by defeating the boycott. Buy Danish. Lego is a Danish company so buy some.

Here is the links to Buy Danish/Denmark products:

• http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004455.htm
• http://buydanish.home.comcast.net/buydanish.htm

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html

http://home.comcast.net/~solidsnake1298/egg_cellph one_1.mpg

Roommates dontated their phones. Called each other and set the phones next to the egg. We left if for about 22mins. The result is in the video

Many timeattacks and speedruns on this site.
Read the faq if you don't know the difference between a timeattack and a speedrun =)

Many timeattacks and speedruns on this site.
Read the faq if you don't know the difference between a timeattack and a speedrun =)

Keep a brick by the bed. Sleep will never be far off. ;) I had to wander off to bed myself. The livestock want to be fed at the butt-crack of dawn.

I did peek into your site... you've got unclosed tables (no /table tag) on http://home.comcast.net/~ssg_vlfs/index.html and all of its subpages that I looked at, making the entire page invisible to 100% compliant browsers.

There's a lot of bad advice on here. It's great that your daughter wants to learn chess. I have two daughters, 3 and 7, and I'm teaching them the game. My younger daughter asked to play with me this morning (she mostly just sets up the pieces).

First, I'm disappointed that so many posters assumed that there's some hidden meaning in your daughter's interest. I can say from experience that, when my daughters don't feel like playing chess, no promises of quality time will get them near the board. I think it's fair to assume that your daughter is genuinely interested, which is great. Also, if she's interested in chess, don't be afraid to teach her chess. Go is a great game, but there's no reason not to teach her chess.

Over the board play is best for learning chess, as people suggest, but I've found that it's not always the best way to interest my older daughter in the game. I bought Fritz and Chesster, and she enjoys working with it over working with me. It does a great job of breaking down the game into practical lessons that are fun to play. It may be a bit advanced for your daughter, but I think it's better than using Chessmaster on the easiest level. I have noticed that it's geared toward a male player and a lot of the humor is distinctly Teutonic, but I didn't find it particularly offensive. I think it's probably all you really need for software until she's a tournament player, and it's reasonably priced. I even caught my wife working with my daughter when she got stuck on the king and rook mate. My wife never gets involved in over-the-board games.

I'd also say that, contrary to what others are writing, chess is not easy for a parent to teach, nor is it an easy game in any sense. It's difficult to play on the same level as your kid if you're at all good, my older daughter doesn't want to play with a handicap, and she as soon as she makes a few opening moves, she gets bogged down and confused. I've had some success setting up chess mazes for her, where I sprinkle pawns on the board and she has to move pieces through the pawns. I've also had success getting her interested in puzzles. I can't blame you for looking for ways to supplement her learning.

Don't just buy any chess book. Most chess books, even beginner ones, are written for an adult audience, and you'll have to translate what you're reading into lessons that are appropriate for a kid. Plus, for the poster that recommended Lasker's Manual, it's in descriptive notation. No child or parent should have to deal with descriptive notation. Make sure any book you buy is in algebraic notation.

I can't recommend beginner books for children from my experience, but Chess for Juniors and How to Beat Your Dad at Chess are universally acclaimed. I got my daughter Simple Checkmates, and she's able to work through it on her own. Kudos to the person who mentioned Dan Heisman. His Novice Nook columns are a great resource for beginning tournament players, and he's the author of A Parent's Guide to Chess. He does online tutoring, and I have a friend who is an online student of his who recommends him highly. I haven't read it, but Susan's Polgar's instruction book might also be of interest. She's one

The Catherine Wheel was a product of the middle ages, especially popular in Germany. The victim's limbs were crushed with blunt objects. His (or her) still-living remains were subjected to the wheel. This meant the mangled arms and legs were threaded through the spokes. The wheel was then hoisted into the air using a long pole. Hungry vultures and crows picked at the body. Death came slowly.

So in conclusion, Homo Sapiens used torture?

Hello,

We are very sad to say that over the New Year the Campus was subjected to several acts of mindless vandalism. As well as bricks being thrown through windows, several members of staff have reported their cars as being the subject of practical jokes. Some of these cars were filled with water whilst others had graffiti daubed across them. We have uploaded the pictures of the graffiti here http://playtimepiano.home.comcast.net/ in the hope that someone may recognise the culprits work. If anyone can shed any light on this unfortunate incident could they please contact the main office as soon as they have time.

Many Thanks & Best Regards,

Professor Robert Gordens

Yale

If you check out my weather station's history, you'll find at the bottom is a chart with the amount of solar radiation landing on my house. The last three days have brought me peaks of 120 W/m^2, 80 W/m^2 and 16 W/m^2 (granted, there's probably snow sitting on the sensor today, but there's snow sitting on the weather station's solar cell as well.) And none of the days recieved more than 60 Watt-hours for more than four hours per day. This is really typical weather for this time of year.

The $400, 85 Watt Kyocera panel is 16% efficient, and is rated 85 Watts only in 1kW of sunlight at 25 deg C. I'd be looking at maybe getting 6 Watts for four or five hours per day for at least three months out of the year. I'd be hard-pressed to recharge a flashlight battery!

Even in the summer, on the brightest days of the year I typically get only momentary peaks over 1kW. It's certainly not an average up here.

Then I would pick whatever is used for french fry machines.

It was a difficult show to sell, and the fact that there was even a movie means that it was very successful. How many television shows in the last ten years have been cancelled halfway into its first season, only to be resurrected as a movie? It's quite a feat. It's an even bigger feat when you look at the fact that the show was aired out of order.

I think Whedon understands the business side of the industry. After all, this was the man who co-wrote and re-wrote a lot of movies that got a lot of attention, but he himself was pushed aside on the writing credits. He understands being snubbed and I think for someone with as much clout as he has, he's just a realist. I think he understands fully that it's not up to him whether Serenity gets a sequel. It's up to TPTB.

You have to move on, not because there's something better that will make you more money, you move on because it's the way it is, and you have to accept it and move on, or you can just stay where you are, and never get past it. You've had fun, and you'll love to have more fun, but it's not up to you whether you get to or not.

"The, um, the movie is finished. And the story is told. The world is not finished. There's more to tell, but that's always the case with everything I do and whether I get the chance to tell [it] or not it is up to somebody else. So I made sure that this movie had completion and didn't feel like a glorified prequel. It's its own piece and it wraps everything up. I have a sense of closure that I never had, and I can walk away satisfied. But if somebody tells me not to walk away, I'll turn right back around." - Comcast.net

This is a fairly misleading headline/summary/article stub. In (numerous) interviews over the past week or so, Joss says in most of them that any future Firefly/Serenity-age would depend on the DVD sales being particularly big.

"It would depend on huge numbers from the DVD," writer/director Whedon allows. "Obviously, we are still shy of making our money back from the box office. But we are within shouting distance. Still, it would have to blow up pretty huge for a sequel to be called for.

"Mind you, stranger things have happened. And they do seem to happen to me. So it's not like I'm shutting the door." -- Toronto Star interview

"The, um, the movie is finished. And the story is told. The world is not finished. There's more to tell, but that's always the case with everything I do and whether I get the chance to tell [it] or not it is up to somebody else. So I made sure that this movie had completion and didn't feel like a glorified prequel. It's its own piece and it wraps everything up. I have a sense of closure that I never had, and I can walk away satisfied. But if somebody tells me not to walk away, I'll turn right back around." -- Comcast Movies interview

This EW article seems to take the stance that since Whedon is working on projects other than Firefly/Serenity and is taking a realistic view towards their finances, he clearly has abandoned them, despite the fact that his other projects have been in the pipe for some time.

Beyond that...the textbook is always a good choice. Type it, check it a few times, and then add it to the dictionary. :)

Yes, it's a design flaw. It's not insurmountable, but does make certain practices unsafe. I don't think that it's unreasonable for programs that are trusted with elevated privileges to be aware of this and protect themselves accordingly. Those programs already have a long list of things they have to be careful about, like not leaving unnecessary ports open, care to avoid buffer overruns, not using shared memory for IPC (unless you're really careful), etc. Not opening windows on the interactive desktop (like it is by default for services) isn't an excessive requirement.

Actually, using a program like jobprc, an you can separate processes with different privileges with jobs and desktops if you want. The extended Software Restriction Policies levels can also do the same thing automatically, on a hash, path or certificate basis.

There is software available as part of the Apple FireWire SDK that lets you record MPEG2 streams direct from a firewire enabled cable box. Hmmm....

Check here, here and here: [use this link: http://machdtvtimer.home.comcast.net/%5D for more info.

Them damn cyber-SteamPunks have huge card decks that they are just waiting to compile. Just you wait - as soon as the cards are read in, the AIs will take over, and we'll all be back to coal again!


Mark Edwards
--
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request

Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.

That isn't completly true, you could die in Secrets of Monkey Island(tm).
Here is a howto from eeggs.com and a screenshot from http://mywebpages.comcast.net/paulsuth/somipage.ht ml

Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.

That isn't completly true, you could die in Secrets of Monkey Island(tm).
Here is a howto from eeggs.com and a screenshot from http://mywebpages.comcast.net/paulsuth/somipage.ht ml

I wrote "Radley Manor," a haunted house adventure, using Inform. You play a kid trying to retrieve a baseball from an abandoned house.

You'll a .z5 interpreter . . . Frotz or the like:

Radley Manor

Not according to the terms of service most cable companies have. Any kind of server - CounterStrike, the distributing part of P2P, Jabber server, all of them are forbidden.

For example, I use Comcast http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp/, and one of the things I'm forbidden from doing is:

"xiv. run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"

I can upload to my remote ftp server all I want - I cannot have my home pc act as an ftp server, P2P server, or anything that provides services to someone on the internet.

It's strange that these opinions go completely ignored by the scientific community. Here are the interesting parts:

DIFFICULTIES FOR ABIOGENESIS
The previous discussions has shown that there is no special symmetry about life forming DNA or protein that causes that proper DNA or protein sequences to form spontaneously. In addition, there is apparently no special feature in nature that causes DNA or protein structures suited for self-replication to form spontaneously, even in an environment which has energy flowing through it. Thus, it appears that the only natural mechanism left for naturally producing the proper DNA or protein sequences for the 1st replicator is just the pure chance of them forming through random intermingling in a prebiotic soup. This section discusses some of the major difficulties in developing a nucleic acid based cell.

he goes on to site a bunch of specific necessities, with a number of individual estimates that need to be factored into any final calculation. I skimmed over it and didn't see any ridiculously huge numbers, it's almost pointless to slap a number on it, but none the less, there is a number out there...

I can't find many non-religious sources, funny how this area goes completely ignored by mainstream science, there aren't even any rebuttals!

http://intelligentdesign.org/odds/odds.htm

Dr. Emile Borel who first formulated the basic Law of Probability which states that the occurrence of an event where the chances are beyond 1 chance in 1050(the 200th power is used for scientific calculations), is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, regardless of the time allotted or how many opportunities could exist for the event to take place.

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Francis Crick, the man who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA had this to say about probability factors and protein synthesis: " To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be? This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is , if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20 200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros! This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense.(Life Itself, its origin and nature, Francis Crick, 1981, pp 51-52) I should mention here that Crick is not a creationist, but his probability numbers for protein synthesis are similar to those of creation scientists.

So there you go, lower estimates in the 1 in 10^200,000 range. A more reasonable estimate would probably be 1 in 10^200,000,000

So personally I think if this happened anywhere in the universe, it was sheer luck that it happened at all, and more likely that the creator-god created us, or at least spawned us from his own, random chance DNA line. I lends serious credibility to the universal designer theory.