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If you don't have an arcade and still want to play the the 'original' ones you can easily emulate it with Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

For Unices there is the XMAME port, which do a great job.

...ideally CCD chips would be embedded into the lense -- certainly a molecular nanotechnology based manufacturing process would greatly improve precision here. This would yield resolution improvement in the realm of orders of magnitude. If all goes according to schedule I will be giving an introduction to this and other issues at sdfcon-1 in Las Vegas this coming June entitled Green Astronomy: Paradigms and Solutions for a Sustainable Future Peace, SA Thigpen KL1FE

You criticise the usual OSS model of supplying developed materials, but then offer something even more useless as an alternative.

Your 'icarusindie' project is doomed from the start. Who the hell is going to pay money to download off a website? And using Paypal, of all things! There are plenty of places that will host files either for free or for such a small fee that it is negligible.

To give a couple of examples, these are more appropriate for the task at hand (offering source code and compiled binaries for download) as you get a shell account as well as webspace:

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
http://www.freeshell.org/

In short: your idea sucks, and there are plenty more viable alternatives.

We wrote a raytracer in graphics class. We shot the rays from where the observer was, just one for each pixel (or whatever resolution you wanted). That way you aren't "shooting them all over the place." If the object is shiny when the ray hits it, move the eye to the point where it hit, figure out the angle of reflection (using quite a bit of mathy stuff) and continue from there.

Here is my ratracer written for class, and here is the majority of the source for it. Also, we did a raytracer using some previous code my prof had, and I was able to add antialiasing and using a grid of objects to render, as seen here. Warning, its a 136 k jpg.

Actually, I think it's been my favorite class so far. Lots of applied programming, math, and neat pics to look at afterward.

We wrote a raytracer in graphics class. We shot the rays from where the observer was, just one for each pixel (or whatever resolution you wanted). That way you aren't "shooting them all over the place." If the object is shiny when the ray hits it, move the eye to the point where it hit, figure out the angle of reflection (using quite a bit of mathy stuff) and continue from there.

Here is my ratracer written for class, and here is the majority of the source for it. Also, we did a raytracer using some previous code my prof had, and I was able to add antialiasing and using a grid of objects to render, as seen here. Warning, its a 136 k jpg.

Actually, I think it's been my favorite class so far. Lots of applied programming, math, and neat pics to look at afterward.

We wrote a raytracer in graphics class. We shot the rays from where the observer was, just one for each pixel (or whatever resolution you wanted). That way you aren't "shooting them all over the place." If the object is shiny when the ray hits it, move the eye to the point where it hit, figure out the angle of reflection (using quite a bit of mathy stuff) and continue from there.

Here is my ratracer written for class, and here is the majority of the source for it. Also, we did a raytracer using some previous code my prof had, and I was able to add antialiasing and using a grid of objects to render, as seen here. Warning, its a 136 k jpg.

Actually, I think it's been my favorite class so far. Lots of applied programming, math, and neat pics to look at afterward.

More RF power causes it's own set of issues. The reason why the licenses have been granted for the RFID systems in question is that they won't interfere with other services. Raising the power exceeds the limits set by the licenses and causes interference with other services. You might find someone in the FCC willing to bend the rules for you and increase the allowed power for the reader units, but that's not likely. Secondly, raising the RF power doesn't do much for you with these tags. There is the very real fact that pushing more RF energy out doesn't 100% correlate to more range. Most of the RFID devices out there are maxed out for range because of the frequencies chosen, antenna sizes on the tags, etc. Raising the RF power with these passive or battery assisted tags as are used with the EZ Pass systems will merely shorten the response time for the tag to turn on and broadcast it's ID info.

And, before you say I don't know what I'm talking about, I might want to point you to my resume and point out that one of my previous jobs was with Amtech who is now a division of TransCore. Amtech makes most of the tags used by these systems and I developed one of the EZ-Pass type systems in use for parking and ground transportation management at DFW International Airport.

I was thinking more along the lines of a musical jokeas it is easier to actually play this wrong than to play it right. Only SCO would do something so obviously disastrous to even think of as this. SCO is a genius insofar as it will surround itself with all it's enemies before likely plunging in the dagger itself.

that is not quite true.

The tones to make a payphone think you had deposited coins are 1700hz and 2200hz, simultaneously, in different burst patterns for different coins. This is called red boxing.

Blue boxing is different, and not specific to payphones... Blue boxing is where the 2600hz tone is used. Basically, as I understand it, there always used to be a 2600hz tone on the line when the phone was off. Somehow, playing this tone after, say, dialing a 1800 number, would enable you to issue operator tones and do whatever you like, while still only be billed (nothing) for the 1-800 call. Blue boxes made 2600hz and other tones. The infamous captain crunch whistle (hey, no talk of john and pedophiles right now please, thats in another lesson) was a promotional thing in cereal boxes that just so happened to make the exact right (2600hz) tone.

All this shit was fixed before I was old enough to hack my way out of a wet paper bag, so I'm really not sure why I know it. You can read more here if you're interested. But it's all ancient history nowadays.

Also, winxp build 2600 is just a coincidence. I believe the first widely used build of XP was #2600, I've certainly seen it on a lot of desktops. In a similar note to my being too young to have blue or red boxed, I also don't own a windows box. Strange I'm making this post.

Stranger still is this whole thread. I mean, have you seen some of the crap up above this? Damn. Damn! Some crazy misinformed people, some bizarro trolls, all kinds of crap. Dontcha just love /. ?

I snapped a couple shots from random saves I had handy. The "Matrix Code" does scroll in a constant downward motion. Picture one is of the servant in Everett Morgan's house. Picture two shows the Nanotech sword on the right of the screen with two scientists and a bot.

Quite a coincidence that I happen to get to the end of the game the same day an article comes up about it!

http://jeberg.freeshell.org/deus-ex/de-matrix1.jpg
http://jeberg.freeshell.org/deus-ex/de-matrix2.jpg

-Jason

I snapped a couple shots from random saves I had handy. The "Matrix Code" does scroll in a constant downward motion. Picture one is of the servant in Everett Morgan's house. Picture two shows the Nanotech sword on the right of the screen with two scientists and a bot.

Quite a coincidence that I happen to get to the end of the game the same day an article comes up about it!

http://jeberg.freeshell.org/deus-ex/de-matrix1.jpg
http://jeberg.freeshell.org/deus-ex/de-matrix2.jpg

-Jason

I made a floppy based linux especially for this purpose: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/escape/. However, if you have a network, it is probably easier to use Knoppix to copy the data over the network rather than burn it to a cd. Note that Knoppix does have cdrecord and mkisofs on it; if you can boot knoppix from one cd drive, and have another to access as a burner (say an external USB cd burner) then you can save your data that way. Knoppix is better than my floppy setup, unless you have no network, and only a cd burner and no other CD device to boot from. Knoppix also supports more filesystems and hardware than I can fit on a floppy or care to deal with.

I have found LG cdburners to be reliable, fast, and work with all the linux distros I have tried (RedHat, Debian, Slackware, and my own single floppy distro.) They are also cheap, up to half the price of some of the more expensive brands.

...of what I think is a 1U dual Xeon Prescott box: The heatsinks - priceless

Actually, I can give a damn good example of Alphas used well. It's Super Dimensional Fortress (telnet link). They seem to be under some heavy load - I'm only getting 3 KB/sec off of them... but if you're bored (or think P4 heatsinks are small), go here.

BTW, isn't it the dual-cpu Alpha support in Linux that SCO isn't happy about?

I second this post, after all I have done it. The hardest part about the 10 minute deadline would be compiling the kernel, but that takes about 2 minutes on the fastest machines these days.

There are many reasons, but a main one is money laundering. I'm an relatively big online poker player and I can tell you that many of the online casinos are very shady operations. Not all, but a good deal.

To launder money, you need to keep it out of the financial system that is the US banking network. Have a bank account? Credit card? Debit card? Took out a loan? When the IRS comes to audit you, they have immediate and full access to all of this. So if Mr. White sells a ten-kilos of cocaine to Mr. Pink and wires $100,000 to his bank account, that's going to show up on the IRS' radar.

However, let's say Mr. White sits down at an online gambling table and 'loses' $100,000 to Mr. Pink. That transaction is stored in the private database of an off-shore casino and is out of the eye of the IRS and the US Government. Washing the money after you withdraw from the casino involves more processes, but the most important thing is that money does not go through the proper, established channels, and the government does not like this.

I think the saying went: You can cheat the people as long as you remember to pay your taxes.

Lastly, I hope they go the route of regulation instead of outright banning.. otherwise my website is moot.
--
MJ
(actually wrote this for an earlier post, but still relevant and everoyne hates 'go to this link' replies)

What you described is a common strategy known as the 'Nightengale' betting system. It was developed back in the day of early gambling (think Greeks) where the concept was to double-up your bet each time to cover your losses.

There have been exhausting mathematically simulations that show how this betting system works and the results are interesting. Whereas random roulette betting will have each player loosing a little bit of money, under the nightengale system, most players win a bit of money while a few players loose a LOT (read: all).

Like you said, the probability of losing eight times in a row is extreme, but play long enough and the odds will catch up to you.

With all of this said.. I've actually used a deviation of this system myself with success. No, I am not going to sell you a book now, but I am going to say that with some creative thinking, a bankroll and a willingness for risk, you can maximize your chances for winning. The only trick is that you must resolve never to make more than six bets on this system for the duration of your entire life. The principle is to stay away from long-term predictability by hedging on short-term variance, then quitting.. forever.

And if that doesn't rub you right, I recommend learning poker (my poker guide website).
--
MJ

but why is online gambling illegal?

There are many reasons, but a main one is money laundering. I'm an relatively big online poker player and I can tell you that many of the online casinos are very shady operations. Not all, but a good deal.

To launder money, you need to keep it out of the financial system that is the US banking network. Have a bank account? Credit card? Debit card? Took out a loan? When the IRS comes to audit you, they have immediate and full access to all of this. So if Mr. White sells a ten-kilos of cocaine to Mr. Pink and wires $100,000 to his bank account, that's going to show up on the IRS' radar.

However, let's say Mr. White sits down at an online gambling table and 'loses' $100,000 to Mr. Pink. That transaction is stored in the private database of an off-shore casino and is out of the eye of the IRS and the US Government. Washing the money after you withdraw from the casino involves more processes, but the most important thing is that money does not go through the proper, established channels, and the government does not like this.

I think the saying went: You can cheat the people as long as you remember to pay your taxes.

Lastly, I hope they go the route of regulation instead of outright banning.. otherwise my website is moot.

--
MJ

I too have a website, and I've got the logs in a nice, easy to read form. Most of the readership of my site is from slashdot.

Notice how many people are using Windows/IE?

Of course, the only reason people usually visit my site is because I said something interesting and they wanted to see who I was. Maybe IE/Windows users are more prone to webwandering.

>At least the visible part of the EM spectrum isn't licensed.

Yes and no. While you can't see, only feel infrared, you can't just go broadcasting it willy-nilly.

And I'm sure there's laws against using high power visible lasers, too...

Linux and WiFi make a great combination.

Here's a HOWTO (soon to be published at the Linux Documentation Project) about using Linux as a WiFi Access Point.

If you have a particular floppy router you want to start with, first make sure it boots the machine and that evrything works except the USB device.

Then you need a linux machine to build the kernel on, and to build any other utilities you might need. You will configure the kernel in the normal way (make menuconfig) and add in USB and any other support you need. Since this might make the whole system too big for a floppy, go and find things that you don't need and remove them. You should be able to make a custom kernel smaller than the original one.

You will have to find out how your router floppy is assembled. The simplest will be if it has a ramdisk image and the kernel on a FAT formatted floppy with syslinux as the boot loader; in that case you will copy your new kernel to the floppy and run the command "syslinux /dev/fd0".

Don't be intimidated, people tend to over hype the difficulty of these things. It's more just tedious details. If you want to try, send me email and I will be glad to answer questions.

the open source expert

here

for real answers to tough questions,
Ask the Open Source Expert

if you is not teh sure ask teh OPEN SORES EXPERT

http://aeoe.freeshell.org/atose/index.php

The Freeshell.org Unix shell/email provider uses a distributed filesystem to provide transparency across their various machines. After a few minutes of searching, I was not able to determine what their method is, but it's worth asking them about it, as Freeshell has over 10,000 users and high traffic.

You all said it died, but I got it... maybe cached from our proxy though.. but anyway.

HERE IT IS

enjoy.. I'll be busy for a bit. :)

Here's a screenshot of it on my machine, with OpenOffice.org.

Vera.

It's a nice font set to start from. I hope that the community can use it to create a unicode version.

Text adventures online. 'Nuff said.

I personally stopped listening to the radio sometime around 1997 when Radio Free Hawaii went off the air. It was radio democracy with ballot boxes around the state. It had better music than any other stations and without the horrible 4 hour rotation that most mainstream stations use. (They figure that most listeners spend 2 hrs a day w/ the radio, so they rotate to make sure you hear the hits). Of course thier ratings were at the very bottom according the Arbitron rating system wich they refused to subscribe to. From what I understand Austrailia copied the format... but I'm not sure if its still going down under.

It must have been a long time since you've seen X, then.

X Fonts.

Actually, this doesn't do it justice. Freetype is actively being developed and better improved for LCD displays and subpixel hinting. Subpixel hinting on X, on an LCD, rivels OS X... And it certainly tops Windows XP.

As they pointed out, text based gaming isn't gone, and it's probably not going to go away. It's just not mainstream anymore.

And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does, except for maybe playing a game while reading a book (which is much harder to do). Also, what "technical capabilities" are you talking about? Hardly anything has changed since the infocom days; the same technology is used (albiet SLIGHTLY more advanced with the introduction of a few new engines - TADS, advent, etc). If you're talking about the addition of graphics, then you're not talking about a text adventure.

My imagination kicks the crap out of a graphics engine any day, and so I'll continue to prefer a good text adventure, and that's *exactly* what I've got. Incidently, I keep some of them here.

Still...it would be nice if there where more epic text adventures - ones that take a year or so to play. But that's probably way more than I can expect.

A lot of the latest games come with the ability to write subgames using their engines.

There are even a few previously released games that are freeware now with such an engine. Dink Smallwood comes to mind.

And for RPGs or interactive fiction a single individual can surely still do their thing. It's even possible to put them on the web.

Not polished? That's crap. To me, polished means no bugs, and an excellent storyline that makes sense. My old games don't crash, and the whole game isn't "go kill the monster and level up." The new ones I've got seem to crash much more often, and I haven't found much BESIDES go kill the monster.

Nearly all of my old games where made by six people or less, but the new ones...

I would also like to note that the best game I've ever played was an independant one.

I was tired of waiting too, so I built it for Slackware Linux and Dropline Gnome from the 1.4a CVS. It is becoming better, but I have a feeling tha they are going to implement a better download manager before releasing 0.6. It's still missing from the CVS version, but an options tab for it is in the options menu.

There are some noticable improvements in the options menu. Speed seems to be faster. I think that they are using experimental fast-loading by default.

Here. Take a look.

Phoenix.

You can just use a nightly build of Phoenix, but I don't think that it is as far ahead as this CVS version. Rest assured, it is improving.

Don't forget that, via Southern Cross, those "backward New Zealanders" provide your country with most of it's Internet capacity.

Without New Zeland, you Australians would have more time to be doing this

IP on Everything

Agreed. The big key is the "patented" byte-code interpreter. That is the big step to getting lovely fonts on Linux. And I do mean lovely. It's not hard to compile into Freetype 2, but by default it won't be there. Apple's not put any pressure on anyone (yet), but it would be nice if they would donate it to OS community.

It really is such a silly and insignificant algorithm, but it makes all of the difference in the world. Try using OpenOffice.org without it. It's frustrating, because antialised fonts are too bold and fat. I've tweaked mine so that they look nice, but it means compiling Freetype 2 with the byte-code interpreter.

If you want to see what a properly antialiased Linux machine looks like, take a peek at this image. Small fonts are crisp, and unantialiased. Large fonts are antialiased and smooth, thanks to Freetype 2 and some minor tweaks.

I've paid for Windows in the past. Does this mean that I'm entitled to use the byte-code interpreter? If not, then I must be a criminal. More information can be found at the Freetype web site

That's funny. I must have compiled a Windows version of Phoenix on my Slackware box. Man, I'm one 1337 coder.

http://zborgerd.freeshell.org/crisp.png

This isn't really anything new. The first successor to long copper lines in the US were microwave links. Plenty of other developing nations have been using wireless links to reach far flung small villages for a while now. One of the big examples of this has been Chile.It is especially useful in mountainous areas. In rough terrain it becomes cheaper to put up two expensive microwave towers that it is to pay for the labor of stringing copper or fiber.

I made this to show to my students.

The DHTML is old, so it won't work with DOM, EXCEPT for the stars which should be whizzing by, which use normal dhtml. Does that work?

For a java example, try this. It uses signed applets to allow you to save and load a game. When I tried it, it opened another window to contain the applet, and I couldn't get it to save for anything.

I tested these with Konqeror v. 3.0.3 for these negative results. This version also doesn't have tabbed browsing built-in. As for extra media types, plugger is a fairly simple and small install, and it has given me all the media types I use, at least (everything that ghostview, adobe, mplayer, abiword, gnumeric, image magick, and xmms are capable of playing).

If all I want is what konqeror can do, I'll just use links in graphical mode.

Its easy to click-through with internet explorer. But what if you've got Netscape 6 or Mozilla?

Sure, its easy to use https mode, but what if you want to sign applets?

Its a REAL pain. You have to download a public key, open up a console, find your certificate store, and manually add it.

I made something that I wanted to do that with. What a pain!

Here it is.

I've been working on getting stuff like this online.

So far, I've gotten, Matthew Russo's zplet working with a CGI front-end.

Next on the list is jetty, though this will probably take a bit (lot) more work, as its not very polished at the moment.

Anyway...I put MY favorite Inform games (those that work with the z-machine interpreter) online at this location.

I just added the competition's zcode section as well - it's
here.

Have fun!

One note: the reason that the applet asks for read/write permission is so that you can save. Its a security risk for you, perhaps, but why live your life in fear?

Here it is.

I've been working on getting stuff like this online.

So far, I've gotten, Matthew Russo's zplet working with a CGI front-end.

Next on the list is jetty, though this will probably take a bit (lot) more work, as its not very polished at the moment.

Anyway...I put MY favorite Inform games (those that work with the z-machine interpreter) online at this location.

I just added the competition's zcode section as well - it's
here.

Have fun!

One note: the reason that the applet asks for read/write permission is so that you can save. Its a security risk for you, perhaps, but why live your life in fear?

Here it is.

I've been working on getting stuff like this online.

So far, I've gotten, Matthew Russo's zplet working with a CGI front-end.

Next on the list is jetty, though this will probably take a bit (lot) more work, as its not very polished at the moment.

Anyway...I put MY favorite Inform games (those that work with the z-machine interpreter) online at this location.

I just added the competition's zcode section as well - it's
here.

Have fun!

One note: the reason that the applet asks for read/write permission is so that you can save. Its a security risk for you, perhaps, but why live your life in fear?

Then there is Microsoft's attack on what it claims is Apple's lacklustre promotion of OS X.

Considering that the chance of MSN Messenger on Mac ever having the same level of functionality as Windows Messenger on XP - which is not even available for other versions of Windows, much like their latest Media Player, the deal with Apple makes much sense; especially considering the number of people who bought Apple to avoid Microsoft products.

My twopence,

Michel
Visit my website here

Now we can ditch normal image-creation programs too. Check this out.

handy links:
Winamp plugin

XMMS plugin

other windows shorten software

SHN FAQ