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Telecommunications software and multimedia laboratory of my school, Helsinki University of Technology organized this this kind of course back in year 1999. It was the first and the last time it was organized. The reason why they removed it, that I don't know. Maybe subject wasn't sexy enough back then. But it's a real shame I have no possibility to attend a course like that. Actually, maybe I hold a petition among friends and mail the professor who lead the '99 course and request the course to be added to selection :) Actually, the homepage of the course is still online (in Finnish) as is the course material which is partly in English. Material covers corresponding EU directives and Finnish national legislation.

I read this Licentiate Thesis work sometime ago, and if you are interested in getting to know virtual reality/environment techniques and CAVE construction it is excellent. It's PDF and over 700K, 146 pages.

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.

Google gave me this:

http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/faq/vga2rgb/int erfacing.html#vga_laptoplcd

The prognosis isn't good :-(

NetHack Falcon's Eye http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nethack.html
I'm aware that you are looking for Mac OS versions, and Falcon's eye is not yet available for Mac, but I still think you should take a look (or maybe even port it ;)

You could try building your own, there is a good page on it here.

P2P packet radio is an old idea. Check out the old Aloha and AX25 protocols. One of the best sites for amature packet radio is Tucson Amateur Packet Radio or Packet Primer.

For more than 10 years, practically all university students have gotten a UNIX login, and universities have been full of public terminals for students in labs and in hallways. In some richer universities, they have even had *oooh* X-terminals.

The machines have usually been Sun, but I don't think Linux would be overwhelmingly different from them...

For example here at Helsinki University of Technology, there are a lot of UNIX workstations available (mainly Alpha, Sun, i386 on Digital UNIX, SunOS and Linux), as well as several big-iron machines (kosh.hut.fi currently has 785 users logged in). They are now starting concentrate on Linux machines to slowly replace the SunOS/Digital UNIX workstations. There are already at least 6 classrooms filled with Linux boxen, with more on the way. (These are the common rooms, the CS department has of course lots more.)

(There are, of course, also Windows classrooms, but I haven't touched one in many months.)

There is an IETF standard called mobile IP which has been capable of doing this for years. I have used it to roam from Fixed Etherenet to 802.11 to cellular with out losing any of my sessions. The are many implimentations available. Dynamincs is is an open source solution. Cisco has a complete line of solutions. As well as a number of other vendors. So why would you want a proprietary solution like the one from greenpacket.

Download here: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/effmp3

I think the problem is bigger and more widespread than just this screenshot. I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap.

Then you haven't seen Falcon's Eye (Screenshots here).

And, at the heart of it all, it really is nethack!

Mine is here: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/desktop.xml

It's actually funny that the student union here at HUT has rented private premier shows (the ones that start 00:01) for both LotR:FotR and SW:AotC only for students.

The LotR tickets went immediately: if you were at the secretary at 8 o'clock when they started selling the tickets, you probably couldn't get a ticket. I waited about 2 hours, and I was 20th in line. (Each person in line was allowed 2 tickets.)

The SW tickets have now been on sale for a few weeks, and AFAIK there are still places left! Goes to show that Ep1 really scared people away...

(I haven't got a ticket - Ep1 was poor enough that I'll wait a few days longer to watch it 1.5 EUR cheaper.)

You mean this one?

The fact that Microsoft is connected to Internet2 doesn't give you 1meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate.

They have probably hunderds of mirrors around the world where the actual wares is downloaded from, you're automatically redirected to the closest one.

Works pretty fine here, they have one mirror in the same facility as where the Finnish University and Research Network backbone is located, this gives me 4-5meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate to my dorm at the campus of Helsinki University of Technology :)

Just in case this is needed: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/wolf3d-source/

Take a look at a websom example. Here you can differentiate pruning from the garden variety fairly easily.

This would allow you to easily make the choice between obviously different usages of the word anchor.

t.

Actually, there has been a project called CarNet, a proposed improvement to the routing protocols of the MANET project, which looks at protocols for IP routing over mobile nodes.

Ultima 1: A Legend is Reborn - http://www.peroxide.dk/ultima/

Ultima 4: The Dawn of Virtue - http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/ultima4/

Ultima 5: Lazarus - http://www.u5lazarus.com

Ultima 6: Prophecy - www.laymeduck.com/u6

Ultima 9: Eriadain - http://eriadain.multimania.com

Ultima 9: Redemption - http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~fountain

Also, Bard's Tale is being remade into Devil Whiskey (Bard's Tale 4). It can be seen at http://www.bardslegacy.com

Well, there is an okay graphical version called falcon's eye. Why can't you play a game that has a trainer or god mode? No will power?

is the Win32 DirectX port of NetHACK with isometric graphics (a lot like Diablo) and sound effects: Falcon's Eye

Has anyone checked out Falcon's Eye? It's a frontend for NetHack that has 3D isometric graphics and background music, and it's available for Linux, DOS and Windows. It looks fabulous, and I think it's a great way to get new people interested in the game.

Sure you can play the Nethack with its original ASCII based interface, but the game is far more sexy with a full SVGA Diablo-esque interface (see screenshots on bottom of linked page). Note this game is fully open source, and still actively developed... even after more than a decade! This game has been polished to perfection.

Free marketing tip (the first one is always free): if you want to sell an operating system (or make it really wanted), please don't name it 'Inferno'. It doesn't bring really good mental images, now does it. Also, 'Plan9' sounds like a warm hatful of geek humor that's guaranteed to provoke negative reactions in more rigid corporate minds.

The folks at Bell Labs pick names like "Plan 9" and "Inferno" for exactly the reasons you say they shouldn't. From http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kny/inferno/background.html:

The first question usually asked about Plan 9 is the origin of its name. Some people probably know the cult classic 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', and the name of Plan 9 is indeed a salutation to that film. In addition, Plan 9 continues the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketing droids cry.

Good question.

Unfortunetly I'm not the person to ask =). But maybe this report from last year will give you a better idea of the goings-on.

I don't know if spoiled is quite it. More to the point, I think some games spend too much attention on graphics, sounds, special effects, and not enough on making a good, playable game. That's true of all game genres, not just multi-player online games.

If you're looking for a MUD, even a text-based one, they're still out there:

• NetHack - successor to Rogue, the granddaddy of them all
• Falcon's Eye - a graphical version of NetHack
• Wyvern - a Java/Jython MUD with graphics

Nope, I was wrong. The 1541 had 2kb of ram according this.

Try it! It makes a really nice analog whirrrrrrring sound.

how about that mod: mount a small mirror at the head axis and shine on it with a laser -> nice galvanometer. project it on a wall and you always know the track your hd is reading.

Show me the slashdot effect :)

I am putting this idea out for two reasons - to get people thinking, and also to act as a sort of "prior art" for patent reasons (not really sure it would count, though).

Ok, so they are wondering how to power this thing, while keeping it small, right? Well, that little Sarcos blurb got me thinking:

Sarcos's suit will incorporate a separate, hydrogen- or petroleum-fired piston at every joint, an approach that aims to avoid the losses that plague distributed-power systems.

...and here is what I came up with:

You know those pneumatic contraction muscles that exist out there (I think there is also a hydraulic version as well)? They use something akin to a mesh, sorta like a "chinese handcuffs" weave, and a bladder inside that when filled with air (or hydraulic fluid), causes the weave to shorten, contracting the muscle - let me see if I can find a link... Ah, here we are:

McKibben Artificial Muscles

Notice the simple construction (hell, it is a construction article!) - some flexible tubing, braided sheathing, and a little simple work, and you can build these yourself!

Ok - now for the unique part (or, at least I think it is unique - I may be wrong, my idea may already be patented or something - I haven't checked - if you know, post here!):

These things use pumps, right? They need something to expand the bladder. Well, typically pneumatic or hydraulic pressure is used - which is all fine and well, except for an exoskeleton app, that power supply tends to be huge. So, let's shrink it!

Instead of generating pressure using a motor power ed compressor - why not generate it using an engine?! How, you may ask? Look at this:

Pulse Two - Performance of a Hydraulic Free Piston Engine

These engines have been around for a while - I have an old Popular Mechanics from 1950 that shows one on the front cover in the use of driving a large freight truck. Essentially, instead of using explosions to drive pistons that turn crankshafts and gears - the movement of the pistons is harnessed directly to pump a working fluid - in most cases hydraulic fluid, I would imagine air could be pumped as well.

Such a power plant could be built small and relatively light weight (I would say lighter in weight and as powerful as a backpack leaf blower engine). Lines could be ran from the engine to the air or hydraulic muscles at the joints.

Now, you may say - why not use regular hydraulic/pneumatic cylinders instead of these "muscles"? This seems to be Sarco's approach, as far as I can tell. Maybe, maybe not. Glad you asked. I wanted to present another power alternative...

Remember that engine - what are we doing: Exploding a fuel in a container causing it to expand greatly, producing power. That power is transmitted in some way to where it is needed - in conventional machines via gears and shafts, in our recently designed exoskeleton via hydraulic/pneumatic lines. But what if you used that exploding gas to drive the muscles? You could hook the lines directly to the combustion chamber, and route the gasses to the muscles - but think outside the box...

Run the fuel lines to the muscles - add an injector at one end, a spark plug at the other, and some kind of exhaust valve system. Make the muscle out of some braided titanium or something (the bladder was just there to keep the working fluid in one place - it isn't a needed device for these muscles - it is the braid that when it expands radially, it contracts laterally) to resist the heat of the explosions. Use a PWM format to "pulse" the explosions in the muscle to vary its "strength". Add some kind of heat dumping system to keep it from overheating.

At that point, the muscles ARE the power source, and the backpack contains control electronics and the fuel tank, etc - ignition coils and such could be built into the spark plug assembly, and the thing becomes a complete fuel/electric machine.

Does any of this sound "do-able"? Does it seem sound reasoning? Is anybody researching this direction? Would anybody be willing to give me a grant to try this out? Sarcos, want to hire me?

Seriously - other than the titanium braid, most of this could be easily fabricated in a home shop! Stick with steel braid and an external combustion chamber, and you could easily do this in a home shop! Maybe I SHOULD DO IT? What do you think? Hmmm...???

From The Jargon File via the UMEC's Jargon Server:

legalese n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

From The Jargon File via the UMEC's Jargon Server:

legalese n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

From The Jargon File via the UMEC's Jargon Server:

legalese n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

From The Jargon File via the UMEC's Jargon Server:

legalese n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

The article implies that they are squeezing the downloads into "latent" portions of the DTV signal.

Well, what I want to know is why can't they do this with existing analog signals instead of forcing users to upgrade their television sets? So says hut.fi:

While the 525 lines in a complete NTSC television picture may seem impressive (after all VGA has only 480) there's a catch. Approximately 100 lines are lost to timing information and retracing. Only about 425 lines make it to the screen.

Available on every analog TV channel is 100 lines, which could theoretically be digitized and used for downloads. If I did my math correctly, that's (60MHz (refresh rate) / 525) * 100 = 11MHz of spare data. Assuming an average of 50 usable channels, 571MHz unused TV spectrum is wasted. I hope they put it to use before trying to develop incompatible standards to do the same thing.

Look no further, your question has been answered here.

How come you haven't heard of it already, I'm getting these offers almost every day...

Yeah, Nethack is great, and for those that want a graphical eye candy aplenty version of one of the best open source games of all time, check out Falcon's Eye: Nethack with eye candy. And for those who don't know what Nethack is... I guess you could say that its a game that inspired Diablo and Diablo II.

Yeah, Nethack is great, and for those that want a graphical eye candy aplenty version of one of the best open source games of all time, check out Falcon's Eye: Nethack with eye candy. And for those who don't know what Nethack is... I guess you could say that its a game that inspired Diablo and Diablo II.

Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?

Every bit of audio present on a CD will be retrieved with a SPDIF connection. Enough quality for ya? ;-)

As for the interface and ease of writing discrete MP3 tracks when the SPDIF stream changes, tagging, etc., well, that's where a SPDIF connection becomes more of a hassle than normal ripping. But that's all really just a software issue -- all the hardware is available. Like the poster, I also have a Slink-e from Nirvis. Great box and it lets you pull approximate TOC info from the CD in a single or multi-disc Sony player (via an S-Link cable) to retrieve CDDB (or equiv) info for tagging or naming. You'll need another connection (S-Link, for example) alongside the SPDIF connection for player/disc/track data.

The Slinke hardware is platform independent, though the software the give away with it is entirely Windows. Search around and you'll see some Linux and Apple support for the Slink-e also...

in Python
someone's project & some links
HA support

By the way, the Slink-e is great for general infrared in/out in addition to controlling Sony (and a few other manufacturers') CDs, MDs, receivers, TVs, etc.

In case the server can't handle the /. effect, here's a mirror of the screen shot: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/glass2k-screensh ot/

Not necessarily. It depends on the "quality" of the video card. Some video cards will allow this, others require that you switch to a special "tweaked" settings mode to get TV-out, while still others have special routing circuitry that is set by a register on the card (or via some wierd I2C bus control). Here are some sites that might help:

VGA to TV Information Center
Chrontel
Video Timing Calculator
VGATV Homepage

As far as the LCD module is concerned - the EDE702 is a good choice - I would almost say with it and the LCD it would be 1/3 the cost of the Matrix Orbital (of course, what you are kinda paying on the MO device is the nice repackaging to make everything fit in a small area). As far as the EL backlight burnout: it might be possible to replace it - but I am not sure it would be worth the trouble. You can get EL kits from AllElectronics, that could be cut and adapted for the device - then you would have to take the LCD off the board and replace the EL portion (if the LCD is truely seperate - otherwise you would be taking the LCD apart - you may or may not get it back together again where it works properly).

I would go to EIO or AllElectronics and buy another display, personally.

Not necessarily. It depends on the "quality" of the video card. Some video cards will allow this, others require that you switch to a special "tweaked" settings mode to get TV-out, while still others have special routing circuitry that is set by a register on the card (or via some wierd I2C bus control). Here are some sites that might help:

VGA to TV Information Center
Chrontel
Video Timing Calculator
VGATV Homepage

As far as the LCD module is concerned - the EDE702 is a good choice - I would almost say with it and the LCD it would be 1/3 the cost of the Matrix Orbital (of course, what you are kinda paying on the MO device is the nice repackaging to make everything fit in a small area). As far as the EL backlight burnout: it might be possible to replace it - but I am not sure it would be worth the trouble. You can get EL kits from AllElectronics, that could be cut and adapted for the device - then you would have to take the LCD off the board and replace the EL portion (if the LCD is truely seperate - otherwise you would be taking the LCD apart - you may or may not get it back together again where it works properly).

I would go to EIO or AllElectronics and buy another display, personally.

One of the professors in our department has been doing some heavy research into computations using more than one base. The idea goes like this:

1. Select two bases that will be able to represent your expected number space best. He started out using 2 and 3, but you can easily use 2 and 7, 2 and 13, 2 and 9973, whatever floats your boat. In fact, you can use any real number as your second base.
2. Map your real numbers to the DBNS number space thusly:
   • 6 = 2^1 * 3^1
   • 18 = 2^1 * 3^2
   • 231.67 ~= 2^3 * 3^3.0637
   Keep in mind that there are many possibilities for your mapping (he's developed optimizations for finding good mappings)
3. Exploit the exponential nature of the system! A multiplication is now a simple addition of exponents. Division is a subtraction.
4. Keep in mind that huge numbers (or huge precision) can be maintained with a small number of bits in the exponents. For example, the number 105413504 (2^7*7^7) requires only two bytes. In binary it requires 27 bits to be represented.

Obviously this isn't a universal solution, but think about DSP hardware, where multiplications are expensive and needed all the time. Not to mention exponentiation for cryptography. Also, this brief explanation doesn't do justice to the full potential/applications of DBNS. A lot of work has gone into it.

If you want to find out more about DBNS, there is a primer at www.rcim.ca/Research/Video_Rate/DBNS/, miscellaneous papers at people.atips.ca/~eskritt and a collection of a few published papers at www.atips.ca/research. Also, some older presentations are archived at wooster.hut.fi/geta/courses/graham/Applications/.

Disclaimer: I'm the web guy for our research group at the U of Calgary. The guy who came up with DBNS is a professor here (Dr. V. Dimitrov).

You may find my site faster than kde.org:
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/kde3-screenshots /

Falcon's Eye Nethack is probably one of the best open source video games for Linux. I mean, the graphics are as good as Diablo's! I highly recommend that any gamer check out Falcon's Eye Nethack

Hi,

I'm going to unabashedly karma whore for a second because Nethack is my favourite game ever. I can't tell you the number of hours I wasted playing this (or other rogue-like games, such as rogue, larn, adom, or omega).

Here are some links to get you all started:

Nethack.org

One of the first and best Nethack pages, from the legenday Boudewijn Waijers

another Nethack homepage

A newer Nethack page

QT Nethack

An impressive graphical Nethack

The google Roguelike directory entry

the classic rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Happy hacking!

Maybe you find my 100Mbit/s .fi link faster than the original .jp site...
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/h7outside.mpg
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/h6homepage2.mpg

Maybe you find my 100Mbit/s .fi link faster than the original .jp site...
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/h7outside.mpg
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/h6homepage2.mpg