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As always when there's a thread about RPG, i recommend to everybody to give a try at Tibia (more infos here). Which is a free multi player online role playing game for windows and linux. Sadly the linux client isnt up to date and really suck by now, maybe sending an email asking for update is worthwhile (?) if you like it (by giving a try at the win32 version)...

Though you still have to train killing small monsters to get skills, there's some points i'd like to develop about this game, and more generally about other rpg. This is probably obvious to everybody playing such games, but in fact they're actually rewarding and giving you some kind of 'XP', while perhaps not shown in your stats. I wanted to write about it, because peoples dont often think about it. While you could go killing other peoples, looting, or training alone, quests are a good way to get the 'XP' i'm thinking about. Of course, they give you some reason to be playing the game, you must solve them, find a special object, kill a hord of mutants, or save some princess (which is always captured by the same phoenix that keep resurecting), and more.

- It may be a riddle, the quest is a challenge to your mind, you have to solve a puzzle, understand what the devolopers were thinking about, perhaps refer to some litteracy you may find on the web. For example i remember of a quest that let you (hardly) find a secret scroll with strange characters on it and which was signed by "Geoffrey Chaucer". It's rewarding because you had to search and find more infos about him to understand the message. The whole point is while doing that you learn new things.

- Killing monsters while solving the quest of course get you some XP in your stats anyway. But some other 'XP' you get here are when the quest is too hard for you. You learn to find friends (socialize), make associations or work for some peoples (trade), or even manipulate other players (politics).

Socializing and politics are a good way to learn how to meet peoples (especially if you're a geek scotched on your computer the whole day). You learn how to present yourself, how you create [a list of] contacts which can be usefull -at one time or another- between themselves, giving you the benefit to know what's going on in other fields of [real or virtual] society because you are contacted first when someone needs something. And this gives you a "first turn", you can act before others. And, IRL, to find a job ;-).

Trading is also a good way to get better skills in and out of the game. You learn where and how to buy or sell, and know how to make benifits from small/large towns markets. I got really suspicious about the prices that real life merchants where giving me, and i'm now really hard when trading, looking for other merchants, and what does it costs me to buy/sell stuff. I nearly saved 25,000 euros when i arranged my new house, and it makes a real difference -- trust me.

Though those two are of course about getting 'XP' in real life, you still get the following one for in game playing, the goal of the quest often brings you something. First is getting an item which may be useful to you (modifying some of your stats), or that you can sell at a good

I use mc (ported to NT) on my w2k box. I can manipulate files an order of magnitude faster than dragging, right-clicking (and the subsequent inexplicable 2-3 second wait sometimes), not to mention windows' caching. I used mc for all of my development (JSP) up until about a month ago when I transitioned to Eclipse.

Oh wait, this was about hardware. I had a hardware dvd card in until a few months ago (Creative DXR-3 or something like that), and I've had the same Gamepad for at least 10 years now.

Charles Dickens,

Bleak House Chapter I

SEC: Pay them the money!
IBM: Why?
SEC: They have sources...?
IBM: That's not source!
SCOX: Uh...?
IBM: This is source.
SCOX: Aiiiieeee! <runs away>

Franklin's autobiography makes for fascinating reading.

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead & rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing" - Ben Franklin

18:24:54 (198.56 KB/s) - `OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz' saved [78347712/78347712]

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

But it can be a good thing, as long as the content is Free from restrictions.

Think.... The classes taught worldwide in universities are nearly the same, why the hell do we waste effort and money reinventing the wheel constantly. If we had a strong library of open text books, college would be that much cheaper for everyone.

It works for elementary school too. There's even less diversity there in textbooks. Was I the only person who thought it was insane that school districts don't have enough money for textbooks?

Our tax money is being wasted on "All Rights Reserved" textbooks to the tune of billions of dollars a year. If 5% of that money for one year instead went to fund the creation of open text books, we'd never have to buy another textbook again.

Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

You don't remember the Gentoo/Unreal Live CD?

Unreal Tournament 2003 Gentoo Live CD

Posted on 16th September 2002 by drobbins

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. You can download the CD using this link.

Here are some good places for newbies to start with Linux...

Hope this helps!

The latest gentoo-sources patch for 2.4.20 can be downloaded here. Warning - really huge directory listing if you browse all the files.)
Addon patches that update this one can be downloaded here.

1. Decide if you want the aavm or rmap VM. If you want aa, delete the files ending in .rmap (and vice versa)
2. I followed what the ebuild script does and deleteted the patches starting with 1, 6 and 8.
3. Apply the addon patches in the order that they're listed in the ebuild script.
4. Run your normal make menuconfig/xconfig and turn on the desired options like Preemptible Kernel and Low latency scheduling. I have Timer frequency (HZ) set to 200 since I only have a PII 450. Some people set it to 500 or 1000 for faster CPUs. I also use supermount and grsecurity.

Some people like the gaming-sources for pure speed but fewer features. The pfeifer-sources are the most bleeding edge patches that eventually become gentoo-sources after testing. Read about the different patches here.

For more on McNealy's anti-privacy advocacy, see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/29/14 32247&mode=thread&tid=158 and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/12/003242 &mode=thread&tid=102. I also like the Doctor Fun cartoon.

If your wondering were computer design is headed? this (scroll down to the "buying is better than building" section) is it. A flat-panel with either the computer seperate, or built in. Same for the periphials. For those who need horsepower? There's either rackmount, or other distributed computing resources i.e appliances which can be hidden (now why does everything NEED to be together?). When MRAM technology improves, and does away with the bulkier aspects of computing i.e. hard drives. (maybe in a PCMCIA format. Bulky HD cases need not apply). Then computers will start looking more like works of art, because presently we are still being hobbled by big MB's with right-angle PCI accessories boards, and bulky peripherals.

Hmmm..

Definitely needs more Pogo.

Check out Doug Englebart's picture : doesn't he look like Q (in James Bond)? No wonder he thought of a whacky input device like the mouse when only keyboards existed.

As Rudyard Kipling so aptly phrased it in _Stalky_&_Co_, "It seems -- and who so astonished as they? -- that they had held back material facts; were guilty both of_suppressio_veri_ and _suggestio_falsi_ (well-known gods against whom they often offended); further, that they were malignant in their dispositions, untrustworthy in their characters, pernicious and revolutionary in their influences, abandoned to the devils of wilfulness, pride, and a most intolerable conceit."

Real simple.

The future of cinema isn't gonna look anything like what this article talks about. It's obvious. Every person i've shown this to has had their chin hit the floor.

My source for public domain-sourced ebooks. Now, they are missing some stuff I'd like to see, but they really do have a ton of goods there. And, even if your reader of choice isn't plucker, all of the books are available in very simple HTML markup for conversion to your format of choice.

And there's always the venerable Project Gutenberg; most of their stuff is in plain, portable, ASCII. They also have a CD of some of the best stuff available.

Anyone else see these pictures on the servers? hehehe, I wonder when these were taken.

Anyone else see these pictures on the servers? hehehe, I wonder when these were taken.

Anyone else see these pictures on the servers? hehehe, I wonder when these were taken.

I think one of the most eloquent critics of English law was Charles Dickens. For instance, in his preface to Bleak House he states in part

A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.

...

At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun.

This is great writing, but it is depressing to note that, in 150 years, little has changed.

Yes, but the difference is that you are normally allowed to print up to 500 verses from these translations as long as you attribute the source. In non-profit printings, you can print as much as you want as long as you attribute the source. At least this is the way it is with the NIV and NRSB. Also, the text of the Bible is not secret. You can get it from multiple sources, with multiple translations, and some translations are in the public domain. No one will come after you if you link to it.

I don't think anyone could possibly claim ownership to such translations as the king James Version.

Nope, it's public domain: The KJV Bible

Most of the books you see published about Christianity are copyrighted

Uh, what's the point? Most books are copyrighted. A book about Christianity is not a sacred text.

as are most of the hymns, though.

As are most secular songs. Some hymns are also public domain. Hymns are not a major tenet of Christianity. They even differ from church to church within Christianity.

but it's not the only religion whose texts are copyrighted.

Christianity's texts aren't copyrighted. The Bible isn't copyrighted. Other Christian works such as the "Apostle's Creed" aren't copyrighted either. Some translations of Christian works are copyrighted, and some of them aren't.

Anyone can translate the Bible and publish it.
Anybody can get a copy of the KJV and publish it.
I guarantee that neither Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John will sue your ass for publishing it.

1. Prohibited uses include
   (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.

I have a list of about 15 web comics that I read. I enjoy them all, to varying degrees.

One thing that sort of bothers me, though, is that the comics I read tend to produced by people who aren't doing them as a business but do them because they enjoy it. They'll also use it as a way to promote other work that they do (Graphics Artists, for example).

But, frankly, this can also mean that the work is flaky, late, etc. I've seen artists decide to take three month sabbaticals because they've decided that they're burned out. Sometimes they get too busy with other tasks--they don't make a living off the comic, so if something more important comes along, they do that.

I don't complain. After all, it's free and they do it out of the kindness of their heart. One of my favorites, InkTank (he has two comics, "Angst Technology" and "Weak-end Warriors") is currently on an extended hiatus. Now, that's fine and dandy, but I'd be a little annoyed if I paid money and he suddenly decided to take a break. Where's my refund? Of course, do I want to read "corporate" comics--someone who does it to put food on his table? Like CDs, do I have to pay for two weeks of crap just for the one entertaining idea?

Actually, I like the Merchandising angle. I have a couple of Ozy and Millie T-Shirts. I try to buy stuff from my favorite sites in order to support their art.

Anyway, here's my obligatory list of some favorites:

Doctor Fun
General Protection Fault
Something Positive
You Damn Kid

Obligatory Dr. Fun link: Doctor Fun

Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?

Some of them are available at Project Gutenberg

#1 - A Princess of Mars
#2 - Gods Of Mars
#2 - Warlord of Mars

I think there were about 12 books, but only a few are available at PG. ERB's work was some of the first titles there. Pretty cool (and very imaginative) old-school Sci-Fi. You may have heard of his other work -- Tarzan.

Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?

Some of them are available at Project Gutenberg

#1 - A Princess of Mars
#2 - Gods Of Mars
#2 - Warlord of Mars

I think there were about 12 books, but only a few are available at PG. ERB's work was some of the first titles there. Pretty cool (and very imaginative) old-school Sci-Fi. You may have heard of his other work -- Tarzan.

Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?

Some of them are available at Project Gutenberg

#1 - A Princess of Mars
#2 - Gods Of Mars
#2 - Warlord of Mars

I think there were about 12 books, but only a few are available at PG. ERB's work was some of the first titles there. Pretty cool (and very imaginative) old-school Sci-Fi. You may have heard of his other work -- Tarzan.

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9511/df951102 .jpg

What kind of dinosaur is Lucky supposed to be? Looks suspiciously like a velociraptor. All I can think of when I look at the photos of Lucky is how funny it would be for him to leap on another animatronic dino and start eating him. Like this: Scenes cut from Jurassic Park: Velociraptors Devour a Barney (from Dr Fun).

What kind of dinosaur is Lucky supposed to be? Looks suspiciously like a velociraptor. All I can think of when I look at the photos of Lucky is how funny it would be for him to leap on another animatronic dino and start eating him. Like this: Scenes cut from Jurassic Park: Velociraptors Devour a Barney (from Dr Fun).

http://www.m-w.com says that the term goes back to 1877, but the first appearance in print of the word capitalism was in the novel The Newcomes, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1854.

I thought the Communist Manifesto may have preceeded that, so I quickly scanned it, and there are several references to Capital, and Capitalists, but no "Capitalism"

This site backs that up, showing what appears to be entries from the OED (which is a paid site, so no linky) for it and a few more 'isms'

BTW, here is an interesting article on Capitalism. I doubt that it will change the minds of any true believers, but I'd encourage all to read it.

Wait a minute, who am I kidding? This is /.

The same book is available in downloadable versions here: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

As a CS major, the intro CS classes at my school recently switched from teaching Java to Python. The class is designed to teach the fundamentals of computer science and computer pogramming. Python is extremely easy to learn, and quite powerful. We used the free text How to Think Like a Computer Scientist as the course textbook. I recommend this text to anyone interested in learning Python as a first programming language.

Is this what they are talking about? Dr. Fun

Why don't they just use a Magic Nine-Ball?

From the Doctor Fun Archive, see "In his secret lab deep beneath Mt. Rainier, Doctor Watson "detects" another error."

From the Doctor Fun Archive, see "In his secret lab deep beneath Mt. Rainier, Doctor Watson "detects" another error."

Celeron=Celerity... or maybe Celebrity

More like Apium graveolens .

Efficeon=Efficient?

As another user pointed out, Efficeon sounds more like a fish. Transmeta should have plundered classic literature again (like it did with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe), possibly taking the name "Nemo" from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Or maybe not.

That's a compliment like saying the fat girl has a good personality.

You didn't like Shallow Hal either, I take it?

Celeron=Celerity... or maybe Celebrity

More like Apium graveolens .

Efficeon=Efficient?

As another user pointed out, Efficeon sounds more like a fish. Transmeta should have plundered classic literature again (like it did with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe), possibly taking the name "Nemo" from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Or maybe not.

That's a compliment like saying the fat girl has a good personality.

You didn't like Shallow Hal either, I take it?

This conversation definitely needs more Pogo

Anyway, I wrote a whitepaper on this sort of thing back in '98. Look around, i'm sure it's still floating around somewhere. Might be useful.

'Socialism' - GNU, Linux, FreeBSD, Dragon CPU, Socialism could actually be a Good Thing.

Hahaha... christ, this is such a troll that I can feel the hook biting at my lip. You want want a fair comparison?

Capitalism:
Enron, Microsoft, SCO, **AA

Socialism:
Gulag, Concentration Camps (then and now), etc

Don't so fast to dismiss capitalism, it's not a perfect system, but it beats socialism by a head. Why? Socialism goes against human nature and evolution. It supports the weakest while hurting the strongest, it assumes what everyone wants to work the same by giving them the same rewards.

The problem with capitalism isn't when it's capitalism, it's when it starts to resemble socialism. Enron happened because people lied, cheated and had their asses covered by friends in government. The **AAs function so well because they pass anticompetition laws through the house.

Microsoft functions well because it makes (and has made) a decent product. This'll probably get me modded down to the basement, but it's the truth. Why was Windows 95 so successful? It had no real competition, now it has competition and it's getting better and better.

Linux isn't about socialism, it's capitalism in it's finest form. It's people doing what they consider best for them to get ahead. For a lot of companies it's about lowering costs, for most of the home grown developers it's about working with others to advance their skills, get themselves a better tool and get bragging rights. What's socialist about that?

Quite comfortably, even</plug>

That's FD-ODIN, a one-disk (with plenty of room to spare!) installation of FreeDOS. Quite a bit of stuff I've tested runs smoothly on it.

-uso.

Interesting how far things have come. :) ..Been futzing around with some of the old and crufty InSight stuff I worked on back in '97.. Now that i'm fairly well versed in Xlib, i've managed to get some of the old stuff off the ground again. I'm calling it "asdf" for now.

(a)(s)imple(d)esktop(f)ront-end.
ASDF v0.01a

Keep an eye out on Freshmeat for a slightly better version in a few days. It's not exactly a KDE killer (it's just a pretty program launcher), but it's fun to poke around with nontheless. :)

Cheers,

...For E-mail and the Web? Let's have a look.

They've encouraged pollution of E-mail with HTML and rich text that's readable only on a client that can interpret the code. I mean, c'mon... If you can't get your message across using well-written sentences in plain ASCII text, then no amount of coloration, fancy fonts, or flashing widgets are going to help.

They've done a lot, both in the past and more recently, that bends or outright breaks W3C Consortium open standards. Granted, they've gotten a little better, but how many web sites still have interactive features that only work if you use IE? And how many have that stupid "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" blurb at the bottom? How are Flash animations and fancy graphics going to help a vision-impaired or outright blind user, who depends on text-to-speech software or simple high-contrast colors, find what they need on the web?

Outlook (known among myself and many of my friends as 'Lookout Distress') is still one of the best virus carriers on the planet. Only Microsoft would come up with an E-mail client insecure enough that it seems almost to have been designed expressly to aid virus and worm transmission.

And now UncaBill and Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer want to try and "Ballmerize" (my word -- like it?) Usenet? Sheesh... With their track records, they'll probably try (and, hopefully, fail miserably) to borg the whole thing into one big "Web Experience" that will be "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" all over again.

As others have so accurately pointed out, Usenet is fine the way it is. Noisy, a bit tough to navigate, and definitely a place where you would want to have your Nomex undies handy to grab at a moment's notice, but perfectly usable to those of us who CARE ENOUGH ABOUT IT to LEARN how to use it right.

Speaking for myself, I think I can say, with confidence, that Balmy should leave Usenet to those who know it best: The admins around the world who carry it, and the thousands of users who make it a most interesting place indeed.

Even on the off chance that the About network doesn't have all the information you need, they have a large number of links to sites with relevant information across the Web, so there's a very good chance that you will be able to use them to find what you are looking for.
Also...although these are not strictly an answer to your question, I would still heartily encourage you to follow the links to these (listed in a suggested order of reading...my probably misguided opinion only) text files, web pages, and books, as I think they could be of enormous benefit to both your children and yourself...indeed, anyone who wishes to read them. Although I understand that several of these could possibly only be understood at tertiary level, they also as far as I know are not normally included in *general* curriculums, and IMHO they should be.

• The Allegory of the Cave by Plato
• Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, by Rene Descartes
• Guide to Ethics & Morality
• The Logic FAQ
• The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
• The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
• The Sovereign Individual, by James Davidson
• The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene
• The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli

It used to be in the past that the education systems of most nations didn't want us to know the why (philosophy, religion, history, political theory) of life, but were content enough to let us know the how. (Science without analysis, numeracy and literacy skills, etc) Now however we are seeing that primarily in America, but also in other places, government education departments no longer even want to allow people to know the how.

Mathematics is part of the how - a means to an end, a way of solving problems - but it is not a destination in itself. The material I've given you links to in my second section is concerned with finding out *why* - "Why am I here? Who am I? How do I know what reality is? What do I want to do with my life? What moral values do I believe in?"
The answers to these questions are far more important than becoming merely literate or mathematically capable for their own sake. Figure out what your purpose is first, and the rest, although still requiring work, will be relatively easy. That is what the links in the second list will help you do, and it's not something you'll be taught to do in any contemporary public school, either...Governments consider people with purpose to be highly dangerous.