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Some Open Source Games

1. Lincity-NG
2. Globulations 2
3. Abuse-SDL
4. The Battle for Wesnoth
5. Solar Wolf
6. Boson
7. FreeCiv

Speaking of games, Abuse (SDL Port, Bungie version) was apparently written mostly in LISP.

As I mentioned, you need a silent install. For F., there's different ways to do that:

1. Use FrontMotion's MSI for Firefox
2. Follow the instructions and created your own MSI using MakeMSI (which is free as in beer, not speech)
3. Follow the instructions on Unattended's wiki and roll a silent install from the .exe

I repackage Firefox into an msi for group policy deployment. I used to use Winstall LE that came with Win2k server, but eventually I learned enough about how msi works to be dissatisfied with that (it often gets lots of unrelated registry changes since so much background crap always happens in windows). Now I just build them by hand.

MakeMSI is a good tool for rolling your own, though it's best if you have some knowledge of how the tables work. Often I'll use Orca to tweak/double check things.

Firefox was a bit of a pain to package the first time because of all the subdirs, but it's really light on the registry keys and for updates it's mostly a matter of just dropping in the new files.

You might want to check out MakeMSI. It's also Open Source, has very good documentation, and doesn't require much knowledge of MSI internals (unlike WiX which is mainly just an XML representation of the database).

...and Perth, Western Australia is way south of the Equator. If you want serious Australian temperatures, try Marble Bar, Pannawonica or Paraburdoo, all of which routinely hit and pass 50C (120F) in summer.

Apparently, places like Sudan are hotter, but we have much better beaches, including the not-named-in-jest "Eighty Mile Beach" up near Broome. And better waves. (-: And better tarts too. :-)

There is no way to do transgenetic breeding, iow. to introduce genes from one species into another species by breeding.

You can forget projector tvs. they are only in the thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of lumins brightness and it's expensive to get really high res ones.

you can forget crt hugescreens, because they take up a massive volume of space.

LED tvs are huge, but the res and brightness are low.

Big LCDs are pretty good, but not great - bad colour satruation and ghosting are common.

which leaves plasma and oled.

Since oled isn't ready for prime time, you should go see a plasma display someday. just don't touch it, as it gets very hot.

I thought Buddhism originated in China?

No! In India for sure.

Although very cool, this does seem like a waste of bandwidth (yes I'm a hypocrite listening to it right now). You can just download a c64 "sid" player here and grab a load of tunes here. You can even play these sid files in winamp using SidAmp. Enjoy

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.

People have stopped palying[sic] FreeSpace about 3 years ago

That doesn't stop people from learning from the code and making neat projects with it.

Open Source isn't just about getting a free dinner...it's about getting to play around with code. We just covered Wolf 3d and Doom algorithms in our graphics course when covering older graphics techniques.

If you want direct, practical, non-developer benefits, it's led to Linux ports of neat games, such as Bungie's Marathon/Aleph One. It's led to improved games, like PrBoom. It's revived development interest in various projects, such as zsnes (still the only Linux snes emulator that can do Seiken Densetsu 3).

Besides, maybe you're the type that plays games for a bit, but there are also people (myself included) that don't play new releases much, but love going back and playing an old nostalgic game now and then. :-)

I guarantee you that people will be poking around at and playing with Freespace 2 much longer because of the source release. I suspect that most people would have forgotten about neat games like Abuse had it not been for its open-sourcing. The result of an open-source clone -- Exult has produced quite a bit of Ultima 7 playing again. The same goes for scummvm, the clone of Lucasart's engine used in Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max. Plus AGIL and Sierra's AGI system.

Open Source is generally a Good Thing. Please don't rag on people for doing good things like this -- sit back and enjoy it, or if you aren't yet interested, wait until someone hacks around with the code a bit. Then enjoy. :-)

I wanna know if this will compile under gcc.

At least Abuse had LISP scripting abilities. There's also some tools for 3d in scheme, but I can't seem to find it right now. And sawfish has backend of scheme. Emacs is written in emacs lisp. etc etc..

Loki has 19 good titles. Which isn't bad. Lets see, tuxgames has 17 more actual titles. So we have 36 or so commercial, packaged titles, most of which are released. There will be a RtCW client port, so that's 37, and there are more ports available like Doom 1-2, and Abuse (for which you can even get the data files for free at the Abuse-SDL site.

With several thousand free games available, a couple hundred of which are worth playing, and commercial games on the way which haven't been announced yet I don't think we'll be lacking good titles to play with for a long time.

Don't forget Abuse-SDL, which lets you relive the fun in Linux. It has links to free levels, other Abuse projects, etc, as well.

My only problem with it is that SDL uses a buggy mode of the emu10k1 (which doesn't work properly on 1Ghz machines). Only XMMS works at all :/
--

• http://www.olga.pl/main/
• ftp://ftp.labyrinth.net.au/pub/OLGA/

• The Greenhouse Hoax...Noel Mc Donald
• Global Warming: A Chilling Perspective
• Greenhouse Syndrome: Just Hot Air?
• Global Warming: A Political, Economic and Scientific Backgrounder
• A BRIEFING ON GLOBAL WARMING, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY
• There are many questions regarding Global Warming
• Global warming has failed experimental test.
• GLOBAL WARMING: INVENTING AN APOCALYPSE
• Home Page of John Daly, author of The Greenhouse Trap.
• John L. Daly Profile of a Greenhouse `Dissenter'

What's wrong, son, did I not espouse a sufficiently PC fear of nukuler teknology to satisfy somebody's agenda? Or was I too quick to satirize some of JD's very commonplace but still misplaced misconceptions? Or maybe, with those classes and janitorial experience at Ames under your belt (I'm josh'n ya, boy!) you think I was somehow treading on your turf? You're standing on the wrong side of that degree to be getting in my face over this stuff...and you don't seem to have been paying attention in class. Now about your 'rebuttal' -- let's tango:

"As for the miscaculation[sic] of the position of large celestial objects, actaully[sic] small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is." It's pretty good. Discounting hardware failures, NASA almost always puts things where they want them. As I've said, the math has been available for centuries. Even the screw-up with Mars Lander still hit the target, albeit a little too steeply, and at a much greater range and with more variables involved than in getting to the Moon. "The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip." Farther away than I think, eh? I'm an amateur astronomer, friend, and you can rely on me to give you a pretty good estimate on it's distance. The Moon has an average distance of around 385,000 km from Earth, although that will vary from perigee to apogee. It has an orbital period of just over 27.3 days and from this we can (after adjusting for eccentricity) calculate an orbital speed of about 1 km/sec. This is fixed, PK, it isn't going to appreciably speed up or slow down, at least not during the life of a missile headed for it's surface, so that 1 km/s isn't enough to make the problem any harder.

"For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit." WHAT? You're describing Hohmann Transfer Orbit used for an _interplanetary_ mission, PK, one in which two different orbits must be matched. The trip from the Earth to the Moon (with apologies to Msr. Verne -- see below) is much simpler, since the Moon essentially revolves around the Earth (okay, they have a common center of mass around which both revolve, but for our purposes, the simplification is sufficient). You then go on to say, "This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. " Um, no. Actually, I'll concede that it is _possible_ it could come back to Earth, but it is by no means a sure thing. Here are some possibilities:

• 1) It could miss the mark but still hit the moon some place else.
• 2) Given that the moon has a Hill Sphere (that's the point where the Moon's gravitational influence outweighs that of all other objects in the universe) of around 38,000km, there's a fairly good chance that a near miss would trap the missile in a bound orbit around the moon.
• 3) If it was launched at more than around 11,000m/s (not at all unreasonable), anything other than a near miss would mean the missile keeps going and going and going (11,182m/s is Earth's escape velocity).
• 4) It could pick up enough speed from lunar gravity to reach escape velocity.
• 5) It could be flung into a stable orbit around the Earth.
• 6) It could be flung into a stable, complicated orbit around the Earth and Moon (I forget what this is called, but there are lots of natural objects in this orbit).
• 7) It could hit the Earth...there, ya happy?

"As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere." Check your history, boy. In fact, since 1961 there have been numerous reentries of satellites carrying a plutonium payload used for power. Remember Apollo 13? Some of its experiments were powered by RTGs using plutonium. What do you think happened to them after Tom Hanks and Co. got safely home? If you guessed anything other than slamming into our Big Blue Marble at 20,000km/hr you're wrong.

In fact, let's ignore just the return of plutonium-powered vehicles...let's look at nukes themselves! No fission or fusion process convert's 100% of the core into energy. Most of the core get's smashed and released as particulate matter. Between 1945 and 1970, tons of plutonium were released into the atmosphere through this very process. Now, I admit I might be mistaken, but the last time I looked out my window, there were still people walking around, birds chirping, and other inconvenient contradictions to your "rebuttal".

The fact is, you've bought into a very popular urban legend about the "toxicity of plutonium" and the damage it would cause "if you released a grapefruit-sized ball of it into the atmosphere." That last little lie is complements of Helen Caldicott and one Karl Grossman who loves to work his readers into an unjustified hysteria. If you want another point of view, consider Ilya Taytslin's Truth About Plutonium. It's nicely referenced with plenty of supporting commentary.

"P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above [Hah!]. But please recall, an explosion visable[sic] on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty."What? Would you kindly go back and _read_ the original article before you flame me? Those Wacky Guys were talking about something at least as large as the one "used on Hiroshima at the end of World War II." Now that bomb was around 20KT. Where JD got his 250MT figure, I have no idea -- I don't think anyone detonated anything bigger than 60MT since Hiroshima. But for the sake of argument, let's be generous and make the sucker ten times more powerful than Hiroshima. 200KT. It would be plenty visible on the Moon from the Earth. Especially if the lunar phase was new (what I believe the author meant instead of "the dark side"). Especially through a telescope.

P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth...[yadda yadda]"Excuse me...why such a large circle? See above. Try a two-mile circle and draw it randomly on the globe. You might hit something inhabited with it, but you're more likely to miss everyone.

"P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon...[blah blah]"Alright, I was going to write something caustic here, but I'm not quite clear on what you're saying so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. My point was that there are no weapons, even in today's arsenals, that could shatter and blow up the Moon as per JD's original rant. Now, if you agree with that statement and were just nitpicking about smaller debris raining down on the Earth after the blast, then sure, I'll let you go. But I will point out that the much more energy is released every time a big meteorite hits a planet than even the largest of our H-bombs. And in all those impacts, not very much makes it down here to ol' terra firma in a form that would hurt anyone. Once in a while, sure. But I'd sooner worry about Shoemaker-Levy 9 than an A-bomb on the Moon.
(On the other hand, if you seriously thought JD's statement had merit, then please change your majors before you graduate...the humanities might be your better choice!)

P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated."Um...it looks like AC already beat me to most of my refutation of this statement. Except I'd go on to point out that if you take the radioactivity of a one tonne mass of plutonium and distributed it evenly across the planet (an engineering feat right there!), the resulting radioactivity would be substantially less than the background radiation found in nature. I don't know if you get out much, but if you don't you should know that most planets are pretty big with an awful lot of surface area. That has disasterous consequences for proclamations of doom.

Look, PhilosopherKing, I don't want to get in a flamewar, but I'm on reasonably firm ground here. If you want to discuss the math and physics, then that would be fun. On the other hand, if you keep posting snotty remarks about "Midvale School for the Gifted", I will continue to be happy to respond in kind.

Truce? (Oh! I almost forgot! Since you're an SF buff, check out Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". It was written somewhere in the 1860s and eerily forecasts the Apollo program right down to the size and mass of the capsule, the number of people on board, the launch site (Florida), and the time the trip takes. Verne did the math and understood the problems well enough to come up with solutions that seem precognitive today!)

That's actually an exaggeration started by Helen Caldicott and perpetuated by anti-nuke activists like Karl Grossman. I suggest an interesting article by Ilya Taytslin to be found at Dr. Caldicott and the Truth About Plutonium. The article largely discusses the space probe Cassini and the uproar over it's use of an RTG power supply, but the points made are generally applicable.