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Bull-Honeywell's GCOS machines still use 9-bit bytes. C was designed to run on these machines (Kernighan's Programming in C begins ``C is a computer language available on the GCOS and UNIX operating systems...''). The size of various types is intentionally left flexible to allow for these machines.

A 36-bit word on a machine with limited address space allows pointers to individual bits.

Those who do not know their own history are doomed to assume that it was lived only by `backward' peoples?

The original GEM was like that, 20 years ago or so! Check out the atari desktop, where you can reach the filesystem with 2 simple clicks!!!! The whole GEM runs fine in 128 KB, and it is fully graphical, allowing file drag-n-drop etc.

And the Amiga OS was like that from the beginning. Each executable was accompanied with a .info file, which was a simple text file describing the properties of the file. Another tool was responsible for opening and processing the .info files in a graphical manner, making the whole thing too easy. Check out this and various other bits for how the Amiga GUI was one of the best, enhancing productivity, unlike modern O/Ss.

_Dark Side_ (1988) was a follow-up of _Driller_ (1987). Those two where probably the first games with solid 3d (unless there were som early 3d Amiga games?)

Earlier non-filled games include _Mercenary_ (1987), _Elite_ (1986), ported to almost every imaginable platform (though more of a first-person space game than a shooter).

Of course, _The Sentinel_ (1986) needs a mention as well. The 3d is somewhat limited, but its definitely solid... And it's a truly great game!

A particularly relevant paragraph from chapter 3 reads:

To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes brag on boards that they will do just that. Threats of this sort are taken seriously. Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift, comprehensive, well-manned (even overmanned); and agents generally burst through every door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn guns. Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled. Hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes. It can be a very dangerous business to raid an American home; people can panic when strangers invade their sanctum. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman can do is to enter someone's home. (The second most dangerous thing is to stop a car in traffic.) People have guns in their homes. More cops are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors.

In addition to having allegedly broken some pretty straighforward computer misuse laws this guy was advocating violence against the state. I think that going in with guns drawn was a perfectly reasonable approach.

Paul.

Somebody is OBVIOUSLY not a hentai fan. ^_^

(sorry, just got done playing an Anime Based RPG that has a large amount of people with catear headbands on. Catgirls rock!)

Just try and tell me these are not cool.

My wife and I recently decided that it would be cool to get a pinball machine. Mr Pinball's site was a great resource, and helped me decide to get a old electromechanical (EM) machine instead of a newer, solid-state (SS) one. If an EM breaks, it's likely that a physical component is at fault (switch, spring, solenoid, etc). If an SS breaks, I think there's less that I can do about it.

I checked around ebay and a few other places, and figured that a decent, playable EM would cost about $1000 (in California). I ended up finding Space Odyssey for $250. It's barely playable, and in poor cosmetic condition. It'll be my evening/weekend project for a few months. The repairs should cost much less than the $750 that I saved.

The first thing that I did was order schematics, a manual, rubber rings, and new flippers from The Pinball Resource. I've since ordered a bunch of other stuff from him. And rec.games.pinball is great. Every time I've had a problem, I get responses within hours. They've helped me out at least two or three times this week alone (flipper rebuild, broken "drained ball detect" switch, unexpected slam tilt/short-circuit). Currently, I've got the machine disassembled for cleaning and waxing.

In short, I would never have purchased my pinball machine unless I found the kind of resources that I did online. Rebuilding a '67 camaro or a monster truck may be a macho thing to do, but restoring this pinball machine seems like the equivalent geek activity.

I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.

What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!

And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.

Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.

Oh well. Time to go down to my basement and fire up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar.

I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.

What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!

And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.

Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.

Oh well. Time to go down to my basement and fire up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar.

I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.

What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!

And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.

Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.

Oh well. Time to go down to my basement and fire up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar.

Argo and Dia are the two I know that are OSS - I have played with both, but I didn't do enough real work for either one to tell you if either will work for you - Argo seems a little more baked...

The real world is a much harsher test environment than internal or even beta testing.

...for surely where thou typest "foo" someone someday shall type "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"

There's also the maxim that companies keep writing more foolproof software, but the world keeps building better fools.

No, it doesn't have 3-D graphics or sound or blood or explosions. But that lets the players focus on tactics: probing for weaknesses, cutting off bases, making diversionary attacks, drawing enemy troops into a trap. It sucked up more of my time in graduate school than all other computer games combined.

The caveat is that it's only partially supported. A branch adding a computer player was started recently, but the client-server version (as opposed to the old X-networking version) has languished.

Apparently, you've never heard of this.

Cover Art
Description

It's "The Fellowship of the Ring", a.k.a. "The Lord of the Rings: Game One" for MS-DOS, from 1985. It was actually just sort of a text-based adventure with occasional illustrations, and as I remember I always got hopelessly stuck somewhere before getting to Bree (before which I got hopelessly stuck in Michel Delving -- the plot of the game is rather different from the book). It had amazing CGA graphics (wow! four colors!) and ran on two 5.25" floppy drives (our computer didn't even have a hard drive at that point).

The funny thing is, I was just thinking about that game a day or so ago. It's buried in a box of my stuff at my parents' place...*sigh*

I also was pretty amazed at how UGLY the Atari 2600 game looks. I was addicted to the 2600 in the late 70s/early 80s (and the 5200 was awesome), though I didn't have one of my own. But I never remembered the graphics being THAT bad. Just a sign how far we've progressed, I suppose...

Ah well, Memory Lane. *sigh* I feel old...

cya

Ethelred

Cover Art
Description

It's "The Fellowship of the Ring", a.k.a. "The Lord of the Rings: Game One" for MS-DOS, from 1985. It was actually just sort of a text-based adventure with occasional illustrations, and as I remember I always got hopelessly stuck somewhere before getting to Bree (before which I got hopelessly stuck in Michel Delving -- the plot of the game is rather different from the book). It had amazing CGA graphics (wow! four colors!) and ran on two 5.25" floppy drives (our computer didn't even have a hard drive at that point).

The funny thing is, I was just thinking about that game a day or so ago. It's buried in a box of my stuff at my parents' place...*sigh*

I also was pretty amazed at how UGLY the Atari 2600 game looks. I was addicted to the 2600 in the late 70s/early 80s (and the 5200 was awesome), though I didn't have one of my own. But I never remembered the graphics being THAT bad. Just a sign how far we've progressed, I suppose...

Ah well, Memory Lane. *sigh* I feel old...

cya

Ethelred

A program called "Bored of The Rings" was produced for the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad home computers many moons ago by Tolkien Games. These days it can be downloaded for emulators from here.

Oh, they did the real Tolkien Trilogy too, which can be downloaded separately via links from here. I just prefered the spoof.

Vik :v)

A program called "Bored of The Rings" was produced for the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad home computers many moons ago by Tolkien Games. These days it can be downloaded for emulators from here.

Oh, they did the real Tolkien Trilogy too, which can be downloaded separately via links from here. I just prefered the spoof.

Vik :v)

Ahhh, google wins again:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games

Lots of LOTR games! Apple II, C64, Atari 400 and ST, Amiga, Acorn, etc...

-nate

Well, I don't know much about this vaporware Atari 2600 LotR game, but a lot of other games based on Tolkiens world has been made.
Check out this neat site. It has all the info you need about computer-based Tolkien games. LotR for Super NES is probably the only one I've tried so far, and it didn't quite meet my expectations ;)

Oh, and didn't someone announce a MMORPG a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it ... which reminds me: Mudconnecter has a list of some MUDs based on Tolkien's books. Of those, Elendor MUSH is probably the best one. I remember playing it some years ago...

The first Tolkien game I played would be The Hobbit. The next? Shadowfax, on the Spectrum. Great animation for its day.

Cheers,

Ian

From the site :

A former Parker Brothers employee says this about the game: "You spent a lot of time roaming through similar-looking screens, and then the damn Nazgul would jump out and you'd run around like crazy. I forget most of the details. It was a competent but not stellar game I think."

Sure sounds dull... Not stellar? I hope this former employee isn't a developer. Last time a programmer told me his code was "competent but not stellar"... ouch!

There was a computer game version of Lord of the Rings actually published. It was made as a computer game on other platforms, the Commodore 64 among others. It was an Infocom-style adventure (except with some static pictures) which quickly became infamous. This was not just because the games were not exactly faithful to the books, but because they came on floppy disks and the game appeared to grind through the entire disk whenever a command was entered. Never before did the 1541 strike more fear into the hearts of men. You can find more information about the game here.

This is another site with a screenshot and box cover (and is not /.ed yet).

Yup, that's the secret service.

If you've read The Hacker Crackdown you'll know that part of their job is to trawl through all the threats made on the presidents/VPs' life - visiting mental institutes, crims in jail, and even the people who post threats on public forums.

To quote:

The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the various pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the President's life

...

If you ever state that you intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know and record who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to. If you're a serious threat - if you're officially considered "of protective interest" - then the Secret Service may well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.

So it was nothing personal, just doing their job. Understand I'm not making judgments on you, them, their job, your post...

Yup, that's the secret service.

If you've read The Hacker Crackdown you'll know that part of their job is to trawl through all the threats made on the presidents/VPs' life - visiting mental institutes, crims in jail, and even the people who post threats on public forums.

To quote:

The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the various pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the President's life

...

If you ever state that you intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know and record who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to. If you're a serious threat - if you're officially considered "of protective interest" - then the Secret Service may well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.

So it was nothing personal, just doing their job. Understand I'm not making judgments on you, them, their job, your post...

Of course, probably everyone in the Universe (except for me that is, up until about 20 min ago) already knows that Bruce Sterling has written (or co-written or edited) a number of sci fi and/or "cyber" books. This one, however, (which is not fiction--we hope :-) ) deals mostly with

the 1990 assault on hackers, when law-enforcement officials successfully arrested scores of suspected illicit hackers and other computer-based law-breakers. These raids became symbolic of the debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting civil liberties. However, The Hacker Crackdown is about far more than a series of police sting operations. It's a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures--the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians. (quote from Amazon)

In the Howto's only the basics are mentioned.
In the manpage, lots of options are explained.
For examples you will want to search freshmeat.net.

A few of my bookmarks:
http://www.lysator.liu.se
http://64.39.18.129
http://www.linuxsecurity.com

And some example scripts you might not find on freshmeat.net:
http://nerdfest.org
http://chaosmongers.org

would you extend these arguments to support it in non-virtual security?

Yup.

Should the CIA and other international organizations use full exposure? Should they publish something titled, "This is the vulnerability of our Nuclear Piles"? "This is where you can cross the border undetected", "This is how to make a Fake ID?"

That's not quite the same. I no more expect the CIA to use full disclosure than Microsoft. Full disclosure is about third parties pointing out problems.

A better analogy would be "Should anyone who wants be able to publish things like, "Guide to Lock Picking"? Sure enough, you can find works on picking locks, defeating car and home alarms, hotwiring cars, making fake ids, and a host of other real world security issues. And these works are good things. Individuals affected by these risks can use this information make their own judgements on how to protect themselves.

Videogames are more often than not bland products created by teams of unimaginative drones of big corporations, following simple formulaes. However, some are art.

Its a lot like movies, some of the are real pieces of art, and some are simple cash-cows.

Quake isn't art, and Most Valuable Primate isn't art, but then you can see O Brother Where Art Thou or play Myst, wich are in my opinion works of art.

Bible of the 21st century? Some bios

I'm backing this reader here.
never used ion, but my windows
are always tiled.
I am definately interested in
extending this paradigm down
into the apps themselves.
Yes, X is scary in the begining :)
but, i have been playing with a
funky python X library.
on top of which is built PLWM,
the pointless window manager,
like PWM and ion, i guess.
Somehow python makes X a lot less
formidable.
Well i'd like to see how possible it
is to build a toolkit on python-xlib...

CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.

OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.

And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.

Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.

This game really is intresting when players are equally good at it its not real world simulation.

I haven't used Visio, but Dia is a nice friendly gtk+/GPL package meant to be much like it. It exports to XML (gzipped by default), but I'm not actually sure how readable or writable its files are. It might be worth looking at.

"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time." - O. Kenobi

Man, I'd nearly forgotten about LodeRunner. I bought LodeRunner returns from Sierra, but like a great many of their products, it's been effectively orphaned. That and they messed with the gameplay a bit in that you had to get keys to unlock doors to access certain areas of the map and there were "sticky" spots where your walking speed was halved. The appeal of the original was the simplicity of play and the simplemindedness of the enemies. Man, I burned some hours on it.

I also wasted scads of time on Wizardry (1-3) and several of the Eamon text adventures. Mmmm, might have to bust out the Apple II emulator and rerun some of these classics. Sleep is for mortals!

For those interested in Eamon, there's a good page available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/eamon/.

I have been playing with dia for a while now. I would agree with the author of dia that the product is in a state where it can be actively used and it is free.

While it could use more widgets/modules it does offer the option to build your own and it is free. Viso is also an excellent choice in the commercial product line, especially the ability to directly link into other windows documents.

Either option (dia or visio) will be time consuming, so I would re-read the previous poster. If you do not absolutely need a picture, go for a spreadsheet or simple database. The time consumed will be less, as you do not need to make it look nice. You will also find it much easier to locate a node, system, etc. in one of these products than to look through all the connections visually.

If you decide to go with the diagram version, I would still suggest the spreadsheet/db be done.

dia home page
dia Win32 Version

I have been playing with dia for a while now. I would agree with the author of dia that the product is in a state where it can be actively used and it is free.

While it could use more widgets/modules it does offer the option to build your own and it is free. Viso is also an excellent choice in the commercial product line, especially the ability to directly link into other windows documents.

Either option (dia or visio) will be time consuming, so I would re-read the previous poster. If you do not absolutely need a picture, go for a spreadsheet or simple database. The time consumed will be less, as you do not need to make it look nice. You will also find it much easier to locate a node, system, etc. in one of these products than to look through all the connections visually.

If you decide to go with the diagram version, I would still suggest the spreadsheet/db be done.

dia home page
dia Win32 Version

(Joke! Joke! My precious karma...meltinnnnnnnnng...)

For all kinds of great info on this topic, read The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling. The entire text is available on the web all sorts of places. Like here, for instance. It's an excellent book.

Yes, he's the same one. He came into the Linux world from writing text games...

Alan used to work for AdventureLand UK where he wrote a game called "Blizzard Pass" [1986]. He later wrote AberMUD (search for 'alan cox interview' on Google, this is mentioned every time someone asks him how he got into Linux) and part of the Abermud world even includes pieces of Blizzard Pass.

See this entry in Spectrum FAQ - Where is...?.

The Adventureland game database site credits him for ScottFree here:
ScottFree page @ AdventureLand

One of my collage professors is currently working on a project named WITAS, an autonomous flying vehicle.

They're currently focusing on traffic supervision (The thing can search the roads for a specific car and follow it around and some other cool stuff) but supposedly theyr're also looking into other applications (such as fire monitoring and some other things)

Apparently, from what I understood from his lectures and from talking to him, they've been talking to, among other cities, Los Angeles, about using the helicopter for monitoring traffic gridlocks and things like that.

The human operator is able to communicate with the helicopter by talking to it, and the helicopter replies! It's really neat, check out the webpage for more info. They still have about 3-4 years to go on the project.

One of my collage professors is currently working on a project named WITAS, an autonomous flying vehicle.

They're currently focusing on traffic supervision (The thing can search the roads for a specific car and follow it around and some other cool stuff) but supposedly theyr're also looking into other applications (such as fire monitoring and some other things)

Apparently, from what I understood from his lectures and from talking to him, they've been talking to, among other cities, Los Angeles, about using the helicopter for monitoring traffic gridlocks and things like that.

The human operator is able to communicate with the helicopter by talking to it, and the helicopter replies! It's really neat, check out the webpage for more info. They still have about 3-4 years to go on the project.

Nope, he is swedish...

Out of the three cases mentioned, the one one that made me the most upset, and is still the one that makes my blood boil the most, was the DeCSS travesty.

I'm talking, particularly, about the case with 2600. I'm not a big backer of 2600 or Emmanuel but in this case I had to give the respect where it was deserved. This was the case, IMHO, that set the tone for all cases after it and because 2600.com made the hearing available on their site I, we, were given a first hand listen to just how badly lawyers could manipulate judges in technology cases.

After listening to this case, at least the whole of 2600 / Emmanuel's side, and finally finding out the judgement, I knew that it was only going to get worse was only going to get worse (I suggest doing a search here for 'Court' it's truly appalling). It wasn't as though the judgement and the judgement alone upset me. It wasn't that I was all "rah-rah" for 2600. It wasn't even that I thought DeCSS should be "legal." It's that the judge had no concept of technology and the justice system allowed a mac truck of a manipulative lawyer to run him over. Listen to the testimony.

I said it before and I will continue to say it, the judicial system needs better qualified people presiding in these cases. I say 'these' because, and IANAL but, this is an entirely different concept than, say, laws of the physical world and laws of the 'cyber one.' I've often thought and giggled about the idea that files are never stolen, because if you copy something it's still there. I truly feal that we need judges that know the facts of the technology before it's sppon fed to them by the attorney's on both sides.

Until that happens, and / or until the hearings on Dmitry, Napster, etc. are made public (if they have been could someone please link them) so we can know for sure if proper and fair judgements were passed.

Without that, and without the DMCA being either a) abolished, or b) re-written (I'd much prefer the latter) the companies that own the DMCA will continue to 0wn anyone they want.

That's my two cents. Mod it to hell.

Asylum wasn't Infocom, it was published by Med Systems, and it was the most amazing thing ever published on the TRS-80. The company later did a IBM PC port that I actually saw once, but it seems to have dropped off of the face of the net.

Asylum had a parser every bit as good as Infocom's, but they added a terrific 3d graphics display on the TRS-80's 128x48 pixel display. Asylum was immersive in a way that very few other games I have ever seen were, and in only 16k. Really one of the best adventure games ever published.

And it was HARD.

Med Systems also published an excellent adventure game called Lucifer's Realm, in which you had to go to hell and convince the devil to let you go to heaven.

All of these games were in many ways more exciting than the Infocom ones, because they melded graphics and a first-rate adventure parser that really took advantage of the *cough* awesome power of the TRS-80.

Don't touch Schildt if you want to learn decent C++. His books have many well-known problems. A couple of the earlier C ones were so bad that people wrote lengthy pages about them to make the point. There was a running joke that his The Annotated ANSI C Standard contained the complete text from the C standard, but was published at a fraction of the cost. This was said to represent the value added by his comments.

If you really want to know what his books are like, you could visit Amazon and read their reviews, which are written by people who purchased the beginners' books, and are therefore by definition not qualified to review them for technical merit. Or, you could do the smart thing and visit the Association of C and C++ Users web site, and check out their book reviews. These are generally regarded as being fair and accurate, and there are an awful lot of bad reviews of an awful lot of Schildt books.

</rant>

http://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/mit-guide.html

It taught me well enough :)

I use IMHO Webmail. one of the newer features is an interface to your .procmailrc file.

IMHO (IMAP Mail HOst) runs on the Roxen web server. Some of the other features of IMHO are: ispell/aspell spell checking, multilingual interface and interface to edit .procmailrc & .forward files.

Bounce ya' boobies.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

Bounce ya' boobies.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";