Slashdot Mirror

Chris Crawford published a book in 1982 called The Art of Computer Game Design (html, pdf). This is, in my opinion, the definitive statement of the computer game medium as an art form. Although the book is somewhat dated and Chris' career seems to be in a Strange Place (Erasmatazz?), it is still a very worthwhile read. A classic, IMHO.

But I don't see what the problem here really is at the top end: just generate your pages from a database and stick the content into a template for the browser/platform in question. What's the big deal?

I know of a good system to do this: the Everything engine (which powers the world's largest online encyclopedia). But what about people whose content is hosted on Freeservers, GeoCities, and XOOM, hosts whose security policies do not permit server-side dynamic page generation?

I watched a bunch of the xoom movies a while back and wondered what happened to them. Someone in this discussion found em - looks like they got sold to NBCi.

NBCi Classic Movies

Killer Bats, Green Hell and some fun "rocket ships on bits of string" style sci-fi. All movies in streaming Realplayer format.

+++++

• NBCi Classic Movies has 'Killer Bats' and more
• Cinemapop has Bruce Lee movies and more
• MovieFlix has Three Stooges and more
• Cinemanowhas great movies like 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space'

I seem to remember Xoom/Nbci had some free movies on their site (free if you became a member that is).Hmm, Looks like they are gone now. I want an MPG archive of all the Marx Brothers Movies =)
--

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

This article sounds like oms brought DVD video to linux.

From a user's perspective, this is simply wrong: I've tried to compile oms for several months now, and I have only had partial success. All the people I asked about OMS had the same problems. Most of the time, the CVS snapshot didn't compile because some sub-parts of OMS were incompatible with others. On good days, it compiled, but had dozens of bugs...

At the same time, other Linux DVD players appeared: xmovie played the .vob files, but with quite poor quality. VideoLAN presented a more useful DVD player, but it's user interface seemed a bit poor to me.

In November 2000, I had my first glimpse on xine. In those days, it was a tiny new project, not even designed to play DVDs "for legal reasons", as the xine people always say. But it had one remarkable feature: It simply worked! I Just had to configure; make; make install and it even played (unencrypted) DVDs. After a few days of searching, I even found the CSS Plugin, which enabled xine to play encrypted DVDs. Again, it was trivial to install...

In the Meantime, there has been a rush of new xine versions. The player has become much more mature, and it supports most features I need for DVD playing, even subtitles. The developer team has been very helpful. They really try to satify user needs. There are precompiled RPM, Slackware and Debian packages. The source is extremely portable, there are people running xine on FreeBSD, or even PowerPC machines.

To make it short: Xine simply works. I never had a reason to switch again...

This article sounds like oms brought DVD video to linux.

From a user's perspective, this is simply wrong: I've tried to compile oms for several months now, and I have only had partial success. All the people I asked about OMS had the same problems. Most of the time, the CVS snapshot didn't compile because some sub-parts of OMS were incompatible with others. On good days, it compiled, but had dozens of bugs...

At the same time, other Linux DVD players appeared: xmovie played the .vob files, but with quite poor quality. VideoLAN presented a more useful DVD player, but it's user interface seemed a bit poor to me.

In November 2000, I had my first glimpse on xine. In those days, it was a tiny new project, not even designed to play DVDs "for legal reasons", as the xine people always say. But it had one remarkable feature: It simply worked! I Just had to configure; make; make install and it even played (unencrypted) DVDs. After a few days of searching, I even found the CSS Plugin, which enabled xine to play encrypted DVDs. Again, it was trivial to install...

In the Meantime, there has been a rush of new xine versions. The player has become much more mature, and it supports most features I need for DVD playing, even subtitles. The developer team has been very helpful. They really try to satify user needs. There are precompiled RPM, Slackware and Debian packages. The source is extremely portable, there are people running xine on FreeBSD, or even PowerPC machines.

To make it short: Xine simply works. I never had a reason to switch again...

Unfortunately they aren't brave enough to bundle the CSS plug-in with it. In fact they've gone to great length to make it very unvisible and must be found here.

Have fun!

Derek

I don't mean to try and take away from the LiViD team. They were the first to start working on a DVD player for linux, and there work has provided the basis but there are several other DVD players for linux. But there are other players which many have reported to be better than oms in the areas of configuration, performance and audio sync. One of these is call VideoLAN which several others have mentioned. It now has css support much like OMS and the performance is suppose to be quite good on lower end system. VideoLAN is not quite as old as OMS but the source was only made available more recently hence less exposure. I believe most of the code in VideoLAN was developed independently of LiViD code except css of course. There is another which has called Xine which is the newest one but reported to be one of the best. I believe this one used the LiVid video and sound system but has tweaked synchronization and performance as well as adding some other feature. This one is also designed to be compatible across several free unix type platforms including *BSD. Note that the standard version of Xine does not come with css support but it can be added with a plugin from here as well as a version with the plugin already built in here. Again what LiViD has done is great but competition as always is good. The only thing I would like to see is some unified plugin standard for these players so that any css plugin could work with any of the DVD players. That way if new DVD's come out that break the current CSS updates could occur much easier for all the projects.

Where'd you get the stuff in bold? I'm curious to read the rest of it.

That's at Bin-Laden Interview.

Where, O where did you get YOUR info???
129 warplanes is about 25% of the US invading force[...] and somehow, the media MISSED THAT?

I wish I could say that S was near N on the keyboard... in any case, the best summary of NATO warplane losses that I can find in 5 minutes on Google is at NATO Warplanes used & lost. Note that the figures there are planes downed on Yugoslav territory... more were lost over non-YS territory...

There's better stuff out there (and in my bookmarks elsewhere)... the Canadian NATO commander, particularly, noted how incredible the YS pilots were... MiG-29s are nothing to sneeze at :)

Here's the real stats:
1. Cruise missiles with 30 percent hit ratios -- this is true

The point is that they were reported to the US public at over 90%; and that the Tomahawk development team had been given that as a goal. 30%, the publicity figure that the Pentagon pulled back to, was in fact the overall hit percent for Tomahawk targets -- meaning it doesn't reflect that it may have taken multiple Tomahawks to hit the target.

Untrue. It was local Somalians... and we actually had a 20:1 kill ratio...

There were a great number of Afganistanis there... and 20:1, if true, is pretty sucky against Somalis, compared to 200:1 in Iraq, no? Not that I'd believe Pentagon figures any more than I believe General Westmoreland's body counts...

only one manned plane was shot down.

See above. You were reading the US media, as it did its very poor job of serving the US people. The F-16 downs just didn't make the big papers.

Now THESE Transformers, the new Car Robots series from Takara in Japan, are SWEET. Word is, Hasbro is bringing them to America.

If you are willing to ditch W2K, Xine with the Captain CSS plug-in makes watching DVDs in linux a joy.

Thanks

Bruce

Things like Napster, Divx, DeCSS work as long as the purveyors and users are the minority leaches, while the rest of society supports the infrastructure.

Two things I find rather funny.

1) You buy the MPAA line that the CSS-decryption code in DeCSS is only used by leeches. On the contrary; the code is used by OMS, and a plugin for Xine that allows people to view encrypted DVDs. I guess I'm a leech...

2) You use the spelling of the old, defunct Divx that was a serious first attempt at enforcing pay-per-use with physical devices. Most people didn't stand for it. It was a first strike at the concept of unlimited usage, and it came too early. Be assured, things like HDCP and SDMI-like systems will be introduced much more quietly in the future to ensure everything is pay-per-use, not to mention laws that ban "time-shifting" and "fair use".

Nothing new here...

Are Seth Brundle, Veronica Quaif and Anton Bartok characters from an obscure SF novel you probably have to be a SF enthusiast to have even heard about, let alone read?

The Fly

Script supported by Movie Scripts Online

[BRUNDLE]

What am I working on? Uh...I'm working on something that'll change

the world and human life as we know it.

[VERONICA]

Change it a lot or just a bit? You'll have to be more specific.

[BRUNDLE]

What, you want me to be specific here, in this room, with, uh...half the

scientific community of North America... eavesdropping?

Read more

This guy has an IDE interface for the DC, apparently, which seems to be 5 chips on some veroboard.

I haven't tried this yet, I'd thought about it a few months ago when I was messing with it, but never did anything. Someone suggested that one could replace the logo with a penguin.

At least it made it to the runner-up list.

I thought for sure that when the article said "The most influential turn-based strategy game", it was going to be X-Com. I was wrong. What a downer!

In case you didn't know, the first 3 X-com games have been re-released, and given a nod by GameSpy.
Also, don't miss this X-Com Graphic Novel, all done in Legos!

Actually there are quite a few linux gaming project that are quite similar to worms. Bomb squad seem to be a regular clone. Clanmecha and nil aren't turnbased. Pingus is a lemmings clone (featuring penguins.. Isn't that cute?), but they want to make a worms mode as well.

Bitmaster's ethernet card. its currently on the workbench, but its an easier way to get ethernet in dclinux, since you can use almost any ne2k clone.

DCGrendel's DCGrendel's Site E-Mail

All the computers were Win9x with a bit of Fortres to keep out the clueless. My desk was directly in front of the "teacher". I would just shell a telnet.exe session from Word Basic. From there I could easily just telnet to the county's gateway. Eventually one of the assistant principals called me up to her office, she tried to suspend for just connecting to the county's gateway. I didn't even login once. They're running telnetd on HP-UX 10.20, no firewall and expect no one to even telnet onto them? What a bunch of drones.

The Fortres matter was even more pathetic. I just popped in a PicoBSD disk, skipped kernel configuration "ee /etc/fstab ; mount /dev/wd0s1 ; cd /dos ; ee config.sys ; ee autoexec.bat". Then removed the hash in front of the /dev/wd0s1 for the fstab entry. Next, REM the fortres lines in autoexec.bat and config.sys, save and finally reboot. One time the bitch saw this so I gave her the disk, she asked what was on it so I told her but. Obviously she didn't understand. So she put the disk in then tried to open it. Still she couldn't figure out what was on it so she gave it back.

Senior year was even worse. The highest level class offered was Web Design. The teacher had a bowl haircut. I thought the only adults that had haircuts like that were either Jim Carey or Down Syndrome patients. Her webpage she encouraged the class to visit for ideas was a blatant ripoff from Developer Networks Y2K Info. And even then her page layout shifts entirely from one page to the next.

When she couldn't help a student with a problem I would go over to offer my help. The problems usually stemmed from incorrect font terminations, etc. Over time, the other kids would call me over first, she hated this. So one day she went to the administrators telling them I was "sabotaging" the computers. After I refuted her claim she then tacked on that I was showing others how to do it as well. The mindless administrators refused to hear any witnesses from the class. That was at the end of the first semester thankfully. I was amused to hear that half the class dropped after I told them what she said.

I know we're not gonna have classes on compression algorthms or anything intresting but having coherent, mature teachers should be a minimum. It bothers me that I gotta pay taxes for this kinda stuff.

That's because most politicans have looked at transit companies as being the same as any other kind of business. This sort of thing is happening to Amtrak right now. Congress wants Amtrak to lose their subsidies and become "self sufficient" by 2004. Like they are going to be able to do that without cutting back service even further.

Imagine if some senator said the same thing about the interstate highway system, or tried to remove the programs that keep gasoline so cheap. Every road funded only by it's own tolls and gas at the world average of $4.50 per gallon would certainly make transit look like a bargain!

Oh no! Paying taxes into transit is an evil, anti-free-market socialist subsidy. Propping up cheap gas and paving evermore countryside, why that's good for EVERYONE!

Don't get me started on "Interstate" 99 (The Bud Shuster Porkway).

There is all ready an agreement buy NBC to show the proposed series Desination MIR. With the planned demise of MIR the focus has shifted to the planned Russian module on the new International Space station. I guess it will be a race to see which deep pocket can get the first Civilian to the Space station. Go here to register for the contest or try here for more details about the proposed show.

http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/ (directory listing) or
http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/gnome-de sktop.html (actual site)


The above is a mirror. I took the effort this time around to butcher all the HTML pages and remove the absolute paths for the images so it renders correctly. Hopefully.

The site was getting bogged down when I was leeching the files, so it's probably slashdotted by now.
Enjoy.

- Ed.

http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/ (directory listing) or
http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/gnome-de sktop.html (actual site)


The above is a mirror. I took the effort this time around to butcher all the HTML pages and remove the absolute paths for the images so it renders correctly. Hopefully.

The site was getting bogged down when I was leeching the files, so it's probably slashdotted by now.
Enjoy.

- Ed.

Sorry, it really was a bad idea to tell people to goto freshmeat and do a search, heh.
I uploaded the 'command.txt' file here, so you can go there to read it.
It's prolly pretty slow, but it works... give it a little while.

Sorry about the delays :P.

Just for comparison:

Current estimate of people living in Europe:

726,358,948

Current estimate of people living in North America:

469,574,005

Even if you only count the western European countries, its still more people than in north America.

(Source: Current World Population)

... would we all really be that bummed out if we just banned all French IP's across the board? I mean, they think Jerry Lewis and Benny Hill to be the height of comedy!

What about Friends? What about The Nanny!? What about the new Saturday Night Live!?! What about *snort* what about... *laugh!* I mean... *guffaw*giggle*laugh*

Ok ok... Nobody could have said that last one with a straight face.


"Put a glide in yo stride and a dip in yo hip, and come on to the Mothership!"

Here is another guy with a Lego movie making project Click

I've done some similar work (on a much, much smaller scale) around the X-COM universe.

You can go here to see it, if you wish.

So, I can tell you the time and patience it took to make this thing is incredible.
Let's take this shot for example. He had to build that entire wall sideways and the "lights" are actually the 1/3 wide plates. Then he had to line up the shot so you can't see anything in the background, light it properly, etc. That's for one shot.

This is a great bit of work. I ran into this site about a year ago, but it's great to see people liking his stuff.

Anyway, my $.02. I'm on to making movies now. It's amazing what you can do with the 1 or 2 hours a week you could have spent watching advertising spacer sitcoms on TV.

These things have been hacked all up and down already, and this is one of the most content-poor accounts I have seen. Here are some better resources:

• eGroups thinknic and thinknic-tech
• The (Unofficial) NIC FAQ-O-Matic
• Kaikun
• NICHacker.com
• BICNic.com

I've gotten one of these myself (littlelarry.capnbry.net, currently offline), pulled it apart, soldered another power connector on, and added a hard drive. The Cyrix PR266 is pretty underpowered, but it runs linux like a scalded dog.

What happens to the brave men and women competing to travel to Mir? Are they going to go down with it as part of the prize?

How does this affect Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor) and his plans for Destination Mir?

Now that DVD-Audio is finally hammered out (dear god why did it take so long???) they come out with this, thinking that somehow it could catch on as a mainstream standard.

Kind of reminds me of DCC back in '92. It's a format built around half-backward compatability (you need new equipment, but at least it can read your old media too), touting enhancements over the media it seeks to replace, while admitting that only audiophiles will be able to hear the difference, and that media will cost more.

Really, truly? I think nowadays the primary motivation behind any new audio media format is to inhibit rampant replication. do you have a Super-CD burner? Will they sell one?

the article describes the tech as if the advancements in sampling were directly tied to the 'advancements' in media. There's no reason this data format couldn't be stored on a DVD, except that DVD-RAM players are becoming too readily available for Sony Music's liking.

Kevin Fox

PS: If you're paranoid, I think it's open source, so you can make sure it doesn't contain any trojans.

Pager motors are one of the perferred devices for imparting motion in BEAM robotics. Look here or here, for starters -- there are tons of BEAM sites out there...

Here's the link to sign-up and win your trip to the jolly green sattelite. NBCi Win a trip to Mir.
Network television leading the way for getting civilians in space.

Here's the link to sign-up to win that trip to the mir Trip to Mir.
Network television leads the way for civilians into space.

Not only did they buy the rights, they already ran some ads asking for applicants.

Check it out here

Of course, they played during the Olympic closing ceremonies, so not that means that only about 6 people saw them (including me), but still....

Come on now, I know everyone wants to endure several weeks of cosmonaut training in order to go up to a 20 year old space station that might blow up at any time and has fungus growing inside it. Sign up here! Oh and don't forget the chance that the rocket you are on going up to Mir might blow up too.

They have the 'Destination Mir' site up now - they don't have much there yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list so you can find out when to send in the application.

This argument persists because people seem to have a hard time accepting the fact that words mean things. When they don't accept the real definition of a word they attempt to coopt it for their own purposes.

Josh Centers started the Hacker Anti-Defamation League a couple of years ago to try to counteract the media's mis-use of Hacker, but the project has never really taken off.

Remember that just because a bunch of people believe something doesn't make it true.

Want an example of using technology in new and creative ways to effect policy makers? Let's all get together and treat the IMF with "indifference and contempt."

Toy Z Tech has a web page up outlining a call to action. The purpose of the action is to shut down IMF web sites (this is synchronous with the protests in Prague). Toy Z Tech offers a download (a web-based IRC client) that supposedly functions as a tool for electronic civil disobience.

If you really want to just edit and do compositing with DVD movies, you don't need to (and shouldn't) convert them to DivX. Just use them in as uncompressed a format as you can. Or if you have a DVD player that can output without copy protection (like the Apex), your best bet would be to record the svideo out directly to your DV camera, and then firewire that into your computer (along with the shots you made yourself). I did this with some shots from FightClub (to make an incredibly lame "Wassup" spoof), and the quality was great.

- Isaac =)

I have a cuecat. It was handed to me at radio shack with no mention of a license agreement, and in fact, the salesman said they were "giving them away for free". I have not installed the software, or even taken the software out of its sleeve. I wrote a javascript decoder for it. I can just as easily write the decoder without having a cuecat, so I want to tell digital convergence i do not accept their EULA. How does one officially do this? Mail it back? Take it back to the RS I got it at?

Alright, so it can be disabled there.

But why doesn't it shut off when you have your security level set as high as it can be? Why didn't they place the controls for such a device in a more obvious location? Does "user data persistence" even give you a clue as to what it's actually doing?

Deleting all cookies, emptying the cache and removing everything from the Temporary Internet Files folder does not make a difference. Hmmm, eh? Why go to the trouble of making it so hard to find this, even for people who know where to look?

There's not even an option for you to be warned when servers set data...

Most average windows users don't even know of that final tab to the IE config which has a list of random options in random order (how helpful of the programmers).

I, for one, am glad I don't use IE at all on my workstation [dual boot] (revenge of mozilla is your friend :)).
--