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Shouldn't you have made it a lambda function passed to global-set-key?

The Emacs idiom for defining new features is to define the function (giving it a long name suitable for an M-x call) and then use global-set-key to add a shortcut. For example, first make M-x tetris-on-drugs, and then map Ctrl+Super+T to it. (The super key on a PC bears a Windows logo.)

This new sail design reminded me of something that I once saw in a book of sail design.

In the 1920's a German designer started designing sailing ships that used a rotating sail pillar as a mast rather than a sheet of material. Here's a link to a page that describes not only the concept but a a way to put together a modern version.

I always figured this was a wonderful idea because this way I wouldn't have to put down my beer when the person on the wheel called out a turn while tacking. I mean for heaven's sake - let's keep in mind the real point to recreational sailing. Grin.

I completely agree with the analysis here. I attend a engineering college where all freshman are required to buy laptops. Thus, there are barely any public labs on campus, because it is assumed that all students will simply bring their laptops with them (not such an appealing proposition for the seniors, who have to lug their four-year-old laptops around and can barely run the software for the classes). The public labs we do have are pitifully slow WindowsNT workstations, which are only used by foreign-exchange students. Additionally, all the classrooms are wired to the Internet, so that each classroom can be transformed into a computer lab for math classes, programming classes, and so forth.

And what is the end result of this? Well, let me simply note that IRC, ICQ, SSH, and Email are significantly more interesting than a really dull physics or chemistry lecture...and my freshman grades reflect this. There was a kid in my Differential Equations class last year that used to play CounterStrike nearly every day during class. If a class wasn't constantly using laptops as part of the lecture, it became nothing more than an incredible distraction.

At my college, the best way to recognize the freshmen is to look for the students who carry their laptops around to each of their classes. Upperclassmen, who have learned their lesson well, bring their tried-but-true notebooks and pens. And of course, the real irony is that last year, I had to buy a 3,000$ computer (as if college isn't expensive enough already :), which I don't use in class, and I don't use at home, either because it is nowhere near as powerful as my desktops.

There definitely are times when a laptop policy such as this is very nice, but I think that overall, it is a very dangerous influence to force upon an educational environment.

I tried out Mandrake a couple of years ago and it already shipped with BSDgames and several versions of Tetris

Mandrake has never shipped with a Tetris brand product. The Tetris Company has not licensed the TETRIS trademark for software running on any POSIX system. Of course, the Windows 3.1 Entertainment Pack (which contains an outdated version of Tetris) will probably run under Wine, and Mandrake shipped with a lot of independently produced falling tetramino games (i.e. clones of Tetris).

If you really want an innovative tetrisclone, don't spring for Tetris Worlds on GBA. Get TOD: Tetanus On Drugs. Source and Windows binaries are included; DOS and Linux binaries are just a recompile away.

Apple's aim with Aqua is brand identiy. They want Aqua instantly associated with Apple.

Sorry, I associate the word Aqua with "Barbie Girl" and Mattel toys, and I associate the look of words written on blue vitamin pills with NyQuil products and the game Dr. Mario. In fact, I once did an Aqua-themed clone of Dr. Mario called Vitamins, part of the freepuzzlearena package.

The buttons in the Aqua theme look like Dr. Mario vitamin pills. Is Apple infringing nintendo's look and feel now?

Actually, the "Vitamins" game in the freepuzzlearena package infringes both nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario (although non-infringing gameplay is also available, and the infringing gameplay can be compiled out) and Apple's trademark on clickable buttons that look like vitamin pills (the default theme; create others with the Allegro Grabber).

On Windows, you just need binaries, themepaks, source, and this DLL. On *N?X systems, you can recompile it from the source archive; it requires the Allegro library.

The buttons in the Aqua theme look like Dr. Mario vitamin pills. Is Apple infringing nintendo's look and feel now?

Actually, the "Vitamins" game in the freepuzzlearena package infringes both nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario (although non-infringing gameplay is also available, and the infringing gameplay can be compiled out) and Apple's trademark on clickable buttons that look like vitamin pills (the default theme; create others with the Allegro Grabber).

On Windows, you just need binaries, themepaks, source, and this DLL. On *N?X systems, you can recompile it from the source archive; it requires the Allegro library.

The buttons in the Aqua theme look like Dr. Mario vitamin pills. Is Apple infringing nintendo's look and feel now?

Actually, the "Vitamins" game in the freepuzzlearena package infringes both nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario (although non-infringing gameplay is also available, and the infringing gameplay can be compiled out) and Apple's trademark on clickable buttons that look like vitamin pills (the default theme; create others with the Allegro Grabber).

On Windows, you just need binaries, themepaks, source, and this DLL. On *N?X systems, you can recompile it from the source archive; it requires the Allegro library.

The buttons in the Aqua theme look like Dr. Mario vitamin pills. Is Apple infringing nintendo's look and feel now?

Actually, the "Vitamins" game in the freepuzzlearena package infringes both nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario (although non-infringing gameplay is also available, and the infringing gameplay can be compiled out) and Apple's trademark on clickable buttons that look like vitamin pills (the default theme; create others with the Allegro Grabber).

On Windows, you just need binaries, themepaks, source, and this DLL. On *N?X systems, you can recompile it from the source archive; it requires the Allegro library.

[canceling the Game Boy Camera] should be $150 off the total.

No, $50 off, as you only needed one camera.

how much do you have to spend to "enjoy fully" Quake 3 Arena? $650 ($800 after monitor) in hardware doesn't go oh-so-far in terms of games

A Celery 500 with a TNT2 runs Q3A just fine (I've tried), and so does the free laptop that many colleges are giving out to students. (Rare markets M-rated Perfect Dark primarily to college students.)

if I wanted to play with an actual friend, it seems fair to say that I would have to note the purchase of multiple copies of the game.

Three more Q3A licenses cost $30. If you just want to play against other players who aren't as predictable as bots, you can play across the Internet; however, that can cost $200,000.

And that's assuming you don't "need" any fancy controllers to "enjoy it fully."

Any computer with a keyboard and an optical mouse should work.

By the way, I apologize for the tone of my previous post.

Apology accepted, but note that your signature, when taken in context, made your tone sound even worse.

try TuxTyping or Tetris

The Tetris Company has not authorized any TETRIS® brand product that runs on a GNU, BSD, or UNIX® system. However, you can try one of my t*tr*s clones, which may help victims of the War on Some Drugs get off mescaline. (A non-drug version called freepuzzlearena is also available.)

Go to university and get yourself an ethernet drop. 100Mbps ethernet is much better than a puny 128kbps-uplink-capped connection

Sure, you'll get fast file transfers across the school's network, but what if 1,500 students are sharing the 6 Mbps fractional T3 uplink from your school to the Internet?

1. Make sure your ventilation ducts are too small to crawl through.

Ineffective if your enemy is allied with the borrowers[?].

7. Make sure your main computers have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.

I might suggest OpenBSD. It's a nice server for servers and firewalls because if you don't know the password, it's incompatible with everything.

10. No matter how many shorts you have in the system, treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.

Bad idea because it would then open up a possible DoS: one of them will blow up the camera, which draws the guards away from the really valuable things.

12. Do not shoot at any of your co-workers if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.

Better yet, hire some competent engineers <plug>who graduated from Rose-Hulman</plug> to design your structures, over-engineering them for safety.

18. Pad any data file of crucial importance to 1.45MB.

Won't help if your can get access to Apache or WinApache. Won't help if you can use dd to split files (a DOS dd fits on a floppy). Won't help if you can get access to a CD burner, as a 4x CD burner can burn 1.5 MB in five seconds (not counting ToC and closing the session).

I had an inside on this...shoulda bought stock six months ago when these people came to my school and did a presentation on their new heart. I was just there to run the video equipment, these guys didn't know they needed some additional equipment to run a video, so I stayed around to run the videos and stuff.

One of the most interesting things about it was how the power is supplied. There is an inductive paddle inside which transfers power to the internal lithium-ion battery from the belt battery pack. They said you could take the battery belt off and the heart would run for about 2.5 hours on internal power. At this point a lot of people began snickering, because this is a laptop school and people were drawing parallels. In any case, I got to handle a few interesting parts.

Actually, the stock hasn't jumped incredibly yet, so it might still be a good idea to grab some shares....

The Solar Phantom VI captured the No. 1 starting position by winning the Formula Sun
Grand Prix in May at Topeka, Kan., by a record 284 miles. It was the latest achievement
for the team, which has placed among the top three finishers in its last five races.

More info can be found here

The Solar Phantom VI captured the No. 1 starting position by winning the Formula Sun
Grand Prix in May at Topeka, Kan., by a record 284 miles. It was the latest achievement
for the team, which has placed among the top three finishers in its last five races.

More info can be found here

Right now I have a Zip drive, a scanner, and a printer daisy-chained off my laptop parallel port. Yes, they all work like that (I wouldn't try using them at the same time though). At school this year I had a 486DX2/66 with a 4G drive in an old HP scanner network module (these are just big enough to hold a motherboard, hard drive, and three cards). It runs Slackware of course. This year I had several LEDs, one of which ran across the room to the partially disassembled peephole. A simple shell script let me use fetchmail to tell if I had email from down the hall. Last year I hacked a Nintendo R.O.B. and mounted a webcam on it, attached limit switches that interrupted the signal that was making it move in that direction. With a couple simple CGI scripts it was a robotic webcam. One day it received over 12% of all hits within my school's domain, more than the school's main page!

By the way I'm a double-E at Rose-Hulman Inst. of Tech, great school. Check it out if you think you're smart, and still have the chance to go to school. I chose it over MIT and Cal Tech.

Well Rose-Hulman, who owns that domain, is quite well known for its excellent engineering departments (according to USNews, they are the #1 non-graduate-degree-granting school in virtually all the engineering specialties). Probably that ROOT acronym was no mistake, either :D.

* Delerium considers applying to Rose-Hulman :D.

Get yerricde a pronounceable handle ... This one might take a while ....

Two years and a month, to be exact. By then, I will have graduated from the school that gave me this username (Damian E Yerrick => yerricde).

and a sense of humor

I have a sense of humor, but not for jokes that are old and poorly told.

I have a friend who has been using an OLD version of aim, never seemed to want to upgrade. Well, the other day, it wouldn't let him log in, so he had to upgrade..

I'm using WinAIM 2.1.1187 on one account and 3.0.1464 on my primary account, and I have no trouble holding a connection. So sue me.

Of course, you'd need to use this technique with a search engine who takes dead link submissions. Eg., Altavista and its "Add or Remove a Page" link

AltaVista does not allow submissions from visually impaired users or users of text-based web browsers such as Lynx, Links, or w3m. Its submission page uses a GIF image (burn all GIFs) to display rotated text in various fonts. The user is supposed to read the text and enter it into a field below. But visually impaired users, users on text browsers, and users on browsers whose developers have been cease-and-desisted by Unisys never see the GIF and cannot contribute links to AltaVista.

The snake game sucks

While we're on the topic of Nintendo consoles, you can get a version of the snake game for NES here.

Still, I'd rather play Tetris.

Do you want generic falling tetraminoes, or do you want to pay through your no$e for the Tetris brand?

They have a really cool summer engineering program, for anyone that has an interest in any type of engineering. Only juniors are allowed in, so there is a little bit of "recruiting" going on. It's 3 weeks, and tons of fun. A nice mix of Sports and other fun activities also.

The thing is run by the school, with real profs doing the teaching, and students from the school are the consolers.

I had a blast, check it out... http://www.rose-hulman.edu/catapult/

In that case, just go out and buy a 20GB IDE hard drive for $99.

20 GB ATA hard drives for laptop computers cost much more than $99. A laptop is all many students at my school have, as they are issued one at the start of their freshman year.

This is great news! But I can hardly believed that we actually discovered Wave Motion Energy without the help of Queen Starsha.

[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]

Dear US Citizen,

I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.

I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.

[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]

The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.

Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.

It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.

• When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny, executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
• When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states, large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.

Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.

"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.

Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.

When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.

Yours,

Alejandro Gómez de Argüello

[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]

Dear US Citizen,

I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.

I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.

[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]

The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.

Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.

It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.

• When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny, executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
• When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states, large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.

Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.

"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.

Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.

When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.

Yours,

Alejandro Gómez de Argüello

All the cool software tools that were on NeXT will be available on OS X when it comes out, for those of you who don't know. Objective C, Project Builder and the other RAD tools, etc. This was part of the deal when Apple bought it.

With that said, then, fond memories of using a NeXT back at school led me to go to great lengths to acquire one after graduation, just for grins. Since getting it, I debated about digging up a text or two and learning ObjC. I had thought that any efforts I put into such a learning attempt would be just character-building and/or fun (in the sick-n-twisted way), but is it possible that I could actually put this to some use in the foreseeable future?

No; they'd be Free, like these.
<O
( \
X Adopt a bird today!

This is a short program I wrote a while back that actually composes classical-sounding music (based on pseudorandom numbers and a lot of music theory). It compiles for DOS and Linux; a DOS binary is included.

BillWinUsr who probably has no compiler ready

If Mozilla were using GCC for Windows, this would be no problem. Bill could just double click make.bat and play some Minesweeper, Solitaire, or Vitamins while GCC is compiling everything.

i can't resist those jolly candylike buttons

Looked like NyQuil LiquiCaps to me. In fact, the capsule-like appearance of the buttons inspired me to write a Dr. Mario clone that works on everything but Mac (it'll work on OS 10 as soon as it gets a stable x11 server).

They've had websites using the look taken down. They've had themes removed from themes.org

Played Vitamins lately? It's a clone of Nintendo's Dr. Mario(TM) with an Aqua-like theme. Works on DOS, Windows 9x, and X11; includes Windows binaries. And it comes with a default theme "Aqua" that looks like Mac OS 10's default theme by the same name.

There's a portable wrapper around much of DirectX. It's called Allegro. It supports nearly everything popular that runs on x86 (DOS, Windows, GNU/Linux, BeOS) and other hardware (the X11 version supports linux-ppc, Slolaris, HockeyPUX, AIX and Pains, etc.) but does not support Mac OS because none of the developers has a Mac to code on. And there are lots of games written for Allegro, including all of mine.

Inner Child Productions (mehampster@aol.com) owns Hampsterdance. Funny, the music was copied from Disney's Robin Hood, and the graphics reportedly came from Harvard hamster web sites, but the <html> is mehampster's. A different implementation (like Assassin's Hamster Blast) is a new work, not covered by mehampster's copyright. And a parody game written in C (such as my GUWAME Hampsterdeath) is definitely not a copy, right?.

Isn't that game (field is six by about twelve units; red bomb destroys contiguous groups of red blocks it touches) also available for Sega Saturn and PC, as Baku Baku Animal? Seeing as I have already cloned Puyo Puyo aka Kirby's Avalanche aka Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, it should be no problem for me to do a baku clone.

Or better yet, using the portable Allegro wrapper around DirectX. I did this for freepuzzlearena (get it here).

When you buy games, they come on huge CDs that have a whole bunch

Same here in the States. Get them from BSDi, the makers of the Walnut Creek CDROM collection. But do they have Hampsterdeath, Vitamins, or freepuzzlearena? I know for a fact that freepuzzlearena started in Russia (as TETRIS®).

• Aqua is a band. They did "Barbie Girl."
• Aqua is also a theme whose widgets look like medication capsules and is the default theme in Mac OS 10, which will soon be packed in with Barbie-looking computers.

• Story title: "Studies Say Video Games Increase Violent Behavior"
• Report title: "Violent Video Games Seen To Increase Violent Behavior"

What about frame lag on that old Vitamins game, where you had to drop pills on the viruses to kill^H^H^H^Hdestroy them? I don't recall any lag on that.

I'd suggest the G400 if you're a Linux user. Plenty fast enough for games, plus it works great under XF86. Won't cost more than $150. If you're buying $50 games, you can afford a $150 video card. Yeah, the Pentium III is expensive, but you don't get high performance from a $35 CPU.

Or a Pentium III. Try an Athlon system; a fella gets more for less.

Anyway, I'm fscking tired of paying $1,000 a year to buy new hardware. If developers keep making games need the CPU and RAM of a major portal's servers and video good enough to render Toy Story 2 in real time, why aren't there games that will run on a lowly 200 MHz Pentium? I'd guess game firms are in bed with hardware manufacturers. But why?

You too can make decent-sounding music...with the Jazz++ MIDI sequencer and the TiMidity MIDI renderer/player. Here's a techno piece I've done.

And then there's the Dr. Mario patent, which I'm proud to break. I did, however, build a failsafe in that game: change two lines of C code and you get a different, non-infringing game that's just as fun.

Most hits rip other games' concepts. No, Nintendo didn't create the side scroller; Activision did in Pitfall for Atari 2600 (no connection with 2600). Alexey Pajitnov of Tetris® fame didn't create polyminoes; that was from the Romans. I think you might want to play some "infringing" games.

No offsense, but first off it just plain doesn't SUCK. I mean, really, has anyone EASILY created some decent artwork with GIMP yet?

I used it for the art in Vitamins.

God, after playing with it for hours and hours I just went back to Photoshop on my Windows box. Gimp BLOWS

Probably because you haven't learned to click and shift-click and keep commonly used menus open (click the dotted line at the top of the menu). I use GIMP or WinGIMP depending on what I'm booted into at the moment (I use Windows because some of my critical apps don't run in Wine).

Make a split-screen game like freepuzzlearena or Vitamins (get 'em here).

I wonder why The Tetris Company hasn't sued this guy yet since they threaten legal action against everyone who has even a vaguely similar tetris java applet on their web page.

You mean like this article which was posted to /. a while back? Bedter is back online, after it was determined that all Elorg and The Tetris Company LLC own about Tetris® is the ®. All they have to do is take "TETR", "ETRI", and "TRIS" out of the name. Thus, freepuzzlearena for Linux, DOS, and Windows.

If you stuff things into a library, you are using the library, not deriving from it.

Two interpretations:

• This discriminates against systems without dynamic linking capability. For example, DOS doesn't have the .dll or .so mechanism; libraries are generally statically linked, and GPL infects all static linked programs.
• The import library needed to link against a DLL is a "work based on the Program" and infects any program linked against it with GPL. Red Hat wants this interpretation to be true, for its Cygwin package depends on it.