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I believe the AMA will be recognizing it as a disease soon, and will hopefully a pill to counter act its affects by 2005.

Get your troll pills here. If trolls are playing Vitamins on their boxen, they can't be trolling /. at the same time.

The unfortunate thing is that we can't just ignore them either, they will simply try harder to get our attention.

There is a limit as to how hard they will try. Ignore them hard enough (build enough karma to get the +1 bonus, then browse at 2) and they'll stop trying.

You said it, Kev. I'll add that Allegro doesn't need a lot of setup code (just four lines; this is a _big_ factor in producing proof-of-concept demos), and it's not limited to fullscreen DirectX (i.e. you can make non-game apps with it).

To see some of my work with Allegro, go here. To see everybody else's, go here.

Allegro is a cross platform game API maintained by Shawn Hargreaves, who used to work at Acclame. Write once, compile for DOS, Win32, Linux, a few other Unix-like systems, and BeOS. There are lots of games made with Allegro, including several by yours truly.

Or the little creatures you click on repeatedly, one after another, trying to make them not overrun you? That's Hampsterdeath.

stuff accesses just as easy to the web surfer, no matter where it's located.

Not 100% accurate. The user might only see com instead of co.uk (or even better to), but ping times to faraway sites are bound to be lower because, for example, light moves only 299.8 km per millisecond. Latency produces slow loading sites, which turn off users who browse linearly and don't use Open Link in New Window aggressively.

stuff accesses just as easy to the web surfer, no matter where it's located.

Not 100% accurate. The user might only see com instead of co.uk (or even better to), but ping times to faraway sites are bound to be lower because, for example, light moves only 299.8 km per millisecond. Latency produces slow loading sites, which turn off users who browse linearly and don't use Open Link in New Window aggressively.

stuff accesses just as easy to the web surfer, no matter where it's located.

Not 100% accurate. The user might only see com instead of co.uk (or even better to), but ping times to faraway sites are bound to be lower because, for example, light moves only 299.8 km per millisecond. Latency produces slow loading sites, which turn off users who browse linearly and don't use Open Link in New Window aggressively.

without the examples that make it clear they're talking about a Dr. Mario-style game, I see nothing really different from, say, Tetris, which would be prior art

Claim 1 of the patent covers any game where targets (i.e. viruses) are erased by being in the same row as colored pieces (i.e. capsules) that you place. And TETRIS® is listed as prior art in the Background.

they don't want any copycats, like Bulletproof software

Actually, back when BPS was Bullet-Proof Software, it developed the TETRIS® games for NES and Game Boy. Now, as Blue Planet Software aka The Tetris Company LLC, it is still developing puzzle games for N64 and has bought the exclusive trademark rights from Elorg.

My version comes with a default theme which is a parody of the Aqua theme included with Mac OS 10.

Sorry, but what is the point of your .sig?

It announces one of my copylefted games, namely Hampsterdeath for DOS, Windows, and Linux.

I'd go there, but it's down.

Typical for my college's ISP :-) Seriously, it was a critical hardware failure; they got it fixed about six hours after you posted.

I suspect a patent exists for just about everything I've ever programmed

Tell me about it. I wrote Vitamins, a clone of Nintendo's Dr. Mario game (download cross-platform GPL'd source and Win32 binary here), only to find out Dr. Mario is patented . But I'm leaving it up; let the bastards sue me :-)

However, DNA is composed of "introns" (non-coding interening sequences, which make up a majority of genes and aren't don't code for anything) and exons - expressed sequences which do the coding.

So Microsoft binaries are mostly introns?

humans and hamsters are 95% genetically similar

So is Hampsterdeath as bad as those first-person shooters where you are blowing fellas' heads off?

exons

I don't know why, but that name reminds me of the Communications Decency Act, an attempt at censoring the Internet.

When I was using gcc *.c -lalleg -o drm (Dr. Mario clone) and gcc *.c -lalleg -o whack (Hampsterdeath), compiling source code took a long time for me too. But then, I learned how to use GNU Make.

When I was using gcc *.c -lalleg -o drm (Dr. Mario clone) and gcc *.c -lalleg -o whack (Hampsterdeath), compiling source code took a long time for me too. But then, I learned how to use GNU Make.

Given this concern, the only reasonable and effective thing for them to have done was to scan the user's hard drive for said cheating tool.

I liken this type of cheating tool to a virus scanner. Sure the scanner catches known cheats, but new cheats come out every day, and some can even be made polymorphic (they encrypt themselves when they run).

Apple refuses to give Be the specs for their machines since the Beige G3's.

The specs for the Apple G3 machines are available on the Apple web site. They're written in the C language, in a document called "Darwin kernel source code"; take a look if you have the time.

If your boss learns to recognize inverted-T logs as gaming, your pay may be docked for playing Quake 3 Arena on company time. Better make it a two-player-on-one-keyboard game such as freepuzzlearena; this will be more confusing.

So you want to fill up the keyboard? Try a typing trainer such as abkey or a falling blocks game such as Tetanus. Both are part of freepuzzlearena.

you're hard-pressed to find a anything in both DOS and Windows, including games

You haven't been to the Depot lately, have you? Because there you can find a whole bunch of games (like freepuzzlearena).

I would especially like to see what percentage of the corporate mail server market Linux has over MS and Lotus.

Have you ever been to Netcraft? You can check what OS a server runs (although GNU/Hurd is reported as GNU/Linux).

it's "unix-like", despite the FAQ's claim that this term is a trademark violation

Pepsi® One soft drink is Coke®-like. freepuzzlearena(TM) game is Tetris®-like. If it were a trademark violation, then NetBSD would already have taken down their Call It a Duck page.

If the X-Box is a Unix-like system, that would make Windows® CE a flavor of Unix. Actually, Windows 9x and NT almost are, thanks to Red Hat's Cygwin port of GNU and (to a lesser extent) the minimal GCC for Windows.

CoughCough Had you bothered to check out the costs associated with attending Rose-Hulman, you'd have seen this:

Let's get the bad news over with first. We estimate (see table on left) that the total cost of one year at Rose-Hulman including room, board, tuition, books, supplies, and a night on the town in Terre Haute will run about $29,000.

James

No, tetris will not run because Blue Planet Software and The Tetris Company haven't ported it yet (ergo no Tetris®), but there are lots of free falling tetromino games (read: Tetris clones) floating around. I even made one, in TI-83 B*S*C (it's not really BASIC; TI calls the 89's language Keystroke) nonetheless. And then I made a C version. Have fun!

Insane aka SameGame, now that was fun. Pick it up (as Insane on 83/86 and SameGame on 89) at ticalc.org

All I have to do is open the equation editor and edit like I would if I was using a commcercial CAS like Maple. (yerricde added this link)

Same on the TI-89; you can set up a subroutine (with local variables) that returns a value. At my school, we jokingly refer to the 89 as "pocket Maple," referring to the copy of Waterloo Maple V that is included with our college's distribution of Windows 98, which comes preinstalled on the laptop we all get. (I'm going off on a big tan() .)

the hp48 ... gives you more options than a simplified "Ti Basic" and an ASM command.

If you have a "run arbitrary binary" command and you have a computer and link cable, you have C. There are free (beer and speech) C compilers for m68k, and m68000 is inside the 89 uses.

it's certainly more rewarding when you reach a much higher summit than you could've on a TI calculator.

On the 89, there are customized OSes that overlay onto the TI environment; one example is DoorsOS. Heck, if the d*rn thing had more RAM (it has 512K), you could make Linux for it.

unlike the TI, which uses both proprietary link hardware and protocols

That have been cracked long ago. The TI-83 was 0wn3d before I even learned about it 2 1/2 years ago. The LPT connector schematics for the TI-8x have been published several places on the web. Look at TIcalc.org for more info.

I love that game (I've even cloned it for Linux and other platforms that support Allegro), but Tetris sucks. The company that makes it is greedy.

But let's get back on topic, shall we?
Try typing "Tetris" into the song title search box on the Napster client and see what cool techno remixes don't pop up.

The school uses a variety of standard conventions previously named (greek/roman gods, colors, planets) for other things. -Hober (too lazy to login)

I work for a company that does laboratory automation. Most of our equipment, including our robotic arm, is designed only to move small sample plates that weigh a few ounces. I think that perhaps your definition of a useful robot is a little too narrow.

Here's a link to one of our robots: ORCA Robotic Arm

We send some of our smaller projects out to local universities for use as senior projects, and some of those teams have used Mindstorms as a tool for building prototypes. My alma mater, Rose-Hulman, is actually using Mindstorms as a part of their Mechatronics course.