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I've also been working on a third-person-perspective adventure game mod for the Source engine as part of my studies.

We built Absence over the last few months of our degree at the University of Salford. There were 7 of us who worked on it, and like the folk at Guildhall, we found the source engine to be very flexible to work with - hammer in particular is a wonderful tool.

There were a few problems, however. As we were left up to our own devices, we had to rely solely on the modding community for support. This was good in that there are a number of friendly and helpful modders about who are willing to give advice - but there are rather massive gaps in knowledge with the source engine - particularly the coding side of things. When you've only got a short amount of time to come up with something the tech can quickly become a significant barrier.

Also, getting the game out to people that don't have the game is a pain. Yes, I know this is a totally obvious thing to say, but when you're trying to get an *adventure* game out, using a *shooter* engine means that your immediate audience is expecting something with guns/cars/boobs/etc, and you tend to not get much of a sympathetic ear when discussing your game.

That aside, tho, source is great fun - and for the purposes of our school project, it did the job admirably.

...then what are these guys making...?

Typo. It is being held at Salford

a port of Scribus to Gnome

Scribus already runs on GNOME:

Scribus will run under most any window manager and does not require KDE itself. However, drag and drop functionality will be lost without KDE. The author of this documentation has made a point of testing each release of Scribus, however briefly,under Gnome 2.x, as well as Blackbox. This has shown no incompatibilities or problems for Scribus, except for the loss of drop and drag functionality.

Plus, why spend all of that time writing ports for 10,000 DEs and/or WMs, when you could spend that time improving the program itself?

Ian has been doing this type of SGI work for 10+ years now.
When I was a University he was the SGI tech, and basical did SGI a truck load of grafting for nothing. They even ofered him a job in California (I suppose that beats Preston hands down).
He has been in contact with lots of people down the years, sys admins at NASA, people in the US DOD, who wouldn't / couldn't tell him what they did. He generaly became the guy to go to when you had an SGI related problem.
Its generaly a shame he's been craped on by his employers University of Central Lancashire and Salford University

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

(2) Sodipodi is a vector drawing program, Scribus is a DTP program. Not in the same field.

Partly true, partly not. Vector drawing is not the same as DTP, but there are connections between them. The Scribus team and the Inkscape team, for example, are working actively to coordinate their backends and make it easy for users to use the two apps together. You can get an idea of the short-term implications of this here, and the long-term implications here.

Link: Scribus Screen Shot Gallery

... where the tests were done.

You can find more information on X.500 Here, here, and here.

First, the law of large numbers over the internet (like with GNU/Linux) shows people will create without direct financial incentive.

Second, this article:
http://www.isi.salford.ac.uk/staff/ab/motivation.h tml discusses how scientific studies find that for creative intellectual work, reward is often no motivator, and can in fact have negative effects on performance.

From the article: "The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings as these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of it. Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards. Employees who are praised for meeting a manager's expectations suffer a drop in motivation."

So, while what you say is essentially the "conventional wisdom" of our age, it may well not be correct as regards creative works.

Also, note that in order to enforce copyright in the internet age, we will need something equivalent to scope in the "War on Drugs" as a "War on Sharing". The War on Drugs effort keeps about a million U.S. citizens behind bars at a direct cost of 20-40 billion dollars a year. And before you laugh and say it is not possible for a million people to be locked up for using Napster and Kaaza, consider that people in the 1960s would have laughed at the notion of a million americans behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s -- but it happened.

For the same amount of money, the U.S. could provide grants of $100K a year to around 400,000 artist, musicians, and writers who make their work freely available.

So, you choose which society you want to live in, however you label some part of it. And by the way, copyrights are monopolies, and monopolies are generally considered anti-capitalist.

. .

If I read this correctly, the reason why the EU local registries don't have their own root servers, and hence control over service levels is a historical issue.

Excerpting from the Internet Software Consortium's page, linked above - and please allow me to state that such a reference is anecdotal rather than given fact,

We then discussed potential candidates and found no volunteers in the AsiaPacific region, none in Africa and only one in Europe.

The "one in Europe" btw was NOT Nominet or another registrar, it was a guy working for LINX, the London INternet eXchange.

There's good reason for this, as late as the early 1990s, Europe was still thinking that X.500 was the way forward, and a large amount of resources from universities, telcos and local standards agencies was devoted to "interoperability" testing of X.500 directory services. What really happened was the standards lagged the implementations so badly that vendors and implementors went ahead and did their own thing, creating, as anyone who has dealt with X.500, a nightmare for inter -vendor interoperability. That created the space in which the InterNet and DNS / BIND could flourish. FWIW, LDAP is a (nor precisely, so please don't flame me, too large a subject for absolute accuracy here) derivative of X.400, itself a cut down form of X.500. Novell's eDirectory, which runs some of the largest sites (CNN.com, AOL messenger services) is itself a souped up LDAP implementation.

You can find a brief overview of X.500 and what the "authorities" in Europe were up to as late as 1990 and beyond in this history of X.500

I'm British born myself, but this all seems to me to be Euro - Whining. Particularly the UK's Nominet making an issue of this is absolutely BS. Nominet has, IMO, very sharp practises. If you "buy" a domain in the UK (domain.co.uk) via an ISP, Nominet maintains a "tag" linking your domain to the "provding" ISP, until another ISP takes it over. Domains _never_ go back into circulation when they expire. Nominet refuses, on the whole, unless you threaten or cajoule them with considerable effort, to "release" your domain because it states it will not get involved in contractual disputes between you and your ISP. Most UK ISPs make contracts which lock you in to your services and charge a considerable and hefty severance fee, usually buried in the small print. You _can_ get a "Neutral Tag" applied to a UK domain, if you pay GBP £80 for two years, which fee goes back to the ISPs who are members of Nominet, which is a for profit company, limited by guarantee, a rare form of UK company which offers very lax statutory reporting. Even though you _can_ do all this, I've had several clients now who've complained to Nominet, e.g. when their ISP is TU and no longer provides service, and Nominet tells them anyway that they can only deal with an ISP who is a member of Nominet. Obviously that's BS. But you can't register a domain in the UK for .co.uk and run your own DNS and maintain it under your own authority without a *lot* of expensive hassle, and possibly an attoney. You could hire me, of course, but this kind of work sucks, so I wouldn't offer it generally.

Sorry for that rant against Nominet, but it's Crocodile Tears time again and minus several million points for the Brits, as per usual.

Please follow the links above, investigate yourself . . .

Novell Directory Services, or eDirectory, is a distributed, replicable, hierarchical directory database, which currently runs with full functionality on NetWare (administered and managed almost exclusively from MS Windows), with plenty of functionality (or so the glossies imply) on Solaris and Linux. In the past, NDS has been accessed mostly from Windows clients through Novell Directory Access Protocol (NDAP), something that looks darn similar to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP, a subset of the heavy X.500's Directory Access Protocol). Novell used to provide an LDAP gateway to the NDS, which would send your LDAP request through NDAP to the NDS, and then the answer would come back through NDAP, through the LDAP gateway, and back to you. Novell's eDirectory now lets you hit NDS directly through LDAP, so LDAP is now a true peer to NDAP.

I've played with NDS for Solaris before, and it's pretty slick. Here at Miami U, we've got one or two replicas of a test NDS tree, and we just made our Solaris machine another replica of that tree. All user attributes like shell and home directory are stored as NDS attributes (part of the installation involved extending the NDS schema to allow for Unix attributes). We're pretty excited about this, because any given client of ours has at least five or six different passwords to remember; consolidating directories is a must at this point.

Novell also has a product in Golden Master right now called NetWare NFS Services 3.0. This is another gateway-type thingy that provides NIS and NFS services. I haven't played with this one yet, but it sounds promising.

The problem I'm running into is that Linux doesn't support 32-bit UID's. Miami has on the order of 30,000 clients to support, so we decided to start numbering UID's at the next highest order of magnitude, 100,000. Well, Linux can't see UID's bigger than 65,535, so we must either re-do all our UID's (big, big, big pain in the tochus, as thousands of these UID's are currently in use), abandon universal UID's and the ability to NFS share data across platforms, or wait until Linux gets big UID support. I've read that the recent 2.3 kernels actually support large UID's but we've still got to wait for glibc 2.2. There have been hacks, but I really don't want an enterprise depending on Joe's hack.