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I remember it as one of the best, most imagination inspiring games I've ever played.

I once faked sick during 2 weeks of junior high so that I could stay home and play it constantly.

Star Control II was amazing. Awesome story, awesome characters, awesome gameplay. One of the best ever adventure games.

Mind your disrespectful, heathen tongue, boy.

I feel sorry for those who missed out. You can look up the Ur-Quan masters remake on sourceforge, though.

I certainly hope for a true sequel, or at least a game set in this amazing universe.

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

This is a link to a full version of Star Controll II. It works on my Vista laptop and is as good now as it was in the old days.

Blah blah blah, learn the lesson, blah blah blah.

You didn't provide any suggestions to solve the problem, just banged on about how important it is to learn that there is a problem. Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? Or is just understanding that it's a massive problem good enough for you?

The purpose of my post was only to assert the importance of the article. And yes, I do think making sure new MMO developers understand the problem is "enough". If you're aware of the rate at which users will tear through content, and plan accordingly, you'll be in better shape than if you learn this lesson by personal experience.

A discussion of how to address this issue was out of the scope of my original post, but since you asked so nicely...

The problem is twofold. The first problem is the scope of quest design -- quests are designed for individuals and small groups of semi-casual players to solve, but inevitably, there will be large, well coordinated groups with more in-game resources and time at their disposal attempting the same quests -- and they'll inevitably accomplish it in an instant. A goal accomplishable by your more casual players is trivial for your hardcore players; similarly, a challenging goal for your hardcore players is completely inaccessible to your casual players.

The second part of the problem is creation of static content is time consuming. It takes months to create a few days worth of content. While the quest-development-time to quest-completion-time ratio can be tweaked to some extent, you'll never, ever be able to create content faster than your players can conquer it.

There are several ways to cope with this:

1. Just accept it, and design for your casual players. Your hardcore players will chew through your content rapidly. Either they get a real kick out of being the first to accomplish goals, and won't mind, or they'll leave for more hardcore oriented games (EVE online?). There's nothing all that wrong with this approach, and it's likely the most financially viable option
2. Design for your hardcore players. Change the "Kill 5 elk" quest to "Kill 500 elk". This will inevitably drive your casual players to easier games (WoW). Your shareholders probably won't be very fond of this choice, but if you're not out for big profits, this is potentially a viable option
3. Design quests to be taken on by the whole server. WoW's opening of the Dark Portal is a good example of this, as is ATITD. ATITD features a technology advancement track that requires all of the game's players to band together to donate massive amounts of game resources to research. The rewards are then available to all players -- much like all players were able to use the Dark Portal. Everyone who pitches in gets a small sense of accomplishment.
4. Abandon static content for dynamic. Dynamically created worlds are not a new idea -- one of the best known examples is 1984's Elite. However, applying this concept to multiplayer games represents a hell of a challenge. Building an MMO is enough of a technical challenge to begin with; making it actually *fun* makes it even harder, and making a procedurally generated world fun for players with diverse levels of interest is a challenge that no one's yet accomplished. There have been attempts, however.
5. Let players create content for each other. This is the Second Life/Metaplace approach. As mentioned previously, the problem with the standard MMO model, is millions of players are playing content created by a few dozen developers on a budget. If you can get your millions of users to start creating content for each other, you'll potentially have far more content available to your users than you could have ever created yourself.

And stayed hidden for some years before getting public... http://www.ohloh.net/projects/ffmpeg/contributors/19252190931444 http://xine.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xine/xine-ui/doc/README_uk?revision=1.3&view=markup to avoid being bothered by software patents (despite them still being illegal in France and EU in general)

Users in need of specific features will pay for the development of the software. Or software could just be created in order to sell services. It's not because software is released as free software that there is no money to be made. One of the many already existing examples is openvista, software for hospitals.

I'm the author of Brain Workshop, an implementation of Suzanne Jaeggi's Dual N-Back task. The scientific basis of the dual n-back task differentiates it from regular Brain Age-type games. I highly encourage everyone to try it out. There is currently more research underway to confirm the positive effects on short term memory and fluid intelligence.

Brain Workshop works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is completely free.

Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list for some interesting discussions.

Try this: Adblock for Safari

Hey, great, a OSS Adblock software that requires you have the latest OS. Yeah, I'd pay to use that.

It's GPL. If you want to make it work on older operating systems, you're welcome to download the code, figure out why it doesn't work, and submit a patch. If they don't like your patch, you can fork it. Don't complain that the work other people are willing to share with you isn't good enough; they don't owe you anything.

From the article:

But don't despair: Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, may be able to help. She has devised a brain-training game that actually works. It's a strange, complex game involving sequences of squares on a computer screen, and it definitely improves "fluid intelligence" - the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, "the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge".

Here is a link to the abstract of her study. And the project Brain Workshop has released an open source version of the game used in the study.

HOL is said to be usable, but doesn't have the same opportunities for name abuse, though 2001 fans could come up with a whole bunch of new ideas. Isabelle, however, would provide such opportunities, if you were to combine it with the package that started this thread. ACL2 is the least abusable name of all, so is quite useless.

Try this: Adblock for Safari

Hey, great, a OSS Adblock software that requires you have the latest OS. Yeah, I'd pay to use that.

That is the issue with Firefox/Mozilla. They seem to ignore the enterprise requirements, how companies do things etc. As result, IE enjoys its kingdom on Windows desktop.

For example, while entire thing is documented, even open source package makers exist, they refuse to ship MSI packages. MSI is the Windows Native installer. It is not so different from shipping tar.gz to Redhat Enterprise and expect those sysadmins sit and convert them to RPM. It is same deal on OS X too while OS X doesn't have that many enterprise users. Normally, a .pkg should be provided.

Here is the entirely open source maker for MSI files coming from MS employee directly. (No moonlight/mono deal)
http://wix.sourceforge.net/

No, Windows admins won't monkey around 2000 terminals to run "setup.exe" files. Some guys spare significant amount of time building their own MSI files just to satisfy Firefox fans.

If you can't run FF3, you better convert to Konqueror or Opera if they really stop security updates. Firefox is really popular and lots of 2.x users still exist. Black hats will sure use that advantage.

Yep, PithHelmet (anti-ad plug-in) causes 3.2 (Mac, of course) to blow up every time when using multiple tabs. Removing its bundle from /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/ made it stable as a rock again (no problems at with about 15 tabs open, with varying kinds of embedded content), but, sadly, I'm buried with ads again.

Try this: Adblock for Safari

500MB? Really?

Say what you want about Apple/Microsoft/Sun/whatever, but nothing beats Beamer (plus KeyJnote if you are talking to idiots impressed by bling).

If you want something new, look at distmake.

It's Gnu Make, extended to run jobs on multiple hosts. It's very fast.

I recently discovered gnofract4d and it reminds you that, whatever you think about CPU usage for web browsing or programming, computers still aren't fast enough :-p. It's like the old days when the first thing you'd do with that shiny new Pentium-66 workstation was to see how fast it could run Fractint. It seems we have to wait at least a decade for high-resolution fractals zoomed in real time. (There is XaoS but it has a limited choice of fractal types and needs to interpolate pixels. The answer may be to use GPU hardware, as FFFF does, but preferably using a compiler like Brahma that translates a high-level language to GPU calls.)

I used to help out via entering bug reports for bugs I found. Invariably, the bug report would either get a gruff, unhelpful reply (like: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382 ), or it would simply be ignored for months and months until the project either closed it due to inactivity or switching bug trackers (like this ex-bug: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1609779&group_id=93438&atid=604306 ).

I don't bother anymore.

I used to help out via entering bug reports for bugs I found. Invariably, the bug report would either get a gruff, unhelpful reply (like: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382 ), or it would simply be ignored for months and months until the project either closed it due to inactivity or switching bug trackers (like this ex-bug: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1609779&group_id=93438&atid=604306 ).

I don't bother anymore.

DSay, where's your local repository of Ndiswrapper's database?

Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites.

This is correct. And by that logic, it may benefit you to send the sourceforge developers a simple message asking them if a modest donation of funds could ail this predicament?

Web servers do cost money but the only real cost of hosting at sourceforge for the project is the domain name (if they feel it's needed). SF.net hosting is free to projects though of course you can donate to OSTG Inc. (a for profit business) who provide the service. SF.net even provide a MySQL database ( http://alexandria.wiki.sourceforge.net/Service+Listing ) so I really can't see any reason why a project couldn't leave up their website and database (at no cost to the project) at "example.sf.net"??

If you can't raise the £9/$9 a year for the domain name (eg Amazon ads, Google ads, donations - ask for donations if none come!) then few want your project that much and you should drop the domain and just use Google Code, Freshmeat or SourceForge, IMHO.

Hi. As luck would have it, I am "that guy". I think I've got an improved version of that code somewhere, and I really, really do get 99% accuracy (but not necessarily 99% precision). For your needs, this would probably be just peachy. Since I was calibrating servo motors for my Ball and Plate project, I needed to eliminate those outliers, so even 99% wasn't enough and I had to finish the rest by hand.

Looking at the dials you want to read on your electric meter, my algorithms would work perfectly. (Not the case if you wanted to read the spinning wheel.) You'd just have to make a mask you you're analyzing each dial separately. You also might have to play around with lighting conditions. In fact, judging by the tiny size you'll almost certainly have to make sure it's illuminated with a strong light. Make sure there's no glare or reflection from the light source, though.

You might also place a white piece of paper behind the dials, if you can. I'm guessing you don't have the right to open this up, but if you can, the more contrast the better.

Lastly, since the code is written in Matlab, using the image analysis toolbox, you might not have the ability to run this right away. However, rest assured that it would be relatively simple to port this dial-reader to C using the OpenCV toolkit. Since most of the Matlab code is very readable (even if I didn't comment it too, too extensively), you shouldn't have too hard a time. The biggest hassle would be the Hough (pronounced "hoff") Transform. OpenCV does this, but I've no experience with it myself, so I can't say if my method for tuning the parameters would work well for you.

Give it a shot and let us know. After the /. article is closed to new comments, you can find my email address on my webpages if you want more advice.

The Atmel AVR Butterfly is a $20 microcontroller on a board intended to be an introduction to AVR microcontrollers or microcontrollers in general. Low cost of entry, plenty of real world I/O (temp sensor, LCD, speaker, light sensor, ADC) and easy to program (free tool-chain, including gcc C compiler). Available from Digi-Key or Mouser online.

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from O'Reilly and Make-zine. Check out the author's associate website, HomeChemLab including their small but friendly and supportive forum.

Finally, for free, teach the lessons that freedom comes with the price of responsibility, and that knowledge and understanding are powerful (physics jokes aside) tools. Also honesty and integrity, include admitting to making mistakes and being unsure are valuable currency for building a reputation that can lead to being trusted (and respected). And that it is okay to be curiosity (though sometimes some tact is also needed). -- My parent's tolerance and patience were important factors in developing my good "geekiness" qualities, so I encourage an environment that is supportive not punitive about failure (mistakes).

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

for IRC on your blackberry
jmirc
http://jmirc.sourceforge.net/

I think this works ok for my limited use.

for telnet / ssh client on your blackberry midpssh
http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/

Works well, lets you have some macros for commands.
Hope someone new finds these and enjoys them.

Mark

I think the way you asked your question lead to confusion, since it appears you don't care about file contents.

If all you want is diff, install diff, don't install cygwin if you're only going to use a couple tools. Most GNU tools have a windows build. http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm

Some antivirus will hook write events (I know Avast can for example, I'm assuming Kaspersky can too), they do this to ask permission (allow? deny?), however if you set up the logging right, you could get a list of every file modified without it doing dialog. However if you're working against a rootkit, it may do a hook itself and skip the antivirus alltogether. However Kaspersky is pretty robust, so it could probably flag other suspicious events, which could be nice if you're trying to emphasize the software as malware. Most of Kaspersky's behavior settings are off by default.

If you want hashes of files, you could try a forensics tool like encase. But it will examine even unallocated parts of hard drive (so use a small HDD).

SelfImage 1.2.1.92
SelfImage is a disk imaging program for Windows. It's capable of making an image file of any hard disk or partition on your system. It can even make images of partitions that Windows doesn't recognize or assign a drive letter to (ie: Linux partitions). Perfect for the dual-boot system.
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/SelfImage/1134441375/1

DiskTools ImageMaker 1.1
DiskTools ImageMaker is a lightweight disk backup software. It enables you to make exact images of your entire hard drive, or separate partitions on a hard drive, to disk files. The images then may be restored to the initial or any other hard drive or volume, regardless of a file system it is formatted in.
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/DiskTools_ImageMaker/1055944044/1

DriveImage XML 2.01
# Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
# Browse these images, view and extract files
# Restore these images to the same or a different drive
# Copy directly from drive to drive
# Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler
Image creation uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe "hot images" even from drives currently in use.
Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools.
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm\

ODIN 0.11 Beta
ODIN is a utility for easy backup of hard drive volumes or complete hard drives under Windows. A disk image can be created or restored. Only used clusters can be backuped, compression on the fly is possible.
http://odin-win.sourceforge.net/

ehm do you mean the 'fc' (File Compare) command that comes with windows, by any chance?

If you need more, you might want to download a Windows version of 'diff', hte standard UN*X tool for this sort of thing.
It's available at:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Just copy diff.exe from the zipfile to c:\windows and you're set to go.

Example: diff c:\oldregistry.reg c:\newregistry.reg

Once, you've enjoyed 'diff', you might want to look into 'find' in the same Zipfile.
Example: find c:\ -ctime -2
This will report all files that have been created within the last 2 days

Enjoy!

Gnome Partition Editor has a live image one can boot from and backup/resize partitions. I have used it several times on windows systems without any issues.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

i think they should install wubi http://wubi-installer.org/ or

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

so they can later can recover from such an mess

Fuck Adobe and their bloated plugins and disrespect for previously used names.

And this proves that sed is somewhat of a mongrol (but I love it all the same): http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/hanoi.htm

Actually you can get all that from Oxygen Office which is what I have been handing to my SMB customers and they love it. It is usually a couple of months behind OO.o,but it has all the templates,clip art,and VBA support that my SMBs prefer over OO.o. And with the economy in the toilet free is a really good reason for a SMB to make the effort to switch. So if you know someone who needs the extras just hand this to them. I'll bet they like it.

> One liners are for show, not for actual usage.

Mostly true. But it's always a bit of a perverse sense of satisfaction when you come out with an obscure one-liner that does exactly what you want.

Besides, I indulge myself in that way too much these days. It turns out that reading completely illegible one-liners is mostly a matter of habit.

Sometimes, I scare myself.

On a very slightly different matter, I always keep http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt closeby, it has proven useful more than once.

Speaking as someone who majored in ancient Greek and Latin as both an undergraduate and in graduate school at U Cal Berkeley, IMHO computer science is now at the cutting edge of philosophy.

Now that AI has been solved, the philosophy of mind has switched from theory-mode to practicum-mode, just as AstroNomy switched from theory-mode and observation-mode to practicum-mode when ManKind ventured into SpaceTravel in the nineteen-sixties.

Even NeuroScience is moving into computer science, as a Theory of Mind for artificial intelligence gets implemented in Open-Source AI SoftWare.

AI Funding is now available for philosophers-turned-computer-scientiosts.

In particular, Sun Microsystems licensed information about the format of Office files from Microsoft, to gain better compatibility.

No. Both Open- and Star- Office use their own MS-Office readers. (I was under the impression that some of the work on wvWare has helped developing OOo's but I'm not sure. I might be confusing with antiword). Nothing licensed from Microsoft.

3rd party non-OSS code was used to provide a reader for WordPerfect's Office suite.
StarOffice uses a 3rd party closed source reader.
Whereas OOo has more recently incorporated the function thank to a separate opensource project (libwpd if my memory still works).

Given the fact that WordPerfect had an important share in some specific markets (international organisations), and that in the beginning OOo still lacked official support for it, it might have made more sense to Google to opt for StarOffice instead.

Note:
In a similar fashion, StarOffice feature 3rd party proprietary support for Grammar check.
Whereas Language Tool is developed for OOo.
Given that LanguageTool still isn't part of stock OOo, this too may have weighted in favor of StarOffice.

In particular, Sun Microsystems licensed information about the format of Office files from Microsoft, to gain better compatibility.

No. Both Open- and Star- Office use their own MS-Office readers. (I was under the impression that some of the work on wvWare has helped developing OOo's but I'm not sure. I might be confusing with antiword). Nothing licensed from Microsoft.

3rd party non-OSS code was used to provide a reader for WordPerfect's Office suite.
StarOffice uses a 3rd party closed source reader.
Whereas OOo has more recently incorporated the function thank to a separate opensource project (libwpd if my memory still works).

Given the fact that WordPerfect had an important share in some specific markets (international organisations), and that in the beginning OOo still lacked official support for it, it might have made more sense to Google to opt for StarOffice instead.

Note:
In a similar fashion, StarOffice feature 3rd party proprietary support for Grammar check.
Whereas Language Tool is developed for OOo.
Given that LanguageTool still isn't part of stock OOo, this too may have weighted in favor of StarOffice.

I used to use jEdit. It's a decent text editor, but now I use Notepad++. I'm also trying Komodo Edit as a possible replacement to Notepad++. All three editors are open source, but Notepad++ is Windows only.

Sed is more than just RegEx, but this is the handiest collection of sed regular expressions that I have ever found:
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt

http://cultivation.sourceforge.net/

Pioneers is a great free software implementation of Settlers of Catan. You can play over LAN, internet, or single player with AI opponents. I'm not sure I'd say it is cooperative, but there is resource trading between players and there's certainly no violence. Oh yeah, and it's fun!

Pioneers homepage

No he's right I'm afraid. On sounds with hundreds of overtones, even a rate of 256 kbps (in stereo) isn't enough. I know because I experimented with image transmission over the sound by synthesising an image into a sound by turning each horizontal line into a modulated sine at a specific frequency. Here's an example with the input and output image transmitted over a 256 kbps (mono!) MP3.

Long story short, when you've got over 500 overtones simultaneously, you need a much higher bitrate. In the aforementioned example with a bitrate of 128 kbps (mono) the output image would get very noisy, and at 64 kbps (mono) which should be considered a normal rate for normal audio music, you could barely recognise either the sound or the input image. The areas that wouldn't be blacked out (entire squares or triangles) would be noised out beyond recognition. Feel free to reproduce my example with varying MP3 encoding rates and you'll see for yourself, the amount of overtones matters an awful lot.

A more useful link might be this

Doesn't Sphinx do this? http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

You've confused the iPhone App Store with Google's Android Market.

And some of us don't care if Microsoft ports the entire Gnome environment, complete with Gnome-yum to MinWin and call it Windows 8, as long as they comply with the licenses and post the source.

Hey... that's actually not a bad idea. I won't buy it, but I'd definitely test the crud out of it.

I wanted to start a project (here is the idea) that would give you a speech interface to a limited, user-defined set of commands. The user should be able to train the program and add new functions/commands.
Advantages: No huge/near-complete databases required, language independent, gets better the more it is used.

However I'm not that familiar with Speech Recognition limitations, and no one has explained me yet, why such a project hasn't been started yet.

Maybe it's just stupid and naive.

Heh, you're right!

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/intro.html#mode-switching

playing games like Star Control 2, Total Annihilation, Tribes 1 & 2, and Quake 2 & 3. I am not sure if I could survive another round.

The fan community has redone SC2 and released it as Ur-Quan Masters - http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ (great remake btw). Total Anni has been remade as Spring - http://spring.clan-sy.com/ but I still find the original modded with TAMutation more fun.

The gaming community has changed considerably though. Gaming is bigger than it ever has been and a massive casual gamer crowd has entered the market. Anything that mainstream is bound to have it's share of mediocrity. There are still great titles out there. You just have to wade through more crap to find them.

...that was plugged on slashdot recently. It's very 80's-arcade style. I can't even tell that it's about emacs and vi (no, keep reading! seriously!) when I'm playing it.

What I do know is that it has a heavy metal soundtrack, explosions, wireframe graphics, spaceships, lasers, shit blowing up left and right, and MORE.

I haven't been able to get more than, like, a minute into the first level, but just playing it cracks me up. The geekiness of it (e.g. bumping into "kernel space" at the top of the screen) makes it funnier too.

http://wordwarvi.sourceforge.net/

Comparing ODF to Word is like comparing HTML to IE. A data format is not the same thing as a program! Sheesh!

If you want ODF and Word, try here (works for me) or maybe here (haven't tried that one).

I see what you did there.. Use a closed proprietary program like Winrar on zip files, very funny :)

For those that actually think that was good advice, switch to PeaZip

I find the cscope interface most useful: http://cscope.sourceforge.net/

cscope is good if you get a ton of code that you know nothing about dumped on you. You can quickly jump around files by setting the cursor on a symbol, and it will also tell you stuff like "find functions calling a function."

This also has the advantage of being religion-neutral: cscope also works with vi.

P.S. Sorry to interrupt the flame wars with some potentially useful information.

I use a lot of custom motions on top of the stock vim ones. My two most often used are:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1905

and

http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=30

It's the motions that really make editing with vim a pleasure.

No more tapping "l" through someones longCamelCaseClassName to change it. 2,wc,w jumps in 2 words, removes the third and drops you into insert mode.

Similarily, v]fd deletes a function in python. ]] jumps to the next class definition.

More motions are better. They help you edit the text structurally rather than as a stream of characters.