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Some more information can be found at the FAQ.
And some images are located there:

http://spies.com/~gus/ran/body.htm

-Legion

This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.

"VSound is a sort of like a `virtual audio loopback cable'. That is, it allows you to record the output audio stream of a program (similar to connecting a loopback cable to the line in and line out jacks on the sound card, and recording the sound from the line in jack, but without the DA/AD conversion losses). One possible use for this application is as part of a RealAudio to wav file converter."

If you have a Debian system, here's all you need to do:

root@localhost:~# apt-get install vsound

If you're on another system, you'll need to download the a href="http://www.zip.com.au/~erikd/vsound/vsound-0 .5.tar.gz">source and also make sure that you have sox installed. (vsound uses sox to convert the raw .au into wav format, which you can then compress however you'd like.)

Forth could work really effectively in that environment, and Chuck got traction. But I think he is on a mission of a higher level, which I struggled to understand as a radio astronomer. It was about complexity before there was "complexity" as a theory. It's also about being "green" - using the hardware's capability fully. No bit or gate goes unused. No more RAM or I/O than is minimally required. It's about using your brains - it's a good thing to spend a whole day getting one line of code right.

So my question to an old friend - is the meaning in the Destination or in the Journey? Does Forth's market penetration matter at all? Or is it the fact that a few of us see the world a little more clearly?

-Martin Ewing

There is also a lot of information (FAQ's) about buying arcade machines from auctions and other places at www.spies.com/arcade/info

check out Wiretap for a boat load of arcade game hacking resources.

Sega, of course. The only thing that really stuck in my head about it was being afraid of rupturing myself trying to do a fatality in Mortal Kombat. Now that i'm thinking about it, didn't the NES have a VR glove? Maybe with a needle, thread, some duct tape and a little creativity, you could get it on your foot.

Yes, it was called the "power glove". Apparently someone at Nintendo has a complex about powerlessness. Anyway, we revisit the peripherals page at nesfan.com to find this information:

The 'Power Glove', released by Mattel in 1989, was an attempt at incorporating virtual reality with the NES. The glove emitted the movement information (left, right, up, down, etc.) of the gamers hand and fingers to sensors that were placed on each corner of the tv screen. Although the 'Power Glove' would work with almost every game available, it didn't work well unless it was with a game that was designed for it (i.e., 'Super Glove Ball'). With a costly price tag of $79.99 (U.S.) being coupled with the peripheral's unreliable control, the 'Power Glove' was quickly forgotten.

It however was not forgotten at all. There is a device called the PGSI which is a preconstructed serial interface for the power glove. It also seems to support the Sega LCD shutter goggles for 3D, but I don't know much about that. As an aside, if anyone has a set of the Sega Master System shutter goggles, and is willing to part with them, I need a pair. I have the interface controller but not the goggles.

See also:

• Powerglove FAQ
• Aminet Amiga Hardware Drivers
• Another powerglove faq

gopher://wiretap.spies.com

Not to sound like an old codger (OK, well, just a little) but when I was taking college programming courses we didn't even have that kind of choice. My first class was FORTRAN and we wrote our programs on punch cards and submitted them to the operator, who ran them, and handed back our printouts. Yes really. After that I was programming on TI 990s in Pascal. My assembly language class used a simulator written by a former grad student as his PhD project. Just so you are clear, none of these later environments were graphical -- strictly character-cell full-screen was the state of the art. So kwitcherbellyachin' and get to coding.

The GREAT BOOKS INDEX at books.mirror.org mirrors many of the texts that were on Wiretap. I think it was their intention to at least mirror all of the literature on the site (as well as provide links to the original archive and the .txt and HTML versions on the net such as at Project Gutenberg ftp sites

There also was a Wiretap mirror at wiretap.spies.com, but I can't tell if it is still there since it seems to be SlashDotted.

wasnt even a processor powerful enough to make all the pretty widgets work.

The Lisa was based on the Xerox Alto (See here, here, here, and here) from the early 70's, so it was certainly doable, although perhaps not with the single-chip-CPU concept that seems to be the only thing the kids of today can conceive of.

And no, I don't have one in my collection. Yet.

A wrinkle in time. by Madeleine L'Engle
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - (Note: get a copy of The AQnnotated Alice by Martin Gardner
The hobbit. by J.R.R. Tolkien
Anything by Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Alan Dean Foster, or Piers Anthony
Darkover (any of the books) by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow by Orsen Scott Card
The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

A decent collection of Science fiction, mostly suitable for children

Also, Please attend the Worldcon, this year it's in Chicago followed by Philadelphia, PA, then San José. We have a lot of things for you and your children.

of course, our little one is only 6 months old. Mostly he's an excuse to reread Harold and the Purple Crayon

I aplogogise for any redundancies. This list took awhile to compile and find the links, especially as the co-author was breastfeeding at the time...

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That "press-release" is anything but believable, however, the score is not that far-fetched at all.
After about 10 levels, there are very few chances to score points on anything but pills, and the odd fruit. (power pills stop working) I know that past this point, I will usually average between 10,000 and 20,00 per level, until my will breaks, then I die. (That's on Ms Pac)

On the original PacMan, there was no randomness to the ghosts'(monsters for the purests) movments. There was a fairly widely know pattern ( here and here) that could beat the ghosts on every level(43 seconds per level). Later, Namco released a mod-chip that would randomize the ghosts movements to give the "wiz-kidz" something new to do.

So... on an original Pac Man, if you apply the pattern flawlessly on every level until the game dies at level 255, you would obtain the theoretical maximum Pac Man score.
3,333,360 / 255 is 13,720.000 pts per level, which is a very reasonable average.

but...

I seems apparent that quite a few people have witnessed the game roll-over at L255, and I can't see how the score would vary too much from 3,333,360 after 255 levels of about 13,000 per level. So I don't see this as such a great feat.
Not to mention that the artical is clearly fake. It's written like a crappy tabloid.

The philosophical antecedent for The Matrix is really the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes:

I will suppose, then, . . . that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice.

Plato's story of the cave ( Republic, Book VII) is with the nature of things (ontology); Descartes' concern is rather with how we know what we thing we know (epistemology), which is the concern of The Matrix. (Granted, if you can draw a clear line dividing ontology from epistemology, you win a philosophy Ph.D., but the distinction is generally serviceable.)

I don't think it's necessary that a film's ideas be wholly original, but it's necessary that the film present those ideas in a new way. The idea that aliens might long ago have visited the earth long predates 2001, but the image of ape-men inspecting a black monolith does not. The Matrix was successful because it presented its themes in a new and visually stunning way.

I agree that Katz does seem to have conflated weblogs and online journals (aka web diaries), and they aren't exactly in the same space.

but you'd be surprised at the interest that people do take in other folks' lives. Archipelago ( http://www.spies.com/~islands ) is a selective ring of OLJs, but there are zillions listed on Open Pages ( http://www.hedgehog.net/op/ ), good, bad, or indifferent. most have their audience. readers feel free to give feedback on what the authors write, and many journals include a forum where this is done publicly.

(I know a web page where a supposedly knowledgeable person tells a reputable interviewer that the Gavilan was the first laptop computer. (Not even close.))

And contrary to popular opionion, the MITS machine was not the first PC. (Not even close.)

Furthermore, he left out all kinds of important milestones:

• Doug Englebart and co's work with the mouse, user interfaces, and more (1969)
• The Xerox Parc innovations, including GUI's, ethernet, laser printers, and more (mid-70's)
• Dynalogic, Kyocera, GRiD, Sharp, and more, who gave us portable computing as we know it (early 80's)

There are plenty of others, of course. Some of the names he left out -- Englebart, Metcalfe, Kay, Berkeley, Sutherland, and so on, are equally, if not more, important than the names on his list.

To find out more [plug:] check out the Vintage Computer Festival or my site.

This guy did a bad job of research resulting in another incomplete and misleading web page.

I knew the guy who was implementing a similar project, called DISCO. The author is a Mac guy, and may be the person of whom you're thinking. I don't know the current state of development, but the web page is still up.