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NekoBus

Bah. RuleMaster is a pain. Real roleplayers do it with no dice and no rules, just imagination and character play. :p

xDND is like Windows and x86 -- it's annoying and kludgy, still based on old cruft that was a bad idea 25 years ago. But it's also the predominant standard.

Anyone want to complete this analogy for GURPS, Hero System, RuleMaster, RuneQuest, etc? ;)

After all, when you are a second-class citizen, you have NO rights at all, never mind a curtailment of your freedom of speech!

What is currently being set up in the United States is a new class system, in which some people have more rights than others. DRM is part of it, but it isn't all of it. The main thing I see is an attempt to set up a society in which insiders will maintain control of the majority of the wealth and outsiders will not be able to topple them. The insiders consist of a class of people who move between the halls of Congress and the top levels of major American corporations, the outsiders are everyone else. This type of plutocracy has existed in the past in many parts of the world, and it always has disasterous results. As has been noted many times, it is a major feature of colonialism. Both the first wave which brought about the American revolution and the later wave for which brought about the Indian independance movement that Gandhi was a famous leader of.

These revolutionary movements were primarily aligned against economic concerns. That's what the British East India Tea Company was about. The preferential treatment of the British East India Tea Company by the British government was a major factor in sparking the American revolution. (I can just see Slashdot circa 177X, "I can't believe that you are getting upset about something as trivial as a tea monoply when there are som many more serious injustices in the world, have some sense of proportion!!") Of course, later the British East India Company was to turn to the opium trade to expand its interests in China. This opium trade was used as an excuse to sieze parts of China for the British Empire.

Mr. Wells, in his "Middle Kingdom" describes the origin of this first war with England: "This war was extraordinary in its origin as growing chiefly out of a commercial misunderstanding; remarkable in its course as being waged between strength and weakness, conscious superiority and ignorant pride; melancholy in its end as forcing the weaker to pay for opium within its borders against all its laws, thus paralyzing the little moral power its feeble government could exert to protect its subjects. . . . It was a turning point in the national life of the Chinese race, but the compulsory payment of six million dollars for the opium destroyed has left a stigma upon the English name."

He also says, "The conflict was now fairly begun; its issue between the parties so unequally matched --one having almost nothing but the right on its side, the other assisted by every material and physical advantage-could easily be foreseen" and again, after speaking of it as being unjust and immoral, he concludes "Great Britain, the first Christian power, really waged this war against the pagan monarch who had only endeavored to put down a vice harmful to his people. The war was looked upon in this light by the Chinese; it will always be so looked upon by the candid historian, and known as the Opium War."

Within fifteen years after this first war, there was another one, and again Great Britain came off victorious. China had to pay another indemnity, three million dollars, and five more treaty ports were opened up. By the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin, the sale of opium in China was legalized in 1858.

1. New powerful cartels being formed by the United States government with global interests and quasi judicial/law enforcement powers.

2. A new openness about the so-called rightness of imperialism by politically connected intellectuals.

3. Propaganda campaigns designed to link copyright infringement with terrorism. (And thus justify the use of force, both in the domestic and foreign spheres.)

Of course, my pure self-interest leads me to worry about the effects this will have here in the U.S. of A. not just the rest of the world. I don't want to go to jail for fixing my computer so it actually works correctly after a law is passed that requires it to be shipped broken (and stay broken!). I don't want the RIAA/MPAA to be given special law enforcement rights without any accountability under the Constitution. Basically, I don't want any of what's going on. Looks like we are all going to get it though, whether we like it or not!

You are grossly misinformed and should be embarassed to post such poorly-researched comments.

The Microsoft windows manager, "Windows" was bundled with DOS to foreclose such products as Deskview.

Your recollection of history is blatently false. Windows and DOS were not bundled until many years after Desqview was dead and Windows had a monopoly of the "OS" market. The fact is that Desqview 2.0 was released in 1987 whereas Win95 (the bundling of DOS and Windows) didn't take place until 1995. Bundling the products was the only thing that made sense and was in a sense the means to discontinue DOS 6.

In fact, neither the DOJ nor the courts have ever found fault with Microsoft for "bundling" DOS and Windows, bundling didn't even become a factor until Netscape's demise. For example, the consent decree of 1994 makes no mention of bundling products and is completely devoted to licensing practises. While you're free to your own fiction, the facts, the DoJ, and the courts tend to disagree with you.

Gates himself decided (at Ballmers suggestion) to get involved and stop DELL from promoting linux desktops

References, please! I hope you work differently in court because I certainly make no judgements without some sort of evidence.

You are grossly misinformed and should be embarassed to post such poorly-researched comments.

The Microsoft windows manager, "Windows" was bundled with DOS to foreclose such products as Deskview.

Your recollection of history is blatently false. Windows and DOS were not bundled until many years after Desqview was dead and Windows had a monopoly of the "OS" market. The fact is that Desqview 2.0 was released in 1987 whereas Win95 (the bundling of DOS and Windows) didn't take place until 1995. Bundling the products was the only thing that made sense and was in a sense the means to discontinue DOS 6.

In fact, neither the DOJ nor the courts have ever found fault with Microsoft for "bundling" DOS and Windows, bundling didn't even become a factor until Netscape's demise. For example, the consent decree of 1994 makes no mention of bundling products and is completely devoted to licensing practises. While you're free to your own fiction, the facts, the DoJ, and the courts tend to disagree with you.

Gates himself decided (at Ballmers suggestion) to get involved and stop DELL from promoting linux desktops

References, please! I hope you work differently in court because I certainly make no judgements without some sort of evidence.

There is a simple RIAA Killer in HTML and Javascript here. No program necessary. Just open this link: http://riaakiller.tripod.com/ and minimize the window. Every 3 seconds it will reload RIAA.ORG and RIAA.COM. That works out to about 20 page loads a minute. If we can get 10,000 people doing this it would be about 200,000 page loads per minute. Check it out!

Another theory is that the donuts are some sort of weapon; the "rope" is the contrail left by the aircraft's engines, and the donuts are exhaust pulses from a gun or something.

What it comes down to is that like you said, nobody knows what created the phenomenon.

Here in Europe we had this. It was called Olivetti Envision. I was working in a department store by the time, and the first time I saw it I thought it was REALLY cool, but there was no actual reaction from people, and Technical Service sucked. But had the most sleek wireles keyboard w/ integrated trackball i had seen. We are talking year 1996 ya know!

Well you are not the first who thinks r2d2 is best used for serving dirnks. Jaba did just this. And look what happend to him.

The replubilc caomes to a a downfall. and they use r2d2 for ship mechanics. what happens to the repuclic.... right: downfall.

wonders what happens to /. with all its attention to r2d2.

However, it was thought to be good scare tactics to use guns as they scared the opponents sh-(or w-)1tless.
So, just because the Laser might not be 'all that', it'd still be a great mind-fuck to go wasting the enemy, just to show the superior technology.

(Maybe you should come up with some other abbreviation for "Playstation 2"...abbreviation overloading is a Bad Thing. :-) )

Or did you mean "PS2"? ;)

you can also "prove" that in the last century (19..) on average the number of car accidents increased with the number of refrigerators.

The best example (IMHO) of this is The Dread Tomato Addition, by Mark Clifton.

Somebody had to be the hero...

I'm parroting a wimpy line here from Eric Eldred--a guy who has "extracted" public domain texts on his website from culled from Barnes & Noble ebooks in Microsoft's Reader format, but of course doesn't know a thing about Tripod's Techodude, and his posted method for pulling .txt from .lit.

Mr. Eldred said to me that he would have let his method be known, but, with the Supreme Court case and all...

Personally, I have too many readers now to get shut down over nothing, ulp, but am I allowed partial credit for convincing Gutenberg to go down under and take advantage of the copyright laws there that say Gatsby and 1984 are public domain?

Nah, I'm just a wuss.

Go get 'em, Bruce!

The fake moon landing: an analysis of "photographs" brought back from the "moon" show that the "landing" was faked. Read on:

NASA Fakes Moon Landing!

--Jim

Our entire financial system needs to be tweaked; if one person or group ends up taking the blame for an entire economy's faults, it will end up being an injustice to everyone in the United States.

First part true, however it requires more than tweaks, but complete reconstruction without using debt+interest as the mean of money creation. Second part false. There is a good reason for people to be angry at MR Bush, and it's got to do with his team, which essentially came out from the Enron team. And, looking at the past of Mr Bush, you'll see that he used more then the Harken energy situation to enrich himself. Strong allegations point to his dealing with the Texas rangers team, which was bought by a mystery investor, just after Mr Bush, as governor, had passed legislation to allow the University of Texas to hide its investments. So, that's two financial scandals, and not just one.

As for the president not knowing about the s11, that may or may not be true, but there is either criminal incompetency, or the willful creation of a situation similar to Pearl Harbor(ignored foreknowledge). As ONE example, please explain how the Pentagon was struck if they are passed all relevant air traffic information, receiving by their own admission the warning 50 minutes before the collision, as well as having the Andrews airbase just beside them? 50 minutes.

Please also remember than Bush was not elected, but selected. There has been scandal after scandal with this admin, and they try to keep everything hidden. That does not restore confidence in markets, and neither does passing ineffective legislation. To me, it seems likely that S11 and the economic crisis are interrelated. Check out this page about predictions back in 1999 about a crash occuring in 2001-2002, and the suggested probable solutions the administration would use, including declaring war, pushing for a massive tax cut and deregulation the Saving and Loans (without mentionning the little accounting trick of using YOUR retirement money to finance what was a surplus)

On the low end, you have to buy a big, clunky, monitor-included thing. If you want a "component" system, you have to buy a tower, which is big and costs much moolah.

Damn straight. The exact Mac I want would use the motherboard from the eMac (or a G4 nForce2, drool), put the graphics in an AGP slot, ditch the CRT, add a PCI slot & an open drive bay.

Just enough expandability to satisfy a budget-conscious informed user. Why does Lord Steve refuse to sell Macs to this large market segment?

Bad:
- The new iMac is still PC100/800 MHz.
- No "upgrade edition" of Jaguar.

Agreed. Even if the G4 is as "pentium-crushing" as Lord Steve claims, ordinary SDRAM is a nasty bottleneck that leaves us well behind increasingly-common Wintel boxes with DDR or RDR.

Although I'd still be satisfied with a PowerMac LC, my new pipe dream is the PowerMac nForce2 . :-)

And if Apple won't sell me a Jaguar upgrade for $39 or less, I'll probably end up burning a copy. :-(

was a old EGA version called egaint, which I had on an old 286. Google found me this list of 883 tetris files.

Hello USA,
what have you got in your own eye?

1/ california: deregulation sucks
2/ microsoft antitrust trial: where are the sanctions?
3/ erin brockowich and elsewhere
4/ homeless: so used to it, it must be OK.
5/ enron
6/ georges bush jr
7/ dmca

no amount of self blindedness or hypocrisy will make the rest of the world forget all this and all the rest.

"power" = volts * farads. The guy who built the electromagnetic can crusher used 120uf (that's picofarads) caps, but at 10kV. Those puppies have a lot of juice. That said, I did manage to dig up a 1 farad (12v) cap at some point. I charged it up to test it, then discharged it using the head of a hammer. The heat from the spark welded (soldered?) the capacitor to the head of the hammer.

Mechanical Engineers build can crushers with moving parts.

Electrical Engineers build can crushers with no moving parts.

However, whatever the discipline, no mad science lab is complete without a Furby Testing Program.

Sure, look up sites about Airwolf (that 1980s series); it made use of R/C models quite heavily - I doubt ever as much since (due to the advanced of computer-generated images, no doubt).

Here's a company that flies R/Cs for camera work
Just to illustrate :
Their 'Airwolf' cam

Oh, some more Airwolf :>
UKcultTV.tripod.com

And peopl eon the internet have been able to read unofficial version of Harry Potter stories for free.

I remember playing this on my TI-85 calculator...

I found a TI-86 version here.

~Will

Can't you see what's going on here? Did you see the commericals for Applied Digital Solutions' VeriChips, the implantable chip (which could eventually be used for tracking kidnap victims) immediately following the news story on CNN about Elizabeth Smart?*

Obviously, the kidnapping is a conspiracy orchastrated by the news agencies themselves to boost public approval and acceptance of implants. Which will only lead to a global police state run by Satan himself.*

*not really

I stopped being all that concerned with spelling issues some while ago when I took a good look at my spelling talent.

I am a very good speller and it happens all on its own, like balance while walking. When I am typing along and misspell a word, my mind immediately latches onto the event. When I see a misspelled word written out, it jumps out of the page at me, clamoring for my attention with StarTrek{tm}-like klaxons. The same whoop whoop happens when some word is mis-used in a sentence that I am reading. It's a talent.

I read a good deal, and have always done so since an early age, so perhaps that itself lends to the talent. I type a good deal, writing adventure scripts and online discussions. I am also a detail person.

But as a talent, I judged that I can't expect everyone else to be that good with spelling. If my reading/writing experience is the source of the talent, then I can't expect eveyone else to have had that experience. You can live a pretty nice life without all the reading I do; even people that I call "not readers" are still functional people all around.

With the advent of spell-checkers, spelling issues may have been alleviated somewhat. It's the auto-correctors that I am worried about ... they may train your fingers that "teh" is the correct way to type "the". Long ago I turned off auto-correction in my word processors; since, I would misspell something, but in an instant the AC fixed it, leaving me to stare bewilderingly at the correct words on the screen. A bell went off, but there was no fire, causing me to doubt my alarm mechanism.

There is probably a bit of the ol' laziness in some fraction of the misspelling that occurs; and laziness is laudably opposed. But perhaps we should better concentrate on the fact that if the message got across, then the purpose of all that typing was served. If you can communicate effectively, then all the details of the communication aren't as important.

P.S. This is a hastily composed note, which increases the chances of a misspelling. I therefore invoke the Haste Disclaimer, although I can't for long (if at all) escape Murphy's terrible laws.

Look what it's done to your brain!

not fore sale though.

its actually my girlfriends collection (and site), but she is a videogame history buff, so theres lots of info here too.

its gunna /. quick so watch out.

You are talking about GNUstep. For many years, the OpenStep API and development tools have been far superior to *anything* else in the Windows or UNIX world. The GNUstep project has already got usable alpha clones of the NeXT development tools that are a joy to work with. Take a look at this mail client developed quickly with GNUstep tools. It runs on GNUstep platforms and Mac OS X.

The GNUstep project is actively tracking the additions made to Cocoa (what Apple decided to call OpenStep after buying NeXT).

GNUstep frameworks and applications will build on most UNIXes, on Mac OS X (obviously), and win32 platforms. Support for the GUI backend is Alpha on win32 but is progressing.

GNUstep has a database framework much like NeXT's Enterprise Object Framework and a web development system much like WebObjects. Also available is a 3D framework, music and sound frameworks, a networking framework, an email framework, and others.

Like Apple, you can write your applications in Objective C or Java. Unlike Apple, the GNUstep project provides several other language options: Ruby, Guile, and other scripting languages by way of StepTalk.

I would say that "Creator" is much less of a specific term than "God." Although it does indeed indicate spiritual leanings, it does not in any way necessarily indicate the judeo-christian religion.

Although it does in some sense indicate a belief in a generic higher power, i far prefer it to the alternative that Eisenhower stuck into the Pledge of Allegiance. If push comes to shove, i'll say that my Creator was whatever star or stars that fussed together the carbon and oxygen that make up my body.

this is a hell of a lot deeper than anyone here seems to realize. Judeo-Christian faith is the basis which the government was built on. it is the history on which the nation was founded. you can't simply strike it out. i don't think they'd let you.

Wow, quite authoritative aren't you? And who wouldn't let me?

"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"
-from Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, approved by Congress and signed by John Adams

"I have examined all the known superstitions of the word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."
-Thomas Jefferson

"I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible)."
-Thomas Paine

Athiesm Awareness
Not a Christian Nation
Treaty of Tripoli

"because Biggie done do some of that shit too"

The UFO sightings are the strongest arguement for the existenct of Project Aurora, the top secret latest hypersonic aircraft out of the US black budget.
Aurora Project Hypersonic Aircraft
has a good image of the "Donut on a rope" contrail that a pulse ramjet is supposed to make, which is thought to be the power plant of the aircraft.
Janes Aerospace has given the Aurora an official entry after sighting the characteristic contrail.

IBM's PS/2 Model 95 (one of the last PS/2 MCA-bus machines, mainly for use as a server) came with a built-in LCD display... there's now a Linux driver for it.

i'm off to Iscandar. fire up the Wave Motion gun.

...because Mr. T kicked his a$$ the last time he complained about their products.

and you can stop worrying about last mile and crap like that....

why? check this:
http://armageddononline.tripod.com/planetx.htm

this might provide an alternative to the superguns and novas for home jamma users. my girlfriend has for arcade rigs and spent forever looking for a suitable jamma rig to play them on. cabinated were out of the question but the superguns werent. go to the arcade section to see her current setup

This guy was like you. There are places you can go if you need to talk to someone about your depression and Internet addiction. There are lots of resources that can help.

for example, all of you people who support emulation because you "cant find" the hardware bullshit, nearly everything in this 70+ system collection was found on ebay. im sorry but ebay has revoked the excuse of obscurity!

Quite possibly the quickest ever invocation of goodwins law on slashdot :)

• The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
  
• Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
  
• Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
  
• How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
  
• To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
  
• Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
  
• Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )
  
• Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
  
  Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
  
  Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
• well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check. :)
  
  There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
  
• I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
  
• At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
  
• It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
  
• This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
  
• I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
  
• No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
  
  Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started. :)
  
• Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
  
• I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
  
• So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
  
  This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
  
  cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.
  

• The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
  
• Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
  
• Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
  
• How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
  
• To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
  
• Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
  
• Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )
  
• Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
  
  Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
  
  Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
• well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check. :)
  
  There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
  
• I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
  
• At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
  
• It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
  
• This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
  
• I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
  
• No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
  
  Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started. :)
  
• Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
  
• I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
  
• So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
  
  This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
  
  cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.
  

long live 2d

put the merry band of poliTICKians in the Seakings for transport and give the military the new jets :) Nothing like heading to the front line in a Leer

The playlists were generated exclusively by listener votes. Ballots were everywhere around town and on every island where the signal could reach. They were tallied every week.

You'd vote for ten songs to put or keep in rotation, ten songs to dump and three songs that would be a hit if radio played it (those songs received proportionately more vote weight).

It made for an eclectic mix, with votes from outside the main demographic also receiving more weight. I heard hundreds of songs on RFH that I'd never heard before, and never heard since--but I loved almost all of them.

Sadly, since the music was so diverse they couldn't claim a single demographic and placed last in the Arbitron ratings that are so necessary for advertising dollars. The station collapsed in 1997 for lack of revenue, despite most of the djs being paid near-volunteer wages.

I know for a fact that the station was the most listened-to station when it was on the air, but the screwed-up Arbitron rating system forced them out of business.

You can see how eclectic the playlist was at the top 300 archive. And also why it was doomed to fail. Back in 1994, this was not corporate music, even though much of it has been adopted by corporate radio since then.

...Rob sure doesn't seem interested... Maybe it's his time of the month*1.5?

If you haven't explored your campus's steam tunnels, then you shouldn't consider your college experience complete.

From alt.college.tunnels: useful campus tunnel info. (Watch out for the pop-up ads.)

I have read speculation that the peak gamma ray bursts tends to be *directional*, probably along the poles of the stars in question. If it happens to be pointing at you, you're toast, otherwise, it is survivable.

You could easily be right, and I think I remember hearing a bit about that. It's hard to get reliable information at the moment because nobody even noticed them until a few years ago. (Within the last decade.) And nobody really has an idea of what they are, except that they're massively huge amounts of energy.

BTW, ain't Beatlejuice due to go off soon? It is also really big.

Betelgeuse is getting close to the end of its life and it's expected to go supernova in the next few million years (really big stars only live for tens or hundreds of millions of years, anyway), but it's nowhere near as unusual as eta Carinae. Check out the writeup here:

The brightening remains mysterious, however, because the star is thought to be very close to its "Eddington limit," where light exerts so much outward pressure that gravity is just barely able to hold the star together. So any further brightening should produce an outrush of material. But an expanding burst of gas--although still too small to be seen directly--would cool like gas rushing out of a spray can. The cooling would strengthen the star's infrared signal and turn down the ultraviolet. But the full STIS spectra showed just the opposite pattern.

I guess that more or less demonstrates our present understanding of the Universe. :)