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First: informed consent was not what we know today. At that point, you essentially signed a form that said "I agree to participate", and that was it. Deception was key to the whole thing, and people thought they were in a learning study, not an authority study.

Second: the labels did not have actual voltages, but rather "pain-levels" or "danger-levels".

Third: individuals were debriefed (largely because of how disturbing this was) and asked about the deception. Most indicated that they had no idea that they were not really shocking someone. The whole experiment hinges on this, and they went to great lengths that it was believable.

Fourth, the whole idea was that the "actor" was telling them to comply with the experiment. The idea is that if you are continually told to do something by an authority you will be more likely to do it.

I just installed Fedora Core 4 and 5 (see below) on my daughter's Winbook W235 http://www.winbook.com/notebooks/w/w_overview.html . This is a very nice machine for $900 with a wide screen, DVD writer, 512M, and an 80G drive. It uses an Intel motherboard with the 855GM graphics adapter and 2200 wifi. As you note you'll need to install the Intel firmware, either from Livna http://rpm.livna.org/ or directly from Intel's site on Sourceforge http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php. Once I had the firmware installed, I could configure the wireless card with the included utilities in GNOME or KDE, and I didn't have to play with ndiswrapper or any other kludge.

The screen is more problematic. The 855 (and later 900+) adapters support a number of resolutions, but they weren't recognized by the normal drivers. The screen on this machine is 1280x768, but an out-of-the-box install forced it to 1024x768 which resulted in very ugly fonts. Luckily there's a little utility out there called 855resolution http://perso.wanadoo.fr/apoirier/ that you can load in rc.local and kick the adapter into other modes. Once I installed that, the KDE "Display" control saw the new resolution, and the Fedora desktop looked as nice as the Windows one.

We don't play games on this machine (we're both console types), so I can't speak for its graphics performance. It works great with Xine, though; movies and anime in the widescreen aspect ratio look terrific. Since I run KDE, I use the arts drivers to handle sound; they work fine.

OK, now for the big problem. FC4 installed just fine off the DVD, but FC5 would not install at all. (I've filed a bug report with the Fedora folks.) I finally installed FC5 by installing FC4 first, then running a system upgrade from the FC5 repositories http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq. This worked fine; it just added a few hours to the installation since yum had to update a couple thousand RPMs.

Finally, here's a hint if you buy a laptop like this one with Windows pre-installed. First, download and boot a copy of the Knoppix live CD or DVD http://www.knopper.net/. Once it's up and running, run "qtparted" from the command prompt. This is a nice graphical frontend to parted that will allow you to resize your partitions without having to buy something like Partition Magic. If you've used the Windows partition at all, I'd recommend running its disk optimizer to push all the Windows files to the front of the partition. Then you can lop off a chunk at the back for Linux.

For those who haven't played the game, I highly recommend checking it out; it remains an amazing and compelling gaming experience to this day. The game is an FPS/RPG hybrid, and it isn't necessary to have played the first game to understand or enjoy it.

Some used copies of the game can be found at GameTZ (http://gametz.com/aGames/PC/System+Shock+2.html). Alternatively, the game routinely shows up on popular BitTorrent sites. After you get ahold of the game, you'll want to download the excellent Rebirth mod (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/etienne.aubert/sshock/ssh ock_rebirth.htm) and upgraded texture pack (http://shtup.home.att.net/), which both really help the game to look much less dated. (Some torrents include the mods, as they're considered almost essential.)

I'm not sure if this post will imspire anyone to check the game out, but I hope I've helped add the game to at least one gamer's all-time favorites list.

Seems no one is giving serious answers so i guess i will be the only one

Freeware or open source software:
01. Firefox, http://www.getfirefox.com/
02. Winamp, http://www.winamp.com/
03. Miranda, http://www.miranda-im.org/
04. Media Player Classic, http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
05. ffdshow, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm
06. CDBurnerXp Pro, http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
07. Daemon-tools, http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
08. uTorrent, http://www.utorrent.com/
09. XnView, http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.htm l
10. ExactAudioCopy, http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
11. Dev-C++, http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
12. 7-zip, http://www.7-zip.org/
13. Real Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm
14. QuickTime Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
15. Process Explorer, http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/processexplo rer.html
16. Uniform Server, http://www.uniformserver.com/
17. nLite, http://www.nliteos.com/ (sp+hotfix+driver slipstreaming and ability to remove almost anything from the windows installation disc, including wmp, ie, drivers, services, etc, you can get your windows install disc down to 180MB with a 70MB RAM footprint after boot).

Commercial/Shareware software.
01. NOD32, http://www.nod32.com/ - simply the best antivirus software out there
02. Cinema4D, http://www.maxoncomputer.com/ Great modelling/rendering program (also available for OS X)
03. mIRC, http://www.mirc.com/ not the best irc client, but it has a tiny memory footprint/feature ratio
04. Directory Opus, http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ replace Explorer with a far better file manager.
05. UltraEdit, http://www.ultraedit.com/ great editor for many textbased formats
06. Visual Studio, http://microsoft.com/
07. Nero Burning ROM. http://www.ahead.de/ my burning program of choice

It appears that XnView http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/uk_pocket_ features.html or Gnome Photo Collector (http://gpc.sourceforge.net/guide.php3) might have keyword indexing.

I would prefer the close tab button to be on the right side of the tab, though. Tabs have relatively little space, and in that situation, I think the favicon is more important because it helps differentiate between tabs, so I think the favicon should stay on the left.

As for closing tabs quickly, I would recommend using the Tab Clicking Options extension, which I have set to close tabs on double-click, and the All-in-one Gestures extension, which lets you close tabs by making an "L" gesture.

Both of those take less effort than middle-clicking, and double-clicking on a tab to close it is more consistent with opening a new tab by double-clicking on the tab bar.

ImageMagick is great, but if you work with less common formats or even those such as Maya's IFF, it doesn't help much (which is odd seeing as how Maya even installs ImageMagick's convert command renamed as imconvert).

There is another program called Nconvert that will handle pretty much any format you throw at it (about 400 in and 40 out). It can do much of what can be done with ImageMagick too, and is available for more than a dozen operating systems.

Unfortunately it's only free for non-commercial use, and 100 (or an agreement) otherwise.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/en_ncdownl oad.html

Kang might have something to say about that.

You are absolutely right. And if a random quick check reveals evidence for a BSE case in the US, then the material has to be validated again by a specialized (say qualified) lab in the UK where they use reliable tests.

But, you cannot donate blood in the US if you lived in Europe.
http://www.redcross.org/services/biomed/blood/supp ly/tse/bsepolicy.html
Of course, Europeans donate blood for Europeans, without a problem. The problem is that people in the US confuse the UK with the EU. Anybody who thinks that there had been an epidemic in the EU should compare the numbers in the entire EU, except for the UK (!), with the US. Good morning, America!
The point is, we need to get the facts right and learn from mistakes. Otherwise we end up with a situation like the one we had in the UK. For some reason beyond my comprehension it seems we are facing a lot of FUD on the one hand side and total ignorance on the other hand.

BTW the biography of Dr. Hans-Gerhard Creutzfeldt and his family is quite interesting.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Gerhard_Creutzfe ldt
http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/91.html

Lots of information about prions has been published over the past century.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marcblum/PageCreutzfeld-Ja cob.html
http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/prions.html

I meant sysstat (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/). The log directory is /var/log/sa. Sorry for the confusion.

Main problem is the short dynamic range of most sensors. You have to expose for something in the mid range and pray the rest will stay within that range. The Umax that I have used has a parallel connection and the only driver available was for W95. No Sane or commercial drivers like Vuescan that would drive that scanner. With Vuescan and the internals of an Epson 3200 you could do much more. Vuescan has a one-pass multi-sampling function that slows the scanner a lot while the S/N ratio gets better. Another function of Vuescan is a long exposure scan that does two runs with different exposures and adds the information of the shadow detail to a normal scan. However a rotation panorama camera loaded with color negative film has much more latitude than a digital (scanner) camera. See: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/panorama/camera/voya_ca_e. html

Usually you have to deal with the high infrared sensitivity of the scanner sensor too. I have used a slide protecter heat shield glass to block the IR but that isn't the best optical filter. At least it allowed semi-color takes with the second version of that panorama camera.

This whole thing sound a lot like what the linux in 3d looks like penguin.
I think that viewing the filesystem as well as all the files connection to each other (symlinks,library dependency etc.) would be a genuinly useful thing to have penguin.
There is also some website that has a 3d view with lined connections between articles on their website, but for the life of me I can't remember what website it was penguin. If anyone can remember and point it out I would be grateful penguin!

NoScript is definitely one of the most useful extensions ever! Have a site that somehow gets pop-ups past you? Well, they work via javascript, so fuck 'em! New security vulnerability due to JS somehow? Fuck 'em again! Ads in general? Fuck 'em, they use JS! Badly coded tag soup websites that depend on JS? Fuck 'em and their incompetent web developers!

Enabled Extensions: [14] (astericks denote highly recommended extensions)
Adblock Plus 0.5.10.20051107*
All-in-One Gestures 0.17*
DOM Inspector 1.9a1
FoxyTunes 1.1.5.4
Linkification 1.1.6*
Location Navigator 0.6* (for porn)
Menu Editor 1.2
MR Tech Local Install 4.0
Nightly Tester Tools 0.7.9.10
NoScript 1.1.3.3*
Permit Cookies 0.5*
Redirect Remover 0.43* (for porn)
Update Channel Selector 1.0.1
WebmailCompose 0.6.1

Not quite.
I have a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook with an Intel 845(?) graphic chip driving a 1400x1050 screen - and the BIOS does not support this resolution. That's why we have hacks like 855resolution that overwrite one of the predefined modes with values for 1400x1050.

Try XnView, far better than IrfanView, IMHO. http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.h tml

As you say, there are v few ISPs who do ipv6 on DSL, the only one I can think of is A&A in the UK.

In France, only Nerim is currently offering native IPv6 access (with each subscription you get one IPv4 and 2^80 IPv6 addresses).

There's also a petition asking Free.fr to provide IPv6 access (19,000 signatures collected up to now). The petition's website mentions that Wanadoo, arguably France's first ISP, has also been conducting experiments with IPv6 since June 2005.

I had for some time collected the scams I did receive.

But the most terrific and impressive one comes from
Mr Mac Bride and it's quite funny to read too :)

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gilbert.fernandes/hoax/hoa x100.txt

In most metropolitan areas of France, two companies have been competing for the "ultrafast" ADSL subscriptions for much of this year already. Free (the company) rolled out ADSL2+ over a year ago after France Telecom deregulated their lines. Their plan includes 29,99 EUR / 20 Mbit/s DOWN by 1Mbit/s UP. Free's runs Linux on the backend, and support Linux with their DSL hardware (built in-house).

I currently suscribe to a second company, Wanadoo (aka France Telecom) due to contractual reasons. The plans offered here are identical with differing hardware and slightly different pricing. Wanadoo is slightly more expensive, but have some included perks such as static-ip and free domain names.

The serious problem with this system is what to do with so much overhead on the download pipe. I absolutely have never used 20Mbit/s down. The closest I can get is roughly half that. There is no service (that I know of) that allows me to stream high throughput video (HDTV 19Mbit/s?) which is the most logical use for such a copious amount of data throughput.

Free has launched their service with complimentary TV over ADSL to combat this, and Wanadoo has built the capability into their hardware, but to my knowledge has not implemented the service. The oppurtunity for On Demand IP.TV, or feature length film distribution through digital means (Ireland's cinema system in the home?) is knocking on our door. Wake up the venture capitalists.

Just my deux centines.

-Robert Emperley
Strasbourg, France

"China seems usually slow to use their power"

Unless you're a protesting student and they happen to have a tank handy. China respects the Internet for its financial power. They seek to use the aspects of the net that they deem beneficial and reject those they believe may support opposition to their control. The financial power represented by their huge potential market is their best tool to influence foreign powers. They can't really use military force against the major Western powers due to geographical factors (distance and oceans). Russian nuclear weapons stand between China and Europe. American forces and technology stand between China and Taiwan. Watch the Spratly Islands - we may see more Chinese military activity there. Make no mistake that the Chinese will use any weapon they can, be it military or financial, to take control of as much of Asia as possible. They consider that control to be their "manifest destiny" in much the same way America did when claiming its territory coast-to-coast. If they can't conquer some parts of it, they will attempt to buy them, or at least bribe the rest of the world to sit back and let it happen.

China wants to take its place as a superpower, equal to or superior to any other. They believe their cultural tradition makes them better than other cultures and that their current position in the world is largely due to Western interference, which they will no longer tolerate. They are playing a game with Western society, biding their time until they are in the right position to reveal their true face. In the meantime they will continue to manipulate the world market by controlling their currency, continue to take our money, and continue to spend it on modernizing their military. They will embrace ANY portion of the West's world that they deem valuable and discard any portion they do not. Of course that includes the internet. Too bad for them they don't really understand the true nature of the net. You may be able to ride it to fame and riches, but you can never really control it.

billy - and they're not the only people in power that are gonna find that out the hard way

Exactly. That's why the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed in short order by the collapse of Cuba, North Korea, and China, all of whom also transformed themselves into fledgling if flawed democracies.

Oh, wait...

The notion that all we had to do was sell people Big Macs and then they'd become democracies is, and always was, a lie. It was a fraud perpetrated by those who wanted to take advantage of cheap labor and lax labor and enviornmental laws. There was never any evidence that wanting material goods would lead to wanting democracy. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. You had the Roman's and their "bread and circuses" policy of simply keeping the masses distracted from the government. In China, you have iPods and KFC.

Instead of aching for democracy, they see China as strong, and want to flex that new found power. It's almost nationalistic. When it comes to democracy, they honestly don't care. They believe the party line that any change to democracy would be too disruptive, so the masses are against it. The Great Firewall of China? They don't care. Most never venture outside of it. Even those here in the US spend most of their time visiting the BBS inside the firewall, like sina.com.cn and sofu.com.

China ceased to be a communist economy sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, no doubt ushered in by Deng Xiaoping's statement, "To be rich is glorious." A look around Bejing today shows a shining example of Maoist communism. Privately owned buisness. A rapidly growing middle class hungry for luxury goods. A wealthy investor class. Mao "Great Leap Forward" Tse-tung would be proud. But don't take my word for it, you can read about it here, or better yet hear it from the Chinese yourself. Just talk to any recent Chinese immigrant, they'll tell you all about it. They're quite proud of the rapid changes in China.

Is China communist? Only nominally. Is it totalitarian? Oh yeah. It's that. But it's got more in common with a kleptocracy than Maoist China.

Cuba's economy went in the tank after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath, the shadow U.S. dollar economy became so large, that Fidel had to no choice but to recognize it. It's now a major Caribbean tourist desintation for Canada and Europe. It's a country where restaurants deal only in dollars and have secret back rooms that contain of all things, extra seating, so that they can get around the legal limits on the maxium occupancy of the dollar resturants in order to make more money.

Cuba is more communist than China, and Cuba certainly isn't as well off as China. In fact it's pretty piss poor, but then again it does have the crippling sanctions imposed on it by the United States in order to show Miami that we're tough on communism. Communism is bad and must be defeated. That's why China is a most-favored-nation trading partner.

You're refering to the North Korea, where the people starve because Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, in an effort to prop up his own financial status, has ordered the collective to stop growing rice and instead grow poppies for heroin production, right? Yes. Yes. Truly a vibrant economy, especially in the markets that sell "pork." That why they have pillboxes lining the Yalu river to shoot anyone crossing into China. Truly a beacon for communism the world over.

Even Vietnam is undergoing market reforms.

Although Mr.Carmack says physics in game engines isn't easily scalable for level of detail, there is ongoing research about this producing good results. I remember a video from last years SIGGRAPH that had hundreds of plastic chairs falling from the sky, and bouncing realistically. The important part was it employed a level-of-detail hierarchy for interacting parts (i.e. an object doesn't have much physical detail if you don't touch it), but it will be some time before we can see such techniques in real time games.

I think you're misunderstanding his point. When he talks about level-of-detail, this has more to do with game design than with algorithms. What he's claiming is that detailed physics has much more of an effect on actual gameplay than detailed rending does, and that it's harder to write a game which graceful downgrades the player's physical interaction with the world. But a graceful downgrading is necessary for people who don't have a fancy physics-accelerating card.

For example, you can take an older game and change its appearance by giving it higher resolution textures, more detailed meshes for the AI models etc., without having to redesign the actual gameplay. (e.g., the SHTUP and Rebirth mods for System Shock 2).

These steps are independent of each other and independent of the rest of the game. They can simply be dropped in, or not. The point is that if it's that straightforward to take a game forward in technology, it's even easier to go in reverse. So the player can choose low texture detail, etc., and the game may look worse, but it will still play the same.

The game physics on the other hand has historically been more closely connected to the way the player interacts with the world.. so it has a big effect on level design. If Half-Life 2 had a 'simple physics' option that would somehow revert the game physics to something equivalent to the physics in the original Half-Life (ignoring aside the difficulty in implementing such an option) then some areas would have to be substantially redesigned so that they would remain playable for people using the simple physics.

This is of course what he means by peripheral elements "such as flowing water" being accelerated. But I have two criticisms of this.

1) Yes, physics acceleration may affect mainly peripheral elements of the game. But in some ways, the same could be said about improved textures, filtering, etc. If it's done well, it can significantly improve the overall experience. If it's done poorly, the player will hardly notice.

2) As long as it's an upgrade of the basic design, it will probably be okay to let it affect critical elements as well. E.g.: due to the engine upgrade in the port of Half-Life to the Source engine, movable crates and such have a more realistic response than in the original implementation. It's not a big improvement, since the levels were really designed with that in mind. But it doesn't hurt.

For me, the real question is whether improved physics would really make a game more enjoyable. I think this depends more on graphics than on anything else. As objects are made to look more realistic, it becomes more satisfying for them to have real-seeming interactions.

If graphics get much better, accelerated physics will be important. But if for some reason graphics tend to stabilize (due to the end of Moore's Law, long load times caused by slow disk access, or whatever), then the usefulness of improving game physics is more questionable.

According to this page, the dialing computer was built with Flash version 4. Download the dialing program from the mirror site since it seems to be the only gate currently in operation. Don't forget to close the iris on incoming wormholes.

For me, I lost interest in Ms. Portman when I saw that picture of her scratching her butt while on the cell phone. Truly iconic. Does anybody have a link to this?

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jps/nat23.jpg

That's just sick. It looks like she's in up to her wrist. I hope it's a fake.

There are, however, genuinely successful examples from the same time period. Germans aren't doing this any more (or bombing London); Japanese aren't doing this any more (or bombing Honolulu). Why not? Because we didn't give every German POW their own copy of Mein Kampf with gloved hands and bent knees. We didn't have a President telling us that Nazism or Japanese militarism was an "ideology of peace". We wiped them out: not the Germans and Japanese, note, who are now our friends and allies, but the ideologies.

Seconded... I really liked Thief 3 and thought it was on par with the earlier ones though.

If you are trying System Shock 2, try downloading the System Shock Rebirth mod which creates higher quality meshes for many objects/opponents but doesn't change gameplay. Very nice.. except maybe the midwife which I thought was scarier in the original, and has gratuitous bare brests in the remake.

The only game that has scared me so much I had to sleep with the lights on. "Babies must sleep... babies must rest... why do you disturb us?"

Just two countries who came (late) to the IPTV revolution.
France (Freebox and Wanadoo)
Italy (Fastweb)
These are examples of where IPTV is really booming. Others can point out to Korea or Japan who, as usual, have been the firt to jump into the fray, but in any case the implementation of these IPTV providers in these countries has by no means been hampered by the lack of content
If my experience with Freebox is any proof, any content can be shown, so if at three o'clock in the morning I am watching indiscriminately a show on the French gaming channel (yay Game One!) or discovering the intiricacies of rectal palpation of cows in Belgrade as shown on some eastern european tv which is in the free basic offer of my IPTV, I can assure you the lack of quality content is by no means the same as lack of content. IPTV will be filled with practically every useless tv show on earth

Some mommies should teach their kids not to compare performance on different hardware.
What's the Linux performance on a 2.8GHz Xeon? (And what was it in September 2004, since there was a *date* close to that article?)

It would have been greater, because the FreeBSD guys were using the Xeon's onboard ethernet, and not going through the PCI bus. The main problem for routing is bus latency.

In short: so?

Ha ha. So that.

In long: here.

And again I suggest you read my reply to that, and again lick my anus.

If you want metric time, you should check out itime, a new "standard" that Swatch tried to push in. It defines the day time as a real number 0<=x<1000, with 0 being the midnight in Switzerland.

Of course, it take a lot less effort to stick with the good old standard devised by ancient Babylonians, mentioning just the time zone when needed.
Personally, I'm sticking with time_t (number of seconds past Epoch).

This picture pretty much sums it up!

(One caveat: I haven't tried the contact sheets under Linux, but I use it all the time as an image browser there.)

It is freeware for non-commercial use (although not opensource).

Cheers,
Mark

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/blateyron/sundials/gb/inde x.html

Download their excellent windows program and make one for free instead

Inspired by the discussions on the Beowulf mailing list we built in March 2003 a Beowulf of bare motherboards. You can see it (with text in French) on this site

Everything is made of metal, using ready-made beams to which we attached the motherboards with integrated Broadcom NICs. The cluster (diskless, headless) has been running fine since then. We have one power supply per node in order to maximize cooling and avoid wiring errors if adding motherboard plugs to power supplies : design was made with CATIA V5R6, calculations were done by graduate students in engineering using Flo Therm, and they predicted the temperature inside the cluster within 1 degree C : 27 degrees at steady state for 19 ambient.

The only detail we had forgotten was to make buttons for power and reset, since they are only to be found in ready-made cases ; we lost hours to find the proper socket size on Radiospares.

The design took about 20 hours, the fabrication about one week, software installation (having to find the proper driver for the NICs for clustermatic, setting up PXE) two days, we saved maybe 30 % of the total cost (here about 4000 euros for 8 Athlon 2400 nodes with 1 Gb RAM), had a lot of fun and learning.

Mouse gestures, automatic numerical forward/back and image zoom, popup blocking, skinning, tabbed browsing and UA spoofing.

Ok, so I liked Opera when I used it for a while. But firefox kicks its butt. I prefered FF myself because there were no ads (although you can add them if you want them)

But all of these features are available as FF extensions... even adding google ads to your browser.

I don't want to sound like a zelot, but FF is cheaper, ad free and does all that plus some. Email client? IRC client? That's what Thunderbird/Chatzilla/Mozilla suite are for.

It's your money, but I know where I'll be putting mine. Straight back in my wallet.

"Yeah, the inverted pendulum is a cute trick, but then again, so is riding a unicycle. I wouldn't advise my grandmother to ride either one."

Somehow that made me think of this

And here's a picture of the nasty muppet who had her great-junction observatory destroyed. Ah memories......

You'd have to be locked in a room pumped full enough of CO2 that there wouldn't be enough O2 in the mix to respirate. You could be killed by HELIUM in that manner!

You should tell that to the 1700 people in Cameroon that lost their lives do to the explosion of CO2 at Lake Nyos.

Actually, they're chemical burns. Chemical burns are possible when living tissue is exposed to high concentrations of CO2. I forget the exact mechanism, but I know CO2 at high partial pressures exposed to water vapor forms carbonic acid. Which although a very weak (relatively speaking of course) acid, would be more than enough to cause the 'burns' seen in the areas surrounding the volcanic lakes in Cameroon. (Remember, the people showing these 'burns' were exposed overnight, so they could have been sweating as they were dying, which would explain the patchy or blotchy appearance of the burns)

This page has a bit more info on the 'phenomenon' surrounding exposure to the lethal gas clouds from the lakes in cameroon. Unfortunately, I can't find any of the pictures. If you ever watch the Discovery channel, they have a show regarding the lakes in Cameroon that shows extensive examples of what I'm talking about.

Killer Lakes

You can google for more

We think the same about you.

Wrong formatting so the link was stripped: comparison

Graphics are dated

Go reload the game. Add in System Shock Rebirth graphics mod. Now at least the creatures will be up to date graphics :-D

I'm surprised no one has gone back and remade it, or touched it up

Be surprised no longer :-)

I'm surprised no one has gone back and remade it, or touched it up.

They have. The folks over at http://sshock2.com keep up to date on all the information. One of the upgrades is an increase in detail to the models of the AI figures. It's called Rebirth. I love it, it really gives an upgrade to the "ghosts" you see in the game who have pointy hands (anyone who's played SS2 knows what I'm talking about).

On the heels of Rebirth came the hi-res texture mod called SHTUP (pronounced shtoop).

There was also an upgrade to the cutscenes in the game, by a group called Wuggles Unlimited, but they seem to have disappeared (lack of hosting).

Look around, there are still fans of SS2 doing work with it!

That article was empty. It really seemed like an old artivle they puulled from the archives where they changed the intro and conclusion. Why did they end up talking about monkeys anyway? It has nothing to do with the real anouncement they wanted to make. Also, there is absolutly no date on the article. It might be normal on gamespot, but it's a serious flaw. Anyway, the article was just horribly bad. Can't believe I wasted time reading it.

For who want to play the game back and can't stand the low polygon characters, the Rebirth mod changes most of the enemies and make the game look a lot more recent. Trying the mod is worth re-installing the game.

Well, we might never get a SS2 remake, but here's the next best thing. It's called System Shock 2 Rebirth, and it replaces most low-polygon meshes with new high-res counterparts. Looks like the development has stopped last year in Beta phase, but it's still worth checking out. I completed the game from start to finish with this mod and it didn't affect the gameplay at all.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/etienne.aubert/sshock/ssho ck_rebirth.htm is a nice little project that aims to update the aging graphics with better textures.

Unfortunately, it has kind of died (latest update in 2003...), but the downloadable Beta 1 works fine.

I was wondering if something like the Turbosail would work. See a bigger picture of the device here: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/b.mauric/images/boats/Caly pso-II.JPG

Dude, just get the All-in-One gestures plugin and drag your mouse up while holding down the right mouse button and it'll load a random page in a new tab. I just tried it and it works fine.

Nah. The drives spin up as soon as they get power, which they will all get at the same time, when the 12V line goes up.

Nope, 'fraid not. See this Atlas IV Jumper definitions for example. SCSI disks default to spinning up on 12V, but every one I've seen has a jumper for either delaying, or waiting for a spinup 'START UNIT' scsi command.

(I'm going to ignore this article's request specifically for games that would objectively look better now than they did back then, believing that this is irrelevant to their enjoyment today. Rather, these look better subjectively, due to the fact that there have been few if any attempts to replicate them, or perhaps none sufficient to surpass them.)

Master of Orion 2.
In fact, now that there's a lousy sequel (http://www.quartertothree.com/reviews/moo3/moo3-1 .shtml gives an amusing overview), it looks even better.

Star Control 2
Nothing quite like it has been even attempted since. (Save a lousy, almost irrelevant sequel.) There's a sourceforge project to port it to modern systems(http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

System Shock 2.
It beat Half Life to the stores, yet actually did a lot of things better (well, besides sales). Still considered by many to be one of the scariest games ever made. There's a graphics patch out there called Rebirth. (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/etienne.aubert/sshock/ssh ock_rebirth.htm)

Wizardry 8
These days, virtually all commercial computer RPGs are either D20 games (AD&D or otherwise), or Diablo clones. Both good and bad ones are starting to feel like generic clones of each other. Even after three years, Wizardry 8 was just about the last decent stat-heavy dungeon crawler. For something different.

And of course since I'm trying to recommend games that not everyone has played, I'll throw Planescape Torment in there. There's even a completely unknown unofficial patch for it that makes it seem better today:
http://www.accesswave.ca/~cthorpe/