...to get rid of the M$ monopoly. Clone Bill Gates! Make five or ten Billies from him, wait twenty years and watch them pushing each other out of the market.
Freeciv was the project to teach me how free-software development works, especially in a quite complex piece of software.
I remember playing Freeciv about three or four years ago: the client was based on libXaw, which is far from the GTK+ eye candy, and the AI was uncomparable to what it is today (yet still being improved). It even crashed and behaved obscurily. Since there wasn't any game of this kind running on GNU/Linux, I gave it a try. Nonetheless it was fun to play, and I was really happy when I won in a 100x60 map against three AI players for the first time, after playing for two weekends.
Some time later, the client has been ported to GTK+, matching my desktop theme and looking like most other applications. The AI became better (and harder to beat, as it behaved differently after a major upgrade), worklists and some other useful stuff went in. Freeciv got the space race and finally the isometric tiles.
The special fun on Freeciv is seeing it evolving over several years, getting a new version and see the differences, following the discussions on the developer mailinglist, even just "playing Lego" in single player mode with a 200x100 map is really fascinating.
It is rather wrong comparing Freeciv to any closed-source Civilization-like game, as most of the fun with Freeciv isn't available on proprietary games. If all you want is eye-candy, go with one of the eat-or-die Civ* variants. If you want to be in between the "making of" a great, complex and fascinating game, you're welcome to give it a try.:-)
The Yopy would not only have been the first GNU/Linux-PDA, but also the coolest. Today, the Yopy still isn't there. Agenda VR3 and Compaq iPAQ have taken its place. The very reason for this is G.Mate not having focused on getting an external community around it.
About a year ago when the Yopy was hyped, I really wanted to get one, or at least look at the distribution. The hardware has been delayed forever, and the distribution was still "under development" accessible (AFAIR) only with some sort of click-through NDA. That is, the distribution was non-free, though they promised to GPL it once it's ready.
I ended up with a Compaq iPAQ H3660 which is basically the same hardware (16 MB flash and 64 MB RAM instead of 32/32 on the Yopy). The distribution ist entirely free-as-in-speech and quite easy to install. Compaq provides some infrastructure (the site "handhelds.org", the Skiff cluster, even some pieces of software like the bootloader or some kernel adjustments), and the rest is getting glued together by an independent developer community the same way Debian is being made (Familiar is widely derived from Debian and works quite similarly).
The hardware - i. e. the case, the LCD, the cradle etc. have matured away their worst child diseases. Meanwhile the Yopy (as in hardware) is still under development...
SO HERE'S WHAT YOU DO (if you're an artist, otherwise don't do this because the FBI can't tap your phone).
ENCRYPT your music files!!
So if I really want to transport secret data without having to fear the FBI, I'll pack it into a MP3 file and encrypt it... they couldn't get after me because I'd call myself an artist and pretend it being a special kind of art.
IIRC Transmeta was the first one to optimize power consumption by design. Probably the world is just not ready for low power chips, but it will be later.
Compare it with engines: about 100 years ago, Rudolf Diesel introduced a more efficient combustion method, which even needed a different kind of fuel. Up to 10 or 15 years ago, diesel engines were noisy, stinky and less powerful than gas engines, so not many people cared about their fuel consumption being slightly lower.
During the 1990s, more and more people (at least in Europe) became aware of the importance of reducing energy consumption. Volkswagen/Audi were the first to introduce a really low-consumption yet very powerful type of diesel engine (TDI). After some years, most other manufactorers saw the growing market and followed. Rudolf Diesel didn't profit at all from his work - he even killed himself in desperation of his seemingly failed invention. But his technology is still there, and today it rocks.
We may probably lose Transmeta, but the idea of designing CPUs in a way that they consume less power while still being quite powerful will remain. The market for this technology is still new, but it is expected to grow - through higher energy prices as well as the need for longer uptime of battery-powered devices.
I'm still compiling and hoping... if that one runs on my iPAQ, it'll be the ultimative game boy for a once hardcore LucasArts gamer.
If it becomes possible to create new SCUMM content, it could even be "abused" as a small-screen user interface (or a similar one could be derived from the SCUMM concept) - simple and lean yet intuitive and powerful, without the need for a keyboard.
PDAs are a lot of fun to hack. The Agenda runs GNU/Linux and is powerful enough for most tasks.
On "http://www.agendacomputing.com/", it's available for $249.
If the bug had occured on a closed source system, the vendor would have tried to keep it secret as long as possible. Bugs can and will happen no matter if the software is open source or not, and this one can't be too trivial, otherwise it would have been discovered earlier. With closed source software, it probably wouldn't have been discovered it at all.
In Germany GNU/Linux-iPAQs (i. e. H36xx for now) can be bought preinstalled with GNU/Linux and QPE from some third-party vendors, e. g. LISA Systems ("http://www.lisa.de/" - please don't/. them too badly, it's a small company;-)). As Compaq contributes a lot of research and development into bringing the penguin to their PDAs, it's really time for them to sell them preinstalled. I'm quite sure it won't take long until the H38xx will have full GNU/Linux support like the H36xx series.
I bought my H3660 from such a third-party vendor, and the default GNU/Linux + QPE installation is really usable.
Probably they'll want a backdoor accessible from the Internet, to allow scanning hard disks and to discover copyrighted material.
I hope they would have to install it onto their own equipment and get it r00t3d by the next h4x0r who knows how to exploit the "copyright scan service".
...which is surely the last box in a properly designed intranet to have music or video files stored on it, as well as it's likely the most secure one and most difficult to hack. Then they'd have to scan the (masqueraded) Intranet for a workstation or a fileserver.
Even then, chances are that they'll probably land on a honeypot. Or trigger a counter-attack. Or simply hack the box of a responsible sysadmin who forwards his syslogged evidence to their uplink, CERT, or the FBI.
With some NAT and port forwarding, it's quite impossible to guess from the outside which service is located on which host.
...in a tiny rotary engine. AFAIR there was a story about an engine with a few mm in diameter. Power it with hydrogen and drive e. g. a harddisk or a CPU cooling system with it. Even a bit larget it could act as a pocket-size mini-powerplant.
[Sec 101] (b) Exception -- Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of subsection (a) or 103(a).
It is still allowed to have a "previously owned" box act as a firewall/proxy/router for the Internet connection, running GNU/Linux, *BSD or whatever. With IP masquerading and HTTP proxying, equipment behind that box is not visible from the Internet. So how should they see it? And if yes, how can they distinguish (by analyzing the Internet traffic) between "previously owned" and "SSSCA crippled"?
As new computers would have to comply with the SSSCA, why should I buy a new one when the current machine is doing well? Many people are still using 486 or Pentium I which are enough for their daily tasks. What does the computer industry say about the SSSCA? The stockholders of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell etc. surely won't like it...
Melissa was quite fast in spreading all over the world, ILOVEYOU was much faster (a week?). What will happen next time when the majority of worldwide Win* users have migrated to Whistler and.NET and someone else launches an email worm?
Probably the user won't even have to open the malicious file any more because of some new cool feature of Outlook or IE... or.NET
Slashdot Mirror
...to get rid of the M$ monopoly. Clone Bill Gates! Make five or ten Billies from him, wait twenty years and watch them pushing each other out of the market.
Freeciv was the project to teach me how free-software development works, especially in a quite complex piece of software.
:-)
I remember playing Freeciv about three or four years ago: the client was based on libXaw, which is far from the GTK+ eye candy, and the AI was uncomparable to what it is today (yet still being improved). It even crashed and behaved obscurily. Since there wasn't any game of this kind running on GNU/Linux, I gave it a try. Nonetheless it was fun to play, and I was really happy when I won in a 100x60 map against three AI players for the first time, after playing for two weekends.
Some time later, the client has been ported to GTK+, matching my desktop theme and looking like most other applications. The AI became better (and harder to beat, as it behaved differently after a major upgrade), worklists and some other useful stuff went in. Freeciv got the space race and finally the isometric tiles.
The special fun on Freeciv is seeing it evolving over several years, getting a new version and see the differences, following the discussions on the developer mailinglist, even just "playing Lego" in single player mode with a 200x100 map is really fascinating.
It is rather wrong comparing Freeciv to any closed-source Civilization-like game, as most of the fun with Freeciv isn't available on proprietary games. If all you want is eye-candy, go with one of the eat-or-die Civ* variants. If you want to be in between the "making of" a great, complex and fascinating game, you're welcome to give it a try.
The Yopy would not only have been the first GNU/Linux-PDA, but also the coolest. Today, the Yopy still isn't there. Agenda VR3 and Compaq iPAQ have taken its place. The very reason for this is G.Mate not having focused on getting an external community around it.
About a year ago when the Yopy was hyped, I really wanted to get one, or at least look at the distribution. The hardware has been delayed forever, and the distribution was still "under development" accessible (AFAIR) only with some sort of click-through NDA. That is, the distribution was non-free, though they promised to GPL it once it's ready.
I ended up with a Compaq iPAQ H3660 which is basically the same hardware (16 MB flash and 64 MB RAM instead of 32/32 on the Yopy). The distribution ist entirely free-as-in-speech and quite easy to install. Compaq provides some infrastructure (the site "handhelds.org", the Skiff cluster, even some pieces of software like the bootloader or some kernel adjustments), and the rest is getting glued together by an independent developer community the same way Debian is being made (Familiar is widely derived from Debian and works quite similarly).
The hardware - i. e. the case, the LCD, the cradle etc. have matured away their worst child diseases. Meanwhile the Yopy (as in hardware) is still under development...
SO HERE'S WHAT YOU DO (if you're an artist, otherwise don't do this because the FBI can't tap your phone).
ENCRYPT your music files!!
So if I really want to transport secret data without having to fear the FBI, I'll pack it into a MP3 file and encrypt it... they couldn't get after me because I'd call myself an artist and pretend it being a special kind of art.
IIRC Transmeta was the first one to optimize power consumption by design. Probably the world is just not ready for low power chips, but it will be later.
Compare it with engines: about 100 years ago, Rudolf Diesel introduced a more efficient combustion method, which even needed a different kind of fuel. Up to 10 or 15 years ago, diesel engines were noisy, stinky and less powerful than gas engines, so not many people cared about their fuel consumption being slightly lower.
During the 1990s, more and more people (at least in Europe) became aware of the importance of reducing energy consumption. Volkswagen/Audi were the first to introduce a really low-consumption yet very powerful type of diesel engine (TDI). After some years, most other manufactorers saw the growing market and followed. Rudolf Diesel didn't profit at all from his work - he even killed himself in desperation of his seemingly failed invention. But his technology is still there, and today it rocks.
We may probably lose Transmeta, but the idea of designing CPUs in a way that they consume less power while still being quite powerful will remain. The market for this technology is still new, but it is expected to grow - through higher energy prices as well as the need for longer uptime of battery-powered devices.
I'm still compiling and hoping... if that one runs on my iPAQ, it'll be the ultimative game boy for a once hardcore LucasArts gamer.
If it becomes possible to create new SCUMM content, it could even be "abused" as a small-screen user interface (or a similar one could be derived from the SCUMM concept) - simple and lean yet intuitive and powerful, without the need for a keyboard.
Now we know that (and where) Maniac Mansion existed - and Bernard finally managed to blow up Dr. Fred's home reactor.
...has finally come half way to the answer of life, the universe and everything.
PDAs are a lot of fun to hack. The Agenda runs GNU/Linux and is powerful enough for most tasks.
On "http://www.agendacomputing.com/", it's available for $249.
If the bug had occured on a closed source system, the vendor would have tried to keep it secret as long as possible. Bugs can and will happen no matter if the software is open source or not, and this one can't be too trivial, otherwise it would have been discovered earlier. With closed source software, it probably wouldn't have been discovered it at all.
In Germany GNU/Linux-iPAQs (i. e. H36xx for now) can be bought preinstalled with GNU/Linux and QPE from some third-party vendors, e. g. LISA Systems ("http://www.lisa.de/" - please don't /. them too badly, it's a small company ;-)). As Compaq contributes a lot of research and development into bringing the penguin to their PDAs, it's really time for them to sell them preinstalled. I'm quite sure it won't take long until the H38xx will have full GNU/Linux support like the H36xx series.
I bought my H3660 from such a third-party vendor, and the default GNU/Linux + QPE installation is really usable.
All they need is a good headline on /., e. g. "RIAA grants free unlimited access to large music database on http://www.music-pirate.org/w4r3z/".
Probably they'll want a backdoor accessible from the Internet, to allow scanning hard disks and to discover copyrighted material.
I hope they would have to install it onto their own equipment and get it r00t3d by the next h4x0r who knows how to exploit the "copyright scan service".
...which is surely the last box in a properly designed intranet to have music or video files stored on it, as well as it's likely the most secure one and most difficult to hack. Then they'd have to scan the (masqueraded) Intranet for a workstation or a fileserver.
Even then, chances are that they'll probably land on a honeypot. Or trigger a counter-attack. Or simply hack the box of a responsible sysadmin who forwards his syslogged evidence to their uplink, CERT, or the FBI.
With some NAT and port forwarding, it's quite impossible to guess from the outside which service is located on which host.
...in a tiny rotary engine. AFAIR there was a story about an engine with a few mm in diameter. Power it with hydrogen and drive e. g. a harddisk or a CPU cooling system with it. Even a bit larget it could act as a pocket-size mini-powerplant.
...once the Internet has become an unusable, proprietary, virus-plagued and outlawed Big Brother hell.
It might be quite different from the former Fido BBSes as far as technology is concerned, but the users and sysops will have the same spirit: freedom.
The terrorist could simply pack his message into Adobe eBook files and have everyone arrested who dares to decrypt his copyrighted work...
It is still allowed to have a "previously owned" box act as a firewall/proxy/router for the Internet connection, running GNU/Linux, *BSD or whatever. With IP masquerading and HTTP proxying, equipment behind that box is not visible from the Internet. So how should they see it? And if yes, how can they distinguish (by analyzing the Internet traffic) between "previously owned" and "SSSCA crippled"?
As new computers would have to comply with the SSSCA, why should I buy a new one when the current machine is doing well? Many people are still using 486 or Pentium I which are enough for their daily tasks. What does the computer industry say about the SSSCA? The stockholders of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell etc. surely won't like it...
...provided that the Soyuz runs "shared source" and bluescreens in the orbit. A small step for a man but a giant leap for mankind... ;-)
Probably the user won't even have to open the malicious file any more because of some new cool feature of Outlook or IE... or .NET