Speaking as someone who has been developing with NVidia's GLX Driver, I've been very disatisfied with their implementation. There have been numerous, significant bugs of note:
1. GL_SWAP_BYTES fails when loading textures. This has forced me to either: a) make a copy of the texture, perform the endian conversion, load the texture and then free the texture-a significant speed hit b) Load the texture as GL_AGBR_ext, which is not cleanly supported across all implementations of OpenGL
2. Reads from the framebuffer fail. I've tested this several times, under multiple applications including glQuake and my own engine.
3. The driver reports that SGIS_multitexture is supported in the extensions string. All calls to the SGIS functions result in a segfault. This has been tested in multiple applications, including glQuake and my own engine.
In summary, the commitment by NVidia to Linux has been nothing more than lipservice. I specifically purchased a TNT2 because it was supported under Linux. Had I known that the GLX support was so incomplete, I would not have purchased that card. I have emailed NVidia about these issues, but I have neither received a response, nor have the issues been addressed.
Erm, a point about version numbering: Under standard OS releases, version 1.0 is a fully stable version which has been rigorously tested and for which there are no known issues (some projects have chosen to violate this definition, for one reason or another). If this was a 1.0 release, then it probably would have been under heavy testing for some time. Right now HURD is still in heavy developement, and will continue to be for some time to come.
As another poster pointed out, Linux pre-1.0 was very stable and reliable.
For the short period (first year or so) I worked retail we did sell macs, and we sold them with our own extended warranties. Most Universities do not offer the same deals (they usually don't have the volume to set up a deal with one of the warranty clearing houses like Warrantech[sp]), so I'm not surprised they were offering an Apple deal instead.
These days, a 3 year (the least you can usually get on a computer) is roughly 5% of the cost of the system. Usually the sales associate sees 5% of that.
CompUSA, who have the major deal for Apple retail, sell their own extended warranties with the systems.
I worked for a number of years at a large retailer. The entire reason for sticking with 1 year warranties is very simple: that way the retailer can stick on an extented warranty of their own. Those warranties are pure profit for the retailer (almost noone ever collects on them). Many manufacturers are "encouraged" to package their products with 1 year warranties because of this. Otherwise, it is very hard to get product on retail shelves.
Bit of a history note for folks: Carmack has been pushing for a massive virtual world system since development on Quake commenced. Even at the time (as Michael Abrash wrote), he was planning on building the metaverse described in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash (if you have not read it, do so). Technology is finally progressing to the point where a massive, persistent environment can be created. Carmack probably has the greatest chance of pulling it off since he has the experience, and the time to do so. Here's hoping...
Actually, its not well known (because we never had to make use of it, thank God), but the Apollo spacecraft was rated to do a dirt landing in case something went wrong (bad reentry, abort on launch). The original (block 1) seats could not handle this, but the later (block 2) seats were rated as such. This is why Wally Schirra made a huge deal about the wind with the Apollo 7 launch. The capsule still had block 1 seats, and odds were poor for them to survive a dirt landing. He was concerned that high winds during a launch abort would blow the capsule back over florida-and kill the crew as a result.
So yes, they could use a clone of the Apollo spacecraft for a dirt landing, although they probably added the russian retro rocket design for safety. I can't see it being a very comfortable landing otherwise.
Personally, I find this to be a bit ludicrous-obviously some folks took things a bit too seriously on the Usenet. Even at the worst I've ever seen (the old Bazemore vs Raphael Quinet war on alt.games.quake & alt.game.doom comes to mind), its never been taken to a legal environment. Not only is this a rather disturbing development for the Usenet (before now noone _ever_ took things this far!), but its a disturbing sign of where things could well go from now. Imagine if you were ordered stop posting to Slashdot by a judge.
Honestly, that sounds a lot like what I would love to see with Doctor Who-a small, core recurring cast managed by a dedicated, intelligent production team attracting _creative_ writers and directors to the series. Star Trek has been suffering from a desire to either pound every good species into the ground (I'm even sick of the Borg now), or asking the script writers to hammer out a few more sequels to their best script.
One thing _all_ of sci fi needs to remember-good science fiction is about people adapting to and existing with high technology, or technology concepts. The technology should always take second place to the characters and their society. Read Foundation, or anything by Clark, Sagan, or Niven to start.
> Geek girls are incapable of being loving and considerate, and unloving and inconsiderate geek guys have to avoid that.
I don't think that is the point Roblimo is trying to make. THe point is, do we really want to date someone just like ourselves? What is there to share, aside from coding tips and geek info? I've tried it, and they don't work out too well. One of the greatest things about dating someone who has different interests than yourself (and I don't mean a guy from IS and a girl from software development) is sharing that. One of the greatest things about a relationship, in my opinion, is learning from a girlfriend things I wouldn't have learnt otherwise, discussing our views on the world (I've gotten a bit philosophical because of it, and examined the world in ways I never would have before), and teaching her things she didn't know before. A relationship dies the day you stop sharing like that.
Watch out, its Mondas, and its crawling with Cybermen! Just you wait, they're going to invade us in 1988 and...uh, whoops, wrong universe! *Dives into the TARDIS*
I'm going to bring up a historical point. This all sounds a bit benevolent (keep people with disabilities from having to suffer life in our society), if you choose to blatently ignore the ethical shortcomings of such a policy.
Then you open your history text book to 1930s Germany, when euthenasia of disabled children was allowed by Hitler. The result was families who lost thousands of children. It resulted in the clinical murder of Jews, Poles (a nation the Nazis favored with their worst tendencies), and many others. Read about what happened to thousands of disabled children who were sent to hospitals to care for them. Read about how many of them died soon after their arrival, with "measles" or some other deadly disease listed as the cause of death.
More often, it was a doctor and a needle full of poison.
To advocate the euthenasia of children because they were born with disabilities is not only wrong, but appalling. What does it say about our society? What will we do next? Advocate the sterilization of anyone who has a genetic predisposition for diabetes, or MS?
Although I am not a parent, I know that if I fathered a child who was disabled, I would do everything I could to care for that child. Its who I am, its the right thing to do. Not quietly ask a doctor to inject an overdose of morphine.
And I really don't give a damn. I have a simple message to everyone outside of the US who sees fit to tell us how to handle the gun issue. Butt out.
This is a very personal, hot topic for the US. We have to deal with it, and folks coming in and telling us that we're nothing more than a bunch of wild west lunatics (Need I mention the wild west never existed outside of a couple isolated cases?), are not going to help things a wit. We all know what your opinions are, but remember that this is a very different culture from much of Europe.
Call me a hipocrite because we go around telling folks like China to clean up their human rights violations. I don't care. This is something we need to resolve on our own, and getting rid of guns won't solve the societal problems which caused Columbine, Fort Worth, and a thousand other incidences. There is no quick fix for this, and outlawing guns certainly won't solve our problems, just make people believe they have done something, and thereby relieve them of any further responsibility for what has happened in this country.
Just saw this myself. Damned shame. Not good timing either, with the Congress eying the money going into NASA like a bunch of beggers on the street. Combine this with the Shuttle fleet being grounded until November at least, and it really does not bode well for NASA's ability to lobby for further funds for at least another couple years. I do hope this does not go down as human arrogance like Observer was. On that one JPL opened a valve that was not supposed to be (the engineers even told them, but JPL knows best), and flooded the probe with fuel. They lit off the engine and *blam* no more probe.
Two possibilities here-first, they wanted to wait for AOL's aquisition of Netscape to be completed so there would be more capital to pay off a settlement. Second, the article notes that patents were awarded as late as this year. It could be they were waiting for the patents to be awarded before they sued.
The feature freeze means that no new features are added, except for the reasons Linus outlined. A code freeze means that no new development occurs on the kernel, just bug fixes. Usually this takes a month or more to complete. If you bypassed the code freeze for release, you could be in for a nasty surprise, which is why the kernel is developed this way. The last thing you want is to release a stable Linux kernel with major bugs.
In the last two years JNT's overall influence on the series began to diminish against Andrew Cartmel's (the best person in Who duringthe 80s), and so some very good authors were recruited. I believe that if someone akin to Phillip Henchcliffe (producer during Tom Baker's best years) had been brought in, the series never would have died.
The best thing a new Who series could do is abandon a lot of the older continuity, and return to the roots of an inventive sci fi series where anything goes. The moment a who author wrote himself into a box and decided something would not fly, the story died. Unless you had Tom Baker working as the Doctor, and even then things sometimes tanked.
OK, I'm probably going to piss off a few folks here by saying this, but I just have to say it.
Ever since Roddenbary died the series has been running on inertia. I would equate the lax plot and writing styles (nevermind the always shoddy Voyager series) to the malaise that set in under John Nathan Turner's tenure as Doctor Who's producer (might I add his tenure resulted in the death of that once fine series?). We have a producer (Berman) who seems more interested in flash and money than pushing the bounds of modern science fiction, which Roddenbery did so well during the original series and during the majority of TNG (you could see when Berman and co. really asserted their influence-the latter half of season 6 and season 7 of TNG were the worst of the lot). What Paramount needs is to get someone in there who really wants to get the franchise back on its feet and return it to its roots-well thought out and inventive stories. Instead I'm seeing more and more stories which rehash the series past without any real creative influx-anyone who remembers the last 9 years of Doctor Who (especially 1984-1989) and the new adventures will agree with me.
Thank you. I feel great sorrow that, apparently, one sad man has brought about all of this.
Folks, as a community, we need to sit back and look at this. This person joins the ranks of the sad people who rampantly attack Windows users, who send offensive emails to companies, and generally degrade the overall image of Linux. We're doing ourselves no good by ignoring these actions.
If this is one person, then he is a very pitiful figure indeed. In the past few weeks we have seen the overall discourse on Slashdot descend to new lows. I have read this forum since the week it first opened, and I have never seen such immature, childish, and outright disrespectful posts. Up until today I was a fierce supporter of the AC option. Today's disgusting display has broken the camel's back. The greatest failing of the internet is the rampant lack of respect exercised by some. Noone, except the most deranged individual, would react in such a flagrant manner in real life. Instead we have a culture on the internet who feel it is obligitory and acceptable to insult and denigrate individuals for their viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs.
To Rob, Hemos, and everyone who runs Slashdot: Please, review the current situation. This is getting well out of hand.
I apologize in advance for several typos in this post. Change Linux in the second to the last sentence of the post to Linus. Also, change "His family is, without, agrieved" to "His family is agrieved". Sorry about that.
Someone very respected has died. His books have become an indispensible resource to anyone developing under Unix. His family is, without, agrieved to see this happen. So what happens on Slashdot? Every single sad, disrespectful cretin comes rolling out of the woodwork. I'm disgusted by the lack of respect too many of us have shown the man. I am equally disgusted by the attitude of a minority of the readers of Slashdot who have chosen to decry this man not because of things he did in his life, but because he did not fully share our viewpoint on OpenSource, GNU/Linux, and many other issues. He did not have to write the books he did, but he did so none the less. I sincerely doubt that his family would like to read some of the things that have been posted here today. Some of you have seen fit to celebrate his death as another gain for our community. It is no such thing.
As long as our community speaks out with such depravity and immaturity, even such a small minority, it will not receive respect many of us desire, and have worked for. The events last week with Unisys (a company whose policies many of us, rightly, disagree with), and many other times, here on Slashdot, the usenet, the web, and in other forums will continue to harm us. Until we choose to grow up and cease our continues flaming, we will not achieve our goals. Grow up people, this is not a religion, this is not a war. This is about debating our ideals and achieving our goals in a mature, productive, fashion. Instead of sending filthy, offensive emails to everyone you don't agree with, sit down, pick a project, and get to work on it. Or start a project of your own to address a need or shortcoming in Linux, or something you think would be pretty cool. That is what RMS, Linux, ESR, and the rest have been fighting for. That is what we all, I hope, believe in.
Man, chill out. First off, id never gave a date, they just said they wanted to get it out before the end of the month. Second, unless you hear something firm from the id guys (via their plans, don't believe anything you read elsewhere), don't assume a release date. Everyone remember the Quake rumors? We didn't even know the Quake test was out until Romero popped up on irc and announced it to the world.
One point most folks don't remember about GNUstep: The end goal is to have one API with which we can write an application, and then just recompile it on any system and have it run. This means you write an application under Linux, test it out, copy it to windows and it should work without any tweaking. That's the end goal of this whole thing. Hopefully they will achieve that goal, because in doing so developers can support multiple operating systems with little or no work. Can you imaging what it would be like for porting if we could get adobe and corel onto this?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who has been developing with NVidia's GLX Driver, I've been very disatisfied with their implementation. There have been numerous, significant bugs of note:
1. GL_SWAP_BYTES fails when loading textures. This has forced me to either:
a) make a copy of the texture, perform the endian conversion, load the texture and then free the texture-a significant speed hit
b) Load the texture as GL_AGBR_ext, which is not cleanly supported across all implementations of OpenGL
2. Reads from the framebuffer fail. I've tested this several times, under multiple applications including glQuake and my own engine.
3. The driver reports that SGIS_multitexture is supported in the extensions string. All calls to the SGIS functions result in a segfault. This has been tested in multiple applications, including glQuake and my own engine.
In summary, the commitment by NVidia to Linux has been nothing more than lipservice. I specifically purchased a TNT2 because it was supported under Linux. Had I known that the GLX support was so incomplete, I would not have purchased that card. I have emailed NVidia about these issues, but I have neither received a response, nor have the issues been addressed.
Erm, a point about version numbering:
Under standard OS releases, version 1.0 is a fully stable version which has been rigorously tested and for which there are no known issues (some projects have chosen to violate this definition, for one reason or another). If this was a 1.0 release, then it probably would have been under heavy testing for some time. Right now HURD is still in heavy developement, and will continue to be for some time to come.
As another poster pointed out, Linux pre-1.0 was very stable and reliable.
For the short period (first year or so) I worked retail we did sell macs, and we sold them with our own extended warranties. Most Universities do not offer the same deals (they usually don't have the volume to set up a deal with one of the warranty clearing houses like Warrantech[sp]), so I'm not surprised they were offering an Apple deal instead.
These days, a 3 year (the least you can usually get on a computer) is roughly 5% of the cost of the system. Usually the sales associate sees 5% of that.
CompUSA, who have the major deal for Apple retail, sell their own extended warranties with the systems.
I worked for a number of years at a large retailer. The entire reason for sticking with 1 year warranties is very simple: that way the retailer can stick on an extented warranty of their own. Those warranties are pure profit for the retailer (almost noone ever collects on them). Many manufacturers are "encouraged" to package their products with 1 year warranties because of this. Otherwise, it is very hard to get product on retail shelves.
Bit of a history note for folks: Carmack has been pushing for a massive virtual world system since development on Quake commenced. Even at the time (as Michael Abrash wrote), he was planning on building the metaverse described in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash (if you have not read it, do so). Technology is finally progressing to the point where a massive, persistent environment can be created. Carmack probably has the greatest chance of pulling it off since he has the experience, and the time to do so. Here's hoping...
Actually, its not well known (because we never had to make use of it, thank God), but the Apollo spacecraft was rated to do a dirt landing in case something went wrong (bad reentry, abort on launch). The original (block 1) seats could not handle this, but the later (block 2) seats were rated as such. This is why Wally Schirra made a huge deal about the wind with the Apollo 7 launch. The capsule still had block 1 seats, and odds were poor for them to survive a dirt landing. He was concerned that high winds during a launch abort would blow the capsule back over florida-and kill the crew as a result.
So yes, they could use a clone of the Apollo spacecraft for a dirt landing, although they probably added the russian retro rocket design for safety. I can't see it being a very comfortable landing otherwise.
Personally, I find this to be a bit ludicrous-obviously some folks took things a bit too seriously on the Usenet. Even at the worst I've ever seen (the old Bazemore vs Raphael Quinet war on alt.games.quake & alt.game.doom comes to mind), its never been taken to a legal environment. Not only is this a rather disturbing development for the Usenet (before now noone _ever_ took things this far!), but its a disturbing sign of where things could well go from now. Imagine if you were ordered stop posting to Slashdot by a judge.
Honestly, that sounds a lot like what I would love to see with Doctor Who-a small, core recurring cast managed by a dedicated, intelligent production team attracting _creative_ writers and directors to the series. Star Trek has been suffering from a desire to either pound every good species into the ground (I'm even sick of the Borg now), or asking the script writers to hammer out a few more sequels to their best script.
One thing _all_ of sci fi needs to remember-good science fiction is about people adapting to and existing with high technology, or technology concepts. The technology should always take second place to the characters and their society. Read Foundation, or anything by Clark, Sagan, or Niven to start.
> Geek girls are incapable of being loving and considerate, and unloving and inconsiderate geek guys have to avoid
that.
I don't think that is the point Roblimo is trying to make. THe point is, do we really want to date someone just like ourselves? What is there to share, aside from coding tips and geek info? I've tried it, and they don't work out too well. One of the greatest things about dating someone who has different interests than yourself (and I don't mean a guy from IS and a girl from software development) is sharing that. One of the greatest things about a relationship, in my opinion, is learning from a girlfriend things I wouldn't have learnt otherwise, discussing our views on the world (I've gotten a bit philosophical because of it, and examined the world in ways I never would have before), and teaching her things she didn't know before. A relationship dies the day you stop sharing like that.
Watch out, its Mondas, and its crawling with Cybermen! Just you wait, they're going to invade us in 1988 and...uh, whoops, wrong universe! *Dives into the TARDIS*
I'm going to bring up a historical point. This all sounds a bit benevolent (keep people with disabilities from having to suffer life in our society), if you choose to blatently ignore the ethical shortcomings of such a policy.
Then you open your history text book to 1930s Germany, when euthenasia of disabled children was allowed by Hitler. The result was families who lost thousands of children. It resulted in the clinical murder of Jews, Poles (a nation the Nazis favored with their worst tendencies), and many others. Read about what happened to thousands of disabled children who were sent to hospitals to care for them. Read about how many of them died soon after their arrival, with "measles" or some other deadly disease listed as the cause of death.
More often, it was a doctor and a needle full of poison.
To advocate the euthenasia of children because they were born with disabilities is not only wrong, but appalling. What does it say about our society? What will we do next? Advocate the sterilization of anyone who has a genetic predisposition for diabetes, or MS?
Although I am not a parent, I know that if I fathered a child who was disabled, I would do everything I could to care for that child. Its who I am, its the right thing to do. Not quietly ask a doctor to inject an overdose of morphine.
And I really don't give a damn. I have a simple message to everyone outside of the US who sees fit to tell us how to handle the gun issue. Butt out.
This is a very personal, hot topic for the US. We have to deal with it, and folks coming in and telling us that we're nothing more than a bunch of wild west lunatics (Need I mention the wild west never existed outside of a couple isolated cases?), are not going to help things a wit. We all know what your opinions are, but remember that this is a very different culture from much of Europe.
Call me a hipocrite because we go around telling folks like China to clean up their human rights violations. I don't care. This is something we need to resolve on our own, and getting rid of guns won't solve the societal problems which caused Columbine, Fort Worth, and a thousand other incidences. There is no quick fix for this, and outlawing guns certainly won't solve our problems, just make people believe they have done something, and thereby relieve them of any further responsibility for what has happened in this country.
Just saw this myself. Damned shame. Not good timing either, with the Congress eying the money going into NASA like a bunch of beggers on the street. Combine this with the Shuttle fleet being grounded until November at least, and it really does not bode well for NASA's ability to lobby for further funds for at least another couple years. I do hope this does not go down as human arrogance like Observer was. On that one JPL opened a valve that was not supposed to be (the engineers even told them, but JPL knows best), and flooded the probe with fuel. They lit off the engine and *blam* no more probe.
Damned shame. We could have learned so much.
Two possibilities here-first, they wanted to wait for AOL's aquisition of Netscape to be completed so there would be more capital to pay off a settlement. Second, the article notes that patents were awarded as late as this year. It could be they were waiting for the patents to be awarded before they sued.
The feature freeze means that no new features are added, except for the reasons Linus outlined. A code freeze means that no new development occurs on the kernel, just bug fixes. Usually this takes a month or more to complete. If you bypassed the code freeze for release, you could be in for a nasty surprise, which is why the kernel is developed this way. The last thing you want is to release a stable Linux kernel with major bugs.
In the last two years JNT's overall influence on the series began to diminish against Andrew Cartmel's (the best person in Who duringthe 80s), and so some very good authors were recruited. I believe that if someone akin to Phillip Henchcliffe (producer during Tom Baker's best years) had been brought in, the series never would have died.
The best thing a new Who series could do is abandon a lot of the older continuity, and return to the roots of an inventive sci fi series where anything goes. The moment a who author wrote himself into a box and decided something would not fly, the story died. Unless you had Tom Baker working as the Doctor, and even then things sometimes tanked.
OK, I'm probably going to piss off a few folks here by saying this, but I just have to say it.
Ever since Roddenbary died the series has been running on inertia. I would equate the lax plot and writing styles (nevermind the always shoddy Voyager series) to the malaise that set in under John Nathan Turner's tenure as Doctor Who's producer (might I add his tenure resulted in the death of that once fine series?). We have a producer (Berman) who seems more interested in flash and money than pushing the bounds of modern science fiction, which Roddenbery did so well during the original series and during the majority of TNG (you could see when Berman and co. really asserted their influence-the latter half of season 6 and season 7 of TNG were the worst of the lot). What Paramount needs is to get someone in there who really wants to get the franchise back on its feet and return it to its roots-well thought out and inventive stories. Instead I'm seeing more and more stories which rehash the series past without any real creative influx-anyone who remembers the last 9 years of Doctor Who (especially 1984-1989) and the new adventures will agree with me.
Thank you. I feel great sorrow that, apparently, one sad man has brought about all of this.
Folks, as a community, we need to sit back and look at this. This person joins the ranks of the sad people who rampantly attack Windows users, who send offensive emails to companies, and generally degrade the overall image of Linux. We're doing ourselves no good by ignoring these actions.
If this is one person, then he is a very pitiful figure indeed. In the past few weeks we have seen the overall discourse on Slashdot descend to new lows. I have read this forum since the week it first opened, and I have never seen such immature, childish, and outright disrespectful posts. Up until today I was a fierce supporter of the AC option. Today's disgusting display has broken the camel's back. The greatest failing of the internet is the rampant lack of respect exercised by some. Noone, except the most deranged individual, would react in such a flagrant manner in real life. Instead we have a culture on the internet who feel it is obligitory and acceptable to insult and denigrate individuals for their viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs.
To Rob, Hemos, and everyone who runs Slashdot: Please, review the current situation. This is getting well out of hand.
I apologize in advance for several typos in this post. Change Linux in the second to the last sentence of the post to Linus. Also, change "His family is, without, agrieved" to "His family is agrieved". Sorry about that.
Someone very respected has died. His books have become an indispensible resource to anyone developing under Unix. His family is, without, agrieved to see this happen. So what happens on Slashdot? Every single sad, disrespectful cretin comes rolling out of the woodwork. I'm disgusted by the lack of respect too many of us have shown the man. I am equally disgusted by the attitude of a minority of the readers of Slashdot who have chosen to decry this man not because of things he did in his life, but because he did not fully share our viewpoint on OpenSource, GNU/Linux, and many other issues. He did not have to write the books he did, but he did so none the less. I sincerely doubt that his family would like to read some of the things that have been posted here today. Some of you have seen fit to celebrate his death as another gain for our community. It is no such thing.
As long as our community speaks out with such depravity and immaturity, even such a small minority, it will not receive respect many of us desire, and have worked for. The events last week with Unisys (a company whose policies many of us, rightly, disagree with), and many other times, here on Slashdot, the usenet, the web, and in other forums will continue to harm us. Until we choose to grow up and cease our continues flaming, we will not achieve our goals. Grow up people, this is not a religion, this is not a war. This is about debating our ideals and achieving our goals in a mature, productive, fashion. Instead of sending filthy, offensive emails to everyone you don't agree with, sit down, pick a project, and get to work on it. Or start a project of your own to address a need or shortcoming in Linux, or something you think would be pretty cool. That is what RMS, Linux, ESR, and the rest have been fighting for. That is what we all, I hope, believe in.
Man, chill out. First off, id never gave a date, they just said they wanted to get it out before the end of the month. Second, unless you hear something firm from the id guys (via their plans, don't believe anything you read elsewhere), don't assume a release date. Everyone remember the Quake rumors? We didn't even know the Quake test was out until Romero popped up on irc and announced it to the world.
One point most folks don't remember about GNUstep: The end goal is to have one API with which we can write an application, and then just recompile it on any system and have it run. This means you write an application under Linux, test it out, copy it to windows and it should work without any tweaking. That's the end goal of this whole thing. Hopefully they will achieve that goal, because in doing so developers can support multiple operating systems with little or no work. Can you imaging what it would be like for porting if we could get adobe and corel onto this?
Check out Terminus. I've seen this a couple times, and its a pretty impressive game and concept.