I ran Debian for many years and ultimately just got kind of bored with it. I switched my own personal deskop over to Gentoo about a year ago and I must say it has been a lot of fun to use.
It *was* fun tinkering with all of those wild compiler settings, but eventually I just went for stable tried and true settings and recompiled my system. I just did an update of my system, for the first time in about 6 months, last week, and it's all running like a champ. I probably won't mess with it for another six months now.
I like Gentoo mainly because the compilers and development libraries are all integrated in a pretty seamless way. In Debian I was always installing libFoo-dev this and that every time I wanted to try and compile something from source, and honestly, I thought it was a hassle, not to mention the Debian versions were usually too out of date to be usefull, and I ran unstable.
That being said, I still put Debian on all my satellite systems and just run Gentoo on my main home workstation. For systems that don't get booted into Linux much and aren't used to compile source code, Debian is much quicker to install and keep current. It runs about as fast, looks about the same, and makes my life easier.
I sorta did this. I purchased a formerly top of the line HP LaserJet 4M+ on Ebay, added the big memory module, and its working just dandy. That thing is a real workhorse.
I'm still playing Neverwinter Nights, and I don't plan on changing soon. I just today updated my linux clients and W00T! Crashes all gone. Does DAoC even have a linux client?
I've never seen so much misunderstanding before in a/. thread. This is amazing.
The main idea here is for home heating. There are clean burning pellet furnaces which use wood pellets now. By making pellets from other sources a good savings can be had.
Plants cannot extract carbon from the ground. They absorb CO2 from the air and emit O2. They do need trace amounts of phosphorous, potassium, and nitrogen which they get from the soil. Some plants, such as soybeans, harbor bacteria which can fixate nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil.
Irrigating this is ridiculous. You would simply grow it in areas where it rains. Put solar panels in the desert, grow fuel vegeatation in places where it rains.
You could concievably convert these pellets to gaseous and then liquid form. If you heat them up without oxygen you can break it down into gaseous carbon radicals which will recombine with steam to form methanol. I've often wondered if you could drive the reaction using heat from a large fresnel lens. In this case the potassium ash residue would be available to be used as fertilizer.
Overall, this is probably considerably more efficient than using solar panels to directly crack water and produce hydrogen, but it is also quite a bit more complicated.
Many of the posts above say Hurd is a waste of time. I suspect the Hurd team just enjoys hacking. I really don't think they care if its a "waste" of time. They just love what they do. I think it's awesome to be so dedicated to your craft. Even if the Hurd never works... I bet they will still look back on the whole experience as something pretty cool.
I think this hits the nail on the head. That's why I have enjoyed tinkering with Hurd over the years. I currently have a bootable Debian/Hurd partition, and I have recently built the L4/Hurd system up to its current state. I haven't been able to get banner running like Marcus did, but its not for a lack of trying.
Many Slashdotters will say "Why waste your time with Hurd because BSD/Linux/Windows/OSX/etc already works great and needs more contributors?" Well, its my time and if I want to play around with experimental source code then that's what I am going to do.
I already have a nicely working Gentoo Linux system that I use most of the time, and I'm happy with it. However, I am one of those types that wants to always learn, and by following the progress of Mach/Hurd and now L4/Hurd I get to grow up with the operating system and there is a small chance that I will be able to make a useful contribution here or there occasionally.
Hurd isn't trying to sell itself to become a replacement for your current favorite operating system. It is simply a project to create an OS based on advanced and sometimes theoretical computer science ideas.
People like Marcus put a lot of effort into realizing these abstractions in code. Sometimes it doesn't work out and they have to backstep, but progress continues. I have been on the developer's mailing list for years, and honestly I don't understand 90% of what they are talking about but it is pretty interesting nonetheless.
Hurd makes pretty heavy use of GNU autotools; i.e. "./configure" and a lot of the real benefits of the old Mach based Debian/Hurd are that upstream sources have been patched so that you can hopefully build them on Hurd just by running configure and make. L4-Hurd is still Hurd, so all the work done is still relevent. When they whip the sheet off of the shiny new engine, the rest of the parts waiting on the shelf are already there.
And they are making good progress. They have it now to the point where a lot of people are working on getting libc to build and once the kernel and libc are working that is the keystone that lets all the other peices of the puzzle come together.
It's totally a research project. There is no agenda other than some people like Marcus thought it was a cool project and decided to fool around with it. I'm the same way, sometimes I get bored with Linux so I put on my Hurd cap and play around with it for a while.
The BOFH hates OS/2, and you DON'T want to make him mad.
If the BOFH had done this job, he would have had Wells-Fargo purchase a super-deluxe QNX licensing contract, then he would have installed BSD on the machines and pocketed the change.
Ahh, OS/2, I miss it. The last time I whipped out my OS/2 Warp disks and tried to install it, it didn't seem to like my 10 years newer hardware and couldn't find a HDD driver. Bummer. I can only imagine how fast it would have run on my 2GHz box.
I think that Wells-Fargo should have used QNX, and now whoever made the decision is probably going to pay. Windows on an ATM connected to the internet is pretty damn frightening. Time to withdraw all my zorkmids out of the bank and stuff it under the mattress.
Well, if I said that theta was my one dimension, then used parametric identities to plot the location of a point on a two dimensional surface, as theta increases linearly the x and y coordinates given by sin(theta) and cos(theta) oscillate. Furthermore, the system could be said to be rotating about the z-axis.
But for the most part, I agree that rotation in one dimension really doesn't make any sense. Oscillation is possible but not rotation, unless you use parametric definitions like above, in which case it really isn't one dimension after all.
I'm pretty sure with the demise of Loki, this one is gone forever. I have a copy somewhere, but even I'm not sure where it is now.:-/
I have almost every Linux game that Loki made. I bet I have 10 of their cd's. A couple years back when they went under EB-Games was liquidating their stock and I snagged them all for a song.
I know it's probably illegal, but these games are not gone forever. I could rip the cd's and post them on a P2P network anytime.
Unfortunately, I am scared of the DMCA and the potential fines and how it could screw up my children's lives if I got busted doing that. I bet if you looked around you could find them though, and some still might be for sale on tuxgames.com. One of these days, maybe 10 years or so from now, I'll try and sneak the cd-rips onto the net if I can, or if you email me I might be able to work with you.
The main problem is bit-rot. Some of the Loki games don't work anymore because they are linked to an ancient libc5. Sucks. It really sucks, because these are some of the best games ever made, and the Loki ports are great. Loki didn't port shitty games, everything they ever did was worth getting.
Just get a cheapo used SBLive! Value edition. It has great sound and works just as well as any of the more expensive versions. The front panel options are pretty cool but I have no idea if they are supported yet in Linux. A LiveDrive might work but I don't have one so I can't say. Radio Shack has whatever plug adapters you might need to interface with your 1/8" stereo input port on the card so that is enough to handle a lot of purposes.
Not in thermodynamics. "Availability" is an actual definition which for steam IIRC is T*delta(S)
I know the parent does not have a clue about thermodynamics. I was merely trying to awaken him to the fact that thermo does indeed consider all forms of energy. Obviously, chemical energy is fantastically convenient because its a quick refill and provides loads of power. The only things that come remotely close to the power per kilogram of gasoline are things like exotic rocket fuels which require dangerous oxidizers and specialized combustion processes.
I'm all for hydrogen power, solar energy and all that, but chemical energy is really really tough to beat as an energy storage medium. Ideally we would use photovoltaic panels to run a chemical fuel production process, that is a lot more handy than batteries or whatnot.
The science of thermodynamics can and does handle all types of energy.
I agree. Mplayer at least can play almost everything. I can usually play things in Linux using Mplayer that my wife can't manage to play in Windows because Media Player usually complains that it can't find or download the correct codec.
RealPlayer stuff just sucks, Windows or Linux. The only people who seem to like that format are computer challenged corporate executives.
Liquid metallic mercury isn't really a big deal. It's not really absorbed into the skin or body while in that form. The main problems are mercury vapor and water-soluable salts of mercury. If you ingested some of it it would presumably react with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach forming mercury chloride which could then be absorbed into your tissues. Symptoms of mercury poisoning are supposedly somewhat like schizophenia. Hatmakers used to use mercury salts to dye feathers and such, and in the days of yore many were likely suffering from mercury poisoning. Thus the phrase "Mad as a hatter" refers to this condition.
If you break a thermometer and the mercury spills into your carpet or cracks in your floor, it is quite difficult to clean it up, usually you need a mercury sucker (squeeze bottle used in reverse), which is what all laboratories should have around. Once you have liquid mercury in the cracks of your floor it slowly evaporates, emitting toxic gaseous mercury into the area, so spill prevention and quick cleanups are essential.
Water-soluable mercury salts (and other heavy metal salts) can be absorbed into the skin so you should always use gloves if you are working with them. Once you have absorbed some heavy metals in your body, they persist for a long time but are slowly eliminated through hair growth and other means. The use of "chelating compounds" can be used to try and remove it mercury and other heavy metals from the body in cases where the poisoning is sufficiently advanced. In most cases, heavy metal poisoning causes strange and insidious chronic mental and physiological effects rather than being acutely fatal.
I don't recommend playing around with liquid mercury because of the danger of spilling some. If you have a jar of it, pour some water on top of the mercury to keep the mercury from forming vapor, and keep it in a plastic container so that if you accidentally drop it it hopefully won't shatter.
What the parent poster really meant was "useful energy", a concept not covered by thermodynamics.
This must be a troll, but I'm bored. Thats what the 3rd law and Entropy is all about. Spontaneous reactions only occur such that the usefull energy is decreased overall. Heat at 120 degrees is simply not as useful as heat at 1000 degrees, and electricity is on the high end of the scale for usefulness. Turkey carcasses and ag-waste are somewhere close to the bottom of the scale.
Anytime that you can utilize low availability forms of energy, you're almost getting something for nothing. Truly, a barrel of high energy fuel is pretty useful, but a truckload of stinking crap is not very useful.
Biological reactions are pretty cool in that they try to do just this by utilizing catalyst aided chemical reactions. Enzymes are specially tailored biological catalysts which break down or allow otherwise pretty unreactive things to react in conditions that would normally be unfavorable.
Look at the mashing process in beer brewing. When you mix the malted grains up and heat them to the correct temperature, enzymes from within the seed kernels become active and break up the starch chains into fermentable sugars. When most of the starch is reacted, you have a sweet sugary liquid which is then strained and boiled up with hops.
The point with biological catalysts is you only have to get the solution to like 150 degrees Farenheit, and the enzymes become active. Thats a lot less energy than using electrochemistry or trying some kind of permanganate oxidation reduction scheme to bust up the long chain starch molecules.
Anyways the thermodynamic term Availability is used denote that different types of energy have different amounts of thermodynamic usefulness. However its hard to compare electricity to gasoline to steam because thats electrical, chemical, and pressure/temperature types of energy. You can figure out the total Joules of heat or Watts of work that can be extracted for a rough comparison, but that doesn't take into consideration the convenience of whatever form of energy or how well suited it is doing to a particular kind of work.
Yeah I have the Loki version of Alpha Centauri, and its a nice peice of work. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is pretty good too, although it crashes during extended battles.
I made another big post down further with a bunch of my suggestions.
Games like Baldurs Gate I&II, Icewind Dale I&II, Fallout 1&2, Planescape Torment. There isn't a whole lot of typing required other than entering your character(s) names. AFAIK you can play these games entirely with a mouse and there is a lot of content here, this is maybe a year or two worth of gaming if you played each of these through a couple times.
Look into Jagged Alliance 2 also, another turn based combat game. I don't think you need to really use the keyboard for anything except entering the initial activation code for your IMP merc, and that game is loads of fun.
The Fallout and Jagged Alliance 2 combat engines would be well suited because they are totally turn based by nature. However, by setting auto-pause on the BG/IWD games you can get the same effect. I suppose I should mention Fallout Tactics also which can be played in turn based mode just like Fallout1&2.
You could probably also play Neverwinter Nights just with a mouse, although playing online is 90% of the fun, and it would be hard to type/chat with other players with just a mouse. If you could manage to let them know its hard for you to type you could probably get in with some adventurers who would work with you.
I'm not even mentioning trivial games like card games, etc, because I tend to like action oriented games with guns, lasers, magic, etc, but I play a lot of turn based strategy games (most of them listed above) because I like the somewhat slower pace and how they give you time to think before each move.
My wife suggests a bunch of Flash games like on shockwave.com or gameblast.com. and from the amount of time she spends playing them I suppose that is the other side of the gaming coin. You'd have to be pretty good with your mouse to play some of these, because they are click fests, but OTOH the only controls are the mouse.
Other turn based games are Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Alpha Centauri, X-Com UFO Defense. Some of the older ones like X-Com run great using DOSBox and its not too hard to set up a shortcut or something to get them started.
I'd recommend setting up a way to at least invoke the [Esc] key with your head mouse so if you get stuck in a text entry box you can try and exit from it. I'm not sure what their capabilities are, but you need a couple keystrokes mapped like for Quicksave/Quickload, Enter, Esc, stuff like that.
I used to have a second line, back before broadband hit my area. I think it amounted to something like $15 a month for the line and $10-20 for dialup service. So it was a little cheaper than broadband but not by much.
The phone company is real good for adding all kinds of mystery fees and surcharges to your bill each month, and a second line simply doubles this.
I was behind a University proxy - and lack of proxy support is something I was upset about).
You do know that using university networks to play games is almost invariably against university policy right? I don't see how you can bitch about something like that when you are the one who is breaking the rules. That being said, Steam seems like some kind of a scam but I haven't had any problems with it on the rare occasion that I actually play HL2 or such.
I'd say that the parent just got ripped off. He took a chance and bought a used copy of the game without checking whether or not it would work.
Personally, I get a lot of games from Ebay. I generally prefer the "New and Unopened" ones myself. I think I'll stay away from WoW in light of this new information, although frankly I just don't like Blizzard games that much. Warcraft II was ok, but I don't like Starcraft, and Diablo II is juvenile to the point of being absurd.
I've heard good things about WoW, but I truly hate having to subscribe for things. Thats what kills it for me. I want less fixed monthly expenses, not more.
Looks like this is one of those threads where I am a mini-expert for a change, since I have fooled around with Rosegarden on and off for many years.
Yeah, the QT and KDE dependencies kind of suck, but what are you gonna do. I run Gentoo with Gnome, but there are a couple of programs that I use that require QT and there is just no getting around it. QCad and LyX come to mind. I was really bitching to myself about LyX depending on QT until I read somewhere on the net that LyX's author is the founder of KDE! Oops hehe. On Gentoo, compiling QT takes a couple of hours on my AthlonXP 2400+, but such is life. You can bet I don't upgrade that puppy very often.
By the way, for those interested, here is a MIDI file that I wrote using Rosegarden a while back that I am using in my game project Space Commander
My Rosegarden creation: commander.mid. For some reason the Verizon server seems buggy and doesn't serve the file properly in FireFox, but I was able to download it using "wget http://mysite.verizon.net/b.d.hilton/commander.mid ". My Netwinder webserver is down right now so all I have is the Verizon webspace to post stuff.
Yeah, I like the sawtooth instrument. So what, I'm a rock'n'roller d00d.
Re:now I just need a working midi device..
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Rosegarden 1.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, the SBLive MIDI is totally supported. All you have to do is load a soundfont using "sfxload".
A couple of large soundfonts are here at this site: PersonalCopy.
These fonts suck up a ridiculous amount of RAM, like 500M or so, so use the ones from your CD if possible (I bought my card second hand so I had to scrounge around).
Honestly, the SBLive (emu101k) is probably the best supported modern sound card available for Linux. When you compile your kernel for ALSA, just check all the MIDI options and build them all as modules. In this case its better to make modules which you don't know what they are than to not make them.
If you are using some distro with a canned kernel, then try running "alsaconfig" which should set up the modules automatically. ALSA used to be a huge pain to set up but in the last year or so there have been some big improvements since it is now the default sound system for Linux and OSS has been declared obsolescent.
To test it out, use the "pmidi" command. For example:
pmidi -p 65:0 myfile.mid
If you don't hear anything then either your mixer has the "music" slider muted, you haven't loaded the right kernel modules, or you haven't loaded a soundfont. Once it is all set up its pretty sweet.
BTW, the OPL3 is just the (Adlib) FM synthesis chip, it doesn't have anything to do with MIDI for the most part.
A MIDI synth can be external, but it doesn't have to be. If you have ALSA and a supported sound card, then ALSA provides a MIDI synthesiser on the board.
For example, I have a Creative SBLive! card which is supported. I load a patchset using the asfxload utility, and my hardware synth can be accessed at MIDI port 65:0. I also have Timidity+ installed, and it's found at port 128:0. And finally, I have an external MIDI keyboard (an old Yamaha PSR-300) which is connected via a gameport to MIDI adapter cable to the SBLive!. The external keyboard is at port 64:0.
Using ALSA's "pmidi" command, I can spool a midi file to any of these devices, so I can actually make the Yamaha play the file externally. I haven't checked out the latest Rosegarden yet, but if it supports ALSA now, then it should be able to output to any of these devices. Old versions only supported the old linux OSS device/dev/sequencer, or you could output a midi file and play it however works best for you. Supposedly you can also capture MIDI and WAV data from external keyboards and other sources but I haven't figured that out yet.
Rosegarden is very cool if you have ALSA sound. I use it to write sheet music scores for my drums, bass, and synth tracks. Then I play the midi file and jam along with my electric guitar which runs into the soundcard through an amp simulator on the line in port. The computer mixes the output together and sounds great. The amp simulator (Zoom 503) basically makes my guitar sound like its being miked from an overdriven Marshall stack and that way I don't have to have a bunch of effects pedals daisy chained together to get a decent sound from the guitar. There are newer amp simulators like the PoD units that are also ideal for running a guitar directly into a soundcard.
Yes, you too can be just like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, making weird music in your own home all by yourself with a Linux computer, Rosegarden, and some rather inexpensive equipment.
Another really cool music creation program to check out is Cecilia. It is a pretty technically oriented synthesizer package which can make some really weird sounds: think Pink Floyd. I haven't figured out how to really use it in combination with Rosegarden yet, but its a blast to play around with it and make strange sounds. Cecilia is pretty crashy and hasn't been updated in a while, but it's still a very nifty toy to fool around with.
More than anything, I can't stand how newspapers stink. There is this weird smell about them that just repulses me. I'd rather read my news on the net any day than have to deal with piles of stinking newspapers. Gaah, I hate that smell, yuck.
That screen looks pretty cool. I guess to save power you'd keep a couple screen buffers in memory. Do a bitwise XOR maybe using hardware to come up with a difference map, and only flip the bits which changed.
Now I get the "Use 2 hash algorithms" comments
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SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, if my file consists of the line "Hello World." then I get the following hashes:
770b95bb61d5b0406c135b6e42260580 for MD5
b924c2f360b572e17c971f1b1b667e0732944df7 for SHA-1
Trying to tinker around with the file and make both hashes come out the same as above would presumably be much more difficult than for any single hashing algorithm, and it might very well be nigh impossible. The little light bulb has finally come on. Now I get it. Yeah using two hash algorithms together would probably work nicely. Don't combine the results mathematically, just append the keys together into a big long string. The final MD5+SHA1 hash key for my file would be:
I don't know whether this would be stronger than a SHA-2 of equivalent bit length or not, but now I get what some of you have been saying. From a common sense view, it would seem that something like this would be pretty darn tough to crack, because you would have to make two different algorithms compute matching keys for a given dataset.
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It *was* fun tinkering with all of those wild compiler settings, but eventually I just went for stable tried and true settings and recompiled my system. I just did an update of my system, for the first time in about 6 months, last week, and it's all running like a champ. I probably won't mess with it for another six months now.
I like Gentoo mainly because the compilers and development libraries are all integrated in a pretty seamless way. In Debian I was always installing libFoo-dev this and that every time I wanted to try and compile something from source, and honestly, I thought it was a hassle, not to mention the Debian versions were usually too out of date to be usefull, and I ran unstable.
That being said, I still put Debian on all my satellite systems and just run Gentoo on my main home workstation. For systems that don't get booted into Linux much and aren't used to compile source code, Debian is much quicker to install and keep current. It runs about as fast, looks about the same, and makes my life easier.
BTW, thanks for the link. I didn't see a link for Sheldon in TTF format, but ProFont looks quite nice in my Gnome Terminal!
I sorta did this. I purchased a formerly top of the line HP LaserJet 4M+ on Ebay, added the big memory module, and its working just dandy. That thing is a real workhorse.
Well, now we do. Back when we only had DOS, which we liked, we did it like this:
C:\> copy con program.exe
Holy Crap! It's Phil the Nuka Cola guy! Man the future is definately here.
I'm still playing Neverwinter Nights, and I don't plan on changing soon. I just today updated my linux clients and W00T! Crashes all gone. Does DAoC even have a linux client?
The main idea here is for home heating. There are clean burning pellet furnaces which use wood pellets now. By making pellets from other sources a good savings can be had.
Plants cannot extract carbon from the ground. They absorb CO2 from the air and emit O2. They do need trace amounts of phosphorous, potassium, and nitrogen which they get from the soil. Some plants, such as soybeans, harbor bacteria which can fixate nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil.
Irrigating this is ridiculous. You would simply grow it in areas where it rains. Put solar panels in the desert, grow fuel vegeatation in places where it rains.
You could concievably convert these pellets to gaseous and then liquid form. If you heat them up without oxygen you can break it down into gaseous carbon radicals which will recombine with steam to form methanol. I've often wondered if you could drive the reaction using heat from a large fresnel lens. In this case the potassium ash residue would be available to be used as fertilizer.
Overall, this is probably considerably more efficient than using solar panels to directly crack water and produce hydrogen, but it is also quite a bit more complicated.
I think this hits the nail on the head. That's why I have enjoyed tinkering with Hurd over the years. I currently have a bootable Debian/Hurd partition, and I have recently built the L4/Hurd system up to its current state. I haven't been able to get banner running like Marcus did, but its not for a lack of trying.
Many Slashdotters will say "Why waste your time with Hurd because BSD/Linux/Windows/OSX/etc already works great and needs more contributors?" Well, its my time and if I want to play around with experimental source code then that's what I am going to do.
I already have a nicely working Gentoo Linux system that I use most of the time, and I'm happy with it. However, I am one of those types that wants to always learn, and by following the progress of Mach/Hurd and now L4/Hurd I get to grow up with the operating system and there is a small chance that I will be able to make a useful contribution here or there occasionally.
Hurd isn't trying to sell itself to become a replacement for your current favorite operating system. It is simply a project to create an OS based on advanced and sometimes theoretical computer science ideas.
People like Marcus put a lot of effort into realizing these abstractions in code. Sometimes it doesn't work out and they have to backstep, but progress continues. I have been on the developer's mailing list for years, and honestly I don't understand 90% of what they are talking about but it is pretty interesting nonetheless.
Hurd makes pretty heavy use of GNU autotools; i.e. "./configure" and a lot of the real benefits of the old Mach based Debian/Hurd are that upstream sources have been patched so that you can hopefully build them on Hurd just by running configure and make. L4-Hurd is still Hurd, so all the work done is still relevent. When they whip the sheet off of the shiny new engine, the rest of the parts waiting on the shelf are already there.
And they are making good progress. They have it now to the point where a lot of people are working on getting libc to build and once the kernel and libc are working that is the keystone that lets all the other peices of the puzzle come together.
It's totally a research project. There is no agenda other than some people like Marcus thought it was a cool project and decided to fool around with it. I'm the same way, sometimes I get bored with Linux so I put on my Hurd cap and play around with it for a while.
If the BOFH had done this job, he would have had Wells-Fargo purchase a super-deluxe QNX licensing contract, then he would have installed BSD on the machines and pocketed the change.
Ahh, OS/2, I miss it. The last time I whipped out my OS/2 Warp disks and tried to install it, it didn't seem to like my 10 years newer hardware and couldn't find a HDD driver. Bummer. I can only imagine how fast it would have run on my 2GHz box.
I think that Wells-Fargo should have used QNX, and now whoever made the decision is probably going to pay. Windows on an ATM connected to the internet is pretty damn frightening. Time to withdraw all my zorkmids out of the bank and stuff it under the mattress.
But for the most part, I agree that rotation in one dimension really doesn't make any sense. Oscillation is possible but not rotation, unless you use parametric definitions like above, in which case it really isn't one dimension after all.
I know it's probably illegal, but these games are not gone forever. I could rip the cd's and post them on a P2P network anytime.
Unfortunately, I am scared of the DMCA and the potential fines and how it could screw up my children's lives if I got busted doing that. I bet if you looked around you could find them though, and some still might be for sale on tuxgames.com. One of these days, maybe 10 years or so from now, I'll try and sneak the cd-rips onto the net if I can, or if you email me I might be able to work with you.
The main problem is bit-rot. Some of the Loki games don't work anymore because they are linked to an ancient libc5. Sucks. It really sucks, because these are some of the best games ever made, and the Loki ports are great. Loki didn't port shitty games, everything they ever did was worth getting.
Just get a cheapo used SBLive! Value edition. It has great sound and works just as well as any of the more expensive versions. The front panel options are pretty cool but I have no idea if they are supported yet in Linux. A LiveDrive might work but I don't have one so I can't say. Radio Shack has whatever plug adapters you might need to interface with your 1/8" stereo input port on the card so that is enough to handle a lot of purposes.
I know the parent does not have a clue about thermodynamics. I was merely trying to awaken him to the fact that thermo does indeed consider all forms of energy. Obviously, chemical energy is fantastically convenient because its a quick refill and provides loads of power. The only things that come remotely close to the power per kilogram of gasoline are things like exotic rocket fuels which require dangerous oxidizers and specialized combustion processes.
I'm all for hydrogen power, solar energy and all that, but chemical energy is really really tough to beat as an energy storage medium. Ideally we would use photovoltaic panels to run a chemical fuel production process, that is a lot more handy than batteries or whatnot.
The science of thermodynamics can and does handle all types of energy.
RealPlayer stuff just sucks, Windows or Linux. The only people who seem to like that format are computer challenged corporate executives.
Liquid metallic mercury isn't really a big deal. It's not really absorbed into the skin or body while in that form. The main problems are mercury vapor and water-soluable salts of mercury. If you ingested some of it it would presumably react with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach forming mercury chloride which could then be absorbed into your tissues. Symptoms of mercury poisoning are supposedly somewhat like schizophenia. Hatmakers used to use mercury salts to dye feathers and such, and in the days of yore many were likely suffering from mercury poisoning. Thus the phrase "Mad as a hatter" refers to this condition.
If you break a thermometer and the mercury spills into your carpet or cracks in your floor, it is quite difficult to clean it up, usually you need a mercury sucker (squeeze bottle used in reverse), which is what all laboratories should have around. Once you have liquid mercury in the cracks of your floor it slowly evaporates, emitting toxic gaseous mercury into the area, so spill prevention and quick cleanups are essential.
Water-soluable mercury salts (and other heavy metal salts) can be absorbed into the skin so you should always use gloves if you are working with them. Once you have absorbed some heavy metals in your body, they persist for a long time but are slowly eliminated through hair growth and other means. The use of "chelating compounds" can be used to try and remove it mercury and other heavy metals from the body in cases where the poisoning is sufficiently advanced. In most cases, heavy metal poisoning causes strange and insidious chronic mental and physiological effects rather than being acutely fatal.
I don't recommend playing around with liquid mercury because of the danger of spilling some. If you have a jar of it, pour some water on top of the mercury to keep the mercury from forming vapor, and keep it in a plastic container so that if you accidentally drop it it hopefully won't shatter.
This must be a troll, but I'm bored. Thats what the 3rd law and Entropy is all about. Spontaneous reactions only occur such that the usefull energy is decreased overall. Heat at 120 degrees is simply not as useful as heat at 1000 degrees, and electricity is on the high end of the scale for usefulness. Turkey carcasses and ag-waste are somewhere close to the bottom of the scale.
Anytime that you can utilize low availability forms of energy, you're almost getting something for nothing. Truly, a barrel of high energy fuel is pretty useful, but a truckload of stinking crap is not very useful.
Biological reactions are pretty cool in that they try to do just this by utilizing catalyst aided chemical reactions. Enzymes are specially tailored biological catalysts which break down or allow otherwise pretty unreactive things to react in conditions that would normally be unfavorable.
Look at the mashing process in beer brewing. When you mix the malted grains up and heat them to the correct temperature, enzymes from within the seed kernels become active and break up the starch chains into fermentable sugars. When most of the starch is reacted, you have a sweet sugary liquid which is then strained and boiled up with hops.
The point with biological catalysts is you only have to get the solution to like 150 degrees Farenheit, and the enzymes become active. Thats a lot less energy than using electrochemistry or trying some kind of permanganate oxidation reduction scheme to bust up the long chain starch molecules.
Anyways the thermodynamic term Availability is used denote that different types of energy have different amounts of thermodynamic usefulness. However its hard to compare electricity to gasoline to steam because thats electrical, chemical, and pressure/temperature types of energy. You can figure out the total Joules of heat or Watts of work that can be extracted for a rough comparison, but that doesn't take into consideration the convenience of whatever form of energy or how well suited it is doing to a particular kind of work.
See?
I made another big post down further with a bunch of my suggestions.
Look into Jagged Alliance 2 also, another turn based combat game. I don't think you need to really use the keyboard for anything except entering the initial activation code for your IMP merc, and that game is loads of fun.
The Fallout and Jagged Alliance 2 combat engines would be well suited because they are totally turn based by nature. However, by setting auto-pause on the BG/IWD games you can get the same effect. I suppose I should mention Fallout Tactics also which can be played in turn based mode just like Fallout1&2.
You could probably also play Neverwinter Nights just with a mouse, although playing online is 90% of the fun, and it would be hard to type/chat with other players with just a mouse. If you could manage to let them know its hard for you to type you could probably get in with some adventurers who would work with you.
I'm not even mentioning trivial games like card games, etc, because I tend to like action oriented games with guns, lasers, magic, etc, but I play a lot of turn based strategy games (most of them listed above) because I like the somewhat slower pace and how they give you time to think before each move.
My wife suggests a bunch of Flash games like on shockwave.com or gameblast.com. and from the amount of time she spends playing them I suppose that is the other side of the gaming coin. You'd have to be pretty good with your mouse to play some of these, because they are click fests, but OTOH the only controls are the mouse.
Other turn based games are Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Alpha Centauri, X-Com UFO Defense. Some of the older ones like X-Com run great using DOSBox and its not too hard to set up a shortcut or something to get them started.
I'd recommend setting up a way to at least invoke the [Esc] key with your head mouse so if you get stuck in a text entry box you can try and exit from it. I'm not sure what their capabilities are, but you need a couple keystrokes mapped like for Quicksave/Quickload, Enter, Esc, stuff like that.
Good luck and happy gaming!
The phone company is real good for adding all kinds of mystery fees and surcharges to your bill each month, and a second line simply doubles this.
I'd say that the parent just got ripped off. He took a chance and bought a used copy of the game without checking whether or not it would work.
Personally, I get a lot of games from Ebay. I generally prefer the "New and Unopened" ones myself. I think I'll stay away from WoW in light of this new information, although frankly I just don't like Blizzard games that much. Warcraft II was ok, but I don't like Starcraft, and Diablo II is juvenile to the point of being absurd.
I've heard good things about WoW, but I truly hate having to subscribe for things. Thats what kills it for me. I want less fixed monthly expenses, not more.
Yeah, the QT and KDE dependencies kind of suck, but what are you gonna do. I run Gentoo with Gnome, but there are a couple of programs that I use that require QT and there is just no getting around it. QCad and LyX come to mind. I was really bitching to myself about LyX depending on QT until I read somewhere on the net that LyX's author is the founder of KDE! Oops hehe. On Gentoo, compiling QT takes a couple of hours on my AthlonXP 2400+, but such is life. You can bet I don't upgrade that puppy very often.
By the way, for those interested, here is a MIDI file that I wrote using Rosegarden a while back that I am using in my game project Space Commander
My Rosegarden creation: commander.mid. For some reason the Verizon server seems buggy and doesn't serve the file properly in FireFox, but I was able to download it using "wget http://mysite.verizon.net/b.d.hilton/commander.mid ". My Netwinder webserver is down right now so all I have is the Verizon webspace to post stuff.
Yeah, I like the sawtooth instrument. So what, I'm a rock'n'roller d00d.
A couple of large soundfonts are here at this site: PersonalCopy.
These fonts suck up a ridiculous amount of RAM, like 500M or so, so use the ones from your CD if possible (I bought my card second hand so I had to scrounge around).
Honestly, the SBLive (emu101k) is probably the best supported modern sound card available for Linux. When you compile your kernel for ALSA, just check all the MIDI options and build them all as modules. In this case its better to make modules which you don't know what they are than to not make them.
If you are using some distro with a canned kernel, then try running "alsaconfig" which should set up the modules automatically. ALSA used to be a huge pain to set up but in the last year or so there have been some big improvements since it is now the default sound system for Linux and OSS has been declared obsolescent.
To test it out, use the "pmidi" command. For example:
pmidi -p 65:0 myfile.mid
If you don't hear anything then either your mixer has the "music" slider muted, you haven't loaded the right kernel modules, or you haven't loaded a soundfont. Once it is all set up its pretty sweet.
BTW, the OPL3 is just the (Adlib) FM synthesis chip, it doesn't have anything to do with MIDI for the most part.
For example, I have a Creative SBLive! card which is supported. I load a patchset using the asfxload utility, and my hardware synth can be accessed at MIDI port 65:0. I also have Timidity+ installed, and it's found at port 128:0. And finally, I have an external MIDI keyboard (an old Yamaha PSR-300) which is connected via a gameport to MIDI adapter cable to the SBLive!. The external keyboard is at port 64:0.
Using ALSA's "pmidi" command, I can spool a midi file to any of these devices, so I can actually make the Yamaha play the file externally. I haven't checked out the latest Rosegarden yet, but if it supports ALSA now, then it should be able to output to any of these devices. Old versions only supported the old linux OSS device /dev/sequencer, or you could output a midi file and play it however works best for you. Supposedly you can also capture MIDI and WAV data from external keyboards and other sources but I haven't figured that out yet.
Rosegarden is very cool if you have ALSA sound. I use it to write sheet music scores for my drums, bass, and synth tracks. Then I play the midi file and jam along with my electric guitar which runs into the soundcard through an amp simulator on the line in port. The computer mixes the output together and sounds great. The amp simulator (Zoom 503) basically makes my guitar sound like its being miked from an overdriven Marshall stack and that way I don't have to have a bunch of effects pedals daisy chained together to get a decent sound from the guitar. There are newer amp simulators like the PoD units that are also ideal for running a guitar directly into a soundcard.
Yes, you too can be just like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, making weird music in your own home all by yourself with a Linux computer, Rosegarden, and some rather inexpensive equipment.
Another really cool music creation program to check out is Cecilia. It is a pretty technically oriented synthesizer package which can make some really weird sounds: think Pink Floyd. I haven't figured out how to really use it in combination with Rosegarden yet, but its a blast to play around with it and make strange sounds. Cecilia is pretty crashy and hasn't been updated in a while, but it's still a very nifty toy to fool around with.
That screen looks pretty cool. I guess to save power you'd keep a couple screen buffers in memory. Do a bitwise XOR maybe using hardware to come up with a difference map, and only flip the bits which changed.
Ok, if my file consists of the line "Hello World." then I get the following hashes:
1 7c 971f1b1b667e0732944df7
770b95bb61d5b0406c135b6e42260580 for MD5
b924c2f360b572e17c971f1b1b667e0732944df7 for SHA-1
Trying to tinker around with the file and make both hashes come out the same as above would presumably be much more difficult than for any single hashing algorithm, and it might very well be nigh impossible. The little light bulb has finally come on. Now I get it. Yeah using two hash algorithms together would probably work nicely. Don't combine the results mathematically, just append the keys together into a big long string. The final MD5+SHA1 hash key for my file would be:
770b95bb61d5b0406c135b6e42260580b924c2f360b572e
I don't know whether this would be stronger than a SHA-2 of equivalent bit length or not, but now I get what some of you have been saying. From a common sense view, it would seem that something like this would be pretty darn tough to crack, because you would have to make two different algorithms compute matching keys for a given dataset.