Bones writes: "You know how all Star Trek games are so full of promise but then suck when they get released (unlike the Star Wars games). Well we must be up to game number 590,000 on the Star Trek license and I think we might for the first time have a good egg according to this review of Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. That Beatdown guy actually liked it, which means it must be good. Plus it uses the famed Quake III Arena engine. Yay!"

Jacek Fedorynski writes: "There's an interview with Michael Abrash on Daily Radar. Michael is an ex-id Software programmer now at Microsoft working on the Xbox, which is the subject of the interview." Covers a lot of stuff including NVidia, HDTV, Lens Flares, and how the X-Box might run quake.

Gleb sent us an IETF draft for electricity over IP (yeah it's old, but it's funny). dbcooper noticed that New Scientist mentioned a kit spaceship for $500k. Oh, and here's some (warning! Over 18 and over!) Odd Javascript that I can't even begin to describe, but it's so odd that I just had to share it. l@ps@n pointed out some Star Wars Origami that is actually pretty sweet. Mr. Fusion urges us to fry that Voodoo3 with two neon sign transformers and watch the fireworks. Phrogman noted that SpaceRef has posted some amazing time-lapse movies assembled from the Hubble space telescope showing stars blowing gas (insert joke here). zenray notd that this month's SC Magazine does a market survey about tools needed to do a forensics-quality copy of disk drives. Basically the requirement is to be an exact byte-for-byte copy; 'dd' gets their BEST BUY award. Congrats! mommydearest wrote in to plug that Ultimate Chaos is hosting the Ultimate AOL CD Invention contest here (grand prize is an IDE RAID controller!). Best I ever came up with was wallpaper (during my cubist period I filled up a wall). An anonymous reader found the x10-men which ain't exactly X10, and it ain't exactly X-Men, but it is truly frightening. And finally, what with election coming up and all, it's a good thing that LafinJack wrote in to let us know that Joe Leiberman and Dick Cheney have joined the ranks of political quake 3 skins available. Taunt and kill them before doing so becomes treason!

You've been hearing about it (and hearing about it) for months -- the Linux-based gaming console in the works from a company called Indrema. Now you can ask the questions that are on your mind about it (like when it will really and truly arrive, in the hooked-up-and-running-Quake sense, say) and get answers from company founder and CEO John Gildred. (More below.)

Warrior writes "Id Software released the newest patch for Quake 3 Arena yesterday, version 1.25. However, the patch literally "breaks" all mods made for the game. GameSpy has an article that addresses the issue, getting id's stance and talking to authors of some of the most popular mods." It sounds like the patch is actually correcting a lot of issues, and while it's too bad that it breaks the mods, sometimes you have to do that to get things working properly.

Nolan Pflug writes "The QdQ team has released their newest speed run through the classic original Quake. The new demo is over four minutes faster than their previous popular release, Quake done Quicker, which was done in a time of 16:35 and released exactly three years ago. The 'with a Vengeance' run completes Quake on Nightmare skill in an amazing 12:23, by taking advantage of all known Quake 'Quirks' such as ways to increase player velocity (bunny-hopping) and damage boosts from grenades and rockets, but there is no cheating involved."

einstein writes "Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake, and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..." also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer." Ah, Old Man Murray - some of the funniest reading out there, in my book.

Step right up ladies and gentlemen and behold, quickies so amazing, that you may not want to stare directly at them. First up, a trio of Microsoft bits: Ethan sent us an RFC for writing RFCs in Word. Russ pointed us to a great entry contained within the microsoft knowledge base. and an anonymous reader noted that boardwatch is selling BillGatus of Borg posters again. You may need a soundtrack for this one: chisox sent a bit about Jem Finer composing a thousand year song (and a machine to play it). If generative music ain't your thing, Jason noted that MC (Stephen) Hawking has made some of his R&B and Rap cuts available in MP3 format. And while it isn't exactly music, Several folks showed us the way to best learn about Semi Conductors: have Britney Spears teach it. wishus's submission is much less educational: he's kissing up to me by telling us that Sarcasta's latest update is in depth study on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. If you need some images to enlighten and amuse, B.D.Mills noted that stinky meat is back if you didn't get enough the first time, Ant sent us the correct use for the new mac cubes, and danfairs sent us a picture of... well, a fire extinguisher. table and chair pointed us to Political Arena, a Quake 3 modwhere you blow up the political candidates (is this treason once one of them gets elected?) If blowing up Bush isn't enough stress reduction for you, einstein has shown us how best to customize your case and void your warrenty in one swing. Of an axe. Kartoffel wrote a CueCat interface for BeOS as well as a Mr T vs. CueCat Comic Strip. Even more offensive then another Mr T vs. episode is a comic featuring Admiral Ackbar debating Napster sent in by georgeha. Last of all, if you didn't know, Spinal Tap is back out in limited release. God what a great flick. Just figured I'd mention it ...

soapy writes "Europe's biggest computer gaming trade show, ECTS, took place in London this week. There's a pretty good show report that summerizes all the games coming out later next year such as Violition's Red Faction by Volition which uses the Quake 3 engine and No One Lives Forever, that James Bond first person shooter. There's also some details on some the console stuff going on such as Nintendo's Gameboy Advance, The Sony PlayStation2 and the PSOne. " If you're got more links, post 'em below.

Anonymous Coward writes " Just giving ya the heads up that over @ the ILL Clan's site. They've released their latest Quake II machinima piece entitled Hardly Workin'. Very impressive stuff. Directed by their group lead, ILL Robinson (who's an Emmy award winner, btw), it looks like this Machinima stuff is actually becoming a medium of its own. The convergence of filmmaking, animation & game development all rolled into one! Its fun to watch & even more impressive that it was all created in the Quake II engine. "

With a planned move to San Francisco next summer, last week saw San Jose's last Linux World Expo, at least for now. The future as always is stubbornly uncertain, but it's impressive that the serendipitous combination of Free tools (from GNU) and a Free kernel (from Linus) has inspired enough interest and prosperity to excite a larger group of people each year. If you've not had the chance to attend one of these expositions, we hope this article will give you a flavor of what it's like. Note: Here are a few pictures from the floor (Day 1 & Day 2) contributed by Sensei^); do you have any cool shots to link to in comments?

turpie writes "CNET's Gamecenter is running a story about dying game genres, their arguments seem valid for some genres like Flight Sims, and but are stretching it a bit for others like RTS (StarCraft) (they may not be too original anymore but I wouldn't say they're dying.) I'm also wondering what this leaves us apart First Person Shooters (ala Dooom & Quake)?" For that matter, since the first person shooter, I don't feel like a new genre has really appeared in awhile.

I just got word from the fine folks at LokiSoft announcing that they are partnering with BSDi to produce games for BSD. Very cool -- my hat is off to all involved. Here's the press release.

munchkin_tr asks: "With the introduction yesterday of ADSL into Australia, at 64kB/sec (carefully phrased as 512 kbps/sec) load rate on the unlimited plan for close to $50 U.S. ($89 Australian including goods and services tax) per month, does this compare with other countries' DSL services? A 1.5mbps option is availible but limited to 500mb's data download per month. The information is available here and please have a look at the "Acceptable Use" Policy, if you can find it on the site. I found it to be hidden on the Telstra Big Pond Advance Web site. No starting up a Quake listen server - your service will be suspended till the end of your contract!" Are there any readers from Australia who have comments and concerns on this? Please share them here.

Priestess asks: "The story on Slashdot about the Xbox had much discussion on the advantages of coding, games especially, for a fixed platform. This made me start to wonder about all the things built into modern OS's that do nothing other than get in the way for games programming. Multi-User Multi-Tasking Memory-Protected OS's running X through a network socket, etc., are very useful indeed, but do you really need any of these things for a 'put in the CD and play' style OS? Clearly not. So I thought I'd ask, how hard would it be to develop a cut down version of the Linux kernel which basically just booted into single-user mode, perhaps with just a small partition mounted to protect the rest of the OS, dumped an image from the CD into RAM and ran nothing but a quick and efficient OpenGL OS? A Games Only free-OS which could be selected from LILO at boot?" Do you all think there might be a use for something like this? Getting into single user mode isn't all that difficult, but maybe there might be some advantage in having a Linux Games system by simply inserting a CD and hitting the 'on' switch.

Anonymous Coward writes "A new hosted site at PlanetQuake called Multi-Head Gaming has got pictures of Unreal Tournament running on 5(!) monitors and Quake and Quake III Arena running on 2. It has also got a small howto with details how to set it up yourself on Linux and Windows 2000."

Manb writes: "As of a few minutes after 9pm EST the long awaited mod was released for download from a slew of mirrors. Rocket Arena has been hyped to be the premiere addon for the final Quake edition from Id Software. With the releasers saying that it will redefine gameplay by changing the core of the Quake 3 engine it is a very promising release. There even seems to be a integrated mp3 player to listen to your own music while fragging your opponent. Even with a soundtrack to this release it is a must download for any Quake fanatic. It's a little hefty weighing in at 56 megs for the client, a meg for the server, and ~70 megs for the soundtrack it's not for the faint of bandwidth. Check out the homepage here."

shiwala writes: "id software is auctioning the SGI Origin 2000 used to process all of the map data for Quake II and Quake III Arena." Hemos and I have been debating auctioning off the case that was the 2nd Slashdot (for a six months). I've been trying to find the alpha that was Slashdot for the first 9 months of its life (it served the first million pages: if I only knew that we would serve that many pages every day). Probably donate the $ to the FSF or Project Gutenberg or something. Anyway this id box amuses me: opening bid is $7500.

An anonymous reader sent in some Leaked Quake IV Screenshots. It's odd how the Quake seems to be converging both topically and visually with Real Life.

electricmonk writes: "Tom's Hardware has just posted their review of the Cyrix III. They benchmarked it against the older Cyrix designs, and a Celeron, and the Celeron beat the crap out of all of them. They aren't meant for desktops, however, so it really isn't a valid comparison. But it is very overclockable, and runs so cool that it can work without a fan. Quake III on an Internet appliance, anyone?"