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Behringer Corp., (973) 948-0226, www.behringersystems.com


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In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. The game's developers, a group of graduate students who were part of the Tech Model Railroad Club, at M.I.T., an early proving ground of computer hackers, had never considered selling the game; their idea was to demonstrate the appeal of interactivity, and to take a first small step toward simulating intelligent life on a computer. Bushnell's ambition was more worldly. He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would be inside the machine. "The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games," he later said, "I put those sales pitches in my automated box." From this unlikely marriage—the computer lab and the carnival—the video-game industry was born.
The first product of Bushnell's company, Atari, was Pong, a simple, elegant game in which two players manipulated electronic paddles and sent a blip back and forth across a black-and-white screen. The game had two basic components. It was a simulation of table tennis, managing to render most of the game's rules, structure, and logic onto the screen. And it was an animation—a moving picture designed to complete the feedback loop between the eyes, the brain, and the fingers on the game controls. The game was designed by a former All-State football player named Al Alcorn, who was Atari's second employee. As Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby tell the story in "Smartbomb," their recently published history of the industry, Bushnell took the handmade Pong game to Andy Capp's Tavern, in nearby Sunnyvale, and within weeks people were lining up outside the bar in the morning, before opening time, to play it. By 1974, Pong had made it to a pizza parlor in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I played it, and for the rest of that summer my dearest desire was to go back and play it again.
The games that followed Pong—Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man, among others—were even more captivating, but the simulations remained the stuff of arcades and midways: sports, space aliens, zombies, shoot-'em-ups. In the nineteen-eighties, as the speed and storage capacity of computers and game-playing consoles grew, designers continued to improve the graphics. The simulation side of the games, however, never came close to realizing the Tech Model Railroad Club's old ambition of reproducing real-life dynamics on the screen. The best-selling video game this year is Madden NFL, in which you get to play pro football from the perspective of star players. Madden NFL is a far more sophisticated simulation than Pong was, but the content of the game is no closer to real life.
In the late nineteen-eighties, a new type of video game quietly emerged—the God game. Computer animation is a brute-force project of converting graphic art into two-dimensional pixels, and, more recently, into three-dimensional polygons, the building blocks of digital pictures. But to create a truly absorbing simulation, one that offers some insight into the nature of real life, is a much more difficult proposition. The designer must play God, or at least the notion of God in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy"—a god that can anticipate the outcome of the player's actions and yet allows the player the feeling of free will.
Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. (You can help them or torture them as you wish, although your actions have consequences in the game.) Another important God-game designer, Sid Meier, has based his Civilization series, which began to appear in 1991, on historical processes, such as scientific discovery, war, and diplomacy. But the master of the genre—the god of God games—is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be. "It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations," he has said. "Why shouldn't games be?" To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life.
For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce's "Ulysses." At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls "possibility space." "Will has a reality-distortion field around him," his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. "He comes up with the craziest idea you've ever heard, and when he's finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy—he's the only sane person in it."
Wright's office is in a corner of a six-story building a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, in Emeryville, California. It has a balcony where he can smoke. The walls are covered with drawings in colored markers, which bear cryptic messages like "Star Map Issues." Wright, who is forty-six, is tall and skinny, with a long, narrow face and slender fingers. He dresses in more or less the same clothes every day—black New Balance sneakers, faded black jeans, a button-down shirt, a leather jacket, and thick aviator-style glasses. His skin is shiny and reddish-brown, in that way that a smoker's skin can look—half tanned and half cured. He sometimes has a wispy mustache and goatee. You don't really have a conversation with him; you mention an idea, and that triggers five or ten associations in Wright's mind, which he delivers in quick bursts of data that are strung together with "um"s.
When I walked into his office, Wright jumped up and, after shaking my hand, said, "Here, try this, um, it's this really cool toy I found recently," and handed me a wireless controller for a small robotic tank that was sitting on the floor. It was facing another tank, which Wright was controlling. He started moving his tank around and shooting mine, watching me curiously, waiting to see how long it would take me to understand what was going on. I felt an odd tingling sensation in my hands, but I didn't pay any attention to it at first. Eventually, I realized that I was getting shocked: every time Wright's tank shot mine, an electric charge passed from the controller into my hands.
Wright had been working on a Power-Point presentation of a talk he had been asked to give about Spore. "It's supposed to be about how I came up with the game, but what I really want to talk about is the history of astrobiology, so I'm doing both," he said. He moved over to the two computers in his office and clicked through some images, while describing the basic structure of Spore. At first, I was baffled. Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise—at a glance, it looks like a "cartoony bug game," as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don't have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; they look more like the architecture in Dr. Seuss books. Wright has also introduced weapons and conquest. The violence isn't gratuitous—in some cases, you have to kill to survive—but it isn't sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them.
At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts—larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level—dry land—and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your own kind which the computer generates, until you form a tribe. You can play a violent game of conquest over other tribes or you can play a social game of conciliation. If you make clever choices, according to the logic of the simulation, you will survive and continue to evolve. Along the way, you get to acquire ever more powerful tools and weapons, and to create dwellings, towns, cities. When your city has conquered the other cities in your world, you can build a spaceship and launch into space. By the final level, you have evolved into an intergalactic god who can travel throughout the universe conducting interplanetary diplomacy and warfare.
The images that Wright called up on the computer were supposed to illustrate the game, but they gave little sense of what it would look like. There was a slide that showed the equation for gravity, a slide about panspermia theory (the idea that life on earth began with organic matter brought from space by comets and other "dirty snowballs"), and a picture of the cast of the early-eighties TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard." Wright paused to say that, according to his calculations, based on the speed of radio waves, a hundred and fifty stars have received "The Dukes of Hazzard" by now.
Spore isn't a multiplayer game, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft, which runs on "massively parallel" computers (a distributed system employing many networked machines); it's what Wright jokingly calls a massively parallel single-player game. If you enable an Internet feature, Spore servers will "pollinate" your copy of the game with content created by other players. In order to create the best content for your style of play—"the right kind of ecosystem for your creature," as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players' content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you. In other words, while you are playing the game, the game is playing you.
Wright asked if I would like to try the Spore "creature editor," which is the first major design tool in the game. On the screen was a kidney-shaped blob that looked like Mr. Potato Head before you add the features. Wright showed me the menus for creating my creature's skeleton, body, eyes, and skin. I used the mouse to stretch the blob into a torso, changing the shape and length of the spine as I did so. I chose the parts from the left side of the screen—flippers, beaks, three-jointed legs—all of which would cost DNA points at this stage of the game. Wright explained, "You can choose different mouths—carnivore, herbivore, omnivore—which will determine not only how you will eat in the world but what type of voice the creature has." On the right side of the screen were graphics that showed the evolutionary advantages and consequences of each choice—speed, power, stealth, etc. Switching to the paint menu, I applied a base coat of purple, then some orange stripes; the computer automatically shaded the colors, so that my creature's skin looked professionally textured.
"O.K., now go to test mode," Wright said.
I clicked a button and my creature sprang to life and started lumbering around the screen. It was a goofy-looking thing—a hammer-fisted apatosaurus with a potbelly, a long neck, and floppy dog ears. But it was a fully animated character, something that Pixar might have created, and I had made it in about three minutes. I felt as if I were playing with digital clay.
Electronic Arts is the largest producer of video games in the world, with more than seven thousand employees, and studios in North America, Europe, and Asia. It makes or licenses software for many game-playing platforms, including computer games for P.C.s and Macs; console games for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft game boxes; handheld games for the Nintendo Game Boy (and the new Nintendo DS) and for the Sony PSP; and online games for playing on the Web. Most recently, E.A. has begun to make "mobile games," for playing on cell phones, a new and rapidly growing market.
E.A. was founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins, a former marketing manager at Apple Computer, as "the new Hollywood," and it was at first supposed to be a haven for video-game auteurs. Hawkins proposed to treat designers, who had hitherto been regarded as mere engineers, as artists, and to design sexy packaging that would evoke album covers, with the names of the creators emblazoned on the front. "Can a video game make you cry?" was one of the company's early challenges. Over the years, E.A. shifted its strategy toward games based on "proven content"—licensed stories and characters from film, sports, and TV, rendered in game form. (More recently, it has focussed on creating its own intellectual property.) E.A. has also developed sports-simulation games, based on professional sports leagues, featuring the players themselves. As Steven L. Kent recounts in "The Ultimate History of Video Games," it began in 1984, with Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One, a basketball game for which E.A. paid Erving and Bird to use their names and images. Since then, E.A. has created a sports-gaming empire. The latest version of Madden NFL, which was originally published in 1990, sold two million copies in its first week of release this August. In recent years, the company has acquired a Microsoft-like reputation for hard-nosed business practices—buying smaller development studios that can no longer afford the rising costs of game production, and shutting out potential competitors with exclusive licensing deals.
The E.A. campus is in Redwood Shores, California, at the northern edge of Silicon Valley. Employees dress in shorts; there's a gym; the games in the company store are less than half price; and several meeting rooms are designed to look like sports bars. But, according to two class-action suits for "unpaid overtime," one filed by E.A. game artists and another by programmers, working for E.A. hasn't always been as much fun as it appears to be. Although both suits have been settled and E.A. has revised its overtime policy, during crunch times eighty-hour weeks continue to be the norm.
While I was at E.A., I was given a demonstration of The Godfather, one of the company's new games. You begin as a low-level criminal and attempt to become, through the clever use of violence and extortion, the head of the crime family. One of the game's innovations is that, in addition to killing opponents, you can also wound them by shooting them in the kneecaps or shoulders—and if you only wound them you can still extort money from them, and thereby advance in the game. I also saw the latest installment of the Tiger Woods golf franchise. The golfer allowed E.A. to attach motion sensors to his body and face, and the data were rendered in computer graphics. The result is, among other things, a remarkable computer-animated version of Woods's famous smile—the way the upper lip slides up over the teeth is perfect. After hitting a good drive, you get to hear Woods whisper, "On the screws, Tiger."
After the demos, I met Larry Probst, the fifty-six-year-old chief executive of E.A., who started in the company's sales department in 1984. Probst explained that E.A. allowed Wright to put together a development team by choosing some of the most talented artists and programmers from E.A.'s vast network of game makers. The company also constructed a separate headquarters for the seventy-five-member team in Emeryville, about fifty miles north of the corporate campus, near Orinda, where Wright was living. It was counting on Spore to help shore up its bottom line. The company's stock price had dropped almost thirty per cent since April, and its sales figures were twenty per cent lower than last year's. Probst blamed the company's problems on one of the cyclical downturns that hits the game industry every four or five years, when a new generation of gaming machines become available; this fall, both the PlayStation 3, from Sony, and Nintendo's Wii system go on sale. Traditionally, gamers stop buying the current generation of games in anticipation of those which will be developed for the new machines.
But there are reasons to believe that E.A.'s problems are more systemic—indeed, that the entire game industry is on the verge of a fundamental restructuring. Not since the early nineteen-eighties, when video games began moving from amusement arcades into homes, has the future seemed so uncertain. While each generation of hardware offers the capacity for increasingly realistic graphics—like Tiger's smile—it also requires producers to devote more programming hours to filling that capacity. Twenty years ago, it was possible for one man to create an entire video game; today, development teams of a hundred or more are the norm. Moreover, E.A.'s basic product, which is a boxed game costing around fifty dollars, isn't as appealing as it once was. Many adult players prefer "casual games," which can be played on cell phones and in shorter sessions online. Instead of buying games at a store and bringing them home, customers want games they can get on the Web. Just as some in the film industry have begun to wonder about the economic feasibility of films that cost upward of fifty million dollars to produce, so people in the game industry wonder whether big-budget games can survive in a climate that favors downloadable games that are cheap, short-lived, and disposable.
During our conversation, Probst seemed most enthusiastic about the market for casual games, especially games for cell phones, which earned E.A. more than a hundred million dollars last year. "Think about what happens when three billion Chinese people have cell phones," he said at one point. But how do you convince a casual gamer, who is just looking for distraction, to play a game that is about evolution, city building, conquest, and interstellar travel? I asked Probst about this, and he said, "You tell people it's a Will Wright game."
Wright belongs to the last generation of game designers (and, indeed, human beings) who grew up before personal computers and game consoles existed. He built models of things as a kid: "ships, cars, planes—I loved to do that," he told me. When Will was ten, he built a balsa-wood replica of the flight deck on the Enterprise, which won an award at a Star Trek convention. He was also fond of the board games made by Avalon Hill, such as PanzerBlitz, a strategy game loosely based on tank warfare on the Eastern Front.
Wright's father, Will, Sr., and grandfather were graduates of Georgia Tech's engineering school, and Wright keeps their graduation pictures hanging on a wall in his house, alongside a picture of himself. His forebears are crewcut men in sober suits, about to embark on successful careers in making useful things. Then, there's Will, Jr., who never graduated from college, and who didn't fit into the family tradition—a gangly man-boy with a sweet, slightly stoned-looking grin. "Something went wrong with this one," Wright said, peering at the picture.
In the nineteen-sixties, Wright's father developed a new way of making plastic packing materials and started a successful company, which allowed the Wrights to live comfortably in Atlanta. Will's dad was also an excellent golfer. His mother, Beverlye Wright Edwards, was an amateur magician and actress. Wright flourished in the local Montessori school, with its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. "Montessori taught me the joy of discovery," Wright told me. "It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design."
In the evening, Will and his father would sit on the porch and talk about the stars, NASA's Apollo program, and the possibility of life on other planets. Wright was planning to be an astronaut, and his goal was to create colonies in space that would help relieve the pressure of overpopulation. His father thought this was a wonderful idea.
When Will was nine, his father died of leukemia, and his mother took him and his younger sister, Whitney, back to Baton Rouge, her home town. Will went to Episcopal, a conventional prep school. He didn't like it as much as the Montessori school, although he enjoyed discussions about God with the faculty. "That's where I became an atheist," he said. He started at Louisiana State University when he was sixteen; two years later, he transferred to Louisiana Tech. He excelled only in subjects that he was interested in: architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, military history. He had impractical goals—in addition to starting colonies in space, he wanted to build robots. He dropped out again after two years, drove a bulldozer for a summer, and then, in the fall of 1980, went to the New School, in Manhattan, where he studied robotics. He lived in an apartment over Balducci's, in Greenwich Village, and spent a lot of time on Canal Street scrounging parts from the sur-plus electronics stores that used to line the street and using them to build a robotic arm.
In the spring of 1981, Wright answered an ad in a car magazine: Richard Doherty, a rally enthusiast, was looking participants to compete in a point-to-point race between Farmingdale, Long Island, and Redondo Beach, California. Wright had a Mazda RX-7, which he and Doherty modified with a larger fuel tank and a roll cage. They wore night-vision goggles so that they could drive fast in the dark without headlights and avoid the cops. "Will said we should take the southern route, even though it was longer, because if we got stopped he'd be able to talk to the cops," Doherty told me. "We did get stopped in Georgia. We were doing a hundred and twenty, with no headlights, but it didn't take Will more than a couple of minutes to make the officer see why he had to let us go without a ticket." They won the race, establishing a new record of thirty-four hours and nine minutes.
After a year at the New School, Wright went back to Baton Rouge to live with his best friend. His family expected Will to take over the plastics company, but Will wasn't interested. (Eventually, they sold the business.) Souping up cars for rally racing was his main passion that summer, until his roommate's sister, Joell Jones, came to Baton Rouge for a visit. Jones was eleven years older than Wright; their families had been friends and he had known her when he was a teen-ager. Now she lived in Oakland, where she was a painter and a social activist. She was back in Baton Rouge to recuperate after severing a nerve in her wrist. To extend the range of motion in her hand, Wright built a device out of metal and rubber bands. "Will would talk to me passionately about the need to colonize space, and I would say that it was more important to feed people on earth," Jones told me. "Somehow we fell in love." When Jones went back to Oakland, Wright asked if he could come and live with her; she agreed, on the condition that he didn't interfere with her painting. They married in 1984.
In the early nineteen-eighties, coin-operated machines began to decline in popularity and home-video games began to take hold. Atari, which had popularized home-gaming consoles, was superseded by Nintendo, a venerable Japanese playing-card company, with its Nintendo Entertainment System. As hardware, the N.E.S. was an improvement over the Atari machines (Atari's joystick controller was replaced with the directional "+" pad, which the player operated with his thumbs), but it was software, in the form of a Nintendo game cartridge called Super Mario Bros., that made Nintendo the industry leader. Shigeru Miyamoto, who had designed Nintendo's Donkey Kong for arcades, redesigned the game, changing the carpenter in the game, whose name was Jumpman, to a plumber, whom he called Mario, and adding a brother named Luigi and a far greater array of aids (golden coins, magic mushrooms), obstacles (fire-spitting enemies), and underground passageways, many of them drawn from Miyamoto's boyhood memories of exploring caves in the mountains near his home in Sonobe.
By the time Super Mario appeared, the syntax for game play was firmly established; it remains the standard grammar today. The player progresses through the game by defeating antagonists, restoring his energy with "power-ups" he finds along the way, accumulating bonus points to rise to progressively harder levels, many of which feature a "boss" who must be defeated in order to earn a "save game" and not have to repeat the level. Although Super Mario, which débuted in the United States in 1985, had a goal (to rescue Princess Peach from a giant reptile named Bowser), it also encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a "software toy"—a concept that influenced Will Wright's notion of possibility space. "The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away," Wright told me. "It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design."
In the late nineties, Sony's PlayStation console replaced the N.E.S. as the dominant home game-playing system, and Microsoft's Xbox, introduced in 2001, is now the second-best-selling machine. But neither Sony nor Microsoft has had Nintendo's influence on basic game design.
In 1991, yet another phase in the game business began when a young programmer named John Carmack, who was, together with John Romero, a partner in a Dallas-based company called id Software, figured out how to program 3-D graphics for a P.C., enabling the designers to give more depth to interior spaces and to create more realistic movements. According to "Masters of Doom," David Kushner's 2003 book, when Romero first saw Carmack's 3-D program, he exclaimed, "This is it. We're gone!" Romero designed the graphics and game play for an ultra-violent game, which called on his own love of nineteen-fifties horror comics published by Evergreen, combined with a heavy-metal sensibility. The result was Doom, the defining first-person shooter, in which you play a "space marine," and the object is to kill the zombies that come at you as you advance deeper into Hell. Everything about the game was designed to inflame a teen-age boy's fantasies of power while causing grave distress to his parents. In 1999, the elders' worst fears about the antisocial effects of first-person shooters seemed to be realized when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the teen-agers who massacred twelve of their classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School, in Colorado, were revealed to be obsessive players of Doom. Congressional hearings on violence in video games followed. More recently, the San Andreas version of the Grand Theft Auto series, in which the object is to pimp and steal your way to the top (you can get power-ups from mugging prostitutes), caused Hillary Clinton to co-sponsor the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would ban the sale of violent games to minors. Clinton also accused the makers of violent and sexually explicit games of "stealing the innocence of our children and making the difficult job of being a parent even harder."
One day in his office, Wright showed me an e-mail he had received from Lara M. Brown, a professor of political science at California State University, Channel Islands, in response to an essay he had written for Wired about the educational value of video games. Brown, who uses technology in her own teaching, wrote, "Most of us are in agreement that this younger generation—raised on video games—has learned to be reactive, instead of active, and worse, they have lost their imaginative abilities and creativity because the games provide all of the images, sounds, and possible outcomes for them. Our students tend to not know how to initiate questions, formulate hypotheses, or lead off a debate because they like to wait to see what 'comes at them.' They also have difficulty imagining worlds (places and/or historical times) unless you (as a professor) can provide them with a picture and a sound to go along with the words. . . . In essence, they seem to have lost the ability to visualize with their minds."
Wright, though, believes that video games teach you how to learn; what needs to change is the way children are taught. "The problem with our education system is we've taken this kind of narrow, reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is," he told me. "It's not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It's not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach. I mean, I think that failure is a better teacher than success. Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways that kids interact with games—that's the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you. The education system is going to realize this sooner or later. It's starting. Teachers are entering the system who grew up playing games. They're going to want to engage with the kids using games."
Shortly after moving in with Jones, Wright began making a helicopter simulator on his personal computer (a Commodore 64). Eventually, the simulator evolved into a shoot-'em-up in which the player flies the helicopter over various cities and islands, trying to bomb buildings and blow up bridges. Wright showed the game to Gary and Doug Carlston, the founders of Broderbund, one of the earliest P.C.-gaming software companies. In 1984, Broderbund brought it out as a P.C. game called Raid on Bungling Bay, and it appeared as a Nintendo cartridge the following year. It was only a moderate success for the P.C., but it sold a million cartridges, mainly in Japan, and because of Nintendo's generous royalty agreement with Broderbund, Wright says, "I made enough money to live on for several years."
In designing Raid on Bungling Bay, Wright noticed that he "was more interested in creating the buildings on the islands than in blowing them up." He started thinking of a game in which the point would be to design buildings, or, maybe, to build a city. A neighbor suggested that Wright take a look at a 1969 book called "Urban Dynamics," by Jay Wright Forrester, an M.I.T. professor, which argued that urban planning could be carried out more rationally by a computer simulation than by humans, because the computer wouldn't be blinded by intuitive biases. In a later book, "World Dynamics," Forrester laid out his proposal for a simulation that could manage the entire planet.
Computer simulations had been around since the nineteen-fifties, when military planners, climatologists, and economic forecasters began programming models of particular scenarios and dynamics, and using them to predict outcomes. One early and well-known biological simulation was the Game of Life, created by a mathematician named John Horton Conway, in 1970. The game, which simulated the growth and death of a living creature, was based on the principle of "cellular automata," in which the programmer assigns simple rules to discrete units, or cells. It can be played on a plain two-dimensional grid, in which black squares represent live cells and white squares represent dead ones. Each cell reacts to the state of the cells around it. The rules are: (1) any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies of loneliness; (2) any live cell with more than three neighbors dies of overcrowding; (3) any live cell with two or three neighbors lives; (4) any dead cell with three neighbors returns to life. Conway's purpose was to show how a simple structure of cells could be organized algorithmically to simulate complex, lifelike systems in which unpredictable or "emergent" outcomes occur.
Wright figured out how to combine Forrester's and Conway's ideas to imitate the dynamics of a city. The player would be responsible for adjusting around a hundred variables in a way that allows the city to thrive. You establish transportation networks, power grids, hospitals, and schools. Each decision affects many other variables: a rising crime rate leads to a declining population, which erodes the tax base, which requires the cutting of some essential services—less funding for the hospital, for example.
Wright built a prototype of the game and worked on it for Broderbund, but the company could not see the commercial potential for a game you couldn't win. Eventually, Broderbund gave back the game's rights to Wright, and he set out to find a backer.
One night, at a pizza party in Alameda, Wright met Jeff Braun, a young businessman who was looking to get into video games. As Braun explained, "Will showed me the game and he said, 'No one likes it, because you can't win.' But I thought it was great. I foresaw an audience of megalomaniacs who want to control the world." Together, they founded Maxis, and brought out SimCity in 1989. (Broderbund eventually joined the venture as a distributor; by then Wright had added a feature that allowed players to destroy their cities with various disasters—a volcano, an earthquake, an alien attack, a meteorite shower.)
SimCity was slow to catch on, but seventeen years later the game has earned the company two hundred and thirty million dollars. A sizable number of players who first became interested in urban design as a result of the game have gone on to become architects and designers, making SimCity arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.
In 1986, Wright and Jones had a daughter, Cassidy, and Jones made Wright promise to share the parenting equally so that she could continue painting. "He really did stick to that," she told me. "He spent a lot of time with Cassidy." While he was at home with his daughter, Wright began to turn over the idea for a new game, a kind of interactive doll house that adults would like as much as children. "I went around my house looking at all my objects, asking myself, 'What's the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?' There should be some reason for everything in my house. What's the reason?"
One morning in 1991, as Wright awoke in his house in the Oakland Hills, he thought he smelled smoke and called 911. Over the next half hour, the smoke got worse. "I thought, Uh-oh, this isn't trending well." He and his wife decided it was time to evacuate (Cassidy was away at a friend's house). They grabbed some family photos, jumped into Jones's car, and drove away. When they returned, three days later, the Oakland Hills firestorm had destroyed everything. Nothing was left except for some lumps of melted metal, the remains of their other car. In the months that followed, as Wright went about replacing his belongings, he started thinking about all the things people needed. "I hate to shop," he said, "and I was forced to buy all these things, from toothpaste, utensils, and socks up to furniture."
Three works helped Wright understand how he could turn these life experiences into a game. One was the book "A Pattern Language," by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley. The book identifies two hundred and fifty-three timeless ways of building, which are classified as patterns—"Stair Seats," "Children's Realm," etc.—and it shows how these patterns can create satisfying living spaces. The idea is that the value of architecture can be measured by the happiness of the people who live in it. The second was the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation," in which Maslow described a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of human needs, with "Physiological" at the bottom, and above it "Safety," "Love," "Esteem," and, at the top, "Self-actualization." The third inspiration was Charles Hampden-Turner's "Maps of the Mind," which compares more than fifty theories about how the mind works. Putting these works together, Wright formulated a model with which to "score" the happiness of the people in his doll house by their status, popularity, and success, and by the quality of the environment the player designs for them—the more comfortable the house, the happier the people. Wright told me, "I don't believe any one theory of human psychology is correct. The Sims just ended up being a mishmash of stuff that worked in the game."
From a technical perspective, Wright's singular achievement in The Sims was to design a new kind of "object-oriented" operating system that modelled the complexity of social dynamics. As Chris Hecker, one of the developers on the Spore team, explained to me, "In Will's games, the objects themselves are encoded to interact with the environment around them. So if you introduce an espresso machine you buy from the online Sims mall, the Sims will be able to make espresso without having to reprogram the game. All you have to do is drop the object into the environment and it will make other stuff happen. The objects create 'verbs,' as we say."
The original Sims had eight motives or needs—hunger, hygiene, bladder, comfort, energy, social, fun, and room—all of which are affected by objects in the world around them. Life for a Sim is the pursuit of happiness, but happiness depends on social interaction and consumption, and consumption requires money. For example, the cheapest bed in The Sims 2, which costs three hundred "simoleons," brings your Sim one point of comfort and two points of energy; a three-thousand-simoleon bed carries seven points of comfort and six of energy. Wright has said that he intended the game as a parody of consumerism, because "if you sit there and build a big mansion that's all full of stuff, without cheating, you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when they had been promising to save you time."
Almost no dedicated Sims player, Wright included, actually follows the rules of the game, which force you to spend many hours working in menial jobs in order to be able to afford nicer stuff. Most players use the "cheats" that are widely available on the Internet and have been built into the game by the programmers. Cheats are short pieces of code you can type into the game that let you get around the rules. Typing "motherlode" into The Sims 2, for example, endows your Sims with fifty thousand simoleons. But using cheats doesn't really feel like cheating, because playing The Sims doesn't really feel like a game. It seems more like gardening, or fixing up your house. One of the game's small triumphs is to make work seem like fun. As my fourteen-year-old niece exclaimed recently, when I asked her what she liked about playing The Sims, "You've got one Sim who you've got to get to school, and another who needs to get to his job, and their kid has been up all night and is in a bad mood, and the house is dirty—I mean, there's a ton of things to do!"
When Wright took his idea to the Maxis board of directors, Jeff Braun says, "The board looked at The Sims and said, 'What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out of his mind.' " Doll houses were for girls, and girls didn't play video games. Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997, was more enthusiastic. (Wright received seventeen million dollars in E.A. stock for his share of the company.) Wright's games are so different from E.A.'s other releases that it was hard to imagine the two being united in the same enterprise. But the success of SimCity had already established Sim as a strong brand, and E.A., which by then, fifteen years after its founding, was becoming a Procter & Gamble-style brand-management company, foresaw the possibility of building a Sim franchise. Released in 2000, The Sims was an immediate hit; it went on to become the best-selling P.C. game of all time. E.A. has since licensed it to many other playing platforms, and issues regular Sims "expansion packs," featuring new content, like Livin' Large, House Party, and Hot Date. (Wright worked on The Sims 2, which was a major redesign, but he has had nothing to do with the expansion packs.) The Sims franchise has earned E.A. more than a billion dollars so far. E.A.'s only misstep was The Sims Online, the multiplayer version released in 2002, which failed to attract the masses of players drawn to other multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft and Runescape.
The Sims brought a huge new population to gaming—girls. That did not come as a complete surprise to Wright, since women made up forty per cent of his Sims development team, and his daughter Cassidy, then fourteen years old, had helped him tinker with the prototypes. When he was a kid, Wright told me, "I never played with dolls, which is more of a social thing than playing with trains—it's about the people in the house. Cassidy helped me see that. She and her friends got into the purely creative side of the game, rather than the goal-oriented side, which really influenced me a lot." Cassidy was traumatized to discover that the Sims could burn down their house, and die in the fire, if they weren't careful around the stove. Wright left that feature in the game.
An unintended result of The Sims' success is that Wright transformed the tactile experience of playing with dolls, which has been a part of children's development for thousands of years, into a virtual experience. The enormous success of The Sims means that children today can grow up without having the hands-on model-making experiences that Wright enjoyed as a child, and that inspired him to make games in the first place.
One evening, I went with Wright to the house he and Jones moved into after the Oakland Hills fire. He drove a black two-door BMW with a fancy radar detector. The car was a mess, inside and out; Wright never washes it, because he wants it to look like one of the banged-up starships in "Star Wars." Parking it in the garage, he led me into the house through a short hallway that was full of oddly shaped pieces of machined steel. Wright explained that these were left over from the days when he competed in gladiatorial robot contests called BattleBots, in which engineers attempt to build the most destructive remote-control robot vehicles possible. These ferocious machines fight in large Plexiglas boxes, ramming into each other at high speeds, trying to disable their opponents by flipping them over; the tournaments are like geek cockfights. One of Wright's robots, which he designed with the help of Cassidy, was called Kitty Puff Puff. It fought its opponents (which had names like the Eviscerator and Death Machine) by sticking a piece of gauze to its opponent's armature, and then driving in circles around it, until the opposing robot was so cocooned in gauze that it couldn't move. Eventually, the organizers banned cocooning.
The house, a split-level, was on a hilltop in Orinda, and it had a lovely view of Mt. Diablo in the distance. Jones's paintings—colorful, biomorphic abstractions—were hung on the walls, and in the yard were her sculptures: architectural-looking objects made of found metal. But Wright's stuff took up most of the space. Just inside the front door was the control console of a Soyuz 23 spacecraft, from the nineteen-seventies, which Wright bought from a former State Department official. Upstairs was his collection of unusual insects. Cassidy was away at college, but her prints—whimsical collages that feature drawings of rabbits and electric sockets—were also on display, and I saw a comic book she made, "The Adventures of Not Asian Girl." On a porch off the living room were large blocks of alabaster that Wright was in the process of sculpting with hand tools into smooth, Brancusi-like shapes, a hobby that Jones had suggested to her husband as a way of expressing his artistic side. The rock dust and overflowing ashtrays on the porch suggested that he had been devoting a considerable amount of time to grinding stone lately.
The house was also filled with books. Some are what Wright calls "landmarks"—foundations for the design of one or another of his games. "Most of the games I've done were inspired by books," he told me. SimEarth, a simulation of the earth's ecology, was based on the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, and SimAnt, an ant-colony simulation, was based on E. O. Wilson's "The Ants." The key landmarks for Spore, however, were not books. They were Drake's equation and "The Powers of Ten." The former, which he'd shown me on the computer screen in his office, is a formula devised in 1961 by Frank Drake, a radio astronomer, to estimate the number of possible worlds in our galaxy that might be populated with beings that could communicate with us. (About ten thousand, according to Drake's calculations.) The latter is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, made in 1977, which begins with a man lying on the grass in a Chicago park, and then shows a series of images of the same shot, each taken from a position ten times farther away than the last one, until the viewer reaches the limits of the universe at 1024 meters (ten to the twenty-fourth power). Then it returns to the opening image and goes the other way, zooming into the man's skin, until at 10-16 you reach the limits of the inner world—the space inside a proton.
"I love 'The Powers of Ten,' " Wright said, "and I've always been a big fan of the Eameses. At the same time, I am really interested in the terms of Drake's equation, and when I began working on Spore I was using it to map some of the game play. At some point I realized that the terms of Drake's equation mapped neatly to the scale of 'The Powers of Ten.' So I rolled the two up into Spore."
Wright seems to be more interested in making games than he is in integrating his ideas into a coherent philosophy. After you have played The Sims long enough, for example, you begin to recognize all the ways in which the simulation is not like real life. (The Sims 2, which came out in 2004, added more refinements to the basic design; in addition to the motives and needs, there are four different aspirations.) The Sims is only as realistic as the social theories it's based on, and these theories have been combined not according to scientific principles but for the purposes of entertainment. The Sims doesn't really model human dynamics; it merely gives you a model for exploring your own idea about how families work (just as playing with dolls does). Wright is not a visionary, in the sense that he is not the author of a world view; he tailors his ideas according to the technical parameters of the simulation and the logic of games. Whether the game involves fighting intergalactic battles or modelling climate change, the simulation works according to a logic of its own. Wright may be the game industry's greatest auteur, but to a large extent he has abdicated authorship of his own creation.
Jones came home with some Mexican takeout, and we ate from the containers, in the living room. Jones is soft-spoken, but she had a quiet authority around the house. She seemed a bit subdued. I asked her if she played her husband's games. "No, I don't. I'm not really interested in games," she said pleasantly. Later, she added, "Our daughter Cass used to say, 'We lived through the process of making the games, so we don't need to play them.' I think it frustrates Will that I don't play his games. Clearly, his games matter, on a deep level, to many people—take these online diaries people keep about their Sims. Wow. I don't know if they're avoiding their lives or learning about them. Me, I don't want to play a game to learn about myself." Several months later, when I heard that Wright and Jones were thinking about separating, and Wright had moved out, I recalled Jones's words.
I asked Wright if he was working on a new game. He said that, for the first time in his career, he was not. He was researching the Soviet space program, and hoping to produce a documentary film about it. He said he was seriously considering a return to rally racing this November by competing in the Baja 1000—a race across the desert. (He later changed his mind.) He has a Hollywood agent and a TV development deal with ABC for a reality show exploring our relationship with technology in the home. But tonight, at least, he did not seem particularly engaged by any of these plans. With the prospect of Spore's launch ahead of him, he seemed a little lost.
In May, I joined some twenty thousand members of the game industry—developers, marketers, distributors, buyers, press—in downtown Los Angeles for the industry's big trade show, Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. Electronic Arts, which had hoped in vain that Wright would have the game ready for the convention, was instead offering conventioneers the opportunity to see Wright demonstrate the game, inside a special Spore Hut that was set up next to E.A.'s enormous pavilion.
By Wednesday morning at ten o'clock, when the trade floor opened, Wright was installed inside the hut, which could accommodate about thirty people. The line to get into the Spore Hut quickly grew to two hours long, snaking through the trade floor. Wright's mission was to play all the way through the game, which he estimates would require seventy-nine years, if one played every aspect of it (Wright is designing cheats), in seventeen to twenty minutes, over and over, for two days.
On the trade floor, screens showed guns, cars, football players, and lycra-clad virtual babes, featuring "better breast shadowing, better breast physics, and deeper breast customization," as one gaming blog put it. It felt as if we were all inside some gigantic video-game machine—the place Nolan Bushnell had imagined thirty-five years earlier.
In the E.A. pavilion, I joined a clump of gamers watching each other play Battlefield 2142, the latest sequel to E.A.'s popular shooter. I took a turn, but kept breaking out in a sweat and being greeted with the alarming sight of my face reflected on the screen—scrunched up, red, demonic-looking. Staggering out of the E.A. pavilion and into the cyber midway, I tried some of the nonviolent games, including Guitar Hero, in which the designers have ingeniously turned the controller into a guitar that you play by pushing buttons; it's like karaoke air guitar. I also tried SingStar Rocks!, a PlayStation game which measures your pitch, phrasing, and timing, and scores you as you sing. (Unfortunately, I chose Nirvana's "Come as You Are," which is not an easy song, and then compounded my problems by trying to sing in Kurt Cobain's register. "Awful" was the game's judgment of my performance, and it bothered me all day.) Finally, I got a demo of Left Behind, which is a Christian-themed video game based on the popular series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. You play a Christian in the streets of post-apocalyptic Manhattan, and the object is to convert as many nonbelievers as you can before the Judgment Day. You get power-ups for finding bits of Scripture, and praying raises your spirit level—which is represented by a graphic "slider" at the top of the screen. However, you have to kill hostile nonbelievers, and can acquire some suitable weaponry for the job. Violence drains your spirit level, but if you click on the pray button you can bring it up again.
The influence of Will Wright was not immediately obvious on the trade floor. His sandbox aesthetic is more noticeable in online virtual communities like Second Life, created by Linden Lab, and based in San Francisco, which uses a similar operating system to The Sims Online. Second Lifers can buy space in a Sim-City-like community, and use it for commercial transactions—conducted in virtual currency that can be exchanged for real money out in the real world. Aspiring musicians can perform onstage while their music is streamed over an audio channel. Second Life seems like a logical outcome of Wright's simulation games—and it isn't technically a game at all. When I asked Wright about Second Life, he said, "I think what you're going to see now on Second Life is people who will start to develop games—someone will invite other people to kick a soccer ball around, and it will go from there."
Wright's situation inside the hut was a little like his situation in the game industry—he seemed both enthroned and imprisoned. I half expected to find Bushnell at the door, charging people a quarter to see the geek. I could dimly make out Wright, seated behind a raft of computers on a raised platform behind the chairs, smears of color from the monitors reflecting on his glasses. There was a large screen on one wall, where the game was projected. He had been demonstrating Spore for about five hours straight when I got there, without lunch or cigarette breaks, although the E.A. handlers had brought him a Mocha Frappuccino, his favorite drink, from Starbucks.
I took my seat. There were little holes in the ceiling, with light behind them, to simulate stars. The walls of the hut were decorated with models of creatures that other players had designed. The lights went down and the game began in the drop of water. "O.K., so we start, and I'm trying to survive here—whoops the guy wants to eat me." Wright narrated the game in the first person, and he seemed to be having fun. Using the creature editor, he put together a part-reptilian, part-avian creature, with yellow and purple stripes, four spindly legs, and talons at the end of its arms; it looked both cute and fierce. "O.K., now I have to survive and eat—whoops, I'm going to run away from that guy. Whoops, not that way—this is a harsh world right now." His creature ate another creature's egg. "O.K., now that I've eaten I feel like mating," and he located a mate the computer had generated for him. The creatures went at it, discreetly, behind a puff of smoke, to the sound of smooth jazz. "Procedurally generated mating," Wright said, with a smoker's chuckle.
Wright hurtled through the levels, evolution moving at hyperspeed as his creature acquired houses, tools, weapons, vehicles, and cities. While he was narrating his creature's adventures, Wright was also explaining how, in passing through the different levels of the game, the player would be progressing through the history of video games: from the arcade games, like Pac-Man, to Miyamoto's Super Mario, to the first-person shooters. At the tribal level you are playing a Peter Molyneux-style God game, and at the global level you are playing Sid Meier's Civilization. Finally, Wright reached the status of intergalactic god, with the power to visit other worlds. "Now we're going to go over to this place, which you can tell by the sliders has intelligent life on it, and this is actually a moon, a moon of this gas giant here. O.K., this is an alien civilization and there are a lot of different things I can do here diplomatically—I can actually use fireworks. O.K., they seem to like that. Actually, now they're starting to worship me as a god. So I might decide to pick one of these guys up." A tractor beam came down from his spaceship and sucked up one of the creatures. The natives started shooting at him. "Oops. They were upset by that."
At a certain point in the performance, the crazy ambition of Spore became clear: Wright was proposing to simulate the limitless possibility of life itself. The simulation falls between Darwinism and intelligent design, into new conceptual territory. Wright had worked out the algorithm for life, as described by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." Dennett writes, "Here, then, is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature. . . . Can it really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance?" The old dream of the M.I.T. hackers who came up with Spacewar—to re-create life on a computer—was coming true forty years later, right here in the Spore Hut, in the form of a spindly, striped creature that looked a little like Will Wright himself.
After Wright's encounter with the other planet, he pulled back to reveal a vast galaxy of other worlds, some computer generated, some created by other players in the game who had reached the status of intergalactic gods—"more worlds than any player could visit in his lifetime," he said. As people in the audience gasped at the vastness of the possibility space, Wright's spaceship zoomed into the interstellar sandbox, looking for an uninhabited planet to colonize, just as young Will had promised his father he would. ♦

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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text:
Other Available Formats
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|Published: July 5, 2011
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|Published: July 5, 2011
I've long considered Larkin Spivey a mentor, warrior, leader, and friend.
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During the Vietnam War Larkin Spivey commanded Bravo Company, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion in defense of the Hue/Phu Bai region and Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines at Khe Sanh and other areas along the DMZ. He later served as Executive Officer of 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, deployed on amphibious ships in support of U. S. advisors and Vietnamese Marine units in country.
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text:
It's hard to imagine anything that's been photographed more than the Eiffel Tower. Since it opened in 1889, the elegant structure has long been an iconic symbol of Paris, a destination for those visiting the city, a site impossible to ignore. For many, the sleek tower—effortlessly gliding skyward, spectacular at night—is a physical manifestation of love and romance. But it's not as if the structure was always without its critics.
Back when designs were unveiled in the 1880s, a group of artists strongly protested its construction, calling it useless and monstrous, an indignation of French taste. Sacrebleu! Its engineer, Gustave Eiffel, likened it to the pyramids and predicted it would eventually become beloved by Parisians and visitors alike. He was right. The Eiffel Tower started its ascent in 1887, and when it was completed two years later, it became the tallest man-made structure ever built at 1,063 feet, surpassing the Washington Monument and holding onto the title of tallest in the world for four decades. An estimated 30,000 people climbed the stairs up into the tower in the first few weeks it opened before elevators had even been installed. It was an instant hit.
Throughout the 20th century, the tower became more than a tower, and more than a symbol of Paris. During World War I, France placed a radio transmitter inside it to jam German radio communications. In World War II, it became a Nazi prize when Germany scaled the structure and planted a swastika on top. Over the years, people have bungee jumped from it. Pilots have attempted to fly underneath it (with disastrous results). By the end of the century, it took on another dimension for Paris's Millennium Celebration when 20,000 light bulbs were installed on the tower, adding a spectacular modern touch that allows it to illuminate each night.
On March 31, the Eiffel Tower will turn 125 years old—and its never been more popular. More than 250 million people have visited the structure since it opened, attracting 6 million people each year and making it the most-visited paid monument in the world.
To commemorate its birthday and exclusive to TIME, Paris-based photographer Lauren Fleishman has been trying to capture the tower in a way it's never been shot before. But it wasn't easy.
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"I think that was a really beautiful moment," she says. "I looked for moments like that, where people were experiencing the tower, looking out at Paris. For some people, it's their dream to come here and see it. So that's how I tried to approach it."
Lauren Fleishman is an award-winning photographer based in New York City and Paris. See more of her work here and or on LightBox here
Josh Sanburn is a writer/reporter for TIME in New York. Follow him on Twitter @joshsanburn.


text:
Talk:SSH keys
- 1 kwallet5
- 2 pam_tally
- 3 SSH public key passphrase
- 4 Starting ssh-agent as a wrapper
- 5 Cleaner systemd-based ssh-agent setup
- 6 SSH Keys generated without -o flag are not safe
- 7
- 8
Section on YubiKeys
- 9 Intro draft
- 10 SSH Agent File Naming
there should be a note about kwallet5 not supporting PGP, for now
--- Lesto (talk) 23:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
- Are you sure it is the case? Can you provide some source, a bug report or something? For now we have SSH keys#Store SSH keys with Kwallet linking to KDE_Wallet#Using_the_KDE_Wallet_to_store_ssh_keys which only has a vague, unsourced "May have a bug" accuracy template. Neitsab (talk) 11:21, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
With two factor authentication (crypto keys **and** password). I achieve that pam_tally increments by 2 the user errors every time I login. So surely there is an error in the suggested configuration--Xan (talk) 12:00, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
SSH public key passphrase
I think that we should add `ssh -p -k ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub` to page, I saw a nice example from https://blog.0xbadc0de.be/archives/300. Pickfire (talk) 10:09, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Starting ssh-agent as a wrapper
In this section, there is a note which says that you "can" add eval$(ssh-agent) to your .xinitrc.
When using ssh-agent as a wrapper to startx, I have noticed that if I have both -- the alias as well as the eval statement in .xinitrc, it spawns 2 ssh-agent processes. I believe this is a leftover note from earlier when we didn't have the section titled "ssh-agent".
Can someone confirm and I will remove that note from the "ssh-agent as a wrapper section", because the way it stands today seems to indicate that you need to do both -- the alias to startx as well as add the eval statement to xinitrc in order for it to work when that is not the case.
Inxsible (talk) 00:46, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
Cleaner systemd-based ssh-agent setup
[Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh-agent -D -a "${SSH_AUTH_SOCK}" [Install] WantedBy=default.target
~/.zshrc or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile or the equivalent
eval $(systemctl --user show-environment | grep SSH_AUTH_SOCK) export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
Touching three files, instead of two, but the path is defined only in one place. Something similar could be achieved with
EnvironmentFile. Thoughts?
Jeremejevs (talk) 17:22, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
- It's arguably not cleaner because you need eval, systemctl and grep to extract the path for the shell. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 18:29, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
SSH Keys generated without -o flag are not safe
SSH Keys with default parameters are not safe [1], Hacker News discussion[2]. The wiki already suggests that we use -o for increased brute force protection, the suggested command for generating keys should include this. Would there be any compatibility issues with any mainstream system by always generating keys with this flag?
Orekix (talk) 02:47, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
- Good call. I'm rearranging the section. It was much too detailed on the technical aspects. All we really want to know is which key type to use and why. There could be compatibility issues with older (pre 2014) implementations of OpenSSH. Hopefully no server you're running has an OS older than 2014. -- Rdeckard (talk) 14:07, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, this flag " -o" is not documented in ssh-keygen's manual page (man or info). If its usage is recommended in the wiki, I think we would need some more links, references, etc., about what it does, why it's not in the manual while being implemented and how you're supposed to find out its existence. Tétrapyle (talk) 09:22, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
- Update. Thanks to information kindly reported by user /dev/zero, this flag is documented in BSD's ssh-keygen manpage. The Gnu/Linux manpage is probably outdated. Tétrapyle (talk)
- As far as I know, OpenSSH 7.8 and above set the OpenSSH format for private keys by default: "ssh-keygen(1): write OpenSSH format private keys by default instead of using OpenSSL's PEM format. The OpenSSH format, supported in OpenSSH releases since 2014 and described in the PROTOCOL.key file in the source distribution, offers substantially better protection against offline password guessing and supports key comments in private keys. If necessary, it is possible to write old PEM-style keys by adding '-m PEM' to ssh-keygen's arguments when generating or updating a key." So, there is no need to set the "-o" flag anymore if you use OpenSSH > 7.7. --Ish (talk) 05:39, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
I think the article should be renamed to SSH key-based authentication because it is mainly about public key authentication. Naming it "SSH keys" is misleading, because with SSH there are always SSH keys involved (the ones of the server) no matter the authentication method used. The parts of the Generating an SSH key pair section that also apply to servers (ssh-keygen and Choosing the authentication key type) would then need to be merged with OpenSSH. Thoughts?
--Larivact (talk) 19:57, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
- It is not "mainly about public key authentication" because SSH keys#Generating an SSH key pair is about actually generating the keys and SSH keys#SSH agents does not describe authentication either, it is about storing the local keys securely and conveniently. Your proposal to change the title does not make sense without massive reorganization to the whole page and other related pages, which I consider unnecessary and counterproductive. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 20:44, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
- SSH agents are just convenience tools for public key authentication. Yes, I already pointed out that Generating an SSH key pair would need to be merged. In fact the introduction is already written as if the article were solely about key-based authentication. Rewriting it to actually explain "SSH keys" would be way more work than merging a single section. --Larivact (talk) 16:28, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- Aside from OpenSSH already being longer than this article, I disagree it's useful to merge Generating an SSH key pair over there. It is two distinct tasks to configure the methods the ssh server accepts for logins, and generating respective keys/storing them safely. Most of this article is written from client-perspective and the client/user needs to make a (somewhat) informed decisions/configurations. --Indigo (talk) 17:59, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- I don't see anything which limits the scope of this page to clients, regardless what most of the content is about. The page is properly linked from both client and server sections of OpenSSH, it doesn't make sense to move the key generation to OpenSSH because the only considerable place is just after the installation section where it can be linked from both client and server sections without using forward references, but readers should not be forced to skim over involved details regarding public key cryptography just to get to the ssh command. Plus, as Indigo said, the OpenSSH page is already long enough.
- You just admitted that SSH keys are different topic than "SSH key-based authentication", so why can't you accept that the topic of this page is "SSH keys" and live with it?
- -- Lahwaacz (talk) 21:14, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- Well I guess what really bothered me is that the article does not live up to its scope. If the scope cannot be narrowed, the content needs to be expanded. I added a respective flag. Closing this; will open a new section for the expansion. --Larivact (talk) 20:10, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Larivact that the article could favorably be renamed, maybe even to "SSH key-based client authentication". The point with using keys is authentication, and it doesn't make sense to have an article on just key generation and storage without mentioning what the purpose of the keys is. If the article is too focused on just generating the keys the article should be expanded, instead of keeping the old name. The part on SSH agents, while not strictly describing authentication, is part of the authentication story and it is a service to the readers to find it here. -- JMyreen 12:22, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
Section on YubiKeys
I agree that the section on YubiKeys could possibly be moved to the YubiKey page, but the YubiKey page is getting too long already. I was not sure where to put it, and chose the SSH Keys page because it deals with exactly the issues at hand in this article, it only presents an alternative to storing the private keys on disk. The focus is primarily on SSH keys, not the YubiKey. This section can also be expanded to include other brands of cryptographic tokens. I don't understand the argument on the "proprietary nature" of the YubiKey, especially regarding the packages. Granted, the YubiKey itself is a closed piece of hardware, but the specifications on how to interact with it are totally open, and follows open standards as much as possible. Yubico's tools are all open source, and opensc (one of the two packages mentioned) is not specific to the YubiKey. Nobody is complaining that a Logitech mouse is proprietary because the code on the microcontroller is closed source. N.b. I have no affiliation with Yubico other than having bought two of their products. -- JMyreen 13:37, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for your prompt remarks. Please don't put that much emphasis on me writing "propietary nature". It was in no way meant discrediting (yes, I agree their open-source approach and documentation is far above average). I just wanted to bring across that it is a proprietary hardware, much like a TPM (article covers similar) but less widespread in usage, and you configure it with its custom (open-sourced) tools.
- For the move over, I see two main options:
- Create a subsection at the end of YubiKey#CCID_Smartcard (which you just expanded with information), or
- Create a new Yubikey#SSH section and move it under that, YubiKey#Two-factor authentication with SSH could be moved in that new section as well, making it two round SSH-related examples.
- My preference would be (1.) since that indeed has the linkage to SSH keys, and no example is covered yet. (YubiKey#Challenge-Response could gain the two-factor section later, but that's nothing to discuss here)
- What do you think? --Indigo (talk) 17:34, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- On your request, I have removed the section "Using a YubiKey with SSH" from this page. If time permits I may republish it on the YubiKey page (it will need editing). --JMyreen 21:00, 23 December 2018.
- Oh, you misunderstood "move" as "remove" there. We move articles or sections according to Help:Procedures. I can help you with that, perform the move and do first adjustments to it. Then you can read over it and see what else you want to change. I take for granted you agree to Yubikey#CCID Smartcard above for now & I'll note here when I moved it. --Indigo (talk) 22:16, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- Done. You find the remainder at SSH_keys#Storing SSH keys on hardware tokens, linking over to the new section.
- Once you had a read over it (at leisure), let me know what you think. --Indigo (talk) 23:13, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
- Closing. --Indigo (talk) 10:29, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
Intro draft
SSH uses public-key cryptography to authenticate servers, optionally it can also be used to authenticate clients.
This article assumes you already have a basic understanding of the Secure Shell protocol and have installed OpenSSH.
Key-based client authentication
SSH keys can serve as a means of identifying yourself to an SSH server using challenge-response authentication. The major advantage of key-based authentication is that in contrast to password authentication it is not prone to brute-force attacks and you do not expose valid credentials, if the server has been compromised.[3]
Furthermore SSH key authentication can be more convenient than the more traditional password authentication. When used with a program known as an SSH agent, SSH keys can allow you to connect to a server, or multiple servers, without having to remember or enter your password for each system.
Key-based authentication is not without its drawbacks and may not be appropriate for all environments, but in many circumstances it can offer some strong advantages. A general understanding of how SSH keys work will help you decide how and when to use them to meet your needs.
If an SSH server has your public key on file and sees you requesting a connection, it uses your public key to construct and send you a challenge. This challenge is an encrypted message and it must be met with the appropriate response before the server will grant you access. What makes this coded message particularly secure is that it can only be understood by the private key holder. While the public key can be used to encrypt the message, it cannot be used to decrypt that very same message. Only you, the holder of the private key, will be able to correctly understand the challenge and produce the proper response.
This challenge-response phase happens behind the scenes and is invisible to the user. As long as you hold the private key, which is typically stored in the
~/.ssh/ directory, your SSH client should be able to reply with the appropriate response to the server.
A private key is a guarded secret and as such it is advisable to store it on disk in an encrypted form. When the encrypted private key is required, a passphrase must first be entered in order to decrypt it. While this might superficially appear as though you are providing a login password to the SSH server, the passphrase is only used to decrypt the private key on the local system. The passphrase is not transmitted over the network.
So there is a new section title, the "public-key cryptography" was moved into a different sentence and the first paragraph of the current Background section is gone:
- SSH keys are always generated in pairs with one known as the private key and the other as the public key. The private key is known only to you and it should be safely guarded. By contrast, the public key can be shared freely with any SSH server to which you wish to connect.
-- Lahwaacz (talk) 21:04, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
SSH Agent File Naming
The current suggested ssh-agent file name is "~/.ssh-agent-thing". I think "~/.ssh-agent.rc" would be more apt, as it bears a certain resemblance to other RC files. Moreover, this will leave the file in the user's home directory as it's never cleaned up. This could be mitigated by writing it to "/tmp/ssh-agent.rc", although I'm not sure what side effects this could have (e.g. on a multi-user system), hence proposing it here before changing the sample script on the page.
CodingKoopa (talk) 18:07, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
- "It's never cleaned up" isn't a major problem as the script will start a new agent on every boot anyway. But you could put the file at
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ssh-agent.envto get auto-cleanup and avoid multi-user issues.
- ...Or you could just tell ssh-agent to put the socket itself at a fixed location such as
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ssh-agent.sock, avoiding the extra indirection. That's how the systemd --user example works.
- grawity (talk) 19:37, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
- I wasn't able to get it working by using
-ato set the socket location and then evaluate that (I got
/run/user/1000/ssh-agent.sock: No such device or address, so I assume that the socket can't be used in the way that I thought it could?). Regardless,
XDG_RUNTIME_DIRis exactly what I was looking for. Cheers.
- CodingKoopa (talk) 20:25, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
- I wasn't able to get it working by using


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Revolution and Counterrevolution in Guatemala, 1944-1963
An Annotated Guide to Street Literature in the Benson Latin American Collection (Part II: 1950-1957)
The Guatemalan Revolution of October, 1944, following the forced resignation of Jorge Ubico, president of Guatemala for the previous thirteen years, led to a struggle for political and social change that has continued to the present. Many of the issues which emerged in the years following the Revolution continue to concern Guatemalans today, and they have taken on international significance in light of an ongoing political and social struggle, which has periodically turned violent.
The first ten years after the Revolution saw two presidents, Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, lead the country to adopt a new constitution, broaden suffrage, encourage an active labor movement, and legislate agrarian reform, a labor code, and university autonomy. Progress toward these and other goals was not without opposition, spearheaded by an active anticommunist movement. The first post-revolutionary decade ended with the resignation of Arbenz in June, 1954, prompted by the presence of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional just across the border in Honduras, reinforced by air support from the United States.
Guatemalan national life changed direction in the next decade, 1954-1963, when Carlos Castillo Armas, erstwhile leader of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, assumed the presidency in July, 1954, and it continued to change when, after his assassination in 1957, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes was elected president (1958). Many changes initiated during the revolutionary period were maintained--social security, the labor code, and public health programs among them. Others, such as the agrarian reform laws, with their actual and symbolic significance, were drastically modified, and the Constitution of 1945 was abrogated and replaced with a new one in 1956. Many organizations--especially those representing economically deprived sectors of society--were abolished, and new political parties were formed. All of these changes occurred amidst protest--this time from student groups, labor organizations, and the remnants of certain political parties.
The political and ideological struggles which characterized Guatemalan national life during these two decades produced many ephemeral publications which were used by organizations, individuals, and the government for a variety of purposes: to state policy, express opinions, advocate causes, question or denounce the views of others, urge fellow citizens to act, advertise meetings, strikes, and demonstrations, and support political candidates.
Scope and Contents Note
This annotated guide identifies and describes 2636 ephemeral publications which are part of the Taracena Flores Collection. *It is the companion volume to Revolution and Counterrevolution in Guatemala, 1944-1963: An Annotated Bibliography of Materials in the Benson Latin American Collection, published in 1984 by the General Libraries of The University of Texas at Austin, which described 984 cataloged items--books, pamphlets, microforms, and serials. These publications came to the Benson Collection as part of the collection of Arturo Taracena Flores, a Guatemalan bibliophile who spent a lifetime gathering printed and other materials about his country. The Taracena Flores Collection, purchased by the University of Texas at Austin in two installments (1963 and 1970), consisted of some 7,000 books and pamphlets, more than 5,000 broadsides, several hundred periodical and newspaper titles, newspaper clippings, maps, and miscellaneous items on all subjects. The dates of publication for most of the items were between 1821 and 1963.
Most of the publications cited in this guide can be termed street literature, since they were intended to be read or distributed widely and/or posted in public places. In keeping with messages intended for a popular audience their content was often brief. **For more information about this material see Ann Hartness, "A political and Social Profile in Street Literature: Guatemala, 1944-1963" in Nahuatl to Rayuela: The Latin American Collection at Texas, ed. Dave Oliphant (Austin: The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1992). First published in The Library Chronicle of The University of Texas at Austin 22, no. 3 (1992): 116-131.
Broadsides--separately published sheets of paper, printed on only one side--comprise by far the largest group of materials. A second and smaller group is comprised of manuscripts and a variety of ephemera, listed under the rubric "Miscellanea." A few examples indicate the wide ranging nature of its content: clandestine originals or carbon copies of anonymous typescripts which urge readers to circulate them or to make additional copies and distribute them; safe conduct passes issued to individuals by the government during states of emergency; invitations to official events; acrostics relaying brief messages; political party membership cards; funeral announcements of prominent persons; and itineraries of visiting foreign dignitaries (such as the one prepared for the visit of Richard M. Nixon in 1955). Campaign handbills for political parties, individual candidates, or slates of candidates form the third category of materials, while the fourth and smallest category is posters.
All of the major issues that concerned Guatemalans during this period (except for the Belize question) are reflected in the materials cited in these materials: agrarian reform, freedom of speech, voting rights for illiterates, communism, anticommunism, the labor movement, rural development, the role of the Church in political affairs, and foreign intervention in Guatemala's internal politics are among them. Also well represented are important events related to these issues--elections, strikes, demonstrations, political conventions, May Day celebrations, presidential inaugurations, political assassinations, and student events with political overtones, such as the Huelga de Dolores.
The materials also represent a broad range of organizations and interest groups, reflecting the ideological impartiality of Arturo Taracena Flores when it came to collecting Guatemalan imprints, for the whole spectrum of political opinion is exemplified. Political parties, labor, unions, cultural and religious organizations, government agencies, and groups representing such diverse interests as those of students, campesinos, landowners, urban workers, the military, teachers, small business owners, and women, all expressed their opinions or interpreted events. Individuals ranging from exiled political leaders and students to elder statesmen also published their views. **Although the diligence of Mr. Taracena Flores in collecting Guatemalan imprints has been referred to, a footnote is in order here. In fact, not all of the materials that he collected were published in Guatemala. Among the more interesting exceptions are publications of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, issued in Honduras, and the publications of exile groups located in El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.
The wealth of documentation about and commentary on Guatemalan national life, 1944-1963, to be found in the Taracena Flores Collection and in other materials acquired by the Benson Collection, is an invaluable resource for research in Guatemalan politics and history, and on such diverse topics as student activism, land reform, anticommunist movements, labor movements, the Church as a factor in politics, and women's studies. It is also rich in material for biography and for studies of specific organizations. The Guatemala of this period continues to attract the interest of political leaders, scholars, and journalists as they look for clues to the current Guatemalan political situation in the events of the past, and attempt to fit contemporary Guatemala into a regional and world context.
The basic arrangement of this guide is chronological by year of publication, encompassing the years 1944-1963. An item is listed under a given year when the date of publication is printed on it, or when the date can be determined from the context. Items which can be placed only within a decade are listed under undated categories representing the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, while those with completely unknown dates are listed under the last category of the guide, "Undated Items." Subdivisions within each year are by format: broadsides, miscellanea, campaign handbills, and posters. Each item within these categories is listed alphabetically by author, or by title if the author is unknown. The individual entries are numbered sequentially (1-2636), and they correspond to the numbers on the items in the collection of ephemera from the Taracena Flores Collection which is available upon request in the Rare Books Reading Room of the Benson Collection.
Each entry provides complete bibliographical information, and most include annotations noting the subject of the publication, the names of individuals or organizations referred to, and other significant information. Annotations are omitted when the title of a piece adequately describes its content and there is nothing else which requires mention.
A list identifying acronyms which appear in the publications follows the guide. In a very few cases acronyms could not be identified, and thus do not appear in this section.
The Author/subject Index is combined in one alphabet. It includes names of persons, organizations, periodicals, and newspapers (which often published broadsides reprinting articles which appeared in them), and laws and decrees. It also includes events and significant dates. For example, citations can be found under such entries as Huelga de Dolores, Elections, Demonstrations, May 1, and Revolution, Oct. 20, 1944. Geographic locations are also cited when an event took place in cities and departamentos other than Guatemala City and the Departamento of Guatemala, or when items were published outside of the capital. The index also includes a few broad subject entries referring to interest groups and to major issues. Students and youth, Women, Campesinos and Agrarian reform and Foreign intervention are examples of these two categories.
Microfilm of the material cited in this guide is available on loan or for purchase from the Benson Latin American Collection.
Special thanks are due to Harold W. Billings, Director of The General Libraries, and to Laura Gutiérrez-Witt, Head Librarian of the Benson Latin American Collection, for their support of the compilation of this guide over a period of several years, which included a research work assignment making the necessary concentration on it possible. Warm thanks are also extended to Veronica Grossi, Lynette Thorn, and Richard Toscano who spent many hours doing the word processing which led to publication, and to Margo Gutiérrez for her proofreading assistance.
Restrictions on Access
Restrictions on Use
Use of some materials may be restricted due to preservation concerns. Standard copyright restrictions apply.
Related Material
Administrative Information
Preferred Citation
Arturo Taracena Flores Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin


text:
Giant glasses of wine, shirtless dancing, Tom butting in on the cul-de-sac crew. "Cougar Town" is back!
The sitcom will make its triumphant return January 8—that's a Tuesday—at its new TV home on TBS. Cast members made the announcement musically this morning in video for an original ditty called "We're Back." (Watch it at bottom of this post.)
Josh Hopkins is in stellar voice and pitch perfectly backed by Courteney Cox, Christa Miller-Lawrence, Busy Philipps, Dan Byrd, Ian Gomez, Brian Van Holt and even Bob Clendenin (noisy neighbor Tom).
They're joined by a bevy of guest stars, including "Scrubs" vet Neil Flynn and Danny Pudi, who I believe is actually in character as Abed from "Community," "Cougar Town's" No. 1 fan. "Cougar Town" was created by "Scrubs" mastermind Bill Lawrence. Lawrence and co-creator/executive producer Kevin Biegel will be involved with the show at TBS, but Ric Swartzlander will take over as showrunner, according to reports.
TBS rescued "Cougar Town" from a fate worse than a day with Tom—cancelation—when it bought the rights to the series from ABC, who didn't treat it very well at all. Since debuting on ABC in 2009, "Cougar Town" was abused by the network, facing a series of scheduling changes and a 10-month of its third season. During its second season, the series was slotted for a spring return after more than two months off the air on a Monday night before continuing in its usual spot on Wednesdays two days later. It averaged about 4 million viewers for its third season.
TBS, which has ordered a fourth season of the whimsical favorite, should provide a much more stable home. So stock up on the wine and dig for extra change, folks. Jan. 8, 2013, will be here before you can scream "Penny Can!"
Busy Philipps, Ian Gomez and Danny Pudi all have strong Chicago ties. Check out out gallery of former Chicagoans on TV.
Want more? Discuss this article and others on Show Patrol's Facebook page.


text:
Ken Anderson Court of Inquiry Set to Begin Sept. 11
The court of inquiry that will investigate whether former prosecutor Ken Anderson committed criminal prosecutorial misconduct in Michael Morton's 1987 trial will get under way in September.
Update, July 17, 5:40 p.m.:
Special prosecutor Rusty Hardin said that former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson's court of inquiry, which had been scheduled to begin Sept. 11, has been moved back to Dec. 10.
Original story:
The court of inquiry that will investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct against the prosecutor who oversaw the wrongful conviction of Michael Morton is set to begin Sept. 11, a lawyer for Morton said Tuesday.
Tarrant County Judge Louis Sturns set the date during a telephone hearing Tuesday between attorneys for Morton and former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson. Cynthia Orr, an attorney for Morton, said the judge scheduled the events to begin after special prosecutor Rusty Hardin finishes a trial in which he is representing former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens in a steroids-related case. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for August.
Orr said a former Houston police officer has also been appointed as an investigator to examine the case against Anderson, who is now a Williamson County state district judge.
A venue for the court of inquiry hasn't been determined.
In 1987, Anderson prosecuted Morton for the murder of his wife. Morton was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison after Anderson convinced the jury that he had beaten his wife to death because she didn't have sex with him on his birthday.
DNA testing last year showed that Morton was innocent and linked his wife's murder to another man. Morton was freed in October, after spending nearly 25 years in prison. Mark Norwood, a 57-year-old Bastrop dishwasher, has been indicted in Christine Morton's murder and is awaiting trial in the Williamson County Jail.
Morton's lawyers allege that during the trial, Anderson deliberately withheld evidence that would have exonerated him.
Anderson has said that while he regrets that the judicial system made mistakes in Morton's case, he did nothing wrong.
Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.


text:
A powerful drama based on the 2007 bestseller 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' opened the fourth Doha Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday in the Qatari capital. The opening night, attended by the film's director Mira Nair and author Mohsin Hamid, also saw a number of Gulf and Arab celebrities at the Souq Waqif, Doha's cultural nerve centre.
Speaking at a press conference earlier in the day, Mira Nair said she decided to adapt the book into a film because she said she was "tired of always seeing the story from one point of view".
"I have always believed that if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will," she said.
The 'Reluctant Fundamentalist', which stars Riz Ahmad and Kate Hudson, along with Shabana Azmi and Om Puri, is about a Pakistani Princeton graduate who becomes torn between his American dream and the call of his homeland.
"We discuss two very important forms of fundamentalism — that of the capitalists and that of terrorists," Nair said.
The film is co-funded by the Doha Film Institute, which owns the festival.
"Bringing [the film] to Doha is like a homecoming for me. They have been with me from day one," said Nair, who added that the film took her five years to make.
Pakistani author Hamid said that while the film was not autobiographical, it reflected his own life experiences. "It comes from a world I am familiar with and similar to my own," he said.
Hamid adapted the bestseller with Ami Boghani and William Wheeler.
More than 87 films will be screened during the eight-day festival, which will also see more than $440,000 (Dh1.61 million) given out in the Arab Film Competition. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival will run until November 24.
Via SyndiGate.info
© Al Nisr Publishing LLC 2019. All rights reserved.


text:
This is what I've got. I cannot boot and I see the two of three little lights on the keyboard blinking all the time and the cooling is working on full power, almost.
I saw in other askubuntu topic suggestion for memory test. I did it. I didn't have any errors.
I am 99,9% sure it is not a hardware problem, because I have Windows 7 and I can boot it and it works just fine.
This problem came without any warning or something. I just turned off the laptop one day and at the other day I couldn't boot.
From recovery mode I get this:


text:
5 Marla Full House, 3 Bedroom, Attach Bath, 2 Kitchen, T.V Lounge Plus Drawing This astonishing house has been extensively refurbished and extended boasting large, bright living space, good-sized bedrooms, with attach bathrooms. Situated on a peaceful road, few steps away from market and all necessities. You will love the feeling of having the amazing house. If you searching for a handsome deal contact us for more details AARZ.Pk.
Read More...
Mian Awais
Business Name:
Property Address:
Bahria Town, Lahore, Punjab
Office Address:
Lakki Marwat
11:00 AM to 9:00 PM
|Property ID: 41162
|Type: Home
|Status: Rent