empire n.
Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game
written by Peter Langston many years ago. A number of
multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist,
and one single-player version implemented for both Unix and VMS;
the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are
notoriously addictive. Of various commercial derivatives the best
known is probably "Empire Deluxe" on PCs and Amigas.
Modern empire is a real-time wargame played over the internet
by up to 120 players. Typical games last from 24 hours (blitz) to
a couple of months (long term). The amount of sleep you can get
while playing is a function of the rate at which updates occur
and the number of co-rulers of your country. Empire server
software is available for unix-like machines, and clients for
Unix and other platforms. A comprehensive history of the game is
available at http://www.empire.cx/infopages/History.html.
The Empire resource site is at http://www.empire.cx/.
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engine n.
1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but
can't be used without some kind of front end. Today we have, especially,
`print engine': the guts of a laser printer. 2. An analogous
piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy
crunching, such as a `database engine'.
The hacker senses of `engine' are actually close to its
original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever
device, or instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This
sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation
of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which
explains why he named the stored-program computer that he
designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.
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