hetnet.nl · Domains · Slashdot Mirror

Amiga Lives Again! by Schraegstrichpunkt · 2007-07-26 18:00 · Score: 1 · on Dearly Departed — Companies and Products That Didn't Make It

Minimig (an FPGA re-implementation of an A500) was released as GPLv3+, as of a few days ago.

Doh, broken link here by ackthpt · 2006-03-10 06:02 · Score: 1 · on The Science of Secrecy

dutch agents

Re:Microsoft sucks. by Zey · 2005-12-16 07:39 · Score: 1 · on 30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share

Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.

Possibly true for the US. Not so elsewhere. In the UK and Australia though, Amstrad's PC clones were at the AUD $1000 price point in 1988 (mine was the PPC512S "luggable" with one of the first "CGA emulating" LCD screens) but there were also similar desktop models around. I used to do my highschool and uni assignments on that with Wordstar and did a bit of programming with Borland Turbo-Pascal 3 (which was released for both DOS and CP/M) ;-).

If we're excluding IBM PC clones, some home micros were quite affordable in the early days. AUD $100 bought me my very first computer: a DSE VZ-200 (aka Laser 200 in Germany, Texet TX8000 in the UK) in 1983, while schools in Australia were generally stocked with Microbees.

Dead Media Project anyone? hello? by RomulusNR · 2005-08-08 09:14 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Mysterious 20-Year-Old Analog Media?

You guys all suck. First place anyone should have looked was The Dead Media Project. A search on dictation turned up this possiblity:

The Recordon, aka the Mail-A-Voice, was a magnetic disc-based dicatation device made in the 50s. It used a paper-based disc (originally; later it used plastic discs) which in theory could be folded, mailed in an envelope, and played back. The media was sold by 3M but not made by them.

A search on DeadMedia for "magnetic disk" also turns up the Timex Magnetic Recorder, though it's believed this was never actually sold.

Re:Well! by SIGPUNKT · 2005-02-22 06:36 · Score: 1 · on Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

What I consider one of my top gadgets I listen to the BBC on.

Me too.

And if I need to fix it, I know I can always rely on this to get it sorted out.

30 to 40 bucks??!? by bbc · 2005-02-20 12:14 · Score: 1 · on Always-On Internet For Cheapskates?

HetNet's cheapest ADSL is 13 euro a month. No idea why you pay so much for broadband.

Haast's Eagle has been known for some time by jd · 2005-01-04 16:54 · Score: 3, Informative · on Ancient DNA Helps Solve the Legend of Giant Eagles

What wasn't known, until very recently, that it was NOT related to other giant eagles, but to one of the smallest eagles in Australia.

Haast's Eagle (Harpagornis moorei) has been known since 1872, to be precise, although the first fossils were apparently found in 1871. According to Christchurch Library in New Zealand, the most complete skeleton was found in 1990.

It is not altogether clear when it became exinct - or even if it did. The last report of a massive bird in New Zealand was in the 19th century, and persistant claims of a giant eagle of comparable size have been made in Canada. It is not impossible that the bird somehow escaped New Zealand and reached the Americas. In which case, Canada would be a logical place for it to go, being relatively uninhabited and much closer in climate to the South Island than, say, South America is.

Merely for trivia value, the Haast Eagle is believed to have preyed (at least in part) on the Moa (pronounced Moor - there are no extinct mowers in New Zealand that anyone is aware of), was the tallest bird that ever lived, at 13 feet. (The Elephant Bird, in comparison, was about 10-12 feet.)

The Moa's eggs, however, were about the same size as those of the Kiwi - which is only about a couple of feet in height. (The Kiwi lays one egg at a time, mostly because the egg is comparable in size to the bird itself!)

However, nature didn't stop there. Not too long ago, a giant octopus, 40' across, washed ashore there. Also, the only known grounds for baby giant squid (yes, the 40' variety) are also in their waters.

There are also several species of dolphin and whale that are unique to the area.

Not to be outdone, the Kea is the only known flightless parot. It is also the highest altitude parrot, living as it does at the snow line along the Southern Alps.

However, New Zealand didn't just produce some of the most magnificent creatures, it also produced some of the sickest, being home to the so-called "Killer Earthworm", a cannibalistic earthworm that devours just about anything in its path.

It also gets featured in Douglas Adams' "Last Chance To See", in consequence of having one of the rarest - and dumbest - birds in the world, which is apparently incapable of telling the difference between an egg and a potato.

Re:I have always wanted to see by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-15 04:50 · Score: 0 · on War of the Worlds Remake Already Shot Overseas

Well, you could always do it yourself, now that it's public domain.

Get a hold of Blender for 3D animation and rendering. You can use Terragen to create photorealistic landscapes. You can grab a kick-ass free model of the martian tripod, or if you've got $65 to spare, you could buy a pre-made model of a martian tripod. I don't recall what type of ship the Thunderchild was supposed to be, so I can't provide a link to that, but there are lots of free models you can find for that, too. That should just about do it... all you need for a CGI recreation of the scene, on a budget of $0.

If you don't like CGI, you could just make a paper model of the martian tripod and shoot it on video in your kitchen sink. The quality might suffer a bit, though.

There's a really cool collection of various WotW artwork here that should help inspire you.

Sims Proposals by SimHacker · 2004-02-16 15:04 · Score: 1 · on Sim City Inside The Sims - Russian Doll Effect?

Sims Proposals

Here are some proposals and documents I've written, describing the work I've done and projects I've proposed with The Sims character animation system, plug-in objects and tools. After four years, a great deal of useful information has been reverse-engineered by independent third-party developers and open source projects like The Sims Technical Library. I hope these ideas will inspire more tool developers to contribute their programming skills to the Sims community.

Will Wright's original vision was enabling creative storytelling, by allowing players to add their own characters and objects to the game, and encouraging developers to program new objects and create tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic. Before The Sims was even released, Luc Barthelet sewed the seeds of its success by providing fans with content and tools like SimShow, so they could start making web sites and character skins. By the time it was released, you could already download a wide range of skins from many different web sites!

Four years later, Sims Object hackers have taken it much further than anyone ever imagined. A third-party tool called "iffpencil 2" has taken the place of Edith (Maxis's visual Sims object programming environment) in the Sims object hacking community.

One mind-blowing example is Slice City, which is an amazing game within a game: SimCity within The Sims! Your Sims can walk around and interact with a live, growing city like a Lilliputian scene from Gulliver's Travels. I'm not making this up: this actually runs INSIDE The Sims, and is ingeniously implemented by plug-in objects!

You start with a power plant, which gradually grows a whole city populated by swarms of insect-sized people. As the city grows, it spawns new objects including buildings (reprogrammed houseplants that the gardener still waters), crowds of people (reprogrammed cockroaches that you can still stomp to death), parks, marinas and monuments. You can go into build mode and rearrange them however you like, place roads (that get extremely busy at rush hour), and interact with the buildings through pie menus in play mode. There's even a tornado that comes through and knocks down your buildings. And you can download add-ons and pre-made cities!

Nothing like SimSlice was in the original design plan, but Will Wright credits all the creative players as the primary reason The Sims has become the #1 selling game of all time.

I believe the starkly contrasting failure of The Sims Online has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't support player created content like the original Sims. One of the fundamental reasons that original Sims players have been disappointed with The Sims Online, is that Maxis never executed on the original plan to let online players upload and exchange their own skins and objects.

In order to help more fully realize Will's original plan, I wrote these proposals and documents to support the community of Sims artists, tool developers and object programmers like Bil Simser, Judson Hudson, Michael Watson, Rick Halle, Tom van Dijk