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That hypothetical conversation will never happen. . . because, if a prosecutor can cite a "national security need," thanks to the USAPATRIOT act, he can get the warrant without ever having to go before a judge.

No, the prosecutor would have to answer to a judge, only thing is it would be a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- the FISC is a seven-member panel, comprised of judges hand-picked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it meets in secret and answers only to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (which also meets in secret).

In all of the FISC's existence, only a single case has gone up for review, a case which challenged some of the more severe powers granted by the USA PATRIOT Act -- the FISCR's ruling upheld that yes, the FISC did have the right to use the powers it sought.

*sigh*

It's pretty hard to reconcile the bible with the abundance of archaeoligcal evidence that shows that dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years before the first humans showed up.

Reading and believing in the Bible doesn't require the reader to take it literally. Some random and eclectic examples of people who don't read the Bible literally.

These fairy tales don't fly on slashdot because the people here are educated enough to know better.

No, they really aren't; I read views on Christianity and other religions that are chock full of misconceptions or misunderstandings all the time.

There's a major tendency by various posters on Slashdot to overgeneralize American Protestant fundamentalism into Christian orthodoxy. If you don't know the differences between fundamentalism and orthodoxy, realize that your knowledge of Christianity ranks fairly low. (Which is to say that people can't be experts on everything. Even on Slashdot.)

My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance. QED indeed.

Yes it can.

Great, this is a copy of my original page of instructions located here. Probably at some time I may have given them permission to copy or link to the site, but I did ask that they reference the original page (which they do not seem to have done).

BTW, this was the first public web page I ever created -- way back in the dark ages of the web. I need to fix the broken links, counter, and my (really) old e-mail link :-(

What crack are you smoking?

Make a knife!

For all you D&D/Conan nerds out there...

You can also buy your own meteorite here.

Agreed about Barney. Now, this Barney would have been a better choice.

What? All my Email Accounts, along with the accounts of most everyone I know recieve around 75-90% Spam.

Only my account that subscribes to bugtraq and some other security focus lists doesn't have such a ratio.
Anybody who subscribes to those lists (should be almost everybody B-)) Knows that that doesn't say mutch though, with 20 messages a day from some of those lists, it's crazy.

But I degress, one account I've had for around 4 years now would be broken due to spam if it wasn't for yahoo's nice filters, now I don't see a drop of it. But my 'Bulk Mail' folder will fill up my 4meg account often in about a week, and I only maintain about 100-200k of saved stuff in there. Oh well, I did a little research for other people paying attention to their ammounts of spam (maybe blatent karma whoring, but who cares hehe):

spamfryer?
Spam Cop
Why spam is bad - Apparently a personal spam site
HiWaay - Alabama ISP, keeping records and real time graphs.

Other Interesting stuff:
MyRealBox - Test bed for Novells Mail server development, checkout the license agreement to get a free mail box, seriously, apparently you must pay $10 for every piece of spam you recieve in the box... Please correct me if you see it differently.
The Cost of Spam

sites from google and SpamCon.

After I found this site on making business card cubes, I started doing more experiments and figured out how to make tetrahedrons, octahedrons, and icosahedrons using a really simple module.

Instructions are here

Now I have a nice set on my monitor.

Early versions of Visual Basic were similar to CanDo (see a comparison). CanDo was released on the Amiga in December 1989. Visual Basic was released in May 1991.

You can see our mail stats here.

yes and no, its called the "work boy"

This site claims to have specs, but the link didn't work Jeff Frohwein's GameBoy Tech

This site has some info, a illustration and a publisher. emulation zone

It also seems that sony makes a info red keyboard, that is compatable with GBC.

Actually, this isn't the first time someone put sticky stuff in a tube, slapped an injected oxidzer on it and got a cheap, effective rocket motor.

>>Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as
>>the inspiration for the development of VRML
>
>The idea was out there in one form or another
>for a lot longer than Snow Crash has been around.

Thanks for the correction. You are of course, correct; other cyberpunk authors had similar stuff in mind for quite a while before snowcrash.

I'll try to partially redeem myself by pointing out that snowcrash's publication date was a half decade before the date that VRML became an ISO standard. I suppose I will have to settle for saying that Snow Crash was highly inspirational to the development of VRML. :)

I recommend you slice it up and sell off most of it. If you and/or your grandpappy were into knives, you might consider having part of it made into a collectible knife.

You could sell it to the knife company for the knife and a nice chunk of cash.

I recall there was a slashdot story on Damascus steel that referred to some of these knives maybe a year ago.

Of course, if its not your typical iron meterorite, then it maybe is even more valuable, so maybe an assay is the best way to start.

My favorite standup games were GORP (rare), Sinistar and Discs of Tron.

Sure you don't mean Gorf? "Gorfian robots, attack, attack! Too bad, space cadet." (Or was there a video game based on the camper's staple, "Good Old Rasins and Peanuts"?)

I only played Sinistar and Discs of Tron a few times but they were definitely cool. Probably the most quarters I pumped into a game, though, was a few years latter with "Space Harrier". That, and the videodisk game "Mad Dog McCree", were the only ones I ever got really good at, where other people would gather around to watch me play.

The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.

I think you're just trolling, but in case you aren't, here's the difference:

I go to a fair bit of trouble and expense to maintain my networks. I get to decide what happens with it. Spam is a parasitical use of that network, something I don't want. The reporting of spam is one of the things I do want. If I feel that it's clogging my network, I can stop anytime; I can't do that with spam.

Spam is noise on a data channel.

Uh, no. It's not like spam is some weird radio interference problem or some quantum effect. Real humans write and send every spam. They do it because they think they can make money at it.

This is not an inevitable consequence of the existence of a communication channel. Spam was negligible for many years; it wasn't until around the time of September That Never Ended or maybe the green card spam that I recall getting any. Since then it has grown explosively, so that for many people it outweighs regular mail. Ignoring it in hopes that it will go away or level out is about as smart as ignoring a suppurating wound.

E15: What is the Gazebo story? And what's the Head of Vecna?

Both of these are gaming stories that have been told and retold so many times that they have taken on the air of urban legends--where the original DM is a "friend of my sister-in-law's uncle's second cousin" and if you track that path down, it turns out to be just that, a story. However, in both of these cases, the original tellers are known, the original versions are archived on the web, and both stories really happened!

The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo, by Richard Aronson, is about a player who didn't know that a gazebo is a hutlike building typically found in parks, and had his character attack one. The story was originally written in 1986, and various versions of it can be found all over the web. One such place is the rec.humor.funny webpage; another, with some background into how the story spread, can be found at DreadGazebo.com.

Whereas the tale of Eric and the Gazebo is about how lack of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, The Head of Vecna, by Mark Steuer, is more of a morality tale about how greed can make you stupid. Most *D&D players have heard about the Hand and Eye of Vecna, powerful artifacts which require the owner to cut off his own hand or eye in order to gain the powers. In this case, the characters found what they thought was the Head of Vecna, and ended up with several headless--and thus very dead--characters. The full story can be found at on the web at Stan Berry's webpage.

About 9 months ago I subscribed to Time, for the first time ever. The first thing I ever got from them, a good two weeks before I got my first issue, was a letter warning me that my subscription was about to run out and I should resubscribe.

Two months after cancelling an AOL Trial account I had for 3 days, citing a desire for broadband as my reason, I got a call from their broadband department. After the usual sales drivel, it went something like this:

Me: I'm not interested, I already have DSL.

Them: I see. Do you have it through BellSouth?

Me: No.

(pause)

Them: hmm... Perhaps you mean you have cable. Do you have service with RoadRunner or Comcast?

Me: No.

(pause)

Them: well, I'm looking at information for your zipcode, and if you don't have service with BellSouth, RoadRunner, or Comcast, you don't have broadband.

Me: Yes, I do.

Them: No, you don't.

Me: Yes, I do.

Them: No, you don't.

Me: Yes, I have service with--

Them: He's making it up. *click*

Yes, AOL hung up on ME this time.

Anyway, I did have DSL service with a local ISP. They may resell BellSouth's service, but they're not BellSouth. I've been with these guys since 9600bps dialup and they've always been great.

Believe it or not, the names in all capital letters is one of the things that conspiracy theorists try to use. A fun read is the destroyed arguments section of the Dixieland Law Journal. That page is a conspiracy site telling other conspiracy people that they're being a little too out there. The capital letters issue is explained and debunked at a link there.

Believe it or not, the names in all capital letters is one of the things that conspiracy theorists try to use. A fun read is the destroyed arguments section of the Dixieland Law Journal. That page is a conspiracy site telling other conspiracy people that they're being a little too out there. The capital letters issue is explained and debunked at a link there.

The bolsters are made from Gibeon nickel-iron meteorite which is acid etched to reveal the beautiful widmanstatten pattern seen only in meteorites. Widmanstatten patterns develop during the slow cooling of the iron core of a planetoid (asteroid). The handles are diamond cut from Renfrow stony meteorite. This meteorite exhibits a black stone matrix flecked with bright nickel inclusions, reminiscent of a starry sky. The spine and thumb-bob are inlayed with Albin stony-iron meteorite. This rare and fragile meteorite forms as molten nickel-iron flows around emerald green olivine crystals.

The bolsters are made from Gibeon nickel-iron meteorite which is acid etched to reveal the beautiful widmanstatten pattern seen only in meteorites. Widmanstatten patterns develop during the slow cooling of the iron core of a planetoid (asteroid). The handles are diamond cut from Renfrow stony meteorite. This meteorite exhibits a black stone matrix flecked with bright nickel inclusions, reminiscent of a starry sky. The spine and thumb-bob are inlayed with Albin stony-iron meteorite. This rare and fragile meteorite forms as molten nickel-iron flows around emerald green olivine crystals.

The bolsters are made from Gibeon nickel-iron meteorite which is acid etched to reveal the beautiful widmanstatten pattern seen only in meteorites. Widmanstatten patterns develop during the slow cooling of the iron core of a planetoid (asteroid). The handles are diamond cut from Renfrow stony meteorite. This meteorite exhibits a black stone matrix flecked with bright nickel inclusions, reminiscent of a starry sky. The spine and thumb-bob are inlayed with Albin stony-iron meteorite. This rare and fragile meteorite forms as molten nickel-iron flows around emerald green olivine crystals.

The bolsters are made from Gibeon nickel-iron meteorite which is acid etched to reveal the beautiful widmanstatten pattern seen only in meteorites. Widmanstatten patterns develop during the slow cooling of the iron core of a planetoid (asteroid). The handles are diamond cut from Renfrow stony meteorite. This meteorite exhibits a black stone matrix flecked with bright nickel inclusions, reminiscent of a starry sky. The spine and thumb-bob are inlayed with Albin stony-iron meteorite. This rare and fragile meteorite forms as molten nickel-iron flows around emerald green olivine crystals.

It almost seems like too much for one man to create!

<HUMOR>
You're right. The triology was written by Sir Francis Bacon.
</HUMOR&gt

I went looking for a picture of that sign once, and found this. I have a printed copy on the front of my monitor. No one's asked me about it yet, though.

The boys at the NSA have been doing this and more for years with ECHELON. Check out the links Link 1, Link 2

Remember that Disney has a history of propaganda - In the movie "The New Spirit" (a film commisioned from Disney during WWII), Donald Duck reminds Americans that it is their patriotic duty to pay their taxes on time (search for "Donald Duck" - believe me, it's there).

1. The majority of their inbound mail is spam.
   
2. The MAPS RSS (relay spam stopper) accounts for the vast majority of spam stopped.
   
3. The MAPS RBL accounts for the smallest amount of spam stopped.
   

But couldn't they have just hacked a Mattel Power Glove?

I actually thought about that one as I was posting the story to Slashdot... I couldn't think about just calling it 10.1 because they have always called it "X"...

What's the roman numeral for this and did the Romans even have decimal places???

So, "...X 10.1..." was the result.

Now that I look around, there are some fun little tools out there, like Lee's Useless Roman Numeral Converter .

How about "X.I"?

Previously, to "tap" an email, the prosecutors had to present the case for the warrant to every judge whose jurisdiction in which the the email passes. ... It is still very difficult to get a wiretap warrant.

How do I read the .gz file? I tried using Winzip 8.0, but got the message

Cannot open file: it does not appear to be a valid archive.

Then I downloaded win-gz and ran it. Win-gz claimed that the file (fasc2a.ps.gz) was not gzipped and refused to unzip it.

Thinking that the file might have somehow become corrupted on download, I downloaded the file a second time. The results were the same.

Does another Win98 user have constructive suggestions for gunzipping?

>If this were someone from the Southern part of the United States,
>we would all be laughing our butts off at this hair brained scheme.

Uh... balloon launched rockets have been around since the '50s. There's even a well-known term for it: a "rockoon". Try a Google search for information.

And as for "laughing your ass off" at the southern United States... one of the most successful recent rockoon launches, and the highest amateur rocket launch *ever*, was a rockoon launch just 3 years ago by... wait for it... the Huntsville, Alabama, chapter of the National Space Society. It was called Project HALO (High-Altitude Lift Off). The only reason they didn't actually reach space the last time was due to a last-second failure of the balloon; and they're still trying to raise funds to purchase another one. Quite a noble effort.

>If this were someone from the Southern part of the United States,
>we would all be laughing our butts off at this hair brained scheme.

Uh... balloon launched rockets have been around since the '50s. There's even a well-known term for it: a "rockoon". Try a Google search for information.

And as for "laughing your ass off" at the southern United States... one of the most successful recent rockoon launches, and the highest amateur rocket launch *ever*, was a rockoon launch just 3 years ago by... wait for it... the Huntsville, Alabama, chapter of the National Space Society. It was called Project HALO (High-Altitude Lift Off). The only reason they didn't actually reach space the last time was due to a last-second failure of the balloon; and they're still trying to raise funds to purchase another one. Quite a noble effort.

Bacon used one of the very first instances of a binary system to hide messages in ordinary text by using two similar but distinguishible fonts.

Where A B C D E F G H I ... = 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ...
and normal is 0 and bold is 1, then:

the quick br... is code for 'hi'

00111 = 7 = h
01000 = 8 = i

I could argue blurbs all day here with the uninformed. There is no point. Anyone interested in this topic should visit

http://home.HiWAAY.net/~becraft/MONEYbrief.html

For a very complete history of the issue going back before the American revolution. It is written by Attorney Larry Becraft. For even more information take a look at his site:

http://home.HiWAAY.net/~becraft/

I could argue blurbs all day here with the uninformed. There is no point. Anyone interested in this topic should visit

http://home.HiWAAY.net/~becraft/MONEYbrief.html

For a very complete history of the issue going back before the American revolution. It is written by Attorney Larry Becraft. For even more information take a look at his site:

http://home.HiWAAY.net/~becraft/

For those who are fans of the Ultima series, my web site, The Notable Ultima, contains quite a bit of historical information on the series. It's sadly out of date - I've never bothered updating it for U9 or most of the UO stuff, for obvious reasons - but if you'd like a trip down memory lane, you may enjoy it.
</blatantplug>

Exactly! If you know you're never going to respond to ads, it makes sense that you'll save the advertiser money if they don't have to deliver the ad to you. If the advertiser is smart, anyway...he should be paying the publisher a small rate for views and a higher rate for click-thrus. This is more of a gamble for the publisher, who will want to get a high CTR to break even, since views alone (at a lower rate) will not pay off as well...maybe not enough to cover his bandwidth costs.

I keep this link on my homepage for just such times as this. Go read it.

I can sympathize with what you are trying to do, as I've tried both uses with my Nikon Coolpix 950. The short answer is both are possible, but it isn't likely to be easy to get what you want out of the setup. Once drivers are available, you should be able to use your digital camera as a webcam fairly effectively, though you may have issues with autofocus, flash, and other camera-only adjustments. For astrophotography, it isn't likely you'll be able to get worthwhile images with the Elph, but I've included a few links on how to get started.

Digial Camera Webcams

Digital cameras defintely produce a much more compelling image than a typical webcam. I have a 3Com HomeConnect (a pretty good quality webcam) and it looks just awful compared to my Nikon N950 (not just resolution, but also trueness of color, CCD noise, and sensitivity). The main limitations are that you can't usually take mini-movies or fast sequences, some key functions are often only controllable on camera (for instance auto-focus and flash), and you'll need a power cord for the camera if you don't want to drain the batteries very quickly.

The easiest way to control the camera from a linux box is with Scott Fritzinger's GPL'd gphoto program. gphoto allows basic control of a variety of cameras through serial or USB connection (and supports both interactive and commmand line modes - add a bit of perl and cron and you can do all sorts of fun things). Its still under development, however, and unfortunately doesn't currently support the Digital Elph (PowerShot S100) to my knowledge. I'm not sure how involved it would be to write a USB Elph driver for it, but you can check out the site if you feel up to it.

Digital Cameras and CCD Astrophotography

With astrophotography, you are getting into a rather specialized and involved use of CCD devices and generally speaking, it takes a good bit of expertise and dollars to get good results. You don't mention what you are looking to capture or what existing equipment you have, so I'll point out some of the basics and you can research further from these. FWIW, I'm not by any means an expert here, but I've been looking to jump in, so I'm seeing the same issues.

While there are limited exceptions, CCD astrophotography generally requires the use of specialized equipment. Your Canon Digital Elph doesn't have the required sensitivity (its equivalent to ISO 100 film), ability to take long exposures, long and fast enough lenses, or adapters for telescope mounting. While its possible to use a barn door tracker or equitorial tracking camera mount with the Elph, the results aren't likely to be worth the effort.

If you really get interested in astrophotography, you'll probably want to pony up for a specialized system like those built by Celestron and SBIG. These are highly sensitive, small array CCD cameras with specialized cooling and software for high gain operation. Add a high quality telescope, equitorial tracking mount, and related accessories, and you are talking about no small dollar commitment. Also, you'll need a lot of time and patience to find and capture accurately really good photos. I'd like to try CCD astrophotography out, but will be playing with 35mm (add a T mount and a Meade ETX and you can get started for under $1000) until I decide I'm really committed and move to a less light polluted neighborhood.

Sky & Telescope has a pretty good guide on where to start. Some good introductions to astrophotgraphy are:

• Sky and Telescope Imaging Resources
• Amateur Astrophotography links
• CCD Astrophotgraphy (annoying sounds)
• Santa Barbara Imaging Group (SBIG), a leading astro CCD maker
• Pin's Astronomy Page

Have fun, RJS

All these programs are copyrighted © by Bob Crispen and are provided without charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License and other licenses as READMEware: In return for the software, you promise to read the documentation.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

1. Coal is a fossil fuel (some has plant fossils).
2. Oil and gas are geological fuels, they're in places just being discovered now.
3. Club of Rome 1972: World reserves 455 billion barrels. "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," said President Jimmy Carter.
4. 600 billion barrels used between 1970 and 1990.
5. 1990: Oil reserves over 900 billion barrels.
6. 1999: World oil reserves: 1,000 billion barrels (5,000 of natural gas also).

Of course, we're ignoring fission plants. Not that it matters when nobody is building power plants. Well, we can all fire up our backyard generators and see what that does to air quality.

Al Gore MP3 quotes unzip it and listen. Gore claims he took the inititave in creating the internet. Salon is a Pro-Democrat publication. They always try to spin stuff their way. Caveat. Im voting strait Libertarian.

The golden era of VRML was when Netscape was the number one Web browser and Netscape's own VRML browser Live3D (nee WebFX, became Cosmo Player) was included in the Netscape bundle most people downloaded.

But within 6 months it had become clear that Netscape itself had gotten so big (and Cosmo Player and the others had gotten so big) that bundling the two together gave an unacceptably large download. And so, VRML browsers were unbundled.

Add in some serious Netscape bugs that grievously affected VRML browsers but didn't affect HTML page viewing much (and therefore were low priority on Netscape's fix list) and some absurd hopefulness that Ma and Pa Kettle wouldn't mind installing a plugin that (briefly) was regarded as being as easy to install as a DOS game, and the mindshare was lost.

And because VRML worlds weren't exactly ubiquitous themselves (building 3D is hard -- building effective 3D is real hard), a substantial number of people upgraded their Netscape installation (or replaced it with a MSIE installation) without ever knowing that they used to have built in VRML browsing capability and didn't any more.

This was the occasion for the first of what have become regular biennial events: The Death of VRML (film at 11).

X3D (sorta aka VRML 2001) is intended to break the ubiquity barrier. Trouble is, XML, on which it's based, is gaining mindshare at a pace that can optimistically be called glacial. Hell, how many web sites even have style sheets, for chrissakes?

VRML has got a couple of niches now. One of them, the "3D community" niche is a pretty big one -- three quarters of a million people have visited Cybertown long enough to sign up as members and a good percentage of them participate in the full 3D experience (informal observation). But in comparison to the 2D web, that's chicken feed.

An application that I think is really going to take off in another niche is Geo VRML where 3D geodata can be used to immeasurably improve the "you are there" experience of maps. Again, a niche, although it's one I'm personally excited about.

And there have been some other really brilliant applications of 3D on the Web that together make up a third niche. You can find a number of them on my site and on about.com -- Sandy's links are better maintained than mine. Let's call that niche "hardcore 3Dheads", among whom I number myself.

But in order for 3D to break out of those niches, it's got to be on every desktop. Huge plugins or controls to download and add to an already bloated Web browser won't do it.

Nor will a new and improved standard or pseudostandard for 3D on the Web. VRML 97 has got plenty of headroom. Not one 3D world in 20 uses the simple but (if I do say so myself) fairly effective color, lighting, and animation tricks in this dolphin, for example.

But until there's a way to get 3D into everybody's Web browser, or using some other means onto everybody's desktop, I'm not optimistic about the future of 3D on the web.

The golden era of VRML was when Netscape was the number one Web browser and Netscape's own VRML browser Live3D (nee WebFX, became Cosmo Player) was included in the Netscape bundle most people downloaded.

But within 6 months it had become clear that Netscape itself had gotten so big (and Cosmo Player and the others had gotten so big) that bundling the two together gave an unacceptably large download. And so, VRML browsers were unbundled.

Add in some serious Netscape bugs that grievously affected VRML browsers but didn't affect HTML page viewing much (and therefore were low priority on Netscape's fix list) and some absurd hopefulness that Ma and Pa Kettle wouldn't mind installing a plugin that (briefly) was regarded as being as easy to install as a DOS game, and the mindshare was lost.

And because VRML worlds weren't exactly ubiquitous themselves (building 3D is hard -- building effective 3D is real hard), a substantial number of people upgraded their Netscape installation (or replaced it with a MSIE installation) without ever knowing that they used to have built in VRML browsing capability and didn't any more.

This was the occasion for the first of what have become regular biennial events: The Death of VRML (film at 11).

X3D (sorta aka VRML 2001) is intended to break the ubiquity barrier. Trouble is, XML, on which it's based, is gaining mindshare at a pace that can optimistically be called glacial. Hell, how many web sites even have style sheets, for chrissakes?

VRML has got a couple of niches now. One of them, the "3D community" niche is a pretty big one -- three quarters of a million people have visited Cybertown long enough to sign up as members and a good percentage of them participate in the full 3D experience (informal observation). But in comparison to the 2D web, that's chicken feed.

An application that I think is really going to take off in another niche is Geo VRML where 3D geodata can be used to immeasurably improve the "you are there" experience of maps. Again, a niche, although it's one I'm personally excited about.

And there have been some other really brilliant applications of 3D on the Web that together make up a third niche. You can find a number of them on my site and on about.com -- Sandy's links are better maintained than mine. Let's call that niche "hardcore 3Dheads", among whom I number myself.

But in order for 3D to break out of those niches, it's got to be on every desktop. Huge plugins or controls to download and add to an already bloated Web browser won't do it.

Nor will a new and improved standard or pseudostandard for 3D on the Web. VRML 97 has got plenty of headroom. Not one 3D world in 20 uses the simple but (if I do say so myself) fairly effective color, lighting, and animation tricks in this dolphin, for example.

But until there's a way to get 3D into everybody's Web browser, or using some other means onto everybody's desktop, I'm not optimistic about the future of 3D on the web.

--cyphergirl

The best thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model. It's plain text (utf8) and marvelous worlds have been built using nothing more than vi or notepad. The worst thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model.

A 200K file for a little bitty building is obscene. You absolutely did not do this by hand. You got it from a modeler that exported VRML, and you figured, "hell, it parses, let's put it on the Web".

I'm not singling you out. Far from it. The thing that was the absolute worst PR for VRML was that easily half the VRML worlds out there were bloated pigs just like your world. That's because hardly anybody valued small, fast worlds, and even fewer knew how to build them. For instance, I've got three VRML decimators (one uses Garland & Heckbert, one uses Hoppe, and I don't know what the third one uses), and I wouldn't dream of publishing a VRML model on the web without sending it through at least one of the decimators.

And don't get me started on color and lighting. Jesus H. Christ, you can do beautiful things with lighting in VRML. You don't have photon tracing (which means the scene will render in your lifetime) but you've got enough effects to make something really beautiful. Not one world in a twenty uses anything but the headlight and primary colors. That alone is responsible for VRML's rep as "cartoonish".

There are many better examples than this one of what you can do with color and lighting when you take a little time, but I might as well toot my own horn.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
The VRMLworks

The best thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model. It's plain text (utf8) and marvelous worlds have been built using nothing more than vi or notepad. The worst thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model.

A 200K file for a little bitty building is obscene. You absolutely did not do this by hand. You got it from a modeler that exported VRML, and you figured, "hell, it parses, let's put it on the Web".

I'm not singling you out. Far from it. The thing that was the absolute worst PR for VRML was that easily half the VRML worlds out there were bloated pigs just like your world. That's because hardly anybody valued small, fast worlds, and even fewer knew how to build them. For instance, I've got three VRML decimators (one uses Garland & Heckbert, one uses Hoppe, and I don't know what the third one uses), and I wouldn't dream of publishing a VRML model on the web without sending it through at least one of the decimators.

And don't get me started on color and lighting. Jesus H. Christ, you can do beautiful things with lighting in VRML. You don't have photon tracing (which means the scene will render in your lifetime) but you've got enough effects to make something really beautiful. Not one world in a twenty uses anything but the headlight and primary colors. That alone is responsible for VRML's rep as "cartoonish".

There are many better examples than this one of what you can do with color and lighting when you take a little time, but I might as well toot my own horn.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
The VRMLworks