Slashdot Mirror

More Lego Sculptures! More game collections going to the highest bidder! More ... P4 benchmarks. Updates below to recent Slashdot stories, and a few tangents not yet here explored. Go crazy!

Ma'am, I'm afraid that Ritalin by itself won't help in this case. Somehow this email from Lego madman (insomniac?) Eric Harshbarger ended up in Hemos's hands, and it's hard to resist. Here he confirms the suspicions of a number of Slashdot readers who looked closely at his previous efforts featured on these pages.

Well, A few weeks ago when I announced my LEGO Mona Lisa, a few folks from Slashdot.org noticed the lower half of a statue ... and some guessed what my next project announcement would be. I've now finally completed a statue of 'San' from the Japanese Animation film Princess Mononoke.

I wrote quite a lot about this model ... and took many, many pictures, so I hope you enjoy browsing.

I also recently finished a much smaller model of the BSD Daemon mascot.

cheers,

eric

Enough already! crizh writes "Anyone interested in another arguement about the merits of the P4 and whether Tom Pabst is biased against Intel/AMD might want to check out the further update he posted on P4/MPEG4 this morning."

Further submissions in this category must be accompanied by sizeable bribes or at least juicy blackmail. Let's see what people think of the P4 vs. whatever Athon variety is cool in 12 months from now and talk about it again then;)

Sore thumbs, perhaps. An unnamed correspondent points out this enormous videogame auction, venturing as he does so: "Seems to be as big if not bigger than the previous one posted."

I dunno about that, but it sure is a lot of games. Is everyone dumping their consoles to spend the proceeds on exotic vacations, or what?

fuuzy math for a new era Erik Inge Bolsø writes "Earlier this year, slashdot had a scoop about a 1990 and 1995 study called fuzz, which tested the quality of UNIX utilities.

In july this year, a followup study was published, in which they did subject a collection of common apps on Windows NT (and 2000) to the same tests. The results are interesting... Full paper available here."

Brother, can you spare some time? swgill writes "After reading about Microsoft's attempt to reach beginner programmers with free copies of Visual C++ for schools I thought about the main problem that was found: Visual C++ and the related teaching material is all based on the Windows API, and algorithms are treated as secondary as best. I am actually in college in England doing an A-level in Computing where I can see the effects of this educational policy (although we use VB6 instead of VC++6). I have decided to found the libteach project at sourceforge. The idea is to prevent people learning to program in school from being forced to relearn their skills when Micro$oft switches focus again and to also give them an idea of programming for another type of system (RT-Linux anyone?)."

Sounds like a worthy project, albeit for now still in the planning stages. Of course, it's helped by the fact that there are several Open Source OSes chock full of programming languages out there, but not by the lack of decent IDEs available for them.

Update The latest in our Hellmouth Revisited series is now online .

cyber-vandal writes: "I've been playing with livid for a few months now, and someone posted a rather disturbing message on the mailing list. Apparently Time Warner are making changes to the region encoding system to stop multi-region dvd players working properly. The link can be found here. I'm hoping it's just the MPAA putting out FUD to discourage people from buying them, can anyone confirm or deny this?" I've tried reaching Time-Warner, and haven't gotten a reply - anyone else heard anything?

cyber-vandal writes "According to this story on ZD in the UK, Sun is considering switching from Linux to Solaris, even though Solaris doesn't actually run on the MIPS architecture." "Ok guys, we bought this company that seems to be doing ok and we want to drive it into the ground as fast as possible. Suggestions?"

Extra, extra -- Read more about it! Yes, that means another round of Slashback, bearing this time: The stillborn auction of [expletive deleted]company.com's domain name; why EPIC has decided to stop sailing with Amazon; and another tantalizing glimpse of a world so advanced we can watch instruction videos on personal computers. More, too.

Even Richard Feynman could have figured this out! Logos writes: "It seems that EPIC has decided to end their relationship with Amazon. Here is a link to the letter that I received on their mailing list. The final straw was Amazon's announcement that they are no longer able to ensure the privacy of their Customer Info."

How apropos! Servius writes: "Doublespeak is a wonderful thing. CNN has this story about EPIC dropping out of the Amazon affiliate program because of Amazon's recent relaxation of their rules for the use of personal data. Quote: 'The new policy is actually stricter than the previous one because it spells out the conditions under which personal information can be transferred.' I hope that makes you feel a lot safer."

Potty mouth, potty mouth, Milkman Dan! Domain shoppers everywhere, your time to mourn has come. After placing the domain f*ckedcompany.com for sale on everyone's favorite auction site site owner Philip Kaplan pulled the auction.

h0ngk0ngph00ey writes:

"After a quick check back at eBay today to see how high the bidding went for f*ckedcompany.com, I was somewhat surprised to see that the auction was ended. A look at the bid history seems to indicate that either eBay pulled it for being offensive, or the seller just got too many responses from people who weren't at all serious. /.'ed to death it seems."

lee@lvcm.com has a different perspective:

"Well without warning the owner pulled the auction from ebay. I was one of the serious high bidders and was never contacted by the owner. CNNfn contacted me and asked me questions (along with several other news organizations) and they were all under the assumption that he really wanted to sell the domain. I guess it was all a publicity stunt."

Will the Geeks in Space have to play Apollo 13? rak3 writes: "The Sync, home for the broadcasts of Geeks in Space and JenniShow (of JenniCam fame), seems to have run into some troubles. The company was going to be acquired, but this has fallen through and they might have to shut down the site. Read more about it here."

It's sad, since the folks behind The Sync have served to support everyone from local artists to aforementioned Geeks in Space. Hopefully, they can pull through this. If not, smart companies everywhere will start mailing them job offers right about now!

Soon I will watch Carlito Brigante kick ass with penguin supervision. cyber-vandal writes: "Two days after the Ask Slashdot on Intervideo's LinDVD, the announcement has been made here. No sign of the actual player being available, but this is a good sign that it wasn't merely MPAA-inspired vapourware. At last I can look forward to fragging my Win9x partition."

And here's another tibdit to add to the DeCSS gallery, for anyone else who admires the technical possibilities of the DVD format but not the politics attached thereto, GeekLife.com writes: "[H]ere's the DVD Logo rendered in beautiful shades of gray using the DECSS code as ink. "