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here is a memo that circulated in SGI in 1993, about how IRIX got bloated and unusable because of exact same reasons as mentioned in the original post:

http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

This is mandatory reading for every new IT employee in my company.

The same thing happened to SGI back in the days of their glory. http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

Google "slit scan". It was an amazing process used to create the Stargate sequence, especially amazing because of the crazy amounts of manual work it took. Another iconic example of slit scan filming is the old opening sequence for "Doctor Who".

This forensic reconstruction of the original gels used in "2001" is a fascinating bit of movie archaeology: http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

• As the black monolith vanishes into a strangely symmetrical alignment of Jupiter and its moons, the camera pans up and the "Stargate" engulfs the screen. For this infinite corridor of lights, shapes, and enormous speed and scale, I designed what I called the Slit-Scan machine. Using a technique of image scanning as used in scientific and industrial photography, this device could produce two seemingly infinite planes of exposure while holding depth-of-field from a distance of fifteen feet to one and one-half inches from the lens at an aperture of F/1.8 with exposures of approximately one minute per frame using a standard 65mm Mitchell camera.

If you have to waste screen real estate with a software clock, at least try beeing geeky at the same time. nixieclock works under X11 and OSX.

The similarities with slit-scan photography immediately stood out to me as well.

For anyone that's interested, there's a reasonably good page describing the technique here and pages about it's application in the stargate sequence of 2001 here and here.

It's possible to fake the technique in Adobe aftereffects with the time displacement filter too.

An aside: I remember reading once that Jeff had got into this stuff after reading a book by the guy who did the visual effects in the trippy scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Does anyone remember the name of that book? I have a nasty deeling it's out of print now...

Okay, so it's not the book or its title, but have some Slit-Scan photography, including the 2001 imagery unwrapped!

IRUSH

BOXX nodes

Yeah, I'd always wished all man pages had a section heading like DESCRIPTION and SYNOPSIS called TUTORIAL. ;)

I also wanted the EXAMPLES section to be mandatory in all man pages, instead of optional. A good page that has an EXAMPLES section is route(8). Many other commands really need it, like tar(1), sed(1) and tr(1). And sorry, but I really dislike info(1); I find it awkward and totally unfamiliar. You might as well use HTML pages and w3m(1) instead of man. And no thanks, I still prefer man for reference. info/w3m/lynx should be used for digressions, NOT a replacement for man. And some of the linux man pages (tar, make) are barely more useful than the command line --help.

Another thing: I would have read man pages more carefully a decade or two ago if all the OS's had this tool called 'manvi' which brings up man pages in VI so it's easy to read/search/save/grep. I drag it with me everywhere now.

Also, linux man pages in particular are often lacking or incomplete. They're getting better, but not up to the quality of, say, SGI man pages, which were policed regularly, and were the word of law on the sgi admin newsgroups. In SGI's case, since the source was closed, they had to have good man pages; RTSL was not an option.