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For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!

Why not ? if you can open source a soft drink ?

The closest thing I can find so far is the Audiotron from turle beach. It seems to be basicly a windows only interface but from the faq

As a reminder, we do not support any networking or configuration issues other than Windows, but here's a configuration that we've used with the AudioTron successfully. We did not notice any hicupps or sharing issues. We have successfully used the audiotron with Redhat 7.0, samba version 2.0.6 and dhcp 2.0pl5.

Buy it here
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"Freaks and Geeks" was truly one of the greatest hour-long shows of the past decade.

If they make DVDs available (currently rumored to be coming through A&E), I hope ThinkGeek would step up and add them to a DVD section on their site. It seems like such a perfect fit. (I was glad to see a lament of the series cancellation in the Demotivators 2001 calendar Thinkgeek is selling...)

"Freaks and Geeks" should be mandatory viewing for slashdot folk, since it was so bloody dead-on about the formulative years of geekdom...

D&D episodes... Atari episodes... Model rocketry episodes... And the band STYX in constant rotation! My life flashed before my eyes, and then got cancelled by some bonehead and replaced with a who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-knockoff...

(sigh)

Actually, we weren't slagged so badly last time... at least nothing that I wouldn't have said if I couldn't check out the site and see what was going on these days (it is obviously a lot different from the googlecached stuff from six months ago).. The "+4 conspiracy post" was just a part-time spork-wielding goatrapist pictured here (don't click that unless you want your eyes to pop out) whom we pissed off by voting down his article on K5. At that time, he had created an 17-page, intricate conspiracy theory about an organization that had a net profit of about $400 and one employee (me). I think it's funny, actually.

But, alas that is over... I actually lost a lot of money because I tried to put my efforts into too many profitless free-software things. We really wanted to go nonprofit but the costs and time needed in doing it otherwise, however, were so damn high that I had to bite my lip and figure out how to manually dissolve a company, how to form an organization, what is expected of a nonprofit, how to publish our accounting data for the public to see, etc. Reading IRS forms is not fun.

I'm surprised Flatpack (aka Spiers from K5) was modded up to +4... Why? Well, he forgot the other things that our notorious organization has done:

• racketeering in local LUGs and, at gunpoint, forcing users to do a full install of Debian GNU/Linux from a crate of 3.5" floppies.
  
• the unpublishably disgusting and controversial murder of Geekizoid founder, Scott "Vlad" Lockwood.
  
• gluttonous consumption of caffeine and ... and asking Matt Szulik of RedHat to feel our warm Bawls.
  
• faking the suicide of CowboyNeal and Inoshiro caused by the depression from being in one too many questionable polls.
  
• a fanatical devotion to old Nintendo games with Engrishy dialogue and a catchy theme song.
  
• extortion stemming from stealing RMS' hippie flute so that he couldn't play music to his servers anymore. This was insanely scandalous, as the GNU servers crashed continually afterward.
  
• incorporation of incantations to Bob Saget within the kernel source.

Anyway, that's my 2c... don't read into it too much or anything. Let's be real... like any geeky club, the aim is just to have fun, build cool stuff, hack free software, chill out, and not give a fsck. It's cool like dat.. and anyone is welcome.

Lucas (Wagner)
Spindl3top
Cambridge, Mass.

Then you could do one of those watter cooled overclock thingies that feeds to a little aquarium. You could probably find one that matched the case design. Oh, and you could use clear tubing instead of the usual black rubber hoses, and put colored water in the tank. Or better yet, put a black light in the case, and color the watter with a highighter pen! Then the watter for the overclock cooler would glow!

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go put shinier chrome wheels and a exaust noisemaker on my '94 Honda Civic. Just kidding - these things do look pretty cool.

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• ThinkGeek Main page

(Error 404: File or resource not found)

• ThinkGeek Main page

(Error 404: File or resource not found)

After all, people having multiple TVs wouldn't want to buy a box for every TV they have. A sollution would be to make all interaction with the box go via the network. If I want to program the box to do something I point my browser at it and have a nice interface, unlike what I would espect from an application running on a TV screen. If I want to copy files to/from the machine I could use FTP, if I want to hack the software I could use SSH :-).

But of course it's not desirable to go to your computer every time you want to do something with the box. The perfect solution would be to have a network connection from the box to all TVs, and from all TVs to your PDA [1] (bluetooth anyone?). You could then do simple things like selecting a file to play or setting your alarm clock. If the PDA's screen would be to limitted then the TV screen could be used.

If bluetooth or something simallar doesn't get integrated into TVs and/or PDA's by that time then small stations could be placed near all TVs. They would be connected via the cable to the box and would be able to tell the box to send a certain peace of audio on a certain frequention which they would then send to the TV via SCART. Simple remote controls could then be used to communicate with the stations.

[1] Heck, all remote controls should be replaced by something like this.

You can get the Axis Network Cameras from thinkgeek.com. It runs Linux, has integrated webserver (which can run video 25 frames/sec at 322x240 or 10 frames/sec at 704x480), plus it has a feature that allows you to back up to an FTP server. It also has motion detection and you can connect it to an alarm or doorbell. I was hoping to get a few of these for my home security, but there was one reason stopping me: they cost $1049.99 each.

Andrew

• Tobacco ~400K deaths/year.
• Alcohol ~100K/year, not including car accidents, maybe another 10-30K
  
• Prescription Drugs ~20K - includes suicides, accidental deaths from recreational use, deaths from non-recreational use.
  
• Caffeine ~5-10K/year - contributes to heart attacks, strokes, blood pressure. My personal favorite.
  
• Cocaine ~2500/year (~1990 figures) - a major contributor is quality differences in street drugs, which can be blamed on the Drug War, and also bad synthetic cocaine relatives accounted for 1/3 in ~1990, again blamed on the War.
  
• Heroin ~2000/year -Again, quality differences due to the War On Drugs are a major contributor to death rates, but additionally there are serious nutritional problems related to spending your money being a junkie. Since medical opiates cost Meth, PCP, etc. - ~700 in ~1990 - meth is probably higher today - partly a popularity thing, and partly it's a substitute for cocaine, which is overpriced due to the war on drugs.
  
• LSD - Zero. The major health risk to LSD is well-intentioned bad treatment by medical personnel, primarily with Thorazine or other dangerously strong tranquilizers. LSD can occasionally lead to Confused Behavior, which has its dangers.
  
• Marijuana - Zero. The stuff isn't toxic. You can't kill yourself by consuming mass quantities - it's been tried. Marijuana can lead to Stupid Behavior, which *can* be fatal, and can lead to Pizza Overdoses and similar bad health effects - but the appetite increase can be a major health benefit for people with cancer, AIDS, and some other diseases. Some research suggests that smoking burning marijuana leaves can cause lung damage, particularly cancer, just as tobacco does, but high-quality modern marijuana (the stuff that D.A.R.E. tells your parents is ten times as strong as the stuff Cheech & Chong smoked which your parents could never score any of) uses much smaller quantities of burning leaves, and since marijuana doesn't have the addictive properties of nicotine, it's *really* hard to smoke two packs a day. Also, lung damage can be reduced by using bongs instead of those little easily-hidden pipes (but the War On Drugs bans this harm-reduction technique) or by consuming your dope in brownies or tea.
  
• Summary - 99% from legal drugs or misuse (possibly legal) of prescription drugs.
  

Deaths from the War On Drugs:

• Gunshots - Some high fraction of the 30000 US gunshot deaths are from the War On Drugs and Drug-War-funded gang activity.
  
• Heterosexual AIDS - almost entirely transmitted through needle sharing or sex with partners who share needles. ~100-200K/year, entirely because the War On Drugs prevents most junkies from buying clean needles at the drugstore. (It's been shown that junkies with diabetes don't get AIDS - because they can use clean needles.) Some fraction of the homosexual AIDS epidemic is also drug-related, and enough heterosexuals have AIDS at this point that the drug can spread epidemically even without the needle-sharing that catalyzed it.
  
• Bad/Variable Quality Street Drugs - as noted, this is a high fraction of the drug deaths.
  
• Latin America murders and civil war deaths, from drug cartels, drug-funded rebel armies, and US-drug-war-funded government armies.
  
• Lack of medical marijuana for cancer and other diseases where appetite is a problem.
  
• Inadequate quantities of painkillers and substitution of inadequate or more dangerous painkillers for opiates, primarily morphine but sometimes also heroin. This is primarily a quality-of-life issue rather than a death-causing issue, but it's a serious problem for many elderly people, cancer patients, and people with other serious injuries or diseases. It's partially driven by medical concerns about avoiding addiction, but primarily by the political correctness enforced by government and medical standards bodies against the use of opiates.
  
• Lives wasted in prison. Being in prison isn't as bad as being dead, but it's still slavery - and if you lose 10 years of your 70-80 behind bars, that's a major loss, affecting your family as well as you. Some US states do have the death penalty for selling large enough quantities of drugs (even marijuana), and some other countries like Singapore are much more enthusiastic about killing you for it. (The US Prison Growth Industry would rather have you as one of their customers than dead.)
  

Then there's all the scary "but if drugs were legal, more people would use them and die" crap. If you look at government figures on death rates and numbers of users, it's 4-5 times safer to be a heroin user than a tobacco user, and about equally dangerous to be a heroin addict as a tobacco addict (the difference between the two figures is that most heroin and cocaine users are not addicts, just occasional users, while 95% of tobacco users are addicts.) Some people who aren't junkies or potheads would waste their lives that way if it were convenient and legal, just as some waste their lives as drunkards. On the other hand, most people would treat marijuana as an occasional drug to use, just as most people consume small quantities of alcohol but aren't frequent drunks. There would be some increased deaths from car accidents - the right way to deal with that is increased enforcement of driving-under-the-influence laws, and it's balanced by the reduction in shootings, drive-by and otherwise.

1) It has mistakenly assumed it could replicate the success of Slashdot simply by repurposing the Slashdot message board system for the purposes of broad-minded subjects mostly related to pop culture, pop technology and pop politics. They have failed to realize that Slashdot's success has come through its specialization. The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects, that all your base would belong to them. But they ain't CATS. They are on their way to destruction. They have no chance to survive, make their time. HA HA HA HA.

2) It assumes it can create value through the aggregation of the readerships of several specific content sites into one single site. YET MANY OF THE CONTENT SITES CONTRIBUTING PARTICIPANTS ARE LOSING MONEY, SOME AT ASTONISHING RATES. If you're a fan of Poynter, which you should be, you'd already have read articles chronicling the plights of Inside.com, Feed, ModernHumorist, and others participating in Plastic. - It prolly aint gonna be with us much longer.

Look at ThinkGeek for good Slashdot/geek related schwag. Open a can of Whoop Ass and support the site... You too could do this!

Look at ThinkGeek for good Slashdot/geek related schwag. Open a can of Whoop Ass and support the site... You too could do this!

Now, as for these shirts and poems and such - it's a cool idea, but what happens if all of them suck and he has to take the best of the sucky ones. I mean, come on...most of us are programmers and the like anyway. How are we supposed to come up with something cool enough for a shirt. I'd say that we let Thinkgeek or Copyleft worry about the cool duds and let us worry about making our code run just that little bit faster.
And, yes, if you're wondering, I am a PHP developer and I love it. I love how flexible it is and how fast it makes development. You don't get caught up so much in syntax that you can't code your way out, and it's developed enough to where just about anything can be done with it (including things like an IRC bot and large database driven websites). -enygma
Daily PHP News, Tutorials and Forums

I've bought stuff from ThinkGeek based on seeing a banner ad on Slashdot.

Thinkgeek TiVo

...they where talking about this...which I thought was pretty good art.

A lot of internet companies based themselves on the "We're-free-because-advertising-will-pay-for-it-al l model "
Everyone just assumed that since it worked for T.V. that it would work on the internet also...

No one ever stopped to think that we all hate commercials on T.V. (except for Super Bowl Night!) and are basically forced to sit through them. Thankfully, we're not forced to click on anything on the internet and can avoid being force-fed all together. If a site does force you, well we turn off our javascripting or just plain don't go there.
I think that in the end, sure some sites with excellent content will survive.... thinkgeek.com comes to mind. They have stuff I want, so I go there and buy it!
All these companies we see as free will have to start charging for services one way or another. The information will always be free, the services won't. Just my $.02

Linuxrunner

I have the Logitech iFeel MouseMan and this product allows you to "feel" a web page as well. While the iFeel technology is limited to a variable speed "rumble" type force feedback, I have found it to be immensely useful to find links and buttons on pages. For instance, while I am reading the summary of a Slashdot article, I can position the cursor on the link to the comments by "feeling" the link (links and buttons have certain feels to them) and then clicking it as I finish the summary. Not that this would help the blind mich, but I, for one, like the certain feel that my desktop and applications have taken on.
The key is overcoming the "gimmick factor." If they can make it genuinely enhance your interface, it will be successful. Thinkgeek has some info on the iFeel Mouseman's sister, just the cheaper version.

Where should Linux go next, then? I think the answer is clear, if you think about it: fluffy toys.

Aha! Good to see that Ximian knows this and are pushing ahead in this exciting new technology! ;)

Us geeks achieved solar powered clothing years ago! First we had propeller baseball caps, a fashion statement that transcended decades, and then went electric with solar around about 1982. Some even had fans embedded in the peak to keep you cool whilst coding in the sun!

ThinkGeek does not have them - Slashdot should be ashamed!

It is an interesting subject for speculation. Clearly, the audience for Internet fads/in-jokes like Mahir, All Your Base..., etc. will continue to grow larger and larger as more and more people get on the Internet.

But authoring a fad is an almost impossible task. It would seem that most cases were accidental.

It seems that certain outfits have positioned themselves rather cleverly to monetize some of the fads. Take ThinkGeek. They very recently rolled out an "All Your Base..." t-shirt. One would assume from the prominent placement of the t-shirt on their website and their recent catalog (I'm on the mailing list) that they are selling rather well.

ThinkGeek obviously didn't create the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" phenom, but they acted very quickly once it was clear it achieved a sort of critical mass. But fads of this sort (based on peculiar, specific in-jokes between net nerds) are very certain to have very short half-lives. As a result, those who author such fads (accidentally or intentionally) don't seem as likely to be positioned to benefit from their own success.

On the other hand, consider the situation of Matt Parker and Trey Stone. They created a South Park short-film, which became a "must-see" piece of entertainment on the Internet. The media began to report on it. Then Comedy Central scooped it up, made the two creators multimillionaires, and rolled out one of their highest-rated series. In this instance, it was transplated from the Internet into the old media system of cable television- then hyped, milked and heavily merchandised.

I think we can expect to see repitions of both of these types of scenarios- essentially, Internet fads that fade as quickly as they came, and Internet fads that become the foundation for a serious commercial enterprise.

A lot of internet companies based themselves on the "We're-free-because-advertising-will-pay-for-it-al l model "
Everyone just assumed that since it worked for T.V. that it would work on the internet also...

No one ever stopped to think that we all hate commercials on T.V. and are basically forced to sit through them. Thankfully, we're not forced to click on anything on the internet and can avoid being force-fed all together. If a site does force you, well we turn off our javascripting or just plain don't go there.
I think that in the end, sure some sites with excellent content will survive.... thinkgeek.com comes to mind. They have stuff I want, so I go there and buy it!
Otherwise, the web was meant to be free! Just my $.02

Linuxrunner

Probably not sufficiently "open" for the /. crowd, but ThinkGeek has something that lets you reboot servers remotely...

about one year ago. i set two limitations to the design of my "lan party computer"

1. it must use standard components (to make it easier to find parts to buy)
2. it must be cheap (at least cheaper than a comparable laptop)

this is a list of components that i used to build the system.
i updated parts of the list to reflect what components i would buy if i was going to build it today.

case mini tower $60
monitor 14" lcd $600
motherboard micro atx $100
processor P3 800Mhz 100FSB $160
ram 256MBpc100SDRAM $100
video Geforce2GTS64MB $195
keyboard mini-keyboard $40
mouse cordless optical $70
hard drive 40GB ide $100
cd-rom drive Plextor16/10/40A $250
floppy 1.44MB Generic $10
sound card SB Live Value $40
network card netgear FA310TX $20
cat5 cable 14 feet $20
headphones koss td61 $20
carry strap GearGrip Pro $35

other stuff:
cable bag a small, strong bag to attach to the side of the case to hold all the cables
power cable with 3 outlets that have 3 prongs each to accommodate the power cables for your system and monitor

i attached the lcd monitor to one side of the case and the cable bag to the other side. i put all the cables attached to the computer inside the bag to get them out of the way. then, when i went to a lan party i would only have to take one power cable, one network cable, the mini-keyboard, cordless mouse, and headphones out of the cable bag. everything was already connected at the back of the computer so there was no onsite setup involved.

i also screwed a piece of plexiglass onto the lcd monitor to protect the screen. (yes it was stupid to drill holes into a monitor that i just spent $900 on at that time, but it worked)

i had a lot of fun with that computer. i even dropped it down a flight of stairs once and the case was bent and all the pci cards popped out of their sockets. i put it back together and it worked fine.
the only downside to building this system was that it weighed about 30lbs. although if you spent more money on a lunchbox case with integrated lcd it would still weigh a lot.

unfortunately i never took any pictures of it for posterity and i ended up dismantling it for parts about 6 months ago, but i'm sure you get the idea.

-stan

For a small display, maybe you could try something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/3288.html

-Leperflesh.

So why does this still qualify as "Stuff that matters?"

Peril n.: A sysadmin with a screwdriver.

I really like the fact that when you hover over the image of the "Black Boxes" at this URL, the "Alt Text" Field says "Atari 2600".

Cool! The monk's black boxen are Ataris!

There was a cute message sent out about the computer club (YUCC) at my former university being shut down:

Dear YUCC members,

It is my sad duty to tell you that after the 2000-2001 academic year YUCC will cease to exist.



During the past year we have had our share of problems. The venture that the YUCC executives had invested heavily in, spatulaXchange.com, has died a gruesome death at the hand of current economic conditions. Not only that, but several of our executives have become addicted to caffinated meatloaf (http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/looflirpa/m eatloaf.html) and have embezzled all of our funds to support their addiction.



Likewise, discussions with the computer science department for funding ended when department chair Prof. Jenkins said "You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha ha ha" and faded from our view screen.



What is left of YUCC will be sold to AOL, since they own everything else and we will be auctioning off the patents that we received on hamster-powered computers that is so desperately needed in second world countries such as Elbonia.



On a personal note, I would like to thank everyone for their continued support - especially my agent Brian Eno and the good folks at RedMeat. YUCC will surely live on in each any every one of our hearts.



Sincerely,


Alex Anglin

YUCC President.

In related news, I'm getting nervous. With all the other crap posted, I'm wondering if my screed on the advantages if we were to all become hermaphroditic felinoids would be posted today.

ThinkGeek.


Somehow I thought /. would be a little more inventive today.

See for yourself, it ain't no April Fool's Joke. They are selling them on ThinkGeek.

I'm going to pick up a pair, along with that new Caffeinated meatloaf they are selling. It is about time they sold some REAL food!

See for yourself, it ain't no April Fool's Joke. They are selling them on ThinkGeek.

I'm going to pick up a pair, along with that new Caffeinated meatloaf they are selling. It is about time they sold some REAL food!

Geeks = FAT!!! Go check out the Caffinated Meat Loaf at ThinkGeek!!!

I reverse engineered the binaries, and came up with this valuable data.
Data compression algorithm: A JPEG of the sock monkey.
Data decompression algorithm: The full lyrics to the Goldfinger (James Bond) theme song, namely:

Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.

Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from

Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.

Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from

Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.

I've been using this CVS book for a reference/tutorial. I find it's a good mix of both, and has gotten me to the point where I don't need to look at it much anymore.

...and don't forget to put on-line your course notes, when you are done :)

All of us in NY should buy ThinkGeek shirts with the DeCSS code on it and stand outside the courthouse for a silent protest.

you can get them over at thinkgeek, maybe we can load balance the /. effect on this one.
----------------------

1) The last book of the Bible is "Revelation" not "Revelations".

2) In the necessary endeavor of speculation into matters concern the Divine, there is a fine line between the profound and profane . Congratulations for positing a theory that manages to be neither while pretending to be both.

3) If you believed that the Bible is absolute, living breathing word of God, the idea of trivializing it in the manner that you have would cause you great personal distress. If you don't believe that the Bible is the absolute, living breathing word of God, what is the point of co-opting its false revelatory promises for explaining the Open Source movement? Oh- I know! You're just contributing your postmodern part to the Great Symbol Drain that Neil Postman warned about....(do a find on "great symbol drain" at the link above for more info...)

4) For those with a genuine interest in understanding the importance of the promise of the New Jerusalem to Christians, do yourself the favor of reading the following substantive study...

5) Jon, the Katz bashing is so de rigueur on slashdot that it saddens me. If ThinkGeek rolled out a "Reduce Internet Pollution- Banish Jon Katz from it" t-shirt, they'd probably make a fortune. I don't believe people always give you a fair shake and believe it is morally wrong to bash you. But sometimes, it seems like you're just begging people to do it. Help those of us who want to see the bashing reduced by not reinforcing the stereotype bandied about here. In short, don't post tripe!


I'm Audi 5000. Peace.

Try one of the many links to ThinkGeek who seem much better at holding up to a /. assault, and have them for sale.

Thinkgeek has these on sale now

Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.

You can buy these at ThinkGeek. One of my favorite sites.

>I'd like to see you go up to some big motherfucker, call him a cunt, and then tell him it's not an insult because you don't know his name ;)

I'd tell him it wasn't a personal insult since I didn't know his name, especially if he was wearing a t-shirt that said "I am an anonymous coward." 8-)

You're missing my point, but heck, I'll let it rest after this... my point is that I think Sony is making a proactive investment now in looking at emulating PSone's so that they can take advantage of upcoming technologies, like the XBox and new PDA's. Then, they will look at providing that backcatalog on new medium for the new devices. Someone already responded to my original post with a really good point about this.

I think we're closer to agreement than you think...

That's it for me on this thread!

OK, but Sean looks nothing like the wonderful Alan Cox. He doesn't even have a five o'clock shadow.

I don't know about that, but thinkgeek.com sells a poster of it here.

My girlfriend got my one of those cool windows and blue neon lights from think geek for my computer. Now at night the whole corner of the room just glows blue. I recomend getting one of these for every computer...

That and I have 6 fans in the case, and one of them has a bad bearing I think.

ThinkGeek Has a Web Cam with a built in server, meaning you would just need the modem. May need some hacking to make it road worthy but it could be a nice way to simplify things.