Slashdot Mirror
The Mini-Quickies That Fell To Earth
johnathan spectre wrote in to tell us about these really cool plasma shoelaces. plasticPaddy wrote in to tell us about SkyBird, a nifty remote-control ornithopter. Fire up the flux capacitor, because feebeling wrote in about this WWW guide, circa 1993. seizer told us about some crazy guy TCP/IP tunneling through E-mail: now that's dedication. Speaking of crazy people, Green Monkey scared me with his submission, a Web site devoted to Pokémon butts. From the self-referential bucket, the Webby Awards have nominated Slashdot in the 'Community' and 'Print and Zines' categories. Go Vote and we get some trophy or something. _damnit_ wrote in with a nice little piece on the Ides of March. In case you're in the greater Boston area, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda will be speaking at the Geek Pride Festival at the end of the month.
"In itself, the Internet is comprised of thousands of smaller regional networks scattered throughout the globe. On any given day it connects roughly 15 million users in over 50 countries. " That's amazing! 15 million users! Who'd a thunk that it'd grow so fast...I bet we're up to a hearty 18 million by now. :)
Dan
Will their talks be posted on the web?
Intelligent Design Theory is not Creationism
Congrats on the Webbie Nom. You guys deserve it. I'm sure you will win
/.'ers trying to hack the system.) :)
(Especially with all the
-- Moondog
Tux could pass as a pokemon, anyone got a picture of his ass?
xxx straight edge xxx
those things are pretty sweet. i wonder how durable they are? perfect thing for a rave/dance club.
-1: flamebait should really be -1: inciteful
Great! the blink tag for your shoes!
How do these Pokemon characters go to the bathroom? And what inhumane things has Green Monkey done to his Pokemon. Posing nude with their butts bared to the world, this must be illegal, somehow.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
That TCP/IP over email tunnel sounds quite like the problems space stations and probes have.Often it will take many hours to get a reply back if the probe is far away. NASA has spent lots of research money trying to figure out ways to get past this by allowing the probes to do their work automatically. But supporting something like TCP/IP will always be impossible, TCP connections have problems on *any* high latency connection, even a high-speed satelite connection. To combat this both sides use large send and receive buffers to keep bandwidth up, that's what the Allow Large Windows Linux kernel option is for.
Why plasma shoelaces? The animated pictures on the site make it look like a bad Dire Straits video. The "Blinking to extend battery life" doesn't help. There must be other things that actually WOULD be cool with plasma glowing, I just can't think of anything that doesn't scream 1986.
The Good Reverend
Aah, that brings back memories. I remember printing out that web guide and a Paleontology web site sometime in 1993 and emailing it to someone. I had attempted to explain this amazing new "World Wide Web" thing to her but she could not comprehend it. Heh, heh.. oh for the days of all grey backgrounds and images which were impervious to having text wrapped around them.
It won't be a march, it'll be a stampede! Just show Katz up onto the stage and it'll break out into rioting not seen since the democractic convention in chicago. The only other person I know of who could inspire such a devout following would be some short guy in glasses who is pitifully rich and took over the world by monopolizing computer operating systems.
Perhaps I'll be seen as a wet blanket on this one, but doesn't anyone get the feeling like the amount of useless shit on the internet has gotten way out of hand?
From dancing hampsters (though they are rather cute) to pokemon butts to virtual hugs, anything that can be about anything has somehow found its way onto the net.
The sad part is that someone actually thought it was interesting enough to put the time into writing the page!
Wet.Mosaic
Get electroluminescent wire in spools at www.funhouseproductions.com
The stuff is amazing, a company in Israel has the patent on the stuff otherwise I imagine it would be everywhere. Anything you can do with neon you can do with this stuff (although it doesn't last forever) I think that Macintosh should start putting it in their I-Macs. I could see it used in phones, glove compartments, monkeys, everywhere!
If you really want to see this stuff in action go to burning man this summer! People go crazy with it. woo hoo!
-WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Today there are at least 100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world.
nice :)
- passion
That's nothing on some of the wonderful technolgies that await us. With the advent of digital television, geeks in North-west England are puting the finishing touches to their new project... Television over Telnet!
Yes folks, you heard it right. Pictures broadcast over the airwaves, recaptured, changed to ASCII, subtitles added and broadcast over a telnet connection from linux box.... telnetevision will take the world by storm!
And all so that people needn't leave the public clusters to see the latest edition of Futurama...
What other wonders does the future have in store? Who knows, but with telnetevision, who will care? Not I!
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
uhh dude you might want to try something different from the banner command in unix. I believe in you I know you can.
Congrats go out to all the boys on the Job in th Geek Compound.
/. will win due to the high volume of active users.
On the Community nomination
ICQ has a better community type presence (IMO), but how many ICQ users are going to know about the Webby awards? I think
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
What next? IP Tunning over Snail Mail! Why? Because you can! All you need: a couple of scanners, Linux, and waaay too much time on your hands. Unfortunately, ping latencies could reach up to a week. And Quake would be barely playable. :)
I think its an interesting solution, after all your other options have been exhausted... I mean, its not the latest and greatest, but it may just work when nothing else does.
I have a couple of doubts on the subject, though. TCP/IP is inherently a low-latency protocol... (by low-latency, I mean less than 5 minutes). In the case of email, were looking at, potentially, latencies of up to 15 min or more. How would the TCP/IP client or server application handle those? You would have to manually readjust the timeouts in the software before trying out this stuff. I see it as very interesting, though.
I was also thinking... this way of tunneling depends entirely on the mail servers... which sometimes, in some businesses at least, are very, VERY overloaded... adding more to the latency... in contrast, a tunneling solution would almost certainly have a server dedicated to it... making it much faster... oh well, just thinking on the subject.
Hypermedia is hypertext with a difference - hypermedia documents contain links not only to other pieces of text, but also to other forms of media...
Nobody even imagined back in the day that we could have sounds, videos, and animations on the page itself. But now we do, and what do we do with it?
Hampsterdance,, that's what.
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
Why have those puny lights blinking at the back of your network card when you can have the entire cable blinking? Now THAT would be great! Just imagine it in a room of lots of computers and hubs! (Yuck!)
Best quotes from the 1993 web guide:
"Today there are at least 100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world."
Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
That barely edges out Seagate's 73.2 drive. the seagate spins to 10,000 rpm, 3000 more leet than the IBM. Oh, the Seagates are SCSI 160 drives as well. Gee this is a fun project...
Lowmag.net
Some people would disagree with this, but I for one, invite them to kiss unix's end.
YOU SMALL DICK FAGGET!!!
Will these be blocked for the protection of our children or preserved for the educational purposes?
It could be worse. You could be trying to send IP over pigeon. From rfc2549:
"Patent Considerations: There is ongoing litigation about which is the prior art: carrier or egg."
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
...but not Pokemon either. Could anyone identify the owner of these butts?
Cool, doens this mean that I can call one into existance for 0 mana? (Or electricity)
American components. Japanese components. Russian components! All made in Taiwan!!
......where did you get that pic? I knew I shouldn't have drank so much. Please remove that pic as it is not public domain and I feel violated.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
great. slashdotted some server on the little island of hawaii. hey, is it true that all of cuba only has a 128k satellite link to the 'net?
I'm not a scholor of Latin, but AFAIK circa means "round" (as circular) and is used similarly to "'round" in English (or "'round-bout" in redneck, as in 'taint it 'round-bout supper time?)
The page is clearly dated October 1993, so (in my quite humble opinion) since we have an exact year, it is not proper to use circa.
Am I wrong on this?
Dear lord! How many times can I say "stuff" in a paragraph?!?
Stuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuff
-WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
Am I the only one wondering about the last sentence?
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".
Oh man, the internet does not change our lives very much at all! Compare the internet revolution to that of when the automobile was invented. The internet and computers are just small fries compared to what cars has done to world culture. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up "pre-car"
-WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
The Plasma shoelaces look really interesting. The thing that gets me, is the Website says they have a 13 hour battery life (and the blinking slows down drain...), but can you turn them OFF? And how hard can you tighten your laces before a rupture sprays plasma in your eye? Or, what if the dog gets ahold of your shoes, and thinks the blinking laces look tasty?
The SkyBird doesn't look that cool. It would be niftier if it was physiologically correct against a REAL bird, and flew like a real bird.
Reading the WebGuide was a trip back, but this section gave me pause:
How was the Web created?
The Web began in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (a collective of European high-energy physics researchers) proposed the project to be used as a means of transporting research and ideas effectively throughout the organization. Effective communications was a goal of CERNs for many years, as its members were located in a number of countries.
1989? Jeez, Al Gore must have just been getting started. (The document has no mention of ARPANET that I could find whatsoever.)
Pokemon Butts: WHY GOD, WHY?!
CmdrTaco: That's GEEK pride. PLEASE make sure you show up at the correct festival. GEEK pride. GEEK.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
what's really cool is the sheer bandwidth the www took up at the time... a whopping 51 gigs in aug. '93!!
I think that I probably downloaded that much stuff today on my own...
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
So these are... Pokeymon butts!
I must confess, I was the person who thought this whole thing up. I'm really very, very sorry about it.
I'm a terrible programmer, but in half an hour of mucking about I came up with something interesting. There's some very crude screenshots here and here. I'm currently working on some working scaling code (to get the aspect ratio right), 'aliasing' (,,, ''' etc), and possibly some way for the program to do the grabbing itself. Image grabbing is currently done by Xawtv's streamer program.
Well, as I said, I'm very sorry about all this.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
In Brazil we use IP over regular surface mail. Horrid ping times, usually several weeks. In fact I'm still waiting for the original 1993 web document to be loaded, and I started the connection in 1993!
Yet more tacky shit to put on a small japanese car.
We call it "silicon Valley".
How come the WWW guide does have an Index Listing for Al Gore-Father of the Internet??? You think he, being the Father of the Internet, would have a mention.....
NT
Heck, in MY day we didn't need no fancy-schmancy e-mail to route packets. We did it all through phone lines. Remember FidoNet? I ran a small FidoNet board for about 2 1/2 years. All the mail routing was done through telephone lines, resulting in delivery times (not to mention long-distance phone charges!) that often rivaled that of conventional mail.
Ah, those were the days...
For more information, click here.
I think misty is kind of sexy. Is that wrong? You're one sick, twisted bastard. Now Jessie of Team Rocket, on the other hand... oh Baby! But we both know she'd never leave James.
i think that an attachable Liquid Nitrogen air bubble would do better, but this is cool, i can't imagine anyone wearing these, but this is cool... "Stay tuned for our upcoming contest to see who has the most unique way of using our Plasma Laces! Winner will receive ALL 8 pairs of colors, worth $240.00!" [ Most unique way of using them? hmm.. i would say the most unique way would be to commit a 3rd degree murder. ]
Slappy
Let us not be too proud of our progress, however. Read the document, and think how LITTLE has changed in six years. There is more of everything, but that page looks as modern as any other. Note the discussion of neat MOSAIC features such as MPEG and streaming QuickTime video ...
We have been standing still by comparison with the period from 1989 to 1993 (Gopher, HyperG, the web, etc.) Consider all the stillborn and unborn: RDF, VRML, VR conferencing, true hypertext, NNTP/HTML collaboration frameworks, Xanadu, alternative navigation frameworks (RDF, Apple's Project X). CSS-2 is barely implemented anywhere, and even CSS-1 is not implemented. Client-side Java has struggled.
Those were the days of the giants, and now we are still digesting those changes -- and fighting endless patent battles.
Ahh, when I was a younger man ... now those were exciting days. Let me tell you .... :-)
john
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
This guy I know uses a scratch disk that is hooked up by SCSI to two machines to network them. of whhttp://http://www.cca.org/dave/tech/badid ea.html
Your tax dollars at work: none of the FBI FOIA pdf flies are readable. They're all corrupted. Someone doesn't know how to set up pdf files for downloading.
That WWW guide is great, I think I'm gonna mirror it. It brought back SO many memories. I'm pretty sure that most of us /.'ers remember our first webpage we visited, mine was the exploding grape experiment, circa early 1994, using (I believe) the original NSCA Mosaic for Win 3.1 -- packaged with WinCIS (CompuServe). If my dates are wrong, please let me know.
/.'ers remember their first www page?
.sig Instructions .sig here
I still remember the day I upgraded from Mosaic to Netscape, of course, little did I know how related they were, but it was so cool, finally being able to download multiple images as well as the text at the same time. No more downloading the HTML, then downloading the background (which of course, was a MUST for webpages back then), then downloading every image. Netscape could handle more than once at a time.
I really wish I could go back in time for an Internet not polluted with noise, just lousy background images...
Any other
_____________________
step one: place
Your local sysadmin (praise the BOFH!) decides what is and is not acceptable to do over the company LAN. Circumventing His security measures invites thee to be cast out, preferably in the most brutal and sadistic manner possible.
I think the coolest "interesting" way to deliver network services that I've heard of was this: at one time New Zealand's link to Usenet was a regular cargo plane which would fly reel-to-reel magtapes of newsgroup posts in from Australia.
Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Ignoring for the moment whether those words rhymed in Latin as well, this does a lot to explain why they thought the Roman Numeral system made sense :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Did anyone else parse that as Gay Pride Festival? I thought Rob was coming out of the closet finally. :-)
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2165, 80
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: Returned: 2165 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2166, 80
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: Returned: 2166 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2167, 80
Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: Returned: 2167 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2168, 80
Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: Returned: 2168 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2169, 80
Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: Returned: 2169 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2170, 80
Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: Returned: 2170 , 80 : NO-USER
Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2171, 80
Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: Returned: 2171 , 80 : NO-USER
First posting isn't trolling. It's...first posting.
Deliberately circumventing security measures set up by your company to protect their LAN and information and to prevent misuse is obviously breaking their policies. Think about it before you do it. Are you prepared to be fired? You do not have any "right" to have Internet access for personal use at work. The resources provided are there for you to accomplish your work and nothing more. Many companies however do have more lax policies that DO allow employees to do a minimal amount of personal surfing and that is fine too. Just don't abuse the good will of your company. Internet access is a privilege and should be treated accordingly. If any of my users was pulling shit like this and I found out about it I'd pull their access to the network immediately. Hard to do your other work without a friggin network connection in this field.
My 18 gig deskstar conked out in less than a year.
:^(
Didn't even have time to fill the sucker up.
And it was OEM and the place I bought it went "out of business" - I suspect that means they will open under a different name so they wont have to honor their warranties.
Thanx for listening to my whining
Google was nominated too! Go vote for them!
Synergy (N): When the whole is bigger than the sum of it's parts eg. 2 + 2 = 5
Lets do the basic addition:
Pokemon Porn
+Battery Powered Birdies
+Plasma laces(You make that sound more whacky)
+Glowing Electric Wire
=The makings of a cartoon butt-bomb ?
In case you are not laughing, my condolences on the death of everyone you held dear.
What do you mean ? Of course it's funny.
OK, I'm done abusing your bandwith for now.
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
I now this will be moderated funny, but
Palm(c) Pron
Excerpt:
A typical Palm Vx user review...
O Palm Vx, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. You are super slim and very light indeed. A PDA is only as useful as it is portable, and you are the most portable of them all. You are a beautiful metallic color, and you get nice and chilly when I set you down. When I take you out, people look at you with envy because you are so sexy. You have a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which I like better than the AA batteries your predecessors (and your successor, the Palm VII) require. I like this because I like always having a fully charged battery, instead of having to replace batteries periodically. Some people don't like this because they don't like carrying around your cradle or your travel recharger when they travel, but I don't mind. Unlike your dull sibling the Palm V, you have 8 MB of main memory, four times as much. You are much smarter and can remember much more stuff. You come with AvantGo, which is nice for reading stuff fro! ! m the Web when I'm not at my machine. Whenever I HotSync you, you download some of my favorite Web pages, and I can read them later, like during a boring meeting. But Palm Vx, you are not perfect. I will now list some of your flaws, so you will not get a big head on me.
You are practically naked. The little leather cover that comes with you is little more than something to protect your screen from getting scratched. What's more, it presses one of your buttons when it is held closed, and this can mess up alarms that go off while the cover is on in this way (though there is a HackMaster hack, PalmVHack, that works around this). I'm working on getting a new case for you right now.
Great! At last I can put IP packet onto UUCP spool, copy to disk and carry it to home :)
If you want the tech specs, go to: www.livewireent.com. They also sell the fiber but it costs more unless you want bulk. ($1.42/ft but only on full 820ft rolls)
It seems to have the best efficiency running at 80v, 450mw/meter, @2000hz refresh. The effective life of the material is about 800-1000hrs which puts it at 50% output. It can run out to twice that, but the output becomes negligible. It has a maximum "safe" bending radius of about 5 iameters. It can be bent more but you've got a chance of realigning the EL material. It is also moisture sensitive but most of the manufacturered stuff is environmentally sealed (water resistant with shrink-tubing but not necessarily waterproof) You can cut it yourself and just solder the end connections together and put a heat-shrink end on it.
You can also get sheets of this stuff from other vendors. If you're interested I can email you the links I've got.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Being able to make a rfc for that is insane enough but what would be geniusly insane would be to implement it.
Of course the Open BSD version would use pigeons with DNA-based steganography and cryptography (to be invented). It would also be engineered with materials that make it almost undestructible.
The Linux version would be sold by three hundreds different birds factories and would have most of the features of the other versions in option. It would also run on Pigeons, Eagles, canaris and even on pterodactyles for those of us that didn't upgrade our hardware.
The FreeBSD version would have a faster IP stack implemented in the pigeons, making them fly at supersonic speed.
The windows version would be with different colored feathers that look beautoiful but would literally crash without visible reason from the casual user POV.
The old Mac version would let you enter your packets only in one way and retrieve them only in one way, which is very simple but gets in your way when you are used to use a Unix pigeon.
The new Mac OS X version looks even better, can work on very long distances without problem but has got some useability issues such as when you overload the interface with too muck packets.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Speaking of 1993, that's when NCSA started publishing What's new for this little package they had called Mosaic.
Here's the first issue.
I was rather surprised to find that a lot of the links I tried still work. I guess that being "first to market" causes some staying power.
As far as I can tell, the 'plasma laces' are just EL (electro-luminescent) wire, which is really neat stuff. Phosphorous + wire in tube == FUN!!
:(. $25 for 10' of wire, $7.50 for a driver that'll take care of 30' of wire (Disclaimer: I am not an employee, just a satisfied customer). The price of the wire seems pretty consistent, other places have other drivers that will do stuff besides just make them glow (blink, chase...)
Wanna make your own? Cool Neon has pre-made kits as well as parts for those so inclined. There's a couple other sites i've found, but the bookmarks are at home, and I'm at work
For a standard TV broadcast at 30fps, what's the cps? Any compression being done on the fly?
Har
--
looking forward to the eye problems this will cause
You're right, TCP/IP over e-mail is easy. The tough stuff comes with TCP/IP over Pony Express.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
I doubt anyone will read this, but who cares...
:-)
I've been experimenting with very basic colour support, using a kind of look-up table. The program has a list of ANSI foreground and background colours, along with various characters to print, and roughly what RGB values they correspond to. It's very messy, and doesn't work too well, but the colour is vaguely acceptable...
You can see some really bad screenshots here, here, here, and here - the first two were of the initial, really bad colour support, being developed over telnet, naturally... The third is the new colour support with a very small lookup table, and the third is with a slightly larger lookup table (still very small though).
I considered 'detail' support, but I'm a terrible programmer and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
I've also got the program to display frames in sequence - it's almost semi-watchable...
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?