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Quickies Rock!
Phexro extended our congratulations to Bruce and Valerie on the birth of Bruce 2.0, otherwise known as Stanley Charles Perens. this is jimmy asked us all to compete in the great Beltsander Races. Need to send crazy Aunt JoAnne some E-mail? Try something from
the Great Spam Archive, sent in by Jones. Nezumi-chan wasn't the only one to write in with this one, but all I can say is Oh, yes. ahaning wrote in to tell us about the Obsolete Computer Museum. Want something to plug them into? blizzard shared Electricity from Giant Artichokes. Also, check out the Ultracade, which is cool unless you're a video game purist like me. Dropkick wrote in about a cyber-riffic washing
machine. Last but not least, Penguin_99 writes in about cool photos from Galileo. That's it, folks. Thanks to AfterY2K for the title inspiration.
Hmmm - How does the quote go - "give me the boy, and I'll give you the man"
Folks, , in 20 years time, we could be looking at someone even more fervent than RMS. Scary
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I hope I'm the first one to say: Congratulations Bruce.
kwsNI
None of those old machines are obsolete! Can anyone say BEOWULF CLUSTER!?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
from-the-conspiracy-to-commit-dept.
What happened to that capital-L-lame story about "video games we hope we don't see" written by some dumb chick who wouldn't know a video game if NESTicle bit her on the ass?
Maybe it was so lame it was pulled? Rightly so, but FOR SHAME!!!! CENSORSHIP!!!!
Hey!
The Atari Portfolio is not obsolete! Thats serving my web site right now.
Oh. Ok.. thats BS. I only wish it was doing something other than sitting on my shelf. Any one want a used Portfolio? I've got the smart parallel port adapter and two 64k memory cards.. Its very cool..
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air and light and time and space
Reboot - marvellous! Can't wait for the movies.
Now why doesn't Galaxy bookshop, or my local video rental place have any? They have all sorts of other crappier TV shows.
Does anyone know a source for these in Oz? Or at least somewhere that does PAL video, not NTSC...
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
Phexro extended our congratulations to Bruce and Valerie on the birth of Bruce 2.0, otherwise known as Stanley Charles Perens.
:-)
You know open-source has hit the big time when we start seeing mergers within the industry.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm much more impressed by the new developments in cyberdefecation.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
An Irish scheme to burn cannabis as a fuel foundered last year because of it was considered too expensive compared with wind-power projects.
WTO stepped in and shut it down. So many of my Irish brethren sought and obtained licenses to produce electricity, WTO feared there would be a worldwide glut leading to the weakening of the utility monopolies.
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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Ha - only 4,784 spam mails since October 1997? In over two and a half years? Heck, I get more than that in two and a half WEEKS!
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
This is quite weird, I went through all links and did not find anything about GNU/Linux.
You can't handle the truth.
Congrats on having a healthy baby. Hope you can still squeeze in some time to continue doing your good work and advocacy. Your baby shares my brother's birthdate, too !
-- Stalkers Should be Shot in the Head
new reboot epidoses: Yet Another Story Reposted On Slashdot:
s html
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/10/144220_F.
Ultracade needs flash - that was a pointless trip. How about a "(needs flash)" warning to save us the effort?
I OBJECT to the Amiga being classified as obsolete!
I know for a fact that Time Warner Wisconsincable (which sucks) has one running the old-style "TV Guide Channel" channel in the Milwaukee area. (but they still suck)
How do I know this?
One day I was channel surfing and came upon a channel (which turned out to be the aforementioned TV Guide channel) displaying the Amiga boot screen and asking for an infinite number of disks!!!
(I guess -- I never got to use an Amiga, which is B.S., but I guess the boot screen if you don't have the boot disk inserted shows an infinite nummber of disks going into a disk drive and not coming back out.)
P.S. For some reason we didn't lose our ABC station. Go figure.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Here I thought the quickies were refering to Bruce Perens 2.0. Then I saw all the other stuff :) Time to remove the mind from the sewage conducting device.
Does anybody else think it's weird that the Giant Artichokes as Fuel article talks about an Irish plan to burn cannabis as fuel? Interesting that they refer to it as a "scheme".
I see that all the time at our local cable community stations. The most common ones are, as you said, the screen asking for a boot disk, OR you just get a plain WorkBench screen.
There also have been sightings of the Windows 95 channel, default install. Wish I could just catch them in the act of setting things up. I'd be captivated for hours.
Better yet, if they ran PC Anywhere, you can watch(as well as your other subscribers) you goof off on the computer in real time!
I actually caught them restting the channel once - on an Amiga - in Tallahassee, FL.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Wife is comming home 1day early.
Quick, wash the bed sheets
and that blue dress with the stain.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The local cable for Baltimore has one of those classified ad channels (mostly just badly rendered images with muzak), which runs on some version of windows. One night, there was a blank screen with a error message saying, "Error: CDROM not available". I guess someone forgot to change the CD for that night.
The Univerity of Maryland College Park also had a cable channel that just showed a Mac desktop (don't know what version), with nothing moving, no changes or mouse movments, 24 hours a day, for a couple of months. Once in a while I would go to the library to watch it for no reason. I'm guessing it was some project that was never finished.
There's also a bar near here that uses WIN95 to operate the cash register, using a touch screen. Of course, it got BSOD, so the manager had to come down, hit the reset button and leave. Twice.
Unless you're planning to "go legit" (put your arcade machine in a public place and start charging people for real) don't waste your money on Ultracade.
ArcadePC is where it's at. Granted, after you add a sufficient computer to the ArcadePC it will probably cost nearly as much as Ultracade, but you won't be locked into buying stupid "game packs" since ArcadePC works with emulators. So the more games MAME supports, the more games your cabinet does.
I will agree to emmett's "Oh,yes" and raise you a "Hell Yeah!" ReBoot Rocks!
http://emulation.net/
:) :) [braces himself for hundreds of flames from angered PDP and C64 zealots]
hey, i always thought of emulation pages as an "obsolete computer museum"
seems like a pretty damn complete list to me, even if the focus is on gaming machines. and i will take ANY day being able to RUN the obsolete computer over looking at pictures of them..
seriously, they have just about every old machine ever made, or about half of them anyway, represented there. Fascinating to look at these things, run them, and realize people--many of whom are reading this discussion right now-- actually USED them to DO things. and they're pieces of crap!
this page in question is for us mac users only, but you get my point.. perhaps some kind person in the audience would post some emulation resources pointing to emulators that run on wintel or whatever flavors of *n?x you like.
oh and as long on we're on the subject i suppose you ought to look at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/
for those of us who find programming languages as interesting as computers..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
We have the Windows channel here in Detroit every Saturday night. AT&T does their 'Real Estate' channel in Powerpoint 97. Powerpoint runs out of memory every Saturday sometime between 5:45 and 6:15.. Fifty minutes later, Dr. Watson comes on the scene and kicks its ass.
Since they reboot the machine manually once a day at 5 am throughout the week, I can confidently say the maximum functional uptime of a NT box running Powerpoint is 37 hours.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Once in a while I see the screen asking for amiga dos disk with the cursor in the upper right corner. Its the type of channel that spews useless information for years, like phone numbers for the school district, etc etc.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You know, this was funny. I was amused. I loved "The Wizard of OS." *BUT*, most importantly, this just isn't the place for these things. Most people don't even see them since they get modded down--rightfully so--soon after they get posted. The only reaon I ever see them is that I always browse at -1 because I very rarely, but sometimes do, get moderator points and feel some odd responsibility to browse that low.
/.
Trolls, there are maybe ten people a day who actually see your long Portman-related ramblings, and pay any attention. Most never even see them. It's a waste of your time, and the time of everyone here at
Now, as for the Slashdot community, here's an odd idea. Why not, ladies and gentlemen, have a special area for trolls and would-be comedians? You know, a little link in the listing to the left on the main page, with a designated place to troll/perform Open Source stand-up. Trolls are here for attention and to try to be appreciated for their sense of humor, as well as to annoy people. If there were a designated "trolling-place," people who want a little comic relief or to get into flame-wars could click over and have a little fun, and many trolls would gladly go over there where people could actually read their stuff (they don't usually read it here since it quickly gets down-modded). Some would stay here to be annoying, but most would instead post in a place where their skills would be appreciated. After all, consider the alt.flame type groups on USENET--there's a sense of pride in places like that where people appreciate the ancient skills of trolling and flaming, whereas on the main pages of Slashdot the trolling and flamebait isn't appreciated. So, it has to be a disappointment all around.
Personally, I think this would be a productive idea if the good Commander and the powers that be would consider trying it on a trial basis. Just my two cents, fellas, no harm intended...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
this site was posted on slashdot like about a year ago. it has pictures and basic specs on many old-school machines. they also have separate sections devoted to video game hardware and scans of old computer ads.
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Only in a Quickies topic would a link to JeffK's "Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes" be ALMOST on-topic. =)
Wacky Fun Computar Comic Jokes
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
BREATHE DEEP!
--Clay
There was a cable access station here in Silicon Valley that had an Amiga Guru exception #3 (black screen version, no less) on the channel for OVER 6 months! (circa 1999) I used to check almost every other day, and it never went away. I don't have a TV anymore, but it may STILL be there (talk about "uptime" ;)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Absolute car wreck.. JeffK is exactly the sort of person Saten would put in the seat next to you on the trip to Hell.. ..
.sig: Now legally binding!
The "any drive" thing was actually the outer manifestation of one of the cooler things on the Amiga. A "volume" didn't have to be a physical disk at all; You could assign the volume label to any directory, anywhere. So when you took your floppy based copy of Deluxe Paint and copied it to a directory on your hard drive, and then it asked for "Volume DPaint: in any drive", all you had to do was assign DPaint: to dh0:DPaint instead.
/bin) and you have C: spanning dh0:c, dh1:c, and ram:c, it'll look in all those places.
Later versions of the OS even introduced virtual volumes that included multiple directories. Like, something looks for a file in "C:" (the equivalent of
It isn't a Unix style unified file system, but it worked really well. It solved one of the problems both Windows and Unix have, making it easy to arrange your drives any way you want, and rearrange at will without breaking everything. If anyone's still worrying about paradigms for devices and file systems in 2000, they'd do well to examine the Amiga's solution.
I also saw an Amiga running a local access advertising channel, years and years ago. I wouldn't have ever known it, but one day it was sitting there with a full screen CLI (nothing interesting in it though, drat.)
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the "creative endeavors" as you call them, when they're genuinely funny and/or interesting. But, there are relatively few people on the main part of Slashdot who read at -1, so ultimately your audience is limited. Very limited when you consider that, except for trolls and moderators/sometime moderators, almost no one browses at -1. If you got 16 replies, I guarantee that 12 of them at least were from mods and trolls. And as for OOG, whom you mentioned, I consider him a character rather than a troll because he posts *on-topic* stuff. You and most trolls don't, and that's the point: people click on these topics to read discussion about the topic at hand, and the occasional marginally-related humor, not to read off-topic bullshit, no matter how "creative" or side-splitting.
As for how "moderators should follow the guidlines"--they usually do, which is why your posts get modded down. A funny one-liner can get modded up for being funny, but a lengthy off-topic post like the parent post here must be modded down for being off-topic or a troll because it takes up so much space that it detracts from the discussion of the article. Clicking down ten screens of off-topic stuff shouldn't be necessary, it it wouldn't be necessary if the idea I outlined above were embraced by the different parties. Ultimately, more people would see your posts if they were in a section dedicated to such posts, and I think that that would be a good thing. Your posts are funny, I enjoy reading them, and more people would enjoy them if they were someplace where people go specifically to see that sort of off-topic but humorous or interesting stuff. As it is, trolls and flamers are on a fast track towards making Slashdot a lot less easy to troll. At the current rate, it won't be long before the powers that be decide to make only logged-in anonymous posts possible, and delete the accounts and the posts of trolls and flamers. Then Slashdot would be effectively troll-proof and you'd never be able to post here again. Do you really think it would be that difficult for someone who works for Slashdot, if they were to decide to do it, to permanetly delete all troll or off-topic posts, and the accounts from which they came? Yeah, you could open another account, but your posts would be up for a couple minutes before they'd be deleted from the board, and of course there'd be no more "name recognition" for trolls who get accounts.
And, that wouldn't be a bad thing to do, either. I think the only reason Taco and Hemos haven't done it is out of respect for "openness" and a free community. But if trolling continues to escalate, so will their means to control it. This time last year the trolling and flaming was nice and moderate. Now, it's extreme and stupid and a waste of many people's time. The choice isn't mine, or the moderators, nor is the fault. The fault is with the trolls who post excessive and off-topic, and the choices are up to the Slashdot admins and the trolls. If trolls and flames get out of hand, the admins will surely stop it quite easily by deleting all troll posts and closing troll acounts. It could be implemented easily, into an Amazon-style 1-Click system for CmdrTaco and Hemos and Roblimo and Cowboy Neal or whoever else they want to, to have the power to just delete the trolls. But if the trolls start being reasonable, maybe it wouldn't have to come to that. The idea I had about a special area for trolling and flaming is just a possible suggestion, which would be up to the Slashdot admins to implement--*if* people such as yourself were to support the suggestion. If not, so what, I don't care, it was just a suggestion. But it's people such as yourself who are being unreasonable. You can't expect a long rambling post, even if totally hilarious, to be modded up as funny when the guidlines clearly call for it to be modded down as off-topic. To mod it down as a troll might not be fair, but to mod it down as off-topic surely is fair. I mean, my posting threshold is defaulted to +2, but I click in the little box to post at just 1 because this is an off-topic message and it's appropriate for me to give up that bonus to avoid bothering people who read at a default of +2, people who are clearly looking to read only good posts which are typically on-topic. If other people decide to mod this up, or down, that's fine, but I will not presume to automatically barge in and annoy people by posting this at +2. It's therefore not unreasonable to expect you to realize that, almost every time you post something off-topic, and long, it will get modded down to -1. And right it should, not because it isn't funny, but because this isn't the place. Someone else mentioned the "undocumented" forums on Slashdot as providing a good place for posts like yours. I don't think that's sufficient, because it provides even less of an audience than the main stories do. But if there were a forum linked to the main page for your sort of humor, and for trolls and flames and free-for-all orgies of unmoderated fun, I think that that should be sufficient to satisfy everyone, and to even give trolls a bigger, and willing, audience. It's just a suggestion, take it or leave it, but personally I'd like to see the inappropriate and ever-increasing trolling and off-topic stuff stop so that I can use all my mod points for moderating stuff up which deserves to be read, rather than modding stuff down which deserves to be ignored.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
>Stanley is the product of a mixed marriage: :-)
> Valerie is a windows user and I use Linux.
> Valerie has agreed for the child to be brought up
> as a Linux user
Watch, when he goes through his rebelious stage as a teenager he's gonna start using a Macintosh.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
The Obsolete Computer Museum is great. Except they have yet to post the cool foto I took of my Kaypro-I... and I submitted the photo around Xmas of 1998! (for real). Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I don't know which is scariest - that their family apparently uses a version numbering scheme, that they announced it like a product press release, their "mixed marriage", or the fact that it literally IS a subdomain of perens.com
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hey, I was just thinking ... maybe I could build a spam filter based upon a training set of spam e-mail. A neural network could maybe be trained to recognise junk-mail. Or maibe I could design a statistical test which checks for a number of characteristic words (EARN, SAVE, etc).
Does anyone have any more ideas on possible solutions?
At the current rate, it won't be long before the powers that be decide to make only logged-in anonymous posts possible, and delete the accounts and the posts of trolls and flamers. Then Slashdot would be effectively troll-proof and you'd never be able to post here again.
I troll here on /. on a semi-regular basis, and I always do in using anonymous posts whilst logged in. It certainly hasn't caused me any problems, so I doubt that part of your argument would stand up.
As for the rest, you're confusing the small numbers of troll posts with the large number of spam posts here on /. Trolls can add value, spam never does.
Microsoft: Don't Innovate, Regurgitate!
Saten? See, even you can post like JeffK.
I released Ron 3.0 under the GPL January 6th using a unique series of nucleotide bases. Examination of Bruce 2.0's code reveals disturbing similarities. Once this post gets the /. community whipped into a frenzy, I will contact Mr Perens and ask him to rectify the situation.
Currently I get 6-7 emails a day at that account. All of it spam. About twice a week one from hotmail asking me to please delete some messages :)
That Ultracade looks pretty cool, but did anyone else notice that the only games for it are from Capcom?
It's missing some of the coolest games from twenty years ago: Defender, Joust, Robotron.... If it had Defender, I'd buy it in a second. Man, I remember the time I got to half a million on Defender. When I went to bed that night, I had burn in on my retinas. I closed my eyes and all I could see were Landers and Baiters zipping by.--Trippy!--The music and sound effects were ringing in my ears. It's amazing that I didn't get carpal tunnel from all the games of Defender that I played as a kid.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Yeah, those emulators are pretty cool. I've used one to play Defender on the Mac before.
However, the experience just isn't the same as having the proper arcade controls in the arcade box. Perhaps, I'll have to get a cheap 486 PC and mount it in a custom enclosure with a VGA monitor and custom controls wired up like a keyboard. Build my own Ultracade....
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Thank you very much ... oh my god, this is so unexpected. Thank you! So many people that helped me get here today ... first of all, I'd like to thank the Lord. Thanks, big guy!! And my mom and dad for all their support all these years ... they've been with me right since Bruce .5 alpha. And all those losers at slashbot ... if it weren't for that herd-like mentality, I wouldn't be writing this today! And a very special thank you ... oh god, I promised I wouldn't cry ... um, a very special thank you to Bill Gates, my inspiration and unintentional mentor. Bill, all this is because of you. Thank you! *sniff*
Bruce
Thanks,
Bruce
Notice that the User has a period in the front. Hal Duston hald@sound.net Boring is good. A conformist in a nonconformist world
George, a slashdotter of eons, told me about his new website which is up and running at
http://www.idmaweb.com/ to check out.
It's supposed to be a community forum for privacy and security issues.
He's a cool guy - ask him to send you some of his wierd pics once in a while, or travel pix from strange locations.
Will in Seattle
Take a look at Arcade At Home. On the left hand side is a link for "Cabinet Pics". It leads you to a page that shows at least fifty people doing just what you said -- building there own arcade machine all built around a PC and an emulator (usually MAME because of the huge number of games it supports). They all use real arcade buttons and joysticks (dials and trackballs even) that are mapped to keyboard commands. Playing a machine like this that is done right would be no different that sitting in an arcade pumping quarters. If you don't want to go all out, you can just use your PC and get a good controller (not a gravis pad or sidewinder that is) like the HotRod.
Dan