Slashdot Mirror


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.

29 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Obsolete!? by EvlPenguin · · Score: 2

    Yes well you go knock yourself out builing a beowulf of C64's and Amiga 500's. You might just get a whole 10 MHz of processing power and a MB or two of RAM. Whoa I think the DOJ is gonna be after you for weilding such power!

    Use your old C64 for electronics projects. Other than that though, these really are useless. But any computer today can be rendered useless by installing Windows >:)

    --

    --
    #nohup cat /dev/dsp > /dev/hda & killall -9 getty
  2. You know :) by / · · Score: 3

    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
    1. Re:You know :) by emmett · · Score: 2
      I feel sorry for Bruce's wife. Calling the kid Bruce 2.0 (even as a joke) is completely demeaning and makes it seem like the child is only Bruce's. How blatantly sexist.

      Bruce has been calling the kid 'Bruce 2.0' for the past several months, in conversation, and even on the radio show I hosted at Comdex last year. Quit whining.

      --Emmett

    2. Re:You know :) by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2
      Actually, Linus started the tradition when he announced "Linus 2.0", thus You have criticized the venerable Linus! Your karma has been reset to -1000, play again :-)

      Gee, Bruce 2.0 was a joke. People accuse me of being humor impaired...

      Thanks

      Bruce

  3. e-washing machine's old news... by laborit · · Score: 2

    I'm much more impressed by the new developments in cyberdefecation.

    - Michael Cohn

    --

    -----
    Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
  4. Energy from Giant Spliffs by quonsar · · Score: 3

    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.

    ======
    "Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

    1. Re:Energy from Giant Spliffs by the_other_one · · Score: 2

      But, officer, I was going to burn it. Honest!

      --
      134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
    2. Re:Energy from Giant Spliffs by B.D.Mills · · Score: 2

      An Irish scheme to burn cannabis as a fuel foundered last year because of it was considered too expensive compared with wind-power projects.

      Too expensive? They could have offset the cost easily. There's a lot of people who are willing to pay large amounts of money to live downwind of such a power plant.

      --

      --

      The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
    3. Re:Energy from Giant Spliffs by slim · · Score: 2

      Too expensive? They could have offset the cost easily. There's a lot of people who are willing to pay large amounts of money to live
      downwind of such a power plant.


      Funny, yes, well done: but it's worth pointing out that hemp grown for this purpose would have negligible narcotic qualities. The whole drug thing distracts people from the other uses of the plant (and it doesn't help that campaigners who *obviously* just want to get stoned legally, also use the "great fuel, animal feed, textile" rhetoric)
      --

  5. you know you're a n3wb33 when. . . by SMN · · Score: 4

    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.
  6. OBJECTION by Mr.+Piccolo · · Score: 2

    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
  7. Quickies by jfortier · · Score: 3

    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.

  8. Urgent Message to Washing Machine: by the_other_one · · Score: 4

    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!
    1. Re:Urgent Message to Washing Machine: by Bazman · · Score: 2

      That washing machine looks so much like a hoax, or April fool message. I mean, all that stuff about being able to change wash cycles and spin speeds 'as your washing needs change'. I've had my washing machine for 7 years and I've only used two of the programs on it. And no, they weren't emacs and Netscape...

      Baz

  9. Re:OBJECTION - the windows and MacOS channels by SydBarrett · · Score: 2


    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.

  10. an obsolete computer "museum" i like a bit better. by mcc · · Score: 3

    http://emulation.net/

    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! :) [braces himself for hundreds of flames from angered PDP and C64 zealots]

    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..

  11. Re:OBJECTION - the amiga channel by technos · · Score: 2

    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!
  12. I shouldn't reply to a troll, BUT--an exception... by Sir_Winston · · Score: 2

    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*
  13. more old-school hardware by Siva · · Score: 3

    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.
  14. Re:OBJECTION - the windows and MacOS channels by ChadN · · Score: 2

    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
  15. WTF by technos · · Score: 2

    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!
  16. Re:Amiga volume names by Joe+Rumsey · · Score: 2

    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.

    Later versions of the OS even introduced virtual volumes that included multiple directories. Like, something looks for a file in "C:" (the equivalent of /bin) and you have C: spanning dh0:c, dh1:c, and ram:c, it'll look in all those places.

    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.)

  17. Obsolete Computer Museum by Crixus · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:Obsolete Computer Museum by Crixus · · Score: 2
      Tom!!! YOU RULE!!! :-) Thanks for putting it online! A little delay never hurt anyone (cough!)

      I'm so excited! That photo was taken with an older digital camera and spiffed up with The Gimp.

      For those who want to see it the url is:

      http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/kaypro-1.htm l

      --
      Ignore Alien Orders
  18. Bruce 2.0 by grappler · · Score: 2

    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
  19. Ultracade by panda · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. Re:Ultracade by JBradley · · Score: 2

      The reason all the games are from Capcom is because Capcom is the only company so far to release their older video games into the public domain. All the other companies (including those who make the classic games you mentioned) haven't released their games even though they are fifteen or so years old and obviously are no longer generating revenue. If you want to play the classic games you mentioned, Ultracade is not what you want anyway, check out MAME at Vintage Gaming or Arcade At Home.

  20. Re:Emulators on PC not the same by panda · · Score: 2

    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.
  21. A cool thing not mentioned by WillAffleck · · Score: 2

    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