Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Toast, Cube, Light
Larry Ellison, watch your back. meforpc writes: "More on LTSP (Linux terminal server project): Riverdale (www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux) decided to make a 'poster child' to get the word out on their project; to do this Bryan Grimshaw made a Linux machine inside of a toaster oven. The idea behind the toaster is to show the ease of setting up a Linux terminal/server network. It's really cool and looks great. (I want one)."
"Oooh, that's one hot system! If you sell it, I hope the buyer doesn't get burned. Might this sort of thing have a Dark Side? Nice rack -- Smmmmmokin'!" Sigh. I've stopped now. The worst pun you can come up with will be rewarded with an official Slashdot groan of derision :)
Soon all will be optical. BdosError writes: "Scientists in Japan seem to have developed an optical transistor, as explained in this article, which I snipped from the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing newsletter. This could go nicely with the optical switching technology mentioned earlier, as it would eliminate the need to convert the electrical signals to/from optical. Plus, it would be a huge benefit for building fast systems which generate less heat in general.
Let's have no comments about the possibilities for a Beowulf cluster."
Well ... no more comments. But actually, why not? This sounds like a good thing for clustered research computers, no?
Of course, we'll see what hits shelves ... TheZalm writes: "The article about Gamecube being in danger is a misrepresentation of the facts. Hiroshi Yamauchi said only that he would reconsider his launch plan, and possibly place a small delay on the launch. See this article at IGN."
Of course, that's what Sega repeatedly said about the Dreamcast, too. The gamecube sounds cool, so I hope it arrives, but it's obviously coming into a hotly contested market.
Commemorating the banal and the momentous. fizban writes: "According to this AP news story, CNN plans to spend the next few years digitizing its entire video archive and making it available to the public over the internet. Excellent! Just think of the multimedia reports the kids of tomorrow will be able to make for their class projects..."
The article skirts the issue of licensing and payment; hopefully CNN will see fit to make at least some of its content free, but I'd be surprised it that's more than a sampling.
The progress may be mind-numbingly slow, but thanks to things like Project Gutenberg, ibiblio and the Internet Moving Image Archive, more and more free content is arriving for us to read, watch and use. ("And, he groused, "it would be nice if all images made with our tax dollars would be available online as well.")
However, the rate of technological advance is no longer affecting our culture as much as it did. Sure, technology is moving forward, but it does not affect society. Our quality of life is no different from someone in the 1950's. The law of diminishing returns is coming into play. If you have a job, car, health insurance and go on holiday twice a year, what more improvements can your lifestyle get? Very few.
Combined with this, there is the effect of globalisation and multiculturalism, which should really be called monoculturalism. This means that society is becoming less varied, and people are becoming more and more similar. Therefore stories have a more global appeal - the latest hollywood blockbuster or remake appeals to someone in Shanghai just as much as someone in LA.
So, before long every type of film will have been made, and all films will be derivatives (derivation being a very postmodern concept, and beloved of recent films). But extensive archiving will allow people to see this, and watch cheap archive footage just as fresh and relevant in 2020 as it is today.
We have to make sure we don't kill the active film industry by suffocating it and overshadowing it with the better films of yesteryear.
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Euroderf lives in northern Britain. He truly hasn't seen any advance since the 50s!
At a guess, it refers to stories that update or follow up on other stories recently posted. So any story people would be waiting for more info on (like the GameCube yoink rumor) can be wrapped up with a nice ending (hah).
High maintenance item. You just wouldn't believe how much bread they burn through.
Why video. Wouldn't it be worthwhile starting with text and stills. It's ridiculous that you can't search for news stories older than the life of the web. Libraries have decades worth of newspapers available for searching - why can't this be put on the web?
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
I just hope the GameCube will be priced so it is afforable in Canada. Since most companies decide on a US price and then decide the Canadian price of the product based on the exchange rate, some stuff is rediculously expensive over here. If they can get a $230 (Canadian dollar) price tag on it, along with the choice of modem or ethernet adapter, then I reckon it will sell like hot-cakes - the important thing is to price it much less than the Playstation 2.
What Nintendo generally has going for them are a bunch of family orientated titles with enough playability and attraction to please most people. It is always surprising how enjoyable some Nintendo games are, inspite of their lack of blood.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
for that Linux box in a toaster:
TOASTY!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
You are a meta-dork.
With all these "witty" comments after each story, timothy is starting to sound like the Locker Gnome. Here's a hint guys: very few people are any good at riffing. Just because Dennis Miller and Jerry Seinfeld and the cast of MST3K are funny, it doesn't mean that your half-ironic puns and fast-paced delivery of malformed jokes is worth reading.
I'm sure timothy is a very nice person, it's just that his special take on stories always fall flat.
I worked for a company once building Linux appliance servers. For Comdex one year we were going to give away a toaster.appliance. We even did a webpage for it. (didn't even make it on slashdot). I still have the web page running over here. It was cool.
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The above is not worth reading.
What's funny about this comment is that the Linux server toaster was built by a high school class that's learning about Linux. RTFA next time, troll!
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I think Nintendo's only trying to gauge how they will price the NGC. Yamauchi has been frank about precious few release details, but console pricing is TBA in late May. This IGN update even points out that the price announce date is 5 days after E3.
They have a lot to consider. If the "all games, no CD/DVD" approach appeals to the general public, then Nintendo can afford to price the NGC as high as is competitive. If it gets a lukewarm response at E3 (for that or any other reason), they may try to fight a price war with Sony and MS, focusing on price in their marketing. That's a major factor with parents, if not with us wealthy geeks.
Even Yamauchi's announcements that NGC will be delayed in order to secure adequate chip supplies hint that pricing is still likely unsure within Nintendo. When (not if) NEC agrees to Nintendo's pricing for the Flipper chip, Nintendo will price the NGC.
Regardless, I'm getting an NGC for the Zeldariotroid games: Zelda, Mario, Metroid. Kids will buy it for Pokemon. Nintendo understands killer apps just as well as MS.
< tofuhead >
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It is still the dark of night.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
So, they already got a bunch of the clips 'digatized' and I guess they are just moving that kind of service onto the web.
The first slashback, if I recall, was a couple of follow ups to stories posted previously on slashdot. timothy coined the term to refer to the follow up, and the word and format became popular very quickly - it was a great way to let /.'ers know how things turned out on some of the more interesting stories. It caught on and became a regular item with its own icon. Cool idea, and it's use has broadened slightly to include not only direct follow ups to stories, but more information or different directions from the subjects of other stories (lots of optical info lately, here's another blurb about optical stuff).
Note that optical logic gates are not completely new. Check out section 5.9.3.3, "The NOLM [Non-Linear Optical Loop Mirror] as a Logic Gate", in IBM's redbook "Understanding Optical Communications".
Also note that they have not created optical logic gates in this article, but optical transistors. However, if they are truly analagous to electrical transistors, then they can be put together to make logic gates. I have no knowledge of which technology is more appropriate (if either) for making large scale optical "integrated circuits".
Incidentally, I definitely recommend that (free as in beer) book to anyone looking for a overview of optics and optical networking for the technical non-optical-engineer. It's a couple of years and old, and so a couple of years out of date, but still accurate in most ways.
-Puk
Get real. Awareness is key to progress. The more people that hear about it the more that are likely to to contact the creator of the idea to see how to do it else where.
Oh and by the way. What's the difference between saying put Tab A in Slot B in person and saying it in a video or an online document.
Get over your need to see people sweat and toil. It's a disgusting fetish.
The Linux toaster is simply to demonstrate the simplicity.
Just what makes you think he's isn't teaching Linux.
Besides QNX blows Linux and BSD out of the water.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
idiot
How about a robot butler and jobs with a manditory minimum of 11 months of vacation. Replicators, and phasers and robotic poontang. Now thats a future we can all get behind!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
-Legion
connected to and controlled by linux. Now *that* would be cool. set a cron job to 'cat toast /dev/toaster' every morning at breakfast. :)
NO CARRIER
Can you imagine a Beowulf clister of these
You're using her as bait, Master!
RTFA next time, troll!
This happens so much that it suprises me that the "slashdot effect" actually exists sometimes.
Ah well,
oojah
--
Do you have any better hostages?
I know what would happen to him.
He'd turn into a cracker.
simple enough if placed in a loop. All that remains is a method of refreshing the signal. To this end, I thought of taking a gas laser, pumped to just a few photons below the point it will lase, and use it as the terminator of the loop. In this way, it gets a refresh on each loop
Good idea. A material that slows down light (such as this one; thanks ultrabot2k1), used as a delay line, gives you optical DRAM. Just make sure you don't try to take your idea into outer space.
Or you could just make optical SRAM by using these optical transistors (a D latch/flipflop is two NOTs and a mux).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Duh, Them kids should stay out of riverdale!
--Moose
It won't be hotly contested if all the competitors keep dropping out. Right now I count one contestant: the PS2. Xbox and Gamecube are both vapour. Dreamcast is toast. Indrema's vapour-toast. Am I missing a half-dozen next-generation consoles, here, or what? (It's entirely possible I'm missing something, so please point it out -- but there really aren't that many new consoles on the way or here, are there?)
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Really. This thing is just a toaster oven with the guts of a not so up to spec computer placed inside it. And then all of a sudden its a linux toaster oven. No it's not, it's a cleverly designed case. What I was expecting, and would be cool, would be some real embedded linux allowing the user log on it remotely, open the toaster door, place (maybe with some basic grabbing doohickey) the item wished to be toasted inside, and heat accordingly. :-)
But alas, I will have to wait another day for such a lazy invention. I already have my coffee machine automated, however, so the first person to make a REMOTE ADMISTRATABLE toaster oven, pleace notify me, and it will quickly join my cron.daily file
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Subject: Newbie needs help
/dev/flame /mnt/fire
Newsgroups: alt.linux.install
I can't get linux to install on my toaster.
Can any one help me?
It has always been the joke in the past but now
that there is a realy a linux toaster we need to start a new joke for those light days on the nntp.
I recomend the founding of a non-profit org that will make sure that Linux is always on the cutting edge of silly hardware so that we will always have something to post on those aformentioned light days.
I could use a linux powered cigarette lighter.
mount
Ascii artist &
This idea of making anything run linux isn't new. Some of my friends used to do that kind of stuff, but they more often tried to make bongs. A bong in a kitchen appliance such as discussed above could really get you toasted. I guess that Linux system would be great for Usenet flame wars. It doesn't look like it can burn a CD though, although some luddite twit will probably put one in to try it out.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
what linus would say if someone installed him in a toaster?
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Well, I think so Brain, but how are we going to install Linux on an electric can opener?
Bryan Grimshaw made a Linux machine inside of a toaster oven. The idea behind the toaster is to show the ease of setting up a Linux terminal/server network
And what, pray was the point in taking a perfectly good toaster-oven which could have quite happily been used to make toast and roast small items, and turn it into a stupid-looking computer case?
None! None at all...
How does this show kids how to set up a terminal/server network?
It doesn't! It's just completely pointless and stupid!
A small while ago when you could come up with any crazy idea for using the internet and have people throw money at you, people were going on and on about how in the Internet Future you'd have the internet on your toaster and the internet on your fridge blah blah blah. This is just the same. Hey! We can do Linux on a watch! Well big deal! A watch is a device for keeping the time. It doesn't need to run Linux or any other operating system for that matter. It has a mechanism. This is all it needs. A toaster just needs to be able to make toast and switch off when the toast reaches the required setting. It doesn't need to be computerised, it just needs simple electrics. A fridge just needs to keep things cold. It only needs a pump and a temperature sensor - simple electics.
I don't want any of my household appliances on the internet, or running Linux, just because some geeks think it's cool, thank you very much... It's just so unnecessary!
Oh, and by the way. It's not cool at all. It's stupid and sad.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
that I submitted the story on the optical transistor (a different link) on Friday night. Woo hoo.
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This really doesn't seem like the coolest computer case I've ever seen, but it does bring a whole new meaning to "frying your processor".
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
If you have a job, car, health insurance and go on holiday twice a year, what more improvements can your lifestyle get? How about just the car, the insurance and the holidays?
The all new Fry mac.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Has anyone got a hold of a development machine and put Linux on it yet? I would love to ping or telnet to that thing.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Question:
Has anyone wondered exactly what "Slashback" means? I would expect it to be updates to previous stories on Slashdot... but it seems to be more like longer quickies or simply a cluster of a handful of submissions.
Any of the old-timers remember the meaning of slashback?
This ain't a troll or anything... it's an honest question!
For example, if you have a figure skater performing to a bit of music, someone will want a license fee. Or a news story with a movie clip in it. Same thing.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Thanks for the link! I understand now. 'been a long time since I've had to think about electrons...
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Heh? What is "electricity propagation" and how is it different the electron mobility in a field, which I thought was electricity, er, current flow, whatever... i've been outta college for 10 years...
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Well, I think it boils down to two things, how fast it takes for a voltage to get from one side of a conductor to another, this is what I referred to as propagation. This is what is important in computers and other high frequency electronics.
I'm not buying that. Point me to a reference that says "electriciy propogation" doesn't have to do with electron mobility, and the electron mobility is a "few inches per hour".
Somethings smells fishy.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Get a life. These people obviously know exactly how to teach kids and have a good time. Maybe your shorts are in a knot, because you have a hard time building a server in a regular case? If you might bother, take a look at the rest of this web site you would find out that these people do great things with/for LINUX.
^_^
Mod this one up, please. Thanks.
You mean like CD-ROMs? :)
It is interesting, but I have a few questions, like how would you read the data back out? How would you make these things tiny enough?
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Too bad I sold my SFP stock, I didn't know it was going to be slashdotted.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Just how fast do you think electricity travels? Its already approximately the speed of light.
And it already takes about a nanosecond for light/electricity to go the distance of your motherboard, which has to be taken account for in design.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well, I think it boils down to two things, how fast it takes for a voltage to get from one side of a conductor to another, this is what I referred to as propagation. This is what is important in computers and other high frequency electronics.
Then there is the actual current flow of electrons, which is really slow in comparision, like a few inches per hour in a normal curcuit. This is mostly acedemic.
Either way, you can't really say "electricity" is slower than light, in any meaningful way.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Propagation was my term, I use it to refer to the transfer of energy.
Here, read this.
Link
My original point was just that electrical energy already travels about at the speed of light. Various things can affect this speed, just as light passing through various materials will change speed. "Electricity" is an abused term, used to refer to lots of things.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Thanks for the link! No problem, that's a pretty good site.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm sorry, but that is just not correct. Electricity propagation velocity is very close to the speed of light in the atmosphere. If you are talking about electron flow, that is much slower, on the order of a few inches per hour. I think it is safe to assume we are talking about propagation velocity here.
Do some research, it's an interesting subject. The reason light holds promise is because we can modulate a lot more data into it, not because it propagates much faster.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
We wrote linked list toy programs in Pascal on a crappy Macintosh. Lucky bastard.
Asshole, the linux toaster was built by students. Students of a teacher TEACHING Linux. Dumbass.
No surge protector will protect my surge. - Commodore64
Give the kids a break, they're in highschool. What cool things have YOU done?
No surge protector will protect my surge. - Commodore64
So I guess when you make a cd, you really are 'burning' it.
So what if puns are the lowest form of comedy,
You laughed didn't you?
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Great, now my computer is running on the speed of light. How do I overclock that?
You think the DMCA took all the fun out of computing, just wait for the laws of physics!
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
That chip that was supposed to be a webserver?
It was just a tiny little chip that had a built in Http server. I was actually thinking about buying one if they were going to produce them
Well why not take it a little further and suggest that everyone spend their time picking up garbage and teaching illiterate people to read? For christ sake, calm down a little. There's nothing wrong with someone having a little fun and trying to do something crazy.
He better not treat me like those Libyan terrorists. I think I might know the difference between a Flux Capacitor and an Atom bomb made out of pinball machine parts. I've almost got enough money for the Mr. Fusion option.
I wonder if the principal still calls everyone Slackers. It would make sense if they used Slackware instead of the K12LTP distro thingie.
And Biff-- aka Butthead?
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
aka Bill Gates
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
What ever happened to the video game companies anyhow?
What did we have before PSX came out? Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, NeoGeo, 3DO... It used to be that Video Game companies made the video game machines... Now it seems that the video game companies are the only ones NOT comming up with consoles.
And while I'm at it... it seems Nintendo cares less about the established market, and has their own monopoly on the portable game market... GB color, a game boy you tilt to control the game, etc. If the Virtual Boy was in color they'd have already taken over in the not-yet-existant future 3D market. I think it's good that nintendo is forward looking, rather than complacent.
Mac OS X is bloated, incomplete, slow, and unstable... Does that sound anything like NeXT?
XFce is small, quick, intuative, and completly functional. Now what does that remind you of?
You all havw a right to spend your resources any way you want, but a Linux server in a toaster isn't a good way to do it in my opinion.
If you want to promote Linux, take the time and instead of praising your geekly glory by making a photogenic linux toaster that will get you linked on slashdot and will slashdot your linux toaster anyway, go teach some kids some linux.
Teaching is unglamorous, dull and frustrating work, nowhere near as entertaining as making a Linux toaster.
But a lot more useful way to pass your free time.
Goat sex free since 2001
Now if you could only use the toaster dials to change the CPU clock and FSB speed. Forget Abit's SoftMenu, now we have physical controls!
This has already been done. Canarie, a Canadian group, is building a disk drive out of a 5k mile DWDM ring. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/161735.html Over time, a combination of high index materials, integrated photonic circuits (waveguides, detectors, and lasers on single chips) will make this more feasible.
Nutritious, tasty fun for the whole family!
Of course, anything you post on slashdot with this toaster would automatically be modded "Flamebait".........
Why yes, all my base are belong to you.
How did you guess?
and everyone knows that girls can't troll.
Bryan Grimshaw made a Linux machine inside of a toaster oven.
Shit with the demise of Slackware, Stormix, Easel, Corel Linux... The similarity is astonishing. Linux is toast.. or to be politically correct its only worth running on toasters take your pick.
wanna root me? (powered by OpenBSD!)
360 degrees of Karma
I once came up with a thought experiment directed at optical storage. If I were to take my rusty trusty ronco flashlight, point it at the sky, and in morse code, flash out "hello world", my message is in fact stored. To retrieve it, I merely have to determine how far it has traveled, and go stand in front of it. simple enough if placed in a loop. All that remains is a method of refreshing the signal. To this end, I thought of taking a gas laser, pumped to just a few photons below the point it will lase, and use it as the terminator of the loop. In this way, it gets a refresh on each loop, Very much the way the old core memory worked. What is the purpose of this diatribe? Optical processors need optical storage.
Excuse me? A high school network administration class?
Wow. I'm envious. When I was in high school, it was really big deal when they showed us how to use a TI-81.
when Linux Toaster Ovens go bad.
Actually it is possible to slow down light. Granted, this we're still a few years away from seeing any usable applications for this technology, but it's still a pretty cool concept.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Wow, so you can run a computer outside of it's case... big fscking deal. Now if this did something like setting my toast time and temp, I'd be impressed. Especially if I could do it from my WAP phone. Sounds to me like a waste of a perfectly good pizza warmer.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Sorry, SGI already has a computer in a toaster-like shell. The O2.
Check out the AT&T coffee machine. This has been upgraded over the years, and now talks to some listening daeomon process via a serial line. The daemon has a CORBA interface, and... oh, just go read the link ;-).
The stats are currently rather old - I'm not sure if the whole thing's still functional.
You would want to seperate a release of a game system from other game systems whenever possible.
This is so that when it is released it gets all the attention to itself and isn't sharing with another system.
If Yamauchi see everyone focused on the XBox he would probably wait to release the GameCude.
This gives everyone time to get the Xbox out of their system.
I'll take the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000<nobr>0<wbr></wbr></nobr> 4R93Z/">George Foreman Grill</a> over a linux toaster. It's great for grilling burgers, fish, vegetables, dishwasher safe, and <a href="http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~medina/slashdot<nobr>/<wbr></wbr></nobr> grill.html">looks a bit like an iMac</a>
I'll take the George Foreman Grill over a linux toaster.
It's great for grilling burgers, fish, vegetables, dishwasher safe, and looks a bit like an iMac