Slashdot Mirror
How to Burn a Magnesium NeXT Cube
Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "How do you set a magnesium NeXT cube case on fire? It took this guy two years, *two* cases and the cooperation of Lawrence Livermore Lab's burn cell." A seriously bizarre tale, but worth a read if you're curious. And I have one of those cubes in my office... all sorts of fiendish ideas start.
They could have tried to light the cube with a burning strip of Mag, or maybe they could have cooked up some Thermite...light a cup of that on fire with the mag strip, which then definitely has enough heat to light the cube on fire.
The server's what's on fire!
...or is it the Microsoft Worm (tm)?
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
That drill was the result of a carrier disaster during Vietnam. The day's sorties were canceled after bad weather socked them in. In the process of removing the armament, a magnesium flare ignited, and instead of just droping the damn thing on the deck or into the drink, the tech threw it into a storage locker, filled with more flares. this happened before the Forestall fire but Naval firefighting proceedures weren't changed.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
> A Cube with color, an optical drive, one of the sweetest monitors I had ever seen
The nice monitor was the megapixel (ie: the monochrome one). The color one was ugly (read common).
And the cube was not a color machine. You had to add a NeXTdimension board into it (and boy, that was slow)
That beeing said, NeXT cubes were the most beautifull machines I ever came close, from a hardware and software point of view. I developed 6 years with those. NeXTstep 6 (aka Mac OS X) is crap by comparison (but maybe it will improve)
Cheers,
--fred
Ahh, quite. As the owner of a NeXT Computer (came BEFORE the NeXTcube, but looks pretty similar). And as a Cocoa/WebObjects developer, I can only agree.
If you have a NeXT (of any type) you have a little black nugget of history. Try and resist the temptation to torch it...
Remember kids: When these are gone, they're gone.
Then you're blind.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
For all intensive purposes. I suppose a particularally intensive purpose would be trying to thread a needle by donzerly light....
At this VAR I used to work for, we took care of the Apple IIs that a school district abruptly decided to obsolete. We had a pallat with 15 or so of these things that were going to the dumpster. Did we simply unceremoniously chuck them in the dumpster? Of course not! It was time to play Apple II Toss. You see, if you put just the right amount of force and arc on an Apple II tossed underhand it will come down with all the force on it's lower right corner. This sprays slices of Apple everywhere! Just about every keycap flies off and the housing disintegrates into several large scattering pieces. The electronics pretty much look like what was left in the Fax Smashing scene in Offficespace. Okay, so we had to get a pushbroom when we were done and our female manager was exasperated with us. It was WAAAAY more fun then leaving them intact for the dumpster divers.
Yep =) So, if you're a netinfo hunk, you can have your network keep working and ot have to fuss with the silliness of manual networking.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Ahhh...good lord the horrible memories...
I still recall when ux4 was so horribly overloaded with idiots on IRC that trying to do any work was next to useless.
Then I discovered how easy it was to crash the whole damn system with a malloc and a fork, then jump back on as soon as it rebooted and start my jobs....
Gotta love UIUC, I cried the day O'Malleys went under....
I was pleased to see that the author of this little adventure was none other than Simson Garfinkel. Garfinkel is an excellent author who, among other things, co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security with Spaf. So this little missive suddenly gave me a whole new perspective on the term firewall. . .
-"Zow"
Did you read the date on this story? We're talking 1993. At the time, NeXT had just gone under, and its cubes were already less-than-desired compared to its competitors.
I definitely agree that preserving the boxes is a great idea, but in the here and now, not eight years ago!
---
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
Ahh, those were happier times.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Lets see.. for burning a NeXT, you miss out on:
Learning a Unix other than Linux.
Learning a Mach kernel.
Learning a fully BSD-style Unix.
Learning Xwindow.
Learning PostScript.
Learning how to handle SCSI devices in Unix.
..and countless other things.
And, what do we gain by burning a NexT?
The ability to say "Duh, I burned a NeXT, i'm 31337."
Yes, I know that the one used in this little "demonstration" was only the case, and not the guts of the box. I just think its a pathetically stupid waste to destroy something that could be of value to someone else not as "31337" as you. No doubt, there will be some dingbat who thinks it'll be cool to take his Pentium out in the back yard and douse it with lighter fluid just so he can see a fire. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who would have killed to get their hands on something as simple as a Pentium, to learn off of, and better themselves.
Bowie J. Poag
Can you get the two OSs to speak NetInfo to each other?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
How the hell did this get modded as informative? Clueless, more like.
What I wouldn't give to have Mike Judge read that account in his "Beavis" voice! And get all excited when talking about the burn, the BURN!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
My NeXT machines still run thank you. When they stop running I will mount them on the wall to be appreciated for the artworks they truly are. The innards, and case of the NeXTstation ('slab') machines were the most elegantly engineered computers ever created. The average 'PC' is a Rube Goldberg contraption in comparison.
The guy who toasted these machines is a philistine akin to the Taliban and their dynamite.
Anyway, just what in heck will put out a magnesium fire, other than flooding the room with N2 (which is possible only if you made arrangements long before the fire started)? A CO2 fire extinguisher obviously is no good, and anything water-based is disastrous (relased H2 might cause secondary explosions). Would Halon work (I don't remember the chemical formula), or would the Mg extract chlorine or something from Halon and keep on burning? Someone suggested burying it in sand, which would put the problem out of sight and eventually seal the Mg in molten glass, but might leave it burning away by SiO2 + 2 Mg --> Si + 2 MgO.
You are talking about Kevin Grundy no doubt...
from the article...
"The paint started bubbling, then burned away, leaving the black
anodized magnesium alloy. ("It's an alloy that is resistent to burning,"
the voice of the soon-to-be-ex-NeXT-employee came back to me.)"
//ct
...burning a Beowulf cluster of these?
Seen _that_ one on any infinite loop bumper stickers?
Too bad this was done in 1993, back when NeXT cubes were plentiful. There's only a finite amount of anything in this world: including space. If we don't recycle stuff, including doing cool stuff and having funn with it, that's no good either. So sit back, and enjoy the pyrotechnics.
'scuse me, dude. Can I bum a cube?
On a different note, there used to be a speed week or something up at the Bonneville Salt Flats which would end with a ritual burning of a VW beetle engine block (which is magnesium) and would probably be visible from Mars. Can't find a link tho.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wow! Does this work?! I had no idea you could put so many ND cards in (I didn't think a cube could use more than one).
That I've gotta try...
Or GNUStep. It's still developing at a steady pace, and works very well even now (all the non-GUI stuff is essentially finished, the GUI stuff is mainly hanging on decent Display Postscript on Linux - fortunately the Display Ghostscript project's nearly done too, except for the NeXT extensions to the Adobe specs.)
Umm..Isn't water about the last thing you want to put on a magnesium fire?
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Material Safety Data Sheet == MSDS. Not Material Date Safety Sheet. A real chemist would know that.
Yup, it was in NeXTWorld magazine, circa 1993. I probably have the magazine that the article was featured in, somewhere...
To bad Juanita didn't have a magnesium flare during her crisis.
I believe Juanita
Funny story.
A few years ago there was a ton of NeXT stuff for sale on the net but every system was missing a HD. Seems that these systems came from the CIA. They sold the computers to a junk dealer, but removed the hard drives in order to insure that the data was nuked! The hard drives ended up going through a metal shreaded and got mix into the new asphalt that they were using to re-pave the parking lots at the CIA HQ. This is a true story.
On another note, I worked with someone at my last job that worked at NeXT (help design the motherboards). He told me that they used to take defective cubes and burn them at a big bonfire a few times a year. He had pictures. I will have to see if I can scan get 'em and scan 'em.
Was it the same as thermite?
as the guy stated.. he's a chemist. and about 80% of all chemists are pyromaniacs. hell.. I should know, I used to be one (a chemist that is.. I'll always be a pyromaniac.. :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
post # 42 is redundant, but post # 46 with the same information and subject line is informative?
Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to metamod we go...
You should try putting an old VW Beetle engine block in a fire. That big lump of Mg alloy makes night into day. Much fun...
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
We saw a little spark now and then, which I thought was cool, but his persistent stirring of the wood fire created enough heat and the thing took off like a rocket (the fire, that is). Mighty bright, it was! All the neighbors turned off all the lights and we were able to read a newspaper with no trouble over 500 feet away from the blaze.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
I haven't been able to see the site yet but the problem seems very simple to me. A small pile of magnesium powder and a bit of detergent and water and you should be able to ignite virtually any piece of solid magnesium (and possibly a lot of the surroundings). Don't try it at home though.
Here are seven of them."
. . .
Unfortunately at $10k a pop NeXT
And there, right there, is the counterpoint and crushing irony. Of the most important breakthrough in computers, the one that mattered and made all the others meaningful was the price. From large offices to small homes, no one was willing to pay the absurd amount of money Jobs seemed to think his machines were worth. And that is still the case. I do not have three or four grand to spend on a computer. There are plenty of breakthroughs, I'm sure, but they are not worth that kind of money. Either Jobs can't do math, or thinks his elitist consumers will just drool to have what he wants, or he's got some hidden coke habit that he supports off the ridiculous overhead. I've opened up a Mac. The components are no different than, and of no higher quality than the ones I find in a PC. What the fuck costs all that money?
-Never trust a tech who tattoes his IP address to his arm, especialy if it's DHCP.
I thought the quote was supposed to be,'Never trust a tech who tattoes his IP address to his arm, especially if it's 127.0.0.1'.
640x480 with 256 grays, no sound or ethernet ;)
But it does run.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
The only NeXT I ever saw running in person was at York U in some back room lab. My friend was developing a bunch of programs in HyperCard on the Macs and used the TurboColor as a CD player! Bloody gorgeous machine.
My biggest claim to geek fame these days is running OpenStep 4.2 in VirtualPC under OS X. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
At least most of the page is available for perusing on the Google cache:
s imson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html+site:simson.n et+next&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:oudSX-rG5cA:
d00de
They also mentioned having to buy special equipment for the manufacturing of the cases since you really don't want too much magnesium dust floating around a factory... My father actually helped me buy powdered magnesium and saltpeter when I was a kid - it's a wonder that I still have all of my fingers!
I've got a 1.1 Mbps SDSL link, but my primary server had a CPU problem and so now the web server is running off a 200Mhz K6 computer. It's plenty fine most of the time, but it can't handle the 5hits/sec that Slashdotters were sending at me. So I shut down the web server.
Try again in a few days.... If you want me to drop you an email when it is back up, drop a note to cube@nitroba.com
I may even have t-shirts with the burning cube on them!
(Yes, I really am Simson Garfinkel)
Solid mangnesium is VERY hard to ignite. So no it won't work.
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
Sorry dude, you're trying way too hard.
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
jdholl1@hotmail.com
And I've got karma to burn baby so here goes!
How about a Beowulf Cluster of those. You could light up a city block!
-1 Troll, I await you!
____________________________________
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Wow, that's gotta be some sort of world record slashdot effect...No comments and it's down...
Help us build a better map!
They send one of your guys to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.
They destroy a cube... you slashdot their homepage.
That's the Chicago Way.
Okay I can do two;
The Web
Doom (I'm serious about this)
Maybe number three is that computers don't need to look naff? But perhaps we needed to wait until the iMac before we got that one?
There is no need to mark it as being a flame risk. The possiblity that it would catch on fire is nil. Bulk magnesium is very hard to burn because it is a very good heat conductor. If you have a lot of magnesium, it is very difficult to ignite, because it conducts heat away. and you can never get any part of it hot enough to ignite.
If you have a small piece (Like a strip that they use for chemistry demos), there is nowhere for the heat to go, so you can heat it up to the ignition point much easier.
Why do you think they had to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab? It is not easy to generate that much heat safely.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
How the hell is that a troll? So anyone who can appreciate a beautiful machine, and doesn't react positively to hearing about how a real life Beavis thinks its cool to burn one, is trolling?
No, because a cigarette/matches/bic lighters don't generate enough heat to ignite Mg let alone your sorry karma-whoring "I can't be insightful so I'll impress everybody with my hum0r" ass...
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Okay, I figured out how to make this work on the Nitroba system. I just lowered the MAX number of servers from 150 (Apache's default) to 5.
Who made Apache's default 150? That's insane. Well, it might not be insane if Apaache was multi-threaded, but with a process for each child, it's insanity.
(Yes, I really am Simson Garfinkel)
York University bought a truck load of them for financial systems software etc. At one point they even sold them at the University computer store in the late 80s early 90s. I remember watching someone quickly develop a GUI database browsing and query application in about 5 minutes using IB *on the store demo machine*. Compared to the cutting edge technology of Windows and Mac (hypercard was useful I guess) NeXT's were out of this world. The technology excellence and Jobs' megalomania both contributed to NeXT pricing the product out of existence. In those days a single workstation might cost 5-10 times a PC. ... sigh
Later after the York U administration began switching people over to the advanced Windows for Worksgroups 3.11 environment (hehe) they'd show up in Lab in labs here and there - but unless you were like a comp. sci. grad student it was hard to get an account on one.
York never did have a firesale on NeXT boxen while I was there. I heard of people getting cubes (with the monitor) for 100$ at other institutions but I never heard what happened at York U.
1 - Set NeXT Cube up as a server
2 - Post Story link on /.
3 - Pictures tomorrow...
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
When I was in the Navy we used to have drills on Magnesium fires. The fear was that one it was ignited, it was incredibly hard to put out and could burn through decks before it was put out. I remember a demo drill where they actually lit a large piece up. We watched it go through three simulated decks in a very short time.
Remember this NeXT poster?
"In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers.
Here are seven of them." The seven:
R/W Optical Disk
The power of Unix (with a GUI)
VLSI chips
Postscript (display and printing)
Digital sound
Multimedia e-mail
Object-oriented/visual development
The NeXT cubes that we used to use were something special. This NeXT poster essentially got it all right, years before its time. Hell we even had a program called zilla.app written by a true code master (Richard Crandall) that allowed us to do distributed computing across platforms (SGI at least). This was back in 1989 or 1990? I think. Wow great machines. I wish I could have purchased one for my own use like the ones in the lab we had back then, but the in our campus bookstore Cubes outfitted like that were something like $10k. But that would get you a completely badass system in all of its black cubeness. Geek coolness was practically sweating out of those things. A Cube with color, an optical drive, one of the sweetest monitors I had ever seen, and best of all a development environment that is still to this day, an amazing workspace.
Unfortunately at $10k a pop NeXT could not afford to keep making machines, but they did focus on the important stuff. (The NeXT OS reborn again as OSX and Webobjects which I wish I had spent more time learning). As the successor to NeXTstep I have great hopes for OSX (If you have not seen the development environment of OSX particularly the GUI developing environment of OSX, it is pretty sweet.) Here we have it folks, potentially the pinacle of UNIXdom. Time will tell.......
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I read this article in a magazine. Or something almost exactly like it. Several of the sentences seem word-for-word. But yeah. It *did* run right when Next discontinued the cube though. So it couldn't have taken him too long to do this.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
How considerate!
I assume overclocking is out of the question?
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
1... 2... 3... Ding, Ding, Ding. And it's all over already.
Wow, only 9 posts and the site's down already. A new record?
Even if the case was completely fire resistant, I doubt the components it contained would be. CPUs go snap-crackle-pop at room temperature without fans and hard drives don't fare much better. I imagine that after a server room fire with fireproof cases, you'd have a slightly darkened case full of puddled molten glass and stray wiring.
Was there a disclamer in the box with the cube saying there was a flame risk? Sure, the flame is cool and all, but if only one was made of Celulose.
Was the Magnesium anodized? Would that impair its flammibility?
They go for about $300
e m& item=1256262930
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt
(Yes, I really am Simson Garfinkel)
"Develop for it? I'll piss on it" was his take on the NeXT platform. Where was he when they were burning this thing? That'd have been worth web-casting.
In any case, it was intended to represent NeXT setting the technology world on fire.
Originally they were going to just burn the blank, but well... READ THE ARTICLE, it's interesting in a "i'm stoned off my ass" sort of way.
...what were the other three?
Breakfast served all day!
You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?
Dunno. Is that made of magnesium too?
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
no, a match is not but these are. and they come in handy for more than lighting cigarettes too
Fscking lameness filter...
Mirror: sans pictures
http://web.thock.com/cubefire.htm
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
How about using the themite reaction to light the case on fire? Would the molten iron melt thru, or ignite the case?
Imagine the irony too! Burning magnesium ultimately resulting in the imolation of its own kind!
Agreed...Not just art, but vision. The NeXT was a harbinger of things to come (that never did..alas), a bold vision of the future. I remember when there was a NeXT dealer in downtown Toronto. Us developers would go down on a hot, lazy, afternoon and gawk at the absolute beauty and precision of those machines. We were developing on generic 386's, running OS/2 1.3, using Smalltalk. Win95, NT, OS/2, and Linux were blips on the horizon, but there they were..black, powerful, and pure geek lust. They were the most futuristic looking, and most futuristically capable machines out there. They made all the high end offerings (like the RS/6000) look primitive, and made our 386's look just plain pathetic.
Now, everybody has machines 20x or more powerful, minus the grace and elegance (the iMac cube came close, but cutesy can't hold a candle to how the NeXT Cubes looked back then), and we still haven't achieved the panache, both visual and hands-on, that these things achieved.
Fortunately, here in Calgary, there is a certain oil company that still runs NextStep, although it is being phased out. Talking to the developers, to a person they nearly cry lamenting their phasing out.
Truly the passing of a legend. I'm not sure whether to be outraged that the folks in the article burnt one, or to be proud watching a Viking warrior go out in a burning effigy...
Which would the boxes themselves have wanted? I hope the latter...
Umm... actually, they do still exist. They just got purchased by Apple. NeXTStep/OpenStep is the foundation for Mac OS X. And I swear that the NeXT cube was the inspiration for the Mac cube, but I can't back it up. So... NeXT is now Apple.
that was dumb
Never had trouble setting magnesium on fire....
Don't Tread on Me
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:oudSX-rG5cA:s imson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html+&hl=en
Now I will wait 30 seconds.
Double check.
Fscking lameness filter... Mirror: Now WITH pictures :-)
http://web.thock.com/cubefire.htm
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I know NeXT boxen are relics from the past, for all intensive purposes, useless. However, they are antiques from a company that no longer exists. They were, in reality, a milestone in computing technology. Superior to everything else around them, NeXT boxes a testiment to innovation (unlike most of what we see today).
There's a finite number of this machines left in the world, and it's a shame to see such a silly waste. Instead of burning these classic machines, try donating them to people who appreciate them. You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?
Why bother.
The cube was painted with a water-soluble paint (not actually black, as it happens: It's a very dark slate gray, so that the logo, which *is* black, stands out.)
As for flammability, it's not an issue. If you read the article, you'll note that it wasn't at all easy to get it lit.
BTW, this article appeared in NeXTWORLD magazine back when these events happend (early '90's).
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
was i the only one that used to steal thin, long strips of magnesium from school, slide them into a cigarette and then cheerily offer them around to that person who would *always* pay you back tomorrow?
bought a whole new meaning to getting blind
Yeah we used to do that out in the middle of the dessert with a half dozen of more tires just for effect... oh those days before we had to worry about mother earth..... Try zirconium sometime... burns twice as hot and bright but costs BIG $$$$$$$
it would make one wonder..why would it be so hard to burn? shouldnt covering it in gasoline and lighting a match work? =D
I think, therefore, I'm smarter than our president.
It's been done in MegaTokyo.
Shouldn't it be possible to use and AMD Athlon to do the same thing to PC? Now that would be entertainment!! :-)
OT: The r and n in 'Burn' merge together on my Mac/iCab and I get the subject 'How to Bum a Magnesium NeXT Cube'...
The light emitted by burning magnesium is *very* high in UV, and can cause serious damage to your sight. (But, you get two eyes, so if you wreck one I guess you're still OK.) That's why it is/was used in flashbulbs; silver emulsion panchromatic film is also extra sensitive to the UV end of the spectrum.
Boy, what I wouldn't give for a few boxes of blue 25s...
They didnt just grab a cube yesterday and set it on fiere, the burning was done right after next cubes were discontinued, and the cubes were provided by next. In the future, think, wait, and then speak.
It didn't sound like it was the paint. It sounded like the metal was an amalgam of magnesium and some other cheaper (and non-flammable) metal, probably 'pot' casting metal. That's why it took so much more heat to get it started.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
This experiment should better be lead into research on fire-resistant cases, rather than just burning them. Considering many corporations important data today stored in PCs, fire-resistant cases would be an attractive solution -- especially if it is comboed with redundant power supply to make "indestructible server"... Cool... DoD would certainly order those. Yeah... it's still vulnerable to hammers... :-)
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Why didn't he just sandblast the paint off?
Information wants to be free, hardware wants to be immolated?
Oh well, at least I get to use the word "anthropomorphism" in a post.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
guess that's what you get for publicising the destruction of such a fine machine. As you sow, so shall you reap.
One of the engineers at CodeFab picked up 130 NeXT systems in a bid to get our attention and have us hire him. It worked (CodeFab was founded by and has hired a number of old hand NeXT community folk).
We gave most of the machines to the free hardware foundation (it was a long time ago and I can't even remember who or give a link. Doh! If you are really interested in tracking this down ping me and I'll figure it out.).
In any case, out of the 130, I kept one configuration for myself... a dream machine. It is a Turbo Cube with 3 NeXTdimension boards connected to 3 21" NeXT monitors. It is frighteningly large but very cool. Works seamlessly.
My next experiment is to try hooking up the various bits of NTSC video in/outs together and see if I can't cause some nice feedback loops or something.
Over the last few hours, I've been getting 35 hits/sec . How do I make this link go away? -Simson Garfinkel
detergent and water? Petroleum jelly is what I heard is best.
If you have no powder, just hacking the solid chuck so there are cuts that result in thin burrs usually will do the trick.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I always knew there was a reason that I spent chemistry classes at school burning various aparatus over a bunsen burner.. it was so I could grow up to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as The NeXT cube burning man. I imagine he will be at the next burning man festival with his own NeXT cube effigy and a blowtorch... seriously strange.
-nemof
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
-- moderators suck ASS andNEVER tire of whacking to goatse.cx
-- Trolled...you WILL be === Yoda
Give me a friggin break...
Bowie J. Poag
"for all computation-intensive purposes"
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
----------
Person 1:
Wow, look at this NeXT case. We could find some parts for it and put together a milestone in computing history.
Person 2:
Or we could set it on fire!
Person 1:
Oooh! Yeah, fire is cool!
----------
I think "from the too-much-spare-time dept." is about right.
SIGFEH
"This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!"
:))
I laughed pretty hard on that one
It's perfectly obvious that the cube was able to automatically adapt and become invulnerable to the torches. It's Wolf 359 all over again, I tell you!
http://overtone.org/sass/cubefire.html is a mirror, if you're finding the main site to be slashdotted.
A good old fashioned APFSDS round (armoured piercing fin stabilizing discarding sabot) made of tungsten and traveling at 2000m/s will do the job just fine...and wouldn't you know it, lots of other tanks have magnesium alloys in their hulls/turrets. There's nothing more terryfying than watching a tank on fire.
Next time bring that NeXT case over to a tank firing range and someone there would be happy to test it out.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Why would someone try to do this? Perhaps it's explained on the page, but I can't get through to it right now. Anyway, I would love to have one of these, and I'd much rather see it given to someone who wants it than have it destroyed.
This is kind of old news, even for Slashdot. Simson Garfinkel (who has been mentioned on this site before) burnt these things in March of 1993.
In '93, these things weren't collectors items -- they were neat-o cool, but still falling in value. By '96, you could probably walk into any math department at any university in the world and buy a Cube with a burned out optical drive, a bad hard drive, a faded out black and white monitor, and a broken PostScript printer, all for well under $500. Hell, at some universities you probably still can.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The Day The NeXT Cube Died...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Livermore needed the names, social security numbers, and addresses of everybody who would be inolved with the project.
An all these years my mother used to take unfocused pictures of us kids using one of those compact cameras with "126" film cartridges, and disposable magnesium flash cubes. The guy should've said he was going to ignite a bunch of flash cubes, and save himself some hassle.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The NeXT cube is ART. The circuit boards are wired in an arrangement so perfect it's beautiful technology art.
God, I sound like Steve Jobs.
I can think of better things to burn that cost >$6000US. Seen how much they go for on EBay?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.