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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.
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
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.
Ok. This is going to come off sounding a little harsh, but here it goes anyway:
You've never used a NeXT, have you ? You really dont have a fucking clue what you're talking about, do you ?
1) you didn't read the article (typical)
2) NeXT machines didn't use X-windows, they used something completely NeXT proprietary. The server process that managed the GUi was called "WindowServer". THe whole GUI was based on DPS. There _were_ Xservers for NeXT, but most were commercial.
3) what does "fully bsd style" mean ? I bet you couldn't come up with a definition for that that made any sense, but even if you could, it wouldn't be NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP.
3a) NS used funky non-unix stuff, like NetInfo (sort of like NIS, but NeXT specific (although ports to other OSes were made))
3b) NS was not very posix compliant.. there were basic posix things missing from NS
3c) Many things in NS/OS were GNU software.. they had no issues about throwing away GPL software and replacing it with GNU as necessary.. hardly a very BSDish thing to do ? A notable example is the system compiler - gcc/objc. Other examples include the use of gnutar in many popular next packages (although I suppose this isn't a NeXT decision so much as a user community one)
4) "handle scsi devices in unix"
Uh.. wtf are you talking about ? On real hardware, SCSI is utterly brainless anyway. But its especailly so on NeXTs.. you just plug in a device and the GUI pops up a box saying "new disk, blow it away or mount it ?" Whats to configure ? Theres none of this sd0a bullshit, NS just figures it out..
so, for what its worth, i agree, NeXT boxes are cool and its too bad they were burning them.. 7+ YEARS AGO. And while everyone is entitled to an opinion, your post is like >50% erroneous as far as your "facts", and then you use these "Facts" to apparently justify ranting about something that never happened.
Nice post, pal.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. Wrong. Metals (alloys or otherwise) do not contain oxygen. However magnesium has sufficient affinity for oxygen that when it's hot, it will rip H2O apart to get more oxygen. That is, spray water on burning magnesium, you supply it with oxygen AND it releases hydrogen gas, which will drift til it mixes with some non-oxygen depleted air, and then probably ignite...
http://overtone.org/sass/cubefire.html is a mirror, if you're finding the main site to be slashdotted.
Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. This is why you have to use chemical extinguishers to put the fire out. (They will even burn under water as some soldiers in Vietnam found out when their Hueys were shot down and submerged in rivers. "Burnt like the sun")
As for Bonneville, yeah its a geek fest in its own right. In addition to the hot rodded Studebakers and such, their is some truly bizzare hardware out there. We used to go out quite a bit a few years ago when a friend was racing, to support him and work the occaisonal pit crew bit. Two pits over there was this guy (Norwood or something, but a great guy) who had an 85 Ferrari GTO body wrapped around a tube frame with a twin turbo NASCAR engine in the thing. Strange....... There was also lots of incredibly innovative stuff as well including hydrogen powered, battery powered, some factory stuff etc....
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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.