Slashdot Mirror
The Teddy Borg is Alive!
probabilistic writes: "Check out what bored MIT students are up to -- a few of my friends, in their never-ending quest for network connectivity and female companionship, created the Teddy Borg. It might look like an innocent teddy bear, but behind the soft exterior lurks a GigaFast 5-port 10/100 ethernet switch."
I bet you could sell these things like hotcakes for LAN parties. Seriously.
...Steve
It gets even better -- if you can manage to get a research grant for something, you can be an "MIT scientist" creating it!
"MIT" goes right along with "space-age technology", "patented", "technology that NASA uses", "custom", and "advanced" in the bin of stupid buzzwords that mean essentially nothing but make the subject sound more impressive.
Ok, slim material, but I did like seeing the status LEDs in the eyes.
Is it me or are MIT geeks seen as the world leaders in "geek coolness?" Its a pretty amazing place where some of the most innovative technology research is done. Yet everytime a student does anything remotely entertaining, its splashed on geek sites across the world.
I guess it just enhances the myth
Hmm. Aesthetics. Aesthetics is something that the consumate marketdroid will never understand. If they had existed in any great numbers 100 years ago, cars would have had great big fiberglass horse sculptures fused to the chassis, to make it look more like the "original". This is what they would think was "aesthetically pleasing", because they have no great desire to actually appreciate what a car was/is. They just use some hackneyed formula, and whatever garbage plops out on the other side of the equals sign, well, that must be what consumers want.
Apply this to computers, and to a lesser extent, technology in general. A person that appreciates what a computer actually is, doesn't want one that looks like a teddy bear, or like some 1950's vision of the future, complete with some improbable Imac-esque form factor.
Does that mean that I prefer clunky XT style cases, with their "mildewed in a lost cave for 12,000 years" beige? Lord no, simply that in loving the things beyond their plastic shell, I actually have a good idea what might make them look their best without trying to turn them into something they're not. Sleek polished black, with only the slightest hint of organic curves, subtle blue LEDs... you get the idea.
Oh, and the wireless hub/switch thing? Sorry if that seems like it's nitpicking to you, but those are more than buzzwords to me. But thanks for showing to the world that they're nothing more than that to you.
sarah:~# nmap -sS -O -v 18.238.3.106
Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Host RECURSION.MIT.EDU (18.238.3.106) appears to be up
Initiating SYN half-open stealth scan against RECURSION.MIT.EDU (18.238.3.106)
Adding TCP port 139 (state open).
The SYN scan took 27 seconds to scan 1523 ports.
For OSScan assuming that port 139 is open and port 1 is closed and neither are f
irewalled
Interesting ports on RECURSION.MIT.EDU (18.238.3.106):
(The 1522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
139/tcp open netbios-ssn
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=trivial time dependency
Difficulty=27 (Easy)
Sequence numbers: 1424217 14242BD 14243AB 1424493 1424579 1424660
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98
Sort of contradicts this story, doesn't it?
Well.. even better.. instead of stuffing network switches into a teddy bear, why not stuff a cable modem / adsl modem into one? I guess those would sell more popularly, and I would definately have a Tux penguin sat on top of my PC knowing that it actually served a purpose :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"