Slashdot Mirror
Linux For Supervillains
computernut writes "Supervillains seem to like Linux. Take a peek at a cool Shockwave Animation on why they use it." Cute little animation. I think we might have shown it here before, but hey it's Sunday, and August which means this is the closest thing to news we might have all day.
This story is a great reason not to get a subscription to slashdot.
Anyway, the video -- which is funny -- is several years old and comes from http://www.ubergeek.tv/
Linux is for Supervillians. The Good Guys use NetBSD.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
My $DEITY
This thing is nearly 3 years old
It's mentioned on other websites with a date of january 2003!
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
..but at least he's honest about it. Doesn't fucking bother capitalizing August or Sunday, doesn't care to look up if it's a dupe.
*gasp* He's just another lazy computer geek! Everyone, get the pitchforks and torches! We're supposed to all be pissed off cuz he's getting paid to be a lazy geek! We're supposed to gripe about having subscriptions and.. o, wait, I'm an AC.
Yes, anyway, Taco is still my man.
First, "they hate copyright", now "they want to destroy the world". What next? "They're trying to put an entire industry (anti-virus) out of business!"?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Since we're duping movies we've seen before, I might as well point out the funniest Switch parody I've ever seen... http://www.roosterteeth.com/archive/download.php?i d=499
Wow, this animation is soooooooooooo old. here is the actual site this came from.
The Television Wiki
... but it's still funny! And besides, some of us don't remember /. stories three years old => So, I for one welcome our three-year-old Linux supervillian overlords. But only when used appropriately.
When I post something relevant it gets rejected, but when someone posts an admittedly funny, but million year old flash animation, it gets front paged?
who cares?? it entertained me - thats more than you can say for most /. posts
Naw.
Next time I submit a story, I'll just make sure it's Sunday in August.
Besides, the video did make me laugh, and on a day I could use it, so I'm happy.
D
Yet again, something absolutely useless on Slashdot has made me dumber. This time it was unfunny too. Thanks Slashdot! Two or three more like this and I'll be too retarded to type.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
lol!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I feel better in the morning knowing I can always count on Slashdot to post something dated from at least a year ago.
Windows XP, fully updated, rarely goes down. Like in Linux, the base system can often save the rest. You just need to restart explorer.exe. Real BSODs, in my experience, tend to be driver and hardware related. The hardware culprits for me have been: An ATI Radeon card, a motherboard (a revision of K7s5a fails memtest out of the box), and bad RAM, of coore than a year.
None of my current Linux systems go for more than a month without X-Windows manager troubles. In one case, I know this to be a video card driver issue. The others, I have no idea about.
I don't think it promotes linux... I think they're actually making fun of it where they say "you have to compile it, patch the kernel, etc". (I'm not being a troll).
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
This thing is called Flash for 5 years already! And previously it wasn't simply Shockwave, but Shockwave Flash. Shockwave is the name of Macromedia Director's internet format and entirely different technology.
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
Macromedia has renamed SWF to "Small Web Format" I'm serious. I sat through a presentation and that's what they called it.
See how much has changed since then, as the Linux revolution in ease of use and consistency has swept the world's desktops.
Yes Veronica, that was intended as sarcasm, not irony.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Although you might be happier just not installing it, there is an official flash player for linux.
It's a good thing then we are all reading and posting from our PowerBooks.
.. and yet you do. And even posting comments.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
It would be, except it's not a shockwave animation - it's flash.
;)
As long as we're posting three year old flash clips, you don't expect an accurate description too, do you?
I wouldn't be surprised to see a /. story on, say, hampster dance in a few years. Not only has that video been around for years, but Darl Mcbride even referred to it in his "open letter" not long ago:
t ml?.v=19
/ 1717257&from=rss
A popular animation
on the Internet features a guy named Steve, the Linux Super Villain.
During the course of the 60 second animation, he describes his work
with Linux stating, "First you have to config it, then write some
shell scripts, update your RPMs, partition your drives, patch your
kernel, compile your binaries and check your version dependencies..."
http://ca.us.biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050808/lam060.h
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/08
Yeah, because flash runs ine on linux, but he is talking about shockwave.
Get a clue, then open mouth
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Huh? Works fine in Mozilla for me. RPM version data follows:
> rpm --qf "%{NAME} - %{SUMMARY}: %{VERSION}\n%{VENDOR}\n" -q flash-player mozilla
flash-player - Macromedia Flash plugin: 7.0.25.0
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
mozilla - The Open Source successor of the Netscape browser: 1.7.5
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
Hope this helps.
If you don't like this site, why do you post so much? I did a quick search for posts by you "Anonymous Coward" and it looks like you're the biggest user of this site!
Sorry, I thought dolphinling was confused about Shockwave and Flash, but it turns out I was. Anyway, whether Shockwave works or not on Linux is mostly irrelevant; I can't say I've ever needed it. Flash is annoying enough, thank you.
He could've just not posted any new articles, keeping the ones that are there on the main page so we can discuss them more.
/.: In the good ol' days, Taco and Hemos posted an article when there was something to post, maybe once an hour, maybe once a day. Articles stayed on the front page for days, and we managed to have meaningful discussions about them.
Why we used to love
Why we don't love it anymore: There's now a quota of one article per hour (or one per 2 hours during USA-side nights and weekends). This results in lots of lame articles and dupes, and makes the older articles disappear from the front page quickly. Unless you're glued to your computer, there's no way to carry on a meaningful discussion, and there's a rush by everybody to post a comment within the first few hours, flooding the articles with irrelevant stuff.
Basically, slashdot's gone from quality to quantity. Great for ad revenue, not so great for readers.
http://www.macboy.com/cartoons/switch/gates/
Really. It does. If you've ever heard an interview with him or seen a presentation - that's him!
As people have said before, Shockwave Flash != Shockwave, though this is really Flash and not Shockwave.
I saw that the article said "Shockwave" and thought it ironic--as everyone knows, Shockwave doesn't run on Linux (except via Wine).
.swf is Flash. Firefox sometimes flakes out when you try to run a non-embedded Flash animation with it.
As long as people are posting old news, here is a guide to being an Evil Overlord http://www.evilrulers.com/eviloverlord.htm
Damn, who would have thought that installing Flash could be that easy. Just type in a 80 char command and voila you have Flash installed. I wonder why everybody hasn't switched to Linux yet :D
that over 50% of terrorist websites run on Open Source webservers? :)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Olds for 'tards. Stuff that mattered.
umm, please explain. I just watched it. Linux. Firefox. Flash plugin. so, huh?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It is pretty funny. Remember, this was made 3 years ago, when a lot of that was still true. He's not making up fud. Back when he made it, lots of those problems were existant. Linux is much better off now, having improved greatly in the last three years (from last year to this year, a lot has changed even). Three years ago, lots of the things that are easy today were much harder.
Help Fight SPAM today!
It is normal flash, just watched it on Gentoo.
Linux is not Windows
apple switch parodies made by the olde english sketch comedy group...
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
Dude, i am in linux and it works fine... it is a flash file, not shockwave...
It great that it's possible to do it several ways but imagine explaining it to somebody over the telephone. Your explanation versus; dude, just say yes when it explicitly asks you if you want to install Shockwave.
August is traditionally a slow news month. The US Congress is out of session. A lot of people are on vacation. People don't usually make major announcements. Maybe tech could be different, but as the article says, "News for Nerds" is a little thin on the ground.
The other key word is "Sunday", meaning no companies issued press releases yesterday or today. If a company has done something interesting (and face it: in the tech world a lot of stuff gets done by companies) it comes out either as a press release or a leak. Slashdot usually runs a lot of "just amusing" stuff on Sundays.
Yeah, it's a years-old Flash animation (which is really cute, but still... who even cares about the iMac ads that it's parodying?). So it's August. Take a breather.
i stumbleupon'ed this last month....
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
Well I kinda liked it. It's Sunday and some nutty flash can't do me any harm, now can it?(Besides my RHEL4 which I'm trying to tune thru my VNC wirelessly).
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
It's actually flash rather than shockwave, stupid inaccurate summary. I assure you there is no shockwave player for linux, if there was I'd be playing miniclip's horribly addictive word leaves game right now.
I am trolling
Is that why you use that little devil character as your mascot?
You'd think that he could at least pronounce Linux correctly.
Uh, the installation command is: yast2 -i mozilla flash-player, but you really don't need to do that unless you've told YaST not to install Flash; Firefox and Flash are installed by default on SuSE 9.3. Anyway, my point was that Flash is well supported and often preinstalled on Linux.
At least the article's animation was smaller than the apple mov file. Or was that the point?
Well, did YOU know...
;)
> 68% of all websites run on Open Source webservers
Assuming the rest run on some form of Microsoft webserver we can clearly se that Microsoft are directly advertising to terrorists
Yet more proof that Microsoft are evil
Unlike wine, flash movies do not get better with age =P
Wow! Anyone else see the irony in trying to configure linux to play the animation which makes fun of installing things on linux?
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Um... nothing has changed. Installing Linux is just as hard now as it was then.
True, the .swf file format does stand for shockwave flash. However, this is a flash animation; a shockwave animation is something quite different. This was an animation that was produced via macromedia flash, and runs in their flash player.
A shockwave animation is one that is produced in Macromedia Director, and requires an entirely different plugin.
They're separate products and separate file formats. The flash format (which is far more common) is vector based, and was designed to stream interesting animations to people while using up as little bandwidth as possible. Similarly, the flash player itself is (or at least originally was) designed to be as small as possible.
In contrast, the shockwave player was designed from the start to handle lots of stuff (bitmaps, vectors, 3d) and so was always a much heavier player.
So anyway, the parent post is right, I think. This is a FLASH animation, not a shockwave animation. Calling this a shockwave animation in the headline is misleading.
Well ok, time to reopen that issue and find out. Considering the current crop of vacuous airheads that are living in their 15 minutes now at least we know that one uses computers. I doubt she will ever say 'Chicken by the Sea".....
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I seem to remember that it downloads an installer, but it has been a while... The problem on GNU/Linux is (as always) traced back to non-free software, once (and if) there is a mature free software flash player you can be sure that you won't have to explicitly install it on any desktop distro.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Dupes aside, are Slashdot editors paid on a Sunday? Do they get double time or do they work a 6 x days + 1 free shift.
For the record, I haven't seen the animation before so it was new to me.
Being a long time comics reader and supervillain myself (well, wannabe, anyway), I believe in Linux!
Kim Polese used this at her talk announcing SpikeSource last year. I had just downloaded it a few days before myself, so when I listened to the MP3 of her talk and heard this come on, I was like, "Oh, cool, Kim!"
I count Kim as a "gorgeous fembot" for this coolness.
Sadly, Linux has not yet improved my love life.
But the orbiting brain laser research is going well on Mandrake 10.1 - to be upgraded to 2006 when it comes out.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This game, made by the same guy, is much much cooler ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
To clarify, though it's already been done, the animation you saw is a Flash animation. Flash does and always has run fine on Linux, though the releases are somewhat behind the windows and mac releases. Shockwave is an entirely different thing (by the same company), and there is no linux player. Last I checked (which was over a year ago) it worked with CrossOver, but that put up ads in the middle of what you were doing.
Since you asked, I use Gentoo, and it was about a day old (gotta love emerge --sync && emerge -Dtau world). Every once in a while, I report a bug to Macromedia about there not being a player. You should too.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Careful, they modded me "troll" for saying the exact same thing. (Even used the same word "ironic".)
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
maybe my standards are a bit low, but I have no problems leaving my debian system looged into a KDE desktop for a couple of weeks at a time.
Windows XP, on the other hand, doesn't actuallly crash, but after a week it is so incredibly sluggish for me that it is unusable. The debian box, after its been running for a week, is as snappy as ever.
You show flash animations parodying Linux at your family reunions?
I'm not criticizing you or anything...your family must be different than mine.
Ride the skies
Remember, this was made 3 years ago, when a lot of that was still true. He's not making up fud. Back when he made it, lots of those problems were existant. Linux is much better off now, having improved greatly in the last three years (from last year to this year, a lot has changed even).
It's a lot better now, but part of the reason I thought this was funny (although I'd seen it long ago) was that I spent all night installing Ubuntu on a laptop I got for free when we cleaned house at work.
Pretty much everything on his list, I've done. I'm recompiling my kernel ATM to get my wireless card working.
Still much better than when I ran a web/mail server for a student newspaper on Redhat 6 though.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Jeez it's not even a shockwave animation! *points to the SWF extension*
I remember a few years ago when I was about 17; I was angry that some people were posting some GNAA crap and just joking about the stupidity of the article. I was an internet geek -- and was sad when people made fun of something that had potential. Saw that very cartoon when it came out. Laughed in my glee running around on my brand spanking new DSL connection that would blink out every so often.
Flash forward, now 20 years old, been looking at slashdot every once and a while. Seen all the complaints over the years, but never really understood. Bored with the internet, only checking one forum that I started moderating back then 1 time every 2 days. Post counts uninteresting, login ID numbers no longer a sign of seniority. I check slashdot using my 3 meg cable connection in my apartment at college to find an article presenting that cartoon I saw, what feels like, so long ago presented as new.
My feelings verified. Same junk circling around from years past, and finally understand what people were complaining about back then. I have just been reading a website put together by some random person with nothing to do. Gods of the internet I saw back then, prove themselves just to be another Joe who is out to make a buck.
I'm glad to see that people are still interested in this animation after all these years :). When I first made this animation, I didn't think the popularity would be what it is today. I was just having fun. I made this in 2002, and got a surprise bandwidth bill of $500 because of it. Now I've got a great server farm ( plug: www.cachefly.com ) that handles the load, so slashdot away :).
Man, I've got to make a sequel some day!
And once again /. has managed to outdo itself...
Insert Sig Here
It runs fine on my GNU/Linux system though. The trouble with flash is that there was no free (as in freedom) flash plugin. However, I guess our friends at the FSF can point you to a project that is working on just that.
" What's so funny is the fact that, although they love linux, they still make the animaton in shockwave, which macromedia doesn't release for linux."
Wow. I guess you need to tell my Debian box that, as it just played it flawlessly. The only possible reason for you to post that is that either you don't use Linux, or you suck at it.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
What's even funnier is that people just assume the description is right, when if they checked, they'd see it was Flash, not Shockwave.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
On linux: adzapper+squid? It works fine on my PC.
interesting. All it took was a single -1 Overrated mod a few comments ago and El Gordo was no more.
And that Overrated mod was for asking the question:
"A raw or frozen egg?"