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
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!
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
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
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!
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.
For most desktop use, though, an X crash (which is probably what you mean by "KDE and Gnome go down all the time") wipes out all your unsaved work and demands a reboot, just as a full-blown operating system crash does. The hair-splitting about "completely crash" doesn't change that.
The bitching about BSODs goes back to when Linux use involved running vi in an xterm in FVWM on barebones video cards. In those days, the GUI really was rock-solid (and Windows was really as flimsy as people made out).
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Wow, not only is the topic three years old, but so are the comments.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
But KDE and Gnome go down all the time.
You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right? I find that those two DEs go down fairly frequently as well. Since switching to XFCE, however, I have never had a crash. Ever. It's absolutely rock-solid, and as long as it's development is focused on speed and stability over, say, bells&whistles, it's going to continue to be rock-solid.
And if you don't like XFCE, there's nothing to stop you from using *box, fvwm, or hell, even tab-window-manager. Maybe your problems with X have less to do with X or Linux themselves, and more to do with your choice of using Desktop Environments with known memory leaks (KDE) and stability problems when dealing with unexpected library versions (Gnome).
And in the event of an X crash, I wouldn't lose my documents, either. At most, I'd lose 5 minutes' work, because that's the interval at which AbiWord is set to autosave my work. Hell, my music wouldn't even stop playing, thanks to me using MPD.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
As long as people are posting old news, here is a guide to being an Evil Overlord http://www.evilrulers.com/eviloverlord.htm
Note that I prefaced my comment with "For most desktop use, though..." Most desktop use uses the GUI and an X crash wipes out all your work. Most desktop users don't have a second computer to ssh in and kill the locked-up X on the first.
If the "At last, Linux Is Ready For The Desktop!" crowd wishes to add a caveat that "...as long as you do all your work in screen and have two computers" -- then, yeah, Linux almost never crashes.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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
You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right?
Only if Linux is your hobby. Something it will never be, and shouldn't be, for the vast majority of people.
"What? Grandma? You're having problems with the Linux box I conned you into buying? It doesn't work as well as your Windows one did? Well, you ignorant slut, don't you realize that the KDE and Gnome that came preinstalled are crap? Those are crashing, not your computer. You don't know the difference? And you do realize there other window managers out there. Jeez, quit whining about email and learn how to use your computer, you stupid whore."
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
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
Unlike wine, flash movies do not get better with age =P
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.
Obviously if you're using Windows and your GDI server crashes you are not going to be able to use the Command Prompt application. So why do you seem to think that a crashed X server could ever possibly allow you to use xterm?
I don't. That's the point. The common argument that if X crashes, your OS hasn't crashed is a strawman. Most users apps are going to be running in X anyways.
The "console environment" is the virtual console layer, which is separate from X. That's what he's talking about. I have no reason to believe you know anything in any detail about Linux or similar operating systems based on your post.
I know what he was talking about. I was pointing out that if you're running X, chances are you're running all, or most of your apps under X, such as in an xterm, which means those apps die as well.
Yes, if you're running stuff in a Virtual Screen, in addition to X, the stuff in other screens will be fine, but that's small consolation to those that are not.
At any rate, X server crashes are rare these days. This is all pretty much irrelevant.
Just like BSOD's are rare on Windows, I would suppose. Same argument.
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