Slashdot Mirror
Steaming Heap of Quickies
I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic!
First lets get the serious quickies out of the way:
chris
sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase
Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia.
Registration is open.
Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned.
k-rist sent us SimShatner.
Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff.
Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD.
Want some Blair Witch Parodies?
irishmikev sent is a
Southpark Parody
and
stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project.
How about a pair of strange places to put a server?
Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and
GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a
box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box.
If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more)
Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice.
and rjh pointed us to the iMaul
(seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today)
Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators.
Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise,
I gotta plug Think Geek which is
the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever.
We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great.
ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.
It's mocking Sun's equally meaningless slogan, "We put the dot in .com"
I was on vacation to Tahoe a few months ago, and we were flipping channels on the TV in a friend's room. There was one channel that had crashed! We just sat there watching the blue screen for a while. I'm not sure they even got it rebooted before morning. That was probably the strangest place I've ever seen one!
--- Phyre
I tried to decide which one I prefer - here's my reasoning:
I think the web page version of Shatner features slightly better acting, and much, much better hair. But the meatware version has better sound quality than my PowerBook does (though it's close), and has gotten to hang out with Heather Locklear.
My vote: SimShatner. After all, even with better sound in the original, you'll only want to listen for so long - not to mention that one of these days, Heather's going to start aging. And she's held it off so long that it'll be catastrophic when it happens. There's just no room for another Dick Clark, female or not.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The brand-spankin' new Austin-Bergstrom International Airport had this same problem. Pretty silly looking.
:-)
This seems to me like the perfect place for Open Source. Who knows how much each airport pays for this app? I bet it's a BUNDLE.
Charge 'em 70% of the going rate to write a GPL'd version, and write it for Linux. Phenomenal uptime, multi-headed monitors (soon) and suddenly travellers across the world start seeing Linux in airports. And some GPL programmers make some money.
And why not release something like this under the GPL? It's not like people choose their airports based on the features of the departure/arrival screens... no competetive advantage there.
Take your cameras to the airport. Let's start a whole gallery of these things.
The main site seems to be getting slow, so here is a mirror of the BSOD.
In case anyone's wondering why no lithographs for the new Demotivators, I mailed them last week to ask. Apparently, something like 50% of the last batch accounted for 90% of their sales, so they're seeing what's popular amongst the new ones before producing the big lithographs.
On a totally unrelated note, check out this for a weird case. Not so much an Apple as a Bean.
Yeah, and about every politician I know thinks "nuclear" is pronounced "nuke-ya-lur," and every Linux zealot I know that calls himself 31337 still can't figure out how to download only the patches to their latest kernel. Doesn't mean it's correct. Further, seeing as so many people here bristle whenever a journalist uses "hacker" when he could've used "cracker," I would think that they'd be in favor of choosing one's words more carefully.
I don't know when the original definition was coined, but it's an NT-only thing -- when you get a blue screen in Win9x, it doesn't mean death is certain; in NT, you have no other choice but to reboot. Just because they're both blue doesn't mean that they're the same thing, no more than I'd confuse a computer running DOS 3.2 with my Linux box just because on my screen I get a prompt and white text on a black background.
As to your other questions, yes, Microsoft employees occasionally use the term, but I don't remember any official documenation referring to it as anything other than a "Stop Error" or a "Blue Screen." Some of their publications, like MSDN stuff, will use "BSOD" from time to time.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Burnout
Attitudes are Contagious. Mine Might Kill You.
Perfect for:
- Anyone Looking to Get Fired
- Anyone consigned to use NT
- Disaffected college students
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
/*
#include "braap.h"
#include "p.h"
#include "cas.h"
#define MAX_ALE 5
void DrinkBeer(int pints) {
}
int main(void) {
}
*/
Yqy...K ecp'v dgnkgxg aqw cevwcnna vqqm vjg vkog vq vtcpuncvg oa uki. Kh aqw vjkpm vjku ku tkfkewnqwu, tgcf oa dkq.
Nothing quite like getting a blue screen on install, or perhaps even on every third boot. Both of these have heppened to me, within the last month.
The problem of the BSOD (one of them) is the lack of info about what exactly caused the problem (unless you read hex). Include this with the overall attempt on NT to hide the hardware and you get the legend of the BSOD. I've had random BSODs, perhaps it's my inexperience, but nonetheless all my users know what it is and what it means. Turn it off and reboot again.
It's a backlash against the advertised ease of NT administration and the reality ($$$ for software, $$$ for support). Just wait until the horror stories of 2000 overwhelming admins start to surface and you'll understand.
(BTW my NTServer4.0(file, web) lasts about 35 days, until it's memory is totally maxed out (256) and needs to be resurrected)
+&x
When WinNuke was all the rage, it would blue-screen Win95 and NT. Win95 was 'recoverable'. NT was not.
However when you tried to use a TCP/IP connection after acknowleging the blue screen, you found that it didn't work. Reboot.
So (I guess) the difference is that you get to save your work in Win95 (unless it's on a TCP/IP-connected server!!) With NT you're just SOL.
Also, many times that Win95 has BSOD'd for me, I can't just acknowlege it and keep going. The damn messages just keep coming until I summon mighty RESET.
"Windows is busy waiting for a close program dialog to appear. To continue waiting, press any key. To reboot your computer, press CTRL-ALT-DEL again..."
Or something like that. Sound familiar?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I love these guys. They even offer Jolt in flavors I never knew existed! Mmmmm... Citrus Climax or Cherry Bomb... I may never drink regular soda again! Did you notice they even have the relative caffeine content listed? Cool!
And scheduled delivery to boot!!
Guys, sorry 'bout that /. effect... it was worth it for all the orders, right?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
In any case, its not a sight that instills warm fuzzies.
From what I could see on the site, all this guy did was drop a motherboard, etc into a pot and photograph it. If I were doing something like this, I would mount it up well, provide some form of real ventilation (maybe make the plant fake, instead of real, and vent through some moss or something), and show the steps through contruction...
Please realise I am not saying that doing such a creative form of casing for a PC is impossible, or that this guy didn't do it. I just expected to see more regarding the construction. As it is, it just seems like a bunch of old parts in a bucket...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
In case anyone is interested, Think Geek explains the problem.
The quickie about tuxtiles is out of date...they stopped taking votes on 9/1/99...
;)
>How long is the vote open?
>Voting will stop on September 1, 1999, so we can
>notify our manufacturer and get a sample made.
Figures...
Sulu and Checkov in the wrong chairs! Sulu was always on the right and Checkov always on the left!
"My site got slashdotted and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
--
Yes, that *is* a real email address...
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
OK, I take it back. ThinkGeek is cool :) The secure submission part is there now. Looks like it was just a badly timed misconfiguration on their end.
My order's going in now.
314-15-9265
Google uses Squid or some other proxy/cache to harvest all of its web pages, *then* indexes them. If a link is dead, you can use their cached version instead (and see the headers) -- it's great for all the bad links you find in web searches.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I don't mean to nitpick, but that's not a BSOD. The BSOD is a NT term. The picture is a Win 9X screen which appears whenever an application generates an exception, executes illegal code, or commits an access violation. It usually does not bring down the system. Although in this case it is in vxd.dll so it's probably some buggy driver code and will bring down the system.
For those who don't know, a BSOD is specific to NT and is equivalent to a kernel panic on most *nix variants. The NT kernel drops to the console (which is 80x40), prints a header and some debug information followed by a hex dump of the processor state and (I think) the stack. Just like a kernel panic, a BSOD is unrecoverable.
In my four years of experience administering NT boxes, every BSOD I've seen has been caused by NT not liking a particular combination of hardware devices or drivers. When they do appear, they appear regularly until you resolve the conflict either by swapping hardware or updating drivers. I've yet to see an isolated, random BSOD.
It seems like some people who don't have any NT admin experience have heard the term BSOD and interpreted it to mean anytime Windows 3.X/9X/NT prints a blue screen. That's not the original meaning of the term.
I think /. ought to start charging protection money. At least they could offer to upgrade equipment (for a tidy fee) to underpowered sites just before unleashing the hacking hordes of hashdom.
If memory serves me correct, that BSOD picture was shot by none other than our very own Alan Cox.
--
any of you people ever done an install of Enlightenment from source? i did this a couple weeks ago. i can't remember vertabrim what happened, but something that looked an awful lot like this happened during the ./configure:
../configure:
Checking for gtk... yes
Checking for ESD... no
WARNING: Esound library not found. Will compile without sound.
Checking for imlib... yes
Checking for lager_ale in _fridge... no
Checking for any_kind_of_ale in _fridge.. no
WARNING: We were unable to locate any ale in your refrigerator. We suggest you fix this problem immediately.
---
i've seen similar things too in other places.. something, i can't remember what, i think it was windowmanager, displayed during
Checking for life_signs in Kenny... no
Oh my God!! They killed Kenny!! You bastards!!
---
The miracle of open source software.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Yeah, that was from the Ottowa Linux Symposium of 8/15/99. This is the Slashdot story that linked to the collection originally.
rooooar
I got an advanced copy of the Despair Y2K calendar from a friend last week. I am still laughing at the dates they chose to include (over 120 bad, stupid, funny dates in human misery in the past 2000 years). My faves are more recent things like the following:
1) January 1st, 2000 - Largest collective hangover in human history.
2) January 7th, 1943 - Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power and wireless communication, dies penniless in New York.
3) January 8th, 1992 - President Bush shares dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.
4) January 14th, 1990 - Homer Simpson first utters "D'oh!", aiding millions in articulating a precise feeling of self-inflicted stupidity.
5) January 19th, 1983 - Apple introduces the world's first "user-friendly" computer, the 52 lb., $10,000 Lisa.
6) January 25th, 1996 - FDA approves Olestra.
7) February 10th, 1996 - Chess legend Gary Kasparov is defeated by IBM's "Deep Blue" supercomputer.
8) March 9th, 1999 - Al Gore tells CNN, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet". MIT's Dr. Larry Roberts makes a voting decision for the 2000 election
9) April 29th, 1983 - "Kilroy Was Here", a concept album about a rock band's descent into self-parody, is certified platinum.
10) December 9th, 1997 - Stroboscopic effects in TV show "Pokemon" trigger seizures in over 600 Japanese children. Media exacerbates the problem by replaying clips while cover the story.
Funny video game errata, pretty obscure, "E.T." game release for Atari 2600, hastens collapse of the videogame industry. Over 1 million copies end up buried in a New Mexico landfill." and August 8, 1997 - Lord British assassinated while addressing his subjects in Britannia
I know where I am buying 90% of my friends for Christmas now.
Smirkleton