Just a Spoonful of Quickies

Mat Kovach is trying to organize a LUG Adventure to Ceder Point next september. For those who don't know, its an awesome roller coaster/ride park in the midwest. I wouldn't mind going actually. overcode noted that the patches to Civilization: Call To Power for Linux from Loki Hack now available. Nuke Lawyer causes is a wonder that causes all lawyers to explode as a nuclear bomb. Great stuff. otterboy found an auction that has old printings of Neal Stephenson books with The Big U weighing in at $400. For a book! (Note:I Finally finished Diamond Age. Wow) Mo B. Dick pointed us to a 486 overclocked to 247 mhz combining freezers and booze. El Clip sent us an awesome mrtg parody of a geeks life. escher sent us Microsith which is definitely among the most amusing MS parodies that I've seen. dustpuppy2000 pointed us to Homepage's at Superiosity which is a promising looking new comic strip.

Comments

Gotta love Microsith

[at0m]

That's the best MS parody I've seen in a while. The "Darth Paper clip" really captures what I feel whenever I open MS word :)

"Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that in emergencies."

Re:Gotta love Microsith

[Tarnar]

The best part is that it's true to the real Paper clip. It's annoying, wastes time loading, comes up FAR too often.. Surfing back and forth across the page, every time I hit the main page, it was up again, annoying me. I was about to get mad when it occured to me just how true to life it was, and I haven't stopped laughing yet!

MRTG

[NME]

Reminds me of a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon. Right on. -nme!

Halflife without a math coprocessor?

[Rendus]

Does Halflife run without a coprocessor? The 486SX had no coprocessor.

Re:Halflife without a math coprocessor?

[Microlith]

Emulate that FPU boy! I believe windows does this already...

Re:Halflife without a math coprocessor?

[drix]

One wonders if they even check. Co-pros were pretty much a given starting with the Pentium, and Half-Life came out well into the Pentium II/Celeron era. Obviously, it does (or they made this up), so I'm guessing no one really looks for a co-processor. Ah, the nostalgia of yearing for a 487 so I could play the HiFi flight models in Falcon 3.0. `Em were the days.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."

MRTG of "geeks life" a sham

[Illusion]

The MRTG graph that supposedly represents a "geeks life" is an obvious sham. Just look at the point on the graph labelled "wake up": it says 7am! Impossible!

:)

About Microsith

[Microlith]

I have been asked many times if I have anything to do with Microsith...

I do NOT!

I have nothing to do with it, yet I wish I did!

Just to clear things up, or prevent them from getting foggy.

Sorry

[mduell]

Hey, before you post, you guys should actually look at the links :)
The overclocked 486 was a hoax...or so the last line ( Well, actually that isn't entirely true...all the notes, recordings, videotape and logs from the experiment were destroyed when the processor blew. Everything posted here is taken from eyewitness accounts ) leads you to believe...

Mark "Erus" Duell

It's a Joke, Laugh

[tred]

Why the 486 overclocking page is a joke:

- The m/b has an AGP slot and 3 DIMM slots, which means it is either a Socket 7 or Socket 370 motherboard; 486's ran on Socket 5 motherboards on which production was stopped on way before AGP or DIMM slots were created
- Socket 5 motherboards were not made to support processors at a higher speed than 133mhz since the fastest 486 ran at 133mhz, therefore there was no appropriate jumper setting to bring it up to 247mhz
- Quake could never run on that processor (nevermind Half-Life), Quake does check for a math co-processor which a 486 sx doesn't have*. I know Quake won't run without one for a fact, I've tried and seen the error message...
- A fridge won't cool to -40C, sorry guys. Not even with that elusive "11" setting ;)
- Adding beer or another alcoholic beverage to a fridge doesn't make it colder
- "Well, actually that isn't entirely true. You see, all the notes, recordings, videotape and logs from the experiment were destroyed when the processor blew. Everything posted here is taken from eyewitness accounts. You'll have to take our word for it... " Doh.

* FYI - The 486 SX was in reality a 486 DX with a faulty math co-processor/floating point unit. Intel had no plans to make SX/DX models until the first crop of 486's had faulty fpu's. Later on in the production of 486's, the SX model was intentionaly made without an fpu.

Re:It's a Joke, Laugh

[drix]

You're both right. Most people recall the distinction between 486SX and DX as being the presence of a math co-processor because the casual user simply doesn't want/need to wrap their minds around the idea of bus width. Although the distinction between SX and DX is much greater, 9 times out of 10 ask someone what the difference between a 486SX-25 and a 486DX-33 was and they'll tell you one has a math co-pro and the other doesn't. I guess that' just how history remembers it. I have no clue as to the validity of the faulty coprocessor story, however I do recall the 386SX appearing much earlier than any 486 in my neck of the woods. Of course, my neck of the woods was just that - woods, of the coniferous variety to be exact. And lots of them. Our local computer store was still advertising DOS 6.22 in stock when Windows 95 came out.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."

Re:Translation, please

[antizeus]

In CivCTP, the lawyer is a "stealth" unit (i.e. invisible unless you have detectors) which can impair production in an adjacent city with their magic power. Nukes, I believe, cause damage to an area of the map. I haven't seen nukes in action yet so I can't be sure. My guess is that once you build the "Nuke Lawyers" wonder (a wonder being something you build in a city for a certain game modifying effect), the existing lawyers explode like nukes. Perhaps not a good thing if you're getting harassed by lawyers (if I'm right, it would damage the cities that they're harassing), but if there are lawyers in an enemy's territory, then it'd be great.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with CivCTP, so I don't know how informative/obvious this is.

Re:What's Slashdot Coming to?

[James Renken]

Well, for Microsith, the machine and bandwidth are handling things very well, but Apache is a little bit unhappy. I've tuned its configuration parameters, and it should behave better now.

(I run the ISP that hosts Microsith. :)

And another one...

[Matt2000]

And one that doesn't get ever get included, but we're getting used to rejection.

(Hint: The link is in the sig)

Hotnutz.com

Microsith vs. the Rebels of Linus

[xdc]

Microsith is a great parody site, and I highly recommend that you check it out if you haven't already. Visit all of its sub-pages, too -- not just the main page. They left me in stiches. Also, I'm afraid I couldn't resist the urge to post the following pun-riddled drivel in its user feedback area:

Darth Insidious vs. Luke Warmweather

Together, we can ruin the galaxy as FUDder and stung!
Never will another Dagobah without a BSODomy!
Always trust ActiveXterminator control from Microsith? [OK]

(EULAgree that the Linus in the sand.)

Kenobi-have, baby, yeah!
You don't need to see my processor identification.
But I want to transmit my applications this year and be the best X Windows pilot in the galaxy!
I must learn the ways of Open Force and become a Jedix Knight.

The above was changed ever-so-slightly from my original Microsith post, so I guess that makes it Service Pack 1. ;)

Re:Heat Transfer

[drix]

It would be smarter to use mineral oil. Being about as conductive as regular air, you run no risk of a shortage; in fact the only problem is residue coating pretty much everything - if you get a layer of that stuff stuck on the copper interconnects in ISA/PCI slots or in the CPU/RAM sockets, you no longer have a circuit, so to speak. However, it cools excellently, and this is a cheap and effective solution if you're into "extreme" cooling. It's been used on supercomputers for a while.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."