"Between these two points, you connect them by some sort of cable of unbelievable properties and have once end attached to a large expandable spool of cable, which happens to be attached to a generator."
Could you run some fibre-optic along with that ? I want to put a bsd server in the universe on the other side of the singularity.
Welcome to alternate.www.freebsd.org.
Hey- if it's a *mirror universe* on the other side we could set up lots of mirror sites in it for ironic purposes.
But seriously, does anyone know what would happen to fibre-optic cable in a black hole ? Would it gain infinite mass or something ? Would the tcp packets be really phat ?
I am a bit of a language freak and have a long-time habit of hearing about a new language, reading a brief feature list, getting really excited, reading the language and library docs, discovering something I don't like, e.g. in C# the way methods aren't virtual by default, going off the language intensely then adding it to my cv anyway.
But when I checked out rebol that was mentioned in the article I found it was in fact as good as it first seemed, maybe better.
Within an hour of first hearing about rebol I had written a gui program that displayed the live picture of the Tokyo Tower on the net and updated it every 60s.
When I first wrote this program, it was as a learning experience for c#- and it took a hell of a lot longer to write and the code is much longer.
So maybe for me rebol is the ultimate lightweight language!
As many have pointed out already the tools to do this have been in Windows (in GDI+) since betas of 2000. I and I'm sure countless others at least made an application with a 50% transparent main window before we realised you just couldn't see the damn thing...
The trick is to make the window background for example black and 50% opaque, but draw the titlebar and the text in the window in 100% opaque. Now you can see the window properly!
This is actually quite tricky because the opacity affects the whole window. What I ended up doing was to have a window with a richtext on it with its background set to transparent (as in not there at all), and a home-drawn titlebar and buttons. Then you have to create a blank window the same size as it set to be all black 50% opaque and cunningly move it around under the other window.
There are a few problems though:
a) Getting the zorder right is annoying (so the 50% opaque window doesn't come on top of the text window)
b) Because the richtext is "transparent" mouse clicks on spaces instead of words go right through to the blank, alpha-blended window underneath.
c) Even if you create a console process and hook its stdout, stderr and stdin so you can have your own alpha-blended terminal (yay!) it doesn't really work because far too many console programs cheat and don't use the stardard streams. (I haven't tried with Cygwin yet though- all of those programs might work...)
I have long been waiting for the day when I can have literally wall-to-wall lcd (or whatever flat display is in at the time).
I think texture-mapping your walls would be a lot cooler than wallpapering them- and less messy too! How long would it be before there was a "wood-chip" module where you could scratch the chips off like people annoyingly do after you've painted it?
Also I could mince around the room all day dragging my posters to different locations...
Imagine! No more agonizing in the shop over which clock, calander etc to buy- just run the applet of your choice!
Then there would be the/. interactive poster (if I could afford the million dollar subscription for it... ("Dude! Your poster's expired!")).
Actually I think makers of posters, art prints etc. would start getting aggressive when they found the "mp3" effect was hitting them.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my silly girlish fantasy, and now you can all reply with your lame jokes about "Windows for walls" (Any colour you like as long as it's blue....) etc.
"Fortunately for M$ (and unfortunately fo Linux), the average user does not have the same requirements as the DOD. They will continue to pick functionality and ease of use over stability every time."
Turning on devil's advocate mode I will point out that konqueror crashes about 3 times a day for me and IE6 never. And as for Koffice...
I like linux- I really do- I like freebsd too, but if you want applications to be reliable, they have to have money spent on them.
Note that this is only true of "user-type" applications- I don't deny that the free unices are better for server daemons and kernels.
"They have no idea how badly XP and Xbox are going to flop."
XP will flop except given away on oem machines. (Just show a person in charge of Purchasing the ui of xp and ask them if they will be upgrading...)
The XBox will actually steal from xp's market, and from pc hardware sales. Just look at the Japanese using the ps2 for general office work with the expansion pack- plus there will be slightly more incentive- at least in the beginning for games manufacturers to ensure their games don't crash...
Aha- but the older networking technology of 100Mb Cat5 *IS* more reliable than 802.11x. Also, although slower, a 56K dialup doesn't have contention so you get more consistent bandwidth. I never get slower than double what I had before in terms of bandwidth, but dropping from 60K a second to 10K a second really hurts! (Hint- adopt vampyric sleep patterns and beat the crowd).
And 4th- Gran Turismo is for the playstation, not the PC.
I bet they just heard of the recent GT3 and filed it under "computer games". They couldn't really be thinking of running an emulator to play GT on. You'd think they could have spent 60s looking up the name of some hot new PC title so they didn't end up looking like idiots...
"All this is doing to the techie is making him/her create another partition. So now they can have their Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, Windoze 9x and now Windoze XP"
Real "techies" have multiple computers, not multiple partitions...
Actually several manufacturers are now doing batches of say 100 NICS all with the same MAC address because they are running out of them.
Also, in reply to the parent's moan about registration, as I mentioned above, I have swapped the cpu, ram and mb on a machine and not had to re-register it- just a "repair" install. Basically all that was the same about the machine was the NIC, GFX, sound and drives.
hahha this is funny- I was telling everyone that win2k was stable about the time it was released (having used the betas a hell of a lot) and everyone was like "Blue screens! Blue screens! Linux is uber-rooly". Only now are a lot of people agreeing with me.
I had XP final on my comp- the motherboard or processor died so I swapped in a new mb, cpu and ram, and when I re-started the machine it blue screened with a Stop Error (7B in fact).
The really bizarre thing is that it didn't ask me to re-register it- and the cpu was Intel whereas the old one was AMD, so even with cpu serial turned off it must have known.
Gosh- you don't suppose all those posts on/. were over-reacting do you?;)
Slashdot Mirror
"Between these two points, you connect them by some sort of cable of unbelievable properties and have once end attached to a large expandable spool of cable, which happens to be attached to a generator."
Could you run some fibre-optic along with that ? I want to put a bsd server in the universe on the other side of the singularity.
Welcome to alternate.www.freebsd.org.
Hey- if it's a *mirror universe* on the other side we could set up lots of mirror sites in it for ironic purposes.
But seriously, does anyone know what would happen to fibre-optic cable in a black hole ? Would it gain infinite mass or something ? Would the tcp packets be really phat ?
graspee
I am a bit of a language freak and have a long-time habit of hearing about a new language, reading a brief feature list, getting really excited, reading the language and library docs, discovering something I don't like, e.g. in C# the way methods aren't virtual by default, going off the language intensely then adding it to my cv anyway.
But when I checked out rebol that was mentioned in the article I found it was in fact as good as it first seemed, maybe better.
Within an hour of first hearing about rebol I had written a gui program that displayed the live picture of the Tokyo Tower on the net and updated it every 60s.
When I first wrote this program, it was as a learning experience for c#- and it took a hell of a lot longer to write and the code is much longer.
So maybe for me rebol is the ultimate lightweight language!
As many have pointed out already the tools to do this have been in Windows (in GDI+) since betas of 2000. I and I'm sure countless others at least made an application with a 50% transparent main window before we realised you just couldn't see the damn thing...
The trick is to make the window background for example black and 50% opaque, but draw the titlebar and the text in the window in 100% opaque. Now you can see the window properly!
This is actually quite tricky because the opacity affects the whole window. What I ended up doing was to have a window with a richtext on it with its background set to transparent (as in not there at all), and a home-drawn titlebar and buttons. Then you have to create a blank window the same size as it set to be all black 50% opaque and cunningly move it around under the other window.
There are a few problems though:
a) Getting the zorder right is annoying (so the 50% opaque window doesn't come on top of the text window)
b) Because the richtext is "transparent" mouse clicks on spaces instead of words go right through to the blank, alpha-blended window underneath.
c) Even if you create a console process and hook its stdout, stderr and stdin so you can have your own alpha-blended terminal (yay!) it doesn't really work because far too many console programs cheat and don't use the stardard streams. (I haven't tried with Cygwin yet though- all of those programs might work...)
graspee
I have long been waiting for the day when I can have literally wall-to-wall lcd (or whatever flat display is in at the time).
/. interactive poster (if I could afford the million dollar subscription for it... ("Dude! Your poster's expired!")).
I think texture-mapping your walls would be a lot cooler than wallpapering them- and less messy too! How long would it be before there was a "wood-chip" module where you could scratch the chips off like people annoyingly do after you've painted it?
Also I could mince around the room all day dragging my posters to different locations...
Imagine! No more agonizing in the shop over which clock, calander etc to buy- just run the applet of your choice!
Then there would be the
Actually I think makers of posters, art prints etc. would start getting aggressive when they found the "mp3" effect was hitting them.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my silly girlish fantasy, and now you can all reply with your lame jokes about "Windows for walls" (Any colour you like as long as it's blue....) etc.
graspee
"Fortunately for M$ (and unfortunately fo Linux), the average user does not have the same requirements as the DOD. They will continue to pick functionality and ease of use over stability every time."
Turning on devil's advocate mode I will point out that konqueror crashes about 3 times a day for me and IE6 never. And as for Koffice...
I like linux- I really do- I like freebsd too, but if you want applications to be reliable, they have to have money spent on them.
Note that this is only true of "user-type" applications- I don't deny that the free unices are better for server daemons and kernels.
graspee
Just because kmail and korganizer are seperate programs, do not be blinded to the fact that they are copying Outlook.
graspee
"*laugh!* - I was going to say it looked like an undertaker's convention"
More like a junior embalmer's portfolio.
graspee
"They have no idea how badly XP and Xbox are going to flop."
XP will flop except given away on oem machines. (Just show a person in charge of Purchasing the ui of xp and ask them if they will be upgrading...)
The XBox will actually steal from xp's market, and from pc hardware sales. Just look at the Japanese using the ps2 for general office work with the expansion pack- plus there will be slightly more incentive- at least in the beginning for games manufacturers to ensure their games don't crash...
graspee
Aha- but the older networking technology of 100Mb Cat5 *IS* more reliable than 802.11x. Also, although slower, a 56K dialup doesn't have contention so you get more consistent bandwidth. I never get slower than double what I had before in terms of bandwidth, but dropping from 60K a second to 10K a second really hurts! (Hint- adopt vampyric sleep patterns and beat the crowd).
graspee
god damn it someone give me some karma
"Hey, that sounds like a pretty good idea....GNU/NT.
a tu res.asp
Where can I buy it?"
http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/interix/fe
graspee
It's slashdotted now (nov 5 1:26am GMT).
graspee
"If a toilet required a month's training to use, it would be a shitty product."
Never a truer word spoken!
An interview with http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/catty.shtml......
you> freeBSD is dying
catty> where is freeBSD?
you> what do you like best about linux?
catty> what do i like best about this coffee maker ?
you> Do you have fake breasts?
catty> i have great looking breasts
you> What is the secret of death?
catty> what is the exact scientific definition of death ?
you> Fuck me, mighty bitch!
catty> bitches are for fuckin
you> Suck my cock
catty> then go suck your pika cock and lick bills ass
you> Do you like slashdot?
catty> yuuup
you> Are you a karma whore?
catty> unless i am a whore slut ass kissing prostitute
you> What is your opinion of the new SMP code in freeBSD 5.0 ?
catty> in my opinion it is better than the prussic
you> Are you active on #linux on dalnet?
catty> if i am not running linux
you> Which is better, KDE or Gnome ?
catty> which one is better ?
you> Answer the question! KDE or Gnome ?
catty> question and the answer is yes
you> Do you like KDE ?
catty> do i like writing stories ?
you> Do you like Gnome ?
catty> do i like hello kitty ?
you> Emacs or VI ?
catty> emacs vi and pico are available for windows
you> Do you run X ?
catty> why do i run to the window everytime a car drives by ?
you> You are starting to make no sense
catty> i am just starting to use a jmerrils sendsmtp
you> Oh, that explains it. Thanks for your time
catty> thanks for my time that was a very interesting
And 4th- Gran Turismo is for the playstation, not the PC.
I bet they just heard of the recent GT3 and filed it under "computer games". They couldn't really be thinking of running an emulator to play GT on. You'd think they could have spent 60s looking up the name of some hot new PC title so they didn't end up looking like idiots...
graspee
Congratulations, you are about the 7th person to make this joke.
Doesn't anybody read the other posts?
graspee
"All this is doing to the techie is making him/her create another partition. So now they can have their Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, Windoze 9x and now Windoze XP"
Real "techies" have multiple computers, not multiple partitions...
graspee
Actually several manufacturers are now doing batches of say 100 NICS all with the same MAC address because they are running out of them.
Also, in reply to the parent's moan about registration, as I mentioned above, I have swapped the cpu, ram and mb on a machine and not had to re-register it- just a "repair" install. Basically all that was the same about the machine was the NIC, GFX, sound and drives.
graspee
hahha this is funny- I was telling everyone that win2k was stable about the time it was released (having used the betas a hell of a lot) and everyone was like "Blue screens! Blue screens! Linux is uber-rooly". Only now are a lot of people agreeing with me.
graspee
XP bluescreens as per usual.
/. were over-reacting do you? ;)
I had XP final on my comp- the motherboard or processor died so I swapped in a new mb, cpu and ram, and when I re-started the machine it blue screened with a Stop Error (7B in fact).
The really bizarre thing is that it didn't ask me to re-register it- and the cpu was Intel whereas the old one was AMD, so even with cpu serial turned off it must have known.
Gosh- you don't suppose all those posts on
graspee
You can get an interpreter for Linux to play your Infocom games you know...
graspee
And yet an iceberg brought down the Titanic...
(cue stirring music).
RMS WindowsXP- 4 miles down...
graspee
Someone who knows the anglo/american difference should mod this up!
Compare: "Bumming a fag"
UK: Getting a cigarette off someone (for free)
US: Being the active partner in a male homosexual act...
graspee
I was amused to see in fact that this post of mine above was:
Post #911!
graspee
(why bother preserving karma when the site's about to die?)
I suggest if the hypocritcial /. staff start getting us to pay for slashdot, we do what they would advise us to do if it were software:
/. ip squats on it.
We fork it!
Someone register www.freeslashdot.org before someone at
graspee
"Throw out some other ideas -- micropayments?"
/.ers think of micropayments by now!
Yes throw that idea the fuck out.
Oh come on now! You must know what
graspee