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User: Boglin

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  1. My personal favorite on Surprising Science Demonstrations? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My favorite was always the standing fire wave. First, take a metal pipe and cap both ends. Drill hole at even intervals along the end of the pipe. Cap both ends, but put a speaker on one end. Also, attach a nozzle where you can pump gas into the pipe. For the show, hook the gas line up to the nozzle and turn it on. Next, set a fire on the gas coming out of each hole. You should get a series of flames of even height. Now turn on the speaker and hook it up to source with a constant frequency. If you set the frequency to one of the resonant frequencies of the tube, you should see the flames forming a wave. (Please note, I am just trying to recall how this was done from memory. I may have left out some crucial step that stops this from just being one big pipe bomb. Don't try this at home unless you are sure of what you are doing.)

  2. Not again on Mule Gives Birth · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Second Foundation barely saved the Seldon plan from the Mule the last time. This kid could ruin everything!

  3. If you can wait a bit on The Best of Windows Open Source Software? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Blender can now go on your list, as they've reached their 100k. It is my impression that the sources should be opened Pretty Soon now. They whole 3d graphics system or game engine may not appeal to Joe Average, but his kids will eat it up. Face it, how many of us originally got into programing so that we could make our own games?

  4. My experience on How Well Does Perl2exe Work for Large Applications? · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A couple of years back, I was writing a small program for language translation and I needed it to run on my classmates' Windows machines. Due to the heavy text processing nature of the project, Perl seemed like the prime choice. However, I knew there wasn't a wicket's chance in a supernova that I was going to get the end users to install Perl.

    Thus, I tried Perl2exe. There were two parts that really impressed me. First, it included all of the packages that I was using, including Perl/TK (as I said, Windows users. The looked at my initial console version like it was in Hieroglyphics.) I was also impressed that the program and dictionary could still be compressed to fit on a floppy, which was a huge relief from having to Perl burn CDs for all of the users. In the end, I would say that, if you are porting a simple maintenance script or other non-time critical application to the Win2k servers, by all means go with Perl2exe. However, if this is a critical part of your new Buzzword Server System, then read a post from someone who knows better.

  5. Re:Why? on Tenebrae Quake · · Score: 3, Funny


    You've hit on a key problem in society today. People are constantly looking for the newest edition, instead of looking back to the classics. Like all those people I see sitting around in coffee shops reading translations of Beowulf. What's wrong with the original edition. It's still English, even if it is an mostly extinct incomprehensible dialect. But these people just demand the latest flashy MLA standards.
    Or when I got to peoples houses and they insist on playing Mozart on their piano. Mozart never even saw a modern piano! But instead of simply shelling out the thousands of dollars for a genuine harpsichord, these pea brained individuals insist on using the latest musical instruments.
    It just the same when people demand some new flashy version of Quake. What was wrong with the old system and its 255 shades of brown? It's just like when people start playing Quake on their new 2000+ XP systems. That wasn't what Id intended for this program. If you want to play Quake, you should darn well go out and buy an old pentium one system system to play it on. No Voodoo cards, either; it was a software engine first. And I don't want to hear any complaints about the 13fps; it just shows that you care more about eye candy than game play.