I wonder how this affects the proposed KDE/NX integration supposedly under development by Aaron Seigo? If you'll remember, this was mentioned way back in December in response to UserLinux shipping Gnome, but I haven't heard anything about it since... let's hope this FreeNX is desktop-independent.
For those still mystified as to what NX is, it is essentially X11 tunneled through SSH, with some clever caching to drastically limit the number of connections an X server/client need to make, to make the connection feel much quicker.
untechnical explanation: Normally a remote X session will have to make many hundreds/thousands of trips between the server and client, but NX uses a cache at both ends, only making the most necessary trips, and usually just sending a diff of the changes rather than the whole stream of data. (roughly speaking, of course, as I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.)
The easiest way to accomplish this is analog: just hook up a wireless speaker system to your computer, then put receivers in each room. Last time I checked 900MHz was a popular frequency, but there might be 2.4GHz models available by now.
Google found this...
I think it deserves to be mentioned, for those who aren't from the West (especially the NW), many towns, rivers, and so on inherited their names from the Native American peoples who (used to) live there.
Tualatin Willamette Nehalem Seattle Klamath Deschutes Yamhill (Yamel) Tukwila Clackamas Potomac (east coast but an Algonquin word nonetheless) Nocona
I've been using Gentoo as my only OS on my only computer for about a year now. I was crazy about portage at first, but at least two different times the build process has gone horribly wrong and hosed my system.
The most recent was about two weeks ago when during a seemingly innocuous emerge, GCC was apparently unmerged or otherwise incapacitated. somehow it deleted certain symbolic links to glibc, which meant I couldn't even start any programs linked against it... which is basically every program ever. I managed to fix the links but the compiler itself is still MIA.
If it were a binary distro, I could just download a new GCC package and be done with it. But no, it's source-based, so to reinstall it I have to compile it... with what? I could get a GRP package, but there isn't one for GCC because it's included in the stage tarball.
I got tired of messing with it, so I now have a Gentoo system with no compiler, which means I can never upgrade until I get it fixed. Portage is great, but in my experience I think it might still have a few kinks left to work out.
On several occations, this has made me open up old revisions of documents, which is a drag.
The Save dialog can't open anything. Maybe you're just a fucking idiot?
The only reason I respond to this post is that such a thoughtless AC remark is modded +5 insightful.
Perhaps the accuser should have thought a little more carefully, lest he prove to be guilty of his own insult: obviously what the original poster meant is that by having a confusing save dialog, his documents were inadvertently saved in the wrong places. Therefore, when he opened what he thought was his last-revised document, it was an older version.
I don't think it's a question of users moving away from OS X to Linux, rather it's Linux users deciding to buy Macs rather than Wintel machines. Many Apple Linux users that I know simply wanted good hardware to run Linux on (especially *Books).
Driver support can be easier as Apple computers are much less of a moving target than the myriad x86 laptops, each with their own blend of proprietary hardware. Compare how many models of laptops a company like Sony puts out, and then multiply that by every PC manufacturer... buying an Apple seems like a pretty safe bet.
"instead of having highly paid programmers at... Blackboard build your critical university systems, you can have scores of software gurus scattered around the globe working completely independently build them for you FOR FREE."
Machinima is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment.
In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. By combining the techniques of filmmaking, the flexibility of animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films.
What are the major advantages of this technique vis-a-vis the old-fashioned way of making animation?
Because it is shot live or scripted in real-time, it's much faster to produce Machinima then traditional CGI animation. A live action director will feel right at home and an animation director will be able to direct without having to rely on key frames. Multiple takes can be made in real-time or just a few takes while the rest is adjusted in post, dependent on the director's style. And because you can modify the original recorded data files, we can change anything in post--add characters, adjust camera angles, create camera moves, fine-tune animation, etc. It's much like doing a reshoot without having to call back the cast and crew.
What is so significant about shooting animation live?
Shooting live can produce a considerable time and cost savings of up to 30-40% and is a radical departure from the traditional key frame animation process. Now animation directors can direct puppeteers as they manipulate the character models in real-time while a live action director will feel right at home.
How does it save time and money?
It saves money by eliminating the time intensive processes of non-real-time character animation and scene compositing. In traditional 3D animation, characters are animated traditionally with keyframes. These animations are either painstakingly choreographed with other characters or composited together into the same scene. A one minute Machinima scene, for example, can be shot in real-time with all characters in the scene at once. And just like a film set, you shoot multiple takes until the director is satisfied. Without the need for a compositing process, you can view each take right there and then.
Sorry, I'm a laymen, can you explain that a little more?
Two-dimensional (2D) animation, like Disney's Tarzan or a Warner Brothers Looney Tune Cartoon, is drawn, inked & painted by hand and then shot frame-by-frame for the final animation. This is obviously labor and time intensive. A half hour cartoon could take six to nine months to draw and is usually done overseas to minimize labor cost. A feature could take two to four years to complete.
3D Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) animation, was pioneered in the late 80's early 90's and put on the map by Pixar's Toy Story. Instead of each frame being drawn by hand, a computer "renders" all of the characters and backgrounds. But a team of computer animators have to animate each character model individually for each scene. Once done, a "compositing" bank of computers renders all of the characters models and objects into the 3D background, making your complete shot. But because of the large amount of 3D graphic, lighting and animated information in each frame, it can take a very fast bank of computers hours, if not days, to render each frame. Some frames of Pixar's Monsters Inc took over 90 hours to process using over 400 computers ganged together in parallel. With 24 frames per sec of footage, you can image how long this process can get. Subsequently, Monsters Inc took four years to produce.
What a minute, are you saying you can produce Pixar level animation in almost half the time?
Well, no, not yet. A company like Pixar will always push the boundaries of what's possible in animation, I mean, come on, they're Pixar, and they've got an Oscar. But, with the advances in computer hardware coming in the next year, it looks pretty good that we can get much closer.
One big point that is irrelevant for the slashdot crowd (and therefore missed) is that the benefits of digital photography are only available to those who can use computers.
This may seem fairly obvious, but when you think about it, this eliminates huge segments of the population. Like my entire family. But more concretely, for many people over 40, for those too poor or indifferent to own a computer, etc., digital photography is not a viable solution.
The vast majority of photographers are not professionals, artists, or students, but grandmothers, or teenagers, or young parents, taking their disposable cameras to Wal-Mart for $3.99 4x6 doubles. For the snapshot crowd, film is far more simple and convenient. Whether or not digital is replacing film, I have serious reservations about whether it should.
Re:Digital Rebel...delibratly cheaped out
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 1
so what you're saying is...
The digital rebel however suffers from being inteonally cheapened. It still takes great pictures, but if you had intended to use the camera in "manual mode" where you control both the shutter time and the apeature you'll find Canon decided to only put one dial on the camera.
the digital Rebel uses the same control system as the 35mm Rebel...
In fact the Digital Rebel's imager is better then most lenses. If you buy the DR and slap a $400 75-300mm USM-IS f/5.6 lens on it you won't get pictures nearly as sharp as the 300L f/4 lens...unfortuantly that lens costs quite a bit more then the camera.
and the quality of the picture depends on the quality of the lens...
Being an insider does not disqualify one from anthropology (though it may make it harder). Read Clifford Geertz, the cultural anthropologist. He never pretends that so-called "bias" is possible to avoid. Rather the aim of the ethnographer is to give a deep enough explanation ("thick description") of a culture in order to "expose their normalness without reducing their peculiarity." Cultural anthropology is never "unbiased", by definition it depends on the interpretations of the ethnographer. In this sense I think ESR does a fine job of explaining the culture of free software hackers in a way that basically makes sense to anyone.
If Diebold's black-box voting system is so atrociously bad (which it obviously is), why doesn't the Open Source community come up with an alternative? Are there such projects in the works currently? This would seem to be the ultimate act of community service.
Of course, the ultimate solution would be a drop-in replacement for Diebold's OS, so the already purchased machines could simply be upgraded... man, that would piss them off.
Dammit! I literally just signed up yesterday. New plan: download as much music as possible before November 8th, then cancel. Maybe if I get more than 2000 songs, they'll even cancel it for me and save me the trouble! Thanks eMusic!
I work in the computer service dept. of an all-Apple liberal arts college, and the thought of searching for an "Apple-quality" laptop makes me chuckle. The original iBook and Powerbook G3 were both pretty solid machines, for their time. But I would not, under any circumstances, buy a new iBook or TiBook.
The white iBook's biggest problem is its constantly failing LCD. The majority of the iBooks we see make an awful creaking noise when the lid is opened, which is the sound of the plastic LCD housing separating. We also see many batteries failing within 1-2 years. And no PC Card slot? No (independent) dual display? No Airport Extreme (802.11g)? Only a G3? Make no mistake, the iBook is a -budget- laptop.
The G4 Powerbook is built like a supermodel - sleek, sexy... and extremely fragile. The only exception, however, is the new 12" Powerbook - it's a little early to pass judgement, but the newest models seem to be incredibly solid. There's all kinds of extra structural reinforcement (which make it a bitch to work on), but the difference is immediately obvious. If anyone wanted to buy an Apple laptop, this would be the one.
That said, my next laptop would most certainly be an IBM. If Apple were Volkswagen, IBM would be BMW. I have a friend with an older T20, and I swear you can hear the lid hermetically seal when you close it. The BIOS is AMAZINGLY configurable. IBMs run Linux like a champ; hell, they used to SELL them with Caldera OpenLinux preloaded! My housemate also has a Thinkpad, and when she went to reinstall Windows, the machine did an automatic factory restoration... without a CD. Those little touches convinced me that a Thinkpad is the only laptop ever worth buying. That is, if you can get past those damn eraser-head trackpoints.
Considering that anything that smells of a Mac clone will surely be squashed by Apple lawyers, why doesn't he just sell the case? As is stated on the site: "
A Big thank you to Mick e (dealchatter) for him to allow us to use his iBox design. His design is the reason so many people are interested." Since it's going to be barebone anyway, the target market is already capable of finding their own parts, and buying a Gigabit motherboard is not terribly difficult. I doubt Apple would be able to stop him from selling a piece of plastic and power supply to hobbyists...
Dude! I had that headset when I was a kid! I used to play Top Gun with it - you were supposed to say "fire!" to make it shoot.... I had my mom paint a red crosshair on the sight to make it cooler. I think it was on clearance at Toys'R'Us. sigh... Those were the days. If only I had picked up a Power Glove, my life would now be complete.
Java's a big thing now, Java's everywhere, Java could probably use a wordprocessor.
Like... Thinkfree Office? Perhaps this is what Java Wordperfect could have been, a fairly popular cross-platform office suite. The last time I tried it, it was still heavily tied into their online services, but someone seems to like it nowadays.
While they don't support PGP, I have used Cryptoheaven casually for over a year and have been fairly impressed. They have a Java client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that runs on your own computer, meaning that the Cryptoheaven servers don't ever see your private key (although they offer to store your key as a convenience option if you choose). It started out as a closed system, meaning only Cryptoheaven members could contact other members, but now they have some kind of internet email gateway for plaintext messages. Anyway, they offer secure email, chat, and storage, with free and 'premium' options. The only questionable aspect is their use of the Rijndael algorithm:
"All services fully encrypted using the latest technology including an AES symmetric cipher Rijndael with 256 bit encryption keys, SHA-256 message digest function, and asymmetric encryption with keys of 2048-4096 bits in length."
The late mythologist Joseph Campbell (who helped Lucas craft the Skywalker/ Vader saga)...
Somehow the idea has grown that George Lucas and Joseph Campbell were old college buddies that sat around the Skywalker Ranch drinking margaritas and discussing mythology. The fact is that Lucas and Campbell never even met until the 80's, and that Star Wars owes more to pulp sci-fi themes than any mythological archetypes. Only after people started making the Star Wars/mythological connection did Lucas claim any influence from Campbell. Salon has an excellent article on this whole thing.
I got one of these for Christmas a few years ago. It's from Radio Shack, model no. 33-1165. I couldn't find it on radioshack.com, so perhaps it is discontinued. The receiver is about the size of a deck of cards, and the sound quality is average for wireless, which means fairly bad.
Re:Buy your friend's "dead" laptop!
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 1
Ironically, my friend recently did this. He ended up replacing every component except the shell and TFT. The previous owners got mad because they thought he had somehow cheated them and demanded it back.
Slashdot Mirror
um, a webmaster's attempt at getting traffic based on unrelated keywords? the Free Software version of "XXX hardcore amateur warez serialz isoz"...
I wonder how this affects the proposed KDE/NX integration supposedly under development by Aaron Seigo? If you'll remember, this was mentioned way back in December in response to UserLinux shipping Gnome, but I haven't heard anything about it since... let's hope this FreeNX is desktop-independent.
For those still mystified as to what NX is, it is essentially X11 tunneled through SSH, with some clever caching to drastically limit the number of connections an X server/client need to make, to make the connection feel much quicker.
untechnical explanation: Normally a remote X session will have to make many hundreds/thousands of trips between the server and client, but NX uses a cache at both ends, only making the most necessary trips, and usually just sending a diff of the changes rather than the whole stream of data. (roughly speaking, of course, as I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.)
The easiest way to accomplish this is analog: just hook up a wireless speaker system to your computer, then put receivers in each room. Last time I checked 900MHz was a popular frequency, but there might be 2.4GHz models available by now. Google found this...
I think it deserves to be mentioned, for those who aren't from the West (especially the NW), many towns, rivers, and so on inherited their names from the Native American peoples who (used to) live there.
Tualatin
Willamette
Nehalem
Seattle
Klamath
Deschutes
Yamhill (Yamel)
Tukwila
Clackamas
Potomac (east coast but an Algonquin word nonetheless)
Nocona
I'm sure there are more...
The really great thing is how well it wears.
I've been using Gentoo as my only OS on my only computer for about a year now. I was crazy about portage at first, but at least two different times the build process has gone horribly wrong and hosed my system.
The most recent was about two weeks ago when during a seemingly innocuous emerge, GCC was apparently unmerged or otherwise incapacitated. somehow it deleted certain symbolic links to glibc, which meant I couldn't even start any programs linked against it... which is basically every program ever. I managed to fix the links but the compiler itself is still MIA.
If it were a binary distro, I could just download a new GCC package and be done with it. But no, it's source-based, so to reinstall it I have to compile it... with what? I could get a GRP package, but there isn't one for GCC because it's included in the stage tarball.
I got tired of messing with it, so I now have a Gentoo system with no compiler, which means I can never upgrade until I get it fixed. Portage is great, but in my experience I think it might still have a few kinks left to work out.
On several occations, this has made me open up old revisions of documents, which is a drag.
The Save dialog can't open anything. Maybe you're just a fucking idiot?
The only reason I respond to this post is that such a thoughtless AC remark is modded +5 insightful.
Perhaps the accuser should have thought a little more carefully, lest he prove to be guilty of his own insult: obviously what the original poster meant is that by having a confusing save dialog, his documents were inadvertently saved in the wrong places. Therefore, when he opened what he thought was his last-revised document, it was an older version.
Seriously, moderators.
I don't think it's a question of users moving away from OS X to Linux, rather it's Linux users deciding to buy Macs rather than Wintel machines. Many Apple Linux users that I know simply wanted good hardware to run Linux on (especially *Books).
Driver support can be easier as Apple computers are much less of a moving target than the myriad x86 laptops, each with their own blend of proprietary hardware. Compare how many models of laptops a company like Sony puts out, and then multiply that by every PC manufacturer... buying an Apple seems like a pretty safe bet.
And after all, they're just plain sexy.
"instead of having highly paid programmers at... Blackboard build your critical university systems, you can have scores of software gurus scattered around the globe working completely independently build them for you FOR FREE."
Oh, you didn't. You mean free vending machines for life Blackboard?
in case it gets slashdotted...
Machinima FAQ
By Frank "ILL Bixby" Dellario
What is Machinima?
Machinima is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment.
In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. By combining the techniques of filmmaking, the flexibility of animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films.
What are the major advantages of this technique vis-a-vis the old-fashioned way of making animation?
Because it is shot live or scripted in real-time, it's much faster to produce Machinima then traditional CGI animation. A live action director will feel right at home and an animation director will be able to direct without having to rely on key frames. Multiple takes can be made in real-time or just a few takes while the rest is adjusted in post, dependent on the director's style. And because you can modify the original recorded data files, we can change anything in post--add characters, adjust camera angles, create camera moves, fine-tune animation, etc. It's much like doing a reshoot without having to call back the cast and crew.
What is so significant about shooting animation live?
Shooting live can produce a considerable time and cost savings of up to 30-40% and is a radical departure from the traditional key frame animation process. Now animation directors can direct puppeteers as they manipulate the character models in real-time while a live action director will feel right at home.
How does it save time and money?
It saves money by eliminating the time intensive processes of non-real-time character animation and scene compositing. In traditional 3D animation, characters are animated traditionally with keyframes. These animations are either painstakingly choreographed with other characters or composited together into the same scene. A one minute Machinima scene, for example, can be shot in real-time with all characters in the scene at once. And just like a film set, you shoot multiple takes until the director is satisfied. Without the need for a compositing process, you can view each take right there and then.
Sorry, I'm a laymen, can you explain that a little more?
Two-dimensional (2D) animation, like Disney's Tarzan or a Warner Brothers Looney Tune Cartoon, is drawn, inked & painted by hand and then shot frame-by-frame for the final animation. This is obviously labor and time intensive. A half hour cartoon could take six to nine months to draw and is usually done overseas to minimize labor cost. A feature could take two to four years to complete.
3D Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) animation, was pioneered in the late 80's early 90's and put on the map by Pixar's Toy Story. Instead of each frame being drawn by hand, a computer "renders" all of the characters and backgrounds. But a team of computer animators have to animate each character model individually for each scene. Once done, a "compositing" bank of computers renders all of the characters models and objects into the 3D background, making your complete shot. But because of the large amount of 3D graphic, lighting and animated information in each frame, it can take a very fast bank of computers hours, if not days, to render each frame. Some frames of Pixar's Monsters Inc took over 90 hours to process using over 400 computers ganged together in parallel. With 24 frames per sec of footage, you can image how long this process can get. Subsequently, Monsters Inc took four years to produce.
What a minute, are you saying you can produce Pixar level animation in almost half the time?
Well, no, not yet. A company like Pixar will always push the boundaries of what's possible in animation, I mean, come on, they're Pixar, and they've got an Oscar. But, with the advances in computer hardware coming in the next year, it looks pretty good that we can get much closer.
How do you use a c
One big point that is irrelevant for the slashdot crowd (and therefore missed) is that the benefits of digital photography are only available to those who can use computers.
This may seem fairly obvious, but when you think about it, this eliminates huge segments of the population. Like my entire family. But more concretely, for many people over 40, for those too poor or indifferent to own a computer, etc., digital photography is not a viable solution.
The vast majority of photographers are not professionals, artists, or students, but grandmothers, or teenagers, or young parents, taking their disposable cameras to Wal-Mart for $3.99 4x6 doubles. For the snapshot crowd, film is far more simple and convenient. Whether or not digital is replacing film, I have serious reservations about whether it should.
so what you're saying is...
The digital rebel however suffers from being inteonally cheapened. It still takes great pictures, but if you had intended to use the camera in "manual mode" where you control both the shutter time and the apeature you'll find Canon decided to only put one dial on the camera.
the digital Rebel uses the same control system as the 35mm Rebel...
In fact the Digital Rebel's imager is better then most lenses. If you buy the DR and slap a $400 75-300mm USM-IS f/5.6 lens on it you won't get pictures nearly as sharp as the 300L f/4 lens...unfortuantly that lens costs quite a bit more then the camera.
and the quality of the picture depends on the quality of the lens...
how is this +5 informative, again?
Being an insider does not disqualify one from anthropology (though it may make it harder). Read Clifford Geertz, the cultural anthropologist. He never pretends that so-called "bias" is possible to avoid. Rather the aim of the ethnographer is to give a deep enough explanation ("thick description") of a culture in order to "expose their normalness without reducing their peculiarity." Cultural anthropology is never "unbiased", by definition it depends on the interpretations of the ethnographer. In this sense I think ESR does a fine job of explaining the culture of free software hackers in a way that basically makes sense to anyone.
If Diebold's black-box voting system is so atrociously bad (which it obviously is), why doesn't the Open Source community come up with an alternative? Are there such projects in the works currently? This would seem to be the ultimate act of community service.
Here's one that I found via Google: Electronic Voting Machine Project
Of course, the ultimate solution would be a drop-in replacement for Diebold's OS, so the already purchased machines could simply be upgraded... man, that would piss them off.
Dammit! I literally just signed up yesterday. New plan: download as much music as possible before November 8th, then cancel. Maybe if I get more than 2000 songs, they'll even cancel it for me and save me the trouble! Thanks eMusic!
I work in the computer service dept. of an all-Apple liberal arts college, and the thought of searching for an "Apple-quality" laptop makes me chuckle. The original iBook and Powerbook G3 were both pretty solid machines, for their time. But I would not, under any circumstances, buy a new iBook or TiBook.
The white iBook's biggest problem is its constantly failing LCD. The majority of the iBooks we see make an awful creaking noise when the lid is opened, which is the sound of the plastic LCD housing separating. We also see many batteries failing within 1-2 years. And no PC Card slot? No (independent) dual display? No Airport Extreme (802.11g)? Only a G3? Make no mistake, the iBook is a -budget- laptop.
The G4 Powerbook is built like a supermodel - sleek, sexy... and extremely fragile. The only exception, however, is the new 12" Powerbook - it's a little early to pass judgement, but the newest models seem to be incredibly solid. There's all kinds of extra structural reinforcement (which make it a bitch to work on), but the difference is immediately obvious. If anyone wanted to buy an Apple laptop, this would be the one.
That said, my next laptop would most certainly be an IBM. If Apple were Volkswagen, IBM would be BMW. I have a friend with an older T20, and I swear you can hear the lid hermetically seal when you close it. The BIOS is AMAZINGLY configurable. IBMs run Linux like a champ; hell, they used to SELL them with Caldera OpenLinux preloaded! My housemate also has a Thinkpad, and when she went to reinstall Windows, the machine did an automatic factory restoration... without a CD. Those little touches convinced me that a Thinkpad is the only laptop ever worth buying. That is, if you can get past those damn eraser-head trackpoints.
Considering that anything that smells of a Mac clone will surely be squashed by Apple lawyers, why doesn't he just sell the case? As is stated on the site: " A Big thank you to Mick e (dealchatter) for him to allow us to use his iBox design. His design is the reason so many people are interested." Since it's going to be barebone anyway, the target market is already capable of finding their own parts, and buying a Gigabit motherboard is not terribly difficult. I doubt Apple would be able to stop him from selling a piece of plastic and power supply to hobbyists...
Dude! I had that headset when I was a kid! I used to play Top Gun with it - you were supposed to say "fire!" to make it shoot.... I had my mom paint a red crosshair on the sight to make it cooler. I think it was on clearance at Toys'R'Us. sigh... Those were the days. If only I had picked up a Power Glove, my life would now be complete.
Java's a big thing now, Java's everywhere, Java could probably use a wordprocessor.
Like... Thinkfree Office? Perhaps this is what Java Wordperfect could have been, a fairly popular cross-platform office suite. The last time I tried it, it was still heavily tied into their online services, but someone seems to like it nowadays.
Oh, I forgot to mention their client is fully open source. Woo hoo!
While they don't support PGP, I have used Cryptoheaven casually for over a year and have been fairly impressed. They have a Java client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that runs on your own computer, meaning that the Cryptoheaven servers don't ever see your private key (although they offer to store your key as a convenience option if you choose). It started out as a closed system, meaning only Cryptoheaven members could contact other members, but now they have some kind of internet email gateway for plaintext messages. Anyway, they offer secure email, chat, and storage, with free and 'premium' options. The only questionable aspect is their use of the Rijndael algorithm:
"All services fully encrypted using the latest technology including an AES symmetric cipher Rijndael with 256 bit encryption keys, SHA-256 message digest function, and asymmetric encryption with keys of 2048-4096 bits in length."
You could make a fortune on writing extensions and ironing out bugs that existed in the original project.
Kinda like Microsoft?
This whole post is a crock. It is impossible to say that your idea of an open source model will work for every person in every situation.
The late mythologist Joseph Campbell (who helped Lucas craft the Skywalker/ Vader saga)...
Somehow the idea has grown that George Lucas and Joseph Campbell were old college buddies that sat around the Skywalker Ranch drinking margaritas and discussing mythology. The fact is that Lucas and Campbell never even met until the 80's, and that Star Wars owes more to pulp sci-fi themes than any mythological archetypes. Only after people started making the Star Wars/mythological connection did Lucas claim any influence from Campbell. Salon has an excellent article on this whole thing.
I got one of these for Christmas a few years ago. It's from Radio Shack, model no. 33-1165. I couldn't find it on radioshack.com, so perhaps it is discontinued. The receiver is about the size of a deck of cards, and the sound quality is average for wireless, which means fairly bad.
Ironically, my friend recently did this. He ended up replacing every component except the shell and TFT. The previous owners got mad because they thought he had somehow cheated them and demanded it back.