Re:Who can forget "Riptide"?
on
Retro Vision
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· Score: 1
Man, I forgot about Riptide. But better still was the Misfits of Science... "Johnny B" the dude who could shoot bolts of lightning from his fists was soooo cool!
A-Team rocked!
on
Retro Vision
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· Score: 2, Funny
Ludicrous?! A-team was a darn sight better than the crap on TV today. Young whippersnappers... Why, when I was your age we were lucky to have a color TV!
Bio-diesel is all a bunch of hype. The stuff stinks, as mentioned, and since it doesn't have the chemical soup that real diesel has, your injection pump and injectors will wear out and gum up. Also, the stuff is even worse than real diesel for gelling up in the cold (and real diesel is bad enough!) and you usually have to have a small tank of real diesel to start the engine with. Why bother?!
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
What's the logic behind that?! Afraid somebody might spill some gas and throw a cigarette on it? If it's such a great idea why don't all of the states prohibit self-serve?
Intel drivers drive me nuts too. However if you are clever you can drill down 12 levels of folders and find the.inf and.dll files that are the actual driver, and just put those on a floppy. Way less than 1.44MB. Intel drivers seem to be pretty universal so you can just do this once and your floppy will work on several flavors on Intel NICs.
Re:Only so much carbon...
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
Dang you, VW != Beetle! I'm sick and tired of all of us Rabbit, Scirocco, Fox, Jetta, Golf, Vanagon, and Passat owners being lumped in with the hippies!
"If you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, gravity will smack you back into the Earth shortly thereafter"
Bull.
If you had infinite rocket propellant and infinite time, you would eventually gain enough distance to break free of earth's gravity. Might take a looong time, but you could do it. Gravity won't magically reach out and snatch you back once you get far enough out.
It stores all of your data in one big fat file. I had a guy at work using it for a small workgroup. That one big file got a little bit corrupted, and he lost the entire thing. Everything was gone.
It would make far more sense, to me, to store things in separate files. That 'all your eggs in one basket' thing, you know.
I knew that was the Descent II logo font even before I read it in the description... uh, excuse me while I shell to DOS and try to find my old scratched D2 CD...
Google for JO.SYS and download the free one some guy wrote. Configure JO.SYS to boot to the hard drive after a 1 second delay. Google for and download int19.com (it makes a PC warm reboot). Put both files on a floppy. Rename JO.SYS to JO.BAK. Configure autoexec.bat on the floppy to do your thing (re-image with Ghost, whatever) and then rename JO.BAK to JO.SYS and then call int19.com.
Finally, configure some kind of startup script on the hard drive to rename a:\JO.SYS to a:\JO.BAK.
Now, every time you reboot it will boot altertately to floppy, then HD, then floppy, then HD, etc.
How? The presence of JO.SYS on a floppy causes a boot to the hard drive. The absence of JO.SYS on the floppy causes a boot to floppy.
This must be used with a Win98 boot floppy to work.
Don't dis the invisible car
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 5, Interesting
We have the technology today! Flexible LCDs are a reality. The tech used in the movie is entirely reasonable and practical: cameras shoot a picture from one side of the car and project the image on the other side.
When Q (Cleese) walked around it on that first shot, you saw his legs get huge and flash by as he walked in front of one of the cameras. That was the touch that made it beleivable.
You'd be better off making fun of some of the other stupid things in the movie, such as the entire driving-around-in-the-melting-ice-palace sequence.
Ok, so you build this thing and put it into orbit. Now how do you get the power to Earth where it's needed? Presently, all wireless energy transference technology loses most of what it sends, so you might as well put the solar cell on the Earth's surface. It would make more power.
Having a tethered array would be about the only way to do it. See Slashdot for more information.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I forgot about Riptide. But better still was the Misfits of Science ... "Johnny B" the dude who could shoot bolts of lightning from his fists was soooo cool!
Ludicrous?! A-team was a darn sight better than the crap on TV today. Young whippersnappers... Why, when I was your age we were lucky to have a color TV!
Without change, something sleeps... deep inside us, and seldom wakes...
The sleeper must awaken!
Bio-diesel is all a bunch of hype. The stuff stinks, as mentioned, and since it doesn't have the chemical soup that real diesel has, your injection pump and injectors will wear out and gum up. Also, the stuff is even worse than real diesel for gelling up in the cold (and real diesel is bad enough!) and you usually have to have a small tank of real diesel to start the engine with. Why bother?!
Yes, I own a diesel car.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Ford pocketed it.
self serve is prohibited
What's the logic behind that?! Afraid somebody might spill some gas and throw a cigarette on it? If it's such a great idea why don't all of the states prohibit self-serve?
Intel drivers drive me nuts too. However if you are clever you can drill down 12 levels of folders and find the .inf and .dll files that are the actual driver, and just put those on a floppy. Way less than 1.44MB. Intel drivers seem to be pretty universal so you can just do this once and your floppy will work on several flavors on Intel NICs.
Dang you, VW != Beetle! I'm sick and tired of all of us Rabbit, Scirocco, Fox, Jetta, Golf, Vanagon, and Passat owners being lumped in with the hippies!
(No offense to the hippies.)
"If you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, gravity will smack you back into the Earth shortly thereafter"
Bull.
If you had infinite rocket propellant and infinite time, you would eventually gain enough distance to break free of earth's gravity. Might take a looong time, but you could do it. Gravity won't magically reach out and snatch you back once you get far enough out.
Only these guys used real guns, no some sissy PVC contraption: http://www.bitpress.com/dc/ The 7 cans is my favorite. :)
It stores all of your data in one big fat file. I had a guy at work using it for a small workgroup. That one big file got a little bit corrupted, and he lost the entire thing. Everything was gone.
It would make far more sense, to me, to store things in separate files. That 'all your eggs in one basket' thing, you know.
Yeah, we HAD an AMD 40MHz 386. I remember thinking how much faster Descent I ran on it compared to the ol' 16MHz 286.
Funny how a I still think of a 40Mhz 386 as "fast".
Hey, I had a VW Rabbit with a trailer hitch, and it could pull trailers just fine, thank you very much!
Or was is the trailer that was pulling the Rabbit backwards... I forget.
I knew that was the Descent II logo font even before I read it in the description... uh, excuse me while I shell to DOS and try to find my old scratched D2 CD...
I've done it.
Google for JO.SYS and download the free one some guy wrote. Configure JO.SYS to boot to the hard drive after a 1 second delay. Google for and download int19.com (it makes a PC warm reboot). Put both files on a floppy. Rename JO.SYS to JO.BAK. Configure autoexec.bat on the floppy to do your thing (re-image with Ghost, whatever) and then rename JO.BAK to JO.SYS and then call int19.com.
Finally, configure some kind of startup script on the hard drive to rename a:\JO.SYS to a:\JO.BAK.
Now, every time you reboot it will boot altertately to floppy, then HD, then floppy, then HD, etc.
How? The presence of JO.SYS on a floppy causes a boot to the hard drive. The absence of JO.SYS on the floppy causes a boot to floppy.
This must be used with a Win98 boot floppy to work.
Read Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Haven't spoken whole sentence since.
Slashdot them with feedback! I did.
We have the technology today! Flexible LCDs are a reality. The tech used in the movie is entirely reasonable and practical: cameras shoot a picture from one side of the car and project the image on the other side.
When Q (Cleese) walked around it on that first shot, you saw his legs get huge and flash by as he walked in front of one of the cameras. That was the touch that made it beleivable.
You'd be better off making fun of some of the other stupid things in the movie, such as the entire driving-around-in-the-melting-ice-palace sequence.
Hey -- ou already CAN get unencumbered MP3s online for $1! Ever visit MP3.com?
Ok, so you build this thing and put it into orbit. Now how do you get the power to Earth where it's needed? Presently, all wireless energy transference technology loses most of what it sends, so you might as well put the solar cell on the Earth's surface. It would make more power. Having a tethered array would be about the only way to do it. See Slashdot for more information.
It's not so great. Based on cableOne's scheme, I'm only saving $5/mo to have internet-only cable service. I bet I'm the only person that does this.