I'm pretty sure there are Simpsons inspired foodstuffs like 'Krusty Kola (90% Safe!)', but how about others?
As suggested earlier, Bachelor Chow (Now with Flavour!) would be an ideal staple foodstuff for nerds, geeks and similar; Duff Beer, LoBrau and Olde Fortran superb for drowning ones sorrows; Slurm might become the cola replacement for the 2000s. The merchandising possibilities are astounding.
There's been loads of disappearing stories over the years here at Slashdot, such as the one revealing collusion between Microsoft, the NSA and the KGB, and the fascinating interview with an alien escaped from Area 51 (itself a prime subject of disappearing stories). Unfortunately, for various reasons, these stories were deleted, and to all intents and purposes never existed.
Hang on, there's someone at the door. Excuse me while I become an unperson...
I'm under the impression that Matt Groening and many of the other Simpsons people found the Simpsons universe almost a little too confining in a way. Only so many things can happen to an average American family, after all (well, without the beetle-browed denizens of alt.tv.simpsons complaining too much...)
Some of my favourite parts of the Simpsons are when the writers go utterly and totally nuts; a lot of my favourite Simpsons moments are like this (Homer in Space? Homer^3? Itchy and Scratchy Land?) The Halloween episodes are a good example of this - the writers basically get a chance to let anything happen, and play with the consequences.
In a way, Futurama is the logical extension. Want a planet filled with human-hating robots? Suicide booths? A homicidal Father Christmas? Coin-operated prostitution droids? A Matrix comprised of senile pensioners? Civilisation-building parasites? Easy. And it doesn't even have to be Halloween either.:-)
I've seen the latest Simpsons and Futurama (despite being in the UK, don't ask) and the Futurama ('I have a plan so devious...') knocked spots off the Simpsons (character killed off for no apparent reason - D'oh!) Oh, and any cartoon that can make P vs NP and 2001 jokes wins points from me.
A Simpsons film could be excellent; it could also be a terrible disappointment. If it was a success, it would be a nice way of making them go out with a bang instead of a whimper.
BTW, a third Futurama season (with 22 episodes) has been confirmed. There's an interesting interview here, along with loads of other cool stuff.:-)
If Slashdot ever does get its own news servers, then how about the ability to add non-Slashdot-related newsgroups?
Non-Usenet newsgroups such as slashdot.tv.simpsons, slashdot.comp.linux.games, slashdot.sci.astro etc could be very popular if they are virtually spam-free and only accessible to people who know about them.
I used the original CAB ('Crystal Atari Browser') on the Atari ST some years ago, when I first got an internet connection - it was pretty nice and surprisingly fast even for an 8MHz machine.
There were two main editions; up to v1.5, when it was freeware, and after, when it became commercial (although with a nearly full-featured demo). Then at some point development switched to the Mac.
The original was written in Pascal, and unless the MAc has a pretty recent version of Pascal I expect it will all have to be recoded. But still taking a lot less time than Mozilla, and with far fewer programmers. Hmmm...:)
There's some stuff about CAB at http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~aclauss/Atari_CA B.html
The browser I'm looking forwards to is Konqueror in KDE 2 - again coded in less time with a lot less programmers.:)
I've watched quite a few of the more recent Simpsons episodes on Sky One at my university hall of residence (no satellite TV back at home) and I must admit I don't like them nearly as much as the earlier ones (as shown on the BBC). Occasionally they're very funny, but not as often as they used to be.
I discovered RealVideo (and even VCD-style MPEG) Futurama episodes on the internet, however, and I'm hooked. I've got every single one except the Christmas episode on my PC now (should have it when I get back to university and my ethernet connection, instead of this 14.4kb/s modem...) and I love it. 'Brilliant' episodes are far more common than with the Simpsons, and often I'm laughing like an idiot. My neighbours must think I'm pretty strange.
Futurama still doesn't reach 'brilliant' every time, but the episodes that aren't so good are still pretty funny (compared with some downright depressing Simpsons episodes, eg the one with Homer and the poisonous sushi). Futurama episodes like the Robot planet one, Nixon running for president etc are superb...
I like the dark undertones in Futurama - at first glance it looks happy and cheerful, but then you see the crack dispensers, the suicide booths and the 25 cent hookerbots. And a main character actively being encouraged to steal, drink and dispense with religion? On prime-time television? Wonderful.:)
Hmmm...
~/media/futurama/futurama.sh
/me sits back and giggles for the next five and a half hours...
BTW, useless factoid - the first season of the Simpsons is starting tomorrow morning on BBC1 at some time. As part of some children's thing. Gah.
I've watched quite a few of the more recent Simpsons episodes on Sky One at my university hall of residence (no satellite TV back at home) and I must admit I don't like them nearly as much as the earlier ones (as shown on the BBC). Occasionally they're very funny, but not as often as they used to be. I discovered RealVideo (and even VCD-style MPEG) Futurama episodes on the internet, however, and I'm hooked. I've got every single one except the Christmas episode on my PC now (should have it when I get back to university and my ethernet connection, instead of this 14.4kb/s modem...) and I love it. 'Brilliant' episodes are far more common than with the Simpsons, and often I'm laughing like an idiot. My neighbours must think I'm pretty strange. Futurama still doesn't reach 'brilliant' every time, but the episodes that aren't so good are still pretty funny (compared with some downright depressing Simpsons episodes, eg the one with Homer and the poisonous sushi). Futurama episodes like the Robot planet one, Nixon running for president etc are superb... I like the dark undertones in Futurama - at first glance it looks happy and cheerful, but then you see the crack dispensers, the suicide booths and the 25 cent hookerbots. And a main character actively being encouraged to steal, drink and dispense with religion? On prime-time television? Wonderful.:) Hmmm... ~/media/futurama/futurama.sh/me sits back and giggles for the next five and a half hours... BTW, useless factoid - the first season of the Simpsons is starting tomorrow morning on BBC1 at some time. As part of some children's thing. Gah.
Apparently the system only has 25 pixels - presumably in a 5x5 square. While such 'vision' will be a vast improvement over nothing, it sounds like the system is still in its early stages and is nowhere near mimicing conventional sight. It's a bit like the early cochlear implants in a way.
There are a hundred pence in a pound. One penny, two pence. It's also called 'pee', after the abbreviation 'p'. So, 50p is fifty pence is fifty P. Coins come in different values; 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence; 1 and 2 pounds. There may or may not be a 5 pound coin.
A pound is also known as a quid, and is often written 'ukp' or 'UKP' because many systems can't cope with the pound (£) symbol. The console in Linux on my system still doesn't know how to do it. There are many problems with printers printing '£' as '#'.
Notes are available in similar sizes to the US dollar bills - 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 etc. I have no idea what a 100 pound note looks like, or whether there are larger notes. The notes all look pretty different - the five pound note has a picture of George Stephenson on it (he supposedly invented the train - what about Trevithick? (sp?)) as well as the standard picture of the Queen; the ten has a picture of Charles Dickens, and the twenty used to have Michael Faraday. The notes get larger as their value increases - the higher value ones now have holograms and other gizmos on them to reduce forgery. There's a fair-sized, almost unpatterned oval on each where a watermark of the Queen's head goes. They're all on white(ish) paper and are pretty ornate, with coloured ink and swirly patterns. None of them are green. They all have a thin strip of metal running vertically through the paper.
There are many slang terms used to denote quantities of money; 'fiver' and 'tenner' are five and ten pounds, while 'grand' is a thousand. I can't think of any more at the moment.
Unfortunately, if you did have a moon of Titan's size with an atmosphere similar to Earth's in temperature and compsosition, the atmosphere would be lost to space pretty quickly. The only reason Titan can hold on to an atmosphere is because of it being very cold there.
It's the reason Mercury, Mars, and all the moons (except Titan) have very little, if any in the way of atmosphere. A lack of a nice, warm, thick atmosphere wouldn't necessarily be too much of a hindrance to life, however - you might get something a little like Europa, with a thin crust of ice covering the surface. The proximity to the star and tidal forces from its parent planet could easily keep an ocean liquid; geothermal[1] vents or similar could provide nutrients and energy for the hypothetical aliens.
Such a moon would almost certainly be tidally locked like Earth's moon, Jupiter's moons and so on. Eclipses caused by the parent planet wouldn't be too much of a problem; the ecosystem probably wouldn't notice that it was dark at all, and the 'night' would be pretty short - a few Earth-days long maximum.
[1] Geo, meaning Earth. What's the correct prefix for a moon orbiting a planet round a distant star?
The planets themselves might have to be ruled out as possible candidates for Earth-style life, but what about any moons? The moons would have to be pretty large to be able to hang on to half-decent atmospheres, and tidal effects from the giant planet would be somewhat on the large side...
Of course, it would be immensely difficult to detect such objects, but the possibility is still there...
I'm only a clueless spod - I've never got even close to running any kind of BBS. I imagine Ford Prefect is a pretty common pseudonym. After all, there are quite a few Slashdot users with very similar usernames; I've got the original.:)
My first online experience was when my dad found a 2400bps modem at work (this was when 28800 modems were the fastest available, so it wasn't that long ago). I connected it to my Atari ST, dialled in to 42BBS (one of the biggest Atari BBSs in the UK, sadly no longer operational) and became hooked immediately. I saved up for a 14.4kb/s modem (it's still my only modem), and enjoyed the benefits of real internet email through 42BBS's email gateway.
About a year after that, I got an internet subscription. I've missed the idea of an 'online community' - parts of Usenet looked promising, but the signal-to-noise ratio was invariably too high. Then, when I went to university, I discovered the so-called 'conferencing system' there (it's often been described as 'communications drivel'). I don't run the BBS, but I help to admin the university Computer Society computers on which it runs.
Alright, so I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, but this is the first I've heard of this film. Contrast this with Phantom Menace, where I knew of the film long, long before it was even released in the US.
Have Disney fouled up in the marketing? Or was I just looking in the wrong places? I would have thought I'd have heard something about it...:)
.. but to avoid an influx of Slashdotters, I'm not revealing its name or location.
Suffice to say, it's been running at my university for years. It was, until recently, running on a small Sun box, but after the original code (it was running a somewhat evolved form of UNaXcess) proved to be far too buggy and difficult to maintain, a rewrite was started. Which failed. Then another rewrite. And so on.
Late summer of this year, the final, all-improved version was rolled out. Which has proved to be very slow, buggy, and somewhat unstable, but still shows a lot of promise. It's improving all the time - and now it runs on Linux instead of SunOS.
The 'community' on is pretty small, but many people know each other in real life, since membership consists mostly (entirely?) of current and former students. There are deep, philosophical debates (Pie-vs-Baguette), musings on the meaning of life ('PUB NOW!' system announcements), and general intellectual advancement (Pointless, Moan, LAM, Holy-Wars, and the ever-popular Abuse).
I know of several other similar internet-based BBS-type things; they usually keep a fairly low profile in order to avoid invasion by clueless AOLers or similar.
Alright, so Matrox haven't written any drivers for Linux. But how come the GLX people have come up with a superb G200/G400 driver based only on specifications, but have been unable to do pretty much anything with the (somewhat obfuscated) source code already provided by NVidia?
I would much rather detailed programming information was released than buggy, non-standard OpenGL drivers. It would be much nicer if all hardware 3D in Linux was derived from one codebase (eg Utah GLX) than if each vendor provided their own, open-source OpenGL implementation.
I bought a graphics card recently. They'd run out of TNTs, so I bought a G200. I'm glad I did so - 3D support in Linux for the G200 has been advancing at an incredible rate compared with that for the TNT.
One minor problem with something being continuously developed is that occasionally things get broken. It'll probably get fixed by the next snapshot...:)
Just make sure you have the latest Mesa3.2dev.tar.gz and glx-SNAP-1999????tar.gz, then try with those. Have a look on the GLX mailing lists and FAQs - they've got a very good little HOWTO there - and find out how to set it up.
When you have the right files, it's pretty easy to setup and install. It works very nicely on my 8MB Matrox G200. It's still not quite as fast as Windows 95's OpenGL, but (IMHO) the picture quality is considerably better - it's not nearly as 'bitty' or dithered-looking in Quake 3.
Keep trying with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised when you get it all working. Xscreensaver OpenGL hacks look very nice - sproingies -root looks somewhat surreal...
There's a new extension being introduced in XFree86 4.0 which should make video zooming and similar things very easy; it's imaginatively called the X Video Extension.
AFAICT, it's still pretty experimental, and I don't know what (if any) hardware is supported, but it sounds very interesting.
Interesting because it was the world's first stored program machine, was programmed by Alan Turing, and was built just down the road from where I am at the moment.
And best of all, there are emulators and programs you can download for it...:)
If the K6-3 is anything like the K6-2, then it'll have the processor type and speed on the top of the chip, in nice embossed letters that can't possibly be peeled off or otherwise removed like a label or sticker. Are Intel processors marked in such a permanent manner, if at all? I have to ask, because all the recent machines I've got are K6-2s.:)
Of course, your system may have a heatsink/fan that's pretty much impossible to remove (with or without invalidating your warranty).
Also, the BIOS only reports what the jumpers on the motherboard set it to use. I had to underclock my PC to be able to install Win95 on my K6-2-450 due to a fun bug in Win95; the BIOS reported the processor as being a K6-233. Before you all flame me, the ONLY reason I installed Win95 was to be able to play Half-Life and use WorldCraft...:)
Apologies, but the browser I used to post that comment (!Browse on an Acorn RiscPC 600) managed to lop off three or four paragraphs that described how the new code made it a lot easier for people writing the applications.
Say, if you want to add a print function. You wouldn't have to write some automatic Postscript generator, you'd simply get KDE/Qt (or Gnome?) to do it for you, using the exact same code used to draw whatever it was on the screen.
The end result would be much faster development of new applications, and much less code-bloat due to common features being re-used so many times.
And as a bonus, these desktop environments also look nice, too, and provide lots of common GUI features.:)
It's a bit more complicated than it looks. Apparently it's due to it allocating all the memory on the graphics card twice; as a result X using 24MB with my 8MB Matrox G200 doesn't sound nearly as bad.
The Linux kernel uses hardly anything compared with the NT one as well.:)
And whatever people say, KDE (and Gnome) don't really use so much memory - a lot of it is in shared libraries. The real culprits are Netscape (obese) and StarOffice (makes Netscape look positively skinny). Netscape on my system uses more memory than KDE and XFree86 put together.
A lot of people don't seem to understand one of the major points behind environments such as KDE and Gnome. Of course, you could always use just plain old Windowmaker, Enlightenment or fvwm2, but then you'd leave out a huge amount of functionality. These new desktop environments aren't just pretty user interfaces; they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone for cartoon food tie-ins?
I'm pretty sure there are Simpsons inspired foodstuffs like 'Krusty Kola (90% Safe!)', but how about others?
As suggested earlier, Bachelor Chow (Now with Flavour!) would be an ideal staple foodstuff for nerds, geeks and similar; Duff Beer, LoBrau and Olde Fortran superb for drowning ones sorrows; Slurm might become the cola replacement for the 2000s. The merchandising possibilities are astounding.
Mmmm... Soylent Cola...
Ford Prefect
There's been loads of disappearing stories over the years here at Slashdot, such as the one revealing collusion between Microsoft, the NSA and the KGB, and the fascinating interview with an alien escaped from Area 51 (itself a prime subject of disappearing stories). Unfortunately, for various reasons, these stories were deleted, and to all intents and purposes never existed.
Hang on, there's someone at the door. Excuse me while I become an unperson...
Ford Prefect
http://www.jinxworld.com/bonus.htm
:-)
Found by typing 'simpsons "pulp fiction"' into Google, then pressing 'I'm feeling lucky'.
I'm going to have to redraw and colourise that Apu picture...
God, I love Google.
Ford Prefect
I'm under the impression that Matt Groening and many of the other Simpsons people found the Simpsons universe almost a little too confining in a way. Only so many things can happen to an average American family, after all (well, without the beetle-browed denizens of alt.tv.simpsons complaining too much...)
:-)
:-)
Some of my favourite parts of the Simpsons are when the writers go utterly and totally nuts; a lot of my favourite Simpsons moments are like this (Homer in Space? Homer^3? Itchy and Scratchy Land?) The Halloween episodes are a good example of this - the writers basically get a chance to let anything happen, and play with the consequences.
In a way, Futurama is the logical extension. Want a planet filled with human-hating robots? Suicide booths? A homicidal Father Christmas? Coin-operated prostitution droids? A Matrix comprised of senile pensioners? Civilisation-building parasites? Easy. And it doesn't even have to be Halloween either.
I've seen the latest Simpsons and Futurama (despite being in the UK, don't ask) and the Futurama ('I have a plan so devious...') knocked spots off the Simpsons (character killed off for no apparent reason - D'oh!) Oh, and any cartoon that can make P vs NP and 2001 jokes wins points from me.
A Simpsons film could be excellent; it could also be a terrible disappointment. If it was a success, it would be a nice way of making them go out with a bang instead of a whimper.
BTW, a third Futurama season (with 22 episodes) has been confirmed. There's an interesting interview here, along with loads of other cool stuff.
Ford Prefect
Lots of handy information here - it actually sounds pretty unlikely from what they have said over the years. Ford Prefect
Just an idea...
If Slashdot ever does get its own news servers, then how about the ability to add non-Slashdot-related newsgroups?
Non-Usenet newsgroups such as slashdot.tv.simpsons, slashdot.comp.linux.games, slashdot.sci.astro etc could be very popular if they are virtually spam-free and only accessible to people who know about them.
Kind of like a Usenet 2...
Ford Prefect
\begin{pedantry}
:)
A B.html
:)
I used the original CAB ('Crystal Atari Browser') on the Atari ST some years ago, when I first got an internet connection - it was pretty nice and surprisingly fast even for an 8MHz machine.
There were two main editions; up to v1.5, when it was freeware, and after, when it became commercial (although with a nearly full-featured demo). Then at some point development switched to the Mac.
The original was written in Pascal, and unless the MAc has a pretty recent version of Pascal I expect it will all have to be recoded. But still taking a lot less time than Mozilla, and with far fewer programmers. Hmmm...
There's some stuff about CAB at http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~aclauss/Atari_C
The browser I'm looking forwards to is Konqueror in KDE 2 - again coded in less time with a lot less programmers.
I've watched quite a few of the more recent Simpsons episodes on Sky One at my university hall of residence (no satellite TV back at home) and I must admit I don't like them nearly as much as the earlier ones (as shown on the BBC). Occasionally they're very funny, but not as often as they used to be.
:)
I discovered RealVideo (and even VCD-style MPEG) Futurama episodes on the internet, however, and I'm hooked. I've got every single one except the Christmas episode on my PC now (should have it when I get back to university and my ethernet connection, instead of this 14.4kb/s modem...) and I love it. 'Brilliant' episodes are far more common than with the Simpsons, and often I'm laughing like an idiot. My neighbours must think I'm pretty strange.
Futurama still doesn't reach 'brilliant' every time, but the episodes that aren't so good are still pretty funny (compared with some downright depressing Simpsons episodes, eg the one with Homer and the poisonous sushi). Futurama episodes like the Robot planet one, Nixon running for president etc are superb...
I like the dark undertones in Futurama - at first glance it looks happy and cheerful, but then you see the crack dispensers, the suicide booths and the 25 cent hookerbots. And a main character actively being encouraged to steal, drink and dispense with religion? On prime-time television? Wonderful.
Hmmm...
~/media/futurama/futurama.sh
/me sits back and giggles for the next five and a half hours...
BTW, useless factoid - the first season of the Simpsons is starting tomorrow morning on BBC1 at some time. As part of some children's thing. Gah.
I've watched quite a few of the more recent Simpsons episodes on Sky One at my university hall of residence (no satellite TV back at home) and I must admit I don't like them nearly as much as the earlier ones (as shown on the BBC). Occasionally they're very funny, but not as often as they used to be. I discovered RealVideo (and even VCD-style MPEG) Futurama episodes on the internet, however, and I'm hooked. I've got every single one except the Christmas episode on my PC now (should have it when I get back to university and my ethernet connection, instead of this 14.4kb/s modem...) and I love it. 'Brilliant' episodes are far more common than with the Simpsons, and often I'm laughing like an idiot. My neighbours must think I'm pretty strange. Futurama still doesn't reach 'brilliant' every time, but the episodes that aren't so good are still pretty funny (compared with some downright depressing Simpsons episodes, eg the one with Homer and the poisonous sushi). Futurama episodes like the Robot planet one, Nixon running for president etc are superb... I like the dark undertones in Futurama - at first glance it looks happy and cheerful, but then you see the crack dispensers, the suicide booths and the 25 cent hookerbots. And a main character actively being encouraged to steal, drink and dispense with religion? On prime-time television? Wonderful. :) Hmmm... ~/media/futurama/futurama.sh /me sits back and giggles for the next five and a half hours... BTW, useless factoid - the first season of the Simpsons is starting tomorrow morning on BBC1 at some time. As part of some children's thing. Gah.
Thanks to BBC News Online, here.
Apparently the system only has 25 pixels - presumably in a 5x5 square. While such 'vision' will be a vast improvement over nothing, it sounds like the system is still in its early stages and is nowhere near mimicing conventional sight. It's a bit like the early cochlear implants in a way.
This is utterly off-topic, but...
There are a hundred pence in a pound. One penny, two pence. It's also called 'pee', after the abbreviation 'p'. So, 50p is fifty pence is fifty P. Coins come in different values; 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence; 1 and 2 pounds. There may or may not be a 5 pound coin.
A pound is also known as a quid, and is often written 'ukp' or 'UKP' because many systems can't cope with the pound (£) symbol. The console in Linux on my system still doesn't know how to do it. There are many problems with printers printing '£' as '#'.
Notes are available in similar sizes to the US dollar bills - 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 etc. I have no idea what a 100 pound note looks like, or whether there are larger notes. The notes all look pretty different - the five pound note has a picture of George Stephenson on it (he supposedly invented the train - what about Trevithick? (sp?)) as well as the standard picture of the Queen; the ten has a picture of Charles Dickens, and the twenty used to have Michael Faraday. The notes get larger as their value increases - the higher value ones now have holograms and other gizmos on them to reduce forgery. There's a fair-sized, almost unpatterned oval on each where a watermark of the Queen's head goes. They're all on white(ish) paper and are pretty ornate, with coloured ink and swirly patterns. None of them are green. They all have a thin strip of metal running vertically through the paper.
There are many slang terms used to denote quantities of money; 'fiver' and 'tenner' are five and ten pounds, while 'grand' is a thousand. I can't think of any more at the moment.
Night...
Or, as the article puts it, 'élite hacking groups'.
:)
Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it...
Unfortunately, if you did have a moon of Titan's size with an atmosphere similar to Earth's in temperature and compsosition, the atmosphere would be lost to space pretty quickly. The only reason Titan can hold on to an atmosphere is because of it being very cold there.
It's the reason Mercury, Mars, and all the moons (except Titan) have very little, if any in the way of atmosphere. A lack of a nice, warm, thick atmosphere wouldn't necessarily be too much of a hindrance to life, however - you might get something a little like Europa, with a thin crust of ice covering the surface. The proximity to the star and tidal forces from its parent planet could easily keep an ocean liquid; geothermal[1] vents or similar could provide nutrients and energy for the hypothetical aliens.
Such a moon would almost certainly be tidally locked like Earth's moon, Jupiter's moons and so on. Eclipses caused by the parent planet wouldn't be too much of a problem; the ecosystem probably wouldn't notice that it was dark at all, and the 'night' would be pretty short - a few Earth-days long maximum.
[1] Geo, meaning Earth. What's the correct prefix for a moon orbiting a planet round a distant star?
The planets themselves might have to be ruled out as possible candidates for Earth-style life, but what about any moons? The moons would have to be pretty large to be able to hang on to half-decent atmospheres, and tidal effects from the giant planet would be somewhat on the large side...
Of course, it would be immensely difficult to detect such objects, but the possibility is still there...
I'm only a clueless spod - I've never got even close to running any kind of BBS. I imagine Ford Prefect is a pretty common pseudonym. After all, there are quite a few Slashdot users with very similar usernames; I've got the original. :)
My first online experience was when my dad found a 2400bps modem at work (this was when 28800 modems were the fastest available, so it wasn't that long ago). I connected it to my Atari ST, dialled in to 42BBS (one of the biggest Atari BBSs in the UK, sadly no longer operational) and became hooked immediately. I saved up for a 14.4kb/s modem (it's still my only modem), and enjoyed the benefits of real internet email through 42BBS's email gateway.
About a year after that, I got an internet subscription. I've missed the idea of an 'online community' - parts of Usenet looked promising, but the signal-to-noise ratio was invariably too high. Then, when I went to university, I discovered the so-called 'conferencing system' there (it's often been described as 'communications drivel'). I don't run the BBS, but I help to admin the university Computer Society computers on which it runs.
Alright, so I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, but this is the first I've heard of this film. Contrast this with Phantom Menace, where I knew of the film long, long before it was even released in the US.
:)
Have Disney fouled up in the marketing? Or was I just looking in the wrong places? I would have thought I'd have heard something about it...
Any other people in a similar situation to me?
Oh, and is there any chance of a DuckPins II?
.. but to avoid an influx of Slashdotters, I'm not revealing its name or location.
Suffice to say, it's been running at my university for years. It was, until recently, running on a small Sun box, but after the original code (it was running a somewhat evolved form of UNaXcess) proved to be far too buggy and difficult to maintain, a rewrite was started. Which failed. Then another rewrite. And so on.
Late summer of this year, the final, all-improved version was rolled out. Which has proved to be very slow, buggy, and somewhat unstable, but still shows a lot of promise. It's improving all the time - and now it runs on Linux instead of SunOS.
The 'community' on is pretty small, but many people know each other in real life, since membership consists mostly (entirely?) of current and former students. There are deep, philosophical debates (Pie-vs-Baguette), musings on the meaning of life ('PUB NOW!' system announcements), and general intellectual advancement (Pointless, Moan, LAM, Holy-Wars, and the ever-popular Abuse).
I know of several other similar internet-based BBS-type things; they usually keep a fairly low profile in order to avoid invasion by clueless AOLers or similar.
Alright, so Matrox haven't written any drivers for Linux. But how come the GLX people have come up with a superb G200/G400 driver based only on specifications, but have been unable to do pretty much anything with the (somewhat obfuscated) source code already provided by NVidia?
I would much rather detailed programming information was released than buggy, non-standard OpenGL drivers. It would be much nicer if all hardware 3D in Linux was derived from one codebase (eg Utah GLX) than if each vendor provided their own, open-source OpenGL implementation.
I bought a graphics card recently. They'd run out of TNTs, so I bought a G200. I'm glad I did so - 3D support in Linux for the G200 has been advancing at an incredible rate compared with that for the TNT.
One minor problem with something being continuously developed is that occasionally things get broken. It'll probably get fixed by the next snapshot... :)
Just make sure you have the latest Mesa3.2dev.tar.gz and glx-SNAP-1999????tar.gz, then try with those. Have a look on the GLX mailing lists and FAQs - they've got a very good little HOWTO there - and find out how to set it up.
When you have the right files, it's pretty easy to setup and install. It works very nicely on my 8MB Matrox G200. It's still not quite as fast as Windows 95's OpenGL, but (IMHO) the picture quality is considerably better - it's not nearly as 'bitty' or dithered-looking in Quake 3.
Keep trying with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised when you get it all working. Xscreensaver OpenGL hacks look very nice - sproingies -root looks somewhat surreal...
There's a new extension being introduced in XFree86 4.0 which should make video zooming and similar things very easy; it's imaginatively called the X Video Extension.
6 .html
AFAICT, it's still pretty experimental, and I don't know what (if any) hardware is supported, but it sounds very interesting.
http://www.xfree86.org/snapshots/3.9.16/DESIGN1
Another old computer that was rebuilt...
:)
http://www.computer50.org/
Interesting because it was the world's first stored program machine, was programmed by Alan Turing, and was built just down the road from where I am at the moment.
And best of all, there are emulators and programs you can download for it...
If the K6-3 is anything like the K6-2, then it'll have the processor type and speed on the top of the chip, in nice embossed letters that can't possibly be peeled off or otherwise removed like a label or sticker. Are Intel processors marked in such a permanent manner, if at all? I have to ask, because all the recent machines I've got are K6-2s. :)
:)
Of course, your system may have a heatsink/fan that's pretty much impossible to remove (with or without invalidating your warranty).
Also, the BIOS only reports what the jumpers on the motherboard set it to use. I had to underclock my PC to be able to install Win95 on my K6-2-450 due to a fun bug in Win95; the BIOS reported the processor as being a K6-233. Before you all flame me, the ONLY reason I installed Win95 was to be able to play Half-Life and use WorldCraft...
Apologies, but the browser I used to post that comment (!Browse on an Acorn RiscPC 600) managed to lop off three or four paragraphs that described how the new code made it a lot easier for people writing the applications.
:)
Say, if you want to add a print function. You wouldn't have to write some automatic Postscript generator, you'd simply get KDE/Qt (or Gnome?) to do it for you, using the exact same code used to draw whatever it was on the screen.
The end result would be much faster development of new applications, and much less code-bloat due to common features being re-used so many times.
And as a bonus, these desktop environments also look nice, too, and provide lots of common GUI features.
It's a bit more complicated than it looks. Apparently it's due to it allocating all the memory on the graphics card twice; as a result X using 24MB with my 8MB Matrox G200 doesn't sound nearly as bad.
:)
The Linux kernel uses hardly anything compared with the NT one as well.
And whatever people say, KDE (and Gnome) don't really use so much memory - a lot of it is in shared libraries. The real culprits are Netscape (obese) and StarOffice (makes Netscape look positively skinny). Netscape on my system uses more memory than KDE and XFree86 put together.
A lot of people don't seem to understand one of the major points behind environments such as KDE and Gnome. Of course, you could always use just plain old Windowmaker, Enlightenment or fvwm2, but then you'd leave out a huge amount of functionality. These new desktop environments aren't just pretty user interfaces; they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex.