The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD
Rapidsite/Apa? Some mutant form of Apache? In any case, it's still reporting FreeBSD.
--Jim
Re:They weren't funny or good
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They were repetive, unimaginative and unfunny. The best jokes are subtle - making it blatantly obvious makes it extremely unfunny.
Good points. Ever read the old Games magazine? Every issue had one fake ad buried in amongst the genuine adverts. That's another element of a good fake: you bury it in among the genuine articles. In that context it has a much better chance to fool people - and to amuse those who are alert enough to get it.
The RISKS Digest is now publishing an entire issue devoted to this April phenomenon, and has for several years. But it was much funnier back when Mr. Neuman published just one fake item in the issue.
But the blatantly obvious can be funny. Spaghetty growing on trees is pretty bleeding obvious, but it's still funny. Like the foolishness over at Freshmeat today: the new color scheme "inspired" by the X-Box. Obvious, but still funny.
There is an interesting, short story posted on the Gentoo Linux site.
No, there's a short article posted on the Gentoo Linux site. A ``short story'' is a form of fiction. (Not that anyone at Slashdot cares, but some of us can't help tilting at windmills.)
For some obscure reason, this was first reported in the Irish Times today.
You mean because the Times scooped their competition? What's so unusual about that? Because it's not a US paper? Not all tech-savvy newspapers are located in the States, you know. Ireland has a thriving tech industry, so it's not all that surprising that they break a tech story now and again.
Add a similar title to your list: Effective C++ by Scott Meyers. Great point-by-point list of C++ techniques and, most importantly, why they are important. A must-have for any serious C++ coder. (More Effective C++, also by Meyers, is good too, but not as essential as its predecessor.)
It had a single row of LEDs, mounted along a pendulum. The pendulum would swing back and forth, and the LEDs would flash so as to make it look like the current time was 'hanging' in the air in front of you.
An electronics store here has this kind of clock, except the "pendulum" is inverted and motor driven. It scans back and forth very fast, and the red LED characters really seem to be hanging in midair. It's programmable and can be made to display the time and a short custom message. Pretty cool for $99 or thereabouts. I'm pretty sure Slashdot has covered this kind of gadget in the past.
Another thing you can do if you don't feel like making your own hardware is to hook your sound card's left and right outputs to an oscilloscope.
You don't even need a scope to do this kind of thing. When I was 16 or 17, I learned how to disconnect the yoke from a TV and connect the inputs to other sources - a poor man's X/Y scope. One time a friend and I connected the horizontal and vertical yokes to the left and right outputs of his stereo's B speaker channel and made all sorts of cool patterns while we played Aerosmith until our ears bled. There must have been some horrible kind of impedance mismatch, though, because after a couple of hours, we completely burnt out his expensive high-power amp. Oops.
Another time, while my girlfriend's parents were in Europe, we reversed the connection to their TV's vertical yoke coil to turn the picture upside down. We were going to leave it that way for her parents to discover, and thought they would find that hysterically funny. But when we realized they probably wouldn't figure out how to fix it, and that they'd probably spend a bunch of money on a TV repairman, we chickened out and put the picture back right-side up. Instead we turned upside down the abstract metal sculpture that hung above their fireplace.
Wow, those nixie clocks bring back some fond memories. I always wanted to build a nixie project, but as a novice hardware hacker, couldn't even read the hookup schematic. Now, a little older, wiser, and with the help of these kits maybe I'll finally build one.
However, while browsing some of the associated links, I came across this clock, which I find even cooler:
It uses an oscilloscope tube to draw the time in green phosphor arcs - no pixels. Way cool! And a kit is available with a guts-on-display plexiglass case. Awesome...
The question is: Will the laptop appreciate the fine flavor of its fuel? I rather doubt it. Do what you like with your Scotch, but there's no way I'm putting any of my Cragganmore or Laphroaig into a fuel cell.
I've been watching X-Files since its first season, and let's face it... it's been pretty terrible in recent years, even before Mulder and Scully were written off into the margins. How long can you milk an alien colonization/invasion/kidnapping/master-race-breed ing conspiracy before the plot twists and turns cease to be surprising? Personally, I think they should make more episodes involving... what was her name, Candy? the entomologist. Or more episodes where Mulder kills vampires by driving stakes through their hearts. Or yes, more carnie episodes with real Geeks and the puzzleman!
I'm not going to miss X-Files. Give me the reruns!
I first saw Grand Day Out in 1990 at an animation festival in Boston. (Along with a Rug Rats short and something bizarre called Deadsy "You can no play with Deadsy unless you have them great big sex-o-thingies".) I'd never seen anything as funny as Wallace and Gromit, and that mechanical thing they ran into on the Moon had me in stitches. Electronics For Dogs, "Gromit! We've forgotten the crackers!", the "parking brake" on the rocket... just thinking about these moments makes me laugh.
That animation festival also ran Creature Comforts, which isn't as funny, but is its own form of genius: interviews with real people, immigrants from other countries about how they compare London to their home country. Nick Park then made up animations of zoo animals speaking the voices instead of real people. Unique. Unusual. Unforgettable.
For years after that, I looked for Grand Day Out on video tape, but it wasn't until the success of his later shorts that videos became available. Now there's little in my collection I treasure more.
Oh, you want reversible compression? Why didn't you say so? We have to have complete specifications you know. I'm sorry that you compressed your 120GB disk full of pr0n and mp3s down to nothing, but it's not really our fault now, is it?
Seriously though, the comp.compression FAQ [faqs.org] is really worth a read, especially question #9 [faqs.org]
YES! Ditto. Seconded. Somebody mod this guy up.
Here's a bit to whet your appetite:
9.1 Introduction
It is mathematically impossible to create a program compressing without loss
*all* files by at least one bit (see below and also item 73 in part 2 of this
FAQ). Yet from time to time some people claim to have invented a new algorithm
for doing so. Such algorithms are claimed to compress random data and to be
applicable recursively, that is, applying the compressor to the compressed
output of the previous run, possibly multiple times. Fantastic compression
ratios of over 100:1 on random data are claimed to be actually obtained.
Such claims inevitably generate a lot of activity on comp.compression, which
can last for several months. Large bursts of activity were generated by WEB
Technologies and by Jules Gilbert. Premier Research Corporation (with a
compressor called MINC) made only a brief appearance but came back later with a
Web page at http://www.pacminc.com. The Hyper Space method invented by David
C. James is another contender with a patent obtained in July 96. Another large
burst occured in Dec 97 and Jan 98: Matthew Burch applied
for a patent in Dec 97, but publicly admitted a few days later that his method
was flawed; he then posted several dozen messages in a few days about another
magic method based on primes, and again ended up admitting that his new method
was flawed. (Usually people disappear from comp.compression and appear again 6
months or a year later, rather than admitting their error.)
Other people have also claimed incredible compression ratios, but the programs
(OWS, WIC) were quickly shown to be fake (not compressing at all). This topic
is covered in item 10 of this FAQ.
[I wish] They'd had the camera swoop through Middle-Earth from important event to important event. The movie didn't really give the idea of Middle-Earth being a really long walk; one thing I liked about the book was the feeling that there was a really big world that they go through.
Agreed. Part of the fun of reading the books, even for the third or fourth time, is constantly flipping to the map at the front of the book to look up the more obscure places, and to follow the progress of the parties (OK, so now they're halfway from Hobbiton to Rivendell, etc).
I've been re-re-re-re-reading some of the more interesting passages from LOTR in a new Houghton Mifflin set that my wife brought home. I nearly freaked out when I went to the front of the book looking for the map... and it wasn't there. I leafed through the front matter several times, but no map. I'd been so used to finding it there that it never occurred to me to look anywhere else. Eventually I woke up and looked in the back... and wow, not just one, but several maps. Calloo Callay!
Many years ago, in the early days of the WWW, Laurence Tribe proposed a "Cyberspace Amendment" to the US Constitution that would explicitly extend all the rights and freedoms of the Constitution to all forms of speech, regardless of the medium. The idea was brought to many of us geeks in a Dr. Dobbs article by Michael Swaine. I know what many of my fellow Slashdotters opinions probably are, but I'd like to have yours: how have our Constitutional protections held up on the Internet, in e-mail, and in WWW publishing? Do we still need a Cyberspace amendment - or do we perhaps need it now more than ever?
OK, maybe the baby conch is a little offbeat, but in my neck of the woods there's nothing unusual about Vienna Sausage, Beany Weany, or Underwood Deviled Ham. No fishing expedition is complete without a few cans of the above, along with a sleeve of soda crackers, a couple cans of beer or Coke, and a few sticks of beef jerky tucked in a mini-Playmate and stowed under the console of your bass boat. If Vienna Sausages are strange, then where's the tin of sardines or the smoked baby oysters? As the other poster said, Pork Brains in Milk Gravy: now that's strange!
Slashdot Mirror
Wehavethewayout.com was returning Apache headers yesterday; today it's returning "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
Oh? I'm getting this from Netcraft:
The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD
Rapidsite/Apa? Some mutant form of Apache? In any case, it's still reporting FreeBSD.
--Jim
They were repetive, unimaginative and unfunny. The best jokes are subtle - making it blatantly obvious makes it extremely unfunny.
Good points. Ever read the old Games magazine? Every issue had one fake ad buried in amongst the genuine adverts. That's another element of a good fake: you bury it in among the genuine articles. In that context it has a much better chance to fool people - and to amuse those who are alert enough to get it.
The RISKS Digest is now publishing an entire issue devoted to this April phenomenon, and has for several years. But it was much funnier back when Mr. Neuman published just one fake item in the issue.
But the blatantly obvious can be funny. Spaghetty growing on trees is pretty bleeding obvious, but it's still funny. Like the foolishness over at Freshmeat today: the new color scheme "inspired" by the X-Box. Obvious, but still funny.
--Jim
What about those little "tape-in" antennas they're advertising on TV all the time these days? Do they do anything at all
Yes. They separate the ignorant from their money. For more information see: Barnum, P.T.
--Jim
There is an interesting, short story posted on the Gentoo Linux site.
No, there's a short article posted on the Gentoo Linux site. A ``short story'' is a form of fiction. (Not that anyone at Slashdot cares, but some of us can't help tilting at windmills.)
--Jim
ha ha, nice going losing karma, FAG!
I've got SHITLOADS. Bring on the modders!
who cares if it's cut and paste. it's still informative
Right. And he cites his source. Not even plagiarism.
--Jim
For some obscure reason, this was first reported in the Irish Times today.
You mean because the Times scooped their competition? What's so unusual about that? Because it's not a US paper? Not all tech-savvy newspapers are located in the States, you know. Ireland has a thriving tech industry, so it's not all that surprising that they break a tech story now and again.
--Jim
Add a similar title to your list: Effective C++ by Scott Meyers. Great point-by-point list of C++ techniques and, most importantly, why they are important. A must-have for any serious C++ coder. (More Effective C++, also by Meyers, is good too, but not as essential as its predecessor.)
--Jim
By FAR the coolest patterns were produced by Dire Straits from the Brothers in Arms LP - especially the song Telegraph Road.
Telegraph Road was on Love Over Gold. Great album, though. Hmmm... I've got an ancient 13" B&W TV... Hmmm... I wonder...
--Jim
It had a single row of LEDs, mounted along a pendulum. The pendulum would swing back and forth, and the LEDs would flash so as to make it look like the current time was 'hanging' in the air in front of you.
An electronics store here has this kind of clock, except the "pendulum" is inverted and motor driven. It scans back and forth very fast, and the red LED characters really seem to be hanging in midair. It's programmable and can be made to display the time and a short custom message. Pretty cool for $99 or thereabouts. I'm pretty sure Slashdot has covered this kind of gadget in the past.
--Jim
Another thing you can do if you don't feel like making your own hardware is to hook your sound card's left and right outputs to an oscilloscope.
You don't even need a scope to do this kind of thing. When I was 16 or 17, I learned how to disconnect the yoke from a TV and connect the inputs to other sources - a poor man's X/Y scope. One time a friend and I connected the horizontal and vertical yokes to the left and right outputs of his stereo's B speaker channel and made all sorts of cool patterns while we played Aerosmith until our ears bled. There must have been some horrible kind of impedance mismatch, though, because after a couple of hours, we completely burnt out his expensive high-power amp. Oops.
Another time, while my girlfriend's parents were in Europe, we reversed the connection to their TV's vertical yoke coil to turn the picture upside down. We were going to leave it that way for her parents to discover, and thought they would find that hysterically funny. But when we realized they probably wouldn't figure out how to fix it, and that they'd probably spend a bunch of money on a TV repairman, we chickened out and put the picture back right-side up. Instead we turned upside down the abstract metal sculpture that hung above their fireplace.
--Jim
Wow, those nixie clocks bring back some fond memories. I always wanted to build a nixie project, but as a novice hardware hacker, couldn't even read the hookup schematic. Now, a little older, wiser, and with the help of these kits maybe I'll finally build one.
However, while browsing some of the associated links, I came across this clock, which I find even cooler:
http://www.cathodecorner.com/
It uses an oscilloscope tube to draw the time in green phosphor arcs - no pixels. Way cool! And a kit is available with a guts-on-display plexiglass case. Awesome...
--Jim
Will a peaty single malt gum up the works?
The question is: Will the laptop appreciate the fine flavor of its fuel? I rather doubt it. Do what you like with your Scotch, but there's no way I'm putting any of my Cragganmore or Laphroaig into a fuel cell.
--Jim
All narrated/introduced by a frankly embarrassed looking Duchovny.
...and his dog "Scully" - er, um, I mean "Stella".
Yes, Bambi! Bambi the roach Queen! I really love those surreally-funny, tongue-in-cheek, let's-not-take-ourselves-too-seriously episodes.
--Jim
I've been watching X-Files since its first season, and let's face it... it's been pretty terrible in recent years, even before Mulder and Scully were written off into the margins. How long can you milk an alien colonization/invasion/kidnapping/master-race-breed ing conspiracy before the plot twists and turns cease to be surprising? Personally, I think they should make more episodes involving... what was her name, Candy? the entomologist. Or more episodes where Mulder kills vampires by driving stakes through their hearts. Or yes, more carnie episodes with real Geeks and the puzzleman!
I'm not going to miss X-Files. Give me the reruns!
--Jim
I first saw Grand Day Out in 1990 at an animation festival in Boston. (Along with a Rug Rats short and something bizarre called Deadsy "You can no play with Deadsy unless you have them great big sex-o-thingies".) I'd never seen anything as funny as Wallace and Gromit, and that mechanical thing they ran into on the Moon had me in stitches. Electronics For Dogs, "Gromit! We've forgotten the crackers!", the "parking brake" on the rocket... just thinking about these moments makes me laugh.
That animation festival also ran Creature Comforts, which isn't as funny, but is its own form of genius: interviews with real people, immigrants from other countries about how they compare London to their home country. Nick Park then made up animations of zoo animals speaking the voices instead of real people. Unique. Unusual. Unforgettable.
For years after that, I looked for Grand Day Out on video tape, but it wasn't until the success of his later shorts that videos became available. Now there's little in my collection I treasure more.
Rock on, Nick Park, rock on!
--Jim
Thats fine, its the uncompressing that gets you!
Oh, you want reversible compression? Why didn't you say so? We have to have complete specifications you know. I'm sorry that you compressed your 120GB disk full of pr0n and mp3s down to nothing, but it's not really our fault now, is it?
--Jim
Seriously though, the comp.compression FAQ [faqs.org] is really worth a read, especially question #9 [faqs.org]
YES! Ditto. Seconded. Somebody mod this guy up.
Here's a bit to whet your appetite:
9.1 Introduction
It is mathematically impossible to create a program compressing without loss
*all* files by at least one bit (see below and also item 73 in part 2 of this
FAQ). Yet from time to time some people claim to have invented a new algorithm
for doing so. Such algorithms are claimed to compress random data and to be
applicable recursively, that is, applying the compressor to the compressed
output of the previous run, possibly multiple times. Fantastic compression
ratios of over 100:1 on random data are claimed to be actually obtained.
Such claims inevitably generate a lot of activity on comp.compression, which
can last for several months. Large bursts of activity were generated by WEB
Technologies and by Jules Gilbert. Premier Research Corporation (with a
compressor called MINC) made only a brief appearance but came back later with a
Web page at http://www.pacminc.com. The Hyper Space method invented by David
C. James is another contender with a patent obtained in July 96. Another large
burst occured in Dec 97 and Jan 98: Matthew Burch applied
for a patent in Dec 97, but publicly admitted a few days later that his method
was flawed; he then posted several dozen messages in a few days about another
magic method based on primes, and again ended up admitting that his new method
was flawed. (Usually people disappear from comp.compression and appear again 6
months or a year later, rather than admitting their error.)
Other people have also claimed incredible compression ratios, but the programs
(OWS, WIC) were quickly shown to be fake (not compressing at all). This topic
is covered in item 10 of this FAQ.
``There is no dark side of the moon really... as a matter of fact, it's all dark.'' - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
Yes, it's Clarke. And its "Any sufficiently advanced technology...."
--Jim
I haven't seen it yet, but from the previews Gandalf doesn't seem how I pictured him from the books.
I thought his beard should be longer and his eyebrows bushier. But these are tiny nitpicks; Gandalf otherwise looks very much like I had imagined.
--Jim
[I wish] They'd had the camera swoop through Middle-Earth from important event to important event. The movie didn't really give the idea of Middle-Earth being a really long walk; one thing I liked about the book was the feeling that there was a really big world that they go through.
Agreed. Part of the fun of reading the books, even for the third or fourth time, is constantly flipping to the map at the front of the book to look up the more obscure places, and to follow the progress of the parties (OK, so now they're halfway from Hobbiton to Rivendell, etc).
I've been re-re-re-re-reading some of the more interesting passages from LOTR in a new Houghton Mifflin set that my wife brought home. I nearly freaked out when I went to the front of the book looking for the map... and it wasn't there. I leafed through the front matter several times, but no map. I'd been so used to finding it there that it never occurred to me to look anywhere else. Eventually I woke up and looked in the back... and wow, not just one, but several maps. Calloo Callay!
--Jim
Many years ago, in the early days of the WWW, Laurence Tribe proposed a "Cyberspace Amendment" to the US Constitution that would explicitly extend all the rights and freedoms of the Constitution to all forms of speech, regardless of the medium. The idea was brought to many of us geeks in a Dr. Dobbs article by Michael Swaine. I know what many of my fellow Slashdotters opinions probably are, but I'd like to have yours: how have our Constitutional protections held up on the Internet, in e-mail, and in WWW publishing? Do we still need a Cyberspace amendment - or do we perhaps need it now more than ever?
--Jim
OK, maybe the baby conch is a little offbeat, but in my neck of the woods there's nothing unusual about Vienna Sausage, Beany Weany, or Underwood Deviled Ham. No fishing expedition is complete without a few cans of the above, along with a sleeve of soda crackers, a couple cans of beer or Coke, and a few sticks of beef jerky tucked in a mini-Playmate and stowed under the console of your bass boat. If Vienna Sausages are strange, then where's the tin of sardines or the smoked baby oysters? As the other poster said, Pork Brains in Milk Gravy: now that's strange!
--Jim