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Quickies

Here Come the Quickies 102

An anonymous reader noted an amusing story where we learn that Jar Jar will make space fun for children with attention spans destoryed by MTV, and senses of humor rendered disfunctional by years of Sitcoms. It might be better if it was hosted by Darth Darth Binks (thanks SissyLaLa) Point_Blank Sent us a really interesting site that has a history of GUIs. Its just interesting to watch the evolution of those clicky interfaces that we've been using for so long. John Hebert noted that there are New Dune Novels coming out. Tim Macinta sent us a super hilarious Microsoft Advocacy HOWTO. Worth the read. $Bob was the first to tell us that the new obfuscated Perl challange is up (no I'm not entering Slash ;) Bowie J. Poag has concocted an epic poem known asTuxowolf: ..A retelling of the classic Beowulf legend in more familliar prose. Gorak sent us a great 3D image gallery at Mastering 3D Graphics that is laden with bit streams that fulfil Rob's Art Axiom (Art is better when it is a desktop image) And finally, the most disturbing bit was sent by an anonymous reader. Ever want to augment your cats the hi tech way. Check it out. Update: 07/29 12:05 by CT : Shaheen reminded me that I'm going to be on The Wednesday Night Wireside net radio thingee tonight at 9:30 EDT.
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Here Come the Quickies

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  • god damn it people who use MicroSoft software are dumb, they have to come to the one true way, and anywasy bill gates is the devil and MicroSoft doesn't have really cool things like targa.c, I wish that RedHat would include targa in Linux when they release new Linuxes, I hope Linux 6.1 will have targa in it, I want to targa that moron who thinks that MicroSoft is the best, I hope that all the 3r337 h4x0rs here wil targa him if they find him on ICQ
  • Those 3D interface screenshots look a bit strange as still images, but I can only imagine how incredible it would be to see them in full 3D.

    Anyone remember the TV show "Reboot," with windows popping up all over the place? 3D windowing manager + LCD visor monitor + wearable PC with touch sensor = the fscking FUTURE.

    Yeah baby!
  • This is the only humor site I bookmark within 5 minutes. Love those misspelling.


    CY
  • by Wah ( 30840 )
    That is a good reason why Linux will one day achieve global domination. It's just one of those things. Great, whoever wrote it, even better with no author. Should be REQUIRED reading, just like the original.

    Anyway, to go off-topic, if you missed Southpark tonite, you missed Moses....he looks like the I/O from Tron in case you didn't know. Totally hilarious. clap-clap. South Park is the next Simpsons, unless Trey or Matt OD.
  • www.newgrounds.com - the site that has the cat augmentation info - has plenty of other amusing time-wasters as well. The Celebrity Assassin and "Beep Me Jesus" pages only begin to scratch the surface of the fun... :D

    (also thanks to whoever posted the URL to the "Bastard Son of the Lord" page below - it's tremendous).

  • "My computer clicked the link and all I got was this lousy web page."

    I read it... and I use linux.... his EULA means nothing to me! :) Why, I even fired off a polite email to him saying why Linux (and corrected some of his bad spelling) is superior to windows.... ahh.. felt good. And he doesn't have any laywers, btw, that's just his talk... one second, phone is ringing.

    Uh on.. says they're laywers... no... they say they're cutting my phone lines now... no, they can't do tha
  • Ai-yi-yi.

    I am not knowingly related to Frank Herbert, the original author of the Dune series and many other excellent SF novels. The English surname "Herbert" is believed [geocities.com] to derive from the original French surname "Hebert", which roughly translates to "famous army". I'm not too shabby at Dune2000, so bring it on. :)

    I am of Cajun (French-Acadian) descent and live in south Louisiana. My surname didn't have anything to do with my appreciation of Frank Herbert's work, only that I love SF and found the world of Dune to be very fascinating, especially after growing up in Louisiana where water and humidity is everywhere and an essential part of life (I grew up on a rice farm).

    BTW, my little brother's name is Frank...

    John Hebert
  • Hey Fizgig,

    You should come on down to New Orleans if ya want some good beignets. Try Cafe Du Monde [cafedumonde.com].

    John HEBERT (only one 'r')
  • Looking at that page, Brad Templeton appears to be cheesed off that the /. mention didn't give him credit for the thing. So here it is...
  • The histery of gui webpage showd all the MicorSoft windows but wen i downloded it there is no Space Cadet!!!! the gui histery webpage is run by a linus long hair or a appple hippie. Apples and linus doesnt rule like Micorsoft so there is no Space Cadet for apples and linus. okay, so the webpage gui histery is riten by a apple hippie or a linus long hair.

    That guy is going to be in reel big trouble when i tell bill the he is voilatin his EULA of Micorsoft by giving windows away for FREE without Space Cadet. yeah scared huh. Micorsoft has smart lawyers and are going to rugh you up you stupidhead long hair. how do you like that? Bill will make me a rich man for gettin you in trouble he might even come over and place Space Cadet with me so there!!!!!!!!

    Space Cadet rules what is your high score!!!!!

    dont for get to go to my other page [freeyellow.com] unless your a linus long hair or a apple hippie.

    Sorry, guys... couldn't resist...


    The following sentence is true.
    The previous sentence is false.
  • Come on, this has to be a joke article. It's too silly to be real. Wearing the silver suits for that "old timey" feel? And the NASA guys are too sarcastic to be believable.
  • In other words, if the goal of this site was to make fun of script kiddies and Microsoft sycophants, then the author hit the nail on the head. The placement of slobbering, non-sensical prose was masterful. The misspelled words were placed in just the right places. It's REALLY convincing.

    It appeared to me that nowhere on the site is the actual word "Microsoft" used. It's always spelled 'Micorsoft'. A very clever way to avoid some possible legal reprisals down the road...

    But the misspelled run-on sentences are priceless. I have to deal with folks who write like that normally, so you'd think I'd be sick of seeing it used in satire. Not so. It still makes me laugh like a loon, especially the last paragraph of Gerald's "Hobbies" section where he complains that birds aren't teaching him how to fly. Oh, man.

  • Enjoy this new (literally) moving master piece [asciimation.co.nz] by ASCIIMATION madman Simon Jansen [asciimation.co.nz]
  • I think it was supposed to be funny...which it was, especially the testimonials. Although the feline spider thing was disturbing...

  • no one scores a zero on a multiple choice test without actually knowing the answers.
    The guy behind me in health class in High School did.
    Genius was cheating on a test with such hard questions as "T/F: Smoking is good for you" so I answered everything wrong. After he handed in his paper, I erased mine and started over.
    OK, considering the fact that he pulled a switchblade on me the next day, I guess I didn't have all the healthy answers...

    Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
    Homer
  • by Fizgig ( 16368 ) on Wednesday July 28, 1999 @04:59PM (#1778005)
    Frank Herbert wrote the original series. Was he also called John? I'm very confused.
  • I was interested to see what a running Windows 1.0 looks like. (Hideous.) My experience with versions before 3.1 was consistent with Dave Barry's description, "whose only function was to put up the splash screen and give an "Out of Memory" message."

  • I'm pretty sure those are Mercury, not Apollo suits...
  • If you look at the rest of the newgrounds atomix website, you will realize Tom Fulp is not even a little bit serious. Pico is my favorite, it's completely evil and demented and I love it.
  • Did you ever read Richard Feynman's account of how he got to be declared psychologically unfit for military service ?

    Never underestimate the ability of bureaucracies to behave in a manner so stupid no individual would ever do it.
  • The fact that he is denying that he is making fun of windows on the email page is what makes it so funny :P

    It is very obvious that he is making fun of windows, but it might not be obvious for everyone. lol

  • Offtopic? I coulda sworn Jar Jar was part of the quickies...

    oh well, hopefully Jar Jar will die in the next Star Wars. Save the series from being too big of a disappointment.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Currently we are moving backwards, people reimplement stupid ideas from the past, e.g. pull-down-menus:

    Around mid-80s everybody knew that pulldown-menus and fileselectors are the wrong way to do it and thank god I didn't had to use it when I got my RISC OS system (RISC OS is somewhere further down). With RISC OS you will never see one of those stupid fileselectore - drag'n'drop was the *ONLY* way to exchange datas between applications or filesystems. And of course there were now stupid pull down menus.

    RISC OS' GUI's (called "wimp") basics were first released 1987 with the Archimedes range of RISC computers (the very first RISC personal computers). Sadly, RISC OS and the RISC computers it run on never really made it very well on the market and there were not much progress in the last years and this platform is struggling for survival (you can say, the went the A* ways (Atari, Amiga, and now Acorn, maybe Apple in future?).

    So I was forced to buy a PC (Oh, no CISC :-( ) and run Unix on it (NetBSD in fact). I've looked at KDE: Argh! What's that? Windows for Un*x? (compared to RISC OS it is). And then Gnome: Not that better either. All those pull-down-menus. Pull-down menus should rot in hell.

    Why, oh why have they (KDE and Gnome) implemented them *AGAIN* though every GUI expert could have said them, that they are a failure?
  • Oooooooooooh, ok. So that really is your name. I figured maybe the cousin of the author submitted it to Slashdot or something, but no, it was just a coincidence! How devious.

    Where else do they have beignets besides New Orleans? Quebec? I don't get out much, though living in Jackson, MS, I get to NO quite often.
  • Gerald Holmes is King of All Technology!! I can't believe I was such a stupidhead to use Linus.

    NT Everywhere!
  • Gerald Holmes regularly contributes to the MSNBC tech BBS. He absolutely Kills me!!!
  • Hmm... probably ennyplace with quasi-French types but NO is the only place I've ever et them.

    John
  • "But kids don't care about all that crap"

    Hmm, sounds like this guy really like his job. I wonder if everyone else on the team shares his opinion, or they hate his guts.
  • It's true! Cats are going to take over the world! See:

    Feline Linux = Felinux!

    The have already warped Linus from an early age to build Linux, which is already on its way to World Domination!

    xeyes is really a portal to which all cats can spy on us. Except their infatuation with the mouse cursor seems to distract them a bit, but none the less, they are EVERYWHERE!

    Trakker

  • by jwriney ( 16598 ) on Wednesday July 28, 1999 @03:29PM (#1778032) Homepage
    "Obfuscated Perl"? Dosen't that kinda go without saying? *grin*

    /me dons protective asbestos suit

    --John Riney
    jwriney@awod.com
  • by Nex ( 23489 )
    Funny all this hyper-exictement (by Nathan?) about the Apple II Desktop of 1986 (he appends exclamation marks) when both the Amiga (Workbench - 1985) and Atari ST (GEM) GUIs were *already* flying high and were Far superior to what the Apple II Desktop had to offer.

    Perhaps he meant 19Seventy6? There's a mistake somewhere - because it didn't smell like sarcasm. Nex
  • Oh, John Hebert. Now I'm confused. Is that a typo or is it just a coincidence?
  • by platinum ( 20276 ) on Wednesday July 28, 1999 @03:35PM (#1778036) Homepage
    Well, I for one am glad that Redhat created X for us 'Linux/Unix' users. ${DIETY} forbid MIT should create such an entity back before Linux gained its popularity.

    In addition, it seems that someone forgot to include those cool GUI administration tools with my FreeBSD version of X. Hmmm...should I email Redhat about this? :)


    -----
    You can ISO9001 certify the process of shooting
    yourself in the foot, so long as the process is
    documented and reliably produces the proper
    result.
  • You can find a write-up of last year's contest in issue 10 of the Perl Journal [itknowledge.com].
  • So, what relation is John Herbert? Not the son/author-of-new book, it seems, unless he is John-Brian. Just curious.
  • This is the first time that I have to THANK /. users for slashdotting a site before I got too tired of it...

    real humor is at the Bastard Son of the Lord Homepage...

    www.trog.com/jesus




  • I didn't write Tuxowulf -- I only posted the URL for it, after seeing it mentioned on EFNet #e. Someone else deserves the credit for this gem. :)

    Bowie
    PROPAGANDA [themes.org]
  • Not anymore! The all powerful Windos advocacy sight is too powerful to stay down long. It is back and it is pretty good. Like Space Cadet. I was so inspired that I have repented and written the guy a fan letter.
  • It was a little too well done to really be a script kiddie. Because of its logical consistency, it surely is deliberately funny.

    It is as if a draftee has scored a zero on a multiple choice military entrance exam. No one will believe the draftee is mentally unqualified because no one scores a zero on a multiple choice test without actually knowing the answers.
  • Even if you won't buy me on ebay rob, you rocked man. Good show. Hope you'll come back sometime.

    ~spot
  • Y'know, after looking at the Apple Lisa screenshots (linked off of the GUI history page), I started to think: in 1975, the Altair had a UI that consisted of blinky lights. Eight years later, the Lisa brought us the GUI of today. But in the ensuing sixteen years up until today, very little has changed.

    What do you think, folks? Is the still-largely application-centric WIMP interface the absolute pinnacle of user interface innovation? Is the web browser really the ultimate means of interacting with a computer?

    I just have to believe there can be something more.

    (still waiting for the day when I will have a animated, rotating 3-D Max von Sydow (as Brewmaster Smith, of course) head on my screen that I can speak commands to...or is it the other way around? :-/ )

    --

  • hehe.. I don't know what he's been smoking, but damn, I should really get some of that stuff!

    *Long-hair linus guy who broke the eula (nyah nyah)
  • don't youunderstand that down-time is goood??? theserver shouldn't be put under too mch pressre im instlaling nt today since i dont want to run linux anymore because it isnt made by microsoft but by communists and other crap!!! i want to support bill gates who is the smartest man in the word he deserves my money for making the computer in the first place dont you agree!!!!!

    and if you donot agree then you violated that eula of that other microsoftsupportingguy and he can su yourass off or something!!!!

    dont yu understnad that nt shoudl be everywere???!? of course it should be!!! it is made by the smartest man in the world and his company!!

  • Where are the Windows/286 and Windows/386 products on this history of guis page? Windows/386 was the most stable product Microsoft ever released.

    Dave Bennett
  • Save the Queen!

    Which one's the Queen?

    I am!

    No you're not!

    Freedom! Horrible horrible freedom!

  • It's a bit of a paradox to love the movie and the book since the two were so different. I for one enjoyed all the books and I'm excited than Brian Herbert is working on these prequels... with his pop's lost notes. Frank Herbert was truly a master of description an imagery. His books take elements of religion, geography, government, biology, etc and combine them in the most intriguing and fasinating way. His writings truly were books within books. But I digress, I'm just really happy something is being done in this universe. I would love to see an anthology of short stories by diffrent sci-fi authors (I know some would probably be a lame embarrassment but hey, we always have the original six).

    stealth
  • Oh come on, I'd be pissed off to, if I had to work with Jar Jar as a publicity stunt. They probably just caught him before his morning coffee, and started harassing him about having to work with an children's character added in post-production.
  • careful, they're ruffled!

    Jarod


  • . . . the author really can write. It's way cool, and the tone is right, but not the language. He's missing a lot of alliteration, and those weird circumlocutions like "wave-walker" for ship and "whale-road" for ocean. Hey, it's damn nice anyway, and to be perfectly frank, Beowulf often reads more like a tongue-twister than poetry. It's rough going if you're not in the right mood. Tuxowulf definitely flows a lot more smoothly. See below.


    This is in translation, obviously:

    . . .
    This heard in his home Hygelac's thane,
    great among Geats, of Grendel's doings.
    He was the mightiest man of valor
    in that same day of this our life,
    stalwart and stately. A stout wave-walker
    he bade make ready. Yon battle-king, said he,
    far o'er the swan-road he fain would seek,
    the noble monarch who needed men!



    See Beowulf [gutenberg.org] at the Gutenberg Project.


    "Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
  • i cant get through to that link... has it been slashdotted?
  • It's interesting to note that the astronauts depicted with Jar-Jar appear to be wearing silver Mercury era spacesuits.
  • And here I am wishing for another Challenger.
    Sorry, perhaps that was in bad taste...

    If anyone got the Simpsons reference in that article, you get a Scooby-snack. :)
  • Check out win1.01! I tried running the executables w/o installing it first, and they wouldnt work! Why don't win1.01 apps work under 98? Where's that damn promised backwards compatibility???
  • Cat's are actually starting to show some hope for usefulness.

    What I would like to see is an alteration of the eye-replacement which would allow a cat to have not only perfect nigh-vision, but have some type of tracking device. I'd also like to see better leg enhancments to increase the animal's speed and power, as well as stealth. (we're talking real pussy power, here).

    I'd like to see a feline with a mini-rack so that I could run Linux from it and play MP3's from my kitty. (Nothing like a fast, night-vision-enabled cat with built-in targetting playing Cannible Corpse while closing in on a rat . . . or the neighbor's dog).

    On a serious note, I wonder how they plan to build the arachnid cat. They have an example of a robotic carrier with many legs and a cat's head attached. How does the cat stay alive? Would it's skin and tissue not die? We can hardly transplant animal heads, let alone keep them alive indeffinately, totally detached from the body!
    ---
    seumas.com

  • In the original Beowulf, Grendel had a mother. Once Beowulf killed Grendel, the mother arose from the swamps, and started wreaking some real havoc. Beowulf killed her too, if I recall correctly, but she was not as much of a sissy as her progeny, Grendel was.
    To carry the analogy from Tuxowulf onwards, one wonders what product MS has waiting in the wings to fill the role of NTendel's mother.

    Darren Schlamp
  • If cat augmentation ever were truly possibly, they cound infuse the cat with that $800 domestic robot!

    Oh, wait . . . Much like that robot when vaccumming, cat's also tend to entangle themselves in strings, thread, and power cords . . .
    ---
    seumas.com

  • At least the chances of having to read a "God Emperor" of sorts drone on for hundreds and hundreds of pages is minimal.

    Man, that got tedius
  • God damn idiots[pblshr/BrianH] miss the whole point of the Dune books.
    Frank's son can not write a menu much less a book on 1000+ Planet Empires. He has 4 ghosts on this book at last count.

    Can you say "The New Adventures of the Young Messiah" Its right out of the gLucuos play book.

    BTW Dune and Dosadii Exp are on the must read for any one living in USA.
  • ...We used it on 286s with EGA monitors. What program? CorelDraw. It was version 2.0 I think.

    Of course we had to drop into dos to use PC PaintBrush. (MS's Paint sucked.)

    The early PS/2s ran windows 2.0 - in VGA Color!
    I don't think we had any programs for 2.0 other than reversi. ;)
  • ok, this is off topic, but it came from a topic. If you go to: http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/obfusc-3-writeup.ht ml
    you find a graph of what languages suck and rule supposedly based on a altavista-using perl program. However, when you try to do exactly the same thing manually, the results you get aren't even close. It has a time stamp marking it less than an hour old. Does anyone know what is up with this?
  • I am not sure why but that page just left me HOWLING and gasping for air, I was laughing so hard.

    Perhaps it's because secretly I do want this to happen so my beloved Tigger (successor to Tiger, my first cat) could live forever.

    Hey... now that I think about it, she does love to chew on wires...
  • John Herbert wrote the original series.

    His son is writing the new book.

    John Hebert is some dude's slashdot login name, which seems to have been misspelled.
  • That Windows advocacy page was the FUNNIEST thing I've seen in ages! If you've ever seen Brak on Cartoon Planet or Space Ghost Coast to Coast, you know exactly the kind of humor that is just crazy enough to work. As a side note, I wonder if all those e-mails he posts are real. If so, there are some people out there who really need to learn what satire is.

    As far as idiot humor goes, this blows "Diary of an AOL Luser" away. 'Nuff said.
  • I have no clue what to think of this page. It was either written by someone who is totally brilliant at comedy and has a great deal of talent, or written by a complete blithering idiot who is wasting perfectly good space on some poor server's hard drives.

    In other words, if the goal of this site was to make fun of script kiddies and Microsoft sycophants, then the author hit the nail on the head. The placement of slobbering, non-sensical prose was masterful. The misspelled words were placed in just the right places. It's REALLY convincing.

    If not, then I REALLY don't want to know what he's been smoking. The page claims that the author was born in the 50s. If that's true, then he has truly screwed up his brain in the last 40 years.

    Anyone care to comment on how they interpreted it?

    Oh, to do justice to my username, I am excited about the upcoming Dune trilogy. While it won't be Herbert, it should still be entertaining.

Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.

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