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Quickies

The Mini-Quickies That Fell To Earth 114

Posted by emmett from the gratuitous-back-to-the-future-reference dept.
johnathan spectre wrote in to tell us about these really cool plasma shoelaces. plasticPaddy wrote in to tell us about SkyBird, a nifty remote-control ornithopter. Fire up the flux capacitor, because feebeling wrote in about this WWW guide, circa 1993. seizer told us about some crazy guy TCP/IP tunneling through E-mail: now that's dedication. Speaking of crazy people, Green Monkey scared me with his submission, a Web site devoted to Pokémon butts. From the self-referential bucket, the Webby Awards have nominated Slashdot in the 'Community' and 'Print and Zines' categories. Go Vote and we get some trophy or something. _damnit_ wrote in with a nice little piece on the Ides of March. In case you're in the greater Boston area, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda will be speaking at the Geek Pride Festival at the end of the month.
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The Mini-Quickies That Fell To Earth More

The Mini-Quickies That Fell To Earth

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  • "In itself, the Internet is comprised of thousands of smaller regional networks scattered throughout the globe. On any given day it connects roughly 15 million users in over 50 countries. " That's amazing! 15 million users! Who'd a thunk that it'd grow so fast...I bet we're up to a hearty 18 million by now. :)

    Dan
  • Will their talks be posted on the web?

  • Congradulations (Score:3)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @12:42PM (#1199913)
    Congrats on the Webbie Nom. You guys deserve it. I'm sure you will win

    (Especially with all the /.'ers trying to hack the system.) :)
    -- Moondog
  • Tux could pass as a pokemon, anyone got a picture of his ass?
  • those things are pretty sweet. i wonder how durable they are? perfect thing for a rave/dance club.

  • Plasma Laces (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great! the blink tag for your shoes!
  • How do these Pokemon characters go to the bathroom? And what inhumane things has Green Monkey done to his Pokemon. Posing nude with their butts bared to the world, this must be illegal, somehow.

    Chris Hagar

  • Email Tunnel (Score:3)

    by retep ( 108840 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @12:49PM (#1199918)

    That TCP/IP over email tunnel sounds quite like the problems space stations and probes have.Often it will take many hours to get a reply back if the probe is far away. NASA has spent lots of research money trying to figure out ways to get past this by allowing the probes to do their work automatically. But supporting something like TCP/IP will always be impossible, TCP connections have problems on *any* high latency connection, even a high-speed satelite connection. To combat this both sides use large send and receive buffers to keep bandwidth up, that's what the Allow Large Windows Linux kernel option is for.

  • Why plasma shoelaces? The animated pictures on the site make it look like a bad Dire Straits video. The "Blinking to extend battery life" doesn't help. There must be other things that actually WOULD be cool with plasma glowing, I just can't think of anything that doesn't scream 1986.

    The Good Reverend
  • Aah, that brings back memories. I remember printing out that web guide and a Paleontology web site [berkeley.edu] sometime in 1993 and emailing it to someone. I had attempted to explain this amazing new "World Wide Web" thing to her but she could not comprehend it. Heh, heh.. oh for the days of all grey backgrounds and images which were impervious to having text wrapped around them.

  • Geek Pride? (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @12:53PM (#1199921)
    It won't be a march, it'll be a stampede! Just show Katz up onto the stage and it'll break out into rioting not seen since the democractic convention in chicago. The only other person I know of who could inspire such a devout following would be some short guy in glasses who is pitifully rich and took over the world by monopolizing computer operating systems.
  • Perhaps I'll be seen as a wet blanket on this one, but doesn't anyone get the feeling like the amount of useless shit on the internet has gotten way out of hand?
    From dancing hampsters (though they are rather cute) to pokemon butts to virtual hugs, anything that can be about anything has somehow found its way onto the net.
    The sad part is that someone actually thought it was interesting enough to put the time into writing the page!
  • How do these Pokemon characters go to the bathroom? And what inhumane things has Green Monkey done to his Pokemon. Posing nude with their butts bared to the world, this must be illegal, somehow.

    Actually Nintendo created the games in question that he derived the page from. So technically from the beginning Nintendo has been warping our children's minds with those evil Pokemon characters (I think they developed this out of an idea from a gay Jamacian porn movie).

  • Glowing wire: AMAZING! (Score:4)

    by WayneGayle ( 107802 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @12:54PM (#1199924)
    Get electroluminescent wire in spools at www.funhouseproductions.com [funhouseproductions.com]

    The stuff is amazing, a company in Israel has the patent on the stuff otherwise I imagine it would be everywhere. Anything you can do with neon you can do with this stuff (although it doesn't last forever) I think that Macintosh should start putting it in their I-Macs. I could see it used in phones, glove compartments, monkeys, everywhere!

    If you really want to see this stuff in action go to burning man [burningman.com] this summer! People go crazy with it. woo hoo!
    -WG
  • That TCP/IP over email tunnel sounds quite like the problems space stations and probes have.Often it will take many hours to get a reply back if the probe is far away. NASA has spent lots of research money trying to figure out ways
    to get past this by allowing the probes to do their work automatically. But supporting something like TCP/IP will always be impossible, TCP connections have problems on *any* high latency connection, even a high-speed satelite
    connection. To combat this both sides use large send and receive buffers to keep bandwidth up, that's what the Allow Large Windows Linux kernel option is for.

    Perhaps a windows client? This would be a nice little tool where things like content filtering in Schools and libraries is often the norm.

  • Today there are at least 100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world.

    nice :)

  • TCP/IP over E-mail? pah! (Score:3)

    by aliastnb ( 155659 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @01:00PM (#1199928)
    That's nothing on some of the wonderful technolgies that await us. With the advent of digital television, geeks in North-west England are puting the finishing touches to their new project... Television over Telnet!

    Yes folks, you heard it right. Pictures broadcast over the airwaves, recaptured, changed to ASCII, subtitles added and broadcast over a telnet connection from linux box.... telnetevision will take the world by storm!

    And all so that people needn't leave the public clusters to see the latest edition of Futurama...

    What other wonders does the future have in store? Who knows, but with telnetevision, who will care? Not I!

    --
  • That's nothing on some of the wonderful technolgies that await us. With the advent of digital television, geeks in North-west England are puting the finishing touches to their new project... Television over Telnet!

    Yes folks, you heard it right. Pictures broadcast over the airwaves, recaptured, changed to ASCII, subtitles added and broadcast over a telnet connection from linux box.... telnetevision will take the world by storm!

    And all so that people needn't leave the public clusters to see the latest edition of Futurama...

    What other wonders does the future have in store? Who knows, but with telnetevision, who will care? Not I!

    This is not a bad thing nor is it something that is especially evil or backward. Usually in restrictive environments the brute and unsophisticated methods are very often times the ones that are necessary.

    Actually this is possible. All you have to have is large ammounts of disk space or a really fast computer. Essentially you can have a connection to a machine with a tv tuner card. Then have an application like bttv or some other linux app do screen shots of each frame of the thing in question. Then convert the files to pnm (portable anymap) and then convert the resulting files to ascii with aview. Then you could theoretically take the output and cat all the files together or have a cat filename.001 filename.002 and so on with a clear call after each frame.

    Bamo instant television over telnet. This medium would work best over delayed broadcast type medium. To get good output you would have to use a small font on the terminal. I use gnome-terminal at a value of Clean Medium at 6 pt to view ascii art creations and it works great.
  • Congrats go out to all the boys on the Job in th Geek Compound.

    On the Community nomination
    ICQ has a better community type presence (IMO), but how many ICQ users are going to know about the Webby awards? I think /. will win due to the high volume of active users.
  • What next? IP Tunning over Snail Mail! Why? Because you can! All you need: a couple of scanners, Linux, and waaay too much time on your hands. Unfortunately, ping latencies could reach up to a week. And Quake would be barely playable. :)
  • unfortunatly e-mail is usually (in my experience) monitored as well.

    Make Seven
  • What next? IP Tunning over Snail Mail! Why? Because you can! All you need: a couple of scanners, Linux, and waaay too much time on your hands. Unfortunately, ping latencies could reach up to a week. And Quake would be
    barely playable. :)

    Clear back in the 1890's chess by mail was a reality. What would be interesting would be to have say an interavtive game with extremely good graphics to be done via say e-mail. You have a machine that sends the data over e-mail and your client parses it. Turn based games work on this principle already.
  • I think its an interesting solution, after all your other options have been exhausted... I mean, its not the latest and greatest, but it may just work when nothing else does.

    I have a couple of doubts on the subject, though. TCP/IP is inherently a low-latency protocol... (by low-latency, I mean less than 5 minutes). In the case of email, were looking at, potentially, latencies of up to 15 min or more. How would the TCP/IP client or server application handle those? You would have to manually readjust the timeouts in the software before trying out this stuff. I see it as very interesting, though.

    I was also thinking... this way of tunneling depends entirely on the mail servers... which sometimes, in some businesses at least, are very, VERY overloaded... adding more to the latency... in contrast, a tunneling solution would almost certainly have a server dedicated to it... making it much faster... oh well, just thinking on the subject.
  • Hypermedia is hypertext with a difference - hypermedia documents contain links not only to other pieces of text, but also to other forms of media...

    Nobody even imagined back in the day that we could have sounds, videos, and animations on the page itself. But now we do, and what do we do with it?
    Hampsterdance, [hampsterdance.com], that's what.

    Make Seven
  • unfortunatly e-mail is usually (in my experience) monitored as well.

    pgp?
  • try partyworks [partyworks.co.uk] for some wire outright, or cool neon [coolneon.com] for some neat designs using same. coolwireusa [coolwireusa.com] has 'smore. coolwireusa has the biggest line out of these. coolneon has diy info. Funny thing is that I just looked this up for a project today...
    random tip: altoids crushed in coke or pepsi... mmmm.
  • Why have those puny lights blinking at the back of your network card when you can have the entire cable blinking? Now THAT would be great! Just imagine it in a room of lots of computers and hubs! (Yuck!)

  • 1993 Guide to the Internet (Score:3)

    by Azog ( 20907 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @01:30PM (#1199940) Homepage
    Best quotes from the 1993 web guide:

    "Today there are at least 100 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world."

    Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • How about splitting up messages and dispersing the fragments to multiple email addresses while encrypting each fragment with PGP?
  • ICQ has a better community type presence (IMO), but how many ICQ users are going to know about the Webby awards? I think /. will win due to the high volume of active users.

    All ICQ has to do is to put up a notice on their web page asking users to vote for ICQ, and if even 1% of their users vote, ICQ will win.
  • Download speeds notwithstanding, this could be the ultimate solution for those poor souls whose access to Napster is blocked ...

  • Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but
    they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".

    I remember growing up without a television and also without a computer til I was in the 10th grade. Life was definately simpler. Although some of my fondest memories were of watching cartoons on my little black and white television at 6am.

    I think that people can get it but just some of the more interesting apects will be hard to convey.
  • Will these be blocked for the protection of our children or preserved for the educational purposes?
  • It could be worse. You could be trying to send IP over pigeon [ohio-state.edu]. From rfc2549 [ohio-state.edu]:

    "Patent Considerations: There is ongoing litigation about which is the prior art: carrier or egg."

  • ...but not Pokemon either. Could anyone identify the owner of these butts [helllabs.org]?

  • Re:Email Tunnel (Score:3)

    by Phrogman ( 80473 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @02:05PM (#1199955)

    Actually there is work being done on the Interplanetary Network Protocol (IPN) at this time. There is an article on it here [spaceref.com] and here [spaceref.com] (and yes, we suggested this story to Rob and the boys and got turned down for some reason). Its quite a fascinating task to tackle.

    Disclaimer: I work for spaceref.com just so you know...

  • Cool, doens this mean that I can call one into existance for 0 mana? (Or electricity)
  • ......where did you get that pic? I knew I shouldn't have drank so much. Please remove that pic as it is not public domain and I feel violated.

  • Microsoft Exchange already can do replication and directory syncronization over SMTP e-mail instead of normal network RPC calls. You could follow MS's lead and design pretty much any protocol over SMTP, I imagine.

    This stuff reminds me of SOAP or XML-RPC or whatever it's called. It would just seem easier to change the firewalls rather than try to run everything over HTTP and SMTP.
    --
  • I'm not a scholor of Latin, but AFAIK circa means "round" (as circular) and is used similarly to "'round" in English (or "'round-bout" in redneck, as in 'taint it 'round-bout supper time?)

    The page is clearly dated October 1993, so (in my quite humble opinion) since we have an exact year, it is not proper to use circa.

    Am I wrong on this?
  • Dear lord! How many times can I say "stuff" in a paragraph?!?
    Stuffstuffstuffstuffstuffstuff
    -WG
  • We accept any of the above credit cards. All orders are processed on a secure or encrypted server.

    Am I the only one wondering about the last sentence?

  • Wow. I feel old. I have no doubt that within a decade, it will be hard to even remember what life was like before the ubiquitous "http://...". It will be like trying to imagine life without telephones. Sure, people will read about it, but they won't really "get" it. Even if they grew up "pre-web".

    Oh man, the internet does not change our lives very much at all! Compare the internet revolution to that of when the automobile was invented. The internet and computers are just small fries compared to what cars has done to world culture. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up "pre-car"
    -WG

  • Quickies Reply (Score:3)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @03:08PM (#1199965)
    Accipiter [mailto] writes: "Here's my Quickie Reply Post."

    The Plasma shoelaces look really interesting. The thing that gets me, is the Website says they have a 13 hour battery life (and the blinking slows down drain...), but can you turn them OFF? And how hard can you tighten your laces before a rupture sprays plasma in your eye? Or, what if the dog gets ahold of your shoes, and thinks the blinking laces look tasty?

    The SkyBird doesn't look that cool. It would be niftier if it was physiologically correct against a REAL bird, and flew like a real bird.

    Reading the WebGuide was a trip back, but this section gave me pause:

    How was the Web created?

    The Web began in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (a collective of European high-energy physics researchers) proposed the project to be used as a means of transporting research and ideas effectively throughout the organization. Effective communications was a goal of CERNs for many years, as its members were located in a number of countries.

    1989? Jeez, Al Gore must have just been getting started. (The document has no mention of ARPANET that I could find whatsoever.)

    Pokemon Butts: WHY GOD, WHY?!

    CmdrTaco: That's GEEK pride. PLEASE make sure you show up at the correct festival. GEEK pride. GEEK.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • You guys deserve it. I'm sure you will win

    Well, /. will win the community award, easy.

    (especially since that's the one all the hacking /.ers will stuff)

    But even I plan on voting for Salon in the magazine category. Honestly, it's better than most print magazines. And frequently, Slashdot articles point to Salon features. So there you go

  • 50 GB (Score:1)

    by emmons ( 94632 )
    what's really cool is the sheer bandwidth the www took up at the time... a whopping 51 gigs in aug. '93!!

    I think that I probably downloaded that much stuff today on my own...

    -----
  • 1989? Jeez, Al Gore must have just been getting started. (The document has no mention of ARPANET that I could find whatsoever.)

    "The Web" != "The Internet"

  • This is for real (Score:3)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @03:24PM (#1199972) Homepage
    I must confess, I was the person who thought this whole thing up. I'm really very, very sorry about it.

    I'm a terrible programmer, but in half an hour of mucking about I came up with something interesting. There's some very crude screenshots here [man.ac.uk] and here [man.ac.uk]. I'm currently working on some working scaling code (to get the aspect ratio right), 'aliasing' (,,, ''' etc), and possibly some way for the program to do the grabbing itself. Image grabbing is currently done by Xawtv's streamer program.

    Well, as I said, I'm very sorry about all this.
  • Well, you all are complaining about Pokemon, well, if you were forced to watch either Barney, or Pokemon, which one would you choose?

    You'd pick Pokemon, wouldn't you?

    I thought so.
  • is it true that all of cuba only has a 128k satellite link to the 'net?

    In Brazil we use IP over regular surface mail. Horrid ping times, usually several weeks. In fact I'm still waiting for the original 1993 web document to be loaded, and I started the connection in 1993!

  • >Snail mail? Heck, you could even use carrier >pigeons.

    RFC1149
    RFC1149 [ietf.org]
    Pretty funny! I seem to remember there was one of these for a coffee pot protocol... hmm...
  • Is going on in California right now.

    We call it "silicon Valley".

  • How come the WWW guide does have an Index Listing for Al Gore-Father of the Internet??? You think he, being the Father of the Internet, would have a mention.....
  • Heck, in MY day we didn't need no fancy-schmancy e-mail to route packets. We did it all through phone lines. Remember FidoNet? I ran a small FidoNet board for about 2 1/2 years. All the mail routing was done through telephone lines, resulting in delivery times (not to mention long-distance phone charges!) that often rivaled that of conventional mail.

    Ah, those were the days...
  • I think misty is kind of sexy. Is that wrong? You're one sick, twisted bastard. Now Jessie of Team Rocket, on the other hand... oh Baby! But we both know she'd never leave James.
  • i think that an attachable Liquid Nitrogen air bubble would do better, but this is cool, i can't imagine anyone wearing these, but this is cool... "Stay tuned for our upcoming contest to see who has the most unique way of using our Plasma Laces! Winner will receive ALL 8 pairs of colors, worth $240.00!" [ Most unique way of using them? hmm.. i would say the most unique way would be to commit a 3rd degree murder. ]
  • I hope this guide becomes an official museum piece. It's very well written with a lovely layout. The HTML is also quite clean.

    Let us not be too proud of our progress, however. Read the document, and think how LITTLE has changed in six years. There is more of everything, but that page looks as modern as any other. Note the discussion of neat MOSAIC features such as MPEG and streaming QuickTime video ...

    We have been standing still by comparison with the period from 1989 to 1993 (Gopher, HyperG, the web, etc.) Consider all the stillborn and unborn: RDF, VRML, VR conferencing, true hypertext, NNTP/HTML collaboration frameworks, Xanadu, alternative navigation frameworks (RDF, Apple's Project X). CSS-2 is barely implemented anywhere, and even CSS-1 is not implemented. Client-side Java has struggled.

    Those were the days of the giants, and now we are still digesting those changes -- and fighting endless patent battles.

    Ahh, when I was a younger man ... now those were exciting days. Let me tell you .... :-)

    john

  • This guy I know uses a scratch disk that is hooked up by SCSI to two machines to network them. of whhttp://http://www.cca.org/dave/tech/badid ea.html [cca.org]
  • That WWW guide is great, I think I'm gonna mirror it. It brought back SO many memories. I'm pretty sure that most of us /.'ers remember our first webpage we visited, mine was the exploding grape experiment, circa early 1994, using (I believe) the original NSCA Mosaic for Win 3.1 -- packaged with WinCIS (CompuServe). If my dates are wrong, please let me know.

    I still remember the day I upgraded from Mosaic to Netscape, of course, little did I know how related they were, but it was so cool, finally being able to download multiple images as well as the text at the same time. No more downloading the HTML, then downloading the background (which of course, was a MUST for webpages back then), then downloading every image. Netscape could handle more than once at a time.

    I really wish I could go back in time for an Internet not polluted with noise, just lousy background images...

    Any other /.'ers remember their first www page?


    _____________________
    .sig Instructions
    step one: place .sig here

  • TCP/IP by air... (Score:3)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2000 @06:05PM (#1199989)
    I think the coolest "interesting" way to deliver network services that I've heard of was this: at one time New Zealand's link to Usenet was a regular cargo plane which would fly reel-to-reel magtapes of newsgroup posts in from Australia.

    Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.
  • Ignoring for the moment whether those words rhymed in Latin as well, this does a lot to explain why they thought the Roman Numeral system made sense :)
  • Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2165, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4886]: Returned: 2165 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2166, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4888]: Returned: 2166 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2167, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:34 DarkStar identd[4889]: Returned: 2167 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2168, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:35 DarkStar identd[4890]: Returned: 2168 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2169, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:54 DarkStar identd[4891]: Returned: 2169 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2170, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:55 DarkStar identd[4892]: Returned: 2170 , 80 : NO-USER
    Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: Connection from gore.nocrew.org
    Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: from: 192.137.161.201 ( gore.nocrew.org ) for: 2171, 80
    Mar 15 22:49:58 DarkStar identd[4893]: Returned: 2171 , 80 : NO-USER
  • Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost. Uhm, you just described TCP.
  • Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.

    A protocol with lots of redundant redundancy to reduce the effect of errors, but without ACK/NAK and therefore without the hassle with windowing that high latency brings.

    I think NASA has already come up with space-borne versions of the major TCP/IP protocols to solve this problem, but I forget the link. There was a /. story about it once. Here it is: Interplanetary Internet protocol in devel. [slashdot.org]

  • Don't be sorry - the hack value alone is worth it!
  • Synergy (N): When the whole is bigger than the sum of it's parts eg. 2 + 2 = 5

    Lets do the basic addition:
    Pokemon Porn
    +Battery Powered Birdies
    +Plasma laces(You make that sound more whacky)
    +Glowing Electric Wire
    =The makings of a cartoon butt-bomb ?

    In case you are not laughing, my condolences on the death of everyone you held dear.
    What do you mean ? Of course it's funny.

    OK, I'm done abusing your bandwith for now.
  • I'd pick Hemos, since in every poll, there seems to be that option. =:-)
  • Another possibility for TCP/IP-Tunneling has been described here:
    1. http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549.txt

  • I swear that second [man.ac.uk] one looks like Peter Davidson... scary stuff.
    --

  • Hrm. Perhaps you were thinking of:

    Pokemon Butts
    + Battery-Powered Birdies
    + Plasma Laces
    + Glowing Electric Wire
    + TCIP/IP Tunneling Over Mail
    =A Hyper-Lightspeed Antenna [slashdot.org]!

    The Pokemon Butts react with the Battery-Powered Birdies to generate the opposing planes of force, while the Plasma Laces and the Glowing Electric Wire provide the parallel heat sources and the "input" and "output" "ports".

    TCP/IP Tunneling over Mail is the obvious protocol to use for communication: with negative latency, no less!

  • Do you think that if we slashdotted thier server, they would consider it a landslide? :)

    Later...
  • I now this will be moderated funny, but

    Palm(c) Pron [ebay.com]

    Excerpt:
    A typical Palm Vx user review...

    O Palm Vx, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. You are super slim and very light indeed. A PDA is only as useful as it is portable, and you are the most portable of them all. You are a beautiful metallic color, and you get nice and chilly when I set you down. When I take you out, people look at you with envy because you are so sexy. You have a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which I like better than the AA batteries your predecessors (and your successor, the Palm VII) require. I like this because I like always having a fully charged battery, instead of having to replace batteries periodically. Some people don't like this because they don't like carrying around your cradle or your travel recharger when they travel, but I don't mind. Unlike your dull sibling the Palm V, you have 8 MB of main memory, four times as much. You are much smarter and can remember much more stuff. You come with AvantGo, which is nice for reading stuff fro! ! m the Web when I'm not at my machine. Whenever I HotSync you, you download some of my favorite Web pages, and I can read them later, like during a boring meeting. But Palm Vx, you are not perfect. I will now list some of your flaws, so you will not get a big head on me.

    You are practically naked. The little leather cover that comes with you is little more than something to protect your screen from getting scratched. What's more, it presses one of your buttons when it is held closed, and this can mess up alarms that go off while the cover is on in this way (though there is a HackMaster hack, PalmVHack, that works around this). I'm working on getting a new case for you right now.
  • Mods screwed up again.

    This is one neato reply, you shoulda gotten a 5 ! And I oughta get banned.

  • I now this will be moderated funny, but
    You should have gotten Score 0: Flamebait.
    you are so sexy No offense but that guy who wants to fuck misty suddenly seems a lot more normal.
    I love computers too (though I prefer my two-processor home-made beowulf-supercomputer to any PDA) but sheez man, there is a very thick line between geek and gross, and your on the wrong side.

  • And here I thought the burlap on the dashboards all the rage in Charlotte a few years back was tacky. I've seen neon door bumpers on a neon a few years ago. what the point was, I don't know. It's like the pimp across the street from a friend of mine who over-pimped a 92-ish Pontiac Grand-AM. A note: blue, yellow, and grey only works when applied properly, like on csx trains.
  • Great! At last I can put IP packet onto UUCP spool, copy to disk and carry it to home :)
  • Great, now the Gutenberg Project can take on the archiving TV broadcasting too. They'll be real happy about that, I'm sure.

    Alternatively, when you've missed an episode of South Park, maybe you could view later it in glorious textorama on Deja.

    Keep up the good work.

    Regards, Ralph.

  • This stuff is really useful. It's about 3mm diameter plastic tubing filled with the electroluminescent material in powder form. One electrode runs down the center of the strand and a second is wrapped around the inside of the tubing. It's visual output is only about 50-100 candles or so. A pair of AA bateries can run a 3ft length for several hours. The cheapest I've found it is $40 for 5 different colors of 3ft lengths with AA battery packs at www.cosmicspaghetti.com [cosmicspaghetti.com]. Right now they've got their St. Paddy's sale of 5 green fibers for $40.

    If you want the tech specs, go to: www.livewireent.com [livewireent.com]. They also sell the fiber but it costs more unless you want bulk. ($1.42/ft but only on full 820ft rolls)

    It seems to have the best efficiency running at 80v, 450mw/meter, @2000hz refresh. The effective life of the material is about 800-1000hrs which puts it at 50% output. It can run out to twice that, but the output becomes negligible. It has a maximum "safe" bending radius of about 5 iameters. It can be bent more but you've got a chance of realigning the EL material. It is also moisture sensitive but most of the manufacturered stuff is environmentally sealed (water resistant with shrink-tubing but not necessarily waterproof) You can cut it yourself and just solder the end connections together and put a heat-shrink end on it.

    You can also get sheets of this stuff from other vendors. If you're interested I can email you the links I've got.

  • It could be worse. You could be trying to send IP over pigeon. From rfc2549:

    Being able to make a rfc for that is insane enough but what would be geniusly insane would be to implement it.

    Of course the Open BSD version would use pigeons with DNA-based steganography [slashdot.org] and cryptography (to be invented). It would also be engineered with materials that make it almost undestructible.

    The Linux version would be sold by three hundreds different birds factories and would have most of the features of the other versions in option. It would also run on Pigeons, Eagles, canaris and even on pterodactyles for those of us that didn't upgrade our hardware.

    The FreeBSD version would have a faster IP stack implemented in the pigeons, making them fly at supersonic speed.

    The windows version would be with different colored feathers that look beautoiful but would literally crash without visible reason from the casual user POV.

    The old Mac version would let you enter your packets only in one way and retrieve them only in one way, which is very simple but gets in your way when you are used to use a Unix pigeon.

    The new Mac OS X version looks even better, can work on very long distances without problem but has got some useability issues such as when you overload the interface with too muck packets.

    ....

  • Speaking of 1993, that's when NCSA started publishing What's new for this little package they had called Mosaic.

    Here's the first issue. [uiuc.edu]

    I was rather surprised to find that a lot of the links I tried still work. I guess that being "first to market" causes some staying power.

  • Did anyone else parse that as Gay Pride Festival?

    Nah, thats first sunday in june and much, Much cooler. :)

    Though maybe I can get a pride for pride attendance deal going with my NICOE this year.

    -Kahuna Burger

  • As far as I can tell, the 'plasma laces' are just EL (electro-luminescent) wire, which is really neat stuff. Phosphorous + wire in tube == FUN!!

    Wanna make your own? Cool Neon [coolneon.com] has pre-made kits as well as parts for those so inclined. There's a couple other sites i've found, but the bookmarks are at home, and I'm at work :(. $25 for 10' of wire, $7.50 for a driver that'll take care of 30' of wire (Disclaimer: I am not an employee, just a satisfied customer). The price of the wire seems pretty consistent, other places have other drivers that will do stuff besides just make them glow (blink, chase...)
  • Actually there is work being done on the Interplanetary Network Protocol (IPN) at this time. There is an article on it here and here (and yes, we suggested this story to Rob and the boys and got turned down for some reason). Its quite a fascinating task to tackle.

    Disclaimer: I work for spaceref.com just so you know...

    they already posted the story [slashdot.org] on that last august...

  • I recall that Text mode quake [slashdot.org] did something similar, but I never saw any infomation about what kind of data rate this required.

    For a standard TV broadcast at 30fps, what's the cps? Any compression being done on the fly?

    Har
    --
    looking forward to the eye problems this will cause

  • I'm certain we'd all be a lot skinnier. :)

  • You're right, TCP/IP over e-mail is easy. The tough stuff comes with TCP/IP over Pony Express.

    Chris Hagar
  • Do you do any matching, to try to get edges represented by appropriate characters -- basically sacrificing local grey level correctness for better resolution. Basically, instead of a triagle looking like this:


    ######
    #####
    ####
    ###
    ##
    #


    make it look like this:


    ------/
    #####/
    ####/
    ###/
    ##/
    #/
    .


    or something like that?
    Or something like
  • I doubt anyone will read this, but who cares...

    I've been experimenting with very basic colour support, using a kind of look-up table. The program has a list of ANSI foreground and background colours, along with various characters to print, and roughly what RGB values they correspond to. It's very messy, and doesn't work too well, but the colour is vaguely acceptable...

    You can see some really bad screenshots here [man.ac.uk], here [man.ac.uk], here [man.ac.uk], and here [man.ac.uk] - the first two were of the initial, really bad colour support, being developed over telnet, naturally... The third is the new colour support with a very small lookup table, and the third is with a slightly larger lookup table (still very small though).

    I considered 'detail' support, but I'm a terrible programmer and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.

    I've also got the program to display frames in sequence - it's almost semi-watchable... :-)

    Ford Prefect
  • Now, that was real ugly:-)

    Anyways, if you look closely at those photo collages that were so hip a couple of years ago, it almost does appear that they choose pictures based on sub-picture resolution colors... I'll explain:

    Say the pixel you're doing contains the edge between a dark and a light area (someone's chin typically). If you look closely at those montages, it seems like the program has chosen mostly pictures that have the bottom half darker than the top half -- in effect getting sub-pixel (in this context, a pixel is one of the small pictures) resolution. You might be able to steal some code from there.

    The ascii character set offers very few characters like that, but it'd be easy enough to do some downsampling of the pixel and then edge enhancement. If that matches one of a small set of cases (/\-_|+@VA>) reasonably well, use that, else use your grey-level lookup table.

    D'ya got any movies to watch yet?

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