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Quickies

Quickielanche 130

Posted by CmdrTaco from the duck-and-cover dept.
Let's start this off with bio2's link to "the tube": an unrollable laptop:super crazy hardware. seizer sent us the most amusing firewall circumventer: a TCP/IP Email Tunnel. While on the subject of bizarre technology, John Petz sent us a webserver running on an Atari 800. Still not in shock? hool sent us a hack over at x42.com which uses the hostname as input to a calculator. tdunn linked us to a place that lists odd things found inside PC cases. It includes a *shudder* severed finger tip. For more wierd tech support, yeahbensteres submitted iamanidiot.com which has some tales that you may or may not believe. Pike sent us 94 Uses for Old Altoids Tins: Who eats 94 tins of altoids? Oh... wait. OwenF sent us linkage to the latest robotic pet craze. Look out AIBO, here comes Robotic Fish! Slashdot's own jamiemccarthy points us to TimeCube.com for all your wierd-science needs. You econ majors might be interested in Yhetti's link to the fortune-cookie market index. Bradley noted a story about a man who changed his name to 'Oxford University' to avoid domain squatting charges from Oxford University. If you have a mission:impossible scheduled next week, Dr. Manhattan sent us a link to a Swiss company that is developing self-destructing CDs. The CIA has some on back order. An anonymous reader pointed us to EarthKam, which has several really beautiful pictures of earth from space. Check out their top 10 ... if only they were bigger they'd make great background art. And finally for those of you who are sick of all the naughty language on TV, deepak saxena sent us a machine that claims it will filter all the damn swearing from TV and video. I'm waiting for a version that filters out Regis.
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  • CPU != case (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is from the bizarre things found in computers page:

    Chicken wishbone Placed inside the Central Processing Unit (CPU) by a customer to prevent the machine crashing.

    More and more often lately I've been hearing people refer to the case as the CPU. Who's spreading this around?

  • Re:First (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    DAMMIT! You got first post AGAIN?!

    You can only push me so far before I snap. Do you have any idea how jealous
    I am? I am INSANELY jealous. Do you know what that means?

    You will wake up with you lover's severed head in your bed. That's how jealous I am.

    You will find all your clothes with a scarlet "Posted First" patch sewed on them. That's how jealous I am.

    You will see me on Hard Copy or A Current Affair, spilling all your secrets. That's how jealous I am.

    You are playing with fire. Do not deny me First Post again. Or else THE RABBIT GETS BOILED!

    Got it?

  • unrollable? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    an unrollable laptop? do regular laptops roll? is that like a roll bar for a laptop? some kind of ruggedized laptop? what does that mean? *ponder* *think* why does that make me think of tobacco paper?

    oh! *lightbulb* a laptop that UNROLLS! wiggy.
  • While cleaning out old computers, used in tech labs (ie: wood shop), to be re-used for either spare parts or workstations at my school, we came across all manner of broken parts, missing pieces (some people just love stealing RAM from computers) and other various tidbits, but one day along with the usual pen lids, crumpled up paper and dust I found: a full sandwich, still in a ziplock baggie. My theory? Someone taking tech decided that, because their computer was going slowly, it was hungry.
  • >I can't Imagine that Atari being able to handle the slashdot effect.

    Why? The Atari 8-bits are a lot tougher than you think.
  • You can put your weed in there!
  • Yes. There seem to be some problems with squid "deciding" whats legal and not. Very pityful, as it really shows how cool things you can use URL:s for.
    I hope atleast that the decimal URL:s [x42.com] works with squid.
    cheers,
    /magnus

  • We do have cable TV, you know. It can often take several minutes to find out that there's nothing worth watching.

    In Britain, those 7 banned words can all be heard on broadcast TV, though not before the "watershed" of 9pm.

  • Aren't they all, sooner or later?
  • Have all utilities-phone, power, cable, etc-disconnected.
    Discontinue all newspaper delivery
    Remove mailbox, get restraining order against postperson
    Put RF shielding over and around house
    And at the rate he's becoming ubiquitous, surround property with barb wire fence and put in landmines
  • Judging by the following quote from the story AOL is already involved :-)

    "We focus our tests very strongly on the CD, mainly because we can get an endless supply of CDs to destroy,..."

  • Apparently calling them the Central *Intelligence* Agency is a dis-information ploy.
    From the article
    "Two years ago, in an attempt to test potential market reaction to the system, George approached Tibbetts, a US based company that supplies the CIA with miniature electronics components. Tibbetts approached the CIA on George's behalf, offering a price of material costs plus $15 per exploding device, based on an order of 100,000 units. The CIA was very interested in the product but on a smaller initial scale - it offered to pay $70 per unit for an amount of 50,000 units when the product was complete. This offer has now been on hold for two years, as the team in Switzerland continues to develop the system."
    Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like paying 3.5 million dollars for 50K of them instead of 1.5 million dollars for 100K of them? At that rate we could have bought one for about 1.7 trillion dollars. Imagine what we would have had to pay to keep them from sending us any.
  • Altoid tins make a good wallet.

  • Repeats (Score:1)

    by Keck ( 7446 )
    Sorry, but haven't better than 50% of these quickies been on /. in the past 12 months? C'mon, don't you even _check_ anymore? .
  • "____ filtering! I really ___like censorship!"

    Now, I really wish someone would figure out a way to filter out stupidity. You know, where the StupidaGoggles... like what Zaphoid Beeblebrox had, except these filter out stupid things instead of dangerous things. See a warm beer out? *ZAP* Instantly filtered. Now you're not tempted to drink warm beer.

  • Now if they get together with those 10GB-on-a-scotch-tape-roll people, we can fit, oooh, let's see... (waves thumb at pic) maybe 150GB inside that little tube, then power and optic sockets on one end for rack mounting (LOBOWR, Lots Of Batons On Wine Racks), solar cells on the case and on the rear of the screens for portability, IR and wireless out the other end, and there you have a dream computer.

    No, wait, we need a 3-megapixel camera and zoom lens in on end, so have to stick the IR and wireless in the power/fibre end too.

    Uh, one more thing, let's squeeze in a laser for measuring distances, pointing at things, and line-of-sight comms. (-:
  • does anyone really care about any of that stuff anyways. it's like the damn forwards that people send me i don't really want them but people send them anyways. they are just useless without and have no meaning at all.

    So why haven't you gone into your Slashdot preferences [slashdot.org] and clicked on the "Quickies" box?

    Jay (=


  • Well, that didn't take long - the Atari 800 web server has been slashdotted about three minutes after the story was posted.
  • Two words: Star Raiders
    --
  • that is great. How did [s]he get all of those out of there?

    -mark
  • Star raiders - Yep still got my copy on cartridge *S* About twice a year I blow the dust off the Atari 400 or 800xl and play a game or two... Shame I never got much better than "Garbage Scow Captain"..... I tried getting it to work in a PC emulator but never had much luck. Maybe I should persevere.
  • I think the best quote on the page has to be:
    Why are you accepting packages for crappy OSes???
    An open-sourced package for a crappy OS is just an open-sourced package for a good OS that hasn't been ported yet...
  • Yeah, that was my philosophy regarding the 'pencil eraser' webserver I'm building, based on this the 'match-head' server [umass.edu] [My design has an iPic, EEPROM, LED driver chip and IRDA LED stacked/epoxied with the pins bent out ['flat'] for interconnections)

    After all, like the only man to ever use nukes for their intended purpose said: "If you can't stand the hits, get off of my keychain"

    __________

  • I'm gonna eat you little fishie...
    I'm gonna eat you little fishie...
    I'm gonna eat you little fishie...
    'Cause I like eating fish.

    My tooth! My tooth! I think I lost my tooth!


    ---
  • Probably didn't cost them a thing. Over in the shipping dept here at my office, we've easily got about 20x as many peanuts as it would take to fill a cubicle... Of course, we do a lot of shipping. :)

    ---
  • Finally. It took this long for Mr. Ray to get Slashdot notoriety. This is still the funniest site I've ever read. Gene Ray is too loony for this stuff to be a joke. Crackpot pseudoscience at its best!

    You are stupid and evil and do not know that you are stupid and evil!

  • Atari 800? Did you say Atari 800?

    I believe, somewhere in the dark recesses of the storage areas in my bookstore, among the old TRS-80s, I've got one of those things. Maybe I should be using it as a server for my bookstore, instead of letting it collect dust.

    Or maybe I'll just put it on eBay.

    paperbacks.homepage.com [homepage.com]

  • Its slashdoted. What a surprize :P

  • Option 1, the guy is under extreme psychosis and actually believes the tripe.

    Option 2, the guy is a typical evangelist attempting to gain power and money by starting a cult by suckering gullible low-IQ poorly educated people.

    Option 3, the website is merely a parody of other major religions, such as christianity (e.g. he may be parodying behaviour of many christian churches that strive to keep its people uneducated and ignorant, to maintain power/money.)

    Option 4, the guy has reached a wisdom plateau above that of God, and we are all STUPID AND IGNORANT FROM BRAINWASHING FROM EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.

    Hard to say, really.

  • Yes, poor poor 8-Bitty.

    But I just love the idea of using that old gear to serve webpages. Had to printout this article to show it to my fellow hackers at tonights LUG-Meeting.

    Now if I only'd remember where I put my old C64... I could let it serve the webpages right off the 1541. 170 KByte should be enough for some text. (And if not, I'll pack the rest on a C-90-Tape, using the Datassette =:-) )

  • Ahh... come on! Have mercy with this poor old grandpa of computer-technology.

    =:-)
  • Using captioning to filter tv is such a broken idea it's not funny. $150 for that? Shit, the parts probably cost about five bucks. Carl's idea was much better. Real-time analysis and interpretation of the video or audio signal. That's _real_ filtering.
  • so run your own in an emulator.
    heres one :
    Source Code

    5 CLOSE #1
    10 A=0
    15 XIO 36,#1,14,0,"R1:"
    20 XIO 34,#1,(192+48),0,"R1:"
    30 XIO 38,#1,64,0,"R1:"
    40 OPEN #1,9,0,"R1:"
    1000 STATUS #1,C
    1010 IF PEEK(747)Atari 800 web server"
    1070 PRINT #1;""
    1071 PRINT #1;"Welcome to the Atari 800 web server"
    1075 A=A+1
    1080 PRINT #1;"

    Hits since last reset:";A
    1800 PRINT #1;""
    1900 STATUS #1,C
    1910 IF PEEK(749)>0 THEN GOTO 1900
    1920 CLOSE #1
    1930 OPEN #1,9,0,"R1:"
    1940 XIO 34,#1,128,0,"R1:"
    1970 STATUS #1,C
    1980 IF PEEK(747)>1 THEN GOTO 1970
    1990 XIO 34,#1,192,0,"R1:"
    1999 GOTO 1000

    You may of course use,modify and distribute this source code freely.

  • This is nothing new I have been doing this for over a year... it is integral with a product that I developed.... come on

    Now the Laptop ... that is cool I have destoyed mine more than once...
  • You know it's bad when you do have 94 altoid tins. I've been wondering what I can do with them...
  • The Fox overdubbed version of Wierd Science:

    "She kicked me in the in the nuts" became "She kicked me in the guts" (not too bad), with the follow-up "In the flippin gizzard?" dubbed over the original line (which I can't remember what it was).

    I enjoy watching dubbed movies, just because the cheesiness makes me roll on the floor...
  • And check out fun with Microwaves [eskimo.com] link that is on the Altoids page.
  • "Hey man, A cube has 8 corners, and 6 sides, punk."

    That is what they want you to believe - your education has made you ignorant.
  • Shutup. You are a stupid brainwashed pedant. You are ignorant because you were born into lies. Everybody lies to you and then you lie. It is a vicious circle. Your education has made you ignorant. You are the most worthless form of human being. Just think, when the sun rises where you are it will be setting on the other side of the earth. This is because of the four corners of the cube. And you thought the world was a sphere. Just goes to show how education has made you stoopid.
  • My ghod is that allidiots.com funny, yet ultra-disgusting. But it is fun to test out my new DSL on
  • CFOX here in Vancouver, BC had a contest last year, and one of the contestants had to legally change his name to Heywood Jablowme.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • I was thinking about this a bit. Having a CDROM that explodes on command is useful but only in a small number of cases. Trying to come up with something other than "Oh shoot, they're here, blow up the CDs," I came up with the following idea:

    * Manufacturer a special drive with a detonator. Make there be some other minor differences as well.
    * Make explodable CDs that can only be read by the type of drive with the built in detonator.
    * In a normal CDROM drive, the disc does nothing (unreadable).
    * In a detonator-enabled drive, it asks for your private key and checks it against the public key used for the disc. If they match, you're good to go.
    * If they don't match, burn baby burn.

    A more secure (paranoid) way to send bulk amounts of data around.
  • Get your high-resolution earth pictures at http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] (assuming, of course, that 25 megapixels is high enough resolution to suit you!)

    -y

  • The minor time of his dawn may be the minor time of your dusk, but it is on yOUr words that the sun will set. To spin the truth on four corners is aRt. To hide in the corner of your indoctrination is a lie.

    come out and let the sun [sun.com] shine upon you, so that you may be free of alleged bliss.

    No planemaker will rule the one who trods upon his own vertices...

  • actually, I have WELL over 100 altoid tins. I've been eating them for years, and I keep thinking I'm going to do SOMETHING useful with the tins . . . about the only thing I've found is they're just the right size to mail dried flowers in (yeah, I'm a sap, what of it? ;-)

    For the record, I have quite a few penguin mints tins too, but they don't sell them anywhere local around here, so I usually just stick to the altoids.
  • And the ploy's working? Looks like the UK courts are more generous than in the U.S.--c.f. Bully Hill Vineyards [afn.org].
  • Dude, it is not cool to publicly post real people's phone numbers and addresses. If someone does want to swing by and talk to him, they can email him first, allowing him to tell them his address and invite them over for tea if he wants to (presumably depending on whether they're cubic enough).

    And yes, I know it wasn't hard to find in this case (or in any case where someone has an NSI domain name, unfortunately) - but that's not the point.

  • There's already one reply from someone with 100 altoid cans, and all report another instance.

    Some friends of mine made a table-top with altoid cans (I don't remember how many; 10x10, I think). It was a basic wooden table with the top carved out, the cans placed in, and a glass sheet on top. I don't remember if they were empty.

    Since there's different altoid flavors with different tins, this could start a revolution in interior design. (Darn, that wasn't so funny after I typed it.)

    What we need is an altoid theme.
  • Classic paranoid schizophrenic raving. Gives me the heebie jeebies. What are people like this doing walking the streets, running Web sites, buying domain names?!?!

  • This timecube site [timecube.com] is really weird ... I wonder if one could imagine any font face, font size or font color that guy didn't try out! ;-)
    I will give $1,000.00 to any person who can disprove 4 days in each earth rotation.

    Did anybody else notice this paragraph? I wonder whom he accepts for the jury ... probably nobody but himself. Otherwise he could become poor very soon, I suspect.

    - Stephan.
    --
    Carpe diem!
  • Can anyone give me details on how I'd go about
    procuring one? Takara doesn't seem to have a
    web site, and I don't know nearly enough people
    in Japan...
  • Thanks and no thanks for this heinous crime of wasting readers' time with timecube. I ran across this blathering page years ago on a different server and it was repellent at a fraction of the current size. Now, quickly scanning the interminable page for anything redeeming due to your recommendation I feel like half my neurons are fried! (Only the cruelty cubicle photo saved the day). Feels much like an sf novel (Timelike Infinity I believe) which had an extraterrestrial intelligence test that destroyed the minds of Earth's best.. it took a mediocre mind to beat it.

    Is there a measurement for the collective amount of processing power or time alive on this planet which gets wasted/wellspent/fed to a given slashdot piece? Ouch.
  • "Ignorance of "Time Cube" indicts you stupid and evil. Explain the "Time Cube". Do you like being Stupid? "Our Cube" corners Liars."

    "Truth about Santa Claus debunks Santa God. God evolves from Santa."

    "Educated people are stupid cowards."
    "Not a single university has accepted my challenge for a public debate of Nature's Time Cube."

    "Pedants cannot comprehend that there are 4 simultaneous Years within a single rotation of Earth about the Sun."

    "Greenwich Time is a Lie"
    "Your midday is someone else's midnight, someone else's sundown and even someone else's sunup."

    That last one is the most coherent statement on the entire site.

    It may not make sense, but it's sure entertaining... (Of course, all this is old news [solareclipse.net] to me... Pardon the blatant plug. ;))

  • Time Cube is a lie.
    It limit you to 4 days.
    Why? When you can have an infinite number of days with a Time Sphere.
  • I read a review of the CurseFree in a newspaper a while ago, it seems like when it comes across an inapropriate word, it will write a more appropriate one on screen and mute the audio for a second or two. Now the newspaper said that it didn't work very well at all and produced results like "Rear out Fraisier" instead of "Butt out...", but "Penis Van Lesbian" ROFL. Children are going to hear these words anyway and it won't do anything to prevent things like innuendo which is much more common

  • OMG...how much did all those foam peanuts cost? How much time do you guys have on your hands...i'm just mystified

  • Ah, so you hang out at It's A Dysfunctional Life [spinnwebe.com] also, eh?


    --

  • I'm sorry, I've been guilty of this in the past. Of course it is refferred to as the CPU in several manuals I've owned for various systems (mostly circa the atari in aforementioned article).

    Mostly it comes from doing round-floor tech support, where the lUsers call up and go "My modem doesn't have a plug for the phone jack..." and you have to get them to call it anything *other* than a "modem" or "Hard disk" just so you won't be tempted to look up their address and pu them out of their misery... Most of these people don't know what a soundcard is or why they need one, or what half the plugs on the back of their computer are for.



    ...5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

  • Only some of them, my last troll was modded up to (4, Insightful). *Hee hee*.

  • The self-destructing CDs were also on Slashdot a while back, although I'm too lazy to look up the exact article right now.
  • No, wait, never mind. I was thinking of the CDs that degrade after the first time they're read. <Note to self - next time, LOOK UP the article before posting!>
  • "Your midday is someone else's midnight, someone else's sundown and even someone else's sunup."

    That last one is the most coherent statement on the entire site.

    There was at least one point where he was actually insightful. Somewhere in the ranting, he said "Word is a Trojan Horse". For years, I've been saying that all Microsoft software, not just MS Word, is a virus. How else could it have spread to 90+% of computers?

  • It's there at the top of the comments section, labelled "Theshold". Set it to 2 or higher to filter out the trolls.

  • I dunno, I prefer mine smelling a little less minty.

  • Why is that they always put a section of "possible uses" for useless things? It's not like it's a joke either.. Nobody will use "e-mail tunneling"; it's useless. Cool, but useless.. I remember that DOOM interfase with 'kill', it had a lot of uses, that nobody will ever actually use.

    --

  • Hmm... a few points:

    There is an ongoing project to put together a usable PPP connection on the Atari 8-bit; it's located here [rr.com].

    The program is so simple it could even run on an 8k Atari 400 (remember those?)

    Later models (the 600xl, 800xl and 130xe) had a parallel bus - I'm sure they could handle higher throughput.

    Hmm... a minimally featured webserver on the Atari 8-bit. Hasn't anyone ported Apache there yet?

  • More Atari's On The Web (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This guy [nacs.net] has a whole system designed to get old Atari computers on the net.

    He even has an Atari BBS running over the internet!

  • Is the instructions to the motherboard. They are small so they are easy to slip in -- and the instructions never seem to be around when you need them. If you are taking apart your computer you probably need it anyway!
  • To follow up to my own post, seems there's a lot of questions surrounding the mysterious "cube full 'o peanuts"

    In no particular order:

    1) this isn't an illusion...well, not really. Those are real packing peanuts, alright, in a real cubicle.

    2) The whole thing took about 20 minutes to set up, and less than 10 minutes to breakdown and clean up.

    3) I have all the "other" pictures of the setup of this prank, so when I see this posted as a quickie link 6 months from now off of tedsbeavertraps.com I'll be able to show that this was indeed the product of my co-workers' own sick minds.

    Stay tuned, we will probably run a detailed story next week sometime on theswindle.com with all the setup pics, and detailed instructions on how to do this to one of your co-workers. Estimated total cost of materials: $25.

  • I think the neatest things from this were links off the Altoid tin page, including the match-head sized web server [umass.edu], and the Altoid tin radio [jdueck.org].


    --Phil (And who doesn't like Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments [eskimo.com]?)
  • It was current when I submitted it just over a week ago.

    The australianIT page search page is giving errors, so I can't find it. I don't even know if australianIT keeps archives.

    Here's a link to theregister's article [theregister.co.uk] about it. The link from that article to the original is also broken. See http://www.oxford-university.com/ [oxford-university.com] for the guy's side of the story.

    The original had more info though. IIRC, apparently the person answers the phone as "Mr University". Anyone know where the original article is?

    Bradley

    PS - extrans mode is broken again.

  • Awhile back I wrote a closed caption decoder for the video4linux drivers because I couldn't find any good NTSC caption readers for generating transcripts.

    Anyways.. goto http://download.linux.com/multimedia/cc.c [linux.com] and download the closed caption reader, it has builtin keyword beep but if you change line 424 to run a system() call you have it run something like 'xawtv-remote mute' and get the same effect as that hardware gizmo..

    I think it would be more fun to have it search for words that are obviously censored and play an audio clip of the appropriate word.
    - MbM

  • Has anyone had any luck getting squid to accept the URL for the Calculator link? Is the problem
    that it really isn't a valid string for URL->URI translation, or whatever?
  • The Oxford University name-change was pretty funny. Reminds me of an image I once saw that was scanned from a newspaper of a guy who changed his name to Heywood Jablowme. I dunno if it was legit or not, but it was funny nonetheless.
    *chuckles*


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • I believe this is one of those 'In 1989 we will all have rocket packs...' look-into-the-future articles. Probably just a concept from a design student. Of course it is really cool and I have dreamed of something similar for years. Hopefully polymer based LED's will become a reality and we can roll up our monitors and carry them under our arms.

  • Well, here's an classic on that topic:

    From: jearney@harp.aix.calpoly.edu (John Earney)
    Subject: Re: Backups and copiers
    Date: Fri, 03 Jun 1994 08:18:37 GMT
    ...

    I have over 2,000 atari carts and I've only found a couple that don't work
    after they're cleaned.

    exactly how durable are atari carts? I thought I'd see for myself...

    I took a combat cart that was made in the 32nd week of 1981 (you can tell
    by reading a little number code printed on the ROM) and did some experiments
    on it to see what how much abuse it could take and still work.

    1) I took the cart and dropped it out of my 2nd story window onto the cement
    5 times. the plastic part of the cart was in pieces, but the game
    still worked.

    2) I put the cartridge back together as best I could and put it out in the
    street. it got run over by a jeep. took it inside and it still
    worked. at this point there was nothing left but the PCB with the
    ROM soldered on it (and a metal cover that went over the ROM.)

    3) I then put the PCB in boiling water for 5 minutes, took it out and
    immediately packed it in a snowball that I made out of frost from my
    freezer. after 5 minutes in the frost ball, I broke all the ice off
    it and plugged it into my atari... It worked!

    4) I have this magnet that's so strong that if you hold it within about 1.5
    feet from a TV screen all the color gets sucked to one side of the
    screen! well, I took that magnet and rubbed it all over the PCB and
    ROM. plugged it in... and it worked!

    5) next I took a lighter and held the ROM right above the flame. I left it
    there for a few minutes until the ROM was smoking and giving off
    a nasty smell. I cleaned off all the suit and plugged it in and
    it still worked.

    6) okay, no more mr. niceguy! I took it outside and had 3 cars run over it,
    I threw it up as high as I could and had it land on the cement twice,
    and I threw it down onto the cement as hard as I could twice. at
    this point the metal cover that goes over the ROM had broken off, the
    PCB was chipped on all the corners, the ROM was smashed onto the PCB
    so that the pins were all squished on one side and were being pulled
    out of the solder on the other side. I had to straighten out the pins
    so that none were touching each other and I had to hold the PCB
    together in one place so that the metal contacts would be in the right
    place when I plugged the game in. guess what... it _still_ worked!!

    7) it had taken heat extremes, shock, and magnetism. next up was
    electricity. I took the atari power supply (9V, 500mA) and connected
    some alligator clips to the output terminals of the power supply.
    then I rubbed the other end of the alligator clips across the metal
    contacts on the game's PCB. I tried a bunch of different
    combinations and always had both alligator clips touching the PCB
    contacts so that electricity would be flowing. I plugged the game
    back in and much to my surprise it still worked!

    8) I grabbed my hammer, laid the game down on the cement and gave it a good
    smack. the ROM cracked right in half breaking the silicon wafer.
    I plugged the game in and of course it had died on that one.

    it took all that abuse to ruin a 13 year old atari game. I'd say they're
    pretty damn durable!

    --
  • No one really has 94 tins of Altoids. However, Penguin Mints [peppermints.com] come in tins about the same size, and I DO have a growing collection. Mmmm....penguin mints....caffeine...must have caffeine.... C A F F E I N E

    Why would you think i'm an addict?

    -mark

  • 404? (Score:2)

    by Paradox ( 13555 )
    The Oxford University one is hilarious... except the link appears to be 404 not found :[

  • Mouse (deceased) The PC World technician who discovered the dead rodent believes the mouse had squirmed into the body of the PC through an empty card slot in a bid to keep warm. The mouse presumably died from either starvation or electrocution

    My own personal experience can actually help in determining this one, should anyone ever have to determine for themselves whether the mouse inside your computer died of electrocution or more natural causes.

    Approximately a decade ago, my phone went dead. An investigation showed a live line at the box outside, so I climbed under the house to inspect the line. At one point, a staple holding the line had pulled free, and the line fell across a heating duct. Near this duct, the line had drooped low to the ground.

    Apparently, a mouse decided to test this line by eating the insulation, and had actually cleared several inches of insulation before severing the wire completely. An undetermined amount of time later, while the mouse chewed on the live end of the line, the phone apparently rang.

    Telltale signal that electrocution was the culprit? The massive squirt of fecal matter, directly behind the mouse from when it had the shit shocked out of it.

    paperbacks.homepage.com [homepage.com]

  • What's with you wussies feeling sorry for that Atari 800 webserver? If it can't stand the hits, it should get off the 'net!

    Screw sympathy - let's melt that f*cker down!
  • God damn it.. I want one.. that has to be the least informative page I've ever seen.
  • An esteemed colleague, Brian Eng [mailto], has decided to dye his gigantic afro. Being the procurer of an afro myself, I feel I have an obligation to endorse this on a site that might contain more afro-wearers per capita than any other.

    Click here [alphapython.com] to gently nudge the vote!
  • The roll-up laptop was MY idea! And they all said I was crazy. The design I had was pretty much . . . no exactly the same. I was looking into it over a year ago - finding materials, pcb designs, chipsets, etc.

    To those one slashdot who know me in real life:

    I told you so!

    Oh wait, my design was one better. You could take off one of the ends of the cylinder and use it as a mouse. (Or does theirs have that too? I may have missed it.)
  • Thanks for the memories. I originally learned to program (after a short stint on a TI/99-4A) in BASIC and assembler on an old Atari 600. People doing stuff like making a web server out of old hardware just crack me up. BTW, I got through fine.
    ---
  • I haven't seen anyone else mention it yet, but what exactly is the point to the rambling nonsense on the timecube site? I've seen crud like this all over the net, but never expected to find it on slashdot.

    About the only redeeming factor I see is that the webserver is running apache on FreeBSD [netcraft.com] (but I'd wager the guy who created the site doesn't even know what FreeBSD or apache are).

    So really, did I miss something extraordinary by just skimming that page? If so, please enlighten me.

  • The link to the company developing exploding cd's was interesting, but what we all really want to know is can AOL be convinced to put the thermite pyrotechnic coating on there giveaway cd's and can the detonator be attached easily to my letterbox?
  • First off....How horrible... /.ing an Atari. I feel guilty doing it.

    Why? Why those damn pseudo animals. The electronic equivelants to complete uselessness. My cat (Not a bot) has to earn a living around the house. She catches bugs and i give her food. Where would someone get so confused on what a pet does?

    Why am i ranting. Most likely the result of visiting timecube. I walk away feeling all slick and nasty from that strange little site. Perhaps i am a little to inept to understand whats going on. Either way i feel stretched and chewed apon from the inside out.

    The tube may be the coolest little laptop design idea yet. This may be something i can actually get into. Im not a weight lifter and i don't have 0.003 micron fingers capable of typing on some of the keyboards available. So, This may just be the answer.

    The man who changed his name. Does it really matter to him? What possible motivation could encourage this behaviour? Let not forget Dotcom guy..arg.

    The e-mail tunnel is astounding. To think someone wanted out of the firewall that bad. Wow.

    off and out
  • With the products of fufme.com soon to be at large, I believe that more strange things will be found in computer cases (wink wink say no more) LONG LIVE REN AND STIMPY!!!!!!!!!!
  • Strangly enough... one of my friends got a brand new Dell a couple years back, I was upgrading his RAM... and to my suprise there were "Camel Points"( the points you collect off of the packs of Camel Cigarettes to get things like watches... kinda like Kool-Aid points) ...holding the 64MB of RAM in place... and this was factory sealed.... crazy shit

    djsw

  • Carl Sagan put this idea into "Contact" many years ago. It was fictionally called "adnix." It detected the speech patterns of advertising and blocked them out. Fictionally, following soon after "adnix" came "preachnix."

    I find it faintly ironic that the preachers beat everyone else to it. Considering the sponsors of that site, I'm sure we'll see "DarwinFree" and "BiasedLiberalMediaFree" next.

  • Re:Oh that poor Atari 800 :( (Score:3)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Thursday March 30, 2000 @05:46PM (#1159903) Journal
    Every time an Atari 800 dies, a new one emerges from eBay to replace it. Thus is the endless circle of Atari.
    --

  • earth cam? (Score:3)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday March 30, 2000 @05:34PM (#1159904) Homepage
    That reminds me of a site i visit frequently-- here's a link [en.com]. it's a real webcam, and much more useful.

  • More stuff from the makers of The Tube... (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday March 30, 2000 @08:05PM (#1159905)
    If you look a bit back from the "Tube" page to here [businessweek.com], you find that the fanciful tube is one of the ideas from the same people (IDEO) that helped design the Palm V and the Transmeta Web-slate. So, such a thing might not be too far off (though the title of the whole thing was "Welcome to 2010").

    The whole series of stuff is pretty cool - flexible large-screen TV's [businessweek.com], VR cave style "smart cubicles [businessweek.com]", and other cool things. The article seems to have a broken link at the end of the chain though.


  • Heard this story a little while ago, and I believe it was in reference to the CurseFree product. Seems that they had programmed the thing to flag on keywords. Not too uncommon. Problem was, it was pretty undiscriminating.

    The most egregious error? The "Dick Van Dyke" show was titled the "Penis Van Lesbian" show.

    Possibly an urban legend, but it sounds plausible to me.

  • At the last job I was at, we used to order HP monitors with every PC we bought (total of about 200 or so over 3 years), and every single one had a nicely folder cheetos bag in it (the single serving snack size one).

    Weird.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • CurseFree - hilarious :) (Score:3)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Thursday March 30, 2000 @07:07PM (#1159908)
    I love this quote:

    "Strict and Religious Settings

    Curse Free TV's Strict setting filters out all offensive phrases, including when the names of God are used in an exclamatory way. The Religious setting, however, when viewing Christian programming, allows the names of God to come through without filtering them out."

    Well, thank ---!

  • In The Spirit Of Quickies (Score:5)

    by dougman ( 908 ) on Thursday March 30, 2000 @05:52PM (#1159909)
    Just thought I'd share this photo of what happened [theswindle.com] to one of my co-workers last week. We're a pretty cruel bunch, and simple pranks just don't cut it in my office.

  • rob, how COULD you?? (Score:5)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday March 30, 2000 @05:22PM (#1159910) Homepage
    yes, it's going to be blatantly obvious by the time i say this.
    yes, it's cliched to say this, and it's a running joke on slashdot to say things of this sort.
    but it needs to be said:

    cdmrtaco.. what were you THINKING?? unleashing the slashdot effect on an Atari 800?? That's just CRUEL!!
    the quickies have been up eight minutes, there are only four comments, and ALREADY the poor thing's slashdotted all to hell.
    Yes, i realize in a couple days the traffic from /. will subside to a non-overwhelming level as this article disappears into the void of "older stuff", but surely the Atari 800 will be so traumatized by this event that it will take years of therapy before it fully recovers psychologically.

    You should be ashamed of yourself.

  • The definition of slashdotted... (Score:5)

    by Keelor ( 95571 ) on Thursday March 30, 2000 @05:18PM (#1159911)
    The definition of slashdotted is what's happening to that poor, poor Atari 800 server right this moment. From the web page:

    With an HTML page of only 250 bytes, this process can support several hits per second on the 9600 baud link!

    *wince*

    ~=Keelor

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