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Quickies

Quickie Sunday 64

Posted by justin++ from the not-sundae dept.
Yep, it's that time again! Nghia gave us a link to some "Jedi Academy" trailers. Several folks wrote in to say that the guys at Themes.org have a new look. forehead graciously provided an "interesting" bit, based on this "Richard Stallman-as-Marx" posting. "I decided to rework the whole song". Orbitz pointed us at a web-controlled RC car with camera. Next is my favorite, as submitted by Electric Keet, Stick Figure Porn. Thyla pointed us in the general direction of Carbonated Borscht for the Evil Geek's Soul, with a thanks to Illiad. Crazy Man on Fire gave us a link to upcoming distributed.net projects coming out soon. poink threw us a link to The Cereal Page (Ok, someone has waaaay too much time on his hands...) J. Pierpont gave us a link to more info on Episode II and III. Now, from Armin Lenz submitted a link to a CPU Gurus, a new CPU site discussing various current and future processors. Finally, Mike Healy, one of The Bazaar dudes, sent us a status report. Read more for the skinny.

Mike Healy writes "Since Steve Blood, our event chairman, is out of the country - he is actually checking out a solar eclipse in Austria - i've taken it upon myself to give you all an update on the Bazaar. I'd wait for steve to get back, all bleary eyed, by i must squelch the rumors being promulgated by certain sales guys for other events, that we folded. This couldn't be further from the truth. Fact of the matter is we are scheduled, locked and loaded and PUMPED for December 14-16 at the javits NYC.

The Bazaar will be the first large scale conference on opensource software to hit the east coast and will stress program, program and program. Our Theory is that if you build it, they will .com

Not only does EarthWeb, by nature of being an IT content HUB have access to the freshest most imperative material, but we have also brought in an indstry expert, lydia Bennett of Dialogos fame, to aggregate and work closely with conference chairs and advisory board to make sure all tracks and tutorials are epic.

Check out the website for more on the program. The exhibit floor will be refreshingly unlike any you have seen in this space being made up of customed designed, turn key demo stations. This not only makes it a breeze for vendors , but also adds integity to the exhibit floor. No huge booths with revolving marquis, No loud PA systems. No freak shows. This is the wrong event to come to if you want to see Trumps daughter in a g string handing out T shirts... This is the right event if you want to meet some of the biggest brains out there and get no nonsense answers regarding opensource free software... Anyway, thats it for now.. More from Steve when he gets back"

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Quickie Sunday

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  • I really thought that CPU Gurus might be an interesting read, since I am a "software guy" but have some interest in hardware.

    Unfortunately, it is painfully obvious that english is not their native language. It is so bad I couldn't stand to spend more than 5 minutes struggling to decipher it.

    Hope they get someone who knows english someday, then it might actually be an interesting site.

    -Tom
  • The two sure things in life are death (the slashdot effect) and taxes...

    So, does anyone out there have some mirrors for the Jedi Academy videos?
  • no - for some reason all my posts start with a score of '2'. Must be because of my posting history (very few, if any are marked down - quite a few are marked up).

    I know that was no pearl of wisdom, but I can't control what my initial score is (usually keeps me from posting this kind of drivel, it was Sunday, tho)
  • It wasn't moderated up. Once you get moderated up enough, your posts start at 2 autmatically. On the other hand, if you get moderated down enough, your posts start a 0, then I think -1 (I can't think of anyone besides DAVEO who got moderated down enough to get a 0). You can tell this post wasn't moderated because there's no adjective after the score.

    For instance, my post will have a score of 2, without moderation. Sometimes I log out and post as an AC because I don't think what I have to say is worth +2. I sort of wish we were given the option of posting with a lower score.

    Or maybe you're talking about something else, but as of now nothing in this thread has been moderated.
  • Thanks for that link, man. Made my day, as did adbusters. Good to know there are non-sleeping humans out there.
  • I understand you can't have a person's face 3 feet away in focus and keep the background clear at the same time, but it doesn't keep such an event from really hurting my eyes. If it can't be done, perhaps moviemakers should stay away from such scenes, then.
  • Hey, those are better than mine! But I was a freshman who didn't really know photoshop all that well when I did those 2 years ago, so there ya go.

    I'm wayyy more talented now, of course. :D

    (and for way more cultural mayhem, check out http://www.rtmark.com , http://www.superbad.com , or http://www.unamerican.com)

  • And now it's back (again), and this time it brought back the other two stories along with about four others that weren't there before (on the page that I get to see). And somewhere during the process my user preferences got reset, but not by me.
    Is the camera about to pan over to Rod Serling?

    posted at 10:12 pm EDT

  • Why should we take you seriously? If you want to report serious problems on Slashdot, get a login! (j/k)
  • Isn't that his annoying voice on those annoying Hardee's "Star" commercials? Geez, it's been *years* since they had a decent ad campaign.

  • Re:And now it's back (again) - OFFTOPIC (Score:3)

    by Jburkholder ( 28127 ) on Sunday August 15, 1999 @05:28PM (#1746013)
    OFFTOPIC for sure...

    Yep, something is screwey. All my slashbox prefs were reset to default. Stories are popping up then dissapearing. I guess they are still recovering from the problem (whatever that was) on Friday.
  • I thought it was just me and my slow machine
    (I don't have the PIII linux up and online yet,
    still using this 486 win95...) glad to hear it's
    just because the site sucks.

    when I tried to browse screenshots in the kde
    section, I couldn't find anything. only way
    I got to see a screenshot was by clicking on
    the top 5 links on the righthand column.
  • CPU Gurus? The site is under construction! Who cares (yet)? Do the Slashdot editors choose items by volume of submissions? Is there a script somewhere that collates incoming submissions and ranks them by frequency?

    Geez

    How about some context? How about some follow-up? Okay, the stick figures were kind of funny, but Clarke's observation that "90% of everything is crap" seems to be bourne out by Slashdot only just a little less than by NBC.

  • "Anyone have an AdultCheck ID for the hardcore section?"
    Right about now I'd say that "nudestickfigures.com" has way more than several.
    Interesting approach--"get into our site foo.com for free, just enter your username and password for bar.com"

  • Thank you for a flamefree explanation.

  • Time for some college students to get that trailer mirrored on internet 2. Remind me never to move to Austria.
  • There were aparently two differnt versions, one where maul gets stabbed,and the other version that has him cut in half, there was a discuttion on theforce.net when the film first opened.
  • At about 11:30 am PDT today I got logged out and couldn't log back in for about five minutes or so. I also got the "reset preferences". At least some of them were - my message score threshold and sorting preference. And the SlashBoxes. My "low bandwidth" preference was still there though.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get an AdultCheck ID.

  • It's the "Depth of Field" in photographer speaking. If you have a person and his face in focus 3 feet away, then it's impossible to have the background (infinity) in focus. (Well, maybe Art Wolf's CGI stuff) This is due to the optical limitation and the nature of human eye. Those who complaint pobrably never pickup a real camera and wouldn't in the time of their lifes understand why Leica lens have great bokeh.
  • That would be relevant if we were talking about real people in front of a real background, but in this case the background came out of a computer, not nature, and could have been given any focus they wanted to. If they were trying to simulate the way backgrounds get blurry when foreground objects are focused on, they did a very poor (and annoying) job.

  • I would but I can't get it :-(
  • But was it really Darth Maul or some sort of technomage optical illusion to allow him to pull a Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls type disappearance? Seems to me that Darth Maul has entirely too much merchandising potential to have been done away with so early in the trilogy. Face it, Jar Jar is going to need 3 movies worth of momentum to move as much product as DM already has.

  • He was very much in two pieces both times I saw it (first time being 12:01). It seems very clear to me that this was intentionally done to make it clear he is NOT going to come back, he's very much dead.
  • So how about a flashback to show us where Darth Maul came from? And is there any rule that says episodes 7, 8, and 9 couldn't be made concurrently with 2 and 3? It's not like it would spoil any surprise since we started reading the book in the middle. Besides, if we have to wait another 20 some years, I don't think taking my nephew to see them will be quite as big a kick.

    Off-topic - sort of - Why, in TPM, did all those computer generated backgrounds have to be so eyestrainingly out of focus whenever there were characters in the foreground?

  • The darker scenes in the trilogy, especially ESB, were better executed than the treacly ewoks/Jar Jar/3PO. More believable, more involving, more interesting to watch. As Empire was the least commercially sucessful while being the richest cinematically, Episode III will probably fare similarly.

    My theories:

    *Anakin already sees Amidala as a mother figure, since at their ages (9 and 14), there is a significant difference in their respective levels development and the roles they play. As they get older, say 16 and 21, different roles are adopted, causing confusion.

    *His mother will probably die in the process of trying to free the slaves on Tatooine. Simple application of Murphy's law.

    *Obiwan, resentful of Anakin for the attention given to him by Gui-Gon, yet burdened by wishing his late master's legacy to continue, will be an impatient, frustrated teacher.

    Anakin will be putty in the Emporer's hands, and it'll be interesting to watch.

    BTW, first post.

  • Hardcore nude teen stick figures (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone have an AdultCheck ID for the hardcore section?

  • New look Themes.org -- It's a disaster! (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 15, 1999 @04:01AM (#1746039)
    Has anyone seen the new look themes.org... 1) Doesn't render properly in Netscape 4.x... 2) Non-intuitive interface is uneccessarily fiddly to use... BUT EVEN WORSE... Anyone seen the new wm.themes.org section... OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE THEY DONE... 1) The browsing interface is RIDICULOUSLY complicated, you have to go through a ridiculous slow cgi script just to browse categories... 2) All but 18 or so themes have mysteriously vanished and can no longer be obviously got at... I hope this is just a temporary glitch in things, they always seem to be fscking about with theses sites though, which were perfectly good anyway IMHO. Oh well I've probably got much better things to do anyway. Come to think of it I should have much better things to do than write this post too :-) have a good sunday people --Liam
  • fsck this for a new look!
    http://e.themes.org/ is 195K of crap to download, of which the dodgy background took longest, and then they go and obliterate it with foreground crap.

    Don't entirely agree about the disappearance of all-but-18 themes though.
    My main worries are that the site has fixed-width frames (the horizontal scroll-bar is EVIL - and 669x864 is a perfectly reasonable size for netscape, IMO), and the DOWNLOAD links are damned obscure, just like before (when they were way off to the right).

    At least the gtk themes site loads a bit faster - although this is the second time round so it's probably cached. It has taken me 3 attempts to find any such thing as a downloads page though.
    Grrrr!

    ~Tim
    --
  • With the backgrounds, they were probably just trying to be realistic. If you're focusing on a foreground object, the background gets fuzzy. This doesn't transfer terribly well to the big screen, however. I recall Conspiracy Theory being particularly bad about this.
  • First Post!
    (yes i'm being very sarcastic)
    If Lucas made the kid that young so that he could be traumatized by leaving his mom behind in slavery, why wasn't it a more traumatic and dramatic scene all around. The kid seems to adjust in just a day or three (nothing like getting to fly a real space ship to perk up your spirits)and two Jedi Knights, the ne plus ultra of good guys in that neck of the universe, seem remarkably unperturbed at the idea of taking her kid and just leaving her there, still owned by a guy who just lost a valuable asset in a wager and who will probably be looking for someone to take it out on. Of course that raises the question of what kind of slaveowner would allow a kid with that much mechanical ability to risk getting killed (and ending his value as a slave) in a race? Or is this George L.'s most subtle racism of all, the "kindly" slaveowner that they were better off being the property of than being free and poor?
  • This story seems to have vanished off the main page. I reloaded the main page and it was no longer there. I had cleared my disk and memory cache just before so I'm not loading an older local version. Apparently this time it's not to keep the SEC happy, but because it was/will be posted at 7:30 p.m. EDT, which isn't for another 10 hours.

  • And now it's gone again! And took two or three other stories with it--clear case--rented apps--and maybe another one, can't remember for sure, they're popping on and off the main page so quick my head is spinning.

    posted at 9:10 pm EDT (I'm getting paranoid)

  • Not to sound jealous (having been a moderator, I know better than put any stock in their opinions), but how does this rate being moderated up?

  • All they seem to want to talk about is IA32 and
    IA64. Some gurus.
  • Somebody's been watching too many budwiser commercials. Norm MacDonald's popularity is yet another red flag signalling the comming apocalypse :)
  • I also found the backgrounds to be paticularly blurry especially when the camera was moving. Do they think they can lay off the rendering a bit just 'cause the camera is moving around?

    Also, does anyone ever notice sound not quite being exactly with mouth movements? Is this some sort of effect of hearing more "background" than "forground" sound if you sit way back in a movie theater?

    anyway.. :-)
  • Anyone else notice on Netscape that the RC camera image does not stay on screen when the site is slow?
  • I agree. People shouldn't put out pointers to their sites until they're complete!
  • I've only seen the movie once, but all I remember was seeing [Darth Maul] stabbed, followed by a fall off-screen.

    As my four-year-old says, "He lost his pants." Obi-Wan slashes him across the midsection, and then you clearly see two separate pieces of Darth Maul falling into the obligatory nigh-infinitely deep pit that seems to be required for just about every light saber duel.

    I think you're confusing his death with that of Qui-Gon, who was killed with a stabbing thrust.

  • *To the tune of "Hazard"* (Score:3)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday August 15, 1999 @07:02PM (#1746058) Homepage Journal
    My hacking really started when I was at MIT,
    there we had this zanny line printer with really cool code,
    that we'd hacked up.

    A few years later they gave us a lazer,
    it printed really fast but the paper kept gettin' jamed,
    to fix that was the plan.

    But, the software was proprietary,
    they didn't supply the source,
    the software was proprietary,
    and we felt totally screwed.

    No-one had the source except for this one guy,
    he was old, and had written half of the crappy code,
    and man it showed. The guys from MIT went knockin' next mornin',
    for the source we asked, he said "no way, I signed an NDA".

    The software was proprietary,
    they didn't supply the source,
    the software was proprietary,
    and man that old dude blowed.

  • Whoah. Reality check: "JAR JAR MUST DIE!" must be written atleast 50 times on any public posting about Star Wars.

    It's inscribed on the inside of Rob Malda's magic ring (you know - one ring to rule them all, one ring to bind them..) that he uses to wield control over the 11 major news organizations....

    --

  • Re:Hyuh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In brightest day, in blackest night,
    No Jar Jar shall escape my sight ...

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