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Quickies

Steaming Heap of Quickies 119

Posted by CmdrTaco from the rob-plays-catchup dept.
I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.
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Steaming Heap of Quickies More

Steaming Heap of Quickies

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  • Not quite. In Win9X, the blue screens are usually the result of misbehaving applications that generate a HW exception that Win9X catches - just like a seg fault in Linux. They are generally not fatal; the application goes down but Win9X stays up. Sometimes, some component of Win9X itself causes it, and then it usually is unrecoverable although not quite dead yet.

    Under NT, a BSOD only appears when the processor has halted. That's why it's called a blue screen of _death_

    I believe the term originated within Microsoft.

  • Atari Videos (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can personally vouch for these videos. Excelent quality, and quite good. Howard has done a very fine job of putting together the programmers and artists for the games most of us remember growing up with. The stories they have are undeniably funny (Especially the Sprinkler Lobotomy). The price may be steep, but they're definately worth every penny.
    And I'm not anonymous, I can't remember my password. (craig@ic.net)
  • Taco, remind me to let you rub your nads on me if we ever meet for posting the Think Geek link. They have subscription plan caffeine deliveries!!! You can get set up with deliveries of Penguin Mints, Jolt Cola and Bawls on a bimonthly, monthly or even weekly basis! Oh god, feeling faint, must order metric buttloads of caffeine...

  • Windows 9x (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone dumb enough to use Windows 9x for a mission critical system deserves to get a BSOD.

    Another thing, those thinkgeek shirts (the few I saw) are the best geek shirts out there. It'd be neat if you could get any phrase you wanted put in binary. I'd like to walk up to my boss with a shirt that said "Mr. is an idiot"
  • Now maybe it is just me, but seriously Rob, was the ThinkGeek stuff so bad you had to unleash the Slashdot Effect on them? :)

    Maybe the guys at ThinkGeek need to hire a geek. :)


    -Davidu

  • Did anyone else have trouble with SimShatner? I just get an error in Netscape "No Plugin for content type text/plain" (or something to that effect. Is there a workaround?

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    That "beware" slash-shirt looks pretty neet.. I'll have to pick one up. Jeez, I remember when Rob was still in college and selling those Malda-Made Slashdot Mugs to people here.. No chance of that happening now, is there? ;>
  • With the case on, my CPU runs a full 15C hotter than with it off..

    Hehe, that's believable. Until last night, I could overclock my dual celery system only if I had the case off (only got through two to four kernel compiles). Last night I installed two case fans (it previously only had the power supply fan in addition to the cpu fans), one in the front and one in the back (my case came with two fan locations, woohoo), and it happily got through 11 compiles, top -d1, procinfo -d1, and ping -f (to another machine). Now, I wonder how well it will work when summer hits (I'm in the southern hemisphere).

    Anyway, to paraphrase Gecko: fans are good, fans work. Or better yet: airflow is good, airflow works.

  • Whoa.. With a little bit of creative artwork...
  • heh heh hehhehheh...

    settle down, taco!

    a truly great shirt--wonder where rob got it?

  • I've seen several PC's in unlikely places with problems booting up. We were at Frankenmuth in this store, and the person's cash register was an old 486 that needed some TLC in the setup screen. My girlfriend had to hold me back to not push F1 and jump right on to help. The second one we saw was at the Macomb Mall. There is a photo booth there that does a bunch of photo effects to your picture (like making it look like it was hand drawn). One day they must've lost power, because when we went by it, it had the power on screen, and "No Keyboard Found. Press F1 to continue." There was also a wedding gift registry at Hudsons that had a BSOD on it. Unfortunately, no CTRL-ALT-DELETE on the membrane keyboard. :)

  • The cable "overview" channel at my former residence often showed an Amiga guru screen.
  • ....before posting his URL to slashdot? At least they don't have the annoying pop-up porno windows that play two-year old with you.
  • ...would post your stories here...you are a WellKnownOpenSourceGeek(make WKOSG---which stands for.....nothing...)
  • I believe that this one post is THE largest post on the front page EVER.

    CmdrTaco, who normally produces nice short and to the point posts, has turned out this behemoth. All I can say is "Cool". Mr. Malda, we salute you! (Now all you need is the code to add yourself to the HOF page)

    -------
    Cool Linux Project of the Week [xoom.com]
    Coming Soon.... October 1st!
  • They changed the date on the site to read the 15th.
  • I saw Chris Rock on Conan O'Brien joking about the Blair Witch Project.

    He said how about a 'Really scary movie about three white people at the "Blair Witch Projects"'

    "Oh my god, that is the third time we've been to the same urine smelly elevator"

    Hmmm...

    I guess you would have had to see it yourself but it was pretty funny.

  • "Tux" featured in Coca-Cola Ad! See www.linux.is [linux.is].

    Yours truly gets interviewed in Upside Today [upside.com]. See their Open Season [upside.com] feature.

    Bruce

  • Prepare? Eeek. You've gotta be kidding.

    I'm not silly enough to post any URL under my control to slashdot itself. No server I have a hand in could handle it.

    Yet today, in a small way, it's doing so anyway. I consider myself fortunate that it was only in the middle of a big fat pack of quickies, so my 100 hits a day site is only having to put up with, say, 6000 hits today instead of the real Slashdot Effect.

    (For the idly curious: I host the "job opening: apprentice Sith Lord" bit. Wheee. I didn't write it, it just showed up.)

  • So, does having one small article listed in a "Quickies" bit mean your site's been slashdotted? (I host the "Sith Apprentice" job app.)
  • I will probably be flamed for this, but I have found NT to be _very_ stable for me as long as the hardware is stable.

    I used to run WfWG 3.11 and MS Word 6.0, and they crashed all the time. Then I moved the machine (an IBM PS/2 Model 80, circa 1989) onto NT3.51 and the 32-bit version of Word, and have never had a crash. Ever. NT4 on the other hand doesn't seem as stable for me. Maybe Win2k will go back to the 'good old days' of NT stability.

  • I don't mean to nitpick, but that's not a BSOD. The BSOD is a NT term.

    You are right, but the term seems to have filtered downwards to WinDOS. Take a look at BSOD Properties [pla-netx.com] which lets you have a Red Screen of Death, etc, on WinDOS.

    In my four years of experience administering NT boxes, every BSOD I've seen has been caused by NT not liking a particular combination of hardware devices or drivers.

    Try running the DOS binary [ta.jcu.cz] of XaoS [paru.cas.cz].

  • When I went to checkout just now at ThinkGeek, it sent me to a secure server page [thinkgeek.com].

    "This is a secure document that uses a high-grade encryption key for U.S. domestic use only (RC4, 128-bit)."

    I don't know if there was one when you visited earlier, but there definitely is a https secure server right now.
  • It's not as if BSOD is an offical technical term or anything (although MS do use it from time to time.) Like all language it means what the people who use it think (and understand) it to mean. The screen goes blue, the windows dies - it's a BSOD.
  • Nobody was hitting "Enter" and it was being unhelpful for travellers...which is the same diff to me.

    Ben
  • Since when are airport displays mission critical?

    When you're late for a flight and you need to know what gate to run for.

  • Nope Matt's still taking votes. I didn't code a stop-date into the pollbooth, so feel free to continue voting.
  • Wow... I'm surprised I've never seen these before. I think I pulled a muscle in my gut laughing so hard. My favorite line on these is "For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Odds are you are one of them."

    These are a WHOLE lot better than those campy motivational posters I've seen hanging around my office...
  • This was probably one of the "Community Bulletin Board" or "Prevue" channels... every once in a while in my city those channels crash. Over labor day weekend (and all weekend, since nobody was there to fix it) the whole channel just showed an Amiga crash screen.

  • Hey, don't blame me for your reading this, I said "no text." :P

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • That article on /. in Time Digital mentions that Slashdot ``has something like 700,000 active users....'' Is this the number of registered users? What is this number?

    How many /.ers are there, anyway? I know that certain rules for moderation and metamoderation require you to be a certain age, which probably means this info is available, so you can compare your ID # to the `youngest' IDs. I just don't know where.
  • Since that one Star Wars personality test said I had about as much kindness as Emperor Palpatine, I figure I might as well apply!
  • Occasionally, a local access station here will show an Amiga Guru meditation (a red blinking box in the upper part of the display indicating a terminal error). Amiga's were (and still are, apparently) often used as video devices due to the nature of their display hardware.

    The problem is that this station will often be broadcasting this image for MONTHS!!! 24 hrs a day of Guru meditaion. You'd think someone would come in and Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga...
  • Jeez.. that reminds me of leaving the Las Vegas Airport after Comdex 98. Several of the screens at the Reno Air terminal had BSOD's on them.
  • somehow reminds me of the Barbapapa [t-online.de] cartoons.
  • It looks more like some kind of fern.

    It would have been much more 31337 if the guy had realized his original goal of creating the first online server inside somebody's ass.

  • The bottleneck is explained at http://www.thinkgeek.com/slashdotted [thinkgeek.com] - they couldn't handle the number of requests and ran out of memory. So someone ran home for another machine...
  • That post looks like Rob fell on his keyboard. I will say that all these Blair Witch parodies are awfully lame. The MTV version was mildly funny, but it's been downhill ever since.
  • yeah.. when i'm fifty i'll be showing my kids the movies of when linus came to america on my old analog television.. or maybe linux world... i don't really know what happened when linus came to america.. was it big??
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";

  • Slogger (Score:1)

    by X-Nc ( 34250 )
    I had to get one of the /. shirts and a hat. I still don't know why I get the hats, though. I have a couple of baseball caps from RH plus 5 or 6 from other companies not to mention I sprung for the RH Fedora (which is definitely worth its price).

    OC, I don't wear hats. Never really did. Got 'em all lying around the house here somewhere. Well, except for the fedora. It's just to good a hat not to sit on top of my system.


    ---
    "Who pill da cubby custar?"

  • Wouldn't #include be more appropriate? :) Alcohol would sure cut short a long night of hacking, or at least make it somewhat harder to troubleshoot a problem. Shatter * Spell check not included.
  • Are you talking about The Onion's Columbine [theonion.com] article? I thought it was great too, and it is actually closer than you'd think. I especially like, "Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine's popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in." A MB I frequent is having a discussion [nintendorks.com] on topic similar to this, it's pretty interesing. Nick is The Flying Banana BTW.
  • My wardrobe will definitly be expanding as I get some of those cool Slashdot shirts. I don't know whether to get the "Org" (what does, "we put the 'o' in .org" mean anyway?) or the "Slashbang". Poll time.
  • I saw it, sent an email to them with it in there, but stupid Hotmail didn't save the email automatically, so I don't have it. I think it basically said that "Either you are trying to access the script incorrectly, or else we're bad programmmers. If it's the latter, please tell us (something, something something) ...If you are the site administrator and have read this far, you're fired : )" or something to that effect. But it's up now, with the message, "Wow. What a ride that /. effect was." And boy do they ever have cool shirts, I need the binary one. : )
  • The problem of the BSOD (one of them) is the lack of info about what exactly caused the problem (unless you read hex).

    This is not exactly true. The first couple of lines can tell you alot if you care to spend a few minutes looking them up in the Microsoft knowledge base. They may not be exact (you may see half a dozen possibilities per message) but it gives you a good starting point. You should also look at the list of drivers it gives you and the problem is usually with one of the first few on the list. My laptop has BSOD'd on me twice in 3 months and both times were within the first week and caused by a bad NIC driver. If I don't put in the PCMCIA card the driver fails, but if I put the card in without plugging the cable into it the driver crashes the whole machine!

    I will probably be flamed for this, but I have found NT to be _very_ stable for me as long as the hardware is stable. The key is to use quality hardware that isn't running on beta quality drivers. Most of my problems have come from either using no-brand hardware (you get what you pay for) or using the latest greatest thing with driver version 1.0.1. NT drivers don't seem to come out of the Beta phase until they've hit 2.0 or so.I am not of course speaking for the security of NT in any way, and I have seen problems like you mentioned about memory being maxed out after a while. What I am trying to say is that in 2 years of administrating a network I have seen that 99% of the instability of NT comes from beta quality drivers. In fact after tracking down all the crappy hardware and drivers on the problematic machines we've averaged less than 1 BSOD a month total for 25 computers. (I know, I know... Linux may crash less than that, but that's not to shabby for what I was given to work with ;-))
  • tee-hee: the timeout message is "slashdot effect...come back later"

    The ? is...was that timeout message there before this quickie was posted?

    another ?...should it have been?
    Any enterprising virus writers want to attack the error message files on web servers?

    -t
  • Oh, i've seen the win95 GPF dialogs at my local airport.

    The only thing stupider than running flight information on NT, is running it on windows 9x.

  • Hmmm. Yet another site gets slashdotted. Not knowing much about the subject, I'm curious as to where the bottleneck usually is. Is it bandwidth, is it processor time, or is it configuration error? On a static site, I would assume it would be bandwidth, but I don't really know.

    In any case, my guess is that it'll be days before I get to see what's inside : )

  • You think that's weird. In a hotel I was at in May, Channel 11 constantly showed... a TRS-80 Basic prompt.

    It must have been for one of those hotel information channels, and the computer got reset... I can see how it would be kinda useful to use a computer that's designed to output to a TV, but a TRS-80? In Basic?

    Actually, it wouldn't especially surprise me if TRS-80s were used in other places, judging from the horrible graphics those channels usually have.

    --
  • Strange coincidence re: Steaming Heap of Quickies.

    The Atari Video Game History is produced by Howard Scott Warsaw, programmer behind "Yars Revenge" and "E.T." for 2600. On his website he takes joking credit for the collapse of the video game industry [netcom.com], saying "Rarely is one given the opportunity to topple a billion dollar industry single handedly. Yet according to the May '95 issue of New Media magazine (p. 27) this was my shot."

    In my Demotivators 2000 calendar, Despair, Inc. [despair.com] includes the November 1982 date that Howard Scott Warsaw's "E.T" was released, saying in full "E.T." game release for Atari 2600; hastens collapse of the videogame industry. Over 1 million copies end up buried in a New Mexico landfill.

    Freak coincidence, or is Rob listening to too many old Police albums?

    Smirkleton

  • Reminiscent of that IBM e-Business TV ad "That was dumb Bob."
  • I was thrilled to finally get into ThinkGeek and wandered around putting together an armload of stuff.

    Proceed to checkout, and ... insecure submission of credit card numbers?

    Bad. No order for you.
  • I *have* seen a random isolated BSOD in NT Workstation. Our TAFE College uses Novell Netware and WinNT, and on some computers, occasionally the system will drop to an NT BSOD. It may have something to do with the hardware (P166/32MB), but the point is that the error occurs randomly, and is not reproduceable.
  • For everyone attending the Atlanta Linux Showcase, you might also be interested in attending Warpstock '99 [warpstock.org] which is the weekend after the ALS and it's also in Atlanta. It's a great week for people interested in alternate operating systems!!!
  • Now all we need is a slashdot and blair witch parody.

    I can see it now...

    -- Moondog
  • /. should do the same thing, espeically for so-called "cool cases" links, which seem to get slashdotted the worst. I'll bet lots of these cool cases actually host the site, but those cumbersome designs overheat the systems until they crash and (sometimes literally) burn. With the case on, my CPU runs a full 15C hotter than with it off...
  • My friend and I recently released a parody of Episode 1's Trailer B: "Star Wars: Episode 1 - When Senators Attack IV". I won't reveal any details, but do check it out at http://www.ultracheese.com [ultracheese.com] :). You'll notice our site is a parody in and of itself... If you're a Star Wars fan, I guarantee any drink you're consuming while watching this parody will become a projectile weapon.

    Please do leave comments at the "Contact Us" section!

    Regards,
    Ryan Mannion

    (FWIW, our parody is strictly non-profit, etc., etc.)

  • I just registered a new name last week, and I'm #88647 (decided I didn't like my previous handle). So, registered users is approaching 100K, but this includes duplicates (like mine).

    Note to Rob - I'd like a way to change my user name, without having to register a new one. My 'old' one had Karma=7, which I'd like to keep.

  • What's BSOD?
  • I think it's ironic that Think Geek sent him free stuff in the hopes of getting a plug, Then when they finaly do, the site is /.ed and can't be accessed. Don't you think they would have relised this was going to happen?
  • It's mocking Sun's equally meaningless slogan, "We put the dot in .com"
  • I was on vacation to Tahoe a few months ago, and we were flipping channels on the TV in a friend's room. There was one channel that had crashed! We just sat there watching the blue screen for a while. I'm not sure they even got it rebooted before morning. That was probably the strangest place I've ever seen one!
  • I tried to decide which one I prefer - here's my reasoning:

    I think the web page version of Shatner features slightly better acting, and much, much better hair. But the meatware version has better sound quality than my PowerBook does (though it's close), and has gotten to hang out with Heather Locklear.

    My vote: SimShatner. After all, even with better sound in the original, you'll only want to listen for so long - not to mention that one of these days, Heather's going to start aging. And she's held it off so long that it'll be catastrophic when it happens. There's just no room for another Dick Clark, female or not.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • The brand-spankin' new Austin-Bergstrom International Airport had this same problem. Pretty silly looking.

    This seems to me like the perfect place for Open Source. Who knows how much each airport pays for this app? I bet it's a BUNDLE.

    Charge 'em 70% of the going rate to write a GPL'd version, and write it for Linux. Phenomenal uptime, multi-headed monitors (soon) and suddenly travellers across the world start seeing Linux in airports. And some GPL programmers make some money.

    And why not release something like this under the GPL? It's not like people choose their airports based on the features of the departure/arrival screens... no competetive advantage there.

    Take your cameras to the airport. Let's start a whole gallery of these things. :-)
  • The main site seems to be getting slow, so here is a mirror [netgate.net] of the BSOD.

  • In case anyone's wondering why no lithographs for the new Demotivators, I mailed them last week to ask. Apparently, something like 50% of the last batch accounted for 90% of their sales, so they're seeing what's popular amongst the new ones before producing the big lithographs.

    On a totally unrelated note, check out this [yeongyang.com] for a weird case. Not so much an Apple as a Bean.

  • Yeah, and about every politician I know thinks "nuclear" is pronounced "nuke-ya-lur," and every Linux zealot I know that calls himself 31337 still can't figure out how to download only the patches to their latest kernel. Doesn't mean it's correct. Further, seeing as so many people here bristle whenever a journalist uses "hacker" when he could've used "cracker," I would think that they'd be in favor of choosing one's words more carefully.

    I don't know when the original definition was coined, but it's an NT-only thing -- when you get a blue screen in Win9x, it doesn't mean death is certain; in NT, you have no other choice but to reboot. Just because they're both blue doesn't mean that they're the same thing, no more than I'd confuse a computer running DOS 3.2 with my Linux box just because on my screen I get a prompt and white text on a black background.

    As to your other questions, yes, Microsoft employees occasionally use the term, but I don't remember any official documenation referring to it as anything other than a "Stop Error" or a "Blue Screen." Some of their publications, like MSDN stuff, will use "BSOD" from time to time.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • http://www.despair.com/demotivator s/burnout.html [despair.com]

    Burnout

    Attitudes are Contagious. Mine Might Kill You.

    Perfect for:
    - Anyone Looking to Get Fired
    - Anyone consigned to use NT
    - Disaffected college students

  • The line spacing is off, but you get the idea:

    /*
    #include "braap.h"
    #include "p.h"
    #include "cas.h"

    #define MAX_ALE 5

    void DrinkBeer(int pints) {
    if (pints == 0)
    Burp():

    else {
    VisitBathroom();

    DrinkBeer(pints--);

    }

    }

    int main(void) {
    int pints = MAX_ALE;

    DrinkBeer(pints);
    PayBarTab();
    return 0;

    }
    */
  • Nothing quite like getting a blue screen on install, or perhaps even on every third boot. Both of these have heppened to me, within the last month.

    The problem of the BSOD (one of them) is the lack of info about what exactly caused the problem (unless you read hex). Include this with the overall attempt on NT to hide the hardware and you get the legend of the BSOD. I've had random BSODs, perhaps it's my inexperience, but nonetheless all my users know what it is and what it means. Turn it off and reboot again.

    It's a backlash against the advertised ease of NT administration and the reality ($$$ for software, $$$ for support). Just wait until the horror stories of 2000 overwhelming admins start to surface and you'll understand.

    (BTW my NTServer4.0(file, web) lasts about 35 days, until it's memory is totally maxed out (256) and needs to be resurrected)
  • I think I need to point out here that Win9x blue screen messages are still quite serious.

    When WinNuke was all the rage, it would blue-screen Win95 and NT. Win95 was 'recoverable'. NT was not.

    However when you tried to use a TCP/IP connection after acknowleging the blue screen, you found that it didn't work. Reboot.

    So (I guess) the difference is that you get to save your work in Win95 (unless it's on a TCP/IP-connected server!!) With NT you're just SOL.

    Also, many times that Win95 has BSOD'd for me, I can't just acknowlege it and keep going. The damn messages just keep coming until I summon mighty RESET.

    "Windows is busy waiting for a close program dialog to appear. To continue waiting, press any key. To reboot your computer, press CTRL-ALT-DEL again..."

    Or something like that. Sound familiar?

  • Quote from the ThinkGeek site this morning (~2 AM EST) Appears they changed the front page after I hit it the first time (~8:30 PM EST).

    • Wow. What a ride that /. effect was.

    I love these guys. They even offer Jolt in flavors I never knew existed! Mmmmm... Citrus Climax or Cherry Bomb... I may never drink regular soda again! Did you notice they even have the relative caffeine content listed? Cool!

    And scheduled delivery to boot!!

    Guys, sorry 'bout that /. effect... it was worth it for all the orders, right?

  • OK, OK... call it a BSOID - Blue Screen of Impending Doom. :P

    In any case, its not a sight that instills warm fuzzies.

  • From what I could see on the site, all this guy did was drop a motherboard, etc into a pot and photograph it. If I were doing something like this, I would mount it up well, provide some form of real ventilation (maybe make the plant fake, instead of real, and vent through some moss or something), and show the steps through contruction...

    Please realise I am not saying that doing such a creative form of casing for a PC is impossible, or that this guy didn't do it. I just expected to see more regarding the construction. As it is, it just seems like a bunch of old parts in a bucket...
  • In case anyone is interested, Think Geek explains the problem [thinkgeek.com].
  • The quickie about tuxtiles is out of date...they stopped taking votes on 9/1/99...

    >How long is the vote open?
    >Voting will stop on September 1, 1999, so we can
    >notify our manufacturer and get a sample made.

    Figures... ;)
  • Sulu and Checkov in the wrong chairs! Sulu was always on the right and Checkov always on the left!
  • "My site got slashdotted and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
    --
    Yes, that *is* a real email address...
  • OK, I take it back. ThinkGeek is cool :) The secure submission part is there now. Looks like it was just a badly timed misconfiguration on their end.

    My order's going in now.

  • Google [google.com] uses Squid or some other proxy/cache to harvest all of its web pages, *then* indexes them. If a link is dead, you can use their cached version instead (and see the headers) -- it's great for all the bad links you find in web searches.

  • Sorry, that's NOT a BSOD (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, 1999 @02:11PM (#1689985)
    I don't mean to nitpick, but that's not a BSOD. The BSOD is a NT term. The picture is a Win 9X screen which appears whenever an application generates an exception, executes illegal code, or commits an access violation. It usually does not bring down the system. Although in this case it is in vxd.dll so it's probably some buggy driver code and will bring down the system.

    For those who don't know, a BSOD is specific to NT and is equivalent to a kernel panic on most *nix variants. The NT kernel drops to the console (which is 80x40), prints a header and some debug information followed by a hex dump of the processor state and (I think) the stack. Just like a kernel panic, a BSOD is unrecoverable.

    In my four years of experience administering NT boxes, every BSOD I've seen has been caused by NT not liking a particular combination of hardware devices or drivers. When they do appear, they appear regularly until you resolve the conflict either by swapping hardware or updating drivers. I've yet to see an isolated, random BSOD.

    It seems like some people who don't have any NT admin experience have heard the term BSOD and interpreted it to mean anytime Windows 3.X/9X/NT prints a blue screen. That's not the original meaning of the term.

  • Re:ThinkGeek gets slashdotted (Score:3)

    by jwp ( 12109 ) on Friday September 10, 1999 @10:26AM (#1689986)
    I think /. ought to start charging protection money. At least they could offer to upgrade equipment (for a tidy fee) to underpowered sites just before unleashing the hacking hordes of hashdom.

  • BSOD (Score:3)

    by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Friday September 10, 1999 @10:15AM (#1689987) Homepage

    If memory serves me correct, that BSOD picture was shot by none other than our very own Alan Cox.
    --

  • #include beer (Score:3)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Friday September 10, 1999 @11:43AM (#1689988) Homepage
    any of you people ever done an install of Enlightenment from source? i did this a couple weeks ago. i can't remember vertabrim what happened, but something that looked an awful lot like this happened during the ./configure:

    Checking for gtk... yes
    Checking for ESD... no
    WARNING: Esound library not found. Will compile without sound.
    Checking for imlib... yes
    Checking for lager_ale in _fridge... no
    Checking for any_kind_of_ale in _fridge.. no
    WARNING: We were unable to locate any ale in your refrigerator. We suggest you fix this problem immediately.

    ---
    i've seen similar things too in other places.. something, i can't remember what, i think it was windowmanager, displayed during ../configure:

    Checking for life_signs in Kenny... no
    Oh my God!! They killed Kenny!! You bastards!!
    ---

    The miracle of open source software.

  • yep (Score:3)

    by Evro ( 18923 ) <evandhoffman@@@gmail...com> on Friday September 10, 1999 @11:42AM (#1689989) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, that was from the Ottowa Linux Symposium of 8/15/99. This [slashdot.org] is the Slashdot story that linked to the collection originally.

  • Despair.com Y2K Calendar dates (Score:4)

    by smirkleton ( 69652 ) on Friday September 10, 1999 @11:16AM (#1689990)
    I got an advanced copy of the Despair Y2K calendar [despair.com]from a friend last week. I am still laughing at the dates they chose to include (over 120 bad, stupid, funny dates in human misery in the past 2000 years). My faves are more recent things like the following:

    1) January 1st, 2000 - Largest collective hangover in human history.

    2) January 7th, 1943 - Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power and wireless communication, dies penniless in New York.

    3) January 8th, 1992 - President Bush shares dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

    4) January 14th, 1990 - Homer Simpson first utters "D'oh!", aiding millions in articulating a precise feeling of self-inflicted stupidity.

    5) January 19th, 1983 - Apple introduces the world's first "user-friendly" computer, the 52 lb., $10,000 Lisa.

    6) January 25th, 1996 - FDA approves Olestra.

    7) February 10th, 1996 - Chess legend Gary Kasparov is defeated by IBM's "Deep Blue" supercomputer.

    8) March 9th, 1999 - Al Gore tells CNN, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet". MIT's Dr. Larry Roberts makes a voting decision for the 2000 election

    9) April 29th, 1983 - "Kilroy Was Here", a concept album about a rock band's descent into self-parody, is certified platinum.

    10) December 9th, 1997 - Stroboscopic effects in TV show "Pokemon" trigger seizures in over 600 Japanese children. Media exacerbates the problem by replaying clips while cover the story.

    Funny video game errata, pretty obscure, "E.T." game release for Atari 2600, hastens collapse of the videogame industry. Over 1 million copies end up buried in a New Mexico landfill." and August 8, 1997 - Lord British assassinated while addressing his subjects in Britannia

    I know where I am buying 90% of my friends for Christmas now.
    Smirkleton

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