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UPFRONT

Issue 99

From Issue #99
July 2002

Jul 01, 2002  By Various
 in
Beer Contest, II

Thanks to everyone who decided that looking for a miniscule beer bottle among the pages of Linux Journal for a chance at some auto accoutrements is a worthy way to spend what little free time you have. Jon maddog Hall even sent in a correct answer (albeit too late to qualify for the prize), telling us “You can't hide beer from maddog”, as if we didn't know.

Many hundreds of readers were sharp enough to find the beer bottle on the table on page 93 in the “Crystal Space” article. Some even picked up on the hint by way of the 3-D glasses suggestion. Others should spend more time looking for beer (or better yet—a job) and less time drinking it, for they “found” beer in the most remarkable places in the magazine's pages. For these folks we're offering another chance. To make the new start fresh, this time you'll be looking for something completely different—a mug of beer—and no, it's not the one pictured here. This one is an example. For this month's prize we'll be letting you help us clean out our warehouse by accepting some pristine vintage Linux Journal XL T-shirts. This time, correct responders numbered 200-300 will win.

Send your mailing address with your answer to beer2@ssc.com. Good luck!

The Game too Addictive for Debian?

If you're doing without Tetris or Solitaire one day at a time, stop reading right now. The free SDL-based game Frozen Bubble, in which you control a cute penguin and lob colored bubbles into a geometric pattern while a chill-room soundtrack plays, is so addictive that user Nick Moffitt reported it to the Debian bug tracking system as a “Title 1 Controlled Substance”.

Bug Report: bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=143176

Game Home Page: www.frozen-bubble.org

—Don Marti

LJ Index—July 2002

  1. Estimated millions of dollars saved annually by Largo, Florida by running Linux applications on Linux servers and thin clients: 1

  2. Number of distinct domains that lead to the Tina's Webcam site: 4,525

  3. Millions of dollars Bertlesmann loaned Napster, through April 2002: 85

  4. Millions of dollars more Bertlesmann would be willing to pay Napster, as of April 2002: 15-30

  5. Billions of dollars for which Napster was originally sued by the RIAA on behalf of Bertlesmann and other companies: 20

  6. Debian Linux CDs burned by the government of Extremadura, a rural area called the poorest in Spain, for distribution to schools through newspaper inserts: 80,000

  7. Number of schools in Extremadura: 670

  8. Number of technology centers in Extremadura: 32

  9. Expected yearly savings to the Extremadura community in millions of dollars: 7

  10. Number of government offices and schools expected in the Extremadura extranet by the end of 2002: 1,478

  11. Number of Extremadura's teachers expected to be trained on the use of Linux in the classroom: 15,000

  12. Millions of dollars spent by MCA Records to make and market the album Ultimate High by Carly Hennesey: 2.2

  13. Copies of Ultimate High sold as a result of MCA Records' efforts: 378

  14. Percentage of records that become profitable, according to record industry sources: 5

  15. Average number of records that must be sold for a major label release to break even: 500,000

  16. Size in inches at its widest side of the Transmeta Crusoe-based OQO “modular computer”: 4.9

  17. Weight in ounces of the OQO: 9

  18. Size in GB of the OQO's hard drive: 10

  19. Expected battery life in hours of the OQO: 8

  20. Trillions of calculations per second of the Linux-powered supercomputer HP sold to the US Dept. of Energy in April 2002: 8.3

  21. Number of Intel Itanium 64-bit processors in the Energy Dept.'s new Linux supercomputer: 1,400

  22. Millions of dollars the Energy Dept. will pay for its new supercomputer: 24.5

Sources

1: ZDNet

2: Ben Edelman, Harvard Law case study

3: New York Times

4-5: ABC News, MP3 Newswire

6-11: Wired News

12-15: Wall Street Journal

16-19: LinuxDevices.com

20-22: CNET

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