The Null Device

2004/3/19

And the latest entry in the annals of hobby operating systems: MenuetOS, an OS whose main feature is that it's written entirely in assembly language. The product of an intrepid cabal of European hackers/masochists, it has a GUI that looks sort of like Windows XP would look if it didn't have proper widgets and was limited to one pixel font, and all the apps anyone in the target audience would need (i.e., it has an IRC client, a NNTP newsreader, MP3 playing/streaming capabilities, a chess client and a Doom-style 3D engine demo), and fits onto a single floppy.

menuetos open-source operating systems tech 0

A few tidbits from civil-libertarian/paranoid-anarchist-nutter site vigilant.tv: in a classic exhibition of Gallic dirigisme, the French government is planning to install a centralised internet censorship proxy on all internet connections in France, to block racist and anti-Semitic websites. Meanwhile, the Australian government stopped publishing reports on its internet censorship scheme in late 2001 (I wonder whether they'll be claiming that they did this on grounds of national security). And finally, an ABC piece on how al-Qaeda use the internet.

al-qaeda architectures of control australia censorship france internet 4

During the 1980s, various musicians and bands put A gallery of 8-bit computer games on their 7" singles. The theory went that you'd play the 7" into a tape recorder, put the tape into your ZX Spectrum (and most of these were Speccy programs), load it and get some bonus content. The exact nature of this content varied from rather iffy-sounding branded video games (such as the Thompson Twins Adventure Game, or The Stranglers' "Aural Quest") to sometimes dubious games actually written by actual band members (Chris Sievey of The Freshies was a serial offender here), to Satanic messages with other messages hidden in the comments. (via bOING bOING)

music naff retrocomputing the stranglers thompson twins videogames zx spectrum 0