The Useless Facts Thread

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Specineff
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Specineff »

Speaking of Samurai Shodown, Ukyo Tachibana's ending in SS2 is a nod to (or even a straight ripoff of) Edward Scissorhands ending.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Merry Clayton suffered a miscarriage mere hours after recording the backing vocals for the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter".
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

If you put together the RAM of every Atari 2600 ever produced (30 million units produced, 128 bytes each), you'd get 3.57 GB, less than a regular modern PC.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by nash87 »

i'm impressed that were so many atari 2600 units produced
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Another example of how computing has advanced: these days, using only gamer-grade parts, it is possible to build a $30,000 cluster capable of 34.5 teraflops; that's $1.80 per gigaflop. In 1961, it would take $8,300,000,000,000 (yes, 8.3 trillion dollars, adjusted for inflation) worth of hardware to give you a gigaflop.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Andrew Eldritch, vocalist of goth rock band The Sisters of Mercy, knows English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Latin. He also studied Mandarin Chinese at a point, but has completely forgotten it.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

This was the first photograph ever uploaded to the world wide web.

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more about them
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SuperGrafx
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by SuperGrafx »

Looks like the photo was just taken yesterday.
It has a timeless look to it.
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Friendly
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Friendly »

Stormwatch wrote:This was the first photograph ever uploaded to the world wide web.

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more about them
This upload from July 18th 1992 isn't the first from what I gather. It's only the first that was uploaded at CERN.

Before this, there was Rocky Mountain News A La Carte Edition in December 1990, which could be a contender:
http://newsandtech.com/resources/thenan ... 002e0.html
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

All right, they say it's press sensationalism. It was likely the first photograph of a band on the web, though.

But the electronic newspaper Friendly mentioned is not a valid candidate, because it was not on the web at all. It used TeleMax, which, I gather, was a private dial-up network, like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. And certainly photographs were widely shared in those networks before.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by ratikal »

The fastest someone will ever run is 29.7 MPH.
The fastest 100-meter time with absolute perfect conditions will be 8.99.
The longest time a normal person can hold their breath is around 15 minutes. An abnormal person that lives 20,000ft above sea level and has a bigger lungs than average could possibly hold their breath up to 30 or 40 minutes.

I got these facts from the book Perfection Point. Really interesting book.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

TV series Friends was originally proposed as a spin-off of Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie Singles, a critically acclaimed romantic comedy set against Seattle's grunge scene.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by MrChiggins »

The drummer for one of the best music acts around, (The Mountain Goats) Jon Wurster, has also written for one of the best shows around: Tom Goes to the Mayor. BOOM BAM POW
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by mesh control »

Eric Warheim played in a 90's emo band called I Am Heaven.
The LP is ok, it sounds like Hoover.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Roberto Carlos, the most successful Brazilian rock musician of all time, has only one leg.
Last edited by Stormwatch on Fri Nov 16, 2012 6:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Moniker »

The bacteria in human feces can, given time, penetrate up to 10 layers of 2-ply toilet paper.

So wipe fast and wash hard, people!
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

The most exclusive limited edition of a game must be one of Enemy Zero for the Saturn: only 20 copies were produced, each sold for $2000 and delivered personally by the game's creator, Kenji Eno.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by ED-057 »

Soundmax AC97 (used in Intel ICH-4M etc.) can be used under Windows NT 3.51.

There is a driver out there for NT4 which does not install on its own. But I took the smnt40.sys and smnt40.dll files and copied them manually. Then I added an entry for this driver to mmdriver.inf and installed them as usual using the control panel. After restarting I got a BSOD, so I had to rename the driver to prevent loading and reboot again. I went to devices control panel and changed "startup" from "system" to "manual." Put the driver file back, rebooted again successfully, then went to the devices panel and started the driver. No BSOD this time. And the sound works!

I also grabbed kbd106.dll and added an entry for it to layout.inf to fix my keyboard layout. I`m using vbemp.sys for my video driver (1024x768x32bit) and Realtek 8139 fast ethernet driver for LAN.

Currently posting from Firefox2 on NT3.51 from my NEC VersaPro VY10F/BHL (Pentium M 753 soldered in place of the original 1.0GHz chip, patched BIOS, 855PM chipset, 768MB DDR266, Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB, 12" XGA screen, 40GB HDD, Atheros 802.11g), booting Japanese WinXP, Win2k, NT3.51, and "DOS 7.1" all from a single FAT32 partition (I`ve been wasting a lot of time today)
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

NT 3.51? Seriously, do you have any apps that require that dinosaur, or is it just for the hell of it?
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Joe Camp, director of the Benji film series, is also the author of a book about horse training. He strongly advocates a "wild horse" model of rearing, opposing the use of horseshoes, bridles with bits, stalls, and industrial feed.
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ED-057
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by ED-057 »

Stormwatch wrote:NT 3.51? Seriously, do you have any apps that require that dinosaur, or is it just for the hell of it?
...the second one.

I should also mention that it needs some updated system files to be able to work on a system with AGP, and to be able to access FAT32 partitions (needs registry changes too)
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

The first spam email was sent on May 1 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at DEC, announcing new models of VAX computers.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by neorichieb1971 »

I noticed in cars (well cars i've owned anyway) that when you do a sharp turn the temperature changes temporarily. Like a wind of air goes past your seat. Usually its colder. Tell me I am not imagining things!
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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Friendly
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Friendly »

Maybe it's the sensation of the blood leaving (part of) your brain due to the centrifugal force.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by moh »

Friendly wrote:Maybe it's the sensation of the blood leaving (part of) your brain due to the centrifugal force.
There is no such thing as a centrifugal force, the perceived 'force' is actually just your body's resistance to a change in direction.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by Stormwatch »

Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City was inspired by Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by linko9 »

The English last name Fotheringay is pronounced "Fungy." Reminded of this fact while rewatching Jeeves and Wooster.

Then stumbled on this page. Good stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_na ... unciations
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by MOSQUITO FIGHTER »

Rocky IV star Dolph Lundgren has a master’s degree in chemical engineering and was awarded a Fulbright grant to study at MIT.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by MOSQUITO FIGHTER »

The drummer from nirvana looks exactly like the singer from foo fighters.
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Re: The Useless Facts Thread

Post by KAI »

Sneezing with your eyes open is impossible.
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