The Definitive Gmail Thread! (Put all invites here)

I've got an invite for the first two people with the wrong answer.

Quite a challenge

I'll take a (not so serious) crack at it by playing a word game:

Total heat generated by a hamster = 0 BTU

Word game #1)
Heat is one form of energy. In a closed system, energy is conserved. Thus, any heat generated by the hamster was derived from energy of another form (chemical or kinetic energy for example). Over time, the heat "loss" from conversion will be converted to other form(s) of energy. So, as time approaches infinity, the amount of heat generated by the hamster that still remains as heat approaches 0.

Word game #2)
The hamster doesn't actually generate heat. Energy cannot be created

Those are two nice beat-around-the-bush answers you would probably see on an exam when the student has no frickin' clue how to solve it.

Alright, because anyone using Linux has to be good, I'll offer up my Gmail invites that I just got on here. I have 6 invites, and they will go to the first 6 people to post their favorite somewhat-obscure program for Linux (i.e. Firefox, OpenOffice, or XMMS are not obscure and do not count). There's so much software out there, I want some names of more good stuff for my computer.

I didn't even attempt to solve it. I thought I'd just help make the loosers feel a little better.

thanks for this thread...

I use rox session for enviroment, i like the mr photohead game, and i use tplayer and noone else does lol.

I don't think it's extremely popular, but I really like gnump3d. It's a Perl script that can be configured to stream your mp3 library over a dynamicaly-generated web page. So, if you have web access, you can listen to anything you own. It's even got user/password protection in case you're afraid someone might stumble across it. It's also configurable to listen to a specific port. So if you do have a regular web server running, move gnump3d to another port, and you can access both.

I think there was another piece of software I looked at that did the same thing: Brunhilde. At the time, I either couldn't get it to compile/install/work and gave up on it since gnump3d worked out-of-the-box.

For nostalgia entertainment (while downloading), there's always XScorch. It's a clone of that good ol' Scorched Earth game for DOS.

Well, I was worried my response would be a "thread killer" when all I was trying to do was add a little humor. So, I went looking to try and find a legitimate answer. I figured body heat generation for mammals is pretty consistent (perhaps that's fallacy #1), and that it's dependent upon weight and possibly height (perhaps fallacy #2). The only information I could find after doing a number of searches through Google was that the human body generates 25,000 BTUs of body heat. As any movie buff knows, that's from "The Matrix" and it's dangerous to use anything in a movie as fact. So, having no other recourse, I started looking for average weights of a hamster, and average weights of people, figuring it would be a simple proportion. Well, everything I found gave too much information. I found average weights for adolescent and mature hamsters (and both were given as weight ranges), and there is no "average" human weight. It too, is separated into adolecent, mature, elderly, gender, and BMI ranges.

So, I gave up

Hopefully if my previous post was a thread killer (I was going for "creativity" points), then this one makes amends. So, all you thermodynamics or biology gurus step up to the plate.

i liked the challenge of this thread so i will give it a go

it will be an estimate of around 22,994.998547 Btu

could i give a link that will give a hint ??

i use ScummVM to play old adventure games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max

i use a program called kid3 to easily tag multiple MP3 files

heat generated i believe is dependent on the metabolism of animals, higher metabolism the more heat generated i think it was ..... just to give people a hint (I'm not board enough to try or even estimate this)

I have Gmail invitations. Let me know, if you want one free.

here is your hint: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=calorie

I love Celestia , it's a 3D space simulator.

Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

ipkungfu

It's my favorite script for configure iptables and is really easy without being much more than a bunch of config files.