gnome

Name of a nuclear test that took place near Carlsbad, New Mexico on December 10, 1961. A 3.1 kiloton device was detonated 1184 feet underground, as an attempt to tap high-pressure steam from salt deposits and transfer it to energy. This was part of the Plowshare experiment, an attempt to harness nuclear destruction for peaceful applications. It was a stupid idea, as all of the steam released was highly radioactive.

Gnome isn't terribly far from Trinity, the first nuclear test site. You'll find a plaque at 32 degrees 15'46.7"N / 103 degrees 51'57.3"W, in the middle of nowhere.

adapted from Wil Huygen's Gnomes

Woodland Gnome
The woodland, or forest gnome is probably the most common type, however this is difficult to verify as he dislikes being seen by humans and has many escape routes. His physical appearance resembles that of an ordinary gnome.

Dune Gnome
A fraction larger than the woodland gnome, he also avoids contact with man. Another distinguishing feature is the drabness of his clothing. The female of this gnome type wears khaki coloured rather than grey clothing.

Garden Gnome
Belonging to the common type, the garden gnome lives in old gardens, even those hemmed in between the new houses of modern cities. If he begins to feel too closed in, he simply goes to the woods, although his learned nature tends to make him feel out of place there. He is more somber than most, and enjoys telling melancholy tales

House Gnome
Resembling an ordinary gnome, he has the most knowledge of mankind. He speaks and understands human language and often inhabits historic old houses, thus he has seen both rich and poor, and heard a great deal. House gnomes are good natured, fond of a joke or tease, but never malevolent. The few exceptions to this rule are due to bad genes resulting from crossbreeding, with truly wicked gnomes occurring only once in a thousand.

Gnome kings are chosen from the house gnome family.

Farm Gnome
The farm gnome resembles the house gnome but has a more constant nature and is more conservative in all matters.

Siberian Gnome
The Siberian Gnome has been most affected by crossbreeding. He stands centimetres larger than the European type and freely associates with trolls. He takes revenge for even the slightest offense by killing cattle, causing bad harvests, droughts and abnormally cold weather.

Tinker Gnomes

Tinker Gnomes are a less well known breed of Gnome. A Tinker Gnome's life ambition is to design and build a device to achieve a given end. Their numbers are small on most worlds, probably due to a combination of high death rate due to 'misfires' of experimental divices and the fact that the primary aim of Tinker Gnome marrage is so as to have someone to hold the blueprints. There are significant numbers on the world of Krynn. Tinker Gnomes are of short height and are prone to short sightedness. The males of the speicies tend to develop facial hair that is not so much a beard as a group of petrified folicles huddling together in fear of the next explosion. Tinker Gnome 'achievements' include

Machine For Getting Upstairs Without Stairs (aka catapult- still in production due to high squelch rate)

Black Dragon Rear Left Leg Scratcher (still in production due to repeated draconic consumption of prototypes)

Gnome Sidewheeler (a flying ship powered by Giant Space Hamsters that actualy works, when the hamsters are in the mood for running in their wheels. There is an unfortunate squelch rate due to loss of power from the hamster generators.)

Svirfneblin:

The svirfneblin, or deep gnomes, dwell in the depths of the earth, where also are found the drow, duergar, and other beings. Unlike the drow and duergar, their society has not split off from that of the surface gnomes; they remain quite friendly, and both speak the Nanomi language. The svirfneblin have been forced by their harsh environment to become somewhat hardier than their surface cousins, but they lack the talents at magery which distinguish surface gnomes. However, as if to compensate, they share with their neighbors the duergar a great predisposition toward psychic abilities, with nearly every svirfneblin developing some form of esoteric mental power in his lifetime.

Svirfneblin generally live for 200 years, and have eyes that are well-adapted to dark conditions but suffer in light.

Minature people. The male is dressed distinctively in a blue shirt with a broad belt, wearing a red pointy cap and sporting a white beard. We don’t usually come in contact with female gnomes because they almost always stay at home.

Some facts
Physical appearance
The Male wears a peaked red cap. He has a full beard, which becomes grey long before his hair does. He wears a blue smock with a Byronic collar or caftan neck (usually covered up by his beard). Then, brown-green pants with footwear consisting of felt boots or shoes of birch bark or wooden clogs depending on the area in which he lives in. Around his waist, he wears a leather belt with tool kit attached (contents usually = knife, hammer, drill, files…)

Facial colouring is fair, but with red apple cheeks, especially in old age. Then nose is straight or slightly upturned. The eyes are generally grey.

The Female wears gray or khaki clothing, also for the purpose of camouflage. Until she is married, she wears a green cap with her braids sticking out. After marriage, her hair disappears under a scarf and darker cap. No brassiere despite a substantial bosom. She wears a blouse with ankle length skirts and black-grey knee socks and high heels or slippers.

Weight
Adult male: 300 grams
Adult female: 250 – 275 grams

Height
Adult: 15 cm (without cap) at age 275 years old, which is considered to be in the prime of life

Life-span
Around 400 years. Courtship and marriage at about age 100 years.

Types of gnomes
Woodland gnomes – most common
Dune gnomes – slightly larger size than the woodland gnome
Garden gnomes – yes, “the common garden variety”, sometimes escapes to the woods to get away from surburbia
House gnomes – has the most knowledge of mankind, and speak man’s language
Farm gnomes – more conservative in nature than house gnomes
Siberian gnomes – associates freely with trolls!! Not to be trusted.
See Impartial's writeup below for a fuller description.

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More information can be found in "Gnomes", by Wil Huygen, and beautifully and cheekily illustrated by Rein Poortvliet. It was originally published in Dutch in 1976.

GNOME, GNU Network Object Model Environment.

GNOME (http://www.gnome.org/) is a desktop environment for UNIXes, developed as a community effort like most of the GNU things. Basically, X Windowing System provides raw support for graphics and doesn't give much more - so you need tools to do actual work. GNOME helps with this.

GNOME is, as noted before, developed by the community of volunteers. GNOME also has corporate backing: Ximian builds GNOME and applications for it full-day, Linux vendors like Red Hat provide great support, and some parties like Sun Microsystems have helped things a great deal (I particularly admire them for the usability testing).

From User Perspective

GNOME consists of code libraries (everything from very fundamental code to full-blown services and daemons), basic things like application launcher (GNOME Panel), file manager (gmc and more recently Nautilus) and window manager (Sawfish), small utilities (GNOME Terminal, gcolorsel, gcharmap, GNOME Mixer etc...), and, of course, full-blown applications (GnuCash, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Evolution, and many, many more).

What makes GNOME interesting that it doesn't actually demand that you use a specific window manager (though using "GNOME/KDE-compliant window manager" is highly suggested). Nor does it actually demand that you use some specific part of infrastructure. If you don't like Sawfish, fine - don't use it. (I don't - I use Window Maker). If you don't like GNOME's session management, fine, don't use it (I don't - I use Window Maker's SM). If you don't like gmc and don't have the horsepower to run Nautilus, don't. (I used gentoo until Nautilus one-point-ohed, but since I don't my mother's computer can't run Nautilus, I use gmc or gentoo there.)

From Developer's Viewpoint

GNOME uses GTK+ as its GUI toolkit and extends it a great deal by introducing new widgets. (One of the reasons for GNOME's existence was that in the ancient days of history, the Heathens who developed KDE picked a non-free toolkit, the satanic Qt! Nowadays Qt is GPLed, but there's still some bitterness in air... =)

GNOME applications typically use GNU Autotools for the build management.

New widgets include dialogs and applications, status bars and menus with stock items, MDI support (that lets the user to use something other than Windows-style MDI, thank God!) and such.

Some of the thing GNOME implements includes cool graphics support. Of particularly high interest is the Canvas widget with which making vector graphics is easy.

GNOME provides infrastructure for networked objects via CORBA (though very few apps actually seem to use it, because of the regrettable complicatedness of CORBA - thus, panel applet-to-panel communication is handled with it, and a few other things, but that's about that). Stuff like session management, uniform application configuration system (well, there's two of them so it's not "uniform", gconf and the other... =), sound (ESounD) and printer access, and even game high score service is out there.

The amount of GNOME infrastructure is growing with each release. I read from somewhere that by GNOME 2.0, the actual API of the system libraries has been frozen, so we will only see more extension libraries and system components in the future.

Gnome (?), n. [F. gnome, prob. fr. Gr. one that knows, a guardian, i. e., of the treasures in the inner parts of the earth, or fr. intelligence, both fr. , , to know. See Know.]

1.

An imaginary being, supposed by the Rosicrucians to inhabit the inner parts of the earth, and to be the guardian of mines, quarries, etc.

2.

A dwarf; a goblin; a person of small stature or misshapen features, or of strange appearance.

3. Zool.

A small owl (Glaucidium gnoma) of the Western United States.

4. [Gr. .]

A brief reflection or maxim.

Peacham.

 

© Webster 1913.