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Cool Cases: Armor or Arcade?
It wouldn't be christmas without a couple of cool cases. An anonymous
reader sent linkage to the 63rd issue of ZZZ online which has a ridiculously armored laptop. If thats not the right case for you, check out Arcade2000. I've been considering retrofitting an old game cabinet for a PC running an emulator, and stumbled upon it. At least its not as expensive as the armored case!
Actually there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to do this quite easily. At the LAN Party I attend, the proprietor has several game cabinets. One of which he's outfitted with an old Atari2600 and a multiplexer.
Actually, I'd like to get the one sit-down cabinet from him and convert it into a computer desk for myself. Now how cool would that be?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Arcade 2000 (Jeff Kemper) has been running into a number of problems fulfilling orders, staying in touch with his customers, returning money, etc. If you take a look at the Build Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ at http://www.arcadecontrols.com and ask around the forums you'll find a number of people who have been ripped off or screwed over by Arcade 2000. If you take a look around there are plenty of other reputable solutions such as Hanho Games, Inc. known for their excellant HotRod Joystick and their ArcadePC arcade game cabinet.
If you're more interested in building your own cabinet check out the BYOAC FAQ or my friend Sithspawn's page about his cabinet. We both built MAME cabinets over the summer. Took a few months, but it's worth it. There's nothing quite like scrolling through a menu of 2000-some arcade, NES, SNES, SMS, etc games and playing with nice classic-feeling controls.
People confuse the terms all the time. Many pistols and rifles are 'automatic' meaning that the weapon prepares itself for the next shot after one is fired. IE: No cocking required.
You're thinking of 'fully automatic' where as long as the trigger is held down it spews bullets. IE: machine gun. Very, very, very few of these are used in crimes compared to regular pistols and rifles.
There is lots of public (voter) confusion on this and many laws are going thru that affect 'automatic' rifles and pistols instead of fully automatic versions. I've talked to two gun control activitists, one of which didn't even know the difference between automatic and fully automatic. Both of them were 'preaching' for banning 'automatic' weapons, where they were really talking about fully auto rifles and machine guns. Quite a shame, really.
Yes, yes... I own some guns but I don't consider myself a gun-nut. I think this is an important distinction that needs to be made.
-MoTec
Now, what I'd really like is a leather s&m outfit for my mouse.
Magnesium is a terrible, amateurish way to light thermite, not to mention its high failure rate. Read chemists use glucose (avail at your local drug store [no, not _that_one]) and Potassium Permagnate (KMnO4). Works just abotu everytime and it looks cool to pour some "ooze" (the glucose) in a purplish-reddish-silver mizture and have it flame up.
Mark Duell
That armored case looks ideal for land surveying. But how bright is the screen? I use a PC when surveying in the field and I have to duck into a shady spot to see the screen at all. If there are no buildings around I have to put a towel over my head to cut off the sunlight. We also use a laptop-based program to guide a boat for hydrographic surveying; obviously the pilot can't keep his head under cover. Our solution thus far has been to get monochrome screens, but those are just about unobtainable any more. Does anyone reading this know of someone who makes a color laptop screen which is both rugged and bright enough to read under direct sunlight?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Having a case made out of LEGO would be great... need a new piece of hardware? Out of drive bays? No problem! Just build another one!
Also, a LEGO computer case would go great with the LEGO desk I plan to get when I become obscenely wealthy.
(I should probably mention that LEGO and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the LEGO Company , which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this post. You have been duly warned.)
--Psi
Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.
The actual shot may be "painless," but watch out for claims of concussions, fractures and other injuries when the "frozen" suspect hits the ground or any other nearby object. Heaven help them if they were running at the time they got hit, too. The keyword here is 'suspect'. As in, not officially proven guilty, which in the USA is up to a judge to determine.
[
Actually it looks like the effect is localized to the muscle or muscle groups hit. This is bad since being shot in the chest by this thing will probably only immobilize the muscles being directly effected. This means the gunman can quite possibly still shoot you because you didn't hit the right muscle groups with the immobilizer. So its probably not as useful as it sounds.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
The armored case is made out of highly flammable magnesium, which would make for an even more secure machine. Attach an igniter to the sucker and when powered on, give the user 20 seconds to enter a password before melting the machine to slag. If Irwin Jacobs had one of these when his laptop got snatched, well ... just think of the satisfaction he would have that not only were Qualcomm's secrets safe, but the thief now has a hole thru both floors of his condo :-).
Why buy yourself an already made machine? Isn't it more enjoyable to get an old Jamma cabinent, strip out the old boads, mount a computer chassis inside of it, and then tear apart a keyboard and start soldering connectors directly to it? Plus, there is the fun of hunting down custom drivers so you can use the original monitor, rigging up the monitor so it rotates, making your own trackball out of mouse parts, and building a splitter so you can use a regular keyboard too (then modifying the case so the keyboard can stay hidden 99% of the time). Plus if you can find an old coin door and mechanism, you could wire it up to take real coins. Then there is hunting down software and an OS (Sorry guys, DOS or Windows works best, the emulator scene seems to love DOS.) It seems like an enjoyable project to me, I don't think I'd ever be able to let someone build one for me. :)
There would be something about taking an old arcade machine with a burned out board, sticking a couple hundred dollars of computer equipment into it plus a few weeks of my time, and making a machine that can play almost any arcade game plus most of the old consoles that would give me a warm fuzzy feeling (plus be illegal in most parts of the world *grin*). I suppose that some might want to buy a pre-made cabinet, but that's like buying an already built computer or having someone else install my OS.
The only problem with doing the above is having to be involved in the emulation scene. There is a small part of the emulation scene that is dedicated to faithfully emulating old hardware (*waves to MAME*), and there is another part that just wants to emulate old games to be able to preserve a part of the past. For every 2 of these people, there are 98 people who seem to have less functioning neurons then fingers. Bulletin boards are filled with messages from clueless newbies who have neglected to RTFM, and it seems that all the emulation homepages threaten pain or death in order to prevent yet another fool for emailing a rom request. I was checking out websites the other night, hoping that someone hacked TCP/IP multi-player functionality into DOS/Win32 Mame, almost all of the message boards I found were filled with "Help, I can't get it to work" threads and people requesting for new games to be emulated so they can avoid paying quarters at the local arcade, as well as the occasionally "MAME runs too slow" post (which MAME does because its dedicated to the faithful emulation of hardware, not fast emulation). Half these people are just waiting for a nice PS/2 emulator to arrive so they can trade cd images and avoid buying games and the console, they have fallen to the dark side of the emulation scene and gives the rest of us the image of being cheap pirates. If you only want to be able to play new games for free, go away, we don't need your kind, stick to your Warez channels and websites. If you don't have enough brain power to read a faq/readme that has already answered the question, go away, you probably should rethink your decision to use a computer in the first place. I may be bitter about it, but in the last few years I've seen the emulation scene become filled with whiny teenage brats, fewer and fewer people care about the ideas of emulation, most just want to play games for free.
Just my $.02
It might not occur to most /. readers, but the armored notebooks aren't for reading /., or playing Quake XIXIV, or loading up X11, or fanatics that are worried about damage. They're for running on the well test rig. Or entering data on the seismic line. In other words, for real world applications where you don't need a PIII-999 to get it to work.
The site that is linked here (review site) misses this point completely. If you have one of these, you're probably not exactly running an app. that stresses the CPU out.
The same link has a story about a company selling ray guns that would let police painlessly immobilize criminals in their tracks; much more interesting than an armoured laptop, I think you'll agree :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I was reading about the new laser device that transmits electric impulses to immobilize people. The new "phaser" so to speak.
One thing didn't set right with me, if it makes all of the target's muscles contract at once, and that target is holding a gun.... what is going to stop the trigger finger from contracting? It would probably set off the gun... Immobilizing the villain would mean risking the lives of others. has anyone else thought of that?