The other advantage is that you need fewer optics to perform correction tasks with a laser projection system. things like zoom and focus and perspective correction can all be taken care of in the software / firmware that controls the mirrors. Think of all the expensive and large optics they are putting into this latest round of "bigscreen" rear projection tv's (the ones thate are ~ 10in deep) -- most have gigantic parabolic mirrors in them and some very specialized lenses to deal with focus. With laser projection, that stuff is very nearly irrelevant...
Well when your CRT stops scanning it will burn up the phosphors at the center of your monitor, so obviously there is some safety mechanism that could be used to prevent this sort of problem...
What about if you fire the laser through some sort of 'light fuse' that will cut it off if the laser stops scanning? Might be complicated to build but would eliminate the problem...
US paper currency is printed with an intaglio process whereby the (slightly conductive) ink is rolled onto plates and then the paper is pressed into the plates (rather than the plates being pressed into the paper on most presses.) IE the RECESSED parts of the plates hold the ink, not the bits that stick up.
The effective result of using this printing method can be felt on the bill. On a new bill the ink will be coarse and raised off of the paper. The lines will be very crisp and solid. There will be no 'breaks' even microscopic in the ink.
Since it's slightly conductive (it has some metals in it and whatnot) and the lines (and crosshatching etc) are pretty well continuous it's going to be an excellent absorber of microwave energy. Without anything else in the microwave to absorb the energy better than the money, it's likely the ink near the portrait is going to get really hot really fast. This is pretty much what I'd expect from microwaving money.
All that being said, the RFID equipment or the security equipment that this money was falsely triggering must be some of the cheapest crap on the market!
You are lucky you live in the US where the laws allow idiot consumers taht spend too much money to simply change their mind and return used products. This is most especially true with cars when if you want a custom order from the factory that might not have good resale value if you return it, you have to jump through hoops to convince a dealer to do it.
I am interested to see the kind of support available for Linux on the MSI Mega180 sytem. It should be fairly straightforward as it is nForce2, but I still wouldn't expect the LCD or remote to be easy to talk to -- might be a fun project to hack on...
For the extremely lazy, the X-Arcade folks are taking preorders on their trackball unit, which I believe includes a 3" trackball. They have not traditionally used happ buttons and joysticks in the past, so it's doubtful this ball will have the same feel as the happ balls on most golden tee machines.
If you do want the "real deal" you can get a 3" trackball from Happ Controls and to interface it you can buy an OptiPAC from Ultimarc, a usb interface from happ (a bit more expensive, though it supports 3 buttons unlike the OptiPAC) or you can even hack apart an old ball mouse and interface through that. Personally, I am using the Ultimarc OptiPAC with a Happ 3" ball on my own cabinet.
Incredible Technologies (makers of Golden Tee Golf arcade machines) used to publish a version of Golden Tee for the PC, though they themselves do not sell it anymore. You can get a copy from ebay for about 3-5 bucks, and there are some addon courses for sale also. The courses are from the arcade games Golden Tee 3D Golf and (the addons) Golden Tee Golf '97. The game supports network, modem, and internet play.
Though it's dated and the graphics are not as good as some of the newer titles, the price is right, and the experience is as close as you can get to the arcade if you want to practice your Golden Tee at home. I bought golden tee pc from ebay last week and have been having a lot of fun with it on the cabinet.
I had a similar experience -- I think it was 1992 or 1993.. I found a dial-in number for public access to the local library card catalog system (Running Dynix on SysV). After a little prodding, I found a way to get access to gopher through the system, which I then could use to jump off to telnet hyperlinks. I think their whole network was connected to the net by a 56K frame relay or something. Fun stuff.
A local ISP was started a year or so later, so I no longer had to jump through hoops to get net access anymore:)
To prevent sniffer attacks against port knocking, one could very easily implement a shared key based system where the knock sequence and timing were defined by an algorighm that generated the sequence based on a shared key and current time. It's still just another password and layer of obscurity; however, it's more cryptographically secure than a fixed knock that can be sniffed out.
I can't think of a way to implement a public key based knocking system without the server needing a copy of each possible user's public keys; and that would sort of defeat the intention of such a system to begin with.
Perhaps I will hack something into that reference implementation. The idea sounds pretty fun to implement, especially for folks who have completely shitty ISP's who get irate about listening services..
This is a very good article on the subject that does a good job of explaining it from both ends, though it's a little perl heavy for no really good reason -- plus it ignores a lot of better and easier techniques to prevent cross-site scripting problems if you actually are using perl or mod_perl.
There is a problem in Listing 5, though. The article says the script is vulnerable because it blindly prints an input value back to the user; however, it only prints the word "parameter" back to the user and is thus not really vulnerable to anything. Looks like they left out a "$".
This link is their technical issues section (no longer on the site).. it doesn't particularly apply to what this guy is asking though since they are primarily concerned with a conversion of VGA to NTSC -- a much different problem.
The site Retro Remakes catalogs remakes of classic games and games inspired by classic games that you probably never knew about. Most of them are free. Granted, most often it's not the original game company doing a full-blown 3d version of some classic 80's space shooter, but there's enough stuff on the site to keep anyone entertained for hours.
The albertson's down the street from me will ask you if you have a card (I have one and use it) but if you don't have the card, the cashier will blip their own card so you get the discounts anyway.
I think they do this because Albertsons is one of those stores that has a bizzare policy of 'buy so many of this and then get one free' -- I know you get a free box of cereal every time you buy 30 boxes, so that's probably what they are after.
Yeah I thought about that when I wrote it, but felt that deleting the lame joke would have been too much effort. Thanks for the compliment on the installation -- it was a lot of work:)
This guy's setup is pretty nicely done. It's the first decent Macintosh one I've seen -- it's all in the software, and this fellow has done a quality job.
Actually no. Gold has the highest thermal and electrical conductivity of the natural, elemental metals, however the cost difference when you need a large chunk of it is fairly sizeable.
Diamond and other carbon structures hold the promise for better (semi-conductivity) and thermal transfer on the small scale, but at this point they are quite a bit more difficult to work with than the "traditional" materials.
DjVu is awesome. We use it extensively where I work. We have hundreds of thousands of pages of data archived in the DjVu format.
There are good opensource decoders and compressors out there and an opensource browser plugin; however, the main problem with encoding a DjVu image is that you have to split the (losslessly compressed SjBz) foreground out from the (highly compressed IW44) background when you begin the compression, and there are no good open algorithms for doing that. Commercial software, unfortunately is the only current resort for performing this task, so while there are open source compressors, they are all but worthless for doing much other than recompresing layers already extracted from existing DjVu documents.
At any rate, the compression ratios are phenominal. Full page color 300dpi scans of documents compress down to like 15-50Kbytes or less at acceptible quality for document reproduction or archival. Unfortunately, it's slow as hell to compress the things. We offload compression onto a cluster of machines to be able to keep up with the scanners.
Don't forget that the ultimate "between two windowpanes" insulation would simply be to create a vacuum between them. Even aerogel can't beat that.
In practical use; however, it would be better since it would last longer. I wonder though how it would stand up to the light and IR bombarding it though..
Since cars are simply running out of features to add, most manufacturers are doing this. BMW and Mercades already have it working also and are waiting on more approvals and testing. It will be very interesting to see how the lawsuits turn out when this thing screws up and wrecks cars.
It's interesting that many of these new vehicle features are doing more and more active monitoring of the car's surroundings. Reverse distance warning systems use ultrasonic emitters in the rear bumper to keep you from hitting small animals, etc. when backing up. Radar in the front grille monitors the speed of the car in front of you for distance-based (following) cruise control.
I wonder how long it will be before cars have HUD's that put hash marks around all other cars on the road and tell you their distance (from your car) and speeds...
The Eucalyptis tree is similarly a problem in Hawaii. It was brought in to solve erosion and weather problems many years ago after the rainforest was cleared to harvest sandalwood; however, being an alien species and highly monotypic, it is now preventing the native plants from growing back. The guy who brought the tree in said something to the effect of "you'll laud me now but hate me later." I agree that it would be good to have such a plant that can be used in this manner as an environment booster and then automatically die off. Too bad when you start talking about this kind of stuff all the tree huggers can smell is themselves. Genetic research and genetic manipulation is one of the few tools that we have at our disposal to make proper environmental repairs in a timely manner and ensure that we don't have to do any more damage as the human population grows.
Slashdot Mirror
Score: 4, Funny only because it's true.
The other advantage is that you need fewer optics to perform correction tasks with a laser projection system. things like zoom and focus and perspective correction can all be taken care of in the software / firmware that controls the mirrors. Think of all the expensive and large optics they are putting into this latest round of "bigscreen" rear projection tv's (the ones thate are ~ 10in deep) -- most have gigantic parabolic mirrors in them and some very specialized lenses to deal with focus. With laser projection, that stuff is very nearly irrelevant...
Well when your CRT stops scanning it will burn up the phosphors at the center of your monitor, so obviously there is some safety mechanism that could be used to prevent this sort of problem...
What about if you fire the laser through some sort of 'light fuse' that will cut it off if the laser stops scanning? Might be complicated to build but would eliminate the problem...
US paper currency is printed with an intaglio process whereby the (slightly conductive) ink is rolled onto plates and then the paper is pressed into the plates (rather than the plates being pressed into the paper on most presses.) IE the RECESSED parts of the plates hold the ink, not the bits that stick up.
The effective result of using this printing method can be felt on the bill. On a new bill the ink will be coarse and raised off of the paper. The lines will be very crisp and solid. There will be no 'breaks' even microscopic in the ink.
Since it's slightly conductive (it has some metals in it and whatnot) and the lines (and crosshatching etc) are pretty well continuous it's going to be an excellent absorber of microwave energy. Without anything else in the microwave to absorb the energy better than the money, it's likely the ink near the portrait is going to get really hot really fast. This is pretty much what I'd expect from microwaving money.
All that being said, the RFID equipment or the security equipment that this money was falsely triggering must be some of the cheapest crap on the market!
You are lucky you live in the US where the laws allow idiot consumers taht spend too much money to simply change their mind and return used products. This is most especially true with cars when if you want a custom order from the factory that might not have good resale value if you return it, you have to jump through hoops to convince a dealer to do it.
I suggest vrms as a healthier replacement.
I am interested to see the kind of support available for Linux on the MSI Mega180 sytem. It should be fairly straightforward as it is nForce2, but I still wouldn't expect the LCD or remote to be easy to talk to -- might be a fun project to hack on...
Well he made some other variants of falling block games like Welltris.
As far as tetris variants go though, I am very fond of Block-Out.
For the extremely lazy, the X-Arcade folks are taking preorders on their trackball unit, which I believe includes a 3" trackball. They have not traditionally used happ buttons and joysticks in the past, so it's doubtful this ball will have the same feel as the happ balls on most golden tee machines.
If you do want the "real deal" you can get a 3" trackball from Happ Controls and to interface it you can buy an OptiPAC from Ultimarc, a usb interface from happ (a bit more expensive, though it supports 3 buttons unlike the OptiPAC) or you can even hack apart an old ball mouse and interface through that. Personally, I am using the Ultimarc OptiPAC with a Happ 3" ball on my own cabinet.
Incredible Technologies (makers of Golden Tee Golf arcade machines) used to publish a version of Golden Tee for the PC, though they themselves do not sell it anymore. You can get a copy from ebay for about 3-5 bucks, and there are some addon courses for sale also. The courses are from the arcade games Golden Tee 3D Golf and (the addons) Golden Tee Golf '97. The game supports network, modem, and internet play.
Though it's dated and the graphics are not as good as some of the newer titles, the price is right, and the experience is as close as you can get to the arcade if you want to practice your Golden Tee at home. I bought golden tee pc from ebay last week and have been having a lot of fun with it on the cabinet.
I had a similar experience -- I think it was 1992 or 1993.. I found a dial-in number for public access to the local library card catalog system (Running Dynix on SysV). After a little prodding, I found a way to get access to gopher through the system, which I then could use to jump off to telnet hyperlinks. I think their whole network was connected to the net by a 56K frame relay or something. Fun stuff.
:)
A local ISP was started a year or so later, so I no longer had to jump through hoops to get net access anymore
To prevent sniffer attacks against port knocking, one could very easily implement a shared key based system where the knock sequence and timing were defined by an algorighm that generated the sequence based on a shared key and current time. It's still just another password and layer of obscurity; however, it's more cryptographically secure than a fixed knock that can be sniffed out.
I can't think of a way to implement a public key based knocking system without the server needing a copy of each possible user's public keys; and that would sort of defeat the intention of such a system to begin with.
Perhaps I will hack something into that reference implementation. The idea sounds pretty fun to implement, especially for folks who have completely shitty ISP's who get irate about listening services..
This is a very good article on the subject that does a good job of explaining it from both ends, though it's a little perl heavy for no really good reason -- plus it ignores a lot of better and easier techniques to prevent cross-site scripting problems if you actually are using perl or mod_perl.
There is a problem in Listing 5, though. The article says the script is vulnerable because it blindly prints an input value back to the user; however, it only prints the word "parameter" back to the user and is thus not really vulnerable to anything. Looks like they left out a "$".
Mooninites unite and assemble!
No one can defeat the quad laser. Jumping is useless!
This link is their technical issues section (no longer on the site) .. it doesn't particularly apply to what this guy is asking though since they are primarily concerned with a conversion of VGA to NTSC -- a much different problem.
Don't you mean Darth Darth Binks?
All Yousa Peoples Gonna Die!!!
The site Retro Remakes catalogs remakes of classic games and games inspired by classic games that you probably never knew about. Most of them are free. Granted, most often it's not the original game company doing a full-blown 3d version of some classic 80's space shooter, but there's enough stuff on the site to keep anyone entertained for hours.
The albertson's down the street from me will ask you if you have a card (I have one and use it) but if you don't have the card, the cashier will blip their own card so you get the discounts anyway.
I think they do this because Albertsons is one of those stores that has a bizzare policy of 'buy so many of this and then get one free' -- I know you get a free box of cereal every time you buy 30 boxes, so that's probably what they are after.
Yeah I thought about that when I wrote it, but felt that deleting the lame joke would have been too much effort. Thanks for the compliment on the installation -- it was a lot of work :)
This guy's setup is pretty nicely done. It's the first decent Macintosh one I've seen -- it's all in the software, and this fellow has done a quality job.
There are some really impressive installations out there. You can see a lot of them on the mp3car.com finished project board. In case anyone is curious, this is my installation.
~GoRK
Actually no. Gold has the highest thermal and electrical conductivity of the natural, elemental metals, however the cost difference when you need a large chunk of it is fairly sizeable.
Diamond and other carbon structures hold the promise for better (semi-conductivity) and thermal transfer on the small scale, but at this point they are quite a bit more difficult to work with than the "traditional" materials.
They make good hardware mainly because they buy (or rip off) a good design and someone else makes it.
DjVu is awesome. We use it extensively where I work. We have hundreds of thousands of pages of data archived in the DjVu format.
There are good opensource decoders and compressors out there and an opensource browser plugin; however, the main problem with encoding a DjVu image is that you have to split the (losslessly compressed SjBz) foreground out from the (highly compressed IW44) background when you begin the compression, and there are no good open algorithms for doing that. Commercial software, unfortunately is the only current resort for performing this task, so while there are open source compressors, they are all but worthless for doing much other than recompresing layers already extracted from existing DjVu documents.
At any rate, the compression ratios are phenominal. Full page color 300dpi scans of documents compress down to like 15-50Kbytes or less at acceptible quality for document reproduction or archival. Unfortunately, it's slow as hell to compress the things. We offload compression onto a cluster of machines to be able to keep up with the scanners.
Don't forget that the ultimate "between two windowpanes" insulation would simply be to create a vacuum between them. Even aerogel can't beat that.
In practical use; however, it would be better since it would last longer. I wonder though how it would stand up to the light and IR bombarding it though..
Since cars are simply running out of features to add, most manufacturers are doing this. BMW and Mercades already have it working also and are waiting on more approvals and testing. It will be very interesting to see how the lawsuits turn out when this thing screws up and wrecks cars.
It's interesting that many of these new vehicle features are doing more and more active monitoring of the car's surroundings. Reverse distance warning systems use ultrasonic emitters in the rear bumper to keep you from hitting small animals, etc. when backing up. Radar in the front grille monitors the speed of the car in front of you for distance-based (following) cruise control.
I wonder how long it will be before cars have HUD's that put hash marks around all other cars on the road and tell you their distance (from your car) and speeds...
The Eucalyptis tree is similarly a problem in Hawaii. It was brought in to solve erosion and weather problems many years ago after the rainforest was cleared to harvest sandalwood; however, being an alien species and highly monotypic, it is now preventing the native plants from growing back. The guy who brought the tree in said something to the effect of "you'll laud me now but hate me later." I agree that it would be good to have such a plant that can be used in this manner as an environment booster and then automatically die off. Too bad when you start talking about this kind of stuff all the tree huggers can smell is themselves. Genetic research and genetic manipulation is one of the few tools that we have at our disposal to make proper environmental repairs in a timely manner and ensure that we don't have to do any more damage as the human population grows.