Most refrigerators are practically dehumidifiers. Condensation will only happen when you open the door ane let humid air in. Besides, you could also just exchange the air in the fridge with some dry CO2 you can get really really cheap.
1) This was not main page news unless you have flat mode turned on.
2) Every office I have worked in has had its share of chair rolling. Last Friday, it was a fairly slow afternoon, and one of the ladies rolled around the whole office to say hi to everybody in her chair. In a tech support room, some people actually raced chairs around the island.
3) I actually downloaded the game and while it is a bit prone to crashing and whatnot it is actually pretty fun and amusing for a time killer. The theme is at least, unique, and the game isn't full of gore or carnage. It reminded me a little bit of Mario Kart.
That is what we do here. I work for an NASD member firm with logging requirements similar to those of the trading firms. I got a patch for jabber somewhere that spits out the messages, then I stuff it into a database and archive it out of there. As a side benefit to using Jabber, we can IM to AIM, MSN, etc. without losing the required logging. Highly recommended -- this saves us thousands of dollars in telephone charges monthly.
Has anyone encountered the problem when quicktime will not even install in windows without completely crashing the machine? I have tried to install quicktime 6.1 numerous times on this one windows xp machine to no avail. Nothing will work - even directly after a completely new clean install of windows.
Plenty of other people out there seem to have the same problem, but i havent found a fix for it. Very bizzare.
except that this field seems to have nothing to do with how it locates you with respect to others proximity - their own site seems to indicate that the location works so well that you can specify which table at the coffee shop you are sitting at so that someone can come over and say "hi."
This application must use some seriously whacked pseudoscience to do its geolocation, which is why it doesnt work at all. I don't think its hit a single person within 250 miles of me and im smack in the center of the damn US. A little window where people could click on a map or enter a postal code would be better -the first three digits even for those who will scream out about privacy BS- then narrow the search with the IP/traceroute based crapola). Maybe that would work a little bit at least
Real (following the standard anyway) power over ethernet is very cool, though and will not damaged legacy devices. The device has a small circut that is powered from the low voltage present on any ethernet cable which makes a power request from the switch or hub, which then is supposed to supply the correct power. If the device is unplugged, the switch or hub will not supply power on the port until it receives another request.
Anyway if you want to learn about it in more detail, look up 802.3af. Basically, 48V is supplied on the MDI pins to a device that wants it. The only real problem with adopting it is that it's most useful for wireless and VoIP systems, and unfortunately, there's a lot of legacy equipment out there that works with other Power-over-ethernet systems that use different pins or different voltages making adoption of the new standard expensive.
Cool that someone wrote something that actually decodes it! I imagine that the graphics chips are scaling up a very low resolution decoded image though.
Still, there are other promising video codecs that (while maybe not as highly compressed as divx) would function much better in the fixed-point low speed world of the GBA and provide full resolution video with processing power to spare!
I'll try to find the demo you were talking about and see how it runs on the actual hardware. Will be fun to see...
Except that the ARM chip in the GBA is the ARM7, and it has no MMU. Plus, it runs at about 16MHz. It could play video but would probably choke trying to do anything with Divx.
Why don't they just start up the Euro equivalent of wheresgeorge.com, the American currency tracker (and www.whereswilly.com, the tracker of inferior Canadian money run by the same folks)?
I couldn't honestly believe there wasn't already one, though, so I did a little googling and found this: http://www.eurobilltracker.com/ site which does exactly that.
Because Mesa's software rendering is SLOW as HELL. Ever load up Quake3 using Mesa? The fastest machines can't keep a good framerate in 640x480 with most of the options tuned way down, much less UT2003. Mesa is nice enough, but is almost more of a reference iplementation created for apps other than games.
Another thing that software rendering could do is more easily thwart cheats, since there's fewer ways to get in-between the game and the onscreen graphics.
Anyway, writing really good, fast rendering engines for 3d stuff like this will always continue to be very impressive to me.
Actually, to be very technical they are just a tiny tiny bit different. They are different enough that a cart can detect which model gameboy it's in by code (and it's not just some sort of query that returns "gameboy sp" - afaik, that sort of direct determination is not possible) -- some homebrew code is using the detection to slightly alter a game's color pallette to account for differences between the way colors look onscreen between the GBA and the GBA SP.. But other than that, there's no difference between the units and all code is 100% compatible.
The introduction of the GBA SP undoubtadely left Nintendo with an overrun of original GBA product either pre-assembly or pre-shipment. Although I havent seen a site posting the innards of a Gameboy Player unit for the GameCube, I would bet that it contains a repurposed GBA motherboard.
These things are built around racing seats... If you've ever sat in a racing seat for more than about 15 minutes, you'll know that they aren't exactly designed for comfort.
Racing seats are designed for safety. They are designed to keep a driver in place and secure in the event of a wreck. Any company who would build a product such as this deserves to have their heads beat in with a baseball bat. My office chair is 1000 times more comfortable and it costs 40 bucks. I can see if perhaps they were desigining some sort of chair for a racing sim or game, but for everyday use... I'm sorry but any fucker who orders one of these deserves the back pain they develop!
BTW, for any naysayer: you can tell they are regular (cheap) racing seats by simply looking at them -- the holes right below the headreast are for the four or five point shoulder harnesses to go through to secure a driver into the chair.
Again, in case the people who posted this advertorial are reading, I hope you don't sell a single one of these piece of shit chairs. Any comment refuting this argument is most likely someone from this enterprise posting some bullshit about how great their complete crap idea is...
Although one of the little whiz-bang demos of software radio generally involves tuning two FM radio stations or something at the same time, there's nothing particularly unique about a software-defined radio that makes it possible. Couple the right wideband receiver with the right circuts to do some off-center modulation and you could build an analog radio that would tune a couple stations at the same time too.
It's simply a question of how much bandwidth you can tune simeotaneously, how much bandwidth each component signal occupies, and the wideband rx having enough definition to clearly modulate a signal that it is not directly tuned to receive.
Some of these issues are really going to be stickers with bringing software-defined radios to the general market on a large scale. Yes, in theory a software defined radio might be able to tune AM, FM, HDTV, 802.11b and every cellular protocol ever, but actually producing the analog part that could do the RF job for that software radio would be a real trick indeed! The radio in this article, for instance, only does 100-400MHz or so.
Let's get some good software-defined antennas going here (Phased Gate Array antennas have some good promise here), and perhaps some software-defined RF electronics (think the analog equivalent of an FPGA) and then we'll really be in business for this software-defined junk!
Yeah, I thought about that right after I had posted.. Problem is most lights that need one of these "electric eyes" already have it built into the fixture -- but nothing a little electrical tape won't fix!
This might seem obvious, but since the network would only work when the lights are on, this would be something of a problem for a very large number of applications where this might actually be of use; for instance, in outdoor spaces where the lights are off during daylight hours.
A workaround, I suppose would be to have a relay in the unit capable of switching the light on and off via network control, X10, or similar while the actual circut remains operational. That would be a likely needed feature on any commercial unit.
Probably quite a while since TiVo has changed from PPC to MIPS and that'd mean another port of OS/X.
Plus, the cost of reimplementing every piece of software on the unit, head end servers, and back-end data processing systems and the like while maintaining interoperability with the old equipment out there probably outdoes the cost saved by only having to maintain one codebase -- plus if they *bought* tivo, they'd get all the engineers that go along with it -- embedded linux engineers.
Sort of like how Microsoft bought Hotmail and only recently (within the last year or so) got it onto the Windows platform (most of the MTA's are actually still UNIX though)
This reminds me of another thing... People who shell out like 300 bucks for a SPDIF audio cable made out of like gold plated 00 gauge wire that's too fat even to bend into anything smaller than an 8" bend radius.
Again, they can "hear the difference" -- i mean, I can hear the difference too when I use a shitty SPDIF cable. The sound cuts out and the DAC buzzes really badly when 1% of the bits don't get there - because the frames can't be decoded! The fucking format has a fucking checksum to make sure the fucking signal comes through fucking flawlessly! IE if you can hear it through a SPDIF cable and it doesnt pop and cut out, then you are getting 100% of the digital information that there is.
One guy gave this particular cable a raving review because it made the sound "more analog" -- whatever the fuck that means -- it's actually impossible for the cable to affect the sound unless it's fucking with the equipment grounding and causing a hum somewhere else in the electronics -- which would actually make it a shitty cable. Fuckers would probably do better with a piece of alarm wire with some RCA connectors soldered on the endss. That's totally retro analog bullshit there!
Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?
Is this sort of like the one time I ran the TI-85 emulator inside of vMac inside of VirtualPC on a Mac, or am I just missing something? Or maybe the time that I ran VPC in ShapeShifter inside of UAE on the PC?!?!
And, again, we are supposed to use this sort of thing in *ENTERPRISE COMPUTING*.. or am I again missing something?
They have this fucking stupid idea that the laser light bounces around inside the plastic and spills out the sides causing bit errors as it continues to scatter around inside of their fucking ridiculous $10,000 cd players (ahem, excuse me they are actually "transports" since all they do is take the bitstream off of the disc and leave it to another $10,000 to decode) Anyway, you paint the sides of the CD so that the light doesn't spill out. (It's hard not to bust out laughing at these fucktards when they actually claim they can *HEAR THE DIFFERENCE* yet will not entertain a blind test.
Never mind the fact that the format is designed with built-in error recovery to ensure that it is possible to get a 100% authentic bitstream from even a slightly damaged, marred or scratched disc. Add a small RAM buffer and spin the drive a little faster, then you even have time to go back and re-read any problematic section!
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Most refrigerators are practically dehumidifiers. Condensation will only happen when you open the door ane let humid air in. Besides, you could also just exchange the air in the fridge with some dry CO2 you can get really really cheap.
how about /([a-z]?[a-z](ni|i|nu)x|[a-z]*bsd)/i
Well, you have to concede a few things:
1) This was not main page news unless you have flat mode turned on.
2) Every office I have worked in has had its share of chair rolling. Last Friday, it was a fairly slow afternoon, and one of the ladies rolled around the whole office to say hi to everybody in her chair. In a tech support room, some people actually raced chairs around the island.
3) I actually downloaded the game and while it is a bit prone to crashing and whatnot it is actually pretty fun and amusing for a time killer. The theme is at least, unique, and the game isn't full of gore or carnage. It reminded me a little bit of Mario Kart.
That is what we do here. I work for an NASD member firm with logging requirements similar to those of the trading firms. I got a patch for jabber somewhere that spits out the messages, then I stuff it into a database and archive it out of there. As a side benefit to using Jabber, we can IM to AIM, MSN, etc. without losing the required logging. Highly recommended -- this saves us thousands of dollars in telephone charges monthly.
Has anyone encountered the problem when quicktime will not even install in windows without completely crashing the machine? I have tried to install quicktime 6.1 numerous times on this one windows xp machine to no avail. Nothing will work - even directly after a completely new clean install of windows.
Plenty of other people out there seem to have the same problem, but i havent found a fix for it. Very bizzare.
~GoRK
except that this field seems to have nothing to do with how it locates you with respect to others proximity - their own site seems to indicate that the location works so well that you can specify which table at the coffee shop you are sitting at so that someone can come over and say "hi."
This application must use some seriously whacked pseudoscience to do its geolocation, which is why it doesnt work at all. I don't think its hit a single person within 250 miles of me and im smack in the center of the damn US. A little window where people could click on a map or enter a postal code would be better -the first three digits even for those who will scream out about privacy BS- then narrow the search with the IP/traceroute based crapola). Maybe that would work a little bit at least
Real (following the standard anyway) power over ethernet is very cool, though and will not damaged legacy devices. The device has a small circut that is powered from the low voltage present on any ethernet cable which makes a power request from the switch or hub, which then is supposed to supply the correct power. If the device is unplugged, the switch or hub will not supply power on the port until it receives another request.
Anyway if you want to learn about it in more detail, look up 802.3af. Basically, 48V is supplied on the MDI pins to a device that wants it. The only real problem with adopting it is that it's most useful for wireless and VoIP systems, and unfortunately, there's a lot of legacy equipment out there that works with other Power-over-ethernet systems that use different pins or different voltages making adoption of the new standard expensive.
~GoRK
Cool that someone wrote something that actually decodes it! I imagine that the graphics chips are scaling up a very low resolution decoded image though.
Still, there are other promising video codecs that (while maybe not as highly compressed as divx) would function much better in the fixed-point low speed world of the GBA and provide full resolution video with processing power to spare!
I'll try to find the demo you were talking about and see how it runs on the actual hardware. Will be fun to see...
~GoRK
It would be better if it did something like this.
Except that the ARM chip in the GBA is the ARM7, and it has no MMU. Plus, it runs at about 16MHz. It could play video but would probably choke trying to do anything with Divx.
Why don't they just start up the Euro equivalent of wheresgeorge.com, the American currency tracker (and www.whereswilly.com, the tracker of inferior Canadian money run by the same folks)?
I couldn't honestly believe there wasn't already one, though, so I did a little googling and found this: http://www.eurobilltracker.com/ site which does exactly that.
Who nees RFID tags when you have this?
Because Mesa's software rendering is SLOW as HELL. Ever load up Quake3 using Mesa? The fastest machines can't keep a good framerate in 640x480 with most of the options tuned way down, much less UT2003. Mesa is nice enough, but is almost more of a reference iplementation created for apps other than games.
Another thing that software rendering could do is more easily thwart cheats, since there's fewer ways to get in-between the game and the onscreen graphics.
Anyway, writing really good, fast rendering engines for 3d stuff like this will always continue to be very impressive to me.
So will the 2ghz chip be named Esther?
Actually, to be very technical they are just a tiny tiny bit different. They are different enough that a cart can detect which model gameboy it's in by code (and it's not just some sort of query that returns "gameboy sp" - afaik, that sort of direct determination is not possible) -- some homebrew code is using the detection to slightly alter a game's color pallette to account for differences between the way colors look onscreen between the GBA and the GBA SP.. But other than that, there's no difference between the units and all code is 100% compatible.
The introduction of the GBA SP undoubtadely left Nintendo with an overrun of original GBA product either pre-assembly or pre-shipment. Although I havent seen a site posting the innards of a Gameboy Player unit for the GameCube, I would bet that it contains a repurposed GBA motherboard.
~GoRK
Excuse me, but why in the FUCK would they suspend the sales of THEIR OWN PRODUCT if they OWN THE LICENSE for the IP contained therein?
This is fucking ridiculous. Burn in hell SCO you pieces of fucking shit!!!!!!
~GoRK
Aren't those guys all dead now?
These things are built around racing seats... If you've ever sat in a racing seat for more than about 15 minutes, you'll know that they aren't exactly designed for comfort.
Racing seats are designed for safety. They are designed to keep a driver in place and secure in the event of a wreck. Any company who would build a product such as this deserves to have their heads beat in with a baseball bat. My office chair is 1000 times more comfortable and it costs 40 bucks. I can see if perhaps they were desigining some sort of chair for a racing sim or game, but for everyday use... I'm sorry but any fucker who orders one of these deserves the back pain they develop!
BTW, for any naysayer: you can tell they are regular (cheap) racing seats by simply looking at them -- the holes right below the headreast are for the four or five point shoulder harnesses to go through to secure a driver into the chair.
Again, in case the people who posted this advertorial are reading, I hope you don't sell a single one of these piece of shit chairs. Any comment refuting this argument is most likely someone from this enterprise posting some bullshit about how great their complete crap idea is...
~GoRK
Erm.. No. That's not technically true.
Although one of the little whiz-bang demos of software radio generally involves tuning two FM radio stations or something at the same time, there's nothing particularly unique about a software-defined radio that makes it possible. Couple the right wideband receiver with the right circuts to do some off-center modulation and you could build an analog radio that would tune a couple stations at the same time too.
It's simply a question of how much bandwidth you can tune simeotaneously, how much bandwidth each component signal occupies, and the wideband rx having enough definition to clearly modulate a signal that it is not directly tuned to receive.
Some of these issues are really going to be stickers with bringing software-defined radios to the general market on a large scale. Yes, in theory a software defined radio might be able to tune AM, FM, HDTV, 802.11b and every cellular protocol ever, but actually producing the analog part that could do the RF job for that software radio would be a real trick indeed! The radio in this article, for instance, only does 100-400MHz or so.
Let's get some good software-defined antennas going here (Phased Gate Array antennas have some good promise here), and perhaps some software-defined RF electronics (think the analog equivalent of an FPGA) and then we'll really be in business for this software-defined junk!
~GoRK
Yeah, I thought about that right after I had posted.. Problem is most lights that need one of these "electric eyes" already have it built into the fixture -- but nothing a little electrical tape won't fix!
This might seem obvious, but since the network would only work when the lights are on, this would be something of a problem for a very large number of applications where this might actually be of use; for instance, in outdoor spaces where the lights are off during daylight hours.
A workaround, I suppose would be to have a relay in the unit capable of switching the light on and off via network control, X10, or similar while the actual circut remains operational. That would be a likely needed feature on any commercial unit.
~GoRK
Probably quite a while since TiVo has changed from PPC to MIPS and that'd mean another port of OS/X.
Plus, the cost of reimplementing every piece of software on the unit, head end servers, and back-end data processing systems and the like while maintaining interoperability with the old equipment out there probably outdoes the cost saved by only having to maintain one codebase -- plus if they *bought* tivo, they'd get all the engineers that go along with it -- embedded linux engineers.
Sort of like how Microsoft bought Hotmail and only recently (within the last year or so) got it onto the Windows platform (most of the MTA's are actually still UNIX though)
This reminds me of another thing... People who shell out like 300 bucks for a SPDIF audio cable made out of like gold plated 00 gauge wire that's too fat even to bend into anything smaller than an 8" bend radius.
x
Again, they can "hear the difference" -- i mean, I can hear the difference too when I use a shitty SPDIF cable. The sound cuts out and the DAC buzzes really badly when 1% of the bits don't get there - because the frames can't be decoded! The fucking format has a fucking checksum to make sure the fucking signal comes through fucking flawlessly! IE if you can hear it through a SPDIF cable and it doesnt pop and cut out, then you are getting 100% of the digital information that there is.
Here's some fucktards ranting on this topic:
http://www.audioreview.com/PRD_124054_1584crx.asp
One guy gave this particular cable a raving review because it made the sound "more analog" -- whatever the fuck that means -- it's actually impossible for the cable to affect the sound unless it's fucking with the equipment grounding and causing a hum somewhere else in the electronics -- which would actually make it a shitty cable. Fuckers would probably do better with a piece of alarm wire with some RCA connectors soldered on the endss. That's totally retro analog bullshit there!
~GoRK
Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?
.. or am I again missing something?
Is this sort of like the one time I ran the TI-85 emulator inside of vMac inside of VirtualPC on a Mac, or am I just missing something? Or maybe the time that I ran VPC in ShapeShifter inside of UAE on the PC?!?!
And, again, we are supposed to use this sort of thing in *ENTERPRISE COMPUTING*
~GoRK
They have this fucking stupid idea that the laser light bounces around inside the plastic and spills out the sides causing bit errors as it continues to scatter around inside of their fucking ridiculous $10,000 cd players (ahem, excuse me they are actually "transports" since all they do is take the bitstream off of the disc and leave it to another $10,000 to decode) Anyway, you paint the sides of the CD so that the light doesn't spill out. (It's hard not to bust out laughing at these fucktards when they actually claim they can *HEAR THE DIFFERENCE* yet will not entertain a blind test.
Never mind the fact that the format is designed with built-in error recovery to ensure that it is possible to get a 100% authentic bitstream from even a slightly damaged, marred or scratched disc. Add a small RAM buffer and spin the drive a little faster, then you even have time to go back and re-read any problematic section!