Sensors and processing of that data in hardware need to come a long ways before will will see usefull robots. We really need high resoultion lazer based scanning and ccd sensors that are not designed for human viewing to come down in cost 1000x. You also need something to process the data from these sensors, todays general purpose PC's would suck down too much current for a mobile robot todo the nessary data analias. You would need dedicated processing built right into the CCD sensors. Basicly you would just want a dataset of 3d corridantes from the hardware that is updated in real time. It would then require vast amount of memory to try and keep a "mental image" of where things are.
I've been playing around with Sharp IR range finders and the resoultion and speed is just not there for real world interaction and then to take even that low resoultion data and do something with it is something else. But then designing software really isn't my field.
AI, don't get me started on how far we are from seeing this... we will likely never(atleast in our life time) see anything that people would call inteligent behavour. Computers are simple machines, they just seem inteligent because they do things pretty fast(We can only see something like 30fps and hear up to 20khz, I'm not sure how fast our other senses are). Its all just switching and clock work.
Sewage and trash is easy, burn the trash, dump the sewage overboard. Most small costal towns have their sewers running straight into the ocean untreated.
They are in international waters to avoid laws, so dumping laws don't really apply to them. I don't think they would get away with dumping oil, around here(NL, Canada) they would start a war over it.
I should of said PV systems and 200watts per square meter is nothing when we are consuming a few kw in a square meter. There is power their, we just can't harvest it directly, wind generators is a far cheaper, more effienct way to collect it.
Exactly, the problem is that higher oil prices basicly equate to a lower quality of life for the average person, one's pay check won't go as far as has in the past and they won't be making much more money unless they have serious investments made in the oil industry.
Oil won't run out in our lifetime but its going to get alot more expensive and the suburbs life style that alot of people in north america are use to will come to an end. Its simple, your going to have to live within walking distance of where you work and buy food.
Alternative fuels become more viable as oil prices go up but they will never meet our current consumption.
What we really need is prices to take a good leap now and give everyone a good scare so they start conserving energy but at the same time it can't be so big that it hurts industry. Maybe they could just increase taxes at the pump and on home heating. Keeping prices low for industry and curving consumer demand. Consumers wouldn't take it and they wouldn't have a chance at being re-elected...
Oil production is getting to the point where supply is not meeting demand. Just last week crude oil hit record highs.
Just go to http://news.google.ca and search for oil.
This problem isn't going to go away but it will solve it self, oil and gas is going to be so expensive in a few years people will not be able to afford to drive to work or drive anywhere for that matter. Prices are expected to get up to $190 a barrel in the long run(before 2020). That means prices at the pump are going to be 4 times higher than today.
And no, hydrogen power won't be the solution, you need to get that hydrogen from somewhere, we are already short on electric power most of which is produced from oil and gas. Currently the best way to produce hydrogen is from oil.
Hydro electric is tapped out in the US. Wind power has some potiental but has its problems. Solar just dose not produce enough energy. Nucular has alot of potential but that won't last more than 30 years, the supply of fuel is limited, though lower grade fuels are available at higher cost.
There is no way we can continue to consume energy at the current rate. The Bush goverment could start pushing people to conserve energy but I think they would rather let the high oil prices do that for them. Iraq will help alittle if they can get things stablized and increase production. I was first puzzled why the americans were going into Iraq, I was looking at the oil production and not the oil reserves:P
The big problem with oil prices going up is that oil is used in some way for everything we consume, from just the basic shipping to market to pesticides used for growing food.
The microsoft xbox type S controllers' thumb sticks are alot better than the PS thumb stick. Now I'm starting a holy war between xbox and PS owners... Anyway the PS controllers are the worst things since windows95, only people who grew up with one in their hands like em. The xbox type S, not the giant orginal controller, fits like a glove and the thumb sticks have a pretty natural feel. Unlike the PS controllers with the thumb sticks unnaturally close together. The xbox controllers also have a little more spring to them and help maintain control, the PS controllers are a all or nothing, you gently touch the stick and it goes all the way left or right. The only thing missing on the xbox controllers are a second set of triggers(I hate having to take my thumb off the right stick to jump, reload or throw a grande)
Anyway microsoft's hardware department has been pretty good, look at the old MS mouse or even the keyboard, both worked great, the xbox is a pretty solid machine as well.
No one is going to beable to afford to live in the suburbs in a few years anyway. Oil prices are going up and up, driving to work is going to cost almost as much as you make in a day. Even with new discoveries of Oil demand is quicly out growing supply.
We are going to have to start living closer to where we work and shop.
Anyway building robots has been done, japan is already well ahead in this field.
This robot is quite useless, most of the work in building a home is the finshing work, roofing, wiring and plumbing. Who wants their entire house to be a damp basement anyway. I guess this is targeted at warm dry climates.
Now build a robot that can do drywall, plastering, sanding and painting and you would have something.
Bare wooden walls can already be factory made pretty dam quickly and go up in hours.
What we really should be focusing on is making homes really energy effiencnt and focus on more liveable apartment buildings.
Most microcontrollers have ttl level rs-232 serial hardware built right on the chip. I'm yet to see any cheap ones with USB suport built in, so thats another chip to convert from USB to ttl rs-232.
RS-232 is a horrible protocol and hardware design. Its way too slow and distance is really limited where its not a differential system like RS-485, RS-422, ethernet and USB. But yet its still everywhere.
I like USB, personally I think everything outside the tower should be USB, even the montior(USB 2.0 is too slow right now). Also everything should have some flash or even ROM where the drivers for that peice of hardware. Now all we need is a way to make cross platform drivers... I'd love to see a cross between gbit ethernet and USB.
Cell phone makers use no standard connectors for two reasons, one to make you buy their cables and two, to keep people from messing with setup of the phone. Its kinda security by rare connector:P
The difference in gauge deterimines how much power the cables will handle without melting and how much power will actually make it to the speakers. Small 16 gauge cables will have a higher resistance and thus more of the energy will be disipated as heat in the cable and if you are pushing alot of power(1000w+) you risk melting the cables and starting a fire.
Speaker cables are just a pair of conductors, aslong as they are big enough you can't go wrong. The connectors are some what important, bar copper will oxidize and become an insulator and reduce the power getting to the speakers.
With patch cables(line level signals) sheilding is important, the more the better. The more sheilding the stiffer the cable will get and thus the harder to work with and it may strain the connectors on your audio equipment.
For video feeds you want good coax because the frequencies are higher than audio and the cable quickly becomes a low pass filter. Standard RG-59 is more than adequate. You generally want softer for patching between equipment. Good quality connectors are worth the money. But don't waste money on gold plated connectors, nickel and silver is just as good if not better.
In general keep cables as short as possible, don't leave a 10' coil behind your system. This is why its best to make your own cables, you can make them to fit.
Cables are quite complex and they do make a huge difference when your going more than 10'. Unballenced line level(standard rca pinplug patch ables) audio cables get extreamly noisy over 10'. But Monster Cables are not going to help here, you need a set of ballancing transformers and a Ballanced sheilded pair(A pair of wires surounded by a foil or braided shield)
For speaker cables you just need big enough conductors(wires), for a 1000w cabinet your going to want atleast number 12 guage wire. AC power cords are a cheap source of number 12, get heavy duty ones from somewhere like the Home Depot or even wall mart, the only problem is that they are usually an ugly yellow or orange, sometimes you can find black cheaply. For a little more money you can buy black 12/2 or 12/3 off the roll. For connectors Nickel is alot better value than gold, its easier to solder and won't tarnish like copper.
Monster Cables just charge way to much for what you get. I guess they are ok if you want translucet blue.
All my sound gear has ballanced connections so I use digiflex cable and Neutrix connectors. Which is still pretty expensive, but no where near Moster Cables, I get it from work(live sound company) at a discount. I also pickup some connectors off ebay on bad cables and what not. N eutrix connectors last for ever.
They are connecting through a satellite thats way out in geosynchronous orbit. It takes 500-600ms to travel out to the satellite and back at the speed of light. These satellites are 35,786km from the surface of the earth, the earth's radus is only 6378km. That distance is almost like going around the earth twice at the surface.
I gota try this, getting two projecters at the same time from school might be tricky, and then there is finding some polarized glasses. They might have some filters in the physics lab...
For a cheap source I think I might just use a pair of these little sony eyecam webcam's that I'm using on my thesis. See how 3d telerobotics works...
Part of the idea is that this robot can hop onto any 802.11b/g network from which it will connect to a webserver where one can login and operate the robot. The video is only for human eyes and no processing will be done besides compression.
My thesis is a object avoidance and navagation system for mobile telerobots. My theory is that the view from the camera is too narrow to nagivate from and that additional information is requried.
I've already spent by budget on sensors, electronic componts and mircontrollers. The webcam was supose to be the simple cheap off the self part.
I already had an old dell PII 400/w 256megs of ram laptop motherboard and 802.11b card kicking around. Its currently setup to boot from cd with a usb flash drive root so we can remove the cdrom to conserve power and space onboard the robot.
The problem is that we are using an old dell PII400 laptop motherboard which only has USB 1.1
The project is to build a telerobot, so basicly capture, compress and then stream the data over 802.11b
Why an old dell motherboard and 801.11b? Because thats what I already had kicking around.
My thesis is really on assisted navaigation for mobile telerobots but we gota built the robot first.
Are there any USB1.1 webcams outthere where linux supports compression? Under windows I can get 15-20fps while under linux I can only get around 5 with this dlink webcam.
The problem is that we are using an old laptop motherboard onboard the robot so a PCI card won't work and I haven't seen many cheap pcmcia/cardbus/pc card capture cards.
The thing is that you wouldn't send in a human to do a robots job. If the first drone failed, a second drone would be sent in. There isn't really much that a human can be trained todo that a drone cannot be programmed todo provideded that the sensor data is upto par with a human which it is not yet. Spend 20 years programming a robot and it will pretty much have the caplibity as a 20yearold human. The hardware is just now getting to the point where this is possible, so we are still 20 years away. Anyway back to my orginal point, if the main radio link gets jammed, a second robot or a serise of robots could be setup to do an optical relay. Robots are cheap, human lives are not...(Well the miltary looks at what is cost to train that person and thats the loss of losing their head)
What about private channels?
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been using IRC since 96 and I have quite a circle of friends who I keep in contact with over IRC on private channels. From my home town of 8000 there are around 800 IRC users who just use IRC to keep in touch and find out where the party is at, etc...
It's also use it for illegal stuff too, like finding weed... (Most people already know who they are dealing with)
Most of the legit chat is going on in private channels that a circle of friends inhabit that will never show up on/list or in a/whois. The only way you could gather stats on these users is to sniff the traffic of the server. The legit chat channels are usually +s because you don't want to be overrun by newbies or 1337 kiddies.
MSN has put a big dent in the number of new IRCers, a few years ago IRC was growing big time but then people started to switch to MSN and the newbies followed likeing the simpler(?) interface.
Warez, MP3's and movies have moved off IRC for the most part and onto the p2p networks for the masses. Its only a few 1000 kids left running xdcc bots and fservs. Then you have the release groups who you will never meet on IRC unless you know someone. I'd have to guess there are a few IRC servers only accessable over SSH where the real big shit is going down.
One of the keys to this game is to load up on quest and go do a few at the same time. Usually when I reach a new area I load up on all the quest. In some areas this means pretty much anything I kill will be working towards a quest.
There are a few really annoying quest where you have to find some npc and kill it. Some respawn in the same spot others are randomly placed in that region and it can take hours of roaming around to find them. Pages from books are also really hard to find, I've been working on the shreading manual for a few day and I've pretty much given up on it.
This is the answer to the computer industry. Most people don't want to install software on their PC. All they need is a webbroswer, email client and some office software. Thats it, simple.
Its all the options that us geeks like that everyone else hates about computers. They all want one way to do things, they don't want anything to change, they don't want to know how to install software or what a harddrive is, etc...
Stuff like digital cameras, scanners and printers all kind of throw a wrench in things but all they need to do is come up with a forward looking standard interface(Both at the UI and driver level) that is dead simple. There shouldn't be a need for each manufacture to have their own drivers. Digital cameras are already pretty much there, most of them just come up as generic usb storage devices. Now all they need to add is a weblike interface for scanner and printer control, where when you click on your printer settings you basicly get a webpage off the deivce.
The RS-232 or EIA/TIA-232 as its know today has alot of shortcommings beyound the DCE -> DTE cabling mess. It has to be the worst standard ever!
They didn't use ballanced cabling which limits the distance and the bandwidth big time. RS-422 and 485 both use ballenced cables and signals and can go up to 4000feet at 115,200 baud while RS-232 can only go 50feet at 19,200 baud.
After playing many many hours of GTA3 I've found myself out sizing up cars, thinking I could go yank some guy out of it and take off. One day I was walking up the street and came across a car that looked really fast and I had to stop my self from going up and trying the doors.
GTA3 and above have to be the worst, just because it simulates doing crimes in the real world. Most other games are modeled in a fake place, somewhere there is no real parallel to here in the real world.
On mine I leave it set to linksys so no one can find it in the mess of 5 or 6 other linksys routers on my street. I also disabled DHCP, changed its IP to not.1 and lowered the TX pwr. To a war driver it will just seem far away and he will think he can't get an IP because he is just to far away. Then he will go on to one of the other insecure AP's on the street. If I was running WEP or WPA or had a diffrent SSID it would be like hanging a sign hackme. (I also use ssh just about everything over wireless)
I know this this shit because I do war drive. I ether go for the easyest (default config, good signal) or the hardest ("secured", weak signal).
Some of the more interesting ones are the collages links between their building back in my home town, which was totally unencrypted, they paid big money to have that system installed before wifi was popular. Now I find it funny that I can sit down in my parents living room and watch people's email passwords/email's and webbrosing scroll my screen.
Now that I'm away going to collage, I can pickup another link between the univeristy's buildings. I think they must have forgotten about this link because their wlan on their main campus is pretty secure. I can harvest email account passwords and what not. I can't associate because they are using wds accross the link. I may try and clone on of the AP's and see if I can spoof some packets into their network.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly...
Sensors and processing of that data in hardware need to come a long ways before will will see usefull robots. We really need high resoultion lazer based scanning and ccd sensors that are not designed for human viewing to come down in cost 1000x. You also need something to process the data from these sensors, todays general purpose PC's would suck down too much current for a mobile robot todo the nessary data analias. You would need dedicated processing built right into the CCD sensors. Basicly you would just want a dataset of 3d corridantes from the hardware that is updated in real time. It would then require vast amount of memory to try and keep a "mental image" of where things are.
I've been playing around with Sharp IR range finders and the resoultion and speed is just not there for real world interaction and then to take even that low resoultion data and do something with it is something else. But then designing software really isn't my field.
AI, don't get me started on how far we are from seeing this... we will likely never(atleast in our life time) see anything that people would call inteligent behavour. Computers are simple machines, they just seem inteligent because they do things pretty fast(We can only see something like 30fps and hear up to 20khz, I'm not sure how fast our other senses are). Its all just switching and clock work.
Sewage and trash is easy, burn the trash, dump the sewage overboard. Most small costal towns have their sewers running straight into the ocean untreated.
They are in international waters to avoid laws, so dumping laws don't really apply to them. I don't think they would get away with dumping oil, around here(NL, Canada) they would start a war over it.
I should of said PV systems and 200watts per square meter is nothing when we are consuming a few kw in a square meter. There is power their, we just can't harvest it directly, wind generators is a far cheaper, more effienct way to collect it.
Exactly, the problem is that higher oil prices basicly equate to a lower quality of life for the average person, one's pay check won't go as far as has in the past and they won't be making much more money unless they have serious investments made in the oil industry.
Oil won't run out in our lifetime but its going to get alot more expensive and the suburbs life style that alot of people in north america are use to will come to an end. Its simple, your going to have to live within walking distance of where you work and buy food.
Alternative fuels become more viable as oil prices go up but they will never meet our current consumption.
What we really need is prices to take a good leap now and give everyone a good scare so they start conserving energy but at the same time it can't be so big that it hurts industry. Maybe they could just increase taxes at the pump and on home heating. Keeping prices low for industry and curving consumer demand. Consumers wouldn't take it and they wouldn't have a chance at being re-elected...
I hope your joking...
:P
Oil production is getting to the point where supply is not meeting demand. Just last week crude oil hit record highs.
Just go to http://news.google.ca and search for oil.
This problem isn't going to go away but it will solve it self, oil and gas is going to be so expensive in a few years people will not be able to afford to drive to work or drive anywhere for that matter. Prices are expected to get up to $190 a barrel in the long run(before 2020). That means prices at the pump are going to be 4 times higher than today.
And no, hydrogen power won't be the solution, you need to get that hydrogen from somewhere, we are already short on electric power most of which is produced from oil and gas. Currently the best way to produce hydrogen is from oil.
Hydro electric is tapped out in the US. Wind power has some potiental but has its problems. Solar just dose not produce enough energy. Nucular has alot of potential but that won't last more than 30 years, the supply of fuel is limited, though lower grade fuels are available at higher cost.
There is no way we can continue to consume energy at the current rate. The Bush goverment could start pushing people to conserve energy but I think they would rather let the high oil prices do that for them. Iraq will help alittle if they can get things stablized and increase production. I was first puzzled why the americans were going into Iraq, I was looking at the oil production and not the oil reserves
The big problem with oil prices going up is that oil is used in some way for everything we consume, from just the basic shipping to market to pesticides used for growing food.
The microsoft xbox type S controllers' thumb sticks are alot better than the PS thumb stick. Now I'm starting a holy war between xbox and PS owners... Anyway the PS controllers are the worst things since windows95, only people who grew up with one in their hands like em. The xbox type S, not the giant orginal controller, fits like a glove and the thumb sticks have a pretty natural feel. Unlike the PS controllers with the thumb sticks unnaturally close together. The xbox controllers also have a little more spring to them and help maintain control, the PS controllers are a all or nothing, you gently touch the stick and it goes all the way left or right. The only thing missing on the xbox controllers are a second set of triggers(I hate having to take my thumb off the right stick to jump, reload or throw a grande)
Anyway microsoft's hardware department has been pretty good, look at the old MS mouse or even the keyboard, both worked great, the xbox is a pretty solid machine as well.
No one is going to beable to afford to live in the suburbs in a few years anyway. Oil prices are going up and up, driving to work is going to cost almost as much as you make in a day. Even with new discoveries of Oil demand is quicly out growing supply.
We are going to have to start living closer to where we work and shop.
Anyway building robots has been done, japan is already well ahead in this field.
This robot is quite useless, most of the work in building a home is the finshing work, roofing, wiring and plumbing. Who wants their entire house to be a damp basement anyway. I guess this is targeted at warm dry climates.
Now build a robot that can do drywall, plastering, sanding and painting and you would have something.
Bare wooden walls can already be factory made pretty dam quickly and go up in hours.
What we really should be focusing on is making homes really energy effiencnt and focus on more liveable apartment buildings.
Most microcontrollers have ttl level rs-232 serial hardware built right on the chip. I'm yet to see any cheap ones with USB suport built in, so thats another chip to convert from USB to ttl rs-232.
:P
RS-232 is a horrible protocol and hardware design. Its way too slow and distance is really limited where its not a differential system like RS-485, RS-422, ethernet and USB. But yet its still everywhere.
I like USB, personally I think everything outside the tower should be USB, even the montior(USB 2.0 is too slow right now). Also everything should have some flash or even ROM where the drivers for that peice of hardware. Now all we need is a way to make cross platform drivers... I'd love to see a cross between gbit ethernet and USB.
Cell phone makers use no standard connectors for two reasons, one to make you buy their cables and two, to keep people from messing with setup of the phone. Its kinda security by rare connector
What languagen dose he script in? PHP? perl? Javascript? :P jk
You should be even more specfic, and say English scripting or something, this is slashdot...
The difference in gauge deterimines how much power the cables will handle without melting and how much power will actually make it to the speakers. Small 16 gauge cables will have a higher resistance and thus more of the energy will be disipated as heat in the cable and if you are pushing alot of power(1000w+) you risk melting the cables and starting a fire.
Speaker cables are just a pair of conductors, aslong as they are big enough you can't go wrong. The connectors are some what important, bar copper will oxidize and become an insulator and reduce the power getting to the speakers.
With patch cables(line level signals) sheilding is important, the more the better. The more sheilding the stiffer the cable will get and thus the harder to work with and it may strain the connectors on your audio equipment.
For video feeds you want good coax because the frequencies are higher than audio and the cable quickly becomes a low pass filter. Standard RG-59 is more than adequate. You generally want softer for patching between equipment. Good quality connectors are worth the money. But don't waste money on gold plated connectors, nickel and silver is just as good if not better.
In general keep cables as short as possible, don't leave a 10' coil behind your system. This is why its best to make your own cables, you can make them to fit.
Cables are quite complex and they do make a huge difference when your going more than 10'. Unballenced line level(standard rca pinplug patch ables) audio cables get extreamly noisy over 10'. But Monster Cables are not going to help here, you need a set of ballancing transformers and a Ballanced sheilded pair(A pair of wires surounded by a foil or braided shield)
For speaker cables you just need big enough conductors(wires), for a 1000w cabinet your going to want atleast number 12 guage wire. AC power cords are a cheap source of number 12, get heavy duty ones from somewhere like the Home Depot or even wall mart, the only problem is that they are usually an ugly yellow or orange, sometimes you can find black cheaply. For a little more money you can buy black 12/2 or 12/3 off the roll. For connectors Nickel is alot better value than gold, its easier to solder and won't tarnish like copper.
Monster Cables just charge way to much for what you get. I guess they are ok if you want translucet blue.
All my sound gear has ballanced connections so I use digiflex cable and Neutrix connectors. Which is still pretty expensive, but no where near Moster Cables, I get it from work(live sound company) at a discount. I also pickup some connectors off ebay on bad cables and what not. N eutrix connectors last for ever.
They are connecting through a satellite thats way out in geosynchronous orbit. It takes 500-600ms to travel out to the satellite and back at the speed of light. These satellites are 35,786km from the surface of the earth, the earth's radus is only 6378km. That distance is almost like going around the earth twice at the surface.
At the speed of light it takes 500-600ms to travel up to the satellite and back down to the earth station.
Can anyone confirm this? Got a link?
I gota try this, getting two projecters at the same time from school might be tricky, and then there is finding some polarized glasses. They might have some filters in the physics lab...
For a cheap source I think I might just use a pair of these little sony eyecam webcam's that I'm using on my thesis. See how 3d telerobotics works...
Part of the idea is that this robot can hop onto any 802.11b/g network from which it will connect to a webserver where one can login and operate the robot. The video is only for human eyes and no processing will be done besides compression.
My thesis is a object avoidance and navagation system for mobile telerobots. My theory is that the view from the camera is too narrow to nagivate from and that additional information is requried.
I've already spent by budget on sensors, electronic componts and mircontrollers. The webcam was supose to be the simple cheap off the self part.
I already had an old dell PII 400/w 256megs of ram laptop motherboard and 802.11b card kicking around. Its currently setup to boot from cd with a usb flash drive root so we can remove the cdrom to conserve power and space onboard the robot.
The problem is that we are using an old dell PII400 laptop motherboard which only has USB 1.1
The project is to build a telerobot, so basicly capture, compress and then stream the data over 802.11b
Why an old dell motherboard and 801.11b? Because thats what I already had kicking around.
My thesis is really on assisted navaigation for mobile telerobots but we gota built the robot first.
Are there any USB1.1 webcams outthere where linux supports compression? Under windows I can get 15-20fps while under linux I can only get around 5 with this dlink webcam.
The problem is that we are using an old laptop motherboard onboard the robot so a PCI card won't work and I haven't seen many cheap pcmcia/cardbus/pc card capture cards.
I would assume changing the battery is done as part of the standard servicing.
The thing is that you wouldn't send in a human to do a robots job. If the first drone failed, a second drone would be sent in. There isn't really much that a human can be trained todo that a drone cannot be programmed todo provideded that the sensor data is upto par with a human which it is not yet. Spend 20 years programming a robot and it will pretty much have the caplibity as a 20yearold human. The hardware is just now getting to the point where this is possible, so we are still 20 years away. Anyway back to my orginal point, if the main radio link gets jammed, a second robot or a serise of robots could be setup to do an optical relay. Robots are cheap, human lives are not...(Well the miltary looks at what is cost to train that person and thats the loss of losing their head)
I've been using IRC since 96 and I have quite a circle of friends who I keep in contact with over IRC on private channels. From my home town of 8000 there are around 800 IRC users who just use IRC to keep in touch and find out where the party is at, etc...
/list or in a /whois. The only way you could gather stats on these users is to sniff the traffic of the server. The legit chat channels are usually +s because you don't want to be overrun by newbies or 1337 kiddies.
It's also use it for illegal stuff too, like finding weed... (Most people already know who they are dealing with)
Most of the legit chat is going on in private channels that a circle of friends inhabit that will never show up on
MSN has put a big dent in the number of new IRCers, a few years ago IRC was growing big time but then people started to switch to MSN and the newbies followed likeing the simpler(?) interface.
Warez, MP3's and movies have moved off IRC for the most part and onto the p2p networks for the masses. Its only a few 1000 kids left running xdcc bots and fservs. Then you have the release groups who you will never meet on IRC unless you know someone. I'd have to guess there are a few IRC servers only accessable over SSH where the real big shit is going down.
One of the keys to this game is to load up on quest and go do a few at the same time. Usually when I reach a new area I load up on all the quest. In some areas this means pretty much anything I kill will be working towards a quest.
There are a few really annoying quest where you have to find some npc and kill it. Some respawn in the same spot others are randomly placed in that region and it can take hours of roaming around to find them. Pages from books are also really hard to find, I've been working on the shreading manual for a few day and I've pretty much given up on it.
This is the answer to the computer industry. Most people don't want to install software on their PC. All they need is a webbroswer, email client and some office software. Thats it, simple.
Its all the options that us geeks like that everyone else hates about computers. They all want one way to do things, they don't want anything to change, they don't want to know how to install software or what a harddrive is, etc...
Stuff like digital cameras, scanners and printers all kind of throw a wrench in things but all they need to do is come up with a forward looking standard interface(Both at the UI and driver level) that is dead simple. There shouldn't be a need for each manufacture to have their own drivers. Digital cameras are already pretty much there, most of them just come up as generic usb storage devices. Now all they need to add is a weblike interface for scanner and printer control, where when you click on your printer settings you basicly get a webpage off the deivce.
The RS-232 or EIA/TIA-232 as its know today has alot of shortcommings beyound the DCE -> DTE cabling mess. It has to be the worst standard ever!
They didn't use ballanced cabling which limits the distance and the bandwidth big time. RS-422 and 485 both use ballenced cables and signals and can go up to 4000feet at 115,200 baud while RS-232 can only go 50feet at 19,200 baud.
After playing many many hours of GTA3 I've found myself out sizing up cars, thinking I could go yank some guy out of it and take off. One day I was walking up the street and came across a car that looked really fast and I had to stop my self from going up and trying the doors.
GTA3 and above have to be the worst, just because it simulates doing crimes in the real world. Most other games are modeled in a fake place, somewhere there is no real parallel to here in the real world.
On mine I leave it set to linksys so no one can find it in the mess of 5 or 6 other linksys routers on my street. I also disabled DHCP, changed its IP to not .1 and lowered the TX pwr. To a war driver it will just seem far away and he will think he can't get an IP because he is just to far away. Then he will go on to one of the other insecure AP's on the street. If I was running WEP or WPA or had a diffrent SSID it would be like hanging a sign hackme. (I also use ssh just about everything over wireless)
I know this this shit because I do war drive. I ether go for the easyest (default config, good signal) or the hardest ("secured", weak signal).
Some of the more interesting ones are the collages links between their building back in my home town, which was totally unencrypted, they paid big money to have that system installed before wifi was popular. Now I find it funny that I can sit down in my parents living room and watch people's email passwords/email's and webbrosing scroll my screen.
Now that I'm away going to collage, I can pickup another link between the univeristy's buildings. I think they must have forgotten about this link because their wlan on their main campus is pretty secure. I can harvest email account passwords and what not. I can't associate because they are using wds accross the link. I may try and clone on of the AP's and see if I can spoof some packets into their network.