Ok, I agree with the cost of living compensation (since I'm a 22 year old programmer living in the valley), but rent isn't quite that bad. I pay $1450 for a 2Br/2Ba in Santa Clara. I'm looking at house rental prices and it looks like about $2100-2400 for 3 bedroom houses. Admitidly a lot more than the $550 I was paying two summers ago in Portland for a 1br/1ba with my roomate.
In his keynote Miyamoto pointed out that it wasn't just hardware and technology that made games fun. I'm not sure if you're trying to point that out or contradict it, but he wasn't advocating simply going forward with technologically superior games. He challenged the game developers to try and make games that are fun. I actually thought the keynote by Phil Harrison (a vp at sony) was a lot more interesting. I was really interested in the PSX2 demos he showed. Apparently the polygon throughput is amazing on that. The bext part, however, was when he stated that Linux would be the psx2 development platform. He said the reason for that was they wanted a stable platform for development. The entire crowd cheered that (except for the 30 or so people from Microsoft who I could just imagine sinking down into their seats).
There's always the Advantech biscuit pc that the original Empeg was based on. The PCM-586E/L accepts any pentium, k5, k6, or cyrix 6x86 up to 300 mhz and has vga lcd and crt, 10/100mb ethernet, 16 bit sound, serial, parallel, keyboard, IrDA, usb interfaces, 1 pci slot, 1 pc/104 connector, eide, and two 72 pin simm sockets. It's cheaper too, but you still have to buy a cpu, ram, etc..
Well, I could hook you up with a couple plastic outdoor chairs. They don't recline but they're not too uncofortable. I suppose I could steal... errr appropriate a couple of those reclining sun chairs from the side of my apartment's pool too (no one's using 'em right now...). Let me know if you're interested.
I've seen keyboards exactly like that at frys for probably under $80. I'm not sure if they're made by kinesis (I don't remember), but if not, they're the exact same layout. I would figure that the design would be patented. The keyboards looked like they were of standard quality and not just some cheap knock-off too. I tried it out and could get used to it (the're really wierd to use). I could see how, after a while, your typing speed could increase using one. It seemed like my fingers were very close to all the relavent keys. I read an article about alternate input devices a couple years ago and this style keyboard was one of the ones featured.
A side note is that the made for tv movie: Tom Clancy's Netforce used these keyboards as their keyboards of the future. BTW, the show was really bad but funny when looked at in present context (replace Will Styles from the movie with Bill Gates).
How about combining this with a Linux box in your trunk to make a cool interface for a car mp3 player. The trunk machine would decode the mp3s and serve web pages to this tablet. You could keep this in the front seat (or mounted on the dash or whatever), and you'd have an 800x600 color touch screen to control your mp3 player. Now that would be cool. (Although I agree, wince needs to go)
I do some 3d graphics as a hobby, and I'm looking to buy a new system soon. Unfortunatly, from all the research I've been doing, I'm finding that there isn't much in the way of midrage graphics cards available, period. Once you start trying to look above consumer level Matrox Milleniums, Viper 550s, etc., you find there aren't may other cards until you start looking in the $1000+ range. For hardware accelerated OpenGL, there are some permedia2 cards that are cheap, but they don't really qualify as professional quality. You can get some Glint TX based cards (Leadtek 2500, Symetric Glyder, Diamond FireGL 3000, etc. - all in the $300 range) that are probably supported loosly in Linux, but they're old and not really supported by the manufacturer. When you start looking at current chipsets (Glint MX and above), all the cards are well over $1000 (Intergraph, Evans & Sutherland, 3dLabs, etc.). It's true that there are some cards in the $700-900 range, but that's still a bit expensive for me. My suggestion is, if you don't want to spend over $1000 on the graphics part of your system is to go for a decent monitor ($700 for the Mitsubishi 900u flat crt, Sony GDM-400ps, etc.) and get a high end consumer level card (Matrox Millenium G200 w/16 megs, or maybe a Number Nine card).
I was just wondering why they made their own coper tubing instead of buying it at a hardware store. I would think that would eliminate a large % of the probibility of leaks.
How about wood? You could go steal paletes from behind costco or safeway (or wherever), break them apart and use the wood. You may need something other than duct tape though. You could buy a litte bag of nails cheaper than a roll of tape anyway. You could use a rock to pound in the nails if you want too.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I agree with the cost of living compensation (since I'm a 22 year old programmer living in the valley), but rent isn't quite that bad. I pay $1450 for a 2Br/2Ba in Santa Clara. I'm looking at house rental prices and it looks like about $2100-2400 for 3 bedroom houses. Admitidly a lot more than the $550 I was paying two summers ago in Portland for a 1br/1ba with my roomate.
In his keynote Miyamoto pointed out that it wasn't just hardware and technology that made games fun. I'm not sure if you're trying to point that out or contradict it, but he wasn't advocating simply going forward with technologically superior games. He challenged the game developers to try and make games that are fun. I actually thought the keynote by Phil Harrison (a vp at sony) was a lot more interesting. I was really interested in the PSX2 demos he showed. Apparently the polygon throughput is amazing on that. The bext part, however, was when he stated that Linux would be the psx2 development platform. He said the reason for that was they wanted a stable platform for development. The entire crowd cheered that (except for the 30 or so people from Microsoft who I could just imagine sinking down into their seats).
There's always the Advantech biscuit pc that the original Empeg was based on. The PCM-586E/L accepts any pentium, k5, k6, or cyrix 6x86 up to 300 mhz and has vga lcd and crt, 10/100mb ethernet, 16 bit sound, serial, parallel, keyboard, IrDA, usb interfaces, 1 pci slot, 1 pc/104 connector, eide, and two 72 pin simm sockets. It's cheaper too, but you still have to buy a cpu, ram, etc..
Well, I could hook you up with a couple plastic outdoor chairs. They don't recline but they're not too uncofortable. I suppose I could steal... errr appropriate a couple of those reclining sun chairs from the side of my apartment's pool too (no one's using 'em right now...). Let me know if you're interested.
I've seen keyboards exactly like that at frys for probably under $80. I'm not sure if they're made by kinesis (I don't remember), but if not, they're the exact same layout. I would figure that the design would be patented. The keyboards looked like they were of standard quality and not just some cheap knock-off too. I tried it out and could get used to it (the're really wierd to use). I could see how, after a while, your typing speed could increase using one. It seemed like my fingers were very close to all the relavent keys. I read an article about alternate input devices a couple years ago and this style keyboard was one of the ones featured.
A side note is that the made for tv movie: Tom Clancy's Netforce used these keyboards as their keyboards of the future. BTW, the show was really bad but funny when looked at in present context (replace Will Styles from the movie with Bill Gates).
How about combining this with a Linux box in your trunk to make a cool interface for a car mp3 player. The trunk machine would decode the mp3s and serve web pages to this tablet. You could keep this in the front seat (or mounted on the dash or whatever), and you'd have an 800x600 color touch screen to control your mp3 player. Now that would be cool. (Although I agree, wince needs to go)
I do some 3d graphics as a hobby, and I'm looking to buy a new system soon. Unfortunatly, from all the research I've been doing, I'm finding that there isn't much in the way of midrage graphics cards available, period. Once you start trying to look above consumer level Matrox Milleniums, Viper 550s, etc., you find there aren't may other cards until you start looking in the $1000+ range. For hardware accelerated OpenGL, there are some permedia2 cards that are cheap, but they don't really qualify as professional quality. You can get some Glint TX based cards (Leadtek 2500, Symetric Glyder, Diamond FireGL 3000, etc. - all in the $300 range) that are probably supported loosly in Linux, but they're old and not really supported by the manufacturer. When you start looking at current chipsets (Glint MX and above), all the cards are well over $1000 (Intergraph, Evans & Sutherland, 3dLabs, etc.). It's true that there are some cards in the $700-900 range, but that's still a bit expensive for me. My suggestion is, if you don't want to spend over $1000 on the graphics part of your system is to go for a decent monitor ($700 for the Mitsubishi 900u flat crt, Sony GDM-400ps, etc.) and get a high end consumer level card (Matrox Millenium G200 w/16 megs, or maybe a Number Nine card).
I was just wondering why they made their own coper tubing instead of buying it at a hardware store. I would think that would eliminate a large % of the probibility of leaks.
Harlequin
How about wood? You could go steal paletes from behind costco or safeway (or wherever), break them apart and use the wood. You may need something other than duct tape though. You could buy a litte bag of nails cheaper than a roll of tape anyway. You could use a rock to pound in the nails if you want too.
Harlequin