Yup. I've had my home server/access-point/router/stereo/whatever running on a K6-2 for years, now. The only time I notice it's slow is when aptitude takes its time reading or updating its database. Even an Atom would be a massive speed upgrade, but I just don't need it.
... THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES...
Most students are not. Most of these inventions were produced by graduate students performing research. Most graduate students doing research in areas that have commercially valuable applications are paid to do that research.
So almost all of these patents and royalties are coming from the work of graduate students who were supported by research grants - employees of the university, essentially.
I'm a graduate student in computer science. I'm paid to do research. Honestly, I'm not even sure whether I am allowed to use the code I've written here after I graduate. But I can release it with an open license (at least open for research use) before I leave to get around that, I think. It's a fairly murky area, and I get the feeling most grad students don't understand the full implications. Most times, no one really cares. However, it is very clear that if there is money involved, the university gets a cut.
Anybody? I'd think that the personal data of just about any news figure is combed over. This is certainly unfortunate but hardly surprising.
Here's the problem. The personal data of news figure should not be combed over by anyone. Please don't just throw up your hands and say "this is certainly unfortunate."
Do you know anyone who works in a government job with access to any sort of records? How about anyone in IT with access to the company's databases for HR, payroll, etc.? These people are just like the rest of us, with the same curiosity and the same failings. They're just as tempted to know interesting little details about other people as anyone else, but they have the power to see those details easily. Many will not be able to avoid the temptation. Most of those people are harmless. Some aren't. Think about how someone who doesn't like you could use personal details of your life against you. There are a *lot* of ways.
We do not live in the world of 1984, nor do we live in a police state with institutionalized, encouraged spying on one's neighbors. But privacy values are malleable, and they can and do shift over time. Your statement and others like it make me feel that we are shifting towards a culture with no expectations of privacy -- towards 1984. Please do what you can to prevent that; at the least, please consider your own views, how they apply to the rest of us, and how they affect the general culture of privacy we have now.
It's a tired analogy, but again, why do people send mail in sealed envelopes as opposed to on postcards or other readable-by-anyone methods? Even if they are doing nothing wrong? The knowledge can provide some power over us, and so there are things they simply don't want other people to know. And we respect that. We should respect that.
I haven't run tests to compare approaches, but I have messed around with it a bit. I do research on Boolean satisfiability (SAT), so I wrote a script to convert sudoku puzzles to SAT problems and ran a fast SAT solver (MiniSAT) on them. The actual solution for any 9x9 grids I gave it took on the order of milliseconds. I don't know how that compares to other techniques, but it was fast enough that I didn't see much point in looking into it more.
There is a very detailed explanation of this approach written by someone else who tried this approach here. It's actually a great read on several related topics, including SAT solving/solvers in general, P vs NP, BDDs, and more. It's full of interesting links, too.
Sudoku can be solved by trying values in cells until a conflict is reached and backtracking to try other assignments. That's the brute-force approach.
Most sudoku puzzles can be solved via implication, however. There is no need to "try" anything. Certain configurations of values in some cells can imply values in other cells. As a very simple example, consider a row that has all cells filled but one. The value of that unfilled cell is implied and can be filled in without having to try any other values. This is a basic example, but clearly more complex ones exist. This is essentially how people solve the puzzles, and I believe it is what the grandparent was describing.
However, I do not believe that the grandparent is correct in stating that these methods solve sudokus in a fraction of the time of the brute force method if you allow for standard optimizations of the brute force method as developed for constraint processing (CP) or Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers. But then again, many of those optimizations are similar to the "clever logic and elegant methods," especially those that perform propagation and follow implications.
Sudoku doesn't have clever logic and elegant methods. There is only one method for solving sudoku puzzles, and it strongly resembles a computer doing brute force.
Don't mod me down if you disagree. If you disagree, consider writing a retort instead.
It would have been nice if you had written something backing up your own claim as well.
For those of you that think it has any validity, try this 6 step experiment.
1) Get a drinking straw. 2) Go to a pool. 3) Start sucking the water out of the pool as fast as you can with that straw. (You probably should not swallow the water) 4) Go to the ocean. 5) Start sucking the water out of the ocean as fast as you can with the same straw. (You definitely should not swallow the water) 6) Now explain to us all how the amount of water that you sucked through the straw was dictated by reserve you are pulling from. Or try this experiment:
1) Get a drinking straw. 2) Get a really big sponge really soaking wet. 3) Start sucking the water out of the sponge as fast as you can with that straw. 4) If you start getting less water, try a different spot on the sponge. 5) Marvel at how thought experiments can prove anything you want if they are divorced enough from the phenomenon of interest, but note that mine is probably closer to the reality of oil extraction than yours is.
There are a lot of different ways to do this under Linux; someone has already posted several links to some resources. The easiest way I found, and the way I've been running my two-seat, single-machine setup at home for about a year, is simply using the capabilities of newer versions of X Windows as described on Chris Tyler's blog (included in those links earlier).
All of the other methods I've seen require non-standard kernel modules or non-standard X servers, etc. This way uses standard software, and I think it should work for most modern distributions (I'm using Gentoo).
What you need hardware-wise:
One graphics card per seat. I have an old AGP Radeon 9000 and a super-old PCI Matrox Mystique.
A monitor extension cable if you want the seats far apart. I first bought a 15ft brand-name one from Buy.com that was absolutely worthless (thin cable, ridiculous ghosting even at low resolutions) - then I bought this "generic" one which works perfectly.
One keyboard/mouse pair per seat. One of my seats has a PS2 keyboard and a USB trackball, and the other has a PS2 mouse and a PS2 keyboard on a PS2 to USB converter that works perfectly hanging off the end of a 10ft USB extension cable.
The software setup is described fairly well in Chris Tyler's blogs (don't skip the comments - there are useful tips from others in there, and on this followup page), but here's the basic idea: You run two separate X instances, each with a different ServerLayout section in the config file. They obviously need to point to different video cards (and I found that using the "SingleCard" option was necessary to get both to work), and you also need to separate the input devices between the two. The best way to do this that I know of (again, avoiding odd kernel modules or other software) is evdev. It's somewhat complicated, but it lets you specify input devices based on where they are plugged in or their specific model numbers, etc. It's fairly flexible.
Once you have two separate X instances up and running, it's a fairly simple matter to get gdm (and I assume most other *dm applications) to launch both automatically with independent login screens.
Good luck!
Re:That depends on a lot more than you think
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Last I checked, Google is in SF and that's about it.
...a misconception that a lot of people have, which is that there's somehow a shortage of scientists. Sorry, just not true.
I truly wonder why you think it is a misconception. It's not some urban legend or "rumors on the internets." The National Science Board is worried about it (NYTimes article here). It's a serious problem that a lot of people (e.g., the US government) are working on.
In fact, as a science teacher, I see a lot of the opposite phenomenon: kids who really care about jazz, or photography, but whose parents are pushing them to do science or computers, because they think it'll be more likely to lead to a good job.
While I agree that pushing kids to do things they don't want to do is foolish, your observation is not evidence for or against any shortage of scientists.
Personally, I don't think pressure from parents or lame gimmicks will make for more scientists and engineers. It seems to be more of a cultural attitude, which requires some deeper, more long-term changes. Honestly, I think that you, as a science teacher, play a relatively large role in that. If you really think the need for more scientists and engineers is just a misconception, I urge you to read more about it, especially the National Science Board's latest report.
Think about a single company, one out of thousands. That one company has a choice to either send jobs overseas or not. If it does, then it saves money, and because it is just one company, the impact on the economy is negligible. So it will have higher profits if it sends the jobs overseas. From a simplified, purely financial point of view, the company clearly wants to outsource and make more money.
Now look at the collection of all companies in a country. As you noted, if they *all* outsource (not entirely possible, but let's go with it for the sake of argument), then they don't have local consumers for their products (also not quite right, because not all companies are consumer-oriented). So in fact they will all make *less* money, even though they are all pursuing an action that will maximize their profit...
So what if one company then realizes the error of its ways and transfers the jobs back from overseas? Then it will have higher costs, but as it is again only one company, it will not be able to have a big enough effect on the economy to raise its revenue. So outsourcing is *still* the optimal policy for any single company, even though outsourcing was the cause of their lowered profit!
The action of a single company sending jobs overseas will always make financial sense for that company. It's just the collective action of many pursuing their optimal policies that leads to low profit for all.
Now, clearly this is vastly oversimplified, but I think it is a useful way of looking at it. It's somewhat related to the Prisoner's Dilemma (something to look up if you're interested) and game theory in general...
Interesting how everyone is jumping all over you, saying that "no no, the one *I* want really *is* five grand!"
So sure, "semi-realistic top-of-the-line" is still around $5,000. But I think a big difference now is that the $500 machine really is perfectly good enough for the vast majority of people, whereas 10 years ago even top-of-the-line machines could feel limited. Technology and performance gains have outpaced increases in common workloads.
Sure, the latest games will always push the boundaries, and that Lightwave render could always stand to lose a few seconds of render time. There will always be workloads at the edge that can benefit from more power, and they will always grow in pace with the cutting-edge, but *most* people do just fine with a $500 PC these days.
Whether or not MS is artificially pumping the common-case machine specs by producing new versions of old software with higher requirements and features we don't need... that's an argument for another time.
I currently have my joystick measuring the temperature of my room once a minute. I originally planned to use thermistors, but experiments with a diode turned out to work just fine. Now, I honestly have no clue how it works, because the specific diode I'm using is basically broken (doesn't act like a diode should in a normal circuit), and a normal diode doesn't work in my circuit. So it was just complete luck that it worked out for me (and I *really* don't know why it works...) But it should work theoretically with thermistors in the same way. Essentially, as long as your current varies with temperature, you can measure temperature with it.
The code is amazingly simple. Here's the important part (C, obviously, running on a Linux 2.2 kernel):
#include <sys/time.h> #include <asm/io.h>
long getreading(short int which) { struct timeval before,after;
outb(1,0x201);// Poke the monostable multivibrator;)
The tricky part is the calibration. You'll first just hope that your readings scale linearly with temperature, and mess around with an offset and slope until it matches some known readings. If it's not linear, well... But if you just want "Good", "Bad", and "This reading wasn't taken, because the CPU is a puddle of slag", then it's not so bad.
Good luck. It was a fun project for me. I still don't have the calibration worked out quite right, but that's okay. Oh, and I use RRD Tool to graph the results. I have pretty, colorful, utterly useless graphs of the temperature of my room. Yay!
One day, I wanted to get a little more power out of my 90MHz Pentium system, but without any added noise (the p90 had a heatsink w/o fan). I figured I could throw a K6-2 in there and underclock it to the point where it would run fine with just a heatsink.
I got a 300MHz K6-2. It went in fine, and I started it out around 200MHz. But my network card (3COM 3C905-tx) freaked out. It dropped packets like crazy and wouldn't even hold a link to my switch for more than a second at a time. Uncerclocking even more made the situation a little better, but I could never get the network card completely stable.
Eventually, though, I *was* running the K6-2 without any heatsink whatsoever, and it only got warm to the touch. This was around 100MHz.
That was even running it at 2.5V, when it only required 2.2V even at 300MHz. Since it was underclocked, it would have probably run below 2.2V, which would have been far cooler than what I had.
Unfortunately, my experiment came to a rather spectacular end when I decided to put the heatsink back on while the system was on. The heatsink clip paid a visit to some pins of a power transistor nearby on the motherboard. Let's just say that sensitive digital equipment like a motherboard isn't supposed to make sparks. Surprisingly, the motherboard was fine - but the cpu was toast. I just went back to using the P90, a little miffed about losing $15, but otherwise fine.
I recently hacked a temperature sensor out of an old <a href="http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n6/gravis.j<nobr>p<wbr></wbr></nobr> g">Gravis joystick</a> and a broken diode. I had to calibrate it "by hand" (in the code to read from the joystick port), of course, but it seems to be accurate to within a degree (F) or so. So for the cost of one diode (on the order of one cent?) and one ancient joystick (free from a friend), I got myself a handy little temperature sensor. Oh, and with <a href="http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/<nobr>r<wbr></wbr></nobr> rdtool/">rrdtool</a>, I get nifty graphs, too!
I sure hope they put noisemakers in those things. Just a few days ago, I was walking past a car that didn't strike me as all that special until it started moving without making noise. It was a Prius, I think. I sort of freaked out and almost shouted, "Dude! Your car isn't making any noise!"
I then realized that if electric cars become more prevalent, I am *so* dead. When crossing roads these days, I'm often in too much of a hurry or just too lazy to look both ways and all that jazz, so I just rely on my ears to hear any approaching bringers of death and/or mutilation. If cars go silent on me, I'll be roadkill in no time!
You can't use real physics. Real physics lives in the continuous time domain, with differential equations and such. Games, on the other hand, live in a strange land of discrete, variable-sized time-steps. You can't just throw your differential equation at it and say "Be realistic!"
Sure, the formulas used are *based* on the regular "scientist" formulas, but they *have* to be approximations. The book tells you how to use do those approximations.
If you give a coder a standard physics textbook and tell him to code a physics engine, he'll either implode or spend ages working out numerical methods for approximating real physics... exactly what is in this book.
If I had a bit more time and money (read: if I weren't a student), I would try this myself. I suppose it might help to know a thing or two about business, also.
Basically, one could set up a company to do this. Partner with companies to sell their old inventory that is currently earning them $0 and split the profits. If I were a game company (and this can be for PC games as well as ROMs), I would have nothing to lose by partnering with such a company and maybe a few bucks to gain.
The basic idea is this: These companies have merchandise that they aren't selling. If it costs them nothing to sell it, why wouldn't they?
Because I'm bored, I went and found you a correction. Dune II is what most people tend to think of as the first RTS (it was the first to be called such), though apparently there was something RTS-like for the Sega Genesis before that.
Read the comments below the linuxfreak article. Brian explains it in a bit more detail. He did use a username/password, but he got it from a file served to the public from their site.
And I think that the "hundreds of attempts" mentioned is just their normal daily load (their advertising claims to reach "over 1000" readers daily, and this is over a year later, right?). And if only *some* were trying to access these files and scripts, why even bother mentioning "hundreds of attempts" - that number is irrelevant!
Basically, he did a bit more than click on "edit," but it sounds like he really did just find the hole and check to be sure.
Believe it or not, it's true... I found it rather odd as it was happening, myself. Oh well, it got me my first troll mod ever, so I guess that's kind of exciting.:-P
Re:Freshman Girls
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Trust me, there are situations that just *aren't* all that enjoyable, even if you're a sex-starved geek. The harassment from the aforementioned nubile young things wasn't too much of a problem. It was the obnoxious, unattractive, self-described dyke who sort of got to me...
It's cool, though. She didn't have 'net access for almost a whole semester.;-) (Really, though, I had no idea how to fix her computer, nor did anyone else, and she didn't seem too bothered by it, anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Low-power chips are great for low-load servers.
Yup. I've had my home server/access-point/router/stereo/whatever running on a K6-2 for years, now. The only time I notice it's slow is when aptitude takes its time reading or updating its database. Even an Atom would be a massive speed upgrade, but I just don't need it.
... THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES ...
Most students are not. Most of these inventions were produced by graduate students performing research. Most graduate students doing research in areas that have commercially valuable applications are paid to do that research.
So almost all of these patents and royalties are coming from the work of graduate students who were supported by research grants - employees of the university, essentially.
I'm a graduate student in computer science. I'm paid to do research. Honestly, I'm not even sure whether I am allowed to use the code I've written here after I graduate. But I can release it with an open license (at least open for research use) before I leave to get around that, I think. It's a fairly murky area, and I get the feeling most grad students don't understand the full implications. Most times, no one really cares. However, it is very clear that if there is money involved, the university gets a cut.
Anybody? I'd think that the personal data of just about any news figure is combed over. This is certainly unfortunate but hardly surprising.
Here's the problem. The personal data of news figure should not be combed over by anyone. Please don't just throw up your hands and say "this is certainly unfortunate."
Do you know anyone who works in a government job with access to any sort of records? How about anyone in IT with access to the company's databases for HR, payroll, etc.? These people are just like the rest of us, with the same curiosity and the same failings. They're just as tempted to know interesting little details about other people as anyone else, but they have the power to see those details easily. Many will not be able to avoid the temptation. Most of those people are harmless. Some aren't. Think about how someone who doesn't like you could use personal details of your life against you. There are a *lot* of ways.
We do not live in the world of 1984, nor do we live in a police state with institutionalized, encouraged spying on one's neighbors. But privacy values are malleable, and they can and do shift over time. Your statement and others like it make me feel that we are shifting towards a culture with no expectations of privacy -- towards 1984. Please do what you can to prevent that; at the least, please consider your own views, how they apply to the rest of us, and how they affect the general culture of privacy we have now.
It's a tired analogy, but again, why do people send mail in sealed envelopes as opposed to on postcards or other readable-by-anyone methods? Even if they are doing nothing wrong? The knowledge can provide some power over us, and so there are things they simply don't want other people to know. And we respect that. We should respect that.
Well, run some tests then ;)
I haven't run tests to compare approaches, but I have messed around with it a bit. I do research on Boolean satisfiability (SAT), so I wrote a script to convert sudoku puzzles to SAT problems and ran a fast SAT solver (MiniSAT) on them. The actual solution for any 9x9 grids I gave it took on the order of milliseconds. I don't know how that compares to other techniques, but it was fast enough that I didn't see much point in looking into it more.
There is a very detailed explanation of this approach written by someone else who tried this approach here. It's actually a great read on several related topics, including SAT solving/solvers in general, P vs NP, BDDs, and more. It's full of interesting links, too.
Sudoku can be solved by trying values in cells until a conflict is reached and backtracking to try other assignments. That's the brute-force approach.
Most sudoku puzzles can be solved via implication, however. There is no need to "try" anything. Certain configurations of values in some cells can imply values in other cells. As a very simple example, consider a row that has all cells filled but one. The value of that unfilled cell is implied and can be filled in without having to try any other values. This is a basic example, but clearly more complex ones exist. This is essentially how people solve the puzzles, and I believe it is what the grandparent was describing.
However, I do not believe that the grandparent is correct in stating that these methods solve sudokus in a fraction of the time of the brute force method if you allow for standard optimizations of the brute force method as developed for constraint processing (CP) or Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers. But then again, many of those optimizations are similar to the "clever logic and elegant methods," especially those that perform propagation and follow implications.
Sudoku doesn't have clever logic and elegant methods. There is only one method for solving sudoku puzzles, and it strongly resembles a computer doing brute force.
Don't mod me down if you disagree. If you disagree, consider writing a retort instead.
It would have been nice if you had written something backing up your own claim as well.
1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Go to a pool.
3) Start sucking the water out of the pool as fast as you can with that straw. (You probably should not swallow the water)
4) Go to the ocean.
5) Start sucking the water out of the ocean as fast as you can with the same straw. (You definitely should not swallow the water)
6) Now explain to us all how the amount of water that you sucked through the straw was dictated by reserve you are pulling from. Or try this experiment:
1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Get a really big sponge really soaking wet.
3) Start sucking the water out of the sponge as fast as you can with that straw.
4) If you start getting less water, try a different spot on the sponge.
5) Marvel at how thought experiments can prove anything you want if they are divorced enough from the phenomenon of interest, but note that mine is probably closer to the reality of oil extraction than yours is.
There are a lot of different ways to do this under Linux; someone has already posted several links to some resources. The easiest way I found, and the way I've been running my two-seat, single-machine setup at home for about a year, is simply using the capabilities of newer versions of X Windows as described on Chris Tyler's blog (included in those links earlier).
All of the other methods I've seen require non-standard kernel modules or non-standard X servers, etc. This way uses standard software, and I think it should work for most modern distributions (I'm using Gentoo).
What you need hardware-wise:
The software setup is described fairly well in Chris Tyler's blogs (don't skip the comments - there are useful tips from others in there, and on this followup page), but here's the basic idea: You run two separate X instances, each with a different ServerLayout section in the config file. They obviously need to point to different video cards (and I found that using the "SingleCard" option was necessary to get both to work), and you also need to separate the input devices between the two. The best way to do this that I know of (again, avoiding odd kernel modules or other software) is evdev. It's somewhat complicated, but it lets you specify input devices based on where they are plugged in or their specific model numbers, etc. It's fairly flexible.
Once you have two separate X instances up and running, it's a fairly simple matter to get gdm (and I assume most other *dm applications) to launch both automatically with independent login screens.
Good luck!
Last I checked, Google is in SF and that's about it.
Well, last I checked...
I truly wonder why you think it is a misconception. It's not some urban legend or "rumors on the internets." The National Science Board is worried about it (NYTimes article here). It's a serious problem that a lot of people (e.g., the US government) are working on.
In fact, as a science teacher, I see a lot of the opposite phenomenon: kids who really care about jazz, or photography, but whose parents are pushing them to do science or computers, because they think it'll be more likely to lead to a good job.
While I agree that pushing kids to do things they don't want to do is foolish, your observation is not evidence for or against any shortage of scientists.
Personally, I don't think pressure from parents or lame gimmicks will make for more scientists and engineers. It seems to be more of a cultural attitude, which requires some deeper, more long-term changes. Honestly, I think that you, as a science teacher, play a relatively large role in that. If you really think the need for more scientists and engineers is just a misconception, I urge you to read more about it, especially the National Science Board's latest report.
Think about a single company, one out of thousands. That one company has a choice to either send jobs overseas or not. If it does, then it saves money, and because it is just one company, the impact on the economy is negligible. So it will have higher profits if it sends the jobs overseas. From a simplified, purely financial point of view, the company clearly wants to outsource and make more money.
Now look at the collection of all companies in a country. As you noted, if they *all* outsource (not entirely possible, but let's go with it for the sake of argument), then they don't have local consumers for their products (also not quite right, because not all companies are consumer-oriented). So in fact they will all make *less* money, even though they are all pursuing an action that will maximize their profit...
So what if one company then realizes the error of its ways and transfers the jobs back from overseas? Then it will have higher costs, but as it is again only one company, it will not be able to have a big enough effect on the economy to raise its revenue. So outsourcing is *still* the optimal policy for any single company, even though outsourcing was the cause of their lowered profit!
The action of a single company sending jobs overseas will always make financial sense for that company. It's just the collective action of many pursuing their optimal policies that leads to low profit for all.
Now, clearly this is vastly oversimplified, but I think it is a useful way of looking at it. It's somewhat related to the Prisoner's Dilemma (something to look up if you're interested) and game theory in general...
Dan's Data has your toothpaste-vs-thermal-compound review right here.
Interesting how everyone is jumping all over you, saying that "no no, the one *I* want really *is* five grand!"
So sure, "semi-realistic top-of-the-line" is still around $5,000. But I think a big difference now is that the $500 machine really is perfectly good enough for the vast majority of people, whereas 10 years ago even top-of-the-line machines could feel limited. Technology and performance gains have outpaced increases in common workloads.
Sure, the latest games will always push the boundaries, and that Lightwave render could always stand to lose a few seconds of render time. There will always be workloads at the edge that can benefit from more power, and they will always grow in pace with the cutting-edge, but *most* people do just fine with a $500 PC these days.
Whether or not MS is artificially pumping the common-case machine specs by producing new versions of old software with higher requirements and features we don't need... that's an argument for another time.
2002 NT7 Impact Risk
It doesn't look so bad. -0.14 on the Palermo Scale (recently downgraded?).
I almost forgot...
A good quick reference
A good detailed reference
I currently have my joystick measuring the temperature of my room once a minute. I originally planned to use thermistors, but experiments with a diode turned out to work just fine. Now, I honestly have no clue how it works, because the specific diode I'm using is basically broken (doesn't act like a diode should in a normal circuit), and a normal diode doesn't work in my circuit. So it was just complete luck that it worked out for me (and I *really* don't know why it works...) But it should work theoretically with thermistors in the same way. Essentially, as long as your current varies with temperature, you can measure temperature with it.
The code is amazingly simple. Here's the important part (C, obviously, running on a Linux 2.2 kernel):
"which" is just the channel you want to read.
The tricky part is the calibration. You'll first just hope that your readings scale linearly with temperature, and mess around with an offset and slope until it matches some known readings. If it's not linear, well... But if you just want "Good", "Bad", and "This reading wasn't taken, because the CPU is a puddle of slag", then it's not so bad.
Good luck. It was a fun project for me. I still don't have the calibration worked out quite right, but that's okay. Oh, and I use RRD Tool to graph the results. I have pretty, colorful, utterly useless graphs of the temperature of my room. Yay!
One day, I wanted to get a little more power out of my 90MHz Pentium system, but without any added noise (the p90 had a heatsink w/o fan). I figured I could throw a K6-2 in there and underclock it to the point where it would run fine with just a heatsink.
I got a 300MHz K6-2. It went in fine, and I started it out around 200MHz. But my network card (3COM 3C905-tx) freaked out. It dropped packets like crazy and wouldn't even hold a link to my switch for more than a second at a time. Uncerclocking even more made the situation a little better, but I could never get the network card completely stable.
Eventually, though, I *was* running the K6-2 without any heatsink whatsoever, and it only got warm to the touch. This was around 100MHz.
That was even running it at 2.5V, when it only required 2.2V even at 300MHz. Since it was underclocked, it would have probably run below 2.2V, which would have been far cooler than what I had.
Unfortunately, my experiment came to a rather spectacular end when I decided to put the heatsink back on while the system was on. The heatsink clip paid a visit to some pins of a power transistor nearby on the motherboard. Let's just say that sensitive digital equipment like a motherboard isn't supposed to make sparks. Surprisingly, the motherboard was fine - but the cpu was toast. I just went back to using the P90, a little miffed about losing $15, but otherwise fine.
I recently hacked a temperature sensor out of an old <a href="http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n6/gravis.j<nobr>p<wbr></wbr></nobr> g">Gravis joystick</a> and a broken diode. I had to calibrate it "by hand" (in the code to read from the joystick port), of course, but it seems to be accurate to within a degree (F) or so. So for the cost of one diode (on the order of one cent?) and one ancient joystick (free from a friend), I got myself a handy little temperature sensor. Oh, and with <a href="http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/<nobr>r<wbr></wbr></nobr> rdtool/">rrdtool</a>, I get nifty graphs, too!
I sure hope they put noisemakers in those things. Just a few days ago, I was walking past a car that didn't strike me as all that special until it started moving without making noise. It was a Prius, I think. I sort of freaked out and almost shouted, "Dude! Your car isn't making any noise!"
I then realized that if electric cars become more prevalent, I am *so* dead. When crossing roads these days, I'm often in too much of a hurry or just too lazy to look both ways and all that jazz, so I just rely on my ears to hear any approaching bringers of death and/or mutilation. If cars go silent on me, I'll be roadkill in no time!
You can't use real physics. Real physics lives in the continuous time domain, with differential equations and such. Games, on the other hand, live in a strange land of discrete, variable-sized time-steps. You can't just throw your differential equation at it and say "Be realistic!"
Sure, the formulas used are *based* on the regular "scientist" formulas, but they *have* to be approximations. The book tells you how to use do those approximations.
If you give a coder a standard physics textbook and tell him to code a physics engine, he'll either implode or spend ages working out numerical methods for approximating real physics... exactly what is in this book.
"It's funny because it's true..."
If I had a bit more time and money (read: if I weren't a student), I would try this myself. I suppose it might help to know a thing or two about business, also.
Basically, one could set up a company to do this. Partner with companies to sell their old inventory that is currently earning them $0 and split the profits. If I were a game company (and this can be for PC games as well as ROMs), I would have nothing to lose by partnering with such a company and maybe a few bucks to gain.
The basic idea is this: These companies have merchandise that they aren't selling. If it costs them nothing to sell it, why wouldn't they?
Because I'm bored, I went and found you a correction. Dune II is what most people tend to think of as the first RTS (it was the first to be called such), though apparently there was something RTS-like for the Sega Genesis before that.
Oh, and as for an open RTS, there's FreeCraft.
Read the comments below the linuxfreak article. Brian explains it in a bit more detail. He did use a username/password, but he got it from a file served to the public from their site.
And I think that the "hundreds of attempts" mentioned is just their normal daily load (their advertising claims to reach "over 1000" readers daily, and this is over a year later, right?). And if only *some* were trying to access these files and scripts, why even bother mentioning "hundreds of attempts" - that number is irrelevant!
Basically, he did a bit more than click on "edit," but it sounds like he really did just find the hole and check to be sure.
Believe it or not, it's true... I found it rather odd as it was happening, myself. Oh well, it got me my first troll mod ever, so I guess that's kind of exciting. :-P
Trust me, there are situations that just *aren't* all that enjoyable, even if you're a sex-starved geek. The harassment from the aforementioned nubile young things wasn't too much of a problem. It was the obnoxious, unattractive, self-described dyke who sort of got to me...
;-) (Really, though, I had no idea how to fix her computer, nor did anyone else, and she didn't seem too bothered by it, anyway.)
It's cool, though. She didn't have 'net access for almost a whole semester.