I wonder if there is any value in the knowledge stored in the brains of us soon-to-be-geezers pinball wizards. Not only did I mis-spend my youth playing pinball machines, I worked my way through school repairing them. 200 violently moving parts + abusive players = job security.
I started working on them in 1978 when stuff like Pong and Space Invaders was high-tech. The control circuitry has changed radically over the years - from relays, solenoid steppers, and cams - to sophisticated multi-processor systems. However, the playfields are still filled with precision mechanisms that get bashed with little cannon balls.
Every machine used to come with a little kit of spare parts you could expect to break in the first week, along with a COMPLETE SET OF SCHEMATICS! Really! They were right there in the bottom of the machine. A complete 30+ page large format book of prints with long fold outs for the complex stuff. No "black box" block diagrams - every wire and resistor was shown. They expected you to repair to the component level - not just swap modules. I am getting misty eyed just thinking about how I had all the info I needed to do the job. In these "modern" times, you don't even get a clear diagram of how to hook up the power LED in your new computer case.
In my opinion, the only people truly qualified to repair pinball machines are the addicts themselves. We used to stay late after work the day a new model was delivered. We would put the first one together (these things used to come in lots of pieces and were not trivial to assemble) on our own time. 3 or 4 of us would then play the machine until dawn - stopping now and then to make tweaks. By morning we were completely fried, but had a supreme knowledge of how to tune the machine for playability. More importantly, we could kick ass in the pinball tournaments the bars would sponsor. The bucks we won would more than pay us back for the sleep we lost. Some of the customers would bitch about "professionals" playing in the tournaments, but the bar owners liked the idea of having somebody around who could unlock the machine and unstick a ball or unjam a coin slot.
smoke-filled VFW halls
quart bottles of playfield wax
a giant canvas bank bag full of rubbers
the smell of stale beer and burnt solenoid drivers
soldering iron burns
you: 685,370 everybody else: under 85,000
It was a simpler time...when carpal tunnel syndrome was just "pinball wrist"
Before we start getting worked up about what the inefficient and bumbling governments of the world are going to do to us - maybe we should spend our energy worrying about what deals like the AOL/Time Warner merger is going to do to us.
Is your broad-band access now going to subject to an AOL user agreement? I am much more afraid of corporate America instituting restrictive rules for connecting to the net through them than the government (at the moment anyway). Corporate lawyers don't necessarily target *real* problems when they write user agreements (or software licenses) - they will happily add language to guard against purely theoretical threats. It's all done in the name of protecting their companies and the interests of their share holders, but the net result is that you will be allowed to use your account where, when, how, and with whom they see fit. If you don't like it, you can get another ISP.
It is only a matter of time before all of the ISP user agreements read virtually the same. There will be a few hold-outs promising an "unfiltered" connection. That's when the government will step in and squash the few "freedom-fighting" ISPs. No reason for the government to act hastily. It's too much work to clamp down on everybody right now. All big G has to do is wait for market forces to standardize web access in to the pre-digested pabulum which is AOL, then pass regulations which make it all but impossible to be an ISP if you aren't a mega corp.
Have you ever actually read your ISP user agreement? It's way more scary than this article.
MiniSeries: Like Masturbating with a Cheese Grater
on
On The Dune Miniseries
·
· Score: 1
I think I can definitively sum up my opinion of the Dune mini-series by paraphrasing Andrew Dice Clay:
It's like masturbating with a cheese grater - sort of interesting, but mostly painful.
If Frank Herbert wasn't dead - this would kill him
on
On The Dune Miniseries
·
· Score: 1
As I said on the original announcement:
Observations on "Dune - The Suck Ass Mini Series"
1. Future Super Beings are VERY whiny
2. Spice does not cure baldness
3. Ornithopters are unbalanced enough to fall over on the ground
4. Guild Navigators look like orange rubber vampires
5. Spend 80% of budget on special effects - well, some of the special effects - but we don't need no stinking dialect coaches!
6. Old Bene Geserit Witches are younger than young witches
7. William Hurt - when saying something profound - be sure to mumble
8. Stilgar looks like a janitor from the Ford truck plant
9. Be sure to sleep with the windows open when your life is in constant danger and the ambient humidity is 0.00003%
10. You would get arrested for exposure for displaying a sand worm in public
11. Wow! There were books written about this? Kewl! I'll read them later - gotta finish the mini series script now.
When they originally announced that Dino was going to do the Dune movie, I was just certain it would suck. Considering the limitations of special effects technology at the time - Dino did one hell of a job. The casting was excellent, everybody could act, and he followed the book pretty closely.
In fairness to the makers of the mini-series, they didn't do *everything* wrong. As far as I could tell, all scenes were well focused. Good camera men.
"Help! I'm getting dizzy! The spinning!" - Frank Herbert (from the grave)
3. Ornithopters are unbalanced enough to fall over on the ground
4. Guild Navigators look like orange rubber vampires
5. Spend 80% of budget on special effects - well, some of the special effects - but we don't need no stinking dialect coaches!
6. Old Bene Geserit Witches are younger than young witches
7. William Hurt - when saying something profound - be sure to mumble
8. Stilgar looks like a janitor from the Ford truck plant
9. Be sure to sleep with the windows open when your life is in constant danger and the ambient humidity is 0.00003%
10. You would get arrested for exposure for displaying a sand worm in public
11. Wow! There were books written about this? Kewl! I'll read them later - gotta finish the mini series script now.
When they originally announced that Dino was going to do the Dune movie, I was just certain it would suck. Considering the limitations of special effects technology at the time - Dino did one hell of a job. The casting was excellent, everybody could act, and he followed the book pretty closely.
In fairness to the makers of the mini-series, they didn't do *everything* wrong. As far as I could tell, all scenes were well focused. Good camera men.
"Help! I'm getting dizzy! The spinning!" - Frank Herbert (from the grave)
1. Does an American Citizen own his/her self - mind, body, and spirit - or are we owned by the government? Yes or No please.
2. Can an American Citizen claim for him/her self, any right not specifically abridged by the Constitution, so long as the right they choose to exercise does not infringe upon the rights of others? Yes or No please.
These issues may seem simple - but the various political factions appear to have very different beliefs.
Consider whether a person does or does not own their body and mind - for lack of a better word - their "being". If a person owns their own being, then government intrusion into things like abortion, assisted suicide, drug use, etc. would be viewed differently than if the government owns us. At this time, we seem to have a mixture of the two beliefs - we own part of our lives and the government owns part. (I profoundly believe that the government is not entitled to even one second of my life, except that I agree to give up through representative taxation for specific services.)
The practice of using taxation for social engineering - attempting to force behavior modification by demanding pieces of our lives - would certainly be curtailed if the government drones quit believing they owned us.
If the candidates would give answers to these questions, it would be much easier to understand their positions on most other issues.
We used to sell these things in our telescope store. They are extremely cool and fun to have around. BUT - careless holiday shoppers can kill them. So can the Fed-Ex guy. The original "Bio Spheres" (the fresh water version) are pretty resilient and can take some handling and some temperature swings. The populations of little animals running around in these are diverse and their numbers change constantly.
The new offering is the "Beach World". These are salt water and have little red shrimp in them. The shrimp are bigger than the critters in the original sphere and the red color is truly striking - when they aren't being hassled! To avoid predators - and dickheads shaking the sphere - they turn clear when disturbed. It takes about an hour for the red color to come back, and you can bug them to death if this happens too often.
The other issue is temperature change. Both spheres can live in a about a 20 degree (F) range between 60 and 80. You need to keep the temp as constant as possible to keep them happy. Sudden or frequent changes can mean death. You can't leave these things in a window where they can get direct sunlight for even 10 minutes. The volume of water is very small - and in direct sunlight - it's only a few short minutes to micro boiled shrimp.
Sooooo......what this means is:
I love these things and I have a couple. They are great pets for semi-responsible people and outstanding converstation starters.
BUT.....
We quit selling them in the store because too many people were killing them. No matter what we said - they seemed to treat these things like paperweights instead of living animals. If you are going to give one of these as a gift, make sure the person you are giving it to is capable of keeping a dog or a plant alive. Also, keep these things in mind:
You MUST make sure they get enough light - you can't walk off and turn the lights off for a week
- they will die.
You can't let it sit in your car while you finish your holiday shopping. 20 minutes in your 40 degree car is death - and not the manufacturer's fault.
It's better to give them a gift certificate for this and wait until April to actually send the sphere if they live in a cold climate. These things have to be shipped overnight Fed-Ex to live through the ordeal. Shipping gravely stresses them and they must recover - that means they must be removed immeditately on arrival. If grandma waits 3 weeks to open this at Christmas, she will get a nice ball of dead green slime to stare at while she cuts you out of the will.
You CAN NOT treat these things like a "snow sphere". Shake it and watch it snow dead shrimp on the minature beach.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there is any value in the knowledge stored in the brains of us soon-to-be-geezers pinball wizards. Not only did I mis-spend my youth playing pinball machines, I worked my way through school repairing them. 200 violently moving parts + abusive players = job security.
I started working on them in 1978 when stuff like Pong and Space Invaders was high-tech. The control circuitry has changed radically over the years - from relays, solenoid steppers, and cams - to sophisticated multi-processor systems. However, the playfields are still filled with precision mechanisms that get bashed with little cannon balls.
Every machine used to come with a little kit of spare parts you could expect to break in the first week, along with a COMPLETE SET OF SCHEMATICS! Really! They were right there in the bottom of the machine. A complete 30+ page large format book of prints with long fold outs for the complex stuff. No "black box" block diagrams - every wire and resistor was shown. They expected you to repair to the component level - not just swap modules. I am getting misty eyed just thinking about how I had all the info I needed to do the job. In these "modern" times, you don't even get a clear diagram of how to hook up the power LED in your new computer case.
In my opinion, the only people truly qualified to repair pinball machines are the addicts themselves. We used to stay late after work the day a new model was delivered. We would put the first one together (these things used to come in lots of pieces and were not trivial to assemble) on our own time. 3 or 4 of us would then play the machine until dawn - stopping now and then to make tweaks. By morning we were completely fried, but had a supreme knowledge of how to tune the machine for playability. More importantly, we could kick ass in the pinball tournaments the bars would sponsor. The bucks we won would more than pay us back for the sleep we lost. Some of the customers would bitch about "professionals" playing in the tournaments, but the bar owners liked the idea of having somebody around who could unlock the machine and unstick a ball or unjam a coin slot.
smoke-filled VFW halls
quart bottles of playfield wax
a giant canvas bank bag full of rubbers
the smell of stale beer and burnt solenoid drivers
soldering iron burns
you: 685,370 everybody else: under 85,000
It was a simpler time...when carpal tunnel syndrome was just "pinball wrist"
Is your broad-band access now going to subject to an AOL user agreement? I am much more afraid of corporate America instituting restrictive rules for connecting to the net through them than the government (at the moment anyway). Corporate lawyers don't necessarily target *real* problems when they write user agreements (or software licenses) - they will happily add language to guard against purely theoretical threats. It's all done in the name of protecting their companies and the interests of their share holders, but the net result is that you will be allowed to use your account where, when, how, and with whom they see fit. If you don't like it, you can get another ISP.
It is only a matter of time before all of the ISP user agreements read virtually the same. There will be a few hold-outs promising an "unfiltered" connection. That's when the government will step in and squash the few "freedom-fighting" ISPs. No reason for the government to act hastily. It's too much work to clamp down on everybody right now. All big G has to do is wait for market forces to standardize web access in to the pre-digested pabulum which is AOL, then pass regulations which make it all but impossible to be an ISP if you aren't a mega corp.
Have you ever actually read your ISP user agreement? It's way more scary than this article.
It's like masturbating with a cheese grater - sort of interesting, but mostly painful.
Observations on "Dune - The Suck Ass Mini Series"
When they originally announced that Dino was going to do the Dune movie, I was just certain it would suck. Considering the limitations of special effects technology at the time - Dino did one hell of a job. The casting was excellent, everybody could act, and he followed the book pretty closely.
In fairness to the makers of the mini-series, they didn't do *everything* wrong. As far as I could tell, all scenes were well focused. Good camera men.
"Help! I'm getting dizzy! The spinning!" - Frank Herbert (from the grave)
1. Future Super Beings are VERY whiny
2. Spice does not cure baldness
3. Ornithopters are unbalanced enough to fall over on the ground
4. Guild Navigators look like orange rubber vampires
5. Spend 80% of budget on special effects - well, some of the special effects - but we don't need no stinking dialect coaches!
6. Old Bene Geserit Witches are younger than young witches
7. William Hurt - when saying something profound - be sure to mumble
8. Stilgar looks like a janitor from the Ford truck plant
9. Be sure to sleep with the windows open when your life is in constant danger and the ambient humidity is 0.00003%
10. You would get arrested for exposure for displaying a sand worm in public
11. Wow! There were books written about this? Kewl! I'll read them later - gotta finish the mini series script now.
When they originally announced that Dino was going to do the Dune movie, I was just certain it would suck. Considering the limitations of special effects technology at the time - Dino did one hell of a job. The casting was excellent, everybody could act, and he followed the book pretty closely.
In fairness to the makers of the mini-series, they didn't do *everything* wrong. As far as I could tell, all scenes were well focused. Good camera men.
"Help! I'm getting dizzy! The spinning!" - Frank Herbert (from the grave)
1. Does an American Citizen own his/her self - mind, body, and spirit - or are we owned by the government? Yes or No please.
2. Can an American Citizen claim for him/her self, any right not specifically abridged by the Constitution, so long as the right they choose to exercise does not infringe upon the rights of others? Yes or No please.
These issues may seem simple - but the various political factions appear to have very different beliefs.
Consider whether a person does or does not own their body and mind - for lack of a better word - their "being". If a person owns their own being, then government intrusion into things like abortion, assisted suicide, drug use, etc. would be viewed differently than if the government owns us. At this time, we seem to have a mixture of the two beliefs - we own part of our lives and the government owns part. (I profoundly believe that the government is not entitled to even one second of my life, except that I agree to give up through representative taxation for specific services.)
The practice of using taxation for social engineering - attempting to force behavior modification by demanding pieces of our lives - would certainly be curtailed if the government drones quit believing they owned us.
If the candidates would give answers to these questions, it would be much easier to understand their positions on most other issues.
The new offering is the "Beach World". These are salt water and have little red shrimp in them. The shrimp are bigger than the critters in the original sphere and the red color is truly striking - when they aren't being hassled! To avoid predators - and dickheads shaking the sphere - they turn clear when disturbed. It takes about an hour for the red color to come back, and you can bug them to death if this happens too often.
The other issue is temperature change. Both spheres can live in a about a 20 degree (F) range between 60 and 80. You need to keep the temp as constant as possible to keep them happy. Sudden or frequent changes can mean death. You can't leave these things in a window where they can get direct sunlight for even 10 minutes. The volume of water is very small - and in direct sunlight - it's only a few short minutes to micro boiled shrimp.
Sooooo......what this means is: I love these things and I have a couple. They are great pets for semi-responsible people and outstanding converstation starters.
BUT..... We quit selling them in the store because too many people were killing them. No matter what we said - they seemed to treat these things like paperweights instead of living animals. If you are going to give one of these as a gift, make sure the person you are giving it to is capable of keeping a dog or a plant alive. Also, keep these things in mind:
You MUST make sure they get enough light - you can't walk off and turn the lights off for a week - they will die.
You can't let it sit in your car while you finish your holiday shopping. 20 minutes in your 40 degree car is death - and not the manufacturer's fault.
It's better to give them a gift certificate for this and wait until April to actually send the sphere if they live in a cold climate. These things have to be shipped overnight Fed-Ex to live through the ordeal. Shipping gravely stresses them and they must recover - that means they must be removed immeditately on arrival. If grandma waits 3 weeks to open this at Christmas, she will get a nice ball of dead green slime to stare at while she cuts you out of the will.
You CAN NOT treat these things like a "snow sphere". Shake it and watch it snow dead shrimp on the minature beach.
Enjoy your Bio Sphere!