DARPA put up a $1,000,000 cold hard cash for an autonomous vehicle and they got dozens of shoddy immitations that couldn't even navigate the test course.
Normally they have to pay a defense contractor BILLIONS to get something that doesn't work.
They saved loads of money, and they don't have to pay until it works, unlike, oh, other DoD projects, like the Osprey, Comanche, Patriot, TW Missile Defense, etc.
The G5 isn't the problem...
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's the mBox.
Yeah, you heard me. The mBox. The inputs on those pieces of crap are so noisy you have to use a separate pre-amp if you want any kind of range. Seriously, I own one, THEY SUCK.
Now, enough trolling about the mBox, that horrible horrible toy. Tinkering around inside the G5 is a phenomenally bad idea. But there are many products that let you quiet a machine w/o oh, melting it. I can't find a link, but there're a number of thin (4mm) foam materials you can put on the inside of your case walls that have great sound dampening ability. Now, the fans are the tougher problem. I'd recommend the venting idea proposed in another post. All external, all cheap.
One last note: To save the recordings you have made, try out Sony/Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction plug in. I've used it to remove the machine noise from my DAW and it's really, really good, especially for voice. Now, yes, it's on a PC, but it'll run FAST on any relatively new (P3 or better, Athlon) desktop.
But dump the mBox if you want to be taken seriously. I can't stand the damn thing, but it wasn't my purchasing decision...
Ok, I just erased the page long rant about how those something something Canadians and New Zealanders are stealing jobs from such great people as, oh MYSELF, my FRIENDS, and the rest of us who are dedicated to the film industry here in lovely Hollywood. Want to talk about outsourcing? It isn't all call center jobs.
I'll just leave one thing...
Does Peter Jackson know how to tie a tie or wear a shirt? I didn't think so. He can take his Kiwi ass back to New Zealand.
In other news, "the shakes"? From Pot and LSD? LSD and Pot are physically addictive? Since when? I don't know about anyone else, but after 10-12 hours of an LSD, I am more than done for the duration.
Actually, somebody hasn't been reading their literature. Marijuana has been found to be addictive for a certain part of the population. Not a huge percentage, but a fair bit. Don't know the exact numbers. Nasty withdrawals symptoms include severe depression. Thankfully, withdrawal does not include, ya know, raping and murdering your entire extended family, like the 'Just Say No' crowd wants to make you think.
Now, LSD just causes long term brain damage. No biggy. We all know that, combined, video games and the internet make you stupid, anyhow.
And in another sidebar, NARC was only fun for the Porsche that fired rockets. That was sweet.
Re: A lot of spare time
on
Borg Cube Case
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yeah, this story definitely presents a conundrum.
We can't tell the guy to get a hobby, and we already know he doesn't have a life...
Your two examples are fantastical. I think people who train with terrorists definitely should feel the long arm of American law enforcement stabbing them in the back.
What I don't support is sneak and peek warrants, arrests where the Feds don't have to tell anyone who they've arrested, what for, or where they are being held. What I especially don't like is this assumption that Al Qaida was after "me." Those planes weren't targeted to kill (yes, they did do that, but bear with me.) The hijacked airliners killed just about 3,000 people, which puts them well below drunk driving, heart disease, and tripping, falling down some stairs and breaking your neck, on the mortality sheet. What the image of the World Trade Center collapsing did is scare the living daylights out of millions of Americans. Congress included. Honest to goodness fear. The dead? An unlucky few who were the victims of a few dozen extremists' last desperate act. If Al Qaida wanted to kill people, they'd have been better off, oh, I dunno, buying a McDonald's franchise or opening a drive through liquor store that didn't check ID. Mass casualties was not the goal. Terror was.
The rest of us lived. We now have to make choices that will keep all of us safe. Safe from violence, yes, but safe from each other more so.
Get real. The two parties that have representatives in Congress have power because of the PEOPLE who make up the party ranks. I like to believe that the Democratic party is made up of people who care about other people's suffering, while the Republicans...they care about the poor and hungry, too.
Yeah, because, you know, Al Qaida has hundreds of representatives in every town and city in America. Al Qaida knows where I live. Al Qaida expects a check from me every April. Al Qaida builds my roads, and runs my schools, and comes to my house every day. Al Qaida can get primetime speechs broadcast at any time. Al Qaida has tanks. Al Qaida has a million men and women ready to storm any place on Earth with overwhelming firepower within hours of being given the order. Al Qaida has nuclear submarines. Al Qaida has over a thousand silos in middle America, brimming with thermonuclear might.
In a head to head battle between the US and Al Qaida, I'm betting on Al Qaida.
I'm also looking to buy a bridge, and maybe a beach front condo in Arizona.
...so I get RFID tags on my bottles of pills. Great. Then I put them in this bag and the tags are jammed. Ok.
SO WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF THE TAGS IN THE FIRST PLACE!?!
If I have to take the bottle out of the bag to show it to the pharmacist or cashier or whoever when I want to get a refill or pay, why not just put a goddamn BAR CODE on the stupid bottle!?! There! Done! I show you the bottle, you do something with it. Bam! Just like what we have today! No extra cost! No upgrades! No new hardware! This is like inventing Caller ID so you can sell everyone Called ID Blocking! Why have BOTH? We can just live without the RFIDs in the first place!
Funny you should mention working for the military, sorta, in a non-baby killing training scenario. I actually DO work for the military (DoD and DARPA through a research lab) developing training tools to help soldiers NOT shoot people. It's fulfilling work, and I still get to play games on the clock.
"Yeah, I'm studying the use of speech recognition and synthesis in the new UT2k4 demo, boss. It's...uh...similar to what we want to use..."
D&D is finally main stream. After 30 years Dungeons & Dragons is no longer the butt of jokes about "probing dungeons" and questions like "Why do dragons horde gold?" And I'm glad to see that the misconception that only pasty white kids who recoil at sunlight play D&D...
Wait......thist just means they're now pasty white out of work dot-commers who play D&D...
DoD is king. Makes CS look like a 14 year old camper fest...wait, that's what CS is...
Seriously folks, RTCW:ET can't hold a candle to Day of Defeat. I played casually for a week and then got hooked. It's worth it, and you can get yourself a Steam working CD-Key off of an copy of Half-Life, CS, or DoD retail, which run, oh...$10 online. Shameless plug, I got mine from dirtcheapgames.com and have been Ownzorin' Allie N00bs since September.
I'd love to see WINE on OS X but will it run any faster than Dosbox? I know you're thinking "Oh, great, he's comparing WINE to a game environment emulator." but hey, it's the same problem. Dosbox emulates a 286 or so wholesale, which is...well...useful for old DOS games, but can Wine promise anything more? WINE is, obviously, not an emulator, so it has to work on top of an actual emulator. Dosbox is slow. Bochs is slow. WINE is fast...on a high end x86. WINE won't run so well on your old 386. So if WINE is running on top of Bochs, is it like taking your Ferrari out for a spin in wet cement?...or is soembody going to do some brilliant hacking that magically turns my G4 into an Athlon?...or a K6?...P2?...486?
See what happens when you leave apt-get update all running overnight?
Back to being serious, I love Debian (I use Fink on my PowerBook) but for the life of me I have NEVER EVER NOT ONCE gotten it to install on my desktop without some serious hacking. I just can't get it to install out of the box...or not the box, as it stands, and I'm not running some odd hardware config. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, easy. Debian? "Please get a MS in Comp. Sci and try again."
Once it is installed, Debian is the best. Hands down, you Gentoo trolls can go compile Mozilla for the next 4 days, it rocks. But where, oh where, is a decent installer for Debian?
Why would iFeel guilty about using OSX? I'm a new PowerBook owner and iFeel having a nice UNIX/BSD/Whatever core under my iHood is a feature. Linux is, as many have stated, not ready for mass desktop usage (though iDisagree, with the latest KDE builds...) so running OSX gives me a system my iFriends, my iMother, my iCoworkers, etc. are more comfortable using while it is secure, powerful, and pretty. That review of BSD yesterday said just that, "Greater server, but the desktop is lacking." OSX gives us Aqua, which solves the desktop problem.
Now, some people will say that using OSX and Apple hardware brainwashes people into supporting Apple blindly. That is not the case. iLove Apple. They have never done anything that iDislike and iHave never noticed any kind of subliminal messages. iLove Apple. iPlan to upgrade and iPlan to stick with this company. iCal tells me to...
But you probably already knew that. That means SCO has enough cash to operate...let's see here...
$699 X 3 = $2,097 - Boies' legal bills = -A Bajillion Dollars Plus or minus a few bucks for the valet parking guy at their favorite bistro.
SCO is done. IBM simply has to take a print out of this article, hand it to their trial judge, and watch Darl start crying...
IBM's "We don't talk to the media about litigation." response is much better than SCO's "Please, believe us, help, we're desperate, I'll say something stupid so you'll print the interview, just god, please, believe what we have to say..."
Maybe I'm confused, but shouldn't SCO have sued Novell first? If they go to trial with IBM before the Novell suit is worked out, then the Big Blue Bulldozer can ride right over them with the ol' "SCO is tied up in court to prove they own the rights to the code that they say they own, but Novell says differently, and it's still up in the air, so they can't touch us" argument. Therefore, SCO better pray that Novell loses (yeah, that'll happen) quickly (Oh wow I can't stop laughing) before IBM gets in front of a judge to have SCO's claims dismissed while Big Blue can continue with its counterclaims. Put simply, SCO just found out, or realized, that they put the cart in front of the horse...not that they own any such horse, cart, or are even on a road anybody recognizes...
Everybody who thinks IBM's lawyer's bust out a Big Blue Grin when this came out, raise your hand.
The big problem you'll face on solar is the ol' "It don't work when the sun ain't around." That means you're better off getting a laptop for a few reasons. 3 or more hours of battery life can be very handy and you can march around with it, meaning you could leave lights off at your desk and stroll over to the kitchen with your laptop, saving electricity in two ways, the lights and that stored in the batteries.
Another option is get a UPS for your desktop. You can run the machine off of that when the power goes out, night, etc. and they are relatively cheap...if you get a 4 hour one... and can power other devices. The laptop and the UPC will trickle charge while juice is flowing, so you can be pretty sure that when the sun does set, you won't miss a beat with your tech.
Now... how exactly are you going to get on the net? Satellite? Pigeon?
Forget perfect gift, it makes them, for the first time giftable at all! You aren't going to drop $400 on an iPod for a friend of relative unless you KNOW they want it, can use it, know how to use it, have enough music to actually make a dent in the thing's capacity, have a pc (and previously a Mac) with a firewire port, and don't drop their small electronics, or run with them, or get them wet, etc. The design of the iPod and the high price point preclude it from being very "givable" because of the type and variety of supporting factors it needs. You don't give just anybody a terrabyte file server or a desktop spectral analyzer either, do you? (But I want one, so somebody pony up!)
Now, a $100 iPod which holds a rational amount of music (Come on, you have 10 GB, but do you need ALL of it ALL the time?) and maybe does away with that stupid hard disk and replaces it with say, flash memory so you can jog with it and drop it without it going berserk, now that would be sweet. A $100 gift is more typical for family members and close friends, while $400 is much more of a, "Now Junior, don't expect much else, we had to give Apple your little sister for that!"
Re:Wrong kind of cube...
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 4, Funny
You hear 'cube' on slashdot and you think "Mac Cube?" "GameCube?" "To the third power?" but in the end the answer is always the same...
Another reason this happens is that a good sound is a good sound. Even better if it has a history. Getting a good door sound is harder than it... sounds. I'm an editor and trust me, if the best door sound has been done, I'd use it if I couldn't get a good foley. Of course, if I could get something better, or just original, I'd use that.
The pathetic bit is that a lot of movies lay in used foley samples that are not only common, but just stupid. A little ingenuity or a 10 minute drive with your over the should recorder and you could do better, but no, have to use that sample that you used last year... There isn't ONE car crash sound, but you couldn't tell that from most movies. There isn't ONE gunshot, but don't tell guys working on a series. Hell, the Wilhelm is just the most famous because it's funny, a little ridiculous, is a tribute to all the films it's been in, and is so damn recognizable.
There're other overused samples, and I'm tempted to say they're probably all from some sample library that was published in 1976 and has just been moving around forever or is included with a ProTools rig.
Slashdot Mirror
DARPA put up a $1,000,000 cold hard cash for an autonomous vehicle and they got dozens of shoddy immitations that couldn't even navigate the test course.
Normally they have to pay a defense contractor BILLIONS to get something that doesn't work.
They saved loads of money, and they don't have to pay until it works, unlike, oh, other DoD projects, like the Osprey, Comanche, Patriot, TW Missile Defense, etc.
It's the mBox.
Yeah, you heard me. The mBox. The inputs on those pieces of crap are so noisy you have to use a separate pre-amp if you want any kind of range. Seriously, I own one, THEY SUCK.
Now, enough trolling about the mBox, that horrible horrible toy. Tinkering around inside the G5 is a phenomenally bad idea. But there are many products that let you quiet a machine w/o oh, melting it. I can't find a link, but there're a number of thin (4mm) foam materials you can put on the inside of your case walls that have great sound dampening ability. Now, the fans are the tougher problem. I'd recommend the venting idea proposed in another post. All external, all cheap.
One last note: To save the recordings you have made, try out Sony/Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction plug in. I've used it to remove the machine noise from my DAW and it's really, really good, especially for voice. Now, yes, it's on a PC, but it'll run FAST on any relatively new (P3 or better, Athlon) desktop.
But dump the mBox if you want to be taken seriously. I can't stand the damn thing, but it wasn't my purchasing decision...
One more! Mouahahaha
Booyeah! I'm a statistic.
All I had to do was post a comment to Slashdot. Gee, in the good ol' days, you had to shoot somebody or get an STD...
Ok, I just erased the page long rant about how those something something Canadians and New Zealanders are stealing jobs from such great people as, oh MYSELF, my FRIENDS, and the rest of us who are dedicated to the film industry here in lovely Hollywood. Want to talk about outsourcing? It isn't all call center jobs.
I'll just leave one thing...
Does Peter Jackson know how to tie a tie or wear a shirt? I didn't think so. He can take his Kiwi ass back to New Zealand.
Don't make fun of the poor sap. He's a moron...I mean uh...n00b. Yeah, that's it.
In other news, "the shakes"? From Pot and LSD? LSD and Pot are physically addictive? Since when? I don't know about anyone else, but after 10-12 hours of an LSD, I am more than done for the duration.
Actually, somebody hasn't been reading their literature. Marijuana has been found to be addictive for a certain part of the population. Not a huge percentage, but a fair bit. Don't know the exact numbers. Nasty withdrawals symptoms include severe depression. Thankfully, withdrawal does not include, ya know, raping and murdering your entire extended family, like the 'Just Say No' crowd wants to make you think.
Now, LSD just causes long term brain damage. No biggy. We all know that, combined, video games and the internet make you stupid, anyhow.
And in another sidebar, NARC was only fun for the Porsche that fired rockets. That was sweet.
Yeah, this story definitely presents a conundrum.
We can't tell the guy to get a hobby, and we already know he doesn't have a life...
Your two examples are fantastical. I think people who train with terrorists definitely should feel the long arm of American law enforcement stabbing them in the back.
What I don't support is sneak and peek warrants, arrests where the Feds don't have to tell anyone who they've arrested, what for, or where they are being held. What I especially don't like is this assumption that Al Qaida was after "me." Those planes weren't targeted to kill (yes, they did do that, but bear with me.) The hijacked airliners killed just about 3,000 people, which puts them well below drunk driving, heart disease, and tripping, falling down some stairs and breaking your neck, on the mortality sheet. What the image of the World Trade Center collapsing did is scare the living daylights out of millions of Americans. Congress included. Honest to goodness fear. The dead? An unlucky few who were the victims of a few dozen extremists' last desperate act. If Al Qaida wanted to kill people, they'd have been better off, oh, I dunno, buying a McDonald's franchise or opening a drive through liquor store that didn't check ID. Mass casualties was not the goal. Terror was.
The rest of us lived. We now have to make choices that will keep all of us safe. Safe from violence, yes, but safe from each other more so.
From a loyal Democrat,
Fuck you, hippie.
Get real. The two parties that have representatives in Congress have power because of the PEOPLE who make up the party ranks. I like to believe that the Democratic party is made up of people who care about other people's suffering, while the Republicans...they care about the poor and hungry, too.
They enjoy watching them suffer.
Yeah, because, you know, Al Qaida has hundreds of representatives in every town and city in America. Al Qaida knows where I live. Al Qaida expects a check from me every April. Al Qaida builds my roads, and runs my schools, and comes to my house every day. Al Qaida can get primetime speechs broadcast at any time. Al Qaida has tanks. Al Qaida has a million men and women ready to storm any place on Earth with overwhelming firepower within hours of being given the order. Al Qaida has nuclear submarines. Al Qaida has over a thousand silos in middle America, brimming with thermonuclear might.
In a head to head battle between the US and Al Qaida, I'm betting on Al Qaida.
I'm also looking to buy a bridge, and maybe a beach front condo in Arizona.
...so I get RFID tags on my bottles of pills. Great. Then I put them in this bag and the tags are jammed. Ok.
SO WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF THE TAGS IN THE FIRST PLACE!?!
If I have to take the bottle out of the bag to show it to the pharmacist or cashier or whoever when I want to get a refill or pay, why not just put a goddamn BAR CODE on the stupid bottle!?! There! Done! I show you the bottle, you do something with it. Bam! Just like what we have today! No extra cost! No upgrades! No new hardware! This is like inventing Caller ID so you can sell everyone Called ID Blocking! Why have BOTH? We can just live without the RFIDs in the first place!
Funny you should mention working for the military, sorta, in a non-baby killing training scenario. I actually DO work for the military (DoD and DARPA through a research lab) developing training tools to help soldiers NOT shoot people. It's fulfilling work, and I still get to play games on the clock.
"Yeah, I'm studying the use of speech recognition and synthesis in the new UT2k4 demo, boss. It's...uh...similar to what we want to use..."
D&D is finally main stream. After 30 years Dungeons & Dragons is no longer the butt of jokes about "probing dungeons" and questions like "Why do dragons horde gold?" And I'm glad to see that the misconception that only pasty white kids who recoil at sunlight play D&D...
...thist just means they're now pasty white out of work dot-commers who play D&D...
Wait...
DoD is king. Makes CS look like a 14 year old camper fest...wait, that's what CS is...
Seriously folks, RTCW:ET can't hold a candle to Day of Defeat. I played casually for a week and then got hooked. It's worth it, and you can get yourself a Steam working CD-Key off of an copy of Half-Life, CS, or DoD retail, which run, oh...$10 online. Shameless plug, I got mine from dirtcheapgames.com and have been Ownzorin' Allie N00bs since September.
...hehe, just kidding. But you can run old DOS games screamingly fast (too fast, actually...) and newer (1997+) games at a good clip.
On the native side...
Fallout 2. It's ported to OSX and it's still the best post-apocalyptic RPG ever created.
I also bought Tropico, which is a fun but somewhat confusing (Why are you all unhappy? More death squads!) sim.
I'd love to see WINE on OS X but will it run any faster than Dosbox? I know you're thinking "Oh, great, he's comparing WINE to a game environment emulator." but hey, it's the same problem. Dosbox emulates a 286 or so wholesale, which is...well...useful for old DOS games, but can Wine promise anything more? WINE is, obviously, not an emulator, so it has to work on top of an actual emulator. Dosbox is slow. Bochs is slow. WINE is fast...on a high end x86. WINE won't run so well on your old 386. So if WINE is running on top of Bochs, is it like taking your Ferrari out for a spin in wet cement? ...or is soembody going to do some brilliant hacking that magically turns my G4 into an Athlon?...or a K6? ...P2? ...486?
See what happens when you leave apt-get update all running overnight?
Back to being serious, I love Debian (I use Fink on my PowerBook) but for the life of me I have NEVER EVER NOT ONCE gotten it to install on my desktop without some serious hacking. I just can't get it to install out of the box...or not the box, as it stands, and I'm not running some odd hardware config. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, easy. Debian? "Please get a MS in Comp. Sci and try again."
Once it is installed, Debian is the best. Hands down, you Gentoo trolls can go compile Mozilla for the next 4 days, it rocks. But where, oh where, is a decent installer for Debian?
Why would iFeel guilty about using OSX? I'm a new PowerBook owner and iFeel having a nice UNIX/BSD/Whatever core under my iHood is a feature. Linux is, as many have stated, not ready for mass desktop usage (though iDisagree, with the latest KDE builds...) so running OSX gives me a system my iFriends, my iMother, my iCoworkers, etc. are more comfortable using while it is secure, powerful, and pretty. That review of BSD yesterday said just that, "Greater server, but the desktop is lacking." OSX gives us Aqua, which solves the desktop problem.
Now, some people will say that using OSX and Apple hardware brainwashes people into supporting Apple blindly. That is not the case. iLove Apple. They have never done anything that iDislike and iHave never noticed any kind of subliminal messages. iLove Apple. iPlan to upgrade and iPlan to stick with this company. iCal tells me to...
Actually, it's 3.
.20 = 15/5 = 3
15 X
But you probably already knew that. That means SCO has enough cash to operate...let's see here...
$699 X 3 = $2,097 - Boies' legal bills = -A Bajillion Dollars
Plus or minus a few bucks for the valet parking guy at their favorite bistro.
SCO is done. IBM simply has to take a print out of this article, hand it to their trial judge, and watch Darl start crying...
IBM's "We don't talk to the media about litigation." response is much better than SCO's "Please, believe us, help, we're desperate, I'll say something stupid so you'll print the interview, just god, please, believe what we have to say..."
Maybe I'm confused, but shouldn't SCO have sued Novell first? If they go to trial with IBM before the Novell suit is worked out, then the Big Blue Bulldozer can ride right over them with the ol' "SCO is tied up in court to prove they own the rights to the code that they say they own, but Novell says differently, and it's still up in the air, so they can't touch us" argument. Therefore, SCO better pray that Novell loses (yeah, that'll happen) quickly (Oh wow I can't stop laughing) before IBM gets in front of a judge to have SCO's claims dismissed while Big Blue can continue with its counterclaims. Put simply, SCO just found out, or realized, that they put the cart in front of the horse...not that they own any such horse, cart, or are even on a road anybody recognizes...
Everybody who thinks IBM's lawyer's bust out a Big Blue Grin when this came out, raise your hand.
... ... ...
HUH!?!
And I thought I was a geek...
What the hell does that mean, what does it do, and who do we sue for the class action lawsuit?
The big problem you'll face on solar is the ol' "It don't work when the sun ain't around." That means you're better off getting a laptop for a few reasons. 3 or more hours of battery life can be very handy and you can march around with it, meaning you could leave lights off at your desk and stroll over to the kitchen with your laptop, saving electricity in two ways, the lights and that stored in the batteries.
Another option is get a UPS for your desktop. You can run the machine off of that when the power goes out, night, etc. and they are relatively cheap...if you get a 4 hour one... and can power other devices. The laptop and the UPC will trickle charge while juice is flowing, so you can be pretty sure that when the sun does set, you won't miss a beat with your tech.
Now... how exactly are you going to get on the net? Satellite? Pigeon?
Forget perfect gift, it makes them, for the first time giftable at all! You aren't going to drop $400 on an iPod for a friend of relative unless you KNOW they want it, can use it, know how to use it, have enough music to actually make a dent in the thing's capacity, have a pc (and previously a Mac) with a firewire port, and don't drop their small electronics, or run with them, or get them wet, etc. The design of the iPod and the high price point preclude it from being very "givable" because of the type and variety of supporting factors it needs. You don't give just anybody a terrabyte file server or a desktop spectral analyzer either, do you? (But I want one, so somebody pony up!)
Now, a $100 iPod which holds a rational amount of music (Come on, you have 10 GB, but do you need ALL of it ALL the time?) and maybe does away with that stupid hard disk and replaces it with say, flash memory so you can jog with it and drop it without it going berserk, now that would be sweet. A $100 gift is more typical for family members and close friends, while $400 is much more of a, "Now Junior, don't expect much else, we had to give Apple your little sister for that!"
You hear 'cube' on slashdot and you think "Mac Cube?" "GameCube?" "To the third power?" but in the end the answer is always the same...
"Webserver is now a flaming beige cube."
Another reason this happens is that a good sound is a good sound. Even better if it has a history. Getting a good door sound is harder than it... sounds. I'm an editor and trust me, if the best door sound has been done, I'd use it if I couldn't get a good foley. Of course, if I could get something better, or just original, I'd use that.
The pathetic bit is that a lot of movies lay in used foley samples that are not only common, but just stupid. A little ingenuity or a 10 minute drive with your over the should recorder and you could do better, but no, have to use that sample that you used last year... There isn't ONE car crash sound, but you couldn't tell that from most movies. There isn't ONE gunshot, but don't tell guys working on a series. Hell, the Wilhelm is just the most famous because it's funny, a little ridiculous, is a tribute to all the films it's been in, and is so damn recognizable.
There're other overused samples, and I'm tempted to say they're probably all from some sample library that was published in 1976 and has just been moving around forever or is included with a ProTools rig.