Rent it, rip it through Total Recorder to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or whatever, cancel. There's always a way to pirate.
Not that I'm advocating such a thing, of course, just pointing out that if someone can hear it, they can copy it just as easily. Copy protection schemes are just a waste of effort.
Lots of machines, both video and pin. If you're planning on throwing parties you don't want your friends waiting in line. Get some competitive machines, too. It's a blast playing Crusin' USA/World/Exotica on a four-seat linked system when you don't have to worry about feeding it your life's savings in quarters.
Where do you live? If it's a cooler climate, is the garage insulated and heated for the winter? If it's a warmer climate, is the garage cooled in the summer? In any case, a few ceiling fans would go a long way.
As for resale value... This will definitely decrease it. Think -- You'll probably want to take the games with you when you move. Even if you don't, there really aren't that many people out there who want a full-blown arcade in their garage. Even as a geek and gamer, I'd rather have a place to keep my car than a garage full of games. Plan on converting the arcade back to a usable garage before you sell.
Crud! Why couldn't this book have come out 5 years ago when I was actually doing game development? Oh well, at least Chris Hecker's physics articles in Game Developer came at the right time.
BTW, if anyone happens to see a Simpsons Bowling arcade machine in the Chicago area, let me know where. I'd love to see if my physics model made it into the final production.
We sometimes do this as a party trick at midwest SF cons. Take your basic ice cream recipe in a big bowl, then have one person slowly pour LN2 from the dewar while the other one stirs maddly. I'm not sure why the article recommends pouring the nitrogen into containers first.
Liquid oxygen works wonderfully as well. Last summer in Michigan we made LOX ice cream with freshly-picked thimbleberries. (And no, it doesn't burn! Not even when you put a blowtorch to it...) In a pinch you can even use dry ice. Have someone rub a block of dry ice on a cheese grater over the bowl. This method tends to leave some residual carbonation in the ice cream. Bring along root beer extract for flavor!
Other fun cryogenic tricks -- Everclear (198 proof grain alcohol) will freeze at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Small pieces chipped off evaporate marvelously on the tongue. An inverted scotch-on-the-rocks can be made by freezing scotch in an ice-cube tray and adding the cubes to a little water or soda. Winecicles are interesting, too, but beware the tongue-and-flagpole effect when you lick them!
Reader Rabbit's Toddler is not too bad (unfortunately our cd had been kidified, so my 22-month-old comes in regularly, tugging on my finger to get tech support when it tried to read a scrated area of the disk and crashes).
I'll second the vote for Reader Rabbit's Toddler. My kid loved it when he was that age. Also the Disney Interactive Storybooks (especially the Pooh titles) are enjoyable. Beware the newer ones, though, which are based on Shockwave rather than Quicktime. You cannot abort the long explanatory animations in the Shockwave titles. You can in the older Quicktime titles (like "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.")
Stay as far away as you can from Teletubbies! I have nothing against the show, really, but the game stinks to high heaven. It too suffers from frequent, long, uninterruptable animation sequences. It uses a clickless (point-and-hover) interface, but provides only a very subtle cue when you've hovered long enough to activate something. And, of course, the activation starts a long non-interactive sequence... Oh, and to exit the game you let the mouse hover in one of the screen corners. The game then exits without confirmation (through a 2-minute long non-interruptable credit sequence!). Now, where do you think a toddler's uncoordinated mouse twitches end up most of the time? You guessed it! The game is just plain frustrating to kids and parents alike.
BTW, I found a solution for the "kidified" CD syndrome. I no longer let my kids have the actual CD media. Instead, I've installed Daemon Tools virtual CD drive software. Before I install a game on the kids' machine I snag an image of it and mount that in the virtual drive. Once the game's installed I replace the desktop icon with a batch file that automagically mounts the appropriate CD image and starts the game. No more scratched CDs! You'll need a large hard drive, but even a 20G drive holds a fair number of games.
This technique works great for my grown-up games, too. Snag the image and forget fumbling for CDs. Daemon Tools emulates common copy-protection schemes, and I have yet to find a game (kiddie or grown-up) that can't be played with the image instead of the CD itself.
I always liked 'trn' under Unix, though I think it's pretty much been orphaned now. I've also heard good things about 'slrn' and 'nn'. All of these are console-based readers. I left the Unix scene too long ago to have found a good reader that runs under X.
Under Win32 I think that Microplanet's Gravity is a fantastic reader. It got orphaned a year or two ago (and the link is down now, so the company may be defunct) but you can still get it from various download sites. Try Webattack.
When Microplanet abandoned it they released the last build (v2.50) as freeware. Good going, guys! I liked it enough to pay for it at v1.1, and I'm glad it's still available.
I mean, great, now they are available. But will anyone actually use them?
To the Great Unwashed Masses, the only domain worth knowing about is ".com". I was trying to set up a "Reply-To" line for my SprintPCS mail. When I called their tech support, I was told that my email address <xxxxx@xxxxx.chi.il.us> was invalid 'cause it didn't end in ".com"! *sigh*
If it doesn't start with "www." and end with ".com", the muggles just can't cope with it.
A number of years ago a buddy of mine at Fermilab created a walk-through of the control rooms as a map for Duke Nukem. I don't think he included weapons, but people loved going around smashing computer monitors with the "mighty foot".
My wife and I took our kids (two boys, ages 9 and 4) to the matinee yesterday. They both enjoyed the film, though the 4yo was quite distressed when the door got shredded. He didn't see the doors as portals to the rooms, but as containing the rooms. Shred the container, and you shred the contents... Ouch! I had to spend a few minutes explaining it to him, and even then I don't think he got it until the very end. (Why aren't the preschools spending more time teaching kids about transdimensional physics?!?!)
In general we all had a good time, though the consensus was that Toy Story 2 was more fun. We'll still end up getting MI when it hits DVD, though.
The only reason someone didn't have an HP in engineering college was that they hadn't saved up enough to buy one yet.
One day at work one of the mechanical engineers asked to borrow my calculator. I handed him my trusty HP. He poked at it a few times, then asked "Where's the 'equals' key?"
I simply stared at him for a couple seconds and said, "You're not really an engineer, are you?"
This is indeed sad. I wouldn't consider buying anything but an HP. My trusty 15C got me through my BSEE degree. Thank ghu for complex matrix operations! Once I got out and landed a job writing firmware I wanted to get a 16C, but sadly HP didn't make them any more. I finally found someone willing to sell a used one for $50 and I snatched it up. At another job, a project designer gave me an almost-new 42S because it lacked the one function he needed. (Actually, I suspect the gift was something of a bribe to keep me on his project.)
And where am I today? Well, right now that 17-year-old 15C is sitting on the desk next to me. The 16C and 42S are in my drawer at work. (The 42S does everything the 16C does and more, but the 16C is just way more convenient for most programming calculations.) Maybe HP is getting out of the calculator business because their products are too good. They last forever. Unlike the TIs which have the self-destructing keypads...
At the absolute most send an email or letter thanking them for the interview. Any more than this just sends up red flags for me. "INSINCERE SCHMOOZING WEENIE!" And only one letter is necessary. If you interviewed with multiple people, just send the note to the manager or senior guy, not everyone involved.
<WAR_STORY> About a decade ago we interviewed someone who seemed okay (not stellar, but okay) technically, but just seemed oily. On top of that, he sent everyone involved this really obsequious sycophantic letter. I didn't want to hire him, but I was the junior guy and we needed warm bodies (remember when the economy was good?) so I got overruled. He did work out okay, but seemed more interested in maintaining his image than in maintaining the code. Eventually he transfered over to marketing, and everyone was happier all around. </WAR_STORY>
In my experience, when we do real in-house interviews (as opposed to job fairs or campus recruiting) we're generally looking to fill one or two fairly specific positions. By the end of the day we can usually give someone a thumbs up or thumbs down. Even if you sent the email from your wireless PDA as soon as you left the building, it'll come in after the decision's been made. (At least the decision whether or not to add you to the short list for a second interview.) I admit I've never been in a situation where we've found 200 resumes that look even halfway worthwhile. Generally the list of people who get called at all is very, very small.
Have you ever actually used the command line in Win2K? It's horrible.
Brother, it's time for you to see the light that is 4NT. Everybody say 'AMEN!'
FSP, anyone?
on
A Better FTP?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Remember FSP, the "File Server Protocol". It was introduced about 10 years ago and was supposed to be the FTP-killer. Technically it probably was superior, but good ol' FTP was available everywhere and was good enough. Today you'd be hard-pressed to find any FSP sites at all. The last published version of the FSP FAQ appears to be dated 1996-08-19. It seems there's really no demand for a better FTP.
(Niche Product Alert!) Perhaps something could be done with the Closed Captioning info?
Great! Now, make it so you have to have an Internet connection to use it (to look up the closed-caption text in the online database) and have it record some additional advertising onto the tape. Quick, patent that sucker and call the VCs!
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot... It has to add MacroVision protection to the tapes you made off the air yourself. Time-shifting is okay, but you'd be depriving those poor artists by making additional copies of those tapes.
That hasn't been the case for a long time now. The division of area codes and the addition of overlay codes (with mandatory 11-digit dialing) have long since done away with the "1-means-toll" guideline.
I've lived here in Illinois for about 12 years now. In that time, local billing has always been based roughly on the number of central offices your call is routed through. Your 'A' band is everyone else in your CO. Your 'B' band is one or two hops, etc. Everything outside of the 'A' band is billed per minute. (NOT a pleasant discovery for BBSers like me who moved from an area where "1-means-toll"! *sigh* And getting the phone company to cough up a list of which numbers are in which band was no mean feat, either.)
What always griped my wagger were the areas where you could not use the full 11-digit number. Local numbers must be dialed with the 7-digit number. What bozo thought that up? It really annoyed me when I was trying to put together the phonebook for my term program.
I imagine they'll use Xbox hardware for the "commodity" games, and they'll continue to use their custom hardware for the "A" games.
I expect you're right. I spent a year and a half at Konami when they still had operations near Chicago. The "commodity" arcade platform at the time was essentially a Playstation with a coin slot. The hardware was nearly identical to the home console, and the same development tools were used. This was in the 96-97 time frame. (The "premium" platform was based on 3DO hardware.)
Stuffing a home console into an arcade machine isn't exactly a new idea.
Dang, I was hoping they'd make the textbooks available online. There are a lot of texts I'd love to browse through, but don't really want to spend the $50-$100 each for the privilege. (How did I ever afford it when I was in college, anyway!?)
The FAQ mentions that things available "could include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course". That's nice and all, but it sounds like you'll still need to get hold of the textbooks if you really want to take advantage of the course materials.
BTW, I suspect that part of that $100M figure may be from lack of revenue selling these materials in the campus bookstore. Just a guess.
The toys are neat, but I fear for anything that doesn't have pointy bits that look like guns. What good is making a model star ship if I can't arm it to the teeth? Mass destruction, that's what sells toys.
The minimalist approach is also really nifty in a geek sort of way, but is it going to be a marketing hit? Even Lego seems to have lost the "generic block" approach and has gone over to making very specific pieces. Presumably this is because they can sell 10 times the number of "Bionicle" kits if you need the unique parts to make each model.
When is Atollo going to be available in my kids' Happy Meals?:-)
"What address are you entering?"
"foo@bar.chi.il.us"
"That's not a valid address. You need to use a real one. You know, one that ends in '.com'."
At this point I'm afraid I managed to use at least six of the seven words you can't say on TV... (BTW, that wasn't the problem at all; their "Reply-To" mechanism was and as far as I know still is demonstrably broken for any address.)
What exactly is everyone doing with their handhelds that makes "color" and "multimedia" top priorities (other than using them as expensive toys that is)?
I bought my Sony Clié 710 specifically for the screen. I love reading books on my Palm, but my old Palm III's screen was just way too low contrast. The Clié's screen is bright and very high-contrast. The front light makes it extremely easy to see in any lighting condition. And the hi-res display gives me great text. (It's even better now that iSilo supports the hi-res screen directly!)
The other "multimedia" features can go jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned. I would have gladly bought the 610 (same specs, minus the MP3 hardware) if it had been available at the time. I watched the demo movies that came with it, then deleted them. I do like to keep photos in there; it's a good way to carry around the output of my digital camera. Actually, right now I have a large chunk of the Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet comics installed.
I also considered the HandEra 330, but I didn't like the 240x320 display. (Although the virtual silkscreen area rocks!) That makes a scaling factor of 1.5x to fit apps on the screen, which makes a lot of bitmaps look just plain wrong. The Clié's 320x320 display is double the Palm's 160x160, so anything that doesn't play nice with the hi-res display can just be viewed in 2x mode.
BTW, I'll do my karma-whoring for the day and give a plug to Baen Webscriptions. Baen books is making all their new paperback releases available electronically concurrent with the dead-tree release. (Actually earlier, if you want to read incomplete galleys.) The releases are done in HTML. No "digital rights management", no bizarro proprietary format, just the book in bog-standard HTML. (Available in other formats too, but I think the HTML is the most portable and most useful.) They also have a free library of complete books so you can try before you buy. Kudos to Baen for being a major dead-tree publisher that actually seems to grok electronic publishing as well!
A cheap $10 nic can easily handle a T1 full of traffic with a latency of a few milliseconds, and I doubt you have a T1.
Right. A full T1 is only 1.5 Mbps, remember. At best, cable is about that downstream and no more than half that upstream. It doesn't take a whole lot of horsepower to route at that speed.
I did notice a speed improvement when I upgraded my firewall machine from a 386/33 to a Pentium/133. But that was just from the CPU increase; the NICs were just moved over to the new machine.
All hail the NE2000 clones! I had at least one honest-to-goodness Novell NE1000 (yes, one thousand) on my network too. Now I have a box full of these old, cheap cards. Wonder what I'd get for them on eBay?
Slashdot Mirror
Rent it, rip it through Total Recorder to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or whatever, cancel. There's always a way to pirate.
Not that I'm advocating such a thing, of course, just pointing out that if someone can hear it, they can copy it just as easily. Copy protection schemes are just a waste of effort.
Lots of machines, both video and pin. If you're planning on throwing parties you don't want your friends waiting in line. Get some competitive machines, too. It's a blast playing Crusin' USA/World/Exotica on a four-seat linked system when you don't have to worry about feeding it your life's savings in quarters.
Where do you live? If it's a cooler climate, is the garage insulated and heated for the winter? If it's a warmer climate, is the garage cooled in the summer? In any case, a few ceiling fans would go a long way.
As for resale value... This will definitely decrease it. Think -- You'll probably want to take the games with you when you move. Even if you don't, there really aren't that many people out there who want a full-blown arcade in their garage. Even as a geek and gamer, I'd rather have a place to keep my car than a garage full of games. Plan on converting the arcade back to a usable garage before you sell.
Crud! Why couldn't this book have come out 5 years ago when I was actually doing game development? Oh well, at least Chris Hecker's physics articles in Game Developer came at the right time.
BTW, if anyone happens to see a Simpsons Bowling arcade machine in the Chicago area, let me know where. I'd love to see if my physics model made it into the final production.
We sometimes do this as a party trick at midwest SF cons. Take your basic ice cream recipe in a big bowl, then have one person slowly pour LN2 from the dewar while the other one stirs maddly. I'm not sure why the article recommends pouring the nitrogen into containers first.
Liquid oxygen works wonderfully as well. Last summer in Michigan we made LOX ice cream with freshly-picked thimbleberries. (And no, it doesn't burn! Not even when you put a blowtorch to it...) In a pinch you can even use dry ice. Have someone rub a block of dry ice on a cheese grater over the bowl. This method tends to leave some residual carbonation in the ice cream. Bring along root beer extract for flavor!
Other fun cryogenic tricks -- Everclear (198 proof grain alcohol) will freeze at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Small pieces chipped off evaporate marvelously on the tongue. An inverted scotch-on-the-rocks can be made by freezing scotch in an ice-cube tray and adding the cubes to a little water or soda. Winecicles are interesting, too, but beware the tongue-and-flagpole effect when you lick them!
I'll second the vote for Reader Rabbit's Toddler. My kid loved it when he was that age. Also the Disney Interactive Storybooks (especially the Pooh titles) are enjoyable. Beware the newer ones, though, which are based on Shockwave rather than Quicktime. You cannot abort the long explanatory animations in the Shockwave titles. You can in the older Quicktime titles (like "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.")
Stay as far away as you can from Teletubbies! I have nothing against the show, really, but the game stinks to high heaven. It too suffers from frequent, long, uninterruptable animation sequences. It uses a clickless (point-and-hover) interface, but provides only a very subtle cue when you've hovered long enough to activate something. And, of course, the activation starts a long non-interactive sequence... Oh, and to exit the game you let the mouse hover in one of the screen corners. The game then exits without confirmation (through a 2-minute long non-interruptable credit sequence!). Now, where do you think a toddler's uncoordinated mouse twitches end up most of the time? You guessed it! The game is just plain frustrating to kids and parents alike.
BTW, I found a solution for the "kidified" CD syndrome. I no longer let my kids have the actual CD media. Instead, I've installed Daemon Tools virtual CD drive software. Before I install a game on the kids' machine I snag an image of it and mount that in the virtual drive. Once the game's installed I replace the desktop icon with a batch file that automagically mounts the appropriate CD image and starts the game. No more scratched CDs! You'll need a large hard drive, but even a 20G drive holds a fair number of games.
This technique works great for my grown-up games, too. Snag the image and forget fumbling for CDs. Daemon Tools emulates common copy-protection schemes, and I have yet to find a game (kiddie or grown-up) that can't be played with the image instead of the CD itself.
I always liked 'trn' under Unix, though I think it's pretty much been orphaned now. I've also heard good things about 'slrn' and 'nn'. All of these are console-based readers. I left the Unix scene too long ago to have found a good reader that runs under X.
Under Win32 I think that Microplanet's Gravity is a fantastic reader. It got orphaned a year or two ago (and the link is down now, so the company may be defunct) but you can still get it from various download sites. Try Webattack.
When Microplanet abandoned it they released the last build (v2.50) as freeware. Good going, guys! I liked it enough to pay for it at v1.1, and I'm glad it's still available.
To the Great Unwashed Masses, the only domain worth knowing about is ".com". I was trying to set up a "Reply-To" line for my SprintPCS mail. When I called their tech support, I was told that my email address <xxxxx@xxxxx.chi.il.us> was invalid 'cause it didn't end in ".com"! *sigh*
If it doesn't start with "www." and end with ".com", the muggles just can't cope with it.
A number of years ago a buddy of mine at Fermilab created a walk-through of the control rooms as a map for Duke Nukem. I don't think he included weapons, but people loved going around smashing computer monitors with the "mighty foot".
No, sorry, I don't know where you can get it...
If only it came with a port of Prop Cycle...
My wife and I took our kids (two boys, ages 9 and 4) to the matinee yesterday. They both enjoyed the film, though the 4yo was quite distressed when the door got shredded. He didn't see the doors as portals to the rooms, but as containing the rooms. Shred the container, and you shred the contents... Ouch! I had to spend a few minutes explaining it to him, and even then I don't think he got it until the very end. (Why aren't the preschools spending more time teaching kids about transdimensional physics?!?!)
In general we all had a good time, though the consensus was that Toy Story 2 was more fun. We'll still end up getting MI when it hits DVD, though.
"That not a kitty! That a monster!"
One day at work one of the mechanical engineers asked to borrow my calculator. I handed him my trusty HP. He poked at it a few times, then asked "Where's the 'equals' key?"
I simply stared at him for a couple seconds and said, "You're not really an engineer, are you?"
This is indeed sad. I wouldn't consider buying anything but an HP. My trusty 15C got me through my BSEE degree. Thank ghu for complex matrix operations! Once I got out and landed a job writing firmware I wanted to get a 16C, but sadly HP didn't make them any more. I finally found someone willing to sell a used one for $50 and I snatched it up. At another job, a project designer gave me an almost-new 42S because it lacked the one function he needed. (Actually, I suspect the gift was something of a bribe to keep me on his project.)
And where am I today? Well, right now that 17-year-old 15C is sitting on the desk next to me. The 16C and 42S are in my drawer at work. (The 42S does everything the 16C does and more, but the 16C is just way more convenient for most programming calculations.) Maybe HP is getting out of the calculator business because their products are too good. They last forever. Unlike the TIs which have the self-destructing keypads...
At the absolute most send an email or letter thanking them for the interview. Any more than this just sends up red flags for me. "INSINCERE SCHMOOZING WEENIE!" And only one letter is necessary. If you interviewed with multiple people, just send the note to the manager or senior guy, not everyone involved.
<WAR_STORY>
About a decade ago we interviewed someone who seemed okay (not stellar, but okay) technically, but just seemed oily. On top of that, he sent everyone involved this really obsequious sycophantic letter. I didn't want to hire him, but I was the junior guy and we needed warm bodies (remember when the economy was good?) so I got overruled. He did work out okay, but seemed more interested in maintaining his image than in maintaining the code. Eventually he transfered over to marketing, and everyone was happier all around.
</WAR_STORY>
In my experience, when we do real in-house interviews (as opposed to job fairs or campus recruiting) we're generally looking to fill one or two fairly specific positions. By the end of the day we can usually give someone a thumbs up or thumbs down. Even if you sent the email from your wireless PDA as soon as you left the building, it'll come in after the decision's been made. (At least the decision whether or not to add you to the short list for a second interview.) I admit I've never been in a situation where we've found 200 resumes that look even halfway worthwhile. Generally the list of people who get called at all is very, very small.
To quote a friend at Motorola, "If a cheap add-in would help your signal, don't you think we'd ship phones with it installed?"
But if you buy one, you might also be interested in this product for your TV.
Brother, it's time for you to see the light that is 4NT. Everybody say 'AMEN!'
Remember FSP, the "File Server Protocol". It was introduced about 10 years ago and was supposed to be the FTP-killer. Technically it probably was superior, but good ol' FTP was available everywhere and was good enough. Today you'd be hard-pressed to find any FSP sites at all. The last published version of the FSP FAQ appears to be dated 1996-08-19. It seems there's really no demand for a better FTP.
Great! Now, make it so you have to have an Internet connection to use it (to look up the closed-caption text in the online database) and have it record some additional advertising onto the tape. Quick, patent that sucker and call the VCs!
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot... It has to add MacroVision protection to the tapes you made off the air yourself. Time-shifting is okay, but you'd be depriving those poor artists by making additional copies of those tapes.
Okay, who's going to be the first to make a Bonsai NeCoRo?
(And how do they taste chopped-up and stir-fried?)
That hasn't been the case for a long time now. The division of area codes and the addition of overlay codes (with mandatory 11-digit dialing) have long since done away with the "1-means-toll" guideline.
I've lived here in Illinois for about 12 years now. In that time, local billing has always been based roughly on the number of central offices your call is routed through. Your 'A' band is everyone else in your CO. Your 'B' band is one or two hops, etc. Everything outside of the 'A' band is billed per minute. (NOT a pleasant discovery for BBSers like me who moved from an area where "1-means-toll"! *sigh* And getting the phone company to cough up a list of which numbers are in which band was no mean feat, either.)
What always griped my wagger were the areas where you could not use the full 11-digit number. Local numbers must be dialed with the 7-digit number. What bozo thought that up? It really annoyed me when I was trying to put together the phonebook for my term program.
I expect you're right. I spent a year and a half at Konami when they still had operations near Chicago. The "commodity" arcade platform at the time was essentially a Playstation with a coin slot. The hardware was nearly identical to the home console, and the same development tools were used. This was in the 96-97 time frame. (The "premium" platform was based on 3DO hardware.)
Stuffing a home console into an arcade machine isn't exactly a new idea.
Dang, I was hoping they'd make the textbooks available online. There are a lot of texts I'd love to browse through, but don't really want to spend the $50-$100 each for the privilege. (How did I ever afford it when I was in college, anyway!?)
The FAQ mentions that things available "could include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course". That's nice and all, but it sounds like you'll still need to get hold of the textbooks if you really want to take advantage of the course materials.
BTW, I suspect that part of that $100M figure may be from lack of revenue selling these materials in the campus bookstore. Just a guess.
Right. And you should poll the hardware for events, rather than relying on interrupts. That would simplify designs marvelously.
Hey, don't forget about IRN-BRU!
The toys are neat, but I fear for anything that doesn't have pointy bits that look like guns. What good is making a model star ship if I can't arm it to the teeth? Mass destruction, that's what sells toys.
The minimalist approach is also really nifty in a geek sort of way, but is it going to be a marketing hit? Even Lego seems to have lost the "generic block" approach and has gone over to making very specific pieces. Presumably this is because they can sell 10 times the number of "Bionicle" kits if you need the unique parts to make each model.
When is Atollo going to be available in my kids' Happy Meals? :-)
About a year ago I was trying to set up a "Reply-To" address for my Sprint PCS Wireless Web Email©®. After many attempts I called their support line and got transfered to a "web support specialist".
At this point I'm afraid I managed to use at least six of the seven words you can't say on TV... (BTW, that wasn't the problem at all; their "Reply-To" mechanism was and as far as I know still is demonstrably broken for any address.)
I bought my Sony Clié 710 specifically for the screen. I love reading books on my Palm, but my old Palm III's screen was just way too low contrast. The Clié's screen is bright and very high-contrast. The front light makes it extremely easy to see in any lighting condition. And the hi-res display gives me great text. (It's even better now that iSilo supports the hi-res screen directly!)
The other "multimedia" features can go jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned. I would have gladly bought the 610 (same specs, minus the MP3 hardware) if it had been available at the time. I watched the demo movies that came with it, then deleted them. I do like to keep photos in there; it's a good way to carry around the output of my digital camera. Actually, right now I have a large chunk of the Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet comics installed.
I also considered the HandEra 330, but I didn't like the 240x320 display. (Although the virtual silkscreen area rocks!) That makes a scaling factor of 1.5x to fit apps on the screen, which makes a lot of bitmaps look just plain wrong. The Clié's 320x320 display is double the Palm's 160x160, so anything that doesn't play nice with the hi-res display can just be viewed in 2x mode.
BTW, I'll do my karma-whoring for the day and give a plug to Baen Webscriptions. Baen books is making all their new paperback releases available electronically concurrent with the dead-tree release. (Actually earlier, if you want to read incomplete galleys.) The releases are done in HTML. No "digital rights management", no bizarro proprietary format, just the book in bog-standard HTML. (Available in other formats too, but I think the HTML is the most portable and most useful.) They also have a free library of complete books so you can try before you buy. Kudos to Baen for being a major dead-tree publisher that actually seems to grok electronic publishing as well!
Right. A full T1 is only 1.5 Mbps, remember. At best, cable is about that downstream and no more than half that upstream. It doesn't take a whole lot of horsepower to route at that speed.
I did notice a speed improvement when I upgraded my firewall machine from a 386/33 to a Pentium/133. But that was just from the CPU increase; the NICs were just moved over to the new machine.
All hail the NE2000 clones! I had at least one honest-to-goodness Novell NE1000 (yes, one thousand) on my network too. Now I have a box full of these old, cheap cards. Wonder what I'd get for them on eBay?