Re:BIG High Contrast Display Readout - Data Storag
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Designing Diabetes Gear?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Accu-Chek Complete from Roche Diagnostics has most of the features you ask for, with the exception of wireless and/or USB/Firewire.
It does feature a 19,200 baud serial port, so it's faster than most wired meters (most are 9600 baud). It is their geek's choice of meters.
Most doctor's offices already have the software and cables necessary to download and review their patient's data. Similar software and cables are available (and included with Complete) for consumers to use at home.
I'd hate to be the patient who wakes up to find the words "HAR HAR, YOU'VE BEEN PWNED!" carved into their chest because some small-wienered cracker thought it would be funny...
No way! You paid a dirt-cheap, well below expected value price for a POS DVD player and it really turned out to be a POS worth what you paid for it? Say it isn't so!
1) Log in
2) Leave the space station and fly to a nearby asteroid field
3) Find an asteroid and maneuver within range
4) Launch my mining bots to scavenge ore while I zap the asteroid with a mining laser
5) Prop my feet up on my desk and watch TV until my cargo hold is full.
6) Return to the space station on autopilot while I go get a glass of water
7) Refine the ore and sell it at the space station.
8) Check the items for sale and see if anyone has managed to find the blueprints to make something cool yet.
9) Go to step 2, repeat ad naseum.
Every once in a great while I would get attacked by pirates and I would have to recall my mining bots and send out my combat drones and let them slaughter the pirates, then pick through their cargo (yay, more crap!) and go back to mining.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy a ship with a bigger cargo hold so I could watch longer snippets of TV while mining.
Blizzard opened up WoW to an open beta and over 500,000 people signed up - It was a mega lagfest.
Blizzard begins selling Wow and only 250,000 bought it - It was a mega lagfest for a day or two while Blizzard added 47 new servers to account for the population.
What this means is that there are roughly twice as many people who want to play as there are people willing to actually pay for the game. If Blizzard had instead had instead launched the game for $0 plus a monthly fee, they would have had to add 150+ new servers to account for the 500,000 people, of which a good portion will quit before their first monthly payment is due.
Blizzard knows what they're doing and it's really not up to us to second guess their marketing techniques, especially when they've got more money than us...:-)
No, it's not the same game. Our backpacks hold a fixed amount of cubic feet of storage, and their still trying to figure out how to convert that to cubic -kilo-bushels or deca-hogsheads, or whatever crazy units system you guys use over there across the pond...;-)
How about a Vigilante class that awards XP for breaking into the homes and businesses of the people doing the selling and, uh, erm... putting an end to their ways... yeah, that's it.
* To pay off the pro-rated depreciation on the hundreds if not thousands of servers the company has had to buy to support the various game worlds, plus at least one test server and one development server.
* To pay for the monthly bandwidth bills
* To pay the salaries of the game developers, artists and 3D modelers who are developing new content
* To pay the salaries of the GMs (in game tech-support people) who have to be online for usually 16 hours per day (not usually the same GM for 16 hours straight).
* To pay the salary of the legal team that is ramping up to sue the first website to try and sell in-game items and money
* To pay the salary of the support operators who answer the phone when you call with billing issues
* To pay off the Ferrari that the lead guys are driving back and forth to work - in 2nd gear - with the parking brake on.
Having been a part of the in-game tech support crew for two different games, you would be surprised at how much backend work there is to support an ongoing game like this.
I have a 2.5 GHz AMD system with a slightly outdated ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and even in a heavily populated area, my CPU utlization never exceeded 80%, most of the time it hovers around 75%. This is the least CPU intensive MMORPG I have ever played.
I remember playing Neverwinter Nights (not the current one, but the original gold-box SSI game) on AOL and paying $5 an hour to play. That was back when you could buy a gold-box game for $20-25 - and I was only making something like $10.25 per hour at the time... I got over that real quick. Moved to Shadows of Yserbius on The Sierra Network and got something outrageous like 60 hours of game play for only $90 per month...
This is a good plan, but how do you get stores to stock a "free" or "almost-free" game on the shelves?
The other problem with free trials is the opportunity for abuse. For example, in Asheron's Call you could build up prestige and rank by getting people to agree to swear allegience to you, and it took X number of people to obtain the next rank. Once you achieved a high enough rank (usually due to having several hundred followers) you were eligible to buy a guild mansion.
At one point they started handing out free 1 week trials to AC and TONS of people created one-week throw away accounts, filled up every character slot and had them all swear to their chosen leader thus grossly increasing their "allegience numbers" and allowing a small group of people to obtain one of the all too few guild mansions for themselves and potentially blocking a real guild from purchasing one.
Go back and re-read the official notes about the open beta.
It is NOT a free trial demo that comes with a game magazine to give you an idea of whether or not you want to buy it.
It is still an ongoing stress test of the servers and they are currently allowing at least twice the expected normal of players on each server. That means that after launch, the number of people per server will be significantly less (and thus the lag) because 1) the only people playing will be people who are paying and 2) the player cap per server will be lower than it is now.
In the Army hopsital lab where I used to work, we had a cylinder of CO2 with a cone (like on a CO2 fire extinguisher) attached to the regulator. When a small quantity of dry ice was needed for flash freezing cytology samples, the operator would don a heavy duty glove and hold a canvas bag over the cone while opening the regulator.
It made a tremendous amount of noise, but you ended up with a bag full of dry ice snow flakes.
Opening the servers prematurely to a select few would be a PR disaster. People may not be able to get the guild name they want because someone who knows someone who's brother knows a guy got them in early, etc.
From everything I've seen in or about WoW so far, I can't believe Blizzard would allow that to happen.
Just like with Half Life 2, you might be able to buy a box early, but until the magic server genie says you can play, it's just a box with pretty pictures on it, not a game.
Actually, WoW won't be playable this weekend as it doesn't launch until Nov 23.
Blizzard announced this weekend that the open beta is not just an opportunity for players to play free (which many seem to think it's all about) but an opportunity for Blizzard to continue stress testing their servers. They are intentionally running the servers with twice as many players as they will have post launch. Lag will most likely be bad on launch day (but it is for *every* MMORPG on launch/patch day) and will be gone within a day or two.
No offense, but I love when people criticize other people's intelligence by using phrases like "one thing i figured out is that people is not STUPID"...
Instead of a memory stick, I bought a PCMCIA sleeve for my iPaq and put a 5GB Kingston Datapak in it.
This gives me plenty of room for all the things I want to have with me (music, movies, porn, etc).
One of the most handy utilities for me is SPB Pocket Plus v2, it provides a *real* close button to end applications (instead of just minimizing them), a good file explorer, some enhancement for Pocket IE, a Today screen plugin that shows memory, storage, backlight adjustment bar and more.
I use a calculator program called 1-Calc, a fabulous MS Project compatible project planner called Pocket Plan, a Backup/Recovery tool called Sprite Backup which will let you restore your system without having to install the program first (the backup file contains the restore.exe) and it also has a conduit for backing up to your PC if your handheld doesn't have enough room for storing it. I have two different drawing programs, Pocket Artist for bitmap editing and Vectorsoft Draw for vector based work. Resco Picture Viewer is handy for carrying around pictures of your kids, etc.
I use BetaPlayer as my preferred movie viewer and PocketPlayer as my music player. Windows Media Player will work for most things, but doesn't handle DivX like BetaPlayer.
When it comes to games, I have Chesscapade - a battlechess type program, Pocket Doom and Pocket Hexen, Bejeweled, the Sony-brand Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are both good, and of course I have the premiere 3D RPG Ultima Underworld, which plays just like the original PC version.
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The Accu-Chek Complete from Roche Diagnostics has most of the features you ask for, with the exception of wireless and/or USB/Firewire.
It does feature a 19,200 baud serial port, so it's faster than most wired meters (most are 9600 baud). It is their geek's choice of meters.
Most doctor's offices already have the software and cables necessary to download and review their patient's data. Similar software and cables are available (and included with Complete) for consumers to use at home.
I'd hate to be the patient who wakes up to find the words "HAR HAR, YOU'VE BEEN PWNED!" carved into their chest because some small-wienered cracker thought it would be funny...
No way! You paid a dirt-cheap, well below expected value price for a POS DVD player and it really turned out to be a POS worth what you paid for it? Say it isn't so!
I played Eve for a month. Here's how it goes.
1) Log in
2) Leave the space station and fly to a nearby asteroid field
3) Find an asteroid and maneuver within range
4) Launch my mining bots to scavenge ore while I zap the asteroid with a mining laser
5) Prop my feet up on my desk and watch TV until my cargo hold is full.
6) Return to the space station on autopilot while I go get a glass of water
7) Refine the ore and sell it at the space station.
8) Check the items for sale and see if anyone has managed to find the blueprints to make something cool yet.
9) Go to step 2, repeat ad naseum.
Every once in a great while I would get attacked by pirates and I would have to recall my mining bots and send out my combat drones and let them slaughter the pirates, then pick through their cargo (yay, more crap!) and go back to mining.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy a ship with a bigger cargo hold so I could watch longer snippets of TV while mining.
Did I miss something somewhere?
Blizzard opened up WoW to an open beta and over 500,000 people signed up - It was a mega lagfest.
Blizzard begins selling Wow and only 250,000 bought it - It was a mega lagfest for a day or two while Blizzard added 47 new servers to account for the population.
What this means is that there are roughly twice as many people who want to play as there are people willing to actually pay for the game. If Blizzard had instead had instead launched the game for $0 plus a monthly fee, they would have had to add 150+ new servers to account for the 500,000 people, of which a good portion will quit before their first monthly payment is due.
Blizzard knows what they're doing and it's really not up to us to second guess their marketing techniques, especially when they've got more money than us...:-)
And you forgot to account for the fact that 75,000 of those were Collector's Edition packages that went for $79.99 each.... cha-ching!
But it was worth it...
No, it's not the same game. Our backpacks hold a fixed amount of cubic feet of storage, and their still trying to figure out how to convert that to cubic -kilo-bushels or deca-hogsheads, or whatever crazy units system you guys use over there across the pond... ;-)
1/50th! How's that?
Still not fast enough to take a picture of a woman with her mouth shut.
How about a Vigilante class that awards XP for breaking into the homes and businesses of the people doing the selling and, uh, erm... putting an end to their ways... yeah, that's it.
Where does the money go?
* To pay off the pro-rated depreciation on the hundreds if not thousands of servers the company has had to buy to support the various game worlds, plus at least one test server and one development server.
* To pay for the monthly bandwidth bills
* To pay the salaries of the game developers, artists and 3D modelers who are developing new content
* To pay the salaries of the GMs (in game tech-support people) who have to be online for usually 16 hours per day (not usually the same GM for 16 hours straight).
* To pay the salary of the legal team that is ramping up to sue the first website to try and sell in-game items and money
* To pay the salary of the support operators who answer the phone when you call with billing issues
* To pay off the Ferrari that the lead guys are driving back and forth to work - in 2nd gear - with the parking brake on.
Having been a part of the in-game tech support crew for two different games, you would be surprised at how much backend work there is to support an ongoing game like this.
I have a 2.5 GHz AMD system with a slightly outdated ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and even in a heavily populated area, my CPU utlization never exceeded 80%, most of the time it hovers around 75%. This is the least CPU intensive MMORPG I have ever played.
I remember playing Neverwinter Nights (not the current one, but the original gold-box SSI game) on AOL and paying $5 an hour to play. That was back when you could buy a gold-box game for $20-25 - and I was only making something like $10.25 per hour at the time... I got over that real quick. Moved to Shadows of Yserbius on The Sierra Network and got something outrageous like 60 hours of game play for only $90 per month...
$15 a month doesn't even faze me anymore...
It started out so well - "I had a chance to shoot Richard "Lord British" Garriott... and then it went downhill...
This is a good plan, but how do you get stores to stock a "free" or "almost-free" game on the shelves?
The other problem with free trials is the opportunity for abuse. For example, in Asheron's Call you could build up prestige and rank by getting people to agree to swear allegience to you, and it took X number of people to obtain the next rank. Once you achieved a high enough rank (usually due to having several hundred followers) you were eligible to buy a guild mansion.
At one point they started handing out free 1 week trials to AC and TONS of people created one-week throw away accounts, filled up every character slot and had them all swear to their chosen leader thus grossly increasing their "allegience numbers" and allowing a small group of people to obtain one of the all too few guild mansions for themselves and potentially blocking a real guild from purchasing one.
That's just one example.
Deam MPAA,
I'm serving my second term and don't need to worry about pissing you off since I can't be re-elected (yet!) anyways...
Many thanks for the money, though. The girls spent it all on cheap booze and fast cars.
W.
Go back and re-read the official notes about the open beta.
It is NOT a free trial demo that comes with a game magazine to give you an idea of whether or not you want to buy it.
It is still an ongoing stress test of the servers and they are currently allowing at least twice the expected normal of players on each server. That means that after launch, the number of people per server will be significantly less (and thus the lag) because 1) the only people playing will be people who are paying and 2) the player cap per server will be lower than it is now.
In the Army hopsital lab where I used to work, we had a cylinder of CO2 with a cone (like on a CO2 fire extinguisher) attached to the regulator. When a small quantity of dry ice was needed for flash freezing cytology samples, the operator would don a heavy duty glove and hold a canvas bag over the cone while opening the regulator.
It made a tremendous amount of noise, but you ended up with a bag full of dry ice snow flakes.
Opening the servers prematurely to a select few would be a PR disaster. People may not be able to get the guild name they want because someone who knows someone who's brother knows a guy got them in early, etc.
From everything I've seen in or about WoW so far, I can't believe Blizzard would allow that to happen.
Just like with Half Life 2, you might be able to buy a box early, but until the magic server genie says you can play, it's just a box with pretty pictures on it, not a game.
Actually, WoW won't be playable this weekend as it doesn't launch until Nov 23.
Blizzard announced this weekend that the open beta is not just an opportunity for players to play free (which many seem to think it's all about) but an opportunity for Blizzard to continue stress testing their servers. They are intentionally running the servers with twice as many players as they will have post launch. Lag will most likely be bad on launch day (but it is for *every* MMORPG on launch/patch day) and will be gone within a day or two.
I've got one at home. Respond if you're really interested. I'll let you have it for dirt cheap - just grateful to get rid of one more dust collector.
no box or documentation, just the puzzle - and I believe it's in the solved state...
No offense, but I love when people criticize other people's intelligence by using phrases like "one thing i figured out is that people is not STUPID"...
I just installed the Beta 3 0.9 version on Firefox 1.0 and it works fine.
Actually, he's more interested in making a name for himself *and* making a huge amount of cash from any settlements that are brought in court.
I bought a 5GB Kingston Datapak (PCMCIA hard drive) off of ebay for $100...
Instead of a memory stick, I bought a PCMCIA sleeve for my iPaq and put a 5GB Kingston Datapak in it.
.exe) and it also has a conduit for backing up to your PC if your handheld doesn't have enough room for storing it. I have two different drawing programs, Pocket Artist for bitmap editing and Vectorsoft Draw for vector based work. Resco Picture Viewer is handy for carrying around pictures of your kids, etc.
This gives me plenty of room for all the things I want to have with me (music, movies, porn, etc).
One of the most handy utilities for me is SPB Pocket Plus v2, it provides a *real* close button to end applications (instead of just minimizing them), a good file explorer, some enhancement for Pocket IE, a Today screen plugin that shows memory, storage, backlight adjustment bar and more.
I use a calculator program called 1-Calc, a fabulous MS Project compatible project planner called Pocket Plan, a Backup/Recovery tool called Sprite Backup which will let you restore your system without having to install the program first (the backup file contains the restore
I use BetaPlayer as my preferred movie viewer and PocketPlayer as my music player. Windows Media Player will work for most things, but doesn't handle DivX like BetaPlayer.
When it comes to games, I have Chesscapade - a battlechess type program, Pocket Doom and Pocket Hexen, Bejeweled, the Sony-brand Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are both good, and of course I have the premiere 3D RPG Ultima Underworld, which plays just like the original PC version.