If anyone has a good source for decent maps on the Internet, please share.:-) I find MapQuest sucks... case in point I can't post a link to their map of the Alaska region.
From a department of the Alaska state government, here's the best map of the region I've found so far. A larger (and fuzzy!) map is here.
Come on... admit it. It's exactly what you were hoping for for Christmas. Stylish and functional! And you won't have to worry so much about stray bullets at your workplace anymore.
First off, I just wanted to say congrats on encouraging your child to explore! That's always nice to see.:)
Some of the following points have been alluded to or stated in previous posts, but as the former 3 time prez of my university's astronomy club I can't help but add my $0.02.;)
Because your daughter is only five years old, you shouldn't go "whole hog" right from day one. In terms of equipment, you've got 3 choices (listed in ascending order of size, complexity, and expense):
Naked-eye observing (more rewarding than many people realize - especially those who haven't experienced country skies - if you can get to a nice, open area that's as far away from light pollution as possible). Check out the Internation Dark Sky Association for more information about "light pollution".
Buy a good pair of binoculars. Head to your library and quickly glance at the covers of the last two or three years of two magazines: "Astronomy" and "Sky and Telescope". It's guaranteed you'll see a review mentioned on the cover for binoculars that are especially well-suited for astronomy. Both magazines have typically done reviews of binoculars every few years.
If you've got the money to take a bit more of a risk (in case your daughter's interest fades in a year or two), then yes, consider buying a telescope. But as others have mentioned, stay away from "department store" telescopes (e.g. "Tasco" brand, etc.). A frequent indicator of an inferior telescope is one that tries to dazzle you with how much it magnifies things. It's often hard for beginners to understand, but this point is crucial for first time telescope buyers: magnification is not what you should be concerned about when buying a telescope! Any scope can be made to magnify any amount, just by changing the eyepiece. The critical things include the scope's ability to gather light (generally, the bigger the aperture the better), the tripod (don't consider this to be minor!), optical quality, overall construction, and so on.
The other suggestions about getting some good beginner's books on the subject and visiting planetariums are all excellent! Do those things regardless of which option you choose above.
I could go on and on. It's hard to analyze a request like this and come up with the perfect recommendation. That's why I'd also really recommend you try and find a good amateur astronomy club in your region. Try searching the web for starters. Or try phoning local universities and colleges to see if you can find someone in a physics department who knows of a contact name. Don't get discouraged if you don't find anyone helpful the first day. Astronomy clubs can be hard to find - but trust me, they're out there.:)
If you can make it to one evening with a good local club, you'll find yourself amongst a horde of people all willing to offer lots of advice (like me:) ). The great thing about that situation is they'll be able to ask you questions real-time about your situation and will be able to give you much better "custom-tailored" advice based on the answers you give.
If you can't manage that, I'd recommend finding some of those beginner's books. I'd also strongly suggest (regardless of how things go) that you spend the next few months reading through "Astronomy" and/or "Sky and Telescope" magazines. Get a subscription if you can, or look for them at your local library. Both are excellent magazines, and they cycle every year or so through reviews of binoculars (as mentioned), astronomy software, books, telescopes, and - perhaps most useful in your case - will often write really excellent articles about what people should consider when they or a child is expressing some interest in astronomy. There's a brief such article on the "Astronomy" magazine website right here. Even if you don't happen to luck out and find one of those articles over the next few months, it's guaranteed that useful pointers will be mentioned in other general articles, letters to the editor, etc. Many people are amazed to find an entire hidden world devoted to amateur astronomy when they look through those magazines for the first time. I know I was - that's how I got started in all of this. And it led to some of the most priceless experiences in my life.:)
Most of all, have fun. Helping your child learn about something like this is awesome, and many people who've done the same will tell you it quickly becomes a wonderful learning experience for all parties involved.:)
I decided I'd take a look at what they have scheduled for the folks on the shuttle for the next few days. I found this site via NASA's ISS webpage. If you check out the official NASA itinerary for December 3rd (posted in a PDF file) you'll see that from 6:40am to 7:30am on that day, the shuttle crew has been scheduled for - in capitals - BREAKFART.
I'm not sure what to think, especially given that this event occurs shortly before the, "Toilet breakthrough indicator data collection".
Guess they're not as worried about air quality up there as I thought.
...but you never know. And Cliff's comment, "or are there other methods that might work better?" affords me some license.;)
Besides, right now at 3 AM these mental images are making me chuckle.
In all seriousness, around the workplace I find it's usually far more effective to illustrate your need for something. As dramatically as possible. "Asking" is for wussies.;)
On Monday, go in to work as usual. Except carry in a large cardboard box with you. Make sure that on your way to your desk as many of your co-workers see the box as possible, but pretend like it's not even there. Ignore any/all strange looks or outright questions about it.
Sit down at your desk and place the box on the floor next to you. Take this out from the box and put it on. Then take this out and put it on too. (Make sure you get one with the optional visor.) Then begin your workday normally.
If you decide to take a break for any reason, do not remove the protective gear. If you have to go to the washroom, the clothing stays on. If you take lunch, the clothing stays on. Hell, if a fire breaks out... well... with all that gear you probably have an advantage anyway so don't worry about that one.
For added effect, turn some music on at your desk as loud as you can. If anyone is foolish enough to ask you to turn the volume down, greet them with a blank look, and then yell back that you can't hear what they're saying because of the noise levels you have to deal with in your work area. A true geek will have patched their helmet's microphone in through their sound system before doing this. Bonus: once your mic is hooked in, hum along with the music.
By the end of the day, it's guaranteed that even the "Relationship Consultant" will have received your the message. Furthermore, it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever again stop by and interrupt you while you're working, whether you're wearing the gear or not.
White noise sucks. Go for the old, "conditions are so bad I'm going insane," ploy.;)
---------------------
My new motto for around the workplace: WWJD - What would JWZ do?;)
I can't remember what FPS rate it takes to fool cats and dogs into thinking there's motion on a screen, but I know it's significantly higher than humans. I believe that's why it's rare that an animal that pays much attention to a TV screen. To most dogs, cats, etc., it's just a bunch of poorly-formed still images.
Perhaps this is a worthy cause for pursuing high framerates. Maybe someday you'll keep your pet occupied at home (watching TV) while you're out, or have your pet participate in your video games... who knows.
I remember a discussion here on Slashdot a while ago about SmartDisk. Somebody was asking if there were any Linux drivers being developed for SmartDisk's amazing disk adapters that allow you to use your existing 1.44MB floppy drive to read/write 2MB - 128MB flash memory modules (the answer was a resounding "yes"). Neat huh?
Anyway, I quickly discovered that the folks at SmartMedia make a bunch of other cool products too, such as ultra-portable USB hard disks (ignore the fact they only mention Macintosh systems in the summaries - the details state they can be used on PCs too). The 4 GB disks are about $180, 6 GB disks are $20 more. If USB is too slow for you, and you have the capacity, they also offer FireWire versions (you probably will need a Mac for these). And finally, if you can't make up your mind, they offer 3 GB - 30 GB versions that support both USB and FireWire environments.
I can't offer any experience with these disks, but I really want to try one out! Maybe someone can post their experience with SmartDisk products? Failing that, you could always get one of these drives and then do us a favor by submitting a review to Slashdot or something.:)
This is yet another way corporations and government are doing away with private ownership of anything.
The cold war is over. Socialism won.
That's a bit harsh, but I think you've got some kind of point in there. I have to wonder though... do we not have ourselves to blame for this, at least in part?
It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there who abuse their freedoms. If something in their life goes wrong, they immediately look to place the blame on someone. They don't seem to understand the term "accident", "act of god", or even "honest mistake". Sometimes the blame lands on a corporation. Now, I know that sometimes that's completely justified - there will always be a percentage of companies that really don't care what happens to their customer - "morality" and "fairness" are words they don't understand.
But all these licensing developed to their ridiculous levels for a reason. Yes, I'm sure some of it has been due to advancement in their wars to protect their "intellectual property". But in the case you point out (about housing contracts), I can't help but wonder if at least some of this mess wasn't brought out by an evolution: customer A attacks company for reason N (which, if customer A had any kind of tolerance or backbone, could have been brushed off with a comment of "shit happens"), company enacts legal restrictions to make sure next time they're not liable for reason N, then customer B attacks company for reason M, and so on.
I presume that legal agreements like the ones we see today are more restrictive than when the very first ones appeared 20, 30 years ago. So I figure it's had to have been an evolution of sorts. Maybe?
If so, have we not brought some of this on ourselves? Are there not an increasing number of people out there who don't want to take responsibility for anything in their lives? Would this not explain why we seem to be heading towards, as you say, "corporations and government[s]... doing away with private ownership of [everything]"? Is their response (whether it's the right one or not) not one we could have guessed at?
I think I've been reading Slashdot at -1 for too long. After reading the Yahoo article and switching to the main site, after a couple of minutes all I could think was, "why can't I find a picture of the mystery frozen body they found?"
Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?
A couple of years ago I realized I really needed a decent backup solution. I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up. That's when I realized that just setting aside a couple 20 Gb HDD's for backups made way more sense than blindly following the "traditional" tape-backup route. Why follow the herd? Get yourself a RAID setup with a stack of IDE drives. Backup your important data onto the server overnight (or whenever).
If you want something a bit more glamorous, take a look at the StorPoint NAS 100 from AXIS. It's about $1000 retail - I don't believe any SCSI disks are included (I know, more than you wanted to spend). But the beauty of this thing is, much like the AXIS video camera many here on/. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.
You'll notice all 3 motherboards are the Micro ATX form-factor, and the last one outright states that it's "Rackmount Ready".
In some ways I like the look of these Tyan boards more than the ASUS ones. These aren't limited to a 333MHz maximum, and they also skip the lame ISA slots to give you more PCI slots. The only downside is the lack of an AGP slot (darn!).
I'm not sure if this is really what you're looking for, but I happened to be looking around yesterday for low-profile options for a firewall/router setup. Not being able to afford a rack-mount system (in terms of price or space), I wound up looking at two "Micro ATX" form-factor motherboards from ASUS:
ASUS P2E-VM microATX motherboard
This one has a built-in AGP 3D Graphics Accelerator (ATI Rage Pro), along with on-board audio, etc.
ASUS P2E-M microATX motherboard
This one drops the on-board stuff and has a standard AGP slot instead - which gives you better flexibility for your video demands. You lose a PCI slot though which kinda bites.
I can't remember what the requirements/possibilities are for rack-mountable cases, so whether either of these two boards would be of use to you I can't say. This "build-it-yourself" option might save you some money though - if you can find the appropriate mounting/casing hardware.
One potential drawback: the maximum processor speed these boards support is 333MHz (not an issue for what I have planned, but it might be for you).
[In case you have some flexibility on the rack-mount system, I found a really small, impressive micro-ATX case from In-Win (the best standard case manufacturer around if you ask me). You can drool (optional) over some pictures of the IW-D500.]
That's an interesting thought. It brings up a question I've had for a while - how does methane compare to propane or natural gas in terms of energy generation?
Say you did have a fair number of people living in rural areas that were interested in doing something like this. How feasible would it be to use methane produced from animal manure/organic decomposition in a fuel cell like this? Presumably in many rural areas (maybe not in the Australian outback) you'd find an abundance of farms...
You could hook a methane generator up to your own house's septic system too I suppose. Running out of fuel? Simple: finish your lunch, grab a book... and head for the bathroom.;)
That really seems like a lot of unnecessary effort. I edit my cookies file by hand once every month or so and screw around with the entries I don't care for - randomizing the hex values, exchanging FALSE values for TRUE, etc..
Worst case, I figure this creates a mess at their end of things when invalid data turns up (that I'm sure they just ignore and reset). Best case is what I've had happen a few times - something I change gets interpreted correctly and all of a sudden I start seeing ads for stuff that's just ridiculously off-target for me. As a 24 year-old male techie, it's a bit amusing to suddenly find yourself bombarded with women's jewelry ads, expectant mother products, etc..
Hmmm... after a quick search at the PC/Blue Disk Library hosted by the awesome folks at the OAK Software Repository, if anyone cares (yeah, I know) here are the first few sections from the SIMCGA manual:
SIMCGA - Simulate CGA with Hercules Monochrome Card
Written in September 1986 by
Chuck Guzis
153 North Murphy Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
This memory-resident utility allows you to "fool" most software requiring a Color Graphics Adapter into using your Hercules (or compatible) monochrome adapter in the graphics mode. Graphics images are reproduced in normal aspect ratio, using as much of the available screen area as is possible.
The trick used here is to program the HGC to display more lines of 3 lines per character time instead of 4 (The CGA displays 2). A service routine hooked into the hardware timer interrupt (int 8) copies one line to the third displayed line to give a filled-out image.
I believe the Hercules monochrome cards ran at 720 x 348 (only mentioning that so you don't calcute an incorrect aspect ratio, of course;) ) Just for a laugh, one of these days I'm going to break mine out of storage and try it in my Windows 98 box to see if it'll be autodetected. I guess I'd better do it soon - it seems unlikely that the next motherboard I own will be physically able to support an 8-bit ISA card.
It had better resolution than CGA, but I have to say it sucked being the only one amongst my friends without color. I was so happy the day I got a copy of "SIMCGA" - a TSR program that allowed us Hercules users to fool games into thinking they were running on a computer with a CGA card installed; a requirement for most PC games back then. I owe whoever wrote "SIMCGA" (and who released it as public-domain) a big thank-you.
Didn't the Hercules cards allow you to have a VGA card installed simultaneously?
Well, despite what that other guy is saying, it's not a trailing slash that's screwing up the link (duh), it's the fact that the correct URL is NEW.3dhardware.net, instead of WWW.3dhardware.net.
This makes me wonder if the folks at 3dhardware didn't set up a secondary server after being alerted to the fact that their main one might be slashdotted. Maybe someone forgot to tell Slashdot about it.
It'd be nice to have some more information about this one. Lots of people have offered great advice about the pros/cons/limits of various networking possibilities, but things could probably get even more helpful if we knew:
1) How far apart are the houses really? Ok, so your friend is "four houses down" - well how far is that in feet/meters? As several people have asked, are we talking Montana back-country, Houston suburbs, or what?
2) What is between you and your friend? Four houses you say - anything else? Any concrete fences? Trees? Oil pipelines? Got a picture or two you could post?
3) Who is between you and your friend? Depending on the distance, and given all the technical details others have provided, it sounds like it might be worthwhile to get to know your neighbors. Would they let you dig a ditch at the end of their backyards? No? Would they perhaps change their minds if you offered to plug them in to the network too? Now that'd be cool - you could start a real "Network Neighborhood". Some cooperation here might also improve your chances of getting one of the cheaper alternatives to work (e.g. one with a repeater halfway, etc.).
You know, *every* time someone here on Slashdot talks about an old freeware or public-domain program for the PC and how they wish they still had it, I've found the program within about 5 minutes.
Right from the main page, go to the section called PC/Blue Disk Library, and go to the PCBLUE subdirectory. Then download the big master index (pbcat.zip). Find the archive file that holds the software you're looking for (trust me, they're all in there), and enjoy!
In your particular case, you're thinking of the "PianoMan" software. There were actually many, many different tunes available with that program, not just the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the Lone Ranger's theme song). The PianoMan program had the ability to generate COM files from the included music (MUS) files. That's why the Lone Ranger song got distributed so much more than the entire PianoMan package.
Rest assured, if you download Volume 216 from the above archive, and then spend about 2 minutes reading the PianoMan documentation, you'll be able to re-generate that Lone Ranger tune/program.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone has a good source for decent maps on the Internet, please share. :-) I find MapQuest sucks ... case in point I can't post a link to their map of the Alaska region.
From a department of the Alaska state government, here's the best map of the region I've found so far. A larger (and fuzzy!) map is here.
What you need is a tank crew helmet!
Come on
I lived under high tension power lines as a kid, and it didn't seem to affect me
You're reading Slashdot for heavens sake
Some of the following points have been alluded to or stated in previous posts, but as the former 3 time prez of my university's astronomy club I can't help but add my $0.02.
Because your daughter is only five years old, you shouldn't go "whole hog" right from day one. In terms of equipment, you've got 3 choices (listed in ascending order of size, complexity, and expense):
- Naked-eye observing (more rewarding than many people realize - especially those who haven't experienced country skies - if you can get to a nice, open area that's as far away from light pollution as possible). Check out the Internation Dark Sky Association for more information about "light pollution".
- Buy a good pair of binoculars. Head to your library and quickly glance at the covers of the last two or three years of two magazines: "Astronomy" and "Sky and Telescope". It's guaranteed you'll see a review mentioned on the cover for binoculars that are especially well-suited for astronomy. Both magazines have typically done reviews of binoculars every few years.
- If you've got the money to take a bit more of a risk (in case your daughter's interest fades in a year or two), then yes, consider buying a telescope. But as others have mentioned, stay away from "department store" telescopes (e.g. "Tasco" brand, etc.). A frequent indicator of an inferior telescope is one that tries to dazzle you with how much it magnifies things. It's often hard for beginners to understand, but this point is crucial for first time telescope buyers: magnification is not what you should be concerned about when buying a telescope! Any scope can be made to magnify any amount, just by changing the eyepiece. The critical things include the scope's ability to gather light (generally, the bigger the aperture the better), the tripod (don't consider this to be minor!), optical quality, overall construction, and so on.
The other suggestions about getting some good beginner's books on the subject and visiting planetariums are all excellent! Do those things regardless of which option you choose above.I could go on and on. It's hard to analyze a request like this and come up with the perfect recommendation. That's why I'd also really recommend you try and find a good amateur astronomy club in your region. Try searching the web for starters. Or try phoning local universities and colleges to see if you can find someone in a physics department who knows of a contact name. Don't get discouraged if you don't find anyone helpful the first day. Astronomy clubs can be hard to find - but trust me, they're out there.
If you can make it to one evening with a good local club, you'll find yourself amongst a horde of people all willing to offer lots of advice (like me
If you can't manage that, I'd recommend finding some of those beginner's books. I'd also strongly suggest (regardless of how things go) that you spend the next few months reading through "Astronomy" and/or "Sky and Telescope" magazines. Get a subscription if you can, or look for them at your local library. Both are excellent magazines, and they cycle every year or so through reviews of binoculars (as mentioned), astronomy software, books, telescopes, and - perhaps most useful in your case - will often write really excellent articles about what people should consider when they or a child is expressing some interest in astronomy. There's a brief such article on the "Astronomy" magazine website right here. Even if you don't happen to luck out and find one of those articles over the next few months, it's guaranteed that useful pointers will be mentioned in other general articles, letters to the editor, etc. Many people are amazed to find an entire hidden world devoted to amateur astronomy when they look through those magazines for the first time. I know I was - that's how I got started in all of this. And it led to some of the most priceless experiences in my life.
Most of all, have fun. Helping your child learn about something like this is awesome, and many people who've done the same will tell you it quickly becomes a wonderful learning experience for all parties involved.
I decided I'd take a look at what they have scheduled for the folks on the shuttle for the next few days. I found this site via NASA's ISS webpage. If you check out the official NASA itinerary for December 3rd (posted in a PDF file) you'll see that from 6:40am to 7:30am on that day, the shuttle crew has been scheduled for - in capitals - BREAKFART.
I'm not sure what to think, especially given that this event occurs shortly before the, "Toilet breakthrough indicator data collection".
Guess they're not as worried about air quality up there as I thought.
...but you never know. And Cliff's comment, "or are there other methods that might work better?" affords me some license. ;)
;)
... well ... with all that gear you probably have an advantage anyway so don't worry about that one.
;)
;)
Besides, right now at 3 AM these mental images are making me chuckle.
In all seriousness, around the workplace I find it's usually far more effective to illustrate your need for something. As dramatically as possible. "Asking" is for wussies.
On Monday, go in to work as usual. Except carry in a large cardboard box with you. Make sure that on your way to your desk as many of your co-workers see the box as possible, but pretend like it's not even there. Ignore any/all strange looks or outright questions about it.
Sit down at your desk and place the box on the floor next to you. Take this out from the box and put it on. Then take this out and put it on too. (Make sure you get one with the optional visor.) Then begin your workday normally.
If you decide to take a break for any reason, do not remove the protective gear. If you have to go to the washroom, the clothing stays on. If you take lunch, the clothing stays on. Hell, if a fire breaks out
For added effect, turn some music on at your desk as loud as you can. If anyone is foolish enough to ask you to turn the volume down, greet them with a blank look, and then yell back that you can't hear what they're saying because of the noise levels you have to deal with in your work area. A true geek will have patched their helmet's microphone in through their sound system before doing this. Bonus: once your mic is hooked in, hum along with the music.
By the end of the day, it's guaranteed that even the "Relationship Consultant" will have received your the message. Furthermore, it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever again stop by and interrupt you while you're working, whether you're wearing the gear or not.
White noise sucks. Go for the old, "conditions are so bad I'm going insane," ploy.
---------------------
My new motto for around the workplace: WWJD - What would JWZ do?
I can't remember what FPS rate it takes to fool cats and dogs into thinking there's motion on a screen, but I know it's significantly higher than humans. I believe that's why it's rare that an animal that pays much attention to a TV screen. To most dogs, cats, etc., it's just a bunch of poorly-formed still images.
... who knows.
Perhaps this is a worthy cause for pursuing high framerates. Maybe someday you'll keep your pet occupied at home (watching TV) while you're out, or have your pet participate in your video games
I remember a discussion here on Slashdot a while ago about SmartDisk. Somebody was asking if there were any Linux drivers being developed for SmartDisk's amazing disk adapters that allow you to use your existing 1.44MB floppy drive to read/write 2MB - 128MB flash memory modules (the answer was a resounding "yes"). Neat huh?
:)
Anyway, I quickly discovered that the folks at SmartMedia make a bunch of other cool products too, such as ultra-portable USB hard disks (ignore the fact they only mention Macintosh systems in the summaries - the details state they can be used on PCs too). The 4 GB disks are about $180, 6 GB disks are $20 more. If USB is too slow for you, and you have the capacity, they also offer FireWire versions (you probably will need a Mac for these). And finally, if you can't make up your mind, they offer 3 GB - 30 GB versions that support both USB and FireWire environments.
I can't offer any experience with these disks, but I really want to try one out! Maybe someone can post their experience with SmartDisk products? Failing that, you could always get one of these drives and then do us a favor by submitting a review to Slashdot or something.
It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there who abuse their freedoms. If something in their life goes wrong, they immediately look to place the blame on someone. They don't seem to understand the term "accident", "act of god", or even "honest mistake". Sometimes the blame lands on a corporation. Now, I know that sometimes that's completely justified - there will always be a percentage of companies that really don't care what happens to their customer - "morality" and "fairness" are words they don't understand.
But all these licensing developed to their ridiculous levels for a reason. Yes, I'm sure some of it has been due to advancement in their wars to protect their "intellectual property". But in the case you point out (about housing contracts), I can't help but wonder if at least some of this mess wasn't brought out by an evolution: customer A attacks company for reason N (which, if customer A had any kind of tolerance or backbone, could have been brushed off with a comment of "shit happens"), company enacts legal restrictions to make sure next time they're not liable for reason N, then customer B attacks company for reason M, and so on.
I presume that legal agreements like the ones we see today are more restrictive than when the very first ones appeared 20, 30 years ago. So I figure it's had to have been an evolution of sorts. Maybe?
If so, have we not brought some of this on ourselves? Are there not an increasing number of people out there who don't want to take responsibility for anything in their lives? Would this not explain why we seem to be heading towards, as you say, "corporations and government[s]
Cool ... but can you eat them? ;)
I think I've been reading Slashdot at -1 for too long. After reading the Yahoo article and switching to the main site, after a couple of minutes all I could think was, "why can't I find a picture of the mystery frozen body they found?"
I think I need to get out more.
Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?
/. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.
;)
A couple of years ago I realized I really needed a decent backup solution. I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up. That's when I realized that just setting aside a couple 20 Gb HDD's for backups made way more sense than blindly following the "traditional" tape-backup route. Why follow the herd? Get yourself a RAID setup with a stack of IDE drives. Backup your important data onto the server overnight (or whenever).
If you want something a bit more glamorous, take a look at the StorPoint NAS 100 from AXIS. It's about $1000 retail - I don't believe any SCSI disks are included (I know, more than you wanted to spend). But the beauty of this thing is, much like the AXIS video camera many here on
Fight the power! Forget the tapes!
In case anyone's still reading this discussion, check out the following Tyan page:
Tyan Tomcat motherboards
You'll notice all 3 motherboards are the Micro ATX form-factor, and the last one outright states that it's "Rackmount Ready".
In some ways I like the look of these Tyan boards more than the ASUS ones. These aren't limited to a 333MHz maximum, and they also skip the lame ISA slots to give you more PCI slots. The only downside is the lack of an AGP slot (darn!).
I can't remember what the requirements/possibilities are for rack-mountable cases, so whether either of these two boards would be of use to you I can't say. This "build-it-yourself" option might save you some money though - if you can find the appropriate mounting/casing hardware.
One potential drawback: the maximum processor speed these boards support is 333MHz (not an issue for what I have planned, but it might be for you).
[In case you have some flexibility on the rack-mount system, I found a really small, impressive micro-ATX case from In-Win (the best standard case manufacturer around if you ask me). You can drool (optional) over some pictures of the IW-D500.]
That's an interesting thought. It brings up a question I've had for a while - how does methane compare to propane or natural gas in terms of energy generation?
... and head for the bathroom. ;)
Say you did have a fair number of people living in rural areas that were interested in doing something like this. How feasible would it be to use methane produced from animal manure/organic decomposition in a fuel cell like this? Presumably in many rural areas (maybe not in the Australian outback) you'd find an abundance of farms...
You could hook a methane generator up to your own house's septic system too I suppose. Running out of fuel? Simple: finish your lunch, grab a book
That really seems like a lot of unnecessary effort. I edit my cookies file by hand once every month or so and screw around with the entries I don't care for - randomizing the hex values, exchanging FALSE values for TRUE, etc..
Worst case, I figure this creates a mess at their end of things when invalid data turns up (that I'm sure they just ignore and reset). Best case is what I've had happen a few times - something I change gets interpreted correctly and all of a sudden I start seeing ads for stuff that's just ridiculously off-target for me. As a 24 year-old male techie, it's a bit amusing to suddenly find yourself bombarded with women's jewelry ads, expectant mother products, etc..
If you're out there Mr. Guzis
I believe the Hercules monochrome cards ran at 720 x 348 (only mentioning that so you don't calcute an incorrect aspect ratio, of course ;) ) Just for a laugh, one of these days I'm going to break mine out of storage and try it in my Windows 98 box to see if it'll be autodetected. I guess I'd better do it soon - it seems unlikely that the next motherboard I own will be physically able to support an 8-bit ISA card.
It had better resolution than CGA, but I have to say it sucked being the only one amongst my friends without color. I was so happy the day I got a copy of "SIMCGA" - a TSR program that allowed us Hercules users to fool games into thinking they were running on a computer with a CGA card installed; a requirement for most PC games back then. I owe whoever wrote "SIMCGA" (and who released it as public-domain) a big thank-you.
Didn't the Hercules cards allow you to have a VGA card installed simultaneously?
Well, despite what that other guy is saying, it's not a trailing slash that's screwing up the link (duh), it's the fact that the correct URL is NEW.3dhardware.net, instead of WWW.3dhardware.net.
This makes me wonder if the folks at 3dhardware didn't set up a secondary server after being alerted to the fact that their main one might be slashdotted. Maybe someone forgot to tell Slashdot about it.
Ok, that's fine. If you win one of these things, or are given one as a gift, just send it along to me and I'll take care of it. Thanks.
http://new.3dhardware.net/reviews/dti18/
It'd be nice to have some more information about this one. Lots of people have offered great advice about the pros/cons/limits of various networking possibilities, but things could probably get even more helpful if we knew:
1) How far apart are the houses really? Ok, so your friend is "four houses down" - well how far is that in feet/meters? As several people have asked, are we talking Montana back-country, Houston suburbs, or what?
2) What is between you and your friend? Four houses you say - anything else? Any concrete fences? Trees? Oil pipelines? Got a picture or two you could post?
3) Who is between you and your friend? Depending on the distance, and given all the technical details others have provided, it sounds like it might be worthwhile to get to know your neighbors. Would they let you dig a ditch at the end of their backyards? No? Would they perhaps change their minds if you offered to plug them in to the network too? Now that'd be cool - you could start a real "Network Neighborhood". Some cooperation here might also improve your chances of getting one of the cheaper alternatives to work (e.g. one with a repeater halfway, etc.).
You know, *every* time someone here on Slashdot talks about an old freeware or public-domain program for the PC and how they wish they still had it, I've found the program within about 5 minutes.
Hey, all you nostalgics! Go here:
OAK Software Repository
Right from the main page, go to the section called PC/Blue Disk Library, and go to the PCBLUE subdirectory. Then download the big master index (pbcat.zip). Find the archive file that holds the software you're looking for (trust me, they're all in there), and enjoy!
In your particular case, you're thinking of the "PianoMan" software. There were actually many, many different tunes available with that program, not just the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the Lone Ranger's theme song). The PianoMan program had the ability to generate COM files from the included music (MUS) files. That's why the Lone Ranger song got distributed so much more than the entire PianoMan package.
Rest assured, if you download Volume 216 from the above archive, and then spend about 2 minutes reading the PianoMan documentation, you'll be able to re-generate that Lone Ranger tune/program.
Take a look at this story from The Payphone Project!
You're right ... someone else pointed that site out just this past Sunday in the Computers and the Noise they Make article.
Aha! There's the comment!