I picked up one of these a while back at a thrift store for $5, thinking "Oh, it'll be easy to find specs for that power/serial connector online".
I was wrong.
The unit has some RJ-45 port on the back that is responsible for bringing both power in, and taking data out (via serial) and I'm missing the magic adaptor. Does anyone out there know the pin-outs for this, so I can build a cable and put it to some use?
Youd be suprised how well something like Mariokart works at a low-grade party. A single race is short enough that, if you have more than 4 people, you can rotate out the loser(s), and still be sure that everyone gets a shot at playing. The game is simple to play, and somebody who's never touched it before, or simply had too much to drink, can pick it up and do reasonably well.
That's not to say that Nintendo has a monopoly on these games, but they do have the most, since four player games never did well on the PSX because the 4-way hardware wasn't standard. I haven't looked much at the new consoles, but the XBox has a decent 4-way party game in Fuzion Frenzy, a game obviously designed with that sole purpose in mind.
Mind you, if everyone present is going to be a gamer geek, fighting games are a good substitute for the 4-way party game, but they don't provide much entertainment if there will be non-gamers, alcohol or females around.
To sum it all up, the key traits of good party game are:
Shallow learning curve: it's a social gathering, not a contest. Make it easy to pick up and participate w/o being too embarrassed
Short turn-around time: Keep people rotating through so that nobody who wants to play has to wait too long and anyone who wants to stop can leave on short notice
Simultanious Multiplayer:2 players is OK, 4 is golden; more than 4 would probably have to strugiling to find room in front of and on the TV.
I think that cuteness (or at least low-violence) is a bonus. GoldenEye and Tekken were OK party games, but Mariokart was a great one.
It's that lack of a solid, well-rounded, well-known office suite that keeps unix in the server-rooms and engineering labs. Considering the current push in large environments towards thin clients, if a proper office suite was available for Unix, Unix would easily come in and wipe the floor with Windows Terminal Server.
My school uses a 10Mb line-of-sight microwave system that covers about 3-4 blocks, between the main building and an annex; living int the rainy Pacific Nortwest, if rain caused it problems we would know.
IIRC, Ma Bell used to use microwave connections for long-distance lines
One other reason I see to move away from Perl as the language for the project is the complete rewrite (IE fundamental changes to syntax, deprecating all existing code) of the language that's currently going on. Perl5 is going the way of COBOL; it will become increasingly difficult to find coders both competant and up to date in their skills.
I'm not really qualified to make any recomendations about which language you should use, but if you're doing a rewrite now, when Perl5 coders are still plentiful, choose a language that you can be reasonably sure will be used 3yr from now. The whole point of the project is to ensure future maintainability for the software..
It could work if it were better than the printed game media, which are little better than infomercials, spewing forth little more than multi-page advertisements disguised as "reviews" and pointless hyped descriptions of vaporwear.
The biggest problem I see would be finding enough programming to fill up all the available space. Something would have to fill up the space, or you'd end up with the same 6hr of programming all week long, maybe some videogame/anime network might have better luck.
This "random, particular time period" that you criticize the facts on happens to cover a majority of the Christmas shopping season, which, in the US, is the time of year when retailers do a large percentage of their yearly sales. Considering the target demographic for game consoles, these numbers probably represent at least 25-30% of the sales for the year.
Go lo-tech, and save yourself the hassle. Don't bother with a fan, just get a big heatsink. Heatsinks don't fail, fans do, a P200 doesn't run that hot to start with.
The only fan you'll really need would be the one on your PSU, and most PSUs don't have monitor wires on the fans anyways.
As for voltages, who really cares? With the price of P200s, you could replace the system several times for what any sort of add-on monitoring hardware would cost.
If you want harware monitoring, buy yourself the cheapest socket370 Celeron (or Duron, but they run a bit hotter, slower Celerons can run nicely w/ passive heatsinks) you can, the cheapest board you can find that still has hardware monitoring on it, and a 128MB stick of cheap ram, and put it into the case you're using for the P200, and you'll probably come out ahead of the game.
I keep seeing "bioinformatics" pop up, but never really hear anythign serious about it. Is it really a big enough field to have much in the way of journals specifically for it?
The biggest problem I see is that the FBI's juridiction is limited to domestic work, and foreign criminal activity against the federal government. Once a copy of ML gets onto the system of a foreigner, they start walking on thin ice. If that foreigner is not involved in criminal activities dirrected against Americans of the USian Federal gov't they've stepped beyond their limits, and into the territory of the CIA.
Broadband isn't really -that- big of a jump. It just unites the cost-effectiveness of a modem with the speed of a leased line. Granted, the technology used may be a bit different, but the end result is a simple evolution. Was there a killer app that made people upgrade from win3.1 to win95, or '95 to '98?
It'll just be a matter of time before more people switch over. I doubt there will be any mass exodous in the future. If anything is holding people back currently it would be poor availability of service and the bad reputation of the available service (which the recent @home failure doesn't help with).
I mean, as it is, people are waiting months to get DSL installs, so obviously there's enough of a demand for the service.
Not to mention that, once the noise is in your digital stream, any automated method you use to remove it -will- reduce the sound quality of the whole song. If you can't clean up the sound enough by cleaning the record, your best bet is to use a wave editor (such as soundforge/cooledit) and remove the clicks & pops by hand.
Well, if you want a more BSD-oriented Linux distro, Slackware Linux supposedly fits the bill. I can't make any real comparisons, but I've been running it without any problems for a number of years, and find working with it much simpler than configuring Redhat.
For the most part 'icebreakers' are worthless and annoying, to both the extroverts (who find them pointless) and the introverts (who will resist them). Something that happened at a school party last night might be interesting, tho... A "snowball fight" using marshmallows. I'll warn you ahead of time to NOT do this in a carpeted area or near upholstry, since the marshmallows will get squished and make a mess. If you have a parking garage, or good weather for an outdoor lot, you've got a great setup.
And if we legalize Marijuana, farmers will be allowed to grow more hemp, and we can use hemp to do things that help the environment.
Honestly, how many highschoolers can type faster than they can write? And how many of those are going to be screwing off in a class they need to pay attention to (as opposed to being a geek stuck in a 'Basic computer applications' class)?
You can't effectively base an argument on how to establish a policy on the skills/behaviors of a minority, especially in a public school, where if you let one student do something, effectively you must let ALL the students do that. You, my friend, are clearly in the minority.
What does it really matter? A kid who's going to let himself be distracted from class to read his email is the same kinda kid that would be acting up or passing notes or twiddling their thumbs. You can't, simply by removing potential distractiosn, make a student who doesn't want to learn want to learn (of course, things distracting interested students are a different matter all together). If the teacher can't present things in a way that interests the students, the teacher is the one at fault, not the laptops
Not to mention the financial side. Considering the way that educational grants go, the district probably doesn't have the resources to implement anything but the most trivial of solutions. THey have money for hardware, and maybe enough for an extra MCSE to handle the machines, but anything that will require aditional hardware or software is not going to happen.
Unfortunately, many (if not most) environments where you are prohibited from installing your personal choice of OS, you are also not allowed to install software on the machine.
Not to mention that the Windows' default behavior for handling window focus makes using the gimp unpleasant.
Of course, with some of the QC problems that've been popping up in the kernel lately, you may find that doing a firmware/driver upgrade causes your speakers to catch on fire or the platters of your HDD to fly across the room, giving your goldfish a buzz cut.
The All Electronics Corporation has a decent online presence. They might not have everything you want, but when they do, it's cheap. They often have things you may not know you wanted, strange assemblies pulled from unsold hardware and whatnot.
I'm glad it was typo and not a meaningless extension made for the sake of a TLA obesession, like the X in PDX (Portland, OR airport code) or the X in PSX (Playstation).
Sorry, this piece is not a winner, please play again.
According to the 2000 CIA World Factbook, the population of Japan is 126,549,976, less than half the population of the US. Granted, they're far more densely packed, but their whole nation is smaller than the state of California.
I wouldn't mind seeing the above comment modded down for being clearly false.
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I picked up one of these a while back at a thrift store for $5, thinking "Oh, it'll be easy to find specs for that power/serial connector online".
I was wrong.
The unit has some RJ-45 port on the back that is responsible for bringing both power in, and taking data out (via serial) and I'm missing the magic adaptor. Does anyone out there know the pin-outs for this, so I can build a cable and put it to some use?
As long as it's not this bird, it wouldn't be -that- bad.
WTF would you even bother going out of your way to add an advanced filesystem to a machine that was essentially being a dumb text terminal?
That's not to say that Nintendo has a monopoly on these games, but they do have the most, since four player games never did well on the PSX because the 4-way hardware wasn't standard. I haven't looked much at the new consoles, but the XBox has a decent 4-way party game in Fuzion Frenzy, a game obviously designed with that sole purpose in mind.
Mind you, if everyone present is going to be a gamer geek, fighting games are a good substitute for the 4-way party game, but they don't provide much entertainment if there will be non-gamers, alcohol or females around.
To sum it all up, the key traits of good party game are:
I think that cuteness (or at least low-violence) is a bonus. GoldenEye and Tekken were OK party games, but Mariokart was a great one.
It's that lack of a solid, well-rounded, well-known office suite that keeps unix in the server-rooms and engineering labs. Considering the current push in large environments towards thin clients, if a proper office suite was available for Unix, Unix would easily come in and wipe the floor with Windows Terminal Server.
My school uses a 10Mb line-of-sight microwave system that covers about 3-4 blocks, between the main building and an annex; living int the rainy Pacific Nortwest, if rain caused it problems we would know.
IIRC, Ma Bell used to use microwave connections for long-distance lines
One other reason I see to move away from Perl as the language for the project is the complete rewrite (IE fundamental changes to syntax, deprecating all existing code) of the language that's currently going on. Perl5 is going the way of COBOL; it will become increasingly difficult to find coders both competant and up to date in their skills.
I'm not really qualified to make any recomendations about which language you should use, but if you're doing a rewrite now, when Perl5 coders are still plentiful, choose a language that you can be reasonably sure will be used 3yr from now. The whole point of the project is to ensure future maintainability for the software..
It could work if it were better than the printed game media, which are little better than infomercials, spewing forth little more than multi-page advertisements disguised as "reviews" and pointless hyped descriptions of vaporwear.
The biggest problem I see would be finding enough programming to fill up all the available space. Something would have to fill up the space, or you'd end up with the same 6hr of programming all week long, maybe some videogame/anime network might have better luck.
This "random, particular time period" that you criticize the facts on happens to cover a majority of the Christmas shopping season, which, in the US, is the time of year when retailers do a large percentage of their yearly sales. Considering the target demographic for game consoles, these numbers probably represent at least 25-30% of the sales for the year.
Go lo-tech, and save yourself the hassle. Don't bother with a fan, just get a big heatsink. Heatsinks don't fail, fans do, a P200 doesn't run that hot to start with.
The only fan you'll really need would be the one on your PSU, and most PSUs don't have monitor wires on the fans anyways.
As for voltages, who really cares? With the price of P200s, you could replace the system several times for what any sort of add-on monitoring hardware would cost.
If you want harware monitoring, buy yourself the cheapest socket370 Celeron (or Duron, but they run a bit hotter, slower Celerons can run nicely w/ passive heatsinks) you can, the cheapest board you can find that still has hardware monitoring on it, and a 128MB stick of cheap ram, and put it into the case you're using for the P200, and you'll probably come out ahead of the game.
I keep seeing "bioinformatics" pop up, but never really hear anythign serious about it. Is it really a big enough field to have much in the way of journals specifically for it?
The biggest problem I see is that the FBI's juridiction is limited to domestic work, and foreign criminal activity against the federal government. Once a copy of ML gets onto the system of a foreigner, they start walking on thin ice. If that foreigner is not involved in criminal activities dirrected against Americans of the USian Federal gov't they've stepped beyond their limits, and into the territory of the CIA.
Broadband isn't really -that- big of a jump. It just unites the cost-effectiveness of a modem with the speed of a leased line. Granted, the technology used may be a bit different, but the end result is a simple evolution. Was there a killer app that made people upgrade from win3.1 to win95, or '95 to '98?
It'll just be a matter of time before more people switch over. I doubt there will be any mass exodous in the future. If anything is holding people back currently it would be poor availability of service and the bad reputation of the available service (which the recent @home failure doesn't help with).
I mean, as it is, people are waiting months to get DSL installs, so obviously there's enough of a demand for the service.
Not to mention that, once the noise is in your digital stream, any automated method you use to remove it -will- reduce the sound quality of the whole song. If you can't clean up the sound enough by cleaning the record, your best bet is to use a wave editor (such as soundforge/cooledit) and remove the clicks & pops by hand.
Well, if you want a more BSD-oriented Linux distro, Slackware Linux supposedly fits the bill. I can't make any real comparisons, but I've been running it without any problems for a number of years, and find working with it much simpler than configuring Redhat.
For the most part 'icebreakers' are worthless and annoying, to both the extroverts (who find them pointless) and the introverts (who will resist them). Something that happened at a school party last night might be interesting, tho... A "snowball fight" using marshmallows. I'll warn you ahead of time to NOT do this in a carpeted area or near upholstry, since the marshmallows will get squished and make a mess. If you have a parking garage, or good weather for an outdoor lot, you've got a great setup.
And if we legalize Marijuana, farmers will be allowed to grow more hemp, and we can use hemp to do things that help the environment.
Honestly, how many highschoolers can type faster than they can write? And how many of those are going to be screwing off in a class they need to pay attention to (as opposed to being a geek stuck in a 'Basic computer applications' class)?
You can't effectively base an argument on how to establish a policy on the skills/behaviors of a minority, especially in a public school, where if you let one student do something, effectively you must let ALL the students do that. You, my friend, are clearly in the minority.
What does it really matter? A kid who's going to let himself be distracted from class to read his email is the same kinda kid that would be acting up or passing notes or twiddling their thumbs. You can't, simply by removing potential distractiosn, make a student who doesn't want to learn want to learn (of course, things distracting interested students are a different matter all together). If the teacher can't present things in a way that interests the students, the teacher is the one at fault, not the laptops
Not to mention the financial side. Considering the way that educational grants go, the district probably doesn't have the resources to implement anything but the most trivial of solutions. THey have money for hardware, and maybe enough for an extra MCSE to handle the machines, but anything that will require aditional hardware or software is not going to happen.
Unfortunately, many (if not most) environments where you are prohibited from installing your personal choice of OS, you are also not allowed to install software on the machine.
Not to mention that the Windows' default behavior for handling window focus makes using the gimp unpleasant.
Of course, with some of the QC problems that've been popping up in the kernel lately, you may find that doing a firmware/driver upgrade causes your speakers to catch on fire or the platters of your HDD to fly across the room, giving your goldfish a buzz cut.
Why not just place all your source in a single directory, and instead of worrying about makefiles, get an intern to take care of all your compilation?
...and how many people in China or India that can afford a $3000 scooter don't have chaufers?
The All Electronics Corporation has a decent online presence. They might not have everything you want, but when they do, it's cheap. They often have things you may not know you wanted, strange assemblies pulled from unsold hardware and whatnot.
I'm glad it was typo and not a meaningless extension made for the sake of a TLA obesession, like the X in PDX (Portland, OR airport code) or the X in PSX (Playstation).
Sorry, this piece is not a winner, please play again.
According to the 2000 CIA World Factbook, the population of Japan is 126,549,976, less than half the population of the US. Granted, they're far more densely packed, but their whole nation is smaller than the state of California.
I wouldn't mind seeing the above comment modded down for being clearly false.