I may give it another shot some time in the future, but the last time I tried a debian install (on my work machine, so I didn't really care as much) the installer didn't even give me the option to choose my desktop environment, sticking me with gnome when I wanted KDE.
There is a reason for that. KDE was (is still?) considered non-free because of its use of the Qt toolkit. Debian is 'pure' in its Freedom, thus you have to install KDE from a non-free repository.
I recently bought one of the older EEE PC 4Gs, and I accidentally figured out just yesterday that it already detects multiple touches on the mouse pad.
A two finger tap is interpreted as a middle click.
I was pretty pleased when It happened; hopefully, since the hardware is capable of it, we'll get updated drivers that make more use of it.
My friends and I have a weekly game night, and we play Monopoly with two modifications that really trim it down:
Everybody gets 3 or 4 properties (handed out at random) at the beginning of the game. You have to buy the property handed to you, or it gets auctioned.
The game ends when the first player goes bankrupt. Calculate your 'worth' according to the rules for income tax. Highest value wins.
I was going to suggest this very thing, but then there's the problem of visibility. If you only have one game available on your website, you may not even show up on Google unless someone is specifically searching for your game.
One solution to this problem, though, may be following the Cheapass rulebook to the letter. Print your own boards and rules, let people find their own pawns, etc., then sell through a site like Paizo (which just happens to be how you buy Cheapass Games now). I don't have any idea how Paizo selects which games to include on their site, or if there are any other websites that would be interested in talking with you, but I'm sure you'll be able to find something (Etsy maybe?).
One last suggestion (and it may have already been mentioned), go spend some time in the Board Game Geek forums. I know that there are a lot of budding game developers there, and there may be some much better suggestions/solutions that they know of. You might also be able to develop a starting market there.
I bought my TI-85 shortly after they came out in '92, and I still use it (in my Ph.D. work, nonetheless). It's kind of a tank, and has held up well over the years (all 14 of them - crap I'm old).
I was going to suggest a TI-86, as it's the memory-upgraded 85. The TI-86 is also lacking symbolic math, so it is generally more allowed on tests and in classes than the TI-89, but it does have a lot of tools that the 83 & 86 don't (like simultaneous equations solving and polynomial root finding) that make it very useful.
Oddly enough, I always presumed that the PC in 'PC Load Letter' stood for 'printer control' as in HP's Printer Control Language (PCL). In fact, I don't know that I have ever seen PC Load Letter on anything but an HP printer.
Surgeons buy pieces from Dow because Dow has spent a lot of time and money certifying the safety of their process and parts with (among others) the FDA. Surgeons buy the parts, and don't have to be too concerned that a manufacturing defect or bad batch of materials slipped past QA. If (God forbid) QA flubs one, the surgeon can (legitimately) blame Dow. If you're doing the QA in your office, however...
While part of the (exorbitant amounts of) money spent on any sort of health care ensures that everyone involved makes a tidy profit, you are paying much more for the guarantee of safety than anything else.
In essence, silicone is cheap; the insurance and hassle involved with making a safe part is very much the antithesis of cheap.
I looove the games I've gotten from Cheapass. Half the fun, for me at least, is the fact that there is 'assembly required'
Since you have to supply your own pieces, and the games come in envelopes (generally), it gives me projects to work on, including building boxes to hold all the cool pieces I've built.
The two Cheapass Games I have are 'Captain Treasure Boots' and 'Steam Tunnel'. For the former, I built little ships to use as pawns, and I used Mardi Gras Doubloons as the treasures. For the latter, I built a pipe-shaped box to hold all the parts. My friends and I have a weekly game night, and we've had a lot of fun with both of those.
Currently, I have my eye on 'Enemy Chocolatier' as a hopeful Christmas gift.
I will have to translate for Yoda. You see he had to learn English on one DVD. Unfortunately to fit the language on the DVD they had to compress the crap out of it and thus he couldn't learn it correctly.
Let me fix this analogy for you. The DVD from which Yoda learned English came with a large, specialized program that took up half the disk so that everything displayed was shiny. Then, to ensure a consistent shininess throughout, the developer rendered each individual English word into a 640x480 24-bit Windows bitmap. Unfortunately, this made tense-changes expensive in terms of disk-space, so that didn't leave a lot of room for the grammar rules. Those had to be left out, but nobody really uses grammar... Hey! Shiny!
A second developer used a small, customized, Gecko-based browser to display all of the uncompressed ASCII text on the disk. They had plenty of room for all the words you'd ever need, plus all the grammar rules. They included a fancy font to make it look shiny (almost as shiny as the other developer's) and even had room left over for a couple of sound-files to listen to as examples of spoken English.
Which method is more 'correct' (i.e., fun)? Just because there are limitations in a format does not necessarily mean that programs stored thereon have to be broken, you just have to be a bit more clever in your storage method. Perhaps the cut-scenes are rendered in-engine as opposed to streamed off the disk. Perhaps you choose to have the speech be pertinent as opposed to omnipresent. Perhaps these trade-offs actually make the game better.
Now let's assume that for the second version of Shiny Shiny English, you get all of the grammar rules and everything else that you need to really learn proper English... except to run it you have to buy a machine that comes at a $350 premium over the competitor, and instead of fixing the all of the previous version's faults they just add an extra polish of Shiny.
...(b) Agents. Any citizen of the United States who is not an attorney, and who fulfills the requirements of this Part may be registered as a patent agent to practice before the Office.
Download the PDF on the linked page for the full skinny. In essence, any US Citizen (or qualified alien) may become a patent agent (which means you can perform patent registrations, etc.) if you pass the exam, and have an appropriate scientific education. As an ME grad student, you've got the education down.
As a Biomedical Engineering Grad student, I have considered becoming a patent agent, but I'd rather do research work instead of getting stuck doing all the patent work at a company too cheap to hire a patent attorney.
What Nintendo does that is 'innovative' (I'll not argue that the specific definition really applies to what they do) is apply new (to videogames) technologies with the intent of changing how games are played and expanding the market. Three examples for reference:
They took miniaturization and LCD technology and produced a handheld console line that still sells millions of systems annually.
They took self-centering analog joysticks and put them into their controllers, providing the player a finer granularity of control. This has now become the industry-standard control input.
They put bog-standard touch-screens into a handheld game system, making the control scheme accessible to anyone who has ever held a pen.
Note that none of these were bleeding-edge technology. It was all older tech applied in a different way (than what the games industry was doing at the time).
If all they had ever done was make the idea available for purchase (ala Microsoft and its tilt-sensing Sidewinder), or make software that required non-standard controllers, I expect that videogames might still be a niche market (at least in the US), and that Nintendo would have gone out of business ages ago. By virtue of being a console manufacturer, they can 'force' (e.g., TV out would have been totally antithetical to the concept of the GameBoy, and, technical issues aside, thus was not included) these new ideas on gamers and developers. By virtue of being a game developer, they lead the way in demonstrating how to effectively utilize these newly-applied technologies. Third party game developers look at writing software for new consoles, see the interesting things Nintendo is doing with the hardware, get ideas from seeing what Nintendo has done with software, and write games that really push the envelope in terms of what type of games are available.
Note, too, that most of the tech advances pushed by Nintendo have expanded the market: The GameBoy let you take games with you (now you need two consoles), and the DS's controls made games more appealing to the large numbers of people that had never really considered gaming. This is good for the long-term viability of video-gaming as a whole, and could, eventually, establish an entertainment medium like what we see with movies today: art-house films for the hardcore, and block-buster sequels for the everyman.
It is thus Nintendo's consistent aversion to stagnation that earns the label innovative. Of course, if there were no Nintendo, other companies would likely have made the same steps, but it may not have been a single company trying new things every generation, and the end result may have been very different from what we see today.
Yes, and clearly, in TV and movies, we don't suffer from the regurgitation of proven material over and over and over again, with a focus on blockbusters in a vain pursuit of mega-profit....
And this is why we have seen the growth of gaming as an industry, namely because it offers an alternative to the same mindless entertainment that's been shoved down our throats.
Unfortunately, if videogames move toward a system where only big-name sequels and licensed pablum comes trickling out, then the entertainment experience of gaming will no longer be the strong competition that attracted us to the medium in the first place. If this does happen (it's in the process of happening now), then there may well be a 'crash' like what we saw in the early 80s. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to that.
...measuring coordinates between 0-1023 on the X axis and 0-767 on the Y axis...
I believe this an awkward way of describing the resolution of the position tracking system, i.e., how many discrete 'tics' can be measured (along each axis) as you move from the lower-left corner of the measurement area to the upper right.
I doubt that there is any sort of camera (in the "take a picture of your face for use in Wii Sports" sense) involved.
Before you submit your plans to a molding shop or machine shop. have someone who knows something look at them! Yes, it is easy to draw something and have it made, but someone who has gone through this process a couple of times will be able to spot common pitfalls that most new designers fall into, namely:
Tolerances far too tight - nothing will move if you have everything too snug, and machine shops start doubling prices for every extra significant figure on those tolerances.
Your parts may not actually be manufacturable - if a machinist or CNC machine can't get to a place to cut away material, you just plain can't make the part.
You have more than one part to be made - one case is likely composed of multiple 'parts', at the very least a front and back half, and if you don't split them out, you'll get one solid chunk back, not the smooth open/close mechanism you expected.
You might not be able to put everything together - Tab A might fit into Slot B in your head, but if the tolerances aren't correct, or if you just goofed, the real parts won't go together like you think.
Your cool design might be buildable, but not manufacturable - rapid prototyping machines can easily make things that are otherwise unmakeable; everything looks great for real production until the machinist/molder laughs you out of his office.
...they commonly have this device that can create any solid plastic shape in 3D using lasers
mnmn is referring here to a rapid prototyping machine, which is a really slick option for early prototypes because of the rapid turn-around time. CNC machines might be a second option, since the parts they make will be durable and very solid (unlike a rapid prototyping machine's output). At my undergraduate institution, we had a rapid prototyping machine (one of the first in the nation at university, by the way), and they would sell time on the machine to individuals/companies who wanted to have things made (Remington Firearms was a steady customer, if I recall correctly). I would suggest asking around at the local Mechanical Engineering departments if I were you, since they are likely to be much less expensive than a professional firm, and much more forgiving of design errors. They will also have access to CNC machines that they may be willing to sell you time on, provided you buy the materials and have everything ready to go (CNC machines don't just take 3D model files, you have to specify cutting paths, depths, and cut orders).
All in all, I'd suggest going to a bar near the local university on a Friday afternoon and waiting for the Mechanical or Industrial Engineering graduate students (they won't be hanging out together) to show up. Start talking with them or buy a few rounds, and they'll have better specific information for you.
When will they force me to have a SONY ONLY television...
I've long believed that this is Sony's Master Plan, only discussed in ultra-high level meetings with only C*Os present.
Think about how wide a reach Sony has, in terms of the types of products and services they offer. Today (in Japan, at least) you could buy a Sony movie, to play on your Sony Blu-Ray player, viewed on your Sony TV. Then you could buy the Sony CD of the soundtrack, listen to it on your Sony ATRAC player (after ripping it using your Sony computer), purchasing it all with your Sony credit card while sitting in the house that the Sony mortgage helped you buy. Think about how much money they would make if they could force you to do it. Think about how hard they try to get you to want to do it.
I'm not generally a conspiracy-theorist, but I can only imagine the pools of drool that form on the table at the aformentioned meetings when thought is given to this topic, and it makes my skin crawl.
Now, while I wait for Sony's black helicopters to take me away for some R&R at Sony Happy Fun Land, I'll leave you with this last disturbing thought...
It wasn't necessarily the memorization of the maps that made the game less fun to play (ruined is too strong a word; we still had fun playing, just not as much).
It was a side-effect of split-screen multi-player (you could glance at one of the splits and tell where the other person was). Of course, this totally removed any ability to camp, so that's a plus. As far as blaming split-screen, it was a sacrifice we were willing to make for all of the other benefits to console-play I mentioned. And, as I said, it really didn't kill the fun; it just made us move the fun to a different game (Gauntlet or Perfect Dark, as examples). No matter how great a game is, eventually I get bored of the quirks of that game, which is why I just plain don't understand the Halo freaks. There's other stuff out there man.
First, The Gimp makes something like this pretty easy. Open an image and go to 'Image -> Mode -> Indexed...', select the Generate Optimized Palette, and select the number of colors you want to use (10 might last your son 5 minutes, 200 might last him four years). Turn dithering off and hit OK. Next, go to 'Image -> Mode -> RGB' to switch it back to RGB color, then go to 'Filters -> Artistic -> Cartoon...', tweak the settings (Mask radius=10 and Percent black=1.0 seem to work), and hit OK. With these two, I was able to get a 'completed-looking' color-by-numbers image from a photo in about 10 seconds. The rest is up to you (I would start by selecting by color, getting the black outlines, and copying them into a new layer. Add in numbers and a legend, and you're good to go). If you want to get fancy, you could use some python-jitsu and whip up some script-fu to do it automagically.
Second, you can keep it hardcore and use a program like NIH Image (or its PC counterpart, ScionImage) and use a procedeure called thresholding to get different levels of black and white from an image. The program is scriptable, and if you google around enough (or poke through the sample scripts) you might be able to hack something together pretty easily. I've used this software to track points glued onto soft tissues (ligaments), and if I recall correctly, it was fairly easy to get it to do this sort of thing (i.e., Biomedical Engineering undergrads were able to get it to work). N.B. This is a serious research-level program, so it is not super user-friendly. I also doubt you'll find anything in the help forums if you search for color-by-number. Search instead for thresholding.
The first option is likely to be waaay easier than the second.
The same things that make every (good) console game fun: ease of use / quick startup, one machine for multiple players, low cost, guaranteed compatibility with your hardware, and livingroom environment.
I know that most PC gamers think it anathema that you share a screen with your friends, or that there might be a stutter in the frame-rate. That's fine; blow $2000 on a PC to play games the way you like to play them. Personally, I thought GoldenEye multiplayer had a good mix of balanced weapons, decent maps, and pick-up-and-play control. All played in the livingroom, where a spilled beer only means 10 minutes of mopping up, not $1000 of fried hardware.
The only real issue I ever had with GoldenEye was the fact that we (my friends and I) eventually memorized the maps, and could quickly hunt each other down. Of course, by the time this became a problem, Perfect Dark was available, giving us a whole new set of maps to memorize.
You also have the wrinkle of perishable products, like fruits and vegetables at grocery stores, where manufacturers cannot really take them back and try to sell them somewhere else, because they have gone all the way through their shelf life at the first store.
In essence, all goods (essentially) are perishible, and I belive the system works more as a hybrid of the two models you describe. Namely, the retailer buys the products with the understanding that the manufacturer will take back and give credit for items that do not sell. There may be a minimum purchase required (e.g., 100 units), or a contract to buy that product from only that wholesaler. The perishible factor comes in when the manufacturer really drops the ball with regard to future support or advertising (as a retailer, would you buy 20 units of a $300 item that gets no advertising, with no recourse it they do not sell?) or with style ("what do you mean plaid isn't in anymore?")
One example of this is Greeting Cards. I work at a small pack-and-ship store (only one store, not a chain), and once a month or so, the sales rep for the greeting-card company comes in, restocks the card racks, takes some notes as to what was not sold, and throws out the 'expired' cards. We get credit for the unsold cards. These really are 'perishible goods' since you can't sell many Mother's Day cards much past the date. Even generic cards expire, as colors/political jokes/seasons change, necessitating new artwork on the cards.
I believe paper-back books work in a similar manner. The book-seller tears off the cover of the unsold books and mails them back for credit (too expensive to send the whole book). This is why there is a warning in the front-matter of paper-back books concerning purchase without a cover.
Note too, that I consistently use the term 'credit'. I bet it's pretty difficult (from the retailer's perspective) to convert said credit into hard currency.
I swore off Sony products after my Walkman ('89 or '90 range, yes tapes) killed three sets of headphones. I relented when Final Fantasy VII came out on the PS1, and aside from that and a pair of headphones, I've not purchased any of their products since.
There are currently three manufacturers whose products I buy without hesitation: Panasonic, Samsung, and Nintendo. Everything I've bought from those companies has been built as solid as a rock, with no difficulties whatsoever.
Hell, my Samsung phone even survived a drop (fling, really) into a Bourbon Street puddle with nary a problem. If you've never seen the sorts of scum and filth that accumulate on the streets of New Orleans know this: if you dip your hand in, you pull back a festering stump.
It's not entirely true that you have to install it.
If you choose the 'Expert' installation option, you have the option of not installing the WGA update, Windows Update then asks if you'd like to turn off notification of that particular update.
That is, of course, what I did.
Of course, for all I know, WU goes ahead and installs it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson for one imagining of this scenario.
That's OK, I've been looking for reddit up-vote arrows this whole thread.
Live wallpapers are programs that write to an always-visible canvas, and thus need to be installed.
Some wallpaper apps keep their libraries online, and provide an easy-to-browse catalog of images. You only download the ones you want.
There is a reason for that. KDE was (is still?) considered non-free because of its use of the Qt toolkit. Debian is 'pure' in its Freedom, thus you have to install KDE from a non-free repository.
I recently bought one of the older EEE PC 4Gs, and I accidentally figured out just yesterday that it already detects multiple touches on the mouse pad.
A two finger tap is interpreted as a middle click.
I was pretty pleased when It happened; hopefully, since the hardware is capable of it, we'll get updated drivers that make more use of it.
I was going to suggest this very thing, but then there's the problem of visibility. If you only have one game available on your website, you may not even show up on Google unless someone is specifically searching for your game.
One solution to this problem, though, may be following the Cheapass rulebook to the letter. Print your own boards and rules, let people find their own pawns, etc., then sell through a site like Paizo (which just happens to be how you buy Cheapass Games now). I don't have any idea how Paizo selects which games to include on their site, or if there are any other websites that would be interested in talking with you, but I'm sure you'll be able to find something (Etsy maybe?).
One last suggestion (and it may have already been mentioned), go spend some time in the Board Game Geek forums. I know that there are a lot of budding game developers there, and there may be some much better suggestions/solutions that they know of. You might also be able to develop a starting market there.
Ahh, so we're from the same vintage.
I bought my TI-85 shortly after they came out in '92, and I still use it (in my Ph.D. work, nonetheless). It's kind of a tank, and has held up well over the years (all 14 of them - crap I'm old).
I was going to suggest a TI-86, as it's the memory-upgraded 85. The TI-86 is also lacking symbolic math, so it is generally more allowed on tests and in classes than the TI-89, but it does have a lot of tools that the 83 & 86 don't (like simultaneous equations solving and polynomial root finding) that make it very useful.
Oddly enough, I always presumed that the PC in 'PC Load Letter' stood for 'printer control' as in HP's Printer Control Language (PCL). In fact, I don't know that I have ever seen PC Load Letter on anything but an HP printer.
Nah, that will never happen.
Surgeons buy pieces from Dow because Dow has spent a lot of time and money certifying the safety of their process and parts with (among others) the FDA. Surgeons buy the parts, and don't have to be too concerned that a manufacturing defect or bad batch of materials slipped past QA. If (God forbid) QA flubs one, the surgeon can (legitimately) blame Dow. If you're doing the QA in your office, however...
While part of the (exorbitant amounts of) money spent on any sort of health care ensures that everyone involved makes a tidy profit, you are paying much more for the guarantee of safety than anything else.
In essence, silicone is cheap; the insurance and hassle involved with making a safe part is very much the antithesis of cheap.
I looove the games I've gotten from Cheapass. Half the fun, for me at least, is the fact that there is 'assembly required'
Since you have to supply your own pieces, and the games come in envelopes (generally), it gives me projects to work on, including building boxes to hold all the cool pieces I've built.
The two Cheapass Games I have are 'Captain Treasure Boots' and 'Steam Tunnel'. For the former, I built little ships to use as pawns, and I used Mardi Gras Doubloons as the treasures. For the latter, I built a pipe-shaped box to hold all the parts. My friends and I have a weekly game night, and we've had a lot of fun with both of those.
Currently, I have my eye on 'Enemy Chocolatier' as a hopeful Christmas gift.
Fire Emblem has the same set of options, allowing you to turn off all battle animations.
You can also press start to skip cutscenes - useful when you are re-playing a chapter so that your Pegasus Knight doesn't die.
Let me fix this analogy for you. The DVD from which Yoda learned English came with a large, specialized program that took up half the disk so that everything displayed was shiny. Then, to ensure a consistent shininess throughout, the developer rendered each individual English word into a 640x480 24-bit Windows bitmap. Unfortunately, this made tense-changes expensive in terms of disk-space, so that didn't leave a lot of room for the grammar rules. Those had to be left out, but nobody really uses grammar... Hey! Shiny!
A second developer used a small, customized, Gecko-based browser to display all of the uncompressed ASCII text on the disk. They had plenty of room for all the words you'd ever need, plus all the grammar rules. They included a fancy font to make it look shiny (almost as shiny as the other developer's) and even had room left over for a couple of sound-files to listen to as examples of spoken English.
Which method is more 'correct' (i.e., fun)? Just because there are limitations in a format does not necessarily mean that programs stored thereon have to be broken, you just have to be a bit more clever in your storage method. Perhaps the cut-scenes are rendered in-engine as opposed to streamed off the disk. Perhaps you choose to have the speech be pertinent as opposed to omnipresent. Perhaps these trade-offs actually make the game better.
Now let's assume that for the second version of Shiny Shiny English, you get all of the grammar rules and everything else that you need to really learn proper English... except to run it you have to buy a machine that comes at a $350 premium over the competitor, and instead of fixing the all of the previous version's faults they just add an extra polish of Shiny.
Now, is "everything else equal"?
From the horse's mouth:
Download the PDF on the linked page for the full skinny. In essence, any US Citizen (or qualified alien) may become a patent agent (which means you can perform patent registrations, etc.) if you pass the exam, and have an appropriate scientific education. As an ME grad student, you've got the education down.
As a Biomedical Engineering Grad student, I have considered becoming a patent agent, but I'd rather do research work instead of getting stuck doing all the patent work at a company too cheap to hire a patent attorney.
- They took miniaturization and LCD technology and produced a handheld console line that still sells millions of systems annually.
- They took self-centering analog joysticks and put them into their controllers, providing the player a finer granularity of control. This has now become the industry-standard control input.
- They put bog-standard touch-screens into a handheld game system, making the control scheme accessible to anyone who has ever held a pen.
Note that none of these were bleeding-edge technology. It was all older tech applied in a different way (than what the games industry was doing at the time).If all they had ever done was make the idea available for purchase (ala Microsoft and its tilt-sensing Sidewinder), or make software that required non-standard controllers, I expect that videogames might still be a niche market (at least in the US), and that Nintendo would have gone out of business ages ago. By virtue of being a console manufacturer, they can 'force' (e.g., TV out would have been totally antithetical to the concept of the GameBoy, and, technical issues aside, thus was not included) these new ideas on gamers and developers. By virtue of being a game developer, they lead the way in demonstrating how to effectively utilize these newly-applied technologies. Third party game developers look at writing software for new consoles, see the interesting things Nintendo is doing with the hardware, get ideas from seeing what Nintendo has done with software, and write games that really push the envelope in terms of what type of games are available.
Note, too, that most of the tech advances pushed by Nintendo have expanded the market: The GameBoy let you take games with you (now you need two consoles), and the DS's controls made games more appealing to the large numbers of people that had never really considered gaming. This is good for the long-term viability of video-gaming as a whole, and could, eventually, establish an entertainment medium like what we see with movies today: art-house films for the hardcore, and block-buster sequels for the everyman.
It is thus Nintendo's consistent aversion to stagnation that earns the label innovative. Of course, if there were no Nintendo, other companies would likely have made the same steps, but it may not have been a single company trying new things every generation, and the end result may have been very different from what we see today.
And this is why we have seen the growth of gaming as an industry, namely because it offers an alternative to the same mindless entertainment that's been shoved down our throats.
Unfortunately, if videogames move toward a system where only big-name sequels and licensed pablum comes trickling out, then the entertainment experience of gaming will no longer be the strong competition that attracted us to the medium in the first place. If this does happen (it's in the process of happening now), then there may well be a 'crash' like what we saw in the early 80s. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to that.
I believe this an awkward way of describing the resolution of the position tracking system, i.e., how many discrete 'tics' can be measured (along each axis) as you move from the lower-left corner of the measurement area to the upper right.
I doubt that there is any sort of camera (in the "take a picture of your face for use in Wii Sports" sense) involved.
Before you submit your plans to a molding shop or machine shop. have someone who knows something look at them! Yes, it is easy to draw something and have it made, but someone who has gone through this process a couple of times will be able to spot common pitfalls that most new designers fall into, namely:
mnmn is referring here to a rapid prototyping machine, which is a really slick option for early prototypes because of the rapid turn-around time. CNC machines might be a second option, since the parts they make will be durable and very solid (unlike a rapid prototyping machine's output). At my undergraduate institution, we had a rapid prototyping machine (one of the first in the nation at university, by the way), and they would sell time on the machine to individuals/companies who wanted to have things made (Remington Firearms was a steady customer, if I recall correctly). I would suggest asking around at the local Mechanical Engineering departments if I were you, since they are likely to be much less expensive than a professional firm, and much more forgiving of design errors. They will also have access to CNC machines that they may be willing to sell you time on, provided you buy the materials and have everything ready to go (CNC machines don't just take 3D model files, you have to specify cutting paths, depths, and cut orders).
All in all, I'd suggest going to a bar near the local university on a Friday afternoon and waiting for the Mechanical or Industrial Engineering graduate students (they won't be hanging out together) to show up. Start talking with them or buy a few rounds, and they'll have better specific information for you.
I've long believed that this is Sony's Master Plan, only discussed in ultra-high level meetings with only C*Os present.
Think about how wide a reach Sony has, in terms of the types of products and services they offer. Today (in Japan, at least) you could buy a Sony movie, to play on your Sony Blu-Ray player, viewed on your Sony TV. Then you could buy the Sony CD of the soundtrack, listen to it on your Sony ATRAC player (after ripping it using your Sony computer), purchasing it all with your Sony credit card while sitting in the house that the Sony mortgage helped you buy. Think about how much money they would make if they could force you to do it. Think about how hard they try to get you to want to do it.
I'm not generally a conspiracy-theorist, but I can only imagine the pools of drool that form on the table at the aformentioned meetings when thought is given to this topic, and it makes my skin crawl.
Now, while I wait for Sony's black helicopters to take me away for some R&R at Sony Happy Fun Land, I'll leave you with this last disturbing thought...
What if you also worked for Sony?
It wasn't necessarily the memorization of the maps that made the game less fun to play (ruined is too strong a word; we still had fun playing, just not as much).
It was a side-effect of split-screen multi-player (you could glance at one of the splits and tell where the other person was). Of course, this totally removed any ability to camp, so that's a plus. As far as blaming split-screen, it was a sacrifice we were willing to make for all of the other benefits to console-play I mentioned. And, as I said, it really didn't kill the fun; it just made us move the fun to a different game (Gauntlet or Perfect Dark, as examples). No matter how great a game is, eventually I get bored of the quirks of that game, which is why I just plain don't understand the Halo freaks. There's other stuff out there man.
First, The Gimp makes something like this pretty easy. Open an image and go to 'Image -> Mode -> Indexed...', select the Generate Optimized Palette, and select the number of colors you want to use (10 might last your son 5 minutes, 200 might last him four years). Turn dithering off and hit OK. Next, go to 'Image -> Mode -> RGB' to switch it back to RGB color, then go to 'Filters -> Artistic -> Cartoon...', tweak the settings (Mask radius=10 and Percent black=1.0 seem to work), and hit OK. With these two, I was able to get a 'completed-looking' color-by-numbers image from a photo in about 10 seconds. The rest is up to you (I would start by selecting by color, getting the black outlines, and copying them into a new layer. Add in numbers and a legend, and you're good to go). If you want to get fancy, you could use some python-jitsu and whip up some script-fu to do it automagically.
Second, you can keep it hardcore and use a program like NIH Image (or its PC counterpart, ScionImage) and use a procedeure called thresholding to get different levels of black and white from an image. The program is scriptable, and if you google around enough (or poke through the sample scripts) you might be able to hack something together pretty easily. I've used this software to track points glued onto soft tissues (ligaments), and if I recall correctly, it was fairly easy to get it to do this sort of thing (i.e., Biomedical Engineering undergrads were able to get it to work). N.B. This is a serious research-level program, so it is not super user-friendly. I also doubt you'll find anything in the help forums if you search for color-by-number. Search instead for thresholding.
The first option is likely to be waaay easier than the second.
The same things that make every (good) console game fun: ease of use / quick startup, one machine for multiple players, low cost, guaranteed compatibility with your hardware, and livingroom environment.
I know that most PC gamers think it anathema that you share a screen with your friends, or that there might be a stutter in the frame-rate. That's fine; blow $2000 on a PC to play games the way you like to play them. Personally, I thought GoldenEye multiplayer had a good mix of balanced weapons, decent maps, and pick-up-and-play control. All played in the livingroom, where a spilled beer only means 10 minutes of mopping up, not $1000 of fried hardware.
The only real issue I ever had with GoldenEye was the fact that we (my friends and I) eventually memorized the maps, and could quickly hunt each other down. Of course, by the time this became a problem, Perfect Dark was available, giving us a whole new set of maps to memorize.
In essence, all goods (essentially) are perishible, and I belive the system works more as a hybrid of the two models you describe. Namely, the retailer buys the products with the understanding that the manufacturer will take back and give credit for items that do not sell. There may be a minimum purchase required (e.g., 100 units), or a contract to buy that product from only that wholesaler. The perishible factor comes in when the manufacturer really drops the ball with regard to future support or advertising (as a retailer, would you buy 20 units of a $300 item that gets no advertising, with no recourse it they do not sell?) or with style ("what do you mean plaid isn't in anymore?")
One example of this is Greeting Cards. I work at a small pack-and-ship store (only one store, not a chain), and once a month or so, the sales rep for the greeting-card company comes in, restocks the card racks, takes some notes as to what was not sold, and throws out the 'expired' cards. We get credit for the unsold cards. These really are 'perishible goods' since you can't sell many Mother's Day cards much past the date. Even generic cards expire, as colors/political jokes/seasons change, necessitating new artwork on the cards.
I believe paper-back books work in a similar manner. The book-seller tears off the cover of the unsold books and mails them back for credit (too expensive to send the whole book). This is why there is a warning in the front-matter of paper-back books concerning purchase without a cover.
Note too, that I consistently use the term 'credit'. I bet it's pretty difficult (from the retailer's perspective) to convert said credit into hard currency.
I swore off Sony products after my Walkman ('89 or '90 range, yes tapes) killed three sets of headphones. I relented when Final Fantasy VII came out on the PS1, and aside from that and a pair of headphones, I've not purchased any of their products since.
There are currently three manufacturers whose products I buy without hesitation: Panasonic, Samsung, and Nintendo. Everything I've bought from those companies has been built as solid as a rock, with no difficulties whatsoever.
Hell, my Samsung phone even survived a drop (fling, really) into a Bourbon Street puddle with nary a problem. If you've never seen the sorts of scum and filth that accumulate on the streets of New Orleans know this: if you dip your hand in, you pull back a festering stump.
It's not entirely true that you have to install it.
If you choose the 'Expert' installation option, you have the option of not installing the WGA update, Windows Update then asks if you'd like to turn off notification of that particular update.
That is, of course, what I did.
Of course, for all I know, WU goes ahead and installs it anyway.