The first version I ever played was also mainframe based, but the interface was a teletype. There was no video display. My games usually ran 10 or 12 pages of fanfold greenbar paper.:)
You apparently missed the part of the brochure they sent as marketing. The part that says "Managed and Moderated to the Max" or the part that says "Full monitoring and management of submissions" or perhaps even that part that says "Completed work is just 1st draft to be polished by the pros".
In other words, fans take something they love, write extensions to it for their own not-for-profit amusement, hand it to FanLib, and proceed to get completely exploited. Oh, but in return they'll maybe get a free t-shirt or something. No thanks. Clearly, they have no concept of what fanfic is and are completely out of touch with writers in general.
That looks pretty good. I did something similar with the OS, but I wanted it to do some other stuff. For example, it can read images from either a network share or from a local drive, it'll automatically sync itself to another network share. This way, I can just drop pictures in a directory on my network and not have to worry about updating the frame. If the frame goes outside of wireless range, it'll have its own local copy of whatever I put in the sync directory.
I also wanted it to auto-orient and resize the pictures when it displays, plus some other stuff. I think I used zgv as well (been awhile since I built it...:)
It's not worth it to modify the hardware. It might be easier to put the thing in a fancy wooden case of some sort to hide the base.
If you do it right, you can make it look like a jewelery box, with, um, a screen sticking out of the back. Ok, the idea needs work.
That's exactly how I did it. I bought a wooden shadow box and finished it. I still had to heavily modify the laptop to get the screen to flip all the way around, and also fit securely in the box. I also had to write a number of scripts to support the wireless connectivity, handle the automatic startup, manage the photos, and deal with sudden unexpected shutdown. All in all, the project took the better part of a month of my free time to complete. It was certainly fun to do, but it's definitely not easy. Even less so if you have no scripting skills or any experience taking hardware apart. Oh, and the end result was like 10 pounds, not including the A/C adapter.
Yeah, I built one of these once. Once. You left out a few steps. And by a few steps, I mean a *lot* of steps. A lot of very annoying, time consuming and painful steps. I'm guessing the OP didn't want a DIY solution.
Note that being photgraphed 300 times per day amounts to being within range of a security camera for ~12 seconds (camera at ~25fps). Seeing as it could take about that time to walk past a camera, it doesn't sound like very much surveilance at all.
This story has been around for years and years. In case you haven't heard it, here it is again.
*** Magic Switch Story
Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 was not designed to prevent spam (although it's being used that way now). It was designed to stop junk faxes and it really works! Use it! Here's some good info.
Just because the door is unlocked does not necessarily mean it's not breaking and entering. The students know the rules. If they choose to break them, they should suffer the consequences. The technological measures that may or may not be in place are irrelevent.
Yeah, I got that. In fact, the first draft of my response specifically had your quoting intact. I don't know how it got dropped on the final post. I blame Apple support.
I personally think that makes a very strong statement about Mr. Jobs's commitment to superior customer service.
Hmmm...I can't seem to find the page on Apple's website that explains how to escalate your problem past the Customer Service monkeys when you can't get it resolved. How is that superior customer service? I think the problem is that we're so used to crappy service that when we get *any* service at all it's considered "superior". I, for one, am not about to applaud Apple for "going above and beyond" when the thing that necessitated it was a complete failure of the system in question.
Twenty minutes later the CEO of the company called me and assured me the problem would be resolved and then proceeded to offer me an additional refund for my "time spent on their failure".
Because it's cheaper than a lawsuit for fradulently charging you for services not delivered. Make no mistake: He was not interested in making an ex-customer happy. He was trying to avoid a lawsuit.
"Not being good at sports" is a self-inflicted wound and a self-perpetuating fallacy.
You know how you get better at sports? Practice. Play more and you get better.
I was always mediocre at sports in school. Good enough to get by, not bad enough to be traumatized. I mention this so you know that I'm not just offering bitter gripes based on negative personal experience in school-time sports.
That said, my school did not teach kids how to play sports. They didn't even teach them to get better at sports (excluding extra-curricular). What they did was divide the kids into two groups and say "Ok, now go play baseball (or football, or dodgeball, or etc.)" We didn't play any one sport enough to get better and we received no coaching with regards to game skills. The goal was to get the kids to excersise. There were many kids in my classes that simply didn't know how to play baseball, and yet they're thrust into this unfortunate situation where they're expected to know all the rules, and they are publicly lambasted and humiliated by fellow students (and sometimes coaches) for failing to immediately excel. It's easy to say "kids will be kids" and that's true, to an extent. It's all part of the growing-up process. I am not trying to demonize team sports in schools.
I'm just trying to say that there is nothing wrong with diversifying your school PE offerings. You don't have to eliminate team sports (or even significantly curtail them), but what's wrong with also providing physical activity opportunities that are not team-oriented?
There are a few reasons that this may be a good idea. For one, school competitive sports (not counting extra-curricular sports) are soul-destroying for kids who are not athletic. (Ever been picked last? Been mercilessly reviled because you missed a catch/goal/etc.?) What's wrong with also including some physical activities that aren't team-oriented? Note that I said "also"; team sports are vital for building group skills and should not be dropped. Secondly, with the continued pussification of our kids, many schools have banned such staples as dodgeball, floor hockey, flag football, tag, and many others.
One big downside, IMHO, is the cost of a standard DDR machine, including upkeep. Heck, the ones at the arcade are falling apart after just a year or so. I can think of better uses for the money that would still accomplish the stated goal.
Well, there's nothing worth mentioning for linux...
Oh, Ekiga? The one that claims to work in 99% of cases but somehow won't go through open NAT firewalls or businesses with port-restricted firewalls? Yeah, what else you got?
While it's true that some parts of Europe are west of the Prime Meridian, the Western Hemisphere is generally take to mean the Americas, especially in the context of this story.
For the television show, fifty or so of these cars were produced, so it wouldn't be as hard as you would think to purchase one. Then, of course, you could always build one!
FTFA: It is one of four documented "camera cars" used for close-up shots and scenes where David Hasselhoff, who played Michael Knight in the series, was behind the wheel.
They have been consistently proven to be ineffective in reducing gun-related crime (leaving aside the severe penalties for possessing a weapon in Mexico).
The bad guys don't want to turn in their guns. Not for a couple of Lakers tickets, not for an XBOX360 (that they probably already have anyway). Legitimate, legal gun owners are not about to hand over a gun that cost many hundreds of dollars for what amounts to a trinket.
The only guns that get turned in are old junk that's rusting away in a closet, or some little old widow who's late husband had a gun and she doesn't know what to do with it.
Personally, I'd rather see some new games (or *any* games for that matter) rather than wave after wave of warmed over PS1 ports. Give me a reason to not regret having bought my rev. 1 PSP.
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
And it's oh so delightful when you have to connect to heterogenous networks who are both using the same private IP scheme. Or when you have to VPN into your office from a customer network and you're both using the same scheme. Or when you have to VPN through a NAT firewall.
Golf balls have bumps and divots over the surface to enable longer flight times. Surely these additional bumps will also aid the shuttle's aerodynamics?
I hear they're planning on painting red racing stripes on it, too, to make it go faster.
Slashdot Mirror
The first version I ever played was also mainframe based, but the interface was a teletype. There was no video display. My games usually ran 10 or 12 pages of fanfold greenbar paper. :)
You apparently missed the part of the brochure they sent as marketing. The part that says "Managed and Moderated to the Max" or the part that says "Full monitoring and management of submissions" or perhaps even that part that says "Completed work is just 1st draft to be polished by the pros".
In other words, fans take something they love, write extensions to it for their own not-for-profit amusement, hand it to FanLib, and proceed to get completely exploited. Oh, but in return they'll maybe get a free t-shirt or something. No thanks. Clearly, they have no concept of what fanfic is and are completely out of touch with writers in general.
That looks pretty good. I did something similar with the OS, but I wanted it to do some other stuff. For example, it can read images from either a network share or from a local drive, it'll automatically sync itself to another network share. This way, I can just drop pictures in a directory on my network and not have to worry about updating the frame. If the frame goes outside of wireless range, it'll have its own local copy of whatever I put in the sync directory.
I also wanted it to auto-orient and resize the pictures when it displays, plus some other stuff. I think I used zgv as well (been awhile since I built it...:)
It's not worth it to modify the hardware. It might be easier to put the thing in a fancy wooden case of some sort to hide the base.
If you do it right, you can make it look like a jewelery box, with, um, a screen sticking out of the back. Ok, the idea needs work.
That's exactly how I did it. I bought a wooden shadow box and finished it. I still had to heavily modify the laptop to get the screen to flip all the way around, and also fit securely in the box. I also had to write a number of scripts to support the wireless connectivity, handle the automatic startup, manage the photos, and deal with sudden unexpected shutdown. All in all, the project took the better part of a month of my free time to complete. It was certainly fun to do, but it's definitely not easy. Even less so if you have no scripting skills or any experience taking hardware apart. Oh, and the end result was like 10 pounds, not including the A/C adapter.
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Yeah, I built one of these once. Once. You left out a few steps. And by a few steps, I mean a *lot* of steps. A lot of very annoying, time consuming and painful steps. I'm guessing the OP didn't want a DIY solution.
Note that being photgraphed 300 times per day amounts to being within range of a security camera for ~12 seconds (camera at ~25fps).
Seeing as it could take about that time to walk past a camera, it doesn't sound like very much surveilance at all.
Oh, well I guess that makes it alright then.
This story has been around for years and years. In case you haven't heard it, here it is again.
***
Magic Switch Story
Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
GLS
(1995-02-22)
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 was not designed to prevent spam (although it's being used that way now). It was designed to stop junk faxes and it really works! Use it! Here's some good info.
This is slashdot, you have to accept that people are gonna nit-pick you.
No, I don't. You're not the boss of me.
Just because the door is unlocked does not necessarily mean it's not breaking and entering. The students know the rules. If they choose to break them, they should suffer the consequences. The technological measures that may or may not be in place are irrelevent.
Yeah, I got that. In fact, the first draft of my response specifically had your quoting intact. I don't know how it got dropped on the final post. I blame Apple support.
I personally think that makes a very strong statement about Mr. Jobs's commitment to superior customer service.
Hmmm...I can't seem to find the page on Apple's website that explains how to escalate your problem past the Customer Service monkeys when you can't get it resolved. How is that superior customer service? I think the problem is that we're so used to crappy service that when we get *any* service at all it's considered "superior". I, for one, am not about to applaud Apple for "going above and beyond" when the thing that necessitated it was a complete failure of the system in question.
Twenty minutes later the CEO of the company called me and assured me the problem would be resolved and then proceeded to offer me an additional refund for my "time spent on their failure".
Because it's cheaper than a lawsuit for fradulently charging you for services not delivered. Make no mistake: He was not interested in making an ex-customer happy. He was trying to avoid a lawsuit.
"Not being good at sports" is a self-inflicted wound and a self-perpetuating fallacy.
You know how you get better at sports? Practice. Play more and you get better.
I was always mediocre at sports in school. Good enough to get by, not bad enough to be traumatized. I mention this so you know that I'm not just offering bitter gripes based on negative personal experience in school-time sports.
That said, my school did not teach kids how to play sports. They didn't even teach them to get better at sports (excluding extra-curricular). What they did was divide the kids into two groups and say "Ok, now go play baseball (or football, or dodgeball, or etc.)" We didn't play any one sport enough to get better and we received no coaching with regards to game skills. The goal was to get the kids to excersise. There were many kids in my classes that simply didn't know how to play baseball, and yet they're thrust into this unfortunate situation where they're expected to know all the rules, and they are publicly lambasted and humiliated by fellow students (and sometimes coaches) for failing to immediately excel. It's easy to say "kids will be kids" and that's true, to an extent. It's all part of the growing-up process. I am not trying to demonize team sports in schools.
I'm just trying to say that there is nothing wrong with diversifying your school PE offerings. You don't have to eliminate team sports (or even significantly curtail them), but what's wrong with also providing physical activity opportunities that are not team-oriented?
There are a few reasons that this may be a good idea. For one, school competitive sports (not counting extra-curricular sports) are soul-destroying for kids who are not athletic. (Ever been picked last? Been mercilessly reviled because you missed a catch/goal/etc.?) What's wrong with also including some physical activities that aren't team-oriented? Note that I said "also"; team sports are vital for building group skills and should not be dropped. Secondly, with the continued pussification of our kids, many schools have banned such staples as dodgeball, floor hockey, flag football, tag, and many others.
One big downside, IMHO, is the cost of a standard DDR machine, including upkeep. Heck, the ones at the arcade are falling apart after just a year or so. I can think of better uses for the money that would still accomplish the stated goal.
Well, there's nothing worth mentioning for linux...
Oh, Ekiga? The one that claims to work in 99% of cases but somehow won't go through open NAT firewalls or businesses with port-restricted firewalls? Yeah, what else you got?
Western Hemisphere
While it's true that some parts of Europe are west of the Prime Meridian, the Western Hemisphere is generally take to mean the Americas, especially in the context of this story.
For the television show, fifty or so of these cars were produced, so it wouldn't be as hard as you would think to purchase one. Then, of course, you could always build one!
FTFA: It is one of four documented "camera cars" used for close-up shots and scenes where David Hasselhoff, who played Michael Knight in the series, was behind the wheel.
They have been consistently proven to be ineffective in reducing gun-related crime (leaving aside the severe penalties for possessing a weapon in Mexico).
The bad guys don't want to turn in their guns. Not for a couple of Lakers tickets, not for an XBOX360 (that they probably already have anyway). Legitimate, legal gun owners are not about to hand over a gun that cost many hundreds of dollars for what amounts to a trinket.
The only guns that get turned in are old junk that's rusting away in a closet, or some little old widow who's late husband had a gun and she doesn't know what to do with it.
What do you mean I didn't get you anything for Valentine's Day!?! It's right here on this microscope slide...
They say it's the thought that counts, but we all know that's not true.
Stop it *while they still have control* you mean. A rocket tumbling out of control back to earth is a danger.
Use the recent, easy peasy to install homebrew firmware to run actual PS1 games instead of warmed-over ports of them.
I think you must have missed both the text and the point of my comment.
Personally, I'd rather see some new games (or *any* games for that matter) rather than wave after wave of warmed over PS1 ports. Give me a reason to not regret having bought my rev. 1 PSP.
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
And it's oh so delightful when you have to connect to heterogenous networks who are both using the same private IP scheme. Or when you have to VPN into your office from a customer network and you're both using the same scheme. Or when you have to VPN through a NAT firewall.
Golf balls have bumps and divots over the surface to enable longer flight times. Surely these additional bumps will also aid the shuttle's aerodynamics?
I hear they're planning on painting red racing stripes on it, too, to make it go faster.