I'm at a university, and lately we've been seeing a rather mysterious problem:
"Limited or No Connectivity"
This error message comes up rarely, but when it does, it's always on wireless cards, it's frequently on new machines, and it's always a mystery. These computers can see the wireless networks just fine, they just don't pay attention.
It seems as though the computer is just ignoring what it's told: We see it send a DHCPREQUEST, we see the server send a DHCPOFFER, but Windows just ignores it.
Various bits of voodoo can coax the card into listening, and therefore working, at least until the next reboot. Forcing the card to reload its drivers, usually by changing a Device setting, sometimes causes it to work. Stopping services, such as the AOL Connectivity Service, sometimes causes it to work. Doing a 'netsh' reset or clicking the "Repair" button almost never causes it to work.
These mysterious computers have no spyware on them, usually because they're brand new. They also have no extra LSPs installed. Manually assigning an address obviously eliminates the DHCP problem, but does not allow it to work on the network.
A lot of those were filled with injokes and specifically geeky jokes. Now that the demographic has changed to the non-geek and general populace they don't work.
Now, hold on there. While the overall demographic has changed, I'm sure that the overall number of people in this audience has remained constant, if not grown slightly. It seems as though the problem is that, rather than having the number of people who would enjoy such a game dwindle, the number of people who would not enjoy such a game has grown enormously.
Since these games used to make enough money even though the market was small, it seems as though there are just two problems with releasing another game along these lines:
Not enough shelf space. The entire genre is bigger nowadays, so a game targeted at a niche market would be moved to a back shelf in favor of a more popular one.
Funding. Who wants to pay for a game whose target audience is a very small percentage of the overall market?
With Internet distribution on the rise, it seems as though a smart, talented group of people should be able to come along and self-publish their comedic graphical adventure game.
Huh. I did the same thing with an old one I got off eBay. Except, mine was more underpowered:
640x480x256 screen, so dithering is a must. 486/25, so it really can't do much in terms of image processing. 4mb RAM, so even having a backbuffer is starting to stretch things.
Basically, I cooked up a very simple protocol: 'crgb' changes color index C to values of RGB. 'pc[x1][x2][y1][y2]' changes the pixel at location ([x1][x2], [y1][y2]) to color c. 's' accepts a stream of data, first every pixel from the upper-left to the lower-right, then the color palette from color 0 to color 255.
The end result of this is that the picture frame is incredibly dumb. In order to display anything, another server needs to connect to it and tell it which bits to flip.
In any case, it runs just fine with a modified version of cardmgr, a homegrown ifconfig, my display program, and an arbiter to make sure things are running fine, running kernel 2.6.8, on 4 megs of RAM! And it's running much better now that I have a backbuffer.
I used to have it do that. The problem I ran in to was that I would get a lot of "Town Profiles" about small towns in the middle of Greenland with a population that was smaller than the town's average temperature in Kelvin.
I'm currently doing my time as a tech support person, and as such, we sometimes get more... interesting... customers.
Case in point: we got a guy calling up having trouble sending email. He said he kept getting a bounce message. The message really didn't make sense, so we got his username and went to talk to the email sysadmins.
Turns out the recipient server was choking, because the user had sent a 700(!) Megabyte attachment! So we cleared the message out of the queue, and let it be.
Half an hour later, the user calls up again, saying he got another bounce message. Back to the sysadmins for a closer inspection of the mail server.
Turns out that what was REALLY happening was the mail server was TIMING OUT after 700 Megs, and the message he was really trying to send was 1.4 GIGAbytes!
We repremanded the user, cleared out the queue, and sent him on his way.
I'm sure you'll get lots of people replying along the lines of "My University has campus-wide access!". Well, here's mine:)
UCSD has campus-wide 802.11b. Though, it probably wouldn't qualify as a "hot spot", because, for the most part, it's only in buildings. And only on certain floors of multiple-story buildings.
But, here's the official (read: conservative) coverage map: http://blink.ucsd.edu/Blink/External/Topics/ Policy/0,1162,1779,00.html
More importantly, have you everr tried to bike to the mall? I tried taking my bicycle out around my house a few weeks ago, and nearly got run over Three(!) times just trying to go around the block! Of course, it doesn't help that there are no bike lanes, and that because of drivers who don't pay attention you have to use the pedestrian crossings in order to cross the street...
If portraying Blacks, Women, Arabs and so on stereotypically is unnacceptable, why should portraying men that way be acceptable?
This, I think, is what gets me the most in society today. Have you ever noticed how few good male rolemodels there are on television?
A few examples, based on what I (or other people I know) have watched:
The Simpsons: Homer is an overweight dolt who is sometimes loveable, but Marge is the smart one who just married a dolt.
Everybody Loves Raymond: Both Raymond and Ray's father are portrayed as immature idiots, while the mother (while doting), as well as Ray's wife, are seen to be the rational ones.
[For children/parents]: The Barenstein Bears. I remember as a child thinking that Papa Bear was rather stupid, and even I, a 5 year old, could see that he was just being an insensitive, stupid jerk.
Interstingly enough, shows that DO appeal to me are ones seem to be Sci-Fi, like ST:TNG and Farscape.
Interestingly, I'm really trying to grasp for TV shows, because like the article says, the demographic I'm in isn't watching much TV anymore.
I noticed this exactly two weeks after I got my TiVo.
I really liked The Simpsons. So, what is the first thing I tell my Tivo to record? Simpsons! Glorious, yellow humor! More Simpsons than I could ever possibly watch, as it was on twice a day, six days a week on Fox.
Then I started having getting tired of nothing but the yellow family. Having 6 hours of The Simpsons per week, while initially fun, leads very quickly to burnout.
So now, I don't record it anymore. It's funny when I see it, but now I feel absolutely no desire to shuffle my schedule around to see the latest episode when it comes on, or even to take time out of my day to see the episode that got recorded.
Basically, PVRs lead very quickly to burnout.
Then there's shows like Farscape, which SciFi shows ever-so-slightly out of order, but that's another can o' worms.
Oddly enough, I just finished building one of my own. It's a $20 NEC laptop from eBay. I believe it's a 486/25 with a 640x480x256 display, and 4 megs of RAM. It's got an Orinoco wireless card, and that's about it.
It runs Linux, except the kernel uses my own program as init. The program is statically compiled, and takes up about 600k. It contains cardmgr (to run PCMCIA cards), hdparm (to spin down the hard drive), ifconfig (to configure the network), udhcpcd (to configure the network as well), and my own "Picture Frame Server" program.
At boot, the program sets the hard drive's spindown time, installs the PCMCIA card, configures the NIC, and then begins listening. I've created a simple 8-bit (overkill, I know) bytecode containing such commands as "[P]ut Pixel at [x, y]", "[C]hange VGA color [n] to [r],[g],[b]", and "Accept Raw [S]tream".
It runs fairly quick. and needs not store ANY pictures on the frame itself, except what's on the screen. I have helper programs that convert standard pictures into a raw format that can be piped to the picture frame from any platform that can dump files to a network socket (Perl is good for that.)
See, at the ATMs my bank uses, they tend to have a pretty advertisement up while they're idle. Then, you go and put your card in, punch in your PIN, wait at a "Loading..." screen, and come to the main menu. Generally, I want to withdraw $20, and it's convenient, because the buttons are almost always in the same place. Almost.
So, one day, I decide I need to do something at an ATM. I put in my card, type in my PIN, and hold my hand over the screen. While waiting at the "Loading..." screen, my fingers ACCIDENTALLY touch the screen. A few seconds later, when the main menu comes up, the "Withdraw $40" button has been pressed, my card comes out, and I make an unintended purchase.
So no, they're not known for their user-friendly interfaces.
Consider the current console situation. PS2 makes it to market months before the other 2 systems and completely solidifies itself as the #1. microsoft and nintendo don't even come close.
Try telling that to Sega, with it's Dreamcast. I seem to remember that it died while people were holding out for the Playstation.
I upgraded to 2.6 a while ago, just because I wanted all of the neat goodies it brings with it (QoS, Bluetooth, etc.). My server has no compiler, and I have no "backup" system, so I compile things on various other Linux systems I run.
It basically runs Gentoo, in that I copied the boot CD, stripped out anything I didn't need, and manually installed things like ssh, apache, etc. The upside is that it's small. The downside is that it's a pain in the butt to upgrade.
The 2.6 install worked without too many initial problems, except the whole devfsd being required, and me not getting around to removing the requirement. That is, until I tried to reboot: server root # shutdown -r now
Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Wed Feb 25 11:24:11 2004):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!/dev/null RK_Init: idt=0xc05dc000, FUCK: Can't find sys_call_table[] server root #
At this point, I'm blaiming the redhat compiler for stripping out something it shouldn't have. Though, anyone else have any suggestions?
You really should use Kermit-Windows for more a reliable windowing system.
Re:I would love to be able to
on
Friday Apple Fun
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do the same thing! Open a terminal, type: sleep 2; killall Dock
You now have two seconds to hit F9. When the Dock is finally killed, your windows will be stuck in expose mode! There are some strange issues with the windows that seem to stem from improper window coordinate updates.
>> Another frequently requested MailNews feature, a preference for placing >>the user's signature above the quoted text, has been added. > >Nooooo! Argh, this will only encourage top-posting.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm at a university, and lately we've been seeing a rather mysterious problem:
"Limited or No Connectivity"
This error message comes up rarely, but when it does, it's always on wireless cards, it's frequently on new machines, and it's always a mystery. These computers can see the wireless networks just fine, they just don't pay attention.
It seems as though the computer is just ignoring what it's told: We see it send a DHCPREQUEST, we see the server send a DHCPOFFER, but Windows just ignores it.
Various bits of voodoo can coax the card into listening, and therefore working, at least until the next reboot. Forcing the card to reload its drivers, usually by changing a Device setting, sometimes causes it to work. Stopping services, such as the AOL Connectivity Service, sometimes causes it to work. Doing a 'netsh' reset or clicking the "Repair" button almost never causes it to work.
These mysterious computers have no spyware on them, usually because they're brand new. They also have no extra LSPs installed. Manually assigning an address obviously eliminates the DHCP problem, but does not allow it to work on the network.
Odd.
Now, hold on there. While the overall demographic has changed, I'm sure that the overall number of people in this audience has remained constant, if not grown slightly. It seems as though the problem is that, rather than having the number of people who would enjoy such a game dwindle, the number of people who would not enjoy such a game has grown enormously.
Since these games used to make enough money even though the market was small, it seems as though there are just two problems with releasing another game along these lines:
With Internet distribution on the rise, it seems as though a smart, talented group of people should be able to come along and self-publish their comedic graphical adventure game.
So, does that mean that we can expect Teapot-Shaped Macs in the future?
Huh. I did the same thing with an old one I got off eBay. Except, mine was more underpowered:
640x480x256 screen, so dithering is a must.
486/25, so it really can't do much in terms of image processing.
4mb RAM, so even having a backbuffer is starting to stretch things.
Basically, I cooked up a very simple protocol: 'crgb' changes color index C to values of RGB. 'pc[x1][x2][y1][y2]' changes the pixel at location ([x1][x2], [y1][y2]) to color c. 's' accepts a stream of data, first every pixel from the upper-left to the lower-right, then the color palette from color 0 to color 255.
The end result of this is that the picture frame is incredibly dumb. In order to display anything, another server needs to connect to it and tell it which bits to flip.
In any case, it runs just fine with a modified version of cardmgr, a homegrown ifconfig, my display program, and an arbiter to make sure things are running fine, running kernel 2.6.8, on 4 megs of RAM! And it's running much better now that I have a backbuffer.
You forgot to HTML-escape the #include line, and you misspelled "printf" :)
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}
I used to have it do that. The problem I ran in to was that I would get a lot of "Town Profiles" about small towns in the middle of Greenland with a population that was smaller than the town's average temperature in Kelvin.
I used to work at a skateboard manufacturer. Naturally, they played punk, ska, and metal via the hold music.
Apparently, people enjoyed it so much they'd call just to be placed on hold! So, basically, know your customers and pick something appropriate.
And the opening line is:
Putting Steve, Jobs, and Internet Business togeter created quite an interesting mental picture at first.
Certainly.
In fact, this chip has already reduced it down to the single instruction:
dnf
Windows Longhorn: We'll release it "When It's Done".
I'm currently doing my time as a tech support person, and as such, we sometimes get more... interesting... customers.
Case in point: we got a guy calling up having trouble sending email. He said he kept getting a bounce message. The message really didn't make sense, so we got his username and went to talk to the email sysadmins.
Turns out the recipient server was choking, because the user had sent a 700(!) Megabyte attachment! So we cleared the message out of the queue, and let it be.
Half an hour later, the user calls up again, saying he got another bounce message. Back to the sysadmins for a closer inspection of the mail server.
Turns out that what was REALLY happening was the mail server was TIMING OUT after 700 Megs, and the message he was really trying to send was 1.4 GIGAbytes!
We repremanded the user, cleared out the queue, and sent him on his way.
So, you used to work on the codebase for Duke Nukem: Forever?
I'm sure you'll get lots of people replying along the lines of "My University has campus-wide access!". Well, here's mine :)
/ Policy /0,1162,1779,00.html
UCSD has campus-wide 802.11b. Though, it probably wouldn't qualify as a "hot spot", because, for the most part, it's only in buildings. And only on certain floors of multiple-story buildings.
But, here's the official (read: conservative) coverage map:
http://blink.ucsd.edu/Blink/External/Topics
More importantly, have you everr tried to bike to the mall? I tried taking my bicycle out around my house a few weeks ago, and nearly got run over Three(!) times just trying to go around the block! Of course, it doesn't help that there are no bike lanes, and that because of drivers who don't pay attention you have to use the pedestrian crossings in order to cross the street...
This, I think, is what gets me the most in society today. Have you ever noticed how few good male rolemodels there are on television?
A few examples, based on what I (or other people I know) have watched:
The Simpsons: Homer is an overweight dolt who is sometimes loveable, but Marge is the smart one who just married a dolt.
Everybody Loves Raymond: Both Raymond and Ray's father are portrayed as immature idiots, while the mother (while doting), as well as Ray's wife, are seen to be the rational ones.
[For children/parents]: The Barenstein Bears. I remember as a child thinking that Papa Bear was rather stupid, and even I, a 5 year old, could see that he was just being an insensitive, stupid jerk.
Interstingly enough, shows that DO appeal to me are ones seem to be Sci-Fi, like ST:TNG and Farscape.
Interestingly, I'm really trying to grasp for TV shows, because like the article says, the demographic I'm in isn't watching much TV anymore.
I noticed this exactly two weeks after I got my TiVo.
I really liked The Simpsons. So, what is the first thing I tell my Tivo to record? Simpsons! Glorious, yellow humor! More Simpsons than I could ever possibly watch, as it was on twice a day, six days a week on Fox.
Then I started having getting tired of nothing but the yellow family. Having 6 hours of The Simpsons per week, while initially fun, leads very quickly to burnout.
So now, I don't record it anymore. It's funny when I see it, but now I feel absolutely no desire to shuffle my schedule around to see the latest episode when it comes on, or even to take time out of my day to see the episode that got recorded.
Basically, PVRs lead very quickly to burnout.
Then there's shows like Farscape, which SciFi shows ever-so-slightly out of order, but that's another can o' worms.
Oddly enough, I just finished building one of my own. It's a $20 NEC laptop from eBay. I believe it's a 486/25 with a 640x480x256 display, and 4 megs of RAM. It's got an Orinoco wireless card, and that's about it.
It runs Linux, except the kernel uses my own program as init. The program is statically compiled, and takes up about 600k. It contains cardmgr (to run PCMCIA cards), hdparm (to spin down the hard drive), ifconfig (to configure the network), udhcpcd (to configure the network as well), and my own "Picture Frame Server" program.
At boot, the program sets the hard drive's spindown time, installs the PCMCIA card, configures the NIC, and then begins listening. I've created a simple 8-bit (overkill, I know) bytecode containing such commands as "[P]ut Pixel at [x, y]", "[C]hange VGA color [n] to [r],[g],[b]", and "Accept Raw [S]tream".
It runs fairly quick. and needs not store ANY pictures on the frame itself, except what's on the screen. I have helper programs that convert standard pictures into a raw format that can be piped to the picture frame from any platform that can dump files to a network socket (Perl is good for that.)
Tell that to their ATM software department.
See, at the ATMs my bank uses, they tend to have a pretty advertisement up while they're idle. Then, you go and put your card in, punch in your PIN, wait at a "Loading..." screen, and come to the main menu. Generally, I want to withdraw $20, and it's convenient, because the buttons are almost always in the same place. Almost.
So, one day, I decide I need to do something at an ATM. I put in my card, type in my PIN, and hold my hand over the screen. While waiting at the "Loading..." screen, my fingers ACCIDENTALLY touch the screen. A few seconds later, when the main menu comes up, the "Withdraw $40" button has been pressed, my card comes out, and I make an unintended purchase.
So no, they're not known for their user-friendly interfaces.
Try telling that to Sega, with it's Dreamcast. I seem to remember that it died while people were holding out for the Playstation.
I upgraded to 2.6 a while ago, just because I wanted all of the neat goodies it brings with it (QoS, Bluetooth, etc.). My server has no compiler, and I have no "backup" system, so I compile things on various other Linux systems I run.
/dev/null
It basically runs Gentoo, in that I copied the boot CD, stripped out anything I didn't need, and manually installed things like ssh, apache, etc. The upside is that it's small. The downside is that it's a pain in the butt to upgrade.
The 2.6 install worked without too many initial problems, except the whole devfsd being required, and me not getting around to removing the requirement. That is, until I tried to reboot:
server root # shutdown -r now
Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Wed Feb 25 11:24:11 2004):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!
RK_Init: idt=0xc05dc000, FUCK: Can't find sys_call_table[]
server root #
At this point, I'm blaiming the redhat compiler for stripping out something it shouldn't have. Though, anyone else have any suggestions?
You really should use Kermit-Windows for more a reliable windowing system.
Do the same thing! Open a terminal, type:
sleep 2; killall Dock
You now have two seconds to hit F9. When the Dock is finally killed, your windows will be stuck in expose mode! There are some strange issues with the windows that seem to stem from improper window coordinate updates.
Originally found at Mac OS X Hints.
And what's wrong with that?
>> Another frequently requested MailNews feature, a preference for placing
>>the user's signature above the quoted text, has been added.
>
>Nooooo! Argh, this will only encourage top-posting.
That's actually how I originally saw Back To the Future: on a VHS tape in an old Camcorder attached to the Amiga monitor.
Good times.
[snip]- itms.icnsu nes-mp3.icnsT unes-ogg.icnsc nsa v.icns
iTunes-database.icns
iTunes-device. icns
iTunes-eq.icns
iTunes-generic.icns
iTunes
iTunes-movie.icns
iTunes-mp2.icns
iT
iTunes-mpg.icns
iTunes-nvf.icns
i
iTunes-playlist.icns
iTunes-sd2.i
iTunes-snd.icns
iTunes-visual.icns
iTunes-w
iTunes-wma.icns <-------
iTunes.icns
iTunes.rsrc
iTun esHelper.app
ko.lproj
Interesting...