Mainly because Wacom tablets are pressure sensitive. This is using radio waves to power the device and track its movement. The mouse STILL has to remain on the special mousepad for it to work, and it doesn't have ANY of the fancy advantages of your thing, but it's still a neat hack and something that may become useful in the future, especially if combined with USB Wireless or something along those lines.
I used to use a Palm IIIe with a fold up keyboard to take notes in class. It was pocketable, lasted about 30 days on two AAA's (very handy since I was in school in a foreign country, so I didn't have to deal with 220v conversion), and did more than word processing. I always had ALL my notes with me, so whenever I felt like studying I could. In the park, on the toilet, waiting for friends, etc.
Downsides? It crashed on me twice while taking notes. No data loss, but I was worried. Occasionally, I could type faster than it would display. No spell check (I'd just upload to the home PC and put it into Word). The screen on the old Palms were kinda lacking; in low light, forget about it.
Having a Mail Boxes Etc. PO Box doesn't really mean that a company is bad, in and of itself. For instance, to get a business license, you have to have a business address. In some states, they allow a "Virtual Office" that you can use as a mailing address. Typically, it means that there will be someone at that address 9-5 m-f.
Some legitimate businesses are able to cut costs of overhead this way.
On an Active Directory domain, the firewall can be controlled by Group Policy. In fact, I ran into a bit of a problem on a Win2k3 server domain, because it has a firewall policy pre-enabled. The point is, on a windows domain, the firewall can be disabled by default very easilly. On Win2k domains (which have no provision for a firewall GP) it is disabled on client machines automatically.
I don't work for a Fortune 100 company, first off. but here's what happened at the home builder I do tech support for: They needed a server, at the time there were only 5 workstations, but they were planning to grow. So, they got a Dell server. P3 500mhz, 8gb scsi, 256 RAM. This was 2000. I forget what it would have cost to buy it outride, but they did a 3 year lease at like $48 a month or something. By the end of the lease, they'd payed thousands, and they didn't own the hardware. Dell gave them the option of returning it or purchasing it for $700-ish.
In the end, we kept it. It seemed worth the money to save teh headache of migrating active directory and exchange to a new server, plus there had been a few upgrades to RAM and HDD.
I've been looking at and yearning for one of those fancy green lasers at think geek. http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/5a47 / Maybe this is finally something that would be useful for the device. I'm sure the laser could trip the photo cells on the lasertag gear. Just strap them to the sides of your guns and set up some sort of circuit to interface with the trigger. That way, it would be more realistic. You'd give up your location when you fired. It'd look cool as hell too.
You are a genius. I think it's a bit much for a hobbist to implement though. It would certainly be a more fun way to play the game though. I would add mild electrical shock to the "wounded" area, or maybe vibration. Shock seems easier and more fun. I think GPS might not be quite accurate enough (14') or fast enough, but I'm going off my experience with my car unit. Perhaps an easier/cheaper way would be to use RFID tags and a series of sensors to triangulate position.
Your post is not really anything that the article is looking for, but it's awesome brainstorming and really innovative and that's usually the best part of/.
I grab images off websites all the time and save them into a bunch of different folders. I would like if the browser paid attention to where I saved certain images from certain sites and then automatically jump to the folder I last used FOR THAT SITE. It would save me a few seconds a day, at least.
Licensed to Ill was the first tape I ever bought. Check your Head was my first CD. The Beastie Anthology was my first DVD. And now, the new one is the first DRM CD.
By the way, MTV2 is playing Beastie Boys stuff ALL day Sunday, including the live show from Vegas.
I switched to Firefox about 2 months ago. I've been converting others along the way. Generally, I make sure that I install the java plugin for IE converts. I think the ability to configure and strip plugins out (or not install the features int he first place) is a big strength of the platform. I do wish it was easier to completely remove the plugins once installed, rather than just disabling them. I had one misbehave and had to go through some hoops to remove it. In short, I would rather have a barebones browser and add to it myself.
I keep an email folder with all of my subscription information in it. However, seeing as how my computer takes 2 passwords to even log into, I think that info will remain safely locked into my useless hardware. I suppose a better idea would be a spreadsheet that I print out periodically and put in the safe with the rest of my goodies.
Ok, so I see that they use something called a "QwikBar" to provide ads. This would seem to double as the login UI as well. What I wonder is how this system would interface with something like a Palm Pilot, or a Linux laptop, or any number of other wireless devices. The news article specifically mentions business travellers having PDA's, but the actual website for the company is a little vague.
So, it seems to me that it would be a simple matter to plug the chips into the stickers we all have to apply to our plates when renewal time comes. Then, make the information available to people who are willing to pay for it, like that fancy traffic advisory system in Seattle (TrafficGauge.com and PDATraffic.com
Even better would be a way to fuse accurrate, timely road condition information with GPS navigation to spread traffic out onto all roadways, and allow the traffic grid system to intelligently monitor and adapt to traffic. Computerised road signage would help get the word out to people without the means for fancy gadgets.
I would advise you to get a LanScaper from Test-Um Inc. Retail is $419, shopping on Froogle will save you $70 or so. Anyway, the benefit of this device is that it will tell you all sorts of things about your infrastructure that any OS based tool will not. A defective cable, for instance, might work 80% of the time, maybe even more, but will lead to corrupt data (which is messy when you're dealing with some big database or something). This tool will weed out bad cables and links pretty quick. You can also find out length of runs, do pings, and many many other things. Totally worth its' weight in gold. (Which is about what it costs)
Even better, Nevada doesn't have state income tax. That's the benefit us constituents get for having slot machines at the grocery store and gas station.
I was fascinated about the chance to own one of these properties. Doing some research, I found some ceveats though. First, the base had to be de-commissioned prior to 1965. After that, there were new treaties which required the complete destruction of the base after de-militarization. Second, being underground can lead to some health hazards, i.e. Radon. Third, missile bases aren't ever located in easy to reach places, and I like to be able to go to the store without a bunch of planning beforehand.
I'd still love to own this monstrosity though. The Titan 1 sites are the most elaborate and extensive. Kind of makes me sick to think about the money spent of this thing when it was built only to be decomissioned ~5 years later.
I worked for these guys in Vegas, on the Dell campaign. It was almost as if I'd written the article myself. Our call times were set at 17.5 minutes though. I don't think I ever hit that. I can remember one time, talking to some sexy sounding lady on the phone for 3 hours. I sat on the phone with her and chatted while her hard drive formatted. (this was back in the Win98 days when format/reinstall was more viable than in today's carefree world of system restore) The trick I learned for getting call times down was to hang up on the customer and call them back, since only incoming calls were part of the average. I'd never do that job again. It was soul sucking. Money wasn't bad, $10 an hour, but it wasn't great. Benefits were decent. I got my wisdom teeth pulled. I even got my little "Dell Certified Technician" diploma. The big thing with punting and giving, where I worked was that calls were monitored. My friend got fired for sending out a set of speakers without going through the whole set of TS webpages Dell had set up. We had an "ownership" policy. Once you get a call, you own it. If that means you have to call them back later, or tomorrow, or whatever, that was your job. Like I said, call-backs didn't hurt your time. The last thing was the rate of first-call resolution. It was said to be really bad if you had a customer call back within a day of you punting them. However, the whole tracking system for that broke, never to be fixed in my 6 months of working there. So, it was a vacant threat that some people (the ones with the low call times and big bonuses) took advantage of. Having worked on the other side of the phone, and currently working as an onsite tech, I kind of know how to deal with the schmucks on the other end. I never say that I'm a tech or that I used to be one of them. I just wait for them to start trying to give me the run around, then I lay into them. So far, it's worked all but once, when a tech put me back into the tech support queue.
Or when someone uses the technology to steal On*Star/Lo-Jack equipped vehicles. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw plans for a cell phone jammer advertised in 2600 or Nuts and Volts with that capability advertised.
Start your own company. Sell your services to small businesses that need them, but not full time. Hire your own people, ride their asses for certs. You'll be making plenty of money and have job security. Just undercut your competition's hourly rate. You should still be able to get $90 an hour. Sell contracts to people who don't want to pay that much, but make them buy 2 discounted hours a month as part of the contract. Maybe charge them $75.
I used to work in a strip club as a doorman. Part of my duties were to take down the Jello wrestling pool on Sundays. This required hosing out a large inflatable pool covered in sticky orange Jello out in the back parking lot. I guess it doesn't top the poster's thing. In fact, apart from the insultingly low pay, getting free lemonade and seeing naked girls all day sort of made it worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Mainly because Wacom tablets are pressure sensitive. This is using radio waves to power the device and track its movement. The mouse STILL has to remain on the special mousepad for it to work, and it doesn't have ANY of the fancy advantages of your thing, but it's still a neat hack and something that may become useful in the future, especially if combined with USB Wireless or something along those lines.
I used to use a Palm IIIe with a fold up keyboard to take notes in class. It was pocketable, lasted about 30 days on two AAA's (very handy since I was in school in a foreign country, so I didn't have to deal with 220v conversion), and did more than word processing. I always had ALL my notes with me, so whenever I felt like studying I could. In the park, on the toilet, waiting for friends, etc.
;)
Downsides? It crashed on me twice while taking notes. No data loss, but I was worried. Occasionally, I could type faster than it would display. No spell check (I'd just upload to the home PC and put it into Word). The screen on the old Palms were kinda lacking; in low light, forget about it.
I'll sell you the whole kit for $50.
Having a Mail Boxes Etc. PO Box doesn't really mean that a company is bad, in and of itself. For instance, to get a business license, you have to have a business address. In some states, they allow a "Virtual Office" that you can use as a mailing address. Typically, it means that there will be someone at that address 9-5 m-f.
Some legitimate businesses are able to cut costs of overhead this way.
On an Active Directory domain, the firewall can be controlled by Group Policy. In fact, I ran into a bit of a problem on a Win2k3 server domain, because it has a firewall policy pre-enabled. The point is, on a windows domain, the firewall can be disabled by default very easilly. On Win2k domains (which have no provision for a firewall GP) it is disabled on client machines automatically.
I don't work for a Fortune 100 company, first off. but here's what happened at the home builder I do tech support for:
They needed a server, at the time there were only 5 workstations, but they were planning to grow. So, they got a Dell server. P3 500mhz, 8gb scsi, 256 RAM. This was 2000. I forget what it would have cost to buy it outride, but they did a 3 year lease at like $48 a month or something. By the end of the lease, they'd payed thousands, and they didn't own the hardware. Dell gave them the option of returning it or purchasing it for $700-ish.
In the end, we kept it. It seemed worth the money to save teh headache of migrating active directory and exchange to a new server, plus there had been a few upgrades to RAM and HDD.
Leasing just seems like a scam to me.
God, they should at least give them a d20 to roll with to decide security clearance.
Maybe because they want people to be able to view all the non standards compliant banking, an e-commerce sites that only work with IE?
Maybe because they don't want to use a technology that gets updated and re-polished all the time like Mozilla.
Maybe they don't want to completely re-engineer their sortware or use open-source code so that others might hack their proprietary crapola?
I've been looking at and yearning for one of those fancy green lasers at think geek.7 /
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/5a4
Maybe this is finally something that would be useful for the device. I'm sure the laser could trip the photo cells on the lasertag gear. Just strap them to the sides of your guns and set up some sort of circuit to interface with the trigger. That way, it would be more realistic. You'd give up your location when you fired. It'd look cool as hell too.
You are a genius. I think it's a bit much for a hobbist to implement though. It would certainly be a more fun way to play the game though. I would add mild electrical shock to the "wounded" area, or maybe vibration. Shock seems easier and more fun. I think GPS might not be quite accurate enough (14') or fast enough, but I'm going off my experience with my car unit. Perhaps an easier/cheaper way would be to use RFID tags and a series of sensors to triangulate position.
/.
Your post is not really anything that the article is looking for, but it's awesome brainstorming and really innovative and that's usually the best part of
I grab images off websites all the time and save them into a bunch of different folders. I would like if the browser paid attention to where I saved certain images from certain sites and then automatically jump to the folder I last used FOR THAT SITE. It would save me a few seconds a day, at least.
Licensed to Ill was the first tape I ever bought.
Check your Head was my first CD.
The Beastie Anthology was my first DVD.
And now, the new one is the first DRM CD.
By the way, MTV2 is playing Beastie Boys stuff ALL day Sunday, including the live show from Vegas.
I switched to Firefox about 2 months ago. I've been converting others along the way. Generally, I make sure that I install the java plugin for IE converts. I think the ability to configure and strip plugins out (or not install the features int he first place) is a big strength of the platform. I do wish it was easier to completely remove the plugins once installed, rather than just disabling them. I had one misbehave and had to go through some hoops to remove it. In short, I would rather have a barebones browser and add to it myself.
I keep an email folder with all of my subscription information in it. However, seeing as how my computer takes 2 passwords to even log into, I think that info will remain safely locked into my useless hardware. I suppose a better idea would be a spreadsheet that I print out periodically and put in the safe with the rest of my goodies.
Ok, so I see that they use something called a "QwikBar" to provide ads. This would seem to double as the login UI as well. What I wonder is how this system would interface with something like a Palm Pilot, or a Linux laptop, or any number of other wireless devices. The news article specifically mentions business travellers having PDA's, but the actual website for the company is a little vague.
Artist conception of next generation units here. Apparently, the shepherd unit is also multilingual.
I believe they are being built by Industrial Automaton
So, it seems to me that it would be a simple matter to plug the chips into the stickers we all have to apply to our plates when renewal time comes. Then, make the information available to people who are willing to pay for it, like that fancy traffic advisory system in Seattle (TrafficGauge.com and PDATraffic.com
Even better would be a way to fuse accurrate, timely road condition information with GPS navigation to spread traffic out onto all roadways, and allow the traffic grid system to intelligently monitor and adapt to traffic. Computerised road signage would help get the word out to people without the means for fancy gadgets.
I would advise you to get a LanScaper from Test-Um Inc. Retail is $419, shopping on Froogle will save you $70 or so. Anyway, the benefit of this device is that it will tell you all sorts of things about your infrastructure that any OS based tool will not. A defective cable, for instance, might work 80% of the time, maybe even more, but will lead to corrupt data (which is messy when you're dealing with some big database or something). This tool will weed out bad cables and links pretty quick. You can also find out length of runs, do pings, and many many other things. Totally worth its' weight in gold. (Which is about what it costs)
Even better, Nevada doesn't have state income tax. That's the benefit us constituents get for having slot machines at the grocery store and gas station.
Some links for the interested:
A real estate agent specializing in Missile Bases
A virtual tour made by some tresspassers.
I was fascinated about the chance to own one of these properties. Doing some research, I found some ceveats though. First, the base had to be de-commissioned prior to 1965. After that, there were new treaties which required the complete destruction of the base after de-militarization. Second, being underground can lead to some health hazards, i.e. Radon. Third, missile bases aren't ever located in easy to reach places, and I like to be able to go to the store without a bunch of planning beforehand.
I'd still love to own this monstrosity though. The Titan 1 sites are the most elaborate and extensive. Kind of makes me sick to think about the money spent of this thing when it was built only to be decomissioned ~5 years later.
I worked for these guys in Vegas, on the Dell campaign. It was almost as if I'd written the article myself. Our call times were set at 17.5 minutes though. I don't think I ever hit that. I can remember one time, talking to some sexy sounding lady on the phone for 3 hours. I sat on the phone with her and chatted while her hard drive formatted. (this was back in the Win98 days when format/reinstall was more viable than in today's carefree world of system restore) The trick I learned for getting call times down was to hang up on the customer and call them back, since only incoming calls were part of the average.
I'd never do that job again. It was soul sucking. Money wasn't bad, $10 an hour, but it wasn't great. Benefits were decent. I got my wisdom teeth pulled. I even got my little "Dell Certified Technician" diploma.
The big thing with punting and giving, where I worked was that calls were monitored. My friend got fired for sending out a set of speakers without going through the whole set of TS webpages Dell had set up. We had an "ownership" policy. Once you get a call, you own it. If that means you have to call them back later, or tomorrow, or whatever, that was your job. Like I said, call-backs didn't hurt your time. The last thing was the rate of first-call resolution. It was said to be really bad if you had a customer call back within a day of you punting them. However, the whole tracking system for that broke, never to be fixed in my 6 months of working there. So, it was a vacant threat that some people (the ones with the low call times and big bonuses) took advantage of.
Having worked on the other side of the phone, and currently working as an onsite tech, I kind of know how to deal with the schmucks on the other end. I never say that I'm a tech or that I used to be one of them. I just wait for them to start trying to give me the run around, then I lay into them. So far, it's worked all but once, when a tech put me back into the tech support queue.
Hey check out my invention.
What is it?
You know, for kids.
Oh wait, that was Tim Robbins, not Roberts
Or when someone uses the technology to steal On*Star/Lo-Jack equipped vehicles. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw plans for a cell phone jammer advertised in 2600 or Nuts and Volts with that capability advertised.
Start your own company. Sell your services to small businesses that need them, but not full time. Hire your own people, ride their asses for certs. You'll be making plenty of money and have job security. Just undercut your competition's hourly rate. You should still be able to get $90 an hour. Sell contracts to people who don't want to pay that much, but make them buy 2 discounted hours a month as part of the contract. Maybe charge them $75.
I used to work in a strip club as a doorman. Part of my duties were to take down the Jello wrestling pool on Sundays. This required hosing out a large inflatable pool covered in sticky orange Jello out in the back parking lot. I guess it doesn't top the poster's thing. In fact, apart from the insultingly low pay, getting free lemonade and seeing naked girls all day sort of made it worth it.
I've been to swapmeets bigger than last year's comdex.