Well your going on about how its a KDE desktop, and you're right, it probably is.
The point you and many other seem to be missing by pointing out that it's a KDE desktop is that KDE is a windows manager for X. If this thing is linux like, maybe you have a CHOICE about which window manager you use?
What really needs to be focused on here is if lindows actually has a awesome windows compatibility layer for X. Not what WM it uses.
Thanks for all your replies. I'm gonna do it for the money cause I need it, I got a feeling a lot of you are in the same boat.
I seem to have hit on an interesting thread through when it came to the current HR culture when it comes to finding work. I'm wish slash would run a story on it. I know i'm not the only one thats been in the HR revolving door for the last few months.
My friend has one of those fathers that left when he was a small kid and pops in once in while to give him a car, business, just sort of out of the blue.
Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow/.ers can help me make the call on this.
Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.
His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.
My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?
It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.
I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.
And it was something the telco could do without running a line out of reach of the drunk drivers.
Funny you should mention that.
One of the now defunct dot coms I worked for moved it's headquarters across the street from the Oakland Raiders training camp. We were there only 3 days when a drunk driver took out the B box that served the entire business park. Nearly every piece of copper was toast. We had one of those scared paranoid CTO's that insisted we do our own mail and web hosting for all 3 sites. Our website, mail, everything was down for the next 2 weeks after that and everyday the CEO kept insisting that there was something we could do to make pacbell work faster. That was no fun.
The telco's stopped reliance on non packet switched networks.
First off you gotta understand how most of the telco copper is utilized. Whenever you make a phone call, the copper between you and the person on the other end is built on the spot. It connects your line, to the Central office, then the CO looks for some free copper to connect to the CO that is servicing the person recieving your call. To quote the book Nerds2.0.1 "It's like if you were taking a trip from LA to D.C., and just for your car alone you took up all the lanes until you finished your trip"
Now i'm pretty sure calls do hit a packet based network somewhere along the way, like on sprints fiber optic long distance network, but i'll get to that in a minute.
So locally, you have all this potential bandwidth that could be saved if we were all using IP phones and such. Unfortunately the equipment to upgrade this network still costs an arm and a leg (i.e. cable or dsl modems) So standard POTS service is still around for 1 good reason, the price of manufacturing the equipment hasn't become cheap enough for the cost to come from either the consumer or AT&T. Give fab technology a few years to catch up because eventually all telco's will need to force an upgrade to save on costs.
Back to the major backbone providers. As with any major telco they have extremely overpaid executives with salaries that would make a MLB player envy. Thats problem #1. Problem #2 is they are slow to adopt things like Internet2 and IPV6 because of the "prohibitivly high costs of upgrading" Well maybe if they didn't have 14 guys getting paid 10 million a year they could afford to have us "peons" perform the upgrades and do the support for the transition.
Change scares these people, but without change there is no progress, and without progress well, I can't really tell you the value of progress but sitting here in my centrally heated home with indoor plumbing and a computer is a helluva lot better than hunting animals with spears or foraging some bushes for berries. I think I'll go microwave me a burrito right now.
I've sat in front of the TV watching all the reports on the northern alliances march to tora bora. A lot of the reporters out there have been using a similiar technology based on the real codec I believe.
In a nutshell its been very cool.
I read another post about using these phones for tech support. What about all the other cool uses?
Your stuck on a highway somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. You call the tow truck company, wave your phone around to show them where you are and wham, based on landmarks they are able to figure out your position and send help.
Someone has been breaking into your house. You set a phone to autoanswer, dial in and find out it's your younger brother coming in eating your food and smokin your cigs.
You're on a blind date, you're not sure who it is you're supposed to meet, call your buddy who set you up, wave the phone around and BAM, he point's out your date in a heartbeat.
You're at the scene of some sorta crime, you call 911, point the camera at the criminals and BLAMMO, they got instant mug shots.
And last but not least, wouldn't it be way cool to have one of these on a watch? Ala Dick Tracey?
These phones have allmost limitless potential for use. I don't think it's fair for people to knock them purely on the basis of, "It's too much in a phone" It doesn't really add that much to the cost of the phone, but it does add another feature that makes the phone a better deal. I.E. getting more for your money.
Around january or so I was looking for a good deal on DSL. I called around everywhere, pacbell kept insisting that I wasn't in a coverage area for POTS service DSL. I kept calling every ISP I could until I got in touch with sprint...
Now here is where it get's hazy.
The sales rep at sprint told me THIS WAS DSL. I repeadedly asked him because I knew about the sprint wireless service and he assured me that it was DSL. I asked him 7 or 8 times at least. I went ahead and authorized the service tech to come out and install it. My retired neighbor was gonna let him into the house to do the work.
When I got home that night a small crowd of about 4 or 5 neighbors were out in front of my house pointing at my roof and talking about something. I got out of the car and low and behold THERE WAS A FRIGGEN 15FOOT TOWER ON MY ROOF!!! The sales guy had obviously lied to me, I was really ticked off.
I figured I would give it a try before I canceled it. It sucked horribly compared to a real wired connection. I called my salesguy back and ripped on him, then I asked to be transferred to his manager and ripped on him for a while. I reminded them that the winter season was approaching and if there was a single leak in my roof I would sue for something, let the lawer figure out what it is.
That night, around 8pm they had another tech on the roof removing the equipment. A week later pacbell changed their tune and I got my DSL self install kit and was up and running.
Considering sprint's track record with long distance slamming, this did not surprise me in the slightest. If I controlled every geek on slashdot I would make them NOT buy anything sprint because they basically slammed me, and falsely represented their product. Since I don't control the geeks, maybe they'll just read what I just said and make their own good choice.
You young whippershnappers have no idea how easy you have it. Back in my day
if you needed portable storage that went beyond a floppy we used hardcards.
They were full sized ISA bus cards with a 20 to 80 meg hard drive attached.
None of this newfangled USB, hot swappable plug and play for us.
I remember transferring lots of files this way. It was fun.
Thank you for giving us that insightful comment. I represent the other side of the fence.. I.E. Sure, sure, the people who love recompiling kernels and running video card benchmarks and so on might not mind
Yup I'm one of "those ppl"
From where i'm standing, this product along with the phone line networking products are for lack of a better word "GAY" The wireless stuff is cool if you don't mind the latency, but my main issue with any type of non ethernet network like this is that it's not ethernet.
Consumers like choices sure, but I don't think this is the right one. It's really not that hard to string together a ethernet network. Nor is it expensive. A box of 1000' of non plenum cat5 costs 50 bucks now, 1 box can wire up most homes.
We already have a good cheap way to network PC's why not stick with what everyone knows? I'd rather see the money thats spent on developing these goofball technologies put into reducing manufacturing costs so we can get gigabit ethernet for the price of 10/100 today. I know it's on the roadmap to eventually get that cheap, but when?
Well nice to see you're admitting you're a llama. As far as being creative about finding work, well sorry man I just don't see myself flipping burgers with you anytime soon. I'd rather be an unemloyed techie than a emplyed burger flipper like yourself. Why do you hate techie's so much? Why do you come to slashdot if you're not one yourself?
The other day my buddy took me out to the San Jose Berryessa flea market to
show me some of these.
I don't know what kind of breakdown we've had in customs, but it looks like more
and more knockoff's are going to start pouring into the states. Although this piece
of hardware isn't a knockoff, it shouldn't take too long for these to be snuck
through customs.
Re:Ease of copying killed the Dreamcast...
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Thanks for the link man, I needed something to keep me occupied.
What I want to know is why isnt the public school system which distributed the original doom shareware stopped doing it?
Like I said, the game was a waste of my time downloading. My precious bandwidth could have been used to save a life, who knows? Instead I was forced to download gamespy, 12 megs, 9.1 meg mpg to advertise another game PLUS sit through banner ads and finally the coup de gra, the game sucked!
And if you have a job i'm happy for you. You are in the minority right now. I got a mortgage payment and im out of work in the bay area along with quite a few of my friends. Pompous jackasses like yourself drive me so friggen nuts that I allmost feel the need to sit in a looney bin and weave baskets, instead I try and share my insight here in the slashdot way.
You sir are a llama.
Re:Ease of copying killed the Dreamcast...
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Dude can you point me to a link for the Videologic KryoII Xserver? It's not on their site so all I can presume is that it doesn't exist.
As far as Using X on a TV who cares if all you're going to do is run mame? Doesn't a 15" RGB defeat the purpose of that arcade feel?
Re:Ease of copying killed the Dreamcast...
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Man I can't believe you got an insightful on that, you obviously don't know sega's history with consoles.
In the beginning there was NES and master sytem. Both were good, but as soon as NES gained %10 market share and NEC decided to bring the PC duo to the states as the turbo grafX sega got scared and went back to make an even better system. Main thing that killed the system more than anything was sega thought they would port their own games to it and make a bundle, so not too many 3rd parties produced games for it.
The better system came to be known as the Genesis, or megadrive in japan. Oooh ahh parellax scrolling backgrounds, 128x128 sprites, 16 bit. FM sound! Even better yet it was based on system-B hardware from the arcades! Arcade (cough sega) games could easily be ported. Again sega gambles that they could not be dethroned because their share of the arcade market was so strong. SNES arrives on the scene along with TurbografX. Sega tries to compete with Nintendo's polygon games by introducing the 32X, terrbible failure, nobody wanted to pay for an extra peripheral to poly's. Worse yet was their try to compete with the TurbografX by releasing an overpowered (but well priced) CD addon that was mostly used to show the girl from Different strokes running around in scantily clad lingerage. The FMV games sucked really bad, they just plain stunk. Dragons lair was cool, thats about it. Again sega gambles on their brand name to compete in the console arena.
To further add to the confusion and to compete with the N64and atari jaguar (yes atari was still trying) sega released the saturn with maybe 10 games at the most written for it. Developers said it was a pain to code for (i'm just repeating what I read) Sega was left to develop most of the games in house. Again they gamle on their own games and lost.
Ok lets go to the dreamcast. I'm not gonna long wind it anymore, im outta steam but sega gets scared by Xbox and PS2 and heads for the hills yet again.
Most of the gamers I know, we were like 14-16 years of age back in 1984-85 when consoles really started to move. . Between me and my friends we got close to 17-19 years experience with buying, selling, trading, and most importantly playing consoles. Every one of them i've ever talked to felt completely screwed by sega. It is a pattern they repeat over and over again which in my opinion will eventually drive the company out of business, and that is, "When anyone steps up to us we're gonna run away run away!" because that is exactly what sega has allways done.
They make great games, and they make great console systems. They COULD turn it around by taking nintendo's and playstations approach of "Lets hire a great team, and push this system to its limits for many years" DK3 on the SNES really pushed the envelope for platformers IMHO and is a shining example of what new development tools and methods can do to boost the life of a console.
Sega, if you're reading this, if you really want my money listen up. Don't be so ready to give up on the DC yet. Make an X server for that graphics chip you use that runs on both the DC and PC hardware (my buddy has a PC based version of your DC graphics chip, no X server exists) Make sure you ship ethernet adapters, keyboards, mice, hard drive adaptors and some friggen version of linux with the thing. I for one would gladly pay $200-300 for a completely custamizable system than can be used as an X terminal on any TV. I will guarantee you millions of dollars in revenue because THIS SITE WOULD REPORT IT. You would have millions of geeks rushing out to buy them cause they would be cool. The usability of the system would be stretched out for many years if you did this and as the price of hardware got cheaper and your volume of sales larger, there would be a good profit in it for you.
Now read this
Just because I disagree with the author, is no reason to give me bad charma.
Let me dive into my review of this POS game.
I found out about it on slash, went to the fileplanet link (me and 5 buddies share 1 account FSCK you fileplanet) and read War and Peace while it downloaded.
The installation went ok, but it did seem just a little weird that there were two progress meters, one running in the background at %100 while the other one went about installing. I know why this is, it just extracts the install files to a temp directory.
Now one of the files I noticed the installer get stuck on for a while was RenSizzlefeb.mpg. Upon closer inspection I found out that this was a 9.1 meg file that wasn't even part of the game! Just 9.1 megs of downloading wasted on something EA could have just provided a link to. Way to bloat EA!
Not even through with the install and this game is making me mad. My shock at the cross marketing EA does is apparent by the installer telling me the only way I can find other people to play online is by installing gamespy! Not that that's a bad thing just why not build the game browser into the game itself like RTCW? Why should I have to sit through annoying banner ads just to play a game?
The graphics in the game really aren't that good! No i'm serious here compared to RTCW they just plain suck! You look at closeups or side profiles of the soldiers they just look like they've all got flat faces! No definition on the nose, ears. To be honest I could not tell where the helmet began and where the forhead ended. At least in RTCW the helmet is very distinct from the rest of the head.
While we're on the subject of the player models, lets get to texturing. The game uses compressed textures which does not do a thing for the game. The skin tone of the faces is monotone I.E. no shading, maybe there is but its not that great. In fact I think the player models in unreal tournament blow the models in MOH away tenfold.
Controls are shitty and unresponsive. For some reason there is a lag between the time I move my mouse and the graphics on the screen update.
About the only good thing I found in the game was the netcode. People did run around smoothly without much skipping around. Definetly a lot better than RTCW test one. Yet with the lag from the controls it doesn't really make a difference now does it?
Before ppl start telling me my PC must suck, trust me it's beefy. Some ppl make up for their shortcomings with their cars or other big things, I do it with my pc OK?
I know this is just a first test but jeesh considering this is EA, the M$ of the gaming industry they would have at least done a little more in house testing on it.. Nah with the economy I guess they don't have the cash to hire as much QA as normal but this game should have been stopped at the router before it was distributed. Not a good call EA, shoulda worked on the textures a bit more.
My 2cents.
I can give you some advice on the tempature stuff.
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As long as these computers have a joystick port you could allways use thermistors
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 9
The Thermistor just needs to be inserted into pins 1 and 3 on the joystick
port. Writing a program to poll the thermistor is easily done in
just about any platform, I know everything from basic to C++ has joystick
reading routines.
If you want to over engineer it more than that, you could always add a
potentiometer and fine tune the thermistor value to the actual ambient temperature
(READ a thermometer, then adjust the pot till the value returned from the
joystick port matches it)
PS I did have a cool little ansi diagram but the lameness filter killed it
Thanks, let me know how you like it. One other thing I forgot to mention is we use mount -t smbfs to his windows machine that has all the mp3's on it and grab them directly over the network. It works a helluva lot better locally though.
I've read about both finalscratch which runs on BeOS and the mixman, which is
a mac/windows device. What about the open source linux based stuff?
I've found only 1 called terminatorX on
freshmeat about a year and a half ago. Just for kicks I let a DJ friend of
mine try it with a optical mouse and he liked it. We tried putting the mouse
over a vinyl that was spinning and he was sold.
Our setup is kinda cute. I gave him a K62 300mhz stripped down to nothing but
X. He is a windows users, (please no boo's) so in order to run it headless
we use reflectionX to connect to the machine and provide an X display. He
bought 2 of the newer versions of the MS optical mouse (faster, increased
response) and gutted them down to just the optical sensor which sits in a nice
enclosure glued to the side of his turntables.
A really cool use for these other than cooling BZZ
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Use them for wings on robotic insects and small flying machines. Would these flap fast enough to provide a good lift to weight ratio?
Thoust shall clicketh http://galway.informatik.uni-kl.de/staff/mandola/o pus.html
And download this free program. It allows for full browsing of many image file types. Enjoy!
Lasers + Moon = GI Joe episode
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I seem to recall an episode where snake leader carved his face into the moon so everyone would know that serpantor was everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Well your going on about how its a KDE desktop, and you're right, it probably is.
The point you and many other seem to be missing by pointing out that it's a KDE desktop is that KDE is a windows manager for X. If this thing is linux like, maybe you have a CHOICE about which window manager you use?
What really needs to be focused on here is if lindows actually has a awesome windows compatibility layer for X. Not what WM it uses.
I can say that full spectrum bulbs give your pot plants the best yield over ordinary flourescent bulbs.
Effect shouldn't be that different on humans.
Thanks for all your replies. I'm gonna do it for the money cause I need it, I got a feeling a lot of you are in the same boat.
I seem to have hit on an interesting thread through when it came to the current HR culture when it comes to finding work. I'm wish slash would run a story on it. I know i'm not the only one thats been in the HR revolving door for the last few months.
My friend has one of those fathers that left when he was a small kid and pops in once in while to give him a car, business, just sort of out of the blue.
/.ers can help me make the call on this.
Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow
Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.
His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.
My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?
It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.
I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.
From the first time I saw tron that CGI was not just a passing fad. Tron should win an award in groundbreaking CGI. It paved the path for the future.
And it was something the telco could do without running a line out of reach of the drunk drivers.
Funny you should mention that.
One of the now defunct dot coms I worked for moved it's headquarters across the street from the Oakland Raiders training camp. We were there only 3 days when a drunk driver took out the B box that served the entire business park. Nearly every piece of copper was toast. We had one of those scared paranoid CTO's that insisted we do our own mail and web hosting for all 3 sites. Our website, mail, everything was down for the next 2 weeks after that and everyday the CEO kept insisting that there was something we could do to make pacbell work faster. That was no fun.
The telco's stopped reliance on non packet switched networks.
First off you gotta understand how most of the telco copper is utilized. Whenever you make a phone call, the copper between you and the person on the other end is built on the spot. It connects your line, to the Central office, then the CO looks for some free copper to connect to the CO that is servicing the person recieving your call. To quote the book Nerds2.0.1 "It's like if you were taking a trip from LA to D.C., and just for your car alone you took up all the lanes until you finished your trip"
Now i'm pretty sure calls do hit a packet based network somewhere along the way, like on sprints fiber optic long distance network, but i'll get to that in a minute.
So locally, you have all this potential bandwidth that could be saved if we were all using IP phones and such. Unfortunately the equipment to upgrade this network still costs an arm and a leg (i.e. cable or dsl modems) So standard POTS service is still around for 1 good reason, the price of manufacturing the equipment hasn't become cheap enough for the cost to come from either the consumer or AT&T. Give fab technology a few years to catch up because eventually all telco's will need to force an upgrade to save on costs.
Back to the major backbone providers. As with any major telco they have extremely overpaid executives with salaries that would make a MLB player envy. Thats problem #1. Problem #2 is they are slow to adopt things like Internet2 and IPV6 because of the "prohibitivly high costs of upgrading" Well maybe if they didn't have 14 guys getting paid 10 million a year they could afford to have us "peons" perform the upgrades and do the support for the transition.
Change scares these people, but without change there is no progress, and without progress well, I can't really tell you the value of progress but sitting here in my centrally heated home with indoor plumbing and a computer is a helluva lot better than hunting animals with spears or foraging some bushes for berries. I think I'll go microwave me a burrito right now.
I've sat in front of the TV watching all the reports on the northern alliances march to tora bora. A lot of the reporters out there have been using a similiar technology based on the real codec I believe.
In a nutshell its been very cool.
I read another post about using these phones for tech support. What about all the other cool uses?
Your stuck on a highway somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. You call the tow truck company, wave your phone around to show them where you are and wham, based on landmarks they are able to figure out your position and send help.
Someone has been breaking into your house. You set a phone to autoanswer, dial in and find out it's your younger brother coming in eating your food and smokin your cigs.
You're on a blind date, you're not sure who it is you're supposed to meet, call your buddy who set you up, wave the phone around and BAM, he point's out your date in a heartbeat.
You're at the scene of some sorta crime, you call 911, point the camera at the criminals and BLAMMO, they got instant mug shots.
And last but not least, wouldn't it be way cool to have one of these on a watch? Ala Dick Tracey?
These phones have allmost limitless potential for use. I don't think it's fair for people to knock them purely on the basis of, "It's too much in a phone" It doesn't really add that much to the cost of the phone, but it does add another feature that makes the phone a better deal. I.E. getting more for your money.
Read my plight before you hurt me moderators.
Around january or so I was looking for a good deal on DSL. I called around everywhere, pacbell kept insisting that I wasn't in a coverage area for POTS service DSL. I kept calling every ISP I could until I got in touch with sprint...
Now here is where it get's hazy.
The sales rep at sprint told me THIS WAS DSL. I repeadedly asked him because I knew about the sprint wireless service and he assured me that it was DSL. I asked him 7 or 8 times at least. I went ahead and authorized the service tech to come out and install it. My retired neighbor was gonna let him into the house to do the work.
When I got home that night a small crowd of about 4 or 5 neighbors were out in front of my house pointing at my roof and talking about something. I got out of the car and low and behold THERE WAS A FRIGGEN 15FOOT TOWER ON MY ROOF!!! The sales guy had obviously lied to me, I was really ticked off.
I figured I would give it a try before I canceled it. It sucked horribly compared to a real wired connection. I called my salesguy back and ripped on him, then I asked to be transferred to his manager and ripped on him for a while. I reminded them that the winter season was approaching and if there was a single leak in my roof I would sue for something, let the lawer figure out what it is.
That night, around 8pm they had another tech on the roof removing the equipment. A week later pacbell changed their tune and I got my DSL self install kit and was up and running.
Considering sprint's track record with long distance slamming, this did not surprise me in the slightest. If I controlled every geek on slashdot I would make them NOT buy anything sprint because they basically slammed me, and falsely represented their product. Since I don't control the geeks, maybe they'll just read what I just said and make their own good choice.
The truth?
You young whippershnappers have no idea how easy you have it. Back in my day if you needed portable storage that went beyond a floppy we used hardcards. They were full sized ISA bus cards with a 20 to 80 meg hard drive attached. None of this newfangled USB, hot swappable plug and play for us.
I remember transferring lots of files this way. It was fun.
Hey Junks!
Thank you for giving us that insightful comment. I represent the other side of the fence.. I.E. Sure, sure, the people who love recompiling kernels and running video card benchmarks and so on might not mind
Yup I'm one of "those ppl"
From where i'm standing, this product along with the phone line networking products are for lack of a better word "GAY" The wireless stuff is cool if you don't mind the latency, but my main issue with any type of non ethernet network like this is that it's not ethernet.
Consumers like choices sure, but I don't think this is the right one. It's really not that hard to string together a ethernet network. Nor is it expensive. A box of 1000' of non plenum cat5 costs 50 bucks now, 1 box can wire up most homes.
We already have a good cheap way to network PC's why not stick with what everyone knows? I'd rather see the money thats spent on developing these goofball technologies put into reducing manufacturing costs so we can get gigabit ethernet for the price of 10/100 today. I know it's on the roadmap to eventually get that cheap, but when?
Well nice to see you're admitting you're a llama. As far as being creative about finding work, well sorry man I just don't see myself flipping burgers with you anytime soon. I'd rather be an unemloyed techie than a emplyed burger flipper like yourself. Why do you hate techie's so much? Why do you come to slashdot if you're not one yourself?
The other day my buddy took me out to the San Jose Berryessa flea market to show me some of these. I don't know what kind of breakdown we've had in customs, but it looks like more and more knockoff's are going to start pouring into the states. Although this piece of hardware isn't a knockoff, it shouldn't take too long for these to be snuck through customs.
Thanks for the link man, I needed something to keep me occupied.
--toq
What I want to know is why isnt the public school system which distributed the original doom shareware stopped doing it?
Like I said, the game was a waste of my time downloading. My precious bandwidth could have been used to save a life, who knows? Instead I was forced to download gamespy, 12 megs, 9.1 meg mpg to advertise another game PLUS sit through banner ads and finally the coup de gra, the game sucked!
And if you have a job i'm happy for you. You are in the minority right now. I got a mortgage payment and im out of work in the bay area along with quite a few of my friends. Pompous jackasses like yourself drive me so friggen nuts that I allmost feel the need to sit in a looney bin and weave baskets, instead I try and share my insight here in the slashdot way.
You sir are a llama.
Dude can you point me to a link for the Videologic KryoII Xserver? It's not on their site so all I can presume is that it doesn't exist.
As far as Using X on a TV who cares if all you're going to do is run mame? Doesn't a 15" RGB defeat the purpose of that arcade feel?
Man I can't believe you got an insightful on that, you obviously don't know sega's history with consoles.
In the beginning there was NES and master sytem. Both were good, but as soon as NES gained %10 market share and NEC decided to bring the PC duo to the states as the turbo grafX sega got scared and went back to make an even better system. Main thing that killed the system more than anything was sega thought they would port their own games to it and make a bundle, so not too many 3rd parties produced games for it.
The better system came to be known as the Genesis, or megadrive in japan. Oooh ahh parellax scrolling backgrounds, 128x128 sprites, 16 bit. FM sound! Even better yet it was based on system-B hardware from the arcades! Arcade (cough sega) games could easily be ported. Again sega gambles that they could not be dethroned because their share of the arcade market was so strong. SNES arrives on the scene along with TurbografX. Sega tries to compete with Nintendo's polygon games by introducing the 32X, terrbible failure, nobody wanted to pay for an extra peripheral to poly's. Worse yet was their try to compete with the TurbografX by releasing an overpowered (but well priced) CD addon that was mostly used to show the girl from Different strokes running around in scantily clad lingerage. The FMV games sucked really bad, they just plain stunk. Dragons lair was cool, thats about it. Again sega gambles on their brand name to compete in the console arena.
To further add to the confusion and to compete with the N64and atari jaguar (yes atari was still trying) sega released the saturn with maybe 10 games at the most written for it. Developers said it was a pain to code for (i'm just repeating what I read) Sega was left to develop most of the games in house. Again they gamle on their own games and lost.
Ok lets go to the dreamcast. I'm not gonna long wind it anymore, im outta steam but sega gets scared by Xbox and PS2 and heads for the hills yet again.
Most of the gamers I know, we were like 14-16 years of age back in 1984-85 when consoles really started to move. . Between me and my friends we got close to 17-19 years experience with buying, selling, trading, and most importantly playing consoles. Every one of them i've ever talked to felt completely screwed by sega. It is a pattern they repeat over and over again which in my opinion will eventually drive the company out of business, and that is, "When anyone steps up to us we're gonna run away run away!" because that is exactly what sega has allways done.
They make great games, and they make great console systems. They COULD turn it around by taking nintendo's and playstations approach of "Lets hire a great team, and push this system to its limits for many years" DK3 on the SNES really pushed the envelope for platformers IMHO and is a shining example of what new development tools and methods can do to boost the life of a console.
Sega, if you're reading this, if you really want my money listen up. Don't be so ready to give up on the DC yet. Make an X server for that graphics chip you use that runs on both the DC and PC hardware (my buddy has a PC based version of your DC graphics chip, no X server exists) Make sure you ship ethernet adapters, keyboards, mice, hard drive adaptors and some friggen version of linux with the thing. I for one would gladly pay $200-300 for a completely custamizable system than can be used as an X terminal on any TV. I will guarantee you millions of dollars in revenue because THIS SITE WOULD REPORT IT. You would have millions of geeks rushing out to buy them cause they would be cool. The usability of the system would be stretched out for many years if you did this and as the price of hardware got cheaper and your volume of sales larger, there would be a good profit in it for you.
Now read this
Just because I disagree with the author, is no reason to give me bad charma.
Let me dive into my review of this POS game.
I found out about it on slash, went to the fileplanet link (me and 5 buddies share 1 account FSCK you fileplanet) and read War and Peace while it downloaded.
The installation went ok, but it did seem just a little weird that there were two progress meters, one running in the background at %100 while the other one went about installing. I know why this is, it just extracts the install files to a temp directory.
Now one of the files I noticed the installer get stuck on for a while was RenSizzlefeb.mpg. Upon closer inspection I found out that this was a 9.1 meg file that wasn't even part of the game! Just 9.1 megs of downloading wasted on something EA could have just provided a link to. Way to bloat EA!
Not even through with the install and this game is making me mad. My shock at the cross marketing EA does is apparent by the installer telling me the only way I can find other people to play online is by installing gamespy! Not that that's a bad thing just why not build the game browser into the game itself like RTCW? Why should I have to sit through annoying banner ads just to play a game?
The graphics in the game really aren't that good! No i'm serious here compared to RTCW they just plain suck! You look at closeups or side profiles of the soldiers they just look like they've all got flat faces! No definition on the nose, ears. To be honest I could not tell where the helmet began and where the forhead ended. At least in RTCW the helmet is very distinct from the rest of the head.
While we're on the subject of the player models, lets get to texturing. The game uses compressed textures which does not do a thing for the game. The skin tone of the faces is monotone I.E. no shading, maybe there is but its not that great. In fact I think the player models in unreal tournament blow the models in MOH away tenfold.
Controls are shitty and unresponsive. For some reason there is a lag between the time I move my mouse and the graphics on the screen update.
About the only good thing I found in the game was the netcode. People did run around smoothly without much skipping around. Definetly a lot better than RTCW test one. Yet with the lag from the controls it doesn't really make a difference now does it?
Before ppl start telling me my PC must suck, trust me it's beefy. Some ppl make up for their shortcomings with their cars or other big things, I do it with my pc OK?
I know this is just a first test but jeesh considering this is EA, the M$ of the gaming industry they would have at least done a little more in house testing on it.. Nah with the economy I guess they don't have the cash to hire as much QA as normal but this game should have been stopped at the router before it was distributed. Not a good call EA, shoulda worked on the textures a bit more.
My 2cents.
As long as these computers have a joystick port you could allways use thermistors
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 9The Thermistor just needs to be inserted into pins 1 and 3 on the joystick port. Writing a program to poll the thermistor is easily done in just about any platform, I know everything from basic to C++ has joystick reading routines.
If you want to over engineer it more than that, you could always add a potentiometer and fine tune the thermistor value to the actual ambient temperature (READ a thermometer, then adjust the pot till the value returned from the joystick port matches it)
PS I did have a cool little ansi diagram but the lameness filter killed it
Thanks, let me know how you like it. One other thing I forgot to mention is we use mount -t smbfs to his windows machine that has all the mp3's on it and grab them directly over the network. It works a helluva lot better locally though.
I've read about both finalscratch which runs on BeOS and the mixman, which is a mac/windows device. What about the open source linux based stuff? I've found only 1 called terminatorX on freshmeat about a year and a half ago. Just for kicks I let a DJ friend of mine try it with a optical mouse and he liked it. We tried putting the mouse over a vinyl that was spinning and he was sold.
Our setup is kinda cute. I gave him a K62 300mhz stripped down to nothing but X. He is a windows users, (please no boo's) so in order to run it headless we use reflectionX to connect to the machine and provide an X display. He bought 2 of the newer versions of the MS optical mouse (faster, increased response) and gutted them down to just the optical sensor which sits in a nice enclosure glued to the side of his turntables.
Use them for wings on robotic insects and small flying machines. Would these flap fast enough to provide a good lift to weight ratio?
Thoust shall clicketh http://galway.informatik.uni-kl.de/staff/mandola/o pus.html
And download this free program. It allows for full browsing of many image file types. Enjoy!
I seem to recall an episode where snake leader carved his face into the moon so everyone would know that serpantor was everywhere.