and it's bad to say "cool beans" about anything MS, but cool beans man!
It looks just like a PC inside! The power connector is old school AMP connectors from the pre ATX days.
The CPU isn't socketed.. Boo MS boo, PGA connectors are only an extra 20 bucks man. I do like the fan design however, that is a big honkin fan blowing over some nice thin fins.
Bad thing about the pics is I can't read any of the writing on the chips. I wanna know what kind of glue chips this thing is using. Is it the new NV motherboard chipset or an intel? I'm guessing the hard drive is a seagate, they're OK but for tinkering purposes I would replace it with my preffered brand.
300 bucks is not a bad price for this toy. All dvd players can read CDroms, would be cool to use it as a base for a car MP3 player. Has a built in RF converter so I can hook it up to my TV without a special monitor. Woah nellie.
Sorta reminds me of the 8-bit days for some reason.
I guess a recycle bin and a tree are UPS's idea of protecting me from thieves...
I'm not joking about this experience but it is funny and relevent to what you said. I was really poor for a spell when I was around 18, so I used to collect the recycling people put out on their street.
I got busted for petty thievery eventually, paid a fine. Man I would have been stoked to find a high-end RAID controller on one of my midnight can hunts. BTW I made about $40 bucks a night, enough for a pack of smokes and some food.
We've been bombarded as a society of images from japan, images of gigantic nuclear fission power Mech's over 50feet tall carrying giant sized rifle's obliterating everything in thier path. It's obvious japan is taking the step to make these dreams a reality. This would be considered a first step in such a weapons program. Teaching the thing how to walk, avoid obstacles that would trip it up, and how to balance itself upright.
I know of one place I would love to see these things march over, just parachute them out of a plane, armed with an m16, walk right into an enemy tunnel mwahahahHAHAHAHA I bet any amount of money they have a secret underground labertory located underneath a stadium where they are teaching these things to aim and keep their balance with an automatic weapon.
It's kinda neat to think my goverment has been funding ID software to teach us how to pilot these things in the future, WADS mouse interface on my Gundam is gonna rock.
Another interesting virtual device
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I was actually playing around with the idea of making my own public internet terminal a while back. I made several different prototypes all with the focus of being truly O/S independant by making the payment systems in hardware.
The first model had a trackball, with the mouse button wired to a coinchute for the penny per page model.
The second model used a relay, KVM switch, a coin chute, and an accumulative timer I bought from happ controls. The relay would switch between buttons on the KVM, and would hold the button down depending on how much money was inserted. It's default position had nothing hooked up (no KB or mouse)
Point is this though, unless that penny is paying for my terminal and connection, no way in hell i'm going to do penny per page. I can see myself sitting in a bar, paying a penny per porn instead of playing the touchmania machines.
Ok maybe this comment wasn't that funny insightful or flame, thanks for passing by it though.
There are still millions of people born pre 1973 that don't consider games art.
When they die, and us youngens take control it will become mainstream. I predict in another 15 years this will happen. Until then those that consider games art will have to hide in our little "command centers" appriciating our artform with others over the net.
Ok i've seen 2 schools of thought over the years when it concerns what some see as overkill in technology.
1. Tech should be stripped down and basic I.E. just enough to get the job done.
2. Tech should be overpowered to show what can be done with tech.
Considering the price of technology has fallen considerably over the last 5 years. WHY NOT add everything but the kitchen sink. 5 years ago I never dreamed I could afford a gig of ram. Low and behold today's low priced pc-133 can be had for less than 20 cents a megabyte. Do I have a gig of ram? Yes I do! It doesn't matter if you call it an upgrade, addition, or bragging rights it was affordable so I went ahead with it.
Any aspect of our lives becomes better when you throw more hardware at it. Freezers that keep inventory, centralized house controls, personal area networks. When the benifit > price and price a drop in the bucket it then becomes a necessary feature for the manufacturer to add in order to stay competitive, which in the end is a win for the consumer. If you want to stay in the dark ages with your low power palm pilot go ahead, i'm going to buy my onyx handheld for the same price.
I can't remember if I saw that on a bugs bunny cartoon or school. I just remember a mouse dressed up like a professor, or was it elmer fudd the shoe maker?
I think in the not to distant future, some open source geek is going to write an autononymous robot program for linux. Maybe it will grab you a beer or get the newspaper, possibly even mow your lawn. I can see heat transfer become really useful outdoors on a hot summer day.
Also what about steel factories? Those places get red hot. How about volcano monitoring on Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii?
Potential customers:
Military
Aerospace
Petroleum
Geological Research
Development of these systems shouldn't just be marketed to the overclockers. People that are overclocking can't afford (or are too cheap to) buy a faster processor. I'm not knocking them, I think they are really cool beans. Yet I think these companies don't have a clue to who their target market should be. Instead of targeting the poor money less overclockers they should be going after customers where a cool CPU is a life or death situation, an absolute necessity.
You sound like you're trying to get me into a flaming inferno,
With the old ricochet, the poletops and client radios used the same frequencies, forcing the client radios to go quiet while the poletop was relaying packets
Uhh that is so utterly incorrect (insert your favorite weakest link comment) The radios do not go dead when the poletops are communicating...
Ricochet works on spread spectrum frequency hopping between 900-914mhz and 916-924mhz. Every 25ms the radio's switched frequencies so there wouldn't be any collisions.
I am quite certain that one connects only to one poletop at a time
Ok problem with posting your resume on the net is people can see where you've worked at. Nowhere in your resume do I see the words "Ricochet" or "Metricom" I'm not trying to knock your geekyness, but I don't see anying there to make you a professor on the subject. I worked there, i'll let you guess what I did, i'm not saying but it was high level geek stuff that anyone with an IQ under 130 could not do.
Now going back to that S register... I believe it was ATS304=115200 that would correctly set the ricochet to it's maximum speed. Go ahead, I see the older ricochets at flea markets all the time why don't YOU buy a couple and dispute my claim correctly without using assumptions and false accusations.
There was one technical reason the ricochet was never introduced at its highest speed come to think about it. At the time most computers still used 8250 UARTS for serial communications. 16550 were coming out but did not become standard fare until MMX came out.
I know your feeling there bud. When I was at the hight of my career during the tech boom, my salary from my day job and consulting put me into the 6 figure range. Not bad for a 28yro HS dropout who taught himself.
Right before the crash, I was working for one of those high profile dot coms. I started to see the acres of (i'm an ex farm boy we measure in acres) of people sitting in those cramped cubicles under those soul sucking flourescent lights busily tapping away in MS VS6 trying to create a product nobody would ever buy or use, I started to become discouraged, depressed even as I watched co-workers become ever increasingly bitter at the fact that we would never go anywhere in this company. We were like the walking dead, showing up 9 to 5 to a company without any positive direction. I think everybody knew it was a case of the blind leading the blind, so it was inevitable that we would all be losing our jobs soon.
My day came about a week after I bought my first house. I left a perfectly stable job because they had found my resume on monster, called me and coaxed me out of my safe shell with more money. I really laid into my boss, the flow of vulgarities from my mouth was like a mighty river, I did not let up on my manager for about 1/2 hour. The job market has not been kind to me, gone are the days of simply faxing or posting your resume somewhere. You actually have to pound pavement and kiss ass to get a job now.
For the first 3 months I was very gung ho about finding a new job, then as the realization of the screwed economy settled in, I started to get a little depressed and discouraged. My depression and self doubt got so bad I started thinking maybe the layoff was my fault, maybe it was something I did to set it in motion and because of that I was punishing myself daily. I stopped participating in/., spent my days lost in UO and counterstrike, not really looking hard for a job.
Then there was the article on how my former employer was going to cut its workforce by %70 on the frontpage of the business section. From the time they had laid me off they must have cut 2000 jobs silenty because the paper reported them as having only 2000 employees, when I was there we had 4000. I felt a little better.
I started to go outside and work on the yard of my new house. I put a hoe in my hand and tore the yard up. I turned part of my yard into a garden. As i'm typing this i'm nibbling on a salad I made with my vegetables. I got into going to my families ranch and plinking hubcaps in the trees. Just for the hell of it I gave the cabin out there a fresh coat of paint. The more I accomplished the better I felt.
That's really the whole point of my post here, it's not so much that the repetetive schoolwork you are doing that is making you dislike CS. It's the lack of accomplishment that is making you want to run away screaming while pulling your hair out. I can fully relate to you on this and unless you start doing things that make you feel like your accomplishing something, you will keep feeling this way.
Screw school, make some time for a project of your own design. Allocate an hour a day to this project. When you complete it you will see what i'm talking about.
I came into the company at a time when the.com boom was just starting to happen. I was young and didn't quite understand business politics yet, so I thought it was right to point out when things are outright ripping off the customer or in the very least preventing the company from dominating the market. My "self rightousness" cost me my job.
You see my freinds, the ricochet development cycle really ended after the first modem was introduced. Sure it got smaller and faster, or so you think. The ricochet was allways capable of 128kbps speed. There was a s register that could change the modem speed to that maximum rate, but unless you were transferring from ricochet to ricochet at a distance of 100 feet or less, you would never see 128kbps from their network. This is because the poletops were set at 9600baud.
Now to understand how you can get 28.8 from poletops set at 9600 you have to understand how the ricochet network works. Basically you are surrounded by these poletops, all shooting out bits at 9600 baud, they are multiplexed together by your modem and combined to get the desired bandwidth. Thus 9600 from 3 poletops would give you 28.8. Internally people who knew about this and thought it was wrong were fired over the years. There was a lot of them trust me.
Whenever a new modem standard like 33.6 or 56k came out, metricom would release a new "Modem software upgrade" that "contained new code!" that would magically turn your 33.6 ricochet into a 28.8 one. All it did was change the default setting of that S Register, maybe some new stuff was added, but thats about it. Nothing really magical or fancy, they fired all the real engineers that created the modem in the first place long ago. All that was left was a skeletal crew that could never really improve the internal electronics design.
When they were "Upgrading the Ricochet Network!" this was nothing more than more smoke up the ass of ricochet users. The poletops speed was simply set from 9600 to anything higher. Just a stupid S register that was allways there.
I think Ricochet's real downfall wasn't the technology, when it was introduced allmost 5 years ago, it was capable of delivering 128kbps service. So the failure can only be found in the strategy used by the marketdroids. $20@month for 128kbps wireless internet service vs $20@month for a standard 28.8 isp would have sold a lot more modems than the $40@mo ricochet $20@mo standard ISP model that they took.
They did do an amazing job creating the network, just a shame that they never put that same effort into people that acually understood the internet market. People have allways gone with the cheaper ISP simply because they want to save money. Anyways I hope no heads roll from my comment.
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Re:I got a VERY SCARY true story.
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now that i think about it, its a scary story from my webmaster wife, its true even if you don't believe me. I'm seriously not trying to troll here.
It's completely unrelated to geeks, but I think/.r's are going to want to hear about it.
My wife works as a webmaster for a local VA (veterans affairs) hospital. Today she was tasked to make a video on radiation poisining so the doctors can train. Apparantly the head VA hospital heard that the taliban has 5 suitcase sized nuclear bombs in the USA. I'm not sure where they heard that from, but VA is a ol boys club, i'm sure their source was reliable.
I think talking about "us" geeks as being "quirky" is a little lame when compared to the "quirks" people at an executive level have.
I've known CEO's that fired guys for messing with "his chick" (note not his wife either )
He hired his best buddy to watch us, he sat in his office drinking all day.
I've seen CTO's that knew nothing and learned OTJ and bumbled through projects for 3 years.
I've known CEO's that had rumored connections to the mafia.
I haven't seen a male beancounters hard drive yet that didn't have massive amounts of porn.
I've seen all kinds of people in all kinds of departments just quirky as can be. Usually they tell me im quirky for being a sysadmin and fixing THIER computer. While im sitting there figuring out what they fucked up this time they go on and on about nothing, meanwhile im racking my brains trying to diagnose but they just keep talking.
First persons shooters did not gain popularity because of the cutting edge graphics they use, it's all a secret.gov plot to turn little kids into killing machines.
I was watching discovery channel last week, they had a special about miniature spy planes (so small they would fit in your pocket) They all had CCTV on them but due to the bandwidth requirements for video, I doubt when these grenades with wings go into full production they will utilize video. I'm predicting now that future iterations of these machines will include a combination of GPS and sonar imaging, which will scan a 30 foot perimiter around itself and create a 3D enviroment, rather than video.
Uncle sam is going to build millions of these things and drop them over Afghanistan. Kids here will be told "It's the latest greatest game!!" When in reality they will be piloting these grenades with wings into enemy strongholds to kill off terrorist threats.
It just totally makes sense, remember a few years back when Carmack was approached by the army about doom? See he's in on it too. I doubt he actually created the formula's for rendering curves in real time ala quake3, I think we got that math from a UFO that was shot down over Rosswell over 50 years ago. The whole alien thing can be proven by looking at alien references in quake itself. Look at that eyeball alien with 2 legs, if that isn't proof of extra terrestrial influence in a game I don't know what is.
Future wars are all going to be fought remotely via killer war robots that use a mouse and keyboard as a control interface. Lets face it, economically it's cheaper in the long run than feeding your army a bunch of krank to keep them up tears their body down pretty good, meaning more post war veterans cost. Also the engaging nature of the FPS acts like a natural krank keeping a soldier up for 2 or 3 days at a time (provided with enough caffiene maybe a week)
Just open your eyes people, the truth is out there.
but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows. Yes in theory they *should* run, but most of the time when I run a game in windows I get a BSOD.
--toq
You can get a intel mobo with integrated sound video, 64 megs of ram, cpu and ethernet (intel 810) for about the same price except that it's a real computer, vs some box that just play's mp3's. Maybe if it were in the sub 100 dollar range it could become "a must have" or "impulse buy" item but for the same price i would rather have a pc. If I wanted LCD I could just get a cheap seiko LCD controller and wire it up to the serial port.
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP, and switching OSes would mean switching ISPs at the same time. The whole evil giant dark overlord's excuse for why linux hasn't gone mainstream has gotten old to me. I'm not fanatical about any o/s. I go with what get's the job done for me. Linux is my firewall nat router, that's about it. A shame that AOL doesn't make this kind of information more easily available. And why should they? They've spent probably billions of dollars since their inception on equipment and software to build their own private AOL protocol, their own little AOL world. When and if linux ever gains a %1 share of the desktop market, then you will see a AOL client on the *nix systems because the profit of subscriptions will far outweigh the cost of hiring a team of coders. It's not there yet.
Ok maybe I do see the point of this, it's to get more software on other o/s's, but going through proper channels is the way to do it. Not like this.
My last 6 months have been spent learning how to properly maintain and shoot
a firearm, hand to hand combat techniques, running my ass off up and downhill in
high altitude and
heat. Most of our training has been supervised by an ex Vietnam veteran
because we wanted to
learn the right way, not the counterstrike way.
In addition to all the combat training, we're stockpiling our camp with lots
of beans, rice, anything that has a good shelf life. Our own water supply not
tied in with any major city water. We have gas masks for chemical attacks
and plenty of antibiotics for any biological attacks (might help) .
Everything we need to survive if the shit hits our soil, and everything we need
to know if we get rushed through training if we end up getting drafted.
People don't realize the invading force may not be bin laden, the Chinese
have had their finger on the button for years. All it would take is
a little political terrorism to shake up Chinese US relations and its going to
be full scale war on our turf for the first time since the 1700's
This is a open warning to any terrorist in the bay area, we're doing this
militia thing the right way, you cannot screw things up here any worse
than what the land grabs did to the orchards. I'm not a part of this new
slashdot crowd, I dislike them with my dying breath for what my home has become,
for turning the valley of hearts delights from thriving farm land into a
swirling cesspool of people, freeways, and superfund toxic waste cleanup sites.
All the little cocky fucks that moved here for money then moved out when the
gold rush left are the true lamers. As much as I disagree with what has
happened, it's life, it's the way America works (i.e. a majority said lets fuck
up the valley) . So I am in a way connected with these people, and I will
defend them.
You have pissed us off more than you will ever know. You pissed me off
enough to quit smoking so I can chase you better. I can nail one of your
men at 300 yards now without a scope and I keep getting better every week.
Don't fuck with the old boys club bin laden, you may think you've poisoned the
minds of many young Americans, but some
of us still see this country for what it really represents. Freedom.
This will now (hopefully soon) lead to vaccinations and treatments for the disease it causes."
Actually its going to be a LONG time before anything usefull comes from this research. Gene's have nothing to do with diesese, it's the folding protiens derived from those genes that can make you sick, or cure a diesese.
Slashdot Mirror
and it's bad to say "cool beans" about anything MS, but cool beans man!
It looks just like a PC inside! The power connector is old school AMP connectors from the pre ATX days.
The CPU isn't socketed.. Boo MS boo, PGA connectors are only an extra 20 bucks man. I do like the fan design however, that is a big honkin fan blowing over some nice thin fins.
Bad thing about the pics is I can't read any of the writing on the chips. I wanna know what kind of glue chips this thing is using. Is it the new NV motherboard chipset or an intel? I'm guessing the hard drive is a seagate, they're OK but for tinkering purposes I would replace it with my preffered brand.
300 bucks is not a bad price for this toy. All dvd players can read CDroms, would be cool to use it as a base for a car MP3 player. Has a built in RF converter so I can hook it up to my TV without a special monitor. Woah nellie.
Sorta reminds me of the 8-bit days for some reason.
I guess a recycle bin and a tree are UPS's idea of protecting me from thieves...
I'm not joking about this experience but it is funny and relevent to what you said. I was really poor for a spell when I was around 18, so I used to collect the recycling people put out on their street.
I got busted for petty thievery eventually, paid a fine. Man I would have been stoked to find a high-end RAID controller on one of my midnight can hunts. BTW I made about $40 bucks a night, enough for a pack of smokes and some food.
We've been bombarded as a society of images from japan, images of gigantic nuclear fission power Mech's over 50feet tall carrying giant sized rifle's obliterating everything in thier path. It's obvious japan is taking the step to make these dreams a reality. This would be considered a first step in such a weapons program. Teaching the thing how to walk, avoid obstacles that would trip it up, and how to balance itself upright.
I know of one place I would love to see these things march over, just parachute them out of a plane, armed with an m16, walk right into an enemy tunnel mwahahahHAHAHAHA I bet any amount of money they have a secret underground labertory located underneath a stadium where they are teaching these things to aim and keep their balance with an automatic weapon.
It's kinda neat to think my goverment has been funding ID software to teach us how to pilot these things in the future, WADS mouse interface on my Gundam is gonna rock.
http://www.fu-fme.com/
I was actually playing around with the idea of making my own public internet terminal a while back. I made several different prototypes all with the focus of being truly O/S independant by making the payment systems in hardware.
The first model had a trackball, with the mouse button wired to a coinchute for the penny per page model.
The second model used a relay, KVM switch, a coin chute, and an accumulative timer I bought from happ controls. The relay would switch between buttons on the KVM, and would hold the button down depending on how much money was inserted. It's default position had nothing hooked up (no KB or mouse)
Point is this though, unless that penny is paying for my terminal and connection, no way in hell i'm going to do penny per page. I can see myself sitting in a bar, paying a penny per porn instead of playing the touchmania machines.
Ok maybe this comment wasn't that funny insightful or flame, thanks for passing by it though.
Dude get dennisons chili beans for a buck a can! much tastier (and more protien content) than ramen.
There are still millions of people born pre 1973 that don't consider games art.
When they die, and us youngens take control it will become mainstream. I predict in another 15 years this will happen. Until then those that consider games art will have to hide in our little "command centers" appriciating our artform with others over the net.
I've met 2 or 3 major players at paypal, supposidly the whole company plays FPS games. No joke.
Ok i've seen 2 schools of thought over the years when it concerns what some see as overkill in technology.
1. Tech should be stripped down and basic I.E. just enough to get the job done.
2. Tech should be overpowered to show what can be done with tech.
Considering the price of technology has fallen considerably over the last 5 years. WHY NOT add everything but the kitchen sink. 5 years ago I never dreamed I could afford a gig of ram. Low and behold today's low priced pc-133 can be had for less than 20 cents a megabyte. Do I have a gig of ram? Yes I do! It doesn't matter if you call it an upgrade, addition, or bragging rights it was affordable so I went ahead with it.
Any aspect of our lives becomes better when you throw more hardware at it. Freezers that keep inventory, centralized house controls, personal area networks. When the benifit > price and price a drop in the bucket it then becomes a necessary feature for the manufacturer to add in order to stay competitive, which in the end is a win for the consumer. If you want to stay in the dark ages with your low power palm pilot go ahead, i'm going to buy my onyx handheld for the same price.
I can't remember if I saw that on a bugs bunny cartoon or school. I just remember a mouse dressed up like a professor, or was it elmer fudd the shoe maker?
Your phone rings and says "Greetings Professor Faulken, Shall we play a game?"
Sorry mods couldn't resist.
I think in the not to distant future, some open source geek is going to write an autononymous robot program for linux. Maybe it will grab you a beer or get the newspaper, possibly even mow your lawn. I can see heat transfer become really useful outdoors on a hot summer day.
Also what about steel factories? Those places get red hot. How about volcano monitoring on Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii?
Potential customers:
Military
Aerospace
Petroleum
Geological Research
Development of these systems shouldn't just be marketed to the overclockers. People that are overclocking can't afford (or are too cheap to) buy a faster processor. I'm not knocking them, I think they are really cool beans. Yet I think these companies don't have a clue to who their target market should be. Instead of targeting the poor money less overclockers they should be going after customers where a cool CPU is a life or death situation, an absolute necessity.
You sound like you're trying to get me into a flaming inferno,
With the old ricochet, the poletops and client radios used the same frequencies, forcing the client radios to go quiet while the poletop was relaying packets
Uhh that is so utterly incorrect (insert your favorite weakest link comment) The radios do not go dead when the poletops are communicating...
Ricochet works on spread spectrum frequency hopping between 900-914mhz and 916-924mhz. Every 25ms the radio's switched frequencies so there wouldn't be any collisions.
I am quite certain that one connects only to one poletop at a time
Ok problem with posting your resume on the net is people can see where you've worked at. Nowhere in your resume do I see the words "Ricochet" or "Metricom" I'm not trying to knock your geekyness, but I don't see anying there to make you a professor on the subject. I worked there, i'll let you guess what I did, i'm not saying but it was high level geek stuff that anyone with an IQ under 130 could not do.
Now going back to that S register... I believe it was ATS304=115200 that would correctly set the ricochet to it's maximum speed. Go ahead, I see the older ricochets at flea markets all the time why don't YOU buy a couple and dispute my claim correctly without using assumptions and false accusations.
There was one technical reason the ricochet was never introduced at its highest speed come to think about it. At the time most computers still used 8250 UARTS for serial communications. 16550 were coming out but did not become standard fare until MMX came out.
Your comment sounds like marketdroid drivvel.
--toq
Hi there!
/., spent my days lost in UO and counterstrike, not really looking hard for a job.
I know your feeling there bud. When I was at the hight of my career during the tech boom, my salary from my day job and consulting put me into the 6 figure range. Not bad for a 28yro HS dropout who taught himself.
Right before the crash, I was working for one of those high profile dot coms. I started to see the acres of (i'm an ex farm boy we measure in acres) of people sitting in those cramped cubicles under those soul sucking flourescent lights busily tapping away in MS VS6 trying to create a product nobody would ever buy or use, I started to become discouraged, depressed even as I watched co-workers become ever increasingly bitter at the fact that we would never go anywhere in this company. We were like the walking dead, showing up 9 to 5 to a company without any positive direction. I think everybody knew it was a case of the blind leading the blind, so it was inevitable that we would all be losing our jobs soon.
My day came about a week after I bought my first house. I left a perfectly stable job because they had found my resume on monster, called me and coaxed me out of my safe shell with more money. I really laid into my boss, the flow of vulgarities from my mouth was like a mighty river, I did not let up on my manager for about 1/2 hour. The job market has not been kind to me, gone are the days of simply faxing or posting your resume somewhere. You actually have to pound pavement and kiss ass to get a job now.
For the first 3 months I was very gung ho about finding a new job, then as the realization of the screwed economy settled in, I started to get a little depressed and discouraged. My depression and self doubt got so bad I started thinking maybe the layoff was my fault, maybe it was something I did to set it in motion and because of that I was punishing myself daily. I stopped participating in
Then there was the article on how my former employer was going to cut its workforce by %70 on the frontpage of the business section. From the time they had laid me off they must have cut 2000 jobs silenty because the paper reported them as having only 2000 employees, when I was there we had 4000. I felt a little better.
I started to go outside and work on the yard of my new house. I put a hoe in my hand and tore the yard up. I turned part of my yard into a garden. As i'm typing this i'm nibbling on a salad I made with my vegetables. I got into going to my families ranch and plinking hubcaps in the trees. Just for the hell of it I gave the cabin out there a fresh coat of paint. The more I accomplished the better I felt.
That's really the whole point of my post here, it's not so much that the repetetive schoolwork you are doing that is making you dislike CS. It's the lack of accomplishment that is making you want to run away screaming while pulling your hair out. I can fully relate to you on this and unless you start doing things that make you feel like your accomplishing something, you will keep feeling this way.
Screw school, make some time for a project of your own design. Allocate an hour a day to this project. When you complete it you will see what i'm talking about.
I came into the company at a time when the .com boom was just starting to happen. I was young and didn't quite understand business politics yet, so I thought it was right to point out when things are outright ripping off the customer or in the very least preventing the company from dominating the market. My "self rightousness" cost me my job.
You see my freinds, the ricochet development cycle really ended after the first modem was introduced. Sure it got smaller and faster, or so you think. The ricochet was allways capable of 128kbps speed. There was a s register that could change the modem speed to that maximum rate, but unless you were transferring from ricochet to ricochet at a distance of 100 feet or less, you would never see 128kbps from their network. This is because the poletops were set at 9600baud.
Now to understand how you can get 28.8 from poletops set at 9600 you have to understand how the ricochet network works. Basically you are surrounded by these poletops, all shooting out bits at 9600 baud, they are multiplexed together by your modem and combined to get the desired bandwidth. Thus 9600 from 3 poletops would give you 28.8. Internally people who knew about this and thought it was wrong were fired over the years. There was a lot of them trust me.
Whenever a new modem standard like 33.6 or 56k came out, metricom would release a new "Modem software upgrade" that "contained new code!" that would magically turn your 33.6 ricochet into a 28.8 one. All it did was change the default setting of that S Register, maybe some new stuff was added, but thats about it. Nothing really magical or fancy, they fired all the real engineers that created the modem in the first place long ago. All that was left was a skeletal crew that could never really improve the internal electronics design.
When they were "Upgrading the Ricochet Network!" this was nothing more than more smoke up the ass of ricochet users. The poletops speed was simply set from 9600 to anything higher. Just a stupid S register that was allways there.
I think Ricochet's real downfall wasn't the technology, when it was introduced allmost 5 years ago, it was capable of delivering 128kbps service. So the failure can only be found in the strategy used by the marketdroids. $20@month for 128kbps wireless internet service vs $20@month for a standard 28.8 isp would have sold a lot more modems than the $40@mo ricochet $20@mo standard ISP model that they took.
They did do an amazing job creating the network, just a shame that they never put that same effort into people that acually understood the internet market. People have allways gone with the cheaper ISP simply because they want to save money. Anyways I hope no heads roll from my comment.
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now that i think about it, its a scary story from my webmaster wife, its true even if you don't believe me. I'm seriously not trying to troll here.
It's completely unrelated to geeks, but I think /.r's are going to want to hear about it.
My wife works as a webmaster for a local VA (veterans affairs) hospital. Today she was tasked to make a video on radiation poisining so the doctors can train. Apparantly the head VA hospital heard that the taliban has 5 suitcase sized nuclear bombs in the USA. I'm not sure where they heard that from, but VA is a ol boys club, i'm sure their source was reliable.
Now that is scary.
I think talking about "us" geeks as being "quirky" is a little lame when compared to the "quirks" people at an executive level have.
I've known CEO's that fired guys for messing with "his chick" (note not his wife either )
He hired his best buddy to watch us, he sat in his office drinking all day.
I've seen CTO's that knew nothing and learned OTJ and bumbled through projects for 3 years.
I've known CEO's that had rumored connections to the mafia.
I haven't seen a male beancounters hard drive yet that didn't have massive amounts of porn.
I've seen all kinds of people in all kinds of departments just quirky as can be. Usually they tell me im quirky for being a sysadmin and fixing THIER computer. While im sitting there figuring out what they fucked up this time they go on and on about nothing, meanwhile im racking my brains trying to diagnose but they just keep talking.
Makes me forget what I was doing.
First persons shooters did not gain popularity because of the cutting edge graphics they use, it's all a secret .gov plot to turn little kids into killing machines.
I was watching discovery channel last week, they had a special about miniature spy planes (so small they would fit in your pocket) They all had CCTV on them but due to the bandwidth requirements for video, I doubt when these grenades with wings go into full production they will utilize video. I'm predicting now that future iterations of these machines will include a combination of GPS and sonar imaging, which will scan a 30 foot perimiter around itself and create a 3D enviroment, rather than video.
Uncle sam is going to build millions of these things and drop them over Afghanistan. Kids here will be told "It's the latest greatest game!!" When in reality they will be piloting these grenades with wings into enemy strongholds to kill off terrorist threats.
It just totally makes sense, remember a few years back when Carmack was approached by the army about doom? See he's in on it too. I doubt he actually created the formula's for rendering curves in real time ala quake3, I think we got that math from a UFO that was shot down over Rosswell over 50 years ago. The whole alien thing can be proven by looking at alien references in quake itself. Look at that eyeball alien with 2 legs, if that isn't proof of extra terrestrial influence in a game I don't know what is.
Future wars are all going to be fought remotely via killer war robots that use a mouse and keyboard as a control interface. Lets face it, economically it's cheaper in the long run than feeding your army a bunch of krank to keep them up tears their body down pretty good, meaning more post war veterans cost. Also the engaging nature of the FPS acts like a natural krank keeping a soldier up for 2 or 3 days at a time (provided with enough caffiene maybe a week)
Just open your eyes people, the truth is out there.
but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows.
Yes in theory they *should* run, but most of the time when I run a game in windows I get a BSOD. --toq
At safeway if you forget your card they let you type in your phone # on the keypad.
I found my local representatives home number and tried that.. It works!
--toq
Yeah but I bet it would take a lot of fast ram to drive a display that large.
You can get a intel mobo with integrated sound video, 64 megs of ram, cpu and ethernet (intel 810) for about the same price except that it's a real computer, vs some box that just play's mp3's. Maybe if it were in the sub 100 dollar range it could become "a must have" or "impulse buy" item but for the same price i would rather have a pc. If I wanted LCD I could just get a cheap seiko LCD controller and wire it up to the serial port.
--toq
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP, and switching OSes would mean switching ISPs at the same time.
The whole evil giant dark overlord's excuse for why linux hasn't gone mainstream has gotten old to me. I'm not fanatical about any o/s. I go with what get's the job done for me. Linux is my firewall nat router, that's about it.
A shame that AOL doesn't make this kind of information more easily available.
And why should they? They've spent probably billions of dollars since their inception on equipment and software to build their own private AOL protocol, their own little AOL world. When and if linux ever gains a %1 share of the desktop market, then you will see a AOL client on the *nix systems because the profit of subscriptions will far outweigh the cost of hiring a team of coders. It's not there yet.
Ok maybe I do see the point of this, it's to get more software on other o/s's, but going through proper channels is the way to do it. Not like this.
--toq
All prepared SIR!!
My last 6 months have been spent learning how to properly maintain and shoot a firearm, hand to hand combat techniques, running my ass off up and downhill in high altitude and heat. Most of our training has been supervised by an ex Vietnam veteran because we wanted to learn the right way, not the counterstrike way.
In addition to all the combat training, we're stockpiling our camp with lots of beans, rice, anything that has a good shelf life. Our own water supply not tied in with any major city water. We have gas masks for chemical attacks and plenty of antibiotics for any biological attacks (might help) . Everything we need to survive if the shit hits our soil, and everything we need to know if we get rushed through training if we end up getting drafted.
People don't realize the invading force may not be bin laden, the Chinese have had their finger on the button for years. All it would take is a little political terrorism to shake up Chinese US relations and its going to be full scale war on our turf for the first time since the 1700's
This is a open warning to any terrorist in the bay area, we're doing this militia thing the right way, you cannot screw things up here any worse than what the land grabs did to the orchards. I'm not a part of this new slashdot crowd, I dislike them with my dying breath for what my home has become, for turning the valley of hearts delights from thriving farm land into a swirling cesspool of people, freeways, and superfund toxic waste cleanup sites. All the little cocky fucks that moved here for money then moved out when the gold rush left are the true lamers. As much as I disagree with what has happened, it's life, it's the way America works (i.e. a majority said lets fuck up the valley) . So I am in a way connected with these people, and I will defend them.
You have pissed us off more than you will ever know. You pissed me off enough to quit smoking so I can chase you better. I can nail one of your men at 300 yards now without a scope and I keep getting better every week. Don't fuck with the old boys club bin laden, you may think you've poisoned the minds of many young Americans, but some of us still see this country for what it really represents. Freedom.
This will now (hopefully soon) lead to vaccinations and treatments for the disease it causes."
Actually its going to be a LONG time before anything usefull comes from this research. Gene's have nothing to do with diesese, it's the folding protiens derived from those genes that can make you sick, or cure a diesese.
--toq