I think you hit the nail right on the head. Quantity vs. Quality. If there were fewer channels the better innovators would be more highly concentrated there, and there would be no room left for the mediocre. As it is now, the mediocre and worse all have happy homes producing the awful lot of crap we have currently available.
Try this, 'tis most excellent! Makes Reader load in 1/2 sec or so, terminates quickly, and hardly ever crashes. It seems it's all those damn stupid bloated plugins causing the problems. To fix:
1. Install Adobe Reader 6.0 and notice where it is installed.
2. Navigate to that folder in Explorer, locate the plug_ins subfolder and rename this folder to plug_ins_disabled.
3. Create a new plug_ins folder.
4. Move the files EWH32.api, printme.api and search.api from plug_ins_disabled to plug_ins.
That commercial was supposedly based on another rube-goldberg-like video short. It's named "lauf.avi", I have it, but I can't find any relevant links to it from Google to point to. It starts with a spinning garbage bag unwinding and descending to hit something else, etc. One very clever thing about it is that it ends with something hitting a garbage bag and starting it to spinning, so the whole thing is an endless loop!
I'll never forget my first day at work at the Stern factory in 1980. Berzerk was in full production, and all the games being burned in, plus the 40 or so being tested and analyzed were all jabbering away:
Get the Humanoid! Intruder Alert! etc. etc.
Hearing the voice x 100 was frickn hilarious! I could barely keep a straight face all day!
By the way if your'e a real fan you may have heard the rare line from it:
"Quarter Detected in Pocket"
The best game audio experience there was we were in production on a game called Moonwars (based on the Scramble hardware set) and me and a buddy tech figured out how to get the game to play it's highscore theme, a full synthesized 6-voice rendition of "Thus Sprach Zarathustra", better known as the theme from "2001: A Space Odessey". Well, we talked all the techs into shorting a particular set of pins on the microprocessor just as the break bell rang, and 40 game board sets all went off in unison and played the theme! It was magnificent!
There really isn't a much better way to do it. There are two wiring harnesses, one extends from the back box to the main body, and another goes from the box out to the playfield.
About the only thing you might be able to do is use a gigantic flex circut to replace some of the harnesses, but the other factor with that is current. The solenoids get a 3-5A kick at 50 VDC. That's a lot of power to run through a thin trace on a flex circuit, hence the use of good 'ol round-type wires.
That, and the spaghetti-like topology of the playfield would be a PCB designer's worst M.C. Escher nightmare!
Ummm... They were licenced rip-offs. Don't you think if you figured it out that Bally wouldn't have too? That's why they didn't obscure it. FYI, I used to analyze / repair production failures of those MPU , SDA, and LDA boards for a living at Stern in the 1980's...
I worked for Stern back in the 1980's, and I can tell you that pinballs are chrome plated copper! Non-magnetic, and for a reason - the parent tells exactly why.
However, there were a FEW games that used ferrous core balls for "Magna-Save" or other effects (Black Knight, Circus Voltaire, for example). However, those games are multi-level and the glass is waaaay up above the ball, to far for any reasonable-sized magnet to influence.
But those were made in later days, back in the olden days, they used the copper based balls almost exclusively to prevent fraud via magnets.
Heheh... I played a Hercules once too. The balls were actually Pool cueballs painted silver! You'll be glad to know that the game IS one of the ones emulated by Visual Pinball/VpinMAME!!
I have a real Flight 2000 (Stern) and a Fireball (Bally) both real classics, Fireball was the first multi-level machine (small upper table but, hey...) and Flight 2000 was one of the first "wide body" style games.
I highly recommend owning one. It's a cool piece of history, an excellent conversation piece, a nice bit of furniture, an auxilliary cocktail table, a home bank/safe, and a launching pad for all sorts of interesting things;)
The latest series of the real Keyholes are basically Hubbles pointed earthward, minus some cosmic instruments, plus some close-up optics. If you ever get a look at a picture of one they are strikingly similar looking.
So, here's my little correction - the word budinskys is usually spelled "butt-in-ski" or "-sky" (hyphens optional) as in some one whose name probably ends in -ski or -sky and who "butts" in [to other people's business] as in the way a ram head-butts it's way around. "Butt" you probably knew all this, anyway...
Everybody is forgetting each and every ethernet adapter has a unique serial number/address, called the MAC address. It would be very easy to prove/disprove you were the one or not by that address.
Also more sophisticated tracking of the type of operating system, version, etc. can be determined by passive profiling of your network activity. This is called fingerprinting.
The combination of "Oh we've got a Win2K box with this MAC address doing the deed". Pretty hard to disprove or refute.
No, it's not flamebait, and I think you are the one that need to do the research. What do YOU call that 28-pin DIP EPROM on each and every older Mac (pre-PCI) peripheral card? It's the BIOS extensions that tell that machine how to use that particular hardware.
Even if you had the closed, proprietary bus specs to design such a card the system wouldn't know shit from shinola about how to use it without that "Magic" BIOS ROM on the card. Maybe you call it something else, but that's what it is (was).
Wasn't the Mac one of the first to do exactly the same thing? Before they adopted PCI buses, they would only work if your peripheral card had a Apple-approved (or written) BIOS ROM on it physically! That, and proprietary closed standards is primarily how they prevented the clone industry from getting it's teeth into Mac-land, IIRC.
I'm not sure about nowadays, whether they allow random PCI cards to be inserted, I haven't heard if they will refuse to boot if you try an unapproved one.
This will only cause a proliferation of web-based collections of hacked BIOS'es, just like rpc1.org is now for DVD player firmwares. All the nasties hacked out for your convenience.
For all of you about to say: "Well, that's against the DMCA...", true, but that hasn't stopped the widespread distribution of region-free hacked DVD firmware has it?
Slashdot Mirror
Either that, or MOG was just pissed her SCO stock is in the shitter ;)
I think you hit the nail right on the head. Quantity vs. Quality. If there were fewer channels the better innovators would be more highly concentrated there, and there would be no room left for the mediocre. As it is now, the mediocre and worse all have happy homes producing the awful lot of crap we have currently available.
Try this, 'tis most excellent! Makes Reader load in 1/2 sec or so, terminates quickly, and hardly ever crashes. It seems it's all those damn stupid bloated plugins causing the problems. To fix:
1. Install Adobe Reader 6.0 and notice where it is installed.
2. Navigate to that folder in Explorer, locate the plug_ins subfolder and rename this folder to plug_ins_disabled.
3. Create a new plug_ins folder.
4. Move the files EWH32.api, printme.api and search.api from plug_ins_disabled to plug_ins.
Try it, you'll like it!
That commercial was supposedly based on another rube-goldberg-like video short. It's named "lauf.avi", I have it, but I can't find any relevant links to it from Google to point to. It starts with a spinning garbage bag unwinding and descending to hit something else, etc. One very clever thing about it is that it ends with something hitting a garbage bag and starting it to spinning, so the whole thing is an endless loop!
Not to mention the name would be more appropriate for a brand of underwear!
In a post-9/11 world, peanut butter and jelly are weapons of mass digestion!
Hmm... or...
In an post-9/11 world, if the jelly of terrorism seeps through the bread of freedom, then the terrorists have already won!
I'll never forget my first day at work at the Stern factory in 1980. Berzerk was in full production, and all the games being burned in, plus the 40 or so being tested and analyzed were all jabbering away:
Get the Humanoid! Intruder Alert! etc. etc.
Hearing the voice x 100 was frickn hilarious! I could barely keep a straight face all day!
By the way if your'e a real fan you may have heard the rare line from it:
"Quarter Detected in Pocket"
The best game audio experience there was we were in production on a game called Moonwars (based on the Scramble hardware set) and me and a buddy tech figured out how to get the game to play it's highscore theme, a full synthesized 6-voice rendition of "Thus Sprach Zarathustra", better known as the theme from "2001: A Space Odessey". Well, we talked all the techs into shorting a particular set of pins on the microprocessor just as the break bell rang, and 40 game board sets all went off in unison and played the theme! It was magnificent!
Ahh, Memories. Great days...
There really isn't a much better way to do it. There are two wiring harnesses, one extends from the back box to the main body, and another goes from the box out to the playfield.
About the only thing you might be able to do is use a gigantic flex circut to replace some of the harnesses, but the other factor with that is current. The solenoids get a 3-5A kick at 50 VDC. That's a lot of power to run through a thin trace on a flex circuit, hence the use of good 'ol round-type wires.
That, and the spaghetti-like topology of the playfield would be a PCB designer's worst M.C. Escher nightmare!
Ummm... They were licenced rip-offs. Don't you think if you figured it out that Bally wouldn't have too? That's why they didn't obscure it. FYI, I used to analyze / repair production failures of those MPU , SDA, and LDA boards for a living at Stern in the 1980's...
This may or may not have been true.
I worked for Stern back in the 1980's, and I can tell you that pinballs are chrome plated copper! Non-magnetic, and for a reason - the parent tells exactly why.
However, there were a FEW games that used ferrous core balls for "Magna-Save" or other effects (Black Knight, Circus Voltaire, for example). However, those games are multi-level and the glass is waaaay up above the ball, to far for any reasonable-sized magnet to influence.
But those were made in later days, back in the olden days, they used the copper based balls almost exclusively to prevent fraud via magnets.
Heheh... I played a Hercules once too. The balls were actually Pool cueballs painted silver! You'll be glad to know that the game IS one of the ones emulated by Visual Pinball/VpinMAME!!
;)
I have a real Flight 2000 (Stern) and a Fireball (Bally) both real classics, Fireball was the first multi-level machine (small upper table but, hey...) and Flight 2000 was one of the first "wide body" style games.
I highly recommend owning one. It's a cool piece of history, an excellent conversation piece, a nice bit of furniture, an auxilliary cocktail table, a home bank/safe, and a launching pad for all sorts of interesting things
Plus, I saw the Africanized Bees story 2 days ago.
;)
A good Apr. 1 hoax for them would be to print all true stories for a day
The latest series of the real Keyholes are basically Hubbles pointed earthward, minus some cosmic instruments, plus some close-up optics. If you ever get a look at a picture of one they are strikingly similar looking.
But then they'll have to kill you...
So, here's my little correction - the word budinskys is usually spelled "butt-in-ski" or "-sky" (hyphens optional) as in some one whose name probably ends in -ski or -sky and who "butts" in [to other people's business] as in the way a ram head-butts it's way around. "Butt" you probably knew all this, anyway...
Everybody is forgetting each and every ethernet adapter has a unique serial number/address, called the MAC address. It would be very easy to prove/disprove you were the one or not by that address.
Also more sophisticated tracking of the type of operating system, version, etc. can be determined by passive profiling of your network activity. This is called fingerprinting.
The combination of "Oh we've got a Win2K box with this MAC address doing the deed". Pretty hard to disprove or refute.
This is what used to be called "Yellow Journalism". In fact, what color is the YRO theme here, anyway??
Acutally, I was referring to reverse engineering, and hacking the checksums, etc., not copy protection.
No, it's not flamebait, and I think you are the one that need to do the research. What do YOU call that 28-pin DIP EPROM on each and every older Mac (pre-PCI) peripheral card? It's the BIOS extensions that tell that machine how to use that particular hardware.
Even if you had the closed, proprietary bus specs to design such a card the system wouldn't know shit from shinola about how to use it without that "Magic" BIOS ROM on the card. Maybe you call it something else, but that's what it is (was).
Thanks.
Maybe IHBT, but, I have also found that Mac zealots seem to have a habit of conveniently forgetting history, on occasion.
But thank you, anyway.
Hmmmm.... The ritualistic release of the magick smoke from the little silicon and epoxy bits on the circuit boards, I would think.
Only PCI sockets on really high-end machines (IBM R6000's, Sun servers, etc.) allow the PCI slots to be powered-down and hot-socketed.
Wasn't the Mac one of the first to do exactly the same thing? Before they adopted PCI buses, they would only work if your peripheral card had a Apple-approved (or written) BIOS ROM on it physically! That, and proprietary closed standards is primarily how they prevented the clone industry from getting it's teeth into Mac-land, IIRC.
I'm not sure about nowadays, whether they allow random PCI cards to be inserted, I haven't heard if they will refuse to boot if you try an unapproved one.
This will only cause a proliferation of web-based collections of hacked BIOS'es, just like rpc1.org is now for DVD player firmwares. All the nasties hacked out for your convenience.
For all of you about to say: "Well, that's against the DMCA...", true, but that hasn't stopped the widespread distribution of region-free hacked DVD firmware has it?
Flash - gotta love it!
Yes, it did block the popups, but plastered across the front page:
"COMING TOMORROW: HOW SPYWARE WORKS!!"
It would have been funnier if you had said:
BSA: Creates cash cows in Seattle which causes sickness in humans.
See, it rhymes...
Darl??
Is that you??