There are no hidden magnets. Only electromagnets are strong enough to affect the ball, and those are too big to "hide". Now, they are a *feature* of certain games - Addams Family is a classic example. And the game always tells you when they are on and why.
Uh no, Madonna signed with a touring/promotion company, not a record label. So it's another non-traditional move, although not the same as what Radiohead did.
Because nerds love to oversimplify and overreach, thinking that the simpler and more elegant a theory or approach is, the more likely it is to be correct. They also think they can apply their intelligence to any field, regardless of expertise.
The server's Fast Ethernet was saturated and no other site could receive service. We handle Slashdottings on a regular basis, usually for customers with dedicated servers or high-volume accounts.
By the time the files moved to university servers, the article was no longer at the top of the Slashdot front page.
No, Data East Pinball was created more or less from scratch. It just happened to be founded by Gary Stern and Joe Kaminkow, with the financial backing of Data East Japan.
The reigning pinball champion is Lyman Sheats, winner of the PAPA 7 World Pinball Championships in September 2004. The next championships are August 11-14, 2005, same location.
Lyman works at Stern, incidentally - many of the former Bally/Williams designers and programmers either work at Stern or do contract work for them. Quality has improved considerably as a result.
Marathon Cigarette CEO: "The guy has collected every single item in our gift catalog; you have to smoke 90,000 packs. Let's face it, the guy should be dead by now!" Lawyer: "I'm not putting you on the stand."
OK, I looked at those. I didn't see anything alarming. It's a huge codebase and when they find problems, they note them, work on fixes, test the fixes, and merge the fixes in. Where's the evil?
D&B has no idea how to run an arcade. It's basically a restaurant business. You have to rotate the games to maintain interest.
D&B bought Pump machines for all of their locations as far as I can tell. It's a more suitable game for adult players when compared to DDR, IMHO, but in any case, it's easier to purchase than DDR. And it's not patent-infringing - the court cases were settled years ago, and I'm surprised to find anyone on Slashdot who thinks the position of buttons you hit with your feet should be patentable! Am I taking Crazy Pills or something??
Liquidated damages refers to compensation for the actual costs incurred by one party due to the breach of the other. For example, if you are in a 3-year contract for a service, and the service provider has an ongoing expense committed for those 3 years, and you cancel early, you can reasonably be liable for their expenses - this is liquidated damages.
An arbritrarily chosen or otherwise indefensible value for liquidated damages is not reasonable and will not hold up in court. It's actually a punitive fine and contracts cannot impose those.
Any sales rep or tech rep will tell you that the unit has to be hooked up to a phone line - I've been hearing this from DirecTV for years, regarding my original RCA DirecTV units, TiVo units, and TiVo2 after DirecTV bought them out. Apart from the initial setup, I have never ever had a phone line connected. It's been seven years this March! If I call to change programming, sometimes they will mention it, and say something like "if the phone isn't hooked up in 30 days you'll lose your service" but it's a lie. I suspect the phone line is the only way they have of gathering their aggregate viewer data (like how many people backed up to watch the Super Boob incident).
I wonder if anyone screaming about what a HORRIBLE idea this is and how it will cause cancer in kittens, has actually tried it? Obviously the FreeBSD developers are not dumb, and root will always be able to get on to use/rescue, and the advantages are a lot more sophisticated than just saving some space on the root partition.
It's pretty knee-jerk to scream about it if you don't actually know how it's been implemented.
Hey, I hear they are beta-testing a real-world version of this "fishing" thing. I wonder if it will be as effective at passing time and relaxing people.
Absolutely true. And really, a lot more people love pinball than realize it. It's an indelible part of the American (and European) pop culture landscape yet it's in danger of totally coming to an end. Operators don't place or maintain machines anymore and the new generation doesn't even know what they are.
The test as conducted is probably slow on IDE because the O/S is seeking over and over again to read each file, probably re-reading the directory structures in between each file access.
I stuck 50,000 messages in a Maildir on a FreeBSD 4.9-RC server, 2.2GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, with a 7200rpm 60GB Western Digital IDE drive, 2MB cache. The kernel has UFS_DIRHASH and SOFTUPDATES enabled. The directory really gets read once, which makes a huge difference.
mutt loaded all 50,000 messages in... wait for it... 18.15 seconds.
I'd have to say this isn't a particularly good test, but also that the way to improve things isn't always to spend more on the hardware.
There are no magnets in Terminator 2, sorry. Perhaps you're thinking of Addams Family, with its "Power" feature - electromagnets which turn on during certain modes.
By and large, the only magnets in pinball machines are ones that are really obvious electromagnets. A non-powered magnet would have to be impossibly powerful to affect the ball much. If you see strange ball movement, it's spin, or bubbled mylar, or scratched playfield surface.
Stern was Sega which was Data East Pinball. The older Stern company was shuttered after investing in laserdisc games. They made classic electromechanical pins and early video games such as Berserk. The Stern today is a different company, although it still has a Mr. Stern running it:)
About the other machine you mentioned, I seriously doubt it has larger balls in it. Standard pinballs are 1-1/16" in diameter. There is a 1" version not used in pinball, but that's about it. So unless your operator got some custom (expensive) ball bearings, or is in fact using the 1" balls as "normal", then you're imagining things:)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget about PAPA, which is open next week for the World Pinball Championships.
http://papa.org/papa13/
The nameservers are at GoDaddy, but the hosting is not. Obama is hosted by pair Networks (pair.com), with the Panther CDN in front of it.
Original article is simply wrong.
J
The knocker is usually virtual - why use a $3 part when you can have the sound system generate more or less the same sound?
I mean in modern Stern games.
J
http://www.papa.org/papa11/
August 14-17, 2008 - come see what real pinball is.
J
Those are pachinkos, which have nothing to do with American pinball. Pinball was invented in Chicago and continues to be made solely in Chicago.
J
There are no hidden magnets. Only electromagnets are strong enough to affect the ball, and those are too big to "hide". Now, they are a *feature* of certain games - Addams Family is a classic example. And the game always tells you when they are on and why.
L
I seem to recall that Yahoo bought Simplenet. A long time ago.
L
Uh no, Madonna signed with a touring/promotion company, not a record label. So it's another non-traditional move, although not the same as what Radiohead did.
Because nerds love to oversimplify and overreach, thinking that the simpler and more elegant a theory or approach is, the more likely it is to be correct. They also think they can apply their intelligence to any field, regardless of expertise.
The server's Fast Ethernet was saturated and no other site could receive service. We handle Slashdottings on a regular basis, usually for customers with dedicated servers or high-volume accounts.
By the time the files moved to university servers, the article was no longer at the top of the Slashdot front page.
J
Well, there is boatloads of bandwidth, but I don't think he'd like to see his bill.
About 8GB was transferred in about 18 minutes, before it was shut down.
J
No, Data East Pinball was created more or less from scratch. It just happened to be founded by Gary Stern and Joe Kaminkow, with the financial backing of Data East Japan.
K
The reigning pinball champion is Lyman Sheats, winner of the PAPA 7 World Pinball Championships in September 2004. The next championships are August 11-14, 2005, same location.
http://www.papa.org/papa8/
Lyman works at Stern, incidentally - many of the former Bally/Williams designers and programmers either work at Stern or do contract work for them. Quality has improved considerably as a result.
K
Marathon Cigarette CEO: "The guy has collected every single item in our gift catalog; you have to smoke 90,000 packs. Let's face it, the guy should be dead by now!"
Lawyer: "I'm not putting you on the stand."
J
OK, I looked at those. I didn't see anything alarming. It's a huge codebase and when they find problems, they note them, work on fixes, test the fixes, and merge the fixes in. Where's the evil?
J
Or EZ2Dancer which is also both and a pretty cool game. The company went out of business though.
J
D&B has no idea how to run an arcade. It's basically a restaurant business. You have to rotate the games to maintain interest.
D&B bought Pump machines for all of their locations as far as I can tell. It's a more suitable game for adult players when compared to DDR, IMHO, but in any case, it's easier to purchase than DDR. And it's not patent-infringing - the court cases were settled years ago, and I'm surprised to find anyone on Slashdot who thinks the position of buttons you hit with your feet should be patentable! Am I taking Crazy Pills or something??
J
Liquidated damages refers to compensation for the actual costs incurred by one party due to the breach of the other. For example, if you are in a 3-year contract for a service, and the service provider has an ongoing expense committed for those 3 years, and you cancel early, you can reasonably be liable for their expenses - this is liquidated damages.
An arbritrarily chosen or otherwise indefensible value for liquidated damages is not reasonable and will not hold up in court. It's actually a punitive fine and contracts cannot impose those.
K
Any sales rep or tech rep will tell you that the unit has to be hooked up to a phone line - I've been hearing this from DirecTV for years, regarding my original RCA DirecTV units, TiVo units, and TiVo2 after DirecTV bought them out. Apart from the initial setup, I have never ever had a phone line connected. It's been seven years this March! If I call to change programming, sometimes they will mention it, and say something like "if the phone isn't hooked up in 30 days you'll lose your service" but it's a lie. I suspect the phone line is the only way they have of gathering their aggregate viewer data (like how many people backed up to watch the Super Boob incident).
K
I wonder if anyone screaming about what a HORRIBLE idea this is and how it will cause cancer in kittens, has actually tried it? Obviously the FreeBSD developers are not dumb, and root will always be able to get on to use /rescue, and the advantages are a lot more sophisticated than just saving some space on the root partition.
It's pretty knee-jerk to scream about it if you don't actually know how it's been implemented.
J
Hey, I hear they are beta-testing a real-world version of this "fishing" thing. I wonder if it will be as effective at passing time and relaxing people.
K
Absolutely true. And really, a lot more people love pinball than realize it. It's an indelible part of the American (and European) pop culture landscape yet it's in danger of totally coming to an end. Operators don't place or maintain machines anymore and the new generation doesn't even know what they are.
K
ps This will be a good pin, trust me.
The test as conducted is probably slow on IDE because the O/S is seeking over and over again to read each file, probably re-reading the directory structures in between each file access.
I stuck 50,000 messages in a Maildir on a FreeBSD 4.9-RC server, 2.2GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, with a 7200rpm 60GB Western Digital IDE drive, 2MB cache. The kernel has UFS_DIRHASH and SOFTUPDATES enabled. The directory really gets read once, which makes a huge difference.
mutt loaded all 50,000 messages in... wait for it... 18.15 seconds.
I'd have to say this isn't a particularly good test, but also that the way to improve things isn't always to spend more on the hardware.
K
There are no magnets in Terminator 2, sorry. Perhaps you're thinking of Addams Family, with its "Power" feature - electromagnets which turn on during certain modes.
By and large, the only magnets in pinball machines are ones that are really obvious electromagnets. A non-powered magnet would have to be impossibly powerful to affect the ball much. If you see strange ball movement, it's spin, or bubbled mylar, or scratched playfield surface.
s
Stern was Sega which was Data East Pinball. The older Stern company was shuttered after investing in laserdisc games. They made classic electromechanical pins and early video games such as Berserk. The Stern today is a different company, although it still has a Mr. Stern running it :)
:)
About the other machine you mentioned, I seriously doubt it has larger balls in it. Standard pinballs are 1-1/16" in diameter. There is a 1" version not used in pinball, but that's about it. So unless your operator got some custom (expensive) ball bearings, or is in fact using the 1" balls as "normal", then you're imagining things
s