Actually, Stern has started using LED somewhat. However, there are at least two drawbacks, or at least differences, with LED which I believe make normal bulbs the default choice: little diffusion, and lack of natural fade-in/fade-out. The first point is especially relevant for the kind of "retry" lights which you mention, since those inserts (as those plastic lenses are called) are usually pretty large. To "fill" a large insert with uniform light from LEDs, you need more than one. May not seem like much, but pinball production is a fight against costs.
Of course, a pro for LEDs is that they give off a lot less heat, and heat is a big killer for playfield inserts over time. And, as you say they usually don't need changing unless you get a cracked solder joint. Also, since LEDs are smaller and can give more focused light in a small area, they are useful for detailed status info without taking up much playfield space. A very good example is on the Lord of the Rings machine from Stern, where there are 18 (I believe) distinct LEDs in an area where only one or a very few incandescent bulbs could have fit in.
And honestly, changing a light bulb in a pinball is generally so quick that the operator should manage to do that as part of his routine of emptying the coinbox. Really.
One recent example of a non-academic book where the author had a public feedback loop in this way, is Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp". The chapters were published on the web and got updated frequently, and the author was active on and consulted comp.lang.lisp throughout the process. It was quite interesting to follow the development of a book so closely, and I must say it really boosted my respect for the works of good technical authors.
All told, a new-in-box machine goes for about $4,000. Damn near impossible to sell to a consumer [...]
Last I heard, the home market was actually up to about 20% of Stern's sales. Considering how much larger the entertainment budget for this generation is compared to earlier, we might very well see this rise, and not only because of less pinballs in commercial operation.
I'd say the fact that the beasts weigh 250 pounds and demand semi-frequent service is a bigger hurdle to growing home sales.
Then it wasn't unusual to pump out 30,000 machines of the same model [...]
I believe the sales record for a pinball machine is The Addams Family, with just over 21,000 units produced (including the Gold edition). Your point is valid, though.
It is actually worth noting a not-player-visible but still groundbreaking thing Stern have accomplished: organizing the production line to be able to profitably do even small (250-500 units) re-runs of previous models. This lets them do a pretty conservative first production run, and then produce more later if the demand for a particular title is high enough. We've seen multiple re-runs of TSPP, LotR and Harley Davidson already, producing only as many machines as the distributors put in an order for. No close-out sale losses, and less need for operators or distributors to take risks when considering how many to buy of a brand new model.
...and to stick my neck out properly for any Bally/Williams lovers in the audience, it is my personal opinion is that LotR is right up there with Attack From Mars, Theatre of Magic and the other classic 90s models. Very good looking, above-average layout and sound, and insanely-much-above-average rules/software.
(..speaking as a happy owner of AFM, ToM, LotR, CftBL, IJ, Shadow and (too many) more.)
That's why I feel so happy about my new way of getting rid of my money: pinball machines. They are still fast and fun, even though their CPU, if any, is a 680x or thereabout.
(Additional entertainment value: telling people that I bought a 6809 machine for $1000+.)
Well we are talking servers here... I think buildworld takes about 1.5 - 2 hours on my lowly 550 Mhz Celeron (100 Mhz FSB).
Also, if you have multiple servers you can do buildworld on just one of them, mount the build area on the others over NFS, and just do installworld on each of them. Nice and effective.
I imagine you're thinking of the Symbolics Lisp machine. It was/is indeed a very nice machine, running an operating system called Genera.
The user interface was quite special, indeed. It can best be explained as "XMLTerm on speed". It was basically a command line interface, but pretty much everything could be clicked on with a mouse. A status line on the bottom of the screen showed what different mouse button actions would do to the "object" currently pointed at -- very helpful.
Some years ago, somebody set out to implement various things using only dd and sh. Their accomplishments included a text editor, a web server and -- to prove a point -- a Turing machine. The things could be found on the now non-existant http://dd.sh/ (fantastic, eh?:) but are now located on http://www.assurdo.com/dd.sh/. These things warm my heart. *happy sigh*
When you buy an "e-matter" publication from fatbrain.com, it's delivered as a Windows executable with an encrypted PDF inside it. Does anyone know of a way of getting at the PDF file from Linux/*BSD, short of through Wine or VMware?
(I asked the support staff at fatbrain.com, but they said I had to read my book in Windows.)
A friend of mine was webmaster for a computer club at the university, when the harddisk with the webpages on it died horribly. This was perhaps three or four years ago, when Altavista was relatively new, and my friend got the idea that maybe they had it archived. A short mail to Altavista, and a few days later the computer club received their entire site as a mail attachment from the friendly guys over at Digital. Now, that's service!
My friend was given the club's "Hack of the Year" award that year for this exploration of distributed backup schemes... *grin*
If a search takes exactly 0.0050 seconds, it's because it's cached. The engine caches all searches for some time, and if someone does the same search again, the results are simply fetched from the cache.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Stern has started using LED somewhat. However, there are at least two drawbacks, or at least differences, with LED which I believe make normal bulbs the default choice: little diffusion, and lack of natural fade-in/fade-out. The first point is especially relevant for the kind of "retry" lights which you mention, since those inserts (as those plastic lenses are called) are usually pretty large. To "fill" a large insert with uniform light from LEDs, you need more than one. May not seem like much, but pinball production is a fight against costs.
Of course, a pro for LEDs is that they give off a lot less heat, and heat is a big killer for playfield inserts over time. And, as you say they usually don't need changing unless you get a cracked solder joint. Also, since LEDs are smaller and can give more focused light in a small area, they are useful for detailed status info without taking up much playfield space. A very good example is on the Lord of the Rings machine from Stern, where there are 18 (I believe) distinct LEDs in an area where only one or a very few incandescent bulbs could have fit in.
And honestly, changing a light bulb in a pinball is generally so quick that the operator should manage to do that as part of his routine of emptying the coinbox. Really.
ssh + tar is often orders of magnitude faster than scp. If you're paid by the hour, stick with scp.
You may find Cells quite interesting. "Cells: a dataflow extension to CLOS" - http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/
One recent example of a non-academic book where the author had a public feedback loop in this way, is Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp". The chapters were published on the web and got updated frequently, and the author was active on and consulted comp.lang.lisp throughout the process. It was quite interesting to follow the development of a book so closely, and I must say it really boosted my respect for the works of good technical authors.
(The book (which really is dead sexy): http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ )
Rock'n'Roll something or other??? (newer game, can't remember the name, had "creatures/vampires/etc" in it)
/bin/monsterbash joke here.)
That was probably Monster Bash.
(Insert funny
All told, a new-in-box machine goes for about $4,000. Damn near impossible to sell to a consumer [...]
...and to stick my neck out properly for any Bally/Williams lovers in the audience, it is my personal opinion is that LotR is right up there with Attack From Mars, Theatre of Magic and the other classic 90s models. Very good looking, above-average layout and sound, and insanely-much-above-average rules/software.
Last I heard, the home market was actually up to about 20% of Stern's sales. Considering how much larger the entertainment budget for this generation is compared to earlier, we might very well see this rise, and not only because of less pinballs in commercial operation.
I'd say the fact that the beasts weigh 250 pounds and demand semi-frequent service is a bigger hurdle to growing home sales.
Then it wasn't unusual to pump out 30,000 machines of the same model [...]
I believe the sales record for a pinball machine is The Addams Family, with just over 21,000 units produced (including the Gold edition). Your point is valid, though.
It is actually worth noting a not-player-visible but still groundbreaking thing Stern have accomplished: organizing the production line to be able to profitably do even small (250-500 units) re-runs of previous models. This lets them do a pretty conservative first production run, and then produce more later if the demand for a particular title is high enough. We've seen multiple re-runs of TSPP, LotR and Harley Davidson already, producing only as many machines as the distributors put in an order for. No close-out sale losses, and less need for operators or distributors to take risks when considering how many to buy of a brand new model.
(..speaking as a happy owner of AFM, ToM, LotR, CftBL, IJ, Shadow and (too many) more.)
ArsTechnica has a periodically updated System Guide which may be of interest to you:
http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/
That's why I feel so happy about my new way of getting rid of my money: pinball machines. They are still fast and fun, even though their CPU, if any, is a 680x or thereabout.
(Additional entertainment value: telling people that I bought a 6809 machine for $1000+.)
If using bash, you could use:
for i in *.JPG ; do mv "$i" "${i%JPG}jpg" ; done
Check the 'Parameter Expansion' section in the man page. Lots of goodies there.
(Now, who's going to mention rename(1)?)
Well we are talking servers here... I think buildworld takes about 1.5 - 2 hours on my lowly 550 Mhz Celeron (100 Mhz FSB).
Also, if you have multiple servers you can do buildworld on just one of them, mount the build area on the others over NFS, and just do installworld on each of them. Nice and effective.
> 700 posts! God, I just can't get over it. Maybe he has a posting problem?
He has obviously gone postal.
Hey, man, wanna trade it for a 3-digit Sourceforge account ID?
I've also got an 8-digit Norwegian phone number and a bridge in London for sale, by the way.
Actually, RFC 1149 is being implemented:
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/
You actually did that? Userland and all?
(Oh, you mean _the_kernel_. Oh. Ah.)
At the very least, one would think PMS/2 was relevant to the discussion.
I imagine you're thinking of the Symbolics Lisp machine. It was/is indeed a very nice machine, running an operating system called Genera.
:-)
The user interface was quite special, indeed. It can best be explained as "XMLTerm on speed". It was basically a command line interface, but pretty much everything could be clicked on with a mouse. A status line on the bottom of the screen showed what different mouse button actions would do to the "object" currently pointed at -- very helpful.
Lots of information can be found on the Sy mbolics Lisp Machine Museum.
Oh, and by the way: Symbolics (the company) is currently developing and delivering Open Genera for Alpha-CPUs.
Some years ago, somebody set out to implement various things using only dd and sh. Their accomplishments included a text editor, a web server and -- to prove a point -- a Turing machine. The things could be found on the now non-existant http://dd.sh/ (fantastic, eh? :) but are now located on http://www.assurdo.com/dd.sh/. These things warm my heart. *happy sigh*
Speaking of fatbrain.com:
When you buy an "e-matter" publication from fatbrain.com, it's delivered as a Windows executable with an encrypted PDF inside it. Does anyone know of a way of getting at the PDF file from Linux/*BSD, short of through Wine or VMware?
(I asked the support staff at fatbrain.com, but they said I had to read my book in Windows.)
Well, I've patented perspiration.
But I don't plan to enforce my patent, so don't sweat it.
[insert sheepish pun-slinger grin here]
> "Actually"? ;-)
> You claim to KNOW this?
> I noticed you live in the same city as FAST headquarters..
> But maybe you cant talk about that
Actually, I think Frode should updates the curriculum vitae on his home page, to include the fact that he's a FAST employee. I claim to know this.
:)
A friend of mine was webmaster for a computer club at the university, when the harddisk with the webpages on it died horribly. This was perhaps three or four years ago, when Altavista was relatively new, and my friend got the idea that maybe they had it archived. A short mail to Altavista, and a few days later the computer club received their entire site as a mail attachment from the friendly guys over at Digital. Now, that's service!
My friend was given the club's "Hack of the Year" award that year for this exploration of distributed backup schemes... *grin*
If a search takes exactly 0.0050 seconds, it's because it's cached. The engine caches all searches for some time, and if someone does the same search again, the results are simply fetched from the cache.