see also Total Annihilation, a game almost 10 years old, and still posessing a loyal following, why? Player built mods! There are so many maps/units/extensions/mods/etc etc etc for TA that you can play it for years and years and years and... you get the point. Extensible architecture IS key.
With my Samsung Phone (via USB) with Verizon speed and usability are pretty OK. On the "3x" network (only in major metropolitan areas and major coridors) I've seen real speeds of about 225k both ways, on the "national" (1xRtt) network (most anywhere with digital signal) I've gotten between 19 and 75k depending on signal strength. Defiately OK for surfing the web and checking e-mail, but by no means "high-speed". A lot of phones also have undocumented analog modem capability, My Samsung A310 will function as a 9600 baud analog modem on even analog cell towers by calling a real dial-up number as opposed to Verizon's supported access shortcuts. It works, but is NOT a replacement for real broadband or even DirecWay. I'm a Direcway installer (among other things "outside of my job description"), and a well tuned Direcway connection on one of the good satellites (AMC9!) will thump the Cell network any day, except for burst uploads and latency.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the booming tech sector a move like this could bring to B-town. Maybe then I could get a job that would let me aford to live in the city (and have 100mb fibre to play ith in my off hours)
hah! I fianlly feel justified for not leaving the state despite outrageous housing costs, low wages, an over-qualified (and VERY competive) workforce, and poor infrastructue. Now if I could only afford an apartment in Burlington...
I know there are many like me out there who have become so used to reading Slashdot, and only Slashdot, that we are horribly out of touch with whats what in nerd news aggregators, What if any other options are there that cover as much (or nearly as much) general nerd goodness in a (mostly) non-repetetive and up to date manner?
P.S. discussion of articles is one of the features I've come to appreciate here on slashdot.
No, teenage celebrity "news" and gossip sites. Try it, many porn and warez sites are less loaded down with pop-up adversting and self installing ad- and spy-ware. Really.
That Microsoft seems to have done some real inovative code and process work on the X-BOX 360. The whole prodedural sythesis system as described in the article should proove to be a real boon to developers. On the other hand Sony has thrown a hell of a lot more esoteric hardware at the problem...
One thing's for sure, IBM has proven it's not affraid to do some unique things at the request of paying customers. Cell or Xenon with Procedural Synthesis, either way IBM has learned a LOT from these game system deals. Don't think they aren't counting on using some of these tricks down the road for other things...
Re:"Advanced Hunt-and-Peck" works
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
I'm a looker myself, but really only a glancer. I have the same problem that others mentioned, where every keyboard I use in a regular day is different. Since I "glance", key placement isn't such a big deal but, but key spacing always throws me off. Going from a laptop to a full-size, or a an intermediate size keyboard always ruins my accuracy.
BTW, Love my Apple Pro II, bought an ADB-to-USB adaptor so I can still use it.
That little Alphasmart thingie looks like a re-packaged TRS-80 portable (102)...
Maybe an old TRS-80 would fit the bill? 25-30 hours on 4 AAs, and you can even program in basic on it! There are few WP's with spell check available for TRS-80 portables too.
VNC is the obvious way to talk to the machine without a monitor connected...
If an external battery could be housed in a mac mini form factor external case (stacked under/ontop of the mini) I bet battery life could be equivelent or longer than a power-book (no LCD to run). Could provide some interesting low-cost remote monitoring solutions...
No, it doesn't seem like enough, but remember the PS2 only has 1/14th the RAM the PS3 will. Some amazing things can be donw with FAST ram and compact, well written code.
Maybe this should be linked SOMEWHERE on slashdot, but it sure as hell isn't front page news. I'm suggesting that rather than post flames about things like this we IGNORE them in the future. If we stop clicking through and viewing adds on crap like this, maybe the loss of revenue will convince someone to start actually publishing CONTENT again.
This is what scares me. I have no real problem with cars being drive-by-wire, or micro-managed by software, but I think there needs to be some real and consideration put into making cars part of a "network". Bluetooth transmitted viri could be the least of our problems. Imagine a completley drive-by-wire car being high-jacked like a zombie PC. Forget guns-in-the-window car jacking, theves could steal the car via Internet! There are already tools to spoof alarm codes, how long before a bluetooth phone or PDA can be used to hack the ignition system? Cars can have computers, cars can be drive-by-wire (as long as the software proves itself) but you'll not get me in a car with a wireless data interface to it's computer. If you need to talk to the car's computer, use buttons (inside the car) or a cable.
Maybe i'm using the wrong routers (Belkin mostly) maybe i'm using the wrong OS (XP Home sp2 mostly) but i have yet to find a UPnP system that works as advertised. Sure Windows finds the "residential gateway device" but if I try to get status from it the "residental gateway" process hangs and has to be killed. When a Win XP hachine is used with ICS i can get status from it, and even control connections, but if i use 2k or Me or 98 as the ICS machine it shows up, but again hangs. UPnP, at least in this application and with these device is useless as far as i've found.
I feel you have a very important point here. Kids don't research, they google! If they can Spotlight, what does this mean for the next generation of teenager's rooms? It sounds funny now, but wait until these people are trying to run companies and governments.
It's defiantely the size. Tiny dies concentrate heat and huge transistor counts mean more current draw, you could solve the heat (well really, the COOLING) problem by making chips BIGGER, but then they'd slow down because signals would have to travel longer distances, and power consumption might actualy go UP becuase it'll take more voltage to push signal over longer interconnects. The laws of thermo-dynamics are a bitch.
heh, just never done it before. figured i;d try out the troll-thing for fit. I could use a little negative karma anyway, I'm starting to get a swollen head.
Even though my other post gos into detail about cheap parts, lets not overlook this one!. I've seen more Sony DVD-players fail within 6 months of waranty expiration than can be rightly accounted for by coincidence. Also BROTHER printers are notoriously finely engineered to fail almost immediately after the number of pages specified in "expected print head life" has been passed.
This is just another of the unsustainable problems with unrestrained capitolism.
Dust and pollen, smoke (a really bad one!) do all shorten the life of a drive, but the REAL kicker is cheap-ass mechanisms. Anyone can buy a $1 laser diode and build an optical pickup, but these cheapo diodes are, well cheap crap. Just like LEDs (see earlier/. article from today) laser diodes dim over time, cheap diodes dim faster, and often have a lower voltage bias set because they can't handle as much power. The lower initial voltage makes them go out that much faster.
Beyond the cheap diodes used in so many cheap electronics, the mechanism design itself is important. a good laser pickup will be SEALED. Many cheapo pickups have the internal guts of the pickup exposed to air, that means not only is the objective lens going to collect dust, but so is the prism, colimating lens, mirror and photo-diode face. Thats no fewer than 5 extra surfaces to collect dust, pollen and smoke (Did I mention that smoke is REALLY bad?) Spend about twice what the cheap ones cost and you'll get a unit that lasts twice as long.
I have a Mitsubishi CD player that cost over $2500 in 1988, it STILL WORKS PERFECTLY! Not only that, but it reads CD-Rs just fine too! It sounds like crap 'cuz it's got first generation DACs, but the high quality laser diode and sealed mechanism have shown thier supperior resistence to the vageries of time. The 1x(!) CD drive for my SUN 3/110 (manf. date 1989!!!) also works perfectly, and that sucker probably went for almost $4000 new.
Cleaning and re-alignment are both do-able and can correct the sorts of problems outlined here, but unless there's solid engineering and quality parts behind the lens it's not worth bothering.
Another thing you get with a more expensive drive is better error correction, both HARDWARE and SOFTWARE. Many cheap drives have a set-screw for sled angle and tracking linearity, the best drives have self-adjusting mechanisms. Also, better drives will have wide-range variable power controllers for the laser instead of just a couple switched resistor pre-sets, this allows the drive to more accurately correct of the tranmissive and reflective changes in the surface of the disc. Even basic drives have pretty good "groove tracking" but being able to correct for optical variations is important too. Good error correction software is also important. A nice buffered oversampling drive should be ABLE to read through a pretty decent size scratch wihout issue. But drives with tinny buffers and poor re-read capability will choke on the smallest scuff.
P.S. RE: celaning discs... Those little brushes don't pack enough force to alter alignment on most drives, unless they are cheap-crap or spin up to 52x. The lens itself is on a floating electromangenticaly aligned sub-frame, so it can get bashed arround by those brushes quite a lot without problems. The real issue with cleaning discs is that they just don't do a very good job. They are OK preventative maintenance, but once the lens gets dirty enough to start effecting the drive's ability to read discs, you'll probably need to go in there with an Alcohol dampened q-tip. Also, smoke residue (Did I mention this one is the worst?) is quite sticky and will not redily come off without a little alcohol.
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nice demo, not quite as convincing as a good 5.1 channel recording, but the holophonic / stereo is much better than most "fake" surround I've heard.
see also Total Annihilation, a game almost 10 years old, and still posessing a loyal following, why? Player built mods! There are so many maps/units/extensions/mods/etc etc etc for TA that you can play it for years and years and years and... you get the point. Extensible architecture IS key.
With my Samsung Phone (via USB) with Verizon speed and usability are pretty OK. On the "3x" network (only in major metropolitan areas and major coridors) I've seen real speeds of about 225k both ways, on the "national" (1xRtt) network (most anywhere with digital signal) I've gotten between 19 and 75k depending on signal strength. Defiately OK for surfing the web and checking e-mail, but by no means "high-speed". A lot of phones also have undocumented analog modem capability, My Samsung A310 will function as a 9600 baud analog modem on even analog cell towers by calling a real dial-up number as opposed to Verizon's supported access shortcuts. It works, but is NOT a replacement for real broadband or even DirecWay. I'm a Direcway installer (among other things "outside of my job description"), and a well tuned Direcway connection on one of the good satellites (AMC9!) will thump the Cell network any day, except for burst uploads and latency.
Yep, the Wacoms use use inductive coupling. This is the first time I've seen an OPTICAL mouse powered by inductive coupling though...
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the booming tech sector a move like this could bring to B-town. Maybe then I could get a job that would let me aford to live in the city (and have 100mb fibre to play ith in my off hours)
hah! I fianlly feel justified for not leaving the state despite outrageous housing costs, low wages, an over-qualified (and VERY competive) workforce, and poor infrastructue. Now if I could only afford an apartment in Burlington...
I know there are many like me out there who have become so used to reading Slashdot, and only Slashdot, that we are horribly out of touch with whats what in nerd news aggregators, What if any other options are there that cover as much (or nearly as much) general nerd goodness in a (mostly) non-repetetive and up to date manner?
P.S. discussion of articles is one of the features I've come to appreciate here on slashdot.
No, teenage celebrity "news" and gossip sites. Try it, many porn and warez sites are less loaded down with pop-up adversting and self installing ad- and spy-ware. Really.
That Microsoft seems to have done some real inovative code and process work on the X-BOX 360. The whole prodedural sythesis system as described in the article should proove to be a real boon to developers. On the other hand Sony has thrown a hell of a lot more esoteric hardware at the problem...
One thing's for sure, IBM has proven it's not affraid to do some unique things at the request of paying customers. Cell or Xenon with Procedural Synthesis, either way IBM has learned a LOT from these game system deals. Don't think they aren't counting on using some of these tricks down the road for other things...
I'm a looker myself, but really only a glancer. I have the same problem that others mentioned, where every keyboard I use in a regular day is different. Since I "glance", key placement isn't such a big deal but, but key spacing always throws me off. Going from a laptop to a full-size, or a an intermediate size keyboard always ruins my accuracy.
BTW, Love my Apple Pro II, bought an ADB-to-USB adaptor so I can still use it.
/me dusts off his C=64sx and pulls the 800 baud modem... OK, lets see here... blows dust off 5.25" floppy with faded penciled label...
LOAD "*",8,1
Loading Ready
Run
WELCOME TO NovaTerm
>at
>OK
>atdt 1-407-259-5286
>Dialing....
Or a TRS-80 102?
That little Alphasmart thingie looks like a re-packaged TRS-80 portable (102)...
Maybe an old TRS-80 would fit the bill? 25-30 hours on 4 AAs, and you can even program in basic on it! There are few WP's with spell check available for TRS-80 portables too.
VNC is the obvious way to talk to the machine without a monitor connected...
If an external battery could be housed in a mac mini form factor external case (stacked under/ontop of the mini) I bet battery life could be equivelent or longer than a power-book (no LCD to run). Could provide some interesting low-cost remote monitoring solutions...
No, it doesn't seem like enough, but remember the PS2 only has 1/14th the RAM the PS3 will. Some amazing things can be donw with FAST ram and compact, well written code.
Maybe this should be linked SOMEWHERE on slashdot, but it sure as hell isn't front page news. I'm suggesting that rather than post flames about things like this we IGNORE them in the future. If we stop clicking through and viewing adds on crap like this, maybe the loss of revenue will convince someone to start actually publishing CONTENT again.
This is what scares me. I have no real problem with cars being drive-by-wire, or micro-managed by software, but I think there needs to be some real and consideration put into making cars part of a "network". Bluetooth transmitted viri could be the least of our problems. Imagine a completley drive-by-wire car being high-jacked like a zombie PC. Forget guns-in-the-window car jacking, theves could steal the car via Internet! There are already tools to spoof alarm codes, how long before a bluetooth phone or PDA can be used to hack the ignition system? Cars can have computers, cars can be drive-by-wire (as long as the software proves itself) but you'll not get me in a car with a wireless data interface to it's computer. If you need to talk to the car's computer, use buttons (inside the car) or a cable.
Maybe i'm using the wrong routers (Belkin mostly) maybe i'm using the wrong OS (XP Home sp2 mostly) but i have yet to find a UPnP system that works as advertised. Sure Windows finds the "residential gateway device" but if I try to get status from it the "residental gateway" process hangs and has to be killed. When a Win XP hachine is used with ICS i can get status from it, and even control connections, but if i use 2k or Me or 98 as the ICS machine it shows up, but again hangs. UPnP, at least in this application and with these device is useless as far as i've found.
I feel you have a very important point here. Kids don't research, they google! If they can Spotlight, what does this mean for the next generation of teenager's rooms? It sounds funny now, but wait until these people are trying to run companies and governments.
It's defiantely the size. Tiny dies concentrate heat and huge transistor counts mean more current draw, you could solve the heat (well really, the COOLING) problem by making chips BIGGER, but then they'd slow down because signals would have to travel longer distances, and power consumption might actualy go UP becuase it'll take more voltage to push signal over longer interconnects. The laws of thermo-dynamics are a bitch.
See What I mean?
heh, just never done it before. figured i;d try out the troll-thing for fit. I could use a little negative karma anyway, I'm starting to get a swollen head.
fp?>
Even though my other post gos into detail about cheap parts, lets not overlook this one!. I've seen more Sony DVD-players fail within 6 months of waranty expiration than can be rightly accounted for by coincidence. Also BROTHER printers are notoriously finely engineered to fail almost immediately after the number of pages specified in "expected print head life" has been passed.
This is just another of the unsustainable problems with unrestrained capitolism.
Is to pay a lot of money for it.
/. article from today) laser diodes dim over time, cheap diodes dim faster, and often have a lower voltage bias set because they can't handle as much power. The lower initial voltage makes them go out that much faster.
Dust and pollen, smoke (a really bad one!) do all shorten the life of a drive, but the REAL kicker is cheap-ass mechanisms. Anyone can buy a $1 laser diode and build an optical pickup, but these cheapo diodes are, well cheap crap. Just like LEDs (see earlier
Beyond the cheap diodes used in so many cheap electronics, the mechanism design itself is important. a good laser pickup will be SEALED. Many cheapo pickups have the internal guts of the pickup exposed to air, that means not only is the objective lens going to collect dust, but so is the prism, colimating lens, mirror and photo-diode face. Thats no fewer than 5 extra surfaces to collect dust, pollen and smoke (Did I mention that smoke is REALLY bad?) Spend about twice what the cheap ones cost and you'll get a unit that lasts twice as long.
I have a Mitsubishi CD player that cost over $2500 in 1988, it STILL WORKS PERFECTLY! Not only that, but it reads CD-Rs just fine too! It sounds like crap 'cuz it's got first generation DACs, but the high quality laser diode and sealed mechanism have shown thier supperior resistence to the vageries of time. The 1x(!) CD drive for my SUN 3/110 (manf. date 1989!!!) also works perfectly, and that sucker probably went for almost $4000 new.
Cleaning and re-alignment are both do-able and can correct the sorts of problems outlined here, but unless there's solid engineering and quality parts behind the lens it's not worth bothering.
Another thing you get with a more expensive drive is better error correction, both HARDWARE and SOFTWARE. Many cheap drives have a set-screw for sled angle and tracking linearity, the best drives have self-adjusting mechanisms. Also, better drives will have wide-range variable power controllers for the laser instead of just a couple switched resistor pre-sets, this allows the drive to more accurately correct of the tranmissive and reflective changes in the surface of the disc. Even basic drives have pretty good "groove tracking" but being able to correct for optical variations is important too. Good error correction software is also important. A nice buffered oversampling drive should be ABLE to read through a pretty decent size scratch wihout issue. But drives with tinny buffers and poor re-read capability will choke on the smallest scuff.
P.S. RE: celaning discs... Those little brushes don't pack enough force to alter alignment on most drives, unless they are cheap-crap or spin up to 52x. The lens itself is on a floating electromangenticaly aligned sub-frame, so it can get bashed arround by those brushes quite a lot without problems. The real issue with cleaning discs is that they just don't do a very good job. They are OK preventative maintenance, but once the lens gets dirty enough to start effecting the drive's ability to read discs, you'll probably need to go in there with an Alcohol dampened q-tip. Also, smoke residue (Did I mention this one is the worst?) is quite sticky and will not redily come off without a little alcohol.
My 2-cents.