heh, I saw some guy in a bimmer texting with his nose last week, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies. But I suppose a cop in a tall SUV wouldn't be able to see him.
Sure, it gets repetitive after "figuring it out", but it actually has pretty varied gameplay, and each battle lasts 15-minutes max.
I like it because it's not much of a stats or twitch game.... yes stats and twitch helps, but a lot of your success often hinges on finding a good rock (or teammate) to hide behind and playing the camouflage system. Still, it's a pretty detailed physics engine, so you can still score the occasional blind shot if you know what you're doing (and you're lucky with the RNG, but mostly by knowing where to aim).
I hate RPG-type battles like in EVE where you're basically playing rock-paper-scissors with dice... Vendetta Online is much more interesting where you can use physics and cover and stuff rather than just banging out options into the interface like you're playing DDR.
WoT is free-to-play, but there's not really anything worth paying money for that you couldn't get by grinding (via successful gameplay, not "menial repetitive tasks"). I only spend a small amount of gold to carry over expensive modules when upgrading tanks, and you can score enough gold for free by doing tutorials and various other things.
Bonus for actually learning things about physics, WWII-era tanks (which all looked the same to me before), various historical artifacts, etc. so I'd even call it mildly more educational than your typical fantasy clickfest.
Yeah, on top of that, I had read somewhere that the Raspberry Pi ethernet port is USB-attached and is prone to periodic resets and disconnects, which basically rules out a Raspberry Pi for projects that would rely on a stable network connection.
But I'm probably mostly upset that the Raspberry Pi is taking away brainshare from people who would otherwise be making interesting hacks for my EeePC 901:-D Yes, I'm probably the only person upset that Fuduntu is unsupported now:P
My father gave me one, I put RaspBMC on it because it seemed like the easiest way to get Debian on it.
That said, I've never really been a big fan of XBMC even running on decent hardware, and it's kinda hard to think of much else to do with a Raspberry Pi that doesn't involve sinking a lot of money for an LCD screen and USB wifi, at which point you're better off with a cheap tablet/smartphone. So I kinda just carry it around so I could put the BSOD screensaver on random LCD TVs that I find in public.
Frankly, I had more fun with the $25 Arduino UNO he sent me. I used it to control one of those cheap Lutron color LED strips: https://plus.google.com/109464377854747809155/videos So if I was a little more motivated, my workstation's mood lighting could correspond to the weather or Nagios or something.
Seconded.... I had a TI-85 in HS, an HP48GX in college engineering, then a few years ago when I took the FE/EIT exam, the prep guide forums recommended the Casio
Sad that I haven't really had a chance to use any decent calculators in the "real world" outside of engineering examinations, though.
Incidentally, the NCEES FE reference guide is an awesome cheat-sheet for engineering math, physics, chemistry, etc. http://cbt.ncees.org/get-the-new-fe-reference-handbook-for-cbt/ Which is awesome to carry around on your kindle or whatever "just in case"
Ha ha, your setup sounds remarkably similar to mine:)
After evaluating the FitPC and a bunch of mini-ITX stuff for work, I ended up getting a (secondhand) nVidia ION / Atom shoebox PC to migrate my 24x7 home server to. With the nVidia drivers, it still makes a decent and responsive desktop with compiz-fusion. The only time I notice that it's actually running on a poky nettop is on the busier flash-crappy web pages.
Ended up getting an AMD-based Toshiba laptop for my wife to replace the crappy iBook I bought her to break her of her Mac habit. It was a big, cheap 17" desktop-replacement deal with ATi HD3500 something graphics. Unfortunately, she got hooked on Windows, but Toshiba abandoned driver support for it, so when we migrated off Vista, the built-in MS drivers do decent 3D acceleration but no 2D acceleration. So it stutters horribly doing any kind of fullscreen video like youtube or Netflix, which is mostly what it does now that she's finished her dissertation.
Haven't really tried to pay attention much at PCs these days, but I find http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ and http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ indispensible nowadays when I come across a new system at work and I want to know how much it sucks based on the alphabet soup in its name, so I can wield it with the appropriate amount of swagger compared to what my peers are packing.
Plus, physical consoles were pretty much always loss leaders... Sega, Sony, Nintendo would lose money on their hardware and make it up on selling titles - both their own and from third-party developers. Is Microsoft not including all of profits from licensing in their reports?
Awesome... I waited until near the end of their run to finally pick up their business-class Voodoo3 with 8MB of SGRAM to replace my crappy S3 Virge something.
Then ATi said they'd more actively support OSS drivers for Linux, so I picked up an All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 with 64MB RAM and a built-in TV tuner. But ultimately nothing ever came out of that that wasn't already reverse-engineered and supported by the OSS Gatos team. Later still, when ATi finally started releasing their closed-source fglrx drivers for Linux, my 7500 was just beyond the cutoff. So around that point I started paying more money for nVidia cards, and never looked back (well, except to confirm that ATi drivers under Linux and Windows were still a mess). Such a shame, since the ATi hardware always sounded solid according to the EE-type reviewers.
Did get burned by nVidia once, since my kids' AMD motherboard came out about the time that AMD bought ATi, and then nVidia started blacklisting SLI from certain AMD motherboard chipsets out of spite. But no big deal, I have 2x 560Ti mostly for multi-seat linux, so it doesn't matter too much that they're not SLI'd
PowerVR was eventually bought by Intel, so we're still suffering some of that intellectual property as recently as some of those FitPC GPUs with horrible binary-blob drivers for Linux. Hopefully that stuff will be put down for good with all of the newer Intel graphics with proper OSS drivers out right from Intel.
Actuall, it looks like you might possibly be covered in the Inmarsat territory, which goes to roughly 82deg latitude with a corresponding drop in bandwidth. http://www.roadpost.com/inmarsat_coverage.aspx
I did a little project using a 5/1Mbps Inmarsat uplink. It was basically on a little gateway device that acted as a bandwidth optimizing proxy for the LAN. You'd probably want something similar to do transparent compression / packet traffic shaping / TCP window tuning etc. to get the most out of your link, if it works at all.
Ah, yes, this brings me back to my mirroring Sunsite over a 9600k modem days...
Though actually, it looks like the practical rtt to another the internet can take 1800ms over Iridium, since it has to bounce the signal around other nodes until it can get to one of its ground stations:/
Of course, Iridium data rates are in dial-up territory. It seems like you might be able to get low-cost consumer grade satellite services from DirecTV or something, using Iridium as the dial-up uplink component. But it also sounds like you'll be transmitting more data than you'll be receiving, if this is for data collection:/
Given that it also sounds likely you're looking at remote sites near the poles, Iridium may be your only option, since it gets pretty difficult to hit geosynchronous satellites beyond 70 deg latitude. So you might want to be optimizing your data transfer needs to fit through a tiny pipe, augmented via occasional sneakernet.
I've sync'd a couple GB per night. Used bandwidth limiting option to avoid maxing out their DSL pipe. Can get caught up on most of my critical stuff over the course of a week or so. Enough for most important documents... and maybe my mp3 collection to boot. I don't bother mirroring my pr0n. Maybe it won't keep up with RAW camera files and video of my crotchfruit, but I generally don't care about those until I spend time to post-process the good ones and upload them to Google+ or GooTube anyway..
F=ma ; Centrifugal force wouldn't work becasuse my blood wasn't baptized, so it doesn't have mass.
Joking aside, the centripetal acceleration merely describes the change in velocity of the swinging hand, like a pendulum, and helps line it up as cumulative with the local gravitational acceleration. Whatever centrifugal force is felt by components of the hand is more dependent upon the motion, so I thought it made more sense to describe that. Then the particulars of how it affects the blood pressure in the plumbing can then be worked out through force balance on the various pieces.
On a more practical note, if I had said "centrifugal force", then I'd still likely be having this exact same conversation with more people who paid less attention in physics than you or I, so using "centripetal acceleration" instead helps filter down to the people who at least knows the difference;-)
Anyway, your hands and toes are already your body's natural radiators, since they have a relatively high surface-area to volume ratio. Your body can already regulate its temperature naturally by pumping more blood into the capillaries near the surface of the skin when it needs to cool off more. As it mentions in the Wired article, simply applying a cold heat sink won't really work, since your body tends to draw blood circulation away from contact with cold surfaces, so you'd also need the pump or something to force the blood circulation back towards the heat sink.
When I do martial arts, I find I get the best cooling by simply swinging my hands back and forth. That gives me forced convection through my fingers, combined with enhanced evaporative cooling of my sweaty palms, while the extra centripetal acceleration draws blood out closer to my fingertips.
There's another similar body hack for those of us with trouble regulating your temperature while sleeping and tend to overheat and start sweating under your blankets: simply sleep with your hands and/or feet sticking out from under the blanket. This will let your body better regulate its core temperature using its natural mechanisms of pumping more blood closer to the skin for more cooling, or drawing blood away from the skin to retain heat and maintain proper core temperature. Hey, it's this "one simple weird trick" for better sleep, on the internet... who would have thunk it?
Actually, this sounds like a pretty good breakthrough... I thought someone had intentionally made a keyboard with bobcat pheromones or something in order to scare away cats and eliminate cat-like typing from keyboards everywhere.
Yep, I have a ML-2851 too and it's been great for several years now. It actually manages to be easier to install drivers for it under Linux than Windows - just select it from the CUPS setup dialog.
Plus, it's a probably the cheapest mono laser with full duplexing. Would not hesitate to get another similar Samsung if the need arises.
I thought the issue with the google wifi map was that they "accidentally" had their packet captures configured to save user data packets in addition to the relatively benign publicly-accessible SSID handshaking info.
Meh, I've worked on training systems that need some kind of button box to act exactly like some other expensive physical multi-selector control system. And sometimes it's deemed worthwhile to build your own little UI box to interface with the software.
These projects were kind of dished out almost like a reward for the EE guys so they could get their hands dirty doing something fun and get a bit of a break dealing with the software / UI devs hashing out the state logic tree with them for the umpteenth time.
Sounds like the bluetooth-based system is just sniffing bluetooth IDs, not exactly "connecting" any more than when your phone sniffs out discoverable Wi-fi access points but doesn't really try to register with any of them.
I blame poor article word choice. You can start worrying when they make it illegal to disable your car's bluetooth so they can use the system to issue speeding tickets.
Slashdot Mirror
But less snide British snark.
I suppose you could http://arstechnica.com/ as well.
Hey, if you're really a masochist, you can go to http://beta.slashdot.org/ for the worst of all worlds!
heh, I saw some guy in a bimmer texting with his nose last week, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
But I suppose a cop in a tall SUV wouldn't be able to see him.
Where are all the slashdot typesetting snobs proclaiming "if it doesn't have proper ligatures, it's an abhorrence!" ?!
... that wouldn't be legal. 8 1/2" x 14" is.
FIXED THAT FOR YOU FULLSTOP
Well, I'm kinda addicted to http://worldoftanks.com/ at the moment.
Sure, it gets repetitive after "figuring it out", but it actually has pretty varied gameplay, and each battle lasts 15-minutes max.
I like it because it's not much of a stats or twitch game.... yes stats and twitch helps, but a lot of your success often hinges on finding a good rock (or teammate) to hide behind and playing the camouflage system. Still, it's a pretty detailed physics engine, so you can still score the occasional blind shot if you know what you're doing (and you're lucky with the RNG, but mostly by knowing where to aim).
I hate RPG-type battles like in EVE where you're basically playing rock-paper-scissors with dice... Vendetta Online is much more interesting where you can use physics and cover and stuff rather than just banging out options into the interface like you're playing DDR.
WoT is free-to-play, but there's not really anything worth paying money for that you couldn't get by grinding (via successful gameplay, not "menial repetitive tasks"). I only spend a small amount of gold to carry over expensive modules when upgrading tanks, and you can score enough gold for free by doing tutorials and various other things.
Bonus for actually learning things about physics, WWII-era tanks (which all looked the same to me before), various historical artifacts, etc. so I'd even call it mildly more educational than your typical fantasy clickfest.
Yeah, on top of that, I had read somewhere that the Raspberry Pi ethernet port is USB-attached and is prone to periodic resets and disconnects, which basically rules out a Raspberry Pi for projects that would rely on a stable network connection.
Sure, let me google you a citation.... eh, doesn't look particularly trustworthy, but:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/08/24/2228251/serious-problems-with-usb-and-ethernet-on-the-raspberry-pi
But I'm probably mostly upset that the Raspberry Pi is taking away brainshare from people who would otherwise be making interesting hacks for my EeePC 901 :-D Yes, I'm probably the only person upset that Fuduntu is unsupported now :P
My father gave me one, I put RaspBMC on it because it seemed like the easiest way to get Debian on it.
That said, I've never really been a big fan of XBMC even running on decent hardware, and it's kinda hard to think of much else to do with a Raspberry Pi that doesn't involve sinking a lot of money for an LCD screen and USB wifi, at which point you're better off with a cheap tablet/smartphone. So I kinda just carry it around so I could put the BSOD screensaver on random LCD TVs that I find in public.
Frankly, I had more fun with the $25 Arduino UNO he sent me. I used it to control one of those cheap Lutron color LED strips:
https://plus.google.com/109464377854747809155/videos
So if I was a little more motivated, my workstation's mood lighting could correspond to the weather or Nagios or something.
Seconded.... I had a TI-85 in HS, an HP48GX in college engineering, then a few years ago when I took the FE/EIT exam, the prep guide forums recommended the Casio
http://www.amazon.com/Casio-Advanced-Scientific-Calculator-Textbook/dp/B000A3IAHM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384664856&sr=8-1&keywords=casio+calculator+scientific
Sad that I haven't really had a chance to use any decent calculators in the "real world" outside of engineering examinations, though.
Incidentally, the NCEES FE reference guide is an awesome cheat-sheet for engineering math, physics, chemistry, etc.
http://cbt.ncees.org/get-the-new-fe-reference-handbook-for-cbt/
Which is awesome to carry around on your kindle or whatever "just in case"
Ha ha, your setup sounds remarkably similar to mine :)
After evaluating the FitPC and a bunch of mini-ITX stuff for work, I ended up getting a (secondhand) nVidia ION / Atom shoebox PC to migrate my 24x7 home server to. With the nVidia drivers, it still makes a decent and responsive desktop with compiz-fusion. The only time I notice that it's actually running on a poky nettop is on the busier flash-crappy web pages.
Ended up getting an AMD-based Toshiba laptop for my wife to replace the crappy iBook I bought her to break her of her Mac habit. It was a big, cheap 17" desktop-replacement deal with ATi HD3500 something graphics. Unfortunately, she got hooked on Windows, but Toshiba abandoned driver support for it, so when we migrated off Vista, the built-in MS drivers do decent 3D acceleration but no 2D acceleration. So it stutters horribly doing any kind of fullscreen video like youtube or Netflix, which is mostly what it does now that she's finished her dissertation.
Haven't really tried to pay attention much at PCs these days, but I find http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ and http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ indispensible nowadays when I come across a new system at work and I want to know how much it sucks based on the alphabet soup in its name, so I can wield it with the appropriate amount of swagger compared to what my peers are packing.
Plus, physical consoles were pretty much always loss leaders... Sega, Sony, Nintendo would lose money on their hardware and make it up on selling titles - both their own and from third-party developers. Is Microsoft not including all of profits from licensing in their reports?
Awesome... I waited until near the end of their run to finally pick up their business-class Voodoo3 with 8MB of SGRAM to replace my crappy S3 Virge something.
Then ATi said they'd more actively support OSS drivers for Linux, so I picked up an All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 with 64MB RAM and a built-in TV tuner. But ultimately nothing ever came out of that that wasn't already reverse-engineered and supported by the OSS Gatos team. Later still, when ATi finally started releasing their closed-source fglrx drivers for Linux, my 7500 was just beyond the cutoff. So around that point I started paying more money for nVidia cards, and never looked back (well, except to confirm that ATi drivers under Linux and Windows were still a mess). Such a shame, since the ATi hardware always sounded solid according to the EE-type reviewers.
Did get burned by nVidia once, since my kids' AMD motherboard came out about the time that AMD bought ATi, and then nVidia started blacklisting SLI from certain AMD motherboard chipsets out of spite. But no big deal, I have 2x 560Ti mostly for multi-seat linux, so it doesn't matter too much that they're not SLI'd
PowerVR was eventually bought by Intel, so we're still suffering some of that intellectual property as recently as some of those FitPC GPUs with horrible binary-blob drivers for Linux. Hopefully that stuff will be put down for good with all of the newer Intel graphics with proper OSS drivers out right from Intel.
I still have a 3dfx card. Booyeah!
Yeah, the trick is teaching the humans not to be afraid and legislate everything out of existence.
Actuall, it looks like you might possibly be covered in the Inmarsat territory, which goes to roughly 82deg latitude with a corresponding drop in bandwidth.
http://www.roadpost.com/inmarsat_coverage.aspx
I did a little project using a 5/1Mbps Inmarsat uplink. It was basically on a little gateway device that acted as a bandwidth optimizing proxy for the LAN. You'd probably want something similar to do transparent compression / packet traffic shaping / TCP window tuning etc. to get the most out of your link, if it works at all.
Ah, yes, this brings me back to my mirroring Sunsite over a 9600k modem days...
Well, if you want decent latency from a satellite network, I think the LEO Iridium constellation might be your only option: 10-20ms rtt vs. 500-600ms rtt for any geosynchronous satellite.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49385912/Iridium-9602-Data-and-Inmarsat-C-latency
Though actually, it looks like the practical rtt to another the internet can take 1800ms over Iridium, since it has to bounce the signal around other nodes until it can get to one of its ground stations :/
Of course, Iridium data rates are in dial-up territory. It seems like you might be able to get low-cost consumer grade satellite services from DirecTV or something, using Iridium as the dial-up uplink component. But it also sounds like you'll be transmitting more data than you'll be receiving, if this is for data collection :/
Given that it also sounds likely you're looking at remote sites near the poles, Iridium may be your only option, since it gets pretty difficult to hit geosynchronous satellites beyond 70 deg latitude. So you might want to be optimizing your data transfer needs to fit through a tiny pipe, augmented via occasional sneakernet.
In short: :/
I've sync'd a couple GB per night. Used bandwidth limiting option to avoid maxing out their DSL pipe. Can get caught up on most of my critical stuff over the course of a week or so. Enough for most important documents... and maybe my mp3 collection to boot. I don't bother mirroring my pr0n. Maybe it won't keep up with RAW camera files and video of my crotchfruit, but I generally don't care about those until I spend time to post-process the good ones and upload them to Google+ or GooTube anyway..
Yeah, better to just have a friend across the country, buy them a hard disk for their server, and swap rsync cron jobs.
F=ma ; Centrifugal force wouldn't work becasuse my blood wasn't baptized, so it doesn't have mass.
Joking aside, the centripetal acceleration merely describes the change in velocity of the swinging hand, like a pendulum, and helps line it up as cumulative with the local gravitational acceleration. Whatever centrifugal force is felt by components of the hand is more dependent upon the motion, so I thought it made more sense to describe that. Then the particulars of how it affects the blood pressure in the plumbing can then be worked out through force balance on the various pieces.
On a more practical note, if I had said "centrifugal force", then I'd still likely be having this exact same conversation with more people who paid less attention in physics than you or I, so using "centripetal acceleration" instead helps filter down to the people who at least knows the difference ;-)
DARPA was working on something similar to this. It was a special glove that actively drew blood to the surface of the skin on your hand and cooled it:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html
Looks like someone managed to commercialize it: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/cgi-bin/gforum.cgi?post=4495810
Anyway, your hands and toes are already your body's natural radiators, since they have a relatively high surface-area to volume ratio. Your body can already regulate its temperature naturally by pumping more blood into the capillaries near the surface of the skin when it needs to cool off more. As it mentions in the Wired article, simply applying a cold heat sink won't really work, since your body tends to draw blood circulation away from contact with cold surfaces, so you'd also need the pump or something to force the blood circulation back towards the heat sink.
When I do martial arts, I find I get the best cooling by simply swinging my hands back and forth. That gives me forced convection through my fingers, combined with enhanced evaporative cooling of my sweaty palms, while the extra centripetal acceleration draws blood out closer to my fingertips.
There's another similar body hack for those of us with trouble regulating your temperature while sleeping and tend to overheat and start sweating under your blankets: simply sleep with your hands and/or feet sticking out from under the blanket. This will let your body better regulate its core temperature using its natural mechanisms of pumping more blood closer to the skin for more cooling, or drawing blood away from the skin to retain heat and maintain proper core temperature. Hey, it's this "one simple weird trick" for better sleep, on the internet... who would have thunk it?
Actually, this sounds like a pretty good breakthrough... I thought someone had intentionally made a keyboard with bobcat pheromones or something in order to scare away cats and eliminate cat-like typing from keyboards everywhere.
http://cheezburger.com/4046581760
Patent this.
Yep, I have a ML-2851 too and it's been great for several years now. It actually manages to be easier to install drivers for it under Linux than Windows - just select it from the CUPS setup dialog.
Plus, it's a probably the cheapest mono laser with full duplexing. Would not hesitate to get another similar Samsung if the need arises.
I thought the issue with the google wifi map was that they "accidentally" had their packet captures configured to save user data packets in addition to the relatively benign publicly-accessible SSID handshaking info.
Meh, I've worked on training systems that need some kind of button box to act exactly like some other expensive physical multi-selector control system. And sometimes it's deemed worthwhile to build your own little UI box to interface with the software.
These projects were kind of dished out almost like a reward for the EE guys so they could get their hands dirty doing something fun and get a bit of a break dealing with the software / UI devs hashing out the state logic tree with them for the umpteenth time.
Is this a bad thing? I suppose they could just get all their data from the Google:
http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-traffic/
Sounds like the bluetooth-based system is just sniffing bluetooth IDs, not exactly "connecting" any more than when your phone sniffs out discoverable Wi-fi access points but doesn't really try to register with any of them.
I blame poor article word choice. You can start worrying when they make it illegal to disable your car's bluetooth so they can use the system to issue speeding tickets.