Anything 'pre-built' is going to cost too much or be otherwise unsuitable. It isn't hard to find Atom-based Mini-ITX systems for like $150. There's also things like that piece of hardware MSI was putting out that is basically the guts of a netbook in a package that mounts to the VESA mounting plate on the back of an LCD and has its own stand...though I don't know what that was supposed to cost. I would think a good Atom machine would be cheap, and more than suitable. (Perhaps even overkill.)
Speaking of thinclients though, I actually have an old IBM hardware x-windows terminal. It's very cool.:3
I have to wonder what stake Microsoft has in teen suicide and school shootings that they'd think this is a good idea. A bit of a leap you say? Let me lay it out for you.
Fat kid gets home from school, decides to play some games to put the bullshit he had to deal with at school behind him... Too bad his avatar is fat too! No escape from the ridicule and stupid crap! Or even worse, the same people who harass him at school start harassing him online, and then start harassing him at school ABOUT his fat avatar! BONUS POINTS!
So, depending on the kid's psychological makeup there are three possible outcomes:
Nothing at all. (Unlikely even for the well-adjusted.)
Suicide. (Probably the more likely of the three.)
School shooting. (Given access to firearms and having pre-existing psychological issues, I'd have to go with 'yep'.)
First of all, buying ink cartridges is a waste of time and money. I own an Epson R1800, it's an entry-level wide format printer. (13x19 sheet or 13x44 roll medium max) A set of ink cartridges costs over a hundred dollars and when I'm making a lot of prints, it lasts about a month if I'm lucky. I finally said to hell with that, and bought a Continuous Flow System for it. Which was $300 for the system and 4oz bottles of all the ink. (iirc, the cartridges hold 0.4ozs of ink) Four ounces of ink lasts over a year, and costs only about twenty bucks more than a set of cartridges. And the stuff I get is for archival quality photo and art printing. It's lightfast and waterproof just like the original ink.
One of the big problems with cartridges, besides costing too much, is that in most cases it won't let you 'use up' the cartridge, because any time it runs dry you risk messing up the heads. So unless you buy one of those little things to zap the chip on the cartridge (Not a bad $15 investment if you're not ready for a CFS) you only end up using around half the ink in the cartridge.
As for what to do with that 'piece of e-waste'... What kind of geek are you?! Rip that sucker open!! There's all sorts of cool shit in there! Nice motors (Steppers if you're lucky), optical encoders, all sorts of useful springs, gears, belts, and pulleys...not to mention a couple of fairly precise steel bars. I saw something once about a guy making his own drafting pencils by lathing a bar from a printer.:P
Man, those crazy camera tracking rigs they have... Those initial tracking shots of the ascent are so stable and 'solid' they almost look like CG. Wow that was awesome. Kill those graphics and replace them with something that doesn't scream 'My other job is making powerpoint slideshows' and put it out on Blu-ray. I'll buy it.
I might be going to Anime Boston this year, I'll have to check it out. I hope they get some copies printed in the original Japanese, I'd love to buy them. This whole thing needs more of a hook though. Here's two ideas that would go a long way I think:
Use Ren'Py to make a game that puts users in the middle of this story, interacting more directly with the characters and asking their own questions about Ubuntu. The best part is, with a click of a button, the game can be distributed for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Throw some character wallpapers and desktop themes on an 'event-only' Ubuntu LiveCD with a custom splashscreen and stuff.
Thousands of dollars spent on little plastic anime girlies and ero 'hug pillow' covers would seem to speak otherwise, but practicality and usefulness are big with otaku culture. Highlighting certain capabilities of linux would help too. For instance, things like graphics apps, game development with Ren'Py, and story/comic/game writing and asset management with celtx. Also the fact that Linux will run on just about anything specs-wise.
A post at Anandtech suggests we'll see price hikes for the 5800-series Radeons until this situation sorts itself out.
Price hikes? No. Probably not. They were already sold out pretty much everywhere. So it's more likely we just won't see any until this is worked out. I'm not saying there won't be assholes selling 5870s for $800 on eBay, I mean, there ALWAYS are. I'm just saying it's not like Newegg is suddenly going to have them back in stock but for a hundred bucks more.
It occurs to me that taking away peoples' internet for what they may view as a perfectly reasonable use of their access (Or even worse, through no fault of their own) is going to KILL PEOPLE. I wish I were joking. I wish this was a joke. But if some kid murders his parents because they took away his Xbox for playing too much Halo, or someone commits suicide because their WoW account was hacked... What's going to happen when people have their right to use the internet revoked?
I have no qualms about saying that I cannot function without the internet. If I need to know something, I look it up on the internet. If I want to know what's going on, I check news sites. If I want to buy something, I buy it online. I do business online. And quite frankly, the number of people that I consider to be 'close friends' and 'colleagues' on the other side of my monitor far exceeds the number of people I know offline, by at least 20-to-1.
Nevermind the whole ridiculousness of it all anyway. Piracy is not theft. Nothing is stolen. There are copies made. And there's only two kinds of people who want copies of stuff: The ones who never would have paid money for it to begin with, and the ones who will end up actually buying it anyway. You can apply that to literally anything.
People are going to die because the entertainment industry doesn't want them getting something for free that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
Hundreds of people die every day in the industrialized world because they can't afford healthcare...and now we have the entertainment industry killing people because they think they lost a CD sale?
Here's a novel idea: Instead of trying to sell a CD with only one or two good songs on it for THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS and giving the artist (You know, those people who did all the work and that the consumer actually gives a shit about?) fuck-all, how about you get with the program and actually try to leverage the goddamn internet to sell things-- ACTUAL PRODUCTS PEOPLE WANT --in a manner that MAKES SENSE for a REASONABLE PRICE.
And people wonder why I don't want to participate in society.
How 'out of context' could it be? Apparently in this opening scene of the game you're a CIA operative who has infiltrated the terrorist group. Kind of why you get shot in the face by the badguys at the end. (Funny, that's exactly what happened at the end of the opening credits of CoD4:MW but it was a lot less 'interactive') And as far as I'm concerned, it is as it should be. And if IW ends up having to change it I'll be (more) pissed. Because you see/do worse shit every time you start up GTA.
If anything, this is designed to give you incentive to despise the antagonists, which it would do well for individuals less apathetic than myself. Personally, my 'giving a shit about people kicking puppies' quota was used up by stuff like the assault on NERV HQ in End of Evangelion. I guess once you see something that makes you think all of humanity being reduced to a vast sea of Tang is not such a bad thing, there's no going back.
Everyone I know who uses Hulu does so because we don't have TVs but still want to watch the few good shows on Television for free like everyone else can. The moment they start charging, there's going to be a almost complete drop-off in Hulu viewership and a huge spike in bittorrent traffic. Who gets the ad dollars then? Honestly? What little there is will go to the bittorrent sites.
Kinda gives me the warm-fuzzies, to be honest. I mean you always have those crazy-ass people going "HURRRRR PIRACY IS TERRORISM" but now I can argue that Hulu, by driving people away from watching their ad-supported free media, and producing web ad revenue for bittorrent sites, are 'supporting terrorism'. ZING!
YAY! Now I can't escape horrible lag and the unwashed masses by playing on a reliable, closely-moderated server full of people who aren't mentally-defective monkeys! Fucking awesome.
Seriously, what the hell? I've always loved clan servers. You find a good one with the gametype and map(s) you want, get in there, play well, and you start developing rivalries and camaraderie with the regulars and even gang up on the occasional asshat griefer/defective who joins. They even tend to have several servers running different maps/gametypes that the same subset of people play on. For the uninitiated, this is called A COMMUNITY. Look it up.
I don't want to be thrown into an endless stream of random assclowns with the exceptions of the 2-3 people on my buddy list, and I don't want to 'friend' every goddamn person I wouldn't mind playing with again. Not to mention the fact that this kind of hosting setup is going to mean the game plays like shit 80% of the time, with no guarantee of stability or performance.
I knew MW2 was too good to be true. I worried they'd find some way to completely fuck it up. Oh well, at least we'll have the singleplayer... Unless they suddenly require us to play with a fucking 360 controller.
Infinity Ward: If I wanted a game console, I'd buy a fucking game console. kthx
The AI in old NEO-GEO arcade fighting games is rather remarkable from what I understand. For example, in the Samurai Spirits series (a.k.a Samurai Shodown) it adapts to any patterns you exhibit early in the match and builds strategies to avoid and counter them later. I never imagined that games from the 16-bit era could have adaptive enemy AI.:O
Fine. I beat the damn game. Not because I was enjoying it, but because I'd be GOD DAMNED if I didn't beat this damnable game! The first part of the boss fight was BULLSHIT. It took me 60 lives to beat Level 9 on my second try. Fuck that. ARRGH! At least now I can delete it from my hard drive.
Grab a dictionary, look up 'entertainment'. This game pissed me off beyond what is reasonable. It's ABSOLUTE BASTARD hard and frustrating even in normal mode, and the fight at the end is impossible. Fuck it. A game is entertainment, and you're supposed to be able to ENJOY IT. I think I'll go play some Samurai Spirits Zero with my cabinet turned up to Level-8 instead, Sankuro's INVINCIBLE SELF-HEALING CHEAP INSTANT BULLSHIT is less frustrating than this, and I ALREADY want to kill people over THAT. (Also, the controls at least respond 100% of the time.)
Also, as far as flash-based platformers go, Canabalt is much better imo.
I don't get why they didn't just tell google to go in and delete the mis-sent email(s) from the system? I mean, if they person didn't do anything wrong, why request that their email account be deleted entirely? If they're worried the user might have SEEN or copied them, the damage is done either way, the best you can do is remove access...so why have someone's account closed because you fucked up?
In fact, why didn't google suggest that, you know? "How about this, instead of you court-ordering us to delete someone's email account because you're a bunch of idiots, we'll just expunge the offending emails from the system, everyone happy?"
Woah there, Big Blue. I call bullshit, shenanigans, and prior art. All it takes is a look at Hackaday to show that people have been doing stuff like this for months now.
I think I've seen one of those 27 kilo HDDs before. I volunteered at a local computer recycling program, and among many usable machines, they'd get old stuff that we were to dismantle, and separate into different kinds of materials for disposal. The one I saw was an IBM, and the outer housing for the HDD was roughly the shape and size of a washer or dryer. The host machine was similar but twice as long. It had an 8-inch floppy with what I think was some kind of auto-loader. I think, all told, it had hookups for THREE 220V circuits. (Two on the host, and one on the HDD) I wanted to get one of the drive platters for myself, but the best I could do was the 'Unit Emergency' killswitch off the host computer. (I had set aside the control panel from the host machine, but didn't have room to take it home that day, and someone tossed it.)
Also, holy crap. I never knew silicon wafers came from hugeass things of silicon like that, I always assumed they were made more or less in their final wafer form artificially from smaller pieces. o_O I guess it makes more sense that they're cut from massive homogeneous chunks of solid silicon.
I wish they had a better shot of the RCA tube memory. I've seen pictures of those before, the dies look cool in a vacuum tube like that. They look very intricate, like miniatures of space station solar panels or something, heh. (Like the die in an EPROM, but MUCH bigger)
Yeah, Vermonter here. I dropped Failpoint and went with Comcast for internet AND phone, when Failpoint refused to recognize the existence of my new apartment despite already providing service to the only other unit. The chronicles of my hellish move that cost me an extra month's rent thanks to Failpoint can be found here.
I don't know, man. The old IV-18 tubes are really wicked looking. You have a cylindrical glass vacuum tube, and inside it is a slab of glass with 7-segment digit phosphors, shiny silver traces, and extremely tiny, thin hexagonal grids infront of each digit. So, it basically looks like a glowing blue digital readout 'suspended' in a thin glass envelope.
There's also the IV-27 which is larger and 13 digits instead of 8, and the IV-21 (I think it's 21) which is a tiny version of the IV-18.
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Anything 'pre-built' is going to cost too much or be otherwise unsuitable. It isn't hard to find Atom-based Mini-ITX systems for like $150. There's also things like that piece of hardware MSI was putting out that is basically the guts of a netbook in a package that mounts to the VESA mounting plate on the back of an LCD and has its own stand...though I don't know what that was supposed to cost. I would think a good Atom machine would be cheap, and more than suitable. (Perhaps even overkill.)
Speaking of thinclients though, I actually have an old IBM hardware x-windows terminal. It's very cool. :3
I have to wonder what stake Microsoft has in teen suicide and school shootings that they'd think this is a good idea. A bit of a leap you say? Let me lay it out for you.
Fat kid gets home from school, decides to play some games to put the bullshit he had to deal with at school behind him... Too bad his avatar is fat too! No escape from the ridicule and stupid crap! Or even worse, the same people who harass him at school start harassing him online, and then start harassing him at school ABOUT his fat avatar! BONUS POINTS!
So, depending on the kid's psychological makeup there are three possible outcomes:
First of all, buying ink cartridges is a waste of time and money. I own an Epson R1800, it's an entry-level wide format printer. (13x19 sheet or 13x44 roll medium max) A set of ink cartridges costs over a hundred dollars and when I'm making a lot of prints, it lasts about a month if I'm lucky. I finally said to hell with that, and bought a Continuous Flow System for it. Which was $300 for the system and 4oz bottles of all the ink. (iirc, the cartridges hold 0.4ozs of ink) Four ounces of ink lasts over a year, and costs only about twenty bucks more than a set of cartridges. And the stuff I get is for archival quality photo and art printing. It's lightfast and waterproof just like the original ink.
One of the big problems with cartridges, besides costing too much, is that in most cases it won't let you 'use up' the cartridge, because any time it runs dry you risk messing up the heads. So unless you buy one of those little things to zap the chip on the cartridge (Not a bad $15 investment if you're not ready for a CFS) you only end up using around half the ink in the cartridge.
As for what to do with that 'piece of e-waste'... What kind of geek are you?! Rip that sucker open!! There's all sorts of cool shit in there! Nice motors (Steppers if you're lucky), optical encoders, all sorts of useful springs, gears, belts, and pulleys...not to mention a couple of fairly precise steel bars. I saw something once about a guy making his own drafting pencils by lathing a bar from a printer. :P
Man, those crazy camera tracking rigs they have... Those initial tracking shots of the ascent are so stable and 'solid' they almost look like CG. Wow that was awesome. Kill those graphics and replace them with something that doesn't scream 'My other job is making powerpoint slideshows' and put it out on Blu-ray. I'll buy it.
I might be going to Anime Boston this year, I'll have to check it out. I hope they get some copies printed in the original Japanese, I'd love to buy them. This whole thing needs more of a hook though. Here's two ideas that would go a long way I think:
Thousands of dollars spent on little plastic anime girlies and ero 'hug pillow' covers would seem to speak otherwise, but practicality and usefulness are big with otaku culture. Highlighting certain capabilities of linux would help too. For instance, things like graphics apps, game development with Ren'Py, and story/comic/game writing and asset management with celtx. Also the fact that Linux will run on just about anything specs-wise.
Aww, someone mod this up. Sure it's not 100% on-topic, but it's related and funny. :D
Hell, I know people who had their consoles banned for no reason and MS told them to go take a leap.
No one tagged this one 'andnothingofvaluewaslost' yet?
Price hikes? No. Probably not. They were already sold out pretty much everywhere. So it's more likely we just won't see any until this is worked out. I'm not saying there won't be assholes selling 5870s for $800 on eBay, I mean, there ALWAYS are. I'm just saying it's not like Newegg is suddenly going to have them back in stock but for a hundred bucks more.
It occurs to me that taking away peoples' internet for what they may view as a perfectly reasonable use of their access (Or even worse, through no fault of their own) is going to KILL PEOPLE. I wish I were joking. I wish this was a joke. But if some kid murders his parents because they took away his Xbox for playing too much Halo, or someone commits suicide because their WoW account was hacked... What's going to happen when people have their right to use the internet revoked?
I have no qualms about saying that I cannot function without the internet. If I need to know something, I look it up on the internet. If I want to know what's going on, I check news sites. If I want to buy something, I buy it online. I do business online. And quite frankly, the number of people that I consider to be 'close friends' and 'colleagues' on the other side of my monitor far exceeds the number of people I know offline, by at least 20-to-1.
Nevermind the whole ridiculousness of it all anyway. Piracy is not theft. Nothing is stolen. There are copies made. And there's only two kinds of people who want copies of stuff: The ones who never would have paid money for it to begin with, and the ones who will end up actually buying it anyway. You can apply that to literally anything.
People are going to die because the entertainment industry doesn't want them getting something for free that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
Hundreds of people die every day in the industrialized world because they can't afford healthcare...and now we have the entertainment industry killing people because they think they lost a CD sale?
Here's a novel idea: Instead of trying to sell a CD with only one or two good songs on it for THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS and giving the artist (You know, those people who did all the work and that the consumer actually gives a shit about?) fuck-all, how about you get with the program and actually try to leverage the goddamn internet to sell things-- ACTUAL PRODUCTS PEOPLE WANT --in a manner that MAKES SENSE for a REASONABLE PRICE.
And people wonder why I don't want to participate in society.
How 'out of context' could it be? Apparently in this opening scene of the game you're a CIA operative who has infiltrated the terrorist group. Kind of why you get shot in the face by the badguys at the end. (Funny, that's exactly what happened at the end of the opening credits of CoD4:MW but it was a lot less 'interactive') And as far as I'm concerned, it is as it should be. And if IW ends up having to change it I'll be (more) pissed. Because you see/do worse shit every time you start up GTA.
If anything, this is designed to give you incentive to despise the antagonists, which it would do well for individuals less apathetic than myself. Personally, my 'giving a shit about people kicking puppies' quota was used up by stuff like the assault on NERV HQ in End of Evangelion. I guess once you see something that makes you think all of humanity being reduced to a vast sea of Tang is not such a bad thing, there's no going back.
Everyone I know who uses Hulu does so because we don't have TVs but still want to watch the few good shows on Television for free like everyone else can. The moment they start charging, there's going to be a almost complete drop-off in Hulu viewership and a huge spike in bittorrent traffic. Who gets the ad dollars then? Honestly? What little there is will go to the bittorrent sites.
Kinda gives me the warm-fuzzies, to be honest. I mean you always have those crazy-ass people going "HURRRRR PIRACY IS TERRORISM" but now I can argue that Hulu, by driving people away from watching their ad-supported free media, and producing web ad revenue for bittorrent sites, are 'supporting terrorism'. ZING!
My comment on this on Kotaku about sums it up.
YAY! Now I can't escape horrible lag and the unwashed masses by playing on a reliable, closely-moderated server full of people who aren't mentally-defective monkeys! Fucking awesome.
Seriously, what the hell? I've always loved clan servers. You find a good one with the gametype and map(s) you want, get in there, play well, and you start developing rivalries and camaraderie with the regulars and even gang up on the occasional asshat griefer/defective who joins. They even tend to have several servers running different maps/gametypes that the same subset of people play on. For the uninitiated, this is called A COMMUNITY. Look it up.
I don't want to be thrown into an endless stream of random assclowns with the exceptions of the 2-3 people on my buddy list, and I don't want to 'friend' every goddamn person I wouldn't mind playing with again. Not to mention the fact that this kind of hosting setup is going to mean the game plays like shit 80% of the time, with no guarantee of stability or performance.
I knew MW2 was too good to be true. I worried they'd find some way to completely fuck it up. Oh well, at least we'll have the singleplayer... Unless they suddenly require us to play with a fucking 360 controller.
Infinity Ward: If I wanted a game console, I'd buy a fucking game console. kthx
The AI in old NEO-GEO arcade fighting games is rather remarkable from what I understand. For example, in the Samurai Spirits series (a.k.a Samurai Shodown) it adapts to any patterns you exhibit early in the match and builds strategies to avoid and counter them later. I never imagined that games from the 16-bit era could have adaptive enemy AI. :O
Fine. I beat the damn game. Not because I was enjoying it, but because I'd be GOD DAMNED if I didn't beat this damnable game! The first part of the boss fight was BULLSHIT. It took me 60 lives to beat Level 9 on my second try. Fuck that. ARRGH! At least now I can delete it from my hard drive.
Grab a dictionary, look up 'entertainment'. This game pissed me off beyond what is reasonable. It's ABSOLUTE BASTARD hard and frustrating even in normal mode, and the fight at the end is impossible. Fuck it. A game is entertainment, and you're supposed to be able to ENJOY IT. I think I'll go play some Samurai Spirits Zero with my cabinet turned up to Level-8 instead, Sankuro's INVINCIBLE SELF-HEALING CHEAP INSTANT BULLSHIT is less frustrating than this, and I ALREADY want to kill people over THAT. (Also, the controls at least respond 100% of the time.)
Also, as far as flash-based platformers go, Canabalt is much better imo.
Once the griefers and gold farmers get involved, you're all proper-fucked.
I don't get why they didn't just tell google to go in and delete the mis-sent email(s) from the system? I mean, if they person didn't do anything wrong, why request that their email account be deleted entirely? If they're worried the user might have SEEN or copied them, the damage is done either way, the best you can do is remove access...so why have someone's account closed because you fucked up?
In fact, why didn't google suggest that, you know? "How about this, instead of you court-ordering us to delete someone's email account because you're a bunch of idiots, we'll just expunge the offending emails from the system, everyone happy?"
The only way he could have been any stupider, is if he logged in to change his FaceBook status to "Robbin a house!"
Sell next-gen consoles as kits! So they have to get their heads around some basic electrical engineering and motor skills! YEAH! 8D
Woah there, Big Blue. I call bullshit, shenanigans, and prior art. All it takes is a look at Hackaday to show that people have been doing stuff like this for months now.
I think I've seen one of those 27 kilo HDDs before. I volunteered at a local computer recycling program, and among many usable machines, they'd get old stuff that we were to dismantle, and separate into different kinds of materials for disposal. The one I saw was an IBM, and the outer housing for the HDD was roughly the shape and size of a washer or dryer. The host machine was similar but twice as long. It had an 8-inch floppy with what I think was some kind of auto-loader. I think, all told, it had hookups for THREE 220V circuits. (Two on the host, and one on the HDD) I wanted to get one of the drive platters for myself, but the best I could do was the 'Unit Emergency' killswitch off the host computer. (I had set aside the control panel from the host machine, but didn't have room to take it home that day, and someone tossed it.)
Also, holy crap. I never knew silicon wafers came from hugeass things of silicon like that, I always assumed they were made more or less in their final wafer form artificially from smaller pieces. o_O I guess it makes more sense that they're cut from massive homogeneous chunks of solid silicon.
I wish they had a better shot of the RCA tube memory. I've seen pictures of those before, the dies look cool in a vacuum tube like that. They look very intricate, like miniatures of space station solar panels or something, heh. (Like the die in an EPROM, but MUCH bigger)
Yeah, Vermonter here. I dropped Failpoint and went with Comcast for internet AND phone, when Failpoint refused to recognize the existence of my new apartment despite already providing service to the only other unit. The chronicles of my hellish move that cost me an extra month's rent thanks to Failpoint can be found here.
Just a rendering for now. Still trying to get my CNC machine built to cut the pieces. EVENTUALLY it will happen. :3
I don't know, man. The old IV-18 tubes are really wicked looking. You have a cylindrical glass vacuum tube, and inside it is a slab of glass with 7-segment digit phosphors, shiny silver traces, and extremely tiny, thin hexagonal grids infront of each digit. So, it basically looks like a glowing blue digital readout 'suspended' in a thin glass envelope.
There's also the IV-27 which is larger and 13 digits instead of 8, and the IV-21 (I think it's 21) which is a tiny version of the IV-18.