Fire. Spend 30 seconds uncapping powder horn, loading powder, loading musket ball. Remove ramrod, push ball down, lift musket, fire dead on shot at enemy. Musket ball loses accuracy at 40 yards and veers off into the unkown.
Repeat above process maybe 20 times or so, until you run out of powder or musket balls. Spend rest of match attempting to bayonett enemy. Get bayonnetted. Wound is minor but becomes infected. Have limb amputated.
Respawn in next map, get mowed down by cannon because you can't break rank.
Now I can't say I wouldn't play an RTS (or preferrably, a turn-based strategy game) set in the Civil War or Revolutionary War (I know there have been several good ones, but nothing lately that implements nicer 3D graphics and the accompanying terrain systems they afford), but any FPS set pre-WW I will either bite because the designers try to retain some semblance of realism, or be so ludicrously unrealistic that the setting would be pointless. Plus, do we really want to encourage a mad rush for the horses at the beginning of the match ("D00D... that horse was mine!")?
I wouldn't call if huffy, honestly. I don't really care what her opinion is of retail sales one way or another, other than to point out that the questions posed are not condescending to women at all, but are simply standard questions that a typical slaes clerk might ask. I would definitely agree with you regarding slime and commission (and even slimy non-commission), but her post wasn't about that subject. It was about salespeople taking a tone or posing questions that she felt questioned her tech ability.
Perhaps the connotation of the statement "Why do you want this" is different in the UK. Rather than direct, (Stateside, at least) I think most people would construe such a phrase to question their choice in product, ie. "Why do you want that thing?" While you may be comfortable with such a question being posed to you (and honestly, I would too), a reasonable amount of people would probably be put off by it. Asking an open-ended question or giving the customer an invitation to talk leans every bit as much toward consulting as blurting out "Why do you want that?" I could be slightly less direct and say, "what sorts of things will you be doing with your monitor", but I could just as easily see a salesperson simply going with something that almost all of their customer base does (pictures and photos, for example). Again, not trying to be huffy, just trying to point out that unless the tone was nasty, it likely wasn't meant in any way as a condescending remark.
And I would certainly agree with you that many of the extended warranty programs out there are complete crap. I would certainly agree with her if she said, "I've seen some bad examples of what happens with those warranties" or "I don't feel they're cost effective" or any of the above. To say that the warranty is condescending, though, is stretching it a bit, considering that my friend who has a master's in EE would probably be just as close to fixing a hard drive or LCD monitor as I, the poster, or the Pope.
At the risk of sounding offensive, I might point out that a lot of your responses are ludicrously condescending to a person who's simply making a couple of assumptions based on the vast majority of their customer base, male or female. I work in a repair center at a major retail electronics business (poke through my posts if you really care which one), and while I wouldn't say that it qualifies me as any sort of expert, it does pay decently enough for a crappy college town to keep me from needing student loans. Please understand that I am not condescending to women, but I do dumb things down. Guess what, I dumb things down for men, too, because about 95% of the populace doesn't care about tech enough to bother learning. It just isn't a passion in their life like it is to a lot of/. folk. That said:
In sales, the goal is to phrase any question as an open-ended one, discouraging a "yes" or "no" answer and encouraging a conversation. It helps the sales person learn a bit about you (which helps them make a recommendation to their average customer. You are obviously not their average customer, but they have no way of knowing either way).
Consider your responses, and the likely questions posed to you by the salesperson.
"No I do not need a large LCD to draw pictures on, I need it to see physics simulations."
Coming right out and asking, "why do you want this?" is an offensive statement to a person of either gender, so any salesperson in this situation is going to ask about a function used by the majority of the public. Drawing pictures or editing pictures or photographs is something almost any customer probably uses their computer for at least some of the time. If you do, that salesperson can ask about other things you do, and it opens up the conversation. If you don't (you obviously use it for physics simulations) it tells the employee other things about you (you know your shit, and on the outside chance that you're someone looking for a computer but who only cares about visualizing physics sims and NOT the hardware itself, they have a good idea of the sort of hardware you'd need). This is not an attempt to patronize you. Now, a person phrasing it with a patronizing tone to their voice, definitely, but almost any salesperson, knowledgeable or no, is going to ask you a similar question.
No I don't need a pop-up blocker, I use Linux and OSX, I out grew Windows when it was on version 3.11
This is a bit more off-the-wall. Again, laws of statisitics show that somewhere over 90% of the computer-using populace is running Windows, most of them likely IE. A pop-up blocker might be a wortwhile thing to those people, assuming they didn't already use one of the 90-jillion freeware products that do the same. This is a bit more into sleazy add-on territory IMHO, since it wouldn't be something any decent salesperson would point you toward unless your conversation steered toward web browsing or internet services, or something of the sort. Since a lot of stores nowadays seem to push ISPs as one of their products (and a lot of those pricier ISPs use pop-up blocking as one of their "premium" services that set them apart), it might just be a really clumsy attempt to segue into them selling you an ISP. I highly doubt you actually say, to their face, "I use Linux and OSX; I outgrew Windows when it was on 3.11", I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, because getting extra crap pushed on you is irritating. If you do, I might ask why you would direct such hostility toward a likely non-commissioned salesperson who is required to offer such services to customers in order to retain his or her job.
No I don't need your over priced warrenty, if it breaks I'll fix it myself.
I would crack up if you made this response to a person regarding anything other than maybe a television, CRT monitor, or stereo amp (the things easily repaired with a soldering iron and a little troubleshooting). I would hope to god that you weren't buying a retai
The two Lunar RPGs were released on Playstation a few years back (The Lunar series originally having been a SegaCD title). I can't speak to the other title, but I remember my friend being a huge fan of the console RPGs (back when we had time to devote to them), and picking up the Silver Star Story: Complete title. It was a nice deluxe set that came in a box about 2 times the thickness (same height and width) as a double CD case. It included a hardbound instruction manual (with a pseudo-leather cover), a nice fold-up cloth map (nice in the presentation sense, I don't know if it was good for gameplay), and a couple of Audio CDs featuring the soundtrack. It sold for $5 than your standard double CD game would've gone for, and seemed like a pretty cool setup.
Honestly, though, I bet most of the stuff was long since forgotten. Pack-ins are generally just a random thing that most people wouldn't have any use for, and with the exception of a functional map or hotkey guide (for really complicated games), I don't care one way or the other. Now, don't even get me started on crappy manuals, because that is something I truly believe has no substitute, in-game tutorial or no.
Random loosely related fact: Several researches seem to believe that this state is respobsible for many people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The "grey" alien that most people seem to point toward was actually originally used in an NBC miniseries in the late 70's and has sort of snowballed from that point.
Researchers theorize the people continue to see images of this alien representation on television and in print, and that it is incorporated into their stories. Their tales of being paralyzed by "rays" are really nothing more than being stuck in episodic sleep paralysis or hypnogogic/hypnopompic sleep states (those states right before you fall asleep or wake up).
Hanaho's Hotrod SE recently dropped in price from the well-nigh ludicrous $249 to the completely reasonable $100. The controller is a full-sized, double arcade joystick setup with seven buttons per player, plus a "coin insert" and "start" button for each player. It functions as nothing more than a standard PS/2 keyboard, and has a passthrough for your actual PS/2 keyboard. As such, it's driverless and keys are easily remapped/rebound without the need for any peculiar software. The whole thing is assembled using actual arcade components, enclosed in a laminated wood exterior (the same sort of stuff used in arcades). Bonus: it weighs like 15 lbs., so it doesn't go floppping every which way when you start wailing on the joystick.
While Lik-Sang's USB-> Playstation adapters definitely look cool, I would have to go with a hotrod for non-finnicky, functional use for MAME, as well as a fair range of console games. If you figure the $18 or so Lik-Sang charges, plus the cost of PS1 controllers (about $20 or so brand new), you're already at about $60, not counting shipping (for the lik-sang, I'd assume you'd buy a PS controller locally). Drop about $40 more into it and you've got a bad-ass controller that's natively mapped in Mame (use the -ctrlr HotrodSE flag to do so), and that will make anyone who sees it jealous. Unless you intend to use a peculiar controller (say, a DDR dance pad), I would say this thing is a must.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Hanaho, I just think that the Hotrod is a great value for the money.
I'm aware of the size restrictions, but note that I didn't say I wanted to print those bills, although I could certainly see how it appeared that way. Of course, even following guidelines such as the 30% rule (I believe it's 25% or 30% larger or smaller to keep the Secret Service from busting you) are difficult to follow when you can't scan the damn source.
I could see uses for magazine covers (not with my picture, of course) for an article of the Fed or stock market rise-fall, or a Forbes/Fortune profile on random succesful business (with CEO/President/whomever the article deems as responsible for turnaround/success in the portrait). All of these are scenarios that would require a high-res scan, are completely legit uses, and would be shut-down by this software.
My father works for Shell, and I remember him telling me about the robotic fill-up system they'd developed a few years back. Although he wasn't terribly forthcoming with the nitty-gritty details, I imagine it simply operated based on a database of your cars' particular measurements coupled with a few at-the-pump IR measurements to fine adjust. The coolest part of the system was when he told me that it could fill an entire 15-gallon tank in (I believe) a little under a minute when coupled with an RF payment system.
But they couldn't use it, because there are federal regulations governing the pressure allowed on a gas pump. Not for safety reasons relating to the car, but so that the jack-holes that try to top-off their tanks can't send a boatload of gas spewing out in all directions. The system was well past prototype stage, as result, because they were trying to convince whatever governing body (EPA, probably) that, "hey, this is a robot! It doesn't try to top-off. The pressure regulation is kind of pointless in this situation."
Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it, and so Shell's newly re-done stations simply have the highest pressure allowed by the regulations.
The last time this feature was mentioned, someone cracked a joke about rap album covers. While a small niche, scanning money for non-counterfeit purposes is certainly not out of the question. Beyond making a dorky rap album cover, I might also want to make a parody of said genre, or even (gasp!) make novelty bills with my picture in the center. All of these are completely legit uses for scanning and manipulating currency, and the anti-counterfeiting software is ignoring the fact that (as far as I understand) getting passable paper is the toughest part of the equation.
Outside of the obvious comments about teaching the fundamentals, not a particular method (it does seem a bit too community college-ish), I would recommend a project-oriented capstone course. Of the many students I've spoken to who needed one of these, the vast majority found them to be the most difficult but worthwhile classes. The University of North Texas (located a few miles from several big-name PC game developers) have an interdisciplinary game design course that's pushed as one of the final courses for students interested in the subject. It encompasses both the CS department and the art department, and they have one semester to develop a working game. Something like this teaches planning, working as part of a team, logical delegating of tasks, time-management, and a whole slew of other things that even a difficult upper-level programming (or art) class simply can't teach.
As an alternate example, a friend of mine graduated a little less than a year ago. His senior Electrical Engineering project was a small group effort (~6 students, IIRC) to design the power source for an anti-personnel missile for Lockheed Martin. Basically, they were given specs (size, acceptable heat levels, power output needed), and were working to design an actual part that would be used in an actual product. The most telling part of the experience was one statement he made a few months later:
"You know, I wish that everytime a professor had taught us something, they would've said, 'by the way, this doesn't actually work in the real world'".
A good application of learning can have a much better result for the student than one more class on topic X. Of course, if poorly done, such classes have the ability to completely screw over good students, impart little knowledge, and piss off industry contacts, but making it work shouldn't be too terribly difficult.
So right. I was actually going to stick in a tip to pick up those goofy adapters, but I got called away for a moment, then forgot when I had returned to finish the post.
I do keep some around for repairs, but it's generally a non-issue. 9 times out of 10, I simply refuse to repair or upgrade anything with AT, since it basically means "old crap that's not worth the time I'll sink into it trying to get some random PCI USB card to actually work".
While this is not necessarily what I'd recommend for serious metal work or case modding or anything, the following is basically what I'd want in a computer area in my garage (a place where I could repair, upgrade, build, tinker, etc.). It'd basically jive with what I have at the repair center I work at.
First thing: get yourself an anti-static countertop. If you poke around, you may find that it'll cost you basically as much to get a decent anti-static counter as to get a halfway decent metal or laminated wood area. Static isn't a huge deal where I live (my part of Texas is humid enough that I never even bother at the house), but it is nice to have, particularly if you are in an area dry enough to worry about it. I actually prefer a countertop over a desk-height area, with a nice bar-stool height rolling chair. I'd go for flourescent lighting for power consumption, and get a good pull-down incandescent (the hooked sort that have a semi-retractable cable to take them up out of the way when not needed) for when I really need some brightness.
Get a large file cabinet. Fill one drawer with a big-ass, multi-tier toolbox with the assorted big 'n' small screwdrivers, nut drivers, pliers, dremel bits, etc. that you need. Get one of those small, sectioned tackle organizers designed for small hooks, flys, etc. Use it to compartmentalize your screws of different size and type. Fill another drawer with large capacity file dividers (the big, say, 2" sort), and fill those file dividers with anti-static bags with spare components (the assorted video, LAN, RAM, etc. that you might use for trouble shooting). Get some of the gallon-size freezer bags and use them to organize your cables. Unless it's something very non-prone to tangling (IDE ribbons, for example), stow each cable in its own bag. File these.
Get a cheap CRT, a keyboard with zero "grandma" buttons, and a basic, 2button + scroll optical mouse. If possible, have both KB and mouse use USB with PS/2 adapters, that way you're set for whatever randomness comes onto your bench. Get a cheap set of speakers (but make sure they're powered units). Run these into a KVM switch, and have a throwaway old machine with a big-ass hard drive in it for when you need to dump everything off for whatever reason (or preferably, have a file server and never have to worry). Get a cheap 10/100 hub (not switch) for checking LAN functionality and for the occasional time when you might want to sniff packets coming off of a machine you're troubleshooting. Oh, and order a notebook IDE->full-size IDE adapter. You never know when you might need one, and although they cost next to nothing, I never seem to be able to find a local vendor that carries them. If you're planning on, I don't know, tinkering with the neighbors machines for the hell of it (God help you), I'd tell you to snag a cheap PCI IDE card with a couple of controllers, for those times when you need to pop a drive in to pull some data off or check whether the problem is drive, board, or cable.
If you're the type of person who tends to work on a lot of things at a time, just pick-up a wire rack shelf to have some place to stow projects while you work on them.
Note: A lot of this applies to the fact that I work on other people's machines day in, day out. I don't have anyhting near this level at the house, but if I were going to build a small workshop anyway, the costs for equipment mentioned here would be in line with what I'd expect to spend.
Actually, I recall reading that they were considering shifting to 2.5" HDDs in the BTX standard. Note: This doesn't mean laptop Hard drives. Apparently, as rotational speeds have gotten higher, the size of the physical platters has shrunk in order to increase reliability (the force at the edge of the smaller platters is less at the same rotational speed). The 3.5" size simply exists now because it's a legacy standard, but they plan to phase down to 2.5" drives since it won't be an issue, space-wise.
As long as the extra space isn't crucial for reliability (although I don't know how we could get LESS reliable IDE drives), I'm all for the smaller space requirements and the accompanying case designs they will afford.
I didn't count on the halftone printing being quite as visible at that resolution, but I actually did want a bit of "nastiness" to the picture. It was for a project that required some sort of faux-public service announcement, and my personal PSA was on anorexia. I ultimately ended up using a slightly different picture a a lower resolution and applying noise and a negative effect to get the "nastiness" I was after.
Negative. The Mac has 768MB of RAM and the image consumed ~400 at 800dpi. Running a crapload of filters would probably have been out of the question, but busting out a simple polygonal lasso shouldn't have been an issue.
I was using Photoshop 7.0 on OS X and ran into a similar problem. I was scanning a Versace ad from a magazine (it was for a random class project), and I needed to be able to blow up a portion of the ad a reasonable amount. I planned to put it on a large print, so I scanned at 800dpi. Photoshop apparently saw some sort of watermark in the ad itself (or the magazine page, it was in one of those gigantic fashion mags with like 500 pages, 8 of which are content) and refused to allow me to do anything with it other than resizing. I scanned at a lower dpi (400), and was able to circumvent the problem. Seemed kind of ghetto to me, though. I haven't tried it under CS, but I'll bet the watermarks exist there, as well.
Just a side note: I know for sure that both Maxtor and IBM/Hitachi have firmware updates for drives that decrease the drive's noise by slightly degrading the performance of the drives. Other drive manufacturers likely have similar abilities, but it isn't anything I've ever investigated.
Also the type and construction of the case you're using can make a big difference in what you're hearing. My primary machine is an Antec full tower made entirely from steel. While it may weigh over 25lbs. without anything in it, it's quieter with two 10K RPM SCSI drives and one 7200 RPM IDE drive (plus about 8 fans total) than my girlfriend's gaming machine (an aluminum tower with four fans and one 7200 RPM IDE drive)
The current PS2 does support component output, albeit interlaced (a couple of games, such as Tekken 4, support a 480p mode by doing so in software). You must purchase the component output cable, which runs about $30. No biggie. Incidentally, this is a very similar arrangement to the XBox, where you need the HD pack to get component, and games still have to support the 480p mode to use it (although a much, much larger range of games support it).
The optical output is in place mostly for DVD playback. Dolby Digital 5.1 is supported in a lot of pre-rendered/recorded cutscenes, but to my knowledge, it doesn't exist in a gameplay mode for any game. DTS released a middleware package that allows developers to add DTS 5.1 to their games, but it is encoded using one of the processors, so there is a minor performance loss. A few EA games (SSX tricky is the only one I know off the top of my head, but there have been others) use this feature. This is in contrast to the XBox, which has a hardware dolby digital encoder and thus almost all games support DD 5.1.
I recall seeing an algorithm that partially ignored traditional dictionary-type translations and relied more on a relational database. For example, rather than work word by word through a given sentence, it attempted to relate that sentence to other sentences and solve in that matter. If it sounds confusing, it's mostly because I read about it quite a while back, and really can't recall most of the details. A sentence such as "Comment Allez-Vous?" would literally translate as "how are you going", or something to that effect (Allez is the second-person plural of 'to go' in French), but is obviously more colloquially translated as "How's it going?" Rather than concern itself with the meanings of the individual words, this algorithm would know the meaning of that phrase and use it as sort-of guidelines for how an unkown phrase would translate. And I'm sure doing that properly, in realtime, with no errors would require a ludicrous amount of processor power and be ridiculously useful. Go ahead an couple that with the above-mentioned truly accurate voice recognition and you've got the legitimate workings of a device most would consider to be science fiction.
Re:The cards are still fully supported.
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 1
Not meant as a flame, but the KyroII ought to support both of those games easily; they're based on engines avilable at the time the card was out (NS is a counter-strike mod, right? Which would make it the Half-life engine, and Enemy Territory is the Q3 engine). Games that use their own, homegrown engine (or possibly the renderware engine; I haven't looked hard enough at some of the guilty parties) simply aren't tested against the KyroII, nor do driver patches seem avilable to resolve that problem.
Future support? Driver updates?
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system that produced performance similar to the then-current Geforce 2s (although some synthetic benchmarks indicated otherwise) while being priced more in line with the MX line of cards. After much reading and research, a buddy of mine decided to pick one up for his machine, his reasoning being that he wasn't a super hardcore gamer, but wanted to be able to throw down with us every once in a while.
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported, even though NEC (the chip designer) and Guillemot/Hercules (the card manufacturer) are still going strong. My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself.
The moral of the story: S3 is a reasonably well-known name. So is Hercules/Guillemot/NEC. It's gonna take a hell of a price/performance ratio to get me to recommend a video card not based on Ati or NVidia after the Kyro debacle.
Excellent point. I work in a retail store as a repair tech, and we started running into new.net (the most sinister of all spyware for reasons that will become clear very soon) about 6 or 7 months ago. New.Net basically hijacks the TCP stack in Windows, and forcibly removing it with ad-aware will screw windows up to the point where it needs to be re-installed. Of course, our simple process now is to just manually uninstall new.net, then proceed with the normal ad-aware process.
Can you imagine the fun Dell's tech support would have trying to fix this? "um, oky, run this random program, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, make sure there isn't this other program."
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Fire. Spend 30 seconds uncapping powder horn, loading powder, loading musket ball. Remove ramrod, push ball down, lift musket, fire dead on shot at enemy. Musket ball loses accuracy at 40 yards and veers off into the unkown.
Repeat above process maybe 20 times or so, until you run out of powder or musket balls. Spend rest of match attempting to bayonett enemy. Get bayonnetted. Wound is minor but becomes infected. Have limb amputated.
Respawn in next map, get mowed down by cannon because you can't break rank.
Now I can't say I wouldn't play an RTS (or preferrably, a turn-based strategy game) set in the Civil War or Revolutionary War (I know there have been several good ones, but nothing lately that implements nicer 3D graphics and the accompanying terrain systems they afford), but any FPS set pre-WW I will either bite because the designers try to retain some semblance of realism, or be so ludicrously unrealistic that the setting would be pointless. Plus, do we really want to encourage a mad rush for the horses at the beginning of the match ("D00D... that horse was mine!")?
I wouldn't call if huffy, honestly. I don't really care what her opinion is of retail sales one way or another, other than to point out that the questions posed are not condescending to women at all, but are simply standard questions that a typical slaes clerk might ask. I would definitely agree with you regarding slime and commission (and even slimy non-commission), but her post wasn't about that subject. It was about salespeople taking a tone or posing questions that she felt questioned her tech ability.
Perhaps the connotation of the statement "Why do you want this" is different in the UK. Rather than direct, (Stateside, at least) I think most people would construe such a phrase to question their choice in product, ie. "Why do you want that thing?" While you may be comfortable with such a question being posed to you (and honestly, I would too), a reasonable amount of people would probably be put off by it. Asking an open-ended question or giving the customer an invitation to talk leans every bit as much toward consulting as blurting out "Why do you want that?" I could be slightly less direct and say, "what sorts of things will you be doing with your monitor", but I could just as easily see a salesperson simply going with something that almost all of their customer base does (pictures and photos, for example). Again, not trying to be huffy, just trying to point out that unless the tone was nasty, it likely wasn't meant in any way as a condescending remark.
And I would certainly agree with you that many of the extended warranty programs out there are complete crap. I would certainly agree with her if she said, "I've seen some bad examples of what happens with those warranties" or "I don't feel they're cost effective" or any of the above. To say that the warranty is condescending, though, is stretching it a bit, considering that my friend who has a master's in EE would probably be just as close to fixing a hard drive or LCD monitor as I, the poster, or the Pope.
At the risk of sounding offensive, I might point out that a lot of your responses are ludicrously condescending to a person who's simply making a couple of assumptions based on the vast majority of their customer base, male or female. I work in a repair center at a major retail electronics business (poke through my posts if you really care which one), and while I wouldn't say that it qualifies me as any sort of expert, it does pay decently enough for a crappy college town to keep me from needing student loans. Please understand that I am not condescending to women, but I do dumb things down. Guess what, I dumb things down for men, too, because about 95% of the populace doesn't care about tech enough to bother learning. It just isn't a passion in their life like it is to a lot of /. folk. That said:
In sales, the goal is to phrase any question as an open-ended one, discouraging a "yes" or "no" answer and encouraging a conversation. It helps the sales person learn a bit about you (which helps them make a recommendation to their average customer. You are obviously not their average customer, but they have no way of knowing either way).
Consider your responses, and the likely questions posed to you by the salesperson.
"No I do not need a large LCD to draw pictures on, I need it to see physics simulations."
Coming right out and asking, "why do you want this?" is an offensive statement to a person of either gender, so any salesperson in this situation is going to ask about a function used by the majority of the public. Drawing pictures or editing pictures or photographs is something almost any customer probably uses their computer for at least some of the time. If you do, that salesperson can ask about other things you do, and it opens up the conversation. If you don't (you obviously use it for physics simulations) it tells the employee other things about you (you know your shit, and on the outside chance that you're someone looking for a computer but who only cares about visualizing physics sims and NOT the hardware itself, they have a good idea of the sort of hardware you'd need). This is not an attempt to patronize you. Now, a person phrasing it with a patronizing tone to their voice, definitely, but almost any salesperson, knowledgeable or no, is going to ask you a similar question.
No I don't need a pop-up blocker, I use Linux and OSX, I out grew Windows when it was on version 3.11
This is a bit more off-the-wall. Again, laws of statisitics show that somewhere over 90% of the computer-using populace is running Windows, most of them likely IE. A pop-up blocker might be a wortwhile thing to those people, assuming they didn't already use one of the 90-jillion freeware products that do the same. This is a bit more into sleazy add-on territory IMHO, since it wouldn't be something any decent salesperson would point you toward unless your conversation steered toward web browsing or internet services, or something of the sort. Since a lot of stores nowadays seem to push ISPs as one of their products (and a lot of those pricier ISPs use pop-up blocking as one of their "premium" services that set them apart), it might just be a really clumsy attempt to segue into them selling you an ISP. I highly doubt you actually say, to their face, "I use Linux and OSX; I outgrew Windows when it was on 3.11", I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, because getting extra crap pushed on you is irritating. If you do, I might ask why you would direct such hostility toward a likely non-commissioned salesperson who is required to offer such services to customers in order to retain his or her job.
No I don't need your over priced warrenty, if it breaks I'll fix it myself.
I would crack up if you made this response to a person regarding anything other than maybe a television, CRT monitor, or stereo amp (the things easily repaired with a soldering iron and a little troubleshooting). I would hope to god that you weren't buying a retai
The two Lunar RPGs were released on Playstation a few years back (The Lunar series originally having been a SegaCD title). I can't speak to the other title, but I remember my friend being a huge fan of the console RPGs (back when we had time to devote to them), and picking up the Silver Star Story: Complete title. It was a nice deluxe set that came in a box about 2 times the thickness (same height and width) as a double CD case. It included a hardbound instruction manual (with a pseudo-leather cover), a nice fold-up cloth map (nice in the presentation sense, I don't know if it was good for gameplay), and a couple of Audio CDs featuring the soundtrack. It sold for $5 than your standard double CD game would've gone for, and seemed like a pretty cool setup.
Honestly, though, I bet most of the stuff was long since forgotten. Pack-ins are generally just a random thing that most people wouldn't have any use for, and with the exception of a functional map or hotkey guide (for really complicated games), I don't care one way or the other. Now, don't even get me started on crappy manuals, because that is something I truly believe has no substitute, in-game tutorial or no.
Random loosely related fact: Several researches seem to believe that this state is respobsible for many people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The "grey" alien that most people seem to point toward was actually originally used in an NBC miniseries in the late 70's and has sort of snowballed from that point.
Researchers theorize the people continue to see images of this alien representation on television and in print, and that it is incorporated into their stories. Their tales of being paralyzed by "rays" are really nothing more than being stuck in episodic sleep paralysis or hypnogogic/hypnopompic sleep states (those states right before you fall asleep or wake up).
Hanaho's Hotrod SE recently dropped in price from the well-nigh ludicrous $249 to the completely reasonable $100. The controller is a full-sized, double arcade joystick setup with seven buttons per player, plus a "coin insert" and "start" button for each player. It functions as nothing more than a standard PS/2 keyboard, and has a passthrough for your actual PS/2 keyboard. As such, it's driverless and keys are easily remapped/rebound without the need for any peculiar software. The whole thing is assembled using actual arcade components, enclosed in a laminated wood exterior (the same sort of stuff used in arcades). Bonus: it weighs like 15 lbs., so it doesn't go floppping every which way when you start wailing on the joystick.
While Lik-Sang's USB-> Playstation adapters definitely look cool, I would have to go with a hotrod for non-finnicky, functional use for MAME, as well as a fair range of console games. If you figure the $18 or so Lik-Sang charges, plus the cost of PS1 controllers (about $20 or so brand new), you're already at about $60, not counting shipping (for the lik-sang, I'd assume you'd buy a PS controller locally). Drop about $40 more into it and you've got a bad-ass controller that's natively mapped in Mame (use the -ctrlr HotrodSE flag to do so), and that will make anyone who sees it jealous. Unless you intend to use a peculiar controller (say, a DDR dance pad), I would say this thing is a must.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Hanaho, I just think that the Hotrod is a great value for the money.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The Powerglove... 2!" ::Crickets heard chirping::
It would be worth it for the sheer humor value.
I'm aware of the size restrictions, but note that I didn't say I wanted to print those bills, although I could certainly see how it appeared that way. Of course, even following guidelines such as the 30% rule (I believe it's 25% or 30% larger or smaller to keep the Secret Service from busting you) are difficult to follow when you can't scan the damn source.
I could see uses for magazine covers (not with my picture, of course) for an article of the Fed or stock market rise-fall, or a Forbes/Fortune profile on random succesful business (with CEO/President/whomever the article deems as responsible for turnaround/success in the portrait). All of these are scenarios that would require a high-res scan, are completely legit uses, and would be shut-down by this software.
My father works for Shell, and I remember him telling me about the robotic fill-up system they'd developed a few years back. Although he wasn't terribly forthcoming with the nitty-gritty details, I imagine it simply operated based on a database of your cars' particular measurements coupled with a few at-the-pump IR measurements to fine adjust. The coolest part of the system was when he told me that it could fill an entire 15-gallon tank in (I believe) a little under a minute when coupled with an RF payment system.
But they couldn't use it, because there are federal regulations governing the pressure allowed on a gas pump. Not for safety reasons relating to the car, but so that the jack-holes that try to top-off their tanks can't send a boatload of gas spewing out in all directions. The system was well past prototype stage, as result, because they were trying to convince whatever governing body (EPA, probably) that, "hey, this is a robot! It doesn't try to top-off. The pressure regulation is kind of pointless in this situation."
Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it, and so Shell's newly re-done stations simply have the highest pressure allowed by the regulations.
The last time this feature was mentioned, someone cracked a joke about rap album covers. While a small niche, scanning money for non-counterfeit purposes is certainly not out of the question. Beyond making a dorky rap album cover, I might also want to make a parody of said genre, or even (gasp!) make novelty bills with my picture in the center. All of these are completely legit uses for scanning and manipulating currency, and the anti-counterfeiting software is ignoring the fact that (as far as I understand) getting passable paper is the toughest part of the equation.
Outside of the obvious comments about teaching the fundamentals, not a particular method (it does seem a bit too community college-ish), I would recommend a project-oriented capstone course. Of the many students I've spoken to who needed one of these, the vast majority found them to be the most difficult but worthwhile classes. The University of North Texas (located a few miles from several big-name PC game developers) have an interdisciplinary game design course that's pushed as one of the final courses for students interested in the subject. It encompasses both the CS department and the art department, and they have one semester to develop a working game. Something like this teaches planning, working as part of a team, logical delegating of tasks, time-management, and a whole slew of other things that even a difficult upper-level programming (or art) class simply can't teach.
As an alternate example, a friend of mine graduated a little less than a year ago. His senior Electrical Engineering project was a small group effort (~6 students, IIRC) to design the power source for an anti-personnel missile for Lockheed Martin. Basically, they were given specs (size, acceptable heat levels, power output needed), and were working to design an actual part that would be used in an actual product. The most telling part of the experience was one statement he made a few months later:
"You know, I wish that everytime a professor had taught us something, they would've said, 'by the way, this doesn't actually work in the real world'".
A good application of learning can have a much better result for the student than one more class on topic X. Of course, if poorly done, such classes have the ability to completely screw over good students, impart little knowledge, and piss off industry contacts, but making it work shouldn't be too terribly difficult.
So right. I was actually going to stick in a tip to pick up those goofy adapters, but I got called away for a moment, then forgot when I had returned to finish the post.
I do keep some around for repairs, but it's generally a non-issue. 9 times out of 10, I simply refuse to repair or upgrade anything with AT, since it basically means "old crap that's not worth the time I'll sink into it trying to get some random PCI USB card to actually work".
While this is not necessarily what I'd recommend for serious metal work or case modding or anything, the following is basically what I'd want in a computer area in my garage (a place where I could repair, upgrade, build, tinker, etc.). It'd basically jive with what I have at the repair center I work at.
First thing: get yourself an anti-static countertop. If you poke around, you may find that it'll cost you basically as much to get a decent anti-static counter as to get a halfway decent metal or laminated wood area. Static isn't a huge deal where I live (my part of Texas is humid enough that I never even bother at the house), but it is nice to have, particularly if you are in an area dry enough to worry about it. I actually prefer a countertop over a desk-height area, with a nice bar-stool height rolling chair. I'd go for flourescent lighting for power consumption, and get a good pull-down incandescent (the hooked sort that have a semi-retractable cable to take them up out of the way when not needed) for when I really need some brightness.
Get a large file cabinet. Fill one drawer with a big-ass, multi-tier toolbox with the assorted big 'n' small screwdrivers, nut drivers, pliers, dremel bits, etc. that you need. Get one of those small, sectioned tackle organizers designed for small hooks, flys, etc. Use it to compartmentalize your screws of different size and type. Fill another drawer with large capacity file dividers (the big, say, 2" sort), and fill those file dividers with anti-static bags with spare components (the assorted video, LAN, RAM, etc. that you might use for trouble shooting). Get some of the gallon-size freezer bags and use them to organize your cables. Unless it's something very non-prone to tangling (IDE ribbons, for example), stow each cable in its own bag. File these.
Get a cheap CRT, a keyboard with zero "grandma" buttons, and a basic, 2button + scroll optical mouse. If possible, have both KB and mouse use USB with PS/2 adapters, that way you're set for whatever randomness comes onto your bench. Get a cheap set of speakers (but make sure they're powered units). Run these into a KVM switch, and have a throwaway old machine with a big-ass hard drive in it for when you need to dump everything off for whatever reason (or preferably, have a file server and never have to worry). Get a cheap 10/100 hub (not switch) for checking LAN functionality and for the occasional time when you might want to sniff packets coming off of a machine you're troubleshooting. Oh, and order a notebook IDE->full-size IDE adapter. You never know when you might need one, and although they cost next to nothing, I never seem to be able to find a local vendor that carries them. If you're planning on, I don't know, tinkering with the neighbors machines for the hell of it (God help you), I'd tell you to snag a cheap PCI IDE card with a couple of controllers, for those times when you need to pop a drive in to pull some data off or check whether the problem is drive, board, or cable.
If you're the type of person who tends to work on a lot of things at a time, just pick-up a wire rack shelf to have some place to stow projects while you work on them.
Note: A lot of this applies to the fact that I work on other people's machines day in, day out. I don't have anyhting near this level at the house, but if I were going to build a small workshop anyway, the costs for equipment mentioned here would be in line with what I'd expect to spend.
Actually, I recall reading that they were considering shifting to 2.5" HDDs in the BTX standard. Note: This doesn't mean laptop Hard drives. Apparently, as rotational speeds have gotten higher, the size of the physical platters has shrunk in order to increase reliability (the force at the edge of the smaller platters is less at the same rotational speed). The 3.5" size simply exists now because it's a legacy standard, but they plan to phase down to 2.5" drives since it won't be an issue, space-wise.
As long as the extra space isn't crucial for reliability (although I don't know how we could get LESS reliable IDE drives), I'm all for the smaller space requirements and the accompanying case designs they will afford.
I didn't count on the halftone printing being quite as visible at that resolution, but I actually did want a bit of "nastiness" to the picture. It was for a project that required some sort of faux-public service announcement, and my personal PSA was on anorexia. I ultimately ended up using a slightly different picture a a lower resolution and applying noise and a negative effect to get the "nastiness" I was after.
Negative. The Mac has 768MB of RAM and the image consumed ~400 at 800dpi. Running a crapload of filters would probably have been out of the question, but busting out a simple polygonal lasso shouldn't have been an issue.
I was using Photoshop 7.0 on OS X and ran into a similar problem. I was scanning a Versace ad from a magazine (it was for a random class project), and I needed to be able to blow up a portion of the ad a reasonable amount. I planned to put it on a large print, so I scanned at 800dpi. Photoshop apparently saw some sort of watermark in the ad itself (or the magazine page, it was in one of those gigantic fashion mags with like 500 pages, 8 of which are content) and refused to allow me to do anything with it other than resizing. I scanned at a lower dpi (400), and was able to circumvent the problem. Seemed kind of ghetto to me, though. I haven't tried it under CS, but I'll bet the watermarks exist there, as well.
Just a side note: I know for sure that both Maxtor and IBM/Hitachi have firmware updates for drives that decrease the drive's noise by slightly degrading the performance of the drives. Other drive manufacturers likely have similar abilities, but it isn't anything I've ever investigated.
Also the type and construction of the case you're using can make a big difference in what you're hearing. My primary machine is an Antec full tower made entirely from steel. While it may weigh over 25lbs. without anything in it, it's quieter with two 10K RPM SCSI drives and one 7200 RPM IDE drive (plus about 8 fans total) than my girlfriend's gaming machine (an aluminum tower with four fans and one 7200 RPM IDE drive)
Just a couple of notes there:
The current PS2 does support component output, albeit interlaced (a couple of games, such as Tekken 4, support a 480p mode by doing so in software). You must purchase the component output cable, which runs about $30. No biggie. Incidentally, this is a very similar arrangement to the XBox, where you need the HD pack to get component, and games still have to support the 480p mode to use it (although a much, much larger range of games support it).
The optical output is in place mostly for DVD playback. Dolby Digital 5.1 is supported in a lot of pre-rendered/recorded cutscenes, but to my knowledge, it doesn't exist in a gameplay mode for any game. DTS released a middleware package that allows developers to add DTS 5.1 to their games, but it is encoded using one of the processors, so there is a minor performance loss. A few EA games (SSX tricky is the only one I know off the top of my head, but there have been others) use this feature. This is in contrast to the XBox, which has a hardware dolby digital encoder and thus almost all games support DD 5.1.
All your other points were definitely valid.
Language translations.
I recall seeing an algorithm that partially ignored traditional dictionary-type translations and relied more on a relational database. For example, rather than work word by word through a given sentence, it attempted to relate that sentence to other sentences and solve in that matter. If it sounds confusing, it's mostly because I read about it quite a while back, and really can't recall most of the details. A sentence such as "Comment Allez-Vous?" would literally translate as "how are you going", or something to that effect (Allez is the second-person plural of 'to go' in French), but is obviously more colloquially translated as "How's it going?" Rather than concern itself with the meanings of the individual words, this algorithm would know the meaning of that phrase and use it as sort-of guidelines for how an unkown phrase would translate. And I'm sure doing that properly, in realtime, with no errors would require a ludicrous amount of processor power and be ridiculously useful. Go ahead an couple that with the above-mentioned truly accurate voice recognition and you've got the legitimate workings of a device most would consider to be science fiction.
Not meant as a flame, but the KyroII ought to support both of those games easily; they're based on engines avilable at the time the card was out (NS is a counter-strike mod, right? Which would make it the Half-life engine, and Enemy Territory is the Q3 engine). Games that use their own, homegrown engine (or possibly the renderware engine; I haven't looked hard enough at some of the guilty parties) simply aren't tested against the KyroII, nor do driver patches seem avilable to resolve that problem.
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system that produced performance similar to the then-current Geforce 2s (although some synthetic benchmarks indicated otherwise) while being priced more in line with the MX line of cards. After much reading and research, a buddy of mine decided to pick one up for his machine, his reasoning being that he wasn't a super hardcore gamer, but wanted to be able to throw down with us every once in a while.
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported, even though NEC (the chip designer) and Guillemot/Hercules (the card manufacturer) are still going strong. My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself.
The moral of the story: S3 is a reasonably well-known name. So is Hercules/Guillemot/NEC. It's gonna take a hell of a price/performance ratio to get me to recommend a video card not based on Ati or NVidia after the Kyro debacle.
hmmm. Where to find a PPC equipped small form factor computer? I'd probably look for something Cube shaped .
Am I the only one who saw that headline and read: "Star wars game announced, delayed"?
Excellent point. I work in a retail store as a repair tech, and we started running into new.net (the most sinister of all spyware for reasons that will become clear very soon) about 6 or 7 months ago. New.Net basically hijacks the TCP stack in Windows, and forcibly removing it with ad-aware will screw windows up to the point where it needs to be re-installed. Of course, our simple process now is to just manually uninstall new.net, then proceed with the normal ad-aware process.
Can you imagine the fun Dell's tech support would have trying to fix this? "um, oky, run this random program, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, make sure there isn't this other program."