This is what I think the article was referring to. It is used to hoist a radar system high in the air. They also use one to broadcast propiganda into Cuba from a site in Florida. I think I remember reading about them being used more for drug interdiction than anything else.
Honig
That is really nice. My current job is nothing like that, my boss is an old school accountant who wants you there at 7:45 and leaving at 5:15 like a manager should. Yes I am a manager, but I manage myself and that is it. I personally work best from 2:30 in the afternoon till around 9 or 10 at night. But this company will not see that yet, as there is a nice bonus tied to my "performance" over the course of the first 6 months.
At my former job, which was very simular to this one; an IT department of one, I shut a bunch of the office whiners up by staying all night to get a new server up and running so they could use it the next day. Another time, they needed help in the distribiution center overnight and I stayed all night again to help out. People quit giving me crap about comming in at 9am after that.
Honig
Might be the fact that Terminals D and E are like a mile from the baggage check/security checkpoint. That said, unless it has been a hell of a trip, I usual walk instead of ride the train to baggage claim. Something about wanting a little blood to ciruclate through my legs after being folded up on a plane for at least 2 hours.
Honig
My former employer makes polyurethane foam (Think Great Stuff or any other of the foam hole fillers, just mixed in a different ratio and in different colors) flower pots. We stapled a header card to the bottom of every pot with the barcode information on there. Worked well until people started switching the barcodes for the 14" pot(~$10.00) to the 24" pot (~26.00)> Needless to say, the stores were a little pissed. So we came up with a adhesive label that would stick to polyurethane foam. Not the easiest thing to stick to, espcially with paint on them.
And barcode labels were a PITA to run at any high speeds on the Zebra 140s we used. Thank god I left that hell hole.
Honig
Though nobody has yet been prosecuted under the law, Provos,
a German national, says his concern is genuine. "As a foreigner I have to be very careful... I'd rather follow the law to the letter than be negatively surprised later."
He is not a US Citizen, nor a Michigan citzen. Read the article. He gets his visa revoked and a trip home, or a nice little jail sentence, but I'm sure the German government would call bulls*it and try to get him back. but at least by putting his work in another country the US Government cannot completely take it as evidence.
Honig
Uh.No.
Look here.
If you know how to edit an.ini file, then you to can setup Windows 2k without a registration key by change 000 to 270 at the end of a pid= line.
I would say know of what you speak before you speak, but well this is/.
um. They DO charge for video taping a certain sites. Kinda pissed me off, then I realized that their ten peso charge was about a dollar and fifty cents. Not like I am financing the government with 10 pesos...
These are usually plastic "fiber optics". Basicly is a light pipe like some cases use for LED lights. It has a remotely located light generator and a color disk that rotates, producing the changing color.
My father's pool has one of these setup in a waterfall and as the main light for the bottom of the pool. Its a real pretty effect and with some work you could adapt it to an inside home setting. The light generator does get hot so placement might be an issue.
Yes he can have a stable business if you focus on tournaments. The tournaments allow people to play the games in an environment that makes you want to play better to beat one of the other guys, as such you might want to buy the game to play and get better at it. I would have loved to have the sheer variety of games and mods that are out there now back when I was running the cafe. Day of Defeat night, CS night, Quake night, Unreal Tournament night, Starcraft night, Diablo night....ect ect ect. The possiblities are endless. As far a demoing software, yes the game room/cafe is a wonderful place to test out new software, even as a marketing point. "Come to the and try out Photoshop 7.0 before plunking down $600 for the new version." or "Don't want to spend 50 bucks for that copy of Extreme Mouse Trap 3D IV? Come buy the and give it a shot on one of our gamming computers for the low low rate of 2 bucks an hour."
Back in the day, (1997, such a heady time) I setup and ran a small cyber-cafe and game room. My observations and suggestions: 1) We had a our pcs locked up in another room away from the game room. In the cafe area they were behind a partition with a small locked walkway to provide access and airflow, big enough to get in and switch the system out or at least pop a ghost boot floppy in and hit reset. The game PC's were in a locked area with a 100mb switched network between the 8 boxes and the dedicated server for glQuake. there were holes in the walls big enough for the various KVM/Sound cables. We also had Thunderseats setup in the individual booths, each hooked to an individual 100 watt amp. 2) Black light in the Game room is cool. Throws enough light to see, and gives a nice ambeiance for multiplayer games. 3) Offer other services. We had a nice fast SCSI auto feeding scanner and nice (for the time) Epson color ink jet printers out front in the net cafe area. These got a pretty fair amount of use from our walk-in traffic..i.e. Older people who did not have a computer but heard through the grapevine that we could help them scan a picture and help them send it to a loved one.:-) We had the entire Office suite on the two machines with access to the scanner. All the machines were able to print to the Epsons and we charged a minimal charge per page printed to cover ink on those thirsty ink jets. 3) Good control software makes the hourly charges easy. I had a good friend who we contracted with to write a client server package to control access to all the pcs in the building. We replaced Explorer with our custom shell that only allowed access to certain programs (IE, Solitare, Freecell on the Internet machines. Quake, Outlaws, Nascar Racing on the game machines) It had a little intigrated timer that ran in the program and it would dump you out of the game/program when whatever time you purchaced ran out and come up with a little login prompt that started the timer and shell program. Also in the program was a button to add one or more hours to your current session so that you would not have to come running back to the register to request more time. This software also ran our POS and inventory system. It was fairly robust for being written over the course of two weeks. 4) Choose your staff wisely. You need at least one person with a solid hardware/software background on hand at all times to minimize downtime and keep the customers happy. Also someone who can be cannon fodder when you have only one or two people wanting to play doesn't hurt either. You also want to make sure your folks are not farking off in CS during the time they should be mopping the floor.:-) 5) Tournaments Tournaments Tournaments. Our biggest day was a 14-18 year old only double elimination Quake tournament. We had lots of nice prizes and had a big party afterwards with food and dj. This was our 2nd tournament it went off without a hitch.
Now for the bad news. You are going to fight with broadband sooner or later. You will loose unless you have enough bandwidth of your own. Along these lines, if you can get enough capital, you might want to look at rolling your own DSL service for some folks. If you can sell the dsl service you can buy a bigger pipe for the cafe and the dsl customers. Also think about leasing your hardware. New pcs every three years is a good thing, especially for gaming systems as 3 years is about the life of todays state of the art. Your not going to be able to compete with the childgeek with a new box in a year and a half, but your selling the environment for multiplayer gaming, rather than the machines the games run on, so having the absolute latest and greatest is not totally required. If latest and greatest is require, roll the upgrades around the place, i.e. this year and a halfs game machine is the last year and a halfs internet access box. Only thing this requires is a couple of intenet access boxes that your consider disposable, which in this day of less than $700 pca, is pretty freakin easy.
Well thats all I can think of for now. Hope I've provided a little info you can use. And I hope you have a better backer than we did, he bankrupted the computer store he owned and took the cafe with it, even though we only had two months where we did not turn a profit in the eight months we were open.
Some of the newer laptops (IBM and Toshiba so far) I have worked on have CF readers built in. It makes it super handy when you need that 3.5 Meg USB Floppy driver so you can read a file off the floppy drive.
Some form of Memory card will replace the floppy. One thing that CF has going for it, is that it has an IDE Interface built into the card hence, its bootable with the proper reader built into the system. Here is the google link to IDE Compact Flash readers. They could be pretty close cost wise too, especially if they remove the slow floppy controller from the motherboards in the not too distant future.
This is ABSOLUTLY the correct argument! Why should I, as a US taxpayer, have to have a portion of my tax monies spent to protect the IP of a group of corporations, especially a couple that are owned by overseas entities (Sony, Bertelsmann AG, ect.)?
Fair use of multimedia content should be in favor of the consumers, not a large corporation looking for long term profits based on how many times a song is played. I buy a cd, I should be able to play that on my computer, my car cd player, and maybe even, god forbid, make a copy of that song so I can listen to it on my mp3 player as I jog or whatever. I should not have to buy six copies of a cd to play it in all those locations that I might want to listen to a song I already bought. Its asinine on the part of the RIAA and the MPAA to think that anybody is going to let them get away with changing the way music and video are played just because they cannot keep up with technology, which is what this argument basically boils down to.
No more legislation like the DMCA, corporations have money to protect themselves with, consumers have nothing but their collective wallets and a bit good faith (::snicker,snicker::) in a legislative body to make good decisions .
That HP one was SWEET! You scanned ran it down the lefthand side of the page, pivoted it at the bottom then ran it up the right hands side. The software automaticly tiled it together and it worked beautifully. It had an infrared port on it so you could beam it straight to a printer to print it out if need be. It worked well with large deed records for a company I used to do consulting for. They went in with a list, scaned what they needed, and walked out without paying a dime for the county's copier.
The deed books are large, so it would most likely do 11x17 without any problems.
I'm on Charter Pipeline in Alabama now....it has been crap all night actually. My ip address did change as for some reason they have us pulling ip's and stuff from a preexsisting server in Georgia. In a town full of college students this will not do for long. Hope they have something more substanial in the works..
My father lives in a town of 7000. He has DSL in his office with 5 computers connect. This is not all that uncommon as the phone company is a small branch of a larger company (Frontier Communications). The cool thing to me is that he lives 3 miles down a dirt road in the middle of a couple of thousand acres of trees and has 768/128 dsl at his house. The phone company has in 3 months added dsl in two of their smaller CO's. He loves it, I like it cause I leach his bandwidth when I visit. It fun to watch your old dad leach more stuff off of Morphius than you do..
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean we get a +1 Sexually Secure to go with it?
This is what I think the article was referring to. It is used to hoist a radar system high in the air. They also use one to broadcast propiganda into Cuba from a site in Florida. I think I remember reading about them being used more for drug interdiction than anything else. Honig
That is really nice. My current job is nothing like that, my boss is an old school accountant who wants you there at 7:45 and leaving at 5:15 like a manager should. Yes I am a manager, but I manage myself and that is it. I personally work best from 2:30 in the afternoon till around 9 or 10 at night. But this company will not see that yet, as there is a nice bonus tied to my "performance" over the course of the first 6 months. At my former job, which was very simular to this one; an IT department of one, I shut a bunch of the office whiners up by staying all night to get a new server up and running so they could use it the next day. Another time, they needed help in the distribiution center overnight and I stayed all night again to help out. People quit giving me crap about comming in at 9am after that. Honig
Might be the fact that Terminals D and E are like a mile from the baggage check/security checkpoint. That said, unless it has been a hell of a trip, I usual walk instead of ride the train to baggage claim. Something about wanting a little blood to ciruclate through my legs after being folded up on a plane for at least 2 hours. Honig
My former employer makes polyurethane foam (Think Great Stuff or any other of the foam hole fillers, just mixed in a different ratio and in different colors) flower pots. We stapled a header card to the bottom of every pot with the barcode information on there. Worked well until people started switching the barcodes for the 14" pot(~$10.00) to the 24" pot (~26.00)> Needless to say, the stores were a little pissed. So we came up with a adhesive label that would stick to polyurethane foam. Not the easiest thing to stick to, espcially with paint on them.
And barcode labels were a PITA to run at any high speeds on the Zebra 140s we used. Thank god I left that hell hole.
Honig
Uh.No. Look here. If you know how to edit an .ini file, then you to can setup Windows 2k without a registration key by change 000 to 270 at the end of a pid= line.
I would say know of what you speak before you speak, but well this is /.
You think that it will get better because it is the 2nd of April? Must not come here often... :-)
Honig
Ape Suits? Why would they where an ape suit. It would get hot over the top of their natural hairy bodies...
doh. I fucking hate Monday's. Then I realized that it let me post to the discussion.
Not the brightest bulb in the cube this morning.
H
I modded it funny...but I have a weird sense of humor.
um. They DO charge for video taping a certain sites. Kinda pissed me off, then I realized that their ten peso charge was about a dollar and fifty cents. Not like I am financing the government with 10 pesos...
Honig
These are usually plastic "fiber optics". Basicly is a light pipe like some cases use for LED lights. It has a remotely located light generator and a color disk that rotates, producing the changing color.
My father's pool has one of these setup in a waterfall and as the main light for the bottom of the pool. Its a real pretty effect and with some work you could adapt it to an inside home setting. The light generator does get hot so placement might be an issue.
Honig
Its fried and there is not even a comment...so here is the Google Cache. Sorry no link to the list of sites :(
Google Cache
That remains to be seen.
Sorry sorry. Glad to see someone who has spend at least some time in the state of Alabama have the common sense to puruse
War Eagle,
Honig
(Yes I know all the terms "common sense" and "/." should not be used together..
Yes he can have a stable business if you focus on tournaments. The tournaments allow people to play the games in an environment that makes you want to play better to beat one of the other guys, as such you might want to buy the game to play and get better at it. I would have loved to have the sheer variety of games and mods that are out there now back when I was running the cafe. Day of Defeat night, CS night, Quake night, Unreal Tournament night, Starcraft night, Diablo night....ect ect ect. The possiblities are endless.
:-)
As far a demoing software, yes the game room/cafe is a wonderful place to test out new software, even as a marketing point. "Come to the and try out Photoshop 7.0 before plunking down $600 for the new version." or "Don't want to spend 50 bucks for that copy of Extreme Mouse Trap 3D IV? Come buy the and give it a shot on one of our gamming computers for the low low rate of 2 bucks an hour."
Good points
Honig
Back in the day, (1997, such a heady time) I setup and ran a small cyber-cafe and game room. My observations and suggestions: :-) We had the entire Office suite on the two machines with access to the scanner. All the machines were able to print to the Epsons and we charged a minimal charge per page printed to cover ink on those thirsty ink jets. :-)
1) We had a our pcs locked up in another room away from the game room. In the cafe area they were behind a partition with a small locked walkway to provide access and airflow, big enough to get in and switch the system out or at least pop a ghost boot floppy in and hit reset. The game PC's were in a locked area with a 100mb switched network between the 8 boxes and the dedicated server for glQuake. there were holes in the walls big enough for the various KVM/Sound cables. We also had Thunderseats setup in the individual booths, each hooked to an individual 100 watt amp.
2) Black light in the Game room is cool. Throws enough light to see, and gives a nice ambeiance for multiplayer games.
3) Offer other services. We had a nice fast SCSI auto feeding scanner and nice (for the time) Epson color ink jet printers out front in the net cafe area. These got a pretty fair amount of use from our walk-in traffic..i.e. Older people who did not have a computer but heard through the grapevine that we could help them scan a picture and help them send it to a loved one.
3) Good control software makes the hourly charges easy. I had a good friend who we contracted with to write a client server package to control access to all the pcs in the building. We replaced Explorer with our custom shell that only allowed access to certain programs (IE, Solitare, Freecell on the Internet machines. Quake, Outlaws, Nascar Racing on the game machines) It had a little intigrated timer that ran in the program and it would dump you out of the game/program when whatever time you purchaced ran out and come up with a little login prompt that started the timer and shell program. Also in the program was a button to add one or more hours to your current session so that you would not have to come running back to the register to request more time. This software also ran our POS and inventory system. It was fairly robust for being written over the course of two weeks.
4) Choose your staff wisely. You need at least one person with a solid hardware/software background on hand at all times to minimize downtime and keep the customers happy. Also someone who can be cannon fodder when you have only one or two people wanting to play doesn't hurt either. You also want to make sure your folks are not farking off in CS during the time they should be mopping the floor.
5) Tournaments Tournaments Tournaments. Our biggest day was a 14-18 year old only double elimination Quake tournament. We had lots of nice prizes and had a big party afterwards with food and dj. This was our 2nd tournament it went off without a hitch.
Now for the bad news. You are going to fight with broadband sooner or later. You will loose unless you have enough bandwidth of your own. Along these lines, if you can get enough capital, you might want to look at rolling your own DSL service for some folks. If you can sell the dsl service you can buy a bigger pipe for the cafe and the dsl customers.
Also think about leasing your hardware. New pcs every three years is a good thing, especially for gaming systems as 3 years is about the life of todays state of the art. Your not going to be able to compete with the childgeek with a new box in a year and a half, but your selling the environment for multiplayer gaming, rather than the machines the games run on, so having the absolute latest and greatest is not totally required. If latest and greatest is require, roll the upgrades around the place, i.e. this year and a halfs game machine is the last year and a halfs internet access box. Only thing this requires is a couple of intenet access boxes that your consider disposable, which in this day of less than $700 pca, is pretty freakin easy.
Well thats all I can think of for now. Hope I've provided a little info you can use. And I hope you have a better backer than we did, he bankrupted the computer store he owned and took the cafe with it, even though we only had two months where we did not turn a profit in the eight months we were open.
Some of the newer laptops (IBM and Toshiba so far) I have worked on have CF readers built in. It makes it super handy when you need that 3.5 Meg USB Floppy driver so you can read a file off the floppy drive.
Some form of Memory card will replace the floppy. One thing that CF has going for it, is that it has an IDE Interface built into the card hence, its bootable with the proper reader built into the system. Here is the google link to IDE Compact Flash readers. They could be pretty close cost wise too, especially if they remove the slow floppy controller from the motherboards in the not too distant future.
This is ABSOLUTLY the correct argument! Why should I, as a US taxpayer, have to have a portion of my tax monies spent to protect the IP of a group of corporations, especially a couple that are owned by overseas entities (Sony, Bertelsmann AG, ect.)?
Fair use of multimedia content should be in favor of the consumers, not a large corporation looking for long term profits based on how many times a song is played. I buy a cd, I should be able to play that on my computer, my car cd player, and maybe even, god forbid, make a copy of that song so I can listen to it on my mp3 player as I jog or whatever. I should not have to buy six copies of a cd to play it in all those locations that I might want to listen to a song I already bought. Its asinine on the part of the RIAA and the MPAA to think that anybody is going to let them get away with changing the way music and video are played just because they cannot keep up with technology, which is what this argument basically boils down to.
No more legislation like the DMCA, corporations have money to protect themselves with, consumers have nothing but their collective wallets and a bit good faith (::snicker,snicker::) in a legislative body to make good decisions
.
That HP one was SWEET! You scanned ran it down the lefthand side of the page, pivoted it at the bottom then ran it up the right hands side. The software automaticly tiled it together and it worked beautifully. It had an infrared port on it so you could beam it straight to a printer to print it out if need be. It worked well with large deed records for a company I used to do consulting for. They went in with a list, scaned what they needed, and walked out without paying a dime for the county's copier.
The deed books are large, so it would most likely do 11x17 without any problems.
Honig
I'm on Charter Pipeline in Alabama now....it has been crap all night actually. My ip address did change as for some reason they have us pulling ip's and stuff from a preexsisting server in Georgia. In a town full of college students this will not do for long. Hope they have something more substanial in the works..
My father lives in a town of 7000. He has DSL in his office with 5 computers connect. This is not all that uncommon as the phone company is a small branch of a larger company (Frontier Communications). The cool thing to me is that he lives 3 miles down a dirt road in the middle of a couple of thousand acres of trees and has 768/128 dsl at his house. The phone company has in 3 months added dsl in two of their smaller CO's. He loves it, I like it cause I leach his bandwidth when I visit. It fun to watch your old dad leach more stuff off of Morphius than you do..