My best friend in grade school (who committed suicide a few years ago unfortunately) owned Haunted House. When his Dad sold that machine it was a really sad day. The 3 levels were so innovative back then. Not my favorite of all time, but certainly, as you say, a fun game with really cool haunted house noises. I can just hear them now....
What's the deal with the ceramic ball? I never played Twighlight long enough to get wizard mode. Was the ball supposed to break or something or was it there just to look cool? I'd imagine a broken ceramic ball would break a lot of the delicate mechanics of a complex modern pinball machine, so I doubt that having the ball break was part of the strategy.
Man, you just brought back so many memories. I remember the dirty old man line. Definately one of pinballs finest moments. I remember the first time I played that game and learned all too quickly that there was to be no ball return if you fumbled out of the gates. I don't know if all the machines lacked the ball saving feature (you know, when you lose a ball immediately upon firing, it gives one back) but this machine never had it. Definately like only the best pinball machine evah!
But the Stern machines are not nearly as nice or as well designed as the old Bally/Williams machines. Pinball is a dying form of entertainment (along with the arcades) and while its great to see one lone survivor still out there, it would be even better if they were up to the quality of late Williams machines. Attack from Mars, Addams Family (BRUTAL!), and Medieval Madness all come to mind. Revenge from Mars was gimmicky along with Episode 1, and as a result I see very few of those machines still around. While Stern makes competetent machines, the Simpsons cannot hold a candle to the sheer genius that Attack From Mars was.
Also, to answer your question more fully, just pick a good quality format you wish to use (like if just MP3 is ok for you, use MP3) and when you transcode set it to the highest settings possible. Personally I think ogg is the better format, but it limits your choices as far as portable players and such go. Even OGG --> MP3 transcoding is not all that bad because you are starting with a better source file than MP3. WMA is also a superior format than MP3, so pretty much anything is going to be better than MP3 at equal bitrates. A low bitrate file is going to sound more or less the exact same when transcoding to a much higher bitrate, so use that as a good rule of thumb and you will go far!
I encode.flacs and CDs straight to.oggs and most everything else I've ended in with my collection is in MP3. For the stuff that really matters, most is in the 256-320/k range CBR. The oggs I encode are all 350 ABR, for what its worth sounds really, really close to a CD and certainly better than MiniDisc. I'd love to just store nothing but FLAC, but I would need to start looking at quadrupling my file server's capacity, which would put me over a terabyte. Also since I run slimserver on my file server and stream everything out to my client PCs in MP3 (Can someone explain how to stream in wav and make it work with winamp?!) I usually take the odd WMAs and such and convert them to the highest possible MP3s, since they will be transcoded down the line eventually anyways. Like the other day I did it to a david gray album. A david gray album isn't really pushing the sonic boundaries like an orchestra so it gets to a point where compression isn't nearly as noticable. It doesn't usually sound so bad, but certain bitrates sound a whole lot worse than others. A lot of hip hop sounds ok in 192k and even some old rock sounds ok, especially when the original recording was lo-fi to begin with. Electronica can sound good at a variety of bitrates, the biggest thing you lose really is some of the high end spectrum and it likes to chop the bass to pieces, especially at low bitrates like 128.
Like here, I have this crappy busta rhymes album I was listening to, and some idiot decided 162k was enough for them. It sounds terrible. To the morons out there that share this crap, please at least use a decent bitrate. Just because you get a smaller file size doesn't mean that it'll sound the same or even comparable. Nothing sucks more than grabbing a random torrent file and finding that the contents are all in crappy bitrates.
I guess for most people its a matter of preferences. If you are an audiophile you probably wouldn't even be asking the questions, so in short, high bitrate MP3s are ok, oggs sound great, so get a player that plays both and encode everything new to ogg.
Now, will someone please tell me how to stream wav or flac with slimserver to winamp if it is possible?
Yes it is in Pennsylvania, amonst many other towns, including the infamous Intercourse, PA, Blue Ball, PA, Beaverdale, PA, Manda Gap, PA, Scalp Level, PA, Stalker, PA and Burning Well, PA. I'm sure there are more funny names around the state. Still not as bad as Gaysport, OH and Businessburg, OH. Let us not forget Why, AZ, Cadillac, FL, Energy, IL, Normal, IL, Sac City, IA, Zook, KS, Cadillac, KY, Ordinary, KY, Hazard, KY, Christmas, MI, Gay, MI, Hell, MI, Nirvanna, MI, Paradise, MI, Askew, MS, Hot Coffee, MS, Competition, MO, Novelty, MO, Flying H, NM, Truth Or Consequences, NM, Weed, NM, Kill Devil Hills, NC, Can do, ND, Happyland, OK, Boring, OR, Half.com, OR, North, SC, Gayville, SD, Mud Butte, SD, Bushland, TX, Earth, TX, Gun Barrel City, TX, Needmore, TX, Tiki Island, TX, Study Butte, TX, Telegraph, TX, Best, TX, Boston, TX, Old Boston, TX, New Boston, TX, Index, WA, Ruff Starbuck, WA, Walla Walla, WA, Acme, WV, Friendly, WV, Odd, WV, or Sod, WV.
Are you talking about a TX chipset ? That one was limited to caching only the first 64 Mb of ram. Or are you talking about older chipsets like the VX, which won't accept chip densities higher than 16 Mbit ? In that case, you CAN use 128 Mb, you just need double height (32x16 Mbit chips) sdram dimms. Sure, they're hard to find, but they do exist and will work even in the earliest dimm sockets.
Yeah, it is most defintely a density issue. According to Dell's own docs on the machine they claim that the chipset won't recognize more than 64 megs.
I have tried 128 megs of low density and it wouldn't see past 64 megs, but I think these chips were even single height) so perhaps dell or intel placed such a limit to avoid compatability problems in the future or what I don't know. The double height chips are indeed hard to come across.
Its too bad because it is a pretty nice board, more than adequate for a lot of tasks, but the lack of decent RAM is really an issue. I compiled Gentoo on an identical box just to see how long it would take. The base alone took roughly 4 or 5 days, but I can't remember. I gave up on even thinking about compiling X and its related libraries.
Windows explorer is the same way. At least for Windows 2000 from my experience. If it waits for the network file over a SMB connection the whole shebang freezes while the drive comes up. Anything that passes through the shell (saving a file,etc) becomes frozen until the SMB mount syncs. The systray even hangs at times until the network becomes free. I probably have issues with my ethernet card (on-board Intel Etherexpress Pro VM 100) or maybe even my SMB shares (samba on linux, P166, 64megs, headless, so no resource hogging X11).
For example, I'll be tagging some MP3s and the whole shell slows to a crawl. On my other PC it wasn't all that much better. Yeah, samba is optimized and such according to recommendations for the buffer sizes under linux. I could be wrong though, cuz something seems pretty wrong.
Anyways, network browsing has never been a real fast process for me (especially with hundreds and thousands of files) coupled with the fact that 100 mb is not really all that fast. A network share is gonna only give you a realistic max of maybe 3-5 MB/sec, probably less if you have multiple connections running. Its not hard for a pentium based file server to saturate its NIC.
Not trying to be offtopic. but if anyone reads this and has any suggestions to improve my usability, please let me know. Like for instance, does file indexing help with SMB mounts? (I have that crap turned off)
I know the apple section isn't really the place to ask such things, but hey, you never know.:)
If the computers he is working on are Dells and Gateways with stock configurations, chances are he isn't going to run into a great deal of issues on the hardware side. If he is like me, however, and is constantly piecing computers together from spare used parts, mismatched RAM pairs in every box for example, he is inviting hardware issues. I think we can safely say that we have gotten beyond the days of Win9x and its poor device driver model that openly invited a BSOD whenever a particular piece of hardware acted up.
Granted, I know that Win2K and XP will BSOD in the event of hardware failure (and many other things), but for that matter so will Linux and just about every other OS out there. Nothing is bullet proof. What I am trying to get at is that hardware repair guys have indeed become nearly useless trade as most issues are software related (as this guy points out as well), but in light of that, there will always be a need for people that can diagnose and repair hardware situations. Out of the many home computers I've looked at, most needed RAM upgrades and what not (in addition to complete OS reinstalls), thus involving some level of knowledge of computer hardware. What stick of RAM would you use for an older gateway P2-400? PC100 would work right? Sure if it is low density. If you just told someone to buy a stick they'd have no idea what the hell to look for. The board won't even recognize most modern RAM you could just buy at best buy.
I have a Dell P166 here I use as a file server. It won't take more than 64 megs of RAM because the wonderful intel chipset is hard limited at 64 megs. Great design feature eh? The board takes SDRAM too. If you stick 128 in it, it just recognizes the first 64. Yeah, a BIOS update never fixed the cap as it was hardcoded into the chipset.
Guess dell never thought anyone would need to give a P200MMX more than 64 megs of RAM. Genius!
The hardware has gotten somewhat simpler to deal with (automatic IRQ assigning comes to mind), but knowing what the hell is wrong when something goes wrong is a skill that will never go away unless hardware designs start becoming radically more simple, disposable, all on one PCB solutions. Video game consoles come to mind.
The guys that do the hardware repair should hopefully be offering anti-spyware cleanups by now as I'm sure that they are well aware of how much their market has shifted within the last few years.
The difference between a computer repair and a car repair, is that the computer repair center can claim your computer broke from a software issue that isn't their doing, whereas a car mechanic isn't going to say, "take this car back to the station you got gas from, they gave you bad gas".
I've heard car mechanics tell people this. You would be amazed at how much bad gasoline is out there. Case in point, one lady I worked with was having lots of hesitancy problems with her engine, after a few trips to the mechanic, he eventually deduced that nothing was wrong with the car and that she was merely getting bad gas. He didn't charge her a great deal and told her to try filling up at another station in the future. Voila! The car magically started running fine. Its all too possible that older gas stations and such may have issues with their tanks getting moisture in them and such, even in the new age of federally mandated double walled tanks. Never rule out bad gas is my point.
Here is some proper formatting for you. Remember, preview!
This idea is so asinine and restrictive that I can almost guarantee that it will fail miserably as well as probably upset a great deal of the existing customer base.
Case in point: I frequent a coffee shop here in Pittsburgh constantly. The Beehive offers free wireless access as well as has around 8-9 computers with all sorts of multiplayer games installed, as well as DVD drives (you can watch movies), and believe it or not, cable access. A number of the computers have tuner cards built in. The money they get from the PCs more than covers the costs of their relatively low upkeep, upgrades, and of course the DSL, which seems to be basic SDSL at maybe.....1.5mps?
They are the only coffee shop in the area to offer free internet, and of course people come and congregate based on this fact. The most comparable coffee shop that offers internet would be the Quiet Storm, and it costs roughly $20/month to $10 for a few hours or something (maybe the day). Of course, Starbucks has T-Mobile hotspots that are completely locked down, but I won't get into THAT.
Don't charge by the hour. By imposing a fixed cost for a fixed period of time (1 coffee = 3 hours or whatever) people will feel like they are being charged for internet usage. No coffee, no internet. If your crowd is a mostly college crowd, it is understandable that many of them are rather poor and cannot afford $10 in coffee a day. I'm sure that a sizable percentage of your customers comes by just to hang out and sees a coffee or two as the cost of admission. This is the appeal of coffee shops, right? The more friends people have with them, the more paying customers you have.
If you have a problem with a large group that does not buy enough to use up your entire space, they need to be kindly, and politely I might add, informed about the simple economics of running a coffee shop. I'm sure the owner pays rent or a mortgage, taxes and obviously, employees.
Also, you should look at supplementing the costs of the free net with some rental computers or something that people can use out of convenience, like a CD burner and a printer. Sometimes it is incredibly convenient to be working on a project and have such things available without having to go to kinkos, especially in a college environment.
Just think about this differently at least. Anything so restrictive is sure to raise complaints and decrease the overall satisfaction of your customers. $100/month is totally worth it to spend, especially when your customers are buying freaking $2-3 coffees. If you implement a system like this, it is going to take time and money to deploy and test, depending on your setup, which I'm guessing isn't probably all that sophisticated.
The problem is really the people that are just using the space. Those are customers you can certainly afford to lose and the best way is ultimately to politely ask them to leave if they are finished with their drinks so that paying customers can use their space. Every bar and coffee shop (the successful ones at least) I've been to will certainly follow some similar policy.
I drive a taxi and I clearly wouldn't let someone ride around without giving me some cash. I expect any other sensible businessman to do the same.
This idea is so asinine and restrictive that I can almost guarantee that it will fail miserably as well as probably upset a great deal of the existing customer base.
Case in point: I frequent a coffee shop here in Pittsburgh constantly. The Beehive offers free wireless access as well as has around 8-9 computers with all sorts of multiplayer games installed, as well as DVD drives (you can watch movies), and believe it or not, cable access. A number of the computers have tuner cards built in. The money they get from the PCs more than covers the costs of their relatively low upkeep, upgrades, and of course the DSL, which seems to be basic SDSL at maybe.....1.5mps?
They are the only coffee shop in the area to offer free internet, and of course people come and congregate based on this fact. The most comparable coffee shop that offers internet would be the Quiet Storm, and it costs roughly $20/month to $10 for a few hours or something (maybe the day). Of course, Starbucks has T-Mobile hotspots that are completely locked down, but I won't get into THAT.
Don't charge by the hour. By imposing a fixed cost for a fixed period of time (1 coffee = 3 hours or whatever) people will feel like they are being charged for internet usage. No coffee, no internet. If your crowd is a mostly college crowd, it is understandable that many of them are rather poor and cannot afford $10 in coffee a day. I'm sure that a sizable percentage of your customers comes by just to hang out and sees a coffee or two as the cost of admission. This is the appeal of coffee shops, right? The more friends people have with them, the more paying customers you have.
If you have a problem with a large group that does not buy enough to use up your entire space, they need to be kindly, and politely I might add, informed about the simple economics of running a coffee shop. I'm sure the owner pays rent or a mortgage, taxes and obviously, employees.
Also, you should look at supplementing the costs of the free net with some rental computers or something that people can use out of convenience, like a CD burner and a printer. Sometimes it is incredibly convenient to be working on a project and have such things available without having to go to kinkos, especially in a college environment.
Just think about this differently at least. Anything so restrictive is sure to raise complaints and decrease the overall satisfaction of your customers. $100/month is totally worth it to spend, especially when your customers are buying freaking $2-3 coffees. If you implement a system like this, it is going to take time and money to deploy and test, depending on your setup, which I'm guessing isn't probably all that sophisticated.
The problem is really the people that are just using the space. Those are customers you can certainly afford to lose and the best way is ultimately to politely ask them to leave if they are finished with their drinks so that paying customers can use their space. Every bar and coffee shop (the successful ones at least) I've been to will certainly follow some similar policy.
I drive a taxi and I clearly wouldn't let someone ride around without giving me some cash. I expect any other sensible businessman to do the same.
Uh. The first zelda had no towns, none. Zelda 2 had a couple, but zelda 2 doesn't really count. A link to the past had 1 town. The oracle games each had two towns (if I remember correctly) and I think that Link's Awakening had like 1 town. Also I think even Minish Cap has 2 or 3 towns, so having only one town in WW is pretty par for the course. Zelda isn't about towns or locales its far more about gameplay and puzzles.
Your future has not been totally bought and sold. Your body and your choice of lifestyle may be already be a part of the machine, but you and your children still have a future. If you keep electing people that will throw away your rights, perhaps you deserve nothing. Over 200 years ago a revolt broke out over, what was it? Restrictive government? Tea taxes?! We revolted against the masters over tea taxes! Now we pay every new tax like our fucking duty to this political machine is to keep feeding it. Wake the fuck up people. Companies are making the laws these days. Our government serves only their political contributions and tax revenue while we turn a blind eye to the atrocities they commit daily overseas. We all need to become dissedents. Our fair government has stifled competition and become a monopoly. Don't let the rebulicans and the democrats tell you otherwise, they have been sold. I can't believe people put up with this and that it doesn't outrage them to read crap like this everyday. There's gotta be some other smart people out there that think the same way. Can't we do anything about this. I'm getting older and I feel like my life is just wasting away while I watch my world and the future of our world slowly rot away. Is there hope yet for mankind?
My reply would be to look at some winamp plugins that do dynamic compression, like audio stocker pro. I've found that if totally flat volume is what you are looking for it does an ok job. There are also some gaining sort of DSPs you can get for XMMS. None of this stuff can replace a good hardware compressor, or even a good software compressor for that matter. Wavelab is probably one of the best audio editors out there if you are a Windows user, also Sound Forge is pretty decent and has some really nice features. I always loved the pop and click removal tool. Audacity is also pretty decent. You just need something to flatten out your volume amplitude. It will make the mix (especially a symphony) sound a lot more flatter however because part of the arrangement is so dependant upon the individual volume levels of the different sections.
As someone has pointed out radio stations do this very well. (with real hardware of course!)
I was going to ask slashdot something similar as well.....
I have all sorts of MP3s and OGGs. What I would like to do is run some sort of gaining program across all of them at once. I already know of mp3gain and oggain. My question is that when such things are run how much of the original mix does it destroy? I mean I just want to generally raise the volume of the files to the be at least within a closer range, but I don't wan't say quiet parts of the mix to be automatically increased in amplitude. I've tried a few plugins for Winamp and XMMS which all claim to normalize as they play, but they are instead compressing the sound dynamically which alters every nearly aspect of the original in many ways, and is not what I'm really looking for (unlike this guy).
There is nothing fair here
on
Build Your Own PBX
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· Score: 1, Informative
# Post Early: If an article has over a certain number of posts on it already, yours is less likely to be moderated.
This is far different however than posting early. The tactic he/she used was to post early in a parent post to try to boost karma by being closer to the top of the page by astroturfing on someone elses high ranking post as well as asking for mod points.
The parent is right in this case. The kid needs to be sent back to school.
Seriously, come on. The problem could have been so many number of things, from instruments to actual fuel loss. Perhaps he enough fuel in spite of the loss. Why are so many idiots here on slashdot so quick to cry conspiracy? Yeah we didn't go to the moon either, right? Appollo 13 was just an artificial crisis, sure that one may actually be plausible, if you forget about the earlier astronauts that had already died. More than a few died right on the launching pad. Of course, we never knew about the terrible Russian tragedies until much later. When a mission has a high probability of technical failure and you run 16 or so missions, the chances that a few will result in catastrophe are greatly increased. It is rather amazing that the Apollo 13 crew ever made it back to earth. Which is a better PR move, success or failure? I can't imagine anyone at NASA wanting to stage a fake space accident at the costs that they were hitting tax payers with.
It is good to be a skeptic, but to the point that everything is a conspiracy and that nobody is telling the truth is quite honestly delusional and psychotic. Unless you were there, nothing is the truth and everything is permitted. Grow up, when people start realizing what is truly going on in the world it may frighten them to realize how little control we have left over any of it.
Oh yeah, that Philadelphia Experiment thing, yeah. That was real. They really did teleport a ship across two harbors. And the sailors, they were really all fused together and mutated. They were also frozen and going out of their minds. Now that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!(TM)
Funny how the crew was interviewed years later and never recalled ever being in the said deporting port and never recalled the event ever happening at all in spite of serving on the ship for years. I guess they had their mind erased right?
From what I've seen of the gnome project, everything in the UI is too pronounced. For example, does the menu bar need all of the icons with a bold highlight around them? Why does the title/menu bar have to take up 25% of the window? Small subdued cues would be grand in a UI. We all eventually know where to click anyways right? For as much as I dislike the classic Windows 2000 UI, it still is not nearly as intrusive as gnome or kde as far as I am concerned. I guess there are some skins out there that probably give me what I want, but we really need something that is slick out of the box, something that doesn't work just like Windows. The Mac GUI creator just passed away (God bless his soul) and we haven't really come up with anything better in the last 30 years? Hell, even Nextstep and OS/2 were steps in a better direction.
If you ask me, there will never be a year of the Linux desktop until somebody creates a Linux desktop environment that is at least as rich as Windows. When is cut and paste going to be even supported across applications in KDE or GNOME? Oh, text works ok? Well what about a piece of a picture or a clip of a wave? What about drag and drop? Can I just drop any document onto a printer icon and have it spit out the result? Without configuring 20 various text files?
When the big boys like Adobe start releasing Photoshop for Linux, then perhaps there will be some sort of market, but until then I hear that the GIMP is fine as long as you don't need to work in CMYK.
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Wow, fascinating!
I'm kinda sad I never got to play Twilight Zone more than just once in my life now.
Thanks for the long explanation!
My best friend in grade school (who committed suicide a few years ago unfortunately) owned Haunted House. When his Dad sold that machine it was a really sad day. The 3 levels were so innovative back then. Not my favorite of all time, but certainly, as you say, a fun game with really cool haunted house noises. I can just hear them now....
Thanks for the memories!
What's the deal with the ceramic ball? I never played Twighlight long enough to get wizard mode. Was the ball supposed to break or something or was it there just to look cool? I'd imagine a broken ceramic ball would break a lot of the delicate mechanics of a complex modern pinball machine, so I doubt that having the ball break was part of the strategy.
Man, you just brought back so many memories. I remember the dirty old man line. Definately one of pinballs finest moments. I remember the first time I played that game and learned all too quickly that there was to be no ball return if you fumbled out of the gates. I don't know if all the machines lacked the ball saving feature (you know, when you lose a ball immediately upon firing, it gives one back) but this machine never had it. Definately like only the best pinball machine evah!
But the Stern machines are not nearly as nice or as well designed as the old Bally/Williams machines. Pinball is a dying form of entertainment (along with the arcades) and while its great to see one lone survivor still out there, it would be even better if they were up to the quality of late Williams machines. Attack from Mars, Addams Family (BRUTAL!), and Medieval Madness all come to mind. Revenge from Mars was gimmicky along with Episode 1, and as a result I see very few of those machines still around. While Stern makes competetent machines, the Simpsons cannot hold a candle to the sheer genius that Attack From Mars was.
Oh FP btw!
Also, to answer your question more fully, just pick a good quality format you wish to use (like if just MP3 is ok for you, use MP3) and when you transcode set it to the highest settings possible. Personally I think ogg is the better format, but it limits your choices as far as portable players and such go. Even OGG --> MP3 transcoding is not all that bad because you are starting with a better source file than MP3. WMA is also a superior format than MP3, so pretty much anything is going to be better than MP3 at equal bitrates. A low bitrate file is going to sound more or less the exact same when transcoding to a much higher bitrate, so use that as a good rule of thumb and you will go far!
I encode .flacs and CDs straight to .oggs and most everything else I've ended in with my collection is in MP3. For the stuff that really matters, most is in the 256-320/k range CBR. The oggs I encode are all 350 ABR, for what its worth sounds really, really close to a CD and certainly better than MiniDisc. I'd love to just store nothing but FLAC, but I would need to start looking at quadrupling my file server's capacity, which would put me over a terabyte. Also since I run slimserver on my file server and stream everything out to my client PCs in MP3 (Can someone explain how to stream in wav and make it work with winamp?!) I usually take the odd WMAs and such and convert them to the highest possible MP3s, since they will be transcoded down the line eventually anyways. Like the other day I did it to a david gray album. A david gray album isn't really pushing the sonic boundaries like an orchestra so it gets to a point where compression isn't nearly as noticable. It doesn't usually sound so bad, but certain bitrates sound a whole lot worse than others. A lot of hip hop sounds ok in 192k and even some old rock sounds ok, especially when the original recording was lo-fi to begin with. Electronica can sound good at a variety of bitrates, the biggest thing you lose really is some of the high end spectrum and it likes to chop the bass to pieces, especially at low bitrates like 128.
Like here, I have this crappy busta rhymes album I was listening to, and some idiot decided 162k was enough for them. It sounds terrible. To the morons out there that share this crap, please at least use a decent bitrate. Just because you get a smaller file size doesn't mean that it'll sound the same or even comparable. Nothing sucks more than grabbing a random torrent file and finding that the contents are all in crappy bitrates.
I guess for most people its a matter of preferences. If you are an audiophile you probably wouldn't even be asking the questions, so in short, high bitrate MP3s are ok, oggs sound great, so get a player that plays both and encode everything new to ogg.
Now, will someone please tell me how to stream wav or flac with slimserver to winamp if it is possible?
If you are too lazy to google for information and such.
Are you talking about a TX chipset ? That one was limited to caching only the first 64 Mb of ram. Or are you talking about older chipsets like the VX, which won't accept chip densities higher than 16 Mbit ? In that case, you CAN use 128 Mb, you just need double height (32x16 Mbit chips) sdram dimms. Sure, they're hard to find, but they do exist and will work even in the earliest dimm sockets.
:)
Hang on. I'll look.
thanatos:/var/log# lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 430VX - 82437VX TVX [Triton VX] (rev 02)
Yeah, it is most defintely a density issue. According to Dell's own docs on the machine they claim that the chipset won't recognize more than 64 megs.
I have tried 128 megs of low density and it wouldn't see past 64 megs, but I think these chips were even single height) so perhaps dell or intel placed such a limit to avoid compatability problems in the future or what I don't know. The double height chips are indeed hard to come across.
Its too bad because it is a pretty nice board, more than adequate for a lot of tasks, but the lack of decent RAM is really an issue. I compiled Gentoo on an identical box just to see how long it would take. The base alone took roughly 4 or 5 days, but I can't remember. I gave up on even thinking about compiling X and its related libraries.
Windows explorer is the same way. At least for Windows 2000 from my experience. If it waits for the network file over a SMB connection the whole shebang freezes while the drive comes up. Anything that passes through the shell (saving a file,etc) becomes frozen until the SMB mount syncs. The systray even hangs at times until the network becomes free. I probably have issues with my ethernet card (on-board Intel Etherexpress Pro VM 100) or maybe even my SMB shares (samba on linux, P166, 64megs, headless, so no resource hogging X11). For example, I'll be tagging some MP3s and the whole shell slows to a crawl. On my other PC it wasn't all that much better. Yeah, samba is optimized and such according to recommendations for the buffer sizes under linux. I could be wrong though, cuz something seems pretty wrong. Anyways, network browsing has never been a real fast process for me (especially with hundreds and thousands of files) coupled with the fact that 100 mb is not really all that fast. A network share is gonna only give you a realistic max of maybe 3-5 MB/sec, probably less if you have multiple connections running. Its not hard for a pentium based file server to saturate its NIC. Not trying to be offtopic. but if anyone reads this and has any suggestions to improve my usability, please let me know. Like for instance, does file indexing help with SMB mounts? (I have that crap turned off) I know the apple section isn't really the place to ask such things, but hey, you never know. :)
If the computers he is working on are Dells and Gateways with stock configurations, chances are he isn't going to run into a great deal of issues on the hardware side. If he is like me, however, and is constantly piecing computers together from spare used parts, mismatched RAM pairs in every box for example, he is inviting hardware issues. I think we can safely say that we have gotten beyond the days of Win9x and its poor device driver model that openly invited a BSOD whenever a particular piece of hardware acted up. Granted, I know that Win2K and XP will BSOD in the event of hardware failure (and many other things), but for that matter so will Linux and just about every other OS out there. Nothing is bullet proof. What I am trying to get at is that hardware repair guys have indeed become nearly useless trade as most issues are software related (as this guy points out as well), but in light of that, there will always be a need for people that can diagnose and repair hardware situations. Out of the many home computers I've looked at, most needed RAM upgrades and what not (in addition to complete OS reinstalls), thus involving some level of knowledge of computer hardware. What stick of RAM would you use for an older gateway P2-400? PC100 would work right? Sure if it is low density. If you just told someone to buy a stick they'd have no idea what the hell to look for. The board won't even recognize most modern RAM you could just buy at best buy. I have a Dell P166 here I use as a file server. It won't take more than 64 megs of RAM because the wonderful intel chipset is hard limited at 64 megs. Great design feature eh? The board takes SDRAM too. If you stick 128 in it, it just recognizes the first 64. Yeah, a BIOS update never fixed the cap as it was hardcoded into the chipset. Guess dell never thought anyone would need to give a P200MMX more than 64 megs of RAM. Genius! The hardware has gotten somewhat simpler to deal with (automatic IRQ assigning comes to mind), but knowing what the hell is wrong when something goes wrong is a skill that will never go away unless hardware designs start becoming radically more simple, disposable, all on one PCB solutions. Video game consoles come to mind. The guys that do the hardware repair should hopefully be offering anti-spyware cleanups by now as I'm sure that they are well aware of how much their market has shifted within the last few years.
The difference between a computer repair and a car repair, is that the computer repair center can claim your computer broke from a software issue that isn't their doing, whereas a car mechanic isn't going to say, "take this car back to the station you got gas from, they gave you bad gas".
I've heard car mechanics tell people this. You would be amazed at how much bad gasoline is out there. Case in point, one lady I worked with was having lots of hesitancy problems with her engine, after a few trips to the mechanic, he eventually deduced that nothing was wrong with the car and that she was merely getting bad gas. He didn't charge her a great deal and told her to try filling up at another station in the future. Voila! The car magically started running fine. Its all too possible that older gas stations and such may have issues with their tanks getting moisture in them and such, even in the new age of federally mandated double walled tanks. Never rule out bad gas is my point.
Sorry about the formatting...forgot that HTML formatted was selected.
Here is some proper formatting for you. Remember, preview!
This idea is so asinine and restrictive that I can almost guarantee that it will fail miserably as well as probably upset a great deal of the existing customer base.
Case in point: I frequent a coffee shop here in Pittsburgh constantly. The Beehive offers free wireless access as well as has around 8-9 computers with all sorts of multiplayer games installed, as well as DVD drives (you can watch movies), and believe it or not, cable access. A number of the computers have tuner cards built in. The money they get from the PCs more than covers the costs of their relatively low upkeep, upgrades, and of course the DSL, which seems to be basic SDSL at maybe.....1.5mps?
They are the only coffee shop in the area to offer free internet, and of course people come and congregate based on this fact. The most comparable coffee shop that offers internet would be the Quiet Storm, and it costs roughly $20/month to $10 for a few hours or something (maybe the day). Of course, Starbucks has T-Mobile hotspots that are completely locked down, but I won't get into THAT.
Don't charge by the hour. By imposing a fixed cost for a fixed period of time (1 coffee = 3 hours or whatever) people will feel like they are being charged for internet usage. No coffee, no internet. If your crowd is a mostly college crowd, it is understandable that many of them are rather poor and cannot afford $10 in coffee a day. I'm sure that a sizable percentage of your customers comes by just to hang out and sees a coffee or two as the cost of admission. This is the appeal of coffee shops, right? The more friends people have with them, the more paying customers you have.
If you have a problem with a large group that does not buy enough to use up your entire space, they need to be kindly, and politely I might add, informed about the simple economics of running a coffee shop. I'm sure the owner pays rent or a mortgage, taxes and obviously, employees.
Also, you should look at supplementing the costs of the free net with some rental computers or something that people can use out of convenience, like a CD burner and a printer. Sometimes it is incredibly convenient to be working on a project and have such things available without having to go to kinkos, especially in a college environment.
Just think about this differently at least. Anything so restrictive is sure to raise complaints and decrease the overall satisfaction of your customers. $100/month is totally worth it to spend, especially when your customers are buying freaking $2-3 coffees. If you implement a system like this, it is going to take time and money to deploy and test, depending on your setup, which I'm guessing isn't probably all that sophisticated.
The problem is really the people that are just using the space. Those are customers you can certainly afford to lose and the best way is ultimately to politely ask them to leave if they are finished with their drinks so that paying customers can use their space. Every bar and coffee shop (the successful ones at least) I've been to will certainly follow some similar policy.
I drive a taxi and I clearly wouldn't let someone ride around without giving me some cash. I expect any other sensible businessman to do the same.
This idea is so asinine and restrictive that I can almost guarantee that it will fail miserably as well as probably upset a great deal of the existing customer base. Case in point: I frequent a coffee shop here in Pittsburgh constantly. The Beehive offers free wireless access as well as has around 8-9 computers with all sorts of multiplayer games installed, as well as DVD drives (you can watch movies), and believe it or not, cable access. A number of the computers have tuner cards built in. The money they get from the PCs more than covers the costs of their relatively low upkeep, upgrades, and of course the DSL, which seems to be basic SDSL at maybe.....1.5mps? They are the only coffee shop in the area to offer free internet, and of course people come and congregate based on this fact. The most comparable coffee shop that offers internet would be the Quiet Storm, and it costs roughly $20/month to $10 for a few hours or something (maybe the day). Of course, Starbucks has T-Mobile hotspots that are completely locked down, but I won't get into THAT. Don't charge by the hour. By imposing a fixed cost for a fixed period of time (1 coffee = 3 hours or whatever) people will feel like they are being charged for internet usage. No coffee, no internet. If your crowd is a mostly college crowd, it is understandable that many of them are rather poor and cannot afford $10 in coffee a day. I'm sure that a sizable percentage of your customers comes by just to hang out and sees a coffee or two as the cost of admission. This is the appeal of coffee shops, right? The more friends people have with them, the more paying customers you have. If you have a problem with a large group that does not buy enough to use up your entire space, they need to be kindly, and politely I might add, informed about the simple economics of running a coffee shop. I'm sure the owner pays rent or a mortgage, taxes and obviously, employees. Also, you should look at supplementing the costs of the free net with some rental computers or something that people can use out of convenience, like a CD burner and a printer. Sometimes it is incredibly convenient to be working on a project and have such things available without having to go to kinkos, especially in a college environment. Just think about this differently at least. Anything so restrictive is sure to raise complaints and decrease the overall satisfaction of your customers. $100/month is totally worth it to spend, especially when your customers are buying freaking $2-3 coffees. If you implement a system like this, it is going to take time and money to deploy and test, depending on your setup, which I'm guessing isn't probably all that sophisticated. The problem is really the people that are just using the space. Those are customers you can certainly afford to lose and the best way is ultimately to politely ask them to leave if they are finished with their drinks so that paying customers can use their space. Every bar and coffee shop (the successful ones at least) I've been to will certainly follow some similar policy. I drive a taxi and I clearly wouldn't let someone ride around without giving me some cash. I expect any other sensible businessman to do the same.
beat me to it! good job!
Uh. The first zelda had no towns, none. Zelda 2 had a couple, but zelda 2 doesn't really count. A link to the past had 1 town. The oracle games each had two towns (if I remember correctly) and I think that Link's Awakening had like 1 town. Also I think even Minish Cap has 2 or 3 towns, so having only one town in WW is pretty par for the course. Zelda isn't about towns or locales its far more about gameplay and puzzles.
Why not just use the classic theme? it looks an awful lot like Windows 2000 to me.
Your future has not been totally bought and sold. Your body and your choice of lifestyle may be already be a part of the machine, but you and your children still have a future. If you keep electing people that will throw away your rights, perhaps you deserve nothing. Over 200 years ago a revolt broke out over, what was it? Restrictive government? Tea taxes?! We revolted against the masters over tea taxes! Now we pay every new tax like our fucking duty to this political machine is to keep feeding it. Wake the fuck up people. Companies are making the laws these days. Our government serves only their political contributions and tax revenue while we turn a blind eye to the atrocities they commit daily overseas. We all need to become dissedents. Our fair government has stifled competition and become a monopoly. Don't let the rebulicans and the democrats tell you otherwise, they have been sold. I can't believe people put up with this and that it doesn't outrage them to read crap like this everyday. There's gotta be some other smart people out there that think the same way. Can't we do anything about this. I'm getting older and I feel like my life is just wasting away while I watch my world and the future of our world slowly rot away. Is there hope yet for mankind?
My reply would be to look at some winamp plugins that do dynamic compression, like audio stocker pro. I've found that if totally flat volume is what you are looking for it does an ok job. There are also some gaining sort of DSPs you can get for XMMS. None of this stuff can replace a good hardware compressor, or even a good software compressor for that matter. Wavelab is probably one of the best audio editors out there if you are a Windows user, also Sound Forge is pretty decent and has some really nice features. I always loved the pop and click removal tool. Audacity is also pretty decent. You just need something to flatten out your volume amplitude. It will make the mix (especially a symphony) sound a lot more flatter however because part of the arrangement is so dependant upon the individual volume levels of the different sections.
As someone has pointed out radio stations do this very well. (with real hardware of course!)
I was going to ask slashdot something similar as well.....
I have all sorts of MP3s and OGGs. What I would like to do is run some sort of gaining program across all of them at once. I already know of mp3gain and oggain. My question is that when such things are run how much of the original mix does it destroy? I mean I just want to generally raise the volume of the files to the be at least within a closer range, but I don't wan't say quiet parts of the mix to be automatically increased in amplitude. I've tried a few plugins for Winamp and XMMS which all claim to normalize as they play, but they are instead compressing the sound dynamically which alters every nearly aspect of the original in many ways, and is not what I'm really looking for (unlike this guy).
# Post Early: If an article has over a certain number of posts on it already, yours is less likely to be moderated.
This is far different however than posting early. The tactic he/she used was to post early in a parent post to try to boost karma by being closer to the top of the page by astroturfing on someone elses high ranking post as well as asking for mod points.
The parent is right in this case. The kid needs to be sent back to school.
Not the first post dude, go home and try again.
While possible, I doubt it.
Seriously, come on. The problem could have been so many number of things, from instruments to actual fuel loss. Perhaps he enough fuel in spite of the loss. Why are so many idiots here on slashdot so quick to cry conspiracy? Yeah we didn't go to the moon either, right? Appollo 13 was just an artificial crisis, sure that one may actually be plausible, if you forget about the earlier astronauts that had already died. More than a few died right on the launching pad. Of course, we never knew about the terrible Russian tragedies until much later. When a mission has a high probability of technical failure and you run 16 or so missions, the chances that a few will result in catastrophe are greatly increased. It is rather amazing that the Apollo 13 crew ever made it back to earth. Which is a better PR move, success or failure? I can't imagine anyone at NASA wanting to stage a fake space accident at the costs that they were hitting tax payers with.
It is good to be a skeptic, but to the point that everything is a conspiracy and that nobody is telling the truth is quite honestly delusional and psychotic. Unless you were there, nothing is the truth and everything is permitted. Grow up, when people start realizing what is truly going on in the world it may frighten them to realize how little control we have left over any of it.
Oh yeah, that Philadelphia Experiment thing, yeah. That was real. They really did teleport a ship across two harbors. And the sailors, they were really all fused together and mutated. They were also frozen and going out of their minds. Now that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!(TM)
Funny how the crew was interviewed years later and never recalled ever being in the said deporting port and never recalled the event ever happening at all in spite of serving on the ship for years. I guess they had their mind erased right?
Dude. It's a joke. It's funny. Laugh.
From what I've seen of the gnome project, everything in the UI is too pronounced. For example, does the menu bar need all of the icons with a bold highlight around them? Why does the title/menu bar have to take up 25% of the window? Small subdued cues would be grand in a UI. We all eventually know where to click anyways right? For as much as I dislike the classic Windows 2000 UI, it still is not nearly as intrusive as gnome or kde as far as I am concerned. I guess there are some skins out there that probably give me what I want, but we really need something that is slick out of the box, something that doesn't work just like Windows. The Mac GUI creator just passed away (God bless his soul) and we haven't really come up with anything better in the last 30 years? Hell, even Nextstep and OS/2 were steps in a better direction.
If you ask me, there will never be a year of the Linux desktop until somebody creates a Linux desktop environment that is at least as rich as Windows. When is cut and paste going to be even supported across applications in KDE or GNOME? Oh, text works ok? Well what about a piece of a picture or a clip of a wave? What about drag and drop? Can I just drop any document onto a printer icon and have it spit out the result? Without configuring 20 various text files?
When the big boys like Adobe start releasing Photoshop for Linux, then perhaps there will be some sort of market, but until then I hear that the GIMP is fine as long as you don't need to work in CMYK.