While I'm not in england, some of my clients are in the UK as well as elsewhere around the world (though the majority are in the mainland US).
My company is headquartered in Indiana, and our servers are also located in Indiana. However, I live on the Big Island of Hawaii. Since Hawaii is separated by 2500 miles of ocean in all directions we rate as one of the most remote places on the planet (note, remote does not mean inaccessable).
Going to work means getting up, making coffee, and trudging upstairs to the computer lab. There I have multiple computers running real-time sensors with alarms to my remote servers. Constantly SSHed into them I type with very very long fingers (thousands of miles long) over cable modem. Back before cable modem I used dual dialup lines and that was also adaquate.
I also have servers at my significant others houses from which I can do the same monitoring and work when there and not at my place... as well as Handspring-to-cellphone for emergency telnet sessions while on the road (or hiking or playing in the lava).
Depending on your direct industry, face to face meetings are rarely needed these days. About 80 to 90% of our clients never meet us and all communication is done by email (preferably) and phone.
What are the minimum requirements? Good FED-X, Good phone service, Good internet, Clean air and lots of fun things to do around you at all times.
What are the downsides? Your work is your home (I'm assuming here that you will be working from your home)... thus it is also your prison. Make sure to distance your work from your actual living quarters. My servers are set to alarm if they can't see the remote systems, which I can hear in the main part of the house... but other than that - you need to be able to seperate your home life from your work life or the home becomes a hell.
I'm sure someone here will be happy to clear this up for me but...
Penetrating thick dust where two galaxies are colliding
How do galaxies get to the point of collision? If the universe began with the big bang that would indicate material being thrown outwards from a source point in pretty much an even pattern. As they continue to go outwards the space between them would increase, not decrease. Now, I know the debate about "are we expanding forever or not" but can someone in a nut shell explain to me what would cause a galaxy to alter trajectory so much as to collide with another - especially after this much time from the big bang? Thanks.
What if there is actually no SCO-owned code in Linux... what if, instead... what they did is lift 5 to 10 to 15 lines of code from multiple parts of linux and place it into SCO owned code and then simply claim that it was stolen from them?
I wouldn't put it past these sleazy sons of bitches.
BTW, I called SCO headquarters yesterday to voice my frustration (801-765-4999). A pleasant woman immediatly answered the phone and asked where to direct my call. I said "Ummmm, anyone"... she said "ummmm, what is this in reference to" and I replied "the sleazy business dealings your doing with the lawsuit". She replied "well, everyone is currently at a company lunchen right now". I replied "What, the last supper"?
Ah well... call 'em and bitch. If nothing else we can swamp their phone systems with our opinions.
...is that this can ALSO be used to restrict software developers, especially us little guys. M$ has frequently done things (such as pricing development tools, etc..) so that it is becoming harder and harder to be a player in the software arena. By forcing DRM they may very well also force *certification*... that is, their hardware won't run *my* software unless I pony up to the M$ bar with lots of cash, hand over my source code to them, and in general pay to belong to their elite club.
Would they do this? Sure, in a rats ass moment they would... first, it would bring them revenue from companies who want to get software published (CHARGE THE DEVELOPERS!!!)... second, they would have to certify it so they would require the source code... hmmmm... look at what they're doing in this chunk of code (SUE!!!!) or... hmmm, look at what they're doing in this chunk of code (STEAL, PATENT AND SUE!!!!). And consider someone perhaps M$ doesn't like... guess what, it doesn't pass certification... period.
As an independent game development company without the resources of the giants, this type of move scares me shitless.
I'd say aloha in leaving, but I have no aloha for the likes of bill gates and his ilk.
If you want a game which is quite unlike any other... and one that is ESPECIALLY perfect for those who like to say "I don't usually play games" try tranquility from TQworld. It works on PC and Mac (requires a good GL driver in your video card)... is a full GL game with tens of thousands of interactive moveable objects... over 200 simultaneous tracks of CD quality music and much more. Best of all, it is not a game that involves violence, gore or killing - instead it's a game for your head - to make you relax and trip out.
Click here to see what Apple themselves had to say about the game. Download is free and there are lots to do for free in the game.
We went ahead and did the upgrade mainly because there are security issues with the past versions. Like I said in my original post, we have a little daemon that runs and looks for, among other things, the hung processes. It KILL -USR1 the parent process ID (launch ID) and that resolves the problem.
Since we've implemented this strategy no users or clients hav ever noticed the hangs. Like I mentioned, we get a few a day (3 to 5) but they're resolved within 5 seconds of occuring..
Our little iDefend program does a few other things too... it looks for abusive users and bans them... it looks for high system load and can kill cgi processes or halt apache altogether until load goes back to normal, etc.
I believe that your bug is a different bug than the one we're reporting. The bug we're seeing NEVER produces high load. The child simply doesn't respond and load goes to zero (since nobody can get hits).
There were other reports similar to yours of high load but those have been resolved (as per the bug reports). I recommend searching the apache bug reports for "high load" and "hang" and see if you can find your report and the associated fix.
We've upgraded our SUNS right along with Apache's releases, and we're running the latest and greatest.
However, we do have one complaint and have filed bug reports which so far have been unresolved. (btw, prior to apache-2.0.39 we did not experience this problem)
A number of uses of SUN servers (we use ULTRAS and V100's) have noted that apache httpd children processes hang ocassionally. With prior than.45 releases we were seeing a hang a few times a week. With the.45 release we are seeing on average 3 to 5 hangs a day, so the problem has gotten worse.
This is not just our boxes - other people have confirmed the problem and the orginal bug report referenced above was actually opened not by me. I asked the original poster if they had problem too with the.45 version and they just upgraded last week and reported back that it also appeared to them to have the problem worse.
Specifically, a child will hang. If you connect via port 80 (e.g., telnet) to the child it answers, but when you type your line (e.g., GET/) it hangs upon carriage return and ALL the children then are hung in the same manner. There is no load associated with the hang, but the server stops responding FOR A PERIOD OF TIME to port 80 requests (e.g., they all hang). The server does seem to eventually recover - but not fast enough for our clients;)
Both the original poster and myself have written watchdog programs which ping (mine pings every 5 seconds) the server and if the server doesn't respond it sends a KILL -USR1 signal (bascially a form of HUP) to the parent process. In 99.9999% of the cases this unsticks the parent and life returns to normal (note, there is no load associated with the hung children - e.g., load does not go up when the child hangs). In the.0001% of the cases where at least two consecutive KILL's don't unstick the parent we do a forced kill of all apache and restart it (again, automated by the watchdog).
THe other reporter is also using SUNS, so this might be particular with their 2.8 OS. Also, ALL of our suns exhibit it, regardless of apache config, etc.
Besides that, also note there are a few changes to the config so using your old config will PROBABLY result in apache bitch'n the first time you startup, but the changes are pretty minor (mostly things you don't need anymore).
I had thought about the Braille option fleetingly... Since he is in his 70's I figured that it would be easier to teach him how to type on a standard keyboard... than to try to teach him Braille AND how to use Braille input, etc. (not to mention that I don't know Braille myself;). I suspect that if I were to take him down the Braille line of thought, that the cost of equipment, lessons and travel to someplace that would teach them (he's on the Big Island of Hawaii) wouldn't be worth the time and trouble. Or at least... we should give standard keyboards a go at it first, since they're only $49 for a decent one;).
I've a client in his 70's. I submitted a similar slashdot article a couple weeks ago, but specific to voice recognition.
My client is literally blind in that all he can see are vague shapes. He is also a hard-core smoker and his voice is fairly inconsistant.
He uses JAWS which is a program that reads information on the screen. I find it terribly annoying but he likes it's functionality.
He wanted voice input... and I called a number of vendors including IBM's voice project etc... but all of them said NO GOOD for nearly blind users as the training sessions are very long and involved and the user has to READ the screen (impossible).
He received a few weeks ago a flyer about the QPOINTER software product. This product is fairly new and not much is out there. I contacted the company and they said training was fairly short (15 minutes or so). I inquired if I could print out the training sessions and they (very nicely I might add) had their programmers send me the training sessions as text files. I printed them out in 2-inch high Arial Black letters on paper (29 pages worth) and brought them over and said "can you read these" and he said "nope". Great... but we installed the software anyway. The training system allowed me to pause so I would pause it, read a couple words to him and then un-pause and he would repeat them. We trained for about 3 hours and indeed it would open up the browser for him, etc. One problem was that he couln't read the visual cues that QPOINTER pops up - but by placing things in a KNOWN order I was able to get him around that.
However, when it came time to entering URL's etc... we were only able to get about 10% accuracy from the program - mainly due to the fact that his voice, after years of smoking, is terribly inconsistant. We retrained for a couple of hours on another day but to no improvement. Thus - we scrapped the voice input idea since he would have no idea if it recognized words and letters correctly or not.
At this point, frustrated, I realized that since I can type totally with MY eyes closed, he should be able to as well. Unfortunatly, he doesn't know how to type - but his wife used to be a typing instructor so... I went out and purchased him the ergonomic MS keyboard (the one with the huge split down the middle). I did this because that keyboard makes finding the proper keys easier due to the split (you don't need to hunt for the raised bump). His wife is currently going to try to teach him to type, and once he gets that down I'm going to go over the special key functions and try to make it work for him.
This is an area ripe for development. As us geeks get older we will encounter the same problems and we WILL demand a solution. Voice recognition is great, but it doesn't work except as a productivity enhancement (e.g., you still need to be able to read). A bigger screen would not help because no matter how big the letters are, he can't read them. Same for a head-up display. And voice input on a system that is ALSO doing voice output provides it's own set of problems (solved currently by using a headset mic).
Good luck - and let us know if you will, how this went for you!!
I'll repeat what I posted a few weeks ago when someone else asked this very same question.
When my wife and I got married we didn't have alot of money. We took my parents (they were dead) wedding rings and had the gold melted down and combined into two new rings. We wanted them to be special and we'd always been interested in the topology and symbolism of a mobius strip (one sided one edged object).
We found a local designer and presented our request and made him a couple of mobius strips outta paper so he got the idea. It took him a couple of molds to get it right but he ended up giving us two beautiful mobius wedding rings. The half-twist was positioned to be just a bit left of center top, so it wasn't uncomfortable (having the twist against your skin) and he flattened the bottom slightly so the twist wouldn't 'twist' around our fingers (e.g., stay in position).
The total price, for everything (remember, we supplied the gold) was $90, and he had gold left over which he gave us back. (this was 25 years ago though).
The first time we put them on we kinda wondered if we'd disappear in a puff of time, but nothing happened (that we could tell).
I used to love Epson printers... but then they went to their facist chip technology in their ink carts. Now... I spend more than 1/2 of a cart. simply cleaning it every time I want to make a printout.
I print maybe once or twice a month - in that time the printer is turned off. Turning it on and making a quick printout usually ends up in a blank sheet of paper. I usually have to force a clean cycle up to 6 or 7 times to make the page print properly.... when you add up the wasted paper, wasted ink... media costs... epson is now at the bottom of my list of printers to buy.
It is dissapointing to see a company who used to make fairly reliable hardware sell out. In my opinion they purposely make their carts. act like this - pure horse crap.
What I would love to see is a printer company that charges more for the printers... and very little for the ink. Anything else is extortion and the company doing it needs to be boycotted and slapped down big time.
... I'm sorry but the "evil bit" simply will not work.
Consider, for example, a program like SATAN. Now... if SATAN is used by a hax0r to examine a system the EVIL BIT should be set to '1'. But if a SYSADMIN uses SATAN to check his system to ensure that his system is safe the EVIL BIT has to be a '0'.
This means that PSYCHIC ENERGY must be involved in order for SATAN to determine the USERS INTENT and thus set the EVIL BIT properly.
But never fear... I've written a scrubber named "RAPTURE" whos job it is to check for packets from SATAN with the EVIL BIT SET and CLENSE the bit by sending it to heaven where it will be happy with 77 virgin '0's.
hehehehehehehe... now now;) There are things you can do in a lava field you can't do in a mine field, at least not easily, like cook chicken in lava. At least it's more fun:)
wow those are expensive. they certainly look like they will do the trick but geeze, $200+ for some of those. egads;)) I can buy alota mag lites for $200:)
Yes, we use similar equipment but it doesn't work will on the lava flow becuase we tend to look around us all the time to find the best paths... when we do that we end up blinding each other. When we turn our heads we don't want to have the light follow;)
Yes, we've tried fluorescent... in fact, I have 20 or so different flashlights - we've tried everything. It isn't a problem of flashlights that work or don't, it's a problem of going through batteries and durability. In other words, I'm looking for something with a huge battery life, light weight and an excellent beam. LED always seemed attractive but like my original post said, I'm unsure.
The question posted is an excellent one. I've often wondered just how good the LED flashlights are for brightness.
My specific use is that I hike the lava fields at night here in hawaii... On moonless or cloudy nights it can be pretty dangerous because of the huge cracks (some of them 30 ft or deeper) and very very uneven ground (you regularly go up and down 15 ft as you clambor over tumulous (lava tubes)).
We use super bright flashlights so we can see distances as well as illuminate the area to find the best paths around obstacles. Since we're 20 miles from any services and any lights (hawaii is VERY dark at night) we often bring 3 or 4 flashlights and plenty of batteries.
We prefer to use flashlights that have a fairly wide field so that it illuminates as much as possible in front of us (and a bit to the sides) without blinding others in the party.
Any recommendations specific to these needs would be GREATLY appreciated since I feel that LED, if bright enough, would be great as it would be lighter and have infinatly better shelf life and battery life.
Anything that is lighter than my 2 million candle power 6 volt rechargable would be a blessing;))
(btw, before you say it, yes, we do use nightvision too but that is very dangerous to wear and walk at the same time, plus it doesn't do that great a job of showing the cracks in the ground which are often in shadow... though it DOES do great for finding where the flowing lava is ahead of you - the NightOwl M is batteryless and uses squeeze pizeo for power - very neat).
we tried rsync... didn't like what it did to load.
though i do like to roll my own for just about everything since it removes the 'blackbox' factor and puts it totally under my control
Part of my job is maintaining game servers as well as servers for web hosts and web clients. We wanted to keep 'mirrored' servers that reflected twice a day any changes that might occur in the live servers. We tried a number of commercial products and found that all of them lacked - mainly, they were hogs and would drive system load up to the point where I felt uncomfortable. So we buckled down and designed our own system which we call "MakeItSo". A daemon runs on the server to be backed up to, and a client is launched by CRON on the server which we wish to backup. A config file instructs the client as well as the server what directories can be backed up, and allows filtering of filenames and directories (e.g., we don't necessairly want to back up server logs, etc). When a new directory is added the client provides a checksum and a signature to the daemon. The next backup will only send files which have changed (incremental backup). We use 'gzip' to compress the file and transmit it.
MakeItSo has a very small footprint (daemon is about 1.4 meg) and it spikes load about.5 while running - very tollerable (some of the commercial packages were spiking load over 4.0!! we use SUN servers). The nice thing is that because we wrote it ourselves (all C) we can tweak it and do just about anything we wish to improve it's performance.
...my wife and I wanted our rings to be something different and special. We were just out of college and pretty poor so we didn't have a lot of money to spend.
We found a local jewler and asked if he could fashion two gold rings in the shape of a mobius strip (a one sided one edged object). We showed him, out of paper, what a mobius strip was and what it could do. A month later, and for a total cost of $90 (in the 80's) we had two rings with a half twist. To make the rings comfortable and keep the twist in a certain place he had slightly flattened the underside of the ring so that it wouldn't ride around on our fingers. (for those interested, to make a one sided one edged solid gold object he created the twist in a mold and then poured the gold into the mold.)
I always liked the mobius strip rings... there is certainly symbolism in them (no 2 sides, but 1 side... 2 people working together as 1, etc...). Nobody else had anything like them and they were quite attractive.
Aloha Nui Loa for your upcoming wedding - hope to see you honeymoon here on the active volcano in Hawaii.
As an indie game developer (TQworld) I both agree and disagree with the article.
In agreement I have to say that if you are pursuing a competitive first person shooter, etc... you require a large staff with many graphic artists, prgrammers, etc. You are also going to pour lots of money into marketing and getting big names for voices etc. Additionally, getting into some of the console markets is near-neigh impossible unless your a well known and established company with millions.
However, in disagreement I offer our own experience. In our view, an indie is most at risk if they (1) accept funding from investors and (2) try to release games that mimic the current genres and (3) do not pay close enough attention to stability (e.g., support issues).
Our game has been fairly successful, and continues to grow, due in part to the fact that it bucks the traditional genres. We have no problem staying afloat because we funded the venture out of pocket and never once accepted money outside the company. This allowed us to retain total control over the direction of the game. Because we retained total control we also had the ability to ensure that we did not release anything until WE were happy and WE were certain it was stable.
It is apparent that it will be a slow and steady climb for us (our first release was in 2001) to get to the point where bigger names take notice, and console manufacturers want to talk - but as with anything, if you are tiny and innovative you can overcome most obstacles and become a david among goliths (sorry:).
In a, perhaps related topic.... yesterday a friend and I were wondering if the troop buildup in the middle east could be measured as a change against the earth. Specifically, considering that our idiotic president has now built up 250,000 troops in the area... and consider the average soldier probably weighs in at around 170 lbs... that would be quite an additional weight in an area where the weight would not have been eariler. If we also factor in the weight of each soldiers gear, the tanks, planes, ships, food and supplies, etc... it is quite a bit of weight that has shifted from a large area (throughout the US) to a small area.
Though I'm sure our *smirking chimp* hasn't considered this, or any of the other implications of this massive stupidity we are embarked on.
Slashdot Mirror
My company is headquartered in Indiana, and our servers are also located in Indiana. However, I live on the Big Island of Hawaii. Since Hawaii is separated by 2500 miles of ocean in all directions we rate as one of the most remote places on the planet (note, remote does not mean inaccessable).
Going to work means getting up, making coffee, and trudging upstairs to the computer lab. There I have multiple computers running real-time sensors with alarms to my remote servers. Constantly SSHed into them I type with very very long fingers (thousands of miles long) over cable modem. Back before cable modem I used dual dialup lines and that was also adaquate.
I also have servers at my significant others houses from which I can do the same monitoring and work when there and not at my place... as well as Handspring-to-cellphone for emergency telnet sessions while on the road (or hiking or playing in the lava).
Depending on your direct industry, face to face meetings are rarely needed these days. About 80 to 90% of our clients never meet us and all communication is done by email (preferably) and phone.
What are the minimum requirements? Good FED-X, Good phone service, Good internet, Clean air and lots of fun things to do around you at all times.
What are the downsides? Your work is your home (I'm assuming here that you will be working from your home)... thus it is also your prison. Make sure to distance your work from your actual living quarters. My servers are set to alarm if they can't see the remote systems, which I can hear in the main part of the house... but other than that - you need to be able to seperate your home life from your work life or the home becomes a hell.
Good luck and Aloha Nui Loa
How do galaxies get to the point of collision? If the universe began with the big bang that would indicate material being thrown outwards from a source point in pretty much an even pattern. As they continue to go outwards the space between them would increase, not decrease. Now, I know the debate about "are we expanding forever or not" but can someone in a nut shell explain to me what would cause a galaxy to alter trajectory so much as to collide with another - especially after this much time from the big bang? Thanks.
And tell your lawyer my # is 801-765-4999.
Aloha
I wouldn't put it past these sleazy sons of bitches.
BTW, I called SCO headquarters yesterday to voice my frustration (801-765-4999). A pleasant woman immediatly answered the phone and asked where to direct my call. I said "Ummmm, anyone"... she said "ummmm, what is this in reference to" and I replied "the sleazy business dealings your doing with the lawsuit". She replied "well, everyone is currently at a company lunchen right now". I replied "What, the last supper"?
Ah well... call 'em and bitch. If nothing else we can swamp their phone systems with our opinions.
Would they do this? Sure, in a rats ass moment they would... first, it would bring them revenue from companies who want to get software published (CHARGE THE DEVELOPERS!!!)... second, they would have to certify it so they would require the source code... hmmmm... look at what they're doing in this chunk of code (SUE!!!!) or ... hmmm, look at what they're doing in this chunk of code (STEAL, PATENT AND SUE!!!!). And consider someone perhaps M$ doesn't like... guess what, it doesn't pass certification... period.
As an independent game development company without the resources of the giants, this type of move scares me shitless.
I'd say aloha in leaving, but I have no aloha for the likes of bill gates and his ilk.
Click here to see what Apple themselves had to say about the game. Download is free and there are lots to do for free in the game.
Aloha and Enjoy!
Since we've implemented this strategy no users or clients hav ever noticed the hangs. Like I mentioned, we get a few a day (3 to 5) but they're resolved within 5 seconds of occuring..
Our little iDefend program does a few other things too... it looks for abusive users and bans them... it looks for high system load and can kill cgi processes or halt apache altogether until load goes back to normal, etc.
There were other reports similar to yours of high load but those have been resolved (as per the bug reports). I recommend searching the apache bug reports for "high load" and "hang" and see if you can find your report and the associated fix.
However, we do have one complaint and have filed bug reports which so far have been unresolved. (btw, prior to apache-2.0.39 we did not experience this problem)
A number of uses of SUN servers (we use ULTRAS and V100's) have noted that apache httpd children processes hang ocassionally. With prior than .45 releases we were seeing a hang a few times a week. With the .45 release we are seeing on average 3 to 5 hangs a day, so the problem has gotten worse.
This is not just our boxes - other people have confirmed the problem and the orginal bug report referenced above was actually opened not by me. I asked the original poster if they had problem too with the .45 version and they just upgraded last week and reported back that it also appeared to them to have the problem worse.
Specifically, a child will hang. If you connect via port 80 (e.g., telnet) to the child it answers, but when you type your line (e.g., GET /) it hangs upon carriage return and ALL the children then are hung in the same manner. There is no load associated with the hang, but the server stops responding FOR A PERIOD OF TIME to port 80 requests (e.g., they all hang). The server does seem to eventually recover - but not fast enough for our clients ;)
Both the original poster and myself have written watchdog programs which ping (mine pings every 5 seconds) the server and if the server doesn't respond it sends a KILL -USR1 signal (bascially a form of HUP) to the parent process. In 99.9999% of the cases this unsticks the parent and life returns to normal (note, there is no load associated with the hung children - e.g., load does not go up when the child hangs). In the .0001% of the cases where at least two consecutive KILL's don't unstick the parent we do a forced kill of all apache and restart it (again, automated by the watchdog).
THe other reporter is also using SUNS, so this might be particular with their 2.8 OS. Also, ALL of our suns exhibit it, regardless of apache config, etc.
Besides that, also note there are a few changes to the config so using your old config will PROBABLY result in apache bitch'n the first time you startup, but the changes are pretty minor (mostly things you don't need anymore).
I had thought about the Braille option fleetingly... Since he is in his 70's I figured that it would be easier to teach him how to type on a standard keyboard... than to try to teach him Braille AND how to use Braille input, etc. (not to mention that I don't know Braille myself ;). I suspect that if I were to take him down the Braille line of thought, that the cost of equipment, lessons and travel to someplace that would teach them (he's on the Big Island of Hawaii) wouldn't be worth the time and trouble. Or at least... we should give standard keyboards a go at it first, since they're only $49 for a decent one ;).
My client is literally blind in that all he can see are vague shapes. He is also a hard-core smoker and his voice is fairly inconsistant.
He uses JAWS which is a program that reads information on the screen. I find it terribly annoying but he likes it's functionality.
He wanted voice input... and I called a number of vendors including IBM's voice project etc... but all of them said NO GOOD for nearly blind users as the training sessions are very long and involved and the user has to READ the screen (impossible).
He received a few weeks ago a flyer about the QPOINTER software product. This product is fairly new and not much is out there. I contacted the company and they said training was fairly short (15 minutes or so). I inquired if I could print out the training sessions and they (very nicely I might add) had their programmers send me the training sessions as text files. I printed them out in 2-inch high Arial Black letters on paper (29 pages worth) and brought them over and said "can you read these" and he said "nope". Great... but we installed the software anyway. The training system allowed me to pause so I would pause it, read a couple words to him and then un-pause and he would repeat them. We trained for about 3 hours and indeed it would open up the browser for him, etc. One problem was that he couln't read the visual cues that QPOINTER pops up - but by placing things in a KNOWN order I was able to get him around that.
However, when it came time to entering URL's etc... we were only able to get about 10% accuracy from the program - mainly due to the fact that his voice, after years of smoking, is terribly inconsistant. We retrained for a couple of hours on another day but to no improvement. Thus - we scrapped the voice input idea since he would have no idea if it recognized words and letters correctly or not.
At this point, frustrated, I realized that since I can type totally with MY eyes closed, he should be able to as well. Unfortunatly, he doesn't know how to type - but his wife used to be a typing instructor so... I went out and purchased him the ergonomic MS keyboard (the one with the huge split down the middle). I did this because that keyboard makes finding the proper keys easier due to the split (you don't need to hunt for the raised bump). His wife is currently going to try to teach him to type, and once he gets that down I'm going to go over the special key functions and try to make it work for him.
This is an area ripe for development. As us geeks get older we will encounter the same problems and we WILL demand a solution. Voice recognition is great, but it doesn't work except as a productivity enhancement (e.g., you still need to be able to read). A bigger screen would not help because no matter how big the letters are, he can't read them. Same for a head-up display. And voice input on a system that is ALSO doing voice output provides it's own set of problems (solved currently by using a headset mic).
Good luck - and let us know if you will, how this went for you!!
Aloha
When my wife and I got married we didn't have alot of money. We took my parents (they were dead) wedding rings and had the gold melted down and combined into two new rings. We wanted them to be special and we'd always been interested in the topology and symbolism of a mobius strip (one sided one edged object).
We found a local designer and presented our request and made him a couple of mobius strips outta paper so he got the idea. It took him a couple of molds to get it right but he ended up giving us two beautiful mobius wedding rings. The half-twist was positioned to be just a bit left of center top, so it wasn't uncomfortable (having the twist against your skin) and he flattened the bottom slightly so the twist wouldn't 'twist' around our fingers (e.g., stay in position).
The total price, for everything (remember, we supplied the gold) was $90, and he had gold left over which he gave us back. (this was 25 years ago though).
The first time we put them on we kinda wondered if we'd disappear in a puff of time, but nothing happened (that we could tell).
Aloha Nui
I print maybe once or twice a month - in that time the printer is turned off. Turning it on and making a quick printout usually ends up in a blank sheet of paper. I usually have to force a clean cycle up to 6 or 7 times to make the page print properly.... when you add up the wasted paper, wasted ink... media costs... epson is now at the bottom of my list of printers to buy.
It is dissapointing to see a company who used to make fairly reliable hardware sell out. In my opinion they purposely make their carts. act like this - pure horse crap.
What I would love to see is a printer company that charges more for the printers... and very little for the ink. Anything else is extortion and the company doing it needs to be boycotted and slapped down big time.
Consider, for example, a program like SATAN. Now... if SATAN is used by a hax0r to examine a system the EVIL BIT should be set to '1'. But if a SYSADMIN uses SATAN to check his system to ensure that his system is safe the EVIL BIT has to be a '0'.
This means that PSYCHIC ENERGY must be involved in order for SATAN to determine the USERS INTENT and thus set the EVIL BIT properly. But never fear... I've written a scrubber named "RAPTURE" whos job it is to check for packets from SATAN with the EVIL BIT SET and CLENSE the bit by sending it to heaven where it will be happy with 77 virgin '0's.
WHOOPS... I didn't mean nightowl - I meant STARGATE-M. My night owl was my earlier scope that got stolen. Sorry.
hehehehehehehe... now now ;) There are things you can do in a lava field you can't do in a mine field, at least not easily, like cook chicken in lava. At least it's more fun :)
wow those are expensive. they certainly look like they will do the trick but geeze, $200+ for some of those. egads ;)) I can buy alota mag lites for $200 :)
Yes, we use similar equipment but it doesn't work will on the lava flow becuase we tend to look around us all the time to find the best paths... when we do that we end up blinding each other. When we turn our heads we don't want to have the light follow ;)
Yes, we've tried fluorescent... in fact, I have 20 or so different flashlights - we've tried everything. It isn't a problem of flashlights that work or don't, it's a problem of going through batteries and durability. In other words, I'm looking for something with a huge battery life, light weight and an excellent beam. LED always seemed attractive but like my original post said, I'm unsure.
My specific use is that I hike the lava fields at night here in hawaii... On moonless or cloudy nights it can be pretty dangerous because of the huge cracks (some of them 30 ft or deeper) and very very uneven ground (you regularly go up and down 15 ft as you clambor over tumulous (lava tubes)).
We use super bright flashlights so we can see distances as well as illuminate the area to find the best paths around obstacles. Since we're 20 miles from any services and any lights (hawaii is VERY dark at night) we often bring 3 or 4 flashlights and plenty of batteries.
We prefer to use flashlights that have a fairly wide field so that it illuminates as much as possible in front of us (and a bit to the sides) without blinding others in the party.
Any recommendations specific to these needs would be GREATLY appreciated since I feel that LED, if bright enough, would be great as it would be lighter and have infinatly better shelf life and battery life.
Anything that is lighter than my 2 million candle power 6 volt rechargable would be a blessing ;))
(btw, before you say it, yes, we do use nightvision too but that is very dangerous to wear and walk at the same time, plus it doesn't do that great a job of showing the cracks in the ground which are often in shadow... though it DOES do great for finding where the flowing lava is ahead of you - the NightOwl M is batteryless and uses squeeze pizeo for power - very neat).
we tried rsync... didn't like what it did to load. though i do like to roll my own for just about everything since it removes the 'blackbox' factor and puts it totally under my control
MakeItSo has a very small footprint (daemon is about 1.4 meg) and it spikes load about .5 while running - very tollerable (some of the commercial packages were spiking load over 4.0!! we use SUN servers). The nice thing is that because we wrote it ourselves (all C) we can tweak it and do just about anything we wish to improve it's performance.
We found a local jewler and asked if he could fashion two gold rings in the shape of a mobius strip (a one sided one edged object). We showed him, out of paper, what a mobius strip was and what it could do. A month later, and for a total cost of $90 (in the 80's) we had two rings with a half twist. To make the rings comfortable and keep the twist in a certain place he had slightly flattened the underside of the ring so that it wouldn't ride around on our fingers. (for those interested, to make a one sided one edged solid gold object he created the twist in a mold and then poured the gold into the mold.)
I always liked the mobius strip rings... there is certainly symbolism in them (no 2 sides, but 1 side... 2 people working together as 1, etc...). Nobody else had anything like them and they were quite attractive.
Aloha Nui Loa for your upcoming wedding - hope to see you honeymoon here on the active volcano in Hawaii.
In agreement I have to say that if you are pursuing a competitive first person shooter, etc... you require a large staff with many graphic artists, prgrammers, etc. You are also going to pour lots of money into marketing and getting big names for voices etc. Additionally, getting into some of the console markets is near-neigh impossible unless your a well known and established company with millions.
However, in disagreement I offer our own experience. In our view, an indie is most at risk if they (1) accept funding from investors and (2) try to release games that mimic the current genres and (3) do not pay close enough attention to stability (e.g., support issues).
Our game has been fairly successful, and continues to grow, due in part to the fact that it bucks the traditional genres. We have no problem staying afloat because we funded the venture out of pocket and never once accepted money outside the company. This allowed us to retain total control over the direction of the game. Because we retained total control we also had the ability to ensure that we did not release anything until WE were happy and WE were certain it was stable.
It is apparent that it will be a slow and steady climb for us (our first release was in 2001) to get to the point where bigger names take notice, and console manufacturers want to talk - but as with anything, if you are tiny and innovative you can overcome most obstacles and become a david among goliths (sorry :).
Though I'm sure our *smirking chimp* hasn't considered this, or any of the other implications of this massive stupidity we are embarked on.