An example of this pragmatic philosophy is Konqueror's support of the CSS extension that allows you to set scrollbar colors. Mozilla refuses to implement it simply because it's not W3C sanctioned, even though it's a perfectly reasonable CSS extension that is widely used.
I dislike this extension. I have no idea whether this is a Microsoft-introduced extension, but I would strongly suspect so. Microsoft has a general policy of building a browser that trusts remote web sites to do a good job of presenting content and not being malicious, and can make it easy to make poor design decisions. I cannot think of a good reason to change scrollbar colors -- from a HCI perspective, this is an extremely poor idea. The user spends a long time learning to immediately recognize the scrollbars on the system, and this would make scrollbars look different at different sites. Mozilla and most other browsers have taken a much more restrictive approach, not letting remote sites have as much control over a user's computer. This approach is more security-centric, and, I've found, works better.
It's not just this one extension, but a vast number of things -- sites bookmarking themselves, sites popping up windows, and all kind of other nastiness that I boggle at every time I use IE on someone's computer.
Sure. It's a lot cheaper. If the music has equivalent value to you as a CD, downloading a single album has just paid for at least two months of service.
Remember that anyone downloading music/movies is investing time, hard drive space/bandwidth, and potentially CDRs anyway.
I actually hope that this company is a front for the RIAA, nailing those who are too stupid/greedy to figure it out.
[shrug] I kind of wish that all speeders would get nailed for breaking the law, potentially with speed-detection devices hidden in all cars. With speeding, people's lives are actually at risk (as opposed to folks just infringing copyrights). However, most people don't like the idea, because they like breaking the law to some degree. I suspect that the same applies to your "I hope the company is an RIAA front" idea -- probably most other people, like me, find the idea of going after users in such a manner distasteful.
1) why doesn't the RIAA just get an account, see who's swapping, and subpoena usernames?
The company just doesn't have to keep logs (at least of information like time-IP-username mappings). There is no requirement to log information, just to turn over any information that *has* been logged. They might want to store aggregate data usage with a username, but that should be more than sufficient.
This is an excellent question, and probably the primary point that the original submitter didn't cover.
Binary software distribution on Linux is a bitch. Unfortunately, many of the people that could improve the state of things are not in the least interested in doing so because "binary software isn't GPLed, and all software should be Free, so screw you". Frankly, this isn't a really feasible position to take, pleasant as it may be to say.
The LSB has helped a bit. It standardized the existence of (a *very* minimal set, mind you) certain libraries. The C ABI has been pretty stable, but the C++ ABI has changed several times in the past few years.
Basically, there are a number of problems.
First, shipping something in C++ is out. If you go back even a year, you're going to hit systems that won't run with your binary C++ software.
Certain interfaces, like DGA 1, have been deprecated. the X11 people seem to have little interest in backwards compatibility with DGA 1. Thus, software using DGA 1 tends to be flaky.
Some constants change and libraries and software are not capable of handling non-compile-time settings. I tried increasing HZ in my kernel a year or two ago, and discovered that it mucked up all kinds of timing stuff, probably due to glibc assuming that runtime and compile-time HZ were the same. It made the animation in Dominions (Well-maintained binary software game from Illwinter) run proportionally faster, for example. This means that even static linking is not a good answer.
Lots of libraries that folks might like to use are *not* always present. Frequently, systems include only one of GNOME or KDE. SDL is a common include now, but Clanlib, OpenAL, and Allegro are generally not included. SDL is not part of the LSB, so may not be relied upon (and as a matter of fact, old statically-linked versions of SDL have broken on newer systems).
I feel that Loki is probably one of the best packagers out there in terms of folks knowledgeable about the Right Way to do things on Linux and how to ship binary software. They've had extensive experience.
I have purchased or tried a number of titles. None of these was ported more than a few years ago, and were theoretically maintained by Loki up until they closed their doors, only one year ago. Of these, on my Fedora Core 1 system:
* Postal seems to work
* Alpha Centauri seems to work.
* Kohan when patched does not work, though the original version generally works, with frequent XFree86-hanging problems when doing things like resigning a mission.
* Soldier of Fortune does not work.
* Heavy Gear II does not work.
* Sim City 3000 does not work.
* Hereos of Might and Magic works.
* Railroad Tycoon seems to still work.
* Postal seems to work
These are not really great odds, and these games use *very* minimal libraries. SDL is the primary one, and Loki *maintained* SDL, so knew it damn well.
Folks that ship binary software that interact more with the system have generally fallen back to releasing many copies on a per-distribution basis, and only supporting some distributions. OpenAFS is open source, and produced by some very capable folks. However, IBM also provides binary packages with OpenAFS. They essentially support only a few Linux distros (particular versions of Debian and Red Hat) and have to provide builds for each release. Their distribution page is quite intimidating to any vendor considering Linux releases.
Illwinter ships their Dominions game and tries to be cross-distribution. The thing even uses 3d, but I'm also using it on a pretty mainstream (Red Hat) system. Not sure what problems might come up on a more oddball system.
Basically, you can safely say that:
* Linux software binary distribution is much, much more expensive and difficult than on Windows or Mac OS. There are many more targets to test and support.
In truth, technology may eliminate some jobs, but it always creates MORE jobs. It merely moves them from one business to another.
I disagree. Technology just plain eliminates jobs.
Society, however, creates new ones to fill the gap.
I agree with you that we are not going to be in a situation where we cannot get any jobs for people. The folks proposing things like this are ridiculous. Luxury items have *always* filled up the gaps -- the wealth always pay a premium for some new status symbol or slight standard-of-living increase.
In India, it is quite financially feasible for a moderately wealthy person to have a number of servants. In the United States, *very* few people have a number of servants, because human labor is so expensive relative to most people's income -- we have a very strong middle class. There are lots of people who would be interested in getting a maid, a gardener, etc if they could afford to do so.
The fact that many people that would like to have servants do not have them is simply because of the fact that we have a vast number of jobs to fill, and people have gone for more desireable ones.
That was just a single example. Are machine-made items generally more uniform, higher quality, more efficient to produce, and cheaper? Sure. However, they don't have the character that hand-made items do. They aren't *unique*. In the US, human labor is expensive (again, lots of jobs relative to the number of people.), so hand-made items are rare, but still purchased by the wealthy. If technology eliminates more jobs, hand-made goods will become more affordable. Yes, you could cheaply get a photograph of a painting on your wall, but it's just not the *same* as having the original painting on your wall.
Our productivity always increases. If we wanted to retain an 1800s standard-of-living, then we would have had most of the population out of work a long time ago. Demands on standard-of-living always cause increases. Heck, today I can walk into my living room (I live in a house with numerous rooms -- far more than the two rooms that the poor would have had a few hundred years ago.) I can turn on the television. A few hundred years ago, the wealthiest king could have had perhaps multiple sets of performers playing at a major event -- a feast, a wedding, etc. I have something like *forty* different stages of performers constantly performing (channels), any of which I can watch. I can even repeat bits I like. The movies and shows contain content that simply could not have been produced in mideval times.
I can go down to the store and choose just about any food I want in the world, and I can afford it. I can eat oranges in the dead of winter, if I want to do so (and I just did this morning). I can eat *ice cream*, which used to be something that was pricy even for royalty.
I wear clothes that have a finer knit, are more durable, and probably more brightly colored than even kings could enjoy.
Each night, I can relax as heated water -- as much as I'd like -- is continuously poured over me. The temperature can be increased exactly to taste with a flick of my fingers.
I can speak with my friends at any time, no matter where in the world they are, and much more quickly than by sending out a horse and rider.
I cannot smell the people that I live with, and they don't need to cover up their own stench with perfume, as would have happened a few hundred years ago. Our clothes are washed with almost no effort.
Our water is drawn and heated for us. Our bread is toasted to taste for us. We can get many varieties of hot food within a few minutes (thanks to the microwave) of the moment we think of it. We can obtain exotic spices of almost any sort. Our dishes are washed for us. Our rugs are beaten for us (thank you, vacuum cleaner). Cold foods are kept easily available to hand. If I want hot chocolate, instead of pumping water, lighting a fire, putting the water over the fire, waiting half an hour,
Powell doesn't dictate American culture. He can have his own opinions and wiggle around a bit, but ultimately, he's a servant of the people.
People in the United States are generally comfortable with murders, guns, and violence on television. They are generally uncomfortable with bare breasts or people making love on television. (Contrast this with Japan or the UK.) This is almost certainly not a "Powell decision" -- the rules were laid down a long time ago, and I doubt he was at the FCC back then.
Clearly VOIP cannot be as reliable as POTS, as it requires a much more complex consumer hardware and software.
I agree with your conclusion, but not your reasoning.
VoIP is not as reliable as POTS, but not because of complexity. VoIP is not a superset of POTS -- it has a larger set of components that must work right, but the reliability of those components are not tied to POTS reliability.
VoIP is not as reliable because the system was not designed for absolute reliability. Standard old IP is designed for use over falible networks, and is generally used on falible networks. Dropping packets is a standard mode of operation. Overselling bandwidth is standard tactics.
If the *only* high-bandwidth needs are for hot-backup, you may be able to, use colo or perhaps, cut a deal with another company's offices (one that could be reached more cheaply with high bandwidth) that also wants to run off-site hot-backup systems -- you supply hot-backup systems for them, they supply some for you. I don't know whether this is standard business practice.
Okay, well, let's see. If you're going to change this anyway in a maximum of 2.5 years, stopgap solutions should work. I'm a software guy, so the approaches that I'd think of try and work around needing the link in the first place:
* I'm not familiar with AD usage, but perhaps you could get away with whatever lower-bandwidth connectivity *is* available (business DSL?) at both locations.
* VoIP -- May be able to get away with a dedicated business DSL line again. More a question for telco folks. Issuing cell phones may be an answer (and these have benefits of their own).
* SQL replication/File replication -- if there's any way to simply dump changes to a hard drive, this may be a good time to consider the van-full-of-CDs approach that someone suggested (or more likely, a USB 2 hard drive). Can you afford to have someone drive a hard drive across town each night for a maximum of 30 months? This has the added benefit of saving you on FedEx or whatever physical transport mechanism you use. With file replication, you may also consider use of a more advanced distributed filesystem like Coda that can lazily propagate data and use distributed servers.
* Line-of-business Apps: Not sure. Depends on what you can get away with. If you can't just mirror a DB -- one side really does do writes that the other side may need to read right away -- and you really do have serious read and write bandwidth usage on each side, then you may be stuck WRT a high-speed link.
You may need to squeeze your growth estimates, if you're going to move in the next 2.5 years, especially if it's more likely to happen in six months. You might also consider the networking issue as a factor in accelerating any move in progress.
And who are these enemies that are developing advanced weapons that we will be helpless against without pouring money into weapons research? I really can't figure out what you're referring to. China? Russia? North Korea?
The United States does not need more conventional weapons. It already has nukes. Said nukes are sufficient to eliminate the need for more "defense funds". Any invasion from another country would result in the destruction of most of that country. Nobody is going to engage in a straight-out military push on the United States, which is the sort of thing that the US is developing weapons to deal with.
As for lives being on the line all over the world...how the hell are we in danger in Germany? Japan? *How*? Would we be in danger at all if we didn't attack people, providing them with a reason to dislike the United States?
The USA is still about freedom and justice, no matter how much the Left wants to change that.
The USA is no more about "freedom and justice" than any *other* country that spouts a set of ideals to inspire patriotism. Many nations, including repressive dictatorships, have come up with all kinds of flowery ideological backings. The Soviets after their rise, the Nazis, etc. The US has some good policies -- we have *very* strong free speech laws, though you aren't going to get thrown in jail for criticizing the government in most other industrialized nations either -- England, Canada, what-have-you.
As for your girlfriend driving a car -- it's all relative as to what you value as freedom and rights. We in the US happen to not be particularly Islamic, and push hard to allow women the freedom to assume traditionally male roles. On the other hand, we have a relatively high drinking age. In the US, you cannot drink until years after vote or make decisions about sex. Driving a vehicle, controlling potentially lethal thousands of pounds of metal at high speed, comes even earlier than drinking. Most other first-world nations take the position that humans have a fundamental right to life, and do not have the death penalty, unlike us. We have a Christianity-influenced background, and have laws generally banning freedom to engage in public nudity. We happen to consider the full-body burka oppressive, but the baring of a breast illegal. It's all what you're used to. I'd say that the United States has a good track record on freedoms, but it certainly isn't the end-all-and-be-all, it's "less free" than many other countries in many areas, and the idea that the ideologies of "true, justice, freedom, democracy" or whatever are anything more than a political tool to influence the masses is ridiculous.
As for Kyoto, we may have had excellent reasons for not signing it, but you're going to have a tough time arguing that it was designed "solely to cripple the US economy".
The other countries abbandoned Kyoto, because one of the major polluters in the world (US) didn't want to fullfill it. It cost money, but also does the NASA projects, and we are here talking about it.
Keep in mind that this is not a trivial change. I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Kyoto agreement, but if they require per-capita pollution caps or similar, and the US has a lot of industry that currently does not comply, it will be a phenomenal amount of money that the US has to expend to retrofit industry. Somewhere like Mongolia probably doesn't worry too much, because they just plain don't have a lot of heavy industry. Sure, they'll sign.
Also, the US has generally, since the seventies or so, tightened many kinds of pollution levels -- air, water, you name it. Cars. The thing is that at least some polluters get grandfathered in. So it's not as if US pollution is necessarily getting worse (it may be, for all I know, though I doubt it), but that it still has a lot of cruft left over from less eco-sensitive times that would be very expensive to rip out all at once.
I agree with you on Iraq. I think that a lot of people are upset about our invasion of Iraq, however. The current Bush excuse seems to be "well, isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" That's patently ridiculous -- considering it reasonable for a country to attack countries that it feels the world would be "better off without" would have had Cuba going after us a long time ago.
On the other hand, Bush does sometimes get unfairly blamed. Many, many political leaders, in the United States and elsewhere, are corrupt. Bush gets a lot of crap about cronyism, but it's not as if other presidents have peen particularly good either.
It does amaze me that Clinton can get impeached for lying about his sex life, and Bush cannot get impeached for starting an internationally denounced invasion based on false pretenses.
Further observation: Humans have evolved in a sub-tropical environment. They are not designed for cool temperate or sub-arctic conditions. proposal: Send only robots to these latitudes on Earth
I don't think anyone is talking about permanent solutions. If we had robots advanced enough at the time we started trying to go to the South Pole, and it cost a huge amount to send someone to the South Pole, wouldn't it have been a better idea to have used robots, until we knew enought o send people?
A trained human is between dozens and hundreds of times as effective as any robot.
I'm not sure that a scalar metric makes sense. There are things that humans can do that robots cannot. Humans are adaptable, and pretty good at dealing with unexpected problems that might come up. They're useful if you're trying something that might fail in some unknown way and you're not sure ahead of time how to fix it (i.e. swapping out a circuit board would mean that you could just build in a redundant board ahead of time). With planetary probes, one major problem that relies on unknown data is dealing with the ground surrounding a landing site. Humans might be very handy, but we also have some clever robots these days.
A second benefit is that manned missions pretty much must be round-trip. Most robotic ones are one-way. Doing a round-trip is expensive and hard, but it lets you bring back samples for free.
In the past, successful manned missions (at least Glenn and Armstrong in the US) have had enormous PR benefits. I suspect that this is still true to a smaller extent, though frequent manned missions to places like the ISS may have worn down public facination with manned missions.
All that being said, humans have an enormous number of issues for space travel. Among others:
* Humans require life support. This means food, water, oxygen, and temperature control, plus much radiation shielding, and space to move around in. It means basic toilet facilities. It generally means safety mechanisms and escape systems. It means medical supplies. This is a *lot* of weight. Weight is a big deal, because for each pound you lift into space, you have to lift some quantity of fuel, which requires more fuel to lift.
* Humans place tough environment constraints on a mission. The Mars landers used a cheap, simple method of slowing down -- big airbags. Putting a human through this would pulp them. Putting someone on Mars probably means requiring a lander with retrorockets. This is more weight. You can't get the module very hot, or very cold, or very irradiated. You have to be really careful about chemicals being exuded into the environment.
* Humans have PR issues. If NASA loses a human, NASA catches a *lot* of flak and has to do investigations and shut down anything that might cause the problem again. If a robot gets lost, some money gets lost, but it doesn't mean a public outcry and the potential for NASA funding to be cut.
* Humans have risk factors. You can try some things with robots that you cannot do with humans. You can say "I wonder what's over here". Sure, there's some chance that the rock sheet that you're driving on might break and dump you into a deep pit, but ultimately, the robot is expendable. People are not.
You have to think -- suppose we could do a round-trip mission. Instead of carrying a human and all the associated support stuff, if we could just get a good robot, we could do the round trip with *masses* more samples for analysis back on Earth.
How long will it be before we can get a robot that can climb down lava pipes and into tunnels?
I have a friend who is in the robotics grad program at Carnegie Mellon University. He builds robots that entirely autonomously explore abandoned mines. Since many of these mines are not safe for a human (gasses, collapses, etc), if a robot fails in the thing, you cannot go in to get it out. The problem of crawling around in tunnels is pretty similar. If you can solve mine tunnels, you can probably handle lava pipes.
Spirit uses more conservative design because it needs to be mature tech -- there can't be a chance of it failing zillions of miles away.
Some other people seem to have posted similarly to what my first thoughts were -- hasn't this already been done in the form of expansion packs? Most expansion packs are cheaper than the original game and don't involve a lot of code.
The only difference I can think of is that perhaps the proposed system would be on a subscription system -- but that means that the onus is on players to cancel if they don't like the first. I don't think I'd want to have to do something to avoid buying the second.
Other problems with episodic stuff -- if a change has to be made that changes the earlier portions of the game due to an issue towards the end of the game, it's not possible to do a fix for the earlier sections of the game. If you find that the vast dogfights planned for the final levels of your World War II game simply kill computers when they use the degree of special effects that you planned and shipped in the less-crowed earlier versions, you're faced with changing how the game works in the last section.
It places constraints on the structure of the game. Generally, episodic products need to stand alone, to some degree. You can't just sell someone "the next 15 minutes of a movie". There needs to be some degree of resolution to an episode to ensure that the episode is a worthwhile product. This is a constraint that can be rough for a game designer, who now has to make lots of little plots.
One of the major factors in addictiveness of a game is how easily one gets back in to the game. In Quake, I click a mouse button and I respawn. Quake is quite addictive. In, say, older platform games, if I die, I need to play most of a level over again to get to where I was. This doesn't have the same degree of "just one more life" appeal. The idea is to keep the game player in an interested mood, and not provide breaks where they have to do something significant to continue playing with new material. If I require a player to stop, wait six months, then start playing the next "episode", they have a non-trivial irritation factor, a break out of the game. It's hard to start playing again.
I postulate that an episode approach may have a tendancy to lead to declining quality. Once you have the first episode out, review writers need to write their reviews. People decide what to buy. After than, there is much less incentive to keep the quality at the same level.
I suspect that the existence of episodes is somewhat due to the nature of TV. You watch an episode for half an hour when it comes on. Game playing doesn't necessarily stop at particular points. As folks have pointed out, MMOGs let providers provide new content continuously, instead of in "episodes". MMOGs could use an episode-like format if they wanted, but they can also do smaller updates.
The story submitter should call the local firm back. Don't get me wrong, I realize that the tech left a bad impression (i.e. is bad service going to dog them through their dealings with the company?), and the folks probably feel snubbed. However, as someone else pointed out, this is not a multimillion dollar deal. It's bad, but people also do occasionally forget things. Heck, I've made a couple of mistakes and oversights in my life, and I've been glad when people give me a chance to make good on it. Maybe the guy's wife just broke up with him, maybe some other company kept having emergencies that he had to handle and got overwhelmed, forgetting about the appointment. Maybe his PDA that he used to keep appointments with was stolen and he's been trying to adapt to using pen-and-paper. Who knows?
Giving folks a chance to make one mistake, unless you're in a situation where a particular mistake absolutely cannot happen is not a bad idea. It can't hurt (aside from a bit of the submitter's time) to bring the people in. He can always decide not to go with them. Given the amount of money on the line, it seems like worthwhile being gracious may be worthwhile.
Also, as others have pointed out, have you considered all possibilities? Do you really need a 45Mbps link? Can you get away with mirroring some fileservers on each side, or something along those lines? We don't really have any idea of what you're doing.
Just a thought -- It might also be worthwhile to hire a local network engineering consultant to give his advice as to what's best to do. He might know of worthwhile things that other local companies have done.
You might consider working a deal with any other businesses interested in doing the same thing and maybe even the city. If there are other businesses that desperately need network connectivity or could reduce their ISP fees by joining into such a thing, perhaps the people asking $800K could be made to give a better deal, or at least split costs.
If you decide to do rooftop links, remember that the failure conditions are different from lines. Depending upon the sort of system you decide upon, bad weather can negatively impact your link.
[Sigh] There's just so little information that it's hard to give more than very basic guesses as to what you want to do.
Raph Koster of Sony Online adds that it "was startling to me... that (the federal comment process) is identical to how we build our patches and patch notes", although since the government has "a legal obligation to protect the privacy of people submitting comments on legislation", this means some disadvantages compared to MMO feedback, as Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."
This is not true. I can come up with at an example that should work from a practical standpoint off-the-cuff.
You can build a black-box database that can identify the same persona as being the source of multiple input submissions. This box must be given supeona-proof status. There are a lot of improvements you could make to the thing, but this should work at a basic level.
Now, this may or may not be acceptable in terms of data logging. However, statistical analysis of the text will inevitably allow linking of comments to some degree, and if the MMO guy is right about a practical benefit to logging, this should work. There would be some onus on users to not submit information that could be linked back to their real identity, but that's true of just about any anonymous feedback system I can think of.
There are people much more experienced in this field who could give a much more intelligent answer than I do -- if the gov't wants a good system that can provide a certain set of functionality with certain privacy restrictions, they and similar folks should be talked to. It's hardly an insoluable problem.
As you note, the wireless spectrum is a shared resource, one that it's *very* difficult to eliminate abuse of.
The problem is, the wireless spectrum falls prey to the public good problem. It's in everyone's benefit to try to outpower the others, and as a result, nobody can get through.
Wireless devices simply profliferate. There are few areas that are going from wireless to wired, and more and more people are picking up wireless devices.
Spread spectrum devices have been getting more popular for some applications, because they are more reliable and give a better signal. However, they pollute the spectrum even worse, causing interference over a broad range of devices.
It reminds me of cable modems. When they came out, they were a great deal. However, in any areas where they've gotten popular, they give awful performance. There are just too many people trying to pile on to one shared resource.
The only remotely convincing argument I've seen from wireless advocates is that signal processing will improve and give better performance (up to a limit). Unfortunately, there are plenty of legacy devices out there that blast out much stronger signals than they need to. These keep more sensitive devices from using the spectrum.
I avoid wireless devices. I use wired Ethernet, wired mice, a wired keyboard, etc. The performance of wireless is only going to go down.
There are a couple of ways to pull off producing your own input devices.
As others have pointed out, the Build Your Own Arcade Controls site is clearly the right way to do things for this. If you're aiming for building a MAME box, this is the right place, or if you're interested in just plain official arcade-style controls.
Happ Controls is a good place to get components. The BYOAC site heavily recommends them. You may be able to salvage trackball mechanisms from an old arcade machine -- these things are expensive, generally $70 and up.
Note that arcade-style trackballs are generally either 2.25 inches or 3 inches. 2.25 inches is pool ball size -- one can actually use pool balls. This is the size that Kensington uses on their (pricy) computer trackballs.
Another way is to build your own system by simply modding an existing device. I've been trackball shopping recently, and have looked at most of the input device vendors. Logitech forces you to use wireless if you want a trackball with lots of buttons, and Kensington devices have mechanical trackball inputs (and are pricy). I picked up a Q-Ball from MacAlly, a USB trackball that runs about $5. (Ironically enough, this devices does not use pool balls.) The Q-Ball isn't made with the greatest tolerances in the world (and comes with a ridiculous "glitter ball"), but it has five buttons (plus up and down on the scrollwheel). It also uses the same Agilent sensors that all current optical mice use -- labeled H2000, these things are all-in-one cameras and image recognition and movement measuring on a chip. They go as the HDNS-2200. Anyway, if you want to build something to suspend a high-quality trackball, you can easily physically modify the thing and reuse the electronics (the HDNS-2200 and the USB interface) on the mouse, since all the sensor does is measure movement of something passing in front of it -- in this case, a trackball -- and you can hook up the buttons to arcade-style buttons. You just need a smooth ball and a casing that allows it to turn smoothly, and hang it right above the HDNS-2200's lens.
If anyone else has one of these, I just replaced the red LEDs on mine with IR LEDs (so that the thing doesn't flash red constantly). The thing then gets a bit cranky about waking up from sleep mode, as the illumination is much dimmer, so I removed the transistor on the same PCB as the H2000 and ran a lead from the collector to the emitter point, which disabled sleep mode. It still doesn't track as well as it did before, so I'm going to try replacing the 950 nm peak IR LEDs with 880 nm peak IR LEDs.
I've been looking at commercially-available small-run USB interface boards, and I've been less than thrilled. I like buttons, and lots of buttons. For MAME use, having one, two, or three buttons is fine -- and if not, people sell cheap USB interface boards with Happ trackball interfaces with interfaces that adapt a *ton* of buttons -- but they make them appear to the computer as a *keyboard*. This is fine for MAME use, but not good if one wants to produce a high-quality trackball for one's own use, since most software prefers to have mouse button clicks rather than keyboard impacts. There *are* USB interface chipsets available and there *are* trackball encoders, but basically you need to learn PIC or another microprocessor, and have at least a decent amount of circuit design experience. This is terribly frusterating to me, as all I want to do is pay less than fifty bucks for a board that can plug into USB, can advertise up to, say, eight buttons (six buttons plus up and down on a scroll wheel!) with simple old button interfaces, and an interface that I can connect a Happ-style ball and encoding mechanism to without needing to write PIC code or do more than add a resistor or two. That would let non-CEs build extremely high-quality input devices for general-purpose use.
If I could get my paws on a schematic for something like this, it'd be awesome. Or maybe I just have to bite the bullet and pick up more CE knowledge. Sigh.
.edu,.gov, and.com (and probably.net, though I can't be sure) apply specifically to the United States. The US built the original system, so it originally started the hierarchy in the US.
To be sure, many companies not based in the US purchased.com addresses when Navigator and Communicator resolved keywords like foo to www.foo.com, and the difference between the TLDs started to slide.
I'm not saying that the TLDs are perfect, but I think that it would require very significant benefits to undergo the branding, marketing, administrative, and technical costs involved in such a major shift.
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An example of this pragmatic philosophy is Konqueror's support of the CSS extension that allows you to set scrollbar colors. Mozilla refuses to implement it simply because it's not W3C sanctioned, even though it's a perfectly reasonable CSS extension that is widely used.
I dislike this extension. I have no idea whether this is a Microsoft-introduced extension, but I would strongly suspect so. Microsoft has a general policy of building a browser that trusts remote web sites to do a good job of presenting content and not being malicious, and can make it easy to make poor design decisions. I cannot think of a good reason to change scrollbar colors -- from a HCI perspective, this is an extremely poor idea. The user spends a long time learning to immediately recognize the scrollbars on the system, and this would make scrollbars look different at different sites. Mozilla and most other browsers have taken a much more restrictive approach, not letting remote sites have as much control over a user's computer. This approach is more security-centric, and, I've found, works better.
It's not just this one extension, but a vast number of things -- sites bookmarking themselves, sites popping up windows, and all kind of other nastiness that I boggle at every time I use IE on someone's computer.
Sure. It's a lot cheaper. If the music has equivalent value to you as a CD, downloading a single album has just paid for at least two months of service.
Remember that anyone downloading music/movies is investing time, hard drive space/bandwidth, and potentially CDRs anyway.
I actually hope that this company is a front for the RIAA, nailing those who are too stupid/greedy to figure it out.
[shrug] I kind of wish that all speeders would get nailed for breaking the law, potentially with speed-detection devices hidden in all cars. With speeding, people's lives are actually at risk (as opposed to folks just infringing copyrights). However, most people don't like the idea, because they like breaking the law to some degree. I suspect that the same applies to your "I hope the company is an RIAA front" idea -- probably most other people, like me, find the idea of going after users in such a manner distasteful.
1) why doesn't the RIAA just get an account, see who's swapping, and subpoena usernames?
The company just doesn't have to keep logs (at least of information like time-IP-username mappings). There is no requirement to log information, just to turn over any information that *has* been logged. They might want to store aggregate data usage with a username, but that should be more than sufficient.
This is an excellent question, and probably the primary point that the original submitter didn't cover.
Binary software distribution on Linux is a bitch. Unfortunately, many of the people that could improve the state of things are not in the least interested in doing so because "binary software isn't GPLed, and all software should be Free, so screw you". Frankly, this isn't a really feasible position to take, pleasant as it may be to say.
The LSB has helped a bit. It standardized the existence of (a *very* minimal set, mind you) certain libraries. The C ABI has been pretty stable, but the C++ ABI has changed several times in the past few years.
Basically, there are a number of problems.
First, shipping something in C++ is out. If you go back even a year, you're going to hit systems that won't run with your binary C++ software.
Certain interfaces, like DGA 1, have been deprecated. the X11 people seem to have little interest in backwards compatibility with DGA 1. Thus, software using DGA 1 tends to be flaky.
Some constants change and libraries and software are not capable of handling non-compile-time settings. I tried increasing HZ in my kernel a year or two ago, and discovered that it mucked up all kinds of timing stuff, probably due to glibc assuming that runtime and compile-time HZ were the same. It made the animation in Dominions (Well-maintained binary software game from Illwinter) run proportionally faster, for example. This means that even static linking is not a good answer.
Lots of libraries that folks might like to use are *not* always present. Frequently, systems include only one of GNOME or KDE. SDL is a common include now, but Clanlib, OpenAL, and Allegro are generally not included. SDL is not part of the LSB, so may not be relied upon (and as a matter of fact, old statically-linked versions of SDL have broken on newer systems).
I feel that Loki is probably one of the best packagers out there in terms of folks knowledgeable about the Right Way to do things on Linux and how to ship binary software. They've had extensive experience.
I have purchased or tried a number of titles. None of these was ported more than a few years ago, and were theoretically maintained by Loki up until they closed their doors, only one year ago. Of these, on my Fedora Core 1 system:
* Postal seems to work
* Alpha Centauri seems to work.
* Kohan when patched does not work, though the original version generally works, with frequent XFree86-hanging problems when doing things like resigning a mission.
* Soldier of Fortune does not work.
* Heavy Gear II does not work.
* Sim City 3000 does not work.
* Hereos of Might and Magic works.
* Railroad Tycoon seems to still work.
* Postal seems to work
These are not really great odds, and these games use *very* minimal libraries. SDL is the primary one, and Loki *maintained* SDL, so knew it damn well.
Folks that ship binary software that interact more with the system have generally fallen back to releasing many copies on a per-distribution basis, and only supporting some distributions. OpenAFS is open source, and produced by some very capable folks. However, IBM also provides binary packages with OpenAFS. They essentially support only a few Linux distros (particular versions of Debian and Red Hat) and have to provide builds for each release. Their distribution page is quite intimidating to any vendor considering Linux releases.
Illwinter ships their Dominions game and tries to be cross-distribution. The thing even uses 3d, but I'm also using it on a pretty mainstream (Red Hat) system. Not sure what problems might come up on a more oddball system.
Basically, you can safely say that:
* Linux software binary distribution is much, much more expensive and difficult than on Windows or Mac OS. There are many more targets to test and support.
In truth, technology may eliminate some jobs, but it always creates MORE jobs. It merely moves them from one business to another.
I disagree. Technology just plain eliminates jobs.
Society, however, creates new ones to fill the gap.
I agree with you that we are not going to be in a situation where we cannot get any jobs for people. The folks proposing things like this are ridiculous. Luxury items have *always* filled up the gaps -- the wealth always pay a premium for some new status symbol or slight standard-of-living increase.
In India, it is quite financially feasible for a moderately wealthy person to have a number of servants. In the United States, *very* few people have a number of servants, because human labor is so expensive relative to most people's income -- we have a very strong middle class. There are lots of people who would be interested in getting a maid, a gardener, etc if they could afford to do so.
The fact that many people that would like to have servants do not have them is simply because of the fact that we have a vast number of jobs to fill, and people have gone for more desireable ones.
That was just a single example. Are machine-made items generally more uniform, higher quality, more efficient to produce, and cheaper? Sure. However, they don't have the character that hand-made items do. They aren't *unique*. In the US, human labor is expensive (again, lots of jobs relative to the number of people.), so hand-made items are rare, but still purchased by the wealthy. If technology eliminates more jobs, hand-made goods will become more affordable. Yes, you could cheaply get a photograph of a painting on your wall, but it's just not the *same* as having the original painting on your wall.
Our productivity always increases. If we wanted to retain an 1800s standard-of-living, then we would have had most of the population out of work a long time ago. Demands on standard-of-living always cause increases. Heck, today I can walk into my living room (I live in a house with numerous rooms -- far more than the two rooms that the poor would have had a few hundred years ago.) I can turn on the television. A few hundred years ago, the wealthiest king could have had perhaps multiple sets of performers playing at a major event -- a feast, a wedding, etc. I have something like *forty* different stages of performers constantly performing (channels), any of which I can watch. I can even repeat bits I like. The movies and shows contain content that simply could not have been produced in mideval times.
I can go down to the store and choose just about any food I want in the world, and I can afford it. I can eat oranges in the dead of winter, if I want to do so (and I just did this morning). I can eat *ice cream*, which used to be something that was pricy even for royalty.
I wear clothes that have a finer knit, are more durable, and probably more brightly colored than even kings could enjoy.
Each night, I can relax as heated water -- as much as I'd like -- is continuously poured over me. The temperature can be increased exactly to taste with a flick of my fingers.
I can speak with my friends at any time, no matter where in the world they are, and much more quickly than by sending out a horse and rider.
I cannot smell the people that I live with, and they don't need to cover up their own stench with perfume, as would have happened a few hundred years ago. Our clothes are washed with almost no effort.
Our water is drawn and heated for us. Our bread is toasted to taste for us. We can get many varieties of hot food within a few minutes (thanks to the microwave) of the moment we think of it. We can obtain exotic spices of almost any sort. Our dishes are washed for us. Our rugs are beaten for us (thank you, vacuum cleaner). Cold foods are kept easily available to hand. If I want hot chocolate, instead of pumping water, lighting a fire, putting the water over the fire, waiting half an hour,
Powell doesn't dictate American culture. He can have his own opinions and wiggle around a bit, but ultimately, he's a servant of the people.
People in the United States are generally comfortable with murders, guns, and violence on television. They are generally uncomfortable with bare breasts or people making love on television. (Contrast this with Japan or the UK.) This is almost certainly not a "Powell decision" -- the rules were laid down a long time ago, and I doubt he was at the FCC back then.
Clearly VOIP cannot be as reliable as POTS, as it requires a much more complex consumer hardware and software.
I agree with your conclusion, but not your reasoning.
VoIP is not as reliable as POTS, but not because of complexity. VoIP is not a superset of POTS -- it has a larger set of components that must work right, but the reliability of those components are not tied to POTS reliability.
VoIP is not as reliable because the system was not designed for absolute reliability. Standard old IP is designed for use over falible networks, and is generally used on falible networks. Dropping packets is a standard mode of operation. Overselling bandwidth is standard tactics.
If the *only* high-bandwidth needs are for hot-backup, you may be able to, use colo or perhaps, cut a deal with another company's offices (one that could be reached more cheaply with high bandwidth) that also wants to run off-site hot-backup systems -- you supply hot-backup systems for them, they supply some for you. I don't know whether this is standard business practice.
Good lord, man. He was trolling. Why waste your time to give some fifteen-year-old his jollies?
Okay, well, let's see. If you're going to change this anyway in a maximum of 2.5 years, stopgap solutions should work. I'm a software guy, so the approaches that I'd think of try and work around needing the link in the first place:
* I'm not familiar with AD usage, but perhaps you could get away with whatever lower-bandwidth connectivity *is* available (business DSL?) at both locations.
* VoIP -- May be able to get away with a dedicated business DSL line again. More a question for telco folks. Issuing cell phones may be an answer (and these have benefits of their own).
* SQL replication/File replication -- if there's any way to simply dump changes to a hard drive, this may be a good time to consider the van-full-of-CDs approach that someone suggested (or more likely, a USB 2 hard drive). Can you afford to have someone drive a hard drive across town each night for a maximum of 30 months? This has the added benefit of saving you on FedEx or whatever physical transport mechanism you use. With file replication, you may also consider use of a more advanced distributed filesystem like Coda that can lazily propagate data and use distributed servers.
* Line-of-business Apps: Not sure. Depends on what you can get away with. If you can't just mirror a DB -- one side really does do writes that the other side may need to read right away -- and you really do have serious read and write bandwidth usage on each side, then you may be stuck WRT a high-speed link.
You may need to squeeze your growth estimates, if you're going to move in the next 2.5 years, especially if it's more likely to happen in six months. You might also consider the networking issue as a factor in accelerating any move in progress.
And who are these enemies that are developing advanced weapons that we will be helpless against without pouring money into weapons research? I really can't figure out what you're referring to. China? Russia? North Korea?
The United States does not need more conventional weapons. It already has nukes. Said nukes are sufficient to eliminate the need for more "defense funds". Any invasion from another country would result in the destruction of most of that country. Nobody is going to engage in a straight-out military push on the United States, which is the sort of thing that the US is developing weapons to deal with.
As for lives being on the line all over the world...how the hell are we in danger in Germany? Japan? *How*? Would we be in danger at all if we didn't attack people, providing them with a reason to dislike the United States?
The USA is still about freedom and justice, no matter how much the Left wants to change that.
The USA is no more about "freedom and justice" than any *other* country that spouts a set of ideals to inspire patriotism. Many nations, including repressive dictatorships, have come up with all kinds of flowery ideological backings. The Soviets after their rise, the Nazis, etc. The US has some good policies -- we have *very* strong free speech laws, though you aren't going to get thrown in jail for criticizing the government in most other industrialized nations either -- England, Canada, what-have-you.
As for your girlfriend driving a car -- it's all relative as to what you value as freedom and rights. We in the US happen to not be particularly Islamic, and push hard to allow women the freedom to assume traditionally male roles. On the other hand, we have a relatively high drinking age. In the US, you cannot drink until years after vote or make decisions about sex. Driving a vehicle, controlling potentially lethal thousands of pounds of metal at high speed, comes even earlier than drinking. Most other first-world nations take the position that humans have a fundamental right to life, and do not have the death penalty, unlike us. We have a Christianity-influenced background, and have laws generally banning freedom to engage in public nudity. We happen to consider the full-body burka oppressive, but the baring of a breast illegal. It's all what you're used to. I'd say that the United States has a good track record on freedoms, but it certainly isn't the end-all-and-be-all, it's "less free" than many other countries in many areas, and the idea that the ideologies of "true, justice, freedom, democracy" or whatever are anything more than a political tool to influence the masses is ridiculous.
As for Kyoto, we may have had excellent reasons for not signing it, but you're going to have a tough time arguing that it was designed "solely to cripple the US economy".
The other countries abbandoned Kyoto, because one of the major polluters in the world (US) didn't want to fullfill it. It cost money, but also does the NASA projects, and we are here talking about it.
Keep in mind that this is not a trivial change. I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Kyoto agreement, but if they require per-capita pollution caps or similar, and the US has a lot of industry that currently does not comply, it will be a phenomenal amount of money that the US has to expend to retrofit industry. Somewhere like Mongolia probably doesn't worry too much, because they just plain don't have a lot of heavy industry. Sure, they'll sign.
Also, the US has generally, since the seventies or so, tightened many kinds of pollution levels -- air, water, you name it. Cars. The thing is that at least some polluters get grandfathered in. So it's not as if US pollution is necessarily getting worse (it may be, for all I know, though I doubt it), but that it still has a lot of cruft left over from less eco-sensitive times that would be very expensive to rip out all at once.
I agree with you on Iraq. I think that a lot of people are upset about our invasion of Iraq, however. The current Bush excuse seems to be "well, isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" That's patently ridiculous -- considering it reasonable for a country to attack countries that it feels the world would be "better off without" would have had Cuba going after us a long time ago.
On the other hand, Bush does sometimes get unfairly blamed. Many, many political leaders, in the United States and elsewhere, are corrupt. Bush gets a lot of crap about cronyism, but it's not as if other presidents have peen particularly good either.
It does amaze me that Clinton can get impeached for lying about his sex life, and Bush cannot get impeached for starting an internationally denounced invasion based on false pretenses.
Carly Fiorina, CEO of HP is on there.
:-(
Oh, fuck.
Further observation: Humans have evolved in a sub-tropical environment. They are not designed for cool temperate or sub-arctic conditions.
proposal: Send only robots to these latitudes on Earth
I don't think anyone is talking about permanent solutions. If we had robots advanced enough at the time we started trying to go to the South Pole, and it cost a huge amount to send someone to the South Pole, wouldn't it have been a better idea to have used robots, until we knew enought o send people?
A trained human is between dozens and hundreds of times as effective as any robot.
I'm not sure that a scalar metric makes sense. There are things that humans can do that robots cannot. Humans are adaptable, and pretty good at dealing with unexpected problems that might come up. They're useful if you're trying something that might fail in some unknown way and you're not sure ahead of time how to fix it (i.e. swapping out a circuit board would mean that you could just build in a redundant board ahead of time). With planetary probes, one major problem that relies on unknown data is dealing with the ground surrounding a landing site. Humans might be very handy, but we also have some clever robots these days.
A second benefit is that manned missions pretty much must be round-trip. Most robotic ones are one-way. Doing a round-trip is expensive and hard, but it lets you bring back samples for free.
In the past, successful manned missions (at least Glenn and Armstrong in the US) have had enormous PR benefits. I suspect that this is still true to a smaller extent, though frequent manned missions to places like the ISS may have worn down public facination with manned missions.
All that being said, humans have an enormous number of issues for space travel. Among others:
* Humans require life support. This means food, water, oxygen, and temperature control, plus much radiation shielding, and space to move around in. It means basic toilet facilities. It generally means safety mechanisms and escape systems. It means medical supplies. This is a *lot* of weight. Weight is a big deal, because for each pound you lift into space, you have to lift some quantity of fuel, which requires more fuel to lift.
* Humans place tough environment constraints on a mission. The Mars landers used a cheap, simple method of slowing down -- big airbags. Putting a human through this would pulp them. Putting someone on Mars probably means requiring a lander with retrorockets. This is more weight. You can't get the module very hot, or very cold, or very irradiated. You have to be really careful about chemicals being exuded into the environment.
* Humans have PR issues. If NASA loses a human, NASA catches a *lot* of flak and has to do investigations and shut down anything that might cause the problem again. If a robot gets lost, some money gets lost, but it doesn't mean a public outcry and the potential for NASA funding to be cut.
* Humans have risk factors. You can try some things with robots that you cannot do with humans. You can say "I wonder what's over here". Sure, there's some chance that the rock sheet that you're driving on might break and dump you into a deep pit, but ultimately, the robot is expendable. People are not.
You have to think -- suppose we could do a round-trip mission. Instead of carrying a human and all the associated support stuff, if we could just get a good robot, we could do the round trip with *masses* more samples for analysis back on Earth.
How long will it be before we can get a robot that can climb down lava pipes and into tunnels?
I have a friend who is in the robotics grad program at Carnegie Mellon University. He builds robots that entirely autonomously explore abandoned mines. Since many of these mines are not safe for a human (gasses, collapses, etc), if a robot fails in the thing, you cannot go in to get it out. The problem of crawling around in tunnels is pretty similar. If you can solve mine tunnels, you can probably handle lava pipes.
Spirit uses more conservative design because it needs to be mature tech -- there can't be a chance of it failing zillions of miles away.
Some other people seem to have posted similarly to what my first thoughts were -- hasn't this already been done in the form of expansion packs? Most expansion packs are cheaper than the original game and don't involve a lot of code.
The only difference I can think of is that perhaps the proposed system would be on a subscription system -- but that means that the onus is on players to cancel if they don't like the first. I don't think I'd want to have to do something to avoid buying the second.
Other problems with episodic stuff -- if a change has to be made that changes the earlier portions of the game due to an issue towards the end of the game, it's not possible to do a fix for the earlier sections of the game. If you find that the vast dogfights planned for the final levels of your World War II game simply kill computers when they use the degree of special effects that you planned and shipped in the less-crowed earlier versions, you're faced with changing how the game works in the last section.
It places constraints on the structure of the game. Generally, episodic products need to stand alone, to some degree. You can't just sell someone "the next 15 minutes of a movie". There needs to be some degree of resolution to an episode to ensure that the episode is a worthwhile product. This is a constraint that can be rough for a game designer, who now has to make lots of little plots.
One of the major factors in addictiveness of a game is how easily one gets back in to the game. In Quake, I click a mouse button and I respawn. Quake is quite addictive. In, say, older platform games, if I die, I need to play most of a level over again to get to where I was. This doesn't have the same degree of "just one more life" appeal. The idea is to keep the game player in an interested mood, and not provide breaks where they have to do something significant to continue playing with new material. If I require a player to stop, wait six months, then start playing the next "episode", they have a non-trivial irritation factor, a break out of the game. It's hard to start playing again.
I postulate that an episode approach may have a tendancy to lead to declining quality. Once you have the first episode out, review writers need to write their reviews. People decide what to buy. After than, there is much less incentive to keep the quality at the same level.
I suspect that the existence of episodes is somewhat due to the nature of TV. You watch an episode for half an hour when it comes on. Game playing doesn't necessarily stop at particular points. As folks have pointed out, MMOGs let providers provide new content continuously, instead of in "episodes". MMOGs could use an episode-like format if they wanted, but they can also do smaller updates.
The story submitter should call the local firm back. Don't get me wrong, I realize that the tech left a bad impression (i.e. is bad service going to dog them through their dealings with the company?), and the folks probably feel snubbed. However, as someone else pointed out, this is not a multimillion dollar deal. It's bad, but people also do occasionally forget things. Heck, I've made a couple of mistakes and oversights in my life, and I've been glad when people give me a chance to make good on it. Maybe the guy's wife just broke up with him, maybe some other company kept having emergencies that he had to handle and got overwhelmed, forgetting about the appointment. Maybe his PDA that he used to keep appointments with was stolen and he's been trying to adapt to using pen-and-paper. Who knows?
Giving folks a chance to make one mistake, unless you're in a situation where a particular mistake absolutely cannot happen is not a bad idea. It can't hurt (aside from a bit of the submitter's time) to bring the people in. He can always decide not to go with them. Given the amount of money on the line, it seems like worthwhile being gracious may be worthwhile.
Also, as others have pointed out, have you considered all possibilities? Do you really need a 45Mbps link? Can you get away with mirroring some fileservers on each side, or something along those lines? We don't really have any idea of what you're doing.
Just a thought -- It might also be worthwhile to hire a local network engineering consultant to give his advice as to what's best to do. He might know of worthwhile things that other local companies have done.
You might consider working a deal with any other businesses interested in doing the same thing and maybe even the city. If there are other businesses that desperately need network connectivity or could reduce their ISP fees by joining into such a thing, perhaps the people asking $800K could be made to give a better deal, or at least split costs.
If you decide to do rooftop links, remember that the failure conditions are different from lines. Depending upon the sort of system you decide upon, bad weather can negatively impact your link.
[Sigh] There's just so little information that it's hard to give more than very basic guesses as to what you want to do.
Raph Koster of Sony Online adds that it "was startling to me... that (the federal comment process) is identical to how we build our patches and patch notes", although since the government has "a legal obligation to protect the privacy of people submitting comments on legislation", this means some disadvantages compared to MMO feedback, as Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."
This is not true. I can come up with at an example that should work from a practical standpoint off-the-cuff.
You can build a black-box database that can identify the same persona as being the source of multiple input submissions. This box must be given supeona-proof status. There are a lot of improvements you could make to the thing, but this should work at a basic level.
Now, this may or may not be acceptable in terms of data logging. However, statistical analysis of the text will inevitably allow linking of comments to some degree, and if the MMO guy is right about a practical benefit to logging, this should work. There would be some onus on users to not submit information that could be linked back to their real identity, but that's true of just about any anonymous feedback system I can think of.
There are people much more experienced in this field who could give a much more intelligent answer than I do -- if the gov't wants a good system that can provide a certain set of functionality with certain privacy restrictions, they and similar folks should be talked to. It's hardly an insoluable problem.
I have a similar problem, but due to SBC giving out free wireless hardware to people that don't need it
Of course, I'm sure that *those* people feel that *you* don't need wireless hardware.
As you note, the wireless spectrum is a shared resource, one that it's *very* difficult to eliminate abuse of.
The problem is, the wireless spectrum falls prey to the public good problem. It's in everyone's benefit to try to outpower the others, and as a result, nobody can get through.
Wireless devices simply profliferate. There are few areas that are going from wireless to wired, and more and more people are picking up wireless devices.
Spread spectrum devices have been getting more popular for some applications, because they are more reliable and give a better signal. However, they pollute the spectrum even worse, causing interference over a broad range of devices.
It reminds me of cable modems. When they came out, they were a great deal. However, in any areas where they've gotten popular, they give awful performance. There are just too many people trying to pile on to one shared resource.
The only remotely convincing argument I've seen from wireless advocates is that signal processing will improve and give better performance (up to a limit). Unfortunately, there are plenty of legacy devices out there that blast out much stronger signals than they need to. These keep more sensitive devices from using the spectrum.
I avoid wireless devices. I use wired Ethernet, wired mice, a wired keyboard, etc. The performance of wireless is only going to go down.
The Q-Ball should be "about $45", not "about $5".
There are a couple of ways to pull off producing your own input devices.
As others have pointed out, the Build Your Own Arcade Controls site is clearly the right way to do things for this. If you're aiming for building a MAME box, this is the right place, or if you're interested in just plain official arcade-style controls.
Happ Controls is a good place to get components. The BYOAC site heavily recommends them. You may be able to salvage trackball mechanisms from an old arcade machine -- these things are expensive, generally $70 and up.
Note that arcade-style trackballs are generally either 2.25 inches or 3 inches. 2.25 inches is pool ball size -- one can actually use pool balls. This is the size that Kensington uses on their (pricy) computer trackballs.
Another way is to build your own system by simply modding an existing device. I've been trackball shopping recently, and have looked at most of the input device vendors. Logitech forces you to use wireless if you want a trackball with lots of buttons, and Kensington devices have mechanical trackball inputs (and are pricy). I picked up a Q-Ball from MacAlly, a USB trackball that runs about $5. (Ironically enough, this devices does not use pool balls.) The Q-Ball isn't made with the greatest tolerances in the world (and comes with a ridiculous "glitter ball"), but it has five buttons (plus up and down on the scrollwheel). It also uses the same Agilent sensors that all current optical mice use -- labeled H2000, these things are all-in-one cameras and image recognition and movement measuring on a chip. They go as the HDNS-2200. Anyway, if you want to build something to suspend a high-quality trackball, you can easily physically modify the thing and reuse the electronics (the HDNS-2200 and the USB interface) on the mouse, since all the sensor does is measure movement of something passing in front of it -- in this case, a trackball -- and you can hook up the buttons to arcade-style buttons. You just need a smooth ball and a casing that allows it to turn smoothly, and hang it right above the HDNS-2200's lens.
If anyone else has one of these, I just replaced the red LEDs on mine with IR LEDs (so that the thing doesn't flash red constantly). The thing then gets a bit cranky about waking up from sleep mode, as the illumination is much dimmer, so I removed the transistor on the same PCB as the H2000 and ran a lead from the collector to the emitter point, which disabled sleep mode. It still doesn't track as well as it did before, so I'm going to try replacing the 950 nm peak IR LEDs with 880 nm peak IR LEDs.
I've been looking at commercially-available small-run USB interface boards, and I've been less than thrilled. I like buttons, and lots of buttons. For MAME use, having one, two, or three buttons is fine -- and if not, people sell cheap USB interface boards with Happ trackball interfaces with interfaces that adapt a *ton* of buttons -- but they make them appear to the computer as a *keyboard*. This is fine for MAME use, but not good if one wants to produce a high-quality trackball for one's own use, since most software prefers to have mouse button clicks rather than keyboard impacts. There *are* USB interface chipsets available and there *are* trackball encoders, but basically you need to learn PIC or another microprocessor, and have at least a decent amount of circuit design experience. This is terribly frusterating to me, as all I want to do is pay less than fifty bucks for a board that can plug into USB, can advertise up to, say, eight buttons (six buttons plus up and down on a scroll wheel!) with simple old button interfaces, and an interface that I can connect a Happ-style ball and encoding mechanism to without needing to write PIC code or do more than add a resistor or two. That would let non-CEs build extremely high-quality input devices for general-purpose use.
If I could get my paws on a schematic for something like this, it'd be awesome. Or maybe I just have to bite the bullet and pick up more CE knowledge. Sigh.
4.) Never ever fuck with Big Blue, unless you like the feeling of your anus getting stretched.
Microsoft has fucked with IBM for years.
.edu, .gov, and .com (and probably .net, though I can't be sure) apply specifically to the United States. The US built the original system, so it originally started the hierarchy in the US.
.com addresses when Navigator and Communicator resolved keywords like foo to www.foo.com, and the difference between the TLDs started to slide.
To be sure, many companies not based in the US purchased
I'm not saying that the TLDs are perfect, but I think that it would require very significant benefits to undergo the branding, marketing, administrative, and technical costs involved in such a major shift.
Thank you. This is a really neat link.