Google video's quality is much better than youtube's in terms of compression and the site is quicker and less busy so I try to use it much more than YouTube.
YouTube however seems to be more social so some content is easier found on their site. Both however are very pervasive...My music professor loaded up a few youTube videos for the class back in april or may which shows that there is even some sort of legitimacy to it.
Group composition doesnt start to matter that much until pretty far into WoW (talking 45-50+ instances here).
Sure you probobly need a tank because its a good strategy (then the healer only has to heal one person) but it isnt just warriors who can tank. Druids can tank almost anything, and I have seen plenty of shammans or hunter/warlock pets tanking and doing just fine. When it comes to healing, priests are best at it but you dont need the BEST healing until you hit the very end of the game...druids, shammans and palidins can all heal just fine for 95% of the game (and there should be some elite part of the game where it DOES matter that you arent the best you could be). As for damage dealers...thats pretty much everyone else whether you have hunters, warlocks, mages, shammans, rogues, druids, other warriors, even priests doing it...groups are generally pretty open.
As to group size, it makes sense that if you are doing it near the lower end of when you should be able to...you are going to need a full group. You can do plenty of instances with a partial group and small groups are quite common when just doign quests out in the world. If 5 people arent enough, every instance allows at least 10 people in a group but you are penalized for using that ammount (you should be doign somethign easier if it takes you 10 people to do it.
It's where the senate is able to call for a time limit until a matter must be voted on. Its how they get rid of filibusters if they have the votes.
Thats right bitch, I went to high school. (its easiest to remember it because its kind of like "closure" and they are really calling for deliberation to come to a close and are just bad spellers)
true, usually I do play fair but when I do this it is when I know I am in a situation that isnt handled directly by the voice menus or I am calling about somethign I have called about before and I know that I will need the person right away.
I mean the same can be done with touchtone places...either just wait and pretend you are on a rotary phone or press random numbers until it gives up and forwards you to a person.
Even better, I have it bookmarked on another machine but I once found a site from a slashdot submission that listed a lot of major companies and what number to dial and exactly what set of buttons to press to get to a service representative.
I always have good luck with saying "Operator" a few times followed buy something along the lines of "Let me talk to a fucking person, no, I just want you to put a person on the phone. No really, I just want to talk to a fuckign person". Eventually you get to a person either because the Operator trick worked or because it cant understand you and forwards you.
If I have to talk to these things, they had better be able to deal with me TALKING to them and not reading a carefully crafted set of keywords to get the right effect. At least when they tell you the numbers to press, you know you are getting it right.
well, if its a full CD (or near it like a full 512mb or larger thumb drive would be) then a dump of the entire thing is going to be slightly more obvious then copying a thumb drive. Of course your point is still valid since its a strange system and it might just be slow and taking a long time to read thigns off of the CD or not have any spindown time set.
I am so glad my university includes putty on thier IT disk that every new student gets (along with firefox and thunderbird and automatically configuring them to connect to the campus network).
They never notice it or have any idea what it is for, but if you need to use it to fix their computer, it is already there (and they are more likely to be using firefox)
Well, if you read the original question, it sounds like they already do rip the data to HDD so they clearly have that issue solved.
The issue at hand is that they have a ton of physical media they need to keep on hand. The good thing is that they dont have to keep it for 10 years or anything...only months.
With that short of a time, offsite storage almost doesnt make sense since you will be changing stock so often. It might then make a lot of sense to use something as simple as shelves. Make sure every disk is labled and then load them into 50 or 100 disk spindles by estimated project completion month. Every time you add a disk to a spindle, write it down (or put it into a computer) and since you wont be removing these disks, only storing them, you should have an ordered list of all disks in each spindle. As soon as all of the projects on that spindle are complete (you could simply wait an additional month or two before checking to make sure) you quick go through the list and check for open projects. If there arent any, dispose of the spindle full of disks as you see fit. If there are remaining projects, just pull the disk and put it somewhere else and dump the rest of the disks.
kind of like a 17 year old in a state with a high (18) age of consent having their parents sign a form so they can have sex totally legally ("hey mom...can you sign this?") in that it is something I am sure you would just love to have to do before having sex.
I had a similar experiance with one of my friends family's cars. It died in front of my house and at the time I assumed dead battery and drover her home. She ended up coming back the next day with her brother while I was at work and taking hte battery home, charging it and bringing it back but it doesnt fix the car.
I pop the hood the next day and start poking around...open the fusebox and all the fuses look good except one so I pull out the multimeter and check it...fuse is fine (I couldnt remove it since it was a large fuse and was somehow attatched to prevent tampering). I did tap on the starter which can free a stuck starter but it didnt exhibit the symptoms of a dead starter so this is the only thing I might have actually changed although I did this before checking hte fuses and it failed to start after doign so.
As I run out of quick and dirty soltions, I sit down in the car and try to turn it over...and it starts right up. She wants to know what I did and is afraid to drive it because she doesnt trust it but I maintain that it is mechanically sound. Well, it was mechanically sound until the downpipe went out (car still works fine with a hole in the downpipe, just gets really loud and polluting) and her 16 year old brother thought he could fix it with duct tape and gorrila glue...
God, I used unison to sync my music for a while and it was absolutely terrible. I'm sure it works well for more complex things but this was a simple process that jsut didnt work well. It was so slow and inneficient no matter what setup I used to run it.
Now I use Syncback (the freeware version...its kind of buried on their site but its there) and its great. Granted, you have to have a windows system somewhere but its worked great for me. It can use a ton of protocols, FTP,SMB, NFS (and through these you can easily sync to non-windows systems or even use it to sync between 2 remote systems) and does so easily and quickly.
Not that it really has much to do with this topic...just had to say somethign when I saw the word Unison
My friend was asked a reasoning problem in a job interview that went something like this: How many phone booths are there in manhattan?
Of course, being the son of a math professor that he is, he started working out averages and calculated a number around 2000 (they told him how many blocks wide and tall the city was I believe).
My response however when he told me that he was asked this was to simply start with 0 and then add a few that they hadnt gotten around to tearing down yet so something around...5 phone booths in manhattan. I went with this because I know how little payphones get used now and how they are dissapearing (also, the phone companies are cheap now so they dont put them in booths, just on walls or stands).
We ended up finding a site that documented the last remaining phone booths...ther were 4.
As much as I want to stick up for not having a phone--I didnt have one until I started college last year at which point it doesnt make sense not to have one since the dorm phones cost more than a lightly used mobile phone--the fact that there is no other way to make contact sure makes it hard. In high school, so many people around me had phones that all I had to do was borrow one (our payphones also dissapeared and the office was full of hardasses who didnt like people using their phone). In a few years, there will simply be no way around it.
The one thing I miss the most though is knowing peoples phone numbers. I still know a few...my home, my dads work, my dads mobile, my mobile, my girlfriends mobile, my girlfriends home (on a good day) but back when you couldnt just scroll to the persons name, I remembered a lot more.
but they didnt pick a "more difficult" environment such as a cheap CD player, they picked an environment with a perfectly good DVD drive that has been modified (laser intensity) so as NOT to work with CDRs. Xboxes can be very finicky with the disks, readability often varies between samples burned on the same brand media. It's not simply a difficult environment, it is one designed not to function...it would be fine if the did it with an xbox and pressed CDs.
Also, I would say that teh initial testing should be done on a relatively good piece of hardware so as to control for error. Once you have the solution that works the best for you, you can then see how bad the hardware can get before it fails but it only makes sense to make sure it works in the controlled environment before sending it out into the wild.
That is something I noticed when I read them...there was no attempt to have similar shots.
You get garish picture backgrounds and different suites of applications (or the windows 3.1 pic which isnt the full screen, only the program manager portion). The KDE ones are the worst offenders...they are heavily modded to look one way or another...might as well replace the windows98 one with my litestep desktop that I used at the time.
The place closest to me is LAN Games. It has been around for a good while now and I have many friends who have gone (I havnt but...oh well). I would go to suggest that it is so successful because it is situated right between the 2 highschools of a first-tier minneapolis suburb. This gives it a fair amount of teen clientell which really is what any game center will most likely focus on (especially in chicago suburbs which are not at all like the inner ring minneapolis suburbs where you can get to teh heart of downtown in 10 minutes). Would still be worth looking at because its a rather low budget operation that keeps in business...their marketing seems to be a lot of word of mouth and fliers offering a small amount of free play.
What I would be curious is what suburbs they are looking to service. I go to teh university of chicago and I can tell you right now, having one around us probobly wouldnt do well (as nice as it might be). First off, you cant really compete with the campus network in terms of speed and the fact that everyone is alerady in a big LAN and second, we are rather urban and the non-student population is either rather wealthy (in and around campus) or very poor (north south or west of campus...the lake is to the east). I understand you said suburb so this doesnt really apply so...lets look at that "other school". You could look toward opening one in evanston which nets you another large university student population although you will face the same problem with the fact that they are already on one big high power LAN. What you also might gain though is the suburban high school population (same as any other suburb). The college will give you slightly older clients who have different schedules but you say you alerady have the daytime figured out.
I wouldnt say there were huge profit margins so you will have to manage costs...keep the rent down but still have enough of a place to keep a presence. Games are expensive--especially when they want you to have special licenses for them--and the systems and high speed connection arent cheap themselves. I dont know how much you can erally charge for the service...LAN Games charges $3 an hour which isnt much coming in to you but is small enough that it doesnt feel l ike a waste to play there rather than at home (you can also bring your own box for $15 a day). They do however hold events like pizza parties, overnight lans, tournaments, and even "ladies night" which can increase traffic and overnight guests will certainly have to spend money on food...
I've got a cheaper harmony that was on slickdeals and while the web-based programming is a little bit of a pain compared to more expensive models, this thing is great.
The only problem is that it cant control my xbox like the xbox dvd remote (I will have to do manual learning) and that my family has a mix of older devices and not all of them have discrete codes and the such (and the other remotes get used sometimes). Another problem is that I have been trying to convince my dad to buy a new reciever.
I mean, the 1970's sony is a great sounding unit but it barely has enough audio inputs to have the TV and CD player plugged in at the same time. If it was a more modern reciever with audio and video switching, this setup would be easier because it wouldnt be like "The TV must be on video, the vcr must be on L2, the dvd player must be on...etc" and would just be "the reciever must be on DVD".
Pick up a used xbox on ebay...should be cheap now that it is so old and the 360 is out (and used gives you a better chance of it being moddable).
Softmod it (easy to do, you just load a saved game in mechwarrior from a usb key and you are set...no soldering or expensive chips) and then install XBMC. XBMC will let you stream media off of another system (SMB, NFS, custom sharing formats, etc) and you are set. The fan is kind of loud but you might be able to fix that...and for the price it cant really be beat.
connected to my TV is my modded xbox running XBMC (so its a P3 733 with64mb of ram but really good TV out). I control it with the dvd remote. The xbox then connects over 100mb ethernet to my main workstation (no fileserver ATM because I am moving back and forth between home and dorm so I keep it all on one desktop and one laptop) over a SMB share although there are a ton of other methods that can be used to connect.
Now when I want to watch the daily show or a ripped movie, I just go to the right directory and click play. It buffers and starts going. Looks great on the TV but makes managment of the files as easy as using my computer. The xbox also can play all of my music, look at pictures, and check the weather in this configuration. There are commercial devices out there that do similar thigns but I am not sure that I have seen any that can hit as many formats as XBMC (which is just an mplayer frontend) can play.
It's a great system when I am at home though I dont get use out of it at school where my monitor is my only large display so I just watch things on the computer. (the xbox then gets a 4 inch screen and lives in the bathroom for playing shower music)
Click listen now and you can get either a mp3 stream or wma of the live on the air station. This station is positively amazing, it is a minneapolis station operated by minnesota public radio. It is different though in that public radio is almost always focused on news and classical music, this station plays a HUGE selection of modern non-classical music. A lot of local and independant artists as well as highly tallented artists that can be heard elsewhere (but usually not the "hit single" that you might here)...if you request it, they can play it even if its not in their typical type. They also do a lot of in-studio preformances which are all archived and available for play from their site. An added bonus is that they employ two of the most talented dj's I have ever heard (one was a long time music expert dj at the U of M's college station and the other is just a great dj who got bounced around a lot as non-cc stations got taken over by clearchannel). The two are usually back to back weeknights from around 3:00-10:00 IIRC (thier names would be Mary Lucia and Mark Wheat).
Give it a shot, and try it at a few different times because sometimes you can pick up on djs in a wierd mood (doing a themed set or something) or shows you might not be into: for example, I believe late saturday nights get deep into underground hip-hop and rap which may not be everyones cup of tea or right now as I post this they are playing a DJ Sasha set recorded sometime this week in california.
This guy does realize that many of the xbox revisions out there are notoriously bad with burnt cds right? burnt disks arent as reflective for the most part and as part of a way to reduce piracy, many of the xboxes out there respond very poorly to anything thats not pressed. This is why when you are installing xbox linux or something on a system where you havnt swapped drives or increased laser power, you ahve to use a CDRW to guarantee a higher success rate. There is now some higher quality CD media out there which reads ok but I can imagine that it would respond worse to scratching in an xbox than say...any modern audio-cd player which is set to solely read what it is fed and pull out intelligible audio.
When you are going to do a test like this, you should use the proper equipment (either a real CD player or a computer with a drive that is tested-accurate and then measure error rate with EAC or something)
Just FYI, LimeWire is not the absolute shit-bomb that it used to be. It's actually a fairly mature and spyware free client. It suffers from spammed files for any popular music and its not all that safe but it works pretty damn well. One possible way to check if they actually were sharing anything with it might be to find lan shared files. I havnt figured out quite how to find users on your LAN but I know that if you search for a file and someone on your LAN has it, it will show up in a different color and tell you. From there you can browse that users files (but that requires you to find a file that they have shared). This was rather amusing in the dorms last year when we found a song that someone had and then found there massive and somewhat odd porn collection.
Slashdot Mirror
YouTube however seems to be more social so some content is easier found on their site. Both however are very pervasive...My music professor loaded up a few youTube videos for the class back in april or may which shows that there is even some sort of legitimacy to it.
pics please
Sure you probobly need a tank because its a good strategy (then the healer only has to heal one person) but it isnt just warriors who can tank. Druids can tank almost anything, and I have seen plenty of shammans or hunter/warlock pets tanking and doing just fine. When it comes to healing, priests are best at it but you dont need the BEST healing until you hit the very end of the game...druids, shammans and palidins can all heal just fine for 95% of the game (and there should be some elite part of the game where it DOES matter that you arent the best you could be). As for damage dealers...thats pretty much everyone else whether you have hunters, warlocks, mages, shammans, rogues, druids, other warriors, even priests doing it...groups are generally pretty open.
As to group size, it makes sense that if you are doing it near the lower end of when you should be able to...you are going to need a full group. You can do plenty of instances with a partial group and small groups are quite common when just doign quests out in the world. If 5 people arent enough, every instance allows at least 10 people in a group but you are penalized for using that ammount (you should be doign somethign easier if it takes you 10 people to do it.
Thats right bitch, I went to high school. (its easiest to remember it because its kind of like "closure" and they are really calling for deliberation to come to a close and are just bad spellers)
I mean the same can be done with touchtone places...either just wait and pretend you are on a rotary phone or press random numbers until it gives up and forwards you to a person.
Even better, I have it bookmarked on another machine but I once found a site from a slashdot submission that listed a lot of major companies and what number to dial and exactly what set of buttons to press to get to a service representative.
If I have to talk to these things, they had better be able to deal with me TALKING to them and not reading a carefully crafted set of keywords to get the right effect. At least when they tell you the numbers to press, you know you are getting it right.
well, if its a full CD (or near it like a full 512mb or larger thumb drive would be) then a dump of the entire thing is going to be slightly more obvious then copying a thumb drive. Of course your point is still valid since its a strange system and it might just be slow and taking a long time to read thigns off of the CD or not have any spindown time set.
They never notice it or have any idea what it is for, but if you need to use it to fix their computer, it is already there (and they are more likely to be using firefox)
The issue at hand is that they have a ton of physical media they need to keep on hand. The good thing is that they dont have to keep it for 10 years or anything...only months.
With that short of a time, offsite storage almost doesnt make sense since you will be changing stock so often. It might then make a lot of sense to use something as simple as shelves. Make sure every disk is labled and then load them into 50 or 100 disk spindles by estimated project completion month. Every time you add a disk to a spindle, write it down (or put it into a computer) and since you wont be removing these disks, only storing them, you should have an ordered list of all disks in each spindle. As soon as all of the projects on that spindle are complete (you could simply wait an additional month or two before checking to make sure) you quick go through the list and check for open projects. If there arent any, dispose of the spindle full of disks as you see fit. If there are remaining projects, just pull the disk and put it somewhere else and dump the rest of the disks.
kind of like a 17 year old in a state with a high (18) age of consent having their parents sign a form so they can have sex totally legally ("hey mom...can you sign this?") in that it is something I am sure you would just love to have to do before having sex.
my Palm IIIxe was good for DAYS as long as you didnt run the gameboy emulator which overclocked it.
I pop the hood the next day and start poking around...open the fusebox and all the fuses look good except one so I pull out the multimeter and check it...fuse is fine (I couldnt remove it since it was a large fuse and was somehow attatched to prevent tampering). I did tap on the starter which can free a stuck starter but it didnt exhibit the symptoms of a dead starter so this is the only thing I might have actually changed although I did this before checking hte fuses and it failed to start after doign so.
As I run out of quick and dirty soltions, I sit down in the car and try to turn it over...and it starts right up. She wants to know what I did and is afraid to drive it because she doesnt trust it but I maintain that it is mechanically sound. Well, it was mechanically sound until the downpipe went out (car still works fine with a hole in the downpipe, just gets really loud and polluting) and her 16 year old brother thought he could fix it with duct tape and gorrila glue...
Now I use Syncback (the freeware version...its kind of buried on their site but its there) and its great. Granted, you have to have a windows system somewhere but its worked great for me. It can use a ton of protocols, FTP,SMB, NFS (and through these you can easily sync to non-windows systems or even use it to sync between 2 remote systems) and does so easily and quickly. Not that it really has much to do with this topic...just had to say somethign when I saw the word Unison
Of course, being the son of a math professor that he is, he started working out averages and calculated a number around 2000 (they told him how many blocks wide and tall the city was I believe).
My response however when he told me that he was asked this was to simply start with 0 and then add a few that they hadnt gotten around to tearing down yet so something around...5 phone booths in manhattan. I went with this because I know how little payphones get used now and how they are dissapearing (also, the phone companies are cheap now so they dont put them in booths, just on walls or stands).
We ended up finding a site that documented the last remaining phone booths...ther were 4.
As much as I want to stick up for not having a phone--I didnt have one until I started college last year at which point it doesnt make sense not to have one since the dorm phones cost more than a lightly used mobile phone--the fact that there is no other way to make contact sure makes it hard. In high school, so many people around me had phones that all I had to do was borrow one (our payphones also dissapeared and the office was full of hardasses who didnt like people using their phone). In a few years, there will simply be no way around it.
The one thing I miss the most though is knowing peoples phone numbers. I still know a few...my home, my dads work, my dads mobile, my mobile, my girlfriends mobile, my girlfriends home (on a good day) but back when you couldnt just scroll to the persons name, I remembered a lot more.
God, I love it how telling people the world is flat scores me fat wads of cash
Also, I would say that teh initial testing should be done on a relatively good piece of hardware so as to control for error. Once you have the solution that works the best for you, you can then see how bad the hardware can get before it fails but it only makes sense to make sure it works in the controlled environment before sending it out into the wild.
You get garish picture backgrounds and different suites of applications (or the windows 3.1 pic which isnt the full screen, only the program manager portion). The KDE ones are the worst offenders...they are heavily modded to look one way or another...might as well replace the windows98 one with my litestep desktop that I used at the time.
its probobly legal
What I would be curious is what suburbs they are looking to service. I go to teh university of chicago and I can tell you right now, having one around us probobly wouldnt do well (as nice as it might be). First off, you cant really compete with the campus network in terms of speed and the fact that everyone is alerady in a big LAN and second, we are rather urban and the non-student population is either rather wealthy (in and around campus) or very poor (north south or west of campus...the lake is to the east). I understand you said suburb so this doesnt really apply so...lets look at that "other school". You could look toward opening one in evanston which nets you another large university student population although you will face the same problem with the fact that they are already on one big high power LAN. What you also might gain though is the suburban high school population (same as any other suburb). The college will give you slightly older clients who have different schedules but you say you alerady have the daytime figured out.
I wouldnt say there were huge profit margins so you will have to manage costs...keep the rent down but still have enough of a place to keep a presence. Games are expensive--especially when they want you to have special licenses for them--and the systems and high speed connection arent cheap themselves. I dont know how much you can erally charge for the service...LAN Games charges $3 an hour which isnt much coming in to you but is small enough that it doesnt feel l ike a waste to play there rather than at home (you can also bring your own box for $15 a day). They do however hold events like pizza parties, overnight lans, tournaments, and even "ladies night" which can increase traffic and overnight guests will certainly have to spend money on food...
The only problem is that it cant control my xbox like the xbox dvd remote (I will have to do manual learning) and that my family has a mix of older devices and not all of them have discrete codes and the such (and the other remotes get used sometimes). Another problem is that I have been trying to convince my dad to buy a new reciever.
I mean, the 1970's sony is a great sounding unit but it barely has enough audio inputs to have the TV and CD player plugged in at the same time. If it was a more modern reciever with audio and video switching, this setup would be easier because it wouldnt be like "The TV must be on video, the vcr must be on L2, the dvd player must be on...etc" and would just be "the reciever must be on DVD".
Softmod it (easy to do, you just load a saved game in mechwarrior from a usb key and you are set...no soldering or expensive chips) and then install XBMC. XBMC will let you stream media off of another system (SMB, NFS, custom sharing formats, etc) and you are set. The fan is kind of loud but you might be able to fix that...and for the price it cant really be beat.
connected to my TV is my modded xbox running XBMC (so its a P3 733 with64mb of ram but really good TV out). I control it with the dvd remote. The xbox then connects over 100mb ethernet to my main workstation (no fileserver ATM because I am moving back and forth between home and dorm so I keep it all on one desktop and one laptop) over a SMB share although there are a ton of other methods that can be used to connect.
Now when I want to watch the daily show or a ripped movie, I just go to the right directory and click play. It buffers and starts going. Looks great on the TV but makes managment of the files as easy as using my computer. The xbox also can play all of my music, look at pictures, and check the weather in this configuration. There are commercial devices out there that do similar thigns but I am not sure that I have seen any that can hit as many formats as XBMC (which is just an mplayer frontend) can play.
It's a great system when I am at home though I dont get use out of it at school where my monitor is my only large display so I just watch things on the computer. (the xbox then gets a 4 inch screen and lives in the bathroom for playing shower music)
Click listen now and you can get either a mp3 stream or wma of the live on the air station. This station is positively amazing, it is a minneapolis station operated by minnesota public radio. It is different though in that public radio is almost always focused on news and classical music, this station plays a HUGE selection of modern non-classical music. A lot of local and independant artists as well as highly tallented artists that can be heard elsewhere (but usually not the "hit single" that you might here)...if you request it, they can play it even if its not in their typical type. They also do a lot of in-studio preformances which are all archived and available for play from their site. An added bonus is that they employ two of the most talented dj's I have ever heard (one was a long time music expert dj at the U of M's college station and the other is just a great dj who got bounced around a lot as non-cc stations got taken over by clearchannel). The two are usually back to back weeknights from around 3:00-10:00 IIRC (thier names would be Mary Lucia and Mark Wheat).
Give it a shot, and try it at a few different times because sometimes you can pick up on djs in a wierd mood (doing a themed set or something) or shows you might not be into: for example, I believe late saturday nights get deep into underground hip-hop and rap which may not be everyones cup of tea or right now as I post this they are playing a DJ Sasha set recorded sometime this week in california.
When you are going to do a test like this, you should use the proper equipment (either a real CD player or a computer with a drive that is tested-accurate and then measure error rate with EAC or something)
Just FYI, LimeWire is not the absolute shit-bomb that it used to be. It's actually a fairly mature and spyware free client. It suffers from spammed files for any popular music and its not all that safe but it works pretty damn well. One possible way to check if they actually were sharing anything with it might be to find lan shared files. I havnt figured out quite how to find users on your LAN but I know that if you search for a file and someone on your LAN has it, it will show up in a different color and tell you. From there you can browse that users files (but that requires you to find a file that they have shared). This was rather amusing in the dorms last year when we found a song that someone had and then found there massive and somewhat odd porn collection.