Netrek is pretty fun, and you can just drop in a server when you have 10 or 15 minutes to kill. It is the ORIGINAL on-line game, and still lots of fun.
One of my recent favorites is just plain old desktop defender. Its flash based.
It is called a "dilemma zone". As it has been pointed out before, it is possible for the yellow light to be too short for you to safely stop before you reach the intersection. This is not a good Traffic Engineering Practice, and endangers the public.
I forget the exact equation, but timing a yellow light goes something like this: 0.5 seconds + the time it takes the design vehicle to cover the distance it takes to stop. If the yellow light is shorter than this, then it would be nearly physically impossible for you to stop before you reached the intersection.
If you get one of these tickets, I think getting it dismissed would be a simple matter of getting the light timing for the signal (the jurisdiction controlling the light should have this on file), and then have a registered traffic engineer do the yellow light length calculations, and hopefully the judge would have enough brains to throw the ticket out, and put the city on notice that the practice is dangerous.
So you want to start a Leica VS Topcon flame war? No one here but us would understand the references.
I admit Leica has been behind the ball on adopting GLONASS, but I still like their post processing better. Multiple observations on a single point work out much better in Leica.
You have to set up your reciever to log satilite observations over at least 2 hours, and take a reading at least every 5 minutes. Opus uses precises satilite orbital information to post process point information. The accuracy of your results depend upon how long you run your observations, and how many observations you log. I typicall run mine over 4 hours, and get an accuracy of around 4mm horizontal. Opus is a great tool when you need to tie your land survey to WGS84 coordinates, or State plane coordinates.
Back when we were purchasing land surveying grade recievers for our company, the sales man explained to us that 10-15 feet was the best that was avalible due to the signal getting distorted by passing through the atmosphere. This is why RTK or DGPS is used in land surveying with multiple recievers.
You might want to read the above post for how GPS works. You don't get your position from the satilites, you just get a time encoded signal. The reciever then uses the signal from at least 3 satilites to triangulate your position. If your reciever can recieve and interperate the signal fromt the GLOSNOS satilites, there is no reason why it can't use the results to augment the results you pulled calculated from the US GPS system.
RTK is pretty much the same as DGPS. If you're a land surveyor and within 200-400 miles of a coast guard station transmitting DGPS correction signals, you have no need to have the "base" system at a known point.
Also, can you provide some geographic reference to where you haven't had enough satellites above the horizon?
Not exactly. DGPS requires post processing after you get back into the office in order to download the correction files from your reference station. In RTK the correction is done in realtime, so there is no post-processing required. This is particularly handy when you are trying to do something that requires you to find a calculated position (like laying out a buidling or grade staking).
DGPS is fine if you are wanting a position within a foot or two. The accuracy of a GPS calculated position is a function of the distance you are from your base station. Typically, we run our bases within 1 mile of the roving units to get acceptable horizontal accuracy (plus or minus 1 cm).
As for the satilite counts, The Leica 500 recievers we use have to have at least 5 good satilites to get a lock. Also, the recievers tend to filter out any satilites that are below 15 degress above the horizon, as atmospheric interference makes the signals from those too eratic to be of much use. There are some days when you pull up your onboard almanac, and see 8 satilites, but only 4 of them are useable. With the current stock of GPS satilies that are up there, you typically only see windows of an hour or two every 24 hours when you are down due to not enough satilites. Having a GLOSNOS enabled reciever pretty much eliminates these down times due to the fact that even an extra 8 satilies helps fill in the times when you don't have enough US GPS satilites avalible.
Surveying with 5 satilites is pretty dicy at best. You cant get up next to buildings, or trees without loosing lock. The ideal number is 8 good signals so you can move around next to objects, and loose a couple of signals, but still have a good lock on your position. Ten or twelve satilies is when we get our best results.
This is good news for land surveyors everywhere. Most all surveyors have switched over to GPS based equipment in the last 10 years. I have been out in the field with GPS equipment, and watched my accuracy go to hell because there were not enough satilites above the horizon. Being able to pull signals from both systems means less downtime for land surveyors, and better field accuracy.
Engaget does not have one fact correct. Topcon has been offering surveying grade GPS units that can pull signals from both the US based system, and the GLONASS system for at least 3 years.
BTW, if you are wondering how land surveyors get the accuracy down to 1cm for gps, it involves using two GPS recievers and a process called RTK. In RTK one reciever (the base) is placed over a known point, and equipped with a radio transmitter. This station transmitts a correction for the GPS signal to the other reciever (the rover). The results are very accurate, and our firm has pretty much stopped using conventional total station, except where vertical accuracy is an issue (gps is only good to 10cm in vertical accuracy).
IMO, the discover that may end up having the most impact will end up being the guys who discovered what atmospheric conditions are most condusive to the transmission of Influenza.
Don't want to get sick?, crank up the heat, and plug in that humidifier.
it seems that I am the family computer support guy. Last year I finally moved my 73 year old father off his failing xp box, and convinced him to buy an Imac. I have been using a 20" Imac for more than a year since I retired my last XP box. Being that my Dad is 73, there were certain windows programs that he had to have. I didn't argue with him, I just installed Parallels, and let him go about things 'his' way. My Dad lives a couple of miles from my place, but it still was a bit of a pain to have to go over to his place ever time Parallels locked up. He still inisist on suspending the virtual machine ever time he wants out of parallels, and I have not been able to convice him that he has to 'turn off' the virtual machine.
So when I heard that Leapord was going to feature screen sharing, I convinced my Dad it was time to upgrade. In the last month, it has saved me three trips over to his place when he needed support. I only wish Apple had included screen sharing sooner. I know there was a pay version, but IMO, apple should have gotten on the remote desktop band wagon long ago. That is something that MS has really outdone Apple on.
So after a month with both of our machines on Leapord, I can say both computers are pretty stable. There have been no kernnel panics, and time machine is working out well on both machines.
In my house, we still have a lap top running XP, and I run a LAMP server on Fendora. The main printer in the house is hooked up to my Imac, and print sharing has been pretty painless using Bonjour on the XP laptop. I am SMB on my fendora server, and I have noticed that Leapord does not drop the connection like Tiger used to.
I will have to admit, my Fedora server puts both my Imac and my XP box to shame for its stability. I run a web server, a weather station server, a samba server all on the same box with fendora. That box literally goes months without having to be touched. I get an email from it every with its system status, and I am impressed with how easy it was to set up and maintain.
is playing games with me, his Dad. I found that Co-op games work best with him. In particular, he loves the Lego Star Wars series. I keep an old xbox around just so we can play together. I do limit the time he can play though. He does understand that some games are for adults only (Gears of War, Halo 3) and I make it a point not to play those games when he is around. I have found myself looking for 'E' rated games that are simple enough for him to play.
I have thought about what my gaming policy will be when he gets older. I spent way too much time in front of the Nintendo when I was growing up, and was pretty chubby as a teen because of it. My parents didn't care how much time I spent playing games. I think I will limit the amount of time my kids will spend gaming. I am glad to see the Xbox now has parental controls that allow you to limit the time spent playing per day. If that console is still around, then that feature will get used.
Microsoft *realy* need to get the quality control situation figured out before they can hope the 360 will have the console life of the PS2. Lets face it, when your two or three year old console breaks, chances are you won't buy another one.
Locally, we have a couple of EB games. Like most people, I just buy used games there. The ones in the mall are pretty bad, but there is one in a strip center on the edge of that has a lot more used games than most, and the employees are pretty nice.
My 4 year old son loves to play lego Star Wars. I bought Lego Star wars 2 off of Amazon, and we had a good time playing. However, we had never played the original Lego Star wars. So I put my 4 year old in his car seat, and we made the trek to our local game stop.
According to the employee, they had 1 copy somewhere in the store. Unfortuanly, their Xbox games were all piled into one of those 4 foot by 4 foot bins, and in no particular order. The employee and I started leafing through all the game in search of the star wars title. We were just getting started when my 4 year old son walked up, stuck his hand in the bin, and pulled out the only copy of the game in the store. I still don't know how my son knew THAT was the game we were looking for. I suspect it was the Lego people on the box though...
I upgraded my Core 2 Imac about 3 days ago. The biggest worry I had was that it would disable my installation of Parrallels desktop (i use it to run Autocad LDD). I am running the older 2.5 version, build 3214. I check with the parrallels forums before I did the install, and most of the users were not having a problem. So I backed up a few things to my external HD, and my LAMP server, and popped in the dvd.
Installation went smoothly, and as expected, Parralels works fine.
In my opinion, The good: New Safari with spell check, because in case you ahve not noticed, I can't spell worth beans. Spaces: I always loved that on my fedora machine, nice to see the Mac catching up. Finder: Much better!
The Bad: The changes to the GUI. The menu bar is the worst. At least give us the option of setting it back to a solid bar! The other thing that bugs me is the washed out 'lights' on the dock that appear when an applicaiton is loaded. Sometimes it is hard to tell when they are there. Once again, it makes me with for the old dock.
I did set up time machine. I was using Ibackup and moving files up to my LAMP machine (running fendora) every night. Time will tell if this was a smart move (no pun intended).
The editorial independence of slashdot, and the meta moderating has keep me coming back here for years. I am glad you have been able to resist the coporate culture as long as you have, and maintain a quality site.
Back a couple of years ago, I was giving a presentation to a bunch of high school seniors on careers in engineering. I asked if any wanted to be CS majors. A few timidly raised their hands. I then asked if any of them had hear of slashdot.org. None of them had. I told them point blank that if they wanted to get anywhere in CS, they had better start reading slashdot.
I picked up Elebits last week, and I am finding that it is one of the few Wii games I can play with my 3 year old son. It took him a couple of games to figure out the targeting system, but after that, he had a blast throwing around the furniture, and generally making a mess, and concentrating very hard to line up a shot to capture elebits.
The fact that the camera control can be restricted to one player is a plus for us. My son does not get how to control the camera yet, so we have fun with me controlling the camera, and him blasting away at furniture.
The last Zelda game I played before buying my Wii was the orginal Legend of Zelda for the NES. I cannot even recall if I finished the game.
I lucked out and picked up a Wii at my local Best Buy the Sunday after Thanksgiving. From there I walked next door the to the Wal-Mart and purchased TP.
I am only about 6 hours into the game, and I have to admit, it is a lot of fun. I am an offical 'Geezer Gamer', and I liked the fact that the controls were very easy to learn, and The game play is made to ramp up your skills before you have to use them.
I realy like the graphics, not only for their styling, but because they don't cause motions sickness! I can play the game for hours on end without getting motion sick. As much as I love playing HALO2 with my friends on my Xbox, I cannot play more than one hour straight without tossing my cookies. Same thing with the Marrowind Series.
My day job is as a Civil Engineer. However, I do a bit of programming on the side, mainly as a hobby.
About a month ago I went ahead and purchased a 20" Imac for use in my home. My wife uses it during the day for email and web browsing, and in the evening, I run Parallels with windows XP to use Autocad and Visual Basic.net Express during the evenings.
Typically, when I am runing Parallels, I don't have a lot of apps open in OSX, so my XP runs quite well with just 512mb of my 2gbs of memory allicated to it. I am still pretty much a newbie to OSX, and setting up Parallels was pretty easy even for me.
Apple has always centered it buisness model around hardware. Why do you think they have not put out an offical version of OSX that will run on a generic PC? Its because that would be counter to their primary profit center, selling hardware.
It is kind of like suggesting that GM no longer sell cars.
What you are missing is a Wireless 802.11n device. Apple is waiting for the new standard before releasing Itv. It will be the only way they will be able to have enough bandwidth between the Itv and the base computer to push across a broadcast quality picture.
It makes sense for us whom already have half the hardware. I already have an Imac, and Itv looks interesting to me, especialy since Itunes already sells tv shows and is starting to sell movies.
I think the reason apple is going the route of having the Itv be a seperate machine is two fold: 1. It keeps the cost of Itv down, and 2. It may help sell a few more macs. --C. Alan
Slashdot Mirror
One of my recent favorites is just plain old desktop defender. Its flash based.
It is called a "dilemma zone". As it has been pointed out before, it is possible for the yellow light to be too short for you to safely stop before you reach the intersection. This is not a good Traffic Engineering Practice, and endangers the public.
I forget the exact equation, but timing a yellow light goes something like this: 0.5 seconds + the time it takes the design vehicle to cover the distance it takes to stop. If the yellow light is shorter than this, then it would be nearly physically impossible for you to stop before you reached the intersection.
If you get one of these tickets, I think getting it dismissed would be a simple matter of getting the light timing for the signal (the jurisdiction controlling the light should have this on file), and then have a registered traffic engineer do the yellow light length calculations, and hopefully the judge would have enough brains to throw the ticket out, and put the city on notice that the practice is dangerous.
So you want to start a Leica VS Topcon flame war? No one here but us would understand the references.
I admit Leica has been behind the ball on adopting GLONASS, but I still like their post processing better. Multiple observations on a single point work out much better in Leica.
You can already do this with the US based GPS system using OPUS. Forgive my bad html, but here is the link:
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/OPUS/
You have to set up your reciever to log satilite observations over at least 2 hours, and take a reading at least every 5 minutes. Opus uses precises satilite orbital information to post process point information. The accuracy of your results depend upon how long you run your observations, and how many observations you log. I typicall run mine over 4 hours, and get an accuracy of around 4mm horizontal. Opus is a great tool when you need to tie your land survey to WGS84 coordinates, or State plane coordinates.
Back when we were purchasing land surveying grade recievers for our company, the sales man explained to us that 10-15 feet was the best that was avalible due to the signal getting distorted by passing through the atmosphere. This is why RTK or DGPS is used in land surveying with multiple recievers.
You might want to read the above post for how GPS works. You don't get your position from the satilites, you just get a time encoded signal. The reciever then uses the signal from at least 3 satilites to triangulate your position. If your reciever can recieve and interperate the signal fromt the GLOSNOS satilites, there is no reason why it can't use the results to augment the results you pulled calculated from the US GPS system.
Not exactly. DGPS requires post processing after you get back into the office in order to download the correction files from your reference station. In RTK the correction is done in realtime, so there is no post-processing required. This is particularly handy when you are trying to do something that requires you to find a calculated position (like laying out a buidling or grade staking).
DGPS is fine if you are wanting a position within a foot or two. The accuracy of a GPS calculated position is a function of the distance you are from your base station. Typically, we run our bases within 1 mile of the roving units to get acceptable horizontal accuracy (plus or minus 1 cm).
As for the satilite counts, The Leica 500 recievers we use have to have at least 5 good satilites to get a lock. Also, the recievers tend to filter out any satilites that are below 15 degress above the horizon, as atmospheric interference makes the signals from those too eratic to be of much use. There are some days when you pull up your onboard almanac, and see 8 satilites, but only 4 of them are useable. With the current stock of GPS satilies that are up there, you typically only see windows of an hour or two every 24 hours when you are down due to not enough satilites. Having a GLOSNOS enabled reciever pretty much eliminates these down times due to the fact that even an extra 8 satilies helps fill in the times when you don't have enough US GPS satilites avalible.
Surveying with 5 satilites is pretty dicy at best. You cant get up next to buildings, or trees without loosing lock. The ideal number is 8 good signals so you can move around next to objects, and loose a couple of signals, but still have a good lock on your position. Ten or twelve satilies is when we get our best results.
This is good news for land surveyors everywhere. Most all surveyors have switched over to GPS based equipment in the last 10 years. I have been out in the field with GPS equipment, and watched my accuracy go to hell because there were not enough satilites above the horizon. Being able to pull signals from both systems means less downtime for land surveyors, and better field accuracy.
Engaget does not have one fact correct. Topcon has been offering surveying grade GPS units that can pull signals from both the US based system, and the GLONASS system for at least 3 years.
http://www.topconpositioning.com/uploads/tx_tttopconproducts/HiPerPro_Broch_REVB.pdf
BTW, if you are wondering how land surveyors get the accuracy down to 1cm for gps, it involves using two GPS recievers and a process called RTK. In RTK one reciever (the base) is placed over a known point, and equipped with a radio transmitter. This station transmitts a correction for the GPS signal to the other reciever (the rover). The results are very accurate, and our firm has pretty much stopped using conventional total station, except where vertical accuracy is an issue (gps is only good to 10cm in vertical accuracy).
IMO, the discover that may end up having the most impact will end up being the guys who discovered what atmospheric conditions are most condusive to the transmission of Influenza.
Don't want to get sick?, crank up the heat, and plug in that humidifier.
it seems that I am the family computer support guy. Last year I finally moved my 73 year old father off his failing xp box, and convinced him to buy an Imac. I have been using a 20" Imac for more than a year since I retired my last XP box. Being that my Dad is 73, there were certain windows programs that he had to have. I didn't argue with him, I just installed Parallels, and let him go about things 'his' way. My Dad lives a couple of miles from my place, but it still was a bit of a pain to have to go over to his place ever time Parallels locked up. He still inisist on suspending the virtual machine ever time he wants out of parallels, and I have not been able to convice him that he has to 'turn off' the virtual machine.
So when I heard that Leapord was going to feature screen sharing, I convinced my Dad it was time to upgrade. In the last month, it has saved me three trips over to his place when he needed support. I only wish Apple had included screen sharing sooner. I know there was a pay version, but IMO, apple should have gotten on the remote desktop band wagon long ago. That is something that MS has really outdone Apple on.
So after a month with both of our machines on Leapord, I can say both computers are pretty stable. There have been no kernnel panics, and time machine is working out well on both machines.
In my house, we still have a lap top running XP, and I run a LAMP server on Fendora. The main printer in the house is hooked up to my Imac, and print sharing has been pretty painless using Bonjour on the XP laptop. I am SMB on my fendora server, and I have noticed that Leapord does not drop the connection like Tiger used to.
I will have to admit, my Fedora server puts both my Imac and my XP box to shame for its stability. I run a web server, a weather station server, a samba server all on the same box with fendora. That box literally goes months without having to be touched. I get an email from it every with its system status, and I am impressed with how easy it was to set up and maintain.
Man, this is Grammer Nazi'ing at a new level.
Ha, I made Nazi a verb! I guess this will lead to another pointless post by yet another Grammer Nazi.
is playing games with me, his Dad. I found that Co-op games work best with him. In particular, he loves the Lego Star Wars series. I keep an old xbox around just so we can play together. I do limit the time he can play though. He does understand that some games are for adults only (Gears of War, Halo 3) and I make it a point not to play those games when he is around. I have found myself looking for 'E' rated games that are simple enough for him to play.
I have thought about what my gaming policy will be when he gets older. I spent way too much time in front of the Nintendo when I was growing up, and was pretty chubby as a teen because of it. My parents didn't care how much time I spent playing games. I think I will limit the amount of time my kids will spend gaming. I am glad to see the Xbox now has parental controls that allow you to limit the time spent playing per day. If that console is still around, then that feature will get used.
Microsoft *realy* need to get the quality control situation figured out before they can hope the 360 will have the console life of the PS2. Lets face it, when your two or three year old console breaks, chances are you won't buy another one.
Locally, we have a couple of EB games. Like most people, I just buy used games there. The ones in the mall are pretty bad, but there is one in a strip center on the edge of that has a lot more used games than most, and the employees are pretty nice.
My 4 year old son loves to play lego Star Wars. I bought Lego Star wars 2 off of Amazon, and we had a good time playing. However, we had never played the original Lego Star wars. So I put my 4 year old in his car seat, and we made the trek to our local game stop.
According to the employee, they had 1 copy somewhere in the store. Unfortuanly, their Xbox games were all piled into one of those 4 foot by 4 foot bins, and in no particular order. The employee and I started leafing through all the game in search of the star wars title. We were just getting started when my 4 year old son walked up, stuck his hand in the bin, and pulled out the only copy of the game in the store. I still don't know how my son knew THAT was the game we were looking for. I suspect it was the Lego people on the box though...
I upgraded my Core 2 Imac about 3 days ago. The biggest worry I had was that it would disable my installation of Parrallels desktop (i use it to run Autocad LDD). I am running the older 2.5 version, build 3214. I check with the parrallels forums before I did the install, and most of the users were not having a problem. So I backed up a few things to my external HD, and my LAMP server, and popped in the dvd.
Installation went smoothly, and as expected, Parralels works fine.
In my opinion,
The good: New Safari with spell check, because in case you ahve not noticed, I can't spell worth beans. Spaces: I always loved that on my fedora machine, nice to see the Mac catching up. Finder: Much better!
The Bad: The changes to the GUI. The menu bar is the worst. At least give us the option of setting it back to a solid bar! The other thing that bugs me is the washed out 'lights' on the dock that appear when an applicaiton is loaded. Sometimes it is hard to tell when they are there. Once again, it makes me with for the old dock.
I did set up time machine. I was using Ibackup and moving files up to my LAMP machine (running fendora) every night. Time will tell if this was a smart move (no pun intended).
The editorial independence of slashdot, and the meta moderating has keep me coming back here for years. I am glad you have been able to resist the coporate culture as long as you have, and maintain a quality site.
Back a couple of years ago, I was giving a presentation to a bunch of high school seniors on careers in engineering. I asked if any wanted to be CS majors. A few timidly raised their hands. I then asked if any of them had hear of slashdot.org. None of them had. I told them point blank that if they wanted to get anywhere in CS, they had better start reading slashdot.
Good luck on the next 10 years!
--C. Alan
Man that game was addicting. I swear it cost me at least 0.2 of my GPA in college, but damm it, I ogged the base, and was NOT free beer.
I picked up Elebits last week, and I am finding that it is one of the few Wii games I can play with my 3 year old son. It took him a couple of games to figure out the targeting system, but after that, he had a blast throwing around the furniture, and generally making a mess, and concentrating very hard to line up a shot to capture elebits.
The fact that the camera control can be restricted to one player is a plus for us. My son does not get how to control the camera yet, so we have fun with me controlling the camera, and him blasting away at furniture.
I run Autocad Land development desktop on Parallels on my Imac. I do mainly 2d stuff, but it works great.
The last Zelda game I played before buying my Wii was the orginal Legend of Zelda for the NES. I cannot even recall if I finished the game.
I lucked out and picked up a Wii at my local Best Buy the Sunday after Thanksgiving. From there I walked next door the to the Wal-Mart and purchased TP.
I am only about 6 hours into the game, and I have to admit, it is a lot of fun. I am an offical 'Geezer Gamer', and I liked the fact that the controls were very easy to learn, and The game play is made to ramp up your skills before you have to use them.
I realy like the graphics, not only for their styling, but because they don't cause motions sickness! I can play the game for hours on end without getting motion sick. As much as I love playing HALO2 with my friends on my Xbox, I cannot play more than one hour straight without tossing my cookies. Same thing with the Marrowind Series.
My day job is as a Civil Engineer. However, I do a bit of programming on the side, mainly as a hobby.
.net Express during the evenings.
About a month ago I went ahead and purchased a 20" Imac for use in my home. My wife uses it during the day for email and web browsing, and in the evening, I run Parallels with windows XP to use Autocad and Visual Basic
Typically, when I am runing Parallels, I don't have a lot of apps open in OSX, so my XP runs quite well with just 512mb of my 2gbs of memory allicated to it. I am still pretty much a newbie to OSX, and setting up Parallels was pretty easy even for me.
--C. Alan
Apple has always centered it buisness model around hardware. Why do you think they have not put out an offical version of OSX that will run on a generic PC? Its because that would be counter to their primary profit center, selling hardware.
It is kind of like suggesting that GM no longer sell cars.
--C. Alan
What am I missing here?
What you are missing is a Wireless 802.11n device. Apple is waiting for the new standard before releasing Itv. It will be the only way they will be able to have enough bandwidth between the Itv and the base computer to push across a broadcast quality picture.
It makes sense for us whom already have half the hardware. I already have an Imac, and Itv looks interesting to me, especialy since Itunes already sells tv shows and is starting to sell movies.
I think the reason apple is going the route of having the Itv be a seperate machine is two fold: 1. It keeps the cost of Itv down, and 2. It may help sell a few more macs.
--C. Alan
"The cat whom walked through walls"