Well, we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic. Votes from different districts are not equal. The votes are simply polls used to determine which way a district will be counted, and not all votes are used in that anyways (even if they were all taken accurately).
So all this is really pointless, how about fighting for a proper democracy, then worry about counting votes when votes actually count.
One person, one vote, how about that first?
Scotty:
She can'nah take much more'o this captain! Th' opensource drivers for the warp core containment controller card are only version 0.2.1 and the project hasn't seen an update for nearly a century! While the hardware is capable of running the engines at 110%, these incomplete kernel drivers can'nah hold her much longer than five minutes over 80%!
Kirk:
Bones! You've got Familiar Linux running on your tricorder, get online and see if you can find a patch for the warp core containment driver!
Bones:
Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a kernel hacker.
After looking at some of the other providers posted, I'd like to point out a few things...
starting package is around $5/mo
includes Gigs of storage, not megs
tens of Gigs of bandwidth, not Gigs
can bring your own DNS service or use theirs
cPanel, FTP, SSL POP3
After looking at other services posted I was surprised, i thought it was just my customers getting ripped off by paying over $5/mo for less than a gig, often less than 100MB of storage and only 1 to 3GB of bandwidth. Guess Fuitadnet really is a good deal if even/.'ers are paying more for less.
I'm using Fuitadnet for my stuff and it seems pretty good. Found them from a popular online comic, so they seem to be able to handle moderate load. It's cheap and the support over IRC is great. They also have reseller accounts if you'd like to resell their hosting to your own customers.
Not sure about your temperature range, I was mainly on the software side...
But I did some industrial automation projects related to SoCal Edison's energy curtailment incentive program for Ducommun Aerostructures...
In this system we actually used simple thermistors connected to an A2F board my step-father (energyoptions-wind.com) had built specially for the application. It was Analog to a Frequency pulse readable by the 24v inputs in the IDEC PLC we were using, however, you could just make it 5v and pulse a pin on your parallel port or even one of the pins on your RS232 port (I like the ring pin for that sorta stuff myself).
Point is, depending on precision needed, you don't need expensive A2D cards and temperature interface hardware, a simple circuit with a few off the shelf ICs can take a simple thermistor and generate a pulse signal.
Precision depends on your temperature range, my step-father's board had precision and range inversely related, trade one for the other. In our application (managing HVAC units) 1Hz represented something near room temperature and 40Hz was around 120F, so our precision bottleneck ended up on the IDEC PLC, not the sensor. It came out to about +/-4F, but we were using cheep thermistors because that was more precise than we needed to be (just needed enough to lower the electric bill without making the guys in the offices sweat too much).
If you want a "toy" worth the money, check out a full EEG biofeedback rig. Yes, I did some work for these guys, but I don't get any benefit from plugging 'em (no royalties, etc). I just thought it was facinating stuff. Check eegspectrum.com or neurocybernetics.com for more info. Their gear is intended for psycho-therapy type applications, but on milder settings it can be relaxing (of course, if you don't know what you're doing, you can also give yourself a migraine from hell, this is real medical gear).
I did some work on a few neurofeedback projects for Neurocybernetics a couple years ago. It's really facinating stuff. Their programmes go further than simple relaxation and actually work as an alternative to psychoactive medications for the treatment of anything from bipolar to ADD to drug addictions (by focusing on different ranges of brain waves). They use feedback to train your brain to balance itself (and i won't say more than that without fear of getting the bejeezus sued outta me).
Check 'em out here: http://neurocybernetics.com/
(I did some of the 3D stuff)
I've used Synergy for a while and it works great. My primary work station is still locked into w2k due to some dev. tools from my customer, but i was tired of spending a monitor on my RH firewall/gateway box. Got synergy up and running on both boxes in under an hour, been working great ever since.
I keep my entire home directory in a Subversion repository. Works great for linux and my windows boxes. Firefox and thunderbird user directories are compatible across platforms.
I just add 'svn up' to my login script and 'svn ci --message "%HOST%@%TIME%%DATE%"' to my logout script.
No reason it shouldn't work for a whole system with an initial 'svn up' somewhere in rc.local and periodic updates in a chron job. Just do a commit whenever you change things on your template system and 5 minutes later it'll be on all your boxen.
There was a slashdot article about putting a home directory under version control a few months ago from which I got the idea, too lazy to find the link at the moment though.
That's good to know. I'll save that for next time company X get's me pissed off at what a monkeyf*** sorry excuse for a gamedevelopment house it is.
Of course, that's wandering a bit off topic, so for some on topic...
I have a lot of respect for artists, and wish game development management shared that feeling. I really hate how most places treat them as expendible. Dozens of artists have come and gone from my shop and only one programmer has ever been fired (after he failed to turn a profit for the full year after he hosed our chances on a nextgen contract near-singlehandedly).
Anywho, one thing I've noticed though, is that most artists (in my experience, YMMV) have a hard time understanding the benifits of getting their work out and visible for free, and most are worried that somebody else is going to rip it off and call it their own anyways, especially if it's in a free product). However, with how poorly artists are treated maybe the 'living demo reel' argument can help get more artists interested in contributing to opensource.
On a side note, I think i remembered hearing something about the woman that made some of the classic MacOS images and fonts (happy mac, the bomb, etc) put a lot of her art out under some sort of free license or something... maybe she or somebody she knows would be interested...
I had an idea a while ago, but no resources or connections to make it happen. Anywho, how about something like sourceforge.net for artists? Generic icon/widget packages, or dedicated projects linked into the sourceforge.net code projects? Font foundries, etc. Or does that already exist somewhere. I know there are plenty of theme/skin sites out there, but what about something more like sourceforge?
just remember that artists have a very different mindset than coders, and will be far less open to opensource (at least in my experience as a professional code monkey at a small game developer).
Of course, you could pay for their art, agree to royalties, and then just change it 20 percent (by putting a filter or bilinear mask of sorts on it) and skrew them outta the royalties like an evil company that shall remain nameless that i know of does (or did in the past).
Oh, uhm... shoulda read more. Please mod me redundant.
And i wasn't thinking of the avg. joe and the billing on phones. cingular is nice enough to bill by bandwidth though and for $20 you can get unlimited (if that's worth it to you).
Unfortunately with J2ME you're limited to the RMS size on the phone for storing data locally, but with BREW phones that isn't as much of a problem. but with brew it's really hard to do home-brew zero development cost (actually impossible). So even if you write j2me apps that are supposed to work offline you'll have a massive issue with storing large amounts of data. of course, i'm still a bit new to phone development, and there may be a way around that to where the filesystem on the phone could be accessed, and maybe even access the built-in phonebook and calendar data using propriatary java classes accessible through the mfr's SDK.
I had a PDA (Casiopea), but never use it now.
Between my subnotebook (Fujitsu P1120 running Mandrake10) and any java enabled cell phone (currently a Motorola v400) and my ability to write anything I need for that phone (java+netbeans cobundle and the SDK from motocoder.com and the ability to post my jad/jar files online or to load them through the cable) I nolonger have any need for a PDA.
If it requires only simple input (such as contacts or transactions) or simple viewing (notes, scaled/broken up maps, etc) then it goes on the phone. If its better suited to a full keyboard and a 1024x600 screen then it goes on the laptop. If it needs real computing power, then it's ssh to the 2.4Ghz AthlonXP system at home and i'm trying to setup a dial in access to my home network so I can use the web from anywhere with cell coverage for free during nights and weekends.(by the way, as these things become more usable, I'll post info in my journal).
I would attribute the decline of the PDA partly to the wide spread adoption of j2me cell phones and the availibility of programs equivelent to those on PDAs for phones (with more limited screens, and so/so input) and the cost of a cellphone which is multipurpose and good enough vs. a PDA.
Another thing I would call a contributing factor on the decline of the PDA, especially in american markets would be similar to why it was hard for me to find a good subnotebook. The majority of the american market (calling all walmart shoppers) are non-tech and just don't want it. The fujitsu p1120 was the only real subnotebook i could find being marketed here in the US. Sony keeps it's best for the japanese market and while you can still get them through sites like dynamism.com, it's expensive. Sony has a few notebooks avail. here in the US (my CFO just got one), but they're more just slim-notebooks and are bulked up by the cdromdrive and touchpad.
Anywho, from my POV, the average american wants a full featured laptop. It will probably be their only machine, and in many cases their first machine in years. They want the freedom to take it anywhere, but don't want the mess and expense of two machines. Thus the relative success of the desktop replacement laptop. I think there's a parallel to the huge-does-everything-your-desktop-can laptop vs. the does-what-you-need-on-the-go-in-a-small-package subnotebook and the costs-as-much-or-less-does-just-about-the-same-can -take-pictures-and-gotta-have-a-cellphone-anyways j2me enabled phone vs. the costs-as-much-or-more-has-a-bigger-screen-but-less -input-and-is-going-to-have-to-cram-in-my-pocket-w ith-the-phone PDA situation. To the average, walmart shopping, light beer drinking, fast food eating, tv watching, non-techie, mass market american consumer, a PDA just doesn't make sense. And, unfortunately, that's who businesses have to keep in mind when deciding if a product line is worth keeping. Even a large percentage of the on the go, somewhat computer literate, sharper image shopping, sushi eating american businessman has to think if it's really worth spending the $300+ on a PDA or if a j2me enabled phone will suffice.
But I always keep in mind the possiblity that rather than calling my carefully selected reference listed that they might instead call up the business directory listing for the company and then get some random person (probably in HR, hopefully working their way to somebody nearer to unit level that actually knows something) other than the carefully selected reference. Why do I worry about that? Because that's what I do when checking out freelancers I subcontract.
Also, those unit level managers might get laid off around the same time you do and who knows who could be answering that line, if anybody answers that line.
Of course, in the time it took me to write this people posted some nice comments on ISO9660, UFS and a possible RieserFS driver for windows. Oh well, still be nice to see it as a more standard thing. Better to "infect" windows with opensource code than open source systems with MS code (the write access setup using ntfs.sys).
I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. There's lots of work out there getting linux to run windows drivers, but I haven't seen much work on writing windows drivers for posix (*nix, whatever) stuff.
A while ago I downloaded the Windows DDK from Microsoft for something, but I didn't end up using it, uninstalled it and now I can't find the download. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem avail. for free from Microsoft's site anymore either (Microsoft WHDC DDK page). I have work to do, but this page seems like it might be of some help: OSROnline.com... maybe.
Anyways, the idea still stands, why aren't there win32 branches of open source file system drivers? Of course, I know squat about writing drivers, especially filesystem drivers, so there may be a damn good reason why not. But figured I'd throw it out anywho.
It's good that you're looking to keep it worksafe and humorous. And not getting fired early is good too. But you fail to mention what should be your primary filter.
Remember that the management droids (HR, etc) are probably going to make it through the cut (since they're usually the ones making the cuts). And they're also the ones that will be writting your letter of recommendation or being listed on your references. Since you've been the "lone gun" ITman, that could be a very valuable recommendation. So while trying to lighten the mood and play the prankster to releive your stress and that of the other workers, remember not to step on the toes of those being left behind, their recommendation could be the one that helps you land your next job.
The repository doesn't get too bulky, especially since it only stores patch files from one revision to the next, not complete copies. So things like mp3s only take up their normal filesize (about) in the repository, since they're unlikely to change.
I don't know if subversion has any special handling of binary files, or if it just stores a whole copy each time (instead of the patches i know it does for text files).
The real issue, is how long it takes to do your initial checkout. If possible, I try to do my initial checkouts on the same LAN as the repository, and then I use a subversion command ('svn switch --relocate lanurl wwwurl') to change all the working copies to use the internet url instead of the local network url for my 'server' (actually my win2k box running apache2).
I've been thinking of doing a write up on how well it's working. I actually got the idea here on/. from some guy that kept his home directory in CVS. Check my journal, it'll probably be the next entry i get around to writing, and i'll include the checked out working copy size, vs all the.svn directories removed (not working copy) vs the actual repository size.
Another big plus to subversion under windows is TortoiseSVN.
This client runs as a shell extension right in explorer, so now all your VCS commands are just a rightclick away. It also includes the ability of configuring what commands are nested in the Tortoise SVN submenu, and which are out on the main context menu. All the ease of use of winzip or powerarchiver for version control. It also adds useful columns to your details view, and has a handy repository browser.
If you're on the go a lot and hop between systems, setting up apache for windows and adding OpenSSL and the Subversion modules are easy (drop me a message and I can point you to some good how-tos, but the Subversion Book (on tigris.org) is pretty much all you need). Once the modules are in place, it's only half a dozen lines in your httpd.conf to open up authenticated https access.
I currently use subversion+tortoise on all my windows machines and the commandline interface on my linux laptop. I run the server from my Win2k workstation with a single port routed through my firewall box.
I use it not just for projects, but also for my thunderbird and firefox profiles (except for the platform specific files), my mp3 collection, desktop, documents, pretty much everything i use on a daily basis. I also have an archive tree thats not actively checked out anywhere.
I'm imagining the games and interractive content would be similar in bandwidth requirements as mobile phone games. Since they'd be running off CF cards, it wouldn't be too difficult to swap out preloaded content during their charge cycle, or better yet, make the chargers more like cradles, and have an rs232 or even ethernet connections to load new content while charging.
I thing BT should be fast enough. And BT is far cheaper than the 802.11 would be. 50 was a conservative figure, i'm sure there'd be more seats within a 10 meter radius of the BT gateway, and the BT gateway could then link to a WiFi network. 1 WiFi + 50 (100?) BT is cheaper than 50 WiFi adapters.
I don't know much about bluetooth, but i do know it's cheaper. I would guestimate that you could get over 50 seats covered by one bluetooth-to-wifi bridge (50 seats within the 10 meter radius of the bridge), so that would reduce the number of wifi setups to at least 1/50th of putting them in every unit. That should make up for the cost of having to add the BT-Wifi bridges every 20 meters or so. Additionally, they could be mounted up out of the way of venue patrons which would allow for larger antenna and such without the worry of ham-fisted sports-fans breaking them off. Also, it would reduce power consumption on the units which would further reduce the cost per unit (due to lower battery requirements).
Slashdot Mirror
+1, Under-rated. =P
So all this is really pointless, how about fighting for a proper democracy, then worry about counting votes when votes actually count. One person, one vote, how about that first?
Scotty:
She can'nah take much more'o this captain! Th' opensource drivers for the warp core containment controller card are only version 0.2.1 and the project hasn't seen an update for nearly a century! While the hardware is capable of running the engines at 110%, these incomplete kernel drivers can'nah hold her much longer than five minutes over 80%!
Kirk:
Bones! You've got Familiar Linux running on your tricorder, get online and see if you can find a patch for the warp core containment driver!
Bones:
Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a kernel hacker.
- starting package is around $5/mo
- includes Gigs of storage, not megs
- tens of Gigs of bandwidth, not Gigs
- can bring your own DNS service or use theirs
- cPanel, FTP, SSL POP3
After looking at other services posted I was surprised, i thought it was just my customers getting ripped off by paying over $5/mo for less than a gig, often less than 100MB of storage and only 1 to 3GB of bandwidth. Guess Fuitadnet really is a good deal if evenI'm using Fuitadnet for my stuff and it seems pretty good. Found them from a popular online comic, so they seem to be able to handle moderate load.
It's cheap and the support over IRC is great.
They also have reseller accounts if you'd like to resell their hosting to your own customers.
Not sure about your temperature range, I was mainly on the software side... But I did some industrial automation projects related to SoCal Edison's energy curtailment incentive program for Ducommun Aerostructures... In this system we actually used simple thermistors connected to an A2F board my step-father (energyoptions-wind.com) had built specially for the application. It was Analog to a Frequency pulse readable by the 24v inputs in the IDEC PLC we were using, however, you could just make it 5v and pulse a pin on your parallel port or even one of the pins on your RS232 port (I like the ring pin for that sorta stuff myself). Point is, depending on precision needed, you don't need expensive A2D cards and temperature interface hardware, a simple circuit with a few off the shelf ICs can take a simple thermistor and generate a pulse signal. Precision depends on your temperature range, my step-father's board had precision and range inversely related, trade one for the other. In our application (managing HVAC units) 1Hz represented something near room temperature and 40Hz was around 120F, so our precision bottleneck ended up on the IDEC PLC, not the sensor. It came out to about +/-4F, but we were using cheep thermistors because that was more precise than we needed to be (just needed enough to lower the electric bill without making the guys in the offices sweat too much).
If you want a "toy" worth the money, check out a full EEG biofeedback rig. Yes, I did some work for these guys, but I don't get any benefit from plugging 'em (no royalties, etc). I just thought it was facinating stuff. Check eegspectrum.com or neurocybernetics.com for more info. Their gear is intended for psycho-therapy type applications, but on milder settings it can be relaxing (of course, if you don't know what you're doing, you can also give yourself a migraine from hell, this is real medical gear).
Neurocybernetics' website isn't as informative as it used to be. Try EEG Spectrum's instead: http://www.eegspectrum.com/
I did some work on a few neurofeedback projects for Neurocybernetics a couple years ago. It's really facinating stuff. Their programmes go further than simple relaxation and actually work as an alternative to psychoactive medications for the treatment of anything from bipolar to ADD to drug addictions (by focusing on different ranges of brain waves). They use feedback to train your brain to balance itself (and i won't say more than that without fear of getting the bejeezus sued outta me). Check 'em out here: http://neurocybernetics.com/ (I did some of the 3D stuff)
ahem. obviously, the monitor is the onlything i'm still spending on the RH box. the keyboard and mouse clutter is what i meant i was tired of.
I've used Synergy for a while and it works great. My primary work station is still locked into w2k due to some dev. tools from my customer, but i was tired of spending a monitor on my RH firewall/gateway box. Got synergy up and running on both boxes in under an hour, been working great ever since.
CVS homedir, by Joey Hess on LinuxJournal: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976
Thanks, that was the one.
I keep my entire home directory in a Subversion repository. Works great for linux and my windows boxes. Firefox and thunderbird user directories are compatible across platforms.
I just add 'svn up' to my login script and 'svn ci --message "%HOST%@%TIME%%DATE%"' to my logout script.
No reason it shouldn't work for a whole system with an initial 'svn up' somewhere in rc.local and periodic updates in a chron job. Just do a commit whenever you change things on your template system and 5 minutes later it'll be on all your boxen.
There was a slashdot article about putting a home directory under version control a few months ago from which I got the idea, too lazy to find the link at the moment though.
That's good to know. I'll save that for next time company X get's me pissed off at what a monkeyf*** sorry excuse for a gamedevelopment house it is.
Of course, that's wandering a bit off topic, so for some on topic...
I have a lot of respect for artists, and wish game development management shared that feeling. I really hate how most places treat them as expendible. Dozens of artists have come and gone from my shop and only one programmer has ever been fired (after he failed to turn a profit for the full year after he hosed our chances on a nextgen contract near-singlehandedly).
Anywho, one thing I've noticed though, is that most artists (in my experience, YMMV) have a hard time understanding the benifits of getting their work out and visible for free, and most are worried that somebody else is going to rip it off and call it their own anyways, especially if it's in a free product).
However, with how poorly artists are treated maybe the 'living demo reel' argument can help get more artists interested in contributing to opensource.
On a side note, I think i remembered hearing something about the woman that made some of the classic MacOS images and fonts (happy mac, the bomb, etc) put a lot of her art out under some sort of free license or something... maybe she or somebody she knows would be interested...
I had an idea a while ago, but no resources or connections to make it happen.
Anywho, how about something like sourceforge.net for artists? Generic icon/widget packages, or dedicated projects linked into the sourceforge.net code projects? Font foundries, etc. Or does that already exist somewhere. I know there are plenty of theme/skin sites out there, but what about something more like sourceforge?
just remember that artists have a very different mindset than coders, and will be far less open to opensource (at least in my experience as a professional code monkey at a small game developer).
Of course, you could pay for their art, agree to royalties, and then just change it 20 percent (by putting a filter or bilinear mask of sorts on it) and skrew them outta the royalties like an evil company that shall remain nameless that i know of does (or did in the past).
Oh, uhm... shoulda read more. Please mod me redundant.
And i wasn't thinking of the avg. joe and the billing on phones. cingular is nice enough to bill by bandwidth though and for $20 you can get unlimited (if that's worth it to you).
Unfortunately with J2ME you're limited to the RMS size on the phone for storing data locally, but with BREW phones that isn't as much of a problem. but with brew it's really hard to do home-brew zero development cost (actually impossible). So even if you write j2me apps that are supposed to work offline you'll have a massive issue with storing large amounts of data. of course, i'm still a bit new to phone development, and there may be a way around that to where the filesystem on the phone could be accessed, and maybe even access the built-in phonebook and calendar data using propriatary java classes accessible through the mfr's SDK.
I had a PDA (Casiopea), but never use it now.
n -take-pictures-and-gotta-have-a-cellphone-anyways j2me enabled phone vs. the costs-as-much-or-more-has-a-bigger-screen-but-less -input-and-is-going-to-have-to-cram-in-my-pocket-w ith-the-phone PDA situation. To the average, walmart shopping, light beer drinking, fast food eating, tv watching, non-techie, mass market american consumer, a PDA just doesn't make sense. And, unfortunately, that's who businesses have to keep in mind when deciding if a product line is worth keeping. Even a large percentage of the on the go, somewhat computer literate, sharper image shopping, sushi eating american businessman has to think if it's really worth spending the $300+ on a PDA or if a j2me enabled phone will suffice.
Between my subnotebook (Fujitsu P1120 running Mandrake10) and any java enabled cell phone (currently a Motorola v400) and my ability to write anything I need for that phone (java+netbeans cobundle and the SDK from motocoder.com and the ability to post my jad/jar files online or to load them through the cable) I nolonger have any need for a PDA.
If it requires only simple input (such as contacts or transactions) or simple viewing (notes, scaled/broken up maps, etc) then it goes on the phone. If its better suited to a full keyboard and a 1024x600 screen then it goes on the laptop. If it needs real computing power, then it's ssh to the 2.4Ghz AthlonXP system at home and i'm trying to setup a dial in access to my home network so I can use the web from anywhere with cell coverage for free during nights and weekends.(by the way, as these things become more usable, I'll post info in my journal).
I would attribute the decline of the PDA partly to the wide spread adoption of j2me cell phones and the availibility of programs equivelent to those on PDAs for phones (with more limited screens, and so/so input) and the cost of a cellphone which is multipurpose and good enough vs. a PDA.
Another thing I would call a contributing factor on the decline of the PDA, especially in american markets would be similar to why it was hard for me to find a good subnotebook. The majority of the american market (calling all walmart shoppers) are non-tech and just don't want it. The fujitsu p1120 was the only real subnotebook i could find being marketed here in the US. Sony keeps it's best for the japanese market and while you can still get them through sites like dynamism.com, it's expensive. Sony has a few notebooks avail. here in the US (my CFO just got one), but they're more just slim-notebooks and are bulked up by the cdromdrive and touchpad.
Anywho, from my POV, the average american wants a full featured laptop. It will probably be their only machine, and in many cases their first machine in years. They want the freedom to take it anywhere, but don't want the mess and expense of two machines. Thus the relative success of the desktop replacement laptop.
I think there's a parallel to the huge-does-everything-your-desktop-can laptop vs. the does-what-you-need-on-the-go-in-a-small-package subnotebook and the costs-as-much-or-less-does-just-about-the-same-ca
That's my rabbid rambling 0.02USD.
I'm just paranoid I guess...
But I always keep in mind the possiblity that rather than calling my carefully selected reference listed that they might instead call up the business directory listing for the company and then get some random person (probably in HR, hopefully working their way to somebody nearer to unit level that actually knows something) other than the carefully selected reference. Why do I worry about that? Because that's what I do when checking out freelancers I subcontract.
Also, those unit level managers might get laid off around the same time you do and who knows who could be answering that line, if anybody answers that line.
Of course, in the time it took me to write this people posted some nice comments on ISO9660, UFS and a possible RieserFS driver for windows. Oh well, still be nice to see it as a more standard thing. Better to "infect" windows with opensource code than open source systems with MS code (the write access setup using ntfs.sys).
I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. There's lots of work out there getting linux to run windows drivers, but I haven't seen much work on writing windows drivers for posix (*nix, whatever) stuff.
A while ago I downloaded the Windows DDK from Microsoft for something, but I didn't end up using it, uninstalled it and now I can't find the download. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem avail. for free from Microsoft's site anymore either (Microsoft WHDC DDK page). I have work to do, but this page seems like it might be of some help: OSROnline.com... maybe.
Anyways, the idea still stands, why aren't there win32 branches of open source file system drivers? Of course, I know squat about writing drivers, especially filesystem drivers, so there may be a damn good reason why not. But figured I'd throw it out anywho.
It's good that you're looking to keep it worksafe and humorous. And not getting fired early is good too. But you fail to mention what should be your primary filter.
Remember that the management droids (HR, etc) are probably going to make it through the cut (since they're usually the ones making the cuts). And they're also the ones that will be writting your letter of recommendation or being listed on your references. Since you've been the "lone gun" ITman, that could be a very valuable recommendation. So while trying to lighten the mood and play the prankster to releive your stress and that of the other workers, remember not to step on the toes of those being left behind, their recommendation could be the one that helps you land your next job.
The repository doesn't get too bulky, especially since it only stores patch files from one revision to the next, not complete copies. So things like mp3s only take up their normal filesize (about) in the repository, since they're unlikely to change. /. from some guy that kept his home directory in CVS. Check my journal, it'll probably be the next entry i get around to writing, and i'll include the checked out working copy size, vs all the .svn directories removed (not working copy) vs the actual repository size.
I don't know if subversion has any special handling of binary files, or if it just stores a whole copy each time (instead of the patches i know it does for text files).
The real issue, is how long it takes to do your initial checkout. If possible, I try to do my initial checkouts on the same LAN as the repository, and then I use a subversion command ('svn switch --relocate lanurl wwwurl') to change all the working copies to use the internet url instead of the local network url for my 'server' (actually my win2k box running apache2).
I've been thinking of doing a write up on how well it's working. I actually got the idea here on
Another big plus to subversion under windows is TortoiseSVN.
This client runs as a shell extension right in explorer, so now all your VCS commands are just a rightclick away. It also includes the ability of configuring what commands are nested in the Tortoise SVN submenu, and which are out on the main context menu. All the ease of use of winzip or powerarchiver for version control. It also adds useful columns to your details view, and has a handy repository browser.
If you're on the go a lot and hop between systems, setting up apache for windows and adding OpenSSL and the Subversion modules are easy (drop me a message and I can point you to some good how-tos, but the Subversion Book (on tigris.org) is pretty much all you need). Once the modules are in place, it's only half a dozen lines in your httpd.conf to open up authenticated https access.
I currently use subversion+tortoise on all my windows machines and the commandline interface on my linux laptop. I run the server from my Win2k workstation with a single port routed through my firewall box.
I use it not just for projects, but also for my thunderbird and firefox profiles (except for the platform specific files), my mp3 collection, desktop, documents, pretty much everything i use on a daily basis.
I also have an archive tree thats not actively checked out anywhere.
I'm imagining the games and interractive content would be similar in bandwidth requirements as mobile phone games. Since they'd be running off CF cards, it wouldn't be too difficult to swap out preloaded content during their charge cycle, or better yet, make the chargers more like cradles, and have an rs232 or even ethernet connections to load new content while charging.
I thing BT should be fast enough. And BT is far cheaper than the 802.11 would be. 50 was a conservative figure, i'm sure there'd be more seats within a 10 meter radius of the BT gateway, and the BT gateway could then link to a WiFi network. 1 WiFi + 50 (100?) BT is cheaper than 50 WiFi adapters.
I don't know much about bluetooth, but i do know it's cheaper. I would guestimate that you could get over 50 seats covered by one bluetooth-to-wifi bridge (50 seats within the 10 meter radius of the bridge), so that would reduce the number of wifi setups to at least 1/50th of putting them in every unit. That should make up for the cost of having to add the BT-Wifi bridges every 20 meters or so. Additionally, they could be mounted up out of the way of venue patrons which would allow for larger antenna and such without the worry of ham-fisted sports-fans breaking them off. Also, it would reduce power consumption on the units which would further reduce the cost per unit (due to lower battery requirements).