Imagine a world where everyone is aware that prices for items fluctuate depending on your buying habits. Consumers won't consume! They'll get a clue and choose to save their money for special purchases so they won't be reamed for being classified as "impulse-spenders" or "electronics-junkies." They'll think before purchasing junk they don't need. The environment is saved! The economy tanks! Hooray! A bizarre new world order replaces the current.
If we put a little thought into each and every one of our purchases, I bet we'd see how little we actually need to get by. People would work less hours, be less stressed out, and the world in general would be a better place.
The awesome part about all this is that all the crap, the junky products that make up the bulk of our purchases like the IKEA cardboard furniture, the cheaply made shoes that fall apart, the food that gives you heart disease -- it gets left on the shelf because you have to really need to want it to risk the prices of everything else going up for a while.
That's a neat device. Thanks for telling us about it!
I'm currently building a pinball machine with a Lindows computer as the brains. This core module looks like what I need to connect the 84 switches and bulbs to the computer. Hell, I could even run perl on the computer and talk to the rabbit module as the "server". Only problem is, how do I reduce 84 switches down to 10 wires? There must be another component out there that does things like this.
Ahh.. knowledge, what a funny thing. I'll figure this out eventually. I just need more books!
> Three nerds will arrive at your door shortly with the Linux CD and baseball bat.
Yeah man. Excellente! It'll be like when Michael Bolton (the skinny coder) in Office Space beat the fax machine with the wrong end of the baseball bat.
Many audio cards fool you into thinking that it plays music cleaner by running the output through a reverb module. I'm not sure if the reverb is driver-based or hardware-based, but it's almost always turned on as a default. I make music and it was driving me crazy until I realized that my cheap SB Live card was adding reverb. I had to go into the driver config to turn it off. Are you sure that your sound card wasn't set to "Hall" or "Small Room?"
In my opinion, the biggest difference between a sound card and the motherboard component sound is the number of channels it can play at the same time. Motherboard sound cards can often only play 4 channels simultaneously (two in stereo), while even a cheap sound card can usually play eight or ten channels simultaneously. This really comes into play when you're playing an MP3 while playing a game. If you're using a motherboard sound card then intermittant event sounds like gunfire will drop out.
Thanks for the review of your Treo. I'll look into seeing if it's worth the upgrade. It certainly does sound like it works well. Perhaps it's my T-Mobile Pocket PC that's the trouble.
Seriously. I have a PocketPC Phone from T-Mobile that I use for work. When it's working (admittedly rarely) I can SSH into my servers, transfer small files through FTP, check my email, and surf the web. Basically, everything I need to check up on my servers and make small changes.
It's deathly slow though. Cellular data transfer across GPRS networks is like being back on 300 baud, complete with frequent disconnects. More often than not though it takes a good four or five minutes to open even a small web page with graphics turned off. I find myself doing all sorts of ridiculous tricks like accessing CGI scripts through GET rather than POST just to avoid waiting for the form to pop up. (e.g. http://mycompany.org/cgi-bin/login.cgi?name=me;pas sword=me) It's bullshit.
Also, as if that isn't bad enough, T-Mobile charges something outrageous like $5 for each megabyte of transfer that I go over in my plan. (I believe the highest data plan allows you 30mb.)
> no registration required if it is copied and posted here, tough guy
Then this is just copyright infringement. Articles are mirrored to help the publisher's servers cope with the press of requests that a slashdot mention brings. It's a good thing, because the publisher continues to have his content delivered to interested readers. However, mirroring an article just to get around a publisher's terms -- that's theft.
Another great resource is Safari. It's a web service that for a fee, allows you to view O'reilly, Que, and Sams books online. I find the code search feature to be invaluable. Cheap way to read technical books.
From the article: "In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry."
"We have been befallen by the great flood of Kazaa, that one of the water of immorality which we hear when we are being told; it has come to us; it has taken us, the great flood of Kazaa..."
> Do we have a standard interface for OLE between applications?
Agreed. It's really frustrating to not be able to copy a simple URL and paste it into another program. That's why I have Windows XP as my daily OS again. It sucks -- but at least I'm productive.
> Secondly - eliminating (or reducing) fans not only eliminates noise, it also improves reliability. How many of us have had fans get noisier over time and eventually die on us?
The fans on my two Athlon XP2100+ PCs sound like hair dryers. If I record my answering machine message with them on it sounds like I'm talking on a cell phone. Ack.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad idea! We play fair. :)
Imagine a world where everyone is aware that prices for items fluctuate depending on your buying habits. Consumers won't consume! They'll get a clue and choose to save their money for special purchases so they won't be reamed for being classified as "impulse-spenders" or "electronics-junkies." They'll think before purchasing junk they don't need. The environment is saved! The economy tanks! Hooray! A bizarre new world order replaces the current.
If we put a little thought into each and every one of our purchases, I bet we'd see how little we actually need to get by. People would work less hours, be less stressed out, and the world in general would be a better place.
The awesome part about all this is that all the crap, the junky products that make up the bulk of our purchases like the IKEA cardboard furniture, the cheaply made shoes that fall apart, the food that gives you heart disease -- it gets left on the shelf because you have to really need to want it to risk the prices of everything else going up for a while.
Disneyland in Anaheim, California has everything that Disney World has without the rednecks.
Also, there's more rides per square foot and the cast members tend to be amiable.
Enough said.
That's a neat device. Thanks for telling us about it!
I'm currently building a pinball machine with a Lindows computer as the brains. This core module looks like what I need to connect the 84 switches and bulbs to the computer. Hell, I could even run perl on the computer and talk to the rabbit module as the "server". Only problem is, how do I reduce 84 switches down to 10 wires? There must be another component out there that does things like this.
Ahh.. knowledge, what a funny thing. I'll figure this out eventually. I just need more books!
Thanks again.
> Three nerds will arrive at your door shortly with the Linux CD and baseball bat.
Yeah man. Excellente! It'll be like when Michael Bolton (the skinny coder) in Office Space beat the fax machine with the wrong end of the baseball bat.
Many audio cards fool you into thinking that it plays music cleaner by running the output through a reverb module. I'm not sure if the reverb is driver-based or hardware-based, but it's almost always turned on as a default. I make music and it was driving me crazy until I realized that my cheap SB Live card was adding reverb. I had to go into the driver config to turn it off. Are you sure that your sound card wasn't set to "Hall" or "Small Room?"
In my opinion, the biggest difference between a sound card and the motherboard component sound is the number of channels it can play at the same time. Motherboard sound cards can often only play 4 channels simultaneously (two in stereo), while even a cheap sound card can usually play eight or ten channels simultaneously. This really comes into play when you're playing an MP3 while playing a game. If you're using a motherboard sound card then intermittant event sounds like gunfire will drop out.
That was a bloody lot of abbreviations.
Thanks for the review of your Treo. I'll look into seeing if it's worth the upgrade. It certainly does sound like it works well. Perhaps it's my T-Mobile Pocket PC that's the trouble.
Seriously. I have a PocketPC Phone from T-Mobile that I use for work. When it's working (admittedly rarely) I can SSH into my servers, transfer small files through FTP, check my email, and surf the web. Basically, everything I need to check up on my servers and make small changes.
s sword=me) It's bullshit.
It's deathly slow though. Cellular data transfer across GPRS networks is like being back on 300 baud, complete with frequent disconnects. More often than not though it takes a good four or five minutes to open even a small web page with graphics turned off. I find myself doing all sorts of ridiculous tricks like accessing CGI scripts through GET rather than POST just to avoid waiting for the form to pop up. (e.g. http://mycompany.org/cgi-bin/login.cgi?name=me;pa
Also, as if that isn't bad enough, T-Mobile charges something outrageous like $5 for each megabyte of transfer that I go over in my plan. (I believe the highest data plan allows you 30mb.)
> no registration required if it is copied and posted here, tough guy
Then this is just copyright infringement. Articles are mirrored to help the publisher's servers cope with the press of requests that a slashdot mention brings. It's a good thing, because the publisher continues to have his content delivered to interested readers. However, mirroring an article just to get around a publisher's terms -- that's theft.
It's mirrored here courtesy of SurveyComplete.
Incedentally, I highly recommend the book Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve C McConnell. It tought me more about programming than the rest of my computer book bookshelf!
Another great resource is Safari. It's a web service that for a fee, allows you to view O'reilly, Que, and Sams books online. I find the code search feature to be invaluable. Cheap way to read technical books.
I remember this also happening during the war in Yugoslavia a few years back.
Here's a good cached article of Jack Valenti's disposition in court against 2600.
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:ni4GUUU00zIC: www.cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-jvd.htm+jack+valenti& hl=en&ie=UTF-8
From the article: "In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry."
"We have been befallen by the great flood of Kazaa, that one of the water of immorality which we hear when we are being told; it has come to us; it has taken us, the great flood of Kazaa..."
Okay, it's not really funny.
> Do we have a standard interface for OLE between applications?
Agreed. It's really frustrating to not be able to copy a simple URL and paste it into another program. That's why I have Windows XP as my daily OS again. It sucks -- but at least I'm productive.
> Secondly - eliminating (or reducing) fans not only eliminates noise, it also improves reliability. How many of us have had fans get noisier over time and eventually die on us?
The fans on my two Athlon XP2100+ PCs sound like hair dryers. If I record my answering machine message with them on it sounds like I'm talking on a cell phone. Ack.
Maybe water cooled is really the way to go.