Mp3! Mp3!
It is surprising how few decent bike exhaust samples there are on the www, the Micron page was about all I could find. Mind you, who am I to talk, my XTZ750 still has the original and rather quiet can.
Funny that, I always thought Yamaha were a manufacturer of reed organs who diversified into other products including motorcycles and computer speakers.
Mind you, there are some of us who view a motorcycle exhaust as a musical instrument in itself.
As far as I know these have been up for way more than just a year. They certainly did the rounds on a motorcycle mailing list I'm on a few years ago.
At the time I remember quite a few list members downloaded and tried them but quite a few very shaky paper R1s went to the breakers because these kits are not paper modelling for the beginner or the faint hearted.
Still, topmarks to Yamaha for doing such a cool thing!
The New Zealand aviator is not alone in the claims made for him.
If you ask a Brazilian, they'll probably tell you that Alberto Santos-Dumont was the first to fly.
I think I'll stick with the Wright brothers for now though.
Someone who rents a house is not a parasite merely for investing their capital in a house as a business.
However IMHO the greedy mass of people in SE England who have taken out buy-to-let mortgages where they finance the house purchase solely from the rental income are parasites because they put nothing in, they merely take out, inflating house prices in the process.
My view only. I'm not an economist.
OK, reading my original post maybe I was a little er.. forthright.
I live in the south east of England. My local IT industry does not benefit from the presence of international financial institutions managing offshore funds, hence the job situation. I envy the IoM residents not just for the TT. A small terraced house in my home town will set you back 250k. If I had a job I'd probably earn about a tenth of that.
And I'd agree with you about open wallet policies. However the local effect is still that of the economy going down the pan.
I think if I had mod points I'd mod the parent as "Insightful" rather than "Troll".
If the UK economy's in such good shape why cant I find a job? And why are all the people I went to university with (electronic engineering, 1993) either in the same position or dead scared of losing their jobs? And why can only criminals and lottery winners afford to buy houses leaving the rest of us living with parents or paying some parasite buy-to-let shared house landlord's mortgage? And why are taxes(direct and indirect) shooting up? The list goes on.
My advice: get the free PC and flog it to pay the bills cos they'll have gone titsup within 6 months.
I'll bet some horrifying data could be gathered on the speed with which riders' heads impact the pavement after an accident.
Yeah, cos all motorcyclists are insane nutters on a one way ticket to instant death, naturally.
If all you can think about when you see the word "Motorcycle" is the word "Accident", then perhaps you should broaden your mind and get a bike licence.
As to the idea itself, as a motorcyclist I dont think it's a good idea. You know about what speed you're doing from the note of your bike's engine, you dont need any distraction to take your attention off the road. Of course an XTZ750 rider like me might see it differently from a Hayabusa rider but there's my 2 penn'orth.
I have an NT4 disk with those distributions on them so they definitely saw the light of day. IIRC MS ditched support for them about 1/2 way through NT4's life so the later service packs didnt come out for them. I never saw anyone who used them, but I remember a PCI card you could get which had a mips computer on it which was billed as turning your 486 or Pentium into a workstation. IIRC it was designed for the mips NT4 port.
NT4 came in 4 flavours, i386, mips, ppc and alpha. And presumably all of these had a driver for NTFS.
Would these drivers, assuming you have an NT4 disk gathering dust, be a solution for non x86 users?
Not much help if you run Linux on ARM or 68k or something but there you go.
If you used the PC Engine plush toy as a pillow, the cartridge slot would support your neck nicely. And the Gamecube would make a great footstool, if only it were bigger.
I once caused a shocked silence once when I shouted across the room to another tech to see if he had a male to male gender bender.
The reason? I was a student sound and lighting tech at the time and we were putting up a rig for a benefit concert... for Hull University Student Lesbian and Gay Committee and I needed to connect together 2 female 3 pin XLR connectors. OOps!
To be fair to the HUULG&B people, once it was explained to them they thought it was really funny. In my experience people who are actually in one of the groups the politically correct types try to defend are usually a lot more laid back about it.
Judging by my several employers over the last few years the norm here in the UK for newer office space at least is that the building is put up with structured cabling already in place. This is usually cat.5, which happily takes care of any network or phone cabling requirements. This is seen as a major selling point for the office so the landlord is happy to provide it.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
We are not without our cabling problems here though, my first job was at a major university, in a 1930s building. The original rubber insulated telephone cables were disused but still in place, and they had coagulated into a malevolent black mass in the risers and cable ducts. I am told they have now been removed, I pity the poor people who had to do it, they must have had to cut them out with an angle grinder.
My experience of internally geared bike gearboxes is that they are very reliable, as long as you maintain their lubrication.
SMIDSY is a competitor in the UK Robot Wars TV show. We use 4 of the venerable Sturmey Archer in-hub gearboxes in this robot because they provide an exceptionally tough and reliable gearbox which fits in a very small space. The reliability of these gearboxes is demonstrated by the fact that while we have on several ocasions broken the Sturmey Archer axles in colisions and fights, we have never had the gearbox itself fail on us in this application which is far in excess of the load for which it was intended. Custom made axles without the S-A's gearchange slot have ressulted in a bombproof gearbox.
As a cyclist I await these new bike designs with intense interest. It is true that trailside maintenance would not be easy but I would expect the sealed design to render the need for trailside maintenance unnecessary.
I have found over the years that I get severe pains in the area of my right hand furthest from the thumb when I play heavily mouse based games. I came to the conclusion that the mouse simply wasnt big enough to support my hand across its entire width as I have quite large hands. I solved the problem by sticking two mice together side by side with double sided sticky pads.
If they can make pointing devices for people with small hands you'd think they could make them for people with big hands but there you go.
A former employer of mine published the instantly forgetable "Action adventure" game Perfect Assassin. This was a rather pedestrian fixed camera 3D puzzle solving game for DOS and Playstation which might have caused some interest in 1994 but released in 1997 it sank without trace. Some publishers are stupid enough to sign any old rubbish.
It featured a cast of characters whose names were sourced from whatever happened to be on the develper's desk at the time. I cant remember them all but the two that stick in my mind are G'set Kasse (Cassette case) and J'am J'ah (Jam jar).
Who said creativity was dead in the games industry?:)
Someone gets to the point of the issue, mod it up!
I used to run a team of games testers and I finally left the games industry in disgust at just these kinds of attitudes from management and in particular the marketing people.
In short, the games industry is run by people who have very little idea of what constitutes their product. They dont play games and they dont understand the software development process. This would be no bad thing if the typical games industry manager were capable of taking on board input from their teams but sadly this just isnt going to happen. People with a marketing background are trained to hype One True Word against all adversity and this translates into an unbelievalbe arrogance that What They Say Can Never Be Wrong. Thus you get people like an ex boss of mine (background: marketing washing machines!) who wouldnt listen to his testers even when the game was completely shafted.
Ford wouldnt employ marketeers who dont drive, why do games companies employ marketeers with no knowlege of the industry?
Very impressive picture, kudos to the kid who took it. I am curious to know though whether any of the pieces of the object would have made it to earth or whether in such events they merely pass through the outer atmosphere in a blaze of glory. I am guessing that a "sofa sized" object would have quite a lot of energy and would cause quite some destruction had it struck the earth in one piece.
"Come home to a real fire" in the context of Wales made me laugh though. Back in the 1980s it was the slogan used to advertise coal fires, and at the time the extreme fringe of the Welsh Nationalists were burning down holiday cotages in North Wales owned by absentees.
I cant remember who it was, might have been "Not the 9 o'clock news", ran a spoof of the coal fire ads, "Come home to a real fire, buy a cottage in Wales"
I was lucky enough to work for the publisher of one of David Braben's earlier games, and in my opinion he is a rare voice of sense in an industry populated largely by vain sefl-obsessed tossers.
However in this case I do not necessarily agree with him. I think his point of communicating emotion by body language is a very interesting one and I will certainly have a look at Dog's Life but I do not agree with him that "pointless killing and death" is keeping women away from gaming. He is right that games like the Quake series are not necessarily babe-magnets but he should watch women playing other games. Pocket tanks is the example that I always think of because my fiancee and her colleagues are hooked on it. No shortage of death and killing there but that doesnt seem to bother them.
In my view the hurdle is not in the games themselves but in the delivery, quite simply the industry markets to young males not young females.
We never had Primestar here in the UK, but there are quite a few alternatives available here that could be used.
If anyone remembers BSB, they'll probably think of the "Squarial" 12GHz planar array(I have one of these as a coffee table:), but BSB also distributed a rather cool 30cm offset fed dish which is a good dish for experiments. I have seen these at radio rallies for not a lot. Alternatively the Sky minidishes have to be worth a look.
It has to be bourne in mind when using a dish that the E.R.P(Effective radiated power) is a lot higher than the basic power of your wi-fi card. So you only have 50mW but you get ALL that 50mW focussed in one place. So there are safety issues with using dishes for wi-fi, take care chaps!
Also offset fed dishes are designed to be used with different feed horns from those used on centre fed dishes. Examine a Sky minidish and you will see that the feed horn is oval, like the dish. The reason for this is that you only want the feedhorn to "see" the dish itself, and not a circular patch which includes areas of the wall the dish is mounted on. These areas only contribute noise to the signal and reduce the effectiveness of the antenna.
And finally... I have seen a very effective ku band antenna made from an aluminium wok lid. It had the LNB mounted behind it with a piece of water pipe coming through the middle as waveguide, and a conical reflector mounted in front of the water pipe. So who's going to be the first to mount a USB wi-fi card at the focus of a wok lid then.....?
I find it amusing that the RIAA does business with a company whose name has within it one of the most heavily legally protected names there is.
Just set up a company called "Champagne" in the EU and if you arent selling sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region by the method champagnoise(spelling?) watch the legal actions from Reims or Epernay roll in. Think Mobilix and you'll see what I mean.
What's the business model?
on
SkyOS GUI Contest
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Leaving aside all do-they-use-GPL'd-code issues I have to admit a curiosity as to the SkyOS business model.
The freedom of a developer to charge for code is as much a freedom as the consumer's freedom to not buy code or the open source developer's freedom to give away their code. Bill Gates has every right to charge for XP(much as we might wish otherwise:), just as I have every right not to buy it. But if you take the decision to charge for code then you have to have a piece of code that is worth charging money for, or perhaps in some cases something that people are prepared to pay money for.
If they intend to make money from a closed source OS then I suspect they will be sorely disappointed. This OS looks quite nice but since it offers nothing that cant be found anywhere else where can it go? If I want to pay for an OS I'll go for one with application support, even if the one without only costs ten euros, and since there are free offerings out there that offer all this and more why should I want to pay in the first place?
Which leaves them with a few ten euro CD replication fees. Not much for that much work, is it? Surely an open source model would result in a distribution with far more value, with useful applications like OpenOffice.org which they could shift a load more of and quite legitimately get away with charging a bit more than 10 euros for CD copies.
However I could be missing a point and being unfair on the developer. Perhaps they do not view it as a revenue stream, instead using it to gain some other advantage. Since I write open software as much for the CV candy as the philanthropy (hey, you have to eat!) I can see why someone might do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mp3! Mp3!
It is surprising how few decent bike exhaust samples there are on the www, the Micron page was about all I could find. Mind you, who am I to talk, my XTZ750 still has the original and rather quiet can.
Funny that, I always thought Yamaha were a manufacturer of reed organs who diversified into other products including motorcycles and computer speakers.
Mind you, there are some of us who view a motorcycle exhaust as a musical instrument in itself.
At the time I remember quite a few list members downloaded and tried them but quite a few very shaky paper R1s went to the breakers because these kits are not paper modelling for the beginner or the faint hearted.
Still, topmarks to Yamaha for doing such a cool thing!
Alexandr Fyodorovich Mozhaisky.
If you ask a Brazilian, they'll probably tell you that Alberto Santos-Dumont was the first to fly.
I think I'll stick with the Wright brothers for now though.
Someone who rents a house is not a parasite merely for investing their capital in a house as a business.
However IMHO the greedy mass of people in SE England who have taken out buy-to-let mortgages where they finance the house purchase solely from the rental income are parasites because they put nothing in, they merely take out, inflating house prices in the process.
My view only. I'm not an economist.
OK, reading my original post maybe I was a little er.. forthright.
I live in the south east of England. My local IT industry does not benefit from the presence of international financial institutions managing offshore funds, hence the job situation. I envy the IoM residents not just for the TT. A small terraced house in my home town will set you back 250k. If I had a job I'd probably earn about a tenth of that.
And I'd agree with you about open wallet policies. However the local effect is still that of the economy going down the pan.
I think if I had mod points I'd mod the parent as "Insightful" rather than "Troll".
If the UK economy's in such good shape why cant I find a job? And why are all the people I went to university with (electronic engineering, 1993) either in the same position or dead scared of losing their jobs? And why can only criminals and lottery winners afford to buy houses leaving the rest of us living with parents or paying some parasite buy-to-let shared house landlord's mortgage? And why are taxes(direct and indirect) shooting up? The list goes on.
My advice: get the free PC and flog it to pay the bills cos they'll have gone titsup within 6 months.
Yeah, cos all motorcyclists are insane nutters on a one way ticket to instant death, naturally.
If all you can think about when you see the word "Motorcycle" is the word "Accident", then perhaps you should broaden your mind and get a bike licence.
As to the idea itself, as a motorcyclist I dont think it's a good idea. You know about what speed you're doing from the note of your bike's engine, you dont need any distraction to take your attention off the road. Of course an XTZ750 rider like me might see it differently from a Hayabusa rider but there's my 2 penn'orth.
I have an NT4 disk with those distributions on them so they definitely saw the light of day. IIRC MS ditched support for them about 1/2 way through NT4's life so the later service packs didnt come out for them. I never saw anyone who used them, but I remember a PCI card you could get which had a mips computer on it which was billed as turning your 486 or Pentium into a workstation. IIRC it was designed for the mips NT4 port.
Would these drivers, assuming you have an NT4 disk gathering dust, be a solution for non x86 users?
Not much help if you run Linux on ARM or 68k or something but there you go.
The web site's too tastefully made.
To be successful, a range of plush toys must have a REALLY naff website.
I'll get my coat......
I once caused a shocked silence once when I shouted across the room to another tech to see if he had a male to male gender bender.
The reason? I was a student sound and lighting tech at the time and we were putting up a rig for a benefit concert... for Hull University Student Lesbian and Gay Committee and I needed to connect together 2 female 3 pin XLR connectors. OOps!
To be fair to the HUULG&B people, once it was explained to them they thought it was really funny. In my experience people who are actually in one of the groups the politically correct types try to defend are usually a lot more laid back about it.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
We are not without our cabling problems here though, my first job was at a major university, in a 1930s building. The original rubber insulated telephone cables were disused but still in place, and they had coagulated into a malevolent black mass in the risers and cable ducts. I am told they have now been removed, I pity the poor people who had to do it, they must have had to cut them out with an angle grinder.
SMIDSY is a competitor in the UK Robot Wars TV show. We use 4 of the venerable Sturmey Archer in-hub gearboxes in this robot because they provide an exceptionally tough and reliable gearbox which fits in a very small space. The reliability of these gearboxes is demonstrated by the fact that while we have on several ocasions broken the Sturmey Archer axles in colisions and fights, we have never had the gearbox itself fail on us in this application which is far in excess of the load for which it was intended. Custom made axles without the S-A's gearchange slot have ressulted in a bombproof gearbox.
As a cyclist I await these new bike designs with intense interest. It is true that trailside maintenance would not be easy but I would expect the sealed design to render the need for trailside maintenance unnecessary.
I have found over the years that I get severe pains in the area of my right hand furthest from the thumb when I play heavily mouse based games. I came to the conclusion that the mouse simply wasnt big enough to support my hand across its entire width as I have quite large hands. I solved the problem by sticking two mice together side by side with double sided sticky pads.
If they can make pointing devices for people with small hands you'd think they could make them for people with big hands but there you go.
It featured a cast of characters whose names were sourced from whatever happened to be on the develper's desk at the time. I cant remember them all but the two that stick in my mind are G'set Kasse (Cassette case) and J'am J'ah (Jam jar).
Who said creativity was dead in the games industry?:)
I used to run a team of games testers and I finally left the games industry in disgust at just these kinds of attitudes from management and in particular the marketing people.
In short, the games industry is run by people who have very little idea of what constitutes their product. They dont play games and they dont understand the software development process. This would be no bad thing if the typical games industry manager were capable of taking on board input from their teams but sadly this just isnt going to happen. People with a marketing background are trained to hype One True Word against all adversity and this translates into an unbelievalbe arrogance that What They Say Can Never Be Wrong. Thus you get people like an ex boss of mine (background: marketing washing machines!) who wouldnt listen to his testers even when the game was completely shafted.
Ford wouldnt employ marketeers who dont drive, why do games companies employ marketeers with no knowlege of the industry?
"Come home to a real fire" in the context of Wales made me laugh though. Back in the 1980s it was the slogan used to advertise coal fires, and at the time the extreme fringe of the Welsh Nationalists were burning down holiday cotages in North Wales owned by absentees.
I cant remember who it was, might have been "Not the 9 o'clock news", ran a spoof of the coal fire ads, "Come home to a real fire, buy a cottage in Wales"
However in this case I do not necessarily agree with him. I think his point of communicating emotion by body language is a very interesting one and I will certainly have a look at Dog's Life but I do not agree with him that "pointless killing and death" is keeping women away from gaming. He is right that games like the Quake series are not necessarily babe-magnets but he should watch women playing other games. Pocket tanks is the example that I always think of because my fiancee and her colleagues are hooked on it. No shortage of death and killing there but that doesnt seem to bother them.
In my view the hurdle is not in the games themselves but in the delivery, quite simply the industry markets to young males not young females.
If anyone remembers BSB, they'll probably think of the "Squarial" 12GHz planar array(I have one of these as a coffee table:), but BSB also distributed a rather cool 30cm offset fed dish which is a good dish for experiments. I have seen these at radio rallies for not a lot. Alternatively the Sky minidishes have to be worth a look.
It has to be bourne in mind when using a dish that the E.R.P(Effective radiated power) is a lot higher than the basic power of your wi-fi card. So you only have 50mW but you get ALL that 50mW focussed in one place. So there are safety issues with using dishes for wi-fi, take care chaps!
Also offset fed dishes are designed to be used with different feed horns from those used on centre fed dishes. Examine a Sky minidish and you will see that the feed horn is oval, like the dish. The reason for this is that you only want the feedhorn to "see" the dish itself, and not a circular patch which includes areas of the wall the dish is mounted on. These areas only contribute noise to the signal and reduce the effectiveness of the antenna.
And finally... I have seen a very effective ku band antenna made from an aluminium wok lid. It had the LNB mounted behind it with a piece of water pipe coming through the middle as waveguide, and a conical reflector mounted in front of the water pipe. So who's going to be the first to mount a USB wi-fi card at the focus of a wok lid then.....?
Try it!.
Just set up a company called "Champagne" in the EU and if you arent selling sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region by the method champagnoise(spelling?) watch the legal actions from Reims or Epernay roll in. Think Mobilix and you'll see what I mean.
The freedom of a developer to charge for code is as much a freedom as the consumer's freedom to not buy code or the open source developer's freedom to give away their code. Bill Gates has every right to charge for XP(much as we might wish otherwise:), just as I have every right not to buy it. But if you take the decision to charge for code then you have to have a piece of code that is worth charging money for, or perhaps in some cases something that people are prepared to pay money for.
If they intend to make money from a closed source OS then I suspect they will be sorely disappointed. This OS looks quite nice but since it offers nothing that cant be found anywhere else where can it go? If I want to pay for an OS I'll go for one with application support, even if the one without only costs ten euros, and since there are free offerings out there that offer all this and more why should I want to pay in the first place?
Which leaves them with a few ten euro CD replication fees. Not much for that much work, is it? Surely an open source model would result in a distribution with far more value, with useful applications like OpenOffice.org which they could shift a load more of and quite legitimately get away with charging a bit more than 10 euros for CD copies.
However I could be missing a point and being unfair on the developer. Perhaps they do not view it as a revenue stream, instead using it to gain some other advantage. Since I write open software as much for the CV candy as the philanthropy (hey, you have to eat!) I can see why someone might do that.