IIRC, while parts of the 5 GHz band are still being auctioned off, there is already a portion of the spectrum that is reserved for unlicensed communications of the same category as 2.4 GHz WLANs/phones, etc. (The regs are linked to from one of the WLAN HOWTOS, I believe, can't remember exactly where.)
The X-bow - The strings do *nothing* - Most serious Nerfers saw off all the "bow" parts, because they add useless bulk. All the power is in an internal spring.
People also will put rubber bands on the plunger, which (unlike the strings) *will* add power.
The dart you describe is *very* similar to a "Stefan" dart.
Stefan dart is:
5/8-in. foam backing rod cut to the approx. length of a dart. (Or in many cases, shorter - they seem to fly better.)
Lead weight (fishing sinker) hot-glued into a hole in the front.
For a bit of added safety, I add a felt pad over the top of the weight.
I happen to be a SysOp at NerfOnline (http://www.nerfonline.net/), a recently re-opened unofficial Nerf site. Sadly, a lot of the people there are 13-year-old kiddie morons, but there are some good people there (a few of whome are 13 but intelligent.:)
My personal favorites:
Lock n' Load - Modified, this is *the best* pistol-style weapon out there. Great range, extremely short reload time. Cons: Discontinued, VERY difficult to find. (I got lucky in Canada.)
SuperMAXX 1500 - 4-shot sniper weapon of doom if you replace the barrels with 1/2-inch Sched. 40 PVC pipe and load micros down said barrels. Can also shoot the original SM ammo well, and megas reasonably well, also the venerable homemade Stefan dart. (Careful, tho - Stefans in a supercharged 1500 can put dents in doors. I'd stick with micros or SM darts when indoors.) Discontinued, but only recently and still relatively easy to find.
SuperMaxx 250/350 - Throw away the darts that come with it, use micros, and stretch the spring if you can. Best used as a backup weapon.
I also own:
Power Clip - Great for the fear factor, but you're fucked as soon as those 10 darts are out. Reload time is horrible. Can only shoot micros, and eats them like anything.
Splitfire - Replacing the barrels with PVC and plugging the pressure release valve (end of the plunger) with glue is a necessity. After this it can compete somewhat with the LnL. Like the 1500, can shoot a wide variety of ammo, but not nearly as far. Also, it's unreliable. A combination of a leaky pump valve and a diaphragm-style trigger system (A small loss of pressure in the air tank causes the rest of the air to be released in the barrel.) have rendered one of the two barrels of my SF inoperable.
My wishlist:
Crossbow. (Yeah, right... They're impossible to find nowadays...)
Big Bad Bow - Nearly as good as the X-bow, it looks like these are getting re-released. (They've reappeared on nerf.com) Some people on NerfOnline have come up with an excellent breech-loading barrel modification for this.
Oh, in the case of both of the bow weapons - modify them to fire darts instead of arrows.
Right. It's an IDE device control protocol which is inferior. i.e. you're always likely to have more burn errors due to the drive not being fed properly if you're using IDE rather than SCSI. It's a fact of life - Even for a single drive, IDE uses far more CPU than SCSI. And once you take into account IDE's lack of bus disconnection, it gets worse. (And IDE device servicing a request ties up the bus, while a SCSI bus only uses the bus when it actually has data to communicate.)
While KDE's widget themability support has GREATLY improved with 2.0, it still can't touch that of gtk+/GNOME. (Yes, I know KDE claims to support gtk+ themes. It doesn't do so well - Try the Wireframe theme and see for yourself. Wireframe happens to be my favorite theme, and does a good job showing off KDE's limitations.)
On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.
I'm primarily a GNOME user. I love GNOME. But I also love Konqueror as a web browser. It alone is worth having KDE libs installed. (Sadly, I have to keep Netscape around because Konqueror's JS support isn't so hot...)
I still refust to use Konq as my file manager because it's ugly. Even when the current alternative is gmc's braindeadness.
As I said, X is not the only app that's having its memory grossly misreported. There's NO WAY in hell that xmms us using 135 megs, even for all process combined. Same for kdeinit.
Two complaints about Konqueror:
Its cookie filtering sometimes rejects even cookies you've told it to accept. (staples.com, www.nerfonline.net)
I haven't figured out how to get java applets to display in the page instead of a seperate windows.
Also, it fails to display the list of supported Linux USB devices (not linux-usb.org, but linked to from the site) properly. About the only page that has a problem, tho.
All in all, I love Konqueror. Sadly, there's an occasional page that requires me to go back to Netscape, but in most cases it kicks the crap out of NS. (Note, I've always hated IE, always will, its UI just plain sucks.) I have deleted all of my Netscape launchers from my desktop, tho...
BTW, one note: I'm a rabid GNOME fan, and I still have GNOME as my primary desktop env. But Konqueror is worth installing the KDE libs and everything else needed...
Even though the original poster said he wanted something national, with the exception of when you're traveling, all you need is a good local microbrewery.
For example, Wagner Valley Brewery at Wagner Vineyards (www.wagnervineyards.com) is excellent. Sadly, their shipping costs are expensive and they have no deals with stores in the Ithaca area.
Ithaca Beer Co. is pretty good, although AFAIK they don't have any stouts. (Haven't seen them in stores...)
Unfortunately, in New York State, supermarkets are (believe it or not) the best place to find beer. (Sadly, non have that good a selection.) Apparently there's a state law saying that you may not sell hard liquor and beer in the same store, hence the liquor stores with the best selection can't also carry a good selection of beer.:(
Of course, most of what I said applies only to the Ithaca, NY area. But wherever you are, look to see if you can find a nearby brewery.
These are the advantages of NOT running in ad-hoc mode:
a) Gateway/access point can act as a repeater
b) With multiple gateways, you can hop in a cellular fashion between access points as you roam.
Currently, all Linux drivers will only run the card in ad-hoc mode, with the exception of the absolute-value.com project. (Or at least, that's what I believe the difference between the AV project and the already-in-kernel drivers is.) I recall in a discussion with some other people a while ago that you can run a card in full access-point mode, but you have to implement a full 802.11b stack in the card driver. I was then told that the only cards such a stack was implemented for were Harris PRISM chipsets. Note that the AV project listed all of their supported cards as being based on or similar to PRISM based cards.
Peer-to-peer 802.11 may be a LAN, but it's a pretty sucky LAN compared to the features you can get with the same hardware and the right driver.
esd_set_stream_pan() is a relatively easy to use function.
But to implement it right, you need a matching esd_get_stream_pan() so that the program doesn't get confused as to what its current volume setting is. Instead you have to get an entire config structure, pass it through another function, and so on and so on. (I haven't looked at the code in a long time, but getting the pan settings was FAR harder than setting them.)
ANY signal, especially a periodic signal, can be represented as a sum of sine waves. (This is the basis of the Fourier transform.)
What is a 15 kHz square wave? It's a 15 kHz sine wave plus sine waves at multiples of 15 kHz. The human ear can't hear those multiples, hence can't tell the difference.
What's my point? My point is that if you sample at 44.1 kHz, you catch ALL of the portions of your signal that are human-hearable. Yes, a human can tell the difference between a 500 Hz sine and a 500 Hz square - that's because there are many harmonics with the human hearing range. But I can assure you, if you play a 15 kHz sine wave and a 15 kHz square/triangle/sawtooth wave, you won't be able to tell the difference.
A few articles ago, someone suggested that Malda & company implement a "Just plain wrong" moderation option.
It's mathematically provable (and the end result of said proof is the Nyquist theorem) that all you need to do is sample a signal at 2x its maximum frequency, and you can recover that signal EXACTLY.
Sample the signal, later pass that sampled signal through a low-pass filter. Afterwards, the only difference between the final signal and the original is a constant multiple. (For example, if you sample with infinite impulses, which have infinite height and zero width but an area of one, the end signal is 1/T (where T is the period) times the original.) The aforementioned technique is "ideal sampling" - which never occurs in the real world. With practical sampling, you get a different multiple than 1/T. But the end result is the same.
You can hear the difference between 2-channel and 5.1 surround. You can hear a BIG difference.
But you can mathematically prove that you can't hear the difference between 44.1 KHz/16 bits and something "better". (Note, as mentioned before, there are some slight exceptions... The mathematics that say 44.1 KHz is enough assume a perfect low-pass filter with no phase-shifting and an infinite slope dropoff. Using a somewhat higher sampling rate allows you to use a less-perfect LPF.) But above 96 KHz, you need not bother... 96 gives PLENTY of headroom for the filter designers.
So this SACD format is going to die unless Sony pushes it with HEAVY marketing. But DVD-A has more people backing it with cheaper (but better!) equipment.
If you do the math, you'll see that the maximum error you obtain with 16-bit sampling is all you need given that line-out signals are 3 volts peak-peak. I don't remember the exact voltage, and I'm too tired to re-work it now. (3 volts divided by 2^16...) But the maximum error of a 16-bit sampled signal is FAR lower than the minimum electrical noise added by even the best super-high quality amplifiers with gold-plated speaker wire contacts and the like. The mathematics behind that are far simpler than the mathematics behind the Nyquist theorem. (While I knew the NT to be true in the past, I finally saw a proof/derivation of it in my Signals and Systems lecture last week - cool stuff.)
But my favorite apps are:
AvantGo (less so since hollywood.com killed their movie listings channel)
Mapopolis (www.mapopolis.com) - Maps for anywhere in the US.
TealPhone - upgrade to the contact manager app, don't have a URL. TealSoft makes a lot of neat Palm apps. Although I think the Visor comes with an enhanced contact manager to begin with...
RPN - RPN calculator. Again, don't have a URL. Search on any of the Palm software archive sites.
Might want to try DopeWars. Some people love it, some people (myself included) find it insanely boring. You don't know until you've tried it.
Actually, lead-acids are probably the worst as far as deep-cycling. Even ones designated as "deep cycle" batteries should never be deep-cycled the way NiCDs have to be. Rechargable alkalines are similar to lead-acids in this respect...
I'd say that if anything, the need to "refill" a lead-acid is a disadvantage. Gel-cells are a wonderful thing.:)
Heard anything about VIA chipsets? (Specifically more recent ones, I have a KT133 Athlon mobo)
On the whole, I've never had problems with VIA chipsets and AGP, this is the first unstable driver I've ever had, and I've been using VIA-based mobos (Epox Super7 for a K6-2 and now an Athlon KT133-based board.) for 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Which class?
I had him for ENGRI/MSE 124... He's one of the top three professors I've ever had, if not #1.
Really smart guy, *amazing* lecturer.
Um, you can't arbitrarily change a license for software (that you have already licensed.)
If you have a free open-source encoder, you can continue using it for no cost. No $2000 fee.
IIRC, while parts of the 5 GHz band are still being auctioned off, there is already a portion of the spectrum that is reserved for unlicensed communications of the same category as 2.4 GHz WLANs/phones, etc. (The regs are linked to from one of the WLAN HOWTOS, I believe, can't remember exactly where.)
The X-bow - The strings do *nothing* - Most serious Nerfers saw off all the "bow" parts, because they add useless bulk. All the power is in an internal spring.
People also will put rubber bands on the plunger, which (unlike the strings) *will* add power.
The dart you describe is *very* similar to a "Stefan" dart.
Stefan dart is:
5/8-in. foam backing rod cut to the approx. length of a dart. (Or in many cases, shorter - they seem to fly better.)
Lead weight (fishing sinker) hot-glued into a hole in the front.
For a bit of added safety, I add a felt pad over the top of the weight.
I happen to be a SysOp at NerfOnline (http://www.nerfonline.net/), a recently re-opened unofficial Nerf site. Sadly, a lot of the people there are 13-year-old kiddie morons, but there are some good people there (a few of whome are 13 but intelligent. :)
My personal favorites:
Lock n' Load - Modified, this is *the best* pistol-style weapon out there. Great range, extremely short reload time. Cons: Discontinued, VERY difficult to find. (I got lucky in Canada.)
SuperMAXX 1500 - 4-shot sniper weapon of doom if you replace the barrels with 1/2-inch Sched. 40 PVC pipe and load micros down said barrels. Can also shoot the original SM ammo well, and megas reasonably well, also the venerable homemade Stefan dart. (Careful, tho - Stefans in a supercharged 1500 can put dents in doors. I'd stick with micros or SM darts when indoors.) Discontinued, but only recently and still relatively easy to find.
SuperMaxx 250/350 - Throw away the darts that come with it, use micros, and stretch the spring if you can. Best used as a backup weapon.
I also own:
Power Clip - Great for the fear factor, but you're fucked as soon as those 10 darts are out. Reload time is horrible. Can only shoot micros, and eats them like anything.
Splitfire - Replacing the barrels with PVC and plugging the pressure release valve (end of the plunger) with glue is a necessity. After this it can compete somewhat with the LnL. Like the 1500, can shoot a wide variety of ammo, but not nearly as far. Also, it's unreliable. A combination of a leaky pump valve and a diaphragm-style trigger system (A small loss of pressure in the air tank causes the rest of the air to be released in the barrel.) have rendered one of the two barrels of my SF inoperable.
My wishlist:
Crossbow. (Yeah, right... They're impossible to find nowadays...)
Big Bad Bow - Nearly as good as the X-bow, it looks like these are getting re-released. (They've reappeared on nerf.com) Some people on NerfOnline have come up with an excellent breech-loading barrel modification for this.
Oh, in the case of both of the bow weapons - modify them to fire darts instead of arrows.
Right. It's an IDE device control protocol which is inferior. i.e. you're always likely to have more burn errors due to the drive not being fed properly if you're using IDE rather than SCSI. It's a fact of life - Even for a single drive, IDE uses far more CPU than SCSI. And once you take into account IDE's lack of bus disconnection, it gets worse. (And IDE device servicing a request ties up the bus, while a SCSI bus only uses the bus when it actually has data to communicate.)
While KDE's widget themability support has GREATLY improved with 2.0, it still can't touch that of gtk+/GNOME. (Yes, I know KDE claims to support gtk+ themes. It doesn't do so well - Try the Wireframe theme and see for yourself. Wireframe happens to be my favorite theme, and does a good job showing off KDE's limitations.)
On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.
I'm primarily a GNOME user. I love GNOME. But I also love Konqueror as a web browser. It alone is worth having KDE libs installed. (Sadly, I have to keep Netscape around because Konqueror's JS support isn't so hot...)
I still refust to use Konq as my file manager because it's ugly. Even when the current alternative is gmc's braindeadness.
As I said, X is not the only app that's having its memory grossly misreported. There's NO WAY in hell that xmms us using 135 megs, even for all process combined. Same for kdeinit.
top is just plain confused...
882 root 19 0 291M 291M 3900 R 5.5 116.8 7:30 X
/proc/meminfo
Moral of the story? Never believe top. It's inaccurate as hell.
When sorting by memory usage, I have a screen full of processes reporting 134 or 135 megs of mem usage! (kdeinit, xmms)
Guess what other system tools report:
cat
Mem: 261861376 259076096 2785280 0 3002368 112926720
Swap: 263135232 0 263135232
MemTotal: 255724 kB
MemFree: 2720 kB
Yes, that's right, I have 256 M and no swap used... Yet X claims to use more than my system memory. Again, don't trust top.
It does CSS better than Netscape, at least...
Two complaints about Konqueror:
Its cookie filtering sometimes rejects even cookies you've told it to accept. (staples.com, www.nerfonline.net)
I haven't figured out how to get java applets to display in the page instead of a seperate windows.
Also, it fails to display the list of supported Linux USB devices (not linux-usb.org, but linked to from the site) properly. About the only page that has a problem, tho.
All in all, I love Konqueror. Sadly, there's an occasional page that requires me to go back to Netscape, but in most cases it kicks the crap out of NS. (Note, I've always hated IE, always will, its UI just plain sucks.) I have deleted all of my Netscape launchers from my desktop, tho...
BTW, one note: I'm a rabid GNOME fan, and I still have GNOME as my primary desktop env. But Konqueror is worth installing the KDE libs and everything else needed...
The Epox EP-8KTA (Socket A as opposed to the 7KXA's Slot A) also has this feature, although I haven't used it yet...
Even though the original poster said he wanted something national, with the exception of when you're traveling, all you need is a good local microbrewery.
:(
For example, Wagner Valley Brewery at Wagner Vineyards (www.wagnervineyards.com) is excellent. Sadly, their shipping costs are expensive and they have no deals with stores in the Ithaca area.
Ithaca Beer Co. is pretty good, although AFAIK they don't have any stouts. (Haven't seen them in stores...)
Unfortunately, in New York State, supermarkets are (believe it or not) the best place to find beer. (Sadly, non have that good a selection.) Apparently there's a state law saying that you may not sell hard liquor and beer in the same store, hence the liquor stores with the best selection can't also carry a good selection of beer.
Of course, most of what I said applies only to the Ithaca, NY area. But wherever you are, look to see if you can find a nearby brewery.
These are the advantages of NOT running in ad-hoc mode:
a) Gateway/access point can act as a repeater
b) With multiple gateways, you can hop in a cellular fashion between access points as you roam.
Currently, all Linux drivers will only run the card in ad-hoc mode, with the exception of the absolute-value.com project. (Or at least, that's what I believe the difference between the AV project and the already-in-kernel drivers is.) I recall in a discussion with some other people a while ago that you can run a card in full access-point mode, but you have to implement a full 802.11b stack in the card driver. I was then told that the only cards such a stack was implemented for were Harris PRISM chipsets. Note that the AV project listed all of their supported cards as being based on or similar to PRISM based cards.
Peer-to-peer 802.11 may be a LAN, but it's a pretty sucky LAN compared to the features you can get with the same hardware and the right driver.
esd_set_stream_pan() is a relatively easy to use function.
But to implement it right, you need a matching esd_get_stream_pan() so that the program doesn't get confused as to what its current volume setting is. Instead you have to get an entire config structure, pass it through another function, and so on and so on. (I haven't looked at the code in a long time, but getting the pan settings was FAR harder than setting them.)
1) It's BARELY maintained. As to why someone doesn't just pick up maintenance, I don't know.
2) It's a minor thing, but it can't handle 48 kHz audio. It won't complain, but it'll sound like shit.
ANY signal, especially a periodic signal, can be represented as a sum of sine waves. (This is the basis of the Fourier transform.)
What is a 15 kHz square wave? It's a 15 kHz sine wave plus sine waves at multiples of 15 kHz. The human ear can't hear those multiples, hence can't tell the difference.
What's my point? My point is that if you sample at 44.1 kHz, you catch ALL of the portions of your signal that are human-hearable. Yes, a human can tell the difference between a 500 Hz sine and a 500 Hz square - that's because there are many harmonics with the human hearing range. But I can assure you, if you play a 15 kHz sine wave and a 15 kHz square/triangle/sawtooth wave, you won't be able to tell the difference.
A few articles ago, someone suggested that Malda & company implement a "Just plain wrong" moderation option.
It's mathematically provable (and the end result of said proof is the Nyquist theorem) that all you need to do is sample a signal at 2x its maximum frequency, and you can recover that signal EXACTLY.
Sample the signal, later pass that sampled signal through a low-pass filter. Afterwards, the only difference between the final signal and the original is a constant multiple. (For example, if you sample with infinite impulses, which have infinite height and zero width but an area of one, the end signal is 1/T (where T is the period) times the original.) The aforementioned technique is "ideal sampling" - which never occurs in the real world. With practical sampling, you get a different multiple than 1/T. But the end result is the same.
You can hear the difference between 2-channel and 5.1 surround. You can hear a BIG difference.
But you can mathematically prove that you can't hear the difference between 44.1 KHz/16 bits and something "better". (Note, as mentioned before, there are some slight exceptions... The mathematics that say 44.1 KHz is enough assume a perfect low-pass filter with no phase-shifting and an infinite slope dropoff. Using a somewhat higher sampling rate allows you to use a less-perfect LPF.) But above 96 KHz, you need not bother... 96 gives PLENTY of headroom for the filter designers.
So this SACD format is going to die unless Sony pushes it with HEAVY marketing. But DVD-A has more people backing it with cheaper (but better!) equipment.
If you do the math, you'll see that the maximum error you obtain with 16-bit sampling is all you need given that line-out signals are 3 volts peak-peak. I don't remember the exact voltage, and I'm too tired to re-work it now. (3 volts divided by 2^16...) But the maximum error of a 16-bit sampled signal is FAR lower than the minimum electrical noise added by even the best super-high quality amplifiers with gold-plated speaker wire contacts and the like. The mathematics behind that are far simpler than the mathematics behind the Nyquist theorem. (While I knew the NT to be true in the past, I finally saw a proof/derivation of it in my Signals and Systems lecture last week - cool stuff.)
Ten? I dunno.
But my favorite apps are:
AvantGo (less so since hollywood.com killed their movie listings channel)
Mapopolis (www.mapopolis.com) - Maps for anywhere in the US.
TealPhone - upgrade to the contact manager app, don't have a URL. TealSoft makes a lot of neat Palm apps. Although I think the Visor comes with an enhanced contact manager to begin with...
RPN - RPN calculator. Again, don't have a URL. Search on any of the Palm software archive sites.
Might want to try DopeWars. Some people love it, some people (myself included) find it insanely boring. You don't know until you've tried it.
Yeah, but we like using RPMs. The dependency database is a wonderful thing. It makes upgrades so much easier.
Actually, lead-acids are probably the worst as far as deep-cycling. Even ones designated as "deep cycle" batteries should never be deep-cycled the way NiCDs have to be. Rechargable alkalines are similar to lead-acids in this respect...
:)
I'd say that if anything, the need to "refill" a lead-acid is a disadvantage. Gel-cells are a wonderful thing.
I'm running X 4.0.1 from Rawhide on my 6.2 box.
You'll have to update a few other packages to get it to install cleanly (initscripts, among others), but it can be done.
BTW, you have to be willing to recompile from SRPMs - precompiled RPMs won't work. But here's how you do it:
Recompile the X RPMs.
Try to install them, find out what needs to be updated.
Get those packages, rebuild them from their SRPMs and install.
After that, the hardest thing is updating your XF86Config file...
From what I recall, lead-acid batteries DO have the highest energy density of any battery - at least by volume.
:(
Unfortunately, all that lead makes them very uncompetitive when speaking of energy density with regards to weight...
Heard anything about VIA chipsets? (Specifically more recent ones, I have a KT133 Athlon mobo)
On the whole, I've never had problems with VIA chipsets and AGP, this is the first unstable driver I've ever had, and I've been using VIA-based mobos (Epox Super7 for a K6-2 and now an Athlon KT133-based board.) for 3 years.