The company I work for hosts on another very large company (that had a lot of downtime for another reason a few years back), on dedicated servers. Believe me when I say we have as many problems with them. So far, there have been no problems for us using Amazon. I think it depends on your needs. Multiple redundancy is probably a better solution, but nothing is perfect yet.
I picked up the glasses at the weekend and tried them out on the official colorcode 3-d website. The effect works, but the colour is bizarre, as the right eye only sees blue. I tried boosting the contrast and saturation, which does help a bit, but still not brilliant. I don't think it will catch on.
I built an arcade machine in partnership with my uncle and would gladly help out tellling you what you NEED to get going. We are in the Lanarkshire area of the UK, so some of our suppliers are local.
19mm MDF boards for the sides of the machine and an offcut for the footplate x 2 (local supplier)
9mm MDF boards for facings and 'Bezel Board'
21'' Hantarex Polo monitor - around £270 inc VAT and delivery
3.2mm slot cutter for your router (this cuts the groove to fit your t-molding trim round the machine) - bought from Mackays of Cambridge
A roll of t-molding - try a shopfitter (we bought ours from Dominic Diamond - the gamesmaster presenter's dad!)
A roll of rubber mat - (Machine mart)
A couple of lengths of 2x4 to make braces
'Special Effect' paint (Bought from Scotpaint in Airdrie)
Controls from Ultimarc (we didn't use a coin box)
12x Red buttons - (use a 28-32mm hole cutter to mount)
1x 1p button
1x 2p button
2x yellow button (coin insert)
2x T-stick (has 4 way / 8 way switch - useful for pacman)
I-pac 2 PS/2
Arcade VGA breakout cable
From Maplin:
Push button with LED to use to turn the computer on and off - front mount this
Tons of coloured wire (we used 2 colours - one for earth and one for live)
You could also get 2 5v LED's to attach to the I-pac and shove up the 1p and 2p start buttons to make them flash when you 'insert a coin', but this is optional since it doesn't work for all games.
For the sound, we used a set of Piezo speakers bought from a car parts store. These already had a nice speaker cover with a lip, and a cylinder design for easy mounting. We powered these with a speaker set from Creative which had a detachable volume control and subwoofer. Attach the volume control to the underside of the control panel.
We used a sheet of aluminium for the control panel top to give it a nice finish.
I think the last things were a strip light to go behind the marquee, and the marquee itself. I designed the marquee in photoshop and sent it to a friend who is a professional sign maker. He mounted the design onto white Foamex which acted as a diffuser.
If I could offer one piece of advice: don't hunt around for a decent piece of Perspex to go in front of the screen. Instead, scribe the outline of the screen onto 9mm (or even 6mm if it's easier) MDF and cut out a snug fit to place around the screen. If needs be, fill any gaps BEHIND the screen with heat resistant black filler.
Oh, and one more thing. Make sure you put heat vents on it at the back, these things get hot.
All in all, it cost about £500 to make (not including the tools to do it). I might draw up some plans properly and give a materials list - this arcade machine is a perfect size for a house.
Hope some of this helps!
While I was a student, I worked for a plastics company who made the Lexmark cartridges (in the UK). The amount of work to make sure the cartridges were of a good standard was rather surprising, with spot checks on yields every half hour using very fine measuring equipment and magnifying devices. The plastic that was used (I think it was called Noryl and was supplied by GE) seemed temprimental, with many cartridges being rejected. Add to that the fact I destroyed one of the moulding tools at a cost of 50,000 and you can see where the costs are. To have someone then come along and take the 'good' cartridges and fill them with their own ink without incurring those costs does, perhaps seem unfair.
However, if other companies are able to produce the cartridges (without infringing patents), where's the problem? And indeed, if it is the cost of the cartriage itself the companies are worried about, why don't THEY have a recylcling scheme? Clearly, the 3rd party vendors are making money from it...
I hope this post makes sense, I've just woken up...
A guy was in business selling a fairly unique product known as a spowker. There were two other fairly large companies well established in the market selling these devices at 50 a pop. This independent guy decided to sell his spowkers at 10. Even though he was gaining customers, his profits were non-existant, and, as such, he was struggling to keep the business running. On a chance call from one of his customers, he was asked how he could sell them so cheaply upon which he replied that his profits were suffering. The customer asked why he did not raise his prices, to which he said that he did not want to annoy his loyal customer base. His customer made a note-worthy plea.
"By increasing your product price to 20, you will improve your profit margin and keep trading. If you were to continue at current prices, you might cease trading, at which point I will have to start paying 50 for the same product"
The man increased his price, made loads of money, and everyone was happy...
Right, the point I am trying to make here is that a failed business model as a direct result of ad-blocking might not be 'tough' just for the business, but also for the end user who might rely on information on such sites being available 'free'. I've bought many things online which I see advertised. OK, so not everything is to my taste, and yes, I do hate overkill, but targeted marketing is always positive.
I'll crawl back under my rock - it's late and i don't make sense...
CSS could never recreate pixel-perfect renditions of pages on all machines. If a developer uses font-size:12pt rather than 12px, the page will always render differently on machines set with higher or lower dpi settings (I use a Dell 8500 laptop with the hi-res ultrasharp screen with a default dpi of 140 or something).
Any pages I make are XHTML compliant, but, as was stated earlier, this does not mean diddly as to how it will render. One thing I used to do (before actually getting a Mac) was test using Basillisk Emulator. This could only use OS 8.1 and IE 4, but it did give an indication as to how the page would look on the Mac. Nowadays, I could care less as to how things render on different browsers. If everyone made pages that only worked on IE, developers of other browsers would soon change them to suit!
(That last thing about not caring was a lie, but sometimes I do get annoyed)
I used to work for Sharp building microwaves to find my college education. Whilst there, one of my supervisors said she was at the research labs in Oxford and they were working on the technology for use in televisions. This was many years ago, and at the time, a white dot had to be placed on the forehead in order to calibrate the screen so that distance and angle would not be a problem. It seems, however, that the current version of the technology does not do this: I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing?
Slashdot Mirror
The company I work for hosts on another very large company (that had a lot of downtime for another reason a few years back), on dedicated servers. Believe me when I say we have as many problems with them. So far, there have been no problems for us using Amazon. I think it depends on your needs. Multiple redundancy is probably a better solution, but nothing is perfect yet.
I picked up the glasses at the weekend and tried them out on the official colorcode 3-d website. The effect works, but the colour is bizarre, as the right eye only sees blue. I tried boosting the contrast and saturation, which does help a bit, but still not brilliant. I don't think it will catch on.
I built an arcade machine in partnership with my uncle and would gladly help out tellling you what you NEED to get going. We are in the Lanarkshire area of the UK, so some of our suppliers are local. 19mm MDF boards for the sides of the machine and an offcut for the footplate x 2 (local supplier) 9mm MDF boards for facings and 'Bezel Board' 21'' Hantarex Polo monitor - around £270 inc VAT and delivery 3.2mm slot cutter for your router (this cuts the groove to fit your t-molding trim round the machine) - bought from Mackays of Cambridge A roll of t-molding - try a shopfitter (we bought ours from Dominic Diamond - the gamesmaster presenter's dad!) A roll of rubber mat - (Machine mart) A couple of lengths of 2x4 to make braces 'Special Effect' paint (Bought from Scotpaint in Airdrie) Controls from Ultimarc (we didn't use a coin box) 12x Red buttons - (use a 28-32mm hole cutter to mount) 1x 1p button 1x 2p button 2x yellow button (coin insert) 2x T-stick (has 4 way / 8 way switch - useful for pacman) I-pac 2 PS/2 Arcade VGA breakout cable From Maplin: Push button with LED to use to turn the computer on and off - front mount this Tons of coloured wire (we used 2 colours - one for earth and one for live) You could also get 2 5v LED's to attach to the I-pac and shove up the 1p and 2p start buttons to make them flash when you 'insert a coin', but this is optional since it doesn't work for all games. For the sound, we used a set of Piezo speakers bought from a car parts store. These already had a nice speaker cover with a lip, and a cylinder design for easy mounting. We powered these with a speaker set from Creative which had a detachable volume control and subwoofer. Attach the volume control to the underside of the control panel. We used a sheet of aluminium for the control panel top to give it a nice finish. I think the last things were a strip light to go behind the marquee, and the marquee itself. I designed the marquee in photoshop and sent it to a friend who is a professional sign maker. He mounted the design onto white Foamex which acted as a diffuser. If I could offer one piece of advice: don't hunt around for a decent piece of Perspex to go in front of the screen. Instead, scribe the outline of the screen onto 9mm (or even 6mm if it's easier) MDF and cut out a snug fit to place around the screen. If needs be, fill any gaps BEHIND the screen with heat resistant black filler. Oh, and one more thing. Make sure you put heat vents on it at the back, these things get hot. All in all, it cost about £500 to make (not including the tools to do it). I might draw up some plans properly and give a materials list - this arcade machine is a perfect size for a house. Hope some of this helps!
While I was a student, I worked for a plastics company who made the Lexmark cartridges (in the UK). The amount of work to make sure the cartridges were of a good standard was rather surprising, with spot checks on yields every half hour using very fine measuring equipment and magnifying devices. The plastic that was used (I think it was called Noryl and was supplied by GE) seemed temprimental, with many cartridges being rejected. Add to that the fact I destroyed one of the moulding tools at a cost of 50,000 and you can see where the costs are. To have someone then come along and take the 'good' cartridges and fill them with their own ink without incurring those costs does, perhaps seem unfair.
However, if other companies are able to produce the cartridges (without infringing patents), where's the problem? And indeed, if it is the cost of the cartriage itself the companies are worried about, why don't THEY have a recylcling scheme? Clearly, the 3rd party vendors are making money from it...
I hope this post makes sense, I've just woken up...
A guy was in business selling a fairly unique product known as a spowker. There were two other fairly large companies well established in the market selling these devices at 50 a pop. This independent guy decided to sell his spowkers at 10. Even though he was gaining customers, his profits were non-existant, and, as such, he was struggling to keep the business running. On a chance call from one of his customers, he was asked how he could sell them so cheaply upon which he replied that his profits were suffering. The customer asked why he did not raise his prices, to which he said that he did not want to annoy his loyal customer base. His customer made a note-worthy plea. "By increasing your product price to 20, you will improve your profit margin and keep trading. If you were to continue at current prices, you might cease trading, at which point I will have to start paying 50 for the same product" The man increased his price, made loads of money, and everyone was happy... Right, the point I am trying to make here is that a failed business model as a direct result of ad-blocking might not be 'tough' just for the business, but also for the end user who might rely on information on such sites being available 'free'. I've bought many things online which I see advertised. OK, so not everything is to my taste, and yes, I do hate overkill, but targeted marketing is always positive. I'll crawl back under my rock - it's late and i don't make sense...
CSS could never recreate pixel-perfect renditions of pages on all machines. If a developer uses font-size:12pt rather than 12px, the page will always render differently on machines set with higher or lower dpi settings (I use a Dell 8500 laptop with the hi-res ultrasharp screen with a default dpi of 140 or something).
Any pages I make are XHTML compliant, but, as was stated earlier, this does not mean diddly as to how it will render. One thing I used to do (before actually getting a Mac) was test using Basillisk Emulator. This could only use OS 8.1 and IE 4, but it did give an indication as to how the page would look on the Mac. Nowadays, I could care less as to how things render on different browsers. If everyone made pages that only worked on IE, developers of other browsers would soon change them to suit!
(That last thing about not caring was a lie, but sometimes I do get annoyed)
I used to work for Sharp building microwaves to find my college education. Whilst there, one of my supervisors said she was at the research labs in Oxford and they were working on the technology for use in televisions. This was many years ago, and at the time, a white dot had to be placed on the forehead in order to calibrate the screen so that distance and angle would not be a problem. It seems, however, that the current version of the technology does not do this: I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing?