I did this same thing. Repurposed an old crappy P4 box and bought a PCI 8400GS for less than $40 because I wanted it to work in Linux. It works beautifully and is near-silent, booting off a cheap SSD with all the fans removed except one quiet 200mm I cut a hole for in the side of the case.
The COD4 thing isn't really a driver problem, it's a problem with COD4's shitty coding. It expects a microphone to be connected, and some sound card drivers provide a "stereo mix" input which is always active that it attaches to. Others do not and so you need a microphone plugged in to make the game not crash on startup. Thanks, Activision!
The same guy has built a cube solver powered by an NXT and a nokia phone doing the processing, and could easily do the same with just an NXT (two, maybe?) since there is plenty of processing power there and it can even do the image recognition. People have already done this, in fact.
The problem isn't triband UMTS radios - if they did do exist, it doesn't matter, because NONE of the four major US mobile providers have 3G roaming agreements - not Verizon and Sprint with EVDO, and not ATT and TMo with UMTS. And, as you say, the Balkanization of frequencies doesn't help a bit.
Sprint and Verizon DO use the same EVDO bands, but of course there's no roaming agreement, so you're stuck with 1xRTT if you're roaming. A truly sad state of affairs.
Works for me. If you have multiple monitors you have to disable them though, as I found out through trial and error - otherwise the game just switches resolutions back and forth at you. I paid $5, my roommate paid $.01, FWIW.
How does this do anything at all to prevent a determined cheater? If you have the genuine Microsoft-branded XBox 360 hard drive, you can open it up and it's just a plain old SATA drive inside - which you can then proceed to plug into any computer. Or if you have the Official Microsoft memory stick, there exists a way to add a USB connector - at which point it's just mass storage.
It's a money grab, plain and simple. $99 for a 60GB 2.5" hard drive with some plastic around it? Piss off, Microsoft - in the computer world, $99 will get you 500 GB in a 2.5" drive without trying. The prices on their brand of flash memory are even more atrocious. $30 for 512 megs? Again, in the computer world that's 16GB in a USB key, which is what the XBox memory stick is, with added plastic.
This is how modern flywheel energy storage works. The rotor is typically made out of carbon fiber or a composite thread wound around a shaft - if the rotor's integrity is lost, it turns into red-hot slag instead of leveling half a city block. Even so, most large flywheels are in a bunker underground encased in several feet of concrete. For it to be safe in a vehicle the containment vessel has to be very strong and also lightweight - which means it'll be expensive, unfortunately.
Just so you know, the MBR is only 512 bytes. If you write more than that (in your case, 1024 bytes), some of the first partition on the drive will get written to. If your goal is to wipe the drive, write the whole drive with zeroes, as erasing the partition table (and even the first 512 bytes of the first partition) doesn't get rid of anything. The reason I say this is because if you ever want to back a partition table up, copying the first 1024 bytes and then writing it again to a different drive or after making changes to the first partition stands a chance of breaking the first partition on the drive - which you may not want. As for the GP's S3 drives, the (mostly windows-only) tools available do nothing to the part of the drive that presents itself as a mass-storage USB device. They twiddle some of the firmware bits in the drive (usually through a custom ATA command). The drive then no longer emulates a CD-ROM drive's USB device ID. This, by the way, is lower-level than what anything you can do to the mass-storage part of the drive with dd can affect. The ATA commands only do it through what is presumably an ugly hack on the part of the drive manufacturers.
No, you don't. Motorola locks down their phones so they will only charge on Motorola (or motorola-clone) chargers. If you plug a Moto phone into a standard mini-USB charger, it'll give you an "unauthorized charger" message. Go ahead and try it with the charger that came with the G1 - that's what it'll tell you. Same deal if you try and plug it into a computer without the Motorola drivers (which they want to charge money for) installed. Thankfully, the G1 and other HTC phones don't give a damn what kind of charger you have them plugged into, and will even ignore the non-standard resistor on pin 4 in Motorola chargers. HTC does its own non-standard thing on pin 4, but in this case it's just to tell the phone it can pull a full amp from the charger for a faster charge.
This is immediately what I thought of. I really enjoyed reading this guy's Deus Ex "walkthrough" where he breaks the hell out of the game. Similar things exist for most first-person RPG-esque games, where the possibilities to totally destroy the game mechanics are there.
The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.
This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity. See Wikipedia for more info.
Have you ever driven a Dodge Neon? Worst car I've ever been in, hands-down. It's no wonder Chrysler is in trouble if the best build quality they can manage is a throwaway car.
I've asked this question as well and never gotten a straight answer. Linux hibernation and suspend is mostly undocumented and still relatively new. I assume it just fails - I've had the hibernate go halfway through dumping the RAM to disk and just suddenly come right back to my X session like I never told it to do anything. At least the suspend is fairly reliable - In Windows it's about a 50/50 gamble whether it comes back or just shuts off after bringing it back out of suspend.
Well, that's just off Dell's website - just head over there and search for 'e6500' or 'd830' or maybe 'studio 17'. They use a strange dynamic URL structure like a lot of commerce websites so it's hard to direct-link stuff there. Actually though, I'd recommend looking at something like Asus or Sager whitebooks - notebooks that come as barebones and you or a reseller add the CPU, RAM, etc - it's how I got my current laptop and it was very inexpensive at the time. powernotebooks.com is a good place to star
You don't have to spend over $2500. When was the last time you checked? Dell right now is selling the Latitude D830 configured with a 15.4" WUXGA screen (1920x1200) for $1,128 if the only option you add is the better screen. That comes with a 2Ghz core2duo, 2 gigs of ram, and a 120gb hard drive. That's the last-gen model as of a few weeks ago since they released the E-series latitudes, but keep in mind these are also the business laptops and are more expensive (and better) than their Inspiron crap. Now, if you want to upgrade to the latest-gen e6500 latitude, that'll cost you $1428 after adding your 1920x1200 screen. If you want a 17" monitor with that resolution, they have it in the form of the Studio 17 for $1199 after adding it. These prices are from five minutes ago. It's not $500 but it's getting there. I bet if you looked hard enough you could find these laptops refurbished on their factory outlet for near enough your target price, or elsewhere.
As an aside: All these laptops have a decently fast dual-core processor. They're C2Ds so they're not crappy like the P4 you want (Netburst was the worst mistake Intel could have made, and was one of the reasons AMD got to be so popular during that era). Core2duos are closer to being pentium 3s than they are pentium 4s, and are far more efficient per clock cycle. My Dothan (older mobile chip, an intermediary step between the Core series and the P3 series) that runs at 2.4Ghz gets the same in benchmarks as a 3.8Ghz Prescott chip, and draws 4x less power under full load and maybe 10-15x less at idle. That should give you some sort of idea on which to base P4/modern Intel chip comparisons, and the chips have only become more efficient since then (2005).
Sure - I've seen lots of great black-and-white movies, and I've seen a lot of great silent movies. Color and/or sound are great to have but aren't essential to the story, and in fact we're seeing a return to "artistic" black-and-white films, or films that make great use of a single color (Sin City, for example), or films that are silent, though those aren't as common (The Call of Cthulhu). And before you go and say that the video itself is sugar coating - well, then, you've got a book, and I've read a lot of those that were pretty great too. As far as I'm concerned 3-d is still used as a gimmick, just as color was (Wizard of Oz, maybe? Damn, that emerald city sure was green) when it first came out. When they can get it to where I don't have to wear polarization glasses over my own glasses (annoyingly distracting), that'll be nice, but my prediction is that 3d will remain mostly in the domain of computer-rendered films, where it's far easier to add a slightly shifted camera angle than it is to film with a second camera on a soundstage. Point is, adding technical features to something doesn't always make it better, but it can certainly help. If, however, you have to do gimmicky stuff like have people pointing right at the camera or slow-motion bullets flying out into the theater at the expense of the art of the film, then it's probably not worth it, unless it's a simple enough flick to begin with that no one cares about the artistry of it, and are watching just to watch (a good action movie, for example.)
The game you're looking for is (apparently) also known as Exterminator. However, there is a *nix port in the bsd-games project, which exists in Gentoo Portage and probably thus in some other distros' package managers. Under the Exterminator name, Rinkworks has a page where you can play a web-based version right here. I had the bsd-games version installed, but found the Exterminator online version in three seconds of googling (search for robots teleport, it's the fifth result.)
That's outside the US. Most countries outside the US have a minimum drinking age of less than 21 in any case. I think the GGP was referring to drinking inside the US.
The reason for the 10Mbps half duplex may be a different reason altogether. In my on-campus apartment all the ports on the switch (which was in our hot water heater closet, so I could actually look at it) were set for 10Mbps half duplex although they all had the capability of 100Mbit full duplex and it had a gigabit fibre backplane to the rest of campus. The official reason I was given for this when I complained was that the wiring in the apartments was so old (cat3) it couldn't handle anything more than 10Mbit, and they weren't willing to re-wire. However, I think they may have been BS-ing me when they told me this since 100Mbit is rather fault tolerant and even a crappy, dropping-every-third-packet 100Mbit connection would be more desirable than the 10Mbit connection. Also, the apartments had undergone a recent remodeling, as had the freshman dorms I was in last year, and the freshman dorms had 100Mbit full duplex as we had the crap half duplex.
Altogether irritating.
To me, there is only one outcome of this case that would truly serve justice. The defendant is most likely guilty of filesharing as charged and can be proven as such. However, this does not mean that because the law says this man should go to jail (U.S. law vs. Australian sovereignty notwithstanding, that's the next episode of Stupid Governments) that the law is right.
It seems obvious, then, that the jury trying this case should use one of the rarely-used options available to them: Jury nullification.
In this case, it seems that the jury would have to consider the case as a whole - not merely the facts presented by the prosecution, not merely the letter of the law. They must consider this man's motives, and the motives of the government that is bringing about this case. Is the government being driven by a corporation known for its bullying thuggishness and its lawsuit-happy executives? Is copyright law fundamentally wrong? I look forward to this jury's answer to these questions and I hope that it is the answer I expect from conscionable human beings.
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You can find dumps of the last generation of open compute stuff on eBay.
I did this same thing. Repurposed an old crappy P4 box and bought a PCI 8400GS for less than $40 because I wanted it to work in Linux. It works beautifully and is near-silent, booting off a cheap SSD with all the fans removed except one quiet 200mm I cut a hole for in the side of the case.
The COD4 thing isn't really a driver problem, it's a problem with COD4's shitty coding. It expects a microphone to be connected, and some sound card drivers provide a "stereo mix" input which is always active that it attaches to. Others do not and so you need a microphone plugged in to make the game not crash on startup. Thanks, Activision!
Replying to this because I accidentally modded you "overrated" instead of "informative". Slashdot's new moderation system needs a confirmation dialog!
The same guy has built a cube solver powered by an NXT and a nokia phone doing the processing, and could easily do the same with just an NXT (two, maybe?) since there is plenty of processing power there and it can even do the image recognition. People have already done this, in fact.
The problem isn't triband UMTS radios - if they did do exist, it doesn't matter, because NONE of the four major US mobile providers have 3G roaming agreements - not Verizon and Sprint with EVDO, and not ATT and TMo with UMTS. And, as you say, the Balkanization of frequencies doesn't help a bit.
Sprint and Verizon DO use the same EVDO bands, but of course there's no roaming agreement, so you're stuck with 1xRTT if you're roaming. A truly sad state of affairs.
Works for me. If you have multiple monitors you have to disable them though, as I found out through trial and error - otherwise the game just switches resolutions back and forth at you.
I paid $5, my roommate paid $.01, FWIW.
How does this do anything at all to prevent a determined cheater? If you have the genuine Microsoft-branded XBox 360 hard drive, you can open it up and it's just a plain old SATA drive inside - which you can then proceed to plug into any computer. Or if you have the Official Microsoft memory stick, there exists a way to add a USB connector - at which point it's just mass storage.
It's a money grab, plain and simple. $99 for a 60GB 2.5" hard drive with some plastic around it? Piss off, Microsoft - in the computer world, $99 will get you 500 GB in a 2.5" drive without trying. The prices on their brand of flash memory are even more atrocious. $30 for 512 megs? Again, in the computer world that's 16GB in a USB key, which is what the XBox memory stick is, with added plastic.
This is how modern flywheel energy storage works. The rotor is typically made out of carbon fiber or a composite thread wound around a shaft - if the rotor's integrity is lost, it turns into red-hot slag instead of leveling half a city block. Even so, most large flywheels are in a bunker underground encased in several feet of concrete. For it to be safe in a vehicle the containment vessel has to be very strong and also lightweight - which means it'll be expensive, unfortunately.
Just so you know, the MBR is only 512 bytes. If you write more than that (in your case, 1024 bytes), some of the first partition on the drive will get written to. If your goal is to wipe the drive, write the whole drive with zeroes, as erasing the partition table (and even the first 512 bytes of the first partition) doesn't get rid of anything. The reason I say this is because if you ever want to back a partition table up, copying the first 1024 bytes and then writing it again to a different drive or after making changes to the first partition stands a chance of breaking the first partition on the drive - which you may not want.
As for the GP's S3 drives, the (mostly windows-only) tools available do nothing to the part of the drive that presents itself as a mass-storage USB device. They twiddle some of the firmware bits in the drive (usually through a custom ATA command). The drive then no longer emulates a CD-ROM drive's USB device ID. This, by the way, is lower-level than what anything you can do to the mass-storage part of the drive with dd can affect. The ATA commands only do it through what is presumably an ugly hack on the part of the drive manufacturers.
I wish more vendors were like Motorola and HTC.
No, you don't. Motorola locks down their phones so they will only charge on Motorola (or motorola-clone) chargers. If you plug a Moto phone into a standard mini-USB charger, it'll give you an "unauthorized charger" message. Go ahead and try it with the charger that came with the G1 - that's what it'll tell you. Same deal if you try and plug it into a computer without the Motorola drivers (which they want to charge money for) installed. Thankfully, the G1 and other HTC phones don't give a damn what kind of charger you have them plugged into, and will even ignore the non-standard resistor on pin 4 in Motorola chargers. HTC does its own non-standard thing on pin 4, but in this case it's just to tell the phone it can pull a full amp from the charger for a faster charge.
This is immediately what I thought of. I really enjoyed reading this guy's Deus Ex "walkthrough" where he breaks the hell out of the game. Similar things exist for most first-person RPG-esque games, where the possibilities to totally destroy the game mechanics are there.
The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.
This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
See Wikipedia for more info.
Have you ever driven a Dodge Neon? Worst car I've ever been in, hands-down. It's no wonder Chrysler is in trouble if the best build quality they can manage is a throwaway car.
Near here is Furman University.
Yes, their sweatshirts say F.U.
I've asked this question as well and never gotten a straight answer. Linux hibernation and suspend is mostly undocumented and still relatively new. I assume it just fails - I've had the hibernate go halfway through dumping the RAM to disk and just suddenly come right back to my X session like I never told it to do anything. At least the suspend is fairly reliable - In Windows it's about a 50/50 gamble whether it comes back or just shuts off after bringing it back out of suspend.
Well, that's just off Dell's website - just head over there and search for 'e6500' or 'd830' or maybe 'studio 17'. They use a strange dynamic URL structure like a lot of commerce websites so it's hard to direct-link stuff there. Actually though, I'd recommend looking at something like Asus or Sager whitebooks - notebooks that come as barebones and you or a reseller add the CPU, RAM, etc - it's how I got my current laptop and it was very inexpensive at the time. powernotebooks.com is a good place to star
You don't have to spend over $2500. When was the last time you checked? Dell right now is selling the Latitude D830 configured with a 15.4" WUXGA screen (1920x1200) for $1,128 if the only option you add is the better screen. That comes with a 2Ghz core2duo, 2 gigs of ram, and a 120gb hard drive. That's the last-gen model as of a few weeks ago since they released the E-series latitudes, but keep in mind these are also the business laptops and are more expensive (and better) than their Inspiron crap. Now, if you want to upgrade to the latest-gen e6500 latitude, that'll cost you $1428 after adding your 1920x1200 screen. If you want a 17" monitor with that resolution, they have it in the form of the Studio 17 for $1199 after adding it. These prices are from five minutes ago. It's not $500 but it's getting there. I bet if you looked hard enough you could find these laptops refurbished on their factory outlet for near enough your target price, or elsewhere.
As an aside: All these laptops have a decently fast dual-core processor. They're C2Ds so they're not crappy like the P4 you want (Netburst was the worst mistake Intel could have made, and was one of the reasons AMD got to be so popular during that era). Core2duos are closer to being pentium 3s than they are pentium 4s, and are far more efficient per clock cycle. My Dothan (older mobile chip, an intermediary step between the Core series and the P3 series) that runs at 2.4Ghz gets the same in benchmarks as a 3.8Ghz Prescott chip, and draws 4x less power under full load and maybe 10-15x less at idle. That should give you some sort of idea on which to base P4/modern Intel chip comparisons, and the chips have only become more efficient since then (2005).
No, it's not: It's in 3:2 resonance with the sun. One mercury year is 1.5 mercury days.
Sure - I've seen lots of great black-and-white movies, and I've seen a lot of great silent movies. Color and/or sound are great to have but aren't essential to the story, and in fact we're seeing a return to "artistic" black-and-white films, or films that make great use of a single color (Sin City, for example), or films that are silent, though those aren't as common (The Call of Cthulhu). And before you go and say that the video itself is sugar coating - well, then, you've got a book, and I've read a lot of those that were pretty great too.
As far as I'm concerned 3-d is still used as a gimmick, just as color was (Wizard of Oz, maybe? Damn, that emerald city sure was green) when it first came out. When they can get it to where I don't have to wear polarization glasses over my own glasses (annoyingly distracting), that'll be nice, but my prediction is that 3d will remain mostly in the domain of computer-rendered films, where it's far easier to add a slightly shifted camera angle than it is to film with a second camera on a soundstage.
Point is, adding technical features to something doesn't always make it better, but it can certainly help. If, however, you have to do gimmicky stuff like have people pointing right at the camera or slow-motion bullets flying out into the theater at the expense of the art of the film, then it's probably not worth it, unless it's a simple enough flick to begin with that no one cares about the artistry of it, and are watching just to watch (a good action movie, for example.)
The game you're looking for is (apparently) also known as Exterminator. However, there is a *nix port in the bsd-games project, which exists in Gentoo Portage and probably thus in some other distros' package managers. Under the Exterminator name, Rinkworks has a page where you can play a web-based version right here. I had the bsd-games version installed, but found the Exterminator online version in three seconds of googling (search for robots teleport, it's the fifth result.)
That's outside the US. Most countries outside the US have a minimum drinking age of less than 21 in any case. I think the GGP was referring to drinking inside the US.
The reason for the 10Mbps half duplex may be a different reason altogether. In my on-campus apartment all the ports on the switch (which was in our hot water heater closet, so I could actually look at it) were set for 10Mbps half duplex although they all had the capability of 100Mbit full duplex and it had a gigabit fibre backplane to the rest of campus. The official reason I was given for this when I complained was that the wiring in the apartments was so old (cat3) it couldn't handle anything more than 10Mbit, and they weren't willing to re-wire. However, I think they may have been BS-ing me when they told me this since 100Mbit is rather fault tolerant and even a crappy, dropping-every-third-packet 100Mbit connection would be more desirable than the 10Mbit connection. Also, the apartments had undergone a recent remodeling, as had the freshman dorms I was in last year, and the freshman dorms had 100Mbit full duplex as we had the crap half duplex. Altogether irritating.
Awesome. Where are my mod points when I need them? Classy AND accurate, all in one! I salute you.
It seems obvious, then, that the jury trying this case should use one of the rarely-used options available to them: Jury nullification.
In this case, it seems that the jury would have to consider the case as a whole - not merely the facts presented by the prosecution, not merely the letter of the law. They must consider this man's motives, and the motives of the government that is bringing about this case. Is the government being driven by a corporation known for its bullying thuggishness and its lawsuit-happy executives? Is copyright law fundamentally wrong? I look forward to this jury's answer to these questions and I hope that it is the answer I expect from conscionable human beings.