Absolutely - the point is - he built it himself though, which is impressive. Buying a $10 Lego X-Wing kit and building it, on the other hand, only requires basic jigsaw puzzle assembly skills, and the result is a little bit naff.
Too right. I also feel that the license tie ins such as the Star Wars concept were pretty naff. They didn't really function as Lego due to too many custom parts that really didn't work in any other scenario, and lets face it - a Lego "A-Wing" or "Tie Interceptor" looked, well: crap, next to a "normal" model of the same craft. Kids aint daft - they see the 2 things on the shelf in the toy store and even at age 7 can see that one looks like the craft in the film, and one looks like some Lego that approximates the thing in the film, if you squint your eye so you can't see that it's covered in bumps. No prizes for guessing which one is more impressive in the playground bragging stakes.
I helped my 7 year old nephew build his Lego jet-ski on Christmas day - he followed the instructions and hours later it was done. Ten minutes later it was a robot/spaceship something or other which he sounded a lot more enthusiastic about (it had all kinds of features that he was making up on the spot - the jet-ski was, well, a jet-ski)
The sheer pervasiveness of the movie/TV tie in these days could mean kids not willing to make believe they are that character without the official costume and accessories!
er - well I'm 3. What do you mean you're 38? Thats a pretty wild claim - I knew a guy who was 8 once, but surely, no - one's over 10 - thats just ridiculous!
Now - has anyone seen another red half-roof block?
22 pcm (about $35 US)for DSL with Force9/Plusnet. This includes hosting as many domains as I want, web space (inc PHP, MySQL) a fax->email number and some other bits and bobs.
I have a theory. As Beagle2 looked, well like a kettle barbecue - I bet those guys discover it in the shed out back when summer arrives. Imagine their faces when they realise they laucnhed 3Kgs of barbecue charcoal by mistake...
LOL - oh you don't know the worst of it yet bud - it doesn't ever stop, even when you're the CEO of the company you work for and havn't seen the inside of a computer for 5 years.
I work as a systems architect on distributed databse, OLTP and web application type stuff mostly for a very large and very distributed corporation, and *still* the family think I should know whats up with their video card/CDROM or even - their PS/2:)
I think. However there is one small pice of foot shootingwith this approach. I regularly get "undeliverable" messages from AOL's relays. I don't know anyone with an AOL account, and thus never send them mail. The anser as I'm sure even apprentice geeks have figured out is that my address is being used by spammers as a return address and AOL have blacklisted it. Theres very little you can do about this. I reckon that in the same way I only used to get a few spams per day (now > 100 and thats only what SpamAssassin doesn't zap off of my IMAP account at my ISP) that everyone will fall victim to this before long. In the same way that spammers aquire lists of addresses to send mail to - they are no starting to use the same addresses to use as the apparent sender.
We need a totally new mail protocol with mandatory proof of origin using some sort Public/Private key pair.
Just getting and using a key signed by a recognised CA will not work Today - as currently, nobodies mail relays demand one before accepting mail.
On ICQ I can proove who I am (within reason) as I have to authenticate myself to the ICQ server when I connect my client. We need something similar for email.
Until this happens I am looking at implementing a whitelist only mail policy on my network. People will have to supply me with the email addresses by phone before they can mail me - as the relay will just bounce *everything* with undeliverables that are apparentley sent from upyours@127.0.0.1:P
The current email system is overrun with this rubbish - time we abandoned it and let the spammers spam each other into oblivion.
I mean - with a network (sort of) so transient it relies on the positions of objects in orbit around planets and outages of days (not to mention the latency !), you'd have thought they would have made the damm thing a bit more autonomous. I mean why on mars does it have to wait to be told to recharge?
Electric motors replace the wheels, an engine replaces the engine, and the electric motors have no transmissions because they're powered by batteries?
I suspect it's more like:-
The transmission (and the brakes to a certain extent) are replaced by electric motors mounted *in* the wheels, which are still very much on the vehicle. The original engine, is also very much still in the bus but now charges the batteries instead of driving the wheels directly.
I mentioned the brakes (and this is mentioned briefly in the article) because you can recover energy from the vehicle's momentum (convert kinetic back into electrical, and then chemical) by using the motors as brakes. This happens when the motion of the bus drives the wheels (and hence the motors) to re-charge the batteries. The drag created on the bus by the motors gives a useful braking affect, and some of the energy is reclaimed. Electric motors, are of course also very useful because if their constant torque output - no gearbox required.
The motors are not "inside out" either - brushless DC fan anyone? chop off the fan blades and stick a tyre on it. The diagram in the article confims this: the coils are on the centre piece - not a new plan.
I don't think they can claim to have "invented" it either. I'm sure many others have pointed out by now that diesel-electric trains work a bit like this. The last paragraph of the article also contradicts this claim - it seems that lots of people in japan were thinking about this in-wheel concept..
It has the potential to be much more efficient than a regular bus, due to less moving parts etc etc, but I am surprised you can get enough energy to pull away just from the batteries (with the engine just running constant revs), unless they were really huge. Diesel electric locomotives rev their nuts off to generate enough power to get moving - the batteries are just smoothing capacitors.
It's a nice, low loss, low friction transmission, but it will cause the suspension boys some headaches because of all that un-sprung weight. Nice to see someone's built a working vehicle though:)
Is it just me or is Firefly "Traveller - the movie"
hmm lets see - owner/operator of starship crewed with dodgy geezers picks up passengers, and cargoes, buys and sells goods, smuggles and engages in the odd heist...
I wonder how many of the episode plots can be found in "76 Patrons":)
I liked it - shame they canned it so early. I think it needed some deeper mystery or binding plotline though - the episodes were too standalone - apart from the psycho woman and brother's search for a cure there was very little continuation from one episode to the next. Perhaps they should have bought the rights to Marc Miller's "The Traveller Adventure" campaign, or maybe Poul Anderson's "Trader Team" books, such as "The Long Night" and "Mirkheim".
I ran into this problem on my girlfriend's PC (my own games PC has 98 on it - I don't want all that Fisher Price style garbage taking up CPU cycles - I ned all the frame rate I can muster!). I created 2 users, both with admin rights. I installed a game she bought ("Harry potter and the strangely boring FP collectathon" or something)under her user id. It won't start. However - here's the wierd bit - log in under any other user id and it works OK - even users created *after* the game was installed on the machine, and even users with no admin rights. Only the admin user that installed the game has problems - which happens to be the user she logs into the machine as.
I also did a google search for the error it generates (sorry can't remember it now) and found that whilst loads of people had seen this issue with XP - none of the threads had definitive answers.
I'll get round to destroying all the user profiles and starting again someday soon, but for now - she's gonna have to stick to Bejewelled:)
hehe funny what you see once you're aware of a problem. I bought a cheap Celery powered emachines to run as my internet gateway/firewall/mail server etc and just after the warranty expired, it shutdown on me. Investigation revealed the PSU thermal cut out had fired becasue the fan wasn't spinning. The fan wasn't spinning because it was almost completely seized.
This is not normally a problem - you spend 10 and put in a new PSU - but it's a wierd midget PSU. Anyway - I salvaged a fan out of another dead PSU but it was amusing to see that written down by someone who has now doubt seen a lot of these machines.
We also have a recent P4 eMachines unit though and it's fine. I have no problem with buying them, even if they do break after a year or two as long as they stick to commodity components - thats why I rarely buy Dell or HP/Compaq etc for home use - I can't be doing with having to rely on someone else to fix it if it breaks - when I can obtain the parts for an eMachines PC from anywhere in under an hour (wierd PSU's notwithstanding:P.
I dont think that was the graphics card market they were referring to. 3D rendering is the thing - I don't think Matrox have been competitive on that front for years.
..the entire world looking up from whaetver they are doing for a brief moment and vaguely mumbling:
"what? er.. yeah right - whatever.."
Before installing Linux on another 100 Intel servers, and a z-series.. (try doing that with SCO unix..)
Nobody's listening any more SCO - your outbursts have become so far fetched, you're like the kid that invents ever more unlikely stories to get attention. These guys are like parasites - they no longer create, but are desperate to get a slice of any pie going. Give it up - even if you won every court action from here til the next century - no one will do business with you ever again..
I think we all realise by now that all of this is most likely a bizarre situation engineered to raise cash on SCO shares. Ignore them - they only want attention.
on some public internet terminals in London City airport on Monday - thought it was hilarious, a popup from a company selling software to guard against well, basically - itself.
LOL:) A fimiliar problem:) Users haven't a clue about normalisation, data modelling but they press buttons in Access to create god-awful non scaleable, flaky, slow and toally vulnerable "systems" that rely on masses of bandwidth and computing power to make them go. Admins ban Access, users use something worse:) hehe I love it.
Here, at some point in the past, someone issued them with a weapons grade mess creator in the form of SAS, which is very powerful in the hands of a skilled developer, but of course, better tools didn't magically endow the users with knowledge of how to spell "entity relationship":P
I'm not knocking them mind: ultimately, it's the fault of IT for not meeting their needs - which causes them to go off and try a home made solution with whatever they can get their hands on.
Still - they could alway ban Excel too - I'd give real money to see what they knock up in Word:)
I have a theory about the lack of roleplaying in these so called "RPG's":) (Produces handy fold out portable soapbox).
I played Traveller AD&D, Runequest and a few others many years ago. (In fact just glancing at a book shelf in here, I can still see "The Traveller Book", "The Traveller Adventure", "Tarsus" and rafts of those cute little black adventure books, and the "Advanced rules":)
(Not to mention MegaTraveller which we tried to make sense out of over 3 years, Traveller "The New Era" (!) and finally "Marc Miller's Traveller" - I draw the line at "GURPS: Traveller" though:-) )
Anyway - the point. I found from the many sessions we had over those years that a sure way of killing off any roleplaying efforts on the part of the players was to introuduce artificial controls on what they were "allowed" to do. For example, a well known custom in Traveller was that heavy armour could not be worn in Starports. Now as referee you could say "no you can't wear that" or you can just let them do whatever they want and face the consequences. So if they did try to walk through the starport dressed in battle armour, they would quickly be surrounded by heavily armed starport security personnel.
As a UK resident, I couldn't wait to see SWG and signed up for the beta (I had to pay quite a hefty shipping charge to obtain the CD's - but hey - I was desperate:-) At first I thought his game was the dogs danglies - the graphics were excellent, and the chracter design phase could have sold as a game in it's own right a few years back as a tool to make pictures of your pen and paper RPG chracters:) But eventually, you get bored of watching the suns set on Tatooine and the leaves wave in the breeze on Naboo and I set off to find out what all these other icons did on my screen. For ages I thought "I'm just not getting this - there's something I'm doing wrong" as I struggled to kill the hamster that was eating my trainers, even though it was only a foot long, and I was armed with a blaster. I was wrong. I was getting it. My mission it seemed was not to seek fortune and glory as a smuggler, bounty hunter, or just general roguish adventurer. My mission was to control the Wamp Rat population south of Mos Eisley, and I didn't posess a T16 or any vehicle come to that - I was expected to run everywhere!
After I'd taken revenge on the Wamp Rats, and slaughtered a few highly dangerous grazing animals on Naboo for no reason other than me being a highly dangerous individual (if only to small furry animals) I decided a career change was in order so I went off to the "mission terminal" and became.... a delivery boy! After my 3rd delivery, and almost 2 hours fo running.. I felt there must be more to life in the Star Wars universe and hooked up with 3 other players who also seemed to be constantly plagued by the local gerbil population trying to eat them from the ankles upwards. We decided we'd try to join the rebellion against the Empire. One of our number had seen a fortress in the wilderness and reckoned it was a rebel hideout so off we went ("wow" I'm thinking "this more like it"). On the way we spy 3 stormtroopers and an Imperial officer in a clearing. Now's our chance to do a bit for the cause. We go into a huddle and come up with a cunning plan (well actually, we just decided to spring out of the trees and shoot them) but hey - it always worked for Harrison Ford and there were only 4 of em. We all leapt out of the bushes, blasters in hand and franctically selecting our targets and.............and.........and...
and nothing. Nada. Nil point. You *can't attack the stormtroopers - the game doesn't let you* ffs! We all stood around sheepishly; said "hi there Imperial dudes" and then legged it into the woods. I more or less gave up on the game there and then - if the game is going to deny legitimate actions - no matter how foolish they may be, then
I already have this in my house. The ingredients are:-
For the storage/music serving:- 1xLinux server in attic.
For the ripping and encoding:- CDparanoia (rip) Lame (encode) FreeDB (track lookup) Grip (Really effective GUI to control the above:)
For the playback:- 2xsliMP3 players http://www.slimp3.org
And a Linksys WET11 for each device to make it wireless (plugs into existing 10/100base ports).
Grip will create the directory strcuture on the fly however you want it (Mine is artist/disc/tracks) and the Slimp3 software will use the ID3 tags to create lists according to genre, band etc although this does of couse depnd on the somewhat inconsistent quality of the data in the FreeDB database:-/
The Slimp3 players come with a nice Perl based web interface and streaming server. You can control the players from the web interface or with the remotes. You can even syncronise all the players on your network:)
..rumours that Counterstrike may be used to treat "fear of accute boredom" may be true...
Scientists have known for years that the game can cure even acute cases of insomnia. It is hoped that the intense boredom generated by hiding behind a box for ten minutes sniping at other players hiding behind their boxes, will help patients confront their phobia.
I can can personally vouch for the sleep inducing properties of CS - having often woken up to find myself on an empty map at 4am.
One top researcher in the field, also speculated that 3wave Capturestrike may similarly be used to confront "fear of shopping in the sales", and "fear of using the underground at rush hour".
No one was prepared to comment on the potential psychological uses for "black and white" although several cows were looking shifty in a nearby field.
My computer is infected with the "Steam" virus - so far it's deleted Half Life and all it's mods, and is filling my disk with these 500MB files of junk!
Someday they'll release it for a continent I live on. Ironically, I have 3 CDs with "SWG" on them from the beta test - but I can't play in the production game, as the client is not for sale here.
Mind you - little wonder no one's a Jedi - from what I can remember, the game is about shooting small furry animals, delivering parcels and making clothes - not "learning about da force"
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Absolutely - the point is - he built it himself though, which is impressive. Buying a $10 Lego X-Wing kit and building it, on the other hand, only requires basic jigsaw puzzle assembly skills, and the result is a little bit naff.
Too right. I also feel that the license tie ins such as the Star Wars concept were pretty naff. They didn't really function as Lego due to too many custom parts that really didn't work in any other scenario, and lets face it - a Lego "A-Wing" or "Tie Interceptor" looked, well: crap, next to a "normal" model of the same craft. Kids aint daft - they see the 2 things on the shelf in the toy store and even at age 7 can see that one looks like the craft in the film, and one looks like some Lego that approximates the thing in the film, if you squint your eye so you can't see that it's covered in bumps. No prizes for guessing which one is more impressive in the playground bragging stakes.
I helped my 7 year old nephew build his Lego jet-ski on Christmas day - he followed the instructions and hours later it was done. Ten minutes later it was a robot/spaceship something or other which he sounded a lot more enthusiastic about (it had all kinds of features that he was making up on the spot - the jet-ski was, well, a jet-ski)
The sheer pervasiveness of the movie/TV tie in these days could mean kids not willing to make believe they are that character without the official costume and accessories!
er - well I'm 3. What do you mean you're 38? Thats a pretty wild claim - I knew a guy who was 8 once, but surely, no - one's over 10 - thats just ridiculous!
Now - has anyone seen another red half-roof block?
22 pcm (about $35 US)for DSL with Force9/Plusnet. This includes hosting as many domains as I want, web space (inc PHP, MySQL) a fax->email number and some other bits and bobs.
I have a theory. As Beagle2 looked, well like a kettle barbecue - I bet those guys discover it in the shed out back when summer arrives. Imagine their faces when they realise they laucnhed 3Kgs of barbecue charcoal by mistake...
LOL - oh you don't know the worst of it yet bud - it doesn't ever stop, even when you're the CEO of the company you work for and havn't seen the inside of a computer for 5 years.
:)
I work as a systems architect on distributed databse, OLTP and web application type stuff mostly for a very large and very distributed corporation, and *still* the family think I should know whats up with their video card/CDROM or even - their PS/2
I think. However there is one small pice of foot shootingwith this approach. I regularly get "undeliverable" messages from AOL's relays. I don't know anyone with an AOL account, and thus never send them mail. The anser as I'm sure even apprentice geeks have figured out is that my address is being used by spammers as a return address and AOL have blacklisted it. Theres very little you can do about this. I reckon that in the same way I only used to get a few spams per day (now > 100 and thats only what SpamAssassin doesn't zap off of my IMAP account at my ISP) that everyone will fall victim to this before long. In the same way that spammers aquire lists of addresses to send mail to - they are no starting to use the same addresses to use as the apparent sender.
:P
We need a totally new mail protocol with mandatory proof of origin using some sort Public/Private key pair.
Just getting and using a key signed by a recognised CA will not work Today - as currently, nobodies mail relays demand one before accepting mail.
On ICQ I can proove who I am (within reason) as I have to authenticate myself to the ICQ server when I connect my client. We need something similar for email.
Until this happens I am looking at implementing a whitelist only mail policy on my network. People will have to supply me with the email addresses by phone before they can mail me - as the relay will just bounce *everything* with undeliverables that are apparentley sent from upyours@127.0.0.1
The current email system is overrun with this rubbish - time we abandoned it and let the spammers spam each other into oblivion.
Indeed - is this a wind up question? You use an IM to talk to your family?!?? in the same friggin house?!?
Get help dude. Quickly.
I mean - with a network (sort of) so transient it relies on the positions of objects in orbit around planets and outages of days (not to mention the latency !), you'd have thought they would have made the damm thing a bit more autonomous. I mean why on mars does it have to wait to be told to recharge?
Electric motors replace the wheels, an engine replaces the engine, and the electric motors have no transmissions because they're powered by batteries?
:)
I suspect it's more like:-
The transmission (and the brakes to a certain extent) are replaced by electric motors mounted *in* the wheels, which are still very much on the vehicle. The original engine, is also very much still in the bus but now charges the batteries instead of driving the wheels directly.
I mentioned the brakes (and this is mentioned briefly in the article) because you can recover energy from the vehicle's momentum (convert kinetic back into electrical, and then chemical) by using the motors as brakes. This happens when the motion of the bus drives the wheels (and hence the motors) to re-charge the batteries. The drag created on the bus by the motors gives a useful braking affect, and some of the energy is reclaimed. Electric motors, are of course also very useful because if their constant torque output - no gearbox required.
The motors are not "inside out" either - brushless DC fan anyone? chop off the fan blades and stick a tyre on it. The diagram in the article confims this: the coils are on the centre piece - not a new plan.
I don't think they can claim to have "invented" it either. I'm sure many others have pointed out by now that diesel-electric trains work a bit like this. The last paragraph of the article also contradicts this claim - it seems that lots of people in japan were thinking about this in-wheel concept..
It has the potential to be much more efficient than a regular bus, due to less moving parts etc etc, but I am surprised you can get enough energy to pull away just from the batteries (with the engine just running constant revs), unless they were really huge. Diesel electric locomotives rev their nuts off to generate enough power to get moving - the batteries are just smoothing capacitors.
It's a nice, low loss, low friction transmission, but it will cause the suspension boys some headaches because of all that un-sprung weight. Nice to see someone's built a working vehicle though
Is it just me or is Firefly "Traveller - the movie"
:)
hmm lets see - owner/operator of starship crewed with dodgy geezers picks up passengers, and cargoes, buys and sells goods, smuggles and engages in the odd heist...
I wonder how many of the episode plots can be found in "76 Patrons"
I liked it - shame they canned it so early. I think it needed some deeper mystery or binding plotline though - the episodes were too standalone - apart from the psycho woman and brother's search for a cure there was very little continuation from one episode to the next. Perhaps they should have bought the rights to Marc Miller's "The Traveller Adventure" campaign, or maybe Poul Anderson's "Trader Team" books, such as "The Long Night" and "Mirkheim".
I ran into this problem on my girlfriend's PC (my own games PC has 98 on it - I don't want all that Fisher Price style garbage taking up CPU cycles - I ned all the frame rate I can muster!). I created 2 users, both with admin rights. I installed a game she bought ("Harry potter and the strangely boring FP collectathon" or something)under her user id. It won't start. However - here's the wierd bit - log in under any other user id and it works OK - even users created *after* the game was installed on the machine, and even users with no admin rights. Only the admin user that installed the game has problems - which happens to be the user she logs into the machine as.
:)
I also did a google search for the error it generates (sorry can't remember it now) and found that whilst loads of people had seen this issue with XP - none of the threads had definitive answers.
I'll get round to destroying all the user profiles and starting again someday soon, but for now - she's gonna have to stick to Bejewelled
hehe funny what you see once you're aware of a problem. I bought a cheap Celery powered emachines to run as my internet gateway/firewall/mail server etc and just after the warranty expired, it shutdown on me. Investigation revealed the PSU thermal cut out had fired becasue the fan wasn't spinning. The fan wasn't spinning because it was almost completely seized.
:P.
This is not normally a problem - you spend 10 and put in a new PSU - but it's a wierd midget PSU. Anyway - I salvaged a fan out of another dead PSU but it was amusing to see that written down by someone who has now doubt seen a lot of these machines.
We also have a recent P4 eMachines unit though and it's fine. I have no problem with buying them, even if they do break after a year or two as long as they stick to commodity components - thats why I rarely buy Dell or HP/Compaq etc for home use - I can't be doing with having to rely on someone else to fix it if it breaks - when I can obtain the parts for an eMachines PC from anywhere in under an hour (wierd PSU's notwithstanding
I dont think that was the graphics card market they were referring to. 3D rendering is the thing - I don't think Matrox have been competitive on that front for years.
..the entire world looking up from whaetver they are doing for a brief moment and vaguely mumbling:
"what? er.. yeah right - whatever.."
Before installing Linux on another 100 Intel servers, and a z-series.. (try doing that with SCO unix..)
Nobody's listening any more SCO - your outbursts have become so far fetched, you're like the kid that invents ever more unlikely stories to get attention. These guys are like parasites - they no longer create, but are desperate to get a slice of any pie going. Give it up - even if you won every court action from here til the next century - no one will do business with you ever again..
I think we all realise by now that all of this is most likely a bizarre situation engineered to raise cash on SCO shares. Ignore them - they only want attention.
on some public internet terminals in London City airport on Monday - thought it was hilarious, a popup from a company selling software to guard against well, basically - itself.
LOL :) A fimiliar problem :) Users haven't a clue about normalisation, data modelling but they press buttons in Access to create god-awful non scaleable, flaky, slow and toally vulnerable "systems" that rely on masses of bandwidth and computing power to make them go. Admins ban Access, users use something worse :) hehe I love it.
:P
:)
Here, at some point in the past, someone issued them with a weapons grade mess creator in the form of SAS, which is very powerful in the hands of a skilled developer, but of course, better tools didn't magically endow the users with knowledge of how to spell "entity relationship"
I'm not knocking them mind: ultimately, it's the fault of IT for not meeting their needs - which causes them to go off and try a home made solution with whatever they can get their hands on.
Still - they could alway ban Excel too - I'd give real money to see what they knock up in Word
I have a theory about the lack of roleplaying in these so called "RPG's" :) (Produces handy fold out portable soapbox).
:)
:-) )
:-) At first I thought his game was the dogs danglies - the graphics were excellent, and the chracter design phase could have sold as a game in it's own right a few years back as a tool to make pictures of your pen and paper RPG chracters :) But eventually, you get bored of watching the suns set on Tatooine and the leaves wave in the breeze on Naboo and I set off to find out what all these other icons did on my screen. For ages I thought "I'm just not getting this - there's something I'm doing wrong" as I struggled to kill the hamster that was eating my trainers, even though it was only a foot long, and I was armed with a blaster. I was wrong. I was getting it. My mission it seemed was not to seek fortune and glory as a smuggler, bounty hunter, or just general roguish adventurer. My mission was to control the Wamp Rat population south of Mos Eisley, and I didn't posess a T16 or any vehicle come to that - I was expected to run everywhere!
......and.... .....and...
I played Traveller AD&D, Runequest and a few others many years ago. (In fact just glancing at a book shelf in here, I can still see "The Traveller Book", "The Traveller Adventure", "Tarsus" and rafts of those cute little black adventure books, and the "Advanced rules"
(Not to mention MegaTraveller which we tried to make sense out of over 3 years, Traveller "The New Era" (!) and finally "Marc Miller's Traveller" - I draw the line at "GURPS: Traveller" though
Anyway - the point. I found from the many sessions we had over those years that a sure way of killing off any roleplaying efforts on the part of the players was to introuduce artificial controls on what they were "allowed" to do. For example, a well known custom in Traveller was that heavy armour could not be worn in Starports. Now as referee you could say "no you can't wear that" or you can just let them do whatever they want and face the consequences. So if they did try to walk through the starport dressed in battle armour, they would quickly be surrounded by heavily armed starport security personnel.
As a UK resident, I couldn't wait to see SWG and signed up for the beta (I had to pay quite a hefty shipping charge to obtain the CD's - but hey - I was desperate
After I'd taken revenge on the Wamp Rats, and slaughtered a few highly dangerous grazing animals on Naboo for no reason other than me being a highly dangerous individual (if only to small furry animals) I decided a career change was in order so I went off to the "mission terminal" and became.... a delivery boy! After my 3rd delivery, and almost 2 hours fo running.. I felt there must be more to life in the Star Wars universe and hooked up with 3 other players who also seemed to be constantly plagued by the local gerbil population trying to eat them from the ankles upwards. We decided we'd try to join the rebellion against the Empire. One of our number had seen a fortress in the wilderness and reckoned it was a rebel hideout so off we went ("wow" I'm thinking "this more like it"). On the way we spy 3 stormtroopers and an Imperial officer in a clearing. Now's our chance to do a bit for the cause. We go into a huddle and come up with a cunning plan (well actually, we just decided to spring out of the trees and shoot them) but hey - it always worked for Harrison Ford and there were only 4 of em. We all leapt out of the bushes, blasters in hand and franctically selecting our targets and.......
and nothing. Nada. Nil point. You *can't attack the stormtroopers - the game doesn't let you* ffs! We all stood around sheepishly; said "hi there Imperial dudes" and then legged it into the woods. I more or less gave up on the game there and then - if the game is going to deny legitimate actions - no matter how foolish they may be, then
Sorry that link should be http://www.slimp3.com
I already have this in my house. The ingredients are:-
:)
:-/
:)
For the storage/music serving:-
1xLinux server in attic.
For the ripping and encoding:-
CDparanoia (rip)
Lame (encode)
FreeDB (track lookup)
Grip (Really effective GUI to control the above
For the playback:-
2xsliMP3 players http://www.slimp3.org
And a Linksys WET11 for each device to make it wireless (plugs into existing 10/100base ports).
Grip will create the directory strcuture on the fly however you want it (Mine is artist/disc/tracks) and the Slimp3 software will use the ID3 tags to create lists according to genre, band etc although this does of couse depnd on the somewhat inconsistent quality of the data in the FreeDB database
The Slimp3 players come with a nice Perl based web interface and streaming server. You can control the players from the web interface or with the remotes. You can even syncronise all the players on your network
Hmm indeed - I mean there are no games and it is called the "Phantom" after all ...
..on my web site the most popular OS is one called "Unknown" which is used by 55.24% of visitors!
:)
http://www.muttsnutts.com/html/stats.php
I'd be using it myself, but I'm waiting for Unknown 2 which has working USB support
..rumours that Counterstrike may be used to treat "fear of accute boredom" may be true...
Scientists have known for years that the game can cure even acute cases of insomnia. It is hoped that the intense boredom generated by hiding behind a box for ten minutes sniping at other players hiding behind their boxes, will help patients confront their phobia.
I can can personally vouch for the sleep inducing properties of CS - having often woken up to find myself on an empty map at 4am.
One top researcher in the field, also speculated that 3wave Capturestrike may similarly be used to confront "fear of shopping in the sales", and "fear of using the underground at rush hour".
No one was prepared to comment on the potential psychological uses for "black and white" although several cows were looking shifty in a nearby field.
My computer is infected with the "Steam" virus - so far it's deleted Half Life and all it's mods, and is filling my disk with these 500MB files of junk!
Someday they'll release it for a continent I live on. Ironically, I have 3 CDs with "SWG" on them from the beta test - but I can't play in the production game, as the client is not for sale here.
Mind you - little wonder no one's a Jedi - from what I can remember, the game is about shooting small furry animals, delivering parcels and making clothes - not "learning about da force"