Just an FYI, but IRIX support was removed in gcc-4.8, in case you're thinking of trying that. Not that Linux is going to get you any farther on an Octane, as I am currently chasing down a futex hanging bug in 4.8 on MIPS R10000 platforms. See gcc PR61538 and Gentoo Bug 516548 for the gory details. Have to git bisect gcc to chase this down, which is _not_ fun.
5 seconds? We had a tornado here in Omaha a couple weeks ago, and the sirens provided no warning because it hit during the 5 minute blind spot in the radar. On one pass it was a severe thunderstorm, on the next pass it was a tornado on the ground.
If they can't make the radar rotate faster, they should add more dishes to the same radar so it's looking in 2 or 3 directions at once. The Radar, even if it lacked the blind spot, can't determine if there's a tornado on the ground or not. It can only detect if there's a significant amount of rotation that makes conditions favourable for tornado formation, and then issue a TVS, or Tornado Vortex Signature. The forecaster reviewing the data has to then decide if the radar's predictions are worth issuing a warning. They have to consider data not only from the radar, but current weather conditions and perhaps from the most important source, people on the ground who spot storms and report them in.
This is why the NWS runs the National Skywarn program to help educate everyday people like yourself on how to look for certain signs of damaging storms, including severe and tornadic storms, and report them in so that the forecasters have solid data on conditions on the ground (which the radar can't see!).
Hydrazine is some pretty nasty stuff actually, which makes their primary claim carry some legitimacy.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
Hydrazine is highly toxic and dangerously unstable, especially in the anhydrous form. Symptoms of acute exposure to high levels of hydrazine in humans may include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, coma, and it can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. The liquid is corrosive and may produce dermatitis from skin contact in humans and animals. Effects to the lungs, liver, spleen, and thyroid have been reported in animals chronically exposed to hydrazine via inhalation. Increased incidences of lung, nasal cavity, and liver tumors have been observed in rodents exposed to hydrazine. And if you watch the landings of the Space Shuttle, NASA moves quickly to safe those things so they can shutdown the APUs and remove the remaining hydrazine stored onboard before letting workers near the thing. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes ever made that I've seen NASA publicly acknowledge -- using a highly toxic rocket fuel as a fuel source for the APUs, which control the elevons and other flight control surfaces used heavily in landing that bird.
I'll vouch that Server 2003 CAN be converted into a very usable desktop/workstation mode, and in my opinion, is far more stable than XP. So if you can land yourself a copy of 2003, dig up the workstation conversion guide on google and give it a whirl.
While I won't comment on Ep1, what really ruined it for me in Ep2 and Ep3 was Hayden Christiensen's total lack of acting. I felt it was bad enough to state that K-Fed can rap better than Hayden can act. Ep3 was especially bad. While the make up guys definitely gave him that "I'm a bad ass" look, his inability to put emotion into speaking his lines just ruined every scene he was in.
And Portman must've caught whatever disease Hayden had as well, cause her acting was pretty bad too. Both of their speaking lines sounded forced and didn't carry the proper sense of emotion for the scenes they were in. Plus, there were no shots of Portman's nude body covered in hot grits. Wth is wrong with Lucas?
Come to think of it, I think the set may also share some blame. something like 90% (if not more) of the sets in Ep3 were CG -- so the entire time of the actual acting by those two, they were surrounded by blue screens (not of death). I imagine that being surrounded by giant blue walls and the like makes it difficult to put one's mind into the appropriate frame to act out one's character very well.
As for Ep2 -- Christopher Lee's bad ass character getting tagged with the stupidest name ever. Who thought up "Dooku"? Tell ya, they should just kept "Saruman" or something. Considering Lucas BS'ed the story enough to stuff R2 and 3PO in, I'm *sure* he could've found a way to get Saruman in.
Course, that must mean that Obi-Wan is Gandalf? And....Anakin is Sauron? Oh gods no, I've just corrupted my memory banks with bad images!
NMIC (National Maritime Intelligence Center), and NESDIS (NOAA's Satellite Ops group) are all in Suitland. NCEP (National Center for Environmental Prediction) and the Hydrological groups are in Camp Springs, which is just a stone's throw south of Suitland. NOAA's HQ is in Silver Spring, too. And I think the IRS has an office in New Carrolton. Ah, and the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Plus in Southern Maryland where I live, We've got Military all around. Indian Head is one of the Naval Surface Warfare Centers to the west, and Pax River NAS is to the south, where work for the F-22 Raptor, F-35 JSF, and even the new Marine One helo has all been done.
Verizon is doing what they are doing so that others won't be able to serve you. When they are finished robbing you of choice they will take your freedom.
Right now, Southern MD has no choice. We have Comcast, and that's it. While the satellite companies down here earn a buck here and there converting people to DirectTV or Dish Network; as far as internet service goes, it's Comcast or Dial-Up. Verizon doesn't even offer DSL service down here (ironically, they play their DSL and FiOS commercials all the time. Talk about salt in the wound). Still at 8mbps down and 384kbps up, but the rich folks up in Howard county get a nice 16mbps down instead (but same upstream I believe).
Personally, I want the idiotic decision-making tools at Verizon to wake up and realize they've got 3.5 counties in the DC Metro area that could use some competition for once. While I'm overall satisfied with Comcast's service for Internet (TV is another story) and tech support is in Baltimore for TV and White Marsh for Internet (no India, yay!), I'd like to see some competition brought in to force them to lower prices and raise speeds.
I also don't buy the triple play offers of Comcast OR Verizon, mostly because I do not like putting my eggs in one basket. I plan on having a copper line for as long as possible, because that thing never goes down, while Comcast's head-end systems fail randomly around here. Had a power outage last night in a different part of the neighborhood (not mine) that took out the head-end, so while I had power, there was no TV or internet. If I had Comcast's VOIP offering, I'd have had no phone service too (but I have a cell phone as backup if need be). That's partially why I like the old copper lines, because they're always there when everything else seemingly fails.
But anyways, Verizon's missing out, and I can't imagine what drives them to have completely ignored my region for even basic DSL services. I called up tech support once, and got a hold of an actual engineer there, and he says they don't even have DSLAMS installed at the local CO's in my county. They passed up that opportunity of an upgrade to focus on a possible fiber upgrade several years later. Yet still we have none.
I love Metroid like any other fan of the series, but my serious gripes with it are that the strategies are usually too repetitive. Hit something three times, open up a weak spot, attack; rinse lather, repeat two more times. And then there's ALWAYS the something in the game that just annoys the living daylights out of me. Some enemy that's just got an extremely annoying attack or movement designed to frustrate me. I think this is why Nintendo builds such excellent hardware, because they know someone is intentionally going to put a Wiimote through a television screen because of some enemy or boss.
In my case, it's the Tiamat AA Guns on that whatchamacallit planet near the beginning, specifically the one with the Aero Troopers. I've done tossed the Wiimote into the wall twice over it, and quite likely am just going to put the game up for several months now. Amazingly, the Wiimote still functions. A PS2 controller would've died long before now.
Call after 12am local time, and you'll usually wind up getting routed to the local night crew, who tend to be a bit smarter than the day folks (in my case, it's usually the Level 2 technicians I get sent straight to). These are the guys that know UNIX, ping, traceroute, and a host of other programs. It also doesn't hurt to query them on their call center location. In my market, I get sent to a call center that's physically located about an hour away.
My problem lately hasn't even been internet related, but more of an upstream signal issue that used to knock the modem offline, plus render their OnDemand service unusable. I complained enough, and they must've modified my modem to withstand the automatic power cycle when upstream spikes at 58dBmV. So I figure, if I call them enough and harass their various tech levels enough on the TV side, they'll somehow do the same. Tip: When you know the signal issue is at the pedestal (for underground installs), request a "Site Surveyor" tech instead of the normal customer contact tech. They seem to get the problem fixed faster and longer.
This means the cable modems they're using have obviously sunk in quality. I have a Motorola SB5100, and it registers my router's MAC Address just fine. These things should be handled by the low-level firmware found in most cable modems (typically a custom VxWorks kernel)
My advice is to go out to the store, and buy the current member of the Motorola SB5100 series, and take back whatever hunk of junk it is they gave out. If you need a router, Linksys WRT54GL plus the dd-wrt firmware can't be beat. No crappy desktop-level software is needed to get such a setup going.
I'd love to read the micro-sized fine print, but we need to force these companies to actually keep the three-paragraph-long fine print block up longer than two seconds:P
This is a good alternative to IE ad blocking, not to mention other nasty URLs. In conjunction with Adblock, it makes the Internet a bit closer to that old fashioned "Information Superhighway" utopia they threw around back in the 90's.
Those are sales numbers, not production numbers, and yes, they are a decrease from prior months. Roughly, compared to February numbers, the Wii saw a 22% decline in sales, along with a small percentage for the 360. The PS3 has actually gone up in sales a little, shockingly enough. 127,000 units in Feb versus 130,000 units in March. Not a big increase, but it's there.
My opinion, it's the slump we usually see around this time of year. I figure some of the blockbuster titles are being retained by Ninty so they can continue to tweak things (they're about as bad as Blizzard on delaying something for quality purposes), but also to combat the future big hitters from the PS3 and 360 Camp (i.e., Halo 3). Figure, they still have Metroid 3 and Mario Galaxy up their sleeves, plus those other new franchises we saw briefly at E3, yet haven't heard from since (H.A.M.M.E.R. and Disaster). I think as we get into the summer and early fall, we're gonna see a lot of really cool stuff coming out for all three consoles. Sony better have cool stuff in the pipeline, or they're gonna be swimming up shite creek without a paddle (and have hole in the boat).
And the DS? Crikey. 508,000 units in one month. That's just insane. I wish I'd invested in their stock a year ago. tbey struck their all-time high since getting listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange back in 1962. I think it's up to ¥36,000 or something now. Their yearly financial report also comes out next week. That'll be interesting to look at.
Considering I live in MD, Southern MD, to be specific, I would LOVE to know what broadband providers are nearby. Comcast has an exclusive lock on my region, and to make things worse, we have an ongoing return-path/upstream signal issue that has, so far, been traced back to the main tap that they've grudgingly done a few tweaks to. Likely just to get us to shut up. Yet the problem keeps coming back. Verizon and their vaunted Fios service is no where to be found. Hell, we don't even have DSL from Verizon available. When I actually called them up on this, the decision was made to avoid upgrading our local CO and go straight to a fiber upgrade in another few years.
Really, Verizon could come down here and own Comcast simply because it'd give people a choice for once. Choice is a GoodThing(TM). So what are they waiting for?
Set your wireless router to use Channel 1 or 11. That did it for me, and Ninty even states this tip in their support section, although they don't offer much of a technical reason why. I kept getting update timeouts when my WRT54GL (running latest dd-wrt) was on channel 6. Switched it to channel 1, and the update progress bar just zipped along like there wasn't a single issue.
Agreed mostly; A lot of the radio stations spend all of 10 seconds running down a list of known tie-ups that anyone can track using online map services and incident trackers (and people who know a specific route very well). My experience has shown WTOP tends to elaborate more on some areas, however. While they'll stick to the usual re-iteration of known traffic issues, if it's a particularly nasty mishap, they will recommend Alt. Routes. Admittedly, however, certain areas have no alternate/escape routes -- the WW bridge corridor for starters.
One thing is for certain, they need many more traffic cameras around the WW bridge corridor. The camera coverage on the VA side is decent, but VDOT needs to fix a few (and add a few around Rt. 1), and MDSHA's coverage on their side is absolutely pitiful. Equally, dDOT should stick a few down 295 for good measure. I'd love to know ahead of time if the 295 backup begins at the split for 95/495 North/South, or if it's gonna be a 4-mile haul from Bolling AFB to beltway.
In the DC/Baltimore region, there's WTOP on 103.5FM and 820AM for news traffic and weather (traffic is every 10mins on the 8's). Alternatively, if one must use a phone to check traffic status, several states have implemented the 511 phone number for checking traffic (in Virginia, this is useful for checking screw ups on the western side of the DC beltway; Maryland has yet to implement this, although their CHART system has an [autodetected] text-only mode for cell phone browsing).
What this feature would really be good for is on their main mapping service that could be checked before leaving to jump into some random traffic mess. Yahoo's maps beta system, while attempting to poorly mimic Google maps, has such a feature (and thus makes it somewhat of a useful service for the time being).
Doing a lot of studying on the nature of the IHS and such, I've discovered this mostly applies to a lot of areas _except_ the DC Beltway (a.k.a., Suicide Circle). It is, quite frankly, a brain dead design as far as interstates go. I-95 was supposed to go through DC, but for some reason (political, I think), that idea was cancelled and I-95, for a time, became the eastern portion of the beltway. It was later re-labelled to the dual scheme of I-95 and I-495. The end result of this is that all your freight traffic has to go around the eastern portion and over the crumbling Wilson Bridge (Although they just opened up the outer loop span and traffic will soon be switched off the old bridge).
Also left out was the DC inner loop system, which would have included an I-266, I-695, I-595, all tying together the converging interstates of I-95, I-66, and I-70. Although one wonders whether this would have helped or hindered the current layout gven the volume of traffic that passes through...
Tons of info on the DC/VA/MD road area can be found at Scott Kozel's Roads to the Future site, as well as tons of info on the various 3-digit interstates (including little-known things like the hidden I-595 in MD and the nature of I-238 in CA) at Kurumi.com
Linux on SGI's MIPS workstations is already pretty usable. The core site is at http://www.linux-mips.org/, plus both Gentoo and Debian have functional MIPS Ports [ G | D ].
Between both distro's, most of SGI's systems from the Indy to the Octane are supported (although support for the individual components is dependent on the machine). We're hoping to get our hands on some of their newer stuff, like a Fuel or an Origin 300 to see how hard that will be to port to (especially the R14000), but the dream is to one day (hopefully before the year 3000) get Linux running on a quad-cpu Tezro:)
Slashdot Mirror
Just an FYI, but IRIX support was removed in gcc-4.8, in case you're thinking of trying that. Not that Linux is going to get you any farther on an Octane, as I am currently chasing down a futex hanging bug in 4.8 on MIPS R10000 platforms. See gcc PR61538 and Gentoo Bug 516548 for the gory details. Have to git bisect gcc to chase this down, which is _not_ fun.
If they can't make the radar rotate faster, they should add more dishes to the same radar so it's looking in 2 or 3 directions at once. The Radar, even if it lacked the blind spot, can't determine if there's a tornado on the ground or not. It can only detect if there's a significant amount of rotation that makes conditions favourable for tornado formation, and then issue a TVS, or Tornado Vortex Signature. The forecaster reviewing the data has to then decide if the radar's predictions are worth issuing a warning. They have to consider data not only from the radar, but current weather conditions and perhaps from the most important source, people on the ground who spot storms and report them in.
This is why the NWS runs the National Skywarn program to help educate everyday people like yourself on how to look for certain signs of damaging storms, including severe and tornadic storms, and report them in so that the forecasters have solid data on conditions on the ground (which the radar can't see!).
http://www.skywarn.org/
OBJECTION!
That explains where the background plot for Blaster Master came from....
Here's what Wikipedia says: Hydrazine is highly toxic and dangerously unstable, especially in the anhydrous form. Symptoms of acute exposure to high levels of hydrazine in humans may include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, coma, and it can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. The liquid is corrosive and may produce dermatitis from skin contact in humans and animals. Effects to the lungs, liver, spleen, and thyroid have been reported in animals chronically exposed to hydrazine via inhalation. Increased incidences of lung, nasal cavity, and liver tumors have been observed in rodents exposed to hydrazine. And if you watch the landings of the Space Shuttle, NASA moves quickly to safe those things so they can shutdown the APUs and remove the remaining hydrazine stored onboard before letting workers near the thing. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes ever made that I've seen NASA publicly acknowledge -- using a highly toxic rocket fuel as a fuel source for the APUs, which control the elevons and other flight control surfaces used heavily in landing that bird.
I'll vouch that Server 2003 CAN be converted into a very usable desktop/workstation mode, and in my opinion, is far more stable than XP. So if you can land yourself a copy of 2003, dig up the workstation conversion guide on google and give it a whirl.
While I won't comment on Ep1, what really ruined it for me in Ep2 and Ep3 was Hayden Christiensen's total lack of acting. I felt it was bad enough to state that K-Fed can rap better than Hayden can act. Ep3 was especially bad. While the make up guys definitely gave him that "I'm a bad ass" look, his inability to put emotion into speaking his lines just ruined every scene he was in.
And Portman must've caught whatever disease Hayden had as well, cause her acting was pretty bad too. Both of their speaking lines sounded forced and didn't carry the proper sense of emotion for the scenes they were in. Plus, there were no shots of Portman's nude body covered in hot grits. Wth is wrong with Lucas?
Come to think of it, I think the set may also share some blame. something like 90% (if not more) of the sets in Ep3 were CG -- so the entire time of the actual acting by those two, they were surrounded by blue screens (not of death). I imagine that being surrounded by giant blue walls and the like makes it difficult to put one's mind into the appropriate frame to act out one's character very well.
As for Ep2 -- Christopher Lee's bad ass character getting tagged with the stupidest name ever. Who thought up "Dooku"? Tell ya, they should just kept "Saruman" or something. Considering Lucas BS'ed the story enough to stuff R2 and 3PO in, I'm *sure* he could've found a way to get Saruman in.
Course, that must mean that Obi-Wan is Gandalf? And....Anakin is Sauron? Oh gods no, I've just corrupted my memory banks with bad images!
NMIC (National Maritime Intelligence Center), and NESDIS (NOAA's Satellite Ops group) are all in Suitland. NCEP (National Center for Environmental Prediction) and the Hydrological groups are in Camp Springs, which is just a stone's throw south of Suitland. NOAA's HQ is in Silver Spring, too. And I think the IRS has an office in New Carrolton. Ah, and the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Plus in Southern Maryland where I live, We've got Military all around. Indian Head is one of the Naval Surface Warfare Centers to the west, and Pax River NAS is to the south, where work for the F-22 Raptor, F-35 JSF, and even the new Marine One helo has all been done.
CIA is in Langley, actually, just off the GW Parkway in VA. But you won't find them on Google Maps very easily.
In Soviet Russia, bomb is mightier than pen!
...There goes my Karma....
Verizon is doing what they are doing so that others won't be able to serve you. When they are finished robbing you of choice they will take your freedom.
Right now, Southern MD has no choice. We have Comcast, and that's it. While the satellite companies down here earn a buck here and there converting people to DirectTV or Dish Network; as far as internet service goes, it's Comcast or Dial-Up. Verizon doesn't even offer DSL service down here (ironically, they play their DSL and FiOS commercials all the time. Talk about salt in the wound). Still at 8mbps down and 384kbps up, but the rich folks up in Howard county get a nice 16mbps down instead (but same upstream I believe).Personally, I want the idiotic decision-making tools at Verizon to wake up and realize they've got 3.5 counties in the DC Metro area that could use some competition for once. While I'm overall satisfied with Comcast's service for Internet (TV is another story) and tech support is in Baltimore for TV and White Marsh for Internet (no India, yay!), I'd like to see some competition brought in to force them to lower prices and raise speeds.
I also don't buy the triple play offers of Comcast OR Verizon, mostly because I do not like putting my eggs in one basket. I plan on having a copper line for as long as possible, because that thing never goes down, while Comcast's head-end systems fail randomly around here. Had a power outage last night in a different part of the neighborhood (not mine) that took out the head-end, so while I had power, there was no TV or internet. If I had Comcast's VOIP offering, I'd have had no phone service too (but I have a cell phone as backup if need be). That's partially why I like the old copper lines, because they're always there when everything else seemingly fails.
But anyways, Verizon's missing out, and I can't imagine what drives them to have completely ignored my region for even basic DSL services. I called up tech support once, and got a hold of an actual engineer there, and he says they don't even have DSLAMS installed at the local CO's in my county. They passed up that opportunity of an upgrade to focus on a possible fiber upgrade several years later. Yet still we have none.
I love Metroid like any other fan of the series, but my serious gripes with it are that the strategies are usually too repetitive. Hit something three times, open up a weak spot, attack; rinse lather, repeat two more times. And then there's ALWAYS the something in the game that just annoys the living daylights out of me. Some enemy that's just got an extremely annoying attack or movement designed to frustrate me. I think this is why Nintendo builds such excellent hardware, because they know someone is intentionally going to put a Wiimote through a television screen because of some enemy or boss.
In my case, it's the Tiamat AA Guns on that whatchamacallit planet near the beginning, specifically the one with the Aero Troopers. I've done tossed the Wiimote into the wall twice over it, and quite likely am just going to put the game up for several months now. Amazingly, the Wiimote still functions. A PS2 controller would've died long before now.
Call after 12am local time, and you'll usually wind up getting routed to the local night crew, who tend to be a bit smarter than the day folks (in my case, it's usually the Level 2 technicians I get sent straight to). These are the guys that know UNIX, ping, traceroute, and a host of other programs. It also doesn't hurt to query them on their call center location. In my market, I get sent to a call center that's physically located about an hour away.
My problem lately hasn't even been internet related, but more of an upstream signal issue that used to knock the modem offline, plus render their OnDemand service unusable. I complained enough, and they must've modified my modem to withstand the automatic power cycle when upstream spikes at 58dBmV. So I figure, if I call them enough and harass their various tech levels enough on the TV side, they'll somehow do the same. Tip: When you know the signal issue is at the pedestal (for underground installs), request a "Site Surveyor" tech instead of the normal customer contact tech. They seem to get the problem fixed faster and longer.
This means the cable modems they're using have obviously sunk in quality. I have a Motorola SB5100, and it registers my router's MAC Address just fine. These things should be handled by the low-level firmware found in most cable modems (typically a custom VxWorks kernel)
My advice is to go out to the store, and buy the current member of the Motorola SB5100 series, and take back whatever hunk of junk it is they gave out. If you need a router, Linksys WRT54GL plus the dd-wrt firmware can't be beat. No crappy desktop-level software is needed to get such a setup going.
I'd love to read the micro-sized fine print, but we need to force these companies to actually keep the three-paragraph-long fine print block up longer than two seconds :P
This is a good alternative to IE ad blocking, not to mention other nasty URLs. In conjunction with Adblock, it makes the Internet a bit closer to that old fashioned "Information Superhighway" utopia they threw around back in the 90's.
Those are sales numbers, not production numbers, and yes, they are a decrease from prior months. Roughly, compared to February numbers, the Wii saw a 22% decline in sales, along with a small percentage for the 360. The PS3 has actually gone up in sales a little, shockingly enough. 127,000 units in Feb versus 130,000 units in March. Not a big increase, but it's there.
My opinion, it's the slump we usually see around this time of year. I figure some of the blockbuster titles are being retained by Ninty so they can continue to tweak things (they're about as bad as Blizzard on delaying something for quality purposes), but also to combat the future big hitters from the PS3 and 360 Camp (i.e., Halo 3). Figure, they still have Metroid 3 and Mario Galaxy up their sleeves, plus those other new franchises we saw briefly at E3, yet haven't heard from since (H.A.M.M.E.R. and Disaster). I think as we get into the summer and early fall, we're gonna see a lot of really cool stuff coming out for all three consoles. Sony better have cool stuff in the pipeline, or they're gonna be swimming up shite creek without a paddle (and have hole in the boat).
And the DS? Crikey. 508,000 units in one month. That's just insane. I wish I'd invested in their stock a year ago. tbey struck their all-time high since getting listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange back in 1962. I think it's up to ¥36,000 or something now. Their yearly financial report also comes out next week. That'll be interesting to look at.
--K
Considering I live in MD, Southern MD, to be specific, I would LOVE to know what broadband providers are nearby. Comcast has an exclusive lock on my region, and to make things worse, we have an ongoing return-path/upstream signal issue that has, so far, been traced back to the main tap that they've grudgingly done a few tweaks to. Likely just to get us to shut up. Yet the problem keeps coming back. Verizon and their vaunted Fios service is no where to be found. Hell, we don't even have DSL from Verizon available. When I actually called them up on this, the decision was made to avoid upgrading our local CO and go straight to a fiber upgrade in another few years.
Really, Verizon could come down here and own Comcast simply because it'd give people a choice for once. Choice is a GoodThing(TM). So what are they waiting for?
Guess I'll have to write my reps on this one...
It should be "Proper Ways to Dispose of Spammers?"
I propose the firing squad or hanging. By their balls (if they have any).
Maybe evisceration?
I think you're mistaking Apple for Sony here....
Set your wireless router to use Channel 1 or 11. That did it for me, and Ninty even states this tip in their support section, although they don't offer much of a technical reason why. I kept getting update timeouts when my WRT54GL (running latest dd-wrt) was on channel 6. Switched it to channel 1, and the update progress bar just zipped along like there wasn't a single issue.
Agreed mostly; A lot of the radio stations spend all of 10 seconds running down a list of known tie-ups that anyone can track using online map services and incident trackers (and people who know a specific route very well). My experience has shown WTOP tends to elaborate more on some areas, however. While they'll stick to the usual re-iteration of known traffic issues, if it's a particularly nasty mishap, they will recommend Alt. Routes. Admittedly, however, certain areas have no alternate/escape routes -- the WW bridge corridor for starters.
One thing is for certain, they need many more traffic cameras around the WW bridge corridor. The camera coverage on the VA side is decent, but VDOT needs to fix a few (and add a few around Rt. 1), and MDSHA's coverage on their side is absolutely pitiful. Equally, dDOT should stick a few down 295 for good measure. I'd love to know ahead of time if the 295 backup begins at the split for 95/495 North/South, or if it's gonna be a 4-mile haul from Bolling AFB to beltway.
In the DC/Baltimore region, there's WTOP on 103.5FM and 820AM for news traffic and weather (traffic is every 10mins on the 8's). Alternatively, if one must use a phone to check traffic status, several states have implemented the 511 phone number for checking traffic (in Virginia, this is useful for checking screw ups on the western side of the DC beltway; Maryland has yet to implement this, although their CHART system has an [autodetected] text-only mode for cell phone browsing).
What this feature would really be good for is on their main mapping service that could be checked before leaving to jump into some random traffic mess. Yahoo's maps beta system, while attempting to poorly mimic Google maps, has such a feature (and thus makes it somewhat of a useful service for the time being).
Doing a lot of studying on the nature of the IHS and such, I've discovered this mostly applies to a lot of areas _except_ the DC Beltway (a.k.a., Suicide Circle). It is, quite frankly, a brain dead design as far as interstates go. I-95 was supposed to go through DC, but for some reason (political, I think), that idea was cancelled and I-95, for a time, became the eastern portion of the beltway. It was later re-labelled to the dual scheme of I-95 and I-495. The end result of this is that all your freight traffic has to go around the eastern portion and over the crumbling Wilson Bridge (Although they just opened up the outer loop span and traffic will soon be switched off the old bridge).
Also left out was the DC inner loop system, which would have included an I-266, I-695, I-595, all tying together the converging interstates of I-95, I-66, and I-70. Although one wonders whether this would have helped or hindered the current layout gven the volume of traffic that passes through...
Tons of info on the DC/VA/MD road area can be found at Scott Kozel's Roads to the Future site, as well as tons of info on the various 3-digit interstates (including little-known things like the hidden I-595 in MD and the nature of I-238 in CA) at Kurumi.com
Linux on SGI's MIPS workstations is already pretty usable. The core site is at http://www.linux-mips.org/, plus both Gentoo and Debian have functional MIPS Ports [ G | D ].
:)
Between both distro's, most of SGI's systems from the Indy to the Octane are supported (although support for the individual components is dependent on the machine). We're hoping to get our hands on some of their newer stuff, like a Fuel or an Origin 300 to see how hard that will be to port to (especially the R14000), but the dream is to one day (hopefully before the year 3000) get Linux running on a quad-cpu Tezro