I admit, I'm guilty of this. Me and the wife just moved from a 2 bedroom in Madison, WI, to a 1 bedroom in Milwaukee (Money/Job Reasons). Now, even though this 1 bedroom we're in now is larger then our old 2 bedroom, I'm still stuck with putting my huge ass corner desk in the living room, with 3 pcs on it, until we figure out something better.
So lately I've been having to move the USB mouse, PS2 keyboard, and VGA cables from machine to machine occasionally (when PCA/VNC or SSH is frozen). I've been pretty luck, haven't hurt anything. In fact, reminds of something else - you know floppy drives are basically hot swappable to? I only owned 1 FDD, and I needed to do this WinXP install on a friends machine but his machine wouldnt boot off the cd (still doesn't boot from cd, weird). So I had to make the startup disks on my box. It went: *Plug in FDD on my machine *Wait for it to create one disk *Wait for FDD light to go off, unplug and plug it into other machine. *Boot up other machine *Wait for it to ask for disk X *Move FDD to other machine *Hit Enter to continue making the next disk etc etc
So with 1 FDD and 1 Disk I was ablt to create and use all of the WinXP startup disks. Though, I wouldn't want to try it again!
You say: Meanwhile, there won't be a reasonable backup system for the home user, and there really hasn't *EVER* been one.
If by "reasonable" you mean cheap, then I somewhat agree with you - but as far as things go, DDS is perfect for home users. It's tiny 4mm tape and VCR-like loading mechanism isn't suited for business environments, but is perfect for home users. If only the drives weren't so pricey - little DDS-4 drives (20 Gb Native/40 Gb compressed) runs over $1000.
If you'd like to use a backup system for your home, try an external HDD, like those from BusLink. They even have one that uses an external Serial ATA connection - just as fast as being on your system. Back up the home system, leave it at work. Works for me.
Yet again another "review" by a site which has very little information.
Basically it's the author's "feeling" about the notebook, a few pictures, some "testing" which means little to a typical laptop user and absolutely no "Print Article" button so I can bypass the "Hot Words" with advertising, side bar with advertising, top frame with advertising, and bottom frame with advertising.
They manage to stretch out 2 paragraphs over 5 pages. Yuck.
Re:There go my savings.
on
The Borg MegaCube
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, if you RTFA you'd of seen that it retails for 449 pounds, which as of right now is about 750$ USD.
It's a shame that there's only 1000 copies released. I'm not the biggest Trek fan, but I used to watch TNG fairly religously (still catch it now and then) and a whole set like this would of been real nice to have. But, like others have said, I'm going to guess that about 900 of those 1000 copies will be bought by die hard trekkies, never opened, and either safely tucked away in a nitrogen filled, cooled, tungsten safe or immediately put up on ebay with a starting bid of $10,000.
On Windows 2000 it says to not go below 64mb, but I usually set maxmem to 32.
This forces Windows to use no more then what the maxmem switch says, ignoring anything else. Have a cocky cow-orker that loves to tell you how leet his new workstation is? maxmem it! That guy will go nuts trying to figure out what happened - especially if there's a gig+ of ram in the machine.
Ever since I was a young boy, I've played the silver ball. From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all. But I ain't seen nothing like it In any amusement hall... That two point six ton machine Sure ain't no damn pin ball !
Horrible quick parody of "The Who"s song Pinball Wizard.
I feel they make quality products - at least in the Mini-ITX formfactor (haven't tried anything else of theirs, except MB chipsets of course).
I've used several of their Mini-ITX boards for projects, and haven't had any problems yet. I find that for the size and power, they are actually pretty powerful. No, you can't play the latest games on them (or any other game for that matter hehe), no you can't play high quality DivX or encode music on the lower models (You can on the new ones though, like the M8000 and M10000). But they are quiet, fit into almost anything (I'm half done modding a VCR to accept the newer Via M10000 Mini-ITX board. When done I'll have a completely functional nearly silent and hidden HTPC next to the TV on the AV shelf, complete with a working VCR), and can handle most jobs you need done. Drop a 3ware 8 port SATA RAID card into it's available PCI slot and you have an excellent fileserver.
Re:Hallelujah, Stephenson is back!
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wouldn't run to the bookstore just yet, afaik it isn't out until tomorrow. I can't wait to pick it up - I'm trying to get a nice hardcover Stephenson library going, and this will be a great addition.
Yup, I love Dell keyboards to. If your looking for more, check out Package2You.com. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page, they have the real old PS2 Dell keyboards (larger and tilt up more in the back then the newer older ones) and the older QuietKey keyboards from 2000 or so. They are system pulls, but clean and work well. And at only $1.79 each the price can't be beat. I own a dozen of them "just in case". Package2You seems to run out of these keyboards a lot, but after a week or so get in more stock.
Another good thing about Microchip.com: http://sample.microchip.com/.
Pick up to 5 items and have em FedEx'ed to your home. It's a great way to check out a new chip you where wondering about, and not spend the money on it. Granted, it's only 5-25$ per piece, but that's 5-25$ you might waste if you get a new chip to play with and end up toasting it.
I just received one of these today from webmaster@match.com. But I received it on my Hotmail account.
And seeing how Hotmail proudly proclaims on every message: "Notice: Attachments are automatically scanned for viruses using McAfee Security" we'll be getting a lot of hotmail users opening it to take a peak
This is a great start, especially with the way the power grid is now. Essentially right now a surge large enough to damage substations creates a large chain effect, where the incoming substation sees the surge, shuts itself down to protect itself, which adds more power to the surge, which heads down to the next station, which shuts off to keep itself from being blown, which adds more power to the surge, etc etc.
With a way to contain a large surge into the system, we could prevent blackouts like the one that occured in NYC in 1977 (Exactly because of this reason). In 1977 a summer storm knocked several high-voltage power lines out of order. Because of the suddenly reduced load, the power tried to flow back to the substation, which knew it couldn't handle it and shut down. This added more power to the grid, which was sent to the next station along the line, which shut itself off, etc. This cycle of power overload, substation shut down happened for about 55 mins till it hit the main generators (which, although they could shut themselves down, had no way to offload this excess power down the line) and took them out for 25 hours.
I said it before, I'll say it again. Get rid of our 30+ year old nuclear reactors (no new orders for units since 1977) and replace them with newer more powerful solutions and second generation solar equipment. When reactors are running at 102.41% capacity, it's time for an upgrade. We've got the technology now to produce cleaner, safer, more powerful nuclear reactors - but that Three Mile Island paranoia still looms with us I guess. Look at European nations, they derive up to 50% of their power from modern nuclear facilites without any problem and no blackouts. The USA? Just 20% of our power comes from Nuclear energy, the rest from coal fired power plants and "peak use" and "daytime use" gas turbine generators.
Hey, I don't want to live right next door to a huge nuke power plant myself, but if it means cleaner, safer, more reliable power I'd be more then happy to.
I don't think blaster caused the power outages or disabled the systems - have you read about the state of the US powergrid as a whole? It's horrendous! I was watching the discovery channel (or History channel, one of those) and they talked about that large blackout that occured back in NYC in 1977.
The power grid protection system itself is what caused the black out. One substation sees it's getting a huge surge of excess power, can't handle it, and shuts down. This passes this huge surge to the next station, which also shuts itself down to protect itself. It's a huge chain reaction of power surge seen my a substation, substation shuts down to protect itself, surge passes on to next station, etc etc.
The show was about terrorism in the US and how unprotected we are - and it really gets you thinking. If some jackass in Ottawa can plug in their hairblower and toast the power to seberal major metropolitan areas, imagine what a well thought out organized terrorist could do. Personally, I think we should some new nuclear power plants. 66 reactors provide 769 billion kWh, or about 20% of the total power produced in the US (2001 figures). These plants are old, the newest ones going all the way back to the early 80s, with no new orders for nuclear units since 77. The US is relying less on its hydroelectric, nuclear and coal plants and building more "peak use" and "daytime" generators, huge gas turbines that are only turned on when there's a peak demand or only on normal business hours, say 9-5.
Why? It's not any more efficient, in fact these giant gas turbines tend to use more fuel then coal systems to produce nowhere near the same power. It's all about asthetics. No one wants a power plant near them, but everyone wants power. So they build these peak use and daytime plants - low output systems that take up almost no room and dont have the usual huge smoke stacks, etc your used to seeing with plants.
I personally wish the US would update it's power infrastructure, and I'd be willing to pay for it. Retire old, inefficient nuclear plants and build new, more powerful, safer ones. Add in more redundancy into the network, more real-time failovers. They are modernizing it, don't get me wrong, but they aren't going at near the pace I'd like to see.
(Probably kiss my karma goodbye now, oh well. The power grid is something no one cares about or wants to put money into unless something goes wrong - then we all conveinently forget about what happened when theres a bill up to repair and update it at the cost of a couple bucks a week in taxes)
Thanks for the info rsmith. Even though that'll compete with a Simpsons rerun on Fox at the same time, I was really starting to get into the Family Guy - Futurama double header, anyway.
Simpsons started out more for children, then went to more of an adult/child mix and now, well they are running out of ideas and losing steam. The newer episodes of "The Simpsons" don't have quite the dry wit and snappy comebacks anymore like they used to. More or less reusing old ideas from a decade ago. Don't get me wrong, I still watch it, but not as religously as I did in the mid to late 90's (when I feel they hit their sweet spot).
Futurama is definatly more adult oriented, but still has the site gags and what not that children love, so it still makes for a good family show.
Then again it's not really fair to compare the two shows really. Simpsons have been around 14 years, Futurama 5. Though I do think the 5th season of Futurama is superior to a 5th season Simpsons, but Groening has grown as an artist since that time, so that can be expected. Let's just hope Futurama gets the syndication that the Simpsons has, and I'll still be happy!
I was a truck driver for a bit after the IT recession - it was fun, and I have a lot of cool looking work shirts now.
Our truck (Me and the wife drove team) was a 2002 Freightliner Century Class S/T, with a 375HP Cat power plant (13.8 liters, max rpms 2100, 10 speed transmission). Our fuel mileage averaged about 8mpg loaded, and 13mpg empty. Now when we hit the east and west coasts, that changed considerably. Most new trucks nowdays have an onboard display that allows you to see some engine stats, like MPG, etc. I've seen the MPG as low as.9MPG fully loaded (78,000pds or so, max in US is 80,000) going up over the rockies in Colorado.
When I first started driving, I thought it was full of a bunch of low-bred moronic rednecks. I learned my lesson - it actually requires a lot of math skills to drive. While the overall max weight of the truck cant exceed 80,000 you have to watch axle weights (usually 20,000 max single axle, 34,000 max tandem). There's 2 places on the truck that slide (usually) the fifth wheel and the trailer axles. Loaded up with paper and the like, it can be a real juggling act, balancing that weight to be even. Even things like the amount of fuel you have in your tanks comes into consideration sometimes. Not only that, but some places have trailer axle restrictions - places like California which only allows the trailer to be MAX in the fifth hole (theres usually 17-21 holes to help us adjust weight) can make it insane.
Not only that, but at least 85% of the truckers I met carried laptops & GPS units these days - it's a lot more high tech then you think! I saw a thing about the Qualcomm tracking center, large screen like in the NASA mission control with thousands of little dots moving - all trucks (and some marine vessels)being tracked via GPS to with 1/10th of a mile in real time.
Take for example if someone changes tires on a big truck...going from the stock size up to 44" of rolling rubber.
Surley if the data were used in something like a court case, or for any important reason, tiresize and other factors would be considered? Any alyer woorth his/er salt would be on top of this.
Not only that, but I'm sure most people would spend the 50$ or so to reprogram the vehicles computer, since putting wrong size tires on your vehicle and NOT doing this will lead to horrible fuel mileage, acceleration, etc on any modern vehicle that relies on accurate info to forecast what will happen next
Are almost non-existant (I have yet to see one, in my 300+ lan parties I've been too). Quite a diffrent thing when you can look at the guy next to you and see him wallhacking, or aimbotting - it's pretty blatant. He'd kick a nice swift kick in the head, and be labeled a lamer.
One thing about planning large scale parties - don't let people without PCs in, unless you know them well. Being stuck at a LAN party without a PC will lead to the pickpocketing and other such mischief that will give your lan party a bad name.
Also, make up a bunch of "packets" of info. Inside the packet, have a little map with the location to the bathrooms, the name of the game server, the IP they can use (or if it's DHCP), and even their place at the table if you have assigned seating.
Make sure to have a couple of 55gallon garbage cans handy, and assign someone as the garbage man - making sure the trash cans arent overflowing, spills are cleaned up, etc - trust me, this is a must.
There's so much more info and hints out there, I'll let some others answer it.
Hell, every thing you need to know about it has been graciously already written for you by lanparty.com. It's called, simply enough, "The Guide" and covers everything pretty well. Read it.
Actually, that's not true. There's a dish made for RV's and SemiTrucks thats self-tracking. It's called the Motosat AutoTrac In-Motion System It's inside of a 'dome' and tries to track the satellite as much as possible. In fact, when I was a truck driver, we had (like most carriers) 2way satellite communication and email and that dish too tracked the satellite in real time. I didn't have to stop the truck to send a message to my dispatcher. And as for How are you supposed to watch TV... Well, in RV's there's usually more then 1 person, and as a truckdriver my wife teamed with me, so she could of watched TV while I was driving, and vice-versa.
This goes along with my plans. 1. Change name ti L. Bob Rife 2. Create cable TV monopoly 3. Start own religion 4. Work on meta-virus 5. Buy aircraft carrier 6. Get residents of 3rd world country to do my bidding!
Slashdot Mirror
I admit, I'm guilty of this.
Me and the wife just moved from a 2 bedroom in Madison, WI, to a 1 bedroom in Milwaukee (Money/Job Reasons).
Now, even though this 1 bedroom we're in now is larger then our old 2 bedroom, I'm still stuck with putting my huge ass corner desk in the living room, with 3 pcs on it, until we figure out something better.
So lately I've been having to move the USB mouse, PS2 keyboard, and VGA cables from machine to machine occasionally (when PCA/VNC or SSH is frozen). I've been pretty luck, haven't hurt anything.
In fact, reminds of something else - you know floppy drives are basically hot swappable to? I only owned 1 FDD, and I needed to do this WinXP install on a friends machine but his machine wouldnt boot off the cd (still doesn't boot from cd, weird). So I had to make the startup disks on my box. It went:
*Plug in FDD on my machine
*Wait for it to create one disk
*Wait for FDD light to go off, unplug and plug it into other machine.
*Boot up other machine
*Wait for it to ask for disk X
*Move FDD to other machine
*Hit Enter to continue making the next disk
etc etc
So with 1 FDD and 1 Disk I was ablt to create and use all of the WinXP startup disks. Though, I wouldn't want to try it again!
And compare serial drives to serial drives.
I would have loved to see that SCSI against an SATA150 drive.
You say:
Meanwhile, there won't be a reasonable backup system for the home user, and there really hasn't *EVER* been one.
If by "reasonable" you mean cheap, then I somewhat agree with you - but as far as things go, DDS is perfect for home users. It's tiny 4mm tape and VCR-like loading mechanism isn't suited for business environments, but is perfect for home users. If only the drives weren't so pricey - little DDS-4 drives (20 Gb Native/40 Gb compressed) runs over $1000.
If you'd like to use a backup system for your home, try an external HDD, like those from BusLink. They even have one that uses an external Serial ATA connection - just as fast as being on your system.
Back up the home system, leave it at work. Works for me.
Yet again another "review" by a site which has very little information.
Basically it's the author's "feeling" about the notebook, a few pictures, some "testing" which means little to a typical laptop user and absolutely no "Print Article" button so I can bypass the "Hot Words" with advertising, side bar with advertising, top frame with advertising, and bottom frame with advertising.
They manage to stretch out 2 paragraphs over 5 pages. Yuck.
You'd get more information from Panasonic's website and their Toughbook W2 Datasheet (PDF) then you will at this site.
Well, if you RTFA you'd of seen that it retails for 449 pounds, which as of right now is about 750$ USD.
It's a shame that there's only 1000 copies released. I'm not the biggest Trek fan, but I used to watch TNG fairly religously (still catch it now and then) and a whole set like this would of been real nice to have. But, like others have said, I'm going to guess that about 900 of those 1000 copies will be bought by die hard trekkies, never opened, and either safely tucked away in a nitrogen filled, cooled, tungsten safe or immediately put up on ebay with a starting bid of $10,000.
One of perhaps my all time favorite jokes to pull on cow-orkers using Windows is a little used and little known boot.ini switch called maxmem.
o ws 2000" /MAXMEM=32
Just append it to the ARC path like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\winnt="Wind
On Windows 2000 it says to not go below 64mb, but I usually set maxmem to 32.
This forces Windows to use no more then what the maxmem switch says, ignoring anything else. Have a cocky cow-orker that loves to tell you how leet his new workstation is? maxmem it! That guy will go nuts trying to figure out what happened - especially if there's a gig+ of ram in the machine.
For added fun, turn OFF his swap file.
Ever since I was a young boy,
I've played the silver ball.
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played them all.
But I ain't seen nothing like it
In any amusement hall...
That two point six ton machine
Sure ain't no damn pin ball !
Horrible quick parody of "The Who"s song Pinball Wizard.
I feel they make quality products - at least in the Mini-ITX formfactor (haven't tried anything else of theirs, except MB chipsets of course).
I've used several of their Mini-ITX boards for projects, and haven't had any problems yet. I find that for the size and power, they are actually pretty powerful. No, you can't play the latest games on them (or any other game for that matter hehe), no you can't play high quality DivX or encode music on the lower models (You can on the new ones though, like the M8000 and M10000).
But they are quiet, fit into almost anything (I'm half done modding a VCR to accept the newer Via M10000 Mini-ITX board. When done I'll have a completely functional nearly silent and hidden HTPC next to the TV on the AV shelf, complete with a working VCR), and can handle most jobs you need done. Drop a 3ware 8 port SATA RAID card into it's available PCI slot and you have an excellent fileserver.
I wouldn't run to the bookstore just yet, afaik it isn't out until tomorrow. I can't wait to pick it up - I'm trying to get a nice hardcover Stephenson library going, and this will be a great addition.
Yup, I love Dell keyboards to. If your looking for more, check out Package2You.com.
:).
Scroll down towards the bottom of the page, they have the real old PS2 Dell keyboards (larger and tilt up more in the back then the newer older ones) and the older QuietKey keyboards from 2000 or so.
They are system pulls, but clean and work well. And at only $1.79 each the price can't be beat. I own a dozen of them "just in case".
Package2You seems to run out of these keyboards a lot, but after a week or so get in more stock.
So, now ya know where to buy them
Another good thing about Microchip.com: http://sample.microchip.com/.
Pick up to 5 items and have em FedEx'ed to your home. It's a great way to check out a new chip you where wondering about, and not spend the money on it. Granted, it's only 5-25$ per piece, but that's 5-25$ you might waste if you get a new chip to play with and end up toasting it.
I just received one of these today from webmaster@match.com. But I received it on my Hotmail account.
And seeing how Hotmail proudly proclaims on every message:
"Notice: Attachments are automatically scanned for viruses using McAfee Security"
we'll be getting a lot of hotmail users opening it to take a peak
"Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Well, here it is on slashdot - and probably will end up being posted on numerous other sites, blogs, etc.
And as the old saying goes "Any publicity, is good publicity"
This is a great start, especially with the way the power grid is now.
Essentially right now a surge large enough to damage substations creates a large chain effect, where the incoming substation sees the surge, shuts itself down to protect itself, which adds more power to the surge, which heads down to the next station, which shuts off to keep itself from being blown, which adds more power to the surge, etc etc.
With a way to contain a large surge into the system, we could prevent blackouts like the one that occured in NYC in 1977 (Exactly because of this reason). In 1977 a summer storm knocked several high-voltage power lines out of order. Because of the suddenly reduced load, the power tried to flow back to the substation, which knew it couldn't handle it and shut down. This added more power to the grid, which was sent to the next station along the line, which shut itself off, etc. This cycle of power overload, substation shut down happened for about 55 mins till it hit the main generators (which, although they could shut themselves down, had no way to offload this excess power down the line) and took them out for 25 hours.
I said it before, I'll say it again. Get rid of our 30+ year old nuclear reactors (no new orders for units since 1977) and replace them with newer more powerful solutions and second generation solar equipment.
When reactors are running at 102.41% capacity, it's time for an upgrade.
We've got the technology now to produce cleaner, safer, more powerful nuclear reactors - but that Three Mile Island paranoia still looms with us I guess.
Look at European nations, they derive up to 50% of their power from modern nuclear facilites without any problem and no blackouts. The USA? Just 20% of our power comes from Nuclear energy, the rest from coal fired power plants and "peak use" and "daytime use" gas turbine generators.
Hey, I don't want to live right next door to a huge nuke power plant myself, but if it means cleaner, safer, more reliable power I'd be more then happy to.
I don't think blaster caused the power outages or disabled the systems - have you read about the state of the US powergrid as a whole? It's horrendous!
I was watching the discovery channel (or History channel, one of those) and they talked about that large blackout that occured back in NYC in 1977.
The power grid protection system itself is what caused the black out. One substation sees it's getting a huge surge of excess power, can't handle it, and shuts down. This passes this huge surge to the next station, which also shuts itself down to protect itself. It's a huge chain reaction of power surge seen my a substation, substation shuts down to protect itself, surge passes on to next station, etc etc.
The show was about terrorism in the US and how unprotected we are - and it really gets you thinking. If some jackass in Ottawa can plug in their hairblower and toast the power to seberal major metropolitan areas, imagine what a well thought out organized terrorist could do.
Personally, I think we should some new nuclear power plants. 66 reactors provide 769 billion kWh, or about 20% of the total power produced in the US (2001 figures). These plants are old, the newest ones going all the way back to the early 80s, with no new orders for nuclear units since 77.
The US is relying less on its hydroelectric, nuclear and coal plants and building more "peak use" and "daytime" generators, huge gas turbines that are only turned on when there's a peak demand or only on normal business hours, say 9-5.
Why? It's not any more efficient, in fact these giant gas turbines tend to use more fuel then coal systems to produce nowhere near the same power. It's all about asthetics. No one wants a power plant near them, but everyone wants power. So they build these peak use and daytime plants - low output systems that take up almost no room and dont have the usual huge smoke stacks, etc your used to seeing with plants.
I personally wish the US would update it's power infrastructure, and I'd be willing to pay for it. Retire old, inefficient nuclear plants and build new, more powerful, safer ones. Add in more redundancy into the network, more real-time failovers.
They are modernizing it, don't get me wrong, but they aren't going at near the pace I'd like to see.
(Probably kiss my karma goodbye now, oh well. The power grid is something no one cares about or wants to put money into unless something goes wrong - then we all conveinently forget about what happened when theres a bill up to repair and update it at the cost of a couple bucks a week in taxes)
aug24, for that comment I now call you my friend.
Thanks for the info rsmith. Even though that'll compete with a Simpsons rerun on Fox at the same time, I was really starting to get into the Family Guy - Futurama double header, anyway.
Simpsons started out more for children, then went to more of an adult/child mix and now, well they are running out of ideas and losing steam. The newer episodes of "The Simpsons" don't have quite the dry wit and snappy comebacks anymore like they used to. More or less reusing old ideas from a decade ago. Don't get me wrong, I still watch it, but not as religously as I did in the mid to late 90's (when I feel they hit their sweet spot).
Futurama is definatly more adult oriented, but still has the site gags and what not that children love, so it still makes for a good family show.
Then again it's not really fair to compare the two shows really. Simpsons have been around 14 years, Futurama 5. Though I do think the 5th season of Futurama is superior to a 5th season Simpsons, but Groening has grown as an artist since that time, so that can be expected.
Let's just hope Futurama gets the syndication that the Simpsons has, and I'll still be happy!
I love that show. It was on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim for like a month, but now it's on TNN (I think TNN) at 1:30 am and 1:30 pm (Central time).
At least we can always have them on DVD.
As I grew older, I definatly got more into Futurama then the Simpsons, even though I've been watching the Simpsons since 1990.
I was a truck driver for a bit after the IT recession - it was fun, and I have a lot of cool looking work shirts now.
.9MPG fully loaded (78,000pds or so, max in US is 80,000) going up over the rockies in Colorado.
Our truck (Me and the wife drove team) was a 2002 Freightliner Century Class S/T, with a 375HP Cat power plant (13.8 liters, max rpms 2100, 10 speed transmission). Our fuel mileage averaged about 8mpg loaded, and 13mpg empty. Now when we hit the east and west coasts, that changed considerably. Most new trucks nowdays have an onboard display that allows you to see some engine stats, like MPG, etc. I've seen the MPG as low as
When I first started driving, I thought it was full of a bunch of low-bred moronic rednecks. I learned my lesson - it actually requires a lot of math skills to drive. While the overall max weight of the truck cant exceed 80,000 you have to watch axle weights (usually 20,000 max single axle, 34,000 max tandem).
There's 2 places on the truck that slide (usually) the fifth wheel and the trailer axles. Loaded up with paper and the like, it can be a real juggling act, balancing that weight to be even. Even things like the amount of fuel you have in your tanks comes into consideration sometimes. Not only that, but some places have trailer axle restrictions - places like California which only allows the trailer to be MAX in the fifth hole (theres usually 17-21 holes to help us adjust weight) can make it insane.
Not only that, but at least 85% of the truckers I met carried laptops & GPS units these days - it's a lot more high tech then you think!
I saw a thing about the Qualcomm tracking center, large screen like in the NASA mission control with thousands of little dots moving - all trucks (and some marine vessels)being tracked via GPS to with 1/10th of a mile in real time.
Take for example if someone changes tires on a big truck...going from the stock size up to 44" of rolling rubber.
Surley if the data were used in something like a court case, or for any important reason, tiresize and other factors would be considered? Any alyer woorth his/er salt would be on top of this.
Not only that, but I'm sure most people would spend the 50$ or so to reprogram the vehicles computer, since putting wrong size tires on your vehicle and NOT doing this will lead to horrible fuel mileage, acceleration, etc on any modern vehicle that relies on accurate info to forecast what will happen next
Are almost non-existant (I have yet to see one, in my 300+ lan parties I've been too).
Quite a diffrent thing when you can look at the guy next to you and see him wallhacking, or aimbotting - it's pretty blatant. He'd kick a nice swift kick in the head, and be labeled a lamer.
One thing about planning large scale parties - don't let people without PCs in, unless you know them well.
Being stuck at a LAN party without a PC will lead to the pickpocketing and other such mischief that will give your lan party a bad name.
Also, make up a bunch of "packets" of info. Inside the packet, have a little map with the location to the bathrooms, the name of the game server, the IP they can use (or if it's DHCP), and even their place at the table if you have assigned seating.
Make sure to have a couple of 55gallon garbage cans handy, and assign someone as the garbage man - making sure the trash cans arent overflowing, spills are cleaned up, etc - trust me, this is a must.
There's so much more info and hints out there, I'll let some others answer it.
Hell, every thing you need to know about it has been graciously already written for you by lanparty.com.
It's called, simply enough, "The Guide" and covers everything pretty well. Read it.
Actually, that's not true. There's a dish made for RV's and SemiTrucks thats self-tracking. It's called the Motosat AutoTrac In-Motion System It's inside of a 'dome' and tries to track the satellite as much as possible. In fact, when I was a truck driver, we had (like most carriers) 2way satellite communication and email and that dish too tracked the satellite in real time. I didn't have to stop the truck to send a message to my dispatcher.
And as for How are you supposed to watch TV...
Well, in RV's there's usually more then 1 person, and as a truckdriver my wife teamed with me, so she could of watched TV while I was driving, and vice-versa.
This goes along with my plans.
1. Change name ti L. Bob Rife
2. Create cable TV monopoly
3. Start own religion
4. Work on meta-virus
5. Buy aircraft carrier
6. Get residents of 3rd world country to do my bidding!
Sweet!
When you have a somewhat accurate portrayal of hacking in movies?
heheh
Coincidence? Yeah, probably.
This post... TO BE CONCLUDED