Re:Professional racing *PREVENTS* bike-innovation!
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Sports Technology?
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· Score: 1
It is very true that a recumbent will not win the Tour, because they simply don't climb well. But that arguement is kind of like saying that a F1 car wouldn't do well in a Baja race.
Recumbents are very nice for fairly flat riding, for commuting, and recreational riding. I have both traditional frame bikes and a recumbent (Vision R40). I love my mountain bike for off-road. I love my recumbent for street & paved trail riding.
I live in Iowa, and there are a lot of greenbelt trails and "rails to trails" here, which are ideal for recumbent riding. They are very comfortable - I can ride just about all day on one, and not have any problems I would have on my traditional frame - yes some people do experience various pains on a traditional bike. I usually get numb hands / wrists, and pain in the shoulders & neck after exteneded traditional frame riding.
On a recumbent, I sometimes get a pain in the achilles area, and in the quad right above the knee, but that's only after some seriously long riding, like after a few days of RAGBRAI
So, you're right that recumbents won't replace racing bikes, but I think it would be great to see a recumbent racing division, on courses specifically suited to them.
Oh, and down-hill on a recumbent is a blast. Yes, they do have less drag, even without a fairing. You can fly down hills, and it's not that scary / precarious once you learn how to handle one. Try going down hill on a recumbent towing a Bob trailer w/ 40 lbs of camping gear. That's some serious downhill speed. Uphill, 6 mph is about right...
I installed Roger Wilco once, and it got Gator all over my PC. For those of you not "in the know", Gator is a spyware app that basically sucks 'n crap, or sucks crap, or is crap.
I'm with the majority here - TeamSpeak is the way to go, until game developers get smart an integrate voice comm. I think Counter-Strike has about the best version of this I've seen.
Flip phones are great, if you like your phone to break all the time. I've got a Nokia 6190 that I've had for several years, and it's been very durable. The people I know that have flip phones keep breaking the hinges on them.
The one think I like better about the new Samsung palm os phone is the graffitti area.
I just hope the sound quality is better than the VisorPhone - I used one for about a year before going back to my nokia.
Having your networking planned out well is key. Get someone who really knows what they're doing with your switches - not someone who just thinks they know. I've seen LAN's that were pretty f'dup because people have switches daisy-chained all over, and the collision lights blink like crazy. Get your network set up correctly and use good equipment, especially for the backbone. Cisco, or Bay Networks work well. As others have mentioned, cheap switches will blow chunks and / or start dropping ports when their MAC tables get overrun.
Secondly, make sure you have adequate power. Our golden rule has always been 8 PC's per 10 amp circut. That may be a bit conservative, but it works well and we have had very few problems that way. Most venues (hotel convention rooms and such) don't have enough power for 120 PC's. Be sure to check - and get someone at the venue who KNOWS what they're talking about, not the sales guy, because he'll tell you what you want to hear.
I've been on staff for a LAN group for 3 years doing LAN's for up to 100 people... and I can tell you if you don't have those two basics covered, nothing else matters.
Our current facility for the last year has been a local Community College campus that just built a new tech campus. Everything is wired with jacks in the floor, and nice Cisco switching equipment. If you can find someplace like that, consider yourselves lucky. Otherwise, good luck kludging your infrastructure together at a hotel.
Some other advice - get all of the various game patches and map packs up on a local file server, and try to get your gamers to use those. Otherwise your outbound internet connection (if you're lucky enough to have one) will get hammered when 120 people go grab the 80mb Desert Combat patch from an internet site.
Also, assemble a good staff that will work together well! Nothing sucks more than having a staff that's fighting at a LAN.
If I were you, I'd hold a couple of smaller LAN's and get your logistics worked out before trying to host a 120 seat LAN right off the bat. Get your staff and some friends together, hold a 25 or 30 seat LAN, doink around with the network, get your game servers running well, and figure out what you're doing before you make a fool of yourselves in front of a big crowd.
Chances are, there's already a LAN group in your area - have you really looked around for one? Consider working together with them. Or at least go to some of their events and get some pointers from people that know what they're doing. Or go laugh at their mistakes.
Roger Zelazny - "Lord of Light". I've seen others mention the Amber series, which I found tedious and self-indulgent on par with Hubbard, but "Lord of Light" was a great book, mixing the Hindu gods with science fiction. "Roadmarks" is pretty interesting too.
David Brin - the "Uplift" series, starting with "Sundiver". Great stuff.
Gregory Benford - great hard science fiction. Timescape is my favorite - you'll never think about time travel quite the same after reading this... I need to read more of his work!
Guy Gavriel Kay - Very good Tolkien inspired fantasy. He's the writer who helped finish the Simarilion (sp?). His style and quality are on par with Tolkien, but he doesn't steal any of the Tolkien mythology, instead he created his own.
Brian W. Aldiss - a very prolific science fiction author, and winner of many awards, but a lot of people have never heard of him. There's a book (based on a short story) called either "Hothouse" or "The Long Afternoon of the Earth" depending on where it was printed. Also, for a very tongue-in-cheek book, try "The 80 Minute Hour - A Space Opera". OK, maybe it's just wierd. But it was fun to read.
You mention you've read "Neuromancer" by Gibson. Have you read "Count Zero Override"? Just about all of the big Gibson fans I know consider this to be his best work, and I agree.
I suppose they could sue Linus for every dime he's ever made selling Linux, right? That would be, er, exactly NOTHING.
Not that I agree with superflous litigation, but it would be SO FUNNY if SCO went through a costly court case, only to have the Judge come to that settlement.
Shit... you mean you're supposed to throw out your old computers. But, what if I find a use for all of those old C-64's, and Sun XPC's, and 486 PC's, and...
64 character file names rate up there with morons
on
High Density CDs
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· Score: 1
...who type the entire body of an email or post in the subject line, or at least start the sentence in the subject, and continue it in the body.
I detest overly long file names. IMHO, spaces shouldn't be a valid character in file names either.
See attached : "Why I hate fricking long filenames attached Word document for slashdot post May 1st 2003.doc"
OK, just my opinion... but just because some of the/. editors are anime freaks, they think somehow everyone else is going to be interested in it.
I liked Speed Racer as much as the next kid when I was in 2nd grade... I really fail to see the attraction in bad animation and even worse dubbing. I mean, if a gamer gets less than 200 fps, they go ape shit. But 10 fps (or whatever anime usually is) is somehow just fine.
The "cosplay" (didn't know the term until today) people were, er, interesting to watch when I was at Gencon a couple years ago. So were the dorks who dress up in Storm Trooper outfits. Of course, nothing beats the chicks in chainmail bikini's with 50 "so you've never really kissed a girl before" nerds following behind at a respectable distance, so they don't get cooties or anything.
p.s. Yeah, I guess this is a troll, isn't it? Note to self: don't post when you get home from the bar.
Moreover, I also spend at least 7 hours every weekend contributing code to some of the more popular projects that you have seen on SourceForge, such as the mail filtering utility and the Gayme instant messaging program.
Hmm... I did a search for "gayme" on sourceforge, no such project. I suspect you're pulling our leg.
In any case... if there is such a project, aren't there already several other IM's out there? So then, isn't your arguement about redunancy a little redundant?
"To dissipate the heat, cooling loops will be employed to take heat from the laser system and transfer it into the aircraft's fuel tank, where it can be burned away."
I'm no "nuclear genius" but that doesn't sound like the safest proposition to me. I wouldn't want to try dissapating 900kw of heat into my car's gas tank... but, best of luck to you.
Um... That's why they launched, or attempted to launch it in the middle of a dry lake bed in the desert.
The rocket is designed to travel 50 or 60 miles straight up (more or less). Even if it went haywire and flew 60 mile horizontally, it would probably just smash into a cactus. I mean, how many people live within 60 miles of a dry lake bed?
If everyone's so worried about the crush server crushing itself and wasting hardware and destroying a Linux box... why don't you do something to save it?
There's lots of seconds left... if you were the type to hack into things, you could crack it and stop it from crushing itself. I personally don't condone that type of activity, and while I'm not a lawyer, especially not a UK lawyer, maybe they'd be lenient on you because you were trying to prevent a machine from killing itself...
I have a nice 15" LCD panel monitor (Gateway FPD 1500) that I've hauled around, using a simple cardboard slip cover to protect it from getting scratched up... not nearly as good as some of the other foam padded / hard shell cases mentioned here.
That said... I also have a Dell Inspiron 8000 900mhz with a GeForce 2 Go (It's a year old). Nothing beats being able to take this to work, to LUG meetings, and to LAN parties. I have the Dell backpack case. I can walk in to a LAN party in one trip, usually with the backpack and one other small bag.
If you are travelling a lot, then the laptop is well worth the investment. A new Inspiron 8200 starts at about $1500.
I've taken my SP250 biking with me (in a pannier on the back of my Vision R40 recumbent) on a centrury ride, and on 3 days of RAGBRAI and other then the mentioned skipping during startup, it's been great.
I did have the read lense get messed up - apparantly it's spring loaded, and hitting a bump must have got it stuck at an angle. A light touch popped it back in place.
As for batteries... the supplied niMH batteries last for 10 to 12 hours. I went to Rad Shack and bought an extra set to carry around with me. You'd be a fool to keep putting alkaline batteries in one of these (or anything else if you can help it).
Other than it being a little on the large side... I love this player.
Your headline is misleading. If you actually read the article, you'll see that the inkjet chip cooling and the roving heat-detecting robot are actually two seperate projects.
The robot seems like overkill to me. You'd think it would be much cheaper and more efficient to mount a thermal sensor in each rack, which could then be networked with the environmental controls in the room, or the proposed louvered / directional floor vents mentioned in the article
A much better use for robotics would be to have a Mountain Dew dispensing droid for the geeks in the office.
It's not as impossible as you might think. Say you're developing a project for a corporate standard where they're using IE 5.5, so you instal IE 5.5 to test it. Then you go look at the help files, click the infected one, and bang-o, you've triggered the virus.
In a perfect (well, perfect for the MS arena anyway) world, that corp standard would be updated to IE 6.0, but it doesn't always work that way. Ask any web developer how many browsers they have on their system for testing purposes. I have Opera 6.x, IE 6, Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 4.x, and lynx... possibly a few others.
Anyone running a nVidia nForce Micro ATX mobo yet? I'm thinking of getting an Abit NV7M... just looking for a little aluminum cube like this one that will hold that mobo - and have a big enough power supply to drive an Athlon.
That way you'd actually have somthing you can game on... I'm currently gaming on a Dell inspiron 8000 w/ geforce 2 go.
p.s. Way to re-post this ss50 story. You already reviewed it about a week ago. Yay,/. rox0rs.
Free as in free, or free as in "you can download and use this software at no cost, but we're going to hose your IP stack and spy on you"? That kind of free? OK, just wanted to clarify.
Funny how whenever anyone mentions Motorola, or AltiVec... it's suddenly a fantastic Apple innovation. IMHO this is akin to Microsoft or it's fans claiming innovation for it's "embrace and extend" tactics.
AltiVec is just some nifty CPU optimization on the G4... it's not a desktop cold fusion device folks. I'll be impressed when a G4 chip doesn't cost 4 times as much as a Pentium or AMD chip. Get over it.
If you read the article, it says nada about Apple... this is a cross compiler for embedded linux systems running Motorola G4 processors.
The article DOES NOT say that RedHat is releasing a Linux distribution for Apple G4's, which about 90% of the posts here seem to imply.
I like the concept of the Flex-ATX case in Tom's review, except for the lack of an AGP slot. It's got built-in NIC & sound, why not leave off the crappy S3 integrated video and give me an AGP slot? Video cards are probably one of the most often updated components in a PC. Or maybe let's see a Flex-ATX mobo based on the nVidia nForce...
I also like the concept of having modular drive bays others have mentioned here - in reference to what Dell & others do in their laptops. An interchangable standard for both laptops and desktops would rock! Imagine being able to pull the DVD/CDRW out of your laptop and pop it in your desktop.
For expansion cards, modules you could plug in - like PC-Card (PCMCIA) or mini-PCI, would be cool. I've always thought PC design should be made of plug-in modules. Want a new CPU? plug in a new card. A different NIC? Just plug in a new card.
Someone else mentioned the Lego modular stacking idea. Ever see the SCSI boxes from Lacie that you can stack? Something like that would be sweet.
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It is very true that a recumbent will not win the Tour, because they simply don't climb well. But that arguement is kind of like saying that a F1 car wouldn't do well in a Baja race.
Recumbents are very nice for fairly flat riding, for commuting, and recreational riding. I have both traditional frame bikes and a recumbent (Vision R40). I love my mountain bike for off-road. I love my recumbent for street & paved trail riding.
I live in Iowa, and there are a lot of greenbelt trails and "rails to trails" here, which are ideal for recumbent riding. They are very comfortable - I can ride just about all day on one, and not have any problems I would have on my traditional frame - yes some people do experience various pains on a traditional bike. I usually get numb hands / wrists, and pain in the shoulders & neck after exteneded traditional frame riding.
On a recumbent, I sometimes get a pain in the achilles area, and in the quad right above the knee, but that's only after some seriously long riding, like after a few days of RAGBRAI
So, you're right that recumbents won't replace racing bikes, but I think it would be great to see a recumbent racing division, on courses specifically suited to them.
Oh, and down-hill on a recumbent is a blast. Yes, they do have less drag, even without a fairing. You can fly down hills, and it's not that scary / precarious once you learn how to handle one. Try going down hill on a recumbent towing a Bob trailer w/ 40 lbs of camping gear. That's some serious downhill speed. Uphill, 6 mph is about right...
I installed Roger Wilco once, and it got Gator all over my PC. For those of you not "in the know", Gator is a spyware app that basically sucks 'n crap, or sucks crap, or is crap.
I'm with the majority here - TeamSpeak is the way to go, until game developers get smart an integrate voice comm. I think Counter-Strike has about the best version of this I've seen.
Flip phones are great, if you like your phone to break all the time. I've got a Nokia 6190 that I've had for several years, and it's been very durable. The people I know that have flip phones keep breaking the hinges on them.
The one think I like better about the new Samsung palm os phone is the graffitti area.
I just hope the sound quality is better than the VisorPhone - I used one for about a year before going back to my nokia.
Having your networking planned out well is key. Get someone who really knows what they're doing with your switches - not someone who just thinks they know. I've seen LAN's that were pretty f'dup because people have switches daisy-chained all over, and the collision lights blink like crazy. Get your network set up correctly and use good equipment, especially for the backbone. Cisco, or Bay Networks work well. As others have mentioned, cheap switches will blow chunks and / or start dropping ports when their MAC tables get overrun.
Secondly, make sure you have adequate power. Our golden rule has always been 8 PC's per 10 amp circut. That may be a bit conservative, but it works well and we have had very few problems that way. Most venues (hotel convention rooms and such) don't have enough power for 120 PC's. Be sure to check - and get someone at the venue who KNOWS what they're talking about, not the sales guy, because he'll tell you what you want to hear.
I've been on staff for a LAN group for 3 years doing LAN's for up to 100 people... and I can tell you if you don't have those two basics covered, nothing else matters.
Our current facility for the last year has been a local Community College campus that just built a new tech campus. Everything is wired with jacks in the floor, and nice Cisco switching equipment. If you can find someplace like that, consider yourselves lucky. Otherwise, good luck kludging your infrastructure together at a hotel.
Some other advice - get all of the various game patches and map packs up on a local file server, and try to get your gamers to use those. Otherwise your outbound internet connection (if you're lucky enough to have one) will get hammered when 120 people go grab the 80mb Desert Combat patch from an internet site.
Also, assemble a good staff that will work together well! Nothing sucks more than having a staff that's fighting at a LAN.
If I were you, I'd hold a couple of smaller LAN's and get your logistics worked out before trying to host a 120 seat LAN right off the bat. Get your staff and some friends together, hold a 25 or 30 seat LAN, doink around with the network, get your game servers running well, and figure out what you're doing before you make a fool of yourselves in front of a big crowd.
Chances are, there's already a LAN group in your area - have you really looked around for one? Consider working together with them. Or at least go to some of their events and get some pointers from people that know what they're doing. Or go laugh at their mistakes.
Roger Zelazny - "Lord of Light". I've seen others mention the Amber series, which I found tedious and self-indulgent on par with Hubbard, but "Lord of Light" was a great book, mixing the Hindu gods with science fiction. "Roadmarks" is pretty interesting too.
David Brin - the "Uplift" series, starting with "Sundiver". Great stuff.
Gregory Benford - great hard science fiction. Timescape is my favorite - you'll never think about time travel quite the same after reading this... I need to read more of his work!
Guy Gavriel Kay - Very good Tolkien inspired fantasy. He's the writer who helped finish the Simarilion (sp?). His style and quality are on par with Tolkien, but he doesn't steal any of the Tolkien mythology, instead he created his own.
Brian W. Aldiss - a very prolific science fiction author, and winner of many awards, but a lot of people have never heard of him. There's a book (based on a short story) called either "Hothouse" or "The Long Afternoon of the Earth" depending on where it was printed. Also, for a very tongue-in-cheek book, try "The 80 Minute Hour - A Space Opera". OK, maybe it's just wierd. But it was fun to read.
You mention you've read "Neuromancer" by Gibson. Have you read "Count Zero Override"? Just about all of the big Gibson fans I know consider this to be his best work, and I agree.
I suppose they could sue Linus for every dime he's ever made selling Linux, right? That would be, er, exactly NOTHING.
Not that I agree with superflous litigation, but it would be SO FUNNY if SCO went through a costly court case, only to have the Judge come to that settlement.
Shit... you mean you're supposed to throw out your old computers. But, what if I find a use for all of those old C-64's, and Sun XPC's, and 486 PC's, and...
...who type the entire body of an email or post in the subject line, or at least start the sentence in the subject, and continue it in the body.
I detest overly long file names. IMHO, spaces shouldn't be a valid character in file names either.
See attached : "Why I hate fricking long filenames attached Word document for slashdot post May 1st 2003.doc"
OK, just my opinion... but just because some of the /. editors are anime freaks, they think somehow everyone else is going to be interested in it.
I liked Speed Racer as much as the next kid when I was in 2nd grade... I really fail to see the attraction in bad animation and even worse dubbing. I mean, if a gamer gets less than 200 fps, they go ape shit. But 10 fps (or whatever anime usually is) is somehow just fine.
The "cosplay" (didn't know the term until today) people were, er, interesting to watch when I was at Gencon a couple years ago. So were the dorks who dress up in Storm Trooper outfits. Of course, nothing beats the chicks in chainmail bikini's with 50 "so you've never really kissed a girl before" nerds following behind at a respectable distance, so they don't get cooties or anything.
p.s. Yeah, I guess this is a troll, isn't it? Note to self: don't post when you get home from the bar.
Airport is WiFi. An Apple AirPort access point just has an Orinico pc-card in it. -dc
Hmm... I did a search for "gayme" on sourceforge, no such project. I suspect you're pulling our leg.
In any case... if there is such a project, aren't there already several other IM's out there? So then, isn't your arguement about redunancy a little redundant?
From the article:
"To dissipate the heat, cooling loops will be employed to take heat from the laser system and transfer it into the aircraft's fuel tank, where it can be burned away."
I'm no "nuclear genius" but that doesn't sound like the safest proposition to me. I wouldn't want to try dissapating 900kw of heat into my car's gas tank... but, best of luck to you.
-dc
Um... That's why they launched, or attempted to launch it in the middle of a dry lake bed in the desert.
The rocket is designed to travel 50 or 60 miles straight up (more or less). Even if it went haywire and flew 60 mile horizontally, it would probably just smash into a cactus. I mean, how many people live within 60 miles of a dry lake bed?
-dc
If everyone's so worried about the crush server crushing itself and wasting hardware and destroying a Linux box... why don't you do something to save it?
There's lots of seconds left... if you were the type to hack into things, you could crack it and stop it from crushing itself. I personally don't condone that type of activity, and while I'm not a lawyer, especially not a UK lawyer, maybe they'd be lenient on you because you were trying to prevent a machine from killing itself...
-dc
Ani has her own Indie record label Righteous Babe Records if you check out the "artists" link, they have several people signed now.
I don't know the #'s, but Ani is often cited as an Indie label sucess story. And her music kicks ass. And her concerts kick ass too.
-dc
I have a nice 15" LCD panel monitor (Gateway FPD 1500) that I've hauled around, using a simple cardboard slip cover to protect it from getting scratched up... not nearly as good as some of the other foam padded / hard shell cases mentioned here.
That said... I also have a Dell Inspiron 8000 900mhz with a GeForce 2 Go (It's a year old). Nothing beats being able to take this to work, to LUG meetings, and to LAN parties. I have the Dell backpack case. I can walk in to a LAN party in one trip, usually with the backpack and one other small bag.
If you are travelling a lot, then the laptop is well worth the investment. A new Inspiron 8200 starts at about $1500.
-dc
I've taken my SP250 biking with me (in a pannier on the back of my Vision R40 recumbent) on a centrury ride, and on 3 days of RAGBRAI and other then the mentioned skipping during startup, it's been great.
I did have the read lense get messed up - apparantly it's spring loaded, and hitting a bump must have got it stuck at an angle. A light touch popped it back in place.
As for batteries... the supplied niMH batteries last for 10 to 12 hours. I went to Rad Shack and bought an extra set to carry around with me. You'd be a fool to keep putting alkaline batteries in one of these (or anything else if you can help it).
Other than it being a little on the large side... I love this player.
-dc
Your headline is misleading. If you actually read the article, you'll see that the inkjet chip cooling and the roving heat-detecting robot are actually two seperate projects.
The robot seems like overkill to me. You'd think it would be much cheaper and more efficient to mount a thermal sensor in each rack, which could then be networked with the environmental controls in the room, or the proposed louvered / directional floor vents mentioned in the article
A much better use for robotics would be to have a Mountain Dew dispensing droid for the geeks in the office.
-dc
Who's on first?
No, The Who was Roger Daltry, Pete Townsend, the late John Entwhistle and the late Keith Moon.
Ziggy Stardust is a fictional character played by David Bowie in his stage show in the 70's.
-dc
It's not as impossible as you might think. Say you're developing a project for a corporate standard where they're using IE 5.5, so you instal IE 5.5 to test it. Then you go look at the help files, click the infected one, and bang-o, you've triggered the virus.
In a perfect (well, perfect for the MS arena anyway) world, that corp standard would be updated to IE 6.0, but it doesn't always work that way. Ask any web developer how many browsers they have on their system for testing purposes. I have Opera 6.x, IE 6, Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 4.x, and lynx... possibly a few others.
-dc
Anyone running a nVidia nForce Micro ATX mobo yet? I'm thinking of getting an Abit NV7M... just looking for a little aluminum cube like this one that will hold that mobo - and have a big enough power supply to drive an Athlon.
/. rox0rs.
That way you'd actually have somthing you can game on... I'm currently gaming on a Dell inspiron 8000 w/ geforce 2 go.
p.s. Way to re-post this ss50 story. You already reviewed it about a week ago. Yay,
-dc
Where do you get 10???
/.'ed site, you can see the 2 standard IDE ports next to the memory slots, and the 4 IDE RAID ports at the bottom right.
Standard IDE 0 & 1 = 4 devices
4 RAID controllers = 8 devices
4 + 8 = 12.
If you get to the
How many firewire HD's could you chain on? If you're desperate you could throw in some USB drives too. Talk about storage out the wazoo.
This message brought to you by the number 12.
-dc
Free as in free, or free as in "you can download and use this software at no cost, but we're going to hose your IP stack and spy on you"? That kind of free? OK, just wanted to clarify.
-dc
Funny how whenever anyone mentions Motorola, or AltiVec... it's suddenly a fantastic Apple innovation. IMHO this is akin to Microsoft or it's fans claiming innovation for it's "embrace and extend" tactics.
AltiVec is just some nifty CPU optimization on the G4... it's not a desktop cold fusion device folks. I'll be impressed when a G4 chip doesn't cost 4 times as much as a Pentium or AMD chip. Get over it.
If you read the article, it says nada about Apple... this is a cross compiler for embedded linux systems running Motorola G4 processors.
The article DOES NOT say that RedHat is releasing a Linux distribution for Apple G4's, which about 90% of the posts here seem to imply.
As usual... read the article first... THEN post.
-dc
I also like the concept of having modular drive bays others have mentioned here - in reference to what Dell & others do in their laptops. An interchangable standard for both laptops and desktops would rock! Imagine being able to pull the DVD/CDRW out of your laptop and pop it in your desktop.
For expansion cards, modules you could plug in - like PC-Card (PCMCIA) or mini-PCI, would be cool. I've always thought PC design should be made of plug-in modules. Want a new CPU? plug in a new card. A different NIC? Just plug in a new card.
Someone else mentioned the Lego modular stacking idea. Ever see the SCSI boxes from Lacie that you can stack? Something like that would be sweet.
-dc