Messages

61

Off Topic / Re: Find out what's inside a package

« on: December 13, 2012, 06:24:51 PM »

I've had amazon ship a USB cable in a giant box with some of those plastic air bag things so I would take the box size with a grain of salt unless it also happens to be heavy and doesn't rattle.

Books usually come packaged in a different kind of box without tape.

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Off Topic / Re: Find out what's inside a package

« on: December 13, 2012, 06:13:33 PM »

The answer is no. You could look up the tracking number on amazon if it was purchased with your account and then read the receipt but that's it.

At my work we get purchase orders attached to the outside of all our boxes that tell you what's in them but that's because we're an actual business and not a house.

tried when I first saw it on all the codes, didn't work :c

So did I, it didn't work for me either but that could be because I'm trying to scan off a computer screen and I've never had much luck with that. In any case, I figure it's probably just shipping information for the post office - they don't care what's in the package really.

If the box had a barcode on it from the manufacturer that would be different - stuff like furniture or bulk paper or whatever usually has barcodes on the boxes for use in the warehouse. This is just a standard amazon box though, probably with another Assassin's Creed ad on the side.

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Drama / Re: RTB Dedicated Hosting Service - add-on management functionality!

« on: December 13, 2012, 05:36:09 PM »

It's very common for native applications to simply be wrappers for web applications, eg. stumbleupon, ebay, youtube applications for cellphones, etc. In fact, my university's app used to be a simple redirection to their mobile website and they managed to get it listed in the apple store. Many businesses refer to their mobile sites as web apps (or just apps) and design them to look like tablet applications, see http://m.npr.org/ for an example. The distinction between a "native" and "web" app is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

You guys need to chill out.

64

Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 11, 2012, 09:07:37 PM »

how do you grid. as far as zoning and bus stops

Well the city I built up there wasn't planned at all. Basically I just put a bus stop on every corner and two rail lines intersecting the whole map.

My plan for my next large city is to use this:



I recall reading somewhere that pedestrians walk a maximum of 7 blocks so that should cover everything. I don't plan on putting a rail station in ever city block because I don't want train tracks that dense across my map. I'll also make some extra wide blocks for horizontal rails that go east/west, those will probably be 7 blocks wide so I can run a rail down the center and have 3 tiles on each side.

Here's a short technical article that explains some of how people decide what form of transportation to take although it's got a lot of holes:

ulator" class="bbc_link" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Understanding_the_Traffic_Sim ulator

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 11, 2012, 04:55:15 PM »

To the north is a city composed entirely of manufacturing, high tech, and high wealth commercial, the east is a city composed entirely of manufacturing, dirty industry, and waste incineration plants, to the south is a small city composed of medium density low and medium wealth apartments, and to the west is a city composed entirely of high tech industry. All are running budget surpluses, some as high as 15k a month.

I'm currently saving up money for the subway system which will hopefully make those briefcases above some of the buildings go away - it's not an issue of there not being enough jobs but a transportation problem. The skyscrapers have such high populations that 1 or 2 will completely overwhelm a bus stop.

I think my next high density city will probably use a much denser street grid so I fit two skyscrapers to a block along with a bus/sub/rail connection.

I may also move the airport to a lower density city.

66

Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 09, 2012, 08:30:36 PM »

I highly recommend anyone playing the game apply the high tech industry fix, which allows rich people to work at high tech industry. Due to a silly programming bug, rich people don't work at high tech industry so you have to zone a lot of commercial for them.

http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/48632-tutorial-applying-the-i-ht-bug-fix-correctly/

The bug also affects nuclear and solar power plants but there's not a general fix for them (although you can easily write it yourself). I didn't bother with it because power plants don't create very many jobs anyway.

EDIT: I started a new region today, I'll have some pictures up of my city in a couple days, once it's grown a bit.

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 06, 2012, 01:53:26 AM »

Any industry will use it for freight. In fact, you technically don't even need stations, they'll dump freight right on to any tracks that border them, but they work a lot better with stations. Ground rail is also one of the cheapest ways to move a lot of people. You can also park a car at a train station so people who don't like riding buses can still use it, and if you put a bus stop next to a rail stop then pretty much everyone will use it. People tend to ride the trains to industrial zones.

I'm not familiar with el rail because I don't use it much. I bet the above ground stuff is cheaper to maintain than the subways, and there's also the whole aesthetic effect.

I also like to use ferries, which although they're not very fast or high capacity, they do help alleviate some congestion on bridges. Unlike bridges people can ride one ferry to any other ferry stop. People can also ride the boats between cities.

At the end of the day it's all about redundancy and variety in mass transit. I use pretty much everything except el and monorail.

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 06, 2012, 12:46:00 AM »

Subway and elevated rail are the same and are favored by lower income. Rails can carry freight traffic and can't connect to subways. Monorails are similar to subways but are favored by high wealth and can't go underground.

I generally don't have monorails in my towns because I don't have enough rich people concentrated in one area to need a separate mass transit network for them. Instead the bulk of my passengers use buses and subways. I use a lot of freight trains in industrial cities and they convert over to some minor passenger lines in my residential areas just because I like to see the trains going around my city but I don't build huge rail networks.

As far as I can tell there's no difference between alternating one way streets next to each other and an avenue except the avenue has the pretty parks in the middle.

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 04, 2012, 09:38:52 PM »

Would Rush Hour possibly cause this? I don't know why it would, but it seems to change a few 'rules'.

I have rush hour so I doubt it.

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Games / Re: Sim City 4

« on: December 04, 2012, 04:31:52 PM »

Yeah I've never had a problem with Sim City 4. I start out with low density everything (except industrial) and build with that until most of the map is full. Then I start incrementally replacing city blocks with medium density. I stop after a few blocks then work out all the traffic problems. After transportation is adequately provided to a block, I start working on the next blocks. I don't built hospitals or police until my first medium density blocks start coming in. I build schools a little bit before then.

Here's my big list of tips:

One common mistake is starting off building a complete school system. When people move into your city they start out at age 0 and won't start attending high school or college for a few decades. You don't need libraries for probably 30 or 40 years. You're just dumping money into something nobody's going to use. Same with water. People don't need water until there's like 10k of them.

You don't need police or health care at all until you want medium and high wealth people, which I don't bother attracting until the medium/high density stages.

You're going to hit hard population caps without neighboring regions. If you just develop one city by itself it's going to be very difficult. Developing two cities side by side is also great because you can put all your industry in one and all your residents in another. Then you'll get no industrial pollution in your residential city, which is great because you're already going to have enough trouble managing air pollution from traffic once you get highways.

Industry produces an obscene amount of water pollution that will shut down all your wells in a mixed development city unless you're on a huge map. Water treatment is also very expensive.

Leave a lot of space for a university and don't bother placing colleges unless you're playing on a huge map. Also leave space for other huge improvements, like airports, stadiums, and golf courses. The bonuses are very important. They're not just for decoration, they alleviate population caps. You're going to need pretty much every bonus.

Contrary to popular belief, low-wealth isn't bad. You can easily make up the drop in tax income with bus faire, and I'm not exaggerating. I had bus stations making hundreds of dollars a month, and multiply it by a couple dozen bus stations... You can easily support a very complex and expensive highway system with mass transit and still have a net income every month on your transit budget. Which is good, because I've hit highway capacity with nothing but bus traffic. Car traffic in my cities is usually outnumbered by buses 3:2.

Rich people hate buses. You have to give them stupidly expensive mass transit like monorails. It's easier to just zone some high tech industry or huge corporate offices down the street from them.

Landfills take up too much room and incinerators are expensive and produce a lot of pollution. Interestingly enough though, you can reduce funding to incinerators to 0 and they'll still burn trash but produce no energy. That solves the cost problem, since incinerators are a stuffty way to produce electricity anyway. Doesn't solve the pollution problem (especially water pollution), so stick them in another city.

There is no reason to send school buses out to collect children in your commercial district. Individually tune the school bus fund so it only covers neighborhoods.

Similarly, schools start out overfunded. Capacity is directly proportional to funding. If you have a high capacity school and only 1000 students, cut it's funding. Don't forget to adjust the budget every few years because the population will change. Same goes for hospitals.

71

Off Topic / Re: Bought an Arduino UNO.

« on: December 04, 2012, 03:53:47 PM »

Adafruit has a fantastic guide on how to get started with Arduino.

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Off Topic / Re: Good Keyboard?

« on: December 03, 2012, 12:37:23 PM »

Unicomp makes cheaper buckling spring keyboards in the $80 range.

The cheapest option is to bid on some actual original model m keyboards on ebay honestly. Get the PS/2 version and a USB converter off monoprice if you need one.

73

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread

« on: December 03, 2012, 12:26:51 PM »

while i haven't experienced this, i've heard static may not necessarily fry a component but cause hardware failure. it's hard to detect whether a failure was made by static though.

Static fries circuits. Basically the integrated circuits all operate somewhere around 1 - 5 volts. Static built up on your body can easily build up to thousands of volts. If you create a path between ground and your hand that passes through one of these components, you'll destroy it.

It is hard to troubleshoot because the computer will just flat out stop working. To figure it out you would need to test every single integrated circuit and see which one was giving incorrect output. I assume you'd need an expensive logic probe to do this.

Technically, when you build a computer you're supposed to do it on an antistatic mat and wrist strap connected to an earth ground, such as a cold water pipe. Nobody does this though, grounding the case and holding onto the metal is a lot less expensive. The easiest way to ground a case is to cut the hot and neutral pins off a power cable and plug it into the power supply and the ground connection on an outlet.

A lot of people just work on a table and touch the case a lot. Even I do this. This is technically wrong and there are cases where thus won't work. If both you and the case are ungrounded then you're relying on the cases's ability to dissipate and spread out charge.

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Games / Re: "Perennial" Prototype - Badspot's new game

« on: December 03, 2012, 11:37:12 AM »

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/03/particulate-planetary-exploration-perennial/
http://indiegames.com/2012/12/playable_prototype_perennial_b.html

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Games / Re: Command and Conquer: ALL 'BOUT IT

« on: December 03, 2012, 02:38:54 AM »

Firestorm and RA2 are still some of my favorite games of all time.

Renegade multiplayer was fun too.