Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
Former college movie theater operator here, Because of copyright law in the USA, to project a movie in public you need the permission of the copyright holder, usually given as a 'public performance license' available through a couple avenues. https://www.criterionpicusa.com/about-us
It costs per day through the way we did it, so we could do a couple performances and had to report ticket revenue as they also got a % sometimes. Big commercial theaters have complicated deals with the studios involving a huge percent of ticket sales, sometimes 100% for weeks, and they're even trying to strongarm some of concession sales, along with bundling like if you want say big sci fi movie, you have to carry our other product too, and limiting prints per market so theaters have to bid per region and bigger chains get more. It's a crazy crazy business with logs of legal history where studios used to have vertical monopoly owning theaters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
If only a few people show up you'll lose money. They usually do these in the chains near me a few times a month though. Classics.
For reference: Stern is nearly the whole market, but there is Jersey Jack and Spooky Pinball, and a handful of smaller players in the market. There is an incredible private community over on pinside.com if you want a community of real people to chat about these machines.
EVERYTHING used to be so complex. Before minicomputers all control systems mostly used relays, so a complicated AV automated system would have walls of octal base relays. We just only have the pinballs and juke machines left because all this was ripped out of industrial places since the 70s and replaced with PLCs and embedded controllers. The complexity is nanoscale and software now so harder to see.
Don't let dreams be dreams, start small, the minimum. One map, one screen. Just a toy for yourself. A little effort expended repeatedly yields compound interest.
My mother's favorite game was Sim City 3000, and that soundtrack is still one of the best and my favorites. Such a groovy Jazz with variety. I'd love to find other artists like Jerry Martin did that soundtrack, most smooth jazz is too cheesy for me.
Yeah, it's a relay counter like a score motor in a pinball machine, but each rotor is different since the I is mod 5, the V is mod2 and the LX is mod 80, directly connected to the lights. The principles discussion is well done. Wow I love old tech documentation!
I still don't have a good visualization of what the display 'dial' looks like
Amazing, thank you for the link! There's an entire 'collected papers' on the IEEE website. I'm going to miss my college library accounts now i'm graduated!
How can they only have one low resolution picture and only pictures of the outside?? What display tech does it use? I can't imagine there are Roman Numeral Nixie tubes. https://www.kuenzigbooks.com/pages/books/28672/claude-e-shan...
I see Clear Lower, Clear KBD, Clear Upper. 7 'digits' display, but wow if anything needed a manual...
The Ride "Superman, The Escape" at six flags magic mountain in california is a Linear Induction Motor driven ride that pushes the ride car using electromagnets. At both ends of the track are some serious magnets that if something fails will stop the car that has a metal fin the electromagets act on in a fail-safe way using that principle. I'm not privy to the exact details, but knew some of the designers. This was built in the mid-90s. You can see the one end in this picture. https://rcdb.com/140.htm#p=264
I've seen it in testing with a power off e-stop and the car just comes to a rather sudden halt, and they have to get it out with a winch slowly. Pretty good safe solution, though not a feature of normal ride operation.
There was a massive 8% JPL layoff earlier in the year with a vauge 'uncertain upcoming budget' justification, perhaps affected a lot of plans. I don't have any inside info though.
not 'beeps' so much as either Pulse-position modulation or FM to control the positions. I had a 'beta test' teddy before they were released, a friend of my father was a sculptor at WoW. I guess little me didn't want to give it back but had to, my Mom had to fight hard to find one at Christmas with a little inside info on delivery dates.
You can still make cool stuff for your own sake, you don't have to monetize every hobby.
My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.
I bought a 400 mostly to support them and I like the designs the PI team does. It felt a bit underpowered as someone with a powerful x86 fedora desktop, but it reminds me of the 'cheap enough to let a kid play/break it' hand-me-down computers I grew up with. I wish I had more time to tinker around, build a 'cyberdeck'.
Proof-of-stake ruins it's security with a rich get richer endgame where the stakers concentrate until it's not distributed enough and one entity or group can collude and control the system and there's no way to exit that state.
Our toyota prius has software enough to keep my cruise control speed safely behind the car in front of me, and give me warnings of lane departures if I weave. The car plays bluetooth audio from my phone. The car has buttons to set the ac settings. This is the appropriate use for software in the car.
Features are not bugs. Touch screens in a car are dangerous and bad. This person is selling something.
Toyota cars last and dont' require subscriptions. I can buy a maps update SD card if I want.
Toyota is killing it and my next purchase will consider anti-features like all controls via screens a failing design.
Sounds related to Wadsworth's Constant on youtube where it skips the first 30% because early on most were filler intros,
also related to the millennial pause, where people over a certain age hit record and have a brief pause before talking versus younger who are already talking while the recording starts, which was an observation of tiktok users of 'elders' like Taylor Swift doing so.
Just went to get some BIOS files for the 5th gen Intel NUCs and they've purged them from the site. It's like when Microsoft purged the KB of everything not in current support. Burning of libraries, it's sickening.