I wouldn't have minded sequels with the same game engines and basic gameplay or even recompilations for newer technology and OSes depending on the cost of those titles. Some games just worked really, really well. I really liked the original Quake, much more than Quake ][ or Quake ]|[ with their revised gameplay and different engines. I really like Warcraft II and was disappointed when an overhead-style Warcraft III wasn't released while I was still into gaming, or that Warcraft II wasn't released in a Windows format that could take advantage of high resolution screens to show more of the battlefield at a time.

You know, as much as I liked titles that came out in the later video-acceleration era with advanced music and sound effects, there's still nothing quite like that first level of DOS-based DOOM with the overdriven guitar coming out of an FM-synth midi chip on a Soundblaster 16, with the monsters roaring and the lights flickering.

Heh. I guess it's been a long time since I played SimCity titles regularly. I kind of gave up when The Sims came out and went in a completely different direction than the city-building games had gone. Thought about playing Streets of SimCity, but between the original overhead-view Grand Theft Auto and the first-person Carmageddon II and Monster Truck Madness on the PC plus Twisted Metal on the Playstation I didn't really feel a need to get into even more games. I didn't even know that EA bought-out Maxis.

Was there really any improvement in the SimCity titles after SimCity 2000? That was probably the last one I played regularly. It seemed, at the time, to be perfect. One could control the terrain, within reason, the under-terrain infrastructure, the water table, and obviously the roads and zoning. What else did a city simulator need?

For POTS lines I prefer the Western Electric 2500 or 2554 depending on a tabletop vs wallmount application. They were designed when the phone company owned them and they were leased with the service, so they were overdesigned to last decades. Nearly every phone in my house is one of these two models.

"I've got a karma-enhancing knife! It gives me a +1 against comments!"

With apologies to Dead Alewives and Dr. Demento...

You know, with that attitude they're probably not going to give you the job, Rincewind...

...we'll have Kaspersky bloatware slowing down new computers belonging to average people, much like how we have Norton bloatware doing that?

And I wonder what this relatively obscure business market, that's not really centered around new technology or technology that the average person could have a chance in hell of playing with, has to do with a site that focuses on nerdy or geeky things.

Be careful, the Cylons can infiltrate computer networks. May be better to keep them separated.

That depends on how much direct control the technician has over the pumps. If the technician doesn't really make any choices and is just conducting rote firmware updates or pushing out prewritten configurations then short of b0rking the process itself he can't do much to break them.

As for the process itself, I advocate a low-tech solution. Go get a bunch of older small Netbooks with ethernet jacks on them, set up a box in the van or service truck as the wifi controller, connect those netbooks to the wifi in the truck, and then connect the netbooks to the pumps. Use the box in the truck to control the netbooks, automate the process or at least add some scripting that makes it easier.

Thanks. Couldn't remember the generic terms. I guess you could blame the combination of video games use apogee and perigee, plus the use of perigee in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Q lost his powers while the ship was trying to save a planet from a natural satellite crashing down, so I picked the ones that I knew didn't specifically refer to Earth-orbiting satellites, though i guessed poorly...

Phobos and Deimos both have nearly circular orbits, with aphelions and parhelions that are not very far apart:

Phobos:
9,234 km min
9,376 km average
9,518 km max


Deimos:
23,453 km min
23,458 km average
23,463 km max


Compared to our Moon:
384,400 km min
363,104 km average
405,696 km max


I can see how one could say that Phobos and Deimos, like our Moon, have extremely regular orbital distances, but given that the science that has stated that our Moon was caused by an impactor is still itself being both refined and challenged, I wonder if it's a little premature to conclude that based on orbital characteristics alone the two Martian moons derived from the same sort of event as our Moon. After all, many of the planets have orbits that are very near circular, but we do not interpret their existence in a similar fashion.

Simply adding a hint of what you posted would have made the article summary work a whole lot better.

The branding, "Yubikey Neo," means nothing to me. Sounds like an Asian version of the main character from The Matrix.

Multimode is good for a lot more than 100'. I've seen 62.5um OM1 push past 1000' with standard SX transceivers, and to 2000' with mode-conditioning cables. With 50um OM3 it gets far better.

You can also use singlemode for short distances, you just have to put your light meter on and attenuate the signal down to avoid burning-out the receiving end. Most providers that use singlemode tend to use it exclusively so they don't have to carry multiple sizes of fiber patch cords, and while the transceivers are more expensive, the fiber itself is cheaper.