It could say "Psystar is accusing Apple of bricking generic PCs that are attempting to illegally run OS X",
That's the thing, though. If you buy a piece of software, you can do whatever you want with it. I can for instance, put an OSX DVD in my PS3, but whether it will work or not isn't Apple's concern once I've paid my money. I can even make a wind chime out of it or use it as a coaster...
There's no such thing as illegally running software as long as you've bought it. Apple is merely being a bunch of punitive jerks.
Apple can't keep clones out of the game forever. And, in fact, it's the #1 reason they still have such a small market share. If they made it truly open platform, given how it generally works faster and costs a fraction as much as Vista, I'd suspect a lot of people would buy legitimate copies. But yes, as someone else commented, Jobs is the reason why Apple died in the past and is likely to do so in the future, unless he leaves or is replaced(again I might add!) He has a mental block of sorts, near as I can tell, when it comes to the idea of opening up the hardware. And it's really hurting them, considering that Vista is such a half-baked OS that could easily be crushed at this point. If only Jobs would stop being so anal about it all...
Moral(which Jobs should know by now...): Being proprietary is always a road to oblivion.
The problem is that the antenna isn't a major power consumer. It's that the signal path between the circuitry and the antenna is so full of junk on many models due to poor slapped-together designs that the signal must be boosted a lot to communicate with the local cell phone tower. In the old days this wasn't a problem as there weren't major limits on power. Some old Analog units transmitted as much as 10-20W!. Now they have to limit their power to a fraction of that. If the digital signal can't be boosted enough to communicate and it's already at that FCC imposed limit, you're out of luck. No bars. Technically you never actually get "no bars" - you just get too little for the error correction to work any more.
But what about the display, the back lighting, the bluetooth/wifi, the internal speaker... I can think of a lot of things in a cell phone that also cause background noise that must be overcome. Those bare traces on the circuit board are essentially also acting like a microphone for any stray RF signals. The mistake I think is that many people are equating this with analog signals. With RF interference with digital signals, it then falls back to how much you can boost the signal to have the error correction still work.
Think of it like a dirty CD that you're trying to get to play. Obviously if you can clean half of the grime off of the surface it'll have less drop-outs and problems. A good player(or cell phone) likely won't care, but a poor one - it can be the difference between getting a signal in a bad area and nothing at all.
Note - a fun thing to do is to put your cell phone near a pocket radio and see how much noise various models generate while even just on standby.
They use wireless just fine with mics and pickups and so on on stage for these reasons all the time. Less cables, less problems, and also if you've ever had to deal with grounding issues, wireless or a line-level signal that's amplified at the source is a huge improvement. I suspect that's the real problem here - too much background RF noise from the components. Rather than brute-forcing it, he decided to find a way to get around this and clean up the signal in the process.
Btw, most pros don't use wired mics any more. Too many issues. Most studios don't use non-powered speakers any more, either. You're right - I haven't found many setups that use IR or wireless(yet), but I can find many professional systems that use S/PDIF, optical, or other non-analog transmission methods.(shoot, most home theater interconnects are now HDMI for exactly these sorts of reasons.
The real question is how much you have to boost the signal to overcome the interference from the electronics nearby. Since we're talking about a digital transmission, this is very much a factor. Too much background noise and you get garbage at the other end.(not quite like analog wireless). As such, digital cellphones have to boost their signal until they can get a connection. Often, quite a lot, in fact.
You can see this with a HDTV set and an antenna. Too low of a signal and you get no picture at all.
So a heavily shielded antenna and chip with a wireless transmission between them might very well save power, as the signal won't have to be boosted as much to connect to the local cell phone tower. In fact, it might also extend the range, since the real limiting factor of cell phone reception is the FCC and other aggencies' limits on broadcasting power. If you can connect to the local tower/access point with say, half the signal, due to it being less noisy to begin with, then you can get slightly better range as well if you keep the power levels at the old limits.
They also do this in recording studios. It takes far less power and wiring(or can be done via RF or IR) to have each speaker have its own small amplifier than to try to power the whole room with a rack of giant units.
This also would create less interference, believe it or not, since running wires near live electrical components(even the tiny components in a circuit board make a difference - just stick an AM radio near your computer's motherboard) tends to cause interference. This is the other reason recording studios do this. They can run a very heavily shielded or wireless line level signal to each speaker directly. Less power, less clutter, less interference.
Except that we ARE heading into an ice age. But before that happens, the ice caps have to melt.(ice age being triggered by excessive heat).
How it works is that when the planet gets too hot, all of the ice melts and dilutes the oceans. This causes them to get much colder and stop flowing. Basically they just sit and get cold. Very quickly. The last ice age was triggered by this sort of event.
According to scientific data(look it up if you want to), the Earth would have entered a natural ice age cycle in 400-500 years. All humanity has managed to do is accelerate the process down to another 50-60 years. Once the ice in Antarctica melts, the planet will act to cool itself down.
Don't underestimate them... They seem to survive almost anything.
Actually, it looks like something you'd see in Futurama. Complete with the X on top. Since X-Mas is evil in the future, of course it's made out of bits of robot "brains".
This makes you wonder exactly HOW cheap the thing is to make if they consider a 50 cent part to be excessively expensive.
Just another example of Microsoft making second rate junk. They are essentially the GM of the computer industry. A few things are good, but the rest is hopelessly average junk that shows how they really aren't trying very hard any more.
Just because there's no one to press charges doesn't mean it's legal or OK, and the OP obviously wants stuff that's undeniably redistributable.
Obviously if the OP is uncomfortable with any of this advice, he'll not do it. But emulators are perfectly fine by themselves. He could just as easily load the emulators on the machines and let the end user figure it out. If you look online, it's actually quite difficult to find MAME ROMs, though a few free ones are available(the major ROM sites were taken down years ago). That may be 15 or so free ROMs, but it is a viable option.
As for copyright, the interesting thing about it is that it's not like patents, which are jealously guarded and bought after a company dies. In the case of abandoned software by decades dead companies, there have been no major cases about this. At worst a few nastygrams have been sent out, but always to the projects/distribution sites(which stop making those files available) and not the end users. Those that were taken down but really popular almost always have sourceforge or similar groups that have made clones as well.
99.9% of the time the places in question that have such files take them down if there's a question.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/faq.php This site is a good place for exact info and they keep their data current. (note - TONS aren't available or are blocked) Some games are shareware, some are abandoned, and some are still available, and usually dirt cheap at that.
It's pretty easy as well to find who owns the rights as well(sites like the above are full of info on each program's status), if you really care. Many of the original authors have explicitly given their okay to use it OR they have outright gifted it to the community/made it open source/etc. There are hundreds of pieces of old abandoned software out there like this. Use those titles and he's fine.
Or just go to Ebay and buy a few copies of the original floppies. I have a box of old programs like this in storage, and I get old stuff like this at garage sales just for this reason. The last I checked, a copy of Elite for PC was nearly free. The floppy need not even work - all you need is the physical disk.
I know it's been mentioned before, but here are the actual links to the game and the literally hundreds of variants.
A couple of notable features are the AI is very good and the game has the only truly fully random number generator in it that I know of, so every game really is unique and odd things can occasionally happen.
My son plays it and has been known to hit the screen in frustration.:) Not bad for a game that will run on most any machine out there. There are also versions that run as a self-playing screen saver. Quite possibly the most interesting screen saver that I know of.
http://www.thangorodrim.net/ Older files, but then again, not much has been changed in the last few years, either.
If you really want free, a couple of games come to mind:
- NetHack/Angband/etc. Yes, these are text-based, but they formed the basis and inspiration for the Diablo series of games, which were frankly, watered down. I've played Angband off and on myself for nearly fifteen years and have only come close to beating it once. Plus, there are a zillion variants out there as well.
- I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned MAME. True, the legality of having the ROM images is suspect, but I doubt if a video game company that's been out of business for a decade will actually do anything about it, either.
- Lastly, with an emulator, tons of abandonware is available. I've spent many a night playing Elite, Apshaii, Sundog, Alternate Reality, and other classics.
- PovRay is cheap and works great. Actual math and scripting and variables that provide real world skills. It also gets kids focused upon the end result more and less on the math and so on, as well as the tiny details of look and feel. anyone can program a spreadsheet given enough time, but making something look fun and interesting is a whole other art in itself.
- No BASIC, VB, LOGO, or other useless languages. They are dead or likely to be so in the decade it takes for the kids to grow up and actually be using computers. Use a more modern full language instead like Java or C+ or similar - something that they can use for web pages and so on instead of decades old stuff. Also, the stuff that they make you learn has to largely be UN-learned in actual classes.
- I'd suggest grabbing a copy of Angband or NetHack. This is done in standard C and is easy to understand and go through, as it has huge amounts of help/comments, groups online, and is an excellent free primer.
I guarantee that if they know PovRay and how Angband or NetHack works, they have enough skills right there to actually get a real life programming job. You will need some books and a lot of patience, but the rewards are worth it.
Note - these programs also have versions that run on Linux as well as Windows, so there's another way to help their knowledge grow. Just learning how to use Linux in and out from a command prompt is equal to a couple of semesters worth of knowledge at a university these days. It's also free and they know how to think outside of the Windows box.
- I'd also recommend a breadboard and a book of electronic projects. Basic electronics is a very useful way to get them to understand WHY things work like they do in a computer. It's fun and very useful knowledge that's all too often just glossed over.
I suggest a TV jammer or a TV kill-box as an eventual project:) Radios also are very fun. I once made a crystal radio, then made one with about 100 diodes to get about a full watt worth of power.(yes it was ungainly but nice to hear stations without any batteries). There's also robotics and other more advanced projects as well. Ham radio licenses also are good(doubly so if they have to build the set), and of course, there are the various "blinken lights" projects out there. 100-1000 LEDs and a lot of time and some programming. Kids love this sort of stuff.:)
All they have to do is redesign the car/platform/etc a little bit to compensate.
And a small rocket would be a very small rocket, actually. we're talking hardly any more powerful than a few model rocket engines to counteract these forces.(think small thrusters or a tiny jet engine)
It's doable. Just not as easily as we once thought.
The real reason that this was put into law was because with every manufacturer making their pieces of plastic and software offshore in China and similar places, all form the same few factories in some cases. Take computer cases. Most are made in a handful of factories and re-badged as required.
"Protecting their image" is actually better translated as keeping the public in the dark as to what their products really cost. If the supplier in China or Malaysia or wherever decides to undercut Apple, well, they are unable to do anything about it as there IS no place cheaper to have it made.
I used to avoid gray market items and offshore no-name electronics. But that was back when they were really just cheap clones. Now, I can get that IPod Mini sans the name from the same factory in China for $40.
GitS is as deep as anything in its media could possibly be. "A person who is not sure if she is a person but is becomes indistinguishable from another person who is not a person but wants to be."
To a point, it is deep. But it also is a problem of the actual format in which it is seen. The Manga is far better at explaining things, IMO, and keeping true to the slightly "off" feeling of the entire world.(this was the actual inspiration of the Matrix)
It's later explained that she was female originally(the very first full body transplant, in fact), though we don't know much about the intervening years and how many bodies she's swapped between(based upon the differences and comments, though, she's likely 50+ years old). I get the feeling from reading it that she tried being male for a while and gave up on it. But they never explain this.
The animated sequels are a boring 5 or 6 out of 10. Nothing special, but not rubbish, either. Worth reading though, since it raises a lot of interesting questions. Since it's almost 15 years old, it is fun to compare the author's vision with how things are today and the likely future.
The one major thing wrong with it seems to be how easily it is accepted. I'd suspect that there would be a huge conflict as soon as the machines became aware. We'll likely see whether this is true or not in the next 30-40 years, though.
Oh - an interesting point here is that this adds to the proof that our real "selves" are our brains. Everything else seems to be stuff/some sort of interface that's attached to it.(whole philosophical issue about mind versus body and identity)
One of the most onerous problems facing users of Windows are the 2GB per process and 4 GB total limits.(often only 3.5GB or so actually usable) This seems to be a corporate decision by Microsoft rater than an actual limitation of the hardware, as all of the modern processors will allow 38 bit addressing.
32 vs 38 bit might not seem like a lot, but it will allow up to 64GB of ram on the OS. Note how the Windows 32 bit builds are crippled on purpose. Linux, BSD, Mac, and so on all allow it with a simple tweak($0 and a couple of minutes - bad Microsoft!) Also, most motherboards can only fit 8GB anyways. Some can fit 16, but that's it. You need special hardware to get anything approaching really large amounts of memory.
1: Get an Acard ANS9010. MWave sells it for about $250. This is a ram based drive. Not a SSD but a real DDR2 ram disk and perfect for sticking a swap file on as well as Photoshop and other swap files. It even has a battery and a CF card slot to do on the fly backups of the device when you shut down. Better than the I-Ram as once it's off, it's off - the battery only exists to power it long enough to dump the contents to the flash drive.
This solves the speed problems and the lack of extra memory slots on most motherboards at the same time.
2: Another dirty $0 trick is to put the swap file on a second drive on an otherwise unused controller. I use my single IDE port for this - it's my temp storage drive and so it sees no real use. But the difference is massive. I can quit a major gaming title and be back to the desktop in under a second. My drive with the applications on it and the paging file never fight for bandwidth or time. Yes, the second drive thrashes for 1-2 minutes while it's cleaning up all of the garbage files, but I don't slow down.
Note - Both of these together? It's astounding how fast Windows (or even Linux) runs like this.
I'm actually amazed that this doesn't exist already. When you open an account, they give you a tiny USB dongle with the account and that gives you access to your specific account. It would hardly cost them much more than the ATM cards that they already give you.
That cannot take your own intellectual property that is in your head. All the lessons you have learned making the project is still in your head. Nothing is stopping you from making some derivative work based on what you learned.
I'd like to add that copyright is also based upon their ability and desire to enforce it. There are situations where they won't care or they won't be in a situation to market it or distribute it(or even care). A lot of businesses are pragmatic and want a tool for a specific job and don't care at all beyond that it works.
But a university? They are even more anal than Apple, Disney, Microsoft, or any commercial firm. Everything you do while on their campus in their minds is theirs if you so much as receive a dime or a single free lunch from them. Such is life. They will not back down if you decide to fight them and this is true at every single place. The only exception would be if it were a thesis project or something that you were doing entirely by yourself without their help.
But then again, you ARE getting a degree out of it. Fair enough.
The ONLY loophole here is to nerf their ability to make money off of it by using GPL or similar code. Nobody wins, but nobody loses either.
And this is exactly the sort of addle-headed MBA management nonsense that leads to problems that we saw during the.com bust a few years ago. The "magic fix" ideology that computers will solve everything and free us. They thought this as well fifty years ago with kitchens and look at how many people still cook as bad despite all of the fancy tools at our disposal.
"Safely ignored" is a naive' statement on your part. The larger problems are exactly the ones that will eventually doom your company to failure if you ignore them. I can't begin to name the number of companies that I've worked for or dealt with over the years that are literally stagnating or being crushed under the weight of their IT departments. They throw money at their problems instead of changing how they deal with things. A great example of this sort of idiocy is going on right now with the U.S. auto makers. Give us money - give us technology! It can all be solved! No, I'm sorry. The real problem is the idiots in charge who can't innovate their way out of a cardboard box, let alone beat Toyota and other companies.
I'll put my money on Dijkstra this time. I suspect he's a lot smarter than most of us here.
(1) The business community, having been sold to the idea that computers would make their lives easier, is mentally unprepared to accept that they only solve the easier problems at the price of creating much harder ones.
So true. I deal with this every day. Despite the high tech wizardry around us, business still runs pretty much the same. Just, the management is all too happy to throw its problems at someone else. I can't remember how many times in the past that I've had a client, boss, or manager ask me something that is impossible and tell me "fix it" or "make it work".
I completely agree. While it might work, CDMA phone type speeds(think 28.8K modem speeds) and bandwidth issues would cripple it. Yes, I know what they propose is supposedly faster than that. But, we're talking dial-up modem speeds for most of the web, though, since binary data like jpegs and so on can't be compressed. And the speeds that they list for wireless and dial-up modems assume/ed a best-case ASCII only HTML scenario. Take a 64K modem and dump a torrent through it and watch it crawl at 3-4K a second.(cell phones do this as well if you have a wireless card in your computer)
Think of it as a open wireless router in every cell phone cell(I can't imagine they would place them any other locations due to zoning and permits). I've seen nonsense like this myself and it's largely worthless in practice.
Yes, you can get on. Yay. Too bad even Slashdot takes a full minute to load...
We do if you are talking about the average amount that is used simultaneously at its maximum. The thing is that our brains constantly multi-task, so it's not like some static 10-20%, it's more like a rapidly shuffling kaleidoscope of activity that ranges from 10-30% or so at any one moment. But our neurons and synapses do require some down-time. We can't just run at maximum all day long without suffering from headaches and fatigue. A machine has no problems at all - full power, 100% of the time, no sleep. And several orders of magnitude faster switching on and off of the individual "neurons".
True, but it may be that a "cat brain" computer if it's running at 4-5x the normal human's efficiency(since we only use a few percent of our brain at any one time) might actually be as smart as a typical human.
I guess the real issue here is whether it's as capable as a cat's brain after using 100% of its capabilities, or if they are going to model a cat's brain in scale and then run that at full throttle.
Slashdot Mirror
It could say "Psystar is accusing Apple of bricking generic PCs that are attempting to illegally run OS X",
That's the thing, though. If you buy a piece of software, you can do whatever you want with it. I can for instance, put an OSX DVD in my PS3, but whether it will work or not isn't Apple's concern once I've paid my money. I can even make a wind chime out of it or use it as a coaster...
There's no such thing as illegally running software as long as you've bought it. Apple is merely being a bunch of punitive jerks.
Apple can't keep clones out of the game forever. And, in fact, it's the #1 reason they still have such a small market share. If they made it truly open platform, given how it generally works faster and costs a fraction as much as Vista, I'd suspect a lot of people would buy legitimate copies. But yes, as someone else commented, Jobs is the reason why Apple died in the past and is likely to do so in the future, unless he leaves or is replaced(again I might add!) He has a mental block of sorts, near as I can tell, when it comes to the idea of opening up the hardware. And it's really hurting them, considering that Vista is such a half-baked OS that could easily be crushed at this point. If only Jobs would stop being so anal about it all...
Moral(which Jobs should know by now...): Being proprietary is always a road to oblivion.
The problem is that the antenna isn't a major power consumer. It's that the signal path between the circuitry and the antenna is so full of junk on many models due to poor slapped-together designs that the signal must be boosted a lot to communicate with the local cell phone tower. In the old days this wasn't a problem as there weren't major limits on power. Some old Analog units transmitted as much as 10-20W!. Now they have to limit their power to a fraction of that. If the digital signal can't be boosted enough to communicate and it's already at that FCC imposed limit, you're out of luck. No bars. Technically you never actually get "no bars" - you just get too little for the error correction to work any more.
But what about the display, the back lighting, the bluetooth/wifi, the internal speaker... I can think of a lot of things in a cell phone that also cause background noise that must be overcome. Those bare traces on the circuit board are essentially also acting like a microphone for any stray RF signals. The mistake I think is that many people are equating this with analog signals. With RF interference with digital signals, it then falls back to how much you can boost the signal to have the error correction still work.
Think of it like a dirty CD that you're trying to get to play. Obviously if you can clean half of the grime off of the surface it'll have less drop-outs and problems. A good player(or cell phone) likely won't care, but a poor one - it can be the difference between getting a signal in a bad area and nothing at all.
Note - a fun thing to do is to put your cell phone near a pocket radio and see how much noise various models generate while even just on standby.
They use wireless just fine with mics and pickups and so on on stage for these reasons all the time. Less cables, less problems, and also if you've ever had to deal with grounding issues, wireless or a line-level signal that's amplified at the source is a huge improvement. I suspect that's the real problem here - too much background RF noise from the components. Rather than brute-forcing it, he decided to find a way to get around this and clean up the signal in the process.
Btw, most pros don't use wired mics any more. Too many issues. Most studios don't use non-powered speakers any more, either. You're right - I haven't found many setups that use IR or wireless(yet), but I can find many professional systems that use S/PDIF, optical, or other non-analog transmission methods.(shoot, most home theater interconnects are now HDMI for exactly these sorts of reasons.
The real question is how much you have to boost the signal to overcome the interference from the electronics nearby. Since we're talking about a digital transmission, this is very much a factor. Too much background noise and you get garbage at the other end.(not quite like analog wireless). As such, digital cellphones have to boost their signal until they can get a connection. Often, quite a lot, in fact.
You can see this with a HDTV set and an antenna. Too low of a signal and you get no picture at all.
So a heavily shielded antenna and chip with a wireless transmission between them might very well save power, as the signal won't have to be boosted as much to connect to the local cell phone tower. In fact, it might also extend the range, since the real limiting factor of cell phone reception is the FCC and other aggencies' limits on broadcasting power. If you can connect to the local tower/access point with say, half the signal, due to it being less noisy to begin with, then you can get slightly better range as well if you keep the power levels at the old limits.
They also do this in recording studios. It takes far less power and wiring(or can be done via RF or IR) to have each speaker have its own small amplifier than to try to power the whole room with a rack of giant units.
This also would create less interference, believe it or not, since running wires near live electrical components(even the tiny components in a circuit board make a difference - just stick an AM radio near your computer's motherboard) tends to cause interference. This is the other reason recording studios do this. They can run a very heavily shielded or wireless line level signal to each speaker directly. Less power, less clutter, less interference.
Except that we ARE heading into an ice age. But before that happens, the ice caps have to melt.(ice age being triggered by excessive heat).
How it works is that when the planet gets too hot, all of the ice melts and dilutes the oceans. This causes them to get much colder and stop flowing. Basically they just sit and get cold. Very quickly. The last ice age was triggered by this sort of event.
According to scientific data(look it up if you want to), the Earth would have entered a natural ice age cycle in 400-500 years. All humanity has managed to do is accelerate the process down to another 50-60 years. Once the ice in Antarctica melts, the planet will act to cool itself down.
http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/list.php
It's apparently melting very quickly now.
Raid 1 is for cockroaches.
Don't underestimate them... They seem to survive almost anything.
Actually, it looks like something you'd see in Futurama. Complete with the X on top. Since X-Mas is evil in the future, of course it's made out of bits of robot "brains".
This makes you wonder exactly HOW cheap the thing is to make if they consider a 50 cent part to be excessively expensive.
Just another example of Microsoft making second rate junk. They are essentially the GM of the computer industry. A few things are good, but the rest is hopelessly average junk that shows how they really aren't trying very hard any more.
Just because there's no one to press charges doesn't mean it's legal or OK, and the OP obviously wants stuff that's undeniably redistributable.
Obviously if the OP is uncomfortable with any of this advice, he'll not do it. But emulators are perfectly fine by themselves. He could just as easily load the emulators on the machines and let the end user figure it out. If you look online, it's actually quite difficult to find MAME ROMs, though a few free ones are available(the major ROM sites were taken down years ago). That may be 15 or so free ROMs, but it is a viable option.
http://mamedev.org/roms/
Free ROMS. Toss a few on the machines and the kids will be happy.
As for copyright, the interesting thing about it is that it's not like patents, which are jealously guarded and bought after a company dies. In the case of abandoned software by decades dead companies, there have been no major cases about this. At worst a few nastygrams have been sent out, but always to the projects/distribution sites(which stop making those files available) and not the end users. Those that were taken down but really popular almost always have sourceforge or similar groups that have made clones as well.
99.9% of the time the places in question that have such files take them down if there's a question.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/faq.php
This site is a good place for exact info and they keep their data current. (note - TONS aren't available or are blocked) Some games are shareware, some are abandoned, and some are still available, and usually dirt cheap at that.
It's pretty easy as well to find who owns the rights as well(sites like the above are full of info on each program's status), if you really care. Many of the original authors have explicitly given their okay to use it OR they have outright gifted it to the community/made it open source/etc. There are hundreds of pieces of old abandoned software out there like this. Use those titles and he's fine.
Or just go to Ebay and buy a few copies of the original floppies. I have a box of old programs like this in storage, and I get old stuff like this at garage sales just for this reason. The last I checked, a copy of Elite for PC was nearly free. The floppy need not even work - all you need is the physical disk.
Oh, but wait - the actual sequels are available online as shareware!
http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/
I know it's been mentioned before, but here are the actual links to the game and the literally hundreds of variants.
A couple of notable features are the AI is very good and the game has the only truly fully random number generator in it that I know of, so every game really is unique and odd things can occasionally happen.
My son plays it and has been known to hit the screen in frustration. :) Not bad for a game that will run on most any machine out there. There are also versions that run as a self-playing screen saver. Quite possibly the most interesting screen saver that I know of.
http://www.thangorodrim.net/
Older files, but then again, not much has been changed in the last few years, either.
http://www.zangband.org/
The most popular variant out there that I know of.
http://www.simugraph.com/simutrans/iso_angband/download.html
3D isomorphic version.
http://rephial.org/
This was mentioned before. Get the newer version here, though you likely will have to compile it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToME_(video_game)
http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0
The most recent surviving variant. Well worth your time to read these pages and ask around on the forums.
If you really want free, a couple of games come to mind:
- NetHack/Angband/etc. Yes, these are text-based, but they formed the basis and inspiration for the Diablo series of games, which were frankly, watered down. I've played Angband off and on myself for nearly fifteen years and have only come close to beating it once. Plus, there are a zillion variants out there as well.
- I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned MAME. True, the legality of having the ROM images is suspect, but I doubt if a video game company that's been out of business for a decade will actually do anything about it, either.
- Lastly, with an emulator, tons of abandonware is available. I've spent many a night playing Elite, Apshaii, Sundog, Alternate Reality, and other classics.
- PovRay is cheap and works great. Actual math and scripting and variables that provide real world skills. It also gets kids focused upon the end result more and less on the math and so on, as well as the tiny details of look and feel. anyone can program a spreadsheet given enough time, but making something look fun and interesting is a whole other art in itself.
- No BASIC, VB, LOGO, or other useless languages. They are dead or likely to be so in the decade it takes for the kids to grow up and actually be using computers. Use a more modern full language instead like Java or C+ or similar - something that they can use for web pages and so on instead of decades old stuff. Also, the stuff that they make you learn has to largely be UN-learned in actual classes.
- I'd suggest grabbing a copy of Angband or NetHack. This is done in standard C and is easy to understand and go through, as it has huge amounts of help/comments, groups online, and is an excellent free primer.
I guarantee that if they know PovRay and how Angband or NetHack works, they have enough skills right there to actually get a real life programming job. You will need some books and a lot of patience, but the rewards are worth it.
Note - these programs also have versions that run on Linux as well as Windows, so there's another way to help their knowledge grow. Just learning how to use Linux in and out from a command prompt is equal to a couple of semesters worth of knowledge at a university these days. It's also free and they know how to think outside of the Windows box.
- I'd also recommend a breadboard and a book of electronic projects. Basic electronics is a very useful way to get them to understand WHY things work like they do in a computer. It's fun and very useful knowledge that's all too often just glossed over.
I suggest a TV jammer or a TV kill-box as an eventual project :) Radios also are very fun. I once made a crystal radio, then made one with about 100 diodes to get about a full watt worth of power.(yes it was ungainly but nice to hear stations without any batteries). There's also robotics and other more advanced projects as well. Ham radio licenses also are good(doubly so if they have to build the set), and of course, there are the various "blinken lights" projects out there. 100-1000 LEDs and a lot of time and some programming. Kids love this sort of stuff. :)
All they have to do is redesign the car/platform/etc a little bit to compensate.
And a small rocket would be a very small rocket, actually. we're talking hardly any more powerful than a few model rocket engines to counteract these forces.(think small thrusters or a tiny jet engine)
It's doable. Just not as easily as we once thought.
The real reason that this was put into law was because with every manufacturer making their pieces of plastic and software offshore in China and similar places, all form the same few factories in some cases. Take computer cases. Most are made in a handful of factories and re-badged as required.
"Protecting their image" is actually better translated as keeping the public in the dark as to what their products really cost. If the supplier in China or Malaysia or wherever decides to undercut Apple, well, they are unable to do anything about it as there IS no place cheaper to have it made.
I used to avoid gray market items and offshore no-name electronics. But that was back when they were really just cheap clones. Now, I can get that IPod Mini sans the name from the same factory in China for $40.
GitS is as deep as anything in its media could possibly be. "A person who is not sure if she is a person but is becomes indistinguishable from another person who is not a person but wants to be."
To a point, it is deep. But it also is a problem of the actual format in which it is seen. The Manga is far better at explaining things, IMO, and keeping true to the slightly "off" feeling of the entire world.(this was the actual inspiration of the Matrix)
It's later explained that she was female originally(the very first full body transplant, in fact), though we don't know much about the intervening years and how many bodies she's swapped between(based upon the differences and comments, though, she's likely 50+ years old). I get the feeling from reading it that she tried being male for a while and gave up on it. But they never explain this.
The animated sequels are a boring 5 or 6 out of 10. Nothing special, but not rubbish, either. Worth reading though, since it raises a lot of interesting questions. Since it's almost 15 years old, it is fun to compare the author's vision with how things are today and the likely future.
The one major thing wrong with it seems to be how easily it is accepted. I'd suspect that there would be a huge conflict as soon as the machines became aware. We'll likely see whether this is true or not in the next 30-40 years, though.
Oh - an interesting point here is that this adds to the proof that our real "selves" are our brains. Everything else seems to be stuff/some sort of interface that's attached to it.(whole philosophical issue about mind versus body and identity)
One of the most onerous problems facing users of Windows are the 2GB per process and 4 GB total limits.(often only 3.5GB or so actually usable) This seems to be a corporate decision by Microsoft rater than an actual limitation of the hardware, as all of the modern processors will allow 38 bit addressing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
32 vs 38 bit might not seem like a lot, but it will allow up to 64GB of ram on the OS. Note how the Windows 32 bit builds are crippled on purpose. Linux, BSD, Mac, and so on all allow it with a simple tweak($0 and a couple of minutes - bad Microsoft!) Also, most motherboards can only fit 8GB anyways. Some can fit 16, but that's it. You need special hardware to get anything approaching really large amounts of memory.
1: Get an Acard ANS9010. MWave sells it for about $250. This is a ram based drive. Not a SSD but a real DDR2 ram disk and perfect for sticking a swap file on as well as Photoshop and other swap files. It even has a battery and a CF card slot to do on the fly backups of the device when you shut down. Better than the I-Ram as once it's off, it's off - the battery only exists to power it long enough to dump the contents to the flash drive.
This solves the speed problems and the lack of extra memory slots on most motherboards at the same time.
2: Another dirty $0 trick is to put the swap file on a second drive on an otherwise unused controller. I use my single IDE port for this - it's my temp storage drive and so it sees no real use. But the difference is massive. I can quit a major gaming title and be back to the desktop in under a second. My drive with the applications on it and the paging file never fight for bandwidth or time. Yes, the second drive thrashes for 1-2 minutes while it's cleaning up all of the garbage files, but I don't slow down.
Note - Both of these together? It's astounding how fast Windows (or even Linux) runs like this.
I'm actually amazed that this doesn't exist already. When you open an account, they give you a tiny USB dongle with the account and that gives you access to your specific account. It would hardly cost them much more than the ATM cards that they already give you.
That cannot take your own intellectual property that is in your head. All the lessons you have learned making the project is still in your head. Nothing is stopping you from making some derivative work based on what you learned.
I'd like to add that copyright is also based upon their ability and desire to enforce it. There are situations where they won't care or they won't be in a situation to market it or distribute it(or even care). A lot of businesses are pragmatic and want a tool for a specific job and don't care at all beyond that it works.
But a university? They are even more anal than Apple, Disney, Microsoft, or any commercial firm. Everything you do while on their campus in their minds is theirs if you so much as receive a dime or a single free lunch from them. Such is life. They will not back down if you decide to fight them and this is true at every single place. The only exception would be if it were a thesis project or something that you were doing entirely by yourself without their help.
But then again, you ARE getting a degree out of it. Fair enough.
The ONLY loophole here is to nerf their ability to make money off of it by using GPL or similar code. Nobody wins, but nobody loses either.
And this is exactly the sort of addle-headed MBA management nonsense that leads to problems that we saw during the .com bust a few years ago. The "magic fix" ideology that computers will solve everything and free us. They thought this as well fifty years ago with kitchens and look at how many people still cook as bad despite all of the fancy tools at our disposal.
"Safely ignored" is a naive' statement on your part. The larger problems are exactly the ones that will eventually doom your company to failure if you ignore them. I can't begin to name the number of companies that I've worked for or dealt with over the years that are literally stagnating or being crushed under the weight of their IT departments. They throw money at their problems instead of changing how they deal with things. A great example of this sort of idiocy is going on right now with the U.S. auto makers. Give us money - give us technology! It can all be solved! No, I'm sorry. The real problem is the idiots in charge who can't innovate their way out of a cardboard box, let alone beat Toyota and other companies.
I'll put my money on Dijkstra this time. I suspect he's a lot smarter than most of us here.
Fantastic article. I especially like this part:
(1) The business community, having been sold to the idea that computers would make their lives easier, is mentally unprepared to accept that they only solve the easier problems at the price of creating much harder ones.
So true. I deal with this every day. Despite the high tech wizardry around us, business still runs pretty much the same. Just, the management is all too happy to throw its problems at someone else. I can't remember how many times in the past that I've had a client, boss, or manager ask me something that is impossible and tell me "fix it" or "make it work".
I completely agree. While it might work, CDMA phone type speeds(think 28.8K modem speeds) and bandwidth issues would cripple it. Yes, I know what they propose is supposedly faster than that. But, we're talking dial-up modem speeds for most of the web, though, since binary data like jpegs and so on can't be compressed. And the speeds that they list for wireless and dial-up modems assume/ed a best-case ASCII only HTML scenario. Take a 64K modem and dump a torrent through it and watch it crawl at 3-4K a second.(cell phones do this as well if you have a wireless card in your computer)
Think of it as a open wireless router in every cell phone cell(I can't imagine they would place them any other locations due to zoning and permits). I've seen nonsense like this myself and it's largely worthless in practice.
Yes, you can get on. Yay. Too bad even Slashdot takes a full minute to load...
I personally can't wait for Alzheimer's given all of the stuff (plus an ex) that I'd love to forget about.
We do if you are talking about the average amount that is used simultaneously at its maximum. The thing is that our brains constantly multi-task, so it's not like some static 10-20%, it's more like a rapidly shuffling kaleidoscope of activity that ranges from 10-30% or so at any one moment. But our neurons and synapses do require some down-time. We can't just run at maximum all day long without suffering from headaches and fatigue. A machine has no problems at all - full power, 100% of the time, no sleep. And several orders of magnitude faster switching on and off of the individual "neurons".
True, but it may be that a "cat brain" computer if it's running at 4-5x the normal human's efficiency(since we only use a few percent of our brain at any one time) might actually be as smart as a typical human.
I guess the real issue here is whether it's as capable as a cat's brain after using 100% of its capabilities, or if they are going to model a cat's brain in scale and then run that at full throttle.