If Amazon doesn't convert the images, he could just upload a PNG file with a lot of information stored in ancillary chunks... the png specification even allows creating custom/developer chunks which should be ignored by any parser that doesn't understand them (for compatibility with future versions of the standard)
CHDK (link to their wikia page) is a custom firmware for a large number of Canon Powershot cameras that can be loaded from the card (and doesn't mess with the original camera firmware) and gives you a lot more features.
For example, after the firmware is loaded you can configure the camera to check for motion and snap pictures whenever there's a certain degree of motion in the frame.
It also gives you the ability to change the video quality to a much better level than the built in presets (selected by Canon to give users a good ratio between battery consumption and record time) so if you take a digital camera and power it from a DC adapter and stick a 16-32 GB card inside, you might just make a HD surveillance camera.
You can shove such modified camera in a teddybear or a larger book and have it conspicuously recording anything moving inside your room.
They have datacenters in US, Holland and maybe Poland (not sure about the last). Currently paying about 110$ for a dedicated server with unmetered 100 mbps port and using about 6 TB a month of that (didn't choose it for bandwidth needs but rather for location and value of hardware for money)
They also have streaming services and CDN that's relatively cheap so that may help you stream the music reliably to people.
I'd also like to recommend Voxel.net - check them out.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a multiplayer game - as far as I know the cracked game will NOT let you play in multiplayer mode... so the majority of the people that downloaded the game probably purchased legal keys or stuck to playing the single player mode or playing with friends in LAN.
Basically, the download acts as DEMO, incentive to buy the access to the multiplayer mode, and it definitely does not mean that a download equals a lost sale.
As for Crysis 2, I'm not sure how many of those downloads were just to "benchmark" their video cards...
Even so, even if a large part of the downloads were pirates, it doesn't mean lost money... it just means they don't make as much money as they wanted. I know in my own case I'm currently taking advantage of every Steam sale to buy games I pirated and enjoyed in the past - I couldn't afford spending 40 euro on a game but now I have no problems paying 5-10 euro for each of the STALKER games, for example.
I currently have over 200 games bought, in the Steam account.
VPS won't be good enough for your needs - most VPSes share the disk space (a raid 5 is shared between 8-16 vps machines so they can't give you lots of space).
Talk to various companies advertising budget servers on Web Hosting Talk forums.
You should be able to rent an Atom based server or an older generation server they wouldn't otherwise be able to rent for about 40-50$ a month and some of the companies will even accept to physically mail them a hard drive and install it in your server for a few extra dollars a month.
With Gillette blades, you only have to change one when it starts to bother you. For some it's once every two weeks or so, for me it's once every 2-3 months. And it's basically a few meters walk to where you store them.
With this camera, it's not like you're going to carry 20 packs of paper in your backpack every day... the purpose of the camera's gimmick, the integrated printer, is no longer there.
If you do plan on actually carrying photo paper, you'd have to get extra batteries because as they say it can only do 25 prints. In this case, you might as well carry a light photo printer with you then. Hell, as long as you still carry a backpack, you might get a cheap 50-100 watt inverter and a motorbike battery and be done with everything.
Unfortunately, at 20$ for 30 sheets of the special photo paper it needs, I don't see it being successful.
I guess they're probably trying to use the classic inkjet printer selling scheme, where the printer is cheap but the cartridges are expensive... though their camera is 300$.
It can also print just 25 photos with its battery which is not clear if it's removable or not - strange number considering the paper is sold in packs of 30.
And in other news, for a one time fee of about 13$, I can get 256 kbps/ 64kbps for free, for as long as I want, without bandwidth limits. It's not high speed but enough to access mail and various websites - pretty much anything except watching videos.
Or I could pay 5$ a month for 10/2 mbps. Or about 13$ a month for 120/6.... see http://www.upc.ro/internet/ divide prices by 3 to get the price in dollars.
Comcast (and the Internet prices in US) is a joke.
It's not always the fault of the controllers, it can also be the way they're connected to the system.
These onboard controllers are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 - it's literally just like plugging them into a x1 slot only they're directly on the motherboard. The problem is there are two versions of PCI Express - the older PCI Express 1.0 provides 250 MB/s in each direction, while PCI Express 2.0 provides 500 MB/s in each direction.
AMD motherboards only had PCI Express 2.0 lanes but Intel had a mix of 2.0 lanes and 1.0 lanes - the most common was 32 x 2.0 lanes (for 2 x x16 lanes for graphics cards) and about 6 x 1.0 lanes coming from the southbridge. So motherboards manufacturers had to either use 1 lane from southbridge and get only 250 MB/s in each direction or resort to using some multiplexing chips that take 2 or more lanes and create a x4 path for the controller. More recently, motherboards detect if there is a card on the second pci express x16 and if there's nothing there, they "borrow" a few of those unused lanes to improve the performance of the various controllers integrated on the motherboard.
But the point is even if the pci express 2.0 is used, there's only 500 MB/s in each direction, SATA 6 gbps means that a maximum of 750 MB/s should be reachable - very few motherboards connect the controllers to more than one 1x lane so even if the controller could reach 750 MB/s, you won't get it.
This is nothing new - remember the gigabit network cards on PCI? The whole PCI system on your computer can do 133 MB/s and a gigabit link can do about 110 MB/s - would you sue anyone if you plug 4 pci cards in your system and can't reach a throughput higher than 133 MB/s ?
Yeah, I noticed it... I only have 3 email accounts and get batches of 15-20 emails every 5-10 minutes with the Win32/Kryptik.RAM trojan virus (ups notifications and invoices)... they go straight to spam
Unless they will change the connector, it will be a mess. The current cables can not possibly deliver 100 watts of power, they're too thin... at best they probably an do about 30 watts.
People will use cheap cables with thin wires to power a printer that needs 40-60 watts of power and will find themselves with burnt cables or even worse, usb ports on the motherboards dead (the individual fuses blown up)
Also, power supplies at this time use separate circuits to deliver up to 3A to the USB ports even when the system is down - this is useful to have wake on key/mouse/modem capability and also to charge devices through USB ports. It's done this way for efficiency.
I don't know how they plan to keep this with the new standard - having ports that can't do high wattage and ports that can do on the back side of the computer would only confuse people.
And last, it's not unusual to have 6-8 USB 2.0 ports on the back of a motherboard - I just can't see how the metal traces on the motherboard could possibly support 100 watts of power to EACH connector... not to mention the metal traces and the whole area will warm up even more due to the high current flowing there, and there's already the cpu voltage regulation system there.
Anyone reading this should also read how Cisco lied and got him arrested in Canada... there's a link right below the description but I'm posting it again here as well:
Even if a person scanning the pages is paid 100$ an hour for his work, that person can probably scan 2 pages a minute, at a cost of about 0.8$ per page. JSTOR charges 10$+ per article, which may be one or several pages, and you basically get a token that expires in 14 days. You don't even get permanent access to that article.
I'm sure nobody says they shouldn't try to recover their costs and cover the bandwidth and server costs but it probably costs less than 3$ to host a PDF file for 20-50 years. Charging tens of dollars for every access seems really greedy and wrong, especially since they didn't create the work, they didn't pay for it, they just host it and scanned it...
It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.
Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
If they were to release HL2 - episode 3, it would have been released after Portal 2 anyway. I believe Portal 2 contains some references that will get the worlds of Portal and Half-Life 2 closer together - Portal 1 already had references about Black Mesa.
Also, from a marketing point of view, if you want to release a game, you want to release it just like big Hollywood movies are released - either when children come back from Summer holidays or towards the end of November - early December, when parents start buying Christmas gifts.
So I wouldn't be surprised to hear Half-Life 2 - Episode 3 is already done or in some beta stage and just waits for the right time to start advertising it.
Smart move from Valve imho would be to get around December both Episode 3 * and * some kind of updated Orange Box, containing the whole Half-Life 2 episodes and both Portals. It would be an excellent gift.
Server video cards embedded on motherboard don't use the system ram, they have an embedded 8 to 128 MB memory chip. Sure, they have a tiny frame buffer in the system ram but there are other things using more system memory than that frame buffer.
As for power usage, such plain vga video card embedded on the motherboard uses a couple of watts on idle - the chip doesn't even need a heatsink so it's not really a power saving feature if you remove it.
You would be saving much more power by using a power supply with high efficiency and wattage close to the actual server usage, instead of using (optionally redundant) 500-800 watts server power supplies.
Seriously, complaining about a few watts... some 1U servers have at least 4 x 40 mm high speed fans inside, each using 2-5 watts of power (because they run at max speed all the time) and you're complaining about a couple of watts on a video card.
Your system doesn't really use 750 watts. Depending on the configuration it barely uses 80-150 watts on idle and when browsing the Internet and only when you play games or do some heavy stuff like video encoding, it gets close to 300 watts.
People got accustomed to power supplies with big watts number because in the past manufacturers were actually lying about how much their power supplies can "deliver" but nowadays there is very little difference in the price of components for a power supply, between let's say a 400 watts power supply and a 750 watts power supply, so it's not worth it for manufacturers to make "quality" power supplies at low wattage.
If you remove the dedicated video card and use a motherboard with integrated video with not so many overclocking features (like 8+2 vrm chips for the cpu, which cause power loss), change the processor to a dual core close to what regular laptops use and enable the power saving features, you'll get close to an average of less than 100 watts. Won't get close to the power efficiency of a laptop because the power supply is designed to get peak efficiency at about 50% of it's rated power, not at 100 watts.
Surely, it will work because it's impossible for someone to encode stuff in Base64 or even Base36 and just paste in the email about 4-8K of characters at a time. Or maybe it's too hard to just create a 1x1 pixel PNG file in paint, run copy smallpicture.png+secretdocument.doc fakepicture.png in command line, and use this picture inline in the email...
This. Lots of page accesses = lots of processing power spent on encryption and decryption. Not everyone can afford hardware cards to do the encryption.
Second, proper certificates costs money, and you "kind of" need one static IP for each website - it's a big hard for a person to justify the need for one IP for each of his 10 blogs - most companies will only issue a block of 8 IPs (5 usable) to a single server.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems quite complicated.
If Amazon doesn't convert the images, he could just upload a PNG file with a lot of information stored in ancillary chunks... the png specification even allows creating custom/developer chunks which should be ignored by any parser that doesn't understand them (for compatibility with future versions of the standard)
For example, just abuse the hell out of iTXt or zTXt chunks in the format : http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/...
For private chunks, see this bit : http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/...
You should search for the js scripts on Wayback Machine, in old archived versions of those websites using your js code.
That should be good enough proof.
They're still working on Carmageddon Reincarnation: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation
They sent emails with youtube video a few weeks ago with some game play and map information
CHDK (link to their wikia page) is a custom firmware for a large number of Canon Powershot cameras that can be loaded from the card (and doesn't mess with the original camera firmware) and gives you a lot more features.
For example, after the firmware is loaded you can configure the camera to check for motion and snap pictures whenever there's a certain degree of motion in the frame.
It also gives you the ability to change the video quality to a much better level than the built in presets (selected by Canon to give users a good ratio between battery consumption and record time) so if you take a digital camera and power it from a DC adapter and stick a 16-32 GB card inside, you might just make a HD surveillance camera.
You can shove such modified camera in a teddybear or a larger book and have it conspicuously recording anything moving inside your room.
Happy customer of Swiftway here : http://www.swiftway.net/
They have datacenters in US, Holland and maybe Poland (not sure about the last). Currently paying about 110$ for a dedicated server with unmetered 100 mbps port and using about 6 TB a month of that (didn't choose it for bandwidth needs but rather for location and value of hardware for money)
They also have streaming services and CDN that's relatively cheap so that may help you stream the music reliably to people.
I'd also like to recommend Voxel.net - check them out.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a multiplayer game - as far as I know the cracked game will NOT let you play in multiplayer mode... so the majority of the people that downloaded the game probably purchased legal keys or stuck to playing the single player mode or playing with friends in LAN.
Basically, the download acts as DEMO, incentive to buy the access to the multiplayer mode, and it definitely does not mean that a download equals a lost sale.
As for Crysis 2, I'm not sure how many of those downloads were just to "benchmark" their video cards...
Even so, even if a large part of the downloads were pirates, it doesn't mean lost money... it just means they don't make as much money as they wanted. I know in my own case I'm currently taking advantage of every Steam sale to buy games I pirated and enjoyed in the past - I couldn't afford spending 40 euro on a game but now I have no problems paying 5-10 euro for each of the STALKER games, for example.
I currently have over 200 games bought, in the Steam account.
VPS won't be good enough for your needs - most VPSes share the disk space (a raid 5 is shared between 8-16 vps machines so they can't give you lots of space).
Talk to various companies advertising budget servers on Web Hosting Talk forums.
You should be able to rent an Atom based server or an older generation server they wouldn't otherwise be able to rent for about 40-50$ a month and some of the companies will even accept to physically mail them a hard drive and install it in your server for a few extra dollars a month.
Techdirt has a great article about this: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111110/10135116708/glimpse-future-under-sopa-warner-bros-admits-it-filed-many-false-takedown-notices.shtml
It makes some interesting parallels to SOPA and E-Parasites bills and why the laws shouldn't be passed.
With Gillette blades, you only have to change one when it starts to bother you. For some it's once every two weeks or so, for me it's once every 2-3 months. And it's basically a few meters walk to where you store them.
With this camera, it's not like you're going to carry 20 packs of paper in your backpack every day... the purpose of the camera's gimmick, the integrated printer, is no longer there.
If you do plan on actually carrying photo paper, you'd have to get extra batteries because as they say it can only do 25 prints. In this case, you might as well carry a light photo printer with you then. Hell, as long as you still carry a backpack, you might get a cheap 50-100 watt inverter and a motorbike battery and be done with everything.
Unfortunately, at 20$ for 30 sheets of the special photo paper it needs, I don't see it being successful.
I guess they're probably trying to use the classic inkjet printer selling scheme, where the printer is cheap but the cartridges are expensive... though their camera is 300$.
It can also print just 25 photos with its battery which is not clear if it's removable or not - strange number considering the paper is sold in packs of 30.
And in other news, for a one time fee of about 13$, I can get 256 kbps/ 64kbps for free, for as long as I want, without bandwidth limits. It's not high speed but enough to access mail and various websites - pretty much anything except watching videos.
Or I could pay 5$ a month for 10/2 mbps. Or about 13$ a month for 120/6.... see http://www.upc.ro/internet/ divide prices by 3 to get the price in dollars.
Comcast (and the Internet prices in US) is a joke.
It's not always the fault of the controllers, it can also be the way they're connected to the system.
These onboard controllers are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 - it's literally just like plugging them into a x1 slot only they're directly on the motherboard. The problem is there are two versions of PCI Express - the older PCI Express 1.0 provides 250 MB/s in each direction, while PCI Express 2.0 provides 500 MB/s in each direction.
AMD motherboards only had PCI Express 2.0 lanes but Intel had a mix of 2.0 lanes and 1.0 lanes - the most common was 32 x 2.0 lanes (for 2 x x16 lanes for graphics cards) and about 6 x 1.0 lanes coming from the southbridge. So motherboards manufacturers had to either use 1 lane from southbridge and get only 250 MB/s in each direction or resort to using some multiplexing chips that take 2 or more lanes and create a x4 path for the controller. More recently, motherboards detect if there is a card on the second pci express x16 and if there's nothing there, they "borrow" a few of those unused lanes to improve the performance of the various controllers integrated on the motherboard.
See this Anandtech article, it explains better than I can explain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2973/6gbps-sata-performance-amd-890gx-vs-intel-x58-p55/2
But the point is even if the pci express 2.0 is used, there's only 500 MB/s in each direction, SATA 6 gbps means that a maximum of 750 MB/s should be reachable - very few motherboards connect the controllers to more than one 1x lane so even if the controller could reach 750 MB/s, you won't get it.
This is nothing new - remember the gigabit network cards on PCI? The whole PCI system on your computer can do 133 MB/s and a gigabit link can do about 110 MB/s - would you sue anyone if you plug 4 pci cards in your system and can't reach a throughput higher than 133 MB/s ?
Yeah, I noticed it... I only have 3 email accounts and get batches of 15-20 emails every 5-10 minutes with the Win32/Kryptik.RAM trojan virus (ups notifications and invoices) ... they go straight to spam
Unless they will change the connector, it will be a mess. The current cables can not possibly deliver 100 watts of power, they're too thin... at best they probably an do about 30 watts.
People will use cheap cables with thin wires to power a printer that needs 40-60 watts of power and will find themselves with burnt cables or even worse, usb ports on the motherboards dead (the individual fuses blown up)
Also, power supplies at this time use separate circuits to deliver up to 3A to the USB ports even when the system is down - this is useful to have wake on key/mouse/modem capability and also to charge devices through USB ports. It's done this way for efficiency.
I don't know how they plan to keep this with the new standard - having ports that can't do high wattage and ports that can do on the back side of the computer would only confuse people.
And last, it's not unusual to have 6-8 USB 2.0 ports on the back of a motherboard - I just can't see how the metal traces on the motherboard could possibly support 100 watts of power to EACH connector... not to mention the metal traces and the whole area will warm up even more due to the high current flowing there, and there's already the cpu voltage regulation system there.
Anyone reading this should also read how Cisco lied and got him arrested in Canada ... there's a link right below the description but I'm posting it again here as well:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110722/02351315202/how-cisco-justice-department-conspired-to-try-to-destroy-one-mans-life-daring-to-sue-cisco.shtml
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/a-pound-of-flesh-how-ciscos-unmitigated-gall-derailed-one-mans-life.ars/1
Even if a person scanning the pages is paid 100$ an hour for his work, that person can probably scan 2 pages a minute, at a cost of about 0.8$ per page. JSTOR charges 10$+ per article, which may be one or several pages, and you basically get a token that expires in 14 days. You don't even get permanent access to that article.
I'm sure nobody says they shouldn't try to recover their costs and cover the bandwidth and server costs but it probably costs less than 3$ to host a PDF file for 20-50 years. Charging tens of dollars for every access seems really greedy and wrong, especially since they didn't create the work, they didn't pay for it, they just host it and scanned it...
This Wired article is very long but very informative and it's worth the time to read it:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701277.pdf
Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB = 488 GB so you need 138 MB/s to get data in an hour.
It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.
Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
If they were to release HL2 - episode 3, it would have been released after Portal 2 anyway. I believe Portal 2 contains some references that will get the worlds of Portal and Half-Life 2 closer together - Portal 1 already had references about Black Mesa.
Also, from a marketing point of view, if you want to release a game, you want to release it just like big Hollywood movies are released - either when children come back from Summer holidays or towards the end of November - early December, when parents start buying Christmas gifts.
So I wouldn't be surprised to hear Half-Life 2 - Episode 3 is already done or in some beta stage and just waits for the right time to start advertising it.
Smart move from Valve imho would be to get around December both Episode 3 * and * some kind of updated Orange Box, containing the whole Half-Life 2 episodes and both Portals. It would be an excellent gift.
Server video cards embedded on motherboard don't use the system ram, they have an embedded 8 to 128 MB memory chip. Sure, they have a tiny frame buffer in the system ram but there are other things using more system memory than that frame buffer.
As for power usage, such plain vga video card embedded on the motherboard uses a couple of watts on idle - the chip doesn't even need a heatsink so it's not really a power saving feature if you remove it.
You would be saving much more power by using a power supply with high efficiency and wattage close to the actual server usage, instead of using (optionally redundant) 500-800 watts server power supplies.
Seriously, complaining about a few watts... some 1U servers have at least 4 x 40 mm high speed fans inside, each using 2-5 watts of power (because they run at max speed all the time) and you're complaining about a couple of watts on a video card.
Your system doesn't really use 750 watts. Depending on the configuration it barely uses 80-150 watts on idle and when browsing the Internet and only when you play games or do some heavy stuff like video encoding, it gets close to 300 watts.
People got accustomed to power supplies with big watts number because in the past manufacturers were actually lying about how much their power supplies can "deliver" but nowadays there is very little difference in the price of components for a power supply, between let's say a 400 watts power supply and a 750 watts power supply, so it's not worth it for manufacturers to make "quality" power supplies at low wattage.
If you remove the dedicated video card and use a motherboard with integrated video with not so many overclocking features (like 8+2 vrm chips for the cpu, which cause power loss), change the processor to a dual core close to what regular laptops use and enable the power saving features, you'll get close to an average of less than 100 watts. Won't get close to the power efficiency of a laptop because the power supply is designed to get peak efficiency at about 50% of it's rated power, not at 100 watts.
Surely, it will work because it's impossible for someone to encode stuff in Base64 or even Base36 and just paste in the email about 4-8K of characters at a time.
Or maybe it's too hard to just create a 1x1 pixel PNG file in paint, run copy smallpicture.png+secretdocument.doc fakepicture.png in command line, and use this picture inline in the email...
This. Lots of page accesses = lots of processing power spent on encryption and decryption. Not everyone can afford hardware cards to do the encryption.
Second, proper certificates costs money, and you "kind of" need one static IP for each website - it's a big hard for a person to justify the need for one IP for each of his 10 blogs - most companies will only issue a block of 8 IPs (5 usable) to a single server.
And of course, I hurried to post the message above and I forgot to mention this other presentation they made about Sexual diversity in games and how sexuality can influence the story and gameplay : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2520-Sexual-Diversity