f you use one of those 'shopper discount' grocery store cards, you're also providing this kind of information, in even greater detail. If you purchased a pregnancy test or jock-itch ointment last week, it's in a database somewhere if you use one of those cards, and the fact that they don't individually target you NOW for marketing based on this information doesn't mean they won't in the future.
Bong! They do use this stuff - well, something like it. I use Tesco in the UK, and I get a bunch of vouchers through the mail every quarter. There are a few 'general purpose' vouchers for points, and a few 'specific purchase' vouchers which give you a discount off a certain class of good. I noticed, in the bunch of vouchers which arrived this week, that all 5 (I think) vouchers were directly relevant to me, and I'll probably use all of them. I really don't think this is a coincidence, since there are a number of things I never buy from that supermarket (meat, alcoholic drinks, fresh fruit/veg, pet food, as examples), and none of the vouchers hit those classes - and previous voucher drops have hit those things I never buy there. Either they've got very lucky picking their vouchers, or they're tailored to me. The voucher 'target' is printed onto the voucher separately from things like the T&Cs, so I know they can do this kind of thing.
Hey, it impressed me:-)
For reference...
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The last time this page was reported on slashdot was back in August. The story is here
Re:Remember when...
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They are 4 guys (and gals) plus some hosting. The problem is that they need some way to pay the 4 guys and gals, and pay the hosting bills. Until now, that's been paied by advertisers, first directly and then via Tucows (5 points to anyone with a 5-digit or more Slashdot ID who knows what Tucows stood for). The advertisers are no longer paying enough of the bills, so they've had to let two people go, and the continued operation of the site is in question.
They need non-advertising based revenue.
ctrl-alt-f
And it still works in the 0.9.3 (ish - home-built from CVS) version of Mozilla I'm running. It looks like the picture is stuck about 5 weeks out of date - is this a sign that the fishcam is dead?
Which, of course, is one of the great things about the BBC. Sure, it isn't perfect, but as a public broadcaster, as opposed to a profit-motivated commercial broadcaster, advertisers and other commercial interests have a relatively low level of influence over news reporting and broadcasting in general.
Plus, they have the best web site in the UK. Bar none.
SCO has a server called scofolks.ocston.org (ocston = not SCO, backwards) which was set up a couple of years ago for similar reasons, except they had a bunch of silly rules like "You mustn't link to anywhere within sco.com from anywhere within ocston.org" - trying to maintain a separation between ocston and SCO.
There was an announcement sent out a few weeks back:
Tarantella Inc. and Caldera International have decided that neither company
will support or provide the ocston service (including email
and web pages). Ocston users are requested to remove their files from
ocston by Thursday, June 28, 2001, as the server will be turned off on June
29th.
The suggestion is that you use FTP to copy your files from ocston.org to
your desktop or system at home. The copied files should not be placed on
any SCO (Tarantella/Caldera) home servers.
The machine is still up, but it's a sign of a very similar situation to that at SGI - or at least that's what it looks like.
For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.
TiVo launched in the UK in October last year, and I've had one since December. They're not the same boxes as in the US, the UK ones being made by Thompson, but the service is substantially the same. The usual dollar-to-pound conversion applies, meaning that both the hardware (and there's only one box available, with 45Gb of storage) and the service cost 40% more than in the US.
The biggest issue you'd have to overcome to provide your own service would be the hardware. You could probably use a UK TiVo without to much problem (has the right voltage and TV standard), but you've have to get the guide data from somewhere. I spoke to people at LinuxWorld in New York back in January who were using TiVo boxes in Australia, and had hacked up the box enough that they could get the guide data from a local web site with local TV listings. I'm not sure if they've released that software, or if it crosses the line regarding the community support of TiVo, meaning that the hacking community will not try to undermine the TiVo service, which would cause financial damage to TiVo - the company. If the software to get guide data in Australia existed, it wouldn't be hard to write similiar software for the US and UK, meaning that people could get full functionality without paying
The marketing name 'iPAQ' is used for a variety of products, including a rebadged Blackberry 'pager', a range of legacy-free PCs, and even some servers. Most people associate the iPAQ name with the handhelds, but that isn't all they are.
The real goal would be to produce a replacement for X that allowed the use of drivers much like Windows does. This way the
environment could be recompiled for any platform, and contributers would only need to install (or create) drivers for the specific
hardware they have. (Kind of like how X has different X servers for each video chipset.)
Okay, so you've described XFree86 version 4. 4.0 was released over a year ago now and while there may have been driver availability problems back then, there should now be support for all current graphics cards as loadable modules. There is a single X server binary, which loads things like graphics drivers, font engines, 3D acceleration support, monitor power management, and most other non-core features as cross-OS (hardware platform specific, so you can't use an x85 Matrox driver on an Alpha machine, but you can use it in Linux, *BSD, Solaris...) loadable modules.
As for the rest of your comments - repeat after me: X11 IS NOT A GUI. X11 is a network-transparent windowing system, which has GUIs implemented on top of it in the form of window managers, 'panels', 'pagers', and so on. You can do some quite amazing things with the flexability of X11+a window manager, including making copies of other GUIs (like Windows, MacOS, BeOS, etc.), at least at the window decorations, mouse behaviour and 'desktop' level, such that it's pretty hard to tell (excepting the apps) what you're using.
The downside of that, of course, is the complete lack of coherence between different apps and the desktop. Personally, the only X apps I run are Netscape/Mozilla (depending on the quality of recent Mozilla builds), XMMS and gvim - everything else runs in an xterm - so I don't worry about consistancy between apps. That, however, is the main problem the two desktop projects (KDE, GNOME) are trying to solve - by producing a load of programs (most of which already exist separately) using a coherent toolkit and (hopefully) design guide, you can produce a coherent desktop.
That's a good point - one I hadn't really thought of. I've ordered the SMAC/Tribes 2 bundle from you, and I bought HG2 from you way back when it came out. In fact, I used the voucher I was given after pre-ordering HG2 at the higher price to pay for part of the shipping (to the UK) of this bundle. OTOH, I'm a LUG organiser, and I've already asked Loki for details of this offer, and announced on the LUG mailing list that I think we should take Loki up on it. I know Loki like you - hell, they recommended I bought SMAC from you rather than using their Digital River-provided store.
I'm suprised to hear that this deal means that LUGs get games cheaper than you. That truely does sound unfair. I assume you heard about this yesterday, which is when I first heard, and I'm suprised that if you asked Loki about it then, they haven't got back to you yet.
Being heavily cynical about this for a moment - what are you going to do about it? You're a store which carries only Linux games, and Loki are still the biggest (though not the only) publisher in the Linux market. Are you going to refuse to carry their games or something? Nope. You'll talk to them, probably shout at them, and you'll work something out with them - I know they've always seemed helpful, reasonable and friendly when I've spoken to them.
This signature is my normal one - it just seems kind of appropriate right here:
Moderate the parent up!
Seriously - I bought a couple of versions of Slackware back in the 3.x days, then went over to RedHat and SuSE for a while, now I'm back on Slackware. Where do I send the money for the 7.x versions I've downloaded, now that it's quicker for me to download than buy? Seriously. I still have a tech job () and I can't think of a Linux/free software/Open Source project which deserves more support. I've got a Slackware penguin sitting on top of my monitor at work, and a t-shirt and snapshot version of Slackware for Sparc - all given to me by various Slackware people. I want to pay for them now that they can't afford to give this stuff away, and I can afford to pay for it.
This reply is coming to you from an iPAQ running Linux over an 802.11 connection:-)
I'm writing it in vim in an xterm (actually rxvt) which was spawned by w3m, using GPLed handwriting recognition software. 'uname -a' gives:
Linux ipaq 2.4.0-test11-rmk1-np3 #67 Tue Jan 2 16:46:11 EST 2001 arm4l unknown
Check www.handhelds.org for the full story.
TiVo has been available in the UK in a PAL version for about 3 months now. Just so you know:-)
Great, except that...
on
Deja.com Vu!
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· Score: 2
"Archive searches for postings prior to May 15, 1999, are [still] temporarily unavailable."
So Dejanews has gone from a decent Usenet archive/search engine, to a shopping advice service, to a Usenet archive going back all of 20 months. Where's the rest of it?
Maybe the money they made by selling the shopping service will allow them to go buy some new hard drives and get the old stuff back on-line. OTOH, maybe not...
Just for reference, this isn't always the way things work. I lost my job, and I had my domain registered under my e-mail address at work, so I, in effect, lost control over my domain at the same time as I lost access to my work e-mail. I put together the necessary documentation, as clearly explained on NSI's pages, and faxed it over to them. Two days later (probably one working day, since I'm in the UK) the changes showed up on my account.
Certainly a painful process, but when they use the from: line on an e-mail as an authenication token I'm glad to see they use an off-line method to verify un-authenticatible changes. It's not such an issue for me - this is a personal domain, so all I'd lose is some personal e-mail and some hits on my site - but for companies who trade on-line, if they lose control of their domains they effectively lose control of their company.
The biggest reason for me (at least right now) is that I cannot currently buy an iPaq. I obviously cannot comment on the new Visors - this is an anti-iPaq (or anti-Compaq to be more precise) post rather than a pro-Visor one - but I do not know of anywhere I can currently buy an iPaq.
Anyone know a place? Ideally retail, with the iPaq in stock, within an easy drive of Palo Alto/Mountain View. Alternatively, somewhere in the UK. E-mail me direct - I'll go and buy one and then come back here and post it. That way, I get one before the store gets/.ed:-)
It will take me significantly longer to wait for the paperwork to be done at Palm than it will to develop my entire program. That is not acceptable when they make it available for download to US-based developers, particularly when I signed the paperwork at PalmSource London last year - why couldn't they accept that as 'catch-all'?
...without ROMs for the POSE, how should a developer test his programs?
Three possibilities come straight to mind which could be usefully combined: Make US developers sign physical paperwork and post it in, and/or restrict the ROMs to run only on POSE and/or stop distributing non-debug ROMs. These could be combined by saying that you can download a debug ROM by click-through but must sign the paperwork to download a 'normal' ROM, which wouldn't run on real hardware, only on POSE.
This is not, repeat not, a charge for the software, although you have to pay the varge to get the software. The charge is for the customer support overhead associated with the combination of a new OS (with a few noticable changes) and a flash-upgrade procedure. The cost of a call for either reason is far more than $20, but the average cost of supporting the upgrade is something like $20 per user. Personally, I would prefer to see a 'pay if you need support' method, since I don't need support, but that would mean much higher charges (or Palm taking a profit hit) for those who did call. Plus, the more less 'techy' users who would need the support are the ones Palm needs to target (c.f. M100), and they don't want to antagonise them.
For reference, I have a TRGPro, so the upgrade was released a while ago for me, and it was free. Although the download is there for non-TRGPros, do not try to use it on a 'normal' Palm - it will not work. Also, the 'register as a developer and you can download it' method has two drawbacks - it only works for US-based developers, and I bet there will be some toughening up on this method when Palm start selling the 3.5 OS.
(I don't know why I'm replying to this - it's a boring virtual Monday)
For reference, +44 is not the international dialling code for Scotland - it's the code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - including England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This may also have something to do with my being in a conference call between 7pm and 8:30pm last night - on a public holiday no less - because it was arranged at a convenient time for the Californians, mid-morning on a Monday.
You do know that Raptor now runs on Linux, don't you? It's exactly the same game, rebuilt on top of SDL, which means it runs under X or fullscreen on the framebuffer console. I bought it (again - I have a DOS copy as well!) and it rocks!
I love the Pro Pinball series and (as an added bonus), I have Fantastic Journey working pretty well under Wine! I had to make a couple of tiny code changes, it doesn't recognise the two shift keys as being different (so I use \ and / instead of the shifts) and the sound doesn't work (or doesn't work well enough to have it unmuted), but the game works, is playable and is at least as fast and smooth as it is under Windows. Drop me a line if you have a copy and want to try to get it working under Wine. Oh yeah, and I also have an old Black Knight machine (currently at my parents house until I have somewhere to put it) which needs a bit of fixing up but which pretty much works. My vote for best (remembered) machines? Adams Family and Twilight Zone - these two both appeared in a laser tag/Quasar place in Leeds (UK) when I used to go in there a lot, and I spent *many* hours playing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hanson. 'Nuff said.
Bong! They do use this stuff - well, something like it. I use Tesco in the UK, and I get a bunch of vouchers through the mail every quarter. There are a few 'general purpose' vouchers for points, and a few 'specific purchase' vouchers which give you a discount off a certain class of good. I noticed, in the bunch of vouchers which arrived this week, that all 5 (I think) vouchers were directly relevant to me, and I'll probably use all of them. I really don't think this is a coincidence, since there are a number of things I never buy from that supermarket (meat, alcoholic drinks, fresh fruit/veg, pet food, as examples), and none of the vouchers hit those classes - and previous voucher drops have hit those things I never buy there. Either they've got very lucky picking their vouchers, or they're tailored to me. The voucher 'target' is printed onto the voucher separately from things like the T&Cs, so I know they can do this kind of thing.
Hey, it impressed me :-)
The last time this page was reported on slashdot was back in August. The story is here
They are 4 guys (and gals) plus some hosting. The problem is that they need some way to pay the 4 guys and gals, and pay the hosting bills. Until now, that's been paied by advertisers, first directly and then via Tucows (5 points to anyone with a 5-digit or more Slashdot ID who knows what Tucows stood for). The advertisers are no longer paying enough of the bills, so they've had to let two people go, and the continued operation of the site is in question.
They need non-advertising based revenue.
ctrl-alt-f
And it still works in the 0.9.3 (ish - home-built from CVS) version of Mozilla I'm running. It looks like the picture is stuck about 5 weeks out of date - is this a sign that the fishcam is dead?
SAY IT AIN'T SO!
Plus, they have the best web site in the UK. Bar none.
There was an announcement sent out a few weeks back:
The machine is still up, but it's a sign of a very similar situation to that at SGI - or at least that's what it looks like.For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.
As applied to (Power) Pill Gates, right?
The biggest issue you'd have to overcome to provide your own service would be the hardware. You could probably use a UK TiVo without to much problem (has the right voltage and TV standard), but you've have to get the guide data from somewhere. I spoke to people at LinuxWorld in New York back in January who were using TiVo boxes in Australia, and had hacked up the box enough that they could get the guide data from a local web site with local TV listings. I'm not sure if they've released that software, or if it crosses the line regarding the community support of TiVo, meaning that the hacking community will not try to undermine the TiVo service, which would cause financial damage to TiVo - the company. If the software to get guide data in Australia existed, it wouldn't be hard to write similiar software for the US and UK, meaning that people could get full functionality without paying
The marketing name 'iPAQ' is used for a variety of products, including a rebadged Blackberry 'pager', a range of legacy-free PCs, and even some servers. Most people associate the iPAQ name with the handhelds, but that isn't all they are.
In the UK (and I'd guess elsewhere), AOL is known simply as AOL - they don't use the America OnLine name at all over here.
Okay, so you've described XFree86 version 4. 4.0 was released over a year ago now and while there may have been driver availability problems back then, there should now be support for all current graphics cards as loadable modules. There is a single X server binary, which loads things like graphics drivers, font engines, 3D acceleration support, monitor power management, and most other non-core features as cross-OS (hardware platform specific, so you can't use an x85 Matrox driver on an Alpha machine, but you can use it in Linux, *BSD, Solaris...) loadable modules.
As for the rest of your comments - repeat after me: X11 IS NOT A GUI. X11 is a network-transparent windowing system, which has GUIs implemented on top of it in the form of window managers, 'panels', 'pagers', and so on. You can do some quite amazing things with the flexability of X11+a window manager, including making copies of other GUIs (like Windows, MacOS, BeOS, etc.), at least at the window decorations, mouse behaviour and 'desktop' level, such that it's pretty hard to tell (excepting the apps) what you're using.
The downside of that, of course, is the complete lack of coherence between different apps and the desktop. Personally, the only X apps I run are Netscape/Mozilla (depending on the quality of recent Mozilla builds), XMMS and gvim - everything else runs in an xterm - so I don't worry about consistancy between apps. That, however, is the main problem the two desktop projects (KDE, GNOME) are trying to solve - by producing a load of programs (most of which already exist separately) using a coherent toolkit and (hopefully) design guide, you can produce a coherent desktop.
Sid Meir's Alpha Centauri
That's a good point - one I hadn't really thought of. I've ordered the SMAC/Tribes 2 bundle from you, and I bought HG2 from you way back when it came out. In fact, I used the voucher I was given after pre-ordering HG2 at the higher price to pay for part of the shipping (to the UK) of this bundle. OTOH, I'm a LUG organiser, and I've already asked Loki for details of this offer, and announced on the LUG mailing list that I think we should take Loki up on it. I know Loki like you - hell, they recommended I bought SMAC from you rather than using their Digital River-provided store.
I'm suprised to hear that this deal means that LUGs get games cheaper than you. That truely does sound unfair. I assume you heard about this yesterday, which is when I first heard, and I'm suprised that if you asked Loki about it then, they haven't got back to you yet.
Being heavily cynical about this for a moment - what are you going to do about it? You're a store which carries only Linux games, and Loki are still the biggest (though not the only) publisher in the Linux market. Are you going to refuse to carry their games or something? Nope. You'll talk to them, probably shout at them, and you'll work something out with them - I know they've always seemed helpful, reasonable and friendly when I've spoken to them.
This signature is my normal one - it just seems kind of appropriate right here:
Moderate the parent up!
Seriously - I bought a couple of versions of Slackware back in the 3.x days, then went over to RedHat and SuSE for a while, now I'm back on Slackware. Where do I send the money for the 7.x versions I've downloaded, now that it's quicker for me to download than buy? Seriously. I still have a tech job () and I can't think of a Linux/free software/Open Source project which deserves more support. I've got a Slackware penguin sitting on top of my monitor at work, and a t-shirt and snapshot version of Slackware for Sparc - all given to me by various Slackware people. I want to pay for them now that they can't afford to give this stuff away, and I can afford to pay for it.
This reply is coming to you from an iPAQ running Linux over an 802.11 connection :-)
I'm writing it in vim in an xterm (actually rxvt) which was spawned by w3m, using GPLed handwriting recognition software. 'uname -a' gives:
Linux ipaq 2.4.0-test11-rmk1-np3 #67 Tue Jan 2 16:46:11 EST 2001 arm4l unknown
Check www.handhelds.org for the full story.
TiVo has been available in the UK in a PAL version for about 3 months now. Just so you know :-)
So Dejanews has gone from a decent Usenet archive/search engine, to a shopping advice service, to a Usenet archive going back all of 20 months. Where's the rest of it?
Maybe the money they made by selling the shopping service will allow them to go buy some new hard drives and get the old stuff back on-line. OTOH, maybe not...
Just for reference, this isn't always the way things work. I lost my job, and I had my domain registered under my e-mail address at work, so I, in effect, lost control over my domain at the same time as I lost access to my work e-mail. I put together the necessary documentation, as clearly explained on NSI's pages, and faxed it over to them. Two days later (probably one working day, since I'm in the UK) the changes showed up on my account.
Certainly a painful process, but when they use the from: line on an e-mail as an authenication token I'm glad to see they use an off-line method to verify un-authenticatible changes. It's not such an issue for me - this is a personal domain, so all I'd lose is some personal e-mail and some hits on my site - but for companies who trade on-line, if they lose control of their domains they effectively lose control of their company.
Anyone know a place? Ideally retail, with the iPaq in stock, within an easy drive of Palo Alto/Mountain View. Alternatively, somewhere in the UK. E-mail me direct - I'll go and buy one and then come back here and post it. That way, I get one before the store gets /.ed :-)
Three possibilities come straight to mind which could be usefully combined: Make US developers sign physical paperwork and post it in, and/or restrict the ROMs to run only on POSE and/or stop distributing non-debug ROMs. These could be combined by saying that you can download a debug ROM by click-through but must sign the paperwork to download a 'normal' ROM, which wouldn't run on real hardware, only on POSE.
For reference, I have a TRGPro, so the upgrade was released a while ago for me, and it was free. Although the download is there for non-TRGPros, do not try to use it on a 'normal' Palm - it will not work. Also, the 'register as a developer and you can download it' method has two drawbacks - it only works for US-based developers, and I bet there will be some toughening up on this method when Palm start selling the 3.5 OS.
(I don't know why I'm replying to this - it's a boring virtual Monday)
For reference, +44 is not the international dialling code for Scotland - it's the code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - including England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This may also have something to do with my being in a conference call between 7pm and 8:30pm last night - on a public holiday no less - because it was arranged at a convenient time for the Californians, mid-morning on a Monday.
You do know that Raptor now runs on Linux, don't you? It's exactly the same game, rebuilt on top of SDL, which means it runs under X or fullscreen on the framebuffer console. I bought it (again - I have a DOS copy as well!) and it rocks!
I love the Pro Pinball series and (as an added bonus), I have Fantastic Journey working pretty well under Wine!
I had to make a couple of tiny code changes, it doesn't recognise the two shift keys as being different (so I use \ and / instead of the shifts) and the sound doesn't work (or doesn't work well enough to have it unmuted), but the game works, is playable and is at least as fast and smooth as it is under Windows.
Drop me a line if you have a copy and want to try to get it working under Wine.
Oh yeah, and I also have an old Black Knight machine (currently at my parents house until I have somewhere to put it) which needs a bit of fixing up but which pretty much works. My vote for best (remembered) machines? Adams Family and Twilight Zone - these two both appeared in a laser tag/Quasar place in Leeds (UK) when I used to go in there a lot, and I spent *many* hours playing them.