Sure, this thing probably won't compete with a GeForce 6600 AGP in Doom 3 or HL 2 (that's a $200-$250 card), but do we really NEED that?
For 99% of users, this could be a great card. If it does great 2D, and can do good 3D (especially features like those used in Apple's Quartz, or Project Looking Glass) it would work more than well enough. Lets face it, for a large number of applications, a GeForce (origional) quality 3D would be MORE than enough for most anything many people would do. And if the graphics are localized into a small area (say a little 200x200 area of a window), then even such a card would be able to render very nice looking graphics (just like a "slow" card could run Doom 3 looking great at such a low resolution).
I'm with you. For a quality, commodity card this could be great. Plus, with the FPGA, not only could be hack the DRIVERS, you could hack the FIRMWARE! Think! You could buy the card, and write software to take the burden off the CPU for decoding MPEG2 or 4. You could even (with a little kernel help) swap firmware on the fly so you could have that video decoding, and then enter a command (or press a button on your desktop) to have the 3D firmware put in. When you're done, go back to video decoding acceleration.
Hell, make it run SETI in the background at super fast speed when just using 2D (like using nVidia cards to do scientific calculations on the GPU).
These things could be a LOT of fun to mess around with. I think I just sold myself on one;)
My understanding was that newer windmills used larger blades, which allowed them to extract the same amount of energy (or more) from the wind while turning slower. So instead of spinning very fast like propeller blades (which would kill any bird who might not be able to see it well), they spin at a speed making the individual blades easy to identify and easy for birds to avoid.
Doesn't that solve the bird problem?
On a side note though, doesn't having tons of large turbines change local weather patterns somehow by disrupting all the windflow?
I've suffered from DIMS for years. Does anyone out there have any good tips or ideas for curing (or reducing) the problem of motion sickness? With all the upcomming games that I'm worried will cause it that I want to play (Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, HL2, Doom 3, etc), I'd love to know.
Yes, that would work great. But as you pointed out, it's the OTHER WAY (like in the half-life movie) that worries me. There is nothing wrong with MC rescuing some girl who's important to the plot and her (or another girl) falling in love with him, but he has to be his cool self about it. If they try to do any kiss scenes or anything else (basically reciprication on his side) then it wouldn't work.
Well, at least it would be hard to mess up master chief and cortana.
Master Chief can be played by anyone. He's just a suit. Then you dub over his voice and you're set.
Cortana is supposed to be CGI anyways (in the game) so there is no problem there either. Again, get the voice from the game and you're set.
They should be able to get it "right" pretty easily. But if it comes to the screen, I'm just worried they will try to give Master Chief a romantic interest or something like that, or scenes without his armor on or something like that. They could make a good action/war flick that would be fun to watch, but they could easily make something that is as true to the game as the Super Mario Brothers move was.
It's almost exactly two GBA SPs next to eachother.
I got one this morning too. My only real complaint is that I think it should have had an analog stick. The touch pad works well in Metroid Prime Hunters, but it just doesn't do it for me in Mario 64. The analog stick just worked better. Or have made the directional pad analog (like the buttons on the PS2).
Still, great little system. I can't wait for more games!
I don't know much about it either. But it was in the newest issue of PC Magazine (which I just happened to get today in the mail). You can read the review here.
They don't seem too happy either. "The T-Mobile Sidekick II does everything the Ogo does but much better, and it doubles as your phone." and "The Ogo is fairly unique [...]. But we wish the device's shortcomings weren't so glaring."
They probably want much more specific data that the anonomized and agregated data TiVo collects. My guess is that most of the TiVo data is just "person X has 31 season passes and 12 hours on their thing and watches an average of 4 hours per day". I wouldn't be suprised if info like the Superbowl thing is only because they tracked that specific show. I'm not sure how valuable that kind of info would be on most shows.
So did I. No only do I not mind people tracking what I'm watching, I WANT them to to monitor it. Anything I can to do to try to show how little I like much of the innane and stupid TV that's on these days (and to help them realize some of those little gems that I don't want to ever dissapear).
That said, they said that they would call me if I was in (IIRC) and I've yet to be called.
I don't see a problem with this. If you force your programmers to work up to 12+ hours a day 7 days a week and won't give them any ovetime or compensation, you're exploiting them (unless you specifically told them that would be their hours). No one should be expected to have to work those kind of hours when they only signed up for "normal" days with "occasional" overtime.
I assume that EA will complain about having to do that to compete or something like that ("We can't higher more because it's too expensive!"), but that doesn't bother me either. Sure programmers in SanFran or the Valley or LA are expesive, but a big part of that is because they have to be able to afford those exorbitantly expensive homes there. If they would create a division outside of Madison, WI or Wichita, KS or some other nice city with more reasonable housing prices they wouldn't have to pay programmers so much. "In-source" to rural America (I saw an article about it the other day). When a small house costs 100-200k and not 1-2m, you don't have to pay your programmers nearly as much for the same standard of living. In fact, you can pay them less, and they can still have a BETTER standard of living. And it's not like a programming team can't be located anywhere. Surf instructors may not be able to do their job in Kansas (relative to CA), but a programmer's location doesn't matter that much.
It's one thing if EA specifically told employees the kind of hours they'd be working, but it sounds like they didn't, which is basically exploitation to me. Sorry, they sound guilty and this sounds like a good thing.
Of course, I'm not a big fan of EA in the first place. Just FYI.
Ethernet, not USB?
on
WiFi Bridging?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I would try going with ethernet, not USB. The basic idea would be to mount a little ethernet to wireless device somewhere (and connect it to your antenna). If the thing can use Power over Ethernet (and you can supply that) then you'd only need one cable going to the device. By keeping the device near the antenna, you don't have the signal loss that your long antenna lead has. Something sort of like this from D-Link.
In fact, there are other devices that could make this even easier. I saw that Linksys will be comming out with what may be the perfect product for you.
Now you should know that there are other (albiet more interesting) options. If you want to go for pure coolness and geekocity, I have just the thing. My brother managed to get a laser link for connecting networks between two buildings a few years ago. With think it's not functional (never tried, think parts might be missing), but it's a cool thing. We have two large units (look like outdoor security camera casings) that each have laser units in them. You point them at eachother, wire everything up, and voila! the networks are supposed to be connected. They were used at a local school years and years ago. Ours are probably slow, and we know they are tolken ring (that's about all we know) but they exist. You could probably find something similiar if you looked enough.
As for your current problems, I don't know. I assume you are running Windows? If you were running Linux you could find out WHY the network is going down (watch for errors from the USB subsystem) but I don't know how (or if) you can do that in Windows. My guess is your 20' USB cable is part of the problem (just a hunch). Also, are you using directional antennas? Not just directional (in that they are not omni-directional) but HIGHLY directional antennas (like Yagis or the pringles WiFi antenna)? That might help too.
Also, now that I think of it, I think many accesspoints have an option to bridge networks built in. A quick check says that my Netgear WG602v2 supports it. But it looks like both ends have to be operating in "bridge mode" (although you can still serve clients in bridge mode, it looks like). So that's a 3rd option.
Neat program. I'll mess around with it more later. But looking at the screenshots on the site reminded me of an old/. story (I think) and I'd like help finding it if anyone can help me, this is somewhat OT.
The program did something similar, it would monitor network traffic and show you all the images that were being transmitted. So you could run it and figure out what sites people were surfing and stuff like that. It was very cool, but I have been unable to find it recently and I don't remember the name. Can anyone help me? Any programs that do this? Thanks.
If you don't go to school, you don't need a scolarship.
If you want to complain that it shouldn't be a scolarship challenge, that's one thing. But don't complain about a scolarship challenge requiring people to be students.
After a little searching, I found a list of 29 possible challenges for the students to solve. It's a PDF: Linux Challenge Options.
Second, I can't wait to see the results of this. Should be interesting to see how some of these are solved, and what other interesting challenges people come up with to try to solve.
If you don't go to school, you don't need a scollarship.
If you want to complain that it shouldn't be a scollarship challenge, that's one thing. But don't complain about a scollarship challenge requiring people to be students.
Some of the things I've seen in the past (like the Complex Spiral site) have amazed me, but this demo REALLY shows why XHTML and CSS is so great.
So I open it up and it's a normal looking web page that is well done and works great. When your browser lacks javascript (or it's turned off) it looks like any other well made page. This is probably why it prints well too. Then you turn on javascript (or in my case let the little security warning from IE that came with SP2 run the script) and it's just like looking at a powerpoint presentation of the exact same data. Add a few other sets of CSS stuff and you could make it also look great for a handheld (like a Palm or some such) that might not be able to display the webpage well (assuming they can't handle the powerpoint style part here).
And it's all just XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Amazing the things that can acomplish wihtout needing Java, ActiveX, Flash, a seperate viewer (like PowerPoint), etc.
When you get someone really skilled with some pieces of technology, it's amazing the stuff they can crank out.
I know the site is down (it was for me) but get a mirror of the zip file (there are ones in other comments) and check it out if you have even the tiniest interest in this.
That's what I was thinking. While the PSP discs are incased, the screen does worry me a little. While I take great care of my stuff, it's still something that could get scratched. When I saw this on/., the thing that I thought of first was my iPod. If they could put this on the front and back to prevent scratches (mine is in pretty good condition, but I've seen worse) or if it could make it easy to get fingerprints off (the only cosmetic flaw with the iPod, it's a magnet for fingerprints). You could put it on gameboy screens, cellphone screens (they could use it), if the optical distortion is low enough (and it must be for blue-ray) then it could make scratchproof camera lenses which would be good both for cellphones (putting 'em in your pockets will scratch 'em one day) and real cameras (wouldn't it be nice if you could buy a $1000+ lens and not have to be super careful not to scratch the thing?).
OK, I looked through all the drives, and their features are largely identicle. But why is it that not a single one supports Mt. Reiner? I've NEVER seen a DVD(+/-)R(W) drive that supports it. Can someone tell me why?
Besides "trade secrets" and such, there are other good reasons. First of all, another company could take their hard written code, change it a little, and then add some hardware to get a implementation for next to no investment (compared to the origional company).
But another reason that I've heard of is that many of these are software radios to a degree. This means that you can choose the powerlevel and frequencies and such in the firmware. Among other things this would let them change to the.11G standard after shipping "pre-G" gear. The problem with this is that it would let people modify the gear to work in a way that would violate the laws enforced by the FCC. Giving people the ability to do that could get the company in trouble with the FCC or get the product's license pulled or something like that. In other words parts of it can't be user modifyable to get approval. The other option would be to embed that stuff in hardware, but then it can't be changed easily (right now, for example, you could ship the same gear to numerous countries even if they all use different spectrums for 802.11 because you could change which one to use in the driver).
But as another poster pointed out, there is no real benefit to the companies to giving people the source. 99% of what people want (the thing to just work) would be served by a freely distributable driver (that was closed source).
Here is my guess, as always, IANALBIPOOSD (IANAL but I play one on/.).
Legal stuff always tries to reserve as many rights as possible for the company, so when they came up with the license for the drivers they came up with a license that gave almost no rights to people (as licenses usually seem to do). And that's the way it's been for a long time because, untill now, no one needed that ability. I mean other than with OSS (IE in the Windows, DOS, or Mac worlds) what reasons would anyone have for wanting to be able to distribute a tiny part of a driver (the firmware) without the rest of the driver for free? The only times I ever saw drivers given out (other than with hardware) was on CDs that game with magazines (so you could get the lastest that way) but then they include the full driver anyway.
Basically, no one cared before now, so there was no reason to give it to people. Now people want it, and I see no reason why there shouldn't give it up (it's not like we're asking to have it open sourced or the rights to dissassemble it or anything).
I was pretty sure he was dead. There were reports that he was ill (maybe cancer or something), plus the fact that he hasn't said anything in a while.
Is there anything on the tape that can date it well? Kerry has been the choice (unofficially) for quite a while (few months) so it could have been made any time during then, even earlier if he had made one for each candidate. Are we even sure it's him and not an impersonator?
It's full of DRM (just like other XM radios) but it doesn't matter because there is no way to get the audio off the device (legitimatly) other than through the analog out port, which is a loophole in the law. Other than that, you'd have to hook something up to read the device's memory while it's on and decrypt the signla from there, or intercept it between decrypting and the DAC (assuming they aren't on the same chip).
At best you might be able to get a digital out through a home connection kit, but I assume that the digital out ports have encryption on them to prevent you from copying that audio like I imagine that DVD players have.
I'm sure they'll try to find a way to complain though. I noticed that XM now has a stereo component XM player, it would be cool if that could timeshift. Now if they would just get some more of my favorite talk radio people (Dr. Laura, Paul Harvey, and I'd LOVE an NRP station (who has a deal with Sirrius, I think) so I could hear This American Life and A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk. But that's another discussion).
My family bought a XM radio in the last year. It's one of the little silver ones that slips into a boombox. Let's compare prices. This thing is $350, includes the reciever (which can apparently time shift), a home kit, a car kit, headphones, and a little more.
Compare that to my SkyFi radio, which was $99. Add the home kit for $70, and the car kit for $70 and you're at $240. If you want to be able to listen anywhere, you need the boombox which is $99. So now we're at $340. Now if you include the fact that this new one can be used anywhere (and doesn't need a big boombox full of D batteries) and time shifts, that's a great deal.
$10 (or so) to make it portable and add timeshifting. Sounds fine.
Now if you want to argue that ALL XM radios are overpriced, that's a different argument. But compared to one of their current offerings, this is a good deal.
Unless you ONLY want to listen to it in the car ever. But if you've had XM for a while, you'll want to start being able to listen to it at home too, and maybe out doing yard work, and...
My one comment is, I'm a little worried about the timeshifting. I hope it doesn't try to do that while on batteries, because I would think that would eat them up if it recorded much stuff. Hopefully only when in a crade (the car, at home, etc.).
Anyone who reads this and isn't instantly suspicious needs to up their paranoia level. Look at all the mistakes in the grammar! "Redhat found...". If this was from RedHat it would be "Redhat has found" or "We found" or "It has come to our attention" or something like that. "Some of the effected distriubtions include..." should be something more like "RedHat 7.2 and newer are effected" or some such. It would not end in "and not only" (which is terrible English, probably supposed to be "and more"). Plus why would a RedHat security advisory inform people if Solaris or *BSD was effected? I would expect that a link would be given to more information about the vulnerability (not just "see redhat.com" which is basically what's there). Last but not least, what has been RedHat all thoughout the advisory becomes "Red Hat" in the last line.
Beyond those obvious problems, the "best" targets of something like this (businesses) would have people who know better than this. Those people would know how a patch file would work. At miniumum the "./inst" section should say "make install", which is much more common. So this would only effect the "newbie" Linux user. Last of all, I would expect that anything RedHat issued would say something like "or get the update through Red Carpet (or whatever their 'Windows Update' is called)".
This isn't a very well made forgery. They could have easily taken a true RedHat advisory and modified it so the language would be better and sound more plausable. They could have at LEAST gotten someone who knows English better.
Does anyone else find it strange someone would go through all the trouble of registering a domain-name to run this scam? Why not say "download it off the (such and such) mirror at ftp://120.584.391.568/pub/mirror/redhat/patches/pa tch_file.tar.gz" or something like that. Use any domain name and make it look like a mirror. When was the last time any company put a file for users at "(domainname).com/file.tar.gz"? Never.
Slashdot Mirror
For 99% of users, this could be a great card. If it does great 2D, and can do good 3D (especially features like those used in Apple's Quartz, or Project Looking Glass) it would work more than well enough. Lets face it, for a large number of applications, a GeForce (origional) quality 3D would be MORE than enough for most anything many people would do. And if the graphics are localized into a small area (say a little 200x200 area of a window), then even such a card would be able to render very nice looking graphics (just like a "slow" card could run Doom 3 looking great at such a low resolution).
I'm with you. For a quality, commodity card this could be great. Plus, with the FPGA, not only could be hack the DRIVERS, you could hack the FIRMWARE! Think! You could buy the card, and write software to take the burden off the CPU for decoding MPEG2 or 4. You could even (with a little kernel help) swap firmware on the fly so you could have that video decoding, and then enter a command (or press a button on your desktop) to have the 3D firmware put in. When you're done, go back to video decoding acceleration.
Hell, make it run SETI in the background at super fast speed when just using 2D (like using nVidia cards to do scientific calculations on the GPU).
These things could be a LOT of fun to mess around with. I think I just sold myself on one ;)
I would agree with the birds comment, but they seem to die anyway (at least reportadly), so it must not be ENOUGH for the fast spinning windmills.
Either that or it's just the birds that are dumb as paste, in which case we may be doing nature a favor ;)
Doesn't that solve the bird problem?
On a side note though, doesn't having tons of large turbines change local weather patterns somehow by disrupting all the windflow?
I've suffered from DIMS for years. Does anyone out there have any good tips or ideas for curing (or reducing) the problem of motion sickness? With all the upcomming games that I'm worried will cause it that I want to play (Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, HL2, Doom 3, etc), I'd love to know.
Yes, that would work great. But as you pointed out, it's the OTHER WAY (like in the half-life movie) that worries me. There is nothing wrong with MC rescuing some girl who's important to the plot and her (or another girl) falling in love with him, but he has to be his cool self about it. If they try to do any kiss scenes or anything else (basically reciprication on his side) then it wouldn't work.
Master Chief can be played by anyone. He's just a suit. Then you dub over his voice and you're set.
Cortana is supposed to be CGI anyways (in the game) so there is no problem there either. Again, get the voice from the game and you're set.
They should be able to get it "right" pretty easily. But if it comes to the screen, I'm just worried they will try to give Master Chief a romantic interest or something like that, or scenes without his armor on or something like that. They could make a good action/war flick that would be fun to watch, but they could easily make something that is as true to the game as the Super Mario Brothers move was.
I got one this morning too. My only real complaint is that I think it should have had an analog stick. The touch pad works well in Metroid Prime Hunters, but it just doesn't do it for me in Mario 64. The analog stick just worked better. Or have made the directional pad analog (like the buttons on the PS2).
Still, great little system. I can't wait for more games!
They don't seem too happy either. "The T-Mobile Sidekick II does everything the Ogo does but much better, and it doubles as your phone." and "The Ogo is fairly unique [...]. But we wish the device's shortcomings weren't so glaring."
They probably want much more specific data that the anonomized and agregated data TiVo collects. My guess is that most of the TiVo data is just "person X has 31 season passes and 12 hours on their thing and watches an average of 4 hours per day". I wouldn't be suprised if info like the Superbowl thing is only because they tracked that specific show. I'm not sure how valuable that kind of info would be on most shows.
That said, they said that they would call me if I was in (IIRC) and I've yet to be called.
I assume that EA will complain about having to do that to compete or something like that ("We can't higher more because it's too expensive!"), but that doesn't bother me either. Sure programmers in SanFran or the Valley or LA are expesive, but a big part of that is because they have to be able to afford those exorbitantly expensive homes there. If they would create a division outside of Madison, WI or Wichita, KS or some other nice city with more reasonable housing prices they wouldn't have to pay programmers so much. "In-source" to rural America (I saw an article about it the other day). When a small house costs 100-200k and not 1-2m, you don't have to pay your programmers nearly as much for the same standard of living. In fact, you can pay them less, and they can still have a BETTER standard of living. And it's not like a programming team can't be located anywhere. Surf instructors may not be able to do their job in Kansas (relative to CA), but a programmer's location doesn't matter that much.
It's one thing if EA specifically told employees the kind of hours they'd be working, but it sounds like they didn't, which is basically exploitation to me. Sorry, they sound guilty and this sounds like a good thing.
Of course, I'm not a big fan of EA in the first place. Just FYI.
In fact, there are other devices that could make this even easier. I saw that Linksys will be comming out with what may be the perfect product for you.
Now you should know that there are other (albiet more interesting) options. If you want to go for pure coolness and geekocity, I have just the thing. My brother managed to get a laser link for connecting networks between two buildings a few years ago. With think it's not functional (never tried, think parts might be missing), but it's a cool thing. We have two large units (look like outdoor security camera casings) that each have laser units in them. You point them at eachother, wire everything up, and voila! the networks are supposed to be connected. They were used at a local school years and years ago. Ours are probably slow, and we know they are tolken ring (that's about all we know) but they exist. You could probably find something similiar if you looked enough.
As for your current problems, I don't know. I assume you are running Windows? If you were running Linux you could find out WHY the network is going down (watch for errors from the USB subsystem) but I don't know how (or if) you can do that in Windows. My guess is your 20' USB cable is part of the problem (just a hunch). Also, are you using directional antennas? Not just directional (in that they are not omni-directional) but HIGHLY directional antennas (like Yagis or the pringles WiFi antenna)? That might help too.
Also, now that I think of it, I think many accesspoints have an option to bridge networks built in. A quick check says that my Netgear WG602v2 supports it. But it looks like both ends have to be operating in "bridge mode" (although you can still serve clients in bridge mode, it looks like). So that's a 3rd option.
The program did something similar, it would monitor network traffic and show you all the images that were being transmitted. So you could run it and figure out what sites people were surfing and stuff like that. It was very cool, but I have been unable to find it recently and I don't remember the name. Can anyone help me? Any programs that do this? Thanks.
It's a scollarship challenge.
If you don't go to school, you don't need a scolarship.
If you want to complain that it shouldn't be a scolarship challenge, that's one thing. But don't complain about a scolarship challenge requiring people to be students.
(Yes, I posted this elsewhere in this thread)
Second, I can't wait to see the results of this. Should be interesting to see how some of these are solved, and what other interesting challenges people come up with to try to solve.
If you don't go to school, you don't need a scollarship.
If you want to complain that it shouldn't be a scollarship challenge, that's one thing. But don't complain about a scollarship challenge requiring people to be students.
So I open it up and it's a normal looking web page that is well done and works great. When your browser lacks javascript (or it's turned off) it looks like any other well made page. This is probably why it prints well too. Then you turn on javascript (or in my case let the little security warning from IE that came with SP2 run the script) and it's just like looking at a powerpoint presentation of the exact same data. Add a few other sets of CSS stuff and you could make it also look great for a handheld (like a Palm or some such) that might not be able to display the webpage well (assuming they can't handle the powerpoint style part here).
And it's all just XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Amazing the things that can acomplish wihtout needing Java, ActiveX, Flash, a seperate viewer (like PowerPoint), etc.
When you get someone really skilled with some pieces of technology, it's amazing the stuff they can crank out.
I know the site is down (it was for me) but get a mirror of the zip file (there are ones in other comments) and check it out if you have even the tiniest interest in this.
This has tons of great applications.
OK, I looked through all the drives, and their features are largely identicle. But why is it that not a single one supports Mt. Reiner? I've NEVER seen a DVD(+/-)R(W) drive that supports it. Can someone tell me why?
But another reason that I've heard of is that many of these are software radios to a degree. This means that you can choose the powerlevel and frequencies and such in the firmware. Among other things this would let them change to the .11G standard after shipping "pre-G" gear. The problem with this is that it would let people modify the gear to work in a way that would violate the laws enforced by the FCC. Giving people the ability to do that could get the company in trouble with the FCC or get the product's license pulled or something like that. In other words parts of it can't be user modifyable to get approval. The other option would be to embed that stuff in hardware, but then it can't be changed easily (right now, for example, you could ship the same gear to numerous countries even if they all use different spectrums for 802.11 because you could change which one to use in the driver).
But as another poster pointed out, there is no real benefit to the companies to giving people the source. 99% of what people want (the thing to just work) would be served by a freely distributable driver (that was closed source).
My 0.02
Legal stuff always tries to reserve as many rights as possible for the company, so when they came up with the license for the drivers they came up with a license that gave almost no rights to people (as licenses usually seem to do). And that's the way it's been for a long time because, untill now, no one needed that ability. I mean other than with OSS (IE in the Windows, DOS, or Mac worlds) what reasons would anyone have for wanting to be able to distribute a tiny part of a driver (the firmware) without the rest of the driver for free? The only times I ever saw drivers given out (other than with hardware) was on CDs that game with magazines (so you could get the lastest that way) but then they include the full driver anyway.
Basically, no one cared before now, so there was no reason to give it to people. Now people want it, and I see no reason why there shouldn't give it up (it's not like we're asking to have it open sourced or the rights to dissassemble it or anything).
Is there anything on the tape that can date it well? Kerry has been the choice (unofficially) for quite a while (few months) so it could have been made any time during then, even earlier if he had made one for each candidate. Are we even sure it's him and not an impersonator?
At best you might be able to get a digital out through a home connection kit, but I assume that the digital out ports have encryption on them to prevent you from copying that audio like I imagine that DVD players have.
I'm sure they'll try to find a way to complain though. I noticed that XM now has a stereo component XM player, it would be cool if that could timeshift. Now if they would just get some more of my favorite talk radio people (Dr. Laura, Paul Harvey, and I'd LOVE an NRP station (who has a deal with Sirrius, I think) so I could hear This American Life and A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk. But that's another discussion).
Compare that to my SkyFi radio, which was $99. Add the home kit for $70, and the car kit for $70 and you're at $240. If you want to be able to listen anywhere, you need the boombox which is $99. So now we're at $340. Now if you include the fact that this new one can be used anywhere (and doesn't need a big boombox full of D batteries) and time shifts, that's a great deal.
$10 (or so) to make it portable and add timeshifting. Sounds fine.
Now if you want to argue that ALL XM radios are overpriced, that's a different argument. But compared to one of their current offerings, this is a good deal.
Unless you ONLY want to listen to it in the car ever. But if you've had XM for a while, you'll want to start being able to listen to it at home too, and maybe out doing yard work, and...
My one comment is, I'm a little worried about the timeshifting. I hope it doesn't try to do that while on batteries, because I would think that would eat them up if it recorded much stuff. Hopefully only when in a crade (the car, at home, etc.).
Beyond those obvious problems, the "best" targets of something like this (businesses) would have people who know better than this. Those people would know how a patch file would work. At miniumum the "./inst" section should say "make install", which is much more common. So this would only effect the "newbie" Linux user. Last of all, I would expect that anything RedHat issued would say something like "or get the update through Red Carpet (or whatever their 'Windows Update' is called)".
This isn't a very well made forgery. They could have easily taken a true RedHat advisory and modified it so the language would be better and sound more plausable. They could have at LEAST gotten someone who knows English better.
Does anyone else find it strange someone would go through all the trouble of registering a domain-name to run this scam? Why not say "download it off the (such and such) mirror at ftp://120.584.391.568/pub/mirror/redhat/patches/pa tch_file.tar.gz" or something like that. Use any domain name and make it look like a mirror. When was the last time any company put a file for users at "(domainname).com/file.tar.gz"? Never.
Most people could have done better, IMHO.