OK, that's one Ironport that's being used to spew spam. With a little work, I'm sure I could show you a Windows/Exchange box, a Linux/Sendmail box, a FreeBSD/Qmail box, or a system running practically any modern OS and MTA that is used for spamming. Anything can be perverted; a chef's knife would probably make an excellent weapon, but that doesn't mean it was designed and built for murderers.
Even if Ironside's boxes are designed to send the same message to millions of recipients, though, what's wrong with that? The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited. If 500,000 people sign up for an email newsletter that I write, then I'm going to need some method of sending all 500,000 people the same message. Assuming I verify list membership with the recipients, I'm doing nothing illegal or immoral. I'm just sending an email to people who have told me they want to recieve it. That's not spam, that's what email was designed to do.
Spam is most certainly wrong, but you shouldn't go after Ironside just because they provide a tool that spammers happen to use. If a spammer who lives in your area buys his food at a local grocery store, should you picket that store until they stop selling food to the spammer? I would think that to be an incredibly futile and misdirected effort. Instead, you should focus your efforts on passing tougher anti-spam laws, designing and implementing better filters, and educating end users so they don't reply to spam. There are many more productive things you could do instead of ranting against one company that happens to provide a tool that some spammers use. Perhaps you should be doing one of them?
I believe that they're talking about a person who has worked as the director on past projects such as The Dig and Escape from Monkey Island, and who was laid off while directing Full Throttle II.
Scorched. Earth. One of the greatest games ever, and the version I linked to (Scorched Earth 2000) has network multiplayer capabilities and is in Java, so it should work on Windows, Linux and Mac clients, or anything else with a web browser and JVM. The game is incredibly simple (just pick an angle, power level, and optionally a weapon), and the basics can be picked up in five minutes or so. Despite the simplicity, though, there are very few things in life that beat killing 4 friends at once with a Death's Head nuclear MIRV.
Installation: It's bundled with several programs. Based on general experience, I'd say it's probably buried somewhere in the EULA, but I don't know the specifics of how it's installed.
Advertising: Displays pop-up ads, monitors keywords and displays advertising based on what you see and type. Also hijacks referrer links.
Privacy: Sends back the term which triggered the ad and the ID of the affiliate software which installed WhenU when it displays an ad. However, there aren't any cookies set or any GUIDs.
Basically, these people seem to be the same as most malware vendors: they say that they got your express permission to install the software, but rely on their affiliates or the EULA From Hell to actually notify you about what is going on. I doubt that either the "it's constitutionally protected" argument or the "the users gave consent" argument will fly any farther than what it takes for the judge to throw them out.
Note: I'm not a lawyer; don't take this as legal advice.
Check out Javacool Software's Spyware Blaster, a program which sets an ActiveX kill bit for identified threats. The software is free, but offers a subscription service for automatic updates.
Note: I'm not affilliated with Javacool, but I have found their product really useful.
The problem there is X, not Linux. X only supports 5 buttons, and with the typical ZAxisMapping 4 5 configuration for a wheel (which maps wheel up to button 4 and wheel down to button 5) you run out of buttons before you can use the extra two on the side.
Please, place blame where it's due - Linux fully supports the USB Human Interface Device spec (which allows more axes and buttons than any sane person could hope to use). The problem is X, which has been around since before time itself and deserves to be put down.
Claria's officials said that instead of offering a "normal" IPO, they would instead try an "innovative bundling strategy." When an investor purchases one of several popular stocks or mutual funds, they will find that a small Claria stock certificate has been Superglued to the back of their purchased certificate. Any attempt to remove or separately sell the Claria stock will automatically destroy both certificates.
Also, Claria said their certificates represent "the latest in investor-tracking technology." Claria's executives plan to use the small audio monitoring devices embedded in each certificate to learn valuable insider information about upcoming shifts in the stock market. "This represents a new direction in the stock market. Never before have companies used their stock certificates as a way to gather valuable investor information," said Claria's CEO in a press release today extolling the virtues of Claria's new business venture.
Addressing privacy concerns, he also mentioned that, "Anyone buying this stock knows exactly what they're getting into. We fully disclose all information about our monitoring technologies to anyone who bothers to break into our company's vault and read the encrypted data therein. Anyone who claims they were misled about privacy simply hasn't done the proper espionage expected of both parties entering into any contract. After all, if you don't catch us spying on you, it's your fault."
While Cisco does have a decent security track record (exempting this colossally boneheaded manuver), your tirade against "slashdot mind-droids" is simply false. Backdoor passwords tend to be one of the most obvious things to detect, excepting serious trickery like putting the password into the compiler. Code that looks like
if (inputpasshash==storedhash) { return TRUE; } else if (inputpasshash==BACKDOOR) { return TRUE; } else { return FALSE; }
tends to stand out pretty
well during a code audit, and is visible even to a beginning C student. Backdoors are harder to sneak into open source software, simply because people will watch your every move and might not agree with all your changes.
Oh joy, another conservative brings up Waco as an example of why things are so much better under Ashcroft than under Reno. Here's a hint for you: Waco consisted of fuckups from the top level (AG's office) to the troops on the ground going in with lethal weapons. Janet Reno isn't wholly responsible for the unfortunate outcome of a joint operation between the FBI, DoJ and BATF. Unless she was on the radio to the troops telling them to shoot children and use tanks or was there with an M60 cackling madly as she mowed down innocent kids, she isn't solely responsible for the massive fuckups at Waco. Disasters of that magnitude require incompetence all down the line, not just evil at the top.
Ashcroft's actions, on the other hand, are directly attributable to him and the DoJ which he controls. Spending your money to cover up a statue of Justice? All him. Planning to divert investigators and money to the War on Porn? All him. Changing the USA PATRIOT act from something requesting a slight expansion of powers into the current abomination only a few minutes before the vote? He was probably in on that, too. Reno wasn't a model AG, but Ashcroft is the one using the office to push his morality on others and expand federal power.
Not only has it been confirmed many times, but it's even been confirmed by satellite. Take a look here for an interesting article which explains how the GPS satellite system must correct for relativity, and how it does so (and in doing so verifies the time-dialation postulate of Einstein's theories).
Of course, the GPS system is not anywhere near the first proof of this or many other relativistic phenomena; atomic clocks on board jetliners can test whether gravity affects the speed of a clock (it does) and other phenomena. Another example is found in cosmic rays; many short-lived particles, formed in the Earth's upper atmosphere when high-energy rays hit the atoms in air, would be unobservable if not for time dialation; "common sense" predicts that they would decay only a few meters from their starting position, but relativity tells us that since the particles are moving extremely fast, their decay rate will be slowed enormously from our frame of reference, and the particles will still be observable from the ground.
If you know where to look, proofs of general and special relativity are all around us. All you need in most cases is an atomic clock or good cloud chamber, yours for not more than a few million dollars.
I seriously doubt that it's harddrive space limiting the capacity of their server offerings. I don't know the details of how Google's search algorithms work, but I can tell you that they don't run in constant time, and that the requirements probably ramp up pretty quickly as you add data. Remember that Pagerank works on the connections between nodes in a network, which means with each node added to the network there may be many connections to analyze.
Also, 20GB of space is a lot in many applications, and search is one of them. These servers are designed to search through mostly text data (including HTML), and even large text files aren't usually more than a few hundred k, or a meg or two at most. If we assume that the average file to be searched is 500k, that's 40,000 searchable files on one low-end server. That's more than enough for a midsize company's support database, for example. These servers seem designed to search small to midsize intranets and midsize to large databases of specific information. If you need more than that for your specific application, you probably have enough resources to contact Google directly and work out a custom solution, as I'm sure many companies have done.
Perhaps I should explain the concepts behind a swap file/partition first. The system "swaps out" data in memory that hasn't been used for a while to the hard drive, which, while much slower than memory, also tends to have much more space available. By doing this, it can then free up fast physical memory for tasks that need it. If it needs the data on the hard drive again, it will swap that back into physical memory, swapping it with data in physical memory that hasn't seen much use recently. Of course, this is an extremely simplistic explanation; the algorithms which determine just what gets swapped when are very complex. Still, it will do for the basic concepts.
What, then does this have to do with putting the swap file in a RAM disk? Simple - a swap file is hard drive space masquerading as RAM, and a RAM drive is RAM masquerading as a hard drive. You end up going in a circle. The net performance gain in the best case would be zero, and in the real world will be negative due to overhead. You would be much better off simply specifiying to Windows to use no swap space at all; of course, this can be dangerous if you don't have more RAM than you'll ever use.
As far as using the HD goes, it sounds like a good idea, albiet with some conditions:
If you're planning on spending any money on this, it would be better off going towards more RAM.
If the drive isn't as fast as your primary HD, it may not be as good a deal as you might think. Remember that the non-DMA access modes used by older IDE drives, can eat up your CPU and thus any performance gain. Of course, this isn't an issue with SCSI if that's what you're using.
If you use an app that has its own scratchpad requirements, you might want to put that on the drive rather than your Windows swapfile. Photoshop comes to mind immediately as an example of where this would be a good thing; it might also be good for dumping processed video onto (although if you're doing major video work, you should have a fast, preferably RAID-0, scratchspace, along with more reliable storage).
As far as a fixed-size swapfile, it should help some in Windows; when you defrag, it will help to keep your swapfile coherent as much as possible. Of course, if the swapfile is the only thing on the drive, it won't matter too much. If you do go for a fixed size file, make sure to make it larger than you ever think you'll need - it sucks to run out of memory when you're doing a lengthy, complex operation. One rule of thumb (not as valid these days) is to set your swap to 2x your physical memory. Another, which I use, is to simply take the most memory you'll ever think you'll use and then add a 50% safety factor. Remember to resize this if you ever start working with really large stuff - high-res video, 3000 x 3000 pixel Photoshop images, etc.
Finally, remember that idealy, you never want to hit swap at all. If you're experiencing problems with thrashing, you should probably either pare down your system (do you really need to run that IM program all the time? all those systray utilities you never use?) or simply bite the bullet and get more RAM. Even the fastest hard drive can't touch RAM for speed, and seeing your system hit the pagefile for routine tasks means it's time to put a new stick of RAM into the beast.
New.net is NOT a registar in the normal sense of the word. The only place that anyone signing up for a domain with them gets a DNS entry is in the new.net DNS servers - if you register "foo.bar" with them, you get nothing but "foo.bar.new.net" . Of course, they have their spyware-infested "New.net Client" that doesn't just add a default domain to DNS but instead takes over the entire Windows TCP/IP stack and causes serious connectivity issues (I've seen machines that can't access any network because of them). New.net is a scam, which relies on people thinking that just because they can type "foo.bar" into their browser and get their homepage, means that they own the domain "foo.bar" with a legitimate registrar.
Many of the legitimate registrars on the Internet are pretty scummy, and ICANN is coming close to the bottom of the barrel, but they can't touch New.net for pure scam-artist nastiness. Anything that's bad for New.net, their "buisiness plan" and their damn spyware is good for the Internet at large. I would love to see them forced to shut down because there are actual, legitimate TLDs that conflict with their offerings. Unfortunately, they'd probably just update their "client software" to check their DNS servers before anything actually legitimate (like, say, the customer's ISP or a root-level nameserver). Anything bad for New.net is good for the Internet at large. They are nothing but scam artists selling something they don't own (new domain names), and deserve everything ICANN in all its fascist idiocy can throw at them. There aren't many people or companies in the world I would wish that upon, but New.net has made the list in spades.
Of course it takes special knowledge to build and operate high voltage, high current devices in a safe manner; I never said otherwise. Also, if you jury-rig any wiring in order to make it work, you could very well pay with your life. High voltage and high current devices are incredibly dangerous in the hands of anyone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing. I don't dispute this. However, there are many devices in the world that are dangerous to build and operate without the proper training - aircraft come to mind immediately.
Regarding the resistance of the human body (to calculate lethal voltages), I remember being told in several HV-safety courses in physics classes that the human cross-body resistance (index finger to index finger) is generally 100 kohms to 1 mohm, depending mostly on the level of sweat on the body, and thus on environmental conditions like heat and humidity. That doesn't mean that 5 kV isn't dangerous, though: remember the 1/10/100 rule: you can feel 1 mA, can't let go at 10 mA due to involuntary local muscle contraction, and at 100 mA you are presenting a serious danger to your heart. Thus, with your 5 kV supply, you'll probably find yourself unable to let go of the power supply's terminals should you touch them. Even the voltages in your house are dangerous, in the right situation (the bathtub scenario: drop a 110v appliance into your bathtub, with you providing a path to ground, and it might not take too much to cause unconciousness and drown you). It's all a matter of knowing what you can do safely.
Why wouldn't I (and many other slashdotters) want to play with equipment like this? To me, the extremely slight risk of cancer caused by short, high-intensity broadband RF pulses is more than offset by the sheer coolness factor of playing with something like this - a little like a geekier form of "extreme sports," perhaps (God knows I already drink enough Mountain Dew).
Even without the coolness factor, though, the risks are still rather slight with some attention to safety.
Electrocution actually isn't much of a risk with many HV devices - most will destroy themselves (or run up against current limiters) far before they output anywhere near the 200-250 mA needed to stop the human heart. While a shock from a tesla coil or other HV device will hurt terribly and pose a risk of burns, it probably won't kill you. Although some devices designed to deliver a high voltage and high current pulse can be extremely dangerous, keeping aware of safety at all times and never using jury-rigged solutions can mean that even a seemingly dangerous activity like playing around with Tesla coils and coincrushers is fairly safe.
As for ozone, all that you have to do to eliminate most risk is to work outside or in a ventilated area, and not stay around areas where arcing has occured. It's certainly not more dangerous than spraypaint, at least in the quantities produced by most amateur experiments. Bottom line: it's reasonably safe and a lot of fun, so why not do it?
One thing I find puzzling is the lack of advancement in game AI. In fact, many new games don't even measure up to the AI standard set by Half-Life (which was one of the first games in which military enemies actually used good squad tactics). In contrast, in Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, (a much more recent game) guards really had only one tactic: rush the supersoldier and die in the hail of bullets. To be sure, there are games with excellent AI these days, but unfortuately they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
One would think that games' AI would be improved as more and more CPU power is made available to developers, but instead it seems stagnant. Of course, this is almost certainly due to the fact that while some features (especially graphics) are easy to display on retail packaging, it's hard to evaluate the strength of a game's AI without actually playing for a while. Thus, Marketing pushes aside development of a good AI for shinier graphics, and gamers buy into the myth that graphics are king.
I understand that programming a good enemy AI is difficult, and I don't expect to have every enemy equipped with a full neural net in order to learn my tactics. Still, is it too much to ask for enemies to attempt to flank my last known position when I duck behind cover? To me, a good enemy AI is what can make all the difference between a mediocre game and a truely memorable one. While other considerations - graphics, physics, gameplay, level design and stability - are important, it seems that game AI always gets left by the wayside in order to make things shinier and provide nice box shots.
Why does HardOCP have to be impartial in their editorials? They said that they think Infinium is a bad investment that probably won't produce anything, and provided (true) facts to back up their case.
HardOCP has an obligation to the truth, but they don't have an obligation to fairness. They present their opinion, clearly labeled as such, and aren't obligated to provide any forum for the pro-Infinium side to respond. After all, it's their server. As long as they don't commit libel, they can do what they want on their soapbox. That's the whole point of the First Amendment - neither the speech of HardOCP nor Infinium can be infringed.
Re:This just in from Saturn
on
Mars Rovers Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Any other planet with rings?
Sure, try Jupiter, or mabye Uranus. Of course, they aren't nearly as prominent; Saturn's rings are the only ones that can be easily seen by an amateur observer. However, I'd think that any solar system with gas giants has a decent chance of having ringed planets, as it's really just dust and rocks that have fallen into a stable orbit and haven't globbed together into a moon. We couldn't really directly detect ringed planets around other stars from Earth; the distances are just too great. It would be great, though, to send some sort of interstellar probe to a distant solar system and have our heirs recieve images of a Saturn-like ringed planet.
It seems a lot of people here are assuming that the x86 as an embedded platform somehow still requires an OS like Windows or Linux. It doesn't. Instead, it would probably use an embedded OS like QNX or VxWorks.
The issue here is whether the x86 platform's issues, like excessive heat and power consumption and the requirement for a separate memory controller, outweigh its advantages, like the large variety of hardware already available to interface to everything under the sun and the fact that it's a well-understood architecture.
Now that's out of the way, here's my two cents: the x86 architecture, or at least the implementations currently available, simply isn't cut out for most embedded applications. While x86's limitations have been addressed with lots of extensions (MMX, SSE, 3dNow, etc.), those end up adding complexity and drawing more power than a chip designed without those limitations. Also, the x86's pitiful lack of registers compared to architectures like the PowerPC (another choice for embedded applications that require a good deal of power) means that almost any complex operations mean lots of going in and out of cache, or, worse, main memory. While x86 is acceptable in an environment with a 300W+ power supply and user tolerance for a good deal of noise, it won't cut it in your VCR. x86 might see some use in applications which require rapid development and lots of power, but in most cases there is already a good solution available.
The server side is easy - all you need is a vaugely recent box (a PII is almost overkill) with lots of drives and a network connection (802.11x, since you specify wireless). Pick SMB, NFS or FTP to serve files; I use SMB because it works well with both Windows and Linux, but you are free to choose whatever you wish.
The client, though, is a tougher nut to crack. If you only want to stream MP3s, then a product like the Audiotron would be excellent; you don't have to worry about finding a good Linux-compatible character-LCD based control system (which you probably would want to use, in this case), and then programming it. The Audiotron-type products are probably best in an audio-only environment, although you could probably get by with a second PC, especially if you can stand to have a small keyboard, mouse and monitor in your rec room. Wireless might be a problem, but I'd imagine anything that doesn't natively grok 802.11x would work with an AP on the other end of a short network cable.
I would advise you to take your thinking beyond just MP3s, though. If you were to get a Shuttle or similar small form factor PC and put a TV card, Linux and MythTV on it, you would have an excellent PVR system that would also play MP3s and even act as a frontend to emulators like MAME and ZSNES. Even if you don't want a PVR (already have Tivo, don't watch TV, whatever), you can still use the other functions. Also, most of the small form factor PCs I've seen are designed to be small, quiet and non-intrusive - it probably wouldn't be much worse than a system like the Audiotron, from an annoyance standpoint. If I were in your shoes, I'd seriously consider taking the money I was going to spend on an Audiotron or similar product and putting it towards one of these babies.
I agree that Point Seven was idiotic - it seems they decided beforehand to go for the "Seven Deadly Sins" angle, then had to pad it out. Still, your other points need to be addressed.
The fact that most of the Ngage's library were ported PS1 games is something of a weakness. Why? Many gamers have PS1s, and have played the most popular games on that platform. Why would they want to replay those games on their portable system? While there is a decent market for ports of older games (look at Nintendo's success with the ports of the NES and SNES Mario games on the GBA), it is a Bad Idea to offer nothing but old games on your new system.
As for the price argument, it's a lot harder for most people to justify a $300 purchase to themselves (or their SO) than it is to justify two $150 purchases (which would get you a GBA SP and a couple games, and a nice mobile phone). Stupid, maybe, but it was also stupid for Nokia to not take note of this. If I were in charge of selling the Ngage, I would either bring the price point down, or market it exclusively as a gaming device and remove the phone capabilities entirely. The gaming community still hasn't gotten over the "$300, OMG that's so expensive!" attitude about the Ngage. I doubt they will for a long time to come.
The sidetalking/bizarre Frisbee accident thing? BAD IDEA when you're trying to sell this as the phone/game system of choice for the "hip" kids. Nobody wants to feel like an idiot after they spent a lot of money on a new phone or game system. I would think that a design like the 6800 model would have been more attractive (and would have gotten rid of the weird vertical-letterbox screen as well). Even if that's too expensive, there are plenty of other options, too. It wouldn't be too hard to simply put the mic and speaker on the top of the phone, like pretty much every other phone since Alexander Grahm Bell invented the damned thing.
Finally, requiring people to remove the battery to change games was another really bad idea. Even if the system does need to be off (unlike most devices using the SD/MMC card format), it could use a physical interlock like the old Game Boy (just a little plastic tab connected to the power switch that holds the game in).
The Ngage ultimatly seems like a system designed by Marketing and sold by Engineering - while there are a few good features, they're encumbered by weird and pointless design decisions.
Your problem is because of Windows (or DOS, if you're even more of a masochist). It will tend to move the file in small chunks, so it goes something like this: read a little bit (maybe a few K) from disk, copy it to memory, seek head to new location, write that tiny amount back to the new location, then go back to the previous location and start over again with a new tiny chunk. As a result, your hard drive's heads are in transit more often than they're reading data, and speeds really suffer. Remember that old versions of DOS and Windows were designed to run on systems with very little memory; this strategy, while slow, also uses very little scratch space.
If you're using Linux and want to copy a lot of stuff from one place to another, you can use dd ('disk dump', designed for moving large files) and specify a blocksize of a few megs; this means that you will be moving data a few megs at a time, rather than a few K at a time - of course, this means that you have to use that much more memory. Also, I would imagine that Cygwin would allow you to use dd under Windows; another option is NTFS, where transfers from one directory to another on a single drive are nearly instantaneous. Of course, then you lose compatability; while FAT variants are understood by almost all OSes, you will have an unpleasant time trying to mount and use an NTFS volume from anything other than Windows. It's all about tradeoffs, but hopefully something here will help.
Without a degree, you probably won't be hired at any US tech firm - with the current trends in outsourcing/downsizing, even people with both degrees and experience are having trouble holding down a job. This isn't the end of the world for your dream, however - think how you can use your medical skills to your advantage here.
One thing that seems to leap out at me is software to manage a medical practice - if you were to learn to program on your own time (via books, online material like Open Courseware, and perhaps working on some Open Source projects), you could probably develop a good system for a doctor's office to track patient records, appointments, and such - I have talked to doctors and their receptionists, and something like this is needed in a lot of practices.
Although there is certainly competition in this arena, you already have contacts in the medical field, and since there isn't a big Microsoft-like giant in the field (to my knowledge), you would stand a decent chance just starting your own business to sell your software. If it's successful, then great, otherwise, you've still got that MD to fall back on;).
Remember, you'll do best working at what you know. Having worked in medicine, you probably know what doctors want to see in a piece of software better than a developer who just decided that medical office software was a good idea and put out his or her idea of what doctors want to see.
Of course, this is all just off the top of my head. There may be fierce competition in the medical software business - I don't know the details of the market. However, if I were you, I would be looking into ways to turn the years spent in medical school and practice into an asset rather than a liability.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if Ironside's boxes are designed to send the same message to millions of recipients, though, what's wrong with that? The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited. If 500,000 people sign up for an email newsletter that I write, then I'm going to need some method of sending all 500,000 people the same message. Assuming I verify list membership with the recipients, I'm doing nothing illegal or immoral. I'm just sending an email to people who have told me they want to recieve it. That's not spam, that's what email was designed to do.
Spam is most certainly wrong, but you shouldn't go after Ironside just because they provide a tool that spammers happen to use. If a spammer who lives in your area buys his food at a local grocery store, should you picket that store until they stop selling food to the spammer? I would think that to be an incredibly futile and misdirected effort. Instead, you should focus your efforts on passing tougher anti-spam laws, designing and implementing better filters, and educating end users so they don't reply to spam. There are many more productive things you could do instead of ranting against one company that happens to provide a tool that some spammers use. Perhaps you should be doing one of them?
I believe that they're talking about a person who has worked as the director on past projects such as The Dig and Escape from Monkey Island, and who was laid off while directing Full Throttle II.
Scorched. Earth.
One of the greatest games ever, and the version I linked to (Scorched Earth 2000) has network multiplayer capabilities and is in Java, so it should work on Windows, Linux and Mac clients, or anything else with a web browser and JVM. The game is incredibly simple (just pick an angle, power level, and optionally a weapon), and the basics can be picked up in five minutes or so. Despite the simplicity, though, there are very few things in life that beat killing 4 friends at once with a Death's Head nuclear MIRV.
- Installation: It's bundled with several programs. Based on general experience, I'd say it's probably buried somewhere in the EULA, but I don't know the specifics of how it's installed.
- Advertising: Displays pop-up ads, monitors keywords and displays advertising based on what you see and type. Also hijacks referrer links.
- Privacy: Sends back the term which triggered the ad and the ID of the affiliate software which installed WhenU when it displays an ad. However, there aren't any cookies set or any GUIDs.
Basically, these people seem to be the same as most malware vendors: they say that they got your express permission to install the software, but rely on their affiliates or the EULA From Hell to actually notify you about what is going on. I doubt that either the "it's constitutionally protected" argument or the "the users gave consent" argument will fly any farther than what it takes for the judge to throw them out.Note: I'm not a lawyer; don't take this as legal advice.
Note: I'm not affilliated with Javacool, but I have found their product really useful.
Please, place blame where it's due - Linux fully supports the USB Human Interface Device spec (which allows more axes and buttons than any sane person could hope to use). The problem is X, which has been around since before time itself and deserves to be put down.
Also, Claria said their certificates represent "the latest in investor-tracking technology." Claria's executives plan to use the small audio monitoring devices embedded in each certificate to learn valuable insider information about upcoming shifts in the stock market. "This represents a new direction in the stock market. Never before have companies used their stock certificates as a way to gather valuable investor information," said Claria's CEO in a press release today extolling the virtues of Claria's new business venture.
Addressing privacy concerns, he also mentioned that, "Anyone buying this stock knows exactly what they're getting into. We fully disclose all information about our monitoring technologies to anyone who bothers to break into our company's vault and read the encrypted data therein. Anyone who claims they were misled about privacy simply hasn't done the proper espionage expected of both parties entering into any contract. After all, if you don't catch us spying on you, it's your fault."
Ashcroft's actions, on the other hand, are directly attributable to him and the DoJ which he controls. Spending your money to cover up a statue of Justice? All him. Planning to divert investigators and money to the War on Porn? All him. Changing the USA PATRIOT act from something requesting a slight expansion of powers into the current abomination only a few minutes before the vote? He was probably in on that, too. Reno wasn't a model AG, but Ashcroft is the one using the office to push his morality on others and expand federal power.
Of course, the GPS system is not anywhere near the first proof of this or many other relativistic phenomena; atomic clocks on board jetliners can test whether gravity affects the speed of a clock (it does) and other phenomena. Another example is found in cosmic rays; many short-lived particles, formed in the Earth's upper atmosphere when high-energy rays hit the atoms in air, would be unobservable if not for time dialation; "common sense" predicts that they would decay only a few meters from their starting position, but relativity tells us that since the particles are moving extremely fast, their decay rate will be slowed enormously from our frame of reference, and the particles will still be observable from the ground.
If you know where to look, proofs of general and special relativity are all around us. All you need in most cases is an atomic clock or good cloud chamber, yours for not more than a few million dollars.
Also, 20GB of space is a lot in many applications, and search is one of them. These servers are designed to search through mostly text data (including HTML), and even large text files aren't usually more than a few hundred k, or a meg or two at most. If we assume that the average file to be searched is 500k, that's 40,000 searchable files on one low-end server. That's more than enough for a midsize company's support database, for example. These servers seem designed to search small to midsize intranets and midsize to large databases of specific information. If you need more than that for your specific application, you probably have enough resources to contact Google directly and work out a custom solution, as I'm sure many companies have done.
What, then does this have to do with putting the swap file in a RAM disk? Simple - a swap file is hard drive space masquerading as RAM, and a RAM drive is RAM masquerading as a hard drive. You end up going in a circle. The net performance gain in the best case would be zero, and in the real world will be negative due to overhead. You would be much better off simply specifiying to Windows to use no swap space at all; of course, this can be dangerous if you don't have more RAM than you'll ever use.
- If you're planning on spending any money on this, it would be better off going towards more RAM.
- If the drive isn't as fast as your primary HD, it may not be as good a deal as you might think. Remember that the non-DMA access modes used by older IDE drives, can eat up your CPU and thus any performance gain. Of course, this isn't an issue with SCSI if that's what you're using.
- If you use an app that has its own scratchpad requirements, you might want to put that on the drive rather than your Windows swapfile. Photoshop comes to mind immediately as an example of where this would be a good thing; it might also be good for dumping processed video onto (although if you're doing major video work, you should have a fast, preferably RAID-0, scratchspace, along with more reliable storage).
As far as a fixed-size swapfile, it should help some in Windows; when you defrag, it will help to keep your swapfile coherent as much as possible. Of course, if the swapfile is the only thing on the drive, it won't matter too much. If you do go for a fixed size file, make sure to make it larger than you ever think you'll need - it sucks to run out of memory when you're doing a lengthy, complex operation. One rule of thumb (not as valid these days) is to set your swap to 2x your physical memory. Another, which I use, is to simply take the most memory you'll ever think you'll use and then add a 50% safety factor. Remember to resize this if you ever start working with really large stuff - high-res video, 3000 x 3000 pixel Photoshop images, etc.Finally, remember that idealy, you never want to hit swap at all. If you're experiencing problems with thrashing, you should probably either pare down your system (do you really need to run that IM program all the time? all those systray utilities you never use?) or simply bite the bullet and get more RAM. Even the fastest hard drive can't touch RAM for speed, and seeing your system hit the pagefile for routine tasks means it's time to put a new stick of RAM into the beast.
Many of the legitimate registrars on the Internet are pretty scummy, and ICANN is coming close to the bottom of the barrel, but they can't touch New.net for pure scam-artist nastiness. Anything that's bad for New.net, their "buisiness plan" and their damn spyware is good for the Internet at large. I would love to see them forced to shut down because there are actual, legitimate TLDs that conflict with their offerings. Unfortunately, they'd probably just update their "client software" to check their DNS servers before anything actually legitimate (like, say, the customer's ISP or a root-level nameserver). Anything bad for New.net is good for the Internet at large. They are nothing but scam artists selling something they don't own (new domain names), and deserve everything ICANN in all its fascist idiocy can throw at them. There aren't many people or companies in the world I would wish that upon, but New.net has made the list in spades.
Regarding the resistance of the human body (to calculate lethal voltages), I remember being told in several HV-safety courses in physics classes that the human cross-body resistance (index finger to index finger) is generally 100 kohms to 1 mohm, depending mostly on the level of sweat on the body, and thus on environmental conditions like heat and humidity. That doesn't mean that 5 kV isn't dangerous, though: remember the 1/10/100 rule: you can feel 1 mA, can't let go at 10 mA due to involuntary local muscle contraction, and at 100 mA you are presenting a serious danger to your heart. Thus, with your 5 kV supply, you'll probably find yourself unable to let go of the power supply's terminals should you touch them. Even the voltages in your house are dangerous, in the right situation (the bathtub scenario: drop a 110v appliance into your bathtub, with you providing a path to ground, and it might not take too much to cause unconciousness and drown you). It's all a matter of knowing what you can do safely.
Even without the coolness factor, though, the risks are still rather slight with some attention to safety.
Electrocution actually isn't much of a risk with many HV devices - most will destroy themselves (or run up against current limiters) far before they output anywhere near the 200-250 mA needed to stop the human heart. While a shock from a tesla coil or other HV device will hurt terribly and pose a risk of burns, it probably won't kill you. Although some devices designed to deliver a high voltage and high current pulse can be extremely dangerous, keeping aware of safety at all times and never using jury-rigged solutions can mean that even a seemingly dangerous activity like playing around with Tesla coils and coincrushers is fairly safe.
As for ozone, all that you have to do to eliminate most risk is to work outside or in a ventilated area, and not stay around areas where arcing has occured. It's certainly not more dangerous than spraypaint, at least in the quantities produced by most amateur experiments. Bottom line: it's reasonably safe and a lot of fun, so why not do it?
One would think that games' AI would be improved as more and more CPU power is made available to developers, but instead it seems stagnant. Of course, this is almost certainly due to the fact that while some features (especially graphics) are easy to display on retail packaging, it's hard to evaluate the strength of a game's AI without actually playing for a while. Thus, Marketing pushes aside development of a good AI for shinier graphics, and gamers buy into the myth that graphics are king.
I understand that programming a good enemy AI is difficult, and I don't expect to have every enemy equipped with a full neural net in order to learn my tactics. Still, is it too much to ask for enemies to attempt to flank my last known position when I duck behind cover? To me, a good enemy AI is what can make all the difference between a mediocre game and a truely memorable one. While other considerations - graphics, physics, gameplay, level design and stability - are important, it seems that game AI always gets left by the wayside in order to make things shinier and provide nice box shots.
Oh, Pac-Man! We must not! We can not! It is not permitted!
HardOCP has an obligation to the truth, but they don't have an obligation to fairness. They present their opinion, clearly labeled as such, and aren't obligated to provide any forum for the pro-Infinium side to respond. After all, it's their server. As long as they don't commit libel, they can do what they want on their soapbox. That's the whole point of the First Amendment - neither the speech of HardOCP nor Infinium can be infringed.
Sure, try Jupiter, or mabye Uranus. Of course, they aren't nearly as prominent; Saturn's rings are the only ones that can be easily seen by an amateur observer. However, I'd think that any solar system with gas giants has a decent chance of having ringed planets, as it's really just dust and rocks that have fallen into a stable orbit and haven't globbed together into a moon. We couldn't really directly detect ringed planets around other stars from Earth; the distances are just too great. It would be great, though, to send some sort of interstellar probe to a distant solar system and have our heirs recieve images of a Saturn-like ringed planet.
The issue here is whether the x86 platform's issues, like excessive heat and power consumption and the requirement for a separate memory controller, outweigh its advantages, like the large variety of hardware already available to interface to everything under the sun and the fact that it's a well-understood architecture.
Now that's out of the way, here's my two cents: the x86 architecture, or at least the implementations currently available, simply isn't cut out for most embedded applications. While x86's limitations have been addressed with lots of extensions (MMX, SSE, 3dNow, etc.), those end up adding complexity and drawing more power than a chip designed without those limitations. Also, the x86's pitiful lack of registers compared to architectures like the PowerPC (another choice for embedded applications that require a good deal of power) means that almost any complex operations mean lots of going in and out of cache, or, worse, main memory. While x86 is acceptable in an environment with a 300W+ power supply and user tolerance for a good deal of noise, it won't cut it in your VCR. x86 might see some use in applications which require rapid development and lots of power, but in most cases there is already a good solution available.
The client, though, is a tougher nut to crack. If you only want to stream MP3s, then a product like the Audiotron would be excellent; you don't have to worry about finding a good Linux-compatible character-LCD based control system (which you probably would want to use, in this case), and then programming it. The Audiotron-type products are probably best in an audio-only environment, although you could probably get by with a second PC, especially if you can stand to have a small keyboard, mouse and monitor in your rec room. Wireless might be a problem, but I'd imagine anything that doesn't natively grok 802.11x would work with an AP on the other end of a short network cable.
I would advise you to take your thinking beyond just MP3s, though. If you were to get a Shuttle or similar small form factor PC and put a TV card, Linux and MythTV on it, you would have an excellent PVR system that would also play MP3s and even act as a frontend to emulators like MAME and ZSNES. Even if you don't want a PVR (already have Tivo, don't watch TV, whatever), you can still use the other functions. Also, most of the small form factor PCs I've seen are designed to be small, quiet and non-intrusive - it probably wouldn't be much worse than a system like the Audiotron, from an annoyance standpoint. If I were in your shoes, I'd seriously consider taking the money I was going to spend on an Audiotron or similar product and putting it towards one of these babies.
The fact that most of the Ngage's library were ported PS1 games is something of a weakness. Why? Many gamers have PS1s, and have played the most popular games on that platform. Why would they want to replay those games on their portable system? While there is a decent market for ports of older games (look at Nintendo's success with the ports of the NES and SNES Mario games on the GBA), it is a Bad Idea to offer nothing but old games on your new system.
As for the price argument, it's a lot harder for most people to justify a $300 purchase to themselves (or their SO) than it is to justify two $150 purchases (which would get you a GBA SP and a couple games, and a nice mobile phone). Stupid, maybe, but it was also stupid for Nokia to not take note of this. If I were in charge of selling the Ngage, I would either bring the price point down, or market it exclusively as a gaming device and remove the phone capabilities entirely. The gaming community still hasn't gotten over the "$300, OMG that's so expensive!" attitude about the Ngage. I doubt they will for a long time to come.
The sidetalking/bizarre Frisbee accident thing? BAD IDEA when you're trying to sell this as the phone/game system of choice for the "hip" kids. Nobody wants to feel like an idiot after they spent a lot of money on a new phone or game system. I would think that a design like the 6800 model would have been more attractive (and would have gotten rid of the weird vertical-letterbox screen as well). Even if that's too expensive, there are plenty of other options, too. It wouldn't be too hard to simply put the mic and speaker on the top of the phone, like pretty much every other phone since Alexander Grahm Bell invented the damned thing.
Finally, requiring people to remove the battery to change games was another really bad idea. Even if the system does need to be off (unlike most devices using the SD/MMC card format), it could use a physical interlock like the old Game Boy (just a little plastic tab connected to the power switch that holds the game in).
The Ngage ultimatly seems like a system designed by Marketing and sold by Engineering - while there are a few good features, they're encumbered by weird and pointless design decisions.
If you're using Linux and want to copy a lot of stuff from one place to another, you can use dd ('disk dump', designed for moving large files) and specify a blocksize of a few megs; this means that you will be moving data a few megs at a time, rather than a few K at a time - of course, this means that you have to use that much more memory. Also, I would imagine that Cygwin would allow you to use dd under Windows; another option is NTFS, where transfers from one directory to another on a single drive are nearly instantaneous. Of course, then you lose compatability; while FAT variants are understood by almost all OSes, you will have an unpleasant time trying to mount and use an NTFS volume from anything other than Windows. It's all about tradeoffs, but hopefully something here will help.
One thing that seems to leap out at me is software to manage a medical practice - if you were to learn to program on your own time (via books, online material like Open Courseware, and perhaps working on some Open Source projects), you could probably develop a good system for a doctor's office to track patient records, appointments, and such - I have talked to doctors and their receptionists, and something like this is needed in a lot of practices.
Although there is certainly competition in this arena, you already have contacts in the medical field, and since there isn't a big Microsoft-like giant in the field (to my knowledge), you would stand a decent chance just starting your own business to sell your software. If it's successful, then great, otherwise, you've still got that MD to fall back on ;).
Remember, you'll do best working at what you know. Having worked in medicine, you probably know what doctors want to see in a piece of software better than a developer who just decided that medical office software was a good idea and put out his or her idea of what doctors want to see.
Of course, this is all just off the top of my head. There may be fierce competition in the medical software business - I don't know the details of the market. However, if I were you, I would be looking into ways to turn the years spent in medical school and practice into an asset rather than a liability.