Oh, this one's actually very easy to explain. Intel is Rambus's biggest booster, and you know why?
Intel had a very special deal with Rambus for 4 million shares of Rambus's stock. The deal was inked at the time that Rambus' stock value was in triple digits, and Intel would have been able to exercise its warrants for $2.50 a share. That meant after all the dust settled over 250 million dollars worth of stock would be Intel's for the taking. But as a stipulation of the deal, 20% of all Intel boards shipped over 2 consecutive quarters had to incorporate Rambus RIMMs. Given that Rambus RIMMs do have advantages over SDRAM under specific circumstances, and the last thing Intel will ever do is admit that they screwed up big time, Intel uses and promotes it to this day. But you'll notice that no one else does...
From what I can tell, Philips is one of the "good guys". Well, as much as a corporation can be a "good guy". At least I personally haven't heard of them doing anything outright evil. Also, Philips is not like the companies we're used to dealing with in North America. Being based in northern Europe seems to give them a bit of a more pragmatic outlook on things, IMHO.
> but the effect of Rambus royalties is insignificant at best.
Ah yes, the "it only costs us a couple of bucks, why worry" argument. So, when DRM laws get passed, and all the DACs on your sound card have to support DRM and they start costing $7 per unit on the sound card instead of a couple of cents, don't worry? And the same in the CD/DVD drive.. And then the video card makers find out about one of the partners in the AGP spec have a patent on something or other and video cards cost $15 more for "royalties", and then the network cards, and so on and so on, and then all together that brand new PC costs an extra $100 as a result of legislation and royalties, we just should suck it up because it's only a bit here and a bit there?
>I read a while ago about the cost of RDRAM. The cost premium has not so much to do with Rambus royalties as it does low yields during fabrication.
So that's the buyer's fault that they have an inherently less efficient production process? And almost nobody was paying Rambus royalties, because almost nobody besides a couple of Rambus' best friends was/is making RDRAM anyway, since DDR SDRAM is cheaper and faster.
>The story mentioned that in the total cost of a 128 or 256 MB RIMM, some 3-5 dollars was the royalty. >This was also when memory prices were significantly higher per meg.
The price of a DIMM on a per meg basis will not have any effect on the royalies that go to RAMBUS as a result. If a DIMM cost $25 before and $30 now, when its price would have dipped to $10, it'll still cost $15.
> Maybe $3-5 pisses you off a whole lot, but in exchange for great memory design (RDRAM is damn good for P4) I'd say its a small price to pay. >I didn't here you complaining that Philips owns the CD standard.
Maybe that's because Philips didn't sit on a council to decide what the next audio system to replace cassette tapes was going to be, secretly patent a whole pile of technology around CDs, then push everyone to adopt CDs, wait a few years for CDs to become firmly entrenched in the marketplace, bring out their own SuperCD(TM) format, watch it tank, and then turn to Sony and all the others who used the "jointly developed" CD standard for all of their devices and go "Hey guys, we've got this patent we never told you about on the CD format to do with X. As a result you all owe us $5 a player. Large bills preferred. Thanks."
No. Instead Philips developed the standard themselves with Sony's help and both licensed it to everyone, up front, with clear and open terms . And, Philips is rather adamant about defending the standard as well. All of these "copy protected" audio discs aren't allowed to use the "Compact Disc" logo, you'll notice. Philips won't let them.
And not just hard drives. Browsing around the company LAN, we find all sorts of things on peoples's shares. And once a couple of years back, my colleague and I discovered some persons of questionable parentage had gotten into one of our colocated servers and was using it as an FTP site for trading games. Our reaction was like this:
Me: "Where did all the disk space go?"
Co-worker: "And this new account?"
Me: "Damn! I knew we should have replaced this POS(a 2 year old install)! It's been compomised!"
Co-worker: "Here's where it went. They've got an FTP site up for trading games. It's taking up 30 gigs!"
Me: "Bastards!.... Is there anything good in there?"
Co-worker: "Actually.... yes..."
Me: "OK. Shut that account out, let's prepare to redo the system. And maybe we should archive that. You know, for evidence...."
So, how many times have you been bitten, and why didn't your emplyers notice the ambulances and the absences during your hospital visits? I'd call some sort of government agency like the WCB and alert them to potentially fatal workplace hazards if I were you...
I first got a Palm 1000 back in 1996(?) when we were writing software add-ons for our main product to sync contacts with PDAs. The programmers were looking for an internal alpha tester, and nobody else wanted the gig, so I did it. At the end of the alpha, I refused to give the Palm 1000 back! I had grown too attached to it, so I got to keep it. From there I went to a Palm Pro, and Palm III and now a Handspring Visor deluxe. I keep meaning to trade up to a color unit, but the battery life isn't there yet for me to actually do so.
But, to answer the original question, Yes I Do use it. Every day.
I keep appointments, phone numbers, notes (and have a fold-out keyboard in my glove box in case I am somewhere I will need to take lots of notes), some games, 2 different time-tracking softwares, a mapping software that I keep a map of the city in (kicks total ass!), bookreader software with usually at least 3 books loaded, and other little things. Once I thought I had lost it, and I was frantically looking for it and seriously considering going to Staples THAT NIGHT and dropping $250 on a replacement, just because it's that important to me.
"there're bandwidth costs to be paid, servers to be bought and maintained, and some of the information you read doesn't just appear there; someone had to do research and type it out."
OK. So, by that logic try this one on for size. Every time you walk into a store at the mall to browse and maybe talk to a sales clerk about this item or that, do you give them a quarter? After all, there's rent to be paid, a staff to hire, electricity, inventory costs, etc. These things aren't cheap, and if you're just going in there to look, you're wasting their time and energy. You're a THIEF!
I also have a 7-year old who went and saw it with me yesterday. She loved it, and didn't even hide her eyes once, which she was very proud of, because at some other movies she has hidden her eyes a bit. This is the same girl who saw a kids after-school movie type thing on the Disney channel a few months earlier with some obviously power-rangers influenced villain (so you could see the tinfoil and construction tape in the costume) who sprayed kids with slime and immobilized them, and that was a phobia of hers for months. Besides, the only thing "upsetting" I can see in the first 10 minutes would be a flying car?
I really liked almost any scene with Garak. My favorite was from this episode.
After Sisko had bribed Quark to drop the charges against Tolar:
Sisko: "Who's watching Tolar?" Garak: "I've locked him in his quarters. I've also left him with the distinct impression that if he attempts to force the door open, it may explode." Sisko: "I hope that's just an impression?!" Garak: "...It's best not to dwell on such minutiae."
Actually, YES THEY DO. A lot of times a lawyer is retained to "protect trademarks and copyrights", and then they just go off hell-bent to do it without further direction from their retainee. I recall a good while back one of Microsoft's law firms went around cooking up business for itself by deleting the mouse driver off a laptop, walking around to computer retailers and seeing which ones would install the mouse driver to help them out. The ones that did got letters in the mail about their "illegal piracy" (since the mouse driver was copyrighted), and demanded a settlement of $5000 or some damn thing, a portion of which went to the law firm, the rest to M$. It later came out that Microsoft themselves had no idea their firm had taken it upon themselves to do this, and told them to stop when the negative publicity started piling up. This lawyer for Wyman probably is proceeding along similar lines to "defend" his client proactively (and of course bill for his time....)
I still wouldn't feel all that safe, because almost certainly this system would be controlled from a central dispatch/computer system like a lot of the automated subways today. They're all designed around the idea that if the central control goes down they stop to avoid a possible collision. In any case, the real Achilles heel I see with this system isn't the question of safety, but rather of loading. I see how difficult it is to get people loaded orderly (and efficiently) on the SkyTrain in Vancouver here during rush hour, and that's with loading being the doors open, you walk in, the doors close. Having this whole hatch thing, sit down close hatch over each 2 seats will cause immense departure delays by comparison to anything subway-ish.
Re:Not much different than with a plane...
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
WHAT?! Miles of difference between a plane. They're talking about a cabin surrounded in vacuum, whereas a plane has at least a thin atmosphere around it at height. If there was a problem, the plane can LAND. Or, at the very least, God forbid let's say there was some emergency to do with cabin air when they were over water at least an hour out from any landmass. The plane could descend and as a last resort, crack a window or two (literally). But this capsule thing.. No different from being out in space. If there's a serious problem with the system, such as the city suffers a power failure, like has happened to me once on the SkyTrain in Vancouver, or perhaps an earthquake kills the power station(s)... well... I sure wouldn't want to be in those little coffins...
If that came to pass, I doubt the Discovery Channel would be sending out all that much email, then. My outbox has almost 6000 messages for the last year. If it was.35 a pop for those messages, the number would instead be about 6 messages. And think about those handy group mails. Send an email to 100 people for $35? Sure, where do I sign?
He wouldn't really be putting himself out of much business, since glasses or not, you should really have your eyes checked every couple of years anyway.
Yes, but console peripherals always suffer atrohy from developers. Support for them is always either put in as an afterthought, or a gimmick. Think about it, if you're Big Developer Company Numba One, do you want to focus your team's attention on making things work for the entire pool of out there, thereby having the best chance that the most people will buy your product, or spend some of that energy developing for the 2% subset that own a mouse and keyboard for the ? Chances are the answer is no. Think of the Sega CD/32X as old-school examples of this. The developers were thinking "Hm, do we make a Genesis game and everyone with a Genesis might buy it, or a Sega CD game, and only the 5% who have a Sega CD might think about buying it?" How many people bought "typing of the dead" for Dreamcast?
The only peripherals that actually get USED in games are the ones that are made so ubiquitous by the console manufacturers themselves, by shipping them with systems, or making them so bluntly useful. Examples of this are memory cards that almost all consoles can't seem to get on without, but when the PSX introduced them it was like a revolution, and how shock controllers started being widely supported by games after the PSX had been out for a few years and Sony started selling all the new PSXs with bundled shock controllers.
"Comments that looked like they were from Pat Moorhead on an Aussie Web site are not from Pat Moorhead, the firm has just told us."
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489
"In fact, according to an AMD UK representative, AMD's Opteron products will run any kind of content in the future -- contrary to the report in The Age, on which our original report, below, was based.
Part of the content in The Age failed to distinguish between comments Moorhead made and conjecture, AMD said."
Liability resulting from length of service 63 (1) After 3 consecutive months of employment, the employer becomes liable to pay an employee an amount equal to one week's wages as compensation for length of service.
(2) The employer's liability for compensation for length of service increases as follows:
(a) after 12 consecutive months of employment, to an amount equal to 2 weeks' wages;
(b) after 3 consecutive years of employment, to an amount equal to 3 weeks' wages plus one additional week's wages for each additional year of employment, to a maximum of 8 weeks' wages.
SO you're saying that you are OK with one company (Clearchannel) owning most of the FM space? That is the danger of tight regulation. Makes it easy for one company to gradually push everyone else out.
If so, WaveLAN would work well. I used to use it to bridge a nework across the street from the 9th floor on one building to the 10th on another. We couldn't mount external antennas except on the roof, and the building management companies wanted a fortune for roof access. So we went with these instead. 2 antennas that we stuck in the window, each about the size of a deck of cards, and off we went. The range on the two omni antennas was about 100-150 meters, and if we'd gone for the small directional magnesium antennas that we could also mount inside and point out the window, we would have had a few kilometers of range. Looks like Orinoco bought them out a few years ago. Lucent also sells a lot of the antennas and components, as well.
>>Because its on a CDR we know the tools are safe.
>Huh? What does it being on a CDR have to do with whether or not you can use it to modify the HD contents?
I think he means that because it runs off a CDR, you know it won't be tainted in the case of a breakin or a virus/worm running around screwing things up.
I've been looking at this for a couple of weeks. Didn't try it on a 2k box, but it works just fine on 98se, ME, and XP Pro. Mounts the drives just fine. The WINE had problems running XP executables, but the 98se exe's worked fine. I even had the Starcraft map editor running in it no problems. Only problem I ran into was on one machine I had no sound,which had an SB16 ISA card, so I thought that was a little odd. Other than that, it works like a hot damn. I ran off copies for my parents to use to boot their computers in case Windows goes out to lunch on them (which happens, and they wait a month for me to visit and fix it) and they need to access the web. We're also looking at using it to replace a company's desktop OS with, as it does everything. We just need to modify it to accept a few presets and everything should be golden.
Ever used a Pocket PC? I had one at the office once. Damn thing crashed more often than my Win98 desktop! I went out and bought with my own money a Handspring instead to replace the Pocket PC.
Pray to whatever deity/force of nature you subscribe to that it doesn't break. A client of mine purchased a Vaio in the winter, and it hasn't worked since day one. Machine starts up and then locks up intermittently. We've been running around in circles with Vaio support to the point my client had to call Sony of Canada's president to get any action on it at all. It's been 5 months. She runs a two person business. At one point, she was on the phone to the repair supervisor at the Coquitlam facility, and when she told him that the laptop had essentially been out of commission for the last 5 months with all this screwing around, and how was someone supposed to get along without a laptop for that long, the asshat actually asked her why she didn't have a spare for situations like this!? Hmm.. Let's see why she didn't have a spare.. Because she spent 75% of her small business's IT budget on a new Sony laptop that DOESN'T WORK?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, this one's actually very easy to explain. Intel is Rambus's biggest booster, and you know why?
Intel had a very special deal with Rambus for 4 million shares of Rambus's stock. The deal was inked at the time that Rambus' stock value was in triple digits, and Intel would have been able to exercise its warrants for $2.50 a share. That meant after all the dust settled over 250 million dollars worth of stock would be Intel's for the taking. But as a stipulation of the deal, 20% of all Intel boards shipped over 2 consecutive quarters had to incorporate Rambus RIMMs. Given that Rambus RIMMs do have advantages over SDRAM under specific circumstances, and the last thing Intel will ever do is admit that they screwed up big time, Intel uses and promotes it to this day. But you'll notice that no one else does...
From what I can tell, Philips is one of the "good guys". Well, as much as a corporation can be a "good guy". At least I personally haven't heard of them doing anything outright evil. Also, Philips is not like the companies we're used to dealing with in North America. Being based in northern Europe seems to give them a bit of a more pragmatic outlook on things, IMHO.
> but the effect of Rambus royalties is insignificant at best.
Ah yes, the "it only costs us a couple of bucks, why worry" argument. So, when DRM laws get passed, and all the DACs on your sound card have to support DRM and they start costing $7 per unit on the sound card instead of a couple of cents, don't worry? And the same in the CD/DVD drive.. And then the video card makers find out about one of the partners in the AGP spec have a patent on something or other and video cards cost $15 more for "royalties", and then the network cards, and so on and so on, and then all together that brand new PC costs an extra $100 as a result of legislation and royalties, we just should suck it up because it's only a bit here and a bit there?
>I read a while ago about the cost of RDRAM. The cost premium has not so much to do with Rambus royalties as it does low yields during fabrication.
So that's the buyer's fault that they have an inherently less efficient production process? And almost nobody was paying Rambus royalties, because almost nobody besides a couple of Rambus' best friends was/is making RDRAM anyway, since DDR SDRAM is cheaper and faster.
>The story mentioned that in the total cost of a 128 or 256 MB RIMM, some 3-5 dollars was the royalty.
>This was also when memory prices were significantly higher per meg.
The price of a DIMM on a per meg basis will not have any effect on the royalies that go to RAMBUS as a result. If a DIMM cost $25 before and $30 now, when its price would have dipped to $10, it'll still cost $15.
> Maybe $3-5 pisses you off a whole lot, but in exchange for great memory design (RDRAM is damn good for P4) I'd say its a small price to pay.
>I didn't here you complaining that Philips owns the CD standard.
Maybe that's because Philips didn't sit on a council to decide what the next audio system to replace cassette tapes was going to be, secretly patent a whole pile of technology around CDs, then push everyone to adopt CDs, wait a few years for CDs to become firmly entrenched in the marketplace, bring out their own SuperCD(TM) format, watch it tank, and then turn to Sony and all the others who used the "jointly developed" CD standard for all of their devices and go "Hey guys, we've got this patent we never told you about on the CD format to do with X. As a result you all owe us $5 a player. Large bills preferred. Thanks."
No. Instead Philips developed the standard themselves with Sony's help and both licensed it to everyone, up front, with clear and open terms . And, Philips is rather adamant about defending the standard as well. All of these "copy protected" audio discs aren't allowed to use the "Compact Disc" logo, you'll notice. Philips won't let them.
And not just hard drives. Browsing around the company LAN, we find all sorts of things on peoples's shares. And once a couple of years back, my colleague and I discovered some persons of questionable parentage had gotten into one of our colocated servers and was using it as an FTP site for trading games. Our reaction was like this:
.... Is there anything good in there?"
Me: "Where did all the disk space go?"
Co-worker: "And this new account?"
Me: "Damn! I knew we should have replaced this POS(a 2 year old install)! It's been compomised!"
Co-worker: "Here's where it went. They've got an FTP site up for trading games. It's taking up 30 gigs!"
Me: "Bastards!
Co-worker: "Actually.... yes..."
Me: "OK. Shut that account out, let's prepare to redo the system. And maybe we should archive that. You know, for evidence...."
So, how many times have you been bitten, and why didn't your emplyers notice the ambulances and the absences during your hospital visits? I'd call some sort of government agency like the WCB and alert them to potentially fatal workplace hazards if I were you...
I first got a Palm 1000 back in 1996(?) when we were writing software add-ons for our main product to sync contacts with PDAs. The programmers were looking for an internal alpha tester, and nobody else wanted the gig, so I did it. At the end of the alpha, I refused to give the Palm 1000 back!
I had grown too attached to it, so I got to keep it. From there I went to a Palm Pro, and Palm III and now a Handspring Visor deluxe. I keep meaning to trade up to a color unit, but the battery life isn't there yet for me to actually do so.
But, to answer the original question, Yes I Do use it. Every day.
I keep appointments, phone numbers, notes (and have a fold-out keyboard in my glove box in case I am somewhere I will need to take lots of notes), some games, 2 different time-tracking softwares, a mapping software that I keep a map of the city in (kicks total ass!), bookreader software with usually at least 3 books loaded, and other little things. Once I thought I had lost it, and I was frantically looking for it and seriously considering going to Staples THAT NIGHT and dropping $250 on a replacement, just because it's that important to me.
"there're bandwidth costs to be paid, servers to be bought and maintained, and some of the information you read doesn't just appear there; someone had to do research and type it out."
OK. So, by that logic try this one on for size. Every time you walk into a store at the mall to browse and maybe talk to a sales clerk about this item or that, do you give them a quarter? After all, there's rent to be paid, a staff to hire, electricity, inventory costs, etc. These things aren't cheap, and if you're just going in there to look, you're wasting their time and energy. You're a THIEF!
Didn't think so.
I also have a 7-year old who went and saw it with me yesterday. She loved it, and didn't even hide her eyes once, which she was very proud of, because at some other movies she has hidden her eyes a bit. This is the same girl who saw a kids after-school movie type thing on the Disney channel a few months earlier with some obviously power-rangers influenced villain (so you could see the tinfoil and construction tape in the costume) who sprayed kids with slime and immobilized them, and that was a phobia of hers for months.
Besides, the only thing "upsetting" I can see in the first 10 minutes would be a flying car?
I really liked almost any scene with Garak. My favorite was from this episode.
After Sisko had bribed Quark to drop the charges against Tolar:
Sisko: "Who's watching Tolar?"
Garak: "I've locked him in his quarters. I've also left him with the distinct impression that if he attempts to force the door open, it may explode."
Sisko: "I hope that's just an impression?!"
Garak: "...It's best not to dwell on such minutiae."
Actually, YES THEY DO. A lot of times a lawyer is retained to "protect trademarks and copyrights", and then they just go off hell-bent to do it without further direction from their retainee. I recall a good while back one of Microsoft's law firms went around cooking up business for itself by deleting the mouse driver off a laptop, walking around to computer retailers and seeing which ones would install the mouse driver to help them out. The ones that did got letters in the mail about their "illegal piracy" (since the mouse driver was copyrighted), and demanded a settlement of $5000 or some damn thing, a portion of which went to the law firm, the rest to M$. It later came out that Microsoft themselves had no idea their firm had taken it upon themselves to do this, and told them to stop when the negative publicity started piling up. This lawyer for Wyman probably is proceeding along similar lines to "defend" his client proactively (and of course bill for his time....)
I still wouldn't feel all that safe, because almost certainly this system would be controlled from a central dispatch/computer system like a lot of the automated subways today. They're all designed around the idea that if the central control goes down they stop to avoid a possible collision.
In any case, the real Achilles heel I see with this system isn't the question of safety, but rather of loading. I see how difficult it is to get people loaded orderly (and efficiently) on the SkyTrain in Vancouver here during rush hour, and that's with loading being the doors open, you walk in, the doors close. Having this whole hatch thing, sit down close hatch over each 2 seats will cause immense departure delays by comparison to anything subway-ish.
WHAT?! Miles of difference between a plane. They're talking about a cabin surrounded in vacuum, whereas a plane has at least a thin atmosphere around it at height. If there was a problem, the plane can LAND.
Or, at the very least, God forbid let's say there was some emergency to do with cabin air when they were over water at least an hour out from any landmass. The plane could descend and as a last resort, crack a window or two (literally).
But this capsule thing.. No different from being out in space. If there's a serious problem with the system, such as the city suffers a power failure, like has happened to me once on the SkyTrain in Vancouver, or perhaps an earthquake kills the power station(s)... well... I sure wouldn't want to be in those little coffins...
If that came to pass, I doubt the Discovery Channel would be sending out all that much email, then. My outbox has almost 6000 messages for the last year. If it was .35 a pop for those messages, the number would instead be about 6 messages. And think about those handy group mails. Send an email to 100 people for $35? Sure, where do I sign?
He wouldn't really be putting himself out of much business, since glasses or not, you should really have your eyes checked every couple of years anyway.
Yes, but console peripherals always suffer atrohy from developers. Support for them is always either put in as an afterthought, or a gimmick. Think about it, if you're Big Developer Company Numba One, do you want to focus your team's attention on making things work for the entire pool of out there, thereby having the best chance that the most people will buy your product, or spend some of that energy developing for the 2% subset that own a mouse and keyboard for the ? Chances are the answer is no. Think of the Sega CD/32X as old-school examples of this. The developers were thinking "Hm, do we make a Genesis game and everyone with a Genesis might buy it, or a Sega CD game, and only the 5% who have a Sega CD might think about buying it?" How many people bought "typing of the dead" for Dreamcast?
The only peripherals that actually get USED in games are the ones that are made so ubiquitous by the console manufacturers themselves, by shipping them with systems, or making them so bluntly useful. Examples of this are memory cards that almost all consoles can't seem to get on without, but when the PSX introduced them it was like a revolution, and how shock controllers started being widely supported by games after the PSX had been out for a few years and Sony started selling all the new PSXs with bundled shock controllers.
The Inquirer has received comment from AMD that:
"Comments that looked like they were from Pat Moorhead on an Aussie Web site are not from Pat Moorhead, the firm has just told us."
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489
"In fact, according to an AMD UK representative, AMD's Opteron products will run any kind of content in the future -- contrary to the report in The Age, on which our original report, below, was based.
Part of the content in The Age failed to distinguish between comments Moorhead made and conjecture, AMD said."
Not necessarily 2 weeks.. In BC, you get 2 weeks after being there a year, and more if you were there 3+ years:
. ht m#section63
http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/stat/E/96113_01
Liability resulting from length of service
63 (1) After 3 consecutive months of employment, the employer becomes liable to pay an employee an amount equal to one week's wages as compensation for length of service.
(2) The employer's liability for compensation for length of service increases as follows:
(a) after 12 consecutive months of employment, to an amount equal to 2 weeks' wages;
(b) after 3 consecutive years of employment, to an amount equal to 3 weeks' wages plus one additional week's wages for each additional year of employment, to a maximum of 8 weeks' wages.
It's a PVR that Isaac Richards has been working on for a while now
I've been thinking about setting this up as soon as I have a TV card to go into my spare box.
http://www.mythtv.org
SO you're saying that you are OK with one company (Clearchannel) owning most of the FM space? That is the danger of tight regulation. Makes it easy for one company to gradually push everyone else out.
Do they have windows that face each other?
If so, WaveLAN would work well. I used to use it to bridge a nework across the street from the 9th floor on one building to the 10th on another. We couldn't mount external antennas except on the roof, and the building management companies wanted a fortune for roof access. So we went with these instead. 2 antennas that we stuck in the window, each about the size of a deck of cards, and off we went. The range on the two omni antennas was about 100-150 meters, and if we'd gone for the small directional magnesium antennas that we could also mount inside and point out the window, we would have had a few kilometers of range. Looks like Orinoco bought them out a few years ago. Lucent also sells a lot of the antennas and components, as well.
www.orinoco.com
>>Because its on a CDR we know the tools are safe.
>Huh? What does it being on a CDR have to do with whether or not you can use it to modify the HD contents?
I think he means that because it runs off a CDR, you know it won't be tainted in the case of a breakin or a virus/worm running around screwing things up.
I've been looking at this for a couple of weeks. Didn't try it on a 2k box, but it works just fine on 98se, ME, and XP Pro. Mounts the drives just fine. The WINE had problems running XP executables, but the 98se exe's worked fine. I even had the Starcraft map editor running in it no problems. Only problem I ran into was on one machine I had no sound,which had an SB16 ISA card, so I thought that was a little odd. Other than that, it works like a hot damn. I ran off copies for my parents to use to boot their computers in case Windows goes out to lunch on them (which happens, and they wait a month for me to visit and fix it) and they need to access the web. We're also looking at using it to replace a company's desktop OS with, as it does everything. We just need to modify it to accept a few presets and everything should be golden.
Why let that stop you? If they want to treat us like criminals, act like it. Go snag Goldmember from a p2p network....
Oh, OK. So, like that's any better.
Ever used a Pocket PC? I had one at the office once. Damn thing crashed more often than my Win98 desktop! I went out and bought with my own money a Handspring instead to replace the Pocket PC.
Pray to whatever deity/force of nature you subscribe to that it doesn't break. A client of mine purchased a Vaio in the winter, and it hasn't worked since day one. Machine starts up and then locks up intermittently. We've been running around in circles with Vaio support to the point my client had to call Sony of Canada's president to get any action on it at all. It's been 5 months. She runs a two person business. At one point, she was on the phone to the repair supervisor at the Coquitlam facility, and when she told him that the laptop had essentially been out of commission for the last 5 months with all this screwing around, and how was someone supposed to get along without a laptop for that long, the asshat actually asked her why she didn't have a spare for situations like this!? Hmm.. Let's see why she didn't have a spare.. Because she spent 75% of her small business's IT budget on a new Sony laptop that DOESN'T WORK?