It was Adam Osborne who suggested the Osborne 1, their current model, was pedestrian compared to what they had in development. Their inventory piled up as everyone waited for the successor and the company ran out of money. He died not very long ago in fact.
Implicit in this story is the fact that in the US, the receiver, not the sender, pays for the message. In Europe (at least in the UK) you must pay to send the message: a few cents or less if you shop around, but it is a price that the spammers have to pay which adds up if they want to do a large broadcast. The main problem here at the moment is pornographic spam sent to children's mobiles, or spam sent with premium-rate return numbers urging you to call back immediately for money/sex etc. which is annoying, but at least it doesn't cost you! In the US, the networks have a lower incentive to sort the problem out because they make money from it! (or is this no longer the case?)
However I can see the sheer volume is going to ramp up, as it has done on my phone for the last year, and people are going to complain as their phone becomes unusable... it's a definite candidate for whitelist-only blocking.
Why wouldn't Microsoft be eyeing SCO for a buy-out? If that's what SCO are so desperate for, Microsoft acquiring the rights to UNIX IP through SCO would give it the leverage it's been desperate to have over Linux. I'm not sure what the kinds of timescale to expect on such a move, but you'd think MS' lawyers are looking carefully to see if this case has any merit, to take full advantage if they think it will hurt the Linux business community.
I agree with a previous poster though-- if specific pieces of code are singled out for infringement, which could take years to bring to a legally enforceable position, they'll be replaced with unencumbered code within a fortnight.
Argh, not Windows 2000/XP. If you switch your motherboard for one that uses a different make of IDE chipset, the OS just blue-screens straight after booting. It loads the old IDE driver, fails to find the hardware, then just stops. Microsoft's official advice is actually to reinstall from scratch-- they supply a complex registry-editing procedure on their knowledgebase but warn that it's easy to get wrong and it takes as least as long to perform as a complete reinstall. So yes, this is one of very rare occasions where I find myself thinking "hmm, they really had that part right with Windows 98":-)
I can recommend them too:) For £15 / $26 per month we do a Linux Virtual Machine package based on User-mode Linux: you get 7.5GB bandwidth, 64MB of RAM for your machine and 3GB disc space for you to do what you want with. You get root access to your machine, out-of-band access to do your own reboots, machine reinstalls, bandwidth monitoring and setting up of watchdog services which can send messages to your mobile phone if something goes wrong with your server. We're also one of very few (the only?) ISP which gives back explicitly to the Free Software community: we give donations to Debian for every sign-up from a Debian-branded link to our site, and offer a 10% discount on our already low prices to contributors to Free Software.
Any questions, feel free to ask here or privately:)
We used 802.11 to make a secure office home network, and like any insecure medium for IP, you can secure it against sniffing by layering a secure tunnelling protocol on top of it. This probably wasn't necessary since most sensitive information goes over ssh or SSL connections anyhow, but the way to do it is to use a encrypted network device tunnelling driver thingy.
I'm used to CIPE and like it because it has a Windows NT/2K/XP implementation as well as a Linux module. VTUN does much the same job, is slightly easier to set up, although instead of a Windows driver, runs on Solaris and various BSDs. We used the latter to make a link between mine & my partner's house and managed to use the Linux bridging features to bridge his home wireless network to the office ethernet-- the bridge is over a vtun interface which sits on top of the 802.11 link between our office and his house. Complicated but it seems to work:)
Anyone else have a similar setup? I'd be interested to know how to grow this kind of setup manageable (not that we have a need for it, but... )
I've recently been impressed by Gentoo Linux which lets you build your system from a BSD-style ports system: the whole thing held together by a bunch of Python scripts, but otherwise your build options, tools and so on are your own choice. If that's not Linux From Scratch I'm not sure what is:-)
Having said that, I'm not always convinced that the way to a reliable server setup is to build everything yourself, but both LFS and Gentoo look good for the desktop.
I got that very same excuse from the organisers of a certain UK-based Linux event after they'd sold us advertising based on the promise of their magazine being given away at the show. Then they moved the date of the show from mid-April to late June with no explanation offered to all the advertisers whom they'd phoned to fill space at discount rates at the last minute. No, it's not that we couldn't persuade enough exhibitors to cover our costs, it's those crazy Americans who won't get on planes, well, no, don't blame us, blame Osama, 9/11 and all that... of course we'll still carry the mag with your three-month old advert to the new show date, I'm sure it'll have the same impact as the current issue... mutter...
So if you are an ambitious entrepreneur (maybe dreaming of getting into the gaming industry?), J2ME may be your ticket
Ugh, I hope not... after a few weeks of developing a pretty simple J2ME game for mobile phones I'm not a fan. You're at the mercy of the MIDP implementation for many quite basic game functions like sound, transparent sprite support, pixel operations and some IO bits and pieces. And Java is just the wrong language when (in the case of the Nokia 3410) you have to limit your total jar size to 50K but still try to write portable code which'll still be relevant on the top-end whizzy colour phones. Every frigging class takes another few precious bytes from your artwork / set of trivia questions, but what can you do? Trying to write less classes really isn't something Java is built to support so I've ended up writing a pre-processor to generate different source trees for each slightly different mobile platform, and the build, test & turnaround times are subsequently horrendous. Though this is just endemic to embedded development, having to run your code & graphics through three or four different Java-based tools to generate a finished product is painful.
On the other hand, your unmodified GBA can be connected to a PC very cheaply to quickly upload demos to its RAM, or to use it to write images to flash cartridges for more substantial pieces of work. Use gcc and a few well-researched documents around the internet and you can get at the full graphics & sound capabilities of the GBA. It makes for much simpler to understand code which can gets results quickly: the portability aspect of Java in embedded devices seems to be a real red herring.
So, umm, to bring the ramble to a close, Java might be nice where you have a roughly similar set of platforms to deploy on, but where your back-end APIs and deployment platforms can vary as wildly as MIDP-supporting devices can, it demands you write pre-processors and other things that are anathema to the language. So if you're after the GBA to showcase a game idea (and I still think it's a great platform for that) you'll get much better results in C.
The problem as I see it is that not even DVD has the capacity to back up modern systems. The advances in hard disk capacity are vastly outstripping our ability to reasonably back them up. I have over 20GB of MP3s that I've ripped so I won't have to keep my cd collection handy. This is great, but I'm pretty much out of luck if I want to keep the stuff backed up.
Fair point, bad example: how haven't you got them backed up if you ripped them from your own (or even friends') CDs in the first place? It's the hard-working audio pirates of the world who have the backup problem:-)
Out of curiosity, what was the point of having the first host, as opposed to the first pair of hosts? "Hey, look at me! I'm networking with myself!"
Heh, there's a similarly misguided mobile phone advertising campaign going on in the UK with Andre Agassi urging you to "be the first with picture messaging!". Surely you want to be... the second? And hope you know the other guy? Or rather, wait for a few hundred to sell and maybe someone else you know will own one of these useless expensive pieces of shit:-)
The PC that looks like an Amstrad CPC! Not such a great deal when you look at the specs, but hey-- it's the retro computer-in-the-keyboard look. Add a three inch floppy drive and you're there.
A friend's mother is a jeweller and I asked whether she'd make a ring to a rough design I'd drawn out (okay, copied & customised a little bit): just a plain gold band with a stone set in a particular way. It came out perfectly and to the right size, because my girlfriend has child-sized fingers and no off-the-shelf design would have fitted without some alteration. You can spend just as much money commissioning a ring, leave off the diamond, and your girlfriend knows she has something that was made just for her rather than hurriedly picked off a shelf in exchange for so many months' salary. A few people have mentioned girlfriends comparing diamond sizes, feelings of inadequacy, bitchiness etc.-- well custom-made trumps expensive any day, which is good because I was a poor student at the time:-)
Remedy where effective technological measures prevent permitted acts
(1) Where the application of any effective technological measure to a copyright work other than a computer program prevents a person from benefiting directly from [reference will be made here either to articles 5.2(a), 2(b), 2(c), 2(d), 2(e), 3(a), 3(b) or 3(e) of the Directive or to provisions of the Act covering the exceptions permitted under these articles] in relation to that work then that person may issue a notice of complaint to the Secretary of State.
(2) The Secretary of State may, following receipt of a notice of complaint, give to the owner of that copyright work or an exclusive licensee such directions as appear to the Secretary of State to be requisite or expedient for the purpose of--
(a) establishing whether any voluntary measure or agreement relevant to the copyright work the subject of the complaint subsists; or
(b) (in the event it is established there is no subsisting voluntary measure or agreement) enabling the complainant to benefit from [those articles or sections] referred to in subsection (1) to which the complaint relates.
I think, in plain(er) English, and filling in the cross-references, that they are proposing for the legitimate recipient of a copyright work to have a right to demand they are able to perform 'permitted acts' with a copyright work if a technological measure prevents it. Under this wording this implies playing a Region 1 DVD on a Region 2 player, playing US and Jap-released games on a chipped Playstation could be the subject of an official complaint, the latter implying the reverse of a recent ruling against a mod-chip maker in the UK!
Unfortunately, 1) I don't understand a fscking word of this document, but wonder whether they're trying to head off criticism through this addition, and 2) they've specifically excluded computer software from this!
Unfortunately also, the EU Copyright Directive is as good as law, and the comments they are inviting are specifically on the required UK implementation of this directive. However, given this state of affairs, this paragraph could be an interesting spanner in the works for UK copyright owners seeking to impose unreasonable restrictions, and could prove a foil against existing anti-'fair use' technologies.
I'd be interested to hear a more complete analysis of this paragraph and its practical upshot: after all, almost everything containing a microprocessor could be argued to contain copyrighted computer software these days.
Seconded on all those points, particularly the professional look of the installer. What really sold me on this installer was the fact that it runs entirely from a script file, GUI is optional, and you compile your script and program resources into a single squashed.exe. This makes it ideal to run from build scripts, and even better the setup compiler runs under Wine, so sending out frequent releases from a Linux development machine is easy.
Okay $200k is a hell of a lot; and we all know that MS loses money on every X-Box sale. A viable alternative development platform would hurt MS. This means it's somebody well-established (rich!) in the industry with a score to settle with Microsoft? Or a games company that wants to open up development for what I understand is a cheap PC platform without paying MS tax? Maybe even a potential coup by Sony or Nintendo? Completely intriguing; maybe we could have a sweepstake on who we think this anonymous donor is...
I think I've seen this somewhere before:-) That's a link to the Amstrad NC- series of computers which had Z80 processors and a clone of BBC BASIC, including an assembler! Great little machines, shame I lost mine in a burglary a few years back.
AOL is using gecko. AOL 7 was switched to gecko, thats also why netscape 6.5 was renamed 7.0
And surely not because IE is 'only' at major version 6, and a version 7 browser has got to be better than a version 6 browser. I'm sure nobody in Netscape's marketing department would stoop to making such a facile point:-)
I wonder if holding something like a "password cracker demo meeting" would help. Set up a test machine, let everyone enter a password of their choice, then run crack or similar on the password file.
Golly, yes, the users will be impressed by that: here, enter a password into our computer here and we'll tell you what you just typed:-)
I think we're more sober now than we used to be. There was a period during the dot-com boom in '99 when I think a lot of people were in some danger of getting distracted by the prospect of lots of easy money.
Has any shareware author tried to encode the payee's VISA card details inside the registration code? That is to say, the payment details are just dressed up in a particular algorithm, with the date and whatever other security details? If users know this is the case, it makes the leaking of legit registration codes rather less likely. Yes, crackers can still generate their own codes but it's another idea to raise the bar to pirates without incoveniencing paying customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Playing Darius' "unique" version of Baby One More Time would make the trip to the courthouse worthwhile. (warning, earplugs advised for anyone who didn't watch Pop Idol...)
It was Adam Osborne who suggested the Osborne 1, their current model, was pedestrian compared to what they had in development. Their inventory piled up as everyone waited for the successor and the company ran out of money. He died not very long ago in fact.
Implicit in this story is the fact that in the US, the receiver, not the sender, pays for the message. In Europe (at least in the UK) you must pay to send the message: a few cents or less if you shop around, but it is a price that the spammers have to pay which adds up if they want to do a large broadcast. The main problem here at the moment is pornographic spam sent to children's mobiles, or spam sent with premium-rate return numbers urging you to call back immediately for money/sex etc. which is annoying, but at least it doesn't cost you! In the US, the networks have a lower incentive to sort the problem out because they make money from it! (or is this no longer the case?)
However I can see the sheer volume is going to ramp up, as it has done on my phone for the last year, and people are going to complain as their phone becomes unusable... it's a definite candidate for whitelist-only blocking.
Why wouldn't Microsoft be eyeing SCO for a buy-out? If that's what SCO are so desperate for, Microsoft acquiring the rights to UNIX IP through SCO would give it the leverage it's been desperate to have over Linux. I'm not sure what the kinds of timescale to expect on such a move, but you'd think MS' lawyers are looking carefully to see if this case has any merit, to take full advantage if they think it will hurt the Linux business community.
I agree with a previous poster though-- if specific pieces of code are singled out for infringement, which could take years to bring to a legally enforceable position, they'll be replaced with unencumbered code within a fortnight.
Argh, not Windows 2000/XP. If you switch your motherboard for one that uses a different make of IDE chipset, the OS just blue-screens straight after booting. It loads the old IDE driver, fails to find the hardware, then just stops. Microsoft's official advice is actually to reinstall from scratch-- they supply a complex registry-editing procedure on their knowledgebase but warn that it's easy to get wrong and it takes as least as long to perform as a complete reinstall. So yes, this is one of very rare occasions where I find myself thinking "hmm, they really had that part right with Windows 98" :-)
I can recommend them too :) For £15 / $26 per month we do a Linux Virtual Machine package based on User-mode Linux: you get 7.5GB bandwidth, 64MB of RAM for your machine and 3GB disc space for you to do what you want with. You get root access to your machine, out-of-band access to do your own reboots, machine reinstalls, bandwidth monitoring and setting up of watchdog services which can send messages to your mobile phone if something goes wrong with your server. We're also one of very few (the only?) ISP which gives back explicitly to the Free Software community: we give donations to Debian for every sign-up from a Debian-branded link to our site, and offer a 10% discount on our already low prices to contributors to Free Software.
:)
Any questions, feel free to ask here or privately
We used 802.11 to make a secure office home network, and like any insecure medium for IP, you can secure it against sniffing by layering a secure tunnelling protocol on top of it. This probably wasn't necessary since most sensitive information goes over ssh or SSL connections anyhow, but the way to do it is to use a encrypted network device tunnelling driver thingy.
:)
... )
I'm used to CIPE and like it because it has a Windows NT/2K/XP implementation as well as a Linux module. VTUN does much the same job, is slightly easier to set up, although instead of a Windows driver, runs on Solaris and various BSDs. We used the latter to make a link between mine & my partner's house and managed to use the Linux bridging features to bridge his home wireless network to the office ethernet-- the bridge is over a vtun interface which sits on top of the 802.11 link between our office and his house. Complicated but it seems to work
Anyone else have a similar setup? I'd be interested to know how to grow this kind of setup manageable (not that we have a need for it, but
I've recently been impressed by Gentoo Linux which lets you build your system from a BSD-style ports system: the whole thing held together by a bunch of Python scripts, but otherwise your build options, tools and so on are your own choice. If that's not Linux From Scratch I'm not sure what is :-)
Having said that, I'm not always convinced that the way to a reliable server setup is to build everything yourself, but both LFS and Gentoo look good for the desktop.
I got that very same excuse from the organisers of a certain UK-based Linux event after they'd sold us advertising based on the promise of their magazine being given away at the show. Then they moved the date of the show from mid-April to late June with no explanation offered to all the advertisers whom they'd phoned to fill space at discount rates at the last minute. No, it's not that we couldn't persuade enough exhibitors to cover our costs, it's those crazy Americans who won't get on planes, well, no, don't blame us, blame Osama, 9/11 and all that... of course we'll still carry the mag with your three-month old advert to the new show date, I'm sure it'll have the same impact as the current issue... mutter...
If we're going to use a OS derived from the 1970s, let's at least pick our favourite and be grateful Linus wasn't a VMS fan :-)
So if you are an ambitious entrepreneur (maybe dreaming of getting into the gaming industry?), J2ME may be your ticket
Ugh, I hope not... after a few weeks of developing a pretty simple J2ME game for mobile phones I'm not a fan. You're at the mercy of the MIDP implementation for many quite basic game functions like sound, transparent sprite support, pixel operations and some IO bits and pieces. And Java is just the wrong language when (in the case of the Nokia 3410) you have to limit your total jar size to 50K but still try to write portable code which'll still be relevant on the top-end whizzy colour phones. Every frigging class takes another few precious bytes from your artwork / set of trivia questions, but what can you do? Trying to write less classes really isn't something Java is built to support so I've ended up writing a pre-processor to generate different source trees for each slightly different mobile platform, and the build, test & turnaround times are subsequently horrendous. Though this is just endemic to embedded development, having to run your code & graphics through three or four different Java-based tools to generate a finished product is painful.
On the other hand, your unmodified GBA can be connected to a PC very cheaply to quickly upload demos to its RAM, or to use it to write images to flash cartridges for more substantial pieces of work. Use gcc and a few well-researched documents around the internet and you can get at the full graphics & sound capabilities of the GBA. It makes for much simpler to understand code which can gets results quickly: the portability aspect of Java in embedded devices seems to be a real red herring.
So, umm, to bring the ramble to a close, Java might be nice where you have a roughly similar set of platforms to deploy on, but where your back-end APIs and deployment platforms can vary as wildly as MIDP-supporting devices can, it demands you write pre-processors and other things that are anathema to the language. So if you're after the GBA to showcase a game idea (and I still think it's a great platform for that) you'll get much better results in C.
Will they take a cheque, do you think? :)
The problem as I see it is that not even DVD has the capacity to back up modern systems. The advances in hard disk capacity are vastly outstripping our ability to reasonably back them up. I have over 20GB of MP3s that I've ripped so I won't have to keep my cd collection handy. This is great, but I'm pretty much out of luck if I want to keep the stuff backed up.
:-)
Fair point, bad example: how haven't you got them backed up if you ripped them from your own (or even friends') CDs in the first place? It's the hard-working audio pirates of the world who have the backup problem
Out of curiosity, what was the point of having the first host, as opposed to the first pair of hosts? "Hey, look at me! I'm networking with myself!"
:-)
Heh, there's a similarly misguided mobile phone advertising campaign going on in the UK with Andre Agassi urging you to "be the first with picture messaging!". Surely you want to be... the second? And hope you know the other guy? Or rather, wait for a few hundred to sell and maybe someone else you know will own one of these useless expensive pieces of shit
The PC that looks like an Amstrad CPC! Not such a great deal when you look at the specs, but hey-- it's the retro computer-in-the-keyboard look. Add a three inch floppy drive and you're there.
A friend's mother is a jeweller and I asked whether she'd make a ring to a rough design I'd drawn out (okay, copied & customised a little bit): just a plain gold band with a stone set in a particular way. It came out perfectly and to the right size, because my girlfriend has child-sized fingers and no off-the-shelf design would have fitted without some alteration. You can spend just as much money commissioning a ring, leave off the diamond, and your girlfriend knows she has something that was made just for her rather than hurriedly picked off a shelf in exchange for so many months' salary. A few people have mentioned girlfriends comparing diamond sizes, feelings of inadequacy, bitchiness etc.-- well custom-made trumps expensive any day, which is good because I was a poor student at the time :-)
I think, in plain(er) English, and filling in the cross-references, that they are proposing for the legitimate recipient of a copyright work to have a right to demand they are able to perform 'permitted acts' with a copyright work if a technological measure prevents it. Under this wording this implies playing a Region 1 DVD on a Region 2 player, playing US and Jap-released games on a chipped Playstation could be the subject of an official complaint, the latter implying the reverse of a recent ruling against a mod-chip maker in the UK!
Unfortunately, 1) I don't understand a fscking word of this document, but wonder whether they're trying to head off criticism through this addition, and 2) they've specifically excluded computer software from this!
Unfortunately also, the EU Copyright Directive is as good as law, and the comments they are inviting are specifically on the required UK implementation of this directive. However, given this state of affairs, this paragraph could be an interesting spanner in the works for UK copyright owners seeking to impose unreasonable restrictions, and could prove a foil against existing anti-'fair use' technologies.
I'd be interested to hear a more complete analysis of this paragraph and its practical upshot: after all, almost everything containing a microprocessor could be argued to contain copyrighted computer software these days.
Seconded on all those points, particularly the professional look of the installer. What really sold me on this installer was the fact that it runs entirely from a script file, GUI is optional, and you compile your script and program resources into a single squashed .exe. This makes it ideal to run from build scripts, and even better the setup compiler runs under Wine, so sending out frequent releases from a Linux development machine is easy.
Okay $200k is a hell of a lot; and we all know that MS loses money on every X-Box sale. A viable alternative development platform would hurt MS. This means it's somebody well-established (rich!) in the industry with a score to settle with Microsoft? Or a games company that wants to open up development for what I understand is a cheap PC platform without paying MS tax? Maybe even a potential coup by Sony or Nintendo? Completely intriguing; maybe we could have a sweepstake on who we think this anonymous donor is...
I think I've seen this somewhere before :-) That's a link to the Amstrad NC- series of computers which had Z80 processors and a clone of BBC BASIC, including an assembler! Great little machines, shame I lost mine in a burglary a few years back.
AOL is using gecko. AOL 7 was switched to gecko, thats also why netscape 6.5 was renamed 7.0
:-)
And surely not because IE is 'only' at major version 6, and a version 7 browser has got to be better than a version 6 browser. I'm sure nobody in Netscape's marketing department would stoop to making such a facile point
I wonder if holding something like a "password cracker demo meeting" would help. Set up a test machine, let everyone enter a password of their choice, then run crack or similar on the password file.
:-)
Golly, yes, the users will be impressed by that: here, enter a password into our computer here and we'll tell you what you just typed
He's a law student, in the middle of exams-- surely LSU have just set him a practical? :-)
I think we're more sober now than we used to be. There was a period during the dot-com boom in '99 when I think a lot of people were in some danger of getting distracted by the prospect of lots of easy money.
:-)
Heh, yes, well remembered
Has any shareware author tried to encode the payee's VISA card details inside the registration code? That is to say, the payment details are just dressed up in a particular algorithm, with the date and whatever other security details? If users know this is the case, it makes the leaking of legit registration codes rather less likely. Yes, crackers can still generate their own codes but it's another idea to raise the bar to pirates without incoveniencing paying customers.