I strongly suspect the important bit there was "on the PC". Trends have been away from PC gaming. The problem could have been that the Sam & Max sequel couldn't be easily adapted to the console.
I've never played the original, so I don't know how hard it would be to squeeze it onto a console's interface.
I've written quite a bit of code that was patent infringing. Often I didn't realize it was so until much later (backing store, for example), but I've generally decided that I don't care anymore.
In most cases the infringing code was something I invented on the fly and coded in a short period of time. Thus obvious and simple solutions to common problems.
There are THOUSANDS of software patents filed DAILY, and it's truly not possible to do patent searches every time I write another 100 lines of code. The only thing that keeps the current legal system from sending the entire software industry into lawsuit deadlock is the fact that most companies make very little effort to ever enforce their patents.
Partly this is because all major software companies have cross licensing agreements with all other major software companies. This is mostly just a safty measure to help avoid major lawsuit conflicts. Notice that individuals and small companies are left totally vulnerable.
If IBM or Microsoft or HP or whoever decides to really cut loose then almost all individuals, open source, and small companies would be shut down. However they don't because it would be bad news for most everyone. Besides if they really cut loose, then the final result would be a major rework of the relevant laws. If they did that, they would haven't this extra weapon to pull out when needed.
And from time to time they do (IBM at least, I assume they aren't the only ones), just not in a high profile way.
A simple question. Verisign is just a sub-contractor. Why haven't they been fired over site finder, and why do they believe they won't be fired now?
If they are being paid to do a job, they have to do the job they way they are told to do it, or quit/get fired. Right? Why is this any different just because the employee is really a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Since when does "the right to innovate" equate to the right to rewrite job requirements?
That is kinda cool actually. Now let's write a JVM in Java!
I did that once. It was to allow detailed emulation/step through debugging of a slightly off-spec (no floating point) embedded Java device by Dallas Semiconductor.
I had a lot of fun with it, both because the device was cool, and well... because it was fun to write Java in Java. It was easy, both because the Java spec was straightforward, and because performance was NOT an issue, so I could for for the simple but reliable implementation.
My best advice is to carefully look at any very small phone companies that might be in your area. We eventually got a deal on a fractional T1 (1 Mb) + 2 phone lines for $300/month. The phone company in question was bought out two months later, but our deal is still good, and will be for years.
THAT would be cheap enough to share with neighbors. It seems to be really stable, really reliable, and (for us) really cheap.
Every DSL company we dealt with before had major issues (including going out of business), major downtime, and major delays during install.
More than once we had the entire office running on a single shared dial up after someone remote screwed us up. I still keep that modem handy.
I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to maintain menus and other data while transcoding, and I haven't been able to make it work.
I suggest using either vobcopy or dvdbackup for extracting the content. They both seem to work fairly well.
If your television has VGA in (or better yet, DVI in) I would suggest trying to use it. This gives you a greater choice in software playback, and will probably lead to a higher quality image on screen (most PC video out options are NOT high quality).
I've been looking into building a system like this myself, but haven't decided exactly how yet. Most of the standard Linux media players can handle DVD video, but I'm not sure which will do the best job with handling the combination of menus, fullscreen playback and IR remote integration. I also haven't yet found a system I like for managing media selection (music, movies, etc).
I would, however, look into the LIRC project for IR reception.
For physical playback, I've been looking at a www.solarpc.com (probably based on Via M10000 motherboard) that will access content my household file server via the network. The playback machine might be diskless to reduce noise.
I have used SolarPC in the past and been happy, but have not yet purchased a machine for video playback. They are small machines that perform as advertised, even though the site is horrible. Be careful however, any machine with a CPU fan will be kinda noisey to have near the TV.
Go to any bar, watch which mugs survive through the night, and which don't. I was trying to quip about evolution in the real world, not a genetic algorithm.
Not really. It's a highly useful plant. You can produce multiple crops per year with managable soil exhaustion. It's an excellent source of fibrous material usable for a lot of things, most notably paper (which is in fact why it was banned in the US, but that's another story).
I don't have sources handy, but I did research this topic at some length in the past and convince myself that Hemp would have real value if it weren't for our political climate.
Though the strains most effective in terms of biomass, fiber production, etc, are NOT the best strains for recreational use.
One should be aware that hemp has been through extensive selective breeding, and the THC levels have boosted considerably in the last 50 years. However the changes to boost THC have made the plant less effective for other purposes.
PS: I should not that I'm not a user, but I am strongly in favor of legalization, both for production and recreational uses.
IF this is really strong encryption, and is well done, it could help to prevent a lot of the misuses of RFIDs. It doesn't stop them, of course, but makes them harder.
If the tags in my clothes will only talk in a useful way to authorized readers, then you can't just put a generic reader in the lamp post and discover everyone that walks by.
However, all that is needed to get the lampost reader to track people is to have the keys, or have some way to get the RFID to talk in a consistant way. For example, always send it the same challenge and see if you get the same response. Hum... the encryption systems probably don't prevent that.
Some sort of salting would be needed in the reply. Current time/request counter, something.
I worked for the computing center when I was in college. When the school was first being connected to the internet, and many people were having their desktops networked for the first time, one of the really common questions from non-technical types was "Where is the Internet?"
A careful summary of world wide networking (this was before web browsers) would be met with a blank stare and "Yes, but where is it?"
We finally decided to tell them it was at a secret location in a closet in Idaho. This seemed to make people feel better.
I never really understood why the most confusing thing was.... "Where is it?"
These people had already learned how to use their email programs and 3270 emulator (virtual mainframe terminal) with no problem.
Thinking back on this.... it makes more sense that AOL had so much success. If AOL was installed you could tell the user that the internet in that little friendly icon right there on the desktop.
But that can fail if the backtick expansion grows too large (which it will in this case). There IS a limit to the size of a command line in unix shells it's just several k.
hammer$cat `find linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r8 -type f` | wc -l bash:/bin/cat: Argument list too long 0
That's the whole point of xargs. It splits the files from find up in to groups that all fit on the command line.
However backtick expansion does rule. It just doesn't work well for large blocks of data.
Preferred stock is kinda special and comes with a lot of extras. Common stock doesn't, but common stock gets it's dividends first (as a trade off).
A common thing with preferred stock is to be able to convert it to common stock through some financial transaction with the company. I'm not sure exactly how, but it's possible for the company to make or lose money through this transaction.
You can't just change the rules related to a share be it common or preferred, but you can take away a share and replace it with a new one (if the stock holders agree).
This looks like they yanked all of the preferred stock, and replaced it with a new flavor of preferred stock that doesn't have a conversion feature.
Somehow or other, the potential losses SCO would have if the preferred stock was converted to common stock were showing up on their balance sheet.
By yanking the conversion features from the preferred stock, that potential loss goes away and the books look better without having really done much of anything.
That was sorta my point. Assuming that performance went from 1,000 jumps/second (a rough guess at what I was getting with the initial implementation which was REALLY wasteful) evaluated to 10,000,000 jumps/second, then the run time would drop from 300,000,000 million years to 30,000 years.
A massive improvement, but still useless from a practical point of view.
But yes, you are correct, linear improvements are sometimes the critical edge needed to make a project useful.
I stay away from the Xbox because I believe that if MS ever dominates gaming, then the whole market will stagnate.
5) High quality exculsive games
The only game exclusive to the XBox that I've been interested in is Halo. However, Halo offers a good example of why MS control would be horrible for the game market. The game was mostly finished and ready for release many years ago. I saw my first demo video of it in '96 (maybe '95?). MS bought the company producing it, and sat on it until their console was ready.
They continued to sit on the PC and Mac versions until they had Halo 2. They are using control of the game to push the console, not producing the game for it's own sake. I like my games, but don't like it when people try to lead me around by them.
But as a secondary note, I (being old fashioned) really consider console games to be generally weaker than PC games. I consider it unfortunate that the PC game market is moving to consoles and less is being done for PCs. In fact, a lot of what is being done is dumbed down enough to fit a console's limitations (sigh).
I have say that trying to program in low level languages, or worrying about the details of the machine archtecture has usually been (in my experience) counter productive in terms of efficiency.
I'm not saying that there aren't places where low level details aren't critical, but for the most part they just draw attention away from the thing that has the most impact on performance.
Application Architecture.
The choices of algorithms and data structures are far more important than any low level details. But low level details are more fun, and tend to make us feel more manly or guruly or something so we tend to focus on them instead. In practice I find that using low level languages or super optimized tools make it hard to worry about high level structure, so the structure gets ignored.
I once worked on a project in which people were seriously freaking out over the performance hit in using virtual functions while parsing the configuration file.
At the same time, the application (a firewall) was performing multiple linear searches through linked lists of several hundred items per packet. These searches were very carefully optimized, so they had to be fast... (sigh). When I switched the system to use STL dictionaries (and later hashes), total throughput jumped three fold, yet some of the developers were worried about the cost of the templates and virtual functions used.
The fact that the algorithm is more important thatnthe details of implementation is a lesson that everyone (myself included) needs to keep getting pounded into them, because it's so easy to forget.
There are places where assembler and hardware details matter a great deal. But they are usually places that contain a lot of repetition that can't be removed algorithmically. Graphics are the obvious example.
A recent example:
My brother in law gave me one of those boards with pegs in which you try to jump your way down to a single peg remaining. I have no idea what it's called, but anyway....
I decided to be cute, and wrote a 100 line python scrpt over lunch to find all possible solutions. I was suprised when it hadn't found a single solution by the time I was finished eating. I was a lot more suprised when it hadn't found anything by the end of the day.
So I killed it and started in optimizing for performance and tweaking and trying different things. This kept me occupied over lunch for a couple of weeks, but didn't produce anything else. Finally I started doing some analysis of the problem. The first thing I found was that the search space (for the board I had) was roughly 10**18.
I didn't matter how much I tweaked the details of my search, it wasn't going to find very many solutions in less than a century (actually, it looks like a naive full search will take several thousand years).
So, after wasting several weeks of lunch breaks, I have redefined the problem. Find A solution, and rewritten my search to use a heuristic. I finished everthing but the heuristic at lunch a couple of days ago. The new system will take 100 or even a 1000 times as long to perform a jump, but I'm expecting to find a solution before I'm dead.
So, don't get bogged down in the details of an implementation. They won't usually take you very far.
I see the sales figures for PS/2 versus X-Box, and the X-Box looks like a failure. But whenever I talk to people about Console gaming they are ALL talking about the X-Box and it's games. It seems to be assumed that you wouldn't play on anyting else, and they get kinda freaked out if I mention that I will not buy an MS game of any kind.
This isn't just one group of friends, but includes people a coffee shops that I meet while traveling, on planes, and all kinds of locations.
How is the X-Box doing versus the PS/2 is console sales recently? Who outsold who during Xmas this year?
I just seems wierd that the stats I hear are so out of whack with personal experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly suspect the important bit there was "on the PC". Trends have been away from PC gaming. The problem could have been that the Sam & Max sequel couldn't be easily adapted to the console.
I've never played the original, so I don't know how hard it would be to squeeze it onto a console's interface.
It would be pretty cool to see Mitnick elected from the write in ballots, especially if he was still in prison at the time.
I've written quite a bit of code that was patent infringing. Often I didn't realize it was so until much later (backing store, for example), but I've generally decided that I don't care anymore.
In most cases the infringing code was something I invented on the fly and coded in a short period of time. Thus obvious and simple solutions to common problems.
There are THOUSANDS of software patents filed DAILY, and it's truly not possible to do patent searches every time I write another 100 lines of code. The only thing that keeps the current legal system from sending the entire software industry into lawsuit deadlock is the fact that most companies make very little effort to ever enforce their patents.
Partly this is because all major software companies have cross licensing agreements with all other major software companies. This is mostly just a safty measure to help avoid major lawsuit conflicts. Notice that individuals and small companies are left totally vulnerable.
If IBM or Microsoft or HP or whoever decides to really cut loose then almost all individuals, open source, and small companies would be shut down. However they don't because it would be bad news for most everyone. Besides if they really cut loose, then the final result would be a major rework of the relevant laws. If they did that, they would haven't this extra weapon to pull out when needed.
And from time to time they do (IBM at least, I assume they aren't the only ones), just not in a high profile way.
A simple question. Verisign is just a sub-contractor. Why haven't they been fired over site finder, and why do they believe they won't be fired now?
If they are being paid to do a job, they have to do the job they way they are told to do it, or quit/get fired. Right? Why is this any different just because the employee is really a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Since when does "the right to innovate" equate to the right to rewrite job requirements?
You are exactly right, and thanks for fitting it into the timeline!
I did that once. It was to allow detailed emulation/step through debugging of a slightly off-spec (no floating point) embedded Java device by Dallas Semiconductor.
I had a lot of fun with it, both because the device was cool, and well... because it was fun to write Java in Java. It was easy, both because the Java spec was straightforward, and because performance was NOT an issue, so I could for for the simple but reliable implementation.
I remember reading that Edgar Dykstra and his students did an early GUI machine, but I've never been sure where it fit into the overall timeline.
It's been long enough that the details were fuzzy, but they did a new language for it at the same time. Possibly Modula-2.
I've played this game for our office for years.
My best advice is to carefully look at any very small phone companies that might be in your area. We eventually got a deal on a fractional T1 (1 Mb) + 2 phone lines for $300/month. The phone company in question was bought out two months later, but our deal is still good, and will be for years.
THAT would be cheap enough to share with neighbors. It seems to be really stable, really reliable, and (for us) really cheap.
Every DSL company we dealt with before had major issues (including going out of business), major downtime, and major delays during install.
More than once we had the entire office running on a single shared dial up after someone remote screwed us up. I still keep that modem handy.
I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to maintain menus and other data while transcoding, and I haven't been able to make it work.
I suggest using either vobcopy or dvdbackup for extracting the content. They both seem to work fairly well.
If your television has VGA in (or better yet, DVI in) I would suggest trying to use it. This gives you a greater choice in software playback, and will probably lead to a higher quality image on screen (most PC video out options are NOT high quality).
I've been looking into building a system like this myself, but haven't decided exactly how yet. Most of the standard Linux media players can handle DVD video, but I'm not sure which will do the best job with handling the combination of menus, fullscreen playback and IR remote integration. I also haven't yet found a system I like for managing media selection (music, movies, etc).
I would, however, look into the LIRC project for IR reception.
For physical playback, I've been looking at a www.solarpc.com (probably based on Via M10000 motherboard) that will access content my household file server via the network. The playback machine might be diskless to reduce noise.
I have used SolarPC in the past and been happy, but have not yet purchased a machine for video playback. They are small machines that perform as advertised, even though the site is horrible. Be careful however, any machine with a CPU fan will be kinda noisey to have near the TV.
Um... isn't that going to be true for ANY system?
I mean, in the end, they will all collapse to a single threshold function that chooses between keep and throw away.
Perhaps the SpamAssasin collapsing mechanism is simplistic, but still...
Neither. They both exploded.
Go to any bar, watch which mugs survive through the night, and which don't. I was trying to quip about evolution in the real world, not a genetic algorithm.
Sorry for the confusion.
However, they weren't designed, they just evolved.
Not really. It's a highly useful plant. You can produce multiple crops per year with managable soil exhaustion. It's an excellent source of fibrous material usable for a lot of things, most notably paper (which is in fact why it was banned in the US, but that's another story).
I don't have sources handy, but I did research this topic at some length in the past and convince myself that Hemp would have real value if it weren't for our political climate.
Though the strains most effective in terms of biomass, fiber production, etc, are NOT the best strains for recreational use.
One should be aware that hemp has been through extensive selective breeding, and the THC levels have boosted considerably in the last 50 years. However the changes to boost THC have made the plant less effective for other purposes.
PS:
I should not that I'm not a user, but I am strongly in favor of legalization, both for production and recreational uses.
When was XHTML created?
The tag in HTML quailifies, except they say the patent only applies to XML files. XHTML is XML, and has the tag. Seems that it would be prior art.
IF this is really strong encryption, and is well done, it could help to prevent a lot of the misuses of RFIDs. It doesn't stop them, of course, but makes them harder.
If the tags in my clothes will only talk in a useful way to authorized readers, then you can't just put a generic reader in the lamp post and discover everyone that walks by.
However, all that is needed to get the lampost reader to track people is to have the keys, or have some way to get the RFID to talk in a consistant way. For example, always send it the same challenge and see if you get the same response. Hum... the encryption systems probably don't prevent that.
Some sort of salting would be needed in the reply. Current time/request counter, something.
I worked for the computing center when I was in college. When the school was first being connected to the internet, and many people were having their desktops networked for the first time, one of the really common questions from non-technical types was "Where is the Internet?"
A careful summary of world wide networking (this was before web browsers) would be met with a blank stare and "Yes, but where is it?"
We finally decided to tell them it was at a secret location in a closet in Idaho. This seemed to make people feel better.
I never really understood why the most confusing thing was.... "Where is it?"
These people had already learned how to use their email programs and 3270 emulator (virtual mainframe terminal) with no problem.
Thinking back on this.... it makes more sense that AOL had so much success. If AOL was installed you could tell the user that the internet in that little friendly icon right there on the desktop.
You do that.
In the mean time I can start my protection service for the 3rd born virgin girls.......
But that can fail if the backtick expansion grows too large (which it will in this case). There IS a limit to the size of a command line in unix shells it's just several k.
/bin/cat: Argument list too long
hammer$cat `find linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r8 -type f` | wc -l
bash:
0
That's the whole point of xargs. It splits the files from find up in to groups that all fit on the command line.
However backtick expansion does rule. It just doesn't work well for large blocks of data.
A simpler solution.
find kernel-source -type f | xargs cat | wc -l
If I remember correctly.....
Preferred stock is kinda special and comes with a lot of extras. Common stock doesn't, but common stock gets it's dividends first (as a trade off).
A common thing with preferred stock is to be able to convert it to common stock through some financial transaction with the company. I'm not sure exactly how, but it's possible for the company to make or lose money through this transaction.
You can't just change the rules related to a share be it common or preferred, but you can take away a share and replace it with a new one (if the stock holders agree).
This looks like they yanked all of the preferred stock, and replaced it with a new flavor of preferred stock that doesn't have a conversion feature.
Somehow or other, the potential losses SCO would have if the preferred stock was converted to common stock were showing up on their balance sheet.
By yanking the conversion features from the preferred stock, that potential loss goes away and the books look better without having really done much of anything.
How's that for a vague explanation?
That was sorta my point. Assuming that performance went from 1,000 jumps/second (a rough guess at what I was getting with the initial implementation which was REALLY wasteful) evaluated to 10,000,000 jumps/second, then the run time would drop from 300,000,000 million years to 30,000 years.
A massive improvement, but still useless from a practical point of view.
But yes, you are correct, linear improvements are sometimes the critical edge needed to make a project useful.
I stay away from the Xbox because I believe that if MS ever dominates gaming, then the whole market will stagnate.
5) High quality exculsive games
The only game exclusive to the XBox that I've been interested in is Halo. However, Halo offers a good example of why MS control would be horrible for the game market. The game was mostly finished and ready for release many years ago. I saw my first demo video of it in '96 (maybe '95?). MS bought the company producing it, and sat on it until their console was ready.
They continued to sit on the PC and Mac versions until they had Halo 2. They are using control of the game to push the console, not producing the game for it's own sake. I like my games, but don't like it when people try to lead me around by them.
But as a secondary note, I (being old fashioned) really consider console games to be generally weaker than PC games. I consider it unfortunate that the PC game market is moving to consoles and less is being done for PCs. In fact, a lot of what is being done is dumbed down enough to fit a console's limitations (sigh).
I have say that trying to program in low level languages, or worrying about the details of the machine archtecture has usually been (in my experience) counter productive in terms of efficiency.
I'm not saying that there aren't places where low level details aren't critical, but for the most part they just draw attention away from the thing that has the most impact on performance.
Application Architecture.
The choices of algorithms and data structures are far more important than any low level details. But low level details are more fun, and tend to make us feel more manly or guruly or something so we tend to focus on them instead. In practice I find that using low level languages or super optimized tools make it hard to worry about high level structure, so the structure gets ignored.
I once worked on a project in which people were seriously freaking out over the performance hit in using virtual functions while parsing the configuration file.
At the same time, the application (a firewall) was performing multiple linear searches through linked lists of several hundred items per packet. These searches were very carefully optimized, so they had to be fast... (sigh). When I switched the system to use STL dictionaries (and later hashes), total throughput jumped three fold, yet some of the developers were worried about the cost of the templates and virtual functions used.
The fact that the algorithm is more important thatnthe details of implementation is a lesson that everyone (myself included) needs to keep getting pounded into them, because it's so easy to forget.
There are places where assembler and hardware details matter a great deal. But they are usually places that contain a lot of repetition that can't be removed algorithmically. Graphics are the obvious example.
A recent example:
My brother in law gave me one of those boards with pegs in which you try to jump your way down to a single peg remaining. I have no idea what it's called, but anyway....
I decided to be cute, and wrote a 100 line python scrpt over lunch to find all possible solutions. I was suprised when it hadn't found a single solution by the time I was finished eating. I was a lot more suprised when it hadn't found anything by the end of the day.
So I killed it and started in optimizing for performance and tweaking and trying different things. This kept me occupied over lunch for a couple of weeks, but didn't produce anything else. Finally I started doing some analysis of the problem. The first thing I found was that the search space (for the board I had) was roughly 10**18.
I didn't matter how much I tweaked the details of my search, it wasn't going to find very many solutions in less than a century (actually, it looks like a naive full search will take several thousand years).
So, after wasting several weeks of lunch breaks, I have redefined the problem. Find A solution, and rewritten my search to use a heuristic. I finished everthing but the heuristic at lunch a couple of days ago. The new system will take 100 or even a 1000 times as long to perform a jump, but I'm expecting to find a solution before I'm dead.
So, don't get bogged down in the details of an implementation. They won't usually take you very far.
I see the sales figures for PS/2 versus X-Box, and the X-Box looks like a failure. But whenever I talk to people about Console gaming they are ALL talking about the X-Box and it's games. It seems to be assumed that you wouldn't play on anyting else, and they get kinda freaked out if I mention that I will not buy an MS game of any kind.
This isn't just one group of friends, but includes people a coffee shops that I meet while traveling, on planes, and all kinds of locations.
How is the X-Box doing versus the PS/2 is console sales recently? Who outsold who during Xmas this year?
I just seems wierd that the stats I hear are so out of whack with personal experience.