Naah. I clicked on it. I just wanted to duplicate it and see if it the intentional consistency might further the chaos, but I'm sure it's all done by now and all I got was your own reply.
Love your video link, though. Though it's relatively long-winded and rather tame, it really is very well done so I am adding it to my collection of publicly-presentable weirdness.:)
The last time I had a discussion like that was with my wife. She wanted to buy an Alienware machine for her gaming fix, and I wanted to build her one from parts.
So she shopped out a reasonable Alienware box, which is easily considered to be the most overglorified brand of PC in the world.
I insisted on competing with a list of parts of similar quality and feature from Newegg, though I skimped a lot on the case (but still included a good power supply).
It turned out that Alienware was only about $150 higher than my total bill of materials on a like-for-like box, included a year of on-site warranty service, and a wide array of choices for color and lighting, and was done.
So if time is money (it is), and warranties are useful (it was, once, for a minor issue), then Alienware would plainly win. And it did: Other than one little problem with the lighting, which they gladly fixed by sending a tech out from 45 miles away to change a little PC board, it's been a completely solid machine.
And so, when it came time to upgrade my own desktop system, I got an Alienware for myself. The case is fucking awesome, both in looks and raw utility, the parts are all of very high-quality, and it worked fine out of the box with zero bullshit and without installing Windows myself. (In neither case was there any crapware to remove.)
So what did buying a pretty-looking computer cost over a boring-looking one? IMHO, all things considered: It was roughly free.
Both systems simply work, and they even every neatly built the Firewire port out into the front panel (along with audio from the X-Fi sound card) using very clever parts and cabling that I simply cannot buy off-the-shelf but which will be compatible with whatever motherboard I install in the future. FFS, even the included DVD burner is the best and fastest I've ever used.
Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy building/tweaking/hacking my own computers, and have for decades....but, seriously: Just because you get to pick a color doesn't mean that it's a bad deal, and there's more to a quality computer than just the CPU and RAM specifications. (How good are the capacitors? How many lies are behind the power supply's ratings? Would you rather have an EVGA video card with reasonable longevity or a Super Rainbow Happy Flower card with possibly iffy/under-spec'd components? How fast is the hard drive? Is the case actually fucking useable when adding/changing hardware, or is it an unforgivable PITA? Do you want massively-overkilled cooling that can be dialed down to calm-and-useful, or a system that needs to sound like a jet engine in order to barely keep up under load? etc.)
All of this is just two data-points worth of anecdote, but when if the next upgrade cycle requires buying an entirely new system just like the last one did, it's likely to be an Alienware machine. And if it's practical to upgrade the existing box piecemeal instead of replacing it absolutely, the very lovely and easy-to-work-on Alienware case will house whatever it is (including a huge motherboard, full-length PCI cards, and a reasonable abundance of drives) neatly, quietly, and without drama.
Honestly, my only real complaint about the Alienware boxen that I have here is that they're very, very heavy: Shipping weight on the PC alone is something like 80 pounds (including a lot of packaging), and it takes a bit of grunt to move it around. It would be nice if the pretty cases were built from aluminum instead of steel, but that'd easily eat up the monetary price differential vs. a quality DIY solution.
You can go ahead and laugh about "oh but I get to pick a color!!!" all you want, but please realize that there's more to a useful computer than numbers and that it may be advantageous to you if you wouldn't dismiss things so easily just because they happen to cost slightly more.
But that's not the point you were arguing against.
I read the discussion as follows:
Them: We'll about to figure it out, and it'll be public! Yay!
You: OMFG. Srsly? When you fuck it up you'll fuck up your clients. Get retailers, raise prices through the fucking roof, and do a one-for-two deal like OLPC.
I assume that, at $25 each, they're raising enough extra money to handle whatever their charitable desires might be. You, however, seem to assume differently. (Perhaps you know more about their charitable desires than they themselves do, and are actually fucking psychic.)
But whatever the case, my point is still valid since you haven't successfully (or even bothered with) trying to argue against it: If you want them on Amazon at higher prices, put them there at whatever price you think is reasonable. If you want a OLPC-sort of deal to sit behind it, implement it.
I personally think your concept is full of shit, but if you think it really does have merit then it is plain from the numbers that there is money to be made from it if anyone actually wants to buy them that way.
You sound like nobody has ever successfully hacked anything clever and unintended into a Broadcom-based device simply because getting such a thing done was never spelled out in plain English and published in freely-available form by Broadcom.
The SD card that I have hacked into my WRT54G disagrees with you, though. Sure, it'd have been easier for [whoever that was] to figure out it with a good set of documentation, but it works very well without, and I didn't have to duplicate the steps they took to develop it, just the end result.
And, obviously, the hardware of the WRT54G was certainly not intentionally made to be at all hacker-friendly, unlike the Raspberry Pi. In fact, that the WRT54G ended up being a relatively flexible platform for an amazing body of interesting work is (at very best) a complete accident on the part of Linksys.
Have a little faith in your hacker brothers. Getting full IO support on a Raspberry Pi, compared to the build tree involved in figuring out how to softmod a PS3/Wii/iWidget/Android/blah sounds really trivial...though certainly challenging enough to be rewarding to those who decide to work on it.
And then, they'll publish their findings. Someone else will verify and polish it up. And eventually, if it's at all useful, it'll be so well-documented and easy to implement that it will become trivial and common.
This only needs done once, since the Internet duplicates information very nicely indeed.
After that, we'll all become very thankful that they bothered with "wasting board space on a GPIO/SPI/I2C header," which will save time and simplify things for everyone else, while the folks behind such hacking will have learned some valuable skills (and the less-adept of us will learn something, too, just by following their progress).
Only a hard-core masochist would prefer an undocumented chipset with no IO header, over an undocumented chipset with the IO header already built-out and waiting for discovery.
Meanwhile, in the "every cloud has a silver lining" department, I foresee that if IO on the Raspberry Pi remains difficult to get to, that this will allow a market for inexpensive USB devices which provide various raw IO to develop... along with documentation to support them. Which really would open up a whole new world of things on all manner of platforms, big and small. As an end-user, I might even prefer this hypothetical platform-agnostic eventuality over having good documentation for one insular device.
Please stop hating, and just realize that a small low-powered general-purpose computer which can actually accomplish useful work, has network connectivity, and includes very reasonable video support that only costs $25 is really fucking awesome. It'd certainly be more awesome if it were also backed with excellent low-level documentation, but seriously man: Get over it. It is what it is, and nothing else is even close at that price level.
Seriously? You propose to increase the price times two, or maybe even quadruple it, and still wind up dealing with the logistics of shipping thousands of packages?
What possible benefit could this have for anyone?
Meanwhile, if you want them sold at Amazon so badly for whatever reason, then put them there yourself -- nothing is stopping you. If you really think the market will bear a price of $60-100 for such an item, then there should be plenty of profit incentive for you to play middleman. And if you feel like giving some of your profit back to the charity, I'm sure they'll be happy to accept your donation...
No. I don't find it shocking at all, but thanks for failing to guess my opinion.
I'm quite familiar with a host of variations in spelling and pronunciation of identical words that exist within the language(s) we call English. "Patents" is simply one such word which I had not encountered before.
Here in Ohio, we have a particular egregiousness when it comes to intentional mispronunciation. From the top of my head, here are some towns near me which are never uttered "correctly":
Lima (pronounced lyme-ah) Cairo (kay-roe) Toledo (toe-lee-doe) Nevada (nah-vay-dah)
The trip from Ohio to Florida would be far more pleasurable if I were able to be continually drunk during that time. (Actually, it is more pleasurable, but I don't dare discuss it because I'm not sure if the statue of limitations is up yet.
What - what's this? A rational explanation, based on sound business logic (ie: money) that doesn't involve intentional evil? On Slashdot, of all places?
I don't know where you are, but I feel that I owe you a beer.
Meh. A lot of things respond poorly to various patterns.
Walking into a bank with a hand in your pocket and a demand for money elicits a poor response.
Escalating a disagreement with another person to the extent of dismemberment elicits a "poor response," and the jury won't care who was "right."
And sending a certain pattern of signalling to the White House's computers will also elicit a poor response, just as setting the pins on a lock (which does not belong to you) in a certain orientation may bring about a "poor response."
It's not that common sense is too abstract. It's that it's not being applied properly to computer crimes.
But the unique format and community of Slashdot are both here exactly because of the at least orthogonally tech-related content.
If you want a mainstream news site that looks like Slashdot and has features like Slashdot, then download Slashcode and get busy on making one.
(There's lots of non-tech related stuff that is also "Stuff that matters," but a particularly safe airline who doesn't really have any flights that don't include.au as at least one endpoint can ground their planes forever and not qualify as "stuff that matters.")
Find me someone intimately familiar with an Android phone, or barcodes, or RFID, who can also grok basic SQL, and somone intimately familiar with the particular practical difficulties of SCCA timing, and I'll have your solution in-place, tested and working, before lunch.
This isn't rocket surgery.
(And if you give us until supper, it might even have a fancy web interface.)
Meh. 33 is enough to keeps the pipes warm. And if you're really being frugal with the layered clothing/blankets thing, it's often cheaper to set the taps to "slow drip" than it is to set the thermostat to "substantially warmer than freezing."
Or just wrap heat tape on the pipes, and turn the furnace off. The water will still flow, the house will still be predictably fucking cold, and you'll still be able to bask in your frugality.
I've played some with both solid-state laser pointers and fairly low-power HeNe gas lasers, and I've just gotta say that my aim is terrible. It's hard to keep such a thing fixed on a non-moving target at a few hundred yards, and it's damn near impossible if it's moving at any great speed.
I do very well with a rifle, or at a game of pool, but shining a hand-held laser at a moving plane is a completely different story.
Why even have warmer and colder buttons? That just encourages people to mash buttons in ways that are likely to be confusing to the system. "I feel chilly" = "Mash Warmer button a dozen times and curse the infernal box."
Such a system could be even simpler if it had two buttons, one labeled "Bad" and the other labeled "Good."
If the temperature is to your liking, you push the "Good" button. If it is not, you push the "Bad" button. Do this whenever you walk by (it's supposed to be in a busy hallway, after all), and it'll figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Naah. I clicked on it. I just wanted to duplicate it and see if it the intentional consistency might further the chaos, but I'm sure it's all done by now and all I got was your own reply.
Love your video link, though. Though it's relatively long-winded and rather tame, it really is very well done so I am adding it to my collection of publicly-presentable weirdness. :)
Heh.
The last time I had a discussion like that was with my wife. She wanted to buy an Alienware machine for her gaming fix, and I wanted to build her one from parts.
So she shopped out a reasonable Alienware box, which is easily considered to be the most overglorified brand of PC in the world.
I insisted on competing with a list of parts of similar quality and feature from Newegg, though I skimped a lot on the case (but still included a good power supply).
It turned out that Alienware was only about $150 higher than my total bill of materials on a like-for-like box, included a year of on-site warranty service, and a wide array of choices for color and lighting, and was done.
So if time is money (it is), and warranties are useful (it was, once, for a minor issue), then Alienware would plainly win. And it did: Other than one little problem with the lighting, which they gladly fixed by sending a tech out from 45 miles away to change a little PC board, it's been a completely solid machine.
And so, when it came time to upgrade my own desktop system, I got an Alienware for myself. The case is fucking awesome, both in looks and raw utility, the parts are all of very high-quality, and it worked fine out of the box with zero bullshit and without installing Windows myself. (In neither case was there any crapware to remove.)
So what did buying a pretty-looking computer cost over a boring-looking one? IMHO, all things considered: It was roughly free.
Both systems simply work, and they even every neatly built the Firewire port out into the front panel (along with audio from the X-Fi sound card) using very clever parts and cabling that I simply cannot buy off-the-shelf but which will be compatible with whatever motherboard I install in the future. FFS, even the included DVD burner is the best and fastest I've ever used.
Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy building/tweaking/hacking my own computers, and have for decades....but, seriously: Just because you get to pick a color doesn't mean that it's a bad deal, and there's more to a quality computer than just the CPU and RAM specifications. (How good are the capacitors? How many lies are behind the power supply's ratings? Would you rather have an EVGA video card with reasonable longevity or a Super Rainbow Happy Flower card with possibly iffy/under-spec'd components? How fast is the hard drive? Is the case actually fucking useable when adding/changing hardware, or is it an unforgivable PITA? Do you want massively-overkilled cooling that can be dialed down to calm-and-useful, or a system that needs to sound like a jet engine in order to barely keep up under load? etc.)
All of this is just two data-points worth of anecdote, but when if the next upgrade cycle requires buying an entirely new system just like the last one did, it's likely to be an Alienware machine. And if it's practical to upgrade the existing box piecemeal instead of replacing it absolutely, the very lovely and easy-to-work-on Alienware case will house whatever it is (including a huge motherboard, full-length PCI cards, and a reasonable abundance of drives) neatly, quietly, and without drama.
Honestly, my only real complaint about the Alienware boxen that I have here is that they're very, very heavy: Shipping weight on the PC alone is something like 80 pounds (including a lot of packaging), and it takes a bit of grunt to move it around. It would be nice if the pretty cases were built from aluminum instead of steel, but that'd easily eat up the monetary price differential vs. a quality DIY solution.
You can go ahead and laugh about "oh but I get to pick a color!!!" all you want, but please realize that there's more to a useful computer than numbers and that it may be advantageous to you if you wouldn't dismiss things so easily just because they happen to cost slightly more.
But that's not the point you were arguing against.
I read the discussion as follows:
Them: We'll about to figure it out, and it'll be public! Yay!
You: OMFG. Srsly? When you fuck it up you'll fuck up your clients. Get retailers, raise prices through the fucking roof, and do a one-for-two deal like OLPC.
I assume that, at $25 each, they're raising enough extra money to handle whatever their charitable desires might be. You, however, seem to assume differently. (Perhaps you know more about their charitable desires than they themselves do, and are actually fucking psychic.)
But whatever the case, my point is still valid since you haven't successfully (or even bothered with) trying to argue against it: If you want them on Amazon at higher prices, put them there at whatever price you think is reasonable. If you want a OLPC-sort of deal to sit behind it, implement it.
I personally think your concept is full of shit, but if you think it really does have merit then it is plain from the numbers that there is money to be made from it if anyone actually wants to buy them that way.
You sound like nobody has ever successfully hacked anything clever and unintended into a Broadcom-based device simply because getting such a thing done was never spelled out in plain English and published in freely-available form by Broadcom.
The SD card that I have hacked into my WRT54G disagrees with you, though. Sure, it'd have been easier for [whoever that was] to figure out it with a good set of documentation, but it works very well without, and I didn't have to duplicate the steps they took to develop it, just the end result.
And, obviously, the hardware of the WRT54G was certainly not intentionally made to be at all hacker-friendly, unlike the Raspberry Pi. In fact, that the WRT54G ended up being a relatively flexible platform for an amazing body of interesting work is (at very best) a complete accident on the part of Linksys.
Have a little faith in your hacker brothers. Getting full IO support on a Raspberry Pi, compared to the build tree involved in figuring out how to softmod a PS3/Wii/iWidget/Android/blah sounds really trivial...though certainly challenging enough to be rewarding to those who decide to work on it.
And then, they'll publish their findings. Someone else will verify and polish it up. And eventually, if it's at all useful, it'll be so well-documented and easy to implement that it will become trivial and common.
This only needs done once, since the Internet duplicates information very nicely indeed.
After that, we'll all become very thankful that they bothered with "wasting board space on a GPIO/SPI/I2C header," which will save time and simplify things for everyone else, while the folks behind such hacking will have learned some valuable skills (and the less-adept of us will learn something, too, just by following their progress).
Only a hard-core masochist would prefer an undocumented chipset with no IO header, over an undocumented chipset with the IO header already built-out and waiting for discovery.
Meanwhile, in the "every cloud has a silver lining" department, I foresee that if IO on the Raspberry Pi remains difficult to get to, that this will allow a market for inexpensive USB devices which provide various raw IO to develop... along with documentation to support them. Which really would open up a whole new world of things on all manner of platforms, big and small. As an end-user, I might even prefer this hypothetical platform-agnostic eventuality over having good documentation for one insular device.
Please stop hating, and just realize that a small low-powered general-purpose computer which can actually accomplish useful work, has network connectivity, and includes very reasonable video support that only costs $25 is really fucking awesome. It'd certainly be more awesome if it were also backed with excellent low-level documentation, but seriously man: Get over it. It is what it is, and nothing else is even close at that price level.
Seriously? You propose to increase the price times two, or maybe even quadruple it, and still wind up dealing with the logistics of shipping thousands of packages?
What possible benefit could this have for anyone?
Meanwhile, if you want them sold at Amazon so badly for whatever reason, then put them there yourself -- nothing is stopping you. If you really think the market will bear a price of $60-100 for such an item, then there should be plenty of profit incentive for you to play middleman. And if you feel like giving some of your profit back to the charity, I'm sure they'll be happy to accept your donation...
I love Peru this time of year.
*whoosh*
I think he meant to say that of the hard drives he's purchased, 25% of them were refurbished, and that none of those have failed.
Eh? Bing shows Lima pretty clearly, for me.
Perhaps you're holding it wrong.
No. I don't find it shocking at all, but thanks for failing to guess my opinion.
I'm quite familiar with a host of variations in spelling and pronunciation of identical words that exist within the language(s) we call English. "Patents" is simply one such word which I had not encountered before.
Here in Ohio, we have a particular egregiousness when it comes to intentional mispronunciation. From the top of my head, here are some towns near me which are never uttered "correctly":
Lima (pronounced lyme-ah)
Cairo (kay-roe)
Toledo (toe-lee-doe)
Nevada (nah-vay-dah)
Forget the ride home from the bar:
The trip from Ohio to Florida would be far more pleasurable if I were able to be continually drunk during that time. (Actually, it is more pleasurable, but I don't dare discuss it because I'm not sure if the statue of limitations is up yet.
Note: I'm not an Apple fan.
Does UK English really, honestly pronounce "patents" as "pay-tense," as heard in TFV?
Just wondering, because over here where I can't do a damned thing about ACTA, we say "pah-tents."
What - what's this? A rational explanation, based on sound business logic (ie: money) that doesn't involve intentional evil? On Slashdot, of all places?
I don't know where you are, but I feel that I owe you a beer.
Meh. A lot of things respond poorly to various patterns.
Walking into a bank with a hand in your pocket and a demand for money elicits a poor response.
Escalating a disagreement with another person to the extent of dismemberment elicits a "poor response," and the jury won't care who was "right."
And sending a certain pattern of signalling to the White House's computers will also elicit a poor response, just as setting the pins on a lock (which does not belong to you) in a certain orientation may bring about a "poor response."
It's not that common sense is too abstract. It's that it's not being applied properly to computer crimes.
But the unique format and community of Slashdot are both here exactly because of the at least orthogonally tech-related content.
If you want a mainstream news site that looks like Slashdot and has features like Slashdot, then download Slashcode and get busy on making one.
(There's lots of non-tech related stuff that is also "Stuff that matters," but a particularly safe airline who doesn't really have any flights that don't include .au as at least one endpoint can ground their planes forever and not qualify as "stuff that matters.")
Syriasly?
Why is "Syria," as shown in the title, displayed a more narrow font than the rest of that title?
(Or am I really the only person to notice this?)
Find me someone intimately familiar with an Android phone, or barcodes, or RFID, who can also grok basic SQL, and somone intimately familiar with the particular practical difficulties of SCCA timing, and I'll have your solution in-place, tested and working, before lunch.
This isn't rocket surgery.
(And if you give us until supper, it might even have a fancy web interface.)
Do we get any kind of award if we earn a spot on your People of Slashdot page?
Maybe an OMG Pony, or some hot grits, or at least a custom goatse or a penis bird?
Will Netcraft confirm the inclusion?
I didn't even notice it was gone, but I'm pleased to have it back. Thanks!
Meh. 33 is enough to keeps the pipes warm. And if you're really being frugal with the layered clothing/blankets thing, it's often cheaper to set the taps to "slow drip" than it is to set the thermostat to "substantially warmer than freezing."
Or just wrap heat tape on the pipes, and turn the furnace off. The water will still flow, the house will still be predictably fucking cold, and you'll still be able to bask in your frugality.
Yes.
Glowing? For how long?
I've played some with both solid-state laser pointers and fairly low-power HeNe gas lasers, and I've just gotta say that my aim is terrible. It's hard to keep such a thing fixed on a non-moving target at a few hundred yards, and it's damn near impossible if it's moving at any great speed.
I do very well with a rifle, or at a game of pool, but shining a hand-held laser at a moving plane is a completely different story.
Just saying.
Why even have warmer and colder buttons? That just encourages people to mash buttons in ways that are likely to be confusing to the system. "I feel chilly" = "Mash Warmer button a dozen times and curse the infernal box."
Such a system could be even simpler if it had two buttons, one labeled "Bad" and the other labeled "Good."
If the temperature is to your liking, you push the "Good" button. If it is not, you push the "Bad" button. Do this whenever you walk by (it's supposed to be in a busy hallway, after all), and it'll figure it out.