*sigh* Trying to replicate trek tech is a complete waste of human resources until we find/manufacture dilithium crystals. Why the heck is NASA wasting my tax money on shuttle replacement parts?!? It's all about dilithium!
Really? Ever hear of a cell phone? How about automatic doors that open when you approach?
I can think of a very good documentary you should watch if you think that trying to replicate Star Trek technology is a waste of time.
Interestingly, like the first cell phones, it also weighs in at a hefty 20lbs. This must be an ST:TOS tricorder, not an ST:TNG one.
The challenge was for any modern Linux distro. DSL is a modern distro. I know people who run it on high end hardware for gaming. Just because it's purpose built to have a small footprint doesn't discount it from the running.
However, if you really want to get pissy about it, you can get Zenwalk or Slackware running on hardware as anemic as in TFA. I know from experience that Zen 4.2 will run on a P90 with 16MB of RAM.
Well, see.... I once got Windows 2000 running on a '486 DX/33 with 64MB fo RAM. Not really that much of an achievement: though it was below the minimum required MHz, it had twice the minimum RAM to make up for it. The thing is... I never shut down that computer if I could help it, because it took 3 hours to boot, and the latency in responding even to a mouse click took several seconds. Compare that to, say, Damn Small Linux, which would fly on that system.
Now. XP has significantly higher "minimum" specs than 2K. It's also significantly more "bloated", in that it actually does need those higher minimum specs because it's got more stuff running. The UI takes more clock cycles to render, and there's more services running. AND... a Pentium at 8MHz with 20MB of RAM has less raw processing power than a '486 DX/33 with 64MB. How well do you think that XP installation actually ran?
Getting an OS *installed* on an anemic system is nowhere near the same as getting it to *run*.
Y'know? Betamax is actually a superior technology to VHS. There's a reason it's what TV stations and recording studios have been using until they went digital.... It records better picture quality, and better sound. VHS won out because of marketing.
The rest of that stuff... can't really argue against it. It's all overpriced and mediocre. But I'd like to point out that SOE probably learned from Everquest (the first)... Millions of subscribers paying $13 US/month to beta test it makes a pretty compelling argument in favour of this kind of business model.
Assuming TFA is telling the truth, this probably has more to do with the US requiring passports of Canadians than with any real desire to enforce the rules.
Excepting 1776-78 and 1812-14, the Canada/US border has been pretty much open for more than 200 years. Now the US has decreed that it's going to require passports of all people crossing the border in any way. They're entitled to do so, but it's ridiculously inconvenient, and will hurt tourism in both countries. We've tried diplomatic means to convince the US of this, but they aren't listening to reason. So we're probably trying playground diplomacy instead... you make things annoying for me, I'll make things annoying for you. Maybe if we inconvenience enough Americans, the people will start demanding their government return to the rational world.
See... in a corporate environment, the network team will secure Windows. Believe it or not, it can be done quite easily... you just have to set the permissions. Windows may not be, by default, anywhere near as secure as Linux, but it has provisioning for running people without admin privileges, without permissions to change the registry or write anywhere on the hard drive but their home directory. You can prevent people from installing stuff. It really *can* be locked down. By a competent admin.
The problem is that it's totally different in a home environment. My desktop is running Linux, I've been running Linux since 1994, so I do have some experience here.... um, how many linux users do you know who neither a) know their root password, nor b) know how to get root access?
Joe User isn't going to use a system at home if he can't install his software. If he has to log in as root to do it, so be it. He's still going to be able to install dangerous software as long as he has root access on the system, and he's never going to use a system if he doesn't have a way to get root access.
I'd like a small, portable system with a decent battery life. My existing laptop lasts 3 hours, and while I know it's not the best that's out there, it's pretty good. What I want is something I can use in conjunction with the laptop, which is really more of a desktop replacement than a lappy.
Here's a short list of some of the features I'd like to see: -Reasonably high DPI screen. Doesn't have to be super-big, maybe 12" should be enough, but it's got to have a respectable resolution. -A backlight that you can actually turn off. -No internal moving parts. It should have an external hard drive you can use for the main OS (docking station?), but also have an internal micro-os which can run word processing and web surfing capabilities without needing the hard drive. It should include a reasonably sized internal flash drive to store my documents on when I'm using it in this mode. This pared down mode does *not* need e-mail, instant messenging, or any games. It just has to be able to load up webmail, the occasional websites, and give a virtual typewriter I can take notes during class/meetings with. It doesn't even need sound. -It doesn't have to be a very powerful processor or have tons of RAM. I am not envisioning this as a desktop replacement, though with a docked hard drive/cd burner there's no reason it can't be a workstation replacement. A geode with 64MB of RAM should be more than enough for the kind of thing I'm thinking about. -A reasonably long battery life. With no moving parts and low-power processor/memory/graphics, coupled with the micro-os I describe above, there is no reason a device that weighs less than 3lbs couldn't be designed to have a battery life exceeding 12 hours. It could also be instant-on, instant-off, like an appliance, when running without the docked OS-containing hard drive.
I understand that this isn't really what this article is about. ultra-portable laptops are all well and good. But they all have the same shortcoming, in my experience: the battery life just isn't long enough. Good luck getting through more than a 3h meeting or lecture with most laptops. What happens when you have more than one? You either find a plug, or you do without.
Back in the early days, using "ph" meant you were doing things to the telephone system. Like that scene in Hackers (yah yah, I know) where the kid used a tape recording of the tones a phone makes when you insert coins to fool the phone company into thinking that he'd inserted coins. Would have been "phreaking".
These days, it's just idiot reporters who don't bother to actually do their research, coupled with idiot kids who think that misspelling words makes them sound cool. A Hacker is somebody who takes things apart, dammit. A Cracker is somebody who breaks through security measures. I want my words back! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make some ovaltine and try to remember where I left my teeth.
So... you actually are illegally sharing ISO images of their software... Starcraft and SOCOM. Why are you complaining?
You do realize that only downloading is legal, and that uploading is still illegal, right? You *could* be successfully sued by the people who own the rights to distribute that software in Canada, and the fines are pretty hefty.
Interestingly enough, I found with some games that running without administration privileges worked like a no-cd patch was installed. That is... NWN and its expansions, for example, ran without the CD installed if they'd been installed with admin privileges and run as a user.:-)
Basically, yeah. It is. It's the rationale for why the recording industry hasn't ever even tried to sue people for downloading music in Canada: it'd never stand up in court. We're already compensating the artists directly through the tariffs, which are getting distributed to the artists' guilds directly, not to their industrialist herders.
yeah, no. It'd be a good thing, really... because it would be grounds to prove in court that I've already paid for any music downloading I ever do.
You know why there's no RIAA (CRIA is the Canadian equivalent) lawsuits in Canada? Because they wouldn't stand up in court. We already pay for it in the form of a small tariff on every blank CD and tape we buy. This is just more of the same. I'm not gonna fight it at all.
Haven't played GuildWars, have you? It's entirely possible to solo your way through the PvE campaign, unless you count the heroes and henchmen you can hire in every outpost as "not soloing"....
Y'know, I was supporting you until you said that. People telling you that you didn't understand the game, people insulting you personally because you believe that PCs are a better option, people telling you that you should get a Mac just because. You're right, in that the cost of entry into the marketplace is significantly lower with PCs. You can put together a *new* PC for under $300 that'll do everything you need to do for business. It'll run Office, it'll do e-mail, it'll be able to surf. It's certainly not a gaming rig, but it's half the cost of an entry-level Mac. For a business, that's a very significant thing.
But *please* don't tell me that you rely on Windows Update for your maintenance. It should not be relied on for a corporate system, because there have been many instances where MS has actually caused more serious errors by rushing fixes to Winodws Update. You could be screwing yourself over by letting it handle your system maintenance. Instead, I'd suggest that the site be blocked, and that you download the patches directly from MS and periodically install them on the computers on the net. That can be automated by means of a login script, even. It'll give you much greater control over what is running on each desktop, which can save you an enormous headache down the road.
e) Since you are a business owner(and good for you!), I hope you are taking maintenance, viruses, EULA, and DRM into your TCO.
There's no maintenance. Viruses aren't a problem with basic virus software and employees that aren't brain-dead. EULA's are ignored. DRM isn't applicable to work.
I sincerely hope I never have to work with you. You're an idiot. Repeat after me: Running Antivirus does NOT immunize against viruses. It significantly reduces the risk of contracting a virus, but no software has a 100% catch rate, particularly with new viruses coming out every day. Do NOT rely on your antivirus to do all the job, because you WILL eventually have a problem. You still need to use your brain and a degree of wariness when you use your computer, or you will eventually get burned.
And I sincerely hope you're going to revisit that whole ignoring EULA thing, because if not, then you're screwed when somebody decides to do a software audit. They do them, and small businesses are usually the ones that get screwed over. Do everything legal. It's simply not worth it in the long run.
Finally, DRM most certainly is an important consideration. It applies to a heck of a lot more than just movies and MP3 files. You'd do well to look into exactly what the implications of your software are.
Your analogy is flawed... what the article describes is actually connecting to the swarm, but not participating in it. I'll try to explain....
He downloads a.torrent for RANDOM_PIRATED_MOVIE01 (hereafter "movie"). His client connects to movie.torrent's tracker, and announces itself as having it down 100%. It ignores any requests to download from it, but as far as the tracker is concerned, he's still 100%. BIG_STUDIO01 (hereafter "studio") connects to the same tracker with the same.torrent, and requests a list of who's seeding. Studio has teh lawyerz send him a letter asking him to stop.
It's not the mere fact that he's got BitTorrent present. It's the fact that he has BitTorrent connected as part of the swarm for that particular file. While that isn't evidence of him actually committing piracy (as they necessarily have no proof of what he actually downloaded unless he downloaded from their seed), I would argue that it's evidence of intent to commit the piracy. Unless, of course, he's just trying to mess with them while not actually downloading anything.:)
Incidentally, you ARE using Wine, right? The commercial variants would actually cost me more than a valid Windows license (the joys of being a CS major).
Cedega, but that's only because Wine doesn't support 32-bit mouse curors. In order to get the cursor to display in GuildWars, you need to do a minor hack to Wine's mouse.c library to force it to use the X cursor instead of allowing the game/program to specify its own. Other than that, though, GuildWars does run on Wine in Win2K or WinXP mode using DirectX 9 libraries/rendering. Wine really has come a long way recently.
The mobo is a socket AM2, an AMD socket with 940 pins. The processor is a 939 setup (939 pins.) This may not seem as though it wouldn't work, but the AM2 setup rearranges the way the pins are aligned such that only an AM2 processor fits in it. So yes, the described system is not possible. Even if it were possible, surely there are better mobo choices, it's memory is DDR 400 for goodness sakes.
(emphasis mine)
The motherboard (ASUS A8R32) is a Socket 939 motherboard. You can tell from the "A8" in the model name... that refers to the socket type. All of ASUS' K8- and A8- series motherboards are Socket 939. Likewise, all of ASUS' Socket AM2 motherboards have "M2" in the model name. My own motherboard is an M2N-E, for example. You can decode that as "AM2 socket, NVidia chipset, configuration type E". In this case, it's a passive chipset heatsink, 6 SATA, no IDE, no onboard Firewire, etc. etc. They also have M2V motherboards, which can decode as "AM2 socket, Via chipset".
In any rate, I game in Vista, and if my framerates are slightly worse, they are plenty good enough... and well ahead of, for example, Wine (though there's something awesome about playing even a DX8 game like WarCraft 3 in Linux/BSD).
Psst... I'm playing DX9 games like GuildWars in Linux...
Having lots of people play it doesn't make it revolutionary. Fact is that WoW is simply an upgrade/clone of EQ, which was an upgrade/clone of UO, which was....
They're just remaking the same game over and over again. If you're going to talk about MMORPGs, then I can really only endorse Ultima Online which started the whole genre, or GuildWars which did away with subscription fees. Neither was particularly revolutionary, though.
Interesting article, but I don't agree with his choices for the final test.:P In XFCE, I'm showing 140MB of RAM used with Firefox, Thunderbird, AbiWord, and Audacity open (listening to streaming MP3 radio)... as opposed to his 200+ MB being used with just FF, TB, and OpenOffice. It's all about app choice.
Still... nicely reassuring about my choice not to run Gnome ^_^
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Really? Ever hear of a cell phone? How about automatic doors that open when you approach?
I can think of a very good documentary you should watch if you think that trying to replicate Star Trek technology is a waste of time.
Interestingly, like the first cell phones, it also weighs in at a hefty 20lbs. This must be an ST:TOS tricorder, not an ST:TNG one.
The challenge was for any modern Linux distro. DSL is a modern distro. I know people who run it on high end hardware for gaming. Just because it's purpose built to have a small footprint doesn't discount it from the running.
However, if you really want to get pissy about it, you can get Zenwalk or Slackware running on hardware as anemic as in TFA. I know from experience that Zen 4.2 will run on a P90 with 16MB of RAM.
I accept your challenge.
Well, see.... I once got Windows 2000 running on a '486 DX/33 with 64MB fo RAM. Not really that much of an achievement: though it was below the minimum required MHz, it had twice the minimum RAM to make up for it. The thing is... I never shut down that computer if I could help it, because it took 3 hours to boot, and the latency in responding even to a mouse click took several seconds. Compare that to, say, Damn Small Linux, which would fly on that system.
Now. XP has significantly higher "minimum" specs than 2K. It's also significantly more "bloated", in that it actually does need those higher minimum specs because it's got more stuff running. The UI takes more clock cycles to render, and there's more services running. AND... a Pentium at 8MHz with 20MB of RAM has less raw processing power than a '486 DX/33 with 64MB. How well do you think that XP installation actually ran?
Getting an OS *installed* on an anemic system is nowhere near the same as getting it to *run*.
Y'know? Betamax is actually a superior technology to VHS. There's a reason it's what TV stations and recording studios have been using until they went digital.... It records better picture quality, and better sound. VHS won out because of marketing.
The rest of that stuff... can't really argue against it. It's all overpriced and mediocre. But I'd like to point out that SOE probably learned from Everquest (the first)... Millions of subscribers paying $13 US/month to beta test it makes a pretty compelling argument in favour of this kind of business model.
Assuming TFA is telling the truth, this probably has more to do with the US requiring passports of Canadians than with any real desire to enforce the rules.
Excepting 1776-78 and 1812-14, the Canada/US border has been pretty much open for more than 200 years. Now the US has decreed that it's going to require passports of all people crossing the border in any way. They're entitled to do so, but it's ridiculously inconvenient, and will hurt tourism in both countries. We've tried diplomatic means to convince the US of this, but they aren't listening to reason. So we're probably trying playground diplomacy instead... you make things annoying for me, I'll make things annoying for you. Maybe if we inconvenience enough Americans, the people will start demanding their government return to the rational world.
Bad news for the aliens if it was an Apple, though... Independance Day is only a few months away :P
See... in a corporate environment, the network team will secure Windows. Believe it or not, it can be done quite easily... you just have to set the permissions. Windows may not be, by default, anywhere near as secure as Linux, but it has provisioning for running people without admin privileges, without permissions to change the registry or write anywhere on the hard drive but their home directory. You can prevent people from installing stuff. It really *can* be locked down. By a competent admin.
The problem is that it's totally different in a home environment. My desktop is running Linux, I've been running Linux since 1994, so I do have some experience here.... um, how many linux users do you know who neither a) know their root password, nor b) know how to get root access?
Joe User isn't going to use a system at home if he can't install his software. If he has to log in as root to do it, so be it. He's still going to be able to install dangerous software as long as he has root access on the system, and he's never going to use a system if he doesn't have a way to get root access.
I'd like a small, portable system with a decent battery life. My existing laptop lasts 3 hours, and while I know it's not the best that's out there, it's pretty good. What I want is something I can use in conjunction with the laptop, which is really more of a desktop replacement than a lappy.
Here's a short list of some of the features I'd like to see:
-Reasonably high DPI screen. Doesn't have to be super-big, maybe 12" should be enough, but it's got to have a respectable resolution.
-A backlight that you can actually turn off.
-No internal moving parts. It should have an external hard drive you can use for the main OS (docking station?), but also have an internal micro-os which can run word processing and web surfing capabilities without needing the hard drive. It should include a reasonably sized internal flash drive to store my documents on when I'm using it in this mode. This pared down mode does *not* need e-mail, instant messenging, or any games. It just has to be able to load up webmail, the occasional websites, and give a virtual typewriter I can take notes during class/meetings with. It doesn't even need sound.
-It doesn't have to be a very powerful processor or have tons of RAM. I am not envisioning this as a desktop replacement, though with a docked hard drive/cd burner there's no reason it can't be a workstation replacement. A geode with 64MB of RAM should be more than enough for the kind of thing I'm thinking about.
-A reasonably long battery life. With no moving parts and low-power processor/memory/graphics, coupled with the micro-os I describe above, there is no reason a device that weighs less than 3lbs couldn't be designed to have a battery life exceeding 12 hours. It could also be instant-on, instant-off, like an appliance, when running without the docked OS-containing hard drive.
I understand that this isn't really what this article is about. ultra-portable laptops are all well and good. But they all have the same shortcoming, in my experience: the battery life just isn't long enough. Good luck getting through more than a 3h meeting or lecture with most laptops. What happens when you have more than one? You either find a plug, or you do without.
Back in the early days, using "ph" meant you were doing things to the telephone system. Like that scene in Hackers (yah yah, I know) where the kid used a tape recording of the tones a phone makes when you insert coins to fool the phone company into thinking that he'd inserted coins. Would have been "phreaking".
These days, it's just idiot reporters who don't bother to actually do their research, coupled with idiot kids who think that misspelling words makes them sound cool. A Hacker is somebody who takes things apart, dammit. A Cracker is somebody who breaks through security measures. I want my words back! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make some ovaltine and try to remember where I left my teeth.
So... you actually are illegally sharing ISO images of their software... Starcraft and SOCOM. Why are you complaining?
You do realize that only downloading is legal, and that uploading is still illegal, right? You *could* be successfully sued by the people who own the rights to distribute that software in Canada, and the fines are pretty hefty.
That's it. I'm totally honked off. I'm gonna send 'em a letter and give 'em what for.
Mmmmm.... Wikiality.....
Interestingly enough, I found with some games that running without administration privileges worked like a no-cd patch was installed. That is... NWN and its expansions, for example, ran without the CD installed if they'd been installed with admin privileges and run as a user. :-)
Basically, yeah. It is. It's the rationale for why the recording industry hasn't ever even tried to sue people for downloading music in Canada: it'd never stand up in court. We're already compensating the artists directly through the tariffs, which are getting distributed to the artists' guilds directly, not to their industrialist herders.
yeah, no. It'd be a good thing, really... because it would be grounds to prove in court that I've already paid for any music downloading I ever do.
You know why there's no RIAA (CRIA is the Canadian equivalent) lawsuits in Canada? Because they wouldn't stand up in court. We already pay for it in the form of a small tariff on every blank CD and tape we buy. This is just more of the same. I'm not gonna fight it at all.
Haven't played GuildWars, have you? It's entirely possible to solo your way through the PvE campaign, unless you count the heroes and henchmen you can hire in every outpost as "not soloing"....
Y'know, I was supporting you until you said that. People telling you that you didn't understand the game, people insulting you personally because you believe that PCs are a better option, people telling you that you should get a Mac just because. You're right, in that the cost of entry into the marketplace is significantly lower with PCs. You can put together a *new* PC for under $300 that'll do everything you need to do for business. It'll run Office, it'll do e-mail, it'll be able to surf. It's certainly not a gaming rig, but it's half the cost of an entry-level Mac. For a business, that's a very significant thing.
But *please* don't tell me that you rely on Windows Update for your maintenance. It should not be relied on for a corporate system, because there have been many instances where MS has actually caused more serious errors by rushing fixes to Winodws Update. You could be screwing yourself over by letting it handle your system maintenance. Instead, I'd suggest that the site be blocked, and that you download the patches directly from MS and periodically install them on the computers on the net. That can be automated by means of a login script, even. It'll give you much greater control over what is running on each desktop, which can save you an enormous headache down the road.
I sincerely hope I never have to work with you. You're an idiot. Repeat after me: Running Antivirus does NOT immunize against viruses. It significantly reduces the risk of contracting a virus, but no software has a 100% catch rate, particularly with new viruses coming out every day. Do NOT rely on your antivirus to do all the job, because you WILL eventually have a problem. You still need to use your brain and a degree of wariness when you use your computer, or you will eventually get burned.
And I sincerely hope you're going to revisit that whole ignoring EULA thing, because if not, then you're screwed when somebody decides to do a software audit. They do them, and small businesses are usually the ones that get screwed over. Do everything legal. It's simply not worth it in the long run.
Finally, DRM most certainly is an important consideration. It applies to a heck of a lot more than just movies and MP3 files. You'd do well to look into exactly what the implications of your software are.
Your analogy is flawed... what the article describes is actually connecting to the swarm, but not participating in it. I'll try to explain....
.torrent for RANDOM_PIRATED_MOVIE01 (hereafter "movie"). .torrent, and requests a list of who's seeding.
:)
He downloads a
His client connects to movie.torrent's tracker, and announces itself as having it down 100%. It ignores any requests to download from it, but as far as the tracker is concerned, he's still 100%.
BIG_STUDIO01 (hereafter "studio") connects to the same tracker with the same
Studio has teh lawyerz send him a letter asking him to stop.
It's not the mere fact that he's got BitTorrent present. It's the fact that he has BitTorrent connected as part of the swarm for that particular file. While that isn't evidence of him actually committing piracy (as they necessarily have no proof of what he actually downloaded unless he downloaded from their seed), I would argue that it's evidence of intent to commit the piracy. Unless, of course, he's just trying to mess with them while not actually downloading anything.
The motherboard (ASUS A8R32) is a Socket 939 motherboard. You can tell from the "A8" in the model name... that refers to the socket type. All of ASUS' K8- and A8- series motherboards are Socket 939. Likewise, all of ASUS' Socket AM2 motherboards have "M2" in the model name. My own motherboard is an M2N-E, for example. You can decode that as "AM2 socket, NVidia chipset, configuration type E". In this case, it's a passive chipset heatsink, 6 SATA, no IDE, no onboard Firewire, etc. etc. They also have M2V motherboards, which can decode as "AM2 socket, Via chipset".
rofl...
@moderate(parent, +1funny);
Having lots of people play it doesn't make it revolutionary. Fact is that WoW is simply an upgrade/clone of EQ, which was an upgrade/clone of UO, which was....
They're just remaking the same game over and over again. If you're going to talk about MMORPGs, then I can really only endorse Ultima Online which started the whole genre, or GuildWars which did away with subscription fees. Neither was particularly revolutionary, though.
Interesting article, but I don't agree with his choices for the final test. :P In XFCE, I'm showing 140MB of RAM used with Firefox, Thunderbird, AbiWord, and Audacity open (listening to streaming MP3 radio)... as opposed to his 200+ MB being used with just FF, TB, and OpenOffice. It's all about app choice.
Still... nicely reassuring about my choice not to run Gnome ^_^