I only saw the wireless scanner once when I visited the big, huge, overly expensive offices about a year after I quit. I was invited back by the CEO. He wanted to hire me again but I said no way, and it's a good thing too because it all went bust a year or so later.
It was a little triangle shaped keychain scanner that I think might have talked BlueTooth or some other tech to a nearby USB receiver. You could scan things on the keychain while you were out and then come back and download them all to your PC.
It seems to me that the advertisers were who they were after as a revenue model. They could have done the tracking in such a way that it wasn't personally identifiable.
It was really pretty simple tech. The original proto-types were none other than off-the-shelf PS2 Keyboard style barcode readers that told the browser to go to a new URL (Ctrl-O maybe).
The later versions were keychains, wireless, etc. The original Cue:Cat was just something funny to get eyeballs.
The guy who was responsible for all of it (Jovan) wasn't a technical guy. He was a direct marketer. He sold millions of "Triple-Edged Windshield Wipers" and was responsible for Susan Powter's "Stop the Insanity" program back in the 80's. That was his thing.:-)
Actually, the REAL reason the tech crowd was furious was because DigitalConvergence starting sending Cease and Desist letters to hardware hackers who were reverse engineering the Cue:Cat to make it do other, useful things. They didn't understand the Open Technology paradigm like a lot of efforts do today and essentially tried to lawyer their way up to the top.
These were some really bad moves on DigitalConvergence's part and part of the reason I left the firm when it was still 20 or so employees.
DigitalConvergence wanted to track everything that was scanned to use it for marketing purposes.
The counterpart to the barcode scanner technology was audio-cue technology that was embedded in video. You connected an audio cable to your TV and there would be this little sound that would be put in by the producers. A piece of software called Concerto read this sound and converted it into a URL. They wanted to replace Nielson.
It had such potentially cool uses. The company raised like 250million dollars and essentially blew through it all and ended up going bankrupt. They had major media outlets like Belo printing their special barcodes (Cue Codes or whatever) and also had TV shows embedding the audio cues.
Slashdot got all uppity about it because there was a unique id imprinted in every Cue:Cat and copy of Concerto. It allowed DigitalConvergence access to lots of behavioral data.
Scary from one perspective and a gold mine from another. This was all before Facebook or anything Social.
I was the 1st employee at DigitalConvergence and saw the development of that product from the absolute beginning.:-)
I still have one in a box somewhere.
I mostly worked on the back-end code, I wasn't the one who came up with all the privacy-invading uses. I tried very hard to convince TPTB that it was a bad idea and Slashdot proved me right.:-)
I always use the Zuni method, which is to say, the method popularized by Judy Rodgers from the Zuni Cafe.
Essentially, you wash your bird and completely cover it with 1 tablespoon of salt per pound. It's best to use the best quality salt you can find; I use Celtic sea-salt that I grind myself.
Put your salt-covered bird in the fridge for a day or three and then roast it at 400-425F (depending on how crispy you like it). The salt takes all of the juices from the inside of the bird and redistributes it throughout the meat. This is essentially an old-fashioned salt-cure.
It results in the most heavenly, moist poultry. I've tried all the other methods, frying, bbq, smoked, basting, etc, and this is how we do poultry now, period.
It's best to do this a few days ahead of time with a turkey but chicken can cure in as little as 12 hours or so and be ready to cook.
I just paid for school supplies with my bitcoins, though I would have rather used dollars had I any available.
You can buy anything on the internet that takes a credit card for bitcoins by using someone else to purchase it for you. Those people exist within the Bitcoin community. Make use of the Web-of-Trust and GPG authentication tools and always keep learning.
Dude, you made my day by mentioning those two things in the same post. I worked on the really early Cue:Cat stuff (don't worry, it wasn't my idea!) and I'm like, totally into BTC now.:-)
Just wanted to add that I am a fan of http://btcvps.net
They are a relatively new VPS operation but they have knowledgeable admins available in their IRC support channel at all hours of the day. The servers have been fairly reliable as they are hosted in very solid datacenters.
If you have a need for a VPS where you can pay pseuodononymously using Bitcoin, they seem to be one of the easiest to work with.
The mining difficulty has been dropping in relation to the number of miners that have been leaving the network. This is exactly how the system was designed, and it's a good thing, because now I'm making more coins than I was before.:-)
Lots of folks have mining hardware that was paid off in the $30 days and now they still run for free at work or wherever. Not everyone is paying for electricity.
Eh, you geeks may scoff but some of us are pulling in 20-30% profits *PER DAY* trading these "silly" Bitcoins.
It really is the ultimate geek fantasy project: a completely open ended, sky-is-the-limit, world political structure changing, disruptive open source software technology.
Anyone that hates without backing it up is just trying to feed you disinformation. Bitcoin directly challenges TPTB because it puts trading power back in the hands of the people.
I worked at Oracle's large (at the time) flagship datacenter in Texas. The guards there were all armed inside of the building, which was protected by embassy-grade security. I only lasted a few months because the environment was so horribly repressive. I did *not* appreciate having my eye scanned or feeling like I was being watched (by armed guards) all of the day.
Someone take down the Goon Fleet corporation link, they changed it to Goatse. I had thought I would never see that horrible, horrible photo ever again.
I really liked on Torrentspy how you could just click the little download icon next to the torrent listing and bypass having to go in to the torrent data page and clicking the download link. They took that away like a year ago and I want it back.:)
The problem is that Firefox won't save place on the page when you click the back button (on Torrentspy anyway) and so you end up having to open up a new tab/page just to go in and click download. That sucks!
Sorry, I've been wanting to bitch about this for a year and now I can. So there...
I was even contemplating writing a small Firefox extension to do just that, but I only know Perl/PHP/Bash Oh well.:)
Yes, but this is misguided. This is all just opinion, of course.
Oh, that and I'm really stoned.:)
It takes multiple people to get a Unix implementation right. I'm talking about complete application architecture. Multiple machines. The difference is, those multiple people are usually consultants or engineers, and they are usually only working on the machines once, during and occasionally after implementation. It usually only requires one skilled Administrator to manage a largish Unix environment if everything is setup correctly (and I do mean correctly). In a properly structured datacenter environment, a revolving group of administrators can manage thousands upon thousands of servers with the right tools and resources. This can also be accomplished using Linux as well, however, the ease of management is directly related to the actual application being hosted. LAMP = Good, Java/Oracle = So-So
Contrast this to your Intel (Windows) guy. It has been my experience that the companies that implement on this platform use in-house resources to engineer and administer the WinTel server environment. The more servers there are, the more administrators. I have yet to come across a sizeable Windows implementation that only requires a few administrators to keep it running properly. The hardware is usually not as reliable (it's been getting much better in the last 3-4 years), and the software usually seems to require a little more help.
Now, I do realize that there are "perfect" WinTel installations done by professionals, but it has been my experience that these are few and far between, the norm being organically grown environments.
Unix implementations just have a history of strict change control and proper implementation teams.
But what do I know... I just want to grow vegetables.
But, how do you crate your own RAID controller...
on
Fibre Channel Storage?
·
· Score: 1
The coolest thing would be to turn a Linux box into a Hardware RAID controller. Most of the arrays out there do not run specialized firmware inside for the OS. They run Linux, VxWorks, Windows NT (*cough* EMC Clariion *cough*), of course, heavily customized versions of these OS's, with some having specialized ASICs inside (i.e. Engenio). The thing is, they change their HBAs into Targets, so that the Initiators (your client PC) can use their disks.
I want to figure out how to do this with a Linux box. How could you stuff 4 HBAs in a box and present two of them to the backend disks, and two to the front-end switches/hosts. With this method, you don't have to worry about Software RAID speed, because you're not doing your CPU processing on this server. You're using it just for RAID calculations, which I'm sure a late-model AMD would be great at.
We do not load our HBA driver (QLogic, qla2300) on boot through the initrd. We modprobe it after the system is up. This way, you just modprobe -r to stop it, and modprobe it again to see the changes.
What I want is a product that is able to offload SSL processing in large quantities. We're limited right now with our load balancers in that we're stuck at 1,000 SSL connections per second. That's not near enough in our current environment. We need to load balance lots of SSL processors to scale out. I'd rather scale up with a bigger box to simplify configuration.
Does anyone know about any of the vendors in this area? I really wish they'd tune one of these big routers for load balancing and SSL processing. It seems like the CSS boxes are too underpowered for very large sites.
I haven't read the specs on the 6500 blades, but I guess I should do that. I don't think they would be able to do much more though.
We need 15,000+ SSL sessions per second processing capability.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, the Cue:Cat scanner was so cheaply manufactured, by Tandy, of course, that it didn't scan very well.
They convinced Tandy corporation to put up the money to make them and then they executed that marketing blitz.
I remember sitting in on the very early C-level meetings at the Tandy center in Fort Worth. That was some scary stuff for a 20-year old. :-)
I think I was 20 then...
I only saw the wireless scanner once when I visited the big, huge, overly expensive offices about a year after I quit. I was invited back by the CEO. He wanted to hire me again but I said no way, and it's a good thing too because it all went bust a year or so later.
It was a little triangle shaped keychain scanner that I think might have talked BlueTooth or some other tech to a nearby USB receiver. You could scan things on the keychain while you were out and then come back and download them all to your PC.
I don't think it ever made it to the public.
It seems to me that the advertisers were who they were after as a revenue model. They could have done the tracking in such a way that it wasn't personally identifiable.
It was really pretty simple tech. The original proto-types were none other than off-the-shelf PS2 Keyboard style barcode readers that told the browser to go to a new URL (Ctrl-O maybe).
The later versions were keychains, wireless, etc. The original Cue:Cat was just something funny to get eyeballs.
The guy who was responsible for all of it (Jovan) wasn't a technical guy. He was a direct marketer. He sold millions of "Triple-Edged Windshield Wipers" and was responsible for Susan Powter's "Stop the Insanity" program back in the 80's. That was his thing. :-)
It was definitely one big old mess...
Sucky for me, I had tons of stock that ended up worthless. :-)
-p
Actually, the REAL reason the tech crowd was furious was because DigitalConvergence starting sending Cease and Desist letters to hardware hackers who were reverse engineering the Cue:Cat to make it do other, useful things. They didn't understand the Open Technology paradigm like a lot of efforts do today and essentially tried to lawyer their way up to the top.
These were some really bad moves on DigitalConvergence's part and part of the reason I left the firm when it was still 20 or so employees.
-p
DigitalConvergence wanted to track everything that was scanned to use it for marketing purposes.
The counterpart to the barcode scanner technology was audio-cue technology that was embedded in video. You connected an audio cable to your TV and there would be this little sound that would be put in by the producers. A piece of software called Concerto read this sound and converted it into a URL. They wanted to replace Nielson.
It had such potentially cool uses. The company raised like 250million dollars and essentially blew through it all and ended up going bankrupt. They had major media outlets like Belo printing their special barcodes (Cue Codes or whatever) and also had TV shows embedding the audio cues.
Slashdot got all uppity about it because there was a unique id imprinted in every Cue:Cat and copy of Concerto. It allowed DigitalConvergence access to lots of behavioral data.
Scary from one perspective and a gold mine from another. This was all before Facebook or anything Social.
Wow, people still remember the Cue:Cat. :-)
I was the 1st employee at DigitalConvergence and saw the development of that product from the absolute beginning. :-)
I still have one in a box somewhere.
I mostly worked on the back-end code, I wasn't the one who came up with all the privacy-invading uses. I tried very hard to convince TPTB that it was a bad idea and Slashdot proved me right. :-)
-p
I always use the Zuni method, which is to say, the method popularized by Judy Rodgers from the Zuni Cafe.
Essentially, you wash your bird and completely cover it with 1 tablespoon of salt per pound. It's best to use the best quality salt you can find; I use Celtic sea-salt that I grind myself.
Put your salt-covered bird in the fridge for a day or three and then roast it at 400-425F (depending on how crispy you like it). The salt takes all of the juices from the inside of the bird and redistributes it throughout the meat. This is essentially an old-fashioned salt-cure.
It results in the most heavenly, moist poultry. I've tried all the other methods, frying, bbq, smoked, basting, etc, and this is how we do poultry now, period.
It's best to do this a few days ahead of time with a turkey but chicken can cure in as little as 12 hours or so and be ready to cook.
Good luck!
I just paid for school supplies with my bitcoins, though I would have rather used dollars had I any available.
You can buy anything on the internet that takes a credit card for bitcoins by using someone else to purchase it for you. Those people exist within the Bitcoin community. Make use of the Web-of-Trust and GPG authentication tools and always keep learning.
Dude, you made my day by mentioning those two things in the same post. I worked on the really early Cue:Cat stuff (don't worry, it wasn't my idea!) and I'm like, totally into BTC now. :-)
Just wanted to add that I am a fan of http://btcvps.net
They are a relatively new VPS operation but they have knowledgeable admins available in their IRC support channel at all hours of the day. The servers have been fairly reliable as they are hosted in very solid datacenters.
If you have a need for a VPS where you can pay pseuodononymously using Bitcoin, they seem to be one of the easiest to work with.
p
The mining difficulty has been dropping in relation to the number of miners that have been leaving the network. This is exactly how the system was designed, and it's a good thing, because now I'm making more coins than I was before. :-)
Lots of folks have mining hardware that was paid off in the $30 days and now they still run for free at work or wherever. Not everyone is paying for electricity.
Eh, you geeks may scoff but some of us are pulling in 20-30% profits *PER DAY* trading these "silly" Bitcoins.
It really is the ultimate geek fantasy project: a completely open ended, sky-is-the-limit, world political structure changing, disruptive open source software technology.
Anyone that hates without backing it up is just trying to feed you disinformation. Bitcoin directly challenges TPTB because it puts trading power back in the hands of the people.
I worked at Oracle's large (at the time) flagship datacenter in Texas. The guards there were all armed inside of the building, which was protected by embassy-grade security. I only lasted a few months because the environment was so horribly repressive. I did *not* appreciate having my eye scanned or feeling like I was being watched (by armed guards) all of the day.
Thank goodness I found better. :-)
Someone take down the Goon Fleet corporation link, they changed it to Goatse. I had thought I would never see that horrible, horrible photo ever again.
I was wrong.
I really liked on Torrentspy how you could just click the little download icon next to the torrent listing and bypass having to go in to the torrent data page and clicking the download link. They took that away like a year ago and I want it back. :)
:)
The problem is that Firefox won't save place on the page when you click the back button (on Torrentspy anyway) and so you end up having to open up a new tab/page just to go in and click download. That sucks!
Sorry, I've been wanting to bitch about this for a year and now I can. So there...
I was even contemplating writing a small Firefox extension to do just that, but I only know Perl/PHP/Bash Oh well.
Yes, but this is misguided. This is all just opinion, of course.
:)
Oh, that and I'm really stoned.
It takes multiple people to get a Unix implementation right. I'm talking about complete application architecture. Multiple machines. The difference is, those multiple people are usually consultants or engineers, and they are usually only working on the machines once, during and occasionally after implementation. It usually only requires one skilled Administrator to manage a largish Unix environment if everything is setup correctly (and I do mean correctly). In a properly structured datacenter environment, a revolving group of administrators can manage thousands upon thousands of servers with the right tools and resources. This can also be accomplished using Linux as well, however, the ease of management is directly related to the actual application being hosted. LAMP = Good, Java/Oracle = So-So
Contrast this to your Intel (Windows) guy. It has been my experience that the companies that implement on this platform use in-house resources to engineer and administer the WinTel server environment. The more servers there are, the more administrators. I have yet to come across a sizeable Windows implementation that only requires a few administrators to keep it running properly. The hardware is usually not as reliable (it's been getting much better in the last 3-4 years), and the software usually seems to require a little more help.
Now, I do realize that there are "perfect" WinTel installations done by professionals, but it has been my experience that these are few and far between, the norm being organically grown environments.
Unix implementations just have a history of strict change control and proper implementation teams.
But what do I know... I just want to grow vegetables.
The coolest thing would be to turn a Linux box into a Hardware RAID controller. Most of the arrays out there do not run specialized firmware inside for the OS. They run Linux, VxWorks, Windows NT (*cough* EMC Clariion *cough*), of course, heavily customized versions of these OS's, with some having specialized ASICs inside (i.e. Engenio). The thing is, they change their HBAs into Targets, so that the Initiators (your client PC) can use their disks.
I want to figure out how to do this with a Linux box. How could you stuff 4 HBAs in a box and present two of them to the backend disks, and two to the front-end switches/hosts. With this method, you don't have to worry about Software RAID speed, because you're not doing your CPU processing on this server. You're using it just for RAID calculations, which I'm sure a late-model AMD would be great at.
Anyone have any ideas?
We do not load our HBA driver (QLogic, qla2300) on boot through the initrd. We modprobe it after the system is up. This way, you just modprobe -r to stop it, and modprobe it again to see the changes.
:)
No reboots here on our 200+ TB 100% Linux SAN.
But yes, Solaris is nice in some ways too.
What I want is a product that is able to offload SSL processing in large quantities. We're limited right now with our load balancers in that we're stuck at 1,000 SSL connections per second. That's not near enough in our current environment. We need to load balance lots of SSL processors to scale out. I'd rather scale up with a bigger box to simplify configuration.
Does anyone know about any of the vendors in this area? I really wish they'd tune one of these big routers for load balancing and SSL processing. It seems like the CSS boxes are too underpowered for very large sites.
I haven't read the specs on the 6500 blades, but I guess I should do that. I don't think they would be able to do much more though.
We need 15,000+ SSL sessions per second processing capability.
The Dream Team
The Humble Guys
Razor 1911
Where is my cookie?
That was most definitely one of the coolest scenes I've seen in a movie in a good while. You could just feel Magnetos' malice. Very inventive.
Yeah, he has convinced me to go to KFC and buy a bucket of Extra Crispy Wings at least 94 times this year.
I've got over 1.5gb of technical books I've been collecting over the last year.
Try the alt.binaries.ebook[s] groups.
Nope, Doc Chaos.
:)
Professor Chaos was Southpark.