In Australian TimeZone gamehalls all games(including those stupid throw balls at the dinosaur =)) have been ethernetted to a central server in the gamehall (and it wouldn't surprise me if the timezone gameplace was in turn linked to HQ).
The ethernet link from the machines seem to be used primarily for payment purposes. You get issued a paper card with x dollars credit "on it", the card contains a unique number that identifies your account on the server. Then with each swipe the money in the account on the server get's reduced by the game cost. You can also "re-charge" your account at the counter. --
When a while ago we approached an accountant with our business plan for an online health site (not the site linked in teh.sig below) he asked us to consider micropayments as an alternative to the revenue models we had proposed (ie. instead of subscriptions and advertisements and the-like).
The concept of micropayments is really old - Newspapers have been working along the same principle for ages (sell many, cheap - read Terry Pratchett's "Truth" =)). No-one is handling it in the transparent, single click (uh oh, Amazon =)) way he mentioned due to the problems with security. We probably need a form of PKI infrastructure that could identify us for - but in a way that the privacy is retained. And more then likely that would need to be free/cheap to gain a large following.
Companies like pay-pal are doing ok but when I remember the hoops I had to jump though to buy The Satori Effect (A good read btw) it was everything but transparent, certainly not single click (not David Pesci's fault - PayPals).
It would be interesting to hear from those guys and compare for example David Pesci's experience to the "Ad powered" ones like userfriendly and (my favourite "site support" comic) helpdex --
"ok, let me get this straight: an interview with one of the leading developers of LinuxPPC and not one question that pertained to MacOS X!? did no MacOS X question get asked, or did he just ignore them?"
I think some got asked - they just didn't get Moderator attention =). On the other hand the OSX vs. LinuxPPC comparison has to belong in a FAQ by now.
i'd like to know, because i've tried both, and after getting used to MacOS X, i really can't see any reason to run LinuxPPC as a desktop machine. (i may pick up an old mac to run as my firewall, however. my old PC just blew up, literally; smoke and all).
Hmm , I had OSX DP4 and then OSX PB on my PowerBook G3 400 (/w 192 MB ram)- and I went back to LinuxPPC because of two reasons:
1. AQUA was very, very sluggish. 2. I wanted to use OSX because it had Java 2 support - but it was not very stable. LinuxPPC's Java 2. (even has Java Enterprise edition) was much better. LinuxPPC's java can run NetBeans IDE too =)
"so apart from my little firewall (that would really best be searved with FreeBSD on an x86 box), remind me again why i would have any good reason to run LinuxPPC? and "because it's GPL" doesn't count as a good reason for me, especially after Apple has "refined" the APSL."
well the above were my reasons. Mind you when OSX finally get's released things may (hopefully) have been improved. --
Actually ,
that is not a silly thought at all. Mac gear always lasted "longer" in obsolesense terms then it's PC counterparts just because Apple didn't come out with a new chip every two months. I think that this is actually a much smarter way of doing things. I means how can you expect software to be obtimised if you change the playing field every odd month.
My "expensive" Mac 9500 lasted years longer then any PC I have owned. --
This will probably be marked as redundant =). But as so many have pointed out it's a game not real life hence isn't "the shock of the community" a little strong. I mean when 300 people get killed at a chinese x-mas party we should be shocked - let's not lose focus on meatspace.
Mind you, I can understand the anger of people that have "worked" hard on their characters to achieve those levels. I am not nearly patient enough to do these things.
--
I am not a physicist either - A lot of people have gotten hung up about that 3 Atom measurement. It was the measurement pertaining to the transistors thickness - not it's width on the die =) which is given as 30 nm.
Still, I suppose when your dealing with something that small your going to see a fair few small signal effects that your gonna have to fix =).
--
Snoop on IRIX has had that feature for a while.. it's invoked with "snoop -a". It's pretty funny (and not to mention a great excuse for using headphones at work =)). Listen to your QUAKE network match.
All I want now are packets that sound like "Mein Leben" for re-sends after collisions. --
However I distinctly subscribing to Nature years and years ago..and due to a spelling mistake they made in my name I was able to trace the selling of my "details" to a whole stuff load of people - this was ahead of the Net boom (and hence privacy protection wasn't as high a priority as it is now)- let me just say that, at least for Nature they appear not to let too many things stand in the way of a quick buck.
"...he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn."
Hehe - one wonders what kind of animal would be appropriate for the O'Reilly treatment of FreeNet.
hmm..no..beats me... --
"Anyone else here get schitzy at the thought of putting all your eggs in one basket like Telia's done? Granted, I'm not at all familiar with their past implementation (i.e., they could have had all 70 machines doing different things, with no fail-over between them at all), but it strikes me as being a bad idea. Well, a "spooky" idea at least. "
Well it would be if they had announced that they replaced 70 Sun's with an IBM Netfinity or something - but this is a G6 Mainframe. It is designed to have more uptime then a perl coder on Red Bull. I am not a Big Iron tech myself but I remember reading about internal mechanism to route around failures and all sorts of stuff that make the machine worth what it is. have a look at the features of the G6 (specifically under Availability and you'll see what I mean)
"I just can't get away from the notion that three smaller machines behind some sort of load balancing deal is better than one big machine doing everything. It just makes more sense to me."
Hmm, from another article they list that the system is also goign to provide 1,500 virtual Linux hosts for the customers. Even with 99.9% uptime a year on each normal box (on average) that works out at roughly 8.8 hours downtime a year.. multiply that by 1,500 machines and you have ~548 tech hours that are spent replacing things. Mainframes and their components are designed with a better uptime (quote from the enhancements page "S/390 G5/G6 enterprise servers are a superior choice for providing 99.999% availability with Parallel Sysplex clustering technology"
Incidentally the spec shet lists the G6 as having two standard Crypto chips - wonder weather some smart has worked out a way to make use of those in Linux (if not I bet it'll only take a few weeks or so =)..) --
Perhaps I am not smoking enough dope, but that THING (Vaio Gt1) looks like crap to me. Much more sexy imho is the Sony PictureBook followup, the one with the inbuild camera and the Transmeta chip. it's only about 3,800 Aussie dollars which is about half that in US dollars. Not to mention it's portability - PURE Sex.. =) --
I was actually shipped DP4 when I joined the ADC but since It was only going to be a week or so since they were supposed to ship the PB I waited with the install. I am pleased to hear it improved. OSX is a damn fine product that will finally make MacOS technically viable in a development shop (Mysql, Java2, C/C++, PHP are already there - although the Java is a little..er..flakey). I can't wait =)
Hehe ,
quite true - I have had Mac OSX installed on my Pismo (G3/400 Notebook) for a while. But I have actually uninstalled it because I found AQUA to cumbersome (read slow) to deal with - so I ended up like that mac-linux guy having a terminal window open at all times. The system was not unstable or anything - in fact the OS was very stable - but some of the apps I use a lot like OmniWeb are still in beta and hence crash a lot.
But my main gripe with OSX is AQUA's quite apparent lack of speed. Running the terminal in AQUA vs just using ">console" at the prompt and going for it makes a hell of a difference - more of a difference then it should. But hey, I suppose this could all be fixed by the time it hit's the shelves but for the moment it's back to a linuxppc(/w Mol) partition. LinuxPPC simply flies. So I take it that puts me into the "Impatient" User category =). But I will give certainly OSX another shot when it's released. It's a big step for Apple to release a unix based OS for "Mac users" --
Reading the related paper about the use of code rearranging (let's not call it code-morphing lest we get a patent infringement notice from TransMeta) for Java optimisation shows some of it being used starting in 1997 (isn't this pre-Transmeta ? prior Art ?).
The PDF doco covers the idea about converting Java bytcode into RISC (PowerPC , it is IBM =) ) code that is then scheduled in a magic way to give a degree of parallisation on the right hardware. Hmm this does smell like Transmeta.
One of the guys working on that Java Paper has got a few patents in his name for optimization.. --
Just how complex benchmarking can get. It's horse for courses. In my home I have an SGI (200Mhz R5000), a few PC's <=233Mhz and a G3/400 Mac Notebook - And you know what,I couldn't tell you which one is best to use. I write this comment on the SGI which I "think" is my favourite machine but the G3/400 would surely beat it in any known benchmark (maybe short of gfx). The PC has a SCSI disk in it which would beat the Mac's ATA drive etc etc.. All benchmarks cannot possibly capture all aspects of a computer for valid comparison with another. You can only compare individual componentry (Disk , CPU , Memory, etc) - I am sure you could produce two benchmarks between Alpha and Intel P3/P4 that would show one beating the other and then the other way around (FP , Seti =),Integer OP's etc). Surely the only valid benchmark is the one that pertains to your usage? --
Ok since you specifically mention IRIX let me pipe in =)..
I have a PowerBook G3/400 running on 192Mb of ram with OSX and it peforms ok->well. I also have an SGI O2 (200 Mhz R5000 with 128MB ram and IRIX 6.5.7). I am sure that in terms of raw speed teh G3 beats the MIPS all over the place - perhaps even in Screen response time. But in true multitasking operation (I cannot describe this in a technical manner other then to say - how the system feels with java and other things open) the O2 wipes the floor with OSX.
In fact even though it's like "UNIX for Mac Users" I find Irix immensly more responsive to use then some of the other OS's I run regulary (on Desktop Systems).
OSX however has "Potential" a lot of the "drag" in the system comes from the AQUA/QUARTZ layers (upon layers) that are stacked above darwin (log in to >console , run top and be amazed how snappy things get). That said - this a Public Beta of the 1st release of a new MacOS - so perhaps we should hope for the best =)
(in summary - not as fast as LinuxPPC on the same hardware - not as technically behind as MacOS "plain") --
..It probably deserves a little more attention. This thing has onboard embedded linux as well as shipping with linux & NT drivers.
I haven't seen a price point for it yet but it may solve a few problems for people (and yes.. someone might be able to write an ueber-decent seti@home client for it - rather then using ex-russion missile control chips =) , ey ?)
My guess is the military is keen to back this one (see the front-page image). Mind you, the size of the domes isn't exactly huge initially [pic].
A quick search on IBM's Patent Database reveals reveals that The navy has some patents regarding 3D volumetric displays already and also shows the tech details behind the volumetric display used by these guys (One of the founders has patented the mechanism used)
..that we get some legal advice how to (as legally as possible) express our opinions to those companies that sprout such cr@p. Should we perhaps have a Slashdot streamlined complaint letter that we send to the company executive officers?. Surely/. is now well known enough to "matter". I mean most of these company's (Amazon's 1-click,DC, etc) target markets are represented right here.
In summary "There has got to be an effective way for us to let these idiots know ?"
It's kind of sad I suppose that if such a systems becomes truely popular it'll have to be controlled by some form of organisation to be truely feasible. Wireless space isn't exactly unused and I'd rather not end up having to use sensitive medical equipment with some schmuck's out there hammering the airwaves with his own homemade 20kw amplifier attached to a +12db Yagi pointed across the hospital. Just tune into the old 27 mhz CB band these days, or for that matter even the UHF CB band for an example. DSSS and FHSS equipment isn't designed to do large scale "cell based" wan's. Rather, I recon those sort of networks will come out of the Mobile phone tech (very soon 3G EDGE+GPRS tech at 384Kbits) which are quite adept at handling wide area coverage.
just my 2c worth --
Slashdot Mirror
The ethernet link from the machines seem to be used primarily for payment purposes. You get issued a paper card with x dollars credit "on it", the card contains a unique number that identifies your account on the server. Then with each swipe the money in the account on the server get's reduced by the game cost. You can also "re-charge" your account at the counter.
--
When a while ago we approached an accountant with our business plan for an online health site (not the site linked in teh .sig below) he asked us to consider micropayments as an alternative to the revenue models we had proposed (ie. instead of subscriptions and advertisements and the-like).
The concept of micropayments is really old - Newspapers have been working along the same principle for ages (sell many, cheap - read Terry Pratchett's "Truth" =)). No-one is handling it in the transparent, single click (uh oh, Amazon =)) way he mentioned due to the problems with security. We probably need a form of PKI infrastructure that could identify us for - but in a way that the privacy is retained. And more then likely that would need to be free/cheap to gain a large following.
Companies like pay-pal are doing ok but when I remember the hoops I had to jump though to buy The Satori Effect (A good read btw) it was everything but transparent, certainly not single click (not David Pesci's fault - PayPals).
It would be interesting to hear from those guys and compare for example David Pesci's experience to the "Ad powered" ones like userfriendly and (my favourite "site support" comic) helpdex
--
Damned..now I will have to mortgage my brother to buy this stuff.
--
Guilty! =) but I do have an Apple IIe and a few Classic's does that count for anything ?
--
I think some got asked - they just didn't get Moderator attention =). On the other hand the OSX vs. LinuxPPC comparison has to belong in a FAQ by now.
i'd like to know, because i've tried both, and after getting used to MacOS X, i really can't see any reason to run LinuxPPC as a desktop machine. (i may pick up an old mac to run as my firewall, however. my old PC just blew up, literally; smoke and all).
Hmm , I had OSX DP4 and then OSX PB on my PowerBook G3 400 (/w 192 MB ram)- and I went back to LinuxPPC because of two reasons:
1. AQUA was very, very sluggish.
2. I wanted to use OSX because it had Java 2 support - but it was not very stable. LinuxPPC's Java 2. (even has Java Enterprise edition) was much better. LinuxPPC's java can run NetBeans IDE too =)
"so apart from my little firewall (that would really best be searved with FreeBSD on an x86 box), remind me again why i would have any good reason to run LinuxPPC? and "because it's GPL" doesn't count as a good reason for me, especially after Apple has "refined" the APSL."
well the above were my reasons. Mind you when OSX finally get's released things may (hopefully) have been improved.
--
Actually , that is not a silly thought at all. Mac gear always lasted "longer" in obsolesense terms then it's PC counterparts just because Apple didn't come out with a new chip every two months. I think that this is actually a much smarter way of doing things. I means how can you expect software to be obtimised if you change the playing field every odd month. My "expensive" Mac 9500 lasted years longer then any PC I have owned.
--
Mind you, I can understand the anger of people that have "worked" hard on their characters to achieve those levels. I am not nearly patient enough to do these things.
--
Hmm I actually got it slightly wrong. Snoop does not play audio signals for certain events but plays the Network data through the audio dsp.
..
kinda like tcpdump >/dev/audio =)
--
This one as some info on the physics in such small scale devices.
--
damned .. i knew I should have hit preview one more time .. ignore the bold on the 2nd paragraph please.. =\
--
Still, I suppose when your dealing with something that small your going to see a fair few small signal effects that your gonna have to fix =).
--
All I want now are packets that sound like "Mein Leben" for re-sends after collisions.
--
I agree on the impartiality part.
..and due to a spelling mistake they made in my name I was able to trace the selling of my "details" to a whole stuff load of people - this was ahead of the Net boom (and hence privacy protection wasn't as high a priority as it is now)- let me just say that, at least for Nature they appear not to let too many things stand in the way of a quick buck.
However I distinctly subscribing to Nature years and years ago
--
Hehe - one wonders what kind of animal would be appropriate for the O'Reilly treatment of FreeNet. hmm..no..beats me...
--
Well it would be if they had announced that they replaced 70 Sun's with an IBM Netfinity or something - but this is a G6 Mainframe. It is designed to have more uptime then a perl coder on Red Bull. I am not a Big Iron tech myself but I remember reading about internal mechanism to route around failures and all sorts of stuff that make the machine worth what it is. have a look at the features of the G6 (specifically under Availability and you'll see what I mean)
"I just can't get away from the notion that three smaller machines behind some sort of load balancing deal is better than one big machine doing everything. It just makes more sense to me."
Hmm, from another article they list that the system is also goign to provide 1,500 virtual Linux hosts for the customers. Even with 99.9% uptime a year on each normal box (on average) that works out at roughly 8.8 hours downtime a year
Incidentally the spec shet lists the G6 as having two standard Crypto chips - wonder weather some smart has worked out a way to make use of those in Linux (if not I bet it'll only take a few weeks or so =)
--
Perhaps I am not smoking enough dope, but that THING (Vaio Gt1) looks like crap to me. Much more sexy imho is the Sony PictureBook followup, the one with the inbuild camera and the Transmeta chip. it's only about 3,800 Aussie dollars which is about half that in US dollars. Not to mention it's portability - PURE Sex .. =)
--
Actually, no.
..er..flakey). I can't wait =)
I was actually shipped DP4 when I joined the ADC but since It was only going to be a week or so since they were supposed to ship the PB I waited with the install. I am pleased to hear it improved. OSX is a damn fine product that will finally make MacOS technically viable in a development shop (Mysql, Java2, C/C++, PHP are already there - although the Java is a little
--
Hehe ,
quite true - I have had Mac OSX installed on my Pismo (G3/400 Notebook) for a while. But I have actually uninstalled it because I found AQUA to cumbersome (read slow) to deal with - so I ended up like that mac-linux guy having a terminal window open at all times. The system was not unstable or anything - in fact the OS was very stable - but some of the apps I use a lot like OmniWeb are still in beta and hence crash a lot.
But my main gripe with OSX is AQUA's quite apparent lack of speed. Running the terminal in AQUA vs just using ">console" at the prompt and going for it makes a hell of a difference - more of a difference then it should. But hey, I suppose this could all be fixed by the time it hit's the shelves but for the moment it's back to a linuxppc(/w Mol) partition. LinuxPPC simply flies. So I take it that puts me into the "Impatient" User category =). But I will give certainly OSX another shot when it's released. It's a big step for Apple to release a unix based OS for "Mac users"
--
Reading the related paper about the use of code rearranging (let's not call it code-morphing lest we get a patent infringement notice from TransMeta) for Java optimisation shows some of it being used starting in 1997 (isn't this pre-Transmeta ? prior Art ?). The PDF doco covers the idea about converting Java bytcode into RISC (PowerPC , it is IBM =) ) code that is then scheduled in a magic way to give a degree of parallisation on the right hardware. Hmm this does smell like Transmeta. One of the guys working on that Java Paper has got a few patents in his name for optimization ..
--
Just how complex benchmarking can get. It's horse for courses. In my home I have an SGI (200Mhz R5000), a few PC's <=233Mhz and a G3/400 Mac Notebook - And you know what,I couldn't tell you which one is best to use. I write this comment on the SGI which I "think" is my favourite machine but the G3/400 would surely beat it in any known benchmark (maybe short of gfx). The PC has a SCSI disk in it which would beat the Mac's ATA drive etc etc .. All benchmarks cannot possibly capture all aspects of a computer for valid comparison with another. You can only compare individual componentry (Disk , CPU , Memory, etc) - I am sure you could produce two benchmarks between Alpha and Intel P3/P4 that would show one beating the other and then the other way around (FP , Seti =),Integer OP's etc). Surely the only valid benchmark is the one that pertains to your usage?
--
In fact even though it's like "UNIX for Mac Users" I find Irix immensly more responsive to use then some of the other OS's I run regulary (on Desktop Systems). OSX however has "Potential" a lot of the "drag" in the system comes from the AQUA/QUARTZ layers (upon layers) that are stacked above darwin (log in to >console , run top and be amazed how snappy things get). That said - this a Public Beta of the 1st release of a new MacOS - so perhaps we should hope for the best =) (in summary - not as fast as LinuxPPC on the same hardware - not as technically behind as MacOS "plain")
--
This thing has onboard embedded linux as well as shipping with linux & NT drivers.
I haven't seen a price point for it yet but it may solve a few problems for people (and yes .. someone might be able to write an ueber-decent seti@home client for it - rather then using ex-russion missile control chips =) , ey ?)
Mind you, the size of the domes isn't exactly huge initially [pic].
A quick search on IBM's Patent Database reveals reveals that The navy has some patents regarding 3D volumetric displays already and also shows the tech details behind the volumetric display used by these guys (One of the founders has patented the mechanism used)
In summary "There has got to be an effective way for us to let these idiots know ?"
It's kind of sad I suppose that if such a systems becomes truely popular it'll have to be controlled by some form of organisation to be truely feasible.
Wireless space isn't exactly unused and I'd rather not end up having to use sensitive medical equipment with some schmuck's out there hammering the airwaves with his own homemade 20kw amplifier attached to a +12db Yagi pointed across the hospital. Just tune into the old 27 mhz CB band these days, or for that matter even the UHF CB band for an example. DSSS and FHSS equipment isn't designed to do large scale "cell based" wan's. Rather, I recon those sort of networks will come out of the Mobile phone tech (very soon 3G EDGE+GPRS tech at 384Kbits) which are quite adept at handling wide area coverage.
just my 2c worth
--