Signatures are valuable in far more realms than credit cards - they are the only legal authentication for many kinds of legally binding documents and I, for one, don't care to have someone else learn to sign my signature.
Yep, I use a distinctly different signature for credit cards as opposed to contracts. It doesn't directly protect me legally, but if I were said I signed a contract I didn't and it looked like the chicken scratch I use on credit cards and every other document signed looked drastically different I think a jury might at least entertain the thought it wasn't mine. I still could have signed it fraudulently to begin with, but they would have that hill to climb rather than the, "he just changed his mind after the fact."
I don't worry so much about credit cards. I've had friends get a lot of grief because of identity theft, but it always got sorted out in the end. Plus, credit cards have protected me from unscrupulous merchants. It involves organizing a bit of documentation, but it's fun to nail the bad guys.
I am fairly certain similar results would be obtained were a local anaesthetic administered via "about 10 to 25 shots".
Probably, but Botox lasts for months, local anestisia lasts for a few hours. I've heard people praise for migranes. I wouldn't want it if it had to be injected in my face. But Imitrex works for me, if it didn't I might try it.
With the exception of my online banking service, every website I visit with Mozilla renders and functions quite well.
My banking and credit card sites work fine. I once had a problem with my bank and sent an e-mail and a reply the next day saying they didn't officially support it but the site was now fixed. Unless their fees are fantastic you should consider another bank. Internet banking is a good thing (Well now it is, they lost some of my money when they beta tested years back, but they credited it back a couple hours after I told em.)
Any kid who is going to hit pure red phosphorous with a screw driver is taking a risk, but not a smart one.
Yes, he should have looked it up first. But did you never burn off your eyebrows with a chemistry set? It was only after I lost my eyebrows twice, a big chunk of hair once, and most of the hair on my legs once that I started taking extra precautions. You could say, "slow learner" but I'd just say it didn't really bother me until I was asked about it by my friends that I thought, oh, burning body bad. (I already had a scar on my chest from an accident at 2 and had enough scars from playing that a painless loss of hair was no biggie.)
The same goes for that kid who is willing to put others in danger by disabling large numbers of smoke detectors in public places.
Oh come on, you never took apart one fire detector to test your Geiger counter? He just got caught up in it because he had a tough family life and uninteresting school. You prolly got just as caught up in computers, it was just inherently safer.
Re:Local Warming != Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
What's up with all this BZZZing? Erik the Red's saga has a mythical explanation for the naming of Greenland. There are also alternate (even more mythical) explanations at other sources. Ummm, no. You forget it was a literate society, they wrote everything down as it happened. I've read some of those stories in the orignal. They are quite boring in their detail. Now, there were obvious exagerations, but they aren't any worse than you're average NYT article if you accept they really did believe in sea monsters and such. Not so difficult to understand when you sail in a little boat and meet a whale.
What we do know for sure is that the climate was once such that Greenland could support a number of Viking settlers. However, the climate worsened, and they all starved a few centuries back.
They lasted nine years or less. They weren't growing wheat or anything. It's not so hard to believe their livestock ate the grass faster than it grew and they never fished enough to make up for it.
I grew up in Iceland where the orignal settlers chopped down all the trees usable for firewood in a few hundred years and then a huge portion of the population starved to death as the economy collapsed. It's both a good and bad example to us, because 1) we prolly won't wipe out humanity or anything 2) most of us will die.
Same with global warming, it's not gonna be the end of humanity. But disease will spread and people will die, big deal. It's the tale of life on earth.
Could you perhaps elaborate a bit for those of us who don't have all the params memorized? Why is it bad?
-O0 -- no optimization, good for debugging -O1 -- some optimization, usually safe even when you've got something that should be volatile but isn't. -O2 -- well optimized, but meaning of code never changed. -O3 -- most optimized, code you wrote is probably not the code running. May cause core dump, may write over memory randomly, hopefully just gives wacky floating point results. Also may run slower, due to code bloat.
-Os -- chooses smaller constructs whether they are faster or not. Sometimes produces faster code, sometimes not. Probably safe.
-O3 is very unsafe from my experience with 2.?? gcc compilers. When it's your own code you can usually massage it to work, but for something like the kernel, I'd turn it on on one source file at a time, stress test, and send in any patches needed to get it working. It has always been recommended that you compile the kernel at -O2 or less. I hope that most developers test with -O3, just because it might reveal a bug that'll show up with a later compiler, but I wouldn't bet on it that they all do.
If I'm working the back drive-thru at a certain unnamed fast food restaurant, my drawer stays open and I do the change in my head
I used to have to do this when I worked at Six Flags as I teenager. But it was because we couldn't cancel orders without a manager. Customers would, esp with families, rattle off an order with a bunch of additions and subtractions. Even simple orders would often be changed because of sticker shock (It is a theme park with 2x 3x normal fast food prices). I would add up orders up to about $40 in my head, anything over that I'd write everything down and estimate. My system seemed less efficient to the other cashiers, but it really wasn't. I rung up 3x what everyone else did consistently, serving the same queues; once my register had half the sales for the resturant.
Since libc5.4.23 the standard malloc has included rudimentary bounds checking. Just set MALLOC_CHECK_ to 1 or 2. At 1 it prints debugging output, at 2 it calls abort() so you can look at the core and see what happened. The best part is you can even do this on code you don't have the source to. Of course the other suggestions here are good, but I've tracked down a lot of bugs without having to link to one of the special range checkers.
You can also set MALLOC_CHECK_ to 0 to get a malloc like Windows and BSD that's safe against double free's and most off by one errors. Not useful for debugging, but can sometimes make a buggy closed source program run without dumping core. It's slower of course, but...
Hey, a 1.1a release. Maybe most of the kinks are out.
Did you try 1.0? 1.1 is clearly marked as an alpha release, it's supposed to have kinks. I've had no problems with 1.0 on Linux or Windows 2000. I miss the download manager, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to the 1.0.x releases for greater stability on MacOS 10 so I can get my mac friends using it.
Not much more to say, I trust their government much more than the US. ICANN needs to be liquidated, though I just wish it were a free country taking over it not some country like Iraq or the US.
Active Wire is probably best for someone that doesn't have access to a parallel port, but if you just a few on/off switches the cheapest solution is a dissected usb mouse. You can just wire into one the buttons for the switch. Plus you probably have bunch of non-ergonomic mice around, they are almost as common as mousepads...
I'm not quite sure what you have a problem with. Could you explain yourself a bit better?
It's simple. Servants need to service someone. Someone needs to actually generate wealth. This is first done by extracting matter and energy from the earth and sun, and then by adding value to this raw material, say turning oil into plastic beads, then turning plastic beads into tape dispenser. The service involved might be the outsourcing of the design of the tape dispenser to a good Italian designer.
But we've learned from the mistakes in urban planning in the last century that you don't get a thriving industry unless you allow all the parts in the chain to be within a few hundred meters of each other (if you don't prevent it, they will be). When they are across town or across the country inefficiencies add up so that only midsize and larger companies can survive and not well at that (They can hire their own designer, lawyer, etc. But not the high quality ones they could afford to contract, were they available.) It stands to reason that the tape dispenser manufacturer that can now offset the high inefficiency of using that Italian designer with a low cost of labor will find an Indian or Indonesian one of higher quality when the costs of that labor go up. Before long the tape dispenser manufacturers of the region will be concentrated near the lawyers, designers, and labor they attract. Copyright doesn't protect you from the market in this case unless it's rewritten so that only one person in the world can make tape dispensers.
The tape dispenser, India and Italy are just examples.
You know considering all the buildings are near the bottom of the picture in both of those some hairspray or tape on the bottoms of the lenses would probably be enough to satisfy the neighbors.
We are moving very quickly away from a manufacturing economy (which is where patents, copywrites, and other IP protections come in handy) to a service economy, where payment on a commision is going to become more prevelant.
Am I the only person worried about this? Who are we going to service if no one here is doing anything? India isn't going to need our lawyers forever, locally offered services always trump ones from 1's, 10's, 100's, or 1000's of miles away.
So far we haven't given up on manufacturing completely, there are still lots of programmers and front line investment bankers for instance, but there seems to be some kind of manifest destiny to just do the back office work that computers are starting to replace.
But he might just be asking for a curtesy, maybe he likes walking around naked in his apartment and doesn't want his co-workers looking at the web page obsesively trying to get a good look. Maybe just positioning it differently will appease him. If you live in a co-op with him he might be able to get you to take it down entirely by appealing to the board. Besides curtesy is underrated, if you can make him happy without ruining the camera view why not?
There might also be a technological solution, blur the portions of the images that show windows before sending them out as a web cam.
Interesting point - Most of the facades of the major buildings on New York's fifth avenue (or practically anywhere else in the city, really) are copyrighted
Wha? Most of the buildings are over a 100 years old. I know one of the Batman movies was held up a long time because one garden designer claimed copyright on his garden. And I know the Dakota won't allow filming there since Rosemary's Baby, but Vanilla Sky snuck it in by driving a car out of the back with the camera on the street. It's well over a hundred years old, when it was built it was derisively called that because it was so far from the city that it might as well have been in Dakota.
Re:And over here I have a bridge to sell you...
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
Does David Brooks' claim that the USA is different from other empires...
Americans always forget that theirs is an infant nation. It has also only really been rich for about a 100 years, and the large middle class didn't exist until after WWII. The decline will happen, but probably not in our lives or even our grandchildren's lives. I don't think it will be all that painful either, most of our talent is from immigration and that will slow and reverse over a long period in human terms, if not historic ones. The talented will move to wherever there is more freedom and economic opportunity and those that like the idyllic beauty and the sedentary way of life will stay. Then a few thousand or even just a few hundred years later a whole new society will be born and the cycle will start over again. No biggy.
I lost count of the number of times I had to re-image my relatively few machines because some idiot decided they absolutely had to have AIM (which hosed one of the math programs we used, which was the actual purpose of the lab).
I never got used to AIM, but I can image that it is a very good educational tool. I used to use finger & [y]talk all the time as an undergrad to quickly talk with friends about a project requirement, test date, etc. These days few machines allow finger and AIM has replaced it.
Couldn't you install some AIM client that doesn't screew things up and point users to it? I know there is a Java client, I can't imagine that being very evil...
Most people who install an OEM copy of Windows will have no idea that they're breaking the law, which I believe is a large part of the reason click-wrap licensing gets away with so much.
This isn't illegal almost anywhere. Copyright doesn't prohibit you from wiping the old PC and installing the software on a new computer. The EULA's are not contracts except for a few regressive southern states(USA). So you aren't even violating any contract. You won't get support for OEM software on new hardware, but that is probably long expired anyway if you're retiring an old PC.
I'll second that, it's very CVS like, but it keeps track of what you have checked out so it does updates much more quickly. The initial checkout takes as long or longer, on a large project you may want to just do the initial checkout overnight. Just be sure not to delete any files you're not using a full update will take forever.
How's the USB and FireWire support in Linux for the PS2? Y'see, I've got an external CD-RW drive that has both USB and FireWire interfaces. It reads CDR media just fine. I'm wondering if I can attach this to my PS2 and use it with Linux as a method of archiving and distributing software.
I haven't tried the firewire, but the USB works, though there aren't a lot of drivers. The kernel is 2.2.1 with patches. Someone has ported 2.2.40, but it can't use the couple binary drivers from Sony. You could probably get any device working, but some porting would be involved.
Yep, I just bought a 2ft one for less than $50 with the Yagi feed. It was a group buy, but even if you buy one it's not too bad. I got mine from dbiplus.
If you look long enough you might find one on the street on trash pickup night. Just put a 2.4 Ghz Yagi on it and you have a high gain antenna...
It's wierd every monitor I've tried had sync-on-green. Once I installed x2x It's just become a seemless part of my desktop. I have two monitors for the workstation and one for the playstation, and I just move the mouse across to the playstation and I can type there. It's not quite fast enough to run KDE or Gnome, but it's been pretty painless so far, things just compile and run. I'm still poring over the docs, but I expect to be able to make some speedy ps2GL apps once I'm up on the peculiarities.
It drives the monitor at 1280x1024 @ 75Hz which is better than I expected. The boot DVD lets you boot any kernel you like, there's already a BSD port. You need the disk to boot so unless you can press silver DVD's you can't distribute the games very far. As stated before they don't document the BIOS calls for accessing the DVD drive without a 'is this a Sony disk' check. But if you walked their drivers in a debugger you could probably figure it out, though all that would give you is a DVD/CD player, you still couldn't boot without their DVD or a harware modification.
The biggest problem with it as a general purpose machine is probably the measly 32 Megs of RAM. I might look into this, but it probably requires more than just installing new chips. But it isn't a general purpose machine, one of the memory transfer rates is 38 GB/s... just try that on a PC....
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Signatures are valuable in far more realms than credit cards - they are the only legal authentication for many kinds of legally binding documents and I, for one, don't care to have someone else learn to sign my signature.
Yep, I use a distinctly different signature for credit cards as opposed to contracts. It doesn't directly protect me legally, but if I were said I signed a contract I didn't and it looked like the chicken scratch I use on credit cards and every other document signed looked drastically different I think a jury might at least entertain the thought it wasn't mine. I still could have signed it fraudulently to begin with, but they would have that hill to climb rather than the, "he just changed his mind after the fact."
I don't worry so much about credit cards. I've had friends get a lot of grief because of identity theft, but it always got sorted out in the end. Plus, credit cards have protected me from unscrupulous merchants. It involves organizing a bit of documentation, but it's fun to nail the bad guys.
I am fairly certain similar results would be obtained were a local anaesthetic administered via "about 10 to 25 shots".
Probably, but Botox lasts for months, local anestisia lasts for a few hours. I've heard people praise for migranes. I wouldn't want it if it had to be injected in my face. But Imitrex works for me, if it didn't I might try it.
With the exception of my online banking service, every website I visit with Mozilla renders and functions quite well.
My banking and credit card sites work fine. I once had a problem with my bank and sent an e-mail and a reply the next day saying they didn't officially support it but the site was now fixed. Unless their fees are fantastic you should consider another bank. Internet banking is a good thing (Well now it is, they lost some of my money when they beta tested years back, but they credited it back a couple hours after I told em.)
Any kid who is going to hit pure red phosphorous with a screw driver is taking a risk, but not a smart one.
Yes, he should have looked it up first. But did you never burn off your eyebrows with a chemistry set? It was only after I lost my eyebrows twice, a big chunk of hair once, and most of the hair on my legs once that I started taking extra precautions. You could say, "slow learner" but I'd just say it didn't really bother me until I was asked about it by my friends that I thought, oh, burning body bad. (I already had a scar on my chest from an accident at 2 and had enough scars from playing that a painless loss of hair was no biggie.)
The same goes for that kid who is willing to put others in danger by disabling large numbers of smoke detectors in public places.
Oh come on, you never took apart one fire detector to test your Geiger counter? He just got caught up in it because he had a tough family life and uninteresting school. You prolly got just as caught up in computers, it was just inherently safer.
What's up with all this BZZZing? Erik the Red's saga has a mythical explanation for the naming of Greenland. There are also alternate (even more mythical) explanations at other sources.
Ummm, no. You forget it was a literate society, they wrote everything down as it happened. I've read some of those stories in the orignal. They are quite boring in their detail. Now, there were obvious exagerations, but they aren't any worse than you're average NYT article if you accept they really did believe in sea monsters and such. Not so difficult to understand when you sail in a little boat and meet a whale.
What we do know for sure is that the climate was once such that Greenland could support a number of Viking settlers. However, the climate worsened, and they all starved a few centuries back.
They lasted nine years or less. They weren't growing wheat or anything. It's not so hard to believe their livestock ate the grass faster than it grew and they never fished enough to make up for it.
I grew up in Iceland where the orignal settlers chopped down all the trees usable for firewood in a few hundred years and then a huge portion of the population starved to death as the economy collapsed. It's both a good and bad example to us, because 1) we prolly won't wipe out humanity or anything 2) most of us will die.
Same with global warming, it's not gonna be the end of humanity. But disease will spread and people will die, big deal. It's the tale of life on earth.
Could you perhaps elaborate a bit for those of us who don't have all the params memorized? Why is it bad?
-O0 -- no optimization, good for debugging
-O1 -- some optimization, usually safe even when you've got something that should be volatile but isn't.
-O2 -- well optimized, but meaning of code never changed.
-O3 -- most optimized, code you wrote is probably not the code running. May cause core dump, may write over memory randomly, hopefully just gives wacky floating point results. Also may run slower, due to code bloat.
-Os -- chooses smaller constructs whether they are faster or not. Sometimes produces faster code, sometimes not. Probably safe.
-O3 is very unsafe from my experience with 2.?? gcc compilers. When it's your own code you can usually massage it to work, but for something like the kernel, I'd turn it on on one source file at a time, stress test, and send in any patches needed to get it working. It has always been recommended that you compile the kernel at -O2 or less. I hope that most developers test with -O3, just because it might reveal a bug that'll show up with a later compiler, but I wouldn't bet on it that they all do.
You're playing with fire mister.
PS in case I want to try this what exact kernel version did you use?
If I'm working the back drive-thru at a certain unnamed fast food restaurant, my drawer stays open and I do the change in my head
I used to have to do this when I worked at Six Flags as I teenager. But it was because we couldn't cancel orders without a manager. Customers would, esp with families, rattle off an order with a bunch of additions and subtractions. Even simple orders would often be changed because of sticker shock (It is a theme park with 2x 3x normal fast food prices). I would add up orders up to about $40 in my head, anything over that I'd write everything down and estimate. My system seemed less efficient to the other cashiers, but it really wasn't. I rung up 3x what everyone else did consistently, serving the same queues; once my register had half the sales for the resturant.
Since libc5.4.23 the standard malloc has included rudimentary bounds checking. Just set MALLOC_CHECK_ to 1 or 2. At 1 it prints debugging output, at 2 it calls abort() so you can look at the core and see what happened. The best part is you can even do this on code you don't have the source to. Of course the other suggestions here are good, but I've tracked down a lot of bugs without having to link to one of the special range checkers.
You can also set MALLOC_CHECK_ to 0 to get a malloc like Windows and BSD that's safe against double free's and most off by one errors. Not useful for debugging, but can sometimes make a buggy closed source program run without dumping core. It's slower of course, but...
Hey, a 1.1a release. Maybe most of the kinks are out.
Did you try 1.0? 1.1 is clearly marked as an alpha release, it's supposed to have kinks. I've had no problems with 1.0 on Linux or Windows 2000. I miss the download manager, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to the 1.0.x releases for greater stability on MacOS 10 so I can get my mac friends using it.
Not much more to say, I trust their government much more than the US. ICANN needs to be liquidated, though I just wish it were a free country taking over it not some country like Iraq or the US.
Active Wire is probably best for someone that doesn't have access to a parallel port, but if you just a few on/off switches the cheapest solution is a dissected usb mouse. You can just wire into one the buttons for the switch. Plus you probably have bunch of non-ergonomic mice around, they are almost as common as mousepads...
The resolution and lighting makes it impossible to see in his window. Just sounds like he is being a pain in the ass.
I'm sure the windows are more visible at night.
I'm not quite sure what you have a problem with. Could you explain yourself a bit better?
It's simple. Servants need to service someone. Someone needs to actually generate wealth. This is first done by extracting matter and energy from the earth and sun, and then by adding value to this raw material, say turning oil into plastic beads, then turning plastic beads into tape dispenser. The service involved might be the outsourcing of the design of the tape dispenser to a good Italian designer.
But we've learned from the mistakes in urban planning in the last century that you don't get a thriving industry unless you allow all the parts in the chain to be within a few hundred meters of each other (if you don't prevent it, they will be). When they are across town or across the country inefficiencies add up so that only midsize and larger companies can survive and not well at that (They can hire their own designer, lawyer, etc. But not the high quality ones they could afford to contract, were they available.) It stands to reason that the tape dispenser manufacturer that can now offset the high inefficiency of using that Italian designer with a low cost of labor will find an Indian or Indonesian one of higher quality when the costs of that labor go up. Before long the tape dispenser manufacturers of the region will be concentrated near the lawyers, designers, and labor they attract. Copyright doesn't protect you from the market in this case unless it's rewritten so that only one person in the world can make tape dispensers.
The tape dispenser, India and Italy are just examples.
You know considering all the buildings are near the bottom of the picture in both of those some hairspray or tape on the bottoms of the lenses would probably be enough to satisfy the neighbors.
We are moving very quickly away from a manufacturing economy (which is where patents, copywrites, and other IP protections come in handy) to a service economy, where payment on a commision is going to become more prevelant.
Am I the only person worried about this? Who are we going to service if no one here is doing anything? India isn't going to need our lawyers forever, locally offered services always trump ones from 1's, 10's, 100's, or 1000's of miles away.
So far we haven't given up on manufacturing completely, there are still lots of programmers and front line investment bankers for instance, but there seems to be some kind of manifest destiny to just do the back office work that computers are starting to replace.
But he might just be asking for a curtesy, maybe he likes walking around naked in his apartment and doesn't want his co-workers looking at the web page obsesively trying to get a good look. Maybe just positioning it differently will appease him. If you live in a co-op with him he might be able to get you to take it down entirely by appealing to the board. Besides curtesy is underrated, if you can make him happy without ruining the camera view why not?
There might also be a technological solution, blur the portions of the images that show windows before sending them out as a web cam.
Interesting point - Most of the facades of the major buildings on New York's fifth avenue (or practically anywhere else in the city, really) are copyrighted
Wha? Most of the buildings are over a 100 years old. I know one of the Batman movies was held up a long time because one garden designer claimed copyright on his garden. And I know the Dakota won't allow filming there since Rosemary's Baby, but Vanilla Sky snuck it in by driving a car out of the back with the camera on the street. It's well over a hundred years old, when it was built it was derisively called that because it was so far from the city that it might as well have been in Dakota.
Does David Brooks' claim that the USA is different from other empires...
Americans always forget that theirs is an infant nation. It has also only really been rich for about a 100 years, and the large middle class didn't exist until after WWII. The decline will happen, but probably not in our lives or even our grandchildren's lives. I don't think it will be all that painful either, most of our talent is from immigration and that will slow and reverse over a long period in human terms, if not historic ones. The talented will move to wherever there is more freedom and economic opportunity and those that like the idyllic beauty and the sedentary way of life will stay. Then a few thousand or even just a few hundred years later a whole new society will be born and the cycle will start over again. No biggy.
I lost count of the number of times I had to re-image my relatively few machines because some idiot decided they absolutely had to have AIM (which hosed one of the math programs we used, which was the actual purpose of the lab).
I never got used to AIM, but I can image that it is a very good educational tool. I used to use finger & [y]talk all the time as an undergrad to quickly talk with friends about a project requirement, test date, etc. These days few machines allow finger and AIM has replaced it.
Couldn't you install some AIM client that doesn't screew things up and point users to it? I know there is a Java client, I can't imagine that being very evil...
Most people who install an OEM copy of Windows will have no idea that they're breaking the law, which I believe is a large part of the reason click-wrap licensing gets away with so much.
This isn't illegal almost anywhere. Copyright doesn't prohibit you from wiping the old PC and installing the software on a new computer. The EULA's are not contracts except for a few regressive southern states(USA). So you aren't even violating any contract. You won't get support for OEM software on new hardware, but that is probably long expired anyway if you're retiring an old PC.
I'll second that, it's very CVS like, but it keeps track of what you have checked out so it does updates much more quickly. The initial checkout takes as long or longer, on a large project you may want to just do the initial checkout overnight. Just be sure not to delete any files you're not using a full update will take forever.
How's the USB and FireWire support in Linux for the PS2? Y'see, I've got an external CD-RW drive that has both USB and FireWire interfaces. It reads CDR media just fine. I'm wondering if I can attach this to my PS2 and use it with Linux as a method of archiving and distributing software.
I haven't tried the firewire, but the USB works, though there aren't a lot of drivers. The kernel is 2.2.1 with patches. Someone has ported 2.2.40, but it can't use the couple binary drivers from Sony. You could probably get any device working, but some porting would be involved.
Yep, I just bought a 2ft one for less than $50 with the Yagi feed. It was a group buy, but even if you buy one it's not too bad. I got mine from dbiplus.
If you look long enough you might find one on the street on trash pickup night. Just put a 2.4 Ghz Yagi on it and you have a high gain antenna...
It's wierd every monitor I've tried had sync-on-green. Once I installed x2x It's just become a seemless part of my desktop. I have two monitors for the workstation and one for the playstation, and I just move the mouse across to the playstation and I can type there. It's not quite fast enough to run KDE or Gnome, but it's been pretty painless so far, things just compile and run. I'm still poring over the docs, but I expect to be able to make some speedy ps2GL apps once I'm up on the peculiarities.
It drives the monitor at 1280x1024 @ 75Hz which is better than I expected. The boot DVD lets you boot any kernel you like, there's already a BSD port. You need the disk to boot so unless you can press silver DVD's you can't distribute the games very far. As stated before they don't document the BIOS calls for accessing the DVD drive without a 'is this a Sony disk' check. But if you walked their drivers in a debugger you could probably figure it out, though all that would give you is a DVD/CD player, you still couldn't boot without their DVD or a harware modification.
The biggest problem with it as a general purpose machine is probably the measly 32 Megs of RAM. I might look into this, but it probably requires more than just installing new chips. But it isn't a general purpose machine, one of the memory transfer rates is 38 GB/s... just try that on a PC....