I think IT's just the start. Kamen's got some designs he's trying to bring to commercialization that turn the Segway into something like what you're hoping for. If his designs for a Stirling are as good as he seems to think of them, you'd use it in the segway to give it much more range- and it would be a device that'd use different fuels (Hell, you COULD do a thermal atomic pile if you were sure it'd not get ruptured and get unbelieveable results with that...).
It's got potential- I just think he released the Segway before it was really ready (i.e. the power plant he's working on for it and other things weren't done...).
Well, I don't know of any- right now, that is. Keeping mind that if you actually had some real range to the things instead of what they're limited to by current battery technology (In other words, if a fuel cell or a Stirling Cycle engine could be made as the energy source for the electronics instead of Li-Ion batteries so that the things have a 50-150 mile range instead of the 10 or so that they currently do...) then there might be some re-working done because they ARE quite impressive. As it stands, they do a tour of downtown Austin and San Antonio on them and it's supposed to be pretty popular.
The paper asks for a third neutral party (i.e. Someone the court picks that has NOTHING to do with either party) to do the search.
In a civil case, that's NOT an unreasonable request- and since the Plaintiff is the one ASKING for the discovery, they have to pay for the third party's time; but they don't get to just use their experts unless the Defendant says, "Yes" to that piece of discovery.
Unfortunately, it's still good advice and if you're thinking ahead you can do this.
You see, the people in these sorts of companies think that they're just simply secure with things like an anti-virus program, etc. running on them. When something goes horribly wrong (and it will- it's not really a matter of an if so much as a when in these cases...) they will blame the poor SOB whose job it was to secure the stuff, but that they knackered his ability to do so- typically with a dismissal and if they get sued suing you or deflecting the lawsuit from the customer they screwed over in the matter to go and sue YOU.
Unless you're even MORE well off than you imply, you don't want to be even remotely close to facing that sort of thing. Cutting and running, preferably with another job in hand is the sanest and safest thing one can do in a situation like this- unless you can get them to wise up, it's a ticking timebomb on your career and your financial stability you just don't want around you.
The "dickhead lawyer" happens to be Corporate Counsel- and he did it on the instructions of the CXO crowd in almost all cases. Most lawyers know for a fact that this is NOT the way to win friends and influence people- and they also know that these things are pretty much bogus the way they are written and the management insisting on you signing the damn things without any further discussion indicates the PRECISE thing I told you. It's a corporate culture that you typically do not want to be a part of.
C'mon... Microsoft has completely NO desire to allow you to easily make things cross-platform for their consoles and whatnot.
They want you as locked in as they can get you- if you want cross-platform (Considering the overall interest in the game dev space MS has, you'd do well to consider this- everywhere else they've had an "interest" in, they've either muscled the company out (Netscape, Stac...) or pressured it almost out of existence (Borland, Intuit...). Do you HONESTLY think they're NOT going to do the same thing to the Game space??) you have to do it yourself. In reality, it's not as difficult as it'd seem. If you've done your game design right, you've abstracted out most of the things like the input layer into something that actually handles a the interface of things like input for the game. The bulk of the code for the game SHOULD be the game itself not input, sound, or graphics. At that point, all you need is a translation layer inside of another interface module for the appropriate piece and you're good to go.
Yes, it's more complicated that I'm making it out to sound, but it's NOT as difficult as people keep making it out to be. Yes, it consumes 10-15% "more time" doing it this way. But what people keep missing is that if you've designed it "this way" it typically gives you back the time you spent on it in the form of less effort that comes from good up-front design instead of relying on MS' API's, the C++ compiler, or cowboy coding to make the work "easier".
And, this is WHY I don't do anything except self-host any more.
For me, those "missed" messages can mean the difference between a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and NOT having it. I'd rather some garbage got through the screens and I got NO false positives. Seems that I am getting pretty decent results with SpamAsssassin on my server right at the moment.
Eventually they don't. My previous day job (not the current one) is probably going to find out that their dismissal of me is going to be very unpleasant- because they can't prove that I was dismissed for NOT signing one of these things and worked over a 12 month period for them.
1) These clauses, typically, are unenforceable- they only have rights to what is relevant to them. 2) Typically, they're bundled with a Non Disclose/Non Compete- this is an IP assignment agreement; you're really not supposed to combine them and if you do, expect extreme difficulties in enforcement. 3) Typically, they're popped on you right after you've accepted the job- they can't legally make your employment conditional on the signing of that document unless it's stated in the job offer that you have to do so. The "everyone does this" line is bogus- the law's pretty specific on that one.
No, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm about to get into a deal with a previous employer over the matter.
My advice (such that a Slashdotter's advice on matters Legal would be...) would be to consult with a lawyer ASAP on the matter- and more probably go looking for work elsewhere. It's pretty much a constant that the company's been given bad advice from an IP attorney or they're just plain flat greedy when it comes to Intellectual "Property", thinking it's like gold or oil. In this case, the people aren't going to be pleasurable to work with because they're also clueless in almost all other matters as well.
That is an interesting point. But how does one otherwise download it? Get a friend to infringe?
I think Apple did themselves out of an opportunity to deal with some of the infringers by absolving the employees of wrongdoing in this instance and using their testimony to go after the people running the tracker that got put up in hopes of shutting the thing down as well as maybe getting their hands on the name of the person that leaked the thing in the first place.
Since this is a civil trial, if enough perponderance of evidence is flung your way by the defendant and you can't address the same; you still typically lose the case.
It's a little silly to have fired them- they're employees downloading the thing off the Internet; it's concrete proof that their IP was being infringed upon. Now, the people can "not recall", etc. if they so chose because they're no longer favoring their now former employer.
You don't avoid PCI latency- you STILL have to cross the bus. You don't avoid hardware interrupts- HOW do you let the OS know that you've sent the data or got it? Optimizing the stack- optimizing WHAT? It's allegedly speeding up UDP traffic; there's little to "optimize" there.
I'd buy TCP Offload maybe needing to be done- for 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware. I should know; I work with that sort of hardware for a client. UDP's not needing diddly at any lower speeds than that- the offloads that make sense and work are scatter-gather DMA of the packet instead of needing an assembly buffer and checksum calculation. Most modern cards worth their salt do this already.
They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.
Well, with the voice call service you could "connect" with it- if you had a phone in your plane. Just use the modem to dial into your ISP. Sure, it's not high-speed, but it did work at least half-assedly. Now, as for Connexion, I suspect that it was a nifty idea, but since 9/11 we're not flying anywhere near as much- not even businesses.
Honestly, I would have shelled out for the service, but I'm the exception, not the norm. So, why carry forward an expensive service that won't at least break-even? In reality, I suspect someone will figure out a cheaper way to do this (as there IS a demand for this sort of thing- just not enough to pay for Boeing's solution...) and then you'll see it show up again- but it will need to meet DO-178B certification requirements. Now, having said this, Connexion met them (Not sure HOW, but they did...) so I would suspect a better one would easily pass muster.
Back a couple of years back, Kyle did a "Sledge-O-Matic" on an engineering prototype of a Phantom.
Yes, they did have hardware- it wasn't anything to write home about. P4 machine, GeForce 4 class GPU... Nothing more than what Indrema promised and couldn't deliver on. That's not to say the console's little more than vapor and has been for some time- but it doesn't surprise me that they had to switch to little more than Steam's offer for all of this. They just couldn't deliver on the promises they made in a manner that could make money for all parties involved.
They're suing for the Rights Holders, which is a different beast- and they're suing people indescriminately left and right over this BS. No, I don't think that illicit file sharing (and there's a distinction there) is right and that "Music should be free!) but in the same breath, suing the customer is rarely a good thing especially when the person in question obviously didn't do what they're claiming. They're setting the financial bar high enough that people just "settle" out of court instead of defend themselves.
Who do you think gets to pocket the money from these settlements and lawsuits? The people making the music?
If you think that, you'd be mistaken- it's the lawyers and the RIAA member organizations that see this money. That's not going to the bat for anyone save themselves- and it's not about the violations, it's about control.
An unsealed bottle of water can be used as a transport for biological and chemical agents- and with many of the agents, you'd never know it wasn't "just water" until it was too late.
To be sure, the "can't be bringing a bottle of water on board" is a bit overboard (But then, many of the things they've instituted have been at least a little bit that way from the beginning...)
But, the conference you might have been thinking about, the Texas Independant Games Conference, happend a couple of weeks ago. It seems to have been a success (Couldn't afford to go, so I wouldn't have first-hand info...). The one you mention is on my list and I hope budget permits my attendance- and it's a good place for a lot of the Indies to go to, along with similar venues elsewhere. E3 was a serious timesink that tended to produce a lot of the train wrecks they tried to call games of late...
I need only point to the exploits of the last year against Windows to illustrate that you were LUCKY not that XP was stable. The WMF exploit was something that MS was appraised of back in middle 90's- by myself when I was working with Document Imaging toolsets. I couldn't understand why they felt the need to allow a data file format to execute arbitrary code within itself then, and it didn't make sense now- and it ended up providing one of the worst security holes to date for Windows machines that existed even in the Vista beta, which purportedly was a re-write of everything (Riiight... You had to crib code from XP/2000 for that bug to have propagated to Vista...).
CRC calc is only part of the overhead in UDP. Another part is all the copying that typically ends up being done to take the header (Which is in it's own chunk of system memory being assembled) and plant it in the packet assembly buffer in memory and then copy the entire buffer to the card- this is done for architechtural reasons in that it's easier to design a modular system doing this at the slight expense of the normally minimal copy overhead... There's also Z-Copy transmission of the packet from it's different places in memory via scatter gather DMA operations. But, again, many of the better "dumb" cards do this, so...
TOE only really sort of makes sense if you're talking something where you're needing to handle 10Gbit Ethernet and something like hooking a SAN array into a cluster of server machines. There, you might see some advantage.
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I think IT's just the start. Kamen's got some designs he's trying to bring to
commercialization that turn the Segway into something like what you're hoping
for. If his designs for a Stirling are as good as he seems to think of them,
you'd use it in the segway to give it much more range- and it would be a device
that'd use different fuels (Hell, you COULD do a thermal atomic pile if you were
sure it'd not get ruptured and get unbelieveable results with that...).
It's got potential- I just think he released the Segway before it was really ready
(i.e. the power plant he's working on for it and other things weren't done...).
Well, I don't know of any- right now, that is. Keeping mind that if you actually had some real
range to the things instead of what they're limited to by current battery technology (In other
words, if a fuel cell or a Stirling Cycle engine could be made as the energy source for the
electronics instead of Li-Ion batteries so that the things have a 50-150 mile range instead of
the 10 or so that they currently do...) then there might be some re-working done because they
ARE quite impressive. As it stands, they do a tour of
downtown Austin and San Antonio on them and it's supposed to be pretty popular.
The paper asks for a third neutral party (i.e. Someone the court picks that has NOTHING to do with either party) to do the search.
In a civil case, that's NOT an unreasonable request- and since the Plaintiff is the one ASKING for the discovery, they have to
pay for the third party's time; but they don't get to just use their experts unless the Defendant says, "Yes" to that piece of
discovery.
Unfortunately, it's still good advice and if you're thinking ahead you can do this.
You see, the people in these sorts of companies think that they're just simply secure
with things like an anti-virus program, etc. running on them. When something goes horribly
wrong (and it will- it's not really a matter of an if so much as a when in these cases...)
they will blame the poor SOB whose job it was to secure the stuff, but that they knackered
his ability to do so- typically with a dismissal and if they get sued suing you or deflecting
the lawsuit from the customer they screwed over in the matter to go and sue YOU.
Unless you're even MORE well off than you imply, you don't want to be even remotely close
to facing that sort of thing. Cutting and running, preferably with another job in hand
is the sanest and safest thing one can do in a situation like this- unless you can get them
to wise up, it's a ticking timebomb on your career and your financial stability you just
don't want around you.
The "dickhead lawyer" happens to be Corporate Counsel- and he did it on the instructions
of the CXO crowd in almost all cases. Most lawyers know for a fact that this is NOT the
way to win friends and influence people- and they also know that these things are pretty
much bogus the way they are written and the management insisting on you signing the damn
things without any further discussion indicates the PRECISE thing I told you. It's a
corporate culture that you typically do not want to be a part of.
C'mon... Microsoft has completely NO desire to allow you to easily make things cross-platform
for their consoles and whatnot.
They want you as locked in as they can get you- if you want cross-platform (Considering the
overall interest in the game dev space MS has, you'd do well to consider this- everywhere
else they've had an "interest" in, they've either muscled the company out (Netscape, Stac...)
or pressured it almost out of existence (Borland, Intuit...). Do you HONESTLY think they're
NOT going to do the same thing to the Game space??) you have to do it yourself. In reality,
it's not as difficult as it'd seem. If you've done your game design right, you've abstracted
out most of the things like the input layer into something that actually handles a the interface
of things like input for the game. The bulk of the code for the game SHOULD be the game itself
not input, sound, or graphics. At that point, all you need is a translation layer inside of
another interface module for the appropriate piece and you're good to go.
Yes, it's more complicated that I'm making it out to sound, but it's NOT as difficult as
people keep making it out to be. Yes, it consumes 10-15% "more time" doing it this way.
But what people keep missing is that if you've designed it "this way" it typically gives
you back the time you spent on it in the form of less effort that comes from good up-front
design instead of relying on MS' API's, the C++ compiler, or cowboy coding to make the
work "easier".
And, this is WHY I don't do anything except self-host any more.
For me, those "missed" messages can mean the difference between a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars
and NOT having it. I'd rather some garbage got through the screens and I got NO false positives. Seems that
I am getting pretty decent results with SpamAsssassin on my server right at the moment.
To be sure, there's bad marriages. There's also good ones.
Give and take. You probably ought to try it someday- you might
find it great...
Eventually they don't. My previous day job (not the current one) is probably going to find out
that their dismissal of me is going to be very unpleasant- because they can't prove that I was
dismissed for NOT signing one of these things and worked over a 12 month period for them.
1) These clauses, typically, are unenforceable- they only have rights to what is relevant to them.
2) Typically, they're bundled with a Non Disclose/Non Compete- this is an IP assignment agreement;
you're really not supposed to combine them and if you do, expect extreme difficulties in enforcement.
3) Typically, they're popped on you right after you've accepted the job- they can't legally make
your employment conditional on the signing of that document unless it's stated in the job offer that
you have to do so. The "everyone does this" line is bogus- the law's pretty specific on that one.
No, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm about to get into a deal with a previous employer over the matter.
My advice (such that a Slashdotter's advice on matters Legal would be...) would be to consult with
a lawyer ASAP on the matter- and more probably go looking for work elsewhere. It's pretty much
a constant that the company's been given bad advice from an IP attorney or they're just plain flat
greedy when it comes to Intellectual "Property", thinking it's like gold or oil. In this case, the
people aren't going to be pleasurable to work with because they're also clueless in almost all other
matters as well.
That is an interesting point. But how does one otherwise download it? Get a friend to infringe?
I think Apple did themselves out of an opportunity to deal with some of the infringers by
absolving the employees of wrongdoing in this instance and using their testimony to go
after the people running the tracker that got put up in hopes of shutting the thing down
as well as maybe getting their hands on the name of the person that leaked the thing in
the first place.
Since this is a civil trial, if enough perponderance of evidence is flung your way by the defendant and you
can't address the same; you still typically lose the case.
It's a little silly to have fired them- they're employees downloading the thing off the Internet; it's concrete proof that their IP was being infringed upon. Now, the people can "not recall", etc. if they so chose because they're no longer favoring their now former employer.
Now, while it was funny when Iliad did the initial joke in UserFriendly, it's not so funny now...
What WON'T they computerize these days?
You don't avoid PCI latency- you STILL have to cross the bus.
You don't avoid hardware interrupts- HOW do you let the OS know that you've sent the data or got it?
Optimizing the stack- optimizing WHAT? It's allegedly speeding up UDP traffic; there's little to "optimize" there.
I'd buy TCP Offload maybe needing to be done- for 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware. I should know;
I work with that sort of hardware for a client. UDP's not needing diddly at any lower speeds than that-
the offloads that make sense and work are scatter-gather DMA of the packet instead of needing an assembly
buffer and checksum calculation. Most modern cards worth their salt do this already.
They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the
problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're
allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be
but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.
External Battery supply such as what's provided by Valence- a Saphion battery pack.
Well, with the voice call service you could "connect" with it- if you had a phone in your plane. Just use the modem
to dial into your ISP. Sure, it's not high-speed, but it did work at least half-assedly. Now, as for Connexion, I
suspect that it was a nifty idea, but since 9/11 we're not flying anywhere near as much- not even businesses.
Honestly, I would have shelled out for the service, but I'm the exception, not the norm. So, why carry forward an
expensive service that won't at least break-even? In reality, I suspect someone will figure out a cheaper way to
do this (as there IS a demand for this sort of thing- just not enough to pay for Boeing's solution...) and then you'll
see it show up again- but it will need to meet DO-178B certification requirements. Now, having said this, Connexion
met them (Not sure HOW, but they did...) so I would suspect a better one would easily pass muster.
Back a couple of years back, Kyle did a "Sledge-O-Matic" on an engineering prototype of a Phantom.
Yes, they did have hardware- it wasn't anything to write home about. P4 machine, GeForce 4 class
GPU... Nothing more than what Indrema promised and couldn't deliver on. That's not to say the
console's little more than vapor and has been for some time- but it doesn't surprise me that they
had to switch to little more than Steam's offer for all of this. They just couldn't deliver on the
promises they made in a manner that could make money for all parties involved.
It doesn't mean much that it's not happened yet- it could be that nobody's twigged onto this little detail in the Bill of Rights.
They're suing for the Rights Holders, which is a different beast- and they're suing people indescriminately
left and right over this BS. No, I don't think that illicit file sharing (and there's a distinction there)
is right and that "Music should be free!) but in the same breath, suing the customer is rarely a good thing
especially when the person in question obviously didn't do what they're claiming. They're setting the
financial bar high enough that people just "settle" out of court instead of defend themselves.
Who do you think gets to pocket the money from these settlements and lawsuits? The people making the music?
If you think that, you'd be mistaken- it's the lawyers and the RIAA member organizations that see this
money. That's not going to the bat for anyone save themselves- and it's not about the violations, it's
about control.
An unsealed bottle of water can be used as a transport for biological and chemical agents- and
with many of the agents, you'd never know it wasn't "just water" until it was too late.
To be sure, the "can't be bringing a bottle of water on board" is a bit overboard (But then, many
of the things they've instituted have been at least a little bit that way from the beginning...)
This would BE the latest. We've just been given a driver that can drive their GMA X3000 integrated GPU.
But, the conference you might have been thinking about, the Texas Independant Games Conference, happend a couple of weeks ago. It seems to have been a success (Couldn't afford to go, so I wouldn't have first-hand info...). The one you mention is on my list and I hope budget permits my attendance- and it's a good place for a lot of the Indies to go to, along with similar venues elsewhere. E3 was a serious timesink that tended to produce a lot of the train wrecks they tried to call games of late...
I need only point to the exploits of the last year against Windows to illustrate that you were LUCKY
not that XP was stable. The WMF exploit was something that MS was appraised of back in middle 90's-
by myself when I was working with Document Imaging toolsets. I couldn't understand why they felt the
need to allow a data file format to execute arbitrary code within itself then, and it didn't make sense
now- and it ended up providing one of the worst security holes to date for Windows machines that existed
even in the Vista beta, which purportedly was a re-write of everything (Riiight... You had to crib
code from XP/2000 for that bug to have propagated to Vista...).
Plans, yes... But they're not there yet; which is what the GP post implied with his bold statements.
CRC calc is only part of the overhead in UDP. Another part is all the copying that typically ends up being done
to take the header (Which is in it's own chunk of system memory being assembled) and plant it in the packet
assembly buffer in memory and then copy the entire buffer to the card- this is done for architechtural reasons
in that it's easier to design a modular system doing this at the slight expense of the normally minimal copy
overhead... There's also Z-Copy transmission of the packet from it's different places in memory via scatter
gather DMA operations. But, again, many of the better "dumb" cards do this, so...
TOE only really sort of makes sense if you're talking something where you're needing to handle 10Gbit Ethernet
and something like hooking a SAN array into a cluster of server machines. There, you might see
some advantage.