The tags in question are made by Sensormatic. They're designed to be deactivated with a short intense magnetic pulse. Also of note is that they're not RFID tags, but rather simple passive magnetic/inductive transponders- absolutely nothing like the tags we're talking about here.
Disabling a Sensormatic tag like the ones Wal-Mart and others use would work with that. A true RFID tag won't work that way- you'd have to generate an EM pulse that would take out the electronics in your house or the store to do what you're suggesting.
They're wanting to track for logistics the item from the factory to the store. They're just talking about using the same tag for replacing the sensormatic stuff (Since it's RFID, it could be ticked off reliably when they "scan" it for pricing) and the UPC code.
At 5 cents a chip, they're mass-producing them for that cheap.
They're usually capable of withstanding some 200-500 or so watts of RF power before blowing out the chip's circuitry. The only way to really discombobulate these things is to detatch the chip from the antenna or remove the whole affair from the thing you're wanting it to no longer be tagged.
As for detecting them, unless you're knowing how they make the chip's transponder work, you're going to have a FUN time catching all of them.
There's very few tags out there that are like bugs that can be immediately detected with common stuff.
There's inductive loop tags (a' la Mobil Speedpass)- they will only respond when powered by a magic frequency and when triggered by the right modulation/data sequence.
There's the dual frequency units, where you send one signal and then the chip responds at a different frequency. These will usually only work in the same manner as the Speedpass type of tag.
Then there's the backscatter type of tags, commonly used by the toll tag systems. They act as a special mirror to the RF signal, re-radiating what they're recieving with a modulation carrier on it. If you don't have the right frequency, they don't work at all- and some of the more sophisticated tags (like the ones we're talking about here...) do handshaking with the RFID base system before re-radiating.
There's several other schemes out there, to be sure- I'm just naming the few I've had to work with in the past. (I worked for a division of Intermec (now owned by TransCore) that did RFID systems for parking, ground transportation management, railcar identification, and these little things they called "gamma" tags that they licensed the technology from IBM that are used for this very thing we're discussing- so I know a little something about it...).
Because these loopy RFID tags are on different frequencies- you're going to have to hit a lot of different frequencies. Spark-gap oscillators will effectively jam anything up into the microwave domain. The catch is that it jams everything and you'll eventually draw attention to yourself.
Yes, that is a problem. But this destructo-disc idea isn't an answer to the problem- it brings on the same issues as the problem you mention and puts a bunch of junk in a landfill. This technology is more akin to somebody saying, "what if we did this," without pondering all the consequences of the process and doing it all the same. Now, you bring up a way of dealing with things that's rather interesting... Too bad they aren't doing this and can't get there from here- or can they?:-)
"Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out."
Actually, they don't want that- they have to "stock" it with the videos to begin with (Which is the same level of effort as restocking DVDs from the rental returns. Now VHS tapes on the other hand...). This would a bad PR thing for them- and they've other plans that would work out as well or better. Can't say anything more than that (covered by my NDA w/my employer)- if things pan out the way I'm hoping they will, you're about to see several changes in things as they're done.
It requires polycarbonate to make CDs and DVDs. Polycarbonate that's generally not recyclable or biodegradable. If the disc self-destructs, it's landfill fodder- which means they're going to be choking up the world with nigh worthless plastic discs, using precious resources (the plastic, the materials to make the disc, etc.). All of this to make that precious pay per view they've been seeking all these years realistic and to do away with rentals (Realize that the media companies view rental companies as the enemy (except Viacom- they own one of the largest rental companies out there...) because they don't control the situation themselves. Rather than fostering their own rental company as Viacom did, they'd do this instead...)
I guess they have to have that object less in, "greed destroys all..."
Microamps versus milliamps (Which, by the way, that switching supply will consume a couple of milliamps as well- not to mention you just bulked up your device considerably...). If it takes 5 micrnoamps to operate something and another unit takes 5 milliamps the microampere consuming device will last much longer.
I don't believe that he was saying that it was impossible or that someone didn't do it- it was just a godsend for the people having to develop devices with numeric displays to not have to mess with Nixies.
Re:Loki still leaves us with the SDL...
on
A Loki Timeline
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· Score: 2
No, it means that it really doesn't care which platform it runs on. There's no single "true" OS for it.
Considering that the police will hunt them down all the same, if they're going to look for a patsy, they're going to look for a patsy even if it's the police instead of a vigilante comittee.
Just because it's the government doing the work, doesn't keep them from trying/punishing the wrong people. That's a myth in and of itself.
WineX is relying on T&L support for their stuf
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2
Gavriel said as much in the DRI Developers IRC meeting this Monday. It's very, very likely that there's something about there being no T&L support right at the moment (though there's plans afoot to fix that omission...) in the DRI drivers.
Their algorithms produce consistently lower quality results per frame than ATI's stuff right at the moment. However, one should note that while this is the case, unless you're slowing things down, you're less likely to notice anything being amiss. However, the complaint IS valid. I would rather have peak quality with slightly lower framerates- less abusive to one's eyes, etc.
Well, at least I bought one of your games...
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2
SiN didn't play any better on my machine than it did under Windows so I didn't buy it. Shogo, on the other hand, was pretty good- I bought that.
He's got a real hosting service, I suspect that he didn't expect the page views that he just got today and didn't pay for the larger service agreement from them.
He's obviously not being extravagant like he was with Ion Storm these days. The core Ion Storm crowd seems to have formed a new company called MonkeyStone and they're producing games for handhelds (Something less ambitious than Daikatana and more easily done on a garage style development budget). The official offices are in Quinlan, TX (A small town some 15 or so miles to the south of Greenville, TX, a town 45 minutes drive time to the east on I-30 from the Dallas side of the DFW metro area...)- office space is dirt cheap there in Quinlan (it's not exactly "pricey" in Greenville, either...).
Looks like he's going for the garage games route of develoment, etc.- something sustainable with reasonable resources. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he's selling it. Could be he's trying to capitalize the GBA version of his game (they DO have to pay a license fee to produce the game for GBA) or he just decided it was an expensive toy (read: penis extention) that he just couldn't justify anymore and is trying to shift it for that reason.
He's got a new company that's producing and publishing games for handhelds. His first game for the PocketPC (Yeah, I know...) has gotten good reviews and it looks like a good candidate for a GBA game from the screenshots they've done.
The only odd thing is that they're purportedly operating out of Quinlan, TX- that's this little town that's about a 20 minute drive to the south of Greenville, TX. Greenville is the county seat of Hunt county, some 45 minutes to the north and east of the Dallas side of the DFW metro area. It'd cost next to nothing to open up shop in Greenville or Quinlan as the rent's definitely much, much cheaper (One of the main Pharmacy tracking/billing/etc. software packages on the PC is developed in Greenville...)- I know this because I used to live in Greenville, TX.
It could very well be that he's selling the car to capitalize the GBA version of his game or any other number of things of that sort of nature.
"Anyway, I don't use linux right now - OS X at home and the W2k bug at work - so let that affect your judgement of my opinion however you feel is appropriate"
OS X is a nice OS. It's much too slow on the hardware I have (Old-World G3 tower...) so I run only Linux and MacOS 9 on it. Win2k's probably a "no options" situation and I can understand- besides, while it's more of a resource pig than NT was, it's still better than it (Relative term, I'll admit, but it IS better).
I'm going to have a G400, but that's because I'm moving a card over from my main machine that's a P3-600 until I can afford another card. Most people getting an Athlon are looking for maximal speed (Who isn't?) so they're going with the NVidia cards because they're "fully" supported with all functionalities including T&L supported (The Radeon doesn't have T&L right at the moment and the top of the line one is a different card w/no support right at the moment...). Most of the Athlon crowd is going to have NVidia cards unless they're insistent about having everything Open Sourced. There's nothing wrong with that position, but since the profile indicates that there's not going to be as many people with other cards, how would they see other AGP cards having this problem?
How many jobs are in this country to buy the stuff that you cheaply produced over there in that 3rd world country? They're not going up right at the moment. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do some of this, but what I am saying is that it's a system and a somewhat fragile one at that. At some point you reach a threshold and you quit making money because people can't buy (because they can't afford it and/or don't have a job to do so...). At some point, it's less about making big sums of money, for down that path lies recessions and depressions.
"The flipside is that if they comply, and the majority will, they will find that they have invested enormous amounts of money in the software now, and they are damn sure going to get their worth out of it! This will close up chances for Free Software on these kinds of systems, because no business is going to replace their brand new expensive software with Linux after paying out the ass."
Drawback with "compliance" is that they'll be coming by a-knocking again in due time pushing for more audits and more compliance. It's like any other protection racket. Sure, this is initially going to close some doors, but there's only so many businesses out there to roust- they're going to have to go through the process all over again in a couple of years.
The digital variety go for some $3000 and go up from there. It's part of why they don't have digital TV in the hands of the masses- it's not lack of ability to mass produce them, it's a lack of desire to put content out that they can't control 100% because someone could make a digital copy of the feed. Since there's not that many digital stations out there right now, the makers aren't ramping up production so the units for sale out there are limited production units and therefore expensive as all get-out.
When the content providers start realizing that most of this is like worrying about locking up excrement in a fire safe, perhaps they'll lighten up and realize like they did with videotapes that it's better to sell the tapes cheap- in this case, they'll make a hell of a lot more money if they killed region coding and made DVDs mostly priced at $10-20 like most videotapes (I don't care what "added value" they're putting in the DVDs- it's NOT worth a 50-100% increase in the price in most cases...).
Slashdot Mirror
The tags in question are made by Sensormatic. They're designed to be deactivated with a short intense magnetic pulse. Also of note is that they're not RFID tags, but rather simple passive magnetic/inductive transponders- absolutely nothing like the tags we're talking about here.
Disabling a Sensormatic tag like the ones Wal-Mart and others use would work with that. A true RFID tag won't work that way- you'd have to generate an EM pulse that would take out the electronics in your house or the store to do what you're suggesting.
It would be in the LABEL of the underwear.
They're wanting to track for logistics the item from the factory to the store. They're just talking about using the same tag for replacing the sensormatic stuff (Since it's RFID, it could be ticked off reliably when they "scan" it for pricing) and the UPC code.
At 5 cents a chip, they're mass-producing them for that cheap.
They're usually capable of withstanding some 200-500 or so watts of RF power before blowing out the chip's circuitry. The only way to really discombobulate these things is to detatch the chip from the antenna or remove the whole affair from the thing you're wanting it to no longer be tagged.
As for detecting them, unless you're knowing how they make the chip's transponder work, you're going to have a FUN time catching all of them.
There's very few tags out there that are like bugs that can be immediately detected with common stuff.
There's inductive loop tags (a' la Mobil Speedpass)- they will only respond when powered by a magic frequency and when triggered by the right modulation/data sequence.
There's the dual frequency units, where you send one signal and then the chip responds at a different frequency. These will usually only work in the same manner as the Speedpass type of tag.
Then there's the backscatter type of tags, commonly used by the toll tag systems. They act as a special mirror to the RF signal, re-radiating what they're recieving with a modulation carrier on it. If you don't have the right frequency, they don't work at all- and some of the more sophisticated tags (like the ones we're talking about here...) do handshaking with the RFID base system before re-radiating.
There's several other schemes out there, to be sure- I'm just naming the few I've had to work with in the past. (I worked for a division of Intermec (now owned by TransCore) that did RFID systems for parking, ground transportation management, railcar identification, and these little things they called "gamma" tags that they licensed the technology from IBM that are used for this very thing we're discussing- so I know a little something about it...).
Because these loopy RFID tags are on different frequencies- you're going to have to hit a lot of different frequencies. Spark-gap oscillators will effectively jam anything up into the microwave domain. The catch is that it jams everything and you'll eventually draw attention to yourself.
Yes, that is a problem. But this destructo-disc idea isn't an answer to the problem- it brings on the same issues as the problem you mention and puts a bunch of junk in a landfill. This technology is more akin to somebody saying, "what if we did this," without pondering all the consequences of the process and doing it all the same. Now, you bring up a way of dealing with things that's rather interesting... Too bad they aren't doing this and can't get there from here- or can they? :-)
"Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out."
Actually, they don't want that- they have to "stock" it with the videos to begin with (Which is the same level of effort as restocking DVDs from the rental returns. Now VHS tapes on the other hand...). This would a bad PR thing for them- and they've other plans that would work out as well or better. Can't say anything more than that (covered by my NDA w/my employer)- if things pan out the way I'm hoping they will, you're about to see several changes in things as they're done.
It requires polycarbonate to make CDs and DVDs. Polycarbonate that's generally not recyclable or biodegradable. If the disc self-destructs, it's landfill fodder- which means they're going to be choking up the world with nigh worthless plastic discs, using precious resources (the plastic, the materials to make the disc, etc.). All of this to make that precious pay per view they've been seeking all these years realistic and to do away with rentals (Realize that the media companies view rental companies as the enemy (except Viacom- they own one of the largest rental companies out there...) because they don't control the situation themselves. Rather than fostering their own rental company as Viacom did, they'd do this instead...)
I guess they have to have that object less in, "greed destroys all..."
Microamps versus milliamps (Which, by the way, that switching supply will consume a couple of milliamps as well- not to mention you just bulked up your device considerably...). If it takes 5 micrnoamps to operate something and another unit takes 5 milliamps the microampere consuming device will last much longer.
I don't believe that he was saying that it was impossible or that someone didn't do it- it was just a godsend for the people having to develop devices with numeric displays to not have to mess with Nixies.
No, it means that it really doesn't care which platform it runs on. There's no single "true" OS for it.
Nah, UGO's desperate for ad revenue- and UGO's their host.
Considering that the police will hunt them down all the same, if they're going to look for a patsy, they're going to look for a patsy even if it's the police instead of a vigilante comittee.
Just because it's the government doing the work, doesn't keep them from trying/punishing the wrong people. That's a myth in and of itself.
Gavriel said as much in the DRI Developers IRC meeting this Monday. It's very, very likely that there's something about there being no T&L support right at the moment (though there's plans afoot to fix that omission...) in the DRI drivers.
Their algorithms produce consistently lower quality results per frame than ATI's stuff right at the moment. However, one should note that while this is the case, unless you're slowing things down, you're less likely to notice anything being amiss. However, the complaint IS valid. I would rather have peak quality with slightly lower framerates- less abusive to one's eyes, etc.
SiN didn't play any better on my machine than it did under Windows so I didn't buy it. Shogo, on the other hand, was pretty good- I bought that.
He's got a real hosting service, I suspect that he didn't expect the page views that he just got today and didn't pay for the larger service agreement from them.
He's obviously not being extravagant like he was with Ion Storm these days. The core Ion Storm crowd seems to have formed a new company called MonkeyStone and they're producing games for handhelds (Something less ambitious than Daikatana and more easily done on a garage style development budget). The official offices are in Quinlan, TX (A small town some 15 or so miles to the south of Greenville, TX, a town 45 minutes drive time to the east on I-30 from the Dallas side of the DFW metro area...)- office space is dirt cheap there in Quinlan (it's not exactly "pricey" in Greenville, either...).
Looks like he's going for the garage games route of develoment, etc.- something sustainable with reasonable resources. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he's selling it. Could be he's trying to capitalize the GBA version of his game (they DO have to pay a license fee to produce the game for GBA) or he just decided it was an expensive toy (read: penis extention) that he just couldn't justify anymore and is trying to shift it for that reason.
He's got a new company that's producing and publishing games for handhelds. His first game for the PocketPC (Yeah, I know...) has gotten good reviews and it looks like a good candidate for a GBA game from the screenshots they've done.
The only odd thing is that they're purportedly operating out of Quinlan, TX- that's this little town that's about a 20 minute drive to the south of Greenville, TX. Greenville is the county seat of Hunt county, some 45 minutes to the north and east of the Dallas side of the DFW metro area. It'd cost next to nothing to open up shop in Greenville or Quinlan as the rent's definitely much, much cheaper (One of the main Pharmacy tracking/billing/etc. software packages on the PC is developed in Greenville...)- I know this because I used to live in Greenville, TX.
It could very well be that he's selling the car to capitalize the GBA version of his game or any other number of things of that sort of nature.
"Anyway, I don't use linux right now - OS X at home and the W2k bug at work - so let that affect your judgement of my opinion however you feel is appropriate"
OS X is a nice OS. It's much too slow on the hardware I have (Old-World G3 tower...) so I run only Linux and MacOS 9 on it. Win2k's probably a "no options" situation and I can understand- besides, while it's more of a resource pig than NT was, it's still better than it (Relative term, I'll admit, but it IS better).
Use the discs as runners in a Tesla Turbine.
:-)
They'd make pretty nifty ones for a small fluid pump...
I'm going to have a G400, but that's because I'm moving a card over from my main machine that's a P3-600 until I can afford another card. Most people getting an Athlon are looking for maximal speed (Who isn't?) so they're going with the NVidia cards because they're "fully" supported with all functionalities including T&L supported (The Radeon doesn't have T&L right at the moment and the top of the line one is a different card w/no support right at the moment...). Most of the Athlon crowd is going to have NVidia cards unless they're insistent about having everything Open Sourced. There's nothing wrong with that position, but since the profile indicates that there's not going to be as many people with other cards, how would they see other AGP cards having this problem?
I botched the HTML code- that'll teach me not to preview stuff... :->
A most impressive demonstration of how EMto do JavaScript coding, as opposed to many sites which demonstrate how not to do it.
How many jobs are in this country to buy the stuff that you cheaply produced over there in that 3rd world country? They're not going up right at the moment. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do some of this, but what I am saying is that it's a system and a somewhat fragile one at that. At some point you reach a threshold and you quit making money because people can't buy (because they can't afford it and/or don't have a job to do so...). At some point, it's less about making big sums of money, for down that path lies recessions and depressions.
"The flipside is that if they comply, and the majority will, they will find that they have invested enormous amounts of money in the software now, and they are damn sure going to get their worth out of it! This will close up chances for Free Software on these kinds of systems, because no business is going to replace their brand new expensive software with Linux after paying out the ass."
Drawback with "compliance" is that they'll be coming by a-knocking again in due time pushing for more audits and more compliance. It's like any other protection racket. Sure, this is initially going to close some doors, but there's only so many businesses out there to roust- they're going to have to go through the process all over again in a couple of years.
The digital variety go for some $3000 and go up from there. It's part of why they don't have digital TV in the hands of the masses- it's not lack of ability to mass produce them, it's a lack of desire to put content out that they can't control 100% because someone could make a digital copy of the feed. Since there's not that many digital stations out there right now, the makers aren't ramping up production so the units for sale out there are limited production units and therefore expensive as all get-out.
When the content providers start realizing that most of this is like worrying about locking up excrement in a fire safe, perhaps they'll lighten up and realize like they did with videotapes that it's better to sell the tapes cheap- in this case, they'll make a hell of a lot more money if they killed region coding and made DVDs mostly priced at $10-20 like most videotapes (I don't care what "added value" they're putting in the DVDs- it's NOT worth a 50-100% increase in the price in most cases...).