Build them a small form factor PC. Don't connect the USB ports and don't provide an optical drive. Install FreeDOS, a basic dialup TCP/IP stack, an email client and a web browser. I'd also set it up to decompress and restore everything from a read-only partition every single time they boot, ideally before processing config files. If there isn't already a way to do this, FreeDOS does have source available, so you could modify that.
Q: Why do some supplier employees not take breaks when others do?
A: There are some business functions and processes that have been fully outsourced (Outsourcing), such as cafeteria services, landscaping and call centers. These Outsourcing engagements are limited, require a certain set of criteria be met and must go through a rigorous approval process.
Well it's the keys, specifically the modifier keys, that are supposed to be sticky. That doesn't imply that their stickiness can only be affected by other keys.
I just tested and OS X treats the clicks and key presses the same way when sticky keys is enabled. Hit the modifier, the next click or key press is modified. Hit the modifier twice and all clicks and key presses and modified until you hit the modifier again to unlock.
The spec in question - http://www.x.org/docs/XKB/XKBp... as Peter references in the bug comments - discusses StickyKeys (4.4 on page 9) and strongly implies modifiers only unlatch on key presses; mouse buttons are not mentioned. His change made the code match this reading of the spec. I have a hard time believing that's what the spec writers intended, but if so then KDE's lock checkbox really isn't supposed to do anything.
This was my reaction as well. I looked at the trademark registration, which has a picture of the Fluke, then at Sparkfun's site. So, fair enough. However, I google image searched 'multimeter' and there are lots of multimeters in that same shade of yellow, of all sorts of brands. I had no idea yellow "meant" Fluke, personally. I think there's a valid case that this trademark has become diluted and generic. Whether all those others are licensed uses or not, if there's no scope for customer confusion of brand, it's no longer a valid trademark.
If you download the spreadsheet you can see that they classify total spending as either "direct" or "grants", of which the vast bulk is "direct". Everything that is not a grant must be being paid to an entity of some kind, whether an actual person, a company, a non-profit or something. You can verify this is the total Federal spending using the Monthly Treasury Statements at https://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/... - I recommend the PDF versions.
As for the percentage going to veterans, I expect the number of veterans isn't growing very much, whereas the Federal budget is. So a constant amount in a larger total is going to be a smaller fraction.
Bottom line, this article is FUD and should not be taken serious by anyone.
The patents are about automatic failover when network nodes or spans break. The earlier patents are about having spare nodes and spans and deciding which to use when some part of the network fails (eg. having a node which broadcasts "who can help?" and available nodes broadcast back "i can help!" and a single node decides which available node to use). The later patents are about turning on and off routes between nodes to reconfigure the network, usually into some sort of mesh network.
I'm not a network engineer so it's hard for me to judge, but the earlier patents seem trivial to me especially since they're from the late 1990s. The latter patents might have some merit - the idea of changing the network to a mesh is interesting, but my gut feeling is they're mostly solutions that any decent engineer would come up with after a bit of head scratching.
If I come to you and ask you to sell me some dynamite so I can rob a bank with it, it doesn't matter whether I actually rob the bank or not. By agreeing to sell me the dynamite you become part of a criminal conspiracy. There's no duty on you to tell the cops about me, but there is the duty to say, "Sorry dude, I can't help you out with that".
It's against the law to fraudulently obtain (or conspire to obtain) a security clearance that requires you to have no family criminal ties if you do have a brother who is a criminal.
Because he was charged with advising and helping people lie to the federal government when they told him they were involved in illegal activity (eg. one of them said his brother was a "violent Mexican drug trafficker" for example. He was essentially involved in a conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and that's what they put him in jail for.
Polygraphs are tantamount to phrenology and graphology in my opinion, but that's not what this case was truly about.
Parental controls triggered by location as well as time, so basically yes. However, this is only a patent application and can thus be denied or challenged while under evaluation.
Here are a couple of the patents Apple was found to have infringed. They actually look non-obvious to me. Basically they're about running a special DNS proxy server that catches non-standard requests, checks credentials in some fashion, and either sets up a just-in-time VPN, passes them through to a normal DNS server, or returns an error. They also don't seem to be a troll company; it looks like this work was done as a government contract.
I didn't look for any details on how Facetime peer-to-peer worked so I don't know if the ruling is correct and generally I consider software non-patentable (copyright and trade secret should be enough) but this is not what I'd call a meritless patent troll case.
I worked at Williams in the 90s. You're pretty much spot on but I do have a few other comments. The fact that games broke more than videogames is true, but what really choked the industry - and I'm counting arcade videogames in this too - was that all the games wound up getting more and more expensive, yet earning less and less money.
Back in the day, if a game didn't pay for itself in 8 weeks, it was a dog. Really good games could do that in 3 weeks. Once they'd done that, the rest was profit. After a while the original location would sell the game and a lesser location would pick it up. Cheaper price, lower earning but still the game paid for itself in a few weeks. Repeat 2 or 3 more times and you have a game in a pizza joint, not earning much but doing well enough to be worth the effort. When the time-to-profit stretched out it choked this whole 'food chain' to the point that distributors were telling the manufacturers that they didn't want to buy any more games, even if they'd signed a contract for exclusivity in return for minimum orders, even if the game was incredible, because they already had a warehouse full of stuff they couldn't sell to the top-tier operators and thus just taking up space and (more importantly) non-cash illiquid assets.
There was also bloody-mindedness on the part of the locations, operators, distributors and manufacturers. Manufacturers kept jacking up prices without enough effort in R&D (Pin2k was an exception and I have so many heroic stories of our effort on that!) and without coming up with enough other ways to add value. Distributors cut back all the services they used to offer (e.g. board repair, big parts catalogs), operators were no longer willing to spend time fixing and cleaning games (easier to put in a Golden Tee Golf instead) and locations didn't want to deal with the space or the noise.
Pinball and slots at WMS were separate business units with their own assembly lines. Spinning reel slot design was briefly under Larry DeMar who was the head of engineering for pinball (and a legend in his own right thanks to Robotron, Defender, Black Knight, High Speed, Funhouse...) but that didn't really affect things and was before Pin2k got going. The fixed cost of the production line was a big drag on profit and we were barely hitting the minimum run rate most of the time, but it wasn't in the tens of thousands. 5000 a year was about where it was at, if I remember rightly. Revenge From Mars perked that up considerably but then the CEO decided to pump up the price for Star Wars Ep 1 and orders, which had been higher, dropped below its sales. That's when they pulled the plug.
After that, a bunch of the WMS pinball people went to Stern and some others went with Pat Lawlor who founded his own design company, manufacturing through Stern. That's why Stern's games improved in quality and play appeal. You can thank Dwight, Keith and Lyman in particular, plus Louis, Greg and John K along with Pat at PLD. George Gomez (Tron, Spy Hunter and the Monster Bash pinball, among others) now runs Stern.
Maybe it's a confusion over terminology. 15 years is about when Lucasarts stopped developing great games themselves. They published plenty after that of course, including Jedi Outcast, but they were all made by licensees. From the outside the studio looked really bipolar to me, thrashing back and forth between internal development and outsourcing frequently enough they couldn't build and maintain any strong teams.
Netflix will get creamed before too long. The networks are going to jack their fees through the roof now that they've realised how much money can be made in that market. Also, the ISPs, especially ones that do cable TV, would rather partner with the networks to offer their own streaming service and they have various ways to disfavour Netflix (charging Netflix money to not be throttled, counting Netflix but not their own service to the user's bandwidth caps).
I pay $35/mo to Virgin, whom I believe just resell Sprint's network. Works great almost everywhere I go. The only exception is Mendocino country, no service whatsoever up there, not even voice.
I had a cheap, cheap prepaid phone for 7 or 8 years, because I didn't feel like paying $800+/yr for a phone. Mind you, I don't do cable TV because $700+/yr buys a lot of DVD boxsets (and videogames) instead.
I only ever shopped at CompUSA once. I bought a PlayStation memory card there and, after checking out, was accosted by two staff members who refused to let me leave until they saw my receipt, appropriately marked. The checkout person hadn't marked it properly and they made me wait while they found him/her (who had just gone on break) to verify I had, actually, paid for this thing despite having a receipt.
I never shopped there again and made sure all my friends knew about this experience. I do not appreciate being treated like a thief.
I would say Elite was superior, and probably the influence for Starflight since it came out 2 years before. You didn't land on planets in Elite, but every system had a space station to dock with (you had to fly into the station). Also, the galaxies were procedurally generated, so lots of places to trade between. You could mine asteroids, fight the station police, trade illicit goods and become a fugitive, upgrade your ship, scoop fuel from the sun...
I think there are technically two. Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern Pinball, although I don't believe the former has put out their first game yet. In any case the market is the merest shadow of its heyday.
I made pinball machines in the 1990s and I don't think you're exactly right. 2.5 times as many games would've been about 2.5 times the maintenance - time per paid credit would've stayed the same, so there would've been 2.5 times as much wear and tear. Also, games in good locations (which is where new games were mostly sold) would've had their earnings go down because they spent big blocks of time being played continuously so they would've need to pick up a lot more players in the slack times.
Operators had lots of control over pricing, especially on Williams/Bally games; we had elaborate support for custom pricing. So third-tier locations could've helped themselves, but chose not to.
What really killed coin-op was that all manufacturers, both pinball and video, were making games that were more and more expensive for operators to buy, but earned less and less money on location. That slowed the churn rate of games (being sold from bigger to smaller operators) and glutted the market with backstock.
At work I have a maximised IDE on my left monitor (with the editor split vertically so I can see a.c and.h file side by side). On my right monitor I have my IM client up against the right hand side, email against the left, browser in the middle and taller than the email, music player in the top left. I put IM windows to the right, so they touch the left-hand edge of the IM contact list.
This lets me work on code and watch for incoming emails while referencing a document off the wiki, see when someone comes back from lunch or gets out of a meeting (their IM status) and if someone messages me I can click straight to the window to reply. Similarly, I can click the music player to the front and immediately get at the volume or track list or whatever, without having to alt-tab or go down to the taskbar.
If all that stuff was maximised or tiled it would be a big pain in the ass for me. I don't log out or turn off the computer for weeks at a time, so once the windows are positioned I'm good - and most of them remember where they were last time anyway.
The way to look at the federal budget is the Monthly Treasury Reports - http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/index.html . They are much more concise and don't have all that useless airy-fairy language. They show the current month and the year to date. I don't think state budgets in general are less complicated. All budgets are hierarchical so it's just a question of how far down you want to drill. I bet even Wyoming's budget has more than an individual can wrap their head around if you break it down enough. Did that office in that town's annex of that county's branch of that subgroup of that sub-department of that department really need 3 new toner cartridges?
I would say what really matters is the big picture, the top 2 or maybe 3 layers of any budget. It'll be a few top-level areas that make up the bulk of the money.
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Build them a small form factor PC. Don't connect the USB ports and don't provide an optical drive. Install FreeDOS, a basic dialup TCP/IP stack, an email client and a web browser. I'd also set it up to decompress and restore everything from a read-only partition every single time they boot, ideally before processing config files. If there isn't already a way to do this, FreeDOS does have source available, so you could modify that.
Notes on DOS email and web clients:
http://www.tokyopc.org/newslet...
http://www.compmiscellanea.com...
They cover that in the full memo:
Q: Why do some supplier employees not take breaks when others do?
A: There are some business functions and processes that have been fully outsourced (Outsourcing), such as cafeteria services, landscaping and call centers. These Outsourcing engagements are limited, require a certain set of criteria be met and must go through a rigorous approval process.
Well it's the keys, specifically the modifier keys, that are supposed to be sticky. That doesn't imply that their stickiness can only be affected by other keys.
I just tested and OS X treats the clicks and key presses the same way when sticky keys is enabled. Hit the modifier, the next click or key press is modified. Hit the modifier twice and all clicks and key presses and modified until you hit the modifier again to unlock.
Seems very much the logical way to do it.
The spec in question - http://www.x.org/docs/XKB/XKBp... as Peter references in the bug comments - discusses StickyKeys (4.4 on page 9) and strongly implies modifiers only unlatch on key presses; mouse buttons are not mentioned. His change made the code match this reading of the spec. I have a hard time believing that's what the spec writers intended, but if so then KDE's lock checkbox really isn't supposed to do anything.
This was my reaction as well. I looked at the trademark registration, which has a picture of the Fluke, then at Sparkfun's site. So, fair enough. However, I google image searched 'multimeter' and there are lots of multimeters in that same shade of yellow, of all sorts of brands. I had no idea yellow "meant" Fluke, personally. I think there's a valid case that this trademark has become diluted and generic. Whether all those others are licensed uses or not, if there's no scope for customer confusion of brand, it's no longer a valid trademark.
"Individual" in this case does NOT mean "person".
If you download the spreadsheet you can see that they classify total spending as either "direct" or "grants", of which the vast bulk is "direct". Everything that is not a grant must be being paid to an entity of some kind, whether an actual person, a company, a non-profit or something. You can verify this is the total Federal spending using the Monthly Treasury Statements at https://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/... - I recommend the PDF versions.
As for the percentage going to veterans, I expect the number of veterans isn't growing very much, whereas the Federal budget is. So a constant amount in a larger total is going to be a smaller fraction.
Bottom line, this article is FUD and should not be taken serious by anyone.
Have you played Star Trek Online? Seems pretty casual-friendly, does a nice job with the lore, and a bunch of the ex-Paragon people are working on it.
Full disclosure: I worked on CoH and know the people in question.
The patents are about automatic failover when network nodes or spans break. The earlier patents are about having spare nodes and spans and deciding which to use when some part of the network fails (eg. having a node which broadcasts "who can help?" and available nodes broadcast back "i can help!" and a single node decides which available node to use). The later patents are about turning on and off routes between nodes to reconfigure the network, usually into some sort of mesh network.
I'm not a network engineer so it's hard for me to judge, but the earlier patents seem trivial to me especially since they're from the late 1990s. The latter patents might have some merit - the idea of changing the network to a mesh is interesting, but my gut feeling is they're mostly solutions that any decent engineer would come up with after a bit of head scratching.
If I come to you and ask you to sell me some dynamite so I can rob a bank with it, it doesn't matter whether I actually rob the bank or not. By agreeing to sell me the dynamite you become part of a criminal conspiracy. There's no duty on you to tell the cops about me, but there is the duty to say, "Sorry dude, I can't help you out with that".
It's against the law to fraudulently obtain (or conspire to obtain) a security clearance that requires you to have no family criminal ties if you do have a brother who is a criminal.
Because he was charged with advising and helping people lie to the federal government when they told him they were involved in illegal activity (eg. one of them said his brother was a "violent Mexican drug trafficker" for example. He was essentially involved in a conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and that's what they put him in jail for.
Polygraphs are tantamount to phrenology and graphology in my opinion, but that's not what this case was truly about.
Parental controls triggered by location as well as time, so basically yes. However, this is only a patent application and can thus be denied or challenged while under evaluation.
Here are a couple of the patents Apple was found to have infringed. They actually look non-obvious to me. Basically they're about running a special DNS proxy server that catches non-standard requests, checks credentials in some fashion, and either sets up a just-in-time VPN, passes them through to a normal DNS server, or returns an error. They also don't seem to be a troll company; it looks like this work was done as a government contract.
I didn't look for any details on how Facetime peer-to-peer worked so I don't know if the ruling is correct and generally I consider software non-patentable (copyright and trade secret should be enough) but this is not what I'd call a meritless patent troll case.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6502135.PN.&OS=PN/6502135&RS=PN/6502135
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7418504.PN.&OS=PN/7418504&RS=PN/7418504
I worked at Williams in the 90s. You're pretty much spot on but I do have a few other comments. The fact that games broke more than videogames is true, but what really choked the industry - and I'm counting arcade videogames in this too - was that all the games wound up getting more and more expensive, yet earning less and less money.
Back in the day, if a game didn't pay for itself in 8 weeks, it was a dog. Really good games could do that in 3 weeks. Once they'd done that, the rest was profit. After a while the original location would sell the game and a lesser location would pick it up. Cheaper price, lower earning but still the game paid for itself in a few weeks. Repeat 2 or 3 more times and you have a game in a pizza joint, not earning much but doing well enough to be worth the effort. When the time-to-profit stretched out it choked this whole 'food chain' to the point that distributors were telling the manufacturers that they didn't want to buy any more games, even if they'd signed a contract for exclusivity in return for minimum orders, even if the game was incredible, because they already had a warehouse full of stuff they couldn't sell to the top-tier operators and thus just taking up space and (more importantly) non-cash illiquid assets.
There was also bloody-mindedness on the part of the locations, operators, distributors and manufacturers. Manufacturers kept jacking up prices without enough effort in R&D (Pin2k was an exception and I have so many heroic stories of our effort on that!) and without coming up with enough other ways to add value. Distributors cut back all the services they used to offer (e.g. board repair, big parts catalogs), operators were no longer willing to spend time fixing and cleaning games (easier to put in a Golden Tee Golf instead) and locations didn't want to deal with the space or the noise.
Pinball and slots at WMS were separate business units with their own assembly lines. Spinning reel slot design was briefly under Larry DeMar who was the head of engineering for pinball (and a legend in his own right thanks to Robotron, Defender, Black Knight, High Speed, Funhouse...) but that didn't really affect things and was before Pin2k got going. The fixed cost of the production line was a big drag on profit and we were barely hitting the minimum run rate most of the time, but it wasn't in the tens of thousands. 5000 a year was about where it was at, if I remember rightly. Revenge From Mars perked that up considerably but then the CEO decided to pump up the price for Star Wars Ep 1 and orders, which had been higher, dropped below its sales. That's when they pulled the plug.
After that, a bunch of the WMS pinball people went to Stern and some others went with Pat Lawlor who founded his own design company, manufacturing through Stern. That's why Stern's games improved in quality and play appeal. You can thank Dwight, Keith and Lyman in particular, plus Louis, Greg and John K along with Pat at PLD. George Gomez (Tron, Spy Hunter and the Monster Bash pinball, among others) now runs Stern.
Maybe it's a confusion over terminology. 15 years is about when Lucasarts stopped developing great games themselves. They published plenty after that of course, including Jedi Outcast, but they were all made by licensees. From the outside the studio looked really bipolar to me, thrashing back and forth between internal development and outsourcing frequently enough they couldn't build and maintain any strong teams.
Netflix will get creamed before too long. The networks are going to jack their fees through the roof now that they've realised how much money can be made in that market. Also, the ISPs, especially ones that do cable TV, would rather partner with the networks to offer their own streaming service and they have various ways to disfavour Netflix (charging Netflix money to not be throttled, counting Netflix but not their own service to the user's bandwidth caps).
I pay $35/mo to Virgin, whom I believe just resell Sprint's network. Works great almost everywhere I go. The only exception is Mendocino country, no service whatsoever up there, not even voice.
I had a cheap, cheap prepaid phone for 7 or 8 years, because I didn't feel like paying $800+/yr for a phone. Mind you, I don't do cable TV because $700+/yr buys a lot of DVD boxsets (and videogames) instead.
I only ever shopped at CompUSA once. I bought a PlayStation memory card there and, after checking out, was accosted by two staff members who refused to let me leave until they saw my receipt, appropriately marked. The checkout person hadn't marked it properly and they made me wait while they found him/her (who had just gone on break) to verify I had, actually, paid for this thing despite having a receipt.
I never shopped there again and made sure all my friends knew about this experience. I do not appreciate being treated like a thief.
I would say Elite was superior, and probably the influence for Starflight since it came out 2 years before. You didn't land on planets in Elite, but every system had a space station to dock with (you had to fly into the station). Also, the galaxies were procedurally generated, so lots of places to trade between. You could mine asteroids, fight the station police, trade illicit goods and become a fugitive, upgrade your ship, scoop fuel from the sun...
I think there are technically two. Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern Pinball, although I don't believe the former has put out their first game yet. In any case the market is the merest shadow of its heyday.
I made pinball machines in the 1990s and I don't think you're exactly right. 2.5 times as many games would've been about 2.5 times the maintenance - time per paid credit would've stayed the same, so there would've been 2.5 times as much wear and tear. Also, games in good locations (which is where new games were mostly sold) would've had their earnings go down because they spent big blocks of time being played continuously so they would've need to pick up a lot more players in the slack times.
Operators had lots of control over pricing, especially on Williams/Bally games; we had elaborate support for custom pricing. So third-tier locations could've helped themselves, but chose not to.
What really killed coin-op was that all manufacturers, both pinball and video, were making games that were more and more expensive for operators to buy, but earned less and less money on location. That slowed the churn rate of games (being sold from bigger to smaller operators) and glutted the market with backstock.
At work I have a maximised IDE on my left monitor (with the editor split vertically so I can see a .c and .h file side by side).
On my right monitor I have my IM client up against the right hand side, email against the left, browser in the middle and taller than the email, music player in the top left. I put IM windows to the right, so they touch the left-hand edge of the IM contact list.
This lets me work on code and watch for incoming emails while referencing a document off the wiki, see when someone comes back from lunch or gets out of a meeting (their IM status) and if someone messages me I can click straight to the window to reply. Similarly, I can click the music player to the front and immediately get at the volume or track list or whatever, without having to alt-tab or go down to the taskbar.
If all that stuff was maximised or tiled it would be a big pain in the ass for me. I don't log out or turn off the computer for weeks at a time, so once the windows are positioned I'm good - and most of them remember where they were last time anyway.
You're thinking of 'kipe'.
The way to look at the federal budget is the Monthly Treasury Reports - http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/index.html . They are much more concise and don't have all that useless airy-fairy language. They show the current month and the year to date. I don't think state budgets in general are less complicated. All budgets are hierarchical so it's just a question of how far down you want to drill. I bet even Wyoming's budget has more than an individual can wrap their head around if you break it down enough. Did that office in that town's annex of that county's branch of that subgroup of that sub-department of that department really need 3 new toner cartridges?
I would say what really matters is the big picture, the top 2 or maybe 3 layers of any budget. It'll be a few top-level areas that make up the bulk of the money.