Don't trust your Wifi router to secure your internet connection, is the answer. WEP was built for wireless, and cracked. WPA was built for wireless, and cracked. Bluetooth was built for wireless, and cracked. It's only a matter of time before WPA2 and everything else goes the same way.
Plug a *real* router in there somewhere so that such things can be monitored and logged and/or you can VPN over your own internal Wifi link so that even someone having complete access to your wireless isn't a problem at all. Then you don't even *need* wifi encryption turned on at all (but it's a good hindrance to any intruders) and you can play games like upside-down-ternet with people who try to get a free ride on your connection.
That's the setup I had - just had a WPA network (WPA2 wasn't around at the time) and didn't trust WEP or (correctly, it seems now) WPA to secure my network. So I just made the wireless access point be an "untrusted" network, as it should be, on my main Linux router - which did the actual connection to the Internet and offering IP's etc.
Whenever I connected to wifi in the home, I ran OpenVPN over the top (so the only traffic you could sniff would be my already-encrypted OpenVPN traffic) - which was transparent and automatic and simple and could use per-client keys. I surfed, and my guests minds were blown that even after I'd told them the WPA password and they'd joined the wireless network they couldn't "see" anything at all.
This also lets you block EVERYTHING coming in via wifi to your laptop except for that OpenVPN port with a decent software firewall, which means you don't have to worry about something accessing filesharing ports, or tapping into whatever junk services your PC's are exposing to the whole wifi network (which, incidentally, can save a lot of bandwidth).
You're seriously relying on a piece of £30 Taiwanese crap to secure your entire Internet connection being broadcast over a radio sphere that could be kilometres wide if you have the right reception equipment? Nope. Treat it like an unsecured Internet connection - tunnel into a known-good server which has a wired connection to the Internet.
Re:I use mintty and cygwin instead
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PuTTY 0.61 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Cygwin is an horrendous suite to work with. Really. Just go look at how you're supposed to guarantee what version of the Cygwin DLL your applications end up using (Hint: Delete any cygwin1.dll that's not in the System directory and hope-to-god that's the most up-to-date). It can't even co-reside with itself so the second you load up a Cygwin app it's a gamble as to what version of the DLL it will find / use and whether it's even compatible any more, and what it'll do to applications you run later on. I take it that you don't do a lot of development with Cygwin compilers because it's a minefield, and after a while, you give anything to remove that Cygwin dependency (which is basically why MinGW exists, for instance).
Also, the tools are horrendously slow. I have a Cygwin development environment that I've carried for a long while and it's stupidly slow when it comes to anything half-decent, anything that forks, etc. not to mention compatibility issues every time you have to move to a new Windows version, etc.
PuTTY, in comparison, is a single file, no dependencies, works fine and everywhere and does 99% of what you want (the example you show is the most esoteric and pointless thing I could think of to show off a console, and relies mainly on the fact that you have an ffplay that can read from pipes on Windows - nothing to do with the console, as such).
A console is a shell client. That's it. It doesn't need to integrate with my current OS / desktop, or form perfect pipes, or do anything more than necessary - it just needs to show me a remote shell on another computer so I can issue commands and see responses. PuTTY does that and does it brilliantly - so much so that I've ditched lots of serial-port comms utilities in favour of PuTTY instead because it also support just raw comms. It's also so incredibly tiny and portable (unlike your Cygwin installation) that I can literally carry it everywhere.
The only thing I *hate* about PuTTY is that all the messing about with keys should really be simplified a lot without having to resort to extra utilities and third-party addons.
Seriously, I don't adjust volumes in games (except to turn off music on some of them). Everything is at "max". And then I use either the master volume *in WINDOWS* (usually via some hotkey on laptops) or the speaker volume itself to bring it down to a decent level. I don't need the games to have volume settings, either internally or via some Windows hack, at all. It all "just works" and has since Windows 3.1! It's honestly not a problem that I, or anyone I support, has ever had - and can be a source of problems, and is nowhere NEAR a reason to upgrade an OS (not just because I'm sure you could dig up a audio mixer driver that could do just want you wanted if there was really a need for it).
And, working in schools where they use a lot of interactive "noisy" apps etc., I can't think of anything worse than a per-executable (and presumably per-user) volume setting. God, I get enough support calls now where someone has turned the volume too low to hear it, or locked it too high, and there's already the speaker-volume, master volume, mixer-volumes, and in-applications volumes to get them to check before you can tell a sound even works.
It'll play merry hell with diagnosis - the standard way to test sound is to put something like WMP playing the Windows startup sound on loop and then adjust everything until it's audible and the correct volume. I could spend 10 minutes doing that per workstation only to find that program X has been configured to do that differently to WMP via some Windows settings, or because a different user has logged on, or because the programs changed (hash or location, however Windows tracks it) and I need to redo all the settings for that for every user.
Seriously, people, it's a dumb idea that you're not using properly at all (or you wouldn't be trying to turn down all the in-game settings to cut one game's speech rather than just control a global volume knob) and, if you were (e.g. for level control because channel X is louder than channel Y), it's actually far more complex than it needs to be.
And I would find that a complete waste of investment, personally. I don't have any problems with per-application faders (if you have more than one program playing sound simultaneously, of course it will sound a mess, and if you have that you can adjust those programs - a volume control is an almost universal widget on anything that plays audio) and certainly wouldn't ever use them.
If something is playing sound, it's because I need to hear it. I haven't touched the volume control panel in YEARS on this machine image that I use, only the hardware Up/Down buttons.
And floating-point audio path? Puh-lease. Is it running over oxygen-free, gold-plated processor registers? Otherwise I'm just not touching it...:-P
But considering that leads to a complete OS compromise, that's pretty poor coding.
You literally only have to turn it on for a second and someone can root you without you knowing. You only have to witness someone pair with a device, or do a single Bluetooth transfer and you can root them. And what are the implications for embedded versions of Windows in, say, phones.
A lot of people use Bluetooth, it's expected to be quite secure in terms of not rooting your computer (people being able to monitor and sniff your Bluetooth data is a different class of problem entirely, and puny in comparison). And like the article says - you probably have the faulty software installed already and only an single tap of that Bluetooth switch will make you vulnerable to automatic rooting, like a virus.
A virus that exploits this will potentially go quickly global and be hard to cleanse because you literally may not even notice that you've been infected and switching on Bluetooth for a split second to send a file to your phone, answer your parent's Skype on a headset, etc. isn't generally considered an infection route.
I agree in that I have BT turned off on everything I own and set to hidden by default but it would be scary if I were using one of the vulnerable systems. That's the sort of thing that will still be catching people out five years from now and it's probably only the first of many such problems. Now before you can put a PC on the net, you need to make sure you've never enabled Bluetooth while Windows was executing until you've got it to the latest patch level.
And thus we reach the point where XP is hardly targeted anymore, isn't vulnerable to the same bugs, is still under support for another three years, and Windows 8 comes out "later this year".
Tell me why I should be on 7 already, after having all my Vista testing thrown out of the window once already?
Please, somebody, print this in 2000pt Helvetica and place it on a banner opposite every international MS HQ for at least the next year and preferably until they *actually* release Windows 8.
Chances are that if you don't, someone will try to backtrack on this before the month is out.
Because when they issue a warrant to search your home, they don't force you to unlock all the doors, open all the windows and make you point out every place you COULD have something hiding.
The problem is not the access, it's the self-incrimination. You can't, in any reasonable first-world country, FORCE someone to provide a case / evidence against themselves. You can find the evidence, you can look through their stuff, you can see what they have, but you can't FORCE them to go into their house and pull something out because you suspect they have it (because they might well not, and them FAILING to produce something that didn't exist would be illegal in that case).
Self-incrimination is in many law systems. My ex-wife had a saying, being legally trained as she was. If someone asked her a question that she didn't want to answer ("Am I fat?"), then her favourite phrase was "I refuse to respond on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me". It doesn't matter if someone did the crime or not, you can't FORCE people to give evidence against themselves because the repercussions for actually-innocent people don't bear thinking about.
Sorry, I don't worship celebrities, I worship the science.
The science that's had its funding cut so it can't even replicate what was achieved over 40 years ago, and won't be able to do it again for decades. I think $100,000 would be better spent on something like the X-Prize or just donating it to a scientific project than owning something vaguely (very vaguely) associated with the past glories of a single nation.
It's why I'm much happier now that ESA is actually starting to lead the game rather than NASA - it means science is being done with my tax money for once. And judging by the Galileo array's ahead-of-schedule, vastly-under-budget (enough to deploy years ahead of schedule) achievement, it was money well spent.
Sure, I'd love to chat to Armstrong or any of the others. But I'd actually prefer it that we were creating more "new" history, than re-living old, now matter how small.
Every time I go on holiday, something weird will happen with a system that's been running perfectly for years. It's guaranteed. And it won't just be because I've been kicking that system back into action all the time and "would get around to fixing it", I would get the really esoteric interconnected problems that suddenly crop up out of nowhere and you're never entirely sure you've solved until months afterwards.
However, my employer knows I'm on the end of a phone if it is indeed an emergency. They have called on me in Italy several times. The trick is to take holidays FAR AWAY from your place of work, and then they can't do anything but cope without you. Flying back to fix a company server? No thanks. Not unless you provide DOUBLE the time I'd taken off in lieu as compensation for ruining my long-planned holiday through poor planning / hiring. If a company can't cope without any single individual, then its hiring policies suck. What would you do if he went under a bus and was *never* coming back?
The worst that's ever happened to me is that I lined up my own brother to go into the company should the emergency they were having not be solved by my instructions. It was, however it would have be after-hours, because he works too, but they would at least have someone there who knew the right switch to press, could be talked through a RAID rebuild, etc. and not have to be led every step of the way and incur only a single day's downtime without making things worse.
Think the downtime wasn't important? It was a school with automated billing, parental contact, phone system, heating controls, registration, medical records, salaries, you name it, not to mention IT lessons and exams. Without registration, etc. the school is legally not allowed to open because they have no records of which children are where, no medical records, etc. Guess what? They coped for the day because they had contingency plans (i.e. cancel all IT lessons and do something else instead, catching up again next week, manual financial control, manual registration, etc.). There are very few companies that *can't* carry on if the IT dies. It might be inconvenient, it might mean harder and more work, but it's rarely impossible unless you're something like an ISP or a datacentre.
If there was nobody else suitable to come and fix the problem? Not hard - hire an IT guy to come in. You do have support contracts for your gear and software, yes? Or you could organise an emergency contractor to visit and fix your problem? It's not hard and the only problem there is finding the right guy (i.e. someone who *can* walk into the middle of a mess and at least get something working enough to last until the "real" IT guy gets back).
If you honestly, genuinely can't cope without an employee - you need him to train an assistant, or even two. It won't be perfect but it's better than nothing. Failing that, you need a large enough team that you can do something on the guy's instructions. Failing that, you need your support contracts which pretty much come as standard with business-level hardware/software. Failing that, you need a contractor at short-notice. If you can't do those four and get to a working system of some fashion within 24 hours, you were always going to be in deep shit whenever anything went wrong anyway. What would you do if the guy left and you had to find a replacement? What if he died? What if he suffered amnesia and forgot all the passwords? What if he was arrested? What if, what if, what if. Or you could just do the normal IT-thing and have backups - lots of them.
Nobody is that invaluable that they have to abandon holidays and drive away from their kids to come back after-hours. Sorry, it's just not true, and if it "is" then that's only the company's fault. It's purely a money saving solution rather than hiring someone else to fix the mess - get the guy who's away on holiday and pay him for a few extra hours - it's cheaper than calling on your support contracts or call-out fees for an emerge
lagniappe = small gift given by a merchant, apparently. Are you in Louisiana because that's apparently the only place in the entire world that you're likely to run into that word.
Let's now be silly here. PSTN operates on a separate grid + backup power basis so that it works even in the case of a (normal) power cut. There's no reason that cellular or broadband networks can't be required to do the same and/or don't already do that.
I've never experienced a cellular "outage" except through something other than simple power - i.e. oversubscribed networks, busy periods (e.g. New Year Eve), or just plain stupidity of someone changing settings they shouldn't. So there's nothing to say that the cellular network isn't already backed in terms of additional / temporary / emergency power.
It's like saying what would have happened during a PSTN outage even if the normal grid wasn't affected? Same problem, and would have happened just as often (PSTN networks aren't somehow infallible, and sometimes HAVE to be shutdown for safety reasons if they are still supplying power to places that could be dangerous - e.g. fires, gas leaks, etc.). All that happens is that instead of PSTN you use cellular, or broadband (which is still essentially running on the same PSTN copper/street cabinets/exchanges).
The only "problem" is that cellular isn't a guaranteed service in that it could be up and running but far too busy to let you call rather than, say, the emergency services. Although they have a QoS for such emergency services, you won't necessarily be able to get signal in an emergency purely because of the sheer number of people near you trying to do the same. But broadband? That's a different matter.
PSTN was just "a" network. What did you do before you had cellular and there was an accident? You relied on PSTN or "something else" (i.e. your neighbours PSTN, or CB radio, or whatever). Now you just shift your expectations and use other methods.
To be honest, in an urban environment, I've never had quite so many completely independent ways of contacting people in an emergency. The loss of one, albeit one of the most reliable, is hardly a loss at all in terms of safety. There are at least three different methods of Internet connection available to me just sitting at home - cable internet, phone-line-based internet (e.g. ADSL, etc.) and 3G internet. They are all more-or-less independent of each other so if the 3G goes down, SOMETHING else will work and if the ADSL goes down, I can always hook up a 3G dongle (on any of 5 major networks that all run seperate infrastructure and frequencies).
If I was out in the sticks, I'd be slightly more worried but your basic landline phone isn't going away - it's just changing its underlying technology. There's still plenty of options open to anyone that needs them. It's not like it's the 40's anymore where the next phone is several miles away and you have no other backups at all.
However, it's probably the only thing he's ever given an opinion on that I happen to agree with. I just find it funny that it's a comment about something far removed from IT where we actually see eye-to-eye.
Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
Seriously, if you don't want other people able to read your emails without your knowledge the only way is to run your own domain and MX server (however even that is subject to the terms of your agreement with your upstream provider and host - probably only co-lo's would give you a guarantee that they're not just browsing through your server's disks, but you can't practically "force" SMTP encryption for people trying to deliver mail to you).
VPS are dirt-cheap nowadays and can be stupidly easy to setup and have things like SquirrelMail running. Securing them is pretty easy (block all access to webmail/pop3/imap except from your personal static IP address, or even a local address and then VPN in to do those things, and leave only the SMTP ports open to the world).
Email is an inherently insecure, readable, open format. If you want guarantees about who's storing / reading / analysing that data, you want to cut out as many middle-men as possible. Or you could just get a life and not plug in real information into your Google profile...
What exactly are you doing that anyone on Slashdot couldn't make themselves, better, cheaper, using components they already have and software that already exists (there are a million and one game-launcher-style apps out there, most of them built for emulators but supporting just about anything you can run via a command line)? Have you checked what X and no video acceleration does to things as simple as TuxRacer (Hint: I had this same idea but for a small desktop-based console for my parents ages ago, and spent more time trying to get things to work reliably and at a decent speed than anything else)?
For that price, you can pick up handheld open source consoles that do the same (or hack an existing commercial console), you can pick up tiny nano-ITX boards of similar spec, the rest is just packaging and probably wouldn't be worth the extra cost to anyone who was interesting in carrying around what is basically a laptop-style games machine.
Additionally, what you describe is actually all in place or surpassed on my normal laptop - even the Playstation gamepads via some USB adaptors for them. The laptop even does HDMI out and VGA out (which 99% of big TV's support now) and has the oomph to do all sorts of graphics filters to make it look half-decent, and I carry adaptors for anything more specialised like Composite / S-Video (hell, you can get them via USB nowadays). The games? Not only can I run all the open-source ones, I can run things like Crysis too and a couple of hundred Steam games. Not only that, I can have Gb's of emulators for systems going back decades and have power enough to run them all. And when I'm done there, I can go online or work and not even notice a difference. Plus I get several hours of battery life and nothing "extra" to lug around.
You really have to have a USP - unique selling point. Yours seems to be "it runs software that someone else has written that already works on every other platform known to man" along with possibly "I set this up for you, and charged you for the privilege".
I'm not saying you couldn't sell them - it just doesn't look very enticing compared to what a $299 netbook with a couple of little extras could do. If you were to be making them en masse for a $100 or so each - i.e. set-top-box price-range, then you'd have something. But even then, it's unlikely to be very original and/or very mass-market.
If you sold more than a 100 or so, I'd be very impressed.
The problem to me is price - I don't mind playing with things like this and knocking up games for them but £50 / â50 / 70$ is a lot of money to ask for this. I didn't pay that for a GP2X and that knocks the socks off this and is portable, handheld, with its own LCD screen, has TV-out, dual-200MHz ARM cores, runs Linux, etc.
This is closer to the "build-your-own-pong" style kits you can get from Vellemans but at stupid cost for something quite simple. If it only has two chips, why does it cost so much, even unassembled (the unassembled prices for the European version, for instance, don't even include the chips and other components - just a PCB, really).
If it was £20, it would be worth dabbling with. As it is, it's just a programmed AVR chip on an RGB chip (and even that's unnecessary for the European SCART version). £50 - plus power - plus casing - plus soldering (in some cases) - plus controllers - plus cables - plus time and effort and software setup, just to get something that's the equivalent of a NES or SNES? It doesn't even have USB and SD-card access is only beta (and I bet it's just a bit-banging SPI interface to the card).
I'd rather just use an old NES or SNES with a EEPROM that I can put programs on - cheaper, easier and probably slightly more powerful and bound to be infinitely more stable and reliable.
Bring the price down to £20-30 (i.e. slightly more than those "100 arcade game in a joystick" things that plug into your TV) and I'll buy one. Until then, I'm better off either hacking on a real console, or just running stuff on a chip myself.
The Pandora isn't actually shipping - again. Been in production for three years and some people who ordered on the first few days **still** haven't received one.
For the past few months you could pay almost the price of the console again in order to get a "Premium" queue-jumper Pandora before even the first pre-orderers from three years ago - after the first few hundred they stopped that and they have said they only offered that because otherwise they would have gone bankrupt and been unable to ship anybody's order.
Current status is that they are abandoning their PCB manufacturer for another, because it's taken them three years to actually get the PCB manufacturer to do anything worthwhile (they accept any excuse and the "community" eggs them on to be nice to everyone because they have a shed-load of money invested in the hope of receiving a device that's not materialised in significant numbers after three years) and now all the PCB's that have been sitting in the manufacturer's storage for all that time have rotted - which means basically starting months of work all over again with another manufacturer.
And they can't even ship Premium orders any more because of that. They've shipped maybe a thousand or two units in total, and a lot of those have gone on eBay almost immediately because with only a thousand units in the wild, most of the software is just ports of Ubuntu software and a couple of emulators.
They still haven't finished "batch 1" yet, and have had a ton of returns and problems (Wifi is the latest - the new boards produced just don't have working wifi because nobody was testing it properly, so they all had to go back) - buttons being faulty, cases cracking, you name it they have problems with it.
They are currently threatening to sue the PCB manufacturer but how they intend to do that while on the edge of bankruptcy is uncertain. Basically, you aren't going to see it in significant numbers enough to attract developers, and certainly not for years (current batch orders haven't even started yet and probably won't for another year, and they have to re-order all the cases, plastics, etc. for that batch)
The running joke among Pandora-watchers is "Two Months" - that's how long everything is said to take until they are back in business and gets stated with regularity every two months for the past three years.
I walked into Maplin Electronics once, only to overhear a salesguy tell someone that a surge-protection strip was VITAL if they wanted to use that external USB hard drive they'd just bought. It was imperative, apparently, and without it their drive wouldn't last a month without blowing up.
So before he managed to return with the £50 surge-protection strip he wanted to sell them, I had a quick word in the customer's ear and they just paid for the USB hard drive and left. What's even more hilarious - behind the guy was a 20min 500W UPS of a very well-known brand for the same price as the "extension lead with a fuse" that he was trying to sell them.
Yeah, because the biggest selling console ever, an instantaneous household name, and 5-years of entirely profit-making sales are a horrendous thing for a company.
*YOU* may not like it, but Nintendo haven't suffered in the slightest. You're really complaining because you aren't in their target market, not that Nintendo aren't doing well for themselves.
Personally, I bought a Wii (original) last month. It was finally what I consider a sensible price for a brand-new full kit (including chargers and two Wiimotes-with-MotionPlus and all the associated gubbins), and I can pick up games for £3-4 each in some cases. I'd played it before at my parents (who have had one for years) and it was... well... a games console like I remember other games consoles - no messing about, into a game, play it, no having to even read an instruction manual and away you go, bursting into fits of laughter when someone falls off the track for the millionth time, or someone else makes silly faces while pretending to row a canoe. When I was a kid, I would have killed for it, even though I consider myself a pretty experienced gamer.
Get this - my girlfriend, who had never played any video games except "Purple Turtle" on the Commodore 64 (go look it up, be sure to bring a resuscitator in case you die laughing), is always switching it on and playing it and wants first go of all the "new games" we get and even browses through them on the shop shelves herself.
It's not targeted at you. It never was. The next one might be but I'd doubt even that - more likely they just want a slightly larger market than the Wii had, so they make similar money even if people decide the Wii is good enough for them.
"The majority of gamers" aren't even in your age-group, most probably (I believe the median age has shifted to those born in the late 70's/early 80's. Again, you're unconsciously confusing "gamer" with some private definition that can't include grannies and 3-year-olds. Nintendo really don't care about your zombie games, because they made more money out of targeting a common base (and not a particular age-group) than all the other console manufacturers did in the last 5 years.
Great, so you get a reputation for working on projects that later come up in the news for how much you were walked over because you didn't want to rock the boat. Any employer would be happy to see that on your CV.
Additionally, I think "I left that HUGE project to pursue other ventures" would be interpreted correctly by anyone who's heard the horror stories about such places, and actually proves you have balls and care about your career whereas "Yeah, I worked on that horror-story project and got nothing to show for it" doesn't have the same effect.
Additionally - if you're doing something "just for your resume (CV)", then your employers will hate you, your colleagues will hate you and, eventually, people who read your CV will laugh at you. I don't think I've *ever* done anything just to put it on my CV. Hell, I actually leave more out of my CV than most people would put in - it's just not necessary and doesn't make that big a difference - a quiet confidence, well-written CV and the *ability* to demonstrate industry experience is a million times more important than "Oh, yeah, I was vaguely associated with Project X at some point in my life", especially if you have ZERO idea how well that project will turn out (e.g. Daikatana, DNF, etc. - I would deliberately REMOVE those from my CV if I were associated with them).
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Don't trust your Wifi router to secure your internet connection, is the answer. WEP was built for wireless, and cracked. WPA was built for wireless, and cracked. Bluetooth was built for wireless, and cracked. It's only a matter of time before WPA2 and everything else goes the same way.
Plug a *real* router in there somewhere so that such things can be monitored and logged and/or you can VPN over your own internal Wifi link so that even someone having complete access to your wireless isn't a problem at all. Then you don't even *need* wifi encryption turned on at all (but it's a good hindrance to any intruders) and you can play games like upside-down-ternet with people who try to get a free ride on your connection.
That's the setup I had - just had a WPA network (WPA2 wasn't around at the time) and didn't trust WEP or (correctly, it seems now) WPA to secure my network. So I just made the wireless access point be an "untrusted" network, as it should be, on my main Linux router - which did the actual connection to the Internet and offering IP's etc.
Whenever I connected to wifi in the home, I ran OpenVPN over the top (so the only traffic you could sniff would be my already-encrypted OpenVPN traffic) - which was transparent and automatic and simple and could use per-client keys. I surfed, and my guests minds were blown that even after I'd told them the WPA password and they'd joined the wireless network they couldn't "see" anything at all.
This also lets you block EVERYTHING coming in via wifi to your laptop except for that OpenVPN port with a decent software firewall, which means you don't have to worry about something accessing filesharing ports, or tapping into whatever junk services your PC's are exposing to the whole wifi network (which, incidentally, can save a lot of bandwidth).
You're seriously relying on a piece of £30 Taiwanese crap to secure your entire Internet connection being broadcast over a radio sphere that could be kilometres wide if you have the right reception equipment? Nope. Treat it like an unsecured Internet connection - tunnel into a known-good server which has a wired connection to the Internet.
Cygwin is an horrendous suite to work with. Really. Just go look at how you're supposed to guarantee what version of the Cygwin DLL your applications end up using (Hint: Delete any cygwin1.dll that's not in the System directory and hope-to-god that's the most up-to-date). It can't even co-reside with itself so the second you load up a Cygwin app it's a gamble as to what version of the DLL it will find / use and whether it's even compatible any more, and what it'll do to applications you run later on. I take it that you don't do a lot of development with Cygwin compilers because it's a minefield, and after a while, you give anything to remove that Cygwin dependency (which is basically why MinGW exists, for instance).
Also, the tools are horrendously slow. I have a Cygwin development environment that I've carried for a long while and it's stupidly slow when it comes to anything half-decent, anything that forks, etc. not to mention compatibility issues every time you have to move to a new Windows version, etc.
PuTTY, in comparison, is a single file, no dependencies, works fine and everywhere and does 99% of what you want (the example you show is the most esoteric and pointless thing I could think of to show off a console, and relies mainly on the fact that you have an ffplay that can read from pipes on Windows - nothing to do with the console, as such).
A console is a shell client. That's it. It doesn't need to integrate with my current OS / desktop, or form perfect pipes, or do anything more than necessary - it just needs to show me a remote shell on another computer so I can issue commands and see responses. PuTTY does that and does it brilliantly - so much so that I've ditched lots of serial-port comms utilities in favour of PuTTY instead because it also support just raw comms. It's also so incredibly tiny and portable (unlike your Cygwin installation) that I can literally carry it everywhere.
The only thing I *hate* about PuTTY is that all the messing about with keys should really be simplified a lot without having to resort to extra utilities and third-party addons.
*Cough* hardware speaker volume.
Seriously, I don't adjust volumes in games (except to turn off music on some of them). Everything is at "max". And then I use either the master volume *in WINDOWS* (usually via some hotkey on laptops) or the speaker volume itself to bring it down to a decent level. I don't need the games to have volume settings, either internally or via some Windows hack, at all. It all "just works" and has since Windows 3.1! It's honestly not a problem that I, or anyone I support, has ever had - and can be a source of problems, and is nowhere NEAR a reason to upgrade an OS (not just because I'm sure you could dig up a audio mixer driver that could do just want you wanted if there was really a need for it).
And, working in schools where they use a lot of interactive "noisy" apps etc., I can't think of anything worse than a per-executable (and presumably per-user) volume setting. God, I get enough support calls now where someone has turned the volume too low to hear it, or locked it too high, and there's already the speaker-volume, master volume, mixer-volumes, and in-applications volumes to get them to check before you can tell a sound even works.
It'll play merry hell with diagnosis - the standard way to test sound is to put something like WMP playing the Windows startup sound on loop and then adjust everything until it's audible and the correct volume. I could spend 10 minutes doing that per workstation only to find that program X has been configured to do that differently to WMP via some Windows settings, or because a different user has logged on, or because the programs changed (hash or location, however Windows tracks it) and I need to redo all the settings for that for every user.
Seriously, people, it's a dumb idea that you're not using properly at all (or you wouldn't be trying to turn down all the in-game settings to cut one game's speech rather than just control a global volume knob) and, if you were (e.g. for level control because channel X is louder than channel Y), it's actually far more complex than it needs to be.
And I would find that a complete waste of investment, personally. I don't have any problems with per-application faders (if you have more than one program playing sound simultaneously, of course it will sound a mess, and if you have that you can adjust those programs - a volume control is an almost universal widget on anything that plays audio) and certainly wouldn't ever use them.
If something is playing sound, it's because I need to hear it. I haven't touched the volume control panel in YEARS on this machine image that I use, only the hardware Up/Down buttons.
And floating-point audio path? Puh-lease. Is it running over oxygen-free, gold-plated processor registers? Otherwise I'm just not touching it... :-P
But considering that leads to a complete OS compromise, that's pretty poor coding.
You literally only have to turn it on for a second and someone can root you without you knowing. You only have to witness someone pair with a device, or do a single Bluetooth transfer and you can root them. And what are the implications for embedded versions of Windows in, say, phones.
A lot of people use Bluetooth, it's expected to be quite secure in terms of not rooting your computer (people being able to monitor and sniff your Bluetooth data is a different class of problem entirely, and puny in comparison). And like the article says - you probably have the faulty software installed already and only an single tap of that Bluetooth switch will make you vulnerable to automatic rooting, like a virus.
A virus that exploits this will potentially go quickly global and be hard to cleanse because you literally may not even notice that you've been infected and switching on Bluetooth for a split second to send a file to your phone, answer your parent's Skype on a headset, etc. isn't generally considered an infection route.
I agree in that I have BT turned off on everything I own and set to hidden by default but it would be scary if I were using one of the vulnerable systems. That's the sort of thing that will still be catching people out five years from now and it's probably only the first of many such problems. Now before you can put a PC on the net, you need to make sure you've never enabled Bluetooth while Windows was executing until you've got it to the latest patch level.
And thus we reach the point where XP is hardly targeted anymore, isn't vulnerable to the same bugs, is still under support for another three years, and Windows 8 comes out "later this year".
Tell me why I should be on 7 already, after having all my Vista testing thrown out of the window once already?
And XP still has three more years of Extended Support. Way to kill Windows 7 off early, Microsoft!
Please, somebody, print this in 2000pt Helvetica and place it on a banner opposite every international MS HQ for at least the next year and preferably until they *actually* release Windows 8.
Chances are that if you don't, someone will try to backtrack on this before the month is out.
I want a refund on my tax, please.
Powerpoint for soldiers? What next, battle plans sent via MS .docx? :-)
... is a military-grade projector, and why would you want one?
Because when they issue a warrant to search your home, they don't force you to unlock all the doors, open all the windows and make you point out every place you COULD have something hiding.
The problem is not the access, it's the self-incrimination. You can't, in any reasonable first-world country, FORCE someone to provide a case / evidence against themselves. You can find the evidence, you can look through their stuff, you can see what they have, but you can't FORCE them to go into their house and pull something out because you suspect they have it (because they might well not, and them FAILING to produce something that didn't exist would be illegal in that case).
Self-incrimination is in many law systems. My ex-wife had a saying, being legally trained as she was. If someone asked her a question that she didn't want to answer ("Am I fat?"), then her favourite phrase was "I refuse to respond on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me". It doesn't matter if someone did the crime or not, you can't FORCE people to give evidence against themselves because the repercussions for actually-innocent people don't bear thinking about.
"animations for the websites I design"
Spotted your problem right there.
Sorry, I don't worship celebrities, I worship the science.
The science that's had its funding cut so it can't even replicate what was achieved over 40 years ago, and won't be able to do it again for decades. I think $100,000 would be better spent on something like the X-Prize or just donating it to a scientific project than owning something vaguely (very vaguely) associated with the past glories of a single nation.
It's why I'm much happier now that ESA is actually starting to lead the game rather than NASA - it means science is being done with my tax money for once. And judging by the Galileo array's ahead-of-schedule, vastly-under-budget (enough to deploy years ahead of schedule) achievement, it was money well spent.
Sure, I'd love to chat to Armstrong or any of the others. But I'd actually prefer it that we were creating more "new" history, than re-living old, now matter how small.
Every time I go on holiday, something weird will happen with a system that's been running perfectly for years. It's guaranteed. And it won't just be because I've been kicking that system back into action all the time and "would get around to fixing it", I would get the really esoteric interconnected problems that suddenly crop up out of nowhere and you're never entirely sure you've solved until months afterwards.
However, my employer knows I'm on the end of a phone if it is indeed an emergency. They have called on me in Italy several times. The trick is to take holidays FAR AWAY from your place of work, and then they can't do anything but cope without you. Flying back to fix a company server? No thanks. Not unless you provide DOUBLE the time I'd taken off in lieu as compensation for ruining my long-planned holiday through poor planning / hiring. If a company can't cope without any single individual, then its hiring policies suck. What would you do if he went under a bus and was *never* coming back?
The worst that's ever happened to me is that I lined up my own brother to go into the company should the emergency they were having not be solved by my instructions. It was, however it would have be after-hours, because he works too, but they would at least have someone there who knew the right switch to press, could be talked through a RAID rebuild, etc. and not have to be led every step of the way and incur only a single day's downtime without making things worse.
Think the downtime wasn't important? It was a school with automated billing, parental contact, phone system, heating controls, registration, medical records, salaries, you name it, not to mention IT lessons and exams. Without registration, etc. the school is legally not allowed to open because they have no records of which children are where, no medical records, etc. Guess what? They coped for the day because they had contingency plans (i.e. cancel all IT lessons and do something else instead, catching up again next week, manual financial control, manual registration, etc.). There are very few companies that *can't* carry on if the IT dies. It might be inconvenient, it might mean harder and more work, but it's rarely impossible unless you're something like an ISP or a datacentre.
If there was nobody else suitable to come and fix the problem? Not hard - hire an IT guy to come in. You do have support contracts for your gear and software, yes? Or you could organise an emergency contractor to visit and fix your problem? It's not hard and the only problem there is finding the right guy (i.e. someone who *can* walk into the middle of a mess and at least get something working enough to last until the "real" IT guy gets back).
If you honestly, genuinely can't cope without an employee - you need him to train an assistant, or even two. It won't be perfect but it's better than nothing. Failing that, you need a large enough team that you can do something on the guy's instructions. Failing that, you need your support contracts which pretty much come as standard with business-level hardware/software. Failing that, you need a contractor at short-notice. If you can't do those four and get to a working system of some fashion within 24 hours, you were always going to be in deep shit whenever anything went wrong anyway. What would you do if the guy left and you had to find a replacement? What if he died? What if he suffered amnesia and forgot all the passwords? What if he was arrested? What if, what if, what if. Or you could just do the normal IT-thing and have backups - lots of them.
Nobody is that invaluable that they have to abandon holidays and drive away from their kids to come back after-hours. Sorry, it's just not true, and if it "is" then that's only the company's fault. It's purely a money saving solution rather than hiring someone else to fix the mess - get the guy who's away on holiday and pay him for a few extra hours - it's cheaper than calling on your support contracts or call-out fees for an emerge
Hell, I had to translate your translation:
lagniappe = small gift given by a merchant, apparently. Are you in Louisiana because that's apparently the only place in the entire world that you're likely to run into that word.
Let's now be silly here. PSTN operates on a separate grid + backup power basis so that it works even in the case of a (normal) power cut. There's no reason that cellular or broadband networks can't be required to do the same and/or don't already do that.
I've never experienced a cellular "outage" except through something other than simple power - i.e. oversubscribed networks, busy periods (e.g. New Year Eve), or just plain stupidity of someone changing settings they shouldn't. So there's nothing to say that the cellular network isn't already backed in terms of additional / temporary / emergency power.
It's like saying what would have happened during a PSTN outage even if the normal grid wasn't affected? Same problem, and would have happened just as often (PSTN networks aren't somehow infallible, and sometimes HAVE to be shutdown for safety reasons if they are still supplying power to places that could be dangerous - e.g. fires, gas leaks, etc.). All that happens is that instead of PSTN you use cellular, or broadband (which is still essentially running on the same PSTN copper/street cabinets/exchanges).
The only "problem" is that cellular isn't a guaranteed service in that it could be up and running but far too busy to let you call rather than, say, the emergency services. Although they have a QoS for such emergency services, you won't necessarily be able to get signal in an emergency purely because of the sheer number of people near you trying to do the same. But broadband? That's a different matter.
PSTN was just "a" network. What did you do before you had cellular and there was an accident? You relied on PSTN or "something else" (i.e. your neighbours PSTN, or CB radio, or whatever). Now you just shift your expectations and use other methods.
To be honest, in an urban environment, I've never had quite so many completely independent ways of contacting people in an emergency. The loss of one, albeit one of the most reliable, is hardly a loss at all in terms of safety. There are at least three different methods of Internet connection available to me just sitting at home - cable internet, phone-line-based internet (e.g. ADSL, etc.) and 3G internet. They are all more-or-less independent of each other so if the 3G goes down, SOMETHING else will work and if the ADSL goes down, I can always hook up a 3G dongle (on any of 5 major networks that all run seperate infrastructure and frequencies).
If I was out in the sticks, I'd be slightly more worried but your basic landline phone isn't going away - it's just changing its underlying technology. There's still plenty of options open to anyone that needs them. It's not like it's the 40's anymore where the next phone is several miles away and you have no other backups at all.
Of course not.
However, it's probably the only thing he's ever given an opinion on that I happen to agree with. I just find it funny that it's a comment about something far removed from IT where we actually see eye-to-eye.
Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
Seriously, if you don't want other people able to read your emails without your knowledge the only way is to run your own domain and MX server (however even that is subject to the terms of your agreement with your upstream provider and host - probably only co-lo's would give you a guarantee that they're not just browsing through your server's disks, but you can't practically "force" SMTP encryption for people trying to deliver mail to you).
VPS are dirt-cheap nowadays and can be stupidly easy to setup and have things like SquirrelMail running. Securing them is pretty easy (block all access to webmail/pop3/imap except from your personal static IP address, or even a local address and then VPN in to do those things, and leave only the SMTP ports open to the world).
Email is an inherently insecure, readable, open format. If you want guarantees about who's storing / reading / analysing that data, you want to cut out as many middle-men as possible. Or you could just get a life and not plug in real information into your Google profile...
What exactly are you doing that anyone on Slashdot couldn't make themselves, better, cheaper, using components they already have and software that already exists (there are a million and one game-launcher-style apps out there, most of them built for emulators but supporting just about anything you can run via a command line)? Have you checked what X and no video acceleration does to things as simple as TuxRacer (Hint: I had this same idea but for a small desktop-based console for my parents ages ago, and spent more time trying to get things to work reliably and at a decent speed than anything else)?
For that price, you can pick up handheld open source consoles that do the same (or hack an existing commercial console), you can pick up tiny nano-ITX boards of similar spec, the rest is just packaging and probably wouldn't be worth the extra cost to anyone who was interesting in carrying around what is basically a laptop-style games machine.
Additionally, what you describe is actually all in place or surpassed on my normal laptop - even the Playstation gamepads via some USB adaptors for them. The laptop even does HDMI out and VGA out (which 99% of big TV's support now) and has the oomph to do all sorts of graphics filters to make it look half-decent, and I carry adaptors for anything more specialised like Composite / S-Video (hell, you can get them via USB nowadays). The games? Not only can I run all the open-source ones, I can run things like Crysis too and a couple of hundred Steam games. Not only that, I can have Gb's of emulators for systems going back decades and have power enough to run them all. And when I'm done there, I can go online or work and not even notice a difference. Plus I get several hours of battery life and nothing "extra" to lug around.
You really have to have a USP - unique selling point. Yours seems to be "it runs software that someone else has written that already works on every other platform known to man" along with possibly "I set this up for you, and charged you for the privilege".
I'm not saying you couldn't sell them - it just doesn't look very enticing compared to what a $299 netbook with a couple of little extras could do. If you were to be making them en masse for a $100 or so each - i.e. set-top-box price-range, then you'd have something. But even then, it's unlikely to be very original and/or very mass-market.
If you sold more than a 100 or so, I'd be very impressed.
*cough* Apologies will be accepted in the form of cash, cheque, postal order, ...
The problem to me is price - I don't mind playing with things like this and knocking up games for them but £50 / â50 / 70$ is a lot of money to ask for this. I didn't pay that for a GP2X and that knocks the socks off this and is portable, handheld, with its own LCD screen, has TV-out, dual-200MHz ARM cores, runs Linux, etc.
This is closer to the "build-your-own-pong" style kits you can get from Vellemans but at stupid cost for something quite simple. If it only has two chips, why does it cost so much, even unassembled (the unassembled prices for the European version, for instance, don't even include the chips and other components - just a PCB, really).
If it was £20, it would be worth dabbling with. As it is, it's just a programmed AVR chip on an RGB chip (and even that's unnecessary for the European SCART version). £50 - plus power - plus casing - plus soldering (in some cases) - plus controllers - plus cables - plus time and effort and software setup, just to get something that's the equivalent of a NES or SNES? It doesn't even have USB and SD-card access is only beta (and I bet it's just a bit-banging SPI interface to the card).
I'd rather just use an old NES or SNES with a EEPROM that I can put programs on - cheaper, easier and probably slightly more powerful and bound to be infinitely more stable and reliable.
Bring the price down to £20-30 (i.e. slightly more than those "100 arcade game in a joystick" things that plug into your TV) and I'll buy one. Until then, I'm better off either hacking on a real console, or just running stuff on a chip myself.
The Pandora isn't actually shipping - again. Been in production for three years and some people who ordered on the first few days **still** haven't received one.
For the past few months you could pay almost the price of the console again in order to get a "Premium" queue-jumper Pandora before even the first pre-orderers from three years ago - after the first few hundred they stopped that and they have said they only offered that because otherwise they would have gone bankrupt and been unable to ship anybody's order.
Current status is that they are abandoning their PCB manufacturer for another, because it's taken them three years to actually get the PCB manufacturer to do anything worthwhile (they accept any excuse and the "community" eggs them on to be nice to everyone because they have a shed-load of money invested in the hope of receiving a device that's not materialised in significant numbers after three years) and now all the PCB's that have been sitting in the manufacturer's storage for all that time have rotted - which means basically starting months of work all over again with another manufacturer.
And they can't even ship Premium orders any more because of that. They've shipped maybe a thousand or two units in total, and a lot of those have gone on eBay almost immediately because with only a thousand units in the wild, most of the software is just ports of Ubuntu software and a couple of emulators.
They still haven't finished "batch 1" yet, and have had a ton of returns and problems (Wifi is the latest - the new boards produced just don't have working wifi because nobody was testing it properly, so they all had to go back) - buttons being faulty, cases cracking, you name it they have problems with it.
They are currently threatening to sue the PCB manufacturer but how they intend to do that while on the edge of bankruptcy is uncertain. Basically, you aren't going to see it in significant numbers enough to attract developers, and certainly not for years (current batch orders haven't even started yet and probably won't for another year, and they have to re-order all the cases, plastics, etc. for that batch)
The running joke among Pandora-watchers is "Two Months" - that's how long everything is said to take until they are back in business and gets stated with regularity every two months for the past three years.
I walked into Maplin Electronics once, only to overhear a salesguy tell someone that a surge-protection strip was VITAL if they wanted to use that external USB hard drive they'd just bought. It was imperative, apparently, and without it their drive wouldn't last a month without blowing up.
So before he managed to return with the £50 surge-protection strip he wanted to sell them, I had a quick word in the customer's ear and they just paid for the USB hard drive and left. What's even more hilarious - behind the guy was a 20min 500W UPS of a very well-known brand for the same price as the "extension lead with a fuse" that he was trying to sell them.
Some days, you can't help but laugh.
Yeah, because the biggest selling console ever, an instantaneous household name, and 5-years of entirely profit-making sales are a horrendous thing for a company.
*YOU* may not like it, but Nintendo haven't suffered in the slightest. You're really complaining because you aren't in their target market, not that Nintendo aren't doing well for themselves.
Personally, I bought a Wii (original) last month. It was finally what I consider a sensible price for a brand-new full kit (including chargers and two Wiimotes-with-MotionPlus and all the associated gubbins), and I can pick up games for £3-4 each in some cases. I'd played it before at my parents (who have had one for years) and it was... well... a games console like I remember other games consoles - no messing about, into a game, play it, no having to even read an instruction manual and away you go, bursting into fits of laughter when someone falls off the track for the millionth time, or someone else makes silly faces while pretending to row a canoe. When I was a kid, I would have killed for it, even though I consider myself a pretty experienced gamer.
Get this - my girlfriend, who had never played any video games except "Purple Turtle" on the Commodore 64 (go look it up, be sure to bring a resuscitator in case you die laughing), is always switching it on and playing it and wants first go of all the "new games" we get and even browses through them on the shop shelves herself.
It's not targeted at you. It never was. The next one might be but I'd doubt even that - more likely they just want a slightly larger market than the Wii had, so they make similar money even if people decide the Wii is good enough for them.
"The majority of gamers" aren't even in your age-group, most probably (I believe the median age has shifted to those born in the late 70's/early 80's. Again, you're unconsciously confusing "gamer" with some private definition that can't include grannies and 3-year-olds. Nintendo really don't care about your zombie games, because they made more money out of targeting a common base (and not a particular age-group) than all the other console manufacturers did in the last 5 years.
Great, so you get a reputation for working on projects that later come up in the news for how much you were walked over because you didn't want to rock the boat. Any employer would be happy to see that on your CV.
Additionally, I think "I left that HUGE project to pursue other ventures" would be interpreted correctly by anyone who's heard the horror stories about such places, and actually proves you have balls and care about your career whereas "Yeah, I worked on that horror-story project and got nothing to show for it" doesn't have the same effect.
Additionally - if you're doing something "just for your resume (CV)", then your employers will hate you, your colleagues will hate you and, eventually, people who read your CV will laugh at you. I don't think I've *ever* done anything just to put it on my CV. Hell, I actually leave more out of my CV than most people would put in - it's just not necessary and doesn't make that big a difference - a quiet confidence, well-written CV and the *ability* to demonstrate industry experience is a million times more important than "Oh, yeah, I was vaguely associated with Project X at some point in my life", especially if you have ZERO idea how well that project will turn out (e.g. Daikatana, DNF, etc. - I would deliberately REMOVE those from my CV if I were associated with them).