As if you had to appologize for that after the 'journalistic integrity' of the story summary.
There's been way too many of these taken out of context, wildly sensational story summaries that would make the inquirer blush.
I'm glad there is a comment system, it's required reading to put things in perspective.
What's also interesting to see is this vicious defence of anything Open Source here on/. by people who I suspect 95% of, have never contributed a single line of code. Real contributers always seem the ones that have a balanced often even pragmatic approach.
Last time I heard, patent application was around $10k per country and around $100k for worldwide filing.
Well, it all depends. The patent office certainly doesn't charge that much, but the lawyers do. So if you are going to file one single patent, then $10K is probably a good ball-park. But it doesn't have to cost that much, especially if you are in the business...
As far as international patents go; I'm no expert on it, but it certainly is not as simple as a fixed $ number. I doubt you could actually get a "worldwide" patent for $100K, but to cover the majority of strategically interesting regions, perhaps that's about right.
Filing a patent in any country prevents anyone else from filing the same patent in all others but only provides legal enforcement in the countries where the patent was was filed. In most cases, inventors can file in other countries as necessary to extend legal protection but doing it incrementally can quickly cost more than an international filing.
(This is what I was told at a conference about a year or two ago.)
All I can say that that is an over-simplification of the reality. It probably holds true for most western countries, but that obviously doesn't include every country on the planet. All I will say is that certain countries have very excentric patent laws.
But to get back to the 'patent portfolio building ' companies; all that is very US centric. It works with the US court system, but I don't think it does nearly as well in for example a European court.
This should be modded funny right? Apparently you and the people who modded this up do not understand patents.
You're the one that should be modded funny; as in "naive" funny.
If you are amazon and you start doing something, then some company comes along after the fact and patents that... tough tarts, all amazon has to do is claim prior art and that company can sit and spin. No need to get your own patent on it.
If you are xyz and invest a great deal of your assests into R&D, and then, hmmm, let's see, a/. favorite, Microsoft comes along and patents that... All you have to do is spend several million $ to prove your prior art. Oops...
Actually, don't get me wrong, this has nothing to do with Microsoft, all I'm illustrating is that a statement like 'claim prior art' is oversimplifying things, as it may actually cost a shitload of cash. This is exactly why it's called patent "portfolio's" now. It's what _every_ reasonable size company does to protect itself.
Seriously, If you think you can protect yourself against patents by proving prior art, you are dillusional. Here's a hint: filing the patent probably cost them $5K. Defending a patent infringment could cost, well, it's hard to say, but it will suffice to say that $5K won't cover lunch...
(disclaimer: I'm not saying this is good; I think it sucks, but it is what you get when you install a system that favors the big guy over the little guy)
Your 3 computers must be running 1000+ watt power supplies, multiple 6800 vid cards, and a ton of hard drives if your home a/c is having trouble cooling that room.
Considering how many obvious artifacts were in the demo scene from the DVD, I am ready to boycott CVS just on principle
Huh. I just watched PICT0004.AVI (didn't want to download more so other people might get a change to access his site). I didn't think it was all _that_ bad. In fact, I don't believe it's much (if any) worse than my Sony DCR-PC9. Sure that's an oldy, but fuck, I paid like $900 for it or something.
I think there's use for video of this quality. To bad there's no CVS around here...
In conclusion, you are a lieing FUD mongering ass-monkey. Have a nice day.
Whatever dude. So I made a mistake. It's actually Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Big FUCKING deal. I'm sure you've never made a mistake in your life and you know what, good for you.
And, yes it's an OEM version. The whole think came exactly as it was displayed in the Fry's display case (Palo Alto, in the CPU case on the bottom); a smallish booklet, the CD (or DVD, whatever) inside a thing plastic wrap, which has on the OUTSIDE the label with the reg. code.
I've NEVER had to validate over the phone and have probably installed about 50 WinXP installs which requried validation.
Yes, well I didn't believe that either. My point was that whatever I bought at Fry's had already been registered and that the support people couldn't explain that to me, or probably more importantly, consider that a serious problem.
So I don't know what your fucking point is, because I've no idea why I would want to make up such a story.
I agree 100%. I actually tried to get the point across to MS but it's harder than you think.
Here's what happened: I bought Windows Media Center 2003 at Fry's. Interesting observation: the validation key is printed on the outside of the package. Other interesting fact: Fry's allows you to return software if it hasn't been opened.
I install Win MC on a machine, and finally decide to activate it. It was no surprise to me that the activation software told me the number of activations for this key had been exceeded. Pretty FUCKING nice Microsoft. I buy brand new software and the first thing I have to do is go on the phone for 20 minutes and explain why I am re-installing this software. Show me any other manufacturer that can get away with something like this. (I think it's pretty much a given that someone just bought my copy at Fry's, wrote down the number and then returned it, but that's not my problem)
So, of course after a while the installation gets hosed because I'm still changing hardware and what have you, so I have to reinstall. Great. Another 20 minutes on the phone.
This time, after I get my code, I politely ask the person on the line if Microsoft in their ads about TCO also took into account the 40 minutes that I have to spend on the phone with them, for what I consider a typical installation. My billing rate would be somewhere around $150/hour, and at 2/3 of an hour, that's a $100. Which about doubles the actual cost of the software right there.
The person doesn't understand, and says that _every_ copy of WinXP now has to be validated over the phone. I ask if there is someone who I can speak with to register a formal complaint about this, because this is obviously not indicated on the software package, as I bought it. Nope says the person on the other line, that's not possible.
Okay, so here's what I'm doing: for the next couple of machines, I'm using the exact same copy of Windows. If I'm going to be treated as a criminal, and more importantly, if I have to cover a cost that's required to get the product to work and that I was completely unaware of at time of purchase, then I think a little civil disobedience is in place. Let the BSA come, we'll see who wins that fight.
Of course the best way to get the message across would be to just not buy MS products in the first place. But this is the problem with monopolies; that's not always an option you have.
To succesfully sell something on eBay you need to: - take pictures and transfer them to your PC - write a comperhensive description - package up your item and get the weight so you can calculate shipping cost - search eBay so you can find a reasonable opening price, reserve price and/or Buy it Now price - list the item on eBay - answer a shitload of questions from people (that never bid) - Email notices to the winner - Calculate postage - Print label - with a bit of luck the bidder was from another country so you have to go to the post office to fill out a bunch of forms and mail the piece - reply to emails as to why the product hasn't arrived after two days - track shipment - leave feedback
In the process you pay: - eBay a listing fee - eBay a percentage of the final sale price - PayPal a certain amount for the transfer - Extra shipping cost because the eBay calculator didn't work correctly (this happens especially with international stuff)
Sure, there's a few things you can do. You can not ship overseas. This usually doesn't have a great affect on how well your item sells if you are in the US. There's plenty of bidders here.
But not accepting PayPal cuts your bidders significantly.
I sell stuff on eBay, but if I suspect is going to be less than a $100 then it's just too much hassle. I can totally see how people would just trade the fucker in.
I am living in Japan now and there's a family restaurant down the street that has terminals at every table where you can play games or read news and such. There's plenty of others like it too...
That sounds pretty cool, but all I'd like is a restaurant where the tables have a button for "My drink is empty, I'd like another one, thank you".
It surprises the hell out of me that in places like here ("Silicon Valley") that is not more prevalent. After the dot-com crash service is pretty good, but it still happens from time to time that you spend 10 minutes or more trying to get the attention of the waiter. This is not where you want to spend your time; most of the times it appears rather rude because you have to ignore the other people at the table.
All they'd have to get is something similar to a flight-attendent call button, but even that appears to be too high-tech.
Well, I'm all the materialist myself and all (really), but you'll never hear me say that someone _deserves_ a $53M house. I personally don't believe anyone _deserves_ that - ever; some are just luckier than others. I'd love to be able to buy a house like that, but I'll never believe I deserved it.
With regards to spending $25B on charity, this, I think, is where things are getting a bit out of control. Y'all can call me a commie and such, but seriously, think about it. Should one single person ever be in control of that much money?
Fortunately it appears that Bill's making some good choices, but when one single person get's control over that much (money) power, I think it's fair to say that we have surpased capitalism.
Well, I'm certainly no expert on the subject of this matter as a resident (as opposed to a citizen), but perhaps you could mention that you will hold them responsible for damages?
I would think that especially a formal letter to that regard should stirr up some things.
In any case, I do agree with others that the problem is with the value that a SSN (combined with some other personal data) has. But that's the reality of the situation. If people don't take you seriously, it would perhaps be an idea to mention something like, 'fair enough, so long as you understand that in case of identity fraud, I will hold _your_ organization responsible for any damages'.
That being said, the nice thing about firefox (and OSS), is that lots of eyeballs can look at, and fix, the code in a timely manner.
Yeah, the lots of eyeballs argument. Have you ever looked at the Firefox source-tree?
I agree that there is possibly a benefit there, but you have to wonder how many people are _actually_ looking at the source, and if so, if they really understand it, and if so, if they would feed back errors they come across.
Seriously, download the Firefox sources, it's not for the faint of heart.
I personally think the difference in response time to bugs between Firefox and Microsoft has little to do with the source being available, but more with the difference between a huge bureaucratic organization and a small, largely technology based organization. In my personal experience with software products from smaller companies, they can perform just as fast as the Firefox team does.
It would be interesting to see how fast the Opera team responds to security issues.
No program that accepts input is safe. Even some programs that don't accept input aren't safe either.
It sounds like you are trying to make a distinction between software that takes input from a keyboard/mouse and software that takes input from say, files for example.
But there really are _very_ few programs that don't have some sort of input. In general they wouldn't be terribly useful, because everytime you ran them, they'd do the exact same thing.
But you are absolutely right that software that takes input from, let's say the real-time clock, might be unsafe. And in fact very often is; most software like that does not do input validation, because the hardware is garantueed to behave in a certain way. The amount of software that reads configuration files without doing any kind of validation is huge.
So you could probably conclude that 'no program is safe'.
enough of the information-less, ad-revenue seeking , spectacularly headlined articles about the XBox please. Lets just wait until there is some real news, shall we?
EVERYONE over-hypes their product during a show like that. I expected some world-shocking revelation, but this is largely a prediction that things aren't going to be as claimed during the show based on how things came along with previous models. Whoop-tee-fucking-do.
Now, if Microsoft had demoed the XBox as if it was all ready to be shipped, but actually ran the software on, say, two G5's under the table, now _that_ would be smoke and mirrors. But the article doesn't mention that, so that must not have happened.
Did you try the new high-end ones, with 10+MB/s read rate?
I'm asking because I want to use a CF drive myself, and CF->IDE adapters are dirt cheap (after all, the interface is almost identical from an electrical point of view)
Hi,
To be honest, I bought the CF based on price, not performance. It was not one of the latest Lexars or SanDisks. It may very well be that with the latest high-end devices you get equal or better performance (as far as sustained write/read) as a 5400 RPM notebook drive.
Sorry I don't remember the brand/model of the particular CF I used. I ended up returning the CF because I finally found a way to network boot XP. Still, booting from CF worked fine, and combined with the fanless Zalman enclosure it is just impossible to tell audibly if the system is on or off;-)
You can, of course, do this today by getting a CompactFlash and a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. You can get at least 8GB.
I ran WinXP off of this for a while. It was interesting to note the different behaviour in terms of performance; sustained transfers are considerably slower, seeks are considerably faster. Over all CF is slower than a 5400 RPM notebook drive, but the overal feel seems smoother somehow.
The unfortunate thing with CF is that they don't support UltraDMA modes, so you end up with more overhead on the CPU side, as well as a slower datapath.
Sometimes people bring up the limited write cycles of Flash. Well, yes, I did turn off the swap file. But most modern CompactFlash perform a sort of 'load balancing' of writes, which means that if you write to the same sector twice, the write may physically happen to two different sectors.
"Revenge of the Sith" rang in a whopping $50 million on its opening Thursday, a single-day record boosted by eagerly anticipated midnight showings, and its total receipts since then beat the four-day $134.3 million opening of 2003's "The Matrix Reloaded." The George Lucas film has also grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide.
Too bad BitTorrent put such a damper on the joy. Think of all that was stolen by those pirates!
I personally still don't think this justifies copyright infringement, but boy, did the MPAA invite a 'and your point is??' response there.
Others mentioned that 10 million spread among 6-8 startups would not be enough to fully fund a startup
Yeah, well others don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's absolutely possible to bootstrap a new company on far less than 1 million dollar. You can't say anything meaningful about it unless you know "the plan".
I'm just replying to your post because I think it's silly the way people talk about startups these days (not you; the others). There certainly are products/markets that require more capital investment in early round financing, but you also have to remember that it's pretty damn uncommon that a company will raise more than a million in round 1 financing. Usually the higher amounts will come in subsequent rounds. This should, again, all be part of "the plan".
Seriously, if you have a good idea for an Open Source based startup, go for it! The main thing it requires is your drive, not cash. But also, I personally think it's very important to plan. Plan what you intend to do, in a realistical manner (have someone else cross check your estimated times, preferably someone that has done software projects before), but definitely TALK with people about it. You may find that others get so excited you don't need to take any financing.
And don't get a cent more financing than you absolutely need. Remember that every cent you take as an investment now, you will be paying back based on high risk investment standards; we're not talking 5% interest rates here. These guys may end up owning more than half of your company before you know it.
One last thing before I stop my rant and continue working on my own lil thing; Don't fool yourself; VCs are not investing money in OSS startups because they think they are so cute. Or because they are of such morally high standards. They are doing it for one thing, and for one thing only; to make as much money as they can from the enterprise.
So go out and do your thing; you don't need a million dollars to do it!
Seriously, I don't think doing something like this would be a positive step for a company to take. They'd get a whole lot of publicity out of it right at the beginning, but pretty soon it'd become a major eyesore, and there'd be a lot of loathing towards them for putting it there. Looking at it would get old really quick.
Yeah, but who says that the advertisement is going to be static? At the moment this is all pretty much a hypothetical discussion anyway, but I imagine that making the billboard 'programmable' would not escape the minds of the people actually trying to put something like this up.
I personally appreciate the fact that a child-porn sharer, for instance, can easily be, as are regularly, tracked down because ISPs keep logs that can be used to track back from networks
Can we PLEASE for once keep the kiddie porn stuff out of an argument? I'm really getting sick and tired of the 'me too - I'm on the right side of the fence - I'm against kiddie porn' crap.
You know, it's pretty easy to win any argument on the planet by pulling out the child pornography card. If anyone challenges you, all you have to do is say that your challenger supports child pornography.
How about this. We do the following: - make cars illegal. It has turned out that nearly 99.5% of all kiddie porn is at some point transported by a car, therefore if we make cars illegal we can illiminate child pornography. - make incandescent light illegal. 99.5% of all kiddie porn is at one time or another observed by incandescent light. If we illegalize incandescent light, that should take care of that problem. - require the Postal Office to keep a perfect log of every piece of mail that they sent. 99.5% of hard-copy kiddie porn is being handled by good ole USPS, better keep track of that. - do I need to go on?
Now, everybody point at me and scream 'OOOHHH!!!'.
Slashdot Mirror
And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read
/. by people who I suspect 95% of, have never contributed a single line of code. Real contributers always seem the ones that have a balanced often even pragmatic approach.
As if you had to appologize for that after the 'journalistic integrity' of the story summary.
There's been way too many of these taken out of context, wildly sensational story summaries that would make the inquirer blush.
I'm glad there is a comment system, it's required reading to put things in perspective.
What's also interesting to see is this vicious defence of anything Open Source here on
(please, no 'you must be new here' jokes)
Forget notellmo.tel. in.tel is going to be the first domain sold.
That's right, and in.tel.sucks is going to be the second! Woohoo!! Right? Right guys?!
Last time I heard, patent application was around $10k per country and around $100k for worldwide filing.
Well, it all depends. The patent office certainly doesn't charge that much, but the lawyers do. So if you are going to file one single patent, then $10K is probably a good ball-park. But it doesn't have to cost that much, especially if you are in the business...
As far as international patents go; I'm no expert on it, but it certainly is not as simple as a fixed $ number. I doubt you could actually get a "worldwide" patent for $100K, but to cover the majority of strategically interesting regions, perhaps that's about right.
Filing a patent in any country prevents anyone else from filing the same patent in all others but only provides legal enforcement in the countries where the patent was was filed. In most cases, inventors can file in other countries as necessary to extend legal protection but doing it incrementally can quickly cost more than an international filing.
(This is what I was told at a conference about a year or two ago.)
All I can say that that is an over-simplification of the reality. It probably holds true for most western countries, but that obviously doesn't include every country on the planet. All I will say is that certain countries have very excentric patent laws.
But to get back to the 'patent portfolio building ' companies; all that is very US centric. It works with the US court system, but I don't think it does nearly as well in for example a European court.
This should be modded funny right? Apparently you and the people who modded this up do not understand patents.
/. favorite, Microsoft comes along and patents that... All you have to do is spend several million $ to prove your prior art. Oops...
You're the one that should be modded funny; as in "naive" funny.
If you are amazon and you start doing something, then some company comes along after the fact and patents that... tough tarts, all amazon has to do is claim prior art and that company can sit and spin. No need to get your own patent on it.
If you are xyz and invest a great deal of your assests into R&D, and then, hmmm, let's see, a
Actually, don't get me wrong, this has nothing to do with Microsoft, all I'm illustrating is that a statement like 'claim prior art' is oversimplifying things, as it may actually cost a shitload of cash. This is exactly why it's called patent "portfolio's" now. It's what _every_ reasonable size company does to protect itself.
Seriously, If you think you can protect yourself against patents by proving prior art, you are dillusional. Here's a hint: filing the patent probably cost them $5K. Defending a patent infringment could cost, well, it's hard to say, but it will suffice to say that $5K won't cover lunch...
(disclaimer: I'm not saying this is good; I think it sucks, but it is what you get when you install a system that favors the big guy over the little guy)
Your 3 computers must be running 1000+ watt power supplies, multiple 6800 vid cards, and a ton of hard drives if your home a/c is having trouble cooling that room.
Or maybe he just lives here
Considering how many obvious artifacts were in the demo scene from the DVD, I am ready to boycott CVS just on principle
Huh. I just watched PICT0004.AVI (didn't want to download more so other people might get a change to access his site). I didn't think it was all _that_ bad. In fact, I don't believe it's much (if any) worse than my Sony DCR-PC9. Sure that's an oldy, but fuck, I paid like $900 for it or something.
I think there's use for video of this quality. To bad there's no CVS around here...
In conclusion, you are a lieing FUD mongering ass-monkey. Have a nice day.
Whatever dude. So I made a mistake. It's actually Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Big FUCKING deal. I'm sure you've never made a mistake in your life and you know what, good for you.
And, yes it's an OEM version. The whole think came exactly as it was displayed in the Fry's display case (Palo Alto, in the CPU case on the bottom); a smallish booklet, the CD (or DVD, whatever) inside a thing plastic wrap, which has on the OUTSIDE the label with the reg. code.
I've NEVER had to validate over the phone and have probably installed about 50 WinXP installs which requried validation.
Yes, well I didn't believe that either. My point was that whatever I bought at Fry's had already been registered and that the support people couldn't explain that to me, or probably more importantly, consider that a serious problem.
So I don't know what your fucking point is, because I've no idea why I would want to make up such a story.
Somebody has to put an end to this.
I agree 100%. I actually tried to get the point across to MS but it's harder than you think.
Here's what happened: I bought Windows Media Center 2003 at Fry's. Interesting observation: the validation key is printed on the outside of the package. Other interesting fact: Fry's allows you to return software if it hasn't been opened.
I install Win MC on a machine, and finally decide to activate it. It was no surprise to me that the activation software told me the number of activations for this key had been exceeded. Pretty FUCKING nice Microsoft. I buy brand new software and the first thing I have to do is go on the phone for 20 minutes and explain why I am re-installing this software. Show me any other manufacturer that can get away with something like this. (I think it's pretty much a given that someone just bought my copy at Fry's, wrote down the number and then returned it, but that's not my problem)
So, of course after a while the installation gets hosed because I'm still changing hardware and what have you, so I have to reinstall. Great. Another 20 minutes on the phone.
This time, after I get my code, I politely ask the person on the line if Microsoft in their ads about TCO also took into account the 40 minutes that I have to spend on the phone with them, for what I consider a typical installation. My billing rate would be somewhere around $150/hour, and at 2/3 of an hour, that's a $100. Which about doubles the actual cost of the software right there.
The person doesn't understand, and says that _every_ copy of WinXP now has to be validated over the phone. I ask if there is someone who I can speak with to register a formal complaint about this, because this is obviously not indicated on the software package, as I bought it. Nope says the person on the other line, that's not possible.
Okay, so here's what I'm doing: for the next couple of machines, I'm using the exact same copy of Windows. If I'm going to be treated as a criminal, and more importantly, if I have to cover a cost that's required to get the product to work and that I was completely unaware of at time of purchase, then I think a little civil disobedience is in place. Let the BSA come, we'll see who wins that fight.
Of course the best way to get the message across would be to just not buy MS products in the first place. But this is the problem with monopolies; that's not always an option you have.
I wonder what the queen listens to?
Yeah, there aren't many things that I wonder about less...
Yeah, eBay.
To succesfully sell something on eBay you need to:
- take pictures and transfer them to your PC
- write a comperhensive description
- package up your item and get the weight so you can calculate shipping cost
- search eBay so you can find a reasonable opening price, reserve price and/or Buy it Now price
- list the item on eBay
- answer a shitload of questions from people (that never bid)
- Email notices to the winner
- Calculate postage
- Print label
- with a bit of luck the bidder was from another country so you have to go to the post office to fill out a bunch of forms and mail the piece
- reply to emails as to why the product hasn't arrived after two days
- track shipment
- leave feedback
In the process you pay:
- eBay a listing fee
- eBay a percentage of the final sale price
- PayPal a certain amount for the transfer
- Extra shipping cost because the eBay calculator didn't work correctly (this happens especially with international stuff)
Sure, there's a few things you can do. You can not ship overseas. This usually doesn't have a great affect on how well your item sells if you are in the US. There's plenty of bidders here.
But not accepting PayPal cuts your bidders significantly.
I sell stuff on eBay, but if I suspect is going to be less than a $100 then it's just too much hassle. I can totally see how people would just trade the fucker in.
I am living in Japan now and there's a family restaurant down the street that has terminals at every table where you can play games or read news and such. There's plenty of others like it too...
That sounds pretty cool, but all I'd like is a restaurant where the tables have a button for "My drink is empty, I'd like another one, thank you".
It surprises the hell out of me that in places like here ("Silicon Valley") that is not more prevalent. After the dot-com crash service is pretty good, but it still happens from time to time that you spend 10 minutes or more trying to get the attention of the waiter. This is not where you want to spend your time; most of the times it appears rather rude because you have to ignore the other people at the table.
All they'd have to get is something similar to a flight-attendent call button, but even that appears to be too high-tech.
He deserves the house, I say.
Well, I'm all the materialist myself and all (really), but you'll never hear me say that someone _deserves_ a $53M house. I personally don't believe anyone _deserves_ that - ever; some are just luckier than others. I'd love to be able to buy a house like that, but I'll never believe I deserved it.
With regards to spending $25B on charity, this, I think, is where things are getting a bit out of control. Y'all can call me a commie and such, but seriously, think about it. Should one single person ever be in control of that much money?
Fortunately it appears that Bill's making some good choices, but when one single person get's control over that much (money) power, I think it's fair to say that we have surpased capitalism.
Well, I'm certainly no expert on the subject of this matter as a resident (as opposed to a citizen), but perhaps you could mention that you will hold them responsible for damages?
I would think that especially a formal letter to that regard should stirr up some things.
In any case, I do agree with others that the problem is with the value that a SSN (combined with some other personal data) has. But that's the reality of the situation. If people don't take you seriously, it would perhaps be an idea to mention something like, 'fair enough, so long as you understand that in case of identity fraud, I will hold _your_ organization responsible for any damages'.
Just a (perhaps simplistic) idea.
That being said, the nice thing about firefox (and OSS), is that lots of eyeballs can look at, and fix, the code in a timely manner.
Yeah, the lots of eyeballs argument. Have you ever looked at the Firefox source-tree?
I agree that there is possibly a benefit there, but you have to wonder how many people are _actually_ looking at the source, and if so, if they really understand it, and if so, if they would feed back errors they come across.
Seriously, download the Firefox sources, it's not for the faint of heart.
I personally think the difference in response time to bugs between Firefox and Microsoft has little to do with the source being available, but more with the difference between a huge bureaucratic organization and a small, largely technology based organization. In my personal experience with software products from smaller companies, they can perform just as fast as the Firefox team does.
It would be interesting to see how fast the Opera team responds to security issues.
No program that accepts input is safe. Even some programs that don't accept input aren't safe either.
It sounds like you are trying to make a distinction between software that takes input from a keyboard/mouse and software that takes input from say, files for example.
But there really are _very_ few programs that don't have some sort of input. In general they wouldn't be terribly useful, because everytime you ran them, they'd do the exact same thing.
But you are absolutely right that software that takes input from, let's say the real-time clock, might be unsafe. And in fact very often is; most software like that does not do input validation, because the hardware is garantueed to behave in a certain way. The amount of software that reads configuration files without doing any kind of validation is huge.
So you could probably conclude that 'no program is safe'.
enough of the information-less, ad-revenue seeking , spectacularly headlined articles about the XBox please. Lets just wait until there is some real news, shall we?
EVERYONE over-hypes their product during a show like that. I expected some world-shocking revelation, but this is largely a prediction that things aren't going to be as claimed during the show based on how things came along with previous models. Whoop-tee-fucking-do.
Now, if Microsoft had demoed the XBox as if it was all ready to be shipped, but actually ran the software on, say, two G5's under the table, now _that_ would be smoke and mirrors. But the article doesn't mention that, so that must not have happened.
Bear in mind that this is the first generation that's been online out of the box
Wow, for a second there I was thinking you were talking about this generation kids. Was kinda wondering how 'mom' would appreciate that expression.
Apocalypse Now.
Every time I see it, I can't help being amazed at how good it is. Simply an incredible film.
Yes! And the exact same goes for Dumb and Dumber!
Right?
Did you try the new high-end ones, with 10+MB/s read rate?
;-)
I'm asking because I want to use a CF drive myself, and CF->IDE adapters are dirt cheap (after all, the interface is almost identical from an electrical point of view)
Hi,
To be honest, I bought the CF based on price, not performance. It was not one of the latest Lexars or SanDisks. It may very well be that with the latest high-end devices you get equal or better performance (as far as sustained write/read) as a 5400 RPM notebook drive.
Sorry I don't remember the brand/model of the particular CF I used. I ended up returning the CF because I finally found a way to network boot XP. Still, booting from CF worked fine, and combined with the fanless Zalman enclosure it is just impossible to tell audibly if the system is on or off
You can, of course, do this today by getting a CompactFlash and a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. You can get at least 8GB.
I ran WinXP off of this for a while. It was interesting to note the different behaviour in terms of performance; sustained transfers are considerably slower, seeks are considerably faster. Over all CF is slower than a 5400 RPM notebook drive, but the overal feel seems smoother somehow.
The unfortunate thing with CF is that they don't support UltraDMA modes, so you end up with more overhead on the CPU side, as well as a slower datapath.
Sometimes people bring up the limited write cycles of Flash. Well, yes, I did turn off the swap file. But most modern CompactFlash perform a sort of 'load balancing' of writes, which means that if you write to the same sector twice, the write may physically happen to two different sectors.
"Revenge of the Sith" rang in a whopping $50 million on its opening Thursday, a single-day record boosted by eagerly anticipated midnight showings, and its total receipts since then beat the four-day $134.3 million opening of 2003's "The Matrix Reloaded." The George Lucas film has also grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide.
Too bad BitTorrent put such a damper on the joy. Think of all that was stolen by those pirates!
I personally still don't think this justifies copyright infringement, but boy, did the MPAA invite a 'and your point is??' response there.
Others mentioned that 10 million spread among 6-8 startups would not be enough to fully fund a startup
Yeah, well others don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's absolutely possible to bootstrap a new company on far less than 1 million dollar. You can't say anything meaningful about it unless you know "the plan".
I'm just replying to your post because I think it's silly the way people talk about startups these days (not you; the others). There certainly are products/markets that require more capital investment in early round financing, but you also have to remember that it's pretty damn uncommon that a company will raise more than a million in round 1 financing. Usually the higher amounts will come in subsequent rounds. This should, again, all be part of "the plan".
Seriously, if you have a good idea for an Open Source based startup, go for it! The main thing it requires is your drive, not cash. But also, I personally think it's very important to plan. Plan what you intend to do, in a realistical manner (have someone else cross check your estimated times, preferably someone that has done software projects before), but definitely TALK with people about it. You may find that others get so excited you don't need to take any financing.
And don't get a cent more financing than you absolutely need. Remember that every cent you take as an investment now, you will be paying back based on high risk investment standards; we're not talking 5% interest rates here. These guys may end up owning more than half of your company before you know it.
One last thing before I stop my rant and continue working on my own lil thing; Don't fool yourself; VCs are not investing money in OSS startups because they think they are so cute. Or because they are of such morally high standards. They are doing it for one thing, and for one thing only; to make as much money as they can from the enterprise.
So go out and do your thing; you don't need a million dollars to do it!
Seriously, I don't think doing something like this would be a positive step for a company to take. They'd get a whole lot of publicity out of it right at the beginning, but pretty soon it'd become a major eyesore, and there'd be a lot of loathing towards them for putting it there. Looking at it would get old really quick.
Yeah, but who says that the advertisement is going to be static? At the moment this is all pretty much a hypothetical discussion anyway, but I imagine that making the billboard 'programmable' would not escape the minds of the people actually trying to put something like this up.
- I wasn't aware that the US owned space. -
Wow, even when we propose keeping space clean, you just can't pass up the chance to do a little US-bashing, can you?
Heheh. Yeah, you are right. Over the last years the US has been such a formidable world-citizen that that comment was certainly uncalled for.
I'm sure the US will try everything it can to keep space clean. From non-US stuff. *ducks*
I personally appreciate the fact that a child-porn sharer, for instance, can easily be, as are regularly, tracked down because ISPs keep logs that can be used to track back from networks
Can we PLEASE for once keep the kiddie porn stuff out of an argument? I'm really getting sick and tired of the 'me too - I'm on the right side of the fence - I'm against kiddie porn' crap.
You know, it's pretty easy to win any argument on the planet by pulling out the child pornography card. If anyone challenges you, all you have to do is say that your challenger supports child pornography.
How about this. We do the following:
- make cars illegal. It has turned out that nearly 99.5% of all kiddie porn is at some point transported by a car, therefore if we make cars illegal we can illiminate child pornography.
- make incandescent light illegal. 99.5% of all kiddie porn is at one time or another observed by incandescent light. If we illegalize incandescent light, that should take care of that problem.
- require the Postal Office to keep a perfect log of every piece of mail that they sent. 99.5% of hard-copy kiddie porn is being handled by good ole USPS, better keep track of that.
- do I need to go on?
Now, everybody point at me and scream 'OOOHHH!!!'.