Give credit where due, people. This isn't impressive because move-sensing chessboards are somehow new. This is impressive because he made his own projector that displays time and opponent move information on the board. Then he used an old, old webcam and custom software to determine the move that he is taking. He made circuit boards, frames, and other equipment. He probably spent 100 hours and a lot of effort in order to make it slightly easier to play chess online.
If a DIY setup like this doesn't bring at least a little smile to your face, your hacker spirit is dead.
Weren't Joust and Gyruss purely digital inputs? I'm trying to think of any non-trackball / non-wheel / non-paddle stick-based arcade games that used analog controls from a retro time-period, and the only one I'm coming up with is Afterburner.
If that is the USB joystick that I purchased a few years back, it is roundly terrible. Sticky and unusable. Avoid.
If you're really into sticks and emulation, remember that Xbox 360 controllers basically out of the box all work as PC controllers. A solid fighting stick would give you a great ball for Pac Man. If that doesn't suit your fancy, building a stick setup for your games is a time-honored tradition that doesn't require much skill, but always comes out looking badass.
Of course, you'd need a stick, a trackball, a ring, etc... But those are solvable.
As far as I know, the solar panel thing was experimented with, but not produced.
I had a friend at Red Hat who worked on the software for the OLPC. His version had a hand crank. For very real, very important durability reasons it was removed.
Windows is an option, though the default is still Sugar / Linux. I don't know numbers on how many of what have shipped.
1.5 million have shipped, mostly to South America and parts of Africa.
OLPC is still full of engineers out to help the developing world.
Just because hardware doubles in speed / capacity for a given price point every few years, sadly does not mean that the price halves for a given speed / capacity. It would probably cost the same today to build a 500 MB hard drive as it would to make a 5 GB one. There are just baseline manufacturing costs that don't really care about technological sophistication or a lack thereof.
The XO-3 looks like a proper jump in that direction: no keyboard, no folding screens, no rabbit-eared Wifi... all of the baseline manufacturing costs reduced. Really, the only thing you're compromising on in a tablet versus a laptop is the keyboard, and the XO's keyboard is legendarily terrible.
Communication is also very important. I know a lot of people in developing nations who can't afford to talk on phones, but have large communities of people and resources they reach over email. These help them develop their businesses, get visas to travel abroad, etc.
G) Passively cooled with no moving parts. Try wandering around Best Buy throwing sand into off-the-shelf laptops and see how long before you're thrown out with a huge repair bill.
E) Durable as hell. I challenge anyone to find a $200 netbook that is waterproof, let alone one that can be dropped from 7 or 8 feet repeatedly without worrying about if it will survive. F) Grid networking. Instead of crowding around a single access point that might not be in reach, a school full of OLPC's can piggyback on eachother's signals to get much further than otherwise possible.
And let's not forget that the XO project is partially responsible for the existence of netbooks. Intel and Microsoft both made reference netbook platforms in response to the perceived threat of OLPC platform. (politics, someone else can jump in with the sordid history, I'm sure). Basically, when it was announced a $100 (cough $200) laptop was considered ludicrous, and a lot of effort went into making viable platforms. Now, netbooks are almost an impulse buy.
The keyboard's pretty terrible, but other than that the OLPC is a surprisingly well designed platform for the environment it finds itself in.
The DMCA only covers copyrighted content protection, not things like garage door openers.
You could argue that the contents of the communication are a copyrighted performance created by the two participants, but it probably wouldn't hold much weight in court.
In the US at least a patent application is public record, and is intended to explain to the world how the object functions. This is not just to enforce the patent, but also to reward spreading the knowlege about how a patent works.
Asking someone to take down a blog post that describes the workings of a patented process is foolish. If the patent is written like it is supposed to be, anyone should be able to understand the patented process. You are no longer protected under trade secrets if you patent (which is why some choose not to). It is by definition at that point public knowledge.
Whether or not they have a patent case against him, they have no case against his blog.
Property is inherently objects. I can hold a guitar in my hand. I can hold a cassette in my hand. I can't hold a concept, or a musical riff, or a mathematical formula in my hand. That is not "property" in the traditional definition. By playing a Kiss tune on my guitar, I haven't deprived the Kiss Army of any property they might own. By holding a Kiss-authored song in my head, that does not give them property rights over my brain. Any sort of "rights" granted in this way are extra rights that society gives, in the hopes that Gene Simmons will keep on making music until all of his teeth fall out. Of course "rights" is a misnomer, since it really is a curb on the freedoms that other people have.
Let's take your farm analogy. If you buy some land and build a farm, you're entitled to make money selling your goods and hopefully passing on a healthy farm to your children. But when you sell your farm wares today, what you get back is money. You can't create a pumpkin today and expect to be making money off of that one pumpkin for hundreds of years. You build stuff on your farm and sell them, building a thriving network of connections, knowledge, and equipment. A creative house is no different. We make cultural objects. But when we create something, it feeds us for a while, then we have to create something else. I work in video games, so my title's shelf lives are incredibly limited. But it is long enough and rewarding enough to go on creating more and more. And were I to own a studio of my own, I would be passing on the network of connections and development knowledge (and branding!) to my children, as well as any money I might have made.
Of course, with the roughly 100 year copyright term currently in the US, I would actually be able to pass on copyrights to my children. And their children. And that sounds silly to me. Why? Because they didn't do anything. Larrkin didn't create Kookaburra, and aren't being rewarded for effort on their part. They bought the rights to a catalog of works, with the hope that they could troll around and sue people with similar songs. As a society, we're agreeing to curb freedoms in exchange for rewarding the production of certain types of intangible cultural artifacts. How is my children's children growing up getting royalty checks for something they had nothing to do with going to encourage them to get off their lazy butts and produce? Or more realistically, how is some large rights clearinghouse getting royalty checks for something they bought on clearance when a record company folded going to encourage the production of more music?
BTW, as thoughts become more valuable, the more inherent incentive there is to create them, the less we need as a society to incentivize their creation. If they're becoming more valuable, then things are moving in the right direction without our intervention.
I'm just waiting for the guy who invented the power chord to sue for the hella dollars he is rightfully owed.
Music is a cultural artifact. Cultural artifacts inherently build upon eachother, or else they are meaningless. A big part of music litigation is finding that line between building on what someone else has done, and just straight duplicating. That line isn't always clear. And frequently, trial judges aren't the right people to be making that distinction.
Dell used to be pretty good about that. For about 8 years their old power adaptors would work with new machines (at degraded rates), and their new power adaptors would work with their old machines. It was a big reason to stay on dells: an abundant supply of power in any given room.
They just changed their adaptor this past year. Now it is this hexagonal thingie that is only compatible with their new models. Damn.
What else would you upgrade or replace? The CPU needs a motherboard built for it, and the motherboard has to be form-fitted to the laptop. Same with northbridge, southbridge, and a bunch of other controllers. PCI / PCIE covers a lot of upgrade grounds.
The graphics card really needs to become standardized, but there is movement in that direction already. Theoretically you could decide on a standard formfactor for optical disk drives. But those seem to be on the outs with laptops anyway. Really, unless you want to create a standardized motherboard formfactor for laptops, and are willing to accept laptops that are about twice as big to fit those, they're about as upgradable currently as they're likely to get for the next few years.
I'm trying to imagine ICANN's brand of fairness applied worldwide.
"If you would like to protest one of our policies, fill out form 23-6 and mail it with a non-refundable check for 500,000 dollars to our headquarters. Please wait 10 years for processing."
Somehow I think we're better off with governments.
Nobody got their servers taken. Nobody had hard drives wiped. The offending people had to go register new names at a different country, change some logos, and spread word about the change. It probably took them about a day.
If you were advertising illegal services in Russia through US magazines, the government would probably step in and stop the ads from happening. They don't have the power to go to Russia and stop the services, but they have the power to stop the advertising on US soil. Same thing here..com is the default domain name, but the BBC and many other sites do very well on their local TLD. 36% of the top domain names in the world are non-.coms. If you're going to do something flagrantly against US law, choosing a non-US domain name (or dealing with a day of downtime) doesn't seem unreasonable.
And we're not talking about redirecting NewZelandVacations.com because their boats use a type of plastic banned in the US. Pirate sites will do just as well on other TLD's. Also, NinjaVideo and TVShack aren't network companies, and shouldn't have been on.net anyway.
I wish people would stop using.com for everything, and start using their appropriate country's TLD. While we're on a.com standard, we're on a US standard. And while I don't actually disagree with US laws in this respect, I don't believe that by default US law should be the applicable jurisdiction for all websites. Of course, we should move us websites to.us instead of.com. But one step at a time.
In 2000 I believed that my vote didn't matter. That the two main candidates were both messed-up sellouts and would both equally do horrible damage to this country and its people.
Boy did Bush prove me wrong.
If anyone lives down to that bar again, I'm moving to Canada.
But the Android market is known to lack filters. You go to the android market because it lacks filters.
Apple claims that all of the ridiculous app store shenanigans over the past few years have been in order to create a family-friendly, safe Disneyland. And hopefully they will deliver on that promise. But in the mean time, buyer beware. Using iTunes to turn hijacked computers into dollars is actually kind of brilliant. Hopefully we won't see that proliferate.
Why should you lock your voicemail if the only phone that is supposed to have access to it is your own?
If someone is spoofing your phone to your phone company, there are much bigger problems. It isn't impossible, but phone cloning is much harder to do now than in the early days of drive-by number stealing. These days the phone companies have pretty solid ways of knowing who you are for billing and other purposes. Yet they use caller-ID to determine voicemail access? That's just a bad implementation.
Having lots of devices with built-in rechargeable batteries, my experience is that the fail state still isn't quite as clean as for alkaline. It's definitely better than NIMH batteries in an Alkaline-expecting device, but:
Rechargeable batteries naturally lose charge over their lifespan. They start at a slightly lower voltage and end at about the same. Devices have many ways of dealing with this natural discharge, but they all seem to be much better at estimating when a recharge is imminent early on in the battery's lifespan.
Lots of rechargable battery devices have replacement upgrade batteries, which may have more power or voltage available to them. These, of course, further complicate the logic of "beep when the user has 15 minutes left." Is that a 75% voltage stream on a 6 cell, 9 cell, a 12 cell, or those special Mickey Mouse 8 cells we gave away at Disneyland?
NiMH also seems to be more temperature-sensitive than Alkaline. While I can't guarantee this messes with overall voltage, my battery indicators do seem to behave differently in the winter than in the summer.
For gaming, you actually do want a scroll wheel with bumps. The scroll wheel is used frequently for discrete selections like weapons and inventory. Sadly, this is why it is really hard to find frictionless scroll wheels.
Personally I want a thumb trackball on mice for scrolling, since 2 dimensional scrolling is a sad part of the real world. And a trackball thumb could be used for easy camera rotation in 3DS Max.
Yes, but this adds 2 9-key pads and a joystick to your mouse hand, leaving your left hand free to continue keyboarding.
On a war flight simulator, this might be enough keys to actually play with only two hands. For 3D development work, you could work in 3DS max without having to press modifiers all of the bloody time. I could think of at least a half-dozen macros in Flash that would be nice to have mapped to dedicated keys under your fingers at all times.
Realistically speaking, it's probably not going anywhere. But more inputs are definitely appreciated for devoted workers / players.
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Give credit where due, people. This isn't impressive because move-sensing chessboards are somehow new. This is impressive because he made his own projector that displays time and opponent move information on the board. Then he used an old, old webcam and custom software to determine the move that he is taking. He made circuit boards, frames, and other equipment. He probably spent 100 hours and a lot of effort in order to make it slightly easier to play chess online.
If a DIY setup like this doesn't bring at least a little smile to your face, your hacker spirit is dead.
The OLPC has flip-up rabbit ears, which helps with reception. Because of this, my OLPC gets better reception than my laptop.
It's mostly a software feature, but it works automatically and it is well integrated.
Weren't Joust and Gyruss purely digital inputs? I'm trying to think of any non-trackball / non-wheel / non-paddle stick-based arcade games that used analog controls from a retro time-period, and the only one I'm coming up with is Afterburner.
If that is the USB joystick that I purchased a few years back, it is roundly terrible. Sticky and unusable. Avoid.
If you're really into sticks and emulation, remember that Xbox 360 controllers basically out of the box all work as PC controllers. A solid fighting stick would give you a great ball for Pac Man. If that doesn't suit your fancy, building a stick setup for your games is a time-honored tradition that doesn't require much skill, but always comes out looking badass.
Of course, you'd need a stick, a trackball, a ring, etc... But those are solvable.
Mesh networking works great.
As far as I know, the solar panel thing was experimented with, but not produced.
I had a friend at Red Hat who worked on the software for the OLPC. His version had a hand crank. For very real, very important durability reasons it was removed.
Windows is an option, though the default is still Sugar / Linux. I don't know numbers on how many of what have shipped.
1.5 million have shipped, mostly to South America and parts of Africa.
OLPC is still full of engineers out to help the developing world.
Just because hardware doubles in speed / capacity for a given price point every few years, sadly does not mean that the price halves for a given speed / capacity. It would probably cost the same today to build a 500 MB hard drive as it would to make a 5 GB one. There are just baseline manufacturing costs that don't really care about technological sophistication or a lack thereof.
The XO-3 looks like a proper jump in that direction: no keyboard, no folding screens, no rabbit-eared Wifi... all of the baseline manufacturing costs reduced. Really, the only thing you're compromising on in a tablet versus a laptop is the keyboard, and the XO's keyboard is legendarily terrible.
Communication is also very important. I know a lot of people in developing nations who can't afford to talk on phones, but have large communities of people and resources they reach over email. These help them develop their businesses, get visas to travel abroad, etc.
G) Passively cooled with no moving parts. Try wandering around Best Buy throwing sand into off-the-shelf laptops and see how long before you're thrown out with a huge repair bill.
The OLPC is easily thousands of times as powerful as your first computer.
E) Durable as hell. I challenge anyone to find a $200 netbook that is waterproof, let alone one that can be dropped from 7 or 8 feet repeatedly without worrying about if it will survive. F) Grid networking. Instead of crowding around a single access point that might not be in reach, a school full of OLPC's can piggyback on eachother's signals to get much further than otherwise possible.
And let's not forget that the XO project is partially responsible for the existence of netbooks. Intel and Microsoft both made reference netbook platforms in response to the perceived threat of OLPC platform. (politics, someone else can jump in with the sordid history, I'm sure). Basically, when it was announced a $100 (cough $200) laptop was considered ludicrous, and a lot of effort went into making viable platforms. Now, netbooks are almost an impulse buy.
The keyboard's pretty terrible, but other than that the OLPC is a surprisingly well designed platform for the environment it finds itself in.
The DMCA only covers copyrighted content protection, not things like garage door openers.
You could argue that the contents of the communication are a copyrighted performance created by the two participants, but it probably wouldn't hold much weight in court.
In the US at least a patent application is public record, and is intended to explain to the world how the object functions. This is not just to enforce the patent, but also to reward spreading the knowlege about how a patent works.
Asking someone to take down a blog post that describes the workings of a patented process is foolish. If the patent is written like it is supposed to be, anyone should be able to understand the patented process. You are no longer protected under trade secrets if you patent (which is why some choose not to). It is by definition at that point public knowledge.
Whether or not they have a patent case against him, they have no case against his blog.
Property is inherently objects. I can hold a guitar in my hand. I can hold a cassette in my hand. I can't hold a concept, or a musical riff, or a mathematical formula in my hand. That is not "property" in the traditional definition. By playing a Kiss tune on my guitar, I haven't deprived the Kiss Army of any property they might own. By holding a Kiss-authored song in my head, that does not give them property rights over my brain. Any sort of "rights" granted in this way are extra rights that society gives, in the hopes that Gene Simmons will keep on making music until all of his teeth fall out. Of course "rights" is a misnomer, since it really is a curb on the freedoms that other people have.
Let's take your farm analogy. If you buy some land and build a farm, you're entitled to make money selling your goods and hopefully passing on a healthy farm to your children. But when you sell your farm wares today, what you get back is money. You can't create a pumpkin today and expect to be making money off of that one pumpkin for hundreds of years. You build stuff on your farm and sell them, building a thriving network of connections, knowledge, and equipment. A creative house is no different. We make cultural objects. But when we create something, it feeds us for a while, then we have to create something else. I work in video games, so my title's shelf lives are incredibly limited. But it is long enough and rewarding enough to go on creating more and more. And were I to own a studio of my own, I would be passing on the network of connections and development knowledge (and branding!) to my children, as well as any money I might have made.
Of course, with the roughly 100 year copyright term currently in the US, I would actually be able to pass on copyrights to my children. And their children. And that sounds silly to me. Why? Because they didn't do anything. Larrkin didn't create Kookaburra, and aren't being rewarded for effort on their part. They bought the rights to a catalog of works, with the hope that they could troll around and sue people with similar songs. As a society, we're agreeing to curb freedoms in exchange for rewarding the production of certain types of intangible cultural artifacts. How is my children's children growing up getting royalty checks for something they had nothing to do with going to encourage them to get off their lazy butts and produce? Or more realistically, how is some large rights clearinghouse getting royalty checks for something they bought on clearance when a record company folded going to encourage the production of more music?
BTW, as thoughts become more valuable, the more inherent incentive there is to create them, the less we need as a society to incentivize their creation. If they're becoming more valuable, then things are moving in the right direction without our intervention.
I'm just waiting for the guy who invented the power chord to sue for the hella dollars he is rightfully owed.
Music is a cultural artifact. Cultural artifacts inherently build upon eachother, or else they are meaningless. A big part of music litigation is finding that line between building on what someone else has done, and just straight duplicating. That line isn't always clear. And frequently, trial judges aren't the right people to be making that distinction.
Dell used to be pretty good about that. For about 8 years their old power adaptors would work with new machines (at degraded rates), and their new power adaptors would work with their old machines. It was a big reason to stay on dells: an abundant supply of power in any given room.
They just changed their adaptor this past year. Now it is this hexagonal thingie that is only compatible with their new models. Damn.
What else would you upgrade or replace? The CPU needs a motherboard built for it, and the motherboard has to be form-fitted to the laptop. Same with northbridge, southbridge, and a bunch of other controllers. PCI / PCIE covers a lot of upgrade grounds.
The graphics card really needs to become standardized, but there is movement in that direction already. Theoretically you could decide on a standard formfactor for optical disk drives. But those seem to be on the outs with laptops anyway. Really, unless you want to create a standardized motherboard formfactor for laptops, and are willing to accept laptops that are about twice as big to fit those, they're about as upgradable currently as they're likely to get for the next few years.
I'm trying to imagine ICANN's brand of fairness applied worldwide.
"If you would like to protest one of our policies, fill out form 23-6 and mail it with a non-refundable check for 500,000 dollars to our headquarters. Please wait 10 years for processing."
Somehow I think we're better off with governments.
The pointers to the servers are on US soil.
Nobody got their servers taken. Nobody had hard drives wiped. The offending people had to go register new names at a different country, change some logos, and spread word about the change. It probably took them about a day.
If you were advertising illegal services in Russia through US magazines, the government would probably step in and stop the ads from happening. They don't have the power to go to Russia and stop the services, but they have the power to stop the advertising on US soil. Same thing here. .com is the default domain name, but the BBC and many other sites do very well on their local TLD. 36% of the top domain names in the world are non-.coms. If you're going to do something flagrantly against US law, choosing a non-US domain name (or dealing with a day of downtime) doesn't seem unreasonable.
And we're not talking about redirecting NewZelandVacations.com because their boats use a type of plastic banned in the US. Pirate sites will do just as well on other TLD's. Also, NinjaVideo and TVShack aren't network companies, and shouldn't have been on .net anyway.
I wish people would stop using .com for everything, and start using their appropriate country's TLD. While we're on a .com standard, we're on a US standard. And while I don't actually disagree with US laws in this respect, I don't believe that by default US law should be the applicable jurisdiction for all websites. Of course, we should move us websites to .us instead of .com. But one step at a time.
In 2000 I believed that my vote didn't matter. That the two main candidates were both messed-up sellouts and would both equally do horrible damage to this country and its people.
Boy did Bush prove me wrong.
If anyone lives down to that bar again, I'm moving to Canada.
But the Android market is known to lack filters. You go to the android market because it lacks filters.
Apple claims that all of the ridiculous app store shenanigans over the past few years have been in order to create a family-friendly, safe Disneyland. And hopefully they will deliver on that promise. But in the mean time, buyer beware. Using iTunes to turn hijacked computers into dollars is actually kind of brilliant. Hopefully we won't see that proliferate.
Why should you lock your voicemail if the only phone that is supposed to have access to it is your own?
If someone is spoofing your phone to your phone company, there are much bigger problems. It isn't impossible, but phone cloning is much harder to do now than in the early days of drive-by number stealing. These days the phone companies have pretty solid ways of knowing who you are for billing and other purposes. Yet they use caller-ID to determine voicemail access? That's just a bad implementation.
Having lots of devices with built-in rechargeable batteries, my experience is that the fail state still isn't quite as clean as for alkaline. It's definitely better than NIMH batteries in an Alkaline-expecting device, but:
Rechargeable batteries naturally lose charge over their lifespan. They start at a slightly lower voltage and end at about the same. Devices have many ways of dealing with this natural discharge, but they all seem to be much better at estimating when a recharge is imminent early on in the battery's lifespan.
Lots of rechargable battery devices have replacement upgrade batteries, which may have more power or voltage available to them. These, of course, further complicate the logic of "beep when the user has 15 minutes left." Is that a 75% voltage stream on a 6 cell, 9 cell, a 12 cell, or those special Mickey Mouse 8 cells we gave away at Disneyland?
NiMH also seems to be more temperature-sensitive than Alkaline. While I can't guarantee this messes with overall voltage, my battery indicators do seem to behave differently in the winter than in the summer.
For gaming, you actually do want a scroll wheel with bumps. The scroll wheel is used frequently for discrete selections like weapons and inventory. Sadly, this is why it is really hard to find frictionless scroll wheels.
Personally I want a thumb trackball on mice for scrolling, since 2 dimensional scrolling is a sad part of the real world. And a trackball thumb could be used for easy camera rotation in 3DS Max.
Yes, but this adds 2 9-key pads and a joystick to your mouse hand, leaving your left hand free to continue keyboarding.
On a war flight simulator, this might be enough keys to actually play with only two hands. For 3D development work, you could work in 3DS max without having to press modifiers all of the bloody time. I could think of at least a half-dozen macros in Flash that would be nice to have mapped to dedicated keys under your fingers at all times.
Realistically speaking, it's probably not going anywhere. But more inputs are definitely appreciated for devoted workers / players.