From the GM link: ''With its robust 42-volt electrical system, the car is configured to run any number of devices in the passenger compartment, from homes to entire farms.''
Thought this seemed familiar, I read it nearly three months ago in the print edition.
Still, he makes some very good points. Have a look at the news story below to read about the 5-year jailterm Champion Of The People Fritz 'they named an evil chip after me' Hollings and others are trying to get you if you dare to tinker. How do people who work against the interests of the people who elected them so continue to get elected?
This is evidently the case, as no one working on the project has had any approach from MS so far.
I think they see it as some distance away from the center of gravity of their customer base, which is mostly pimply -> wrinkly twitchers. Plus they probably rightly see that actually very few of their customers overall will ever get a modchip that is necessary to run it.. 1%-5% something like that.
However the other week Michael Steil, the project lead had Open Office up. That really made me think, with a little more maturity and slickness, quickly and easily booting into being able to run Mozilla, Mplayer, Office apps, all from a free CD and a $10 USB keyboard could potentially give MS nightmares from several angles. What's needed now is a) to still work with the new 'secure' version that's in the pipeline, and b) preferably some way to get control of the machine without a modchip.
On the job offer, most of the folks working on the project are in the EU, and several (although not necessarily all) do not find themselves philisophically aligned with the aims of MS. But if anyone wants to join them, I'd wish them good luck against the modchip manufacturers, they'll need it. I think that kind of job could be interesting, but if they day dawns that you 'win', the excitement fades, the scales fall from your eyes and you look around at the smoking ruins you have caused.
In fact there have been no reports of the new version of the xbox out in the wild yet. I think MS have warehouses full of the old ones to get rid of.
I purchased a second one for routing/ printerserver duties last Friday, and it was manufactured in May 2002. So I think we're still pretty safe for a few weeks.
Re:Spirit the Stallion
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
You don't stand a chance, I hear her boyfriend's hung like a horse
Another more interesting question is why don't they give the consumer what they want and issue the film on DVD at a higher price simultaneous with the cinema release.
Think about it... what's actually the problem?
Re:Summary of functionality
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 2
I live in the UK. The project leader and several other people who worked on it are in DE. This may be difficult to understand, but those are not states of America.
I guess that was your contribution: thanks very much.
The X-Box is at the confluence of several bad trends in the world.
1) The trend towards evolving a 'perfect customer', a sheeplike animal which only consumes and offers money. Such creatures may never contribute, it would be competition for the attention of the other sheeplike creatures.
2) The introduction of extraordinarily overzealous punative Intellectual Property laws. The patent laws again are designed to stop people being able to contribute by making a land-grab of concepts on behalf of established interests. You are just not allowed, by dint of fines and imprisonment, to contribute in the areas these corporate barons have fenced off.
And if you try to go around that, the barons are ready with the copyright law, EUCD, DMCA.
3) The cross-ownership of Intellectual Property driven corporations and Media companies, which leads to...
4) The meekness of our representatives in government. They are there to represent the interests of the people that voted them in. Instead they represent their own interests by pandering to the powerful media corporations, who hold out the dreadful stick of public humiliation in their outlets (or worse, no coverage at all), and who knows what kind of porkbarrel carrots
5) The sleight of hand that takes money but delivers no ownership. Evil licenses. You buy software - but do you own it? What happens when that extends to physical hardware like the xbox itself? Already MS issue licenses that deny you the right to print comparitive benchmarks. You want things to extend down that path, controlling your rights to utilize physical objects that you paid for, with punitive laws enacted by your own gutless government to back them up?
6) Palladium. With the force of the DMCA/EUCD.
Consider these reasons, and then consider the act of Tux occupying the Instrument Of The Beast and telling people that they can be free.
Does this answer your question?
Re:Is USB compatible?
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The USB is standard USB, except for the physical connector. However, inside the box is a hub daughtercard, which provides the four game ports. Until/unless Xbox -> Standard USB Type A sockets become available, a reasonable hack is to solder a short USB cable on the daughtercard hub connector.
The wire colours are standardized for USB and the cable in the xbox uses the standard colours, which you will find if you cut any USB cable.
Summary of functionality
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A better link is directly to the xbox linux site on Sourceforge.
Basically this is a micro distro that fits either on 1MByte of flash in the xbox / in a modchip, or is also able to boot from an unsigned XBE on a CD. After booting web services, telnet, etc are available. We added a small precooked default website on the box; after booting visiting http://192.168.0.64/ (the default IP for the box) brings up this page direct from your box.
We hope to issue a full distro that boots into X in the next couple of releases, with video, USB and audio up.
I am active in the X-Box Linux effort, and based in the UK, it makes me very sad to read the summaries of this law here.
King Canute-style the people who make money from restricting availability of digital content have gotten more bad law made. As there is no technical fix for the erosion of their ability to overcharge, they instead try to bludgeon their customers into lying still.
The resources of the state, including the unique powers to punish and deprive citizens of money and liberty will soon be being applied to individuals in the name of enriching the copyright holders. This is so inappropriate its ludicrous.
I admired Janis Ian's second article reminding the legislators that they are voted in. But look at the incestuousness between these 'copyright holders' and the media that politicians need to influence the masses that vote for them! How far would a party get if it stood on a platform of de-emphasising these laws (I say that because no one country can strike them from the books, this being an EC law).
However, there is one bright light untouched by this. Linux, GPL software in general, stands as the opposition to this IP world. At the cost of 'dropping out' from using programs and media that is not free, you can still get by. So my prediction is that this historic force of giving hugely excessive power to copyright holders across the world will polarize people all the more and give the whole free knowledge philosophy a huge boost, turning many of us into mini-Stallmans.
Sure there is, turn off your TV, prise your kids out of the kid-shaped depression in the sofa and do other things that don't require you to be passive and watch ads to give you a value system.
I have been using Quickbooks 6.0 on crossover for a couple of weeks, it works fine.
In fact it works almost perfectly without crossover on CVS wine, the only problem is not being able to print, the print dialog won't come up (no small problem for this kind of sw). Crossover supplies the print dialog and the whole thing hangs together excellently.
It has already been discussed by people active in looking at the X-Box
here, including a comment by bunnie, the original Hacking God. The current feeling is that until they stop using a commodity CPU, whatever they do can be worked around in greater or lesser time.
Interesting... I am running KDE3 on the Redhat limbo beta. I seem to recall it was on 7.3 too, although I was still trying to use Gnome at that point. They don't seem to be downplaying KDE from my point of view, you get a choice of either or both.
Nautilus does most of what you'd expect, but little things like not self-updating if you copy files into the directory its looking at, the Konq preview-on-hover, and the sheer speed difference when you have a few windows open made KDE much better as it stands today IMHO.
>the mozilla UI is pretty much standardized on all platforms
That was my point. She uses a very limited number of apps, eg, the browser, Word. Even her email is done via the browser. So long as the OS does not actively get in her way, she would be quite happy with KDE3, Mozilla, and Open Office. The fact that its Linux running it all underneath is not relevant to her.
I think a lot of users are in this situation, all day they interact with web pages and for them the browser is ''the computer'', plus they know a handful of apps. They have someone else to set up networking, printers, where there are more obvious differences. They are quite ready to run a modern Linux distro, will not care, and if they are pleased it will be because they find more free games under the 'Start' menu (or if they are coming from a 95/98/Me machine, because it will not crash any more).
I disagree... my wife was in here at the weekend and she saw that I was in Mozilla on a site categorizing the food by country (http://www.recipesource.com/), took over the keyboard, found some Thai recipes she had been looking for and printed them off.
I pointed out to her that she had been using Linux (the rest of the machines in the house are currently 98 or XP), and she agreed that it had been no effort.
So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture, File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way. I am using KDE3 and it really isn't far away from where it needs to be.
Sure there are games and specific apps that won't come over from Windows despite Wine and Crossover Office (which fixed the problems with Quickbooks 6 in wine for printing), but I was very pleasantly surprised with how far everything had come since I last looked a year or so ago.
There's something about these 'Home Entertainment' systems that is deeply disturbing. They sit in a corner of your living space like a modern shrine, exciting in their adherents the same passivity and receptiveness as the old places of worship.
The worshipper sits before them slackjawed, Pringles are the Body of Christ and Sunny Delight their communion wine. The worshipper becomes the holy consumer, contributing nothing but willing to pay, and pay again for his 'entertainment' to any creature that can make them forget themselves for a while longer.
There is a strange social aspect to these systems, too. The size of your television is important to men. Self-loathing eats away like a cancer at the man who cannot afford a television at least as large as his friends; why, he is not only willing but eager to go into debt to avoid this Terrible Shame. And the man who buys his first DVD player knows he is someone.
Yes, someone who will be paying inflated prices for 'entertainment' on DVD from now on. For just like the Old Religions, there is a coinslot built into the edifice.
It doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to build it into your life day by day.
What is it with these interviews lately? People have interesting things to say and then they reveal they correspond with child molestors or are in trouble because they have a backup personality (I imagine this is less fun than it sounds).
Is Taco feeding them a Truth drug in some dungeon at the Corporate Headquarters?
Slashdot Mirror
...someone DID imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
If they're going cheap, they might make a pretty impressive IEEE 802.11 antenna.
From the GM link: ''With its robust 42-volt electrical system, the car is configured to run any number of devices in the passenger compartment, from homes to entire farms.''
um... what????
Thought this seemed familiar, I read it nearly three months ago in the print edition.
t op
Still, he makes some very good points. Have a look at the news story below to read about the 5-year jailterm Champion Of The People Fritz 'they named an evil chip after me' Hollings and others are trying to get you if you dare to tinker. How do people who work against the interests of the people who elected them so continue to get elected?
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956811.html?tag=fd_
This is evidently the case, as no one working on the project has had any approach from MS so far.
I think they see it as some distance away from the center of gravity of their customer base, which is mostly pimply -> wrinkly twitchers. Plus they probably rightly see that actually very few of their customers overall will ever get a modchip that is necessary to run it.. 1%-5% something like that.
However the other week Michael Steil, the project lead had Open Office up. That really made me think, with a little more maturity and slickness, quickly and easily booting into being able to run Mozilla, Mplayer, Office apps, all from a free CD and a $10 USB keyboard could potentially give MS nightmares from several angles. What's needed now is a) to still work with the new 'secure' version that's in the pipeline, and b) preferably some way to get control of the machine without a modchip.
On the job offer, most of the folks working on the project are in the EU, and several (although not necessarily all) do not find themselves philisophically aligned with the aims of MS. But if anyone wants to join them, I'd wish them good luck against the modchip manufacturers, they'll need it. I think that kind of job could be interesting, but if they day dawns that you 'win', the excitement fades, the scales fall from your eyes and you look around at the smoking ruins you have caused.
On my site there is a $4 modchip that most 12 year olds could fit.
The xbox is also attractive at its price for DVD drive and a modern video chipset, plus excellent TV-out.
Yes, you need some kind of modchip / BIOS replacement in order to get any unsigned executable to run on the box, including Linux.
American, Austrian, German, English, and other places too.
In fact there have been no reports of the new version of the xbox out in the wild yet. I think MS have warehouses full of the old ones to get rid of.
I purchased a second one for routing/ printerserver duties last Friday, and it was manufactured in May 2002. So I think we're still pretty safe for a few weeks.
You don't stand a chance, I hear her boyfriend's hung like a horse
Yes. It would.
Another more interesting question is why don't they give the consumer what they want and issue the film on DVD at a higher price simultaneous with the cinema release.
Think about it... what's actually the problem?
I live in the UK. The project leader and several other people who worked on it are in DE. This may be difficult to understand, but those are not states of America.
I guess that was your contribution: thanks very much.
The X-Box is at the confluence of several bad trends in the world.
1) The trend towards evolving a 'perfect customer', a sheeplike animal which only consumes and offers money. Such creatures may never contribute, it would be competition for the attention of the other sheeplike creatures.
2) The introduction of extraordinarily overzealous punative Intellectual Property laws. The patent laws again are designed to stop people being able to contribute by making a land-grab of concepts on behalf of established interests. You are just not allowed, by dint of fines and imprisonment, to contribute in the areas these corporate barons have fenced off.
And if you try to go around that, the barons are ready with the copyright law, EUCD, DMCA.
3) The cross-ownership of Intellectual Property driven corporations and Media companies, which leads to...
4) The meekness of our representatives in government. They are there to represent the interests of the people that voted them in. Instead they represent their own interests by pandering to the powerful media corporations, who hold out the dreadful stick of public humiliation in their outlets (or worse, no coverage at all), and who knows what kind of porkbarrel carrots
5) The sleight of hand that takes money but delivers no ownership. Evil licenses. You buy software - but do you own it? What happens when that extends to physical hardware like the xbox itself? Already MS issue licenses that deny you the right to print comparitive benchmarks. You want things to extend down that path, controlling your rights to utilize physical objects that you paid for, with punitive laws enacted by your own gutless government to back them up?
6) Palladium. With the force of the DMCA/EUCD.
Consider these reasons, and then consider the act of Tux occupying the Instrument Of The Beast and telling people that they can be free.
Does this answer your question?
The USB is standard USB, except for the physical connector. However, inside the box is a hub daughtercard, which provides the four game ports. Until/unless Xbox -> Standard USB Type A sockets become available, a reasonable hack is to solder a short USB cable on the daughtercard hub connector.
The wire colours are standardized for USB and the cable in the xbox uses the standard colours, which you will find if you cut any USB cable.
Basically this is a micro distro that fits either on 1MByte of flash in the xbox / in a modchip, or is also able to boot from an unsigned XBE on a CD. After booting web services, telnet, etc are available. We added a small precooked default website on the box; after booting visiting http://192.168.0.64/ (the default IP for the box) brings up this page direct from your box.
We hope to issue a full distro that boots into X in the next couple of releases, with video, USB and audio up.
I am active in the X-Box Linux effort, and based in the UK, it makes me very sad to read the summaries of this law here.
King Canute-style the people who make money from restricting availability of digital content have gotten more bad law made. As there is no technical fix for the erosion of their ability to overcharge, they instead try to bludgeon their customers into lying still.
The resources of the state, including the unique powers to punish and deprive citizens of money and liberty will soon be being applied to individuals in the name of enriching the copyright holders. This is so inappropriate its ludicrous.
I admired Janis Ian's second article reminding the legislators that they are voted in. But look at the incestuousness between these 'copyright holders' and the media that politicians need to influence the masses that vote for them! How far would a party get if it stood on a platform of de-emphasising these laws (I say that because no one country can strike them from the books, this being an EC law).
However, there is one bright light untouched by this. Linux, GPL software in general, stands as the opposition to this IP world. At the cost of 'dropping out' from using programs and media that is not free, you can still get by. So my prediction is that this historic force of giving hugely excessive power to copyright holders across the world will polarize people all the more and give the whole free knowledge philosophy a huge boost, turning many of us into mini-Stallmans.
Sure there is, turn off your TV, prise your kids out of the kid-shaped depression in the sofa and do other things that don't require you to be passive and watch ads to give you a value system.
I have been using Quickbooks 6.0 on crossover for a couple of weeks, it works fine.
In fact it works almost perfectly without crossover on CVS wine, the only problem is not being able to print, the print dialog won't come up (no small problem for this kind of sw). Crossover supplies the print dialog and the whole thing hangs together excellently.
It has already been discussed by people active in looking at the X-Box here, including a comment by bunnie, the original Hacking God. The current feeling is that until they stop using a commodity CPU, whatever they do can be worked around in greater or lesser time.
Interesting... I am running KDE3 on the Redhat limbo beta. I seem to recall it was on 7.3 too, although I was still trying to use Gnome at that point. They don't seem to be downplaying KDE from my point of view, you get a choice of either or both.
Nautilus does most of what you'd expect, but little things like not self-updating if you copy files into the directory its looking at, the Konq preview-on-hover, and the sheer speed difference when you have a few windows open made KDE much better as it stands today IMHO.
>the mozilla UI is pretty much standardized on all platforms
That was my point. She uses a very limited number of apps, eg, the browser, Word. Even her email is done via the browser. So long as the OS does not actively get in her way, she would be quite happy with KDE3, Mozilla, and Open Office. The fact that its Linux running it all underneath is not relevant to her.
I think a lot of users are in this situation, all day they interact with web pages and for them the browser is ''the computer'', plus they know a handful of apps. They have someone else to set up networking, printers, where there are more obvious differences. They are quite ready to run a modern Linux distro, will not care, and if they are pleased it will be because they find more free games under the 'Start' menu (or if they are coming from a 95/98/Me machine, because it will not crash any more).
I disagree... my wife was in here at the weekend and she saw that I was in Mozilla on a site categorizing the food by country (http://www.recipesource.com/), took over the keyboard, found some Thai recipes she had been looking for and printed them off.
I pointed out to her that she had been using Linux (the rest of the machines in the house are currently 98 or XP), and she agreed that it had been no effort.
So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture, File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way. I am using KDE3 and it really isn't far away from where it needs to be.
Sure there are games and specific apps that won't come over from Windows despite Wine and Crossover Office (which fixed the problems with Quickbooks 6 in wine for printing), but I was very pleasantly surprised with how far everything had come since I last looked a year or so ago.
There's something about these 'Home Entertainment' systems that is deeply disturbing. They sit in a corner of your living space like a modern shrine, exciting in their adherents the same passivity and receptiveness as the old places of worship.
The worshipper sits before them slackjawed, Pringles are the Body of Christ and Sunny Delight their communion wine. The worshipper becomes the holy consumer, contributing nothing but willing to pay, and pay again for his 'entertainment' to any creature that can make them forget themselves for a while longer.
There is a strange social aspect to these systems, too. The size of your television is important to men. Self-loathing eats away like a cancer at the man who cannot afford a television at least as large as his friends; why, he is not only willing but eager to go into debt to avoid this Terrible Shame. And the man who buys his first DVD player knows he is someone.
Yes, someone who will be paying inflated prices for 'entertainment' on DVD from now on. For just like the Old Religions, there is a coinslot built into the edifice.
It doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to build it into your life day by day.
Mr Perens now able to walk without wheelbarrow; confirms HP has his nuts in a very large jar.
What is it with these interviews lately? People have interesting things to say and then they reveal they correspond with child molestors or are in trouble because they have a backup personality (I imagine this is less fun than it sounds).
Is Taco feeding them a Truth drug in some dungeon at the Corporate Headquarters?
I have only slightly smaller balls than that, and I am able to walk because my wife keeps them in a jar.