In my experiences, the people that buy and sell this data are oblivious to where it came from and that it might be gathered in a less-than-pleasant fashion. Their primary concern is accuracy and price.
The demographic data junkies at most corporations I've dealt with are college graduates with degrees in sales and marketing, not comp-sci. Their news pages are wsj.com and ESPN.com, not slashdot or kuro5in.
On the bright side, they're all virus paranoid and if things like this show up in NAV and they somehow make the connection - that's good. The problem is, they're usually virus paranoid because they've once (or twice, in many cases) launched "BRITNEY.EXE" thinking it actually was nudie pics of Britney, only to spam their entire company with the latest Email virus.
My point being they find things like this out the hard way, and as long as there's thousands of these people out there to buy the 'evil' data to learn the lesson, there's a market to sell 'evil' data.
-500 points to @Home's marketing for not allowing me to find out that they originally had >1.5mb/sec bandwidth (and I did try to find it).
Not that my subscription fees would have made a difference, but I might have went with them instead of DSL had I known. I wonder how many other customers they lost by not slapping stats like that on their marketing materials...
The worst part of this is Keith Powell, who's squatting on kpmgsucks.com doesn't have a page and is probably missing out on the most traffic it'll ever get.
You really can't go wrong with Chez Geek. Yeah, sure, it doesn't have a controller or updated 3d support, but it does kick arse. Including a case of the geek's beverage of choice usually improves the experience.
For under $10, there's a few Cheapass games that are a ton of fun with the right crowd. Give Me The Brain, Deadwood, and Ben Hurt are good. We also dig Ebola Monkey Hunt from Placebo Press. Both can be had for ~$7.
That's unfortunate. I'd counter with a good experience. I picked up a new Audigy sound card, but discovered the driver CD was bad (not bad enough to totally crash, but bad enough that WinME would stop and ask to re-insert the CD). I called Creative's tech support and asked for a replacement CD (giving a detailed explanation of the media failure). They said they'd drop a new CD in the mail ASAP. Instead, they sent me an entire replacement Audigy (with a working CD).
My only other exposure to Akira has been through repeated viewings of the Criterion Laserdisc version. I couldn't help but notice they completely redubbed the English voices DVD release! The DVD dub voices are much less "anime-esque" compared to the Laserdisc and the names are all pronounced differently from what I'm used to (somehow, they sound closer to what I'd expect the Japanese pronunciation to be). Very disconcerting. It just doesn't feel as raw or as much fun as the older LD version.
Does anyone know the history of the two dubs? (I haven't watched any of the extras yet).
"So why are they changing their product to adapt to the weaker market segment?"
Do not underestimate the enterprise market. Tens of thousands of handhelds are sold to corporate customers in renewing contracts that can bring much higher profit margins than units that you see on store shelves (that cost money for nice packaging, shelf space, endcap advertising, technical support).
If someone like Ford, GE, or FedEx chooses to buy 10,000 of PDA brand X instead of Y because X has the horsepower to parse their custom 100mb database in 1/2 the time as brand Y (who decided they were fine relying on old tech and didn't need big horsepower), that's several millions of dollars of revenue not on your bottom line.
A few notes on setting up a wireless access point:
As a precautionary measure, turn on some kind of access security. The Lucent Orinoco and Apple Airport both allow you to restrict access via password or MAC address.
If you choose not to do this, at least put the AP behind some sort of firewall and make sure any internal shares are secure from "guest" access.
I've got a mixed network in my apartment and I'd discovered that one of my neighbors had a wireless card and was hijacking my bandwidth! (and possibly surfing my internal network).
Sandisk makes a floppy disk-sized cartridge that holds a SmartMedia card and allows you to access it using a standard floppy drive (Mac is read-only though). It does require drivers though, so no booting from it a-la LRP.
While SmartMedia is certainly more expensive than floppies (still ~$2/mb), it's certainly a lot more durable and portable and (as a standard) will probably outlast this new floppy tech.
It's probably been 15 years since I read the book, but didnt the 'spider' have 3 legs? One would hope the artist had actually read the book and understands why it's terribly important they not make a concession like that for the sake of cinema or practicality or whatever. Maybe it's a Python production - "Ramans do everything in 6's" "Uh, threes, sir!".
FYI - There is a fairly decent VB plugin for Palm development. Due to the custom UI widgets, it's not as easy to do cross-platform development as one would hope, but it certainly does work well.
www.appforge.com
Actually, Jeff and Donna left Palm primarily because they were unhappy with 3Com's management. Shame they didn't stick around a little longer until Palm was spun off, but in the end Handspring is probably the best thing to happen to Palm since Microsoft decided PDA's should run Windows.
Why would Palm re-work Grafitti? While many people have minor gripes about it, the truth is it does work well for millions of users. It's pretty low on the list of "Things to fix".
The definition of "pleasing to listen to" is pretty subjective. In the case of most sysadmins, I'd imagine Peep would be more effective with samples taken from Quake than the local park.
I believe This is what you're looking for. Although it's not really suited for multiple sources and you need some kind of RS232 hardware on the acquisition end...
The Crusoe's not really aimed at the PDA market. It's way too overpowered and as energy stingy as it is, it doesn't come anywhere near todays PDA processors.
The Crusoe TM 3200 - 333mhz (Transmeta's most "mobile" processor) consumes ~15mW of power in it's most power conservative state (deep sleep idle) and averages 1.4W (mp3 playback) (both of these figures include the Northbridge chipset power consumption as well).
By comparison, an entire Palm Pilot Pro (using a 16mhz Dragonball eats ~26mW in it's idle state and consumes ~160mW when running CPU intensive applications.
While you could leave your Crusoe on the shelf and outlast a Palm, It wouldnt take very long for 1.4W to drain a pair of AAA batteries once you start doing something with the unit.
My friends and I had the chance to attend Robot Wars several years back with a round for autonomous bots - it just wasn't that fun. The bots were slow, didn't have any original attacks, and were generally less violent. I dont think amateur teams can afford the time or development resources to spend on making truely brutal autonomous bots. Maybe if some colleges sponsered the event....
Is it appears that the system will go a long ways towards preventing broken transfers and the D/L of incomplete files - one of the primary problems plagueing Napster and Gnutella. Since it costs Mojo to publish, it's unlikely someone would bother to publish something incomplete, and since the file has to be fully uploaded before it's registered (AFAICT), no downloading unfinished uploads.
That feature alone may be Mojo's salvation.
I was under the impression from the docs that it actually COSTS Mojo to upload. Ways to GET Mojo basically revolved around donating hardware resources (storage, cpu, bandwidth). You can't actually get Mojo for sending your own data, you have to send data that the system has stored on your drive.
That being said, where the vision will fall flat is nobody's going to pay to publish the porn and warez and MP3's that make up 90% of the Napster/Gnutella traffic when you can still get it through Napster/Gnutella for free.
Strap a webcam to the top, add an accelerometer to it and program the Palm with a fuzzy algorithm to produce the most violent jerky movement while streaming video to a 72" TV being watched by a batch of too-drunk hackers?
I think a closer parallel would be:
You buy a Ford, rip out the engine and replace it with a Studebaker engine with more HP. A few months later, something goes wrong so you return to the shop expecting a warrantee repair. The mechanic's a nice guy and a bit of a Studebaker hacker, so he fixes it anyhow (or maybe he tries and fails), but you posted how to replace the engine on the net and now there's a line of 50 Fords with Studebaker engines all suffering some problem hoping for a repair. This mean's Ford has several options:
-Agree to fix Studebaker engines, which means working a deal with Studebaker for parts (which wont be nearly as cheap as Ford parts) and sending all the mechanics to Studebaker school. Not cheap in the short run, not cheap in the long run.
-Ignore these customers and state "We don't fix modified Fords" to stop people sending modified units back, incurring the wrath of the customer base.
-Accept modified units but charge out-of-warrantee repair fees. This works fine until someone puts a Mazda turbo on the Studebaker engine and posts results to the net. Suddenly, Ford has to send all mechanics to Studebaker AND Mazda school (and narrows hiring choices to mechanics who know Ford, Studebaker, and Mazda, which are very scarce in Silicon Valley and want premium cash & stock options) and negotiate parts deals with Mazda. This becomes a never-ending cycle and results in high repair fees and Ford spending a lot more energy on repairs and a lot less on making new cars (which again incurs the wrath of the customer base because Ford "isn't spending enough energy innovating").
Or worse yet, Ford comes out with a free chip upgrade that adds tons of HP and drives fuel economy down more than any upgrade that the hackers have been doing, but doesn't work with the now-wimpy Studebaker engines, so now everyone is in a huff because Ford's not supporting the innovators (or as most customers will say "screwing over the hackers") and they're left with weaker machines than if they'd just left the hood down in the first place.
Before raking this thing over the coals, keep in mind that pretty much any/. reader does not fall into the target market for this product. The m100 is aimed towards the non-techie youth market, the same people who have custom faceplates on their Nokia and the most fashionable school backpack available.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experiences, the people that buy and sell this data are oblivious to where it came from and that it might be gathered in a less-than-pleasant fashion. Their primary concern is accuracy and price.
The demographic data junkies at most corporations I've dealt with are college graduates with degrees in sales and marketing, not comp-sci. Their news pages are wsj.com and ESPN.com, not slashdot or kuro5in.
On the bright side, they're all virus paranoid and if things like this show up in NAV and they somehow make the connection - that's good. The problem is, they're usually virus paranoid because they've once (or twice, in many cases) launched "BRITNEY.EXE" thinking it actually was nudie pics of Britney, only to spam their entire company with the latest Email virus.
My point being they find things like this out the hard way, and as long as there's thousands of these people out there to buy the 'evil' data to learn the lesson, there's a market to sell 'evil' data.
-500 points to @Home's marketing for not allowing me to find out that they originally had >1.5mb/sec bandwidth (and I did try to find it).
Not that my subscription fees would have made a difference, but I might have went with them instead of DSL had I known. I wonder how many other customers they lost by not slapping stats like that on their marketing materials...
The worst part of this is Keith Powell, who's squatting on kpmgsucks.com doesn't have a page and is probably missing out on the most traffic it'll ever get.
Not available yet
For under $10, there's a few Cheapass games that are a ton of fun with the right crowd. Give Me The Brain, Deadwood, and Ben Hurt are good. We also dig Ebola Monkey Hunt from Placebo Press. Both can be had for ~$7.
Did I mention including the beverage of choice?
That's unfortunate. I'd counter with a good experience. I picked up a new Audigy sound card, but discovered the driver CD was bad (not bad enough to totally crash, but bad enough that WinME would stop and ask to re-insert the CD). I called Creative's tech support and asked for a replacement CD (giving a detailed explanation of the media failure). They said they'd drop a new CD in the mail ASAP. Instead, they sent me an entire replacement Audigy (with a working CD).
My only other exposure to Akira has been through repeated viewings of the Criterion Laserdisc version. I couldn't help but notice they completely redubbed the English voices DVD release! The DVD dub voices are much less "anime-esque" compared to the Laserdisc and the names are all pronounced differently from what I'm used to (somehow, they sound closer to what I'd expect the Japanese pronunciation to be). Very disconcerting. It just doesn't feel as raw or as much fun as the older LD version.
Does anyone know the history of the two dubs? (I haven't watched any of the extras yet).
"So why are they changing their product to adapt to the weaker market segment?"
Do not underestimate the enterprise market. Tens of thousands of handhelds are sold to corporate customers in renewing contracts that can bring much higher profit margins than units that you see on store shelves (that cost money for nice packaging, shelf space, endcap advertising, technical support).
If someone like Ford, GE, or FedEx chooses to buy 10,000 of PDA brand X instead of Y because X has the horsepower to parse their custom 100mb database in 1/2 the time as brand Y (who decided they were fine relying on old tech and didn't need big horsepower), that's several millions of dollars of revenue not on your bottom line.
Drat! Never again will the phrase "Feminine hygiene commercial, everybody drink!" be heard in my domicile's hallowed halls.
A few notes on setting up a wireless access point:
As a precautionary measure, turn on some kind of access security. The Lucent Orinoco and Apple Airport both allow you to restrict access via password or MAC address.
If you choose not to do this, at least put the AP behind some sort of firewall and make sure any internal shares are secure from "guest" access.
I've got a mixed network in my apartment and I'd discovered that one of my neighbors had a wireless card and was hijacking my bandwidth! (and possibly surfing my internal network).
Uhoh, I think we've just slashdotted a woman's pants.
Sandisk makes a floppy disk-sized cartridge that holds a SmartMedia card and allows you to access it using a standard floppy drive (Mac is read-only though). It does require drivers though, so no booting from it a-la LRP.
While SmartMedia is certainly more expensive than floppies (still ~$2/mb), it's certainly a lot more durable and portable and (as a standard) will probably outlast this new floppy tech.
It's probably been 15 years since I read the book, but didnt the 'spider' have 3 legs? One would hope the artist had actually read the book and understands why it's terribly important they not make a concession like that for the sake of cinema or practicality or whatever. Maybe it's a Python production - "Ramans do everything in 6's" "Uh, threes, sir!".
FYI - There is a fairly decent VB plugin for Palm development. Due to the custom UI widgets, it's not as easy to do cross-platform development as one would hope, but it certainly does work well. www.appforge.com
Actually, Jeff and Donna left Palm primarily because they were unhappy with 3Com's management. Shame they didn't stick around a little longer until Palm was spun off, but in the end Handspring is probably the best thing to happen to Palm since Microsoft decided PDA's should run Windows.
Why would Palm re-work Grafitti? While many people have minor gripes about it, the truth is it does work well for millions of users. It's pretty low on the list of "Things to fix".
The definition of "pleasing to listen to" is pretty subjective. In the case of most sysadmins, I'd imagine Peep would be more effective with samples taken from Quake than the local park.
I believe This is what you're looking for. Although it's not really suited for multiple sources and you need some kind of RS232 hardware on the acquisition end...
The Crusoe's not really aimed at the PDA market. It's way too overpowered and as energy stingy as it is, it doesn't come anywhere near todays PDA processors.
The Crusoe TM 3200 - 333mhz (Transmeta's most "mobile" processor) consumes ~15mW of power in it's most power conservative state (deep sleep idle) and averages 1.4W (mp3 playback) (both of these figures include the Northbridge chipset power consumption as well).
By comparison, an entire Palm Pilot Pro (using a 16mhz Dragonball eats ~26mW in it's idle state and consumes ~160mW when running CPU intensive applications.
While you could leave your Crusoe on the shelf and outlast a Palm, It wouldnt take very long for 1.4W to drain a pair of AAA batteries once you start doing something with the unit.
My friends and I had the chance to attend Robot Wars several years back with a round for autonomous bots - it just wasn't that fun. The bots were slow, didn't have any original attacks, and were generally less violent. I dont think amateur teams can afford the time or development resources to spend on making truely brutal autonomous bots. Maybe if some colleges sponsered the event....
Is it appears that the system will go a long ways towards preventing broken transfers and the D/L of incomplete files - one of the primary problems plagueing Napster and Gnutella. Since it costs Mojo to publish, it's unlikely someone would bother to publish something incomplete, and since the file has to be fully uploaded before it's registered (AFAICT), no downloading unfinished uploads.
That feature alone may be Mojo's salvation.
I was under the impression from the docs that it actually COSTS Mojo to upload. Ways to GET Mojo basically revolved around donating hardware resources (storage, cpu, bandwidth). You can't actually get Mojo for sending your own data, you have to send data that the system has stored on your drive.
That being said, where the vision will fall flat is nobody's going to pay to publish the porn and warez and MP3's that make up 90% of the Napster/Gnutella traffic when you can still get it through Napster/Gnutella for free.
Strap a webcam to the top, add an accelerometer to it and program the Palm with a fuzzy algorithm to produce the most violent jerky movement while streaming video to a 72" TV being watched by a batch of too-drunk hackers?
Remind me again why you switched to windows if you prefer a console interface?
I think a closer parallel would be:
You buy a Ford, rip out the engine and replace it with a Studebaker engine with more HP. A few months later, something goes wrong so you return to the shop expecting a warrantee repair. The mechanic's a nice guy and a bit of a Studebaker hacker, so he fixes it anyhow (or maybe he tries and fails), but you posted how to replace the engine on the net and now there's a line of 50 Fords with Studebaker engines all suffering some problem hoping for a repair. This mean's Ford has several options:
-Agree to fix Studebaker engines, which means working a deal with Studebaker for parts (which wont be nearly as cheap as Ford parts) and sending all the mechanics to Studebaker school. Not cheap in the short run, not cheap in the long run.
-Ignore these customers and state "We don't fix modified Fords" to stop people sending modified units back, incurring the wrath of the customer base.
-Accept modified units but charge out-of-warrantee repair fees. This works fine until someone puts a Mazda turbo on the Studebaker engine and posts results to the net. Suddenly, Ford has to send all mechanics to Studebaker AND Mazda school (and narrows hiring choices to mechanics who know Ford, Studebaker, and Mazda, which are very scarce in Silicon Valley and want premium cash & stock options) and negotiate parts deals with Mazda. This becomes a never-ending cycle and results in high repair fees and Ford spending a lot more energy on repairs and a lot less on making new cars (which again incurs the wrath of the customer base because Ford "isn't spending enough energy innovating").
Or worse yet, Ford comes out with a free chip upgrade that adds tons of HP and drives fuel economy down more than any upgrade that the hackers have been doing, but doesn't work with the now-wimpy Studebaker engines, so now everyone is in a huff because Ford's not supporting the innovators (or as most customers will say "screwing over the hackers") and they're left with weaker machines than if they'd just left the hood down in the first place.
Before raking this thing over the coals, keep in mind that pretty much any /. reader does not fall into the target market for this product. The m100 is aimed towards the non-techie youth market, the same people who have custom faceplates on their Nokia and the most fashionable school backpack available.