I first heard about non-zero sum in real life from Robert K. You can get his game that teaches financial education as well has have some fun. You can get the game from his website (they have a kids version too) at:
Most of the arguments for open sourcing the driver assume that this is a simple device, like a video card or a sound card. I have a hunch as to who this company is. I have worked with their boards, and I've actually seen the documentation for this "secret" of theirs. It is extremely complex. Even people who have the documentation have a hard time bringing out the full functionality.
Reverse engineering it would not be easy. The secret has been available in the hardware for years, and I don't think any competition has done anything like it. It is a very complex ASIC on their boards.
I like the notion that they open source their driver without support for the secret, but with support for plugins. A binary plugin can be provided for the extra functionality, and all the comapny has to do is port that binary plugin to the different architectures (x86, PPC, etc.). It allows for people to get the driver up and running anywhere, and then the extra functionality comes at the pace the company can keep up with.
Its not an ideal situation, but this is not an ideal world.
I have an idea as to who this company may be. And the "secret" to which he refers is far more complex than the MIDI card example. It is *possible* to reverse engineer it, but very *impracticle*. There is no consumer device that I can think of that has the complexity of this one "feature" of the companies boards. Even with the documentation for it, it is hard to get it working.
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I first heard about non-zero sum in real life from Robert K. You can get his game that teaches financial education as well has have some fun. You can get the game from his website (they have a kids version too) at:
http://www.richdad.com/products.html
Reverse engineering it would not be easy. The secret has been available in the hardware for years, and I don't think any competition has done anything like it. It is a very complex ASIC on their boards.
I like the notion that they open source their driver without support for the secret, but with support for plugins. A binary plugin can be provided for the extra functionality, and all the comapny has to do is port that binary plugin to the different architectures (x86, PPC, etc.). It allows for people to get the driver up and running anywhere, and then the extra functionality comes at the pace the company can keep up with.
Its not an ideal situation, but this is not an ideal world.
I have an idea as to who this company may be. And the "secret" to which he refers is far more complex than the MIDI card example. It is *possible* to reverse engineer it, but very *impracticle*. There is no consumer device that I can think of that has the complexity of this one "feature" of the companies boards. Even with the documentation for it, it is hard to get it working.
You can look at IPNetRouter (may be Mac only). It allows you to designate a machine that accepts incoming packets that it can't use NAT to route.