That's exactly what it is -- USB with a funky cable.
I've been out of the "scene" for a while since I hacked my two, so I just went and looked at the bulletin boards that discuss these things, and I'm sad to report that apparently Pure Digital has finally started making a version of these things that can't be hacked using any of the existing methods. Here is a thread where the guys who figured the hack out are saying that the latest rev may finally be unhackable.
If you can get your hands on older ones, (Rev 3.62 or earlier), then you're in business, but the party may be over for owners of the new 3.70 ones.
I don't know about Rite-Aid ones, but the CVS ones are indeed hackable. The first generation required you just to build a cable; later generations have added some attempts at locking out hackers, but these have also been defeated via some clever tricks. I have two of these little CVS guys and they're a lot of fun.
Took the words right out of my mouth. The Zeldman book is a weird read. He makes you say "OK, that sounds great! Can't wait till he fills in some details...." and then, all of a sudden, you get to the last page, and realize you didn't learn a damn thing. Grrrr.
In my experience, the answer is often "yes." Skipping the introductory material means, in the minds of some editors, shutting out some of the potential audience, so they'll very often make a case for including this material.
Sometimes it's not the editors, though, but the reviewers. Reviewers won't always "get it" if they're not actually part of the book's target audience. Again, though, this may be the editor's fault for choosing inappropriate reviewers.
Mr. Spock was the science officer on the Enterprise, whose quotes should indeed be noted in "stardates." Dr. Spock was a 20th-century pediatrician and anti-war activist; Julian calendar dates would be more appropriate.
I could make the same comment about [i]laptops[/i]. If there had been [i]laptops[/i] back when I went to college, maybe I would have been to class more, let alone WiFi.
People I know seem not really to know what I do for a living. They know it has to do with computers, and most of them know I'm working on software, and many know that I'm doing something with browser software. In a nutshell, here's what my company does: Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating
Sigh. Yep. Tell them that. It's "a dashboard for collaborating". That'll convince those non-computer-savvy neighbors! Let's see what Aunt Gert thinks:
A dashboard is that place in the car where I keep my plastic Virgin Mary. There's also some dial thingies I occasionally look at, although half of them I'm not sure what they do. And "collaborating", I don't even know what that means, although it sounds a little illegal.
Why do geeks simply never say "It's a way to work together with your friends over the Web!" Why do we have to use nonsense words like "dashboard" and "collaboration" when there are perfectly lovely plain English substitutes?
the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95.
Sorry, but are they saying that Vista is somehow more significant than XP? The move from XP to Vista (which sounds like just XP with different colors, and more DRM) is somehow more significant than the move from 16-bit segments to a flat 32-bit address space?
I agree with most of what this guy has to say, except for the "blank tabs" thing. He wants new tabs to open with the home page, or last page visited, or something. But opening new tabs blank is exactly right. Whenever I explicitly open a new tab -- i.e., whenever I say "New Tab" rather than "Open in new Tab" -- the next thing I do is type into the URL box. IE's approach of having crap already in the URL box just adds steps. If you want a new tab with your home page, then make a new tab, then click "home."
Every living thing is evolving. No creatures alive are genetically identical to ones living 60,000 years ago. At that time there were wooly mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers running around.
I suppose you could argue that this is useful ammo against the ID folks, but it's really only the Flying Spaghetti Monster acolytes and other True Believers who have the hubris to believe Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the pinnacle of creation, out of the box.
Why would anyone change the name of their product from a semi-reasonable English word, to a nonsense word that any adult would feel embarrassed to say out loud? I can't imagine a better way to scare off potential new users.
Not that the company had a good business idea, or anything, but this is exactly the thing that made sure "Flooz.com" was DOA.
Tried the Java demo. It's a neat idea. It takes a minute or to to get used to it, but then it starts to feel as natural as clearing off your desk with the back of your hand when you and the secretary need someplace to... well, put something down.
Five hundred million dollars.
Five hundred million dollars.
Half a billion dollars.
In all seriousness: for what? I can't see where there's anything of any value to buy.
von Neumann wrote about self-reproduction in the late 40's and early 50's. He talked about two kinds of self-reproduction: "trivial" and "true". The trivial kind is what we see here, parts designed to force other similar parts into alignment. People are constantly coming up with demos like this. It's been done with wooden blocks, robot parts, and molecules. Ho-hum.
But von Neumann postulated that true self-reproduction, the biological kind, required a device called a Universal Constructor that could, given a blueprint, build anything (within limits, of course.) In so doing, he predicted the existence of DNA, the purpose of which was determined a few years later. The real "grey goo" nanomachines would have to be of this sort to do anything resembling evolution, or even to be capable of reproducing from raw materials rather than ready-made parts.
to Danish costumers of rival company 'Telmore'.
Spamming the people who ake their competitor's clothes? This seems like a pretty round-about way of competing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lime slice, dude.
Crap. There go my weekend plans.
I've been out of the "scene" for a while since I hacked my two, so I just went and looked at the bulletin boards that discuss these things, and I'm sad to report that apparently Pure Digital has finally started making a version of these things that can't be hacked using any of the existing methods. Here is a thread where the guys who figured the hack out are saying that the latest rev may finally be unhackable.
If you can get your hands on older ones, (Rev 3.62 or earlier), then you're in business, but the party may be over for owners of the new 3.70 ones .
I don't know about Rite-Aid ones, but the CVS ones are indeed hackable. The first generation required you just to build a cable; later generations have added some attempts at locking out hackers, but these have also been defeated via some clever tricks. I have two of these little CVS guys and they're a lot of fun.
Took the words right out of my mouth. The Zeldman book is a weird read. He makes you say "OK, that sounds great! Can't wait till he fills in some details ...." and then, all of a sudden, you get to the last page, and realize you didn't learn a damn thing. Grrrr.
In my experience, the answer is often "yes." Skipping the introductory material means, in the minds of some editors, shutting out some of the potential audience, so they'll very often make a case for including this material.
Sometimes it's not the editors, though, but the reviewers. Reviewers won't always "get it" if they're not actually part of the book's target audience. Again, though, this may be the editor's fault for choosing inappropriate reviewers.
Now, which one did you mean?
I could make the same comment about [i]laptops[/i]. If there had been [i]laptops[/i] back when I went to college, maybe I would have been to class more, let alone WiFi.
Wish I had mod points. Well spoken, ahem!
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this already. A great software design technique based on role playing!
From the site blog:
Sigh. Yep. Tell them that. It's "a dashboard for collaborating". That'll convince those non-computer-savvy neighbors! Let's see what Aunt Gert thinks:
Why do geeks simply never say "It's a way to work together with your friends over the Web!" Why do we have to use nonsense words like "dashboard" and "collaboration" when there are perfectly lovely plain English substitutes?
the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95.
Sorry, but are they saying that Vista is somehow more significant than XP? The move from XP to Vista (which sounds like just XP with different colors, and more DRM) is somehow more significant than the move from 16-bit segments to a flat 32-bit address space?Hey, cool! Didn't know that one!
I agree with most of what this guy has to say, except for the "blank tabs" thing. He wants new tabs to open with the home page, or last page visited, or something. But opening new tabs blank is exactly right. Whenever I explicitly open a new tab -- i.e., whenever I say "New Tab" rather than "Open in new Tab" -- the next thing I do is type into the URL box. IE's approach of having crap already in the URL box just adds steps. If you want a new tab with your home page, then make a new tab, then click "home."
Every living thing is evolving. No creatures alive are genetically identical to ones living 60,000 years ago. At that time there were wooly mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers running around.
I suppose you could argue that this is useful ammo against the ID folks, but it's really only the Flying Spaghetti Monster acolytes and other True Believers who have the hubris to believe Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the pinnacle of creation, out of the box.
Why would anyone change the name of their product from a semi-reasonable English word, to a nonsense word that any adult would feel embarrassed to say out loud? I can't imagine a better way to scare off potential new users.
Not that the company had a good business idea, or anything, but this is exactly the thing that made sure "Flooz.com" was DOA.
... well, actually, nobody listens.
That doesn't work either. Same problem. The .package doesn't seem to know anything at all about dependencies.
If something airs at 3pm, then it most certainly [i]does[/i] shift with DST. If it didn't, then during DST, it'd air at 2pm.
Tried the Java demo. It's a neat idea. It takes a minute or to to get used to it, but then it starts to feel as natural as clearing off your desk with the back of your hand when you and the secretary need someplace to ... well, put something down.
Five hundred million dollars. Five hundred million dollars. Half a billion dollars. In all seriousness: for what? I can't see where there's anything of any value to buy.
Protected memory and NTFS were not new in Win2k; NTFS was present in WinNT4 and protected memory in the very first versions of NT.
Only if he agrees to use it for shampoo and hairbrushes.
But von Neumann postulated that true self-reproduction, the biological kind, required a device called a Universal Constructor that could, given a blueprint, build anything (within limits, of course.) In so doing, he predicted the existence of DNA, the purpose of which was determined a few years later. The real "grey goo" nanomachines would have to be of this sort to do anything resembling evolution, or even to be capable of reproducing from raw materials rather than ready-made parts.
to Danish costumers of rival company 'Telmore'. Spamming the people who ake their competitor's clothes? This seems like a pretty round-about way of competing.