Knoppix is okay, but I really like having a very usable distro on one of those 185mb cd's. The small cd's actually fit in your pocket (typically of my coat) so I can have a useable linux distro wherever I go, AND it works on old hardware (read: PC's that can't boot off of usb keys).
I don't have a laptop at work (don't travel enough to warrant the expense) but when I do travel, I usually end up having to "borrow" someone's PC when they aren't using it. This is pain to say the least. It is great to say: "hey, let me just use that old junky one in the corner." They usually respond: oh, you can't use that one, the hard drive is broken. Which is when I say "Perfect!", and they give me this very strange look....
That said, slax is the only 'small' distro I've found that includes the utilities I need:
1. dhcp 2. Web browser that supports ssl AND PROXIES!!! (most small distros use the dillo web browser, which does not support proxies. Without proxy support, I can't get outside the corporate firewall, which sort of makes it hard to read slashdot.) 3. ssh 4. multi-desktop window manager [click to focus] (yes, I started on windows, flame me...) 5. vnc viewer 6. reasonably workable xterm (konsole and rxvt are my favorites)
Also nice about slax is that is has full PCMCIA support. When I've used it on laptops (belonging to other people, of course) I've been able to use PCMCIA network cards (10/100 and some wireless cards) and it supports flash memory (so I can copy over my ssh keys). I love to have these features in one of those 50mb business card distro's, but they never seem to include a functional web browser, and do include a bunch of utilities I don't care about.
(sigh) I guess I'll have to build my own distro, if I only knew how/had the time to learn... Until then, however, slax is the best distro I've found for what I need.
A good friend in High School worked at a wood pulp processing plant. She had to carry a gas mask with her at all times, because every time the chlorine alarms when off, you had 10 to 15 seconds to stick your gas mask on and start running down the 5 flights of stairs to get out of the plant before the cloud of chlorine gas killed you. Chlorine leaks wheren't supposed to happen, so they didn't require the employees to wear gas masks at all times (and they didn't provide enough filters to do this even if you wanted to). However, the summer she worked there, they were installing some new equipment, right next to (and some cases intertwined with) the running equipment, so there were gas leaks on average about once per week.
The upside? The graveyard shift would run the forks on their forklifts up to maximum height and JOUST with them. It was not uncommon for one or both forklifts to topple over. Least it need to be said -- don't be near one of those things when it flips over.
Who cares about harpoon 4 when harpoon 3 is still in active development? Supposedly the multiplayer version is already in beta (hope that doesn't turn into vaporware, but there's at least one military customer interested, so maybe it will see the light of day yet....) More info: www.harpoon3.com www.harpoonhq.com
Even the most recently dusted-off Harpoon I/online/classic/classic '97/ (now called harpoon classic 2002) is a really fun game, and it's only $30. Harpoon Classic 2002
You could always buy Linux systems from HP, then HP picks up the tab if you get sued...
Not as cheap as Linux or *BSD downloaded for free, but cheaper than getting sued, and it just might be around the same cost as SCO, only better because it has those 'enterprise' features SCO claims IBM stole but that don't exist in its own products....
Then again, you could just migrate to DOS. No linux code, no BSD code... er.... very little code of any kind, really...
SCO sues IBM in order to trigger a buy-out, but only triggers a buy out of a competitor (SuSE) by IBM using Novel as a proxy. Meanwhile, SCO pisses off all its customers, who flee to.... IBM/SuSE/Novel.
This url says the plane landed safely within 35 feet of the target: http://tam.plannet21.com/
My guess is that you are correct about the telemetry -- if you check out the site, it mentions that telemetry is only sent about once per minute, and at one point they lost it all together for three hours. The last coordinates put the flight to within a mile off shore. However, if you consider that the plane was flying around 56 mph, then it could cover almost a mile in a minute. Plus, regular R/C gear has a range of about three miles, though typically about one and half is about the limit if you want to see what you are doing. So, theoretically, the plane could have been nearly two and half miles off shore, sent a telemetry reading, flew another mile, then switched over to manual control, and flew the rest of the way under ground control with no more telemetry.
At any rate, they included a document inside the plane signed by an FAI official in Newfoundland, and there was another FAI official in Ireland that is supposed to sign it to confirm the world record. So, if this document turns up soggy, then I guess we'll know if someone had to fish it out of the North Atlantic...
Re:Hell of an achievement.
on
TAM 5 Has landed
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mod the parent up. This is an amazing accomplishment.
As a R/C modeler myself, the specs of this plane are basically what I learned to fly on. Think: standard trainer with an O.S. 61 engine. This sort of plane can typically fly about 20 minutes on a tank of gas, and never more than about 800 feet in altitude, and never more than about a mile and half away. Things you have to worry about are:
1. Running out of gas. 2. Having the temperature conditions change the performance of the engine, causing it to stall. (It is not uncommon to tweak the fuel mixture on a model airplane on nearly every flight through an afternoon of flying.) 3. Such a small plane is susceptible to fairly small gusts of wind that can make if fly off-course, flip it upside down, etc. Anything more than about 15mph wind, and most model airplanes get tricky to fly. Especially if it is gusty (i.e. not a constant wind speed/direction) 4. Battery life - standard R/C batteries will last for about 2-4 hours max. 5. There is no way to restart the motor if it quits 6. Things can (and often do) come apart in flight. These things are made of balsa wood and heat-shrink coating. I've had planes explode in flight, wings come off, tails come off, etc.
Now, take a model airplane that is only about 5 feet long and with a wing span of 6 feet, and operates as described above, and modify it so that it can:
1. Fly continuously for 40 hours. 2. Fly through day and night in a variety of temperature and moisture conditions and not have the engine quit, or have to adjust the fuel mixture (since you can't do that in flight on the TAM models) 3. Navigate 1900 miles by itself, negotiating mid-Atlantic weather, variable wind speed, variable wind direction, variable air density, temperature, etc, with NO help from a pilot. 4. Somehow provide power for all of the electronics for 40 hours 5. Somehow fit 5.5 pounds of fuel, plus standard R/C radio, plus a home-grown GPS auto-navigation system, plus an alternator for the electrical equipment, plus two telemetry data systems, plus the computer to run it all into a plane that only weighs 11 pounds (think: two bag of groceries) and not weaken the structure so much that the whole mess DOESN'T fly apart on you.
Now do that while legally blind and def.
All I can say is: Wow. (okay, I had a whole bunch of four-letter words to say, but they aren't appropriate in this situation...)
I mean, if 99% of people can up and hum the theme to Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, then surely the film version one of the greatest works of 20th century literature should have a tune you can remember well enough to hum...
What are you talking about? I can hum the main theme to LotR right now! It goes:
Bah de bah, bah de bah, bah de bah, bah de da, da, da...
The DMCA might prevent you from taking an HP cartridge and reprogramming it so that it no longer thinks it is "expired." This would let you put brand X ink in the thing, and when brand X ink ruins the printer (that ink is corrosive, by the way) you sent the hole mess back to HP and demand a replacement or repair at HP's expense. That's a terrific business plan if you make brand X ink -- you don't have to do worry about how well your ink works in the printer because if anything goes wrong, people blame HP.
However, there is NOTHING (other than perhaps patent law, but don't get me started there) to prevent another company from reverse-engineering the printer and designing their own cartridge that has their own expiration date encoded on the thing.
The fact is, no one does this because it costs too much money in R&D to design a cartidge that can sit on the shelf for years and with corrosive ink inside that is designed to dry quickly on paper and yet not dry up inside the cartidge. (yada yada yada, read the second article)
It is simply a whole lot easier (and cheaper) to sell refil kits with crap ink and let someone else take the blame (and pay the expense) when it fails. HP is just protecting themselves (and their profits.) (Though they could have been more up-front about it.)
It may even be legal to replace the little chip on the cartridge. However, just like if you put aftermarket parts on your car, don't expect the original manufacturer to repair or replace it under warrenty when it fails.
Er, um.... You've been able to do this since KDE 3.x (maybe earlier??) Bring up Konqueror, type in: smb://[netbiosname]/[sharename]
Example: smb://computer12/sharedfolder
If you get it wrong, konqueror kindly promts you to go the KDE control panel -> network -> windows shares to set up your defaults. If your default username/password doesn't work, it pops up a window so you can enter a different one. You DO NOT have to be root to make this work. If you look at the screen shots, this is exactly what you are seeing in Lindows.
This is not news. This feature has been available for at least 6 months (since KDE 3.0 came out) and it's free... (as in beer)
If you look at the artists as essentialy contract employees to the RIAA, then what exactly is wrong with your cost structure if you rely on less than 5% of your workforce to generate enough revenue to not only cover all of your expenses, but turn a nice profit as well?
Most people cite the cost of manufacturing CD's as proof that CD's cost too much. However, if that where true, than more than 5% of artists' albums should be profitable. So, the money has got be dropping out of the system someplace else. Mostly, I've heard that it is the marketing and promotion that costs so much. So, logically, if you extend the business model where the only way you make money is to get a mega hit, then naturally, you'll promote everything in hopes that you'll find the next hit.
That sounds a lot like the gambling industry -- you get a pay-off once in a while, so you blindly throw money down a hole in hopes of the next big pay off. Maybe the companies of the RIAA need to take a few pages from the world of business in every other industry and do a little more research on when and where to invest. -- Sign a contract for a single ONLY for a new band, and see where that goes. If it looks like there is enough interest, produce an album.
Of course, I'm sure the RIAA will say that if the hit is big, and there's not a contract in place that gives them rights to next several albums, then the artist might move to a different label, thus "cheating" the first label out of a chance to recoupe their investment. Gee, that sounds like *competition*. Maybe labels need to offer benefits/attributes that will attract artists to them. I'll bet you'll start to see health benefits, pensions, etc if labels were forced to compete for clients like every other industry I'm aware of.
This would seem to lead to a new competative advantage in the recording industry -- the better you are at promoting albums with a minimum of cost, the more successful you could be. Do you think this might lead to inovation, both with styles of music and a variety of artists, and with delivery methods? Simply starting a service that would allow you preview music and suggest other artists that you might like could be profitable.
Amazon already does this, sort of... but IMHO the quality of the samples isn't good enough, long enough, nor do they have enough songs from enough albums, and the suggestions for what else you might like to listen to are generally not very interesting. I've purchased more albums based on browsing through my friends' MP3 collections than anything else. (Yes, I actually BUY music, even if I can get it for free -- I don't think I'm alone.)
The RIAA's business model simply isn't going to be viable in the near future. Sure, they're going to pull every string they can to maintain their business without having to change (would YOU do anything different?) However, it seems like there is an opportunity for a handful of perceptive suits to forge a new business model that can take over when the dinosaures kick off...
Also I like the idea that I can read the drive with an ext2 driver from an older kernel or from FreeBSD just in case. In case of what? I don't know, but somehow it makes me feel better.
...How about in case you want to make a disk image with a tool like DriveImage that supports ext2, and therefore, in a round-about way, ext3?
Hard disk crash? no problem -- drop in a new drive and the cd with your partition image and you're up in 15 minutes.
Note: I'm not affliated with PowerQuest -- I just buy their software when I've got money left over from buying a book of the new 37 cent US first class stamps...
I got up this morning an noticed my linux box churning away on the hard drive -- turns out att rolled dhcp last night, and while a got a new ip and entries for dns servers in resolv.conf, the routes hadn't updated properly. One reboot and I'm up. For those of you that were on at&t, here's some info:
AT&T's new user page is up, and so is their help page, but who knows for how long (these were both down last night).
The new user page has the info about how to change your settings to get on attbi. If you are using windows, just use the auto config utility. If that doesn't work, or if this page goes down again, here's the info I got:
1. Use dhcp (it looks like the IP's are really dynamic now -- you get a new one every time your lease expires, unlike @home. This will be very annoying for some people, depending on how long the leases are. The lease time I got was 3600. I am assuming that is in seconds, so that's hour. Maybe they'll change this later?)
2. The dns servers I got were:
204.127.198.4
63.240.76.4
12.242.16.50
12.242.16.34
3. The mail and news servers are:
POP3:mail.attbi.com
SMTP:mail.attbi.com
news:netnews.attbi.com
4. Email is now username@attbi.com
As I am writing this, I got an automated call from at&t saying that service is up in my area.
IF you could get more storage into this thing, it might be interesting:
Drop in a 6GB IBM micro drive, and you've got a halfway decent small-bandwidth web server.
add some mp3's and a PCMCIA sound card, and have it play They Might Be Giants all day long.
NFS mount to another box and make it a really cool dumb terminal. (that's REALLY dumb, with no monitor...)
put a usb camera with it, apache, and a wireless network card -- instant portable voyeur-cam!
network a bunch of them together and make a beowul... er, never mind, bad idea.
paint it black/green, install an IRC server and use it to assimilate/control all of the windows CE versions of the cerfcube with IRC bots -- send it to Steve Gibson. Put it on a string and swing it around your head and make engine sounds--The borg cube lives! Resistance is mostly futile!
Plug 400 of them into your home network, and use them to DDoS your internet-enabled weather-forecasting toaster. (of course, only if it supposed to rain today)
Look at the winning teams in each category -- you'll find large corporate sponsors or prestigious colleges.
I was on a FIRST team three years ago as a member of the University of Idaho / Moscow High School team. We had very little money and no experienced team members in machining, welding, electronics, etc. As a result, we did poorly. I'm glad we did. It gave us a chance to observe the winning teams and how they worked. I also was able to talk to several of the high school students on the team that wound up winning the competition. He's what we saw:
Observations of winning FIRST teams:
1. The only teams that did well had large corporate sponsors. In our competition, one company entered four teams - they all paced in the top 10. This one company had turned the FIRST competition into their own inter-company rivalry.
2. The students I talked to on the winning team didn't build most of the robot. They were allowed to draw pictures of what they thought it should look like (with help from engineers from the sponsor) and the sponsors chose the best design, and modified it to their liking, and built it for the students. The students were allowed to decorate it, put stickers on it, etc.
3. If you watch the winning teams in the pit areas, you see large amount of brand-new expensive tools (portable lathes, drill presses, laptops, 5-foot tall roll-away snap-on tool sets, etc.) Also, you will rarely see a student actually work on the robot. They hand tools to the sponsoring engineers, but only the adults actually fix the robots.
4. The parts kit you get with your registration does not change much from year to year, so you can design (for example) a drive system one year, and spend all of the next year perfecting it, so that this design is done and already built for the next year. The winning team was working on their robot for three months before they got the rules for the next competition. Since the nature of the competition does not change a great deal from year to year, you can reuse a lot of last year's work.
I think the students we worked with got a lot more out of the competition than the students on the winning teams - they designed, built, maintained, and drove THEIR robot. They learned about problem solving, choosing the right material for the right application (given the loading forces, etc.), team work (the students had to work together to built the robot.), and that if all you want to do is win you wind up sacrificing a lot of things.
If anyone has ever been a part of Olympics of the Mind, you'll find that this is a much better way of getting students interested in engineering and science (at least it was when I participated) I saw third-grade teams beat college teams because the materials and tools were limited to the point that money and professional machining skills had little benefit to the final outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, no... perhaps the site has simply Moved
Knoppix is okay, but I really like having a very usable distro on one of those 185mb cd's. The small cd's actually fit in your pocket (typically of my coat) so I can have a useable linux distro wherever I go, AND it works on old hardware (read: PC's that can't boot off of usb keys).
I don't have a laptop at work (don't travel enough to warrant the expense) but when I do travel, I usually end up having to "borrow" someone's PC when they aren't using it. This is pain to say the least. It is great to say: "hey, let me just use that old junky one in the corner." They usually respond: oh, you can't use that one, the hard drive is broken. Which is when I say "Perfect!", and they give me this very strange look....
That said, slax is the only 'small' distro I've found that includes the utilities I need:
1. dhcp
2. Web browser that supports ssl AND PROXIES!!! (most small distros use the dillo web browser, which does not support proxies. Without proxy support, I can't get outside the corporate firewall, which sort of makes it hard to read slashdot.)
3. ssh
4. multi-desktop window manager [click to focus] (yes, I started on windows, flame me...)
5. vnc viewer
6. reasonably workable xterm (konsole and rxvt are my favorites)
Also nice about slax is that is has full PCMCIA support. When I've used it on laptops (belonging to other people, of course) I've been able to use PCMCIA network cards (10/100 and some wireless cards) and it supports flash memory (so I can copy over my ssh keys). I love to have these features in one of those 50mb business card distro's, but they never seem to include a functional web browser, and do include a bunch of utilities I don't care about.
(sigh) I guess I'll have to build my own distro, if I only knew how/had the time to learn...
Until then, however, slax is the best distro I've found for what I need.
A good friend in High School worked at a wood pulp processing plant. She had to carry a gas mask with her at all times, because every time the chlorine alarms when off, you had 10 to 15 seconds to stick your gas mask on and start running down the 5 flights of stairs to get out of the plant before the cloud of chlorine gas killed you. Chlorine leaks wheren't supposed to happen, so they didn't require the employees to wear gas masks at all times (and they didn't provide enough filters to do this even if you wanted to). However, the summer she worked there, they were installing some new equipment, right next to (and some cases intertwined with) the running equipment, so there were gas leaks on average about once per week.
The upside? The graveyard shift would run the forks on their forklifts up to maximum height and JOUST with them. It was not uncommon for one or both forklifts to topple over. Least it need to be said -- don't be near one of those things when it flips over.
Who cares about harpoon 4 when harpoon 3 is still in active development? Supposedly the multiplayer version is already in beta (hope that doesn't turn into vaporware, but there's at least one military customer interested, so maybe it will see the light of day yet....)
More info:
www.harpoon3.com
www.harpoonhq.com
Even the most recently dusted-off Harpoon I/online/classic/classic '97/ (now called harpoon classic 2002) is a really fun game, and it's only $30. Harpoon Classic 2002
You could always buy Linux systems from HP, then HP picks up the tab if you get sued...
Not as cheap as Linux or *BSD downloaded for free, but cheaper than getting sued, and it just might be around the same cost as SCO, only better because it has those 'enterprise' features SCO claims IBM stole but that don't exist in its own products....
Then again, you could just migrate to DOS. No linux code, no BSD code...
er.... very little code of any kind, really...
If true, that would be sort of ironic...
SCO sues IBM in order to trigger a buy-out, but only triggers a buy out of a competitor (SuSE) by IBM using Novel as a proxy.
Meanwhile, SCO pisses off all its customers, who flee to.... IBM/SuSE/Novel.
Oops.
This url says the plane landed safely within 35 feet of the target:
http://tam.plannet21.com/
My guess is that you are correct about the telemetry -- if you check out the site, it mentions that telemetry is only sent about once per minute, and at one point they lost it all together for three hours. The last coordinates put the flight to within a mile off shore. However, if you consider that the plane was flying around 56 mph, then it could cover almost a mile in a minute. Plus, regular R/C gear has a range of about three miles, though typically about one and half is about the limit if you want to see what you are doing. So, theoretically, the plane could have been nearly two and half miles off shore, sent a telemetry reading, flew another mile, then switched over to manual control, and flew the rest of the way under ground control with no more telemetry.
At any rate, they included a document inside the plane signed by an FAI official in Newfoundland, and there was another FAI official in Ireland that is supposed to sign it to confirm the world record. So, if this document turns up soggy, then I guess we'll know if someone had to fish it out of the North Atlantic...
Mod the parent up. This is an amazing accomplishment.
As a R/C modeler myself, the specs of this plane are basically what I learned to fly on. Think: standard trainer with an O.S. 61 engine. This sort of plane can typically fly about 20 minutes on a tank of gas, and never more than about 800 feet in altitude, and never more than about a mile and half away. Things you have to worry about are:
1. Running out of gas.
2. Having the temperature conditions change the performance of the engine, causing it to stall. (It is not uncommon to tweak the fuel mixture on a model airplane on nearly every flight through an afternoon of flying.)
3. Such a small plane is susceptible to fairly small gusts of wind that can make if fly off-course, flip it upside down, etc. Anything more than about 15mph wind, and most model airplanes get tricky to fly. Especially if it is gusty (i.e. not a constant wind speed/direction)
4. Battery life - standard R/C batteries will last for about 2-4 hours max.
5. There is no way to restart the motor if it quits
6. Things can (and often do) come apart in flight. These things are made of balsa wood and heat-shrink coating. I've had planes explode in flight, wings come off, tails come off, etc.
Now, take a model airplane that is only about 5 feet long and with a wing span of 6 feet, and operates as described above, and modify it so that it can:
1. Fly continuously for 40 hours.
2. Fly through day and night in a variety of temperature and moisture conditions and not have the engine quit, or have to adjust the fuel mixture (since you can't do that in flight on the TAM models)
3. Navigate 1900 miles by itself, negotiating mid-Atlantic weather, variable wind speed, variable wind direction, variable air density, temperature, etc, with NO help from a pilot.
4. Somehow provide power for all of the electronics for 40 hours
5. Somehow fit 5.5 pounds of fuel, plus standard R/C radio, plus a home-grown GPS auto-navigation system, plus an alternator for the electrical equipment, plus two telemetry data systems, plus the computer to run it all into a plane that only weighs 11 pounds (think: two bag of groceries) and not weaken the structure so much that the whole mess DOESN'T fly apart on you.
Now do that while legally blind and def.
All I can say is: Wow.
(okay, I had a whole bunch of four-letter words to say, but they aren't appropriate in this situation...)
I mean, if 99% of people can up and hum the theme to Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, then surely the film version one of the greatest works of 20th century literature should have a tune you can remember well enough to hum...
What are you talking about? I can hum the main theme to LotR right now! It goes:
Bah de bah, bah de bah, bah de bah, bah de da, da, da...
Or wait, is that Volkswagon theme.... Damn.
Er, no.
The DMCA might prevent you from taking an HP cartridge and reprogramming it so that it no longer thinks it is "expired." This would let you put brand X ink in the thing, and when brand X ink ruins the printer (that ink is corrosive, by the way) you sent the hole mess back to HP and demand a replacement or repair at HP's expense. That's a terrific business plan if you make brand X ink -- you don't have to do worry about how well your ink works in the printer because if anything goes wrong, people blame HP.
However, there is NOTHING (other than perhaps patent law, but don't get me started there) to prevent another company from reverse-engineering the printer and designing their own cartridge that has their own expiration date encoded on the thing.
The fact is, no one does this because it costs too much money in R&D to design a cartidge that can sit on the shelf for years and with corrosive ink inside that is designed to dry quickly on paper and yet not dry up inside the cartidge. (yada yada yada, read the second article)
It is simply a whole lot easier (and cheaper) to sell refil kits with crap ink and let someone else take the blame (and pay the expense) when it fails. HP is just protecting themselves (and their profits.) (Though they could have been more up-front about it.)
It may even be legal to replace the little chip on the cartridge. However, just like if you put aftermarket parts on your car, don't expect the original manufacturer to repair or replace it under warrenty when it fails.
Er, um....
You've been able to do this since KDE 3.x (maybe earlier??) Bring up Konqueror, type in:
smb://[netbiosname]/[sharename]
Example:
smb://computer12/sharedfolder
If you get it wrong, konqueror kindly promts you to go the KDE control panel -> network -> windows shares to set up your defaults. If your default username/password doesn't work, it pops up a window so you can enter a different one. You DO NOT have to be root to make this work. If you look at the screen shots, this is exactly what you are seeing in Lindows.
This is not news. This feature has been available for at least 6 months (since KDE 3.0 came out) and it's free... (as in beer)
If you look at the artists as essentialy contract employees to the RIAA, then what exactly is wrong with your cost structure if you rely on less than 5% of your workforce to generate enough revenue to not only cover all of your expenses, but turn a nice profit as well?
Most people cite the cost of manufacturing CD's as proof that CD's cost too much. However, if that where true, than more than 5% of artists' albums should be profitable. So, the money has got be dropping out of the system someplace else. Mostly, I've heard that it is the marketing and promotion that costs so much. So, logically, if you extend the business model where the only way you make money is to get a mega hit, then naturally, you'll promote everything in hopes that you'll find the next hit.
That sounds a lot like the gambling industry -- you get a pay-off once in a while, so you blindly throw money down a hole in hopes of the next big pay off. Maybe the companies of the RIAA need to take a few pages from the world of business in every other industry and do a little more research on when and where to invest. -- Sign a contract for a single ONLY for a new band, and see where that goes. If it looks like there is enough interest, produce an album.
Of course, I'm sure the RIAA will say that if the hit is big, and there's not a contract in place that gives them rights to next several albums, then the artist might move to a different label, thus "cheating" the first label out of a chance to recoupe their investment. Gee, that sounds like *competition*. Maybe labels need to offer benefits/attributes that will attract artists to them. I'll bet you'll start to see health benefits, pensions, etc if labels were forced to compete for clients like every other industry I'm aware of.
This would seem to lead to a new competative advantage in the recording industry -- the better you are at promoting albums with a minimum of cost, the more successful you could be. Do you think this might lead to inovation, both with styles of music and a variety of artists, and with delivery methods? Simply starting a service that would allow you preview music and suggest other artists that you might like could be profitable.
Amazon already does this, sort of... but IMHO the quality of the samples isn't good enough, long enough, nor do they have enough songs from enough albums, and the suggestions for what else you might like to listen to are generally not very interesting. I've purchased more albums based on browsing through my friends' MP3 collections than anything else. (Yes, I actually BUY music, even if I can get it for free -- I don't think I'm alone.)
The RIAA's business model simply isn't going to be viable in the near future. Sure, they're going to pull every string they can to maintain their business without having to change (would YOU do anything different?) However, it seems like there is an opportunity for a handful of perceptive suits to forge a new business model that can take over when the dinosaures kick off...
Just my $17.98's worth...
Also I like the idea that I can read the drive with an ext2 driver from an older kernel or from FreeBSD just in case. In case of what? I don't know, but somehow it makes me feel better.
...How about in case you want to make a disk image with a tool like DriveImage that supports ext2, and therefore, in a round-about way, ext3?
Hard disk crash? no problem -- drop in a new drive and the cd with your partition image and you're up in 15 minutes.
Note: I'm not affliated with PowerQuest -- I just buy their software when I've got money left over from buying a book of the new 37 cent US first class stamps...
I got up this morning an noticed my linux box churning away on the hard drive -- turns out att rolled dhcp last night, and while a got a new ip and entries for dns servers in resolv.conf, the routes hadn't updated properly. One reboot and I'm up. For those of you that were on at&t, here's some info:
AT&T's new user page is up, and so is their help page, but who knows for how long (these were both down last night).
The new user page has the info about how to change your settings to get on attbi. If you are using windows, just use the auto config utility. If that doesn't work, or if this page goes down again, here's the info I got:
1. Use dhcp (it looks like the IP's are really dynamic now -- you get a new one every time your lease expires, unlike @home. This will be very annoying for some people, depending on how long the leases are. The lease time I got was 3600. I am assuming that is in seconds, so that's hour. Maybe they'll change this later?)
2. The dns servers I got were:
204.127.198.4
63.240.76.4
12.242.16.50
12.242.16.34
3. The mail and news servers are:
POP3:mail.attbi.com
SMTP:mail.attbi.com
news:netnews.attbi.com
4. Email is now username@attbi.com
As I am writing this, I got an automated call from at&t saying that service is up in my area.
Hang on, Seattle, I'm sure it's comming!
IF you could get more storage into this thing, it might be interesting:
Drop in a 6GB IBM micro drive, and you've got a halfway decent small-bandwidth web server.
add some mp3's and a PCMCIA sound card, and have it play They Might Be Giants all day long.
NFS mount to another box and make it a really cool dumb terminal. (that's REALLY dumb, with no monitor...)
put a usb camera with it, apache, and a wireless network card -- instant portable voyeur-cam!
network a bunch of them together and make a beowul... er, never mind, bad idea.
paint it black/green, install an IRC server and use it to assimilate/control all of the windows CE versions of the cerfcube with IRC bots -- send it to Steve Gibson. Put it on a string and swing it around your head and make engine sounds--The borg cube lives! Resistance is mostly futile!
Plug 400 of them into your home network, and use them to DDoS your internet-enabled weather-forecasting toaster. (of course, only if it supposed to rain today)
Look at the winning teams in each category -- you'll find large corporate sponsors or prestigious colleges.
I was on a FIRST team three years ago as a member of the University of Idaho / Moscow High School team. We had very little money and no experienced team members in machining, welding, electronics, etc. As a result, we did poorly. I'm glad we did. It gave us a chance to observe the winning teams and how they worked. I also was able to talk to several of the high school students on the team that wound up winning the competition. He's what we saw:
Observations of winning FIRST teams:
1. The only teams that did well had large corporate sponsors. In our competition, one company entered four teams - they all paced in the top 10. This one company had turned the FIRST competition into their own inter-company rivalry.
2. The students I talked to on the winning team didn't build most of the robot. They were allowed to draw pictures of what they thought it should look like (with help from engineers from the sponsor) and the sponsors chose the best design, and modified it to their liking, and built it for the students. The students were allowed to decorate it, put stickers on it, etc.
3. If you watch the winning teams in the pit areas, you see large amount of brand-new expensive tools (portable lathes, drill presses, laptops, 5-foot tall roll-away snap-on tool sets, etc.) Also, you will rarely see a student actually work on the robot. They hand tools to the sponsoring engineers, but only the adults actually fix the robots.
4. The parts kit you get with your registration does not change much from year to year, so you can design (for example) a drive system one year, and spend all of the next year perfecting it, so that this design is done and already built for the next year. The winning team was working on their robot for three months before they got the rules for the next competition. Since the nature of the competition does not change a great deal from year to year, you can reuse a lot of last year's work.
I think the students we worked with got a lot more out of the competition than the students on the winning teams - they designed, built, maintained, and drove THEIR robot. They learned about problem solving, choosing the right material for the right application (given the loading forces, etc.), team work (the students had to work together to built the robot.), and that if all you want to do is win you wind up sacrificing a lot of things.
If anyone has ever been a part of Olympics of the Mind, you'll find that this is a much better way of getting students interested in engineering and science (at least it was when I participated) I saw third-grade teams beat college teams because the materials and tools were limited to the point that money and professional machining skills had little benefit to the final outcome.