When you hear something that sounds implausable like that, no matter how much you want to believe it, make sure you check it in Snopes before repeating it on the web.
Uh, no major game company releases their big game _after_ the Christmas rush. The 10 games a day is actually somewhat believeable if you've looked at the release charts from now until Christmas with every developer trying to get their 3/4 finished game out the door and on the shelves before mommies everywhere try to find something for their kids.
The battery on those devices is designed to last longer than the internal random number store. After you have the device for 5 years it stops working and you have to replace it.
As for damaging the RSA key, it's hard to do more than superficial scratches to those things. They are tough, like digital watches. I've never heard of anyone actually breaking the things, and I've seen them used at every place I work. BTW, in my experiance it is rare for the password to only be the number on the pad. It's almost always some combination of a number you memorize and the pad's current number, so stealing one is usually worthless.
This is right, it's much the same way some photographers will shoot their subjects slightly out of focus to give them a warmed over look and hide any small imperfections. Of course you lose fidelity at the same time, but from a purely subjective point of view that's ok.
Wow, that's some marketing. The "40 miles" claim is when you're in deep space and using high gain antennas. Actual performance will be less than a mile. Also, in case people want to compare this with 802.11 (which is difficult because they are in different bands), a typical 802.11b card radiates 30mW, instead of the 1W these guys are apparently claiming. The data rate is nothing exceptional either, 115.2kbps (and these are 1000 bits/kb sized), which pales in comparison to 802.11g at ~55000kbps. This technology would have a much higher "wow" factor 5 years ago, but nowadays that kind of range for that kind of throughput just isn't all that new or special.
I wouldn't worry too much about mis-typing a key unless you have an absolutely huge number of "invalid" keys stored as possibliites in your system. Even the most basic serials these days seem to be 20 alphanumeric characters long, and the chance of randomly typing in one of 100 "bad" keys is microscopic.
Have you ever considered that perhaps you're charging too much for your software? Also, if people are flooding you with support requests for shareware, there is a good chance that they won't actually plop down $$$ for the software until it works as advertised. No matter how much work you put into your anti-piracy system, people won't pay for crap.
I don't want to sound too harsh here, but if you take a hostile view of your customers, they will respond in kind. This might be a good opportunity to step back and see if there is anything you could be doing differently to make your product more buyable in the eyes of your consumers.
Sitti's robot weighs about a gram, or half of a dime. And so far, it's cheap. Sitti estimates his spartan prototype cost about $10 in materials to make.
They're saying it's cheap, but it looks like the materials cost $20/gram! For American readers, that's ~$9,072/pound.
My parents have an old Generation 1 RCA DirectTV setup (with the dog slow guide), and we basically never saw rain fade. The only times the signal went out (for no more than 2 minutes at a time) were overcast and hazy days. This happened maybe twice a year.
It's actaully kind of interesting to compare it to the cable system I have now. The major difference is that the cable company advertises a _lot_ about how Satellite systems suck, but almost none of their "quality of life" points ever ring true for me. It is true that we had to buy and install the equipment, but that was a one time charge, unlike the cable company boxes (which are far crappier than even the slow guide on the DirectTV system) that cost me $10/month. Also, the PPV stuff on DirectTV was great, it was $2.50 to rent a movie instead of the $6 my local cable company charges (I never use the cable company one, but we used the DirectTV one all the time). I've heard that DirecTV raised their rates though.:(
Alright! Lets make it prohibitively expensive to run a mailing list! Everybody wants to check webpages daily for announcements about the dozens of various projects they work on in their spare time.
DHCP isn't really that hard, but the documentation that comes with the release is not very good for mere mortals. I've had a lot better luck going online and finding an example config file and just editing that to do what I need. Especially if you aren't trying to be really fancy with your DHCP, this works great.
Hey, I rather like Takeshi's Castle and Iron Chef, and both of those are game shows. What you really mean is that nobody wants to see foreign quiz shows, because the material will be impossible for the average viewer (as if Jeopardy's insistance on quizzing about long dead operas is any better).
You really don't know what you're talking about do you. "The shape of the pixels"? I'm imagining a TV with little horizontal lines for each pixel from your description.:)
The worst part is that the serial port is (ironically) one of the hardest to offload to another interface. The tight timing on the serial port means you can't have a lot of stuff between it and the processor. For instance, PC-Card serial ports tend to fall over a lot when you start pushing a lot of data through them. Also, since I work with a lot of headless equipment (heck, even our switches have serial consoles on them!) I'd hate to lose the serial port. I also agree that the Parallel port is mostly useless these days (even the days of parallel ethernet are gone) and I wouldn't mind seeing a few more USB ports (why do laptops only ship with 1 USB port?!?) and a serial port in its place.
USB was not standard on most PII's. Some had them, to be sure, but hardly ubiquitous.
What? The only PII level machine I've ever run into without USB was a "comptuter show special" AMD K6-400 (IIRC) that was basically a Pentium-class motherboard with an upgraded socket. Needless to say it was a heap of crap. I've run through dozens of PII motherboards over the years and they've all had USB on them (although most people didn't care since nobody used the USB ports back then). Even the OEMs were in on the USB craze by the time the PII-300 was popular.
Is your school still running Pentium-75s and 486es (not entirely unlikely in many areas)?
Oh, and a "five year old computer" would be something built in 1999, which would almost certainly have USB. You need to look back 8 or 9 years to really get a lack of USB ports on most computers.
I respectfully disagree. The current direction of the HD market and Blu-ray reminds me a lot of the direction the market took with S-VHS vs. regular VHS. While it is true that DVD really stomped over the VHS market, there was certainly a lot more to DVDs than just "better image quality on equipment you don't have" for the average consumer. DVDs have numerous other advantages over VHS (storage space, shelf life, no need to rewind, extras on disc, etc...) that were easy to sell to Joe Schmoe (who you need to buy your technology for it to really be successful). Blue-Ray discs are basically going to be "Just like DVD, only with better image quality if you buy all of this expensive home theatre equipment to replace your 20" TV/VCR/DVD combo set" unless the industry can really focus on getting the price down and the volume up.
I'll tell you one thing, Joe Schmoe is not going to spend $1500+ on a HDTV with that $200 TV sitting on the shelf just down the aisle.
I thought the booting problem was eventually going to bite me in the ass when I pulled the floppy drive out of my PC a couple of years ago. It turns out to be a non-issue. I've got CDRW blanks and know how to burn floppy images as El-Torrito boot sectors (that pretty much every computer these days can boot). It's slightly less convient than the floppy, but it's only come up a couple of times and removing the floppy drive kept my HDD from overheating, so I think it was worth it.
My local library has tons of tapes of PBS programs, documentaries, History Channel series on Hitler, and other stuff I'm generally not looking for. Maybe yours is better, but I wouldn't expect to find, for example, Repo Man at my public library. Maybe my local librarians are just snobbish about "popular" media, but they don't seem to stock much stuff that I would watch for entertainment.
This is the biggest reason I want an a la carte system! I don't want ESPN, but I know a big chunk of my monthly bill is going towards this channel. The home shopping channels I can live with, but I'm really looking to maximize my enjoyment per dollar.
The biggest problem is that many media companies bundle their channels together, so if you want Comedy Central and Sci Fi you are also forced to take Oxygen, FX, Animal Planet, and a bunch of other stations that you don't care about. This setup is not likely to change because otherwise those other channels would rarely be picked up by the cable companies and would end up folding.
You must be lucky, my local video stores (all Blockbusters and locally ownd foreign-language-only places) completely blow for selection. Blockbuster in particular never seems to carry anything I'd actually want to watch. Netflix on the other hand has been like a gift from God. I've been able to watch dozens of old movies that I missed in the theatres years ago and cult classics. I have yet to hear someone talking about a film that I couldn't find on Netflix. Plus, Blockbuster seems to do everything possible to stick you with late fees, even if their storefront is blocked by construction preventing you from getting the DVD back in the slot until 5 minutes past noon. They still send me an occasional coupon for free movie rentals and I throw them away, why should I drive out to the store to rent some movie I didn't really want to see, even if it is free?
Because without Tivo your cable company is going to go back to doing what it always does. Never innovate and always raise prices. It took Tivo to get them off of their butts and finally implement DVR. You still can't stream MP3s or anything else to your cable box (which is handy when your stereo is attached to your TV). I don't know about your area, but in mine the "video on demand" service is a joke, there are like 50 movies on it and they're all summer movie crap, and they're fairly expensive to rent. If the Tivo/Netflix partnership goes well, that service could be greatly improved (and reduced in price) while your local monopoly tries their hardest to squash their competition.
I'm not sure I'd really tout FF Tactics for it's storyline either. It's got a great battle system and a fiendish (if somewhat predictable) AI, but the storyline was a convoluted mess that at best didn't detract too much from the gameplay.
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When you hear something that sounds implausable like that, no matter how much you want to believe it, make sure you check it in Snopes before repeating it on the web.
Uh, no major game company releases their big game _after_ the Christmas rush. The 10 games a day is actually somewhat believeable if you've looked at the release charts from now until Christmas with every developer trying to get their 3/4 finished game out the door and on the shelves before mommies everywhere try to find something for their kids.
The battery on those devices is designed to last longer than the internal random number store. After you have the device for 5 years it stops working and you have to replace it.
As for damaging the RSA key, it's hard to do more than superficial scratches to those things. They are tough, like digital watches. I've never heard of anyone actually breaking the things, and I've seen them used at every place I work. BTW, in my experiance it is rare for the password to only be the number on the pad. It's almost always some combination of a number you memorize and the pad's current number, so stealing one is usually worthless.
This is right, it's much the same way some photographers will shoot their subjects slightly out of focus to give them a warmed over look and hide any small imperfections. Of course you lose fidelity at the same time, but from a purely subjective point of view that's ok.
Wow, that's some marketing. The "40 miles" claim is when you're in deep space and using high gain antennas. Actual performance will be less than a mile. Also, in case people want to compare this with 802.11 (which is difficult because they are in different bands), a typical 802.11b card radiates 30mW, instead of the 1W these guys are apparently claiming. The data rate is nothing exceptional either, 115.2kbps (and these are 1000 bits/kb sized), which pales in comparison to 802.11g at ~55000kbps. This technology would have a much higher "wow" factor 5 years ago, but nowadays that kind of range for that kind of throughput just isn't all that new or special.
Alright, where can I find this $100 six minute porno reel with awkward cuts every 25 seconds?
I wouldn't worry too much about mis-typing a key unless you have an absolutely huge number of "invalid" keys stored as possibliites in your system. Even the most basic serials these days seem to be 20 alphanumeric characters long, and the chance of randomly typing in one of 100 "bad" keys is microscopic.
Have you ever considered that perhaps you're charging too much for your software? Also, if people are flooding you with support requests for shareware, there is a good chance that they won't actually plop down $$$ for the software until it works as advertised. No matter how much work you put into your anti-piracy system, people won't pay for crap.
I don't want to sound too harsh here, but if you take a hostile view of your customers, they will respond in kind. This might be a good opportunity to step back and see if there is anything you could be doing differently to make your product more buyable in the eyes of your consumers.
Yep, and if you're really lucky it might even be playing at a theatre within 2 hours of your home/business.
My parents have an old Generation 1 RCA DirectTV setup (with the dog slow guide), and we basically never saw rain fade. The only times the signal went out (for no more than 2 minutes at a time) were overcast and hazy days. This happened maybe twice a year.
:(
It's actaully kind of interesting to compare it to the cable system I have now. The major difference is that the cable company advertises a _lot_ about how Satellite systems suck, but almost none of their "quality of life" points ever ring true for me. It is true that we had to buy and install the equipment, but that was a one time charge, unlike the cable company boxes (which are far crappier than even the slow guide on the DirectTV system) that cost me $10/month. Also, the PPV stuff on DirectTV was great, it was $2.50 to rent a movie instead of the $6 my local cable company charges (I never use the cable company one, but we used the DirectTV one all the time). I've heard that DirecTV raised their rates though.
Ok, that's enough rambling.
Alright! Lets make it prohibitively expensive to run a mailing list! Everybody wants to check webpages daily for announcements about the dozens of various projects they work on in their spare time.
DHCP isn't really that hard, but the documentation that comes with the release is not very good for mere mortals. I've had a lot better luck going online and finding an example config file and just editing that to do what I need. Especially if you aren't trying to be really fancy with your DHCP, this works great.
Hey, I rather like Takeshi's Castle and Iron Chef, and both of those are game shows. What you really mean is that nobody wants to see foreign quiz shows, because the material will be impossible for the average viewer (as if Jeopardy's insistance on quizzing about long dead operas is any better).
You really don't know what you're talking about do you. "The shape of the pixels"? I'm imagining a TV with little horizontal lines for each pixel from your description. :)
Hot damn, where is your merry-go-round? That sounds like a blast to ride, not for little kids though.
The worst part is that the serial port is (ironically) one of the hardest to offload to another interface. The tight timing on the serial port means you can't have a lot of stuff between it and the processor. For instance, PC-Card serial ports tend to fall over a lot when you start pushing a lot of data through them. Also, since I work with a lot of headless equipment (heck, even our switches have serial consoles on them!) I'd hate to lose the serial port. I also agree that the Parallel port is mostly useless these days (even the days of parallel ethernet are gone) and I wouldn't mind seeing a few more USB ports (why do laptops only ship with 1 USB port?!?) and a serial port in its place.
Is your school still running Pentium-75s and 486es (not entirely unlikely in many areas)?
Oh, and a "five year old computer" would be something built in 1999, which would almost certainly have USB. You need to look back 8 or 9 years to really get a lack of USB ports on most computers.
I respectfully disagree. The current direction of the HD market and Blu-ray reminds me a lot of the direction the market took with S-VHS vs. regular VHS. While it is true that DVD really stomped over the VHS market, there was certainly a lot more to DVDs than just "better image quality on equipment you don't have" for the average consumer. DVDs have numerous other advantages over VHS (storage space, shelf life, no need to rewind, extras on disc, etc...) that were easy to sell to Joe Schmoe (who you need to buy your technology for it to really be successful). Blue-Ray discs are basically going to be "Just like DVD, only with better image quality if you buy all of this expensive home theatre equipment to replace your 20" TV/VCR/DVD combo set" unless the industry can really focus on getting the price down and the volume up.
I'll tell you one thing, Joe Schmoe is not going to spend $1500+ on a HDTV with that $200 TV sitting on the shelf just down the aisle.
I thought the booting problem was eventually going to bite me in the ass when I pulled the floppy drive out of my PC a couple of years ago. It turns out to be a non-issue. I've got CDRW blanks and know how to burn floppy images as El-Torrito boot sectors (that pretty much every computer these days can boot). It's slightly less convient than the floppy, but it's only come up a couple of times and removing the floppy drive kept my HDD from overheating, so I think it was worth it.
My local library has tons of tapes of PBS programs, documentaries, History Channel series on Hitler, and other stuff I'm generally not looking for. Maybe yours is better, but I wouldn't expect to find, for example, Repo Man at my public library. Maybe my local librarians are just snobbish about "popular" media, but they don't seem to stock much stuff that I would watch for entertainment.
This is the biggest reason I want an a la carte system! I don't want ESPN, but I know a big chunk of my monthly bill is going towards this channel. The home shopping channels I can live with, but I'm really looking to maximize my enjoyment per dollar.
The biggest problem is that many media companies bundle their channels together, so if you want Comedy Central and Sci Fi you are also forced to take Oxygen, FX, Animal Planet, and a bunch of other stations that you don't care about. This setup is not likely to change because otherwise those other channels would rarely be picked up by the cable companies and would end up folding.
You must be lucky, my local video stores (all Blockbusters and locally ownd foreign-language-only places) completely blow for selection. Blockbuster in particular never seems to carry anything I'd actually want to watch. Netflix on the other hand has been like a gift from God. I've been able to watch dozens of old movies that I missed in the theatres years ago and cult classics. I have yet to hear someone talking about a film that I couldn't find on Netflix. Plus, Blockbuster seems to do everything possible to stick you with late fees, even if their storefront is blocked by construction preventing you from getting the DVD back in the slot until 5 minutes past noon. They still send me an occasional coupon for free movie rentals and I throw them away, why should I drive out to the store to rent some movie I didn't really want to see, even if it is free?
Because without Tivo your cable company is going to go back to doing what it always does. Never innovate and always raise prices. It took Tivo to get them off of their butts and finally implement DVR. You still can't stream MP3s or anything else to your cable box (which is handy when your stereo is attached to your TV). I don't know about your area, but in mine the "video on demand" service is a joke, there are like 50 movies on it and they're all summer movie crap, and they're fairly expensive to rent. If the Tivo/Netflix partnership goes well, that service could be greatly improved (and reduced in price) while your local monopoly tries their hardest to squash their competition.
I'm not sure I'd really tout FF Tactics for it's storyline either. It's got a great battle system and a fiendish (if somewhat predictable) AI, but the storyline was a convoluted mess that at best didn't detract too much from the gameplay.