This indicates that something is seriously wrong with your UPS. If it did drive a current or voltage across the input power plugs it'd be powering the building grid which is not only illegal, but those doing so are liable for any damage to the power grid and associated line workers. They take just as much protection for a downed grid as a live one for stupid users who try to power a downed grid, but several die each year because someone's power went out and their generator/UPS/alternative power system was back feeding the utility company when the grid was down. Connecting two mismatched live grids together is fun for the whole family.
If your UPS is UL listed then there are several regulations which govern just this sort of action. Report the problem to APC, if they don't do anything about it (!!!) then report it to the UL and/or BBB.
I'm being completely serious. For it to go this bad there is certian to be more wrong with it. I wouldn't trust it to power anything worth more than $10.
For those, like me, interested in the encoding/decoding technology used in the DSD (digital stream data) that the SACD is encoded with here is a short, useful paper on 1-bit Sigma-Delta Modulation. Those remotely familiar with digital signal processing shouldn't have any difficulty with it, but it isn't an introductory piece or tutorial either.
I bet you only say this when it appears to be in your favor. Try this similar sentence on for size:
When Microsoft decided they didn't like the legal state of things and decided to come up with their own standards, they were rising above petty legal fights and truly addressing the issues faced by individuals and businessed whose interests are firmly in the hands of patent owners that only care about themselves.
You are purporting to believe in a value, yet I doubt you believe in the value, just this particular case.
BTW, since these video disc players are not DVD licensed, do they have the right to use DVD keys to decrypt existing DVDs? These keys, I imagine, are licensed along with the patent and royalty agreements. This will work great in non-DMCA countries, the USA, however, will likely stop them at customs after some mild lobbying from various patent owners and trade groups. It's very likely that these are destined for the huge chinese market, but they are probably hoping to skirt around the law and get these into the US as well.
I've requested my entry (ann arbor destroyed by mozilla) be removed to favor Ann Arbor Party in ypsilanti. Please sign up for the Ann Arbor Party, that's where I'll be going...
These CDs are not free, nor is the music free. You can market them as free, but those taglines fall quickly on their face when you see that you can't download the music without charge (or even with a charge, for that matter).
Essentially this is a distribution company, and they charge huge rates to send you a 'free' CD. I can get better shipping rates through any major (or minor) carrier, and even most couriers.
Here's their business plan:
Make no useful product
Obtain 'free' product from elsewhere
Advertise shipping service for 'free' product
Outsource shipping
This doesn't punch a hole in anything, much less the RIAA's theory about the CD price fixing being necessary. All this shows is that someone can set up a virtual company giving product away and making money on the shipping - which all too many internet companies failed at a year or two ago.
Here's the bottom line - you can give away garbage, and you can sell wanted products, but you can't sell garbage and expect to survive off it. If they think that they are going to make enough money on this gimmick to grow their business and become a heavyweight player, well, best of luck. But remember MP3.com isn't so hot these days, their artists aren't so hot, and they're giving away their music with the added benefit of instant gratification.
FightCloud - if you really want to appeal to people, don't call a donkey a horse. We are intelligent consumers. If we're given an reasonable choice, we'll make a reasonable decision. The RIAA markets their products to the stupid and weak. We have to eat it because that's all there is for many good groups (who can't or won't free themselves of the RIAA's lies). Tell us that your CDs cost $2.50 each and that S&H is $2.50 for the first CD and $0.50 for each additional CD in each shipment.
If you clicked the links on the 'fatality' page, you'll find that the majority of people listed with strike through (fatality) are actually women who died due to complications during and after abortions, not docters who perform abortions.
If the technology works (as pointed out by the press release no cooling has actually been achieved) then it likely will remain far too expensive for the return on energy savings for quite some time. It will have a place in aerospace and defense (typical areas where high cost and short life can be justified with gains in weight and energy savings) but you won't be seeing it in your refridgerator for some time - at least not until they make a cheaper (less efficient) version which can be mass produced and lasts for years.
They, like many companies, have a lot of theory, a lot of calculations, and a lot of patents. Chances are they are hoping to sell it all to someone who has the resources to really try it out. Along with their other 'innovations' it appears that they are an IP company.
Constant improvements in resolution and sound fidelity will probably outstrip the computer generated visual and auraul improvements for the next decade or two such that the average person on average equipment would easily be able to tell the difference between an actor and an animation. There are tons more issues than just getting the face right - though in staid newscast shots it'll be easier where the newscaster is looking into the camera. But when is the last time you saw a full newscast with only close up face shots?
The problem isn't creating a realistic human animation - the problem is duplicating the realistic movements of an existing person. You couldn't just replace Dan Rather, for instance, since anyone who watches him infrequently would notice those little things that can't quite be animated yet. Even slicing together real video of the person is noticably different.
The restrictions for the wireless theatre access is more for copy protection than anything else. No reasonable person would want to watch the movie through a slow internet connection with a web cam, but the movie studios certianly don't want it to even be considered.
It's easier to keep perl up to date and apply patches for it (maintain) if there are no critical system pieces that depend on it. Perl was never considered 'standard' and shouldn't be installed on systems that don't need or use it. Of course many people who live/breathe/eat perl are going to be surprised, but this is good for them.
Any large corporation can tell you where true security lies:
Security through obesity
Sure, they'll say they are fit and nimble - they can change their direction quickly, squash bugs in their code in record time, etc. But the truth is that only corporations large enough to squash evildoers, such as those who find bugs, can truly be considered 'secure'. You'd be surprised at how much more information would be out now if certian people didn't have that 800lb gorrilla breathing down their neck...
Well, one way of doing it is assigning one network card per room - ie, you'll have one box with a dozen cards in it that handles a dozen rooms (you can get multiple ethernet cards - 8ports are not hard to come by). Have each concentrator box essentially act as a gateway on a per port basis. This is called "Killing gnats with a nuke." It works in every case, but is overkill. I'm sure you can figure everything else out with that basic description.
However, the most effective way to set this up is to assume that 80%-90% of your customers are coming in with a DHCP client. So you wire up the hotel as a regular switched network with DHCP. Then you get very cheap linux boxes, or reverse engineer some of those nifty broadband gateway devices and put your own code in. If a customer is having problems getting on then you truck up to the router closet and reattach their room to one of the linux boxes or gateways which acts like a dhcp enabled translator.
I suspect you can get a decent router to manage the physical connections and detect the situation so it is completely transparant to the users and the hotel staff.
Lastly, don't think of it in terms of IP addresses, think of it in terms of MAC addresses. Whenever you receive a packet inside the network with a new ip or mac in the packet, you add it to your database and instruct your NAT to route properly for it. The only situation in which you'll have a problem is when two people come in with the same static address. I'd suggest that this is such a remote possibility that you can instruct the hotel staph to physically reconnect a patch cable to another subnet on your network. Look into switches and routers that route by MAC address only. Then the subnets will take care of themselves, and since your box is dynamically applying IPs based on mac addresses you'll never have a problem.
From their FAQ:... StarBand Model 360 satellite modem that connects to an Ethernet or USB port on your existing PC.
As with most broadband modems this has an ethernet port, which generally connect directly to your ethernet card. Don't use USB. Use LILO to boot to windows, get it set up in your USB-less version of windows, then steal the settings (which most likely is a simple DHCP setup). It's far easier for them to put the smarts into the modem and configure windows as little as possible than it is to field tech support and keep configuration programs and drivers up to date on all versions of windows. You will likely find that the USB driver is a simple USB ethernet driver anyway, and you may even be able to find generic linux drivers for whatever chipset it's using - but you may have to 'research' the innards of the modem to determine the chipset since they probably don't advertise it in the USB strings.
Therefore you'll most likely find that it'll be easy to set up in windows, easy to set up in linux, and easy to set up with a gateway.
Make sure you find a service provider that has a money back gurantee or free month or something, though, just in case.
Please note the gratuitious use of "likely" and "may" in this post. I've not used them.
I love KLEZ.G. I had Trend Micro's evaluation corporate scanner installed for the lst month and still got infected by it. I'm now using Sophos which cleans it, but the virus seems to corrupt a DLL upon first use so after installation I go to safe mode and run the scanner with 'DELETE'. KLEZ.G overwrites the exe instead of just 'patching' it so there is no disinfection. Bugger of a virus to deal with, and my office (we're a management company) has infected some of the hotels we manage. Luckily our video stores run DOS and an email program which doesn't allow/use attachments.
McAffee didn't say anything about this virus either, though I'll admit our virus files are from early this year.
I've now set all the outlook express clients to run in restricted security mode now, though, so we likely won't have much more of a problem in the future. Didn't infect Outlook, though, and obviously didn't infect other clients.
The major problem is post-install maintenance. If you know your way around troubleshooting a PC then it isn't a big issue, though. The only catch is keeping track of warranties.
To do that yuo need a big database project and the ability to track eahc individual item (since you'll likely buy a few dozen parts at a time, instead of one huge buy).
To take care of that problem, here's what I do: I ignore the warranty past the first 90 days. If it fails in that time then I'll bother to get a replacement. If it fails a year later, then it isn't worth my time to pursue the issue - my time alone is worth more to the company for two hours of work than a single CPU, motherboard, HD, etc.
So you need to decide up front what you are going to do in the post install world before you install.
As a side note, for my corporate workers, I build celeron 1GHz machines - $75 each for the mobo and chip, a GOOD case and a few fans for $50, 128MB for $30 or so, and a $65 HD (10G - everything usefull is on network). They don't need high performance (well, most of them), and network speed actually affects more of what they do that just about anything else I can do with their system.
Honestly Linux is overkill, as is a full computer. Chances are, however, very good that speed of development is paramount - it doesn't have to work so good the first time, just make it work. Then we'll evaluate it and refine it.
Therefore I'm going to stun, and yes, even shock, the slashdot crowd. I may be publicly skewered, but in the interest of your job and sanity:
Use DOS - 6.22 ought to work fine, but whatever you can find lying around will work. Make a simple QBasic program that has a simple interface, and makes simple sounds. It all fits onto one floppy disk, and runs under dos 3.x, through windows.NET server, including every reasonable Linux/Unix/BSD solution you can come up with.
Make it do simple beeps to the PC speaker and amplify it, or hook the parallel port up to a large bell or beeper. It'll fit on a single floppy, and will run on that old accounting computer no one wants to use.
If you want to have different sounds you can throw a sound card and hard drive in there and load a simple dos WAV player which won't take much CPU power. These can be called from Qbasic (or your language of choice - Turbo C 2 is free and comes with a useful IDE)
This project should take you an hour if you buy a PA system from Radio Shack. Your Boss will be impressed at your elite hacking skills, and you will be revered by workers across the factory floor.
And when you leave/get fired you can have it play "Who let the dogs out" or somesuch.
Leave you wanting more... what? Tuna fish? If you want tuna fish, you're pretty much out of luck. Apple stopped selling tuna fish about the time the Lisa didn't come out, and MS simply refuses to acknowledge tuna compliant systems. No one makes tuna drivers anymore, so you'll be stuck with an old outdated driver on an old outdated OS (or worse, an emulator!) and the hardware stinks. Sure, it smells ok for a day or two, but your friends and SO will leave in a flash if you don't pay the high maintenance costs. Good tuna isn't cheap.
The IRS has actually spent time and money trying to make the tax code (which is harder to read than the average EULA) easy to follow with the various forms they've created.
The average software shop doesn't care if their EULA is readable, and increasingly more companies like it that way. Providing a simplified explanation is not trivial, and has various legal landmines to navigate.
So any comparison is not very reasonable - they are intended for completely different purposes, and one will necessarily be more difficult to understand than the other.
Transflective displays are expensive, they can't gurantee color quality or brightness (since the light source is not defined except in total darkness), and the simple fact is that even in sunny conditions you have to orient yourself just right to have the sun do it's job in lighting up your diaplay. This is the same technology used in the IPAQ and the rest of the newer PDAs.
Manufacturer's of laptops have likely determined that the majority of customers use their laptops under a certian range of conditions, mostly indoors, and mostly under office lighting. Also, transflective displays cannot be backlit. The material used to take light from the side (from LEDs, CCFL tubes, etc), shine it over, through the LCD, and allow it to then pass back to the user are not only expensive to manufacture and handle (easy to scratch, must be worked with in clean room, etc) but lose a portion of their light, meaning less light for the display.
This makes them, overall, more expensive in both cost and energy usage.
As with all LCD parts it's not as much of an issue with smaller devices (PDA, game machines, phones, etc), but the cost in a laptop isn't worth it, especially for the very small percentage of users that would benefit from it.
-Adam
Whatever copy protection it has is useless...
on
Dataplay Ready to Launch
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They are going to depend on the licensing scheme that won't allow players to emit the raw data - ie, no computer dataplay drives. They'll connect with USB and firewire, but part of their copy protection is no raw access to data, meaning it's hard to break the encryption.
However, that just means hackers get to go to a new level, modifying hardware, changing the code in the microcontrollers, etc.
I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).
All of which have Digital Restrictions Management built in. Of course the recording industry is going to go for it. Their SDMI initiative failed (and is still flopping about like a fish looking for water), and there is no way they can control any software/data based approach - too many fingers have to be in the pudding to make it work, and one of those fingers may leak - much like how the DVD decryption routines were discovered (which would have taken longer without the key, but would likely have still taken place)
So their only hope is
Copyright/patent new format
Copyright/patent hardware and algorithms
Only license copyrights/patents to those willing to play ball their way
But the trick is then getting the consumers to pay for this new deal, which initially is going to be very expensive. Given the choice of buying an IPOD and this new disc device, which do you think the average joe is going to get? No little discs to lose, tons of space, no DRM (well, hacked away) , and personal organizer to boot.
They'd have to sell millions of these before the price comes down, and like the minidisc it ain't gonna happen.
I suspect that even when they only release a certian artist in that format the music will still be available (one person with player and a nice sound card, or simply ripped off the radio) in an adequate format. It will backfire, because music consumers are fickle and will simply stop listening to an artist if the entrance fee is $300, and the artists are less likely to play ball with companies that use them like pawns to bring about DRM.
It's a complicated chess game, and they are playing like they've lost their queen. They will fail if they don't fold the game and start with a completely different mindset.
So I'm not worried. Besides, CDs will likely be available cheaply for a long, long time.
-Adam
Re:I'd make or modify an existing program to do th
on
Cloaking Detection?
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· Score: 2
Many of the site he'll likely be testing have some dynamic content in them, such as a date and time, counter, etc. A simple compare will show those lines that are different - if a lot is different then you know the page has changed significantly. If the compare only spits out a few lines you can log them and look at them later, or simply assume it's giving a different page to a different user and modifying some date/time/ads/cookie/etc info.
A CRC or HASH will be a bit faster, but I suspect they'll turn up more false positives and create more post-processing than necessary.
-Adam
I'd make or modify an existing program to do this
on
Cloaking Detection?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I imagine wget or another HTTP client can be coaxed to spit out the spider and browser type strings associated with search engine spiders. It would be a simple, straightforward hack to make a script that would request a page twice, once reporting itself as a search engine (and requesting the robots.txt file for good measure) and secondly as a regular browser. Then do a simple compare.
You could give it a list of sites and it could go through dozens or hundreds of sites a minute, rather than you doing it by hand. You could have it save pages that show differences, or at least give you the URLs so you could load them later and study the differences (if that is a goal).
You could use PHP, perl, java, etc to do this very simply as well. I imagine a simple PHP script could well be less than 50 lines, and could even call your browser and load the two pages side by side each time it found a difference.
If you have sold software before then you know how much it's going to sell. Providing a trial period is good, and those that need the software will try it and buy it.
If I'm looking for a piece of software that I don't know where to get, however, it usually means that I need it for some short term use now and not an hour from now, nor am I willing to give out my email for something I may never use again by someone I don't want to hear from.
You have set some fairly low jumps in the path of users who want to use your product. If you are aiming for customers who need your product and are willing to pay for it, then those jumps are not large. If you want everyone who sees your site to download your trialware, then you'd better eliminate those jumps.
You could do so by giving people a choice. Instead of saying, "If you want to use our software without paying, you must do steps one two and three." you could say something like, "We want to get our software into your hands. We know you'll find it useful. You can download the slightly crippled, time limited version right now and start using it immediately, or you can download the full version that's limited to a longer period of time if you register with your email address. The registration key will be sent immediately, and you should be able to use your software in under ten minutes (unless you use AOL - their mail sucks - it could take ten hours)."
The cold hard reality is that your software is going to be used without people paying for it. You can put jumps in the way that are annoying, but it's up to you to find the right balance of annoyance versus purchases. The more annoying the trialware is, the less likely I'll get it even if it's better than a less annoying piece of software (that may even cost more)
Clickbook is an example of this. I would like to have a product like clickbook, but their particular cripple scheme (last I tried it) was so absurdly annoying to me personally that I couldn't bring myself to pay for what appeared to be a decent product. It was like they wrapped it in a cardboard box and left it out on the sidwalk for me to use - only it was chained to the sidewalk and I had to sign away some info to bring it and the sidewalk home so I could try it out.
You want to have your product seen in the best light possible. That means some may walk away without paying. The balance is non-trivial, and it is a business decision - not one which should be made up by a discussion list like this one.
But it's your business - you get to gamble. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Slashdot Mirror
This indicates that something is seriously wrong with your UPS. If it did drive a current or voltage across the input power plugs it'd be powering the building grid which is not only illegal, but those doing so are liable for any damage to the power grid and associated line workers. They take just as much protection for a downed grid as a live one for stupid users who try to power a downed grid, but several die each year because someone's power went out and their generator/UPS/alternative power system was back feeding the utility company when the grid was down. Connecting two mismatched live grids together is fun for the whole family.
If your UPS is UL listed then there are several regulations which govern just this sort of action. Report the problem to APC, if they don't do anything about it (!!!) then report it to the UL and/or BBB.
I'm being completely serious. For it to go this bad there is certian to be more wrong with it. I wouldn't trust it to power anything worth more than $10.
-Adam
For those, like me, interested in the encoding/decoding technology used in the DSD (digital stream data) that the SACD is encoded with here is a short, useful paper on 1-bit Sigma-Delta Modulation . Those remotely familiar with digital signal processing shouldn't have any difficulty with it, but it isn't an introductory piece or tutorial either.
-Adam
You are purporting to believe in a value, yet I doubt you believe in the value, just this particular case.
BTW, since these video disc players are not DVD licensed, do they have the right to use DVD keys to decrypt existing DVDs? These keys, I imagine, are licensed along with the patent and royalty agreements. This will work great in non-DMCA countries, the USA, however, will likely stop them at customs after some mild lobbying from various patent owners and trade groups. It's very likely that these are destined for the huge chinese market, but they are probably hoping to skirt around the law and get these into the US as well.
-Adam
I've requested my entry (ann arbor destroyed by mozilla) be removed to favor Ann Arbor Party in ypsilanti. Please sign up for the Ann Arbor Party, that's where I'll be going...
-Adam
Essentially this is a distribution company, and they charge huge rates to send you a 'free' CD. I can get better shipping rates through any major (or minor) carrier, and even most couriers.
Here's their business plan:
- Make no useful product
- Obtain 'free' product from elsewhere
- Advertise shipping service for 'free' product
- Outsource shipping
This doesn't punch a hole in anything, much less the RIAA's theory about the CD price fixing being necessary. All this shows is that someone can set up a virtual company giving product away and making money on the shipping - which all too many internet companies failed at a year or two ago.Here's the bottom line - you can give away garbage, and you can sell wanted products, but you can't sell garbage and expect to survive off it. If they think that they are going to make enough money on this gimmick to grow their business and become a heavyweight player, well, best of luck. But remember MP3.com isn't so hot these days, their artists aren't so hot, and they're giving away their music with the added benefit of instant gratification.
FightCloud - if you really want to appeal to people, don't call a donkey a horse. We are intelligent consumers. If we're given an reasonable choice, we'll make a reasonable decision. The RIAA markets their products to the stupid and weak. We have to eat it because that's all there is for many good groups (who can't or won't free themselves of the RIAA's lies). Tell us that your CDs cost $2.50 each and that S&H is $2.50 for the first CD and $0.50 for each additional CD in each shipment.
But then, your business would fail, wouldn't it?
-Adam
If you clicked the links on the 'fatality' page, you'll find that the majority of people listed with strike through (fatality) are actually women who died due to complications during and after abortions, not docters who perform abortions.
This is why they call them 'fatalities'.
-Adam
If the technology works (as pointed out by the press release no cooling has actually been achieved) then it likely will remain far too expensive for the return on energy savings for quite some time. It will have a place in aerospace and defense (typical areas where high cost and short life can be justified with gains in weight and energy savings) but you won't be seeing it in your refridgerator for some time - at least not until they make a cheaper (less efficient) version which can be mass produced and lasts for years.
They, like many companies, have a lot of theory, a lot of calculations, and a lot of patents. Chances are they are hoping to sell it all to someone who has the resources to really try it out. Along with their other 'innovations' it appears that they are an IP company.
-Adam
Constant improvements in resolution and sound fidelity will probably outstrip the computer generated visual and auraul improvements for the next decade or two such that the average person on average equipment would easily be able to tell the difference between an actor and an animation. There are tons more issues than just getting the face right - though in staid newscast shots it'll be easier where the newscaster is looking into the camera. But when is the last time you saw a full newscast with only close up face shots?
The problem isn't creating a realistic human animation - the problem is duplicating the realistic movements of an existing person. You couldn't just replace Dan Rather, for instance, since anyone who watches him infrequently would notice those little things that can't quite be animated yet. Even slicing together real video of the person is noticably different.
-Adam
The restrictions for the wireless theatre access is more for copy protection than anything else. No reasonable person would want to watch the movie through a slow internet connection with a web cam, but the movie studios certianly don't want it to even be considered.
-Adam
It's easier to keep perl up to date and apply patches for it (maintain) if there are no critical system pieces that depend on it. Perl was never considered 'standard' and shouldn't be installed on systems that don't need or use it. Of course many people who live/breathe/eat perl are going to be surprised, but this is good for them.
-Adam
...I plan on living forever.
So far, so good.
-Adam
Any large corporation can tell you where true security lies:
Security through obesity
Sure, they'll say they are fit and nimble - they can change their direction quickly, squash bugs in their code in record time, etc. But the truth is that only corporations large enough to squash evildoers, such as those who find bugs, can truly be considered 'secure'. You'd be surprised at how much more information would be out now if certian people didn't have that 800lb gorrilla breathing down their neck...
-Adam
Well, one way of doing it is assigning one network card per room - ie, you'll have one box with a dozen cards in it that handles a dozen rooms (you can get multiple ethernet cards - 8ports are not hard to come by). Have each concentrator box essentially act as a gateway on a per port basis. This is called "Killing gnats with a nuke." It works in every case, but is overkill. I'm sure you can figure everything else out with that basic description.
However, the most effective way to set this up is to assume that 80%-90% of your customers are coming in with a DHCP client. So you wire up the hotel as a regular switched network with DHCP. Then you get very cheap linux boxes, or reverse engineer some of those nifty broadband gateway devices and put your own code in. If a customer is having problems getting on then you truck up to the router closet and reattach their room to one of the linux boxes or gateways which acts like a dhcp enabled translator.
I suspect you can get a decent router to manage the physical connections and detect the situation so it is completely transparant to the users and the hotel staff.
Lastly, don't think of it in terms of IP addresses, think of it in terms of MAC addresses. Whenever you receive a packet inside the network with a new ip or mac in the packet, you add it to your database and instruct your NAT to route properly for it. The only situation in which you'll have a problem is when two people come in with the same static address. I'd suggest that this is such a remote possibility that you can instruct the hotel staph to physically reconnect a patch cable to another subnet on your network. Look into switches and routers that route by MAC address only. Then the subnets will take care of themselves, and since your box is dynamically applying IPs based on mac addresses you'll never have a problem.
-Adam
From their FAQ: ... StarBand Model 360 satellite modem that connects to an Ethernet or USB port on your existing PC.
As with most broadband modems this has an ethernet port, which generally connect directly to your ethernet card. Don't use USB. Use LILO to boot to windows, get it set up in your USB-less version of windows, then steal the settings (which most likely is a simple DHCP setup). It's far easier for them to put the smarts into the modem and configure windows as little as possible than it is to field tech support and keep configuration programs and drivers up to date on all versions of windows. You will likely find that the USB driver is a simple USB ethernet driver anyway, and you may even be able to find generic linux drivers for whatever chipset it's using - but you may have to 'research' the innards of the modem to determine the chipset since they probably don't advertise it in the USB strings.
Therefore you'll most likely find that it'll be easy to set up in windows, easy to set up in linux, and easy to set up with a gateway.
Make sure you find a service provider that has a money back gurantee or free month or something, though, just in case.
Please note the gratuitious use of "likely" and "may" in this post. I've not used them.
-Adam
I love KLEZ.G. I had Trend Micro's evaluation corporate scanner installed for the lst month and still got infected by it. I'm now using Sophos which cleans it, but the virus seems to corrupt a DLL upon first use so after installation I go to safe mode and run the scanner with 'DELETE'. KLEZ.G overwrites the exe instead of just 'patching' it so there is no disinfection. Bugger of a virus to deal with, and my office (we're a management company) has infected some of the hotels we manage. Luckily our video stores run DOS and an email program which doesn't allow/use attachments.
McAffee didn't say anything about this virus either, though I'll admit our virus files are from early this year.
I've now set all the outlook express clients to run in restricted security mode now, though, so we likely won't have much more of a problem in the future. Didn't infect Outlook, though, and obviously didn't infect other clients.
-Adam
The major problem is post-install maintenance. If you know your way around troubleshooting a PC then it isn't a big issue, though. The only catch is keeping track of warranties.
To do that yuo need a big database project and the ability to track eahc individual item (since you'll likely buy a few dozen parts at a time, instead of one huge buy).
To take care of that problem, here's what I do: I ignore the warranty past the first 90 days. If it fails in that time then I'll bother to get a replacement. If it fails a year later, then it isn't worth my time to pursue the issue - my time alone is worth more to the company for two hours of work than a single CPU, motherboard, HD, etc.
So you need to decide up front what you are going to do in the post install world before you install.
As a side note, for my corporate workers, I build celeron 1GHz machines - $75 each for the mobo and chip, a GOOD case and a few fans for $50, 128MB for $30 or so, and a $65 HD (10G - everything usefull is on network). They don't need high performance (well, most of them), and network speed actually affects more of what they do that just about anything else I can do with their system.
-Adam
Honestly Linux is overkill, as is a full computer. Chances are, however, very good that speed of development is paramount - it doesn't have to work so good the first time, just make it work. Then we'll evaluate it and refine it.
.NET server, including every reasonable Linux/Unix/BSD solution you can come up with.
Therefore I'm going to stun, and yes, even shock, the slashdot crowd. I may be publicly skewered, but in the interest of your job and sanity:
Use DOS - 6.22 ought to work fine, but whatever you can find lying around will work. Make a simple QBasic program that has a simple interface, and makes simple sounds. It all fits onto one floppy disk, and runs under dos 3.x, through windows
Make it do simple beeps to the PC speaker and amplify it, or hook the parallel port up to a large bell or beeper. It'll fit on a single floppy, and will run on that old accounting computer no one wants to use.
If you want to have different sounds you can throw a sound card and hard drive in there and load a simple dos WAV player which won't take much CPU power. These can be called from Qbasic (or your language of choice - Turbo C 2 is free and comes with a useful IDE)
This project should take you an hour if you buy a PA system from Radio Shack. Your Boss will be impressed at your elite hacking skills, and you will be revered by workers across the factory floor.
And when you leave/get fired you can have it play "Who let the dogs out" or somesuch.
-Adam
but they still leave me wanting more.
Leave you wanting more... what? Tuna fish? If you want tuna fish, you're pretty much out of luck. Apple stopped selling tuna fish about the time the Lisa didn't come out, and MS simply refuses to acknowledge tuna compliant systems. No one makes tuna drivers anymore, so you'll be stuck with an old outdated driver on an old outdated OS (or worse, an emulator!) and the hardware stinks. Sure, it smells ok for a day or two, but your friends and SO will leave in a flash if you don't pay the high maintenance costs. Good tuna isn't cheap.
-Adam
Obviously if you wanted to discuss this or share your two cents you should do it in the newsgroup.
Duh.
-Adam
The IRS has actually spent time and money trying to make the tax code (which is harder to read than the average EULA) easy to follow with the various forms they've created.
The average software shop doesn't care if their EULA is readable, and increasingly more companies like it that way. Providing a simplified explanation is not trivial, and has various legal landmines to navigate.
So any comparison is not very reasonable - they are intended for completely different purposes, and one will necessarily be more difficult to understand than the other.
-Adam
Transflective displays are expensive, they can't gurantee color quality or brightness (since the light source is not defined except in total darkness), and the simple fact is that even in sunny conditions you have to orient yourself just right to have the sun do it's job in lighting up your diaplay. This is the same technology used in the IPAQ and the rest of the newer PDAs.
Manufacturer's of laptops have likely determined that the majority of customers use their laptops under a certian range of conditions, mostly indoors, and mostly under office lighting. Also, transflective displays cannot be backlit. The material used to take light from the side (from LEDs, CCFL tubes, etc), shine it over, through the LCD, and allow it to then pass back to the user are not only expensive to manufacture and handle (easy to scratch, must be worked with in clean room, etc) but lose a portion of their light, meaning less light for the display.
This makes them, overall, more expensive in both cost and energy usage.
As with all LCD parts it's not as much of an issue with smaller devices (PDA, game machines, phones, etc), but the cost in a laptop isn't worth it, especially for the very small percentage of users that would benefit from it.
-Adam
However, that just means hackers get to go to a new level, modifying hardware, changing the code in the microcontrollers, etc.
I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).
All of which have Digital Restrictions Management built in. Of course the recording industry is going to go for it. Their SDMI initiative failed (and is still flopping about like a fish looking for water), and there is no way they can control any software/data based approach - too many fingers have to be in the pudding to make it work, and one of those fingers may leak - much like how the DVD decryption routines were discovered (which would have taken longer without the key, but would likely have still taken place)
So their only hope is
- Copyright/patent new format
- Copyright/patent hardware and algorithms
- Only license copyrights/patents to those willing to play ball their way
But the trick is then getting the consumers to pay for this new deal, which initially is going to be very expensive. Given the choice of buying an IPOD and this new disc device, which do you think the average joe is going to get? No little discs to lose, tons of space, no DRM (well, hacked away) , and personal organizer to boot.They'd have to sell millions of these before the price comes down, and like the minidisc it ain't gonna happen.
I suspect that even when they only release a certian artist in that format the music will still be available (one person with player and a nice sound card, or simply ripped off the radio) in an adequate format. It will backfire, because music consumers are fickle and will simply stop listening to an artist if the entrance fee is $300, and the artists are less likely to play ball with companies that use them like pawns to bring about DRM.
It's a complicated chess game, and they are playing like they've lost their queen. They will fail if they don't fold the game and start with a completely different mindset.
So I'm not worried. Besides, CDs will likely be available cheaply for a long, long time.
-Adam
Many of the site he'll likely be testing have some dynamic content in them, such as a date and time, counter, etc. A simple compare will show those lines that are different - if a lot is different then you know the page has changed significantly. If the compare only spits out a few lines you can log them and look at them later, or simply assume it's giving a different page to a different user and modifying some date/time/ads/cookie/etc info.
A CRC or HASH will be a bit faster, but I suspect they'll turn up more false positives and create more post-processing than necessary.
-Adam
I imagine wget or another HTTP client can be coaxed to spit out the spider and browser type strings associated with search engine spiders. It would be a simple, straightforward hack to make a script that would request a page twice, once reporting itself as a search engine (and requesting the robots.txt file for good measure) and secondly as a regular browser. Then do a simple compare.
You could give it a list of sites and it could go through dozens or hundreds of sites a minute, rather than you doing it by hand. You could have it save pages that show differences, or at least give you the URLs so you could load them later and study the differences (if that is a goal).
You could use PHP, perl, java, etc to do this very simply as well. I imagine a simple PHP script could well be less than 50 lines, and could even call your browser and load the two pages side by side each time it found a difference.
-Adam
If you have sold software before then you know how much it's going to sell. Providing a trial period is good, and those that need the software will try it and buy it.
If I'm looking for a piece of software that I don't know where to get, however, it usually means that I need it for some short term use now and not an hour from now, nor am I willing to give out my email for something I may never use again by someone I don't want to hear from.
You have set some fairly low jumps in the path of users who want to use your product. If you are aiming for customers who need your product and are willing to pay for it, then those jumps are not large. If you want everyone who sees your site to download your trialware, then you'd better eliminate those jumps.
You could do so by giving people a choice. Instead of saying, "If you want to use our software without paying, you must do steps one two and three." you could say something like, "We want to get our software into your hands. We know you'll find it useful. You can download the slightly crippled, time limited version right now and start using it immediately, or you can download the full version that's limited to a longer period of time if you register with your email address. The registration key will be sent immediately, and you should be able to use your software in under ten minutes (unless you use AOL - their mail sucks - it could take ten hours)."
The cold hard reality is that your software is going to be used without people paying for it. You can put jumps in the way that are annoying, but it's up to you to find the right balance of annoyance versus purchases. The more annoying the trialware is, the less likely I'll get it even if it's better than a less annoying piece of software (that may even cost more)
Clickbook is an example of this. I would like to have a product like clickbook, but their particular cripple scheme (last I tried it) was so absurdly annoying to me personally that I couldn't bring myself to pay for what appeared to be a decent product. It was like they wrapped it in a cardboard box and left it out on the sidwalk for me to use - only it was chained to the sidewalk and I had to sign away some info to bring it and the sidewalk home so I could try it out.
You want to have your product seen in the best light possible. That means some may walk away without paying. The balance is non-trivial, and it is a business decision - not one which should be made up by a discussion list like this one.
But it's your business - you get to gamble. Enjoy it while it lasts!
-Adam