Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, said the game tanked because "it was practically broken." A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably.
THAT
My parents never bought me a game console, but a few of my friends had them, and I had two friends with 2600's that had that cart. I recall trying to play it, and yes, immense frustration. You'd walk around on a 2d map with a grid of rooms, and random rooms would be trapped. I could spend 10 minutes trying to levitate out of a trap. My friends usually had better luck, because they'd been playing it so much more, but even they would average several attempts to get out of a single trap. I can see why peope would return the game. Ten minutes of that and the cart came out and something else went in.
iirc, the trick was to let go of the levitate button AND hit the only correct exit direction, at precisely the moment you emerged from the hole. Otherwise, you'd fall right back in. (I never did really get the timing down, I only got out on rare occasion, I think due to luck) After a few attempts, you'd be out of energy. I think elliot would magically stop by with a handful of reeces pieces or whatever, at a cost of your score, but all that did was extend the frustration. It was impossible to beat the game without both a good memory and escaping several traps. If you had difficulty with the (random) map, you could easily have to deal with dozens of trapped rooms.
Imagine climging up a ladder and just as you peek your head over the roof edge someone is swinging a shovel at you. You have a split second to dodge the shovel and pull them off the roof or you're falling. Now repeat that 15-20 times. That was 90% of the game.
I think in most cases the flow itself would keep bubbles in check. Bubbles move at a fixed speed up a liquid. As long as the liquid is moving faster than that speed through the siphon, bubbles shouldn't be an issue.
But I don't know the dynamics of what happens if an air pocket manages to form at the top. It may or may not dissipate on its own. Or it may grow, slowing and eventually stopping the siphon action.
and a straw with three holes in it might work as a siphon, depending on the size of the third hole (and other related factors such as the viscosity of air)
You'll probably just lie on the tarmac defrosting and then maybe try some experimental crawling
Better get your baby feet on pretty quickly. Big heavy things are rolling over that slab on a fairly regular basis. It's not a good place to loiter.
Another thing this does is show just how ineffective security theatre is around airports. That could've been a large bomb strapped to that landing gear, wired to go off at 35,000 ft. Damaging the gear enough to make the plane do a cartwheel on live TV when it tries to land would probably give the nutjobs more satisfaction than another plane disappearing over the atlantic anyway. (and bonus! no suicide required!)
This proves the fact that someone can sneak all the way out to the plane undetected, and pretty much nullifies the expensive nude-vision body scanners.
You sure? The fourth largest army (North Korea, active personnel) wouldn't last more than two days against the fifth largest? Not to mention that NK's is by far the largest in the world in terms of reservists.
Re-learn the lesson that was the "Russian Steamroller" in WW2. Even an extremely large army that is poorly equipped will fare badly in battle. To play that game, you have to be willing to toss your people into the fire like coal and simply outlast the offensives until some other factor kicks in. That didn't go so well in the first half of WW2 for Russia, and the Germans knew how it worked and very nearly completed their push. When you're taking losses above 10:1 it's difficult to physically get that many bullet-stoppers up to the front line fast enough to slow down the offensive, regardless of the size of your army. Logistics were the Germans' downfall - resupply and weather. Russia had to flood the line with bullet-stoppers until they caught a break. And in today's wars, and especially considering the proximity here, that won't be an issue.
Lack of any significant airforce would be another issue, but that really is irrelevent because NK simply hasn't got much in the way of substantial millitary targets to take out.
If Russia were to decide to "step over the border" into NK (like they're doing elsewhere currently...) I seriously doubt it would come to war. It would probably end up like more of a "ok you little snot-nosed kid, you've had your fun but we've grown tired of it. Time for us to straighten out this disaster." Kim would find himself on a plane to Moscow shortly thereafter. But fixing NK would be such an enormous headache / liability, would they really want to take on that burdonsome of a projecct?
Thing is, even with the best of intentions, NK is an incredible mess. Even if some well-meaning power had the ability to just step in and be handed the reigns to fix it, it'd be a tremendous undertaking. There's way too much wrong to try to tackle it all at once, it would have to be handled in stages. I can't imagine the borders opening up anywhere inside five years, regardless of who was at the helm. Right now the majority of people in NK have been brainwashed into believing their leader is a god, the entire world wants to eat their babies, and their military could conquer every army on earth. When most of your populace honestly believes this, you take on the very difficult job of saving someone that doesn't want to be saved. We saw that in Japan at the end of WW2, entire villagaes in the outlying islands committing suicide because of what the millitary told them the US troops would do when they got there. NK is exactly the same that way. We could drive a red cross truck loaded with food into a starving village over there and they'd come out of their huts with pitchforks, kill all the aid workers, and burn the truck, food and all, thinking it was poisoned. It takes quite a long time to fix that.
I have NO idea how many lego sets I had. IMHO the "junk" of the sets were the windows, people, wheels, the stupid closed minded stuff. I preferred the raw blocks, mainly the 2x4 and the longer ones that were in such short supply. I mad some amazing things, including a box with a door locked by three tumblers, that required its lego key to open. (if it had been glued together, naturally)
I also had dominos and blocks, two capsula sets (adding a switch, motor, and wires to the mix), an old and a new girder n panel set (kinda meh), tinker toys (also meh), and later a number of assemblable toys like a little battery powered toy boat I had to wind the motor (dc windings) on, a ball clock, crystal radio, and by age 10 two electronic design experimenter (150 and 200 in 1's). I did a LOT of building when I was growing up. (though a good deal of it started going toward electronics by the time I was a teen)
Kids need a shot at that sort of play when they're growing up. It's not going to be for everyone, but this whole culture of "stick an ipad in his hands" by default is just a shame. Ikea is going to go out of business by the next generation, nobody will be able to assemble any of their furniture!
I was just talking with a friend of mine, father of my godson, about the possibility of getting him into arduino. Wow, he's gonna be NINE this December, and he doesn't have anywhere near the head-start I did. I did manage to inspire him with a variety of art supplies which he loves, and got him several of those assemblable bots from radio shack last year, trying to get him a good start and taste of things that he finds he has an aptitude for. It's not just building things, kids need to get exposure to a variety of things as early as possible, so they get their feet wet with essential flexible skills like buidling, as well as getting a taste of variety to see what they really enjoy.
But being able to make things, that's such a basic, universal skill. It's one that every kid should get heavy exposure to, in a format they can enjoy excelling in.
The more relevant question to ask is "Why DID Symantec do this?" A more interesting question would be "Why did Symantec break the law?" They didn't do that, but the answer to all three is the same.
"because it helps them make money".
In this particular case, the fear of ransomware helps Symantec sell their product. So a researcher doing something to combat ransomware hurts Symantec's business. So they do what they can do, to protect their profits. In this case, it's even legal for them to do it. So it's a no-brainer.
You simply have to expect this sort of behavior from any big business. There's no point in being confused or shocked by it.
A month from now they will be able to make a new press release, "Two months ago security researchers dealt a blow to ransomware, protecting users and devaluating our product. Today, we're pleased to announce the ransomware developers have made the necessary fixes to their code outlined in our recent publication, and once again, Symantec is your only defense against ransomware!"
Danger implies risk. Risk implies different possible outcomes.
If we send a meatbag to mars, they're not coming back before they spoil. There's only one possible outcome. It's not risky OR dangerous. It's guaranteed lethal. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, lets continue with the booking please? (and I wouldn't mind signing up myself, but I rather doubt they'd take me)
the current carrying capacity is also dependent on the voltage and the frequency. Frequency is probably not an issue here, but the voltage may be a factor.
I'm sure if they were publicly asked if such a whitelist exists, they would deny it. And they would be lying. The first group that inspired the creation of the list is the list of state senators. Those were built into the system from day 1, I'm sure 100% of them are on the "always fly list". And then a few of the uppers in the NSA landed on the list due to travel etc, and raised hell, and got themselves added to the list by internal means. And it just snowballed from there as someone says "well if we're adding sensators and ourselves, who else would be a good idea to keep the heat off us?" Judges, celebs, secretaries of state, governers, union officials, and other powerful people added thereafter. I bet the list is well into the ten thousands by now.
Well, the recent adoption of arduino was a good effort, but probably too little, too late.
And right now their markup on arduino products is pretty unpalatable. They're selling things for quite a bit above MSRP. The first thing that does is drive people to buy from places like MCE that are still quasi-retail, but online only. (where RS is likely headed) But then once you're online you realize that $65 Mega2560 that you found at MCM for $50 can actually be had in generic form (Funduino 2560) for $16 with free shipping off ebay, as long as you're willing to wait 3 weeks for it. And then Radio Shack falls back to it's "I need this today" store of desperation only. You did buy one mega from RS, but you will never buy another one from them because now you have four more knockoffs at home for the price of one more locally. While "local desperation" is a valid market, it's not a good one to rely on for too much of your volume.
I still go there somewhat frequently because I'm too impatient for my own good though.
Don't tell a crowd of nerds that your new product is unbreakable, unless you actually want them to try very, very hard to break it. It's like waving a flag at a bull, you'd better have your pads laced up nice and snug, because you're goin' for a ride.
The sad part? One of the absolute best presents I ever had as a little kid was that 120-in-one electronics lab kit they used to sell
And the 200-in-1 that I got a year after the 150. That was 100% responsible for my interest in electronics today. My how far the Shack has fallen. I remember back in the days, going out to the local RS in KCMO with my breadboard and pencil/paper with schematics, buying parts, over to the table to work on it, back over for a few more things I needed nextâ¦. now it's so hit-and-miss. I can think of more parts they've stopped carrying than parts they DO carry. Walls of 5pk's of resistors turned into a single pull-out drawer with maybe 15 varietyâ¦.
Hardware that allows software to easily damage it is designed wrong. If your OS crashes, it can basically do anything Murphy's Law dictates, within the bounds of what the hardware will try to humor it on. Hardware has to be designed to protect itself against flippy software because it's gonna happen from time to time. I'm not saying that all hardware needs to be 100% software-proof, but it needs to be, within reasonable limits. The sound hardware blowing out your speaker cone because your software tried to turn the volume up to 1e+15 is a hardware/firmware issue that should be covered under warranty.
Police do not get to keep the money they collect. None of that money is allowed to go back to the police department.
In my city, the Chief of Police drove around for several years in a red ferrari, seized from I believe a drug dealer. They had it sent into the shop to retrofit a light bar, radio, etc into. It's difficult to say what exact maneuvers they went through to pull it off, it might have been a not-so-public public auction or something.
Wish I still had a pic of it to share. It was an interesting sight to see. You can see similar things nowadays though looking at some of the hopped up police cars that run on the autobahn, looks about the same. Sort of like this, only it was red and the light bar was a lot wider: (and they didn't bother to write "police" across the side)
typically attracts people that already have a stable full of unicorns, especially if you're foolish enough to put a big bounty on it. Announcing you have "perfect security" just brings the embarrassment to your door that much faster.
And try as you might, even actual "perfect security" on your part will usually fail miserably at someone else's hands. Look at Safai, and how often flash or java (or the user themselves) is used to compromise it. (approaching 100%?)
I think that's the first thing you need to do before deciding how to react.
Did the author decide he'd created an unmanageable hack and push management to pull in a contractor to either clean up the project or simply suffer through trying to maintain it, so he could get back to focusing on his other work?
Did management rush the author to get something "usable" out the door so they could put him on another project, and you're just the mop-up crew?
It's very likely one of those two things. You could respond to either of them by simply "run, forrest, run!", or you could roll up your sleeves and get to work. If you choose to take it on, your approach will depend on why you are there. First off, trashing on the author won't get you anywhere with anyone, don't even consider it. The author may realize he made a mess, management may not. But right now the author is your best ally. Don't burn that bridge by running to management and telling them the reason it's going to be expensive to fix is because the author created a mess.
That being said, document everything, in case it comes back to bite you. You don't need to share that documentation with anyone unless necessary. It's your safety net in case the excrement strikes the oscillating unit and the author tries to blame the problems on you.
Have a private chat with the author and find out which of the two above is the reason you're there. You'll notice that in either case, he's probably very happy to have you taking over, and you should be able to easily leverage that to get his cooperation. That will make your job monumentally easier. Projects by good authors that get into this state are usually the result of inadequate planning, or a late change in requirements. The author probably had a fairly-well fleshed out plan that went south at some point, and that plan is probably not very clear to you right now. Ask about that plan, find out where the code was meant to go, why it didn't end up going there, and mosts importantly what problems did that create and how did he work around them. Those work-arounds are what's causing your grief. Knowing what they are is half the battle (that's why stuff broke when you edited), knowing why they were necessary is the other half. (THAT'S why other unrelated stuff started breaking) Get this information from the author.
At that point, you can take a very well-informed look at the project and decide if it's worth your hassle to take on. Then either take it or leave it. If you decide to bail, you can look back on your documentation and decide how much of that is necessary to justify your decision and get some compensation for your trouble. If you do decide to take on the project, discuss the issue again with the author and get their input on how to explain the maintenance costs. Even if it has to come down to "this is going to be expensive because Bob created a mess", giving him a chance to have some input on how this is addressed will help keep him in your corner down the road. If he's anywhere near reasonable, he'll understand that he's going to have to accept some of the responsibility for what he started.
They have vowed to safeguard funding for the program to keep it on track.
"Don't worry, even if you don't deliver what we asked for, get way behind schedule, and run way over budget, we'll still pay you." That pretty much sums up the issue right there. That's why we have debacles like the F-35. These clowns making the hardware simply can't fail. We're guaranteeing to buy whatever crap they happen to offer us. Military Contracts have been known to be "gravy" for decades now, and that needs to change. The classic "$250 toilet seat" jab is unfortunately a reality, and a persistent one at that.
It's not jut the government that can't run like a business, it's the businesses working with the government that are having the same issue, and it's again a problem from within the government, it's a behavior that their system both allows and seems to encourage. A select few are getting rich on our tax dollars, and we're not getting what we should in exchange, be it materials or government itself. Pisses me off that there's nothing effective I can do about it. (and no, voting hasn't helped so farâ¦)
this is a little different because the case was filed by the defendant basically. They wanted the court to clarify their non-infringement in advance of any litigation that the patent owner may have decided to spring up at a later time.
"Innovent until proven guilty" usually only applies to the normal direction of cases, not ones that operate in reverse like this does.
I pondered this a bit to see if I could identify an easy avenue of abuse for this, but it looks pretty good. If you want to get into a market with what you believe is novel tech, but are fearful that a certain giant already in the market may sue you later down the road, you can get a judgement either for OR against, right now, before you've invested heavily. Really, it's a "win" for the new player either way. Either the court affirms they're not infringing and they can proceed to enter the market, OR the court finds they are infringing, and they can stop investing immediately or choose to license. It's a very good defensive move for the new player.
Reminds me of in wedding vows, "speak now or forever hold your peace". Prevents a big established player from sitting silent until a new startup gets invested and serious momentum and then the giant springs up out of the bushes demanding licensing fees. When they do that, it places the upstart seriously under the gun since they may have invested very heavily. At that point, licensing becomes much more attractive than walking away, as they might have decided to do if they'd have known from the start that they were infringing. So, statistically, this will end up costing patent holders, and helping people hoping to enter the market. (by keeping them out of it if it's going to end up costing them a bundle they hadn't planned on)
perhaps not. This could cut costs. There's always overhead in having more than one model of anything, whether it's a car, a computer, a hair dryer, or software.
In many cases it's cheaper to do the R&D and design once, manufacture, stock, and deliver a single product, and then deal with "feature activation" after the sale. Software does this a lot. Look at all the software available now that you can buy an upgraded license code for to activate new features. It doesn't cost them a nickel more to ship the software with features that you can't use. (until/unless you pay for them)
If the feature isn't all that expensive to manufacture, it may be cheaper to simply install it in a disabled state in ALL vehicles. Add $10 to the manufacturing cost, (realistic for say, heated seats) and then charge $200 to enable the option. As long as you get at least 5% of customers that buy it, (either at purchase, or down the road) you at least break even. Get 25% total sales for it and make a killing. Customers will find it easier to swallow a feature that can be "enabled" for $200 than to either (A) take it to a dealer and get the seats replaced and the vehicle rewired for $800, or (B) just plain not make the purchase at all since it's too expensive after the sale. In the long run, feature activation will likely generate more profit for the manufacturers, while at the same time getting functioning heated seats in more people's hands. It has the potential to be a win-win.
This will inevitably lead to feature-hacking and all the dmca/pirate/hacking drama, but I don't think I need to get into that. People already do that with the ECUs, reprogramming them for racing etc. I even know someone that reprograms and replaces ECUs right now. 50-150 more HP with a simple software upgrade. The future is now, it's just not for sale by the manufacturers just yet. But I'm sure it's coming.
Slashdot Mirror
THAT
My parents never bought me a game console, but a few of my friends had them, and I had two friends with 2600's that had that cart. I recall trying to play it, and yes, immense frustration. You'd walk around on a 2d map with a grid of rooms, and random rooms would be trapped. I could spend 10 minutes trying to levitate out of a trap. My friends usually had better luck, because they'd been playing it so much more, but even they would average several attempts to get out of a single trap. I can see why peope would return the game. Ten minutes of that and the cart came out and something else went in.
iirc, the trick was to let go of the levitate button AND hit the only correct exit direction, at precisely the moment you emerged from the hole. Otherwise, you'd fall right back in. (I never did really get the timing down, I only got out on rare occasion, I think due to luck) After a few attempts, you'd be out of energy. I think elliot would magically stop by with a handful of reeces pieces or whatever, at a cost of your score, but all that did was extend the frustration. It was impossible to beat the game without both a good memory and escaping several traps. If you had difficulty with the (random) map, you could easily have to deal with dozens of trapped rooms.
Imagine climging up a ladder and just as you peek your head over the roof edge someone is swinging a shovel at you. You have a split second to dodge the shovel and pull them off the roof or you're falling. Now repeat that 15-20 times. That was 90% of the game.
I wasn't aware that there was a Politically-Correct (PC) term for "Advertising"... but that must be it?
I think in most cases the flow itself would keep bubbles in check. Bubbles move at a fixed speed up a liquid. As long as the liquid is moving faster than that speed through the siphon, bubbles shouldn't be an issue.
But I don't know the dynamics of what happens if an air pocket manages to form at the top. It may or may not dissipate on its own. Or it may grow, slowing and eventually stopping the siphon action.
and a straw with three holes in it might work as a siphon, depending on the size of the third hole (and other related factors such as the viscosity of air)
Better get your baby feet on pretty quickly. Big heavy things are rolling over that slab on a fairly regular basis. It's not a good place to loiter.
Another thing this does is show just how ineffective security theatre is around airports. That could've been a large bomb strapped to that landing gear, wired to go off at 35,000 ft. Damaging the gear enough to make the plane do a cartwheel on live TV when it tries to land would probably give the nutjobs more satisfaction than another plane disappearing over the atlantic anyway. (and bonus! no suicide required!)
This proves the fact that someone can sneak all the way out to the plane undetected, and pretty much nullifies the expensive nude-vision body scanners.
Re-learn the lesson that was the "Russian Steamroller" in WW2. Even an extremely large army that is poorly equipped will fare badly in battle. To play that game, you have to be willing to toss your people into the fire like coal and simply outlast the offensives until some other factor kicks in. That didn't go so well in the first half of WW2 for Russia, and the Germans knew how it worked and very nearly completed their push. When you're taking losses above 10:1 it's difficult to physically get that many bullet-stoppers up to the front line fast enough to slow down the offensive, regardless of the size of your army. Logistics were the Germans' downfall - resupply and weather. Russia had to flood the line with bullet-stoppers until they caught a break. And in today's wars, and especially considering the proximity here, that won't be an issue.
Lack of any significant airforce would be another issue, but that really is irrelevent because NK simply hasn't got much in the way of substantial millitary targets to take out.
If Russia were to decide to "step over the border" into NK (like they're doing elsewhere currently...) I seriously doubt it would come to war. It would probably end up like more of a "ok you little snot-nosed kid, you've had your fun but we've grown tired of it. Time for us to straighten out this disaster." Kim would find himself on a plane to Moscow shortly thereafter. But fixing NK would be such an enormous headache / liability, would they really want to take on that burdonsome of a projecct?
Thing is, even with the best of intentions, NK is an incredible mess. Even if some well-meaning power had the ability to just step in and be handed the reigns to fix it, it'd be a tremendous undertaking. There's way too much wrong to try to tackle it all at once, it would have to be handled in stages. I can't imagine the borders opening up anywhere inside five years, regardless of who was at the helm. Right now the majority of people in NK have been brainwashed into believing their leader is a god, the entire world wants to eat their babies, and their military could conquer every army on earth. When most of your populace honestly believes this, you take on the very difficult job of saving someone that doesn't want to be saved. We saw that in Japan at the end of WW2, entire villagaes in the outlying islands committing suicide because of what the millitary told them the US troops would do when they got there. NK is exactly the same that way. We could drive a red cross truck loaded with food into a starving village over there and they'd come out of their huts with pitchforks, kill all the aid workers, and burn the truck, food and all, thinking it was poisoned. It takes quite a long time to fix that.
I have NO idea how many lego sets I had. IMHO the "junk" of the sets were the windows, people, wheels, the stupid closed minded stuff. I preferred the raw blocks, mainly the 2x4 and the longer ones that were in such short supply. I mad some amazing things, including a box with a door locked by three tumblers, that required its lego key to open. (if it had been glued together, naturally)
I also had dominos and blocks, two capsula sets (adding a switch, motor, and wires to the mix), an old and a new girder n panel set (kinda meh), tinker toys (also meh), and later a number of assemblable toys like a little battery powered toy boat I had to wind the motor (dc windings) on, a ball clock, crystal radio, and by age 10 two electronic design experimenter (150 and 200 in 1's). I did a LOT of building when I was growing up. (though a good deal of it started going toward electronics by the time I was a teen)
Kids need a shot at that sort of play when they're growing up. It's not going to be for everyone, but this whole culture of "stick an ipad in his hands" by default is just a shame. Ikea is going to go out of business by the next generation, nobody will be able to assemble any of their furniture!
I was just talking with a friend of mine, father of my godson, about the possibility of getting him into arduino. Wow, he's gonna be NINE this December, and he doesn't have anywhere near the head-start I did. I did manage to inspire him with a variety of art supplies which he loves, and got him several of those assemblable bots from radio shack last year, trying to get him a good start and taste of things that he finds he has an aptitude for. It's not just building things, kids need to get exposure to a variety of things as early as possible, so they get their feet wet with essential flexible skills like buidling, as well as getting a taste of variety to see what they really enjoy.
But being able to make things, that's such a basic, universal skill. It's one that every kid should get heavy exposure to, in a format they can enjoy excelling in.
The more relevant question to ask is "Why DID Symantec do this?" A more interesting question would be "Why did Symantec break the law?" They didn't do that, but the answer to all three is the same.
"because it helps them make money".
In this particular case, the fear of ransomware helps Symantec sell their product. So a researcher doing something to combat ransomware hurts Symantec's business. So they do what they can do, to protect their profits. In this case, it's even legal for them to do it. So it's a no-brainer.
You simply have to expect this sort of behavior from any big business. There's no point in being confused or shocked by it.
A month from now they will be able to make a new press release, "Two months ago security researchers dealt a blow to ransomware, protecting users and devaluating our product. Today, we're pleased to announce the ransomware developers have made the necessary fixes to their code outlined in our recent publication, and once again, Symantec is your only defense against ransomware!"
Danger implies risk. Risk implies different possible outcomes.
If we send a meatbag to mars, they're not coming back before they spoil. There's only one possible outcome. It's not risky OR dangerous. It's guaranteed lethal. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, lets continue with the booking please? (and I wouldn't mind signing up myself, but I rather doubt they'd take me)
the current carrying capacity is also dependent on the voltage and the frequency. Frequency is probably not an issue here, but the voltage may be a factor.
Huh. I learned a new term today.... Ampacity
I'm sure if they were publicly asked if such a whitelist exists, they would deny it. And they would be lying. The first group that inspired the creation of the list is the list of state senators. Those were built into the system from day 1, I'm sure 100% of them are on the "always fly list". And then a few of the uppers in the NSA landed on the list due to travel etc, and raised hell, and got themselves added to the list by internal means. And it just snowballed from there as someone says "well if we're adding sensators and ourselves, who else would be a good idea to keep the heat off us?" Judges, celebs, secretaries of state, governers, union officials, and other powerful people added thereafter. I bet the list is well into the ten thousands by now.
Well, the recent adoption of arduino was a good effort, but probably too little, too late.
And right now their markup on arduino products is pretty unpalatable. They're selling things for quite a bit above MSRP. The first thing that does is drive people to buy from places like MCE that are still quasi-retail, but online only. (where RS is likely headed) But then once you're online you realize that $65 Mega2560 that you found at MCM for $50 can actually be had in generic form (Funduino 2560) for $16 with free shipping off ebay, as long as you're willing to wait 3 weeks for it. And then Radio Shack falls back to it's "I need this today" store of desperation only. You did buy one mega from RS, but you will never buy another one from them because now you have four more knockoffs at home for the price of one more locally. While "local desperation" is a valid market, it's not a good one to rely on for too much of your volume.
I still go there somewhat frequently because I'm too impatient for my own good though.
Don't tell a crowd of nerds that your new product is unbreakable, unless you actually want them to try very, very hard to break it. It's like waving a flag at a bull, you'd better have your pads laced up nice and snug, because you're goin' for a ride.
Hardware that allows software to easily damage it is designed wrong. If your OS crashes, it can basically do anything Murphy's Law dictates, within the bounds of what the hardware will try to humor it on. Hardware has to be designed to protect itself against flippy software because it's gonna happen from time to time. I'm not saying that all hardware needs to be 100% software-proof, but it needs to be, within reasonable limits. The sound hardware blowing out your speaker cone because your software tried to turn the volume up to 1e+15 is a hardware/firmware issue that should be covered under warranty.
In my city, the Chief of Police drove around for several years in a red ferrari, seized from I believe a drug dealer. They had it sent into the shop to retrofit a light bar, radio, etc into. It's difficult to say what exact maneuvers they went through to pull it off, it might have been a not-so-public public auction or something.
Wish I still had a pic of it to share. It was an interesting sight to see. You can see similar things nowadays though looking at some of the hopped up police cars that run on the autobahn, looks about the same. Sort of like this, only it was red and the light bar was a lot wider: (and they didn't bother to write "police" across the side)
http://www.carhoots.com/media/...
typically attracts people that already have a stable full of unicorns, especially if you're foolish enough to put a big bounty on it. Announcing you have "perfect security" just brings the embarrassment to your door that much faster.
And try as you might, even actual "perfect security" on your part will usually fail miserably at someone else's hands. Look at Safai, and how often flash or java (or the user themselves) is used to compromise it. (approaching 100%?)
I think that's the first thing you need to do before deciding how to react.
Did the author decide he'd created an unmanageable hack and push management to pull in a contractor to either clean up the project or simply suffer through trying to maintain it, so he could get back to focusing on his other work?
Did management rush the author to get something "usable" out the door so they could put him on another project, and you're just the mop-up crew?
It's very likely one of those two things. You could respond to either of them by simply "run, forrest, run!", or you could roll up your sleeves and get to work. If you choose to take it on, your approach will depend on why you are there. First off, trashing on the author won't get you anywhere with anyone, don't even consider it. The author may realize he made a mess, management may not. But right now the author is your best ally. Don't burn that bridge by running to management and telling them the reason it's going to be expensive to fix is because the author created a mess.
That being said, document everything, in case it comes back to bite you. You don't need to share that documentation with anyone unless necessary. It's your safety net in case the excrement strikes the oscillating unit and the author tries to blame the problems on you.
Have a private chat with the author and find out which of the two above is the reason you're there. You'll notice that in either case, he's probably very happy to have you taking over, and you should be able to easily leverage that to get his cooperation. That will make your job monumentally easier. Projects by good authors that get into this state are usually the result of inadequate planning, or a late change in requirements. The author probably had a fairly-well fleshed out plan that went south at some point, and that plan is probably not very clear to you right now. Ask about that plan, find out where the code was meant to go, why it didn't end up going there, and mosts importantly what problems did that create and how did he work around them. Those work-arounds are what's causing your grief. Knowing what they are is half the battle (that's why stuff broke when you edited), knowing why they were necessary is the other half. (THAT'S why other unrelated stuff started breaking) Get this information from the author.
At that point, you can take a very well-informed look at the project and decide if it's worth your hassle to take on. Then either take it or leave it. If you decide to bail, you can look back on your documentation and decide how much of that is necessary to justify your decision and get some compensation for your trouble. If you do decide to take on the project, discuss the issue again with the author and get their input on how to explain the maintenance costs. Even if it has to come down to "this is going to be expensive because Bob created a mess", giving him a chance to have some input on how this is addressed will help keep him in your corner down the road. If he's anywhere near reasonable, he'll understand that he's going to have to accept some of the responsibility for what he started.
that might have been just shire of a good pun
it's a bit like a two character slashdot nick... my... precious...
I thought classified wasn't an excuse for lying to or withholding information from congress?
I thought lying to congress was a felony or something? Maybe that's why they're avoiding the L-word?
"Don't worry, even if you don't deliver what we asked for, get way behind schedule, and run way over budget, we'll still pay you." That pretty much sums up the issue right there. That's why we have debacles like the F-35. These clowns making the hardware simply can't fail. We're guaranteeing to buy whatever crap they happen to offer us. Military Contracts have been known to be "gravy" for decades now, and that needs to change. The classic "$250 toilet seat" jab is unfortunately a reality, and a persistent one at that.
It's not jut the government that can't run like a business, it's the businesses working with the government that are having the same issue, and it's again a problem from within the government, it's a behavior that their system both allows and seems to encourage. A select few are getting rich on our tax dollars, and we're not getting what we should in exchange, be it materials or government itself. Pisses me off that there's nothing effective I can do about it. (and no, voting hasn't helped so farâ¦)
this is a little different because the case was filed by the defendant basically. They wanted the court to clarify their non-infringement in advance of any litigation that the patent owner may have decided to spring up at a later time.
"Innovent until proven guilty" usually only applies to the normal direction of cases, not ones that operate in reverse like this does.
I pondered this a bit to see if I could identify an easy avenue of abuse for this, but it looks pretty good. If you want to get into a market with what you believe is novel tech, but are fearful that a certain giant already in the market may sue you later down the road, you can get a judgement either for OR against, right now, before you've invested heavily. Really, it's a "win" for the new player either way. Either the court affirms they're not infringing and they can proceed to enter the market, OR the court finds they are infringing, and they can stop investing immediately or choose to license. It's a very good defensive move for the new player.
Reminds me of in wedding vows, "speak now or forever hold your peace". Prevents a big established player from sitting silent until a new startup gets invested and serious momentum and then the giant springs up out of the bushes demanding licensing fees. When they do that, it places the upstart seriously under the gun since they may have invested very heavily. At that point, licensing becomes much more attractive than walking away, as they might have decided to do if they'd have known from the start that they were infringing. So, statistically, this will end up costing patent holders, and helping people hoping to enter the market. (by keeping them out of it if it's going to end up costing them a bundle they hadn't planned on)
perhaps not. This could cut costs. There's always overhead in having more than one model of anything, whether it's a car, a computer, a hair dryer, or software.
In many cases it's cheaper to do the R&D and design once, manufacture, stock, and deliver a single product, and then deal with "feature activation" after the sale. Software does this a lot. Look at all the software available now that you can buy an upgraded license code for to activate new features. It doesn't cost them a nickel more to ship the software with features that you can't use. (until/unless you pay for them)
If the feature isn't all that expensive to manufacture, it may be cheaper to simply install it in a disabled state in ALL vehicles. Add $10 to the manufacturing cost, (realistic for say, heated seats) and then charge $200 to enable the option. As long as you get at least 5% of customers that buy it, (either at purchase, or down the road) you at least break even. Get 25% total sales for it and make a killing. Customers will find it easier to swallow a feature that can be "enabled" for $200 than to either (A) take it to a dealer and get the seats replaced and the vehicle rewired for $800, or (B) just plain not make the purchase at all since it's too expensive after the sale. In the long run, feature activation will likely generate more profit for the manufacturers, while at the same time getting functioning heated seats in more people's hands. It has the potential to be a win-win.
This will inevitably lead to feature-hacking and all the dmca/pirate/hacking drama, but I don't think I need to get into that. People already do that with the ECUs, reprogramming them for racing etc. I even know someone that reprograms and replaces ECUs right now. 50-150 more HP with a simple software upgrade. The future is now, it's just not for sale by the manufacturers just yet. But I'm sure it's coming.