> Take away Microsoft's demand at this level and this will most likely continue through the
student's lives.
Entirely true. I got into Solaris because Sun dumped about $250K worth of IPC workstations and 21" black-and-white monitors into our CS lab when I was in college.
Strangely, everyone I graduated with also thought Sun gear and their OS was pretty cool, soundly beating the crap out of those MS-DOS boxen we had in our dorm rooms. We laughed when we saw Windows 3.1, which was the "really cool thing because you could run more than one program at once".
Opportunity to any Linux consultant-type geek: Find a school district. Point out the costs of MSFT licencing. Offer, for $20 per box, to install Linux and KOffice.
If you're in high school and are a consultant-type geek, offer to do it for free for your school, then $20 per box to other schools.
"Bring a child up in the way in which he should go, and when he is older, he will not depart from it".
- Proverbs.
> [Suing security analysts for publishing 'sploits] seems like asking whether hammer makers
are responsible for murders-by-hammer. (On second thought,
don't give any lawyers wind of that idea.)
Too late. Gunmakers have been sued with astonishing regularity, essentially being blamed for the actions of the (ab)users of their products.
(Of course, the typical/. liberal wouldn't know or care about that, because guns 'r' bad, mmmmkay, and the typical/. conservative is probably already writing a rant to that effect.
Let the ubiquitous typical/. gun-control-and-politics thread now commence. But let's keep it in one place this time rather than filling the whole damn commentspace with it;-)
> We do produce campaigns with popup ads, particularly since these ads get a much higher response that banners.
How many of those clickthroughs are real clickthroughs and not just users who don't know about Alt-F4 to close a window, and "clicked" on your ad because they missed the upper-right-hand corner of the window as they tried to close the pop-up?
> Flash ads - haven't found anything that reliably removes the big flash ads from Excite or ZDNet or such.
When do you really want Flash content?
When you're downloading that.swf file for "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", or some funky animation on a web page.
Tell your browser to regard its MIME-type as "Unknown/prompt/save". It'll ask for a plugin. Tell it "no, you can't have the plugin". Voila, no more flash. If you actually want to see the Flash file (very rare occurrence), just download it and play it later.
Block the ad servers altogether. Turn off image-autoload. (When was the last time a picture on ZDnet or CNet was actually related to the article?;-)
> I guess the only problem is that X10 actually has to honor their own cookies. If they start noticing a bunch of cookies that have
values greater than 30 days then they might just consider it invalid or issue another cookie and everyone will have to put up with
those "pop-under" adds again. Then again, maybe they will get smart and just get rid of the pop-under ad alltogether... or maybe
not...
This comment -- and the fact that other companies are going to start using the same technique -- is why I reject opt-out "cookie" solutions altogether.
The popup/under/banner/whatever ad-generating code is adversary code.
If you're going to jump through hoops to avoid these ads, might I point out that jumping through hoops to trust your adversary is a poor strategy. If you're going to jump through hoops, jump through hoops that will eliminate his ability to [ab]use your resources.
Option 1: Hack code to place a button on your menu bar (Mozilla, sorry about you IE users) that will toggle ALL Javashit on/off. You're usually only surfing one web site at a time, right? Click to turn it all on (your bank, your broker), click to turn it all off (X10, pr0n-hunting). I do this manually through the 2-3 menu-subtrees in Nutscrape 4, and I've found that I never miss Javashit, although it has the side effect of greatly reducing my tolerance for idiot webmasters that use Javashit buttons where a simple HREF would do. Thankfully, I don't go to many such sites on a regular basis.
Option 2: Find the location of the pop-under providers -- usually ad-servers like Doublefuck. Kill 'em in your HOSTS file on 'doze.
Option 3: Use a local proxy like Junkbuster or Proxomitron.
Bottom line: From a strategic perspective, it's stupid to use countermeasures that rely on either the integrity or negligence of your adversary, especially given the availability of other countermeasures that are not only more effective to begin with, but are (relatively speaking) immune from any action your adversary may take in the future.
The enemy can't run code on your box if you don't allow him to. And the enemy can't even deliver the damn payload (be it Javashit code, huge-azz Flash and.GIF banners, or Doublefuck tracking cookies) if you've blocked his ass at the firewall or proxy.
> Most people *don't* advance, that's the problem, and that's why ephermal pop-culture
crap will always dominate the the Top Ten rising category and then go into the Top Ten
declining spot when the fad has fizzled.
So you geeks in high school or college that want a social life -- all you have to do is find the "rising top 10", click on a few, eliminate the ones that aren't part of your culture (e.g. French Big Brother), and voila, you're on top of the trends.
Best yet, you can say "Naah, I gave that up, it's so over" when you see 'em on the declining top-10.
The first few times, it'll be passed off as coincidence. Two or three big fads later, and all the "cool people" at school will forever wonder how the hell you always seem to know what's trendy before they do.
Once the whole school is following your lead as Supreme Arbiter Of Cool, fuck with their heads. Start a Tux-The-Penguin tattooing craze, for instance...
> We even have the robotic Microsoft Barney doll. Imagine that.
s/Imagine/fear/g.
A co-worker bought one for his sprog a few years ago, and brought it into the office. We were amused by the evil way in which it "woke up" whenever we opened the filing cabinet in which it was stored.
It eventually wound up hanged by the neck by the cords for the blinds, swinging in the office window until Christmas.
The head even lolled at an angle, which was quite a trip, as it really looked like it had been hanged, and then it would cackle that evil Barney-laugh every time someone stood close to it or bumped into it.
> I would pay to see Barney take the stand in a court of law claiming defamation of character. "I love you, You love
me... wait, why can't you love me?"
I sue you, you sue me,
You can't afford our lawyers' fee,
With a nasty letter from Dewey, Cheatem, Howe,
Up your ass our landsharks plow!
(Gotta problem with that, you big fat purple fuck? Bring it on, motherfucker, bring it on...)
> I've heard the 7-11 convenience stores here in the U.S. are now selling prepaid debit cards that can
be used just like a credit card, except anonymously. So when you go on the lam, get one of those.
So what are you gonna buy it with?
(I suppose if you've already gone on the lam, there's always the old-fashioned option of stealing:-)
> Is it really worth our freedom and privacy to spend our own money in order to catch the minority
of people who are laundering money?
People who launder money are typically involved in illegal dealings.
One illegal cash-based industry is the drug trade.
And as we all, know, drugs (except alcohol and tobacco, those are OK!) kill chillllldrun.
So if tracking everyone's cash purchases saves (all together now, let's hear you bleat it like you mean it!) juuuust onnnne chyyyyyyyuld, then of course it's worth it!
> If you feel that this payoff is justified, then I'm glad that your opinion doesn't actually count in the
larger scheme of things.
Huh?
Outside of Slashdot, most of the sheep do believe the payoff is justified. Worse yet, the sheep vote.
The fact is, the politicians - whose opinions are the only opinions that matter - have been highly successful at using such rhetoric to sell such schemes to the sheeple. And the rest, unfortunately, has been, is, and will continue to be, history.
> Quite true, and I do the same thing (perhaps with a few variations;-), but what I was getting at is that in the
random, non-yet-defined-and-filtered info, there is sometimes some good stuff.
True -- but what are the odds of it appearing on the ultra-filtered TV news?
Freerepublic seems rather like a Republican version of Slashdot without a moderated story queue. It'll often give me coverage of stuff like "man bites dog", "All your base!", and what-not.
> I fear that we're in danger of
becoming a world of narrow specialists, none of whom have anything approaching a Renaissance view of the
world.
During the Renaissance, it was possible for one person (e.g. DaVinci) to know Everything Worth Knowing. 20 years ago, it was possible to read all the messages in all of USENET. (Even 10 years ago, you could read all the messages in most of the groups you followed.)
That's no longer the case.
> It's not that there is too much information out there, it's that the difficulty in sorting the wheat from the chaff
forces us to limit ourselves.
I'd argue that it's both -- even given a magic wand that instantly separates wheat from chaff, there's too much background information you need to assimilate in order to make sense of the new information ("wheat") you've sorted.
Today's Slashdot is a good example -- lots of people posting to this thread, because everyone understands enough about mass media to have an informed opinion on it.
Yet we have very few people posting anything on the artificial heart thread beyond "whoa, cool!" or "How does this differ from that guy with the artificial heart in the 80s", because almost none of us are Biology grads / med students, fewer went through med school, and probably only one or two of them went on to become cardiologists.
Just as most of the general public isn't going to spend the 2-3 years in geekdom to understand why DMCA is a Really Bad Idea, most of us aren't going to spend the 2-3 years in med school to enclue ourselves on the new heart.
> For example, I don't watch TV news any more, because I know that there may be 1.5 minutes worth of "good"
information provided to me in a given half hour, but I don't want to waste the time necessary to sit there and
absorb all of the other crap they're sending my way.
>
But that also means that I'm missing 45 minutes [1.5 x 30 days] of valuable information every month.
Not really.
I did the same thing you did - gave up TV news except for business coverage - for exactly the same reaspon.
I don't care about the dippy chick who offed her brood, the hot new cuisine style (that's really just an ad for a restaurant, all footage provided by the restaurant's PR agency), or the "news" that (surprise surprise) once again, there was violence in the Middle East and Balkans today. Sports and Hollyweird gossip are permanently in my mental killfile.
So that's all but the 1.5 minutes of useful information.
But 30 seconds at each of cnn.com (mainsleaze), freerepublic.com (right/libertarian), salon.com (left/liberal), Slashdot (geek), thestreet.com (business), and finance.yahoo.com (news reports on my own holdings) gives me a 99.9% probability that I'll already have seen the 1.5 minutes of useful info on the news that night.
Add onto that a few NASA and science sites, and even if the nightly news does a 90-second segment on Galileo, odds are I'll get far more out of 90 seconds on NASA's site than I will on the evening news, which will burn 60 of those 90 seconds explaining that Galileo is a spacecraft, that Jupiter is a planet, and that Galileo's main antenna is b0rken.
(Cripes, I'm not looking forward to Cassini. When we finally get to Saturn, I'll bet 30 of every 90 seconds of mainstream Cassini coverage will still be about the eco-freaks whining about the RTGs. And another 30 seconds interviewing some guy who remembers protesting it. Gotta get that human interest angle in there somehow.)
I'd argue that it's because mainstream news tries so hard to have "something to draw everyone's attention" that I've turned it off altogether. "Jack of all trades, master of none" doesn't work when you grew up online and want the detailed scoop.
> This technologically-driven ADD is transforming politics,
entertainment, sports and culture. There is only so much attention
to go around, and we are being bombarded with more information all
the time. Most of us have no idea how to allocate our attention
widely or productively. Those who can help us will be rich.
Oh, it's a Katz article. You don't need to read anything more
than the first paragraph.
> What I don't understand is why the state DOT doesn't set up fake radar emitters every few miles or so... Can't be
that expensive to do these days, and you could probably run each of them off its own solar array.
In high-traffic areas (e.g. Bay Area, CA), this might work. But traffic's so dense that nobody can speed effectively anyways.
In low-traffic, high-speed areas (e.g, Bad Ass, TX), where you can do some serious speeding, all I can say is "Hey, cool! Free solar panels! Now I can mount one on the back of my I-Opener with GPS!"
> The credit card number was given during the purchase of the hardware. They TOLD people that they did NOT have
to sign up for the internet service, and of course, would not be billed for it until they did. > >
Then they proceeded to charge these people for the service anyway. That's fraudulent.
Exactly.
And the original rationale for "it doesn't cost you anything until it phones home" was that people might buy the base unit for a relative, and the relative would then pay the subscription cost -- the point being that there might be a month or two between "I bought it" and "Grandma's birthday" when the thing gets plugged in.
("Here, Grandma! Now you can email me! And it only costs you $20/month!";-)
> "Exploiting" or even "cherry picking" loss leaders is hardly "Bad faith". Since it is really the responsibility to those
selling the things to make sure their business model is viable.
True -- hence my use of the word "perhaps". There were people who bought a dozen of the things over the phone, telling the rep they were gonna give 'em to their relatives.
The ethically-questionable part was lying about one's intentions at time of purchase. The fact is they were (initially) offering the things for sale without a minimum subscription term, and you could have phoned up and said "I intend to encase them in cement and use them to prop up my car" and they'd still have been obliged to sell you one.
I'm quite happy with my IO. 10" diagonal 800x600x16-bit dual-scan screen is comparable to a low-end laptop. Grabbed the soldering iron and wedged in a K6-III-333 underclocked to 200 MHz, and cooled passively. Burned a new BIOS boot logo, soldered in a second serial port, VGA-out and audio-out, mounted a 6G hard drive in it and an external IDE port for a CD-ROM or external drive enclosure... all in all, makes a very nice jukebox. As an added bonus, if I take it in the car, I can use the serial port for GPS and moving-map software.
Basically, with sufficient hacking, an I-Opener can be turned into the equivalent of a low-end laptop with a dual-scan screen. You may be able to get a better deal by buying a used laptop, but it won't be as much fun (nor will you learn as much) as you will by buying an IO and turning it into something unique.
Props and shout-outs to everyone (too many to mention!) on linux-hacker.net who helped make it possible. And to Netpliance who, despite being real pricks about their TOS, gave me some k00l toyz, even if I had to wrestle with them in order to make them live up to their end of the bargain.
> Given the high probability that any Pluto Express spacecraft, if approved, will actually be built
and launched in time to make it there before Pluto's atmosphere freezes out,
s/high/near-zero/g.
(I'd originally intended to write "high probability that... won't be built". D'oh.)
Hmm, if I read that space.com orbit correctly, this thing's moving closer to the Sun rather than away from it (as Pluto is doing).
Given the high probability that any Pluto Express spacecraft, if approved, will actually be built and launched in time to make it there before Pluto's atmosphere freezes out, how 'bout a trip to this thing (to see if it has an atmosphere that hasn't frozen out) instead?
(...possible reddish crud on the surface... very old organics... yummmm...)
Hell, build and launch two spacecraft and look at 'em both. Marginal cost of the second spacecraft is chickenfeed compared to the design work of building the first. Build a clone of DS1 and let it find its own way there with an ion engine. Just launch something goddamnit... *grumblegrumblegrumble*
Slashdot Mirror
CLID - Caller ID - has nothing to with what they use on 1-800 numbers. Has never been. Never will be.
There is no known way of concealing your number when calling a 1-800 number, short of calling from a pay phone or some other poor fux0r'z phone.
Entirely true. I got into Solaris because Sun dumped about $250K worth of IPC workstations and 21" black-and-white monitors into our CS lab when I was in college.
Strangely, everyone I graduated with also thought Sun gear and their OS was pretty cool, soundly beating the crap out of those MS-DOS boxen we had in our dorm rooms. We laughed when we saw Windows 3.1, which was the "really cool thing because you could run more than one program at once".
Opportunity to any Linux consultant-type geek: Find a school district. Point out the costs of MSFT licencing. Offer, for $20 per box, to install Linux and KOffice.
If you're in high school and are a consultant-type geek, offer to do it for free for your school, then $20 per box to other schools.
"Bring a child up in the way in which he should go, and when he is older, he will not depart from it".
- Proverbs.
"How they got into my pager, I'll never know."
- With apologies to Groucho Marx.
Sure, if you can hack double-black-diamond slopes ;-)
Too late. Gunmakers have been sued with astonishing regularity, essentially being blamed for the actions of the (ab)users of their products.
(Of course, the typical /. liberal wouldn't know or care about that, because guns 'r' bad, mmmmkay, and the typical /. conservative is probably already writing a rant to that effect.
Let the ubiquitous typical /. gun-control-and-politics thread now commence. But let's keep it in one place this time rather than filling the whole damn commentspace with it ;-)
How many of those clickthroughs are real clickthroughs and not just users who don't know about Alt-F4 to close a window, and "clicked" on your ad because they missed the upper-right-hand corner of the window as they tried to close the pop-up?
When do you really want Flash content?
When you're downloading that .swf file for "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", or some funky animation on a web page.
Tell your browser to regard its MIME-type as "Unknown/prompt/save". It'll ask for a plugin. Tell it "no, you can't have the plugin". Voila, no more flash. If you actually want to see the Flash file (very rare occurrence), just download it and play it later.
Block the ad servers altogether. Turn off image-autoload. (When was the last time a picture on ZDnet or CNet was actually related to the article? ;-)
This comment -- and the fact that other companies are going to start using the same technique -- is why I reject opt-out "cookie" solutions altogether.
The popup/under/banner/whatever ad-generating code is adversary code.
If you're going to jump through hoops to avoid these ads, might I point out that jumping through hoops to trust your adversary is a poor strategy. If you're going to jump through hoops, jump through hoops that will eliminate his ability to [ab]use your resources.
Option 1: Hack code to place a button on your menu bar (Mozilla, sorry about you IE users) that will toggle ALL Javashit on/off. You're usually only surfing one web site at a time, right? Click to turn it all on (your bank, your broker), click to turn it all off (X10, pr0n-hunting). I do this manually through the 2-3 menu-subtrees in Nutscrape 4, and I've found that I never miss Javashit, although it has the side effect of greatly reducing my tolerance for idiot webmasters that use Javashit buttons where a simple HREF would do. Thankfully, I don't go to many such sites on a regular basis.
Option 2: Find the location of the pop-under providers -- usually ad-servers like Doublefuck. Kill 'em in your HOSTS file on 'doze.
Option 3: Use a local proxy like Junkbuster or Proxomitron.
Bottom line: From a strategic perspective, it's stupid to use countermeasures that rely on either the integrity or negligence of your adversary, especially given the availability of other countermeasures that are not only more effective to begin with, but are (relatively speaking) immune from any action your adversary may take in the future.
The enemy can't run code on your box if you don't allow him to. And the enemy can't even deliver the damn payload (be it Javashit code, huge-azz Flash and .GIF banners, or Doublefuck tracking cookies) if you've blocked his ass at the firewall or proxy.
So you geeks in high school or college that want a social life -- all you have to do is find the "rising top 10", click on a few, eliminate the ones that aren't part of your culture (e.g. French Big Brother), and voila, you're on top of the trends.
Best yet, you can say "Naah, I gave that up, it's so over" when you see 'em on the declining top-10.
The first few times, it'll be passed off as coincidence. Two or three big fads later, and all the "cool people" at school will forever wonder how the hell you always seem to know what's trendy before they do.
Once the whole school is following your lead as Supreme Arbiter Of Cool, fuck with their heads. Start a Tux-The-Penguin tattooing craze, for instance...
If she does, so much the better! (Us geeks love eating pizza :)
s/Imagine/fear/g.
A co-worker bought one for his sprog a few years ago, and brought it into the office. We were amused by the evil way in which it "woke up" whenever we opened the filing cabinet in which it was stored.
It eventually wound up hanged by the neck by the cords for the blinds, swinging in the office window until Christmas.
The head even lolled at an angle, which was quite a trip, as it really looked like it had been hanged, and then it would cackle that evil Barney-laugh every time someone stood close to it or bumped into it.
Evil, man. Pure motherfucking evil.
>
> don't you mean Katz?
Let's hope so. I mean, the last time people threw cats into mixers on alt.tasteless, the rec.pets.cats people really got ticked.
('course, they also learned about crossposting... albeit, the hard way...)
I sue you, you sue me,
You can't afford our lawyers' fee,
With a nasty letter from Dewey, Cheatem, Howe,
Up your ass our landsharks plow!
(Gotta problem with that, you big fat purple fuck? Bring it on, motherfucker, bring it on...)
So what are you gonna buy it with?
(I suppose if you've already gone on the lam, there's always the old-fashioned option of stealing :-)
People who launder money are typically involved in illegal dealings.
One illegal cash-based industry is the drug trade.
And as we all, know, drugs (except alcohol and tobacco, those are OK!) kill chillllldrun.
So if tracking everyone's cash purchases saves (all together now, let's hear you bleat it like you mean it!) juuuust onnnne chyyyyyyyuld, then of course it's worth it!
> If you feel that this payoff is justified, then I'm glad that your opinion doesn't actually count in the larger scheme of things.
Huh?
Outside of Slashdot, most of the sheep do believe the payoff is justified. Worse yet, the sheep vote.
The fact is, the politicians - whose opinions are the only opinions that matter - have been highly successful at using such rhetoric to sell such schemes to the sheeple. And the rest, unfortunately, has been, is, and will continue to be, history.
MS Knowledgebase Q188074 - Low Disk Space Notification Received When Drive Is[NOT!] Full
Works on 98 and 98SE. Oughta work on WinME.
True -- but what are the odds of it appearing on the ultra-filtered TV news?
Freerepublic seems rather like a Republican version of Slashdot without a moderated story queue. It'll often give me coverage of stuff like "man bites dog", "All your base!", and what-not.
> I fear that we're in danger of becoming a world of narrow specialists, none of whom have anything approaching a Renaissance view of the world.
During the Renaissance, it was possible for one person (e.g. DaVinci) to know Everything Worth Knowing. 20 years ago, it was possible to read all the messages in all of USENET. (Even 10 years ago, you could read all the messages in most of the groups you followed.)
That's no longer the case.
> It's not that there is too much information out there, it's that the difficulty in sorting the wheat from the chaff forces us to limit ourselves.
I'd argue that it's both -- even given a magic wand that instantly separates wheat from chaff, there's too much background information you need to assimilate in order to make sense of the new information ("wheat") you've sorted.
Today's Slashdot is a good example -- lots of people posting to this thread, because everyone understands enough about mass media to have an informed opinion on it.
Yet we have very few people posting anything on the artificial heart thread beyond "whoa, cool!" or "How does this differ from that guy with the artificial heart in the 80s", because almost none of us are Biology grads / med students, fewer went through med school, and probably only one or two of them went on to become cardiologists.
Just as most of the general public isn't going to spend the 2-3 years in geekdom to understand why DMCA is a Really Bad Idea, most of us aren't going to spend the 2-3 years in med school to enclue ourselves on the new heart.
> But that also means that I'm missing 45 minutes [1.5 x 30 days] of valuable information every month.
Not really.
I did the same thing you did - gave up TV news except for business coverage - for exactly the same reaspon.
I don't care about the dippy chick who offed her brood, the hot new cuisine style (that's really just an ad for a restaurant, all footage provided by the restaurant's PR agency), or the "news" that (surprise surprise) once again, there was violence in the Middle East and Balkans today. Sports and Hollyweird gossip are permanently in my mental killfile.
So that's all but the 1.5 minutes of useful information.
But 30 seconds at each of cnn.com (mainsleaze), freerepublic.com (right/libertarian), salon.com (left/liberal), Slashdot (geek), thestreet.com (business), and finance.yahoo.com (news reports on my own holdings) gives me a 99.9% probability that I'll already have seen the 1.5 minutes of useful info on the news that night.
Add onto that a few NASA and science sites, and even if the nightly news does a 90-second segment on Galileo, odds are I'll get far more out of 90 seconds on NASA's site than I will on the evening news, which will burn 60 of those 90 seconds explaining that Galileo is a spacecraft, that Jupiter is a planet, and that Galileo's main antenna is b0rken.
(Cripes, I'm not looking forward to Cassini. When we finally get to Saturn, I'll bet 30 of every 90 seconds of mainstream Cassini coverage will still be about the eco-freaks whining about the RTGs. And another 30 seconds interviewing some guy who remembers protesting it. Gotta get that human interest angle in there somehow.)
I'd argue that it's because mainstream news tries so hard to have "something to draw everyone's attention" that I've turned it off altogether. "Jack of all trades, master of none" doesn't work when you grew up online and want the detailed scoop.
Oh, it's a Katz article. You don't need to read anything more than the first paragraph.
Now where the fuck's my million dollars?
In high-traffic areas (e.g. Bay Area, CA), this might work. But traffic's so dense that nobody can speed effectively anyways.
In low-traffic, high-speed areas (e.g, Bad Ass, TX), where you can do some serious speeding, all I can say is "Hey, cool! Free solar panels! Now I can mount one on the back of my I-Opener with GPS!"
>
> Then they proceeded to charge these people for the service anyway. That's fraudulent.
Exactly.
And the original rationale for "it doesn't cost you anything until it phones home" was that people might buy the base unit for a relative, and the relative would then pay the subscription cost -- the point being that there might be a month or two between "I bought it" and "Grandma's birthday" when the thing gets plugged in.
("Here, Grandma! Now you can email me! And it only costs you $20/month!" ;-)
True -- hence my use of the word "perhaps". There were people who bought a dozen of the things over the phone, telling the rep they were gonna give 'em to their relatives.
The ethically-questionable part was lying about one's intentions at time of purchase. The fact is they were (initially) offering the things for sale without a minimum subscription term, and you could have phoned up and said "I intend to encase them in cement and use them to prop up my car" and they'd still have been obliged to sell you one.
I'm quite happy with my IO. 10" diagonal 800x600x16-bit dual-scan screen is comparable to a low-end laptop. Grabbed the soldering iron and wedged in a K6-III-333 underclocked to 200 MHz, and cooled passively. Burned a new BIOS boot logo, soldered in a second serial port, VGA-out and audio-out, mounted a 6G hard drive in it and an external IDE port for a CD-ROM or external drive enclosure... all in all, makes a very nice jukebox. As an added bonus, if I take it in the car, I can use the serial port for GPS and moving-map software.
Basically, with sufficient hacking, an I-Opener can be turned into the equivalent of a low-end laptop with a dual-scan screen. You may be able to get a better deal by buying a used laptop, but it won't be as much fun (nor will you learn as much) as you will by buying an IO and turning it into something unique.
Pics of my mods at: Tackhead Sound System
Props and shout-outs to everyone (too many to mention!) on linux-hacker.net who helped make it possible. And to Netpliance who, despite being real pricks about their TOS, gave me some k00l toyz, even if I had to wrestle with them in order to make them live up to their end of the bargain.
s/high/near-zero/g.
(I'd originally intended to write "high probability that ... won't be built". D'oh.)
Given the high probability that any Pluto Express spacecraft, if approved, will actually be built and launched in time to make it there before Pluto's atmosphere freezes out, how 'bout a trip to this thing (to see if it has an atmosphere that hasn't frozen out) instead?
(...possible reddish crud on the surface... very old organics... yummmm...)
Hell, build and launch two spacecraft and look at 'em both. Marginal cost of the second spacecraft is chickenfeed compared to the design work of building the first. Build a clone of DS1 and let it find its own way there with an ion engine. Just launch something goddamnit... *grumblegrumblegrumble*