It's amazing how much companies will spend for products that have low resource, rock solid, and free alternatives that are often times superior to the paid version. Jabber VS SecureIM, for example, or Zone Alarm VS BlackICE, Crimson Editor, Chokkin & Pettan, Putty, Pegasus Mail, YAPS... There is a perception of quality issue when trying to evaluate a product that doesn't cost anything. Managers are used to $100 widgets being better than $50 widgets. Free widgets are always junk. The software world is a very different place, and (fortunately) many of the very best things are free. Furthermore, a manager's time is worth, in theory, more than they are paid. So that $300 savings they made by using GuildFTP as their organization's internal FTP server is offset by the 4 hours it took to find and test all of the available freeware FTP servers.
Linux's selling point should be that it is Open, not that it is free. $200 is how much that manager will pay the user of that computer before lunch.
"Don't worry, in just 3 years DVD-R will be standard, which will provide plenty of space for all of your current backup needs." The smiling vapor then suddenly dissappears.
Seriously, though. If you are looking for backup utilities, NONAGS has several that might be useful for spanning your disks. I personally use Polder Backup onto a separate drive, backing up only those things which I can't replace (photos, text documents, and music). You could also use CYGWIN to zip / tar your entire drive, then use Chokkin Pettan to segment into CD-sized bites. From personal experience I can tell you that programs other than CYGWIN choke on 5 GB+ files. Maybe a backup drive is in order?
While I agree that Debian and Mandrake would be an interesting marriage, I hardly think it is an appropriate one. How many years of testing does Debian do before they will put a package into Stable? And Mandrake? Mandrake is an ultra-easy to use distro. Debian is an ultra-easy to administer distro. While I would like to see a lot more bleed between the distros, I seriously doubt the two would survive the honeymoon. Still, an affair might bear fruit.
Hmmm... To buy out half of a 35 billion dollar company would probably cost about 25 billion dollars (counting your effect on stock prices). Assuming we can get all 290,063,529 people in the United States to donate 50 dollars each, we'd still be 15 billion short of our goal. We could do it if we managed to convince all 6,306,439,451 people in this world to donate 5 dollars to the cause, but that would be difficult considering China's per-capita / per annum GDP of $3,600, and understandable distaste for Mulan.
It's amazing how, in the face of lowered demand and lowered sales, the Music Industry response has been to make their product LESS valuable to an end consumer. $15 for 1 hour of music that can be used across all of the devices in my home, car, and at work is a lot more compelling than $15 dollars for 1 hour of music that can only be listened to in the living room.
It sounds like what Microsoft has done with its "layering" scheme is to have non-redbook audio which can't be seen by computers, and equivalent WMA data files that are restricted to refuse copying. Thus playback on older CD players and Windows PC's would be preserved, but CDROM based players and car players would still be SOL. (The article never mentions the viability of Car-based playback). Because this would rely upon existing microsoft technology, it would tend to preserve their hegemony without a significant expenditure of cash. Note that it says Microsoft has invested 500 million in DRM technology, which (after taking into account creative marketing accountants) would be reasonable to cover their existing WMA software, servers, playback devices, marketing, Palladium, etc.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned such a scheme doesn't do anything for newer CD player playback, Car CD playback, or Linux playback, or Mac playback, and (of course) still doesn't allow you to consolidate your music collection onto one computer or bring it with you on a Rio (solid state music being essential for certain activities, such as jogging or mountain biking).
So, in essence, Microsoft has offered a solution that would increase the reliance upon Microsoft products, and would increase the cost of transitioning away from them. TBNT.
(Hmmm... now where did that old single-speed CD ROM without error checking go?)
When you put it that way, it appears there should be some clear separation between systems in the car. You wouldn't put shell access onto a machine that runs your billing system, why put an entertainment center onto a machine that makes sure your airbags deploy? There is no reason your main CPU should control your turn signal.
CPUs in cars aren't a horrible idea: ABS systems and the more complicated one-wheel-braking systems have existed for years, and cars have had upgrade chips since the early 90's. However, adding an operating system to a controller chip just ensures that you can't guarentee the reliability. What about separating systems into *Going to kill you* *Might kill you* and *Won't kill you*. Brakes, airbags, etc get dedicated controllers. Seat positions, climate control, and lighting get another system. Anything involving Video, Cell Phones, Blue Tooth, or Outlook Express get the last system. Volume is, as always, controlled by knobs.
Has contract law become so misguided that a simple disclaimer can release the business from any liability due to obvious gross negligence? As "contracts" with registrars are basically non-negotiable, do they truly fall under the heading of contract law?
As the legal system was setup in part to protect individuals and businesses from unfair, exploitive, or negligent other individuals or businesses, doesn't the legal responsibilities of said party have precedence over a codification of negligent business practices?
Agreed. We live in a world where people are pointing with $120 Kensington trackballs and typing on $8 "Internet-Enabled" (Aka hotkey) keyboards. Why not have little LCD screens in the Fkeys to display their current function? Or LED keys that change to reflect the status of modifiers like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, etc. Or, like apple has, keys that advertise their wares in the dark? Maybe a programmable, general use pad, similar to having a PDA mounted on your keyboard, that would be used by programs as additional feedback. For example, Photoshop could use such a device to display tools and layers, freeing up screen space for the image you are editing.
It's high time we got a grossly overpriced, much deserved upgrade to the old keyboard. What gives?
How will an MP3 DRM be compatible?
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Analysts say that the development is particularly positive for content owners who want to publish to devices that support industry standards but have long been afraid of digital theft.
"That this can support MP3 and MPEG-4 is significant because up until now you haven't seen adoption of these formats by major content providers because they lacked digital rights management," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Ok... How can MP3's be played back in industry standard devices (such as the Archos Jukebox), and yet remain protected? Am I missing something large, or isn't the point of wrapping an MP3 in such a layer to prevent it from being understood?
Just a quick note - Manual Refils of inkjets work. I used them several years back with a pair of HP printers to disasterous results. Recently, I tried again with a cheap (OnTel, 19.95) and available (every CVS has them) brand in an Epson printer with quite satisfactory results. The blacks aren't *quite* as dark as they used to be, and the colors aren't *exactly* the same, but they are similar enough to be unnoticeable for printing mapquest directions and christmas party invitations. They also break down to about $3 per cartridge of ink, a more realistic total.
If you haven't used them in a long time, and you are cost aware, give the needles a chance. They are much better for the environment than replacements, and are much cheaper too.
Let's not forget how Real takes over your desktop. There is a taskbar icon / program, a quicklaunch icon, a start menu icon, a desktop icon... It launches your MP3's, Audio CD's, DVD's, MPEGS, MusicNet... And while things have gotten better with RealOne (real used to crash if it started without the taskbar program running), it is still a RealBigPain.
RealDRM means that I would be forced to use that nasty player instead of WinAMP, and that is never a good thing. At least WinAMP doesn't put in a Startup Screen, change your casebadge, put bumperstickers on your car...
Still frontlit? They have never been frontlit. The original Gameboy used a fairly standard LCD screen. The Gameboy Color, a TFT. The GBA uses a widescreen TFT. Using a TFT with an LCD frontlight allows the GBA (with afterburner, a product created by a frustrated consumer... Nintendo could do better) to achieve 6 hours or more on a pair of AA batteries.
More people than sega had color handheld systems. Sega's GameGear and their 16 bit Nomad, along with NEC's Turboexpress and Atari's Lynx, all used backlit, color LCD displays in their system. They were also incredibly thick (backlites take much more space than frontlites), and ate through a set of 4x AA's in 2 hours or less.
I'm sorry, but I can't see the "insightful" in your statement. People don't want backlit, color LCD displays, and the GameGear is not a good system to support such a claim. People want easy to see, pretty displays. People want their displays light, with low battery requirements, and with a high degree of visibility in all conditions. People at heart are technology-agnostic when you give them what they want.
If you visit this old wired story, there is a bit of evidence that the increasingly pervasive and increasingly intricate electrical fields we are exposed to every day may not be having a neutral effect on our mental states. The author wonders, not without reason, whether the hallucinatory effect he experienced might be related to the surprising, so far unexplained explosion of mental illness in developed nations. I remember an abnormal developmental psychologist professor from the University who said that many of the hallucinatory schizophrenics in her care had objectively fewer episodes while wearing some form of EM radiation shielding around their brains, and a good friend working in a home for mentally troubled youths seconded the assertion.
In other words, there may be a very good health reason for the ubiquity of self-medicinal aluminium headware. Perhaps we should be attempting to investigate the link between tin hats and improvement in certain forms of mental illness, rather than simply mocking the subject (and QED anyone attempting to study it)?
In case the other poster didn't bring it up, you can find updated drivers for the nomad IIc here, which will allow you to use 128 MB smart cards (if you can't already), which can be had for $40 or less.
The problem with going any further is that the driver for smartcards has to be on the device. Compact Flash cards have the driver on the card itself. It is a trivial matter to put in a 5 GB CF microdrive in CF 2 devices from 8 years ago, but it is impossible to use any particular smart media card unless the manufacturer has specifically programmed the device to be able to handle it. So unless you are willing to program the firmware for either the device or the recepticle, you probably aren't going to find what you are looking for*.
Of course, if you do, please keep us posted. We've got a few somewhat useless Rio PMP 300's that would love to be PMPed out.
Sorry, I've been saving that pun for years.
-C
*It's extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible, that you may be able to connect an IDE controller in place of the smart card controller, but I really doubt it.
Compact Flash is a pin swap for a standard IDE drive. If you REALLY wanted to you could add a laptop drive, and a battery (you would have to check with a manufacturer whether it takes 5v or 12v) connected to the camera by a highly modified ribbon cable. Laptop drives do take power along the main ribbon, so you might choose to forgo the additional battery, but you will certainly need to carry additional batteries for the camera... they weren't made to power a always spinning disk. And don't use a standard IDE drive unless you want a head crash.
A less than one page press release, uncorroborated on the Net, that says that Tai Chi is a form of shadow boxing and that this thing will "Play" Tai Chi? All I can assume that means is that it is capable of moving a second limb in order to balance a first limb, without any sort of major locomotion, but the author's grasp of the subtlety of Tai Chi seems a little tenuous. With the broad scope of this posting, it could be the next revolution in computing or a new program for the Sony Aiboman.
If the patent calls for a change in the "ornamental or decroative appearance of a device," but then goes back to claim this could provide feedback to the user about the internal state of the device, doesn't that preclude the display from being decorative? Isn't it then, simply, an additional display device inside of a case?
I know, there are millions of examples of prior art that all are microprocessor controlled utilizing storage (write once only, but it is storage) and decorative lights projected through a surface. But at what point do we draw the line between decorative and functional?
The point of waterproof books is so that you can read in the bathtub. Or read in the rain at a bus stop. You can keep textbooks for schoolchildren for more years. Durability, durability, durability.
And that old book scent is mostly dust mites. While
I'm positive it is against the rules of the GPL to re-release source code as if it were your own. I'm fairly certain that means anyone submitting GPL'd code for a grade is in violation of the terms of use, and therefore you are not giving help during a quiz, examination, or a class exercise. You had the right to define the copyright on the code, and while the University may or may not have the right to remove that code from their webservers (see thread on ACLU and newspapers), they do not have the right to remove that code from existence.
That having been said, your professor does want to keep a solid, useful learning plan viable, and part of that is forcing students to think through the problems themselves. What are your goals WRT putting up this code? I know I have the urge to share everything too, but do the benifits of your goals outweigh the (slightly) decreased effectiveness of the class? Is there somewhere else that you could post the code that will minimize the danger to the courses, somewhere unlikely to be found by UD students?
You are going into a negotiation with the university here. You *are* in the right, and I'm sure there are at least a half-dozen undergraduate or graduate Technology Law students who would love to rally to your cause. However, the professor has a very real concern, as cheating (and therefore not learning) is far more common and difficult to discover than anyone would care to admit. Even if in the murky are of coding your work would be used as a Cliff's Note instead of a cheat sheet, that is still not teaching students how to think about the problem. Ultimately, the best arrangement may be to simply take the code down and store it away in exchange for a signed letter of appreciation from the university (as a CYA measure).
BTW, your other professor is doing his programmers a disservice by getting them used to unreasonably signing away the rights to their code. This type of activity is a plague on the entire IT industry, and has resulted in serious and unfortunate litigation from which the programmer always loses... even if it is just 20,000 in court costs.
You say you need fast IO, but you don't say how fast. You say you need a big hard drive, but you don't say how big. You say you need it cheap and expandable, but we all know THAT's not happening. And you don't say what you consult for or what OS you require.
For a preliminary suggestion, you could try the Micro PC, which appears to barely fit your requirements for power, and is small enough to be carried gingerly onboard in a padded case. A Powerbook might also be a good solution, but that is up to your OS needs... If you didn't need windows you should already own one anyway.
But remember, whatever you get, it will be part of your image as a consultant. If you are a real techie, a custom-built box will impress. If you are an artistic type, you need a Powerbook or a Vaio, or another attractive, polished but original ultralight. If you are a pointy-haired executive who has greatly overestimated his needs, a half-sized mini vaio would be very sleek and sexy. Network guys seem to be able to get away with any type of box, the uglier the better.
What are the needs that you are attempting to satisfy? What specs would satisfy those needs? If you don't tell us that, any advice you get here will be worthless.
Interesting overview, but how is this different than the current state of things? You'll notice that the title screen of all major releases contain at least two different logos... the big-name publisher and the unknown independent developer. The last game that I worked on was released by one of the Big Three as a Star-line title, but was developed 500 miles away at a little development house on the beach.
Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing. They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services. Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers. And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.
The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses. What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how much companies will spend for products that have low resource, rock solid, and free alternatives that are often times superior to the paid version. Jabber VS SecureIM, for example, or Zone Alarm VS BlackICE, Crimson Editor, Chokkin & Pettan, Putty, Pegasus Mail, YAPS... There is a perception of quality issue when trying to evaluate a product that doesn't cost anything. Managers are used to $100 widgets being better than $50 widgets. Free widgets are always junk. The software world is a very different place, and (fortunately) many of the very best things are free. Furthermore, a manager's time is worth, in theory, more than they are paid. So that $300 savings they made by using GuildFTP as their organization's internal FTP server is offset by the 4 hours it took to find and test all of the available freeware FTP servers.
Linux's selling point should be that it is Open, not that it is free. $200 is how much that manager will pay the user of that computer before lunch.
Seriously, though. If you are looking for backup utilities, NONAGS has several that might be useful for spanning your disks. I personally use Polder Backup onto a separate drive, backing up only those things which I can't replace (photos, text documents, and music). You could also use CYGWIN to zip / tar your entire drive, then use Chokkin Pettan to segment into CD-sized bites. From personal experience I can tell you that programs other than CYGWIN choke on 5 GB+ files. Maybe a backup drive is in order?
While I agree that Debian and Mandrake would be an interesting marriage, I hardly think it is an appropriate one. How many years of testing does Debian do before they will put a package into Stable? And Mandrake? Mandrake is an ultra-easy to use distro. Debian is an ultra-easy to administer distro. While I would like to see a lot more bleed between the distros, I seriously doubt the two would survive the honeymoon. Still, an affair might bear fruit.
It's amazing how, in the face of lowered demand and lowered sales, the Music Industry response has been to make their product LESS valuable to an end consumer. $15 for 1 hour of music that can be used across all of the devices in my home, car, and at work is a lot more compelling than $15 dollars for 1 hour of music that can only be listened to in the living room.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned such a scheme doesn't do anything for newer CD player playback, Car CD playback, or Linux playback, or Mac playback, and (of course) still doesn't allow you to consolidate your music collection onto one computer or bring it with you on a Rio (solid state music being essential for certain activities, such as jogging or mountain biking).
So, in essence, Microsoft has offered a solution that would increase the reliance upon Microsoft products, and would increase the cost of transitioning away from them. TBNT.
(Hmmm... now where did that old single-speed CD ROM without error checking go?)
- C
When you put it that way, it appears there should be some clear separation between systems in the car. You wouldn't put shell access onto a machine that runs your billing system, why put an entertainment center onto a machine that makes sure your airbags deploy? There is no reason your main CPU should control your turn signal.
CPUs in cars aren't a horrible idea: ABS systems and the more complicated one-wheel-braking systems have existed for years, and cars have had upgrade chips since the early 90's. However, adding an operating system to a controller chip just ensures that you can't guarentee the reliability. What about separating systems into *Going to kill you* *Might kill you* and *Won't kill you*. Brakes, airbags, etc get dedicated controllers. Seat positions, climate control, and lighting get another system. Anything involving Video, Cell Phones, Blue Tooth, or Outlook Express get the last system. Volume is, as always, controlled by knobs.
Has contract law become so misguided that a simple disclaimer can release the business from any liability due to obvious gross negligence? As "contracts" with registrars are basically non-negotiable, do they truly fall under the heading of contract law?
As the legal system was setup in part to protect individuals and businesses from unfair, exploitive, or negligent other individuals or businesses, doesn't the legal responsibilities of said party have precedence over a codification of negligent business practices?
Agreed. We live in a world where people are pointing with $120 Kensington trackballs and typing on $8 "Internet-Enabled" (Aka hotkey) keyboards. Why not have little LCD screens in the Fkeys to display their current function? Or LED keys that change to reflect the status of modifiers like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, etc. Or, like apple has, keys that advertise their wares in the dark? Maybe a programmable, general use pad, similar to having a PDA mounted on your keyboard, that would be used by programs as additional feedback. For example, Photoshop could use such a device to display tools and layers, freeing up screen space for the image you are editing.
It's high time we got a grossly overpriced, much deserved upgrade to the old keyboard. What gives?
"That this can support MP3 and MPEG-4 is significant because up until now you haven't seen adoption of these formats by major content providers because they lacked digital rights management," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Ok... How can MP3's be played back in industry standard devices (such as the Archos Jukebox), and yet remain protected? Am I missing something large, or isn't the point of wrapping an MP3 in such a layer to prevent it from being understood?
Just a quick note - Manual Refils of inkjets work. I used them several years back with a pair of HP printers to disasterous results. Recently, I tried again with a cheap (OnTel, 19.95) and available (every CVS has them) brand in an Epson printer with quite satisfactory results. The blacks aren't *quite* as dark as they used to be, and the colors aren't *exactly* the same, but they are similar enough to be unnoticeable for printing mapquest directions and christmas party invitations. They also break down to about $3 per cartridge of ink, a more realistic total.
If you haven't used them in a long time, and you are cost aware, give the needles a chance. They are much better for the environment than replacements, and are much cheaper too.
-C
Let's not forget how Real takes over your desktop. There is a taskbar icon / program, a quicklaunch icon, a start menu icon, a desktop icon... It launches your MP3's, Audio CD's, DVD's, MPEGS, MusicNet... And while things have gotten better with RealOne (real used to crash if it started without the taskbar program running), it is still a RealBigPain.
RealDRM means that I would be forced to use that nasty player instead of WinAMP, and that is never a good thing. At least WinAMP doesn't put in a Startup Screen, change your casebadge, put bumperstickers on your car...
Still frontlit? They have never been frontlit. The original Gameboy used a fairly standard LCD screen. The Gameboy Color, a TFT. The GBA uses a widescreen TFT. Using a TFT with an LCD frontlight allows the GBA (with afterburner, a product created by a frustrated consumer... Nintendo could do better) to achieve 6 hours or more on a pair of AA batteries.
More people than sega had color handheld systems. Sega's GameGear and their 16 bit Nomad, along with NEC's Turboexpress and Atari's Lynx, all used backlit, color LCD displays in their system. They were also incredibly thick (backlites take much more space than frontlites), and ate through a set of 4x AA's in 2 hours or less.
I'm sorry, but I can't see the "insightful" in your statement. People don't want backlit, color LCD displays, and the GameGear is not a good system to support such a claim. People want easy to see, pretty displays. People want their displays light, with low battery requirements, and with a high degree of visibility in all conditions. People at heart are technology-agnostic when you give them what they want.
In other words, there may be a very good health reason for the ubiquity of self-medicinal aluminium headware. Perhaps we should be attempting to investigate the link between tin hats and improvement in certain forms of mental illness, rather than simply mocking the subject (and QED anyone attempting to study it)?
...Don't have to open up the computer case to install
Which are you more comfortable with, opening your 500 dollar computer or gouging a hole in your 20,000 dollar wall?
Some smart card specs, , an IDE controller pinout. Very different, sadly.
-Correction, Controller, not driver.
The problem with going any further is that the driver for smartcards has to be on the device. Compact Flash cards have the driver on the card itself. It is a trivial matter to put in a 5 GB CF microdrive in CF 2 devices from 8 years ago, but it is impossible to use any particular smart media card unless the manufacturer has specifically programmed the device to be able to handle it. So unless you are willing to program the firmware for either the device or the recepticle, you probably aren't going to find what you are looking for*.
Of course, if you do, please keep us posted. We've got a few somewhat useless Rio PMP 300's that would love to be PMPed out.
Sorry, I've been saving that pun for years.
-C
*It's extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible, that you may be able to connect an IDE controller in place of the smart card controller, but I really doubt it.
Compact Flash is a pin swap for a standard IDE drive. If you REALLY wanted to you could add a laptop drive, and a battery (you would have to check with a manufacturer whether it takes 5v or 12v) connected to the camera by a highly modified ribbon cable. Laptop drives do take power along the main ribbon, so you might choose to forgo the additional battery, but you will certainly need to carry additional batteries for the camera... they weren't made to power a always spinning disk. And don't use a standard IDE drive unless you want a head crash.
Hmm... Laptop to CF... It would probably work.
A less than one page press release, uncorroborated on the Net, that says that Tai Chi is a form of shadow boxing and that this thing will "Play" Tai Chi? All I can assume that means is that it is capable of moving a second limb in order to balance a first limb, without any sort of major locomotion, but the author's grasp of the subtlety of Tai Chi seems a little tenuous. With the broad scope of this posting, it could be the next revolution in computing or a new program for the Sony Aiboman.
Can anyone find another source for this story?
-C
I know, there are millions of examples of prior art that all are microprocessor controlled utilizing storage (write once only, but it is storage) and decorative lights projected through a surface. But at what point do we draw the line between decorative and functional?
-C
The point of waterproof books is so that you can read in the bathtub. Or read in the rain at a bus stop. You can keep textbooks for schoolchildren for more years. Durability, durability, durability. And that old book scent is mostly dust mites. While
I'm positive it is against the rules of the GPL to re-release source code as if it were your own. I'm fairly certain that means anyone submitting GPL'd code for a grade is in violation of the terms of use, and therefore you are not giving help during a quiz, examination, or a class exercise. You had the right to define the copyright on the code, and while the University may or may not have the right to remove that code from their webservers (see thread on ACLU and newspapers), they do not have the right to remove that code from existence.
That having been said, your professor does want to keep a solid, useful learning plan viable, and part of that is forcing students to think through the problems themselves. What are your goals WRT putting up this code? I know I have the urge to share everything too, but do the benifits of your goals outweigh the (slightly) decreased effectiveness of the class? Is there somewhere else that you could post the code that will minimize the danger to the courses, somewhere unlikely to be found by UD students?
You are going into a negotiation with the university here. You *are* in the right, and I'm sure there are at least a half-dozen undergraduate or graduate Technology Law students who would love to rally to your cause. However, the professor has a very real concern, as cheating (and therefore not learning) is far more common and difficult to discover than anyone would care to admit. Even if in the murky are of coding your work would be used as a Cliff's Note instead of a cheat sheet, that is still not teaching students how to think about the problem. Ultimately, the best arrangement may be to simply take the code down and store it away in exchange for a signed letter of appreciation from the university (as a CYA measure).
BTW, your other professor is doing his programmers a disservice by getting them used to unreasonably signing away the rights to their code. This type of activity is a plague on the entire IT industry, and has resulted in serious and unfortunate litigation from which the programmer always loses... even if it is just 20,000 in court costs.
For a preliminary suggestion, you could try the Micro PC, which appears to barely fit your requirements for power, and is small enough to be carried gingerly onboard in a padded case. A Powerbook might also be a good solution, but that is up to your OS needs... If you didn't need windows you should already own one anyway.
But remember, whatever you get, it will be part of your image as a consultant. If you are a real techie, a custom-built box will impress. If you are an artistic type, you need a Powerbook or a Vaio, or another attractive, polished but original ultralight. If you are a pointy-haired executive who has greatly overestimated his needs, a half-sized mini vaio would be very sleek and sexy. Network guys seem to be able to get away with any type of box, the uglier the better.
What are the needs that you are attempting to satisfy? What specs would satisfy those needs? If you don't tell us that, any advice you get here will be worthless.
-C
Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing. They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services. Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers. And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.
The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses. What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?
-C