Microsoft doesn't charge for the barebones C# compiler (csc.exe), last I checked (I think it comes with the runtimes and one of the service packs), nor did they charge anybody who wanted to download the.NET runtimes.
Also, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 express edition is currently free.
The site to which you have linked does not correctly identify my city. It claims I am in "Beaconsfield", a municipality bordering Pointe-Claire. It does not correctly identify the city as Google does.
Google bought out Urchin. This is their replacement for Urchin.
Essentially it does what Urchin does, statistical analysis of traffic and visitors, broken down into all sorts of categories. How many people from Madrid, Montreal, New York, etc. How many people using WinXP, Linux, Firefox, Safari, etc. How many pages people load per visit. What the returns on your AdWords ads are (how many people coming from there are doing anything meaningful with the site). What pages people are visiting. How many are new visitors and how many are returning.
So, all that sort of stuff. The differences between Urchin and GA is that GA is way easier to set up. Urchin involved installing and configuring the software on your server, inserting code into web pages, and then TRYING to get Urchin to parse the Apache logs (I've had a great deal of trouble with that last part). With Google Analytics, you simply put the code on your site and that's it, google handles everything else.
Another difference is that Urchin supported HTML graphs and SVG. GA uses flash. While this is somewhat of a good thing (Not very many people have SVG capable browsers or plugins. Firefox 1.0.x crashed when the Adobe SVG plugin was installed), now that I'm using Firefox 1.5, I sort of wish that it was still SVG.
Google Analytics is doing some kind of fucking magic with city-tracking too. It shows my traffic to a site I'm developing as coming from "Pointe-Claire", the small city of 20,000 on the island of Montreal (Right above New York) where I live. How they figured this out, I have no clue. My IP's DNS identifies me as being in Toronto, 500 kilometers away from where I am. I wish I knew how they narrowed it down to Pointe-Claire considering that Pointe-Claire is just one tiny city in the middle of a cluster of dozens of other cities on the same small island.
Does Google have access to the Bell Sympatico DSL customer data? Do they know where the routers are and are placing me by the closest router to me (Does Bell even HAVE any routers in Pointe-Claire when Pointe-Claire is essentially part of Montreal)? This is a bit scary how they figured that out.
I go to the local video rental store, they don't stock a single VHS casette. Not one. Yes, they still publish new movies on VHS, but it'd be nearly impossible to find them in retail stores. You'd have to buy them online.
I think, however, that saying that DVD is dead is stupid. The replacements are not even available yet. DVD still controls the vast majority of the market. I don't see how that is dead.
More seriously, to take a relatively recent PC intended for desktop use, let's assume 32MB. WinXP is annoying to use on 128MB of memory, and almost unusable on 64MB of memory.
Linux, on the other hand, will do just fine with 32MB of memory providing you use a light window manager and don't run useless extra crap in the background.
Who cares? Broadcom already has technology that allows players to handle both HD-DVD and BluRay. Eventually these combo players will take over the market, and HD-DVD/BluRay will become as irrelevant as DVD+RW/DVD-RW. People will just use whatever they want because both formats work for everyone.
Older notebooks don't matter when considering next-gen notebooks. Any solid-state drive's size will be judged based on the magnetic drives available at that time.
No, that's not what my scheme amounts to. There is a difference between increasing price for people who don't agree to a partnership and providing a price incentive to join a program such as this. If EB or GameStop wanted to sue EA for offering a discount for joining their program, they would be welcome to it, but they'd lose. That is, they'd lose if the case wasn't thrown out of court right away, which it probably would be. Of course IANAL.
I've made my opinion known before. I think retail stores selling used games is wrong. I won't get into the reasons I feel that way here.
What I will say is that I think that the publishers are the problem. They're charging too much for their product, and even Mark Rein, quoted in the article as speaking out against used sales, thinks that publishers charge too much.
The solution is simple. Publishers need to lower the price charged to retailers by at least 33%, but ONLY do it for retailers who agree not to sell used games. Consumers might be happy assuming that the lower prices lead to lower game prices (they might not), retailers are happy because they end up making more money per unit due to a much larger profit margin, and publishers are happy because even though they've reduced prices they're selling more copies by eliminating the used game business. Everybody wins.
Publishers won't do this, however. Because they're greedy, and because they are too stuck in their ways to take a big risk like that even if it will earn them more money. Think about how the RIAA is clinging to a dying business model, biting and screaming trying to stop online distribution like iTunes from succeeding, and then try to tell me that EA would behave any differently.
SSH is responding though. When I try to connect I get a login prompt. You're right that they've change the behaviour of port 21, though. The rest seem to be the same ones I reported as being open, IIRC, but I don't recall the exact precise contents of my post.
Maybe somebody is going to head over to http://www.securityfocus.com/vulnerabilities and notice that there are forty or fifty vulnerabilities listed for the software that I was able to identify versions of. Maybe somebody will be kind enough to notify the people about their insecure box. But since there isn't any contact info directly on the site...
Or you could, you know, repair the disc before returning it? Resurfacing a CD/DVD isn't exactly expensive. There are many cheap consumer resurfacers out there, and for seriously scratched discs, professional resurfacing (Which restores an optical-grade surface) costs about $5 per disc.
I mean, come on. This problem isn't exactly serious. The xbox 360 (ALL of them, this isn't caused by defective consoles like Game Fly is saying) only scratches discs if you tilt it. The simple solution is to not tilt your 360 while in use, and use it in the horizontal position. If you kick the unit really hard and cause it to somehow tilt while flat on a surface and it scratches a disc, pay $5 for a resurfacing and promise to be more careful next time.
Gamy Fly's policy is stupid, yes. But that is no excuse for throwing away common sense.
So long as Microsoft includes the proper drivers for any BD-ROM drive, I'm happy. I don't have a problem with requiring a driver CD for a BD-RW drive in order to actually burn anything, but the basic reading functionality should be present in the default driver.
I don't expect Windows to be able to play BD video disks without software from somebody like Intervideo or Cyberlink, as it was with DVDs.
Processors already use nanotechnology. Gate sizes on current processors are 65 to 90 nanometers, with 45 nanometers planned soon. What, do we need gates smaller than one nanometer for it to be called nanotechnology? But then, you wouldn't be in the nanometer range anymore, since you'd be smaller than one nanometer.
And nobody said you had to run Windows XP on the embedded box. Grab a minimal linux kernel, throw in BusyBox, and you've got a pretty small amount of overhead. You only load the drivers that are needed, and have barely any additional apps running.
You'd have to go this route with the xbox anyhow, since you'd need to install Linux on it anyhow. So you'd be tossing away all the benefits of the xbox and end up back where you started: either get the smaller size, additional memory, and much greater expandability offered by a nano-itx solution, or go with the possibly cheaper xbox solution.
Of course, the xbox itself may not be that much cheaper when purchased new and modded.
You obviously haven't been following SciFi very closely. They have quite a bit of original programming. There are, of course, the Big Three (Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis). And then there are the made-for-tv movies and miniseries that "SciFi Pictures" pumps out. They've got their traditional ones, and then their "LBX" ones, which is where they go low-budget and pump out multiple movies for the same price as one normal budget one (The thinking, I suppose, is that everybody will like at least one instead of most people hating the only one).
There are also news shows in the works. "The Dresden Files" is a full series planned for 2006, as is "Eureka". They have others too, like "Ghost Hunters" and "Tripping the Rift".
Do they have as many as HBO? No. HBO is rather a bit larger than SciFi, for one thing. For another thing, it would seem like a bunch of HBO's "Original Shows" are either cancelled and in syndication. Regardless, SciFi is quickly catching up to channels like HBO when it comes to quantity of original programming.
That is, I think, the good thing about cable. Low budgets have forced shows to be more economical, make better use of their money. The fact that they can still produce shows like Battlestar Galactica is just incredible.
And because they are on cable, the expectations are lower. Galactica gets ratings like 2.0, 2.1, and it is SciFi's most successful show ratings-wise. They don't need "high" ratings to make money. We'd never see a show like Battlestar Galactica being made by NBC, simply because the audience isn't there. Cable has brought us these wonders.
So, what is my point? If BSG was on NBC, you'd have a valid point. But it isn't on NBC, it's on SciFi, where ratings that NBC considers a failure are considered a huge success by SciFi. BSG isn't going away any time soon, not as long as it stays one of the top rated shows on SciFi.
Perhaps you will do well to consider, why are pictures of white house considered a security risk and pictures of Rashtrapati bhawan aren't ?
Because Google is based in the US, and if the US government tells them to do something like that, no matter how stupid, they have no choice but to obey. If India asks them to do something stupid, there is less reason to.
All Indian Government is demanding, is equal treatment of security concerns... assuming that Google does wants to engage in business activities in India.
There are no security concerns. The photos are available publicly to anybody who wants to buy them.
Even the pictures of White house can be bought elsewhere... so why are they blurred out yet you are objecting to Indian government demanding the same ?
The White House is not blurred out. Google's version merely has a repainted roof, hardly a major change.
For your info, satellite or detailed maps of the sensitive buildings in India, are restricted and not available so easily to foreigners. Try getting one.
No, they are not restricted, and they are easily available. India has no control over the satellites owned by businesses in other countries. Only the countries that those businesses are in have any say.
These photos are not security risks, and even if they were, they can be purchased elsewhere. While Google will likely agree to India's silly requests, that doesn't make the requests any less stupid.
But these are public photos. Google just bought them, and so can anybody else. I don't understand why Google Earth is considered a security risk when the source of the images isn't. Do they think that terrorists don't use money in exchange for goods and services?
I don't think the ECM-3611 is any better than the nano-ITX board. In fact, I think it is worse.
For one thing, it isn't really smaller. It is 14cm by 10cm, whereas the nano-ITX is 12cm by 12cm. Virtually the same surface area.
Furthermore, adding a VGA to TV converter adds $50 to $100 to the price, and may not have as high quality as a direct output from the motherboard's onboard video.
Slashdot Mirror
Airliners already land regularly on autopilot. I don't know if they use GPS, but it isn't like the pilot is landing the aircraft every single time.
So, then, it's free, like Microsoft's .NET is?
.NET runtimes.
Microsoft doesn't charge for the barebones C# compiler (csc.exe), last I checked (I think it comes with the runtimes and one of the service packs), nor did they charge anybody who wanted to download the
Also, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 express edition is currently free.
The site to which you have linked does not correctly identify my city. It claims I am in "Beaconsfield", a municipality bordering Pointe-Claire. It does not correctly identify the city as Google does.
Google bought out Urchin. This is their replacement for Urchin.
Essentially it does what Urchin does, statistical analysis of traffic and visitors, broken down into all sorts of categories. How many people from Madrid, Montreal, New York, etc. How many people using WinXP, Linux, Firefox, Safari, etc. How many pages people load per visit. What the returns on your AdWords ads are (how many people coming from there are doing anything meaningful with the site). What pages people are visiting. How many are new visitors and how many are returning.
So, all that sort of stuff. The differences between Urchin and GA is that GA is way easier to set up. Urchin involved installing and configuring the software on your server, inserting code into web pages, and then TRYING to get Urchin to parse the Apache logs (I've had a great deal of trouble with that last part). With Google Analytics, you simply put the code on your site and that's it, google handles everything else.
Another difference is that Urchin supported HTML graphs and SVG. GA uses flash. While this is somewhat of a good thing (Not very many people have SVG capable browsers or plugins. Firefox 1.0.x crashed when the Adobe SVG plugin was installed), now that I'm using Firefox 1.5, I sort of wish that it was still SVG.
Google Analytics is doing some kind of fucking magic with city-tracking too. It shows my traffic to a site I'm developing as coming from "Pointe-Claire", the small city of 20,000 on the island of Montreal (Right above New York) where I live. How they figured this out, I have no clue. My IP's DNS identifies me as being in Toronto, 500 kilometers away from where I am. I wish I knew how they narrowed it down to Pointe-Claire considering that Pointe-Claire is just one tiny city in the middle of a cluster of dozens of other cities on the same small island.
Does Google have access to the Bell Sympatico DSL customer data? Do they know where the routers are and are placing me by the closest router to me (Does Bell even HAVE any routers in Pointe-Claire when Pointe-Claire is essentially part of Montreal)? This is a bit scary how they figured that out.
Dead? No. But it isn't in widespread use either.
I go to the local video rental store, they don't stock a single VHS casette. Not one. Yes, they still publish new movies on VHS, but it'd be nearly impossible to find them in retail stores. You'd have to buy them online.
I think, however, that saying that DVD is dead is stupid. The replacements are not even available yet. DVD still controls the vast majority of the market. I don't see how that is dead.
Seriously, Yahoo has made the shows available legally for free. Why would you pay money for free content?
I mean, this isn't like P2P vs CDs here. They made the content available for free LEGALLY.
Exactly. Try running Windows XP on 8MB of memory.
More seriously, to take a relatively recent PC intended for desktop use, let's assume 32MB. WinXP is annoying to use on 128MB of memory, and almost unusable on 64MB of memory.
Linux, on the other hand, will do just fine with 32MB of memory providing you use a light window manager and don't run useless extra crap in the background.
Who cares? Broadcom already has technology that allows players to handle both HD-DVD and BluRay. Eventually these combo players will take over the market, and HD-DVD/BluRay will become as irrelevant as DVD+RW/DVD-RW. People will just use whatever they want because both formats work for everyone.
Older notebooks don't matter when considering next-gen notebooks. Any solid-state drive's size will be judged based on the magnetic drives available at that time.
Bah, just celebrate Wintereenmas (http://www.wintereenmas.com/) and call it a day.
No, that's not what my scheme amounts to. There is a difference between increasing price for people who don't agree to a partnership and providing a price incentive to join a program such as this. If EB or GameStop wanted to sue EA for offering a discount for joining their program, they would be welcome to it, but they'd lose. That is, they'd lose if the case wasn't thrown out of court right away, which it probably would be. Of course IANAL.
I've made my opinion known before. I think retail stores selling used games is wrong. I won't get into the reasons I feel that way here.
What I will say is that I think that the publishers are the problem. They're charging too much for their product, and even Mark Rein, quoted in the article as speaking out against used sales, thinks that publishers charge too much.
The solution is simple. Publishers need to lower the price charged to retailers by at least 33%, but ONLY do it for retailers who agree not to sell used games. Consumers might be happy assuming that the lower prices lead to lower game prices (they might not), retailers are happy because they end up making more money per unit due to a much larger profit margin, and publishers are happy because even though they've reduced prices they're selling more copies by eliminating the used game business. Everybody wins.
Publishers won't do this, however. Because they're greedy, and because they are too stuck in their ways to take a big risk like that even if it will earn them more money. Think about how the RIAA is clinging to a dying business model, biting and screaming trying to stop online distribution like iTunes from succeeding, and then try to tell me that EA would behave any differently.
SSH is responding though. When I try to connect I get a login prompt. You're right that they've change the behaviour of port 21, though. The rest seem to be the same ones I reported as being open, IIRC, but I don't recall the exact precise contents of my post.
You don't, maybe somebody else does.
Maybe somebody is going to head over to http://www.securityfocus.com/vulnerabilities and notice that there are forty or fifty vulnerabilities listed for the software that I was able to identify versions of. Maybe somebody will be kind enough to notify the people about their insecure box. But since there isn't any contact info directly on the site...
They're hosted at ev1servers.net, meaning they're hosting this on a budget dedicated server.
The domain also resolves to s1.avres.net and avres.net.
They are running SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_3.6.1p2 on port 22.
They are running an internet-visible MySQL 3.23.58 server on port 3306.
They have port 21 (FTP) open and accepting connections, but disconnecting a second later
While SMTP (port 25) is closed, they are running an unidentified POP3 server on port 110.
They are running Apache 2.0.46. The box identifies itself as running RedHat, most likely RHEL3.
Amazing what you can find out by telnetting to a few common port numbers, no?
Or you could, you know, repair the disc before returning it? Resurfacing a CD/DVD isn't exactly expensive. There are many cheap consumer resurfacers out there, and for seriously scratched discs, professional resurfacing (Which restores an optical-grade surface) costs about $5 per disc.
I mean, come on. This problem isn't exactly serious. The xbox 360 (ALL of them, this isn't caused by defective consoles like Game Fly is saying) only scratches discs if you tilt it. The simple solution is to not tilt your 360 while in use, and use it in the horizontal position. If you kick the unit really hard and cause it to somehow tilt while flat on a surface and it scratches a disc, pay $5 for a resurfacing and promise to be more careful next time.
Gamy Fly's policy is stupid, yes. But that is no excuse for throwing away common sense.
So long as Microsoft includes the proper drivers for any BD-ROM drive, I'm happy. I don't have a problem with requiring a driver CD for a BD-RW drive in order to actually burn anything, but the basic reading functionality should be present in the default driver.
I don't expect Windows to be able to play BD video disks without software from somebody like Intervideo or Cyberlink, as it was with DVDs.
Processors already use nanotechnology. Gate sizes on current processors are 65 to 90 nanometers, with 45 nanometers planned soon. What, do we need gates smaller than one nanometer for it to be called nanotechnology? But then, you wouldn't be in the nanometer range anymore, since you'd be smaller than one nanometer.
And nobody said you had to run Windows XP on the embedded box. Grab a minimal linux kernel, throw in BusyBox, and you've got a pretty small amount of overhead. You only load the drivers that are needed, and have barely any additional apps running.
You'd have to go this route with the xbox anyhow, since you'd need to install Linux on it anyhow. So you'd be tossing away all the benefits of the xbox and end up back where you started: either get the smaller size, additional memory, and much greater expandability offered by a nano-itx solution, or go with the possibly cheaper xbox solution.
Of course, the xbox itself may not be that much cheaper when purchased new and modded.
You obviously haven't been following SciFi very closely. They have quite a bit of original programming. There are, of course, the Big Three (Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis). And then there are the made-for-tv movies and miniseries that "SciFi Pictures" pumps out. They've got their traditional ones, and then their "LBX" ones, which is where they go low-budget and pump out multiple movies for the same price as one normal budget one (The thinking, I suppose, is that everybody will like at least one instead of most people hating the only one).
There are also news shows in the works. "The Dresden Files" is a full series planned for 2006, as is "Eureka". They have others too, like "Ghost Hunters" and "Tripping the Rift".
Do they have as many as HBO? No. HBO is rather a bit larger than SciFi, for one thing. For another thing, it would seem like a bunch of HBO's "Original Shows" are either cancelled and in syndication. Regardless, SciFi is quickly catching up to channels like HBO when it comes to quantity of original programming.
That is, I think, the good thing about cable. Low budgets have forced shows to be more economical, make better use of their money. The fact that they can still produce shows like Battlestar Galactica is just incredible.
And because they are on cable, the expectations are lower. Galactica gets ratings like 2.0, 2.1, and it is SciFi's most successful show ratings-wise. They don't need "high" ratings to make money. We'd never see a show like Battlestar Galactica being made by NBC, simply because the audience isn't there. Cable has brought us these wonders.
So, what is my point? If BSG was on NBC, you'd have a valid point. But it isn't on NBC, it's on SciFi, where ratings that NBC considers a failure are considered a huge success by SciFi. BSG isn't going away any time soon, not as long as it stays one of the top rated shows on SciFi.
Perhaps you will do well to consider, why are pictures of white house considered a security risk and pictures of Rashtrapati bhawan aren't ?
Because Google is based in the US, and if the US government tells them to do something like that, no matter how stupid, they have no choice but to obey. If India asks them to do something stupid, there is less reason to.
All Indian Government is demanding, is equal treatment of security concerns... assuming that Google does wants to engage in business activities in India.
There are no security concerns. The photos are available publicly to anybody who wants to buy them.
Even the pictures of White house can be bought elsewhere... so why are they blurred out yet you are objecting to Indian government demanding the same ?
The White House is not blurred out. Google's version merely has a repainted roof, hardly a major change.
For your info, satellite or detailed maps of the sensitive buildings in India, are restricted and not available so easily to foreigners. Try getting one.
No, they are not restricted, and they are easily available. India has no control over the satellites owned by businesses in other countries. Only the countries that those businesses are in have any say.
These photos are not security risks, and even if they were, they can be purchased elsewhere. While Google will likely agree to India's silly requests, that doesn't make the requests any less stupid.
But these are public photos. Google just bought them, and so can anybody else. I don't understand why Google Earth is considered a security risk when the source of the images isn't. Do they think that terrorists don't use money in exchange for goods and services?
A good working environment makes a job more enjoyable? Why didn't we think of this before!
I don't think the ECM-3611 is any better than the nano-ITX board. In fact, I think it is worse.
For one thing, it isn't really smaller. It is 14cm by 10cm, whereas the nano-ITX is 12cm by 12cm. Virtually the same surface area.
Furthermore, adding a VGA to TV converter adds $50 to $100 to the price, and may not have as high quality as a direct output from the motherboard's onboard video.