From what I read in the article, it wouldn't matter if the game were released for the PC market, as it is extreamly unlikely to ever hit a store shelf in any case.
Of course what the person putting toghether this product misses, is that just because you can't find a copy at BB, CC, EB, or GS, doesn't mean that it won't be available at online retailers, or on e-bay.
From there perhaps it will garner a tremendous online following, perhaps.
Nah, the nick name comes from the condition the nails were found in when they were discovered to be holding the trolls feet off the ground, by being pounded through the trolls eyes. Wouldn't want to upset a trolls ability to type, but since he doesn't need to see, or use his brain, it seems appropriate.
I'm sorry, being partly Scottish Highlander myself (though it gets interesting when visiting the family tree throgh Virginia) I usually bash the box around a bit rather than ask others for support, and felt this was the normal state of events for the Scotts, Northern Irish and the Welsh. I should remember never to take a generalization like UK businesses and restrict it's meaning to the standout representatives of that class who happen to be in London, (where they should probably be looking up at their heads on pikes for stupidity)
note also one should remember that when selling services to England, take the value you price at in dollars, remove the dollar sign, add a pound sign, leave the numbers alone, and you just added about a 33% mark on.
Start a business selling support for Linux. Sell it by seat, at perhaps $200 per seat per year (or something a bit lower than the business support agreement for Windows). Add a $400 per user install and one time training fee. Pay higher a former teacher to provide education at $30k per year. Word into the contract that additional one day training sessions are available for $500 per day per user.
Configure a basic user workstation and server set, with scripts to auto update bug fixes first copies to one or more servers (depending upon seat base size) with re-distribution down to the desktop. (i.e. nightly ftp mirrors from your favorite security mirror for the distribution(s) in use, and a update shortly after that to all workstations, use anacron or other cron deamon that will catch the fact an event should have happened while a workstation was powered down.)
Sell your services to businesses in England.
Profit.
-Rusty
p.s. yes I know its not quite that easy, it needs to be fleshed out a bit.
No, "Since I can't afford to buy that new Lexus, I'll just make a low quality copy of it and drive off with the copy."
The original is still there, hasn't been lost, and the dealer can still sell it. There may be low quality copies out on the road, but this is the real thing, and should be valued as such.
Additionally, if I happen to like the way the copy performs relative to copies of other products, it provides an incentive for me to work harder, or smarter to get the cash to buy that Lexus for myself. If it breaks down, or performs in a way I don't like I can discard it and try a low quality copy of some other car.
Isn't that similar to what people did with various cars from years ago? Get an old VW bug chassi, and put a fiberglass rendition of a MGB, Rolls Royce, or some other car on top of it, then outfit the seats etc as desired? Granted it was not free, it did tend to involve learning how to work with car parts, etc.
Then again, that's just my view. Today you are more likely to see an old bug revamped with batteries and an electric motor than appearing as an MGB. Though the two are not mutually exclusive.
That was just a high level overview. For all I know they are using a concave mirror as their lense. I am not sure what they ar actually using for a sensor, however people are familiar enough with the concept of a ccd (video camera sensor) to get the idea of such a sensor for a different spectrum of light (which is all x-rays are).
For technical specs your best bet would be to talk to the manufacturers.
From the perspective of a Niel Stephenson reader, think of this as a x-ray frequency varient of milameter radar.
What this does is send extreamly low dose x-ray radiation in the direction of the subject being scanned. Some percentage fo the x-rays (being extreamly high energy, even if it is low dose) will pass through the subject. Some percentage will be absorbed by the subject. Some other percentage will be reflected by the subject.
A percentage of the reflected x-rays will be captured by an x-ray sensitive varient of a CCD and an image will be created by a computer.
The demonstrations so far indicate that x-rays for the most part are passing right through clothing, and being reflected by the skin of the subject. Harder objects (such as plastic and metals) are either going to absorbe a higher percentage than usuall, or reflect a higher percentage than the subject, and will present visable difference in the image collected.
Some training will be required, however most weapons are going to be fairly visable to this equipment.
I have not heard however if glass is something that this equipment will recognize. We could be back to seeing metal and ceramic knives, but not glass.
Much of this is my own opinion, so take what you will from it. Critizism is welcome as well.
Sure set up an e-mail address in the hands of the ISP with one of the worst records for stopping Spam, in an effort to cut down on telemarketing calls.
And in small form factor, what would you like to loose to include physical interfaces for the legacy serial ports?
I grant you that if I wanted to have more than six USB ports I would need to add another USB controller. And yes it would cost more than $2.20.
I still contend that USB ports will provide me with the capability of supporting far more than physical serial and paralell interfaces in significantly less space.
Since a single legacy serial interface with an integrated 16550afn UART has a maximum speed of 115kbps, (aprox) and a USB1.1 has a 12Mbps speed and I can fit two USB ports in the space of a single db9 serial, or even a single ps/2 port.
Note I am not telling you to give up on physical serial interfaces if you choose to include them in your design. I am simply saying that if you are attempting to build an extreamly small platform, (which admittedly will probably cost more than a mini-ITX based system) you get more bang for your buck to use USB ports rather than legacy Serial and Paralell ports. If you only include six USB ports, you can sell Paralell and Serial adapters, at a significant mark-up, to those customers who find a need for those interfaces.
Then again, that's just my opinion. You are welcome to hold your own.
Ah, but I can put 8-10 usb-a ports in the space taken up by two db9 and a db25 that would be required for a legacy printer port and two legacy serial ports.
The supporting chipset may theoretically cost more, but if it is included in the bios for the motherboard, I will never see the cost difference. A single usb-a port running at usb 1.1 spec speeds can easily support three printers, and four or more serial ports, even if they are through adapters of some sort. The initial cost may be more, but the functionality is significantly better to use USB ports in place of db9 serial, and db25 paralell interfaces. A usb-ps2 interface will even take care of providing you with a keyboard or mouse port if you are too cheap to get such from a supplier at $10 or less for the combo.
Actually both serial and paralell ports are easily available as USB adapters. I support a printer, and have supported a palm Vx with appropriate adapters.
The price of the adapters, when compared to the added space on the motherboard that the interface would take up, may very well be worth it.
This is one of the reasons I have configured Evolution to not display remote images, unless I request them. The other is that pulling remote images has the functionality of verifying your e-mail address. (server operator generates a couple million unique random numbers, creates a table of associations between e-mail names and the random numbers, sends each e-mail address their random number as an img src=protocol://server/uniqRanomNunber/image.php, which does a lookup on the uniquRandomNunber, and confirms your e-mail address. Spamer sells list of confirmed e-mail addresses, and you get more spam.
Suggestion. If your e-mail client does not allow you to disable remote image retrieval, at the very least turn off preview panes. Bette is to find a client that does allow you to disable remote image retrieval.
In a sense, popfile does provide whitelisting at the level you are looking for. Popfile has what they call "Magnets" where you configure a string that you want popfile to look for, and before it applies any of the baysian rules to the message, if it sees that string, it classifies the message as you request.
Functionally I believe this means that it effectively ignores the content at that point, meaning that other messages that you receive are not classified relative to these messages. I could be wrong however.
About the only complaint I have about popfile is that there is no way to "reclassify" the messages I have received. I.e. I can not have it go back though the messages and change the subjects as is appropriate after I have passed through them in popfile and re-classified them there.
........use the fact that they gathered information from the server to get the IP addresses they searched from blackholed.
The fact that there is no law against you collecting data does not mean that the people providing that data can't use the fact that you collected that data to prevent you from sending large volumes of e-mail to them.
Likewise this will rapidly identify open-proxy sources that may also be used to send spam at another time.
The information is sufficient to allow the people who hold those numbers to realize that they are their own.
A better combination might have been the first two digits of the first three, one of the digits of the middle two, and two of the digits of the last four. (with placement)
That combination will not uniquely identify anyone any more than the first five digits would, but would be enough that the holder would bereasonably sure it was his or her own number.
So if my number were 123-45-6789, disclosing 12*-*5-*7*9 would be sufficient to match the number for me. If I was completly uncertain, I could nicely ask the person doing the disclosing to privately confirm the remaining digits, (3,4,6 & 8) but that combination gives 1000 possible SSNs, some of which would be invalid.
i-link is capable of being used as a network transport, which USB does not natively support. You can currently link up two mac laptops via firewire and no other network interfaces, and exchange data/mount folders, etc. In other words the capability is there.
It may require more work to be implemented, but I suspect that you could link an iBook to a Vaio via the respective firewire iLInk interfaces. (Though not having tried this, I don't know.)
Might I point out that it seems silly to market as a video conference device if it does not have a display. To me that seems to defeat the purpose of video conferencing.
I am pretty sure that the only way this would work is if it has a composit or s-video out to plug into whatever monitor happens to bey available. Presumably the usb is there to support a camera. (something else to carry around) Along with the Wall-wart, the keyboard/mouse combo, and a 5" lcd tv you need to carry around for locations where you can't plug into an available tv, it kind of defeats the purpose as a video conferencing device.
With all those requirements, a laptop with a pinhole camera would make more sense.
I would suspect that Sony and Microsoft both think they have interconnectivity options available. The question really should be what advantage will either, or both see as a result of this.
Sony is a very divers company, with quite a bit of infighting. The Music side of the business (which may be hemoraging money shortly) hates the idea of any of the other product lines (mostly hardware) having the capability of handling MP3 files in any form.
Something tells me that most of the MD players out there have a firmware update waiting in the wings that will turn on their ability to play MP3 files, significantly boosting the marketability of the player. (Do you know of a lot of MP3 players of any capacity that will run continuously for 50+ hours on a single AA battery?)
Since I have not been actively looking for a DVD player lately, I do not know if they are meeting the market demands of playing CD's with MP3 files on them. With the exception of the $300 devices, I am not sure that there are many competitors making players without this feature.
One of the options that Sony could be doing with their DVD players is something HP and others have been doing with stand-alone media centers. It is trivial to implement on a PS2 with the Linux kit, but would be cheaper to implement in an otherwise stand alone dvd player. All the hardware is there to play MP3, almost all Sony media devices have i-link capability so there should be nothing preventing the dvd player from streaming audio from a pc, or with a QNX os, be able to mount shared media folders and run slideshows while playing music, or possibly play video. (Though to play Divx/mpeg4 might be beyond the standard hardware in a dvd player.
From what I have seen as the capabilities of Sony H/W engineers, I strongly suspect that the submitter is correct, this is a ploy to get DRM distributed within the house.
Might be a pain to go to the store, pick up a copy of MIIB only to find out that fan site for ST-V that you are hosting on your home system disallows you from watching the movie. (as an example)
If you read the Cringly article, you will find that the supporting documentation for one of the features, that SCO is claiming as an IBM violation was a piece of code developed as an implementation of an idea that was documented before the implementation. That implementation contains substantial similarity between Unix and Linux source code. What SCO is claiming is that the fact that it was impemented in Unix means that it is SCO property as a derivative work.
My question is that if the work is implemented in Linux first, to prove that it works, then is implemented in Unix, does the code involved then become the property of SCO as a derivative work?
I have no delusions that in the case of the Sequent case that the Linux implementation came first. However if the concept was documented in a general form (as Cringly indicates it was) the copyright for the documented idea would take precedence, as the implementation is an example of the idea, not the source of the idea.
One other item of note is that there has been substantial new development in Linux and Open Source Software in general. A significant portion will most likely show up in Linux before SCO-Unix, or IBM-AIX. An example would be Perl6. (as an application, not part of the OS!) It would not surprise me if there were several people working on implentations of concepts on their own, that submit such concepts to Linux, and subsequently are hired and provide similar implementations to comercial Unix distributions. As such, will Unix become "Tainted" by the GPL, or will another piece of code be identified as matching between Unix and Linux?
Granted my questions are Strawman arguments. I do not know if they hold validity or not.
I have a Linksys AP Broadband Router, with the Cisco TA, directly connected to one of the hub ports. The Linksys is doing NAT against several devices in my apartment, including the TA.
A lot of questions are addressed at the vonage web site. When I signed up for vonage I did have a linux box (debian, kernel 2.2.something) acting as my NAT gateway, and never had a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I read in the article, it wouldn't matter if the game were released for the PC market, as it is extreamly unlikely to ever hit a store shelf in any case.
Of course what the person putting toghether this product misses, is that just because you can't find a copy at BB, CC, EB, or GS, doesn't mean that it won't be available at online retailers, or on e-bay.
From there perhaps it will garner a tremendous online following, perhaps.
-Rusty
Nah, the nick name comes from the condition the nails were found in when they were discovered to be holding the trolls feet off the ground, by being pounded through the trolls eyes. Wouldn't want to upset a trolls ability to type, but since he doesn't need to see, or use his brain, it seems appropriate.
I'm sorry, being partly Scottish Highlander myself (though it gets interesting when visiting the family tree throgh Virginia) I usually bash the box around a bit rather than ask others for support, and felt this was the normal state of events for the Scotts, Northern Irish and the Welsh. I should remember never to take a generalization like UK businesses and restrict it's meaning to the standout representatives of that class who happen to be in London, (where they should probably be looking up at their heads on pikes for stupidity)
-Rusty
note also one should remember that when selling services to England, take the value you price at in dollars, remove the dollar sign, add a pound sign, leave the numbers alone, and you just added about a 33% mark on.
Start a business selling support for Linux. Sell it by seat, at perhaps $200 per seat per year (or something a bit lower than the business support agreement for Windows). Add a $400 per user install and one time training fee. Pay higher a former teacher to provide education at $30k per year. Word into the contract that additional one day training sessions are available for $500 per day per user.
Configure a basic user workstation and server set, with scripts to auto update bug fixes first copies to one or more servers (depending upon seat base size) with re-distribution down to the desktop. (i.e. nightly ftp mirrors from your favorite security mirror for the distribution(s) in use, and a update shortly after that to all workstations, use anacron or other cron deamon that will catch the fact an event should have happened while a workstation was powered down.)
Sell your services to businesses in England.
Profit.
-Rusty
p.s. yes I know its not quite that easy, it needs to be fleshed out a bit.
Aluminum foil, lots of it, make a hat for your house...
-Rusty
He gathered and prepared documentation then didn't release it before?
No, "Since I can't afford to buy that new Lexus, I'll just make a low quality copy of it and drive off with the copy."
The original is still there, hasn't been lost, and the dealer can still sell it. There may be low quality copies out on the road, but this is the real thing, and should be valued as such.
Additionally, if I happen to like the way the copy performs relative to copies of other products, it provides an incentive for me to work harder, or smarter to get the cash to buy that Lexus for myself. If it breaks down, or performs in a way I don't like I can discard it and try a low quality copy of some other car.
Isn't that similar to what people did with various cars from years ago? Get an old VW bug chassi, and put a fiberglass rendition of a MGB, Rolls Royce, or some other car on top of it, then outfit the seats etc as desired? Granted it was not free, it did tend to involve learning how to work with car parts, etc.
Then again, that's just my view. Today you are more likely to see an old bug revamped with batteries and an electric motor than appearing as an MGB. Though the two are not mutually exclusive.
-Rusty
That was just a high level overview. For all I know they are using a concave mirror as their lense. I am not sure what they ar actually using for a sensor, however people are familiar enough with the concept of a ccd (video camera sensor) to get the idea of such a sensor for a different spectrum of light (which is all x-rays are).
For technical specs your best bet would be to talk to the manufacturers.
-Rusty
From the perspective of a Niel Stephenson reader, think of this as a x-ray frequency varient of milameter radar.
What this does is send extreamly low dose x-ray radiation in the direction of the subject being scanned. Some percentage fo the x-rays (being extreamly high energy, even if it is low dose) will pass through the subject. Some percentage will be absorbed by the subject. Some other percentage will be reflected by the subject.
A percentage of the reflected x-rays will be captured by an x-ray sensitive varient of a CCD and an image will be created by a computer.
The demonstrations so far indicate that x-rays for the most part are passing right through clothing, and being reflected by the skin of the subject. Harder objects (such as plastic and metals) are either going to absorbe a higher percentage than usuall, or reflect a higher percentage than the subject, and will present visable difference in the image collected.
Some training will be required, however most weapons are going to be fairly visable to this equipment.
I have not heard however if glass is something that this equipment will recognize. We could be back to seeing metal and ceramic knives, but not glass.
Much of this is my own opinion, so take what you will from it. Critizism is welcome as well.
-Rusty
Sure set up an e-mail address in the hands of the ISP with one of the worst records for stopping Spam, in an effort to cut down on telemarketing calls.
Anyone else see the irony here?
-Rusty
They each contain only one serious defect, and millions of features, some of which do things that you as the serious defect would not expect.
-Rusty
And in small form factor, what would you like to loose to include physical interfaces for the legacy serial ports?
I grant you that if I wanted to have more than six USB ports I would need to add another USB controller. And yes it would cost more than $2.20.
I still contend that USB ports will provide me with the capability of supporting far more than physical serial and paralell interfaces in significantly less space.
Since a single legacy serial interface with an integrated 16550afn UART has a maximum speed of 115kbps, (aprox) and a USB1.1 has a 12Mbps speed and I can fit two USB ports in the space of a single db9 serial, or even a single ps/2 port.
Note I am not telling you to give up on physical serial interfaces if you choose to include them in your design. I am simply saying that if you are attempting to build an extreamly small platform, (which admittedly will probably cost more than a mini-ITX based system) you get more bang for your buck to use USB ports rather than legacy Serial and Paralell ports. If you only include six USB ports, you can sell Paralell and Serial adapters, at a significant mark-up, to those customers who find a need for those interfaces.
Then again, that's just my opinion. You are welcome to hold your own.
-Rusty
Ah, but I can put 8-10 usb-a ports in the space taken up by two db9 and a db25 that would be required for a legacy printer port and two legacy serial ports.
The supporting chipset may theoretically cost more, but if it is included in the bios for the motherboard, I will never see the cost difference. A single usb-a port running at usb 1.1 spec speeds can easily support three printers, and four or more serial ports, even if they are through adapters of some sort. The initial cost may be more, but the functionality is significantly better to use USB ports in place of db9 serial, and db25 paralell interfaces. A usb-ps2 interface will even take care of providing you with a keyboard or mouse port if you are too cheap to get such from a supplier at $10 or less for the combo.
Actually both serial and paralell ports are easily available as USB adapters. I support a printer, and have supported a palm Vx with appropriate adapters.
The price of the adapters, when compared to the added space on the motherboard that the interface would take up, may very well be worth it.
-Rusty
Like this is going to help his self esteam.
In all likelyhood all this will do is force him to reconsider the decision about bigger being better as noted in all the spam he is ignoring.
-Rusty
This is one of the reasons I have configured Evolution to not display remote images, unless I request them. The other is that pulling remote images has the functionality of verifying your e-mail address. (server operator generates a couple million unique random numbers, creates a table of associations between e-mail names and the random numbers, sends each e-mail address their random number as an img src=protocol://server/uniqRanomNunber/image.php, which does a lookup on the uniquRandomNunber, and confirms your e-mail address. Spamer sells list of confirmed e-mail addresses, and you get more spam.
Suggestion. If your e-mail client does not allow you to disable remote image retrieval, at the very least turn off preview panes. Bette is to find a client that does allow you to disable remote image retrieval.
-Rusty
In a sense, popfile does provide whitelisting at the level you are looking for. Popfile has what they call "Magnets" where you configure a string that you want popfile to look for, and before it applies any of the baysian rules to the message, if it sees that string, it classifies the message as you request.
Functionally I believe this means that it effectively ignores the content at that point, meaning that other messages that you receive are not classified relative to these messages. I could be wrong however.
About the only complaint I have about popfile is that there is no way to "reclassify" the messages I have received. I.e. I can not have it go back though the messages and change the subjects as is appropriate after I have passed through them in popfile and re-classified them there.
-Rusty
........use the fact that they gathered information from the server to get the IP addresses they searched from blackholed.
The fact that there is no law against you collecting data does not mean that the people providing that data can't use the fact that you collected that data to prevent you from sending large volumes of e-mail to them.
Likewise this will rapidly identify open-proxy sources that may also be used to send spam at another time.
-Rusty
The information is sufficient to allow the people who hold those numbers to realize that they are their own.
A better combination might have been the first two digits of the first three, one of the digits of the middle two, and two of the digits of the last four. (with placement)
That combination will not uniquely identify anyone any more than the first five digits would, but would be enough that the holder would bereasonably sure it was his or her own number.
So if my number were 123-45-6789, disclosing 12*-*5-*7*9 would be sufficient to match the number for me. If I was completly uncertain, I could nicely ask the person doing the disclosing to privately confirm the remaining digits, (3,4,6 & 8) but that combination gives 1000 possible SSNs, some of which would be invalid.
-Rusty
i-link is capable of being used as a network transport, which USB does not natively support. You can currently link up two mac laptops via firewire and no other network interfaces, and exchange data/mount folders, etc. In other words the capability is there.
It may require more work to be implemented, but I suspect that you could link an iBook to a Vaio via the respective firewire iLInk interfaces. (Though not having tried this, I don't know.)
-Rusty
Might I point out that it seems silly to market as a video conference device if it does not have a display. To me that seems to defeat the purpose of video conferencing.
I am pretty sure that the only way this would work is if it has a composit or s-video out to plug into whatever monitor happens to bey available. Presumably the usb is there to support a camera. (something else to carry around) Along with the Wall-wart, the keyboard/mouse combo, and a 5" lcd tv you need to carry around for locations where you can't plug into an available tv, it kind of defeats the purpose as a video conferencing device.
With all those requirements, a laptop with a pinhole camera would make more sense.
Just my observations.
-Rusty
I would suspect that Sony and Microsoft both think they have interconnectivity options available. The question really should be what advantage will either, or both see as a result of this.
Sony is a very divers company, with quite a bit of infighting. The Music side of the business (which may be hemoraging money shortly) hates the idea of any of the other product lines (mostly hardware) having the capability of handling MP3 files in any form.
Something tells me that most of the MD players out there have a firmware update waiting in the wings that will turn on their ability to play MP3 files, significantly boosting the marketability of the player. (Do you know of a lot of MP3 players of any capacity that will run continuously for 50+ hours on a single AA battery?)
Since I have not been actively looking for a DVD player lately, I do not know if they are meeting the market demands of playing CD's with MP3 files on them. With the exception of the $300 devices, I am not sure that there are many competitors making players without this feature.
One of the options that Sony could be doing with their DVD players is something HP and others have been doing with stand-alone media centers. It is trivial to implement on a PS2 with the Linux kit, but would be cheaper to implement in an otherwise stand alone dvd player. All the hardware is there to play MP3, almost all Sony media devices have i-link capability so there should be nothing preventing the dvd player from streaming audio from a pc, or with a QNX os, be able to mount shared media folders and run slideshows while playing music, or possibly play video. (Though to play Divx/mpeg4 might be beyond the standard hardware in a dvd player.
From what I have seen as the capabilities of Sony H/W engineers, I strongly suspect that the submitter is correct, this is a ploy to get DRM distributed within the house.
Might be a pain to go to the store, pick up a copy of MIIB only to find out that fan site for ST-V that you are hosting on your home system disallows you from watching the movie. (as an example)
Then again, this is my observations and thoughts.
-Rusty
If you read the Cringly article, you will find that the supporting documentation for one of the features, that SCO is claiming as an IBM violation was a piece of code developed as an implementation of an idea that was documented before the implementation. That implementation contains substantial similarity between Unix and Linux source code. What SCO is claiming is that the fact that it was impemented in Unix means that it is SCO property as a derivative work.
My question is that if the work is implemented in Linux first, to prove that it works, then is implemented in Unix, does the code involved then become the property of SCO as a derivative work?
I have no delusions that in the case of the Sequent case that the Linux implementation came first. However if the concept was documented in a general form (as Cringly indicates it was) the copyright for the documented idea would take precedence, as the implementation is an example of the idea, not the source of the idea.
One other item of note is that there has been substantial new development in Linux and Open Source Software in general. A significant portion will most likely show up in Linux before SCO-Unix, or IBM-AIX. An example would be Perl6. (as an application, not part of the OS!) It would not surprise me if there were several people working on implentations of concepts on their own, that submit such concepts to Linux, and subsequently are hired and provide similar implementations to comercial Unix distributions. As such, will Unix become "Tainted" by the GPL, or will another piece of code be identified as matching between Unix and Linux?
Granted my questions are Strawman arguments. I do not know if they hold validity or not.
-Rusty
I have a Linksys AP Broadband Router, with the Cisco TA, directly connected to one of the hub ports. The Linksys is doing NAT against several devices in my apartment, including the TA.
A lot of questions are addressed at the vonage web site. When I signed up for vonage I did have a linux box (debian, kernel 2.2.something) acting as my NAT gateway, and never had a problem.
-Rusty