Since when does it take 50 scanners to replace 1 fax machine?
The main reason fax machines still exist is that the learning curve is steeper for scan-attach-to-e-mail than it is for faxing. People who work with documents alot are not the ones who are interested in new technology. And it typically has to be deployed across the entire industry, not just between individuals.
The lack of cheap, automatically feeding, low resolution scaners is also a deterrent.
As a parallel, real estate agents are just starting to adopt digital cameras at a high rate. They actually started putting home descriptions online 5+ years ago. That only happened because they were already putting listings into a central computer database. Someone else did the work of moving that online. But the agents were used to just sending a film canister to someone else for pics of the house. Twenty bucks a house for film and processing, because they can't be bothered to learn things like downloading pics from the camera and e-maiing them out. It's amazing that you find better pictures of items on e-bay than you do while shopping for a moderately priced house.
The other reason is that a lot of people don't have e-mail accounts set up for accepting a 20 page scanned document.
I'd bet he started working on the iTMS project a long while ago. He's just been acquitted twice for doing the same thing with DVD encryption. Now that he has rock solid precedent, he can practically walk into court without a lawyer if the recording industry sues him. He's got a great big whoop-ass stick, and it's time to use it.
In Norway, that is... Americans are still screwed.
Actually, MP3s are a compressed form of WAVs. When you play back MP3s, they are decompressed to WAVs for the output device. So converting an MP3 to a WAV and playing back the WAV results in an identical waveform to what the MP3 puts out. WAV is also the format used to store audio on the CD in the first place. The only thing CDs add is time stamp info, ECC and coding for the laser to track it's position around the CD.
Your argument about RGB vs. YUV is faulty. They both sample the original data in technically different ways. Your same argument could be made about 44 vs 48 khz digital recording. You can't convert between them without interpolating and thus losing data. That doesn't make them lossy on their own.
It now sounds like you're trying to say that any method of storing information is 'lossy'. What's an audio or video format that isn't lossy to you?
BTW, I believe you are alone including analog formats in your definition of 'lossy'. If you're going to go re-defining the english language, you should be more clear.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=lossy
A very large number of websites abandoned MSIE 5.5 a long time ago, if only to move up to a higher bitlevel of encryption. Nobody should be bitching about not being able to upgrade from 4.0 (or whatever shipped with win 98) to MSIE 5.5. If your computer can't run a recent browser, you should't worry about not being able to download an earlier (also obsolete) browser to run.
When they stop making service packs and critical updates available, let me know.
Old versions of Linux aren't being removed from servers, nor are any any updates. You can also download the newest package for free. Nobody's letting win 98 users update their old computer to win XP for free without breaking some laws.
The only reason you will ever find an non-availability of any Linux distro or patch, is because nobody cares enough to host it.
[Not!] Re:It's like the auto industry.
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In the auto industry, any body shop can fix your door if it gets dented, and you don't face problems with patent owners preventing you from getting replacement parts.
With windows 95 (and likely 98 now), Microsoft is removing the availability of critical updates (equivalent factory recalls). They then wield the power via copyright law and DMCA to prevent anyone from making them available to people who run win 98, thus forcing a paid upgrade.
I don't care so much that they won't provide patches to any new exploits that are found after 5 years (providing they don't sue any white hats that fix them). I do care if they pull the patches and updates that already exist. It's like if you buy a car that ends up with a recall for the seat belt, you get it fixed, and ten years later when you bring it in for a new muffler, they put back in the original, defective seat belt.
BTW, if cars had as many defects and ran as poorly as windows, people would go back to riding horses. Luckily for them, microsoft fills their software with distracting bells and whistles.
You seem to have a definition of 'lossy' that is heavily biased against digital formats, and uninformed. Any analog copy loses signal quality from the original sampling. Film doesn't count individual photons, and audio recordings always drop fidelity above a certain frequency. I've yet to see someone make an atom by atom copy of film, audio tape, or grooved record, thus losing information present in the original. Anyone who has ever been to an unamplified concert knows that there is no recording that will sound as good as hearing the instruments live. No photo will ever capture the color and detail of seeing the object live (extreme examples of optical manipulation notwithstanding). Any time there is a conversion, there will be loss.
The term 'lossy', in regard to information storage, refers to any format that intentionally discards existing data in a particular manner in order to fit into the medium more easily. Non-lossy digital formats would include tiff (I think), rle and bmp (both picture formats), or shn and wav (audio formats). You can convert between non-lossy formats, and get back identical data each time. Just because something is digital doesn't mean it's 'lossy'. Jpg, mpg and mp3 are all lossy because the codecs intentionally fudge data in order to make it fit into a smaller data file. When they're doing a good job, you lose less information than you would when making an analog copy. CDs aren't 'lossy'. They simply have a dynamic range and sampling rate that is narrower than the best analog recording mediums. In the analog world, you can do a lot worse than CD audio.
By your argument, VHS or Betamax would be a better quality than the digital projector systems that George Lucas and others are trying to get theaters to adopt. Or that a 6 megapixel camera is worse image quality than an SLR with bargain basement film and crappy lens.
By the time either format is pushed out, dual format CDRW + DVD+/- R drives will probably be $20. By that time, nobody will complain that the free upgrade they got is now obsolete.
BTW, the thing making either format obsolete will probably be some 30GB optical format, not competition from the other version of DVD recording.
Maybe people don't realize this, but wind turbines are typically more than a hundred feet across, and elevated so that the bottom of the rotor is a few stories off the ground to avoid the treeline. The rotor also has to rotate freely into the wind direction.
I assume that you are doing this to bring more people into you shop or keep them there longer, rather than trying to make a killing selling the net access...
I would suggest changing the password daily, and giving it away free to people who spend $5+ (?) when they come in. Anyone else can pay 50 cents extra for it. It would be sort of an honor thing for people to not pick up a slip laying around and surf free.
I think anything that requires you to give out individual passwords would require you to raise your price on access by $1 just to cover the administration. If you don't change passwords regularly, people in neighboring businesses are likely to start using your connection.
Keep in mind that you will be providing a connection that could be popular with people trading kiddie porn if you are not careful. I would recommend putting a bandwidth cap of 128/16kbps or 256/16kbps to keep the roaches off you net.
Hopefully you already realize that you will be violating the TOS for any household internet account. Buying a business account will likely double the ISP cost.
Is there a precompiled version of Linux that would fit on a floppy, USB drive, CDRom ISO, or boot from LAN that is designed to be an MP3 player? I would really like to downclock one of my old computers so that it doesn't need a CPU fan, strip out the HD, and set it up as a dedicated LAN MP3 player in my stereo rack. Some sort of slave setup where any computer on the LAN can send it commands to play MP3s from any networked hard drive. Or it could browse the shared directories on it's own, of course. Unless there's already a device out there for less than $100 that does this...
386s are surprisingly slow at displaying JPGs. Especially ones taken at 3+ megapixel camera resolution that your typical geek would have. Most slideshow programs don't pre-decode the picture before displaying it since it tends to be near instantaneous on modern machines. This means that a 386 driven picture show would spend a lot of time showing the picture being decoded.
I used to like the geek factor of being able to point out my server computer in the corner that I built from scrap parts in the garage. Last summer, I realized that the thing was noisy (god, I hate constant din of fans and hard drives), bulky, and continuously converted a ~100 Watt power feed into heat in a room that I did not want extra heat in. Plus extra AC costs from May - September. And I was paying roughly $8.64 per month for it. (.1KW/H * 24h * 30 days * $0.12/KWh) That's over $100/year!
The space I picked up from dumping that system gave me the room to put in a nice third system to invite an extra friend over for LAN gaming. My old K6-2 server was ass for playing games on.
Now I automatically mirror important files across the LAN to the other computer. Media files are in a shared (read only) directory. I can open the FTP port to my main computer if I want to let a friend FTP some files from me. My backup router is sitting on the shelf at Best Buy 3 miles away.
Traffic graphs and logging... Who cares? I don't have a 13 year old son who needs regular grounding for surfing for porn. My connection is 3mbps/384kbps, so I don't even need complicated load balancers. And I do want all of my machines to be on the same subnet for gaming.
I only know one person who needs more than a router/firewall for his machines at home, and he opted for multiple connections instead. He has a dedicated line to work (which then connects to the net), and a dedicated line to the internet. The two networks never touch.
I can understand using an old system as a terminal for web surfing instead of a better system, or setting it up as a 24/7 print and file server for homes with the other computers spread across the house. But using it as just a firewall/router is like driving nails with a jackhammer. It might be fun, but you look stupid doing it.
It seems like you're using a lot of that old hardware because you can't bear to dump it, rather than using it to fill a legitimate need. Do you really need to do your routing, web serving, and backups all on separate machines? You're like a smoker carrying around matches, a lighter, and two pieces of flint.
Actually, it doesn't. Back when a router cost $200, an old computer was a good way to run your net connection. Nowadays, you can get a router (with 802.11b AP and 4 port switch, no less) for as little as $30. The difference in electricity costs for running this 24/7 come to $5-10 per month. Not to mention the space savings, and the lack of noise or heat gain.
DLP != Plasma. It is a rear projection system. Unlike the 3X CRT based systems that sell for $1500+, it produces a much better picture, doesn't suffer from burn-in, always upconverts to the highest resolution, and is much smaller & lighter. They cost about 3 times the price of a rear projection CRT system, but 1/3 that of a Plasma TV. The downside is that they are still about 15-20 inches deep, and the projector bulb ($200-400) needs to be replaced every 4000 hours or so.
You can get DLP TVs that don't have the base like the one pictured. They're just a bit deeper, and you still have to set them on a table or some sort. They're shaped like very short neck widescreen CRTs. Near me, Ultimate Electronics, Best Buy and Sears (?!?) carry DLP TVs.
I don't know what most people think, but the 24 fps in theaters sucks. Anytime a large patch of white shows up on the screen, I can plainly see the flicker, even while looking straight at it (persistence usually diminishes the effect of flicker near the center of your vision).
1080i is on par with 720p for recorded video (and cheaper to produce), but if you have any plans to attach a computer to that new high def widescreen (you are a/. reader, after all), you will want to go with the one that does 720p. Most text is just 1 pixel wide, and that becomes excruciating to read when interlaced.
Up until now, the only demand for Microdrives has been camera owners who want a single Compact Flash card to take thousands of high resolution pictures. Microdrives use very few parts compared to a regular hard drive, so if they were produced in massive quantities, they could slash the price to a small fraction of the current one. Building the assembly line is likely the greatest expense in producing the drives.
If Apple came to IBM with an offer to buy a million of the 1 gig drives at $40 each, ($40,000,000 contract), I'm sure some VP would work their ass off to make it happen. Especially since it would help them reduce their price on CF Mirco Drives, and push regular flash memory out of the market. There's a massive market for 1-2 gig Micro Drives that is waiting for the price to get reasonable. Portable USB storage, video and photo cameras, MP3 players, PDAs, digital picture frames, just to name a few. It's actually pretty amazing that a solid state storage device has greater market share than a disc based one right now.
There are already lots of good posts on how to do a professional run at 1000+ copies. Before you get to that point, you should do a few dozen copies to test with friends and strangers at game cons using techniques like what Cheapass Games does.
For decks of action or play cards, print on pre-perforated blank business card sheets. If you have a board that you play on, use the heaviest cardstock that you can run through your printer (8.5x11 probably). If you want a bigger board, use multiple sheets. Set up interchangeable board elements to hide the fact that you can't print one huge board (like the random placement of RoboRally boards). Use generic glass beads for tokens. For unique pawns, fold pieces of paper into an upside down 'V' shape with a picture on them.
Until you really fine tune the game to point where random people like it even with the Ghetto(tm) pieces, you shouldn't bother with anything pricey, like die cut decks, full color anything (unless it comes out of your own inkjet), or custom designed pawns. Board games tend to be very pricey to produce. Richard Garfield came to Wizards of the Coast with RoboRally and several other board games back in the early 90's. They told him that the board games were far too costly to produce. Eventually he came back with something much cheaper called Magic: the Gathering. It required over 300 different pieces of artwork, but only cost about $1 per deck, or $0.25 per pack to manufacture. Their wholesale price was about 4x that. Once Garfield's net worth hit 8 figures, he was able to produce the board games he originally wanted to do. Keep this in mind when you're trying to decide if the professionally produced decks and die cut pieces are worth investing in.
Anyone making heavy-weight perforated hexagonal sheets would be awesome, but that's probably too much to ask. It would significantly speed my dream of a Nuclear Winter of Catan game.:)
is to prove 'infringement', and then force the code to remain in Linux. The 'infringing' code is already public knowledge, but they have made the very important step of tricking the judge into protecting the secrecy of something that widely distributed and still available to anyone. This logically implies that the same judge will force the 'secret' to be kept if and when he/she rules on the side of SCO. If IBM can't publically disclose what the infringing code, they are hard pressed to remove and replace it, and forced to leave the infringing code in. With a judgment that Linux is infringing, SCO gains massive leverage to charge anything they want to for someone else's OS.
could charge upwards of $200 per month for digital collections of art by painters that have been dead for hundreds of years.
What moron decided on custom $3000 boxes to serve media instead of and off-the-shelf DVD player with scripted DVDs? For 1/10th of the price, you could sell a nearly identical version of this at Best Buy. Thousands of historical paintings, licensed modern works or 10 min vid clips of easily obtainable things like the ocean, forests or everyone's favorite fish tanks.
Personally, I would just download JPGs and MPGs of whatever I want and play it on my $40 DVD player that reads regular files off any burned CDR or DVD-R.
I occasionally use an old 80 MB (not gig) Maxtor hard drive from around 1990 for flashing the BIOS on motherboards. I can't boot into pure DOS with Windows with my regular setup, so this 80MB HD with DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.0 works great. The amazing thing is that I can put it into any machine, have the mouse work perfectly, and boot into DOS and windows without a single error message.
I use the hard drive because it's more reliable than the floppy drives that seem to quit on me after a mere 6 months ('new' ones too). Maybe it's because I try to use 15 year old floppy disks.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when does it take 50 scanners to replace 1 fax machine?
The main reason fax machines still exist is that the learning curve is steeper for scan-attach-to-e-mail than it is for faxing. People who work with documents alot are not the ones who are interested in new technology. And it typically has to be deployed across the entire industry, not just between individuals. The lack of cheap, automatically feeding, low resolution scaners is also a deterrent.
As a parallel, real estate agents are just starting to adopt digital cameras at a high rate. They actually started putting home descriptions online 5+ years ago. That only happened because they were already putting listings into a central computer database. Someone else did the work of moving that online. But the agents were used to just sending a film canister to someone else for pics of the house. Twenty bucks a house for film and processing, because they can't be bothered to learn things like downloading pics from the camera and e-maiing them out. It's amazing that you find better pictures of items on e-bay than you do while shopping for a moderately priced house.
The other reason is that a lot of people don't have e-mail accounts set up for accepting a 20 page scanned document.
I'd bet he started working on the iTMS project a long while ago. He's just been acquitted twice for doing the same thing with DVD encryption. Now that he has rock solid precedent, he can practically walk into court without a lawyer if the recording industry sues him. He's got a great big whoop-ass stick, and it's time to use it.
In Norway, that is... Americans are still screwed.
Actually, MP3s are a compressed form of WAVs. When you play back MP3s, they are decompressed to WAVs for the output device. So converting an MP3 to a WAV and playing back the WAV results in an identical waveform to what the MP3 puts out. WAV is also the format used to store audio on the CD in the first place. The only thing CDs add is time stamp info, ECC and coding for the laser to track it's position around the CD.
Your argument about RGB vs. YUV is faulty. They both sample the original data in technically different ways. Your same argument could be made about 44 vs 48 khz digital recording. You can't convert between them without interpolating and thus losing data. That doesn't make them lossy on their own.
It now sounds like you're trying to say that any method of storing information is 'lossy'. What's an audio or video format that isn't lossy to you?
BTW, I believe you are alone including analog formats in your definition of 'lossy'. If you're going to go re-defining the english language, you should be more clear.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=lossy
A very large number of websites abandoned MSIE 5.5 a long time ago, if only to move up to a higher bitlevel of encryption. Nobody should be bitching about not being able to upgrade from 4.0 (or whatever shipped with win 98) to MSIE 5.5. If your computer can't run a recent browser, you should't worry about not being able to download an earlier (also obsolete) browser to run.
When they stop making service packs and critical updates available, let me know.
Old versions of Linux aren't being removed from servers, nor are any any updates. You can also download the newest package for free. Nobody's letting win 98 users update their old computer to win XP for free without breaking some laws.
The only reason you will ever find an non-availability of any Linux distro or patch, is because nobody cares enough to host it.
In the auto industry, any body shop can fix your door if it gets dented, and you don't face problems with patent owners preventing you from getting replacement parts.
With windows 95 (and likely 98 now), Microsoft is removing the availability of critical updates (equivalent factory recalls). They then wield the power via copyright law and DMCA to prevent anyone from making them available to people who run win 98, thus forcing a paid upgrade.
I don't care so much that they won't provide patches to any new exploits that are found after 5 years (providing they don't sue any white hats that fix them). I do care if they pull the patches and updates that already exist. It's like if you buy a car that ends up with a recall for the seat belt, you get it fixed, and ten years later when you bring it in for a new muffler, they put back in the original, defective seat belt.
BTW, if cars had as many defects and ran as poorly as windows, people would go back to riding horses. Luckily for them, microsoft fills their software with distracting bells and whistles.
You seem to have a definition of 'lossy' that is heavily biased against digital formats, and uninformed. Any analog copy loses signal quality from the original sampling. Film doesn't count individual photons, and audio recordings always drop fidelity above a certain frequency. I've yet to see someone make an atom by atom copy of film, audio tape, or grooved record, thus losing information present in the original. Anyone who has ever been to an unamplified concert knows that there is no recording that will sound as good as hearing the instruments live. No photo will ever capture the color and detail of seeing the object live (extreme examples of optical manipulation notwithstanding). Any time there is a conversion, there will be loss.
The term 'lossy', in regard to information storage, refers to any format that intentionally discards existing data in a particular manner in order to fit into the medium more easily. Non-lossy digital formats would include tiff (I think), rle and bmp (both picture formats), or shn and wav (audio formats). You can convert between non-lossy formats, and get back identical data each time. Just because something is digital doesn't mean it's 'lossy'. Jpg, mpg and mp3 are all lossy because the codecs intentionally fudge data in order to make it fit into a smaller data file. When they're doing a good job, you lose less information than you would when making an analog copy. CDs aren't 'lossy'. They simply have a dynamic range and sampling rate that is narrower than the best analog recording mediums. In the analog world, you can do a lot worse than CD audio.
By your argument, VHS or Betamax would be a better quality than the digital projector systems that George Lucas and others are trying to get theaters to adopt. Or that a 6 megapixel camera is worse image quality than an SLR with bargain basement film and crappy lens.
By the time either format is pushed out, dual format CDRW + DVD+/- R drives will probably be $20. By that time, nobody will complain that the free upgrade they got is now obsolete.
BTW, the thing making either format obsolete will probably be some 30GB optical format, not competition from the other version of DVD recording.
Maybe people don't realize this, but wind turbines are typically more than a hundred feet across, and elevated so that the bottom of the rotor is a few stories off the ground to avoid the treeline. The rotor also has to rotate freely into the wind direction.
Wind turbines only spin in the neighborhood of 60 RPM. I well imagine that birds have more trouble with airplane props and jet engines.
I assume that you are doing this to bring more people into you shop or keep them there longer, rather than trying to make a killing selling the net access...
I would suggest changing the password daily, and giving it away free to people who spend $5+ (?) when they come in. Anyone else can pay 50 cents extra for it. It would be sort of an honor thing for people to not pick up a slip laying around and surf free.
I think anything that requires you to give out individual passwords would require you to raise your price on access by $1 just to cover the administration. If you don't change passwords regularly, people in neighboring businesses are likely to start using your connection.
Keep in mind that you will be providing a connection that could be popular with people trading kiddie porn if you are not careful. I would recommend putting a bandwidth cap of 128/16kbps or 256/16kbps to keep the roaches off you net.
Hopefully you already realize that you will be violating the TOS for any household internet account. Buying a business account will likely double the ISP cost.
That came out in 2002. It's two>(!) expansion packs came out this year. I think that knocks it out of the running for the parent post's question.
Is there a precompiled version of Linux that would fit on a floppy, USB drive, CDRom ISO, or boot from LAN that is designed to be an MP3 player? I would really like to downclock one of my old computers so that it doesn't need a CPU fan, strip out the HD, and set it up as a dedicated LAN MP3 player in my stereo rack. Some sort of slave setup where any computer on the LAN can send it commands to play MP3s from any networked hard drive. Or it could browse the shared directories on it's own, of course. Unless there's already a device out there for less than $100 that does this...
watch picture collection
386s are surprisingly slow at displaying JPGs. Especially ones taken at 3+ megapixel camera resolution that your typical geek would have. Most slideshow programs don't pre-decode the picture before displaying it since it tends to be near instantaneous on modern machines. This means that a 386 driven picture show would spend a lot of time showing the picture being decoded.
I used to like the geek factor of being able to point out my server computer in the corner that I built from scrap parts in the garage. Last summer, I realized that the thing was noisy (god, I hate constant din of fans and hard drives), bulky, and continuously converted a ~100 Watt power feed into heat in a room that I did not want extra heat in. Plus extra AC costs from May - September. And I was paying roughly $8.64 per month for it. (.1KW/H * 24h * 30 days * $0.12/KWh) That's over $100/year!
The space I picked up from dumping that system gave me the room to put in a nice third system to invite an extra friend over for LAN gaming. My old K6-2 server was ass for playing games on.
Now I automatically mirror important files across the LAN to the other computer. Media files are in a shared (read only) directory. I can open the FTP port to my main computer if I want to let a friend FTP some files from me. My backup router is sitting on the shelf at Best Buy 3 miles away.
Traffic graphs and logging... Who cares? I don't have a 13 year old son who needs regular grounding for surfing for porn. My connection is 3mbps/384kbps, so I don't even need complicated load balancers. And I do want all of my machines to be on the same subnet for gaming.
I only know one person who needs more than a router/firewall for his machines at home, and he opted for multiple connections instead. He has a dedicated line to work (which then connects to the net), and a dedicated line to the internet. The two networks never touch.
I can understand using an old system as a terminal for web surfing instead of a better system, or setting it up as a 24/7 print and file server for homes with the other computers spread across the house. But using it as just a firewall/router is like driving nails with a jackhammer. It might be fun, but you look stupid doing it.
It seems like you're using a lot of that old hardware because you can't bear to dump it, rather than using it to fill a legitimate need. Do you really need to do your routing, web serving, and backups all on separate machines? You're like a smoker carrying around matches, a lighter, and two pieces of flint.
A P100 makes a fine SOHO firewall..
Actually, it doesn't. Back when a router cost $200, an old computer was a good way to run your net connection. Nowadays, you can get a router (with 802.11b AP and 4 port switch, no less) for as little as $30. The difference in electricity costs for running this 24/7 come to $5-10 per month. Not to mention the space savings, and the lack of noise or heat gain.
DLP != Plasma. It is a rear projection system. Unlike the 3X CRT based systems that sell for $1500+, it produces a much better picture, doesn't suffer from burn-in, always upconverts to the highest resolution, and is much smaller & lighter. They cost about 3 times the price of a rear projection CRT system, but 1/3 that of a Plasma TV. The downside is that they are still about 15-20 inches deep, and the projector bulb ($200-400) needs to be replaced every 4000 hours or so.
You can get DLP TVs that don't have the base like the one pictured. They're just a bit deeper, and you still have to set them on a table or some sort. They're shaped like very short neck widescreen CRTs. Near me, Ultimate Electronics, Best Buy and Sears (?!?) carry DLP TVs.
I don't know what most people think, but the 24 fps in theaters sucks. Anytime a large patch of white shows up on the screen, I can plainly see the flicker, even while looking straight at it (persistence usually diminishes the effect of flicker near the center of your vision).
/. reader, after all), you will want to go with the one that does 720p. Most text is just 1 pixel wide, and that becomes excruciating to read when interlaced.
1080i is on par with 720p for recorded video (and cheaper to produce), but if you have any plans to attach a computer to that new high def widescreen (you are a
Up until now, the only demand for Microdrives has been camera owners who want a single Compact Flash card to take thousands of high resolution pictures. Microdrives use very few parts compared to a regular hard drive, so if they were produced in massive quantities, they could slash the price to a small fraction of the current one. Building the assembly line is likely the greatest expense in producing the drives.
If Apple came to IBM with an offer to buy a million of the 1 gig drives at $40 each, ($40,000,000 contract), I'm sure some VP would work their ass off to make it happen. Especially since it would help them reduce their price on CF Mirco Drives, and push regular flash memory out of the market. There's a massive market for 1-2 gig Micro Drives that is waiting for the price to get reasonable. Portable USB storage, video and photo cameras, MP3 players, PDAs, digital picture frames, just to name a few. It's actually pretty amazing that a solid state storage device has greater market share than a disc based one right now.
There are already lots of good posts on how to do a professional run at 1000+ copies. Before you get to that point, you should do a few dozen copies to test with friends and strangers at game cons using techniques like what Cheapass Games does.
:)
For decks of action or play cards, print on pre-perforated blank business card sheets. If you have a board that you play on, use the heaviest cardstock that you can run through your printer (8.5x11 probably). If you want a bigger board, use multiple sheets. Set up interchangeable board elements to hide the fact that you can't print one huge board (like the random placement of RoboRally boards). Use generic glass beads for tokens. For unique pawns, fold pieces of paper into an upside down 'V' shape with a picture on them.
Until you really fine tune the game to point where random people like it even with the Ghetto(tm) pieces, you shouldn't bother with anything pricey, like die cut decks, full color anything (unless it comes out of your own inkjet), or custom designed pawns. Board games tend to be very pricey to produce. Richard Garfield came to Wizards of the Coast with RoboRally and several other board games back in the early 90's. They told him that the board games were far too costly to produce. Eventually he came back with something much cheaper called Magic: the Gathering. It required over 300 different pieces of artwork, but only cost about $1 per deck, or $0.25 per pack to manufacture. Their wholesale price was about 4x that. Once Garfield's net worth hit 8 figures, he was able to produce the board games he originally wanted to do. Keep this in mind when you're trying to decide if the professionally produced decks and die cut pieces are worth investing in.
Anyone making heavy-weight perforated hexagonal sheets would be awesome, but that's probably too much to ask. It would significantly speed my dream of a Nuclear Winter of Catan game.
is to prove 'infringement', and then force the code to remain in Linux. The 'infringing' code is already public knowledge, but they have made the very important step of tricking the judge into protecting the secrecy of something that widely distributed and still available to anyone. This logically implies that the same judge will force the 'secret' to be kept if and when he/she rules on the side of SCO. If IBM can't publically disclose what the infringing code, they are hard pressed to remove and replace it, and forced to leave the infringing code in. With a judgment that Linux is infringing, SCO gains massive leverage to charge anything they want to for someone else's OS.
could charge upwards of $200 per month for digital collections of art by painters that have been dead for hundreds of years.
What moron decided on custom $3000 boxes to serve media instead of and off-the-shelf DVD player with scripted DVDs? For 1/10th of the price, you could sell a nearly identical version of this at Best Buy. Thousands of historical paintings, licensed modern works or 10 min vid clips of easily obtainable things like the ocean, forests or everyone's favorite fish tanks.
Personally, I would just download JPGs and MPGs of whatever I want and play it on my $40 DVD player that reads regular files off any burned CDR or DVD-R.
To overcome your problem, they just need to add a speakerphone. Alot of phones have them now.
google turns this up at #1
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/torrent/
I occasionally use an old 80 MB (not gig) Maxtor hard drive from around 1990 for flashing the BIOS on motherboards. I can't boot into pure DOS with Windows with my regular setup, so this 80MB HD with DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.0 works great. The amazing thing is that I can put it into any machine, have the mouse work perfectly, and boot into DOS and windows without a single error message.
I use the hard drive because it's more reliable than the floppy drives that seem to quit on me after a mere 6 months ('new' ones too). Maybe it's because I try to use 15 year old floppy disks.