The Price is what I don't entirely understand. Shure when the tech was new I could see it, but what the heck causes them to cost so much. Mine is only 4"x6" in active area. That's about $4 per square inch!
Hmm, I'm gonna have to see if I can find more about how they work. 256 pressure levels, dunno what the x,y resolution is though. It can differentiate wich end of the pen is in use, and the pen has a two way button, but it feels like a plastic toy and ways almost nothing.
I'd guesse somthing like how RFID tags work, only a bit more complex.
You must have one that actually shuts the damn light off, My brother was looking at cordless mice/keyboard combo's and though I tried to convince him to get the logitec set (slightly cheaper, less 'eye-candy' crap) he insisted on the MS pair because 'windows is so unreliable I don't want to give it any more excuse than I have to. I expect microsoft would at least support thier own hardware right'. (I dunno how I kept from laughing myself sensless at that gem)
Needless to say the thing is a pos, takes 2 minutes if you switch channels because of inerference to find one it can use (and of course you have NO mouse or keyboard during that time) and it needs the batteries replace every 3-4 weeks because it keeps the bright red led lit 24/7.
The 'old white design' for the Trackman with the thumb ball is indeed very good. I bought one when they were $70+ and this thing has survived so many 2'-4' falls(I got it for lack of space, and still manage to add enough clutter to knock it off) over the years (2-3 I forget) without a hitch I'm just amazed. It's got two buttons and a clickable wheel that works as a middle button with OS's that actually understand such for more than panning web pages. I'm quite happy with it.
But you do have a valid point about the awkwardness at first, not mention the sore thumb muscles at first, but it's been well worth it. My only complaint is Black&White's idiot failure to have decent shortcut keys make it hard to play with a trackball because of the subtle differences in motions.
Mouse gestures sound cool, but what if you don't have a mouse?
After all what are 7 megapixels and smarts good for if the thing can't help you spot someone atractive, just so long as it learns its' OWNERS preferences, and not some factory default.(shudder)
A minor totaly useless nit, But I think a flash in a disco would just about as noticeable as a beep.
The rest I agree with, too easy to bypass a flash (swap for a resistor would probably do it), and probably not that hard for a beep depending on implentation.
Besides a really clever person could even disguise a digital cam so many ways that the one on his/her phone could be just one of many.
Not entirely, I have such a device where the 'pad' provides power. However it's a Wacom pad and bothe the included pen and mouse are powered by the pad.
In this case it makes sense because it not about being completly wireless per se, but about having the ability to switch between normal mousework and pressure sensitive pen work with a BUNCH of wires or batteries.
Apreciate any clues to make it work. I'm considering checking to see if the install disk can boot, it's possible the live cd is a bit trimmed down as it's labled 'move 1.0 installation cd download edition'.
At least I think the first of the other two cd's is a bootable install disk, it's called 'installation desktop cd 1(x86)'
FWIW I'm running an ASUS A8V Delux with an Athalon64-1500, 1 gig pc3200mem (twox512M), and an AIW Radeon 9600. both optical drives are lite-on dvd burners, one is a dual layer, both on the second ata/ide port and the two hard drives are on the first ata/ide port.
My email is Mycroft1[place the apropriate symbol here]mindspring[dot here]com
By any chance you work for, or othewise have somthing to do with developement, Mandrake or it's intaller,boot? just curious because of the 'at work' context. Of your message.
Worst case senario I intend to eventually (by xmass) have a dedicated linux box based around my old nforce2 MB(AOpen ak97d IIRC). Main reason for buying the cheap box of mandrake was to get a feel for what they've done in the last 8-12 months. That that's all that's readily available around here other than $100 versions of suse and red hat, and the suse being an old version probably as the same 3 boxes have been on the shelf for about a year now.
Thanks again.
Problem is when ALL the console makers are selling thier main consol under cost.
Nintendo crying "but sony is selling at a loss to drive us out of bussiness" won't go far when it's discoverd they are also selling at a loss.
Now they might get somewhere if sony was also giving away the sdk's and selling periphereals so cheap that they obviously were taking a loss across the board from undercutting.
Basically the consols are just ONE part of the whole bussines for consol game systems and the practice of selling that part below cost and making it up and then some through the rest of the system is an industry standard practice.
Not only that, but they really don't make much if any money off of hardware sales. How much has Xbox lost MS sofar? Not shure but it was sold considerably BELOW cost at first.
As the parent suggests they make thier money off of licensing out the right to make games for thier consol and the SDK's and special developer versions of the hardware and so on.
I wouldn't mind if they swapped thier Plan to making money off the hardware and selling thier official seal of aproval on games they felt deserved it.
They could even decide the warrenty may not apply (at thier option of course) if you ran code that had not gotten thier seal of aproval in case it did somthing Bad(tm) to the hardware.
If they did that then they could give away, or sell very cheaply, the sdk's.
However I doubt that would work as a everytime a new generation of consoles came out they would cost almost as much a high end pc. (over $1000 most likely) and the games would still cost $49.99 on up. And not only that the other big console makers would have to switch to that model as well or nobody would buy thiers and the game developer would see that comming and pony up to get sdk's for the 'popular' consoles.
Thanks anyway though. What happens is when I try to boot from the live cd it starts a fairly normal looking Linux boot, then bails with '...process ended abnormaly with message "no screens found"' followed by fairly standard shutdown messages.
The AIW I had was the one before 7500 just plain radeonAIW (7000 I believe, but it was sold and marketed as just ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon).
AMD64 works just fine as a x86 32bit processor and requires nothing to be done to work as such, so this is a non-issue. Especially since it's X bailing because it 'can't find any screens'.
I can understand not getting the AIW functions or 3d accel to work properly, my beef is with it not working at all in beyond basic mode and just bombing out because of it. If a windows installer can work fine starting out with just vga graphics, why can't Mandrake pull it off.
It just seems like they are making assumptions they shouldn't be from the get go. Which is bad since the 8.x and 9.0 had NO problem with my old AIWRadeon for basic graphics support (up to 1024x768 at 32bit that I remember).
The boot system should have a more gracefull handling of X not comming up rather than just shutting down, such as switching to a text mode system to allow you to try and find workable setting or even point it at a driver if you should have one.
I pretty much agree with your assesment. However I've heard of judges with no technical savvy (or worse some but not enough), comming up with some pretty stange rullings in the past and that's really my only equivication here.
A lot of otherwise smart, and sometimes tech savy, people do things that seem rather stupid from a security standpoint. It's usually a matter of social engineering.
Though in this case the odds do seem a bit lower because anyone going to all the trouble to figure out and setup a Linux box for mounting remote windows shares is having to do more work than a few simple click in most cases, the thought and effort one must go through should create a greater inertia to impulse thinking that social engineering often relies on.
Not during DOS attack. It has the potential to used as one, it doesn't need one to work.
Also it doesn't require a man-in-the-middle, that's just one way to do it. The other is if the other machine is malicious or compromised itself.
"With your purchase, you assume all the rights and obligations of the previous license holder. "
Eh no I pay them money for the product they give me. If thier under some obligation that they are supposed to require of any new owner and they fail to secure that before selling the product then they may be liable for breaking thier contract, but I'm not then automatically placed under it just because they didn't fullfil thier obligation.
If things worked your way and I bought a used car and the previous owner lost say wrongfull death suit for running someone over with I'd suddenly be liable for whatever money he still owed from that suit.
"...is like people who think that they will hear clicks on the telephone when the FBI is tapping their phone lines. "
Purely anectedotal, and not really proven, but I think sometimes phonetaps DO have noticeable effects.
Here's the story.
One of my paternal uncles has a fairly high up job as engineer with a certain aerospace company and does work on military aircraft design, exactly what we don't know and he can't and won't say. So it's pretty much a given that he gets 'checked up on' from time to time (IIRC I've been told he signed an agreement or three allowing that sort of thing) to make shure he's not explaining to some other government how build a better plane, or how to get past ours, etc.
And it seems likely they do checks on his family, though probably not as often. In fact it seems likely enough that his brothers and sisters just assume it.Welll one day my dad is talking to one of my uncles(a different one, he's got 7 siblings) and the connection is crap and full of hiss and clicks that usually are not there even though it's 2000miles long distance (perhaps becuase that means it's bounced off a satalite). So my uncle jokes that the 'they're using a crappy wiretap this time, wish they'd fix it' in a fairly dead pan way. My dad opens his mouth to make some comical reply or other when they both hear a couple strong clicks, some odd noise, and then the line goes crystal clear. Spooked them both for a few minutes.
I actually know a place where your computer could be in one State, Keyboard in another, mouse in yet another and you in a fourth. All connected with standard wiring. That could create some interesting jurisdictional issues I would imagine.
However I don't recall any power outlets there, Just some stands selling native jewlery and a large metal & concrete decorative slab.
This is called four corners IIRC, passed through going to California by car over 20 years ago, I was quite young so memory isn't perfect.
Just a place where the borders of four states all meet up.
I wish I could second this (I rather liked Mandrake during the late 8.x and 0.x series), but Mandrake's live cd has failed to work on both systems I've tried it on.
I went throught this before with, IIRC, mandrake 6.x series and 7.x.
This time I suspect it doesn't like my video card* (can't find screen when trying to start X), but with the earlier distro's I would always get a divide by 0 error, and that on four or five machines in a row.
It seems odd they have so much trouble with building a bootloader/installer that can't recover from such errors, in the first case div by zero is simply a very bad sign, and in the second shouldn't it switch to generic vga or even text mode?
My current video card is a Radeon AIW-9600 and was used on both systems as the second try occured after a significant upgrade (new mb,ram,case optical drives and floppy+media reader only hd's,video,audio and powersuply were kept), given the issues surrounding drivers on any recent video card (especialy radeons) it doesn't suprise me X had issues, it does suprise me mandrake didn't think of it.
Well I still have the old mb (nforce2) and case and can probably borrow my brother old nvidia card so I'll likely try again when I turn that into a backup system.
Though if anyone knows how to get it working on my curent system (A8V delux asus mb, 1G ram, Atholon64 3500+, SB Live platinum, and Radeon AIW-9600) I'd listen. but this is someone elses ask slashdot, and to be honest I didn't really dig or try much beyond booting the livecd and watching it crash.
It's no mental block to say I don't see how I'm bound by a contract I'm not party to.
My 'purchase contract' is usually $x for Product Y. They place a product on the shelves and lable it a specific, this is thier offer, by giving them said price (plus any aplicable sales tax) I accept thier offer.
This has NOTHING to do with whatever agreement the product was originaly produced under in relation to me other than if thier sale of it to me violoted thier agreement, but in that case it's thier problem as I am NOT a party to that agreement.
HUH? I'm not shure I follow your reasoning. You seem to be saying I'm bound by a license because of the copying that had to happen for me to be able buy something in the store?
I didn't make that copy therefore anything agreed to in order to poduce that copy is between the rights holder and the person making the copy, NOT me. I had no involvement and am not a party to the creation of that copy, only in the purchase of it (assuming a purchase and not a gift by eigther the rights holder or a third party, but that's likely tangential anyway).
If you meant something else I'm sorry but I completly missed it.
I think perhaps they intend to prevent someone with a patent from adding a pattened algorithym/piece of code to a GPL'd piece of software, waiting till it gets popular, then charging royalties for the patent.
By adding somthing like 'if you creative a derived work or release a work under the gpl you agree that you also give free license use/modify/redistribut to any patents you own or controll to those that recieve said work or otherwise have right to said work under the gpl' by somthing like I mean somthing written in proper leagalise and that would actually work as IANAL and don't know how to actually word such a thing.
As it currently stands it might be possible for evil person/corop x to submarine patened functionality into some popular gpl'd work.
Slashdot Mirror
The Price is what I don't entirely understand. Shure when the tech was new I could see it, but what the heck causes them to cost so much. Mine is only 4"x6" in active area. That's about $4 per square inch!
Hmm, I'm gonna have to see if I can find more about how they work. 256 pressure levels, dunno what the x,y resolution is though. It can differentiate wich end of the pen is in use, and the pen has a two way button, but it feels like a plastic toy and ways almost nothing.
I'd guesse somthing like how RFID tags work, only a bit more complex.
Mycroft
You must have one that actually shuts the damn light off, My brother was looking at cordless mice/keyboard combo's and though I tried to convince him to get the logitec set (slightly cheaper, less 'eye-candy' crap) he insisted on the MS pair because 'windows is so unreliable I don't want to give it any more excuse than I have to. I expect microsoft would at least support thier own hardware right'. (I dunno how I kept from laughing myself sensless at that gem)
Needless to say the thing is a pos, takes 2 minutes if you switch channels because of inerference to find one it can use (and of course you have NO mouse or keyboard during that time) and it needs the batteries replace every 3-4 weeks because it keeps the bright red led lit 24/7.
Mycroft
The 'old white design' for the Trackman with the thumb ball is indeed very good. I bought one when they were $70+ and this thing has survived so many 2'-4' falls(I got it for lack of space, and still manage to add enough clutter to knock it off) over the years (2-3 I forget) without a hitch I'm just amazed. It's got two buttons and a clickable wheel that works as a middle button with OS's that actually understand such for more than panning web pages. I'm quite happy with it.
But you do have a valid point about the awkwardness at first, not mention the sore thumb muscles at first, but it's been well worth it. My only complaint is Black&White's idiot failure to have decent shortcut keys make it hard to play with a trackball because of the subtle differences in motions.
Mouse gestures sound cool, but what if you don't have a mouse?
Mycroft
I believe that is being corrected as we type. Shareaza was opensourced (GPL) as of version2.0 so it's just a matter of time and coder effort.
Mycroft
After all what are 7 megapixels and smarts good for if the thing can't help you spot someone atractive, just so long as it learns its' OWNERS preferences, and not some factory default.(shudder)
Mycroft
A minor totaly useless nit, But I think a flash in a disco would just about as noticeable as a beep.
The rest I agree with, too easy to bypass a flash (swap for a resistor would probably do it), and probably not that hard for a beep depending on implentation.
Besides a really clever person could even disguise a digital cam so many ways that the one on his/her phone could be just one of many.
Mycroft
I should hope it's cheaper, this wacom pad cost $100. Was an impulse buy of the sort I rarely engage in these days.
Mycroft
Not entirely, I have such a device where the 'pad' provides power. However it's a Wacom pad and bothe the included pen and mouse are powered by the pad.
In this case it makes sense because it not about being completly wireless per se, but about having the ability to switch between normal mousework and pressure sensitive pen work with a BUNCH of wires or batteries.
Mycroft
Apreciate any clues to make it work. I'm considering checking to see if the install disk can boot, it's possible the live cd is a bit trimmed down as it's labled 'move 1.0 installation cd download edition'.
At least I think the first of the other two cd's is a bootable install disk, it's called 'installation desktop cd 1(x86)'
FWIW I'm running an ASUS A8V Delux with an Athalon64-1500, 1 gig pc3200mem (twox512M), and an AIW Radeon 9600. both optical drives are lite-on dvd burners, one is a dual layer, both on the second ata/ide port and the two hard drives are on the first ata/ide port.
My email is Mycroft1[place the apropriate symbol here]mindspring[dot here]com
By any chance you work for, or othewise have somthing to do with developement, Mandrake or it's intaller,boot? just curious because of the 'at work' context. Of your message.
Worst case senario I intend to eventually (by xmass) have a dedicated linux box based around my old nforce2 MB(AOpen ak97d IIRC). Main reason for buying the cheap box of mandrake was to get a feel for what they've done in the last 8-12 months. That that's all that's readily available around here other than $100 versions of suse and red hat, and the suse being an old version probably as the same 3 boxes have been on the shelf for about a year now.
Thanks again.
Mycroft
Problem is when ALL the console makers are selling thier main consol under cost.
Nintendo crying "but sony is selling at a loss to drive us out of bussiness" won't go far when it's discoverd they are also selling at a loss.
Now they might get somewhere if sony was also giving away the sdk's and selling periphereals so cheap that they obviously were taking a loss across the board from undercutting.
Basically the consols are just ONE part of the whole bussines for consol game systems and the practice of selling that part below cost and making it up and then some through the rest of the system is an industry standard practice.
Mycroft
Not only that, but they really don't make much if any money off of hardware sales. How much has Xbox lost MS sofar? Not shure but it was sold considerably BELOW cost at first.
As the parent suggests they make thier money off of licensing out the right to make games for thier consol and the SDK's and special developer versions of the hardware and so on.
I wouldn't mind if they swapped thier Plan to making money off the hardware and selling thier official seal of aproval on games they felt deserved it.
They could even decide the warrenty may not apply (at thier option of course) if you ran code that had not gotten thier seal of aproval in case it did somthing Bad(tm) to the hardware.
If they did that then they could give away, or sell very cheaply, the sdk's.
However I doubt that would work as a everytime a new generation of consoles came out they would cost almost as much a high end pc. (over $1000 most likely) and the games would still cost $49.99 on up. And not only that the other big console makers would have to switch to that model as well or nobody would buy thiers and the game developer would see that comming and pony up to get sdk's for the 'popular' consoles.
Mycroft
Thanks anyway though. What happens is when I try to boot from the live cd it starts a fairly normal looking Linux boot, then bails with '...process ended abnormaly with message "no screens found"' followed by fairly standard shutdown messages.
The AIW I had was the one before 7500 just plain radeonAIW (7000 I believe, but it was sold and marketed as just ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon).
Mycroft
BTW &FWIW it also failed to boot on a sytem running an Athalon xp 2600+, which lacks the 64bit functionality of the A64 system.
Mycroft
AMD64 works just fine as a x86 32bit processor and requires nothing to be done to work as such, so this is a non-issue. Especially since it's X bailing because it 'can't find any screens'.
Mycroft
I can understand not getting the AIW functions or 3d accel to work properly, my beef is with it not working at all in beyond basic mode and just bombing out because of it. If a windows installer can work fine starting out with just vga graphics, why can't Mandrake pull it off.
It just seems like they are making assumptions they shouldn't be from the get go. Which is bad since the 8.x and 9.0 had NO problem with my old AIWRadeon for basic graphics support (up to 1024x768 at 32bit that I remember).
The boot system should have a more gracefull handling of X not comming up rather than just shutting down, such as switching to a text mode system to allow you to try and find workable setting or even point it at a driver if you should have one.
Mycroft
I pretty much agree with your assesment. However I've heard of judges with no technical savvy (or worse some but not enough), comming up with some pretty stange rullings in the past and that's really my only equivication here.
Mcyroft
A lot of otherwise smart, and sometimes tech savy, people do things that seem rather stupid from a security standpoint. It's usually a matter of social engineering.
Though in this case the odds do seem a bit lower because anyone going to all the trouble to figure out and setup a Linux box for mounting remote windows shares is having to do more work than a few simple click in most cases, the thought and effort one must go through should create a greater inertia to impulse thinking that social engineering often relies on.
Mycroft
Not during DOS attack. It has the potential to used as one, it doesn't need one to work.
Also it doesn't require a man-in-the-middle, that's just one way to do it. The other is if the other machine is malicious or compromised itself.
Mycroft
"With your purchase, you assume all the rights and obligations of the previous license holder. "
Eh no I pay them money for the product they give me. If thier under some obligation that they are supposed to require of any new owner and they fail to secure that before selling the product then they may be liable for breaking thier contract, but I'm not then automatically placed under it just because they didn't fullfil thier obligation.
If things worked your way and I bought a used car and the previous owner lost say wrongfull death suit for running someone over with I'd suddenly be liable for whatever money he still owed from that suit.
Mycroft
"...is like people who think that they will hear clicks on the telephone when the FBI is tapping their phone lines. "
Purely anectedotal, and not really proven, but I think sometimes phonetaps DO have noticeable effects.
Here's the story.
One of my paternal uncles has a fairly high up job as engineer with a certain aerospace company and does work on military aircraft design, exactly what we don't know and he can't and won't say. So it's pretty much a given that he gets 'checked up on' from time to time (IIRC I've been told he signed an agreement or three allowing that sort of thing) to make shure he's not explaining to some other government how build a better plane, or how to get past ours, etc.
And it seems likely they do checks on his family, though probably not as often. In fact it seems likely enough that his brothers and sisters just assume it.Welll one day my dad is talking to one of my uncles(a different one, he's got 7 siblings) and the connection is crap and full of hiss and clicks that usually are not there even though it's 2000miles long distance (perhaps becuase that means it's bounced off a satalite). So my uncle jokes that the 'they're using a crappy wiretap this time, wish they'd fix it' in a fairly dead pan way. My dad opens his mouth to make some comical reply or other when they both hear a couple strong clicks, some odd noise, and then the line goes crystal clear. Spooked them both for a few minutes.
Mycroft
I actually know a place where your computer could be in one State, Keyboard in another, mouse in yet another and you in a fourth. All connected with standard wiring. That could create some interesting jurisdictional issues I would imagine.
However I don't recall any power outlets there, Just some stands selling native jewlery and a large metal & concrete decorative slab.
This is called four corners IIRC, passed through going to California by car over 20 years ago, I was quite young so memory isn't perfect.
Just a place where the borders of four states all meet up.
Mycroft
I wish I could second this (I rather liked Mandrake during the late 8.x and 0.x series), but Mandrake's live cd has failed to work on both systems I've tried it on.
I went throught this before with, IIRC, mandrake 6.x series and 7.x.
This time I suspect it doesn't like my video card* (can't find screen when trying to start X), but with the earlier distro's I would always get a divide by 0 error, and that on four or five machines in a row.
It seems odd they have so much trouble with building a bootloader/installer that can't recover from such errors, in the first case div by zero is simply a very bad sign, and in the second shouldn't it switch to generic vga or even text mode?
My current video card is a Radeon AIW-9600 and was used on both systems as the second try occured after a significant upgrade (new mb,ram,case optical drives and floppy+media reader only hd's,video,audio and powersuply were kept), given the issues surrounding drivers on any recent video card (especialy radeons) it doesn't suprise me X had issues, it does suprise me mandrake didn't think of it.
Well I still have the old mb (nforce2) and case and can probably borrow my brother old nvidia card so I'll likely try again when I turn that into a backup system.
Though if anyone knows how to get it working on my curent system (A8V delux asus mb, 1G ram, Atholon64 3500+, SB Live platinum, and Radeon AIW-9600) I'd listen. but this is someone elses ask slashdot, and to be honest I didn't really dig or try much beyond booting the livecd and watching it crash.
Mycroft
It's no mental block to say I don't see how I'm bound by a contract I'm not party to.
My 'purchase contract' is usually $x for Product Y. They place a product on the shelves and lable it a specific, this is thier offer, by giving them said price (plus any aplicable sales tax) I accept thier offer.
This has NOTHING to do with whatever agreement the product was originaly produced under in relation to me other than if thier sale of it to me violoted thier agreement, but in that case it's thier problem as I am NOT a party to that agreement.
Mycroft
HUH? I'm not shure I follow your reasoning. You seem to be saying I'm bound by a license because of the copying that had to happen for me to be able buy something in the store?
I didn't make that copy therefore anything agreed to in order to poduce that copy is between the rights holder and the person making the copy, NOT me. I had no involvement and am not a party to the creation of that copy, only in the purchase of it (assuming a purchase and not a gift by eigther the rights holder or a third party, but that's likely tangential anyway).
If you meant something else I'm sorry but I completly missed it.
Mycroft
I think perhaps they intend to prevent someone with a patent from adding a pattened algorithym/piece of code to a GPL'd piece of software, waiting till it gets popular, then charging royalties for the patent.
By adding somthing like 'if you creative a derived work or release a work under the gpl you agree that you also give free license use/modify/redistribut to any patents you own or controll to those that recieve said work or otherwise have right to said work under the gpl' by somthing like I mean somthing written in proper leagalise and that would actually work as IANAL and don't know how to actually word such a thing.
As it currently stands it might be possible for evil person/corop x to submarine patened functionality into some popular gpl'd work.
Mycroft