Not only can you obtain MAME ROMS, but you can get all the ROMS for all your old systems. I was able to ressurect my Intellivision, Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, MS-PacMan Machine, and Nintendo 64 on my PC.
I thought about putting together a project to contact all the ROM license holders and see how much they would want for the copyrights. We (the collective we) would then all contribute to a fund that would be used to buy the licenses and place them into the Public Domain. I personally contacted a few license holders and the response was quite negative.
It seems that the large corporations which own the licenses and copyrights don't want us emulating old games, but instead want us to go buy NEW game systems. They aren't the most nostalgic bunch and I am glad that all these old treasures have been preserved through emulators.
Fast Forwarding, you can play MAME on XBOX now:) Imagine every arcade console game ever made burned onto a single DVD. This would be the killer XBOX app! Bill has got the money to make it happen. It could be his gift to the world, but we will never see it.
As a technologist, computer nerd, and person that likes to promote technology for the sake of technology. I would like to step forward and shout, "More Technology is not the Solution to Terrorism". Osama's terrorist network used sneakernet to move bits of paper and some cash around via courier. Until we develop a computer capabable of monitoring sneakernet, we aren't going to catch guys like Osama.
In the end, you amass so much data that it is impossible to analyze. Just like in movie Office Space, you can generate graphs, statistics, and reports, but who is going to read them all?
Imagine if we invested the same amount of money into anti-terrorism training for people instead of harddrives, computers, and paper. The best supercomputer in which to invest money to stop terrorism is the human mind. Also, the human supercomputer does a must better job with face recognition.
Give me a rocket launcher please....
on
Landshark
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Each year, I take a couple of weeks off and leave the madness of the rat race behind. I arrive at the beach early and setup my beach umbrellas and sand chairs. The goal is to do nothing but squish my toes in the sand and watch the puffy white clouds against the clear blue sky for a single day.
Every year as mid day approaches so do the loud annoying jet skis and their idiot riders who can't seem to follow simple rules like, stay out of the swimming zone and don't get drunk and ride your jet ski. Do they even put mufflers on these annoying devices?
My attempt to clear my mind turns to thoughts of "jet ski seeking rocket lauchers". I hate these things and now I find that they are just going to get bigger, louder, and even more obnoxious.
Next year I have to find a "jet-ski" free lake, if there is such a thing.
Let's suppose you go out a customizable, supported commercial software system. Further, let's assume the implementation is a wild success.
Let's suppose you want to build on your prior success and repeat it. You bring in a second vendor and explain that the *NEW* system you are about to purchase must interface with the old system. The vendor offers to create an interface for a nominal charge. Let's assume this is a wild success.
Life is great, all your systems are stable, customized and interfaced. Remember, that no system is an island and has to join the enterprise sooner or later.
--- Time Passes ----
You are walking down the hall with a bounce in your step and head to your mailbox box, where you find a letter from the first vendor. The letter explains that your current product, which is running so well has been deprecated and will be desupported at the end of the year. You think, no problem, we'll just upgrade.
A few days later you get a similar letter from the second vendor, the dreaded "DESUPPORT NOTICE". Ok, now your starting to sweat, your world is in need of upgrading and then, you remember the interface that ties both successful system together.
You go back to your office and fumble for business cards and try to contact the sales guys who sold you this stuff, however the area codes are now different and either none of the sales guys still work at the same company or have been transferred to another territory. This prevents customers from forming long term relationships with salemen. Why do they do this??? I don't know.
You finally find the new sales reps and setup meetings. They explain that the product has changed and so has the licensing. They also explain you will need to upgrade your hardware, O/S, and backend database for the new verion to work. As for the interface that ties the two togehter, that becomes a major problem and the source of many meetings. Finally, you get a quote and the cost to upgrade the interface is astronomical.
Now you are stuck. You can't just upgrade one half. You are deprecated and desupported, but still have to pay for support or you will have to rebuy the software if you ever upgrade. Vendors will typically refuse you upgrades if you let support lapse and will make you repurchase it all over again.
Your options are to: 1. rewrite the interface inhouse 2. pay the ransom 3. don't upgrade 4. reimplement both systems all over again with new products and this time add language to the contract about the interface and upgrades
How many people has this happened to? Raise your hand high in the air. Yes, I see you!
One of the MANY, MANY, MANY things I like about OSS is that I can go at my own pace. No one is putting a gun to my head saying, UPGRADE OR DIE!
If I create dependencies, I make sure I can upgrade one half at a time, instead of multvendor "BIG BANG" upgrades/implementations. Ask Hershey how much their "BIG BANG" multivendor SAP implementation cost them.
When you buy commercial software, you get on the upgrade treadmill and you have NO CONTROL. Also, when you run into a bug and call support, the answer is ALWAYS, "You need to upgrade to the next version". My answer is "No, I am paying for support, so fix the DARN BUG" and they drag their feet and eventually mail me a "Desupport Notice".
Now, let's talk about customizations and backward compatibility. OSS, especially PERL has AMAZING backward compatibility which is NOT found in most commercial products. I've taken large PERL web applications and moved them forward in time about 5 years and they ALL WORKED! Try that with Microsoft Visual Whatever or Java. I get so sick of reading, this function/feature/method was deprecated in version x.1 and of course you are installing x.2.......
I don't know what you are developing, so it is hard to give specific advice, but remember to use the right tool for the job, get training, and decide how fast you are willing to upgrade before you plunk down money with a vendor, since staying one release in front of being desupported will be part of your new job description.
Sometimes I joke with my team and ask, "What is it we do again????"... "Oh yeah I remember, we upgrade."...
So instead of spending all my time reading mail lists and developing new useful stuff, I can spend my valuable time upgrading and utilizing the support resources I pay for, since I am going to need them when I hit a bump in the upgrade process. Also, vendors will gladly sell you "upgrade consulting" services, but won't actually do the upgrade for you, they just consult you know.
* M$ Active Directory is LDAP! * NDS v4.0 is LDAP! * Slapd is LDAP! * Netscape Directory Server is LDAP!
And they all work with nearly every LDAP client, including Mac's and the Mozilla browser.
* Slurpd is not LDAP, but likes to consume LDAP information. * Who'sYourDaddy_d and SayMyName_d are not part of Open LDAP, but should be:) * PerLDAP is not LDAP, but is great for doing LDAP programming.
Now for my Microsoft RANT. Yep, M$ stole LDAP and renamed it Active Directory Services. It appears that no matter how much money M$ seems to amass, they just can't seem to buy a clue and come up with a good idea on their own. It's the same old "embrace and extend" commodity protocols which now seems to be their only strategy.
Also, Microsoft products will read LDIF (LDAP Interchange File), but amazingly enough, M$ products won't write an LDIF file. Yes, you can check in anytime you want, but you can never LEAVE!
Lastly, I tried to use Outlook with OpenLDAP and it crashed (the only client to crash). The only option on my pick list is Microsoft LDAP server. Hmmmmm... what exactly is a Microsoft LDAP server? If anyone finds one of these let me know, I want to see if it can make an LDIF file. However, I could care since, I use Mozilla exclusively as my browser now.
And for anyone out there wanting to implement LDAP, I suggest you do two things...
1. Read the RFC's (they helped me immensely) 2. Get the book, "Implementing LDAP" by wrox.com
One component that seems to be missing in the whole Open Source realm is hardware control. I wonder if it would be viable or even possible for the Open Source community to co-develop, or at least be able to provide specifications to hardware manufacturers.
Many hardware vendors are finally waking up and embracing Open Source, e.g. (3ware, Adaptec, Intel, AMD), but it seems as if the community is always fighting with hardware. If worst came to worst, we could all boycott a particular vendor and pledge as a community to buy non DRM (Digital Restrictions Managemet) devices from a competitor in volume.
After all, DRM is NOT LAW! (Well at least not until Microsoft donates $20,000 to a couple of congressional campaigns).
Open Source should have Open Hardware!
Also, I am not worrying too much about Palladium or other "copy protection" type devices. They will be defeated just like every other type of "copy protection" that has ever been invented. In fact reverse engineering Palladium in compliance with the DMCA will probably be a sourceforge project.
Many of you may be wondering, why ALSA made front page news. There are several reasons:
1. ALSA sound drivers are nearly impossible to install. 2. If you want to turn your Linux box into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) ala TiVo, then you need the alsa drivers and the stuff from the GATOS project.
(See) http://gatos.sourceforge.net/overview.php
I am glad that someone posted the HOW-TO... Alsa has been a big thorn in my side for awhile now. Maybe now I can get the ALSA-Mixer working properly.
- There's More Than One Way To Do It - poor sandboxing, easy to screw up server - wasn't designed as web scripting language
Whoever tells Larry that PERL was rejected, please be gentle since he isn't done with the next PERL rewrite yet and this might cause unintended consequences. Better yet, just wait until the next version is out before you break the news that Y! rejected PERL for PHP.
Kmart said the sale included one server license and 25 desktop licenses it bought from Microsoft.
All this over 25 licenses? Who cares about 25 licenses? This isn't even worth the "evil lawyers" fees?
There has got to be more to this story. Maybe Microsoft legal just sends out a boilerplate document and objects to any and all Chapter 11 filings. I'd like to know more about this story if anyone has more details.
Stories like this are great to save in my file and drag out for the next Open Source vs. Proprietary Software license debate.
Perl is NOT as fast as 'C', but there are quite a fews to make PERL faster...
1. Use MOD_PERL
2. For repetitive tasks, e.g. Email Scanning for SPAM, daemonize your PERL and write a small 'C' client to talk to it.
PERL is an interpreted language, so each time you fire up a script it there is a lot of overhead and PERL has a pretty hefty memory foot print (4-5 MB) on avg per script.
All that being said, remember to use the right tool for the job or the right combinations of tools. IMHO, C and PERL make an unstoppable tag team. PERL is the "swiss army chainsaw" of languages and is great for matching patterns, writing web backends, XML, manipulating data streams, talking to databases, sending email, interacting with LDAP. PERL is my current language of choice, just because I can be very productive, very quickly and there are volumes of programming examples of how to solve a problem at least 20 different ways.
This is probably heresy, but I actually prefer PERL over JAVA,
One other nice thing about PERL is that the backward compatbility is incredible. Recently I had to migrate a bunch of apps from SCO to Linux/Solaris. By merely changing the path to the PERL executable, ALL the PERL scripts ran fine. This was roughly a 5 year jump in time, try that with 'C', Java, or a Microsoft language.
I can't say enough about the power, flexibility, and documentation. If all other programming languages vanished and we were left with 'C/C++' and PERL I think we would survive just fine. Actually, I might need to keep TCL and SQL too:)
Even if this were the case (which it is not) the current system is to reject ALL the kids. Bright kid from a lousy neighborhood with poor parents and a lousy school - "well sorry kid you have to fail with the school because if we let you go to a decent school it wouldn't be fair to that kid that beats you up every day. You want to go to that nice private school across town? - that's only for rich kids, poor kids have to go here. Oh where do MY kids go, well I commuted in to give you this message, my kids are going to a nice school in the suburbs". As you said - Nice!
The "nice" was meant to be sarcastic. As in, "yes" we will give you a voucher, but it geographically unworkable for you. Many cities, especially Detroit, don't have decent mass transportation, thus it would impossible for kids to use their vouchers. The geography creates a barrier that can't be easily overcome.
And as for the picking teachers, give me a break. How would you like to trade your current salary for a teachers salary? Additionally, teachers are "always on", every minute they are in the classroom. With private sector jobs, you can sluff-off, congregate at the water cooler, and get a nice big fat check at the end of the week.
Most teachers I know are both caring and compotent. However the amount of administrivia required by teachers is sickening. For example, teachers all have email so that School Board Administration can contact them with the latest useless form they need to fill out. Classrooms now have phones, so that the administration or parents can call anytime. Additionally, "kids have rights" and kids know it, which makes discipline a lot tougher than a "swat on the bum".
Teachers need to spend their precious time on teaching and not babby sitting, collecting lunch money, or other administrivia BS that does not directly benefit the education experience.
Anyone who thinks it's easy and piece of cake ought to give it a try and make your "HOW-TO" video tape available. Our society could benefit from it greatly. Perhaps start with a 1st grade elementary classroom in the innercity and show us how to get all those kids reading at 1st grade level by the time they leave.
We need more teachers, smaller class sizes, and better parents.
You don't know jack about inner-city schools. The problem isn't vouchers, the problems are
1. No one wants to teach there. 2. No one wants to go to school there. 3. No one wants to live there.
In Detroit, substitute teachers get FULL health coverage (and of course Kevlar vests). The current daily substitute count is about 2,000.
As for vouchers, schools of choice, charter schools. How does this help the inner-city? Are parents going to drive their kids to the good schools in the subburbs every morning? Maybe you'd be kind enough to start a bus service.
What about reinventing education with charter schools? Charter schools have proven to be a total failure and that fact is proven out with test scores?
What about "schools of choice"? This is a fancy way of saying, we want to take our tax dollars and fund exclusive private schools that our kids go to. Also, the exclusive private schools don't have to take problem kids or handicapped kids and reserve the right to boot anyone they want back to public schools. So we get the money and the best kids, and you can turn your public school into a home for all the people we reject. Nice!
If you have an answer I'd like to hear it. The only solutions I can see are:
1. We need a lot more giving caring teacher in the innercity. 2. The innercity needs to stop having more children than they can properly parent. 3. The republicans need to stop trying to rape all the money out of public education so they can go fund "star wars" or "bombing Iraq".
Lastly, packing in bodies has nothing to do with Federal FUNDS. The reason bodies are packed in is because THERE AREN'T ENOUGH TEACHERS IN THE INNER-CITY, so class sizes grow HUGE! I am sure Deroit would love to have 15 kids per class in the lower elementary, but guess what.. there aren't enough teachers! Additionally, the Feds and State are going to pay out no matter where that kid ends up.
My apologies to the NON-Americans out there, but this offtopic post was neccessary.
Don't forget that once you have distributed your software over the Internet to an untrustworthy, evil user, s/he is going to give it away for free. S/he is going to start buring illegal copies of the software he downloaded for all his friends and will probably download it right into his P2P upload directory.
After the Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) is complete, the user has to get through the EULA so he can install it.
Just who are you going to get to write that EULA?
Might I humbly suggest,
http://www.evil-lawyers-who-write-eulas.com
These guys specialize in incomprehensible leagaleze and by the time they are done, your EULA will stand a proud 250 lines long and allow you to have your way with both the user of your software and his/her computer.
I think we all agree that a culture is defined by its arts, music, and literature. Why couldn't we come up with a system where all funding for the arts and music came from:
a) Tax dollars and/or b) Private Donations / Sponsorships
- All movie theatres could turn into dollar shows, since the Hollywood ticket tax would be over. - All cable/satellite channels would be FREE. - All downloads of movies, music, and literature would be FREE
Statistics could be collected on downloads, movie theatre attendance, movie rentals, cable box feedback and then, the content providers would be paid their fair percentage quarterly based on eyeballs or earbrums. Finally, a true democratic approach to voting for content, with a socialist funding strategy. Just call me a centrist!
Think of the time, effort, and money that could be saved. The FBI wouldn't have to waste it's time on tracking down pirate distribution groups and could spend more time on real crime. Content providers would be encouraged to create both quantity and quality. The more you pumped out, the better your chances of getting a bigger piece of the pie. And lawyers, would have to go find something else to do with their time instead of threatening ISP's and P2P networks. There's always patent law.
All the useless middlemen would disappear (Bye Bye SONY), and money could go directly to content providers, except for movies which would still require a studio house. New copy protection technolgies wouldn't have to constantly be developed to protect media, and the global piracy business would be put out of business.
I am still not sure how to handle Software and Sporting events. Maybe Open Source will win out and sports will finally fade away, so NHl/NBA games will stop pre-empting "Enterprise's" time slot.
We can all see the current content delivery system is close to self self-destruction, but meanwhile we will all have to suffer with half-baked copy-protection and ill conceived laws.
We need some post-moderism in content creation, delivery, and royalty payments or it's going to be ugly for a long, long time.
You can stick a parallel to serial adapter on an IDE drive, reduce the cable size, but it's still a crappy IDE drive.
If IDE hardware developers read slashdot, here is a list of IDE problems I'd like to see fixed.
1. You can't HOTSWAP an IDE drive without risking blowing your drive, crontroller, or upsetting the powersupply. 2. You can't WARMSWAP an IDE drive, without risking blowing your drive, controller, or upsetting your powersupply. 3. IDE still only supports 2, yes 2 drivers per controller, which makes it impossible to do hardware RAID-5. That leaves us with software RAID-5 as our only option. 4. IDE cables can only stretch so far, so even if you could somehow manage to get 8 IDE controllers into a box, for a total of 16 drives, there would still be cable length issues. I think 1 m is max. We need differential IDE:) 5. IDE drives are just now able to verify data integrity, but thats good since we can start using IDE drives in servers that don't need 100% uptime. 6. ATA/100 Round IDE cables are already available. In fact I just ordered some that have a UV reflective coating for my next case mod which features a black light. Airflow isn't a big issue, in fact Compaq has been slicing up IDE cables for a long time now to increase airflow. 7. The SUSTAINED TRANSFER WRITE RATE of IDE drives is still not fast enough to store uncompressed NTSC video at 60 frames per second, or store high bandwidth Satellite streams. 8a. Size increase (GB's) are not keeping pace with read/write access speeds and simply adding cache RAM and tweaking seek algorithms isn't going to remedy this problem. 8b. As, internal volatile write caches grow larger, the risk of uncommitted writes being lost in a power outage or crash increases.
If serial ATA would let me connect 4 drives per controller, I might start getting excited. If I could start "hot swapping" IDE drives, I would get really excited.
However, going from "flat to round" and "parallel to serial" is about as exciting as Windows XP compared to Windows 2000. It does the same thing, only slightly different. Actually in the case of Windows XP, thats not true, since Windows XP is missing device drivers for older Digital Cameras, Scanners, Modems, Video Cards etc... but assuming you could still use all your exiting hardware it would be about that exciting.
However, I try to throw some cash Red Hat's way every now and then so they keep making distros.
Assume your cluster costs $50,000 to build (including the Giga-bit ethernet gear), you are only going to pay $l000 or less for the O/S.
That's a great deal and a half. Also, that paultry $1,000 investment keeps you in patches plus, gets your a year of email install/configuration tech support.
The application itself if not going to run on the cluster. The cluster is simply going to be used as a "compute farm" for solving the datasets and models produced by the application.
This is similar to what is happening in the animation industry. The LINUX boxes are simply going to "crunch" the numbers and feed the results back to an application running under Windows or high end UNIX workstations.
For a cheap "compute farm" cluster, you can't beat Red Hat Advanced Server with Xenon's.
We are planning to build a 16 node cluster next year for the same purpose as Chrysler. Again, the apps aren't running here, LS-Dyna, DynaForm, Hypermesh, FEMB etc... will still all run on a UNIX/Windows workstation, but the solving will be done (very quickly) on a Red Hat cluster.
Do you really think Microsoft cares or reads./ ?
They probably block it on their proxy server since it would dishearten all their employees and create morale issues.
Also,./ would be filled with more whining, e.g.
"I don't understand, we are just trying to make great software. Why do they hate us so much?"
1. Will turning Palladium "off" ALWAYS be an option in the future?
2. What is plan "B" for a TPA (trusted computing architecture) when Palladium hardware security is defeated and anyone can run bogus signed code?
( I secretly want them to answer "Why, that's impossible, no one could ever break Palladium." )
* The Titanic was an UNSINKABLE ship! *
Re:Translation wanted -- From a recovering EQ'er
on
Unmaking The Game
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here is the translation:
Velious is an EQ expansion pack. Each time Sony develops another part of the EQ world, they charge everybody $39.95 for the expansion pack, in addition to the $9.89 monthly fee. Think of it as add-on pack.
Lower Guk is the name of a zone. The EQ world is divided into zones. This cuts down on network traffic and server crashes. If everyone piled into the same zone, imagine the network traffic from updates, and people sending broadcast messages called "shouts" constantly. Velious added more "zones" to the EQ world.
The "fugi camp" is where a certain MOB (in game monster or creature) spawns (appears). Some MOB's are very rare and only occur once every two weeks or so. I think it's probability based. Anyway, if you want a particular item and don't want to spend all your hard earned cash, you have to wait and wait and wait and wait. When it finally spawns you and your buddies kill it and hope it has the item. In this case the item is a "fungi tunic" which I believe has regenerative powers. That means it heals you when you get beat up in battle. The word "lore" means that you can only have one in your possession at a time. In the U.S. a wife can be considered a "lore" item, since you can only have one. This is an attempt to keep the hardcore players from harvesting all the good items. The theory is once they get their "Fungi Tunic" they'll go try to get something else, since they can only have one.
The guys in this post weren't interested in the tunic for themselves, they just wanted to get them and sell them for the PP (platinumn) which is the form of currency used in EQ.
If you need to know anything else, let me know.. I had to quit, it was runing my life. The game is highly addictive and the longer you play the harder it is to make any progress. If you are a person who like to "WIN" video games, don't ever start playing EQ, it's IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!
The game has ruined many a marriage and cost many a geek their job. It is worse than crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it looks cool, but how hackable is this thing?
Can I interface it to my Linux box to get real time pics to my websever?
I want Linux compatible consumer electronics. I am sick of building my own!
mame.dk, never heard of them.
:) Imagine every arcade console game ever made burned onto a single DVD. This would be the killer XBOX app! Bill has got the money to make it happen. It could be his gift to the world, but we will never see it.
However I have heard of the MAME burners, The Tombstone Project, and Rom-Mania!.
Not only can you obtain MAME ROMS, but you can get all the ROMS for all your old systems. I was able to ressurect my Intellivision, Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, MS-PacMan Machine, and Nintendo 64 on my PC.
I thought about putting together a project to contact all the ROM license holders and see how much they would want for the copyrights. We (the collective we) would then all contribute to a fund that would be used to buy the licenses and place them into the Public Domain. I personally contacted a few license holders and the response was quite negative.
It seems that the large corporations which own the licenses and copyrights don't want us emulating old games, but instead want us to go buy NEW game systems. They aren't the most nostalgic bunch and I am glad that all these old treasures have been preserved through emulators.
Fast Forwarding, you can play MAME on XBOX now
Offtopic, regarding your .sig
"Shop Smart. Shop SMART!"
I just watched "Army of Darkness" for the first time tonight and thought it was funny and ok, but how did this move get "cult" status?
As a technologist, computer nerd, and person that likes to promote technology for the sake of technology. I would like to step forward and shout, "More Technology is not the Solution to Terrorism". Osama's terrorist network used sneakernet to move bits of paper and some cash around via courier. Until we develop a computer capabable of monitoring sneakernet, we aren't going to catch guys like Osama.
In the end, you amass so much data that it is impossible to analyze. Just like in movie Office Space, you can generate graphs, statistics, and reports, but who is going to read them all?
Imagine if we invested the same amount of money into anti-terrorism training for people instead of harddrives, computers, and paper. The best supercomputer in which to invest money to stop terrorism is the human mind. Also, the human supercomputer does a must better job with face recognition.
Each year, I take a couple of weeks off and leave the madness of the rat race behind. I arrive at the beach early and setup my beach umbrellas and sand chairs. The goal is to do nothing but squish my toes in the sand and watch the puffy white clouds against the clear blue sky for a single day.
Every year as mid day approaches so do the loud annoying jet skis and their idiot riders who can't seem to follow simple rules like, stay out of the swimming zone and don't get drunk and ride your jet ski. Do they even put mufflers on these annoying devices?
My attempt to clear my mind turns to thoughts of "jet ski seeking rocket lauchers". I hate these things and now I find that they are just going to get bigger, louder, and even more obnoxious.
Next year I have to find a "jet-ski" free lake, if there is such a thing.
Let's suppose you go out a customizable, supported commercial software system. Further, let's assume the implementation is a wild success.
.......
... "Oh yeah I remember, we upgrade."...
Let's suppose you want to build on your prior success and repeat it. You bring in a second vendor and explain that the *NEW* system you are about to purchase must interface with the old system. The vendor offers to create an interface for a nominal charge. Let's assume this is a wild success.
Life is great, all your systems are stable, customized and interfaced. Remember, that no system is an island and has to join the enterprise sooner or later.
--- Time Passes ----
You are walking down the hall with a bounce in your step and head to your mailbox box, where you find a letter from the first vendor. The letter explains that your current product, which is running so well has been deprecated and will be desupported at the end of the year. You think, no problem, we'll just upgrade.
A few days later you get a similar letter from the second vendor, the dreaded "DESUPPORT NOTICE". Ok, now your starting to sweat, your world is in need of upgrading and then, you remember the interface that ties both successful system together.
You go back to your office and fumble for business cards and try to contact the sales guys who sold you this stuff, however the area codes are now different and either none of the sales guys still work at the same company or have been transferred to another territory. This prevents customers from forming long term relationships with salemen. Why do they do this??? I don't know.
You finally find the new sales reps and setup meetings. They explain that the product has changed and so has the licensing. They also explain you will need to upgrade your hardware, O/S, and backend database for the new verion to work. As for the interface that ties the two togehter, that becomes a major problem and the source of many meetings. Finally, you get a quote and the cost to upgrade the interface is astronomical.
Now you are stuck. You can't just upgrade one half. You are deprecated and desupported, but still have to pay for support or you will have to rebuy the software if you ever upgrade. Vendors will typically refuse you upgrades if you let support lapse and will make you repurchase it all over again.
Your options are to:
1. rewrite the interface inhouse
2. pay the ransom
3. don't upgrade
4. reimplement both systems all over again with new products and this time add language to the contract about the interface and upgrades
How many people has this happened to?
Raise your hand high in the air. Yes, I see you!
One of the MANY, MANY, MANY things I like about OSS is that I can go at my own pace. No one is putting a gun to my head saying, UPGRADE OR DIE!
If I create dependencies, I make sure I can upgrade one half at a time, instead of multvendor "BIG BANG" upgrades/implementations. Ask Hershey how much their "BIG BANG" multivendor SAP implementation cost them.
When you buy commercial software, you get on the upgrade treadmill and you have NO CONTROL. Also, when you run into a bug and call support, the answer is ALWAYS, "You need to upgrade to the next version". My answer is "No, I am paying for support, so fix the DARN BUG" and they drag their feet and eventually mail me a "Desupport Notice".
Now, let's talk about customizations and backward compatibility. OSS, especially PERL has AMAZING backward compatibility which is NOT found in most commercial products. I've taken large PERL web applications and moved them forward in time about 5 years and they ALL WORKED! Try that with Microsoft Visual Whatever or Java. I get so sick of reading, this function/feature/method was deprecated in version x.1 and of course you are installing x.2
I don't know what you are developing, so it is hard to give specific advice, but remember to use the right tool for the job, get training, and decide how fast you are willing to upgrade before you plunk down money with a vendor, since staying one release in front of being desupported will be part of your new job description.
Sometimes I joke with my team and ask, "What is it we do again????"
So instead of spending all my time reading mail lists and developing new useful stuff, I can spend my valuable time upgrading and utilizing the support resources I pay for, since I am going to need them when I hit a bump in the upgrade process. Also, vendors will gladly sell you "upgrade consulting" services, but won't actually do the upgrade for you, they just consult you know.
Good Luck!
* M$ Active Directory is LDAP!
:)
* NDS v4.0 is LDAP!
* Slapd is LDAP!
* Netscape Directory Server is LDAP!
And they all work with nearly every LDAP client, including Mac's and the Mozilla browser.
* Slurpd is not LDAP, but likes to consume LDAP information.
* Who'sYourDaddy_d and SayMyName_d are not part of Open LDAP, but should be
* PerLDAP is not LDAP, but is great for doing LDAP programming.
Now for my Microsoft RANT. Yep, M$ stole LDAP and renamed it Active Directory Services. It appears that no matter how much money M$ seems to amass, they just can't seem to buy a clue and come up with a good idea on their own. It's the same old "embrace and extend" commodity protocols which now seems to be their only strategy.
Also, Microsoft products will read LDIF (LDAP Interchange File), but amazingly enough, M$ products won't write an LDIF file. Yes, you can check in anytime you want, but you can never LEAVE!
Lastly, I tried to use Outlook with OpenLDAP and it crashed (the only client to crash). The only option on my pick list is Microsoft LDAP server. Hmmmmm... what exactly is a Microsoft LDAP server? If anyone finds one of these let me know, I want to see if it can make an LDIF file. However, I could care since, I use Mozilla exclusively as my browser now.
And for anyone out there wanting to implement LDAP, I suggest you do two things...
1. Read the RFC's (they helped me immensely)
2. Get the book, "Implementing LDAP" by wrox.com
M, Go Blue!
One component that seems to be missing in the whole Open Source realm is hardware control. I wonder if it would be viable or even possible for the Open Source community to co-develop, or at least be able to provide specifications to hardware manufacturers.
Many hardware vendors are finally waking up and embracing Open Source, e.g. (3ware, Adaptec, Intel, AMD), but it seems as if the community is always fighting with hardware. If worst came to worst, we could all boycott a particular vendor and pledge as a community to buy non DRM (Digital Restrictions Managemet) devices from a competitor in volume.
After all, DRM is NOT LAW! (Well at least not until Microsoft donates $20,000 to a couple of congressional campaigns).
Open Source should have Open Hardware!
Also, I am not worrying too much about Palladium or other "copy protection" type devices. They will be defeated just like every other type of "copy protection" that has ever been invented. In fact reverse engineering Palladium in compliance with the DMCA will probably be a sourceforge project.
Many of you may be wondering, why ALSA made front page news. There are several reasons:
1. ALSA sound drivers are nearly impossible to install.
2. If you want to turn your Linux box into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) ala TiVo, then you need the alsa drivers and the stuff from the GATOS project.
(See) http://gatos.sourceforge.net/overview.php
I am glad that someone posted the HOW-TO... Alsa has been a big thorn in my side for awhile now. Maybe now I can get the ALSA-Mixer working properly.
Good Luck, and may your all Linux boxes be PVR's!
- There's More Than One Way To Do It
- poor sandboxing, easy to screw up server
- wasn't designed as web scripting language
Whoever tells Larry that PERL was rejected, please be gentle since he isn't done with the next PERL rewrite yet and this might cause unintended consequences. Better yet, just wait until the next version is out before you break the news that Y! rejected PERL for PHP.
Kmart said the sale included one server license and 25 desktop licenses it bought from Microsoft.
All this over 25 licenses? Who cares about 25 licenses? This isn't even worth the "evil lawyers" fees?
There has got to be more to this story. Maybe Microsoft legal just sends out a boilerplate document and objects to any and all Chapter 11 filings. I'd like to know more about this story if anyone has more details.
Stories like this are great to save in my file and drag out for the next Open Source vs. Proprietary Software license debate.
Though The browser war is over ...
To borrow a quote from my friend, "John 'Bluto' Blutarski" who spent most of his college career on double secret probation.
Was it over when the Nazi's bombed Pearl Harbor?
Well it ain't over now!!!!!!
The browser wars won't be over until Mozilla stomps IE.
Other than that, the book sounds excellent!
Is the speed there?
:)
Perl is NOT as fast as 'C', but there are quite a fews to make PERL faster...
1. Use MOD_PERL
2. For repetitive tasks, e.g. Email Scanning for SPAM, daemonize your PERL and write a small 'C' client to talk to it.
PERL is an interpreted language, so each time you fire up a script it there is a lot of overhead and PERL has a pretty hefty memory foot print (4-5 MB) on avg per script.
All that being said, remember to use the right tool for the job or the right combinations of tools. IMHO, C and PERL make an unstoppable tag team. PERL is the "swiss army chainsaw" of languages and is great for matching patterns, writing web backends, XML, manipulating data streams, talking to databases, sending email, interacting with LDAP. PERL is my current language of choice, just because I can be very productive, very quickly and there are volumes of programming examples of how to solve a problem at least 20 different ways.
This is probably heresy, but I actually prefer PERL over JAVA,
One other nice thing about PERL is that the backward compatbility is incredible. Recently I had to migrate a bunch of apps from SCO to Linux/Solaris. By merely changing the path to the PERL executable, ALL the PERL scripts ran fine. This was roughly a 5 year jump in time, try that with 'C', Java, or a Microsoft language.
I can't say enough about the power, flexibility, and documentation. If all other programming languages vanished and we were left with 'C/C++' and PERL I think we would survive just fine. Actually, I might need to keep TCL and SQL too
GO PERL!
Even if this were the case (which it is not) the current system is to reject ALL the kids. Bright kid from a lousy neighborhood with poor parents and a lousy school - "well sorry kid you have to fail with the school because if we let you go to a decent school it wouldn't be fair to that kid that beats you up every day. You want to go to that nice private school across town? - that's only for rich kids, poor kids have to go here. Oh where do MY kids go, well I commuted in to give you this message, my kids are going to a nice school in the suburbs". As you said - Nice!
The "nice" was meant to be sarcastic. As in, "yes" we will give you a voucher, but it geographically unworkable for you. Many cities, especially Detroit, don't have decent mass transportation, thus it would impossible for kids to use their vouchers. The geography creates a barrier that can't be easily overcome.
And as for the picking teachers, give me a break. How would you like to trade your current salary for a teachers salary? Additionally, teachers are "always on", every minute they are in the classroom. With private sector jobs, you can sluff-off, congregate at the water cooler, and get a nice big fat check at the end of the week.
Most teachers I know are both caring and compotent. However the amount of administrivia required by teachers is sickening. For example, teachers all have email so that School Board Administration can contact them with the latest useless form they need to fill out. Classrooms now have phones, so that the administration or parents can call anytime. Additionally, "kids have rights" and kids know it, which makes discipline a lot tougher than a "swat on the bum".
Teachers need to spend their precious time on teaching and not babby sitting, collecting lunch money, or other administrivia BS that does not directly benefit the education experience.
Anyone who thinks it's easy and piece of cake ought to give it a try and make your "HOW-TO" video tape available. Our society could benefit from it greatly. Perhaps start with a 1st grade elementary classroom in the innercity and show us how to get all those kids reading at 1st grade level by the time they leave.
We need more teachers, smaller class sizes, and better parents.
You don't know jack about inner-city schools. The problem isn't vouchers, the problems are
1. No one wants to teach there.
2. No one wants to go to school there.
3. No one wants to live there.
In Detroit, substitute teachers get FULL health coverage (and of course Kevlar vests). The current daily substitute count is about 2,000.
As for vouchers, schools of choice, charter schools. How does this help the inner-city? Are parents going to drive their kids to the good schools in the subburbs every morning? Maybe you'd be kind enough to start a bus service.
What about reinventing education with charter schools? Charter schools have proven to be a total failure and that fact is proven out with test scores?
What about "schools of choice"? This is a fancy way of saying, we want to take our tax dollars and fund exclusive private schools that our kids go to. Also, the exclusive private schools don't have to take problem kids or handicapped kids and reserve the right to boot anyone they want back to public schools. So we get the money and the best kids, and you can turn your public school into a home for all the people we reject. Nice!
If you have an answer I'd like to hear it. The only solutions I can see are:
1. We need a lot more giving caring teacher in the innercity.
2. The innercity needs to stop having more children than they can properly parent.
3. The republicans need to stop trying to rape all the money out of public education so they can go fund "star wars" or "bombing Iraq".
Lastly, packing in bodies has nothing to do with Federal FUNDS. The reason bodies are packed in is because THERE AREN'T ENOUGH TEACHERS IN THE INNER-CITY, so class sizes grow HUGE! I am sure Deroit would love to have 15 kids per class in the lower elementary, but guess what.. there aren't enough teachers! Additionally, the Feds and State are going to pay out no matter where that kid ends up.
My apologies to the NON-Americans out there, but this offtopic post was neccessary.
Don't forget that once you have distributed your software over the Internet to an untrustworthy, evil user, s/he is going to give it away for free. S/he is going to start buring illegal copies of the software he downloaded for all his friends and will probably download it right into his P2P upload directory.
After the Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) is complete, the user has to get through the EULA so he can install it.
Just who are you going to get to write that EULA?
Might I humbly suggest,
http://www.evil-lawyers-who-write-eulas.com
These guys specialize in incomprehensible leagaleze and by the time they are done, your EULA will stand a proud 250 lines long and allow you to have your way with both the user of your software and his/her computer.
Good Luck!@
I think we all agree that a culture is defined by its arts, music, and literature. Why couldn't we come up with a system where all funding for the arts and music came from:
a) Tax dollars and/or
b) Private Donations / Sponsorships
- All movie theatres could turn into dollar shows, since the Hollywood ticket tax would be over.
- All cable/satellite channels would be FREE.
- All downloads of movies, music, and literature would be FREE
Statistics could be collected on downloads, movie theatre attendance, movie rentals, cable box feedback and then, the content providers would be paid their fair percentage quarterly based on eyeballs or earbrums. Finally, a true democratic approach to voting for content, with a socialist funding strategy. Just call me a centrist!
Think of the time, effort, and money that could be saved. The FBI wouldn't have to waste it's time on tracking down pirate distribution groups and could spend more time on real crime. Content providers would be encouraged to create both quantity and quality. The more you pumped out, the better your chances of getting a bigger piece of the pie. And lawyers, would have to go find something else to do with their time instead of threatening ISP's and P2P networks. There's always patent law.
All the useless middlemen would disappear (Bye Bye SONY), and money could go directly to content providers, except for movies which would still require a studio house. New copy protection technolgies wouldn't have to constantly be developed to protect media, and the global piracy business would be put out of business.
I am still not sure how to handle Software and Sporting events. Maybe Open Source will win out and sports will finally fade away, so NHl/NBA games will stop pre-empting "Enterprise's" time slot.
We can all see the current content delivery system is close to self self-destruction, but meanwhile we will all have to suffer with half-baked copy-protection and ill conceived laws.
We need some post-moderism in content creation, delivery, and royalty payments or it's going to be ugly for a long, long time.
More is better!
You can stick a parallel to serial adapter on an IDE drive, reduce the cable size, but it's still a crappy IDE drive.
:)
... but assuming you could still use all your exiting hardware it would be about that exciting.
If IDE hardware developers read slashdot, here is a list of IDE problems I'd like to see fixed.
1. You can't HOTSWAP an IDE drive without risking blowing your drive, crontroller, or upsetting the powersupply.
2. You can't WARMSWAP an IDE drive, without risking blowing your drive, controller, or upsetting your powersupply.
3. IDE still only supports 2, yes 2 drivers per controller, which makes it impossible to do hardware RAID-5. That leaves us with software RAID-5 as our only option.
4. IDE cables can only stretch so far, so even if you could somehow manage to get 8 IDE controllers into a box, for a total of 16 drives, there would still be cable length issues. I think 1 m is max. We need differential IDE
5. IDE drives are just now able to verify data integrity, but thats good since we can start using IDE drives in servers that don't need 100% uptime.
6. ATA/100 Round IDE cables are already available. In fact I just ordered some that have a UV reflective coating for my next case mod which features a black light. Airflow isn't a big issue, in fact Compaq has been slicing up IDE cables for a long time now to increase airflow.
7. The SUSTAINED TRANSFER WRITE RATE of IDE drives is still not fast enough to store uncompressed NTSC video at 60 frames per second, or store high bandwidth Satellite streams.
8a. Size increase (GB's) are not keeping pace with read/write access speeds and simply adding cache RAM and tweaking seek algorithms isn't going to remedy this problem.
8b. As, internal volatile write caches grow larger, the risk of uncommitted writes being lost in a power outage or crash increases.
If serial ATA would let me connect 4 drives per controller, I might start getting excited. If I could start "hot swapping" IDE drives, I would get really excited.
However, going from "flat to round" and "parallel to serial" is about as exciting as Windows XP compared to Windows 2000. It does the same thing, only slightly different. Actually in the case of Windows XP, thats not true, since Windows XP is missing device drivers for older Digital Cameras, Scanners, Modems, Video Cards etc
Ok, you win.. that beats it :)
However, I try to throw some cash Red Hat's way every now and then so they keep making distros.
Assume your cluster costs $50,000 to build (including the Giga-bit ethernet gear), you are only going to pay $l000 or less for the O/S.
That's a great deal and a half. Also, that paultry $1,000 investment keeps you in patches plus, gets your a year of email install/configuration tech support.
But, your solution is definately cheaper !
Nice, but I bet you can't write the same rules using ipchains. :)
The application itself if not going to run on the cluster. The cluster is simply going to be used as a "compute farm" for solving the datasets and models produced by the application.
... will still all run on a UNIX/Windows workstation, but the solving will be done (very quickly) on a Red Hat cluster.
This is similar to what is happening in the animation industry. The LINUX boxes are simply going to "crunch" the numbers and feed the results back to an application running under Windows or high end UNIX workstations.
For a cheap "compute farm" cluster, you can't beat Red Hat Advanced Server with Xenon's.
We are planning to build a 16 node cluster next year for the same purpose as Chrysler. Again, the apps aren't running here, LS-Dyna, DynaForm, Hypermesh, FEMB etc
It just rocks!
Do you really think Microsoft cares or reads ./ ?
They probably block it on their proxy server since it would dishearten all their employees and create morale issues.
Also, ./ would be filled with more whining, e.g.
"I don't understand, we are just trying to make great software. Why do they hate us so much?"
1. Will turning Palladium "off" ALWAYS be an option in the future?
2. What is plan "B" for a TPA (trusted computing architecture) when Palladium hardware security is defeated and anyone can run bogus signed code?
( I secretly want them to answer "Why, that's impossible, no one could ever break Palladium." )
* The Titanic was an UNSINKABLE ship! *
Here is the translation:
Velious is an EQ expansion pack. Each time Sony develops another part of the EQ world, they charge everybody $39.95 for the expansion pack, in addition to the $9.89 monthly fee. Think of it as add-on pack.
Lower Guk is the name of a zone. The EQ world is divided into zones. This cuts down on network traffic and server crashes. If everyone piled into the same zone, imagine the network traffic from updates, and people sending broadcast messages called "shouts" constantly. Velious added more "zones" to the EQ world.
The "fugi camp" is where a certain MOB (in game monster or creature) spawns (appears). Some MOB's are very rare and only occur once every two weeks or so. I think it's probability based. Anyway, if you want a particular item and don't want to spend all your hard earned cash, you have to wait and wait and wait and wait. When it finally spawns you and your buddies kill it and hope it has the item. In this case the item is a "fungi tunic" which I believe has regenerative powers. That means it heals you when you get beat up in battle. The word "lore" means that you can only have one in your possession at a time. In the U.S. a wife can be considered a "lore" item, since you can only have one. This is an attempt to keep the hardcore players from harvesting all the good items. The theory is once they get their "Fungi Tunic" they'll go try to get something else, since they can only have one.
The guys in this post weren't interested in the tunic for themselves, they just wanted to get them and sell them for the PP (platinumn) which is the form of currency used in EQ.
If you need to know anything else, let me know.. I had to quit, it was runing my life. The game is highly addictive and the longer you play the harder it is to make any progress. If you are a person who like to "WIN" video games, don't ever start playing EQ, it's IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!
The game has ruined many a marriage and cost many a geek their job. It is worse than crack.
Harddrives are going to die soon.
They will be replaced by a "memory brick" that plugs in at the end of your new serial IDE cable.