From their website they have a page (about 3 clicks away from the product link) that seems pretty compliant, the label of the button that brings up that page says GPL on it. It was right under the support pages (from their top menu, second link from the left). I didn't RTFA though, so maybe there's something wrong/broken with this page? Or maybe MPlayer want's more credit on the packaging? (like a "Powered by MPlayer" sticker?)
Maybe they just put that page up in the last day or two?
Anywho, I'm off to read the actual MPlayer accusation page now...
There's a coffee shop I frequent that set up wireless access downstairs from my office. In the beggining we "donated" an old machine to them with WinXP on it. After some tweaking we had it doing a satisfactory job of sharing the internet connection (DSL modem connected on eth0, wireless router on eth1) and running winamp with output to their sound system.
Of course, I'm sure most/.ers will scream at this idea, but it did the job, was fine security wise (after some tweaking of assinine default settings) and only took 1 programmer half a day to setup. This place wasn't even a "mom & pop", it's actually a fairly popular coffee shop in the middle of an open air portion of the Valencia mall in SoCal.
However, that solution is no longer in place. They ended up hiring a company that put in a couple eMachine terminals for $2/15 minutes or something. They were actually going to charge for the wireless. At first they were going to collect the MACs for existing 'free' users but after some whining and complications they just left the wireless free (so you only pay if you're using the terminals). This has worked out pretty well. I think they've got a mid/high end router of somesort doing most of the work now though.
Anywho, seems to be working fine. I don't know if they have any sort of quotas set up, but there doesn't seem to be a problem. Most of the patrons that use the wireless are workers from my office or surrounding offices and some college students. Hope some of that info's usefull to you.
Coming from a paid software development job, I'll have to say I really enjoyed this article (especially because I'm already doing a chunk of what it says and now I have something to link to some of my lazy teammates).
As far as the controvercial myth #1 goes, troll or not I'm glad it was brought up. I'm thinking about getting into open source development (I've got about 4 ideas I'd like to work on and I'm even considering changing jobs for a while to make time for it) and I don't have much of a "feel" for what the OSS community is really like yet. I'll find out for myself soon enough if myth #1 is troll or not, but I wouldn't have even been looking for it, <sarc>i just assumed it was one big happy family.</sarc>
For energy savings programs that I work on we use a very simple homebuilt temperature sensor.
It's just a thermistor (thermally sensative resistor, looks like two thin wires with a small red ball of plastic like substance in the middle) connected to an circuit that converts the current reading to a frequency, the frequency is then read by whatever the brains of the project are (usually a lame-ass PLC (like Idec's MicroSmart line) or soon a customised EtherNut). I'm sure you could also plug it into a parallel port and a little software to read the frequency of the pulses and convert to actual temperature and publish an html document to the web should be all you need.
Another post mentioned something that sounded similar but skipped the custom circuit and just jacked into a gameport. I'm guessing that a gameport does the same thing the circuit we use does and converts the current (from a POT in the joystick) to a useful digital value.
Now, you wanted a simple, off the shelf solution? Maybe try starting a sourceforge project for the software to convert thermistor data over joystick to a published html page. Post it and the programmers will come (maybe, i'm still a noob to the OSS community). All you would need for testing would be a POT stuck into the gameport.
If you don't like java and your clients are all Windows or Mac users then you may want to consider shockwave. Shockwave scripting language (lingo) is fairly powerful (once you get to know it) with editing text and text assets in the shockwave movie can be used to produce html or rtf data that could be save and/or uploaded to where they need to be.
Of course, there's no linux support (yet) for shockwave and I'm probably a bit biased since I've been doing shockwave work for 3 years straight.
Big deal, the code is simple. If this is it, then there's no problem just follow SOP.
Kernel developer A: write a spec for what ulong_t atealloc(struct map, size_t); is supposed to do.
Kernel developer B (who has never seen ate_utils.c before): follow the spec and write a new replacement from scratch.
There, no more SCO code.
What I don't get, is how do they really justify this little bit of code (which as far as i can tell isn't even included in the kernels i build for my home machine) entitles them to more money than a full copy of windows?
Uhm... last i checked, there's an option to do that already. I think it defaults to download automatically and then an icon in the taskbar lets you know they're ready to install and with 3 clicks you're installing them and getting ready to reboot 3 times.
Maybe they're talking about making it default or forfced... maybe i should RTFA...
I'm using Energizer NiMh AAs and the Energizer charger all of which I picked up at target for cheap. I use them in my wavebirds (Game Cube wireless controlers) and my Nikon CoolPix 2100, their performance is actually a bit better than the the Nikon brand batteries and charger that cost 4x as much.
Of course, the first few charges sucked, but on the 3rd cycle, NiMh batteries really seem to come to life.
Best of all, I got the energizer charger just for AAs, but on closer inspection, you can plug in AAA and 9v (or 12v? I never remember which is which) batteries as well. And the charger was less than the Nikon one that only does AAs.
Not so much that it would spoil network patching, but it would limit the types of applications it could be used on.
With XPE you can only use it the way Microsoft lets you, I'm sure there's plenty of application Microsoft would be fine with, however, you still have to run your ideas through them. They don't have to give you an XPE license if they don't want to.
Now, if this whole thing was based on Linux, then you could really do whatever you want with it... I wonder, have they gotten together a DirectX sort of Wine thing yet? I thought I heard of soemthing called WineX or something, but I could be wrong. Anywho, that'd really be the ticket on this sort of idea.
I talked to these guys at E3 this year (they were down in the basement). This thing isn't nearly all it's cracked up to be.
First off, they start off talking about how you can plop any PC title in there and it will play, no problem. A bit slower the first time than others though. So, I ask if they have some sort of special version of install shield and what do they do if a developer uses a really strange in house installer? Finally, the truth comes out, they have to write a script for each and every game, which means thousands of install scripts, in addition to the patch scripts. It seemed like a small (under 20 ppl) outfit, so I'm pretty sure "Thousands" is theoretical.
As far as how they expect to make their money, the patches and everything will be a subscription service, don't believe them if they say otherwise.
Basically, it comes down to one nutty guy that seems more from marketing than the tech. side of things and a few poor programmer side kicks trying deparately to keep up with his wide and ignorant feature claims.
Did I say this thing is full of shit? It is, really, the more I think about it, the more I remember how upset I was at his obtuse claims of compatibility and performance (when was the last time you had to upgrade the processor/ram in your PS2? when was the last time you had to upgrade your gaming PC?). This guy is just a dreamer with no grasp of reality. I savor the memory of how red faced and deflated I left him in the basement at E3 after shooting down every response he had to my questions about compatibility, hardware performance, etc.
Anyways, don't buy into the marketese, this product will suck if it ever makes it on the shelf.
However, as another reader mentioned, there could be other great applications for this sort of embedded system with network patching and such, but the XPEmbedded licence pretty much spoils that.
However, many areas of manufacturing these days use lasers, and these would be plenty fast for those applications. They would also get rid of moving parts, which is great since many manufacturing environments contain large amounts of airborne debris which require anything with moving parts to me continually maintained/replaced.
So, maybe not fast enough for communication, but fast enough for other things. Also, given enough time, it could catch up with desirable data speeds..
As somebody else pointed out, there's lots of information online at msdn.microsoft.com
For other needs, you can google your way out of most problems (since the chances of you being the first person to run into an issue with Windows are slim).
Learn vbscript, they're the only way to get things done sometimes (unless you want F2 to be your new best friend). Also, learn some of the old Batch scripting, many of those tricks can be applied to the vbscript tools. Oh, and learn all the hotkeys, it'll speed things up ([+]+D: desktop, [+]+F: Search, [+]+E: Explorer, etc.
Also, look for documentation on your network's weak spots. If you're running IIS, get ready for some fun learning how to lock it down tight. Oh, and bookmark windowsupdate.microsoft.com on every machine, but test each patch on a test system if you can before deploying it across the network.
Speaking of deploying across the network, there are a number of tools to take care of installations and patches over the network from the comfort of your desk (I'm sure there's OSS OS equiv's). Also, at least with windows 2000 and up, you can schedule tasks remotely if you connect to the remote machine over the LAN (or VPN) using administrator account credentials.
I consider myself a technophile. I've got a lot of gear at home and I'm in the process of putting a number of sensors and controls on the internet.
However, the last thing I'd do is put each device out on it's own IP for the world to see. Wouldn't it be great fun for hackers to find an exploit in the new GE refrigerator and go spoiling all the food in every apartment in NewYork during the heat of summer? As if it didn't smell enough...
Even if I had 100 devices at home, each one would just have a port mapped from my gateway device (a $200 WalMart special running RH9). I seriously doubt I'm going to have around 65k devices that need to be exposed to the net.
So, my cell may have it's own IP, and maybe my car, but that's still just 3 internet IP addresses for a technophile. Any other web enabled gadgets I want can be routed through the Home/Car/Cell connection.
I really see no problem here. Besides, even though web enabled devices will spread from the techies out to main stream consumers, we're still talking upper middle class and up. And mostly just in the US/Canada/EU/Japan. I could see 3 to 10 IPs per person tops, and that's far from a crisis.
Now, you could argue, more sites and businesses on the net will take up more addresses, but many of the hosting solutions I've looked at offer a "virtual" server on a shared physical box, probably using host headers and such (neat trick, read the host header and redirect the requests to a specific site based upon the URL in the request, even IIS does it).
I've got a few Ideas, but not enough time to read all the posts so far, so forgive me for dups.
Images
Perhaps deploying a backend application that would generate custom made ISO (or other popular formats) images and make them avail. for download for say 10 days or something. Then email an invoice and a download link to the user, they download the ISO and can use that to burn a CD from. On the same page, have not just cover art in image format, but.zip files containing all the files for popular programs such as Nero and EasyCD Creator. Can't get much closer/novice friendly than that. However, this would probably require either A) An automated process to generate custom ISOs on demand, or B) A large library of albums with added content already in ISO format. Sounds like a fun project to me, if only I had time.
Services As I noticed some readers mention in what I skimmed before writing this, a monthly service could be nice, but keep it low. In exchange for the monthly fee, give them all they want in the way of singles. Since many indy artists (at least that I know) don't actually do singles, these could just be the 2 most popular tracks from an album. On the same page these freebies are downloaded from, have a link to Buy the whole album today!.
Added Content You said you've got the deal for MP3s, what about MPEGS (or other popular video formats)? You could either charge per download, or do these as freebies for subscribers or both. For example, subscribers could download 1 music video per album for free (I don't know how many indy label artists have time to make videos, but hey). And you could also make interview videos, or even offer a service to fans to distribute (with dues paid to artist and fans) submitted concert footage (preferably edited together from mulitple fan's cameras). In addition to offering these as stand alones, you could offer these as part of the albums. I remember there was a brief fad of doing hybrid music CDs with added content (common with DVDs today) if you popped them in your PC. This would be a great thing to bring back, now when fans buy albums, they don't just get the music and cover art, but music videos, concert footage and interviews. If you use macromedia's director you could even make an easy interface that would run on Mac and PC (but that's starting to cross the line of content distribution to content creation, but if you could find a few competent shockwave programmers to contract it could pay off and add value to your company).
All together package
I mentioned ISOs, these could either be music CD images, or just data CD images loaded with MP3s, an autorun macromedia interface, videos, etc. Or (not sure how hard this would be) perhaps even both (were there compatibility issues with those music/data CDs? And could you do a Mac/PC/music CD?).
Anyways, hope there's some useful ideas in there. Good Luck!
Actually, that's exactly what they're doing with the-features-previously-known-as-palladium (now just a part of longhorn?).
You know that little message you get when you download the latest drivers for deviceX but manufacturerX doesn't want to spend $X to get another digital signature from M$? The one that strongly discourages installing unsigned drivers?
Well, that's gonna happen with ALL software on longhorn. Except, it may be worse. You may have to go into the control panel into some dark corner while logged in as Administrator in order to enable allowing unsigned-by-microsoft software to even be attempted to be installed.
Also, from a few articles i've read, Microsofts next version of windows will be 2 sided, "Trusted" and "UnTrusted". Now, i'm just guessing, but I bet that if i made unsigned programY, and MSOffice ran on the "Trusted" side of the DRM curtain (where my unsigned app would be on the "UnTrusted" side, IF it was even able to be installed), then I seriously doubt that my programY will be able to take advantage of any of the "cool".Net interactions avail. with MSOffice.
In effect, the next generation of Windows (plus, god-forbid, hardware enabled DRM) will turn the PC platform into an XBox (although i'm sure somebody will find a hack, still, it's a pain in the ass).
Try installing RedHat7.1, then wipe the system and try installing RedHat9. See the difference? Yes, M$ may have Linux beat on the easy-install-all-together-ready-to-go-in-3-disks deal (note, that's 1 disc for windows, 2 for office). However, Linux is catching up quick. We all know that the foundation of linux isn't why it's not on more systems. It's rock phuxing solid. What's keeping linux of grandma's PC is the install setup, and many distro's are tackling this problem while we speak. As soon as I have some free time (whenever that may happen), I'd love to help contribute to an installer for some distro out there. I mean, even RedHat7.1 (and probably older even) have a fully graphical installer (still have textmode for the first half of Win2k and WinXP) and have the pre-defined setup types (Home, office, laptop, server, etc). My big recommendation though, would be something in between the multiple choice system type selection and the individual package selection. You know, like if I select Office, then it gives me another menu where i can select from a few best of breed PIM's, Word Processors, SpreadSheets, or even Suite packages (openoffice, etc). So that I can have my pick w/o having to pick packages.
Also a simple menu with thumbnails for selecting the windowing system would be nice. And more than just KDE or Gnome (that's what redhat gives) would be nice.
Anywho, i could rant and wishlist all day, but the point is, M$'s only real advantage now is it's "easy" installer. Sure, it's integrated to hell, but as long as OSS developers stick to open standards and make an effort for interoperability then Linux should catch up in no time. </rant>
I spent all day yesterday getting WU IMAP server going on cygwin running on the w2k server at my office (i'd make it linux, but it's not my call)... only to find out that you can't really use it that well in outlookXP (probably intentionally on the outlook side)...
So, i spent most of the night trying to figure out how to write a plugin, like the one that's out for connecting to Lotus servers via outlook, with no luck really.
I was getting ready to just write my own simple groupware that would do basics like contacts, calendar and email folders and a client using XML...
Thanks to OGo, now i can go spend all night working on my other side projects! I'm downloading the rpms now, i hope it works under cygwin!
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At E3 (electronic entertainment expo) the big thing in the nintendo area was cooperative play.
No use to the author since but for cube owners (preferably with a few GBAs and link cables) it'll be great as soon as these hit the market (i think a few were targeted for christmas release).
There were 3 that stood out to me...
A pacman game where 3 players control ghosts on the TV in pretty 3D and a 4th player controls pacman on his/her GBA.
A legend of zelda: wind waker spinoff called Tetra's Trackers where 4 players play competatively in scavenger hunt type missions (for the first few levels at least). I don't know if there may be some cooperative play (a la mario party) later on, but the games are simple enough that the playing field is pretty even for veteran gamers and newbies alike.
And a new Final Fantasy game that's kind of diablo like gameplay for up to 4 players. All cooperative and played with GBAs plugged into the cube with status screens/menus on the GBA.
No good for sony users and not in time for summer, but something to look forward to. Seems like cooperative play may be the next big thing (from what I saw from the heavyweights at E3).
I started programing in BASIC and then BASICA on an old IBM XT with IBM DOS 3.something. I learned by example from BASIC games in the back of Highlights magazine (science version) borrowed from my JrHigh teacher. I now work at a small game developer in southern California making 35,000USD with only a GED.
I give that background to say that this 0.02USD is coming from the other end of the spectrum, I've taken some CS courses at the local Jr College, but of the 3 professors, 1 is a geneous (worked for JPL out of highschool and designed a guitar pedal for Hendrix) and the other 2 are boneheads, after I did all the courses from the good prof. I quit and am now looking at going back to school for a completely job unrelated major (like english). Anywho, so I really don't know what your CS studies have given you in the way of preparation for the real world of programing, but if say you were going to come work with me, here's what I'd want from you.
1) DOCUMENTATION! DOCUMENTATION! DOCUMENTATION! I don't know about undergrad level CS, but the 100 to 200 level courses I've been exposed to lacked grotesquely in this aspect. Remember, when you get paid for code, sure your check depends on if it works or not, but to give your employer their honest moneys worth you should really supply documentation in the form of at least one technical design document and lots of comments in your code. Also (and this is more personal preference than anything) most compilers in most languages can work with pretty long variable names so use the long names and save on comments (I don't mean never use 1 letter variables, 'i' is fine for a loop incremental, but with more importaint or complex things, go big). Remember, you're probably not going to be at company X forever. So when the time for feature additions or new platform support comes down the line, the code you can be proud of is code they can throw at a Jr programer for the tweaks and not give him/her an ulcer just trying to figure out WTF you were trying to do, let alone where the bug/incompatiblity is. Also, even if you are at company X forever, you may be busy with project Z when they need work done on project Q from when you first started there. So they give the fixes to another programer, imagine how embarrased you could be if they crack open your source and see a big uncommented mess! Maybe project Z will end up being your last.
2) Avoid band-aids! Note I say avoid and not never use. When there's a problem with the way an object was designed (possibly due to no fault of your own, being a smaller company in the games buisness, publishers love to throw feature changes at us half way through a project because they can get away with it) take the time to rewrite the object if needed. Of course unless it's the day before your milestone and there just isn't time, then it's okay to do a bandaid, but then document the hell out of so that when/if anybody else has to go into your code you don't look like an idiot.
3) Paper first! Thats something I learned from the 1 good professor at my community college. When I whip up little tools and such (which I imagine is most of the author's experince, making tools to make admin life easier) I just jump right in and code. However, when it's code in the actual product it's worth it to take the time to sit down and draw it all out on paper. Pseudo-code, object diagrams, hierarchy, sure there's visualization programs out there but it's faster on paper. One of the big advantages of drawing it out on paper is that as a programer (at least as me) you get attached to that object you stayed up until 3AM writing. Then you find a flaw in it and should rewrite it, but it's so much more tempting to just bandaid it. If it had been written out on paper first, you may've caught the design flaw ahead of time and instead of throwing out all that code, all you're looking at is a little scribble here, jot down some new psuedo-code and a little scribble here, there and there to carry the changes to all the depen
Actually, Kodak makes a pretty nice line of digital cameras and even makes (sells relabeled?) digital flash media. Unfortunately I'm stuck with Canon and Nikon (I loved Kodak when I did film photography, forget Fuji) because I'm clinging to good old CF, no SD or memory sticks for me.
The gain isn't in the complication of updating the scraper program, its in the cost of proofreaders for the OCR data. Most corporate types won't trust OCR data that hasn't at least been skimmed by a proofreader. A proofreader is a whole person (or outsource contract) that requires wages, benefits, etc.
In other words, you're not creating a problem that will be solved by a few existing programmers, it's a problem that will require additional staff.
Every encryption (which this kind of is through obscuration [sp?]) can be broken, the goal of real world encryption is just to make it more expensive to decrypt it than the value of the data locked inside.
Yeah, i forgot on 2.
As far as 1 goes, a few more gifs isn't going to be noticed in the bloat of ecommerce sites out there today, which factors into the title (lots ecommerce titles take a big dump on web standards and are non-functional/ugly with anything other than MSIE or NS4.79 and below because that's all the webmonkies get taught at their local community college).
On 4, the big issues isn't the scrapers, it's that the scrapers will use OCR which may have a higher error rate due to the scramble/fuzz images which will cost in proofreading. Most corporate types require anything input by OCR to be proofread, which costs money. The code for a better scraper isn't the money eater, it's the proofreading of the OCR data.
3,4,5: Properly done the images could be spat out pretty quickly with less backend lag than it takes to look up the prices and generate the html page anyways.
Anywho, not like I even like the idea anyways, i think that if information is posted on the web it should be free game (with the exception of copywritten origional content).
I really only thought up the idea because i read the article after a 4 hour coding spree on a stupid web project for a big stupid monolithic company and it sounded like the sort of thing they'd ask of me (Make it scraper proof!) =P
I think such rules exist, but they don't get enforced much. If you ever try looking at online stores such as buy.com or walmart.com you'll see what I mean.
But, you're right, I completely forgot about that issue... of course you could always check the UserAgent of the person visiting, but that would defeat the purpose, if scrapping prices is against the TOS then what's to keep them from faking their UserAgent to be an audio web browser? /me goes back to the drawing board.
Slashdot Mirror
From their website they have a page (about 3 clicks away from the product link) that seems pretty compliant, the label of the button that brings up that page says GPL on it. It was right under the support pages (from their top menu, second link from the left).
I didn't RTFA though, so maybe there's something wrong/broken with this page? Or maybe MPlayer want's more credit on the packaging? (like a "Powered by MPlayer" sticker?)
Maybe they just put that page up in the last day or two?
Anywho, I'm off to read the actual MPlayer accusation page now...
There's a coffee shop I frequent that set up wireless access downstairs from my office.
/.ers will scream at this idea, but it did the job, was fine security wise (after some tweaking of assinine default settings) and only took 1 programmer half a day to setup.
In the beggining we "donated" an old machine to them with WinXP on it. After some tweaking we had it doing a satisfactory job of sharing the internet connection (DSL modem connected on eth0, wireless router on eth1) and running winamp with output to their sound system.
Of course, I'm sure most
This place wasn't even a "mom & pop", it's actually a fairly popular coffee shop in the middle of an open air portion of the Valencia mall in SoCal.
However, that solution is no longer in place. They ended up hiring a company that put in a couple eMachine terminals for $2/15 minutes or something. They were actually going to charge for the wireless. At first they were going to collect the MACs for existing 'free' users but after some whining and complications they just left the wireless free (so you only pay if you're using the terminals). This has worked out pretty well. I think they've got a mid/high end router of somesort doing most of the work now though.
Anywho, seems to be working fine. I don't know if they have any sort of quotas set up, but there doesn't seem to be a problem. Most of the patrons that use the wireless are workers from my office or surrounding offices and some college students.
Hope some of that info's usefull to you.
Coming from a paid software development job, I'll have to say I really enjoyed this article (especially because I'm already doing a chunk of what it says and now I have something to link to some of my lazy teammates).
As far as the controvercial myth #1 goes, troll or not I'm glad it was brought up. I'm thinking about getting into open source development (I've got about 4 ideas I'd like to work on and I'm even considering changing jobs for a while to make time for it) and I don't have much of a "feel" for what the OSS community is really like yet. I'll find out for myself soon enough if myth #1 is troll or not, but I wouldn't have even been looking for it, <sarc>i just assumed it was one big happy family.</sarc>
For energy savings programs that I work on we use a very simple homebuilt temperature sensor.
It's just a thermistor (thermally sensative resistor, looks like two thin wires with a small red ball of plastic like substance in the middle) connected to an circuit that converts the current reading to a frequency, the frequency is then read by whatever the brains of the project are (usually a lame-ass PLC (like Idec's MicroSmart line) or soon a customised EtherNut). I'm sure you could also plug it into a parallel port and a little software to read the frequency of the pulses and convert to actual temperature and publish an html document to the web should be all you need.
Another post mentioned something that sounded similar but skipped the custom circuit and just jacked into a gameport. I'm guessing that a gameport does the same thing the circuit we use does and converts the current (from a POT in the joystick) to a useful digital value.
Now, you wanted a simple, off the shelf solution? Maybe try starting a sourceforge project for the software to convert thermistor data over joystick to a published html page. Post it and the programmers will come (maybe, i'm still a noob to the OSS community). All you would need for testing would be a POT stuck into the gameport.
If you don't like java and your clients are all Windows or Mac users then you may want to consider shockwave. Shockwave scripting language (lingo) is fairly powerful (once you get to know it) with editing text and text assets in the shockwave movie can be used to produce html or rtf data that could be save and/or uploaded to where they need to be.
Of course, there's no linux support (yet) for shockwave and I'm probably a bit biased since I've been doing shockwave work for 3 years straight.
Big deal, the code is simple. If this is it, then there's no problem just follow SOP. Kernel developer A: write a spec for what ulong_t atealloc(struct map, size_t); is supposed to do. Kernel developer B (who has never seen ate_utils.c before): follow the spec and write a new replacement from scratch. There, no more SCO code. What I don't get, is how do they really justify this little bit of code (which as far as i can tell isn't even included in the kernels i build for my home machine) entitles them to more money than a full copy of windows?
Uhm... last i checked, there's an option to do that already. I think it defaults to download automatically and then an icon in the taskbar lets you know they're ready to install and with 3 clicks you're installing them and getting ready to reboot 3 times. Maybe they're talking about making it default or forfced... maybe i should RTFA...
I'm using Energizer NiMh AAs and the Energizer charger all of which I picked up at target for cheap.
I use them in my wavebirds (Game Cube wireless controlers) and my Nikon CoolPix 2100, their performance is actually a bit better than the the Nikon brand batteries and charger that cost 4x as much.
Of course, the first few charges sucked, but on the 3rd cycle, NiMh batteries really seem to come to life.
Best of all, I got the energizer charger just for AAs, but on closer inspection, you can plug in AAA and 9v (or 12v? I never remember which is which) batteries as well. And the charger was less than the Nikon one that only does AAs.
Not so much that it would spoil network patching, but it would limit the types of applications it could be used on.
With XPE you can only use it the way Microsoft lets you, I'm sure there's plenty of application Microsoft would be fine with, however, you still have to run your ideas through them. They don't have to give you an XPE license if they don't want to.
Now, if this whole thing was based on Linux, then you could really do whatever you want with it... I wonder, have they gotten together a DirectX sort of Wine thing yet? I thought I heard of soemthing called WineX or something, but I could be wrong.
Anywho, that'd really be the ticket on this sort of idea.
I talked to these guys at E3 this year (they were down in the basement). This thing isn't nearly all it's cracked up to be.
First off, they start off talking about how you can plop any PC title in there and it will play, no problem. A bit slower the first time than others though. So, I ask if they have some sort of special version of install shield and what do they do if a developer uses a really strange in house installer?
Finally, the truth comes out, they have to write a script for each and every game, which means thousands of install scripts, in addition to the patch scripts. It seemed like a small (under 20 ppl) outfit, so I'm pretty sure "Thousands" is theoretical.
As far as how they expect to make their money, the patches and everything will be a subscription service, don't believe them if they say otherwise.
Basically, it comes down to one nutty guy that seems more from marketing than the tech. side of things and a few poor programmer side kicks trying deparately to keep up with his wide and ignorant feature claims.
Did I say this thing is full of shit? It is, really, the more I think about it, the more I remember how upset I was at his obtuse claims of compatibility and performance (when was the last time you had to upgrade the processor/ram in your PS2? when was the last time you had to upgrade your gaming PC?).
This guy is just a dreamer with no grasp of reality. I savor the memory of how red faced and deflated I left him in the basement at E3 after shooting down every response he had to my questions about compatibility, hardware performance, etc.
Anyways, don't buy into the marketese, this product will suck if it ever makes it on the shelf.
However, as another reader mentioned, there could be other great applications for this sort of embedded system with network patching and such, but the XPEmbedded licence pretty much spoils that.
You are correct, too slow for communications.
However, many areas of manufacturing these days use lasers, and these would be plenty fast for those applications. They would also get rid of moving parts, which is great since many manufacturing environments contain large amounts of airborne debris which require anything with moving parts to me continually maintained/replaced.
So, maybe not fast enough for communication, but fast enough for other things. Also, given enough time, it could catch up with desirable data speeds..
As somebody else pointed out, there's lots of information online at msdn.microsoft.com
For other needs, you can google your way out of most problems (since the chances of you being the first person to run into an issue with Windows are slim).
Learn vbscript, they're the only way to get things done sometimes (unless you want F2 to be your new best friend). Also, learn some of the old Batch scripting, many of those tricks can be applied to the vbscript tools.
Oh, and learn all the hotkeys, it'll speed things up ([+]+D: desktop, [+]+F: Search, [+]+E: Explorer, etc.
Also, look for documentation on your network's weak spots. If you're running IIS, get ready for some fun learning how to lock it down tight. Oh, and bookmark windowsupdate.microsoft.com on every machine, but test each patch on a test system if you can before deploying it across the network.
Speaking of deploying across the network, there are a number of tools to take care of installations and patches over the network from the comfort of your desk (I'm sure there's OSS OS equiv's). Also, at least with windows 2000 and up, you can schedule tasks remotely if you connect to the remote machine over the LAN (or VPN) using administrator account credentials.
Anyways, good luck. Hope that helps.
I consider myself a technophile. I've got a lot of gear at home and I'm in the process of putting a number of sensors and controls on the internet.
However, the last thing I'd do is put each device out on it's own IP for the world to see. Wouldn't it be great fun for hackers to find an exploit in the new GE refrigerator and go spoiling all the food in every apartment in NewYork during the heat of summer? As if it didn't smell enough...
Even if I had 100 devices at home, each one would just have a port mapped from my gateway device (a $200 WalMart special running RH9). I seriously doubt I'm going to have around 65k devices that need to be exposed to the net.
So, my cell may have it's own IP, and maybe my car, but that's still just 3 internet IP addresses for a technophile. Any other web enabled gadgets I want can be routed through the Home/Car/Cell connection.
I really see no problem here. Besides, even though web enabled devices will spread from the techies out to main stream consumers, we're still talking upper middle class and up. And mostly just in the US/Canada/EU/Japan.
I could see 3 to 10 IPs per person tops, and that's far from a crisis.
Now, you could argue, more sites and businesses on the net will take up more addresses, but many of the hosting solutions I've looked at offer a "virtual" server on a shared physical box, probably using host headers and such (neat trick, read the host header and redirect the requests to a specific site based upon the URL in the request, even IIS does it).
The Register has a nice blurb on this.
/. crowd that bogged their servers?
However, was it the Times as they state, or more likely the
I've got a few Ideas, but not enough time to read all the posts so far, so forgive me for dups.
.zip files containing all the files for popular programs such as Nero and EasyCD Creator. Can't get much closer/novice friendly than that.
Images Perhaps deploying a backend application that would generate custom made ISO (or other popular formats) images and make them avail. for download for say 10 days or something. Then email an invoice and a download link to the user, they download the ISO and can use that to burn a CD from.
On the same page, have not just cover art in image format, but
However, this would probably require either A) An automated process to generate custom ISOs on demand, or B) A large library of albums with added content already in ISO format. Sounds like a fun project to me, if only I had time.
Services
As I noticed some readers mention in what I skimmed before writing this, a monthly service could be nice, but keep it low.
In exchange for the monthly fee, give them all they want in the way of singles. Since many indy artists (at least that I know) don't actually do singles, these could just be the 2 most popular tracks from an album. On the same page these freebies are downloaded from, have a link to Buy the whole album today!.
Added Content
You said you've got the deal for MP3s, what about MPEGS (or other popular video formats)? You could either charge per download, or do these as freebies for subscribers or both.
For example, subscribers could download 1 music video per album for free (I don't know how many indy label artists have time to make videos, but hey). And you could also make interview videos, or even offer a service to fans to distribute (with dues paid to artist and fans) submitted concert footage (preferably edited together from mulitple fan's cameras).
In addition to offering these as stand alones, you could offer these as part of the albums. I remember there was a brief fad of doing hybrid music CDs with added content (common with DVDs today) if you popped them in your PC. This would be a great thing to bring back, now when fans buy albums, they don't just get the music and cover art, but music videos, concert footage and interviews.
If you use macromedia's director you could even make an easy interface that would run on Mac and PC (but that's starting to cross the line of content distribution to content creation, but if you could find a few competent shockwave programmers to contract it could pay off and add value to your company).
All together package
I mentioned ISOs, these could either be music CD images, or just data CD images loaded with MP3s, an autorun macromedia interface, videos, etc.
Or (not sure how hard this would be) perhaps even both (were there compatibility issues with those music/data CDs? And could you do a Mac/PC/music CD?).
Anyways, hope there's some useful ideas in there.
Good Luck!
Actually, that's exactly what they're doing with the-features-previously-known-as-palladium (now just a part of longhorn?).
.Net interactions avail. with MSOffice.
You know that little message you get when you download the latest drivers for deviceX but manufacturerX doesn't want to spend $X to get another digital signature from M$? The one that strongly discourages installing unsigned drivers?
Well, that's gonna happen with ALL software on longhorn. Except, it may be worse. You may have to go into the control panel into some dark corner while logged in as Administrator in order to enable allowing unsigned-by-microsoft software to even be attempted to be installed.
Also, from a few articles i've read, Microsofts next version of windows will be 2 sided, "Trusted" and "UnTrusted". Now, i'm just guessing, but I bet that if i made unsigned programY, and MSOffice ran on the "Trusted" side of the DRM curtain (where my unsigned app would be on the "UnTrusted" side, IF it was even able to be installed), then I seriously doubt that my programY will be able to take advantage of any of the "cool"
In effect, the next generation of Windows (plus, god-forbid, hardware enabled DRM) will turn the PC platform into an XBox (although i'm sure somebody will find a hack, still, it's a pain in the ass).
Have to say, you have a really good point.
But have you tried RedHat9?
Try installing RedHat7.1, then wipe the system and try installing RedHat9. See the difference? Yes, M$ may have Linux beat on the easy-install-all-together-ready-to-go-in-3-disks deal (note, that's 1 disc for windows, 2 for office).
However, Linux is catching up quick. We all know that the foundation of linux isn't why it's not on more systems. It's rock phuxing solid. What's keeping linux of grandma's PC is the install setup, and many distro's are tackling this problem while we speak.
As soon as I have some free time (whenever that may happen), I'd love to help contribute to an installer for some distro out there. I mean, even RedHat7.1 (and probably older even) have a fully graphical installer (still have textmode for the first half of Win2k and WinXP) and have the pre-defined setup types (Home, office, laptop, server, etc).
My big recommendation though, would be something in between the multiple choice system type selection and the individual package selection. You know, like if I select Office, then it gives me another menu where i can select from a few best of breed PIM's, Word Processors, SpreadSheets, or even Suite packages (openoffice, etc). So that I can have my pick w/o having to pick packages.
Also a simple menu with thumbnails for selecting the windowing system would be nice. And more than just KDE or Gnome (that's what redhat gives) would be nice.
Anywho, i could rant and wishlist all day, but the point is, M$'s only real advantage now is it's "easy" installer. Sure, it's integrated to hell, but as long as OSS developers stick to open standards and make an effort for interoperability then Linux should catch up in no time.
</rant>
I spent all day yesterday getting WU IMAP server going on cygwin running on the w2k server at my office (i'd make it linux, but it's not my call)... only to find out that you can't really use it that well in outlookXP (probably intentionally on the outlook side)...
So, i spent most of the night trying to figure out how to write a plugin, like the one that's out for connecting to Lotus servers via outlook, with no luck really.
I was getting ready to just write my own simple groupware that would do basics like contacts, calendar and email folders and a client using XML...
Thanks to OGo, now i can go spend all night working on my other side projects! I'm downloading the rpms now, i hope it works under cygwin!
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At E3 (electronic entertainment expo) the big thing in the nintendo area was cooperative play.
No use to the author since but for cube owners (preferably with a few GBAs and link cables) it'll be great as soon as these hit the market (i think a few were targeted for christmas release).
There were 3 that stood out to me...
A pacman game where 3 players control ghosts on the TV in pretty 3D and a 4th player controls pacman on his/her GBA.
A legend of zelda: wind waker spinoff called Tetra's Trackers where 4 players play competatively in scavenger hunt type missions (for the first few levels at least). I don't know if there may be some cooperative play (a la mario party) later on, but the games are simple enough that the playing field is pretty even for veteran gamers and newbies alike.
And a new Final Fantasy game that's kind of diablo like gameplay for up to 4 players. All cooperative and played with GBAs plugged into the cube with status screens/menus on the GBA.
No good for sony users and not in time for summer, but something to look forward to. Seems like cooperative play may be the next big thing (from what I saw from the heavyweights at E3).
I started programing in BASIC and then BASICA on an old IBM XT with IBM DOS 3.something. I learned by example from BASIC games in the back of Highlights magazine (science version) borrowed from my JrHigh teacher. I now work at a small game developer in southern California making 35,000USD with only a GED.
I give that background to say that this 0.02USD is coming from the other end of the spectrum, I've taken some CS courses at the local Jr College, but of the 3 professors, 1 is a geneous (worked for JPL out of highschool and designed a guitar pedal for Hendrix) and the other 2 are boneheads, after I did all the courses from the good prof. I quit and am now looking at going back to school for a completely job unrelated major (like english).
Anywho, so I really don't know what your CS studies have given you in the way of preparation for the real world of programing, but if say you were going to come work with me, here's what I'd want from you.
1) DOCUMENTATION! DOCUMENTATION! DOCUMENTATION!
I don't know about undergrad level CS, but the 100 to 200 level courses I've been exposed to lacked grotesquely in this aspect.
Remember, when you get paid for code, sure your check depends on if it works or not, but to give your employer their honest moneys worth you should really supply documentation in the form of at least one technical design document and lots of comments in your code. Also (and this is more personal preference than anything) most compilers in most languages can work with pretty long variable names so use the long names and save on comments (I don't mean never use 1 letter variables, 'i' is fine for a loop incremental, but with more importaint or complex things, go big).
Remember, you're probably not going to be at company X forever. So when the time for feature additions or new platform support comes down the line, the code you can be proud of is code they can throw at a Jr programer for the tweaks and not give him/her an ulcer just trying to figure out WTF you were trying to do, let alone where the bug/incompatiblity is. Also, even if you are at company X forever, you may be busy with project Z when they need work done on project Q from when you first started there. So they give the fixes to another programer, imagine how embarrased you could be if they crack open your source and see a big uncommented mess! Maybe project Z will end up being your last.
2) Avoid band-aids!
Note I say avoid and not never use. When there's a problem with the way an object was designed (possibly due to no fault of your own, being a smaller company in the games buisness, publishers love to throw feature changes at us half way through a project because they can get away with it) take the time to rewrite the object if needed. Of course unless it's the day before your milestone and there just isn't time, then it's okay to do a bandaid, but then document the hell out of so that when/if anybody else has to go into your code you don't look like an idiot.
3) Paper first!
Thats something I learned from the 1 good professor at my community college. When I whip up little tools and such (which I imagine is most of the author's experince, making tools to make admin life easier) I just jump right in and code. However, when it's code in the actual product it's worth it to take the time to sit down and draw it all out on paper. Pseudo-code, object diagrams, hierarchy, sure there's visualization programs out there but it's faster on paper.
One of the big advantages of drawing it out on paper is that as a programer (at least as me) you get attached to that object you stayed up until 3AM writing. Then you find a flaw in it and should rewrite it, but it's so much more tempting to just bandaid it. If it had been written out on paper first, you may've caught the design flaw ahead of time and instead of throwing out all that code, all you're looking at is a little scribble here, jot down some new psuedo-code and a little scribble here, there and there to carry the changes to all the depen
Or just snag a copy of VMWare and load redhat on it.
Actually, Kodak makes a pretty nice line of digital cameras and even makes (sells relabeled?) digital flash media. Unfortunately I'm stuck with Canon and Nikon (I loved Kodak when I did film photography, forget Fuji) because I'm clinging to good old CF, no SD or memory sticks for me.
The gain isn't in the complication of updating the scraper program, its in the cost of proofreaders for the OCR data. Most corporate types won't trust OCR data that hasn't at least been skimmed by a proofreader. A proofreader is a whole person (or outsource contract) that requires wages, benefits, etc.
In other words, you're not creating a problem that will be solved by a few existing programmers, it's a problem that will require additional staff.
Every encryption (which this kind of is through obscuration [sp?]) can be broken, the goal of real world encryption is just to make it more expensive to decrypt it than the value of the data locked inside.
Yeah, i forgot on 2.
As far as 1 goes, a few more gifs isn't going to be noticed in the bloat of ecommerce sites out there today, which factors into the title (lots ecommerce titles take a big dump on web standards and are non-functional/ugly with anything other than MSIE or NS4.79 and below because that's all the webmonkies get taught at their local community college).
On 4, the big issues isn't the scrapers, it's that the scrapers will use OCR which may have a higher error rate due to the scramble/fuzz images which will cost in proofreading. Most corporate types require anything input by OCR to be proofread, which costs money. The code for a better scraper isn't the money eater, it's the proofreading of the OCR data.
3,4,5: Properly done the images could be spat out pretty quickly with less backend lag than it takes to look up the prices and generate the html page anyways.
Anywho, not like I even like the idea anyways, i think that if information is posted on the web it should be free game (with the exception of copywritten origional content). I really only thought up the idea because i read the article after a 4 hour coding spree on a stupid web project for a big stupid monolithic company and it sounded like the sort of thing they'd ask of me (Make it scraper proof!) =P
I think such rules exist, but they don't get enforced much. If you ever try looking at online stores such as buy.com or walmart.com you'll see what I mean.
/me goes back to the drawing board.
But, you're right, I completely forgot about that issue... of course you could always check the UserAgent of the person visiting, but that would defeat the purpose, if scrapping prices is against the TOS then what's to keep them from faking their UserAgent to be an audio web browser?