Or, my favorite example of this, the Eagles "Hotel California" album - three good songs starting off (Hotel California, Life in the Fast Lane, New Kid in Town), then a complete load of dreck for the rest of it. And yet, number 37 on Rolling Stone's "top 500 albums of all time".
Look, this isn't a marriage - you didn't promise "...til death do you part." There are no therapists specializing in helping estranged contractors/headhunters work out their problems. It's a business relationship; if they aren't producing, find someone who will./frank
With RF, you also eliminate issues with hiding the normal lights/reflectors with clothing/costumes, etc. As I understand at the moment, motion capture is done with an actor in a leotard to avoid these problems. With RF, you open up new possibilities of filming a real actor in real costume, and being able to motion detect them in real time. I'm not quite sure what you'd do with it, but that's why I'm an engineer and not a "creative" type.
Frankly, you need help. You're not going to successfully develop a product from this on your own. Give up on the "lone wolf" approach - you're not gonna make it.
Find a VC who understands the motion picture industry, and has contacts there. Sell out, keeping whatever percentage you can. Let the VC help you find the managers and developers necessary to take this to the next level - either as a standalone product or a technology for sale.
Alternatively, take what you have to ILM or Pixar or Disney or whoever. You'll have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone to do this; once again, a VC could help you with that.
which is why in most labs O2 cylinders are at relative low pressure.
Then labs must be wusses compared to every welding shop in town, where O2 is delivered at 3000 psi (21 MPa for our benighted friends) in a bunch of old metal cylinders clanging around in the back of a truck.
Of course, the same goes for all of those recreational scuba divers - 3000 psi strapped to their back.
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, and the places you work consider this relatively low pressure. In which case, I apologize profusely.
Most of the mysterious illnesses of our society, from wifi allergies to "travelling" pain, to fibromyalgia and chronic pain disorder, are all manifestations of dysthemia and depression.
Get in touch with the local Ham Radio group or some other homebrew club (no, not that kind of brew). Perhaps a local Robotics society. You should find quite a number of people who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about electronics. Work out some cheap and easy one-class, or one-week kinds of projects. If you're a good salesman, you might be able to get them to dig through their junkboxes and come up with the appropriate parts for free. Heaven knows I have a box of through-hole R's and C's that I'll never use, along with dozens of 4000 series CMOS and various powered breadboards. If a teacher with your enthusiasm came up, I'd be more than happy to share (or show up once a week as the visiting mad scientist).
With the volunteers, you can build all of the things mentioned above - radios, audio amplifiers, games, music makers, light organs, telegraphs/telephones, light-beam based phones, quiz show buttons (four buttons per team, with a light for the first button and a lockout on the other buttons; run a quiz show after building the device), replacement radio control for a broken RC christmas toy, digital circuits.
Teach them chemistry; both Ferric Chloride and Ammonium Persulfate etching are cheap and can be used to make PCBs or copper decorations (put the same resist pattern on both sides of a thin copper sheet). The PCBs can be used for the projects if necessary, the decorations to keep them interested.
Look at geeks.com or dealextreme.com for ideas of cheap little toys; and get the kids to reproduce them. Look to sciplus.com or goldmine-elec.com for unique bits and pieces and cheap parts. LEDs are always interesting; use'em.
As Lockhart's Lament (http://plato.asu.edu/LockhartsLament.pdf) argues, giving them a problem they care about and helping them to solve it is going to go a long ways towards keeping their interest compared to (in the voice of Ben Stein) "This, children, is the symbol for a resistor. It has the following characteristics...".
From TFA: "There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.
"FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google.
Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons". "
It was unmaintainable because it was written in Bash, Expect, and C, so they rewrote it in Bash, Python, and C?
Four 500 mg tablets (standard "Extra Strength" size) is too much for you to take, when the recommended dose is 2?
I often pop 2 g of Aspirin to handle a headache; 1 g doesn't do much. Fortunately, Aspirin taken occasionally has essentially no side effects, as long as the dose is kept below 10(!) grams. You'd have to go up to around 35 grams to start getting lethal effects.
Perhaps because Tom Tom's business model involves building and selling GPS devices, and not fighting patent battles?
It becomes really easy to decide to settle such a lawsuit to keep management focused on "job 1", rather than focusing on saving a few pennies per unit by fighting a lawsuit for several years with a very well funded adversary.
The difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business often comes down to the CEO's ability to make such a business decision without letting the "fairness" of the issue cloud the "business" of the issue. Get too involved in "I'm not going to let them bleed me for what may be an obvious patent with what could be some obliquely-related prior art", and you're not focusing on your core business.
Neither Rock Band or Guitar Hero are very age appropriate for kids. Not only are the lyrics and imagery questionable, even the "Easy" (for GH) level is pretty darned hard for them, and the "Beginner" (or whatever they call it) level is so dumbed down that even they think its just a joke.
On the other hand, it would be a great family game if they could keep up.
If they present present less sex and drugs oriented visuals, and a younger bias to the difficulty level, it opens the game up to a whole new audience.
If you prefer as an on-screen avatar a half-dressed, skanky chick with needle tracks up her arm, feel free to not buy this game.
If your BIOS knows how to rewrite FLASH, the BIOS routines can be co-opted to, well, rewrite FLASH at any time. The fact that the standard BIOS API doesn't provide a way to rewrite the FLASH doesn't mean that a non-standard, undocumented way to rewrite FLASH doesn't exist. You seem to believe that because the BIOS doesn't allow "something", that "something" can't be accomplished. I believe that code is code, and unless the BIOS was written in an extremely security conscious manner, the BIOS code to write the FLASH can be utilized without the BIOS' permission. Or, more simply, the Flash write code can be duplicated and used outside the BIOS. It's not rocket science.
As a firmware engineer who patches ROM code in embedded systems daily, I'll give a bit of insight.
The BIOS as a whole is specific to the board that it is running on. However, that doesn't mean that additions can't be made to the BIOS in a generic fashion. Imagine you searched the BIOS Flash for unused space (all of them will have it), and relocated code into that space (relocating a DOS.exe file is trivial). Writing a FLASH is not a difficult operation, though different motherboard manufacturers probably write protect it in different ways. Your code is now in the BIOS ROM.
You then modify the code in the flash that handles e.g. INT 14 (Serial communications, pretty much a dead function on modern PCs). This is nothing more than overwriting the first couple of bytes of the address pointed to by the INT14 vector in the flash - you store them in your patch area, and JMP to your routine. Once again, it's a Flash write.
Now, certainly, at some point in time (BIOS, probably) someone will attempt to enumerate/initialize the serial ports. Your code is now running - the world is your oyster. With this exploit, you can now probably hoist the BIOS code into a VM PRIOR to loading Windows. And you're still there.
There are different families of BIOS that you would have to support - Phoenix, AMI (do they still exist?), HP, Intel, etc. There are different schemes for protecting Flash, etc. These differences are probably smaller than they sound.
Has anyone else noticed that this thread has an extremely high ratio of replies marked "informative" or "insightful". At least, it's got the highest ratio I've ever seen.
If they're offering 10%, take it. It will certainly have a vesting schedule attached to it. Don't feel guilty about leaving in three months if things aren't working out; they won't feel guilty about firing you in three months if business goes south.
Ask for an immediate vesting clause in the case of termination (other than for cause), or sale of the company. You don't want to accept their offer, then get fired three months from now when they find someone new (because you threatened to leave), or when the company gets sold.
Ask for the latest financial statements. Your perception of the money being made by the company, and the finance guy's perception may be totally different. If they're offering options to keep you, you need to be able to value the offer.
If there is a board of directors, insist on a seat. With a 10% stake, you would be entitled to it. Its the best way to find out where the company is, and where its going.
Ask the CEO for his exit strategy - is he planning on running the company forever, is he planning on a private sale, is he planning on going public? Each of these has a different risk/reward tradeoff that you have to make.
Being handcuffed with vesting options, but having no visibility into the viability of the company, is like being harnessed to a wagon with a closed box on top, being told "You'll get what's inside after we make it over the mountain". Especially when you don't know if the wagonmaster is dipping into the box on the trip.
Writing in 'C' is an order of magnitude faster than writing in assembler; if you're building a system with 10 man-years of coding in it, that becomes really, really important.
Imagine writing a host-side USB stack in assembler; a BIOS has to have that. Or writing an Ethernet driver and TCP/IP stack in assembler. Or any of the other large subsystems of a BIOS; the task would be daunting to me, a 20 year veteran of embedded systems (yes, my 'C' and Assembly mojo is strong).
Assembler has proven its worth when sprinkled through embedded systems. When profiling finds the routines that are bottlenecks for time-critical functions, a good assembly programmer can often speed up the 'C' code by a factor of 2 to 10. But, this generally involves very small chunks of code - 10 to 50 lines of assembly.
In most real systems, the vast majority of the code is executed rarely, and rarely has a performance impact. For example, on a modern dual-core, 2 GHz processor with a GB of RAM, the code used to the display the BIOS setup UI and handle user input will execute faster than human percepption in almost any language you could imagine (say, a PERL interpreter written in VB which generates interpreted LISP). There is no reason in the world to try to optimize performance here. Even in things like Disk I/O, the BIOS' job is mostly to boot the OS, then get the hell out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a Zombie Tarantula? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula_hawk
Or, my favorite example of this, the Eagles "Hotel California" album - three good songs starting off (Hotel California, Life in the Fast Lane, New Kid in Town), then a complete load of dreck for the rest of it. And yet, number 37 on Rolling Stone's "top 500 albums of all time".
When do you fire a headhunter?
When you no longer trust them to represent you.
Look, this isn't a marriage - you didn't promise "...til death do you part." There are no therapists specializing in helping estranged contractors/headhunters work out their problems. It's a business relationship; if they aren't producing, find someone who will. /frank
WTF does "one, giant active directory domain" or "ping accross continents baby" have to do with IP Subnets?
Do you have any understanding of networks at all, or do you just spew back the crap you've heard?
Great idea.
With RF, you also eliminate issues with hiding the normal lights/reflectors with clothing/costumes, etc. As I understand at the moment, motion capture is done with an actor in a leotard to avoid these problems. With RF, you open up new possibilities of filming a real actor in real costume, and being able to motion detect them in real time. I'm not quite sure what you'd do with it, but that's why I'm an engineer and not a "creative" type.
Frankly, you need help. You're not going to successfully develop a product from this on your own. Give up on the "lone wolf" approach - you're not gonna make it.
Find a VC who understands the motion picture industry, and has contacts there. Sell out, keeping whatever percentage you can. Let the VC help you find the managers and developers necessary to take this to the next level - either as a standalone product or a technology for sale.
Alternatively, take what you have to ILM or Pixar or Disney or whoever. You'll have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone to do this; once again, a VC could help you with that.
JMHO.
Google is your friend. Use it.
Then labs must be wusses compared to every welding shop in town, where O2 is delivered at 3000 psi (21 MPa for our benighted friends) in a bunch of old metal cylinders clanging around in the back of a truck.
Of course, the same goes for all of those recreational scuba divers - 3000 psi strapped to their back.
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, and the places you work consider this relatively low pressure. In which case, I apologize profusely.
Best typo ever.
Fixed that for ya.
It was spectacularly beautiful before it was flooded; much like the Grand Canyon.
It is still spectacularly beautiful, I go boating for a week on it every year. Something I can't do at the Grand Canyon. /frank
Yes, they are; and writing bogus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon Wikipedia entries about them. /frank
Most of the mysterious illnesses of our society, from wifi allergies to "travelling" pain, to fibromyalgia and chronic pain disorder, are all manifestations of dysthemia and depression.
Source?
Don't do it yourself.
Get in touch with the local Ham Radio group or some other homebrew club (no, not that kind of brew). Perhaps a local Robotics society. You should find quite a number of people who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about electronics. Work out some cheap and easy one-class, or one-week kinds of projects. If you're a good salesman, you might be able to get them to dig through their junkboxes and come up with the appropriate parts for free. Heaven knows I have a box of through-hole R's and C's that I'll never use, along with dozens of 4000 series CMOS and various powered breadboards. If a teacher with your enthusiasm came up, I'd be more than happy to share (or show up once a week as the visiting mad scientist).
With the volunteers, you can build all of the things mentioned above - radios, audio amplifiers, games, music makers, light organs, telegraphs/telephones, light-beam based phones, quiz show buttons (four buttons per team, with a light for the first button and a lockout on the other buttons; run a quiz show after building the device), replacement radio control for a broken RC christmas toy, digital circuits.
Teach them chemistry; both Ferric Chloride and Ammonium Persulfate etching are cheap and can be used to make PCBs or copper decorations (put the same resist pattern on both sides of a thin copper sheet). The PCBs can be used for the projects if necessary, the decorations to keep them interested.
Look at geeks.com or dealextreme.com for ideas of cheap little toys; and get the kids to reproduce them. Look to sciplus.com or goldmine-elec.com for unique bits and pieces and cheap parts. LEDs are always interesting; use'em.
As Lockhart's Lament (http://plato.asu.edu/LockhartsLament.pdf) argues, giving them a problem they care about and helping them to solve it is going to go a long ways towards keeping their interest compared to (in the voice of Ben Stein) "This, children, is the symbol for a resistor. It has the following characteristics...".
Good luck,
From TFA:
"There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.
"FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google.
Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons". "
It was unmaintainable because it was written in Bash, Expect, and C, so they rewrote it in Bash, Python, and C?
Four 500 mg tablets (standard "Extra Strength" size) is too much for you to take, when the recommended dose is 2?
I often pop 2 g of Aspirin to handle a headache; 1 g doesn't do much. Fortunately, Aspirin taken occasionally has essentially no side effects, as long as the dose is kept below 10(!) grams. You'd have to go up to around 35 grams to start getting lethal effects.
Now, that is a lot of stuff. /frank
Perhaps because Tom Tom's business model involves building and selling GPS devices, and not fighting patent battles?
It becomes really easy to decide to settle such a lawsuit to keep management focused on "job 1", rather than focusing on saving a few pennies per unit by fighting a lawsuit for several years with a very well funded adversary.
The difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business often comes down to the CEO's ability to make such a business decision without letting the "fairness" of the issue cloud the "business" of the issue. Get too involved in "I'm not going to let them bleed me for what may be an obvious patent with what could be some obliquely-related prior art", and you're not focusing on your core business.
You don't have 7 year old children, do you?
Neither Rock Band or Guitar Hero are very age appropriate for kids. Not only are the lyrics and imagery questionable, even the "Easy" (for GH) level is pretty darned hard for them, and the "Beginner" (or whatever they call it) level is so dumbed down that even they think its just a joke.
On the other hand, it would be a great family game if they could keep up.
If they present present less sex and drugs oriented visuals, and a younger bias to the difficulty level, it opens the game up to a whole new audience.
If you prefer as an on-screen avatar a half-dressed, skanky chick with needle tracks up her arm, feel free to not buy this game.
OK, you lost me at step 6. Citation?
And, by the way, at step 7. Citation?
If your BIOS knows how to rewrite FLASH, the BIOS routines can be co-opted to, well, rewrite FLASH at any time.
The fact that the standard BIOS API doesn't provide a way to rewrite the FLASH doesn't mean that a non-standard, undocumented way to rewrite FLASH doesn't exist.
You seem to believe that because the BIOS doesn't allow "something", that "something" can't be accomplished. I believe that code is code, and unless the BIOS was written in an extremely security conscious manner, the BIOS code to write the FLASH can be utilized without the BIOS' permission.
Or, more simply, the Flash write code can be duplicated and used outside the BIOS. It's not rocket science.
As a firmware engineer who patches ROM code in embedded systems daily, I'll give a bit of insight.
The BIOS as a whole is specific to the board that it is running on. However, that doesn't mean that additions can't be made to the BIOS in a generic fashion. Imagine you searched the BIOS Flash for unused space (all of them will have it), and relocated code into that space (relocating a DOS .exe file is trivial). Writing a FLASH is not a difficult operation, though different motherboard manufacturers probably write protect it in different ways. Your code is now in the BIOS ROM.
You then modify the code in the flash that handles e.g. INT 14 (Serial communications, pretty much a dead function on modern PCs). This is nothing more than overwriting the first couple of bytes of the address pointed to by the INT14 vector in the flash - you store them in your patch area, and JMP to your routine. Once again, it's a Flash write.
Now, certainly, at some point in time (BIOS, probably) someone will attempt to enumerate/initialize the serial ports. Your code is now running - the world is your oyster. With this exploit, you can now probably hoist the BIOS code into a VM PRIOR to loading Windows. And you're still there.
There are different families of BIOS that you would have to support - Phoenix, AMI (do they still exist?), HP, Intel, etc. There are different schemes for protecting Flash, etc. These differences are probably smaller than they sound.
11 straight days over 100F? Hell, we can go 3 straight MONTHS over 100F. Talk to me when you see 11 straight days over 115F.
I think "They're worthless" has "get a lawyer" beat in the number of responses.
But, yes, I can smell the burning from here...
Has anyone else noticed that this thread has an extremely high ratio of replies marked "informative" or "insightful". At least, it's got the highest ratio I've ever seen.
OK, mod me "off-topic" now. /frank
If they're offering 10%, take it. It will certainly have a vesting schedule attached to it. Don't feel guilty about leaving in three months if things aren't working out; they won't feel guilty about firing you in three months if business goes south.
Ask for an immediate vesting clause in the case of termination (other than for cause), or sale of the company. You don't want to accept their offer, then get fired three months from now when they find someone new (because you threatened to leave), or when the company gets sold.
Ask for the latest financial statements. Your perception of the money being made by the company, and the finance guy's perception may be totally different. If they're offering options to keep you, you need to be able to value the offer.
If there is a board of directors, insist on a seat. With a 10% stake, you would be entitled to it. Its the best way to find out where the company is, and where its going.
Ask the CEO for his exit strategy - is he planning on running the company forever, is he planning on a private sale, is he planning on going public? Each of these has a different risk/reward tradeoff that you have to make.
Being handcuffed with vesting options, but having no visibility into the viability of the company, is like being harnessed to a wagon with a closed box on top, being told "You'll get what's inside after we make it over the mountain". Especially when you don't know if the wagonmaster is dipping into the box on the trip.
Writing in 'C' is an order of magnitude faster than writing in assembler; if you're building a system with 10 man-years of coding in it, that becomes really, really important.
Imagine writing a host-side USB stack in assembler; a BIOS has to have that. Or writing an Ethernet driver and TCP/IP stack in assembler. Or any of the other large subsystems of a BIOS; the task would be daunting to me, a 20 year veteran of embedded systems (yes, my 'C' and Assembly mojo is strong).
Assembler has proven its worth when sprinkled through embedded systems. When profiling finds the routines that are bottlenecks for time-critical functions, a good assembly programmer can often speed up the 'C' code by a factor of 2 to 10. But, this generally involves very small chunks of code - 10 to 50 lines of assembly.
In most real systems, the vast majority of the code is executed rarely, and rarely has a performance impact. For example, on a modern dual-core, 2 GHz processor with a GB of RAM, the code used to the display the BIOS setup UI and handle user input will execute faster than human percepption in almost any language you could imagine (say, a PERL interpreter written in VB which generates interpreted LISP). There is no reason in the world to try to optimize performance here. Even in things like Disk I/O, the BIOS' job is mostly to boot the OS, then get the hell out of the way.