read Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies article on how to determine a price for things... at the end, you'll be wiser, but no better off in determining what price should be if you have a single product and a variable market!
also of more general interest on how the price of items can be set is The Undercover Economist (indirect link to Amazon), where he touches on the dotcom boom and microsoft's monopoly.
Writing to my BIOS.... now thats a different matter and one I would take exception to.
indeed, this is why I always, if possible, use both the write-protect jumper on the motherboard (if it exists) as well as disabling write in the cmos/bios settings.
100% agree. Microchip's products are really great as they do a range of devices from cheap and simple devices up to quite complex ones. They are fun to use and quick to learn - sure, in the real world, high level languages like Java are desired by employers, but these are so abstract that you don't get a feel for the actual workings of the computer. Its vital that people understand how the actual machine works, and there's nothing like a bit of assembler and some flashing LEDs and push buttons to do this.
the policy for requiring the dongle would be set by Microsoft -
every boot
every 10th boot
for product activation
I don't see how using it purely to activate as a one-shot would stop a group of people sharing the same license.
if usb interface driver fails, then yes, you'd be fscked. that'd be a bigger problem in a laptop if no pcmcia slot to add a usb card. but you'd be f'd if the video card failed, that's the price.
the point is that it'd be fair, but harsh. unlike the old parallel dongles, a crypto dongle would be much hard to hack. the idea is to prevent mass piracy, leaking of corporate keys, and be only the mildest of inconvenience to the end user, which WGA etc is definitely not achieving.
and I still don't like it, but it'd be better than WGA and the arbitrary revocation of license keys that MS can provoke.
that depends on whether you turn off automatic searching in IE... which you should do. Damnit, if I want to search, I'll use a search engine. Likewise, I don't want friendly error messages, I want sheer naked unadorned 404s!
any remember dongles.. the old sort fitted on your parallel port, and enabled expensive software like autocad to run.
people didn't like them, because they often had multiple dongles, and they were sometime incompatible
now, with USB, it'd be trivial. also MS could afford to give away a four-port usb hub with vista premium max super one that costs US$600 or whatever. then, you can install vista on all your computers, or upgrade/repair in anyway, and your key is still valid. bonus points if MS allow you to transfer keys from one dongle to another. You could also sell your copy in a fair manner and the buyer would run the risk of the license being revoked by MS.
now, don't get me wrong, I hate copy protection as much as anyone, but lets make it easy, transparent, and fair. moreover, potential buyers would then have to face up to licensing conditions squarely, instead of, as at the moment, thinking they can get away with buying one copy for their entire family... if they realised it was going to cost US$1000 for the three machines at home, they might decide to try linux.
I will have to try this with a basic dos disk, XOSL boot manager, partition magic and a few other things. I love XOSL, it's a great way to do boot management as it intelligently recovers when something comes along and takes over the MBR. When I needed to triple-boot my laptop between win98 (because of a piece of hardware that only worked in win98), winXP and linux, xosl made it trivial.
does this basically mean deleting the partition on a USB memory device and creating a 1.2MB partition on it?
This is my guess because on a few occasions now I've helped people whose linux boxes don't automount their flash cards or usb sticks, the memory have been corrupted and windows then formats the "root" of the drive rather than creating a partition (so you'd actually mount/dev/mmcsd rather than/dev/mmcsd1 for example)... the only easy way is to use fdisk on linux to create a new primary partition and then format that on linux or windows as fat-16.
For example, the HTC universal is a closed proprietary device, and getting linux working on it has been an uphill struggle for the dedicated team working on it (and they have achieved wonders - kudos to them!). Check out their progress on UniversalStatus.
Even the Sharp Zaurus, until recently one of the few handhelds which came with linux out of the box still has proprietary/closed-source elements - the SD driver is one example. One of the biggest missing pieces of the jigsaw is an accelerated video driver for the Zaurus SL-6000 series - there's a Toshiba TC6393XB chip for which virtually no documentation is available (it also drives the SD card slot, so presumably Toshiba didn't want to release the programmers guide for fear of giving out information on that somewhat proprietary standard).
are there companies out there that use dummy terminals for office machines?
a dummy terminal would be one that doesn't do anything other than look like a terminal.
I think what you meant to say was a dumb terminal
OTOH, a terminal for dummies could be a dummy terminal or a dumb terminal
it was once observed by Israel that going to war with the USA and losing resulted in massive investment by the USA into your country... and senior politicians jokingly debated declaring war and rapidly losing... but then decided there was a risk of winning!
Or that's how that bit of urban legend came to me.
personally, if a server is that important, have a warm standby which is a clone of the live one. when update time arrives, stop replication, do the update to see what works and what breaks, and then you'll have the confidence to do the live server.
if you can't afford a replica, at least have a full set of disks onto which you clone the system, and then update the copy.
if you can't afford a set of replica disks and your server has mirrored disks, break the mirroring on your live server (having checked for smart errors etc on the disks), update the primary disks, and if it works, re-mirror.
if your server isn't mirrored or even raided, you can't be serious about the quality of the server you run, therefore if you break it, who cares?!
it exports the whole of the sd card, one of the files there is an encapsulated linux boot image. why? because tomtom allow you to update the OS on the machine as well as the maps. when running in usb mass store, the navigation s/w isn't running.
every buy a DVD these days and try and skip the trailers and adverts and crap?
at least the movie itself is continuous and lacks adverts. oh wait, what about product placement? go look up how much it costs to have one of your products made highly visible in the latest Bond movie.
and don't get me started over the merchandising. my son is into Pixar's Cars; he has the dvd, t-shirt, pyjamas, models and even napkin/serviettes! At least we held off buying most of it until it was no longer premium priced.
spam has been beaten for *him* - he now has enough money to pay for a call centre in India to quarantine all the email addressed to bill.gates@microsoft.com and forward only the real emails on to bill.gates.secret.email.address@microsoft.com.
tomtom devices act as usb mass storage devices so you can copy s/w, map updates and speed camera POIs to them; thus the device won't actively infect, but can be a vector for infected files.
The good news with Toshiba televisions is that they can radio for help when there's a problem. The snag is that invoking this service costs US$10,000 per day, so you better hope that it gets fixed damn quick!
Slashdot Mirror
read Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies article on how to determine a price for things... at the end, you'll be wiser, but no better off in determining what price should be if you have a single product and a variable market!
also of more general interest on how the price of items can be set is The Undercover Economist (indirect link to Amazon), where he touches on the dotcom boom and microsoft's monopoly.
Writing to my BIOS.... now thats a different matter and one I would take exception to.
indeed, this is why I always, if possible, use both the write-protect jumper on the motherboard (if it exists) as well as disabling write in the cmos/bios settings.
there are graphviz viewers which allow some interaction, so you could drag nodes about a bit to make it less messy.
I live in Pittsburgh. This is fucked up right here.
Is living in Pittsburgh as bad as C&H think?
100% agree. Microchip's products are really great as they do a range of devices from cheap and simple devices up to quite complex ones. They are fun to use and quick to learn - sure, in the real world, high level languages like Java are desired by employers, but these are so abstract that you don't get a feel for the actual workings of the computer. Its vital that people understand how the actual machine works, and there's nothing like a bit of assembler and some flashing LEDs and push buttons to do this.
the policy for requiring the dongle would be set by Microsoft -
every boot
every 10th boot
for product activation
I don't see how using it purely to activate as a one-shot would stop a group of people sharing the same license.
if usb interface driver fails, then yes, you'd be fscked. that'd be a bigger problem in a laptop if no pcmcia slot to add a usb card. but you'd be f'd if the video card failed, that's the price.
the point is that it'd be fair, but harsh. unlike the old parallel dongles, a crypto dongle would be much hard to hack. the idea is to prevent mass piracy, leaking of corporate keys, and be only the mildest of inconvenience to the end user, which WGA etc is definitely not achieving.
and I still don't like it, but it'd be better than WGA and the arbitrary revocation of license keys that MS can provoke.
that depends on whether you turn off automatic searching in IE... which you should do. Damnit, if I want to search, I'll use a search engine. Likewise, I don't want friendly error messages, I want sheer naked unadorned 404s!
Wait, Windows ME, is that you?
Windows 95 called, it wants its joke back.
ba-doom-tish... I'll be hear all 6.9915167 days (according to my pentium calculator).
any remember dongles.. the old sort fitted on your parallel port, and enabled expensive software like autocad to run.
people didn't like them, because they often had multiple dongles, and they were sometime incompatible
now, with USB, it'd be trivial. also MS could afford to give away a four-port usb hub with vista premium max super one that costs US$600 or whatever. then, you can install vista on all your computers, or upgrade/repair in anyway, and your key is still valid. bonus points if MS allow you to transfer keys from one dongle to another. You could also sell your copy in a fair manner and the buyer would run the risk of the license being revoked by MS.
now, don't get me wrong, I hate copy protection as much as anyone, but lets make it easy, transparent, and fair. moreover, potential buyers would then have to face up to licensing conditions squarely, instead of, as at the moment, thinking they can get away with buying one copy for their entire family... if they realised it was going to cost US$1000 for the three machines at home, they might decide to try linux.
hmm, interesting, thanks.
I will have to try this with a basic dos disk, XOSL boot manager, partition magic and a few other things. I love XOSL, it's a great way to do boot management as it intelligently recovers when something comes along and takes over the MBR. When I needed to triple-boot my laptop between win98 (because of a piece of hardware that only worked in win98), winXP and linux, xosl made it trivial.
me, me, let me guess!
/dev/mmcsd rather than /dev/mmcsd1 for example)... the only easy way is to use fdisk on linux to create a new primary partition and then format that on linux or windows as fat-16.
does this basically mean deleting the partition on a USB memory device and creating a 1.2MB partition on it?
This is my guess because on a few occasions now I've helped people whose linux boxes don't automount their flash cards or usb sticks, the memory have been corrupted and windows then formats the "root" of the drive rather than creating a partition (so you'd actually mount
For example, the HTC universal is a closed proprietary device, and getting linux working on it has been an uphill struggle for the dedicated team working on it (and they have achieved wonders - kudos to them!). Check out their progress on UniversalStatus.
Even the Sharp Zaurus, until recently one of the few handhelds which came with linux out of the box still has proprietary/closed-source elements - the SD driver is one example. One of the biggest missing pieces of the jigsaw is an accelerated video driver for the Zaurus SL-6000 series - there's a Toshiba TC6393XB chip for which virtually no documentation is available (it also drives the SD card slot, so presumably Toshiba didn't want to release the programmers guide for fear of giving out information on that somewhat proprietary standard).
are there companies out there that use dummy terminals for office machines?
a dummy terminal would be one that doesn't do anything other than look like a terminal.
I think what you meant to say was a dumb terminal
OTOH, a terminal for dummies could be a dummy terminal or a dumb terminal
it was once observed by Israel that going to war with the USA and losing resulted in massive investment by the USA into your country... and senior politicians jokingly debated declaring war and rapidly losing... but then decided there was a risk of winning!
Or that's how that bit of urban legend came to me.
do they keep a track log?
there's no feature (or isn't in tomtom 5 which is what I have), but you can add it - look at www.opentom.org for the third party app from amacri.
garmin handhelds do have a breadcrumb trail feature built in, and can even convert it to a route for you
personally, if a server is that important, have a warm standby which is a clone of the live one. when update time arrives, stop replication, do the update to see what works and what breaks, and then you'll have the confidence to do the live server.
if you can't afford a replica, at least have a full set of disks onto which you clone the system, and then update the copy.
if you can't afford a set of replica disks and your server has mirrored disks, break the mirroring on your live server (having checked for smart errors etc on the disks), update the primary disks, and if it works, re-mirror.
if your server isn't mirrored or even raided, you can't be serious about the quality of the server you run, therefore if you break it, who cares?!
it exports the whole of the sd card, one of the files there is an encapsulated linux boot image. why? because tomtom allow you to update the OS on the machine as well as the maps. when running in usb mass store, the navigation s/w isn't running.
the difference between civil engineers and electronic engineers? the former built targets, the latter missiles.
every buy a DVD these days and try and skip the trailers and adverts and crap?
at least the movie itself is continuous and lacks adverts. oh wait, what about product placement? go look up how much it costs to have one of your products made highly visible in the latest Bond movie.
and don't get me started over the merchandising. my son is into Pixar's Cars; he has the dvd, t-shirt, pyjamas, models and even napkin/serviettes! At least we held off buying most of it until it was no longer premium priced.
spam has been beaten for *him* - he now has enough money to pay for a call centre in India to quarantine all the email addressed to bill.gates@microsoft.com and forward only the real emails on to bill.gates.secret.email.address@microsoft.com.
so, you got your flying car yet? me neither :-(
it's irrelevant to the case in point, as it can act as usb mass storage and thus be carrying infected files.
actually, it's running linux - tomtom's gpl page. Also take not of OpenTom, a team of 3rd party tomtom hackers.
tomtom devices act as usb mass storage devices so you can copy s/w, map updates and speed camera POIs to them; thus the device won't actively infect, but can be a vector for infected files.
thanks for that useful info...
The good news with Toshiba televisions is that they can radio for help when there's a problem. The snag is that invoking this service costs US$10,000 per day, so you better hope that it gets fixed damn quick!