You already have a cheapo Netgear router, which I imagine can do NAT. So buy one of the new Netgear Gaming routers that allow you to do bandwidth limiting, and set that up as your primary router, hanging off the modem. Plug your in-laws into this directly. Then take your old cheapo and plug it into the new router and hide all your machined behind it. That gives you access (through 2 layers of NAT) to the net, and protects you from your in-laws' virii, as well as allowing you to gaurentee a reasonable slice of bandwidth from the gaming router to your cheapo router so that even in the case of your in-laws' machines saturating the internet connection with virus traffic, you still have sufficient bandwidth to finish your CounterStrike game before going into the other room and forcing them to unplug from the network while you clean their boxen.
9. The right to a publishing arrangement that reflects the iterative nature of game development; one that recognizes that changing a game as it is developed is part of creating a game.
Wait a minute, does this guy work for 3D Realms? Iterative development is one thing, infinite development is another...
480 million ISK goes for $1000 real money? What the hell am I doing reading Slashdot at work? I should be reading Slashdot while playing EVE online! Seriously, thats a lot more lucrative than I thought the market in EVE was - 480M ISK is not THAT hard to come by.
Looks like the installer list contains the names of most media players, possibly for Sony to survey the market and report back to HQ what media players people have installed. Windows Media Player and Winamp make that list, and I seriously doubt Sony would prevent WMP from playing their CDs entirely - that would just be stupid. It could also be something to help the installer keep MIME type associations straight - maybe so it can return posession of the MIME types to the proper app when it isn't controlling them? The DRM server list looks more critical and does not include simple players. It seems to be a list of rippers. I might guess that some action like cutting off CD access entirely would occur when a process that matches the DRM list is detected running. Of course, I haven't let Sony root my box yet, so this is all just guesswork on my part. If renaming your ripper EXE doesn't hide it from Sony's DRM server, then perhaps you could try renaming the main window (using reshack or a hex editor or similar on the EXE) since that seems to be the alternative name stored in the DRM list. Also it may check the "original filename" inside the EXE (the one shown on Windows next to the file version number and stuff when you view "properties"), so again you might want to use reshack or a hex editor to change that as well. Or just edit the magic lists themselves (unless Sony has some sort of checksum on them)
The only real use I can think of for this technology, considering the bandwidth requirements, would be public closed-circuit viewing of live remote events. For example, imagine this set up at the Olympic games and transmitted to 5 or 6 special "viewing arenas" (glorified theaters) worldwide so that if you can't make it to the games physically, you can go to your nearest viewing arena and pay to watch it live. Or imagine it for NFL: a team establishes a dedicated link to their home stadium whenever they play away, and ticketholders who can't travel to the away game can watch the game DLP projected (by an whole array of projectors) onto a big white canvas stretched across the astroturf.
Re:I don't care about what people say re: Theo...
on
OpenBSD Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
i take it you think people should be rewarded for asking stupid questions, doing no research, and not following guidelines?
Of course! Isn't that the whole point of Slashdot?
There is no mention of transport to or from the moon, so I would assume there is none. The article doesn't specifically say, but it seems to imply that this competition will be the excavation of some sort of simulated regolith here on earth.
I'm sure there are going to be some specific rules to try to make this slightly more akin to a moon mission that for example the Caterpillar working in the vacant lot next door. Restrictions on interaction with the environment, for example (no intake of atmosphereic gasses like oxygen)
Still, it sounds like CMU might just jeed to convert a Caterpillar to run on DC, bolt on a massive battery pack that can last 30 minutes, and retrofit their autonomous vehicle AI to it......No, there has got to be some size/weight restriction here.
Then perhaps a better approach would be to make the nice little boot-time Tux image cover about 80% of the screen. Keep a small (4 lines or so) window of scrolling messages at the bottom, but keep the majority of the screen covered by a nice calm image in order to suppress the panic people have come to associate with screenfulls of "gibberish" that have a tendency to appear when operating systems crash.
Set up a demo system. Ask for the oldest, slowest, trashiest piece of hardware currently in use, and transform it via Linux or BSD into a minimal desktop. There will be three very important things to demo: speed, functionality, and looks.
Speed - install few programs. Only what is necessary. Functionality - Make sure you survey the current uses of the computers and chose a set of applications which cover these uses. Looks - As much as it might chafe you, general users seem to judge the operating system and applications by their appearance. Go find a nice, juicy, lickable theme for your window manager and apps.
Then demo the system for them. Show them how much you can do with even the lowliest of their equipment. If they are unsure, let someone important use the system for a while and notice the stability improvement.
Hopefully that will win you some converts and some trust. If not, I hate to say it, but you are screwed: just do what they want and try to make the "I told you so!"s obvious without actually saying them when bad things happen.
Oh, and for God's sake, hide the bootup slew of text. It freaks technophobes out...
Actually, after reading the patent, it looks like they are drawing moisture from the air via cooling/dehumidifying, and are then atomizing it into a mist, and injecting it between two laminar airflows to stabalize the screen. I would imagine they use the hot exhaust from the cooling process as the laminar flow surrounding the screen, so as the flow breaks down and the hot dry air and cold, supersaturated air mix, the mist evaporates back into the air and you have essentially the same air you started with. The big upside to this is that the system doesn't increase the overall humidity in a room or require a resovoir to be refilled, but the downside is that this would not work well in a particularily dry environment.
For all you who didn't RTFA, they are booting from a USB mass storage device (which just happens to be an iPod) running Knoppix, and virtualizing the hardware to allow a less flexible OS (*cough* windows *cough*) to run on virtually any x86 hardware. The benefit being that you can take your Windows desktop's "Soul" with you on your iPod and just plug it in and go wherever you have a computer handy. Nothing revolutionary here except that IBM is starting to push this tword a dedicated device and software that should make setting this sort of thing up easier for the layperson. Pretty soon grandma will be toting her windows install, complete with Word, Explorer, and her favorite games downloaded from Yahoo, all on her trendy iPod which she can also use to listen to cool tunes when she's on the plane and doesn't have her grandson's computer to borrow. Personally I think this trend could be a very good thing, what with the horrible attempts at separation of user data in current operating systems where the majority of the data is actually shared.
just what we need. European-designer-lag. I get enough matrix-style lag already, thatnk-you-very-much. (If this is more than just smooth lag, somebody please explain it to me because I'm obviously missing something important...)
On a side note, I had wondered if a space-time distortion bubble could be created in a multiplayer game. Sort of a local bubble of temporarily slowed time, which as the effect wears off, hyper-accelerates to catch up to the rest of the game world. The difference from lag there would be that all player within the bubble would experience the same slow time, and a player entering ot exiting the bubble would pass through an area of distorted time as they transition from one timeframe to the other... not sure what sort of paradoxes would have to be sidestepped to make this work right. any astrophysacists want to step in and take it from here?
hmmm, I think I just described the Tokyo-Jupiter temporal distortion from Ra-Xaphan...
Well, as for practical applications, I can see 2: since this lens would be very cheap to produce, it might be interesting to see a lens packaged with a video game to allow head-to-head play on the same TV without traditional split-screen. (the TV would need to be high-definition to achieve any sort of usable resolution, and the game could present an interface to calibrate the image interlacing granularity and alignment so that the lens could be used on different sized displays.) The second practical use is a stereoscopic display without the need for red/blue, polarized, or shutter glasses. I think there is already a company that produces these, at some ungodly price...
Am I the only one here who saw this as another twisted hacking story? The kid discovered that by pressing two keys at once he was able to trigger a function which had been intentionally removed from the key matrix. How is this any different than any other sort of frowned-upon reverse engineering? Sure he was "only 12" so maybe it's "cute" and "using his head", but what happens when he turns 18 and discovers that he can use a Sharpie on a CD, or a hex-editor on an application? Suddenly he is no longer a hero, but a villan... I mean for *$%^-sake, TI actually sent him a graphing calculator for free... When was they last time TI sent the Linux/BSD wireless chipset hackers a free Prism dev kit Hell, even just the fscking manual would be nice. It's this double standard $%^& that really irks me.
I suppose. It just amazed me that they would have the ATM wide open in the middle of a croud of people and expect people not to glance at it as they walked by... especially considering I wasn't close enough to really see anything other than a general overview of what I has always assumed was inside anyway.
On that subject, I recall hearing of a technique once that used optical sampling to read the light emitted by the RX/TX lights on a modem into the room. On some modems, these flashes actually correspond to the real electical signal, thus with only a view of reflected light from these LEDs, you could reconstruct the conversation.
Now for the application: I was at a mall one time, about an hour before closing. There was a PFF ATM there which was being restocked with cash. I passed maybe 20 feet from it, and glanced at its innards. Before the overprotective hawaiian-shirt guy told me I wasn't allowed to look (WTF! It's a public place with lots of people and you aren't even doing a good job concealing this stuff, and you tell me I'm not allowed to view my surroundings at the mall as I walk through!?) I managed to see the layout. Basically, a CRT, a keypad, a receipt printer, a motherbord, and a black Hayes 2400 or 1200 baud modem all set on seperate little shelves. If you remember these particular modems, you know they had nice little red RX/TX LEDs in the front. If you were to sample at a high enough rate, you should be able to reconstruct the bank communication from the light leaking through the cracks in the case...
Close, but that would make it d6x2, not 2d6. I'd wager he's just half-orc, has trouble with big words like "longsword," and prefers the more brutish ring to "cleaver," incorrect though it may be...
So you need simple, fast, no-need-for-network CPU load?
Boot any linux liveCD that supports your hardware, and run the following command:
cat/dev/urandom | gzip >/dev/null
Sould eat one whole CPU and run forever. If you have an SMP machine, run one instance of that per CPU, and you should max out. The system should still remain responsive enough that you can terminate the processes at will, even though the CPU is at 100% usage.
I would try to pick a liveCD that does not bother starting X since that just adds to the boot time.
You may want to consider the heat generated by components other than the CPU. Hard drives put off a significant amount of heat, as do memory and video, and to a lesser extent network hardware.
To utilize a lot of memory as well as CPU, you might look for something like a prime-factoring program. (prime seives love to eat memory)
For video heat, try something like an unlimited framerate demo in Quake 2. (I think there is even a Linux port)
For network load, just use a ping utility that supports flood-ping and arbitrary payloads. Then floodping yourself or something on the LAN with huge packets.
For hard drive heat, you could just dd/dev/zero to a blank HD (since you are booting from CD, destroying the contents of the HD won't crash the OS)
Hell, now that I think about it, you could just wire that PIC directly into the soft power switch on any ATX motherboard and just trigger a soft shutdown that way. No need for a monitoring daemon there, and would (well, "should" would be the right word) work on Windows too.
Hmmm, yeah, now that you mention it, that is how it worked. I recall fiddling with that stuff in assembly once upon a time. (Thank you, Mark Feldman....) Well if you wanted a real ADC, you could use the microphone input on the sound card or wire up a $1.50 PIC from Microchip to the parallel port, serial port, or the game/MIDI digital lines (the ones usually used for triggers).
You might also consider wiring up a battery monitor so that your machine can do a graceful shut-down when battery power is depleted. I am not an electrician, but I think this should be possible with a couple transistors, resistors, some wire, and the MIDI/Game port. (To eny electricians, the MIDI/Game port is available on most computer sound cards and has an 8-bit ADC built in. Calibrated to 0-5VDC I believe. It is multiplexed across 4 inputs, so there is potential to monitor up to 4 analog lines.) Hack up a daemon to monitor this level and initiate a shutdown if it drops too low. You should also use something fairly resiliant for a filesystem. Ideally, read-only hard disk with a ramdrive. (like Knoppix), but if that isn't a possability, ReiserFS is fairly good. If you go with the RO+ramdisk solution, outages should be a non-issue anyway.
smaller? in the long run probably the flash+JS, since the flash and possibly even most of the JS can be cached once and reused for all the different titles. just a single call to the cached JS routine and cached flash file with a font name and text would be enough. (say 100 bytes of data for each call plus maybe 100k up front for the flash app and JS routine?) conversely for server-side PNG, each string of text would require an entire graphic to be sent. (at least a few kB of data for small monochrome images, and more for large or anti-aliased images) hopefully the flash and javascript are small enough to make this sort of caching worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
You already have a cheapo Netgear router, which I imagine can do NAT. So buy one of the new Netgear Gaming routers that allow you to do bandwidth limiting, and set that up as your primary router, hanging off the modem. Plug your in-laws into this directly. Then take your old cheapo and plug it into the new router and hide all your machined behind it. That gives you access (through 2 layers of NAT) to the net, and protects you from your in-laws' virii, as well as allowing you to gaurentee a reasonable slice of bandwidth from the gaming router to your cheapo router so that even in the case of your in-laws' machines saturating the internet connection with virus traffic, you still have sufficient bandwidth to finish your CounterStrike game before going into the other room and forcing them to unplug from the network while you clean their boxen.
9. The right to a publishing arrangement that reflects the iterative nature of game development; one that recognizes that changing a game as it is developed is part of creating a game.
Wait a minute, does this guy work for 3D Realms? Iterative development is one thing, infinite development is another...
480 million ISK goes for $1000 real money? What the hell am I doing reading Slashdot at work? I should be reading Slashdot while playing EVE online!
Seriously, thats a lot more lucrative than I thought the market in EVE was - 480M ISK is not THAT hard to come by.
Looks like the installer list contains the names of most media players, possibly for Sony to survey the market and report back to HQ what media players people have installed. Windows Media Player and Winamp make that list, and I seriously doubt Sony would prevent WMP from playing their CDs entirely - that would just be stupid. It could also be something to help the installer keep MIME type associations straight - maybe so it can return posession of the MIME types to the proper app when it isn't controlling them?
The DRM server list looks more critical and does not include simple players. It seems to be a list of rippers. I might guess that some action like cutting off CD access entirely would occur when a process that matches the DRM list is detected running. Of course, I haven't let Sony root my box yet, so this is all just guesswork on my part. If renaming your ripper EXE doesn't hide it from Sony's DRM server, then perhaps you could try renaming the main window (using reshack or a hex editor or similar on the EXE) since that seems to be the alternative name stored in the DRM list. Also it may check the "original filename" inside the EXE (the one shown on Windows next to the file version number and stuff when you view "properties"), so again you might want to use reshack or a hex editor to change that as well.
Or just edit the magic lists themselves (unless Sony has some sort of checksum on them)
The only real use I can think of for this technology, considering the bandwidth requirements, would be public closed-circuit viewing of live remote events. For example, imagine this set up at the Olympic games and transmitted to 5 or 6 special "viewing arenas" (glorified theaters) worldwide so that if you can't make it to the games physically, you can go to your nearest viewing arena and pay to watch it live. Or imagine it for NFL: a team establishes a dedicated link to their home stadium whenever they play away, and ticketholders who can't travel to the away game can watch the game DLP projected (by an whole array of projectors) onto a big white canvas stretched across the astroturf.
i take it you think people should be rewarded for asking stupid questions, doing no research, and not following guidelines?
Of course! Isn't that the whole point of Slashdot?
There is no mention of transport to or from the moon, so I would assume there is none.
...No, there has got to be some size/weight restriction here.
The article doesn't specifically say, but it seems to imply that this competition will be the excavation of some sort of simulated regolith here on earth.
I'm sure there are going to be some specific rules to try to make this slightly more akin to a moon mission that for example the Caterpillar working in the vacant lot next door. Restrictions on interaction with the environment, for example (no intake of atmosphereic gasses like oxygen)
Still, it sounds like CMU might just jeed to convert a Caterpillar to run on DC, bolt on a massive battery pack that can last 30 minutes, and retrofit their autonomous vehicle AI to it...
Then perhaps a better approach would be to make the nice little boot-time Tux image cover about 80% of the screen. Keep a small (4 lines or so) window of scrolling messages at the bottom, but keep the majority of the screen covered by a nice calm image in order to suppress the panic people have come to associate with screenfulls of "gibberish" that have a tendency to appear when operating systems crash.
Set up a demo system. Ask for the oldest, slowest, trashiest piece of hardware currently in use, and transform it via Linux or BSD into a minimal desktop.
There will be three very important things to demo: speed, functionality, and looks.
Speed - install few programs. Only what is necessary.
Functionality - Make sure you survey the current uses of the computers and chose a set of applications which cover these uses.
Looks - As much as it might chafe you, general users seem to judge the operating system and applications by their appearance. Go find a nice, juicy, lickable theme for your window manager and apps.
Then demo the system for them. Show them how much you can do with even the lowliest of their equipment. If they are unsure, let someone important use the system for a while and notice the stability improvement.
Hopefully that will win you some converts and some trust. If not, I hate to say it, but you are screwed: just do what they want and try to make the "I told you so!"s obvious without actually saying them when bad things happen.
Oh, and for God's sake, hide the bootup slew of text. It freaks technophobes out...
Actually, after reading the patent, it looks like they are drawing moisture from the air via cooling/dehumidifying, and are then atomizing it into a mist, and injecting it between two laminar airflows to stabalize the screen. I would imagine they use the hot exhaust from the cooling process as the laminar flow surrounding the screen, so as the flow breaks down and the hot dry air and cold, supersaturated air mix, the mist evaporates back into the air and you have essentially the same air you started with. The big upside to this is that the system doesn't increase the overall humidity in a room or require a resovoir to be refilled, but the downside is that this would not work well in a particularily dry environment.
For all you who didn't RTFA, they are booting from a USB mass storage device (which just happens to be an iPod) running Knoppix, and virtualizing the hardware to allow a less flexible OS (*cough* windows *cough*) to run on virtually any x86 hardware. The benefit being that you can take your Windows desktop's "Soul" with you on your iPod and just plug it in and go wherever you have a computer handy. Nothing revolutionary here except that IBM is starting to push this tword a dedicated device and software that should make setting this sort of thing up easier for the layperson. Pretty soon grandma will be toting her windows install, complete with Word, Explorer, and her favorite games downloaded from Yahoo, all on her trendy iPod which she can also use to listen to cool tunes when she's on the plane and doesn't have her grandson's computer to borrow.
Personally I think this trend could be a very good thing, what with the horrible attempts at separation of user data in current operating systems where the majority of the data is actually shared.
just what we need. European-designer-lag. I get enough matrix-style lag already, thatnk-you-very-much. (If this is more than just smooth lag, somebody please explain it to me because I'm obviously missing something important...)
On a side note, I had wondered if a space-time distortion bubble could be created in a multiplayer game. Sort of a local bubble of temporarily slowed time, which as the effect wears off, hyper-accelerates to catch up to the rest of the game world. The difference from lag there would be that all player within the bubble would experience the same slow time, and a player entering ot exiting the bubble would pass through an area of distorted time as they transition from one timeframe to the other... not sure what sort of paradoxes would have to be sidestepped to make this work right. any astrophysacists want to step in and take it from here?
hmmm, I think I just described the Tokyo-Jupiter temporal distortion from Ra-Xaphan...
Well, if they buy out the bookie taking google-buyout bets, they are sure to win...
Well, as for practical applications, I can see 2:
since this lens would be very cheap to produce, it might be interesting to see a lens packaged with a video game to allow head-to-head play on the same TV without traditional split-screen. (the TV would need to be high-definition to achieve any sort of usable resolution, and the game could present an interface to calibrate the image interlacing granularity and alignment so that the lens could be used on different sized displays.)
The second practical use is a stereoscopic display without the need for red/blue, polarized, or shutter glasses. I think there is already a company that produces these, at some ungodly price...
Am I the only one here who saw this as another twisted hacking story?
The kid discovered that by pressing two keys at once he was able to trigger a function which had been intentionally removed from the key matrix. How is this any different than any other sort of frowned-upon reverse engineering? Sure he was "only 12" so maybe it's "cute" and "using his head", but what happens when he turns 18 and discovers that he can use a Sharpie on a CD, or a hex-editor on an application? Suddenly he is no longer a hero, but a villan... I mean for *$%^-sake, TI actually sent him a graphing calculator for free... When was they last time TI sent the Linux/BSD wireless chipset hackers a free Prism dev kit Hell, even just the fscking manual would be nice.
It's this double standard $%^& that really irks me.
I'm not sure about inmates, but the general in the Coneheads movie wanted to do that to mexicans...
I suppose. It just amazed me that they would have the ATM wide open in the middle of a croud of people and expect people not to glance at it as they walked by... especially considering I wasn't close enough to really see anything other than a general overview of what I has always assumed was inside anyway.
On that subject, I recall hearing of a technique once that used optical sampling to read the light emitted by the RX/TX lights on a modem into the room. On some modems, these flashes actually correspond to the real electical signal, thus with only a view of reflected light from these LEDs, you could reconstruct the conversation.
Now for the application: I was at a mall one time, about an hour before closing. There was a PFF ATM there which was being restocked with cash. I passed maybe 20 feet from it, and glanced at its innards. Before the overprotective hawaiian-shirt guy told me I wasn't allowed to look (WTF! It's a public place with lots of people and you aren't even doing a good job concealing this stuff, and you tell me I'm not allowed to view my surroundings at the mall as I walk through!?) I managed to see the layout. Basically, a CRT, a keypad, a receipt printer, a motherbord, and a black Hayes 2400 or 1200 baud modem all set on seperate little shelves. If you remember these particular modems, you know they had nice little red RX/TX LEDs in the front. If you were to sample at a high enough rate, you should be able to reconstruct the bank communication from the light leaking through the cracks in the case...
Close, but that would make it d6x2, not 2d6.
I'd wager he's just half-orc, has trouble with big words like "longsword," and prefers the more brutish ring to "cleaver," incorrect though it may be...
The Perseus project at Tufts is an excellent source of ancient literature, as well as some translations.
;)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
If true classics are your thing.
So you need simple, fast, no-need-for-network CPU load?
/dev/urandom | gzip > /dev/null
/dev/zero to a blank HD (since you are booting from CD, destroying the contents of the HD won't crash the OS)
Boot any linux liveCD that supports your hardware, and run the following command:
cat
Sould eat one whole CPU and run forever. If you have an SMP machine, run one instance of that per CPU, and you should max out. The system should still remain responsive enough that you can terminate the processes at will, even though the CPU is at 100% usage.
I would try to pick a liveCD that does not bother starting X since that just adds to the boot time.
You may want to consider the heat generated by components other than the CPU. Hard drives put off a significant amount of heat, as do memory and video, and to a lesser extent network hardware.
To utilize a lot of memory as well as CPU, you might look for something like a prime-factoring program. (prime seives love to eat memory)
For video heat, try something like an unlimited framerate demo in Quake 2. (I think there is even a Linux port)
For network load, just use a ping utility that supports flood-ping and arbitrary payloads. Then floodping yourself or something on the LAN with huge packets.
For hard drive heat, you could just dd
Hell, now that I think about it, you could just wire that PIC directly into the soft power switch on any ATX motherboard and just trigger a soft shutdown that way. No need for a monitoring daemon there, and would (well, "should" would be the right word) work on Windows too.
Hmmm, yeah, now that you mention it, that is how it worked. I recall fiddling with that stuff in assembly once upon a time. (Thank you, Mark Feldman....)
Well if you wanted a real ADC, you could use the microphone input on the sound card or wire up a $1.50 PIC from Microchip to the parallel port, serial port, or the game/MIDI digital lines (the ones usually used for triggers).
You might also consider wiring up a battery monitor so that your machine can do a graceful shut-down when battery power is depleted. I am not an electrician, but I think this should be possible with a couple transistors, resistors, some wire, and the MIDI/Game port. (To eny electricians, the MIDI/Game port is available on most computer sound cards and has an 8-bit ADC built in. Calibrated to 0-5VDC I believe. It is multiplexed across 4 inputs, so there is potential to monitor up to 4 analog lines.) Hack up a daemon to monitor this level and initiate a shutdown if it drops too low.
You should also use something fairly resiliant for a filesystem. Ideally, read-only hard disk with a ramdrive. (like Knoppix), but if that isn't a possability, ReiserFS is fairly good.
If you go with the RO+ramdisk solution, outages should be a non-issue anyway.
smaller? in the long run probably the flash+JS, since the flash and possibly even most of the JS can be cached once and reused for all the different titles. just a single call to the cached JS routine and cached flash file with a font name and text would be enough. (say 100 bytes of data for each call plus maybe 100k up front for the flash app and JS routine?)
conversely for server-side PNG, each string of text would require an entire graphic to be sent. (at least a few kB of data for small monochrome images, and more for large or anti-aliased images)
hopefully the flash and javascript are small enough to make this sort of caching worthwhile.