These are the smallest cases I have seen, but only marginally so. Both Firewire 400 AND 800, as well USB 2.0. Are they really any better than your no name $10 USB enclosure - no. It is just the smallest form factor I have seen, but only beating the others out by millimeters.
One question that has always been in the back of my mind, but I have never bothered to actually hook up a packet sniffer and watch, what about DNS queries?
Most corporations have internal DNS servers, that they could certainly log your suspicious requests (or even hijack and re-route) to various nefarious sites. Does Firefox (Mozilla) route the DNS requests through the tunnel as well somehow? I thought SSH could only do TCP forwarding, so I seem to be missing something. Unless somehow the SOCKS proxy is doing the requests on the other end of the tunnel and brining them back.
Anyone actually sniffed the traffic to see if DNS is still vulnerable to corporate annoyances?
Assuming you are imaging the laptops with Windows, I can't imagine you having to image a linux laptop as often for some reason or another...
Anyway, back in the day I got a free copy of Ghost with my motherboard. Now that they are completely owned by the Symantec umbrella, they are probably quite a bit more expensive, but I bet you can still get a single-user burn-to-a-dvd-with-the-image for relatively little. If that is to expensive, then go learn DD or some of the more advanced techniques that I am sure will pop up all over this board. Why buy the total solution when you aren't really going to use it anyway? Also, if you are in a windows environment, perhaps their RIS Server product would do what you need as well? Can the laptops boot from the network?
Yes but what happens to those poor servers when the real heater kicks on during those winter months and cooks the whole closet? You would most certainly need to have a one-way vent of sorts.
Of course, what if the heat stays on for a long enough period of time, and the closet can't vent... or perhaps over time, each time the furnace fires up and shuts down, the closet warms up 1 degree or so... could be disaster.
Better to just flat out vent it to a storage room or somewhere that is can freely blow, and feed cooler in from another source.
When runes of superior vigor are selling for 70,000+ gold... I think that farming is certainly a component, and to the point where a casual gamer such as myself will never likely be able to afford one. It certainly is having an impact in the world - inflation - unlimited gold being sent out, but my wages stay the same.... sounds like the US economy right now...
I think you have hit the nail right on the head. I am a Guild Wars player (casuaully, at the very most maybe 5 hours per week) - and it fits me perfectly. The things I like best are, of course, no monthly fee, as well as the MMORPG part is well balanced - there is a cohesive (though not stellar) story that you can follow and lead you through the game, a boatload of side quests, relatively easy (though a bit time consumptive) progress through the game, and of course - you get your own copy of the world while out adventuring.
Bottom line, is WoW offers many of those same things, but to me the price and relative lack of story from what I perceive, having never played it, are what has never led me into the WoW realm. RPG's have always been telling a story, and let you take a leading role. Not just participation in some alternate reality world.
People are really missing the point on this - it isn't about turning developers into designers, or designers into developers - it is about allowing them to fully leverage each others strengths. The Expression stuff can make use of the libraries developers provide, or they can have the GUI stub out methods and events that the developers can tie back in with the business logic etc...
Granted, as a developer who is often forced into a designer role as well, I look forward to enhaced toolsets. Maybe not from MS, but you can bet that the competitors (and quasi non-competitors like OSS) will release newer / updated tools to provide similar or even better functionality down the road. Not to nit-pick, but it really doesn't matter for a designer to understand the inner tickings of a computer (and to some extent a developer, though they will be much better off if they do). Just like you probably don't have nearly the trained eye nor layout skills that the designers do for their artwork. Strengths and Toolsets. This is what MS is trying to bridge, or in market-speak - creating "synergies"!!!
(oh boy I have a bright future in marketing I am afraid...)
You make some good points, but more importantly than them playing Halo instead of Counter-Strike, it is Halo on the XBox instead of on a PC....
The bought out bungie, forced a first party release to their console, and only later offered a crippled pile for the PC. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
They did similar thing with the Midtown Madness and Crimson Skies franchises, and probably others as well. If they don't want PC gaming to die off, well duh, quit cancelling games that were targetted for it!
Cast in another vote. The thing I love is it is roughly the size of my laptop, (skinnier and a bit longer), and fits nicely in the case with it. I can take it with me since the scanning head can lock, and draws power directly from the USB port. A VERY nice piece of machinery!
Regardless of prior art and other nonsense involved in why this patent was granted... the thing that really bugs me about this is that Creative has long since stopped innovating - this is the third time in recent history that they have levied a large patent media mess. A3D, id and some 3D code, and now an interface? The madness has to stop. The other two I can actually fathom their point of view on it, but this latest is simply money grubbing from a large corporation and certainly is an abuse of our legal system....
I really don't have a problem with a company trying to make money, or trying to protect their assets, but I fail to see how the interface is their asset - or even something that should be protectable at all. Keep digging your grave, we will all be better once you are gone.
MS is definitely most famous for software, which I am sure would be prominently displayed, but I would love to go check out the latest version of their keyboards and mice. MS does make some pretty fine hardware (software is certainly up to a more heated debate here).
Of course this is all really just marketing, and I don't forsee myself going to the store, even if in NY, so what do I really care....
No Carputer (tm) is complete without this....
on
Linux Based CarPC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would certainly agree with your statement of being technically far superior to old ASP, and even PHP to some degree (though not totally, nor am I well-versed enough to argue the finer points) - However as for being superior to ColdFusion... I think that is certainly more of a gray area.
As an example, ColdFusion (as of MX7) has some VERY nice integrated reporting, charting and forms support built in that ASP.NET does not. Not that you couldn't go find and add them in - but at what cost, both time and monetary perspective, not to mention support.
Personally I am not crazy about ColdFusion either, the nonsense of trying to remember when to pound a variable and when to just pass it always seem to escape me, and I end up spending more time in cfscript blocks than is probably necessary, but it is that flexibility that is great - not to mention the extremely rich toolkit it provides.
At the end of the day,.NET (both web and desktop) was designed with business in mind - it is very much so geared for the enterprise. I think it is quite fair to say that PHP is certainly not targetting the enterprise the same way.NET is. ColdFusion has some deep corporate roots and performs quite admirably in that regard as well.
And lets all just forget that traditional ASP ever happened.
No - I wouldn't buy an xbox just for HL3. Don't get me wrong, HL2 was good - but by no means a killer app nor has it the swaying power to make me get a single console over another...
It can cover hardware, software, whatever. I wouldn't limit your scope - at least not initially as the way to steadily grow this side business (you make it sound as though your day job will stay put?) is through word of mouth. Provide a good service, and guaranteed people will pass the info along. I can't count how many times (well maybe select count(*) from clients) that someone has told me how glad they were to have found someone good and reliable at fixing problems. Someone they can trust to come into their homes and businesses to address their needs.
With that in mind, I always make it a point (when dealing with businesses particularly) to let them know that this isn't my primary profession, and as such I may not be able to come put out the fire at a moments notice, or at least not without an exorbitant fee, but that I am happy to help them out regularly because of the relationship we have established. Every single customer I have is extremely satisfied with the level of support they get, and realize that technical glitches are just part of the digital age we live in.... ahhh job security.
All that being said, the most steady stream of income simply comes from people needing help getting their spyware removed, tightening down security for kids accounts, email questions and general help desk type issues. I even have been called to install software. I would also make sure to have a CD wallet with some diagnostic tools, boot cd's, etc available as well as USB memory stick with all the sysinternals stuff you can get. And don't forget a screwdriver, #2 philips will open almost every case out there.
And lastly, make yourself available - not necessarily to arrive put the fire out - but answer your cellphone, email, etc. PROMPTLY. It can make a huge difference, and many times you might even be able to help solve the problem over the phone/email (did you try rebooting?).
While this is great and all, it really isn't all that terribly interesting to me. What it does do for me is open the flood gates - I guarantee that if this does marginally well (or even if it tanks, who am I to say) that Asus, Epox, Abit and bunch of the other big vendors are going to jump on this bandwagon, followed up by broadcom, silicon images and other creating a dedicated chip for this instead of xilinx as well as supporting ECC memory... and of course it would be a stand-alone PCI/PCIe card instead of plugging into the existing controller on the mainboard.
Then the real fun will start as 3ware, promise, adaptec and others pick up the card n' chips and decide to do something crazy like put a SATAII or Ultra320 interface on it and a RAID chip that treats each DIMM as a channel.... while RAID 5 wouldn't be terribly interesting, RAID-0 (essentially quad-channel baby!) could put up some serious numbers. A good use for that SLI board, put one of these in that unused 8x/16x PICe slot...
Cost will be an issue, but if they could maintain the $150 price point, or even beat it, while adding all these features - this could really be some killer upcoming technology.
I also use GMail for some light duty backup purposes, and to further help the paranoia I use http://www.truecrypt.org/ to put smallish (1-5MB) encrypted partitions up there for sensitive data. So far they have scaled with additional storage faster than my demand for storage, so I am quite happy with it so far. Just store the executable for TrueCrypt in your account as well and you are set for life.
Better than this, and much more portable, is simply use the mouse to switch the keyboard layout to Dvorak or something.... the hardware will still send the key as it is labeled on the keyboard, but the OS should convert it on the fly to whatever appropriate dvorak key.... and of course boot from a trusted Knoppix CD or something...
Windows is now a 64 bit tweak of a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit user interface for an 8 bit operating system based on a 4 bit architecture from a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
* Snippet * Bach: Just to give you a specific example, wouldn't it be cool to have the game that has the person on the PC being the general who is driving the strategy and the person on the console on Xbox Live executing the strategy. That is a completely new genre, not sure what you would call it, but that's a completely different experience, and it leverages everything that steve talked about that we're putting in place. That's the kind of thinking that we're going to get people to, whether it's first party or third party. Look past the gaming aspects of the console, how does the Xbox 360 serve as Microsoft's beachhead into the living room. A 20GB hard drive isn't a lot of space for storage, but since it does have this broadband connection, how is it going to integrated with IPTV, streaming video, and streaming audio?
Three things: Number one, who knows what configurations will be there by the time we're done. I think that's important to say. Number two, because you do have the network connectivity, whether you have a Media Center PC or not. You can put an awfully big hard disk on a regular PC and plug into this ecosystem, we have plenty of extensibility in terms of storage. And then number three, you take the IP TV work we're doing, and that technology can run on a PC, on a set top box, it can run on an Xbox. So there will be, in conjunction with the work we do with the video delivery companies, particularly the telcos, who have tended to be our strongest customers for our IPTV stuff, there will be yet another way to acquire and use video content. So you have set tops, you have the set top experience, you have the Xbox, you've got a big hard disk, you've got networked to the PC in the home, so I think there will be a lot of ways to get that media onto the Xbox.
Whenever online console game services are discussed, it is always brought up that XBox Live does it right, even though there is a subscription attached. Bottom line is this: No one is (should be?) forced to use it. It can work wonderfully for smaller (and larger) studios that don't want to deal with the mess of maintaining servers, but they shouldn't have to be forced into it.
Here is why: Many of the PC games talk to a dedicated server that spits out known servers on the internet, and then the client queries those individually. XL just consolidates that, and provides an SDK for developers to take advantage of.
If Nintendo provides a free "server listing" for all registered games, it won't cost them much in server hardware / bandwidth, since the real meat (actual game servers and really fat pipes for them) will be taken care of elsewhere. They have very little to lose with this model. It really will depend on what the game publishers decide to do with it... dedicated servers, allow any console to act as a server... etc...
It is nice to allow the end user to specify the verbosity of the log file - do you log each request, only failures, or every entrance/exit to a function? If the log is to assist in diagnosing the error, it is nice to be able to turn on extra information that would normally just quickly fill up disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
Ready for dual or single core action - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16813131570
These are the smallest cases I have seen, but only marginally so. Both Firewire 400 AND 800, as well USB 2.0. Are they really any better than your no name $10 USB enclosure - no. It is just the smallest form factor I have seen, but only beating the others out by millimeters.
One question that has always been in the back of my mind, but I have never bothered to actually hook up a packet sniffer and watch, what about DNS queries?
Most corporations have internal DNS servers, that they could certainly log your suspicious requests (or even hijack and re-route) to various nefarious sites. Does Firefox (Mozilla) route the DNS requests through the tunnel as well somehow? I thought SSH could only do TCP forwarding, so I seem to be missing something. Unless somehow the SOCKS proxy is doing the requests on the other end of the tunnel and brining them back.
Anyone actually sniffed the traffic to see if DNS is still vulnerable to corporate annoyances?
Assuming you are imaging the laptops with Windows, I can't imagine you having to image a linux laptop as often for some reason or another...
Anyway, back in the day I got a free copy of Ghost with my motherboard. Now that they are completely owned by the Symantec umbrella, they are probably quite a bit more expensive, but I bet you can still get a single-user burn-to-a-dvd-with-the-image for relatively little. If that is to expensive, then go learn DD or some of the more advanced techniques that I am sure will pop up all over this board. Why buy the total solution when you aren't really going to use it anyway? Also, if you are in a windows environment, perhaps their RIS Server product would do what you need as well? Can the laptops boot from the network?
Yes but what happens to those poor servers when the real heater kicks on during those winter months and cooks the whole closet? You would most certainly need to have a one-way vent of sorts.
Of course, what if the heat stays on for a long enough period of time, and the closet can't vent... or perhaps over time, each time the furnace fires up and shuts down, the closet warms up 1 degree or so... could be disaster.
Better to just flat out vent it to a storage room or somewhere that is can freely blow, and feed cooler in from another source.
When runes of superior vigor are selling for 70,000+ gold... I think that farming is certainly a component, and to the point where a casual gamer such as myself will never likely be able to afford one. It certainly is having an impact in the world - inflation - unlimited gold being sent out, but my wages stay the same.... sounds like the US economy right now...
Let if be co-op multiplayer for the PC version......
* holds breath *
(expect me dead long before that announcement is ever made)
I think you have hit the nail right on the head. I am a Guild Wars player (casuaully, at the very most maybe 5 hours per week) - and it fits me perfectly. The things I like best are, of course, no monthly fee, as well as the MMORPG part is well balanced - there is a cohesive (though not stellar) story that you can follow and lead you through the game, a boatload of side quests, relatively easy (though a bit time consumptive) progress through the game, and of course - you get your own copy of the world while out adventuring.
Bottom line, is WoW offers many of those same things, but to me the price and relative lack of story from what I perceive, having never played it, are what has never led me into the WoW realm. RPG's have always been telling a story, and let you take a leading role. Not just participation in some alternate reality world.
People are really missing the point on this - it isn't about turning developers into designers, or designers into developers - it is about allowing them to fully leverage each others strengths. The Expression stuff can make use of the libraries developers provide, or they can have the GUI stub out methods and events that the developers can tie back in with the business logic etc...
Granted, as a developer who is often forced into a designer role as well, I look forward to enhaced toolsets. Maybe not from MS, but you can bet that the competitors (and quasi non-competitors like OSS) will release newer / updated tools to provide similar or even better functionality down the road. Not to nit-pick, but it really doesn't matter for a designer to understand the inner tickings of a computer (and to some extent a developer, though they will be much better off if they do). Just like you probably don't have nearly the trained eye nor layout skills that the designers do for their artwork. Strengths and Toolsets. This is what MS is trying to bridge, or in market-speak - creating "synergies"!!!
(oh boy I have a bright future in marketing I am afraid...)
You make some good points, but more importantly than them playing Halo instead of Counter-Strike, it is Halo on the XBox instead of on a PC....
The bought out bungie, forced a first party release to their console, and only later offered a crippled pile for the PC. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
They did similar thing with the Midtown Madness and Crimson Skies franchises, and probably others as well. If they don't want PC gaming to die off, well duh, quit cancelling games that were targetted for it!
Cast in another vote. The thing I love is it is roughly the size of my laptop, (skinnier and a bit longer), and fits nicely in the case with it. I can take it with me since the scanning head can lock, and draws power directly from the USB port. A VERY nice piece of machinery!
Go Cannon!
Regardless of prior art and other nonsense involved in why this patent was granted... the thing that really bugs me about this is that Creative has long since stopped innovating - this is the third time in recent history that they have levied a large patent media mess. A3D, id and some 3D code, and now an interface? The madness has to stop. The other two I can actually fathom their point of view on it, but this latest is simply money grubbing from a large corporation and certainly is an abuse of our legal system....
I really don't have a problem with a company trying to make money, or trying to protect their assets, but I fail to see how the interface is their asset - or even something that should be protectable at all. Keep digging your grave, we will all be better once you are gone.
MS is definitely most famous for software, which I am sure would be prominently displayed, but I would love to go check out the latest version of their keyboards and mice. MS does make some pretty fine hardware (software is certainly up to a more heated debate here).
Of course this is all really just marketing, and I don't forsee myself going to the store, even if in NY, so what do I really care....
Mp3car MTSVO-SC Fully motorized VGA Touch Screenh =25&products_id=120
http://www.mp3car.com/store/product_info.php?cPat
(not affiliated in anyway)
I would certainly agree with your statement of being technically far superior to old ASP, and even PHP to some degree (though not totally, nor am I well-versed enough to argue the finer points) - However as for being superior to ColdFusion... I think that is certainly more of a gray area.
.NET (both web and desktop) was designed with business in mind - it is very much so geared for the enterprise. I think it is quite fair to say that PHP is certainly not targetting the enterprise the same way .NET is. ColdFusion has some deep corporate roots and performs quite admirably in that regard as well.
As an example, ColdFusion (as of MX7) has some VERY nice integrated reporting, charting and forms support built in that ASP.NET does not. Not that you couldn't go find and add them in - but at what cost, both time and monetary perspective, not to mention support.
Personally I am not crazy about ColdFusion either, the nonsense of trying to remember when to pound a variable and when to just pass it always seem to escape me, and I end up spending more time in cfscript blocks than is probably necessary, but it is that flexibility that is great - not to mention the extremely rich toolkit it provides.
At the end of the day,
And lets all just forget that traditional ASP ever happened.
No - I wouldn't buy an xbox just for HL3. Don't get me wrong, HL2 was good - but by no means a killer app nor has it the swaying power to make me get a single console over another...
It can cover hardware, software, whatever. I wouldn't limit your scope - at least not initially as the way to steadily grow this side business (you make it sound as though your day job will stay put?) is through word of mouth. Provide a good service, and guaranteed people will pass the info along. I can't count how many times (well maybe select count(*) from clients) that someone has told me how glad they were to have found someone good and reliable at fixing problems. Someone they can trust to come into their homes and businesses to address their needs.
With that in mind, I always make it a point (when dealing with businesses particularly) to let them know that this isn't my primary profession, and as such I may not be able to come put out the fire at a moments notice, or at least not without an exorbitant fee, but that I am happy to help them out regularly because of the relationship we have established. Every single customer I have is extremely satisfied with the level of support they get, and realize that technical glitches are just part of the digital age we live in.... ahhh job security.
All that being said, the most steady stream of income simply comes from people needing help getting their spyware removed, tightening down security for kids accounts, email questions and general help desk type issues. I even have been called to install software. I would also make sure to have a CD wallet with some diagnostic tools, boot cd's, etc available as well as USB memory stick with all the sysinternals stuff you can get. And don't forget a screwdriver, #2 philips will open almost every case out there.
And lastly, make yourself available - not necessarily to arrive put the fire out - but answer your cellphone, email, etc. PROMPTLY. It can make a huge difference, and many times you might even be able to help solve the problem over the phone/email (did you try rebooting?).
While this is great and all, it really isn't all that terribly interesting to me. What it does do for me is open the flood gates - I guarantee that if this does marginally well (or even if it tanks, who am I to say) that Asus, Epox, Abit and bunch of the other big vendors are going to jump on this bandwagon, followed up by broadcom, silicon images and other creating a dedicated chip for this instead of xilinx as well as supporting ECC memory... and of course it would be a stand-alone PCI/PCIe card instead of plugging into the existing controller on the mainboard.
Then the real fun will start as 3ware, promise, adaptec and others pick up the card n' chips and decide to do something crazy like put a SATAII or Ultra320 interface on it and a RAID chip that treats each DIMM as a channel.... while RAID 5 wouldn't be terribly interesting, RAID-0 (essentially quad-channel baby!) could put up some serious numbers. A good use for that SLI board, put one of these in that unused 8x/16x PICe slot...
Cost will be an issue, but if they could maintain the $150 price point, or even beat it, while adding all these features - this could really be some killer upcoming technology.
Ahhhhh, something to keep dreaming about.
Go google it - two six pin connectors and the smallest 2.5 inch drive I have seen
I also use GMail for some light duty backup purposes, and to further help the paranoia I use http://www.truecrypt.org/ to put smallish (1-5MB) encrypted partitions up there for sensitive data. So far they have scaled with additional storage faster than my demand for storage, so I am quite happy with it so far. Just store the executable for TrueCrypt in your account as well and you are set for life.
Very cool.
Better than this, and much more portable, is simply use the mouse to switch the keyboard layout to Dvorak or something.... the hardware will still send the key as it is labeled on the keyboard, but the OS should convert it on the fly to whatever appropriate dvorak key.... and of course boot from a trusted Knoppix CD or something...
Windows is now a 64 bit tweak of a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit user interface for an 8 bit operating system based on a 4 bit architecture from a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
--No idea who originally coined this
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000597043723/
* Snippet *
Bach: Just to give you a specific example, wouldn't it be cool to have the game that has the person on the PC being the general who is driving the strategy and the person on the console on Xbox Live executing the strategy. That is a completely new genre, not sure what you would call it, but that's a completely different experience, and it leverages everything that steve talked about that we're putting in place. That's the kind of thinking that we're going to get people to, whether it's first party or third party.
Look past the gaming aspects of the console, how does the Xbox 360 serve as Microsoft's beachhead into the living room. A 20GB hard drive isn't a lot of space for storage, but since it does have this broadband connection, how is it going to integrated with IPTV, streaming video, and streaming audio?
Three things: Number one, who knows what configurations will be there by the time we're done. I think that's important to say. Number two, because you do have the network connectivity, whether you have a Media Center PC or not. You can put an awfully big hard disk on a regular PC and plug into this ecosystem, we have plenty of extensibility in terms of storage. And then number three, you take the IP TV work we're doing, and that technology can run on a PC, on a set top box, it can run on an Xbox. So there will be, in conjunction with the work we do with the video delivery companies, particularly the telcos, who have tended to be our strongest customers for our IPTV stuff, there will be yet another way to acquire and use video content. So you have set tops, you have the set top experience, you have the Xbox, you've got a big hard disk, you've got networked to the PC in the home, so I think there will be a lot of ways to get that media onto the Xbox.
Whenever online console game services are discussed, it is always brought up that XBox Live does it right, even though there is a subscription attached. Bottom line is this: No one is (should be?) forced to use it. It can work wonderfully for smaller (and larger) studios that don't want to deal with the mess of maintaining servers, but they shouldn't have to be forced into it.
Here is why: Many of the PC games talk to a dedicated server that spits out known servers on the internet, and then the client queries those individually. XL just consolidates that, and provides an SDK for developers to take advantage of.
If Nintendo provides a free "server listing" for all registered games, it won't cost them much in server hardware / bandwidth, since the real meat (actual game servers and really fat pipes for them) will be taken care of elsewhere. They have very little to lose with this model. It really will depend on what the game publishers decide to do with it... dedicated servers, allow any console to act as a server... etc...
It is nice to allow the end user to specify the verbosity of the log file - do you log each request, only failures, or every entrance/exit to a function? If the log is to assist in diagnosing the error, it is nice to be able to turn on extra information that would normally just quickly fill up disk space.