It's true, it was Valve's baby, if you remember. Valve made this copy protection and are now not accountable for its strictness - amusing, because the whole point was that strictly, everyone would get it at the same time.
The infrastructure is important: not only the physical infrastructure like roads, trains and powerlines, but also the governmental infrastructure (like courts, government offices, etc.). Plus, a stable government (not a one-man show like in many other places) is necessary: money flees uncertainty.
While generally your comment makes sense, I take issue with the last statement. Money doesn't flee uncertainty. It would be far more correct to say it flees the certainty of unprofitability and the certainty of unstable infrastructure and government and an arbitrary court system, like in Indonesia for example. Investment pours into uncertain economies like Russia after the end of the Cold War because they promise change, and change is the essence of growth.
Ukraine has a bunch of cornfields, a bunch of old steel mills, and not much else. Right? Well, Ukraine also has a budding technology sector, and -- after the U.S., India, and Russia -- the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world. It was a main center of the Soviet programming industry. The first computer built in continental Europe was made in Ukraine in 1951. Even today, scientific institutes each year churn out some 50,000 science or technology graduates. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India. "We want Ukraine to become a technological country again, not just a country with agriculture and tank production," says Yuri Sivitsky, chairman of Softline, one of Ukraine's largest software producers.
What are the chances? While Ukraine isn't likely ever to rival India, it certainly has the potential to become a player. Just look at Softline. Founded by mathematicians in 1995, it has 500 employees, up from a dozen in 1998. Revenues are set to hit $10 million this year, up 70% from 2003. Its clients include Ingersoll-Rand Co. (IR ) and Hugo Boss.
The offshore programming industry, although small, is growing fast. According to Market-Visio, a research firm in Moscow, Ukraine's software exports will grow 43% this year to $100 million. Around 10,000 programmers are employed in the industry, working for customers such as Boeing (BA ), DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), General Electric (GE ), Citibank (C ), and NASA. Much of the work is customized business software. But gaming is also growing. Kvasar-Micro, Ukraine's largest info tech company, recently landed an order to develop a computer game for mobile handsets.
Ukraine's main selling point is the quality of its mathematical education. Another is cheap labor. An average programmer in Ukraine earns $500 a month, not quite as low as India, but half the level in Moscow and a fraction of programming salaries in the West. But the edge Ukraine gets from high education and low wages is offset by other factors. Around 90% of all software on sale in Ukraine is pirated, so domestic makers can't get the revenue they need to grow. Other problems are a lack of business skills, venture finance, and government support. But things are looking up. Management skills are improving as Ukrainians gain Western experience and earn MBAs. The government is mulling tax incentives for tech investment and starting to tighten piracy laws.
Some of the biggest names in the global technology industry have started to wake up to Ukraine's potential. "Ukraine is building up quickly," says Gerard J. Kleisterlee, CEO of Dutch electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics (PHG ), which makes an array of high-tech goods there. Flextronics International Ltd. (FLEX ), a Singapore electronics powerhouse, recently set up a software design lab in Ukraine, and CEO Michael E. Marks is enthusiastic about the nation's potential as an engineering and design power. If he's right, Ukraine has a digital future.
Today's world is busy, and people are allocating less and less time to leisure. Leisure seems to have become the time we spend between tasks, rather than time with its own importance. Often it is just the time we spend moving between work and home, both of which are essentially work environments now (both the family and workplace burdens are shared by both genders now). This is an attempt by Fox, a company that produces leisure activities that tether you to home, to overcome its intrinsic anachronism and make its product an activity relevant and feasible for today's citizens. That means shoving itself into coffee breaks or time spent on the bus. Convergence with a pre-existing, indispensible device is really the most pragmatic way of making TV portable. Hence this type of convergence is inevitable, and will be for as long as the TV companies seek profit.
A few weeks ago, we started investigating the possibility of putting Linux on an XBOX. We played with some ideas in our heads, a render farm, a cheap office computer or a distributed crypto platform, just to start. The idea required a little bit of elbow grease, a mod chip, Linux and a bunch of free time.
Costs
Unfortunately, the cost of building an XBOX PC runs a little more than the cost of the XBOX. We need to factor in the cost of the mod chip, probably a hard drive, keyboard and mouse. Mod chips run anywhere from $40 to $80; the one we use in this review costs about $75. A USB keyboard and mouse usually run another $15. If you are going to be doing any clustering, you do not really need to invest in a keyboard/mouse at all. For most uses, the 8GB hard drive is sufficient enough, although upgrading to a 20GB drive might be in order for a larger Linux distribution.
Used and refurbished XBOXes range from $120 to $160. Used XBOXes are usually the way to go, since we will be soon voiding the warranty anyway to install the mod chip. When shopping for an XBOX to mod, older is sometimes better. Although the SmartXX mod chip works on all versions of the XBOX available, the newest version 1.6 XBOXes require a few extra wires to be soldered, even on the solderless install kit.
For our distributed computing ideas, we have an exciting analysis in store. We managed to round up 8 XBOXes with mod chips for this review. That only equates to 5.8GHz of distributed CPU power, 80GB of hard drive space, and just 512MB of memory. However, if our distributed computing project is successful, scaling to a much higher CPU clock might be very feasible. Finding an equivalent $1600 PC would be nearly impossible, but that assumes our distributed XBOX network actually behaves like a $1600 PC instead of 8 $150 PCs. It may be the case that network and disk latencies are too high for us to practically compute anything. There are also some issues on power consumption and noise. The XBOX is relatively quiet for a PC, unless you have a whole lot of them. Our lab recorded approximately 42dBA when our eight node XBOX cluster was on.
If you plan on just running your XBOX as a stand-alone PC, then costs like power become no issue. The XBOX consumes 100W at full load. For a 16-cluster node to operate for one hour, we need 1.6 kilowatt hours of power. If you pay 10 cents per kwh, that's about $1400 for one year of operation.
Putting it all Together
Modding the XBOX is really the simple part. We received a solderless SmartXX v2 from www.bmmods.com. These generally run for $75 if you get the solderless adaptor or $60 for the solder option. Other mod chips work well for installing a Linux distribution, but the SmartXX comes with an XBOX version of Debian (Xebian) and is the most mature chip for running a Linux distribution.
Opening up the XBOX and getting at the mainboard was fairly simple. The SmartXX comes with PDF manuals that demonstrate how to unscrew all of the components. Below, you can see the process in a few quick steps. Opening the XBOX just requires an Allen wrench.
Opening the XBOX
The next step is to remove the hard drive and DVD drive so that we can get at the D0 pin hole on the motherboard. This will allow us to put the XBOX into debug mode.
Removing the drives
Now, we have the SmartXX finally mounted correctly. If you look carefully at the image below, you can see the copper wire from the pin pad to the D0 lead that gives our mod chip all the magical power.
Total time for our installation was about 15 minutes, although a solder option would probably take a little but more than a half hour. Adding the mod chip to the XBOX was far simpler than any of us had originally thought, and after doing the process just once with a solderless option, we feel like we could easily do the process again with a solder option. This would save us a bit of cash if we were consideri
If it inspires you to great feelings you should read my JOURNAL. Not offtopic mods, just replying. And I think we all understand that the strength of this country is only as strong as we allow the President to be.
"I may not agree with President George W. Bush's decisions, but I agree with his willingness to make them." *salutes flag*
This is NOT A TROLL. Stop misusing the troll mod, mods!
Troll: Within the understood forms of trolling phenomena (eg. goatcx, poll troll toll, dylan's 115th dream) or clearly pranking the thread. Not relevant to the discussion.
Flamebait: A coarse insult that doesn't respond to the actual comment someone made, angry and designed to elicit more anger in response. For example, "You are a fucking idiot! You are so damn ugly your mother probably vomited when you were born then fed you that vomit for the next ten years of your life!" Not relevant to the discussion.
Offtopic: Just talking about something in the thread that has no bearing on the thing the story was originally about AND no bearing on its parent, if it represents part of a discussion that naturally emerged within the thread. Offtopic is for "Hey, Bill, did you catch the game on Saturday?" and, more plausibly, "More interesting is that Microsoft announced blah blah..."
Redundant: A repetition; a comment that only paraphrases (or directly reposts) another, earlier comment.
Overrated: Anything else.
As for the comment about French as a language, which obviously got this modded down, French is a language closely regulated. What the parent said was legitimate.
It's sad and tragic because we want a sense of wellbeing fostered in our citizens, and also because another opponent of civilization, and of fraternity in general, standing alone, does not contribute anything, either to our society or to their own happiness.
Contribution is its own reward, and devastatingly, it's a dish rarely tasted by those who are not hungry for it or those with eating disorders like anorexia or digestive disorders like IBS, if you follow my metaphor.
"On the morning of Thursday the 7th of October, U.S. authorities delivered a federal order to Rackspace (Indymedia's provider, whose offices are in London and USA), requiring the surrender of Indymedias' web servers to the demanding agency. According to what was said to Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they couldn't give Indymedia more information respecting the order." ISPs have received orders to stand quiet in similar situtations in which orders were given not to keep the involved parts informed on what was going on.
Indymedia has not been clear as to how and why a server outside American jurisdiction can be requested by American authorities.
At the same time, an additional server was disconnected at Rackspace; that server provided streaming radio for some emitters, BLAG (a Linux distribution), and quite a few more sites.
In the last months numerous attacks to independant media have been seen being perpetrated by the U.S. federal government. In August, the secret service used a jurisdictional requirement in an attempt to disband New York's CMI before the RNC, attempting to obtain IP registers in USA and Holland. The past month the FCC dismantled several American radio emtitters. Two weeks earlier the FBI requested that Indymedia delete a story on the Nantes CMI who had the picture of some Swedish secret police officer and CMI volunteers were visited by the FBI to inquire on the same issue. Meanwhile, Indymedia and other organizations had success with their victories against FedEx, Diebold and the Patriot Act. Today, nevertheless, American authorities have disconnected CMIs all over the globe.
The list of affected CMIs include:
Italy, Brasil, Uruguay, England, Andorra, Polonia, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille , Euskal Herria (País vasco), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen Belgrado, Portugal, Praga and Galicia"
Anything that offers consumers more choice in telephone communication will force vendors of both plain old phone services and those of VoIP to make their services more competitive. Whoever wins, we win.
Those who want to upgrade or repair their Macs don't understand what liberal Apple is - a company that manufactures computers whose workings are impenetrable and hidden (i.e. information hiding), like parts themselves are in other PCs. If people start upgrading their Macs, it's only a matter of time before they turn where they should - to American x86 or American x86-64.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, well, we elect our pilot flight deck cowboys.
Did Vivendi put the authentication in there?
It's true, it was Valve's baby, if you remember. Valve made this copy protection and are now not accountable for its strictness - amusing, because the whole point was that strictly, everyone would get it at the same time.
The infrastructure is important: not only the physical infrastructure like roads, trains and powerlines, but also the governmental infrastructure (like courts, government offices, etc.). Plus, a stable government (not a one-man show like in many other places) is necessary: money flees uncertainty.
While generally your comment makes sense, I take issue with the last statement. Money doesn't flee uncertainty. It would be far more correct to say it flees the certainty of unprofitability and the certainty of unstable infrastructure and government and an arbitrary court system, like in Indonesia for example. Investment pours into uncertain economies like Russia after the end of the Cold War because they promise change, and change is the essence of growth.
and the server goes down.
Building The Muscle To Be A Tech Player
Ukraine has a bunch of cornfields, a bunch of old steel mills, and not much else. Right? Well, Ukraine also has a budding technology sector, and -- after the U.S., India, and Russia -- the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world. It was a main center of the Soviet programming industry. The first computer built in continental Europe was made in Ukraine in 1951. Even today, scientific institutes each year churn out some 50,000 science or technology graduates. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India. "We want Ukraine to become a technological country again, not just a country with agriculture and tank production," says Yuri Sivitsky, chairman of Softline, one of Ukraine's largest software producers.
What are the chances? While Ukraine isn't likely ever to rival India, it certainly has the potential to become a player. Just look at Softline. Founded by mathematicians in 1995, it has 500 employees, up from a dozen in 1998. Revenues are set to hit $10 million this year, up 70% from 2003. Its clients include Ingersoll-Rand Co. (IR ) and Hugo Boss.
The offshore programming industry, although small, is growing fast. According to Market-Visio, a research firm in Moscow, Ukraine's software exports will grow 43% this year to $100 million. Around 10,000 programmers are employed in the industry, working for customers such as Boeing (BA ), DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), General Electric (GE ), Citibank (C ), and NASA. Much of the work is customized business software. But gaming is also growing. Kvasar-Micro, Ukraine's largest info tech company, recently landed an order to develop a computer game for mobile handsets.
Ukraine's main selling point is the quality of its mathematical education. Another is cheap labor. An average programmer in Ukraine earns $500 a month, not quite as low as India, but half the level in Moscow and a fraction of programming salaries in the West. But the edge Ukraine gets from high education and low wages is offset by other factors. Around 90% of all software on sale in Ukraine is pirated, so domestic makers can't get the revenue they need to grow. Other problems are a lack of business skills, venture finance, and government support. But things are looking up. Management skills are improving as Ukrainians gain Western experience and earn MBAs. The government is mulling tax incentives for tech investment and starting to tighten piracy laws.
Some of the biggest names in the global technology industry have started to wake up to Ukraine's potential. "Ukraine is building up quickly," says Gerard J. Kleisterlee, CEO of Dutch electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics (PHG ), which makes an array of high-tech goods there. Flextronics International Ltd. (FLEX ), a Singapore electronics powerhouse, recently set up a software design lab in Ukraine, and CEO Michael E. Marks is enthusiastic about the nation's potential as an engineering and design power. If he's right, Ukraine has a digital future.
No problem.
Yeah, it was me all along, posting anonymously.
Today's world is busy, and people are allocating less and less time to leisure. Leisure seems to have become the time we spend between tasks, rather than time with its own importance. Often it is just the time we spend moving between work and home, both of which are essentially work environments now (both the family and workplace burdens are shared by both genders now). This is an attempt by Fox, a company that produces leisure activities that tether you to home, to overcome its intrinsic anachronism and make its product an activity relevant and feasible for today's citizens. That means shoving itself into coffee breaks or time spent on the bus. Convergence with a pre-existing, indispensible device is really the most pragmatic way of making TV portable. Hence this type of convergence is inevitable, and will be for as long as the TV companies seek profit.
Introduction
A few weeks ago, we started investigating the possibility of putting Linux on an XBOX. We played with some ideas in our heads, a render farm, a cheap office computer or a distributed crypto platform, just to start. The idea required a little bit of elbow grease, a mod chip, Linux and a bunch of free time.
Costs
Unfortunately, the cost of building an XBOX PC runs a little more than the cost of the XBOX. We need to factor in the cost of the mod chip, probably a hard drive, keyboard and mouse. Mod chips run anywhere from $40 to $80; the one we use in this review costs about $75. A USB keyboard and mouse usually run another $15. If you are going to be doing any clustering, you do not really need to invest in a keyboard/mouse at all. For most uses, the 8GB hard drive is sufficient enough, although upgrading to a 20GB drive might be in order for a larger Linux distribution.
Used and refurbished XBOXes range from $120 to $160. Used XBOXes are usually the way to go, since we will be soon voiding the warranty anyway to install the mod chip. When shopping for an XBOX to mod, older is sometimes better. Although the SmartXX mod chip works on all versions of the XBOX available, the newest version 1.6 XBOXes require a few extra wires to be soldered, even on the solderless install kit.
For our distributed computing ideas, we have an exciting analysis in store. We managed to round up 8 XBOXes with mod chips for this review. That only equates to 5.8GHz of distributed CPU power, 80GB of hard drive space, and just 512MB of memory. However, if our distributed computing project is successful, scaling to a much higher CPU clock might be very feasible. Finding an equivalent $1600 PC would be nearly impossible, but that assumes our distributed XBOX network actually behaves like a $1600 PC instead of 8 $150 PCs. It may be the case that network and disk latencies are too high for us to practically compute anything. There are also some issues on power consumption and noise. The XBOX is relatively quiet for a PC, unless you have a whole lot of them. Our lab recorded approximately 42dBA when our eight node XBOX cluster was on.
If you plan on just running your XBOX as a stand-alone PC, then costs like power become no issue. The XBOX consumes 100W at full load. For a 16-cluster node to operate for one hour, we need 1.6 kilowatt hours of power. If you pay 10 cents per kwh, that's about $1400 for one year of operation.
Putting it all Together
Modding the XBOX is really the simple part. We received a solderless SmartXX v2 from www.bmmods.com. These generally run for $75 if you get the solderless adaptor or $60 for the solder option. Other mod chips work well for installing a Linux distribution, but the SmartXX comes with an XBOX version of Debian (Xebian) and is the most mature chip for running a Linux distribution.
Opening up the XBOX and getting at the mainboard was fairly simple. The SmartXX comes with PDF manuals that demonstrate how to unscrew all of the components. Below, you can see the process in a few quick steps. Opening the XBOX just requires an Allen wrench.
Opening the XBOX
The next step is to remove the hard drive and DVD drive so that we can get at the D0 pin hole on the motherboard. This will allow us to put the XBOX into debug mode.
Removing the drives
Now, we have the SmartXX finally mounted correctly. If you look carefully at the image below, you can see the copper wire from the pin pad to the D0 lead that gives our mod chip all the magical power.
Total time for our installation was about 15 minutes, although a solder option would probably take a little but more than a half hour. Adding the mod chip to the XBOX was far simpler than any of us had originally thought, and after doing the process just once with a solderless option, we feel like we could easily do the process again with a solder option. This would save us a bit of cash if we were consideri
It took, what, all of a few hours for the truth to out? But no. You couldn't wait.
It wasn't a matter of waiting. The answer wouldn't have come if the story hadn't been posted.
I'm not sure I got that "bar of soap" idea right
You handle the phone functionality, then, and I'll handle the soap aesthetics. Maybe the grandparent is talking about this?
If it inspires you to great feelings you should read my JOURNAL. Not offtopic mods, just replying. And I think we all understand that the strength of this country is only as strong as we allow the President to be.
"I may not agree with President George W. Bush's decisions, but I agree with his willingness to make them." *salutes flag*
Does it run Linux?
It does, okay, bah. Some things nothing can take away from me.
This is NOT A TROLL. Stop misusing the troll mod, mods!
Troll: Within the understood forms of trolling phenomena (eg. goatcx, poll troll toll, dylan's 115th dream) or clearly pranking the thread. Not relevant to the discussion.
Flamebait: A coarse insult that doesn't respond to the actual comment someone made, angry and designed to elicit more anger in response. For example, "You are a fucking idiot! You are so damn ugly your mother probably vomited when you were born then fed you that vomit for the next ten years of your life!" Not relevant to the discussion.
Offtopic: Just talking about something in the thread that has no bearing on the thing the story was originally about AND no bearing on its parent, if it represents part of a discussion that naturally emerged within the thread. Offtopic is for "Hey, Bill, did you catch the game on Saturday?" and, more plausibly, "More interesting is that Microsoft announced blah blah..."
Redundant: A repetition; a comment that only paraphrases (or directly reposts) another, earlier comment.
Overrated: Anything else.
As for the comment about French as a language, which obviously got this modded down, French is a language closely regulated. What the parent said was legitimate.
Why is that sad?
It's sad and tragic because we want a sense of wellbeing fostered in our citizens, and also because another opponent of civilization, and of fraternity in general, standing alone, does not contribute anything, either to our society or to their own happiness.
Contribution is its own reward, and devastatingly, it's a dish rarely tasted by those who are not hungry for it or those with eating disorders like anorexia or digestive disorders like IBS, if you follow my metaphor.
People come into a world that has already been built, and sometimes they feel lost. They define themselves in opposition to it.
It's only rough, so sorry for any mistakes.
"On the morning of Thursday the 7th of October, U.S. authorities delivered a federal order to Rackspace (Indymedia's provider, whose offices are in London and USA), requiring the surrender of Indymedias' web servers to the demanding agency. According to what was said to Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they couldn't give Indymedia more information respecting the order." ISPs have received orders to stand quiet in similar situtations in which orders were given not to keep the involved parts informed on what was going on.
Indymedia has not been clear as to how and why a server outside American jurisdiction can be requested by American authorities.
At the same time, an additional server was disconnected at Rackspace; that server provided streaming radio for some emitters, BLAG (a Linux distribution), and quite a few more sites.
In the last months numerous attacks to independant media have been seen being perpetrated by the U.S. federal government. In August, the secret service used a jurisdictional requirement in an attempt to disband New York's CMI before the RNC, attempting to obtain IP registers in USA and Holland. The past month the FCC dismantled several American radio emtitters. Two weeks earlier the FBI requested that Indymedia delete a story on the Nantes CMI who had the picture of some Swedish secret police officer and CMI volunteers were visited by the FBI to inquire on the same issue. Meanwhile, Indymedia and other organizations had success with their victories against FedEx, Diebold and the Patriot Act. Today, nevertheless, American authorities have disconnected CMIs all over the globe.
The list of affected CMIs include: Italy, Brasil, Uruguay, England, Andorra, Polonia, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille , Euskal Herria (País vasco), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen Belgrado, Portugal, Praga and Galicia"
Here's a nested version of the discussion.
Why did you reply to the poll troll? Your comment has nothing to do with the poll troll.
"Gods witnessed glaciers forming faster than my downloads...now I can finally download the whole internet"
Yet presumably only after the entire planet is covered in glaciers.
"Hot Damn... Gods witnessed glaciers forming faster than my downloads"
If you already have a hot dam, logic dictates that all you need is some way to empty it onto the glaciers to speed up your Internet connection.
In Soviet Russia, The Hard Diks Mounts YOU!
You and that poll troll have something going on, don't you?
More articles, for the more article inclined.
Anything that offers consumers more choice in telephone communication will force vendors of both plain old phone services and those of VoIP to make their services more competitive. Whoever wins, we win.
How the fuck can I be modded troll for spreading TRUTH?
Osama bin Laden's hoping that someday the sun will actually hit someone or something in the West on its way down.
Those who want to upgrade or repair their Macs don't understand what liberal Apple is - a company that manufactures computers whose workings are impenetrable and hidden (i.e. information hiding), like parts themselves are in other PCs. If people start upgrading their Macs, it's only a matter of time before they turn where they should - to American x86 or American x86-64.
Why the fuck would the abbreviation of "Democrat"/"Demagogue" be "Demm" with two "m"s, huh? What is wrong with you?
Read my journal you crazy fishbowl.