LOL! Squirrelly Wrath! I love it. Wish the guild I'm in had a name that cool. Oh well. Incidently how many servers are Care Bear on? I know of at least 4 different servers I've seen Care Bear (or some derivative such as Care Bear Club) on.
And now, I must take my squirrel to the bagel shop!
The problem with bittorrent is it isn't a single unified network, rather it's a technology for creating a small distributed network for all the users interested in a particular "file". It also requires a central tracker running somewhere for each "file", which also must have a complete copy of the file. The only thing bittorrent does is improve the transfer of files by distributing its transfer load across the network when possible. You could of course develop something similar to bittorrent that acts as a distributed storage system, but ultimately it wouldn't be bittorrent, but bittorrent-like. Also as someone else pointed out, the storage must come from somewhere, so if you're planning on this to reduce your required local storage space, and everyone else who joined the network does likewise, the storage on the network will always be less than that available to any of the members. Further it would probably be vulnerable to a DoS attack. Assuming it presents the storage available on the entire network as a unified space, there would be nothing to stop someone from spamming large junk files into the network and eating all the storage space available. From that point it would become very difficult to maintain, because you'd need to give someone the ability to remove files, which would necessitate giving everyone the ability, leading to a different form of DoS where someone simply deletes random files off the network. Also, because you're counting on redundancy of the network to prevent data lose, this implies anything stored on the network would be stored redundantly as well forcing the total storage of the network to greatly exceed that of what could actually be stored in the network.
Ultimately you need to consider what exactly you're trying to accomplish. Bittorrent sets out to reduce the load on any given node in distributing a single file (or collection of files). It accomplishes this by distributing the load across the entire network. The cost is that every node on the network, rather than just a single node must bear the load, and thus even though the load on a single node is greatly reduced, the load on all nodes is slightly increased (any given node will have used more bandwidth than they would have if they were downloading the file from one central node). Similarly if you're trying to use a network to distribute data for backup purposes, then by definition the data must be stored redundantly. This is ok, but the cost will be that every participant in the network will be utilizing more storage than they would if they were not part of the network. If your attempt is to reduce the storage requirement of a given file (or group of files) that could work as well, but that means the file will be fragile as there won't be room for backups, and that the cost for nodes is they will be storing a file or files that they don't necessarily want. Likewise the networks storage capacity would be limited to what people are willing to contribute essentially out of the goodness of their hearts, as they for the most part won't ever see any personal benefit.
If the encryption really works, then I might distribute a lot of my own personal storage to torrent networks, and just cache locally only copies of what I need to access fast and often.
Similar concept to Freenet, but Freenet is really really slow and no guarantee you'll ever get back anything you put on it. As for bittorrent, that only works if you can convince a bunch of people to not only download the "files" you want to distribute, but to keep them available for downloading at some undetermined point in the future. Bittorrent is great for propagating large files in high demand to many people quickly, but it really sucks as a persistence system.
You would be better off either getting a server somewhere and storing an encrypted imagine on it, or else using one of the network storage websites that have cropped up lately. Of course all this costs money, but hey, no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't think so. However, if you claim the encryption is a "copyright protection device" and you actually own the right to whatever it is you're encrypting, you can probably slap them upside the head with a DMCA violation.
No. Europe's wars were primarily about borders or cultures, and fueled by various governments trying to make land grabs. Middle east conflicts on the other hand are primarily fueled by religion, which has the added punch of being the core of many of their governments. When two groups of people are arguing over who owns what, it's a lot easier to resolve, then when two groups of people are arguing over some topic of religion (ironically enough even more so when their essentially the "same" religion). Probably the biggest hurtle to be overcome is that a large chunk of all their governments are hardline religious extremists, so even if you could get a sizable portion to be reasonable, you'd still have that hardcore faction trying to incite war.
No clue, and I'm inclined to agree, but apparently a lot of people aren't, to judge by the way EB/Gamestop stores are popping up on every other corner.
Going to tackle this in reverse order. First, individual stores don't order games (disclaimer: I have never worked for EB/Gamestop, but I have talked with employees). Stores place pre-orders and other than that what they receive in their shipments is decided by someone in corporate. Presumably they have some sort of system, that probably involves big sweaty rolls of money from other large corporations being left in certain key CEO pockets, and possibly dart boards at some step to help determine exactly which games and what quantities will show up.
As far as not making money on new releases that's not entirely true. They of course make profit off them, otherwise they wouldn't stock them, just like any other business. The key thing is that new games are not their most profitable item. They have essentially perfected a formula for squeezing the maximum profit out of each store that they possibly can. They start by reducing orders of new games to nearly the exact amount demanded. They do that by only carrying 1 or 2 new copies of any given game beyond what's pre-ordered. That ensures that they have enough on hand to meet the initial demand (assuming everyone pre-orders, and they probably order a certain percentage of the pre-orders extra to meet demand of those that didn't, say 10% of the pre-orders), but that they won't have many or any extra copies laying around. That's the initial investment, and they do make a bit of profit there. Where the big profit comes in though is in the re-sells. They give you something like $5 credit on a game that they'll turn around a re-sell for $40, that's 700% profit! That's why they want you to trade games in and buy used games, they make insane profit off each one.
As for the strategy guides and accessories, those are just icing on the cake. They like to sell them of course, it's all profit after all, but the big bucks come from the re-sells. I'm what EB would consider a nightmare customer. I buy nothing but brand new games, rarely pre-order (unless I think it'll sell out, I'm usually right on that call to), and never buy guides or accessories. I also never trade in used games.
So would we essentially be accomplishing the same thing if every other social networking site just started using the Facebook API? Yes, but that's slightly less appealing because it would be controlled by Facebook and thus Microsoft. Admittedly OpenSocial being backed by Google is somewhat suspect as well, but at least with that there's a call right from the outset to make it a standard API that's not owned by any particular social network.
You mean like AJAX and the multiple frameworks that aren't owned by anyone is?
Yes, but you're still missing the point. It needs to be designed from the beginning for developing network based applications. That means it needs real graphics and animation capabilities. Sure you can kludge it in JavaScript and HTML by using 1 pixel by 1 pixel colored divs, but that's really really slow and terribly wasteful, not to mention a real pain in the butt to program. It would also be nice if it could integrate into the native OS to a certain extent (tray icons, in OS X have the menu across the top of the screen, etc.). But most importantly it needs to be lightweight. Most if not all the data (barring graphics) should be in some sort of text format like HTML and CSS, not binary blobs like class files. It also needs to put a lot of thought into security issues. For an example of something that I think is very close, but fails at least the proprietary test, check out Adobe AIR.
Well, I'm assuming that Facebook is hosting their own ads, and not embedding them inside of widgets, in which case no, Facebook won't be sharing ad revenue. The only way this could hurt Facebook is it reduces the lock-in on developers who can freely distribute their widgets on all social networks that support OpenSocial, as opposed to having to develop versions for every network. I also don't know how much of a users data will actually be available when they aren't logged in. I'm assuming that you would need to be logged in to the social network (or else how would you even be viewing the widget in the first place) in order for it to access your data. OpenSocial is just a standardized Widget API to make it easier to port widgets between social networks.
I don't think you're reading what's being said here. OpenSocial isn't a social network like Facebook, and it's not meant to compete with or replace Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever social network is currently the "hip" thing. OpenSocial is a standard design that people who write applications for things like Facebook can use to allow their applications to be used all over the place. If Facebook, MySpace, etc. all included support for OpenSocial, and the developers used that to develop their applications (widgets might be a more appropriate term, application I think implies more functionality than most of these things actually have) using OpenSocial, then they can all inter operate with each other and different social networks.
So, in short, OpenSocial neither needs nor wants the support of regular users, it's looking for the support of the social network developers (both internal to places like Facebook and MySpace, and external such as the ones making "applications" for Facebook).
Once more there's confusion here. JSON is not JavaScript, any more than XML is. JSON was modeled somewhat after the JavaScript syntax, but it's considered a markup in its own right, and there are parsers available for it in many languages either out of the box (PHP), or as external libraries (Java, Ruby, etc.). JavaScript is a language like many others, and like any language it's possible to write very bad code in it. If you think strong typing will prevent that you're wrong (I've personally seen people write some very very bad code in Java).
AJAX exists because of a need that isn't being met. It's an attempt to fill that need and really has nothing to do with JavaScript other than that's the tool that was provided to get the job done. Like it or not, every web browser out there supports JavaScript, and the only other alternative out there with even as little as 40% of the browser market is VB (and then only if you're using IE and Windows). Do I think AJAX is wrong? Partially. I think that people are pushing browsers too far, trying to make them do things that they aren't really designed for. I think we need a new kind of browser to sit along side the web browser, not to replace it. In addion to http: which is handled by traditional web browsers, I think we need a app: or something similar handled by a "app browser" that's designed from the ground up to handle application development. The key to making the whole system work though is it needs to be a open standard not owned by any one company. If Google, or Microsoft, or even Mozilla Foundation get their hands on the standard and become the voice for it people won't want to adopt it because it will be used to bundle all kinds of things and lock people in to a particular vendor. We need HTML/CSS/JavaScript but done for applications this time. HTML was created for documents, and it's done very well in that regard, but we need something more, something for applications, and that's where we need to branch out and make something new.
Of course, most of this is terribly off-topic at this point, but since you brought up client side scripting and AJAX I'd figure I'd put this out here.
I've worked with some of the JS to Java AJAX bridges in the past that used JSON for the RPC communication and they usually add an extra "class" field to the JSON data to help serialize between the prototype based JS and the class based Java. It actually works very well, but has one catch that you can't have a property named class on either the JS or Java side of things or it mucks up the serialization.
I think his issue is more to do with a misunderstanding of the different technologies involved here. He seems to be confused between the "widgets" that googles API is designed for (embeddable in web pages, essentially small JS and HTML snippets with AJAX connections to backend servers) and the "widgets" that yahoos API is designed for (run inside a client side sandbox, xml widget layout, JS code for logic/RPC). Most of googles stuff is designed to plug into either their customized homepage, or be dropped onto a server and run in a web browser (like the google maps code). Yahoo on the other hand acquired Konfabulator which is a desktop client designed to function as a plugin framework for small widgets. That's the big difference, one is a scriptable rich client, and the other is basically traditional webapp development.
I agree to a point. The problem is, I've seen many after market Wiimotes, or Wiimote covers and accessories not manufactured by Nintendo that don't have a whole lot of identification on the boxes. In addition to this I can see a situation where someones grandmother that doesn't know an XBox360 from a PS3 walking through Walmart during the holiday rush when everyone is scrambling to grab anything they can off the shelf, seeing one of these things and thinking it looks a lot like that Wii thing their grandson has been asking for and grabbing one. In this case you have someone who isn't particularly clear on what a real Wiimote looks like, doesn't know much about the brand or what kind of packaging the item is supposed to come in, and is in a rush because everyone is going crazy trying to grab "the hot new toy" for christmas. I think it's just this sort of thing that if not Walmart, then at least the manufacturer of this particular item is counting on. The fact that they went as far as to add fake "speaker holes" to the front of this thing in an effort to make it look just that much closer to a real Wiimote shows that they're trying to scam people with this thing.
I'm not sure what exactly your point with this is, but I'd like to contribute some interesting facts. First, JSON isn't a Google thing. In fact, it was created by a Yahoo employee (Douglas Crockford), and is an open standard which is available as RFC4627. Having worked with JSON in the past, it's a much simpler, and much lighter markup language than XML (yes, that's right, it's a markup language, nothing more, just like XML, and HTML). I'm not certain how google is using JSON in their API, but in my experience deciding to use JSON over XML is probably a smart idea, as JSON is much more compact, and much easier to write (a lot less typing) and can easily represent all the standard data constructs available in almost any language.
If you want to bash the design of Googles API versus Yahoos that's fine, but please don't confuse the issue by saying JSON is somehow more complicated than XML, as that couldn't be farther from the truth.
As several people have mentioned, it's a solid state HD. As in flash. A 4GB flash drive is pretty good when going for what amounts to a souped up web browser. If you need more space than that and can't use some sort of external device you're probably trying to do something with the Eee that you're better off doing with a beefier system anyway.
I also think the quoted price might be a bit off. Originally these were supposed to be going for ~$200, but ASUS later said that was an initial estimate and that they'd be a bit more expensive, but I'm pretty sure it's still less than $400. According to the wikipedia entry at least it's supposed to be between $299 and $399.
Actually had something like that, but as part of the rooting process it looks like they either disabled it, or they replaced OpenSSH with a copy that had a backdoor. The old log files didn't show any connections other than when we logged in to check out what was up with the box, and it was only after we wiped the box and re-installed everything that the logs recorded all the failed logins.
No, Apache was running in it's own account, but I think they installed a console PHP script and ran some sort of local exploit. Like I said, no clue exactly how they did it, and the log files were pretty well trashed. Our first clue something was screwy was when we logged in and none of the standard utilities like ls were behaving properly (kept complaining that the standard switches like -l and -a were invalid). The whole system was trashed and we had to do a total re-install. The hosting company kept a backup of the old system and we tried to figure out everything we could from the logs left over as well as watching how the attackers behaved after we restored the system, but other than probing for a few files we had cleaned up and a bunch of attempts to log in to SSH with a pair of accounts we didn't see them do anything else. That's part of why I suspect it was some sort of PHP exploit centered around PHPBB, because that didn't get re-installed when we brought the system back up and some of their probes tried to access files that belonged to that.
Nah, this wasn't cycling, it was the same 2 names tried constantly over and over again. It may have been part of a botnet and the C&C node was trying to log back in, because it looked automated.
What's bigger, the Storm effect... or the Slashdot effect...
Duh -- the Storm effect, since the worm is more likely to actually RTFA. Oh, that's easy to fix. Just post the story with the links labeled as Natalie Portman covered in Hot Grits, Naked and Petrified.
Ah, undernet, those were the days. Friend of mine got payed a visit by the police once for playing on undernet. Seems he accidently crashed a few of their servers and they didn't take kindly to it. Turns out that if you have a few hundred bots all join a channel at once, and then a few of them get it in their head to kick one of those said bots, who of course gets kicked by a few more bots, who then get kicked by even more bots, that all that kicking and joining is enough to DOS the servers into submission. Heh, whoops. He stayed off IRC for a bit after that one.
Yeah, buddy of mine had his Gentoo box rooted and used as some sort of base system for rooting others. He found out after his ISP notified him that they shutdown his internet access because his server had been reported as probing other servers for vulnerable PHP apps. Not entirely sure how they rooted the box, but from what I could piece together going through the logs they managed to find a old copy of PHPBB he had been mucking around with on a subdomain (never linked it to anything, so they must have found it by brute force scanning, or maybe combing through DNS records). The traffic logs from other systems and the local logs all showed a series of automated scans for about 2 dozen known vulnerabilities in various pieces of pre-packaged PHP applications in a whole tone of domains. Looked like they just lifted a big chunk of every registered domain between something like ba-fa and were just working their way through it running scans. After we wiped the system and did a fresh install the OpenSSH log showed hundreds of attempted logins under the names of I think Doug and Samantha or something like that, so it seems likely they put a back door into OpenSSH as neither of those accounts were in the old passwd file. They really did a number on that system, and we didn't even know about it for a couple weeks because no one actually logs into the server, at most it gets a new file ftped to it every few weeks or so as things are tweaked.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL! Squirrelly Wrath! I love it. Wish the guild I'm in had a name that cool. Oh well. Incidently how many servers are Care Bear on? I know of at least 4 different servers I've seen Care Bear (or some derivative such as Care Bear Club) on.
And now, I must take my squirrel to the bagel shop!
The problem with bittorrent is it isn't a single unified network, rather it's a technology for creating a small distributed network for all the users interested in a particular "file". It also requires a central tracker running somewhere for each "file", which also must have a complete copy of the file. The only thing bittorrent does is improve the transfer of files by distributing its transfer load across the network when possible. You could of course develop something similar to bittorrent that acts as a distributed storage system, but ultimately it wouldn't be bittorrent, but bittorrent-like. Also as someone else pointed out, the storage must come from somewhere, so if you're planning on this to reduce your required local storage space, and everyone else who joined the network does likewise, the storage on the network will always be less than that available to any of the members. Further it would probably be vulnerable to a DoS attack. Assuming it presents the storage available on the entire network as a unified space, there would be nothing to stop someone from spamming large junk files into the network and eating all the storage space available. From that point it would become very difficult to maintain, because you'd need to give someone the ability to remove files, which would necessitate giving everyone the ability, leading to a different form of DoS where someone simply deletes random files off the network. Also, because you're counting on redundancy of the network to prevent data lose, this implies anything stored on the network would be stored redundantly as well forcing the total storage of the network to greatly exceed that of what could actually be stored in the network.
Ultimately you need to consider what exactly you're trying to accomplish. Bittorrent sets out to reduce the load on any given node in distributing a single file (or collection of files). It accomplishes this by distributing the load across the entire network. The cost is that every node on the network, rather than just a single node must bear the load, and thus even though the load on a single node is greatly reduced, the load on all nodes is slightly increased (any given node will have used more bandwidth than they would have if they were downloading the file from one central node). Similarly if you're trying to use a network to distribute data for backup purposes, then by definition the data must be stored redundantly. This is ok, but the cost will be that every participant in the network will be utilizing more storage than they would if they were not part of the network. If your attempt is to reduce the storage requirement of a given file (or group of files) that could work as well, but that means the file will be fragile as there won't be room for backups, and that the cost for nodes is they will be storing a file or files that they don't necessarily want. Likewise the networks storage capacity would be limited to what people are willing to contribute essentially out of the goodness of their hearts, as they for the most part won't ever see any personal benefit.
Similar concept to Freenet, but Freenet is really really slow and no guarantee you'll ever get back anything you put on it. As for bittorrent, that only works if you can convince a bunch of people to not only download the "files" you want to distribute, but to keep them available for downloading at some undetermined point in the future. Bittorrent is great for propagating large files in high demand to many people quickly, but it really sucks as a persistence system.
You would be better off either getting a server somewhere and storing an encrypted imagine on it, or else using one of the network storage websites that have cropped up lately. Of course all this costs money, but hey, no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't think so. However, if you claim the encryption is a "copyright protection device" and you actually own the right to whatever it is you're encrypting, you can probably slap them upside the head with a DMCA violation.
No. Europe's wars were primarily about borders or cultures, and fueled by various governments trying to make land grabs. Middle east conflicts on the other hand are primarily fueled by religion, which has the added punch of being the core of many of their governments. When two groups of people are arguing over who owns what, it's a lot easier to resolve, then when two groups of people are arguing over some topic of religion (ironically enough even more so when their essentially the "same" religion). Probably the biggest hurtle to be overcome is that a large chunk of all their governments are hardline religious extremists, so even if you could get a sizable portion to be reasonable, you'd still have that hardcore faction trying to incite war.
No clue, and I'm inclined to agree, but apparently a lot of people aren't, to judge by the way EB/Gamestop stores are popping up on every other corner.
Going to tackle this in reverse order. First, individual stores don't order games (disclaimer: I have never worked for EB/Gamestop, but I have talked with employees). Stores place pre-orders and other than that what they receive in their shipments is decided by someone in corporate. Presumably they have some sort of system, that probably involves big sweaty rolls of money from other large corporations being left in certain key CEO pockets, and possibly dart boards at some step to help determine exactly which games and what quantities will show up. As far as not making money on new releases that's not entirely true. They of course make profit off them, otherwise they wouldn't stock them, just like any other business. The key thing is that new games are not their most profitable item. They have essentially perfected a formula for squeezing the maximum profit out of each store that they possibly can. They start by reducing orders of new games to nearly the exact amount demanded. They do that by only carrying 1 or 2 new copies of any given game beyond what's pre-ordered. That ensures that they have enough on hand to meet the initial demand (assuming everyone pre-orders, and they probably order a certain percentage of the pre-orders extra to meet demand of those that didn't, say 10% of the pre-orders), but that they won't have many or any extra copies laying around. That's the initial investment, and they do make a bit of profit there. Where the big profit comes in though is in the re-sells. They give you something like $5 credit on a game that they'll turn around a re-sell for $40, that's 700% profit! That's why they want you to trade games in and buy used games, they make insane profit off each one. As for the strategy guides and accessories, those are just icing on the cake. They like to sell them of course, it's all profit after all, but the big bucks come from the re-sells. I'm what EB would consider a nightmare customer. I buy nothing but brand new games, rarely pre-order (unless I think it'll sell out, I'm usually right on that call to), and never buy guides or accessories. I also never trade in used games.
Yes, but you're still missing the point. It needs to be designed from the beginning for developing network based applications. That means it needs real graphics and animation capabilities. Sure you can kludge it in JavaScript and HTML by using 1 pixel by 1 pixel colored divs, but that's really really slow and terribly wasteful, not to mention a real pain in the butt to program. It would also be nice if it could integrate into the native OS to a certain extent (tray icons, in OS X have the menu across the top of the screen, etc.). But most importantly it needs to be lightweight. Most if not all the data (barring graphics) should be in some sort of text format like HTML and CSS, not binary blobs like class files. It also needs to put a lot of thought into security issues. For an example of something that I think is very close, but fails at least the proprietary test, check out Adobe AIR.
Well, I'm assuming that Facebook is hosting their own ads, and not embedding them inside of widgets, in which case no, Facebook won't be sharing ad revenue. The only way this could hurt Facebook is it reduces the lock-in on developers who can freely distribute their widgets on all social networks that support OpenSocial, as opposed to having to develop versions for every network. I also don't know how much of a users data will actually be available when they aren't logged in. I'm assuming that you would need to be logged in to the social network (or else how would you even be viewing the widget in the first place) in order for it to access your data. OpenSocial is just a standardized Widget API to make it easier to port widgets between social networks.
I don't think you're reading what's being said here. OpenSocial isn't a social network like Facebook, and it's not meant to compete with or replace Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever social network is currently the "hip" thing. OpenSocial is a standard design that people who write applications for things like Facebook can use to allow their applications to be used all over the place. If Facebook, MySpace, etc. all included support for OpenSocial, and the developers used that to develop their applications (widgets might be a more appropriate term, application I think implies more functionality than most of these things actually have) using OpenSocial, then they can all inter operate with each other and different social networks.
So, in short, OpenSocial neither needs nor wants the support of regular users, it's looking for the support of the social network developers (both internal to places like Facebook and MySpace, and external such as the ones making "applications" for Facebook).
Sure they do, that's that thing they keep changing every time they release a new version of Office.
Once more there's confusion here. JSON is not JavaScript, any more than XML is. JSON was modeled somewhat after the JavaScript syntax, but it's considered a markup in its own right, and there are parsers available for it in many languages either out of the box (PHP), or as external libraries (Java, Ruby, etc.). JavaScript is a language like many others, and like any language it's possible to write very bad code in it. If you think strong typing will prevent that you're wrong (I've personally seen people write some very very bad code in Java).
AJAX exists because of a need that isn't being met. It's an attempt to fill that need and really has nothing to do with JavaScript other than that's the tool that was provided to get the job done. Like it or not, every web browser out there supports JavaScript, and the only other alternative out there with even as little as 40% of the browser market is VB (and then only if you're using IE and Windows). Do I think AJAX is wrong? Partially. I think that people are pushing browsers too far, trying to make them do things that they aren't really designed for. I think we need a new kind of browser to sit along side the web browser, not to replace it. In addion to http: which is handled by traditional web browsers, I think we need a app: or something similar handled by a "app browser" that's designed from the ground up to handle application development. The key to making the whole system work though is it needs to be a open standard not owned by any one company. If Google, or Microsoft, or even Mozilla Foundation get their hands on the standard and become the voice for it people won't want to adopt it because it will be used to bundle all kinds of things and lock people in to a particular vendor. We need HTML/CSS/JavaScript but done for applications this time. HTML was created for documents, and it's done very well in that regard, but we need something more, something for applications, and that's where we need to branch out and make something new.
Of course, most of this is terribly off-topic at this point, but since you brought up client side scripting and AJAX I'd figure I'd put this out here.
I've worked with some of the JS to Java AJAX bridges in the past that used JSON for the RPC communication and they usually add an extra "class" field to the JSON data to help serialize between the prototype based JS and the class based Java. It actually works very well, but has one catch that you can't have a property named class on either the JS or Java side of things or it mucks up the serialization.
I think his issue is more to do with a misunderstanding of the different technologies involved here. He seems to be confused between the "widgets" that googles API is designed for (embeddable in web pages, essentially small JS and HTML snippets with AJAX connections to backend servers) and the "widgets" that yahoos API is designed for (run inside a client side sandbox, xml widget layout, JS code for logic/RPC). Most of googles stuff is designed to plug into either their customized homepage, or be dropped onto a server and run in a web browser (like the google maps code). Yahoo on the other hand acquired Konfabulator which is a desktop client designed to function as a plugin framework for small widgets. That's the big difference, one is a scriptable rich client, and the other is basically traditional webapp development.
I agree to a point. The problem is, I've seen many after market Wiimotes, or Wiimote covers and accessories not manufactured by Nintendo that don't have a whole lot of identification on the boxes. In addition to this I can see a situation where someones grandmother that doesn't know an XBox360 from a PS3 walking through Walmart during the holiday rush when everyone is scrambling to grab anything they can off the shelf, seeing one of these things and thinking it looks a lot like that Wii thing their grandson has been asking for and grabbing one. In this case you have someone who isn't particularly clear on what a real Wiimote looks like, doesn't know much about the brand or what kind of packaging the item is supposed to come in, and is in a rush because everyone is going crazy trying to grab "the hot new toy" for christmas. I think it's just this sort of thing that if not Walmart, then at least the manufacturer of this particular item is counting on. The fact that they went as far as to add fake "speaker holes" to the front of this thing in an effort to make it look just that much closer to a real Wiimote shows that they're trying to scam people with this thing.
I'm not sure what exactly your point with this is, but I'd like to contribute some interesting facts. First, JSON isn't a Google thing. In fact, it was created by a Yahoo employee (Douglas Crockford), and is an open standard which is available as RFC4627. Having worked with JSON in the past, it's a much simpler, and much lighter markup language than XML (yes, that's right, it's a markup language, nothing more, just like XML, and HTML). I'm not certain how google is using JSON in their API, but in my experience deciding to use JSON over XML is probably a smart idea, as JSON is much more compact, and much easier to write (a lot less typing) and can easily represent all the standard data constructs available in almost any language.
If you want to bash the design of Googles API versus Yahoos that's fine, but please don't confuse the issue by saying JSON is somehow more complicated than XML, as that couldn't be farther from the truth.
As several people have mentioned, it's a solid state HD. As in flash. A 4GB flash drive is pretty good when going for what amounts to a souped up web browser. If you need more space than that and can't use some sort of external device you're probably trying to do something with the Eee that you're better off doing with a beefier system anyway.
I also think the quoted price might be a bit off. Originally these were supposed to be going for ~$200, but ASUS later said that was an initial estimate and that they'd be a bit more expensive, but I'm pretty sure it's still less than $400. According to the wikipedia entry at least it's supposed to be between $299 and $399.
I want they question to be "Describe the internet", and see how many "series of tubes" answers we get.
Actually had something like that, but as part of the rooting process it looks like they either disabled it, or they replaced OpenSSH with a copy that had a backdoor. The old log files didn't show any connections other than when we logged in to check out what was up with the box, and it was only after we wiped the box and re-installed everything that the logs recorded all the failed logins.
No, Apache was running in it's own account, but I think they installed a console PHP script and ran some sort of local exploit. Like I said, no clue exactly how they did it, and the log files were pretty well trashed. Our first clue something was screwy was when we logged in and none of the standard utilities like ls were behaving properly (kept complaining that the standard switches like -l and -a were invalid). The whole system was trashed and we had to do a total re-install. The hosting company kept a backup of the old system and we tried to figure out everything we could from the logs left over as well as watching how the attackers behaved after we restored the system, but other than probing for a few files we had cleaned up and a bunch of attempts to log in to SSH with a pair of accounts we didn't see them do anything else. That's part of why I suspect it was some sort of PHP exploit centered around PHPBB, because that didn't get re-installed when we brought the system back up and some of their probes tried to access files that belonged to that.
Nah, this wasn't cycling, it was the same 2 names tried constantly over and over again. It may have been part of a botnet and the C&C node was trying to log back in, because it looked automated.
Ah, undernet, those were the days. Friend of mine got payed a visit by the police once for playing on undernet. Seems he accidently crashed a few of their servers and they didn't take kindly to it. Turns out that if you have a few hundred bots all join a channel at once, and then a few of them get it in their head to kick one of those said bots, who of course gets kicked by a few more bots, who then get kicked by even more bots, that all that kicking and joining is enough to DOS the servers into submission. Heh, whoops. He stayed off IRC for a bit after that one.
Yeah, buddy of mine had his Gentoo box rooted and used as some sort of base system for rooting others. He found out after his ISP notified him that they shutdown his internet access because his server had been reported as probing other servers for vulnerable PHP apps. Not entirely sure how they rooted the box, but from what I could piece together going through the logs they managed to find a old copy of PHPBB he had been mucking around with on a subdomain (never linked it to anything, so they must have found it by brute force scanning, or maybe combing through DNS records). The traffic logs from other systems and the local logs all showed a series of automated scans for about 2 dozen known vulnerabilities in various pieces of pre-packaged PHP applications in a whole tone of domains. Looked like they just lifted a big chunk of every registered domain between something like ba-fa and were just working their way through it running scans. After we wiped the system and did a fresh install the OpenSSH log showed hundreds of attempted logins under the names of I think Doug and Samantha or something like that, so it seems likely they put a back door into OpenSSH as neither of those accounts were in the old passwd file. They really did a number on that system, and we didn't even know about it for a couple weeks because no one actually logs into the server, at most it gets a new file ftped to it every few weeks or so as things are tweaked.