This totally ignores a large part of cheating, which is that software on the client can control the play even if the gameplay is handled on the server. Clients can still run automappers, autoaimers, and so on.
I used to play MUDs, and used a Procomm's key recorder to record movement keystrokes to go from the pub to the orc's den or whatever. It saved monotonous typing. But it also gave me a minor advantage: on my blazing 9600 bps connection, I'd zip past other players on my way there. It's a slippery slope between that and writing software to play the monotonous aspects of the game for you, attacking monsters, monitoring health, selling loot, and so on. MUDs did nothing to prevent this sort of client-side automation.
Those sorts of problems extend to a wide range of games, from MUDs to 3D shooters to word games, board games, card games, and so on.
Detecting Stealth Planes
Posted by Hemos on Sunday November 28, @05:23PM
from the now-we've-got-you dept.
Zurk writes " Newsweek said China's new Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system tracked the signals of civilian radio and television broadcasts and picked up aircraft by analysing the minute turbulence their flight caused in the commercial wavelengths. cool huh ? " They hope to use it to detect the F-117A and potentially the F-22. Very cool use of technology to fix a problem.
ABC Enhanced TV has been doing what it needs to do since 1999, without any extra hardware. They control when things are broadcast on your television, and synch the content on their web site to that broadcast. Of course they have to offer something you'd be interested in, like additional trivia for statistomaniacal sports nuts, or real-time polls or whatever. That way you'll put up with the Enhanced Commercials on your computer:-).
Perhaps the most touted benefit was a gimmick for Monday Night Football viewers. They had a well-educated representative from Britannica.com provide real-time explanations of Dennis Miller's notoriously obscure references. (Yeah, they could have done this with text on the TV - like I said, it was a gimmick).
Cue's idea could theoretically allow the same sort of thing without the need for precise scheduling. You'd be able to synch web info even if you're watching a videotape, for example. Or marketers could record the "links" right into their infomercials, broadcast them whenever local rates happen to be cheap, and still be able to launch mounds of pop-up ads on your computer before you can hit the mute button.
The idea of allowing television broadcasts to control proprietary closed-source software on your computer that connects to the Internet has some amazingly evil possibilities. It's an almost Microsoft-like idea, except for its being doomed to financial failure.
> 40KB download? 12KB upload? $150 a month? Yeah right... That is rediculous.
Where did you get those bandwidth figures? Here are some from their FAQ:
The speed at which data will flow from the Internet to your PC will average 400kbps. The speed at which data will flow from your PC to the Internet (e.g., when sending an email) will average 128kbps.
While you're using a capital B, and may be meaning kilobytes per second rather than kilobits, they still don't match the FAQ's bandwidth stats, and I think a 10x-20x downstream improvement over a typical dial-up in a remote location is more than a "glorified modem."
On the other hand, their actual pricing sheet says that they may, at their discretion, limit your bandwidth as described in their Terms and Conditions, which they don't seem to make publicly available on their web site.
That gives me an idea!
on
DSLBlaster?
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· Score: 5
In place of my cable modem, I'll hook the cable into my television set. It'll show a scribbly image, but the TV's radiation will minutely interfere with my fluorescent light. By reprogramming the DSP inside my optical mouse and holding it up to the bulb, I'll have a steady stream of data coming through the mouse's USB connector. From there, it's a simple matter of hooking the mouse to my Laserjet's USB port, changing the ROM to redirect the packets out the parallel input port, running that to my Xircom parallel port ethernet adapter, and from there straight into my 10 base-T hub.
Now if I can just think of a way to get from the hub to my computer....
I get the feeling that some critical details are missing from flicx's account.
In particular, police involvement, threat of criminal charges, confiscation of equipment as evidence, suspension, and expulsion seem like they're probably completely independent from the issue of an administration-critical site. I doubt that a judge would grant a protective order if the only issue were that you failed to censor somebody else's political comments.
What seems more likely is that the "threats" allegedly spoofed from your e-mail address are being considered as actual threats from you. That would explain why the police would confiscate equipment, why a judge would grant a protective order, why you would be suspended, and why you would face expulsion. These actions could happen to anyone based on spoofed threats, particularly when technically uninformed people are making the decisions. (For example, administrators assuming a "reply to" address must be authentic, police believing administrators, and a judge believing police). I've had a Secret Service visit due to a spoofed threat as well, based solely on a reply-to address. I'm not saying the extent of their actions are correct, justified, or defensible, but they could at least be largely explained under this scenario of ignorance.
If I'm correct that spoofed threats are what set most of these actions in motion, then you have to do some legwork and wait for the slow wheels of justice to turn. But if you didn't send the threats, then there's no way to prove you did, and so some of your bigger problems will be resolved. (Assuming the System works, which it usually seems to for these types of situations).
Some of the other issues, such as intellectual property ownership and data ownership on a university-owned machine, are still arguable. But they seem largely separate from the criminal issues which make the case seem so dramatic.
With IBM on board, the announcement seems like an overall win for the consortium. But even without them, the changes are insignificant.
The companies that left are rather trivial players. That's kind of backed up by the fact that you have to explain who they are. Two dot coms whose web sites seem to be down at the moment, a graphics card company I've never heard of, and a consumer electronics company I've never heard of? (LG's probably bigger than I realize, but they don't ring a bell the way Sony, Matushita/Panasonic, Fuji, or Philips do.)
On the other hand, they've gained IBM. You don't need to explain who they are.
Now consider a few of the companies that did stay in the consortium: Aiwa, AT&T, BMG Entertainment, Casio, Compaq, Dolby Labs, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Iomega, JVC, Kenwood, Lucent, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Napster, Nokia, Philips Electronics, Pioneer, Real Networks, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Toshiba, and Yamaha.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide.:-)
I'm not arguing that SDMI is making a good, nice, or viable standard. But if you're trying to make it sound like they're in trouble simply because the quantity of companies dropped is greater than the quantity of companies added, I think you've neglected to consider the significance of those companies.
Re:Capaccino discussed before here on Slashdot
on
Tiny Little Computer
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· Score: 2
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/:
Provider error '80004005'
Unspecified error
//global.asa, line 20
Or after ten retries....
Provider error '80004005'
Unspecified error
/Default.asp, line 87
Hope that's not one of their Cappuccino PCs being used as their web server....
> you can argue we should be _nobler_ than Microsoft-
Indeed, I would. Are you actually arguing otherwise? That isn't a really high bar you're setting, you know!
I think you're overestimating the effectiveness of this so-called blunder. I doubt mainstream media will pick it up without doing a little more research into the facts, at which point NewsForge's slanted coverage is at least as interesting a story as Microsoft's actions. "Linux Companies Fighting Distortion With Distortion"...now there's a story!.
War may be war, but integrity counts for something regardless.
The show organizers sell many different types of sponsorships. The exhibitors contract limits many marketing activities, but you can purchase exclusive or semi-exclusive rights to override those limits. From http://www.techshows.com/Sponsorship/sponsorship_p romo.htm:
"Pathfinder Sponsor
Foot prints leading from the registration area to your booth will be a great way to garner your company that additional exposure with a slice of fun tossed in! These foot prints will not only give direction to your booth on the event floor but can also be a continuous interactive "Cake Walk" with prizes provided by your company. We make announcements every hour to go to the nearest footprints (they are numbered) and then the attendee on that number wins the prize."
The article failed to address the question of whether or not the show organizers normally allow this sort of activity from other participants. Whether Microsoft's assertion that "you can't pass out free software here" was a rule MS just created, and was enforced because they're a big sponsor of the show, or if Microsoft was informing SLUG of a rule to which they had previously agreed in a signed contract. (Assuming they're even an exhibitor at all...if they're not, they're even farther off base). From paragraph 14 of the exhibitor contract linked at http://www.techshows.com/Exhibitors_Only.html:
The distribution of samples, souvenirs, publications and the like or sales promotion activities must be conducted by Exhibitor within its booth. The distribution of any article that interferes with the activities or obstructs access to neighboring booths or that impedes aisles is prohibited.
This isn't public property, it's a private business, leasing space to trade show organizers trying to make money. Part of that involves setting up rules to keep guerrilla marketers in check, because the show organizers want to make money from the marketers, not provide a free venue for them. They also need to protect the interests of the people who are paying for advertising placement. If they sold Microsoft prime entrance real estate for a big display, but then allowed anybody else to stand around pitching product there, it would devalue that advertisement. They sell all sorts of marketing rights, such as exclusive rights to advertise on the shuttle busses, on the ticket booths, and so on. If they don't protect the companies paying for this, they'll have a tough time selling such placement at the next show.
When a lot of people misinterpret what you've written, rather than think "man, what a bunch dimwits," I'd look at what you could have done better yourself.
I think the widespread misinterpretation, which you seem to attribute to uninformed or careless viewers, is really traceable primarily to a poor method of visually depicting the information you're trying to convey. When you label Mozilla 1.0 in the May graph as "When it is ready", yet attach a line between that and the first part of Q4 2001, it's easy to misinterpret, and in fact hard to interpret it correctly. I realize technical communication probably isn't your fortee, but if you think about it, can't you see the cause of the problem here? Show that image to 100 professional software engineers, ask them when they think version 1.0 will be done, and I bet a majority will say the early part of Q4 2001.
Since what you're really trying to indicate is the earliest possible date along a wide range of dates when it might be done, perhaps you could depict target ranges (earliest foreseeable to latest foreseeable) for some of the milestones. Or if you don't want to go into that sort of detail, omit 1.0 from the graph, but include a footnote toward the bottom describing the situation textually, since it's not easily conveyed within that diagram format. Something like "Version 1.0 may be ready as early as Q4 2001, but will likely take several months longer, and won't be released until meeting our release criteria."
One more thing: saying the 1.0 release date hasn't slipped at all is true in a sense. But it's also true that the optimistic ("if we're lucky/when it's ready") release date has been slipping - it was 5 months away in December, and 6 months later, it's still 5 months away. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it is a real change to one aspect of the timeline, and it's obviously an important aspect to many people. Brushing it off as a mere misinterpretation seems to sidestep that point.
Here in SE Michigan, the impression I get from friends with DSL is that they all suck. I'm use a cable modem, with MediaOne, and think they're great, as do a few people I know who use their service. They have some policies you might take issue with, Terms of Use stuff, like they want to charge more money if you use the connection for more than one computer. But as far as delivering the service they advertise, they've exceeded my expectations.
Since when is EE Times widely respected? This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nor a source of significant independent research. It's a typical pop engineering mag full of fluff. The bulk of their online daily news updates are derived from corporate press releases, which they maybe follow up with a phone call or two to make even fluffier.
One little detail that they left out of the article is that E-Tenna Corp. is all of four days old...or at least they announced their existance in a May 14 press release. They were just spun off from Titan, who sent out a flurry of press releases to get mouthpieces like EE Times to talk them up, so they can carry the snippits around to people with more money than engineering aptitude as they beg for additional financing. (They also announced completion of first-round financing of $7 million when the corporation was announced four days ago, but $7 million isn't nearly enough.) They have no products or customers, so they need to talk up their unproven ideas to attract investors.
Looking over the text of the submission, I'm inclined to think the Anonymous Coward is an employee of Titan or E-Tenna Corp. as well. Who else but a corporate flak is going to spew something like "nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now." Either you know about antennas and you know that's false, or you don't know about antennas and so you wouldn't be that enthused about this amorphous possible future development.
"The Transmeta chip runs 80% cooler with 80% less power requirements, eliminating a lot of heat and need for fans, bringing single point of failure in the machine down to near zero."
What kind of pointy-haired boss nonsense is that? By what yardstick of single points of failure has it approached zero, and how close is "near?" What about unplugging it? Bumping the reset switch? Drive failure? Flood? Fire? Or running Windows with IIS?
Okay, it's hard to classify Windows as a mere single point of failure.
This is just a puff PR piece. The basic trick is that it's a BIG honkin' external battery (2.5-3 pounds, more than some laptops), shaped so it "matches the footprint of most portable computers."
While their site doesn't say for sure, this sounds like a recent trend, using a lithium ion battery with some polymer technique to make solid leak-proof batteries in extremely irregular shapes, like plastic. It is a cool thing, and can help designers squeeze extra use out of a device's space, but I don't see what these guys have added other than making it the size of a laptop.
They aren't claiming better energy densities than other lithium ion batteries, they just compare their battery's life (watt hours) against "ordinary" (presumably old nicad) laptop (presumably internal) batteries.
Maybe not a bad product, but this is a marketing effort, not a scientific breakthrough.
Some people have commented that the site is lame, just a couple pics and comments. I'd agree, it's nothing special, and I'm surprised at the Slashdot description of it. But the site is about a play, how to get to it, when it runs, viewer comments. The play it's referring to is well done. Maybe not earth-shattering, but it's an interesting first-hand perspective on some of the dot com hysteria, with some amusing diatribes (if they amuse you) as well as personal insights and self reflection. For people who dismiss the site because "it's got a fat guy with a bone," I don't think you'll get much from the play, but if you're dismissive only because of the lack of content on the site, that's not really reflective of what its author has to say.
You can view the entire play in Real or Quicktime formats at different speeds from http://206.253.218.29/21dogyears/index.htm. The web page seems intermittently slashdotted at the moment, though I just watched the 100kbps feed for forty minutes or so, and performance was fine.
> It seems like every six months these days, someone comes out with a head-motion pointer. They go way, way back.
Indeed, the first one I recall was a Mac pointer in 1985 or 1986. It was worn more like headphones than this thing, and it had a microphone with which you'd make a sound to click.
Considering the site has already been slashdotted into oblivion, and presumably they aren't even streaming any video yet, I wouldn't count on this working within hours of MIR's re-entry.
If I were AOL, Radio Shack, or another of mirrentry.com's sponsors, I'd be a little uneasy with this.
Burrito wrote: I would bet that it is buildable. But see Reflections on Trusting Trust.
You're making the incorrect assumption that Microsoft has opened up its source code so that people can trust it. This is not correct. As I recall, even the best of customers gets access to only 95% of the source code, which casts further suspicion. Also, they specifically disallow any organization outside the United States from looking at their source code.
If they are harboring secret code for the NSA, but are trying to address growing customer demand for a peek at their source, their current policy is exactly what you'd expect.
From CNet: "Microsoft lists the main benefits of the program to customers as follows: one, augmenting the ability to debug and optimize customers' internal applications; two, improving troubleshooting of deployed Windows environments; and three, increasing understanding of Windows to promote long-term success of the customer's organization."
The "in short" version seems a little too short, for those of us who have never heard of eFront. And the log files are many, many times the length of War and Peace. So I apologize for not having read the entire "article" before commenting. But the charges seem a little stupid to me...buying web sites to make more money back is not a crime! Do the log files actually state doing something illegal, or is this just whimpering from eFront's competitors?
The "summary" link above is vaguely written, with nothing clearly stated to be illegal. It's more like it's written to *sound* illegal. "Screw the affiliates by lowering the CPM from $3 to $.75"...does that mean in actual breach of contract, or does it mean renegotiate the monthly pay rate? There's a big difference! Ad rates change all the time.
Bragging about "tricking" people into clicking ads (in the summary link), sorry, that sucks, but within certain bounds, that's part of web advertising today. You see tricky banners on CNN and most other major web sites too, like "click the monkey to win" and so on.
Bragging about "pop-ups and how he can do whatever he wants to his visitors," again, if this is just a gripe about unsolicited pop-up ads, they suck, but have become mainstream practice these days. I'd say most of the major media web sites I visit pop up ad consoles at different times.
"He frequently berates his visitors, at one point calling them 'sheep', He brags about his own 'leetness.'" Yadda yadda yadda. I'm sorry, if the whole issue is that this guy is a ruthless profit-seeker you wouldn't want to be friends with, it just seems like a lot of personal griping. Okay, maybe he's an asshole, but so what?
Again, I haven't read the 15 megabytes of log files, so I'm not saying for sure this is just a lot of name-calling, but if there are specific allegations of fraud, it would be interesting to have them summarized with more details and credibility than the "summary" link in the initial posting.
It seems to me you've got to get AOL or Microsoft on board. AOL users constitute the majority of web traffic to many (perhaps most?) sites, and of course Microsoft browsers constitute the majority of browsers visiting most web sites.
If either company, AOL or MS, were to try this themselves, they'd likely have fairly easy acceptance, despite the massive uproar from Slashdot-types, since they'd automatically have 50%+ of the market. AOL runs their own DNS so they'd have instant market penetration, while MS could build the alternate DNS capability into their OS, browser, and ISP service, and have solid market penetration within a year.
Once that point of critical market saturation (I think at least 50%) is reached, companies will start advertising or hosting desirable destinations with the new URLs, and individual holdouts will switch over even if they don't use MS or AOL's latest software.
One other important industry from which to gain support are search engines. But if enough users are going along with an alternate system, Google and others would probably follow, especially if you tossed them some cash for their support. AOL and MS have plenty to toss.
IdeaLab seems to be going at it from the other end, which has been tried countless times already. While they haven't released financial details, they're probably the best funded effort to date, and the timing is good with solid International dislike for the establishment (ICANN). But they'll still need to get some bigger supporters than the "midsized ISPs" they've currently lined up.
Atrow writes: Every restaurant I have ever entered in the past 10 years has established both a smoking section and a non-smoking section.
How about we put you in a non-smoking section of a restaurant, and set off a hydrogen-cyanide gas bomb the next table over, in the smoking section. You wouldn't have any problem with that would you?:-)
"Sunonwealth has made huge investments in developing..." blah blah
blah.
I'm don't really understand what their patent covers,
but my best guess is the idea of making notches
on a circuit board with which to align and mount a small fan and
associated sensor (and I'm not sure what the sensor does, except
that it can turn the fan on). It would be interesting to have a
company representative translate their patent claims into language
a layperson could understand.
5,967,763 Positioning devices for a sensor element of a miniature
fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat
including a number of annularly spaced poles each having a radially
extending stem and a circumferential arcuate section. Each stem has a
winding wound therearound, and each arcuate section has a first end
edge and a second end edge. A circuit board is securely connected to
the coil seat and includes a sensor element mounted thereon. The
sensor element is located on a vertical line extending from one of the
first end edge and the second end edge of one of the poles.
6,109,892 Positioning device for a sensor element of a miniature
fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat having
an axle tube, an upper polar plate assembly, a lower polar plate
assembly, and a winding mounted between the upper polar plate assembly
and the lower polar plate assembly. A circuit board is mounted to the
axle tube and includes a sensor element for activating a rotor. The
sensor element is located on a vertical line extending from an end
edge of the lower polar plate assembly along a direction parallel to a
longitudinal axis of the axle tube.
6,114,785 Positioning device for a sensor element of a miniature
fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat having
an axle tube, an upper polar plate assembly, a lower polar plate
assembly, and a winding mounted between the upper polar plate assembly
and the lower polar plate assembly. A circuit board is mounted to the
axle tube and includes a sensor element for activating rotor. The
sensor element is located on a line extending from an end edge of the
upper polar plate assembly along a direction parallel to a
longitudinal axis of the axle tube.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone recommend an alternative, non-snooping BIOS maker? Award apparently merged with Phoenix.
This totally ignores a large part of cheating, which is that software on the client can control the play even if the gameplay is handled on the server. Clients can still run automappers, autoaimers, and so on.
I used to play MUDs, and used a Procomm's key recorder to record movement keystrokes to go from the pub to the orc's den or whatever. It saved monotonous typing. But it also gave me a minor advantage: on my blazing 9600 bps connection, I'd zip past other players on my way there. It's a slippery slope between that and writing software to play the monotonous aspects of the game for you, attacking monsters, monitoring health, selling loot, and so on. MUDs did nothing to prevent this sort of client-side automation.
Those sorts of problems extend to a wide range of games, from MUDs to 3D shooters to word games, board games, card games, and so on.
This seems to be a similar approach to one discussed in a previous SlashDot thread, http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/28/1723230.shtm l:
Detecting Stealth Planes
Posted by Hemos on Sunday November 28, @05:23PM
from the now-we've-got-you dept.
Zurk writes " Newsweek said China's new Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system tracked the signals of civilian radio and television broadcasts and picked up aircraft by analysing the minute turbulence their flight caused in the commercial wavelengths. cool huh ? " They hope to use it to detect the F-117A and potentially the F-22. Very cool use of technology to fix a problem.
ABC Enhanced TV has been doing what it needs to do since 1999, without any extra hardware. They control when things are broadcast on your television, and synch the content on their web site to that broadcast. Of course they have to offer something you'd be interested in, like additional trivia for statistomaniacal sports nuts, or real-time polls or whatever. That way you'll put up with the Enhanced Commercials on your computer :-).
Perhaps the most touted benefit was a gimmick for Monday Night Football viewers. They had a well-educated representative from Britannica.com provide real-time explanations of Dennis Miller's notoriously obscure references. (Yeah, they could have done this with text on the TV - like I said, it was a gimmick).
Cue's idea could theoretically allow the same sort of thing without the need for precise scheduling. You'd be able to synch web info even if you're watching a videotape, for example. Or marketers could record the "links" right into their infomercials, broadcast them whenever local rates happen to be cheap, and still be able to launch mounds of pop-up ads on your computer before you can hit the mute button.
The idea of allowing television broadcasts to control proprietary closed-source software on your computer that connects to the Internet has some amazingly evil possibilities. It's an almost Microsoft-like idea, except for its being doomed to financial failure.
> 40KB download? 12KB upload? $150 a month? Yeah right... That is rediculous.
Where did you get those bandwidth figures? Here are some from their FAQ:
The speed at which data will flow from the Internet to your PC will average 400kbps. The speed at which data will flow from your PC to the Internet (e.g., when sending an email) will average 128kbps.
While you're using a capital B, and may be meaning kilobytes per second rather than kilobits, they still don't match the FAQ's bandwidth stats, and I think a 10x-20x downstream improvement over a typical dial-up in a remote location is more than a "glorified modem."
On the other hand, their actual pricing sheet says that they may, at their discretion, limit your bandwidth as described in their Terms and Conditions, which they don't seem to make publicly available on their web site.
In place of my cable modem, I'll hook the cable into my television set. It'll show a scribbly image, but the TV's radiation will minutely interfere with my fluorescent light. By reprogramming the DSP inside my optical mouse and holding it up to the bulb, I'll have a steady stream of data coming through the mouse's USB connector. From there, it's a simple matter of hooking the mouse to my Laserjet's USB port, changing the ROM to redirect the packets out the parallel input port, running that to my Xircom parallel port ethernet adapter, and from there straight into my 10 base-T hub.
Now if I can just think of a way to get from the hub to my computer....
I get the feeling that some critical details are missing from flicx's account.
In particular, police involvement, threat of criminal charges, confiscation of equipment as evidence, suspension, and expulsion seem like they're probably completely independent from the issue of an administration-critical site. I doubt that a judge would grant a protective order if the only issue were that you failed to censor somebody else's political comments.
What seems more likely is that the "threats" allegedly spoofed from your e-mail address are being considered as actual threats from you. That would explain why the police would confiscate equipment, why a judge would grant a protective order, why you would be suspended, and why you would face expulsion. These actions could happen to anyone based on spoofed threats, particularly when technically uninformed people are making the decisions. (For example, administrators assuming a "reply to" address must be authentic, police believing administrators, and a judge believing police). I've had a Secret Service visit due to a spoofed threat as well, based solely on a reply-to address. I'm not saying the extent of their actions are correct, justified, or defensible, but they could at least be largely explained under this scenario of ignorance.
If I'm correct that spoofed threats are what set most of these actions in motion, then you have to do some legwork and wait for the slow wheels of justice to turn. But if you didn't send the threats, then there's no way to prove you did, and so some of your bigger problems will be resolved. (Assuming the System works, which it usually seems to for these types of situations).
Some of the other issues, such as intellectual property ownership and data ownership on a university-owned machine, are still arguable. But they seem largely separate from the criminal issues which make the case seem so dramatic.
With IBM on board, the announcement seems like an overall win for the consortium. But even without them, the changes are insignificant.
:-)
The companies that left are rather trivial players. That's kind of backed up by the fact that you have to explain who they are. Two dot coms whose web sites seem to be down at the moment, a graphics card company I've never heard of, and a consumer electronics company I've never heard of? (LG's probably bigger than I realize, but they don't ring a bell the way Sony, Matushita/Panasonic, Fuji, or Philips do.)
On the other hand, they've gained IBM. You don't need to explain who they are.
Now consider a few of the companies that did stay in the consortium: Aiwa, AT&T, BMG Entertainment, Casio, Compaq, Dolby Labs, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Iomega, JVC, Kenwood, Lucent, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Napster, Nokia, Philips Electronics, Pioneer, Real Networks, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Toshiba, and Yamaha.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide.
I'm not arguing that SDMI is making a good, nice, or viable standard. But if you're trying to make it sound like they're in trouble simply because the quantity of companies dropped is greater than the quantity of companies added, I think you've neglected to consider the significance of those companies.
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/:
//global.asa, line 20
/Default.asp, line 87
Provider error '80004005'
Unspecified error
Or after ten retries....
Provider error '80004005'
Unspecified error
Hope that's not one of their Cappuccino PCs being used as their web server....
> you can argue we should be _nobler_ than Microsoft-
Indeed, I would. Are you actually arguing otherwise? That isn't a really high bar you're setting, you know!
I think you're overestimating the effectiveness of this so-called blunder. I doubt mainstream media will pick it up without doing a little more research into the facts, at which point NewsForge's slanted coverage is at least as interesting a story as Microsoft's actions. "Linux Companies Fighting Distortion With Distortion"...now there's a story!.
War may be war, but integrity counts for something regardless.
The show organizers sell many different types of sponsorships. The exhibitors contract limits many marketing activities, but you can purchase exclusive or semi-exclusive rights to override those limits. From http://www.techshows.com/Sponsorship/sponsorship_p romo.htm:
"Pathfinder Sponsor
Foot prints leading from the registration area to your booth will be a great way to garner your company that additional exposure with a slice of fun tossed in! These foot prints will not only give direction to your booth on the event floor but can also be a continuous interactive "Cake Walk" with prizes provided by your company. We make announcements every hour to go to the nearest footprints (they are numbered) and then the attendee on that number wins the prize."
The article failed to address the question of whether or not the show organizers normally allow this sort of activity from other participants. Whether Microsoft's assertion that "you can't pass out free software here" was a rule MS just created, and was enforced because they're a big sponsor of the show, or if Microsoft was informing SLUG of a rule to which they had previously agreed in a signed contract. (Assuming they're even an exhibitor at all...if they're not, they're even farther off base). From paragraph 14 of the exhibitor contract linked at http://www.techshows.com/Exhibitors_Only.html:
The distribution of samples, souvenirs, publications and the like or sales promotion activities must be conducted by Exhibitor within its booth. The distribution of any article that interferes with the activities or obstructs access to neighboring booths or that impedes aisles is prohibited.
This isn't public property, it's a private business, leasing space to trade show organizers trying to make money. Part of that involves setting up rules to keep guerrilla marketers in check, because the show organizers want to make money from the marketers, not provide a free venue for them. They also need to protect the interests of the people who are paying for advertising placement. If they sold Microsoft prime entrance real estate for a big display, but then allowed anybody else to stand around pitching product there, it would devalue that advertisement. They sell all sorts of marketing rights, such as exclusive rights to advertise on the shuttle busses, on the ticket booths, and so on. If they don't protect the companies paying for this, they'll have a tough time selling such placement at the next show.
When a lot of people misinterpret what you've written, rather than think "man, what a bunch dimwits," I'd look at what you could have done better yourself. I think the widespread misinterpretation, which you seem to attribute to uninformed or careless viewers, is really traceable primarily to a poor method of visually depicting the information you're trying to convey. When you label Mozilla 1.0 in the May graph as "When it is ready", yet attach a line between that and the first part of Q4 2001, it's easy to misinterpret, and in fact hard to interpret it correctly. I realize technical communication probably isn't your fortee, but if you think about it, can't you see the cause of the problem here? Show that image to 100 professional software engineers, ask them when they think version 1.0 will be done, and I bet a majority will say the early part of Q4 2001. Since what you're really trying to indicate is the earliest possible date along a wide range of dates when it might be done, perhaps you could depict target ranges (earliest foreseeable to latest foreseeable) for some of the milestones. Or if you don't want to go into that sort of detail, omit 1.0 from the graph, but include a footnote toward the bottom describing the situation textually, since it's not easily conveyed within that diagram format. Something like "Version 1.0 may be ready as early as Q4 2001, but will likely take several months longer, and won't be released until meeting our release criteria." One more thing: saying the 1.0 release date hasn't slipped at all is true in a sense. But it's also true that the optimistic ("if we're lucky/when it's ready") release date has been slipping - it was 5 months away in December, and 6 months later, it's still 5 months away. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it is a real change to one aspect of the timeline, and it's obviously an important aspect to many people. Brushing it off as a mere misinterpretation seems to sidestep that point.
Here in SE Michigan, the impression I get from friends with DSL is that they all suck. I'm use a cable modem, with MediaOne, and think they're great, as do a few people I know who use their service. They have some policies you might take issue with, Terms of Use stuff, like they want to charge more money if you use the connection for more than one computer. But as far as delivering the service they advertise, they've exceeded my expectations.
Since when is EE Times widely respected? This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nor a source of significant independent research. It's a typical pop engineering mag full of fluff. The bulk of their online daily news updates are derived from corporate press releases, which they maybe follow up with a phone call or two to make even fluffier.
One little detail that they left out of the article is that E-Tenna Corp. is all of four days old...or at least they announced their existance in a May 14 press release. They were just spun off from Titan, who sent out a flurry of press releases to get mouthpieces like EE Times to talk them up, so they can carry the snippits around to people with more money than engineering aptitude as they beg for additional financing. (They also announced completion of first-round financing of $7 million when the corporation was announced four days ago, but $7 million isn't nearly enough.) They have no products or customers, so they need to talk up their unproven ideas to attract investors.
Looking over the text of the submission, I'm inclined to think the Anonymous Coward is an employee of Titan or E-Tenna Corp. as well. Who else but a corporate flak is going to spew something like "nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now." Either you know about antennas and you know that's false, or you don't know about antennas and so you wouldn't be that enthused about this amorphous possible future development.
"The Transmeta chip runs 80% cooler with 80% less power requirements, eliminating a lot of heat and need for fans, bringing single point of failure in the machine down to near zero."
What kind of pointy-haired boss nonsense is that? By what yardstick of single points of failure has it approached zero, and how close is "near?" What about unplugging it? Bumping the reset switch? Drive failure? Flood? Fire? Or running Windows with IIS?
Okay, it's hard to classify Windows as a mere single point of failure.
This is just a puff PR piece. The basic trick is that it's a BIG honkin' external battery (2.5-3 pounds, more than some laptops), shaped so it "matches the footprint of most portable computers."
While their site doesn't say for sure, this sounds like a recent trend, using a lithium ion battery with some polymer technique to make solid leak-proof batteries in extremely irregular shapes, like plastic. It is a cool thing, and can help designers squeeze extra use out of a device's space, but I don't see what these guys have added other than making it the size of a laptop.
They aren't claiming better energy densities than other lithium ion batteries, they just compare their battery's life (watt hours) against "ordinary" (presumably old nicad) laptop (presumably internal) batteries.
Maybe not a bad product, but this is a marketing effort, not a scientific breakthrough.
Some people have commented that the site is lame, just a couple pics and comments. I'd agree, it's nothing special, and I'm surprised at the Slashdot description of it. But the site is about a play, how to get to it, when it runs, viewer comments. The play it's referring to is well done. Maybe not earth-shattering, but it's an interesting first-hand perspective on some of the dot com hysteria, with some amusing diatribes (if they amuse you) as well as personal insights and self reflection. For people who dismiss the site because "it's got a fat guy with a bone," I don't think you'll get much from the play, but if you're dismissive only because of the lack of content on the site, that's not really reflective of what its author has to say.
You can view the entire play in Real or Quicktime formats at different speeds from http://206.253.218.29/21dogyears/index.htm. The web page seems intermittently slashdotted at the moment, though I just watched the 100kbps feed for forty minutes or so, and performance was fine.
> It seems like every six months these days, someone comes out with a head-motion pointer. They go way, way back.
Indeed, the first one I recall was a Mac pointer in 1985 or 1986. It was worn more like headphones than this thing, and it had a microphone with which you'd make a sound to click.
Considering the site has already been slashdotted into oblivion, and presumably they aren't even streaming any video yet, I wouldn't count on this working within hours of MIR's re-entry.
If I were AOL, Radio Shack, or another of mirrentry.com's sponsors, I'd be a little uneasy with this.
Burrito wrote: I would bet that it is buildable. But see Reflections on Trusting Trust.
You're making the incorrect assumption that Microsoft has opened up its source code so that people can trust it. This is not correct. As I recall, even the best of customers gets access to only 95% of the source code, which casts further suspicion. Also, they specifically disallow any organization outside the United States from looking at their source code.
If they are harboring secret code for the NSA, but are trying to address growing customer demand for a peek at their source, their current policy is exactly what you'd expect.
From CNet: "Microsoft lists the main benefits of the program to customers as follows: one, augmenting the ability to debug and optimize customers' internal applications; two, improving troubleshooting of deployed Windows environments; and three, increasing understanding of Windows to promote long-term success of the customer's organization."
The "in short" version seems a little too short, for those of us who have never heard of eFront. And the log files are many, many times the length of War and Peace. So I apologize for not having read the entire "article" before commenting. But the charges seem a little stupid to me...buying web sites to make more money back is not a crime! Do the log files actually state doing something illegal, or is this just whimpering from eFront's competitors?
The "summary" link above is vaguely written, with nothing clearly stated to be illegal. It's more like it's written to *sound* illegal. "Screw the affiliates by lowering the CPM from $3 to $.75"...does that mean in actual breach of contract, or does it mean renegotiate the monthly pay rate? There's a big difference! Ad rates change all the time.
Bragging about "tricking" people into clicking ads (in the summary link), sorry, that sucks, but within certain bounds, that's part of web advertising today. You see tricky banners on CNN and most other major web sites too, like "click the monkey to win" and so on.
Bragging about "pop-ups and how he can do whatever he wants to his visitors," again, if this is just a gripe about unsolicited pop-up ads, they suck, but have become mainstream practice these days. I'd say most of the major media web sites I visit pop up ad consoles at different times.
"He frequently berates his visitors, at one point calling them 'sheep', He brags about his own 'leetness.'" Yadda yadda yadda. I'm sorry, if the whole issue is that this guy is a ruthless profit-seeker you wouldn't want to be friends with, it just seems like a lot of personal griping. Okay, maybe he's an asshole, but so what?
Again, I haven't read the 15 megabytes of log files, so I'm not saying for sure this is just a lot of name-calling, but if there are specific allegations of fraud, it would be interesting to have them summarized with more details and credibility than the "summary" link in the initial posting.
It seems to me you've got to get AOL or Microsoft on board. AOL users constitute the majority of web traffic to many (perhaps most?) sites, and of course Microsoft browsers constitute the majority of browsers visiting most web sites. If either company, AOL or MS, were to try this themselves, they'd likely have fairly easy acceptance, despite the massive uproar from Slashdot-types, since they'd automatically have 50%+ of the market. AOL runs their own DNS so they'd have instant market penetration, while MS could build the alternate DNS capability into their OS, browser, and ISP service, and have solid market penetration within a year. Once that point of critical market saturation (I think at least 50%) is reached, companies will start advertising or hosting desirable destinations with the new URLs, and individual holdouts will switch over even if they don't use MS or AOL's latest software. One other important industry from which to gain support are search engines. But if enough users are going along with an alternate system, Google and others would probably follow, especially if you tossed them some cash for their support. AOL and MS have plenty to toss. IdeaLab seems to be going at it from the other end, which has been tried countless times already. While they haven't released financial details, they're probably the best funded effort to date, and the timing is good with solid International dislike for the establishment (ICANN). But they'll still need to get some bigger supporters than the "midsized ISPs" they've currently lined up.
Atrow writes: Every restaurant I have ever entered in the past 10 years has established both a smoking section and a non-smoking section.
:-)
How about we put you in a non-smoking section of a restaurant, and set off a hydrogen-cyanide gas bomb the next table over, in the smoking section. You wouldn't have any problem with that would you?
"Sunonwealth has made huge investments in developing..." blah blah blah.
I'm don't really understand what their patent covers, but my best guess is the idea of making notches on a circuit board with which to align and mount a small fan and associated sensor (and I'm not sure what the sensor does, except that it can turn the fan on). It would be interesting to have a company representative translate their patent claims into language a layperson could understand.
5,967,763 Positioning devices for a sensor element of a miniature fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat including a number of annularly spaced poles each having a radially extending stem and a circumferential arcuate section. Each stem has a winding wound therearound, and each arcuate section has a first end edge and a second end edge. A circuit board is securely connected to the coil seat and includes a sensor element mounted thereon. The sensor element is located on a vertical line extending from one of the first end edge and the second end edge of one of the poles.
6,109,892 Positioning device for a sensor element of a miniature fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat having an axle tube, an upper polar plate assembly, a lower polar plate assembly, and a winding mounted between the upper polar plate assembly and the lower polar plate assembly. A circuit board is mounted to the axle tube and includes a sensor element for activating a rotor. The sensor element is located on a vertical line extending from an end edge of the lower polar plate assembly along a direction parallel to a longitudinal axis of the axle tube.
6,114,785 Positioning device for a sensor element of a miniature fan
A positioning device for a miniature fan includes a coil seat having an axle tube, an upper polar plate assembly, a lower polar plate assembly, and a winding mounted between the upper polar plate assembly and the lower polar plate assembly. A circuit board is mounted to the axle tube and includes a sensor element for activating rotor. The sensor element is located on a line extending from an end edge of the upper polar plate assembly along a direction parallel to a longitudinal axis of the axle tube.