So they can cram even more people in coach. Because if you can swap out the passenger accommodation, everywhere on the plane can be coach.
I'm guessing they're not seeing so much success with their programs like asking people to upgrade to "premium coach" (5cm extra legroom) for $30.
On my flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam back in January(Boing 777-ER), Delta wanted more like $130 for 'premium coach', had it been $30 i might actually have considered it.
Now that we got the A380 going to Copenhagen i might be able to try two story cattle class on future trips, no doubt having any kind of blood circulation in your lower extremities will be $150 by then heh
Actually doubt that system is all that bad on power consumption, it's so powerful that it probably just idles a lot, DIMMs use very little power and so do SSDs as long as PSU efficiency isn't total crap(doubtful in a workstation/server class product) it probably consumes less than 100W at the wall most of the time.
Even old graphics cards like Radeon 5xx0 series(anno 2009) have reasonable power saving modes when not working hard, my 5870 crossfire rig pulls ~120W at the wall under normal, non gaming, loads.
Little enough that i could run it for several hours per day off just a few m2 of Photovoltaics.
I actually found your post both reasonable and well considered. Too bad these discussions so often devolve into political and ideological trash talk.
As you said we fall on all range of the scale, while i personally can't handle such a workload as yours it's always good to hear how others make such situations work to an advantage, If TFA is to be believed a lot of people are going to need such expertise in the future.
Indeed, exactly why i didn't back this but kept their now defunct page bookmarked so i could order when they sorted out manufacturing.
For once it paid off to be cynical, i never back anything on KS unless it's so trivial i can easily afford to lose it(under $50).
As much as I'm an Amiga fanboy 4ever, that rumor needs to DIE, they used a wide mix of SGI workstations, Pentium & DEC Alpha renderfarms and even Macs for compositing for the actual series, only the pilot episode mostly had effects created on Commodore HW.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/... http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/...
Sorry for being pedantic, but this IS Slashdot after all;)
And the literal translation is more along the lines of 'The Bicycle Snake', if you were English it'd probably be called 'The Serpent Way' or something of that ilk.
Now get off my bike-path^H^H Lawn!. Damn drunk pedestrians..
In his honor, I plan to launch a streaming burials site, where you can watch people being laid to rest 24/7. No, I will not pay any royalties to the families of the deceased.
I plan to call the site "GraveShark".
Definitely puts 'Shark Week' into a whole new perspective..
Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Core i5 4670k @ 4.3Ghz
Gigabyte Z87 mobo
32GB DDR3 RAM
256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (OS/Apps)
2 x 1TB Seagate HDD in RAID0 (scratch disk)
2 x ATI Radeon HD5850 Crossfire
Watercooled CPU/GFX (mainly for the noise)
2x 24" 1080p Samsung LCD
Older 50" LG FullHD Plasma (movies)
Runs Win7 Used mostly for VMs, Creative Suite and a bit of Gaming and HTPC use.
NAS/Server:
AMD Athlon II x4 615e
8GB DDR2
Asrock Nforce based mobo
LSI 16 Port PCIe X8 SAS/Sata Controller
4 x 5in3 SAS/SATA backplanes w/trays.
64GB SSD OCZ Vertex III (OS)
16 x 2/8TB HDDs (RAID6, main storage ~100TB usable w/XFS once upgrade to 8TB drives is complete)
2 x 4TB HDD(RAID1, backups)
2 x PCIe Gbe Network cards
1 x PCIe Wifi adapter a/b/g/n
Runs Ubuntu Server, Mainly used for archiving lots of VMs, DVD and BD images. Also does double duty as main router/Intranet/VPN host. Runs 24/7.
Also several other older systems around the place, but nothing particularly interesting about them, they're mostly Franken-rigs built with whatever leftovers were available during a decades worth of upgrade cycles and random projects.
How about your cousins who live on the bad side of town? Or too bad for the kid whose dad wasn't as smart as you and had a car wreck on the way home from his second min. wage job? It's screw them because that is not me?
Indeed
Or the kids living in the shitpile next door infecting your children with 'preventable disease of the week' because they can't afford any healthcare?
Their drunken father who tries to rob your place cause he has no access to a job, drug dependency treatment or proper education to improve his prospects.
The wife who's constantly abused and has kid after kid just to fill her empty miserable life with meaning, eventually hoping that at least one of them might end up being lucky/successful enough to support her after 50 years of abuse and neglect has taken their toll?
It's not just on a personal level, what about the people who needs loans and mortgages for their houses/businesses but can't get them without government incentives?
Environmental conscientiousness? NP we'll just export all our toxic crap to the 3rd world, after all, they're used to living in shitpiles anyway.
Oh and a big FU to all public rec. areas, national parks and heritage sites, art exhibitions, museums, libraries, transport systems, sanitation, emergency services, and anything else that these freeloaders mooch off the system.
Everyone knows if you have to share anything you're obviously a mental deviant and a menace to society, so should be shot on principle to improve the gene-pool.
Socialism really isn't that bad once you get used to it, at least I can look my neighbors(all of them) in the eye without cringing and that goes for neighboring nations as well. Society needs to work FOR EVERYBODY, nor just the privileged few.
Best would, of course, be massive privileges for everyone, but reality has to set in somewhere.. at least until we reach a post-scarecity society some day, even if that means AIs and drones running the world in some kind of Banksian utopia.
Another found that, among AAAS members, more than half believe in "God or a higher power".
Seems there's a perfectly cromulent reason for why so many scientists are religious:
Science is the inevitable outcome when you go looking for God in all the wrong places and it requires strong belief to keep searching regardless.
Only recently(last few centuries) have things like necessity, altruism, wealth and fame started to overtake outright belief as the major motivator for scientific endeavor.
Yea i personally am a big fan of the 'broke student 5.1 Surround Special'
Using a 4 Channel Car-fi amp(4x100W typical) ~$25-$50 used, usually powered by a PC ATX PSU or similar (practically free as in beer).
A 5.1 USB soundcard($20ish) hardwired directly to amp + Guitar/Bass amplifier($50) used as subwoofer.
Decent speakers bought used can be had for around $50 a pair, good speakers last for decades unlike most crap made nowadays, so just spend whatever you can reasonably afford, since it's a fair investment in the long run, just make sure to check they still work(no damaged tweeter/woofer units).
Use standard Cat-5 network cable for signal cable AND speaker cable(double up), failing that regular mains cable works too, again free as in beer.
Use media player/OS driver to mix center channel into front speakers.
Bonus points for:
Soldering the connections.
6 ch. car amp, bridge one pair for center speaker, or get a powered full range PA mono speaker(easily found used).
Braiding the Cat-5 cables, with honors if the speakers you got can be bi-amped and the braid uses it(2 bass and one for treble/tweeters)
Using a studio grade soundcard, firewire ones tend to be common, useful if you have the connector anyway.
If you can find a mains power noise filter and/or have proper ground connections.
Using the guitar amp for it's intended purpose.
Optional mounting hardware.
I've had people compare such setups to $10K+ supposedly high-end gear, they can be amazingly high fidelity
for what can be done on a very frugal budget.
Don't get frightened by how it looks, just consider it 'ART' =)
Actually what people may be hearing is atrocious sample rate conversion, they might benefit from improved up-sampling algorithms from 44.1Khz -> 48/96Khz. Some soundcards and drivers are notorious for this(looking at you Creative Labs) but that's probably only after you've spent an hour just finding out how to turn off all the default EQ booster/plug-in/effect crap as well.
Quite so, AAC also is perceptibly better on my stereo once you crank up the volume. Digital PWM amplifier (sometimes referred to as Class-D) seems to be especially vulnerable to this harsh distortion in MP3 encodings.
Extra bitrate does mitigate the issue, but with lossless it lessens considerably. But it can never get better than the source material at any rate.
Stuff that usually sounds like crap in MP3 at any bitrate:
Live recordings with lots of audience participation
Treble heavy songs(hihats, cymbals, lots of complex chords)
Heavily stereo panned recordings.
Don't need to go bonkers on HD audio though, a straight FLAC CD rip is perfectly adequate for most listening and can be trivially stored and later downconverted if space is needed, but there might just be that occasional gem that does sound even better in 24bit/48Khz if you have the right equipment(Ears, Hardware and proper training/experience).
Anyone claiming >48Khz samplerate is needed probably just wants to sell something or they have a very large tinfoil hat collection.
Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware
And since this is/.
Preliminary chip info:
Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980
and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0
Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.
No need for jail, just confiscate X% of their assets then cap their maximum income to the national average wage for a decade or so. That should make them squirm.
I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."
So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.
And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
We built a storage server with 16 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT1 HDDs back in April/May 2011, the invoice says 6950kr (DKK, was 5.2DKK = $1 USD at the time*) so that works out to $83.53 USD per drive even here in Denmark and it wasn't any special deal, just day prices.
* - Source:
http://nationalbanken.statistikbank.dk/nbf/107312
But for Avengers, I did go see it in 3d. The 3d sucked and the glasses were uncomfortable after 2 hours.
I paid 7.25 which seems very reasonable.
Indeed it does..
Almost unreasonably so, I just paid 110DKK(about $19.5USD incl. 25%VAT) + 5DKK reservation fee for the same privilege.
The audio was fine and so was the movie for that matter, but the Real3D setup gave me a splitting headache after just half an hour or so. I think I'll enjoy the 2D Bluray version considerably more, DAMN, there goes another $35..
How are these people NOT making money hand over fist already? And they want MORE protection for their racket?!
. .. ...
o--(=\=) ---THIS IS THE WORLDS SMALLEST VIOLIN AND IT'S PLAYING JUST FOR YOU MPAA.
Indeed Linksys(and hence Cisco) does seem to have embraced the enhusiast modding community the NLSU2 is quite popular too.
I think the cases used in the article are poor examples of 'hacker' friendly hardware & companies.
Companies like Linksys, Dream Multimedia and Gamepark(GP2X) seem much more dedicated to allowing free access to their hardware.
A lot of game developers saw the potential a long time ago and we have quite a few good games that are still great today because of it.
Only thing that can be hard sometimes is to find out where to start out or indeed which hardware is open to modding.
Thankfully there's people like http://www.bsodtv.org/ to help out those who feel a bit lost.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason they're doing this?
So they can cram even more people in coach. Because if you can swap out the passenger accommodation, everywhere on the plane can be coach.
I'm guessing they're not seeing so much success with their programs like asking people to upgrade to "premium coach" (5cm extra legroom) for $30.
On my flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam back in January(Boing 777-ER), Delta wanted more like $130 for 'premium coach', had it been $30 i might actually have considered it. Now that we got the A380 going to Copenhagen i might be able to try two story cattle class on future trips, no doubt having any kind of blood circulation in your lower extremities will be $150 by then heh
A laudable and courageous post, soon to be modded -1 Socialist and consigned to oblivion.
TL;DR: Wish i had some mod points.
Actually doubt that system is all that bad on power consumption, it's so powerful that it probably just idles a lot, DIMMs use very little power and so do SSDs as long as PSU efficiency isn't total crap(doubtful in a workstation/server class product) it probably consumes less than 100W at the wall most of the time.
Even old graphics cards like Radeon 5xx0 series(anno 2009) have reasonable power saving modes when not working hard, my 5870 crossfire rig pulls ~120W at the wall under normal, non gaming, loads. Little enough that i could run it for several hours per day off just a few m2 of Photovoltaics.
I actually found your post both reasonable and well considered. Too bad these discussions so often devolve into political and ideological trash talk.
As you said we fall on all range of the scale, while i personally can't handle such a workload as yours it's always good to hear how others make such situations work to an advantage, If TFA is to be believed a lot of people are going to need such expertise in the future.
Indeed, exactly why i didn't back this but kept their now defunct page bookmarked so i could order when they sorted out manufacturing.
For once it paid off to be cynical, i never back anything on KS unless it's so trivial i can easily afford to lose it(under $50).
REAL Klingons only eat live Gakh!
As much as I'm an Amiga fanboy 4ever, that rumor needs to DIE, they used a wide mix of SGI workstations, Pentium & DEC Alpha renderfarms and even Macs for compositing for the actual series, only the pilot episode mostly had effects created on Commodore HW. ;)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/...
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/...
Sorry for being pedantic, but this IS Slashdot after all
Now please excuse me while I go make my new tinfoil hat.
Don't forget to put it on your expense form, I'm sure NASA will reimburse you the $0.30 as a matter of course.
Everybody knows it's pronounced "kameloså"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
As a Dane I just have to say:
It's 'CEEY - KILL - SCHLAAN - UHN'>/b>
And the literal translation is more along the lines of 'The Bicycle Snake', if you were English it'd probably be called 'The Serpent Way' or something of that ilk.
Now get off my bike-path^H^H Lawn!. Damn drunk pedestrians..
In his honor, I plan to launch a streaming burials site, where you can watch people being laid to rest 24/7. No, I will not pay any royalties to the families of the deceased.
I plan to call the site "GraveShark".
Definitely puts 'Shark Week' into a whole new perspective..
Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Main:
Core i5 4670k @ 4.3Ghz
Gigabyte Z87 mobo
32GB DDR3 RAM
256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (OS/Apps)
2 x 1TB Seagate HDD in RAID0 (scratch disk)
2 x ATI Radeon HD5850 Crossfire
Watercooled CPU/GFX (mainly for the noise)
2x 24" 1080p Samsung LCD
Older 50" LG FullHD Plasma (movies)
Runs Win7 Used mostly for VMs, Creative Suite and a bit of Gaming and HTPC use.
NAS/Server:
AMD Athlon II x4 615e
8GB DDR2
Asrock Nforce based mobo
LSI 16 Port PCIe X8 SAS/Sata Controller
4 x 5in3 SAS/SATA backplanes w/trays. 64GB SSD OCZ Vertex III (OS)
16 x 2/8TB HDDs (RAID6, main storage ~100TB usable w/XFS once upgrade to 8TB drives is complete)
2 x 4TB HDD(RAID1, backups)
2 x PCIe Gbe Network cards
1 x PCIe Wifi adapter a/b/g/n
Runs Ubuntu Server, Mainly used for archiving lots of VMs, DVD and BD images. Also does double duty as main router/Intranet/VPN host. Runs 24/7.
Also several other older systems around the place, but nothing particularly interesting about them, they're mostly Franken-rigs built with whatever leftovers were available during a decades worth of upgrade cycles and random projects.
Rebranding?! They're using the same name - 'Ruscosmos' - for the new agency, instead of giving it a new name.
Indeed 'Ruscorruptmos' has a nice ring to it :)
Did it play Beethoven's "Für Elise"? The one I had did, if I recall it correctly.
Mine played "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean" and promptly died 10 minutes later, it was quite an expensive repair too :/
How about your cousins who live on the bad side of town? Or too bad for the kid whose dad wasn't as smart as you and had a car wreck on the way home from his second min. wage job? It's screw them because that is not me?
Indeed
Or the kids living in the shitpile next door infecting your children with 'preventable disease of the week' because they can't afford any healthcare?
Their drunken father who tries to rob your place cause he has no access to a job, drug dependency treatment or proper education to improve his prospects.
The wife who's constantly abused and has kid after kid just to fill her empty miserable life with meaning, eventually hoping that at least one of them might end up being lucky/successful enough to support her after 50 years of abuse and neglect has taken their toll?
It's not just on a personal level, what about the people who needs loans and mortgages for their houses/businesses but can't get them without government incentives?
Environmental conscientiousness? NP we'll just export all our toxic crap to the 3rd world, after all, they're used to living in shitpiles anyway.
Oh and a big FU to all public rec. areas, national parks and heritage sites, art exhibitions, museums, libraries, transport systems, sanitation, emergency services, and anything else that these freeloaders mooch off the system.
Everyone knows if you have to share anything you're obviously a mental deviant and a menace to society, so should be shot on principle to improve the gene-pool.
Socialism really isn't that bad once you get used to it, at least I can look my neighbors(all of them) in the eye without cringing and that goes for neighboring nations as well. Society needs to work FOR EVERYBODY, nor just the privileged few.
Best would, of course, be massive privileges for everyone, but reality has to set in somewhere.. at least until we reach a post-scarecity society some day, even if that means AIs and drones running the world in some kind of Banksian utopia.
Another found that, among AAAS members, more than half believe in "God or a higher power".
Seems there's a perfectly cromulent reason for why so many scientists are religious:
Science is the inevitable outcome when you go looking for God in all the wrong places and it requires strong belief to keep searching regardless.
Only recently(last few centuries) have things like necessity, altruism, wealth and fame started to overtake outright belief as the major motivator for scientific endeavor.
(disclaimer 'atheist-by-default' poster)
Hideki!
What a Chii-sy comment ^^;
Yea i personally am a big fan of the 'broke student 5.1 Surround Special'
Using a 4 Channel Car-fi amp(4x100W typical) ~$25-$50 used, usually powered by a PC ATX PSU or similar (practically free as in beer).
A 5.1 USB soundcard($20ish) hardwired directly to amp + Guitar/Bass amplifier($50) used as subwoofer. Decent speakers bought used can be had for around $50 a pair, good speakers last for decades unlike most crap made nowadays, so just spend whatever you can reasonably afford, since it's a fair investment in the long run, just make sure to check they still work(no damaged tweeter/woofer units).
Use standard Cat-5 network cable for signal cable AND speaker cable(double up), failing that regular mains cable works too, again free as in beer.
Use media player/OS driver to mix center channel into front speakers.
Bonus points for:
Soldering the connections.
6 ch. car amp, bridge one pair for center speaker, or get a powered full range PA mono speaker(easily found used).
Braiding the Cat-5 cables, with honors if the speakers you got can be bi-amped and the braid uses it(2 bass and one for treble/tweeters)
Using a studio grade soundcard, firewire ones tend to be common, useful if you have the connector anyway.
If you can find a mains power noise filter and/or have proper ground connections.
Using the guitar amp for it's intended purpose.
Optional mounting hardware.
I've had people compare such setups to $10K+ supposedly high-end gear, they can be amazingly high fidelity for what can be done on a very frugal budget.
Don't get frightened by how it looks, just consider it 'ART' =)
Actually what people may be hearing is atrocious sample rate conversion, they might benefit from improved up-sampling algorithms from 44.1Khz -> 48/96Khz. Some soundcards and drivers are notorious for this(looking at you Creative Labs) but that's probably only after you've spent an hour just finding out how to turn off all the default EQ booster/plug-in/effect crap as well.
Quite so, AAC also is perceptibly better on my stereo once you crank up the volume. Digital PWM amplifier (sometimes referred to as Class-D) seems to be especially vulnerable to this harsh distortion in MP3 encodings.
Extra bitrate does mitigate the issue, but with lossless it lessens considerably. But it can never get better than the source material at any rate.
Stuff that usually sounds like crap in MP3 at any bitrate:
Live recordings with lots of audience participation
Treble heavy songs(hihats, cymbals, lots of complex chords)
Heavily stereo panned recordings.
Don't need to go bonkers on HD audio though, a straight FLAC CD rip is perfectly adequate for most listening and can be trivially stored and later downconverted if space is needed, but there might just be that occasional gem that does sound even better in 24bit/48Khz if you have the right equipment(Ears, Hardware and proper training/experience).
Anyone claiming >48Khz samplerate is needed probably just wants to sell something or they have a very large tinfoil hat collection.
Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware
And since this is /.
Preliminary chip info:
Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980 and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0
Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.
No need for jail, just confiscate X% of their assets then cap their maximum income to the national average wage for a decade or so. That should make them squirm.
I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."
So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.
And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
+1 Just so.
Thank you.
We built a storage server with 16 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT1 HDDs back in April/May 2011, the invoice says 6950kr (DKK, was 5.2DKK = $1 USD at the time*) so that works out to $83.53 USD per drive even here in Denmark and it wasn't any special deal, just day prices.
* - Source: http://nationalbanken.statistikbank.dk/nbf/107312
But for Avengers, I did go see it in 3d. The 3d sucked and the glasses were uncomfortable after 2 hours.
I paid 7.25 which seems very reasonable.
Indeed it does.. Almost unreasonably so, I just paid 110DKK(about $19.5USD incl. 25%VAT) + 5DKK reservation fee for the same privilege.
The audio was fine and so was the movie for that matter, but the Real3D setup gave me a splitting headache after just half an hour or so. I think I'll enjoy the 2D Bluray version considerably more, DAMN, there goes another $35..
How are these people NOT making money hand over fist already? And they want MORE protection for their racket?!
o--(=\=) ---THIS IS THE WORLDS SMALLEST VIOLIN AND IT'S PLAYING JUST FOR YOU MPAA.
Indeed Linksys(and hence Cisco) does seem to have embraced the enhusiast modding community the NLSU2 is quite popular too.
I think the cases used in the article are poor examples of 'hacker' friendly hardware & companies. Companies like Linksys, Dream Multimedia and Gamepark(GP2X) seem much more dedicated to allowing free access to their hardware.
A lot of game developers saw the potential a long time ago and we have quite a few good games that are still great today because of it. Only thing that can be hard sometimes is to find out where to start out or indeed which hardware is open to modding.
Thankfully there's people like http://www.bsodtv.org/ to help out those who feel a bit lost.