I'm sure it's a nice device, but I think your pricing is a little off. I recently built a new server - AMD x64 with 2GB of RAM for around $100 (excluding storage, as I assume your device is diskless). In my case that was:
CPU $30 mobo $35 2GB ram $30
Plus shipping etc. I had a spare case/psu but otherwise you can get that for less than $50. Far from being underpowered the server is nice and fast (I'm sure it's faster in general use than your machine) and runs several linux VMs quite happily. I haven't tried it with HD video (I use it headless) but if the onboard isn't up to the job I'm sure a cheap nvidia or something would do it fine and still come in under $200 total.
So obviously these are very different boxes, and my server is certainly nowhere near as small or quiet as your device, but your whole "2x the cost" thing is really not true.
If he sent a death threat in the post would you expect all the postal trucks to be impounded ?
No, but I don't see the police seizing routers or patch panels either. I would however expect them to examine the envelope/letter, figure out where/when it came from and then maybe go and see if there are any security cameras showing you mailing the letter. That's the exact same thing as figuring out which server hosts the message board and going to see if there are any useful logs. The difference is that to look for the logs they need to take the box, which sucks for IM.
Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.
Oh I agree, I think maybe I wasn't clear. Obviously your password has to look *nothing* like anything in the dictionary, that's a given. I was just saying that using one prng vs another slightly more random one won't make a lot of difference. You don't need a cryptographically strong rng for generating a passphrase.
For something like a WPA passphrase (it's not really the key) the actual amount of "randomness" isn't important provided whatever you use isn't in whatever dictionary the attacker is using. Once the dictionary attack is exhausted they're going to have to move onto simple one-by-one testing, and being "more random" or "less random" has no real meaning. Eventually they'll hit the right one, it's just a matter of how long that takes, which is a matter of luck and what order they test them in:)
I have no idea where you're coming from (government?) but in _my_ real world stakeholders change requirements all the time. Like daily. And saying "no you can't have this because you signed off on something last week" is a great way to dramatically shorten your career. The real world that my stakeholders live in changes all the time, so their requirements change all the time, so you have to be able to react.
According to whom? According to the stakeholders who mutually agree on the design
I've had stakeholders who understand requirements, and even some who understand specs. Never one who understood a design in any useful way. This ties into my first point though, without knowing the requirements are right how can you validate a design?
Says you who very clearly have not been on a large waterfall project with people who know what they're doing?
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who tries to do anything useful with a rigid waterfall doesn't know what they're doing by definition, so I guess not:)
The waterfall is broken, seriously. I'm paraphrasing from an excellent talk I attended a while back, but here goes.
For a typical waterfall you're doing roughly these steps: Requirements Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Maintenance. So let's start at the beginning...requirements. So off you go notebook in hand to get some requirements. When are you done? How do you know you got them all? Hint: you will never have them all, and they will keep changing. But you have to stop at some point so you can move onto design, so when do we stop? Typically it's when we get to the end of the week/month/year allocated on the project plan. Awesome. Maybe we've got 50% of the reqs done, maybe not. It'll be a long time until we find out for sure...
Next up - Design! Woot, this bit is fun. So we crank up Rose or whatever and get to work. But when do we stop? Well again, that's tough. Because I don't know about you but I can design forever, getting better and better, more and more modular, more and more generic, until the whole thing has flipped itself inside out. So we stop when it's "good enough" - according to who? Or more likely, it's now 1 week to delivery and no-one's written any code yet so we better stop designing!
Implementation time. Well at least this time we know when we're done! We're up against it time wise though, because we did such a good job on Reqs & Design. Let's pull some all nighters and get stuff churned out pronto, who cares how good it is, no time for that now. That lovely, expensive design gets pushed aside.
No time to test...gotta hit the release date.
Sure this isn't the waterfall model as published in the text books, but it's how it works (fails) in real life. And the text books specifically don't say how to fix the problems inherent in the first two stages. What to do instead? Small, incremental feature based development. Gather requirements, assign costs to them, ask the sponsors to pick a few, implement & test the chosen features, repeat until out of time or money.
It has decent hardware for gaming purposes already built in
Yes, but that hardware isn't accessible from Linux.
If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux
Apart from the entirely different architecture of course. The whole cell thing is really quite different from x86 both in terms of low level interaction (which a cross compiler could take care of) and also things like threading and memory model. It's far from a simple recompile if you want decent performance.
Sony did a half-assed attempt at this years ago, but if they (or a third party) introduced official support for a Linux OS on their console
They already officially support it. You just can't write games with it because of the hypervisor. The last thing Sony want is people writing games on their system without going through the "offical" channels, because they make good money from licensing. Microsoft are actually better than Sony in this regard, in that XNA allows anyone to download the SDK and write an Xbox360 game using the full system and all the hardware. The only issue there is that, like Apple, MS own the only distribution point.
Well you're lucky that the blades interface worked well for you, it certainly had it's own problems. However, if you don't like NXE (and to be honest, it gets pretty easy once you learn your way around) just hit the big silver buttons and you get your blades back.
A bit of advice I got when I bought the generator was that you don't need to run your fridge and freezer all the time, providing you open them infrequently. Every few hours just plug them in, let the compressors bring the temperature down, and then unplug them.
But surely that's exactly what they already do on their own? Modern appliances are designed to be as energy efficient as possible (whilst still keeping your food cold enough to not poison you). I don't think that you randomly cutting it's power is going to help in any way.
That page is a hoot. In general I groan whenever a software homepage has a "Philosophy" section, but the installation instructions more than make up for it...
Installation for Non-Programmers (emphasis mine)
1. FBUI resides inside the 2.6.9 kernel, so the first thing you must do is to get the kernel, un-tar FBUI in its directory, select the necessary options mentioned in the README, then make the kernel and update your loader to let you boot the new kernel. (I will offer a precompiled x86 kernel later.)
2. You also need to tell your boot loader to switch to the VESA console during booting. In LILO use the expression vga=792 for a 1024x768 display or vga=789 for 800x600.
3. Then you boot with the kernel. Next you need to set up the PCF font directory, populating it with fonts from the X distribution, making sure to uncompress them. The PCF font reader is really just a temporary chunk of code so I'm not going to update it to perform automatic decompression. Note, if you aren't sure where the fonts are, type (as root) find / -name "*.pcf*". To make sure libfbui knows where they are, you can use the PCFFONTDIR environment variable (as in export PCFFONTDIR=/path...).
4. Once you've done these things, just compile the sample programs in/usr/src/linux-2.6.9/libfbui and run them from there. You may find it helps to run a program in a different virtual console using the -c switch.
See how easy? I am a programmer and that's... well... yeah.
Actually, not quite. The City has nothing to do with it, as the bridges & tunnels in question are owned by the Port Authority. From their website:
The Port Authority operates the George Washington, Goethals and Bayonne bridges; the Outerbridge Crossing; and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. Videotaping and photographing at toll plazas at any of these facilities is prohibited, and the Port Authority reserves the right to restrict videotaping and photography to designated areas at all of its bridges and tunnels.
Sure it only mentions toll plazas, but for a tunnel that's basically all of it except inside the tunnel itself, where you'd get run over if you tried to take a photo!
The MTA (who I believe own most of the other bridges) have a rule that basically says "you have to do what the signs say" - and guess what the signs say? No photos.
Both X360 and Ps3 lose money on every console purchased I don't believe that's true any more for the 360, although I haven't dug up a link to cite. However, you're right that the Wii is more profitable and has been so for longer.
This translates to cheaper licensing fees for developers Does it? I haven't seen any comparisons on licensing/dev kit costs, but I'd be interested to read them if you know of any.
Even more, there are avenues such as the virtual console and wiiware to release on which will give Take-Two a chance to release some smaller things, or older games as well Exactly like PSN and XBLA, but less popular:) I think it's pretty well acknowledged that XBLA is the one to beat in the download-to-console segment.
To not to sell to the wii would be idiotic considering its outsold the other two consoles by a vast margin. It's true that the hardware numbers are hard to ignore. The problem is that the Wii's attach rate is terrible, particularly for 3rd party titles. It doesn't matter how many Wii's there are out there if no-one's buying the games. I know that I haven't bought a Wii game since Boom Blox, and there's nothing whatsoever on the radar I'm interested in. And before you stereotype me as some kind of anti-nintendo troll, I stood on line on the street for hours to get that thing on launch day. I even flew to LA the year before to try it out @ E3. Now I never even switch it on - huge disappointment.
It's international roaming that is the issue, there's pretty much no such thing as regional roaming any more (at least I haven't seen such a plan for a long time).
Yeah, right, "fun". I can happily say that standing in line for 6 hours for a Wii on launch day was the biggest mistake I've made in 20 years of gaming. Nintendo's making tons of cash, good for them, but it's not by making a product which is "better" in any real way, it's by appealing to an entirely new market. A market which is, to put it bluntly, unsophisticated and undemanding. I think it's great that there are people around the world learning about the fun of gaming and that they're enjoying themselves, but don't kid yourself - Nintendo are doing the absolute minimum of development and the maximum of marketing. I can only hope that these new gamers get offered something decent to play before they get bored of yet another disc full of mini games.
Yes, it is true. I'm sitting at a Windows machine right now. I could get up, move over the the next office, log in, and it would look exactly the same. Same settings, same desktop wallpaper, same homedir, same everything. It's just standard roaming profiles. The only difference is for locally installed apps, but as our app image is largely the same on every machine that's not much of an issue.
Wrong. Totally wrong. A cursory search of the Symantec (for example) DB shows a number of Mac specific attack signatures, including a fun looking AppleScript mass-mailing worm, an OS-level buffer overflow vuln, etc. A tiny minority of the total, sure, but not zero.
OS designed from the ground up for multi-user networked security (like Linux, BSD, or as a result, MacOS)
Pull the other one, it's got bells on! BSD I can maybe buy, but Linux is no more "designed from the ground up for multi-user networked security" than XP. Single root user with unlimited power and an unchangable ID? Overly coarse-grained FS ACLs? The problem with Windows isn't the design (at least, not in anything post-NT), it's the fact that most installations intentionally defeat the security model to make things "easier".
As a citizen of the "rest of the world" - you're full of it. Whilst I wouldn't use the term sandwich to apply to a cheeseburger myself, it isn't a great mental leap to understand what the person behind the counter is asking about. It's fine that the word doesn't make sense in whatever region you're from, but don't extrapolate that to everywhere else without actual evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's pretty impressive. Their scanner somehow didn't find a bunch of my drives though...I wonder if the downloaded version is any better.
I'm sure it's a nice device, but I think your pricing is a little off. I recently built a new server - AMD x64 with 2GB of RAM for around $100 (excluding storage, as I assume your device is diskless). In my case that was:
CPU $30
mobo $35
2GB ram $30
Plus shipping etc. I had a spare case/psu but otherwise you can get that for less than $50. Far from being underpowered the server is nice and fast (I'm sure it's faster in general use than your machine) and runs several linux VMs quite happily. I haven't tried it with HD video (I use it headless) but if the onboard isn't up to the job I'm sure a cheap nvidia or something would do it fine and still come in under $200 total.
So obviously these are very different boxes, and my server is certainly nowhere near as small or quiet as your device, but your whole "2x the cost" thing is really not true.
No, but I don't see the police seizing routers or patch panels either. I would however expect them to examine the envelope/letter, figure out where/when it came from and then maybe go and see if there are any security cameras showing you mailing the letter. That's the exact same thing as figuring out which server hosts the message board and going to see if there are any useful logs. The difference is that to look for the logs they need to take the box, which sucks for IM.
Exclusively digital, not HD. SD broadcasts will continue for quite some time.
Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.
Oh I agree, I think maybe I wasn't clear. Obviously your password has to look *nothing* like anything in the dictionary, that's a given. I was just saying that using one prng vs another slightly more random one won't make a lot of difference. You don't need a cryptographically strong rng for generating a passphrase.
For something like a WPA passphrase (it's not really the key) the actual amount of "randomness" isn't important provided whatever you use isn't in whatever dictionary the attacker is using. Once the dictionary attack is exhausted they're going to have to move onto simple one-by-one testing, and being "more random" or "less random" has no real meaning. Eventually they'll hit the right one, it's just a matter of how long that takes, which is a matter of luck and what order they test them in :)
I have one which I got from eBay. Looks like they're still on there, something like this should work.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...breathe....Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!
I have no idea where you're coming from (government?) but in _my_ real world stakeholders change requirements all the time. Like daily. And saying "no you can't have this because you signed off on something last week" is a great way to dramatically shorten your career. The real world that my stakeholders live in changes all the time, so their requirements change all the time, so you have to be able to react.
I've had stakeholders who understand requirements, and even some who understand specs. Never one who understood a design in any useful way. This ties into my first point though, without knowing the requirements are right how can you validate a design?
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who tries to do anything useful with a rigid waterfall doesn't know what they're doing by definition, so I guess not :)
The waterfall is broken, seriously. I'm paraphrasing from an excellent talk I attended a while back, but here goes.
For a typical waterfall you're doing roughly these steps: Requirements Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Maintenance. So let's start at the beginning...requirements. So off you go notebook in hand to get some requirements. When are you done? How do you know you got them all? Hint: you will never have them all, and they will keep changing. But you have to stop at some point so you can move onto design, so when do we stop? Typically it's when we get to the end of the week/month/year allocated on the project plan. Awesome. Maybe we've got 50% of the reqs done, maybe not. It'll be a long time until we find out for sure...
Next up - Design! Woot, this bit is fun. So we crank up Rose or whatever and get to work. But when do we stop? Well again, that's tough. Because I don't know about you but I can design forever, getting better and better, more and more modular, more and more generic, until the whole thing has flipped itself inside out. So we stop when it's "good enough" - according to who? Or more likely, it's now 1 week to delivery and no-one's written any code yet so we better stop designing!
Implementation time. Well at least this time we know when we're done! We're up against it time wise though, because we did such a good job on Reqs & Design. Let's pull some all nighters and get stuff churned out pronto, who cares how good it is, no time for that now. That lovely, expensive design gets pushed aside.
No time to test...gotta hit the release date.
Sure this isn't the waterfall model as published in the text books, but it's how it works (fails) in real life. And the text books specifically don't say how to fix the problems inherent in the first two stages. What to do instead? Small, incremental feature based development. Gather requirements, assign costs to them, ask the sponsors to pick a few, implement & test the chosen features, repeat until out of time or money.
It's also a completely different story. Unlock != Jailbreak.
Yes.
Yes, but that hardware isn't accessible from Linux.
Apart from the entirely different architecture of course. The whole cell thing is really quite different from x86 both in terms of low level interaction (which a cross compiler could take care of) and also things like threading and memory model. It's far from a simple recompile if you want decent performance.
They already officially support it. You just can't write games with it because of the hypervisor. The last thing Sony want is people writing games on their system without going through the "offical" channels, because they make good money from licensing. Microsoft are actually better than Sony in this regard, in that XNA allows anyone to download the SDK and write an Xbox360 game using the full system and all the hardware. The only issue there is that, like Apple, MS own the only distribution point.
Well you're lucky that the blades interface worked well for you, it certainly had it's own problems. However, if you don't like NXE (and to be honest, it gets pretty easy once you learn your way around) just hit the big silver buttons and you get your blades back.
Now that's what I'm talking about! On my wishlist for next Christmas :)
But surely that's exactly what they already do on their own? Modern appliances are designed to be as energy efficient as possible (whilst still keeping your food cold enough to not poison you). I don't think that you randomly cutting it's power is going to help in any way.
That page is a hoot. In general I groan whenever a software homepage has a "Philosophy" section, but the installation instructions more than make up for it...
See how easy? I am a programmer and that's... well... yeah.
Actually, not quite. The City has nothing to do with it, as the bridges & tunnels in question are owned by the Port Authority. From their website:
Sure it only mentions toll plazas, but for a tunnel that's basically all of it except inside the tunnel itself, where you'd get run over if you tried to take a photo!
The MTA (who I believe own most of the other bridges) have a rule that basically says "you have to do what the signs say" - and guess what the signs say? No photos.
You might be interested in this page.
Ahh yes, -1 Troll. The NDF strike again :)
Both X360 and Ps3 lose money on every console purchased
I don't believe that's true any more for the 360, although I haven't dug up a link to cite. However, you're right that the Wii is more profitable and has been so for longer.
This translates to cheaper licensing fees for developers
Does it? I haven't seen any comparisons on licensing/dev kit costs, but I'd be interested to read them if you know of any.
Even more, there are avenues such as the virtual console and wiiware to release on which will give Take-Two a chance to release some smaller things, or older games as well :) I think it's pretty well acknowledged that XBLA is the one to beat in the download-to-console segment.
Exactly like PSN and XBLA, but less popular
To not to sell to the wii would be idiotic considering its outsold the other two consoles by a vast margin.
It's true that the hardware numbers are hard to ignore. The problem is that the Wii's attach rate is terrible, particularly for 3rd party titles. It doesn't matter how many Wii's there are out there if no-one's buying the games. I know that I haven't bought a Wii game since Boom Blox, and there's nothing whatsoever on the radar I'm interested in. And before you stereotype me as some kind of anti-nintendo troll, I stood on line on the street for hours to get that thing on launch day. I even flew to LA the year before to try it out @ E3. Now I never even switch it on - huge disappointment.
Not so rare any more. Pretty much all the tunnels & bridges in NYC are "no photo" zones. Take a look at this entertaining gallery for examples.
It's international roaming that is the issue, there's pretty much no such thing as regional roaming any more (at least I haven't seen such a plan for a long time).
*looks at dust-covered wii*
Yeah, right, "fun". I can happily say that standing in line for 6 hours for a Wii on launch day was the biggest mistake I've made in 20 years of gaming. Nintendo's making tons of cash, good for them, but it's not by making a product which is "better" in any real way, it's by appealing to an entirely new market. A market which is, to put it bluntly, unsophisticated and undemanding. I think it's great that there are people around the world learning about the fun of gaming and that they're enjoying themselves, but don't kid yourself - Nintendo are doing the absolute minimum of development and the maximum of marketing. I can only hope that these new gamers get offered something decent to play before they get bored of yet another disc full of mini games.
Yes, it is true. I'm sitting at a Windows machine right now. I could get up, move over the the next office, log in, and it would look exactly the same. Same settings, same desktop wallpaper, same homedir, same everything. It's just standard roaming profiles. The only difference is for locally installed apps, but as our app image is largely the same on every machine that's not much of an issue.
Wrong. Totally wrong. A cursory search of the Symantec (for example) DB shows a number of Mac specific attack signatures, including a fun looking AppleScript mass-mailing worm, an OS-level buffer overflow vuln, etc. A tiny minority of the total, sure, but not zero.
OS designed from the ground up for multi-user networked security (like Linux, BSD, or as a result, MacOS)
Pull the other one, it's got bells on! BSD I can maybe buy, but Linux is no more "designed from the ground up for multi-user networked security" than XP. Single root user with unlimited power and an unchangable ID? Overly coarse-grained FS ACLs? The problem with Windows isn't the design (at least, not in anything post-NT), it's the fact that most installations intentionally defeat the security model to make things "easier".
As a citizen of the "rest of the world" - you're full of it. Whilst I wouldn't use the term sandwich to apply to a cheeseburger myself, it isn't a great mental leap to understand what the person behind the counter is asking about. It's fine that the word doesn't make sense in whatever region you're from, but don't extrapolate that to everywhere else without actual evidence.