So.. An idea I have been toying with for quite some time now is the possibility of incorporating into Hijack an encrypted binary database of dates and serial numbers, and having Hijack do something special when a particular "number/date" pops up.

This can be done without taking up more than a few hundred bytes of kernel space, and zero disk space (or not).

Things like.. "Happy Birthday" popping up for individual users on certain days, or "Screw off" on every day for a specific user whose serial number ends in 4155. Those are the two extremes.

But.. the ethics the ethics..

Debate?

Eh. The idea of "happy birthday" messages doesn't impress me much. I'm not necessarily opposed to your idea, but I'd need to see more of an application for it than just displaying custom messages on certain dates before I'd be in favor of this.

Well, do remember this can be done at near zero-cost to RAM on the player, so "not seeing an application for it" in the eyes of some user(s) is no reason not to do it.

Here's some more examples between the two extremes.. my knowledge of trivial is horrible, so I don't know the real dates, but messages like these could pop up"

"On this date, Hugo listened to the first mp3 on the prototype"

"Ohio Cincinnatti (spelling?) Empeg Meet today!"

"Empeg BBS Aniversary Day"

"1000th Player sold on this day in 2001"

"yn0t_ finally hit Pooh-Bah today in 2002"

etc..


Kinda like a wandering "Fortune Cookie" database for us ancient UNIX types.

Cheers

Maybe that would be cool... But how about the overhead of having to maintain that encrypted database.. Or would this be something that the users would be given a tool to customize/add things to themselves?

I think I would turn this feature off, simply because the pop-ups would likely get in the way of me using the player to, like, play MP3's. I love the fortune cookie type thing a la UNIX as you've described, but those didn't "pop up," they were just displayed during login and didn't get in the way of anything.

But as you've said, no RAM cost or anything, so go ahead... Just give us an option to enable/disable it?

Really though I'm just nay-saying here because I'd rather see you work on userland app-interface type things like that disk-writing idea.

That would be really cool! (Having the important empeg dates). Maybe we could list some? When was the first batch started? When did empeg.com go live etc etc.

Or how about "Your anniversary is tomorrow" "Mother's Day, 2 Days away - Call Mom" etc..

In reply to:

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"Ohio Cincinnatti (spelling?) Empeg Meet today!"

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One "T" in Cincinnati. But you were close.

I like the idea, it's kind of like the popup about the European meeting that we had. I changed hijack versions just to see it that weekend.

I just like the idea of little factoids... "fact of the day" hehe

>I think I would turn this feature off, simply because the ... would likely get in the way of me using the player to, like, play MP3's.
..
>Really though I'm just nay-saying here because I'd rather see you work on userland app-interface type things like that disk-writing idea.

I think userland apps would get in the way of me using the player to, like, play MP3's too.

Cheers

As a pop up message during bootup would be cool.

There's another use, but of limited value. If a unit known to be "stolen" is booted with network, it could do some sort of notification if the new "owner" was foolish enough to put a new hijack on it. There's a lot of ifs, there.

I think userland apps would get in the way of me using the player to, like, play MP3's too.

Touché!

ya it would be nice to kidna have a calender thing to remind you to do stuff, like "Appointment With So-and-so at 3:40pm today" ect. Or have it linked with the boot up animation and have animations for certain days of the week ect. ect. what do u think about that mark? Or is it possible?