The Guts Of An iPod
The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at
this Japanese web site
have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is
here. The FireWire contoller appears to be
TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B
w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."
I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs. They *can* and *do* use products designed elsewhere if it can offer them a competitive advantage...
Lucent 802.11b cards, AMD based base stations, and not Portal designed mp3 player and UI by Pixo.
Now if they can only work together with AMD and NVIDIA to introduce a new low cost entry level Mac ($500 range) and use DAISY type runtime optimzation and recompilation in the OS to make it hardware agnostic...
GPL Deconstructed
Too bad Apple sold its shares in ARM... They purchased them when the Newton used ARM chips and then sold most of the investment about a year ago. I thought it was a mistake at the time - but Apple could probably purchase the entire company now for what it made selling the shares last year.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
I was in an SDMI meeting when that is precisely what was proposed. The drop dead codes would be encoded into CDs. The first time that the MP3 player saw the drop dead code it would set a switch so that it would only accept SDMI encoded MP3 files.
That was the first and last meeting with those loonies that I attended. The basic idea that they had was that I would spend several million dollars building security technology for them and they would pay me $0.10 per player until the royalties reached a certain point when they would buy my interest out completely for about $100K.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Better yet, how about software Guts?
If Windows could read HFS+ hard drives with firewire without the 3rd party software, you could just plug it in and upload whatever you wanted.
All the music files are in an invisible folder at the root level of the drive. Very easy to copy. I don't know about adding files that way, there may be a playlist that needs to be updated as well...