Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Embed, Dougal, FireWire
Reality is just an illustrator's concept. In regards to the speculative piece about what animals will look like in the future, Ken Colangelo writes: "The author of After Man was Dougal Dixon, not Dougal Adams. He's got a pretty long track record as an amazing bio-illustrator.
He had, at one point, spoken of a book he was working on called "Man After Man" I believe. This would discuss what man would evolve into. In any case, I am probably his biggest (only?) fan and would appreciate it if you'd tell slashdot to correct his name ... This guy clearly needs to be working in speculative evolution again, now that computer graphics have caught up to his abilities. Animal Planet just doesn't seem to be that great at it."
A bit more on that secret FireWire, since it's no longer secret. cwill1004 writes "As was speculated yesterday, it turns out that Apple is indeed including a new higher-speed FireWire on its new laptops. Dubbed IEEE1394b, it appears to be primarily for external storage devices. One article on the Storage Supersite says that LaCie, Maxtor, SmartDisk, and Indigita have already hopped on board. The best part: IEEE1394b is backwards compatible, and available on both Mac and PC."
Perl undoes simplicity itself.
ljb writes " I've re-written Tom Murphy's
'embed' bit-flipping program
in Perl. At 76 characters (shorter than a standard
80-character width terminal line),
I believe this qualifies as a Perl "one-liner". Heck, you could even fit this on an old IBM punchcard
(ignoring character set limitations). Here's the Perl script --
$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$f&&$f++==2?$c-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4: ++$c||s/../\0\0/s;print}<>"
So get distributed crackin' ... scubacuda writes "On. Off. Now it's on again? According to PC World (et al), The Neo Project again tackles the challenge of cracking Microsoft's encryption key."
The Neo Project again tackles the challenge of cracking Microsoft's encryption key." Isnt this prohibited by the DMCA?
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
Three words: perlgolf.sourceforge.net
He did finish the book "Man after Man". The basic idea was that we genetically engineer about 3 or 4 different races (plain dwellers, undersea people, etc.) and then end up dying off when the magnetic poles reverse. The rest of the book shows how these races evolve over the next thousands of years. Pretty neat stuff, lots of pictures and thought put into it.
dinosaur comics
Just so you know:
There is one "classic" Firewire port and one Firewire 800 port on the 17" Powerbook. So no need for an adapter.
I remember hearing somewhere that the Powerbook comes with an adapter so you can plug old Firewire cables into the Firewire 800 port, but I couldn't find any confirmation of that on the Apple site.
-Mark
The new Firewire is signal compatible, but it has a new plug. So you need adapters to plug old cables into the new PowerBooks.
Actually, the new powerbooks (as awesome as they are) come complete with an 1394 AND 1394b connections. So users won't need adapters, they'll just have two ports for their firewire peripherals. If the user takes up all the bandwidth on the 400mb/s port, he can then get an adapter for the 800mb/s and keep on adding new devices.
Apple will think of any problem like this before release, and then fix it.
-isolenz
The 1394b spec actually calls for speeds up to 3200 Mb/sec, being an 8x improvment over the 1394a spec (800, 1600 and 3200 vs 100, 200 and 400). The spec also calls for cable lengths up to 50 meters over plastic fibre, as I recall.
The current Apple implementation may be a price/performance trade-off.
-- Alastair
Firewire 800 uses 9 pins instead of 6, and it uses optical cable to get longer range (100 meters on FW800 vs. 4.5 on FW400 and 5 on USB2). See the Apple FireWire page.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I have both "After Man" and "Man after Man" by Dougal Dixon. The first is, IMHO, a much better read than the second.
My main problem with the second is that it assumes that man will have a brief fling with genetic engineering, creating a few new subspecies, and then die out due to genetic flaws. After that, other than a bit of 'Animal Husbandry' by one subspecies on another, no directed evolution takes place. Frankly, I found this so unlikely a scenario that I was completely unable to suspend belief and enjoy the book for the speculation that it was.
The First book was MUCH better. It simply assumes that man wipes himself out by some (unspecified) means, as well as taking every endagered species with him. The book then tries to imagine how evolution might fill all of the resultant vacant ecological niches. Many of the animals are interesting and even when implausible, are fascinating to wonder about.
Seriously, rsa-2048 is like giving a million monkeys a million type writers, its not going to work.
Encryption is powerful for a reason, people DON'T want their files being crax0red. rc5-72 projects gonna take 3000 YEARS to crack.
The "standard", 128-bit is 2^64 times stronger than 64 bit. it is FUTILE to even TRY and crack it. Once somethings encrypted with it, the ONLY way to crack it is to comprimise the key.
RSA-2048 on the other hand, requires factorisation of huge numbers that are not computable with todays computers, unless you have a couple of trillion orders of magnatude of the current age of the universe to spare.
IT'S Microsoft's box, It's what THEY are in control with, IT'S THEIR Black box! Microsoft Isnt gonna let any old idiot write crap for its machine, If you wanna put linux on a console, get a Playstation 2 and the OFFICAL KIT!
He did finish it.
My copy says (C) 1990
It's not just creepy anymore.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Here's an example (natori), from the Year 2000 winners:
It supposedly generates a picture of the moon in it's current phase.
Impossible? feh.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
No. Even if the source is closed, someone will generally find a way to intercept the protocol (like the quake aimbot proxy cheats).... Stuff like that... Open source just lets everyone look over and fix vulnerabilities.
Apple has it right. Use USB for low-power low-bandwidth serial devices like mice, most printers and scanners, and heck even Zip drives, and use FireWire for the high-bandwidth peripherals. The connectors are small enough that our laptops can handle multiples of each. So bring 'em all!
FYI, an old but still accurate response to the announcement of USB 2.0 from David Every.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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MacObserver
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MacBuyersGuide
WiebeTech also now supports ATA-6 (large IDE drives) in its FireWire bridge product line.(WiebeTech is my consulting client. I did the firmware and user interface for FireWire Encrypt).
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It totally depends on the processor and the code in question. Blindly unrolling loops can kill performance if you put too much pressure on the I cache.
Firewire has one other point in it's favor aside from speed. USB requires a PC to arbitrate the bus while Firewire does not. It is possible to transfer video from DV camera to DV camera with a Firewire cable for instance. If the camera in question understands the partition and filesystem formats, it can even be downloaded directly onto a Firewire hard drive. I also remember reading somewhere that USB is bursty compared to Firewire. That is, properly designed Firewire devices have higher sustained data rates than any form of USB. This is more shades of IDE vs. SCSI I suppose.
Basically, USB is intended to interface devices to PCs. Intel likes it that way. Firewire is meant to interconnect devices to each other as well as PCs.
This is a windows only issue, but why is it that the DV manufacturers decided in their infinite wisdom to make it so you could only capture in one format (DV)?
I used to love using my analog BT878 card to do software mpeg compression while I captured. It saved me a ton of disk space and let me capture many different things.
The recomended disk space for 2 hours of DV is 30 gigs. Since I had no other option I just went out and bought an 80 gig drive.
So I guess my question to the 1394b creators is, will I be able to software compress a DV stream as I capture it? Or will I have to use oodles of disk space like I do now.
A page on factoring algorithms
burris
So the new plug is a feature enhancement, not a brazen way to force people to buy new cables...whenever someone ships FireWire 800 only products
Sorry, you are incorrect.
This page was written by marketroids, and they missed the entire point.
IEEE 1394b defines several different PHY (physical layer) specifications in order to have the same basic signaling methology.
The PHY's specified in IEEE 1394b are the standard copper (the 9-wire cable you mentioned) for speeds up to 800 mbps at 4 meters, UTP-5 w/ an RJ-45 connector for speeds up to 100 mbps at 100 meters, and 1000-micron plastic optical fiber (POF) and 50-micron multimode fiber for up to 3.2Gbps at varying distances. I don't know how many of these PHY's have been adopted, but they're in the standard (kind of like 1000baseCX 50-ohm balanced copper cables w/ DB-9 connectors for GigE that have never been produced).
Calling IEEE 1394b "Firewire 800" is a misnomer. It is in all reality a very adaptable, wide-reaching standard for high-speed serial bus applications.
I typed
./moon_phase.exe
mvg@GEB ~
$ gcc moon_phase.c -o moon_phase
mvg@GEB ~
$ ls
identd.c moon_phase.c moon_phase.exe quotes
temp test.c test.exe
mvg@GEB ~
$
LAM
_ENE SFIL
++TERAVO DEDLA
___EMNE SFILTERA
____AVOIDEDLAME ESS
____FILTERI ABASTARD
_____SONOFAN VILPLANF
____ORSOMET INGORNOTH
_____INGLAMEN SSFILTER
------ISANOY NGBUTIWILL
-------MAKEDOWITHW ATIHA
------BLAHBLAH LAHBLA HH
BLAHBLAH LAHBLAHHH
bLAHB AHBLAHBL HHH
BLA BLAHBL HBLA HH
YOUGETTHEIDEABLAH
BL HBLAHBLA BLAHH
bLAHB AHBLAHBLAH
BLAHBLAHBL HBLA
BLAH LAHB AHB
LAM NESS ILT
ERIS AMEE
YES
mvg@GEB ~
$
The manufacturer is mitsubishi, they call it Net Command and they have all their pro. equipment firewire enabled. When you connect any device, it appears in a device manager-like screen where you can choose to send video and/or sound to any connected device that can output video and/or sound. Very cool, and WAAAAY better than RCA, coax, S-Video, or Component.
today is spelling optional day.
Gotta love Google ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I've been told that the checksum isn't actually checked by windows -- apparently, my program updates it incorrectly (using an 8-bit sum instead of a 32-bit one) and doesn't update some other global header checksum. I haven't fixed the program in case I ever end up going to court over it (where it might matter that I haven't touched the page in 6 years), and because it works anyway...