Slashback: Embed, Dougal, FireWire

Slashback this evening brings you a few corrections, updates, amplifications and reversals -- read on for more on the Xbox key cracking project, the new version of FireWire, and more.

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."

Comments

Note on backwards compatibility

[djupedal]

Firewire 800 uses a different port/connector. Yes, you can connect(legacy) Firewire 400, but you will need an adapter at the port.

Re:"Compatible"

[JPawloski]

Firewire would be nice if more devices supported it. Unfortunately, Firewire is looking like SCSI, and USB is looking like IDE/ATA.

Sure, no one who knows what they are talking about would argue that USB is better, but they will say that USB comes with more computers, and is cheaper for device manufacturers because of it's compatibility modes. eg. You won't see a firewire mouse with a $1 tranciever that allows it to plug right into PS/2--or a Firewire to Parallel & Serial adapter.

I really think Firewire missed the boat on making it easy and cheap for device manufactuers to add Firewire support to their devices... USB obviously didn't.

Firewire's main advantage is it's speed (which still doesn't come close to Ethernet--which further narrows Firewire's market) over USB, but I suspect, if they don't do a better job enticing device makers, Firewire could just as well disappear in favor of USB everywhere.

That *is* funny...

[tmasssey]

I agree. That is hilarious, not redundant. Though, the !1 is even better... If I had mod points, I'd give you both one.

Perl: Programming Language? Not!

[g_bit]

$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$f&&$f++==2?$c-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4: ++$c||s/../\0\0/s;print}

Dude, whoe the hell wants to look at that shit? You might as well just program in assembly.