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

"Compatible"

[Gorimek]

The new Firewire is signal compatible, but it has a new plug. So you need adapters to plug old cables into the new PowerBooks.

Haven't heard of why they did this, but I guess they had a reason. Hopefully a good one.

Re:"Compatible"

[mbessey]

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

Re:"Compatible"

[SoCalChris]

Only Apple would put forth a "revolutionary" new product which offers a measly 2x improvement. Note to technologists: please offer an order of magnitude (give or take) before making us by everything over again.

The bandwidth of firewire is extremely high, especially compared to other competing technologies like USB1.0. I think doubling the bandwidth is pretty impressive.

I do agree with you however that they should have tried to keep the original plugs for compatibility, but who knows, they probably had a good reason to use a new style.

Besides, how much would it cost to go out and get a new IEEE1394b daughterboard for your computer? A USB2.0 card can be had for under $50, so I would imagine the new IEEE1394b will be around there pretty soon anyways. It's not like you will have to go replace your entire computer and perephials to use the new technology.

Re:"Compatible"

[Detritus]

I'm not going to buy a new car until I can find one with a top speed that is an order of magnitude higher than my current car. I don't want to hear any whining about the difficulty of designing cars that are aerodynamically stable at Mach 1.2.

Re:"Compatible"

[AJWM]

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.

Re:"Compatible"

[90XDoubleSide]

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.

Man after Man

[potaz]

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.

Re:and the winner of uber geek 2002 is....

[RealAlaskan]

we can all sleep better knowing that bits can flip in 76 characters... I hope this was a school assignment!

I guess some people find pleasure in this.. Personally I prefer women.

Women? For flipping bits? You are strange.

Re:and the winner of uber geek 2002 is....

[iapetus]

I prefer women who find pleasure in 76-byte Perl scripts for bit-flipping. :)

Re: Computers use binary, remember?

[RodgerDodger]

It is an order of magnitude. Observe:

New Speed = Old Speed x 10

If you think a doubling of speed isn't impressive, then you've been jaded too long.

Impossible to obfuscate C? Surely you jest...

[douglips]

Never heard of the the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest, I supposed.

Here's an example (natori), from the Year 2000 winners:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
double l;main(_,o,O){return putchar((_--+22&&_+44&&main(_,-43,_),_&&o)?(main(- 43,++o,O),((l=(o+21)/sqrt(3-O*22-O*O),l*l<4&&(fabs (((time(0)-607728)%2551443)/405859.-4.7+acos(l/2)) <1.57))[" #"])):10);}

It supposedly generates a picture of the moon in it's current phase.

Impossible? feh.

Re:Firewire would be nice...

[tbmaddux]

You won't see a firewire mouse...

Well, good! What mouse needs to transmit data on the order of gigabits per second (IEEE 1394b specs with speeds of 0.8, 1.6, 3.2 Gbps which BTW also refutes your claim that its speed doesn't come close to Ethernet)?

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.

WiebeTech has 1394b too

[MichaelCrawford]

Here are articles about WiebeTech's announcement of 1394b support:

• MacObserver
• 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).

One more application...

[unicorn]

I was in Best Buy, or The Good Guys the other day, and happened to see a display of stereo equipment. The manufacturer was pitching the product line as using Firewire to interconnect all the devices. Personally I think this is a great design. Suddenly each device has a power cord, and a single data cable. And then the reciever has a "hub" built in. FAR less spaghetti behind the system, FAR less opportunities for noise to leak into the wiring, etc.

my take on the Perl bit flipper

[Dr. Awktagon]

His one-liner doesn't seem to update the checksum? There is a checksum someplace in there.

How do I know this interesting fact? Because last year I tried writing my own one-liner, but couldn't squeeze it down to one line because of the checksum.

Here's what I came up with at the time, which according to diff produces identical output to the C code:

$/=$_;s''$_=<>;?OS/2?g;$n=pos>>2;$f=-n+1,32);-f/2+ 4,16)=0;(-n
,32))=unpack"x$f%32C".-n+2,32),$_;pri nt';s'-'vec($_,$'g;eval

121 bytes if you take out the newlines. And any slashdot-inserted spaces.

No, I have no idea how it works any more. The code is placed in $_, the '-' is not as it seems, eval() runs the code in $_, and that's all I can tell you. Welcome to Perl!

IEEE1394 isn't going away.

[dmaxwell]

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.

Re:and the winner of uber geek 2002 is....

[Black Copter Control]

Women? For flipping bits? You are strange.

I don't know about you, but my bits get flipped by attractive women on a regular basis.

Oh yeah?

[Anonymous DWord]

!1

Re:Too bad it requires googleflops.

[ChaosDiscord]

IT'S Microsoft's box, It's what THEY are in control with, IT'S THEIR Black box!

If it's their box, what exactly did I pay $200 for? The nifty packing material?