Thing is, if somebody was using one of these notch filters to block the communication from the set top box to the cable company, the cable company wouldn't be adding the box to the audience figures. Since I'm assuming they'd pay the PPV provider based on the actual audience, the cable company isn't paying for the viewers they don't know about. I'd assume the audience counters and billing systems are linked, so as soon as the cable company finds out that you watched a movie and adds you to the count sent to the PPV provider, they also bill you.
Except Commander Keen didn't have the @#%#%$!! code lookup copy protection in the middle of the game. That's right, the middle, not the beginning. So you'd be playing through, having a great time, then get asked for a code, and....
"We finally caught you, F.O.E. spy! The real Captain Goodnight would have had the secret decoder ring!" AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
While this used to be the case, it obviously cannot be anymore, for the simple reason that you cannot buy a SCSI disk from a major manufacturer that spins at under 10,000 RPM, and you cannot buy an IDE disk from a major manufacturer that spins over 7200 RPM.
But when you have to get 12 people from point A to point B one mile away, you can do it a lot faster with the three Pintos (assuming they don't explode) than one Corvette. It all depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
Sometimes in the Washington D.C. area you can pick up HF transmissions from the California Highway Patrol (they use 39-40 MHz radio systems, so it's a bit below the TV channels.) The Maryland State Police barracks here in College Park recently had to change their frequency because they kept getting stepped on by their California counterparts...
Because Windows (at least not without Terminal Services or Citrix) is not multiuser, VNC on Windows acts as a simple remote control program a la PCAnywhere. It simply displays the contents of the system's screen and lets you control the console session. I imagine that without a video card in the system, Windows wouldn't put up an image that VNC could display remotely. I wouldn't be suprised if Windows refused to boot without a video card either.
VNC on Unix creates a seperate X session, similar to Microsoft Terminal Services on Windows. It works independently of the console display, so it doesn't care whether one is actually present.
You can't read 800K Mac disks using a PC floppy controller. The 800K Mac disks, as well as all Apple II disks, used a type of data encoding called GCR. PC floppy disks use MFM encoding. In addition, as you pointed out, the 800K disks have variable rotation speeds. The consequence is that the stock PC floppy drive/controller setup cannot understand them.
However, the PC floppy drive interface, being 25 or so years old, has digital control signals but analog data signals. The actual encoding and decoding of the digital data on the bus to an an analog signal on the disk is performed by the controller, not the drive. So if you replace the controller, you could encode or decode the data in a different format. The variable speeds of the Mac disks will just result in the data arriving at different rates when spun in a fixed-speed PC floppy drive, which can be compensated for by a special controller. That's probably how this device works.
The old ST506/412 interface hard drives for PC's were similar, with analog data signals to the drive and the encoder on the controller card. That's why you could replace your MFM-encoding controller with an RLL-encoding controller, perform a low-level format, and get 50% more space on your old hard drive (guaranteed... not depending on the compressibility of the data like with SuperStor, DriveSpace, or other compression utilities.)
There's full-screen Flash intersitials for MSN 8 on washingtonpost.com, if not other sites... Just one of the many reasons I don't have flash installed.
Re:Error,Cannot Close Application, Click OK to clo
on
Gnarly Error Messages
·
· Score: 1
BASIC uses the = (single equals) operator as both the assignment operator (either by itself or with the LET statement) and the comparison operator. For example:
10 X = 1 20 LET Y = 2 30 IF X = Y THEN PRINT "You won't see this" 40 PRINT X, Y 50 END
will produce "1 2" as output.
Just one of the many reasons why people hate BASIC...
If you go to freeware.sgi.com, and click on More Freeware, there should be a link to the May 2001 freeware distribution, which was the last one that would run on Irix 6.2-6.4. I run a lot of stuff from that freeware set on my old Indy. If you'd rather run newer versions of things, you can get gcc from the freeware distribution, install it, then compile programs yourself. Only thing that I've found is that since SGI changed the interfaces to the audio library between 6.2 and 6.5, you'll have to hack the source to MP3 players to get them to compile.
inst sucks. If you've ever tried installing Irix, you know what I mean. Inst is text-based and command-line driven. Older versions even had some undocumented magic words you had to type ("set delay_conflicts 1" or some such) or the install would fail. And if you have dependency conflicts, you can't tell it to just install all the packages to satisfy the dependencies. You have to tell it how to solve each individual problem by typing "conflicts 1a 2a 3b 4a 5b 6b 7b" or something similar. If they based the OS review on just the installer - or if they had to use the installer at all (they mention Irix came preloaded) - they probably would have said Irix is awful.
The one problem with your perpetual-motion device idea is that it's not possible to remove all the air from a vacuum chamber. You can remove almost all the air, but not every last bit of it. Since there will still be some air left, it would create friction and your magnet would eventually slow down and come to a stop (although it would spin for quite a long time.)
I think the smartctl for linux will give you the true value as well as the normalized 0-253 value.
nanite:/# smartctl -a/dev/hda [snip] Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: Revision Number: 16 Attribute Flag Value Worst Threshold Raw Value ( 5)Reallocated Sector Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 1
I heard my drive do a read retry a couple days ago and then realized this number was at 1. I can't remember if it read 0 before. But this last number looks like it might be the raw value from the drive.
One day, while trying to take notes in class, I dropped my Palm IIIxe on the floor and broke the screen. (Whooooops.) Because I had the Palm folding keyboard that worked with the III series but not the newer models with their redesigned cases, I opted to pay Palm $100 to fix my unit rather than to go buy a new one. So I sent my device back, and a week later I get the exchange unit. I then threw some batteries in it and stick it in my backpack, and then when I go to use it two days later it doesn't turn on because the batteries are dead. I figured that the case I had it in was pushing one of the buttons and didn't really think much of it at the time, but after several more sets of dead batteries I did some testing and found that the device would run down batteries in 12 hours while sitting turned off in a drawer. Hard resets and a different brand of battery didn't fix it, so off it went back to Palm for another exchange...
One week later, the second replacement arrives. In go the batteries, and I even install a fresh copy of the Hotsync software for Windows and sync with that instead of using KPilot to restore my old data. Same problem - 12 hours later, turned off in a drawer, dead batteries. So I call up Palm again and explain my situation, and they say to do another exchange, and when I asked what I could do if the new unit had the same problem they told me I could call corporate headquarters "using the number from the website." Thankfully, the third replacement worked.
So in the end, in order to have a $100 repair performed on my Palm, I had to pay the $100, plus $5 in tax, $10 three times for return shipping and $8 for a 12 pack of batteries from the rat shack. Total of $142. Plus it took a month and three trips to the post office. Rather inconvienient, and not exactly a ringing endorsement of Palm's quality control...
If states were honestly interested in improving public safety at traffic lights, they would study the situation and vary yellow-light duration based on speed limit (and weather conditions).
I live in Silver Spring, Maryland near the DC line and commute to my summer job along Route 29. It's a reverse commute, so the traffic is light and the signals are synchronized for people going the other way - so there's lots of red lights. For most of my route, this is a six-lane divided highway with traffic lights every mile or so and a speed limit of 55. People regularly go 65 or 70 on this road (assuming it's not rush hour, when you're lucky if you're doing 2.) The yellow lights here are about 6-8 seconds long, giving you more time than you need to stop. Problem is, I'll get too used to the long yellows after a week of doing nothing but driving 29 to and from work, and then drive somewhere else and find myself running the lights because the yellows are shorter. So, varying the length of yellow lights creates its own set of problems. Now, if everybody just stopped for the yellow lights like they were supposed to it wouldn't matter, but that'll never happen...
Actually, the people I've talked to say that Micropolis made the worst hard drives ever. The spec sheets on them all looked good and the prices were right, though. We put a 9gb scsi Micropolis drive in a server at school, and it developed bad blocks after a while but never failed entirely. When I mentioned this problem to a friend, his response was "You PAID MONEY for a MICROPOLIS DRIVE????" Oh well... Just goes to show you if you put ten people in a room and ask them who makes the best hard drive, you'll get about ten different responses.
I want to start smoking just tick those people off.
Betcha didn't know that the American Legacy Foundation, who produces these ads, is funded by the tobacco companies as part of the national tobacco lawsuit settlement. So while some people (the CDC, etc.) think they're the greatest thing ever, the conspiracy theorists say that the over-the-top style is part of a tobacco industry plot to make everybody smoke more. Apparently the conspiracy theorists are at least partially right on this one...
I've always thought systems where entering a pirate regcode make the program malfunction are stupid, because they make the program look like it doesn't work and will most likely simply cause the user to go look elsewhere. Now if it would do something like burn your CD, but 5 minutes into it start saying "This CD was burned on an illegal copy of Program ABCD", that might actually be a little more effective. But hey, I don't write software, so what do I know?
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
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· Score: 1
In order to impress some classmates, I once took an old Western Digital Pirahna 200mb ide drive, pulled the lid off, stuck it in a computer, and watched it boot Windows. Nobody except me thought it would work. I was able to repeat this stunt several times with the same drive, and it didn't fail or give so much as a read error.
Sometimes computers do things they are never supposed to do. But if you store anything important on a hard drive that has been opened, you're just asking for trouble.
I installed Morpheus and without asking it installed some software from Brilliant Digital. Went to their website and it looks like it's a "enhanced" media player plugin a la Onflow that seems to exist to "enhance" our advertising experience. Sounds like shovelware to me...
I know the BD software isn't essential for Morpheus because I uninstalled it and Morpheus still works. The software probably doesn't spy on you, hence they can say "no spyware", but it still installs it without asking.
Like it or not, copying commercial software is ILLEGAL. Although I agree that today's software licensing situation is beyond ridiculous, that methods used by the industry to calculate losses to "piracy" straight out of la-la land, and that small-scale piracy of products such as Windows 2000 have helped companies such as MS by letting would-be MCSE's get more practice, the laws currently on the books and the decisions currently being made by the courts say that unauthorized distribution of commerical software is copyright infringement and that such infringement is illegal.
This isn't about outlawing Linux or personal firewalls. This isn't about invasion of privacy. This isn't about the legal grey area that is file sharing software. This isn't about arresting Torvalds or raiding Transmeta. This is simply the police doing their job, enforcing well-understood and court-tested laws in what appears to be a very well-planned sting operation.
If you think that improvements in motor vehicle technology mean that 65 mph speed limits are too slow, you don't drive 120 and then expect people to listen to you when you are locked up for reckless driving. Similarly, you don't distribute warez and then go whining about censorship and the like once the law catches up with you. You won't get any points for calling it civil disobedience either, because you know full well that these people weren't doing this for the greater good, they were doing it because they wanted Photoshop for free.
Yeah, it sucks. But, as they say, if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. Besides, it's not like the police did anything new. Undercover cops posed as warez kiddies much as undercover cops have posed as drug dealers and prostitutes in the real world. With all the security technology out there, if warez kiddies couldn't avoid falling into a trap as simple as this, did they really deserve to survive?
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Thing is, if somebody was using one of these notch filters to block the communication from the set top box to the cable company, the cable company wouldn't be adding the box to the audience figures. Since I'm assuming they'd pay the PPV provider based on the actual audience, the cable company isn't paying for the viewers they don't know about. I'd assume the audience counters and billing systems are linked, so as soon as the cable company finds out that you watched a movie and adds you to the count sent to the PPV provider, they also bill you.
Except Commander Keen didn't have the @#%#%$!! code lookup copy protection in the middle of the game. That's right, the middle, not the beginning. So you'd be playing through, having a great time, then get asked for a code, and....
"We finally caught you, F.O.E. spy! The real Captain Goodnight would have had the secret decoder ring!" AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
While this used to be the case, it obviously cannot be anymore, for the simple reason that you cannot buy a SCSI disk from a major manufacturer that spins at under 10,000 RPM, and you cannot buy an IDE disk from a major manufacturer that spins over 7200 RPM.
But when you have to get 12 people from point A to point B one mile away, you can do it a lot faster with the three Pintos (assuming they don't explode) than one Corvette. It all depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
Sometimes in the Washington D.C. area you can pick up HF transmissions from the California Highway Patrol (they use 39-40 MHz radio systems, so it's a bit below the TV channels.) The Maryland State Police barracks here in College Park recently had to change their frequency because they kept getting stepped on by their California counterparts...
Because Windows (at least not without Terminal Services or Citrix) is not multiuser, VNC on Windows acts as a simple remote control program a la PCAnywhere. It simply displays the contents of the system's screen and lets you control the console session. I imagine that without a video card in the system, Windows wouldn't put up an image that VNC could display remotely. I wouldn't be suprised if Windows refused to boot without a video card either.
VNC on Unix creates a seperate X session, similar to Microsoft Terminal Services on Windows. It works independently of the console display, so it doesn't care whether one is actually present.
You can't read 800K Mac disks using a PC floppy controller. The 800K Mac disks, as well as all Apple II disks, used a type of data encoding called GCR. PC floppy disks use MFM encoding. In addition, as you pointed out, the 800K disks have variable rotation speeds. The consequence is that the stock PC floppy drive/controller setup cannot understand them.
However, the PC floppy drive interface, being 25 or so years old, has digital control signals but analog data signals. The actual encoding and decoding of the digital data on the bus to an an analog signal on the disk is performed by the controller, not the drive. So if you replace the controller, you could encode or decode the data in a different format. The variable speeds of the Mac disks will just result in the data arriving at different rates when spun in a fixed-speed PC floppy drive, which can be compensated for by a special controller. That's probably how this device works.
The old ST506/412 interface hard drives for PC's were similar, with analog data signals to the drive and the encoder on the controller card. That's why you could replace your MFM-encoding controller with an RLL-encoding controller, perform a low-level format, and get 50% more space on your old hard drive (guaranteed... not depending on the compressibility of the data like with SuperStor, DriveSpace, or other compression utilities.)
There's full-screen Flash intersitials for MSN 8 on washingtonpost.com, if not other sites... Just one of the many reasons I don't have flash installed.
BASIC uses the = (single equals) operator as both the assignment operator (either by itself or with the LET statement) and the comparison operator. For example:
10 X = 1
20 LET Y = 2
30 IF X = Y THEN PRINT "You won't see this"
40 PRINT X, Y
50 END
will produce "1 2" as output.
Just one of the many reasons why people hate BASIC...
We is NATO
I suppose all your base are belong to NATO as well?
If you go to freeware.sgi.com, and click on More Freeware, there should be a link to the May 2001 freeware distribution, which was the last one that would run on Irix 6.2-6.4. I run a lot of stuff from that freeware set on my old Indy. If you'd rather run newer versions of things, you can get gcc from the freeware distribution, install it, then compile programs yourself. Only thing that I've found is that since SGI changed the interfaces to the audio library between 6.2 and 6.5, you'll have to hack the source to MP3 players to get them to compile.
Installer?
inst sucks. If you've ever tried installing Irix, you know what I mean. Inst is text-based and command-line driven. Older versions even had some undocumented magic words you had to type ("set delay_conflicts 1" or some such) or the install would fail. And if you have dependency conflicts, you can't tell it to just install all the packages to satisfy the dependencies. You have to tell it how to solve each individual problem by typing "conflicts 1a 2a 3b 4a 5b 6b 7b" or something similar. If they based the OS review on just the installer - or if they had to use the installer at all (they mention Irix came preloaded) - they probably would have said Irix is awful.
The one problem with your perpetual-motion device idea is that it's not possible to remove all the air from a vacuum chamber. You can remove almost all the air, but not every last bit of it. Since there will still be some air left, it would create friction and your magnet would eventually slow down and come to a stop (although it would spin for quite a long time.)
I think the smartctl for linux will give you the true value as well as the normalized 0-253 value.
/dev/hda
nanite:/# smartctl -a
[snip]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
Revision Number: 16
Attribute Flag Value Worst Threshold Raw Value
( 5)Reallocated Sector Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 1
I heard my drive do a read retry a couple days ago and then realized this number was at 1. I can't remember if it read 0 before. But this last number looks like it might be the raw value from the drive.
I have had problems with Palm too....
One day, while trying to take notes in class, I dropped my Palm IIIxe on the floor and broke the screen. (Whooooops.) Because I had the Palm folding keyboard that worked with the III series but not the newer models with their redesigned cases, I opted to pay Palm $100 to fix my unit rather than to go buy a new one. So I sent my device back, and a week later I get the exchange unit. I then threw some batteries in it and stick it in my backpack, and then when I go to use it two days later it doesn't turn on because the batteries are dead. I figured that the case I had it in was pushing one of the buttons and didn't really think much of it at the time, but after several more sets of dead batteries I did some testing and found that the device would run down batteries in 12 hours while sitting turned off in a drawer. Hard resets and a different brand of battery didn't fix it, so off it went back to Palm for another exchange...
One week later, the second replacement arrives. In go the batteries, and I even install a fresh copy of the Hotsync software for Windows and sync with that instead of using KPilot to restore my old data. Same problem - 12 hours later, turned off in a drawer, dead batteries. So I call up Palm again and explain my situation, and they say to do another exchange, and when I asked what I could do if the new unit had the same problem they told me I could call corporate headquarters "using the number from the website." Thankfully, the third replacement worked.
So in the end, in order to have a $100 repair performed on my Palm, I had to pay the $100, plus $5 in tax, $10 three times for return shipping and $8 for a 12 pack of batteries from the rat shack. Total of $142. Plus it took a month and three trips to the post office. Rather inconvienient, and not exactly a ringing endorsement of Palm's quality control...
If states were honestly interested in improving public safety at traffic lights, they would study the situation and vary yellow-light duration based on speed limit (and weather conditions).
I live in Silver Spring, Maryland near the DC line and commute to my summer job along Route 29. It's a reverse commute, so the traffic is light and the signals are synchronized for people going the other way - so there's lots of red lights. For most of my route, this is a six-lane divided highway with traffic lights every mile or so and a speed limit of 55. People regularly go 65 or 70 on this road (assuming it's not rush hour, when you're lucky if you're doing 2.) The yellow lights here are about 6-8 seconds long, giving you more time than you need to stop. Problem is, I'll get too used to the long yellows after a week of doing nothing but driving 29 to and from work, and then drive somewhere else and find myself running the lights because the yellows are shorter. So, varying the length of yellow lights creates its own set of problems. Now, if everybody just stopped for the yellow lights like they were supposed to it wouldn't matter, but that'll never happen...
Actually, the people I've talked to say that Micropolis made the worst hard drives ever. The spec sheets on them all looked good and the prices were right, though. We put a 9gb scsi Micropolis drive in a server at school, and it developed bad blocks after a while but never failed entirely. When I mentioned this problem to a friend, his response was "You PAID MONEY for a MICROPOLIS DRIVE????" Oh well... Just goes to show you if you put ten people in a room and ask them who makes the best hard drive, you'll get about ten different responses.
I want to start smoking just tick those people off.
Betcha didn't know that the American Legacy Foundation, who produces these ads, is funded by the tobacco companies as part of the national tobacco lawsuit settlement. So while some people (the CDC, etc.) think they're the greatest thing ever, the conspiracy theorists say that the over-the-top style is part of a tobacco industry plot to make everybody smoke more. Apparently the conspiracy theorists are at least partially right on this one...
Disney doesn't get off scot free. Everybody already knows they're evil and there's no need for debate...
I've always thought systems where entering a pirate regcode make the program malfunction are stupid, because they make the program look like it doesn't work and will most likely simply cause the user to go look elsewhere. Now if it would do something like burn your CD, but 5 minutes into it start saying "This CD was burned on an illegal copy of Program ABCD", that might actually be a little more effective. But hey, I don't write software, so what do I know?
In order to impress some classmates, I once took an old Western Digital Pirahna 200mb ide drive, pulled the lid off, stuck it in a computer, and watched it boot Windows. Nobody except me thought it would work. I was able to repeat this stunt several times with the same drive, and it didn't fail or give so much as a read error.
Sometimes computers do things they are never supposed to do. But if you store anything important on a hard drive that has been opened, you're just asking for trouble.
Does it strike anyone besides me as just a wee bit wrong to have an FTC Commissioner named Mr. Swindle?
Next, the boot question. Boot CDs are now nearly as easy to master as boot floppies, and all PCs that I've seen since 1996 support CD boot.
And the easiest way to master a boot CD using most programs (Easy CD Creator and Nero) is to get the boot image from.... a floppy!
I installed Morpheus and without asking it installed some software from Brilliant Digital. Went to their website and it looks like it's a "enhanced" media player plugin a la Onflow that seems to exist to "enhance" our advertising experience. Sounds like shovelware to me...
I know the BD software isn't essential for Morpheus because I uninstalled it and Morpheus still works. The software probably doesn't spy on you, hence they can say "no spyware", but it still installs it without asking.
Like it or not, copying commercial software is ILLEGAL. Although I agree that today's software licensing situation is beyond ridiculous, that methods used by the industry to calculate losses to "piracy" straight out of la-la land, and that small-scale piracy of products such as Windows 2000 have helped companies such as MS by letting would-be MCSE's get more practice, the laws currently on the books and the decisions currently being made by the courts say that unauthorized distribution of commerical software is copyright infringement and that such infringement is illegal.
This isn't about outlawing Linux or personal firewalls. This isn't about invasion of privacy. This isn't about the legal grey area that is file sharing software. This isn't about arresting Torvalds or raiding Transmeta. This is simply the police doing their job, enforcing well-understood and court-tested laws in what appears to be a very well-planned sting operation.
If you think that improvements in motor vehicle technology mean that 65 mph speed limits are too slow, you don't drive 120 and then expect people to listen to you when you are locked up for reckless driving. Similarly, you don't distribute warez and then go whining about censorship and the like once the law catches up with you. You won't get any points for calling it civil disobedience either, because you know full well that these people weren't doing this for the greater good, they were doing it because they wanted Photoshop for free.
Yeah, it sucks. But, as they say, if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. Besides, it's not like the police did anything new. Undercover cops posed as warez kiddies much as undercover cops have posed as drug dealers and prostitutes in the real world. With all the security technology out there, if warez kiddies couldn't avoid falling into a trap as simple as this, did they really deserve to survive?