The Internet Archive's Petabox. is a petabyte of storage in a shipping container. Each rack holds 100 terabytes, and power consumption is 6 KW per rack. Capricorn builds them for the Internet Archive.
Sounds like Google is trying that out.
There's nothing that exotic about this. The military builds racks of electronics into shipping containers all the time. It's mostly a cable management and maintenance access problem. You have to be able to do everything from the front of the rack, which requires some design work but isn't rocket science.
"Serenity" has great visuals, but the space part of the plot makes no sense at all. Space is so crowded it looks like an LA freeway at rush hour. If the bad guys had that many ships, they'd win.
Star Wars is bad enough, with gunnery accuracy that belongs to the age of sail. They can build interstellar ships and intelligent robots, but they can't build a targeting system that can score hits at point-blank range.
And it never seems to occur to anybody in the Star Wars universe that the right weapon for taking out a guy with a light saber is something like a shotgun. Always use the right tool for the job. [Best example of this in SF/fantasy is Buffy in "Innocence". She's facing the Judge, who, in the distant past, has required entire armies to take him down. She gets his attention by shooting him with a small crossbow. He yells at her "You're a fool. No weapon forged can stop me". Buffy replies "That was then. This is now.", as she picks up and aims a shoulder-fired antitank weapon, with which she blows the Judge into very tiny pieces.]
Many of the early Edison recordings are of surprisingly good quality. It turns out that the mechanical recording process wasn't too bad. The tinny quality of early cylinder recordings came from the mechanical playback process, which was terrible. When those cylinders are played with modern equipment, they sound much better.
The Amberoll cylinders were tough, too. They had to be, to survive repeated mechanical playback, with a stylus pressure of about a pound.
So they're much tougher than vinyl records.
There's now optical equipment for reading damaged or fragile cylinders and records. UCSB isn't using it, but it's available for the tough cases.
Some of these recordings are a century old. The original media are still playable. It's sad that we don't have something to transcribe them to that will be playable a century from now. All we can do is hope that someone will recopy the files periodically.
The company that makes this, NemesysCo., has a whole line of voice analysis products, some of which are downloadable. At the bottom of the line, there's "Love Detector". Only $19.99 for Pocket PC, $49.95 for Windows PC.
Then there's the cellular phone "Love Detector" service. You call someone via their system, and after the call, you get an SMS message with their analysis. (TV commercial here. In Hebrew, for the Israeli version.)
Moving up the product line a bit, they offer Ex-Sense, their low-end lie detector product. Only $149, including phone connector cable. Screenshots here.
Then there's Ex-Sense Pro, at $499. Unclear what you get with the "Pro" version.
All these, NemesysCo says, use the same technology as Gatekeeper.
As ZDnet points out, the $100 laptop is bogus. It doesn't even exist as a prototype. The device pictured is a dummy. It's supposed to use some vaporware "e-ink" display. It's not currently buildable for $100. And if it was, there would be commercial models out before Negroponte's boondoggle delivered.
But most importantly, it's not a cell phone.. The best thing that high-tech has given the third world is cell phones. You can get a cell phone connection in almost all third-world cities, where most of the people are. The GSM consortium is trying to push handsets down to $30.
The future in the third world is cell phones with Internet access, not vaporware laptops with hand cranks.
Those two snippets of code don't constitute a copyright violation. They're a functional part. You more or less have to do that decryption that way. That makes it uncopyrightable. This has come up before, usually in the context of "lockout codes" for ink cartridges or game cartridges.
But even if a work is in some sense "original" under 102(a), it still may not be copyrightable
because 102(b) provides that "[i]n no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship
extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery,
regardless of [its] form." 17 U.S.C. 102(b)....
For similar reasons, when external factors constrain the choice of expressive vehicle, the doctrine
of "scènes à faire"--"scenes," in other words, "that must be done"--precludes copyright protection. See Twentieth Century Fox Film, 361 F.3d at 319-20; see generally Nimmer 13.03[B][4]. In the literary
context, the doctrine means that certain phrases that are "standard, stock, . . . or that necessarily follow from
a common theme or setting" may not obtain copyright protection. Gates Rubber, 9 F.3d at 838. In the
computer-software context, the doctrine means that the elements of a program dictated by practical
realities--e.g., by hardware standards and mechanical specifications, software standards and compatibility
requirements, computer manufacturer design standards, target industry practices, and standard computer
programming practices--may not obtain protection. Id. (citing case examples); see Sega Enters., 977 F.2d
at 1524 ("To the extent that a work is functional or factual, it may be copied."); Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 960 F.2d 1465, 1473 (9th Cir. 1992) (affirming district court's finding that "[p]laintiffs
may not claim copyright protection of an . . . expression that is, if not standard, then commonplace in the
computer software industry"). As "an industry-wide goal," programming "[e]fficiency" represents an
external constraint that figures prominently in the copyrightability of computer programs. Altai, 982 F.2d
at 708.
Some guy recently bought a paper copy of Encyclopedia Brittanica and read through it. Then he wrote a book about doing it. Amazon sales rank around 5000.
For some file types, Windows File Manager opens a low-end application in the left part of the filename window specific to the file type. You can play MIDI files and see JPEG thumbnails, for example.
That's the beginning of a "type manager" interface. There's presumably some way to register your own application with File Manager so that it is automatically invoked when the right type of file comes along, but I'm not currently doing Win32 programming, so I don't know which API to look at.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, two years from now, if your number plates aren't readable, your car doesn't look like the proper model for the plates, or something in your dossier indicates you're suspicious, you'll be physically prevented from entering Central London.
Traffic lights and arrows will divert you to an inspection lane. Vehicles that don't comply will be brought to a very abrubt stop.
Re:Needed: Automatic "EULA-reject" mode
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
EULA's themselves are not legally enforcable so there's no need.
We need a mode for both web browsing and installs that rejects any end user license agreement in a legally enforceable way. Employee PCs in organizations with IT departments should have this on by default.
Web browsers should present a header which has some disclaimer like "The user of this web browser is not authorized to enter into contracts with any party on behalf of XXX company. Any agreement purportedly entered into via this network connection is null and void".
It would be desirable to have a machine-readable standard for this, so web servers can determine whether they should deny access to certain pages or forms. Courts have recognized the "robots.txt" file convention, so there's legal precedent for this. (eBay vs. Bidder's Edge) It doesn't require legislation; a widely used standard would be sufficient. This is a task for W3C.
Direct install via CD should have a similar convention, but that's harder to do. First, fix it in web browsers.
Sony CEO didn't support Bush in 2004
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So Sony is in real trouble. Watch this turn into a criminal case.
Has anyone filed a criminal complaint yet?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you're a sysadmin cleaning this crap out of a big collection of computers, you're in a good position to file a criminal complaint with the Department of Justice. And you should. A crime has been committed.
Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, sees this as a question of how well written their EULA is, a topic of much conversation in the media lately.
But either way, she noted over IM, "if the EULA did not advise the user that s/he was installing software on the machine that would collect information and/or open the machine to vulnerabilities, then the software arguably violates 18 usc 1030(a)(5)(A)." That's a criminal charge. But Granick doesn't see criminal prosecution of Sony anytime soon.
"The (Department of Justice) is not going to charge Sony.... They have never charged a big corporation with a computer crime."
In order to invoke 18 USC 1030, you have to show $5,000 in damages or damage to a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense or national security. That's another interesting point of Kaminsky's work, because it shows networks that are part of national security and civil infrastructure faithfully reporting their existance back to Sony, along with as yet unknown information about the compromised computers.
For historical reasons, most of the UNIX-like operating systems have terrible interprocess communication mechanisms. Early UNIX only had pipes. This started a tradition that interprocess communication works like I/O, leading to named pipes, sockets, and domain sockets.
The result is a set of rather slow interprocess communication mechanisms. (One can do worse. In the old MacOS, interprocess communication could only pass one message per vertical refresh time, and this wasn't documented.)
On top of those mechanisms, even slower interprocess communication systems are typically implemented, such as OpenRPC and CORBA.
(For even more inefficiency, there's XPC. In Perl. But I digress.)
Because of this history, there's a perception that interprocess communication has to be slow. It doesn't.
What you really want looks more like what QNX has - fast interprocess messaging that interacts properly with the scheduler. QNX has to have interprocess communication done right, because it does everything through it, including all I/O. This works out quite well. You take a performance hit (maybe 20% for this), but you get much of that back because the higher levels become more efficient when built on good IPC.
The QNX messaging primitives are available for Linux, although the implementation isn't good enough for inclusion in the standard kernel. That work should be redone for the current kernel.
IPC/scheduler interaction really matters. If you get it wrong, each interprocess transaction results in an extra pass through the scheduler, or worse, both the sending process
and the receiving process lose their turn at the CPU. This is easy to test. Start up two processes that communicate using your IPC mechanism. Measure the performance. Then start up a compute-bound process and measure again. If the IPC rate drops by much more than a factor of 2, something is wrong. Don't be surprised if it drops by two orders of magnitude. That's an indication that IPC/scheduler interaction was botched.
Sun addressed this in the mid-1990s with their "Doors" interface in Solaris, which had roughly the right primitives. But that idea never caught on.
The article here implements a message-passing system via shared memory, which is not exactly a new idea, even for UNIX. I think it first appeared in MERT, in the 1970s. It's an attempt to solve at the user level something that the OS should be doing for you.
Shared memory is a hack. It's hard to make it work right. With it, one process can crash other processes in hard-to-debug ways.
Sometimes you need it because you're moving vast amounts of data, (by which I mean more than just a video stream) but that's rarely the case.
TOKYO and SANTA CLARA, CA DECEMBER 7, 2004 "Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that the companies have been collaborating on bringing advanced graphics technology and computer entertainment technology to SCEI's highly anticipated next-generation computer entertainment system. Both companies are jointly developing a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) incorporating NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce(TM) and SCEI's system solutions for next-generation computer entertainment systems featuring the Cell* processor".
5,426,762 -- "System for determining a truth of software in an information processing apparatus". That's the lockout system for non-Nintendo game cartridges. You don't want to include that in an emulator. Expires January 24, 2006, anyway.
5,207,426 -- "Controller for a game machine". Covers the physical design of the game controller. Irrelevant for an emulator.
5,070,479 -- "External memory having an authenticating processor and method of operating same". More lockout system stuff. Expires January 24, 2006, anyway.
4,799,635 -- "System for determining authenticity of an external memory used in an information processing apparatus". Still more lockout stuff. Appears to expire December 23, 2005.
4,687,200 -- "Multi-directional switch" This is about how to make a cheap four-direction arrow key switch.
None of those would ever have interfered with building an emulator.
The design patents cover the "ornamental design" of the case and cartridge. They're irrelevant to an emulator.
The copyright issues are a separate problem, and probably a bigger one.
There are several approaches to power distribution. One is "telco type"
-48VDC distribution. This is most appropriate when the configuration doesn't change much. Wiring usually involves big cables and screw lugs. Plugs aren't standardized. More importantly, there's no set of simple rules, like the UL/NEMA/NEC standards that govern plugs, outlets, wiring, and circuit breakers, that make 120V power distribution safe without having to measure everything.
In the 120VAC world, everything has been designed so that end users don't have to worry much about overloading the wiring. If they do, a circuit breaker will trip.
An ordinary power plug, a "5-15P", can handle 15A, so if you have an outlet strip, there is a breaker to protect the plug and cord from overload, should the total load on the power strip exceed 15A. A 20A power strip must have a "L5-20P" plug, the big twist-lock type.
As soon as you get away from 120VAC, you lose that designed-in idiot-proofing. (Europe is still struggling in this area, with too many different connectors, so you don't get the same level of idiot-proofing in the 220VAC part of the world.) So once you leave 120VAC, you're going to need power engineering skills. (Clamp-around ammeters are very useful, and yes, you can get them for DC.)
There's also 400Hz AC distribution, which allows for smaller transformers and filter caps in power supplies. 400Hz rackmount servers are available. Aircraft, military, and some mainframe systems use 400Hz. It's not a big win in this era of switching power supplies.
There's 3-phase power distribution. Here's a 3-phase outlet strip. More to the point, there's an efficiency gain in running a UPS from 3-phase power, and big UPSs are usually 3-phase, at least on the input side. Arguably, power should be 3-phase down to the point where it's rectified to DC, because 3-phase rectifiers need far less filtering, but nobody does this for small loads.
American Power Conversion has been pushing the idea of integrating power conversion, cable management, and cooling into standard racks.
Classically, those are the big problems in big computer systems. Seymour Cray used to say that the big problems were "the thickness of the (wiring) mat" and "getting rid of the heat". By that standard, APC is now as much of a computer manufacturer as, say, Dell; neither makes motherboards or ICs, they just package gear from others. Which is a wierd thought.
All of this power is going to be converted again, at least once, and probably twice, before it hits the semiconductors. That's the job of point-of-load DC to DC converters, usually ICs on the board that do the final conversion. Typically, when you get to the computer, there's a conversion from the line voltage (120-240VAC, 48VDC, etc) to internal distribution voltages of 5-12VDC, then another conversion and regulation just before each device, usually downward to something like 3.3VDC. This keeps transient load changes from one device from affecting others. There may be on-chip regulation, too. The losses at those last stages of conversion are usually the biggest ones in the whole chain.
The capacitor story is covered properly, with manufacturer names and electrolyte formulas, in IEEE Spectrum for April, 2003.
But you have to be an IEEE member to read it.
To see if the excessive hydrogen was being produced
by impurities in the capacitor foil, wavelength
dispersive x-ray spectrographic (WDS) analyses of
foils from a capacitor from the lot of Taiwanese
capacitors known to bulge and foils from a capacitor
from a lot of non-bulging Japanese capacitors were
performed.
A small amount of magnesium was
detected in both the Taiwanese and Japanese foils, and
copper was detected in the Taiwanese foils alone (see
Table 1). Ignoring the topical constituents of oxygen
and carbon, the purity of the cathodic aluminum foil
from the Japanese capacitor worked out to be
approximately 99.1 wt%, which was within the limit
set by Dapo. The purity of the cathodic aluminum foil
from the Taiwanese capacitor was approximately
97.5%,which was below the minimum value stated by
Dapo. The insufficient purity of the Taiwanese
aluminum foil could cause gaseous hydrogen
production that would not be impeded by a
depolarizer, but the galvanic couples were not thought
to be sufficient to account for the rapid production of
hydrogen gas that was necessary to cause the
relatively rapid bulging of the capacitor cans.
There were other anomalies in the ion
chromatographic analyses,chiefly variations in the
amounts of ammonium and phosphate ions present.
Ammonium ions in water form ammonium hydroxide,
which is strongly basic. This raised concerns about the
pH of the electrolyte in the bulging capacitors,as a
review of the chemical properties of aluminum oxide -
the dielectric - showed that it is slightly soluble in
basic solutions (but not in acidic)[8 ]. Measuring the
pH of electrolytes from capacitors from the Taiwanese
lot known to bulge and from a Japanese lot that had
not exhibited bulging showed that the electrolytes of
the bulging lot were weakly basic (7 < pH < 8),while
those of the non-bulging lot were acidic (pH 4).
And that's the cause - internal corrosion because the electrolyte has a highly acidic Ph.
More and more web pages now run up the CPU, network, and cache load, even when their window is not in the foreground. Now there's this annoying "Which page is killing performance" problem.
We actually had occasion to use a tinfoil hat when testing the Overbot for the DARPA Grand Challenge. To simulate a loss of GPS signal, we put a tinfoil hat over the GPS antenna.
Our first hat was a stainless steel mixing bowl.
GPS reception continued. We were even able to get WAAS and Omnistar HP lockup with the mixing bowl on top of the antenna.
An actual tinfoil hat cut off more of GPS, but we could still get "single" GPS signals, although not the corrections for Omnistar.
Slashdot Mirror
Just call the nearest Sony Style retail store and ask. Let them know your concerns.
Sounds like Google is trying that out.
There's nothing that exotic about this. The military builds racks of electronics into shipping containers all the time. It's mostly a cable management and maintenance access problem. You have to be able to do everything from the front of the rack, which requires some design work but isn't rocket science.
Star Wars is bad enough, with gunnery accuracy that belongs to the age of sail. They can build interstellar ships and intelligent robots, but they can't build a targeting system that can score hits at point-blank range.
And it never seems to occur to anybody in the Star Wars universe that the right weapon for taking out a guy with a light saber is something like a shotgun. Always use the right tool for the job. [Best example of this in SF/fantasy is Buffy in "Innocence". She's facing the Judge, who, in the distant past, has required entire armies to take him down. She gets his attention by shooting him with a small crossbow. He yells at her "You're a fool. No weapon forged can stop me". Buffy replies "That was then. This is now.", as she picks up and aims a shoulder-fired antitank weapon, with which she blows the Judge into very tiny pieces.]
The Amberoll cylinders were tough, too. They had to be, to survive repeated mechanical playback, with a stylus pressure of about a pound. So they're much tougher than vinyl records.
There's now optical equipment for reading damaged or fragile cylinders and records. UCSB isn't using it, but it's available for the tough cases.
Some of these recordings are a century old. The original media are still playable. It's sad that we don't have something to transcribe them to that will be playable a century from now. All we can do is hope that someone will recopy the files periodically.
Then there's the cellular phone "Love Detector" service. You call someone via their system, and after the call, you get an SMS message with their analysis. (TV commercial here. In Hebrew, for the Israeli version.)
Moving up the product line a bit, they offer Ex-Sense, their low-end lie detector product. Only $149, including phone connector cable. Screenshots here.
Then there's Ex-Sense Pro, at $499. Unclear what you get with the "Pro" version.
All these, NemesysCo says, use the same technology as Gatekeeper.
But most importantly, it's not a cell phone.. The best thing that high-tech has given the third world is cell phones. You can get a cell phone connection in almost all third-world cities, where most of the people are. The GSM consortium is trying to push handsets down to $30. The future in the third world is cell phones with Internet access, not vaporware laptops with hand cranks.
From the SCC vs Lexmark appellate decision:
But even if a work is in some sense "original" under 102(a), it still may not be copyrightable because 102(b) provides that "[i]n no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of [its] form." 17 U.S.C. 102(b). ...
For similar reasons, when external factors constrain the choice of expressive vehicle, the doctrine of "scènes à faire"--"scenes," in other words, "that must be done"--precludes copyright protection. See Twentieth Century Fox Film, 361 F.3d at 319-20; see generally Nimmer 13.03[B][4]. In the literary context, the doctrine means that certain phrases that are "standard, stock, . . . or that necessarily follow from a common theme or setting" may not obtain copyright protection. Gates Rubber, 9 F.3d at 838. In the computer-software context, the doctrine means that the elements of a program dictated by practical realities--e.g., by hardware standards and mechanical specifications, software standards and compatibility requirements, computer manufacturer design standards, target industry practices, and standard computer programming practices--may not obtain protection. Id. (citing case examples); see Sega Enters., 977 F.2d at 1524 ("To the extent that a work is functional or factual, it may be copied."); Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 960 F.2d 1465, 1473 (9th Cir. 1992) (affirming district court's finding that "[p]laintiffs may not claim copyright protection of an . . . expression that is, if not standard, then commonplace in the computer software industry"). As "an industry-wide goal," programming "[e]fficiency" represents an external constraint that figures prominently in the copyrightability of computer programs. Altai, 982 F.2d at 708.
Maybe he was the inspiration for this guy.
We'll be back with "The Return of Jar-Jar" after these messages.
That's the beginning of a "type manager" interface. There's presumably some way to register your own application with File Manager so that it is automatically invoked when the right type of file comes along, but I'm not currently doing Win32 programming, so I don't know which API to look at.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, two years from now, if your number plates aren't readable, your car doesn't look like the proper model for the plates, or something in your dossier indicates you're suspicious, you'll be physically prevented from entering Central London. Traffic lights and arrows will divert you to an inspection lane. Vehicles that don't comply will be brought to a very abrubt stop.
You wish.
The general trend in the courts seems to be roughly as follows:
Web browsers should present a header which has some disclaimer like "The user of this web browser is not authorized to enter into contracts with any party on behalf of XXX company. Any agreement purportedly entered into via this network connection is null and void". It would be desirable to have a machine-readable standard for this, so web servers can determine whether they should deny access to certain pages or forms. Courts have recognized the "robots.txt" file convention, so there's legal precedent for this. (eBay vs. Bidder's Edge) It doesn't require legislation; a widely used standard would be sufficient. This is a task for W3C.
Direct install via CD should have a similar convention, but that's harder to do. First, fix it in web browsers.
So Sony is in real trouble. Watch this turn into a criminal case.
Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, sees this as a question of how well written their EULA is, a topic of much conversation in the media lately.
But either way, she noted over IM, "if the EULA did not advise the user that s/he was installing software on the machine that would collect information and/or open the machine to vulnerabilities, then the software arguably violates 18 usc 1030(a)(5)(A)." That's a criminal charge. But Granick doesn't see criminal prosecution of Sony anytime soon.
"The (Department of Justice) is not going to charge Sony.... They have never charged a big corporation with a computer crime."
In order to invoke 18 USC 1030, you have to show $5,000 in damages or damage to a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense or national security. That's another interesting point of Kaminsky's work, because it shows networks that are part of national security and civil infrastructure faithfully reporting their existance back to Sony, along with as yet unknown information about the compromised computers.
But he's way behind on speed. The current record holder is "Teach Yourself UNIX in 10 minutes".
You may also need "Advanced Speed Typing" and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Treatment.
On top of those mechanisms, even slower interprocess communication systems are typically implemented, such as OpenRPC and CORBA. (For even more inefficiency, there's XPC. In Perl. But I digress.)
Because of this history, there's a perception that interprocess communication has to be slow. It doesn't.
What you really want looks more like what QNX has - fast interprocess messaging that interacts properly with the scheduler. QNX has to have interprocess communication done right, because it does everything through it, including all I/O. This works out quite well. You take a performance hit (maybe 20% for this), but you get much of that back because the higher levels become more efficient when built on good IPC.
The QNX messaging primitives are available for Linux, although the implementation isn't good enough for inclusion in the standard kernel. That work should be redone for the current kernel.
IPC/scheduler interaction really matters. If you get it wrong, each interprocess transaction results in an extra pass through the scheduler, or worse, both the sending process and the receiving process lose their turn at the CPU. This is easy to test. Start up two processes that communicate using your IPC mechanism. Measure the performance. Then start up a compute-bound process and measure again. If the IPC rate drops by much more than a factor of 2, something is wrong. Don't be surprised if it drops by two orders of magnitude. That's an indication that IPC/scheduler interaction was botched.
Sun addressed this in the mid-1990s with their "Doors" interface in Solaris, which had roughly the right primitives. But that idea never caught on.
The article here implements a message-passing system via shared memory, which is not exactly a new idea, even for UNIX. I think it first appeared in MERT, in the 1970s. It's an attempt to solve at the user level something that the OS should be doing for you.
Shared memory is a hack. It's hard to make it work right. With it, one process can crash other processes in hard-to-debug ways. Sometimes you need it because you're moving vast amounts of data, (by which I mean more than just a video stream) but that's rarely the case.
SCEA press release:
SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND NVIDIA ANNOUNCE JOINT GPU DEVELOPMENT FOR SCEI'S NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM> .
TOKYO and SANTA CLARA, CA
DECEMBER 7, 2004
"Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that the companies have been collaborating on bringing advanced graphics technology and computer entertainment technology to SCEI's highly anticipated next-generation computer entertainment system. Both companies are jointly developing a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) incorporating NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce(TM) and SCEI's system solutions for next-generation computer entertainment systems featuring the Cell* processor".
-
5,426,762 -- "System for determining a truth of software in an information processing apparatus".
-
5,207,426 -- "Controller for a game machine".
-
5,070,479 -- "External memory having an authenticating processor and method of operating same".
-
4,799,635 -- "System for determining authenticity of an external memory used in an information processing apparatus".
-
4,687,200 -- "Multi-directional switch"
None of those would ever have interfered with building an emulator.That's the lockout system for non-Nintendo game cartridges. You don't want to include that in an emulator. Expires January 24, 2006, anyway.
Covers the physical design of the game controller. Irrelevant for an emulator.
More lockout system stuff. Expires January 24, 2006, anyway.
Still more lockout stuff. Appears to expire December 23, 2005.
This is about how to make a cheap four-direction arrow key switch.
The design patents cover the "ornamental design" of the case and cartridge. They're irrelevant to an emulator.
The copyright issues are a separate problem, and probably a bigger one.
If anybody cares, there's still a Enternet 300 support site.
Results 1 - 10 of about 191,000 for 'sendmail "security hole"'
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,910,000 for 'sendmail bug'.
Any questions?
There are several approaches to power distribution. One is "telco type" -48VDC distribution. This is most appropriate when the configuration doesn't change much. Wiring usually involves big cables and screw lugs. Plugs aren't standardized. More importantly, there's no set of simple rules, like the UL/NEMA/NEC standards that govern plugs, outlets, wiring, and circuit breakers, that make 120V power distribution safe without having to measure everything.
In the 120VAC world, everything has been designed so that end users don't have to worry much about overloading the wiring. If they do, a circuit breaker will trip. An ordinary power plug, a "5-15P", can handle 15A, so if you have an outlet strip, there is a breaker to protect the plug and cord from overload, should the total load on the power strip exceed 15A. A 20A power strip must have a "L5-20P" plug, the big twist-lock type. As soon as you get away from 120VAC, you lose that designed-in idiot-proofing. (Europe is still struggling in this area, with too many different connectors, so you don't get the same level of idiot-proofing in the 220VAC part of the world.) So once you leave 120VAC, you're going to need power engineering skills. (Clamp-around ammeters are very useful, and yes, you can get them for DC.)
There's also 400Hz AC distribution, which allows for smaller transformers and filter caps in power supplies. 400Hz rackmount servers are available. Aircraft, military, and some mainframe systems use 400Hz. It's not a big win in this era of switching power supplies.
There's 3-phase power distribution. Here's a 3-phase outlet strip. More to the point, there's an efficiency gain in running a UPS from 3-phase power, and big UPSs are usually 3-phase, at least on the input side. Arguably, power should be 3-phase down to the point where it's rectified to DC, because 3-phase rectifiers need far less filtering, but nobody does this for small loads.
American Power Conversion has been pushing the idea of integrating power conversion, cable management, and cooling into standard racks. Classically, those are the big problems in big computer systems. Seymour Cray used to say that the big problems were "the thickness of the (wiring) mat" and "getting rid of the heat". By that standard, APC is now as much of a computer manufacturer as, say, Dell; neither makes motherboards or ICs, they just package gear from others. Which is a wierd thought.
All of this power is going to be converted again, at least once, and probably twice, before it hits the semiconductors. That's the job of point-of-load DC to DC converters, usually ICs on the board that do the final conversion. Typically, when you get to the computer, there's a conversion from the line voltage (120-240VAC, 48VDC, etc) to internal distribution voltages of 5-12VDC, then another conversion and regulation just before each device, usually downward to something like 3.3VDC. This keeps transient load changes from one device from affecting others. There may be on-chip regulation, too. The losses at those last stages of conversion are usually the biggest ones in the whole chain.
The definitive study, from The Computer Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) Electronic Products and Systems Center , is "Identification of Missing or Insufficient Electrolyte Constituents in Failed Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors". CALCE actually took capacitors apart and analyzed the electrolyte.
To see if the excessive hydrogen was being produced by impurities in the capacitor foil, wavelength dispersive x-ray spectrographic (WDS) analyses of foils from a capacitor from the lot of Taiwanese capacitors known to bulge and foils from a capacitor from a lot of non-bulging Japanese capacitors were performed.
A small amount of magnesium was detected in both the Taiwanese and Japanese foils, and copper was detected in the Taiwanese foils alone (see Table 1). Ignoring the topical constituents of oxygen and carbon, the purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Japanese capacitor worked out to be approximately 99.1 wt%, which was within the limit set by Dapo. The purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Taiwanese capacitor was approximately 97.5%,which was below the minimum value stated by Dapo. The insufficient purity of the Taiwanese aluminum foil could cause gaseous hydrogen production that would not be impeded by a depolarizer, but the galvanic couples were not thought to be sufficient to account for the rapid production of hydrogen gas that was necessary to cause the relatively rapid bulging of the capacitor cans. There were other anomalies in the ion chromatographic analyses,chiefly variations in the amounts of ammonium and phosphate ions present. Ammonium ions in water form ammonium hydroxide, which is strongly basic. This raised concerns about the pH of the electrolyte in the bulging capacitors,as a review of the chemical properties of aluminum oxide - the dielectric - showed that it is slightly soluble in basic solutions (but not in acidic)[8 ]. Measuring the pH of electrolytes from capacitors from the Taiwanese lot known to bulge and from a Japanese lot that had not exhibited bulging showed that the electrolytes of the bulging lot were weakly basic (7 < pH < 8),while those of the non-bulging lot were acidic (pH 4).
And that's the cause - internal corrosion because the electrolyte has a highly acidic Ph.
And, most of the time, it's ad content.
Our first hat was a stainless steel mixing bowl. GPS reception continued. We were even able to get WAAS and Omnistar HP lockup with the mixing bowl on top of the antenna.
An actual tinfoil hat cut off more of GPS, but we could still get "single" GPS signals, although not the corrections for Omnistar.
So the radiolocation bands really do get through.