The biggest culprits were the North American version of the Atari 7800, whose IPL used an RSA signature to verify that Atari had approved the program
Yeah, except for the part where the 7800 was a complete failure because (after releasing only a couple thousand in 1984), Atari put them on the shelf for two years. They only sold them again when they got tired of them taking up warehouse space. Besides, what REALLY happened was that the C64 and IBM PC killed off consoles from 1984 to 1986 because they had floppy drives, and you could pirate games much easier than from cartridges.
But yeah, the 7800 used a 960-bit RSA encryption of a hash of the game contents, which provided the delay to watch the shiny Atari logo during start-up. There were potential ways around it, but in the end it was the Atari ST signature program being found on a hard drive in a dumpster that opened it up. (IIRC, the first time it was found along with the Lynx and Jaguar signature programs, then a few years later found again on another dumpster hard drive.) The CIC chip is a whole other story, but it eventually got reverse-engineered, thanks in part to Tengen's clone chip.
The other flight was officially a demo flight but brought up actual cargo, just as SpaceX's demo flight did. Needs more adjectives like "second private firm to send cargo to ISS under contract" or something like that. I still think their previous flight was more important.
Part of the problem is what is being defined as viable: asteroids with significant quantities of platinum-group metals (or water ice), somewhere along Earth's solar orbit (to avoid needing too much delta-V). If we ever reach the point where it becomes viable to send ships out to the asteroid belt, that will change. It currently takes 2 years for a return Mars mission, an asteroid mission could easily be 3-5 years. That would be a lot of resources to bring along (not just food air and water, but medical support crew, etc.) for a human mission, but an unmanned mission could make it possible.
The problem is that once you get them split up small enough, they're all whizzing around and there are a lot more that can hit you. And even if you get them, eventually some alien flying saucers get pissed off and start shooting lasers at you.
They're worried about the avionics on the vehicle. It would be kind of bad if it got zapped today by something that is likely to be gone tomorrow. Also remember that only Soyuz and Dragon are two-way, so once they detach it from ISS, all it needs to do is a re-entry burn.
Yes, I've also had the glitches that cause timers to slip an hour back every few months. And after TVGOS was pulled, my 7000 locked up twice to the point where I had to disconnect the power AND the antenna to fix it. I think a station was trying to extend its PSIP guide beyond 24 hours, and there were glitches in either the guide data or how the 7000 handled it.
I'm going to say no. Transmitters don't work that way. You don't just raise/lower your ERP on a whim, and it would be a pain in the ass to intentionally design it to work that way.
Have you tried manually rotating your antenna? ATSC reception does seem to be dependent upon aiming your antenna properly, especially when you're close enough to the transmitter for multipath reflections to be strong. Also, the usual: mount the antenna as high as possible (tough luck if you live in an apartment), and make sure the connections on an outdoor antenna aren't getting corroded. Mine's been up for over 10 years, and it made a big difference a few months ago when I went up and wiggled/re-tightened the connections a bit. And get a UHF/VHF antenna if you have stations broadcasting on VHF. If you live in a downtown high-rise situation, it could be multipath and you need an attenuator in-line on your antenna wire.
Also, weather can be a problem. Wind can rotate the antenna off-aim, and rain can cause problems too, probably multipath.
If the antenna is too inconvenient to rotate while watching for signal quality, just cram the end of about 15 feet of speaker wire into the center of the F connector, hold it out with your hands, and point the wire in different directions while watching signal quality to find the proper direction. If it's a problem to have a real roof antenna (apartment, etc.), this wire can even be put under a rug and used as an antenna.
I'm going to bet your problem is more due to bad antenna than weak signal.
We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick.
The problem is that cable viewers are still a majority. Tivo had a chance to get me as a customer a few years ago right after the digital switchover, but all their stuff at the time seemed to be aimed at cable viewers, and certainly not ATSC viewers. That's when I got a CM 7000, which was decent, but it crashed a lot, losing 2 minutes of what I was watching live, and what was recording on another channel, too. And it became a lot less useful once OTA TVGOS got yanked by (mac)Rovi(sion), and PSIP guides only went to 12 hours (right now only two channels here go to 24 hours, PBS and FOX). Also, its storage format was proprietary, so I wouldn't expect to be able to get MPEG2 files out of the 7500 either. See where it says "Unknown if external HDD can be read by a Linux box or a PC with a Linux file system driver"? Having access to the Rovi guide is nice, though.
There was also some crappy OTA DVR I found (I can't remember its name) which uses an NTFS (!) formatted hard drive to record raw MPEG2 TS, but its user interface made dog poop look good. I think it didn't do guides at all and only had VCR-style "time / channel / length" recording.
If you can live without "simple", there is MythTV. A few months ago, I built myself a MythTV box using dual Hauppage 2250s (bought a few months apart) for four tuners. It's definitely not plug and play. But I get direct MPEG2 transport stream rips that I can copy and re-encode however and whenever I want. Over the past six months or so, I filled up a 1.5GB partition as I learned how to use it, and only recently did I finally get the hang of cutting commercials. (HDTV is about 5GB an hour of which 1GB is commercials!) I'm still using the OTA guide with it, but there is a proper guide that you can subscribe to.
The thing about cutting commercials is that I do it manually, because MythTV's detection has false positives. Sometimes I even see a commercial I drop out of editing to watch, or even leave in. (like State Farm's "superfans" commercials during SNL) And I do watch some stuff live, but I'm old enough to ignore commercials and do something else for 3 minutes. Also, sometimes I skip back to check something, and commercials let me catch up to live. I really only cut commercials because of how much disk space they take up.
And the best part of MythTV? I can run the frontend on my laptop and stream over wireless. So I can even watch live TV in the bathroom.
I had the Channel Master 7000 version of that, which was pretty good except that it had a tendency to crash while I was watching something, and usually took 2 minutes to reboot, which meant I missed the show that I was watching, and possibly another being recorded on the other tuner. It also sucked when OTA TVGOS schedules got yanked by (mac)Rovi(sion). I've since moved on to a MythTV box, which I'll talk about in a post replying to GP.
Actually there are only 4 million OUIs available, because one bit is for multicast and another bit is for "local administration" addresses. But yeah, there are still a lot. In no way does it mean that they are about to flood the world with Ethernet devices. Most likely it means that they wanted to make soda machines with Ethernet interfaces. If you add a chip to your own board (as opposed to, say, a PCI card), you do not get a MAC address from the chip manufacturer. The important thing is that 16 million addresses is the standard allocation size. You can't even get a second one until you can prove that you've used up at least 95% of those 16 million addresses in actual Ethernet devices.
And as someone else has pointed out, this was registered at least three years ago. So OMGWTFBBQBLOGSPAM. All we have here is a clueless blogger who apparently doesn't understand OUI allocations.
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The biggest culprits were the North American version of the Atari 7800, whose IPL used an RSA signature to verify that Atari had approved the program
Yeah, except for the part where the 7800 was a complete failure because (after releasing only a couple thousand in 1984), Atari put them on the shelf for two years. They only sold them again when they got tired of them taking up warehouse space. Besides, what REALLY happened was that the C64 and IBM PC killed off consoles from 1984 to 1986 because they had floppy drives, and you could pirate games much easier than from cartridges.
But yeah, the 7800 used a 960-bit RSA encryption of a hash of the game contents, which provided the delay to watch the shiny Atari logo during start-up. There were potential ways around it, but in the end it was the Atari ST signature program being found on a hard drive in a dumpster that opened it up. (IIRC, the first time it was found along with the Lynx and Jaguar signature programs, then a few years later found again on another dumpster hard drive.) The CIC chip is a whole other story, but it eventually got reverse-engineered, thanks in part to Tengen's clone chip.
Fedora 21: Old Enough to Drink!
The other flight was officially a demo flight but brought up actual cargo, just as SpaceX's demo flight did. Needs more adjectives like "second private firm to send cargo to ISS under contract" or something like that. I still think their previous flight was more important.
And no way to rip the DVDs? You inhuman monster!
Wow. It's like Slashdot Beta on steroids.
Don't forget the light speed drives you'll need. Those are probably a bit farther in the future.
Part of the problem is what is being defined as viable: asteroids with significant quantities of platinum-group metals (or water ice), somewhere along Earth's solar orbit (to avoid needing too much delta-V). If we ever reach the point where it becomes viable to send ships out to the asteroid belt, that will change. It currently takes 2 years for a return Mars mission, an asteroid mission could easily be 3-5 years. That would be a lot of resources to bring along (not just food air and water, but medical support crew, etc.) for a human mission, but an unmanned mission could make it possible.
The problem is that once you get them split up small enough, they're all whizzing around and there are a lot more that can hit you. And even if you get them, eventually some alien flying saucers get pissed off and start shooting lasers at you.
The only way to win is not to play.
A more accurate car analogy would be GM wanting to build a car using your technology and asking you how many assembly line workers it would take.
And to think, they rejected my Ask Slashdot submission on how to find a cheat code on my bank's web site for unlimited moneys
Just walk up to any ATM and press: up up down down left right left right B A start.
They're worried about the avionics on the vehicle. It would be kind of bad if it got zapped today by something that is likely to be gone tomorrow. Also remember that only Soyuz and Dragon are two-way, so once they detach it from ISS, all it needs to do is a re-entry burn.
About once every 500 years you get a really bad one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
Because it's about GNU control.
Yes, I've also had the glitches that cause timers to slip an hour back every few months. And after TVGOS was pulled, my 7000 locked up twice to the point where I had to disconnect the power AND the antenna to fix it. I think a station was trying to extend its PSIP guide beyond 24 hours, and there were glitches in either the guide data or how the 7000 handled it.
Yo dawg, we heard you were digging a pipe, so we put a pipe in your pipe so you can tunnel while you tunnel.
USR's problem was 3Com. And it's too bad your Telebit can't find any other whales to sing to.
I'm going to say no. Transmitters don't work that way. You don't just raise/lower your ERP on a whim, and it would be a pain in the ass to intentionally design it to work that way.
Have you tried manually rotating your antenna? ATSC reception does seem to be dependent upon aiming your antenna properly, especially when you're close enough to the transmitter for multipath reflections to be strong. Also, the usual: mount the antenna as high as possible (tough luck if you live in an apartment), and make sure the connections on an outdoor antenna aren't getting corroded. Mine's been up for over 10 years, and it made a big difference a few months ago when I went up and wiggled/re-tightened the connections a bit. And get a UHF/VHF antenna if you have stations broadcasting on VHF. If you live in a downtown high-rise situation, it could be multipath and you need an attenuator in-line on your antenna wire.
Also, weather can be a problem. Wind can rotate the antenna off-aim, and rain can cause problems too, probably multipath.
If the antenna is too inconvenient to rotate while watching for signal quality, just cram the end of about 15 feet of speaker wire into the center of the F connector, hold it out with your hands, and point the wire in different directions while watching signal quality to find the proper direction. If it's a problem to have a real roof antenna (apartment, etc.), this wire can even be put under a rug and used as an antenna.
I'm going to bet your problem is more due to bad antenna than weak signal.
We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick.
The problem is that cable viewers are still a majority. Tivo had a chance to get me as a customer a few years ago right after the digital switchover, but all their stuff at the time seemed to be aimed at cable viewers, and certainly not ATSC viewers. That's when I got a CM 7000, which was decent, but it crashed a lot, losing 2 minutes of what I was watching live, and what was recording on another channel, too. And it became a lot less useful once OTA TVGOS got yanked by (mac)Rovi(sion), and PSIP guides only went to 12 hours (right now only two channels here go to 24 hours, PBS and FOX). Also, its storage format was proprietary, so I wouldn't expect to be able to get MPEG2 files out of the 7500 either. See where it says "Unknown if external HDD can be read by a Linux box or a PC with a Linux file system driver"? Having access to the Rovi guide is nice, though.
There was also some crappy OTA DVR I found (I can't remember its name) which uses an NTFS (!) formatted hard drive to record raw MPEG2 TS, but its user interface made dog poop look good. I think it didn't do guides at all and only had VCR-style "time / channel / length" recording.
If you can live without "simple", there is MythTV. A few months ago, I built myself a MythTV box using dual Hauppage 2250s (bought a few months apart) for four tuners. It's definitely not plug and play. But I get direct MPEG2 transport stream rips that I can copy and re-encode however and whenever I want. Over the past six months or so, I filled up a 1.5GB partition as I learned how to use it, and only recently did I finally get the hang of cutting commercials. (HDTV is about 5GB an hour of which 1GB is commercials!) I'm still using the OTA guide with it, but there is a proper guide that you can subscribe to.
The thing about cutting commercials is that I do it manually, because MythTV's detection has false positives. Sometimes I even see a commercial I drop out of editing to watch, or even leave in. (like State Farm's "superfans" commercials during SNL) And I do watch some stuff live, but I'm old enough to ignore commercials and do something else for 3 minutes. Also, sometimes I skip back to check something, and commercials let me catch up to live. I really only cut commercials because of how much disk space they take up.
And the best part of MythTV? I can run the frontend on my laptop and stream over wireless. So I can even watch live TV in the bathroom.
I had the Channel Master 7000 version of that, which was pretty good except that it had a tendency to crash while I was watching something, and usually took 2 minutes to reboot, which meant I missed the show that I was watching, and possibly another being recorded on the other tuner. It also sucked when OTA TVGOS schedules got yanked by (mac)Rovi(sion). I've since moved on to a MythTV box, which I'll talk about in a post replying to GP.
I'll just wait for Elon Musk to launch NavX.
Yep, and it really worked great for the Russians! You can't point a telescope anywhere in the sky these days without spotting a Russian space colony!
Actually there are only 4 million OUIs available, because one bit is for multicast and another bit is for "local administration" addresses. But yeah, there are still a lot. In no way does it mean that they are about to flood the world with Ethernet devices. Most likely it means that they wanted to make soda machines with Ethernet interfaces. If you add a chip to your own board (as opposed to, say, a PCI card), you do not get a MAC address from the chip manufacturer. The important thing is that 16 million addresses is the standard allocation size. You can't even get a second one until you can prove that you've used up at least 95% of those 16 million addresses in actual Ethernet devices.
And as someone else has pointed out, this was registered at least three years ago. So OMGWTFBBQBLOGSPAM. All we have here is a clueless blogger who apparently doesn't understand OUI allocations.
Also Linux, except you have to figure out how to turn them on first. Except for #1, since viruses aren't a problem.
Good thing we changed the name to Urectum to avoid all those problems.