Another poster pointed out that this thing lacks an AGP slot. Very uncool.
A couple days ago, Robin and I were playing Neverwinter Nights (yes, I broke down and rebooted, but I _still_ want the linux version). A friend called and we invited him over to play. He brought a low-end 1.1 GHz celeron machine he picked up at Fry's a couple months ago, and a fresh copy of NWN (yes, we're all very geeky... even Robin... see our website for more info about us)
Turns out he couldn't play. The on-board video was so slow you couldn't even navigate the menus. I had a machine (in need of some service) with a GeForce3 card in it, so we pulled the card and poped out his box... only to find that it lacked an AGP slot. I guess the $300 price tag for the box (it has linux pre-installed, he installed XP onto it) is a reasonable excuse, maybe.
But if you're slinging bullshit like:
Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing
and it can't even be upgraded with a (current) game-capable graphics card, how can anyone consider is an expereince of next generation computing.
and to add a bit of poetic justice, this shameful ad copy only got their site slashdotted, so potential customers for this lame "next generation way of computing" are getting nothing more than HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy. Maybe they should have used a LARGER and more capable computer!
I've been designing and fiddling with electronic for many years now (10 years professionally, many before I graduated from OSU).
I can tell you from many painful experiences that the most common occurance when connecting transistors in an unintended manner is shorting the (low impedance) power supply with a forward biased P-N junction, or putting too much voltage accross a reverse biased P-N junction... either way leading to destruction of one of more parts. Let's presume they constrained the choices to prevent blown parts.
When nothing blows up, the two most common cases (when connecting high-gain amps) are unintentional oscillation and unintended pickup of stray signals. It takes good design practice and good implementation to avoid these (usually) undesirable results.
To say that it "Reinvents Radio" is crazy. Radio reception involves the concept of demodulation, where changes in the received signal are turned into the output and the "carrier" frequency is not. Simply receiving a signal is not radio, and any reasonable sense of the word in the context of transistor circuits. Extracting modulated changes to that signal is what radio is about. Even the simplest forms of radio, such as on/off keying (morse code, etc) involve translating bursts of the carrier into tones or some other indication to the user. The key concept is that the transmitter encodes information by modulating the transmitted signal, and the receiver recovers the information, not just the raw signal.
Usually, but not always, rolled up in the concept of "radio" is a tuning system that selects a very small band of the available spectrum for reception, and usually this tuning system can be controlled accurately to correspond to the know carrier frequency used by the transmitter. Certainly in its modern usage, the word "radio" reasonably also implies good selectivity of frequencies that are received.
You are almost certainly correct, that they do have plenty of computers, but....
They do finance operations internationally, even if the scale is 'hundred millions' and not 'tens of billions.' That isn't managed by paper cheques and letters of credit.
... do try to maintain a little historical perspective. International finance pre-dates computers by hundreds of years.
If you can do something better than your competitors, or if you can do the same thing but cheaper, you will have an advantage and the natural selection of the free market will elevate you above the rest.
Yeah, tell that to Digital (DR-DOS) and dozens of others Microsoft has crushed over the years.
a large portion of the blame falls squarely on those who promote and use MP3 instead of unencumbered alternatives like OggVorbis.
Yeah, go tell that to Justin Frankel of Nullsoft/WinAMP fame, years before Vorbis was even publically announced.
It was only within the last several months that Ogg/Vorbis came out of beta and the bitstream format was fixed (even though the current libs apparantly don't use all the defined features, so it's debatable if you could call it "mature"). ISO 11172 by contrast, the MPEG1 standard, was published by the International Standard Organization in 1988 and revised in 1993. That's 9 to 14 years ago, depending on how you count.
Clearly today's royalty mess is largely the fault of people who implemented and used MP3 encoding many years before Ogg/Vorbis even existed. If they all just would have had enough forsight to forsee this coming, and instead of MP3, use nothing at all and wait for Ogg/Vorbis, then we all woulda been better off.
It is unfortunate, and Thompson/FgH are truely slimey bastards for tweaking a critically important clause and then lying through their teeth that nothing has been changed. So maybe it is their fault, but don't go laying the blame on anyone using MP3 back in the 90's, when the only alternative to using a patented codec was silence.
BTW, it still remains to be seen if ogg/vorbis truely does not violate any patents.
Since 1988, when the ISO (International Stanards Organization) published ISO 11172, apparantly revised in 1993. Either way, it's been an offical internation standard for a many years.
Even if mp3 were not a true ISO standard, which it certainly is, it's deployed widely enough to be considered a de-facto standard. But that's a moot point, because MPEG layer 3 audio is indeed an official international standard, ISO 11172-3, according to the International Standards Organization. An official ISO standard that's very widely deployed... it just doesn't get any more "standard" than that.
There was no deception. Patents were disclosed, known, and awarded before ANY serious use of mp3's occurred.
Yes, mostly. The FgH patents were issued in Germany in 1989, one year after ISO-11172 (mpeg1 standard) was published. In the USA, the patent was issued sometime in the mid-90's, 1996 I seem to recall.
DSD is essentially 1-bit PCM, similar to that used in "1-bit DAC" CD players. It can be window-FFT'd into the frequency domain just like any other PCM; you just have to discard the top 63/64 of the spectrum. Going back from window-FFT to 1-bit PCM is a matter of going to 24-bit PCM, oversampling, and then using heavy dithering.
I sure hope there's some noise shaping going on in the process, cause 2.82 MHz divided by 44.1 kHz is an oversampling ratio of only 64. With conventional PWM (no noise shaping), that's only 6 bits per sample.
So if you attempt to encode, don't forget to pass the samples through a 4th order (or higher) delta-sigma modulator.
Maybe someone doesn't want to take the hassel to reboot.
That's me!
I purchased NWN several weeks ago. I've been busy doing real work in linux, and the NWN box has been sitting on the table right next to the monitor for about a month. I even opened it and peeked at the 3 cds and manual (mostly a list of spells). I keep telling myself "I should really reboot and give it a try sometime, just to see what it's like".
Rebooting is a hassle. Often times I'll leave things running on my linux desktop, including ssh sessions with remote machines. I design with embedded processors (usually 8-bit) and often times I'll leave "seyon" running, logging data that some embedded board is sending to my serial port. Rebooting is very disruptive to my work environment.
Then again, getting "hooked" on NWN for a few weeks will be too.... but I'm expecting that NWN will be fun. Rebooting is not.
Let's show them their linux support was worthwhile. Head out and buy the game the day the linux client is released.
... or just simply use the linux client in networked play...
While NWN can be played stand-alone without a network, most people playing NWN will at least occasionally make network connections to bioware (eg, patches). The NWN protocols reportedly use the serial number shipped with the game. Assuming that's true, and assuming that the protocol informs that of the version and platform the client is running, it would be very simple for Bioware to collect stats on the number of linux, windows and dual-boot users.
So if you really want to "show your support" for the linux client, when is it eventually released, you could just as well buy the game now and make sure you keep your network connection unplugged while you're playing, so that all your network connectivity is via the upcoming linux client.
But they know linux users are (largely) dual-booting and somehow I doubt they'll worry about counting up the number of users who NEVER ran the windows client. More likely, they'll compile some ongoing stats for the percentage of users using each client on an ongoing basis. Simply using the linux client over the network (in communication with Bioware's servers) will be showing plenty of "support for the linux client".
FWIW, I purchased NWN shortly after it appeared in stores, and I'm waiting for the linux client... not so much for philosophical reasons, but simply because I've been busy lately and rebooting is a pain (I tend to leave a bunch of stuff running on the linux desktop).
If everybody had to do it from scratch it would not be feasable. My point is, it has been done. It can be duplicated, and/or, used to produce hardware to do it again, in a more commercial like setting.
It would not be easy to automate (eg, connecting to those 6 mil spaced traces), but yes, it could be automated.
And for all that trouble to build automated gear, Microsoft and Nvidia could implement even the most trivial changes to make automated hardware hacking gear obsolete.
Even with zero changes to the secret automated bootloader that embedded within the Nvidia chipset, just swapping the locations of a few wires on the circuit board and ordering their next batch of boards with the wires in different locations (or on inner layers where you can't touch them) would completely frustrate any automated key extraction techniques. It's a simple matter of opening the CAD software with the board layout, clicking and dragging on a few wires to move them, re-run the DRC checks and generate a new set of "gerber" files to send to the board fab. Here in the US, setup fees for a new set of gerbers run about $200. Even if Microsoft spends $3000 doing paperwork to document the changes, that quickly amortizes itself over the next batch of 50000 xboxes (xboxen?). Rinse and repeat a few times, and automated key extraction now has to deal with many different flavors of the board with the necessary signals in different, difficult-to-reach locations.
And that's just a trivial change of pushing a few polygons in the CAD software and ordering the next batch of circuit boards with new layout. Did you catch the mention of Nvidia recently reporting losses due to excess inventory of chipsets for the xbox that were obsolete and needed to be scrapped. They changed something.... I'll bet you can get at least one thing that changed inside the chip recently:)
Or worse, what if you missed a message like that from a total stranger
Such as:
My name is Natalie. I live in St.Petersberg and I am looking
for a real relationship with a real man. I signed up with this internet
service to meet good western men -- I hope you are really there.
[url deleted] Please see and write me here if you like me
or perhaps this from "nec. Jen":
It's all me [link deleted] Click Here
and here's one of the few kinky ones:
I would like invite you to come create a couples or singles profile and join this online community. If you are into alternative lifestyle, or just looking for something kinky in your life come try it out. It now has Video IM working and you do not need a web cam to use it. Check it out you will find what you are looking for.
Check out TMDA, tmda.sourceforge.net. This program assumes you don't want mail from anybody whom you haven't explicitly allowed, or who has verified that they are a real person and not a spammer.
This is only a solution for people who, well, only want mail from people they already know, and don't mind putting up a rude and obnoxious barrier... "I don't want to even talk with you until you jump though these hoops to verify you're not a spammer" for anyone else.
If spam assassin could be taught with the same database, it would probably perform almost identically.
Perhaps you missed the numerous times that he pointed out the advantage of the analysis automatically discovering the spam probability of ALL words, instead of a predetermined list shipped with the filter (as in spamassassin).
That said, I use Spamassassin and it really works well... but I found that I had to set my threshold up to 7.5 and lower the points from some of the rules to avoid false positives from students in India and other countries who ask questions about the circuits and code on my website (many of their ISPs are in blacklists and they hit various rules for various reasons).
The base assumption in the XBox paper is that the key is unique to each box....
By the way, the hardware used may have been expensive, but the hardware PRODUCED to do it was valued by the author at about $50. So a device could be created to spit out the codes easily and cheaply.
I just wanted to interject a quick reality check. Sure, it looks cheap and easy when quickly reading the paper (or just reading comments on slashdot, most written by people who themselves skimmed or did even read it). It looks so simple and easy...
The bare circuit board was made by Advanced Circuits using their $33 each service (that I've used a few times for my own projects). At the time they had a minimum of 2 boards, now it's three. $99 (plus shipping) is still a GREAT price for prototype circuit boards with 6 mil spacing. The norm for the industry is in the $300 neighborhood.
But that $100 only gets you a tiny bare circuit board with a LVDS to TTL buffer chip and 6 mil traces at the same spacing as the traces on the xbox circuit board (nice of them to route the signals on the outer layer instead of an inner layer with the vias burried under the BGA package).
Another component he used as a Xilinx development board, which probably sells for several hundred dollars, and featured a nice Virtex series FPGA chip (expensive). Even if you get the chip as a free sample, you'll need a 4 to 6 layer board (which is way outside of the $33 double sided service), and the ones with flexible choices of I/O signalling only come in BGA packages... which requires very expensive equipment or hiring an board assembly company to solder it. Those chips can only be programmed using proprietary software. Xilinx does provide some limited free software, but the full version sells between $700 to $2500 depending on which chips is supports.
Now I suppose if you're working in your basement, your labor might be free... but consider the difficultly of soldering those 6 mil traces to the matching 6 mil tracks on the xbox PCB. Also consider that he hand-routed the signals inside the FPGA chip for 200 MHz performance... a very difficult and time consuming task, and he manually tweaked the propagation delay of the clock to get his sampling into the center of the stable bit times of the waveforms on the xbox board.
I've spent quite a bit of time designing with FPGAs (eg, the mp3 player on my website), and I can tell you that this hand optimizing the internal layout of the FPGA, custom tweaked for the other delays in his system, is some very serious voodoo magic that takes an incredible amount of time and patience.
Anyway, my point is that the cost is much more than $50... as a student or engineer with access to much of the equipment, you can discount those other costs. Even if the hardware and software were free, the skill required is absolutely astounding. I know it's easy to read a paper like that and lump it into the collective memory of blubs that "appeared on slashdot" without any (or much) appreciation for what an incredible feat it was.
That's why I'm writing this long-winded message... to remind and armchair would-be hardware hackers out there that reading a paper like that prepares one for mastery in hardware hacking about as well as watching the olympic on television prepares one to be a champion figure skater.
So a device could be created to spit out the codes easily and cheaply. It also would not have to be attached for a long period of time, just long enough to retrieve the key. As such you could, theoretically take your xbox to a shop, and be handed the key 2 minutes later. Wouldn't have to solder anything either.
It would be trivial for Microsoft to make all those signals in inner layers of the circuit board in future revisions. Many other more sophisticated counter measures are also possible. Technically unsophisticated laws, like say, the DCMA also serve as a pretty good deterant (at least against a shop doing the work for profit).
But even with the xbox, as it was 1/2 a year ago, the key extraction is a very tough job. The bug in the secret bootloader that allowed the lookup tables for hardware config to bypass the entire process has almost certainly been fixed by now (reportedly, Nvidia recently reported a significant loss on an inventory of xbox specific chips that had to be scrapped... one can only assume they had the original bootloader code and the chips they're making now have a different key and that bug fixed).
So next time you watch figure skating, and they make it look so easy... the same is true with this sort of hardware hacking. Anyone who really does design and play with hardware can tell you that the process described in that paper was absolutely astounding. And while it was relatively cheap, it certainly costs MUCH more than $50.
In fact, a great many can't or don't write any meaningful code at all. But there's a lot more to be done that churning out code (or circuits, for some of us:)
Trying out the very latest CVS versions and entering meaningful bug reports and writing "howto" and other types of documentation are really valuable efforts. These are the places where hard-core coders deeply involved in their projects won't see bugs because they "know" how to use their programs, and of course don't write newbie oriented documentation.
Failing that, I rather see interested geeks lobbying that doing nothing constructive at all. Even writing one email or fax is better than going to watch TV or play the latest massively multiplayer game.
I purchased a HDTV a few months back, and I learned a couple things in the process:
Virtually none of the HDTVs on the market can display 720p or 1080p, nearly all can show 480p and 1080i.
Entry level HDTVs retail at about $1700, and it only gets more expensive from there (I paid $1900 with a wooden stand)
A 36 inch (nearly the smallest size available) Toshiba HDTV weighs just over 200 pounds and barely fits through the front door!
I seriously doubt that ABC, or anyone else, is going to transmit 720p anytime soon. I'm no expert on the rest of that stuff, but having gone through the comparative shopping experience only a few months ago, it's safe to say that there just aren't (or weren't a few months ago) almost ANY televisions capable of displaying 720p. I opted for a cheaper model anyway, mostly due to limited space in the living room.
The picture is really nice, but then a lot of the $2000 analog TVs had pretty damn good pictures too. I almost never watch TV (girlfriend watches a little, maybe 1-2 hours a week), but every now and then we rent a movie. I usually have a couple beers and she often has a wine... so the picture could be crappy. The sound is what's important... or the lack of that 15 kHz sound that emits from nearly all analog TVs and gives me a really bad headache.
Anyway, my main point is that all the HDTVs I saw... and I looked at a good number, could display 480i, 480p and 1080i, but definately not 720p.
Come on! They must be leaving out ALL kinds of information here!
Yep, I'd say so. For example, I just don't buy this:
... switch to the Linux computer operating system in 1999, it did so to save money... So it replaced 32 computer servers, based on the time-tested Unix operating systems, at an average cost of $50,000 each, with 40 Linux servers, at $3,000 a pop.
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
Yeah, yeah, I know, maybe they mean new unix boxes would have been $50k vs $3k unix boxen, maybe. But that's not what it actually says. The article is so loose with the language that they probably are comparing NEW boxes at $3k each to OLD boxen at $50k each. Sounds like the real benefit was computing the cash requirement faster, and a fair comparison would have actually compared the cost of new linux servers against the cost of new unix and windows servers, and the resulting performance of each. But that's a lot of work... maybe almost as difficult as it would be for Byron Acochido (the author of that article) or his editor to proof read their text from a critical viewpoint and edit it to be factually correct.
Of course, the poorly worded loose language works in Linux's favor in this case, so it must be ok. If it were in Microsoft's favor, would I be screaming FUD?? Hmm...
I design products with 8-bit embedded processors. The typical scenario is a single chip with 2k to 16k of eprom/flash code memory and 64 to 1k of RAM. That's quite a bit smaller than 64k of ram in a C-64.
The most popular 8-bit chips today are the 8051 (multi-source), AVR (atmel), PIC (microchip), and HC08/HC11 (motorola). Cost is usually the primary consideration, and projects with volumes of 20k/year and up, it makes a lot of sense to do some or all of the project in assembly language so you can get the code into a smaller chip that costs $1 less. Multiply that $1 by 20k (or whatever production volume is expected) per year over the life of the product.
At the beginning of many projects, there's usually a list of "got to have" features, and "would be nice to have" features (as long as they don't add cost or significantly delay the product release). A good designer (and there are many) will ask a lot of questions about the actual application and make changes to the feature set that still meet the customer's needs (often times an improvement) but allow the code to be smaller, run at a slower speed (increase battery life or reduce the cost of the power supply circuitry), and use less RAM.
It's a very different world from PC software. The 8051, PIC, AVR and HC08/11 are available in many different flavors with different mixes of built-in peripherals and different amounts of code and ram memory.... and an amazing amount of work goes into making VERY efficient code so it can fit in a less expensive chip. On top of that, most products that ship with those 8-bit chips ARE UNDER WARRANTY for years, and a bad bug in the firmware usually means replacing the product for everyone who's effected.
I just can't see a VNC server on that "got to have" feature list, and I can't see it not increasing the cost enough to get quickly axe'd from the "nice to have" list. Even using an additional 128 or 256 bytes (yes, bytes, not Mbytes, not kbytes, but individual bytes) will almost certainly push a "normal" 8-bit microcontroller project up to a chip that costs $1 to $2 more. That's a lot of money when you go into production and start shipping thousands every month!!
Nobody wants a copy, they want something original, and that means a radical departure from the desktop analogy. [snip] ...some run cute little tab and dock apps that help launch your favorite apps (ho hum) but none of these products (OSX included) have revolutionized or even attempted to improve upon the Windows GUI. Lycoris is just a simple Windows copy. No improvements, no paradigm shift.
Sounds like someone doesn't know his 80's and early 90's history very well, specifically who copied who's gui.
.... and I also forgot to mention that you'd get a law passed (DMCA) that forces any alleged spammer to be immediately disconnected from the internet, simply by sending a complaint letter to their ISP.
Re:considering the alternative...
on
RIAA Smacked by DoS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
because really, what are they supposed to do to prevent a distributed network of thousands.... So I started to think... "How would I feel if... Then I realized that I do... SPAMers. Sure, if I had the time, money, and expertise, I could take them each to court.
Yep, it's too much trouble to go after the ones actually causing the "problem".
Therefore, you'd put pressure on the creators of all email client software to check for a special cryptographic signature/watermark in every message, so that only "authorized" messages could be received and read?
When _all_ of authors those authors refuse, or at least take a "let's think this through carefully" approach, you'd use your lobby with congress to fast-track legislation to mandate these "security" measures in all "devices" devices capable of touching email in any way? You'd press as hard as possible, with zero regard for what impact it might have for email in general for everybody else.
You wouldn't stop there, you'd also get is worked into "open" standard, such as DVD-R, IDE (ATA-6) hard drives, flash memory modules, etc, so that it would be impossible to use the actual storage devices to store spam messages?
Maybe somewhere along the way, you'd lobby for a tax on all transport of messages (aka sales of blank recordable media), on the assumption that much of is it used for inappropriate spam despite the security measures?
And to top it all off, failing all these other approachs, you'd lobby for vigilante justice, so you could send your thugs directly to the homes/operations of those spammers to shut them down (no due process, little to zero liability for yourself for making mistakes).
What next? Forced spying on users to see what they're doing (Replay4000 case, admittedly the movie studios, not the RIAA) ???
Slashdot Mirror
A couple days ago, Robin and I were playing Neverwinter Nights (yes, I broke down and rebooted, but I _still_ want the linux version). A friend called and we invited him over to play. He brought a low-end 1.1 GHz celeron machine he picked up at Fry's a couple months ago, and a fresh copy of NWN (yes, we're all very geeky... even Robin... see our website for more info about us)
Turns out he couldn't play. The on-board video was so slow you couldn't even navigate the menus. I had a machine (in need of some service) with a GeForce3 card in it, so we pulled the card and poped out his box... only to find that it lacked an AGP slot. I guess the $300 price tag for the box (it has linux pre-installed, he installed XP onto it) is a reasonable excuse, maybe.
But if you're slinging bullshit like:
Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing
and it can't even be upgraded with a (current) game-capable graphics card, how can anyone consider is an expereince of next generation computing.
and to add a bit of poetic justice, this shameful ad copy only got their site slashdotted, so potential customers for this lame "next generation way of computing" are getting nothing more than HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy. Maybe they should have used a LARGER and more capable computer!
I can tell you from many painful experiences that the most common occurance when connecting transistors in an unintended manner is shorting the (low impedance) power supply with a forward biased P-N junction, or putting too much voltage accross a reverse biased P-N junction... either way leading to destruction of one of more parts. Let's presume they constrained the choices to prevent blown parts.
When nothing blows up, the two most common cases (when connecting high-gain amps) are unintentional oscillation and unintended pickup of stray signals. It takes good design practice and good implementation to avoid these (usually) undesirable results.
To say that it "Reinvents Radio" is crazy. Radio reception involves the concept of demodulation, where changes in the received signal are turned into the output and the "carrier" frequency is not. Simply receiving a signal is not radio, and any reasonable sense of the word in the context of transistor circuits. Extracting modulated changes to that signal is what radio is about. Even the simplest forms of radio, such as on/off keying (morse code, etc) involve translating bursts of the carrier into tones or some other indication to the user. The key concept is that the transmitter encodes information by modulating the transmitted signal, and the receiver recovers the information, not just the raw signal.
Usually, but not always, rolled up in the concept of "radio" is a tuning system that selects a very small band of the available spectrum for reception, and usually this tuning system can be controlled accurately to correspond to the know carrier frequency used by the transmitter. Certainly in its modern usage, the word "radio" reasonably also implies good selectivity of frequencies that are received.
They do finance operations internationally, even if the scale is 'hundred millions' and not 'tens of billions.' That isn't managed by paper cheques and letters of credit.
Yeah, tell that to Digital (DR-DOS) and dozens of others Microsoft has crushed over the years.
Yeah, go tell that to Justin Frankel of Nullsoft/WinAMP fame, years before Vorbis was even publically announced.
It was only within the last several months that Ogg/Vorbis came out of beta and the bitstream format was fixed (even though the current libs apparantly don't use all the defined features, so it's debatable if you could call it "mature"). ISO 11172 by contrast, the MPEG1 standard, was published by the International Standard Organization in 1988 and revised in 1993. That's 9 to 14 years ago, depending on how you count.
Clearly today's royalty mess is largely the fault of people who implemented and used MP3 encoding many years before Ogg/Vorbis even existed. If they all just would have had enough forsight to forsee this coming, and instead of MP3, use nothing at all and wait for Ogg/Vorbis, then we all woulda been better off.
It is unfortunate, and Thompson/FgH are truely slimey bastards for tweaking a critically important clause and then lying through their teeth that nothing has been changed. So maybe it is their fault, but don't go laying the blame on anyone using MP3 back in the 90's, when the only alternative to using a patented codec was silence.
BTW, it still remains to be seen if ogg/vorbis truely does not violate any patents.
Since 1988, when the ISO (International Stanards Organization) published ISO 11172, apparantly revised in 1993. Either way, it's been an offical internation standard for a many years.
Even if mp3 were not a true ISO standard, which it certainly is, it's deployed widely enough to be considered a de-facto standard. But that's a moot point, because MPEG layer 3 audio is indeed an official international standard, ISO 11172-3, according to the International Standards Organization. An official ISO standard that's very widely deployed... it just doesn't get any more "standard" than that.
Yes, mostly. The FgH patents were issued in Germany in 1989, one year after ISO-11172 (mpeg1 standard) was published. In the USA, the patent was issued sometime in the mid-90's, 1996 I seem to recall.
To give credit, I first heard this phrase coined by Steve of Secure Design Software.
Or for the RIAA to compensate the execu^H^H^H^H^H artists for revenue lost to every unauthorized MP3 downloaded over Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, etc.
I sure hope there's some noise shaping going on in the process, cause 2.82 MHz divided by 44.1 kHz is an oversampling ratio of only 64. With conventional PWM (no noise shaping), that's only 6 bits per sample.
So if you attempt to encode, don't forget to pass the samples through a 4th order (or higher) delta-sigma modulator.
That's me!
I purchased NWN several weeks ago. I've been busy doing real work in linux, and the NWN box has been sitting on the table right next to the monitor for about a month. I even opened it and peeked at the 3 cds and manual (mostly a list of spells). I keep telling myself "I should really reboot and give it a try sometime, just to see what it's like".
Rebooting is a hassle. Often times I'll leave things running on my linux desktop, including ssh sessions with remote machines. I design with embedded processors (usually 8-bit) and often times I'll leave "seyon" running, logging data that some embedded board is sending to my serial port. Rebooting is very disruptive to my work environment.
Then again, getting "hooked" on NWN for a few weeks will be too.... but I'm expecting that NWN will be fun. Rebooting is not.
While NWN can be played stand-alone without a network, most people playing NWN will at least occasionally make network connections to bioware (eg, patches). The NWN protocols reportedly use the serial number shipped with the game. Assuming that's true, and assuming that the protocol informs that of the version and platform the client is running, it would be very simple for Bioware to collect stats on the number of linux, windows and dual-boot users.
So if you really want to "show your support" for the linux client, when is it eventually released, you could just as well buy the game now and make sure you keep your network connection unplugged while you're playing, so that all your network connectivity is via the upcoming linux client.
But they know linux users are (largely) dual-booting and somehow I doubt they'll worry about counting up the number of users who NEVER ran the windows client. More likely, they'll compile some ongoing stats for the percentage of users using each client on an ongoing basis. Simply using the linux client over the network (in communication with Bioware's servers) will be showing plenty of "support for the linux client".
FWIW, I purchased NWN shortly after it appeared in stores, and I'm waiting for the linux client... not so much for philosophical reasons, but simply because I've been busy lately and rebooting is a pain (I tend to leave a bunch of stuff running on the linux desktop).
It would not be easy to automate (eg, connecting to those 6 mil spaced traces), but yes, it could be automated.
And for all that trouble to build automated gear, Microsoft and Nvidia could implement even the most trivial changes to make automated hardware hacking gear obsolete.
Even with zero changes to the secret automated bootloader that embedded within the Nvidia chipset, just swapping the locations of a few wires on the circuit board and ordering their next batch of boards with the wires in different locations (or on inner layers where you can't touch them) would completely frustrate any automated key extraction techniques. It's a simple matter of opening the CAD software with the board layout, clicking and dragging on a few wires to move them, re-run the DRC checks and generate a new set of "gerber" files to send to the board fab. Here in the US, setup fees for a new set of gerbers run about $200. Even if Microsoft spends $3000 doing paperwork to document the changes, that quickly amortizes itself over the next batch of 50000 xboxes (xboxen?). Rinse and repeat a few times, and automated key extraction now has to deal with many different flavors of the board with the necessary signals in different, difficult-to-reach locations.
And that's just a trivial change of pushing a few polygons in the CAD software and ordering the next batch of circuit boards with new layout. Did you catch the mention of Nvidia recently reporting losses due to excess inventory of chipsets for the xbox that were obsolete and needed to be scrapped. They changed something.... I'll bet you can get at least one thing that changed inside the chip recently :)
Such as:
or perhaps this from "nec. Jen": and here's one of the few kinky ones:Actually, there's suprisingly few of these in my spam file these days.
This is only a solution for people who, well, only want mail from people they already know, and don't mind putting up a rude and obnoxious barrier... "I don't want to even talk with you until you jump though these hoops to verify you're not a spammer" for anyone else.
Perhaps you missed the numerous times that he pointed out the advantage of the analysis automatically discovering the spam probability of ALL words, instead of a predetermined list shipped with the filter (as in spamassassin).
That said, I use Spamassassin and it really works well... but I found that I had to set my threshold up to 7.5 and lower the points from some of the rules to avoid false positives from students in India and other countries who ask questions about the circuits and code on my website (many of their ISPs are in blacklists and they hit various rules for various reasons).
By the way, the hardware used may have been expensive, but the hardware PRODUCED to do it was valued by the author at about $50. So a device could be created to spit out the codes easily and cheaply.
I just wanted to interject a quick reality check. Sure, it looks cheap and easy when quickly reading the paper (or just reading comments on slashdot, most written by people who themselves skimmed or did even read it). It looks so simple and easy...
The bare circuit board was made by Advanced Circuits using their $33 each service (that I've used a few times for my own projects). At the time they had a minimum of 2 boards, now it's three. $99 (plus shipping) is still a GREAT price for prototype circuit boards with 6 mil spacing. The norm for the industry is in the $300 neighborhood.
But that $100 only gets you a tiny bare circuit board with a LVDS to TTL buffer chip and 6 mil traces at the same spacing as the traces on the xbox circuit board (nice of them to route the signals on the outer layer instead of an inner layer with the vias burried under the BGA package).
Another component he used as a Xilinx development board, which probably sells for several hundred dollars, and featured a nice Virtex series FPGA chip (expensive). Even if you get the chip as a free sample, you'll need a 4 to 6 layer board (which is way outside of the $33 double sided service), and the ones with flexible choices of I/O signalling only come in BGA packages... which requires very expensive equipment or hiring an board assembly company to solder it. Those chips can only be programmed using proprietary software. Xilinx does provide some limited free software, but the full version sells between $700 to $2500 depending on which chips is supports.
Now I suppose if you're working in your basement, your labor might be free... but consider the difficultly of soldering those 6 mil traces to the matching 6 mil tracks on the xbox PCB. Also consider that he hand-routed the signals inside the FPGA chip for 200 MHz performance... a very difficult and time consuming task, and he manually tweaked the propagation delay of the clock to get his sampling into the center of the stable bit times of the waveforms on the xbox board.
I've spent quite a bit of time designing with FPGAs (eg, the mp3 player on my website), and I can tell you that this hand optimizing the internal layout of the FPGA, custom tweaked for the other delays in his system, is some very serious voodoo magic that takes an incredible amount of time and patience.
Anyway, my point is that the cost is much more than $50... as a student or engineer with access to much of the equipment, you can discount those other costs. Even if the hardware and software were free, the skill required is absolutely astounding. I know it's easy to read a paper like that and lump it into the collective memory of blubs that "appeared on slashdot" without any (or much) appreciation for what an incredible feat it was.
That's why I'm writing this long-winded message... to remind and armchair would-be hardware hackers out there that reading a paper like that prepares one for mastery in hardware hacking about as well as watching the olympic on television prepares one to be a champion figure skater.
So a device could be created to spit out the codes easily and cheaply. It also would not have to be attached for a long period of time, just long enough to retrieve the key. As such you could, theoretically take your xbox to a shop, and be handed the key 2 minutes later. Wouldn't have to solder anything either.
It would be trivial for Microsoft to make all those signals in inner layers of the circuit board in future revisions. Many other more sophisticated counter measures are also possible. Technically unsophisticated laws, like say, the DCMA also serve as a pretty good deterant (at least against a shop doing the work for profit).
But even with the xbox, as it was 1/2 a year ago, the key extraction is a very tough job. The bug in the secret bootloader that allowed the lookup tables for hardware config to bypass the entire process has almost certainly been fixed by now (reportedly, Nvidia recently reported a significant loss on an inventory of xbox specific chips that had to be scrapped... one can only assume they had the original bootloader code and the chips they're making now have a different key and that bug fixed).
So next time you watch figure skating, and they make it look so easy... the same is true with this sort of hardware hacking. Anyone who really does design and play with hardware can tell you that the process described in that paper was absolutely astounding. And while it was relatively cheap, it certainly costs MUCH more than $50.
Trying out the very latest CVS versions and entering meaningful bug reports and writing "howto" and other types of documentation are really valuable efforts. These are the places where hard-core coders deeply involved in their projects won't see bugs because they "know" how to use their programs, and of course don't write newbie oriented documentation.
Failing that, I rather see interested geeks lobbying that doing nothing constructive at all. Even writing one email or fax is better than going to watch TV or play the latest massively multiplayer game.
- Virtually none of the HDTVs on the market can display 720p or 1080p, nearly all can show 480p and 1080i.
- Entry level HDTVs retail at about $1700, and it only gets more expensive from there (I paid $1900 with a wooden stand)
- A 36 inch (nearly the smallest size available) Toshiba HDTV weighs just over 200 pounds and barely fits through the front door!
I seriously doubt that ABC, or anyone else, is going to transmit 720p anytime soon. I'm no expert on the rest of that stuff, but having gone through the comparative shopping experience only a few months ago, it's safe to say that there just aren't (or weren't a few months ago) almost ANY televisions capable of displaying 720p. I opted for a cheaper model anyway, mostly due to limited space in the living room.The picture is really nice, but then a lot of the $2000 analog TVs had pretty damn good pictures too. I almost never watch TV (girlfriend watches a little, maybe 1-2 hours a week), but every now and then we rent a movie. I usually have a couple beers and she often has a wine... so the picture could be crappy. The sound is what's important... or the lack of that 15 kHz sound that emits from nearly all analog TVs and gives me a really bad headache.
Anyway, my main point is that all the HDTVs I saw... and I looked at a good number, could display 480i, 480p and 1080i, but definately not 720p.
Yep, I'd say so. For example, I just don't buy this:
I don't care how expensive those old unix systems were (when they were new), replacing them with ANYTHING costs more than simply continuing to use the existing machines that are already owned.
Yeah, yeah, I know, maybe they mean new unix boxes would have been $50k vs $3k unix boxen, maybe. But that's not what it actually says. The article is so loose with the language that they probably are comparing NEW boxes at $3k each to OLD boxen at $50k each. Sounds like the real benefit was computing the cash requirement faster, and a fair comparison would have actually compared the cost of new linux servers against the cost of new unix and windows servers, and the resulting performance of each. But that's a lot of work... maybe almost as difficult as it would be for Byron Acochido (the author of that article) or his editor to proof read their text from a critical viewpoint and edit it to be factually correct.
Of course, the poorly worded loose language works in Linux's favor in this case, so it must be ok. If it were in Microsoft's favor, would I be screaming FUD?? Hmm...
What could the other 10% possibly be, since you've never given the address to anyone?
The most popular 8-bit chips today are the 8051 (multi-source), AVR (atmel), PIC (microchip), and HC08/HC11 (motorola). Cost is usually the primary consideration, and projects with volumes of 20k/year and up, it makes a lot of sense to do some or all of the project in assembly language so you can get the code into a smaller chip that costs $1 less. Multiply that $1 by 20k (or whatever production volume is expected) per year over the life of the product.
At the beginning of many projects, there's usually a list of "got to have" features, and "would be nice to have" features (as long as they don't add cost or significantly delay the product release). A good designer (and there are many) will ask a lot of questions about the actual application and make changes to the feature set that still meet the customer's needs (often times an improvement) but allow the code to be smaller, run at a slower speed (increase battery life or reduce the cost of the power supply circuitry), and use less RAM.
It's a very different world from PC software. The 8051, PIC, AVR and HC08/11 are available in many different flavors with different mixes of built-in peripherals and different amounts of code and ram memory.... and an amazing amount of work goes into making VERY efficient code so it can fit in a less expensive chip. On top of that, most products that ship with those 8-bit chips ARE UNDER WARRANTY for years, and a bad bug in the firmware usually means replacing the product for everyone who's effected.
I just can't see a VNC server on that "got to have" feature list, and I can't see it not increasing the cost enough to get quickly axe'd from the "nice to have" list. Even using an additional 128 or 256 bytes (yes, bytes, not Mbytes, not kbytes, but individual bytes) will almost certainly push a "normal" 8-bit microcontroller project up to a chip that costs $1 to $2 more. That's a lot of money when you go into production and start shipping thousands every month!!
Sounds like someone doesn't know his 80's and early 90's history very well, specifically who copied who's gui.
.... and I also forgot to mention that you'd get a law passed (DMCA) that forces any alleged spammer to be immediately disconnected from the internet, simply by sending a complaint letter to their ISP.
Yep, it's too much trouble to go after the ones actually causing the "problem".
Therefore, you'd put pressure on the creators of all email client software to check for a special cryptographic signature/watermark in every message, so that only "authorized" messages could be received and read?
When _all_ of authors those authors refuse, or at least take a "let's think this through carefully" approach, you'd use your lobby with congress to fast-track legislation to mandate these "security" measures in all "devices" devices capable of touching email in any way? You'd press as hard as possible, with zero regard for what impact it might have for email in general for everybody else.
You wouldn't stop there, you'd also get is worked into "open" standard, such as DVD-R, IDE (ATA-6) hard drives, flash memory modules, etc, so that it would be impossible to use the actual storage devices to store spam messages?
Maybe somewhere along the way, you'd lobby for a tax on all transport of messages (aka sales of blank recordable media), on the assumption that much of is it used for inappropriate spam despite the security measures?
And to top it all off, failing all these other approachs, you'd lobby for vigilante justice, so you could send your thugs directly to the homes/operations of those spammers to shut them down (no due process, little to zero liability for yourself for making mistakes).
What next? Forced spying on users to see what they're doing (Replay4000 case, admittedly the movie studios, not the RIAA) ???