Hopefully what they're talking about patenting isn't the protection scheme that's on Series2/2.5 Tivos, because that's been owned for a couple of years now. Series3 Tivos have been hacked to get shell access so far, but AFAIK, encryption hasn't been cracked.
On a Series2 Tivo, it's not rocket science: 1) Pull hard drive 2) Replace kernel with another kernel that doesn't do an integrity check of files at boot time. 3) Make the startup scripts spawn a telnet daemon (Tivo was thoughtful enough to provide one) 4) Change 8 bytes in 'tivoapp' to disable encryption. (and copying files off the Tivo this way is at least 2x faster than TivoToGo transfers)
Series2.5 (nightlight and dual-tuner) and Series3 (dual CableCard HDTV) require that a PROM chip be desoldered, reflashed to remove file integrity checking, and then put back in. All the Series3 Tivo lacks is step 4, but it'll only be a matter of time.
Most set lighting is done with carbon-arc bulbs, which IIRC have a color temp of 5000K. Normal daylight is around 5500K. Tungsten incandescents are around 2800K. Fluorescents are all over the place...I've seen them from the 3000s (warm white) to 6500K.
That said, there are standard color-temperature correcting gels for lights to make them all play nice together. You can put a light-purple gel on a fluorescent to cut the green, and a light blue gel on the incandescent to bring it to daylight. Most camera strobes are already daylight-balanced.
There are already photographic fluorescent arrays made by a company called Kino Flo (kinoflo.com) that are designed with film and movies in mind - they have variable-frequency ballasts that can be driven at 50-400 Hz, so you can shoot at higher shutter speeds (most professional DSLRs don't have flash sync much higher than 1/250)
It's existed even before the flag was a glimmer in a Hollywood lawyer's eye. I've got my Tivo hacked to prevent the shows from being recorded encrypted on the hard drive int he first place. Then, I can extract them at my leisure to my PC, and do whatever I want. This isn't the DRM-ed "Tivo to Go" crap either. Fully unencumbered MPEG-2 files.
I've been using CostCo for my photo printing since they opened a warehouse near me last year. They also have some features which cater to pro-sumer and pro-level photographers. Here's some of the things I like:
1) Most CostCo warehouses have ICC profiles made and updated frequently. They're available for download at http://drycreekphoto.com/Frontier/. If you do photo post-processing in an ICC-aware app (ie Photoshop) and have a profiled monitor, your colors will match from screen to print. 2) Large prints are also very reasonably priced - $2 for up to 8x12. 3) If you want to do odd sizes for matting, no problem - I can get a 5x5 image printed on an 8x10 sheet and trim and mat it however I want for a particular frame.
Also, CostCo isn't a huge PITA like Wal-Mart is when it comes to good-looking pictures. Wal-Mart will refuse to print a shot that looks "too good", and the lab worker at CostCo will say "Hey, great picture - what camera did you use?".
Of course, Apple would be wrong. You can use J River's Media Center v9.1 to manage your iPod (along with other music, photos, etc).
It actually uses QuickTime's own routines to work with AAC (M4A, M4P) files both on your computer and on the iPod. You just have to send one purchased song to your iPod with iTunes, and then MC will be able to manage any other purchased music (iTunes creates an authorization file once on your iPod).
All I use iTunes for is buying songs. MC9 handles everything else music-related on my computer.
There is one you didn't look at - Media Center 9. In my mind, it's actually better than iTunes (although without the iTunes Music Store). It goes for US$40, with a free 30-day demo to try it out. Follow the Interact link to their forums and download the latest 9.1 beta (9.1.271 as of yesterday).
Here's what it supports on the iPod: * Volume normalization (without modifying the MP3 file) so you're not juggling volume on every song * Fully supports iPod Ratings, Play Counts, and Last Played information (none of the other Windows iPod software does) * Smartlists - I can define a playlist that says - "give me 1 hour of U2 songs I've rated as 4/5 stars but I haven't listened to in the past 2 weeks. Sort it by release date of the album" As I do/don't listen to songs, the list will update itself every time I sync to my computer. It also does BPM analysis, so I can say "give me songs with tempos greater than 120". * It syncs correctly...you won't have 5 copies of the same song on your hard drive or on your iPod.
And, for the non-iPod users, it'll sync your devices too.
Or, if your VIP isn't worth that much, the Shure e2c goes for $99 SRP, and you can get them at Guitar Center for $79. Great phones to go with an iPod on a plane flight.
Actually, they do make "protocol converters" (which provide an AUX input for your car, and convert it into a signal that your car stereo can handle) for a lot of cars. Basically, if your stock/replacement head unit is capable of controlling a CD changer, you may be able to hook in this way.
Try http://www.pie.net/ - I got a converter for my 2001 Honda Civic for $50.
All you'll need to do is figure out how to get to the back of your headunit. My install details are at my blog.
When I brought identical assignments to their attention, they didn't pounce, but gave me options such as taking off some points or letting it go.
I was a grader for a similar CS course at my alma mater (U of Illinois), and ran into a similar problem. Basically, I had about 30 kids (in a class of 350) who handed in the same code, aside from minor cosmetic changes (comments, variable names). No sophisticated checker used - I just noticed a few people who formatted their output the exact same wrong way. Grepped the handin folders, and found 30 people with the same answer. Some of them were dumb enough to hand in from adjacent workstations at the same time. Unfortunately, the professors in charge of the course wimped out - they just gave the kids a 0 on the assignment (worth maybe 5% of the grade), after all their rhetoric about punishing cheaters.
My respect for UIUC's CS department went down the drain after that.
> @home, and I hear they don't play nice with
> linux, so I'd be SOL. I just hope I get the DSL > before @Home starts port scanning me.
I've been on AT&T@Home since september 2000, and they do work fine with Linux, even though it's officially unsupported. All I had to do to get it to be Linux friendly was put their nameservers in/etc/resolv.conf, and then do "dhcpcd -C subscriberid eth0" and I was up and running.
The only thing @Home scans for is NNTP servers, according to my logs. I have FTP, HTTP, and SSH running, and haven't had anyone come sniffing (of course, I still use iptables).
Speed for me has been good...I usually get >250KB/sec to fast servers, and latency's minimal (most pings 50ms). Service/uptime has been good too. We've had one day of downtime (DHCP server crashed), and the one time I needed tech support, it got fixed pretty quick.
I've heard a heck of a lot more complaints about DSL versus cable, so I'm sticking with it.
There's an easy solution to this. My father's a programmer at Boeing, and he needs to run on both Windows and Linux. The solution? They gave him two boxes. One runs Windows. The other runs Linux.
Not posting your e-mail address anywhere is the best way to go. I have a throwaway hotmail account that I give to most websites.
You're probably not getting spam to your.edu because a lot of spam lists have.edu addressed stripped. They figure we're all poor college students. I've been posting with the above address (bdjohns1+usenet@uiuc.edu) to usenet for a couple years, and I average maybe one spam a month to that address..
If you're looking for something a little more sohpisticated than X-10 for home automation, talk to a good lighting design firm - they've got stuff that you can afford to put in a middle/high-end house that in the words of my uncle (who owns one of these businesses) "will make X-10 look like tin cans and string".
That's a very simplistic view...almost akin to saying Pi ~ 3.
The authority of a private school to operate in the US is derived from various laws, both state and federal (all powers not expressly granted to the federal g'ment is granted to the states, etc). So, you end up with pretty much everything that the government is involved in being subject to the constraints of the Constitution.
And, even then, there are limits, like the "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre", which is not protected speech. "I'm gonna bring a gun to school" is similar enough for your average judge to agree.
The problem with this is a matter of the money. At my school (UIUC), residence hall users are limited to 500MB total traffic per day. They're working on a process to implement a sliding-scale bandwidth limiter, but when you've already got something in excess of 50,000 currently allocated IP addresses, it's not too easy. Plus, we're also the local POP for most of the regions ISPs, with the exception of the DSL folks and @Home.
One of our netadmins ran the budget analysis, and for unlimited access, every dorm resident would need to fork over $150/year above and beyond current housing rates (~$5600/yr). That's assuming everyone pays. Figuring an average of one computer per dorm room, that amount nearly doubles.
As it was, at peak times, Napster alone was accounting for over 60% of outbound traffic on our commodity links (non-Internet2).
Sure, @Home says they're using DHCP. Every time my system comes up or down, I always get the exact same IP address - it's configured through dhcpcd, but never changes.
In any case, it's easy enough under Linux, since I'm not doing masq or anything - I just closed off basically every service. All that's listening is Apache, SSH, sendmail (no relay), and imapd (but only to 127.0.0.1 for IMP via httpsd).
It's not a perfect setup by any means, but between that, a backup of my RPM database, and tripwire, I'm in decent enough shape.
That, and it doesn't corrode. Pure aluminum's rather weak from a structural fatigue standpoint...so they alloy it with iron and copper to make aircraft alloys, like 2024, 7050, 7076, etc. Problem there is you get electrolytic corrosion which gets particularly nasty when you fly in coastal environments. Aloha had a plane that had some skin peel off because of this. Titanium skin/rivets would be much more preferable, since they're not nearly as susceptible to corrosion damage.
Geez...is it really *that hard*?
# cp/data/backup/tarballs/linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2/usr/src/
# tar xvyf linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2
# cd linux
# make config
# make dep; make bzImage; make modules; make modules_install; cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.17; cp System.map/boot/
# vim/etc/lilo.conf
# shutdown -r now
No charge...clue-by-four thwacks are free, of course.
Well, I've been poking around at the various sites during the day, and I'm kinda disappointed to see that only the helixcode.com's server has the SRPM files available. And, as those who've tried to visit it today can attest, it's slower than tar flowing uphill. I tried to start downloading, and I was getting ~1K/sec on a fast pipe.
Regular GNOME gets a nice kick in the pants when I rebuild source RPMS with -mcpu=i686 -O6 - I'd like to get a chance to play with this a little.
It's great that ATi's finally helping out by supporting their software in the open-source world...but they're nowhere near the first developers to open-source their DVD materials. Creative has supported their DxR2 cards under Linux since November/December 1999. (see opensource.creative.com) Creative's DxR2 card is purely hardware, so they can distribute a completly open-source implementation of DVD playback.
CSS is handled legally by the drivers - they just call the ZivaDS (the descrambler chip) and say "unlock the drive, unlock the title, decode the data". The driver code has no knowledge of CSS secrets - they're all contained within the hardware.
Right now, the support is good - VGA overlay is working for the most part, and IFO parsing (with the exception of selecting multiple camera angles) is done, so movies like The Matrix and Tomorrow Never Dies play correctly. Chapter searching works to a certain extent as well. There's a graphical frontend (gdxr2) available.
Unfortunately, there's no support yet for Creative's newest card, the DxR3 - it has some functions in software, which have not been released by Sigma (who manufactures the decoder hardware). Maybe ATi's release of binaries for the restricted materials will spur them along...
Actually, I discovered and reported a minor bug in the handling of WinAMP skin files. Like the AC mentioned, you can either rename the files to have a.zip extension, or do something like this:
-in xmms/skinwin.c at line 152, there's an if statement listing a bunch of file types. Just add in another OR case for.wsz following the same format, and it's all good.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully what they're talking about patenting isn't the protection scheme that's on Series2/2.5 Tivos, because that's been owned for a couple of years now. Series3 Tivos have been hacked to get shell access so far, but AFAIK, encryption hasn't been cracked.
On a Series2 Tivo, it's not rocket science:
1) Pull hard drive
2) Replace kernel with another kernel that doesn't do an integrity check of files at boot time.
3) Make the startup scripts spawn a telnet daemon (Tivo was thoughtful enough to provide one)
4) Change 8 bytes in 'tivoapp' to disable encryption.
(and copying files off the Tivo this way is at least 2x faster than TivoToGo transfers)
Series2.5 (nightlight and dual-tuner) and Series3 (dual CableCard HDTV) require that a PROM chip be desoldered, reflashed to remove file integrity checking, and then put back in. All the Series3 Tivo lacks is step 4, but it'll only be a matter of time.
No, not nearly so much of a problem as you think.
Most set lighting is done with carbon-arc bulbs, which IIRC have a color temp of 5000K. Normal daylight is around 5500K. Tungsten incandescents are around 2800K. Fluorescents are all over the place...I've seen them from the 3000s (warm white) to 6500K.
That said, there are standard color-temperature correcting gels for lights to make them all play nice together. You can put a light-purple gel on a fluorescent to cut the green, and a light blue gel on the incandescent to bring it to daylight. Most camera strobes are already daylight-balanced.
There are already photographic fluorescent arrays made by a company called Kino Flo (kinoflo.com) that are designed with film and movies in mind - they have variable-frequency ballasts that can be driven at 50-400 Hz, so you can shoot at higher shutter speeds (most professional DSLRs don't have flash sync much higher than 1/250)
It's existed even before the flag was a glimmer in a Hollywood lawyer's eye. I've got my Tivo hacked to prevent the shows from being recorded encrypted on the hard drive int he first place. Then, I can extract them at my leisure to my PC, and do whatever I want. This isn't the DRM-ed "Tivo to Go" crap either. Fully unencumbered MPEG-2 files.
I've been using CostCo for my photo printing since they opened a warehouse near me last year. They also have some features which cater to pro-sumer and pro-level photographers. Here's some of the things I like:
1) Most CostCo warehouses have ICC profiles made and updated frequently. They're available for download at http://drycreekphoto.com/Frontier/. If you do photo post-processing in an ICC-aware app (ie Photoshop) and have a profiled monitor, your colors will match from screen to print.
2) Large prints are also very reasonably priced - $2 for up to 8x12.
3) If you want to do odd sizes for matting, no problem - I can get a 5x5 image printed on an 8x10 sheet and trim and mat it however I want for a particular frame.
Also, CostCo isn't a huge PITA like Wal-Mart is when it comes to good-looking pictures. Wal-Mart will refuse to print a shot that looks "too good", and the lab worker at CostCo will say "Hey, great picture - what camera did you use?".
Of course, Apple would be wrong. You can use J River's Media Center v9.1 to manage your iPod (along with other music, photos, etc).
It actually uses QuickTime's own routines to work with AAC (M4A, M4P) files both on your computer and on the iPod. You just have to send one purchased song to your iPod with iTunes, and then MC will be able to manage any other purchased music (iTunes creates an authorization file once on your iPod).
All I use iTunes for is buying songs. MC9 handles everything else music-related on my computer.
There is one you didn't look at - Media Center 9. In my mind, it's actually better than iTunes (although without the iTunes Music Store). It goes for US$40, with a free 30-day demo to try it out. Follow the Interact link to their forums and download the latest 9.1 beta (9.1.271 as of yesterday).
Here's what it supports on the iPod:
* Volume normalization (without modifying the MP3 file) so you're not juggling volume on every song
* Fully supports iPod Ratings, Play Counts, and Last Played information (none of the other Windows iPod software does)
* Smartlists - I can define a playlist that says - "give me 1 hour of U2 songs I've rated as 4/5 stars but I haven't listened to in the past 2 weeks. Sort it by release date of the album" As I do/don't listen to songs, the list will update itself every time I sync to my computer. It also does BPM analysis, so I can say "give me songs with tempos greater than 120".
* It syncs correctly...you won't have 5 copies of the same song on your hard drive or on your iPod.
And, for the non-iPod users, it'll sync your devices too.
Or, if your VIP isn't worth that much, the Shure e2c goes for $99 SRP, and you can get them at Guitar Center for $79. Great phones to go with an iPod on a plane flight.
Actually, they do make "protocol converters" (which provide an AUX input for your car, and convert it into a signal that your car stereo can handle) for a lot of cars. Basically, if your stock/replacement head unit is capable of controlling a CD changer, you may be able to hook in this way.
Try http://www.pie.net/ - I got a converter for my 2001 Honda Civic for $50.
All you'll need to do is figure out how to get to the back of your headunit. My install details are at my blog.
I've got to agree with this guy:
When I brought identical assignments to their attention, they didn't pounce, but gave me options such as taking off some points or letting it go.
I was a grader for a similar CS course at my alma mater (U of Illinois), and ran into a similar problem. Basically, I had about 30 kids (in a class of 350) who handed in the same code, aside from minor cosmetic changes (comments, variable names). No sophisticated checker used - I just noticed a few people who formatted their output the exact same wrong way. Grepped the handin folders, and found 30 people with the same answer. Some of them were dumb enough to hand in from adjacent workstations at the same time. Unfortunately, the professors in charge of the course wimped out - they just gave the kids a 0 on the assignment (worth maybe 5% of the grade), after all their rhetoric about punishing cheaters.
My respect for UIUC's CS department went down the drain after that.
> @home, and I hear they don't play nice with
/etc/resolv.conf, and then do "dhcpcd -C subscriberid eth0" and I was up and running.
> linux, so I'd be SOL. I just hope I get the DSL > before @Home starts port scanning me.
I've been on AT&T@Home since september 2000, and they do work fine with Linux, even though it's officially unsupported. All I had to do to get it to be Linux friendly was put their nameservers in
The only thing @Home scans for is NNTP servers, according to my logs. I have FTP, HTTP, and SSH running, and haven't had anyone come sniffing (of course, I still use iptables).
Speed for me has been good...I usually get >250KB/sec to fast servers, and latency's minimal (most pings 50ms). Service/uptime has been good too. We've had one day of downtime (DHCP server crashed), and the one time I needed tech support, it got fixed pretty quick.
I've heard a heck of a lot more complaints about DSL versus cable, so I'm sticking with it.
There's an easy solution to this. My father's a programmer at Boeing, and he needs to run on both Windows and Linux. The solution? They gave him two boxes. One runs Windows. The other runs Linux.
Not posting your e-mail address anywhere is the best way to go. I have a throwaway hotmail account that I give to most websites.
.edu because a lot of spam lists have .edu addressed stripped. They figure we're all poor college students. I've been posting with the above address (bdjohns1+usenet@uiuc.edu) to usenet for a couple years, and I average maybe one spam a month to that address..
You're probably not getting spam to your
If you're looking for something a little more sohpisticated than X-10 for home automation, talk to a good lighting design firm - they've got stuff that you can afford to put in a middle/high-end house that in the words of my uncle (who owns one of these businesses) "will make X-10 look like tin cans and string".
A private school is not Congress
That's a very simplistic view...almost akin to saying Pi ~ 3.
The authority of a private school to operate in the US is derived from various laws, both state and federal (all powers not expressly granted to the federal g'ment is granted to the states, etc). So, you end up with pretty much everything that the government is involved in being subject to the constraints of the Constitution.
And, even then, there are limits, like the "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre", which is not protected speech. "I'm gonna bring a gun to school" is similar enough for your average judge to agree.
The problem with this is a matter of the money. At my school (UIUC), residence hall users are limited to 500MB total traffic per day. They're working on a process to implement a sliding-scale bandwidth limiter, but when you've already got something in excess of 50,000 currently allocated IP addresses, it's not too easy. Plus, we're also the local POP for most of the regions ISPs, with the exception of the DSL folks and @Home.
One of our netadmins ran the budget analysis, and for unlimited access, every dorm resident would need to fork over $150/year above and beyond current housing rates (~$5600/yr). That's assuming everyone pays. Figuring an average of one computer per dorm room, that amount nearly doubles.
As it was, at peak times, Napster alone was accounting for over 60% of outbound traffic on our commodity links (non-Internet2).
Sure, @Home says they're using DHCP. Every time my system comes up or down, I always get the exact same IP address - it's configured through dhcpcd, but never changes.
In any case, it's easy enough under Linux, since I'm not doing masq or anything - I just closed off basically every service. All that's listening is Apache, SSH, sendmail (no relay), and imapd (but only to 127.0.0.1 for IMP via httpsd).
It's not a perfect setup by any means, but between that, a backup of my RPM database, and tripwire, I'm in decent enough shape.
Bzzt. Wrong answer.
On Install CD1:
RedHat/RPMS/kernel-headers-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
On Install CD2:
preview/RPMS/kernel-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-2.4.0-0.26.i586.rpm
kernel-2.4.0-0.26.i686.rpm
kernel-doc-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-enterprise-2.4.0-0.26.i686.rpm
kernel-headers-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-pcmcia-cs-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-smp-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-smp-2.4.0-0.26.i586.rpm
kernel-smp-2.4.0-0.26.i686.rpm
kernel-source-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
kernel-utils-2.4.0-0.26.i386.rpm
Jesus H. Christ...even Al and George W. could do better fact-checking.
You want this as the uninstall command:
# rpm -e openssh
Whenever you uninstall a package, all you need is the base package name.
That, and it doesn't corrode. Pure aluminum's rather weak from a structural fatigue standpoint...so they alloy it with iron and copper to make aircraft alloys, like 2024, 7050, 7076, etc. Problem there is you get electrolytic corrosion which gets particularly nasty when you fly in coastal environments. Aloha had a plane that had some skin peel off because of this. Titanium skin/rivets would be much more preferable, since they're not nearly as susceptible to corrosion damage.
Actually, there's an easier way to compile a kernel with kgcc (at least when I built 2.4.0-test8):
In linux/Makefile, there's a variable called HOSTCC. Just set it to kgcc, and it should be all good.
Geez...is it really *that hard*? /data/backup/tarballs/linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2 /usr/src/
/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.17; cp System.map /boot/
/etc/lilo.conf
# cp
# tar xvyf linux-2.2.17.tar.bz2
# cd linux
# make config
# make dep; make bzImage; make modules; make modules_install; cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage
# vim
# shutdown -r now
No charge...clue-by-four thwacks are free, of course.
Well, they now have an account registered to:
:)
Elwood Blues
1060 W. Addison
Chicago, IL 60613
with meaningless AC (773) phone numbers...
Those who've seen the Blues Brothers will get this one.
Well, I've been poking around at the various sites during the day, and I'm kinda disappointed to see that only the helixcode.com's server has the SRPM files available. And, as those who've tried to visit it today can attest, it's slower than tar flowing uphill. I tried to start downloading, and I was getting ~1K/sec on a fast pipe.
Regular GNOME gets a nice kick in the pants when I rebuild source RPMS with -mcpu=i686 -O6 - I'd like to get a chance to play with this a little.
CSS is handled legally by the drivers - they just call the ZivaDS (the descrambler chip) and say "unlock the drive, unlock the title, decode the data". The driver code has no knowledge of CSS secrets - they're all contained within the hardware.
Right now, the support is good - VGA overlay is working for the most part, and IFO parsing (with the exception of selecting multiple camera angles) is done, so movies like The Matrix and Tomorrow Never Dies play correctly. Chapter searching works to a certain extent as well. There's a graphical frontend (gdxr2) available.
Unfortunately, there's no support yet for Creative's newest card, the DxR3 - it has some functions in software, which have not been released by Sigma (who manufactures the decoder hardware). Maybe ATi's release of binaries for the restricted materials will spur them along...
-in xmms/skinwin.c at line 152, there's an if statement listing a bunch of file types. Just add in another OR case for .wsz following the same format, and it's all good.