What point was I trying to make? Ah! Yes...use the machine for what it was built for an not for what is standard now. I've seen people complain that their "older" PC got unbaringly slow because they installed Window 98 and kept installing new soft all the time... *sigh* Normally those people just buy a new machine like nice little consumers ought to do.
Of course. Your ten year old 386 is exactly the same computer as it was when you bought it. It's still every bit as fast as it ever was.
Your perceptions of what a computer should be have changed since then. Not only do you want a bigger and (arguably not) better operating system than Windows 3.1, but you're now trying to play MP3s, video clips, video games, not to mention opening fat and inefficient programs.
At the time your 386 was new, a little video window the size of a postage stamp and playing 5 frames per second was high-tech video.
Nowadays, thanks to ever-faster processors, many new computers now ship with DVD players. (And don't get into a semantical argument that most of the processing occurs in the DVD decoder, I know that too, but I use it as an illustration anyway.)
How long ago was it that Bill Gates said we'd never need anything more than 640k of RAM?
It is hard to tell the difference (at boot time) between 95 on a 486 and Win98SE on a PIII 700.
So, run Windows 95B on a PIII-700. Not just will it be a hell of a lot faster than 98SE, it also won't have the stupid "Active Desktop".
("Active Desktop", of course, is just a very nice way of saying that not only can you crash Explorer, but you can also crash Internet Explorer, all without ever having to dial up your ISP.)
, I can't think of a single actual Microsoft (...) program that requires a 300MHz CPU, very much a 1GHz.
Oh come on. The damned acid-trip paperclip in Office takes, like, 30% of your CPU cycles.
The bigger the CPU speed (and, more importantly, factor into that the number of CPU cycles it takes to execute the average instruction), the faster the parts of Office that you actually need will work.
Along the same lines, if I wanted to, I could take a 5 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine and make it power my car. It would work just fine, but it would be about as useful as Windows 95 on a 386.
Even if M$ software were efficient, incremental upgrades in speed make it possible to do things that we couldn't do a few years ago. A few years ago, arguably, you didn't need anything more than a 486. 486 machines don't generally play MP3s very well.
My perosonal opinion is that Global Warming is a scam by "green" conmen ("greenpeace" comes to mind here) so they don't need to get real jobs, and can screw high school girls
Thank you! I agree with everything else you said in your post, and there *is* a lot of evidence that global warming *is* occurring, and there's even *more* evidence that it's just part of a natural weather cycle that we haven't been keeping records long enough to have observed very well. Of course, predictably, the media fails to acknowledge that evidence for the most part.
The line I quoted from your post, however, made me stand up and clap.
I think NT4 came with a MIPS version... I haven't the least idea how well it worked, or where in the HELL you're going to find any software for it, though.
Well, at least anyone attempting could rest assured that the interface's most cherished features, especially the Blue Screen Of Death, will remain substantially the same no matter what the processor.
Ugh. I don't think I knew there was MIPS support in NT, but I'm wondering now:
If I killed someone for doing something as stupid as installing NT 4 onto a Silicon Graphics machine, would I be eligible for the electric chair, or would the idiot who incited his own death in this way be eligible for a Darwin Award?
Laroussi's process, specified in pending patent applications, is scalable; cold-plasma containers of virtually any size are feasible.
Okay, I was about to poo-poo the article at this point, since it seemed like it was about neon signs.
Not that neon signs aren't interesting or neat, it's just that when Crookes invented his first discharge tube in the late 1800s, it was news. But it isn't now.
A neon sign; or one of those neat little high-voltage fireglobe things you can buy at The Sharper Image; argon, helium-neon and carbon dioxde lasers already use cold plasma at their cores, crystal lasers like ruby and YAG:ND use xenon strobes (cold plasma) to excite them. For that matter, the strobe lights in a dance bar or the electronic flash on your camera. Even the tiny little NE-2 and NE-2H glow lamps you can buy at Radio Shack for $2 are perfect examples of cold plasma, and as the array of devices I've listed will demonstrate, it's already very versatile and scalable.
Changing the gases inside the device will change the colors. Neon is usually an orangy-red, argon is green, etc. Different mixes of the gases (usually noble (inert)) will result in different electrical and optical properties.
No vacuum pumps are required, since the plasma is generated at normal atmospheric pressure.
This is the part that finally made me stop, with some interest.
Plasma is easily creatable both in a vacuum and at atmospheric pressure. All you really need to do is excite a gas, generally using high voltage electricity. The higher the pressure of the gas, generally the higher the voltage required to excite it actually is.
Simply walking across a rug on a dry day and having static electricity jump from your fingertip is a wonderful display of atmospheric pressure plasma. But, like lightning, it's hot; if the spark were continuous, it would eventually burn you.
(As one example, I've built dozens of tesla coils as a hobby, and it's fun to pull a spark off the top of them, using only your fingertip (use proper safety precautions if you try this). That's a great example of atmospheric pressure plasma. But the problem is, it gets damned hot if it arcs for too long to any given spot on your body.)
Consider the temperature of lightning. Fine, there's less energy involved here, so the temperature is less. But I can still pull an arc from my favorite tesla coil, using my fingertip, and then use my other hand to move pieces of paper into the arc. The paper catches fire almost immediately.
Cold plasma exists in neon lightbulbs and numerous other devices. But, at atmospheric pressure it's quite a development. I can't wait to play with it.
So, this guy has an inheritable syndrome that causes heart trouble, and feels that its wrong to pass on these genes.
I've heard that said about male pattern baldness, which is particularily distressing.
I mean, I've neither got male pattern baldness (my grandfather died last year, 98 years old, with a veritable mop of white hair), nor do I have any known congenital or inherited predisposition to any diseases. Maybe I speak from a position that I don't fully understand. But come on, let's enjoy those little human failings and vulnerabilities we have. They're what make us interesting.
Having said that, I have a nose bigger than Pinocchio, Cyrano De Bergerac and Nicholas Cage. Combined. In fact, when I'm tired, its sheer mass upsets my center of gravity and makes me fall over. When I sneeze, it's a seismic event; it makes the San Andreas' worst look like a mere sniff. And the expelled winds will remove even the most tenacious trailer parks from any piece of southern Florida real estate. If I breathe deeply inside a car, I can implode the windshield.
And ya know what? I'm cool with it. While I have a very aerodynamic profile, I'm a good looking guy, though I'd never be one of the world's Brad Pitts or John Kennedy Jrs. And for that, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I'm not that good looking, because if I were, I think people might be afraid to approach me, or might brand me a snob. On the other hand, I'm glad I'm good looking. My nose is the division between the two; I've been asked for autographs by people who thought I was either Wil Wheaton or Jerry O'Connell, and, in fact, when I'm facing someone straight on, I look very much like the two of them combined. A quick turn of the head, and they give me a phone number but cease to ask for autographs.
(The other great advantage is the propositions I get in bars. I'm 6'4", and women come up to me. They stare at my nose the way men stare at breasts. They take a look at the size of my hands, then look at the size of the shoes I'm wearing, then look at my nose from as many angles as they think they can without me noticing. Of course, I always notice. A couple of times, I've been asked directly just how big I am... You know. So, things that we perceive as detracting from our appearance aren't necessarily a liability.)
I'm glad to be me, with all my strengths and weaknesses; things that genetic alteration could have changed perhaps at the press of a button in the future, things that would now require immensely painful plastic surgery. Who cares? I am who I am; I'm grateful to be who I am.
Hey, if you're looking for a good PCI DEC tulip card w/ 4 LEDs, you can't beat the Netgear FA-310TX. $17.95 last time I saw on Buy.com
Thank you all for responding to that.
I'll certainly check out those, and the other suggestion for the D-Link DE-530.
Not that this has any sort of real relevant use, but my firewall/proxy has a free 5.25" bay, which I'm going to use to mount a hard disk drive. Since it's a 3.5" drive, I'll be using one of those adaptors, and it's got a faceplate.
I've already laid plans to drill a whole bunch of holes into it and have labelled LEDs for eth0 and eth1. Again, not that it's got any practical use, except that it'll make my gateway look really impressive sitting under my fax machine with a zillion blinking lights on it.
PR#3 should switch you over to 80 columns (if you have the 80 column card) PR#6 is for floppies one and two (usually) and PR#7 is normally for the second pair of floppies (although I never saw such a beast). PR#1 is normally the printer. PR#2 would have been the serial card where you plug in the modem. Not sure about the rest.
Wow. That takes me back. I knew it was either pr#3 or pr#6.
I can't believe that last time I actually used one of these things, I was in Grade 3. 1983. And I can't believe that I still sorta remembered the command. Spooky, ain't it?
I remember running Bank Street Writer, Gertrude's Boots, and a couple of video games that we'd snuck in. Man oh man, that takes me back.
I remember that the disk drives were attached to the controller with small ribbon cables; no additional leads for power. And, looking back at it now, I know the drives were just modified Shugarts with Apple stickers glued on.
I also remember one of them failing once. As improbable as this sounds - and maybe I remember it wrong - I remember the classroom started to stink of plastic burning. And I remember the teacher pulling a smoking diskette out of the drive. I don't remember if the disk was melted or not; looking back on it, I suspect someone stuck something metal into the drive and it fried something, and the smoke just happened to be around the diskette as it came out of the drive.
It took me years to get over my fear of 5.25" disk drives. 8" and 11" drives still give me the heebie-jeebies.
BTW, anybody remember the DuoDrives? Looked nifty, but damn if you weren't screwed if one went down.
Yup. But there are lots of things like that now. I never used a DuoDrive, but I can imagine that the mechanism just mates up to a custom faceplate. How is that different from the disk drive on any notebook computer, or for that matter, lots of the highly-stylized HP Pavilions and stuff today? I agree it's still icky, but proprietary parts obviously have a long history in the computer industry.
On the other hand, I'd love to put a power eject floppy drive onto my computer, a la Macintosh.
When I used a Mac, they laughed because I had no command prompt. When I used Linux, they laughed because I had no GUI.
When I used an Amiga, they laughed because my command prompt was in my GUI.
If you're feeling really brave, you might also look up Eunice. It was a UNIX-like environment running under VMS. There used to be entries in some early versions of autoconf that ran something along the lines of "checking for eunice... not found, fortunately".
That's something that I didn't see getting covered on the History of UNIX webpage. I mean, cracks about UNIX' unfortunate homonym should be legion to its history.
When I was first introduced to UNIX - not accidentally coincidental with my first Internet account back in 1988 - it was by a guy who sounded like High Pitched Eric off the Howard Stern Radio Show.
Between the combination of the frequent use of the word "UNIX" and the spoken falsetto this guy had, I was feeling very protective of the ol' family jewels.
A few years after that, in 1996 and at the ripe old age of 22, I was in a rush to get to a meeting. Get this: the meeting was for the National Capital Freenet, which used Solaris and was one of my early forms of Internet connectivity. I finished urinating, and in a hurry, I caught myself in my zipper. I got to find out how it felt to speak with a falsetto for a few days. However, it wasn't without its benefits; when I went to the hospital, the doc there circumcised me, and my only regret about being circumcised is that the zipper accident didn't happen sooner in my life.
UNIX were highly respected members of society in Roman times. They were used to protect high-ranking women, as they could almost certainly be trusted to Do The Right Thing. Their history is very interesting reading.
I can't believe that was moderated down! That was very funny. Either the moderator who did that takes UNIX way too seriously, or he just didn't get it.
I work for a major American defense contractor, and I therefore speak with some authority. Note that nothing I'm going to release is a trade secret or a federal secret.
A lot of mission-critical stuff a few years ago was based on the Texas Instruments TMS9900 CPU chip, which is an old 16-bit processor that is basically a Texas Instruments TI-99000 minicomputer scaled down to a single 64-pin DIP. The most common place that you will find a TMS9900 these days, however, is in a TI-99/4A home computer sitting around in someone's closet.
Lots of other older stuff used Z-80s. In fact, the control system for the NRX reactor (now decommissioned) at Canada's Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories was using a Z80 processor and core memory due to its relatively minimal vulnerability to the effects of ionizing radiation if something went wrong.
Our more recent mission-critical stuff around the office uses either Motorola 68000s or Intel i960 processors, both of which are used as embedded processors running machine language off ROM chips. All the mission-critical (ie. radar, etc.) stuff appears to be written in assembly language, then (of course) assembled to machine language.
That's not to say that a lot of stuff these days is written for Linux and other operating systems, but not with the stuff that I see on a daily basis.
Besides, with the efficiency required to run a lot of the older processors that you have to use (because of their availability in industrial and military temperature ratings), all OS code must be lean and tight, generally written specifically for the application. Fault tolerance and real-time operation with a processor that people would laugh at having on a desktop are not an option, they are a requirement.
Let's face it, if you're at war and the guidance computer in a cruise missile you've just fired goes down, you could blow up your allies, not your enemies.
use the graphical online help system. You can bring it up by typing: rm -rf/
You know, I would agree with the moderation that this was really funny, if it wasn't possible that a new user might mistake this for being a serious instruction.
I think we're all united in that we want to get people away from using Windows as a desktop operating system, let alone a serious networking operating system.
When you undermine the attempts of new Linux/UNIX users to be able to understand their systems, let alone "help" them along by making them inadvertantly erase their hard drives, all you end up doing is making them abandon their efforts in frustration and turn to such wonderfully stable, efficient, inexpensive and highly secure operating systems as Windows 2000.
*Any that involve the words "boat anchor", "landfill", or "stick it..." do not qualify as constructive (or original).
Hmmm... I've got an old one where the motherboard was completely trashed, the keyboard had several bad keys, and the case was done. (It was from my high school, and had spent a number of years first in the computer lab, then was retired to the electronics classroom.) Suffice it to say that it was trashed.
I welded the little holes on the bottom of the case shut, painted the inside with POR-15 epoxy, and filled it with kitty litter. My cat loves it, and it's a real conversation piece in my bathroom.
not even OS.
If the ROM chips are still socketed on the motherboard, you still have an OS.
Type "pr#3" at a command prompt. If that doesn't make the floppy drive try to read, then type "pr#6". It one of the pr numbers, I can't remember which. If you try all of them in sequence, you'll find the floppy controller, the 80-column card (if you have it), etc.
From there, all you'll need is a little bit of software in the drive. I'm sure someone somewhere has written a program that will allow you to use a modern computer to format a 5.25" disk in Apple II format, then you should be able to download and copy something to it.
From what I've read, many of the DoS attacks merely send so many packets toward a computer that it can't handle them all. Couldn't this happen whether the packets are dropped or not?
Could filter out all ICMP (ping, etc.) packets as part of your firewalling ruleset, but that will have other consequences, since ICMP is important to help negotiate a TCP connection when something goes wacky somewhere.
Just make the firewall ruleset watch for fragmented ICMP packets, as well as misformed ICMP packets (ie. the "ping of death").
A floodping just eats bandwidth, sometimes overloading and crashing routers and stuff along the way. Yank your internet connection to make damned sure this doesn't hit the internet, then from a Linux box, type "ping -f 192.168.x.x &" several times, where the x.x is the rest of the local IP address of a Windows box. Watch your ethernet lights, and the collision light on your hub. When I do this, my Windows 95B box slows right down, but it doesn't crash.
A DoS attack usually involves sending a floodping of malformed or fragmented packets, meaning that the system at the other end either experiences buffer over-runs (which, depending on how well the operating system protects memory, may or may not corrupt something else in RAM) or retries in vain to get the other part of the fragmented packets that the other system is sending.
At some point, the buffers either become full or start to over-write their boundaries. The blue screen of death is only around the corner.
BTW, don't take this as gospel, this is my understanding of what happens from burning the candle at both ends as I learn about network security in preparation for administering a webserver at the office.
hmmm... only 2 eh.. But yea, from a 486. I have a linux box using a cyrix M2(233mhz-PR300 thing). And it can handle it's full bandwidth of 10mbps, quite easily,
Yup, I'm quite impressed.
I run a Dell P-133 machine, using an Allied Telesyn AT-1500 on my local LAN and a generic NE-2000 PCI card on my external connection.
With my DSL setup, I have to run PPPoE, so I've got Roaring Penguin's solution, and a fairly good firewall routine.
When I fire up top and then start downloading big files on any one of my Windows clients, I never show more than about 2% CPU useage on the Dell, and most of that is running top.
I've saturated my 10 Mbps Intranet a few times, mostly parking a few video files on the Linux server, and then playing them from the 4 Windows clients scattered throughout my house. Even so, the Dell never peaked out over 5% CPU useage. As long as I stay away from X, there's loads of power and memory for ipchains to do its thing.
of course I am running nice DEC tulip chips and no icky 3com junk, or realtek crud. It's been a while but I believe I could get around 60mbps, maybe higher, but this was also only from one source to one destination.
AT-1500s are bus-mastering ISA cards; I wish I could get two of them to run in that same machine, but I've never been able to get two ISA network adapters to run in Red Hat 6.0. Even though they run fine together under Windows 95, I get an "Ieee! Killing interrupt handler!" message when I try to bring up eth1 with the PPPoE driver.
I like the AT-1500s because they've got great LBL factor. ("LBL" = "Little Blinking LED")
LEDs for Link, Collision, TX and RX. Very pretty when my roommates are online.
Anyone know of any good PCI network cards with lots of LEDs? (Scary that it's a prime purchasing criteria, isn't it?)
I personally wouldn't be surprised to see ISPs start taking that kind of action, but once it does start happening, who knows what the limit will be?
But, I fail to understand the problem. Private IP addresses don't belong on the Internet, right?
So, if they don't belong there, they're there either because of an error (ie. plugged Internet connection into the wrong ethernet card on my Linux firewall/router) or because of a malicious attempt to take advantage of a potential security hole.
In either case, there's no legitimate reason why you'd want 192.168.x.x to be on the greater 'net, right?
I'm still a Linux newbie, and I'm still new to the power and responsibility my Linux firewall/router gives me that Windows doesn't. But filtering out all external packets claiming to be from my internal LAN was one of the very first things I did in implementing my firewall; even if I only copied the scripts off a How-To and modified them for my needs.
Speaking of which, how do I set up hosts.deny and hosts.allow to allow all telnet (bad, I know, but I'll never log in as root remotely; I promise) and http requests to my webserver into my LAN? <grin>
DVD is a purely digital format. The discs are not "PAL" or "NTSC", nor do they contain sync pulses or any other analog-isms. When you decode the video, you get 720x480 24 bit raw frames.
Okay. And the storage mechanism for the series of raw frames is MPEG, isn't it, which would roughly mean that it stores each frame once, then adjusts each one in sequence according to the change?
I figured it was purely digital; the only question being whether or not it actually stored each complete frame as it would be stored on a videocassette or broadcast over the air. But I doubted that, since it strikes me that the overhead to actually attempt to store sync information and stuff in a digital format (rather than just create it on playback) would hamper compatibility with other future formats, as well as simply being unnecessary.
Macrovision is "added on" by the player, according to some bits on the disc (discs can switch Macrovision on and off individually - it's not global to the player). All DVD-CCA licensed players *must* have Macrovision encoding on any composite/S-Video/component outputs.
So, all we need to do is learn what line on one of the really big VLSI chips on the board is held high/low to keep Macrovision on/off...
Unless the image is processed digitally into a frame, including vertical and horizontal information, before being send to the D/A converter for output... That would make things a little bit more difficult. But if you're running a DVD player with composite and S-Video outputs, I doubt that's the case, for a variety of technical reasons that stem from the nature of the way color information is modulated onto NTSC luminance information.
Hmmm... Actually, the more I think about it, if you have separate outputs on the DVD player, I'm more convinced that the video is prepared in analog format first, then somewhere along the way a sync processor circuit gets in between, adds chroma, H+V sync, and performs the chroma modulation to the luminance signal. Somewhere along the way, there's probably an output from the DVD player's computer that turns on and off the Macrovision circuits. It's only a matter of finding that signal line somewhere in the myriad of pins connected to all those proprietary chips.
This includes PC-based decoder cards, which is why the makers of those cards refuse to give specs out to free/open source software developers. Once you have specs it would be trivial to defeat the added Macrovision even in Windows, and we can't have that.
Now, I understand.
In either case, though, unless you're a complete purist and don't want to add any extra electronics between your disc and your TV set, it's probably just easier to throw together a small scrubber, rather than trying to take out the Macrovision at the source.
Macrovision sure does make it tough for me to watch old movies on my antique TV collection: a 1954 General Electric doesn't play very well with stuff hidden in the vertical blanking interval. Nor does my 1957 GE UltraVision, nor does my 1956 Admiral Bakelite, nor does my 1960 Philco TravLer, nor does my 1954 RCA color. Only my 1955 Motorola doesn't seem to care.
Watching Ben Hur on an ancient black and white TV with my surround-sound system running just seems so weird, but it's also a lot of fun. <grin>
Well, actually, that's why I had one too-we used them with a Toaster. Didn't realize how useful they were until someone asked me to try copying a tape...:)
You had a Toaster? <jealousy>Bastard!</jealousy>
Not just useful with a Toaster, though. Actually, my most powerful machine at the time, my old A500, was a relatively late addition to my home TV studio. (It came about the same time as a friend of mine slipped me a copy of Broadcast Titler 2.0 that they used to use to replace the $50,000 Chyron machines for newscasts.)
Before that, the TBCs were useful for syncing my only (at the time) 3/4" VTR with my camera's internal sync generator; once that was done, I could do crossfades between sources, and capture them onto my VHS machine.
After a while, I scored some more derelict 1970s-vintage 3/4" decks, and started to get creative when I threw together a luminance keyer.
You know what a "Chroma Key" is, right? Ya know, the blue screen background? It's entirely an analog way of superimposing one video source over another. Matched sync is critical (so I couldn't do it without either a whole bunch of synced cameras or VTRs on TBCs). All that the chroma key does is look for a specific color (commonly blue) and switches to the other video source while that special color is being sent.
Actually building a chroma keyer is just a matter of watching each line of video for a specific amplitude and phase of chroma information being sent in the scan line. Detecting the phase is the really tough part for me with my self-taught informal electronics training, and when I did this, I was in high school and so couln't afford to dedicate $200 of parts that I'd bought in Radio Shack blister packs to being smoked off a piece of perfboard in a failed attempt. <grin>
So, I just went the easier way: when I knew I wasn't in a horizontal or vertical blanking interval, my sync separator circuit held a line high. A high DISP line coming off my homebrew sync-sep board meant that I was in a displayable part of the video signal, and was used to turn on and off a small comparator circuit.
Any time the source video, in the displayable area, got above a given brightness, it switched to the second video source. With that, I had very crude "blue-screen" ability.
It was really cool, too, because if you played with the thresholds, comparator recovery times and other neat stuff like that, you could absolutely butcher a piece of video in all sorts of MTV "How did you do that?" ways.
In fact, one of the broadcast engineers at the station, who knew that I was good with a soldering iron and had had me rebuilding VTRs with him at one point, asked me how my luminance keyer circuit was coming along. I brought it in the next day, and plugged it in on the bench, and we threw some synced video at it. It was quite unspectacular compared to some of the big-$$ chroma keys at the station, but because it was easy to mess with, we were sticking capacitors across the comparator's switching output to introduce some smear in the source switching. We got some neat effects out of it that way, and even ended up showing it to the news producer, who used it to produce a neat smeared overlay for the opening of the evening newscast. That was cool.
Ahhh, I love NTSC video, even if it is completely inconsistant and archaic. The NTSC video signal represents what is probably the single most complicated analog waveform in general use.
Would I fear getting mugged walking through a city park in the dead of night here in Toronto, Canada? Sure. Would I fear being shot? Nope.
Interesting. Guess you didn't hear about the shooting last night at the corner of Sherbourne and Shuter Streets. (Shuter. How appropriate.)
Or the daily shootings in the Jane and Finch area. Interesting. That's still in Toronto.
Sure, probably most of the handguns used in Canadian crimes are smuggled across the border. But if the US had more restrictive gun control, it wouldn't solve the problem.
After all, if you impose gun control, then the only people who will still have guns are the criminals.
Don't know about you, but I'll be looking for wash-'n-wear kevlar-blend T-shirts from that point on.
Again, I am not a physicist, but while reading up on this technology I read that each monitor has its own particular frequency, and in fact you can have two monitors of identical make and model sitting next to each other, and it is still possible to clearly delineate between the two using tempest technology, because of minor variations in components that are introduced in the manufacturing process (i.e. no two monitors are *exactly* alike).
Well, no two cars are exactly alike either. But that doesn't stop the same police radar gun from reading their speed.
The signals that someone would be intercepting would be generated by the host computer, not by the monitor. It's just that the monitor is a very convenient transmitting antenna for everything that leaves your VGA port.
Your deflection circuits would provide a really strong signal to help point a directional antenna, and they'd also provide you with sync information (top of frame, horizontal and vertical reset, refresh rates, etc.) that you can use later on once you've captured the video.
Once you've used the H and V circuits as a good signal with which to point your antenna, you can rest assured that the video signal that your VGA port puts out is amplified quite a bit (from about 1V p~p to about 90V p~p) within your monitor. The cathode drive voltage on most monitors is about 90V. Given the frequencies involved for high res VGA video (ie. leading and trailing edges of a sharp vertical line on the screen), for good bandwidth, everything would have to be pretty low impedance to minimize the effects of stray capacitance in the video driver stages. Which makes the basics for a very good radio transmitter.
Now, in response to the post to which I'm responding, I'm sure similar models will radiate the RF with similar efficiency. But two dissimilar models side by side will probably be somewhat different in their behavior.
Your motherboard, too, is a pretty damned good transmitter, but to actually be able to make sense of the sheer noise coming off my spectrum analyzer when I point the antenna near my old Pentium 166MMX, I can't say. But the information is all there, with the change of state of every line on the address, data, control, MFM, IDE, etc. buses, a nice spike of RF energy is transmitted.
I can clearly make out my 66MHz processor bus (sorry, guys, it's not overclocked) on the spectrum analyzer; I can clearly make out my 166MHz clock, I can clearly make out a 7.8MHz pulsetrain that I assume to be my ISA bus, and I can see a spike at 33MHz that I assume is either my PCI bus or is the base oscillator that is clock-doubled to make my 66MHz bus.
I'm reminded at this point that I damned well need a new computer, but between my low pay, high taxes and high rent, I can't seem to afford it. Anybody want to hire a self-professed video guru and computer geek? Assets include a warped sense of humor...
When your neighbors could buy a machine that allows them to watch you shagging your girlfriend if they wanted to?
Well, almost.
Just remember that not only the FBI but also most cable companies already have the ability to drive past your house and see what's on your TV screen.
The tuner in your TV, VCR or cable box is superheterodyne, meaning it mixes a local oscillator with the incoming signal. The frequency of the local oscillator, when it's at the same frequency as a particular TV channel that you want to watch, produces a beat signal that is amplified by the electronics of the device.
Superhet is a great system, and that's why it's in virtually everything that receives RF. (I wonder if RCA still gets royalties on the patent?)
But, the signal of the local oscillator does leak out of the tuner, and if you look for it and measure its frequency, you know what the TV is tuned to.
ie. "That's very interesting. The house at 15 Robin Hood Lane has a TV set tuned to HBO, but they don't pay for HBO..."
When the cable guy rings your doorbell to do an unexpected "signal check", never let him in. If you're a cable thief, that is.
But that's not the only thing your TV set spits out. All conventional TV sets and monitors have very powerful circuits for deflecting the electron beams in the picture tube. They radiate a lot of electromagnetic energy. Now, the jury's still out on whether or not they cause any health effects, but I can promise you that they're very easy to detect.
Use the deflection signals from a TV set or monitor to point your antenna directly at it and sync your receiver to it.
Then, all you'd need to do is amplify the everything you're picking up in the 150kHz to 5MHz range, and use it to drive a CRT.
All of a sudden, the van parked in front of your house can see the creative accounting processes you use to keep your business afloat, as you type innocently away at your computer. Or they can see from your TV what kind of kinky movies you like. Etc.
Of course, you could wrap everything electronic in your house with aluminum foil connected to a cold water pipe or other suitable ground, but it detracts a little from their safety, working life and usefulness.
Privacy doesn't exist, hasn't for years, and that says nothing of cellular/cordless phones. Or listening devices that any ambitious high school kid can build with a laser pointer and a tripod, devices that can be positioned miles away from you and yet use your windows as listening devices. Nothing.
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Of course. Your ten year old 386 is exactly the same computer as it was when you bought it. It's still every bit as fast as it ever was.
Your perceptions of what a computer should be have changed since then. Not only do you want a bigger and (arguably not) better operating system than Windows 3.1, but you're now trying to play MP3s, video clips, video games, not to mention opening fat and inefficient programs.
At the time your 386 was new, a little video window the size of a postage stamp and playing 5 frames per second was high-tech video.
Nowadays, thanks to ever-faster processors, many new computers now ship with DVD players. (And don't get into a semantical argument that most of the processing occurs in the DVD decoder, I know that too, but I use it as an illustration anyway.)
How long ago was it that Bill Gates said we'd never need anything more than 640k of RAM?
So, run Windows 95B on a PIII-700. Not just will it be a hell of a lot faster than 98SE, it also won't have the stupid "Active Desktop".
("Active Desktop", of course, is just a very nice way of saying that not only can you crash Explorer, but you can also crash Internet Explorer, all without ever having to dial up your ISP.)
Oh come on. The damned acid-trip paperclip in Office takes, like, 30% of your CPU cycles.
The bigger the CPU speed (and, more importantly, factor into that the number of CPU cycles it takes to execute the average instruction), the faster the parts of Office that you actually need will work.
Along the same lines, if I wanted to, I could take a 5 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine and make it power my car. It would work just fine, but it would be about as useful as Windows 95 on a 386.
Even if M$ software were efficient, incremental upgrades in speed make it possible to do things that we couldn't do a few years ago. A few years ago, arguably, you didn't need anything more than a 486. 486 machines don't generally play MP3s very well.
More power means more new uses.
Thank you! I agree with everything else you said in your post, and there *is* a lot of evidence that global warming *is* occurring, and there's even *more* evidence that it's just part of a natural weather cycle that we haven't been keeping records long enough to have observed very well. Of course, predictably, the media fails to acknowledge that evidence for the most part.
The line I quoted from your post, however, made me stand up and clap.
Thank you.
Hmm... Well, it would never run on the SG Challenge XL, then, since, AFAIK, that's a MIPS10000 machine.
Yeah, now why *anyone* would want to run NT on an Indy is beyond me. Seems to me that it defeats almost half the purpose of having an Indy.
PowerPC is even more laughable: Mac users are undoubtedly the biggest PowerPC users, and they're incredibly independant and scornful of Microsloth.
Latex and Emacs seem to be flakey on NT.Flakey? I can't even get vi to start up in DOS!
Well, at least anyone attempting could rest assured that the interface's most cherished features, especially the Blue Screen Of Death, will remain substantially the same no matter what the processor.
Ugh. I don't think I knew there was MIPS support in NT, but I'm wondering now:
If I killed someone for doing something as stupid as installing NT 4 onto a Silicon Graphics machine, would I be eligible for the electric chair, or would the idiot who incited his own death in this way be eligible for a Darwin Award?
Quoted from article:
Laroussi's process, specified in pending patent applications, is scalable; cold-plasma containers of virtually any size are feasible.Okay, I was about to poo-poo the article at this point, since it seemed like it was about neon signs.
Not that neon signs aren't interesting or neat, it's just that when Crookes invented his first discharge tube in the late 1800s, it was news. But it isn't now.
A neon sign; or one of those neat little high-voltage fireglobe things you can buy at The Sharper Image; argon, helium-neon and carbon dioxde lasers already use cold plasma at their cores, crystal lasers like ruby and YAG:ND use xenon strobes (cold plasma) to excite them. For that matter, the strobe lights in a dance bar or the electronic flash on your camera. Even the tiny little NE-2 and NE-2H glow lamps you can buy at Radio Shack for $2 are perfect examples of cold plasma, and as the array of devices I've listed will demonstrate, it's already very versatile and scalable.
Changing the gases inside the device will change the colors. Neon is usually an orangy-red, argon is green, etc. Different mixes of the gases (usually noble (inert)) will result in different electrical and optical properties.
No vacuum pumps are required, since the plasma is generated at normal atmospheric pressure.This is the part that finally made me stop, with some interest.
Plasma is easily creatable both in a vacuum and at atmospheric pressure. All you really need to do is excite a gas, generally using high voltage electricity. The higher the pressure of the gas, generally the higher the voltage required to excite it actually is.
Simply walking across a rug on a dry day and having static electricity jump from your fingertip is a wonderful display of atmospheric pressure plasma. But, like lightning, it's hot; if the spark were continuous, it would eventually burn you.
(As one example, I've built dozens of tesla coils as a hobby, and it's fun to pull a spark off the top of them, using only your fingertip (use proper safety precautions if you try this). That's a great example of atmospheric pressure plasma. But the problem is, it gets damned hot if it arcs for too long to any given spot on your body.)
Consider the temperature of lightning. Fine, there's less energy involved here, so the temperature is less. But I can still pull an arc from my favorite tesla coil, using my fingertip, and then use my other hand to move pieces of paper into the arc. The paper catches fire almost immediately.
Cold plasma exists in neon lightbulbs and numerous other devices. But, at atmospheric pressure it's quite a development. I can't wait to play with it.
I've heard that said about male pattern baldness, which is particularily distressing.
I mean, I've neither got male pattern baldness (my grandfather died last year, 98 years old, with a veritable mop of white hair), nor do I have any known congenital or inherited predisposition to any diseases. Maybe I speak from a position that I don't fully understand. But come on, let's enjoy those little human failings and vulnerabilities we have. They're what make us interesting.
Having said that, I have a nose bigger than Pinocchio, Cyrano De Bergerac and Nicholas Cage. Combined. In fact, when I'm tired, its sheer mass upsets my center of gravity and makes me fall over. When I sneeze, it's a seismic event; it makes the San Andreas' worst look like a mere sniff. And the expelled winds will remove even the most tenacious trailer parks from any piece of southern Florida real estate. If I breathe deeply inside a car, I can implode the windshield.
And ya know what? I'm cool with it. While I have a very aerodynamic profile, I'm a good looking guy, though I'd never be one of the world's Brad Pitts or John Kennedy Jrs. And for that, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I'm not that good looking, because if I were, I think people might be afraid to approach me, or might brand me a snob. On the other hand, I'm glad I'm good looking. My nose is the division between the two; I've been asked for autographs by people who thought I was either Wil Wheaton or Jerry O'Connell, and, in fact, when I'm facing someone straight on, I look very much like the two of them combined. A quick turn of the head, and they give me a phone number but cease to ask for autographs.
(The other great advantage is the propositions I get in bars. I'm 6'4", and women come up to me. They stare at my nose the way men stare at breasts. They take a look at the size of my hands, then look at the size of the shoes I'm wearing, then look at my nose from as many angles as they think they can without me noticing. Of course, I always notice. A couple of times, I've been asked directly just how big I am... You know. So, things that we perceive as detracting from our appearance aren't necessarily a liability.)
I'm glad to be me, with all my strengths and weaknesses; things that genetic alteration could have changed perhaps at the press of a button in the future, things that would now require immensely painful plastic surgery. Who cares? I am who I am; I'm grateful to be who I am.
Thank you all for responding to that.
I'll certainly check out those, and the other suggestion for the D-Link DE-530.
Not that this has any sort of real relevant use, but my firewall/proxy has a free 5.25" bay, which I'm going to use to mount a hard disk drive. Since it's a 3.5" drive, I'll be using one of those adaptors, and it's got a faceplate.
I've already laid plans to drill a whole bunch of holes into it and have labelled LEDs for eth0 and eth1. Again, not that it's got any practical use, except that it'll make my gateway look really impressive sitting under my fax machine with a zillion blinking lights on it.
Wow. That takes me back. I knew it was either pr#3 or pr#6.
I can't believe that last time I actually used one of these things, I was in Grade 3. 1983. And I can't believe that I still sorta remembered the command. Spooky, ain't it?
I remember running Bank Street Writer, Gertrude's Boots, and a couple of video games that we'd snuck in. Man oh man, that takes me back.
I remember that the disk drives were attached to the controller with small ribbon cables; no additional leads for power. And, looking back at it now, I know the drives were just modified Shugarts with Apple stickers glued on.
I also remember one of them failing once. As improbable as this sounds - and maybe I remember it wrong - I remember the classroom started to stink of plastic burning. And I remember the teacher pulling a smoking diskette out of the drive. I don't remember if the disk was melted or not; looking back on it, I suspect someone stuck something metal into the drive and it fried something, and the smoke just happened to be around the diskette as it came out of the drive.
It took me years to get over my fear of 5.25" disk drives. 8" and 11" drives still give me the heebie-jeebies.
BTW, anybody remember the DuoDrives? Looked nifty, but damn if you weren't screwed if one went down.Yup. But there are lots of things like that now. I never used a DuoDrive, but I can imagine that the mechanism just mates up to a custom faceplate. How is that different from the disk drive on any notebook computer, or for that matter, lots of the highly-stylized HP Pavilions and stuff today? I agree it's still icky, but proprietary parts obviously have a long history in the computer industry.
On the other hand, I'd love to put a power eject floppy drive onto my computer, a la Macintosh.
When I used a Mac, they laughed because I had no command prompt. When I used Linux, they laughed because I had no GUI.When I used an Amiga, they laughed because my command prompt was in my GUI.
And I had to mount and unmount my disks.
And the disk drive ticked every two seconds.
Bastards.
That's something that I didn't see getting covered on the History of UNIX webpage. I mean, cracks about UNIX' unfortunate homonym should be legion to its history.
When I was first introduced to UNIX - not accidentally coincidental with my first Internet account back in 1988 - it was by a guy who sounded like High Pitched Eric off the Howard Stern Radio Show.
Between the combination of the frequent use of the word "UNIX" and the spoken falsetto this guy had, I was feeling very protective of the ol' family jewels.
A few years after that, in 1996 and at the ripe old age of 22, I was in a rush to get to a meeting. Get this: the meeting was for the National Capital Freenet, which used Solaris and was one of my early forms of Internet connectivity. I finished urinating, and in a hurry, I caught myself in my zipper. I got to find out how it felt to speak with a falsetto for a few days. However, it wasn't without its benefits; when I went to the hospital, the doc there circumcised me, and my only regret about being circumcised is that the zipper accident didn't happen sooner in my life.
UNIX hit me way too close to home that day.
I'm not sure whether to laugh hysterically or cry at the thought of someone trying to install 2000 on a SGI box.
Hmmm... Yeah. How well does Windows 2000 support non-Alpha/non-x86 multiprocessor systems?
LOL
I can't believe that was moderated down! That was very funny. Either the moderator who did that takes UNIX way too seriously, or he just didn't get it.
Being a UNIX guru is very castrating.
For the ignorant, look up "Eunuch" on Yahoo.
Okay.
I work for a major American defense contractor, and I therefore speak with some authority. Note that nothing I'm going to release is a trade secret or a federal secret.
A lot of mission-critical stuff a few years ago was based on the Texas Instruments TMS9900 CPU chip, which is an old 16-bit processor that is basically a Texas Instruments TI-99000 minicomputer scaled down to a single 64-pin DIP. The most common place that you will find a TMS9900 these days, however, is in a TI-99/4A home computer sitting around in someone's closet.
Lots of other older stuff used Z-80s. In fact, the control system for the NRX reactor (now decommissioned) at Canada's Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories was using a Z80 processor and core memory due to its relatively minimal vulnerability to the effects of ionizing radiation if something went wrong.
Our more recent mission-critical stuff around the office uses either Motorola 68000s or Intel i960 processors, both of which are used as embedded processors running machine language off ROM chips. All the mission-critical (ie. radar, etc.) stuff appears to be written in assembly language, then (of course) assembled to machine language.
That's not to say that a lot of stuff these days is written for Linux and other operating systems, but not with the stuff that I see on a daily basis.
Besides, with the efficiency required to run a lot of the older processors that you have to use (because of their availability in industrial and military temperature ratings), all OS code must be lean and tight, generally written specifically for the application. Fault tolerance and real-time operation with a processor that people would laugh at having on a desktop are not an option, they are a requirement.
Let's face it, if you're at war and the guidance computer in a cruise missile you've just fired goes down, you could blow up your allies, not your enemies.
rm -rf
You know, I would agree with the moderation that this was really funny, if it wasn't possible that a new user might mistake this for being a serious instruction.
I think we're all united in that we want to get people away from using Windows as a desktop operating system, let alone a serious networking operating system.
When you undermine the attempts of new Linux/UNIX users to be able to understand their systems, let alone "help" them along by making them inadvertantly erase their hard drives, all you end up doing is making them abandon their efforts in frustration and turn to such wonderfully stable, efficient, inexpensive and highly secure operating systems as Windows 2000.
Hope the guy can reinstall his operating system.
Hmmm... I've got an old one where the motherboard was completely trashed, the keyboard had several bad keys, and the case was done. (It was from my high school, and had spent a number of years first in the computer lab, then was retired to the electronics classroom.) Suffice it to say that it was trashed.
I welded the little holes on the bottom of the case shut, painted the inside with POR-15 epoxy, and filled it with kitty litter. My cat loves it, and it's a real conversation piece in my bathroom.
not even OS.If the ROM chips are still socketed on the motherboard, you still have an OS.
Type "pr#3" at a command prompt. If that doesn't make the floppy drive try to read, then type "pr#6". It one of the pr numbers, I can't remember which. If you try all of them in sequence, you'll find the floppy controller, the 80-column card (if you have it), etc.
From there, all you'll need is a little bit of software in the drive. I'm sure someone somewhere has written a program that will allow you to use a modern computer to format a 5.25" disk in Apple II format, then you should be able to download and copy something to it.
Could filter out all ICMP (ping, etc.) packets as part of your firewalling ruleset, but that will have other consequences, since ICMP is important to help negotiate a TCP connection when something goes wacky somewhere.
Just make the firewall ruleset watch for fragmented ICMP packets, as well as misformed ICMP packets (ie. the "ping of death").
A floodping just eats bandwidth, sometimes overloading and crashing routers and stuff along the way. Yank your internet connection to make damned sure this doesn't hit the internet, then from a Linux box, type "ping -f 192.168.x.x &" several times, where the x.x is the rest of the local IP address of a Windows box. Watch your ethernet lights, and the collision light on your hub. When I do this, my Windows 95B box slows right down, but it doesn't crash.
A DoS attack usually involves sending a floodping of malformed or fragmented packets, meaning that the system at the other end either experiences buffer over-runs (which, depending on how well the operating system protects memory, may or may not corrupt something else in RAM) or retries in vain to get the other part of the fragmented packets that the other system is sending.
At some point, the buffers either become full or start to over-write their boundaries. The blue screen of death is only around the corner.
BTW, don't take this as gospel, this is my understanding of what happens from burning the candle at both ends as I learn about network security in preparation for administering a webserver at the office.
Yup, I'm quite impressed.
I run a Dell P-133 machine, using an Allied Telesyn AT-1500 on my local LAN and a generic NE-2000 PCI card on my external connection.
With my DSL setup, I have to run PPPoE, so I've got Roaring Penguin's solution, and a fairly good firewall routine.
When I fire up top and then start downloading big files on any one of my Windows clients, I never show more than about 2% CPU useage on the Dell, and most of that is running top.
I've saturated my 10 Mbps Intranet a few times, mostly parking a few video files on the Linux server, and then playing them from the 4 Windows clients scattered throughout my house. Even so, the Dell never peaked out over 5% CPU useage. As long as I stay away from X, there's loads of power and memory for ipchains to do its thing.
of course I am running nice DEC tulip chips and no icky 3com junk, or realtek crud. It's been a while but I believe I could get around 60mbps, maybe higher, but this was also only from one source to one destination.AT-1500s are bus-mastering ISA cards; I wish I could get two of them to run in that same machine, but I've never been able to get two ISA network adapters to run in Red Hat 6.0. Even though they run fine together under Windows 95, I get an "Ieee! Killing interrupt handler!" message when I try to bring up eth1 with the PPPoE driver.
I like the AT-1500s because they've got great LBL factor. ("LBL" = "Little Blinking LED")
LEDs for Link, Collision, TX and RX. Very pretty when my roommates are online.
Anyone know of any good PCI network cards with lots of LEDs? (Scary that it's a prime purchasing criteria, isn't it?)
But, I fail to understand the problem. Private IP addresses don't belong on the Internet, right?
So, if they don't belong there, they're there either because of an error (ie. plugged Internet connection into the wrong ethernet card on my Linux firewall/router) or because of a malicious attempt to take advantage of a potential security hole.
In either case, there's no legitimate reason why you'd want 192.168.x.x to be on the greater 'net, right?
I'm still a Linux newbie, and I'm still new to the power and responsibility my Linux firewall/router gives me that Windows doesn't. But filtering out all external packets claiming to be from my internal LAN was one of the very first things I did in implementing my firewall; even if I only copied the scripts off a How-To and modified them for my needs.
Speaking of which, how do I set up hosts.deny and hosts.allow to allow all telnet (bad, I know, but I'll never log in as root remotely; I promise) and http requests to my webserver into my LAN? <grin>
Okay. And the storage mechanism for the series of raw frames is MPEG, isn't it, which would roughly mean that it stores each frame once, then adjusts each one in sequence according to the change?
I figured it was purely digital; the only question being whether or not it actually stored each complete frame as it would be stored on a videocassette or broadcast over the air. But I doubted that, since it strikes me that the overhead to actually attempt to store sync information and stuff in a digital format (rather than just create it on playback) would hamper compatibility with other future formats, as well as simply being unnecessary.
Macrovision is "added on" by the player, according to some bits on the disc (discs can switch Macrovision on and off individually - it's not global to the player). All DVD-CCA licensed players *must* have Macrovision encoding on any composite/S-Video/component outputs.So, all we need to do is learn what line on one of the really big VLSI chips on the board is held high/low to keep Macrovision on/off...
Unless the image is processed digitally into a frame, including vertical and horizontal information, before being send to the D/A converter for output... That would make things a little bit more difficult. But if you're running a DVD player with composite and S-Video outputs, I doubt that's the case, for a variety of technical reasons that stem from the nature of the way color information is modulated onto NTSC luminance information.
Hmmm... Actually, the more I think about it, if you have separate outputs on the DVD player, I'm more convinced that the video is prepared in analog format first, then somewhere along the way a sync processor circuit gets in between, adds chroma, H+V sync, and performs the chroma modulation to the luminance signal. Somewhere along the way, there's probably an output from the DVD player's computer that turns on and off the Macrovision circuits. It's only a matter of finding that signal line somewhere in the myriad of pins connected to all those proprietary chips.
This includes PC-based decoder cards, which is why the makers of those cards refuse to give specs out to free/open source software developers. Once you have specs it would be trivial to defeat the added Macrovision even in Windows, and we can't have that.Now, I understand.
In either case, though, unless you're a complete purist and don't want to add any extra electronics between your disc and your TV set, it's probably just easier to throw together a small scrubber, rather than trying to take out the Macrovision at the source.
Macrovision sure does make it tough for me to watch old movies on my antique TV collection: a 1954 General Electric doesn't play very well with stuff hidden in the vertical blanking interval. Nor does my 1957 GE UltraVision, nor does my 1956 Admiral Bakelite, nor does my 1960 Philco TravLer, nor does my 1954 RCA color. Only my 1955 Motorola doesn't seem to care.
Watching Ben Hur on an ancient black and white TV with my surround-sound system running just seems so weird, but it's also a lot of fun. <grin>
You had a Toaster? <jealousy>Bastard!</jealousy>
Not just useful with a Toaster, though. Actually, my most powerful machine at the time, my old A500, was a relatively late addition to my home TV studio. (It came about the same time as a friend of mine slipped me a copy of Broadcast Titler 2.0 that they used to use to replace the $50,000 Chyron machines for newscasts.)
Before that, the TBCs were useful for syncing my only (at the time) 3/4" VTR with my camera's internal sync generator; once that was done, I could do crossfades between sources, and capture them onto my VHS machine.
After a while, I scored some more derelict 1970s-vintage 3/4" decks, and started to get creative when I threw together a luminance keyer.
You know what a "Chroma Key" is, right? Ya know, the blue screen background? It's entirely an analog way of superimposing one video source over another. Matched sync is critical (so I couldn't do it without either a whole bunch of synced cameras or VTRs on TBCs). All that the chroma key does is look for a specific color (commonly blue) and switches to the other video source while that special color is being sent.
Actually building a chroma keyer is just a matter of watching each line of video for a specific amplitude and phase of chroma information being sent in the scan line. Detecting the phase is the really tough part for me with my self-taught informal electronics training, and when I did this, I was in high school and so couln't afford to dedicate $200 of parts that I'd bought in Radio Shack blister packs to being smoked off a piece of perfboard in a failed attempt. <grin>
So, I just went the easier way: when I knew I wasn't in a horizontal or vertical blanking interval, my sync separator circuit held a line high. A high DISP line coming off my homebrew sync-sep board meant that I was in a displayable part of the video signal, and was used to turn on and off a small comparator circuit.
Any time the source video, in the displayable area, got above a given brightness, it switched to the second video source. With that, I had very crude "blue-screen" ability.
It was really cool, too, because if you played with the thresholds, comparator recovery times and other neat stuff like that, you could absolutely butcher a piece of video in all sorts of MTV "How did you do that?" ways.
In fact, one of the broadcast engineers at the station, who knew that I was good with a soldering iron and had had me rebuilding VTRs with him at one point, asked me how my luminance keyer circuit was coming along. I brought it in the next day, and plugged it in on the bench, and we threw some synced video at it. It was quite unspectacular compared to some of the big-$$ chroma keys at the station, but because it was easy to mess with, we were sticking capacitors across the comparator's switching output to introduce some smear in the source switching. We got some neat effects out of it that way, and even ended up showing it to the news producer, who used it to produce a neat smeared overlay for the opening of the evening newscast. That was cool.
Ahhh, I love NTSC video, even if it is completely inconsistant and archaic. The NTSC video signal represents what is probably the single most complicated analog waveform in general use.
Would I fear being shot? Nope.
Interesting. Guess you didn't hear about the shooting last night at the corner of Sherbourne and Shuter Streets. (Shuter. How appropriate.)
Or the daily shootings in the Jane and Finch area. Interesting. That's still in Toronto.
Sure, probably most of the handguns used in Canadian crimes are smuggled across the border. But if the US had more restrictive gun control, it wouldn't solve the problem.
After all, if you impose gun control, then the only people who will still have guns are the criminals.
Don't know about you, but I'll be looking for wash-'n-wear kevlar-blend T-shirts from that point on.
Well, no two cars are exactly alike either. But that doesn't stop the same police radar gun from reading their speed.
The signals that someone would be intercepting would be generated by the host computer, not by the monitor. It's just that the monitor is a very convenient transmitting antenna for everything that leaves your VGA port.
Your deflection circuits would provide a really strong signal to help point a directional antenna, and they'd also provide you with sync information (top of frame, horizontal and vertical reset, refresh rates, etc.) that you can use later on once you've captured the video.
Once you've used the H and V circuits as a good signal with which to point your antenna, you can rest assured that the video signal that your VGA port puts out is amplified quite a bit (from about 1V p~p to about 90V p~p) within your monitor. The cathode drive voltage on most monitors is about 90V. Given the frequencies involved for high res VGA video (ie. leading and trailing edges of a sharp vertical line on the screen), for good bandwidth, everything would have to be pretty low impedance to minimize the effects of stray capacitance in the video driver stages. Which makes the basics for a very good radio transmitter.
Now, in response to the post to which I'm responding, I'm sure similar models will radiate the RF with similar efficiency. But two dissimilar models side by side will probably be somewhat different in their behavior.
Your motherboard, too, is a pretty damned good transmitter, but to actually be able to make sense of the sheer noise coming off my spectrum analyzer when I point the antenna near my old Pentium 166MMX, I can't say. But the information is all there, with the change of state of every line on the address, data, control, MFM, IDE, etc. buses, a nice spike of RF energy is transmitted.
I can clearly make out my 66MHz processor bus (sorry, guys, it's not overclocked) on the spectrum analyzer; I can clearly make out my 166MHz clock, I can clearly make out a 7.8MHz pulsetrain that I assume to be my ISA bus, and I can see a spike at 33MHz that I assume is either my PCI bus or is the base oscillator that is clock-doubled to make my 66MHz bus.
I'm reminded at this point that I damned well need a new computer, but between my low pay, high taxes and high rent, I can't seem to afford it. Anybody want to hire a self-professed video guru and computer geek? Assets include a warped sense of humor...
You know, when you put it the way you did, you may have a point.
Water-saving toilets are my biggest beef.
These toilets, instead of using 2 gallons of water to get rid of your feces in one flush, require 4 flushes at 1 gallon each.
And, in the end, there's always still that little remnant of toilet paper that floats, almost apologetically, to the top.
Sadly, it's illegal to sell a real toilet in the United States now.
When I move there from Canada, that's the one piece of contraband I will somehow smuggle across the border.
Quoted from Article:
When your neighbors could buy a machine that allows them to watch you shagging your girlfriend if they wanted to?Well, almost.
Just remember that not only the FBI but also most cable companies already have the ability to drive past your house and see what's on your TV screen.
The tuner in your TV, VCR or cable box is superheterodyne, meaning it mixes a local oscillator with the incoming signal. The frequency of the local oscillator, when it's at the same frequency as a particular TV channel that you want to watch, produces a beat signal that is amplified by the electronics of the device.
Superhet is a great system, and that's why it's in virtually everything that receives RF. (I wonder if RCA still gets royalties on the patent?)
But, the signal of the local oscillator does leak out of the tuner, and if you look for it and measure its frequency, you know what the TV is tuned to.
ie. "That's very interesting. The house at 15 Robin Hood Lane has a TV set tuned to HBO, but they don't pay for HBO..."
When the cable guy rings your doorbell to do an unexpected "signal check", never let him in. If you're a cable thief, that is.
But that's not the only thing your TV set spits out. All conventional TV sets and monitors have very powerful circuits for deflecting the electron beams in the picture tube. They radiate a lot of electromagnetic energy. Now, the jury's still out on whether or not they cause any health effects, but I can promise you that they're very easy to detect.
Use the deflection signals from a TV set or monitor to point your antenna directly at it and sync your receiver to it.
Then, all you'd need to do is amplify the everything you're picking up in the 150kHz to 5MHz range, and use it to drive a CRT.
All of a sudden, the van parked in front of your house can see the creative accounting processes you use to keep your business afloat, as you type innocently away at your computer. Or they can see from your TV what kind of kinky movies you like. Etc.
Of course, you could wrap everything electronic in your house with aluminum foil connected to a cold water pipe or other suitable ground, but it detracts a little from their safety, working life and usefulness.
Privacy doesn't exist, hasn't for years, and that says nothing of cellular/cordless phones. Or listening devices that any ambitious high school kid can build with a laser pointer and a tripod, devices that can be positioned miles away from you and yet use your windows as listening devices. Nothing.