I wish people would stop publicising the fact that the RIAA are suing people. It is the media who are now responsible for stopping file sharers, not the RIAA. The RIAA can only catch a small handful of people to set an example, if the media outlets just ignored the cases then they would most likely have to stop these heavy handed scare tactics.
I develop a number of video products for USB 2.0 and previously USB 1.1. I have some experience of driver development but I am technically a hardware engineer with a leaning towards microcontroller development.
Recently I started developing with USB 2.0 assuming that I could get maybe 50MB/sec data through (480Mbps - overhead) the high speed mode of USB 2.0. Note that full speed is lower than high speed in the spec ?!?!?!?
What I found was that on PCI / cardbus plugin cards, this was actually reduced to about 20MB/sec. This is less than half what you seen on product boxes.
The issue is that host controllers are at fault. USB 2.0 contains a number of slots in each frame on the bus that can be filled with data. If I remember correctly, there are 13 available slots for bulk transfers that can take 512 bytes each. Technically, 12 of these shoulb be the theoratical maximum limit to fill. In practice, many controllers only fill 3 giving the poor bandwidth as they cant keep up with the data rate.
The other issue is with the PCI bus. On many computers this is not fast enough to deal with a single device needing high speed bandwidth although in most cases it does not appear to be the bottleneck.
Most add-on USB 2.0 host controller cards contain a chip from one manufacturer (who I choose not to mention). These suffer the worst performance of 18-20 MB/sec. They comply with the Intel EHCI 0.95 spec for host controllers although the manufacturer has offered a new 1.0 compliant chip offering some increases in speed.
The best performance is when USB 2.0 is tapped from Intel North Bridges on the motherboard. 11 of the slots are filled with data and 35MB/sec can be achieved. Its still not the maximum performance though
If you are buying a PC, make sure you insist on built in USB 2.0 or all your devices may run slow. Also make sure you only use the Microsoft drivers on Windows as they offer significant improvements over others. Win XP or Win2K SP4 contain these.
Note that the USB 2.0 and EHCI 1.0 specs do not contain any specification as to the bandwidth a host controller must provide. Some chips may be better or worse than those mentioned above as there is no control on what a manufacturer should provide
I searched for electronics to see how many hits I got and look what comes back:
"Warning: fsockopen(): unable to connect to 127.0.0.1:9182 (Connection refused) in/home/ian/whittlebit.com/wqserver.php on line 13 Connection to WQServer failed"
I guess this now means they can work out how fast you drink your beer and how much you have had. Combine this with a store card type idea and they can decide who they want as customers, who to serve more quickly and have your beer of choice ready when you walk in the door......
I guess the benefit is the pub probably knows your address and can call you a taxi home when you have passed the drink limit set on your account
I'm wondering if custom hardware would provide some benefit here. An access point pings the client (the client will only be connected to one AP at a time anyway). A number of 2.4 Ghz receivers then look for the return signal from the client when it acknowledges. As you say calibrated receivers must be used and we would likely have to be outdoors
This brings an interesting point. It is far easier for a client to locate itself if it knows where access points are by connecting to each in turn and using directional finding. It would be much harder to locate a client unless you can force it to drop one connection and connect to another location
Not always. It can work on direction or signal strength or combination of the two (especially in terms of radio aerials). For instance, lets say we are in open land with omnidirectional aerials. Direction cannot be known so we plot strength (equating approximate distance) on a graph. Where the circles overlap gives us an approximate position. This can be done with other aerial shapes and in three dimensions by working out the signal in every aera on the map. Imagine it as three circles with a gradient pattern strongest in the centre. The starting strength at the receiver determines where on the gradient we start and it gets lighter the further out by the law dealing with signal strength (such as the inverse square law). The darkest points on the map indicate potential locations.
Given direction only, we draw three lines from our APs. Where they cross is the predicted location
All this has is an electromagnetic coupler, and it's only a 'dem' as it can only demodulate a signal and not talk back. You either hold it near your phone or pc speaker and it picks up the codes like a hearing aid set to 'T'
First, someone who has been hit by a DoS attack has no way of telling if it was from a hacker or the 31337 R144 h4xx0rs. So being techno savvy like most p2p users they report the abuse to their ISP and cause immense hassle for them in following up these DoS attacks (I know, I have to deal with these for some of the systems I administer)
Second, if there are many cases involving DoS or other attacks on an ISPs customers, then the upstream provider or the ISP may start serious filtering or cutting of connections to protect their bandwidth as bandwidth costs them money. ISP based filtering would be a terrible thing as it would put a stop to many legitimate internet activities
Thirdly, this is so open to abuse. If an ISP is being bombed with abuse requests then it can take weeks for them to deal with these. The real hackers get lost in the noise and cannot be caught. An ongoing abuse to one of my systems from a Blueyonder customer in the UK has taken 5 days now and still no response from the abuse team. After speaking to tech support I was told it can be a fortnight for them to give a first response. All the time while my systems are being hammered by email bombs that I'm having to block at the firewall. A longer response and abuse teams are useless.......
I seem to remember all gps systems shut off when they reach a certain speed because they think they are being used as missile guidance. So if you drive fast enough you wont have a problem!
You can just about manufacture chips at home. Not directly in sicilon but by using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) you can effectively create your own chips. They consist of a matrix of logic gates, which can be blown with an EPROM programmer and will make a rather good digital semicinductor. You can use them as finite state machines with either Moore or Mealy models which is ideal for robotics or basic computing applications. And best of all, software is available such as PALASM which can minimise your logic down to fit on the chip without the need for Karnaugh maps!
It's about time someone actually got round to a decent kit player. One of the electronics magazines in the UK (Electronics and Beyond) has been publishing a series on how to add an lcd to and remove most of the functionality of your home pc but this is far better! And it's not in a huge rack mount case!!!
I've contacted Digital Convergence a number of times to ask if I can have one of these things sent to the UK but I haven't had a reply. Does anyone know where I can get one or would someone send me a couple please?
Just ran a few scans, the PUT method is still allowed into root. Might be a way to get an index back up possibly. It's a shame the whole thing went down but the ascii art is cool!
It's made me wonder whether hooking an old p60 of mine up to the university net connection with open acess would be like. Could be an interesting research project into the psychology of 31337 hax0r script kiddies. Just a shame I'm an electronic engineer althought that does mean I can monitor the box from a hardware level so if they trash it I can still find out how.
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I wish people would stop publicising the fact that the RIAA are suing people. It is the media who are now responsible for stopping file sharers, not the RIAA. The RIAA can only catch a small handful of people to set an example, if the media outlets just ignored the cases then they would most likely have to stop these heavy handed scare tactics.
I develop a number of video products for USB 2.0 and previously USB 1.1. I have some experience of driver development but I am technically a hardware engineer with a leaning towards microcontroller development.
Recently I started developing with USB 2.0 assuming that I could get maybe 50MB/sec data through (480Mbps - overhead) the high speed mode of USB 2.0. Note that full speed is lower than high speed in the spec ?!?!?!?
What I found was that on PCI / cardbus plugin cards, this was actually reduced to about 20MB/sec. This is less than half what you seen on product boxes.
The issue is that host controllers are at fault. USB 2.0 contains a number of slots in each frame on the bus that can be filled with data. If I remember correctly, there are 13 available slots for bulk transfers that can take 512 bytes each. Technically, 12 of these shoulb be the theoratical maximum limit to fill. In practice, many controllers only fill 3 giving the poor bandwidth as they cant keep up with the data rate.
The other issue is with the PCI bus. On many computers this is not fast enough to deal with a single device needing high speed bandwidth although in most cases it does not appear to be the bottleneck.
Most add-on USB 2.0 host controller cards contain a chip from one manufacturer (who I choose not to mention). These suffer the worst performance of 18-20 MB/sec. They comply with the Intel EHCI 0.95 spec for host controllers although the manufacturer has offered a new 1.0 compliant chip offering some increases in speed.
The best performance is when USB 2.0 is tapped from Intel North Bridges on the motherboard. 11 of the slots are filled with data and 35MB/sec can be achieved. Its still not the maximum performance though
If you are buying a PC, make sure you insist on built in USB 2.0 or all your devices may run slow. Also make sure you only use the Microsoft drivers on Windows as they offer significant improvements over others. Win XP or Win2K SP4 contain these.
Note that the USB 2.0 and EHCI 1.0 specs do not contain any specification as to the bandwidth a host controller must provide. Some chips may be better or worse than those mentioned above as there is no control on what a manufacturer should provide
I searched for electronics to see how many hits I got and look what comes back:
/home/ian/whittlebit.com/wqserver.php on line 13
"Warning: fsockopen(): unable to connect to 127.0.0.1:9182 (Connection refused) in
Connection to WQServer failed"
Yet the page itself seems to load really quickly
I guess this now means they can work out how fast you drink your beer and how much you have had. Combine this with a store card type idea and they can decide who they want as customers, who to serve more quickly and have your beer of choice ready when you walk in the door......
I guess the benefit is the pub probably knows your address and can call you a taxi home when you have passed the drink limit set on your account
I'm wondering if custom hardware would provide some benefit here. An access point pings the client (the client will only be connected to one AP at a time anyway). A number of 2.4 Ghz receivers then look for the return signal from the client when it acknowledges. As you say calibrated receivers must be used and we would likely have to be outdoors
This brings an interesting point. It is far easier for a client to locate itself if it knows where access points are by connecting to each in turn and using directional finding. It would be much harder to locate a client unless you can force it to drop one connection and connect to another location
Not always. It can work on direction or signal strength or combination of the two (especially in terms of radio aerials). For instance, lets say we are in open land with omnidirectional aerials. Direction cannot be known so we plot strength (equating approximate distance) on a graph. Where the circles overlap gives us an approximate position. This can be done with other aerial shapes and in three dimensions by working out the signal in every aera on the map. Imagine it as three circles with a gradient pattern strongest in the centre. The starting strength at the receiver determines where on the gradient we start and it gets lighter the further out by the law dealing with signal strength (such as the inverse square law). The darkest points on the map indicate potential locations.
Given direction only, we draw three lines from our APs. Where they cross is the predicted location
All this has is an electromagnetic coupler, and it's only a 'dem' as it can only demodulate a signal and not talk back. You either hold it near your phone or pc speaker and it picks up the codes like a hearing aid set to 'T'
This is absolutely crazy......
First, someone who has been hit by a DoS attack has no way of telling if it was from a hacker or the 31337 R144 h4xx0rs. So being techno savvy like most p2p users they report the abuse to their ISP and cause immense hassle for them in following up these DoS attacks (I know, I have to deal with these for some of the systems I administer)
Second, if there are many cases involving DoS or other attacks on an ISPs customers, then the upstream provider or the ISP may start serious filtering or cutting of connections to protect their bandwidth as bandwidth costs them money. ISP based filtering would be a terrible thing as it would put a stop to many legitimate internet activities
Thirdly, this is so open to abuse. If an ISP is being bombed with abuse requests then it can take weeks for them to deal with these. The real hackers get lost in the noise and cannot be caught. An ongoing abuse to one of my systems from a Blueyonder customer in the UK has taken 5 days now and still no response from the abuse team. After speaking to tech support I was told it can be a fortnight for them to give a first response. All the time while my systems are being hammered by email bombs that I'm having to block at the firewall. A longer response and abuse teams are useless.......
I seem to remember all gps systems shut off when they reach a certain speed because they think they are being used as missile guidance. So if you drive fast enough you wont have a problem!
You can just about manufacture chips at home. Not directly in sicilon but by using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) you can effectively create your own chips. They consist of a matrix of logic gates, which can be blown with an EPROM programmer and will make a rather good digital semicinductor. You can use them as finite state machines with either Moore or Mealy models which is ideal for robotics or basic computing applications. And best of all, software is available such as PALASM which can minimise your logic down to fit on the chip without the need for Karnaugh maps!
It's about time someone actually got round to a decent kit player. One of the electronics magazines in the UK (Electronics and Beyond) has been publishing a series on how to add an lcd to and remove most of the functionality of your home pc but this is far better! And it's not in a huge rack mount case!!!
I've contacted Digital Convergence a number of times to ask if I can have one of these things sent to the UK but I haven't had a reply. Does anyone know where I can get one or would someone send me a couple please?
Just ran a few scans, the PUT method is still allowed into root. Might be a way to get an index back up possibly. It's a shame the whole thing went down but the ascii art is cool!
It's made me wonder whether hooking an old p60 of mine up to the university net connection with open acess would be like. Could be an interesting research project into the psychology of 31337 hax0r script kiddies. Just a shame I'm an electronic engineer althought that does mean I can monitor the box from a hardware level so if they trash it I can still find out how.