No, I don't think I can disable it. I can only issue an instruction to a computer which is described as disabling the function permanently, but that doesn't exactly mean anything important.
Here's the scenario:
I "disable" it, the appropriate bits are written into the flash ROM on the motherboard, and it appears to be disabled.
Later, something else comes along, and writes different bits into the flash ROM. And then it's not disabled anymore.
(And, whatever the case, the default is "off," which should at least forestall any white hat usage of the thing without user intervention. Emphasis on "should" and "white hat". It's Really Fucking Important to maintain a certain level of mistrust when it comes to considering such matters.)
And, whatever the case: I don't think it even matters at that point. The thing still needs some software support in order to work, and the package which includes that software can fairly easily modify the BIOS to include whatever small bit of code the programmer decides should be there.
There's well-documented, reliable, and easy methods for inserting your own code into BIOS to initialize a SCSI card, perform a network boot, or change the Energy Star logo, and there's no reason at all why these same methods cannot be used purposes other than those I just listed -- including, of course, quietly inserting malicious backdoors.
Re:would suck if someone somewhere was actually
on
Wi-Fi Allergy a PR Stunt
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's attitudes like that which keep people reclusive when actually do experience strange things (whether medical, mental, metaphysical -- whatever strange means today).
Some people are attention-whores, for sure. And some of those people make stuff up. The rest of the world, though - they'd probably rather keep their strangeness to themselves, than to be studied like a lab rat.
You're talking about human beings, not creatures which we need to find in order to "be able to study them."
Once upon a time, I had a 32x Plextor SCSI CD-ROM reader, back when such a thing was still a trendy thing to have for ripping audio CDs, which was generally problematic back then.
It worked pretty well, but eventually Plextor made a new firmware for it that improved a few things. They mailed it out to me for free, via USPS. After the package showed up, I found a small, square EEPROM inside of a static-resistant carrier and, IIRC, a brief instruction sheet.
The process was simple: Pull the drive, turn it over, remove old chip, insert new chip, reassemble, and done.
I mean, sheesh: BIOS wasn't always flashable, either, yaknow -- it used to be contained on socketed ROMs that could be swapped around fairly easily.
You're not missing any clues; it's just impossible.
My Dell Inspiron 6000's last BIOS update (several years ago) came with some Computrace back-end stuff, with the aforementioned options for on, off, and disable. On and disable are both "permanent" options.
Which is really interesting, if you follow the timeline: The feature wasn't wasn't there at all to begin with. And then, I flashed it in. And now, it says its permanent. Uh - yeah, right.
If I set it to "on" or "disable", it'll just flip a bit somewhere, and/or do some magic crypto, and flash that result into a region of BIOS.
But, it's still all just flash. It can still be erased, and then it can be rewritten. The BIOS might not support doing this on its own (for reasons which might range from management to marketing), but that doesn't mean that it's something that cannot be accomplished with other tools.
But, these days: After you've enter 5 digits and pound, it will then READ THE NUMBER BACK TO YOU, and ask you for confirmation, along with an option to re-enter it if it's wrong.
My 4-year-old 1.83GHz Pentium M laptop works just peachy with Vista and Windows 7.
It's a 32-bit CPU, though -- 64-bit laptops didn't particularly exist yet at that point in time. There is also no rational upgrade path to get the machine running some manner of x86 CPU.
Yeah, sure -- I'm statistically insignificant because I'm just me. But apparently someone at Microsoft seems to think I'm part of a substantial enough sample set to continue to release 32-bit OS's. So, I guess: Your opinion on the matter didn't count, and won't count until folks like me stop buying 32-bit operating systems.
Careful with that sort of crazy talk around here. Folks 'round these parts just don't take too kindly of anyone who says that Linux is insecure because it's got itself a human in front of it.
I guess they reckon that Linux makes people smart enough not to ruin their own computers anymore.
I didn't even recognize the plant until recently, but twice in the past year, I've been prescribed steroids to heal poison ivy reactions on my hands and forearms which simply would not get better on its own.
I have a fair spot of land (for living in town, at least), which hasn't been maintained in a long time, and it's full of the stuff. Periodic exposure to it is inevitable for me, if I'm ever to proceed with making my lawn hospitable.
The other day, I was picking up some dry wood to throw on a fire we were having, and noticed in the dim lighting that I'd also grabbed a handful of poison ivy.
There was no reaction at all.
I guess I'm cured, then. Or, maybe -- just perhaps, I was making it up. Or maybe I was just lucky, which seems most likely.
Math is good and all, but oversimplification is always bad.
If you really want to correlate microwave ovens and WiFi radios, you need to account for modulation as well. A microwave, typically, emits a fairly constant wash of stuff around 2.4GHz. A WiFi radio does not -- its patterns are all over the place in time, and vary with usage.
Not saying that the DJ in question is or is not a quack, just that you've neglected at least as many variables as you've bothered to include.
I, for one, think that the Silverlight player is crap.
I have a dual-head machine with a very nice 1600x1200 IPS-panel NEC LCD as my primary monitor, and a nice (but far lesser) 24" 1920x1080 TN-panel Asus LCD as the secondary.
I want to pop up a Netflix show on the secondary monitor, full-screen, and continue to do stuff like read Slashdot on the other display. Silverlight has no problem putting good-quality video up, full-screen, on the second display -- but as soon as I click outside that window (ie, to browse Slashdot), it shrinks back down to windowed mode. My dual-head computer is therefore retarded into being effectively a single-head machine for the duration of the film, unless I either want to watch it in a little window or soak up a couple of cores worth of CPU power zooming in with Ctrl-+.
Allegedly, if I had Media Center on my computer, this could be worked around. But with Netflix + Silverlight, it cannot be accomplished. Of course, this situation works fine if I'm playing a DVD on my own computer -- it just doesn't work with Netflix's streaming service.
It is therefore retarded (in a very literal sense of the word).
I'd like also to note that Flash seems to have the same difficulty, and that its behavior is similarly inexcusable and retarded.
The best I can do, if I want to watch a film in my office and occasionally fuck around on the Web, is fire up my 4-year-old laptop and use that to browse with instead of my badass dualhead desktop rig. Which, also (and obviously) is retarded.
I've complained to Microsoft Silverlight developers directly about this, and the best they ever say is something like "You're right. It is retarded. Maybe we'll fix it some day. *harumph*" while months/years pass by and it's still an issue.
The only common quadraphonic technique applied to LPs which used high frequencies was CD-4, and CD-4 media was known to wear out rapidly. In other words, IMHO, it barely worked. (Disclaimer: I do have some very nice and proper CD-4 decoding electronics, and I understand the format well enough to decode it digitally without much work, but I'm not holding my breath about finding decent source material for this format.)
Nyquist states, in a nutshell, that there is no aliasing as long as the frequency to be recorded is less than the frequency of half the frequency of sampling, with "less than" being the key to having it work out that way. As for how this is possible: That's what the final low-pass stage is for upon playback -- things (such as your 15KHz carrier on a 44.1KHz sampling rate) just wind up exactly where they were originally, with intact phasing and everything else.
It's been debated at length, and there's no reason to repeat that particular debate here. You can even prove it to yourself with some graph paper and a sliderule, if you want to be all old-skool about it.
Now, when you throw digital "antialiasing" (ala, for example, Sony's Super Bit Mapping used mostly on some of their reissue CDs) into the mix, things get a bit blurrier. Such technologies apply a fancy sort of PWN to the PCM signal along with a reduction in bit-depth, allowing lower frequencies to have improved an noise floor. This noise floor increases (though generally not more than 3dB above that of a normal PCM recording) along with frequency. But: Even that doesn't show that Nyquist is wrong.
Because even without that, the stuff is all in-phase and accurate down to whatever the floor is. It's just how it works. There's practical limits to it, of course, insofar as there's practical limits on filters, ADC/DAC design, and other things analog. Incidentally, this is why many playback chains use oversampling: It's used in order to push the Nyquist filter as far out of the audible band as practically and efficiently possible. And even this is not because Nyquist is somehow broken, but because without it we can't build nth order filters of sufficient magnitude to keep from rolling off the high end earlier than needed without also causing (possibly) audible ringing within the passband.
I agree that a mix of analog and digital is the worst of both worlds, but I submit that digital (done properly -- there's certainly lots of bad converters, processes, and [perhaps most damaging] engineers out there) is so good that it's perfectly able to capture all of the trash produced by any preceding analog stage with sufficient accuracy that any of its own misgivings are inaudible.
As I write this, I'm reminded of a Stereophile article from sometime in the middle 90s. IIRC (and no, I'm not going to look it up), they copied some good LP recordings onto a good DAT machine after passing it through a good preamp, and played the result compared to the original LP. They were surprised that the DAT recordings were just as roomy, airy, so-on-so-forth as the LP, and were pleased that listening to the DAT would not cause further wear on the LP. And then, IIRC, the author went into an emotional and flowery minirant about how it just didn't matter if it sounded the same or not.
He liked playing LPs and all of the physical actions associated with it, even though it sounded exactly the same, and therefore enjoyed spinning vinyl more than jockying DAT tapes.
Which, you know, is cool - just because someone likes the sound and feel of analog media and electronics, doesn't mean that the sound itself cannot be captured and reproduced digitally...nor does it mean that digital can ever replace the physical sensation and emotional attachment of analog.
And as a realist, who has been listening to music of all kinds for a long time, riding in cars with the windows open, and employed in all manner of loud occupations, I find the following to be true: My ears are mostly toast beyond about 15KHz, as your
I have depression, severe anxiety, and Asberger's. My mind often reels uncontrollably at all manner of things that aren't sensical in any meaningful way.
I am, therefore, crazy.
If I had a gimp leg, I'd call myself crippled.
And if I had a below-average IQ, I might call myself a moron, or an imbecile.
I'm not at all pleased with the relatively recent trend of sissying up terms to avoid offending anyone, and you aren't helping any crazy people by being offended by them yourself.
Wireless on a laptop for a fellow at work here interferes with networking when I try to install various network printers - turning off wireless allows it to work fine. (Basically, I can't specify to use a wired connection instead of wireless, and even when I turn off wireless, it still gets networking information from the wrong DNS. - don't even try to tell me why or how to fix it, I don't have the authority nor the wherewithal to do so.)
Hey -- guess what? The laptop works fine. And Windows is working fine. Your network, however, is broken. Dig it: You have multiple DNS servers, some of which don't fucking work, why exactly? And then you expect the OS (whatever OS it might be) to automagically pick the correct one for you? How the fuck is it supposed to know?
Networking is full of hate, their new system of irritating users with every request of the computer is annoying as hell, it's still not secure... do I need to go on?
Please, go on. I don't find myself being more particularly hateful toward things when dealing with networking on Vista than I do with various incarnations of Linux.
UAC isn't a cure-all for security, but it's very similar to what modern desktop Linux systems have been doing even longer. Except it's a little more secure under Vista by being resistant to software keyloggers.
So, by all means continue. I'd like to hear more of what you have to say.
On Windows (within which, if there is any concept of an inode, it is totally ignored by all software), it breaks.
But even on a Mac: If I move a file to a different drive, or over to a network share -- the inode trick won't be sufficient, and breakage will still ensue.
The iPhone is just a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is based on FreeBSD. It, therefore, has a very good scheduler (one of FreeBSD's best features is that the system stays usable and responsive, seemingly no matter how high the load on the CPU is).
Apple's own software multitasks just fine, where it is useful to do so. They just don't let third-party apps run in the background.
My jailbroke iPod Touch (same hardware, more or less) works just fine as a multiuser Unix box, background apps and all. There's no compelling reason why I couldn't install Apache, Postfix, and BIND on it, and make a silly little Internet-facing WiFi-connected server (with a built-in UPS!) out of it, except for the fact that I'd rather do that on real hardware if I had a need to do so.
A "battery extender" that, in addition to being non-integral, gets its power stuffed through at least a couple of DC-DC converters within the phone itself, all while the internal battery charger leeches current and generates heat (ie: wastes even more energy).
Just what I want on a mobile device -- more complexity!
Thanks for the tip!
(Before the mods mark this down as "troll," please understand the following: I like the iPhone. I also like my iPod Touch. And if I didn't get a free Verizon phone from work, I'd probably carry an iPhone instead. But my iPod Touch has positively dismal battery life -- one of my favorite uses for it is to sit in the back yard streaming Pandora over WiFi into a set of battery-operated speakers, but it's only good for a couple of hours of this before the battery goes flat. It saddens me that it's actually more convenient to pull the car around and use its stereo, than to use my gee-whiz iPod. I can't imagine that the iPhone's battery life is much better at this task, with the phone also sucking down juice. I think it's inexcusable, these days, that so many manufacturers products don't have removable and/or expandable internal batteries. The fact that it's an Apple product doesn't somehow excuse them from this idiocy. But, hey -- at least they finally figured out how to do cut-and-paste with it.)
Sure. You can re-architect and update existing products indefinitely.
Some changes which might be introduced would be useful and well looked-upon.
Eventually, however, you change something which someone hates.
Over here in reality, though, the question is somewhat different:
How long should a for-profit, publicly-traded corporation like Microsoft keep adding features to an old operating system for free? A decade? Two of them? Forever?
The first memory I have of a VT100 was when I bought one at a hamfest for a friend on IRC for a dollar, pried off the front logo with my knife, and summarily dropped the rest of it into a nearby trashcan.
The last memory was when I mailed that logo off to him.
HP has always been a real bitch to deal with when it came to supporting old peripherals.
Once upon a time, I paid over $1,100 for an HP Scanjet IIcx. Nice scanner, really - heavy, SCSI, legal-sized, and able to pull out interesting details in things being scanned.
Last time I looked for new software for it (several years ago), HP's website advised me that I'd have to pay them for it. Ugh.
I got rid of the scanner long before Vista was released, though I think I can predict exactly how well it wouldn't work if I tried to plug such a model into my Vista desktop machine.
I have a hard time blaming Microsoft for this problem, though -- it's not like they generally write the drivers to begin when it comes to specialized hardware.
So fuck HP for being a bunch of cunts.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have done anything in particular to make old hardware not work except update their driver model.
Which, it seems, needed to happen anyway if we're going to proceed into 64-bit goodness.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so: Blow the fuse upon either activating or disabling it.
And then, something else comes along and changes the code that looks for the status of that fuse.
Ever hear of a video game crack? This sounds trivial, by comparison.
No, I don't think I can disable it. I can only issue an instruction to a computer which is described as disabling the function permanently, but that doesn't exactly mean anything important.
Here's the scenario:
I "disable" it, the appropriate bits are written into the flash ROM on the motherboard, and it appears to be disabled.
Later, something else comes along, and writes different bits into the flash ROM. And then it's not disabled anymore.
(And, whatever the case, the default is "off," which should at least forestall any white hat usage of the thing without user intervention. Emphasis on "should" and "white hat". It's Really Fucking Important to maintain a certain level of mistrust when it comes to considering such matters.)
And, whatever the case: I don't think it even matters at that point. The thing still needs some software support in order to work, and the package which includes that software can fairly easily modify the BIOS to include whatever small bit of code the programmer decides should be there.
There's well-documented, reliable, and easy methods for inserting your own code into BIOS to initialize a SCSI card, perform a network boot, or change the Energy Star logo, and there's no reason at all why these same methods cannot be used purposes other than those I just listed -- including, of course, quietly inserting malicious backdoors.
It's attitudes like that which keep people reclusive when actually do experience strange things (whether medical, mental, metaphysical -- whatever strange means today).
Some people are attention-whores, for sure. And some of those people make stuff up. The rest of the world, though - they'd probably rather keep their strangeness to themselves, than to be studied like a lab rat.
You're talking about human beings, not creatures which we need to find in order to "be able to study them."
Not everything is flash-based, yaknow.
Once upon a time, I had a 32x Plextor SCSI CD-ROM reader, back when such a thing was still a trendy thing to have for ripping audio CDs, which was generally problematic back then.
It worked pretty well, but eventually Plextor made a new firmware for it that improved a few things. They mailed it out to me for free, via USPS. After the package showed up, I found a small, square EEPROM inside of a static-resistant carrier and, IIRC, a brief instruction sheet.
The process was simple: Pull the drive, turn it over, remove old chip, insert new chip, reassemble, and done.
I mean, sheesh: BIOS wasn't always flashable, either, yaknow -- it used to be contained on socketed ROMs that could be swapped around fairly easily.
You're not missing any clues; it's just impossible.
My Dell Inspiron 6000's last BIOS update (several years ago) came with some Computrace back-end stuff, with the aforementioned options for on, off, and disable. On and disable are both "permanent" options.
Which is really interesting, if you follow the timeline: The feature wasn't wasn't there at all to begin with. And then, I flashed it in. And now, it says its permanent. Uh - yeah, right.
If I set it to "on" or "disable", it'll just flip a bit somewhere, and/or do some magic crypto, and flash that result into a region of BIOS.
But, it's still all just flash. It can still be erased, and then it can be rewritten. The BIOS might not support doing this on its own (for reasons which might range from management to marketing), but that doesn't mean that it's something that cannot be accomplished with other tools.
But, these days: After you've enter 5 digits and pound, it will then READ THE NUMBER BACK TO YOU, and ask you for confirmation, along with an option to re-enter it if it's wrong.
# really is beyond useless in this application.
Here's some great information on printing barcodes with all kinds of different printers and operating systems.
Not really.
My 4-year-old 1.83GHz Pentium M laptop works just peachy with Vista and Windows 7.
It's a 32-bit CPU, though -- 64-bit laptops didn't particularly exist yet at that point in time. There is also no rational upgrade path to get the machine running some manner of x86 CPU.
Yeah, sure -- I'm statistically insignificant because I'm just me. But apparently someone at Microsoft seems to think I'm part of a substantial enough sample set to continue to release 32-bit OS's. So, I guess: Your opinion on the matter didn't count, and won't count until folks like me stop buying 32-bit operating systems.
Careful with that sort of crazy talk around here. Folks 'round these parts just don't take too kindly of anyone who says that Linux is insecure because it's got itself a human in front of it.
I guess they reckon that Linux makes people smart enough not to ruin their own computers anymore.
I'm allergic to poison ivy.
I didn't even recognize the plant until recently, but twice in the past year, I've been prescribed steroids to heal poison ivy reactions on my hands and forearms which simply would not get better on its own.
I have a fair spot of land (for living in town, at least), which hasn't been maintained in a long time, and it's full of the stuff. Periodic exposure to it is inevitable for me, if I'm ever to proceed with making my lawn hospitable.
The other day, I was picking up some dry wood to throw on a fire we were having, and noticed in the dim lighting that I'd also grabbed a handful of poison ivy.
There was no reaction at all.
I guess I'm cured, then. Or, maybe -- just perhaps, I was making it up. Or maybe I was just lucky, which seems most likely.
Perhaps the girl was lucky that time, too.
Math is good and all, but oversimplification is always bad.
If you really want to correlate microwave ovens and WiFi radios, you need to account for modulation as well. A microwave, typically, emits a fairly constant wash of stuff around 2.4GHz. A WiFi radio does not -- its patterns are all over the place in time, and vary with usage.
Not saying that the DJ in question is or is not a quack, just that you've neglected at least as many variables as you've bothered to include.
I, for one, think that the Silverlight player is crap.
I have a dual-head machine with a very nice 1600x1200 IPS-panel NEC LCD as my primary monitor, and a nice (but far lesser) 24" 1920x1080 TN-panel Asus LCD as the secondary.
I want to pop up a Netflix show on the secondary monitor, full-screen, and continue to do stuff like read Slashdot on the other display. Silverlight has no problem putting good-quality video up, full-screen, on the second display -- but as soon as I click outside that window (ie, to browse Slashdot), it shrinks back down to windowed mode. My dual-head computer is therefore retarded into being effectively a single-head machine for the duration of the film, unless I either want to watch it in a little window or soak up a couple of cores worth of CPU power zooming in with Ctrl-+.
Allegedly, if I had Media Center on my computer, this could be worked around. But with Netflix + Silverlight, it cannot be accomplished. Of course, this situation works fine if I'm playing a DVD on my own computer -- it just doesn't work with Netflix's streaming service.
It is therefore retarded (in a very literal sense of the word).
I'd like also to note that Flash seems to have the same difficulty, and that its behavior is similarly inexcusable and retarded.
The best I can do, if I want to watch a film in my office and occasionally fuck around on the Web, is fire up my 4-year-old laptop and use that to browse with instead of my badass dualhead desktop rig. Which, also (and obviously) is retarded.
I've complained to Microsoft Silverlight developers directly about this, and the best they ever say is something like "You're right. It is retarded. Maybe we'll fix it some day. *harumph*" while months/years pass by and it's still an issue.
The only common quadraphonic technique applied to LPs which used high frequencies was CD-4, and CD-4 media was known to wear out rapidly. In other words, IMHO, it barely worked. (Disclaimer: I do have some very nice and proper CD-4 decoding electronics, and I understand the format well enough to decode it digitally without much work, but I'm not holding my breath about finding decent source material for this format.)
Nyquist states, in a nutshell, that there is no aliasing as long as the frequency to be recorded is less than the frequency of half the frequency of sampling, with "less than" being the key to having it work out that way. As for how this is possible: That's what the final low-pass stage is for upon playback -- things (such as your 15KHz carrier on a 44.1KHz sampling rate) just wind up exactly where they were originally, with intact phasing and everything else.
It's been debated at length, and there's no reason to repeat that particular debate here. You can even prove it to yourself with some graph paper and a sliderule, if you want to be all old-skool about it.
Now, when you throw digital "antialiasing" (ala, for example, Sony's Super Bit Mapping used mostly on some of their reissue CDs) into the mix, things get a bit blurrier. Such technologies apply a fancy sort of PWN to the PCM signal along with a reduction in bit-depth, allowing lower frequencies to have improved an noise floor. This noise floor increases (though generally not more than 3dB above that of a normal PCM recording) along with frequency. But: Even that doesn't show that Nyquist is wrong.
Because even without that, the stuff is all in-phase and accurate down to whatever the floor is. It's just how it works. There's practical limits to it, of course, insofar as there's practical limits on filters, ADC/DAC design, and other things analog. Incidentally, this is why many playback chains use oversampling: It's used in order to push the Nyquist filter as far out of the audible band as practically and efficiently possible. And even this is not because Nyquist is somehow broken, but because without it we can't build nth order filters of sufficient magnitude to keep from rolling off the high end earlier than needed without also causing (possibly) audible ringing within the passband.
I agree that a mix of analog and digital is the worst of both worlds, but I submit that digital (done properly -- there's certainly lots of bad converters, processes, and [perhaps most damaging] engineers out there) is so good that it's perfectly able to capture all of the trash produced by any preceding analog stage with sufficient accuracy that any of its own misgivings are inaudible.
As I write this, I'm reminded of a Stereophile article from sometime in the middle 90s. IIRC (and no, I'm not going to look it up), they copied some good LP recordings onto a good DAT machine after passing it through a good preamp, and played the result compared to the original LP. They were surprised that the DAT recordings were just as roomy, airy, so-on-so-forth as the LP, and were pleased that listening to the DAT would not cause further wear on the LP. And then, IIRC, the author went into an emotional and flowery minirant about how it just didn't matter if it sounded the same or not.
He liked playing LPs and all of the physical actions associated with it, even though it sounded exactly the same, and therefore enjoyed spinning vinyl more than jockying DAT tapes.
Which, you know, is cool - just because someone likes the sound and feel of analog media and electronics, doesn't mean that the sound itself cannot be captured and reproduced digitally...nor does it mean that digital can ever replace the physical sensation and emotional attachment of analog.
And as a realist, who has been listening to music of all kinds for a long time, riding in cars with the windows open, and employed in all manner of loud occupations, I find the following to be true: My ears are mostly toast beyond about 15KHz, as your
Whatever.
I have depression, severe anxiety, and Asberger's. My mind often reels uncontrollably at all manner of things that aren't sensical in any meaningful way.
I am, therefore, crazy.
If I had a gimp leg, I'd call myself crippled.
And if I had a below-average IQ, I might call myself a moron, or an imbecile.
I'm not at all pleased with the relatively recent trend of sissying up terms to avoid offending anyone, and you aren't helping any crazy people by being offended by them yourself.
Have you taken delivery of your hemisphere yet?
Remember, possession is 9/10ths of the law.
Hey -- guess what? The laptop works fine. And Windows is working fine. Your network, however, is broken. Dig it: You have multiple DNS servers, some of which don't fucking work, why exactly? And then you expect the OS (whatever OS it might be) to automagically pick the correct one for you? How the fuck is it supposed to know?
Please, go on. I don't find myself being more particularly hateful toward things when dealing with networking on Vista than I do with various incarnations of Linux.
UAC isn't a cure-all for security, but it's very similar to what modern desktop Linux systems have been doing even longer. Except it's a little more secure under Vista by being resistant to software keyloggers.
So, by all means continue. I'd like to hear more of what you have to say.
On Windows (within which, if there is any concept of an inode, it is totally ignored by all software), it breaks.
But even on a Mac: If I move a file to a different drive, or over to a network share -- the inode trick won't be sufficient, and breakage will still ensue.
The iPhone is just a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is based on FreeBSD. It, therefore, has a very good scheduler (one of FreeBSD's best features is that the system stays usable and responsive, seemingly no matter how high the load on the CPU is).
Apple's own software multitasks just fine, where it is useful to do so. They just don't let third-party apps run in the background.
My jailbroke iPod Touch (same hardware, more or less) works just fine as a multiuser Unix box, background apps and all. There's no compelling reason why I couldn't install Apache, Postfix, and BIND on it, and make a silly little Internet-facing WiFi-connected server (with a built-in UPS!) out of it, except for the fact that I'd rather do that on real hardware if I had a need to do so.
Oh, neat.
A "battery extender" that, in addition to being non-integral, gets its power stuffed through at least a couple of DC-DC converters within the phone itself, all while the internal battery charger leeches current and generates heat (ie: wastes even more energy).
Just what I want on a mobile device -- more complexity!
Thanks for the tip!
(Before the mods mark this down as "troll," please understand the following: I like the iPhone. I also like my iPod Touch. And if I didn't get a free Verizon phone from work, I'd probably carry an iPhone instead. But my iPod Touch has positively dismal battery life -- one of my favorite uses for it is to sit in the back yard streaming Pandora over WiFi into a set of battery-operated speakers, but it's only good for a couple of hours of this before the battery goes flat. It saddens me that it's actually more convenient to pull the car around and use its stereo, than to use my gee-whiz iPod. I can't imagine that the iPhone's battery life is much better at this task, with the phone also sucking down juice. I think it's inexcusable, these days, that so many manufacturers products don't have removable and/or expandable internal batteries. The fact that it's an Apple product doesn't somehow excuse them from this idiocy. But, hey -- at least they finally figured out how to do cut-and-paste with it.)
And what if I change this library?
Oh. Right. iTunes breaks.
*yawn*
Sure. You can re-architect and update existing products indefinitely.
Some changes which might be introduced would be useful and well looked-upon.
Eventually, however, you change something which someone hates.
Over here in reality, though, the question is somewhat different:
How long should a for-profit, publicly-traded corporation like Microsoft keep adding features to an old operating system for free? A decade? Two of them? Forever?
Why?
(Feh.)
The first memory I have of a VT100 was when I bought one at a hamfest for a friend on IRC for a dollar, pried off the front logo with my knife, and summarily dropped the rest of it into a nearby trashcan.
The last memory was when I mailed that logo off to him.
HP has always been a real bitch to deal with when it came to supporting old peripherals.
Once upon a time, I paid over $1,100 for an HP Scanjet IIcx. Nice scanner, really - heavy, SCSI, legal-sized, and able to pull out interesting details in things being scanned.
Last time I looked for new software for it (several years ago), HP's website advised me that I'd have to pay them for it. Ugh.
I got rid of the scanner long before Vista was released, though I think I can predict exactly how well it wouldn't work if I tried to plug such a model into my Vista desktop machine.
I have a hard time blaming Microsoft for this problem, though -- it's not like they generally write the drivers to begin when it comes to specialized hardware.
So fuck HP for being a bunch of cunts.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have done anything in particular to make old hardware not work except update their driver model.
Which, it seems, needed to happen anyway if we're going to proceed into 64-bit goodness.
So it says it's UNSTABLE, but that doesn't mean that it is actually really unstable.
I interpret that to mean that it's already lying to me before I even get a chance to install it.
Oh, good.
So we still get yet another weird player-specific database to try to keep sync'd with reality.
Hooray, and stuff.