Let's look at this with a bit of objective sarcasm, shall we?
Tidal forces and physical stress: Oh, sure - being sloshed around a washing machine is way more stressful than bouncing around on my keyring attached to my beltloop and being dropped repeatedly. Besides, everyone knows that surface mount chips are fragile little buggers that just pop right off of their PCBs at the slightest provocation, especially during particular lunar alignments. I think the gravity of this problem is pretty well known.
Rapid heating and cooling: Right. Because everyone wants their cotton pants to shrink as much as possible, so they ALWAYS wash them with the hottest water available. Why, some folks even boil a kettle and pour that in, too, just for good measure!
Water wearing down contacts: WTF? Are you really suggesting that there is erosion happening on such a scale as to wear down gold-platedcopper? In a washing machine? Wow. It's amazing that anything ever comes out of that thing intact.
Oh, right, but we're using SOAP! OMG, the soap will ruin everything!!@!! It's so CORROSIVE with its NEGATIVE CHEMICAL EFFECTS! Now I know why the brass buttons and zippers on my pants keep disappearing: Because the soap EATS THEM. Mystery solved! Next!
Soap residue as a conductor: You didn't mention this, but it's so obvious that I'm going to put it in for you. Everyone knows that in Western societies, washing machines do not have a rinse cycle to remove soap, because a rinse cycle would be wasteful of our most precious and rare natural resource: Water. So, we're forever wearing clothes which are soaked to the brim with soap. EVERYONE knows this. It's eating my pants right now!
Thermal stresses of great rapidity and DOOM: Holy shit. Are you serious? Because, just last January, I left my toasty warm house, with my thumb drive clipped to my keyring, bouncing around like it always is, and went out into the -5F night to walk up the hill to the store and buy some milk. The store was warm. And then I walked back up the hill toward home. (Boy, was it cold.) Back in my warm house, I guess I should have been totally flabbergasted that the thumb drive had survived the cornucopia of stress and abuse. I had no idea! Poor little thumb drive. I'm sorry! I'll never treat you like this again!
[/sarcasm]
My suggestion is simple: If ever you find a flash device at the bottom of the washing machine basin, go ahead and send it through the drier along with everything else. This will shake most of the water (and nearly all of any remaining soap) out, evenly distribute the rest of the moisture, and then warm it up so that anything still wet will evaporate. Afterward, just plug it in and use it. It's almost certainly just fine. If you want to be extra cautious, just wash the same load again without soap, and then send it through the drier.
If you don't dry it, because you're still fucking skittish about it, then either disassemble it and dry it by hand, or be prepared to wait a really long fucking time for the water to creep out at room temperature. Plugging a device like this in while it is still wet will cause electrolysis to ruin your day. I strongly suspect that most reports of flash devices dieing after being wet are only the result of incomplete drying.
Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them
on
Even Dirtier IT Jobs
·
· Score: 1
During my brief stint in the US Army, I realized a lot of things. One of the most important of them was this: It's possible to make a lot of money in the military, but usually only as a civilian.
Others here suggest leaving town (perhaps the whole state) and moving on to grander places. I have the following suggestion:
Find a local contractor who does some manner of small electronics work for the Marine base, and work for them. If you've got skills adequate to successfully do even mundane board-level repair on a laptop, then you've got patience and mindset adequate to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of military/government communication and networking systems.
I do this, as part of my current job, for a DOD installation near here. My pay rate is a little more than double what yours is in an area of Ohio with a relatively low cost of living. And when a laptop breaks, I generally pass the project on to one of my lower-paid associates...
Since 9/11, the area of security and communications (both private and public) has been rolling in cash. In the midst of a recession, the company I work for is having its best year ever.
And, though it seems unorthodox, most of the clients that I do work for are happy to see me come in late and work in the wee hours of the morning, because any interruptions I cause them during those times aren't as critical as they would be during the day when there's more stuff going on. And dress code? Hah. My hair is long, I wear a beard, and my clothes are clean -- that's the extent of the expectations in this field when you can actually get stuff done.
Food for thought, I guess. I just hope you don't end up back in a van.:-/
I've got computers at home and at work which have lived for more than 5 years without any real issues.
I look forward to the day when buying a computer for a specific application is like buying a circuit breaker panel: Once it's properly installed, it will do what it's supposed to do pretty much forever (in human terms, at least).
I wouldn't know how to even approach the subject without sounding like I'm just trying to extract more cash out of him.
You're still thinking like a frugal geek, not a doctor who just wants stuff to work with minimal hassle.
Of course getting this job done is going to extract cash from him. I'd guess that he's prepared for that; chances are, those systems he bought and paid someone to set up 15 years ago weren't exactly inexpensive, either.
So: Forget money. Please. And just ask: Can it be done?
I think it can.
Myself, I'd use all new parts. A low-power motherboard from VIA or Intel. A good power supply, with high-quality, slow-moving fans, and ball bearings. And I'd try, hard, to cool the CPU passively.
For storage, I'd use a SSD, or a slow-spinning 3.5" drive. I would make sure that intake air passes over (or under) the drive, to keep it at a reasonable temperature. The box would have plenty of RAM (more for an SSD to minimize swap).
And, gosh, I guess that's it. If the machines aren't connected to Teh Intarweb, I'd put the same software (maybe even including Windows 95) back on, and call it a decade.
Name one competent government employee. Obama Jury's still out on that one.
Neutral as could be. The poster was even fairly elaborate on why he had not yet decided on Obama's competence, which is a whole world different from claiming that he's somehow incompetent.
Your comprehension seems lacking. And your undue retaliation is more harmful than not. As a current and past Obama supporter, it shames me to see you behave in such a fashion.
Good = competent, bad = incompetent. Those aren't the only meanings of any of those words, but they're pretty common ones. ("Joe's a good worker," "Tammy is bad at that job.")
It's all about the context. And in this context, "good" is synonymous with "competent." (Isn't English fun?)
I think you're begging the question, in the traditional sense of the word, with your strong reaction. Nobody said Obama was incompetent, or bad, or anything else negative in this thread, but you're arguing as if someone had. (The reality is that the only reply to your initial assertion was totally and unashamedly fucking neutral, though it did seem hopeful.)
I'd guess that you make a habit of such fallacies, and that this tendancy might be part of the reason why you post at 0...
Because some of us elder geeks like learning about clever and functional hardware tricks, I suppose. It's always interesting to me when a piece of hardware learns a new trick which its designers never intended, with software alone. Using the PC speaker for digital audio is one. Data acquisition with a parallel port is another.
Central Point's PC Tools Backup program used to do floppy detection, but it kept the motor spinning the whole time. So, doing this same trick without spinning the motor is interesting to me.
If it's not interesting to you, then get off my lawn, kid, and go fuck with your water cooling rig some more and post the results on Twitter or something. Don't come whining here.
I have an LS-120. Even used it once. It seemed fast. I left it there for a few months, and never used it again.
My older computers have the floppy drives removed to provide better cooling to the hard drive(s). My newer computers have better cooling for the hard drives by design.
I haven't used a floppy disk in at least two years. (I do have an external drive if the need ever arises, but I no longer have any media for it.)
Great! So, go find me some prior art, because in my years of dealing with communications systems which include provision for independent DC battery backups, I've never ever seen anything so clever, carefully-balanced, and efficient. (The systems I'm familiar with range in vintage from new, to a little over 30 years old, and IMHO includes a fairly broad scope of gear.)
Application number: 11/756,939 Publication number: US 2008/0030078 A1 Filing date: Jun 1, 2007 Inventors: William Whitted, Montgomery Sykora, Ken Krieger, Benchiao Jai, William Hamburgen, Jimmy Clidaras, Donald L. Beaty, Gerald Aigner Assignee: Exaflop LLC [Note that Exaflop LLC's mailing address is the same as Google's.]
U.S. Classification 307066000
The most interesting parts, to me:
Figure 1, which shows an AC-DC converter, a battery, and a motherboard on a tray, in parallel.
And the following excerpts:
[0013] The system can further include a charger configured to charge the battery through a path connected across the DC bus. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is less than about 26 Volts. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is between about 10 Volts and about 15 Volts. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is about 13.65 Volts. In some implementations, the AC-to-DC conversion circuit regulates the DC output voltage signal to approximately 1 Volt above the maximum nominal charge voltage of the battery. The DC bus voltage can provide sufficient voltage for a linear regulator connected in series with the battery across the DC bus to trickle charge the battery to a fully charged state according to battery specifications.[...]
and this gem:
[0016] The system can further include at least one DC-DC converter configured to convert a voltage supplied on the DC bus to at least one additional DC voltage. In some implementations, the additional voltage is selected from the group consisting of: -5; 1; 3; 3.3; 5; 7.5; 10; about 18-20; and, about 20-26 Volts.
That last one, 16, is pretty specific: It basically comes out and says that there is no secondary regulation to 12V.
And so, I rest my case and declare that it is, indeed, a brilliant and simple design.
According to the picture in TFA, the power supply outputs only 13.65VDC. There is no 12V rail.
The picture also shows what looks like a 1TB Hitachi 7K1000.B. It's rated at 12VDC +/- 10%, while withstanding spikes of up to 15VDC.
Now: Between the cabling, the motherboard (which the drives receive power from), and the many Amps of load, the voltage WILL drop some.
So why 13.65VDC? Because that's probably the closest they could get to 13.8VDC (a typical charging voltage for lead-acid gel cells), without ever really exceeding the specifications of the hard drives (after voltage drop).
It seems likely enough that any other voltage would either do a lousy job keeping the battery charged, or destroy components. And it's pretty obvious that any other design would use more parts, and lose efficiency.
The only other thing to do is use a bit of software along with the board's built-in voltage monitoring to shut everything off as the battery gets down to around 10.8VDC.
Of course, this is all just postulation on my part. I'm going to go dig up the patent now and see if I'm right...but if I'm even in the same BALLPARK with the above assumptions, then Google's design is neither obvious nor something which has been done before in a PC, and is certainly worthy of a patent.
Because Windows, generally[1], doesn't autorun a USB flash device, but will autorun from a USB CD-ROM. It's handy to plug a thumb drive into a machine, and, you know, have the magic work[2].
[1]: In my experience, only Vista and Windows 7 do this at all without extra help. [2]: Difficult though it may be, try to imagine yourself not as a talented geek with a 5-digit Slashdot UID, and instead as Joe Layman. Joe's happy that his software Just Works when he plugs his thumb drive into a random Windows computer, and Joe doesn't care what sort of ugly hacks have to happen in order for that to occur.
On the plus side, U-Verse works very well with torrents.
With Roadrunner, I had to do clever QoS traffic shaping stuff inside of a custom firmware on a WRT54G in order to keep torrents from swamping the connection with high latency.
With U-Verse, I don't. I can just leave Azureus run wide-open, and it'll occupy the entire 6mbps/1mbps connection with hundreds of connections, while latency always stays low. My wife no longer complains about me downloading torrents while she plays WOW.
It works so well that I've bypassed the fancy WRT54G altogether, since the supplied U-Verse 2-wire router seems to work quite well enough for everything I do without extra help. (It also includes a battery backup, so I can continue to use the laptop during a power outage.)
Puppies, as I understand it, are also delicious. I plan giving it a taste some day.
(Disclaimer: I also keep fish. Some of them (Oscars, in particular) show remarkable intelligence and learning ability, but this doesn't detract from their deliciousness. We have new addition to our family; a Doberman pup of a couple months of age. My fondness for the family dog doesn't detract from the deliciousness of dogs in general. I have a pet bird, which also shows learning ability, and find that chicken and turkey and ostrich are all fantastic foods. We even have a pet rat, and he's pretty awesome, but that's not going to stop me from killing other unwanted rodents in or around my house.)
The flash is in several sections (similar to disk partitions). Part of the boot code (which has its own section) is smart enough to talk TFTP; the boot_wait parameter just tells it how long to sit and wait for TFTP to happen.
Nobody -should- be touching that location - it's there for safety. And while there isn't really any grand protection preventing someone from maliciously modifying this code, it is somewhat device-specific and fickle. In fact, it's somewhat like a PC BIOS in that there's usually nothing preventing malware from overwriting it, but nobody ever bothers to try.
Further, the worm being discussed here does not perform boot code updates, so there's no current reason for it to be suspect.
Meanwhile, JTAG: This is a hardware interface allowing you to directly rewrite the flash ROM on the device, usually using a parallel port on a PC. My own JTAG cable consists of a few resistors on an old internal serial cable, worked just fine recovering a bricked WRT54G (with boot_wait disabled) a couple of years ago. There's nothing anything on the device can do to prevent you from rebuilding the entire system with a JTAG cable.
I use GNU Keyring for the same thing. Except, I run it on an old PalmOS device. It keeps a neat little encrypted database of all of the passwords it makes, along with anything else I want to keep private, and it's easy to carry anywhere...
Ping hack? Truly devastating back door? Google it yourself and then come back once you understand that it's not a remote exploit[1]. You call it a back door; but it's just a clever way to execute commands on the box, after having already logged into it as a superuser.
The other problem was fixed five years ago. I'll wager that most of these routers have either had their firmware upgraded, or found themselves in the trash can, because the whole thing was a steaming pile of shit at that point in time. They'd lock up frequently. Lose wireless from time to time. Fun stuff. Newer firmwares eventually began to not suck quite as bad.
Hardware failure rates of Linksys stuff from back then have been pretty high as well. Linksys had a habit (as did most everyone else) of using lousy filter capacitors on their boards, which would eventually swell up and fail. I've seen their wall-wart power supplies having high failure rates. There's a good chance that between the bunky firmware, and the bunky hardware, that there's only a very small percentage of these boxes still in use in a vulnerable state.
[1]: And since it's a local exploit, then it really doesn't matter -- by the time they've infiltrated their way deep enough that they're attacking your router from inside your own network, you've already lost the last important battle, and the war is over.
A. Is your password "admin," "root," "password," or some other such simplistic shit? Can you log into it remotely? If so, you're vulnerable. B. Does SSH still connect? Can you get to your router's web page? If so, it's not infected. C. It's a router, not something of any great intrinsic value. Nuke the firmware and start over. (Reset, boot_wait, JTAG - lots of ways to nuke a new firmware into these things without having network access to them. Listed previously are some good terms to Google for.)
I'd guess that most people, even geeks, don't run dd-wrt, tomato, or openwrt on their router unless they've got a pretty good clue about what's going on.
On the other hand: The average Joe, who just buys a WRT54G (aka: black box) from Wal-Mart, plugs it into his cable modem, and logs into the "linksys" SSID from his laptop isn't affected by this worm, since the default configuration doesn't allow remote access from the Internet at all.
No, I don't spent entire afternoons haggling over a nickle. If the first place gives me a price that seems appropriate for the amount of service I need (which, typically, is nothing), I'll pay cash for it and walk out the door. I will not be a "problem customer" -- I'll be the easiest sale anyone ever had, and they'll never hear from me again until the next time I need something big.
But if the price sucks, and/or if they spend sixteen fucking minutes out back smoking a cigarette while they "ask their manager" about the price of the item, I'll be the worst.
I sell computer services, too. I also sell odds and ends computer parts to a few customers who can't be bothered with getting stuff on their own. And I'm just as happy to be paid hourly to show the person how to buy their own RAM from Newegg and how to install it themselves, as I am to mark those same parts up 50 or 100% and be paid hourly to install them myself.
And, yeah, I'm perfectly happy with Dell, HP, Wal-Mart, and Apple. I'm perfectly happy sending my customers there, if they have stuff that they need. I'm just not happy paying a salesperson for service or advise that I don't want.
Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts is available for sale in FLAC, WAV, and MP3 of various bitrates. I wish others would do the same.
I bought the 320kbps MP3s, since it's plenty for my ears and I hate to be bothered with transcoding.
In fact, even though it does offend my own audiophile sensibilities, high-bitrate MP3 is my format of choice. It works everywhere, I cannot discern a difference between it and a CD, and it works everywhere. I listen to them with my iPod, my PSP, in the car stereo, the PS3, the TV itself, on little $3 dime-store special players...
Oh, sure: I'll be screwed if it comes time to shift to a different format, but I don't care. It's apparent to me, at this point, that there's no way that MP3 is going anywhere anytime soon (if ever).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at this with a bit of objective sarcasm, shall we?
Tidal forces and physical stress: Oh, sure - being sloshed around a washing machine is way more stressful than bouncing around on my keyring attached to my beltloop and being dropped repeatedly. Besides, everyone knows that surface mount chips are fragile little buggers that just pop right off of their PCBs at the slightest provocation, especially during particular lunar alignments. I think the gravity of this problem is pretty well known.
Rapid heating and cooling: Right. Because everyone wants their cotton pants to shrink as much as possible, so they ALWAYS wash them with the hottest water available. Why, some folks even boil a kettle and pour that in, too, just for good measure!
Water wearing down contacts: WTF? Are you really suggesting that there is erosion happening on such a scale as to wear down gold-plated copper? In a washing machine? Wow. It's amazing that anything ever comes out of that thing intact.
Oh, right, but we're using SOAP! OMG, the soap will ruin everything!!@!! It's so CORROSIVE with its NEGATIVE CHEMICAL EFFECTS! Now I know why the brass buttons and zippers on my pants keep disappearing: Because the soap EATS THEM. Mystery solved! Next!
Soap residue as a conductor: You didn't mention this, but it's so obvious that I'm going to put it in for you. Everyone knows that in Western societies, washing machines do not have a rinse cycle to remove soap, because a rinse cycle would be wasteful of our most precious and rare natural resource: Water. So, we're forever wearing clothes which are soaked to the brim with soap. EVERYONE knows this. It's eating my pants right now!
Thermal stresses of great rapidity and DOOM: Holy shit. Are you serious? Because, just last January, I left my toasty warm house, with my thumb drive clipped to my keyring, bouncing around like it always is, and went out into the -5F night to walk up the hill to the store and buy some milk. The store was warm. And then I walked back up the hill toward home. (Boy, was it cold.) Back in my warm house, I guess I should have been totally flabbergasted that the thumb drive had survived the cornucopia of stress and abuse. I had no idea! Poor little thumb drive. I'm sorry! I'll never treat you like this again!
[/sarcasm]
My suggestion is simple: If ever you find a flash device at the bottom of the washing machine basin, go ahead and send it through the drier along with everything else. This will shake most of the water (and nearly all of any remaining soap) out, evenly distribute the rest of the moisture, and then warm it up so that anything still wet will evaporate. Afterward, just plug it in and use it. It's almost certainly just fine. If you want to be extra cautious, just wash the same load again without soap, and then send it through the drier.
If you don't dry it, because you're still fucking skittish about it, then either disassemble it and dry it by hand, or be prepared to wait a really long fucking time for the water to creep out at room temperature. Plugging a device like this in while it is still wet will cause electrolysis to ruin your day. I strongly suspect that most reports of flash devices dieing after being wet are only the result of incomplete drying.
Thank you.
During my brief stint in the US Army, I realized a lot of things. One of the most important of them was this: It's possible to make a lot of money in the military, but usually only as a civilian.
Others here suggest leaving town (perhaps the whole state) and moving on to grander places. I have the following suggestion:
Find a local contractor who does some manner of small electronics work for the Marine base, and work for them. If you've got skills adequate to successfully do even mundane board-level repair on a laptop, then you've got patience and mindset adequate to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of military/government communication and networking systems.
I do this, as part of my current job, for a DOD installation near here. My pay rate is a little more than double what yours is in an area of Ohio with a relatively low cost of living. And when a laptop breaks, I generally pass the project on to one of my lower-paid associates...
Since 9/11, the area of security and communications (both private and public) has been rolling in cash. In the midst of a recession, the company I work for is having its best year ever.
And, though it seems unorthodox, most of the clients that I do work for are happy to see me come in late and work in the wee hours of the morning, because any interruptions I cause them during those times aren't as critical as they would be during the day when there's more stuff going on. And dress code? Hah. My hair is long, I wear a beard, and my clothes are clean -- that's the extent of the expectations in this field when you can actually get stuff done.
Food for thought, I guess. I just hope you don't end up back in a van. :-/
Bah.
I've got computers at home and at work which have lived for more than 5 years without any real issues.
I look forward to the day when buying a computer for a specific application is like buying a circuit breaker panel: Once it's properly installed, it will do what it's supposed to do pretty much forever (in human terms, at least).
I wouldn't know how to even approach the subject without sounding like I'm just trying to extract more cash out of him.
You're still thinking like a frugal geek, not a doctor who just wants stuff to work with minimal hassle.
Of course getting this job done is going to extract cash from him. I'd guess that he's prepared for that; chances are, those systems he bought and paid someone to set up 15 years ago weren't exactly inexpensive, either.
So: Forget money. Please. And just ask: Can it be done?
I think it can.
Myself, I'd use all new parts. A low-power motherboard from VIA or Intel. A good power supply, with high-quality, slow-moving fans, and ball bearings. And I'd try, hard, to cool the CPU passively.
For storage, I'd use a SSD, or a slow-spinning 3.5" drive. I would make sure that intake air passes over (or under) the drive, to keep it at a reasonable temperature. The box would have plenty of RAM (more for an SSD to minimize swap).
And, gosh, I guess that's it. If the machines aren't connected to Teh Intarweb, I'd put the same software (maybe even including Windows 95) back on, and call it a decade.
Name one competent government employee.
Obama
Jury's still out on that one.
Neutral as could be. The poster was even fairly elaborate on why he had not yet decided on Obama's competence, which is a whole world different from claiming that he's somehow incompetent.
Your comprehension seems lacking. And your undue retaliation is more harmful than not. As a current and past Obama supporter, it shames me to see you behave in such a fashion.
Good luck.
Good = competent, bad = incompetent. Those aren't the only meanings of any of those words, but they're pretty common ones. ("Joe's a good worker," "Tammy is bad at that job.")
It's all about the context. And in this context, "good" is synonymous with "competent." (Isn't English fun?)
I think you're begging the question, in the traditional sense of the word, with your strong reaction. Nobody said Obama was incompetent, or bad, or anything else negative in this thread, but you're arguing as if someone had. (The reality is that the only reply to your initial assertion was totally and unashamedly fucking neutral, though it did seem hopeful.)
I'd guess that you make a habit of such fallacies, and that this tendancy might be part of the reason why you post at 0...
Because some of us elder geeks like learning about clever and functional hardware tricks, I suppose. It's always interesting to me when a piece of hardware learns a new trick which its designers never intended, with software alone. Using the PC speaker for digital audio is one. Data acquisition with a parallel port is another.
Central Point's PC Tools Backup program used to do floppy detection, but it kept the motor spinning the whole time. So, doing this same trick without spinning the motor is interesting to me.
If it's not interesting to you, then get off my lawn, kid, and go fuck with your water cooling rig some more and post the results on Twitter or something. Don't come whining here.
K? Thx.
I have an LS-120. Even used it once. It seemed fast. I left it there for a few months, and never used it again.
My older computers have the floppy drives removed to provide better cooling to the hard drive(s). My newer computers have better cooling for the hard drives by design.
I haven't used a floppy disk in at least two years. (I do have an external drive if the need ever arises, but I no longer have any media for it.)
Great! So, go find me some prior art, because in my years of dealing with communications systems which include provision for independent DC battery backups, I've never ever seen anything so clever, carefully-balanced, and efficient. (The systems I'm familiar with range in vintage from new, to a little over 30 years old, and IMHO includes a fairly broad scope of gear.)
Found the patent:
Application number: 11/756,939
Publication number: US 2008/0030078 A1
Filing date: Jun 1, 2007
Inventors: William Whitted, Montgomery Sykora, Ken Krieger, Benchiao Jai, William Hamburgen, Jimmy Clidaras, Donald L. Beaty, Gerald Aigner
Assignee: Exaflop LLC [Note that Exaflop LLC's mailing address is the same as Google's.]
U.S. Classification
307066000
The most interesting parts, to me:
Figure 1, which shows an AC-DC converter, a battery, and a motherboard on a tray, in parallel.
And the following excerpts:
[0013] The system can further include a charger configured to charge the battery through a path connected across the DC bus. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is less than about 26 Volts. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is between about 10 Volts and about 15 Volts. In some implementations, the single DC bus voltage is about 13.65 Volts. In some implementations, the AC-to-DC conversion circuit regulates the DC output voltage signal to approximately 1 Volt above the maximum nominal charge voltage of the battery. The DC bus voltage can provide sufficient voltage for a linear regulator connected in series with the battery across the DC bus to trickle charge the battery to a fully charged state according to battery specifications.[...]
and this gem:
[0016] The system can further include at least one DC-DC converter configured to convert a voltage supplied on the DC bus to at least one additional DC voltage. In some implementations, the additional voltage is selected from the group consisting of: -5; 1; 3; 3.3; 5; 7.5; 10; about 18-20; and, about 20-26 Volts.
That last one, 16, is pretty specific: It basically comes out and says that there is no secondary regulation to 12V.
And so, I rest my case and declare that it is, indeed, a brilliant and simple design.
According to the picture in TFA, the power supply outputs only 13.65VDC. There is no 12V rail.
The picture also shows what looks like a 1TB Hitachi 7K1000.B. It's rated at 12VDC +/- 10%, while withstanding spikes of up to 15VDC.
Now: Between the cabling, the motherboard (which the drives receive power from), and the many Amps of load, the voltage WILL drop some.
So why 13.65VDC? Because that's probably the closest they could get to 13.8VDC (a typical charging voltage for lead-acid gel cells), without ever really exceeding the specifications of the hard drives (after voltage drop).
It seems likely enough that any other voltage would either do a lousy job keeping the battery charged, or destroy components. And it's pretty obvious that any other design would use more parts, and lose efficiency.
The only other thing to do is use a bit of software along with the board's built-in voltage monitoring to shut everything off as the battery gets down to around 10.8VDC.
Of course, this is all just postulation on my part. I'm going to go dig up the patent now and see if I'm right...but if I'm even in the same BALLPARK with the above assumptions, then Google's design is neither obvious nor something which has been done before in a PC, and is certainly worthy of a patent.
Because Windows, generally[1], doesn't autorun a USB flash device, but will autorun from a USB CD-ROM. It's handy to plug a thumb drive into a machine, and, you know, have the magic work[2].
[1]: In my experience, only Vista and Windows 7 do this at all without extra help.
[2]: Difficult though it may be, try to imagine yourself not as a talented geek with a 5-digit Slashdot UID, and instead as Joe Layman. Joe's happy that his software Just Works when he plugs his thumb drive into a random Windows computer, and Joe doesn't care what sort of ugly hacks have to happen in order for that to occur.
On the plus side, U-Verse works very well with torrents.
With Roadrunner, I had to do clever QoS traffic shaping stuff inside of a custom firmware on a WRT54G in order to keep torrents from swamping the connection with high latency.
With U-Verse, I don't. I can just leave Azureus run wide-open, and it'll occupy the entire 6mbps/1mbps connection with hundreds of connections, while latency always stays low. My wife no longer complains about me downloading torrents while she plays WOW.
It works so well that I've bypassed the fancy WRT54G altogether, since the supplied U-Verse 2-wire router seems to work quite well enough for everything I do without extra help. (It also includes a battery backup, so I can continue to use the laptop during a power outage.)
Interesting -- I didn't realize that.
I stand corrected. Thanks!
XSS, eh?
That's a lot more like a security failure in the browser, than any sort of remotely-exploitable failure of the router.
But what do I know - I'm just an idealist.
Puppies, as I understand it, are also delicious. I plan giving it a taste some day.
(Disclaimer: I also keep fish. Some of them (Oscars, in particular) show remarkable intelligence and learning ability, but this doesn't detract from their deliciousness. We have new addition to our family; a Doberman pup of a couple months of age. My fondness for the family dog doesn't detract from the deliciousness of dogs in general. I have a pet bird, which also shows learning ability, and find that chicken and turkey and ostrich are all fantastic foods. We even have a pet rat, and he's pretty awesome, but that's not going to stop me from killing other unwanted rodents in or around my house.)
Kind of.
The flash is in several sections (similar to disk partitions). Part of the boot code (which has its own section) is smart enough to talk TFTP; the boot_wait parameter just tells it how long to sit and wait for TFTP to happen.
Nobody -should- be touching that location - it's there for safety. And while there isn't really any grand protection preventing someone from maliciously modifying this code, it is somewhat device-specific and fickle. In fact, it's somewhat like a PC BIOS in that there's usually nothing preventing malware from overwriting it, but nobody ever bothers to try.
Further, the worm being discussed here does not perform boot code updates, so there's no current reason for it to be suspect.
Meanwhile, JTAG: This is a hardware interface allowing you to directly rewrite the flash ROM on the device, usually using a parallel port on a PC. My own JTAG cable consists of a few resistors on an old internal serial cable, worked just fine recovering a bricked WRT54G (with boot_wait disabled) a couple of years ago. There's nothing anything on the device can do to prevent you from rebuilding the entire system with a JTAG cable.
I use GNU Keyring for the same thing. Except, I run it on an old PalmOS device. It keeps a neat little encrypted database of all of the passwords it makes, along with anything else I want to keep private, and it's easy to carry anywhere...
Ping hack? Truly devastating back door? Google it yourself and then come back once you understand that it's not a remote exploit[1]. You call it a back door; but it's just a clever way to execute commands on the box, after having already logged into it as a superuser.
The other problem was fixed five years ago. I'll wager that most of these routers have either had their firmware upgraded, or found themselves in the trash can, because the whole thing was a steaming pile of shit at that point in time. They'd lock up frequently. Lose wireless from time to time. Fun stuff. Newer firmwares eventually began to not suck quite as bad.
Hardware failure rates of Linksys stuff from back then have been pretty high as well. Linksys had a habit (as did most everyone else) of using lousy filter capacitors on their boards, which would eventually swell up and fail. I've seen their wall-wart power supplies having high failure rates. There's a good chance that between the bunky firmware, and the bunky hardware, that there's only a very small percentage of these boxes still in use in a vulnerable state.
[1]: And since it's a local exploit, then it really doesn't matter -- by the time they've infiltrated their way deep enough that they're attacking your router from inside your own network, you've already lost the last important battle, and the war is over.
A. Is your password "admin," "root," "password," or some other such simplistic shit? Can you log into it remotely? If so, you're vulnerable.
B. Does SSH still connect? Can you get to your router's web page? If so, it's not infected.
C. It's a router, not something of any great intrinsic value. Nuke the firmware and start over. (Reset, boot_wait, JTAG - lots of ways to nuke a new firmware into these things without having network access to them. Listed previously are some good terms to Google for.)
I'd guess that most people, even geeks, don't run dd-wrt, tomato, or openwrt on their router unless they've got a pretty good clue about what's going on.
On the other hand: The average Joe, who just buys a WRT54G (aka: black box) from Wal-Mart, plugs it into his cable modem, and logs into the "linksys" SSID from his laptop isn't affected by this worm, since the default configuration doesn't allow remote access from the Internet at all.
If you something fun, ALL day, EVERY day, it eventually stops being fun.
Some examples:
Candy. All the candy you want, all the time. Eventually, you'd get tired of candy.
Booze. All of the best booze, all of the time. Eventually, you'll get tired of being in a stupor.
Turbo. As fast as it can go, all of the time. If you use it all the time, eventually it stops seeming fast.
I mean, FFS: Imagine having an infinite supply of hookers and blow. Eventually, you'll grow tired of...er, actually, scratch that.
Hookers and blow FTW!
No, I don't spent entire afternoons haggling over a nickle. If the first place gives me a price that seems appropriate for the amount of service I need (which, typically, is nothing), I'll pay cash for it and walk out the door. I will not be a "problem customer" -- I'll be the easiest sale anyone ever had, and they'll never hear from me again until the next time I need something big.
But if the price sucks, and/or if they spend sixteen fucking minutes out back smoking a cigarette while they "ask their manager" about the price of the item, I'll be the worst.
I sell computer services, too. I also sell odds and ends computer parts to a few customers who can't be bothered with getting stuff on their own. And I'm just as happy to be paid hourly to show the person how to buy their own RAM from Newegg and how to install it themselves, as I am to mark those same parts up 50 or 100% and be paid hourly to install them myself.
And, yeah, I'm perfectly happy with Dell, HP, Wal-Mart, and Apple. I'm perfectly happy sending my customers there, if they have stuff that they need. I'm just not happy paying a salesperson for service or advise that I don't want.
Desqview required a 286.
["Wooooosh." Just so nobody else has to do it.)
Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts is available for sale in FLAC, WAV, and MP3 of various bitrates. I wish others would do the same.
I bought the 320kbps MP3s, since it's plenty for my ears and I hate to be bothered with transcoding.
In fact, even though it does offend my own audiophile sensibilities, high-bitrate MP3 is my format of choice. It works everywhere, I cannot discern a difference between it and a CD, and it works everywhere. I listen to them with my iPod, my PSP, in the car stereo, the PS3, the TV itself, on little $3 dime-store special players...
Oh, sure: I'll be screwed if it comes time to shift to a different format, but I don't care. It's apparent to me, at this point, that there's no way that MP3 is going anywhere anytime soon (if ever).