A modchip is usually a PIC or ASIC programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.
what it does,
The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.
and how are you supposed to
install it (do you need to make your own
pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to
unsolder something and then solder this in
place), etc.?
It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).
For the record, I have never owned a console or
a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I
am interested to know what hack value consoles
have in general and in this case Xbox.
The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.
I always hated this argument because old movies that are no longer in theaters are also put on region locked discs.
Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):
[snip]
I could go on and on and on.
The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.
I kinda bought Hollywood's "we want to stagger DVD release dates because we need to stagger cinema releases because we don't have enough prints to go round" argument until I noticed this for myself a couple of months ago (not having really paid much attention to DVD until then...)
This is basic economics; if you're able to artificially segment your market, you'll optimise the total revenue by charging the most each segment will pay for your product. Without region coding, europeans like me would probably be importing all our DVDs from S-E Asia or the US where they're cheaper.
Playing the DVD game ensures you'll get screwed by the content publishers because the rules have been set by them entirely to their advantage. I've chosen not to play (apart from region-free discs such as music...)
I guess you're implying that if I write software using MS Visual Studio then I have to name my product something like Microsoft/BlackHawk SuperProduct (tm) just because I have used an MS tool to produce my product.
Not at all, but then, if Microsoft wrote Visual Studio and licensed it to you, then they would be within their rights to ask you to do so. You, of course, could always refuse to accept the license and use something else.
To be honest, the main statement I was disagreeing with was this:
GNU's contribution certainly isn't enough to deserve equal mention in the name of the operating system.
Well, IMHO, "Linux" isn't actually a very good name for the operating system that the majority of the readership of this site uses. GNU isn't much better, given things like GNOME, KDE, XFree86, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org also contribute massively to it, but I do agree with RMS that it's important that GNU and the FSF receive some credit.
That said, in conversation, I'll usually use "Linux" because it's a convenient shorthand, when most (if not all) of my peers know exactly what I am referring to.
I woke up early one morning to the sound of my electronic metronome going tick-tick-tick-tock quite loudly. My first thought was that I'd somehow managed to leave it on before going to bed and sleeping right through it. When I checked, I found that my old Nokia 6150 was charging right next to it and the aerial was pointing right at it.
My guess is that one of the periodic cell checkin transmissions induced enough of a current in the on/off circuit that the metronome decided to switch on. Spooky!
Well, as SO6 and OOo are based on SO5.2, both have more features than the only widely available SO release. Further, since SO6 went gold a few weeks back (it must have done, in order for Mandrake purchasers to have something to download!), I would imagine that OOo has more bugfixes than the first release of SO6 when it turns up in a month or so.
That said, it's entirely possible that Sun's first release of SO6 will have all the fixes found in OOo 1.0.0 (i.e. it'll be SO6-SP1 or something).
Finally, SO includes a bunch of extras - clipart, fonts, templates and the like.
Here is a question. What is the difference between the sover and the installer besides 50 meg?
As far as I can see as an OOo outsider, the solver is the object files (+ source?) so that if you're hacking on one specific part of OOo, you can compile, link and test without having to recompile the whole suite overnight.
If all you want to do is play with the "finished product", just grab the installer.
You'll only get anti-aliased fonts if you're using XFree 4.1 or newer and have AA properly configured.
The screenshots don't show anti-aliased fonts, so I assume you've got a different problem. If the fonts are generally lumpy, it's possible that your Xserver is running with a non-standard or non-square resolution. Force it to 75dpi x 75dpi by starting it with -dpi 75.
XFree 4 appears to query the monitor using DDC and set the dpi settings accordingly by default. Some monitors give out duff information...
No, but it is a very likely StarOffice 6 killer...
Why would I run the risk of paying out for gobeProductive, when I know from using SO for the last 5 years that it'll meet my requirements? gobe don't even have an eval download available!
Heck, I've been evaluating OpenOffice - it'll probably suffice, once they get the showstoppers out and get to one-dot-oh.
Quorn's OK. I've been eating meat almost continuously (bar a period during mid-1995 when I lived off cheese for 6 months before I stopped worrying about BSE:).
Quorn works pretty well in Bolognese and Chilli, though you need to add a fair amount of seasoning and PLENTY of tomato juice & puree for it to have any flavour. That said, chilli made using Quorn seems to have a harsh chilli heat that beef chilli doesn't.
Quorn used as chicken works quite well, too, but like chicken, doesn't really taste of much apart from the marinade/coating.
For more info, check out DiscountLaptops
and PowerNotebooks. It's a shame that laptops are much more expensive in the UK and that our Tier 3 vendors only seem to sell ASUS (in the case of Hi-Grade) and Clevo. Both of which are OK, but it'd be nice to have a few alternatives.
I'm getting on pretty well with a Toshiba 3000-214. The bigger brother is the -514 with a PIIIm-1G instead of the PIIIm-933 in the -214. They're known as the 3000-S204 and similar in the US.
AFAIK, they've sold out of a lot of places now, but you might still find them (at clearance prices, natch!) in the shops. Almost everything works; the exceptions are the modem (AMR Lucent/Agere controllerless) and power management (only APM power off and DPMS seem to work).
Red Hat 7.2 needs to be setup in text mode and the nVidia driver added post-install to support the geforce 2go (even TV out works). The built-in ethernet is an RTL8139. USB works out of the box.
Infra-Red also works and I have it happily talking to a Nokia 6210.
One potential 'gotcha' is that there are no PS/2 or serial ports. Depending on your intended use, this may be something of a showstopper as serial PC-cards are quite expensive and USB serial adaptors aren't reputed to be terribly compatible with all serial devices.
If you don't care about the pre-installed Linux, then you could pickup a Clevo laptop sold by a number of Tier 3 vendors, including AJP, Evesham, Mesh, Rock, Sigma, IPC and many, many others. The Quadra 150 appears to be the same as the Clevo 8500V.
DNUK have a good rep. but they aren't the cheapest.
I attempted to install Linux on this beast about 3 months ago, and realized that it had a BIOS specifically made for WinNT.. a blue menu with no such option as "switch to digital unix" as the article mentions. No way to boot from a floppy or CD either. (though i think it has an option to reinstall NT...)
That sounds like the ARC firmware. I've used it many times to install Linux, though it was about 5 years ago now. Check out a thread I contributed to at google groups. There are some useful links there.
Further, I seem to recall that this post describes roughly what I used to do on these machines.
Sounds as though you gave up without really trying...
Yup, I seem to recall that Amdahl were bitten by this when 360 (?) mainframes were all the rage. Before my time (at least professionally;-) so the memory is a little hazy...
How much did it cost Intel to replace all those P5-60s and -90s back in 1994/95?
Perhaps that's why they've introduced microcode update functionality (typically done by your BIOS, but there's stuff in the Linux kernel to allow you to do it from the OS).
I second the recommendation of Forrest Mims books. He was a true hardware hacker, built and tested all his own designs and meticulously wrote out all his books by hand on engineering paper.
I started with a Forrest Mims book. The Babani range are also quite useful. They've tended to cross the line into computing these days and those aren't so good, but the electronics ones are handy enough.
Furthermore, I _would_ talk to guys at Radio Shack, but you need to find the experienced ones. usually a manager or someone older who's worked in the store for a long time, and is really interested in electronics. These guys often who a lot more than you would guess. Of course, the majority of them, especially the younger ones wouldn't know which way to put the batteries in.
For UK hardware geeks, Radio Shack is dead and gone (Carphone Warehouse turned 'em all into cellphone shops) but Maplin was, and still is, better than UK Radio Shacks ever were.
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A modchip is usually a PIC or ASIC programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.
what it does,
The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.
and how are you supposed to install it (do you need to make your own pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to unsolder something and then solder this in place), etc.?
It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).
For the record, I have never owned a console or a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I am interested to know what hack value consoles have in general and in this case Xbox.
The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.
--
Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):
[snip]
I could go on and on and on.
The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.
I kinda bought Hollywood's "we want to stagger DVD release dates because we need to stagger cinema releases because we don't have enough prints to go round" argument until I noticed this for myself a couple of months ago (not having really paid much attention to DVD until then...)
This is basic economics; if you're able to artificially segment your market, you'll optimise the total revenue by charging the most each segment will pay for your product. Without region coding, europeans like me would probably be importing all our DVDs from S-E Asia or the US where they're cheaper.
Playing the DVD game ensures you'll get screwed by the content publishers because the rules have been set by them entirely to their advantage. I've chosen not to play (apart from region-free discs such as music...)
--
You could always run your data through cdencrypt before you PGP/GPG it. ;-)
Not at all, but then, if Microsoft wrote Visual Studio and licensed it to you, then they would be within their rights to ask you to do so. You, of course, could always refuse to accept the license and use something else.
To be honest, the main statement I was disagreeing with was this:
GNU's contribution certainly isn't enough to deserve equal mention in the name of the operating system.
Well, IMHO, "Linux" isn't actually a very good name for the operating system that the majority of the readership of this site uses. GNU isn't much better, given things like GNOME, KDE, XFree86, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org also contribute massively to it, but I do agree with RMS that it's important that GNU and the FSF receive some credit.
That said, in conversation, I'll usually use "Linux" because it's a convenient shorthand, when most (if not all) of my peers know exactly what I am referring to.
--
--
My guess is that one of the periodic cell checkin transmissions induced enough of a current in the on/off circuit that the metronome decided to switch on. Spooky!
--
--
IIRC, it's been adapted from ispell, the UNIX spellchecker, by Kevin Hendricks. Bravo!
--
Well, as SO6 and OOo are based on SO5.2, both have more features than the only widely available SO release. Further, since SO6 went gold a few weeks back (it must have done, in order for Mandrake purchasers to have something to download!), I would imagine that OOo has more bugfixes than the first release of SO6 when it turns up in a month or so.
That said, it's entirely possible that Sun's first release of SO6 will have all the fixes found in OOo 1.0.0 (i.e. it'll be SO6-SP1 or something).
Finally, SO includes a bunch of extras - clipart, fonts, templates and the like.
--
As far as I can see as an OOo outsider, the solver is the object files (+ source?) so that if you're hacking on one specific part of OOo, you can compile, link and test without having to recompile the whole suite overnight.
If all you want to do is play with the "finished product", just grab the installer.
--
The screenshots don't show anti-aliased fonts, so I assume you've got a different problem. If the fonts are generally lumpy, it's possible that your Xserver is running with a non-standard or non-square resolution. Force it to 75dpi x 75dpi by starting it with -dpi 75.
XFree 4 appears to query the monitor using DDC and set the dpi settings accordingly by default. Some monitors give out duff information...
--
Why would I run the risk of paying out for gobeProductive, when I know from using SO for the last 5 years that it'll meet my requirements? gobe don't even have an eval download available!
Heck, I've been evaluating OpenOffice - it'll probably suffice, once they get the showstoppers out and get to one-dot-oh.
--
Quorn works pretty well in Bolognese and Chilli, though you need to add a fair amount of seasoning and PLENTY of tomato juice & puree for it to have any flavour. That said, chilli made using Quorn seems to have a harsh chilli heat that beef chilli doesn't.
Quorn used as chicken works quite well, too, but like chicken, doesn't really taste of much apart from the marinade/coating.
--
Ah, but then, you'd need to think in Russian
--
For more info, check out DiscountLaptops and PowerNotebooks. It's a shame that laptops are much more expensive in the UK and that our Tier 3 vendors only seem to sell ASUS (in the case of Hi-Grade) and Clevo. Both of which are OK, but it'd be nice to have a few alternatives.
--
AFAIK, they've sold out of a lot of places now, but you might still find them (at clearance prices, natch!) in the shops. Almost everything works; the exceptions are the modem (AMR Lucent/Agere controllerless) and power management (only APM power off and DPMS seem to work).
Red Hat 7.2 needs to be setup in text mode and the nVidia driver added post-install to support the geforce 2go (even TV out works). The built-in ethernet is an RTL8139. USB works out of the box.
Infra-Red also works and I have it happily talking to a Nokia 6210.
One potential 'gotcha' is that there are no PS/2 or serial ports. Depending on your intended use, this may be something of a showstopper as serial PC-cards are quite expensive and USB serial adaptors aren't reputed to be terribly compatible with all serial devices.
--
DNUK have a good rep. but they aren't the cheapest.
--
--
That sounds like the ARC firmware. I've used it many times to install Linux, though it was about 5 years ago now. Check out a thread I contributed to at google groups. There are some useful links there.
Further, I seem to recall that this post describes roughly what I used to do on these machines.
Sounds as though you gave up without really trying...
--
--
UTC=false
Because Windows diddles with the hardware clock directly, it can't be used (directly) as a UTC time source for UNIX.
Naturally, if you're ONLY running Linux, you can have UTC=true and forget about it.
--
Yup, I seem to recall that Amdahl were bitten by this when 360 (?) mainframes were all the rage. Before my time (at least professionally ;-) so the memory is a little hazy...
--
Perhaps that's why they've introduced microcode update functionality (typically done by your BIOS, but there's stuff in the Linux kernel to allow you to do it from the OS).
--
I started with a Forrest Mims book. The Babani range are also quite useful. They've tended to cross the line into computing these days and those aren't so good, but the electronics ones are handy enough.
Furthermore, I _would_ talk to guys at Radio Shack, but you need to find the experienced ones. usually a manager or someone older who's worked in the store for a long time, and is really interested in electronics. These guys often who a lot more than you would guess. Of course, the majority of them, especially the younger ones wouldn't know which way to put the batteries in.
For UK hardware geeks, Radio Shack is dead and gone (Carphone Warehouse turned 'em all into cellphone shops) but Maplin was, and still is, better than UK Radio Shacks ever were.
--
I dunno. I find it invaluable for transporting live whales in my time-travelling starship, complete with enough water to for them to move around in.
I could use steel or something, but, darn, I like to press my nose up to their enclosure during the journey.
--