See, the thing about bad RAM and SIMMs/DIMMs is that they can test the chips before soldering them onto the circuit board. If they want, they can even test them before putting the chips in a plastic case. So if you have "bad" RAM, it's more likely to be a defect in the soldering process that renders the whole stick (or an entire column of data bits) useless, or bad contact with the socket.
You'll probably get better results simply by cleaning off the contacts with a pencil eraser (remembering to brush away all the eraser dust first) and firmly re-inserting them into the socket.
Back when I was in high school (around the time of the IBM PC, FWIW) I would play with TTL chips like they were Legos, and make all sorts of cheezy projects with them, from silly LED flashers to hacking on the video generator section of my TRS-80.
Anyhow, twice I accidentally ran the power from my 5V 1A power supply directly through them. Their tops popped off instantly. The first one was a jumbo, and the top of it bounced off my glasses. Good thing I was nearsighted and had to wear glasses or it might have gone into my eye! (The second one was just an itty bitty, and nothing memorable.)
So if you're bored of microwaving AOL CDs, then get out those old junk 2400 baud external modems, rip out the LEDs, and hook 'em up to a 5 volt power supply!
How does this affect Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor) and his plans for Destination Mir?
I know that if I won a chance to go on Mir, and Mir was being decomissioned, I would have no problems taking the ISS as a substitute prize.
On the other hand, Destination Mir probably wouldn't be quite as interesting an idea if it weren't for Mir being so rickety. Where's the fun in competing to get on a brand new, safe space station?
The solution is obvious. Call in Sally Struthers on this. This poor, fuel-starved space station needs YOUR help. Won't you please give? Only another 40 million dollars, and we can save Mir for all of humanity. And if you won't give for Mir, then please give to save the innocent fungus barely clinging to life on it, in a hostile, airless environment.
[By the way, it was obviously a troll because anyone that can write as clearly as Anne Marie can also think clearly enough to analyse the situation for herself rather than just repeat mass propaganda and support a single-group viewpoint.]
I don't think you're being sensitive to just how pervasive the "mass propaganda" stereotype of anime is. To call someone a troll just because the "mass propaganda" is their only exposure to something isn't a fair way to judge them.
It's all the fault of the "mall otakus" (the male ones, at least) who watch too much Drag-on-ball Z, Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Urotsukidoji. They've played every fighting game there is, and all they want is to see people beat each other up, a picture splattered with blood, and women getting raped.
It's time we spread the word that Japanese animation is about more than just blood and sex, it's also about
Every morning I drive by drkoop.com and think about how they could use just a few pennies out of your pocket. They have nothing but a heartless, uncaring highway passing them by while their stock price is left out in the cold, without even the simplest of convienences, like fresh running espresso. Abandoned by investors, they are reduced to begging for venture capital at the highway intersections of US 183, holding up heart-wrenching singns with slogans such as "WILL PORTAL FOR T1 FEED" and "HOMEPAGELESS, PLEASE GIVE, GOD BLESS". Is this some third world country? No, this is happening RIGHT HERE, in AMERICA. A mere three dollars a share can get them back on the road to recovery. Won't you please see it in your hearts to give to those in need?
...by an Alabama resident who claims that they're holding on to expired names long past any reasonable time period...
And I'm sure everybody suspects by now that they've got their domain name lookup CGI "bugged" so they can squat interesting names that aren't registered immediately after a search reports that the domain name is free. (See the recent Cringely article for an example.)
I make a point of always using the command line nslookup and whois because it's at least a bit harder to put a bug on those lookups (which go through complicated daemons written in C and might even cause a security problem if badly patched) than it is a web CGI written in Perl or VB.
I see a lot of people whining about "but what if I have a graphics card newer than the CD-ROM?" Actually, the same applies to network card drivers as well.
So where does it say that you don't have any hard drive at all? The point isn't not to use the hard drive, but simply not to have to install a not-of-your-choice OS on it to play a game. There is a problem with the hard drive having a file system supported by the OS on the CD-ROM, but Linux has support for a lot more filesystems than Windoze does.
What is needed is some standard way to put drivers on a hard drive where the CD-ROM's OS can load them in a "plug and play" sort of way. Besides, you need a hard drive to store configuration info and game saves anyhow.
And not all games will necessarily even care about drivers. If the game can run in 640x480x16 VGA with no networking, or even a mostly standard 256 color SVGA mode, it won't care about drivers.
Re:Buy specific branches
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 2
It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc.
After all, that was the whole point of Altavista, back when it was still altavista.digital.com -- it was intended to show off DEC's hardware.
At least Altavista is still useful for its original function. Sure, they've crowded the window with crappy flashing ads, and put all the keyword crap in (search for "flying buttmonkeys", and it'll give you a link to "Comparison shop for flying buttmonkeys"!), but it still works as a web search site.
Looking at the picture for a while, it appears that the screen spins 180 degrees at the center of its hinge, and locks down over the keyboard, rather than simply flipping in and out.
I hope they've got a durable connection between the screen and the base, or it could go bad after a few thousand twists. Not to mention if you kept turning it in the same direction all the time.
Okay... So I live in Texas (for the last 18 months),
Ah, so that makes you an expert on Texas politics.
and I see what a mess IT is. G. Dubya has been missing in action here since early in the year.
If you knew anything about Texas politics, you'd know that the position of Governor in Texas doesn't really do all that much. By law. The Lt. Governor position has much more power.
Probably nothing less than a worldwide outbreak of ebola.
Seriously, though, go to this link, find the little check box with the name "Jon Katz" next to it, click on it, then click on the "save" button at the bottom of the page. Presto, no more JonKatz!
there are more Americans turning 18 than ever before, and they now know that at least one presidential candidate is an idiot.
Yes, the chicken-hypnotizing internet-inventing "I harvested the tobacco" "watched my $RELATIVE die of lung cancer" "who is this person" (referring to a Thomas Jefferson bust) condescending-voiced tree.
"Gore, Gore, Gore of the Jungle, watch out he's a tree!" (bum da dum)
I called the spokesperson, Fredrik Almgren, and a somewhat cautious dialogue ensued. How did the Swedes know that this was really Simon Singh on the phone and not some imposter trying to steal their solution? I was the only other person in the world who also knew the plaintexts, and this became the decisive factor in establishing a relationship of trust.
What's interesting about this is that they used the cryptography from the book as a form of authentication! Sort of like a digital signature in reverse. If he was the real Simon Singh, he would have already known the plaintext to #10, and could use that to identify himself. And if he weren't, then he would presumably be from a team that had already solved it, so why bother calling them? (Yeah, I know, they might have solved every one but #5, but the same challenge/response works for all the problems, and strengthens the authentication.)
why not have all of the different language sub-titles available for all region encodings and allow the viewer to choose which, if any, sub-titles to watch?
Presuming you're referring to the "more subtitles in other regions" thing, the answer is one word: xenophobia. Joe Six Pack doesn't want to see them thar chickin scratchins from them little slant eyed... well, you get the idea. Or at least Hollywood thinks Joe Six Pack doesn't want to see them, which is all that matters.
As usual for Slashdot, they make an article out of old news. The only news here is that TW is finally starting to use a trick that other DVD manufacturers have been using for well over a year now.
Basically, a DVD player has not one, but two places that contain the region code. One is a bitmap with one bit per region, stored in the MPEG stream. Normally, a player will only play a disc with a specific bit set in the region code bitmap, and a disc will have one or more regions set.
Note that there are eight bits, but only six regions. The other two are reserved for future use. In fact, I think one of them is intended for use in special situations, like in-flight movies on airplanes. I have found disks advertised as "all region", which would not play in regions 7 or 8, and others which would play in all regions 1 thru 8.
The second place is in a register that is readable by the GUI code. (As mentioned in an earlier response, this is register #20.) Because this is an integer, it can contain only one region code at any given time. So the player will have one "native" zone, regardless of how permissive its bitmap is.
There are two types of region mods. One, typically called "region zero", is to simply disable the MPEG region checking. This is like using a crowbar to open a locked door. The second is to make the player truly switch regions so that it becomes a player from another region. This is like having a keyring with all the keys on it. (I suppose there's also a third way, which is to region-zero the bitmap, and make the GUI region switchable for trick disks. Or even better yet, have it check the bitmap and set register #20 automatically. I guess this would be like having a master key. But I haven't heard about people doing this.)
The "region-zero" mod won't change your GUI region, so any "trick" disk from the same region as the "native" region of the player, will always play, as always. However, the mod itself may change the native region of the player from its factory setting, say to zone 1, which is the most useful.
Switching the regions works well, and some players let you do that from secret codes on the remote. But such players may also have a built-in counter so that you can only change regions 5-25 times before it stays locked.
The best are players which have been modded to be infinitely region switchable, and Macrovision disabled. The Pioneer 505, 909, and 606 (from before Pioneer changed their logo) were famous for only requiring two jumper wires be soldered to the MPEG board. Then the CONDITION button in the right menu would switch regions.
There's one more cool thing that can be done with this. There are now discs which check the GUI region and enable/disable features depending on the native region of the player. So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets them sell in multiple regions, but they only have to master the disc once, and only keep one item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to be one of these.
There is a similar situation with the Playstation. Most Playstation chips work by blasting the special subcodes over and over into the right input. However, many of the people who installed chips also happened to sell games, and were just as annoyed at piracy as Sony was. So someone came up with the "anti-piracy" chip. This chip watched for the first three bytes of the subcode (SCEA, SCEJ, SCEE), and blasted the last byte of the USA code whenever it saw them. A CD-R wouldn't have the subcodes, and the chip would know it.
Then someone came up with a trick to check for chips by only putting the subcodes where it was necessary to boot the game. It would check parts of the disc that did NOT have the subcodes, and get pissed if it found them. The best part was that anti-piracy chips had no trouble with this scheme, because they didn't send the subcodes when they weren't supposed to. (Sure, someone then came up with the "stealth" chip, which disables itself after running long enough to boot a disc, but that's not as l33t as the way anti-piracy chips work.)
5. most people NEVER erase the tape before giving it to goodwill, so now you can go home and listen to peoples messages.
Damn, I'm glad I only use digital answering machines at home! I hate analog tape formats because they have crappy quality, and the hardware is unreliable.
This sounds like more fun than what I like to find at thrift stores, which is old Mac hard disks and Syquest cartridges. One time I found a backup tape from a SCO Unix system, and a tape drive that could read it. Nothing really fun, though.
I looked at the IP registry and I noticed that while they are using one of the officially unassigned networks (192.168.x.x), they are assigning it to their members (currently 25 entries in this list) in class C chunks. Obviously they aren't planning on more than 250 or so members. They probably should have used the 10.x.x.x range, but maybe this type of project doesn't scale well past 250 or so sites per wireless network.
But isn't this kind of thing what gave Fidonet such growing pains? The original Fidonet address spec was two 16 bit integers, but then they had to add zones in front, and they wanted non-dialable client nodes, so points were tacked to the end. Some software never properly supported zones, much less points. (And some TCP/IP software still doesn't support variable length bit masks either.) At least with a full class C per site, they don't have to worry about the "point problem".
but will they ignore this whole thing because only a few people have machines that can run it?
My developer subscription was up for renewal and they had a special offer for the beta seeded level being $400 instead of $500. So I paid $200 extra to upgrade my subscription... and I don't have a G3 or G4 Mac yet. Even if I did, I hear this thing wants 128meg minimum. Even the first G3 iMacs didn't have that.
But yes, I'm getting the beta and I don't even have a machine that can run it. Yet.
At least I have a computer! I heard people were so hyped by the W95 release that they bought it when they didn't even have a computer at all!
It says that 'Doug Davis, Digital Convergence's CTO, said he applauds the hackers' ingenuity and "chuckles" at some of the ideas they have dreamed up.'"
You mean like sticking it up your ass?
here and here.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll probably get better results simply by cleaning off the contacts with a pencil eraser (remembering to brush away all the eraser dust first) and firmly re-inserting them into the socket.
Anyhow, twice I accidentally ran the power from my 5V 1A power supply directly through them. Their tops popped off instantly. The first one was a jumbo, and the top of it bounced off my glasses. Good thing I was nearsighted and had to wear glasses or it might have gone into my eye! (The second one was just an itty bitty, and nothing memorable.)
So if you're bored of microwaving AOL CDs, then get out those old junk 2400 baud external modems, rip out the LEDs, and hook 'em up to a 5 volt power supply!
I know that if I won a chance to go on Mir, and Mir was being decomissioned, I would have no problems taking the ISS as a substitute prize.
On the other hand, Destination Mir probably wouldn't be quite as interesting an idea if it weren't for Mir being so rickety. Where's the fun in competing to get on a brand new, safe space station?
Or at least save Mir so we can have more "reality programming".
I don't think you're being sensitive to just how pervasive the "mass propaganda" stereotype of anime is. To call someone a troll just because the "mass propaganda" is their only exposure to something isn't a fair way to judge them.
It's all the fault of the "mall otakus" (the male ones, at least) who watch too much Drag-on-ball Z, Ninja Scroll, Akira, and Urotsukidoji. They've played every fighting game there is, and all they want is to see people beat each other up, a picture splattered with blood, and women getting raped.
It's time we spread the word that Japanese animation is about more than just blood and sex, it's also about
Every morning I drive by drkoop.com and think about how they could use just a few pennies out of your pocket. They have nothing but a heartless, uncaring highway passing them by while their stock price is left out in the cold, without even the simplest of convienences, like fresh running espresso. Abandoned by investors, they are reduced to begging for venture capital at the highway intersections of US 183, holding up heart-wrenching singns with slogans such as "WILL PORTAL FOR T1 FEED" and "HOMEPAGELESS, PLEASE GIVE, GOD BLESS". Is this some third world country? No, this is happening RIGHT HERE, in AMERICA. A mere three dollars a share can get them back on the road to recovery. Won't you please see it in your hearts to give to those in need?
And I'm sure everybody suspects by now that they've got their domain name lookup CGI "bugged" so they can squat interesting names that aren't registered immediately after a search reports that the domain name is free. (See the recent Cringely article for an example.)
I make a point of always using the command line nslookup and whois because it's at least a bit harder to put a bug on those lookups (which go through complicated daemons written in C and might even cause a security problem if badly patched) than it is a web CGI written in Perl or VB.
The NASA space flight site has on its space station page a picture of the space station with the Z1 truss attached.
So where does it say that you don't have any hard drive at all? The point isn't not to use the hard drive, but simply not to have to install a not-of-your-choice OS on it to play a game. There is a problem with the hard drive having a file system supported by the OS on the CD-ROM, but Linux has support for a lot more filesystems than Windoze does.
What is needed is some standard way to put drivers on a hard drive where the CD-ROM's OS can load them in a "plug and play" sort of way. Besides, you need a hard drive to store configuration info and game saves anyhow.
And not all games will necessarily even care about drivers. If the game can run in 640x480x16 VGA with no networking, or even a mostly standard 256 color SVGA mode, it won't care about drivers.
After all, that was the whole point of Altavista, back when it was still altavista.digital.com -- it was intended to show off DEC's hardware.
At least Altavista is still useful for its original function. Sure, they've crowded the window with crappy flashing ads, and put all the keyword crap in (search for "flying buttmonkeys", and it'll give you a link to "Comparison shop for flying buttmonkeys"!), but it still works as a web search site.
I hope they've got a durable connection between the screen and the base, or it could go bad after a few thousand twists. Not to mention if you kept turning it in the same direction all the time.
Reverses and what?
Damn cute little thing, though.
Ah, so that makes you an expert on Texas politics.
and I see what a mess IT is. G. Dubya has been missing in action here since early in the year.
If you knew anything about Texas politics, you'd know that the position of Governor in Texas doesn't really do all that much. By law. The Lt. Governor position has much more power.
Probably nothing less than a worldwide outbreak of ebola.
Seriously, though, go to this link, find the little check box with the name "Jon Katz" next to it, click on it, then click on the "save" button at the bottom of the page. Presto, no more JonKatz!
Yes, the chicken-hypnotizing internet-inventing "I harvested the tobacco" "watched my $RELATIVE die of lung cancer" "who is this person" (referring to a Thomas Jefferson bust) condescending-voiced tree.
"Gore, Gore, Gore of the Jungle, watch out he's a tree!" (bum da dum)
Posted with Mozilla M18 WinNT
What's interesting about this is that they used the cryptography from the book as a form of authentication! Sort of like a digital signature in reverse. If he was the real Simon Singh, he would have already known the plaintext to #10, and could use that to identify himself. And if he weren't, then he would presumably be from a team that had already solved it, so why bother calling them? (Yeah, I know, they might have solved every one but #5, but the same challenge/response works for all the problems, and strengthens the authentication.)
So they block ports 22 and 23. So what? Just pick another one that they haven't blocked. Like RealAudio...
/usr/local/sbin/sshd -p 7070
He, M.E.L., you can drive pretty good. Hey, watch out for that sharp curve! Oh no!!!!
#@%)(*&#$!@!!!!!! [CRASH]
Presuming you're referring to the "more subtitles in other regions" thing, the answer is one word: xenophobia. Joe Six Pack doesn't want to see them thar chickin scratchins from them little slant eyed... well, you get the idea. Or at least Hollywood thinks Joe Six Pack doesn't want to see them, which is all that matters.
Basically, a DVD player has not one, but two places that contain the region code. One is a bitmap with one bit per region, stored in the MPEG stream. Normally, a player will only play a disc with a specific bit set in the region code bitmap, and a disc will have one or more regions set.
Note that there are eight bits, but only six regions. The other two are reserved for future use. In fact, I think one of them is intended for use in special situations, like in-flight movies on airplanes. I have found disks advertised as "all region", which would not play in regions 7 or 8, and others which would play in all regions 1 thru 8.
The second place is in a register that is readable by the GUI code. (As mentioned in an earlier response, this is register #20.) Because this is an integer, it can contain only one region code at any given time. So the player will have one "native" zone, regardless of how permissive its bitmap is.
There are two types of region mods. One, typically called "region zero", is to simply disable the MPEG region checking. This is like using a crowbar to open a locked door. The second is to make the player truly switch regions so that it becomes a player from another region. This is like having a keyring with all the keys on it. (I suppose there's also a third way, which is to region-zero the bitmap, and make the GUI region switchable for trick disks. Or even better yet, have it check the bitmap and set register #20 automatically. I guess this would be like having a master key. But I haven't heard about people doing this.)
The "region-zero" mod won't change your GUI region, so any "trick" disk from the same region as the "native" region of the player, will always play, as always. However, the mod itself may change the native region of the player from its factory setting, say to zone 1, which is the most useful.
Switching the regions works well, and some players let you do that from secret codes on the remote. But such players may also have a built-in counter so that you can only change regions 5-25 times before it stays locked.
The best are players which have been modded to be infinitely region switchable, and Macrovision disabled. The Pioneer 505, 909, and 606 (from before Pioneer changed their logo) were famous for only requiring two jumper wires be soldered to the MPEG board. Then the CONDITION button in the right menu would switch regions.
There's one more cool thing that can be done with this. There are now discs which check the GUI region and enable/disable features depending on the native region of the player. So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets them sell in multiple regions, but they only have to master the disc once, and only keep one item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to be one of these.
There is a similar situation with the Playstation. Most Playstation chips work by blasting the special subcodes over and over into the right input. However, many of the people who installed chips also happened to sell games, and were just as annoyed at piracy as Sony was. So someone came up with the "anti-piracy" chip. This chip watched for the first three bytes of the subcode (SCEA, SCEJ, SCEE), and blasted the last byte of the USA code whenever it saw them. A CD-R wouldn't have the subcodes, and the chip would know it.
Then someone came up with a trick to check for chips by only putting the subcodes where it was necessary to boot the game. It would check parts of the disc that did NOT have the subcodes, and get pissed if it found them. The best part was that anti-piracy chips had no trouble with this scheme, because they didn't send the subcodes when they weren't supposed to. (Sure, someone then came up with the "stealth" chip, which disables itself after running long enough to boot a disc, but that's not as l33t as the way anti-piracy chips work.)
Too bad there are only three of them or you could imagine a Beowu[CHOKE-GAGGGG]
NO CARRIER
Damn, I'm glad I only use digital answering machines at home! I hate analog tape formats because they have crappy quality, and the hardware is unreliable.
This sounds like more fun than what I like to find at thrift stores, which is old Mac hard disks and Syquest cartridges. One time I found a backup tape from a SCO Unix system, and a tape drive that could read it. Nothing really fun, though.
But isn't this kind of thing what gave Fidonet such growing pains? The original Fidonet address spec was two 16 bit integers, but then they had to add zones in front, and they wanted non-dialable client nodes, so points were tacked to the end. Some software never properly supported zones, much less points. (And some TCP/IP software still doesn't support variable length bit masks either.) At least with a full class C per site, they don't have to worry about the "point problem".
My developer subscription was up for renewal and they had a special offer for the beta seeded level being $400 instead of $500. So I paid $200 extra to upgrade my subscription... and I don't have a G3 or G4 Mac yet. Even if I did, I hear this thing wants 128meg minimum. Even the first G3 iMacs didn't have that.
But yes, I'm getting the beta and I don't even have a machine that can run it. Yet.
At least I have a computer! I heard people were so hyped by the W95 release that they bought it when they didn't even have a computer at all!
You mean like sticking it up your ass? here and here.