...and while we're on the subject, I have a Japanese (vodafone) Nokia 6630 phone that I'd really love to unlock. So far, one place I took it to said they couldn't and another shop I have yet to visit says that they can. Online searches so far say it can't be done...yet. Anyone have any info into this?
Dunno what search terms you used, but online searches for "unlock 6630" tell me it can be unlocked.
I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Ah, that's nothin' new. Go dredge the USENET archives for comp.lang.c and you'll find a steady supply of nimrods saying "I need to write a program to [insert Comp Sci project here]-- does anyone have a source listing for something that does this?" These posts are easily identified by the stream of replies to the effect of "go do your own homework, jackass!" There are always a few dopes at the bottom looking for an easy way out.
It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?
I suspect a large radiator like that might be enough on its own to cool via convection, even inside the case. Even if it does require a separate fan, I must say that's a welcome change. Since the day video cards started requiring active cooling, that cheap-ass little crap-fan has consistently been the noisiest and most failure-prone thing in every system I've owned. I have a year old GeForce FX 5600 in my current system that's on its THIRD fan.
There is an insightful analysis of traffic jams at this page which explains that jams are larely the result of people not letting other people merge into their lane coupled with the relatively-slow reaction time of humans.
The "merging traffic" analysis on that page is flawed. The "neatly merging zipper" fails to account for the fact that the newly merged cars must slow down in order to re-establish their previous following distance. Furthermore, those two animations are not actually accurate depictions of similar traffic densities with different driver behaviors. The slow one on the left represents what happens in very dense traffic. The fast one on the right represents very light traffic.
Inertial guidance is great, especially as a supplement to GPS, but it's not quite to the level where it can accurately guide a "flying" bomb the several miles they're capable of, let alone a cruise missile over several hundred miles. It will hit close, if GPS was jammed for the whole flight, again close than I'd like to be, but it could be off by a hundred yards--which is no good if you're gunning for SAM sites or tanks, or other hardned targets.
FWIW, cruise missiles and glide bombs (e.g. Tomahawk, JSOW) only use inertial/GPS nav to get near the target. Terminal homing is generally done via imaging infrared.
It's of no use that the GPS satellites know where the Capitol and Pentagon are. These satellites are just beacons and the only way you can adjust their accuracy is based on their own position. It's true you can alter precision over Afganistan but you can't select small areas. It all has to do with the satellite visibility from the ground. It takes hundreds of miles on the ground to lose visibility.
Appparently it is you who does not completely understand how the GPS system works. Turning off GPS availability for a specific area involves more than just "switching off" the satellite when it's "overhead". It's simple orbital mechanics. Their orbital period is about 11hrs 58mins, and they remain visible from any given terrestrial point for 6-7 hours. Therefore, unless you're shutting off GPS service for an area comprising approximately half the earth's surface centered on the spot you want to black out (and that is clearly not the case), obviously there is some degree of directional selectivity from individual satellites. They're not "just beacons" in the sense that any receiver with line of sight gets the same signal. They can and do use multiple antennas and interferometry tricks to affect availability. The only questions that then remain are how small an area can they black out, and can they perhaps choose to instead introduce a much worse version of the old Selective Availability random error factor to that area.
The jumping around sensitive areas is done by ground jamming; it has nothing to do with the GPS satellites. The jammers on the ground have only enough power to overcome the satellite signal in the area of interest. All what these jammers do is sync with an incoming GPS satellite transmision and insert advanced/delayed position pulses.
More than likely this is the case. I was merely wondering aloud whether this is necessarily the case.
Did you not know that there is was an option to turn of the "wait at end of turn" feature?
That check box should read "wait at end of every turn". Disabling it cuts down the number of times it pauses for input, but you still end up pounding that enter key an awful lot. It's not just the end of turn pause, either. It's also all those other input-required, but not relevant to that scenario events as well. If all your unit actions are set to automate, or you have no actions at all, it will automatically wait at the end of the turn, check box be damned. Trust me, there's no way to make it "freewheel" through forty-odd turns. If that box was checked I'd have been sitting there for THIRTY minutes pounding the enter key.
I have enjoyed the Civilization series since the beginning, but with the third incarnation it was pointed out to me that it's rather disappointing that the game continues to be played on a tube rather than a globe. If Civilization IV is also on a strip, could you explain what difficulties the development team is having in implementing what seems to be such an obvious and simple detail?
In that same vein, are we going to see another isometric grid layout like Civ3, which is essentially just the same old awkwardly unrealistic grid from Civ1? Great effort was obviously expended in Civ3 to conceal the fact that the world was made up of 90-degree angles, but in the end the world was still made of 90-degree angles. Will we be getting hex tiles, or is it back to the same ol' grid?
Civ3 was wonderfully customisable as long as you were sticking with a civ-type game, but even basic reaching beyond this ran into trouble, e.g. I found no way to get the map generator to have different weighting of tile types, or extend the number of varieties beyond the land/sea split. Have all these kind of limitations been removed? How possible is a total conversion? What about conversions to a different game type?
I imagine there will always be some aspects that won't be moddable, if for no other reason than you gotta anchor the game system somewhere.
For example, I have no great hopes of seeing my "alien invaders" scenario get much easier to implement. The premise is that you are a space-faring alien civ (with all techs) crash landed on an already developed planet. Basically, you're given one settler and a couple defense-only "mecha" units in some random spot on the map, but all the other civs have already had 40-80 turns to build up their empires. The only way I could do this in Civ3 was to force the "alien invader" player to build a large and difficult wonder only available to them (I called it "Spacecraft Salvage") before they could build any new units. This basically forced the player to sit there and press "next turn" 40-80 times in order to give the enemy civs a head start. It was a fun scenario because the strategies get really weird when it's one small hyper-advanced civ vs. a half dozen crazy beligerant iron age, renaissance, or industrial age civs; but it was always a pain to sit there and hit space for 10 minutes at the beginning of every game.
I don't think you understand how GPS works. Essentially every satellite broadcasts a highly accurate time signal. As these satellites are all at different distances from an observer, these signals arrive at the observer at slightly different times. The receiver has an internal table of positions of the satellites, and uses this table and the time-delays to triangulate its own position.
I know precisely how the system works. You're failing to understand the point I'm making.
So, as the grandparent said, the system doesn't 'know' where you are, and so it can't send you different information depending on where you are.
GPS satellites do not use omnidirectional antennas, simply broadcasting their signal. They have the capability of "turning off" the unencrypted civil frequencies for arbitrarily designated geographic areas, i.e. they could instruct the satellites to render all civilian GPS units useless in Afghanistan during an invasion. This is not speculation, this is part of the design of the GPS system. I said it before, and I repeat it here again:
Given that they can "black out" arbitrarily defined geographic areas, preventing civilian GPS units from functioning within those areas (this point is not debateable-- it's a fact of the GPS system design), it's not too great a leap to say that they might also be able to transmit badly error-mangled signals to arbitrarily defined geographic areas, even areas as small as the near vicinity of the US Capitol and the Pentagon. This doesn't require the GPS satellites to "know where you are", and I never said it did. It only requires the GPS satellites to know where the Capitol and Pentagon are.
Where the other kids saw a unit circle, I saw a schematic representation of a generator armature.
I'd love to see math taught with applications, wherever possible. That's what can keep it from putting kids to sleep.
Unfortunately, easily half the kids in an average high school math class don't give a rat's ass about applications either. They're taking trig so they'll have the requisite advanced math to be considered for "good schools". Their goal is to have a Communications degree from Stanford instead of Texas A&M.
True. But they know where the US Capitol and the Pentagon are.
And even if they did, they broadcast the same information
Not necessarily. It's already well known that they can selectively turn off the signal in arbitrary geographic areas. It's hardly a leap at all to selectively introduce errors around particular spots.
If this effect is really happening, it is more likely due to the receiver or else the mapping software.
Indeed, that's the most likely cause. I'm just saying that if it is being spoofed, it's more likely being done at the source rather than the more unreliable method of putting an antenna on the roof.
I would be very very very surprised if the Russians haven't been able to get their hands on a military GPS locator and picked it apart. Sure, the US can still turn it off but then it's lights out for everyone
There's no advantage to having a military GPS receiver. They're not all that different from civilian receivers. It was assumed when they designed the system that "the enemy" would procure an example of the device at some point. This is why the military channels are protected by encryption. The guidance package off a JDAM (for example) is worth diddly squat once its encryption keys expire, and in a war zone, I guarantee those keys expire very quickly.
How effective would that jamming really be.... since anyone smart enough to build a cruise missile that could use GPS for guidance would be equally intelligent enough to build a cruise missile to simply home in on the jamming single it's self.
THis sounds like a completely different situation than jamming. Jamming would just make the GPS unit lose signal lock. If the GPS is showing the location jumping all over the place, US government buildings are protected by some sort of actual false signal. The false signal isn't necessarily coming from the ground either, as the GPS system is controlled by the US government. It's very likely that the non-encrypted channels have heavy errors introduced around government buildings.
True, but there is little point in battle field jamming of GPS
Not so.. GPS is used to give coordinates for smart bombs. These GPS coordinates can be provided by ground based troops based on a suitably enhanced binoculars that will determine absolute position of an object in sight - thereby allowing troops on the ground to call in a smart bomb targetted to anything they can see.
Yep. But of course that's why they still teach map n' compass navigation. We were trained to call in artillery strikes in the pre-GPS days with easily sub-20m accuracy. A decent map and a laser rangefinder, I could call out sub-10m target positions, no problem.
Actually, because of the incredibly low power GPS transmits at...it is possible to design a GPS jammer that broadcasts BELOW the ambient noise floor that will still impact GPS receivers.
True, but when you jam GPS you usually have to overcome the unavoidable fact that your signal is coming from the ground. The GPS antenna on the guidance tailkit on these bombs is at the very rear, which places the entire body of the bomb between it and any jammer located near the target. This increases the power requirement significantly. Besides, the fact that the selective availability signal is encrypted means that the best they can hope to do is disrupt the signal, as spoofing in any meaningful way requires valid encryption keys. As soon as the guidance system finds itself being jammed it switches over to inertial guidance and, unless you got some sort of gravity generator, there's no jamming that.
Can they not use multiple stations to make it appear the signal is coming from a place where it is not?
No, all that would do is present multiple individual targets. Modern direction finding equipment uses such advanced digital processing that it can separately identify two transmitters right next to each other based on subtle differences between them caused by things like inherent manufacturing variations in the transmitters' modulation circuitry.
However, real methods exist for sending confusing signals that will effectively jam a GPS signal. This jamming can force so called "smart bombs" to rely on internal guidance instead of GPS. The result (hopefully) is that the less precise guidance would cause the bomb or missile to miss the target.
Problem with active GPS jamming is that it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Any sort of active jamming on the battle field is a huge beacon on the battlefield screaming BLOW ME UP! It then becomes a question of whether or not to turn on the jammer at all, as at most it'll be good for slightly de-accurizing (if that's not a word, it ought to be) one bombing run before being obliterated. If they were cheap enough, maybe, but even still...
Interesting. So would it be possible to manufacture these crystal sheets large enough for a Nano, or even large enough for say a PDA?
Synthetic sapphire starts of as a spherical shape that is then "sliced" into round discs. They're already expensive ($30-$70) at that size. Getting them large enough to cover a decent-sized LCD screen would likely cost more in raw materials than the rest of the ipod.
Sliders' should have been a widespread hit, but it was ahead of its time. The show was about a wiz-kid genius Quinn Mallory, played by Jerry O'Connell, and his band of three companions who slide among Earth's alternate realities.
WTF? The show was trash. More than half the time the "alternate earths" were so implausible as to shetter suspension of disbelief within the first 10 minutes. Sample plot synopsis: "a parallel earth where all is the same as now...only there's no medicines". That's right, identical except for lack of antibiotics and such. I wanted to suggest reading Connections by James Burke to the genius who wrote that episode (plus smack him in the head). Good science fiction it wasn't.
No, the problem centers on the government having enough firepower to wipe out all life on Earth. Compared with muzzle-loaders where, if you survive the first volley, a large enough crowd can easily overcome the agents of the oppresive regime (ie, the military unit doing the firing).
Nukes and chemical weapons aside, in the modern world, half a dozen soldiers with M-16s and an adequate supply of ammo could effectively fight off the entire population of a major city by themselves.
You know, if the circumstances were serious enough (i.e. general population in unrest, not just the "dark folk"), I suspect they wouldn't be able to count on the loyalty of the military. Half a dozen soldiers are unlikely to open fire on a crowd of their neighbors...
The B52 dropping tons of bombs in WW II didn't hit a lot of targets
If only..... I think you mean the B-17 in WW2 (17,600lb bomb load), or maybe the B-52 in Vietnam (60,000lb bomb load); but the B52 was pretty accurate.
It's only a matter of days before a hack will surface on how to bypass any anti-recording-flag. The underground TiVo community is huge and need not worry die hard TiVo fans. Will it prevent casual TV recording? Maybe. Will it hurt the TiVo company? Probably. Can we still record what ever we want? Sure!
Hah! Sounds exactly, almost word for word, like what was said about the P4/P5 access card for DirecTV when the P3 card encryption stream was turned off. There used to be a huge, vibrant DTV hacking community. Now there ain't squat. Nothing is 100% secure, but given enough time they can make it so difficult that it'll no longer be worth the bother. In the case of DTV, most of the die-hard hackers dumped Dave (DirecTV) and picked up with Charlie (Dish Network). Though now with all the streams on Dish going to Nagra2, I wonder how many people will just give up...
Is it possible to get MythTV running on TiVo hardware?
Nope. TiVo hardware is a closed, special-purpose device. It happens to use Linux as its OS, but beyond that it bears little resemblance to any commercial off the shelf system.
I wouldn't say Therapy (big t) as much as venting.
I dunno, professional talk therapy is little more than directed venting. It helps in the short term to realize that [parents/bosses/friends/war] screwed you up, but eventually you gotta quit obsessing on your history and basically get over yourself. Of all the talk therapy practitioners I went through, none seemed to want to do anything but hear me tell unpleasant stories. Never any solutions, just constant consciousness of the problem. Blech.
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Dunno what search terms you used, but online searches for "unlock 6630" tell me it can be unlocked.
Ah, that's nothin' new. Go dredge the USENET archives for comp.lang.c and you'll find a steady supply of nimrods saying "I need to write a program to [insert Comp Sci project here]-- does anyone have a source listing for something that does this?" These posts are easily identified by the stream of replies to the effect of "go do your own homework, jackass!" There are always a few dopes at the bottom looking for an easy way out.
I suspect a large radiator like that might be enough on its own to cool via convection, even inside the case. Even if it does require a separate fan, I must say that's a welcome change. Since the day video cards started requiring active cooling, that cheap-ass little crap-fan has consistently been the noisiest and most failure-prone thing in every system I've owned. I have a year old GeForce FX 5600 in my current system that's on its THIRD fan.
The "merging traffic" analysis on that page is flawed. The "neatly merging zipper" fails to account for the fact that the newly merged cars must slow down in order to re-establish their previous following distance. Furthermore, those two animations are not actually accurate depictions of similar traffic densities with different driver behaviors. The slow one on the left represents what happens in very dense traffic. The fast one on the right represents very light traffic.
FWIW, cruise missiles and glide bombs (e.g. Tomahawk, JSOW) only use inertial/GPS nav to get near the target. Terminal homing is generally done via imaging infrared.
Appparently it is you who does not completely understand how the GPS system works. Turning off GPS availability for a specific area involves more than just "switching off" the satellite when it's "overhead". It's simple orbital mechanics. Their orbital period is about 11hrs 58mins, and they remain visible from any given terrestrial point for 6-7 hours. Therefore, unless you're shutting off GPS service for an area comprising approximately half the earth's surface centered on the spot you want to black out (and that is clearly not the case), obviously there is some degree of directional selectivity from individual satellites. They're not "just beacons" in the sense that any receiver with line of sight gets the same signal. They can and do use multiple antennas and interferometry tricks to affect availability. The only questions that then remain are how small an area can they black out, and can they perhaps choose to instead introduce a much worse version of the old Selective Availability random error factor to that area.
The jumping around sensitive areas is done by ground jamming; it has nothing to do with the GPS satellites. The jammers on the ground have only enough power to overcome the satellite signal in the area of interest. All what these jammers do is sync with an incoming GPS satellite transmision and insert advanced/delayed position pulses.
More than likely this is the case. I was merely wondering aloud whether this is necessarily the case.
That check box should read "wait at end of every turn". Disabling it cuts down the number of times it pauses for input, but you still end up pounding that enter key an awful lot. It's not just the end of turn pause, either. It's also all those other input-required, but not relevant to that scenario events as well. If all your unit actions are set to automate, or you have no actions at all, it will automatically wait at the end of the turn, check box be damned. Trust me, there's no way to make it "freewheel" through forty-odd turns. If that box was checked I'd have been sitting there for THIRTY minutes pounding the enter key.
In that same vein, are we going to see another isometric grid layout like Civ3, which is essentially just the same old awkwardly unrealistic grid from Civ1? Great effort was obviously expended in Civ3 to conceal the fact that the world was made up of 90-degree angles, but in the end the world was still made of 90-degree angles. Will we be getting hex tiles, or is it back to the same ol' grid?
I imagine there will always be some aspects that won't be moddable, if for no other reason than you gotta anchor the game system somewhere.
For example, I have no great hopes of seeing my "alien invaders" scenario get much easier to implement. The premise is that you are a space-faring alien civ (with all techs) crash landed on an already developed planet. Basically, you're given one settler and a couple defense-only "mecha" units in some random spot on the map, but all the other civs have already had 40-80 turns to build up their empires. The only way I could do this in Civ3 was to force the "alien invader" player to build a large and difficult wonder only available to them (I called it "Spacecraft Salvage") before they could build any new units. This basically forced the player to sit there and press "next turn" 40-80 times in order to give the enemy civs a head start. It was a fun scenario because the strategies get really weird when it's one small hyper-advanced civ vs. a half dozen crazy beligerant iron age, renaissance, or industrial age civs; but it was always a pain to sit there and hit space for 10 minutes at the beginning of every game.
I know precisely how the system works. You're failing to understand the point I'm making. So, as the grandparent said, the system doesn't 'know' where you are, and so it can't send you different information depending on where you are.
GPS satellites do not use omnidirectional antennas, simply broadcasting their signal. They have the capability of "turning off" the unencrypted civil frequencies for arbitrarily designated geographic areas, i.e. they could instruct the satellites to render all civilian GPS units useless in Afghanistan during an invasion. This is not speculation, this is part of the design of the GPS system. I said it before, and I repeat it here again:
Given that they can "black out" arbitrarily defined geographic areas, preventing civilian GPS units from functioning within those areas (this point is not debateable-- it's a fact of the GPS system design), it's not too great a leap to say that they might also be able to transmit badly error-mangled signals to arbitrarily defined geographic areas, even areas as small as the near vicinity of the US Capitol and the Pentagon. This doesn't require the GPS satellites to "know where you are", and I never said it did. It only requires the GPS satellites to know where the Capitol and Pentagon are.
Unfortunately, easily half the kids in an average high school math class don't give a rat's ass about applications either. They're taking trig so they'll have the requisite advanced math to be considered for "good schools". Their goal is to have a Communications degree from Stanford instead of Texas A&M.
True. But they know where the US Capitol and the Pentagon are.
And even if they did, they broadcast the same information
Not necessarily. It's already well known that they can selectively turn off the signal in arbitrary geographic areas. It's hardly a leap at all to selectively introduce errors around particular spots.
If this effect is really happening, it is more likely due to the receiver or else the mapping software.
Indeed, that's the most likely cause. I'm just saying that if it is being spoofed, it's more likely being done at the source rather than the more unreliable method of putting an antenna on the roof.
There's no advantage to having a military GPS receiver. They're not all that different from civilian receivers. It was assumed when they designed the system that "the enemy" would procure an example of the device at some point. This is why the military channels are protected by encryption. The guidance package off a JDAM (for example) is worth diddly squat once its encryption keys expire, and in a war zone, I guarantee those keys expire very quickly.
THis sounds like a completely different situation than jamming. Jamming would just make the GPS unit lose signal lock. If the GPS is showing the location jumping all over the place, US government buildings are protected by some sort of actual false signal. The false signal isn't necessarily coming from the ground either, as the GPS system is controlled by the US government. It's very likely that the non-encrypted channels have heavy errors introduced around government buildings.
Not so.. GPS is used to give coordinates for smart bombs. These GPS coordinates can be provided by ground based troops based on a suitably enhanced binoculars that will determine absolute position of an object in sight - thereby allowing troops on the ground to call in a smart bomb targetted to anything they can see.
Yep. But of course that's why they still teach map n' compass navigation. We were trained to call in artillery strikes in the pre-GPS days with easily sub-20m accuracy. A decent map and a laser rangefinder, I could call out sub-10m target positions, no problem.
True, but when you jam GPS you usually have to overcome the unavoidable fact that your signal is coming from the ground. The GPS antenna on the guidance tailkit on these bombs is at the very rear, which places the entire body of the bomb between it and any jammer located near the target. This increases the power requirement significantly. Besides, the fact that the selective availability signal is encrypted means that the best they can hope to do is disrupt the signal, as spoofing in any meaningful way requires valid encryption keys. As soon as the guidance system finds itself being jammed it switches over to inertial guidance and, unless you got some sort of gravity generator, there's no jamming that.
No, all that would do is present multiple individual targets. Modern direction finding equipment uses such advanced digital processing that it can separately identify two transmitters right next to each other based on subtle differences between them caused by things like inherent manufacturing variations in the transmitters' modulation circuitry.
Problem with active GPS jamming is that it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Any sort of active jamming on the battle field is a huge beacon on the battlefield screaming BLOW ME UP! It then becomes a question of whether or not to turn on the jammer at all, as at most it'll be good for slightly de-accurizing (if that's not a word, it ought to be) one bombing run before being obliterated. If they were cheap enough, maybe, but even still...
Synthetic sapphire starts of as a spherical shape that is then "sliced" into round discs. They're already expensive ($30-$70) at that size. Getting them large enough to cover a decent-sized LCD screen would likely cost more in raw materials than the rest of the ipod.
WTF? The show was trash. More than half the time the "alternate earths" were so implausible as to shetter suspension of disbelief within the first 10 minutes. Sample plot synopsis: "a parallel earth where all is the same as now...only there's no medicines". That's right, identical except for lack of antibiotics and such. I wanted to suggest reading Connections by James Burke to the genius who wrote that episode (plus smack him in the head). Good science fiction it wasn't.
You know, if the circumstances were serious enough (i.e. general population in unrest, not just the "dark folk"), I suspect they wouldn't be able to count on the loyalty of the military. Half a dozen soldiers are unlikely to open fire on a crowd of their neighbors...
If only..... I think you mean the B-17 in WW2 (17,600lb bomb load), or maybe the B-52 in Vietnam (60,000lb bomb load); but the B52 was pretty accurate.
Hah! Sounds exactly, almost word for word, like what was said about the P4/P5 access card for DirecTV when the P3 card encryption stream was turned off. There used to be a huge, vibrant DTV hacking community. Now there ain't squat. Nothing is 100% secure, but given enough time they can make it so difficult that it'll no longer be worth the bother. In the case of DTV, most of the die-hard hackers dumped Dave (DirecTV) and picked up with Charlie (Dish Network). Though now with all the streams on Dish going to Nagra2, I wonder how many people will just give up...
Nope. TiVo hardware is a closed, special-purpose device. It happens to use Linux as its OS, but beyond that it bears little resemblance to any commercial off the shelf system.
I dunno, professional talk therapy is little more than directed venting. It helps in the short term to realize that [parents/bosses/friends/war] screwed you up, but eventually you gotta quit obsessing on your history and basically get over yourself. Of all the talk therapy practitioners I went through, none seemed to want to do anything but hear me tell unpleasant stories. Never any solutions, just constant consciousness of the problem. Blech.