Unfortunately, there's alot of stuff in your BIOS that isn't executable code. If your system has a PCI or Cardbus slot, you've got a "PCI Routing Table" which tells the OS how each slot has its interrupts mapped, and the such.
If you're using a SMP system, there's a "MP Table" which tells the OS how to configure the APICs, interrupt triggering, etc.
There also is a little bit of code that many OS's use for power management (suspend, hybernate, sleep, etc), that's a pain in the ass to access from protected mode.
Also, almost everything on the motherboard is configured during the POST and bootup. All sorts of timing values, drive strengths, etc. The OS generally won't touch any of this. New BIOS's sometimes change these default values to what the manufacturer has discovered to be better settings.
If you're having PROBLEMS with something, by all means upgrade, even if you don't think your OS is actually calling any code in the BIOS. But if it works, I generally recommend people to avoid playing with it. I've removed ROMs from a few friends' motherboards, just to correct damage they did from flashing the wrong BIOS on them. (Surface mount soldering tools and a eeprom/flash programmer are very handy at times)
After all, when was the last time You, as a sysadmin, responded to an informative message to postmaster@your.org that was written in an Asian language??
Wow, it's so rare that slashdot speaks to me this personally, since I'm the owner of your.org. (Really! Go do a whois on it).
I have to say I'd probably throw away any e-mail in an Asian language, since up to this point, every Asian language e-mail I've received appears to be spam.
There, wasn't that esay! That's what I'd do, case closed, problem solved.
P.S. When you guys fill out forms asking for an e-mail address, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not use domains like that. Someone owns them. Use "domain.com" or "example.com" instead, which will never resolve to anything. "your.org" gets more spam than you could possibly imagine.
The tiny bit of ram that the BIOS uses to store all your settings between boots is made of CMOS. The BIOS itself is stored in regular PROMs or in more recent years flash rom.
Re:TiVo software is inflexible
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Huh? What version of the software do you have?
1) You can select to record programs by searching by name, but it only searched within a limited horizon of programming (the week or so for which it has the guide). If not found, it can be recorded. For example, you couldn't ask it to record "Mission to Mars" whenever it comes on next.
Sure you can. "Pick programs to record", "Search using wishlists", "Create a new wishlist", "Title Wishlist". You can even use wildcards. Record all movies that match "*mars*" and it will do it.
2) You can't ask it to record programs matching criteria like a particular actor, or keyword in title etc.
From the main menu, pick "Pick programs to Record" then "Search using Wishlists". You can choose programs by Actor, Director, Category, Keyword or Title.
3) Once a program has been selected for recording, you can't change the record quality without cancelling it, finding it again via search, channel guide or whatever, and re-selecting to record it.
"Pick Programs to Record", "To do list". Choose your program, then "Cancel/Edit the Season Pass", "Change recording options". In there you get the settings "Record Quality", "Keep at most", "Show Type", "Keep until", etc...
4) It takes 2-4 hours to process and index the program guide after making a call to TiVo! (what on earth is it doing?)
You fail to mention that it only does this ONCE, when you first buy it. It's not like you'll ever see it again. (and it's generating indexes for all those ways you can search for programs - much much better than downloading extra data over analog modem lines)
6) If you have a partial recording of something that you are also currently recording, it doesn't distinguish between the two - so you can delete the partial until the current recording it complete
I couldn't parse this sentence at all... Could you rephrase?
If you have a Comcast General Instrument cable box, the supplied infrared blasters for channel changing are not strong enough and you'll have to but better ones (for ~$30).
Hrm, I couldn't find any mention of this on the tivo forums... I've got the GI DCT box myself, and haven't had a problem.
You sure you don't work for ReplayTV or something?:)
1) The sound quality isn't quite what I thought it would be. While I don't know the actual bitrates used, the music channels sound about like a 64k MP3, and the talk/news channels sound about like a 24k MP3. I think I'd rather slightly fewer channels if it meant better quality.
2) Since they transmit every bit multiple times, (either 3 or 4 copies of the stream is sent at once on a time delay, I can't remember which), dropouts are EXTREMELY rare. They have both spatial (two satellites you can receive at once), frequency (broadcasting on multiple frequencies), and time (broadcasting the same content multiple times) diversity. Nice.
3) Yes, you're paying $9.95/month for *SOME* channels that have commercials. Most channels don't have commercials. Even then, the stations that DO have commercials air far far less than the FM stations I've listened to.
4) You get some neat features like being able to display artist/song for each channel.
5) Wow, some of the channels air things you'd never hear on the radio. The main comedy channel has more swear words per minute than you could imagine. None of the songs have the "bad words" beeped out. If you have kids, and are concerned, you can have them block any channels you don't want them to listen to. (Each channel is pretty clearly marked on the guide if it has strong language or not)
6) Some of the channels do sound kinda amateur-hour. Kinda like college radio. I'm sure as time progresses they'll get more refined, but... Wow, some of the DJ's and commercials for themselves are cheesy. Really bad.
7) They do have some really cool channels. CNN Headline News (the audio from the TV channel - usually works well except for "Nothing can describe the images you're seeing now..." bits), The Discovery Channel Radio, etc... Keeps me entertained.
8) If you're a channel flipper, the delay between changing channels is kinda long... 1/2 to 1 second.
9) Overall worth it for me. The total of 1 to 1.5 hours a day I spend in the car is at least enjoyable now. I've only had it for 3-4 weeks, but it's kept my attention that long.
SDRAM is also slightly persistant. Just rebooting doesn't necessarily clear your ram. In an embedded system I'm working on now, using industry standard PC133 dimms, I can power off, wait 2 mins, power on, and the data is *mostly* still there. (a few bit errors here and there, etc)
One kinda cool (mis?)use of this feature is with FreeBSD's 'dmesg'. 'dmesg" shows the boot up log of the system. (kernel messages, etc). If you reboot, and the pointers still look valid, dmesg will show you the log messages as far back as the buffer will allow, sometimes spanning 2-3 boots.
Most OS's have a "zero on allocate" method, where before they hand out any RAM to any process where it matters, they zero it. This is also an important security feature - suppose on a multi-user system, I open my e-mail program and send off a nice private e-mail and close it. Do I want you to be able to malloc() 256MB, and look through it to find my e-mail still sitting around? No. Before the OS hands out ram to a process, it usually zero's it. (note, malloc followed by free followed by malloc isn't usually zero'ed, it's assumed that within the same process, you'll wipe things out yourself if you really want it secure.)
In any case, this isn't an issue at all. When you boot up ANY pc right now, it's not all zero'ed out, and OS's don't expect it to be. Rebooting things to cure problems is fixing things you put in RAM that got corrupted, as well as logical errors (the system is confused by something, etc).
I know this is kinda unrelated, but.. Does anyone know why Comedy Central is showing the SAME episodes of the same shows over and over again? Since last Tuesday I've seen the episode of SNL with Ben Stiller more times than I can count. My tivo seems to think they all should be different episodes, but that's not what they're actually airing. They've thrown in a few of the really old episodes from the first season too, but it's been a lot of Ben Stiller... It's not just SNL, but the most obvious one I've seen.
I think people here who are saying "Big deal, it's how the industry works.. Old CPU's stop getting made" are missing the point.
The "embedded" world is a bunch of companies producing devices that are usually small, lower powered, small production runs, and generally get made for alot longer than most electronics you're used to.
The last company I worked for (Midway Games) made arcade(coin-operated) video games. For a brief time, I worked with the group called "Wavenet". Wavenet was an idea to link arcade games up in arcades all through the world, to allow real-time tournaments. The first game that was tried was Mortal Kombat 3. MK3 used a really weird processor called a 34010 from Texas Instruments. (Weird in that it had *BIT* addressable memory, funky graphics opcodes built in that we never used, etc) However, the game designers pretty much pushed the CPU to its max before we had a chance to make it a networked game. There wasn't enough RAM, CPU, or ROM (for networking code) left to do it, as well as this board didn't have an ethernet output on it to connect it up to the router.
Midway ended up designing a tiiiiny little board (running a small embedded OS that just translated game commands into TCP/IP and vice versa) that plugged into an expansion connector on the MK3 board. It had an Ethernet controller, some ram, more ROMs for the networking code and a 386SX CPU made by AMD on it. Why not use a Pentium, or Pentium Pro? (which was the newest CPU out at the time)
Cost. Right now, you can get 386SX CPU's for a couple of dollars.
Power. Compare the latest generation of 386 CPUs to even a slow PII. HUUUGE difference here.
Board space. The embedded 386's are a little bigger than an american nickle. Pentium class CPU's... well... are big.
Longevity. When we bought these, we got committments from our suppliers that the CPU would be around for at least X months/years. This is REALLLLY important to us. If we're going to spend a ton of cash designing a board based around a CPU, we don't want it to disappear next month when something better comes along.
Had the embedded world not existed, and we had to use a faster/newer CPU, the board cost would have doubled, it would have been a bigger board(again more $$), We likely would have needed to put a bigger power supply(or played tricks with regulators), and then had to redsign the board every time the trendy chip got unpopular. All for horsepower we didn't even need!
Take a look here. Intel is still supporting and selling 80186 CPU's, for embedded controller uses.
Many many companies depend on slower CPU's for things. I don't know if it's still true, but at one point nearly every computer-controlled traffic light system sold used an 80186 CPU. Intel(?) came up with a "hardened" version of it that tolerated extreme cold and extreme heat. Companies that produce products like that are even happy paying double price for an old CPU that can do that, than installing air conditioners and heaters in every traffic light box.
The embedded CPU industry is a place where normal PC economics do not apply. It's not unheard of to pay extra for a part just because you know it'll be around for 10 years, instead of a cheaper(sometimes better) part that will go away as soon as it's not trendy.
While I don't know the specifics of this deal, it sounds like AMD is breaking their previously announced EOL(End Of Life) dates. This is quite likely going to piss a lot of people off who built their product around one of these CPUs.
I no longer work there, but while I was at Midway Games, I briefly worked on a project(called WaveNet) like this.
We took the arcade game Mortal Kombat 3, added a tiny board to an expansion connector with a 386 with a TCP/IP stack and ethernet port to it, and connected it to a Bay router hooked to a 56k leased line... We had a small NOC at Midway where all the 56k lines terminated, and some servers that acted as the hosts for the games.
At its peak, we had about 15 games in the Chicago area hooked up. It worked pretty well, we had to make a few modifications to the game... Mortal Kombat is a very very very twitch-reaction speed game. The delays introduced from networking it were, while unavoidable, kinda high. But, most people couldn't tell the difference after we were done.
(My only involvment with this was gameplay related changes to MK3 after the project was nearly completed)
After Mortal Kombat 3, the same thing was done with San Francisco Rush in a bunch of arcades in the California area. Same idea, but with a driving game, delays aren't nearly as noticable.
(I had no involvement in this project)
Now the project is called MTN. (Midway Tournament Network). They're taking several Midway games and networking them across the world... (You may be able to find details about it on Midway's website)
I'm not trying to downplay what these guys are doing, but i don't think many people here recognize that this is already in place, to some extent.
I see a lot of posters here saying that "If they double their capacity every x months, that's only 8MB in 4 years" or something...
When working on a new technology, having a 256kbit chip is just as useful as a 256mbit chip, when all you're doing is proving the technology out. They have no reason to be trying to produce massive dies yet, because all that will do is reduce their yields... and when they're making one-off runs of these to test them, that's a killer.
I'm certain that by the time they go into production, the capacity will be impressive.
I've got one of the Intel 80200 evaluation boards on my desk at work. They're reallllly nice CPU's..
They run existing ARM code. Intel has a "porting guide" that's only a few pages long, mentioning hardly used features of the original chips. The only big difference is that the don't support thumb mode anymore, which isn't a huge loss.
They change their clock speed depending on the input voltage. Yes, you heard me right. Wanna slow the system down? Don't bother with changing clock generators and the such, just bring Vcc lower. It's very cool. Even at full speed, it only draws a few watts. And of course, no heatsink needed.
It's faaaaaaaaaaast. As long as you don't need floating point, it's actually a very competitive chip. You can check intel's site for actual benchmarks, but I was very surprised.
It's small. It's in a BGA package less than an inch square. The PCI-PCI bridge they used on the sample board is several times larger than the CPU itself, I had to look several times to find it.
It's cheap. I don't think my NDA with Intel allows me to discuss the pricing we have, but.... They're cheap enough to put in a PDA for sure.
I hope this chip really takes off, because there are so many cool things I'd love to do with it.:)
According to pcdata.com, and a few other "web demographic" sites, www.stileproject.com is in the top 2000 visited sites on the net. Granted, due to the adult content of the site, it's largely viewed by home users. But, a site this does get a nice breakdown of the net as a whole. Here are the stats we see:
85.6% Internet Explorer
12.0% Netscape
01.2% "Netscape Compatible" browsers
00.2% Opera
00.07% WebTV
In my experience, largely "geeky" websites see huge amounts of netscape users. Our breakdown by OS:
93.35% Windows
03.22% Macintosh
01.80% Unknown (browser doesn't report OS)
01.38% Unix variants
00.07% WebTV
00.01% BeOS
00.004% OS/2
00.003% RISC OS
00.002% Amiga
00.0002% OpenVMS
Since it may be of interest to people here, here's the Unix breakdown:
I moderated/ran the Bruce Perens IRC Chat that was mentioned a few months back here. Idiots decided to ping flood his DSL line out of existance during the chat, and I had to call him on the phone and type his answers for him.
I've been involved with IRC in one way or another for about 7 years now. It's reasons like this that I do NOT run an IRC server anymore.
Around 5 years ago, I ran toast.ne.us.dal.net, part of the DALnet IRC network (obviously). The bandwidth for it was generously donated by a local ISP, in exchange for borrowing some of my expertise from time to time. We only had a frame relay T1, but easily held more than 1000 users at a time.(Which was a record, for a short period) With popularity, attacks started coming.
The first thing that hit was SYN floods. Linux added the TCP cookies feature, which helped a bit. Then raw ICMP echo request floods, which caused us to get icmp blocked at our uplink, which hurt our customers, but was deemed worth while. Then when ICMP didn't work, people flooded the crap out of us with UDP. Then the Smurf attacks started. It came to a point that more often than not, during the evening, I was spending my time on the phone with our increasingly annoyed uplink getting things filtered and blocked.
In 1996, I moved to Illinois, and took the server with me. I started my own ISP on two T1's, and pretty immediately decided to pull the DALnet server, when the period of time that we're getting flooded exceeded the time we weren't. I then moved my IRC server to a much smaller network called NewNet. While the floods were much worse, it still was a perpetual annoyance that some brat in Israel decided he didn't like us, and would reguarly flood us from hacked.jp servers, who we could never get the admins to fix. I'd also get people attacking my router directly, affecting thousands of customers, all over a silly IRC matter...
Then one day, the "script kiddies" discovered Wingate. Wingate is a highly useful Windows proxy system, that was unfortunately shipped for quite a long time in a highly insecure state. They had a telnet and SOCKS4 proxy sitting wide open, with no passwords necessary. One script out there would go scanning through cable modem and DSL netblocks, gather a list of a few thousand insecure wingates, and connecting them ALL to our network, using them to flood the crap out of us. No longer could we even ban naughty users, because they had thousands of hosts they could choose from.
One VERY frustrating day, I ended up writing a little tool to scan EVERY user who connected to our network, to see if they were actually connecting from an insecure proxy server. Worked wonders, but we had thousands of nasty e-mails from people asking why we were trying to hack them (by connecting to port 1080 then immediately disconnecting?). Much education was required, and many notices of "You're about to be scanned, disconnect if you don't want this to happen" were necessary to prevent some idiots with a firewall they didn't understand from flooding abuse@dragondata.com with nonsensical complaints about hack attempts.
Today, floods are much more sophisticated than the ones we saw 5 years ago. Current floods are completely legitimate TCP/IP packets, that look real. Not floods of SYN's, but real looking data, that you can't just slap a simple filter in to get rid of. Now, unless you're using a stateful firewall that can detect this sort of thing, you're pretty much screwed. (FreeBSD's ipfw system is now stateful, and works quite well for this sort of thing.)
Really, here are the major problems.
1) Network administrators don't secure their networks. They may secure their machines, but they let their routers blindly pass off spoofed packets, when it would be pretty easy in 99% of the cases to block packets with source addresses coming from a port that they don't belong in.
2) Any complaint to any abuse@ address that involves IRC seems to go into/dev/null. A wonderful discussion has gone on on the NANOG(North American Network Operators Group) mailing list, the past few weeks about this very problem. "IRC is stupid, don't make yourself a target" is something heard all too often. If people would just secure things now, when someone's attacking a web server, or something else of yours, you won't have that problem either. What if someone decided to DoS one of the major political party's web pages today, with the same types of floods? It's the same problem, but somehow this is worth investigating, but not if it's IRC? Yes, IRC isn't as philosophically important, but it's a very popular service, none the less...
3) It's nearly impossible to prosecute the people who do this. I've talked at great lengths with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. While they sympathize, unless they have a huge dollar amount in damages they can show, there's little they can do.
4) The same companies and universities get hacked over and over again. I'd like to see someone sue one of them for negligance one of these times.
5) Stupid battles like this are really putting a drain on the IRC community. IRCD server software has pretty much gone untouched over the last few years, because any technically competant coders are busy coming up with proxy detectors and fighting floods, than writing code. There are things with IRC that could be done that would blow people away. But, I'm burned out. 7 years of fighting with people who need psychological help, because they do things like take down a huge network, instead of dealing with their issues in a constructive ways....
6) People take IRC too seriously. It's just for fun, people.
I posted the geek porn story on the Stile Project a few days ago. (Lots of sex and gross stuff, don't click those links if you are offended by such things)
The link to their site, while being somewhat obvious, is www.geekporn.com. Neither the quickies above, or the story it links to, actually lists the URL anywhere. I had a few readers mail it to me.
According to a few of posts on NANOG (North American Network Operators Group - see www.merit.edu for info), NASA's Ames facility was attacked on Friday, knocking it down for most of the day. NASA hosts E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, which having it down is a "bad thing".
(Disclosure: I'm a former video game developer for one of the companies mentioned below)
Classic video games are still profitable. While we may look back at some of the old games and say they're worthless now, they're still being sold in many cases.
Also, making the games GPL'ed is really silly. Lots of old games get remakes, why would manufacturers want the market filled with 500 versions of a past title when they want to make a new one?
While this is surely going to be considered flamebait by many... The same copyright law that allows the creators of video games to set their own terms of distribution is the SAME LAW that allows GPL developers to set which restrictions there are on distributing GPL'ed code.
So many people say that copyright laws need to be thrown out or changed... Want copyright laws reduced to 5 years? That means a 5 year old Linux kernel would be free for anyone to do as they wish with, without GPL'ed restrictions. All the old GNU binutils would have no protection at all. While I agree that insanely long copyrights don't do a lot of good for society, people are trading ROMS for some rather recent games.
MAME now supports Rampage World Tour, a Midway game released in 1999. A quick check of a few big ROM sites turn up the ROMs for this game. This game is STILL ON THE SHELVES for consoles, and the ROMs are being traded. Any half-way excuse of "preservation of classics" is out the window at this point.
I like classic games more than most. I've got an extensive library of old game boards in my basement. I also like having the games on my PC, but I buy the classics CD's when they come out.
Remember, just because something isn't for sale anymore doesn't mean it's free, or even should be.
I'm guessing that any "terrain following radar" processor would either be a standard microprocessor (i386, arm, 68k, etc), meaning there's no reason to use this over a standard proc. OR it's an ASIC, meaning it's impossible to make it do anything but process terrain.
The picture of the six processor board is obviously faked. The processor closest to the camera is overlapping a crystal. The skew of the chips repeated isn't perspective corrected properly, either. Also, staggering the upper chips from the lower chips has to make routing impossible on the board.
There are obviously no jumpers or sockets on either board, when the faq mentions them.
If I were going to do something this silly, I'd use a ColdFire or StrongArm processor. In any case, I don't think there are ANY high performance microprocessors that have imbedded ram/flash/etc. The fastest thing out there like that would seem to be a 68HC11 which maxes out at around 4Mhz. The ColdFire *does* have 4k of SRAM internal to it, but definately not 2MB+ of flash, internal ram, cache, etc. Jamming that much stuff on one die is expensive, and you end up with low yields.
The cost to layout the board and get 1000 or so boards in would be very very prohibitive for a product like this.
There is a LOT of Free Software out there that is not GNU or GPL'ed or anything similar. In fact, I've shipped a fully functional embedded product without a byte of GNU or GPL'ed code, so it's not impossible to find lots of non GNU stuff out there.
I really don't think we need to pollute the TLD namespace any futher by adding a TLD for one group's software movement. If anything, make it a more generic name like.soft or something. I really think.org fits nicely for this sort of thing. Almost every GNU project is a "non profit organization", so why not use.org?
If Microsoft wanted.msft, everyone would be screaming. Why is this collection of software any different in the terms of DNS?
I know the issue of having 3.5 come out AFTER 4.0 is confusing, so let me try to explain why.
There are many thousands of users who are using 3.4, which are quite happy doing so.
When 4.0 came out, it was using lots of (relatively) untested code, so the general advice was "unless you have a good reason to use 4.0, stick with 3.x until 4.1 comes out". To be perfectly blunt, in the past anything ending in.0 tended to be a bit rough around the edges.
4.0 came out, and actually has been very stable and bugs have been scarce. However, they still have the comittment to the 3.x users to incorporate some of the recent changes, so here came 3.5.
5.0 is the "bleeding-edge/scary" code that hasn't been released yet, and is where developers to go make huge changes. Right now they're making gigantic changes to the SMP structure to make interrupts more thread-like, and the such.
While I give the FreeBSD team kudos for supporting users who aren't tracking the latest and greatest, I've had no problems with 4.0 at all, and am recommending it to anyone who is getting a fresh start.
If you're a 3.x user who just wants to update, go with a 3.5 upgrade.
If you're a new users, grab 4.0. (4.1 isn't too far away, too).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there's alot of stuff in your BIOS that isn't executable code. If your system has a PCI or Cardbus slot, you've got a "PCI Routing Table" which tells the OS how each slot has its interrupts mapped, and the such.
If you're using a SMP system, there's a "MP Table" which tells the OS how to configure the APICs, interrupt triggering, etc.
There also is a little bit of code that many OS's use for power management (suspend, hybernate, sleep, etc), that's a pain in the ass to access from protected mode.
Also, almost everything on the motherboard is configured during the POST and bootup. All sorts of timing values, drive strengths, etc. The OS generally won't touch any of this. New BIOS's sometimes change these default values to what the manufacturer has discovered to be better settings.
If you're having PROBLEMS with something, by all means upgrade, even if you don't think your OS is actually calling any code in the BIOS. But if it works, I generally recommend people to avoid playing with it. I've removed ROMs from a few friends' motherboards, just to correct damage they did from flashing the wrong BIOS on them. (Surface mount soldering tools and a eeprom/flash programmer are very handy at times)
After all, when was the last time You, as a sysadmin, responded to an informative message to postmaster@your.org that was written in an Asian language??
Wow, it's so rare that slashdot speaks to me this personally, since I'm the owner of your.org. (Really! Go do a whois on it).
I have to say I'd probably throw away any e-mail in an Asian language, since up to this point, every Asian language e-mail I've received appears to be spam.
There, wasn't that esay! That's what I'd do, case closed, problem solved.
P.S. When you guys fill out forms asking for an e-mail address, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not use domains like that. Someone owns them. Use "domain.com" or "example.com" instead, which will never resolve to anything. "your.org" gets more spam than you could possibly imagine.
Not to be an ass, but.. Your currency conversion is a bit off.
:)
The CAD->USD is near it's 24 month low, and 999CAD is 1250USD. 780CAD -> 487USD
However, I'd be happy to exchange as much CAD as you want for USD, at your 2:1 ratio.
.... that you could only write once, sure. :)
Actually, no.
The tiny bit of ram that the BIOS uses to store all your settings between boots is made of CMOS. The BIOS itself is stored in regular PROMs or in more recent years flash rom.
Huh? What version of the software do you have?
:)
1) You can select to record programs by searching by name, but it only searched within a limited horizon of programming (the week or so for which it has the guide). If not found, it can be recorded. For example, you couldn't ask it to record "Mission to Mars" whenever it comes on next.
Sure you can. "Pick programs to record", "Search using wishlists", "Create a new wishlist", "Title Wishlist". You can even use wildcards. Record all movies that match "*mars*" and it will do it.
2) You can't ask it to record programs matching criteria like a particular actor, or keyword in title etc.
From the main menu, pick "Pick programs to Record" then "Search using Wishlists". You can choose programs by Actor, Director, Category, Keyword or Title.
3) Once a program has been selected for recording, you can't change the record quality without cancelling it, finding it again via search, channel guide or whatever, and re-selecting to record it.
"Pick Programs to Record", "To do list". Choose your program, then "Cancel/Edit the Season Pass", "Change recording options". In there you get the settings "Record Quality", "Keep at most", "Show Type", "Keep until", etc...
4) It takes 2-4 hours to process and index the program guide after making a call to TiVo! (what on earth is it doing?)
You fail to mention that it only does this ONCE, when you first buy it. It's not like you'll ever see it again. (and it's generating indexes for all those ways you can search for programs - much much better than downloading extra data over analog modem lines)
6) If you have a partial recording of something that you are also currently recording, it doesn't distinguish between the two - so you can delete the partial until the current recording it complete
I couldn't parse this sentence at all... Could you rephrase?
If you have a Comcast General Instrument cable box, the supplied infrared blasters for channel changing are not strong enough and you'll have to but better ones (for ~$30).
Hrm, I couldn't find any mention of this on the tivo forums... I've got the GI DCT box myself, and haven't had a problem.
You sure you don't work for ReplayTV or something?
I've got one now, and have noticed a few things.
1) The sound quality isn't quite what I thought it would be. While I don't know the actual bitrates used, the music channels sound about like a 64k MP3, and the talk/news channels sound about like a 24k MP3. I think I'd rather slightly fewer channels if it meant better quality.
2) Since they transmit every bit multiple times, (either 3 or 4 copies of the stream is sent at once on a time delay, I can't remember which), dropouts are EXTREMELY rare. They have both spatial (two satellites you can receive at once), frequency (broadcasting on multiple frequencies), and time (broadcasting the same content multiple times) diversity. Nice.
3) Yes, you're paying $9.95/month for *SOME* channels that have commercials. Most channels don't have commercials. Even then, the stations that DO have commercials air far far less than the FM stations I've listened to.
4) You get some neat features like being able to display artist/song for each channel.
5) Wow, some of the channels air things you'd never hear on the radio. The main comedy channel has more swear words per minute than you could imagine. None of the songs have the "bad words" beeped out. If you have kids, and are concerned, you can have them block any channels you don't want them to listen to. (Each channel is pretty clearly marked on the guide if it has strong language or not)
6) Some of the channels do sound kinda amateur-hour. Kinda like college radio. I'm sure as time progresses they'll get more refined, but... Wow, some of the DJ's and commercials for themselves are cheesy. Really bad.
7) They do have some really cool channels. CNN Headline News (the audio from the TV channel - usually works well except for "Nothing can describe the images you're seeing now..." bits), The Discovery Channel Radio, etc... Keeps me entertained.
8) If you're a channel flipper, the delay between changing channels is kinda long... 1/2 to 1 second.
9) Overall worth it for me. The total of 1 to 1.5 hours a day I spend in the car is at least enjoyable now. I've only had it for 3-4 weeks, but it's kept my attention that long.
SDRAM is also slightly persistant. Just rebooting doesn't necessarily clear your ram. In an embedded system I'm working on now, using industry standard PC133 dimms, I can power off, wait 2 mins, power on, and the data is *mostly* still there. (a few bit errors here and there, etc)
One kinda cool (mis?)use of this feature is with FreeBSD's 'dmesg'. 'dmesg" shows the boot up log of the system. (kernel messages, etc). If you reboot, and the pointers still look valid, dmesg will show you the log messages as far back as the buffer will allow, sometimes spanning 2-3 boots.
Most OS's have a "zero on allocate" method, where before they hand out any RAM to any process where it matters, they zero it. This is also an important security feature - suppose on a multi-user system, I open my e-mail program and send off a nice private e-mail and close it. Do I want you to be able to malloc() 256MB, and look through it to find my e-mail still sitting around? No. Before the OS hands out ram to a process, it usually zero's it. (note, malloc followed by free followed by malloc isn't usually zero'ed, it's assumed that within the same process, you'll wipe things out yourself if you really want it secure.)
In any case, this isn't an issue at all. When you boot up ANY pc right now, it's not all zero'ed out, and OS's don't expect it to be. Rebooting things to cure problems is fixing things you put in RAM that got corrupted, as well as logical errors (the system is confused by something, etc).
I know this is kinda unrelated, but.. Does anyone know why Comedy Central is showing the SAME episodes of the same shows over and over again? Since last Tuesday I've seen the episode of SNL with Ben Stiller more times than I can count. My tivo seems to think they all should be different episodes, but that's not what they're actually airing. They've thrown in a few of the really old episodes from the first season too, but it's been a lot of Ben Stiller... It's not just SNL, but the most obvious one I've seen.
I think people here who are saying "Big deal, it's how the industry works.. Old CPU's stop getting made" are missing the point.
The "embedded" world is a bunch of companies producing devices that are usually small, lower powered, small production runs, and generally get made for alot longer than most electronics you're used to.
The last company I worked for (Midway Games) made arcade(coin-operated) video games. For a brief time, I worked with the group called "Wavenet". Wavenet was an idea to link arcade games up in arcades all through the world, to allow real-time tournaments. The first game that was tried was Mortal Kombat 3. MK3 used a really weird processor called a 34010 from Texas Instruments. (Weird in that it had *BIT* addressable memory, funky graphics opcodes built in that we never used, etc) However, the game designers pretty much pushed the CPU to its max before we had a chance to make it a networked game. There wasn't enough RAM, CPU, or ROM (for networking code) left to do it, as well as this board didn't have an ethernet output on it to connect it up to the router.
Midway ended up designing a tiiiiny little board (running a small embedded OS that just translated game commands into TCP/IP and vice versa) that plugged into an expansion connector on the MK3 board. It had an Ethernet controller, some ram, more ROMs for the networking code and a 386SX CPU made by AMD on it. Why not use a Pentium, or Pentium Pro? (which was the newest CPU out at the time)
Cost. Right now, you can get 386SX CPU's for a couple of dollars.
Power. Compare the latest generation of 386 CPUs to even a slow PII. HUUUGE difference here.
Board space. The embedded 386's are a little bigger than an american nickle. Pentium class CPU's... well... are big.
Longevity. When we bought these, we got committments from our suppliers that the CPU would be around for at least X months/years. This is REALLLLY important to us. If we're going to spend a ton of cash designing a board based around a CPU, we don't want it to disappear next month when something better comes along.
Had the embedded world not existed, and we had to use a faster/newer CPU, the board cost would have doubled, it would have been a bigger board(again more $$), We likely would have needed to put a bigger power supply(or played tricks with regulators), and then had to redsign the board every time the trendy chip got unpopular. All for horsepower we didn't even need!
Take a look here. Intel is still supporting and selling 80186 CPU's, for embedded controller uses.
Many many companies depend on slower CPU's for things. I don't know if it's still true, but at one point nearly every computer-controlled traffic light system sold used an 80186 CPU. Intel(?) came up with a "hardened" version of it that tolerated extreme cold and extreme heat. Companies that produce products like that are even happy paying double price for an old CPU that can do that, than installing air conditioners and heaters in every traffic light box.
The embedded CPU industry is a place where normal PC economics do not apply. It's not unheard of to pay extra for a part just because you know it'll be around for 10 years, instead of a cheaper(sometimes better) part that will go away as soon as it's not trendy.
While I don't know the specifics of this deal, it sounds like AMD is breaking their previously announced EOL(End Of Life) dates. This is quite likely going to piss a lot of people off who built their product around one of these CPUs.
(Warning: Very adult content)
This is old news. Stile Project already has had a Colon Cam. We've nicknamed her the Goatse Girl.
(No, it's not goatse.cx, but it's worse.)
This is one of the really really rare occasions where linking to porn is somehow on topic. Scary.
I no longer work there, but while I was at Midway Games, I briefly worked on a project(called WaveNet) like this.
We took the arcade game Mortal Kombat 3, added a tiny board to an expansion connector with a 386 with a TCP/IP stack and ethernet port to it, and connected it to a Bay router hooked to a 56k leased line... We had a small NOC at Midway where all the 56k lines terminated, and some servers that acted as the hosts for the games.
At its peak, we had about 15 games in the Chicago area hooked up. It worked pretty well, we had to make a few modifications to the game... Mortal Kombat is a very very very twitch-reaction speed game. The delays introduced from networking it were, while unavoidable, kinda high. But, most people couldn't tell the difference after we were done.
(My only involvment with this was gameplay related changes to MK3 after the project was nearly completed)
After Mortal Kombat 3, the same thing was done with San Francisco Rush in a bunch of arcades in the California area. Same idea, but with a driving game, delays aren't nearly as noticable.
(I had no involvement in this project)
Now the project is called MTN. (Midway Tournament Network). They're taking several Midway games and networking them across the world... (You may be able to find details about it on Midway's website)
I'm not trying to downplay what these guys are doing, but i don't think many people here recognize that this is already in place, to some extent.
I see a lot of posters here saying that "If they double their capacity every x months, that's only 8MB in 4 years" or something...
When working on a new technology, having a 256kbit chip is just as useful as a 256mbit chip, when all you're doing is proving the technology out. They have no reason to be trying to produce massive dies yet, because all that will do is reduce their yields... and when they're making one-off runs of these to test them, that's a killer.
I'm certain that by the time they go into production, the capacity will be impressive.
Ack, you're right... It doesn't support 26-bit mode.. Sorry, it's late here. :)
-- Kevin
I've got one of the Intel 80200 evaluation boards on my desk at work. They're reallllly nice CPU's..
:)
They run existing ARM code. Intel has a "porting guide" that's only a few pages long, mentioning hardly used features of the original chips. The only big difference is that the don't support thumb mode anymore, which isn't a huge loss.
They change their clock speed depending on the input voltage. Yes, you heard me right. Wanna slow the system down? Don't bother with changing clock generators and the such, just bring Vcc lower. It's very cool. Even at full speed, it only draws a few watts. And of course, no heatsink needed.
It's faaaaaaaaaaast. As long as you don't need floating point, it's actually a very competitive chip. You can check intel's site for actual benchmarks, but I was very surprised.
It's small. It's in a BGA package less than an inch square. The PCI-PCI bridge they used on the sample board is several times larger than the CPU itself, I had to look several times to find it.
It's cheap. I don't think my NDA with Intel allows me to discuss the pricing we have, but.... They're cheap enough to put in a PDA for sure.
I hope this chip really takes off, because there are so many cool things I'd love to do with it.
-- Kevin
The predecessor to the NSA line-eater bug was the NSA character-eater bug, of course.
According to pcdata.com, and a few other "web demographic" sites, www.stileproject.com is in the top 2000 visited sites on the net. Granted, due to the adult content of the site, it's largely viewed by home users. But, a site this does get a nice breakdown of the net as a whole. Here are the stats we see:
85.6% Internet Explorer
12.0% Netscape
01.2% "Netscape Compatible" browsers
00.2% Opera
00.07% WebTV
In my experience, largely "geeky" websites see huge amounts of netscape users. Our breakdown by OS:
93.35% Windows
03.22% Macintosh
01.80% Unknown (browser doesn't report OS)
01.38% Unix variants
00.07% WebTV
00.01% BeOS
00.004% OS/2
00.003% RISC OS
00.002% Amiga
00.0002% OpenVMS
Since it may be of interest to people here, here's the Unix breakdown:
79.18% Linux
07.28% FreeBSD
04.19% SunOS
03.85% Other Unix variants
01.94% OpenBSD
01.85% IRIX
00.61% OSF1
00.51% HP-UX
00.30% NetBSD
00.26% AIX
00.0002% BSD/OS
The Unix/Linux users seem kind of high, but it may be due to the Linux Girls Gallery getting linked everywhere.
-- Kevin
(hoping this won't be considered spam, but rather info that I keep getting asked)
One other thing..
:)
I moderated/ran the Bruce Perens IRC Chat that was mentioned a few months back here. Idiots decided to ping flood his DSL line out of existance during the chat, and I had to call him on the phone and type his answers for him.
People will ruin anything that can, I swear.
-- Kevin
I've been involved with IRC in one way or another for about 7 years now. It's reasons like this that I do NOT run an IRC server anymore.
.jp servers, who we could never get the admins to fix. I'd also get people attacking my router directly, affecting thousands of customers, all over a silly IRC matter...
/dev/null. A wonderful discussion has gone on on the NANOG(North American Network Operators Group) mailing list, the past few weeks about this very problem. "IRC is stupid, don't make yourself a target" is something heard all too often. If people would just secure things now, when someone's attacking a web server, or something else of yours, you won't have that problem either. What if someone decided to DoS one of the major political party's web pages today, with the same types of floods? It's the same problem, but somehow this is worth investigating, but not if it's IRC? Yes, IRC isn't as philosophically important, but it's a very popular service, none the less...
Around 5 years ago, I ran toast.ne.us.dal.net, part of the DALnet IRC network (obviously). The bandwidth for it was generously donated by a local ISP, in exchange for borrowing some of my expertise from time to time. We only had a frame relay T1, but easily held more than 1000 users at a time.(Which was a record, for a short period) With popularity, attacks started coming.
The first thing that hit was SYN floods. Linux added the TCP cookies feature, which helped a bit. Then raw ICMP echo request floods, which caused us to get icmp blocked at our uplink, which hurt our customers, but was deemed worth while. Then when ICMP didn't work, people flooded the crap out of us with UDP. Then the Smurf attacks started. It came to a point that more often than not, during the evening, I was spending my time on the phone with our increasingly annoyed uplink getting things filtered and blocked.
In 1996, I moved to Illinois, and took the server with me. I started my own ISP on two T1's, and pretty immediately decided to pull the DALnet server, when the period of time that we're getting flooded exceeded the time we weren't. I then moved my IRC server to a much smaller network called NewNet. While the floods were much worse, it still was a perpetual annoyance that some brat in Israel decided he didn't like us, and would reguarly flood us from hacked
Then one day, the "script kiddies" discovered Wingate. Wingate is a highly useful Windows proxy system, that was unfortunately shipped for quite a long time in a highly insecure state. They had a telnet and SOCKS4 proxy sitting wide open, with no passwords necessary. One script out there would go scanning through cable modem and DSL netblocks, gather a list of a few thousand insecure wingates, and connecting them ALL to our network, using them to flood the crap out of us. No longer could we even ban naughty users, because they had thousands of hosts they could choose from.
One VERY frustrating day, I ended up writing a little tool to scan EVERY user who connected to our network, to see if they were actually connecting from an insecure proxy server. Worked wonders, but we had thousands of nasty e-mails from people asking why we were trying to hack them (by connecting to port 1080 then immediately disconnecting?). Much education was required, and many notices of "You're about to be scanned, disconnect if you don't want this to happen" were necessary to prevent some idiots with a firewall they didn't understand from flooding abuse@dragondata.com with nonsensical complaints about hack attempts.
Today, floods are much more sophisticated than the ones we saw 5 years ago. Current floods are completely legitimate TCP/IP packets, that look real. Not floods of SYN's, but real looking data, that you can't just slap a simple filter in to get rid of. Now, unless you're using a stateful firewall that can detect this sort of thing, you're pretty much screwed. (FreeBSD's ipfw system is now stateful, and works quite well for this sort of thing.)
Really, here are the major problems.
1) Network administrators don't secure their networks. They may secure their machines, but they let their routers blindly pass off spoofed packets, when it would be pretty easy in 99% of the cases to block packets with source addresses coming from a port that they don't belong in.
2) Any complaint to any abuse@ address that involves IRC seems to go into
3) It's nearly impossible to prosecute the people who do this. I've talked at great lengths with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. While they sympathize, unless they have a huge dollar amount in damages they can show, there's little they can do.
4) The same companies and universities get hacked over and over again. I'd like to see someone sue one of them for negligance one of these times.
5) Stupid battles like this are really putting a drain on the IRC community. IRCD server software has pretty much gone untouched over the last few years, because any technically competant coders are busy coming up with proxy detectors and fighting floods, than writing code. There are things with IRC that could be done that would blow people away. But, I'm burned out. 7 years of fighting with people who need psychological help, because they do things like take down a huge network, instead of dealing with their issues in a constructive ways....
6) People take IRC too seriously. It's just for fun, people.
Kevin Day
I posted the geek porn story on the Stile Project a few days ago. (Lots of sex and gross stuff, don't click those links if you are offended by such things)
The link to their site, while being somewhat obvious, is www.geekporn.com. Neither the quickies above, or the story it links to, actually lists the URL anywhere. I had a few readers mail it to me.
-- Kevin
According to a few of posts on NANOG (North American Network Operators Group - see www.merit.edu for info), NASA's Ames facility was attacked on Friday, knocking it down for most of the day. NASA hosts E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, which having it down is a "bad thing".
(Disclosure: I'm a former video game developer for one of the companies mentioned below)
Classic video games are still profitable. While we may look back at some of the old games and say they're worthless now, they're still being sold in many cases.
Activision is selling 30 Intellivision games on one PSX CD for $29.
Midway is selling their "Greatest Hits" Volume 1 and Volume 2(no longer on their site).
Atary (admittedly part of Midway now) is also selling a Greatest Hits cd.
Namco has a Museum 1, Museum 3, and Museum 64 collection out now.
Also, making the games GPL'ed is really silly. Lots of old games get remakes, why would manufacturers want the market filled with 500 versions of a past title when they want to make a new one?
While this is surely going to be considered flamebait by many... The same copyright law that allows the creators of video games to set their own terms of distribution is the SAME LAW that allows GPL developers to set which restrictions there are on distributing GPL'ed code.
So many people say that copyright laws need to be thrown out or changed... Want copyright laws reduced to 5 years? That means a 5 year old Linux kernel would be free for anyone to do as they wish with, without GPL'ed restrictions. All the old GNU binutils would have no protection at all. While I agree that insanely long copyrights don't do a lot of good for society, people are trading ROMS for some rather recent games.
MAME now supports Rampage World Tour, a Midway game released in 1999. A quick check of a few big ROM sites turn up the ROMs for this game. This game is STILL ON THE SHELVES for consoles, and the ROMs are being traded. Any half-way excuse of "preservation of classics" is out the window at this point.
I like classic games more than most. I've got an extensive library of old game boards in my basement. I also like having the games on my PC, but I buy the classics CD's when they come out.
Remember, just because something isn't for sale anymore doesn't mean it's free, or even should be.
-- Kevin
Bleh.
There is a LOT of Free Software out there that is not GNU or GPL'ed or anything similar. In fact, I've shipped a fully functional embedded product without a byte of GNU or GPL'ed code, so it's not impossible to find lots of non GNU stuff out there.
I really don't think we need to pollute the TLD namespace any futher by adding a TLD for one group's software movement. If anything, make it a more generic name like
If Microsoft wanted
(flame suit on)
-- Kevin
I know the issue of having 3.5 come out AFTER 4.0 is confusing, so let me try to explain why.
.0 tended to be a bit rough around the edges.
There are many thousands of users who are using 3.4, which are quite happy doing so.
When 4.0 came out, it was using lots of (relatively) untested code, so the general advice was "unless you have a good reason to use 4.0, stick with 3.x until 4.1 comes out". To be perfectly blunt, in the past anything ending in
4.0 came out, and actually has been very stable and bugs have been scarce. However, they still have the comittment to the 3.x users to incorporate some of the recent changes, so here came 3.5.
5.0 is the "bleeding-edge/scary" code that hasn't been released yet, and is where developers to go make huge changes. Right now they're making gigantic changes to the SMP structure to make interrupts more thread-like, and the such.
While I give the FreeBSD team kudos for supporting users who aren't tracking the latest and greatest, I've had no problems with 4.0 at all, and am recommending it to anyone who is getting a fresh start.
If you're a 3.x user who just wants to update, go with a 3.5 upgrade.
If you're a new users, grab 4.0. (4.1 isn't too far away, too).
-- Kevin