"Most termite species are tropical or subtropical, but a few live in temperate regions." I'd posit that even fewer live in a properly cooled data center. So, on the surface (no pun intended), this doesn't seem to be a good comparison.
But reading further into the Wikipedia article: "Termites have biting mouthparts and are soft-bodied, of moderate to small size. They live in dark nests and tunnels, except when the winged alates emerge to leave their parent colony." When comparing termites to geeks, they both seem to have biting mouth parts and the geeks are definitely soft-bodied. And of smaller size. And, like the termites, true geeks live in their parent's basement.
"Termites cannot themselves digest the wood that they consume." Few geeks can live on chewed-up pencils. So again, another similarity.
Lastly, Termites construct extremely large and elaborate mounds to house their colonies.... The internal structure of these mounds can be quite complex, with ventilation chimneys for active temperature control"Need I say more?!
That was the original size.png. When I reduced the palette to 32, I got the smaller file you see. more info on this post. Good eye! Now, how can I reduce the size of flash.html? All I can see is removing the font re-definitions at the beginning of each line in the tables, but I don't know if Mozilla will like that when I try to edit the file again.
That was my thought with the first disposable digital camera. IIRC, I didn't find an obvious erase in the firmware, but that's a moot point because I never found a recycled camera. The camera wasn't really designed to be recycled -- it had a surface that could easily be scratched, even with very light use.
The second still camera (the PV2) has a USB function that sucks out all the important system files out of Flash memory and saves them in SDRAM. It then reformats the memory and copies the files back in. It's a pretty good erase (maybe not NSA secure, but recovery would involve probing the IC wafer), and I don't see why it wouldn't be used.
But, the biggest security risk seems to be the time after development and before sending the cameras back to Pure Digital for recycling. According the people who operate the machines, the development machines don't erase the pictures. They stay on the camera in case something messes up -- they didn't want to have angry customers saying "what do you mean you accidently deleted my prints". It seems that the used cameras stay a while at the stores, so any operator could make prints of your pictures for up to a couple of weeks after you have them developed. But, bad employees is probably about the same risk as with traditional development.
Since the camcorder uses a separate partition with only picture data, I suspect it would be pretty easy to reformat only this section completely. (the PV2 had system and user data in the same filesystem, which is why it had to save the data in ram)
Ha ha! Ok, you've shamed me into it! I reduced the palette to 32 colors and posted it as a png. It looks a lot better, thanks. It's also only 7628 bytes.
Apple had a lot of decoration in the window - antialiasing, plus textured background, plus multi-colored candy buttons that ate up colors. Normally I would have thought PNG would have been better, but guis are getting more picturesque all the time.
I figured someone would criticize me. You're seeing low-res version for slashdot - sorry, bandwidth trumps aesthetics today. Tomorrow the pretty pictures will go back up.
Check the file sizes: -rw-r--r-- 38000 Jun 24 21:09 PICT0001-info.png -rw-r--r-- 13343 Jun 25 12:36 PICT0001-info.jpg -rw-r--r-- 10958 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon-full.jpg -rw-r--r-- 2334 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon.jpg -rw-r----- 4547 Jun 25 13:02 index.html -rw-r----- 23960 Jun 25 13:25 flash.html
My low-res pictures are 13k vs 38k, and 2.3k vs 11k. Overall, loading flash.html is 40k instead of 73k. That means (roughly) 80% more visitors for the same bandwidth!
I also tried GIF and TIFF - they were pretty close in size to the original PNG.
I was about to mod you insightful, but then I realized what the grandparent was probably talking about... the microcode. The microcode is a lot more important for recreating details. Pentium processors have a limited ability to fix silicon bugs in software. The microcode is in volatile memory, so it must be loaded on every boot by either the OS or the BIOS. It's top-secret, but access to this lower-level info might let you write a custom instruction (or not, I don't know how much the mechanism can change the operation)
sorry to burst your bubble, but nothing is uncrackable. There are a zillion ways around it (from commandos stealing the os source from apple, to exploiting a flaw, to brute-forcing the keys). The only way it could be uncrackable is if their PR team convinced people not to try... and they seem to have had some success in this area.
The Judicial branch is under direct assault. House Majority Leader Tom Delay right after the Atlanta courthouse shooting of a judge (and others): "If they thumb their nose at Congress and the president, the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.". About judges in florida who diasgreed with federal interference in the right-to-die case: "Congress for many years has shirked its responsibility to hold the judiciary accountable. No longer." Asked whether the House would consider impeachment charges against the judges involved, he responded, "There's plenty of time to look into that."
Don't think the republicans already thought of this obstacle. I'm with you - the judicial branch is my only hope, but I'm afraid Rehnquist won't hold out until 2008.
The PV2 still camera I mentioned above would be great for that. It's $18 and you can send images to it over the USB. sample image. The firmware beeps for each new picture and requires a button press, but I modded it so it is silent and operates like another screen. The only drawback is a about a 1/2 second refresh time. The firmware can be optimized to eliminate the slow double-buffering, but you're not going to be able to play asteroids like that. (maybe on the built-in firmware). Of course, a text-only interface would be much faster.
Re:Has the prior digicam hack...
on
Disposable Camcorder
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've gotten feedback from a couple of photography teachers who use it for teaching kids. I have no idea how much this has impacted sales, but I've seen articles in popsci and pc world, so it has gotten out to the public. Next to teaching, my personal favorite use has been the guys who launched one in a balloon to 52,000 feet (previously mentioned on slashdot)
more info & the PV2 still camera with LCD
on
Disposable Camcorder
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As pointed out yesterday on engadget, these cameras have been out a few months -- it's just that the press release came out recently. Yep, it's from the same company that made the hacked still camera.
These cameras seem to have an external program memory, so it might not be too hard to hack. The forum above also has dissection pictures.
BTW, last summer PureDigital came out with a still camera called the PV2. Unlike the one that was previously mentioned on slashdot, this new one has an LCD post-view screen and it's based on a completely different chipset. It has also been hacked. I figured out the authentication mechanism on this and most of the communications. Others got the camera to work with standard drivers and are figuring out the proprietary raw format. I wrote a disassembler and have published commentary on the built-in firmware, but you'll need a camera & firmware file to make sense of it. The firmware is protected by a checksum, but that was easy to find and correct.
How much would these people love an optimized math library? They've got specialized software they run and have specialized users, so they can put that extra effort to get 10% faster results (or however faster it would be)
Coding wouldn't have been expensive unless you were selling the software. I'm not thinking commercial software, but instead optimized GCC, math, or multimedia libraries... or maybe even compiling just frequently-used aps, such as linux and/or apache. But, the post above yours says that different processors had different microcode, so it would have been very hard to keep up with,
I wonder what would have happened if Transmeta had released the instruction set for the native VLIW instruction-set processor that runs the x86 emulation layer. Sure, it's probably very hard to code for, but may have offered a tremendous advantage for some applications.
Also, hopefully OQO and others have a backup plan so this doesn't put a kink in the handheld pc market.
There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981. But, it's also a designated museum room, so all the stuff in it had been put there on purpose and is hopefully only suitable as museum artifacts.
The first and second gen ipods had physically larger batteries, the third gen battery was about 1/2 the size. There is a good picture illustrating this at anandtech. This made the 3rd gen ipods thinner than the earlier models.
The goal was to make the drink still cold for my long bus ride home in the afternoon. Even when I froze the drink, it got warm sitting in my locker. I started by making a form-fitting styrofoam cooler out of left-over packing material. The walls were probably 1/4" thick. Result: cool, but not ice-cold. So, on my second try, I found some thicker sytrofoam (1/2-3/4") and built a box out of that. Result: still frozen solid - success! Of course I couldn't drink it, but that wasn't the point...
I've done lots of driver development on various machines (linux, solaris, OSX, vxWorks), and my favorite for general hacking has been OSX. Besides the traditional OS-level drivers, it also allows user-level USB drivers. I use the user-level access for my projects and it provides simple no-hassle operation. The code is still limited by the user's permissions, but I don't need access to other system resources. The windows equivalents need to rely on libusb, a generic os-level driver that passes user-level commands through to the USB device. Because of window's USB driver model, though, libusb can only work for one device type and must have the VID/PID's set before installation. OSX is much simpler when you need to write a hack that modifies a device's PID - it doesn't need another driver installation to continue talking with the device.
Actually, vxworks was the easiest to write drivers for, but since it is an embedded OS with no distinction between user code and OS (they share the same namespace!), it doesn't really count.
... that would have been true with other P2P services, but bittorrent reversed that paradigm. Heavily trafficked bittorrents download quickly, and the ones no one is downloading die.
I agree - it's more than just the instruction set that matters. I'll agree with that other point, too - I cared a lot about the VMU and the digital cameras, but it wasn't that easy.:-)
... not every processor is documented. In fact, the documentation for a lot of high volume processors isn't available. I'd like PSP docs, or docs on the processor in the ipod, or even the processor in the disposable digital cameras or the VMU game system -- but none of these docs are publicly available. The hardware manual for the G5 PowerPC was finally published last November, over a year after apple started selling the hardware.
So, no, the documentation doesn't always get released.
Slashdot Mirror
"(more like a termite tent)"
... The internal structure of these mounds can be quite complex, with ventilation chimneys for active temperature control" Need I say more?!
"Most termite species are tropical or subtropical, but a few live in temperate regions." I'd posit that even fewer live in a properly cooled data center. So, on the surface (no pun intended), this doesn't seem to be a good comparison.
But reading further into the Wikipedia article: "Termites have biting mouthparts and are soft-bodied, of moderate to small size. They live in dark nests and tunnels, except when the winged alates emerge to leave their parent colony." When comparing termites to geeks, they both seem to have biting mouth parts and the geeks are definitely soft-bodied. And of smaller size. And, like the termites, true geeks live in their parent's basement.
"Termites cannot themselves digest the wood that they consume." Few geeks can live on chewed-up pencils. So again, another similarity.
Lastly, Termites construct extremely large and elaborate mounds to house their colonies.
That was the original size .png. When I reduced the palette to 32, I got the smaller file you see. more info on this post. Good eye! Now, how can I reduce the size of flash.html? All I can see is removing the font re-definitions at the beginning of each line in the tables, but I don't know if Mozilla will like that when I try to edit the file again.
That was my thought with the first disposable digital camera. IIRC, I didn't find an obvious erase in the firmware, but that's a moot point because I never found a recycled camera. The camera wasn't really designed to be recycled -- it had a surface that could easily be scratched, even with very light use.
The second still camera (the PV2) has a USB function that sucks out all the important system files out of Flash memory and saves them in SDRAM. It then reformats the memory and copies the files back in. It's a pretty good erase (maybe not NSA secure, but recovery would involve probing the IC wafer), and I don't see why it wouldn't be used.
But, the biggest security risk seems to be the time after development and before sending the cameras back to Pure Digital for recycling. According the people who operate the machines, the development machines don't erase the pictures. They stay on the camera in case something messes up -- they didn't want to have angry customers saying "what do you mean you accidently deleted my prints". It seems that the used cameras stay a while at the stores, so any operator could make prints of your pictures for up to a couple of weeks after you have them developed. But, bad employees is probably about the same risk as with traditional development.
Since the camcorder uses a separate partition with only picture data, I suspect it would be pretty easy to reformat only this section completely. (the PV2 had system and user data in the same filesystem, which is why it had to save the data in ram)
Ha ha! Ok, you've shamed me into it! I reduced the palette to 32 colors and posted it as a png. It looks a lot better, thanks. It's also only 7628 bytes.
Apple had a lot of decoration in the window - antialiasing, plus textured background, plus multi-colored candy buttons that ate up colors. Normally I would have thought PNG would have been better, but guis are getting more picturesque all the time.
I figured someone would criticize me. You're seeing low-res version for slashdot - sorry, bandwidth trumps aesthetics today. Tomorrow the pretty pictures will go back up.
Check the file sizes:
-rw-r--r-- 38000 Jun 24 21:09 PICT0001-info.png
-rw-r--r-- 13343 Jun 25 12:36 PICT0001-info.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 10958 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon-full.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 2334 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon.jpg
-rw-r----- 4547 Jun 25 13:02 index.html
-rw-r----- 23960 Jun 25 13:25 flash.html
My low-res pictures are 13k vs 38k, and 2.3k vs 11k. Overall, loading flash.html is 40k instead of 73k. That means (roughly) 80% more visitors for the same bandwidth!
I also tried GIF and TIFF - they were pretty close in size to the original PNG.
I was about to mod you insightful, but then I realized what the grandparent was probably talking about... the microcode. The microcode is a lot more important for recreating details. Pentium processors have a limited ability to fix silicon bugs in software. The microcode is in volatile memory, so it must be loaded on every boot by either the OS or the BIOS. It's top-secret, but access to this lower-level info might let you write a custom instruction (or not, I don't know how much the mechanism can change the operation)
An example microcode fix is for "High Temperature and Low Supply Voltage Operation May Result in Incorrect Processor Operation"
sorry to burst your bubble, but nothing is uncrackable. There are a zillion ways around it (from commandos stealing the os source from apple, to exploiting a flaw, to brute-forcing the keys). The only way it could be uncrackable is if their PR team convinced people not to try... and they seem to have had some success in this area.
Sounds like this might come in handy for putting linux on the xbox 360.
The Judicial branch is under direct assault. House Majority Leader Tom Delay right after the Atlanta courthouse shooting of a judge (and others): "If they thumb their nose at Congress and the president, the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.". About judges in florida who diasgreed with federal interference in the right-to-die case: "Congress for many years has shirked its responsibility to hold the judiciary accountable. No longer." Asked whether the House would consider impeachment charges against the judges involved, he responded, "There's plenty of time to look into that."
Don't think the republicans already thought of this obstacle. I'm with you - the judicial branch is my only hope, but I'm afraid Rehnquist won't hold out until 2008.
Actually, it is TI, not HP.
.. if only they had used the original TI-30
And they are recalling 160,000 calculators, not 11,000.
The PV2 still camera I mentioned above would be great for that. It's $18 and you can send images to it over the USB. sample image. The firmware beeps for each new picture and requires a button press, but I modded it so it is silent and operates like another screen. The only drawback is a about a 1/2 second refresh time. The firmware can be optimized to eliminate the slow double-buffering, but you're not going to be able to play asteroids like that. (maybe on the built-in firmware). Of course, a text-only interface would be much faster.
I've gotten feedback from a couple of photography teachers who use it for teaching kids. I have no idea how much this has impacted sales, but I've seen articles in popsci and pc world, so it has gotten out to the public. Next to teaching, my personal favorite use has been the guys who launched one in a balloon to 52,000 feet (previously mentioned on slashdot)
As pointed out yesterday on engadget, these cameras have been out a few months -- it's just that the press release came out recently. Yep, it's from the same company that made the hacked still camera.
p ?f=13
The community working on hacking this new camcorder is located at:http://camerahacks.10.forumer.com/viewforum.ph
These cameras seem to have an external program memory, so it might not be too hard to hack. The forum above also has dissection pictures.
BTW, last summer PureDigital came out with a still camera called the PV2. Unlike the one that was previously mentioned on slashdot, this new one has an LCD post-view screen and it's based on a completely different chipset. It has also been hacked. I figured out the authentication mechanism on this and most of the communications. Others got the camera to work with standard drivers and are figuring out the proprietary raw format. I wrote a disassembler and have published commentary on the built-in firmware, but you'll need a camera & firmware file to make sense of it. The firmware is protected by a checksum, but that was easy to find and correct.
main pv2 forums
PV2 FAQ from the forum - a great starting place
my FAQ's
unofficial devkit for writing your own programs.
Apple used to sell a dos card for macs - it was a 66 MHz 486 that plugged in and used the mac's screen peripherals.
whoops - something I forgot to add that post...
How much would these people love an optimized math library? They've got specialized software they run and have specialized users, so they can put that extra effort to get 10% faster results (or however faster it would be)
Coding wouldn't have been expensive unless you were selling the software. I'm not thinking commercial software, but instead optimized GCC, math, or multimedia libraries... or maybe even compiling just frequently-used aps, such as linux and/or apache. But, the post above yours says that different processors had different microcode, so it would have been very hard to keep up with,
I wonder what would have happened if Transmeta had released the instruction set for the native VLIW instruction-set processor that runs the x86 emulation layer. Sure, it's probably very hard to code for, but may have offered a tremendous advantage for some applications.
Also, hopefully OQO and others have a backup plan so this doesn't put a kink in the handheld pc market.
There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981. But, it's also a designated museum room, so all the stuff in it had been put there on purpose and is hopefully only suitable as museum artifacts.
The first and second gen ipods had physically larger batteries, the third gen battery was about 1/2 the size. There is a good picture illustrating this at anandtech. This made the 3rd gen ipods thinner than the earlier models.
I modded my juice box in highschool.
The goal was to make the drink still cold for my long bus ride home in the afternoon. Even when I froze the drink, it got warm sitting in my locker. I started by making a form-fitting styrofoam cooler out of left-over packing material. The walls were probably 1/4" thick. Result: cool, but not ice-cold. So, on my second try, I found some thicker sytrofoam (1/2-3/4") and built a box out of that. Result: still frozen solid - success! Of course I couldn't drink it, but that wasn't the point...
I've done lots of driver development on various machines (linux, solaris, OSX, vxWorks), and my favorite for general hacking has been OSX. Besides the traditional OS-level drivers, it also allows user-level USB drivers. I use the user-level access for my projects and it provides simple no-hassle operation. The code is still limited by the user's permissions, but I don't need access to other system resources. The windows equivalents need to rely on libusb, a generic os-level driver that passes user-level commands through to the USB device. Because of window's USB driver model, though, libusb can only work for one device type and must have the VID/PID's set before installation. OSX is much simpler when you need to write a hack that modifies a device's PID - it doesn't need another driver installation to continue talking with the device.
Actually, vxworks was the easiest to write drivers for, but since it is an embedded OS with no distinction between user code and OS (they share the same namespace!), it doesn't really count.
check out gpgpu or BrookGPU as starting points.
... that would have been true with other P2P services, but bittorrent reversed that paradigm. Heavily trafficked bittorrents download quickly, and the ones no one is downloading die.
I agree - it's more than just the instruction set that matters. I'll agree with that other point, too - I cared a lot about the VMU and the digital cameras, but it wasn't that easy. :-)
... not every processor is documented. In fact, the documentation for a lot of high volume processors isn't available. I'd like PSP docs, or docs on the processor in the ipod, or even the processor in the disposable digital cameras or the VMU game system -- but none of these docs are publicly available. The hardware manual for the G5 PowerPC was finally published last November, over a year after apple started selling the hardware.
So, no, the documentation doesn't always get released.