driversguide? what a freaking PITA.. every time I'm looking for drivers for anything I get pages of hits for the fscking driversguide forums from other people looking for the same drivers who never bothered to do a simple search first. I've never figured out how to actually get -drivers- from driversguide other than giving them money, and I'd like to see some proof that they'll actually have the drivers I'm after before I go doing that!
Usually what I do is figure out who made the device (If there's no manufacturers name you can look up the FCC ID at www.fcc.gov) and go to the manufacturers homepage. Most of them have drivers downloadable for just about everything they ever made.
And what really pisses me off most; if it weren't for places like driversguide.com and windrivers.com, the MANUFACTURERS site with the FREE drivers would probably be a whole heap easier to find via google!!
What is it with ants and electronics..?
on
Ants Invade iBook
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· Score: 2
Last week a friend of mine's electronic gate stopped working. Ants had built a nest inside the control box shorting a bunch of stuff out. Just now I cleaned out about a quantrillion baby ants from under my BSD box.. Must've been some food crumbs under there or something. I first noticed them 'cos there was a trail of ants going from under the computer up to my modem and back. I can't see any food on the modem either so I have no idea what they were doing there!
I think they just like warm dry places to nest, and inside electronic devices is usually warm and dry.
Alternatively; what if I strip all the comments and formatting, and rename all the varables to random meaningless sequences? The code will still compile but won't be much help for understanding or improving the program. I looked this up a while back, so I've forgotten where I found it but the answer is apparently 'no'; source code doesn't count if it's been obfuscated or is delivered in some unusable form.
I'd love to know what the situation would be if anyone ever managed to write a useful program in INTERCAL and tried to release it under GPL:)
You won't be able to play regular ogg's on a 33MHz machine, even if it had an FPU. You could possibly play them on a 486 DX4-100 with nothing else running, and you can easily do it on a P90..
I've played mp3's on a DX2-66 before; even with a custom kernel and booting directly into a bash shell you still can't play them at 44KHz stereo.
OTOH if you're playing low-bitrate (16-32 kbps) ogg's (perhaps for recorded speech or telephone hold music) that would probably work..
I'm highly amused by some of the comments in this thread; from my own perspective anything better than a P100 w 32M ram is a perfectly acceptable system. My main machine right now is a P166 with 64M and as well as using it for browsing, programming, etc it provides NAT, DNS, dhcp, apache.. I'm planning to upgrade sometime (probably to a P233, I had one last year but it died:( ). I'm in no hurry; this machine does everything I need for now.
My first linux machine was a 386 with 4M ram. I had to upgrade to 8M fairly quickly because it would totally thrash when I tried to compile the kernel (or almost anything else bigger than hello.c) and I couldn't run X at all until I got a 486..
Kids these days.. bah!!
I'll bookmark the link though; I have a spare P100 with 8M on it that I'd like to turn into a dedicated mp3/ogg player.
A few links, minimal comment;
This was mentioned (iirc) on/. earlier, and I keep referring back to it. I really don't understand the difference between a person seeing and hearing something in public versus a camera observing the same thing.
And I wonder what your neighbors would think of my my perv-cam hack
Yeah, same thing. I entered "Linux Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond" and it gives me "Bill Gates" ?!! I think the algorithm needs a bit of fine tuning! otoh it did pick a lot of other members of the 'open-source community' too. And at least it didn't return Larry Ellison anywhere..
Oh shit, it just gets worse.. "Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and Donald Becker" also returns Bill Gates as the third in the list! You're telling me Bill has been hacking the linux kernel too?!! (or perhaps this is the real reason why he's so reluctant to reveal any more Windows source code)
This article explains how to remove the Linux operating system from your computer and install Windows XP. This article assumes that Linux is already installed on your computer's hard disk, that Linux native and Linux swap partitions are in use (which are incompatible with Windows XP), and that there is no free space left on the hard disk.
One totally fucking HUGE oversight that makes this howto utterly useless. By default, most Linux installs create an extended partition and put several non-DOS logical partitions in it.
I'm not sure if XP's fdisk program has been updated, but they mention DOS5.0's fdisk program as being 'equally' useful in removing Linux partitions and it's not. The usual DOS/Windows fdisk program can remove the LILO boot loader easily enough (fdisk/mbr) and can remove any kind of primary partition, but it CANNOT remove non-DOS logical partitions or non-empty extended partitions. Thus is simply cannot remove the partitions that almost any standard linux install creates. This is a HUGE flaw in the DOS fdisk program. To remove linux (or any other non-DOS logical partitions) you have to use a non-microsoft tool such as norton utilities or Linux's own fdisk program.
Thank you MS for one again spreading misleading information about Linux. Please don't try to help when you don't even understand, and are a large part of, the problem!
I apologise for this totally of-topic rant, but I have to help people several times a week because this so-called help causes them to render their linux system unbootable, and they then have to spend considerable effort getting boot and rescue floppies to get back into linux so they can remove the partitions PROPERLY.
Exactly what I was going to say, but you beat me too it.
The SAMBA people have already had trouble in this area and advise ppl not to look at any of MS's shared-source code. What worries me is that shared source will be presented as 'example' code to be worked on in universities, and an entire generation of programmers will be forced to study it or not graduate. That's one hell of a wedge they can use against any Windows-interoperability OSS project.
some rather insane ppl (kiwi's too!) cooled the entire mobo using fluorinert (i probably spelled that wrong) and liquid nitrogen.
There's two problems with this; one is condensation. The other is that your PC contains things like the CMOS battery and lots of capacitors which have some 'liquid' parts and die horribly when frozen.
Also something else I just though of.. think about 'armies invading Russia, buttons becoming brittle and falling off' in terms of solder and board etchings..
'Unbreakable' is oracles hook (yeah, the hole was patched so they're back to beign 'unbreakable' again).. this week MS is using Trustworthy Computing as their catchphrase. Sheesh! keep up will ya?!!
I'm not sure of the exact details, but when I deliberately 'refresh' a page, it forces the cache here to refresh too, and I can't imagine that squid or any other cache would behave differently just because it was listening on port 80 rather than port 3128.
But why bother reloading at all? just check that the connection came directly from your IP at the time. If it's being proxied, the connection the web server sees will -always- be from the proxy and not directly from your IP.
Actually you don't even need your own server to test this. There's a page at junkbusters that tells you (amongst other things) the IP you connected from. If the IP junkbusters gives you isn't the same as the one ifconfig thinks you have, then there's a proxy somewhere
Finally, in reply to another comment about traceroute.. http uses TCP port 80 (https uses a higher port, but since everything but the IP is encrypted and none of it can be cached, there's little point in proxying it) , traceroute uses UDP on some other port, and ping uses ICMP echo packets. Apples and oranges..
fact 2: Patents expire 17 years from date of issue or 20 years from date of filing. So 120 years is a bit silly.
Granted, i'm just being an ass and didn't even read the article, but are you -sure- this point is invalid? What was the original term of copyright, and what is the current one? And how did that happen?:)
Doctor: We need to run some tests to see if your unborn child has Canavan disease. The test costs $3002.50 and if we don't diagnose it early, your child will die or at least be crippled for life.
Patient: But why is the test so expensive?
Doctor: Well, the test itself costs is really simple and only costs $2.50 The other $3000 goes to the great grandson of the researcher who stumbled onto the gene that the test looks for almost 120 years ago. He gets away with charging $3000 because it's a life-or-death diagnosis, and since he owns the worldwide patent on it nobody's allowed to make a cheaper test.
Oh yeah (preview doesn't save me from becoming distracted) I originally started to mention this because I was going to say that the system is also pretty unreliable. The bt848 is not a perfectly reliable card, my video switcher (printer port and old PABX relays) sometimes doesn't switch, and most annoying DeadRat has a habit of denying access to/dev/{mediadevices} for nonroot users at semirandom intervals. There's no way I'd try and sell this as a security solution for any business, but it does make a nice webcam setup.
That's why you upload one frame every 30 seconds to your webserver.
Switching video inputs on a bt848 doesn't work so well anyhow, it takes the card 200ms or more to sync the new signal so for four cameras you're limited to about 1 frame per second.
On my crappy overloaded p233 I can manage about 6 frames per minute at 640x480 from 4 cams after I timestamp, jpeg compress and archive them. Good enough for me considering that I don't really own anything valuable. Plus I scale down and upload every third frame here
because I'm a cam geek.
Efficient hydrogen-based fuel cells have been around for a while now. Just recently there was a story on slashdot about using a sunlight-pumped orbiting laser (I'm not going to dig for the link..) which would presumably let you send the collected energy down to earth with minimal atmospheric loss. So I've been wondering for a while if there was a better way to split water; electrolysis is hopelessly inefficient.
.. which really proves the point.. when you say DivX everyone thinks of the codec right away, and virtually nobody thinks of (or has even *heard* of) the rights-restricting videodisc standard with the same name.
Yeah.. but should it also be illegal to break into your own home, say if you forgot the key? Or even if you just want to find out how the lock works, make sure firsthand that it's a reasonably good lock, or whatever?
I think that was the point.. perhaps I should read the article:)
Say my ISP provides me the IP address "202.49.6.35" via DHCP. If you run a little javascript thingy via the browser on that box and ask what it's IP is, you get "202.49.6.35" and all is known to be good. This little javascript thingy could be on one of the ISP's internal pages that almost everyone has to go to, say the one that says what your monthly account and traffic usage is. To be sure, make the page 'require' javascript too..
Internally I'm using 192.168.1.0/24 addresses. If you run the same javascript thingy on a windows box behind the NAT, it says it's IP is 192.168.1.4 but you can see in the logs that the request came from 202.49.6.35. Well, that's only one windows box so perhaps it's one of those 'airport' things.
Two days later you see '192.168.1.3' from the same user, it's a fair guess that they have two windows machines behind some kind of NAT.
Trust me, you'll know when your call is going via satellite, the delay is quite noticable and very disconcerting. Sometimes you can hear the echo of your own voice (eg if they're using a speakerphone), the person you're speaking to will seem to pause before replying to you, and continue speaking if you try to interrupt.
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driversguide? what a freaking PITA.. every time I'm looking for drivers for anything I get pages of hits for the fscking driversguide forums from other people looking for the same drivers who never bothered to do a simple search first. I've never figured out how to actually get -drivers- from driversguide other than giving them money, and I'd like to see some proof that they'll actually have the drivers I'm after before I go doing that!
Usually what I do is figure out who made the device (If there's no manufacturers name you can look up the FCC ID at www.fcc.gov) and go to the manufacturers homepage. Most of them have drivers downloadable for just about everything they ever made.
And what really pisses me off most; if it weren't for places like driversguide.com and windrivers.com, the MANUFACTURERS site with the FREE drivers would probably be a whole heap easier to find via google!!
Last week a friend of mine's electronic gate stopped working. Ants had built a nest inside the control box shorting a bunch of stuff out. Just now I cleaned out about a quantrillion baby ants from under my BSD box.. Must've been some food crumbs under there or something. I first noticed them 'cos there was a trail of ants going from under the computer up to my modem and back. I can't see any food on the modem either so I have no idea what they were doing there!
I think they just like warm dry places to nest, and inside electronic devices is usually warm and dry.
Alternatively; what if I strip all the comments and formatting, and rename all the varables to random meaningless sequences? The code will still compile but won't be much help for understanding or improving the program. I looked this up a while back, so I've forgotten where I found it but the answer is apparently 'no'; source code doesn't count if it's been obfuscated or is delivered in some unusable form.
I'd love to know what the situation would be if anyone ever managed to write a useful program in INTERCAL and tried to release it under GPL :)
You won't be able to play regular ogg's on a 33MHz machine, even if it had an FPU. You could possibly play them on a 486 DX4-100 with nothing else running, and you can easily do it on a P90.. I've played mp3's on a DX2-66 before; even with a custom kernel and booting directly into a bash shell you still can't play them at 44KHz stereo. OTOH if you're playing low-bitrate (16-32 kbps) ogg's (perhaps for recorded speech or telephone hold music) that would probably work..
I'm highly amused by some of the comments in this thread; from my own perspective anything better than a P100 w 32M ram is a perfectly acceptable system. My main machine right now is a P166 with 64M and as well as using it for browsing, programming, etc it provides NAT, DNS, dhcp, apache.. I'm planning to upgrade sometime (probably to a P233, I had one last year but it died :( ). I'm in no hurry; this machine does everything I need for now.
My first linux machine was a 386 with 4M ram. I had to upgrade to 8M fairly quickly because it would totally thrash when I tried to compile the kernel (or almost anything else bigger than hello.c) and I couldn't run X at all until I got a 486..
Kids these days.. bah!!
I'll bookmark the link though; I have a spare P100 with 8M on it that I'd like to turn into a dedicated mp3/ogg player.
- If you buy drugs you're providing justification for the 'war on drugs'
- The 'war on drugs' has resulted in US money being paid directly to terrorist organisations in Columbia, Afghanistan and South America.
QED: If you buy drugs, you're supporting terrorisim. The conclusion is logically sound... play progress quest instead.
A few links, minimal comment; This was mentioned (iirc) on /. earlier, and I keep referring back to it. I really don't understand the difference between a person seeing and hearing something in public versus a camera observing the same thing.
And I wonder what your neighbors would think of my my perv-cam hack
Oh shit, it just gets worse.. "Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and Donald Becker" also returns Bill Gates as the third in the list! You're telling me Bill has been hacking the linux kernel too?!! (or perhaps this is the real reason why he's so reluctant to reveal any more Windows source code)
One totally fucking HUGE oversight that makes this howto utterly useless. By default, most Linux installs create an extended partition and put several non-DOS logical partitions in it.
I'm not sure if XP's fdisk program has been updated, but they mention DOS5.0's fdisk program as being 'equally' useful in removing Linux partitions and it's not. The usual DOS/Windows fdisk program can remove the LILO boot loader easily enough (fdisk /mbr) and can remove any kind of primary partition, but it CANNOT remove non-DOS logical partitions or non-empty extended partitions. Thus is simply cannot remove the partitions that almost any standard linux install creates. This is a HUGE flaw in the DOS fdisk program. To remove linux (or any other non-DOS logical partitions) you have to use a non-microsoft tool such as norton utilities or Linux's own fdisk program.
Thank you MS for one again spreading misleading information about Linux. Please don't try to help when you don't even understand, and are a large part of, the problem!
I apologise for this totally of-topic rant, but I have to help people several times a week because this so-called help causes them to render their linux system unbootable, and they then have to spend considerable effort getting boot and rescue floppies to get back into linux so they can remove the partitions PROPERLY.
The SAMBA people have already had trouble in this area and advise ppl not to look at any of MS's shared-source code. What worries me is that shared source will be presented as 'example' code to be worked on in universities, and an entire generation of programmers will be forced to study it or not graduate. That's one hell of a wedge they can use against any Windows-interoperability OSS project.
There's two problems with this; one is condensation. The other is that your PC contains things like the CMOS battery and lots of capacitors which have some 'liquid' parts and die horribly when frozen.
Also something else I just though of.. think about 'armies invading Russia, buttons becoming brittle and falling off' in terms of solder and board etchings..
Talent and effort huh? Then why's it still illegal to copy britney or nsync?
Anyhow, your theory is bunk.. there's months, perhaps a year of effort in putting out a CD? Several million years for the 'development' of the cat..
But why bother reloading at all? just check that the connection came directly from your IP at the time. If it's being proxied, the connection the web server sees will -always- be from the proxy and not directly from your IP.
Actually you don't even need your own server to test this. There's a page at junkbusters that tells you (amongst other things) the IP you connected from. If the IP junkbusters gives you isn't the same as the one ifconfig thinks you have, then there's a proxy somewhere
Finally, in reply to another comment about traceroute.. http uses TCP port 80 (https uses a higher port, but since everything but the IP is encrypted and none of it can be cached, there's little point in proxying it) , traceroute uses UDP on some other port, and ping uses ICMP echo packets. Apples and oranges..
Granted, i'm just being an ass and didn't even read the article, but are you -sure- this point is invalid? What was the original term of copyright, and what is the current one? And how did that happen? :)
Patient: But why is the test so expensive?
Doctor: Well, the test itself costs is really simple and only costs $2.50 The other $3000 goes to the great grandson of the researcher who stumbled onto the gene that the test looks for almost 120 years ago. He gets away with charging $3000 because it's a life-or-death diagnosis, and since he owns the worldwide patent on it nobody's allowed to make a cheaper test.
Switching video inputs on a bt848 doesn't work so well anyhow, it takes the card 200ms or more to sync the new signal so for four cameras you're limited to about 1 frame per second.
On my crappy overloaded p233 I can manage about 6 frames per minute at 640x480 from 4 cams after I timestamp, jpeg compress and archive them. Good enough for me considering that I don't really own anything valuable. Plus I scale down and upload every third frame here because I'm a cam geek.
.. which really proves the point.. when you say DivX everyone thinks of the codec right away, and virtually nobody thinks of (or has even *heard* of) the rights-restricting videodisc standard with the same name.
I think that was the point.. perhaps I should read the article :)
40m and 80m SSB, 6wpm morse code.. .. seems fair enough to me..
Say my ISP provides me the IP address "202.49.6.35" via DHCP. If you run a little javascript thingy via the browser on that box and ask what it's IP is, you get "202.49.6.35" and all is known to be good. This little javascript thingy could be on one of the ISP's internal pages that almost everyone has to go to, say the one that says what your monthly account and traffic usage is. To be sure, make the page 'require' javascript too..
Internally I'm using 192.168.1.0/24 addresses. If you run the same javascript thingy on a windows box behind the NAT, it says it's IP is 192.168.1.4 but you can see in the logs that the request came from 202.49.6.35. Well, that's only one windows box so perhaps it's one of those 'airport' things.
Two days later you see '192.168.1.3' from the same user, it's a fair guess that they have two windows machines behind some kind of NAT.
Trust me, you'll know when your call is going via satellite, the delay is quite noticable and very disconcerting. Sometimes you can hear the echo of your own voice (eg if they're using a speakerphone), the person you're speaking to will seem to pause before replying to you, and continue speaking if you try to interrupt.