I admit that I didn't realize itunes can organize mp3s the way I would like to see them via tags and dynamic playlists, but that is besides the point. Your response *is* ironic as Walkiry pointed out, because it involves playlists, which require tagging. I've already made it clear that re-tagging thousands of mp3s isn't an option. It would be too tedious for reasons that are throughly argued in my response to your original (clearly misguided) reply to my post.
Gee thanks genius. A bunch of features which I can't bloody use! These all require ID3 tags, including your dynamic *playlists*. What did I say about playlists and my thousands of mp3s that don't have ID3 tags? What country are you from, you probably only get english music that comes pre-tagged. You haven't been in my situation, you arrogant twit. I have a pre-existing collection, of mostly Hindi music, and I don't have the time to go though thousands of mp3s and re-tag them in a relational manner using keywords. Do you have any idea how much time that would take? There are other things to do, you know - like going out and having a life. Can you really say it is my fault for not being anal enough to edit every song I ever downloaded, adding appropriate, systemized tag information? Are you crazy? You say it is nobody's fault that my songs aren't tagged but at the same time you expect them to be tagged. Who is going to do this? - thus I need an alternative UI option.
Obviously my argument about ID3 tags is not a straw man argument. A straw man argument would be trying knock down another position, like apple's present organizational system. I like it and am not trying to knock it, as I said, it is not good in "in my case". I am just saying there should be an alternative. What are you, some kind of an apple nazi?
In fact it is your argument that is the straw man. You presented a distorted view of my argument and knocked that down in order to try and knock down my original argument. I never said the apple organizational system in and of itself was bad. Again, I repeat, I need an alternative option - apples system should not be slated for destruction - I am not "against" it. What are you card carrying member of the republican party? A lot of folks on slashdot are a lot more conservative than they realize.
What about a bunch of these linux based ipods wirelessly networked with 802.11 compact flash cards, recording synchronized audio streams to a master wireless laptop? Great for recording multi-track music or for film soundtrack. There is a huge market for this - digital recorders exist for these applications but a system with all the features ipod linux could offer is ridiculously expensive. The ipod is a mass produced, and thus a relatively low cost product that could be useful in bringing down costs for smaller productions that are willing to hack it. Heck, properly made, it wouldn't even have to be a hack.
Now we just have to wait and see if the ipod linux team can break the code of the proprietary mp3 encoder/decorder built into the ipod. Ipod linux doesn't quite record or play mp3s yet.
This is flamebait, and I should mod it as such, but I think it'll make more of a difference if I explain why I would.
Who is going to go making playlists for every one of their folders and then update those playlists every time they add new folders? I see a problem here, one where the ipod playlists become a pain in the ass to keep up - why keep the same data in two places where they will surely fall out of sync without tedious manual synhronization?
I also use folders to make a custom nested format which separates songs by language, style, and year. You can't do that with playlists. A final plus for me is that browsing by folder avoids using ID3 tags, many of which aren't present on the the thousands of foreign language mp3s I have. The original ipod firmware lists a lot of songs as Unknown for me - I have to play them to figure out what the songs are - how useful is that?
The parent's response is similar to the many I saw on the ipodlounge forums. When people asked about browsing by folder, a bunch of apple zealots would shoot em down saying apple's way is better and that they should use it because it is easier. Well not in my case.
-----Some Ideas for the Ipod Linux
A neat thing that has been overlooked - wait till someone replaces the drive with a wireless CF card! We'll get an mp3 player that can be used anywhere around the house to stream music over the local network. We'll have to wait till the Linux firmware can actually play mp3s without skipping though, something the original article submission kinda implied could be done. It appears this is because they are relying on the processor to decode mp3s rather than whatever proprietary hardware mp3 decoder/encoder hardware is in there. Hopefully soon, if they do it at all, they will reverse engineer how to control the mp3 chip in there.
Another idea - what about streaming HDTV over the network and through through the firewire port? A TV with firewire port can do the decoding! Streaming mpeg2 to a firewire equipped HDTV wouldn't require the ipod to do any decoding, so it appears there should be enough procesing power to do this. It'd be nice to see an ipod docked next to the HDTV, and able to play video content from the PC. Didn't Netflix just announce downloadable rentals? Write a program that transcodes the rental into mpeg2 in real time and streams it through the IPOD onto a big TV screen. Pretty neat.
The amount of Unix/Linux coverage is still pretty small in comparison to market share, especially server market share, where the growth rate is several times that of Windows. What was the rate of coverage? 17 references in how many pages of popular IT textbooks, used by how many students? 17 references in 4,031 pages of IT text used by 500 to 800 thousand students every year. Ouch.
Besides, I thought the main point of the article was to point out the blatant mis-information in the few references that do exist. Now the author doesn't really pick the references apart, he only quotes them - he assumes his audience is technically competent enough to do so. That was probably a mistake, as it could cause a lot of people to fall into the same argument you've just made. Or maybe you just didn't read the article. The mis-charcterizations of Linux in these books are gross and incompetant, here are two of the 17 references:
"Unix also poses some security problems, because multiple users and jobs can access the same file simultaneously. Vendors have developed different versions of Unix that are incompatible, thereby limiting software portability."
"One reason Microsoft's software is the de facto standard is because it is available to run on a variety of computer systems. Recognizing the desirability and benefits of interoperability and software portability, Microsoft's Windows products are designed to be used on many computers besides desktop systems (servers, for example). This is not only a wish of Microsoft, but it is also the wish of many IT professionals responsible for developing and supporting enterprise systems."
There are sometimes trade-offs involved in using Linux, but the books emphasize mostly downsides, and aim to paint the downsides with a broad, false stroke, when in fact the downsides and *upsides* are complex vary greatly with application.
Sure gloat about the War of 1812. Not to mention it was the Brits that burned down the White House, led by Major General Robert Ross. His account reads:
"Judging it of consequence to complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay, so that the army might retire without loss of time, the following buildings were set fire to and consumed -- the capitol, including the Senate house and House of Representation, the Arsenal, the Dock-Yard, Treasury, War office, President's Palace, Rope-Walk, and the great bridge across the Potewmac."
Of course I'm sure the Canadians played a pivotal role in cheering on the powerful British forces from the sidelines. They also incited Indians against American settlements on the border, God forbid their militia fight their own battles. While the U.S. chose to repel the unfair rule of the British, the Canadians smiled and took it up the ass, only gradually rebelling, with ideas borrowed from the United States. I wonder if the British would have eventually even given Canada sovereignty had the U.S. not weakened and driven them out from most of North America.
Alright, who downloaded the stand alone 2d barcode reader? I am itching to read my license data now. Someone please mirror it. For those of you who couldn't get to the instruction you should use a large GIF scan (~1meg) for best results. A digital camera works but not as well.
slashdotters argue that code is artistic work and should not be patentable, that it is more like writing..
On the other they argue for the mandantory release of code..
Should book publishers then be required to release author's works for free on the internet?
This needs to be reconciled somehow. The patent issue I can understand, they often give someone a stronghold on trivial permutations of existing technology. Hopefully it will only be a matter of time before our congress people comes to their senses with this one. We need someone well respected and vocal to educate them.
Mandatory open source is incompatible with capitalism, so why even push it?
One thing worth noting is that the windows software they used to send magic WOL packets sent them to UDP port 2304. I don't know if this port is standard, so if WOL works through your firewall with their program but not ether-wake or some other software, find out what port your software uses and subsititure that into the firewall forwarding rules.
This is an awesome site, but who else wondering where this guy got the time to draw every last detail of his setup and the process in pdf? I am talking a physically accurate vector drawing of the wiring closet, other pdfs that show all the way to a detailed termination at the ports, and lots more misc diagrams. I researched structured wiring for my parent's house and he has what amounts to days of googling with cross referencing to remove misinformation, organized in perfect detail. The process is simply and clearly described in an obsessive, but organized way - the site could be published as a book. Amazing, I wonder what this guy does for a living. He is smart has lots of free time.
Someone builds their own EZ-Pass readers for fun and profit. I'd assume anyone with RFID engineering knowledge could find out what frequency the tag operates on, either by bringing some kind of radio monitor to an EZ-Pass booth or by taking the tag apart. Each TAG should send a unique response, encrypted or not. It could for example be used by high schools to make sure kids don't leave, for one thing. I'm sure the rest of the slashdot crowd could come up with plenty more big brother like scenarios.
I did this once. A cheap radio shack photocell tied to +5 volts via an active output pin on your parallel port, with the other end of the photocell going to an input pin on that same port, will cause that input pin to read 0 when little or no ambient lighting is present. When hit by a red laser pointer the resistance across the photocell is lowered and the voltage at the input pin ramps up above the binary threshold, to more than ~0.8 volt but less than 5 volts. Because of this, reading the input pin from software when the photocell is lit by a laser beam shows a binary value of 1. To avoid false alarms from stray light, I housed the photocell in a sealed, opaque box with a hole in it for the laser beam to enter and hit the photocell.
A simple C program that reads and writes the memory address of the parallel port can detect, log, and act on these "laser trip" events, doing something as simple as beeping, or as complex as taking a picture and asking for a code. The program should write a 1 to the bit that controls the output pin you are using so that +5 volts appears on it. It should then repeatedly read the input pin you are using. When the input pin transitions from 1 to 0, even for a moment, you know the laser beam has been cut.
The quick and dirty C code to do parallel port operations under linux can be found at here. For beginners I suggest you use one of control bits/pins as your output and one of the status bits/pins as your input. The data bits/pins are bi-directional and must be configured for input or output, and using them makes things slightly more complicated. If you want to get really fancy try using the parallel port IRQ to detect the transition from 1 to 0, this should save processing power by avoiding an expensive loop to check the state of the input pin constantly.
If you need a little more background on the parallel port before diving in, check out this resource
Finally, the above description is for a single laser beam. I used a mirror to bounce a single beam around, to get greater coverage, and to provide the effect of multiple beams in the presence of aerosol or powder. You should be able to support thirteen independent laser beams on a single parallel port, using the data bits/pins and the status bits/pins combined.
Are you an amazing software developer looking for challenging opportunities? We've got the place for you. Our organization is seeking a mid-level (or junior with fair experience) software engineer, who is energetic and EXTREMELY self-motivated. Our company only hires people who drive themselves for the goal.
You will be working on software for the PalmOS platform as well as software for Windows. You should be flexible with the type of programming you do. Your work may include writing Windows components for integration with Palm.
Compensation is $40k/yr, no benefits initially. You will be working from home initially and will be worked like a dog, so please expect long hours. Please include a full resume and a detailed list of projects you have been involved with.
I have heard arguments that it would be dangerous to jettison spent nuclear fuel into space, because an accident on the way up would spread nuclear waste over a wide area of earth.
Now that only begs the question of if it's dangerous to send a nuclear engine into space. How risky is such a thing?
I don't know much about the subject at all, so excuse me if this sounds like ignorance.
Agreed, but when I mod up a post like this one and it gets meta-moderated, I lose Karma. I have modded down posts that were blatantly plagiarized from other threads and sources on the internet, only to get a post meta-moderation letter from slashdot telling me my karma has been "penalized". Replies to posts tip me off to this sort of behavior, but meta-moderators don't read into context before judging a post. The system is imperfect and often the best and most knowledgeable moderators lose their karma.
Compact flash is addressed much like any other drive, but often the card's own logic distributes writes so that all portions of the card are used evenly. This is called "wear leveling" and extends the life of the card. The problem is that cheap no-name manufacturers don't implement it, so do a little research before picking one. Also, I hear that some of the nicer cards remap failed sectors and do read after write verification, though at the expense of speed. Again, check into the specs of the more respected brands before buying.
Now consider that a good consumer level CF card can do 300,000 writes on a sector before failure. With the benefit of wear leveling this means a 64 meg card can have rougly 64 x 300,000 megabytes written to it before failure. Now this seems fine and dandy, but you still have two potential problems to worry about.
Frequently accessing the card causes the OS to write information like last access time very frequently. Each time this happens the data is moved to a new sector on the card, using up one of the 300,000 writes that sector is allowed. In some scenarios this can wear down the card very quickly. With backups, the data usually sits unaccessed, so take it as a warning. Alternatively, pass the 'noatime' option to mount. This tells linux not to update access times.
One last pitfall - CF has a bad habit of dying if power goes out mid-write. For this reason I'd buy 2 quality CF cards with more capacity, and thus lifespan, than I need, rotate them, and not worry about it.
During that blackout the other week, regular cells in the my area (White Plains, NY) died. My buddy's Nextel wouldn't dial out, but direct connect worked. There must something very different about the way direct connect on Nextel works. I was under the impression that phone to phone connections are made, bypassing the network.
Also, the exploit does not circumvent any security measures in the PS2, this should be obvious since you need a legal PS1 disc to perform the hack in the first place.
I don't mean to troll or anything but the buffer overflow code that is written on to the memory card does circumvent security measures, doesn't it? Maybe I misunderstood but can't anyone now burn their own custom software on a disc, put it's ID in title.db, and thus give that software full access to previously protected hardware? Or does the hack have to facilitate piracy of copyrighted software in some way to be a violation of the DMCA?
I have been reading here that the design of the PS2 doesn't provide a way for a software hack to allow the playing of region hacked or pirated discs. I am assuming this is because all the verification of the disc takes place in hardware. But can't coders eventually write their own loader in software, emulating what the PS2 hardware does when booting a disc?
Finally one question, can you recommend a resource for learning console hacking to someone already familiar with computer science and some hardware?
Now that people know about this weakness it will be the focus of a lot of hacking to create a title.db that will run off of any game, thus meaning all you have to do is replace the file on a memory card (Is this a PS1 or PS2 memory card we're talking about?) and voila. Maybe even give us a nice "Insert unsigned disk now" prompt.
I got the the impression that the Playstation 2 internal ROM loads a specific config from title.db based on the ID of the PS1 disc in the drive. So the overflow code in title.db doesn't run unless a hacked section that corresponds to the ID of the present disc exists in title.db. To include all titles in the hacked memory card would require too much space.
A solution would be to have all your custom software discs use the same ID, which would correspond to a single hacked config section in title.db.
Has anyone interfaced one of these to a computer? Do they work on a standard protocol? Something that Linux works with? It would be handy in voice controlling a car computer that I've been thinking about hacking together for fun. Every extra wire eliminated in such a cluttered environment would be a blessing.
Guess what? It takes me to this overture search page. Makes me wonder if they've patented the use of commonly misspelled domains. The odd thing is that the whois database says that kuri5hin.org is not registered. The IE status bar briefly showed contact with auto.search.msn.com before turning up the overture page, which is also bothersome. The most logical explanation is that overture is the default search engine for my IE install. But how did it get that way? Do they just hijack unsuspecting user's browsers?
RG8 is used for old school ethernet networks and is 50 ohm while RG6 is 75 ohm. Television equipment in the U.S. is tuned for 75 ohms so you definitely don't want to use RG8, you'd actually weaken your signal.
Slashdot Mirror
I admit that I didn't realize itunes can organize mp3s the way I would like to see them via tags and dynamic playlists, but that is besides the point. Your response *is* ironic as Walkiry pointed out, because it involves playlists, which require tagging. I've already made it clear that re-tagging thousands of mp3s isn't an option. It would be too tedious for reasons that are throughly argued in my response to your original (clearly misguided) reply to my post.
Gee thanks genius. A bunch of features which I can't bloody use! These all require ID3 tags, including your dynamic *playlists*. What did I say about playlists and my thousands of mp3s that don't have ID3 tags? What country are you from, you probably only get english music that comes pre-tagged. You haven't been in my situation, you arrogant twit. I have a pre-existing collection, of mostly Hindi music, and I don't have the time to go though thousands of mp3s and re-tag them in a relational manner using keywords. Do you have any idea how much time that would take? There are other things to do, you know - like going out and having a life. Can you really say it is my fault for not being anal enough to edit every song I ever downloaded, adding appropriate, systemized tag information? Are you crazy? You say it is nobody's fault that my songs aren't tagged but at the same time you expect them to be tagged. Who is going to do this? - thus I need an alternative UI option.
Obviously my argument about ID3 tags is not a straw man argument. A straw man argument would be trying knock down another position, like apple's present organizational system. I like it and am not trying to knock it, as I said, it is not good in "in my case". I am just saying there should be an alternative. What are you, some kind of an apple nazi?
In fact it is your argument that is the straw man. You presented a distorted view of my argument and knocked that down in order to try and knock down my original argument. I never said the apple organizational system in and of itself was bad. Again, I repeat, I need an alternative option - apples system should not be slated for destruction - I am not "against" it. What are you card carrying member of the republican party? A lot of folks on slashdot are a lot more conservative than they realize.
What about a bunch of these linux based ipods wirelessly networked with 802.11 compact flash cards, recording synchronized audio streams to a master wireless laptop? Great for recording multi-track music or for film soundtrack. There is a huge market for this - digital recorders exist for these applications but a system with all the features ipod linux could offer is ridiculously expensive. The ipod is a mass produced, and thus a relatively low cost product that could be useful in bringing down costs for smaller productions that are willing to hack it. Heck, properly made, it wouldn't even have to be a hack.
Now we just have to wait and see if the ipod linux team can break the code of the proprietary mp3 encoder/decorder built into the ipod. Ipod linux doesn't quite record or play mp3s yet.
This is flamebait, and I should mod it as such, but I think it'll make more of a difference if I explain why I would.
Who is going to go making playlists for every one of their folders and then update those playlists every time they add new folders? I see a problem here, one where the ipod playlists become a pain in the ass to keep up - why keep the same data in two places where they will surely fall out of sync without tedious manual synhronization?
I also use folders to make a custom nested format which separates songs by language, style, and year. You can't do that with playlists. A final plus for me is that browsing by folder avoids using ID3 tags, many of which aren't present on the the thousands of foreign language mp3s I have. The original ipod firmware lists a lot of songs as Unknown for me - I have to play them to figure out what the songs are - how useful is that?
The parent's response is similar to the many I saw on the ipodlounge forums. When people asked about browsing by folder, a bunch of apple zealots would shoot em down saying apple's way is better and that they should use it because it is easier. Well not in my case.
-----Some Ideas for the Ipod Linux
A neat thing that has been overlooked - wait till someone replaces the drive with a wireless CF card! We'll get an mp3 player that can be used anywhere around the house to stream music over the local network. We'll have to wait till the Linux firmware can actually play mp3s without skipping though, something the original article submission kinda implied could be done. It appears this is because they are relying on the processor to decode mp3s rather than whatever proprietary hardware mp3 decoder/encoder hardware is in there. Hopefully soon, if they do it at all, they will reverse engineer how to control the mp3 chip in there.
Another idea - what about streaming HDTV over the network and through through the firewire port? A TV with firewire port can do the decoding! Streaming mpeg2 to a firewire equipped HDTV wouldn't require the ipod to do any decoding, so it appears there should be enough procesing power to do this. It'd be nice to see an ipod docked next to the HDTV, and able to play video content from the PC. Didn't Netflix just announce downloadable rentals? Write a program that transcodes the rental into mpeg2 in real time and streams it through the IPOD onto a big TV screen. Pretty neat.
Besides, I thought the main point of the article was to point out the blatant mis-information in the few references that do exist. Now the author doesn't really pick the references apart, he only quotes them - he assumes his audience is technically competent enough to do so. That was probably a mistake, as it could cause a lot of people to fall into the same argument you've just made. Or maybe you just didn't read the article. The mis-charcterizations of Linux in these books are gross and incompetant, here are two of the 17 references:
There are sometimes trade-offs involved in using Linux, but the books emphasize mostly downsides, and aim to paint the downsides with a broad, false stroke, when in fact the downsides and *upsides* are complex vary greatly with application.
Sure gloat about the War of 1812. Not to mention it was the Brits that burned down the White House, led by Major General Robert Ross. His account reads:
"Judging it of consequence to complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay, so that the army might retire without loss of time, the following buildings were set fire to and consumed -- the capitol, including the Senate house and House of Representation, the Arsenal, the Dock-Yard, Treasury, War office, President's Palace, Rope-Walk, and the great bridge across the Potewmac."
Of course I'm sure the Canadians played a pivotal role in cheering on the powerful British forces from the sidelines. They also incited Indians against American settlements on the border, God forbid their militia fight their own battles. While the U.S. chose to repel the unfair rule of the British, the Canadians smiled and took it up the ass, only gradually rebelling, with ideas borrowed from the United States. I wonder if the British would have eventually even given Canada sovereignty had the U.S. not weakened and driven them out from most of North America.
Alright, who downloaded the stand alone 2d barcode reader? I am itching to read my license data now. Someone please mirror it. For those of you who couldn't get to the instruction you should use a large GIF scan (~1meg) for best results. A digital camera works but not as well.
slashdotters argue that code is artistic work and should not be patentable, that it is more like writing..
On the other they argue for the mandantory release of code..
Should book publishers then be required to release author's works for free on the internet?
This needs to be reconciled somehow. The patent issue I can understand, they often give someone a stronghold on trivial permutations of existing technology. Hopefully it will only be a matter of time before our congress people comes to their senses with this one. We need someone well respected and vocal to educate them.
Mandatory open source is incompatible with capitalism, so why even push it?
Wake on LAN through a router/firewall
One thing worth noting is that the windows software they used to send magic WOL packets sent them to UDP port 2304. I don't know if this port is standard, so if WOL works through your firewall with their program but not ether-wake or some other software, find out what port your software uses and subsititure that into the firewall forwarding rules.
This is an awesome site, but who else wondering where this guy got the time to draw every last detail of his setup and the process in pdf? I am talking a physically accurate vector drawing of the wiring closet, other pdfs that show all the way to a detailed termination at the ports, and lots more misc diagrams. I researched structured wiring for my parent's house and he has what amounts to days of googling with cross referencing to remove misinformation, organized in perfect detail. The process is simply and clearly described in an obsessive, but organized way - the site could be published as a book. Amazing, I wonder what this guy does for a living. He is smart has lots of free time.
http://www.swhowto.com/images/ReelStand_2.JPG
http://www.swhowto.com/images/SkNetPanel.pdf
http://www.swhowto.com/images/TelCommDetails3.pdf
http://www.swhowto.com/images/VideoLoss_2xa.pdf
Someone builds their own EZ-Pass readers for fun and profit. I'd assume anyone with RFID engineering knowledge could find out what frequency the tag operates on, either by bringing some kind of radio monitor to an EZ-Pass booth or by taking the tag apart. Each TAG should send a unique response, encrypted or not. It could for example be used by high schools to make sure kids don't leave, for one thing. I'm sure the rest of the slashdot crowd could come up with plenty more big brother like scenarios.
I did this once. A cheap radio shack photocell tied to +5 volts via an active output pin on your parallel port, with the other end of the photocell going to an input pin on that same port, will cause that input pin to read 0 when little or no ambient lighting is present. When hit by a red laser pointer the resistance across the photocell is lowered and the voltage at the input pin ramps up above the binary threshold, to more than ~0.8 volt but less than 5 volts. Because of this, reading the input pin from software when the photocell is lit by a laser beam shows a binary value of 1. To avoid false alarms from stray light, I housed the photocell in a sealed, opaque box with a hole in it for the laser beam to enter and hit the photocell.
A simple C program that reads and writes the memory address of the parallel port can detect, log, and act on these "laser trip" events, doing something as simple as beeping, or as complex as taking a picture and asking for a code. The program should write a 1 to the bit that controls the output pin you are using so that +5 volts appears on it. It should then repeatedly read the input pin you are using. When the input pin transitions from 1 to 0, even for a moment, you know the laser beam has been cut.
The quick and dirty C code to do parallel port operations under linux can be found at here. For beginners I suggest you use one of control bits/pins as your output and one of the status bits/pins as your input. The data bits/pins are bi-directional and must be configured for input or output, and using them makes things slightly more complicated. If you want to get really fancy try using the parallel port IRQ to detect the transition from 1 to 0, this should save processing power by avoiding an expensive loop to check the state of the input pin constantly.
If you need a little more background on the parallel port before diving in, check out this resource
Finally, the above description is for a single laser beam. I used a mirror to bounce a single beam around, to get greater coverage, and to provide the effect of multiple beams in the presence of aerosol or powder. You should be able to support thirteen independent laser beams on a single parallel port, using the data bits/pins and the status bits/pins combined.
Are you an amazing software developer looking for challenging opportunities? We've got the place for you. Our organization is seeking a mid-level (or junior with fair experience) software engineer, who is energetic and EXTREMELY self-motivated. Our company only hires people who drive themselves for the goal.
m l
You will be working on software for the PalmOS platform as well as software for Windows. You should be flexible with the type of programming you do. Your work may include writing Windows components for integration with Palm.
Compensation is $40k/yr, no benefits initially. You will be working from home initially and will be worked like a dog, so please expect long hours. Please include a full resume and a detailed list of projects you have been involved with.
Compensation: $40k/yr FT
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sof/18823825.ht
I have heard arguments that it would be dangerous to jettison spent nuclear fuel into space, because an accident on the way up would spread nuclear waste over a wide area of earth.
Now that only begs the question of if it's dangerous to send a nuclear engine into space. How risky is such a thing?
I don't know much about the subject at all, so excuse me if this sounds like ignorance.
I guess the slashdot editors editors weren't too into the hacking/phreaking scene back in the day. This was documented some 10 years ago.
If you want proof, consult the google time machine. Scroll down or search for "Chrome Box".
Agreed, but when I mod up a post like this one and it gets meta-moderated, I lose Karma. I have modded down posts that were blatantly plagiarized from other threads and sources on the internet, only to get a post meta-moderation letter from slashdot telling me my karma has been "penalized". Replies to posts tip me off to this sort of behavior, but meta-moderators don't read into context before judging a post. The system is imperfect and often the best and most knowledgeable moderators lose their karma.
Compact flash is addressed much like any other drive, but often the card's own logic distributes writes so that all portions of the card are used evenly. This is called "wear leveling" and extends the life of the card. The problem is that cheap no-name manufacturers don't implement it, so do a little research before picking one. Also, I hear that some of the nicer cards remap failed sectors and do read after write verification, though at the expense of speed. Again, check into the specs of the more respected brands before buying.
Now consider that a good consumer level CF card can do 300,000 writes on a sector before failure. With the benefit of wear leveling this means a 64 meg card can have rougly 64 x 300,000 megabytes written to it before failure. Now this seems fine and dandy, but you still have two potential problems to worry about.
Frequently accessing the card causes the OS to write information like last access time very frequently. Each time this happens the data is moved to a new sector on the card, using up one of the 300,000 writes that sector is allowed. In some scenarios this can wear down the card very quickly. With backups, the data usually sits unaccessed, so take it as a warning. Alternatively, pass the 'noatime' option to mount. This tells linux not to update access times.
One last pitfall - CF has a bad habit of dying if power goes out mid-write. For this reason I'd buy 2 quality CF cards with more capacity, and thus lifespan, than I need, rotate them, and not worry about it.
During that blackout the other week, regular cells in the my area (White Plains, NY) died. My buddy's Nextel wouldn't dial out, but direct connect worked. There must something very different about the way direct connect on Nextel works. I was under the impression that phone to phone connections are made, bypassing the network.
I have been reading here that the design of the PS2 doesn't provide a way for a software hack to allow the playing of region hacked or pirated discs. I am assuming this is because all the verification of the disc takes place in hardware. But can't coders eventually write their own loader in software, emulating what the PS2 hardware does when booting a disc?
Finally one question, can you recommend a resource for learning console hacking to someone already familiar with computer science and some hardware?
I got the the impression that the Playstation 2 internal ROM loads a specific config from title.db based on the ID of the PS1 disc in the drive. So the overflow code in title.db doesn't run unless a hacked section that corresponds to the ID of the present disc exists in title.db. To include all titles in the hacked memory card would require too much space.
A solution would be to have all your custom software discs use the same ID, which would correspond to a single hacked config section in title.db.
Has anyone interfaced one of these to a computer? Do they work on a standard protocol? Something that Linux works with? It would be handy in voice controlling a car computer that I've been thinking about hacking together for fun. Every extra wire eliminated in such a cluttered environment would be a blessing.
I was just trying to head over to www.kuro5hin.org after visiting slashdot and mistankenly typed www.kuri5hin.org.
Guess what? It takes me to this overture search page. Makes me wonder if they've patented the use of commonly misspelled domains. The odd thing is that the whois database says that kuri5hin.org is not registered. The IE status bar briefly showed contact with auto.search.msn.com before turning up the overture page, which is also bothersome. The most logical explanation is that overture is the default search engine for my IE install. But how did it get that way? Do they just hijack unsuspecting user's browsers?
RG8 is used for old school ethernet networks and is 50 ohm while RG6 is 75 ohm. Television equipment in the U.S. is tuned for 75 ohms so you definitely don't want to use RG8, you'd actually weaken your signal.
slashdot marketting for B&O?
An acoustic lens that makes sound travel equally in all directions? Sounds like a fast DSP that cancels out room reflections.
How about the recently made Ars Technica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video? It was made with exactly what you want to do in mind.