I haven't really been up to date on the latest cell tech, but maybe a few of you who are can address what I'm wondering about -
The signal from the GPS satellites is pretty weak...How does the cell phone reliably get its coordinates? Most of the handheld GPS units I have used will lose GPS lock if you have it in the car, in buildings or even under trees because of the line-of-sight obstruction. If you require E911 service, the chances are pretty good you will be in a location that doesn't get very hot GPS reception. Is there some kind of secondary location service?
Antennas must be tuned for optimum reception of a signal, which means that in a GPS enabled cell phone there is probably two antennas - one for GPS and one for cell service. Can anyone confirm that theory? It could theoretically use the same antenna for both GPS and cell service, but either way if you wanted to disable it you could cut the trace that carries the signal to the GPS controller.
Hmm...Downloaded it and installed it, but the seed hosts included with the program, katcher.2y.net and monolith.2y.net are not active on port 4900, which seems to be the default port this protocol uses.
The katcher.2y.net address resolves to 128.114.51.108, and monolith doesn't resolve at all. Reverse DNS lookup indicates that everything in that class C netblock belongs to UC Santa Cruz and nothing in there is talking on 4900. Seeing as how the seeders are not talking on port 4900 and there's no reference on the web pages for more of them, I'm going to guess that this program is more about a proof of concept than a serious contender on the p2p field.
Ah, yes...I remember hearing about Jennicam back in the day. I even visited there a couple of times, but I wasn't impressed with the empty chair, nor did I have the attention span to wait for that one flash of boobie, and the same pretty much goes for all camwhores.
That is why I was most surprised a couple of weeks ago when I VNC'd into a co worker's laptop set up at her house to troubleshoot a router problem I was having and saw a pair of boobs on my monitor. It turns out that while my co worker was here at work, her sister has borrowed the laptop and was showing off her assets to a Yahoo chatroom and had the cam preview window convieniently open.
It was the coolest thing that has ever happened to me, especially since it was during the normal course of mundane systems administration. I mean, there I was troubleshooting a crypto map and *bam* 20 year old boobs delivered to my doorstep. It almost makes me wish my routers would freak out more often.
Ah, the wonders of Google. This article addresses the second half of my post as well as your question.
It seems that it's illegal to use an autodialer or pre-recorded message to telemarket to cell phone users.
The rules are still in place even though now you are able to take your land line and put it on your cell phone. The FCC does not care about the added complexity for telemarketers, it seems. It seems that the FCC is saying to them "Figure it out on your own. But if you make a mistake, we're coming after you."
It'd be cool to be able to transfer my home number to my cell and carry it with me wherever, not to mention cutting out the cost of my phone line, but I'm concerned that the system is not quite working properly yet. I think I'll wait until I hear more success stories.
The other issue that I am wondering about is telemarketing. It's illegal for telemarketers to call your cell phone, but if I take my land line number and give it to my cell phone, how will the telemarketers know not to call it? Did the FCC ever say anything about this?
Does this REALLY matter anymore? Are they still harping on the original code that Jon released? Did anyone bother to check that there are dozens of freeware applications, and ones that are commercially sold that are able to decrypt, de-macrovision, and de-regionize DVD's in one click?
The original DeCSS code that this bullshit is about isn't even a factor anymore. A better mousetrap has been built. Why bother this kid anymore? All this points out is that the Norwegian court system is owned by corporate interests, and the fools running it follow their whims like sheep.
Question for those of you who have these things
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The write speed of an 8X DVD is about 11MB/sec, right? Does anyone have problems with their hard disks keeping up with that speed, especially when they are doing other stuff in the background?
What is the point of a 2MB buffer on this thing? It would run out in 1/5 of a second....
Forgive me, but I know very little about UNIX programming. Does this mean that if you were to write a program that tweaks memory addresses that don't belong to it, it will be stopped?
Well that fine for the file system, but does it have protected memory space for each session? If so, wouldn't that get kind of demanding on the system? If not, how do you stop people from messing with the core OS?
This is yet another testiment as to how people who don't understand technology shouldn't be allowed to make policy for it. Now, granted, he doesn't seem serious about the idea. However, the very suggestion marks serious ignorance as to how the 'Net works.
Now, if the government ran all the email servers in the world, they could implement this tomorrow, but we are talking about millions of privately owned servers.
Is the plan to turn ISPs into tax cops? Are you going to charge x amount of money whenever you detect an outbound connection on port 25? What if the email doesn't go though? Spammers have dozens of people in the Bcc: field, but only one outbound SMTP connection is made from their computer to send it. If they don't send that mail to their local ISP's server, they'll have no idea how many people that mail went out to. Sure you could set up a system to read the headers of any email that floats by, but we all know how people fell in love with Carnivore.
And if people don't want to pay the tax, what's to stop them from sending the data on another port to an offshore server where it will be routed to its destination via SMTP? Or better yet, tronjanizing a clueless users system to do the same, then what happens when the bill comes?
The gubermint seriously needs to keep their hands off of tech until they get a clue.
Cost isn't the only factor. Besides nationalistic reasons, a lot of countries are worried about being dependent on Microsoft. For instance, most of their standards are locked...SMB, NTFS, Word, Excel, etc...These are all proprietary formats and all had to be reverse engineered to gain compatibility with Linux. This takes time and is a pain in the ass. With formats on open source software, the spec for everything is obviously spelled out.
In other words, these counties don't want to be stuck with a "Black box" that they can't open if the day should come where Microsoft decides they want to play nasty with them. This is not just about today's data...This is about data they will have 100 years from now.
If anything, these things are affirming open source. Yes, Red Hat is removing their free version of the software and strictly selling Enterprise, but oh...Strange that, IT'S STILL OPEN SOURCE.
Microsoft's business model involves black box software, undocumented API's, and sloppy implementations. You want to be compatible with Microsoft? You have to reverse engineer everything. If that can't be done, guess what, you have to buy their software. Microsoft worries that reavealing their source code will destroy them.
Open source lays all out for anyone to see. This won't change with RedHat Enterprise...The GPL forbids it. But yet they are still making money. So tell me again, Microsoft, why open source is dead?
Sorry for the rant. I'm more than a little pissed at the government for forcing crippled products on us.
Ah, that's OK, I feel pretty much the same way. Let them pass their idiotic protectionist laws, and let the unwashed masses poison their minds with the latest reality TV episodes. I will definitely not be first in line to buy an HDTV. Hell I haven't watched the idiot box I have in half a year now.
I researched Macrovision a bit in reponse to your post and it seems that all it really does is exploit a flaw in the way a VCR works by putting in bogus brightness information into the signal. TV's can handle this, but VCR's cannot.
Maybe you should forget about making VHS copies and go straight to digital, then burn it on DVD or something? Have you tried digitizing your video with a video capture board? Unfortunately, I have no idea how capture cards handle Macrovision. My research indicated that most cap cards refuse to do Macrovision, however, I got a whisper from a quick Google search that Pinnacle cards ignore it.
Doh, what was I thinking about the dark side of the moon bit? That's what I get for posting and working at the same time...heh. With any luck a mod will bring that post down to zero so no one sees it:)
Thanks for not flaming for that. Mercy for misstatements on Slashdot is hard to come by.
Anyhow, can we at least agree this whole thing is science fiction and that there are far cheaper ways of generating power than this plan?
The relay satellites are microwave mirrors. They just need to be steered to the correct angle to reflect the beam to the receiver. The surface of such a mirror can be 99% vacuum - a mesh with holes smaller than the wavelength.
I don't argue that this is possible, but the power loss from such a setup would be unacceptable. Remember that the moon is 250,000 miles away from the earth...There will be some major divergence of the radio beam on the way here. Not only that, the grid you speak of will itself absorb energy, and certainly not reflect 100% of the power. Assuming your power station is on the other side of the Earth, you might have relay two or three times, causing even more loss.
Maybe they could use a maser to get the tightest divergence possible, but it would still be an incredibly hard target to hit, let alone relay it to other satellites to get it to the surface. Then you have to worry about freespace loss due to the atmosphere. And the higher frequency you run at, the worse it gets.
To meet global power requirements you'll need to cover a significant portion of the Earth's surface and keep it all in good maintenance in the presence of rain, dust, hail, winds, corrosion, condensation, birds, lightning, ground erosion, vegetation, earthquakes and, of course, people.
Very true, and it's also true that on the moon's spin makes it such that one side is always facing the sun. Why, if you were to put a solar array up there, you would be talking about having 24/7 sunlight for it. That would be great, if you lived on the moon...But what would be the point of building such a thing if you had no power left by the time the beam got here? And that brings up another point...When the dark side is facing the earth, how will the microwave beam get here from the other side?
First of all, the moon is not geosynchronous. Since the moon does not stay in a fixed position over the surface of Earth, how are you going to be able to have a centralized power station receive this energy? Oh you could build hundreds of them, but everyone would have to take their turn. And besides that this sounds like an "American" project. I'd love to hear about how they plan on getting power when the moon happens to be on the other side of the planet.
Relay satellites will not work. Yes, I read the bit about the relay satellites, but that's ridiculous. They would work fine for radio, which only needs miniscule amounts of current in order to work, but if you want to generate enough electricity to power even a lightbulb, you are talking about an enormous amount of radio power. There are only two ways a radio beam can be "bent": Either you bounce it off of something, or you have a station repeat the signal. In the case of power generation, the latter will not work...How are you going to regenerate that much power in a tiny satellite? And if you could, what would be the point of having the lunar base to begin with? Using the satellite as a passive relay would cause enormous power loss.
Besides all this, there's just too much complexity here. Every time you convert from one kind of energy to another there is always some loss involved. So what this guy's proposing is that you have a solar array on the moon, which converts sunlight to electricity at about 20% efficiency, which then converts this electricity to microwaves, which is then beamed down to earth, but never to a fixed location because the moon doesn't stay in one place relative to the surface of the earth, so then you could possibly go though relay satellites which would cause insane power loss. When the beam gets to earth, probably about 4% of its original strength, it's then converted to electricty again and might be able to power some blinky LED's, if you're lucky.
Wouldn't it be easier just to build a massive solar array HERE ON EARTH??
Seriously. George Lucas is too full of himself to listen to the fans. IMHO, seeing the deleted scenes for the first time was cool, but if you watch them over and over the lame factor is too much to bear.
One of the best scenes, when Han one-ups Greedo in the bar was completely profaned, as was the I will-now-step-on-the-tail-of-the-intergalactic-gan gster-who-is-trying-to-kill me scene.
*sigh* I suppose I'm preaching to the choir. With any luck the original will play by default but the DVD will have the option to throw the deleted scenes in using the angle feature for the true masochists among us.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't really been up to date on the latest cell tech, but maybe a few of you who are can address what I'm wondering about -
The signal from the GPS satellites is pretty weak...How does the cell phone reliably get its coordinates? Most of the handheld GPS units I have used will lose GPS lock if you have it in the car, in buildings or even under trees because of the line-of-sight obstruction. If you require E911 service, the chances are pretty good you will be in a location that doesn't get very hot GPS reception. Is there some kind of secondary location service?
Antennas must be tuned for optimum reception of a signal, which means that in a GPS enabled cell phone there is probably two antennas - one for GPS and one for cell service. Can anyone confirm that theory? It could theoretically use the same antenna for both GPS and cell service, but either way if you wanted to disable it you could cut the trace that carries the signal to the GPS controller.
But if you do this, how legal would that be?
Hmm...Downloaded it and installed it, but the seed hosts included with the program, katcher.2y.net and monolith.2y.net are not active on port 4900, which seems to be the default port this protocol uses.
The katcher.2y.net address resolves to 128.114.51.108, and monolith doesn't resolve at all. Reverse DNS lookup indicates that everything in that class C netblock belongs to UC Santa Cruz and nothing in there is talking on 4900. Seeing as how the seeders are not talking on port 4900 and there's no reference on the web pages for more of them, I'm going to guess that this program is more about a proof of concept than a serious contender on the p2p field.
Can it be argued that if you buy CD's, you've already paid your tax to the music industry that's it's OK to download music?
And what's going to stop people from running over to the States and buying CD's at $0.10/disc?
Ah, yes...I remember hearing about Jennicam back in the day. I even visited there a couple of times, but I wasn't impressed with the empty chair, nor did I have the attention span to wait for that one flash of boobie, and the same pretty much goes for all camwhores.
That is why I was most surprised a couple of weeks ago when I VNC'd into a co worker's laptop set up at her house to troubleshoot a router problem I was having and saw a pair of boobs on my monitor. It turns out that while my co worker was here at work, her sister has borrowed the laptop and was showing off her assets to a Yahoo chatroom and had the cam preview window convieniently open.
It was the coolest thing that has ever happened to me, especially since it was during the normal course of mundane systems administration. I mean, there I was troubleshooting a crypto map and *bam* 20 year old boobs delivered to my doorstep. It almost makes me wish my routers would freak out more often.
The RIAA also claims that its tactics are actually working -- to increase awareness and reduce online piracy.
Of course the RIAA tactics are working. How else could you explain the millions of files that were unshar^H^H^H^H^H deleted last month?
Ah, the wonders of Google. This article addresses the second half of my post as well as your question.
It seems that it's illegal to use an autodialer or pre-recorded message to telemarket to cell phone users.
The rules are still in place even though now you are able to take your land line and put it on your cell phone. The FCC does not care about the added complexity for telemarketers, it seems. It seems that the FCC is saying to them "Figure it out on your own. But if you make a mistake, we're coming after you."
It'd be cool to be able to transfer my home number to my cell and carry it with me wherever, not to mention cutting out the cost of my phone line, but I'm concerned that the system is not quite working properly yet. I think I'll wait until I hear more success stories.
The other issue that I am wondering about is telemarketing. It's illegal for telemarketers to call your cell phone, but if I take my land line number and give it to my cell phone, how will the telemarketers know not to call it? Did the FCC ever say anything about this?
Does this REALLY matter anymore? Are they still harping on the original code that Jon released? Did anyone bother to check that there are dozens of freeware applications, and ones that are commercially sold that are able to decrypt, de-macrovision, and de-regionize DVD's in one click?
The original DeCSS code that this bullshit is about isn't even a factor anymore. A better mousetrap has been built. Why bother this kid anymore? All this points out is that the Norwegian court system is owned by corporate interests, and the fools running it follow their whims like sheep.
The write speed of an 8X DVD is about 11MB/sec, right? Does anyone have problems with their hard disks keeping up with that speed, especially when they are doing other stuff in the background?
What is the point of a 2MB buffer on this thing? It would run out in 1/5 of a second....
Forgive me, but I know very little about UNIX programming. Does this mean that if you were to write a program that tweaks memory addresses that don't belong to it, it will be stopped?
Well that fine for the file system, but does it have protected memory space for each session? If so, wouldn't that get kind of demanding on the system? If not, how do you stop people from messing with the core OS?
The program I'm trying to run that is causing my computer to fail is "rm -rf". What's wrong?
A man who's name is "Ransom Love" is the co-founder of SCO? Perhaps they took his name on the business plan a little too literally.
This is yet another testiment as to how people who don't understand technology shouldn't be allowed to make policy for it. Now, granted, he doesn't seem serious about the idea. However, the very suggestion marks serious ignorance as to how the 'Net works.
Now, if the government ran all the email servers in the world, they could implement this tomorrow, but we are talking about millions of privately owned servers.
Is the plan to turn ISPs into tax cops? Are you going to charge x amount of money whenever you detect an outbound connection on port 25? What if the email doesn't go though? Spammers have dozens of people in the Bcc: field, but only one outbound SMTP connection is made from their computer to send it. If they don't send that mail to their local ISP's server, they'll have no idea how many people that mail went out to. Sure you could set up a system to read the headers of any email that floats by, but we all know how people fell in love with Carnivore.
And if people don't want to pay the tax, what's to stop them from sending the data on another port to an offshore server where it will be routed to its destination via SMTP? Or better yet, tronjanizing a clueless users system to do the same, then what happens when the bill comes?
The gubermint seriously needs to keep their hands off of tech until they get a clue.
Well, it goes deeper than that.
Cost isn't the only factor. Besides nationalistic reasons, a lot of countries are worried about being dependent on Microsoft. For instance, most of their standards are locked...SMB, NTFS, Word, Excel, etc...These are all proprietary formats and all had to be reverse engineered to gain compatibility with Linux. This takes time and is a pain in the ass. With formats on open source software, the spec for everything is obviously spelled out.
In other words, these counties don't want to be stuck with a "Black box" that they can't open if the day should come where Microsoft decides they want to play nasty with them. This is not just about today's data...This is about data they will have 100 years from now.
If anything, these things are affirming open source. Yes, Red Hat is removing their free version of the software and strictly selling Enterprise, but oh...Strange that, IT'S STILL OPEN SOURCE.
Microsoft's business model involves black box software, undocumented API's, and sloppy implementations. You want to be compatible with Microsoft? You have to reverse engineer everything. If that can't be done, guess what, you have to buy their software. Microsoft worries that reavealing their source code will destroy them.
Open source lays all out for anyone to see. This won't change with RedHat Enterprise...The GPL forbids it. But yet they are still making money. So tell me again, Microsoft, why open source is dead?
Sorry for the rant. I'm more than a little pissed at the government for forcing crippled products on us.
Ah, that's OK, I feel pretty much the same way. Let them pass their idiotic protectionist laws, and let the unwashed masses poison their minds with the latest reality TV episodes. I will definitely not be first in line to buy an HDTV. Hell I haven't watched the idiot box I have in half a year now.
I researched Macrovision a bit in reponse to your post and it seems that all it really does is exploit a flaw in the way a VCR works by putting in bogus brightness information into the signal. TV's can handle this, but VCR's cannot.
Maybe you should forget about making VHS copies and go straight to digital, then burn it on DVD or something? Have you tried digitizing your video with a video capture board? Unfortunately, I have no idea how capture cards handle Macrovision. My research indicated that most cap cards refuse to do Macrovision, however, I got a whisper from a quick Google search that Pinnacle cards ignore it.
You are correct, I'm an idiot. It was one of those brain farts that happen when you hit "Submit" too soon I guess.
Doh, what was I thinking about the dark side of the moon bit? That's what I get for posting and working at the same time...heh. With any luck a mod will bring that post down to zero so no one sees it :)
Thanks for not flaming for that. Mercy for misstatements on Slashdot is hard to come by.
Anyhow, can we at least agree this whole thing is science fiction and that there are far cheaper ways of generating power than this plan?
The relay satellites are microwave mirrors. They just need to be steered to the correct angle to reflect the beam to the receiver. The surface of such a mirror can be 99% vacuum - a mesh with holes smaller than the wavelength.
I don't argue that this is possible, but the power loss from such a setup would be unacceptable. Remember that the moon is 250,000 miles away from the earth...There will be some major divergence of the radio beam on the way here. Not only that, the grid you speak of will itself absorb energy, and certainly not reflect 100% of the power. Assuming your power station is on the other side of the Earth, you might have relay two or three times, causing even more loss.
Maybe they could use a maser to get the tightest divergence possible, but it would still be an incredibly hard target to hit, let alone relay it to other satellites to get it to the surface. Then you have to worry about freespace loss due to the atmosphere. And the higher frequency you run at, the worse it gets.
To meet global power requirements you'll need to cover a significant portion of the Earth's surface and keep it all in good maintenance in the presence of rain, dust, hail, winds, corrosion, condensation, birds, lightning, ground erosion, vegetation, earthquakes and, of course, people.
Very true, and it's also true that on the moon's spin makes it such that one side is always facing the sun. Why, if you were to put a solar array up there, you would be talking about having 24/7 sunlight for it. That would be great, if you lived on the moon...But what would be the point of building such a thing if you had no power left by the time the beam got here? And that brings up another point...When the dark side is facing the earth, how will the microwave beam get here from the other side?
I'm already seeing several problems with this.
First of all, the moon is not geosynchronous. Since the moon does not stay in a fixed position over the surface of Earth, how are you going to be able to have a centralized power station receive this energy? Oh you could build hundreds of them, but everyone would have to take their turn. And besides that this sounds like an "American" project. I'd love to hear about how they plan on getting power when the moon happens to be on the other side of the planet.
Relay satellites will not work. Yes, I read the bit about the relay satellites, but that's ridiculous. They would work fine for radio, which only needs miniscule amounts of current in order to work, but if you want to generate enough electricity to power even a lightbulb, you are talking about an enormous amount of radio power. There are only two ways a radio beam can be "bent": Either you bounce it off of something, or you have a station repeat the signal. In the case of power generation, the latter will not work...How are you going to regenerate that much power in a tiny satellite? And if you could, what would be the point of having the lunar base to begin with? Using the satellite as a passive relay would cause enormous power loss.
Besides all this, there's just too much complexity here. Every time you convert from one kind of energy to another there is always some loss involved. So what this guy's proposing is that you have a solar array on the moon, which converts sunlight to electricity at about 20% efficiency, which then converts this electricity to microwaves, which is then beamed down to earth, but never to a fixed location because the moon doesn't stay in one place relative to the surface of the earth, so then you could possibly go though relay satellites which would cause insane power loss. When the beam gets to earth, probably about 4% of its original strength, it's then converted to electricty again and might be able to power some blinky LED's, if you're lucky.
Wouldn't it be easier just to build a massive solar array HERE ON EARTH??
But we're already in it!
Seriously. George Lucas is too full of himself to listen to the fans. IMHO, seeing the deleted scenes for the first time was cool, but if you watch them over and over the lame factor is too much to bear.
n gster-who-is-trying-to-kill me scene.
One of the best scenes, when Han one-ups Greedo in the bar was completely profaned, as was the I will-now-step-on-the-tail-of-the-intergalactic-ga
*sigh* I suppose I'm preaching to the choir. With any luck the original will play by default but the DVD will have the option to throw the deleted scenes in using the angle feature for the true masochists among us.
Please tell me it won't be the special edition...