I used to brag about my little inventions to my boss. One time, pre-DMCA, when I worked for a medical orthopedic robotics company, I spent a few evenings of off-time trying to duplicate a software dongles functionality. I used a work digital oscillioscope to study the data patterns transpiring over the paralell port.
Turns out the dongle had 4 distinct data patterns in it. The protected software would address the dongle with two bits to select one of those 4 patterns, and the dongle then sent the requested code out through one of the paralell port lines in serial bit by bit fashion.
So first I used some extra 8051 micro-controllers (belonging to work) and just tried to emulate the behavior, but the 8051 was by far too slow to shift the bits in on time.
Then I used a EPROM (again belonging to work) and some boolean logic gates, bingo.. easily fast enough to address the ROM and shift the code in on schedule. This is probably exactly what is inside the dongle. It worked perfect. I could copy a dongle.
I was pretty excited and shared my creation with the CEO. He got excited and asked me if I could make a version of it that just accepted the original dongle and watched it for a bit, and then could emulate it, allowing the user to "back up" their dongles in case they lost theirs or what not. Sure, no problem.
He called the company lawyer right there to ask the legality of such a device, and all the lawyer wanted to know was "so whose DSO did you use? whose ROM chips? whose EPROM burners? whose computer programmed them? Oh, sounds like a cool toy, we own it of course since you used all work hardware to make it."
All I really wanted was to make a single copy of the dongle anyway for myself, but they had to go and be dicks about it so I just dropped it completely. Doubt it could have been a product anyway like the CEO thought.
I went out of town for 3 weeks on vacation, some field mice got into our house while we were out. They found a nice warm place to set up a nest.... in my Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner, which was pretty new and damn expensive at the time.
The SS4000 has a nice opening on the back where you can get in and out, and a nice warm area for building a small rodent residence... above the hole for the optical lens...
The SS4000 was thoroughly screwed up by this, and was filled with mouse poop to boot.
Truly it was a most exquisite and memorable sight. The sun was already beginning to put on the ruddy hues of sunset, and there, far in on its face, was the sharp, round, black disc of Venus. It was then easy to sympathise with the supreme joy of Horrocks when, in 1639, he for the first time witnessed this spectacle. The intrinsic beauty of the phenomenon, its rarity, the fulfilment of the prediction, the noble problem which the transit of Venus enables us to solve, are all present to our thoughts when we look at this pleasing picture, the like of which will not occur again until the flowers are blooming in the June of A.D. 2004.
Robert Stawell Ball, The Story of the Heavens (1885)
Here you go. Asteroid Ida and it's little moon "Dactyl".
Dactyl is about 0.75 x 0.8 x 1.0 miles in size. Imagine that!! Imagine sitting on Dactyl and orbiting Ida. Now, I'm not sure if a rock of 1 mile in diameter can even hold you down.
Does anyone know how to calculate your weight on Dactyl? Size listed above and it's probably 2.2 - 2.9 grams per cubic centimeter.
Build a box, make it 10,000 cubits high, and 10,000 cubits wide. Make it of Acacia tree bark wound with giraffe leather. Place thousands of steel hooks all over the outside of the box. (Explained later.)
Place all the Canadians inside, stand them on end, and place them layer upon layer.
When all the Canadians are in the box, close it, and seal it. Make sure it is water and air tight.
Float the box into the Pacific Ocean and tow it until it is over the Mariana Trench.
Begin attaching steel weights to the steel hooks on the outside of the box. Continue attaching weights until the box no longer floats, but no more, steel is very expensive currently and this box will be sinking very deep as to make the steel unrecoverable.
I want it all made of hemp products. I can imagine the odor released by the computers of 100 customer service reps in open cubicles. "God, I love walking in here to the smell of computers each morning!"
I've ordered 50 and 100 packs of Samsung Beall DVD-R from MeritLine like 3 times now. Plus my Pioneer 106 (-R +R -RW +RW) drive was like $120 there. Good prices, and reliable ordering every time so far. I have no connections with them except I order from them.
I dont know about scaling it up. The article is short on details which relate much to eyewear. Eyeglasses correct a huge range of flaws in eyes; by far not the least of which is astigmatism, (wildly popular) which is when your cornea is not curved the same in all axis. (For example, your eyeglasses correction may need to be different vertically than horizontally.)
Astigmatism isn't going to lend well to this, would be my guess, but who knows maybe those wizards can make assymetrical fluid shapes.
Secondly, the size.. why make it big? Make it small like contacts (your eyes dialate only to 5 or 6 mm as an adult.) And put it close. Bizarre tiny eyeglasses is the ticket.
YES..... American Chopper
on
Borg Cube Case
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I've seen that... the scene you mention is right before the Lumberjack Sized Dad comes in and pops another vein in his forehead over the lastest father/son conflict, right??? I hear he wraps a muffler around his sons head in the season finale.
Having worked at a startup (that failed!) I'm sure it is much worse than meets the eye. How much did all that eye candy cost after all? I'm sure _ONE_ million dollars would go a long way towards buying all that workout equipment, the Humvee and replacement motor, the washer/drywer, foosball, The Sneaker, those autographed guitars, AND the Aeron chairs. Keep in mind this company found a way to zero HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars and you're not doing that with Pez machines and steel welded mp3.com vanity logos.
Whatever, dude. You can mire yourself in semantics, meanwhile I'll be busy in the real world here obseving voltage drops across wires when current is flowing through them. I honestly dont give a damn about your arguments of phrasing it correctly, I think the point was obvious.
My Canon 10D with 550EX flash on it (read: lever arm) fell 4 feet to a hardwood desk and all I had to do was take a finger and wipe some dust off one corner of the 10D's beautiful magnesium shell:) No affects. I've dropped my share of Canon gear through the ages with zero ill effects ever.
Their flagship digital SLR (removable lens digital) ha 14 megapixels, still more than Canon or Nikon (fow now.) Sample Pics Personally, I love the Canon DSLR's though like the EOS 10D for $1500.
> ummmmm... no. Having different voltages at the > ends of a wire creates current. Voltage is just > the potential.
OK then... drawing current over a wire will create a voltage drop across the wire, equal to the amount of current flowing (in amps) multiplied by the resistance of the wire (in ohms).
In our case, current returning on the ground wire (bad!) was generating a voltage drop over the ground wire, elevating the voltage potential of every grounded object in the house.
We have been remodeling our house, and found the old circuit breaker panel improperly wired. The Neutral (white wire) was hardwired to the ground inside the panel. Now, having neutral grounded is normal for a MAIN DISCONNECT panel, but not for a SUB panel. If you have more than one panel, some are going to be SUB panels, and ground and neutral should be isolated from each other.
Anyway, since neutral was grounded in the breaker panel, it means all the return current in the house was balancing between the ground and neutral wires to get back to the main disconnect panel. Now, sending current over wires makes voltage, and in this case, that voltage is seen on every grounded item in the house!! Electrical fields everywhere.
Normally with 120V AC currents in your house, current on hot equals current on neutral, and the net RF field balance of a circuit in use is ZERO. (Try and clamp on ammeter to confirm this..) But if your ground and neutral are improper, it can make all kinds of wires have fields.
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I used to brag about my little inventions to my boss. One time, pre-DMCA, when I worked for a medical orthopedic robotics company, I spent a few evenings of off-time trying to duplicate a software dongles functionality. I used a work digital oscillioscope to study the data patterns transpiring over the paralell port.
Turns out the dongle had 4 distinct data patterns in it. The protected software would address the dongle with two bits to select one of those 4 patterns, and the dongle then sent the requested code out through one of the paralell port lines in serial bit by bit fashion.
So first I used some extra 8051 micro-controllers (belonging to work) and just tried to emulate the behavior, but the 8051 was by far too slow to shift the bits in on time.
Then I used a EPROM (again belonging to work) and some boolean logic gates, bingo.. easily fast enough to address the ROM and shift the code in on schedule. This is probably exactly what is inside the dongle. It worked perfect. I could copy a dongle.
I was pretty excited and shared my creation with the CEO. He got excited and asked me if I could make a version of it that just accepted the original dongle and watched it for a bit, and then could emulate it, allowing the user to "back up" their dongles in case they lost theirs or what not. Sure, no problem.
He called the company lawyer right there to ask the legality of such a device, and all the lawyer wanted to know was "so whose DSO did you use? whose ROM chips? whose EPROM burners? whose computer programmed them? Oh, sounds like a cool toy, we own it of course since you used all work hardware to make it."
All I really wanted was to make a single copy of the dongle anyway for myself, but they had to go and be dicks about it so I just dropped it completely. Doubt it could have been a product anyway like the CEO thought.
We had a Cisco router wigging out the other month. Our Network Admin decided to reset it, and it offered this up:
Kodiak_Rtr uptime is 6 years, 9 weeks, 3 days, 10 hours, 43 minutes
System restarted by power-on
I went out of town for 3 weeks on vacation, some field mice got into our house while we were out. They found a nice warm place to set up a nest.... in my Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner, which was pretty new and damn expensive at the time.
The SS4000 has a nice opening on the back where you can get in and out, and a nice warm area for building a small rodent residence... above the hole for the optical lens...
The SS4000 was thoroughly screwed up by this, and was filled with mouse poop to boot.
Truly it was a most exquisite and memorable sight. The sun was already beginning to put on the ruddy hues of sunset, and there, far in on its face, was the sharp, round, black disc of Venus. It was then easy to sympathise with the supreme joy of Horrocks when, in 1639, he for the first time witnessed this spectacle. The intrinsic beauty of the phenomenon, its rarity, the fulfilment of the prediction, the noble problem which the transit of Venus enables us to solve, are all present to our thoughts when we look at this pleasing picture, the like of which will not occur again until the flowers are blooming in the June of A.D. 2004.
Robert Stawell Ball, The Story of the Heavens (1885)
Or did you forget Alaska was on the west coast of America, you insensitive clod!
Here you go. Asteroid Ida and it's little moon "Dactyl".
Dactyl is about 0.75 x 0.8 x 1.0 miles in size. Imagine that!! Imagine sitting on Dactyl and orbiting Ida. Now, I'm not sure if a rock of 1 mile in diameter can even hold you down.
Does anyone know how to calculate your weight on Dactyl? Size listed above and it's probably 2.2 - 2.9 grams per cubic centimeter.
Build a box, make it 10,000 cubits high, and 10,000 cubits wide. Make it of Acacia tree bark wound with giraffe leather. Place thousands of steel hooks all over the outside of the box. (Explained later.)
Place all the Canadians inside, stand them on end, and place them layer upon layer.
When all the Canadians are in the box, close it, and seal it. Make sure it is water and air tight.
Float the box into the Pacific Ocean and tow it until it is over the Mariana Trench.
Begin attaching steel weights to the steel hooks on the outside of the box. Continue attaching weights until the box no longer floats, but no more, steel is very expensive currently and this box will be sinking very deep as to make the steel unrecoverable.
I want it all made of hemp products. I can imagine the odor released by the computers of 100 customer service reps in open cubicles. "God, I love walking in here to the smell of computers each morning!"
I've ordered 50 and 100 packs of Samsung Beall DVD-R from MeritLine like 3 times now. Plus my Pioneer 106 (-R +R -RW +RW) drive was like $120 there. Good prices, and reliable ordering every time so far. I have no connections with them except I order from them.
If it's big enough to assume spherical shape by the action of gravity, it's a planet.
Bill "Jamaica" Gates
Now you can play noises of having sex while you talk on the phone.
....we'd appreciate if Chrysler could respond promptly.
Yours Truly,
Darl McBride
FUTURE CEO, CHRYSLER^z^z^z^z^z
OWNER, BIG BLUE^z^z^z^z
KING OF UNIX^z^z^z^z^z
"KING KERNEL"^z^z^z^z^z
CEO, SCO Inc.
I dont know about scaling it up. The article is short on details which relate much to eyewear. Eyeglasses correct a huge range of flaws in eyes; by far not the least of which is astigmatism, (wildly popular) which is when your cornea is not curved the same in all axis. (For example, your eyeglasses correction may need to be different vertically than horizontally.)
Astigmatism isn't going to lend well to this, would be my guess, but who knows maybe those wizards can make assymetrical fluid shapes.
Secondly, the size.. why make it big? Make it small like contacts (your eyes dialate only to 5 or 6 mm as an adult.) And put it close. Bizarre tiny eyeglasses is the ticket.
I need to burn some Karma
exobiology experiments
odd rock formation
the kind with boobies
the kind with exhaust pipes
I've seen that... the scene you mention is right before the Lumberjack Sized Dad comes in and pops another vein in his forehead over the lastest father/son conflict, right??? I hear he wraps a muffler around his sons head in the season finale.
Having worked at a startup (that failed!) I'm sure it is much worse than meets the eye. How much did all that eye candy cost after all? I'm sure _ONE_ million dollars would go a long way towards buying all that workout equipment, the Humvee and replacement motor, the washer/drywer, foosball, The Sneaker, those autographed guitars, AND the Aeron chairs. Keep in mind this company found a way to zero HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars and you're not doing that with Pez machines and steel welded mp3.com vanity logos.
Whatever, dude. You can mire yourself in semantics, meanwhile I'll be busy in the real world here obseving voltage drops across wires when current is flowing through them. I honestly dont give a damn about your arguments of phrasing it correctly, I think the point was obvious.
My Canon 10D with 550EX flash on it (read: lever arm) fell 4 feet to a hardwood desk and all I had to do was take a finger and wipe some dust off one corner of the 10D's beautiful magnesium shell :) No affects. I've dropped my share of Canon gear through the ages with zero ill effects ever.
Their flagship digital SLR (removable lens digital) ha 14 megapixels, still more than Canon or Nikon (fow now.) Sample Pics Personally, I love the Canon DSLR's though like the EOS 10D for $1500.
> ummmmm... no. Having different voltages at the
> ends of a wire creates current. Voltage is just > the potential.
OK then... drawing current over a wire will create a voltage drop across the wire, equal to the amount of current flowing (in amps) multiplied by the resistance of the wire (in ohms).
In our case, current returning on the ground wire (bad!) was generating a voltage drop over the ground wire, elevating the voltage potential of every grounded object in the house.
We have been remodeling our house, and found the old circuit breaker panel improperly wired. The Neutral (white wire) was hardwired to the ground inside the panel. Now, having neutral grounded is normal for a MAIN DISCONNECT panel, but not for a SUB panel. If you have more than one panel, some are going to be SUB panels, and ground and neutral should be isolated from each other.
Anyway, since neutral was grounded in the breaker panel, it means all the return current in the house was balancing between the ground and neutral wires to get back to the main disconnect panel. Now, sending current over wires makes voltage, and in this case, that voltage is seen on every grounded item in the house!! Electrical fields everywhere.
Normally with 120V AC currents in your house, current on hot equals current on neutral, and the net RF field balance of a circuit in use is ZERO. (Try and clamp on ammeter to confirm this..) But if your ground and neutral are improper, it can make all kinds of wires have fields.
My spam is canned and put on pallettes now and delivered by semi truck.
Before CAN SPAM.. my SpamKiller trap had about 3100 spam per month.
After CAN SPAM... my SpamKiller trap has about 4200 spam per month. Steadily growing, as always.