They also couldn't handle radio emission according to FCC standards for home use either.
According to the Apple II History page the FCC issues were related to the RF modulator design used. I don't think anyone has ever claimed Woz was an RF engineer.
And talking about BASIC, the BASIC language they first created for the Apple II wasn't good either, so they had to buy it from MicroSoft, but at double the price of Commodore.
Then hit that page again and read the part starting with "An interesting bit of trivia about Wozniak's Integer BASIC was that he never had an assembly language source file for it. He wrote it in machine language, assembling it by hand on paper". One of the things Microsoft had going for them when they were working on their BASIC was that they access to much better development tools running on a larger system, and were essentially cross-compiling from there to generate the code for the home PC. Anybody can write a BASIC interpreter, fitting one into a tiny space in the era before there were even good assemblers available was a different thing altogether.
After reading their related RTA description, your comments don't make any sense to me. It's an API for exposing stats or other information you collect in your program via a standardized sockets protocol. If no one is actually reading the stats, there is no overhead beyond whatever you already have in your app to collect them. Yes, the app may slow appreciably when someone is connected and reading the data via this interface; as long as responding to that is in a low-priority process, who cares?
Conventional wisdom is that there is a yearly quota for returns to audit, and once it's reached they stop asking the computer for more. You can read about it any number of places; here are three sources:
There is absolutely no excuse for waiting until the last minute to file.
It's widely recognized that being lost in the gigantic mass of filers who put their returns in at the last minute reduces your chances of being selected for an audit. Unless you're getting a fat refund check (in which case you're a different class of idiot), anyone who sends their return in even a day before the deadline is being foolish.
For example, a random web search quickly finds "5 ways to avoid an audit": if you are concerned about a potential audit, never file until the last minute. It won't hurt and can only decrease your chances of being selected.. You'll find similar advice in most tax recommendations if you read up on the subject a bit.
The Linksys WRT54G case has nothing to do with driver signing or similar protection mechanisms. It's strictly an economic deal. By switching to an alternative operating system (VxWorks intead of Linux), Linksys was able to reduce the amount of memory and flash in the WRT54G, therefore reducing construction cost. The resulting system is too underpowered to run most Linux configurations, that's the main thing that makes it less useful for hacking.
See the WRT54G table for more about how the model line evolved.
Like the total count of all vulnerabilities, including all the little impossible to exploit ones, is important. Let's focus on the serious ones mentioned in their data.
There will always be a need for high-end audio, though, so if Creative loses the low-end, they could continue to produce high-quality audio cards for the discerning gamer and audiophile.
Audiophiles moved on some time ago to using cards from companies like M-Audio instead of Creative, as they have better sound quality when doing playback of digital music like CD rips. The only market Creative has left are the gamers who care about 3D positioning of sound effects and similar complicated features. On-board sound ate the low-end, M-Audio and other pro market players ate the high-end of their customer base.
Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 1
Firewire 800 isn't fast enough even for current generation video, it has to be compressed quite a bit to transfer across that type of link. Do the math: I estimate that even my 1024x768 laptop at 24 bit color/60Hz refresh is producing 1.1Gbps of video signal. The HDMI spec calls for almost 4Gbps of bandwidth, that's the ballpark for what a universal cable would need to handle for it to replace current video standards.
Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 1
I don't see people shoving stuff where it doesn't belong. The problem is if something fits in a USB port but isn't supposed to work with USB. I haven't seen a device like that exist.
Then you should join the person I replied to in spending more time among the masses; while painful, it's an excellent way to discover how things get misdesigned and misused. I've run into several devices that plug into a USB port but don't work right, typically because someone hasn't paid attention to the standard for how much power is supposed to be available. From Wikipedia on USB:
Some USB devices draw more power than is permitted by the specification for a single port. This is a common requirement of external hard and optical disc drives and other devices with motors or lamps. Such devices can be used with an external power supply of adequate rating; some external hubs may, in practice, supply sufficient power.
I regularly tell people who purchased USB hard drives who are having problems that they should use an external power supply for the drive, even if the USB bus (either via the port itself or via powered hub) is supposed to provide enough power. In many cases, this has completedly cleared up intermittant problems they were having when running from USB bus power.
This sort of issue is exactly the problem with the "one connector to rule them all" idea. Consolidate a bunch of low-speed serial devices together into one standard, as USB does, great. But the physical specifications for the type of cable that provides a high-speed serial connection are slightly different from those of a cable aimed at power delivery. Video signals have their own quirks. The sort of over-engineered uber-cable rugged enough to handle all of these things at once is going to be physically larger and more expensive than the current cheap cables used for specific applications now, and I doubt the supposed "connectors will be cheaper because of higher volume" cost saving of such a scheme really exists as a result.
Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?
on
eSATA Connectors
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused
Clearly you've never actually worked with end-users. The fact that the major connectors are physically different, and therefore won't fit in the other holes no matter how hard you push, is the only reason they're sometimes plugged into the correct spot now.
The peak output setting available for the WRT54GL I have when running dd-wrt is 250mw. As you say, it would be unwise to push to the limit. Similar to the GP post here, I'm running mine at 75mW. It works dramatically better than the default 28mW. The last time I came across a good analysis from someone with test equipment, for that particular model the distortion level made the effective useful maximum around 100mW of output.
If you spend any length of time surfing with a Javascript blocking tool (I use NoScript with Firefox), you'll discover that enormous number of web sites are completely disfunctional without Javascript nowadays. I find myself needing to toggle it back on for sites every day, usually for menu navigation options. Today, for example, it was something on the Asus web site that didn't work; yesterday it was a tech review site. The idea that only "productiveness-destroying" sites use Javascript is naive.
I put only the most disposable of my data on external drives. There are many reasons why manufacturers warranty external drives for considerably less time than internal ones (in some cases, 1 year vs. 5 years):
1) While separate, the power supplies in external drives aren't likely to be even as good as the one in your PC.
2) A surge sufficient to blow out things inside your PC could easily make its way out eSATA, USB, Firewire, etc, so I don't how much the argument of an external power supply saving you applies.
3) External enclosures are even more prone to vibration issues than case-mounted ones, and dependinging on the design the cooling profile may not be any better than the problematic units I described either.
At least eSATA solves one of the problems external units have suffered from, which is that USB/Firewire ones almost never report SMART data, so you don't even have that to help you.
Spinrite was a sometimes useful utility in a few years following its earlier releases; I know I saved a drive or two with it back in the day back where it was the only useful tool around for home recovery work. We moved past that period quite some time ago. For many years now, hard drive electronics have corrected errors like bad sectors at a level well below where it's possible for Spinrite to operate at. Gibson and company should have withdrawn Spinrite from the market some time ago. Do not be fooled by the fact that it's still for sale into thinking that it still works on modern equipment. You should just run the drive manufacturer's disk utility instead, that will force a SMART scan that's far more useful than Spinrite.
Whether it's worth copying the drive to another one before trying recovery is very dependant on how much data is lost, and how much work it will take to setup for that copy. I've had drives where the act of shutting the system off and moving the bad unit was enough to fully kill it; the disc never spun back up again once it stopped. If you only have a small amount of data to get off, you may be better off just trying to do the recovery without powering off the system at all.
For recovery of Windows based systems from only partially damaged drives, the best affordable consumer-level tool I've found is iRecover. I've recovered gigabytes worth of data lost on lost drives with that tool; highly recommended if you've lost the filesystem, but the drive still spins and you can access it from your PC.
I have a concern with the recommendations given in the introduction:
We assume that all hard drives will be handled with care, so they should be installed in suitable drive bays. If you use multiple drives, we recommend removable drive frame solutions, which help reduce vibration transfer onto the computer chassis and even back to individual hard drives. Make sure that your system has sufficient ventilation, so high speed hard drives won't overheat.
I've found that the removable drive frames available for cheap consumer hardware to be total crap. The metal enclosure keeps heat close to the drive, and the tiny fans used don't move nearly as much air past the drive as when it's inside the case, being cooled by the airflow of the case fans. The drive temperature is therefore higher even under the best conditions. In addition, the smaller fans fill with gunk quickly and as a result wear out faster than larger ones, leading regularly to a drive trapped in an uncooled box.
I've used enclosures from Promise, Enermax, and several other companies whose products were so bad I tried to forget their names; all had fans that instantly became the least reliable part of the entire system once I installed the drive frame, and I wasn't happy with the drive's temperature from day one.
I don't think the person making this comment at Tom's ever keeps systems running long enough to realize the long-term issues that come with anything cheaper than server-grade drive enclosures for hard drives. I'd welcome suggestions for a better quality product in this category. It's a hard subject to cover, because by the time you've had several units setup for a year or two to gather useful data on how rugged they are, the product is obsolete; not something any review site I'm aware of is setup to cover.
A distribution of GNU utilising the kernel of Solaris would certainly receive at least as much support (from the FSF) as GNU with the kernel Linux," [FSF Executive Director Peter] Brown said.
What an amazing vision of the future^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlast October.
The last time I tried upgrading a Windows OS was ME. That compounded a disaster on a disaster. Most of my system fonts disappeared and it largely killed a machine.
It only largely killed it? Hell, you got one of the good ME installation experiences.
This just means that users'll be calling YOU to make it work and make YOUR life harder. Then again, maybe you make money working on Windows. I do it for free for family members. So I want things to be as simple as possible.
Free support for the family without any restrictions is a recipe for disaster. I tell my family members that I'll help them with their support issues as long as they agree contact me for suggestions before they make major hardware purchases. Somebody buys a piece of crap (like a Vista PC) without asking me about it first so I could tell them why it's a bad idea, they're cut-off. The last time I was consulted pre-purchase in that fashion, said family member got a Mac Mini instead of another Dell, and is now one of their happy faithful. Everybody wins this way.
Remember, the generation before yours survived high school and college without the benefit of graphing calculators, and the generation before that used pencil, paper, and tables. Most of them turned out okay.
And you never know when being able to do things by hand is going to save your ass.
I recall a physics exam my freshman year of college, fairly simple mechanics stuff: find how long something takes to slide down a ramp, that sort of thing. About 10 minutes into the hour long exam my calculator blew up. Something in the LCD burst, it was a paperweight.
This was the kind of tech school where the professors just don't give a shit about your issues, and where too many missed exams counted against you heavily; leaving in the middle of one without completing it was the same thing. I was fast enough to get everything but one problem finished with 40 minutes to spare even without the calculator. Only problem was that the answer involved multiplying by the sine of an angle.
I had a couple of sin and cos values memorized: 30 degrees, 60 degrees. Had memorized the square roots of 1 through 5 to a few places, and happened to know how to compute those by hand as well.
Ever come across these formulas?
sin(x/2) = ± sqrt([1 cos x] / 2) cos(x/2) = ± sqrt([1 + cos x] / 2) sin(a±b)=sin(a)*cos(b)±sin(b)*cos(a)
Well, if you know sin(30) and cos(30), from these you can compute the values at 15 degrees with a few mathematical operations, then 7.5, then 3.75, etc. Build that little table, and then you can add or subtract things together to reach other values, and maybe throw in a little linear interpolation. Eventually I build an estimate answer using this approach that was close enough to get most of the points for the problem. Got dinged for not using enough significant digits, as if I'd made a rounding error, but got most of the credit.
Slashdot Mirror
They also couldn't handle radio emission according to FCC standards for home use either.
According to the Apple II History page the FCC issues were related to the RF modulator design used. I don't think anyone has ever claimed Woz was an RF engineer.
And talking about BASIC, the BASIC language they first created for the Apple II wasn't good either, so they had to buy it from MicroSoft, but at double the price of Commodore.
Then hit that page again and read the part starting with "An interesting bit of trivia about Wozniak's Integer BASIC was that he never had an assembly language source file for it. He wrote it in machine language, assembling it by hand on paper". One of the things Microsoft had going for them when they were working on their BASIC was that they access to much better development tools running on a larger system, and were essentially cross-compiling from there to generate the code for the home PC. Anybody can write a BASIC interpreter, fitting one into a tiny space in the era before there were even good assemblers available was a different thing altogether.
After reading their related RTA description, your comments don't make any sense to me. It's an API for exposing stats or other information you collect in your program via a standardized sockets protocol. If no one is actually reading the stats, there is no overhead beyond whatever you already have in your app to collect them. Yes, the app may slow appreciably when someone is connected and reading the data via this interface; as long as responding to that is in a low-priority process, who cares?
Conventional wisdom is that there is a yearly quota for returns to audit, and once it's reached they stop asking the computer for more. You can read about it any number of places; here are three sources:
h tmd ing-an-IRS-Audit&id=456566
http://schmidtwestergard.com/articles/filinglate.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Practical-Tips-For-Avoi
http://www.totaltaxsolutions.com/avoid-audit.htm
Generally, the later you file, the better off you are--as long as you pay the right amount on April 15th.
There is absolutely no excuse for waiting until the last minute to file.
It's widely recognized that being lost in the gigantic mass of filers who put their returns in at the last minute reduces your chances of being selected for an audit. Unless you're getting a fat refund check (in which case you're a different class of idiot), anyone who sends their return in even a day before the deadline is being foolish.
For example, a random web search quickly finds "5 ways to avoid an audit": if you are concerned about a potential audit, never file until the last minute. It won't hurt and can only decrease your chances of being selected.. You'll find similar advice in most tax recommendations if you read up on the subject a bit.
The logo is for "compact disc digital audio". See Red Book (audio CD standard) for details about this issue.
The Linksys WRT54G case has nothing to do with driver signing or similar protection mechanisms. It's strictly an economic deal. By switching to an alternative operating system (VxWorks intead of Linux), Linksys was able to reduce the amount of memory and flash in the WRT54G, therefore reducing construction cost. The resulting system is too underpowered to run most Linux configurations, that's the main thing that makes it less useful for hacking.
See the WRT54G table for more about how the model line evolved.
Like the total count of all vulnerabilities, including all the little impossible to exploit ones, is important. Let's focus on the serious ones mentioned in their data.
High-severity security vulnerabilities in 2006
Windows: Q1/2=5 Q3/4=12 Total=17
RedHat Linux: Q1/2=1 Q3/4=2 Total=3
Mac OS X: Q1/2=3 Q3/4=1 Total=4
Now that's a summary I can agree with.
There will always be a need for high-end audio, though, so if Creative loses the low-end, they could continue to produce high-quality audio cards for the discerning gamer and audiophile.
Audiophiles moved on some time ago to using cards from companies like M-Audio instead of Creative, as they have better sound quality when doing playback of digital music like CD rips. The only market Creative has left are the gamers who care about 3D positioning of sound effects and similar complicated features. On-board sound ate the low-end, M-Audio and other pro market players ate the high-end of their customer base.
Firewire 800 isn't fast enough even for current generation video, it has to be compressed quite a bit to transfer across that type of link. Do the math: I estimate that even my 1024x768 laptop at 24 bit color/60Hz refresh is producing 1.1Gbps of video signal. The HDMI spec calls for almost 4Gbps of bandwidth, that's the ballpark for what a universal cable would need to handle for it to replace current video standards.
I don't see people shoving stuff where it doesn't belong. The problem is if something fits in a USB port but isn't supposed to work with USB. I haven't seen a device like that exist.
Then you should join the person I replied to in spending more time among the masses; while painful, it's an excellent way to discover how things get misdesigned and misused. I've run into several devices that plug into a USB port but don't work right, typically because someone hasn't paid attention to the standard for how much power is supposed to be available. From Wikipedia on USB:
Some USB devices draw more power than is permitted by the specification for a single port. This is a common requirement of external hard and optical disc drives and other devices with motors or lamps. Such devices can be used with an external power supply of adequate rating; some external hubs may, in practice, supply sufficient power.
I regularly tell people who purchased USB hard drives who are having problems that they should use an external power supply for the drive, even if the USB bus (either via the port itself or via powered hub) is supposed to provide enough power. In many cases, this has completedly cleared up intermittant problems they were having when running from USB bus power.
This sort of issue is exactly the problem with the "one connector to rule them all" idea. Consolidate a bunch of low-speed serial devices together into one standard, as USB does, great. But the physical specifications for the type of cable that provides a high-speed serial connection are slightly different from those of a cable aimed at power delivery. Video signals have their own quirks. The sort of over-engineered uber-cable rugged enough to handle all of these things at once is going to be physically larger and more expensive than the current cheap cables used for specific applications now, and I doubt the supposed "connectors will be cheaper because of higher volume" cost saving of such a scheme really exists as a result.
By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused
Clearly you've never actually worked with end-users. The fact that the major connectors are physically different, and therefore won't fit in the other holes no matter how hard you push, is the only reason they're sometimes plugged into the correct spot now.
The peak output setting available for the WRT54GL I have when running dd-wrt is 250mw. As you say, it would be unwise to push to the limit. Similar to the GP post here, I'm running mine at 75mW. It works dramatically better than the default 28mW. The last time I came across a good analysis from someone with test equipment, for that particular model the distortion level made the effective useful maximum around 100mW of output.
This was covered on Slashdot already. If you're going to read Slashdot, at least fucking read it.
Maybe they were waiting until that story was accepted to Slashdot a second time before reading it.
If you spend any length of time surfing with a Javascript blocking tool (I use NoScript with Firefox), you'll discover that enormous number of web sites are completely disfunctional without Javascript nowadays. I find myself needing to toggle it back on for sites every day, usually for menu navigation options. Today, for example, it was something on the Asus web site that didn't work; yesterday it was a tech review site. The idea that only "productiveness-destroying" sites use Javascript is naive.
This is nothing compared to all the holes and open ports I found last time I was at the whitehouse.com site.
I put only the most disposable of my data on external drives. There are many reasons why manufacturers warranty external drives for considerably less time than internal ones (in some cases, 1 year vs. 5 years):
1) While separate, the power supplies in external drives aren't likely to be even as good as the one in your PC.
2) A surge sufficient to blow out things inside your PC could easily make its way out eSATA, USB, Firewire, etc, so I don't how much the argument of an external power supply saving you applies.
3) External enclosures are even more prone to vibration issues than case-mounted ones, and dependinging on the design the cooling profile may not be any better than the problematic units I described either.
At least eSATA solves one of the problems external units have suffered from, which is that USB/Firewire ones almost never report SMART data, so you don't even have that to help you.
Spinrite was a sometimes useful utility in a few years following its earlier releases; I know I saved a drive or two with it back in the day back where it was the only useful tool around for home recovery work. We moved past that period quite some time ago. For many years now, hard drive electronics have corrected errors like bad sectors at a level well below where it's possible for Spinrite to operate at. Gibson and company should have withdrawn Spinrite from the market some time ago. Do not be fooled by the fact that it's still for sale into thinking that it still works on modern equipment. You should just run the drive manufacturer's disk utility instead, that will force a SMART scan that's far more useful than Spinrite.
Whether it's worth copying the drive to another one before trying recovery is very dependant on how much data is lost, and how much work it will take to setup for that copy. I've had drives where the act of shutting the system off and moving the bad unit was enough to fully kill it; the disc never spun back up again once it stopped. If you only have a small amount of data to get off, you may be better off just trying to do the recovery without powering off the system at all.
For recovery of Windows based systems from only partially damaged drives, the best affordable consumer-level tool I've found is iRecover. I've recovered gigabytes worth of data lost on lost drives with that tool; highly recommended if you've lost the filesystem, but the drive still spins and you can access it from your PC.
I have a concern with the recommendations given in the introduction:
We assume that all hard drives will be handled with care, so they should be installed in suitable drive bays. If you use multiple drives, we recommend removable drive frame solutions, which help reduce vibration transfer onto the computer chassis and even back to individual hard drives. Make sure that your system has sufficient ventilation, so high speed hard drives won't overheat.
I've found that the removable drive frames available for cheap consumer hardware to be total crap. The metal enclosure keeps heat close to the drive, and the tiny fans used don't move nearly as much air past the drive as when it's inside the case, being cooled by the airflow of the case fans. The drive temperature is therefore higher even under the best conditions. In addition, the smaller fans fill with gunk quickly and as a result wear out faster than larger ones, leading regularly to a drive trapped in an uncooled box.
I've used enclosures from Promise, Enermax, and several other companies whose products were so bad I tried to forget their names; all had fans that instantly became the least reliable part of the entire system once I installed the drive frame, and I wasn't happy with the drive's temperature from day one.
I don't think the person making this comment at Tom's ever keeps systems running long enough to realize the long-term issues that come with anything cheaper than server-grade drive enclosures for hard drives. I'd welcome suggestions for a better quality product in this category. It's a hard subject to cover, because by the time you've had several units setup for a year or two to gather useful data on how rugged they are, the product is obsolete; not something any review site I'm aware of is setup to cover.
A distribution of GNU utilising the kernel of Solaris would certainly receive at least as much support (from the FSF) as GNU with the kernel Linux," [FSF Executive Director Peter] Brown said.
What an amazing vision of the future^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlast October.
No big deal, they'll just use "We Didn't Start the Fire" instead.
If people want to walk around with sunglasses at night, you gonna ticket them, too?
Yes, people who have Corey Hart songs on their iPod should get two tickets.
(come on, you know, you mention Linux at a party, you ain't getting laid).
I just go to parties where they like masochists.
The last time I tried upgrading a Windows OS was ME. That compounded a disaster on a disaster. Most of my system fonts disappeared and it largely killed a machine.
It only largely killed it? Hell, you got one of the good ME installation experiences.
This just means that users'll be calling YOU to make it work and make YOUR life harder. Then again, maybe you make money working on Windows. I do it for free for family members. So I want things to be as simple as possible.
Free support for the family without any restrictions is a recipe for disaster. I tell my family members that I'll help them with their support issues as long as they agree contact me for suggestions before they make major hardware purchases. Somebody buys a piece of crap (like a Vista PC) without asking me about it first so I could tell them why it's a bad idea, they're cut-off. The last time I was consulted pre-purchase in that fashion, said family member got a Mac Mini instead of another Dell, and is now one of their happy faithful. Everybody wins this way.
Remember, the generation before yours survived high school and college without the benefit of graphing calculators, and the generation before that used pencil, paper, and tables. Most of them turned out okay.
And you never know when being able to do things by hand is going to save your ass.
I recall a physics exam my freshman year of college, fairly simple mechanics stuff: find how long something takes to slide down a ramp, that sort of thing. About 10 minutes into the hour long exam my calculator blew up. Something in the LCD burst, it was a paperweight.
This was the kind of tech school where the professors just don't give a shit about your issues, and where too many missed exams counted against you heavily; leaving in the middle of one without completing it was the same thing. I was fast enough to get everything but one problem finished with 40 minutes to spare even without the calculator. Only problem was that the answer involved multiplying by the sine of an angle.
I had a couple of sin and cos values memorized: 30 degrees, 60 degrees. Had memorized the square roots of 1 through 5 to a few places, and happened to know how to compute those by hand as well.
Ever come across these formulas?
sin(x/2) = ± sqrt([1 cos x] / 2)
cos(x/2) = ± sqrt([1 + cos x] / 2)
sin(a±b)=sin(a)*cos(b)±sin(b)*cos(a)
Well, if you know sin(30) and cos(30), from these you can compute the values at 15 degrees with a few mathematical operations, then 7.5, then 3.75, etc. Build that little table, and then you can add or subtract things together to reach other values, and maybe throw in a little linear interpolation. Eventually I build an estimate answer using this approach that was close enough to get most of the points for the problem. Got dinged for not using enough significant digits, as if I'd made a rounding error, but got most of the credit.
When time was called I was in the middle of trying to check my answer against the results of a Taylor Series computed with Horner's Rule. Converting degrees to radians by hand is a snap once you've memorized Pi to a thousand places...