Now, understand something here - I don't own an iPhone.
Now that we have that out of the way, if you have a unix system or device, and you have physical access to the system, don't know the root password, and we'll pretend for the moment that you can't drop it to single user mode, how do you get in?
Usually? If it's a filesystem you can read, mount said filesystem on another box, change the passwd file, and update any shadow files/database files. Now, I would HOPE that apple didn't go porting the entire netinfo system over, so what we should be clamoring for is that encrypted system image. If someone can get at that filesystem, then all of this becomes moot. Edit the filesystem, update your phone.:)
I know there's an iPhone teardown out there someplace already. There's probably a jtag on there where you could enable a serial port...
Is it paranoia if the OS really *is* sending tons of data to Redmond? Is it slander if it's true? How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop? Just WTF *is* the cream filling in the middle of Hostess snack cakes????
It's precisely that type of behavior that drove me to quit and start my own company. I couldn't sleep well at night with my financial wellbeing in the hands of someone else. Granted, being your own boss doesn't exactly pave the way to stacks of cash, but I didn't have to constantly worry about being fired anymore.
Perhaps I just have a weak psyche, but I can't handle that type of treatment. My last boss wanted GPS tracking on me to know where I was at all times. That's insane, and around here that type of behavior is becoming more and more normal.
Now I have a humble 3-desk office, my own data center, and no boss breathing down my neck. Far from peaceful, but it's a damned sight better than what I had to deal with before.
Except that this was 2 years of litigation. Attorneys aren't going to work for free for years. Also, her time, and distress. That's 2 years of her life she's never going to get back, and in the end they just said "Oh, nevermind. Have a nice life!" At this point she's probably had to put her home into hock in order to defend herself. Now here's my question - how many of you are willing to put your home/retirement/both on the line to stand up to them?
That's why their tactics work. They know most people cannot afford to risk it. I'm thinking that wherever that special hell is for child molesters, the people that decide who get sued this way belong there too. It's one thing to be tangibly harmed by someone and have to seek legal recourse. It's another to not be harmed *at all*, and throw someone's fiscal wellbeing into jeopardy over your bottom line.
I'm sorry. I'm a forgiving person. I'm a kind and loving person. I would love nothing more to punch a few lawyers and corporate big-wigs in the face over this one. Comparatively speaking they have nothing to lose, but from a financial standpoint, the people being sued have everything to lose by standing up for themselves. They know this, and they're doing it anyway.
That's where I draw the line. Straight to that special place in hell with you.
Call up Apple and offer to port the Quicktime runtimes to Linux for free, and not have license compatibility issues. It would have to be a closed-source binary, and could not make use of any GPL code. Good luck!:)
I say the same here, but I'm curious...$1.25/100 gold pieces is fine and all, but how is it that they make so little money in a week? Is gold THAT hard to come by in-game? I could rack up 10,000 gil playing FF12 in an hour. Is gold harder to make playing online games?
Don't panic too hard. He's probably one of the IE developers. Why do you think Windows has so many unhandled exceptions?
I'll tell you why:
if(bush is lying){
moore is right; } else{
moore is wrong; }
The concept that both might be right or wrong in some instances escapes some people. That, and we live in a society where people in power will skew "the truth" to make themselves look good, regardless of the reality of things. When was the last time you heard a president apologize for being wrong about something? Anything? Show humility?:\
That actually brought to mind something really interesting...
We have all of these really cool features in open source software. I do mean REALLY cool too. I run my entire business on FreeBSD servers (no flame wars, just a personal preference!), and amonst all of the really cool things that Linux and FreeBSD can do, I've often wondered something. Why do we have to pull a full reboot for a new kernel?
Don't answer me directly. I know the answer. I know what a kernel is and what it does. Mostly.:) The reason I bring it up is the hack required for the tivo required a port of monte. Is there any reason that this couldn't become a standard feature? ie, compile the latest kernel fixes, monte in the new kernel, do a service by service restart? I know it's pedantic, but it's then possible to have perpetual uptime, is it not? I"m presuming that the old kernel gets flushed from memory, and since you do a rolling service restart, no one service goes completely down.
I'm making an awful lot of presumptions, and I guess the thought is that if you're going to go to the trouble of doing a rolling service restart, you might as well just cut the power and be done with it...but still. It'd be nice if there's a security fix in the kernel that wouldn't break compatibility with existing running applications to just let you compile, monte to the new kernel, flush the old kernel, and life goes on. Is there a technical limitation that I'm not seeing? Understand I have some FreeBSD-isms going on here with the monolithic kernel vs. kernel+modules. I've run into a nightmare a few times before on a debian box where I've compile a new kernel but forgot to recompile all of the modules, and stuff dies.
I do this on my own networks, and I don't get complaints about it. Yes I'm an ISP. No, I'm not evil. I make every effort not to be evil. When it comes to transport out to the internet, YES, I do shape traffic. Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get the full bandwidth you're paying for with P2P. What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput. That only occurs if I'm horribly over-subscribed, which just won't happen, because if I'm paying wholesaler rates, there's really no way I'd allow it to happen. Bought in appropriate quantities bandwidth is cheap. TRANSPORT of that bandwidth is what is expensive. I can buy up all the bandwidth I want from the right location for next to nothing. Getting it to you is what costs me big time. If you build the infrastructure to me, support it, and don't whine at me when it's down, I can sell it to you cheaply, too.
No, I don't like the big media conglomerates any more than you do, but being in the business I can tell you that this isn't wholly evil. What I would like to see from them is a release of HOW they're shaping it. That release makes it look to me more like they're doing Web > Everything Else, or putting hard caps on VOIP, Video, P2P, etc, which would be evil as well. I don't hard cap bandwidth below what you're paying for. Now, that said, our service contracts are worded such that you know up front that you're buying burstable service. We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair. If you have a big download, burst away, that's what you've paid for. Running a warez FTP isn't. Running a (high bandwidth) website isn't. We don't have language that says you can't run a server. You can, but you're not allowed to saturate your connection 24/7. If we see that, you get a phone call asking you to purchase a dedicated connection rather than a burstable one. The problem with the cable companies is that they don't offer dedicated connections, because they CAN'T. You're on the same node as your neighbors, and whether you pay for a dedicated connection or not, you degrade the service of your neighbors when you saturate the line, end of story.
I wish I could grow out faster, but I can't. I am try to get some investors to get more infrastructure out there, but Ma Bell isn't too happy about my existence right now.:\ I've tried to avoid doing business with "Mom" as I've taking to call them, but it's hard. Anyhoo...that's off-topic. Point is, don't bust their chops for shaping. Bust them for not telling you *how* they're shaping, and "ask" with your money for them to do it right, and not be greedy. If not, make sure your neighbors know what is up too, and if they don't initially care ("we just browse the web and check e-mail"), make them aware of the impact this sort of behavior could have on them down the road, and get them to at least make phone calls and case a ruckus. If they really are your only broadband choice, call the local newspaper, or tv station. They usually have investigative reporters on-hand, and if you can explain in layman's terms what's going on, guaranteed you might get them to re-think their policy. Companies hate bad PR, it hurts the revenue stream, and I know first hand that lost revenue HURTS.
It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that either.
Yes, it *could* have been matched or beaten, and yes, there is a way to adapt. Do a bit of research on Bollywood. That's a polar opposite example of the US. Piracy, by comparison, is pretty much non-existent here. There are movies being made, far too much money spent to make them, and all for the hope of being the summer blockbuster, when it is unneccessary. We don't need super-stardom. These companies are NOT guaranteed a profit. Piracy generally occurs because things are sold at a higher price than they need to be. True, capitalism speaks that you should always sell at the highest price any demographic is willing to spend, but...well, I don't have the time nor energy to go into a full-blown econ lesson here. The movie was made for $10mil. It didn't have to cost that much, that was a production choice. (Note - I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply a choice.) If it costs $5mil, yes, it still costs twice as much as the expense of the pirates, but bear in mind that there's also labor duplication and distribution duplication. The market becomes more competitive, even vs pirates, and as distribution costs approach 0, then the legit option will become increasingly more palatable than the pirated of the same. This is without taking DRM and barriers to consumption into account (which throws an already bleak picture for the MAFIAA in even further turmoil).
I sell legit, Tony Cola for $.75/glass, but in order to buy it, you have to prick your finger at time of purchase. The Cola's pretty good, so people put up with the pricks. Eventually someone across the street manages to make a perfect duplicate of Tony Cola (and in our imaginary world there are no production or distribution costs), they get all of the great taste of sucking on Tony without the pricks. Where do *you* think they'll go?
Why not contribute something useful? As a business, we've had to go through this, and it wasn't much fun. We needed to do scalable storage. The only real answer there is to do some version of LVM.
So...buy 4 drives, do raid5. If you want to grow the storage, don't buy 1 more drive, but 3-4 more. Do RAID5, add that raid5 to your volume group.
The answer is that the drives are stored internally, and then we go off on NAS storage and slow writes. I just get tired of posters getting belittled. Experience levels vary wildly around here, and the only way for the less experienced to become educated is either be told or learn first-hand. Come off the soap box.
Well that's just it. I'm seeing an increasing amount of references to teleportation which are sect 2 - trasmit data, duplicate, destroy the original. I recall seeing mention of it in sci-fi that way as far back as a Trek novel named Star Trek: Federation. The book came out around the same time as Generations, and told the story of Zephram Cochran, seemed for more plausible than the movie/tv version, and how he was appalled at transporter technology, as it essentially kept creating transporter duplicates, each one believing it is the original when in fact the original died long before, and it was either Kirk or Scott that corrects him and states that the original matter is transported as a stream of energy.
Now I know I'm mixing fiction and fact here, but understand something - I don't like calling the "sect 2" version teleportation any more than you like, but it keeps getting referred to as teleportation. I'd rather refer to it as teleduplication.
That said - which happens first? Teleportation duplicates of humans, or genetic cloning of humans? Which one becomes closer to what comes to mind from sci-fi when we refer to cloning?:)
Let's put it this way - there are two sects in the field of teleportation that I'm aware of right now.
Sect 1 defines teleportation as the tearing down of matter, converting it into energy, transport that energy, and convert it back into matter.
Sect 2 defines teleportation as scanning all of the information about an object, transport that INFORMATION to destination, create replica, then tear down the original.
Star Trek subscribes to version 1, unless of course you're watching a very particular episode.:)
Anyway, in both cases, you recall hearing the term "pattern buffer" in trek, right? In either case, you have to break Heisenberg's Law (Heisenberg compensator anyone?) about knowing the exact state and location of all particles that make up an object. You store that information, transmit it to the other site, and from that site you either reconstruct the original, or duplicate the original.
The frightening thing is, I see this program in my head writing an XML document, with trees and braches going something like atom/particle/state, and gzip compress it, then transmit it over the fastest method available, decompress on the other side. Just add matter.:D
As another reply to this mentioned, they *could* use bsd's libc instead, could they not? I mean yeah...there would be hacking to do, but certainly not enough to make them "suffer".
Heck, if they really needed to they could do a wholesale switch to BSD. The hardware is supported, and I'm sure tivobin could be ported (note - I've hacked my own tivo a few times...)
There's nothing forcing them to stick with Linux, really. I'd prefer they stay with it and stop trying to stop the hackers and just live with the license, but moving to BSD isn't the end of the world for them either. This isn't a BSD troll, it's just a matter of fact. If the hardware is supported, when coding for BSD vs. Linux, there are minor differences, but really...at the end of the day everything that Tivo does could be maintained.
Amarok is good, but I think he's overlooking the obvious here (well...obvious to anyone who's worked with UMS devices at all....)
What's happening with his player is that it is either - 1, not recognized by the OS as a UMS (doesn't sound like this...he's able to put files on it and mount it, etc), or 2, the application doesn't recognize the device. If the latter, then what he needs to do is get the USB Vendor ID and Product ID of the player, and send it to the devs so that they can add support for it. If he doesn't mind recompiling from source, he can probably locate the file where the USB identifiers are kept, add them locally, and recompile.
That said, there are a bunch of devices out there that misrepresent themselves as UMS, but in reality are not. I had a camera like this. It took SmartMedia flash, and had a USB cable that was suppose to allow me to plug the camera in and use it as a card reader. Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX immediately attempted to load the UMS driver, as the device claimed this, but then failed miserably. The camera came with a driver disk for Windows, which should have tipped me off right away what was happening. Essentially whomever wrote the firmware for the camera had it identify with that class, even though it wasn't true. It triggers the OS to load the wrong driver, and somehow they worked around that for the Windows driver. If he has that going on, he's pretty much SOL. If he can mount the player and copy files, it's just a matter of getting those two ID's into the hands of the developers, and temporarily modifying his own build until the next version comes out.
This is why Open Source stuff is cool. Your device isn't supported, but is standards compliant? Add it to the sources and recompile.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Now THAT is funny. :D
That would make a jtag connector that much more useful one would think then....right?
Now, understand something here - I don't own an iPhone.
:)
Now that we have that out of the way, if you have a unix system or device, and you have physical access to the system, don't know the root password, and we'll pretend for the moment that you can't drop it to single user mode, how do you get in?
Usually? If it's a filesystem you can read, mount said filesystem on another box, change the passwd file, and update any shadow files/database files. Now, I would HOPE that apple didn't go porting the entire netinfo system over, so what we should be clamoring for is that encrypted system image. If someone can get at that filesystem, then all of this becomes moot. Edit the filesystem, update your phone.
I know there's an iPhone teardown out there someplace already. There's probably a jtag on there where you could enable a serial port...
I wonder...
Is it paranoia if the OS really *is* sending tons of data to Redmond?
Is it slander if it's true?
How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop?
Just WTF *is* the cream filling in the middle of Hostess snack cakes????
No, now we just have to worry about dead people voting even more now that John Edward is involved
:)
It's a joke. Laugh.
It's precisely that type of behavior that drove me to quit and start my own company. I couldn't sleep well at night with my financial wellbeing in the hands of someone else. Granted, being your own boss doesn't exactly pave the way to stacks of cash, but I didn't have to constantly worry about being fired anymore.
Perhaps I just have a weak psyche, but I can't handle that type of treatment. My last boss wanted GPS tracking on me to know where I was at all times. That's insane, and around here that type of behavior is becoming more and more normal.
Now I have a humble 3-desk office, my own data center, and no boss breathing down my neck. Far from peaceful, but it's a damned sight better than what I had to deal with before.
Except that this was 2 years of litigation. Attorneys aren't going to work for free for years. Also, her time, and distress. That's 2 years of her life she's never going to get back, and in the end they just said "Oh, nevermind. Have a nice life!" At this point she's probably had to put her home into hock in order to defend herself. Now here's my question - how many of you are willing to put your home/retirement/both on the line to stand up to them?
That's why their tactics work. They know most people cannot afford to risk it. I'm thinking that wherever that special hell is for child molesters, the people that decide who get sued this way belong there too. It's one thing to be tangibly harmed by someone and have to seek legal recourse. It's another to not be harmed *at all*, and throw someone's fiscal wellbeing into jeopardy over your bottom line.
I'm sorry. I'm a forgiving person. I'm a kind and loving person. I would love nothing more to punch a few lawyers and corporate big-wigs in the face over this one. Comparatively speaking they have nothing to lose, but from a financial standpoint, the people being sued have everything to lose by standing up for themselves. They know this, and they're doing it anyway.
That's where I draw the line. Straight to that special place in hell with you.
Call up Apple and offer to port the Quicktime runtimes to Linux for free, and not have license compatibility issues. It would have to be a closed-source binary, and could not make use of any GPL code. Good luck! :)
I say the same here, but I'm curious...$1.25/100 gold pieces is fine and all, but how is it that they make so little money in a week? Is gold THAT hard to come by in-game? I could rack up 10,000 gil playing FF12 in an hour. Is gold harder to make playing online games?
I'll tell you why: The concept that both might be right or wrong in some instances escapes some people. That, and we live in a society where people in power will skew "the truth" to make themselves look good, regardless of the reality of things. When was the last time you heard a president apologize for being wrong about something? Anything? Show humility?
Mention you use FreeBSD, get modded into oblivion!
Okay funny guy. :P
:) The reason I bring it up is the hack required for the tivo required a port of monte. Is there any reason that this couldn't become a standard feature? ie, compile the latest kernel fixes, monte in the new kernel, do a service by service restart? I know it's pedantic, but it's then possible to have perpetual uptime, is it not? I"m presuming that the old kernel gets flushed from memory, and since you do a rolling service restart, no one service goes completely down.
That actually brought to mind something really interesting...
We have all of these really cool features in open source software. I do mean REALLY cool too. I run my entire business on FreeBSD servers (no flame wars, just a personal preference!), and amonst all of the really cool things that Linux and FreeBSD can do, I've often wondered something. Why do we have to pull a full reboot for a new kernel?
Don't answer me directly. I know the answer. I know what a kernel is and what it does. Mostly.
I'm making an awful lot of presumptions, and I guess the thought is that if you're going to go to the trouble of doing a rolling service restart, you might as well just cut the power and be done with it...but still. It'd be nice if there's a security fix in the kernel that wouldn't break compatibility with existing running applications to just let you compile, monte to the new kernel, flush the old kernel, and life goes on. Is there a technical limitation that I'm not seeing? Understand I have some FreeBSD-isms going on here with the monolithic kernel vs. kernel+modules. I've run into a nightmare a few times before on a debian box where I've compile a new kernel but forgot to recompile all of the modules, and stuff dies.
Enough said.
;)
Young whipper snappers.
Great game, but the logic engine is flawed.
Pick Ryu (or anyone for that matter....that isn't named Dan). Hold down/right. Wait. Right side getting kinda full? Hold down/left. Wait, watch, win.
Next?
Key words - stream based protocol. I'm talking TCP, not UDP. UDP protocols have issues, which I address separately.
You're not getting it, are you?
:\ I've tried to avoid doing business with "Mom" as I've taking to call them, but it's hard. Anyhoo...that's off-topic. Point is, don't bust their chops for shaping. Bust them for not telling you *how* they're shaping, and "ask" with your money for them to do it right, and not be greedy. If not, make sure your neighbors know what is up too, and if they don't initially care ("we just browse the web and check e-mail"), make them aware of the impact this sort of behavior could have on them down the road, and get them to at least make phone calls and case a ruckus. If they really are your only broadband choice, call the local newspaper, or tv station. They usually have investigative reporters on-hand, and if you can explain in layman's terms what's going on, guaranteed you might get them to re-think their policy. Companies hate bad PR, it hurts the revenue stream, and I know first hand that lost revenue HURTS.
I do this on my own networks, and I don't get complaints about it. Yes I'm an ISP. No, I'm not evil. I make every effort not to be evil. When it comes to transport out to the internet, YES, I do shape traffic. Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get the full bandwidth you're paying for with P2P. What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput. That only occurs if I'm horribly over-subscribed, which just won't happen, because if I'm paying wholesaler rates, there's really no way I'd allow it to happen. Bought in appropriate quantities bandwidth is cheap. TRANSPORT of that bandwidth is what is expensive. I can buy up all the bandwidth I want from the right location for next to nothing. Getting it to you is what costs me big time. If you build the infrastructure to me, support it, and don't whine at me when it's down, I can sell it to you cheaply, too.
No, I don't like the big media conglomerates any more than you do, but being in the business I can tell you that this isn't wholly evil. What I would like to see from them is a release of HOW they're shaping it. That release makes it look to me more like they're doing Web > Everything Else, or putting hard caps on VOIP, Video, P2P, etc, which would be evil as well. I don't hard cap bandwidth below what you're paying for. Now, that said, our service contracts are worded such that you know up front that you're buying burstable service. We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair. If you have a big download, burst away, that's what you've paid for. Running a warez FTP isn't. Running a (high bandwidth) website isn't. We don't have language that says you can't run a server. You can, but you're not allowed to saturate your connection 24/7. If we see that, you get a phone call asking you to purchase a dedicated connection rather than a burstable one. The problem with the cable companies is that they don't offer dedicated connections, because they CAN'T. You're on the same node as your neighbors, and whether you pay for a dedicated connection or not, you degrade the service of your neighbors when you saturate the line, end of story.
I wish I could grow out faster, but I can't. I am try to get some investors to get more infrastructure out there, but Ma Bell isn't too happy about my existence right now.
It's not the goods were provided at a cost people weren't willing to spend, it's that illegal goods were provided at a lower cost than could possibly be matched. There's no way to "adapt" to that either.
Yes, it *could* have been matched or beaten, and yes, there is a way to adapt. Do a bit of research on Bollywood. That's a polar opposite example of the US. Piracy, by comparison, is pretty much non-existent here. There are movies being made, far too much money spent to make them, and all for the hope of being the summer blockbuster, when it is unneccessary. We don't need super-stardom. These companies are NOT guaranteed a profit. Piracy generally occurs because things are sold at a higher price than they need to be. True, capitalism speaks that you should always sell at the highest price any demographic is willing to spend, but...well, I don't have the time nor energy to go into a full-blown econ lesson here. The movie was made for $10mil. It didn't have to cost that much, that was a production choice. (Note - I'm not saying it's right or wrong, simply a choice.) If it costs $5mil, yes, it still costs twice as much as the expense of the pirates, but bear in mind that there's also labor duplication and distribution duplication. The market becomes more competitive, even vs pirates, and as distribution costs approach 0, then the legit option will become increasingly more palatable than the pirated of the same. This is without taking DRM and barriers to consumption into account (which throws an already bleak picture for the MAFIAA in even further turmoil).
I sell legit, Tony Cola for $.75/glass, but in order to buy it, you have to prick your finger at time of purchase. The Cola's pretty good, so people put up with the pricks. Eventually someone across the street manages to make a perfect duplicate of Tony Cola (and in our imaginary world there are no production or distribution costs), they get all of the great taste of sucking on Tony without the pricks. Where do *you* think they'll go?
The answer is clear. Ditch the pricks.
Wake up, look at my RSS feeds to find:
"Using AI to Fire Transformers"
Wow, that's deep. Oops.
Erm...?
Why not contribute something useful? As a business, we've had to go through this, and it wasn't much fun. We needed to do scalable storage. The only real answer there is to do some version of LVM.
So...buy 4 drives, do raid5. If you want to grow the storage, don't buy 1 more drive, but 3-4 more. Do RAID5, add that raid5 to your volume group.
The answer is that the drives are stored internally, and then we go off on NAS storage and slow writes. I just get tired of posters getting belittled. Experience levels vary wildly around here, and the only way for the less experienced to become educated is either be told or learn first-hand. Come off the soap box.
Well that's just it. I'm seeing an increasing amount of references to teleportation which are sect 2 - trasmit data, duplicate, destroy the original. I recall seeing mention of it in sci-fi that way as far back as a Trek novel named Star Trek: Federation. The book came out around the same time as Generations, and told the story of Zephram Cochran, seemed for more plausible than the movie/tv version, and how he was appalled at transporter technology, as it essentially kept creating transporter duplicates, each one believing it is the original when in fact the original died long before, and it was either Kirk or Scott that corrects him and states that the original matter is transported as a stream of energy.
:)
Now I know I'm mixing fiction and fact here, but understand something - I don't like calling the "sect 2" version teleportation any more than you like, but it keeps getting referred to as teleportation. I'd rather refer to it as teleduplication.
That said - which happens first? Teleportation duplicates of humans, or genetic cloning of humans? Which one becomes closer to what comes to mind from sci-fi when we refer to cloning?
Don't suppose you have a whitepaper on that method, do you? :)
I hate car trips.
How are they NOT related?
:)
:D
:P
Let's put it this way - there are two sects in the field of teleportation that I'm aware of right now.
Sect 1 defines teleportation as the tearing down of matter, converting it into energy, transport that energy, and convert it back into matter.
Sect 2 defines teleportation as scanning all of the information about an object, transport that INFORMATION to destination, create replica, then tear down the original.
Star Trek subscribes to version 1, unless of course you're watching a very particular episode.
Anyway, in both cases, you recall hearing the term "pattern buffer" in trek, right? In either case, you have to break Heisenberg's Law (Heisenberg compensator anyone?) about knowing the exact state and location of all particles that make up an object. You store that information, transmit it to the other site, and from that site you either reconstruct the original, or duplicate the original.
The frightening thing is, I see this program in my head writing an XML document, with trees and braches going something like atom/particle/state, and gzip compress it, then transmit it over the fastest method available, decompress on the other side. Just add matter.
Wow I'm sick.
As another reply to this mentioned, they *could* use bsd's libc instead, could they not? I mean yeah...there would be hacking to do, but certainly not enough to make them "suffer".
Heck, if they really needed to they could do a wholesale switch to BSD. The hardware is supported, and I'm sure tivobin could be ported (note - I've hacked my own tivo a few times...)
There's nothing forcing them to stick with Linux, really. I'd prefer they stay with it and stop trying to stop the hackers and just live with the license, but moving to BSD isn't the end of the world for them either. This isn't a BSD troll, it's just a matter of fact. If the hardware is supported, when coding for BSD vs. Linux, there are minor differences, but really...at the end of the day everything that Tivo does could be maintained.
Amarok is good, but I think he's overlooking the obvious here (well...obvious to anyone who's worked with UMS devices at all....)
:)
What's happening with his player is that it is either - 1, not recognized by the OS as a UMS (doesn't sound like this...he's able to put files on it and mount it, etc), or 2, the application doesn't recognize the device. If the latter, then what he needs to do is get the USB Vendor ID and Product ID of the player, and send it to the devs so that they can add support for it. If he doesn't mind recompiling from source, he can probably locate the file where the USB identifiers are kept, add them locally, and recompile.
That said, there are a bunch of devices out there that misrepresent themselves as UMS, but in reality are not. I had a camera like this. It took SmartMedia flash, and had a USB cable that was suppose to allow me to plug the camera in and use it as a card reader. Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX immediately attempted to load the UMS driver, as the device claimed this, but then failed miserably. The camera came with a driver disk for Windows, which should have tipped me off right away what was happening. Essentially whomever wrote the firmware for the camera had it identify with that class, even though it wasn't true. It triggers the OS to load the wrong driver, and somehow they worked around that for the Windows driver. If he has that going on, he's pretty much SOL. If he can mount the player and copy files, it's just a matter of getting those two ID's into the hands of the developers, and temporarily modifying his own build until the next version comes out.
This is why Open Source stuff is cool. Your device isn't supported, but is standards compliant? Add it to the sources and recompile.