I am afraid that, by owning a satellite television provider and a satellite internet provider, AT&T will proclaim that they have fulfilled the "universal service" mandate and refuse to upgrade any more legacy copper wire plant. There have been rumors that AT&T will not run new copper lines to a home or business if they are covered by any cell phone tower or any competing phone provider (including VoIP from another provider); nor will they replace faulty or noisy existing copper lines, since you could get service from a competitor.
Customer growth with UVERSE was not happening fast enough -- content distributors (Disney/ESPN, premium movie channels, Scripps Networks, etc.) charged AT&T more because they did not have the subscriber numbers to leverage lower channel costs. After the merger, I expect those contracts to be renegotiated for much lower costs per subscriber for AT&T. Not that the consumers will see any of those savings...
I wonder how they are storing the gender in the database. Most databases allocate a single character for gender -- M or F in most cases. I had joked that a company could easily offer Neuter and Transgender and still use the single character space. How are they storing 50 different choices in a single character?
Either that, or create another linked table for the multitude of choices, and use X in gender to indicate a lookup in the auxiliary gender table.
Would some countries limit what choices their citizens could have?
I am very happy with Zino for many of my magazine subscriptions. Most magazines are read once and then donate or recycle; having them electronic takes up much less space. With some magazines you also have access to back issues. For the ones that do not, a screenshot of an interesting article is usually enough to find it online elsewhere. For the magazines embracing more restrictive DRM, I find a replacement or continue to receive the physical version that can be scanned. If Zinio goes away, nothing of great value to me is lost -- same risk as a magazine going out of business.
There are still some magazines that have not or will not embrace the digital; for those, I am carefully evaluating whether I still need the information they contain. This also applies to magazines that are charging the same price for physical as electronic subscription, despite the savings in printing and mailing.
Yes, yes, a magazine or book does not crash or run out of battery; for most of the magazines I get, not having immediate access to it is not a deal-breaker.
Thinking back 25+ years ago, so please forgive any inaccuracies. Reasons to crack open a mid-80's Mac (128K or 512K Fat Mac) and void your warranty/AppleCare:
1) Replace the *#%$ flyback transformer
2) Aftermarket RAM upgrade (128K->512K)
3) Third party hard drive
4) Floppy disk 400K->800K upgrade
5) External video adapter
6) Other stuff lost in the corners of my mind.
Didn't the SE/30 also require a case-cracking kit?
Yes, the original 128K, 512K, Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac SE/30 all required the case-cracking kit. Essentially it was a long handled Torx screwdriver, and a hinged piece of metal to assist in opening the firm-fitting back of the case from the front. Search for "macintosh torx" for some examples.
The biggest upgrades at the time was going from four 256K SIMM to four 1M SIMM for MultiFinder. So many programs, all running at once!
I still have an SE/30 upgrade which installed a XT compatible board in the expansion slot. Several companies made external video cards for the SE and SE/30.
On topic, notice that almost every Mac after that was able to be user-upgradable fairly easily (Mac II family, Performa, Quadra, etc.) mainly because RAM and hard drive sizes were increasing so dramatically year to year. How fast is RAM and hard drive capacity increasing today?
The Pocket Computer 7, yes. Which is why I wrote all my programs down on paper. Hated when the battery needed to be replaced, it meant that I would soon be retyping in my programs.
The PC-6 had a backup battery, a CR2016, so replacing the main batteries did not make it forget your programs or data. It also had a specialty printer port, so you could print data or programs.
Reading your proposal for having an FPGA hold a critical part of the encryption process, I was reminded of the many places we have seen this idea before: dongles (parallel port and USB), arcade games (slapstic from Atari, the CPS-2 "suicide batteries", and NAOMI to name a few), SmartCards, and others.
Instead of using FPGA, I would use a cheaper PIC or Atmel device -- the security is in the algorithm implemented in the device. Having a copy of the hardware in the hand of an attacker, whether cheap or expensive, nullifies the extra security it provides. Notice for the devices above, they were all compromised after diligent work over time.
For a out-of-band verification system, I can see this working pretty well -- for an individual user or server. Making sure that the device does the calculation and not holding a "shared secret" is the key. Having to carry around a physical device to decrypt your data would be inconvenient; having only one device that can authenticate users is ideal (and a spare device for Murphy).
I just find it curious that the wheel of progress is rotating back to using separate hardware to implement hashing or security instead of just relying on algorithm complexity.
Of course, there (the original) DiVX format, which used a phone-home DVD player and special DiVX discs from Circuit City. Also a miserable failure.
What I find funny is that most people who buy DVD movies only watch them a couple of times. Occasionally it was cheaper to buy it than to rent it (think of all the overstocked copies of a popular movie at the rental places), so I have a few movies myself that were watched once, and have been loaned out to others.
Which is the crazy thing about all this -- it is the removal of the ability to loan out or resell the physical copy that seems to be the goal. E-book readers, Steam cloud software, all of these replace first-sale with license-to-use.
I still thought Opera had advertising in the interface, and had actively avoided using it. After your comment, I read their 1Q report -- apparently they're working on back ends to compress web data to send to their Opera mobile browsers (less bandwidth), along with a Google partnership for the desktop search (and other ventures).
I wondered how long it would take for streaming movies to get ads embedded within, or around the display frame. Combine this innovation with the picture recognition advertising technology, and preference targeting, and I'm afraid the synergy of the underlying revenue stream would be insurmountable.
Would Dish Network or DirecTV have prior art on some aspect of this? They both currently have integrated ads within the program guide. Or the TVGuide channel, with the incessant video ad at the top? Did someone think to include an ad frame on the new TVs that connect to the internet and show videos and web pages? How about Microsoft's and Dish Network's WebTV? Video games with a "pay to continue" timer?
Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 1
We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.
For now, quarterly results are great, because we're still coasting on all the innovation of previous years. There has been no disruptive technology to dislodge this mindset.
However, if one or two companies have a mindset of finding a competitive advantage by doing research for a couple of years, they could leapfrog existing companies with their newer processes. But, no guarantee of finding an advantage. It takes visionaries to look farther than the quarterly cash flow sheets.
Most companies will not do long-term research until necessary. The advantage of waiting for a new innovation to appear (from someone else's research) is that it's not near as expensive to clone the advantage for yourself.
So, our current model is that small companies spend lots of money looking for competitive advantages against larger companies, find one, and promptly get bought out or cloned.
Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
What you are describing was implemented in Ultima Online. Kill a player, all the guards in cities mark you KoS (kill on sight). The solution was to not go to cities anymore. No banking, but there's plenty of killed player corpses to loot.
So, roving gangs of PKers hang out at the load points between areas, and kill your character while your computer is loading the next area's graphics. The solution for a while was the formation of anti PKers, who would descend in mass and swarm a PK group. But, now their characters were also flagged as PKers.
So yes, it ended up as a feudal system. Unfortunately, it was a world where the PK eventually won.
At least I'm not the only one watching these programs -- Holmes on Homes may be the one you are referencing.
Ideally, an older contractor (or programmer) has to have a young mindset. Continuing to do what has worked in the past makes it harder for your work to interface with current methodologies. Writing database software using ODBC.DLL calls or not using Ditra under your new bathroom tile floors -- it means that your work will not mesh with current practices.
I would expect a specialist in their field to remain mostly up-to-date on their knowledge, or let me know they specialize in a particular older technology. Or, one would hope, they can do both.
We are talking about making the distro as lite as possible. Putting the entire games suite takes up another big chunk. I never understood the reasoning behind the "games suite" to begin with. Wouldn't it be better if people chose their own games?
For most Windows users, there are only four games -- Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, Minesweeper, and (for some) the pinball game. When they see all of the games available from the live Ubuntu CD, they are interested in finding out more. As a selling point, seeing the list of games already installed has impact on end users. Showing them all of the games available for free via the package management system just seals the deal. (Yes, XP has the Internet-enabled games as well. Meh.)
I think the solution is to make the buttons themselves say what they do, rather than clicking Ok or Cancel, have the button say "Exit crashed program", or "Install new program" or what have you. Always being OK or Cancel conditions people to just blindly click.
The Apple user interface guidelines have always stated that verbs should be used on command buttons. Inserting a blank disk under Mac OS pops up the "Format" or "Eject" dialog box. On Windows, the text says "To format the disk, click OK. To quit, click CANCEL" with "OK" or "Cancel" buttons.
Of course, if you put something other than OK or CANCEL in the dialog box, most Windows users freeze up. They don't know what to click.
Making users read the dialog box text helps. Just make sure the text is actually useful for making a decision.
Of course, if you can duplicate the data content and algorithms of the RFID chip, say by physically dismantling it layer-by-layer with a destructive analysis, you can clone it even if you don't know the shared secret. The article is claiming (without ANY credible evidence, BTW) to have somehow made this impossible, presumably by creating some random-but-repeatable property in the chip that cannot be extracted by analysis for reproduction in a cloned chip.
Wasn't there a problem with the SID chip on the Commodore 64, where the filter section came out differently on different SID chip lots? Wiki mentions it briefly; I remember some games gave the ability to disable the SID filter if it sounded pants.
I would conjecture that it is possible to spec a circuit that would have the potential to have unique characteristics per chip. Or just design it so that 2.0 + 2.0 = 4.00000013 or 3.99999985 or other random number because of a silicon flaw unique to each chip.
Given how many arcade games have survived the past 30 years, why not burn the data to a modern EPROM? It's lasted to this point for old console games, old motherboards, even fairly modern video games.
The interface could be problematic, but somebody will have the means to read the data off of the EPROM into our quantum-tunneling diamond-substrate 100GHz personal computer interface devices. Or that dusty Pentium 2GHz non-DRM computer in the basement.
BTW even though the 2600 joystick was in essence digital, all the inputs were read through analog mechanisms.
The Atari 2600 joystick was five digital push-buttons on a circuit board (one for each direction, and the fire button). The console set a single bit for each button pushed. The joystick was read as digital data.
The Atari 2600 paddles, however, were analog. A strobe byte to start the capacitor discharging through the variable resistor inside the controller. The program would check several times per frame for a complete discharge, and use the time it took as the value of the paddle.
Funny enough, the Star Raiders touch pad (and Atari BASIC) was also an analog control. The row and column were the two paddles, and different resistances for each row or column. Read single keys only.
The Atari 2600 steering controller was digital. Two bits per paddle, in the pattern 01-11-10-00 so that only one bit changed as you rotated.
Lastly, the Atari 5200 joystick was entirely analog. Many gamers cursed its lack of return to center. Playing Pac-Man on that monster was not fun.
The Atari 7800 returned to the digital joystick mechanism (backwards compatible with the 2600), but added a second fire button (either fire button triggered the "fire" bit, but an analog method was provided to determine which fire button was pressed (left or right)).
The Coleco controllers were also compatible with the Atari 2600 and 7800 joysticks; I don't remember if the Coleco's keypad was compatible with the Star Raiders touch pad.
Finally, all of these controllers also work with the Commodore 64 and 128 joystick port. Exact same pinouts and functionality (digital and analog). Many times I used a 2600 joystick for Commodore gaming. (I really should try that Koala touchpad with some Atari games...)
That was far too long, hope someone finds it useful.
They had six servers, all with anemic populations. About six months ago, they merged the population into three servers (and the pvp server).
Server performance was never the issue -- the client side performance is. Yes, the textures are incredibly detailed, the locations are beautifully sculpted. It overwhelms anything less than a NVidia 8800 or similar.
Hmm, need to have registered an email address with Microsoft LiveID. Nah, just make me a new one. More spam fodder.
Verify my school against the list here. No go, just the big universities listed. Oh, but there's another way!
So, purchase a free item from JourneyEd, and we'll get an email with authorization to download. Sure, click-click.
Oh, look. "VeriClick - The easiest way to provide proof of your academic status." For the low price of $2.95, we'll look into our master database of registered students from 1,500 colleges and see if you're in there. Or I can email or fax proof for free. I'm sure the verification process will take at least a week or so.
New account with JourneyEd, usual account information. Skipped the payment step, that's good.
Apparently, nobody told JourneyEd about this, their webserver is full of molasses. I can't go any farther right now.
Well, there's always the MSDNAA (It looks like a troll), where for the low fee of $799 we'll send you discs for the campus (or $499 for download only). Still have to get keys from MSDN web server.
LDA #$46 STY $0000,Y LDA #$69 STA $0001,Y LDA #$72 STA $0002,Y LDA #$73 STA $0003,Y LDA #$74 STA $0004,Y LDA #$21 STA $0005,Y
Assuming the display started at memory address zero (and the Y register is zero), this would work. If this was from rusty memory, color me impressed. Much better than myself. If you used 85 instead of 99 (STA zpage instead of STA Absolute,Y) it could be shorter.
Using some crib notes (memory map and an opcode reference from the Apple Programmer's Handbook (shrunk and laminated, never leave home without it)), here's a smaller version.
If there was a way to Thumbs down every feminine hygiene, Burger King, and other junk I'm not interested in, and Thumbs up things I like,
pretty soon they'd have an idea of what I like. Then they could insert targeted ads into the commercial break (which could now be shorter
since the dollar value per minutes would be higher since it is target specific). Then I'd only see what I'm really interested in,
and I might actually watch a commercial or 2. Hell, if they really want to capitalize on this, why not let me push a button and get
MORE information on the product (a detailed video clip) or have them send me dead trees if I prefer.
I remember having an original WebTV receiver (Dishplayer 7100) from Dish Network in 1998 or 1999. While you were watching a program, it would occasionally put a green bar at the bottom and ask if you wanted more information about the program you were watching, and it would open the WebTV web browser (and stop displaying the program you were watching). I don't know if it would put up the link for commercials (never did for me). It only showed the banner a few times; I guess I didn't watch the right programs.
I found it intrusive, because there was no way to turn the info banner off, or control how long it stayed on the screen. Fortunately, not many programs had a link to the web. After the hard drive died in it, I bought a new receiver -- never did sign up for the WebTV portion. Never plugged in the phone line.
It would be nice to thumb up or down commercials in addition to programs, but then you have to send the timings for commercial breaks, make sure the local channels don't replace them (where appropriate), and several other technical problems.
The judges took this into consideration. Short answer: it's the computer running the software that's infringing, not the software itself. Congress can choose to close this loophole.
From the (thanks to another poster) fine PDF):
AT&T holds a patent on an apparatus for digitally
encoding and compressing recorded speech. Microsoft's
Windows operating system, it is conceded, has the potential
to infringe AT&T's patent, because Windows incorporates
software code that, when installed, enables a computer
to process speech in the manner claimed by that
patent. It bears emphasis, however, that uninstalled
Windows software does not infringe AT&T's patent any
more than a computer standing alone does; instead, the
patent is infringed only when a computer is loaded with
Windows and is thereby rendered capable of performing as
the patented speech processor. The question before us:
Does Microsoft's liability extend to computers made in
another country when loaded with Windows software
copied abroad from a master disk or electronic transmission
dispatched by Microsoft from the United States? Our
answer is "No."
The master disk or electronic transmission Microsoft
sends from the United States is never installed on any of
the foreign-made computers in question. Instead, copies
made abroad are used for installation. Because Microsoft
does not export from the United States the copies actually
installed, it does not "suppl[y] . . . from the United States"
"components" of the relevant computers, and therefore is
not liable under 271(f) as currently written.
Plausible arguments can be made for and against extending
271(f) to the conduct charged in this case as
infringing AT&T's patent. Recognizing that 271(f) is an
exception to the general rule that our patent law does not
apply extraterritorially, we resist giving the language in
which Congress cast 271(f) an expansive interpretation.
Our decision leaves to Congress' informed judgment any
adjustment of 271(f) it deems necessary or proper.
I have seen more web sites that uses VBV. My credit card was "automatically and for my convenience" signed up for VBV by my issuing bank. More than once I've cancelled my order instead of dealing with the additional verification.
When I finally needed to buy from NewEgg, it took 3 or 4 tries to get through the VBV crap page (unblock popups, unblock cookies, allow JavaScript). Surprised it let me try that many times. I was not impressed with the security or functionality, from the consumer standpoint.
Or you're one local root exploit away from having your hard drive wiped.
Long ago, having your *nix box cracked meant you hard drive was wiped. Haha, very funny.
Today, the people who crack access to systems are not interested in destroying it -- it's a computing resource, and a potential gateway to acquiring other computing resources. Right now, the low-hanging fruit is the plethora of unprotected or underpatched Windows systems. But I'm sure if someone was to root your *nix box, the last thing they would do is wipe the hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I am afraid that, by owning a satellite television provider and a satellite internet provider, AT&T will proclaim that they have fulfilled the "universal service" mandate and refuse to upgrade any more legacy copper wire plant. There have been rumors that AT&T will not run new copper lines to a home or business if they are covered by any cell phone tower or any competing phone provider (including VoIP from another provider); nor will they replace faulty or noisy existing copper lines, since you could get service from a competitor.
Customer growth with UVERSE was not happening fast enough -- content distributors (Disney/ESPN, premium movie channels, Scripps Networks, etc.) charged AT&T more because they did not have the subscriber numbers to leverage lower channel costs. After the merger, I expect those contracts to be renegotiated for much lower costs per subscriber for AT&T. Not that the consumers will see any of those savings...
I wonder how they are storing the gender in the database. Most databases allocate a single character for gender -- M or F in most cases. I had joked that a company could easily offer Neuter and Transgender and still use the single character space. How are they storing 50 different choices in a single character? Either that, or create another linked table for the multitude of choices, and use X in gender to indicate a lookup in the auxiliary gender table. Would some countries limit what choices their citizens could have?
I am very happy with Zino for many of my magazine subscriptions. Most magazines are read once and then donate or recycle; having them electronic takes up much less space. With some magazines you also have access to back issues. For the ones that do not, a screenshot of an interesting article is usually enough to find it online elsewhere. For the magazines embracing more restrictive DRM, I find a replacement or continue to receive the physical version that can be scanned. If Zinio goes away, nothing of great value to me is lost -- same risk as a magazine going out of business.
There are still some magazines that have not or will not embrace the digital; for those, I am carefully evaluating whether I still need the information they contain. This also applies to magazines that are charging the same price for physical as electronic subscription, despite the savings in printing and mailing.
Yes, yes, a magazine or book does not crash or run out of battery; for most of the magazines I get, not having immediate access to it is not a deal-breaker.
Yes, the original 128K, 512K, Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac SE/30 all required the case-cracking kit. Essentially it was a long handled Torx screwdriver, and a hinged piece of metal to assist in opening the firm-fitting back of the case from the front. Search for "macintosh torx" for some examples.
The biggest upgrades at the time was going from four 256K SIMM to four 1M SIMM for MultiFinder. So many programs, all running at once! I still have an SE/30 upgrade which installed a XT compatible board in the expansion slot. Several companies made external video cards for the SE and SE/30.
On topic, notice that almost every Mac after that was able to be user-upgradable fairly easily (Mac II family, Performa, Quadra, etc.) mainly because RAM and hard drive sizes were increasing so dramatically year to year. How fast is RAM and hard drive capacity increasing today?
The Pocket Computer 7, yes. Which is why I wrote all my programs down on paper. Hated when the battery needed to be replaced, it meant that I would soon be retyping in my programs. The PC-6 had a backup battery, a CR2016, so replacing the main batteries did not make it forget your programs or data. It also had a specialty printer port, so you could print data or programs.
Reading your proposal for having an FPGA hold a critical part of the encryption process, I was reminded of the many places we have seen this idea before: dongles (parallel port and USB), arcade games (slapstic from Atari, the CPS-2 "suicide batteries", and NAOMI to name a few), SmartCards, and others.
Instead of using FPGA, I would use a cheaper PIC or Atmel device -- the security is in the algorithm implemented in the device. Having a copy of the hardware in the hand of an attacker, whether cheap or expensive, nullifies the extra security it provides. Notice for the devices above, they were all compromised after diligent work over time.
For a out-of-band verification system, I can see this working pretty well -- for an individual user or server. Making sure that the device does the calculation and not holding a "shared secret" is the key. Having to carry around a physical device to decrypt your data would be inconvenient; having only one device that can authenticate users is ideal (and a spare device for Murphy).
I just find it curious that the wheel of progress is rotating back to using separate hardware to implement hashing or security instead of just relying on algorithm complexity.
Actually, this has been tried. It was not accepted very well in the marketplace.
limited-use-dvd-technology self-destructing-dvds-coming-soon the-one-use-self-destructing-dvd-returns
Of course, there (the original) DiVX format, which used a phone-home DVD player and special DiVX discs from Circuit City. Also a miserable failure.
What I find funny is that most people who buy DVD movies only watch them a couple of times. Occasionally it was cheaper to buy it than to rent it (think of all the overstocked copies of a popular movie at the rental places), so I have a few movies myself that were watched once, and have been loaned out to others.
Which is the crazy thing about all this -- it is the removal of the ability to loan out or resell the physical copy that seems to be the goal. E-book readers, Steam cloud software, all of these replace first-sale with license-to-use.
I still thought Opera had advertising in the interface, and had actively avoided using it. After your comment, I read their 1Q report -- apparently they're working on back ends to compress web data to send to their Opera mobile browsers (less bandwidth), along with a Google partnership for the desktop search (and other ventures).
I wondered how long it would take for streaming movies to get ads embedded within, or around the display frame. Combine this innovation with the picture recognition advertising technology, and preference targeting, and I'm afraid the synergy of the underlying revenue stream would be insurmountable.
Would Dish Network or DirecTV have prior art on some aspect of this? They both currently have integrated ads within the program guide. Or the TVGuide channel, with the incessant video ad at the top? Did someone think to include an ad frame on the new TVs that connect to the internet and show videos and web pages? How about Microsoft's and Dish Network's WebTV? Video games with a "pay to continue" timer?
For now, quarterly results are great, because we're still coasting on all the innovation of previous years. There has been no disruptive technology to dislodge this mindset.
However, if one or two companies have a mindset of finding a competitive advantage by doing research for a couple of years, they could leapfrog existing companies with their newer processes. But, no guarantee of finding an advantage. It takes visionaries to look farther than the quarterly cash flow sheets.
Most companies will not do long-term research until necessary. The advantage of waiting for a new innovation to appear (from someone else's research) is that it's not near as expensive to clone the advantage for yourself.
So, our current model is that small companies spend lots of money looking for competitive advantages against larger companies, find one, and promptly get bought out or cloned.
What you are describing was implemented in Ultima Online. Kill a player, all the guards in cities mark you KoS (kill on sight). The solution was to not go to cities anymore. No banking, but there's plenty of killed player corpses to loot.
So, roving gangs of PKers hang out at the load points between areas, and kill your character while your computer is loading the next area's graphics. The solution for a while was the formation of anti PKers, who would descend in mass and swarm a PK group. But, now their characters were also flagged as PKers.
So yes, it ended up as a feudal system. Unfortunately, it was a world where the PK eventually won.
At least I'm not the only one watching these programs -- Holmes on Homes may be the one you are referencing.
Ideally, an older contractor (or programmer) has to have a young mindset. Continuing to do what has worked in the past makes it harder for your work to interface with current methodologies. Writing database software using ODBC.DLL calls or not using Ditra under your new bathroom tile floors -- it means that your work will not mesh with current practices.
I would expect a specialist in their field to remain mostly up-to-date on their knowledge, or let me know they specialize in a particular older technology. Or, one would hope, they can do both.
For most Windows users, there are only four games -- Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, Minesweeper, and (for some) the pinball game. When they see all of the games available from the live Ubuntu CD, they are interested in finding out more. As a selling point, seeing the list of games already installed has impact on end users. Showing them all of the games available for free via the package management system just seals the deal.
(Yes, XP has the Internet-enabled games as well. Meh.)
The Apple user interface guidelines have always stated that verbs should be used on command buttons. Inserting a blank disk under Mac OS pops up the "Format" or "Eject" dialog box. On Windows, the text says "To format the disk, click OK. To quit, click CANCEL" with "OK" or "Cancel" buttons.
Of course, if you put something other than OK or CANCEL in the dialog box, most Windows users freeze up. They don't know what to click.
Making users read the dialog box text helps. Just make sure the text is actually useful for making a decision.
Wasn't there a problem with the SID chip on the Commodore 64, where the filter section came out differently on different SID chip lots? Wiki mentions it briefly; I remember some games gave the ability to disable the SID filter if it sounded pants.
I would conjecture that it is possible to spec a circuit that would have the potential to have unique characteristics per chip. Or just design it so that 2.0 + 2.0 = 4.00000013 or 3.99999985 or other random number because of a silicon flaw unique to each chip.
The interface could be problematic, but somebody will have the means to read the data off of the EPROM into our quantum-tunneling diamond-substrate 100GHz personal computer interface devices. Or that dusty Pentium 2GHz non-DRM computer in the basement.
The Atari 2600 joystick was five digital push-buttons on a circuit board (one for each direction, and the fire button). The console set a single bit for each button pushed. The joystick was read as digital data.
The Atari 2600 paddles, however, were analog. A strobe byte to start the capacitor discharging through the variable resistor inside the controller. The program would check several times per frame for a complete discharge, and use the time it took as the value of the paddle.
Funny enough, the Star Raiders touch pad (and Atari BASIC) was also an analog control. The row and column were the two paddles, and different resistances for each row or column. Read single keys only.
The Atari 2600 steering controller was digital. Two bits per paddle, in the pattern 01-11-10-00 so that only one bit changed as you rotated.
Lastly, the Atari 5200 joystick was entirely analog. Many gamers cursed its lack of return to center. Playing Pac-Man on that monster was not fun.
The Atari 7800 returned to the digital joystick mechanism (backwards compatible with the 2600), but added a second fire button (either fire button triggered the "fire" bit, but an analog method was provided to determine which fire button was pressed (left or right)).
The Coleco controllers were also compatible with the Atari 2600 and 7800 joysticks; I don't remember if the Coleco's keypad was compatible with the Star Raiders touch pad.
Finally, all of these controllers also work with the Commodore 64 and 128 joystick port. Exact same pinouts and functionality (digital and analog). Many times I used a 2600 joystick for Commodore gaming. (I really should try that Koala touchpad with some Atari games...)
That was far too long, hope someone finds it useful.
They had six servers, all with anemic populations. About six months ago, they merged the population into three servers (and the pvp server). Server performance was never the issue -- the client side performance is. Yes, the textures are incredibly detailed, the locations are beautifully sculpted. It overwhelms anything less than a NVidia 8800 or similar.
Hmm, need to have registered an email address with Microsoft LiveID. Nah, just make me a new one. More spam fodder.
Verify my school against the list here. No go, just the big universities listed. Oh, but there's another way!
So, purchase a free item from JourneyEd, and we'll get an email with authorization to download. Sure, click-click.
Oh, look. "VeriClick - The easiest way to provide proof of your academic status." For the low price of $2.95, we'll look into our master database of registered students from 1,500 colleges and see if you're in there. Or I can email or fax proof for free. I'm sure the verification process will take at least a week or so.
New account with JourneyEd, usual account information. Skipped the payment step, that's good.
Apparently, nobody told JourneyEd about this, their webserver is full of molasses. I can't go any farther right now.
Well, there's always the MSDNAA (It looks like a troll), where for the low fee of $799 we'll send you discs for the campus (or $499 for download only). Still have to get keys from MSDN web server.
This is not looking free in time or money.
Using some crib notes (memory map and an opcode reference from the Apple Programmer's Handbook (shrunk and laminated, never leave home without it)), here's a smaller version.
For the pedantics that point out that I miscalculated the relative jumps, byte me. Too lazy to find an Apple II emulator and dig around for ROMs.This evening, I'll be on the IIgs playing Bolo. Or Karateka.
I remember having an original WebTV receiver (Dishplayer 7100) from Dish Network in 1998 or 1999. While you were watching a program, it would occasionally put a green bar at the bottom and ask if you wanted more information about the program you were watching, and it would open the WebTV web browser (and stop displaying the program you were watching). I don't know if it would put up the link for commercials (never did for me). It only showed the banner a few times; I guess I didn't watch the right programs.
I found it intrusive, because there was no way to turn the info banner off, or control how long it stayed on the screen. Fortunately, not many programs had a link to the web. After the hard drive died in it, I bought a new receiver -- never did sign up for the WebTV portion. Never plugged in the phone line.
It would be nice to thumb up or down commercials in addition to programs, but then you have to send the timings for commercial breaks, make sure the local channels don't replace them (where appropriate), and several other technical problems.
I have seen more web sites that uses VBV. My credit card was "automatically and for my convenience" signed up for VBV by my issuing bank. More than once I've cancelled my order instead of dealing with the additional verification.
When I finally needed to buy from NewEgg, it took 3 or 4 tries to get through the VBV crap page (unblock popups, unblock cookies, allow JavaScript). Surprised it let me try that many times. I was not impressed with the security or functionality, from the consumer standpoint.
Cache date is December 1 of 2006. They registered google-nasa.com as well. Mentions Megan Smith and Chris Kemp on front page.
Long ago, having your *nix box cracked meant you hard drive was wiped. Haha, very funny.
Today, the people who crack access to systems are not interested in destroying it -- it's a computing resource, and a potential gateway to acquiring other computing resources. Right now, the low-hanging fruit is the plethora of unprotected or underpatched Windows systems. But I'm sure if someone was to root your *nix box, the last thing they would do is wipe the hard drive.