Water injection was used extensively in WW2 aircraft engines. All it does is to retard the rate of flame front propagation in the combustion chamber, which suppresses detonation -- in other words, it improves the anti-knock qualities of the fuel. Turning on the water did nothing to increase power output by itself, but enabled the pilot to open the throttle further and burn more fuel to get a power increase without the engine blowing itself up.
Nothing special about the Goose except its size...wooden airplanes were very common for a time and aircraft homebuilders still use lots of wood. This story is about paper outperforming wood (as well as some metals).
That was the ProLok disk. It had a spot on it that had been heated with a laser, enough to fuse some of the oxide. The result was a small amount of disk space that could be read but not altered. The copy-check consisted of writing all zeroes to that area; verifying all zeroes; writing all ones; and verifying all ones. A disk with the laser spot would always produce at least one compare error.
The routine was hidden inside a really lame obfuscation scheme. It would read a section of encrypted code from the disk, XOR it byte by byte with a byte selected from a table, and store it in RAM. Then it would select another byte from the table and do the XOR again. And again, thirty or forty times. Each cycle would begin by altering the single-step and breakpoint interrupt vectors to point to an exit instruction.
If you went to the trouble of tracing your way down through all that, you were rewarded with a delicious irony: the ProLok disk was, itself, a copyright infringement. In order to do the write/read checks they had to insert hooks into the BIOS -- but that was not so easy in the small-RAM days when the BIOS executed directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. Vault had to make its own BIOS, and did it by (drum roll) copying IBM's (rimshot). And they made an absurdly lame attempt to cover it up: they took some 800 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS, added their hooks, then went through it and interchanged logical-shift-left and arithmetic-shift-left instructions wherever the MSB and carry were guaranteed to be zero (meaning both instructions did the same thing). So, disassemblies of the two BIOSes would look a LITTLE different...
Oh, the crack? A two-byte change on the disk, probably a back door they forgot to remove. Compuserve was the central clearinghouse for cracks in those days, and picked it up within a week.
AFAIK Vault's only client was Ashton-Tate, who used it on dBase III. The president of Vault was a guy with a law-enforcement background and a SWAT team mentality who fancied himself a mighty crime fighter, and when he was embarrassed by the quick crack, he boasted they were developing ProLok Plus, which would punish crackers by physically damaging the machine. Business customers were enraged, Ashton-Tate dumped Vault (which was expensive because they owned a one-third interest in it), and Vault was no more.
...is the one we've all seen in the airport: confiscation of bottled water. Every time a TSA guy finds your bottle of Dasani, he pours the suspected explosive in the trash. His very first good catch will be his last...
Back in the Seventies when HBO was being distributed over 2.3GHz links, loads of people built antennas that consisted of an aluminum snow saucer with a one-pound coffee can as the feedhorn, the latter supported on three pieces of aluminum rod. The antenna connection was a Type N female connector with a piece of brass rod 1.25 inches (1/4 wave) long, sticking radially in from the circumference of the can, 2.5 inches (1/2 wave) from the closed end.
Of course the saucer was spherical, not parabolic, but the error was within the Rayleigh criterion of 1/8 wave, so it worked remarkably well. Rumor Has It (tm) that it could deliver a clear HBO signal over twenty miles from the Denver transmitter, in a neighborhood that HBO itself declined to serve because of intervening hills...
Well, no, it would mean that a few million Native Americans would own it. But we Europeans adjusted the title the way we do best, and now we, along with some later arrivals, own it.
...in fact, two layers of prior art. There was a Slashdot article in 2006 that mentioned a lower-tech version, and in that thread I referred to an even lower-tech version from the Seventies called "Whizzers", that involved cardboard targets.
The term "cricket" surfaced in a racial-discrimination lawsuit in Denver in the 1970s, as code for black patrons at a certain disco. Their doorman was overheard calling his management on his walkie-talkie and discussing how many "crickets" he should admit to the club.
That means Google, Yahoo, etc., need to remove China from the map
A much better option than going along with what China wants them to publish. Sometimes the best course is to let jackasses make jackasses of themselves.
At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing).
Melbourne, 1956, Hungarians vs Russians in water polo...
Slashdot Mirror
rj
I'll take a case of Thin Mints...
rj
Nothing special about the Goose except its size...wooden airplanes were very common for a time and aircraft homebuilders still use lots of wood. This story is about paper outperforming wood (as well as some metals).
rj
rj
That was the ProLok disk. It had a spot on it that had been heated with a laser, enough to fuse some of the oxide. The result was a small amount of disk space that could be read but not altered. The copy-check consisted of writing all zeroes to that area; verifying all zeroes; writing all ones; and verifying all ones. A disk with the laser spot would always produce at least one compare error.
The routine was hidden inside a really lame obfuscation scheme. It would read a section of encrypted code from the disk, XOR it byte by byte with a byte selected from a table, and store it in RAM. Then it would select another byte from the table and do the XOR again. And again, thirty or forty times. Each cycle would begin by altering the single-step and breakpoint interrupt vectors to point to an exit instruction.
If you went to the trouble of tracing your way down through all that, you were rewarded with a delicious irony: the ProLok disk was, itself, a copyright infringement. In order to do the write/read checks they had to insert hooks into the BIOS -- but that was not so easy in the small-RAM days when the BIOS executed directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. Vault had to make its own BIOS, and did it by (drum roll) copying IBM's (rimshot). And they made an absurdly lame attempt to cover it up: they took some 800 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS, added their hooks, then went through it and interchanged logical-shift-left and arithmetic-shift-left instructions wherever the MSB and carry were guaranteed to be zero (meaning both instructions did the same thing). So, disassemblies of the two BIOSes would look a LITTLE different...
Oh, the crack? A two-byte change on the disk, probably a back door they forgot to remove. Compuserve was the central clearinghouse for cracks in those days, and picked it up within a week.
AFAIK Vault's only client was Ashton-Tate, who used it on dBase III. The president of Vault was a guy with a law-enforcement background and a SWAT team mentality who fancied himself a mighty crime fighter, and when he was embarrassed by the quick crack, he boasted they were developing ProLok Plus, which would punish crackers by physically damaging the machine. Business customers were enraged, Ashton-Tate dumped Vault (which was expensive because they owned a one-third interest in it), and Vault was no more.
rj
And that would be bad for the typical obese American or Brit how?
rj
Yeah, and I hear the baked Alaska goes down.
rj
Oh, bugger.
rj
Thanks.
rj
I'd be grateful for a cite to that...
rj
rj
They copied the whole bloody Royal Navy, added a few things, and creamed the original in the Pacific.
rj
...and all they had going in was the Zero fighter and the Long Lance torpedo...who knew?
rj
It certainly is, but as Atraxen says, that's not anywhere close to trinitroglycerin -- so your K-Y and/or Astroglide won't get you in trouble.
rj
Back in the Seventies when HBO was being distributed over 2.3GHz links, loads of people built antennas that consisted of an aluminum snow saucer with a one-pound coffee can as the feedhorn, the latter supported on three pieces of aluminum rod. The antenna connection was a Type N female connector with a piece of brass rod 1.25 inches (1/4 wave) long, sticking radially in from the circumference of the can, 2.5 inches (1/2 wave) from the closed end.
Of course the saucer was spherical, not parabolic, but the error was within the Rayleigh criterion of 1/8 wave, so it worked remarkably well. Rumor Has It (tm) that it could deliver a clear HBO signal over twenty miles from the Denver transmitter, in a neighborhood that HBO itself declined to serve because of intervening hills...
Well, no, it would mean that a few million Native Americans would own it. But we Europeans adjusted the title the way we do best, and now we, along with some later arrivals, own it.
rj
...in fact, two layers of prior art. There was a Slashdot article in 2006 that mentioned a lower-tech version, and in that thread I referred to an even lower-tech version from the Seventies called "Whizzers", that involved cardboard targets.
rj
An hommage to W. C. Fields.
rj
Cult: A small, unpopular religion.
Religion: A large, popular cult.
rj
With a parachute.
rj
The term "cricket" surfaced in a racial-discrimination lawsuit in Denver in the 1970s, as code for black patrons at a certain disco. Their doorman was overheard calling his management on his walkie-talkie and discussing how many "crickets" he should admit to the club.
rj
A much better option than going along with what China wants them to publish. Sometimes the best course is to let jackasses make jackasses of themselves.
rj
The borders go onto the map after the satellite takes the picture. Like, say, the border between China and Tibet.
rj
Aw, shit, you mean you'd have to turn your head once in a while to see your surroundings? What the hell kind of realism is that?
rj
Melbourne, 1956, Hungarians vs Russians in water polo...
rj