I agree.
Looking at this picture, there are no "DRM chips" in the remote:
http://s2.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/kFbNaWbE3NBPWbew.large
It's probably just a few resistors between the buttons and ground connection to signal which button has been pressed.
This is no different to the fact that my Nokia phone, which works as an audio player has a 2.5mm socket rather than a 3.5mm socket.
Just like with my phone, it's only a matter of time before attachments become available that have the same set of buttons on a small attachment that then allows connectivity from standard earphones.
I do hope Rudd's a better PM. He's a politician, Rudd has very little experience as a politician - strictly speaking, he's spent most of his life as a diplomat. Had you asked about Kevin Rudd two years ago, people would be saying "Kevin who?".
With regards to the sale of public assets, I'd say the state governments (which have been Labor run for years in every state) are the worst and not for the better of the state, but merely to increase the coffers. Bob Carr, the recent former premier in NSW was a great example - he established a number of projects funded by public-private partnerships and now works on a part-time basis (paid $$$) for the investment bank (Macquarie) which funded these projects.
Not to mention all the propaganda advertising being played on the radio at the moment trying to re-assure us that it's ok that they're selling off the electricity services....
I think people had become bored of John Howard more than anything. They saw him as nearing retirement and decided to vote for the opposition simply to remove the incumbent for the sake of doing so, blind to the inexperience of Rudd and lack of policies from his party (for example, Kyoto is still no closer to being implemented than it was under a Howard government, despite the common misconception of otherwise). Kevin Rudd has offered a lot of spin and has done well in "keeping up appearances", but I don't invisage any positive change to this country as a result.
On the topic of an "Access Card" equivalent, I wouldn't write it off yet - the only thing that's for sure is that it won't be called an "Access Card", it will most likely be named with a more subtle name.
I'd say it's quite unlikely that this is an ARP spoof.
In order for this to work, there would need to be other servers within the same layer 2 broadcast domain, meaning that the attacking server would have to be within the same VLAN. TFA provides nothing to support an ARP spoof as a probable cause.
All they're doing is using the ipod as a bootable USB hard drive. It's no different to booting your computer with a USB hard drive, or any kind of flash memory.
In fact, a few years ago, I booted my computer from a Nokia 5510 phone which has 64Mb of RAM. I had a minimal Linux (LinuxFromScratch) installation on it - minimal lilo installation to handle the boot, a loopback filesystem to contain an Ext2 fs with Linux on it and a small initrd which contains the usb-storage driver and handles mounting the loopback etc.
It was slow, but worked quite nicely.
I eventually started playing with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive and that works incredibly well with any PC that boots from a USB Drive (or failing that, I even made a boot floppy for those that don't).
I've tried Quicktime, WMP10, VLC and Real - none of them can play this even after renaming to different extensions.
50 Karma points to the first person who figures out how to play it:-)
About two years ago, I was given an old TI Extensa 900CDT notebook (P133, 32Mb of RAM) by a friend which had a dead HDD, no CD and only a floppy drive. There were no USB ports.
Since this laptop didn't have any USB ports and only two PCMCIA ports, the first thing I decided to do was to make a Linux boot floppy containing the PCMCIA drivers and the cardmgr daemon. I then created an LFS-type distro on a 512Mb CF card (used for other purposes, but I had it spare). I found this to be incredibly slow and not suitable for running a fully-fledged X environment (even with the minimalist of mimimalist WMs).
I eventually aquired a CardBus USB adapter which would offer greater speed, permitting me to attach an external USB 2.0 HDD to the laptop.
I tried for no less than 6 months to get this working - there were issues with the CardBus controller being assigned IRQs under Linux, which was a real problem and a brick wall.
I eventually tried a few solutions that permit the use of USB HDDs to operate in a pure DOS Environment. Surprisingly, these solutions (there was DUSE and another from Panasonic) which actually worked on this laptop/USB controller/USB HDD configuration.
I wasn't too keen on using DOS, so I managed to build a FreeDOS boot disk that contained the necessary USB stack (with storage), loadlin and the Linux kernel (along with a small, but suitable initial ramdisk). Although I thought that there would be some issues with the DOS USB stack and the Kernel, there surprisingly weren't. This allowed the system to initialise the IRQs and when Linux came to using them (I just had to use some pci=irqmask=xxxx parameters), the USB drive worked.
I was very impressed with getting this working and could even run X apps with decent performance (Abiword, xmms etc).
Soon after I achieved this, I was at a swap meet and bought (I wasn't even looking for one!) a 2.1Gb 2.5" HDD for AUD $30, still in the original packaging (obviously old stock). I installed it, and that's what it has been running since.
My advice to the author of the article is that be prepared to make a project of this. If you don't have the time and want a quick fix, look for a cheap 1-4.5Gb HDD. Avoid anything over 8Gb if you can because the older BIOSes may be problematic (although that said, there was a pre-OS program that I could run to get a 10Gb HDD working on mine).
I see integration with GNOME a potentially bad thing. I use a bloatware-free desktop with XFCE and find that the number of programs written for GTK that increasingly use GNOME is a concern.
I can comfortably run XFCE and many GTK-only apps on a P133 laptop with 32Mb of RAM, but as soon as GNOME is integrated into them (GNUmeric comes to mind), these programs get full of bloat.
The/. article mentions that this could be a replacement for Mini-ITX, but in reality, I suspect that you could use (with quite a bit of modding) a Mini-ITX in one of these boxes intead of the existing board.
A Mini-ITX would offer a nice replacement for the Mips-based CPU and dependence on old SIMM modules for memory.
Does ADSL in South Africa have download caps? If so, what do people pay for excess usage? Is ADSL available in most exchanges in South Africa?
In 1997, just before I left Pretoria, I had a 33.6K modem (connecting at that speed), which is faster than the speed that can be achieved by my 56K modem in Australia (due to line splitting technologies, many people are limited to 28.8Kbit, hence no ADSL either).
In light of this, I went to Cable Internet (my only broadband option) and have been using Telstra BigPond Cable for the past two years. The service is relatively fast (with a theoretical speed of 10Mbit - the highest I've had is 7Mbit), although the 3Gb limit is often a problem. We pay about AUD $87/month (R455) which is definitely not value for money considering the other offers available on ADSL (to those who can get it).
I agree, (I take you're referring to UTS? I study IT there), the University is very proud of its achievements in the league, yet there's no mention on/. or the site referred to.
Living in Australia, I wonder how long it will be before the partially Government owned Telstra discovers that I've been downloading DeCSS (for playing DVDs I actually owned) and send police to lock me up in jail for 5 years.
Makes me sick when there are people who are actually comitting crimes that harm people and society aren't even getting jail terms.
He's a coward and a liar, he locks up innocent refugees in the middle of the desert - Would you like to pay for them? I sure as hell wouldn't, I work for a living and as such am sick of paying for crap like this.
Whilst I'm aware of a few programs that use DeCSS for copying DVDs to formats such as DivX, removing the CSS, what if DeCSS was used legitimitely in a piece of software such as a DVD player that contained a binary form of the decoder and was not capable of pirating DVDs?
I pose this question because I am currently developing a small Linux distro and there are some really good pieces of software around that allow the playback of DVD. I would like to include such software, but not at the expense of a court battle.
What deems DeCSS illegal (in terms of the MPAA)? If I were to (for example) compile Xine , Mplayer or Ogle with DeCSS support compiled into the programs by means of a static version of the library, the program will still play DVDs as normal, but the DeCSS code could not be used for anything else on the system because the library does not have to exist on the computer, besides inside the player itself. In doing this, am I breaking the law, or at risk of having the MPAA onto me?
Maybe they should stick with the older hardware
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
KDE runs extremely slow on anything less than a 500MHz PC with 128mb of RAM+ and that's before you start running applications ontop of that. Maybe the KDE developers should develop a more efficient desktop that doesn't need such powerful systems for the task it performs.
Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours, what BS! Maybe they should rewrite the entire system if that's the case.
If you use KDE (I personally prefer WindowMaker), I recommend you DON'T donate higher-end hardware to them, it will just give them a chance to create an even more inefficient system and they'll turn around and say "well, it works on my Athlon XP 2800+ with 1Gb of RAM..., I guess your one year old computer is just toooooo slow to run our inefficient X beautifier.".
>You know, just because you think that every white person that has left South Africa did so because of the political situation does not mean that it is so.
You obviously have no idea what it's like living over there, and I can perfectly understand. The reason being that South Africa's media is so incredibly sensored that no murders or serious crimes can be reported (it harms tourism, damages the government's reputation etc).
I think that all people leaving South Africa (myself, family and many friends who can included) do so with one of the prime reasons being because of the political situation and because they can get to a better place.
Apartheid ("separate development") is more alive than ever in South Africa (and having living there most of my life, I am so disheartened to see how it's still in existance), but the now completely black government in power has swapped things over.
The apartheid is stronger than ever in South Africa, but instead of blacks being disadvantaged, everyone is.
Try living over there and see how long it is before someone you know (or even yourself, and especially if youre white) is killed for crimes based on race. This is one thing OSS software can't help (unfortunately).
Most people don't see this because South Africa's racist government has banned media coverage of murders and serious crimes - if no one sees these things happening, how will the "new apartheid" (aposed to the "new South Africa") ever be identified?
I have nothing against black people, but the majority of them are worse off now than they ever were during the apartheid.
I have lived in South Africa for almost all my life and four years ago, got out of there and have moved to Sydney, Australia (like most who can, do!). The primary reason for this was the amount of corruption going on, largely due to the shocking government in South Africa (it's disheartening to say this, but SA is going like the rest of Africa).
The RSA Government has obviously recognised OSS software as a means to reduce costs which is excellent news for them, and good for the OSS community, but it won't be sustainable for very long. Professionals are leaving RSA in droves and whilst it's cheap for the government to hire such people to manage Linux systems, corners will be cut everywhere and the South African government's greed will simply make the project fail (OSS software is good, but often requires a little more expertise to implement than other solutions which is ok in almost all circumstances).
In the end, the corrupt government will screw things up so bad that they can't even afford to
maintain even OSS systems.
IBM Drives are just terrible and they don't seem to be very quick to be of assistance even when they do break down. Any improvement should be on reliability rather than storage capacity - the reliability of current "pixie dust" drives is poor, imagine what these would be like?
Last year, I bought two Deskstar 40Gb drives for a small development server on a RAID. When the first drive failed, I swapped the drives with others and used the second drive in a desktop PC. Surprise, surprise the second drive died a few days ago and thought it might be a good idea to return both drives.
When I contacted IBM about returning the drives, I was horrified to find that I have to post the drives to Singapore (I live in Sydney, Australia). This is not cheap, costing me $30 per drive to get it to Singapore from here.
Would anyone happen to know of any cheaper alternatives to getting these drives back to IBM (under RMA)?
What an excellent advance! I've been using Mplayer to play WMA audio as well as streaming WMA/ASF Audio for quite some time now. Even though it has the "ugly DLL hacks", it works nicely, but I would much rather see a plugin (perhaps using the new piece of code) so that everyone can enjoy it with XMMS.
Is there already an XMMS input plugin already available that allows the playback of WMA audio (preferrably using the new code that is free from WINE/DLL hacks) and possibly WMA streaming audio (mms:// and http://?).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Looking at this picture, there are no "DRM chips" in the remote: http://s2.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/kFbNaWbE3NBPWbew.large It's probably just a few resistors between the buttons and ground connection to signal which button has been pressed. This is no different to the fact that my Nokia phone, which works as an audio player has a 2.5mm socket rather than a 3.5mm socket. Just like with my phone, it's only a matter of time before attachments become available that have the same set of buttons on a small attachment that then allows connectivity from standard earphones.
With regards to the sale of public assets, I'd say the state governments (which have been Labor run for years in every state) are the worst and not for the better of the state, but merely to increase the coffers. Bob Carr, the recent former premier in NSW was a great example - he established a number of projects funded by public-private partnerships and now works on a part-time basis (paid $$$) for the investment bank (Macquarie) which funded these projects.
Not to mention all the propaganda advertising being played on the radio at the moment trying to re-assure us that it's ok that they're selling off the electricity services....
I think people had become bored of John Howard more than anything. They saw him as nearing retirement and decided to vote for the opposition simply to remove the incumbent for the sake of doing so, blind to the inexperience of Rudd and lack of policies from his party (for example, Kyoto is still no closer to being implemented than it was under a Howard government, despite the common misconception of otherwise). Kevin Rudd has offered a lot of spin and has done well in "keeping up appearances", but I don't invisage any positive change to this country as a result.
On the topic of an "Access Card" equivalent, I wouldn't write it off yet - the only thing that's for sure is that it won't be called an "Access Card", it will most likely be named with a more subtle name.
I'd say it's quite unlikely that this is an ARP spoof. In order for this to work, there would need to be other servers within the same layer 2 broadcast domain, meaning that the attacking server would have to be within the same VLAN. TFA provides nothing to support an ARP spoof as a probable cause.
Probably not a good idea - you might give them something slightly more legitimate to back up their claims of "stability problems" with Linux :-)
It won't - it's just a new advanced marketecture from Intel.
64Mb of RAM was meant to mean 64Mb of Flash Memory
All they're doing is using the ipod as a bootable USB hard drive. It's no different to booting your computer with a USB hard drive, or any kind of flash memory.
In fact, a few years ago, I booted my computer from a Nokia 5510 phone which has 64Mb of RAM. I had a minimal Linux (LinuxFromScratch) installation on it - minimal lilo installation to handle the boot, a loopback filesystem to contain an Ext2 fs with Linux on it and a small initrd which contains the usb-storage driver and handles mounting the loopback etc.
It was slow, but worked quite nicely.
I eventually started playing with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive and that works incredibly well with any PC that boots from a USB Drive (or failing that, I even made a boot floppy for those that don't).
I've tried Quicktime, WMP10, VLC and Real - none of them can play this even after renaming to different extensions. 50 Karma points to the first person who figures out how to play it :-)
This has been done before: http://mini-itx.com/projects/legobox/
About two years ago, I was given an old TI Extensa 900CDT notebook (P133, 32Mb of RAM) by a friend which had a dead HDD, no CD and only a floppy drive. There were no USB ports.
Since this laptop didn't have any USB ports and only two PCMCIA ports, the first thing I decided to do was to make a Linux boot floppy containing the PCMCIA drivers and the cardmgr daemon. I then created an LFS-type distro on a 512Mb CF card (used for other purposes, but I had it spare). I found this to be incredibly slow and not suitable for running a fully-fledged X environment (even with the minimalist of mimimalist WMs).
I eventually aquired a CardBus USB adapter which would offer greater speed, permitting me to attach an external USB 2.0 HDD to the laptop.
I tried for no less than 6 months to get this working - there were issues with the CardBus controller being assigned IRQs under Linux, which was a real problem and a brick wall.
I eventually tried a few solutions that permit the use of USB HDDs to operate in a pure DOS Environment. Surprisingly, these solutions (there was DUSE and another from Panasonic) which actually worked on this laptop/USB controller/USB HDD configuration.
I wasn't too keen on using DOS, so I managed to build a FreeDOS boot disk that contained the necessary USB stack (with storage), loadlin and the Linux kernel (along with a small, but suitable initial ramdisk). Although I thought that there would be some issues with the DOS USB stack and the Kernel, there surprisingly weren't. This allowed the system to initialise the IRQs and when Linux came to using them (I just had to use some pci=irqmask=xxxx parameters), the USB drive worked.
I was very impressed with getting this working and could even run X apps with decent performance (Abiword, xmms etc).
Soon after I achieved this, I was at a swap meet and bought (I wasn't even looking for one!) a 2.1Gb 2.5" HDD for AUD $30, still in the original packaging (obviously old stock). I installed it, and that's what it has been running since.
My advice to the author of the article is that be prepared to make a project of this. If you don't have the time and want a quick fix, look for a cheap 1-4.5Gb HDD. Avoid anything over 8Gb if you can because the older BIOSes may be problematic (although that said, there was a pre-OS program that I could run to get a 10Gb HDD working on mine).
I see integration with GNOME a potentially bad thing. I use a bloatware-free desktop with XFCE and find that the number of programs written for GTK that increasingly use GNOME is a concern. I can comfortably run XFCE and many GTK-only apps on a P133 laptop with 32Mb of RAM, but as soon as GNOME is integrated into them (GNUmeric comes to mind), these programs get full of bloat.
The /. article mentions that this could be a replacement for Mini-ITX, but in reality, I suspect that you could use (with quite a bit of modding) a Mini-ITX in one of these boxes intead of the existing board.
A Mini-ITX would offer a nice replacement for the Mips-based CPU and dependence on old SIMM modules for memory.
But that's because it usually IS true!
Does ADSL in South Africa have download caps? If so, what do people pay for excess usage? Is ADSL available in most exchanges in South Africa?
In 1997, just before I left Pretoria, I had a 33.6K modem (connecting at that speed), which is faster than the speed that can be achieved by my 56K modem in Australia (due to line splitting technologies, many people are limited to 28.8Kbit, hence no ADSL either).
In light of this, I went to Cable Internet (my only broadband option) and have been using Telstra BigPond Cable for the past two years. The service is relatively fast (with a theoretical speed of 10Mbit - the highest I've had is 7Mbit), although the 3Gb limit is often a problem. We pay about AUD $87/month (R455) which is definitely not value for money considering the other offers available on ADSL (to those who can get it).
I agree, (I take you're referring to UTS? I study IT there), the University is very proud of its achievements in the league, yet there's no mention on /. or the site referred to.
Living in Australia, I wonder how long it will be before the partially Government owned Telstra discovers that I've been downloading DeCSS (for playing DVDs I actually owned) and send police to lock me up in jail for 5 years.
Makes me sick when there are people who are actually comitting crimes that harm people and society aren't even getting jail terms.
He's a coward and a liar, he locks up innocent refugees in the middle of the desert - Would you like to pay for them? I sure as hell wouldn't, I work for a living and as such am sick of paying for crap like this.
Whilst I'm aware of a few programs that use DeCSS for copying DVDs to formats such as DivX, removing the CSS, what if DeCSS was used legitimitely in a piece of software such as a DVD player that contained a binary form of the decoder and was not capable of pirating DVDs? I pose this question because I am currently developing a small Linux distro and there are some really good pieces of software around that allow the playback of DVD. I would like to include such software, but not at the expense of a court battle.
What deems DeCSS illegal (in terms of the MPAA)? If I were to (for example) compile Xine , Mplayer or Ogle with DeCSS support compiled into the programs by means of a static version of the library, the program will still play DVDs as normal, but the DeCSS code could not be used for anything else on the system because the library does not have to exist on the computer, besides inside the player itself. In doing this, am I breaking the law, or at risk of having the MPAA onto me?
KDE runs extremely slow on anything less than a 500MHz PC with 128mb of RAM+ and that's before you start running applications ontop of that. Maybe the KDE developers should develop a more efficient desktop that doesn't need such powerful systems for the task it performs.
Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours, what BS! Maybe they should rewrite the entire system if that's the case.
If you use KDE (I personally prefer WindowMaker), I recommend you DON'T donate higher-end hardware to them, it will just give them a chance to create an even more inefficient system and they'll turn around and say "well, it works on my Athlon XP 2800+ with 1Gb of RAM..., I guess your one year old computer is just toooooo slow to run our inefficient X beautifier.".
>You know, just because you think that every white person that has left South Africa did so because of the political situation does not mean that it is so.
You obviously have no idea what it's like living over there, and I can perfectly understand. The reason being that South Africa's media is so incredibly sensored that no murders or serious crimes can be reported (it harms tourism, damages the government's reputation etc). I think that all people leaving South Africa (myself, family and many friends who can included) do so with one of the prime reasons being because of the political situation and because they can get to a better place.
Apartheid ("separate development") is more alive than ever in South Africa (and having living there most of my life, I am so disheartened to see how it's still in existance), but the now completely black government in power has swapped things over.
The apartheid is stronger than ever in South Africa, but instead of blacks being disadvantaged, everyone is.
Try living over there and see how long it is before someone you know (or even yourself, and especially if youre white) is killed for crimes based on race. This is one thing OSS software can't help (unfortunately).
Most people don't see this because South Africa's racist government has banned media coverage of murders and serious crimes - if no one sees these things happening, how will the "new apartheid" (aposed to the "new South Africa") ever be identified?
I have nothing against black people, but the majority of them are worse off now than they ever were during the apartheid.
I have lived in South Africa for almost all my life and four years ago, got out of there and have moved to Sydney, Australia (like most who can, do!). The primary reason for this was the amount of corruption going on, largely due to the shocking government in South Africa (it's disheartening to say this, but SA is going like the rest of Africa).
The RSA Government has obviously recognised OSS software as a means to reduce costs which is excellent news for them, and good for the OSS community, but it won't be sustainable for very long. Professionals are leaving RSA in droves and whilst it's cheap for the government to hire such people to manage Linux systems, corners will be cut everywhere and the South African government's greed will simply make the project fail (OSS software is good, but often requires a little more expertise to implement than other solutions which is ok in almost all circumstances).
In the end, the corrupt government will screw things up so bad that they can't even afford to maintain even OSS systems.
IBM Drives are just terrible and they don't seem to be very quick to be of assistance even when they do break down. Any improvement should be on reliability rather than storage capacity - the reliability of current "pixie dust" drives is poor, imagine what these would be like? Last year, I bought two Deskstar 40Gb drives for a small development server on a RAID. When the first drive failed, I swapped the drives with others and used the second drive in a desktop PC. Surprise, surprise the second drive died a few days ago and thought it might be a good idea to return both drives. When I contacted IBM about returning the drives, I was horrified to find that I have to post the drives to Singapore (I live in Sydney, Australia). This is not cheap, costing me $30 per drive to get it to Singapore from here. Would anyone happen to know of any cheaper alternatives to getting these drives back to IBM (under RMA)?
What an excellent advance! I've been using Mplayer to play WMA audio as well as streaming WMA/ASF Audio for quite some time now. Even though it has the "ugly DLL hacks", it works nicely, but I would much rather see a plugin (perhaps using the new piece of code) so that everyone can enjoy it with XMMS. Is there already an XMMS input plugin already available that allows the playback of WMA audio (preferrably using the new code that is free from WINE/DLL hacks) and possibly WMA streaming audio (mms:// and http://?).