"Electronic tools made with electricity running on wires?" - No need, you can do a lot with interference patterns, phase shifts etc... without leaving the optical domain.
And if any wire is involved... you can very easily ascertain the speed in it by varying its length and observing the difference.
Scientists? Take a good oscilloscope and a fast rise pulse generator (a crystal can from a 486 board does for your purposes), some twenty feet of cable, and measure it yourself!
This is essentially, BTW, what you can buy in packaged form as a TDR.
Alternate experiment: multiple length cable loops around a 74S04, and a frequency counter.
wrong. There existed a true 50MHz (non clock doubled) 486DX chip before the introduction of the clock doubled series - can you say Dream PC of the very early 1990s... It wasn't long lived since most board manufacturers at that time simply could not cope with the RF demands of a 50MHz FSB design... and cooling also proved to be a problem (This was way before fan cooled heatsinks became a staple of the PC world)
DISCLAIMER: The following is neither my opinion nor is it not my opinion. Just spicy food for thought.
OK, why don't see the whole copyright/drm matter
from a viewpoint of blatant democracy? There are
more people interested in free^H^H^H^Hgratis entertainment/software than people interested in
preserving the copyrights. Case closed.
Minority
protection? Yeah, like that ever was working as it was meant to work. OTOH, one could say that high finance is indeed a minority deserving special protection.
And don't forget there is enough content to get us over the next 20 years. Note my emphasis on the word content, as its usage provokes exactly the attitude I am displaying/caricaturing here.
I can only assert a moral high ground in people breaking copyrights which are mainly there for the profit of megacorps. If they declare war on their customers, the rules of total war apply: every loss of the enemy our gain. They played by those rules long enough it seems.
What about forming a cult that
voluntarily attends n concerts for every m CDs worth of music "pirated" (at n=formula(m) that makes artists break even)?;-)
BTW, I do support technical copy protection: Technology is a much fairer and pleasant fighting
ground than law.
Depending on how the the power regulation system for the laser diode is designed, cooling a laser diode beyond normal operating temperature ranges might prove a bad idea.
At the same electrical power input, these devices will provide more optical power the cooler they get. I managed to get like 4x the rated output** from laser pointer type diodes with the help of freeze spray*.
Unfortunately, laser diodes demirror at a certain optical power level,making them pretty useless.
So if the the demand of the control electronics for optical power is limited against the actual optical power level (measured by a photodiode within the laser head for example) in the driver circuit, all is fine. If it is a current limiting circuit, you might be in some trouble....
*which sadly has a tendency to make air moisture condense and freeze on the optics nearby, so much of the optical power is lost.
** might even have been 12x, as was measured by the internal photodiode. But there I am conservative since the ice might have reflected some light back into the photodiode, and I had no means to calibrate the photodiode. And yes, I did manage to demirror the laser by accidentally shorting an opamp pin in the modulator circuitry to +v, which blew the zener diode meant to clamp it to safe levels and drove the laser at 2,5x the rated amperage while at high optical power due to cooling;-)
P.S. If you ever see one of those console units, you know, the piece of furniture with a stereo in it? GRAB IT! They're old and ugly but they sound great and they make a fantastic stereo computer speaker!
Old tube equipment? ouch, can be very bad advice.
Most tube equipment which is stated for AC/DC operation is bloody dangerous if you try to connect
anything external to it, since the operating ground
of those construction is one side of the mains,
so you have a 50% chance of getting bitten with an
unpolarized plug. AC equipment is mostly but not always safe, I have seen constructions
which use a transformer for the tube heaters
but draw the main anode voltage straight from
the mains.
LOL... google for reports about aerospace mishaps
and accidents due to wiring.
I think the now-standard is a three-layer Teflon-Kapton-Teflon insulation, neither Teflon nor
Kapton alone a safe enough. Mind that the insulation
on these wires is ridiculously thin compared to
that on office computer or mains wiring.
At the time these interfaces were invented, the additional decoding logic needed could have been
rather expensive, i think i saw old catalogues
where simple logic circuits sold for tens of
dollars, at least those with a reliability rating
suitable for computer use.
Furthermore, some of the lines may have had to work
independently of a connection established in terms
of same baudrate, parity etc....
This is the standard for the so called Eurostecker,
which is used for Class II** (protective insulation,
no grounding) devices. The Schukostecker (Schutzkontaktstecker, literally protective
contact plug) which is used for Class I (grounded) has two *all bare* pins and two redundant side contacts for grounding.
**defined in VDE standards.
On a lighter note, i don't know how US standards
compare to this, but the insulation requirements
for mains connected equipment are quite brutal here. About ten times the mains voltage without breakdown*, and this is for *grounded* devices,
protective insulation devices have even more.
*not so unreasonable, when you consider that a
transient spike can break down insulation too,
and far worse pave the way for an arc that lasts
a mains cycle*** and could probably cause further
damage, fire or injury (a few thousand watts are not harmless even for a fiftieth second when
turned to heat in a small, probably confined space). Back to the connector topic, see why
some are maybe rated for 250V**** but definitely
not for raw mains.
***or heat up/ionise the air enough to sustain the
arc... ouch!!
****A surprising lot of classical computer connectors ARE.
I'm not from the UK myself, but judging from
home wiring manuals originating there the kind
of distribution panel fuses where you don't
change a cartridge but clamp a length of bare stock
fuse wire in between two supports seem to be still
in common usage there.
Using a (linear) voltage regulator would be a really
inefficient design. 7 times the power the device
uses will be dissipated as heat by the regulator.
errr.. latin has changed a hell of a lot over the ages, and most dictionaries are trying to keep to
the words in existence at a certain era. For example, most smaller latin dictionaries you
can buy are restricted to the words in existence
at the era of the roman empire, since most of the
potential buyers probable are highschool latin students, who will mostly
face texts from this era. Medieval and modern latin have added or obsoleted a lot of words.
You'll get stuck trying to translate the Carmina Burana using a dictionary that was meant
for studying Julius Caesar (yes, victors write the
history books, and that man wrote history books lol) or Plinius.
Never assume free online dictionaries are complete as to all words existent in a language. Compare those available on dict(1) servers to, say, the Chambers Dictionary or the OED, and you'll see there's miles in between.
A list of all valid ISBNs in the world, let alone
a list of those which belong to books which exist in a nominal library (I bet that it is trivial to extract such a list electronically from the inventory data of the library), would make for a very trivial dictionary attack on such a hash. If it can be encrypted in a time frame which does not obstruct the workflow in a library, with the measure of processing power available to such a library, it can surely be cracked in short time with the processing power available to an investigating agency.
A net with holes will still catch you some fish...
They probably don't expect *complete* information
on individuals from such spying, but *lots of bulk* information
which helps narrowing down a group of suspects (narrow the group of suspects down from "the whole population", that is.).
And by the way, an online bookstore will probably
keep more records on you than any library, for
perfectly legitimate reasons. The local bookstore,
as long as you *will be allowed to buy books and newspapers for cash*, is an option of course.
Just restoring a saved state at filesystem level does not reliably destroy information
added since the state was saved. Some tinkering
with the standard unix commands strings(1) and grep(1) on a raw disk device can lead interesting results without too much trouble.
Restoring from an *unoptimized* raw partition/disk
image (eg using dd(1) ) (as can easily be accomplished with a bootable
linux CD + NFS) will at least put such information
out of the reach of reading with normal operating means.
Recovery of such information would then require
lab conditions and cause substantial costs.
Such recovery can be made even more difficult
with "wiping" programs, which overwrite the disk
with random patterns (dd(1) again +/dev/urandom(4) for a quick solution) multiple times.
Obviously it is simpler *not* to use any magnetic
media here at all. Though recovery of information
from pulled RAM chips has been done(!), I doubt that it is a trivial or even viable task when they were used under a complex OS that manages memory in a complex way.
Should there be a fire, you will be in trouble with that setup, at least regarding insurance, since you still messed with the power supply unit itself. Unless you are a qualified electronics tech (not only computer tech), they'll likely say you created the fire hazard, no matter whether your modification was the cause.
AFAIK, as a tinkerer, you have to keep to technical regulations especially strictly (some electrical equipment you can buy from stores would probably get you convicted in case of an accident if you built it the same way yourself), and modifying a closed device by tampering with a safety-critical part* (cooling) without being able to theoretically prove continued safety (unless you really compute it through that is) is most likely not among those things allowed.
*yes, we both know how unreliable they are, but does the judge know?
Compressor? Most electronics literature warns against doing exactly this, as the compressed air can bend or even rip off components or fine wiring standing off from the circuit boards (think voltage regulator heatsinks, which are excellent air pressure collectors).
For those who don't know yet: The information in that article already proved wrong and dangerous.
The article says that the detailed method of sabotage is safe in so far as that no injury to humans could result.
However, a followup on this article, which is due
to certain censorship activities now *harder* to find on the web than the original, states that a deadly accident was the result of action by people who relied on the information in the original article and carried out the described acts.
I can thus understand well that a railway company is not very fond of the idea to have such misinformation spread uncontrolledly.
Slashdot Mirror
"Electronic tools made with electricity running on wires?" - No need, you can do a lot with interference patterns, phase shifts etc... without leaving the optical domain. And if any wire is involved... you can very easily ascertain the speed in it by varying its length and observing the difference.
Scientists? Take a good oscilloscope and a fast rise pulse generator (a crystal can from a 486 board does for your purposes), some twenty feet of cable, and measure it yourself!
This is essentially, BTW, what you can buy in packaged form as a TDR.
Alternate experiment: multiple length cable loops around a 74S04, and a frequency counter.
wrong. There existed a true 50MHz (non clock doubled) 486DX chip before the introduction of the
clock doubled series - can you say Dream PC of the very early 1990s...
It wasn't long lived since most board manufacturers at that time simply could not cope with the RF demands of a 50MHz FSB design... and cooling also proved to be a problem (This was way before fan cooled heatsinks became a staple of the PC world)
http://www.iana.org/assignments/multicast-addresse s
OK, why don't see the whole copyright/drm matter from a viewpoint of blatant democracy? There are more people interested in free^H^H^H^Hgratis entertainment/software than people interested in preserving the copyrights. Case closed.
Minority protection? Yeah, like that ever was working as it was meant to work. OTOH, one could say that high finance is indeed a minority deserving special protection.
And don't forget there is enough content to get us over the next 20 years. Note my emphasis on the word content, as its usage provokes exactly the attitude I am displaying/caricaturing here.
I can only assert a moral high ground in people breaking copyrights which are mainly there for the profit of megacorps. If they declare war on their customers, the rules of total war apply: every loss of the enemy our gain. They played by those rules long enough it seems.
What about forming a cult that voluntarily attends n concerts for every m CDs worth of music "pirated" (at n=formula(m) that makes artists break even)? ;-)
BTW, I do support technical copy protection: Technology is a much fairer and pleasant fighting
ground than law.
beyond normal operating temperature ranges might prove a bad idea.
At the same electrical power input, these devices will provide more optical power the cooler they get. I managed to get like 4x the rated output** from laser pointer type diodes with the help of freeze spray*.
Unfortunately, laser diodes demirror at a certain optical power level,making them pretty useless.
So if the the demand of the control electronics for optical power is limited against the actual optical power level (measured by a photodiode within the laser head for example) in the driver circuit, all is fine. If it is a current limiting circuit, you might be in some trouble....
*which sadly has a tendency to make air moisture condense and freeze on the optics nearby,
so much of the optical power is lost.
** might even have been 12x, as was measured by the internal photodiode. But there I am conservative since the ice might have reflected some light back into the photodiode, and I had no means to calibrate the photodiode. And yes, I did manage to demirror the laser by accidentally shorting an opamp pin in the modulator circuitry ;-)
to +v, which blew the zener diode meant to clamp it to safe levels and drove the laser at 2,5x the rated amperage while at high optical power due to cooling
I think the now-standard is a three-layer Teflon-Kapton-Teflon insulation, neither Teflon nor Kapton alone a safe enough. Mind that the insulation on these wires is ridiculously thin compared to that on office computer or mains wiring.
Furthermore, some of the lines may have had to work independently of a connection established in terms of same baudrate, parity etc....
This is the standard for the so called Eurostecker, which is used for Class II** (protective insulation, no grounding) devices. The Schukostecker (Schutzkontaktstecker, literally protective contact plug) which is used for Class I (grounded) has two *all bare* pins and two redundant side contacts for grounding. **defined in VDE standards. On a lighter note, i don't know how US standards compare to this, but the insulation requirements for mains connected equipment are quite brutal here. About ten times the mains voltage without breakdown*, and this is for *grounded* devices, protective insulation devices have even more. *not so unreasonable, when you consider that a transient spike can break down insulation too, and far worse pave the way for an arc that lasts a mains cycle*** and could probably cause further damage, fire or injury (a few thousand watts are not harmless even for a fiftieth second when turned to heat in a small, probably confined space). Back to the connector topic, see why some are maybe rated for 250V**** but definitely not for raw mains. ***or heat up/ionise the air enough to sustain the arc... ouch!! ****A surprising lot of classical computer connectors ARE.
I'm not from the UK myself, but judging from home wiring manuals originating there the kind of distribution panel fuses where you don't change a cartridge but clamp a length of bare stock fuse wire in between two supports seem to be still in common usage there.
Using a (linear) voltage regulator would be a really inefficient design. 7 times the power the device uses will be dissipated as heat by the regulator.
You'll get stuck trying to translate the Carmina Burana using a dictionary that was meant for studying Julius Caesar (yes, victors write the history books, and that man wrote history books lol) or Plinius.
Never assume free online dictionaries are complete as to all words existent in a language. Compare those available on dict(1) servers to, say, the Chambers Dictionary or the OED, and you'll see there's miles in between.
A list of all valid ISBNs in the world, let alone a list of those which belong to books which exist in a nominal library (I bet that it is trivial to extract such a list electronically from the inventory data of the library), would make for a very trivial dictionary attack on such a hash. If it can be encrypted in a time frame which does not obstruct the workflow in a library, with the measure of processing power available to such a library, it can surely be cracked in short time with the processing power available to an investigating agency.
And by the way, an online bookstore will probably keep more records on you than any library, for perfectly legitimate reasons. The local bookstore, as long as you *will be allowed to buy books and newspapers for cash*, is an option of course.
Restoring from an *unoptimized* raw partition/disk image (eg using dd(1) ) (as can easily be accomplished with a bootable linux CD + NFS) will at least put such information out of the reach of reading with normal operating means.
Recovery of such information would then require lab conditions and cause substantial costs. Such recovery can be made even more difficult with "wiping" programs, which overwrite the disk with random patterns (dd(1) again + /dev/urandom(4) for a quick solution) multiple times.
Obviously it is simpler *not* to use any magnetic media here at all. Though recovery of information from pulled RAM chips has been done(!), I doubt that it is a trivial or even viable task when they were used under a complex OS that manages memory in a complex way.
sorry, tiredly forgot I was using html formatting. line was dd if=drive under test bs=like, 1m for hdd, 8k for fdd of=/dev/null
plain unix method: dd if= bs= of=/dev/null is nice for a simple read test. Watch for console error messages. ;-)
BTW, what I've found is that a lot of IDE drive errors result from bad cabling, not bad drives!
The CPU stab test from jv16.org is also quite nice,sadly needs windows...
*use a dozen or so known good disks ;-)
Should there be a fire, you will be in trouble
with that setup, at least regarding insurance,
since you still messed with the power supply unit itself. Unless you are a qualified electronics tech
(not only computer tech), they'll likely say you
created the fire hazard, no matter whether your modification was the cause.
AFAIK, as a tinkerer, you have to keep to technical
regulations especially strictly (some electrical equipment you can buy from stores would probably get you convicted in case of an accident if you built it the same way yourself), and modifying a closed device by tampering with a safety-critical part* (cooling) without being able to theoretically prove continued safety (unless you really compute it through that is) is most likely not among those things allowed.
*yes, we both know how unreliable they are, but does the judge know?
Compressor? Most electronics literature warns against doing
exactly this, as the compressed air can bend or even
rip off components or fine wiring standing off from
the circuit boards (think voltage regulator heatsinks, which are excellent air pressure collectors).
The article says that the detailed method of sabotage is safe in so far as that no injury to humans could result.
However, a followup on this article, which is due to certain censorship activities now *harder* to find on the web than the original, states that a deadly accident was the result of action by people who relied on the information in the original article and carried out the described acts.
I can thus understand well that a railway company is not very fond of the idea to have such misinformation spread uncontrolledly.