LEDMeter is a existing bit of GPL'd software for doing CPU load, memory/HD usage, etc. under Win32 with a parallel port's data lines... it also has a tutorial (solder pin A to B, as opposed to here's-a-schematic-you-build-it) for buffering the lines through a cheap octal buffer chip, although an NPN transistor array would work just fine.
I'm going to update it soon to fix a few odd conditions with WinXP data sources and revamp it to allow use of other peripherals and other data sources, and allow you to write arbitrary boolean expressions for LEDs.
Mind, if you're going to be switching something larger than a cheap NPN bipolar can handle and you're going to be switching it often, use an N-channel power MOSFET in a Darlington pair with an NPN. Far more reliable than a mechanical relay.
It's more useful if you understand why they sound different... the thing is, if you're not driving them at a clipping level, tube and mosfet amplification are nearly identical. The difference is that mosfets will do a hard clip across the wave's peak, whereas tubes will make a logarithmic curve up to the clip level, then back down. Tubes also have an assymetric clip.
*laugh* My girlfriend, who shares my anime obsession, were talking about DBZ after I posted, and came to the conclusion that it's really the suspense. So many episodes are just building up to this massive battle... you're compelled to see what happens, even though you've fallen asleep to all the screaming (as oxymoronic as that sounds). And I have to admit that the concept of Saiyan are neat. But I just can't dig it. I think it's the art style that turns me off.
GTO is oustanding, altho the manga is better IMHO. Also let us not forget Serial Experiments: Lain, or any of the other of their ilk. I agree with the parent on Spirited Away and Mononoke.
*grinning at the giant battling robots comments* I dunno, Rah'Xephon and NGE are the only mecha shows I've liked. Full Metal Panic, GunParade March, the whole Robotech series, etc. just never hooked me. I guess it's the mysticism bent that both those shows have, while the others are more of an extension on modern technology.
I'm looking forward to Behind the Clouds right now -- a typical separated-loves story in an alternate future where Japan was conquered and divided after WW2.
Kiddy Grade (Gainax) has been pretty interesting too.
Oh, it's not all anime. A great deal of it sucks ass (ex: DBZ, Hamtaro, Pokemon, etc.) -- and if you think that's true in the US, you should see all the loads of total crap that's released in Japan and never makes it here because the sheer stench of it tips off the customs officials.
What makes good anime? Consistent, three-dimensional -- as in deep, not as in their look -- characters with back stories and patterns that viewers can relate and get attached to. A consistent art style. (Seizure robots do not apply.) Compelling writing, with humor where appropriate -- whether that's slapstick humor or the more darker variety. Believable lines, and convincing voice actors. In other words, the exact same things that make good film.
Cowboy Bebop is considered one of the heights of anime, for all of the above. Other good examples of anime (IMO) would be Trigun, Rah'Xephon, Shinseiki (Neon Genesis) Evangelion, and the recent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. If you're the type that likes relationship dramas, Love Hina is pretty well known and liked. There's shows that run the line between relationships and action, like Martian Successor Nadesico. There's also the full-length movie variety of anime, of which the most famous are Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
*shrug* There's good and bad anime, just like there's good and bad films and good and bad TV -- favorites will vary with a person's taste, but there are consistent things you can critique on.
Mind, they DID make a version of Linux that ran on CPUs without MMUs (the most notable being the Motorola Dragonball, used in Palms up until recently) called ucLinux.
I would argue that operating systems target a class of architecture -- not just the CPU, but the underlying system as well. We've been relatively lucky with IA-32 in that despite all the changes in leading architectures over the years (DRAM/SDRAM/DDR/Rambus, ISA/VLBus/CardBus/EISA/PCI/AGP, etc.) the general scheme of things has been very consistent. I mean, to this day, look how many northbridges emulate the ancient PIC chips.
It's certainly true that some chips are faster at certain OS-related things (context switches, etc) than others, and some have better MMU designs than others (don't get me started on PE-mode and V86 on the 386), but that seems more a nod to usability than a nod to any specific design of OS.
(That, and hardware MMU/paging isn't necesarily required for multitasking, it just makes it far more efficient, and it provides you a level of protection from poorly written third party apps. The Z80 and 8086 are still the dominant processors in embedded applications because you don't have to worry about it if you're writing all the apps along with the OS and know as fact that they behave well.)
PowerPC is an open architecture; several companies make different CPUs based on the design. IBM's historically made them for servers (the 970 was originally intended to be a server chip) while Motorola made them for desktops (Apple). Only problem is, Motorola sucks -- and their growth in the wireless business has gotten them to the point where they don't need Apple's business any more, so they have no real reason to improve their CPU line.
The G3 and G4 are also PowerPC chips -- they just are specific models made by Motorola. It's half new implementation, half relative.
Finally, a CPU doesn't run any specific OS -- OSes just have to be written for that CPU (and more generally, for the system architecture that CPU uses). Linux has supported the PPC for a long time; there's a distro called Yellow Dog that specifically targets Macs, and does a good job of it. Mac OS X's kernel, Darwin, has been backported to Intel IA-32. Windows used to be available for Alpha processors. It's just a matter of coding and hardware knowledge.
Unicode contains merely the lower sixteen bits of the UCS (Universal Character Set), aka ISO 10646. UCS defines a 31-bit character set; the lower 65534 positions, which Unicode dupes, is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) or Plane 0. Tengwar and Cirth are defined in the full UCS table, along with the complete Hangul Jamo and both Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Han kanji.
Specifically, Unicode is one possible Level 3 implementation of ISO 10646. All characters have the same indices and names in both standards; the Unicode spec merely adds formatting and rendering semantics for languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and standardizes algorithms for sorting and comparison. (That last bit is the most important, since ISO 10464 is little more than a very large table.)
Correct, the AdLib was FM synth. Creative relied pretty heavily on the fact that it was cheaper than a genuine AdLib card tho for a while, until sampled sound took over.
And, actually, that parallel port rig was pretty common. If you wanted to do it portably, you just hooked up an 8 bit DAC to it, but cheaper ones just used a R^2 resistor network and leeched off the parallel port -- moderately risky depending on whether or not you ran it to an amplifier or directly to a headset. (Sink/source capabilities have never been standardized for parallel ports; you can still find some boxes in use today that are rated for 5 mA source.)
Dungeon Master was such an awesome game:D And it had a great soundtrack too. DM2 was good too, but I never sat down and beat it. Maybe I should...
Sigh. Does anyone know if the emu10k module can be used from inside UMSDOS? It'd be a lot easier to run my old games in Linux than trying to find an old version of the old BLASTER= emulator software for the SBLive. I've been craving some old Wing Commander: Privateer...
The code that allows that to happen is generated by the COMPILER, not the OS. The problem can be duplicated in gcc and any other C++ compiler, and with any other OS with a flat memory space. There is no way to fix it without breaking from the C++ spec. (Although it gets a bit messier when the class has virtual functions and you need an offset for the vtable.)
But, then, this is likely a oneshot troll, since there aren't any other posts on the acocunt. Oh well.
It's pretty well thought out. Each of the sections in the XBE (analogous to the Win32 PE format, EXE) is checksummed using SHA-1. Each hash is stored in the header along with the byte offsets of each section. The entire header is then checksummed again with SHA-1, and the resulting hash is signed using 2048-bit RSA. The public key is stored in the XBox's BIOS.
So, you're right about not needing the whole program. As far as we know there's no intermediate keys used.
Given the reasonable assumption that the private RSA key has been selected several times and is sufficiently high to make a brute-force search infeasable, the only chance for running unsigned code without hardware modification will be somehow taking advantage of a security hole in a signed XBox program -- either the Dashboard (the software that comes up when an XBox is powered on without a game in the drive, a preferences/save-game manager and audio ripper/player) or in one or more titles produced by a third party.
You can be sure that nobody at MSFT will actually have the private key. They'll have a black box there with the key in tamper-proof silicon. You get authorization to see the box, you put in a finished XBE with no signature, you get back out a signed executable, you're escorted from the room.
At least, that's how I'd do it if I were in their position, since the key is the linchpin that's allowing MSFT to stay competitive by preventing unauthorized games or copying.
Catch: Get a running task into the system. Your best bet to do this without modchipping would, IMO, be to emulate XBox Live or another download system for a game. You can open the box and plug the drive into a normal IDE system - but it uses the ATA protocol's password mode - meaning you either have to crack the key or hotswap the drive after powering it up in an XBox.
Catch: Get the task running. The XBox is essentially a single-process OS due to its use of unified memory addresses for all hardware.
Having looked at the problem for some time my suspicion for the best way to go about it would be a buffer overflow or other flaw in the saved game system, since you can put those on a memory card easily enough and copy it to the HDD. Tada, backdoor without requiring modchipping.
In the XBox, once you've got control of the CPU, everything becomes possible. The catch is doing that, since the kernel will not allow you to load an unsigned executable. At the same time, I'm sure that MSFT has quite thoroughly checked the Dashboard XBE on the drive for exploitable bugs...... hah.
Went out as a group with my friends and saw The Two Towers. Even stopped by a decent coffee shop (i.e. not Starbucks) afterwards. About $15, total.
Everquest Gold (retail + all four expansions in a bundle) is $70. Three months of the game is $30. Are you so sure? Even if you went really cheap and just bought the basic original retail for $9 and one month, that's still more than a movie and discussing geek shit over two mochas after.
I daresay that watching Ents dam the river Isen is far more fulfilling for the average geek than buying an old game and a month of play -- enough for a non-ub3r player without a guide to the areas to get to 15-20 or so.
Maybe I should have added that all my friends were addicted to it, and altho I no longer played, I've seen them go through 30 to 60, and just never saw much difference. About the only thing I ever enjoyed seeing on their monitors was seeing the Planes for the first time. Really, I think I actually did myself a huge favor by getting out before 25 when the game still felt new to me, but just not interesting enough to continue paying. Of them, only two of them are still playing, and that's mostly because they've got too many friends in their guilds to put it down. The rest have all either gotten bored with twiddling thumbs between raids or decided that money would be best spent elsewhere or saved in the current economy.
FYI, I'm also not a newbie to MMOGs -- I used to be a regular reader of Lum the Mad, and I've also gone through UO, AC, AO, and DAOC in their turn. I'm not saying all MMORPGs are boring, but I would definitely say that Everquest is the least entertaining in the long run of them all.
Although it could be worse. You could be playing World War 2 Online.:P
You create a character with six vital statistics, a spell/skill book, and a bunch of empty slots for inventory. You put armor and weapons in your inventory slots. You walk your blocky 100-triangle avatar out in a third-person view, you click on a monster to target it, and you hit a key to start auto-attacking it. You sit there twiddling your thumbs until either it dies or you die.
Once you get a few levels, you can start getting spells and skills. These make it slightly less boring -- you make your character sit, and memorize spells, and then drag them to a bar on your screen, and you can hit 1-8 to cast them in battle. It's still pretty boring.
That, right there, is the game in a nutshell. You use a mix of auto-attacking and spells (or, being honest, either one or the other depending on your class) to kill creatures and level up. There is no plot, no rise in stature beyond who has the best items (aka phat lootz) and highest levels. Oh, and one thing the article writer forgot to mention -- those high-level planar raids have to be signed up for on a calendar up to two months in advance.
Yes, that's the game. What people get addicted to is the in-game chat, the shared experiences and what people share when they've got little else to do. I played EQ for two years before getting bored with it, and never got beyond lv20 -- my fondest memory of it is just BSing one night with a friend, drinking myself silly in-game (there's actually an Alcohol Tolerance skill) and doing drunken leaps off the bridges of a tree city called Felwithe.
The author's mostly just a whiny little technogoth -- but the game really doesn't have that much to offer. For the cost of the game and four expansions, and a few months subscription, you could easily buy an XBox and a copy of Splinter Cell, or upgrade your video card and play Doom 3 in a few months... or, my preference, do something nice for your significant other. Believe me, I'd rather have warm arms around me than an item in EQ anyday.
I live in Portland, OR, home of PersonalTelco - a fairly well known volunteer group for WiFi access. We have more nodes listed on nodedb for the Portland metropolitan area than nearly any STATE - and take that to all states if you count all of Oregon.
We had a big landmark case here a while ago that's exactly what you're fearing. PersonalTelco's been providing a totally free 11Mb connection to Pioneer Courthouse Square (a major hotspot in downtown Portland), and the Starbucks on one corner of the square tried to compete with them, broadcasting their pay-to-use TMobile service on the same channel.
Starbucks ended up having to back down - they now broadcast on channel 11, and PT on 6.
PT's a great group to get involved with - not only do they have regular meetings and stay active with local politics, they also organize a lot of things like group buys on antenna connectors and workshops on Pringles can waveguides.
Nintendo is having a lot of trouble fighting the image that their games are targeted towards kids. Look at their most successful franchises - Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc... and while we may certainly enjoy playing them, there's still the lingering image of selling to the 8-14 group. (Who here remembers Nintendo Power? I've still got a mint issue 1.)
In contrast, look at the perennials on the Playstation: MGS, Tony Hawk, etc. On the PS2: GTA3, MGS2, etc. On the Dreamcast: Shenmue. On the XBox, Splinter Cell and Steel Battalion. The reason the original PSX was a smash hit was because it had the games to sell itself to the teen, college, and adult crowd. This doesn't mean that said games are any more or less fun than the Nintendo classics, it's just a different image. Most of us have heard stories about the massive censoring required for third-party titles.
Now, they've been getting away from that with Metroid Prime and some other GameCube titles, and they've had some decidedly grown up games for the N64. However, they're still fighting the kid image that got them where they are now.
Re:I'm waiting for someone to build a homebrew X-B
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Building Consoles For Fun
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· Score: 4, Interesting
1) Unified memory architecture. 2) Close to Win32, but not quite. 3) Liberal use of hashing and checksumming.
The XBE executable format is actually pretty interesting - it's similar to Win32's PE, but with many more flags and tables - for example, bitfields for what mediums are acceptable to run the game off of (DVD, hard drive, CD-RW, etc.) Each section and the relocation address tables have a SHA-1 hash taken of it, the header containing the section offsets and hashes of each is itself hashed, digitally signed using PKE, and then encrypted.
The hard drive also uses the ATA spec's password protection, although that's already been bypassed and the drive dumped. In any case, most people with homebrew code are using the neXgen or EvoX dashboards to run an FTP server on the XBox for uploading and downloading files to the HDD, so you don't have to muck about with IDE cables.
Most of the modchips out there right now work by tying the chip enable pin on the on-board BIOS to to ground, and emulating the BIOS directly on the LPC bus to allow execution of unsigned code and ignore mismatched media flags. (BTW, kudos to MSFT for complicating things with a floating ground... more than a few early modchips were responsible for fried PCs while doing in-circuit programming.)
Never worked much in the service industries, have you? Boycotts don't do much, you're right. Word of mouth is EVERYTHING though. This is very much true of ISPs, also -- I've seen it first hand.
Technically, yes, a person has the right to run his company any way he sees fit - or the stockholders, in the case of an incorporated business. Speaking for the company off-hours should certainly be discouraged. However, giving unofficial help in a tech forum to frustrated users (either from your ISP, or from a competitor's) should not be an offense, much less one worthy of termination. Hell, I'd be MORE likely to hire someone who did that.
(In fact, I've got a good story for ya - a friend of mine split up his DSL line with several other people, and one of said people ended up getting the ISP targeted for a two-day DoS attack. The abuse staff at the ISP ran the name of my friend through Google - and got nothing but postings on LUGs, Sendmail mailing lists, and overclocking forums. They ended up hiring him part-time.)
Yep, everyone has a right to make business decisions. However, some decisions are better than others. Having seen first-hand what happens when ISP word of mouth goes from very good to very bad (the result of policy and staff changes in a previously stable company following a buyout) it's apparent to me that decisions that lead to bad word of mouth should be avoided. This is basic microeconomics, bud.
If I were ever interested in working for an ISP again, or maybe running one, the number one thing I'd shoot for is trust - trust between employer and employees, and trust between business and customers. It may not be the most guaranteed to make profit, but it's the best way to maintain repeat business - and, frankly, if I wanted to make big bucks and hate my career, I'd go work for the government.
Mathematically, though, as long as you have enough supplemental qubits for error correction, the math works out for any application of Shor's algorithm.
It's actually pretty ingenious - it takes advantage of entanglement to generate a superposition of all discrete logs of x, and then performs a Fourier transform on it. If the most likely discrete log is odd and non-zero, then you can factor using basic number theory. (If not, rinse and repeat; Shor's algorithm does have a work factor, although its scope isn't as large as with Grover's search algorithm.)
However, once a tree has been expanded and properly pruned, "near matches" or "related forks" can be returned quite easily. Grover's algorithm only returns a single result.
Furthermore, Grover has a work factor involved; the "baking" transform is not guaranteed to work.
In theory, once you've got a floating-point PCM or ADPCM value, you can cast that out to any precision of integer you want -- the same blackbox decoder would work whether you were creating an 8-bit signal for a basic DSP or a 24-bit signal for a studio-quality DAC. (The latter is particularly relevant since Ogg can support more than two channels and can chain multiple segments in a single Ogg bitstream.) In theory you could even design a DAC to directly accept an IEEE 724 floating point number.
Decoding using the FP decoder and casting to, say, 16bit unsigned bigendian, should sound no different than decoding to the same point using Tremor. I haven't looked at any comparisons of algorithmic complexity for the two decoders, since the one project I'm working that uses Vorbis is using libvorbisfile.
(Or rather, the Mac OS X Framework version of it... the OSX-specific source in CVS is broken at present, but you can coax it into compiling with a bit of elbow grease. It also needs to have a Mac-specific gcc flag added to change the base address for the relocation table to allow prelinking. If anyone out there from vorbis.com is reading this, take those UNIX libs off the damned download page and get the Frameworks working -- most Mac users are NOT mentally equipped to su root and copy a bunch of.sos into/usr/lib!!)
The main stumbling block to Vorbis implementations was that the reference decoder was floating point intensive, whereas MPEG decoding can be done with mostly integers. However, there's now the "Tremor" reference decoder which uses purely integer math.
It's not really that difficult of a format. The only real oddity is that you have to buffer in the first few Ogg pages quickly in order to set up the codebook and other Vorbis headers, whereas MPEG uses discrete frames; but, once you've got the headers parsed, Vorbis is a relatively straightforward format.
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LEDMeter is a existing bit of GPL'd software for doing CPU load, memory/HD usage, etc. under Win32 with a parallel port's data lines... it also has a tutorial (solder pin A to B, as opposed to here's-a-schematic-you-build-it) for buffering the lines through a cheap octal buffer chip, although an NPN transistor array would work just fine.
I'm going to update it soon to fix a few odd conditions with WinXP data sources and revamp it to allow use of other peripherals and other data sources, and allow you to write arbitrary boolean expressions for LEDs.
Mind, if you're going to be switching something larger than a cheap NPN bipolar can handle and you're going to be switching it often, use an N-channel power MOSFET in a Darlington pair with an NPN. Far more reliable than a mechanical relay.
It's more useful if you understand why they sound different... the thing is, if you're not driving them at a clipping level, tube and mosfet amplification are nearly identical. The difference is that mosfets will do a hard clip across the wave's peak, whereas tubes will make a logarithmic curve up to the clip level, then back down. Tubes also have an assymetric clip.
(Yes, this is horribly OT.)
*laugh* My girlfriend, who shares my anime obsession, were talking about DBZ after I posted, and came to the conclusion that it's really the suspense. So many episodes are just building up to this massive battle... you're compelled to see what happens, even though you've fallen asleep to all the screaming (as oxymoronic as that sounds). And I have to admit that the concept of Saiyan are neat. But I just can't dig it. I think it's the art style that turns me off.
GTO is oustanding, altho the manga is better IMHO. Also let us not forget Serial Experiments: Lain, or any of the other of their ilk. I agree with the parent on Spirited Away and Mononoke.
*grinning at the giant battling robots comments* I dunno, Rah'Xephon and NGE are the only mecha shows I've liked. Full Metal Panic, GunParade March, the whole Robotech series, etc. just never hooked me. I guess it's the mysticism bent that both those shows have, while the others are more of an extension on modern technology.
I'm looking forward to Behind the Clouds right now -- a typical separated-loves story in an alternate future where Japan was conquered and divided after WW2.
Kiddy Grade (Gainax) has been pretty interesting too.
Oh, it's not all anime. A great deal of it sucks ass (ex: DBZ, Hamtaro, Pokemon, etc.) -- and if you think that's true in the US, you should see all the loads of total crap that's released in Japan and never makes it here because the sheer stench of it tips off the customs officials.
What makes good anime? Consistent, three-dimensional -- as in deep, not as in their look -- characters with back stories and patterns that viewers can relate and get attached to. A consistent art style. (Seizure robots do not apply.) Compelling writing, with humor where appropriate -- whether that's slapstick humor or the more darker variety. Believable lines, and convincing voice actors. In other words, the exact same things that make good film.
Cowboy Bebop is considered one of the heights of anime, for all of the above. Other good examples of anime (IMO) would be Trigun, Rah'Xephon, Shinseiki (Neon Genesis) Evangelion, and the recent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. If you're the type that likes relationship dramas, Love Hina is pretty well known and liked. There's shows that run the line between relationships and action, like Martian Successor Nadesico. There's also the full-length movie variety of anime, of which the most famous are Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
*shrug* There's good and bad anime, just like there's good and bad films and good and bad TV -- favorites will vary with a person's taste, but there are consistent things you can critique on.
Mind, they DID make a version of Linux that ran on CPUs without MMUs (the most notable being the Motorola Dragonball, used in Palms up until recently) called ucLinux.
I would argue that operating systems target a class of architecture -- not just the CPU, but the underlying system as well. We've been relatively lucky with IA-32 in that despite all the changes in leading architectures over the years (DRAM/SDRAM/DDR/Rambus, ISA/VLBus/CardBus/EISA/PCI/AGP, etc.) the general scheme of things has been very consistent. I mean, to this day, look how many northbridges emulate the ancient PIC chips.
It's certainly true that some chips are faster at certain OS-related things (context switches, etc) than others, and some have better MMU designs than others (don't get me started on PE-mode and V86 on the 386), but that seems more a nod to usability than a nod to any specific design of OS.
(That, and hardware MMU/paging isn't necesarily required for multitasking, it just makes it far more efficient, and it provides you a level of protection from poorly written third party apps. The Z80 and 8086 are still the dominant processors in embedded applications because you don't have to worry about it if you're writing all the apps along with the OS and know as fact that they behave well.)
PowerPC is an open architecture; several companies make different CPUs based on the design. IBM's historically made them for servers (the 970 was originally intended to be a server chip) while Motorola made them for desktops (Apple). Only problem is, Motorola sucks -- and their growth in the wireless business has gotten them to the point where they don't need Apple's business any more, so they have no real reason to improve their CPU line.
The G3 and G4 are also PowerPC chips -- they just are specific models made by Motorola. It's half new implementation, half relative.
Finally, a CPU doesn't run any specific OS -- OSes just have to be written for that CPU (and more generally, for the system architecture that CPU uses). Linux has supported the PPC for a long time; there's a distro called Yellow Dog that specifically targets Macs, and does a good job of it. Mac OS X's kernel, Darwin, has been backported to Intel IA-32. Windows used to be available for Alpha processors. It's just a matter of coding and hardware knowledge.
Unicode contains merely the lower sixteen bits of the UCS (Universal Character Set), aka ISO 10646. UCS defines a 31-bit character set; the lower 65534 positions, which Unicode dupes, is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) or Plane 0. Tengwar and Cirth are defined in the full UCS table, along with the complete Hangul Jamo and both Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Han kanji.
Specifically, Unicode is one possible Level 3 implementation of ISO 10646. All characters have the same indices and names in both standards; the Unicode spec merely adds formatting and rendering semantics for languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and standardizes algorithms for sorting and comparison. (That last bit is the most important, since ISO 10464 is little more than a very large table.)
Correct, the AdLib was FM synth. Creative relied pretty heavily on the fact that it was cheaper than a genuine AdLib card tho for a while, until sampled sound took over.
:D And it had a great soundtrack too. DM2 was good too, but I never sat down and beat it. Maybe I should...
And, actually, that parallel port rig was pretty common. If you wanted to do it portably, you just hooked up an 8 bit DAC to it, but cheaper ones just used a R^2 resistor network and leeched off the parallel port -- moderately risky depending on whether or not you ran it to an amplifier or directly to a headset. (Sink/source capabilities have never been standardized for parallel ports; you can still find some boxes in use today that are rated for 5 mA source.)
Dungeon Master was such an awesome game
Sigh. Does anyone know if the emu10k module can be used from inside UMSDOS? It'd be a lot easier to run my old games in Linux than trying to find an old version of the old BLASTER= emulator software for the SBLive. I've been craving some old Wing Commander: Privateer...
The code that allows that to happen is generated by the COMPILER, not the OS. The problem can be duplicated in gcc and any other C++ compiler, and with any other OS with a flat memory space. There is no way to fix it without breaking from the C++ spec. (Although it gets a bit messier when the class has virtual functions and you need an offset for the vtable.)
But, then, this is likely a oneshot troll, since there aren't any other posts on the acocunt. Oh well.
It's pretty well thought out. Each of the sections in the XBE (analogous to the Win32 PE format, EXE) is checksummed using SHA-1. Each hash is stored in the header along with the byte offsets of each section. The entire header is then checksummed again with SHA-1, and the resulting hash is signed using 2048-bit RSA. The public key is stored in the XBox's BIOS.
So, you're right about not needing the whole program. As far as we know there's no intermediate keys used.
Given the reasonable assumption that the private RSA key has been selected several times and is sufficiently high to make a brute-force search infeasable, the only chance for running unsigned code without hardware modification will be somehow taking advantage of a security hole in a signed XBox program -- either the Dashboard (the software that comes up when an XBox is powered on without a game in the drive, a preferences/save-game manager and audio ripper/player) or in one or more titles produced by a third party.
You can be sure that nobody at MSFT will actually have the private key. They'll have a black box there with the key in tamper-proof silicon. You get authorization to see the box, you put in a finished XBE with no signature, you get back out a signed executable, you're escorted from the room.
At least, that's how I'd do it if I were in their position, since the key is the linchpin that's allowing MSFT to stay competitive by preventing unauthorized games or copying.
Catch: Get a running task into the system. Your best bet to do this without modchipping would, IMO, be to emulate XBox Live or another download system for a game. You can open the box and plug the drive into a normal IDE system - but it uses the ATA protocol's password mode - meaning you either have to crack the key or hotswap the drive after powering it up in an XBox.
... hah.
Catch: Get the task running. The XBox is essentially a single-process OS due to its use of unified memory addresses for all hardware.
Having looked at the problem for some time my suspicion for the best way to go about it would be a buffer overflow or other flaw in the saved game system, since you can put those on a memory card easily enough and copy it to the HDD. Tada, backdoor without requiring modchipping.
In the XBox, once you've got control of the CPU, everything becomes possible. The catch is doing that, since the kernel will not allow you to load an unsigned executable. At the same time, I'm sure that MSFT has quite thoroughly checked the Dashboard XBE on the drive for exploitable bugs...
On the other hand, you can save a lot of cash by buying the hardware separately and sticking them in a slightly modified ATX case.
(I'm hitting for both teams -- longtime PC user, but currently about 60-40ing it between the PC and a 533MHz G4.)
And regarding the movie-at-the-theatre comment:
Went out as a group with my friends and saw The Two Towers. Even stopped by a decent coffee shop (i.e. not Starbucks) afterwards. About $15, total.
Everquest Gold (retail + all four expansions in a bundle) is $70. Three months of the game is $30. Are you so sure? Even if you went really cheap and just bought the basic original retail for $9 and one month, that's still more than a movie and discussing geek shit over two mochas after.
I daresay that watching Ents dam the river Isen is far more fulfilling for the average geek than buying an old game and a month of play -- enough for a non-ub3r player without a guide to the areas to get to 15-20 or so.
Maybe I should have added that all my friends were addicted to it, and altho I no longer played, I've seen them go through 30 to 60, and just never saw much difference. About the only thing I ever enjoyed seeing on their monitors was seeing the Planes for the first time. Really, I think I actually did myself a huge favor by getting out before 25 when the game still felt new to me, but just not interesting enough to continue paying. Of them, only two of them are still playing, and that's mostly because they've got too many friends in their guilds to put it down. The rest have all either gotten bored with twiddling thumbs between raids or decided that money would be best spent elsewhere or saved in the current economy.
:P
FYI, I'm also not a newbie to MMOGs -- I used to be a regular reader of Lum the Mad, and I've also gone through UO, AC, AO, and DAOC in their turn. I'm not saying all MMORPGs are boring, but I would definitely say that Everquest is the least entertaining in the long run of them all.
Although it could be worse. You could be playing World War 2 Online.
He actually describes the game pretty well. :P
You create a character with six vital statistics, a spell/skill book, and a bunch of empty slots for inventory. You put armor and weapons in your inventory slots. You walk your blocky 100-triangle avatar out in a third-person view, you click on a monster to target it, and you hit a key to start auto-attacking it. You sit there twiddling your thumbs until either it dies or you die.
Once you get a few levels, you can start getting spells and skills. These make it slightly less boring -- you make your character sit, and memorize spells, and then drag them to a bar on your screen, and you can hit 1-8 to cast them in battle. It's still pretty boring.
That, right there, is the game in a nutshell. You use a mix of auto-attacking and spells (or, being honest, either one or the other depending on your class) to kill creatures and level up. There is no plot, no rise in stature beyond who has the best items (aka phat lootz) and highest levels. Oh, and one thing the article writer forgot to mention -- those high-level planar raids have to be signed up for on a calendar up to two months in advance.
Yes, that's the game. What people get addicted to is the in-game chat, the shared experiences and what people share when they've got little else to do. I played EQ for two years before getting bored with it, and never got beyond lv20 -- my fondest memory of it is just BSing one night with a friend, drinking myself silly in-game (there's actually an Alcohol Tolerance skill) and doing drunken leaps off the bridges of a tree city called Felwithe.
The author's mostly just a whiny little technogoth -- but the game really doesn't have that much to offer. For the cost of the game and four expansions, and a few months subscription, you could easily buy an XBox and a copy of Splinter Cell, or upgrade your video card and play Doom 3 in a few months... or, my preference, do something nice for your significant other. Believe me, I'd rather have warm arms around me than an item in EQ anyday.
I live in Portland, OR, home of PersonalTelco - a fairly well known volunteer group for WiFi access. We have more nodes listed on nodedb for the Portland metropolitan area than nearly any STATE - and take that to all states if you count all of Oregon.
We had a big landmark case here a while ago that's exactly what you're fearing. PersonalTelco's been providing a totally free 11Mb connection to Pioneer Courthouse Square (a major hotspot in downtown Portland), and the Starbucks on one corner of the square tried to compete with them, broadcasting their pay-to-use TMobile service on the same channel.
Starbucks ended up having to back down - they now broadcast on channel 11, and PT on 6.
PT's a great group to get involved with - not only do they have regular meetings and stay active with local politics, they also organize a lot of things like group buys on antenna connectors and workshops on Pringles can waveguides.
Nintendo is having a lot of trouble fighting the image that their games are targeted towards kids. Look at their most successful franchises - Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc... and while we may certainly enjoy playing them, there's still the lingering image of selling to the 8-14 group. (Who here remembers Nintendo Power? I've still got a mint issue 1.)
In contrast, look at the perennials on the Playstation: MGS, Tony Hawk, etc. On the PS2: GTA3, MGS2, etc. On the Dreamcast: Shenmue. On the XBox, Splinter Cell and Steel Battalion. The reason the original PSX was a smash hit was because it had the games to sell itself to the teen, college, and adult crowd. This doesn't mean that said games are any more or less fun than the Nintendo classics, it's just a different image. Most of us have heard stories about the massive censoring required for third-party titles.
Now, they've been getting away from that with Metroid Prime and some other GameCube titles, and they've had some decidedly grown up games for the N64. However, they're still fighting the kid image that got them where they are now.
1) Unified memory architecture.
2) Close to Win32, but not quite.
3) Liberal use of hashing and checksumming.
The XBE executable format is actually pretty interesting - it's similar to Win32's PE, but with many more flags and tables - for example, bitfields for what mediums are acceptable to run the game off of (DVD, hard drive, CD-RW, etc.) Each section and the relocation address tables have a SHA-1 hash taken of it, the header containing the section offsets and hashes of each is itself hashed, digitally signed using PKE, and then encrypted.
The hard drive also uses the ATA spec's password protection, although that's already been bypassed and the drive dumped. In any case, most people with homebrew code are using the neXgen or EvoX dashboards to run an FTP server on the XBox for uploading and downloading files to the HDD, so you don't have to muck about with IDE cables.
Most of the modchips out there right now work by tying the chip enable pin on the on-board BIOS to to ground, and emulating the BIOS directly on the LPC bus to allow execution of unsigned code and ignore mismatched media flags. (BTW, kudos to MSFT for complicating things with a floating ground... more than a few early modchips were responsible for fried PCs while doing in-circuit programming.)
Never worked much in the service industries, have you? Boycotts don't do much, you're right. Word of mouth is EVERYTHING though. This is very much true of ISPs, also -- I've seen it first hand.
Technically, yes, a person has the right to run his company any way he sees fit - or the stockholders, in the case of an incorporated business. Speaking for the company off-hours should certainly be discouraged. However, giving unofficial help in a tech forum to frustrated users (either from your ISP, or from a competitor's) should not be an offense, much less one worthy of termination. Hell, I'd be MORE likely to hire someone who did that.
(In fact, I've got a good story for ya - a friend of mine split up his DSL line with several other people, and one of said people ended up getting the ISP targeted for a two-day DoS attack. The abuse staff at the ISP ran the name of my friend through Google - and got nothing but postings on LUGs, Sendmail mailing lists, and overclocking forums. They ended up hiring him part-time.)
Yep, everyone has a right to make business decisions. However, some decisions are better than others. Having seen first-hand what happens when ISP word of mouth goes from very good to very bad (the result of policy and staff changes in a previously stable company following a buyout) it's apparent to me that decisions that lead to bad word of mouth should be avoided. This is basic microeconomics, bud.
If I were ever interested in working for an ISP again, or maybe running one, the number one thing I'd shoot for is trust - trust between employer and employees, and trust between business and customers. It may not be the most guaranteed to make profit, but it's the best way to maintain repeat business - and, frankly, if I wanted to make big bucks and hate my career, I'd go work for the government.
Mathematically, though, as long as you have enough supplemental qubits for error correction, the math works out for any application of Shor's algorithm.
It's actually pretty ingenious - it takes advantage of entanglement to generate a superposition of all discrete logs of x, and then performs a Fourier transform on it. If the most likely discrete log is odd and non-zero, then you can factor using basic number theory. (If not, rinse and repeat; Shor's algorithm does have a work factor, although its scope isn't as large as with Grover's search algorithm.)
However, once a tree has been expanded and properly pruned, "near matches" or "related forks" can be returned quite easily. Grover's algorithm only returns a single result.
Furthermore, Grover has a work factor involved; the "baking" transform is not guaranteed to work.
In theory, once you've got a floating-point PCM or ADPCM value, you can cast that out to any precision of integer you want -- the same blackbox decoder would work whether you were creating an 8-bit signal for a basic DSP or a 24-bit signal for a studio-quality DAC. (The latter is particularly relevant since Ogg can support more than two channels and can chain multiple segments in a single Ogg bitstream.) In theory you could even design a DAC to directly accept an IEEE 724 floating point number.
.sos into /usr/lib!!)
Decoding using the FP decoder and casting to, say, 16bit unsigned bigendian, should sound no different than decoding to the same point using Tremor. I haven't looked at any comparisons of algorithmic complexity for the two decoders, since the one project I'm working that uses Vorbis is using libvorbisfile.
(Or rather, the Mac OS X Framework version of it... the OSX-specific source in CVS is broken at present, but you can coax it into compiling with a bit of elbow grease. It also needs to have a Mac-specific gcc flag added to change the base address for the relocation table to allow prelinking. If anyone out there from vorbis.com is reading this, take those UNIX libs off the damned download page and get the Frameworks working -- most Mac users are NOT mentally equipped to su root and copy a bunch of
The main stumbling block to Vorbis implementations was that the reference decoder was floating point intensive, whereas MPEG decoding can be done with mostly integers. However, there's now the "Tremor" reference decoder which uses purely integer math.
It's not really that difficult of a format. The only real oddity is that you have to buffer in the first few Ogg pages quickly in order to set up the codebook and other Vorbis headers, whereas MPEG uses discrete frames; but, once you've got the headers parsed, Vorbis is a relatively straightforward format.