I recently got a tiny point-and-shoot camera, a Canon ELPH 300 HS, and I've been participating in CHDK's effort to hack it. When we got RAW support working, I learned the camera's lens actually has severe barrel distortion that gets "corrected" in software before saving a JPEG.
Images are "shopped" before they even emerge from the camera these days.
I often get up early to jog or bike. At 6:00 AM, when I'm on a side street coming to an intersection with an arterial, and the light is red for me and green for the arterial, pressing the walk button will _immediately_ change the light for the arterial to yellow.
At 8:00 AM, however, with rush-hour traffic clogging up the arterial, the walk button appears to do nothing.
I could understand advertising $39.95/mo exclusive of taxes, but the phone companies themselves tack on a bunch of other surcharges that are _not_ taxes. They make them sound like taxes by calling them "regulatory recovery fees", but they're really unadvertised price hikes that they can spring on you at will, even when you have a contractual price.
Make phone companies advertise their ACTUAL rate first. Then go after these warnings...
(It's for this reason I use a prepaid Tracfone; no surprises.)
On a couple of flights, I've tried to catch a glimpse of the stars through the window--far above city lights, with less atmosphere to look through, I'd think it'd be a pretty good view. The placement of the window makes it very difficult to look "up", however--not to mention the blinking light on the wing and all the interior lights preventing any sort of dark adaptation.
A plane with a transparent fuselage should solve two of these problems by permitting a line of sight that doesn't require craning your neck and is angled away from the wingtip light. It'd still be tricky to block out other local lights, but maybe possible...
When I was in high school, Zshell (an exploit that allowed running native Z80 assembly on a TI-85) was all the rage. The exploit and various apps (mostly games) spread virally throughout the school. I did some Z80 assembly programming myself, and it was a learning experience arguably more useful to my career than anything I learned in high school...
Years later at college, when my old 85 had been handed down to a younger sibling, I found I needed a graphing calculator for a physics class. I bought a TI-89 and was impressed to see TI allowed it to run native software, no hacks required. (There were still hacks, to get around a few limitations such as code size, but even these limitations were relaxed in later firmware versions.) I spent far more time programming the calculator than actually using it as a calculator.
Now they're back in their lock-it-down mode? Shame. It always disappoints me when manufacturers go out of their way to make their devices less useful--and in this case, a less capable learning tool, for budding programmers anyway.
Driving home tonight, I noticed dozens of buildings (mostly office buildings and hotels) that are uplit with thousands of watts of light. Car lots--even _empty_ car lots--are ridiculously bright, even after closing time. Billboards are nearly universally lit from below by lights that are pointed _straight up_, wasting the majority of the light they generate. My home city recently installed huge acorn-style streetlights every 30 feet along both sides of major thoroughfares. Why do governments focus on light bulbs and TV sets when our night skies are lit so brightly we can't even see stars anymore?
if you change the icon of your.exe file to be the word doc icon, then the.exe still shows up
That doesn't make sense. How is Windows supposed to tell that your binary's icon looks like Word's icon? I suppose Windows could cache icons from various versions of popular programs to compare against, but then malware writers would just make a change that would be visually undetectable, like modifying a single pixel.
It's not nearly so impressive as Holmes was last year - but it certainly moves impressively fast. When I was taking test shots to check focus, I saw the comet visibly moved relative to the stars in 15 seconds. Holmes wasn't nearly that fast. I made an animation showing its motion relative to the stars over a period of 20 minutes.
I have a Windows 7 pre-beta (from PDC) installed on my laptop, and it actually calls itself 6.1. That's bound to cause some confusion, particularly when whatever they call the release that actually uses major version 7 comes out.
Q8200 is a 45nm chip vs. the 65nm Q6600, so it comes with lower power consumption and allegedly slightly better IPC than the older core--so it should perform about the same.
The real complaint about the Q8200 is that it's missing the virtualization technology that's present in the Q6600 and the Q9000-series.
US$200 in 1992, is worth about US$300 today. Looking at Microsoft's site, we see that Vista Home Premium ("Full Version") is US$239. Heck, even if you leave DOS out completely, US$150 inflates to US$225, only a hair cheaper.
But viewed as a percentage of the cost of the computer, Windows has easily tripled in price since the early '90s. You can almost build an entire PC for the cost of a Windows license these days. You may argue that Windows does a lot more than it used to, but the same is true of computer hardware.
It actually looks reasonable - you can still perform raw disk writes from userland (with admin rights, of course) - you just can't write over a mounted volume. Disk imaging utilities will still work, provided they dismount any volumes before they overwrite them (which they ought to be doing anyway; I should know, I wrote a Windows disk imaging utility at my last job).
And of course, you can't dismount a disk with an active pagefile on it, so it solves that vulnerability. But it does so in a reasonable way--I can't really imagine why a well-behaved program would want to scribble over a mounted volume; you don't know whether the cache is just going to clobber what you wrote in a second anyway. So I apologize for my FUD in the parent message; this security feature actually seems to strike a good balance.
IIRC, that's what the "pagefile attack" was all about - getting the kernel to run unsigned code. To close that loophole, MS prevents you from performing raw writes.
Oh well, dd on a Knoppix CD still works.
Actually, come to think of it, if this raw-write-disallowing only applies to disks that have pagefiles on them, then this wouldn't be a real loss, because you'd be unable to lock the volume anyway--and restoring over the existing pagefile would be a Bad Thing in terms of system reliability and such.
The following has been removed from the RIAA's website, but the Internet Archive remembers:
If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail.
5. Explorer improvements - more multi-threaded (less blocking) and (FINALLY) it doesn't b0rk an entire file copy job just because one file failed... now you can retry or skip the offending item. Welcome to 1993, apparently.
Vista is less blocking? What is that crazy green progress bar that pops up in the address bar from time to time (particularly if you hit F5 twice in a short period of time). Vista can take minutes before it will display two files in a folder... I've gotten used to dropping to a cmd.exe shell to copy files out because I can't wait for Explorer to finish doing whatever the heck it's doing...
And speaking of retry/skip on copy, that functionality can be added to 2000/XP with this open-source software.
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I recently got a tiny point-and-shoot camera, a Canon ELPH 300 HS, and I've been participating in CHDK's effort to hack it. When we got RAW support working, I learned the camera's lens actually has severe barrel distortion that gets "corrected" in software before saving a JPEG.
Images are "shopped" before they even emerge from the camera these days.
To put that number in perspective, it would take a stack of 4GB hard drives extending past the orbit of Saturn...
I often get up early to jog or bike. At 6:00 AM, when I'm on a side street coming to an intersection with an arterial, and the light is red for me and green for the arterial, pressing the walk button will _immediately_ change the light for the arterial to yellow.
At 8:00 AM, however, with rush-hour traffic clogging up the arterial, the walk button appears to do nothing.
I could understand advertising $39.95/mo exclusive of taxes, but the phone companies themselves tack on a bunch of other surcharges that are _not_ taxes. They make them sound like taxes by calling them "regulatory recovery fees", but they're really unadvertised price hikes that they can spring on you at will, even when you have a contractual price.
Make phone companies advertise their ACTUAL rate first. Then go after these warnings...
(It's for this reason I use a prepaid Tracfone; no surprises.)
On a couple of flights, I've tried to catch a glimpse of the stars through the window--far above city lights, with less atmosphere to look through, I'd think it'd be a pretty good view. The placement of the window makes it very difficult to look "up", however--not to mention the blinking light on the wing and all the interior lights preventing any sort of dark adaptation.
A plane with a transparent fuselage should solve two of these problems by permitting a line of sight that doesn't require craning your neck and is angled away from the wingtip light. It'd still be tricky to block out other local lights, but maybe possible...
When I was in high school, Zshell (an exploit that allowed running native Z80 assembly on a TI-85) was all the rage. The exploit and various apps (mostly games) spread virally throughout the school. I did some Z80 assembly programming myself, and it was a learning experience arguably more useful to my career than anything I learned in high school...
Years later at college, when my old 85 had been handed down to a younger sibling, I found I needed a graphing calculator for a physics class. I bought a TI-89 and was impressed to see TI allowed it to run native software, no hacks required. (There were still hacks, to get around a few limitations such as code size, but even these limitations were relaxed in later firmware versions.) I spent far more time programming the calculator than actually using it as a calculator.
Now they're back in their lock-it-down mode? Shame. It always disappoints me when manufacturers go out of their way to make their devices less useful--and in this case, a less capable learning tool, for budding programmers anyway.
It's not scheduled to fly again, but it'll be ready as a "launch-on-need" vehicle to rescue the Endeavour crew if that craft is unable to re-enter.
But why does it need to phone home?
How can an installation that was activated successfully suddenly become "non-genuine"?
Driving home tonight, I noticed dozens of buildings (mostly office buildings and hotels) that are uplit with thousands of watts of light. Car lots--even _empty_ car lots--are ridiculously bright, even after closing time. Billboards are nearly universally lit from below by lights that are pointed _straight up_, wasting the majority of the light they generate. My home city recently installed huge acorn-style streetlights every 30 feet along both sides of major thoroughfares. Why do governments focus on light bulbs and TV sets when our night skies are lit so brightly we can't even see stars anymore?
That doesn't make sense. How is Windows supposed to tell that your binary's icon looks like Word's icon? I suppose Windows could cache icons from various versions of popular programs to compare against, but then malware writers would just make a change that would be visually undetectable, like modifying a single pixel.
I got a picture of Comet Lulin early Saturday morning.
It's not nearly so impressive as Holmes was last year - but it certainly moves impressively fast. When I was taking test shots to check focus, I saw the comet visibly moved relative to the stars in 15 seconds. Holmes wasn't nearly that fast. I made an animation showing its motion relative to the stars over a period of 20 minutes.
Clearly, playing Quake in the browser is the killer app for this technology.
I have a Windows 7 pre-beta (from PDC) installed on my laptop, and it actually calls itself 6.1. That's bound to cause some confusion, particularly when whatever they call the release that actually uses major version 7 comes out.
Q8200 is a 45nm chip vs. the 65nm Q6600, so it comes with lower power consumption and allegedly slightly better IPC than the older core--so it should perform about the same.
The real complaint about the Q8200 is that it's missing the virtualization technology that's present in the Q6600 and the Q9000-series.
For hard disk encryption, you need to keep the key in memory. Can't ask the user for a password every time you read a sector.
The weather forecast doesn't look good where I am... or anywhere within hundreds of miles... sigh...
But viewed as a percentage of the cost of the computer, Windows has easily tripled in price since the early '90s. You can almost build an entire PC for the cost of a Windows license these days. You may argue that Windows does a lot more than it used to, but the same is true of computer hardware.
Actually, some blame has been placed on the lead-free solder used in the 360--it's more brittle than 63/37 tin-lead solder.
Suppose you have a bad sector somewhere. Will dd skip it and move on, or will it bail out?
Because if it bails out, everything beyond the bad sector doesn't get erased...
Here.
It actually looks reasonable - you can still perform raw disk writes from userland (with admin rights, of course) - you just can't write over a mounted volume. Disk imaging utilities will still work, provided they dismount any volumes before they overwrite them (which they ought to be doing anyway; I should know, I wrote a Windows disk imaging utility at my last job).
And of course, you can't dismount a disk with an active pagefile on it, so it solves that vulnerability. But it does so in a reasonable way--I can't really imagine why a well-behaved program would want to scribble over a mounted volume; you don't know whether the cache is just going to clobber what you wrote in a second anyway. So I apologize for my FUD in the parent message; this security feature actually seems to strike a good balance.
Now the FUD in TFA is another story...
The newest victim of DRM: disk imaging utilities.
IIRC, that's what the "pagefile attack" was all about - getting the kernel to run unsigned code. To close that loophole, MS prevents you from performing raw writes.
Oh well, dd on a Knoppix CD still works.
Actually, come to think of it, if this raw-write-disallowing only applies to disks that have pagefiles on them, then this wouldn't be a real loss, because you'd be unable to lock the volume anyway--and restoring over the existing pagefile would be a Bad Thing in terms of system reliability and such.
Screw HD-DVD too.
I'm holding out for Gamma-Ray.
Vista is less blocking? What is that crazy green progress bar that pops up in the address bar from time to time (particularly if you hit F5 twice in a short period of time). Vista can take minutes before it will display two files in a folder... I've gotten used to dropping to a cmd.exe shell to copy files out because I can't wait for Explorer to finish doing whatever the heck it's doing...
And speaking of retry/skip on copy, that functionality can be added to 2000/XP with this open-source software.
This article says it's 84 AU out, which is a little more than 11.6 light-hours.