Ah.... gotcha this time buddy..... this will only sting for a moment.... and then you can go back to your racket....
Until next timez I sendz wanna my collectionz agentz around...
And then youz better handz him a nice stack of that peacock puke youz getting off of our... *ahem* citizens..... say 5% of your take after expenses? Not like it will hurt much.... but ya know..... youz gots to pay the Piper some timez.....
Me thinks the EU ha been watching old gangster movies..... and taking notes.
It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests.
Oh FCS.... walk by the executive parking lot some time and look at the cars parked there.... and back in the 80's and 90's there were nice little signs at the curb to tell you who's raging cock was assigned to the stall!
Since Pepsi and Coke fight tooth and nail for dominance and neither can hold it for long..... and occasionally they both get blind sided by "Crisp and Clean no caffine.... never had it never will"
I have enjoyed watching those two Neanderthals slugging it out with sticks and stones my whole.
And you know why they get away with it? Because NEITHER of them has monopoly position!
Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.
/quote>
This would be suicide for the OEM because they would be making a product their customers don't want any more.
The strong-arm with the OEMs didn't have teeth until AMD lagged a bit.... then it was on... All it took was a little bit of something that Intel had that AMD didn't.... like maybe volume delivery dates.... who knows....
That's all it would have taken to get this ball swinging against AMD.
And maybe Jobs will have to flip the Platform_Transition bit again and run off to Power6 or AMD in a couple of years because the EU court just took Intel's lunch money for Tuesday.... THIS week.
They'd have to bring the orbital velocity down from the 17,000+mph to 0.
You might want to run the maths....
If they had enough energy to do a full-stop de-orbit they'd have more than enough to alter their orbit to reach the ISS... a MUCH SAFER solution...
As it is they only have enough fuel to change their inertial vector ~800 - 1200 meters/sec no where near enough for even a 2 degree orbital plane alteration let alone a full-stop de-orbit....
You need to stop watching SciFi.... it's rotting your brain.
rip an electric ignition based "crack torch" apart. Take out the piezoelectric igniter unit. Hold igniter very close to the antenna click the igniter a few times... ten or twenty times if you are really paranoid. Feel the tingling from the ESD? That will blow the receiver up but good.
Don't think it will work? I witnessed a friend kill a running computer that way with one click. The igniter was triggered about 8 inches above the motherboard.... the ESD pulses fried about half the MOS/NMOS devices, and a few TTL devices in the computer including the CPU. How do I know it did that much damage? I am the one who fixed the computer. I was quite frankly shocked at the time as to just how much damage the igniter did.
It won't leave any burns or other signs of tampering on the device and there is no need to touch the device. it simply will fail to work any more.
Every receiver that uses a heterodyne converter (and GPS receivers use them) also transmits a small leakage signal. at the down-converter's frequency. A sensitive enough receiver tuned to the correct band for that receiver MIGHT detect the unit.
If said GPS is retransmitting it's position fix via another radio link, then it's definitely detectable.
An easier solution would be to place a small transmitter under your car that broadcasts noise on the GPS band.... Sevailance GPS receiver fail! Navicomp in your car (with antenna on the roof) a little less reliable, but still functional.
But that leads me to an interesting question: How the heck did the cops get a GPS receiver to work UNDER a car.... The signal is weak enough when the antenna is mounted on the roof to have issues with an accurate fix! A car is isolated from ground and the shiny upper surfaces make an excellent reflector...
It seems unlikely to me that they just mag-mounted a GPS to the frame and called it good. Maybe it was an 6DOF based accelerometer/gyro system?
Shouldn't matter for the legal implications... even if it was a simple beacon transmitter and the cops used a set of fixed antennas in the city to track the beacon's apparent signal strength/pulse arrival time to estimate a position. Little harder than GPS but not too much for a few CIS/EE students to work out on contract.
Heck when I was a teen we did it by hand with C.B.s to track a designated "fox" who was required to key-up every 10 minutes for 30 seconds. By tracking relative signal strength from 3 or more observation points, it was accurate enough that we could locate the "fox" to within a square block in very few rounds.
Some of the hounds were fixed and some were mobile... running the fix required only a notepad to record observations and mobile receivers locations, a city map, a ruler and a pencil with a good eraser.... I went through a lot of gas station maps that summer:P
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."
This is not about what is casually observable. This not looking in the windows for a showing of probable cause. it's not walking by with a trained dog.... for a showing of probable cause. This is not entering my vehicle to search it.... all of which have been examined under the 4th Amendment...
This is laying hands on my property, -my effects- *without a showing of probable cause*. That is what disturbs me about this ruling.
Note: To place a ticket on the windshield of my vehicle requires a probable cause. To wit: The officer's sworn testimony (vis a vis the signed and properly marked ticket) that he/she PERSONALLY witnessed my vehicle parked in violation of statute.
In most jurisdictions I have lived in.... a civilian placing flyers on vehicles parked on a public street is tampering with private property, and is charged with a misdemeanor, if they are caught doing it.
If the flyers are only placed on vehicles parked on private property (in my jurisdiction you generally park on private property at your own risk, but that won't protect the property owner from willful, or negligent acts) I could easily file suit and claim that the agent of the property owner who placed the flyer on my vehicle has damaged my property in the process of placing said flyer. I assure you; even if I fail to prove my case, said property owner would likely avoid applying that method of spamming their customers again, because the risk of liability would be too high.
I'm further reminded of some individuals who attached electrical devices(electronic in this case is a bit of joke) to public and private property that had LEDs on them, depicting a popular cartoon character. Wow did that make a big scene in Bean Town, or what?
The marketeers who executed that little stunt were cited for anything and everything the DA could think of.... and one of those things was tampering with public property... and tampering with private property without prior authorization.... isn't that interesting?
The MPAA doesn't care about consumers. That's also not their mission statement. Their job is to care about movie makers. Essentially, the consumer is the necessary evil to get money to their protectees. If they could force you (or anyone, for that matter) to hand money to their members, it would probably be all right with them.
Sorry, but the argument is like saying "Unions don't care for employers". No they don't. It's the necessary evil they have to deal with.
At a certain threshold, unions don't care about their rank & file constituency either. What's best for the employee becomes secondary to what's best for the union leadership. I see it as an inherent conflict of interest.
When a support/service organization reaches a critical mass it typically begins behaving like a living organism. Unions and similar organizations like the *AA start out behaving like... Pilot fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_fish...and end up behaving like lamprey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamprey
The bug in VHS was never really fixed. The issue is due to the way that VHS(and Beta) systems had to record video.
Analog video recorders match the tape movement and the rotation speed of the flying heads dynamically, such that the mechanical system is held in synchronization with the incoming video signal.
The synchronization during recording is very brittle because it has nothing to reference internally, except the regularity, and conformance of the incoming video signal to the broadcast standard. Additionally the mechanical nature of the recording servo loops is that they do not respond well to sudden changes in the timing of the synchronization information in a video signal.
Macrovision and and similar systems produce video that "wiggles" the horizontal and vertical sync pulses in the time domain such that the VHS recording servos cannot stay locked, thus causing "tearing" of the magnetic signal written to the tape.
The only real "fix" for this is to buffer up a significant portion of the incoming video frame and analyze the sync information to get feed-forward correction to the servos. The ability to do this would add a LOT of cost to a VHS recorder. I don't know for sure, but I doubt record buffering was ever available in mass-market units.
As a side note rental VHS tapes could be "copy protected" using a similar technique. A modified recorder was used that introduced a similar "wiggle" into the recording servos during write. The key difference here is that the source video signal did not have this "wiggle", so the servos remain locked to the source, and the servos were of a much higher quality than the ones found in mass-market VHS recorders allowing them to keep the mechanical elements of the record loop under tighter control.
I should also point out there were boxes sold (often as kits) that would buffer a line or two of the video signal in an analog delay line, and average the "wiggle" out of the sync. The filtering wasn't perfect and the delay-line buffering introduced some noise to the resulting video, but they did work. At the time multi-line analog delay lines were hideously expensive, so these boxes were often used by commercial pirates to create counterfeit rental tapes from either mass-market sources, or early release rental sources.
I cant afford to fund 'big science' out of my pocket. Don't get me wrong... I 'd like to, but near-freezing organic cultivation studies are all I can afford to contribute at this time.... and y'all don't seem to appreciate my papers.... so I'll be moving on.... I hope the particle smasher does well....
Modern drives have "servo tracks" on them - used for setting the head position. If you use an eraser powerful enough to wipe the drive, then the servo track is most likely also wiped - rendering the drive totally useless to most folk.
This wasn't the case on SCSI drives up to about 4GB. They had enough smarts to rewrite their own servo tracks if you did a low-level format.
Most PATA drives of the same vintage had relatively dumb controllers and could not be recovered. They were also less than half the price of comparable SCSI drives, and a lot less reliable.
From personal experience, it was fairly simple to recover data from a SCSI drive with a control board failure by replacing the control board. There was no assembly specific information stored on the drive controller for units made from the same line of drives. This was true even if the swapped controllers we from drives with different capacities, as long as the controller was the same model.
Not so with ATA drives... Servo tracks are written using a special machine that determines the unit specific parameters. Those unit specific parameters are then stored on the controller during final controller/CAN assembly, calibration, and test.
It is likely that this is also true of modern pSCSI and SAS drives, as it seriously reduces the complexity of the drive controller. This also reduces QA costs and QA failures at final assembly.
Back in the day, I used to ride around on an old 3-speed bike collecting techno-fruit that had fallen from the corporate trees in and around Montain View, CA....
My arch nemesis: Atari Security Service.... They drove around in white Ford Broncos(the shift supervisor) or white CJ-5 Jeeps( the rank & file) they caught me a couple of times, but I altered my raid tactics and they never knew I was there.
Along with valuable caches of ICs, engineering prototypes, demo units, cosmetic QA failed units, and retired test equipment, many coffee stained "Confidential" documents passed through my paws... HR reports with employee data, engineering documents, source code, executive policy memos, and even legal documents, litigation and contract drafts....
I do miss being a larval geek in the Sillycon Trench....
Shoving a 3.6GHz quad-core into a 2U case pretty much requires water cooling.... or lots of 60Db fans... Now I have a really fast local server that doesn't scream like a banshee.... or use precious real estate in my already cramped workspace.
For me it wasn't about bragging rights.... it was about creating a high performance linux machine box that I could LIVE with....
Lol it did another unexpected service this winter.... The baseboard heater in my office was off for the duration....
Ok I give up. I was pulling most of this from memory. As point of order this was very important for me when I was a high school student in the 80's... This variant record nonsense, and it's use as a type coercion mechanism was part of the ACT exam in CIS. The exam explicitly stated that the assumed compiler was UCSD PASCAL. I passed that exam with a perfect score.
Standard Pascal does not have UNION. Standard Pascal does have variant records which are basically discriminated unions.
My bad... I hadn't used PASCAL in so long I forgot how to declare a variant records also referred to a union records... and I got the keyword for it from C stuck in my craw.... -.-
This is what I meant, and this is type coercion PASCAL style:
...
Type
typeswitch = (asint, aschars);
var TCorerce : record
case typeswitch: sw of
asint: (int : Integer);
aschars: (chars : packed array[1..4] of Char);
end;...
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean you have brown stains around your lips instead of purple ones?
Ok who let that over-caffeinated Mentat in here?
Ah.... gotcha this time buddy..... this will only sting for a moment.... and then you can go back to your racket....
Until next timez I sendz wanna my collectionz agentz around...
And then youz better handz him a nice stack of that peacock puke youz getting off of our... *ahem* citizens..... say 5% of your take after expenses? Not like it will hurt much.... but ya know..... youz gots to pay the Piper some timez.....
Me thinks the EU ha been watching old gangster movies..... and taking notes.
It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests.
Oh FCS.... walk by the executive parking lot some time and look at the cars parked there.... and back in the 80's and 90's there were nice little signs at the curb to tell you who's raging cock was assigned to the stall!
Paleeze.
Lol....
You do a risk analysis and it doesn't look like such a bad deal....
Oh but what happens if we get caught?
We cut some 'dead-wood'.... trim a few budgets and move on....
Business as usual....
Since Pepsi and Coke fight tooth and nail for dominance and neither can hold it for long..... and occasionally they both get blind sided by "Crisp and Clean no caffine.... never had it never will"
I have enjoyed watching those two Neanderthals slugging it out with sticks and stones my whole.
And you know why they get away with it? Because NEITHER of them has monopoly position!
FCS read for comprehension peeps!!!
Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.
/quote>
This would be suicide for the OEM because they would be making a product their customers don't want any more.
The strong-arm with the OEMs didn't have teeth until AMD lagged a bit.... then it was on...
All it took was a little bit of something that Intel had that AMD didn't.... like maybe volume delivery dates.... who knows....
That's all it would have taken to get this ball swinging against AMD.
lol
And maybe Jobs will have to flip the Platform_Transition bit again and run off to Power6 or AMD in a couple of years because the EU court just took Intel's lunch money for Tuesday.... THIS week.
prediction = !gonna_happen * ever;
Step 1: Find a large wealthy company.
Step 2: Fine them for anti-competitive behaviour.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Ok break is over....
Back on your heads!
Nothing to see here.....
And don't drink coffee at your desk moron.... didn't they teach you anything at the ivory tower? Computers and hot brownian liquids don't mix!
They'd have to bring the orbital velocity down from the 17,000+mph to 0.
You might want to run the maths....
If they had enough energy to do a full-stop de-orbit they'd have more than enough to alter their orbit to reach the ISS... a MUCH SAFER solution...
As it is they only have enough fuel to change their inertial vector ~800 - 1200 meters/sec no where near enough for even a 2 degree orbital plane alteration let alone a full-stop de-orbit....
You need to stop watching SciFi.... it's rotting your brain.
Here's a simple solution:
rip an electric ignition based "crack torch" apart. Take out the piezoelectric igniter unit. Hold igniter very close to the antenna click the igniter a few times... ten or twenty times if you are really paranoid. Feel the tingling from the ESD? That will blow the receiver up but good.
Don't think it will work? I witnessed a friend kill a running computer that way with one click. The igniter was triggered about 8 inches above the motherboard.... the ESD pulses fried about half the MOS/NMOS devices, and a few TTL devices in the computer including the CPU. How do I know it did that much damage? I am the one who fixed the computer. I was quite frankly shocked at the time as to just how much damage the igniter did.
It won't leave any burns or other signs of tampering on the device and there is no need to touch the device. it simply will fail to work any more.
YMMV
Every receiver that uses a heterodyne converter (and GPS receivers use them) also transmits a small leakage signal. at the down-converter's frequency. A sensitive enough receiver tuned to the correct band for that receiver MIGHT detect the unit.
If said GPS is retransmitting it's position fix via another radio link, then it's definitely detectable.
An easier solution would be to place a small transmitter under your car that broadcasts noise on the GPS band.... Sevailance GPS receiver fail! Navicomp in your car (with antenna on the roof) a little less reliable, but still functional.
But that leads me to an interesting question: How the heck did the cops get a GPS receiver to work UNDER a car.... The signal is weak enough when the antenna is mounted on the roof to have issues with an accurate fix! A car is isolated from ground and the shiny upper surfaces make an excellent reflector...
It seems unlikely to me that they just mag-mounted a GPS to the frame and called it good. Maybe it was an 6DOF based accelerometer/gyro system?
Shouldn't matter for the legal implications... even if it was a simple beacon transmitter and the cops used a set of fixed antennas in the city to track the beacon's apparent signal strength/pulse arrival time to estimate a position. Little harder than GPS but not too much for a few CIS/EE students to work out on contract.
Heck when I was a teen we did it by hand with C.B.s to track a designated "fox" who was required to key-up every 10 minutes for 30 seconds. By tracking relative signal strength from 3 or more observation points, it was accurate enough that we could locate the "fox" to within a square block in very few rounds.
Some of the hounds were fixed and some were mobile... running the fix required only a notepad to record observations and mobile receivers locations, a city map, a ruler and a pencil with a good eraser.... I went through a lot of gas station maps that summer :P
Bullshit:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."
This is not about what is casually observable. This not looking in the windows for a showing of probable cause. it's not walking by with a trained dog.... for a showing of probable cause. This is not entering my vehicle to search it.... all of which have been examined under the 4th Amendment...
This is laying hands on my property, -my effects- *without a showing of probable cause*. That is what disturbs me about this ruling.
Note: To place a ticket on the windshield of my vehicle requires a probable cause. To wit: The officer's sworn testimony (vis a vis the signed and properly marked ticket) that he/she PERSONALLY witnessed my vehicle parked in violation of statute.
In most jurisdictions I have lived in.... a civilian placing flyers on vehicles parked on a public street is tampering with private property, and is charged with a misdemeanor, if they are caught doing it.
If the flyers are only placed on vehicles parked on private property (in my jurisdiction you generally park on private property at your own risk, but that won't protect the property owner from willful, or negligent acts) I could easily file suit and claim that the agent of the property owner who placed the flyer on my vehicle has damaged my property in the process of placing said flyer. I assure you; even if I fail to prove my case, said property owner would likely avoid applying that method of spamming their customers again, because the risk of liability would be too high.
I'm further reminded of some individuals who attached electrical devices(electronic in this case is a bit of joke) to public and private property that had LEDs on them, depicting a popular cartoon character. Wow did that make a big scene in Bean Town, or what?
The marketeers who executed that little stunt were cited for anything and everything the DA could think of.... and one of those things was tampering with public property... and tampering with private property without prior authorization.... isn't that interesting?
The MPAA doesn't care about consumers. That's also not their mission statement. Their job is to care about movie makers. Essentially, the consumer is the necessary evil to get money to their protectees. If they could force you (or anyone, for that matter) to hand money to their members, it would probably be all right with them.
Sorry, but the argument is like saying "Unions don't care for employers". No they don't. It's the necessary evil they have to deal with.
At a certain threshold, unions don't care about their rank & file constituency either. What's best for the employee becomes secondary to what's best for the union leadership. I see it as an inherent conflict of interest.
When a support/service organization reaches a critical mass it typically begins behaving like a living organism. Unions and similar organizations like the *AA start out behaving like... Pilot fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_fish ...and end up behaving like lamprey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamprey
The bug in VHS was never really fixed. The issue is due to the way that VHS(and Beta) systems had to record video.
Analog video recorders match the tape movement and the rotation speed of the flying heads dynamically, such that the mechanical system is held in synchronization with the incoming video signal.
The synchronization during recording is very brittle because it has nothing to reference internally, except the regularity, and conformance of the incoming video signal to the broadcast standard. Additionally the mechanical nature of the recording servo loops is that they do not respond well to sudden changes in the timing of the synchronization information in a video signal.
Macrovision and and similar systems produce video that "wiggles" the horizontal and vertical sync pulses in the time domain such that the VHS recording servos cannot stay locked, thus causing "tearing" of the magnetic signal written to the tape.
The only real "fix" for this is to buffer up a significant portion of the incoming video frame and analyze the sync information to get feed-forward correction to the servos. The ability to do this would add a LOT of cost to a VHS recorder. I don't know for sure, but I doubt record buffering was ever available in mass-market units.
As a side note rental VHS tapes could be "copy protected" using a similar technique. A modified recorder was used that introduced a similar "wiggle" into the recording servos during write. The key difference here is that the source video signal did not have this "wiggle", so the servos remain locked to the source, and the servos were of a much higher quality than the ones found in mass-market VHS recorders allowing them to keep the mechanical elements of the record loop under tighter control.
I should also point out there were boxes sold (often as kits) that would buffer a line or two of the video signal in an analog delay line, and average the "wiggle" out of the sync. The filtering wasn't perfect and the delay-line buffering introduced some noise to the resulting video, but they did work. At the time multi-line analog delay lines were hideously expensive, so these boxes were often used by commercial pirates to create counterfeit rental tapes from either mass-market sources, or early release rental sources.
I cant afford to fund 'big science' out of my pocket. Don't get me wrong... I 'd like to, but near-freezing organic cultivation studies are all I can afford to contribute at this time.... and y'all don't seem to appreciate my papers.... so I'll be moving on.... I hope the particle smasher does well....
Sincerely,
Austria
Modern drives have "servo tracks" on them - used for setting the head position. If you use an eraser powerful enough to wipe the drive, then the servo track is most likely also wiped - rendering the drive totally useless to most folk.
This wasn't the case on SCSI drives up to about 4GB. They had enough smarts to rewrite their own servo tracks if you did a low-level format.
Most PATA drives of the same vintage had relatively dumb controllers and could not be recovered. They were also less than half the price of comparable SCSI drives, and a lot less reliable.
From personal experience, it was fairly simple to recover data from a SCSI drive with a control board failure by replacing the control board. There was no assembly specific information stored on the drive controller for units made from the same line of drives. This was true even if the swapped controllers we from drives with different capacities, as long as the controller was the same model.
Not so with ATA drives... Servo tracks are written using a special machine that determines the unit specific parameters. Those unit specific parameters are then stored on the controller during final controller/CAN assembly, calibration, and test.
It is likely that this is also true of modern pSCSI and SAS drives, as it seriously reduces the complexity of the drive controller. This also reduces QA costs and QA failures at final assembly.
Back in the day, I used to ride around on an old 3-speed bike collecting techno-fruit that had fallen from the corporate trees in and around Montain View, CA....
My arch nemesis: Atari Security Service.... They drove around in white Ford Broncos(the shift supervisor) or white CJ-5 Jeeps( the rank & file) they caught me a couple of times, but I altered my raid tactics and they never knew I was there.
Along with valuable caches of ICs, engineering prototypes, demo units, cosmetic QA failed units, and retired test equipment, many coffee stained "Confidential" documents passed through my paws... HR reports with employee data, engineering documents, source code, executive policy memos, and even legal documents, litigation and contract drafts....
I do miss being a larval geek in the Sillycon Trench....
lol he was just pumping the heat over the neighboring cubicles.
Shoving a 3.6GHz quad-core into a 2U case pretty much requires water cooling.... or lots of 60Db fans...
Now I have a really fast local server that doesn't scream like a banshee.... or use precious real estate in my already cramped workspace.
For me it wasn't about bragging rights.... it was about creating a high performance linux machine box that I could LIVE with....
Lol it did another unexpected service this winter.... The baseboard heater in my office was off for the duration....
Clever. Now all they have to do is look for the guy that just started running.
I don't have to out run them. I just have to out run YOU!
Dammit... forgot to grab my tinfoil hat....
Where there's a whip...
... there's a way.
I'll switch to min-maxing Slashdot if it comes to it.
Ah! Troll mod! Rerolling...
fixed that for you.
Ok I give up. I was pulling most of this from memory. As point of order this was very important for me when I was a high school student in the 80's... This variant record nonsense, and it's use as a type coercion mechanism was part of the ACT exam in CIS. The exam explicitly stated that the assumed compiler was UCSD PASCAL. I passed that exam with a perfect score.
I haven't used pascal since then.
Standard Pascal does not have UNION. Standard Pascal does have variant records which are basically discriminated unions.
My bad... I hadn't used PASCAL in so long I forgot how to declare a variant records also referred to a union records... and I got the keyword for it from C stuck in my craw.... -.-
This is what I meant, and this is type coercion PASCAL style:
Type
typeswitch = (asint, aschars);
var TCorerce : record ...
case typeswitch: sw of
asint: (int : Integer);
aschars: (chars : packed array[1..4] of Char);
end;
TCoerce.sw := asint; := 0x4655434B; := aschars;
TCoerce.int
TCoerce.sw
writeln(TCoerce.chars[2]); (* prints 'U' *)
Pascal doesn't even have the concept of a typecast.
You are incorrect Pascal does have typecasting, though it feels like bolt-on, after thought solution: UNION