The story makes it seem like this is a great deal but in fact it is a terrible ripoff. Search for "broken ipod" on eBay.. For example "ipod 15 gig 3g 3rd gen broken" with what appears to be a broken hard drive is at $82.01 after 8 bids and with 5 and a half hours left.
I just opened up the phone and took a photo. The connection labelled mic is the audio output (connected to computer line in) and spkr is the input (connenected to computer line or headphone out). The connection with two wires connecting to it is ground. Note how I decoupled the mic connection with a 0.1 microfarad capacitor.
I decided to have short cables dangling out of the phone to avoid doing permanent modifications to the case. I unplug the phone when using the phone with my computer and I unplug the computer connections when using it as a phone. I've also used the "spkr" connection to record phone conversations.
I also modified a cordless phone for use with online voice conversations. It's a Sanyo CLT-9171, one of the early 900 MHz spread spectrum digital ones. Using an oscilloscope it was easy to find where to connect. The phone still works for standard phone conversations, and I can even use one of the connections I added to record conversations.
The ruling is incredibly stupid. It's crazy if they want DHS to be about national security. If they want to do something like this with a government department they should have chosen a less important one. I don't know, maybe DHS isn't really important and it's just there to make people feel better?
It's not like children are abused through the internet. The person who abused them still has to actually meet the children and offline evidence about this is still there like it always was.
I can't think of any serious crime which only happens through computer networks.
A proxy could be much cheaper than buying what you download through it. For example compare rates for usenet access or prices on those sites where you can buy DRM-free MP3s cheaply to prices of CDs. Plus I'm sure that many people download for reasons other than price. It's can be a lot more convenient.
Creating such a proxy might be a good business idea right now, but I think it would probably be a bad thing for Canada. I'm sure it would lead to a lot more pressure to toughen up relevant laws.
It shouldn't be too hard to mod a Mac Mini to use Pover Over Ethernet. I'm not sure if POE provides enough power though. This page claims that about 13 watts is available. Even 15.4 watts would be too low. In the article it says the power usage can spike to 20 watts. You'd probably need a very high efficiency DC-DC converter and you may have to run the Mac Mini diskless or maybe with a flash card instead of a hard drive.
The author says he measured 14-20W for the mac mini under load, but his 80W-Hr battery only lasted 1H:50M, implying a 40W+ power draw.
It's not that simple. It's not like the batteries supply 80W-Hr of power at their rated voltage and then shut down. With most types of batteries the voltage drops slowly as they discharge. Batteries also aren't perfect voltage sources. They have internal resistance, which means that if you draw more current the voltage will drop. I suspect the voltage got too low because of these two factors and the Mac Mini crashed or shut down. The batteries might still be able to power a flashlight.
Could these patents actually be good? The patents can stop others from using simillar techniques and this should reduce the overall amount of these attacks on P2P networks. They also provide information about the attacks, and that information can be used to help defend against them.
It's silly to say that software isn't free unless there is a requirement that changes to the code need to be published. Requirements are restrictions; they decrease freedom. I think that requirement is a good idea. I just feel it's wrong to say that it increases freedom.
IMHO having the drive hide bad sectors is a good idea. That way you don't have to enter any bad sector lists, you don't have to scan for them when formatting, and the OS doesn't have to worry about them.
What would you do if you had full control over bad sectors? You're still able to keep trying to read a new bad sector that contains data. The drive will try to repair it when you write to it and if it can't then it will remap it. It seems to me the only thing you can't do is force the drive to try to repair bad sectors that it gave up on earlier.
Also consider how hard would it be to make a perfect hard drive. Would you be willing to pay for that? Bad sectors that were there all along don't even hurt reliability. It's only a problem when new ones go bad.
Lenses between the display and your eye can easily change the distance that your eyes need to focus to. This way most head-mounted displays appear to be much larger screens at a much larger distance. Camcorder viewfinders do a simillar thing. There's usually some control to adjust the focus distance. A range of settings works and you can pick out the most comfortable one.
Having the heap grow forwards and the stack grow backwards made sense back before multitasking and virtual memory. It's just one of the many archaic things in the x86 architecture.
There are bad things about using a different socket. Devices which don't use POE can still connect to POE ports and use the ethernet part. Because of this you'd need special adapter cables. Plus when introducing power over ethernet you'd have to replace all the wall jacks and patch cables and that would be a major expense.
Regarding PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, they are electrically identical. Software could theoretically support two PS/2 mice or two keyboards but nobody seems to care about that so the connectors should probably be different.
I'm sure hovercrafts would use a lot more power than wheeled vehicles. I don't think solar panels would provide enough power for that. Plus hovercrafts would create large clouds of dust, some of which would settle on the solar panels and make things worse.
I think they chose 6PM so more people would attend the launch. Most stores will be normally open at that time and most people won't be at work. It's better than a midnight launch IMHO.
The CPU supports 16 bit mode when running a 64 bit OS. It just doesn't support virtual 8086 mode. This means that it is possible to run 16 bit protected mode code such as Windows 3.x apps but it is impossible to run 16 bit real mode code such as MS-DOS apps. However, Microsoft chose to not support 16 bit Windows apps either. For more info look here.
It's not beta. There was a public beta test and that is now over. The OS is finished. It's just that there are relatively few drivers and even fewer 64 bit applications.
The OS is there for whoever needs it. Microsoft is just making sure that people don't start upgrading without understanding the limitations.
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The story makes it seem like this is a great deal but in fact it is a terrible ripoff. Search for "broken ipod" on eBay.. For example "ipod 15 gig 3g 3rd gen broken" with what appears to be a broken hard drive is at $82.01 after 8 bids and with 5 and a half hours left.
I decided to have short cables dangling out of the phone to avoid doing permanent modifications to the case. I unplug the phone when using the phone with my computer and I unplug the computer connections when using it as a phone. I've also used the "spkr" connection to record phone conversations.
I also modified a cordless phone for use with online voice conversations. It's a Sanyo CLT-9171, one of the early 900 MHz spread spectrum digital ones. Using an oscilloscope it was easy to find where to connect. The phone still works for standard phone conversations, and I can even use one of the connections I added to record conversations.
The ruling is incredibly stupid. It's crazy if they want DHS to be about national security. If they want to do something like this with a government department they should have chosen a less important one. I don't know, maybe DHS isn't really important and it's just there to make people feel better?
I can't think of any serious crime which only happens through computer networks.
Creating such a proxy might be a good business idea right now, but I think it would probably be a bad thing for Canada. I'm sure it would lead to a lot more pressure to toughen up relevant laws.
It shouldn't be too hard to mod a Mac Mini to use Pover Over Ethernet. I'm not sure if POE provides enough power though. This page claims that about 13 watts is available. Even 15.4 watts would be too low. In the article it says the power usage can spike to 20 watts. You'd probably need a very high efficiency DC-DC converter and you may have to run the Mac Mini diskless or maybe with a flash card instead of a hard drive.
It's not that simple. It's not like the batteries supply 80W-Hr of power at their rated voltage and then shut down. With most types of batteries the voltage drops slowly as they discharge. Batteries also aren't perfect voltage sources. They have internal resistance, which means that if you draw more current the voltage will drop. I suspect the voltage got too low because of these two factors and the Mac Mini crashed or shut down. The batteries might still be able to power a flashlight.
Could these patents actually be good? The patents can stop others from using simillar techniques and this should reduce the overall amount of these attacks on P2P networks. They also provide information about the attacks, and that information can be used to help defend against them.
xyzzy <shift> seems sufficient with WinXP SP2
The shift was treated like an HTML tag and so it was invisible.
xyzzy seems sufficient with WinXP SP2
I was using the IDE drivers, not libata.
It's silly to say that software isn't free unless there is a requirement that changes to the code need to be published. Requirements are restrictions; they decrease freedom. I think that requirement is a good idea. I just feel it's wrong to say that it increases freedom.
What would you do if you had full control over bad sectors? You're still able to keep trying to read a new bad sector that contains data. The drive will try to repair it when you write to it and if it can't then it will remap it. It seems to me the only thing you can't do is force the drive to try to repair bad sectors that it gave up on earlier.
Also consider how hard would it be to make a perfect hard drive. Would you be willing to pay for that? Bad sectors that were there all along don't even hurt reliability. It's only a problem when new ones go bad.
I couldn't get smartctl to work in XP because the VIA VT8237 drivers pretend the drive is SCSI but Linux doesn't do that and smartctl works.
Thanks for that link. There are more videos there, downloads are fast, and the videos seem smoother than the one linked from the story.
Their ads into others' pages, like Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria? That would definitely mean "Don't be evil" just died.
Lenses between the display and your eye can easily change the distance that your eyes need to focus to. This way most head-mounted displays appear to be much larger screens at a much larger distance. Camcorder viewfinders do a simillar thing. There's usually some control to adjust the focus distance. A range of settings works and you can pick out the most comfortable one.
Having the heap grow forwards and the stack grow backwards made sense back before multitasking and virtual memory. It's just one of the many archaic things in the x86 architecture.
It seems to me like some stories are here just to get Microsoft-hating people all excited.
Regarding PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, they are electrically identical. Software could theoretically support two PS/2 mice or two keyboards but nobody seems to care about that so the connectors should probably be different.
I'm sure hovercrafts would use a lot more power than wheeled vehicles. I don't think solar panels would provide enough power for that. Plus hovercrafts would create large clouds of dust, some of which would settle on the solar panels and make things worse.
I think they chose 6PM so more people would attend the launch. Most stores will be normally open at that time and most people won't be at work. It's better than a midnight launch IMHO.
The CPU supports 16 bit mode when running a 64 bit OS. It just doesn't support virtual 8086 mode. This means that it is possible to run 16 bit protected mode code such as Windows 3.x apps but it is impossible to run 16 bit real mode code such as MS-DOS apps. However, Microsoft chose to not support 16 bit Windows apps either. For more info look here.
The OS is there for whoever needs it. Microsoft is just making sure that people don't start upgrading without understanding the limitations.