Oh, right, because they had to have the light shine through the aluminum instead of putting a bit of epoxy in a 1/16" hole and sand it flush with the shell.
NT itself is rock solid. It's the devices (and most of all the drivers for them) in most PCs that leave something to be desired. Just yesterday I had to reboot because my SD slot would no longer detect cards.
Games are a different story. To pirate a game, you actually have to crack the DRM on it. You have to either produce a copy that's indistinguishable from the original, or modify the console and game code to bypass the checks, and probably decrypt the game content as well. You cannot simply play a game and record it. (You can but it doesn't make a playable copy.)
For music and videos, it's preferable if you can decrypt the original, but you by no means need that to pirate it. If you can play a song, you can record it with any common sound card. If you can play a video, you can record it with an HDMI capture card, and you'll likely need an HDCP stripper too. Admittedly these are less common and more expensive than sound cards, but they exist and only one person needs to record it and post the torrent.
Encrypted digital audio to headphones? I'll buy a cheap pair, rip the cones out of the speakers and connect the wires that go into the electromagnet up to line in. No matter how you make it, if I can listen to it I can pirate it without resorting to playing it into a mic.
Not sure what you're referring to, but I've yet to encounter a DVD (not Blu-Ray) that Media Player Classic and VLC can't play, and since they aren't officially licensed players that means they're cracking whatever DRM is on the disc.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was the original CSS, and then after DeCSS they created a modified CSS that uses different keys and even cycles them every X minutes of video. These discs have a "copy protected" symbol on the back (two discs with an arrow between them in a "no" sign), with an explanation that if your player is really old and doesn't bear the same logo you won't be able to play it. Theoretically if you aren't a licensed player you can't complete the auth sequence, can't get the set of keys for the disc, and can't play the disc. In practice, computers are fast enough that they can forget about the auth sequence and bruteforce each key in under a second.
DVD DRM is endgame. For Blu-Ray you still need a not-yet-revoked player key, the disc-specific title key, or a master key.
This would be useful only if phones (Windows Phone 8, I'm looking at you!!!) allowed application data, if not the applications themselves, to be installed on the removable media. That way, not only can one make good use of the flash, but also, in case one wants to switch to a new phone, all the apps that one bought w/ the last phone can be smoothly migrated to the new one.
First, I don't know how any of this is handled in Windows Phone or if there are any hacks or workarounds. All my smartphones have been Android.
Android (at least ICS) does allow this, though in a somewhat limited form, and it wastes^H^H^H^H^H^Huses more space than storing them on the phone. Another way if you have it rooted is the Link2SD app, which does some symlink trickery to put the app on the SD card exactly as it is on the phone. None of this allows easily transferring purchased apps to a new phone though. With the official way they're encrypted, and with the Link2SD way there's no easy way to transfer the links and the stub that says it's installed.
However, moving purchased apps to a new device is already pretty easy. I associated a new device with my Google account, went to Play Store, My Apps, all. It listed all apps I had purchased for my old phone and gave me the option to install each of them on my new one.
Also, by SD card, do they nowadays mean the original SD or the MicroSD form factor? The 2 are different enough for one to easily accommodate 4 times the capacity of the other.
This is a full-size SD. Current largest MicroSD available is still 128 GB. The only difference between SD and MicroSD is physical size, which limits how much memory they can fit due to flash die sizes. The cards are the same interface as each other. MicroSD has an extra pin, but it's a second ground. Adapters exist to convert either way, but the one to put an SD in a MicroSD slot obviously sticks way out.
Bogging down the scammer for an hour puts a far larger dent in their profits than hanging up on them, letting them move onto a more gullible mark, and telling one other potential mark to do the same. This isn't about which activity is more enjoyable to you, this is about damaging them and their ability to hurt others.
And if even just a handful of people use the metasploit this article is about with an OS-killing payload*, it would probably put them out of commission for a good bit longer than trolling them, and at much lower time cost to you. *--or even just things that flip the display output, change mouse speed, force 16 color mode, set a 1 second screensaver timeout with password protection, or other general annoyances.
I've been thinking about installing Win98 (which I believe is the minimum requirement for Ammyy) on my 486 DX/33, and then installing a bunch of toolbars and adware to make it even slower. Win98 minimum requirement is 486 DX2/66, but I've gotten it to run slowly on a 33 MHz one. Let them suffer trying to install their probably XP-minumum-requirement viruses on that for a while.
"Thanks, I'm glad you called! My computer *has* been running kinda slow lately."
Two issues with the $25 graphing calculator are build quality and software.
While it doesn't have exactly state-of-the-art electronics in it, the TI-84 is a beast. It holds up to the abuse most students put it through. If you made a $25 one, it would probably be built like a cheap Android phone. Those don't last nearly as long as a TI calculator, even if cared for really well.
As for software, I've seen plenty of graphing calculator phone apps, but none of them can hold a candle to a TI calculator. Color and the higher res screen are both nice, but they simply don't support the quantity of functions or programmability of the TI calculators. Someone else suggested R, which has a different problem: It can do all the things, but it's far more complex to pick up and use than a TI calculator.
There's a reason the graphing calculator app on my phone is a TI-89 emulator.
TrueCrypt also lets you customize that message. Change the password prompt to "NTLDR is missing", say something along the lines of "shoot, it crashed again, guess I'll have my techy friend fix it when I get home", and you just might get it through.
This isn't so much a question of whether to allow people to yell FIRE in a crowded theater. It's more like confiscating anything that might possibly contain something that could be made into an ignition source before you can enter the theater, and not giving it back when you leave.
To be fair, they probably designed the pictograms more for non-native English speakers than illiterate people. It also makes it easier to tell at a glance what you need to do than a block of text, not that cooking McFood is that complex.
Why not let AdBlock kill the ads in videos as well? Unless the person posting the video has put the ad in before encoding it (in which case the playback slider will let you skip it), AdBlock zaps pretty much all of the at least on Firefox. It astonished me that it was able to do it despite it being inside a Flash Player, but it does it very reliably.
Or set up your router to point your 360 to a local DNS server that applies hosts file based filtering. It's not as thorough as AdBlock, but it can kill quite a lot of ads. Alternatively if you can get a 360 to use an HTTP proxy, you can do even better filtering with that.
Wonder if this can be made to work on normal Android devices. Some cheapo ones don't come with Play Store. On other somewhat outdated devices, Play Store insists on updating itself to a new version that absolutely BLOWS on older hardware.
It's good for a small-screen touch GUI. It can get irritating on a screen big enough that you *could* have 2 apps tiled side by side, with a floating music player miniwindow in the corner, if only it would let you. Sure, there's a few apps that can make a floating window, but this is a tiny minority. Besides, even on a ~10" touchscreen the "floating windows over a desktop" design is irritating. The ability to tile normal apps that usually run fullscreen would be great.
Bluetooth keyboards? Yeah, they're nice, but quite often unless you're using an on-screen keyboard that explicitly supports them, the keyboard app pops up anyway. Or my favorite: SwiftKey, which recognizes that you're using an external keyboard and hides its on-screen one, but still autocorrects what you type based on how you type on a touchscreen. And then there's how long it took Android to make the ctrl key work like a normal modifier and not like sticky keys. Also, near complete lack of keyboard shortcuts. I shouldn't need to lift my hands from the keyboard and mess with the touchscreen to do simple things like save, undo, switch between two text entry apps, or even just send a chat message.
App switching gets irritating as well. I haven't tried it on a TouchWiz device, but the usual procedure is to long-press home until an app list comes up. This is slower and more tedious than tabbing through apps on a desktop OS. Then add in that apps get frozen when tabbed away from, and sometimes inexplicably quit altogether. Yes, this is ultimately the fault of the app developer, but it really shouldn't be necessary to write a daemon to make an app that can do stuff while you're not looking at it, or do your own state saving to make an app not reset to its main menu should the OS decide to page it out of memory. It seems even Google themselves can't get this stuff right: Gmail *always* quits and has to reload when I switch to another app, and whenever I open Play Store it seems like it's about 50/50 whether it's going to show me the last thing I looked at or the main menu.
Desktop OSes have done all this stuff seamlessly for a decades. On a PC, if I minimize something I can 100% trust that it is still there and doing anything I asked it to do, even if I can't see it. Android has repeatedly taught me to change this assumption.
As for "Android is Linux", yes it is, and I really appreciate that. But that still doesn't fix that its command line is crippled and horrible in comparison. It's like normal *nix command line, minus a handful of the more useful commands, and with others missing options or modified not to produce useful output. Among other things, I have seen an ifconfig that never prints anything, and an rm that complains about the file -rf not existing.
Well, the '90s iteration of it *worked*. It taught kids to read, and got them to read. It obviously isn't a comprehensive literacy education, but it doesn't have to be. If it can get kids interested enough to pick up a book and read, it'll be a success. Unless there's reason to believe the current go-around isn't going to be done as well, I say let them have a go at it.
Though if it's already been mounted by the user with hidden volume protection on, you can write near the end. If there's a hidden volume, the write will be discarded and the old data will remain. Apart from that, hiden volumes are pretty hard to detect unless you've captured multiple versions of the container and things have changed in the hidden volume in between.
One cross-platform option that looks good is EncFS. There's a FUSE module for it on Linux, and Safe (getsafe.org) is a port of the same thing, plus a GUI, for Mac and Windows. Or stick with TrueCrypt format and move to a different program for accessing it, like tc-play or cryptsetup.
(NOTE: I haven't tested these products. This is just from reading stuff here and there, and looking around.)
If you still have it, get an LCD fixer program that flashes the whole screen at 60 Hz. Leave that running a couple nights and it should fix the burned in stuff.
Unless of course that was a CRT, in which case it's pretty much permanent aside from the untested idea of making a picture of the screenburn and leave a negative of it on a while to "wear level" the screen. It would obviously need to be lined up just right, and I don't know if it would make things better or worse.
Just because 30 FPS is the most common format doesn't mean increasing it wouldn't be noticeable. If you can see the difference in a 3D game, you can see the difference in an action sequence in a movie.
I've seen some clips that were shot at 60 FPS and watched them on a PC. The motion looked considerably more fluid and natural than the same clip at 30 FPS.
I used hosts based blocking until AdBlock came along.
Procedure for blocking an annoying object with hosts: obtain URL for item, pray it isn't hosted on the same (sub)domain as something you don't want to block, add it to hosts, restart DNS, reload page Procedure for blocking an annoying object with AdBlock or similar: right-click, block item, adjust filter if the preview shows other things blocked too
Hosts also fails completely at blocking somedomain/images/ads/annoying-blinking-banner.gif while allowing you to browse somedomain. Or completely blocking the the ads YouTube makes you watch before some videos. Or killing the random Facebook "like" buttons everywhere while still allowing you to view the main Facebook site. Or blocking the specific JavaScript file that makes the newest annoying "feature" added to Google work. Or blocking the obnoxious animated avatar/sig some random user on a forum has. --all of which AdBlock does easily.
There are some major perks you get from being further up the stack. Hosts just blocks whole (sub)domains. An HTTP proxy allows blocking based on URL and tweaking things within the page, but is easily defeated by JavaScript or Flash's idiotic habit of ignoring HTTP proxy settings. Browser extensions can see and edit the page *after* any JavaScript has done its thing, and mess with the Flash plugin more directly.
You can download Flash games, you know. Even ones built into a webpage. Some things like high score tables might not work, but the game itself is usually fully playable, and often looks better since you can scale it to any size.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, right, because they had to have the light shine through the aluminum instead of putting a bit of epoxy in a 1/16" hole and sand it flush with the shell.
NT itself is rock solid. It's the devices (and most of all the drivers for them) in most PCs that leave something to be desired. Just yesterday I had to reboot because my SD slot would no longer detect cards.
>games
Games are a different story. To pirate a game, you actually have to crack the DRM on it. You have to either produce a copy that's indistinguishable from the original, or modify the console and game code to bypass the checks, and probably decrypt the game content as well. You cannot simply play a game and record it. (You can but it doesn't make a playable copy.)
For music and videos, it's preferable if you can decrypt the original, but you by no means need that to pirate it. If you can play a song, you can record it with any common sound card. If you can play a video, you can record it with an HDMI capture card, and you'll likely need an HDCP stripper too. Admittedly these are less common and more expensive than sound cards, but they exist and only one person needs to record it and post the torrent.
Encrypted digital audio to headphones? I'll buy a cheap pair, rip the cones out of the speakers and connect the wires that go into the electromagnet up to line in. No matter how you make it, if I can listen to it I can pirate it without resorting to playing it into a mic.
Not sure what you're referring to, but I've yet to encounter a DVD (not Blu-Ray) that Media Player Classic and VLC can't play, and since they aren't officially licensed players that means they're cracking whatever DRM is on the disc.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was the original CSS, and then after DeCSS they created a modified CSS that uses different keys and even cycles them every X minutes of video. These discs have a "copy protected" symbol on the back (two discs with an arrow between them in a "no" sign), with an explanation that if your player is really old and doesn't bear the same logo you won't be able to play it. Theoretically if you aren't a licensed player you can't complete the auth sequence, can't get the set of keys for the disc, and can't play the disc. In practice, computers are fast enough that they can forget about the auth sequence and bruteforce each key in under a second.
DVD DRM is endgame. For Blu-Ray you still need a not-yet-revoked player key, the disc-specific title key, or a master key.
This would be useful only if phones (Windows Phone 8, I'm looking at you!!!) allowed application data, if not the applications themselves, to be installed on the removable media. That way, not only can one make good use of the flash, but also, in case one wants to switch to a new phone, all the apps that one bought w/ the last phone can be smoothly migrated to the new one.
First, I don't know how any of this is handled in Windows Phone or if there are any hacks or workarounds. All my smartphones have been Android.
Android (at least ICS) does allow this, though in a somewhat limited form, and it wastes^H^H^H^H^H^Huses more space than storing them on the phone. Another way if you have it rooted is the Link2SD app, which does some symlink trickery to put the app on the SD card exactly as it is on the phone. None of this allows easily transferring purchased apps to a new phone though. With the official way they're encrypted, and with the Link2SD way there's no easy way to transfer the links and the stub that says it's installed.
However, moving purchased apps to a new device is already pretty easy. I associated a new device with my Google account, went to Play Store, My Apps, all. It listed all apps I had purchased for my old phone and gave me the option to install each of them on my new one.
Also, by SD card, do they nowadays mean the original SD or the MicroSD form factor? The 2 are different enough for one to easily accommodate 4 times the capacity of the other.
This is a full-size SD. Current largest MicroSD available is still 128 GB. The only difference between SD and MicroSD is physical size, which limits how much memory they can fit due to flash die sizes. The cards are the same interface as each other. MicroSD has an extra pin, but it's a second ground. Adapters exist to convert either way, but the one to put an SD in a MicroSD slot obviously sticks way out.
Bogging down the scammer for an hour puts a far larger dent in their profits than hanging up on them, letting them move onto a more gullible mark, and telling one other potential mark to do the same. This isn't about which activity is more enjoyable to you, this is about damaging them and their ability to hurt others.
And if even just a handful of people use the metasploit this article is about with an OS-killing payload*, it would probably put them out of commission for a good bit longer than trolling them, and at much lower time cost to you. *--or even just things that flip the display output, change mouse speed, force 16 color mode, set a 1 second screensaver timeout with password protection, or other general annoyances.
I've been thinking about installing Win98 (which I believe is the minimum requirement for Ammyy) on my 486 DX/33, and then installing a bunch of toolbars and adware to make it even slower. Win98 minimum requirement is 486 DX2/66, but I've gotten it to run slowly on a 33 MHz one. Let them suffer trying to install their probably XP-minumum-requirement viruses on that for a while.
"Thanks, I'm glad you called! My computer *has* been running kinda slow lately."
Two issues with the $25 graphing calculator are build quality and software.
While it doesn't have exactly state-of-the-art electronics in it, the TI-84 is a beast. It holds up to the abuse most students put it through. If you made a $25 one, it would probably be built like a cheap Android phone. Those don't last nearly as long as a TI calculator, even if cared for really well.
As for software, I've seen plenty of graphing calculator phone apps, but none of them can hold a candle to a TI calculator. Color and the higher res screen are both nice, but they simply don't support the quantity of functions or programmability of the TI calculators. Someone else suggested R, which has a different problem: It can do all the things, but it's far more complex to pick up and use than a TI calculator.
There's a reason the graphing calculator app on my phone is a TI-89 emulator.
TrueCrypt also lets you customize that message. Change the password prompt to "NTLDR is missing", say something along the lines of "shoot, it crashed again, guess I'll have my techy friend fix it when I get home", and you just might get it through.
This isn't so much a question of whether to allow people to yell FIRE in a crowded theater. It's more like confiscating anything that might possibly contain something that could be made into an ignition source before you can enter the theater, and not giving it back when you leave.
To be fair, they probably designed the pictograms more for non-native English speakers than illiterate people. It also makes it easier to tell at a glance what you need to do than a block of text, not that cooking McFood is that complex.
Why not let AdBlock kill the ads in videos as well? Unless the person posting the video has put the ad in before encoding it (in which case the playback slider will let you skip it), AdBlock zaps pretty much all of the at least on Firefox. It astonished me that it was able to do it despite it being inside a Flash Player, but it does it very reliably.
Or set up your router to point your 360 to a local DNS server that applies hosts file based filtering. It's not as thorough as AdBlock, but it can kill quite a lot of ads. Alternatively if you can get a 360 to use an HTTP proxy, you can do even better filtering with that.
Wonder if this can be made to work on normal Android devices. Some cheapo ones don't come with Play Store. On other somewhat outdated devices, Play Store insists on updating itself to a new version that absolutely BLOWS on older hardware.
It's good for a small-screen touch GUI. It can get irritating on a screen big enough that you *could* have 2 apps tiled side by side, with a floating music player miniwindow in the corner, if only it would let you. Sure, there's a few apps that can make a floating window, but this is a tiny minority. Besides, even on a ~10" touchscreen the "floating windows over a desktop" design is irritating. The ability to tile normal apps that usually run fullscreen would be great.
Bluetooth keyboards? Yeah, they're nice, but quite often unless you're using an on-screen keyboard that explicitly supports them, the keyboard app pops up anyway. Or my favorite: SwiftKey, which recognizes that you're using an external keyboard and hides its on-screen one, but still autocorrects what you type based on how you type on a touchscreen. And then there's how long it took Android to make the ctrl key work like a normal modifier and not like sticky keys. Also, near complete lack of keyboard shortcuts. I shouldn't need to lift my hands from the keyboard and mess with the touchscreen to do simple things like save, undo, switch between two text entry apps, or even just send a chat message.
App switching gets irritating as well. I haven't tried it on a TouchWiz device, but the usual procedure is to long-press home until an app list comes up. This is slower and more tedious than tabbing through apps on a desktop OS. Then add in that apps get frozen when tabbed away from, and sometimes inexplicably quit altogether. Yes, this is ultimately the fault of the app developer, but it really shouldn't be necessary to write a daemon to make an app that can do stuff while you're not looking at it, or do your own state saving to make an app not reset to its main menu should the OS decide to page it out of memory. It seems even Google themselves can't get this stuff right: Gmail *always* quits and has to reload when I switch to another app, and whenever I open Play Store it seems like it's about 50/50 whether it's going to show me the last thing I looked at or the main menu.
Desktop OSes have done all this stuff seamlessly for a decades. On a PC, if I minimize something I can 100% trust that it is still there and doing anything I asked it to do, even if I can't see it. Android has repeatedly taught me to change this assumption.
As for "Android is Linux", yes it is, and I really appreciate that. But that still doesn't fix that its command line is crippled and horrible in comparison. It's like normal *nix command line, minus a handful of the more useful commands, and with others missing options or modified not to produce useful output. Among other things, I have seen an ifconfig that never prints anything, and an rm that complains about the file -rf not existing.
Well, the '90s iteration of it *worked*. It taught kids to read, and got them to read. It obviously isn't a comprehensive literacy education, but it doesn't have to be. If it can get kids interested enough to pick up a book and read, it'll be a success. Unless there's reason to believe the current go-around isn't going to be done as well, I say let them have a go at it.
Though if it's already been mounted by the user with hidden volume protection on, you can write near the end. If there's a hidden volume, the write will be discarded and the old data will remain. Apart from that, hiden volumes are pretty hard to detect unless you've captured multiple versions of the container and things have changed in the hidden volume in between.
One cross-platform option that looks good is EncFS. There's a FUSE module for it on Linux, and Safe (getsafe.org) is a port of the same thing, plus a GUI, for Mac and Windows. Or stick with TrueCrypt format and move to a different program for accessing it, like tc-play or cryptsetup.
(NOTE: I haven't tested these products. This is just from reading stuff here and there, and looking around.)
If you still have it, get an LCD fixer program that flashes the whole screen at 60 Hz. Leave that running a couple nights and it should fix the burned in stuff.
Unless of course that was a CRT, in which case it's pretty much permanent aside from the untested idea of making a picture of the screenburn and leave a negative of it on a while to "wear level" the screen. It would obviously need to be lined up just right, and I don't know if it would make things better or worse.
Just because 30 FPS is the most common format doesn't mean increasing it wouldn't be noticeable. If you can see the difference in a 3D game, you can see the difference in an action sequence in a movie.
I've seen some clips that were shot at 60 FPS and watched them on a PC. The motion looked considerably more fluid and natural than the same clip at 30 FPS.
Then you find your attempts at making a GUI look like Win95 all over again and run the other way.
I used hosts based blocking until AdBlock came along.
Procedure for blocking an annoying object with hosts: obtain URL for item, pray it isn't hosted on the same (sub)domain as something you don't want to block, add it to hosts, restart DNS, reload page
Procedure for blocking an annoying object with AdBlock or similar: right-click, block item, adjust filter if the preview shows other things blocked too
Hosts also fails completely at blocking somedomain/images/ads/annoying-blinking-banner.gif while allowing you to browse somedomain. Or completely blocking the the ads YouTube makes you watch before some videos. Or killing the random Facebook "like" buttons everywhere while still allowing you to view the main Facebook site. Or blocking the specific JavaScript file that makes the newest annoying "feature" added to Google work. Or blocking the obnoxious animated avatar/sig some random user on a forum has. --all of which AdBlock does easily.
There are some major perks you get from being further up the stack. Hosts just blocks whole (sub)domains. An HTTP proxy allows blocking based on URL and tweaking things within the page, but is easily defeated by JavaScript or Flash's idiotic habit of ignoring HTTP proxy settings. Browser extensions can see and edit the page *after* any JavaScript has done its thing, and mess with the Flash plugin more directly.
You can download Flash games, you know. Even ones built into a webpage. Some things like high score tables might not work, but the game itself is usually fully playable, and often looks better since you can scale it to any size.
But no divides were involved.