No no no! We cannot infer that it will work for Sony. This Sony is Blue. Bush is a Red. If they ever cross: total protonic reversal! And that's bad. Okay. Alright, important safety tip - thanks.
Bleah. I'm sick of all this "I live in Massachusetts so I am a victim of Turner's Greed" BS. If you feel victimized, talk to the people who overreacted about a bunch of frikkin' signs.
I'd give you a funny point (well earned, IMO) but wouldn't it be easier to just buy a new string of lights?
Or maybe your Christmas lights are rather more elaborate than mine, and "a string" won't cover it.:)
'Course, LED lights do have their issues: the white ones sold in stores are more often blue, they flicker (no full-wave rectifier, just LEDs on AC), and they throw spots rather than a more uniform glow. (I actually like the spots they throw on the wall, though...)
Some may question the need for improvements in the field of animated fluids. But many forget that animated fluids are pivotal to the success of Hentai, in which they are used quite extensively and to good effect.
Are you seriously going to ask that here at Slashdot? Thats like asking a liberal "So what do you think of Bush?" ...Right, 'cause we all know that The Liberals are inherently incapable of answering a question like that in a reasonable manner. There won't be any meaningful thought, there will only be Liberal Bias, because The Liberals hate America.
Or maybe it's possible that, among a group where the prevailing opinion is anti-Bush, or anti-Windows, individuals will be able to engage in rational discussion - and even if they've already formed the opinion you expect of them they may have very good, logical reasons for having done so.
Or maybe they're all just sheep. Baaaa! I think what I think because a man on TV told me to!
I don't know, I think it could be an event we'll remember forever, and tell our grandkids about - like how my parents' generation remembers where they were when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon (and that other guy didn't). We'll look back and say, "I remember where I was when Microsoft released Vista..."
If you buy NoPass-derived hardware like all these Slot-1 devices, then no, it doesn't matter - any DS will work.
If you do have a pre-v4 DS and a compatible wi-fi card and a programmable GBA cart of some kind, then you can take advantage of the fact that WiFiMe will work with your device and use it to run FlashMe - get up and running with homebrew at no additional cost - but if you're lacking any one of these things it's probably more cost-effective to get a Slot-1 flash cart.
More info about NoPass and the DS encryption: gamecards have some single-key encryption that's used to authenticate a gamecard as being valid. This was cracked by dumping the DS BIOS and digging around, which made it possible for people to create their own game cards without them being approved by Nintendo. The DS Wi-Fi mode uses public-key encryption which (fortunately? unfortunately?) hasn't been cracked. This means you can't send homebrew code to non-FlashMe'd DSes via the Wireless Multi Boot protocol - and also means that people can't exploit that ability in order to send Trojan Horse programs to people's DSes.
There are hardware limitations that prevent software from overwriting the main part of the firmware - a full firmware update can only be performed if the user manually shorts out the SL1 jumper, accessible through the battery compartment (underneath the "security" sticker)
Mario Kart and other internet Wi-Fi games do write Wi-Fi settings to an unprotected area of the DS flash ROM - this area was inadvertently used by early versions of FlashMe. A DS flashed with an old version of FlashMe could be bricked by Mario Kart (I think there's still a recovery mode in FlashMe that could correct the problem - don't know about that, though.) Shortly after the problem was discovered, FlashMe was updated to correct the issue. But anyway, the Wi-Fi games don't do anything to the firmware that would affect one's ability to use PassMe-type solutions.
What happened is that Nintendo started making DSes with firmware (v4) that prevented the use of the first-generation boot methods. This happened a little while before Mario Kart came out, and the red Mario Kart DS bundle was one of the first products you could point to on the shelf and say "that one has firmware v4 on it." With the others, it was mostly guesswork as to whether it would have v4 or an older version installed. There was a danger that a newly-purchased DS - especially one of the newer colors, or an imported model, etc. - would have the v4 firmware and thus be incompatible with PassMe v1 or WiFiMe - and no way to tell the difference without turning the machine on.
(The story so far) PassMe was the first known method for conveniently running homebrew code on the DS. It worked by using a genuine DS cart to get past the DS's crypto checks, but overwriting an execution address so that one of the CPUs would jump to an address on the GBA slot. WiFiMe worked similarly - sending signed code (an official demo or the like) to a DS, but changing an address in the header to make one CPU jump to an address in the newly-downloaded header, and make the other jump to the GBA slot. Both approaches worked because firmware v3 and earlier checks crypto signatures and checksum data for the code loaded from the cart - but it gets the starting addresses for the CPUs from an unchecked area of the game header.
V4 fixed that loophole, by checking the jump addresses against ones stored in a signed area of the program code, and by setting up the CPU to forbid jumps into the GBA ROM space - and so PassMe 2 was devised with a more complex scheme: I don't understand the whole process it uses, but a PassMe 2 device had to be specifically set up for the game cart you used with it, and it relied on some PassMe2 data being written to SRAM (game save space) on the GBA slot. On boot, PassMe2 did a buffer overrun, causing execution to jump to the SRAM (which, IIRC, was complicated by the fact that slot-2 SRAM access is a bit strange: I think each byte is memory-mapped to a word address, so in other words you only get 8 bits out of every 16. So the SRAM code had to be tailored to work under those conditions)
The current method, "NoPass", is the result of the crypto signing system on the DS having been cracked. I don't know the exact details (can people sign their own code now? Or did someone simply devise one particular bootloader program and find a working signature for it?) but the result is that for the past year or so, it's been possible to create a slot-1 device, not licensed (or signed) by Nintendo, which can boot DS code without it already being memory-mapped. The early versions just booted to the GBA slot, like PassMe-type devices, but now there's slot-1 NoPass devices that have their own storage and boot to that. Because the NoPass bootloader actually passes the DS bootup tests, rather than bypassing them, it seems very unlikely that this mechanism will ever be defeated by Nintendo.
As a side note: regarding FlashMe and the DS Lite, I was looking up information on FlashMe earlier today and I found mention of a danger specific to
Sure! It's been the default behavior of Flashme for a long time now. Then some people wanted their DS'es to appear stock despite having been flashed (so they could resell them or whatever without having to flash them back to the standard, I guess - no one would know the difference unless they had some DS software on slot-2...) and so they made the "stealth" version of Flashme that left the Health & Safety screen intact.
Flashme also allows you to boot unsigned code over WMB - so you can send demos, programs-in-development, small homebrew, etc. over to the DS using a computer with a compatible Wi-Fi card. With a stock DS the only things you can boot over WMB are official demos, either from the PC or a DS (in other words, signed code) and WiFiMe - the WMB hack that lets you run slot-2 software on an unmodded DS. But WiFiMe doesn't work on current DS firmware, only old ones - like pre-Mario-Kart old. But last I checked the "compatible Wi-Fi card" requirement meant specifically a non-USB device using the RT2500 chipset. There were reports that people got the Linux version working on USB Wi-Fi modules using closely related chipsets, but I don't have one so I can't personally confirm that. I don't know if the situation's changed since then. The thing is that in order to speak WMB the Wi-Fi hardware has to set some very specific parameters - so the guy who wrote the WMB client and WiFiMe for Windows made it work with just one type of hardware, and by writing a device driver to support the required operations. The Linux version had a little more API support in the existing kernel drives for doing that stuff, I guess, which is why the USB device could be made to work.
Since the new Slot-1 adaptors use micro-SD I think it'd still be more convenient to beam over work-in-progress builds rather than copy them to the SD and run them that way - though as yet I've still not gotten off my ass to do any DS development in earnest.
Couldn't you also just get a slot-1 device, and then put memory-mapped RAM in slot-2?
I'm curious about DSLinux - at this point I have no idea if it really does anything useful (though DanTheMan's post suggests that it really, truly does) and at the moment I don't have a slot-2 device with any significant amount of RAM on it (just got a GBAMP and a GBA flash cart) but if it really is useful in a practical sense then I'd really like to give it a go, once I get a device that'll give me a decent amount of filesystem storage. (Technically the GBAMP does, potentially, but I don't have any big CF cards)
Now I could get a slot-2 device and be done with it, but it's really exciting to me that there are now slot-1 devices that work on stock DSes, fit completely in the slot, and pack a micro-SD card for storage. That sounds like all kinds of fun, and I want in. Even though I have a flashed fat DS (and can therefore use full-size slot-2 devices that take normal SD cards, and leave the damn thing in and not think about it) it's exciting to me that they finally got running homebrew boiled down to such a simple formula.
But I don't know what I would get for slot-2 for memory expansion to run DSLinux. Opera? Or I could get one of the other flash adaptors... which makes the purchase of a slot-1 adaptor seem a bit silly, unless I just want it as a way to run FlashMe on people's DSes...
Do you know if it would be possible to run an ssh client on DSLinux without RAM expansion? I think it might be worth running for that alone - ability to remote-login over an open wireless access point (my Treo, unfortunately, doesn't have WiFi, so the ability to do SSH with it depends on getting sufficient phone network coverage.)
That's pretty cool, then! Sweet that there's PS1 emulation going (what do you do about the missing buttons, though? I guess that means no Armored Core... Well, unless the analog stick is emulating the D-pad and the D-pad is emulating buttons... But Rockman X4 would work for sure, as would a lot of other great games...) for sure it sounds like the PSP homebrew has a lot of great emulation stuff going - where the DS would need to scale down and push its limits to emulate, say, the SNES, PSP can muscle straight through something like that...
But I have to say - since I own a DS and not a PSP, the DS news is a whole lot more exciting to me.
Try to avoid homebrew solutions that require you to flash your DS bios. It voids your warranty. Bah! I flashed my DS as soon as I could get the WiFi exploit working on Linux (I'm happy to say I played at least a very small role in helping to get that software working...) - it was well worth it for the benefit of bypassing the health & safety screen alone.
Besides which, I've come up with all kinds of other ways to void my warranty - replacing the plastic casing of the DS with an aftermarket knock-off and painting the thing, for starters.
Somebody actually watched that movie? Who knew? Oh, yes... Lined right up and saw it in the theater... I think what they were trying to do was create the illusion of a compelling movie, but with the hope that by selling caffeinated drinks and showing all that water everybody would need to get up and go to the bathroom every few minutes, so no one would actually see it - but they'd still think it was good 'cause they didn't see enough of the movie to know otherwise... I wasn't thirsty that day.
"oh, your Honor, we are but mere idiots drooling on our papers, we just want money. grant us our relief and give us lots of everybody else's money. also, your wallet and watch, hand 'em over." "Your Honor, I am but a simple caveman: One day while gathering some food I was caught up in an icy river and frozen in a glacier for ten thousand years. I do not understand your complex world. But I do understand this: my client, the IBM corporation, requested and received final disclosure of the complaints to be brought against it by the plaintiff, SCO Group, and these complaints were not a part of that disclosure. Surely, your honor, if a simple caveman can understand this it must be equally evident to an enlightened man of modern times such as yourself."
Yeah, contracting the UFCL group to handle their legal defense was probably IBM's best move.
Slashdot Mirror
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
"TIME FOR GO TO BED..."
Whom says that it can only be used in the objective case?
Bleah. I'm sick of all this "I live in Massachusetts so I am a victim of Turner's Greed" BS. If you feel victimized, talk to the people who overreacted about a bunch of frikkin' signs.
I'd give you a funny point (well earned, IMO) but wouldn't it be easier to just buy a new string of lights?
:)
Or maybe your Christmas lights are rather more elaborate than mine, and "a string" won't cover it.
'Course, LED lights do have their issues: the white ones sold in stores are more often blue, they flicker (no full-wave rectifier, just LEDs on AC), and they throw spots rather than a more uniform glow. (I actually like the spots they throw on the wall, though...)
Some may question the need for improvements in the field of animated fluids. But many forget that animated fluids are pivotal to the success of Hentai, in which they are used quite extensively and to good effect.
Hands up how many people went between google and yahoo trying these searches? (Thinks about how to answer this question...)
Wait, I know: CowboyNeal!
Or maybe it's possible that, among a group where the prevailing opinion is anti-Bush, or anti-Windows, individuals will be able to engage in rational discussion - and even if they've already formed the opinion you expect of them they may have very good, logical reasons for having done so.
Or maybe they're all just sheep. Baaaa! I think what I think because a man on TV told me to!
I don't know, I think it could be an event we'll remember forever, and tell our grandkids about - like how my parents' generation remembers where they were when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon (and that other guy didn't). We'll look back and say, "I remember where I was when Microsoft released Vista..."
If you buy NoPass-derived hardware like all these Slot-1 devices, then no, it doesn't matter - any DS will work.
If you do have a pre-v4 DS and a compatible wi-fi card and a programmable GBA cart of some kind, then you can take advantage of the fact that WiFiMe will work with your device and use it to run FlashMe - get up and running with homebrew at no additional cost - but if you're lacking any one of these things it's probably more cost-effective to get a Slot-1 flash cart.
More info about NoPass and the DS encryption: gamecards have some single-key encryption that's used to authenticate a gamecard as being valid. This was cracked by dumping the DS BIOS and digging around, which made it possible for people to create their own game cards without them being approved by Nintendo. The DS Wi-Fi mode uses public-key encryption which (fortunately? unfortunately?) hasn't been cracked. This means you can't send homebrew code to non-FlashMe'd DSes via the Wireless Multi Boot protocol - and also means that people can't exploit that ability in order to send Trojan Horse programs to people's DSes.
There are hardware limitations that prevent software from overwriting the main part of the firmware - a full firmware update can only be performed if the user manually shorts out the SL1 jumper, accessible through the battery compartment (underneath the "security" sticker)
Mario Kart and other internet Wi-Fi games do write Wi-Fi settings to an unprotected area of the DS flash ROM - this area was inadvertently used by early versions of FlashMe. A DS flashed with an old version of FlashMe could be bricked by Mario Kart (I think there's still a recovery mode in FlashMe that could correct the problem - don't know about that, though.) Shortly after the problem was discovered, FlashMe was updated to correct the issue. But anyway, the Wi-Fi games don't do anything to the firmware that would affect one's ability to use PassMe-type solutions.
What happened is that Nintendo started making DSes with firmware (v4) that prevented the use of the first-generation boot methods. This happened a little while before Mario Kart came out, and the red Mario Kart DS bundle was one of the first products you could point to on the shelf and say "that one has firmware v4 on it." With the others, it was mostly guesswork as to whether it would have v4 or an older version installed. There was a danger that a newly-purchased DS - especially one of the newer colors, or an imported model, etc. - would have the v4 firmware and thus be incompatible with PassMe v1 or WiFiMe - and no way to tell the difference without turning the machine on.
(The story so far)
PassMe was the first known method for conveniently running homebrew code on the DS. It worked by using a genuine DS cart to get past the DS's crypto checks, but overwriting an execution address so that one of the CPUs would jump to an address on the GBA slot. WiFiMe worked similarly - sending signed code (an official demo or the like) to a DS, but changing an address in the header to make one CPU jump to an address in the newly-downloaded header, and make the other jump to the GBA slot. Both approaches worked because firmware v3 and earlier checks crypto signatures and checksum data for the code loaded from the cart - but it gets the starting addresses for the CPUs from an unchecked area of the game header.
V4 fixed that loophole, by checking the jump addresses against ones stored in a signed area of the program code, and by setting up the CPU to forbid jumps into the GBA ROM space - and so PassMe 2 was devised with a more complex scheme: I don't understand the whole process it uses, but a PassMe 2 device had to be specifically set up for the game cart you used with it, and it relied on some PassMe2 data being written to SRAM (game save space) on the GBA slot. On boot, PassMe2 did a buffer overrun, causing execution to jump to the SRAM (which, IIRC, was complicated by the fact that slot-2 SRAM access is a bit strange: I think each byte is memory-mapped to a word address, so in other words you only get 8 bits out of every 16. So the SRAM code had to be tailored to work under those conditions)
The current method, "NoPass", is the result of the crypto signing system on the DS having been cracked. I don't know the exact details (can people sign their own code now? Or did someone simply devise one particular bootloader program and find a working signature for it?) but the result is that for the past year or so, it's been possible to create a slot-1 device, not licensed (or signed) by Nintendo, which can boot DS code without it already being memory-mapped. The early versions just booted to the GBA slot, like PassMe-type devices, but now there's slot-1 NoPass devices that have their own storage and boot to that. Because the NoPass bootloader actually passes the DS bootup tests, rather than bypassing them, it seems very unlikely that this mechanism will ever be defeated by Nintendo.
As a side note: regarding FlashMe and the DS Lite, I was looking up information on FlashMe earlier today and I found mention of a danger specific to
Sure! It's been the default behavior of Flashme for a long time now. Then some people wanted their DS'es to appear stock despite having been flashed (so they could resell them or whatever without having to flash them back to the standard, I guess - no one would know the difference unless they had some DS software on slot-2...) and so they made the "stealth" version of Flashme that left the Health & Safety screen intact.
Flashme also allows you to boot unsigned code over WMB - so you can send demos, programs-in-development, small homebrew, etc. over to the DS using a computer with a compatible Wi-Fi card. With a stock DS the only things you can boot over WMB are official demos, either from the PC or a DS (in other words, signed code) and WiFiMe - the WMB hack that lets you run slot-2 software on an unmodded DS. But WiFiMe doesn't work on current DS firmware, only old ones - like pre-Mario-Kart old. But last I checked the "compatible Wi-Fi card" requirement meant specifically a non-USB device using the RT2500 chipset. There were reports that people got the Linux version working on USB Wi-Fi modules using closely related chipsets, but I don't have one so I can't personally confirm that. I don't know if the situation's changed since then. The thing is that in order to speak WMB the Wi-Fi hardware has to set some very specific parameters - so the guy who wrote the WMB client and WiFiMe for Windows made it work with just one type of hardware, and by writing a device driver to support the required operations. The Linux version had a little more API support in the existing kernel drives for doing that stuff, I guess, which is why the USB device could be made to work.
Since the new Slot-1 adaptors use micro-SD I think it'd still be more convenient to beam over work-in-progress builds rather than copy them to the SD and run them that way - though as yet I've still not gotten off my ass to do any DS development in earnest.
Couldn't you also just get a slot-1 device, and then put memory-mapped RAM in slot-2?
I'm curious about DSLinux - at this point I have no idea if it really does anything useful (though DanTheMan's post suggests that it really, truly does) and at the moment I don't have a slot-2 device with any significant amount of RAM on it (just got a GBAMP and a GBA flash cart) but if it really is useful in a practical sense then I'd really like to give it a go, once I get a device that'll give me a decent amount of filesystem storage. (Technically the GBAMP does, potentially, but I don't have any big CF cards)
Now I could get a slot-2 device and be done with it, but it's really exciting to me that there are now slot-1 devices that work on stock DSes, fit completely in the slot, and pack a micro-SD card for storage. That sounds like all kinds of fun, and I want in. Even though I have a flashed fat DS (and can therefore use full-size slot-2 devices that take normal SD cards, and leave the damn thing in and not think about it) it's exciting to me that they finally got running homebrew boiled down to such a simple formula.
But I don't know what I would get for slot-2 for memory expansion to run DSLinux. Opera? Or I could get one of the other flash adaptors... which makes the purchase of a slot-1 adaptor seem a bit silly, unless I just want it as a way to run FlashMe on people's DSes...
Do you know if it would be possible to run an ssh client on DSLinux without RAM expansion? I think it might be worth running for that alone - ability to remote-login over an open wireless access point (my Treo, unfortunately, doesn't have WiFi, so the ability to do SSH with it depends on getting sufficient phone network coverage.)
That's pretty cool, then! Sweet that there's PS1 emulation going (what do you do about the missing buttons, though? I guess that means no Armored Core... Well, unless the analog stick is emulating the D-pad and the D-pad is emulating buttons... But Rockman X4 would work for sure, as would a lot of other great games...) for sure it sounds like the PSP homebrew has a lot of great emulation stuff going - where the DS would need to scale down and push its limits to emulate, say, the SNES, PSP can muscle straight through something like that...
But I have to say - since I own a DS and not a PSP, the DS news is a whole lot more exciting to me.
Besides which, I've come up with all kinds of other ways to void my warranty - replacing the plastic casing of the DS with an aftermarket knock-off and painting the thing, for starters.
It must have been rather shocking when you found out about this. Well, time heals all wounds I guess.
We're the one for you, New England, Fairpoint Telecommunications...
Nope, doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
"Victoria Terpsichore"
There, I'll take the big stack of money now...
And the terrorists, they use it too. As part of increased security after 9/11 they've banned people from bringing the stuff onto planes.
Yes, but now that they're without a mother they may be more susceptible to other dangers in the world...
I would think that Dennis Hopper would be a bigger concern...
Yeah, contracting the UFCL group to handle their legal defense was probably IBM's best move.