Here's the thing people don't seem to realize: FPGAs *are* cheap.
Case in point: Xilinx XC3S50A. $5.75 at Avnet. Comes in a hobby-solderable VQFP and you can make it work on a 2-layer board. Add a SPI flash to boot from (or a nearby micro with ~50K of spare flash), an oscillator, and +3.3V/1.2V regulators for power and you're still under 10 bucks parts cost - in low quantity.
This chip is only bottom of the line, but it's full of awesome stuff - "DCM" clock multipliers that can let you run FPGA designs at 250+ MHz by multiplying up slow external clocks, three 18x18 multipliers that run at almost the same speed, three 2Kbyte SRAM blocks that you can use as instruction/data memory for processors (eg, a Picoblaze, which can run at 100+ MHz).
These are great little things to play with as a hobbyist. I've contemplated making an Arduino shield with a small, cheap FPGA for people to experiment with, but I never really could figure out any good way to get data and signals in and out of the chip in a way that shows off what FPGAs are really good at.
I'm 100% in favor of detecting and banning hacked consoles from PSN. It's Sony's network and they have the fundamental right anyway, and secondly, if it keeps cheaters/hacks/aimbots/etc off the PSN, I'm 110% in favor of that.
And I'll just buy another PS3. It will remain unmodified, and I'll use that for playing games online. And my current PS3 will remain as my "hacker's delight" that runs homebrew. If Sony detects that it's modified and bans it from the PSN, that's fine.
As for everyone else, if they want a PS3 to hack I'm sure it won't take long before Sony starts detecting modified PS3s and banning them from PSN, and $100 PS3s start appearing on Kijiji/Craigslist next to the Xbox360's that are banned from XBL.
That being said, I wish Sony was more accepting of the hacker community, perhaps even facilitating it somewhat. I actually thing it'd be awesome if Sony added a feature to the PS3 where you could 100% unlock the console hardware, banning the console from PSN in the process. It'd be a lot better, and probably even cheaper for them in the long run, than continuing their current bullshit of legally shafting people like Geohot. Hey, if people want to figure out how to program your game system, you should be helping them!
Sort of like the Maxwell House "brew some good" ads. Which don't really advertise coffee, they just show a can of coffee with a backdrop of some charitable work that the company donated to going on in the background. I'm sure the cost of airing the ad exceeds the cost of the charitable work by a huge amount, but at least they're doing something. There's plenty of other ads like that airing on TV right now with the same theme.
I'd say let companies do the same sort of thing with Wikipedia. If a company donates above a certain minimum amount, let them have an unobtrusive ad display every so often where they can brag about donating to the site. Let them show a cup of coffee, box of KD, a server rack or whatever the company's product is, let them make a small reference to their product, etc... but the main theme of the ad has to be "We donated to this place.". Clicking on their ad wouldn't bring them to their site, it'll bring them to a page within Wikipedia which has more information about the donation(s) they've made.
If I logged in and saw a small "Wikipedia runs on Dunkin' - Proud supporter of this site." image in the upper right corner of the screen, I'd honestly be pleased to see that - while I've never donated to Wikipedia, and feel somewhat ashamed about it because I do spend a fair bit of time on there, I've got huge respect for people and companies that do. And unlike the aforementioned Maxwell House ad, 100% of their advertising cost goes to Wikipedia. Can't knock that.
But if I saw a "Announcing the new MochaLatteChocoChino from Dunkin Donuts!" image in the middle of the screen, halfway through an article, I'd be seriously pissed off at that.
I'm an embedded designer, and I recently created a system which has a raw NAND flash memory chip installed on it. We've manufactured a few hundred of these already, and the majority NAND chips come from the factory with half a dozen bad blocks marked, but I've personally seen a few NAND chips which have *no* bad blocks.
And devices which do have bad blocks have the blocks marked as bad by programming them, so you can mark any good block as bad if you want. So there's nothing stopping me from buying a few trays of NAND, reading the bad blocks and picking out the few error-free ones, and cloning the NAND chip from one of these supposedly "unclonable because of its bad blocks" devices referred to in the original post - copying bad blocks and all.
But you don't even have to do that.
Even devices which *do* have bad blocks may not have hard failures in those blocks, where a bit is completely unable to be programmed or erased. And if you successfully erase a bad block, you've just marked that block as good again. So with enough program/erase cycles, you may be able to successfully make a bad block good again and hold the data you want. If not, move onto the next chip from your tray of NAND and try again.
And you might not even have to get that 100% right, provided you don't have more than 1 bit of error per sector between the original device and the clone. The ECC will correct that bit error, and the now-cloned device (assuming it uses a proper NAND filesystem) should just encounter the bad sector, move the block and mark the previously-bad block as bad again. At this point, you may only need to buy a few NAND chips instead of a few trays in order to clone any given NAND chip.
Now as a protection against this last idea, the device could fsck its NAND on boot and set a maximum # of new bad blocks as a tripwire for cloning protection. But if you know what that threshold is, just throw more NAND chips at the problem until you successfully program one below that threshold.
Has an ARM9 at 1.2GHz, half a gig of RAM, sound, VGA video, lots of USB, SD card reader, 2 GbE ports, eSATA and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive in it. Mine draws 10W from the wall. And it happily runs Debian.
My only beef is the video (XGI Z11) has absolutely horrible driver support, so don't expect the thing to play Blu-ray.
$129 gets you a Guruplug Server Plus. It doesn't have a dual core CPU, but a 1.2GHz ARM9 gives plenty of grunt. Has half a gig of DDR2, half a gig of NAND, 2 gigabit ethernet jacks, USB, eSATA and a SD slot. And it happily runs Debian.
I'm an EE who does electronics design for a living, and I've done audio, SMPS, digital, FPGA, you name it. And in each case, the "best scope to use" was different:
- For analog work, or for simple microcontroller debugging, something like a USBee will work great.
- If you're doing higher speed analog, lower-frequency RF or switching power supply design, I'm a huge fan of the Tektronix DPO series. I use a TDS3032.
- For digital work (debugging serial/parallel interfaces and whatnot) I use an old 100MHz "Mega Zoom" HP logic analyzer.
- If I'm doing a design with a big FPGA, bringing lots of extra signals to the FPGA during layout time and using something like Chipscope Pro (on Xilinx FPGAs) to watch what's going on has been extremely handy. No test equipment required!
Replace "variance" with "length". Every line on a high speed parallel bus on a circuit board has to be almost exactly the same length, otherwise the delay you get in the longer lines can make the bits on those lines arrive too late. Likewise, valid data can arrive too early on a couple of lines if they're too short.
If you look at the memory bus on a modern motherboard, you'll see lots of "squiggly" traces, traces which loop back on themselves, etc. This is done to make the short lines longer so that the length of all the lines match up.
About the only "massively parallel" bus that you'll still find on a computer is the SDRAM bus, everything else (SATA, USB, PCI Express, HyperTransport, etc) is all serialized. But I fully expect "parallel" DRAM technology to hit a wall soon, and DDRx memory to be replaced with a something that uses multiple high-speed serial interfaces instead of single wide parallel bus. I'm also expecting Rambus to rear its ugly head again, when that happens..
Just as cheap as any other company who bought the same caps, such as:
- Abit (recapped a buddy's BP6) - Antec (original Truepowers, SL series, Minuet power supplies, etc) - Apple (I've recapped a few iMac G5's now) - Asus (recapped my A7N8X)
And that's just the A's. Almost everybody got fucked by the bad capacitor plague.
Regarding the RGBY LCD, that's like saying that a printer with a CMYK cartridge is a fraud, because no image file format specifies a black channel. And how about printers that print with 7 colors of ink? Shouldn't Epson's executive be thrown in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for releasing the Stylus 2200, when all you really need, theoretically, is CMY inks?
Here's the thing. The video standard by which video is sent to your TV set (BT.709, sRGB, xvYCC, whatever) specifies a color gamut, which includes yellow. Your TV set, knowing the characteristics of its LCD panel, will perform an appropriately weighted colorspace conversion to translate from the incoming video standard to a set of drive signals which match the LCD, preserving as much of the incoming color gamut as possible. RGBY LCDs are capable of displaying a wider gamut - specifically they're capable of producing a more pure, less "washed out" yellow color, so they'll more accurately render the input. How much yellow to display is calculated using the same method that your CMYK inkjet knows how much black to print given a RGB source.
Go to your local big box electronics store, find the 4-color TV set and jam your face up to it. You'll see yellow pixels.
Oddly enough, he's right. Integer operations *are* way faster on most CPUs. Maybe not on a modern x86 CPU working in SSE space, but they're not "most CPU's".
If you're writing code for a fixed-point DSP chip (used in most home receivers) the majority of RISC processors (ARM, MIPS, most Power) or any microcontroller, working in integer space will be much faster since floating point has to be emulated or issued to a separate floating point unit which requires extra overhead to move data to/from it.
And the same engineers who target code to those systems also tend to use Matlab. Many systems (control systems, audio/video codecs, whatnot) are simulated in Matlab before they're even written for their target processor, where you can do things like verify the algorithm up front, then specify an arbitrary number of bits at different stages to find out how much error it introduces so you can pick your data types in your target.
Matlab with 32-bit integers (or 64 bit floats + rounding, for 53 bits) is good enough for simulating most 16 bit DSPs (40 bit accumulator, usually) but not quite enough for a 24 bit DSP (56 bit accumulator, usually). Having pure 64 bit integer support means you're good for 24 bitters.
Now, knowing Matlab, I wouldn't be surprised if they emulate integers somehow using floating point;)
Mine came from Nu Horizons, an electronic component distributor - http://www.nuhorizons.com/ - part # is 003-RD0004.
They're out of stock, but they seem to allow qty. 1 orders with a 2 week manufacturer lead time - you can try ordering one and see what happens.
However looking at Globalscale's site, it looks like they've now depreciated the openrd-client and openrd-base, and now have the "openrd-ultimate" which has a PCIe slot sticking out of it where the SD card slot used to be, and a MicroSD slot added by the audio connectors. Nu Horizons might sell that instead, but I can't find it.
I have a Marvell openrd-client. This thing has the guts of a Sheevaplug except it comes in a fancier case, uses a separate wall wart, has onboard video, more peripherals and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive inside.
I've got a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive poked inside and Debian Linux installed, and it acts as a file server, music server, torrent downloader, etc. Pulls about 8 watts from the wall, though I've got video disabled, second ethernet disabled, etc. Couldn't be happier with the thing.
I agree with you on one thing; I'm not about to go out and buy an overpriced box of chocolates, flowers, and a teddy bear that'll get thrown out the following week. I'm 100% against the peddling of stupid chinese-made pink-colored shit, stuff that's gonna die (cut flowers), etc.
But what's wrong with taking the occasion to go out to a nice local restaurant you haven't been to in a while, having a few drinks and having a little fun with your lady? It's enjoyable for both of ya. God forbid it's "conformist" or something.
Brute-forcing DES doesn't require any creative algorithm to be run in parallel. You have 2^56 possible keys, split them amongst 2^n crackers and each cracker has to process 2^(56-n) keys. Not too hard.
And loading an array of DES cracker cores onto an array of chips isn't novel either, ie:
Linux is seriously one of the best things to happen to the embedded design market. I'd describe it as "a big pile of work that's already done for you, for free".
We've currently working on a project which uses a NXP LPC32xx ARM9 processor. NXP themselves wrote a pile of supporting code for the processor's peripherals and contributed it to the kernel - doing this work lets them say "hey, our chip runs Linux" and makes the chip much more attractive to their customers. Like us; we decided the chip had the right set of peripherals and price for our application, and we were planning on running Linux anyway, so it was a perfect fit.
So we built our board and started verification. Most things worked right out of the box, except for Ethernet; after fighting for a couple of days with it, we found a bug in NXP's code which didn't work with our PHY configuration, which we fixed and now it's working great. Kernel patch is on the way, which should hopefully save the next guy some work.
End result? NXP's happy because they're selling their chips, and we're happy because we're selling our products. And Linux improves in the process. What's not to love?
A nation's electrical infrastructure is everywhere and largely unguarded - there's really nothing stopping a single, determined individual from doing an extreme amount of *physical* damage to a power company via sabotage.
Theoretically, there's no reason I can't:
- Sneak into the woods with a gas angle grinder and start cutting guy wires on hydro towers. Cut down a few >300KV lines feeding a city and they'll have no power for days. - Break into unmanned substations and open oil drains on transformers. Or shoot a hole in a transformer with a high caliber rifle for the same effect - oil spill, destroyed transformer, easily a week of no electrical service. - You probably can't do much to a power station directly (lots of staff, security, etc) but there's plenty of other things. Sabotage a rail line feeding a coal power station, a pipeline feeding a natural gas station, an oil tank at a oil station, etc. Or the power lines exiting them.
Get a large, determined group of people doing this, and you've got a big problem. Especially since we depend on electricity so much nowadays for day-to-day things - phones (who owns a corded phone anymore?), light, refrigeration, heating, etc. You can secure a power company system against "cyber-attacks" by keeping the damn thing off the internet - but good luck securing the physical power grid, since it's so big.
The solution to all of this?
- Intelligence, and - Not pissing the fucking world off such that they *want* to do this shit. (Yeah, cliche, whatever.)
- Any of the IMAX 3D science/nature films. It's 3D because it was filmed in 3D, not because the director wants you ducking shit. - "Up", the recent kids movie. I saw this one in 3D a while ago, and I must say, it was tastefully done.
But yes, most directors use 3D as an effect instead of a canvas, and the results are horribly annoying.
It's like CGI; there's a few directors who know how to use it well and tastefully (Terminator 2's T1000 being the ultimate example of good CGI), and then there's MICHAELBAYSPLOSIONS!!!111...
Nobody would be able to record anything off the analog outputs with this incredible, high-tech, unbreakable copy-protection technology... wouldn't they?
GFCI's are fast - they're required to interrupt current within a fraction of an AC cycle. The effect of this is that you only get a "pulsed DC" shock, which is a whole lot better than several cycles of AC you'd ordinarily get which can do bad things like introduce irregular heart rhythms.
My uncle is a retired electrician, and is about as old-school as you'd get. To test if a wire was live, he'd carefully touch it with the tip of his finger - if he got a small shock, he knew there was AC present. One time he demonstrated to me how a GFCI works by jamming a flat-head screwdriver into the hot side of the outlet and touching the screwdriver shaft with his finger. The outlet tripped and he didn't even flinch. Since then, I've been sold on the things.
Anyway, I'm also an EE, and I've designed a few pieces of equipment that plug into 120V and had to be certified for CSA/UL/whatnot. There's two classes of device.
- 120V, 2-prong devices (Class II) have to be double insulated and pass a hi-pot test between the AC input and any secondary electrical connectors, or metal surfaces, on the device. These don't operate without a ground, so they're obviously safe if they're plugged into a 3-prong-yet-ungrounded outlet.
- 120V, 3-prong devices (Class I) require that their chassis is connected to electrical earth ground. Double insulation isn't required and no hi-pot is required. Assuming that the earth ground is OK, Class I devices are very safe. But remove the earth ground and weird things start to happen.
First of all, most class I devices have Y capacitors between hot/neutral and ground to shunt conducted EMI. Assuming these are equal value, neutral is grounded at the panel and there's no other current paths (connections between the equipment and other grounds, etc) they act as a capacitive divider and will cause the chassis to float at 60VAC. The impedance behind this 60VAC is quite high, but it is capacitive - if you touch the case at just the right moment, you'll effectively have a 85VDC-charged capacitor in the 1-10nF range discharged into you. This likely won't hurt you, but you will get a tingle.
Also, if the device is a PC and you start plugging other peripherals in it, they'll get the same "shock". Fortunately most connectors (D-subs, USB, etc) connect their grounds before connecting any signal lines so the chassis ground carries the current, and Ethernet provides galvanic isolation which protects that, but there's a chance you'll fry your peripherals and/or PC if it's grounded wrong.
A GFCI won't correct this. It'll protect you from a bad shock, but that's pretty much it.
In summary, if your device has a ground pin, MAKE SURE IT'S GROUNDED.
I'll fess up. I've got a SD card in my Wii with old NES games, and I run Homebrew Channel and FCE Ultra on my Wii.
Mind you, I own most of the games (SMB games, Mega Man games, TMNT2, etc) on NES cartridges. I do have an old NES, but I just can't be arsed to drag the thing out, wire it up to my TV and spend 10 minutes wiggling cartridges until they work. And I couldn't be arsed to buy games I already own on Virtual Console so I can play them again. Even though they're only $5/game, it's a principle thing.
But not everyone has a closet full of old video game equipment to use as lame justification. And Nintendo is probably losing a good bit of money because of kids telling their friends how to exploit the Wii and install FCE Ultra so that they don't have to buy the Virtual Console games. So, I kinda understand the whole anti-homebrew thing from that direction...
If you've ever been exposed to arc flash from welding or witnessing a large short circuit. you'll know that isn't the most fun thing - you get bad spots and trails in your vision, a bad headache, and eventually nausea - been there, done that. The same symptoms that the real dazzler advertises, and the same things experienced by the news reporter lady.
If the "bedazzler" doesn't have the same "eye-burning" power as an arc flash or the real dazzler, it's probably just not bright enough. And I suspect that's the case - they've got the green LEDs spread out over a much larger device than the real dazzler, which lessens the 'burn your eyes' effect. Plus, they've basically made a stupidly powerful continuous-light flashlight with sections that blink, and the blinking probably isn't even visible from the glare the device generates. The original 2M-candlepower bulb in their flashlight would probably be more effective at subduing a person.
I'm thinking a better design would involve increasing the density of the LEDs, using only green ones (best lumens/watt) and operating them at a high pulse discharge current (akin to a flash) instead of at continuous current like they're doing.
They live in their own world, and they like it that way. When big companies come in and start doing big company thing like, oh, installing internet... that's the big company trampling all over the little guy! So they oppose the whole thing out of principle, not because of things like "valid reasoning."
Hell, I once had a woman in the valley tell me my car was poisoning her because it had a hole in its exhaust. They're like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing people don't seem to realize: FPGAs *are* cheap.
Case in point: Xilinx XC3S50A. $5.75 at Avnet. Comes in a hobby-solderable VQFP and you can make it work on a 2-layer board. Add a SPI flash to boot from (or a nearby micro with ~50K of spare flash), an oscillator, and +3.3V/1.2V regulators for power and you're still under 10 bucks parts cost - in low quantity.
This chip is only bottom of the line, but it's full of awesome stuff - "DCM" clock multipliers that can let you run FPGA designs at 250+ MHz by multiplying up slow external clocks, three 18x18 multipliers that run at almost the same speed, three 2Kbyte SRAM blocks that you can use as instruction/data memory for processors (eg, a Picoblaze, which can run at 100+ MHz).
These are great little things to play with as a hobbyist. I've contemplated making an Arduino shield with a small, cheap FPGA for people to experiment with, but I never really could figure out any good way to get data and signals in and out of the chip in a way that shows off what FPGAs are really good at.
I'm 100% in favor of detecting and banning hacked consoles from PSN. It's Sony's network and they have the fundamental right anyway, and secondly, if it keeps cheaters/hacks/aimbots/etc off the PSN, I'm 110% in favor of that.
And I'll just buy another PS3. It will remain unmodified, and I'll use that for playing games online. And my current PS3 will remain as my "hacker's delight" that runs homebrew. If Sony detects that it's modified and bans it from the PSN, that's fine.
As for everyone else, if they want a PS3 to hack I'm sure it won't take long before Sony starts detecting modified PS3s and banning them from PSN, and $100 PS3s start appearing on Kijiji/Craigslist next to the Xbox360's that are banned from XBL.
That being said, I wish Sony was more accepting of the hacker community, perhaps even facilitating it somewhat. I actually thing it'd be awesome if Sony added a feature to the PS3 where you could 100% unlock the console hardware, banning the console from PSN in the process. It'd be a lot better, and probably even cheaper for them in the long run, than continuing their current bullshit of legally shafting people like Geohot. Hey, if people want to figure out how to program your game system, you should be helping them!
Sort of like the Maxwell House "brew some good" ads. Which don't really advertise coffee, they just show a can of coffee with a backdrop of some charitable work that the company donated to going on in the background. I'm sure the cost of airing the ad exceeds the cost of the charitable work by a huge amount, but at least they're doing something. There's plenty of other ads like that airing on TV right now with the same theme.
I'd say let companies do the same sort of thing with Wikipedia. If a company donates above a certain minimum amount, let them have an unobtrusive ad display every so often where they can brag about donating to the site. Let them show a cup of coffee, box of KD, a server rack or whatever the company's product is, let them make a small reference to their product, etc... but the main theme of the ad has to be "We donated to this place.". Clicking on their ad wouldn't bring them to their site, it'll bring them to a page within Wikipedia which has more information about the donation(s) they've made.
If I logged in and saw a small "Wikipedia runs on Dunkin' - Proud supporter of this site." image in the upper right corner of the screen, I'd honestly be pleased to see that - while I've never donated to Wikipedia, and feel somewhat ashamed about it because I do spend a fair bit of time on there, I've got huge respect for people and companies that do. And unlike the aforementioned Maxwell House ad, 100% of their advertising cost goes to Wikipedia. Can't knock that.
But if I saw a "Announcing the new MochaLatteChocoChino from Dunkin Donuts!" image in the middle of the screen, halfway through an article, I'd be seriously pissed off at that.
I don't have a hunting cabin. Does that make me LEED Platinum?
I'm an embedded designer, and I recently created a system which has a raw NAND flash memory chip installed on it. We've manufactured a few hundred of these already, and the majority NAND chips come from the factory with half a dozen bad blocks marked, but I've personally seen a few NAND chips which have *no* bad blocks.
And devices which do have bad blocks have the blocks marked as bad by programming them, so you can mark any good block as bad if you want. So there's nothing stopping me from buying a few trays of NAND, reading the bad blocks and picking out the few error-free ones, and cloning the NAND chip from one of these supposedly "unclonable because of its bad blocks" devices referred to in the original post - copying bad blocks and all.
But you don't even have to do that.
Even devices which *do* have bad blocks may not have hard failures in those blocks, where a bit is completely unable to be programmed or erased. And if you successfully erase a bad block, you've just marked that block as good again. So with enough program/erase cycles, you may be able to successfully make a bad block good again and hold the data you want. If not, move onto the next chip from your tray of NAND and try again.
And you might not even have to get that 100% right, provided you don't have more than 1 bit of error per sector between the original device and the clone. The ECC will correct that bit error, and the now-cloned device (assuming it uses a proper NAND filesystem) should just encounter the bad sector, move the block and mark the previously-bad block as bad again. At this point, you may only need to buy a few NAND chips instead of a few trays in order to clone any given NAND chip.
Now as a protection against this last idea, the device could fsck its NAND on boot and set a maximum # of new bad blocks as a tripwire for cloning protection. But if you know what that threshold is, just throw more NAND chips at the problem until you successfully program one below that threshold.
Marvell OpenRD-client:
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdcdetails.aspx
Has an ARM9 at 1.2GHz, half a gig of RAM, sound, VGA video, lots of USB, SD card reader, 2 GbE ports, eSATA and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive in it. Mine draws 10W from the wall. And it happily runs Debian.
My only beef is the video (XGI Z11) has absolutely horrible driver support, so don't expect the thing to play Blu-ray.
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-32-guruplug-server-plus.aspx
$129 gets you a Guruplug Server Plus. It doesn't have a dual core CPU, but a 1.2GHz ARM9 gives plenty of grunt. Has half a gig of DDR2, half a gig of NAND, 2 gigabit ethernet jacks, USB, eSATA and a SD slot. And it happily runs Debian.
And latency is a bad thing, depending on algorithm.
Doesn't matter how fast the CPU or GPU is, if the implementation spends 90% of its time stalled waiting for data to arrive to/from the GPU.
I'm an EE who does electronics design for a living, and I've done audio, SMPS, digital, FPGA, you name it. And in each case, the "best scope to use" was different:
- For analog work, or for simple microcontroller debugging, something like a USBee will work great.
- If you're doing higher speed analog, lower-frequency RF or switching power supply design, I'm a huge fan of the Tektronix DPO series. I use a TDS3032.
- For digital work (debugging serial/parallel interfaces and whatnot) I use an old 100MHz "Mega Zoom" HP logic analyzer.
- If I'm doing a design with a big FPGA, bringing lots of extra signals to the FPGA during layout time and using something like Chipscope Pro (on Xilinx FPGAs) to watch what's going on has been extremely handy. No test equipment required!
Replace "variance" with "length". Every line on a high speed parallel bus on a circuit board has to be almost exactly the same length, otherwise the delay you get in the longer lines can make the bits on those lines arrive too late. Likewise, valid data can arrive too early on a couple of lines if they're too short.
If you look at the memory bus on a modern motherboard, you'll see lots of "squiggly" traces, traces which loop back on themselves, etc. This is done to make the short lines longer so that the length of all the lines match up.
About the only "massively parallel" bus that you'll still find on a computer is the SDRAM bus, everything else (SATA, USB, PCI Express, HyperTransport, etc) is all serialized. But I fully expect "parallel" DRAM technology to hit a wall soon, and DDRx memory to be replaced with a something that uses multiple high-speed serial interfaces instead of single wide parallel bus. I'm also expecting Rambus to rear its ugly head again, when that happens..
Just as cheap as any other company who bought the same caps, such as:
- Abit (recapped a buddy's BP6)
- Antec (original Truepowers, SL series, Minuet power supplies, etc)
- Apple (I've recapped a few iMac G5's now)
- Asus (recapped my A7N8X)
And that's just the A's. Almost everybody got fucked by the bad capacitor plague.
Regarding the RGBY LCD, that's like saying that a printer with a CMYK cartridge is a fraud, because no image file format specifies a black channel. And how about printers that print with 7 colors of ink? Shouldn't Epson's executive be thrown in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for releasing the Stylus 2200, when all you really need, theoretically, is CMY inks?
Here's the thing. The video standard by which video is sent to your TV set (BT.709, sRGB, xvYCC, whatever) specifies a color gamut, which includes yellow. Your TV set, knowing the characteristics of its LCD panel, will perform an appropriately weighted colorspace conversion to translate from the incoming video standard to a set of drive signals which match the LCD, preserving as much of the incoming color gamut as possible. RGBY LCDs are capable of displaying a wider gamut - specifically they're capable of producing a more pure, less "washed out" yellow color, so they'll more accurately render the input. How much yellow to display is calculated using the same method that your CMYK inkjet knows how much black to print given a RGB source.
Go to your local big box electronics store, find the 4-color TV set and jam your face up to it. You'll see yellow pixels.
Oddly enough, he's right. Integer operations *are* way faster on most CPUs. Maybe not on a modern x86 CPU working in SSE space, but they're not "most CPU's".
If you're writing code for a fixed-point DSP chip (used in most home receivers) the majority of RISC processors (ARM, MIPS, most Power) or any microcontroller, working in integer space will be much faster since floating point has to be emulated or issued to a separate floating point unit which requires extra overhead to move data to/from it.
And the same engineers who target code to those systems also tend to use Matlab. Many systems (control systems, audio/video codecs, whatnot) are simulated in Matlab before they're even written for their target processor, where you can do things like verify the algorithm up front, then specify an arbitrary number of bits at different stages to find out how much error it introduces so you can pick your data types in your target.
Matlab with 32-bit integers (or 64 bit floats + rounding, for 53 bits) is good enough for simulating most 16 bit DSPs (40 bit accumulator, usually) but not quite enough for a 24 bit DSP (56 bit accumulator, usually). Having pure 64 bit integer support means you're good for 24 bitters.
Now, knowing Matlab, I wouldn't be surprised if they emulate integers somehow using floating point ;)
Mine came from Nu Horizons, an electronic component distributor - http://www.nuhorizons.com/ - part # is 003-RD0004.
They're out of stock, but they seem to allow qty. 1 orders with a 2 week manufacturer lead time - you can try ordering one and see what happens.
However looking at Globalscale's site, it looks like they've now depreciated the openrd-client and openrd-base, and now have the "openrd-ultimate" which has a PCIe slot sticking out of it where the SD card slot used to be, and a MicroSD slot added by the audio connectors. Nu Horizons might sell that instead, but I can't find it.
I have a Marvell openrd-client. This thing has the guts of a Sheevaplug except it comes in a fancier case, uses a separate wall wart, has onboard video, more peripherals and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive inside.
I've got a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive poked inside and Debian Linux installed, and it acts as a file server, music server, torrent downloader, etc. Pulls about 8 watts from the wall, though I've got video disabled, second ethernet disabled, etc. Couldn't be happier with the thing.
I agree with you on one thing; I'm not about to go out and buy an overpriced box of chocolates, flowers, and a teddy bear that'll get thrown out the following week. I'm 100% against the peddling of stupid chinese-made pink-colored shit, stuff that's gonna die (cut flowers), etc.
But what's wrong with taking the occasion to go out to a nice local restaurant you haven't been to in a while, having a few drinks and having a little fun with your lady? It's enjoyable for both of ya. God forbid it's "conformist" or something.
Brute-forcing DES doesn't require any creative algorithm to be run in parallel. You have 2^56 possible keys, split them amongst 2^n crackers and each cracker has to process 2^(56-n) keys. Not too hard.
And loading an array of DES cracker cores onto an array of chips isn't novel either, ie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker (using ASICs)
http://www.copacobana.org/ (using FPGAs)
Linux is seriously one of the best things to happen to the embedded design market. I'd describe it as "a big pile of work that's already done for you, for free".
We've currently working on a project which uses a NXP LPC32xx ARM9 processor. NXP themselves wrote a pile of supporting code for the processor's peripherals and contributed it to the kernel - doing this work lets them say "hey, our chip runs Linux" and makes the chip much more attractive to their customers. Like us; we decided the chip had the right set of peripherals and price for our application, and we were planning on running Linux anyway, so it was a perfect fit.
So we built our board and started verification. Most things worked right out of the box, except for Ethernet; after fighting for a couple of days with it, we found a bug in NXP's code which didn't work with our PHY configuration, which we fixed and now it's working great. Kernel patch is on the way, which should hopefully save the next guy some work.
End result? NXP's happy because they're selling their chips, and we're happy because we're selling our products. And Linux improves in the process. What's not to love?
A nation's electrical infrastructure is everywhere and largely unguarded - there's really nothing stopping a single, determined individual from doing an extreme amount of *physical* damage to a power company via sabotage.
Theoretically, there's no reason I can't:
- Sneak into the woods with a gas angle grinder and start cutting guy wires on hydro towers. Cut down a few >300KV lines feeding a city and they'll have no power for days.
- Break into unmanned substations and open oil drains on transformers. Or shoot a hole in a transformer with a high caliber rifle for the same effect - oil spill, destroyed transformer, easily a week of no electrical service.
- You probably can't do much to a power station directly (lots of staff, security, etc) but there's plenty of other things. Sabotage a rail line feeding a coal power station, a pipeline feeding a natural gas station, an oil tank at a oil station, etc. Or the power lines exiting them.
Get a large, determined group of people doing this, and you've got a big problem. Especially since we depend on electricity so much nowadays for day-to-day things - phones (who owns a corded phone anymore?), light, refrigeration, heating, etc. You can secure a power company system against "cyber-attacks" by keeping the damn thing off the internet - but good luck securing the physical power grid, since it's so big.
The solution to all of this?
- Intelligence, and
- Not pissing the fucking world off such that they *want* to do this shit. (Yeah, cliche, whatever.)
I can personally recommend the following:
- Any of the IMAX 3D science/nature films. It's 3D because it was filmed in 3D, not because the director wants you ducking shit.
- "Up", the recent kids movie. I saw this one in 3D a while ago, and I must say, it was tastefully done.
But yes, most directors use 3D as an effect instead of a canvas, and the results are horribly annoying.
It's like CGI; there's a few directors who know how to use it well and tastefully (Terminator 2's T1000 being the ultimate example of good CGI), and then there's MICHAELBAYSPLOSIONS!!!111...
Nobody would be able to record anything off the analog outputs with this incredible, high-tech, unbreakable copy-protection technology... wouldn't they?
GFCI's are fast - they're required to interrupt current within a fraction of an AC cycle. The effect of this is that you only get a "pulsed DC" shock, which is a whole lot better than several cycles of AC you'd ordinarily get which can do bad things like introduce irregular heart rhythms.
My uncle is a retired electrician, and is about as old-school as you'd get. To test if a wire was live, he'd carefully touch it with the tip of his finger - if he got a small shock, he knew there was AC present. One time he demonstrated to me how a GFCI works by jamming a flat-head screwdriver into the hot side of the outlet and touching the screwdriver shaft with his finger. The outlet tripped and he didn't even flinch. Since then, I've been sold on the things.
Anyway, I'm also an EE, and I've designed a few pieces of equipment that plug into 120V and had to be certified for CSA/UL/whatnot. There's two classes of device.
- 120V, 2-prong devices (Class II) have to be double insulated and pass a hi-pot test between the AC input and any secondary electrical connectors, or metal surfaces, on the device. These don't operate without a ground, so they're obviously safe if they're plugged into a 3-prong-yet-ungrounded outlet.
- 120V, 3-prong devices (Class I) require that their chassis is connected to electrical earth ground. Double insulation isn't required and no hi-pot is required. Assuming that the earth ground is OK, Class I devices are very safe. But remove the earth ground and weird things start to happen.
First of all, most class I devices have Y capacitors between hot/neutral and ground to shunt conducted EMI. Assuming these are equal value, neutral is grounded at the panel and there's no other current paths (connections between the equipment and other grounds, etc) they act as a capacitive divider and will cause the chassis to float at 60VAC. The impedance behind this 60VAC is quite high, but it is capacitive - if you touch the case at just the right moment, you'll effectively have a 85VDC-charged capacitor in the 1-10nF range discharged into you. This likely won't hurt you, but you will get a tingle.
Also, if the device is a PC and you start plugging other peripherals in it, they'll get the same "shock". Fortunately most connectors (D-subs, USB, etc) connect their grounds before connecting any signal lines so the chassis ground carries the current, and Ethernet provides galvanic isolation which protects that, but there's a chance you'll fry your peripherals and/or PC if it's grounded wrong.
A GFCI won't correct this. It'll protect you from a bad shock, but that's pretty much it.
In summary, if your device has a ground pin, MAKE SURE IT'S GROUNDED.
I'll fess up. I've got a SD card in my Wii with old NES games, and I run Homebrew Channel and FCE Ultra on my Wii.
Mind you, I own most of the games (SMB games, Mega Man games, TMNT2, etc) on NES cartridges. I do have an old NES, but I just can't be arsed to drag the thing out, wire it up to my TV and spend 10 minutes wiggling cartridges until they work. And I couldn't be arsed to buy games I already own on Virtual Console so I can play them again. Even though they're only $5/game, it's a principle thing.
But not everyone has a closet full of old video game equipment to use as lame justification. And Nintendo is probably losing a good bit of money because of kids telling their friends how to exploit the Wii and install FCE Ultra so that they don't have to buy the Virtual Console games. So, I kinda understand the whole anti-homebrew thing from that direction...
If you've ever been exposed to arc flash from welding or witnessing a large short circuit. you'll know that isn't the most fun thing - you get bad spots and trails in your vision, a bad headache, and eventually nausea - been there, done that. The same symptoms that the real dazzler advertises, and the same things experienced by the news reporter lady.
If the "bedazzler" doesn't have the same "eye-burning" power as an arc flash or the real dazzler, it's probably just not bright enough. And I suspect that's the case - they've got the green LEDs spread out over a much larger device than the real dazzler, which lessens the 'burn your eyes' effect. Plus, they've basically made a stupidly powerful continuous-light flashlight with sections that blink, and the blinking probably isn't even visible from the glare the device generates. The original 2M-candlepower bulb in their flashlight would probably be more effective at subduing a person.
I'm thinking a better design would involve increasing the density of the LEDs, using only green ones (best lumens/watt) and operating them at a high pulse discharge current (akin to a flash) instead of at continuous current like they're doing.
This guy is the "valley farmer" stereotype.
They live in their own world, and they like it that way. When big companies come in and start doing big company thing like, oh, installing internet... that's the big company trampling all over the little guy! So they oppose the whole thing out of principle, not because of things like "valid reasoning."
Hell, I once had a woman in the valley tell me my car was poisoning her because it had a hole in its exhaust. They're like that.