You could possiblly detect a GPS receiver by picking up the local oscilator frequency (or frequencies in if it's a double conversion receiver) depending on how close you are and how leaky the radio circuitry is.
You could also possiblly detect the device "phoning home" to report the tracking information.
One problem could be depending on how often they want samples and how much battery life they require the device may spend most of it's time sleeping and hence almost completely radio silent.
There's plenty of netbooks that were sold with huge bezels around the screen. Whilst I don't want the netbooks to be physically bigger, I'm more than happy to pay for a screen that goes to the edges of whatever sized machine I've bought. BTW such machines do exist already, for example the HP mini 2140 crams a 10 inch screen, a standard 2.5 inch drive and even an expresscard slot into a box about the same size as an EEE 900. I just wish thier UK website offered the "HD" screen option.
Not easilly they can't. Standard IC technology basically relies on etching transistors into the surface of a damn near perfect single crystal silicon wafer. Wiring is then built up over the top of this layer of transistors
So you can't easilly build one layer of transistors on top of another. I guess you could use technology similar to that used for SOI but I strongly suspect it would be very expensive and bring little gain.
You can stack whole chips on top of each other, but afaict it's only done when space is really tight and typically on much lower power stuff than PCs use (there are some arm chips for example where you can put the ram and flash directly on top of the CPU). Remember heat is a big issue with PC CPUs.
You can write apps for nokias (at least ones with factory firmware, I belive some providers lock them down even more) with a with a self signed cert but there are some fairly major limitations on what those apps can do.
If you want to get past those limitations and do things like use the built in GPS in some phones then you will have to go through the whole devcert/approval rigmarole (unless your company is big enough to persuade symbian to hand them thier own deployment certificate)
Oh and BTW symbians basterdised version of C++ sucks.
In the UK, electric kettles are 240V/13A While you get the odd fast boil kettle that draws a full 13A most of the kettles i've seen have been lower, sometimes quite a bit lower.
Still they are usually higher than the max current that can be drawn through an american socket.
How exactly does one put a price on moon rocks? With great difficulty since afaict none has ever been sold openly so you can't really put a market value on it.
If you price it at the cost of getting more the value would be very high indeed. According to wikipedia Apollo cost "between $20 and $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars (or approximately $135 billion in 2005 dollars).". and returned "381.7 kg (841.5 lb) of rocks and other material from the Moon" If we use the 2005 dollars (which should be reasonablly close to 2009 dollars) that works out to $354 million dollers a kilo!
Of course apollo did other stuff and plain sample return missions would be cheaper but still returning stuff from the moon is not cheap.
Actually, I'd be interested in knowing how this works (assuming it's true) It's most definately true
Actually finding out how wine does 16 bit code is trickier. I've found out from the documentation that it involves something called "winevdm.exe.so" but i dunno how that binary does it. I guess it would be possible to RTFS but I don't care enough to do that.
To my knowledge 16-bit instructions aren't available in 64-bit mode, so it can't just be running it natively You can't do 16 bit real mode code under a 64 bit kernel. I'm not sure what the situation is with 16 bit protected mode code (wikipedia claims it's possible but doesn't provide a citation for that claim)
Afaict the hard part in emulation is doing it fast.
Simple interpretive emulation is pretty easy and if you only want to run apps from another CPU (rather than a whole OS) you don't need to emulate much in the way of hardware since you only have to emulate the userland environment.
If you want good performance from your emulation you have to use "dynamic recompilation", basically converting the machine code from one CPU to another in blocks and then emulating it.
x86 (remember the original intel macs were NOT x64, that came later) is widely known as a register starved architecture. PPC OTOH has plenty of registers.
I would imagine translation of code from a register poor architecture to run on a register rich architecture would be much simpler than translation of code from a register rich architecture to run on a register poor architecture.
Afaict debug is a 16 bit does tool for creating and debugging 16 bit dos apps. Since 64 bit windows doesn't support dos apps (or 16 bit windows apps for that matter) it wouldn't make much sense to include something that both is one and is a tool for working with them.
P.S. I find it amusing that wine on 64 bit linux can run 16 bit windows apps yet 64 bit windows can't.
Afaict collisions aren't much use for such things, unless you could make two apps one malicious one non-malicious that collided and somehow get the non-malicious one signed to high privilages. But if you are in a position to do that you can just get code with a hidden malicious feature signed.
Another big issue with a lot of current hash functions (at least MD5 and I think SHA1 too) is that thier block based nature means that if you can reasonablly generate two collisions of "random garbage" you can reasonablly generate two files with a prefix you choose before generating the collisions, followed by the two sets of "random garbage" followed by a suffix you choose AFTER generating the collisions.
Combine that with a carefully selected file format (IIRC it can be done with pdf) and you can make two files that have the same hash with different meaningfull content visible and no visible random garbage.
This makes "random garbage collision" attacks much worse than they would appear at first sight.
The blame does lie partly (or even mainly) on microsoft but big brand OEMs can certainly ship CDs that are bios locked but still proper install CDs. Dell does this for example (at least on thier buisness machines, I dunno what they do on thier home machines).
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors. Bigger than the low storage flash based players (flash was a lot more expensive then, a player with gigabytes of flash would have been unthinkable). But a bit smaller and a lot sleeker than things like the DAP jukebox. The UI was also pretty well designed afaict (if you are going to have a jukebox style mp3 player the interface is pretty critical).
Making a good product is all about getting things right accross the board. If your product is crap in one important area your product is crap regardless of how good it is in other areas.
Firstly all moden CPUs have thermal protection, (afaict the most recent chip you could get to go up in smoke by just removing the CPU cooler was the athlon XP and I belive some later athlon XP motherboards added additional protection circuitry to stop it happening). Afaict athlon XP systems generally didn't have motherboard controlled fans anyway (at least on desktops, I dunno about on laptops)
Secondly while a fan stopping will probablly result in overheating it will be much more gradual and much less severe than complete heatsink removal.
I'm pretty sure my Radeon doesn't have this feature, since it gets hot as hell if I let it run for too long. Just how hot is hot as hell? it's perfectly possible for a chip to be both hot enough to burn your fingers yet still within it's operating temperature range.
Running the repair tool off your install CD should fix this, or you can do a reinstall with "leave filesystem alone" option. Unfortunately a significant proportion of OEMs don't provide proper install CDs anymore:(. Afaict that started sometime arround the late win98/early winME era (I never bought a machine that came with 2K big brand OEM so I can't comment on what happened there).
In the 98/ME/2K days this wasn't such a big deal since you could just borrow a CD from someone who had a proper copy. However microsofts actions with and since the release of XP have made it much more awkward to get arround this by just borrowing a CD. Big brand OEM copies are bios locked. system builder and retail copies require activation and if you use them with a big brand OEM key you are going to have to ring MS and beg for activation. Volume license copies of XP don't have this shit but using a generated key is likely to trip up WGA and using a borrowed key on any machine you don't control puts the company it was borrowed from at risk of ending up on the WGA shitlist. With vista the no-activation-requied VLK copies have gone completely.
PNG... and we all know how well that caught on... you've probably never even heard of PNG right? png was moderately successfull. Every major browser added support for it (at least for the features of png that were also in gif, transparent truecolor png support wasn't added to IE until pretty late on) and some sites did switch to it. Still a lot of sites stayed on gif and eventually the patents expired.
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator
I'm fairly sure the video playback youtube uses is built into the flash vm. The custom stuff written in actionscript (flash's scripting language) just the interface controls etc.
Afaict actionscript is pretty slow as a programming language so writing a full video codec in it's probablly not very pracical.
The itanium port is still supported on server editions, just not on desktop editions.
Afaict the alpha and itanium ports were never supported on the same version. Alpha support ended with a win2K rc. IIRC itanium support was introduced with a late port of win2K.
I was under the impresion that the object model changed hugely from php4 to php5 so if your code was object orientated there was a large change it would be broken in a big way by php 5.
Thats just what i've heard though, i've only done relatively minor stuff in php myself (though I did make a small contribution to mediawiki).
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders. You can call it irrelevent if you like but the fact is debian has always prided itself on wide portability. Debians own stats place the arm variants somewhere in mid-field users wise. Its way behind i386 and amd64, way ahead of ia64, mips, mipsel and s390 and in the same order of magnitude as powerpc and sparc.
It seems to me that eglibc is the result of the distros who care about arm realising that given upstreams current status inserting another layer between the distros that care about arm and glibc will reduce duplicated effort and probablly improve compatibility between arm distros.
If they have a true transparent proxy then putting in another proxy will cause your traffic to hit the transparent proxy then the other proxy. A transparent proxy will generally only catch traffic targetted at port 80. So if your "other proxy" is listening on a port other than 80 you can buypass the transparent proxy.
Yeah, raise the price of everything to 20-40% over market value, so it can be offered at a 10-20% discount off the "original price". The job of the liquidators is to get as much as possible as quickly as possible for the stock being liquidated. Not to build a good reputation with customers.
So if such slimy tactics are legal in your region IMO it would be negligent of the liquidators not to use them.
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You could possiblly detect a GPS receiver by picking up the local oscilator frequency (or frequencies in if it's a double conversion receiver) depending on how close you are and how leaky the radio circuitry is.
You could also possiblly detect the device "phoning home" to report the tracking information.
One problem could be depending on how often they want samples and how much battery life they require the device may spend most of it's time sleeping and hence almost completely radio silent.
There's plenty of netbooks that were sold with huge bezels around the screen. Whilst I don't want the netbooks to be physically bigger, I'm more than happy to pay for a screen that goes to the edges of whatever sized machine I've bought.
BTW such machines do exist already, for example the HP mini 2140 crams a 10 inch screen, a standard 2.5 inch drive and even an expresscard slot into a box about the same size as an EEE 900. I just wish thier UK website offered the "HD" screen option.
Not easilly they can't. Standard IC technology basically relies on etching transistors into the surface of a damn near perfect single crystal silicon wafer. Wiring is then built up over the top of this layer of transistors
So you can't easilly build one layer of transistors on top of another. I guess you could use technology similar to that used for SOI but I strongly suspect it would be very expensive and bring little gain.
You can stack whole chips on top of each other, but afaict it's only done when space is really tight and typically on much lower power stuff than PCs use (there are some arm chips for example where you can put the ram and flash directly on top of the CPU). Remember heat is a big issue with PC CPUs.
You can write apps for nokias (at least ones with factory firmware, I belive some providers lock them down even more) with a with a self signed cert but there are some fairly major limitations on what those apps can do.
If you want to get past those limitations and do things like use the built in GPS in some phones then you will have to go through the whole devcert/approval rigmarole (unless your company is big enough to persuade symbian to hand them thier own deployment certificate)
Oh and BTW symbians basterdised version of C++ sucks.
In the UK, electric kettles are 240V/13A
While you get the odd fast boil kettle that draws a full 13A most of the kettles i've seen have been lower, sometimes quite a bit lower.
Still they are usually higher than the max current that can be drawn through an american socket.
debian:/home/plugwash# file /c/windows/system32/debug.exe /c/windows/system32/debug.exe: MS-DOS executable, MZ for MS-DOS
debian:/home/plugwash#
(the windows install is XP pro, i'm booted into linux at the moment)
Seems pretty clear to me, it's a DOS executable and it's well documented that 64 bit windows cannot run dos executables.
How exactly does one put a price on moon rocks?
With great difficulty since afaict none has ever been sold openly so you can't really put a market value on it.
If you price it at the cost of getting more the value would be very high indeed. According to wikipedia Apollo cost "between $20 and $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars (or approximately $135 billion in 2005 dollars).". and returned "381.7 kg (841.5 lb) of rocks and other material from the Moon" If we use the 2005 dollars (which should be reasonablly close to 2009 dollars) that works out to $354 million dollers a kilo!
Of course apollo did other stuff and plain sample return missions would be cheaper but still returning stuff from the moon is not cheap.
IIRC work has started on one but it isn't in a usable state yet.
One big question is what is the use for a 64-bit wine? What apps are there that have a 64-bit windows version but not a 64-bit linux version?
Actually, I'd be interested in knowing how this works (assuming it's true)
It's most definately true
Actually finding out how wine does 16 bit code is trickier. I've found out from the documentation that it involves something called "winevdm.exe.so" but i dunno how that binary does it. I guess it would be possible to RTFS but I don't care enough to do that.
To my knowledge 16-bit instructions aren't available in 64-bit mode, so it can't just be running it natively
You can't do 16 bit real mode code under a 64 bit kernel. I'm not sure what the situation is with 16 bit protected mode code (wikipedia claims it's possible but doesn't provide a citation for that claim)
Afaict the hard part in emulation is doing it fast.
Simple interpretive emulation is pretty easy and if you only want to run apps from another CPU (rather than a whole OS) you don't need to emulate much in the way of hardware since you only have to emulate the userland environment.
If you want good performance from your emulation you have to use "dynamic recompilation", basically converting the machine code from one CPU to another in blocks and then emulating it.
x86 (remember the original intel macs were NOT x64, that came later) is widely known as a register starved architecture. PPC OTOH has plenty of registers.
I would imagine translation of code from a register poor architecture to run on a register rich architecture would be much simpler than translation of code from a register rich architecture to run on a register poor architecture.
Afaict debug is a 16 bit does tool for creating and debugging 16 bit dos apps. Since 64 bit windows doesn't support dos apps (or 16 bit windows apps for that matter) it wouldn't make much sense to include something that both is one and is a tool for working with them.
P.S. I find it amusing that wine on 64 bit linux can run 16 bit windows apps yet 64 bit windows can't.
Afaict collisions aren't much use for such things, unless you could make two apps one malicious one non-malicious that collided and somehow get the non-malicious one signed to high privilages. But if you are in a position to do that you can just get code with a hidden malicious feature signed.
Another big issue with a lot of current hash functions (at least MD5 and I think SHA1 too) is that thier block based nature means that if you can reasonablly generate two collisions of "random garbage" you can reasonablly generate two files with a prefix you choose before generating the collisions, followed by the two sets of "random garbage" followed by a suffix you choose AFTER generating the collisions.
Combine that with a carefully selected file format (IIRC it can be done with pdf) and you can make two files that have the same hash with different meaningfull content visible and no visible random garbage.
This makes "random garbage collision" attacks much worse than they would appear at first sight.
The blame does lie partly (or even mainly) on microsoft but big brand OEMs can certainly ship CDs that are bios locked but still proper install CDs. Dell does this for example (at least on thier buisness machines, I dunno what they do on thier home machines).
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors.
Bigger than the low storage flash based players (flash was a lot more expensive then, a player with gigabytes of flash would have been unthinkable). But a bit smaller and a lot sleeker than things like the DAP jukebox. The UI was also pretty well designed afaict (if you are going to have a jukebox style mp3 player the interface is pretty critical).
Making a good product is all about getting things right accross the board. If your product is crap in one important area your product is crap regardless of how good it is in other areas.
Two problems with that idea
Firstly all moden CPUs have thermal protection, (afaict the most recent chip you could get to go up in smoke by just removing the CPU cooler was the athlon XP and I belive some later athlon XP motherboards added additional protection circuitry to stop it happening). Afaict athlon XP systems generally didn't have motherboard controlled fans anyway (at least on desktops, I dunno about on laptops)
Secondly while a fan stopping will probablly result in overheating it will be much more gradual and much less severe than complete heatsink removal.
I'm pretty sure my Radeon doesn't have this feature, since it gets hot as hell if I let it run for too long.
Just how hot is hot as hell? it's perfectly possible for a chip to be both hot enough to burn your fingers yet still within it's operating temperature range.
Running the repair tool off your install CD should fix this, or you can do a reinstall with "leave filesystem alone" option. :(. Afaict that started sometime arround the late win98/early winME era (I never bought a machine that came with 2K big brand OEM so I can't comment on what happened there).
Unfortunately a significant proportion of OEMs don't provide proper install CDs anymore
In the 98/ME/2K days this wasn't such a big deal since you could just borrow a CD from someone who had a proper copy. However microsofts actions with and since the release of XP have made it much more awkward to get arround this by just borrowing a CD. Big brand OEM copies are bios locked. system builder and retail copies require activation and if you use them with a big brand OEM key you are going to have to ring MS and beg for activation. Volume license copies of XP don't have this shit but using a generated key is likely to trip up WGA and using a borrowed key on any machine you don't control puts the company it was borrowed from at risk of ending up on the WGA shitlist. With vista the no-activation-requied VLK copies have gone completely.
PNG... and we all know how well that caught on... you've probably never even heard of PNG right?
png was moderately successfull. Every major browser added support for it (at least for the features of png that were also in gif, transparent truecolor png support wasn't added to IE until pretty late on) and some sites did switch to it. Still a lot of sites stayed on gif and eventually the patents expired.
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator
I'm fairly sure the video playback youtube uses is built into the flash vm. The custom stuff written in actionscript (flash's scripting language) just the interface controls etc.
Afaict actionscript is pretty slow as a programming language so writing a full video codec in it's probablly not very pracical.
Java OTOH is capable of doing a full decoder and one is indeed availible from http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/ for an example of it in use see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tupolev_Tu-95.ogg .
The itanium port is still supported on server editions, just not on desktop editions.
Afaict the alpha and itanium ports were never supported on the same version. Alpha support ended with a win2K rc. IIRC itanium support was introduced with a late port of win2K.
I was under the impresion that the object model changed hugely from php4 to php5 so if your code was object orientated there was a large change it would be broken in a big way by php 5.
Thats just what i've heard though, i've only done relatively minor stuff in php myself (though I did make a small contribution to mediawiki).
Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
You can call it irrelevent if you like but the fact is debian has always prided itself on wide portability. Debians own stats place the arm variants somewhere in mid-field users wise. Its way behind i386 and amd64, way ahead of ia64, mips, mipsel and s390 and in the same order of magnitude as powerpc and sparc.
It seems to me that eglibc is the result of the distros who care about arm realising that given upstreams current status inserting another layer between the distros that care about arm and glibc will reduce duplicated effort and probablly improve compatibility between arm distros.
If they have a true transparent proxy then putting in another proxy will cause your traffic to hit the transparent proxy then the other proxy.
A transparent proxy will generally only catch traffic targetted at port 80. So if your "other proxy" is listening on a port other than 80 you can buypass the transparent proxy.
Yeah, raise the price of everything to 20-40% over market value, so it can be offered at a 10-20% discount off the "original price".
The job of the liquidators is to get as much as possible as quickly as possible for the stock being liquidated. Not to build a good reputation with customers.
So if such slimy tactics are legal in your region IMO it would be negligent of the liquidators not to use them.