When I've lost the drive electronics once, I just swapped the drive's circuit board with an identical one. Usually a few screws on the bottom come off, and voila!
The trick is finding an IDENTICAL drive to swap boards with. I was lucky that I bought several drives at once with identical revisions and close serial numbers. But, it might be worth a try.
It would be quite easy to configure the kernel build process for several machines to each make a.o file, and them send them to a master machine for a final link.
If the end goal of this was to just compile kernels fast, you would be right. These numbers were posted because everybody knows how fast their kernel compiles. If someone posts TPC-H or SpecWeb99 numbers, no one notices. Normal people can say, "Wow, that is fast!"
Linux has booted on the Sequent NUMA-Q stuff for a while. Martin was the one who first added the support. 2.5 is adding things like Pat Gaughen's discontig-mem and the ability to bind tasks to a single quad for scheduling, and memory allocation. Basically, the kernel support is very good, and very stable; I use these machines every day.
They do take a good bit of time to boot. In fact, it makes me much more careful when booting new kernels on them because if I screw up, I've got to wait 5 minutes, or so, for it to boot again! But, they do boot a lot faster when you run them as a single quad and turn off the detection of other quads.
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10).
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
I have D-Link DI-713, which has been replaced with the DI-714. It has a built in RS-232 port so that you can
set the box's IP, or change the admin password.
But, you can also hook an external modem up to it.
I know, I know, it's and extra box to lug around,
but I already had an extra modem to use on mine,
until I got broadband.
It works pretty well, you can set the inactivty
timeout, and everything.
What are you smoking?!? High end box DOES NOT mean your 1.2 GHz Athlon!! We're talking about machines with >8 processors here. Machines which need to use the PPro PAE so that over 4gig of memory can be addressed.
There are serious VM stability issues with these systems. Ever wonder why Redhat hasn't released a >2.4.9 kernel? It's because 2.4.10 is where the new VM system went in. Redhat is busily porting Rick van Riel's 2.4.9 VM up to the later kernels so that they can use it.
As all of us know, many large companies are putting large amounts of resources toward Linux. 2.4 will continue to be important to these companies because it is the version currently being shipped with the distributions, and will continue to be shipped for at least a year or two.
How are you going to deal with the submissions from people like IBM and SGI who are going to want to make significant changes to 2.4?
I work in IBM's Linux Technology Center. I get paid to work on the Linux kernel. Our mission is simply: "make Linux better."
I spent the first few weeks just familiarizing myself with the kernel's internals. Now, I spend my time communicating with maintainers and producing patches to fix SMP locking issues.
I'm 22 and just out of college, so these dream jobs are waiting somewhere for some of you.
You're right, I am overreacting. I see CPRM as being very dangerous.
The "secret number" is not the key. Let me explain.
The CPRM cipher algorithm is quite similar to DES. The CPRM "secret number" is analagous to the s-boxes which are used in the DES algorithm. The design of these boxes is really the core of the algorithm. In DES's case, their design is integral to making it good against differential cryptanalysis. If these boxes are not well designed the cipher is more easily broken.
Let me emphasize, the secret number is not the key!!
You're not quite right about CPRM being open. In order to get the specs, you need to have them mailed to you. This is free of charge, but you cannot download them at all.
AND, part of the cipher involves a 256 byte "secret number" which can only be obtained if you sign a license agreement. Sounds REALLY open to me.
When Minidisc first came out, there was a data version. However (get this) the audio and data disks were different and not interoperable. You can still go buy a MD Data disk, if you want, at Minidisco. However, they're $13.49 each!
I remember seeing MD data drives a LONG time ago. But I haven't seen one marketed in years. There is still no really easy way to title audio disks without buying one of the expensive decks. Bah humbug.
I opened one up on the way to the developer once. It was a long car ride and I got bored. In the one that I opened (a Kodak MAX something...) the film was 35mm, but it did not have a normal sprocket for the camera to wind it with. It was a strange shape so that normal film couldn't be wound it it, nor could the film be used in a normal camera. You actually take pictures in reverse order from normal.
In addition, in a normal camera, you wind film out of the canister, then rewind it back when you're done. In a disposable, you are actually rewinding it while you shoot each picture, it comes unwound inside the camera already.
Let me get this right: When you have a power outage, you want to make sure that you can watch your really big TV, and use your "large speaker amp"? On my UPS, (yes that is a boat battery which it uses) I only have my 2 important systems and one 13 inch monitor. That way, it can last longer. I don't need my big MP3 machine or my 19 in. monitor running when the power goes out, I only need to be able to safely shut the important machines down if I have to. You put the bare minimum of stuff on a UPS.
For your purposes, I recommend an old mainstay of power backups: a nuclear reactor. That way, you only have to refuel it every 20 years or so, AND you don't need a connection to the lousy power grid!
It's a much smaller download than Win32, and uses Oscar (thus probably implements the MD5 stuff).
AOL makes it available via FTP, so you can just retrieve the part that is necessary for your MD5sum. (using FTP RETR) Very quick for small parts.
You can save whatever you downloaded so that you don't have to redo the download later.
the.prc file (or some part of it) is probably what the checksum comes out of. Since it's uncompressed, there is less work to do.
I'm no lawyer, but if libfaim simply implements the downloading of the file, is that not analagous to linking to it? Isn't linking to a file or page legal?
Is there a better platform than Palm to do this on?
Because of its all in all crappy command line interface, I gave up on up2date on my machines that don't have X.
I use rhup, a free (you don't get charged ten bucks to use it) utility to download updates for you.
My first reaction to this is: Oh no, not another
portable storage medium! We already have SmartMedia, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick.
But, this gets the distinction of being independent from all of those, if a computer has a USB port and the right software, it can read it! The only bad part is that the USB port on 95% of the computers I have seen is hidden away, not accessible like a floppy.
<TONGUE IN CHEEK>
This is yet another demonstration of how broadband is like a drug. The more of it you get, the more of it you want. For instance, all of those slow AOL users don't want any more. But give them one hit of cable modem, and they go nuts.
You get 2 MEGABYTES/sec!!!!!! AND you want more!!!! My suggestion: stop now while you still can, broadband almost has you in its clutches. Once it gets hold, it never lets go. Run, run for your life, run while you still can. </TONGUE IN CHEEK>
The only way to really guarantee that you'll have a permanent email address is to do it yourself. There are plenty of ways to do this. I used Granite Canyon to do my DNS for a while. It is completely free.
You can also find people who will forward email for entire domains for cheap or free. If you register your domain with Your Name Free you can get free forwarding.
Or, you can do what I do now: Run your own sendmail box. I handle all of my domain's email. I never have to worry about it breaking, because I know that I can fix it. I also have no one else to blame beside myself.
Most of the retrieval methods that you could possibly try involve fooling the MD into writing a new table of contents (TOC).
The trick is to record a 74 minute track on another disc, then eject it without the recorder knowing. This is the tricky part. It usually involves the MD's service mode, or a screwdriver.
After you have that disc out, you put your previously screwed one in. You pretend to make a small change, such as a track marker, and then get the recorder to write another TOC by stopping it or trying to eject it.
If the bad disc was fragmented at all, you're screwed unless you like piecing track parts back together.
As a previous poster said, check out minidisc.org for more specific info. They will probably have the information about service mode for your MD device.
For short term portable listening, I think it is pretty dead. MP3 players are lighter, easier to load music onto and there are lots of them to choose from. The only problem is that the media costs a lot. If you want to listen to a lot of different music, you either spend a lot of money on media, or you copy the music often. For the common/.er copying often is just fine. However, not everyone sits down at their PC several times a day. That is one thing that keeps it alive, no need for a PC.
The thing I love about my MZ-R90 is being able to take my player on a trip with a handful of discs and know that I'll be entertained the whole time. I'm not entertained for more than a few hours with 32 or 64MB of MP3s. My rechargeable NiMH battery lasts at least 12 hours, and I have two, so battery life has never been an issue for me.
The thing that has kept me buying Minidisc equipment has been the superb portable recording ability. There is nothing which is so small which can record for so long and sound so good. It is great for recording all kinds of live music. My only complaint is switching discs. But that time is lower now because my player can begin recording before the disc is even spinning.
Finally, there's always a lot of activity at minidisc.org.
Slashdot Mirror
When I've lost the drive electronics once, I just swapped the drive's circuit board with an identical one. Usually a few screws on the bottom come off, and voila!
The trick is finding an IDENTICAL drive to swap boards with. I was lucky that I bought several drives at once with identical revisions and close serial numbers. But, it might be worth a try.
It would be quite easy to configure the kernel build process for several machines to each make a .o file, and them send them to a master machine for a final link.
If the end goal of this was to just compile kernels fast, you would be right. These numbers were posted because everybody knows how fast their kernel compiles. If someone posts TPC-H or SpecWeb99 numbers, no one notices. Normal people can say, "Wow, that is fast!"
it is in 2.5.
Linux has booted on the Sequent NUMA-Q stuff for a while. Martin was the one who first added the support. 2.5 is adding things like Pat Gaughen's discontig-mem and the ability to bind tasks to a single quad for scheduling, and memory allocation. Basically, the kernel support is very good, and very stable; I use these machines every day.
Seriously, I wonder how long it takes to boot.
They do take a good bit of time to boot. In fact, it makes me much more careful when booting new kernels on them because if I screw up, I've got to wait 5 minutes, or so, for it to boot again! But, they do boot a lot faster when you run them as a single quad and turn off the detection of other quads.
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10).
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
Wait a minute... Isn't Sparc Big-Endian too?
I have D-Link DI-713, which has been replaced with the DI-714. It has a built in RS-232 port so that you can set the box's IP, or change the admin password. But, you can also hook an external modem up to it.
I know, I know, it's and extra box to lug around, but I already had an extra modem to use on mine, until I got broadband.
It works pretty well, you can set the inactivty timeout, and everything.
What are you smoking?!? High end box DOES NOT mean your 1.2 GHz Athlon!! We're talking about machines with >8 processors here. Machines which need to use the PPro PAE so that over 4gig of memory can be addressed.
There are serious VM stability issues with these systems. Ever wonder why Redhat hasn't released a >2.4.9 kernel? It's because 2.4.10 is where the new VM system went in. Redhat is busily porting Rick van Riel's 2.4.9 VM up to the later kernels so that they can use it.
As all of us know, many large companies are putting large amounts of resources toward Linux. 2.4 will continue to be important to these companies because it is the version currently being shipped with the distributions, and will continue to be shipped for at least a year or two.
How are you going to deal with the submissions from people like IBM and SGI who are going to want to make significant changes to 2.4?
I work in IBM's Linux Technology Center. I get paid to work on the Linux kernel. Our mission is simply: "make Linux better."
I spent the first few weeks just familiarizing myself with the kernel's internals. Now, I spend my time communicating with maintainers and producing patches to fix SMP locking issues.
I'm 22 and just out of college, so these dream jobs are waiting somewhere for some of you.
You're right, I am overreacting. I see CPRM as being very dangerous.
The "secret number" is not the key. Let me explain.
The CPRM cipher algorithm is quite similar to DES. The CPRM "secret number" is analagous to the s-boxes which are used in the DES algorithm. The design of these boxes is really the core of the algorithm. In DES's case, their design is integral to making it good against differential cryptanalysis. If these boxes are not well designed the cipher is more easily broken.
Let me emphasize, the secret number is not the key!!
P.S. I looked on Google for differential cryptananlysis, but it came back with squat. I read about it in Security in Computing, by Charles Pfleeger.
You're not quite right about CPRM being open. In order to get the specs, you need to have them mailed to you. This is free of charge, but you cannot download them at all.
AND, part of the cipher involves a 256 byte "secret number" which can only be obtained if you sign a license agreement. Sounds REALLY open to me.
What is a dissuasion fee, and why is the lawyer asking for one?
When Minidisc first came out, there was a data version. However (get this) the audio and data disks were different and not interoperable. You can still go buy a MD Data disk, if you want, at Minidisco. However, they're $13.49 each!
I remember seeing MD data drives a LONG time ago. But I haven't seen one marketed in years. There is still no really easy way to title audio disks without buying one of the expensive decks. Bah humbug.
I opened one up on the way to the developer once. It was a long car ride and I got bored. In the one that I opened (a Kodak MAX something...) the film was 35mm, but it did not have a normal sprocket for the camera to wind it with. It was a strange shape so that normal film couldn't be wound it it, nor could the film be used in a normal camera. You actually take pictures in reverse order from normal.
In addition, in a normal camera, you wind film out of the canister, then rewind it back when you're done. In a disposable, you are actually rewinding it while you shoot each picture, it comes unwound inside the camera already.
Here is a bit of information about reusing disposable wide angle cameras.
Let me get this right: When you have a power outage, you want to make sure that you can watch your really big TV, and use your "large speaker amp"? On my UPS, (yes that is a boat battery which it uses) I only have my 2 important systems and one 13 inch monitor. That way, it can last longer. I don't need my big MP3 machine or my 19 in. monitor running when the power goes out, I only need to be able to safely shut the important machines down if I have to. You put the bare minimum of stuff on a UPS.
For your purposes, I recommend an old mainstay of power backups: a nuclear reactor. That way, you only have to refuel it every 20 years or so, AND you don't need a connection to the lousy power grid!
A perpetual motion machine, to sit next to my cold fusion reactor.
- It's a much smaller download than Win32, and uses Oscar (thus probably implements the MD5 stuff).
- AOL makes it available via FTP, so you can just retrieve the part that is necessary for your MD5sum. (using FTP RETR) Very quick for small parts.
- You can save whatever you downloaded so that you don't have to redo the download later.
- the
.prc file (or some part of it) is probably what the checksum comes out of. Since it's uncompressed, there is less work to do.
I'm no lawyer, but if libfaim simply implements the downloading of the file, is that not analagous to linking to it? Isn't linking to a file or page legal?Is there a better platform than Palm to do this on?
Because of its all in all crappy command line interface, I gave up on up2date on my machines that don't have X.
I use rhup, a free (you don't get charged ten bucks to use it) utility to download updates for you.
Also, the drinking songs would get out of hand.
What do you do with a drunken coder?...
Who is going to understand the code that you wrote while drunk? You didn't comment it, you don't understand it, but it works!
My first reaction to this is: Oh no, not another portable storage medium! We already have SmartMedia, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick.
But, this gets the distinction of being independent from all of those, if a computer has a USB port and the right software, it can read it! The only bad part is that the USB port on 95% of the computers I have seen is hidden away, not accessible like a floppy.
<TONGUE IN CHEEK>
This is yet another demonstration of how broadband is like a drug. The more of it you get, the more of it you want. For instance, all of those slow AOL users don't want any more. But give them one hit of cable modem, and they go nuts.
You get 2 MEGABYTES/sec!!!!!! AND you want more!!!! My suggestion: stop now while you still can, broadband almost has you in its clutches. Once it gets hold, it never lets go. Run, run for your life, run while you still can.
</TONGUE IN CHEEK>
The only way to really guarantee that you'll have a permanent email address is to do it yourself. There are plenty of ways to do this. I used Granite Canyon to do my DNS for a while. It is completely free.
You can also find people who will forward email for entire domains for cheap or free. If you register your domain with Your Name Free you can get free forwarding.
Or, you can do what I do now: Run your own sendmail box. I handle all of my domain's email. I never have to worry about it breaking, because I know that I can fix it. I also have no one else to blame beside myself.
Most of the retrieval methods that you could possibly try involve fooling the MD into writing a new table of contents (TOC).
The trick is to record a 74 minute track on another disc, then eject it without the recorder knowing. This is the tricky part. It usually involves the MD's service mode, or a screwdriver. After you have that disc out, you put your previously screwed one in. You pretend to make a small change, such as a track marker, and then get the recorder to write another TOC by stopping it or trying to eject it.
If the bad disc was fragmented at all, you're screwed unless you like piecing track parts back together.
As a previous poster said, check out minidisc.org for more specific info. They will probably have the information about service mode for your MD device.
Let us know how this one turns out. Good luck!
For short term portable listening, I think it is pretty dead. MP3 players are lighter, easier to load music onto and there are lots of them to choose from. The only problem is that the media costs a lot. If you want to listen to a lot of different music, you either spend a lot of money on media, or you copy the music often. For the common /.er copying often is just fine. However, not everyone sits down at their PC several times a day. That is one thing that keeps it alive, no need for a PC.
The thing I love about my MZ-R90 is being able to take my player on a trip with a handful of discs and know that I'll be entertained the whole time. I'm not entertained for more than a few hours with 32 or 64MB of MP3s. My rechargeable NiMH battery lasts at least 12 hours, and I have two, so battery life has never been an issue for me.
The thing that has kept me buying Minidisc equipment has been the superb portable recording ability. There is nothing which is so small which can record for so long and sound so good. It is great for recording all kinds of live music. My only complaint is switching discs. But that time is lower now because my player can begin recording before the disc is even spinning.
Finally, there's always a lot of activity at minidisc.org.