It's interesting to see the big guys getting hit with these scams..
In our medium sized single-store retail business, we've seen a huge surge in the last few years in false invoicing from companies we've never dealt with.
For example, you'll get a $424.93 invoice from Artin Technology Consulting Inc. or a $129.00 invoice from Joe's Plumbing, with an address close to where you are, but a head office/billing address out of the country or something. It may even be a real company but with an altered address to send payment to. The services appear to be normal things that you buy. I've often wondered if they dumpster dive to farm data.
We've caught our accountants almost paying the bills due to how similar they look to normal business expenses and overhead for everything from tech services to building maintenance..
They often have purchase order numbers and authorization information from a general manager or something (probably they harvested those from our website's 'contact' section, or simply called in and asked who the general manager is..).
Really all you have to do is keep a proper database of vendors and services, only send payment to addresses on file, and only add a vendor to a database when you're damn sure they're real, and you're good to go.
Weird unknown bill? Screw it, just wait 30 days until any sane company would be hunting you down trying to charge you interest. If it's a scam they probably wont bother you again.
I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player or whatever.
The tape adapters don't quite cut it, so I keep a collection of tapes on board, just for driving music. Classic rock, jazz, soul sound just fine on an old cassette. Got a perfectly fine tape deck at a garage sale for 10 bucks for recording.
Thing is, the difference between a 'good' 'metal' tape, and a 'bad' tape (usually labelled 'vocal use' or 'everyday recording'), is HUGE... For comparison, think of a cheap stereo with the eq set up badly vs an old clock radio with a towel thrown over it.
Trying to buy new good-quality tapes right now doesn't seem easy, I've tried... so I'd probably end up buying a few of these cassettes.
So, there is my use case.
Thing is, there isn't really any other!
Anyone without a special use case that would use a cassette tape for ordinary music listening where they don't have to!?
Cassettes are only used on purpose by the kind of intolerable hipster douche nozzle that should be put on a boat and relocated to some kind of island where there is no escape. Seriously, die.
Tape is fine, get a reel-to-reel rig if you really like tape, it's a fine medium. Sell your house and get a studer or something.
my condolences, but news for nerds? do nerds actually like that spandex crime fighting fantasy garbage? i thought comic book fans were more in the loser or at least the dork spectrum
From the press release, the affected phones have the following services installed:
com.adups.fota.sysoper
com.adups.fota
I'd probably check your phone to ensure those don't exist.... And it sends data to the following domains, if ya wanted to firewall or sniff it or whatever:
i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.
first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):
she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.
itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.
plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.
second time:
she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)
fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.
no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.
there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)
"You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap,"
No, you find two-stroke engines in applications where you need high power but extremely low weight. Their cheapness is simply a byproduct of their simplicity (hence, weight savings). There are plenty of applications where a 4-stroke engine simply wouldn't work because it would weigh too much (leaf blowers, chain saws, etc) or would be too bulky (mopeds, model airplanes, lawnmowers, etc). Sure their efficiency needs some work, or replacement if a viable alternative is created, but at the moment there are several applications where 4-stroke engines or battery power simply wouldn't work.
the power-to-weight ratio gap is very small these days in the 1hp+ market. engines like the honda GX25 have something like 7lbs making 1hp, perfect for a handheld blower. honda even bolts a perfectly good leaf blower to it, but they only sell it in the european market for some reason, i have no idea why they don't bring it into north america: http://www.honda.co.uk/lawn-an...
it's perfectly ok for a really mature peice of software to stay in a distrubution, even in a relatively unmaintained state.
you don't have to 'change' something just because new features aren't being added anymore, until the lack of a new feature prevents it from being installed on more than a few edge cases, or a substantial bug is found that makes its use unsafe.
i doubt either of these will be the case with lilo for many years.
as a slackware user myself, i have no real problem with grub and i use it on a few machines where it's advantageous, but most of my systems still boot with lilo, and i don't see any need to change them around in the near future.
even though it's like saying 'attackers with the root password for a unix system have been observed manipulating logs and deleting core system files' deserves security disclosure...
it does also bring up the old double edged sword of requiring signed firmware for devices like this. although a disgruntled admin can certainly cause serious damage, simply being able to hide malicious code at the hardware level via a remote admin interface is bad news.
their profiled "terrorists" are usually from societies that are accustomed to communicating covertly without any electronic means.
i'm not an expert in terrorism or communication, but i was a punk kid once that did bad things. even i was smart enough to know that if you were planning something big and illegal, you didn't go calling people about it, or writing it down.
do they really think that someone is going to send an email or text message saying "hit the big red button 12:30 next tuesday"? or that someone will save a map to a warehouse of deadly weapons in "the cloud" and name it "weaponsmap.jpg"?
of course they don't.
so how is this gaping hole in the intensions of the survaillance plan not being used as leverage to stop this nonsense before america goes from paranoid to total police state at the press of a button one night? are people so weak that all it would take is someone sending an encrypted message about a "serious terrorist act that would kill a lot of people" that's "intercepted" and the plot "stopped" to widen the scope of this stuff?
as someone watching this from outside the USA, it's very confusing to me
finding out our ideas are completely wrong isn't "interesting", it's a setback.
considering it's a complex set of ideas that potentially describe how the entire universe and everything in it works, isn't "incomplete" or "unfinished" is about the best we can shoot for at this point
US citizen with government intel that's illegal to spill, travels to russia where there's technically no specific law that says 'no talking about private US government stuff' (just guessing..)
instead of simply spilling the beans to the russians on the down low, they get on a computer and post it all over publically accessable internet forums which state the user's identity.
guy comes back to USA expecting not to be jailed. derp. by USA standards, this guy is an idiot for expecting that, right?
so why is this different?
it is different, of course. very much so. but exactly how it is different is fairly important to understanding the situation
but they're a machine, which makes them for the most part very easy to reverse engineer or copy by any country with a decent science program.
your analogy is broken, since we aren't talking about a hobbyist toy compared to a real machine, we're talking foreign governments (or companies) funding r&d and research into drone technology.
how about a honda civic compared to a ford mustang? (also a good analogy since the foreign product will be junk, at first, based on inappropriate chunks of existing technology from other projects, but eventually will surpass others in reliability...)
debian uses simple release engineering like unstable -> testing -> release. there are other projects that work in a similar way, freebsd is fairly similar. they have commonly done gigantic system-wide break everything for months type changes in freebsd current.
they don't need to fork to test experiental things, they just do it in unstable first. then when they can't find problems, it goes into testing. eventually testing becomes a release.
considering systemd has been in debian in an experimental capacity for nearly 3 years, i think they've done enough testing to consider it stable.
it's nothing like debian/kfreebsd, because changing to a completely different kernel is nothing like changing an init system. not to mention that debian/kfreebsd was expected to have a very long steep development curve with a very small audience, whereas systemd is something that is already proven to be a fairly stable thing. redhat has been using it by default for half a decade.
i'll never use systemd, though. not because i don't trust its stability. the way it works and is configured reminds me of DJB software. makes sense, works well enough, but is wrong on a level that is difficult to explain.
Saying the issue is pretty much totally muslims is like saying "violent pit bull attacks are pretty much totally dogs" or "christian child molesters are pretty much totally christians". Being technically true doesn't mean it's helpful (and doesn't make it less harmful)
On my internal network, I used ntp as the ntp server for my house. I put "listen interface" in the ntp.conf file, and instructed it to listen only on the 10.1.1.1 interface. yet netstat showed that ntp was still listening on *:123. It's sloppy design and sloppy coding.
I don't like cable TV, I archive my media. I have a nice media center pc I have in my living room, which is huge, loud, and consumes a ton of power, and has been in operation for a very long time, still runs first generation DDR. I don't mind old, overbuilt, reliable noisy stuff.
But I decided to put a smaller lcd tv in the bedroom... obviously my wife can't handle noise and blinkylights while she sleeps, and I couldn't handle finding a small but awesome smart tv for a good price that would play all my media formats.
Turns out the raspberry pi plus a cheap normal tv was the best way to have a zero noise, cool running, awesome media center that shreds 1080p video. It hid easily behind the TV, is powered by the USB port on the TV, so there's only one cord running to the TV - power.
Setup took minimal work, and it's been a huge benefit to our everyday lives.
I ran the main media center with a mysql server so the libraries sync, taking additional load off the raspberry pi.
Sure, "Joe" might not be able to figure that out, but i bet he could put openelec on an SD card and get it connected to his appliance NAS pretty easily?
My parents have an appliance that's similar. It'll play XVID stuff from a NAS, probably h264, but it'd probably freak if you tried to play an mkv container. It was a prepackaged black box that's expensive as the pi, but it's slow, there's no plugins, and not even close to as capable as xbmc.
And guess what, it makes freaky high pitched electronoises because it's built with chinese caps and junk, so there's no way it could live in a nice quiet bedroom. The pi is a nice board that simply morphs itself into that role as easy as a premade device, because it's open.
The previous things i've done with a pi have included building full-time car dashboards and tuning analysis systems for my vehicle projects, to avoid having to lug a laptop around. Sure, didn't NEED to build a pi into my car, but once it was done, it really belonged there. It was cheap, i could leave it on overnight and not drain my car battery, and i could SSH to my car from my living room to retrieve and analyze logs. It also kicked me in the butt and got me coding again, which was great.
These are things that small, open, low power consumption, passively cooled, and have lots of ways to connect shit really come in handy, even for someone that isn't a hardcore hobbyist.
"It seems unlikely that this lawsuit will result in a messy legal battle. The huge publicity the movie has enjoyed in the past few weeks will virtually guarantee decent sales for Sony, even without lucrative box office revenues. Yoon Mi-rae should not only be able to secure a piece of that but also raise her profile in a way that would not have been possible had Sony paid her in the first instance."
although a near impossibility, i like to have faith that on some level everything will work out for us, and that a future incarnation of what we've grown into will witness the final years of the universe, rather than just being a bunch of coincidental meat sacks that will instantly die out when something random smacks into our planet, or a bunch of space fleas that jump around to various planets in our solar system to survive until we witness the death of our sun, and that's the end.
that stupid impossible thought, that what we're doing here today could have some eventual influence on how eternity on the scale of the universe plays out, drives me to learn and understand as much as i can in my life.
i hope that's a driving force for some of the people that design these space probes and experiments too
or it's possible i've just read too much asimov, whichever
the entire build for amd64 and x86 has moved to the llvm compiler and clang
this is a gigantic plus in the long run, llvm/clang is a great project, and having such a widely used operating system out in the wild relying on it will only bring good.
changing to an entirely different compiler *could* expose new and interesting problems or bugs that can't be anticipated until the code is run by the masses in all different environments. this could be stuff that's very hard to find during release candidate testing.
for that reason, the 10.x series is one release i'd probably wait a good long while before installing on any of my own systems...
oh dear god dont write over the protected area!...
it's used for some specialized keys for some rarely used version of DRM. so if you have a CPRM "protected" file on the sd card, then.. you know.... "accidently" give the file to someone else, they'll lack the decryption keys (since they're stored outside of the filesystem by the program that wrote the file to the flash card) and the file will be useless.
it's another one of those things that attempts to relabel yet another "generic binary storage device" as a "specialized media holder to assist content protection", and you should actually go out of your way to destroy this "protected area" instead of carefully avoiding damage to it.
it's totally safe to write over this "protected area" and use it for your own data, and it's rare to run into programs that actually use CPRM for protection against distribution (although they probably do exist, why would you use such a thing?).
that's probably why you've never heard of it or noticed writing over it.
it hasn't come up yet, but im pretty sure if someone (including the voices in my head) said 'kill a bunch of people in this room without using guns or knives' i'd figure out an effective way to do it pretty quickly.
that's ignoring the fact that this gun detector is circumvented by maximum rounds fired per however long it takes the cops to get there. i realize they know this too, but since you can kill a hell of a lot of people with automatic weapons in a few minutes, someone truly dedicated to shooting up a school is going to make a game of it now.
the pi isn't that useful in itself, but it's great inspiration once you pick a device, say 'this should have a little computer in it', and go from there
i bought mine as a 'spare cheap linux thingie', and after i did the usual nerdy tweaks and patches and automating maintainance junk that i always do, it sat there powered up for years not doing any good. i couldn't even run it as a time server (my initial plan) since i found it didn't have an RTC and i didnt' care to install one
then i got the idea to build it into my car to do "something". i didn't really know what. music?
regular car pcs aren't that interesting, but what the hell. i got a 12v to 5v power supply, got wireless working on it so i could manage it from my living room, and mounted it in my glove compartment.
it ended up inspiring a chain of r&d packed with scope creep and overengineering that burned off many hundreds of hours of my boredom time:
- dissecting how the serial datastream from my car's ecm worked - learning about raw ftdi commands and eventually resigning myself to learing libftdi - writing a toolkit to manage the datastream in c - make the entire thing threaded and modular and have tons of crazy debugging and error checking features - learn how github works, just for a change over my other revision control choices - develop my own retarded configuration file format so it could be hacked to work with other cars (why? i have no idea) - trying to achieve the maximum throughput of requests/responses - hacking together a little ncurses dashboard of various engine parameters - writing a standardized datalogging interface that logged everything, all the time - interfacing it with analog signals to get more data (wideband o2 sensor input) - writing a decent datalog analyzer program to make use of the data to better tune the car, to the point of where i could just execute a binary and get new more accurate fueling tables handed to me
if it wasn't for the pi, i never would have learned about all that junk in such detail, and my car wouldn't run so well!
it was full of challenges, limited usb ports, hacking the usb ports so the wireless adaptor wouldn't overload the thermal fuses, the lack of RTC meant logging timestamps could never work properly (used a 'global time index counter' type thing), etc.
i can keep going too, if i make this thing play music, i can rig it up so it becomes an inspired dj, plays slow calm tracks for crusing around, and hard fast tracks when i start driving harder.. i also plan to rig the GPIO up to my steering wheel controls to do nifty things like be able to control my idle speed with what used to be a volume control..
money well spent for sure.
if i had to hack a real car pc together, or butcher a laptop to build it into my dash, i probably wouldn't have bothered due to the initial cost and time investment. once it's there, you just can't resist hacking on it.
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It's interesting to see the big guys getting hit with these scams..
In our medium sized single-store retail business, we've seen a huge surge in the last few years in false invoicing from companies we've never dealt with.
For example, you'll get a $424.93 invoice from Artin Technology Consulting Inc. or a $129.00 invoice from Joe's Plumbing, with an address close to where you are, but a head office/billing address out of the country or something. It may even be a real company but with an altered address to send payment to. The services appear to be normal things that you buy. I've often wondered if they dumpster dive to farm data.
We've caught our accountants almost paying the bills due to how similar they look to normal business expenses and overhead for everything from tech services to building maintenance..
They often have purchase order numbers and authorization information from a general manager or something (probably they harvested those from our website's 'contact' section, or simply called in and asked who the general manager is..).
Really all you have to do is keep a proper database of vendors and services, only send payment to addresses on file, and only add a vendor to a database when you're damn sure they're real, and you're good to go.
Weird unknown bill? Screw it, just wait 30 days until any sane company would be hunting you down trying to charge you interest. If it's a scam they probably wont bother you again.
I would buy high end cassettes.
I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player or whatever.
The tape adapters don't quite cut it, so I keep a collection of tapes on board, just for driving music. Classic rock, jazz, soul sound just fine on an old cassette. Got a perfectly fine tape deck at a garage sale for 10 bucks for recording.
Thing is, the difference between a 'good' 'metal' tape, and a 'bad' tape (usually labelled 'vocal use' or 'everyday recording'), is HUGE... For comparison, think of a cheap stereo with the eq set up badly vs an old clock radio with a towel thrown over it.
Trying to buy new good-quality tapes right now doesn't seem easy, I've tried... so I'd probably end up buying a few of these cassettes.
So, there is my use case.
Thing is, there isn't really any other!
Anyone without a special use case that would use a cassette tape for ordinary music listening where they don't have to!?
Cassettes are only used on purpose by the kind of intolerable hipster douche nozzle that should be put on a boat and relocated to some kind of island where there is no escape. Seriously, die.
Tape is fine, get a reel-to-reel rig if you really like tape, it's a fine medium. Sell your house and get a studer or something.
my condolences, but news for nerds? do nerds actually like that spandex crime fighting fantasy garbage? i thought comic book fans were more in the loser or at least the dork spectrum
From the press release, the affected phones have the following services installed:
com.adups.fota.sysoper
com.adups.fota
I'd probably check your phone to ensure those don't exist. ... And it sends data to the following domains, if ya wanted to firewall or sniff it or whatever:
bigdata.adups.com (primary)
bigdata.adsunflower.com
bigdata.adfuture.cn
bigdata.advmob.cn
i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.
first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):
she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.
itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.
plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.
second time:
she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)
fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.
no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.
there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)
"You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap,"
No, you find two-stroke engines in applications where you need high power but extremely low weight. Their cheapness is simply a byproduct of their simplicity (hence, weight savings). There are plenty of applications where a 4-stroke engine simply wouldn't work because it would weigh too much (leaf blowers, chain saws, etc) or would be too bulky (mopeds, model airplanes, lawnmowers, etc). Sure their efficiency needs some work, or replacement if a viable alternative is created, but at the moment there are several applications where 4-stroke engines or battery power simply wouldn't work.
the power-to-weight ratio gap is very small these days in the 1hp+ market. engines like the honda GX25 have something like 7lbs making 1hp, perfect for a handheld blower. honda even bolts a perfectly good leaf blower to it, but they only sell it in the european market for some reason, i have no idea why they don't bring it into north america: http://www.honda.co.uk/lawn-an...
it's perfectly ok for a really mature peice of software to stay in a distrubution, even in a relatively unmaintained state.
you don't have to 'change' something just because new features aren't being added anymore, until the lack of a new feature prevents it from being installed on more than a few edge cases, or a substantial bug is found that makes its use unsafe.
i doubt either of these will be the case with lilo for many years.
.. of slackware people.
as a slackware user myself, i have no real problem with grub and i use it on a few machines where it's advantageous, but most of my systems still boot with lilo, and i don't see any need to change them around in the near future.
even though it's like saying 'attackers with the root password for a unix system have been observed manipulating logs and deleting core system files' deserves security disclosure...
it does also bring up the old double edged sword of requiring signed firmware for devices like this. although a disgruntled admin can certainly cause serious damage, simply being able to hide malicious code at the hardware level via a remote admin interface is bad news.
their profiled "terrorists" are usually from societies that are accustomed to communicating covertly without any electronic means.
i'm not an expert in terrorism or communication, but i was a punk kid once that did bad things. even i was smart enough to know that if you were planning something big and illegal, you didn't go calling people about it, or writing it down.
do they really think that someone is going to send an email or text message saying "hit the big red button 12:30 next tuesday"? or that someone will save a map to a warehouse of deadly weapons in "the cloud" and name it "weaponsmap.jpg"?
of course they don't.
so how is this gaping hole in the intensions of the survaillance plan not being used as leverage to stop this nonsense before america goes from paranoid to total police state at the press of a button one night? are people so weak that all it would take is someone sending an encrypted message about a "serious terrorist act that would kill a lot of people" that's "intercepted" and the plot "stopped" to widen the scope of this stuff?
as someone watching this from outside the USA, it's very confusing to me
....pretty sure being right allows us to advance more quickly
finding out our ideas are completely wrong isn't "interesting", it's a setback.
considering it's a complex set of ideas that potentially describe how the entire universe and everything in it works, isn't "incomplete" or "unfinished" is about the best we can shoot for at this point
US citizen with government intel that's illegal to spill, travels to russia where there's technically no specific law that says 'no talking about private US government stuff' (just guessing..)
instead of simply spilling the beans to the russians on the down low, they get on a computer and post it all over publically accessable internet forums which state the user's identity.
guy comes back to USA expecting not to be jailed. derp. by USA standards, this guy is an idiot for expecting that, right?
so why is this different?
it is different, of course. very much so. but exactly how it is different is fairly important to understanding the situation
but they're a machine, which makes them for the most part very easy to reverse engineer or copy by any country with a decent science program.
your analogy is broken, since we aren't talking about a hobbyist toy compared to a real machine, we're talking foreign governments (or companies) funding r&d and research into drone technology.
how about a honda civic compared to a ford mustang? (also a good analogy since the foreign product will be junk, at first, based on inappropriate chunks of existing technology from other projects, but eventually will surpass others in reliability...)
debian uses simple release engineering like unstable -> testing -> release. there are other projects that work in a similar way, freebsd is fairly similar. they have commonly done gigantic system-wide break everything for months type changes in freebsd current.
they don't need to fork to test experiental things, they just do it in unstable first. then when they can't find problems, it goes into testing. eventually testing becomes a release.
considering systemd has been in debian in an experimental capacity for nearly 3 years, i think they've done enough testing to consider it stable.
it's nothing like debian/kfreebsd, because changing to a completely different kernel is nothing like changing an init system. not to mention that debian/kfreebsd was expected to have a very long steep development curve with a very small audience, whereas systemd is something that is already proven to be a fairly stable thing. redhat has been using it by default for half a decade.
i'll never use systemd, though. not because i don't trust its stability. the way it works and is configured reminds me of DJB software. makes sense, works well enough, but is wrong on a level that is difficult to explain.
Saying the issue is pretty much totally muslims is like saying "violent pit bull attacks are pretty much totally dogs" or "christian child molesters are pretty much totally christians". Being technically true doesn't mean it's helpful (and doesn't make it less harmful)
On my internal network, I used ntp as the ntp server for my house. I put "listen interface" in the ntp.conf file, and instructed it to listen only on the 10.1.1.1 interface. yet netstat showed that ntp was still listening on *:123. It's sloppy design and sloppy coding.
interface ignore wildcard
I can be a joe computer user,
I don't like cable TV, I archive my media. I have a nice media center pc I have in my living room, which is huge, loud, and consumes a ton of power, and has been in operation for a very long time, still runs first generation DDR. I don't mind old, overbuilt, reliable noisy stuff.
But I decided to put a smaller lcd tv in the bedroom... obviously my wife can't handle noise and blinkylights while she sleeps, and I couldn't handle finding a small but awesome smart tv for a good price that would play all my media formats.
Turns out the raspberry pi plus a cheap normal tv was the best way to have a zero noise, cool running, awesome media center that shreds 1080p video. It hid easily behind the TV, is powered by the USB port on the TV, so there's only one cord running to the TV - power.
Setup took minimal work, and it's been a huge benefit to our everyday lives.
I ran the main media center with a mysql server so the libraries sync, taking additional load off the raspberry pi.
Sure, "Joe" might not be able to figure that out, but i bet he could put openelec on an SD card and get it connected to his appliance NAS pretty easily?
My parents have an appliance that's similar. It'll play XVID stuff from a NAS, probably h264, but it'd probably freak if you tried to play an mkv container. It was a prepackaged black box that's expensive as the pi, but it's slow, there's no plugins, and not even close to as capable as xbmc.
And guess what, it makes freaky high pitched electronoises because it's built with chinese caps and junk, so there's no way it could live in a nice quiet bedroom. The pi is a nice board that simply morphs itself into that role as easy as a premade device, because it's open.
The previous things i've done with a pi have included building full-time car dashboards and tuning analysis systems for my vehicle projects, to avoid having to lug a laptop around. Sure, didn't NEED to build a pi into my car, but once it was done, it really belonged there. It was cheap, i could leave it on overnight and not drain my car battery, and i could SSH to my car from my living room to retrieve and analyze logs. It also kicked me in the butt and got me coding again, which was great.
These are things that small, open, low power consumption, passively cooled, and have lots of ways to connect shit really come in handy, even for someone that isn't a hardcore hobbyist.
"It seems unlikely that this lawsuit will result in a messy legal battle. The huge publicity the movie has enjoyed in the past few weeks will virtually guarantee decent sales for Sony, even without lucrative box office revenues. Yoon Mi-rae should not only be able to secure a piece of that but also raise her profile in a way that would not have been possible had Sony paid her in the first instance."
well,
although a near impossibility, i like to have faith that on some level everything will work out for us, and that a future incarnation of what we've grown into will witness the final years of the universe, rather than just being a bunch of coincidental meat sacks that will instantly die out when something random smacks into our planet, or a bunch of space fleas that jump around to various planets in our solar system to survive until we witness the death of our sun, and that's the end.
that stupid impossible thought, that what we're doing here today could have some eventual influence on how eternity on the scale of the universe plays out, drives me to learn and understand as much as i can in my life.
i hope that's a driving force for some of the people that design these space probes and experiments too
or it's possible i've just read too much asimov, whichever
the entire build for amd64 and x86 has moved to the llvm compiler and clang
this is a gigantic plus in the long run, llvm/clang is a great project, and having such a widely used operating system out in the wild relying on it will only bring good.
changing to an entirely different compiler *could* expose new and interesting problems or bugs that can't be anticipated until the code is run by the masses in all different environments. this could be stuff that's very hard to find during release candidate testing.
for that reason, the 10.x series is one release i'd probably wait a good long while before installing on any of my own systems...
oh dear god dont write over the protected area! ...
it's used for some specialized keys for some rarely used version of DRM. so if you have a CPRM "protected" file on the sd card, then.. you know.... "accidently" give the file to someone else, they'll lack the decryption keys (since they're stored outside of the filesystem by the program that wrote the file to the flash card) and the file will be useless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
it's another one of those things that attempts to relabel yet another "generic binary storage device" as a "specialized media holder to assist content protection", and you should actually go out of your way to destroy this "protected area" instead of carefully avoiding damage to it.
it's totally safe to write over this "protected area" and use it for your own data, and it's rare to run into programs that actually use CPRM for protection against distribution (although they probably do exist, why would you use such a thing?).
that's probably why you've never heard of it or noticed writing over it.
it hasn't come up yet, but im pretty sure if someone (including the voices in my head) said 'kill a bunch of people in this room without using guns or knives' i'd figure out an effective way to do it pretty quickly.
that's ignoring the fact that this gun detector is circumvented by maximum rounds fired per however long it takes the cops to get there. i realize they know this too, but since you can kill a hell of a lot of people with automatic weapons in a few minutes, someone truly dedicated to shooting up a school is going to make a game of it now.
oh and the screen was on special for $20 on amazon as a 'backup camera'. it ended up only being good enough for ncurses with a big ugly font.
there's a picture on here.
http://fbodytech.com/aldlrpi.h...
the pi isn't that useful in itself, but it's great inspiration once you pick a device, say 'this should have a little computer in it', and go from there
i bought mine as a 'spare cheap linux thingie', and after i did the usual nerdy tweaks and patches and automating maintainance junk that i always do, it sat there powered up for years not doing any good. i couldn't even run it as a time server (my initial plan) since i found it didn't have an RTC and i didnt' care to install one
then i got the idea to build it into my car to do "something". i didn't really know what. music?
regular car pcs aren't that interesting, but what the hell. i got a 12v to 5v power supply, got wireless working on it so i could manage it from my living room, and mounted it in my glove compartment.
it ended up inspiring a chain of r&d packed with scope creep and overengineering that burned off many hundreds of hours of my boredom time:
- dissecting how the serial datastream from my car's ecm worked
- learning about raw ftdi commands and eventually resigning myself to learing libftdi
- writing a toolkit to manage the datastream in c
- make the entire thing threaded and modular and have tons of crazy debugging and error checking features
- learn how github works, just for a change over my other revision control choices
- develop my own retarded configuration file format so it could be hacked to work with other cars (why? i have no idea)
- trying to achieve the maximum throughput of requests/responses
- hacking together a little ncurses dashboard of various engine parameters
- writing a standardized datalogging interface that logged everything, all the time
- interfacing it with analog signals to get more data (wideband o2 sensor input)
- writing a decent datalog analyzer program to make use of the data to better tune the car, to the point of where i could just execute a binary and get new more accurate fueling tables handed to me
if it wasn't for the pi, i never would have learned about all that junk in such detail, and my car wouldn't run so well!
it was full of challenges, limited usb ports, hacking the usb ports so the wireless adaptor wouldn't overload the thermal fuses, the lack of RTC meant logging timestamps could never work properly (used a 'global time index counter' type thing), etc.
i can keep going too, if i make this thing play music, i can rig it up so it becomes an inspired dj, plays slow calm tracks for crusing around, and hard fast tracks when i start driving harder.. i also plan to rig the GPIO up to my steering wheel controls to do nifty things like be able to control my idle speed with what used to be a volume control..
money well spent for sure.
if i had to hack a real car pc together, or butcher a laptop to build it into my dash, i probably wouldn't have bothered due to the initial cost and time investment. once it's there, you just can't resist hacking on it.