That's different though, because you did it and you own it, data included. You are still in control.
A government one would probably have rules against tampering/modifying, would be illegal to switch off and/or remove, you would not be able to decide when you want it to track you, and the data it collects would be owned by the government, to do as it wishes with (including selling it on to insurance,etc...)
I don't think many people are against tracking/telematics as a technology, more that they are weary of government application of said technology, especially once they get their foot in the door, they can later on extend it as they wish, including (potentially) dictating what the car does.
Out of curiosity? what problems did you have with virtualising Debian? I ask because we settled on virtualising all our old Debian servers (running on a Debian qemu/kvm host) and have not had a single problem with them. I've even moved to virtualising all my old servers (broken laptops mostly) into one single server at home, all worked flawlessly :).
Virtualised some Ubuntu as well, and it was also painless.
I think 1 or 2 can happen, but not 3. If the worst comes to the worst they'd get bought out eventually. As witnessed by the number of fanboys, Sony brand name still has a lot of monetary value. They also hold patents and have some good technologies (e.g. Cell processor). They earn good money in non-consumer space in specialist areas (supercomputers, embedded systems, DSP processing, etc...)
The question is will the stock go up or down before 1 and 2 apply? I honestly cannot say. Depends on how much of a loss you're willing to take, and how confident you are in judging the firms potential for future performance! :)
Good luck! (Alas, I'm not allowed to invest, so I just get to watch)
I meant it in scope of them offering it running on PC's. At that point the only place you could get an ATRAC encoder was inside the hardware (although I assume somewhere in the deepest darkest depths, they had a software implementation used for those mastered minidiscs, which probably ran on PC's). It would also make sense that after 20+ years of development, Sony would continue to use ATRAC internally, as it is theirs. If they used mp3 they would have to pay for a licence + royalties. Lame is only allowed for research purposes (officially).
ATRAC was a very good codec, one of the nicest things about it is that you its quality was encoder led. This means that improvements in encoder quality didn't break old decoders. A music file encoded with ATRAC3 (For example) actually sounded better on an ATRAC1 decoder than an ATRAC1 encode would.
Plus it was energy efficient. My old minidisc player gave me 40 hours of playback from 1 AA battery (60+ hours if I used the internal battery as well). It took a long while until mp3 players caught up with that, and they didn't have the whole issue power draw from the rotating assembly (HD-based ones excepted).
It had a lot of potential like I said, it was Sony's control-freakery and paranoia about piracy that ruined their chances.
And they already had it :) (After all, it was used in the Minidisc's already). It was their deployment of it that really messed everything up. If they made it as flexible as mp3 (multiple software encoders, published specs, etc...) they may have had some running against mp3 initially. It was for the time a very good lossy compression format, alas they didn't share, mp3 got refined (specifically thanks to the lame guys) and beat it out in quality in the end.
Instead I remember people hacking out libraries from realmedia encoder (as realplayer apparently used atrac for its audio streaming) and using those to (de|en)code atrac files on PC's. This worked ok, but without the keys needed to digitally encrypt the files prior to transfer to the minidisc (the net-MD concept they finally allowed after mp3 players had already taken off, too little too late really) it still pretty useless. The big advantage is that you could add your ATRAC files directly and have the software not transcode it for you (slowly).
My point is that Sony had some excellent hardware ideas, it was the execution from the management perspective that messed things up. I think that minidisc could have dominated had they made it as flexible as CD (or hell, they allowed people to "burn" Minidiscs on their PC), but they were so petrified of piracy, they crippled it fatally. People had to record from CD in "real time", and not surprisingly, when the first companies started the mp3-cd concept, the ability to quickly burn multiple albums on your PC to CD blew away Sony's chances.
Sony has royally shafted all their customers. Back in 1992 when minidisc came out, it could have taken the world by storm. Smaller than a tape, CD-quality sound (good enough anyway), can't scratch the disk as it in a case, recordable, even in the field!
By all intents and purposes it should have taken over from both tape and CD, but noo, Sony had to cripple it with proprietary lockouts, and even go so far to split the format in "Minidisc-data" and "minidisk-audio", and go so far as to prevent people making computer drives that could write minidisk-audio (nobody bothered with minidisc-data as a consequence).
talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sony could have owned the media market pre-mp3 (and then had the clout to sustain and perhaps embrace the mp3 revolution). Instead the blew their leg off and continued to stagger on until the late 90's.
Once again, mp3's came out, rather than embrace them they made their own lossy format (Atrac), but once again cripped it with DRM and you had to use only their windows software (sonicstage was it?) which was a POS like no other (you had to check songs in and out, and if you checked it out 3 times, that was it, you can't listen to it anymore). Buggy as hell.
So now Sony blew their other leg off, and finally adopted mp3 (long after Apple and others had left them in the dust). Panicking now, they had the wonderful idea of rootkitting your PC if you stuck a Sony CD in there, for god forbid you wanted to rip it to an mp3! They ballsed the mp3 revolution up, so now have to stop you from doing it.
Great! So now they blew an arm off as well, another arm went with the otherOS and PS3, and well.. quite frankly they've run out of limbs.
I stopped with the minidiscs, and since the rootkit fiasco refused to pay Sony (and its sister companies) a cent. Forget about the shock of their share price plummeting, I'm amazed they survived this long. I assume it was momentum they built up from a time in the 80's when they built damn good quality hifi and electrical equipment... because most smaller firms would have collapsed years ago from this level of mismanagement and micromanaged freakery.
What does Ubuntu offer? What is its unique selling point they can make money from?
The article nicely points out how Red Hat makes its money, and also says that Ubuntu will not do it that way.
So... how can Ubuntu make money? If they start charging for using the OS, surely places like Amazon etc... will just switch to another free OS, like Debian? That would require very little infra changes (e.g. I've switched between them many times). Does Ubuntu offer anything in particular that would prevent people just dumping it if they start charging?
It's all well and good saying Ubuntu should start making money from the cloud deployments, but I don't see how they can do it, unless they write some sort of proprietary Ubuntu-only extensions/software geared towards cloud management, then perhaps. However I don't see that happening either.
That's pretty cool! You could get a gun's eye view :D Does the boat actually fire? (I presume the combat bit actually involves actually firing stuff at each other?). You could have some fun implementing a ballistic calculator into it, perhaps with range estimation :)
I have so many ideas for the pi, primarily because I can risk it in environments and experiments where the magic smoke/water damage is more likely. Places where I'd never dare stick an expensive PC.
What he said! If anything this is more akin to Via's Nano-itx (at 12cmx12cm) than the rasberry pi.
The main selling point of the pi is that it is so cheap, cheap enough that you could take risks with it that you would not want to do with something costing 10x as much. Basically I see it as an experimental computer (something between a fully fledged PC and micro-controllers), something you can use to teach yourself, or stick it in difficult environments without risking a lot of money.
The Intel does not compete with it, they are in different leagues completely.
Re: So what about those of us that got locked out?
Wow that sucks... thankfully I don't really use the account anymore (the account was from 2002, so already quite old), I kept it around for the history.
Thankfully I moved away from relying on MS a long long time ago, so this doesn't affect me much, but it must really suck for those who actually use it. Perhaps this will finally push the rest of my friends off MS :)
I got locked out of my own hotmail account a few months ago, and many many attempts to get MS to reset the password were fruitless.
They kept telling me that it was my fault for having a weak password, that there was nothing wrong with their security, that someone must have seen me type it in, etc....
Plus they didn't want to reset it because I did not know the new secret word/sentence that the attacker set.
After loads of hassle I gave up (I only really had the account for historic reasons and msn, due to some people still using it), but for those who still used MS for their main account must have had a lot of problems.
So now that it turns out it was a bug, will MS finally start agreeing to reset accounts? Ideally an apology would be nice as well, but I don't think that will happen.
I wonder how long this bug has been known about... I used to remember people telling me about their hotmail getting hacked (even years ago, before gmail for example), but never knew how it was done.
Actually.. the religious nuts will probably continue to do sex the old fashioned way, especially if this is seen as "unnatural, impure, etc...". What may happen is that birthrates will fall for those who use these bots (especially if they form long term childless bonds with them), while the religious ones will continue to breed, resulting in a demographic shift towards the faithful.
How that would affect society in the future, I guess we'll see :)
Not my cup of tea personally, the thing I love most about the girls I dated is that they are their own people, with opinions, thoughts and feelings, rather than a robotic equivalent to a sycophant, but whatever tickles your tackle. Each to his own, etc....
Ah sorry about that, I had a look at the rear of the 2400 ES from your link, and you're in luck! You have both a rs232 and a sirius control port.
Now the rs232 will depend on the encoding Sony use, but if they raise any pins high you should be able to get +10V when the Amp turns on. Easiest to test each pin with a multimeter with the amp on, find one that has a signal, turn off the amp and see if it drops. If it does, then you're good to go! :)
If you're not using the "Sirius" control port (mini-din on the top left), that could be perfect. The SiriusConnect port has a pin it raises high when the amp is on (known as the "Power enable" pin). It is so that you can turn on/off the Sirius receiver with the amp.
According to the pinouts I found here: http://www.pbase.com/mrubin/image/93526001/original.jpg (sorry, I can't use tiny.cc, etc... as I'm at work, and they are blocked) pin 2 is the "Power enable" pin.
If you feel you're competent enough with electronics, give it a try. It is probably easier than guessing with the rs232 port.
So actually, modern Sony HT equipment has more options than my old stuff, lucky you! :) I can see a few other ports to try, but that is going into proper hacking territory. Better to try the above low hanging fruit first. Good luck! :)
How did they spot two worlds orbiting each other without a star?
Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that our telescopes are not powerful enough to see exoplanets on their own. They can only spot them when they pass across their star, or by the effects the planets have on their star (e.g. gravitational).
So we only observe the stars directly, and infer the planets from the star, so how do you spot planets when there is no star to observe and infer from?
Any astroboffins in the ranks who can enlighten me?
My one had an "AC out", but it was a proprietary connector (some odd cross between US and Euro sockets, I presume you needed a "Sony adapter" cable to do it properly).
It was a solid state relay rated at 110V (US I presume). You cannot feed your 220V stuff directly, but you can stick 12V down one pin, and it will activate the relay (and complete the circuit), so you can drive another 240V relay if you want.
I had all sorts of Sony AV equipment, and the AC thing was very much a home theater feature (so you could turn on all your gear with one remote). I'd be very surprised if they actually removed this from new models....
I had the same problem, but mine was rather trivial to solve, my Rotel pre-amp had a "remote out" which would put 5V out when I turn it on with the remote. I just ran a wire to a relay along the same route as the sub-woofer cables. Now when I turn on the preamp with the remote, it turns on the power amps and the sub-woofer.
Check if your AMP has a remote out equivalent, so far most Audio equipment I've owned has had it in some form or another (Rotel, Marantz, Technics and Sony). There is a tendency to have them with incompatible connectors/pins and voltages (to prevent you mixing separates I guess), but a bit of Googling you can find out the specs, and in some cases schematics for interfacing between them.
For me at least they do this nice deal, where you can get 50MB roaming data for £10, which works out to something like 20p a MB.
Still a lot (and I agree the roaming costs are outrageous for what they are) but far better than what the others offer. I got a 1 month rolling contract while touring across Europe* and the above deal was excellent (I used the roaming charges primarily for email, the odd web lookup and my GPS, as it pulls map data via a net connection if it hasn't been to an area before).
Something to consider for those of you who are on T-mobile (this is one of their booster packages, and is available on all the contracts of theirs I've used).
* Only applies to EU countries, When we drove through Switzerland for e.g, the rate was 7.98 per MB, but they send you a sms to warn you, so I just turned off my phone while there.
Assuming the motor's power requirements are the same, then having a longer wire will result in higher resistance, which will increase the heat output of the wire for a given current, no?
And a Lotus? Nice! I've always been partial to the Esprit myself, but they are expensive to get a hold of! (Plus there is an issue of space living in London, otherwise I'd love to have a little classic car collection going!)
They would have to be thicker, if you want the same overall resistance when you stick all that current down them.
Keeping all things the same, longer wires will have more resistance (is it a linear relation? I'm not sure), so if you want to keep the same overall resistance you'd need thicker wires (or better conducting metal in them).
I guess I was wrong about it being a new thing then. The oldest car I know that had the battery at the back was the BMW 8 series in the 90's (Along with the 90's Porsche 944 Turbo, but I believed that was in order to make more space in the engine bay for the turbo piping).
Out of curiosity, which classic car do you have? It would be interesting to see where the idea of sticking the battery in the back came from...
Why modern cars seem to like sticking the battery at the back? In all the older cars I've known/used the battery was as near to the engine as possible. This is due to the huge starting current required when cranking.
At 12V the wires are really thick and short. Surely sticking the battery at the back results in even thicker wires needed? (to stem the resistive losses through the increased length).
What advantage did putting the battery in the back achieve?
Will their clients do once Foxconn decides they are no longer needed, and will happily offer to do the "product positioning, marketing, sales and distribution" as well?
Will they just be shell companies while Foxconn leases the brand names? That will only work until Foxconn pushes its own brand names (or just buys them out, which at that point they would be rich enough to do).
Re: Charging on the headphone plug: not a good idea
If the jack is intelligent enough to facilitate digital communication (which here is being used for Paypal's little item) I see little reason why the charger would not supply power until properly negotiated with the phone. Till then don't put any power down the jack.
That solves all the issues you mentioned in one swoop, except the shorting of the pins of the DAC, which I've never had an issue with, but I've only put 48V down it, and low current, not 1A (an interface to the phone system that malfunctioned). I agree that this would require more intelligence in the charger. Perhaps detecting a blip in current usage and cutting power, or just have the DAC protected. Usually they should go through high-resistance isolation transformers anyway, not be directly wired to the pins.
And I hardly use any insertion force, usually they work loose due to sitting plugged in, or moved about while plugged in. Usually it is the removal, where some cables have really strong notches that cause it to fail.
Not to mention the connectors are flimsy as hell. The cynic in me thinks the deliberately make them like that so you can't have a phone work more than 2-3 years. Not to mention there are a right PITA to get the right orientation in the dark, or when fumbling in the car.
If you ask my opinion, I wish they'd bring back the old (larger) Nokia charging connectors. Those seemed to work really well, fit in any direction, don't fall out or break contact, and I never had a connector failure. Plus almost everyone made compatible connectors anyway.
Yeah, but if you read about this in detail, you will see that they mention that it uses the headphone jack of the phone.
It is true, most phone headphone sockets are longer than usual. They accept the usual thee-ring headphone jack, and also the 4-ring "hands-free" jack, which has an extra ring for microphone input.
I haven't seen the jack of this paypal addition, but I presume it uses the mic jack to send signals to the phone via some modulation. You should be able to do low-speed full duplex with this setup.
Also, headphone jacks are far more resilient than mini-usb jacks, being designed for repeated insertion/removal.
I wish they didn't standardise on the mini-usb connector for charging though. It really wasn't designed in mind for constant replugging. My last two phones gave up the ghost because the mini-usb jack broke due to repeated plugging in and out during the day for charging.
Better if they had standardised on the headphone jack for power (perhaps even longer plug, with 5 rings?) although then you could not listen to music while charging without a splitter...
Yes, Chrysler did do it in the 50's, but only after the Brits (surprise surprise ;) ). Rover did it in the 50's too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover_Company#Experimental_cars
Not only that, in the 60's they went and built a Le Mans race car out of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover-BRM
Fuel economy was an issue back then as well, but there were other issues too that made it a poor choice for road cars. The issues they had was spool spin up time, complexity of the transmission (had to use hydraulics and a variable transmission system due to the high rpm and the turbines tenancy to not want to slow down and spin up much) and hot exhaust.
Boundary layer turbines (aka, Tesla Turbines, after the guy to invented them) are more efficient than standard turbines, but I don't think they are better than IC engines at the size to fit in a car.
Also, they work best with steam or another working fluid. Running them with hot air has been experimented on by the tesla turbine building club, and so far they have either proven too heavy/complex, too poor efficiency, or have blown themselves to bits (at least from what I've read).
Not to say people are not trying, and they may well make it one day, just not yet :)
Still, if it is your dream, there are people who have stuck them in cars. It is doable, just don't expect your fuel bill to go down :)
To my knowledge turbines give poorer fuel economy than IC Engines (at least for the size you can fit in a car comfortably).
Where turbines shine is in power to weight ratio, which is important for aircraft, and they improve in efficiency the larger they are (hence why they try to stick a few big engines on aircraft, rather than many little ones).
AFAIK that is the primary reason they have not been used in cars so far. Not to mention noise limits in urban areas, really hot exhaust, and probably a few other niggles I've not thought of at the moment.
I mean, some of the tallest people I know are from some of the hottest climes, particularly Africa. I always thought being larger helps in hot climates due to increased surface area for cooling.
Also, humans seem to be getting taller with time, statistically speaking. I believe the average height in the UK has been increasing for centuries now ( I cannot for the life of me remember where the status for this came from, but I do remember reading about it).
Then again, they are talking size in weight. I can imagine humans getting lighter, as they need less fat to keep warm, etc... Those Africans I mentioned were tall, but very lean.
It takes nowhere near the same amount of space. Yes, the top sticks out a bit, but underneath is a lot of space. I can either put stuff under the tray, or just have it hang out the side of the desk, facing the wall. As most of the weight is still on the mini-tower like box, this is a very stable arrangement. It also frees up more desk space for my monitor and other office-things I use on a day to day basis.
I could not stick the large ones half off the desk without serious stability problems. As I mentioned before, I had both the brother and samsung laser printers.
I mean what, the thing was 4 inches wide? Truly a nice and efficiently packed laser printer. I guess I'm a minority in wanting these kinds of printers, which I guess explains why nobody makes them in this form factor anymore....
Yes I did read it, and they still took a lot of real estate compared to the Panasonic. At least they look like they take up a lot of space. Perhaps future reviews could include the dimensions of the printers being reviewed?
Then again, I never had a problem with dust buildup, and while I would have to take the paper out to close it, I hardly ever had to close it, unless I was moving stuff around, which might happen once a year during spring cleaning. Otherwise it just sits there all the time.
I don't know, I think I hardly ever close my printers unless I'm moving them about, but that's just me I guess.
I had the previous Samsung model mentioned in the review, and the brother series, and they were both physically bigger (although very good printers. However the Samsung "Linux drivers" are a pain to install. Why couldn't they just provide a PPD file and be done with it, rather they had to wrap it in 100+MB of autoexec installers that need a GUI to run).
I could not keep those printers on my desk, so ended up in the closet, or on the floor (where they invariably get kicked and something gets broken). As you say though, each to his own :)
Does anyone build laser printers that are upright? I live in a tiny studio flat with very very limited desk space. I don't have the space on my desk for these kind of square printers. The kx-p4400 was taller than it was wide which I loved. It could sit next to my monitor on the edge of the desk.
Alas I think the Ex took it with her when we split up, as I can't find it along any of my stuff.
Thing is, I can't find them second hand, nor can I find any new ones that are a similar shape. Does anyone here know of such laser printers?
(It looks like this: http://www.nefec.org/upm/images/mpa440.jpg )
Rainbow tables only work on unsalted hashes. If you salt the hash, then the tables become pretty much useless, as you need to compute the values each and every time, for every device.
That is the reason (for example) that WPA2 has not been able to be cracked so easily, the router (if you got a decent one, avoid the BT/Thomson ones at all costs) hashes the password with the ESSID (and sometimes the serial number) meaning that you can't use rainbow tables. You'd have to break the password for each router individually.
Reading RAM contents from the FW port was demo'd what, back in 05? Earlier? So long ago I don't actually remember anymore....
Used to be that you could use a FW Ipod running Linux to just plug into a machine and have it alter the machines RAM contents, allowing you to logon without a password, read encryption keys etc... all the while looking totally innocuous to anyone around you.
This technique is no longer as useful as back then, as modern processors implement an IOMMU, which prevents anything attached to a bus from using DMA to access the entire RAMspace, thwarting this attack vector.
You could argue that these guys packaged it nicely in a GUI and made it available for purchase to the general public, but I don't think they are the first at that either (I seem to remember outfits springing out offering this tech about a year after it was demo'd). I'm guessing it has to do with Apple, so is news?
It all really depends on how much you want to spend. LTO Tape has a shelf life of 30 years (at least) and can store a good chunk of data (000's of GB) but the initial investment in drive and tapes is pricy.
CD's are not that good, because the quality went down as mass production ramped up and they got cheaper. I still have perfectly readable CD's from my parents (80's) while CD's from the 90's and 00's are already falling apart.
My solution between these is Hard disks. I can buy 1TB Quite cheap, and they tend to last 5-10 years on the shelf. Also if they do go south there is a ton of recovery companies that can do something about it (normally if a drive fails from lack of use, it's the electromechanics that go, not the platters/data). Every once in a while I can transfer the data to a newer disk as time goes on, perhaps adding more data (like when I went from 500GB -> 1TB).
I also have a thing with a mate, where we each bought some drives, and we keep our really important stuff backed up on each others machines (via rsync on the net). Makes sure we have geographically separate backups of critical stuff.
Who here remembers the days of gnutella, gnutella2 and the Donkey network, where the same concept was used (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed2k_URI_scheme for more info).
I always thought bittorrent went somewhat backwards with requiring central management and tracking via the torrent files. Nice to see that now we'll have both the benefits of bittorrent with the distributed nature of the old P2P networks.
Perhaps next it's time to develop a distributed search system, so you don't even need to host a website with the links (as I'm sure they'll try to shut you down and extradite you for running it, no matter how much you point out you're doing the same a google). Then we would've really gone full circle :-)
I used to use it back in the day before it got bought by AOL, but once AOL got hold of it (and all the original authors resigned) it just went downhill so fast... Coincided with my final push to be linux-only so went to xmms (which was essentially a winamp 2 clone).
I remember AOL being really slow to fix bugs, but really fast to add new ways of sticking adverts or bundling crap with winamp. Such a shame... (I liked the winamp 5 media library, and the skinning opportunities, and the whole skinning ecosystem around it)
The nullsoft shoutcast streaming server is still popular though, despite not being updated in years. Includes some iffy overflow bugs that AOL hasn't fixed since they took it over, resulting in some of my fave net radio stations going offline randomly until someone kicks the streaming server.
Why does whatever AOL touch turn to crap. It's like the reverse-midas touch...
I always like it when game companies open source old games. I remember fondly when they open sourced one of my childhood faves (warzone2100) and seen it mature quite nicely (If you're interesting in an open-source RTS, give http://www.wz2100.net/ a look).
I have to say I've never played marathon (back then I was far more into RTS games) but it definitely looks interesting, so will install it on my PC when I get a spare moment. Thanks a lot for the article!
The poor *are* the taxpayers, the rich are the customers.
At least it seems that way when you see how the gov bends to the will of those with money, while everyone else pays for them to do so via said taxes...
Considering three is absolutely useless for voice calls. Sometimes I get connection errors when I try to call, sometimes others can't get to me for hours at a time, and sometimes it just cuts off a conversation mid-way with "Connection error".
With voice performance like that, I'm not surprised 97% of their traffic is "data". You can't make a damn phone call using three.
(Moved back to t-mobile, because despite the excellent deal w.r.t internet data, 3G is not fast enough for Voip, and I do still need to make voice calls from time to time).
However, from what I gather the point of the protest is to be seen and heard by those they are protesting against,no? As someone said earlier: "Better to hang in there like a boil on the neck of the moneyed interests".
How can you achieve that by not protesting when those very people are there? I mean, the city is probably totally empty of financial workers (and the "top 1%") on a Saturday. All you'll really get is tourists. I liken this idea to protesting in an empty room. It might make you feel like you are doing something about it, but fundamentally nobody can hear or care about what you say.
I don't know, perhaps they should try to get alternate days off work, so that at least the protest has people there during the week (like the US protests, they've been there for weeks now, not just the odd Saturday). I don't feel they will achieve anything with the current plan, but they are free to try.
The day that almost the entire financial sector is shut down (and those that are working, are doing so remotely from home). I'd understand if they did it during the week, but who on earth do they expect to hear them on a Saturday?
Seems a bit silly, but I am willing to be enlightened to the logic behind this...
Sorry, didn't realise I had to actually respond to your post directly. My post is here if you're still interested: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1198280
The Car is a 1982 Porsche 944, 2.5L. Insured with Chaucer classic car insurance. £300 per year fully comp, with no mile limits (but I told them I'd drive less than 10k a year as an estimate) and free 90 day insurance if I take the car to Europe.
One thing I have is that I bunged an extra £20 a month to my rent and got a flat with a gated parking spot. This probably lowered the insurance a bit (As old cars generally don't have as good security systems against break in)
Also came with free breakdown cover in the UK. Didn't even offer me the option of the GPS module, and to be honest, I'm not sure where they would stick it. The most advanced piece of electronics in the car is the cassette radio.
The car is my main driver, it is my sole car (I am a named driver on a friends 2004 VW Golf TDI though, that's £500 per yr, but I don't drive that often). I live in an apartment in London, and only have one parking spot available (otherwise I would have bought quite a few cars by now, including the BMW 635csi E24 ).
The E30 series should be coming into the category now. I believe the cutoff is 1983 at the moment, so the oldest models should be qualifying as classic any year now.
Also not sure why I'd tell porkies about this, I don't get much out of making this up and posting it on the net...
(and if you think this is a porky, you should meet a mate of mine, he managed at the age of 20 to get insurance on a 90's Mitsubishi 300ZX (3.0L Twin-turbo V6) for some really small money. All these years later, I'm still not quite sure how he pulled that one off...)
I guess the insurance companies figure that if you buy an old car, you know what you're doing, and won't wrap it round the nearest lamp-post (you don't see many chavs driving round in classics).
Also, I agreed to a high personal excess, it's £750 (about how much the car itself is worth, before I do work on it), but I'm fine with that.
@Jean Le PHARMACIEN: Lol, typo, Freudian slip? Autospell? Don't have a clue mate.. :P Well spotted though! :)
There are insurers who offer this already. I am in the "under 25's" section, a male, and have my license for about a year now.
The initial car I bought was a VW Polo 1.0L from 1998, and insurance was about £1300/yr for it. Some insurers (like Tesco) offered me a lower rate (about £900/yr) if I agreed to install a GPS Tracking device. When I asked what it does they told me the following:
* It is installed in the engine bay, and hooks into the ECU
* It measures speed, throttle position, acceleration, location and time
* It sends this to the insurer (they didn't specify how, but I presume via mobile network)
The insurer would then adjust me premiums based on how risky I drive, how much I drive, and when I drive (apparently driving on Friday night incurs higher premiums). To me it sounds like this tech has already been around a while, although I'm not sure if the one they offered me provided g-forces logging.
I wasn't given the ability to view the contents of the GPS device, no phone/web app to interact with it, so I guess that's a new feature of this system.
I can't tell you how it would have turned out, as I didn't take the offer up. Turns out that if I got an older car, I could get classic car insurance. So sold the VW and ended up buying a 1982 sports couple, and my insurance is £300 a year! The low insurance more than makes up for the fact the 2.5L engine used more fuel, and no need for any kind of tracking device. So I'm happy.
Heat assisted recording tech has been used in magneto-optical storage before. I believe this is the tech used in Minidisc's, which was why they were rewritable (and later on, how they shoved 1GB of data onto 330MB disks with HiMD). In Minidisc drives the laser you saw at the bottom was not for burning to the disk, rather it just was for heating, it was the magnetic head above that did the actual writing.
Of course, this being applied to hard disks is new, and developing a head that has the required performance for disk speeds is no mean feat, so kudos to TDK for the work!
And in answer to Sir Runcible Spoon, it will improve performance, but as a side effect. The denser the platters are, the more bits will pass across the head per unit length. At the same speed, you will get more bits flying past the head for denser media, hence faster read/write speeds.
Now how much faster I'm not sure, hard disks are being specialised for large, slow storage. The "fast disk" area is increasingly being SSD based, with tiered storage systems. For example, I'm considering using http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ for ssd->HD caching of R/W IOPS.
For reference, when this hack came about the ipod 3G had just come out!
It works on any OS with DMA enabled via firewire, including Linux/OSX. Used to unlock peoples WinXP machines by using the FW port. Their faces were priceless!
Anyway, this was by design. Any bus that allows DMA (including PCI/cardbus/pcmcia) allows this hack, and it's been in use for many many years. Firewire made it easier due to the plug and play nature, but it wasn't new.
Despite this though, we still used fw for ages (still do actually) because of it's lower overhead and it's DMA capability.
The same thing that allows this hack allows remote DMA (accessing the contents of RAM from one machine on another remote machine). This was pretty much the preserve of infiniband supercomputers with skyhigh prices to match. The fact we could do the same thing for about 50 quid using firewire more than made up for this security hole. Built our uni cluster using this feature.
Such a shame it never caught on as well as USB though. I hear that thunderbolt offers the same DMA features* (also being bus based interconnect) makes me happy. The idea of a 10gbit/s interconnect at consumer prices for the next cluster I build sounds awesome!
Remember one thing about security. If your attacker has physical access that's the end, they can get in.
*Note: Newer processors are developing what is being called an IOMMU, which will control/protect certain areas of memory from being altered or read by external devices, which should actually put a stop to these attacks. The older processors did not offer this, so were vulnerable to this attack.
If done correctly thunderbolt will not have this security hole, while offering similar features and a lot of speed. What's not to like?
a) Every single Tablet Thinkpad I've owned (X41, X61, and I've used the one before the reviewed one) only ever allowed you to turn the LCD screen clockwise. That is nothing new.
b) All Tablet Thinkpad's don't have the thinklight, due to the fact that the screen bezel has to be flush in order to be able to be used both as a tablet and normal machine. I can tell you to this day I miss that feature from the tablet Thinkpads, and it's always a toss up when it comes to a new machine, whether I'd prefer a tablet or the LED light.
(Long long time Thinkpad user, although all owned by me rather than corporate)
* Lossless copy, so I can always transcode it to any new improved format that comes out, without having to rebuy it on "mp5" or whatever comes next.
* I can format shift to my hearts content without anyone stopping me, or with loss of quality that comes from lossy->lossy transcoding.
* DRM Free: I can rip it and store it losslessly, with no problems, no major hoops to jump through, etc...
* Does not rely on the net. Some DRM requires activation etc... that requires the internet. I don't always have the internet on me.
* Works just about everywhere. Just about everything has a CD player, my car, portable ones, hifi decks, friends places.
* No hassle. Put the CD in, hit "play" and you're done. No need to install, activate stuff, confirm who you are, etc...
* OS agnostic. I am 100% Linux at home, and have been since 1999, A lot of DRM schemes don't work on Linux. I don't want to have a windows box kicking round just for listening to music.
* I get a physical backup, usually with cover art etc... that seems to hold well with age. I have some of my parents CD's, that are almost 30 years old, and still play perfectly (interesting to see how solidly the old disks were built, they actually feel heavier than modern CD's) .
As it stands, I intend to keep buying CD's until they refuse to stock them anymore. Don't know what I'd do then, hopefully someone will over a lossless online store.
Saying that, a lot of people I know buy CD's, just that nobody actually goes to the high street to do it. I buy almost all my CD's second hand. Either at the charity shop, a small local music store, or on Amazon, where the 1-click buy and low prices (£1.50) result in me buying CD's impulsively.
The only annoyance is that they take up space, and I have to move them when I move house as well, but I consider that a small price to pay for the benefits and freedom it brings.
One thing I loved about Firewire was it's ability to do remote direct memory access (RDMA). In fact I used this for fast, low latency transfer from different machines.
It brought (for cheap) the ability to do RDMA, something that you'd have to shell out $$$$ for in the form of infiniband for HPC.
Coupled with the fact that I could transfer at high speed between two disks with no CPU usage, complete with daisy chaining. I felt it really was the superior standard compared to USB. I really missed it when USB "won" over FW (I still have a lot of FW400 equipment that I use).
So the idea that lightpeak might have provided us with a consumer grade equivalent to infiniband, with 10gb/s throughput. Something that gives all the benefits of FW, but with new tech.
I'm all for it! The security concerns are not a big deal (even with the old FW, you could disable remote DMA if it was a problem, rendering this attack useless). USB was a POS when was released (although good for it's original niche, which was replacing serial/parallel ports/ps2), let alone now.
"society's hunger for fresh organs becomes sufficiently powerful that black-market "organlegger" gangsters seize people off the street and break them up for parts"
We already have that. Kidnapping of people to be broken up for their organs has been going on for the last 30 years or so, with organs mostly going to the US due to many more people in need of an organ than those willing to donate, coupled with a lot of money to be made.
In fact I think this development will reduce the demand for black market organs. Currently if an organ doner dies they have about 2 days to find matches for all the organs or they go to waste. With this system we can store those organs for extended periods of time, thereby increasing the pool of available doner organs for everyone.
It would also allow for larger searches. No longer do you have to search only the local area/district/country but you can take your time and search worldwide, then organise shipping etc... without worrying whether the organ will still be usable by the time it arrives.
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54 posts • joined Friday 13th November 2009 12:10 GMT
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Re: already installed one
That's different though, because you did it and you own it, data included. You are still in control.
A government one would probably have rules against tampering/modifying, would be illegal to switch off and/or remove, you would not be able to decide when you want it to track you, and the data it collects would be owned by the government, to do as it wishes with (including selling it on to insurance,etc...)
I don't think many people are against tracking/telematics as a technology, more that they are weary of government application of said technology, especially once they get their foot in the door, they can later on extend it as they wish, including (potentially) dictating what the car does.
Re: What does Ubuntu offer?
Out of curiosity? what problems did you have with virtualising Debian? I ask because we settled on virtualising all our old Debian servers (running on a Debian qemu/kvm host) and have not had a single problem with them. I've even moved to virtualising all my old servers (broken laptops mostly) into one single server at home, all worked flawlessly :).
Virtualised some Ubuntu as well, and it was also painless.
I think 1 or 2 can happen, but not 3. If the worst comes to the worst they'd get bought out eventually. As witnessed by the number of fanboys, Sony brand name still has a lot of monetary value. They also hold patents and have some good technologies (e.g. Cell processor). They earn good money in non-consumer space in specialist areas (supercomputers, embedded systems, DSP processing, etc...)
The question is will the stock go up or down before 1 and 2 apply? I honestly cannot say. Depends on how much of a loss you're willing to take, and how confident you are in judging the firms potential for future performance! :)
Good luck! (Alas, I'm not allowed to invest, so I just get to watch)
Re: Point of order
I meant it in scope of them offering it running on PC's. At that point the only place you could get an ATRAC encoder was inside the hardware (although I assume somewhere in the deepest darkest depths, they had a software implementation used for those mastered minidiscs, which probably ran on PC's). It would also make sense that after 20+ years of development, Sony would continue to use ATRAC internally, as it is theirs. If they used mp3 they would have to pay for a licence + royalties. Lame is only allowed for research purposes (officially).
ATRAC was a very good codec, one of the nicest things about it is that you its quality was encoder led. This means that improvements in encoder quality didn't break old decoders. A music file encoded with ATRAC3 (For example) actually sounded better on an ATRAC1 decoder than an ATRAC1 encode would.
Plus it was energy efficient. My old minidisc player gave me 40 hours of playback from 1 AA battery (60+ hours if I used the internal battery as well). It took a long while until mp3 players caught up with that, and they didn't have the whole issue power draw from the rotating assembly (HD-based ones excepted).
It had a lot of potential like I said, it was Sony's control-freakery and paranoia about piracy that ruined their chances.
Re: ATRAC
And they already had it :) (After all, it was used in the Minidisc's already). It was their deployment of it that really messed everything up. If they made it as flexible as mp3 (multiple software encoders, published specs, etc...) they may have had some running against mp3 initially. It was for the time a very good lossy compression format, alas they didn't share, mp3 got refined (specifically thanks to the lame guys) and beat it out in quality in the end.
Instead I remember people hacking out libraries from realmedia encoder (as realplayer apparently used atrac for its audio streaming) and using those to (de|en)code atrac files on PC's. This worked ok, but without the keys needed to digitally encrypt the files prior to transfer to the minidisc (the net-MD concept they finally allowed after mp3 players had already taken off, too little too late really) it still pretty useless. The big advantage is that you could add your ATRAC files directly and have the software not transcode it for you (slowly).
My point is that Sony had some excellent hardware ideas, it was the execution from the management perspective that messed things up. I think that minidisc could have dominated had they made it as flexible as CD (or hell, they allowed people to "burn" Minidiscs on their PC), but they were so petrified of piracy, they crippled it fatally. People had to record from CD in "real time", and not surprisingly, when the first companies started the mp3-cd concept, the ability to quickly burn multiple albums on your PC to CD blew away Sony's chances.
Re: Stop Shafting Your Customers
Corrected the title for you.
Sony has royally shafted all their customers. Back in 1992 when minidisc came out, it could have taken the world by storm. Smaller than a tape, CD-quality sound (good enough anyway), can't scratch the disk as it in a case, recordable, even in the field!
By all intents and purposes it should have taken over from both tape and CD, but noo, Sony had to cripple it with proprietary lockouts, and even go so far to split the format in "Minidisc-data" and "minidisk-audio", and go so far as to prevent people making computer drives that could write minidisk-audio (nobody bothered with minidisc-data as a consequence).
talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sony could have owned the media market pre-mp3 (and then had the clout to sustain and perhaps embrace the mp3 revolution). Instead the blew their leg off and continued to stagger on until the late 90's.
Once again, mp3's came out, rather than embrace them they made their own lossy format (Atrac), but once again cripped it with DRM and you had to use only their windows software (sonicstage was it?) which was a POS like no other (you had to check songs in and out, and if you checked it out 3 times, that was it, you can't listen to it anymore). Buggy as hell.
So now Sony blew their other leg off, and finally adopted mp3 (long after Apple and others had left them in the dust). Panicking now, they had the wonderful idea of rootkitting your PC if you stuck a Sony CD in there, for god forbid you wanted to rip it to an mp3! They ballsed the mp3 revolution up, so now have to stop you from doing it.
Great! So now they blew an arm off as well, another arm went with the otherOS and PS3, and well.. quite frankly they've run out of limbs.
I stopped with the minidiscs, and since the rootkit fiasco refused to pay Sony (and its sister companies) a cent. Forget about the shock of their share price plummeting, I'm amazed they survived this long. I assume it was momentum they built up from a time in the 80's when they built damn good quality hifi and electrical equipment... because most smaller firms would have collapsed years ago from this level of mismanagement and micromanaged freakery.
What does Ubuntu offer? What is its unique selling point they can make money from?
The article nicely points out how Red Hat makes its money, and also says that Ubuntu will not do it that way.
So... how can Ubuntu make money? If they start charging for using the OS, surely places like Amazon etc... will just switch to another free OS, like Debian? That would require very little infra changes (e.g. I've switched between them many times). Does Ubuntu offer anything in particular that would prevent people just dumping it if they start charging?
It's all well and good saying Ubuntu should start making money from the cloud deployments, but I don't see how they can do it, unless they write some sort of proprietary Ubuntu-only extensions/software geared towards cloud management, then perhaps. However I don't see that happening either.
Re: WTF???
It's Japan, remember! http://news.3yen.com/wp-content/images/japan-crazy-shit-350x.png
Re: different beasts
That's pretty cool! You could get a gun's eye view :D Does the boat actually fire? (I presume the combat bit actually involves actually firing stuff at each other?). You could have some fun implementing a ballistic calculator into it, perhaps with range estimation :)
I have so many ideas for the pi, primarily because I can risk it in environments and experiments where the magic smoke/water damage is more likely. Places where I'd never dare stick an expensive PC.
Good luck with your project, sounds awesome :)
Re: different beasts
What he said! If anything this is more akin to Via's Nano-itx (at 12cmx12cm) than the rasberry pi.
The main selling point of the pi is that it is so cheap, cheap enough that you could take risks with it that you would not want to do with something costing 10x as much. Basically I see it as an experimental computer (something between a fully fledged PC and micro-controllers), something you can use to teach yourself, or stick it in difficult environments without risking a lot of money.
The Intel does not compete with it, they are in different leagues completely.
Re: So what about those of us that got locked out?
Wow that sucks... thankfully I don't really use the account anymore (the account was from 2002, so already quite old), I kept it around for the history.
Thankfully I moved away from relying on MS a long long time ago, so this doesn't affect me much, but it must really suck for those who actually use it. Perhaps this will finally push the rest of my friends off MS :)
So what about those of us that got locked out?
I got locked out of my own hotmail account a few months ago, and many many attempts to get MS to reset the password were fruitless.
They kept telling me that it was my fault for having a weak password, that there was nothing wrong with their security, that someone must have seen me type it in, etc....
Plus they didn't want to reset it because I did not know the new secret word/sentence that the attacker set.
After loads of hassle I gave up (I only really had the account for historic reasons and msn, due to some people still using it), but for those who still used MS for their main account must have had a lot of problems.
So now that it turns out it was a bug, will MS finally start agreeing to reset accounts? Ideally an apology would be nice as well, but I don't think that will happen.
I wonder how long this bug has been known about... I used to remember people telling me about their hotmail getting hacked (even years ago, before gmail for example), but never knew how it was done.
Re: How did they spot two worlds orbiting each other without a star?
So basically we got lucky :)
Thanks for the explanation! It does seem obvious in hindsight, lol!
Re: What could possibly go wrong?
Actually.. the religious nuts will probably continue to do sex the old fashioned way, especially if this is seen as "unnatural, impure, etc...". What may happen is that birthrates will fall for those who use these bots (especially if they form long term childless bonds with them), while the religious ones will continue to breed, resulting in a demographic shift towards the faithful.
How that would affect society in the future, I guess we'll see :)
Not my cup of tea personally, the thing I love most about the girls I dated is that they are their own people, with opinions, thoughts and feelings, rather than a robotic equivalent to a sycophant, but whatever tickles your tackle. Each to his own, etc....
Re: *still* not there
Ah sorry about that, I had a look at the rear of the 2400 ES from your link, and you're in luck! You have both a rs232 and a sirius control port.
Now the rs232 will depend on the encoding Sony use, but if they raise any pins high you should be able to get +10V when the Amp turns on. Easiest to test each pin with a multimeter with the amp on, find one that has a signal, turn off the amp and see if it drops. If it does, then you're good to go! :)
If you're not using the "Sirius" control port (mini-din on the top left), that could be perfect. The SiriusConnect port has a pin it raises high when the amp is on (known as the "Power enable" pin). It is so that you can turn on/off the Sirius receiver with the amp.
According to the pinouts I found here: http://www.pbase.com/mrubin/image/93526001/original.jpg (sorry, I can't use tiny.cc, etc... as I'm at work, and they are blocked) pin 2 is the "Power enable" pin.
If you feel you're competent enough with electronics, give it a try. It is probably easier than guessing with the rs232 port.
So actually, modern Sony HT equipment has more options than my old stuff, lucky you! :) I can see a few other ports to try, but that is going into proper hacking territory. Better to try the above low hanging fruit first. Good luck! :)
How did they spot two worlds orbiting each other without a star?
Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that our telescopes are not powerful enough to see exoplanets on their own. They can only spot them when they pass across their star, or by the effects the planets have on their star (e.g. gravitational).
So we only observe the stars directly, and infer the planets from the star, so how do you spot planets when there is no star to observe and infer from?
Any astroboffins in the ranks who can enlighten me?
Re: *still* not there
Does it have an "AC outlet" something like this (to the right):
http://cdn.sulitstatic.com/images/2011/1015/081935750_0818089459e58fc5bd266b4f5d10f9ea742c3e810325d844e.jpg
My one had an "AC out", but it was a proprietary connector (some odd cross between US and Euro sockets, I presume you needed a "Sony adapter" cable to do it properly).
It was a solid state relay rated at 110V (US I presume). You cannot feed your 220V stuff directly, but you can stick 12V down one pin, and it will activate the relay (and complete the circuit), so you can drive another 240V relay if you want.
I had all sorts of Sony AV equipment, and the AC thing was very much a home theater feature (so you could turn on all your gear with one remote). I'd be very surprised if they actually removed this from new models....
What model do you have?
Re: *still* not there
I had the same problem, but mine was rather trivial to solve, my Rotel pre-amp had a "remote out" which would put 5V out when I turn it on with the remote. I just ran a wire to a relay along the same route as the sub-woofer cables. Now when I turn on the preamp with the remote, it turns on the power amps and the sub-woofer.
Check if your AMP has a remote out equivalent, so far most Audio equipment I've owned has had it in some form or another (Rotel, Marantz, Technics and Sony). There is a tendency to have them with incompatible connectors/pins and voltages (to prevent you mixing separates I guess), but a bit of Googling you can find out the specs, and in some cases schematics for interfacing between them.
No mention of T-mobile?
For me at least they do this nice deal, where you can get 50MB roaming data for £10, which works out to something like 20p a MB.
Still a lot (and I agree the roaming costs are outrageous for what they are) but far better than what the others offer. I got a 1 month rolling contract while touring across Europe* and the above deal was excellent (I used the roaming charges primarily for email, the odd web lookup and my GPS, as it pulls map data via a net connection if it hasn't been to an area before).
Something to consider for those of you who are on T-mobile (this is one of their booster packages, and is available on all the contracts of theirs I've used).
* Only applies to EU countries, When we drove through Switzerland for e.g, the rate was 7.98 per MB, but they send you a sms to warn you, so I just turned off my phone while there.
Re: Could someone explain to me...
Surely though P = I^2 * R.
Assuming the motor's power requirements are the same, then having a longer wire will result in higher resistance, which will increase the heat output of the wire for a given current, no?
And a Lotus? Nice! I've always been partial to the Esprit myself, but they are expensive to get a hold of! (Plus there is an issue of space living in London, otherwise I'd love to have a little classic car collection going!)
Re: Could someone explain to me...
They would have to be thicker, if you want the same overall resistance when you stick all that current down them.
Keeping all things the same, longer wires will have more resistance (is it a linear relation? I'm not sure), so if you want to keep the same overall resistance you'd need thicker wires (or better conducting metal in them).
I guess I was wrong about it being a new thing then. The oldest car I know that had the battery at the back was the BMW 8 series in the 90's (Along with the 90's Porsche 944 Turbo, but I believed that was in order to make more space in the engine bay for the turbo piping).
Out of curiosity, which classic car do you have? It would be interesting to see where the idea of sticking the battery in the back came from...
Could someone explain to me...
Why modern cars seem to like sticking the battery at the back? In all the older cars I've known/used the battery was as near to the engine as possible. This is due to the huge starting current required when cranking.
At 12V the wires are really thick and short. Surely sticking the battery at the back results in even thicker wires needed? (to stem the resistive losses through the increased length).
What advantage did putting the battery in the back achieve?
And what exactly....
Will their clients do once Foxconn decides they are no longer needed, and will happily offer to do the "product positioning, marketing, sales and distribution" as well?
Will they just be shell companies while Foxconn leases the brand names? That will only work until Foxconn pushes its own brand names (or just buys them out, which at that point they would be rich enough to do).
Re: Charging on the headphone plug: not a good idea
If the jack is intelligent enough to facilitate digital communication (which here is being used for Paypal's little item) I see little reason why the charger would not supply power until properly negotiated with the phone. Till then don't put any power down the jack.
That solves all the issues you mentioned in one swoop, except the shorting of the pins of the DAC, which I've never had an issue with, but I've only put 48V down it, and low current, not 1A (an interface to the phone system that malfunctioned). I agree that this would require more intelligence in the charger. Perhaps detecting a blip in current usage and cutting power, or just have the DAC protected. Usually they should go through high-resistance isolation transformers anyway, not be directly wired to the pins.
And I hardly use any insertion force, usually they work loose due to sitting plugged in, or moved about while plugged in. Usually it is the removal, where some cables have really strong notches that cause it to fail.
Not to mention the connectors are flimsy as hell. The cynic in me thinks the deliberately make them like that so you can't have a phone work more than 2-3 years. Not to mention there are a right PITA to get the right orientation in the dark, or when fumbling in the car.
If you ask my opinion, I wish they'd bring back the old (larger) Nokia charging connectors. Those seemed to work really well, fit in any direction, don't fall out or break contact, and I never had a connector failure. Plus almost everyone made compatible connectors anyway.
Re: What I don't get
Yeah, but if you read about this in detail, you will see that they mention that it uses the headphone jack of the phone.
It is true, most phone headphone sockets are longer than usual. They accept the usual thee-ring headphone jack, and also the 4-ring "hands-free" jack, which has an extra ring for microphone input.
I haven't seen the jack of this paypal addition, but I presume it uses the mic jack to send signals to the phone via some modulation. You should be able to do low-speed full duplex with this setup.
Also, headphone jacks are far more resilient than mini-usb jacks, being designed for repeated insertion/removal.
I wish they didn't standardise on the mini-usb connector for charging though. It really wasn't designed in mind for constant replugging. My last two phones gave up the ghost because the mini-usb jack broke due to repeated plugging in and out during the day for charging.
Better if they had standardised on the headphone jack for power (perhaps even longer plug, with 5 rings?) although then you could not listen to music while charging without a splitter...
Re: the batmobile beats this
Yes, Chrysler did do it in the 50's, but only after the Brits (surprise surprise ;) ). Rover did it in the 50's too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover_Company#Experimental_cars
Not only that, in the 60's they went and built a Le Mans race car out of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover-BRM
Fuel economy was an issue back then as well, but there were other issues too that made it a poor choice for road cars. The issues they had was spool spin up time, complexity of the transmission (had to use hydraulics and a variable transmission system due to the high rpm and the turbines tenancy to not want to slow down and spin up much) and hot exhaust.
Boundary layer turbines (aka, Tesla Turbines, after the guy to invented them) are more efficient than standard turbines, but I don't think they are better than IC engines at the size to fit in a car.
Also, they work best with steam or another working fluid. Running them with hot air has been experimented on by the tesla turbine building club, and so far they have either proven too heavy/complex, too poor efficiency, or have blown themselves to bits (at least from what I've read).
Not to say people are not trying, and they may well make it one day, just not yet :)
Still, if it is your dream, there are people who have stuck them in cars. It is doable, just don't expect your fuel bill to go down :)
Re: the batmobile beats this
To my knowledge turbines give poorer fuel economy than IC Engines (at least for the size you can fit in a car comfortably).
Where turbines shine is in power to weight ratio, which is important for aircraft, and they improve in efficiency the larger they are (hence why they try to stick a few big engines on aircraft, rather than many little ones).
AFAIK that is the primary reason they have not been used in cars so far. Not to mention noise limits in urban areas, really hot exhaust, and probably a few other niggles I've not thought of at the moment.
I'm not sure about this...
I mean, some of the tallest people I know are from some of the hottest climes, particularly Africa. I always thought being larger helps in hot climates due to increased surface area for cooling.
Also, humans seem to be getting taller with time, statistically speaking. I believe the average height in the UK has been increasing for centuries now ( I cannot for the life of me remember where the status for this came from, but I do remember reading about it).
Then again, they are talking size in weight. I can imagine humans getting lighter, as they need less fat to keep warm, etc... Those Africans I mentioned were tall, but very lean.
Interesting study, none the less.
Re: Do: Re: Mi: I miss my panasonic kx-p4400
It takes nowhere near the same amount of space. Yes, the top sticks out a bit, but underneath is a lot of space. I can either put stuff under the tray, or just have it hang out the side of the desk, facing the wall. As most of the weight is still on the mini-tower like box, this is a very stable arrangement. It also frees up more desk space for my monitor and other office-things I use on a day to day basis.
I could not stick the large ones half off the desk without serious stability problems. As I mentioned before, I had both the brother and samsung laser printers.
I mean what, the thing was 4 inches wide? Truly a nice and efficiently packed laser printer. I guess I'm a minority in wanting these kinds of printers, which I guess explains why nobody makes them in this form factor anymore....
Re: Re: I miss my panasonic kx-p4400
Yes I did read it, and they still took a lot of real estate compared to the Panasonic. At least they look like they take up a lot of space. Perhaps future reviews could include the dimensions of the printers being reviewed?
Then again, I never had a problem with dust buildup, and while I would have to take the paper out to close it, I hardly ever had to close it, unless I was moving stuff around, which might happen once a year during spring cleaning. Otherwise it just sits there all the time.
I don't know, I think I hardly ever close my printers unless I'm moving them about, but that's just me I guess.
I had the previous Samsung model mentioned in the review, and the brother series, and they were both physically bigger (although very good printers. However the Samsung "Linux drivers" are a pain to install. Why couldn't they just provide a PPD file and be done with it, rather they had to wrap it in 100+MB of autoexec installers that need a GUI to run).
I could not keep those printers on my desk, so ended up in the closet, or on the floor (where they invariably get kicked and something gets broken). As you say though, each to his own :)
I miss my panasonic kx-p4400
Does anyone build laser printers that are upright? I live in a tiny studio flat with very very limited desk space. I don't have the space on my desk for these kind of square printers. The kx-p4400 was taller than it was wide which I loved. It could sit next to my monitor on the edge of the desk.
Alas I think the Ex took it with her when we split up, as I can't find it along any of my stuff.
Thing is, I can't find them second hand, nor can I find any new ones that are a similar shape. Does anyone here know of such laser printers?
(It looks like this: http://www.nefec.org/upm/images/mpa440.jpg )
@Timo
Rainbow tables only work on unsalted hashes. If you salt the hash, then the tables become pretty much useless, as you need to compute the values each and every time, for every device.
That is the reason (for example) that WPA2 has not been able to be cracked so easily, the router (if you got a decent one, avoid the BT/Thomson ones at all costs) hashes the password with the ESSID (and sometimes the serial number) meaning that you can't use rainbow tables. You'd have to break the password for each router individually.
Not New...
Reading RAM contents from the FW port was demo'd what, back in 05? Earlier? So long ago I don't actually remember anymore....
Used to be that you could use a FW Ipod running Linux to just plug into a machine and have it alter the machines RAM contents, allowing you to logon without a password, read encryption keys etc... all the while looking totally innocuous to anyone around you.
This technique is no longer as useful as back then, as modern processors implement an IOMMU, which prevents anything attached to a bus from using DMA to access the entire RAMspace, thwarting this attack vector.
You could argue that these guys packaged it nicely in a GUI and made it available for purchase to the general public, but I don't think they are the first at that either (I seem to remember outfits springing out offering this tech about a year after it was demo'd). I'm guessing it has to do with Apple, so is news?
It all really depends on how much you want to spend. LTO Tape has a shelf life of 30 years (at least) and can store a good chunk of data (000's of GB) but the initial investment in drive and tapes is pricy.
CD's are not that good, because the quality went down as mass production ramped up and they got cheaper. I still have perfectly readable CD's from my parents (80's) while CD's from the 90's and 00's are already falling apart.
My solution between these is Hard disks. I can buy 1TB Quite cheap, and they tend to last 5-10 years on the shelf. Also if they do go south there is a ton of recovery companies that can do something about it (normally if a drive fails from lack of use, it's the electromechanics that go, not the platters/data). Every once in a while I can transfer the data to a newer disk as time goes on, perhaps adding more data (like when I went from 500GB -> 1TB).
I also have a thing with a mate, where we each bought some drives, and we keep our really important stuff backed up on each others machines (via rsync on the net). Makes sure we have geographically separate backups of critical stuff.
Old is new again...
Who here remembers the days of gnutella, gnutella2 and the Donkey network, where the same concept was used (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed2k_URI_scheme for more info).
I always thought bittorrent went somewhat backwards with requiring central management and tracking via the torrent files. Nice to see that now we'll have both the benefits of bittorrent with the distributed nature of the old P2P networks.
Perhaps next it's time to develop a distributed search system, so you don't even need to host a website with the links (as I'm sure they'll try to shut you down and extradite you for running it, no matter how much you point out you're doing the same a google). Then we would've really gone full circle :-)
Does anybody actually use winamp anymore?
I used to use it back in the day before it got bought by AOL, but once AOL got hold of it (and all the original authors resigned) it just went downhill so fast... Coincided with my final push to be linux-only so went to xmms (which was essentially a winamp 2 clone).
I remember AOL being really slow to fix bugs, but really fast to add new ways of sticking adverts or bundling crap with winamp. Such a shame... (I liked the winamp 5 media library, and the skinning opportunities, and the whole skinning ecosystem around it)
The nullsoft shoutcast streaming server is still popular though, despite not being updated in years. Includes some iffy overflow bugs that AOL hasn't fixed since they took it over, resulting in some of my fave net radio stations going offline randomly until someone kicks the streaming server.
Why does whatever AOL touch turn to crap. It's like the reverse-midas touch...
Very nice!
I always like it when game companies open source old games. I remember fondly when they open sourced one of my childhood faves (warzone2100) and seen it mature quite nicely (If you're interesting in an open-source RTS, give http://www.wz2100.net/ a look).
I have to say I've never played marathon (back then I was far more into RTS games) but it definitely looks interesting, so will install it on my PC when I get a spare moment. Thanks a lot for the article!
is it so?...
No no dear chap... you got it all wrong!
The poor *are* the taxpayers, the rich are the customers.
At least it seems that way when you see how the gov bends to the will of those with money, while everyone else pays for them to do so via said taxes...
Doesn't surprise me...
Considering three is absolutely useless for voice calls. Sometimes I get connection errors when I try to call, sometimes others can't get to me for hours at a time, and sometimes it just cuts off a conversation mid-way with "Connection error".
With voice performance like that, I'm not surprised 97% of their traffic is "data". You can't make a damn phone call using three.
(Moved back to t-mobile, because despite the excellent deal w.r.t internet data, 3G is not fast enough for Voip, and I do still need to make voice calls from time to time).
RE: Why are the protesting on Saturday?
Fair point, people need to be able to eat.
However, from what I gather the point of the protest is to be seen and heard by those they are protesting against,no? As someone said earlier: "Better to hang in there like a boil on the neck of the moneyed interests".
How can you achieve that by not protesting when those very people are there? I mean, the city is probably totally empty of financial workers (and the "top 1%") on a Saturday. All you'll really get is tourists. I liken this idea to protesting in an empty room. It might make you feel like you are doing something about it, but fundamentally nobody can hear or care about what you say.
I don't know, perhaps they should try to get alternate days off work, so that at least the protest has people there during the week (like the US protests, they've been there for weeks now, not just the odd Saturday). I don't feel they will achieve anything with the current plan, but they are free to try.
Why are the protesting on Saturday?
The day that almost the entire financial sector is shut down (and those that are working, are doing so remotely from home). I'd understand if they did it during the week, but who on earth do they expect to hear them on a Saturday?
Seems a bit silly, but I am willing to be enlightened to the logic behind this...
Sorry, didn't realise I had to actually respond to your post directly. My post is here if you're still interested: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1198280
@Steven, Dibbley, etc...
The Car is a 1982 Porsche 944, 2.5L. Insured with Chaucer classic car insurance. £300 per year fully comp, with no mile limits (but I told them I'd drive less than 10k a year as an estimate) and free 90 day insurance if I take the car to Europe.
One thing I have is that I bunged an extra £20 a month to my rent and got a flat with a gated parking spot. This probably lowered the insurance a bit (As old cars generally don't have as good security systems against break in)
Also came with free breakdown cover in the UK. Didn't even offer me the option of the GPS module, and to be honest, I'm not sure where they would stick it. The most advanced piece of electronics in the car is the cassette radio.
The car is my main driver, it is my sole car (I am a named driver on a friends 2004 VW Golf TDI though, that's £500 per yr, but I don't drive that often). I live in an apartment in London, and only have one parking spot available (otherwise I would have bought quite a few cars by now, including the BMW 635csi E24 ).
The E30 series should be coming into the category now. I believe the cutoff is 1983 at the moment, so the oldest models should be qualifying as classic any year now.
Also not sure why I'd tell porkies about this, I don't get much out of making this up and posting it on the net...
(and if you think this is a porky, you should meet a mate of mine, he managed at the age of 20 to get insurance on a 90's Mitsubishi 300ZX (3.0L Twin-turbo V6) for some really small money. All these years later, I'm still not quite sure how he pulled that one off...)
I guess the insurance companies figure that if you buy an old car, you know what you're doing, and won't wrap it round the nearest lamp-post (you don't see many chavs driving round in classics).
Also, I agreed to a high personal excess, it's £750 (about how much the car itself is worth, before I do work on it), but I'm fine with that.
@Jean Le PHARMACIEN: Lol, typo, Freudian slip? Autospell? Don't have a clue mate.. :P Well spotted though! :)
I didn't take this offer..
There are insurers who offer this already. I am in the "under 25's" section, a male, and have my license for about a year now.
The initial car I bought was a VW Polo 1.0L from 1998, and insurance was about £1300/yr for it. Some insurers (like Tesco) offered me a lower rate (about £900/yr) if I agreed to install a GPS Tracking device. When I asked what it does they told me the following:
* It is installed in the engine bay, and hooks into the ECU
* It measures speed, throttle position, acceleration, location and time
* It sends this to the insurer (they didn't specify how, but I presume via mobile network)
The insurer would then adjust me premiums based on how risky I drive, how much I drive, and when I drive (apparently driving on Friday night incurs higher premiums). To me it sounds like this tech has already been around a while, although I'm not sure if the one they offered me provided g-forces logging.
I wasn't given the ability to view the contents of the GPS device, no phone/web app to interact with it, so I guess that's a new feature of this system.
I can't tell you how it would have turned out, as I didn't take the offer up. Turns out that if I got an older car, I could get classic car insurance. So sold the VW and ended up buying a 1982 sports couple, and my insurance is £300 a year! The low insurance more than makes up for the fact the 2.5L engine used more fuel, and no need for any kind of tracking device. So I'm happy.
Not exactly brand new tech...
Heat assisted recording tech has been used in magneto-optical storage before. I believe this is the tech used in Minidisc's, which was why they were rewritable (and later on, how they shoved 1GB of data onto 330MB disks with HiMD). In Minidisc drives the laser you saw at the bottom was not for burning to the disk, rather it just was for heating, it was the magnetic head above that did the actual writing.
Of course, this being applied to hard disks is new, and developing a head that has the required performance for disk speeds is no mean feat, so kudos to TDK for the work!
And in answer to Sir Runcible Spoon, it will improve performance, but as a side effect. The denser the platters are, the more bits will pass across the head per unit length. At the same speed, you will get more bits flying past the head for denser media, hence faster read/write speeds.
Now how much faster I'm not sure, hard disks are being specialised for large, slow storage. The "fast disk" area is increasingly being SSD based, with tiered storage systems. For example, I'm considering using http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ for ssd->HD caching of R/W IOPS.
Wow talk about old!
I remember this being demo'ed back in 2004!
For reference, when this hack came about the ipod 3G had just come out!
It works on any OS with DMA enabled via firewire, including Linux/OSX. Used to unlock peoples WinXP machines by using the FW port. Their faces were priceless!
Anyway, this was by design. Any bus that allows DMA (including PCI/cardbus/pcmcia) allows this hack, and it's been in use for many many years. Firewire made it easier due to the plug and play nature, but it wasn't new.
Despite this though, we still used fw for ages (still do actually) because of it's lower overhead and it's DMA capability.
The same thing that allows this hack allows remote DMA (accessing the contents of RAM from one machine on another remote machine). This was pretty much the preserve of infiniband supercomputers with skyhigh prices to match. The fact we could do the same thing for about 50 quid using firewire more than made up for this security hole. Built our uni cluster using this feature.
Such a shame it never caught on as well as USB though. I hear that thunderbolt offers the same DMA features* (also being bus based interconnect) makes me happy. The idea of a 10gbit/s interconnect at consumer prices for the next cluster I build sounds awesome!
Remember one thing about security. If your attacker has physical access that's the end, they can get in.
*Note: Newer processors are developing what is being called an IOMMU, which will control/protect certain areas of memory from being altered or read by external devices, which should actually put a stop to these attacks. The older processors did not offer this, so were vulnerable to this attack.
If done correctly thunderbolt will not have this security hole, while offering similar features and a lot of speed. What's not to like?
A few points....
a) Every single Tablet Thinkpad I've owned (X41, X61, and I've used the one before the reviewed one) only ever allowed you to turn the LCD screen clockwise. That is nothing new.
b) All Tablet Thinkpad's don't have the thinklight, due to the fact that the screen bezel has to be flush in order to be able to be used both as a tablet and normal machine. I can tell you to this day I miss that feature from the tablet Thinkpads, and it's always a toss up when it comes to a new machine, whether I'd prefer a tablet or the LED light.
(Long long time Thinkpad user, although all owned by me rather than corporate)
I prefer CD's
They have the following abilities:
* Lossless copy, so I can always transcode it to any new improved format that comes out, without having to rebuy it on "mp5" or whatever comes next.
* I can format shift to my hearts content without anyone stopping me, or with loss of quality that comes from lossy->lossy transcoding.
* DRM Free: I can rip it and store it losslessly, with no problems, no major hoops to jump through, etc...
* Does not rely on the net. Some DRM requires activation etc... that requires the internet. I don't always have the internet on me.
* Works just about everywhere. Just about everything has a CD player, my car, portable ones, hifi decks, friends places.
* No hassle. Put the CD in, hit "play" and you're done. No need to install, activate stuff, confirm who you are, etc...
* OS agnostic. I am 100% Linux at home, and have been since 1999, A lot of DRM schemes don't work on Linux. I don't want to have a windows box kicking round just for listening to music.
* I get a physical backup, usually with cover art etc... that seems to hold well with age. I have some of my parents CD's, that are almost 30 years old, and still play perfectly (interesting to see how solidly the old disks were built, they actually feel heavier than modern CD's) .
As it stands, I intend to keep buying CD's until they refuse to stock them anymore. Don't know what I'd do then, hopefully someone will over a lossless online store.
Saying that, a lot of people I know buy CD's, just that nobody actually goes to the high street to do it. I buy almost all my CD's second hand. Either at the charity shop, a small local music store, or on Amazon, where the 1-click buy and low prices (£1.50) result in me buying CD's impulsively.
The only annoyance is that they take up space, and I have to move them when I move house as well, but I consider that a small price to pay for the benefits and freedom it brings.
Excellent!
One thing I loved about Firewire was it's ability to do remote direct memory access (RDMA). In fact I used this for fast, low latency transfer from different machines.
It brought (for cheap) the ability to do RDMA, something that you'd have to shell out $$$$ for in the form of infiniband for HPC.
Coupled with the fact that I could transfer at high speed between two disks with no CPU usage, complete with daisy chaining. I felt it really was the superior standard compared to USB. I really missed it when USB "won" over FW (I still have a lot of FW400 equipment that I use).
So the idea that lightpeak might have provided us with a consumer grade equivalent to infiniband, with 10gb/s throughput. Something that gives all the benefits of FW, but with new tech.
I'm all for it! The security concerns are not a big deal (even with the old FW, you could disable remote DMA if it was a problem, rendering this attack useless). USB was a POS when was released (although good for it's original niche, which was replacing serial/parallel ports/ps2), let alone now.
This is a good development
"society's hunger for fresh organs becomes sufficiently powerful that black-market "organlegger" gangsters seize people off the street and break them up for parts"
We already have that. Kidnapping of people to be broken up for their organs has been going on for the last 30 years or so, with organs mostly going to the US due to many more people in need of an organ than those willing to donate, coupled with a lot of money to be made.
In fact I think this development will reduce the demand for black market organs. Currently if an organ doner dies they have about 2 days to find matches for all the organs or they go to waste. With this system we can store those organs for extended periods of time, thereby increasing the pool of available doner organs for everyone.
It would also allow for larger searches. No longer do you have to search only the local area/district/country but you can take your time and search worldwide, then organise shipping etc... without worrying whether the organ will still be usable by the time it arrives.
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