Some pictures over at Reference Scan, my Magnetic Resonance Imaging blog, of an explosion in Atlanta. It’s neat.
Category: Geek service
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One key to rule them all
Using only a retail copy of the King Kong HD-DVD and an XBox-360 DVD drive, a hacker reverse-engineered the copy-protection for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. They did it not by cracking the code but by simply tracking data as it moved between the disc and system memory.
UPDATE: There’s a lengthy essay and rumination on DRM issues at Kaedrin weblog, which I recommend in particular to interested readers arriving via Meta Filter.
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external graphics cards
This has intriguing potential ramifications for computer design downstream:
A new PCI Express standard has been approved that will allow for the development of and operation of external PCIe graphics cards. Dubbed the PCI Express External Cabling specification and approved by the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), version 1.0 extends PCIe outside of the case.
The most obvious application for the new standard is external enclosures for graphics cards. Once you get past the price tag, the biggest barriers for many who would want to deploy a dual SLI or Crossfire system are heat, power, and space. Newer GeForce and Radeon graphics cards can emit a lot of heat while demanding a significant amount of power under high load. In addition, the need for large heat sinks and fans often means that you lose a second slot to a single PCIe graphics card.
Now imagine sticking a pair of graphics cards into an external enclosure with its own power supply and fan, hooking your monitor to that, and connecting it to your PC or even a laptop. Those are the kinds of possibilities opened up by the External Cable specification.
The advantages are well-summarized above, but take the idea further. We already have external bulk storage and external sound cards for laptops. Now imagine that via Bluetooth you also divorce the keyboard and mouse. External optical drives are also easier to deal with than internal bays. What’s left? Just a core that contains your essential apps and your critical data. You could conceivably just carry a small brick around, that is your computing core, and have it seamlessly adapt to your pre-defined computing environments. One might have an ultralight notebook chassis with a 14inch screen for travel; a beefed up desktop unit for the office and a silent SFF PC for the home. Your core is what contains your user profile and OS and authentication; biometrics keep it secure from anyone else’s use but yours. The bulk of your data remains accessible securely over the internet, by hooking up your master data store to a router with fixed IP and using strong encryption and VPN connections.
I’m sure this isn’t an original thought. Still, bears thinking about the advantages over the modern era. At the very least you’d only need to buy one copy of Windows 🙂
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dooooomed
John Dvorak says that Microsoft is toast. Twice. Consider yourselves warned!
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Thinkpad a wannabe Wii
Since IBM Thinkpads come with a built-in accelerometer, which serves to protect thehard drive if sudden movement is detected, some enterprising folks figured out a way to use the entire laptop as a motion controller similar to the Nintendo Wii. They have a simple file to download that works with a few games like Tux Racer and Blazetris (a Tetris clone) – you just move the laptop physically around to control the game action. This isn’t some third-party hack but an actual research project at IBM. I am tempted to try this out, though the idea of shaking my precious laptop in the air has me abit leery…
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Microsoft Vista is its own grandfather
Vista is so advanced, that it serves as its own upgrade. Take that, Mac OS X!
UPDATE: Do you only have Vista Basic installed, but want to try a feature of Ultimate out for a while? Here’s a nifty trick for extending the activation grace period from 30 days to 120 days. Fully legitimate, using a documented Windows command.
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cell phone television the easy way
This article at Ars about the economics and technical challenges of watching TV on your cel phone leaves me confused. For one thing, Sprint already offers TV, and they seem to meet the affordability problem by simply charging up the wazoo. My cell phone can support streaming TV but I’d have to pay an extra $15/month at minimum for the service; a more realistic unlimited usage plan is a $40 addon.
But what’s even more puzzling is why cell phones don’t just allow you to watch standard TV. Rather than muck about with bandwidth concerns over the cell network, just receive the TV signal from actual TV towers. Am I missing something here? Doesn’t that seem the easiest route? The resolution on my cell phone LCD is probably higher than my analog TV anyway; with HDTV that won’t be the case but the signal can always be downsampled in realtime (easier than upsampling since there’s no interpolation involved).
Sure, the cell phone companies don’t get any revenue by this, but the cell phone makers could certainly sell it as a value-added feature on upscale phones. People would pay; I know I’d watch TV on my cell phone while commuting on the bus, for example – much easier than dealing with digital downloads and portable DVD players and whatnot.
UPDATE: The Japanese have had analog TV on their cell phones since 2003, and now have digital TV too.
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take a scenic Vista drive, virtually
You can actually test-drive Windows Vista online, by running the full OS in a virtual machine via Microsoft’s website. The demo is powered by Microsoft Virtual Server. VMs are a great way to let a totally unknown user muck about as they please with no risk of damage whatsoever – it’s like Etch a Sketch – a sandbox that wipes clean after each use.
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Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Pete Zaitcev, a well-armed blogger with deep knowledge of all things anime and linux, says my recent commentary on Linux was “hilariously retarded“. My crime was my poor choice of examples of Linux hardware compatibility: USB thumbdrives and optical mice. He’s absolutely right, those are poor examples indeed (unlike, say, graphics cards, TV tuners, webcams, …). However, my broader point stands – seamless, plug and play compatibility of a generic USB device (or for that matter any peripheral) is not guaranteed with Linux. Were it otherwise, this site wouldn’t need to exist. All in all, I think my comments about Linux were rather optimistic, and hardly hostile.
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CES2007: 1TB for $399
Hitachi and Seagate are racing to deliver 1-terabyte (1TB) hard drives by the first quarter. These are the fruits of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR).
Since the 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is about to start in Las Vegas, expect the week ahead to be full of these kinds of goodies. For example, there are Blu-Ray burners, HD-DVD burners, and even combo Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drives coming out soon. Wireless USB is going to be big this year, as will Windows Slideshow, an advanced secondary external LCD screen for laptop computers running Vista. And there’s even a 32GB flash-based notebook hard drive. There’s a storage-technology slideshow on the web that previews some of these technologies.
The best CES coverage is at Ars Technica and Tom’s Hardware. Stay tuned…