June 28, 2012
OSx86 is a collaborative hacking project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture and x86-64 compatible processors. The effort started soon after the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement that Apple would be transitioning its personal computers from PowerPC to Intel microprocessors. Apple uses a Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, to tie Mac OS to the systems it distributed to developers after announcing its switch to Intel’s chips. A computer built to run this type of Mac OS X is also known as a Hackintosh.
Hackintoshed notebook computers are also referred to as ‘Hackbooks.’ The Apple software license does not allow Mac OS X to be used on a computer that is not ‘Apple-branded.’ The legality of this form of tying is disputed. While the methods Apple uses to prevent Mac OS X from being installed on non-Apple hardware are protected from commercial circumvention in the United States by the DMCA, specific changes to the law regarding the concept of jailbreaking has thrown such and similar circumvention methods when carried out by end-users for personal use into a legal grey area.
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June 28, 2012
Asymmetric warfare is war between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly, or whose strategy or tactics differ significantly. Such struggles often involve strategies and tactics of unconventional warfare (such as subversion and sabotage); the ‘weaker’ combatants use strategy to offset their deficiencies. Such strategies may not necessarily be militarized, involving combatants with widely varying degrees of training and support.
This is in contrast to symmetric warfare, where two powers have similar military forces and resources and rely on tactics that are similar overall, differing only in details and execution. The term is frequently used to describe what is also called ‘guerrilla warfare,’ ‘insurgency,’ and ‘terrorism’ (as well as ‘counterinsurgency’ and ‘counterterrorism’), essentially violent conflict between a formal military and an informal, poorly-equipped, but resilient opponent.
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June 28, 2012
A sixteen-segment display, sometimes called a ‘Union Jack’ display (because it resembles the British Flag), is a type of display based on 16 segments. It is an extension of the more common seven-segment display, adding four diagonal and two vertical segments and splitting the three horizontal segments in half (A fourteen-segment display splits only the middle horizontal segment). A sixteen-segment display can have 65,536 different states; they were were originally designed to display alphanumeric characters (Latin letters and Arabic digits).
Later they were used to display Thai numerals and Persian characters. Before the advent of inexpensive dot-matrix displays, sixteen and fourteen-segment displays were some of the few options available for producing alphanumeric characters on calculators and other embedded systems. However, they are still sometimes used on VCRs, car stereos, microwave ovens, telephone Caller ID displays, and slot machine readouts.
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