9 ms·
Turn your PC upside down to boot into Linux (2003)
- lorenzhs 11y agoHigh-end laptops like ThinkPads often have an accelerometer, I'm not quite sure how hard it would be to access it from GRUB2 but it would definitely be a neat trick to boot a hidden partition or something. Or maybe display a fake error message and refuse to boot if it's not sideways as a crude method of protection.
- agumonkey 11y agoOh I remember someone managing to tap into that ! gosh ... I hope I can find it again. ps: #ibmthinkpad refreshed my memory. > old thinkpads (<= T60/61 or something): hdaps.ko from the kernel > newer thinkpads (up to X201/T400/T410?) hdaps.ko from tp-smapi > new thinkpads: no wai (simply because no linux driver as of now, nobody reversed the windows driver yet)
- JoshTriplett 11y agoCurrent Thinkpads don't necessarily have the accelerometer anymore, because they don't have spinning drives. ("hdaps" referred to "hard drive active protection system".)
- dfox 11y agoIIRC, even old(-ish) X200/X201 does not necessarily have accelerometer if it was factory configured with SSD.
- lorenzhs 11y agoThe T450's Hardware Maintenance Manual reads The system board has an accelerometer, which can be broken when several thousands of G-forces are applied. Note: Dropping a system board from a height of as little as 6 inches so that it falls flat onto a hard bench can subject the accelerometer to as much as 6000 G's of shock. so it seems like at least some current ThinkPads still come with an accelerometer, and it's not in the disk.
- agumonkey 11y ago450 series are never sold with mechanical hdds ? Do they use it to report misuse ?
- eli 11y agoOld MacBooks too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw
- jsingleton 11y agoMany laptops have these sensors, often as part of a hard drive protection system. If it detects 9.8g suddenly going to 0g then it parks the read head as it's probably just been dropped. I'm not sure if they're still present in this era of SSDs. Maybe if they weren't part of the disk itself. They were used by the Quake-Catcher Network project from Stanford. Although from the OS. ...seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. https://github.com/carlgt1/qcn https://github.com/carlgt1/qcn Edit: Yes, I meant ms⁻² not g. Been a while since I've done any physics. 9.8g is probably more like what it would sense when hitting the floor, which is a bit too late to do anything useful. At least I didn't claim it to be 6.54×10⁻¹⁰ Nm²kg⁻² (bonus points if you get this).
- delazeur 11y ago> If it detects 9.8g suddenly going to 0g then it parks the read head as it's probably just been dropped. 9.8g? Is your office inside a centrifuge? :-P
- dikaiosune 11y agoMaybe supposed to be 9.8 m/s^2 ?
- yoha 11y agoTo clarify what delazeur meant: g already means "9.8 m/s²" Thus, normal gravity is 1g and free fall is 0g. 9.8g would mean 9.8 times the gravity at Earth surface, that is "96 m/s²". You would feel almost ten times as heavy. For reference: Jupiter "surface" gravity is 25.9 m/s² Sun "surface" gravity is 274 m/s²
- yompers888 11y agoAssuming force being applied along the axis of the spine, and that it continues, you would experience tunnel vision, lightheadedness, loss of consciousness, and eventual death. People can't really handle more than 5g on that axis without a special g suit. Lesson: Don't try to take it standing up.
- sschueller 11y agoShake laptop to boot Linux :)
- dheera 11y agoI've been wanting to get access to the ThinkPad accelerometer in Linux but haven't yet found a way to do so.
- bcg1 11y agoCould even consider implementing this inside a coreboot payload to load a "hidden" OS that on the BIOS flash chip. https://www.coreboot.org/Linux https://www.coreboot.org/Linux
- larrydag 11y agoPerhaps I'm missing the point. If one is going to boot up between OS's that often wouldn't virtualization work best? Other than that it is a neat hack.
- KC8ZKF 11y agoThe points you are missing are 2003 and Celeron. Efficient and easy virtualization is relatively recent.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoVMWare Workstation was already on its 4th major release by 2003.
- mattdotc 11y agoWhich wasn't really free if I remember correctly. You had to buy or crack it. Also, I don't think the performance really compared on consumer desktop hardware. As annoying as dual-booting was, it was the way all of my hobbyist friends and I preferred back then. edit: grammar
- dsp1234 11y agoHardware virtualization for intel/amd processors did not come until 2006. So you could run VMWare and get decent performance with paravirtualized drivers, but running a completely different OS would have required software virtualization, and it was not fast by any means. Booting to the other operating system was a much better experience since the OS would then have full use of the resources without software virtualization being in the way.
- wang_li 11y agoSoftware only virtualization was faster than the first generation of hardware supported virtualization. See page 7. of this document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf http://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf
- ANGUS_POTATO 11y agoGET THIS SMUT OFF THE INTERNET
- ANGUS_POTATO 11y agobet u can't hack me u bitchezzz
- ANGUS_POTATO 11y agohttps://www.google.com.au/search?q=ANGUS_POTATO&oq=ANGUS_POTATO&aqs=chrome..69i57.606j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=%22ANGUS_POTATO%22 https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ANGUS_POTATO&oq=ANGUS_POT... NO RESULTS!!!!! HaHaHa
- golergka 11y ago> Greetings Hackaday visitors and Time Travellers from the early 2000s! This is the best reaction I have ever seen to a sudden surge of traffic to an old page.
- PascLeRasc 11y agoYeah I posted this on Sunday and it seems to just have taken off this morning - is that normal?
- dikaiosune 11y agoSometimes the mods take things they think were unfairly missed and put them on the bottom of the front page to see if that generates interest.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsingleton 11y agoHackaday got the story from here and linked to this which may have generated interest. http://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/flip-your-desktop-over-to-boot-linux/ http://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/flip-your-desktop-over-to-boo...
- dang 11y agodikaiosune has it right. We put it in the second-chance pool, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there. It's the latest in a long series of experiments to try to give good stories a second crack at the front page. Edit: Wow, you've been posting some great articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=PascLeRasc https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=PascLeRasc. We've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11007792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11007792 in the second-chance pool and we'll send you a repost invite for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932621. (After a few days have gone by, we do the latter instead of re-upping the post.) Hope you'll keep up the great submissions!
- xylon 11y agoThis is the best idea ever. This is totally the most inspiring thing I have read all day. Putting my computer in a software distribution box will be a truly life-changing experience. And turn it into a Linux box just by turning it upside-down and putting an extra box over! It is so ingenious. So amazing!
- SFjulie1 11y agohttp://www.linux.sh/loadlin.html http://www.linux.sh/loadlin.html in 2003 you still could install linux on a FAT32 system and boot from windows, you could even share your swap space with the file windows was using for the same purpose. So an autoexec.bat with a menu and loadlin called in the process. It was not even a big penalty. We were real hackers like this : http://www.tsgk.net/cowboyz/tdc.html http://www.tsgk.net/cowboyz/tdc.html
- rdl 11y agoSoftware delivered in large physical boxes; not so much nostalgia but horror at 1) how wasteful the process was 2) how skewed it made things -- not being able to easily patch and thus deathmarch or even late shipping, and then the horrors of shipping crap and then hoping the patch would fix it, because you had to ship on a specific date. And just how hard to make/expensive/etc. boxes, manuals, etc. were, and how annoying it was to manage inventory.
- gh02t 11y agoI can remember when PC game boxes shrunk down from the huge size to the smaller format. And now they are "shrinking" into nothingness with digital distribution.
- ge0rg 11y agoYes, and the games you "buy" also shrink into nothingness if the distributor goes bankrupt or you are accused to violate somebody's ToS. I wish back for the physical distribution of game media and offline validation of serial numbers, if only to be able to play my old games in 20 years.
- jhasse 11y agoBuy at gog.com :)
- gh02t 11y agoTrue, though half the time nowadays all the physical copy does is link to a download. The last game I can remember buying a physical copy of was Civ V and basically the only thing in the box was a link to download it on Steam. With the onerous always-on DRM that seems so prevalent in many games today I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to play many of the more recent games I "own" in 20 years anyway.
- jhasse 11y agoThere are recent games which go against this trend. For example the last one I bought without DRM was Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition. Support them :)
- ksherlock 11y agoCute trick. Reminds me of the Karateka easter egg -- if you inserted the floppy disk upside down[1], the graphics displayed upside down. 1. 95% of HN is now confused
- dordoka 11y agoFor those interesed, I was among the not-confused-but-curious (I'm old enough to even have inserted cassette tapes on a computer) and found out this [0] explanation :) Nice story, thanks ksherlock. [0]: http://www.geek.com/games/karateka-apple-ii-floppy-disk-had-a-side-b-played-game-upside-down-1509335/ http://www.geek.com/games/karateka-apple-ii-floppy-disk-had-...
- speeder 11y agoUnfortunately it is not explained HOW they did it. It is somewhere on Mechner site and diaries, but I can't find it again. Basically, one day while coding, he found out that one single bit caused a bug in rendering that flipped the whole game upside down, it was completely unintentional. But he thought it would be hilarious to make the easter egg (indeed, it was). Later he used the same technique on Prince of Persia game (there is an area of the game where you drink a potion that flips that bit, flipping the whole game upset down, this had to be emulated for non-Apple systems, probably caused some pain to people porting the game :P)
- wang_li 11y agoThe Apple II floppy drives were single sided. It would be trivial to put different code on the other side of the floppy disk itself. A single bit error that would simply flip everything upside down seems quite improbable given the Apple II hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if a bug inspired the easter egg, but I'd be shocked if there was a single bit difference between the front and back of the floppy.
- speeder 11y agoI think it was related to something about how a pointer to the video data worked in the game engine (not a property of Apple II itself). Maybe it was the positive/negative bit that was flipped, and made the pointer read backwards and underflow, but end rendering anyway due to some hardware quirk.
- noonespecial 11y agoShake it upside-down to reboot would be much more fun.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoAn oldie but a goodie : http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-03 http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-03
- noonespecial 11y agoThanks. That's the one I was thinking of but for some reason I was remembering it as having been a "User Friendly" so my google-fu failed me.