Slashdot Mirror
New Business Card Rescue CDs
Linuxcare has introduced version 1.2 of their business card-sized rescue disks, which now contain 140 MB of recovery tools, Debian install capabilities, the X Window System, PCMCIA support, and ssh. From the picture they look pretty cool, too. I remember seeing the business card CDs at a COMDEX a couple of years ago, but this is easily the best use I've seen for them, and is a needed improvement over the previous version.
I've never seen anything like this before. I checked Linuxcare's site, but couldn't find more about these things, and surprisingly there's nothing on their front page about it. Anybody got a link for more info?
PS - First Post :)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
They aren't business card size. They are noticeably larger.
I'm getting an uncanny image in my head of linux partisans handing these out to people who've just called customer service because their windoze machines BSODed:
"Have the data on your computers ever been hurt because of the negligent actions of an operating-system vendor? Linux could help you receive the relief that you deserve." Of course, the notion of a contingency fee would have to be revamped: "We don't make make money unless you decide to give us money instead of downloading the software separately on your own."
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I must have missed that past article. The cd's seem to have their ends clipped off. can the cdrom read them that way?
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
I'm wondering how useful this would be. The main benefit of having it in this format is that you can put it in your wallet, right? Hopefully, you wouldn't need it *that* often, but you would need it at a moment's notice, so you'd probably have it in there for a while (possibly alongside other items with similar attributes, natch).
So, if this is the case, how long would it hold up? It is still a CD, after all; would it need similar handling as a normal CD? How likely is it that when you actually need it, it will still be useable?
Despite these reservations... where can I actually get one? *grin*
These oddly cut mini CDROMs aren't really new...
:-)
But wouldn't we geeks just *love* to get our hands on RECORDABLES of the same size!!!
Finally we can have some high-res pictures of our loved ones in our wallets (140MB... hmmm, quite a lot of loved ones, family, coworkers, pets, pictures of computers and whatever you want to take with you)
http://www.octave.com/551519/en/cdrmedia/businessc ard.html
I think this is a really cool idea, don't get me wrong, but:
:)
These things don't work in mail-slot style ROM readers and they are precarious at best in caddy-readers... that is the only probelm I see.
I have a couple of old Plextor and NEC ROM drives that use caddys that live in my Linux box, and a spankin new mail-slot DVD drive in my new computer, so I would not be able to use these. Maybe I should have thought of that!
And of course the same goes for a a ton of Japanese market j-pop CD-singles that come on heart, star, and other shape (but balanced) CDs...
A
There has got to be a HUGE market for that.... I know most CD-ROMs can read the lil' discs, but can CD-R's write them?
----
And that's what all there business-card cd-roms are for. So don't expect a link on their website or something.
Ask and ye shall be linked. Look here for your very own business card CD-R blanks. Pricy compared to regular blanks ($2-$4 depending on quantity), but I never put a price on cool.
No affiliation. I just know how to use Google.
Are you making one for each company that has "Linux" in its name, or what?
What do you use as a cd-drive to read these things? Is it something specific to laptops, or what?
Open your cupholder...err.. CD drive. See how there are two rings in it, the outer super-jumbo-slurpee sized ring is for normal CDs. The inner, coke-can sized ring is where these things go.
0 1 - just my two bits
From the looks of the picture, I have to wonder what sort of business card is being used for comparison. Because, assuming that the hole in the center is the same size as that of a normal disk (and it would have to be, wouldn't it?), these cd's are much bigger than normal business cards. Or perhaps I jsut have a non-standard sized implimentation of BusinessCard?
how do they fit 140 MB of data onto this card? I believe those cards are itself trimmed from 8cm media cards, which hold 140 mb of data or 21 minutes. With the top and bottom trimmed, isn't the largest available data on the CD bounded by the shortest diameter? (in other words, much less than 140mb?)
Anyone know how to get ahold of one of the linuxcare ones?
Something tells me these things could cause problems with slot loading drives (they work like car scd players).
I got one of these in the mail on time, and it turned out it was a home-brewed cd, because it was a CD-R, and it still had a little room left on it, so I deleted the crap of it, and was able to fit a good 50megs on there of shareware games to give to a friend who doesn't have the internet
I don't know if it's all that bad. If a win box goes down, you can walk over to the owner and say, "here - the last 'rescue disk' you'll ever need!"
;)
Oh wait, that was partisan. Guess you were right. Nevermind
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Hmm... now that is pretty neat. bizcard-cd has blanks for $4 each. Now where's my credit card...
----
These miniature CDs have been around for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, I have one with a "New Kids on the Block" single on it. :b
I think I saw an ISP using this media to distribute their software.
Anyways, the little CDs took off elsewhere (Japan, I believe), while they were mostly shunned here.
But, to be honest with you, unless you really dig "cool", they're a big fat waste of money. CD-Rs cost $1 a piece and these Mini CD-Rs run $2 - $5.
`course, a Linux distro on one of these is just cool as hell. I wonder if I could pick up a couple of hundred of these and pass them out at out next LUG meeting.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Nope. Just pop it in a standard CD-ROM drive. Most have a little ridge in hem that will allow them to hold mini-CD's quite comfortably. Which is basically what this is -- a mini-CD, with the edges chopped off.
Of course, if you have a caddy drive, you're outta luck...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I've been a fan of single-disk distros for quite a while-- after Staroffice borked my libc a while back, its what I used to rebuild. This sounds like a pretty cool implementation of that, especially with X on-CD.
Does anyone have any more info, or has anyone ever used this? Could be really useful as a rescue distro...
The sun is going down, I say we follow it out of town- We've been here for far too long.
Still not dead.
I seriously doubt that the little ridge holds it in place while it's spinning at god-knows-what RPM. I think the spindle clamps it down while it's spinning... but the ridge DOES make sure that the spindle is aligned correctly when the disc is inserted.
So, I'd guess that either rounded edges or a rectangle with rounded corners would work - as long as the resulting disc is perfectly inscribed in the correct diameter circle... some of the links in comments here show some wicked looking shapes (gears, fish, etc - just gotta balance it right)
----
Hrm, you said CD-R, but you erased it... it was a CD-RW? That's even cooler, but I haven't seen any of those for sale...
----
One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.
I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a .deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.
As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.
With this business card sized media, you could put literally any data on the cdrom, up to 52MB (on the true business card sized ones).
Programs such as ssh, gpg, and other crypto sensitive stuff could be placed on here. To hide their contents, make a par-point presentation in staroffice and put that on there. That way, when you meet anyone, just give them one of these rediculously overpriced CDRs with your info on it, and they'll also get a copy of all the non-exportables.
Actually, the export business is getting easier now, but it doesn't hurt to put something important on them. Just think, if you were Kevin Mitnick and you wanted your data back from the feds, you could've just burned a stack of these things and mailed them to your friends. When you got out of jail, just call one of them up and have them send you your card back. With a stack of 50, the sheer volume would assure you access to your data.
Actually that brings up another idea for these, put copies of data you need to keep and mail them to people. Or how about a distributed collection of data, each person has to provide the business card to complete the library and access the data. You could make a high-tech easter egg hunt out of this.
Even better yet, you put the secret key to get at your fortune, spread across a bunch of these. You then mail them out to all your willed partiticpants. When you die, they ALL have to cooperate to get at your money!
How about putting a unique key on each one of these and having people use them as access cards, you could block out specific access cards and institute your own access policy.
This would be great for a website. You send each member a card that they have to use each time they access your website, as a password substitute. This would bypass user chosen passwords and provide the ultimate security for accessing a service. If one of the cards is compromised, cancel access for it.
Make up your own use for these!
Mabye I'm missing something here, but I can't find anything about them on Linuxcare's website. In there a URL where you can buy these things? :o
While they were giving a few of these guys out at the '99 Atlanta Linux Showcase my cohorts and I managed to sneak away with some. We tried them out when we got back and sure enough they worked great, had a cute LinuxCare bootlogo, most cd drives read them (except for the slot-load pionners...), but I thought I remember them only having 30MB (must have been version 1.1, b/c it also lacked the penguin on the left). I started carrying mine around in my wallet and got some great reactions when I used it good effect in BSOD-like situations.
Anyway, the lesson is, dont carry the damn things in your wallet, b/c it eventually got cracked and is now useless decoration.
~tide
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
Sadly, the CD's from most of the distros are useless for rescue, since they only have the bare minimum to install the OS. Has LinuxCare made ISO images available?
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Essentially discs with a browser, a mini-website portal thingy and a 'free' internet deal. They are fully rectangular.. If any-one saw those in CD-R, I'd buy them! The rounded-off ones.. No thanks.
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
how durable are these things? can I stick it in my wallet and sit down without worrying about cracking my CD?
I post links to stuff here
I was just looking at the shape CDs at bizcard-cd.com. Hmmmm. How long until we see a rescue disk shaped like a penguin? P.S. - Don't even think about it, I've already patented it. And anyway, I think Amazon just patented free thought....
Well not two weeks later I downloaded and compiled a new kernel and misconfigured it to the point where I couldnt boot. I popped that LinuxCare disk in, booted and recompiled another kernel in no time.
I think it's much nicer and easier to use then using the rescue mode in RedHat's boot disks. Also, they good to use when someone wants a quick Linux demo too...
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
I do tech support for a company who sent a large amount of these disks out as a promotion for a new product. Well, as you could guess we got plenty of calls where people had put them in the cdroms that don't have a tray that comes in and out. The ones that just suck the disc in. I even talked to one guy who put one in his regular cd-rom drive and when he opend the tray to take it out it had "eaten it" in his words. And now it was "lost somewhere in his cdrom drive."
I don't know how many people they had to send reimbursement checks out for their cdrom drives to be fixed but we got quite a number of calls about it.
Imagine if AOL sent out 20million disks like these. There goes 10million cdrom drives to the repair shop. Haha!
At RhinoCdCard.com they specialize in putting custom data on custom cut cds for a very low price.
They have one that is barely larger than a business card that holds 40mb, and they also plan on producing DVDs cut the same way.
----------------------------------------------
I don't really mind double posts on
CD-R OUTLET they've got the 3" mini-cd and the business cards, both writable.
They also used them for promoting their web portal (countdown 9/9/99 or something like that, was supposed to go online Sept. 9, 1999).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
-jwb
When did computers that'll boot from a cd become more common than computers with floppy drives?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Dosn't the size and shape determine how well the material can be read from an optical standpoint? I assume that cd readers are using a circular method of retrieving the data so how do they read it when large gaps (as seen from the bottoms being sheared off in the pic)? Just a thought.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/{sda,hda}
which will wipe out the entire disk including the partition table (don't do this on a disc which contains anything useful!). It makes it possible to install NT4 on a disk larger than 8GB without hassle, and Redhat installers will partition the disc without any nasty questions when the disc is blank. It is also useful when you want to erase a disc "beyond any recognition", ie. when someone else is going to use it.
I have used tomsrtbt to format a disc with fat, copy a win95 cd into it, booted the machine in dos and started the installation. Why? I didn't have a dos driver for the f*ing CD drive connected to a Sound Blaster controller.
http://www.toms.net/rb/
YES !! I want tomsrtbt ++ on a credit card size cd now !!!!
Don't leave home without it.
RFC1925
... or any other machine that just has a slot, rather than a tray that slides out?
... I'm just asking about the physical compatibility ... flamers, cool yer jets ...
And, I certainly realize that a "Linux rescue disc" probably won't work on a Mac
Propellers are not circular, and they are balanced. When you think about it that way, suddenly it's not counter-intuitive at all.
(BTW, this isn't quite on the point, look up how they load centrifuges: If they have seven identical things to go in a centrifuge, they put in three things, spaced 120 degrees apart. It's balanced, and you can forget about those three things completely. Then they put in the other four things, 90 degrees apart. They're balanced too, so the whole thing is still balanced. What's cool is they don't have to worry at all about where the four things are relative to the first three: They simply don't care, because the two groups don't affect each other due to the fact that they're balanced among themselvess. If you look at it, it looks wrong as all hell, but it's balanced right and it won't freak out at high speed.)
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
If you shaped them as a 3-point or 4-point star you could have a mini CD that doubles as a martial arts weapon ;-) Actually, existing AOL coasters would probably slice well to that same shape (I certainly wasn't going to put one in my machine!).
for those claimming it's balanced.. well in this case it is.but
I think you havn't seen thier samples like www.shapecd.com. they have quite a lot of unballanced shapes. However. I doubt if there's any influence because the force of gravity is simply to small compared to the torque.
Utter nonsense, Signal 11. The inertial vector of the system (and by extension the angular momentum vector and any associated torque effects that airflow may cause) is directed outward normal to the plane of the CD, just like any other CD. Please try to learn something about a topic before posting.
These things are too small to fit an X and a live filesystem on it. I don't quit understand why live filesystem isn't so popular. It's is the best demo format on any machines. Usually what I do is, pop a slackware 7 CD in a windows machine, boot from the CD, quickly configure network and X, then run X. Slow as it is, I still can demostrate netscape, and sometimes staroffice over the network.
For rescue, tom's root and boot disk is pretty darn good, and you can make one anywhere.
They're kinda cool, but it'd be a nightmare if all my users got them.
jeff_C
Slackware has a /live directory on its bootable CD. This may be what you are looking for.
Lars -
Okay. I know that shaped CDs are not new.. and we hard about these CDs from linuxcare at te last show... but where can we get them?
How did such an uninformed post get a +2 score? Oh yea, self moderation.
Karma whore.
.
Lars -
They're about the same price here at the swap'n'swindle.
;)
My plans for it include a disc with the Windows distributed.net client, an autorun.inf and a bootable section. The autorun and the autoexec will both install the client. Simply inserting the disc into a Windows machine will contribute to my keyrate.
Shhh....
My rescue CD is way too big to fit on one of these things. It nearly fills a 5" CD-R now.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Yup, he was convinced that the distribution medium was what made his scheme great and gave it the means to succeed where so many other commerce systems had failed.
I just kept him around long enough to get some pictures of the CD, since I'd never seen one before. He seemed amused by my quickcam too.
When they make a real CD, they wash the media layer away from the outer millimeter before applying the coating. This allows the polycarbonate shell to be continuous around both sides of the CD, and air never touches the media layer.
If you cut your own and get the balance perfect, it'll work for a while. But who knows what oxygen might do to the CD-RW dye? The edges might become unusable after a while, and I don't know how fast it would spread.
I don't know the chemical makeup of the dye, but I'm sure someone could tell you why they go through the bother in the first place of keeping it away from air at the edge. cd-recordable.com used to have a wonderful section showing how CD-Rs are made, but they seem to have changed affiliations and that section disappeared.
When 3" CD-Audio singles came out, many of them came with a small adapter which was basically a hollow 5" cd with some sort of micro clip mechanism to hold the mini in the middle.
I've never used one, and I think they might have required the mini to have a shaped edge, so that the clip wouldn't be thicker than the CD. So they might not be compatible with the mini CD-Rs and rectangular minis we're seeing now.
If anyone has one of these things, I'd like to hear about whether it works.
If you cut the disc it would expose the core (they used to be aluminum, don't know what they are now) and it would deteriorate.
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
It's like Renault Encore owners carry a spare transmission in the trunk. You're responsible for making whatever adaptations are necessary to compensate for the shortcomings of your hardware.
Shouldn't those slot drives ship with an adapter ring or two?
The ones that actually fit in business card holders are 50MB. The slightly larger ones, which you can still wedge into your wallet, are 140. A plain round 3" is 200 or so, I think. 250 perhaps? Then vanilla 5"ers are 650 and you can get overburn-ready discs that go to 700 and if your drive is capable of it, some of these can go to about 708. Check www.ahead.de and look at Nero, everybody's favorite Win9x-based CD authoring software, which includes overburn support.
You notice when you burn a disc that when you look at the data side you can see where the data was written? Like if you only write 100 mb, only the first centimeter from the center is used. Well I would guess that if you cut the corners but leave the written portion alone it would work. You'd have to make sure not to bend the CD up, too.
But like I said, this is a complete guess and I have no reason to think this would work other than it seems logical.
_________________
rooooar
The guys at cd-recordable.com have been making colored, black, and aryan CD-Rs for quite some time. They go for about $2 a disk in bundles of ten.
So when are we going to see colored-plastic business card cut CD-RW discs?
*boink* That's the sound of my brain going "wow!".
Cool, thanks!
i picked up a copy of the orignal linuxcare cd at linux world last year and tried to boot off of it to see what it had. it didn't boot.
so i mounted it to see what was on it. it didn't mount.
i was getting annoyed and for some odd reason put it in my windoze box. and voila! it worked! but not as i expected it to. the cd had 13 tracks 2 of which were readable. the cdplayer fired up and i was soon listenning to some gospel choir ala kirk franklin. truly bizarre. the second track appeared to be about 13 seconds of another song.
Sandpaper at 250 degrees fahrenheit.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
This doesn't make small-sized cd's a good idea, though. I've bought a couple, and they've all seemed to get lost.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I'm guessing this is because the first edge of oxidation around the cut stops any further oxygen from creeping in.
I might be wrong though, and just have been lucky, but some cracked CD's are still usable after four years. So I suppose it's ok to cut your own cd's. The absence of a protective coating around any edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut cd doubles as an effective murder weapon.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I have a pioneer DVD-103 drive, which has no tray. These look like they work in normal drives, but will they work in a slot drive like mine?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Yeah, another interesting note is that I believe the cut-shaped 140mb CDs were the idea of some MSN Canada employee (I met the guy once.) If someone knows otherwise, by all means please let me know.
Has anyone seen the little IE5 discs? They're pretty cool (regardless of which evil empire company made them.)
Pete
When you get the bootable recovery disk, you will find a URL to the linuxcare web site where the BBC is discussed.
I've been screaming from the rooftops for a long time now that little 3" CD-RW disks are a perfect replacement for damnable floppies. Think of it, CD-R of that size could be used in 90% of the cd-rom drives in existence. If computer companies would start standardizing on new DVD/CD-RW drives and drop 1.44MB floppies, superdisks, and zips, then these sized disks would solve the tranportability problem of normal CDs. You eliminate a drive from the computer, maintain compatibility with CD's and DVD's, you still have access to larger CD's for backup purposes, I could go on an on! Best of all 3" CD-R/CD-RW disks can be used in almost all CD-RW drives already out there. Why don't they start selling these things everywhere?! Doesn't anybody have any "vision"?
-Frustrated Geek
"Life is a series of mistakes and success depends on how well we learn from them." - Isaac Church
This is soooooo cool. Just think, being able to carry a bunch of ultra-useful linux utilities around in your pocket. Hey, it even has X, if that's your thing.
One problem, though. Where can I get one of these things?
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
If a credit-card sized CD holds 40MB, then maybe an unfoldable one that comes out double the size (less a bit for the fold) should be able to do a couple of hundred megs. With "bzip2 -9" you could fit a useable distribution on that (especially if you replace monsters like Netscape with something lighter). Q: "What do you know about Linux?" A: Reaches into wallet... "Here, install this!" You might need some reversible brackety bits that slid across the fold, flick-knife style, to make it rigid enough, but I'm sure there are ways. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There are two main types of balance: static balance and dynamic balance. Static balance is how the object behaves under a force (usually gravity) if it is not being accelerated. Dynamic balance is how the object is balanced if it is being accelerated. In our example, the CD is being given a rotational acceleration around its principle axis. Interesting side note: your auto-mechanic has to do both sorts of balance when he rotates your tires, except he probably calls the second kind "spin balance".
To calculate dynamic balance you need to find the moment of inertia of the object. This is fairly easy for symetrical objects like normal CD's but with these weird shapes you will likely have to use a tensor and calculate moments and products of inertia. I'll make mistakes if I try to explain this. :)
Anyways, bottom line is that it is possible to have spin balance with weird shapes. Just try to keep the principle axis in the center.
/joeyo
2^5
I got one of these handed to me at the "Linux Demo Day" a few months back. First time I sat down on a hard chair I heard a distinct cracking noise. Sure enough, the thing had cracked into a million little pieces. It's a cool idea - but I don't know if they really do too well in a wallet :)
I was trying to figure out why my hit counter was going crazy tonight then I stumbled upon this thread. Thanks for all the hits guys! If anyone need some questions answered email me privately I'm signing off for the night but will glady respond to all. We also have a faq page on our web site http://cardiscs.com Regards, Andy Carr Citiscape Shapes
Hi Everyone,
If you come by our booth in Hall 6, USA Pavillion you can get them from us (Linuxcare), you can also get them from Linux International- also in the US pavillion!
Take care, Art..
Is there anyone who got some spares at LWCE @ Javits? If so, I for one want one of these new bootable recovery discs. I have one of the previous ones (the one that LinuxCare gave out in San Jose in August), but this looks much better. Please let me know - I'd definitely like to get me one of these.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I know I've received a few AOL CDs at this size, formatted with 40M of data.
You can have their Debian based mini-distro soon, I've found the information on LinuxCare's site, here. At the moment, it doesn't say very much, but it does mention that more information will be provided soon, as well as ISO images, and source code!
;-)
They also have a mailing list setup for discussion of the business card. You can subscribe by sending an e-mail to the list request address, with the word 'subscribe' in the body.
This is one cool thing, and I've gotta give props to LinuxCare for this.
Topher
innominate have them, too. It's a debian 20MB rescue disk. I think it looks cooler than the one from linuxcare, because it's orange and really creditcard size...
"Is it friday yet?"
Is there anything to stop some manufacturer making a small MP3 player that reads from these small CDROMs. The unit should end up being just a bit larger than a minidisc player. We could then place hours of music on these small CDROMs. Would the drives be able to spin fast enough? 4MB for a four minute track, 1MB a minute, 18kbytes a second? Would the power consumption for spinning the CDROM and decompressing the data be too great?
As to AOL CDs: (I also read this on a web page but can no longer find the link,) fill a bowl with hot water, then threading a sink plug on its chain through the centre hole, dangle the arrangement in the hot water. After a short time the CD starts to melt and droop on the plug. Lift the result out of the water and hang, waiting for it too cool down and dry. Once cooled, remove the plug and invert the now vase shaped result, insert a candle and give them as Birthday presents and stocking fillers to non-computer literate folks. (Don't, whatever you do, give them to someone who is computer literate, except Sysops or Admins of course).
I also give drums and other musical instruments to young children.
OK that last one is truely evil ...
threadeds blog
Yeah but is it worth booting at all?
Mitnick can't touch a PC, as part of his sentancing; if he wanted his data back, he could have one of his friends mail him box filled with twenty pounds (11.339809 kilograms) worth of Post-It notes. ^_^
I know these links have been beaten to death like a dead yak, but I must say they are 15.99 for ten at cdroutlet.com
10 PRINT "LINUX RULEZ!!@@!!"
20 GOTO 10
Then we'll be really cool.
In more than one case I have found myself using the Red Hat install CD as a rescue disk whenever LILO failed for any reason.
I boot the CD, switch to the bash prompt on virtual console #1, mount my hard disk and chroot to it.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
> Those things aren't balanced! :-)
Guess someone failed the moments of inertia calculations on the physics/calculas tests
> it has to do with centrifucal(sp?) force
Did you mean Centripetal (or Centrifugal ) force?
http://explorezone.com/101/centrifugal.h tm
Cheers
I had a 3" AOL CD but I don't seem to be able to find it atm.
john
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
A.) Not really, that would be an immature display of a breach of hacker ethics, and just plain stupid.
B.) Radio shacks dont have PCs with CD drives, they just have dummies
i got one of these a linux world in san jose last year, and actualy used it to recover a machine while we were there, however, i would warn against using these in cheap cdroms. i had mine become lodged in a cheap panasonic drive, and a friend of mine had a similar experience. works well, however, in laptop drives with snap-down centers (like are found in portable cd players).
That, and it since you are only cutting the CD twice after burning it, producing the things becomes (marginally) chaper
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
look here
A kit with bizcard CD-Rs, labels and software is here. 12 disks, 16 glossy labels, and software for $99. They offer everything separately, though.
bp
uuh. great. too bad its useless if someone has whacked a keylogger or backorifice onto the windoze box tho.
try http://www.demolinux.org...you can modify it as you see fit.they have a debian version on the way and they currently run a redhat hybrid with suse install tools.
A company called ShapeCD has a patent on business card shaped CDs. See the patent on IBM's site. It seems that there is also a patent on an X'mas shaped CD. Hmmm.
All the links so far seem to be US based - one of them even allowed you to choose "United Kingdom" from a drop-down list as part of your address and then, when checking-out said that "UK is not a supported destination for shipping ..."
Anyone know of a place in the UK that sells these?
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
>The absence of a protective coating around any
>edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut
>cd doubles as an effective murder weapon
Heat the edges using a cigarette lighter, matches, or whatever. It smoothes those sharp polycarbonate edges quite nicely.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I wonder how can windoze keylogger do its job when your rebooted into live linux-on-CD ?
Brain is my second favorite organ.
It is if you run any kind of Unix on it. There is an ssh-capable terminal prog, so they aren't useless even if they're in a computer lab where you shouldn't really hack them :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Using /dev/random would take _forever_ to wipe anything of any reasonable size. Reads on it block until there is enough randomness in the entropy pool to give out cryptographically secure random numbers. Using /dev/urandom would drain the entropy pool almost completely (unless the kernel keeps some entropy in reserve or something), besides the fact that it is much slower. (The kernel uses some complicated code to deal with the random pool, and I'm not sure that it could keep up with normal disk speeds of 14MB/s.)
I don't think writing random data over a disk is much more secure than writing zeros, and probably not worth it. Maybe it makes it harder for people who are trying to detect the remaining weak magnetic moments which the zeroing didn't reverse, but you could probably make that a lot harder by writing a disk full of ones after zeroing the disk. If things are _that_ important, it might be better to open up the case and trash the mechanism alignment. Then nobody would stand a chance on a modern high density hard disk. (the alignment is really sensitive in those things.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I got a Toshiba laptop ad recently in the mail that had one of these. I kept it because it had Quicktime 4.0 on it.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
umm..dude..i was referring to the previous post where the guy sez he carries a windoze ssh with him.