Yeah, I realize that it's not the most secure method, but I was trying to get it to fit on the subject line, and I was running out of characters.
Nontheless, it's far better than just shipping the drive out the door without doing anything, and it'll at least deter the casual purchaser who wants to know if anybody left something on the (( Presumably anonymous )) drives they bought. if you're expecting that somebody is going to want to read the data on the drives,
If you've got really important stuff on the drive, then yes, you should (1) read from/dev/urandom, and (2), put it in an infinite loop and let it run for a few days.
The extra electricity will cost you a full $0.20 and save a lot of headache.
Replace hd with sd if you have scsi drives.
Granted, that works on Linux, not AIX. It's been long enough since I admined AIX that I can't remember how to determine all partitions. More importantly, it probably wouldn't fit on the subject line (which was the purpose of this post).
In any case, the point is it's still a (short) one-liner to clean the disks if you know the partition names. If those were Intel boxes, you could have booted off of Knoppix, and run the subject line. Even for RS/6000 boxes, it should be possible to find a Linux boot CD. That's really all you should need.
And various people have free disk-erase boot CDs/floppies. What more do you really want? Stick in floppy, boot, go for lunch. Job done.
SCO has been backpedalling for so long that they've added an extra gear to the mix. This allows them to claim that they're pedalling forward while they're going backwards at full speed.
Some people might call this 'reverse gear', but they've given it a new name and managed to patent it as a business method.
You shouldn't even be able to find an NTSC only television in stores right now. And yet...
What better example of planned obsolescence can you find?
Hey! My TV stopped working! It's still in warranty, so fix it!
Your TV's working fine there's just no signal for it to receive... analog broadcasts are now illegal
Anda log what?
You need a digital TV
You mean a computer? I don't want a computer.. they make you sick! Viruses and such.
No. That's just WIndows. A digital TV is a regular tv that recieves a different kind of signal than yours. A Digital signal.
Well, why didn't they tell me? I just bought this TV this year
No big problem. You just need to buy a converter box. Here!
That's more expensive than my TV!
You bought it on sale, didn't you?
Yeah, of course!
Well, now you know why it was on sale!.
Well nobody told me that it was about to be useless
If we did, you wouldn't have bought it, would you?
Of course not!
I guess that that's why we didn't make a big deal about it
But now I've got a useless television!
It's not useless. All you need is this converter
You're lucky it's not legal to shoot you.
The GPL and the BSD licenses focus on different types of freedom.
The BSD licence focuses on freedom for the developer. Do what you want with it -- change it, sell it, close source it.. Whatever. Once you have the source code, (if it's still free) you can do whatever you want with it.
The GPL focuses on freedom for the source code. Do whatever you want -- change it, use it sell it, whatever -- as long as people continue to have access to the source.
The problem with the GPL is that some companies may be unwilling to use GPL code in a product if it meant that they have to make their changes publicly available.
The problem with the BSD license is that, for any company that faces real competition, releasing code changes is potentially a zero-sum game. If your competition takes your BSD code, improves it and closes off the changes, they gain from your work, and you lose.
In other word, each license has a potential cost for businesses. For GPL, the cost comes when you choose to use it. For BSD, the cost comes when you look at releasing your changes back to the community.
Given these associated costs, I'm not at all surprised to see that companies like SUN are willing to use BSD code all over their own products, but unwilling to contribute back to the community -- Contribution is where BSD costs a company. Of course, this refusal to contribute back has a cost for companies, as well. It places an intrinsic limit on the vibrancy of the community that created the product that you're so happy to use. The BSD license feeds into the environment of greed, and suffers from the costs of that approach.. The irony is that it depends on a commitment to contribution for the BSD codebase to continue growing.
This is where I see that companies like IBM prefer the GPL. Using the GPL means that you can contribute back to the community that gave you your product without having to worry about your changes being hijacked by your competition. Any changes that your competition make are required to be returned to you. The GPL enforces a share-alike attitude among it's redistributors and thus allows a company to justify contributing code back into the community. This creates an environment where the code, if it is of any use to the commercial community, it is highly likely to increase in an almost viral pattern anybody who likes it enough to use it tends to contribute to it's growth (either directly or indirectly).
This, for me, is why I'm willing to contribute to BSD code, but prefer GPL licenses. The BSD license needs a culture of contribution, but the GPL creates a culture of contribution.
I remember transcribing the Minesota lawsuit disclosures for Groklaw (last year, was it?). When I got to the stuff about Go, I remember thinking "oh, man, this is nasty! I wonder why 'Go' didn't sue?"
Now we know why -- Go wasn't quite aware of all that Microsoft did to pull their legs out from under tham. They probably saw a bit, but the full impact of what they did, and why was probably not obvious to Go until the disclosures came out last year -- Then, they probably came up with the same question as I did.
Perhaps you should have launched class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for the Be shareholders. The statute of limitations has probably expired now, though. Too bad.
The decision (so far) doesn't bother me much in the Grokster case. What it seems to say is that it's OK to distribute Technology, but it's not OK to encourage copyright infringement.
....
We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate. The model shows that Microsoft can use piracy as an effective tool to price discriminate, and that piracy may even result in higher profits to Microsoft!....
I think that this probably can be extended to the MPAA, RIAA and friends -- in fact, there's the infamous stats that showed a CD buying spree as napster's fortunes rose, and the popping almost the week that napster got shut down.
If you want to hurt the copyright cartels, obviously the best thing to do is discourage your friends from comitting copyright infringement and encourage them to by local and independently sourced music. and/or music or software that is under an open license. This also tends to result in more money staying in the local economy (good for you in the long run).
Just like Linux has forced Microsoft to produce better software, lower their pricing and even give at least lip service to 'open' (cough cough) standards, if your friends start ignoring content that is copy protected and going for stuff with permissive customer rights, then those companies are going to have to respond in kind to keep their market share.
What I liked about grokster was the peer-to-peer distribution network. What I disliked about it is that they openly encouraged copyright violation that effectively supported the mega-corps. This Supreme Court decision seems to open up the possibility of a peer to peer company that actually promotes independent music over the mass market pablum.
The columbine shooters went very terribly wrong. It's one thing to strike out against intolerance and mean-spiritedness. It's another thing entirely to go killing your tormentors.
Weird thing about the Oklahoma bombing:
When it happened, the FBI was very quick to determine that it was not done by muslims, and they were very fast to say so.
My take is that they warning off the congresscritters who had been perannually trying to pass some version of what is now called the PATRIOT USA Act. It's a lot easier to get away with that kind of legislation when it looks like it's not aimed at blonde-haired, blue eyed ex-marines types. Versions of that act had been sitting in the queue for years getting shot down over a year or two, and then being re-introduced so that when (not if) something like the WTB attacks occured, it could get beefed up and passed while people were still in shock.
I guess it depends on where you are, and what the weather's like at the moment. This time of year, it's likely as not to be at least resonably warm in most any US state (other than parts of Alaska). Come winter time, however, it could be advisable to start pumping in outside air and/or using the heat of the machines to warm the building.
On the other hand, and not having seen the pictures, It's got me wondering if the data centre wasn't designed by someone a bit short on physics, who never realized that it's a bad idea to let the waste heat from your AC units stay in the space you're trying to cool.
(( I know it's unlikely, but we've all read the Darwin Awards... ))
USB 2.0 "High-speed" is incredibly slow. Around 11MBps on my Linux box.
Strange. I'm getting 20MB/s on my external USB drive ( `sync ; time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1M count=200 ; time sync `). It's a large-drive (5") enclosure with a regular hard drive. It's also attached direct to my PC. No hubs, etc, if that makes any difference.
Granted -- it's still slower than the 40MB/s I get talking to raw IDE, but it's still acceptable, in my worls -- especially for backup purposes. Of course, if you've got firewire, there's no reason not to flount it.
You may want to check to make sure that you've got the proper driver loaded. I think that on my machine the ehci driver is the slow USB one, while the Uhci driver is the fast one.. Older versions of knoppix seemed to only load the slow driver by default.
They are just picking... from the original batch of applicants.
... Which implies that the original batch of submissions was better than they were originally hoping for.
Having the money from a decent programming job will help you pay for dates. All you have to do is remember to ask out every girl you find interesting. You can't get a 'yes' to a question never asked.
The requirement to install new versions of windows includes where the breakage is the result of malicious action ("Windows aint done till Lotus won't run") or buggy software (You could try to claim that MS doesn't release buggy software, but we'd just laugh at you).
The point is that Microsoft's license claims that you no longer control your machine -- they do. If that breaks your business, that's not Microsoft's problem.
According to Microsoft's EULA, if they come out witha nother version of the software that breaks your application, you must install the broken version, or you lose all rights to use windows. You are not allowed to continue using the old, working version until you get a fix (or over the long term because it's 'good enough'). To do so would leave you open to litigation.
I don't drink beer (I generally don't drink alcohol, except for the occasional celebratory champaign). However, a good A&W root beer would do me fine.
I'm sure that there are others like me...
Far better to have the futue of your company in the hands of a possiblyu psychopathic company like Microsoft -- who have an EULA that claims that they can force any software change they want down your throat, even if it breaks your mission-critical applications (your other choice is to destroy all copies of the software )-:, stop your software from working if they decide you aren't using it right and can change the terms of your 'license' (not likely to your advantage) at almost any time.
Some time ago, I dnded up with two accounts... (bir of a long story why). Now, when I have mod points on one, I just use the other to post. After a while I ended up with a karma bonus on both of them... What's reall annoying is when they both get mod points at the same time.
Human Beings are as natural a part of the Earth's ecosystem as earthworms and aardvarks. We need to accept that our behavior will affect the planet not unlike any other animals.
Here is where I digress with you:
Given that we are a natural part of the Earth's ecosystem, it is foolish to pretend that we can effectively separate our own survivability from the health of that ecosystem.
Technology can help us to ride out temporary 'blips' in the ecosystem, but when our misuse of technology causes systemic degradation, the future starts to look very dim.
Consider the problem of deficits: For the last couple of decades, it's been taken as a given that economic deficts are a long-term bad thing -- fobbing off the costs of our current spending on our children. An ecological deficit has the same fundamental problems, but is actualy more real than an economic one -- it's just not as clearly and mathematically provable. As (I think) Einstein said: "To the extent to which mathematics describes the real world, it is not exact. To the extent to which it is exact, it does not describe the real world."
My experience seems to indicate that porting to multiple architectures / OSes, etc. tend to expose bugs that existed but would have stayed hidden for a longer period of time if they been limited to a singld platform.
So, yes there is more work, but a lot of that is really just front-loading the process of bug-squashing that's better to be done at the front end anyways.
I think that, to an extent this is a case of confusing the symptoms and the underlying cause. Sometimes, for example, taking Tylenol 3's can cover up a headache. This may seem good, but if the end result is to hold up tracking the underlying problem (say, a brain-tumor) until it causes serious complications, the long-term result of supressing the symptoms is actually negative.
Slashdot Mirror
Nontheless, it's far better than just shipping the drive out the door without doing anything, and it'll at least deter the casual purchaser who wants to know if anybody left something on the (( Presumably anonymous )) drives they bought. if you're expecting that somebody is going to want to read the data on the drives,
If you've got really important stuff on the drive, then yes, you should (1) read from /dev/urandom, and (2), put it in an infinite loop and let it run for a few days.
happy now?The extra electricity will cost you a full $0.20 and save a lot of headache.
Granted, that works on Linux, not AIX. It's been long enough since I admined AIX that I can't remember how to determine all partitions. More importantly, it probably wouldn't fit on the subject line (which was the purpose of this post).
In any case, the point is it's still a (short) one-liner to clean the disks if you know the partition names. If those were Intel boxes, you could have booted off of Knoppix, and run the subject line. Even for RS/6000 boxes, it should be possible to find a Linux boot CD. That's really all you should need.
And various people have free disk-erase boot CDs/floppies. What more do you really want? Stick in floppy, boot, go for lunch. Job done.
Some people might call this 'reverse gear', but they've given it a new name and managed to patent it as a business method.
A: 3.215 ± 3%
. . . 95% of the time.
What better example of planned obsolescence can you find?
The BSD licence focuses on freedom for the developer. Do what you want with it -- change it, sell it, close source it.. Whatever. Once you have the source code, (if it's still free) you can do whatever you want with it.
The GPL focuses on freedom for the source code. Do whatever you want -- change it, use it sell it, whatever -- as long as people continue to have access to the source.
The problem with the GPL is that some companies may be unwilling to use GPL code in a product if it meant that they have to make their changes publicly available.
The problem with the BSD license is that, for any company that faces real competition, releasing code changes is potentially a zero-sum game. If your competition takes your BSD code, improves it and closes off the changes, they gain from your work, and you lose.
In other word, each license has a potential cost for businesses. For GPL, the cost comes when you choose to use it. For BSD, the cost comes when you look at releasing your changes back to the community.
Given these associated costs, I'm not at all surprised to see that companies like SUN are willing to use BSD code all over their own products, but unwilling to contribute back to the community -- Contribution is where BSD costs a company. Of course, this refusal to contribute back has a cost for companies, as well. It places an intrinsic limit on the vibrancy of the community that created the product that you're so happy to use. The BSD license feeds into the environment of greed, and suffers from the costs of that approach.. The irony is that it depends on a commitment to contribution for the BSD codebase to continue growing.
This is where I see that companies like IBM prefer the GPL. Using the GPL means that you can contribute back to the community that gave you your product without having to worry about your changes being hijacked by your competition. Any changes that your competition make are required to be returned to you. The GPL enforces a share-alike attitude among it's redistributors and thus allows a company to justify contributing code back into the community. This creates an environment where the code, if it is of any use to the commercial community, it is highly likely to increase in an almost viral pattern anybody who likes it enough to use it tends to contribute to it's growth (either directly or indirectly).
This, for me, is why I'm willing to contribute to BSD code, but prefer GPL licenses. The BSD license needs a culture of contribution, but the GPL creates a culture of contribution.
Now we know why -- Go wasn't quite aware of all that Microsoft did to pull their legs out from under tham. They probably saw a bit, but the full impact of what they did, and why was probably not obvious to Go until the disclosures came out last year -- Then, they probably came up with the same question as I did.
Perhaps you should have launched class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for the Be shareholders. The statute of limitations has probably expired now, though. Too bad.
This may, overall, be good.
The Madpenguin interview TFA starts by pointing out a study that indicates Copyright infringement may be good for Microsoft.
I think that this probably can be extended to the MPAA, RIAA and friends -- in fact, there's the infamous stats that showed a CD buying spree as napster's fortunes rose, and the popping almost the week that napster got shut down.If you want to hurt the copyright cartels, obviously the best thing to do is discourage your friends from comitting copyright infringement and encourage them to by local and independently sourced music. and/or music or software that is under an open license. This also tends to result in more money staying in the local economy (good for you in the long run).
Just like Linux has forced Microsoft to produce better software, lower their pricing and even give at least lip service to 'open' (cough cough) standards, if your friends start ignoring content that is copy protected and going for stuff with permissive customer rights, then those companies are going to have to respond in kind to keep their market share.
What I liked about grokster was the peer-to-peer distribution network. What I disliked about it is that they openly encouraged copyright violation that effectively supported the mega-corps. This Supreme Court decision seems to open up the possibility of a peer to peer company that actually promotes independent music over the mass market pablum.
Weird thing about the Oklahoma bombing:
When it happened, the FBI was very quick to determine that it was not done by muslims, and they were very fast to say so.
My take is that they warning off the congresscritters who had been perannually trying to pass some version of what is now called the PATRIOT USA Act. It's a lot easier to get away with that kind of legislation when it looks like it's not aimed at blonde-haired, blue eyed ex-marines types. Versions of that act had been sitting in the queue for years getting shot down over a year or two, and then being re-introduced so that when (not if) something like the WTB attacks occured, it could get beefed up and passed while people were still in shock.
On the other hand, and not having seen the pictures, It's got me wondering if the data centre wasn't designed by someone a bit short on physics, who never realized that it's a bad idea to let the waste heat from your AC units stay in the space you're trying to cool.
(( I know it's unlikely, but we've all read the Darwin Awards... ))
I'm guessing that the plastic is melting by now...
Strange. I'm getting 20MB/s on my external USB drive ( `sync ; time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1M count=200 ; time sync `). It's a large-drive (5") enclosure with a regular hard drive. It's also attached direct to my PC. No hubs, etc, if that makes any difference.
Granted -- it's still slower than the 40MB/s I get talking to raw IDE, but it's still acceptable, in my worls -- especially for backup purposes. Of course, if you've got firewire, there's no reason not to flount it.
You may want to check to make sure that you've got the proper driver loaded. I think that on my machine the ehci driver is the slow USB one, while the Uhci driver is the fast one.. Older versions of knoppix seemed to only load the slow driver by default.
They are just picking ... from the original batch of applicants.
... Which implies that the original batch of submissions was better than they were originally hoping for.
The 'no's are just a filtering heuristic.
The point is that Microsoft's license claims that you no longer control your machine -- they do. If that breaks your business, that's not Microsoft's problem.
According to Microsoft's EULA, if they come out witha nother version of the software that breaks your application, you must install the broken version, or you lose all rights to use windows. You are not allowed to continue using the old, working version until you get a fix (or over the long term because it's 'good enough'). To do so would leave you open to litigation.
I don't drink beer (I generally don't drink alcohol, except for the occasional celebratory champaign). However, a good A&W root beer would do me fine.
I'm sure that there are others like me...
No. Just point a monitor lizard at your opponents and give it a boot to the backend.
Far better to have the futue of your company in the hands of a possiblyu psychopathic company like Microsoft -- who have an EULA that claims that they can force any software change they want down your throat, even if it breaks your mission-critical applications (your other choice is to destroy all copies of the software )-:, stop your software from working if they decide you aren't using it right and can change the terms of your 'license' (not likely to your advantage) at almost any time.
Some time ago, I dnded up with two accounts... (bir of a long story why). Now, when I have mod points on one, I just use the other to post. After a while I ended up with a karma bonus on both of them... What's reall annoying is when they both get mod points at the same time.
Here is where I digress with you:
Given that we are a natural part of the Earth's ecosystem, it is foolish to pretend that we can effectively separate our own survivability from the health of that ecosystem.
Technology can help us to ride out temporary 'blips' in the ecosystem, but when our misuse of technology causes systemic degradation, the future starts to look very dim.
Consider the problem of deficits: For the last couple of decades, it's been taken as a given that economic deficts are a long-term bad thing -- fobbing off the costs of our current spending on our children. An ecological deficit has the same fundamental problems, but is actualy more real than an economic one -- it's just not as clearly and mathematically provable. As (I think) Einstein said: "To the extent to which mathematics describes the real world, it is not exact. To the extent to which it is exact, it does not describe the real world."
So, yes there is more work, but a lot of that is really just front-loading the process of bug-squashing that's better to be done at the front end anyways.
I think that, to an extent this is a case of confusing the symptoms and the underlying cause. Sometimes, for example, taking Tylenol 3's can cover up a headache. This may seem good, but if the end result is to hold up tracking the underlying problem (say, a brain-tumor) until it causes serious complications, the long-term result of supressing the symptoms is actually negative.
Which is better Emacs or Vi?