What measures are put in place so that the right machines can only communicate with the right machines?
You have a machine A that's dialing (using PSTN?) an election computer B.
So has anyone made sure that only A can talk to B?
Or can C dial A's number just as A "picks up the phone to dial" B, and result in A talking to C but thinking it is talking to B.
Countermeasure: get Telco to ensure that no inward connections can be made on lines used for outbound calls.
Personally, given the US thought it was worth spending BILLIONS to choose the leaders of Iraq (a crippled country albeit with tons of oil), I don't see why you guys can't spend a bit more on choosing the leaders of the World's Most Powerful Nation, and do things properly.
But no. Instead we see crappy machines like Diebold's being used.
Y'know, maybe the US should outsource their elections to India as well. The Indians seem to be able to do elections even if they can't do Tech Support.
actually, I'm willing to _bet_ that the machines used in the casino have better written software. I believe that in the US such machines are audited by a 3rd party, to make sure that the pay-out rates are as per advertised and there's no cheating involved.
But of course the correct operation of casino machines is more important than the correct operation of electronic voting machines.
After all, with the former real money is involved. Whereas the latter is just for entertainment right?
Especially since it's not actually proven that the voting machines are directly involved in the selection of the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world.
I'm not sure how things are done generally in the US. But I'd have thought that it would be better to try to convince people privately that they are doing something wrong rather than do it in Public TV.
So maybe Stewart's blasting them was also just part of the Show. Not sure what the full implications are if that is so.
You seen those? Where you have two commentators - each will always side their wrestler _no_matter_what_. And you have two wrestlers doing their stuff.
And while they have been assigned "sides", they're still not going to do or highlight stuff that's not in the Script or part of the Plan.
I don't really know Stewart - not in the US and don't even watch his show. But from the transcript - it sure looks like he went out on a limb there to make his stand. Heck he even called one of the hosts a dick (justifiably IMO, but that may hurt him later).
Sure he didn't do as well as possible vs the hosts, but I'm sure the hosts have some "combat" experience too. But you can see Stewart keep trying to get his point across. I'm sure the hosts knew what he was getting at. But they just kept avoiding it.
Not sure what that all that will cost Stewart. But he obviously decided it was worth it.
People of the US, wake up. Do something. Stewart can't do it all alone. He's a comedian - but sure looks like he's trying to the best of his ability.
The US system reminds me of a Magician's show - you're given "choices", but they're practically all picked for you already.
BUT EVEN SO, it's silly to pick the bunch who don't even _bother_ to put up a good and _believable_ show. Please at least pick a bunch who don't keep insulting the audience's intelligence. Bush and friends with "tons of WMD" and "Imminent danger". Diebold with the ever-tamperable e-voting machines. Come on. Even if it all remains a show, at least MAKE EM put up a BETTER SHOW.
The act of putting up a good show sometimes does much good even though it is just an act (plus who knows, the actors might even start believing in their roles). Whereas it is far less likely for much good to result from putting up a bad show.
That's what worries some of us in the rest of the world.
The US people don't want to know or seem to care. Look at the response to Diebold, Iraq + "WMD".
When we say we don't support Bush, they say stupid stuff like: "That's because we don't want a strong America". Or we are lying/just-as-evil "Democrats". Doh! Just look at many of the postings here.
There was a strong America for gulf war I and AFAIK much of the world was fairly supportive up till the US gov did some dubious stuff post sep 11.
Dunno why so many US ppl don't seem to get it when/why the very same allies/neutrals that said "Go ahead, attack Iraq" when Iraq attacked Kuwait, said a very different thing when the US wanted to start Gulf War II.
AFAIK many of us don't mind a strong America. A "stupid/evil and strong America" is what worries us.
The US playing "World Police" is OK. It's when the US starts heading down the path towards "World Dictator" that scares us.
Face it US folk. We were right to say there was no justification for the 2nd Iraq war based on the official reasons given - we could see your leaders were not being _honest_ about the war. Whether they lied is another matter - but the lack of honesty was obvious to us, we don't understand fully why it wasn't obvious to you. EVEN NOW, the US Gov gets away with: "aw shucks, oops looks like the info wasn't good, oh well aren't you glad Saddam is out of power now?".
Doh. When the World Most Powerful Nation goes against the most of world opinion, unilaterally attacks an already hamstrung nation ruled by a evil dictator and most importantly doesn't give honest reasons for doing so, it's missing the point completely to swallow the "aren't you glad Saddam is gone" line.
Remember: being honest is not the same as not telling lies. When very many people say "you're wrong", if you really care about the truth, you should at least recheck the "facts", rather than keep massaging them till they look good to you.
I don't see how people can conclude Bush and the US Gov were honest.
So far he has not apologized for the wrong things he has done. From whatever I can see, he appears to be a _willing_ pawn.
And the citizens of the US are pawns as well. So far the rest of world sees you all as willing pawns - given the support (whether explicit or not) of the actions taken by the US.
You can build everything on another box, and then copy/usr/obj and/usr/ports/distfiles over and then shutdown to single user and do the installs from there. See this for background.
There are many ways to do it depending on whether you want it built from source or just want the binaries.
In some interpretations of Revelation, Christians would still be around.
"Of course, we are talking 6 billion people in the world right now -- there is a lot of technology that still needs to be developed (and paid for) that would enable all worldwide gov'ts to control what people buy. Isn't there?"
It's not that difficult tech and economic-wise. Mainly government/political issues.
Basically you'd need Global Authorities for the various stuff like Global Court. Global Government. The tech is all there.
Then it'll just have to operate nice for a few years, making everyone happy.
Then when the time comes the Beast will sit on his throne.
Why was that guy fired? Did everyone else think the code look good. Or everyone else thought it sucked and he pushed it in anyway? Or he still thinks he hasn't done anything wrong?
If it's the former then it seems more a scapegoat thing, and you've lost someone who may have learnt one or two things more...
Anyway the American Idol analogy still applies. I wonder if the US masses would be more displeased if the American Idol organizers limited TV time to only 2 contestants out of 6? Compared to the presidential debate organizers only allowing 2 participants out of 6.
The tapes don't come with tape drives. The tape drives are often expensive (many cost as much as six or more 200GB HDDs). If you're talking about a format where 200GB = a lot of tapes, tape autoloaders are even more expensive.
Price isn't the only cost, AFAIK most of these tape drives are slow - you'd take from 10 to 20 hours (or more) to backup 200GB assuming zero time taken to load and unload tapes. Whereas HDDs are 10x faster. When the time comes to restore from backups, I'd rather not have to wait 10-20 hours to restore.
The prices for tape systems and media almost seem like a scam to me, for what they do and the limitations they have.
If SATA hotswap becomes practical, I'd use HDDs for backups without a thought (unless there's something else better). Sure HDDs are more fragile than tapes in many ways. But tape drives seem to "eat" tapes every now and then, more often than I'd thought acceptable. After all the frigging data is supposed to be more important than the drive.
Maybe tapes make sense if you're a huge enterprise with tons and tons of backups. But for home use, get a few HDDs and use them as backup media+drive.
Still I don't see how the numbers add up. Do show me how tapes are cheaper if you include the drive for say 24 backups (3 yrs + 11 mths + 4 wks + 6 days).
Worse: your spouse/beloved answers your phone and hears a sexy voice saying "Hi, I saw you at the party..."... or "Brandy and I had a great time last night, we'd like to see more of you...".
Amongst: Intel, AMD, Transmeta, IBM POWER, SPARC, VIA etc, it's unlikely that Transmeta will "win". But it still gets more than its market share worth of "broadcast" here, whenever there's something remotely interesting going on.
Having competition can help keep the regular winners from being lazy or even colluding.
It's almost like having the American Idol thing but only giving the bulk of air-time to two competitors who the organizers think have the best chances. After all the other competitors chances of winning are "statistically indistinguishable from zero". Well in these sort of cases such actions will be sort of self-fulfilling right?
Y'know even IF it's all a setup, at least you people should make the System go through the proper motions as if it isn't a setup. It makes for a more enjoyable and "believable" Show.
That said, it sure looks like many people don't mind watching a crap show. As is the Show's not just insulting their intelligence, it's taking a baseball bat to it.
Re:Use Norton Ghost
on
Backups to CD-R?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"I just wish I could back up 200+ gig HD's to disc of some kind. "
You can. It's called another 200GB HDD.
Seriously at USD0.50/GB it's not such a bad idea (compared to tape or other alternatives). Get one of those HDD tray/rack thingies so you can remove/add it easily.
Would be great if cheap SATA hotswappable HDD trays/bays become widely available.
"You just posted a bunch of weird looking command lines that Windows XP users are supposed to use. My bet is most of them are quivering in the corner with a blanket calling for mommy after reading that."
Hehe. Point taken.
BUT, my bet is most of them won't even notice my post flash past their screen;). They don't see any dialog boxes etc etc.
But for some reason same users are able to open messages containing worm infested encrypted zipfiles, enter the relevant passwords (included in message), and successfully extract the worms and run them without help from IT personnel.
I wonder if some may even have no memory of doing all that.
I use knoppix and dd
on
Backups to CD-R?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You need another HDD or a fileserver (with network).
Assuming you want to backup first ata hdd on target system.
Boot Knoppix on system to be backed up- Use: knoppix 2 noswap or knoppix noswap (latter if you have enough ram + cpu and you still want to browse the web etc whilst backing up;) ).
Then mount the drive/share you want to put the backups to. e.g. mount -t smbfs -o username=blah//fileserver/backup/mnt/test
This creates files that are 650MB in size. You can burn these to CD-Rs. I prefer to leave a bit of unused space at the CD-R's edge (some seem to peel off there).
Note: that there are reports that dd in linux in some cases doesn't copy the last byte.
Also you may have to manually turn on DMA access on the HDD using hdparm, for speed.
To restore you do a similar thing - boot knoppix.
then mount the restore drive/fileserver (readonly if paranoid).
I'm not 100% sure of the command-line parameters. But that's the general principle. I have successfully backed up and restored a number of images this way.
I use lzop because it is faster than gzip - with lzop I can get an average of 30MB/sec with an Athlon 2000XP - not far from max HDD transfer rate, for not much worse compression ratio. gzip is 2 to 3 times slower. Unfortunately lzop seems to be giving me an error in Knoppix 3.6 when I try to decompress. I'm mainly using Knoppix 3.3 though.
Don't forget: CD-Rs can be flaky backup media. Assuming a 40GB HDD compresses to 15-20GB, you'll need about 25 CD-Rs. If any of these don't work you can't restore successfully. So you may need to double the number for redundancy. That is a lot of trouble.
I actually suggest buying a few spare big HDDs and backup to them.
Per GB they're not much more expensive than CD-Rs.
100-200GB drives are about twice the price per GB compared to CD-Rs, and probably less flaky, problematic and troublesome for long term storage (plus take up less space than 150-300 CD-Rs). Just don't drop them and keep them in a safe dry + cool place (packed with dehumidifiers), e.g. data-grade fireproof safe. Buy multiple different brands of HDDs if you're paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
What measures are put in place so that the right machines can only communicate with the right machines?
You have a machine A that's dialing (using PSTN?) an election computer B.
So has anyone made sure that only A can talk to B?
Or can C dial A's number just as A "picks up the phone to dial" B, and result in A talking to C but thinking it is talking to B.
Countermeasure: get Telco to ensure that no inward connections can be made on lines used for outbound calls.
Personally, given the US thought it was worth spending BILLIONS to choose the leaders of Iraq (a crippled country albeit with tons of oil), I don't see why you guys can't spend a bit more on choosing the leaders of the World's Most Powerful Nation, and do things properly.
But no. Instead we see crappy machines like Diebold's being used.
Y'know, maybe the US should outsource their elections to India as well. The Indians seem to be able to do elections even if they can't do Tech Support.
actually, I'm willing to _bet_ that the machines used in the casino have better written software. I believe that in the US such machines are audited by a 3rd party, to make sure that the pay-out rates are as per advertised and there's no cheating involved.
But of course the correct operation of casino machines is more important than the correct operation of electronic voting machines.
After all, with the former real money is involved. Whereas the latter is just for entertainment right?
Especially since it's not actually proven that the voting machines are directly involved in the selection of the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world.
Right?
Yah, and AFTER that he got his good luck - free food and lodging courtesy of the Chinese Government...
;)
After all his apartment is ruined right?
Yah, when u tried to comment the site tried to lookup your info but it wasn't in the Database.
Don't worry. Please remain where you are. Assistance will arrive shortly.
Remember: The Computer is your friend!
Did Stewart try to convince them privately first?
I'm not sure how things are done generally in the US. But I'd have thought that it would be better to try to convince people privately that they are doing something wrong rather than do it in Public TV.
So maybe Stewart's blasting them was also just part of the Show. Not sure what the full implications are if that is so.
Oh well at least it is something different.
As Stewart says: it's like "pro-wrestling" TV.
You seen those? Where you have two commentators - each will always side their wrestler _no_matter_what_. And you have two wrestlers doing their stuff.
And while they have been assigned "sides", they're still not going to do or highlight stuff that's not in the Script or part of the Plan.
I don't really know Stewart - not in the US and don't even watch his show. But from the transcript - it sure looks like he went out on a limb there to make his stand. Heck he even called one of the hosts a dick (justifiably IMO, but that may hurt him later).
Sure he didn't do as well as possible vs the hosts, but I'm sure the hosts have some "combat" experience too. But you can see Stewart keep trying to get his point across. I'm sure the hosts knew what he was getting at. But they just kept avoiding it.
Not sure what that all that will cost Stewart. But he obviously decided it was worth it.
People of the US, wake up. Do something. Stewart can't do it all alone. He's a comedian - but sure looks like he's trying to the best of his ability.
The US system reminds me of a Magician's show - you're given "choices", but they're practically all picked for you already.
BUT EVEN SO, it's silly to pick the bunch who don't even _bother_ to put up a good and _believable_ show. Please at least pick a bunch who don't keep insulting the audience's intelligence. Bush and friends with "tons of WMD" and "Imminent danger". Diebold with the ever-tamperable e-voting machines. Come on. Even if it all remains a show, at least MAKE EM put up a BETTER SHOW.
The act of putting up a good show sometimes does much good even though it is just an act (plus who knows, the actors might even start believing in their roles). Whereas it is far less likely for much good to result from putting up a bad show.
Aristocracy = rule by small group
Autocracy = rule by a single individual
Plutocracy = rule by the wealthy
Hypocracy = rule by the hypocrites?
#include
int main() {
return AvP_WHOEVER_WINS;
}
That's what worries some of us in the rest of the world.
The US people don't want to know or seem to care. Look at the response to Diebold, Iraq + "WMD".
When we say we don't support Bush, they say stupid stuff like: "That's because we don't want a strong America". Or we are lying/just-as-evil "Democrats". Doh! Just look at many of the postings here.
There was a strong America for gulf war I and AFAIK much of the world was fairly supportive up till the US gov did some dubious stuff post sep 11.
Dunno why so many US ppl don't seem to get it when/why the very same allies/neutrals that said "Go ahead, attack Iraq" when Iraq attacked Kuwait, said a very different thing when the US wanted to start Gulf War II.
AFAIK many of us don't mind a strong America. A "stupid/evil and strong America" is what worries us.
The US playing "World Police" is OK. It's when the US starts heading down the path towards "World Dictator" that scares us.
Face it US folk. We were right to say there was no justification for the 2nd Iraq war based on the official reasons given - we could see your leaders were not being _honest_ about the war. Whether they lied is another matter - but the lack of honesty was obvious to us, we don't understand fully why it wasn't obvious to you. EVEN NOW, the US Gov gets away with: "aw shucks, oops looks like the info wasn't good, oh well aren't you glad Saddam is out of power now?".
Doh. When the World Most Powerful Nation goes against the most of world opinion, unilaterally attacks an already hamstrung nation ruled by a evil dictator and most importantly doesn't give honest reasons for doing so, it's missing the point completely to swallow the "aren't you glad Saddam is gone" line.
Remember: being honest is not the same as not telling lies. When very many people say "you're wrong", if you really care about the truth, you should at least recheck the "facts", rather than keep massaging them till they look good to you.
I don't see how people can conclude Bush and the US Gov were honest.
A pawn? Yes. But helpless? No.
So far he has not apologized for the wrong things he has done. From whatever I can see, he appears to be a _willing_ pawn.
And the citizens of the US are pawns as well. So far the rest of world sees you all as willing pawns - given the support (whether explicit or not) of the actions taken by the US.
In Corporate USA Diebold steals votes from you!
Maybe the UN should send in troops to help restore democracy :).
You can build everything on another box, and then copy /usr/obj and /usr/ports/distfiles over and then shutdown to single user and do the installs from there.
See this for background.
There are many ways to do it depending on whether you want it built from source or just want the binaries.
That depends on which country you're in.
"Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite "
;).
But does Parrot run Perl as of now?
In some interpretations of Revelation, Christians would still be around.
"Of course, we are talking 6 billion people in the world right now -- there is a lot of technology that still needs to be developed (and paid for) that would enable all worldwide gov'ts to control what people buy. Isn't there?"
It's not that difficult tech and economic-wise. Mainly government/political issues.
Basically you'd need Global Authorities for the various stuff like Global Court. Global Government. The tech is all there.
Then it'll just have to operate nice for a few years, making everyone happy.
Then when the time comes the Beast will sit on his throne.
Why was that guy fired? Did everyone else think the code look good. Or everyone else thought it sucked and he pushed it in anyway? Or he still thinks he hasn't done anything wrong?
If it's the former then it seems more a scapegoat thing, and you've lost someone who may have learnt one or two things more...
The CPU share is due to people voting with money.
Anyway the American Idol analogy still applies. I wonder if the US masses would be more displeased if the American Idol organizers limited TV time to only 2 contestants out of 6? Compared to the presidential debate organizers only allowing 2 participants out of 6.
Heh.
That depends on whether you unpack them from their boxes or not :D.
There's probably also a joke somewhere about trying to figure out whether a quantum computer is on or off.
Which tape formats are you talking about?
The tapes don't come with tape drives. The tape drives are often expensive (many cost as much as six or more 200GB HDDs). If you're talking about a format where 200GB = a lot of tapes, tape autoloaders are even more expensive.
Price isn't the only cost, AFAIK most of these tape drives are slow - you'd take from 10 to 20 hours (or more) to backup 200GB assuming zero time taken to load and unload tapes. Whereas HDDs are 10x faster. When the time comes to restore from backups, I'd rather not have to wait 10-20 hours to restore.
The prices for tape systems and media almost seem like a scam to me, for what they do and the limitations they have.
If SATA hotswap becomes practical, I'd use HDDs for backups without a thought (unless there's something else better). Sure HDDs are more fragile than tapes in many ways. But tape drives seem to "eat" tapes every now and then, more often than I'd thought acceptable. After all the frigging data is supposed to be more important than the drive.
Maybe tapes make sense if you're a huge enterprise with tons and tons of backups. But for home use, get a few HDDs and use them as backup media+drive.
Still I don't see how the numbers add up. Do show me how tapes are cheaper if you include the drive for say 24 backups (3 yrs + 11 mths + 4 wks + 6 days).
Worse: your spouse/beloved answers your phone and hears a sexy voice saying "Hi, I saw you at the party..."... or "Brandy and I had a great time last night, we'd like to see more of you...".
Slashdot posts stories about "fringe" CPUs too.
Amongst: Intel, AMD, Transmeta, IBM POWER, SPARC, VIA etc, it's unlikely that Transmeta will "win". But it still gets more than its market share worth of "broadcast" here, whenever there's something remotely interesting going on.
Having competition can help keep the regular winners from being lazy or even colluding.
It's almost like having the American Idol thing but only giving the bulk of air-time to two competitors who the organizers think have the best chances. After all the other competitors chances of winning are "statistically indistinguishable from zero". Well in these sort of cases such actions will be sort of self-fulfilling right?
Y'know even IF it's all a setup, at least you people should make the System go through the proper motions as if it isn't a setup. It makes for a more enjoyable and "believable" Show.
That said, it sure looks like many people don't mind watching a crap show. As is the Show's not just insulting their intelligence, it's taking a baseball bat to it.
"I just wish I could back up 200+ gig HD's to disc of some kind. "
You can. It's called another 200GB HDD.
Seriously at USD0.50/GB it's not such a bad idea (compared to tape or other alternatives). Get one of those HDD tray/rack thingies so you can remove/add it easily.
Would be great if cheap SATA hotswappable HDD trays/bays become widely available.
"You just posted a bunch of weird looking command lines that Windows XP users are supposed to use. My bet is most of them are quivering in the corner with a blanket calling for mommy after reading that."
;). They don't see any dialog boxes etc etc.
Hehe. Point taken.
BUT, my bet is most of them won't even notice my post flash past their screen
But for some reason same users are able to open messages containing worm infested encrypted zipfiles, enter the relevant passwords (included in message), and successfully extract the worms and run them without help from IT personnel.
I wonder if some may even have no memory of doing all that.
You need another HDD or a fileserver (with network).
;) ).
//fileserver/backup /mnt/test
/dev/hdc /mnt/test (if have another hdd).
/mnt/test/20041010
/mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-
/mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-* | lzop -d > /dev/hda
Assuming you want to backup first ata hdd on target system.
Boot Knoppix on system to be backed up-
Use:
knoppix 2 noswap
or
knoppix noswap
(latter if you have enough ram + cpu and you still want to browse the web etc whilst backing up
Then mount the drive/share you want to put the backups to.
e.g. mount -t smbfs -o username=blah
or mount
mkdir
dd if=/dev/hda bs=131072 | lzop -c | split -b 650m -
This creates files that are 650MB in size. You can burn these to CD-Rs. I prefer to leave a bit of unused space at the CD-R's edge (some seem to peel off there).
Note: that there are reports that dd in linux in some cases doesn't copy the last byte.
Also you may have to manually turn on DMA access on the HDD using hdparm, for speed.
To restore you do a similar thing - boot knoppix.
then mount the restore drive/fileserver (readonly if paranoid).
Then:
cat
I'm not 100% sure of the command-line parameters. But that's the general principle. I have successfully backed up and restored a number of images this way.
I use lzop because it is faster than gzip - with lzop I can get an average of 30MB/sec with an Athlon 2000XP - not far from max HDD transfer rate, for not much worse compression ratio. gzip is 2 to 3 times slower. Unfortunately lzop seems to be giving me an error in Knoppix 3.6 when I try to decompress. I'm mainly using Knoppix 3.3 though.
Don't forget: CD-Rs can be flaky backup media. Assuming a 40GB HDD compresses to 15-20GB, you'll need about 25 CD-Rs. If any of these don't work you can't restore successfully. So you may need to double the number for redundancy. That is a lot of trouble.
I actually suggest buying a few spare big HDDs and backup to them.
Per GB they're not much more expensive than CD-Rs.
100-200GB drives are about twice the price per GB compared to CD-Rs, and probably less flaky, problematic and troublesome for long term storage (plus take up less space than 150-300 CD-Rs). Just don't drop them and keep them in a safe dry + cool place (packed with dehumidifiers), e.g. data-grade fireproof safe. Buy multiple different brands of HDDs if you're paranoid.