I've read through your post 3 or 4 times to try to work out what point you're trying to make. Possibly:
The initial hypothesis was that people may be prostitutes because they enjoy it, perhaps a specific case of the general "all jobs are voluntary so people surely do them because they enjoy them" nonsense. You've given another example of a job which people don't necessarily do because they enjoy, so I guess you're attempting to provide evidence against that hypothesis.
Fast-food work is as physically dangerous, emotionally debilitating, unregulated, lacking in any benefits, controlled by highly abusive bosses and as associated with severe social stigma as prostitution.
Fast-food workers across the world are typically as desperate for money as prostitutes.
The person that had to pay for drinks, a dinner, and a movie and didn't even get more than a peck on the cheak and an offer to do it again in a couple nights, in hope that you might get a proper kiss. A few weeks, a dozen hours or more, and a few hundred dollars, and they "might" get lucky...
Oh, so the purpose of a date is to get sex, and you're a "victim" if the other person doesn't put out?
You need to review your understanding of human relationships. (Yes, I'm sure you'll point out you're talking about "people/women like that", and not yourself. Mhm.)
Look, there are many good arguments for the legalisation of prostitution per se (even for minors, although the person paying for services would then likely be breaking some statutory rape law).
But it's without foundation to bring up the "lots of women want to do it" argument. And "want to do it", whatever the tedious capitalist he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields armchair philosophers will tell you, must not be confused with "is desperate for money and willing to do it because there is no viable alternative". I have not read any evidence that a majority of prostitutes work because they enjoy being prostitutes. Have you?
Stop being a "prostitution is no initiation of force therefore it should be legal therefore it is OK" libertard and instead ask "Is it moral in general to pay for prostitutes?" Don't use the exception of the $xE6/year professional dominatrix with a fancy web site living in Hollywood and servicing the stars. Consider the average prostitute.
But Google has this insanely profitable AdWords business
If only the Mozilla Foundation had the balls to include an ad blocker which dealt with Google Adwords, perhaps we'd start to see an Internet funded by people willing to pay for (or share) quality content rather than an Internet funded by advertisers pushing crap to the lazy and easily persuaded.
You know, with how pervasive social networking is these days, and how poorly educated a lot of the public seems to be about how the legal system works, I have to say that I am surprised that this has not happened sooner. It was bound to happen eventually. Personally, i think that the punishment should be a little steeper than 250$ and an essay. This is the sort of behavior that needs to be nipped in the bud, set a proper example, and really show that this sort of thing will not be tolerated.
how poorly educated a lot of the public seems to be about how the legal system works
"There are some things you're not supposed to do, but nothing happens if you don't get caught."
This isn't ignorance, merely poorly judged risk-taking.
Cloud computing? Conflation of data not being recorded and the choice to be secret about what's recorded? Technologically simple solutions with "hundreds of I/O points"?
Rather than hand-waving over every single modern technology which might be remotely relevant to the flight recorder, how about writing down, point by point, each improvement you feel should be made and why you feel it would be beneficial. Mention deployments to flying aircraft as well as destruction testing which has been done. IOW, what that is broken are you able to fix?
And, yes, pilot privacy is a concern because certain well-known air crashes have involved the airline and/or even government falsifying data to put the blame on the pilots (cue fingers wagged at France).
The whole idea smacks of academic elitism. I edit Wikipedia articles on a few different subjects and I can say without equivocation that my knowledge of those subjects is second to none.
Yeah the point in "academic elitism" is that it deals with people who have a high personal opinion of their abilities and enough time to tell everyone about it by requiring methodical peer review. It's possible that you are brilliant, but uttering "I can say without equivocation" isn't adequate demonstration.
without any proof of the incorrectness of the statement, it gets completely disregarded.
I hear you rape goats. Without any proof of incorrectness, I don't think people should disregard this.
To dismiss information out of hand just because it came from the internet
It's nothing to do with the media, and everything to do with the method of review. There's lots of excellent and reliable information which happens to be available on the Internet.
is just as ridiculous as accepting the testimony of any expert at face value.
Well, when you're ill you see a doctor rather than a car mechanic. You might still investigate what the doctor tells you but can you understand why you choose the doctor?
And predictably happens on every single computer that gets updated
Which is why the "correct" solution in this case is to chain load GRUB from the Windows bootloader (if you choose GRUB at all).
Well, guess what the "embedding area" is? If it's okay to use it for something like this
It's okay to extend a partition into empty space. It's not okay to use space for storage while it's not part of any partition.
Again, the problem isn't so much shrinking it,
If you want to make primary partition n into a logical partition then the obvious quick option is to slightly shrink partition n-1 to fit the metadata for the extended partition. Then you don't have to move the actal data for partition n at all.
Maybe he has a different sense of priority to you. In the case of air pollution addressed earlier, maybe Gates recalls how many Western countries - and now China and India - have gone/are going through periods of intense pollution killing or harming a great number of people. Maybe he believes this is part of the process of industrialisation, and the solution is not to stop investing in companies which pollute but to save the workforce from far more basic problems so the country's development can accelerate.
It's a common theme of developing countries to tell the West to shut the fuck up about environmental problems since we had the privilege of going through our industrial revolutions before man started contemplating how he was causing damage to the environment (including the environment of workers). Nation builders tend to think of where the whole country is going to be in a few decades and how to get there, not about the fate of the individual worker today. This approach might still be harsh, and it might not even be necessary (any more), but it's not as hopeless as you paint it.
Horrible or not, you have to deal with it. Things in the real world are rarely ideal, and if it fails to work it'll be considered to be your fault even if it isn't.
I'm not sure what kind of user just *expects* you to be able to install Linux on any machine without shifting around any of your original data. The average user doesn't care about installing a new OS at all, and the user with more than a couple of Windows OS upgrades under his belt knows that you're not always going to experience a seamless experience.
Nevertheless, you don't build in a hack applied on every machine just to deal with extreme cases.
Since we're dealing with pathological cases, I assume that the case where there's no space between MBR and first partition is also automatically handled by this Ubuntu-over-NTFS thing?
That will be even worse. Instead of 4 programs that break it, it'll break on every windows update that updates the bootloader.
A bootloader update is predictable and can be checked for on each Windows startup. Indeed, Windows (as other OS) upgrades may replace the MBR without asking, so I assume this is happening already.
A random program writing to unpartitioned space or a restore utility assuming that unpartitioned space can zeroed on restore is much harder to mitigate against.
Of course, you could just stop being so territorial about the MBR and get the NT bootloader to chainload GRUB if you think it's really needed for this specific case.
Thus, you can't convert transparently from primary to logical. To convert you'd have to push all the partition's data down by one sector, if it's even possible.
Oh, transparently = quickly. Well, if you're not explicitly modifying the size of any earlier partitions and you have no interpartition gaps to use up and your partitioning tool can't gracefully reduce the size of any earlier filesystem by one sector, yes.
It's also bullshit to claim that you're altruistic when you're too uninterested in positive progress to even be cautious about where you invest.
Except that the aim is not to "claim that you're altruistic" but to support a specific set of causes. If I love cats and donate billions a year to cat charities you can't bitch, "You're not being altruistic because you made your money selling landmines!" All I claimed was that I wanted to help cats.
Also, you can argue that he's not being cautious enough if you like - that he's too goal-directed and happily makes certain high-return investments to guarantee the greatest possible revenue source for his specific projects. This is a common geek problem and I'm sure sufficiently loud arguments from the right people will change Gates' investment strategy. He's not investing in land mines, though.
This is why what little money I do have is banked with a local credit union
Some mutuals and cooperatives have sadly been selling out (or plain over-selling) in the past couple of decades, but it can be an ethical and even practical option for small amounts of money. Still need to watch out where they're investing, but I'm sure you are!
But don't act like Gates is a good guy
This isn't He Man vs Skeletor. Consider what he's doing that's good and try to do something about what he's doing bad. Don't just exclaim, "Well he's a cunt because he does at least X Y Z wrong; we'll ignore him!" and throw your arms up in self-righteousness.
he doesn't actually care how much good or ill he does, or they would be investing ethically.
You give me a 15 minute walk around where you live and I guarantee you I will be able to find at least two dozen negative ethical implications of purchases you have made.
The Gates' foundation's purpose is to promote strong IP laws across the developing world now,
When even the USDOJ finds you guilty of exploiting your monopoly position, and engaging in anticompetitive practice, you know you've fucked up.
You know that you haven't spent enough time lobbying in Washington. MS was fairly apolitical before that. It learnt its lesson.
Microsoft has been repeatedly shown to have developed their own applications using secret APIs,
So what? The question you should be asking is, "Are the public APIs good enough?" not, "Why can't MS do everything exactly as I want it?" And you're always welcome to use secret APIs, unlike on many Apple platforms - it just won't be supported and may break.
and to have inserted unnecessary delay loops into public functions.
Evidence?
the old saw "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" has not been debunked
I hear you are a paedophile. I see this hasn't been debunked.
Microsoft has a long history of malfeasance of all types and to ignore history is to be an idiot.
Yes, MS does lots of annoying things. I sincerely recommend factoring their painful licensing and interoperability problems into deciding the extent to which you want MS servers in your shop. Similarly, I don't particularly encourage the writing of Linux drivers while the kernel API is such a whimsically moving target, and consider Samba to be a weak replacement for MS' own SMB offering with everything not-quite-working-properly. The BSA abuses the philosophy it claims to be built on, just as various OS vendors do when they offer closed source enterprise versions or document so fucking terribly that you need to take out a support contract.
Even if his giving today is completely the result of his dad persuading him, what exactly is wrong with that? Are you saying that goodness is only goodness if the decision to be good is made in a vacuum?
"Yeah, he saved my life, but he only saved my life because last Thursday his grandmother encouraged him to attend a First Aid course." The guy still considered the options and made the final decision to attend the course / give away the money. He didn't have to.
Yeah, what's happening here is that someone with a lot of capital is investing it to increase the amount of money available. This is what almost all well-funded foundations do. It would be, you hopefully realise, fucking stupid to either stuff the money under the mattress or give it all away immediately.
Now, such investments will almost certainly in some ways trickle down to operations which are harmful to some people in some way. Every cent you have in a bank or other investment account is doing a similar thing. It is perfectly legitimate to call a foundation up on this in the hope that you can encourage them to make investments you consider more ethically sound, but it doesn't imply some sort of plot to exploit / harm the ones you're helping.
In Gates' specific case he's tried to stop the investment side from interfering with the giving side and vice versa to prevent conflicts of interest. The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.
Do the HP calculators use special HP math to perform the calculations?
Well, yes, obviously each calculator uses its own algorithms. What an odd question. Some of the firmware source has even been released, if you look hard enough (e.g.).
Or do you base your remark on brand loyalty and ignorance?
I base my remark on having fairly quickly sold a TI-89 once I started to enjoy the speed and flexibility of RPN and the tremendous amount of configurability of an HP calculator vs TI. HP totally lost the plot in hardware build quality with the HP 49G and gradually got back to nearly-OK with the 50G, but I hung on because the firmware is so good.
Also cool is the ability to program right down to Saturn / ARM assembler with the semi-official blessing of the vendor rather than the vendor trying to sue you.
Ignoring the obvious utility of a partition which is easy to read and rarely mounted for write so it's kept intact even if horrible things happen to the main system partition, what horrible incantations do you use for FDE which includes/boot encryption?
First partition is NTFS, 500GB free. Next 3 partitions are primary, recovery data.
We're already considering a completely idiotic setup, even though I'm sure at least one vendor has sold machines configured like that. Of course, we have to go to challenging cases for this horrible hack to even be considered appropriate;-).
Get Linux to install and run from the NTFS partition (in an.img file), while not adding any partitions (you can't), not passing control to the NTFS boot sector (will boot windows, so won't do).
Either replace the boot code in the NTFS boot sector to load a Grub n'th stage or replace NTLDR (or Vista/7 equivalent) with a Grub n'th stage.
Not sure what you mean there.
I simply meant that the EBR should be considered metadata, not in any sense part of the logical partition.
You'd be surprised, but people still run DOS and Win95. Legacy stuff. Can't break it arbitrarily.
There's no obligation to not re-align on the faked cylinder boundary during any repartition. The space you waste simply ends up not being available for allocation to your new operating system's partition.
A 512 byte sector (MBR) does not have enough space for code to read a filesystem.
If you've written a filesystem sufficiently complex that (i) you cannot read all files in 510 bytes of code; and (ii) you cannot read small files flagged to be stored optimised for easy reading such that they can be read in 510 bytes of code then you're using the wrong filesystem for system boot / recovery. Wherever you're booting your main OS from should be easy to read and hard to corrupt. IOW,/boot is not / is not/home etc.
With the new GUID Partition Table [wikipedia.org] (GPT) format, there are 128 partitions available.
With MBR, there are infinite partitions available (space-permitting).
Like other people mentioned, dedicating a partition to the bootloader is undesirable, as it runs into issues with recovery partitions.
What issues? If you mean "the presence of a recovery partition means fewer unused partitions" then, yes, of course it may. Just as the presence of multiple operating systems may. But you're foolish if you start custom installing operating systems on your machine then try to use an OEM recovery partition. Either use a regular OS install ISO or something like Reflect / TrueImage / Ghost which is designed with multiple partitions in mind.
Your menu probably was hardcoded. Grub reads the menu from disk.
No, the same code used to search for a particular partition (primary/logical) would first be instructed to list each partition number and type. Not a sufficiently informative UI for production, but there's an awful lot you can do in ~400 bytes if you make the effort.
But a production boot manager would load more substantial code from a particular partition so it could create an elegant, descriptive menu.
In my understanding, an extended partition has an extended partition record right where the boot sector on a primary would be.
Well, the logical partition is only considered to start where indicated by the extended boot record.
To covert a primary to an extended you'd have to shrink the filesystem
Not unless your drive was completely full, in which case you wouldn't have space to repartition for your new OS in the first place.
and push it down by several blocks so that it starts on cylinder 0 too.
On a cylinder boundary? How is this relevant with LBA? What are you actually achieving with a modern drive?
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You've managed to misread my post in so many ways that you may be trolling. Let me break it down like I did to the "other poster":
I've read through your post 3 or 4 times to try to work out what point you're trying to make. Possibly:
unregulated, lacking in any benefits, controlled by highly abusive bosses and as associated with severe social stigma as prostitution.
The person that had to pay for drinks, a dinner, and a movie and didn't even get more than a peck on the cheak and an offer to do it again in a couple nights, in hope that you might get a proper kiss. A few weeks, a dozen hours or more, and a few hundred dollars, and they "might" get lucky...
Oh, so the purpose of a date is to get sex, and you're a "victim" if the other person doesn't put out?
You need to review your understanding of human relationships. (Yes, I'm sure you'll point out you're talking about "people/women like that", and not yourself. Mhm.)
If the girl herself wants to do it, there's no "victims".
Oh, that old argument.
Look, there are many good arguments for the legalisation of prostitution per se (even for minors, although the person paying for services would then likely be breaking some statutory rape law).
But it's without foundation to bring up the "lots of women want to do it" argument. And "want to do it", whatever the tedious capitalist he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields armchair philosophers will tell you, must not be confused with "is desperate for money and willing to do it because there is no viable alternative". I have not read any evidence that a majority of prostitutes work because they enjoy being prostitutes. Have you?
Stop being a "prostitution is no initiation of force therefore it should be legal therefore it is OK" libertard and instead ask "Is it moral in general to pay for prostitutes?" Don't use the exception of the $xE6/year professional dominatrix with a fancy web site living in Hollywood and servicing the stars. Consider the average prostitute.
But Google has this insanely profitable AdWords business
If only the Mozilla Foundation had the balls to include an ad blocker which dealt with Google Adwords, perhaps we'd start to see an Internet funded by people willing to pay for (or share) quality content rather than an Internet funded by advertisers pushing crap to the lazy and easily persuaded.
You know, with how pervasive social networking is these days, and how poorly educated a lot of the public seems to be about how the legal system works, I have to say that I am surprised that this has not happened sooner. It was bound to happen eventually. Personally, i think that the punishment should be a little steeper than 250$ and an essay. This is the sort of behavior that needs to be nipped in the bud, set a proper example, and really show that this sort of thing will not be tolerated.
how poorly educated a lot of the public seems to be about how the legal system works
"There are some things you're not supposed to do, but nothing happens if you don't get caught."
This isn't ignorance, merely poorly judged risk-taking.
You'll also get two tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert and a new laptop pimped out with Norton Internet Security 2011.
Well, that one's too easy...
That's the great thing about Latin - you can put object before subject for emphasis and establish meaning from case.
Oh wait...
Cloud computing? Conflation of data not being recorded and the choice to be secret about what's recorded? Technologically simple solutions with "hundreds of I/O points"?
Rather than hand-waving over every single modern technology which might be remotely relevant to the flight recorder, how about writing down, point by point, each improvement you feel should be made and why you feel it would be beneficial. Mention deployments to flying aircraft as well as destruction testing which has been done. IOW, what that is broken are you able to fix?
And, yes, pilot privacy is a concern because certain well-known air crashes have involved the airline and/or even government falsifying data to put the blame on the pilots (cue fingers wagged at France).
The whole idea smacks of academic elitism. I edit Wikipedia articles on a few different subjects and I can say without equivocation that my knowledge of those subjects is second to none.
Yeah the point in "academic elitism" is that it deals with people who have a high personal opinion of their abilities and enough time to tell everyone about it by requiring methodical peer review. It's possible that you are brilliant, but uttering "I can say without equivocation" isn't adequate demonstration.
without any proof of the incorrectness of the statement, it gets completely disregarded.
I hear you rape goats. Without any proof of incorrectness, I don't think people should disregard this.
To dismiss information out of hand just because it came from the internet
It's nothing to do with the media, and everything to do with the method of review. There's lots of excellent and reliable information which happens to be available on the Internet.
is just as ridiculous as accepting the testimony of any expert at face value.
Well, when you're ill you see a doctor rather than a car mechanic. You might still investigate what the doctor tells you but can you understand why you choose the doctor?
And predictably happens on every single computer that gets updated
Which is why the "correct" solution in this case is to chain load GRUB from the Windows bootloader (if you choose GRUB at all).
Well, guess what the "embedding area" is? If it's okay to use it for something like this
It's okay to extend a partition into empty space. It's not okay to use space for storage while it's not part of any partition.
Again, the problem isn't so much shrinking it,
If you want to make primary partition n into a logical partition then the obvious quick option is to slightly shrink partition n-1 to fit the metadata for the extended partition. Then you don't have to move the actal data for partition n at all.
Maybe he has a different sense of priority to you. In the case of air pollution addressed earlier, maybe Gates recalls how many Western countries - and now China and India - have gone/are going through periods of intense pollution killing or harming a great number of people. Maybe he believes this is part of the process of industrialisation, and the solution is not to stop investing in companies which pollute but to save the workforce from far more basic problems so the country's development can accelerate.
It's a common theme of developing countries to tell the West to shut the fuck up about environmental problems since we had the privilege of going through our industrial revolutions before man started contemplating how he was causing damage to the environment (including the environment of workers). Nation builders tend to think of where the whole country is going to be in a few decades and how to get there, not about the fate of the individual worker today. This approach might still be harsh, and it might not even be necessary (any more), but it's not as hopeless as you paint it.
Horrible or not, you have to deal with it. Things in the real world are rarely ideal, and if it fails to work it'll be considered to be your fault even if it isn't.
I'm not sure what kind of user just *expects* you to be able to install Linux on any machine without shifting around any of your original data. The average user doesn't care about installing a new OS at all, and the user with more than a couple of Windows OS upgrades under his belt knows that you're not always going to experience a seamless experience.
Nevertheless, you don't build in a hack applied on every machine just to deal with extreme cases.
Since we're dealing with pathological cases, I assume that the case where there's no space between MBR and first partition is also automatically handled by this Ubuntu-over-NTFS thing?
That will be even worse. Instead of 4 programs that break it, it'll break on every windows update that updates the bootloader.
A bootloader update is predictable and can be checked for on each Windows startup. Indeed, Windows (as other OS) upgrades may replace the MBR without asking, so I assume this is happening already.
A random program writing to unpartitioned space or a restore utility assuming that unpartitioned space can zeroed on restore is much harder to mitigate against.
Of course, you could just stop being so territorial about the MBR and get the NT bootloader to chainload GRUB if you think it's really needed for this specific case.
Thus, you can't convert transparently from primary to logical. To convert you'd have to push all the partition's data down by one sector, if it's even possible.
Oh, transparently = quickly. Well, if you're not explicitly modifying the size of any earlier partitions and you have no interpartition gaps to use up and your partitioning tool can't gracefully reduce the size of any earlier filesystem by one sector, yes.
It's also bullshit to claim that you're altruistic when you're too uninterested in positive progress to even be cautious about where you invest.
Except that the aim is not to "claim that you're altruistic" but to support a specific set of causes. If I love cats and donate billions a year to cat charities you can't bitch, "You're not being altruistic because you made your money selling landmines!" All I claimed was that I wanted to help cats.
Also, you can argue that he's not being cautious enough if you like - that he's too goal-directed and happily makes certain high-return investments to guarantee the greatest possible revenue source for his specific projects. This is a common geek problem and I'm sure sufficiently loud arguments from the right people will change Gates' investment strategy. He's not investing in land mines, though.
This is why what little money I do have is banked with a local credit union
Some mutuals and cooperatives have sadly been selling out (or plain over-selling) in the past couple of decades, but it can be an ethical and even practical option for small amounts of money. Still need to watch out where they're investing, but I'm sure you are!
But don't act like Gates is a good guy
This isn't He Man vs Skeletor. Consider what he's doing that's good and try to do something about what he's doing bad. Don't just exclaim, "Well he's a cunt because he does at least X Y Z wrong; we'll ignore him!" and throw your arms up in self-righteousness.
he doesn't actually care how much good or ill he does, or they would be investing ethically.
You give me a 15 minute walk around where you live and I guarantee you I will be able to find at least two dozen negative ethical implications of purchases you have made.
The Gates' foundation's purpose is to promote strong IP laws across the developing world now,
Really? Do you have a coherent argument for this?
When even the USDOJ finds you guilty of exploiting your monopoly position, and engaging in anticompetitive practice, you know you've fucked up.
You know that you haven't spent enough time lobbying in Washington. MS was fairly apolitical before that. It learnt its lesson.
Microsoft has been repeatedly shown to have developed their own applications using secret APIs,
So what? The question you should be asking is, "Are the public APIs good enough?" not, "Why can't MS do everything exactly as I want it?" And you're always welcome to use secret APIs, unlike on many Apple platforms - it just won't be supported and may break.
and to have inserted unnecessary delay loops into public functions.
Evidence?
the old saw "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" has not been debunked
I hear you are a paedophile. I see this hasn't been debunked.
Microsoft has a long history of malfeasance of all types and to ignore history is to be an idiot.
Yes, MS does lots of annoying things. I sincerely recommend factoring their painful licensing and interoperability problems into deciding the extent to which you want MS servers in your shop. Similarly, I don't particularly encourage the writing of Linux drivers while the kernel API is such a whimsically moving target, and consider Samba to be a weak replacement for MS' own SMB offering with everything not-quite-working-properly. The BSA abuses the philosophy it claims to be built on, just as various OS vendors do when they offer closed source enterprise versions or document so fucking terribly that you need to take out a support contract.
On what date precisely were all these businesses forced to simultaneously install Microsoft software?
Even if his giving today is completely the result of his dad persuading him, what exactly is wrong with that? Are you saying that goodness is only goodness if the decision to be good is made in a vacuum?
"Yeah, he saved my life, but he only saved my life because last Thursday his grandmother encouraged him to attend a First Aid course." The guy still considered the options and made the final decision to attend the course / give away the money. He didn't have to.
Yeah, what's happening here is that someone with a lot of capital is investing it to increase the amount of money available. This is what almost all well-funded foundations do. It would be, you hopefully realise, fucking stupid to either stuff the money under the mattress or give it all away immediately.
Now, such investments will almost certainly in some ways trickle down to operations which are harmful to some people in some way. Every cent you have in a bank or other investment account is doing a similar thing. It is perfectly legitimate to call a foundation up on this in the hope that you can encourage them to make investments you consider more ethically sound, but it doesn't imply some sort of plot to exploit / harm the ones you're helping.
In Gates' specific case he's tried to stop the investment side from interfering with the giving side and vice versa to prevent conflicts of interest. The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.
He's the rich founder of MS, yet he's an awesome philanthropist and geek father keen to educate his kids properly.
You have stuff to learn from this guy.
Do the HP calculators use special HP math to perform the calculations?
Well, yes, obviously each calculator uses its own algorithms. What an odd question. Some of the firmware source has even been released, if you look hard enough (e.g.).
Or do you base your remark on brand loyalty and ignorance?
I base my remark on having fairly quickly sold a TI-89 once I started to enjoy the speed and flexibility of RPN and the tremendous amount of configurability of an HP calculator vs TI. HP totally lost the plot in hardware build quality with the HP 49G and gradually got back to nearly-OK with the 50G, but I hung on because the firmware is so good.
Also cool is the ability to program right down to Saturn / ARM assembler with the semi-official blessing of the vendor rather than the vendor trying to sue you.
The pathological extreme being that it doesn't matter that "freedom" was never intended not to mean "slavery".
Ignoring the obvious utility of a partition which is easy to read and rarely mounted for write so it's kept intact even if horrible things happen to the main system partition, what horrible incantations do you use for FDE which includes /boot encryption?
First partition is NTFS, 500GB free.
Next 3 partitions are primary, recovery data.
We're already considering a completely idiotic setup, even though I'm sure at least one vendor has sold machines configured like that. Of course, we have to go to challenging cases for this horrible hack to even be considered appropriate ;-).
Get Linux to install and run from the NTFS partition (in an .img file), while not adding any partitions (you can't), not passing control to the NTFS boot sector (will boot windows, so won't do).
Either replace the boot code in the NTFS boot sector to load a Grub n'th stage or replace NTLDR (or Vista/7 equivalent) with a Grub n'th stage.
Not sure what you mean there.
I simply meant that the EBR should be considered metadata, not in any sense part of the logical partition.
You'd be surprised, but people still run DOS and Win95. Legacy stuff. Can't break it arbitrarily.
There's no obligation to not re-align on the faked cylinder boundary during any repartition. The space you waste simply ends up not being available for allocation to your new operating system's partition.
A 512 byte sector (MBR) does not have enough space for code to read a filesystem.
If you've written a filesystem sufficiently complex that /boot is not / is not /home etc.
(i) you cannot read all files in 510 bytes of code; and
(ii) you cannot read small files flagged to be stored optimised for easy reading such that they can be read in 510 bytes of code
then you're using the wrong filesystem for system boot / recovery. Wherever you're booting your main OS from should be easy to read and hard to corrupt. IOW,
With the new GUID Partition Table [wikipedia.org] (GPT) format, there are 128 partitions available.
With MBR, there are infinite partitions available (space-permitting).
Like other people mentioned, dedicating a partition to the bootloader is undesirable, as it runs into issues with recovery partitions.
What issues? If you mean "the presence of a recovery partition means fewer unused partitions" then, yes, of course it may. Just as the presence of multiple operating systems may. But you're foolish if you start custom installing operating systems on your machine then try to use an OEM recovery partition. Either use a regular OS install ISO or something like Reflect / TrueImage / Ghost which is designed with multiple partitions in mind.
Your menu probably was hardcoded. Grub reads the menu from disk.
No, the same code used to search for a particular partition (primary/logical) would first be instructed to list each partition number and type. Not a sufficiently informative UI for production, but there's an awful lot you can do in ~400 bytes if you make the effort.
But a production boot manager would load more substantial code from a particular partition so it could create an elegant, descriptive menu.
In my understanding, an extended partition has an extended partition record right where the boot sector on a primary would be.
Well, the logical partition is only considered to start where indicated by the extended boot record.
To covert a primary to an extended you'd have to shrink the filesystem
Not unless your drive was completely full, in which case you wouldn't have space to repartition for your new OS in the first place.
and push it down by several blocks so that it starts on cylinder 0 too.
On a cylinder boundary? How is this relevant with LBA? What are you actually achieving with a modern drive?