As a dual EE CS student, I can say that it's definitely RAD faster to hack the firmware, even if the more reliable is to build a FPGA... pinouts tend to be tricky for keyboard jockies...
While you raise some exceedingly good points, the problem with this is that the drives really are over engineered beyond hope of hacking.
Trust one of the/. crowd here, we would pretty much all like to see this in action, but the truth of the matter is that you can't do what he's asking. Modern rotating media are by definition NOT binary (hence digital) devices, they are analog. There must exist a translation between analog and digital, and the controller does that.
Now, if he wants to avoid using a filesystem so he can gain extra overhead (think no FAT tables, no redundant tables, no file information like size and location pointers) then *that* is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and ext2fs is a great starting point.
Otherwise, what he wants (as stated above) is impossible. Let the drive do the analog-digital conversions.
I figured staying up with the twitter feed was twittering, whereas the act of posting one message was tweeting.
I don't particularly tweet the/. stories, so I can't say that that's one of my daily activities. However, I monitor my twitter feed for (amongst other things)/. postings.
Therefore, I stand by my own original statement. Oh, and the sibling poster to me had a REALLY good point:p
Or if you twitter, you can just skip checking the front page all day, just wait for story announcements to come to you. (yeah, soviet meme joke waiting there, but too lazy to reach out and touch it, even with this long soliloquy).
However, I think that today's XKCD _really is_ that good, so I agree with the desire to post this particular one to the/. front-page. Glad now that we finally have an idle section for this sort of thing tho;).
Bonus points to whoever can name a Bruce Willis role that shows him as a sysadmin!
Bear in mind it only shows IE8 equitably. Even Microsoft would prefer to see people upgrade off IE6 or IE7. That's pretty big in and of itself, no? (ok, for security concerns obviously it's a great idea, but to pretty well force everyone to take notice that they should be running something other than IE6 or IE7...)
The first five are Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera. On a second screen, the ballot will list AOL, Maxthon, K-Meleon, Flock, Avant Browser, Sleipnir and SlimBrowser.
Also, it's important to note that three or four of these browsers (at a minimum) are rebranded IE experiences, using the IE rendering engine. A couple are rebranded Firefox builds.
The link isn't working, taking way too long... did we really/.-effect a Microsoft server? Too funny. Although, it's most likely not on the main Microsoft cloud.
And remember it in November. Rant this stuff every day to everyone around you (except the/. stuff) and rant it fully.
Remind everyone that this system is something that we allowed to get fucked up, and that we're taking it back.
And if they look at you all o.O - ask them if they minded the bankers getting rich while this country was slammed into a recession and 10%+ unemployment from relative peace of 10 years ago. If they are ok with that, then encourage them not to vote.
We're taking this country back, and we're starting in November. (well, I've been preaching this for 6 years now, but critical mass is only starting to take off)
I tend to think of it not as "if an attack were imminent" but rather "if the country was being seiged or invaded". We're constantly under threat of imminent attacks of all sorts, this is why we have standing army, police and others. But I know what you mean.
As for the fillings, that only works for them if you have lead fillings, no?;)
Obviously... Someone ask the GP if he donned his tinfoil hat...
I'm curious if we can get a play-by-play of what happened during the day, rather than just a report of after the fact. Surely it wouldn't help the bad guys that much, would it? I'm curious how they determined that they're unable to respond quickly or correctly enough. The article posted seems to indicate this was as much a think-game as it was an actual exercise.
I should think actual panic would induce the cell-networks and governors (amongst other groups) to actually concede the control they may not otherwise concede, especially when it's a wargame and the parties involved aren't the real parties.
Good thoughts, but if I could do a deer nibbling on a rosebush in Blender, I would no longer have my eyes, so what use would I be?:p
No seriously though. I can barely work MSPaint.exe... almost anyone who can work in Blender and make it look professional is doing great in my eyes.
I may play with it Blender in the future to see what I can do, and starting with a spaceship sounds like a good way for me to learn the system. And the first line is proof of my understanding of Blender and what it takes to work in it. Strictly meme stuff.
Well actually I didn't know that Maytag ~ Sears until lately. Would have been nice, but since I didn't make the original purchase, I think that can slide too.
Wait, you mean that "ValueRAM" doesn't give the concept of their brands away? I use Kingston stuff because it's bulk and cheap, not because it's performance. Anyone else who does otherwise is amazing me with their concepts of brand recognition.
I do not think that means what you think it means... if the boys with the big toys decide they want us to be free for less than 17 years, then there's nothing a Google pwned patent can do. Capisce?
I agree that these filmmakers shouldn't be making the movies. However, maybe it's fair to say that the films shouldn't be made for the masses, but not "don't make the movie". It's fair for the handful who know the stories to have the films. After watching all the soap operas I have in my life (not nearly as many as have been made) and after having discussed them with the ones purposely watching them, I think geeks are due something reasonable to fill our movie cases too!
You are aware then that in his later years he tied all his universes together, right? It ends with Robots + Foundation going places that weren't evident at the beginning of either. And if you take it with the one story about the ACs and the people asking "what will happen after the stars are dead" then it's like he's got a meta meta story... interesting but I don't know if that was intended.
Unfortunately he wasn't able by himself to finalize the series, so after he passed the estate asked three authors (very excellent authors) to finish the series off his notes, and I think they did an admirable job (if losing his style and voice every so often on the way).
I agree and back you on this one. I think that his stories were very complex and if one filmmaker were to try and present half the stories from I, Robot in the form they were presented in the book, nobody would like the film. Thinking cars and robots on Mercury and slumbering giants with no vocal abilities and cavernous computers... those theatrical sets would be hard to reproduce. But to grasp what it means to rely on robots to the point that nobody knows who's in control, and everyone assumes the robots are benign, and it's up to those in charge to _ensure_ that the robots are kept in check... We as a society _must_ keep a check on the constraints of our society. If we assume that someone else is always watching out for us, eventually we're going to get hosed by someone who's only looking out for himself. He'll be a dictator, and we'll have to take it, or die in the process of taking him down. Hell, Asimov never wanted his stories told all at one time, or he would've written the stories to be contiguous. He wanted us to focus on a facet at a time of the dichotomy of the reliance on machines. The best way to stress that the stories were about morals was to move the background every time.
(Back on the sets issue: Seriously, 20+ filmlets of ~10-30 minutes each? That's a friggin miniseries. Perhaps if the Wachowski brothers wanted to attack it...)
But by the same token, I'm curious how anyone can build up the character appeal and the emotional attachment to bring out the _problems_ of the Foundation novellas in 90 minutes. And mix in the running shooting and flying that everyone will expect.
What should be more fun is Prelude to Foundation. That's damn near a miniseries by itself. "The Flight"!
So... do you think Asimov was onto something with his Psychohistory, or do you think he's just a damned masterful storyteller? I have to think that his idea of mob blindness and the thought that reliance on a single common outcome implies that the mob will force itself in that direction was a valid idea; that he was almost spot-on in his vision.
Yeah, $120 was just a gut first vote... on further reflection I would probably do more like $200/mo for the service, but my wife might not... not until she understood what it meant to watch everything over fiber on the computer, thus reducing two other bills per mo (television, phone) and going to a simple VOIP for landline...
$DEITY I can't wait till April and we hear the results of ANY of Google's deliberations on this...
At this point in time, April 2010 is looking to be an important month!
Slashdot Mirror
As a dual EE CS student, I can say that it's definitely RAD faster to hack the firmware, even if the more reliable is to build a FPGA... pinouts tend to be tricky for keyboard jockies...
While you raise some exceedingly good points, the problem with this is that the drives really are over engineered beyond hope of hacking.
Trust one of the /. crowd here, we would pretty much all like to see this in action, but the truth of the matter is that you can't do what he's asking. Modern rotating media are by definition NOT binary (hence digital) devices, they are analog. There must exist a translation between analog and digital, and the controller does that.
Now, if he wants to avoid using a filesystem so he can gain extra overhead (think no FAT tables, no redundant tables, no file information like size and location pointers) then *that* is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and ext2fs is a great starting point.
Otherwise, what he wants (as stated above) is impossible. Let the drive do the analog-digital conversions.
I figured staying up with the twitter feed was twittering, whereas the act of posting one message was tweeting.
I don't particularly tweet the /. stories, so I can't say that that's one of my daily activities. However, I monitor my twitter feed for (amongst other things) /. postings.
Therefore, I stand by my own original statement. Oh, and the sibling poster to me had a REALLY good point :p
yeah yeah yeah and then there was this one time when I tied an onion to my belt because it was the fashion ... ;)
Or if you twitter, you can just skip checking the front page all day, just wait for story announcements to come to you. (yeah, soviet meme joke waiting there, but too lazy to reach out and touch it, even with this long soliloquy).
However, I think that today's XKCD _really is_ that good, so I agree with the desire to post this particular one to the /. front-page. Glad now that we finally have an idle section for this sort of thing tho ;).
Bonus points to whoever can name a Bruce Willis role that shows him as a sysadmin!
Probably was too long for him. Thought it was cute that he kept the subject line but couldn't be arsed to read it... Irony is a beautiful thing.
Bear in mind it only shows IE8 equitably. Even Microsoft would prefer to see people upgrade off IE6 or IE7. That's pretty big in and of itself, no? (ok, for security concerns obviously it's a great idea, but to pretty well force everyone to take notice that they should be running something other than IE6 or IE7 ...)
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/07/28/browser-ballot-screen-isn-t-just-for-windows-7.aspx
who has time to do that? I'll just point to something that's more than 6 months old (albeit this one mentions just 10, other sources shortly thereafter were mentioning 11 or more such as
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/18/0210240/How-Europes-Mandated-Browser-Ballot-Screen-Works
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142416/FAQ_How_the_IE_ballot_screen_works
which listed:
so ...)
It also would appear as though Microsoft wanted to do a "top ten" http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-24statement.mspx so I believe that they are using the "top ten" plus IE8, thus making 11.
Also, it's important to note that three or four of these browsers (at a minimum) are rebranded IE experiences, using the IE rendering engine. A couple are rebranded Firefox builds.
Also:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/1927255/Microsoft-Agrees-To-EU-Browser-Ballot-Screen?from=rss
Wow, I started getting the article to pull up, wanted to see the images (which for some reason weren't loading) so when I clicked on one, I got:
The image “http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/clip_image0024_thumb_01FF3E3A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Intriguinger and Intriguinger.
Oh, and the comments on the article are somewhat lol. somewhat.
11 has been long known in this space. The above comment is a nonquestion.
The link isn't working, taking way too long... did we really /.-effect a Microsoft server? Too funny. Although, it's most likely not on the main Microsoft cloud.
And remember it in November. Rant this stuff every day to everyone around you (except the /. stuff) and rant it fully.
Remind everyone that this system is something that we allowed to get fucked up, and that we're taking it back.
And if they look at you all o.O - ask them if they minded the bankers getting rich while this country was slammed into a recession and 10%+ unemployment from relative peace of 10 years ago. If they are ok with that, then encourage them not to vote.
We're taking this country back, and we're starting in November. (well, I've been preaching this for 6 years now, but critical mass is only starting to take off)
I tend to think of it not as "if an attack were imminent" but rather "if the country was being seiged or invaded". We're constantly under threat of imminent attacks of all sorts, this is why we have standing army, police and others. But I know what you mean.
As for the fillings, that only works for them if you have lead fillings, no? ;)
Obviously... Someone ask the GP if he donned his tinfoil hat...
I'm curious if we can get a play-by-play of what happened during the day, rather than just a report of after the fact. Surely it wouldn't help the bad guys that much, would it? I'm curious how they determined that they're unable to respond quickly or correctly enough. The article posted seems to indicate this was as much a think-game as it was an actual exercise.
I should think actual panic would induce the cell-networks and governors (amongst other groups) to actually concede the control they may not otherwise concede, especially when it's a wargame and the parties involved aren't the real parties.
Good thoughts, but if I could do a deer nibbling on a rosebush in Blender, I would no longer have my eyes, so what use would I be? :p
No seriously though. I can barely work MSPaint.exe ... almost anyone who can work in Blender and make it look professional is doing great in my eyes.
I may play with it Blender in the future to see what I can do, and starting with a spaceship sounds like a good way for me to learn the system. And the first line is proof of my understanding of Blender and what it takes to work in it. Strictly meme stuff.
Uh, thanks for the analogy?
Well actually I didn't know that Maytag ~ Sears until lately. Would have been nice, but since I didn't make the original purchase, I think that can slide too.
Wait, you mean that "ValueRAM" doesn't give the concept of their brands away? I use Kingston stuff because it's bulk and cheap, not because it's performance. Anyone else who does otherwise is amazing me with their concepts of brand recognition.
I do not think that means what you think it means ... if the boys with the big toys decide they want us to be free for less than 17 years, then there's nothing a Google pwned patent can do. Capisce?
I agree that these filmmakers shouldn't be making the movies. However, maybe it's fair to say that the films shouldn't be made for the masses, but not "don't make the movie". It's fair for the handful who know the stories to have the films. After watching all the soap operas I have in my life (not nearly as many as have been made) and after having discussed them with the ones purposely watching them, I think geeks are due something reasonable to fill our movie cases too!
But I agree with your premise.
You are aware then that in his later years he tied all his universes together, right? It ends with Robots + Foundation going places that weren't evident at the beginning of either. And if you take it with the one story about the ACs and the people asking "what will happen after the stars are dead" then it's like he's got a meta meta story ... interesting but I don't know if that was intended.
Unfortunately he wasn't able by himself to finalize the series, so after he passed the estate asked three authors (very excellent authors) to finish the series off his notes, and I think they did an admirable job (if losing his style and voice every so often on the way).
Just saying, definitely worth the read.
I agree and back you on this one. I think that his stories were very complex and if one filmmaker were to try and present half the stories from I, Robot in the form they were presented in the book, nobody would like the film. Thinking cars and robots on Mercury and slumbering giants with no vocal abilities and cavernous computers ... those theatrical sets would be hard to reproduce. But to grasp what it means to rely on robots to the point that nobody knows who's in control, and everyone assumes the robots are benign, and it's up to those in charge to _ensure_ that the robots are kept in check... We as a society _must_ keep a check on the constraints of our society. If we assume that someone else is always watching out for us, eventually we're going to get hosed by someone who's only looking out for himself. He'll be a dictator, and we'll have to take it, or die in the process of taking him down. Hell, Asimov never wanted his stories told all at one time, or he would've written the stories to be contiguous. He wanted us to focus on a facet at a time of the dichotomy of the reliance on machines. The best way to stress that the stories were about morals was to move the background every time.
(Back on the sets issue: Seriously, 20+ filmlets of ~10-30 minutes each? That's a friggin miniseries. Perhaps if the Wachowski brothers wanted to attack it...)
But by the same token, I'm curious how anyone can build up the character appeal and the emotional attachment to bring out the _problems_ of the Foundation novellas in 90 minutes. And mix in the running shooting and flying that everyone will expect.
What should be more fun is Prelude to Foundation. That's damn near a miniseries by itself. "The Flight"!
So ... do you think Asimov was onto something with his Psychohistory, or do you think he's just a damned masterful storyteller? I have to think that his idea of mob blindness and the thought that reliance on a single common outcome implies that the mob will force itself in that direction was a valid idea; that he was almost spot-on in his vision.
if you're still watching: too kind of you. thanks.
Yeah, $120 was just a gut first vote... on further reflection I would probably do more like $200/mo for the service, but my wife might not... not until she understood what it meant to watch everything over fiber on the computer, thus reducing two other bills per mo (television, phone) and going to a simple VOIP for landline...
$DEITY I can't wait till April and we hear the results of ANY of Google's deliberations on this...
At this point in time, April 2010 is looking to be an important month!
I see you understood I meant the price of the service would come down with time :p
Can you imagine a life with high-speed internet without Comcast? (or whatever name they give themselves?)