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  1. Re:Yeah, I remember when VMWare first came out... on The Legacy of CPU Features Since 1980s · · Score: 1

    I was running VMs on Z80 hardware - it was slow, since they were software-emulating the CPU (I did 6502 and Z80), but hey, you don't need any special hardware or CPU features for virtualization. The special features are performance optimizations, nothing else.

  2. Re:Yeah, I remember when VMWare first came out... on The Legacy of CPU Features Since 1980s · · Score: 2

    Not only do their prices sting, but they suffer heavily from living on their own little island and steadfastly refuse to use standard terminology, and seem to be doing a lot of stuff differently just because they can - not because it makes sense.

  3. Re:Nostalgic for Windows 7? on Microsoft Ends Mainstream Support For Windows 7 · · Score: 1

    For whatever reason, VirtualPC/XP was always sluggish compared to VMware with an XP VM on the same machine, with same host OS and otherwise identical settings. And this wasn't on underpowered hardware either.

  4. Re:Nostalgic for Windows 7? on Microsoft Ends Mainstream Support For Windows 7 · · Score: 1

    I'd perhaps add that OS X didn't have any revolutionary changes in its UI, like we got with Windows 8. The dock is still here, 10 major OS X releases after the first one. The stoplights in the title bar are still there, too. Things have changed around multi-screen, virtual desktop and full screen modes, certainly, and we've got Spotlight halfway along the way (10.4). I've been using OS X as my main desktop since 10.5, and it seemed to be mostly painless experience, with very little re-learning needed to go between versions.

  5. Re: Only 30 Grand? on Chevrolet Unveils 200-Mile Bolt EV At Detroit Auto Show · · Score: 1

    $200 is roughly a monthly lease on a Volt.

  6. Re:Double nope on Chevrolet Unveils 200-Mile Bolt EV At Detroit Auto Show · · Score: 1

    Volt has 350+ mile range. Prius has 500+ mile range. So I don't buy your range rambling.

  7. Re:Indeed on Archive.org Adds Close To 2,400 DOS Games · · Score: 1

    Sigh. In the U.S., the existence of the Copyright Law is due to Constitution, and the purpose has nothing whatsoever to do with creator's rights. The Copyright Law exists

    ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. (U.S. Constitution. Art. I, Sec. 8.)

    Again, let's be clear: the purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The means of achieving it are to give authors and inventors some rights for a limited time.

  8. Re: short on Archive.org Adds Close To 2,400 DOS Games · · Score: 1

    Oooh, Colargol! Someone should something something Colargol in SpaceX's dragon :)

  9. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 1

    I forgot to add that if, due to a very unlikely circumstance, a domain will be partially magnetized during one track writing, it'll very likely be partially magnetized during another writing of the same track as well. So yes, a poorly inter-track domain may contain noise, not data. That doesn't make it useful for data recovery, and such domains are relatively few.

  10. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 1

    There's two things in this picture that are very different than what you have, say, in an audio tape recorder. 1. A head producing very high magnetic field gradient. 2. A high-coercivity material that doesn't give shit about fields that aren't strong enough to remagnetize a domain. This adds up to a situation where domains at the boundary between tracks work in a binary fashion. Either they flip, and they contain data from the current track, or they don't and they contain data from the neighboring track. There's no situation where they'd have previous data from the same track, because the head positioning errors are smaller than the domain size!

  11. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 1

    The head positioning error is much smaller than the width of the track. There are no buffer zones.

  12. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 1, Redundant

    That's not the case with modern hard drives, at least nothing made in the last decade. You worked on such a machine long time ago and/or you weren't told really what it was for. The machine you worked on, if it was done for recovery of drives made after 1998 or thereabouts, was simply made to read data that was not overwritten. It was to be used when one wished to read the drive's contents without using the drive's electromechanical system to do so. Such a machine makes life easier iff you have reverse-engineered enough of the drive to know the encoding used on the data, and the formatting of all the housekeeping information. It lets you skip having to do platter transplants, and generally having to use the drive's own firmware for data recovery - where the firmware wasn't designed for that.

  13. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 4, Informative

    most of the data can generally be recovered easily enough

    Nope. The drives manufactured in the last two decades, give-or-take, have the size of magnetic domains matched to the size of the field generated by the heads. The "edge" of the track is defined by where data from one track ceases to be, and the data from another track begins, and this is a binary thing. One domain here has data from this track, another domain there has data from that track.

    What people constantly fail to realize is that if there was an area of disk, the mythical "inter-track gap", that was any good at storing any data, it'd be stupid for the manufacturer to not put the expensive platter real estate to good use. And they do precisely that: they use all of the platters to store your current data. There is no inter track gap.

  14. Re:Hello microwave on Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence · · Score: 4, Insightful

    older non-PMR drives

    Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.

  15. Re:Pullin' a Gates? on How We'll Program 1000 Cores - and Get Linus Ranting, Again · · Score: 1

    For iteration, as long as you know a bit in advance what you will need, you can certainly issue prefetch requests. They can often remove cache stalls altogether.

  16. Re:Punctuation and Capitalization Errors on Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    Well, the modus operandi and know-how of the operator didn't change much, so there...

  17. Re:Here's your insightful comment on Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins · · Score: 2

    Well, an exchange really works by taking the bitcoins - they now own them, not you, all that you have is an entry in some other database - a digital IOU. They could have used the blockchain to store a tamper-proof backup of who was the "real" owner of the coins held by the exchange, too, but chose not to.

  18. +1 for initiative, -1 for poor troubleshooting on Putting a MacBook Pro In the Oven To Fix It · · Score: 2

    The symptoms are, in a nutshell: fans running full-blast, yet the system still runs too hot. To me this screams that the heat pipes are faulty.

    Yes, they sometimes are either faulty from the factory, or fail shortly after you start using the system. One failure mode is loss of coolant. Another one is through detachment and pooling of the wick material. All the ones I've seen failed still had coolant, but the wick material was loose inside of the pipe, instead of nicely attached to the entirety of the interior surface. A failed heat pipe can't but accelerate the stress fracturing of the solder balls on the chips it services, and the cyclic stress amplitudes will be larger due to larger temperature changes.

  19. Re:And how many were terrorists? Oh, right, zero. on TSA Has Record-Breaking Haul In 2014: Guns, Cannons, and Swords · · Score: 1

    Still, it's not catastrophic. All that will happen is the masks dropping, the pilots having to don theirs quickly, lowering the altitude, and that's about it. Nobody should die if you merely shoot out through the fuselage.

  20. Re:Isn't that obvious? on Quantum Physics Just Got Less Complicated · · Score: 2, Funny

    Stephanie is fat or homeley

    Dear Coward, you fail at google.

  21. Re:Man, am I old ... on Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off · · Score: 1

    Of course no one is gonna sort through this, because it won't be necessary. This is raw data. The stuff that goes into iPhoto is a small fraction of it. The library sits there because I can still afford to pay for the hard drives :)

    The funniest thing is that such amount of data is surprisingly not hard to generate. All that my wife does is depress the shutter and chase the kids here and there. She isn't a professional, but she did notice that she can capture some unique and serendipitous pics that way. Yeah, 99.99% of them are trash, but without them the 0.01% wouldn't even be possible. She loves the newfangled absurdly fast SD cards, of course. She *hates* slow cameras.

  22. Re:Man, am I old ... on Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off · · Score: 1

    Those aren't iPhone JPEGs, but ~20 Mpixel RAW files, and there are thousands of them each month - closer to 10k, really. These days it's really easy to generate vast numbers of pictures when you have a good camera. When she shoots kids, it's 10 shots per second, often until the buffer fills up after 50-60 shots. I'd say she takes on average 300 shots per day. It really doesn't take very long to have that many. If the camera was any faster, it'd have been more I'm afraid :)

  23. Re:Man, am I old ... on Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off · · Score: 1

    My wife's photographs, taken recreationally only, can amount to a couple hundred GB per month. She does pare it down to 100GB or so sometime later. What's so "hard" to understand here? Our photo archive is almost 10TB at this point. Music - about 10GB. Family videos - 2TB or so.

  24. Re:Joke? They're real! on The Joker Behind the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory Chip Hoax · · Score: 1

    Not necessarily. Some modern color printers have built-in optical scanners used for color alignment. They certainly can read what they wrote on the image transfer belt. I have one like that.

  25. Re:Joke? They're real! on The Joker Behind the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory Chip Hoax · · Score: 0

    You confuse EPROM, PROM and ROM. A mask-programmed ROM cannot be erased without destroying it. UV light will do nothing to a ROM. A PROM uses cells with electrically-destructible fuses or cells with stored electrical charge - it is electrically programmed, not mask-programmed. UV light will do nothing to a fuse-based PROM, but will erase the charge-based PROM. The charge-based PROMs are also called OTP EPROM (one time programmable, but not eraseable, so a misnomer). The addition of a quartz window turns a non-eraseable charge-based PROM into an EPROM, where E stands for eraseable. Finally, with addition of erase circuitry, an EPROM becomes an EEPROM where it can be electrically erased. Most EEPROMs can still be erased with UV light, if you were to access the bare die - although some EEPROMs shield the data-storing capacitors to protect the data from reverse-engineering/tampering. Such high-integrity parts won't erase in presence of UV, even if you de-encapsulated the chips.