To answer your and the previous poster's question, the drives write something more like QAM to the disk - one "bit time" may contain several bits encoded. When you read the drive back you're looking at pulses of varying phase and frequency.
If you wrote all zeros to an MFM drive you'd see a recognisable pattern that would be the same every time. If you wrote a sector of all zeros to a modern drive twice, you'd see two completely different patterns. Both would resemble noise;-)
You are right that disks don't simply write the bytes you send it onto the disk, but you cannot access or wipe the physical structures through any/dev/* trickery.
Yes, it probably wasn't clear that I meant wiping off the data. You can't mess about with the "internal" stuff on the disk, because the controller won't put data there without magic firmware.
but if there is an actual requirement to control zero and ones in specific tracks/sectors, you might as well build your own chip for a drive.
Not to mention that disks haven't actually written "zeros and ones" as such for at least 15 years, which is why a single pass of/dev/zero will wipe a recentish disk beyond recovery.
Speaking of which... they live in a desert. The only reason they ever had water to put on their lawn is that they import it via aqueducts over 200 miles, transforming the source from a formerly verdant valley into an arid desert.
I've never understood why people would want to go and live somewhere that has no water. Throughout the history of human settlement, we've always looked for places that have a certain amount of natural shelter, and a good supply of water. In these places you've actually got such a scarcity of water that you have to measure how much you use and pay based on that! Why would you want to live like that?
...just about had to special order a laptop with a real serial port on it, or you just couldn't read all the equipment in the field.
The problem is that it's very hard to generate the right voltages for the serial port from the 5V 500mA USB port supply. If you got something like an FTDI chip and hung a couple of *proper* RS232 drivers off it running from a decent power supply, then you'd have a better chance of getting it to work. It would be bulkier, but still cheaper than ordering a special laptop.
That way, when sales of Assassin's Creed 2 are pathetically low and there are no cracks available, then Ubisoft must be forced to accept that poor sales are due to poor products, not "piracy". Hopefully the movie, music and games industries will learn from Ubisoft's impending demise.
I did wonder if they had all the weight of the extra flywheel aft of the rear axle - I bet that would make it entertaining on wet twisty roads.
For those that don't believe that Porsches don't handle - when was the last time you saw an early-80s Turbo that *hadn't* had the rear end rebuilt? What do you suppose physics does with a car where there's hardly any weight over the front axle, and a great big heavy engine and gearbox *behind* the rear axle? Hint - try an experiment. Get a dart, and throw it feathers-first at the dartboard. What does the dart try to do? Which end hits the dartboard?
Are you kidding? Porsches are only fast in a straight line, or on roads with a lot of big wide corners. Find a road that's less than glassy-smooth and you're not going to go above about 50mph before the car becomes unmanageable because the suspension is too stiff and doesn't have any travel.
There are lots of low Earth orbit satellites that you can't see them with a telescope - but you can track with a simple aerial and UHF handheld radio. The obvious benefit of this is that it doesn't really matter if it's cloudy or daytime; if the satellite is up there you'll hear it and be able to track it across the sky. Bonus prize for learning enough Morse to understand its callsign.
Updates to IE6 can be had for absolutely no charge, have been for half a decade now. IE7 from Microsoft, Firefox from the Mozilla Foundation.
The software may be available at no cost, but upgrading to IE7 or Firefox could be an extremely expensive business. A lot of companies have web apps and intranet pages that do not render correctly in anything other than IE6. Who pays to update all of that?
I don't want to watch a video. I want to see the photographs. I haven't got the patience or attention span to sit and watch videos. Just give me the photos and a page of text.
Why certain critical vehicle systems would ever be allowed to be electronic without NASA level testing.
I like the throttle-by-wire system on my '88 Citroën CX. The throttle pedal consists of a flat metal plate pivoted on a steel bar, and a steel wire bolted to the other end of the bar goes through the bulkhead into the engine bay and pulls a little lever on the side of the carburettor. The only time it gets affected by bugs is during the summer when the air filter gets a bit clogged. I have had a catastrophic throttle failures, when the wee spring came off the throttle lever and got lost (if you see a tension spring about 3/4" diameter and 2" long somewhere on the road between Dundee and Perth, it's mine). All that happened was it shut slowly and idled at 1300rpm.
I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.
They're not the worst, either. A few years ago I used to help out at an English class for exchange students - primarily for people who spoke English as a second language, but also for people who needed help with written English. Many (if not most) of the students from the US could barely read and write at 3rd Year High School level (age 13-14, or so). They struggled with work from the Standard Grade curriculum.
People throw massive amounts of RF at the Moon, with high-powered transmitters and highly directional aerials. Using the same highly-directional aerials you can receive the very faint echo of your signal reflected off the Moon. The reason it's faint is that most of it misses, and when it reflects off the convex curve of the Moon most of it diverges into space.
Now, while this used to be used by various government and military comms people, it's mostly done by radio amateurs now, using equipment that wouldn't take over much of the average suburban back garden. If you threw the resources of a large radio telescope at it (like for example CAMRAS) then you could detect very tiny signals indeed.
This might be taken as being anti-American, but it's not. Really, it's not.
I live in Scotland. My country is a lot older than America, to the extent that my house has trees in the garden that predate the USA. Somewhere round about the time that the Declaration of Independence was being signed, my house was having an extension built on an existing extension on the original house. We're the old guys. And from where I'm sitting, I can see the young guys.
America now looks like a possibly slightly backwards late teenager/early twenties guy, still pedalling around town on his outgrown BMX bike and making "Your Mom" jokes, while all the little kids that were too little for America to play with like India, Pakistan, Iran and China have now grown up a bit and got jobs and cars and girlfriends. And America really desperately wants to play, and throws his not inconsiderable weight around, but really until America grows up and starts acting like a responsible grown-up no-one wants to know.
America has slowly - over the past 20 years or so - made itself utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.
"Drag racing" isn't really racing, though. It's just accelerating hard in a straight line, then stopping. You couldn't make a racing car with an automatic gearbox, and expect it to stay on the track beyond the first couple of corners. Heaven help you if turn 1 leads into a chicane...
My 22-year-old Citroen CX usually cleared the windows within 30 seconds or so, even in the -20C mornings we had over our fairly brief winter just there. In the cold weather it took longer for hydraulic system to bring the thick, cold, gooey oil up to pressure.
Going vegan would actually decrease the amount of land needed, since it's more efficient to just make wheat/corn, instead of making wheat/corn and then (inefficiently) converting it to steak.
You're really not getting this. Cows don't eat corn, they eat grass. This is why in most of the world, cows are fed on grass or grass-like feed (hay, silage etc) with relatively small amounts of things like oats and wheat. Over here, we make a lot of use of "draff" which is spent distillery mash - malt that's been boiled up for the sugar to be used in brewing. The other important thing that you're missing is that a lot of the "undesirable" stuff that your cow food gets turned into is actually cow *shit*. You let this compost for a while (it helps to mix it with straw and burn it, but that smells awful) and yay, free fertiliser *without* petrochemicals. All this stuff about livestock farming "using up all the water" is just nonsense - cows don't magically make mass disappear. They are not nuclear reactors. They drink water - quite a lot of water - and either pee it out (yay, nitrogen compounds, just what nitrate-poor grassland needs) or sweat it out (okay, water vapour is the most significant greenhouse gas, I'll give you that). Either way nothing is lost for the water cycle. Eventually more fresh water just falls from the sky. Oh, here comes some now!
Even better than cows are sheep, which can eat tough heathery plants and tough grasses that not much else can eat. We hardly have to feed sheep at all over the winter (maybe a little bit of draff mixed with shredded sugar beet - yes, technically something you could feed humans. You get enough sugar already, fatso). The good bit about that is you can make use of farmland that isn't really suitable for arable farming. Go and have a look at pretty much any country that has hills (ie. not rolling cornfields like the middle states of the US), and work out how you're going to plant it.
That's not quite true. The vast majority of the world's livestock farms aren't on land that's suitable for arable farming. Furthermore, without the livestock farms you are wholly dependant on petrochemical-derived fertilisers and human waste for farming - but it turns out that to make human waste from sewage plants safe to use as fertiliser, you need lots of petrochemicals. Oops.
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It's hot, and dry. That's not pleasant.
Right now the temperature where they live is about 18C. How the hell can you live with that being the coldest it gets, and no rainfall?
To answer your and the previous poster's question, the drives write something more like QAM to the disk - one "bit time" may contain several bits encoded. When you read the drive back you're looking at pulses of varying phase and frequency.
If you wrote all zeros to an MFM drive you'd see a recognisable pattern that would be the same every time. If you wrote a sector of all zeros to a modern drive twice, you'd see two completely different patterns. Both would resemble noise ;-)
You are right that disks don't simply write the bytes you send it onto the disk, but you cannot access or wipe the physical structures through any /dev/* trickery.
Yes, it probably wasn't clear that I meant wiping off the data. You can't mess about with the "internal" stuff on the disk, because the controller won't put data there without magic firmware.
but if there is an actual requirement to control zero and ones in specific tracks/sectors, you might as well build your own chip for a drive.
Not to mention that disks haven't actually written "zeros and ones" as such for at least 15 years, which is why a single pass of /dev/zero will wipe a recentish disk beyond recovery.
Most Mercedes cars post-W124, many Merc vans, and all Citroen XMs. IIRC certain Saabs, too.
Speaking of which... they live in a desert. The only reason they ever had water to put on their lawn is that they import it via aqueducts over 200 miles, transforming the source from a formerly verdant valley into an arid desert.
I've never understood why people would want to go and live somewhere that has no water. Throughout the history of human settlement, we've always looked for places that have a certain amount of natural shelter, and a good supply of water. In these places you've actually got such a scarcity of water that you have to measure how much you use and pay based on that! Why would you want to live like that?
...just about had to special order a laptop with a real serial port on it, or you just couldn't read all the equipment in the field.
The problem is that it's very hard to generate the right voltages for the serial port from the 5V 500mA USB port supply. If you got something like an FTDI chip and hung a couple of *proper* RS232 drivers off it running from a decent power supply, then you'd have a better chance of getting it to work. It would be bulkier, but still cheaper than ordering a special laptop.
That way, when sales of Assassin's Creed 2 are pathetically low and there are no cracks available, then Ubisoft must be forced to accept that poor sales are due to poor products, not "piracy". Hopefully the movie, music and games industries will learn from Ubisoft's impending demise.
I did wonder if they had all the weight of the extra flywheel aft of the rear axle - I bet that would make it entertaining on wet twisty roads.
For those that don't believe that Porsches don't handle - when was the last time you saw an early-80s Turbo that *hadn't* had the rear end rebuilt? What do you suppose physics does with a car where there's hardly any weight over the front axle, and a great big heavy engine and gearbox *behind* the rear axle? Hint - try an experiment. Get a dart, and throw it feathers-first at the dartboard. What does the dart try to do? Which end hits the dartboard?
Are you kidding? Porsches are only fast in a straight line, or on roads with a lot of big wide corners. Find a road that's less than glassy-smooth and you're not going to go above about 50mph before the car becomes unmanageable because the suspension is too stiff and doesn't have any travel.
There are lots of low Earth orbit satellites that you can't see them with a telescope - but you can track with a simple aerial and UHF handheld radio. The obvious benefit of this is that it doesn't really matter if it's cloudy or daytime; if the satellite is up there you'll hear it and be able to track it across the sky. Bonus prize for learning enough Morse to understand its callsign.
Updates to IE6 can be had for absolutely no charge, have been for half a decade now. IE7 from Microsoft, Firefox from the Mozilla Foundation.
The software may be available at no cost, but upgrading to IE7 or Firefox could be an extremely expensive business. A lot of companies have web apps and intranet pages that do not render correctly in anything other than IE6. Who pays to update all of that?
I don't want to watch a video. I want to see the photographs. I haven't got the patience or attention span to sit and watch videos. Just give me the photos and a page of text.
It would have been nice to see how they looked.
My first thought on reading the GP was "will this work with bottled real ale, or is it just hops-flavoured soda water like Budweiser?"
This is just another reason for me to not want to buy Chinese made goods
And yet you'll trust American-made goods? You *sure* there isn't a backdoor in that iPhone?
I have (briefly) had 25 mod points, but after using a couple they dropped back to 15.
Why certain critical vehicle systems would ever be allowed to be electronic without NASA level testing.
I like the throttle-by-wire system on my '88 Citroën CX. The throttle pedal consists of a flat metal plate pivoted on a steel bar, and a steel wire bolted to the other end of the bar goes through the bulkhead into the engine bay and pulls a little lever on the side of the carburettor. The only time it gets affected by bugs is during the summer when the air filter gets a bit clogged. I have had a catastrophic throttle failures, when the wee spring came off the throttle lever and got lost (if you see a tension spring about 3/4" diameter and 2" long somewhere on the road between Dundee and Perth, it's mine). All that happened was it shut slowly and idled at 1300rpm.
Low tech machinery is awesome.
I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.
They're not the worst, either. A few years ago I used to help out at an English class for exchange students - primarily for people who spoke English as a second language, but also for people who needed help with written English. Many (if not most) of the students from the US could barely read and write at 3rd Year High School level (age 13-14, or so). They struggled with work from the Standard Grade curriculum.
People throw massive amounts of RF at the Moon, with high-powered transmitters and highly directional aerials. Using the same highly-directional aerials you can receive the very faint echo of your signal reflected off the Moon. The reason it's faint is that most of it misses, and when it reflects off the convex curve of the Moon most of it diverges into space.
Now, while this used to be used by various government and military comms people, it's mostly done by radio amateurs now, using equipment that wouldn't take over much of the average suburban back garden. If you threw the resources of a large radio telescope at it (like for example CAMRAS) then you could detect very tiny signals indeed.
This might be taken as being anti-American, but it's not. Really, it's not.
I live in Scotland. My country is a lot older than America, to the extent that my house has trees in the garden that predate the USA. Somewhere round about the time that the Declaration of Independence was being signed, my house was having an extension built on an existing extension on the original house. We're the old guys. And from where I'm sitting, I can see the young guys.
America now looks like a possibly slightly backwards late teenager/early twenties guy, still pedalling around town on his outgrown BMX bike and making "Your Mom" jokes, while all the little kids that were too little for America to play with like India, Pakistan, Iran and China have now grown up a bit and got jobs and cars and girlfriends. And America really desperately wants to play, and throws his not inconsiderable weight around, but really until America grows up and starts acting like a responsible grown-up no-one wants to know.
America has slowly - over the past 20 years or so - made itself utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.
"Drag racing" isn't really racing, though. It's just accelerating hard in a straight line, then stopping. You couldn't make a racing car with an automatic gearbox, and expect it to stay on the track beyond the first couple of corners. Heaven help you if turn 1 leads into a chicane...
My 22-year-old Citroen CX usually cleared the windows within 30 seconds or so, even in the -20C mornings we had over our fairly brief winter just there. In the cold weather it took longer for hydraulic system to bring the thick, cold, gooey oil up to pressure.
Going vegan would actually decrease the amount of land needed, since it's more efficient to just make wheat/corn, instead of making wheat/corn and then (inefficiently) converting it to steak.
You're really not getting this. Cows don't eat corn, they eat grass. This is why in most of the world, cows are fed on grass or grass-like feed (hay, silage etc) with relatively small amounts of things like oats and wheat. Over here, we make a lot of use of "draff" which is spent distillery mash - malt that's been boiled up for the sugar to be used in brewing. The other important thing that you're missing is that a lot of the "undesirable" stuff that your cow food gets turned into is actually cow *shit*. You let this compost for a while (it helps to mix it with straw and burn it, but that smells awful) and yay, free fertiliser *without* petrochemicals. All this stuff about livestock farming "using up all the water" is just nonsense - cows don't magically make mass disappear. They are not nuclear reactors. They drink water - quite a lot of water - and either pee it out (yay, nitrogen compounds, just what nitrate-poor grassland needs) or sweat it out (okay, water vapour is the most significant greenhouse gas, I'll give you that). Either way nothing is lost for the water cycle. Eventually more fresh water just falls from the sky. Oh, here comes some now!
Even better than cows are sheep, which can eat tough heathery plants and tough grasses that not much else can eat. We hardly have to feed sheep at all over the winter (maybe a little bit of draff mixed with shredded sugar beet - yes, technically something you could feed humans. You get enough sugar already, fatso). The good bit about that is you can make use of farmland that isn't really suitable for arable farming. Go and have a look at pretty much any country that has hills (ie. not rolling cornfields like the middle states of the US), and work out how you're going to plant it.
That's not quite true. The vast majority of the world's livestock farms aren't on land that's suitable for arable farming. Furthermore, without the livestock farms you are wholly dependant on petrochemical-derived fertilisers and human waste for farming - but it turns out that to make human waste from sewage plants safe to use as fertiliser, you need lots of petrochemicals. Oops.