Consider this: if either mate pulls a hissy fit over the orientation of a hinged piece of plastic, I say shoot them both! One for being a petty jerk/bitch, the other for having such poor taste as to risk spreading weak genes through reproduction.
Thank you! Finally someone who actually knows what they're talking about rather than repeating other people's misconceptions.
Like you said, FAT32 can go really large, but Microsoft intentionally disabled support for formatting FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. Many non-MS tools can format a larger FAT32 drive, that Windows 2000/XP will happily mount.
The bigger problem though, is all the 16-bit garbage apps that are typically present on FAT32 systems. Windows 98 is a very dirty thing. It likes to destroy anything it doesn't understand, so mounting a large FAT32 partition under these crusty old Dos Shells is disastrous.
Ideally, I'd like to see a simplified, open file-system for removable media. Something that could be trivially supported in future releases of all major operating systems. It certainly doesn't need balanced B-trees or any such perks, just a basic system that requires very little memory to operate, making it easier for consumer devices to safely access it, and easy for any OS developer to write a quick kernel driver.
In general, if you really need more than one or two network drops per room, you could just plug in a cheap mini-switch, as you probably wouldn't be using the full pipe all the time. Server room excepted, of course!
Personally I would still run at least two separate RJ45 outlets, on opposite sides of the room just to avoid having to snake cables along the floor. People always think of where they will set up their computer, but what about the little TV and IP-aware gaming console/TiVo in the other corner ?
Most importantly, think about what YOUR needs are, not mine nor any other geeks'. I'm an ethernet freak, in a 2-person household I've got 21 ports going on. One computer for her, a dozen for me (including 3 servers) and a bunch of consoles/appliances. My future hope is likely to have 10Gbe backbone wiring with a 16-port managed switch on every floor:)
The #1 problem with politics is that people vote for a candidate, instead of voting for what they want. We give one guy some power, foolishly believing he's going to act in anyone's interests but his own. Philanthropy is a very rare trait.
I'd rather see a scenario where the people vote on issues they want addressed, and whoever ends up with the leadership job is effectively an employee of the taxpayers. If he does a shit job, we vote to get his worthless ass fired and someone else fills the seat. There will still be abuses and corruption, but the constituents will have a bit more control over the whole mess and it will at least partially encourage the candidates to do their goddamned job.
That's actually the easy part, just do PWM to get accurate brightness. The higher the frequency, the finer the levels. I guess the ideal way to do this would be a very simple PIC controller. Some of them have built-in USB support.
That's a nice name for something I call "the art of being proudly anti-social", however there is something to be said about the physical manifestations of stress over time. The youthful she-demon today will probably look like George Burns when she hits 40. Or maybe that's because more people will have punched her arrogant lights out.
The body can tell a story, but the common (stupid) human tends to read it backwards.
Blah blah diamonds.. blah blah dirt-cheap... blah blah profiteering gluttons... blah blah electron and the switch.
So uh, when do we get guns to go hunt down those DeBeers goons so I can have my Quantum-core Pentium ? Oh and how do you overclock those things anyway ?
I consider anything above 10C to be painfully hot. Painfully cold, to me, would be around -30C. That's why I don't wear a jacket in the winter unless it's raining and someone's walking next to me with a big industrial fan.
Yes, I'm a freak, but I thought pain was supposed to be a mechanism to warn the body of unsustainable situations. I can't imagine anyone freezing to death at 10C. At 0C, I can concede that a particularly weak person, suffering from exhaustion, would eventually die from the added stress of temperature regulation. I could also die at 0C, not from the cold itself, but because my skin dries up and becomes quite brittle after a while. I'd be one fat nerdy frozen-blood-covered cadaver.
IANA world leader, so feel free to enlighten me, but what right does a publicly elected government have to hide things from its owners ? Owners being the citizens, of course. I know we do things a bit differently up here in the cold green expanse of Canada, but we consider government to be (as a whole) a group of people who act on behalf of the greater population for certain things, and they invoke various democratic devices like referendums for the tricky stuff. That's why we call them public servants. They're supposed to work FOR us. When one of them gets caught behaving badly, we browbeat the smug out of them like a mother to her wayward child, publicly grill to a nice char, then ship them off to some lame ass office job to limit the amount of damage they'll be causing. We may not own the person, but we own their work.
It's one of those things that triggers a civil protest if things are allowed to linger for too long, or gross injustice is suspected. For example, if there were too much resistance in providing detailed intelligence spending records, and someone is dedicated to getting them out to the public, chances are we'd have a peaceful demonstration in Ottawa until we get our way. It doesn't always work as quickly or efficiently as we'd like, but we get what we want in the end.
Actually, this would be AMD's late response to the Core 2 Quad. Given that Intel is going to be slashing those prices again in July, AMD needs to be ready with something faster and/or cheaper to stay in the race.
Seriously, a super-clockable Q6600 for $266 bucks ? Hello!
AMD is playing catch-up right now, but Intel is doing what little it can to block the opposition by eliminating the price gap. AMD really needs to pull a rabbit out of a hat this time, or they will be left sitting on the bench until their next breakthrough.
Part of the problem is we're still working against each other when it comes to energy. $400K of solar power equipment isn't the cost, it's the sale price. How much of that went to the various middlemen involved ?
If we keep treating energy efficiency like a luxury, it won't be long before we value energy above life itself. Forget 1984, it'll be more like Mad Max.
So that's why there were so many goddamned red-plated Volvos in my neighborhood...
Seriously though, am I the only guy who's sick of Stephen "American Wannabe" Harper ? Last time I checked, the US economy was in steady decline thanks to Dubya's persistent efforts to vilify the country he's supposed to be leading. So then why the hell is the Canadian premier kissing American ass ?
Canada already has laws that already outlaw camcording in theatres, it's all part of a big concept we call Copyright. We don't need to specifically target camcording, we just need to enforce the laws that are already there. That starts with the imbeciles that man today's mega-movie-plex-odeon-eramas, as they're the first line of defense to stop clandestine taping. The problem is these kids earn minimum wage, and have little incentive to do the right thing. Blame it all on the bloated film industry, whose ridiculous budgets and ticket prices have squeezed every last bit of life out of the market. By alienating its customers and even its business partners, the film industry has created a huge gap in the market, one that modern technology can easily fill. Don't feel like paying $12 per ticket for the film, and $20 for popcorn and soda ? Then stay at home and download it for free, drink your $0.20 can of soda and your $0.50 bag of popcorn.
Where there is such great demand, inevitably someone springs up to fill the void.
Why don't we settle this roman-style and eradicate the patent from both portfolios ? This patent has been used as a weapon... Who would you rather give a gun to: a gangster or a thug ? Either one's going to hurt you with it.
It would be interesting to see just how many security holes go unpatched because the new IT guy takes an interest in the vulnerability. For example, let's pretend I'm the big cheese admin leaving the company, and I have a nice little backdoor that I leave open for my own dirty uses. My replacement finds my backdoor, and is faced with a few options:
1. Close the vulnerability and stool me 2. Close the vulnerability and keep quiet (to keep management from panicking) 3. Leave it open and ignore it (unlikely) 4. Leave it open and exploit it
And if the new guy is really young, there's always:
5. Leave it open and tell all his friends about it, get busted and spend the rest of his life doing crap jobs because he now has an ugly criminal record
But seriously, I'd be willing to bet a good portion of the new guys, maybe 25% or so, would simply take advantage of the vulnerability for their own voyeuristic tendencies. I dunno, maybe I've worked with too many skeevy techies, my perception could very well be skewed.
I used to do such things myself, when I was running a retail outfit. I had various props that hinted at magical talents and unbounded wealth. Things like a 5-foot "LCD" display in my front window, with a teeny-weeny DVI cable coming out its ass. Nevermind the fact that it was a projector with lovingly-aligned mirrors. Without exception, every new customer walking in would ask "How much is that huge monitor ?" and I'd answer a quarter mil. Let's just say I rarely sold any 15" or 17" monitors, only the much more profitable 19" and up.
The same logic applied to the (then-novel) uber-gaming PC submerged in oil. I never sold any, but just having that prop on display was enough to establish my reputation as a tech god to these laypeople.
I think you can tell by now, that if I were to open up a data recovery firm, I'd spend some quality time destroying all sorts of hard drives in the most creative ways. Bullet holes, mig welding "accidents", drive platters mistaken for grinding wheels, used as brake rotors, rusted worse than my piece of shit Ford... I wouldn't ever say that I recovered anything from them, people would just foolishly assume I am a magician. It's not false advertising, it's entertainment:)
Do you really think only apple makes 8 core machines?
In the consumer segment, YES!
Of course you could always contact me about acquiring prebuilt 8 and 16-core Opteron rigs, but I'm not the guy with the neat commercials and the flashy stores.
What the hell are they parallelizing ? Again they're straying further away from the true definition of an operating system. The OS should be aware of multiple cores and try to balance them efficiently, but if they're talking about optimizing code for multiple execution cores, they're thinking of application software. An operating system is supposed to be a glorified collection of device drivers, low-level APIs and maybe a basic user interface to build upon. Everything else is an application. Windows Explorer is an application. Xorg is an application.
What Microsoft needs to do is learn how to do non-blocking I/O, because that's the slowest part of any computer system these days. Processors are fast and cheap, so is RAM. Hard drives are still slow pieces of crap. It's real cute that the average idiot can go to Best Buy and grab a 750gb drive, but he'd probably be better served with a 75gb drive that's 10 times faster, because Windows will stall while waiting for data to come off those slow noisy platters.
That's one thing I really like about the Mac, it's good at hiding some of its lag by showing at least some interface feedback really quickly while the rest of the stuff loads. Windows will just sit paralyzed while a dozen processes fight for disk attention and total throughput stretches toward zero.
All this bullcrap about making paper documents more secure is patently stupid. It printed data on a piece of paper. Almost every computer owner has access to a printer. No matter what physical measures are taken to secure something, the only guaranteed result is that the outlaws will develop ever-better techniques to defeat those measures. If there is any real value in counterfeiting whatever uses this invisible ink, then the criminals bent on exploiting these documents will invest the funds necessary to recreate the "magic ink", or do it the easy way and just bribe someone at Xerox. They can forge that heat-sensitive ink we have on our money orders (Canada), I think it's safe to bet they can inject friggin lemon juice into an inkjet cartridge.
A far better solution would be to eliminate the security risk attached to the actual piece of paper, the same way web developers (the good ones at least) don't store sensitive data in cookies. Just put a friggin reference number on the piece of paper, a pointer to some global database of whatever it is you're peddling. Treat the document like a one-time-pad.
I'd skip hardware RAID altogether and just get the most basic SATA controllers I could find. Even fake RAID controllers use vendor-specific disk signatures, which means when the cheap controller dies and you find out the company went out of business or the model is discontinued after 18 months, your data is locked away in a weird illogical format.
On the other hand, with software RAID and a dumb controller, you can move your drive arrays anywhere and they will work. I personally use Promise SATA2 cards because I was able to score them cheaply from my supplier, but go with whatever's available. They all pretty much use the same garbage Silicon Image chips so there's hardly any difference between the OEM stuff and the pricey brand-name adapters.
Nowhere on their site does it ever suggest this thing has any usable storage space. I've got a USB eeprom programmer that's about the same size, but I would never go around calling it a USB stick because that's yet another incorrect name for USB flash storage. Along with Jump Drive, USB key, USB traveler (?!), USB floppy (?!?!) and various other dumb names common folk make up.
That's all fine and dandy, but for an anti-social fellow like myself, I much prefer the carefully controlled (and distant) companionship of a few guildmates I've never actually met, than being stuck in a bar having to hear some pompous asses' self-righteous success stories over cheap watered-down martinis and gold-digging bar sluts who probably can't tell the difference between good cocaine and comet bathroom cleaner. Until they're writhing on the floor, green and blue, suffocating on all the solvents now clogged up their nose while I gank a bunch of Alliance lowbie scum, oblivious to the dying bimbo in my kitchen.
As much as I like watching stupid superficial people suffer in agony, their blood-curdling screams tend to drown out my Vent chat.
Slashdot Mirror
To whoever was cynical enough to mod me "Insightful": I LOVE YOU!
Are you suggesting that .co.uk sites are of lesser quality than Canadian and American content ?
Next on Slashdot: Scientific study links dental health to website quality.
Consider this: if either mate pulls a hissy fit over the orientation of a hinged piece of plastic, I say shoot them both! One for being a petty jerk/bitch, the other for having such poor taste as to risk spreading weak genes through reproduction.
Eugenics starts in the bathroom!
Thank you! Finally someone who actually knows what they're talking about rather than repeating other people's misconceptions.
Like you said, FAT32 can go really large, but Microsoft intentionally disabled support for formatting FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. Many non-MS tools can format a larger FAT32 drive, that Windows 2000/XP will happily mount.
The bigger problem though, is all the 16-bit garbage apps that are typically present on FAT32 systems. Windows 98 is a very dirty thing. It likes to destroy anything it doesn't understand, so mounting a large FAT32 partition under these crusty old Dos Shells is disastrous.
Ideally, I'd like to see a simplified, open file-system for removable media. Something that could be trivially supported in future releases of all major operating systems. It certainly doesn't need balanced B-trees or any such perks, just a basic system that requires very little memory to operate, making it easier for consumer devices to safely access it, and easy for any OS developer to write a quick kernel driver.
Right! So can you tell me exactly how to set this "ro" flag in the nonexistent fstab on Windows ?
Nobody's worried about a Linux virus infecting a Windows box.
In general, if you really need more than one or two network drops per room, you could just plug in a cheap mini-switch, as you probably wouldn't be using the full pipe all the time. Server room excepted, of course!
:)
Personally I would still run at least two separate RJ45 outlets, on opposite sides of the room just to avoid having to snake cables along the floor. People always think of where they will set up their computer, but what about the little TV and IP-aware gaming console/TiVo in the other corner ?
Most importantly, think about what YOUR needs are, not mine nor any other geeks'. I'm an ethernet freak, in a 2-person household I've got 21 ports going on. One computer for her, a dozen for me (including 3 servers) and a bunch of consoles/appliances. My future hope is likely to have 10Gbe backbone wiring with a 16-port managed switch on every floor
The #1 problem with politics is that people vote for a candidate, instead of voting for what they want. We give one guy some power, foolishly believing he's going to act in anyone's interests but his own. Philanthropy is a very rare trait.
I'd rather see a scenario where the people vote on issues they want addressed, and whoever ends up with the leadership job is effectively an employee of the taxpayers. If he does a shit job, we vote to get his worthless ass fired and someone else fills the seat. There will still be abuses and corruption, but the constituents will have a bit more control over the whole mess and it will at least partially encourage the candidates to do their goddamned job.
That's actually the easy part, just do PWM to get accurate brightness. The higher the frequency, the finer the levels. I guess the ideal way to do this would be a very simple PIC controller. Some of them have built-in USB support.
That's a nice name for something I call "the art of being proudly anti-social", however there is something to be said about the physical manifestations of stress over time. The youthful she-demon today will probably look like George Burns when she hits 40. Or maybe that's because more people will have punched her arrogant lights out.
The body can tell a story, but the common (stupid) human tends to read it backwards.
Blah blah diamonds.. blah blah dirt-cheap ... blah blah profiteering gluttons... blah blah electron and the switch.
So uh, when do we get guns to go hunt down those DeBeers goons so I can have my Quantum-core Pentium ? Oh and how do you overclock those things anyway ?
Hi, I'm Canadian.
I consider anything above 10C to be painfully hot. Painfully cold, to me, would be around -30C. That's why I don't wear a jacket in the winter unless it's raining and someone's walking next to me with a big industrial fan.
Yes, I'm a freak, but I thought pain was supposed to be a mechanism to warn the body of unsustainable situations. I can't imagine anyone freezing to death at 10C. At 0C, I can concede that a particularly weak person, suffering from exhaustion, would eventually die from the added stress of temperature regulation. I could also die at 0C, not from the cold itself, but because my skin dries up and becomes quite brittle after a while. I'd be one fat nerdy frozen-blood-covered cadaver.
IANA world leader, so feel free to enlighten me, but what right does a publicly elected government have to hide things from its owners ? Owners being the citizens, of course. I know we do things a bit differently up here in the cold green expanse of Canada, but we consider government to be (as a whole) a group of people who act on behalf of the greater population for certain things, and they invoke various democratic devices like referendums for the tricky stuff. That's why we call them public servants. They're supposed to work FOR us. When one of them gets caught behaving badly, we browbeat the smug out of them like a mother to her wayward child, publicly grill to a nice char, then ship them off to some lame ass office job to limit the amount of damage they'll be causing. We may not own the person, but we own their work.
It's one of those things that triggers a civil protest if things are allowed to linger for too long, or gross injustice is suspected. For example, if there were too much resistance in providing detailed intelligence spending records, and someone is dedicated to getting them out to the public, chances are we'd have a peaceful demonstration in Ottawa until we get our way. It doesn't always work as quickly or efficiently as we'd like, but we get what we want in the end.
Actually, this would be AMD's late response to the Core 2 Quad. Given that Intel is going to be slashing those prices again in July, AMD needs to be ready with something faster and/or cheaper to stay in the race.
Seriously, a super-clockable Q6600 for $266 bucks ? Hello!
AMD is playing catch-up right now, but Intel is doing what little it can to block the opposition by eliminating the price gap. AMD really needs to pull a rabbit out of a hat this time, or they will be left sitting on the bench until their next breakthrough.
Part of the problem is we're still working against each other when it comes to energy. $400K of solar power equipment isn't the cost, it's the sale price. How much of that went to the various middlemen involved ?
If we keep treating energy efficiency like a luxury, it won't be long before we value energy above life itself. Forget 1984, it'll be more like Mad Max.
POKE 59468,14
READY
LOAD "ZONK:*",8,1
SEARCHING FOR "ZONK.BAS"
LOADING
SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 20
READY
Seriously Zonk, maybe you should go work for Digg.
So that's why there were so many goddamned red-plated Volvos in my neighborhood...
Seriously though, am I the only guy who's sick of Stephen "American Wannabe" Harper ? Last time I checked, the US economy was in steady decline thanks to Dubya's persistent efforts to vilify the country he's supposed to be leading. So then why the hell is the Canadian premier kissing American ass ?
Canada already has laws that already outlaw camcording in theatres, it's all part of a big concept we call Copyright. We don't need to specifically target camcording, we just need to enforce the laws that are already there. That starts with the imbeciles that man today's mega-movie-plex-odeon-eramas, as they're the first line of defense to stop clandestine taping. The problem is these kids earn minimum wage, and have little incentive to do the right thing. Blame it all on the bloated film industry, whose ridiculous budgets and ticket prices have squeezed every last bit of life out of the market. By alienating its customers and even its business partners, the film industry has created a huge gap in the market, one that modern technology can easily fill. Don't feel like paying $12 per ticket for the film, and $20 for popcorn and soda ? Then stay at home and download it for free, drink your $0.20 can of soda and your $0.50 bag of popcorn.
Where there is such great demand, inevitably someone springs up to fill the void.
Why don't we settle this roman-style and eradicate the patent from both portfolios ? This patent has been used as a weapon... Who would you rather give a gun to: a gangster or a thug ? Either one's going to hurt you with it.
It would be interesting to see just how many security holes go unpatched because the new IT guy takes an interest in the vulnerability. For example, let's pretend I'm the big cheese admin leaving the company, and I have a nice little backdoor that I leave open for my own dirty uses. My replacement finds my backdoor, and is faced with a few options:
1. Close the vulnerability and stool me
2. Close the vulnerability and keep quiet (to keep management from panicking)
3. Leave it open and ignore it (unlikely)
4. Leave it open and exploit it
And if the new guy is really young, there's always:
5. Leave it open and tell all his friends about it, get busted and spend the rest of his life doing crap jobs because he now has an ugly criminal record
But seriously, I'd be willing to bet a good portion of the new guys, maybe 25% or so, would simply take advantage of the vulnerability for their own voyeuristic tendencies. I dunno, maybe I've worked with too many skeevy techies, my perception could very well be skewed.
I used to do such things myself, when I was running a retail outfit. I had various props that hinted at magical talents and unbounded wealth. Things like a 5-foot "LCD" display in my front window, with a teeny-weeny DVI cable coming out its ass. Nevermind the fact that it was a projector with lovingly-aligned mirrors. Without exception, every new customer walking in would ask "How much is that huge monitor ?" and I'd answer a quarter mil. Let's just say I rarely sold any 15" or 17" monitors, only the much more profitable 19" and up.
:)
The same logic applied to the (then-novel) uber-gaming PC submerged in oil. I never sold any, but just having that prop on display was enough to establish my reputation as a tech god to these laypeople.
I think you can tell by now, that if I were to open up a data recovery firm, I'd spend some quality time destroying all sorts of hard drives in the most creative ways. Bullet holes, mig welding "accidents", drive platters mistaken for grinding wheels, used as brake rotors, rusted worse than my piece of shit Ford... I wouldn't ever say that I recovered anything from them, people would just foolishly assume I am a magician. It's not false advertising, it's entertainment
In the consumer segment, YES!
Of course you could always contact me about acquiring prebuilt 8 and 16-core Opteron rigs, but I'm not the guy with the neat commercials and the flashy stores.
What the hell are they parallelizing ? Again they're straying further away from the true definition of an operating system. The OS should be aware of multiple cores and try to balance them efficiently, but if they're talking about optimizing code for multiple execution cores, they're thinking of application software. An operating system is supposed to be a glorified collection of device drivers, low-level APIs and maybe a basic user interface to build upon. Everything else is an application. Windows Explorer is an application. Xorg is an application.
What Microsoft needs to do is learn how to do non-blocking I/O, because that's the slowest part of any computer system these days. Processors are fast and cheap, so is RAM. Hard drives are still slow pieces of crap. It's real cute that the average idiot can go to Best Buy and grab a 750gb drive, but he'd probably be better served with a 75gb drive that's 10 times faster, because Windows will stall while waiting for data to come off those slow noisy platters.
That's one thing I really like about the Mac, it's good at hiding some of its lag by showing at least some interface feedback really quickly while the rest of the stuff loads. Windows will just sit paralyzed while a dozen processes fight for disk attention and total throughput stretches toward zero.
All this bullcrap about making paper documents more secure is patently stupid. It printed data on a piece of paper. Almost every computer owner has access to a printer. No matter what physical measures are taken to secure something, the only guaranteed result is that the outlaws will develop ever-better techniques to defeat those measures. If there is any real value in counterfeiting whatever uses this invisible ink, then the criminals bent on exploiting these documents will invest the funds necessary to recreate the "magic ink", or do it the easy way and just bribe someone at Xerox. They can forge that heat-sensitive ink we have on our money orders (Canada), I think it's safe to bet they can inject friggin lemon juice into an inkjet cartridge.
A far better solution would be to eliminate the security risk attached to the actual piece of paper, the same way web developers (the good ones at least) don't store sensitive data in cookies. Just put a friggin reference number on the piece of paper, a pointer to some global database of whatever it is you're peddling. Treat the document like a one-time-pad.
I'd skip hardware RAID altogether and just get the most basic SATA controllers I could find. Even fake RAID controllers use vendor-specific disk signatures, which means when the cheap controller dies and you find out the company went out of business or the model is discontinued after 18 months, your data is locked away in a weird illogical format.
On the other hand, with software RAID and a dumb controller, you can move your drive arrays anywhere and they will work. I personally use Promise SATA2 cards because I was able to score them cheaply from my supplier, but go with whatever's available. They all pretty much use the same garbage Silicon Image chips so there's hardly any difference between the OEM stuff and the pricey brand-name adapters.
Nowhere on their site does it ever suggest this thing has any usable storage space. I've got a USB eeprom programmer that's about the same size, but I would never go around calling it a USB stick because that's yet another incorrect name for USB flash storage. Along with Jump Drive, USB key, USB traveler (?!), USB floppy (?!?!) and various other dumb names common folk make up.
That's all fine and dandy, but for an anti-social fellow like myself, I much prefer the carefully controlled (and distant) companionship of a few guildmates I've never actually met, than being stuck in a bar having to hear some pompous asses' self-righteous success stories over cheap watered-down martinis and gold-digging bar sluts who probably can't tell the difference between good cocaine and comet bathroom cleaner. Until they're writhing on the floor, green and blue, suffocating on all the solvents now clogged up their nose while I gank a bunch of Alliance lowbie scum, oblivious to the dying bimbo in my kitchen.
As much as I like watching stupid superficial people suffer in agony, their blood-curdling screams tend to drown out my Vent chat.