That's just an attack on Microsoft. Formatting does not erase your data, it erases the metadata, (re)initializing the filesystem structures to a clean, possibly blank state. The raw data remains, but since you no longer have an index to tell you where each file begins, how big it is and what it's called, you have no easy way to access it.
With many filesystems, this metadata exists in several places and usually has one or more backup copies. A "quick" format tends to kill the main index, leaving the backups mostly intact. Recovery tools can scan the disk to find these backups and "unformat" the filesystem. On FAT systems, they don't have this luxury, instead they look for specific signatures to find old orphaned directory entries, but it's the same idea.
So... "formatting" doesn't really erase your data. Says so in the name: format. If you want to erase data, use an erasing tool, such as `dd if=/dev/zero` or DBAN or anything else that overwrites the entire disk.
The only thing people "know" about the CIA's abilities is whatever Hollywood dreams up for movies and TV gimmicks.
As an outsider, my caricatured perception of government intelligence is a bunch of failed lawyers tallying various stats and counting down the minutes to their next smoke break. Recovering data from an erased hard drive seems well beyond the reach of any federal employee I've ever met. Maybe the top engineers at Western Digital could pull it off, but they have better things to do like cramming more bits onto a fucking platter.
Well, I hope the guy got plenty of "personal enjoyment" because I think it's a lame hack. He didn't actually get Linux working on an 8-bit processor. He got it working in an emulator, which apparently he DID write. At no point did he port the Linux kernel to a new platform. This is right up there with booting Linux on a GP2X console via Bochs.
So, to recaption this article:
"ARMv5 emu for underpowered and rarely used AVR chip. ATmega community baffled and bewildered. Oh, and it boots Linux in half a day."
I don't know all of these services, but doesn't the DMCA's safe harbor provision exempt them from this sort of witch hunt prosecution, as long as DMCA reports are handled in a timely manner ? You could receive a thousand such reports a day, as long as you promptly take down the content (or challenge false claims), you're supposed to be in the clear, as far as the law is concerned.
I've received such complaints in the past, when one of my hosting clients had their site compromised and was used as a warez drop. I fixed the problem, nuked the offending files and never heard of it again. Given that I'm currently in the process of setting up such a file host (no payments though), I'm a bit concerned about this legal abuse. Youtube allows user uploads, and honors DMCA takedowns, and they seem to be doing just fine. Both sites are hosting user-created content. Both have the potential to carry copyrighted material. Both generate ad revenue from their traffic. What makes a filehost any different ?
This is the problem with ANY human development. Money gets in the way. Money, as much as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers would like you to believe, is NOT a tangible resource. It is not work. It is not food. It is not building materials. It certainly is not intellect. It is a psychological weapon.
If the world really wanted to feed Africa, it would be done. Money would not be a factor. If we knew what to do, how to do it, and had the appropriate resources to accomplish it, it could get done. You need trucks ? Okay, boat some trucks over from Germany. You need fuel ? Hello, middle east! You need labour ? I see a billion people with nothing better to do than help us help them.
Who's paying for all this ? Who cares ? What's the goal ? Are we trying to help humanity move forward, or are we solely concerned with moving numbers around on a spreadsheet ?
Money is the worst religion of all, because it is the only worshipped deity that is proven, by definition, to not exist.
Why would any of those quesitons not be legal ? Perhaps it is a function of where you live. I know up here, those types of questions are legal and common, because they are choices. Some of them can be worked around, others cannot. There's a clear difference between asking a candidate if they CAN DO something, and asking them if they ARE something then relying on your own prejudices to make a decision for them.
I get what you're hinting at, and it's a valid example, but if a person's private life is having a disruptive effect on their job performance, that's still an "on the job" issue. All I need to be concerned with, is that quinta-mom is doing a terrible job and needs to have a chat with me about meeting expectations. If, in the course of that conversation, she brings up the fact that her five kids keep her up at night, or she's stressed out because she can't make ends meet, it is my duty - not as a boss, but as a fellow human being - to reason with her and help find possible improvements to her situation. Ultimately, even without knowing about the household situation, if a person interviewed well and gave me the impression they were worth hiring, I'd like to think I'm not gullible nor stupid and that with a little help, they can get over their issues and get back to being that talented individual I had scouted in the first place.
I guess, what I'm saying is that a little bit of unofficial counseling can go a long way. This isn't to say everyone can be salvaged, I've had my share of liars and thieves. They were presented with hard evidence of their wrongdoings and offered a choice between prosecution or termination. Done. For those other 95% who are not incorrigible criminals, generally speaking a friendly boss gets better results than a tyrannical boss. That's how I flourished in my career beginnings, and it is the model upon which I base my own leadership.
If you're Linux-savvy, try Zoneminder. All you need is a PC and a camera, for which there are extensive compatibility lists online. Once you have motion detection working, you can set up a shell script to copy to a remote host - in case the Zoneminder box itself gets stolen. For bonus points, use a small-form-factor PC and hide it somewhere clever, like behind a ceiling tile or under the staircase.
If you're not so comfortable doing it yourself, there are many vendors online who sell pre-configured kits including a recorder unit, cabling and a few cameras. I think the price range starts around $500 to $700 if memory serves... some of them come with mobile apps and "cloud" storage so you can monitor your home on the go. If you're in Canada, I can refer you to a good friend of mine who runs such a surveillance store and knows this field better than I ever could.
I'd like to think some of my success can be attributed to holistic ambitions, rather than short-term profits. I'd sooner cooperate with a so-called "rival" and see us both flourish. At least where I'm from, human bonds are stronger than financial ties.
I don't know what a "pozzed load of liberal bullshit" is, or why Obama would be delivering such, but if you have a problem with people who study other people's viewpoints in an effort to continually improve their own, then I suppose I am guilty of whatever it is you are accusing me.
I do not claim to know the answers, in fact what I basically said is no one can, so the wisest approach is to keep an open mind and evaluate every situation on its own merits.
I get what you're saying, and yes it's true a company does not put all its eggs in one basket (usually). Despite that, a bad economy is bad for everyone who isn't a bankster. Jobs are down, but so is consumption, so most businesses' income is reduced as well. I've certainly noticed the crunch, even though I'm way up in Canada, as many of my clients are U.S. based and have had to scale things back a fair bit.
That said, it is not trivial to replace an employee. Walmart greeters may be easily interchangeable, but developers, engineers, (good) managers, and countless other professionals amass rich business knowledge and history, extremely difficult to transfer to paper; perhaps impossible. There is also the relational element. It takes a while before random strangers become a team. There was this one job where, for the first 3 months I hardly ever saw my own boss. A year later we were tag-teaming almost every contract, once we realized we both complemented and counterpointed each other quite nicely. That's not something you can shove down anyone's throat with training slides.
I dunno, maybe I'm the weird one, but if I'm having a fundamental problem with an employee, or even a boss or client, I discuss it with them - lay out what each party's expectations are, and what can be done to satisfy them. Some cases require more patience than others, and there have been incidents where the mutually agreed resolution was to terminate. I had one guy who was slacking off all the time, and after talking it over, admitted he had strong moral objections with some of our clients (porn sites). I didn't fire him, instead he started freelancing and I handed him a few prude-friendly contracts. Nothing huge, but enough to give him a running start. Why would I give him some of my business ? Because a few years prior, someone else did the same for me and helped to get me established. I'm not trying to preach some "pay it forward" meme, but in business I think you're better off making friends than enemies. I can think of no quicker way to make enemies than by taking away their income over some superficial matter. In today's money-centric reality, that's worse than a dozen punches to the face.
Ahem! As a business owner too, I'm glad there are regulations in place to level the playing field for everyone. If not being legally allowed to discriminate based on irrelevant information causes your business to suffer, you were doing it wrong in the first place, and I'm quite happy to replace you in the market. I work with people on 5 continents, and all are at the top of their game. If you base your staffing decisions on whoever seems "whitest" or worships the same imaginary friend in the sky, you are severely limiting your ability to compete in the global market.
Hiring is expensive because it is a serious relationship that must not be taken lightly. If it were any cheaper, there would be absolutely no job security because bosses like you could hire and fire people on a whim. Do you really expect an employee to perform well if they're under constant threat of losing their job ? You need to look beyond the tip of your nose and realize you need them as much as they need you.
I quite enjoyed that movie, it's one of those popcorn feature I'll re-watch every now and then. It's fun, looks great, and panders to my distaste for government. Also, hot shaven grits.
As for the GP who saw it as "a thinly veiled propaganda against the Bush presidency", well that just, like, your opinion, man. I'm sure more than a few Britons saw it as propaganda against the British government. There might even be a South Korean dude who felt it was propaganda against the South Korean government. Holy sheeple Batman, a movie about rising up against corrupt lying governments strikes a chord with people who live under corrupt lying governments! Whoda thunk it?!
"Karma Police, arrest this man, he used the N-word, he isn't very nice..." (with apologies to Radiohead)
It's the UK. They still have frumpy monarchs. They read Orwell's 1984 like an instruction manual. This should be no surprise to anyone, but more importantly: it's coming to a North American federal government near you.
If tweeting your ignorance the world is considered "inciting racial hatred", then I'd like to know how these same governments justify small-scale genocide in the name of oil.
So then, you get proper circuit design/sim software, something which Minecraft is not.
My whole point in the previous post was that rather than building useless stuff from scratch, he should be taking advantage of existing tech to further his skills and knowledge. When I started programming, I learned a (shitty) high-level language because that's what was current at the time. Once I knew what I could do with these silly machines, I then learned 6502 assembler for my own curiosity (and later, 286/386). Why do it the hard way if you can reach greater heights the easy way ? Learn the nuts and bolts to satisfy your own obsessive curiosity, sure, but I'd like to think a 16 year old might have more immediately pertinent uses for his/her time.
It really pisses me off to watch such potential go to waste, because it does not fit "the western way". It reminds me of my own childhood, when my brain was very hungry but had little to "eat". I couldn't get the things it craved, so I had to reinvent the wheel to provide them myself. Couldn't afford a graphics editor, so I built one from scratch. Couldn't afford the assembler cart, so I wrote my own damned assembler. Today, things are different. We have much easier access to knowledge and free software to learn on, so to watch someone spend an inordinate amount of time doing things backwards is one of the most frustrating and depressing experiences I can think of.
I don't mean to be all high and mighty about what the kid "should" be doing. I'm just saying it's a sad world if we encourage such futile accomplishments over true growth.
It's impressive in the sense that this guy created a fairly simple "computer", using a limited game environment (Minecraft), running on a virtual machine (Java), running on a physical machine (PC/Mac). In other words, he's spending a million CPU cycles to simulate a single gate in the most roundabout way possible.
I'm impressed that someone with that much patience and functional intellect is wasting so much time in Minecraft, when they could be learning actual chip design. I'm impressed that bragging rights in a game are more important than actual worthwhile accomplishments. I'm impressed that Soulskill wasted so many more of our CPU and brain cycles sharing this pointless feat.
P.S. attributing personal characteristics to people solely by race is...what exactly? I forgot what that's called.
Culture. Saying we French Quebecers are all alcoholic cousin-fucking hippies may be offensive, but it is often accurate (just not ALL of us). Have you seen our step-cousins ? You'd hit that too!
Discriminating based on race is racism. Saying all black people should be shot/deported/launched into space because they're not white, well that's just racist.
So Obama's contributors seem to be mostly intellectual-type organisations. Universities, tech companies, law firms.
Romney's contributors are all banksters.
Maybe I'm being too rational here, but it seems to me that such a drastically obvious divide should be ground for both candidates being disqualified/removed from the race. I thought the whole point was to have one leader for the whole country, not just half of the country - or significantly less, if you subscribe to my bullshit theory that 90% of all people are terminally stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just an attack on Microsoft. Formatting does not erase your data, it erases the metadata, (re)initializing the filesystem structures to a clean, possibly blank state. The raw data remains, but since you no longer have an index to tell you where each file begins, how big it is and what it's called, you have no easy way to access it.
With many filesystems, this metadata exists in several places and usually has one or more backup copies. A "quick" format tends to kill the main index, leaving the backups mostly intact. Recovery tools can scan the disk to find these backups and "unformat" the filesystem. On FAT systems, they don't have this luxury, instead they look for specific signatures to find old orphaned directory entries, but it's the same idea.
So... "formatting" doesn't really erase your data. Says so in the name: format. If you want to erase data, use an erasing tool, such as `dd if=/dev/zero` or DBAN or anything else that overwrites the entire disk.
The only thing people "know" about the CIA's abilities is whatever Hollywood dreams up for movies and TV gimmicks.
As an outsider, my caricatured perception of government intelligence is a bunch of failed lawyers tallying various stats and counting down the minutes to their next smoke break. Recovering data from an erased hard drive seems well beyond the reach of any federal employee I've ever met. Maybe the top engineers at Western Digital could pull it off, but they have better things to do like cramming more bits onto a fucking platter.
Well, I hope the guy got plenty of "personal enjoyment" because I think it's a lame hack. He didn't actually get Linux working on an 8-bit processor. He got it working in an emulator, which apparently he DID write. At no point did he port the Linux kernel to a new platform. This is right up there with booting Linux on a GP2X console via Bochs.
So, to recaption this article:
"ARMv5 emu for underpowered and rarely used AVR chip. ATmega community baffled and bewildered. Oh, and it boots Linux in half a day."
I don't know all of these services, but doesn't the DMCA's safe harbor provision exempt them from this sort of witch hunt prosecution, as long as DMCA reports are handled in a timely manner ? You could receive a thousand such reports a day, as long as you promptly take down the content (or challenge false claims), you're supposed to be in the clear, as far as the law is concerned.
I've received such complaints in the past, when one of my hosting clients had their site compromised and was used as a warez drop. I fixed the problem, nuked the offending files and never heard of it again. Given that I'm currently in the process of setting up such a file host (no payments though), I'm a bit concerned about this legal abuse. Youtube allows user uploads, and honors DMCA takedowns, and they seem to be doing just fine. Both sites are hosting user-created content. Both have the potential to carry copyrighted material. Both generate ad revenue from their traffic. What makes a filehost any different ?
I also thought the CC info was stored on Microsoft's servers. You can't even buy stuff on an Xbox without being logged into your Live account.
People want to fight MORE when they're unhappy (for instance, starving) than when they are content (for instance, well-fed).
Explain America.
The problem I see with NGOs is they are still, on some level, a business. They deal with money. The money is what causes all the problems.
This is the problem with ANY human development. Money gets in the way. Money, as much as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers would like you to believe, is NOT a tangible resource. It is not work. It is not food. It is not building materials. It certainly is not intellect. It is a psychological weapon.
If the world really wanted to feed Africa, it would be done. Money would not be a factor. If we knew what to do, how to do it, and had the appropriate resources to accomplish it, it could get done. You need trucks ? Okay, boat some trucks over from Germany. You need fuel ? Hello, middle east! You need labour ? I see a billion people with nothing better to do than help us help them.
Who's paying for all this ? Who cares ? What's the goal ? Are we trying to help humanity move forward, or are we solely concerned with moving numbers around on a spreadsheet ?
Money is the worst religion of all, because it is the only worshipped deity that is proven, by definition, to not exist.
Why would any of those quesitons not be legal ? Perhaps it is a function of where you live. I know up here, those types of questions are legal and common, because they are choices. Some of them can be worked around, others cannot. There's a clear difference between asking a candidate if they CAN DO something, and asking them if they ARE something then relying on your own prejudices to make a decision for them.
I get what you're hinting at, and it's a valid example, but if a person's private life is having a disruptive effect on their job performance, that's still an "on the job" issue. All I need to be concerned with, is that quinta-mom is doing a terrible job and needs to have a chat with me about meeting expectations. If, in the course of that conversation, she brings up the fact that her five kids keep her up at night, or she's stressed out because she can't make ends meet, it is my duty - not as a boss, but as a fellow human being - to reason with her and help find possible improvements to her situation. Ultimately, even without knowing about the household situation, if a person interviewed well and gave me the impression they were worth hiring, I'd like to think I'm not gullible nor stupid and that with a little help, they can get over their issues and get back to being that talented individual I had scouted in the first place.
I guess, what I'm saying is that a little bit of unofficial counseling can go a long way. This isn't to say everyone can be salvaged, I've had my share of liars and thieves. They were presented with hard evidence of their wrongdoings and offered a choice between prosecution or termination. Done. For those other 95% who are not incorrigible criminals, generally speaking a friendly boss gets better results than a tyrannical boss. That's how I flourished in my career beginnings, and it is the model upon which I base my own leadership.
If you're Linux-savvy, try Zoneminder. All you need is a PC and a camera, for which there are extensive compatibility lists online. Once you have motion detection working, you can set up a shell script to copy to a remote host - in case the Zoneminder box itself gets stolen. For bonus points, use a small-form-factor PC and hide it somewhere clever, like behind a ceiling tile or under the staircase.
If you're not so comfortable doing it yourself, there are many vendors online who sell pre-configured kits including a recorder unit, cabling and a few cameras. I think the price range starts around $500 to $700 if memory serves... some of them come with mobile apps and "cloud" storage so you can monitor your home on the go. If you're in Canada, I can refer you to a good friend of mine who runs such a surveillance store and knows this field better than I ever could.
I'd like to think some of my success can be attributed to holistic ambitions, rather than short-term profits. I'd sooner cooperate with a so-called "rival" and see us both flourish. At least where I'm from, human bonds are stronger than financial ties.
How do YOU know I'm American ? (hint: I'm not!)
I don't know what a "pozzed load of liberal bullshit" is, or why Obama would be delivering such, but if you have a problem with people who study other people's viewpoints in an effort to continually improve their own, then I suppose I am guilty of whatever it is you are accusing me.
I do not claim to know the answers, in fact what I basically said is no one can, so the wisest approach is to keep an open mind and evaluate every situation on its own merits.
I get what you're saying, and yes it's true a company does not put all its eggs in one basket (usually). Despite that, a bad economy is bad for everyone who isn't a bankster. Jobs are down, but so is consumption, so most businesses' income is reduced as well. I've certainly noticed the crunch, even though I'm way up in Canada, as many of my clients are U.S. based and have had to scale things back a fair bit.
That said, it is not trivial to replace an employee. Walmart greeters may be easily interchangeable, but developers, engineers, (good) managers, and countless other professionals amass rich business knowledge and history, extremely difficult to transfer to paper; perhaps impossible. There is also the relational element. It takes a while before random strangers become a team. There was this one job where, for the first 3 months I hardly ever saw my own boss. A year later we were tag-teaming almost every contract, once we realized we both complemented and counterpointed each other quite nicely. That's not something you can shove down anyone's throat with training slides.
I dunno, maybe I'm the weird one, but if I'm having a fundamental problem with an employee, or even a boss or client, I discuss it with them - lay out what each party's expectations are, and what can be done to satisfy them. Some cases require more patience than others, and there have been incidents where the mutually agreed resolution was to terminate. I had one guy who was slacking off all the time, and after talking it over, admitted he had strong moral objections with some of our clients (porn sites). I didn't fire him, instead he started freelancing and I handed him a few prude-friendly contracts. Nothing huge, but enough to give him a running start. Why would I give him some of my business ? Because a few years prior, someone else did the same for me and helped to get me established. I'm not trying to preach some "pay it forward" meme, but in business I think you're better off making friends than enemies. I can think of no quicker way to make enemies than by taking away their income over some superficial matter. In today's money-centric reality, that's worse than a dozen punches to the face.
I dunno man, what about Tony Blair ? Or is my Bush-hatred being spread too thin here ?
Ahem! As a business owner too, I'm glad there are regulations in place to level the playing field for everyone. If not being legally allowed to discriminate based on irrelevant information causes your business to suffer, you were doing it wrong in the first place, and I'm quite happy to replace you in the market. I work with people on 5 continents, and all are at the top of their game. If you base your staffing decisions on whoever seems "whitest" or worships the same imaginary friend in the sky, you are severely limiting your ability to compete in the global market.
Hiring is expensive because it is a serious relationship that must not be taken lightly. If it were any cheaper, there would be absolutely no job security because bosses like you could hire and fire people on a whim. Do you really expect an employee to perform well if they're under constant threat of losing their job ? You need to look beyond the tip of your nose and realize you need them as much as they need you.
I accidentally the whole preposition.
Same here.
I quite enjoyed that movie, it's one of those popcorn feature I'll re-watch every now and then. It's fun, looks great, and panders to my distaste for government. Also, hot shaven grits.
As for the GP who saw it as "a thinly veiled propaganda against the Bush presidency", well that just, like, your opinion, man. I'm sure more than a few Britons saw it as propaganda against the British government. There might even be a South Korean dude who felt it was propaganda against the South Korean government. Holy sheeple Batman, a movie about rising up against corrupt lying governments strikes a chord with people who live under corrupt lying governments! Whoda thunk it?!
"Karma Police, arrest this man, he used the N-word, he isn't very nice..." (with apologies to Radiohead)
It's the UK. They still have frumpy monarchs. They read Orwell's 1984 like an instruction manual. This should be no surprise to anyone, but more importantly: it's coming to a North American federal government near you.
If tweeting your ignorance the world is considered "inciting racial hatred", then I'd like to know how these same governments justify small-scale genocide in the name of oil.
So then, you get proper circuit design/sim software, something which Minecraft is not.
My whole point in the previous post was that rather than building useless stuff from scratch, he should be taking advantage of existing tech to further his skills and knowledge. When I started programming, I learned a (shitty) high-level language because that's what was current at the time. Once I knew what I could do with these silly machines, I then learned 6502 assembler for my own curiosity (and later, 286/386). Why do it the hard way if you can reach greater heights the easy way ? Learn the nuts and bolts to satisfy your own obsessive curiosity, sure, but I'd like to think a 16 year old might have more immediately pertinent uses for his/her time.
It really pisses me off to watch such potential go to waste, because it does not fit "the western way". It reminds me of my own childhood, when my brain was very hungry but had little to "eat". I couldn't get the things it craved, so I had to reinvent the wheel to provide them myself. Couldn't afford a graphics editor, so I built one from scratch. Couldn't afford the assembler cart, so I wrote my own damned assembler. Today, things are different. We have much easier access to knowledge and free software to learn on, so to watch someone spend an inordinate amount of time doing things backwards is one of the most frustrating and depressing experiences I can think of.
I don't mean to be all high and mighty about what the kid "should" be doing. I'm just saying it's a sad world if we encourage such futile accomplishments over true growth.
It's impressive in the sense that this guy created a fairly simple "computer", using a limited game environment (Minecraft), running on a virtual machine (Java), running on a physical machine (PC/Mac). In other words, he's spending a million CPU cycles to simulate a single gate in the most roundabout way possible.
I'm impressed that someone with that much patience and functional intellect is wasting so much time in Minecraft, when they could be learning actual chip design. I'm impressed that bragging rights in a game are more important than actual worthwhile accomplishments. I'm impressed that Soulskill wasted so many more of our CPU and brain cycles sharing this pointless feat.
Get. Off. My. Fucking. Lawn. Bitches.
Why is this RUBBISH on the front page?
Because the stupid people that rule the world have finally taken over our beloved site.
P.S. attributing personal characteristics to people solely by race is...what exactly? I forgot what that's called.
Culture. Saying we French Quebecers are all alcoholic cousin-fucking hippies may be offensive, but it is often accurate (just not ALL of us). Have you seen our step-cousins ? You'd hit that too!
Discriminating based on race is racism. Saying all black people should be shot/deported/launched into space because they're not white, well that's just racist.
What about box #5: the detonator box ?
Okay... that's freakishly too consistent.
So Obama's contributors seem to be mostly intellectual-type organisations. Universities, tech companies, law firms.
Romney's contributors are all banksters.
Maybe I'm being too rational here, but it seems to me that such a drastically obvious divide should be ground for both candidates being disqualified/removed from the race. I thought the whole point was to have one leader for the whole country, not just half of the country - or significantly less, if you subscribe to my bullshit theory that 90% of all people are terminally stupid.