I want to disagree with you, cdrguru, but with your low UID and telling username, I find myself unable to.
Instead, I'd like to ask you a question:
I had understood that, for the past many years, most CDs (whether recordable or not) were injection-molded, not stamped. Do you have any evidence or anecdotes to suggest that the primary manufacturing process for recordable media these days still involves stamping?
When SCSI Macs were common, their use was largely relegated to education and artistry -- neither of which were common consumer uses. The PC ruled the day when the SCSI Mac had its stomping ground.
That said, I was obviously referring to IBM-compatible PCs in particular. If you want to throw SCSI Macs into the mix, then feel free; just replace "MFM/RLL" with "SCSI", and you get a very similar timeline. (Except it's a slightly more favorable timeline -- I still have SCSI controllers which can talk to a mid-eighties drive, but I've only ever owned one MFM controller and it was disposed of a long, long time ago.)
- Stuff that I can buy on DVD or CD like Babylon 5 or Star Trek, I buy. These discs are physically pressed with pits so they won't self-erase themselves like DVD-Rs or CD-Rs tend to do. They should last the rest of my life.
Waitafrigginsecond -- you mean to say that your backup strategy for store-bought discs is: (drumroll) NOTHING?
Of course, the grease in the bearings can dry out, but that really doesn't seem to be much of a problem: It's a silicone-based substance, and it's wrapped up pretty tightly away from the ambient environment. There just isn't much for it to do except sit around and be stable... Old drives used oilite (sintered bronze) ball bearings almost as a rule, while newer ones often use fluid dynamic bearings -- and in either case, that aspect is fairly stable.
I've recovered data from hard drives that have been submerged in flood water for four days. They're durable little creatures, for sure, but even then at least half of the drives I touched after that flood were impossible to recover with my (primitive) methods.
That said, the biggest problem seems to be stiction. The heads of a hard drive normally fly slightly above the surface of the disk in operation (courtesy of the Bernoulli effect), but typically rest on the platter itself when the drive is not spinning. If left there long enough, the (very flat) surface of the head sometimes sticks to the (very flat) surface of the disk.
Sometimes, a disk can be spun up normally after a few years; other times, the spindle motor will stall trying to unstick the heads. There's various methods to relieve this striction, such as freezing, baking, or spinning the drive by hand on a tabletop and letting momentum free the heads, but they're all ugly.
So: For long-term, offline storage, I stick to offline-oriented media. Tapes might be good, DVD/CD-R might be good (and the admonished DVD-RAM is almost certainly better). Hard drives? It almost sounds like a bad joke.
(*: Not to pick on Nissan, by any means -- it seems that automotive chemistry isn't always just straightforward. I just replaced the radiator expansion tank on my BMW, after it exploded with a shotgun-like blast of steamy coolant. BMW used bad plastics in the cooling systems of on all of their early E36 3-series cars, including the water pump, the radiator, the expansion tank, the cap, and the thermostat housing. The radiator was new in 2003, the water pump was also recent, and I assumed that the expansion tank was also new with the radiator. I assumed wrong. A couple of days later, the fill cap fell apart, and failed to contain pressure. Live and learn.
I'd like to take a moment to point out how important it is, when reading a contract or any other sort of written agreement, to read the whole thing -- not just the parts you like.
It seems pedantic to have to spell this out, but since so many folks here seem to need it spelled out for them . . .
Funny. I read the exact same thing, and interpreted it totally differently.
In fact, I still do.
Glad that judge at least does what it's supposed to. I'll have to try to remember it for when I have a similar problem in the future (and I certainly have in the past).
My computer room is intentionally dark. The newly-installed solid red oak floor is stained black, the walls are a dark, flat olive drab, and the ceiling is a matching shade of dirty brown. There is a black curtain over the room's solitary window. I cover all of the blindingly-bright blue LEDs on my electronics with red electrical tape to dim them down.
Curses to you and the other light-seekers, and likewise to your reflective e-ink displays. Everything I need to see lights up by itself already.
If there's an English major in the house: What is it called when an interview consists of one small question, followed by many paragraphs of detailed answer, followed by an unrelated question?
In other words: Is there any sort of descriptive term for "interview by email" which I can learn, so that I can more aptly describe these non-conversations in the future?
They have about as much interaction as an interview might if it were conducted by parcel post. While the monologues contained therein may (or may not be) interesting, the whole thing lacks so much spontaneity and fluidity that I might as well be reading a book.
It almost does what he wants. He doesn't spell it out, but it seems strongly implied that he also wants a system capable of automatically finding these duplicates by itself, and then automatically determining which image is "best."
Which seems obvious, to me: If he's got enough photos of sufficient disorganization that he can't tell automatically which duplicate is best, then there probably isn't any straight-forward way (with filenames or directory trees or whatever) to find out which ones are dupes to begin with.
Judge, the afore-linked program, only does the job of finding the best image out of a set of duplicates.
What tool can be used to find the (near) duplicates to begin with?
But those are citizens who happen to be employed by the government, not government divisions. All citizens get taxed on the same set of rules, no matter who they work for (with odd exceptions for clergy and a few other things).
Then, I got my own house, and things changed. The mail carriers would often deliver my mail to my next-door neighbor, who had a similar (though plainly different) last name, and the neighbor sometimes would bring it over for us.
About this time, periodicals started disappearing. My wife buys subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Playboy (she likes the pictures), and with each one, we'd sometimes go months without seeing an issue.
Generally, though, aside from deliveries at that house: My experience with the USPS has been top-notch. And it's also been top-notch since we've moved to a different part of town.
I don't mean to strawman your argument, but: Do you really want your government taxing itself? Because that's a layer of absurdity that I, for one, am completely unwilling to pay for the administration of.
How in the world will doing this protect you while traveling from A to B?
Not everyone who travels lives in a hotel. They might sleep in one from time to time, but the rest time they've got all of their immediate possessions with them. Including, of course, a passport.
It's just as bad in the States with ASCAP and BMI, both of whom wish to extort money from any public establishment with any music whatsoever, whether performed live or from a legitimately-purchased recording.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC parallel port has lived for nearly three decades.
Do you have any particular reason to suggest that USB can't do the same in a usefully-compatible fashion?
I want to disagree with you, cdrguru, but with your low UID and telling username, I find myself unable to.
Instead, I'd like to ask you a question:
I had understood that, for the past many years, most CDs (whether recordable or not) were injection-molded, not stamped. Do you have any evidence or anecdotes to suggest that the primary manufacturing process for recordable media these days still involves stamping?
When SCSI Macs were common, their use was largely relegated to education and artistry -- neither of which were common consumer uses. The PC ruled the day when the SCSI Mac had its stomping ground.
That said, I was obviously referring to IBM-compatible PCs in particular. If you want to throw SCSI Macs into the mix, then feel free; just replace "MFM/RLL" with "SCSI", and you get a very similar timeline. (Except it's a slightly more favorable timeline -- I still have SCSI controllers which can talk to a mid-eighties drive, but I've only ever owned one MFM controller and it was disposed of a long, long time ago.)
Waitafrigginsecond -- you mean to say that your backup strategy for store-bought discs is: (drumroll) NOTHING?
Fortunately, Nissan doesn't make hard drives(*).
Of course, the grease in the bearings can dry out, but that really doesn't seem to be much of a problem: It's a silicone-based substance, and it's wrapped up pretty tightly away from the ambient environment. There just isn't much for it to do except sit around and be stable... Old drives used oilite (sintered bronze) ball bearings almost as a rule, while newer ones often use fluid dynamic bearings -- and in either case, that aspect is fairly stable.
I've recovered data from hard drives that have been submerged in flood water for four days. They're durable little creatures, for sure, but even then at least half of the drives I touched after that flood were impossible to recover with my (primitive) methods.
That said, the biggest problem seems to be stiction. The heads of a hard drive normally fly slightly above the surface of the disk in operation (courtesy of the Bernoulli effect), but typically rest on the platter itself when the drive is not spinning. If left there long enough, the (very flat) surface of the head sometimes sticks to the (very flat) surface of the disk.
Sometimes, a disk can be spun up normally after a few years; other times, the spindle motor will stall trying to unstick the heads. There's various methods to relieve this striction, such as freezing, baking, or spinning the drive by hand on a tabletop and letting momentum free the heads, but they're all ugly.
So: For long-term, offline storage, I stick to offline-oriented media. Tapes might be good, DVD/CD-R might be good (and the admonished DVD-RAM is almost certainly better). Hard drives? It almost sounds like a bad joke.
(*: Not to pick on Nissan, by any means -- it seems that automotive chemistry isn't always just straightforward. I just replaced the radiator expansion tank on my BMW, after it exploded with a shotgun-like blast of steamy coolant. BMW used bad plastics in the cooling systems of on all of their early E36 3-series cars, including the water pump, the radiator, the expansion tank, the cap, and the thermostat housing. The radiator was new in 2003, the water pump was also recent, and I assumed that the expansion tank was also new with the radiator. I assumed wrong. A couple of days later, the fill cap fell apart, and failed to contain pressure. Live and learn.
Bingo.
I'd like to take a moment to point out how important it is, when reading a contract or any other sort of written agreement, to read the whole thing -- not just the parts you like.
It seems pedantic to have to spell this out, but since so many folks here seem to need it spelled out for them . . .
"Fairly often"? On what timescale?
In the consumer market: We had ATA for something like twenty years. And now we have SATA, with no replacement in sight.
Before that, we (consumers) had MFM and RLL.
And that, sir, is the complete history of PC hard drive interfaces.
So, again: "Fairly often"?
Funny. I read the exact same thing, and interpreted it totally differently.
In fact, I still do.
Glad that judge at least does what it's supposed to. I'll have to try to remember it for when I have a similar problem in the future (and I certainly have in the past).
He has? Where?
...which can always (and easily) be adjusted down to sanity.
Gah.
My computer room is intentionally dark. The newly-installed solid red oak floor is stained black, the walls are a dark, flat olive drab, and the ceiling is a matching shade of dirty brown. There is a black curtain over the room's solitary window. I cover all of the blindingly-bright blue LEDs on my electronics with red electrical tape to dim them down.
Curses to you and the other light-seekers, and likewise to your reflective e-ink displays. Everything I need to see lights up by itself already.
How will you mod someone up, once you've already commented on the article?
Right. Because, every day, the news is positively littered with articles about thieves who have used an unlocked car as a ram.
As if smashing the window and opening the door the old-fashioned way were so difficult.
[/sarcasm, for the sarcasm-impaired.]
Would it be?
Which part of copyright law acts to eliminate existing contracts upon expiration?
If there's an English major in the house: What is it called when an interview consists of one small question, followed by many paragraphs of detailed answer, followed by an unrelated question?
In other words: Is there any sort of descriptive term for "interview by email" which I can learn, so that I can more aptly describe these non-conversations in the future?
They have about as much interaction as an interview might if it were conducted by parcel post. While the monologues contained therein may (or may not be) interesting, the whole thing lacks so much spontaneity and fluidity that I might as well be reading a book.
The amount of logic utilized by moderators is inversely related to the amount of crack cocaine they consume.
Not that I am by any means immune from these effects -- I'd probably never had replied, had you not gotten "insightful" mods on that posting.
Cheers.
It almost does what he wants. He doesn't spell it out, but it seems strongly implied that he also wants a system capable of automatically finding these duplicates by itself, and then automatically determining which image is "best."
Which seems obvious, to me: If he's got enough photos of sufficient disorganization that he can't tell automatically which duplicate is best, then there probably isn't any straight-forward way (with filenames or directory trees or whatever) to find out which ones are dupes to begin with.
Judge, the afore-linked program, only does the job of finding the best image out of a set of duplicates.
What tool can be used to find the (near) duplicates to begin with?
Right. Sure.
Actually, the neighbor folks were very nice people.
But if they USPS had delivered my mail to my house to begin with, my neighbors would never have had a chance to steal it.
How in the fuck does mis-delivered mail have "nothing to do with the USPS"?
But those are citizens who happen to be employed by the government, not government divisions. All citizens get taxed on the same set of rules, no matter who they work for (with odd exceptions for clergy and a few other things).
For 24 years, I never lost mail.
Then, I got my own house, and things changed. The mail carriers would often deliver my mail to my next-door neighbor, who had a similar (though plainly different) last name, and the neighbor sometimes would bring it over for us.
About this time, periodicals started disappearing. My wife buys subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Playboy (she likes the pictures), and with each one, we'd sometimes go months without seeing an issue.
Generally, though, aside from deliveries at that house: My experience with the USPS has been top-notch. And it's also been top-notch since we've moved to a different part of town.
I don't mean to strawman your argument, but: Do you really want your government taxing itself? Because that's a layer of absurdity that I, for one, am completely unwilling to pay for the administration of.
The website cited for being the source of the image currently at the top of the Wikipedia page is here, with its English counterpart being right here.
It includes all 10 Rorschach images.
So it's "normal" for 1942, then.
Either way, it's absurd.
How in the world will doing this protect you while traveling from A to B?
Not everyone who travels lives in a hotel. They might sleep in one from time to time, but the rest time they've got all of their immediate possessions with them. Including, of course, a passport.
It's just as bad in the States with ASCAP and BMI, both of whom wish to extort money from any public establishment with any music whatsoever, whether performed live or from a legitimately-purchased recording.